182 ORIENTALISM Le ciel et la mer sont toujours [a; le ciel d’Orient, la mer d’Ionie se donnent chaque matin le saint baiser d'amour; mais la terre est morte, morte sous la main de l’homme, et les dieux se sont envolés! (The sky and the sea are still there; the Oriental sky and the Ionian sky give each other the sacred kiss of love each morning; but the earth is dead, dead because man has killed it, and the gods have fled.) If the Orient is to live at all, now that its gods have fled, it must be through his fertile efforts. In the Voyage en Orient the narrative consciousness is a constantly energetic voice, moving through the labyrinths of Oriental existence armed—Nerval tells us—with two Arabic words, tayeb, the word for assent, and mafisch, the word for rejection. These two words enable him selectively to confront the antithetical Oriental world, to confront it and draw out from it its secret principles. He is predisposed to recognize that the Orient is “le pays des réves et de l’illusion,” which, like the veils he sees everywhere in Cairo, conceal a deep, rich fund of female sexuality. Nerval repeats Lane’s experience of discovering the necessity for marriage in an Islamic society, but unlike Lane he does attach himself to a woman. His liaison with Zaynab is more than socially obligatory: IT must unite with a guileless young girl who is of this sacred soil, which is our first homeland; I must bathe myself in the vivifying springs of humanity, from which poetry and the faith of our fathers flowed forth! . . . I would like to lead my life like a nove}, and I willingly place myself in the situation of one of those active and resolute heroes who wish at all costs to create a drama around them, a knot of complexity, in a word, action.” Nerval invests himself in the Orient, producing not so much a novelistic narrative as an everlasting intention—never fully realized —to fuse mind with physical action. This antinarrative, this parapilgrimage, is a swerving away from discursive finality of the sort envisioned by previous writers on the Orient. Connected physically and sympathetically to the Orient, Nerval wanders informally through its riches and its cultural (and principally feminine) ambience, locating in Egypt especially that maternal “center, at once mysterious and accessible” from which all wisdom derives.*® His impressions, dreams, and memories alternate with sections of ornate, mannered narrative done in the Oriental style; the hard realities of travel—in Egypt, Lebanon,

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 183 Turkey—mingle with the design of a deliberate digression, as if Nerval were repeating Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire using an underground, though far less imperial and obvious, route. Michel Butor puts it beautifully: To Nerval’s eyes, Chateaubriand’s journey remains a voyage along the surface, while his own is calculated, utilizing annex centers, lobbies of ellipses englobing the principal centers; this allows him to place in evidence, by paratlax, all the dimensions of the snare harbored by the normal centers. Wandering the streets or environs of Catro, Beirut, or Constantinople, Nerval is always lying in wait for anything that will allow him to sense a cavern extending beneath Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem [the principal cities of Chateaubriand’s /tinéraireJ. . . Just as the three cities of Chateaubriand are in communication —Rome, with its emperors and popes, reassembling the heritage, the testament, of Athens and Jerusalem-——the caverns of Nerval . .. become engaged in intercourse.* Even the two large plotted episodes, “The Tale of the Caliph Hakim” and “The Tale of the Queen of the Morning,” that will supposedly convey a durable, solid narrative discourse seem to push Nerval away from “overground” finality, edging him further and further into a haunting internal world of paradox and dream. Both tales deal with multiple identity, one of whose motifs—explicitly stated—-is incest, and both return us to Nerval’s quintessential Oriental world of uncertain, fluid dreams infinitely multiplying themselves past resolution, definiteness, materiality. When the journey is completed and Nerval arrives in Malta on his way back to the European mainland, he realizes that he is now in “le pays du froid et des orages, et déja Orient n’est plus pour moi qu’un de ses réves du matin auxquets viennent bientdt succéder les ennuis du jour.”"” His Voyage incorporates numerous pages copied out of Lane’s Modern Egyptians, but even their lucid confidence seems to dissolve in the endlessly decomposing, cavernous element which is Nerval’s Orient. His carnet for the Voyage supplies us, I think, with two perfect texts for understanding how his Orient untied itself from anything resembling an Orientalist conception of the Orient, even though his work depends on Orientalism to a certain extent. First, his appetites strive to gather in experience and memory indiscriminately: “Je sens le besoin de m’assimiler toute la nature (femmes étrangéres}. Souvenirs d’y avoir vécu.” The second elaborates a bit