248 ORIENTALISM person defining. All Arab Orientals must be accommodated to a vision of an Oriental type as constructed by the Western scholar, as well as to a specific encounter with the Ortent in which the Westerner regrasps the Orient’s essence as a consequence of his intimate estrangement from it. For Lawrence as for Forster, this latter sensation produces the despondency as well of personal failure; for such scholars as Macdonald, it strengthens the Orientalist discourse itself. And it puts that discourse abroad in the world of culture, politics, and actuality. In the period between the wars, as we can easily judge from, say, Malraux’s novels, the relations between East and West assumed a currency that was both widespread and anxious. The signs of Oriental claims for political independence were everywhere; certainly in the dismembered Ottoman Empire they were encouraged by the Allies and, as is perfectly evident in the whole Arab Revolt and its aftermath, quickly became problematic. The Orient now appeared to constitute a challenge, net just to the West in general, but to the West’s spirit, knowledge, and imperium. Aftet a good century of constant intervention in (and study of) the Orient, the West’s role in an East itself responding to the crises of modernity seemed considerably more delicate. There was the issue of outright occupation; there was the issue of the mandated territories; there was the issue of European competition in the Orient; there was the issue of dealing with native elites, native popular movements, and native demands for self-government and independence; there was the issue of civilizational contacts between Orient and Occident. Such issues forced reconsideration of Western knowledge of the Orient. No less a personage than Sylvain Lévi, president of the Société asiatique between. 1928 and 1935, professor of Sanskrit at the Collége de France, reflected seriously in 1925 on the urgency of the East-West problem: Our duty is to understand Oriental civilization. The humanistic problem, which consists, on an intellectual level, in making a sympathetic and intelligent effort to understand foreign civilizations in both their past and their future forms. is specifically posed for us Frenchmen {although similar sentiments could have been expressed by an Englishman: the problem was a European one] in a practical way with regard to our great Asiatic colonies. . . . These peoples are the inheritors of a long tradition of history, of art, and of religion, the sense of which they have not entirely lost and which they are probably anxious to prolong. We have

Orientalism Now 249 assumed the responsibility of intervening in their development, sometimes without consulting them, sometimes in answer to their request... . We claim, rightly or wrongly, to represent a superior civilization, and be cause of the right given us by virtue of this superiority, which we regularly affirm with such assurance as makes it seem incontestable to the natives, we have called in question all their native traditions. . In a general way, then, ‘wherever the European has intervened, the native has perceived himself with a sort of general despair which was really poignant since he felt that the sum of his wellbeing, in the moral sphere more than in sheer material terms, instead of increasing had in fact diminished. All of which has made the foundation of his social life seem to be flimsy and to crumble under him, and the golden pillars on which he had thought to rebuild his life now seem no more than tinseled cardboard. This disappointment has been translated into rancor from one end to the other of the Orient, and this rancorz is very close now to turning to hate, and hate only waits for the right moment in order to turn into action. If because of laziness or incomprehension Europe does not make the effort that its interests alone require from it, then the Asiatic drama will approach the crisis point, It is here that that science which is a form of life and an instrument of policy—-that is, wherever our interests are at stake—owes it to itself to penetrate native civilization and life in their intimacy in order to discover their fundamental values and durable characteristics rather than to ‘smother native life with the incoherent threat of European civi vilizational imports. We must offer ourselves to these civilizations as we do our other products, that is, on the local exchange market. [Emphasis in original}** Lévi has no difficulty in connecting Orientalism with politics, for the long—or rather, the prolonged—Western intervention in the East cannot be denied either in its consequences for knowledge or in its effect upon the hapless native; together the two add up to what could be a menacing future. For all his expressed humanism, his admirable concern for fellow creatures, Lévi conceives the present juncture in unpleasantly constricted te ms. The Oriental is imagined to feel his world threatened by a superior civilization; yet his motives are impelled, not by by some positive desire for freedom, political independence, or cultural