Authors: Edward W. Said
Orientalism (34 page)
Connected physically and sympathetically to the Orient, Nerval wanders informally through its riches and its cultural (and principally feminine) ambience, locating in Egypt especially that maternal “center, at once mysterious and accessible” from which all wisdom derives.
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His impressions, dreams, and memories alternate with sections of ornate, mannered narrative done in the Oriental style; the hard realities of travel—in Egypt, Lebanon,
Turkey—mingle with the design of a deliberate digression, as if Nerval were repeating Chateaubriand’s
Itinéraire
using an underground, though far less imperial and obvious, route. Michel Butor puts it beautifully:
To Nerval’s eyes, Chateaubriand’s journey remains a voyage along the surface, while his own is calculated, utilizing annex centers, lobbies of ellipses englobing the principal centers; this allows him to place in evidence, by parallax, all the dimensions of the snare harbored by the normal centers. Wandering the streets or environs of Cairo, Beirut, or Constantinople, Nerval is always lying in wait for anything that will allow him to sense a cavern extending beneath Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem [the principal cities of Chateaubriand’s
Itinéraire
].…
Just as the three cities of Chateaubriand are in communication—Rome, with its emperors and popes, reassembling the heritage, the testament, of Athens and Jerusalem—the caverns of Nerval … become engaged in intercourse.
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Even the two large plotted episodes, “The Tale of the Caliph Hakim” and “The Tale of the Queen of the Morning,” that will supposedly convey a durable, solid narrative discourse seem to push Nerval away from “overground” finality, edging him further and further into a haunting internal world of paradox and dream. Both tales deal with multiple identity, one of whose motifs—explicitly stated—is incest, and both return us to Nerval’s quintessential Oriental world of uncertain, fluid dreams infinitely multiplying themselves past resolution, definiteness, materiality. When the journey is completed and Nerval arrives in Malta on his way back to the European mainland, he realizes that he is now in “le pays du froid et des orages, et déjà l’Orient n’est plus pour moi qu’un de ses rêves du matin auxquels viennent bientôt succéder les ennuis du jour.”
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His
Voyage
incorporates numerous pages copied out of Lane’s
Modern Egyptians
, but even their lucid confidence seems to dissolve in the endlessly decomposing, cavernous element which is Nerval’s Orient.
His
carnet
for the
Voyage
supplies us, I think, with two perfect texts for understanding how his Orient untied itself from anything resembling an Orientalist conception of the Orient, even though his work depends on Orientalism to a certain extent. First, his appetites strive to gather in experience and memory indiscriminately: “Je sens le besoin de m’assimiler toute la nature (femmes étrangères). Souvenirs d’y avoir vécu.” The second elaborates a bit
on the first: “Les rêves et la folie … Le désir de l’
Orient
. L’Europe s’élève. Le rêve se réalise … Elle. Je l’avais fuie, je l’avais perdue … Vaisseau d’Orient.”
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The Orient symbolizes Nerval’s dream-quest and the fugitive woman central to it, both as desire and as loss. “Vaisseau d’Orient”—vessel of the Orient—refers enigmatically either to the woman as the vessel carrying the Orient, or possibly, to Nerval’s own vessel for the Orient, his prose
voyage
. In either case, the Orient is identified with commemorative
absence
.
How else can we explain in the
Voyage
, a work of so original and individual a mind, the lazy use of large swatches of Lane, incorporated without a murmur by Nerval as
his
descriptions of the Orient? It is as if having failed both in his search for a stable Oriental reality and in his intent to give systematic order to his re-presentation of the Orient, Nerval was employing the borrowed authority of a canonized Orientalist text. After his voyage the earth remained dead, and aside from its brilliantly crafted but fragmented embodiments in the
Voyage
, his self was no less drugged and worn out than before. Therefore the Orient seemed retrospectively to belong to a negative realm, in which failed narratives, disordered chronicles, mere transcription of scholarly texts, were its only possible vessel. At least Nerval did not try to save his project by wholeheartedly giving himself up to French designs on the Orient, although he did resort to Orientalism to make some of his points.
In contrast to Nerval’s negative vision of an emptied Orient, Flaubert’s is eminently corporeal. His travel notes and letters reveal a man scrupulously reporting events, persons, and settings, delighting in their
bizarreries
, never attempting to reduce the incongruities before him. In what he writes (or perhaps because he writes), the premium is on the eye-catching, translated into self-consciously worked-out phrases: for example, “Inscriptions and birddroppings are the only two things in Egypt that give any indication of life.”
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His tastes run to the perverse, whose form is often a combination of extreme animality, even of grotesque nastiness, with extreme and sometimes intellectual refinement. Yet this particular kind of perversity was not something merely observed, it was also studied, and came to represent an essential element in Flaubert’s fiction. The familiar oppositions, or ambivalences, as Harry Levin has called them, that roam through Flaubert’s writing—flesh versus mind, Salomé versus Saint John, Salammbô versus Saint Anthony
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—are powerfully validated by what he saw in the Orient, what, given
his eclectic learning, he could see there of the partnership between knowledge and carnal grossness. In Upper Egypt he was taken with ancient Egyptian art, its preciosity and deliberate lubricity: “so dirty pictures existed even so far back in antiquity?” How much more the Orient really answered questions than it raised them is evident in the following:
You [Flaubert’s mother] ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions—so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.
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Flaubert’s work is so complex and so vast as to make any simple account of his Oriental writing very sketchy and hopelessly incomplete. Nevertheless, in the context created by other writers on the Orient, a certain number of main features in Flaubert’s Orientalism can fairly be described. Making allowances for the difference between candidly personal writing (letters, travel notes, diary jottings) and formally aesthetic writing (novels and tales), we can still remark that Flaubert’s Oriental perspective is rooted in an eastward and southward search for a “visionary alternative,” which “meant gorgeous color, in contrast to the greyish tonality of the French provincial landscape. It meant exciting spectacle instead of hum-drum routine, the perennially mysterious in place of the all too familiar.”
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When he actually visited it, however, this Orient impressed him with its decrepitude and senescence. Like every other Orientalism, then, Flaubert’s is revivalist:
he
must bring the Orient to life, he must deliver it to himself and to his readers, and it is his experience of it in books and on the spot, and his language for it, that will do the trick. His novels of the Orient accordingly were labored historical and learned reconstructions. Carthage in
Salammbô
and the products of Saint Anthony’s fevered imagination were authentic fruits of Flaubert’s wide reading in the (mainly Western) sources of Oriental religion, warfare, ritual, and societies.
What the formal aesthetic work retains, over and above the marks of Flaubert’s voracious readings and recensions, are memories of Oriental travel. The
Bibliothèque des idées reçues
has it that an Orientalist is “un homme qui a beaucoup voyagé,”
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only unlike most other such travelers Flaubert put his voyages to ingenious use. Most of his experiences are conveyed in theatrical form. He is
interested not only in the content of what he sees but—like Renan—in
how
he sees, the way by which the Orient, sometimes horribly but always attractively, seems to present itself to him. Flaubert is its best audience:
… Kasr el-’Aini Hospital. Well maintained. The work of Clot Bey—his hand is still to be seen. Pretty cases of syphilis; in the ward of Abbas’s Mamelukes, several have it in the arse. At a sign from the doctor, they all stood up on their beds, undid their trouserbelts (it was like army drill), and opened their anuses with their fingers to show their chancres. Enormous infundibula; one had a growth of hair inside his anus. One old man’s prick entirely devoid of skin; I recoiled from the stench. A rachitic: hands curved backward, nails as long as claws; one could see the bone structure of his torso as clearly as a skeleton; the rest of his body, too, was fantastically thin, and his head was ringed with whitish leprosy.
Dissecting room: … On the table an Arab cadaver, wide open; beautiful black hair.…
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The lurid detail of this scene is related to many scenes in Flaubert’s novels, in which illness is presented to us as if in a clinical theater. His fascination with dissection and beauty recalls, for instance, the final scene of
Salammbô
, culminating in Mâtho’s ceremonial death. In such scenes, sentiments of repulsion or sympathy are repressed entirely; what matters is the correct rendering of exact detail.
The most celebrated moments in Flaubert’s Oriental travel have to do with Kuchuk Hanem, a famous Egyptian dancer and courtesan he encountered in Wadi Haifa. He had read in Lane about the
almehs
and the
khawals
, dancing girls and boys respectively, but it was his imagination rather than Lane’s that could immediately grasp as well as enjoy the almost metaphysical paradox of the
almeh’s
profession and the meaning of her name. (In
Victory
, Joseph Conrad was to repeat Flaubert’s observation by making his musician heroine—Alma—irresistibly attractive and dangerous to Axel Heyst.)
Alemah
in Arabic means a learned woman. It was the name given to women in conservative eighteenth-century Egyptian society who were accomplished reciters of poetry. By the mid-nineteenth century the title was used as a sort of guild name for dancers who were also prostitutes, and such was Kuchuk Hanem, whose dance “L’Abeille” Flaubert watched before he slept with her. She was surely the prototype of several of his novels’ female characters in her learned sensuality, delicacy, and (according to Flaubert)
mindless coarseness. What he especially liked about her was that she seemed to place no demands on him, while the “nauseating odor” of her bedbugs mingled enchantingly with “the scent of her skin, which was dripping with sandalwood.” After his voyage, he had written Louise Colet reassuringly that “the oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another man.” Kuchuk’s dumb and irreducible sexuality allowed Flaubert’s mind to wander in ruminations whose haunting power over him reminds us somewhat of Deslauriers and Frédéric Moreau at the end of
l’Education sentimentale
:
As for me, I scarcely shut my eyes. Watching that beautiful creature asleep (she snored, her head against my arm: I had slipped my forefinger under her necklace), my night was one long, infinitely intense reverie—that was why I stayed. I thought of my nights in Paris brothels—a whole series of old memories came back—and I thought of her, of her dance, of her voice as she sang songs that for me were without meaning and even without distinguishable words.
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The Oriental woman is an occasion and an opportunity for Flaubert’s musings; he is entranced by her self-sufficiency, by her emotional carelessness, and also by what, lying next to him, she allows him to think. Less a woman than a display of impressive but verbally inexpressive femininity, Kuchuk is the prototype of Flaubert’s Salammbô and Salomé, as well as of all the versions of carnal female temptation to which his Saint Anthony is subject. Like the Queen of Sheba (who also danced “The Bee”) she could say—were she able to speak—“Je ne suis pas une femme, je suis un monde.”
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Looked at from another angle Kuchuk is a disturbing symbol of fecundity, peculiarly Oriental in her luxuriant and seemingly unbounded sexuality. Her home near the upper reaches of the Nile occupied a position structurally similar to the place where the veil of Tanit—the goddess described as
Omniféconde
—is concealed in
Salammbô
.
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Yet like Tanit, Salomé, and Salammbô herself, Kuchuk was doomed to remain barren, corrupting, without issue. How much she and the Oriental world she lived in came to intensify for Flaubert his own sense of barrenness is indicated in the following:
We have a large orchestra, a rich palette, a variety of resources. We know many more tricks and dodges, probably, than were ever known before. No, what we lack is the intrinsic principle, the soul
of the thing, the very idea of the subject. We take notes, we make journeys: emptiness! emptiness! We become scholars, archaeologists, historians, doctors, cobblers, people of taste. What is the good of all that? Where is the heart, the verve, the sap? Where to start from? Where to go? We’re good at sucking, we play a lot of tongue-games, we pet for hours: but the real thing! To ejaculate, beget the child!
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Woven through all of Flaubert’s Oriental experiences, exciting or disappointing, is an almost uniform association between the Orient and sex. In making this association Flaubert was neither the first nor the most exaggerated instance of a remarkably persistent motif in Western attitudes to the Orient. And indeed, the motif itself is singularly unvaried, although Flaubert’s genius may have done more than anyone else’s could have to give it artistic dignity. Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies, is something on which one could speculate: it is not the province of my analysis here, alas, despite its frequently noted appearance. Nevertheless one must acknowledge its importance as something eliciting complex responses, sometimes even a frightening self-discovery, in the Orientalists, and Flaubert was an interesting case in point.
