178 ORIENTALISM alleges that the plains of Canaan appear to best advantage in the works of Poussin and Lorrain. From being a “translation,” as he called it earlier, his voyage is now turned into a prayer, which exercises his memory, soul, and heart more than it does his eyes, mind, or spirit.*® This candid announcement completely unlooses Lamartine’s analogic and reconstructive (and undisciplined) zeal. Christianity is a religion of imagination and recollection, and since Lamartine considers that he typifies the pious believer, he indulges himself accordingly. A catalogue of his tendentious “observations” would be intermninable: a woman he sees reminds him of Haidée in Don Juan, the relationship between Jesus and Palestine is like that between Rotsseau and Geneva; the actua] river Jordan is less important than the “mysteries” it gives rise to in one’s sou]; Orientals, and Muslims in particular, are lazy, their politics are capricious, passionate, and futureless; another woman reminds him of a passage in Atala; neither Tasso nor Chateaubriand (whose antecedent travels seem often to harass Lamartine’s otherwise heedless egoism) got the Holy Land right—and on and on. His pages on Arabic poetry, about which he discourses with supreme confidence, betray no discomfort at his total ignorance of the language. All that matters to him is that his travels in the Orient reveal to him how the Orient is “la terre des cultes, des prodiges,” and that he is its appointed poet in the West. With no trace of self-irony he announces: This Arab land is the land of prodigies; everything sprouts there, and every credulous or fanatical man can become a prophet there in his turn. He has become a prophet merely by the fact of residence in the Orient. By the end of his narrative Lamartine has achieved the purpose of his pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, that beginning and end point of all time and space. He has internalized reality enough to want to retreat from it back into pure contemplation, solitude, philosophy, and poetry.” Rising above the merely geographical Orient, he is transformed into a latter-day Chateaubriand, surveying the East as if it were a personal (or at the very least a French) province ready to be disposed of by European powers. From being a traveler and pilgrim in real time and space, Lamartine has become a transpersonal ego

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 179 identifying itself in power and consciousness with the whole of Europe. What he sees before him is the Orient in the process of its inevitable future dismemberment, being taken over and consecrated by European suzerainty. Thus in Lamartine’s climactic vision the Orient is reborn as European right-to-power over it: This sort of suzerainty thus defined, and consecrated: as a European Tight, will consist principally in the right to occupy one or another territory, as well as the coasts, in order to found there either free cities, or European colonies, or commercial ports of call... . Nor does Lamartine stop at this. He climbs still higher to the point where the Orient, what he has just seen and where he has just been, is reduced to “nations without territory, patrie, rights, laws or security . . . waiting anxiously for the shelter” of European occupation. m9 In all the visions of the Orient fabricated by Orientalism there is no recapitulation, literally, as entire as this one. For Lamartine a pilgrimage to the Orient has involved not only the penetration of the Orient by an imperious consciousness but also the virtual elimination of that consciousness as a resuit of its accession to a kind of impersonal and continental control over the Orient. The Orient’s actual identity is withered away into a set of consecutive fragments, Lamartine’s recollective observations, which are later to be gathered up and brought forth as a restated Napoleonic dream of world hegemony. Whereas Lane’s human identity disappeared into the scientific grid of his Egyptian classifications, Lamartine’s consciousness transgresses its normal bounds completely. In so doing, it repeats Chateaubriand’s journey and his visions only to move on beyond them, into the sphere of the Shelleyan and Napoleonic abstract, by which worlds and populations are moved about like so many cards on a table. What remains of the Orient in Lamartine’s prose is not very substantial at all. Its geopolitical reality has been overlaid with his plans for it; the sites he has visited, the people he has met, the experiences he has had, are reduced to a few echoes in his pompous generalizations. The last traces of particularity have been rubbed out in the “résumé politique” with which the Voyage en Orient concludes. Against the transcendent quasi-national egoism of Lamartine we must place Nerval and Flaubert in contrast. Their Oriental works play a substantial role in their total oeuvre, a much greater one than Lamartine’s imperialist Voyage in his oeuvre. Yet both of them,