114 ORIENTALISM this anticipated project of Bouvard’s is rudely interrupted by reality—this time by the sudden appearance of gendarmes who accuse him of debauchery. A few lines later, however, the second item of interest turns up. The two men simultaneously confess to each other that their secret desire is once again to become copyists. They have a double desk made for them, they buy books, pencils, erasers, and—as Flaubert concludes the sketch— “ils s’y mettent”: they turn to. From trying to live through and apply knowledge more or less directly, Bouvard and Pécuchet are reduced finally to transcribing it uncritically from one text to another. Although Bouvard’s vision of Europe regenerated by Asia is not fully spelled out, it (and what it comes to on the copyist’s desk) can be glossed in several important ways. Like many of the two men’s other visions, this one is global and it is reconstructive; it represents what Flaubert felt to be the nineteenth-century predilection for the rebuilding of the world according to an imaginative vision, sometimes accompanied by a special scientific technique. Among the visions Flaubert has in mind are the utopias of Saint-Simon and Fourier, the scientific regenerations of mankind envisioned by Comte, and al] the technical or secular religions promoted by ideologues, positivists, eclectics, occultists, traditionalists, and idealists such as Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Michelet, Cousin, Proudhon, Cournot, Cabet, Janet, and Lamennais.? Throughout the novel Bouvard and Pécuchet espouse the various causes of such figures; then, having ruined them, they move on looking for newer ones, but with no better results. The roots of such revisionist ambitions as these are Romantic in a very specific way. We must remember the extent to which a major part of the spiritual and intellectual project of the late eighteenth century was a reconstituted theology—natural supernaturalism, as M. H. Abrams has called it; this type of thought is carried forward by the typical nineteenth-century attitudes Flaubert satirizes in Bouvard et Pécuchet. The notion of regeneration therefore harks back to a conspicuous Romantic tendency, after the rationalism and decorum of the Enlightenment . . . (to revert] to the stark drama and suprarational mysteries of the Christian story and doctrines and to the violent conf nd abrupt reversals of the Christian inner life, turning : = of destruction and creation, hell and heaven, exile ‘Grid “tamaiiie, death and rebirth, dejection and joy, paradise lost and- Fregained. . . . But since they teas

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 115 lived, inescapably, after the Enlightenment, Romantic writers revived these ancient matters with a difference: they undertook to save the overview of human history and destiny, the existential paradigms, and the cardina! values of their religious heritage, by reconstituting them in a way that would make them intellectually acceptable, as well as emotionally pertinent, for the time being.? What Bouvard has in mind—the regeneration of Europe by Asia —was a very influential Romantic idea. Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for example, urged upon their countrymen, and upon Europeans in general, a detailed study of India because, they said, it was Indian culture and religion that could defeat the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) of Occidental culture. And from this defeat would arise a new, revitalized Europe: the Biblical imagery of death, rebirth, and redemption is evident in this prescription. Moreover, the Romantic Orientalist project was not merely a specific instance of a general tendency; it was a powerful shaper of the tendency itself, as Raymond Schwab has so convincingly argued in La Renaissance orientale. But what mattered was not Asia so much as Asia’s use to modern Europe. Thus anyone who, like Schlegel or Franz Bopp, mastered an Oriental language was a spiritual hero, a knight-errant bringing back to Europe a sense of the holy mission it had now lost. It is precisely this sense that the later secular religions portrayed by Flaubert carry on in the nineteenth century. No less than Schlegel, Wordsworth, and Chateaubriand, Auguste Comte—like Bouvard—was the adherent and proponent of a secular post-Enlightenment myth whose outlines are unmistakably Christian. In regularly allowing Bouvard and Pécuchet to go through revisionist notions from start to comically debased finish, Flaubert drew attention to the human flaw common to all projects. He saw perfectly well that underneath the idée re¢ue “Europe-regenerated-by-Asia” lurked a very insidious hubris. Neither “Europe” nor “Asia” was anything without the visionaries’ technique for turning vast geographical domains into treatable, and manageable, entities. At bottom, therefore, Europe and Asia were our Europe and our Asia— our will and representation, as Schopenhauer had said. Historical laws were in reality historians’ laws, just as “the two forms of humanity” drew attention less to actuality than to a European capacity for lending man-made distinctionggliis of inevitability. As for the other half of the phrase—“ wi Fe soldered together”— there Flaubert mocked the blithg ence of science to actuality,