—— 192 ORIENTALISM IT mention such matters simply as a way of keeping vivid the sense of layer upon layer of interests, official learning, institutional pressure, that covered the Orient as a subject matter and as a territory during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Even the most innocuous travel book—and there were literally hundreds written after mid-century"*—contributed to the density of public awareness of the Orient; a heavily marked dividing line separated the delights, miscellaneous exploits, and testimonial portentousness of individual pilgrims in the East (which included some American voyagers, among them Mark Twain and Herman Melville’) from the authoritative reports of scholarly travelers, missionaries, governmental functionaries, and other expert witnesses. This dividing line existed clearly in Fllaubert's mind, as it must have for any individual consciousness that did not have an innocent perspective on the Qrient as a terrain for literary exploitation. English writers on the whole had a more pronounced and harder sense of what Oriental pilgrimages might entail than the French. India was a valuably real constant in this sense, and therefore all the territory between the Mediterranean and India acquired a correspondingly weighty importance. Romantic writers like Byron and Scott consequently had a political vision of the Near Orient and a very combative awareness of how relations between the Orient and Europe would have to be conducted. Scott’s historical sense in The Talisman and Count Robert of Paris allowed him to set these novels in Crusader Palestine and eleventh-century Byzantium, respectively, without at the same time detracting from his canny political appreciation of the way powers act abroad. The failure of Disraeli’s Tancred can easily be ascribed to its author's perhaps overdeveloped knowledge of Oriental politics and the British Establishment's network of interests; Tancred’s ingenuous desire to go to Jerusalem very soon mires Disraeli in ludicrously complex descriptions of how a Lebanese tribal chieftain tries to manage Druzes, Muslims, Jews, and Europeans to his political advantage. By the end of the novel Tancred’s Eastern quest has more or less disappeared because there is nothing in Disraeli’s material vision of Oriental realities to nourish the pilgrim’s somewhat capricious impulses. Even George Eliot, who never visited the Orient herself, could not sustain the Jewish equivalent of an Oriental pilgrimage in Daniel Deronda (1876) without straying into the complexities of British realities as they decisively affected the Eastern project.

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 193 Thus whenever the Oriental motif for the English writer was not principally a stylistic matter (as in FitzGerald’s Rubdiydt or in Morier’s Adventures of Hajji.Baba of Ispahan), it forced him to confront a set of imposing resistances to his individual fantasy. There are no English equivalents to the Oriental works by Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert, just as Lane’s early Orientalist counterparts—Sacy and Renan-—were considerably more aware than he was of how much they were creating what they wrote about. The form of such works as Kinglake’s Eothen (1844) and Burton’s Persona! Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855-1856) is rigidly chronological and dutifully linear, as if what the authors were describing was a shopping trip to an Oriental bazaar rather than an adventure. Kin glake’s undeservedly famous and popular work is a pathetic catalogue of pompous ethnocentrisms and tiringly nondescript accounts of the Englishman’s East. His ostensible purpose in the book is to prove that travel in the Orient is important to “moulding of your character—that is, your very identity,” but in fact this turns out to be little more than solidifying “your” anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and general allpurpose race prejudice. We are told, for instance, that the 4rabian Nights is too lively and inventive a work to have been created by a “mere Oriental, who, for creative purposes, is a thing dead and dry—a mental mummy.” Although Kinglake blithely confesses to no knowledge of any Oriental language, he is not constrained by ignorance from making sweeping generalizations about the Orient, its culture, mentality, and society. Many of the attitudes he repeats are canonical, of course, but it is interesting how little the experience of actually seeing the Orient affected his opinions. Like many other travelers he is more interested in remaking himself and the Orient (dead and dry—a mental mummy) than he is in seeing what there is to be seen. Every being he encounters merely corroborates his belief that Easterners are best dealt with when intimidated, and what better instrument of intimidation than a sovereign Western ego? En route to Suez across the desert, alone, he glories in his self-sufficiency and power: “I was here in this African desert, and I myself, and no other, had charge of my life.”"® [t is for the comparatively useless purpose of letting Kinglake take hold of himself that the Orient serves him. Like Lamartine before him, Kinglake comfortably identified his superior consciousness with his nation’s, the difference being that