188 ORIENTALISM 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 veive, 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!?!* 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. The Orient threw him back on his own human and technical resources. It did not respond, just as Kuchuk did not, to his presence. Standing before its ongoing life Flaubert, like Lane before him, felt his detached powerlessness, perhaps also his self-induced unwillingness, to enter and become part of what he saw. This of course was Flaubert’s perennial problem; it had existed before he went East, and it remained after the visit. Flaubert admitted the difficulty, the antidote to which was in his werk (especially in an Oriental work like La Tentation de Saint Antoine) to stress the form of encyclopedic presentation of material at the expense of human engagement in life. Indeed, Saint Anthony is nothing if net a man for whom reality is a series of books, spectacles, and pageants unro}ling temptingly and at a distance before his eyes. All of Flaubert’s immense learning is structured——as Michel Foucault has tellingly noted—like a theatrical, fantastic library, parading before the anchorite’s gaze:"* residually, the parade carries in its form Flaubert’s memories @f Kasr ef Ainj (the. syphilitics’ army drill) and Kuchuk's dance. More to the point, however, is that Saint Anthony

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 189 is a celibate to whom temptations are primarily sexual. After putting up with every sort of dangerous charm, he is finally given a glimpse into the biological processes of life; he is delirious at being able to see life being born, a scene for which Flaubert felt himself to be incompetent during his Oriental sojourn. Yet because Anthony is delirious, we are meant to read the scene ironically, What is granted to him at the end, the desire to become matter, to become life, is at best a desire—whether realizable and fulfillable or not, we cannot know. Despite the energy of his intelligence and his enormous power of intellectual absorption, Flaubert felt in the Orient, first, that “the more you concentrate on it [in detail] the less you grasp the whole,” and then, second, that “the pieces fall into place of themselves.”"'* At best, this produces a spectacular form, but it remains barred to the Westerner’s full participation in it. On one level this was a persona! predicament for Flaubert, and he devised means, some of which we have discussed, for dealing with it. On a more general level, this was an epistemological difficulty for which, of course, the discipline of Orientalism existed. At one moment during his Oriental tour he considered what the epistemological challenge could give rise to. Without what he called spirit and style, the mind could “get lost in archaeology”: he was referring to a sort of regimented antiquarianism by which the exotic and the strange would get formulated into lexicons, codes, and finally clichés of the kind he was to ridicule in the Dictionnaire des idées regues. Under the influence of such an attitude the world would be “regulated like a college. Teachers will be the law. Everyone will be in uniform.” As against such an imposed discipline, he no doubt felt that his own treatments of exotic material, notably the Oriental material he had both experienced and read about for years, were infinitely preferable. In those at least there was room for a sense of immediacy, imagination, and flair, whereas in the ranks of archaeological tomes everything but “learning” had been squeezed out. And more than most novelists Flaubert was acquainted with organized learning, its products, and its results: these products are clearly evident in the misfortunes of Bouvard and Pécuchet, but they would have been as comically apparent in fields like Orientalism, whose textual attitudes belonged to the world of idées recues. Therefore one could either construct the world with verve and style, or one could copy it tirelessly according to impersonal academic rules of procedure.