Orientalism - autonomous learning

252 ORIENTALISM
Orienlalism Now
253
literally nothing except the rags they stand up in-when you
see how the people live, and still more, how easily they die, it is
always difficult to believe that you are walking among human
beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact.
The people have brown faces-besides they have so many of
them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even
have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown
stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They arise out
of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they
sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody
notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon
fade back into the soil.58
Aside from the picturesque characters offered European readers in
the exotic fiction of minor writers (Pierre Loti, Marmaduke Pickthall,
and the like), the non-European known to Europeans is
precisely what Orwell says about him. He is either a figure of fun,
or an atom in a vast collectivity designated in ordinary or cultivated
djscourse as an undifferentiated type called Oriental, African,
yellow, brown, or Muslim. To such abstractions Orientalism had
contributed its power of generalization, converting instances of a
civilization into ideal bearers of its values, ideas, and positions,
which in turn the Orientalists had found in "the Orient" and transformed
into common cultural currency.
If we reflect that Raymond Schwab brought out his brilliant
biography of AnquetiI-Duperron in I 934--and began those studies
which were to put Orientalism in its proper cultural context-we
must also remark that what he did was in stark contrast to his fellow
artists and intellectuals, for whom Orient and Occident were still
the secondhand abstractions they were for Valery. Not that Pound,
Eliot, Yeats, Arthur Waley, Fenollosa, Paul Claudel(in his C~nnaissance
de rest), Victor segalen, and others were ignoring "the
wisdom of the East," as Max MUlier had called it a few generations
earlier. Rather the culture viewed the Orient, and Islam in particular,
with the mistrust with which its learned attitude to the
Orient had always been freighted. A suitable instance of this contemporary
attitude at its most explicit is to be found in a series of
lectures given at the University of Chicago in 1924 on "The
Occident and the Orient" by Valentine Chirol, a well-known European
newspaperman of great experience in the East; his purpose
was to make clear to. educated Americans that the Orient was not
as far off as perhaps they believed. His line is a simple one: that
Orient and Occident are irreducibly opposed to each other, and that
the Orient-in particular "Mohammedanism"-is one of "the
great world-forces" responsible for "the deepest lines of cleavage"
in the world. 59 Chirol'ssweeping generalizations are, I think, adequately
represented by the titles of his six lectures: "Their Ancient
Battleground"; "The Passing of the Ottoman Empire, the Peculiar
Case of Egypt"; "The Great British Experiment in Egypt"; "Protectorates
and Mandates"; "The New Factor of Bolshevism"; and
"Some General Conclusions."
To such relatively popular accounts of the Orient as Chirol's,
we can add a testimonial by Elie Faure, who in his ruminations
draws, like Chirol, on history, cultural expertise, and the familiar
contrast between White Occidentalism and colored Orientalism.
While delivering himself of paradoxes like "Ie carnage permanent de
l'indifference orientale" (for, unlike "us," "they" have no conception
of peace), Faure goes on to show that the Orientals' bodies are
lazy, that the Orient has no conception of history, of the nation, or
of patrie, that the Orient is essentially mystical-and so on. Faure
argues that unless the Oriental learns to be rational, to develop
techniques of knowledge and positivity, there can be no rapprochement
between East and West. 60 A far more subtle and learned
account of the East-West dilemma can be found in Fernand Baldensperger's
essay "OU s'affrontent l'Odent et I'Occident intellectuels,"
but he too speaks of an inherent Oriental disdain for the idea,
for mental discipline, for rational interpretation. s1
Spoken as they are out of the depths of European culture, by
writers who actually believe themselves to be speaking on behalf
of that culture, such commonplaces (for they are perfect idees re~ues)
cannot be explained simply as examples of provincial chauvinism.
They are not that, and-as will be evident to anyone who knows
anything about Faure's and Baldensperger's other work-are the
more paradoxical for not being that. Their background is the transformation
of the . exacting, professional science of Orientalism,
whose function in nineteenth-century culture had been the restoration
to Europe of a lost portion of humanity, but which had become
in the twentieth century both an instrument of policy and, more
important, a code by which Europe could interpret both itself and
the Orient to itself. For reasons discussed earlier in this book,
modern Orientalism already carried within itself the imprint of