166 ORIENTALISM elementary books on .. . the Orjental languages, nothing is more important than to lay the cornerstone of this museum, which I consider a living commentary upon and interpretation [truchement) of the dictionaries.7* Truchement derives nicely from the Arabic turjaman, meaning “interpreter,” “intermediary,” or “spokesman.” On the one hand, Orientalism acquired the Orient as literally and as widely as possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the West, filtering it through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical reviews, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West. The Orient, in short, would be converted from the personal, sometimes garbled testimony of intrepid voyagers and residents into impersonal definition by a whole array of scientific workers. It would be converted from the consecutive experience of individual research into a sort of imaginary museum without walls, where everything gathered from the huge distances and varieties of Oriental culture became categorically Oriental. It would be reconverted, restructured from the bundle of fragments brought back piecemeal by explorers, expeditions, commissions, armies, and merchants into lexicographical, bibliographical, departmentalized, and rextualized Orientalist sense. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Orient had become, as Disraeli said, a career, one in which one could remake and restore not only the Orient but also oneself. IV Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French Every European traveler or resident in the Orient has had to protect himself from its unsettling influences. Someone like Lane ultimately rescheduled and resituated the Orient when he came to write about it. The eccentricities of Oriental life, with its odd calendars, its exotic spatial configurations, its hopelessly strange languages, its seemingly perverse morality, were reduced con 

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 167 siderably when they appeared as a series of detailed items presented in a normative European prose style. It is correct to say that in Orientalizing the Orient, Lane not only defined but edited it; he excised from it what, in addition to his own human sympathies, might have ruffled the European sensibility. In most cases, the Orient seemed to have offended sexual propriety; everything about the Orient---or at least Lane’s Orient-in-Egypt---exuded dangerous sex, threatened hygiene and domestic seemliness with an excessive “freedom of intercourse,” as Lane put it more irrepressibly than usual. But there were other sorts of threats than sex. All of them wore away the European discreteness and rationality of time, space, and personal identity. In the Orient one suddenly confronted unimaginable antiquity, inhuman beauty, boundless distance. These could be put to use more innocently, as it were, if they were thought and written about, not directly experienced. In Byron’s “Giaour,” in the Westdstlicher Diwan, in Hugo’s Orientales, the Orient is a form of release, a place of original opportunity, whose keynote was struck in Goethe's “Hegire”— Nord und West Siid zersplittern, Throne bersten, Reiche zittem, Fluchte du, in reinen Osten Patriarchenluft zu kosten! (North, West, and South disintegrate, Thrones burst, empires tremble. Fly away, and in the pure East Taste the Patriarchs’ air.) One always returned to the Orient—“Dort, im Reinen und in Rechten/Will ich menschlichen Geschlechten/In des Ursprungs Tiefe dringen” (There in purity and righteousness will I go back to the profound origins of the human race)—seeing it as completion and confirmation of everything one had imagined: Gottes ist der Orient! Gottes ist der Okzident! Nord und siidliches Gelande Ruht im Frieden seiner Hinde.?é (God is the Orient! God is the Occident! Northern and southern lands Repose in the peace of His hands.)