144 ORIENTALISM and his son Isidore were biological speculators of extcaordinary fame and influence, particularly among Jiterary intellectuals during the first half of the nineteenth century in France. Etienne, we recall, had been a member of the Napoleonic expedition, and Balzac dedicated an important section of the preface for La Comédie humaine to him; there is also much evidence that Flaubert read both the father and theson and used their views in his work. Not only were Etienne and Isidore legatees of the tradition of “Romantic” biology, which included Goethe and Cuvier, with a strong interest in analogy, homology, and organic ur-form among species, but they were also specialists in the philosophy and anatomy of monstrosity-—— teratology, as Isidore called it—in which the most horrendous physiological aberrations were considered a result of internal degradation within the species-life.** I cannot here go into the intricacies (as well_as the macabre fascination) of teratology, though it is enough to mention that both Etienne and Isidore exploited the theoretical power of the linguistic paradigm to explain the deviations possible within a biological system. Thus Etienne’s notion was that a monster is an anomaly, in the same sense that in language words exist in analogical as well as anomalous relations with each other: in linguistics the idea is at least as old as Varro’s De Lingua Latina. No anomaly can be considered simply as a gratuitous exception; rather anomalies confirm the regular structure binding together all members of the same class. Such a view is quite daring in anatomy. At one moment in the “Préliminaice” to his Philosophie anatomique Etienne says: And, indeed, such is the character of our epoch that it becomes impossible today to enclose oneself strictly within the framework of a simple monograph. Study an object in isojation and you will only be able to bring it back to itself; consequently you can never have perfect knowledge of it. But see it in the midst of beings who are connected with each other in many different ways, and which are isolated from each other in different ways, and you will discover for this object a wider scope of relationships. First of all, you will know it better, even in its specificity: but more important, by considering it in the very center of its own sphere of activity, you will know precisely how it behaves in its own exterior world, and you will also know how its own features are constituted in reaction to its surrounding milieu.5* Not only is Saint-Hilaire saying that it is the specific character of contemporary study (he was writing in 1822) to examine phe 

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 145 nomena comparatively; he is also saying that for the scientist there is no such thing as a phenomenon, no matter how aberrant and exceptional, that cannot be explained with reference to other phenomena. Note also how Saint-Hilaire employs the metaphor of centrality (/e centre de sa sphére d’activité) used later by Renan in L’Avenir de la science to describe the position occupied by any object in nature—including even the philologist---once the object is scientifically placed there by the examining scientist. Thereafter between the object and the scientist a bond of sympathy is established. Of course, this can only take place during the laboratory experience, and not elsewhere. The point being made is that a scientist has at his disposal a sort of leverage by which even the totally unusual occurrence can be seen naturally and known scientifically, which in this case means without recourse to the supernatural, and with recourse only to an enveloping environment constituted by the scientist. As a result nature itself can be reperceived as continuous, harmoniously coherent, and fundamentally intelligible. Thus for Renan Semitic is a phenomenon of arrested development in comparison with the mature languages and cultures of the Indo-European group, and even with the other Semitic Oriental languages.** The paradox that Renan sustains, however, is that even as he encourages us to see languages as in some way corresponding to “étres vivants de la nature,” he is everywhere else proving that his Oriental languages, the Semitic Janguages, are inorganic, arrested, totally ossified, incapable of self-regeneration; in other words, he proves that Semitic is not a live language, and for that matter, neither are Semites live creatures. Moreover, Indo-European language and culture are alive and organic because of the laboratory, not despite it. But far from being a marginal issue in Renan’s work, this paradox stands, I believe, at the very center of his entire work, his style, and his archival existence in the culture of his time, a culture to which—as people so unlike each other as Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, James Frazer, and Marcel Proust concurred —he was a very important contributor. To be able to sustain a vision that incorporates and holds together life and quasi-living creatures (Indo-European, European culture) as well as quasimonstrous, parallel inorganic phenomena (Semitic, Oriental culture) is precisely the achievement of the European scientist in his laboratory. He constructs, and the very act of construction is a sign of imperial power over recalcitrant phenomena, as well as a con