148 ORIENTALISM body (as they had for Vico) and more to a sightless, imageless, and abstract realm ruled over by such hothouse fomnulations as race, mind, culture, and nation. In that realm, which was discursively constructed and called the Orient, certain kinds of assertions could be made, all of them possessing the same powerful generality and cultural validity. For all of Renan’s effort was to deny Oriental culture the right to be generated, except artificially in the philological laboratory. A man was not a child of the culture; that dynastic conception had been too effectively challenged by philology. Philology taught one how culture is a construct. an articulation (in the sense that Dickens used the word for Mr. Venus’s profession in Our Mutual Friend), even a creation, butnot anything more than a quasi-organic structure. What is specially interesting in Renan is how much he knew himselfto be a creature of his time and of his ethnocentric culture. On the occasion of an academic response to a speech made by. Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1885, Renan averred as how “it was so sad to be a wiser man than one’s nation. . . . One cannot feel bitterness towards one’s homeland. Better to be mistaken along with the nation than to be too right with those who tell it hard truths.” The economy of such a statement is almost too perfect to be true. For does not the old Renan say that the best relationship is one of parity with one’s own culture, its morality, and its ethos during one’s time, that and not a dynastic relation by which one is either the child of his times or their parent? And here we return to the laboratory, for it is there—as Renan thought of it—that filial and ultimately social responsibilities cease and scientific and Orientalist ones take over. His laboratory was the platform from which as an Orientalist he addressed the world; it mediated the statements he made, gave them confidence and general precision, as well as continuity. Thus the philological laboratory as Renan understood it redefined not only his epoch and his culture, dating and shaping them in new ways; it gave his Oriental subject matter a scholarly coherence, and more, it made him (and later Orientalists in his tradition) into the Occidental cultural figure he then became. We may well wonder whether this new autonomy within the culture was the freedom Renan hoped his philological Orientalist science would bring or whether, so far as a critical historian of Orientalism is concerned, it set up a complex affiliation between Orientalism and its putative human subject matter that is based finally on power and not really on disinterested objectivity.

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 149 Il Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination Renan’s views of the Oriental Semites belong, of course, less to the realm of popular prejudice and common anti-Semitism than they do to the realm of scientific Oriental philology. When we read Renan and Sacy, we readily observe the way cultural generalization had begun to acquire the armor of scientific statement and the ambience of corrective study. Like many academic specialties in their early phases, modern Orientalism held its subject matter, which it defined, in a viselike grip which it did almost everything in its power to sustain. Thus a knowing vocabulary developed, and its functions, as much as its style, located the Orient in a comparative framework, of the sort employed and manipulated by Renan. Such comparatism is rarely descriptive; most often, it is both evaluative and expository. Here is Renan comparing typically: One sees that in all things the Semitic race appears to us to be an incomplete race, by virtue of its simplicity. This race—if I dare use the analogy—is to the Indo-European family what a pencil sketch is to painting; it lacks that variety, that amplitude, that abundance of life which is the condition of perfectibility. Like those individuals who possess so little fecundity that, after a gracious childhood, they attain only the most mediocre virility, the Semitic nations experienced their fullest flowering in their first age and have never been able to achieve true maturity. Indo-Europeans are the touchstone here, just as they are when Renan says that the Semitic Oriental sensibility never reached the heights attained by the Indo-Germanic races. Whether this comparative attitude is principally a scholarly necessity or whether it is disguised ethnocentric race prejudice, we cannot say with absolute certainty. What we can say is that the two