250 ORIENTALISM wares beseeching his attention. By a single stroke you will defuse the Orient (by letting it think itself to be an “equal” quantity on the Occidental marketplace of ideas), and you will appease A ‘Western fears of an Oriental tidal wave. At bottom, of course, ‘Lévi’s principal point—and his most telling confession—is that ‘unless something is done about the Orient, “the Asiatic drama will ‘approach the crisis point.” Asia suffers, yet in its suffering it threatens Europe: the eternal, bristling frontier endures between East and West, almost unchanged since classical antiquity. What Lévi says as the most august of modern Orientalists is echoed with less subtlety by cultural humanists. Item: in 1925 the French periodical Les Cahiers du mois conducted a survey among notable intellectual figures; the writers canvassed included Orientalists (Lévi, Emile Senart) as well as literary men like André Gide, Paul Valéry, and Edmond Jaloux. The questions dealt with relations between Orient and Occident in a timely, not to say brazenly provocative, way, and this already indicates something about the cultural ambience of the period. We will immediately recognize how ideas of the sort promulgated in Orientalist scholarship have now reached the level of accepted truth. One question asks whether Orient and Occident are mutually impenetrable (the idea was Maeterlinck’s) or not; another asks whether or not Oriental influence represented “un peril grave”-—~ Henri Massis’s words—to French thought; a third asks about those values in Occidental culture to which its superiority over the Orient can be ascribed. Valéry’s response seems to me worth quoting from, so forthright are the lines of its argument and so time-honored, at least in the early twentieth century: From the cultural point of _yiew, I donot think that_we have much to fear now from the Oriental influence. It is not unknown to us. We owe to the Orient all the beginnings of our arts and of a great deal of our knowledge. We can very well welcome what now comes out of the Orient, if something new is coming out of there —which I very much doubt. This doubt is precisely our guarantee and our European weapon. Besides, the real question in such matters is to digest. But that has always been, just as precisely, the great specialty of the European mind through the ages. Our role is therefore to maintain this power of choice, of universal comprehension, of the ¢ransforma- . tion of everything into our own substance, powers which have made us what we are. The Greeks and the Romans showed us

Orientalism Now 251 how to deal with the monsters of Asia, how to treat them by analysis, how to extract from them their quintessence. . . . The Mediterranean basin seems to me to be like a closed vessel where the essences of the vast Orient have always come in order to be condensed. [Emphasis and ellipses in original]}** If European culture generally has digested the Orient, certainly Valéry was aware that one specific agency for doing the job has been Orientalism. In the world of Wilsonian principles of national selfdeterinination, Valéry relies confidently on analyzing the Orient’s threat away. “The power of choice” is mainly for Europe first to acknowledge the Orient as the origin of European science, then to treat it as a superseded origin. Thus, in another context, Balfour could regard the native inhabitants of Palestine as having priority on the land, but nowhere near the subsequent authority to keep it; the mere wishes of 700,000 Arabs, he said, were of no moment compared to the destiny of an essentially European colonial movement.** Asia represented, then, the unpleasant likelihood of a sudden eruption that would destroy “our” world; as John Buchan put it in 1922: The earth is seething with incoherent power and unorganized intelligence. Have you ever reflected on the case of China? There you have millions of quick brains stiffed in trumpery crafts. They have no direction, no driving power, so the sum of their efforts is futile, and the world laughs at China.°* But if China organized itself (as it would), it would be no laughing matter. Europe's effort therefore was to maintain itself as what Valéry called “une machine puissante,”*? absorbing what it could from outside Europe, converting everything to its use, intellectually and materially, keeping the Orient selectively organized (or disorganized). Yet this could be done only through clarity of vision and analysis. Unless the Orient was seen for what it was, its power ~—military, material, spiritual—would sooner or later overwhelm Europe. The great colonial empires, great systems of systematic Iepression, existed to fend off the feared eventuality. Colonial subjects, as George Orwell saw them in Marrakech in 1939, must not be seen except as a kind of continental emanation, African, Asian, Oriental: When you walk through a town like this—two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own