196 ORIENT ALISM ing a pilgrim to Mecca and Medina. So what we read in his prose is the history of a consciousness negotiating its way through an alien culture by virtue of having successfully absorbed its systems of information and behavior. Burton’s freedom was in having shaken himself loose of his European origins enough to be able to live as an Oriental. Every scene in the Pilgrimage reveals him as winning out over the obstacles confronting him, a foreigner, in a strange place. He was able to do this because he had sufficient knowledge of an alien society for this purpose. In no writer on the Orient so much as in Burton do we feel that generalizations about the Oriental—for example, the pages on the notion of Kayf for the Arab or on how education is suited to the Oriental mind (pages that are clearly meant as a rebuttal to Macaulay’s simple-minded assertions) '?'—are the result of knowledge acquired about the Orient by living there, actually seeing it firsthand, truly trying to see Oriental life from the viewpoint of a person immersed in it. Yet what is never far from the surface of Burton‘s prose is another sense it radiates, a sense of assertion and domination over all the complexities of Oriental life. Every one of Burton’s footnotes, whether in the Pilgrimage or in his translation of the Arabian Nights (the same is true of his “Terminal Essay” for it!??) was meant to be testimony to his victory over the sometimes scandalous system of Oriental knowledge, a system he had mastered by himself. For even in Burton’s prose we are never directly given the Orient; everything about it is presented to us by way of Burton’s knowledgeable (and often prurient) interventions, which remind us repeatedly how he had taken over the management of Oriental life for the purposes of his narrative. And it is this fact —for in the Pilgrimage it is a fact—that elevates Burton’s consciousness to a position of supremacy over the Orient. In that position his individuality perforce encounters, and indeed merges with, the voice of Empire, which is itself a system of rules, codes, and concrete epistemological habits. Thus when Burton tells us in the Pilgrimage that “Egypt is a treasure to be won,” that it “is the most tempting prize which the East holds out to the ambition of Europe, not excepted even the Golden Horn,”"** we must recognize how the voice of the highly idiosyncratic master of Oriental knowl edge informs, feeds into the voice of European ambition for rule over the Orient. Burton’s two voices blending into one presage the work of Orientalists-cum-imperial agents like T. E. Lawrence, Edward

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 197 Henry Palmer, D. G. Hogarth, Gertrude Bell, Ronald Storrs, St. John Philby, and William Gifford Palgrave, to name only some English writers. The double-pronged intention of Burton's work is at the same time to use his Oriental residence for scientific observation and not easily to sacrifice his individuality to that end. The second of these two intentions leads him inevitably to submit to the first because, as will appear increasingly obvious, he is a European for whom such knowledge of Oriental society as he has is possible only for a European, with a European’s self-awareness of society as a collection of rules and practices. In other words, to be a European in the Orient, and to be one knowledgeably, one must see and know the Orient as a domain ruled over by Europe. Orientalism, which is the system of European or Western knowledge about the Orient, thus becomes synonymous with European domination of the Orient, and this domination effectively overrules even the eccentricities of Burton’s personal style. Burton took the assertion of personal, authentic, sympathetic, and humanistic knowledge of the Orient as far as it would go in its struggle with the archive of official European knowledge about the Orient. In the history of nineteenth-century attempts to restore, restructure, and redeem all the various provinces of knowledge and life, Orientalism—like all the other Romantically inspired learned disciplines---contributed an important share. For not only did the field evolve from a system of inspired observation into what Flaubert called a regulated college of learning, it also reduced the personalities of even its most redoubtable individualists like Burton to the role of imperial scribe. From being a place, the Orient became a domain of actual scholarly rule and potential imperial sway. The role of the early Orientalists like Renan, Sacy, and Lane was to provide their work and the Orient together with a mise en scéne; later Orientalists, scholarly or imaginative, took firm hold of the scene. Still later, as the scene required management, it became clear that institutions and governments were better at the game of management than individuals. This is the legacy of nineteenth-century Orientalism to which the twentieth century has become inheritor. We must now investigate as exactly as possible the way twentiethcentury Orientalism—inaugurated by the long process of the West’s occupation of the Orient from the 1880s on—successfully controlled freedom and knowledge; in short, the way Orientalism was fully formalized into a repeatedly produced copy of itself.