174 ORIENTALISM The great gifts of sympathetic intuition which had enabled Chateaubriand to represent and interpret North American mysteries in René and Atala, as weil as Christianity in Le Génie du Christianisme, are aroused to even greater feats of interpretation during the ftinéraire. No longer is the author dealing with natural primitivity and romantic sentiment: here he is dealing with eternal creativity and divine originality themselves, for it is in the Biblical Orient that they were first deposited, and they have remained there in unmediated and latent forin. Of course, they cannot be simply grasped; they must be aspired to and achieved by Chateaubriand. And it is this ambitious purpose that the Itinéraire is made to serve, just as in the text Chateaubriand’s ego must be reconstructed radically enough to get the job done. Unlike Lane, Chateaubriand attempts to consume the Orient. He not only appropriates it, he represents and speaks for it, not in history but beyond history, in the timeless dimension of a completely healed world, where men and lands, God and men, are as one. In Jerusalem, therefore, at the center of his vision and at the ultimate end of his pilgrimage, he grants himself a sort of total reconcitiation with the Orient, the Orient as Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Greek, Persian, Roman, and finally French, He is moved by the plight of the Jews, but he judges that they too serve to illuminate his general vision, and as a further benefit, they give the necessary poignance to his Christian vindictiveness. God, he says, has chosen a new people, and it is not the Jews.*¢ He makes some other concessions to terrestrial reality, however. If Jerusalem is booked into his itinerary as its final extraterrestria} goal, Egypt provides him with material for a political excursus. His ideas about Egypt supplement his pilgrimage nicely. The magnificent Nile Delta moves him to assert that I found only the memories of my glorious country worthy of those magnificent plains, I saw the remains of monuments of a new civilization, brought to the banks of the Nile by the genius of France.*? But these ideas are put in a nostalgic mode because in Egypt Chateaubriand believes he can equate the absence of France with the absence of a free government ruling a happy people. Besides, after Jerusalem, Egypt appears to be only a kind of spiritual anticlimax. After political commentary on its sorry state, Chateaubriand asks himself the routine question about “difference” as a resuit of

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 175 historical development: how can this degenerate stupid mob of “Musulmans” have come to inhabit the same land whose vastly different owners so impressed Herodotus and Diodorus? This is a fitting valedictory to Egypt, which he leaves for Tunis, Carthaginian ruins, and finally, home. Yet he does one last thing of note in Egypt: unable to do more than look at the Pyramids from a distance, he takes the trouble to send an emissary there, to have him inscribe his (Chateaubriand’s) name on the stone, adding for our benefit, “one has to fulfill all the little obligations of a pious traveler.” We would not ordinarily give much more than amused attention to this charming bit of touristic banality. As a preparation, however, for the very last page of the IMinéraire, it appears more important than at first glance. Reflecting on his twenty-year project to study “tous les hasards et tous les chagrins” as an exile, Chateaubriand notes elegiacally how every one of his books has been in fact a kind of prolongation of his existence. A man with neither a home nor the possibility of acquiring one, he finds himself now well past his youth. If heaven accords him eternal rest, he says, he promises to dedicate himself in silence to erecting a “monument a ma patrie.” What he is left with on earth, however, is his writing, which, if his name will live, has been enough, and if it will not live, has been too much.** These closing tines send us back to Chateaubriand’s interest in getting his name inscribed on the Pyramids. We will have understood that his egoistic Oriental memoirs supply us with a constantly demonstrated, an indefatigably performed experience of self. Writing was an-act of life for Chateaubriand, for whom nothing, not even a distant piece of stone, must remain scriptively untouched by him if he was to stay alive. If the order of Lane’s narrative was to be violated by scientific authority and enormous detail, then Chateau briand’s was to be transformed into the asserted will of an egoistic, highly volatile individual. Whereas Lane would sacrifice his ego to the Orientalist canon, Chateaubriand would maxe everything he said about the Orient wholly dependent on his ego. Yet neither writer could conceive of his posterity as continuing on fruitfully after him. Lane entered the impersonality of a technical discipline: his work would be used, but not as a human document. Chateaubriand, on the other hand, saw that his writing, like the token inscription of his name on a Pyramid, would signify his self; if not, if he had not succeeded in prolonging his life by writing, it would be merely excessive, superfluous.