Orientalism - autonomous learning

114 ORIENT ALISM
Orientalist Structures and Restructures
115
this anticipated project of Bouvard's is rudely interrupted by
reality-this time by the sudden appearance of gendarmes who
accuse him of debauchery. A few lines later, however, the second
item of interest turns up. The two men simultaneously confess to
each other that their secret desire is once again to become copyists.
They have a double desk made for them, they buy books, pencils,
erasers, and-as Flaubert concludes the sketch- "ils s'y mettent":
they turn to. From trying to live through and apply knowledge more
or less directly, Bouvard and Pecuchet are reduced finally to transcribing
it uncritically from one text to another.
Although Bouvard's vision of Europe regenerated by Asia is not
fully spelled out, it (and what it comes to on the copyist's desk) can
be glossed in several important ways. Like many of the two men's
other visions, this one is global and it is reconstructive; it represents
what Flaubert felt to be the nineteenth-century predilection for the
rebuilding of the world according to an imaginative vision, sometimes
accompanied by a special scientific technique. Among the
visions Flaubert has in mind are the utopias of Saint-Simon and
Fourier, the scientific regenerations of mankind envisioned by
Comte, and all the technical or secular religions promoted by
ideologues, positivists, eclectics, occultists, traditionalists, and
idealists such as Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Michelet, Cousin,
Proudhon, Cournot, Cabet, Janet, and Lamennais. 2 Throughout the
novel Bouvard and Pecuchet espouse the various causes of such
figures; then, having ruined them, they move on looking for newer
ones, but with no better results.
The roots of such revisionist ambitions as these are Romantic
in a very specific way. We must remember the extent to which a
major part of the spiritual and intellectual project of the late
eighteenth century was a reconstituted theology-natural supernaturalism,
as M. H. Abrams has called it; this type of thought is
carried forward by the typical nineteenth-century attitudes Flaubert
satirizes in Bouvard et Pecuchet. The notion of regeneration therefore
harks back to
a conspicuous Romantic tendency, after the rationalism and
decorum of the Enlightenment ... [to revert] to the stark drama
and suprarational mysteries of the Christian story and doctrines
and to the violent conflicts and abrupt reversals of the Christian
inner life, turning on the extremes of destruction and creation,
hell and heaven, exile and reunion, death and rebirth, dejection
and joy, paradise lost and paradise regained .... But since they
lived, inescapably, after the Enlightenment, Romantic writers
revived these ancient matters with a difference: they undertook to
save the overview of human history and destiny, the existential
paradigms, and the cardinal values of their religious heritage, by
reconstituting them in a way that would make them intellectually
acceptable, as well as emotionally pertinent, for the time being.s
What Bouvard has in mind-the regeneration of Europe by Asia
-was a very influential Romantic idea. Friedrich Schlegel and
Novalis, for example, urged upon their countrymen, and upon
Europeans in general, a detailed study of India because, they said,
it was Indian culture and religion that could defeat the materialism
and mechanism (and republicanism) of Occidental culture. And
from this defeat would arise a new, revitalized Europe: the Biblical
imagery of death, rebirth, and redemption is evident in this prescription.'
Moreover, the Romantic Orientalist project was not
merely a specific instance of a general tendency; it was a powerful
shaper of the tendency itself, as Raymond Schwab has so convincingly
argued in. La Renaissance orientale. But what mattered
was not Asia so much as Asia's use to modern Europe. Thus anyone
who, like Schlegel or Franz Bopp, mastered an Oriental language
waS a spiritual hero, a knight-errant bringing back to. Europe a
sense of the holy mission it had now lost. It is precisely this sense
that the later secular religions portrayed by Flaubert carry on in
the nineteenth century. No less than Schlegel, Wordsworth, and
Chateaubriand, Auguste Comte-like Bouvard-was the adherent
and proponent of a secular post-Enlightenment myth whose outlines
are unmistakably Christian.
In regularly allowing Bouvard and Pecuchet to go through revisionist
notions from start to comically debased finish, Flaubert drew
attention to the human flaw common to all projects. He saw perfectly
well that underneath the idee re,;ue "Europe-regenerated-by-Asia"
lurked a very insidious hubris. Neither "Europe" nor "Asia" was
anything without the visionaries' technique for turning vast geographical
domains into treatable, and manageable, entities. At bottom,
therefore, Europe and Asia were our Europe and our Asiaour
will and representation, as Schopenhauer had said. Historical
laws were in reality historians' laws, just as "the two foons of
humanity" drew attention less to actuality than to a European capacity
fQr lending man-made distinctions an air of inevitability. As for
the other half of the phrase-"wi1l at last be soldered together"­
there Flaubert mocked the blithe indifference of science to actuality,