184 ORIENTALISM on the first: “Les réves et la folie... Le désir de 'Orient. L’Europe séleve. Le réve se réalise . . . Elle. Je Vavais fuie, je lavais perdue . .. Vaisseau d’Orient.”"*! The Orient symbolizes Nerval’s dreamquest and the fugitive woman central to it, both as desire and as Joss. “Vaisseau d’Orient”—vessel of the Orient—_refers enigmatically either to the woman as the vessel carrying the Orient, or possibly, to Nerval’s own vessel for the Orient, his prose voyage. In either case, the Orient is identified with commemorative absence. How else can we explain in the Voyage, a work of so original and individual a mind, the lazy use of large swatches of Lane, incorporated without a murmur by Nerval as his descriptions of the Orient? It is as if having failed both in his search for a stable Oriental reality and in his intent to give systematic order to his re-presentation of the Orient, Nerval was employing the borrowed authority of a canonized Orientalist text. After his voyage the earth remained dead, and aside from its brilliantly crafted but fragmented embodiments in the Voyage, his self was no less drugged and worn out than before. Therefere the Orient seemed retrospectively to belong to a negative realm, in which failed narratives, disordered chronicles, mere transcription of scholarly texts, were its only possible vessel. At least Nerval did not try to save his project by wholeheartedly giving himself up to French designs on the Orient, although he did resort to Orientalism to make some of his points. In contrast to Nerval’s negative vision of an emptied Orient, Flaubert’s is eminently corporeal. His travel notes and letters reveal a man scrupulously reporting events, persons, and settings, delighting in their bizarreries, never attempting to reduce the incongruities before him. In what he writes (or perhaps because he writes), the premium ison the eye-catching, translated into self-consciously worked-out phrases: for example, “Inscriptions and birddroppings are the only two things in Egypt that give any indication of life.”"*? His tastes run to the perverse, whose form is often a combination of extreme animality, even of grotesque nastiness, with extreme and sometimes intellectual refinement. Yet this particular kind of perversity was not something merely observed, it was also studied, and came to represent an essential element in Flaubert’s fiction. The familiar oppositions, or ambivalences, as Harry Levin has called them, that roam through Flaubert’s writing—flesh versus mind, Salomé versus Saint John, Salammbé versus Saint Anthony'“—ate powerfully validated by what he saw in the Orient, what, given

Orientalist Structures and Restructures 185 his eclectic learning, he could see there of the partnership between knowledge and camal grossness. In Upper Egypt he was taken with ancient Egyptian art, its preciosity and deliberate lubricity: “so dirty pictures existed even so far back in antiquity?” How much more the Orient really answered questions than it raised them is evident in the following: You {Flaubert’s mother] ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions—-so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams.1** Flaubert’s work is so complex and so vast as to make any simple account of his Oriental writing very sketchy and hopelessly incomplete. Nevertheless, in the context created by other writers on the Orient, a certain number of main features in Flaubert’s Orientalism can fairly be described. Making allowances for the difference between candidly personal writing (letters, travel notes, diary jottings) and forinally aesthetic writing (novels and tales), we can still remark that Flaubert’s Oriental perspective is rooted in an eastward and southward search for a “visionary alternative,” which “meant gorgeous color, in contrast to the greyish tonality of the French provincial landscape. It meant exciting spectacle instead of humdrum routine, the perennially mysterious in place of the all too familiar.”’*° When he actually visited it, however, this Orient impressed him with its decrepitude and senescence. Like every other Orientalism, then, Flaubert’s is revivalist: he must bring the Orient to life, he must deliver it to himself and to his readers, and it is his experience of it in books and on the spot, and his language for it, that will do the trick. His novels of the Orient accordingly were labored historical and learned reconstructions. Carthage in Salammbé and the products of Saint Anthony’s fevered imagination were authentic fruits of Flaubert’s wide reading in the (mainly Western) sources of Oriental religion, warfare, ritual, and societies. What the formal aesthetic work retains, over and above the marks of Flaubert’s voracious readings and recensions, are memories of Oriental travel. The Bibliothéque des idées recues has it that an Orientatist is “un homme qui a beaucoup voyagé,”** only unlike most other such travelers Flaubert put his voyages to ingenious use. Most of his experiences are conveyed in theatrical form. He is