Orientalism (45 page)

Lévi has no difficulty in connecting Orientalism with politics, for the long—or rather, the prolonged—Western intervention in the East cannot be denied either in its consequences for knowledge or in its effect upon the hapless native; together the two add up to what could be a menacing future. For all his expressed humanism, his admirable concern for fellow creatures, Lévi conceives the present juncture in unpleasantly constricted terms. The Oriental is imagined to feel his world threatened by a superior civilization; yet his motives are impelled, not by some positive desire for freedom, political independence, or cultural achievement
on their own terms
, but instead by rancor or jealous malice. The panacea offered for this potentially ugly turn of affairs is that the Orient be marketed for a Western consumer, be put before him as one among numerous
wares beseeching his attention. By a single stroke you will defuse the Orient (by letting it think itself to be an “equal” quantity on the Occidental marketplace of ideas), and you will appease Western fears of an Oriental tidal wave. At bottom, of course, Levi’s principal point—and his most telling confession—is that unless something is done about the Orient, “the Asiatic drama will approach the crisis point.”

Asia suffers, yet in its suffering it threatens Europe: the eternal, bristling frontier endures between East and West, almost unchanged since classical antiquity. What Lévi says as the most august of modern Orientalists is echoed with less subtlety by cultural humanists. Item: in 1925 the French periodical
Les Cahiers du mois
conducted a survey among notable intellectual figures; the writers canvassed included Orientalists (Lévi, Émile Senart) as well as literary men like André Gide, Paul Valéry, and Edmond Jaloux. The questions dealt with relations between Orient and Occident in a timely, not to say brazenly provocative, way, and this already indicates something about the cultural ambience of the period. We will immediately recognize how ideas of the sort promulgated in Orientalist scholarship have now reached the level of accepted truth. One question asks whether Orient and Occident are mutually impenetrable (the idea was Maeterlinck’s) or not; another asks whether or not Oriental influence represented “un peril grave”—Henri Massis’s words—to French thought; a third asks about those values in Occidental culture to which its superiority over the Orient can be ascribed. Valéry’s response seems to me worth quoting from, so forthright are the lines of its argument and so time-honored, at least in the early twentieth century:

If European culture generally has digested the Orient, certainly Valéry was aware that one specific agency for doing the job has been Orientalism. In the world of Wilsonian principles of national self-determination, Valéry relies confidently on analyzing the Orient’s threat away. “The power of choice” is mainly for Europe first to acknowledge the Orient as the origin of European science, then to treat it as a superseded origin. Thus, in another context, Balfour could regard the native inhabitants of Palestine as having priority on the land, but nowhere near the subsequent authority to keep it; the mere wishes of 700,000 Arabs, he said, were of no moment compared to the destiny of an essentially European colonial movement.
⁵⁵

Asia represented, then, the unpleasant likelihood of a sudden eruption that would destroy “our” world; as John Buchan put it in 1922:

But if China organized itself (as it would), it would be no laughing matter. Europe’s effort therefore was to maintain itself as what Valéiy called “une machine puissante,”
⁵⁷
absorbing what it could from outside Europe, converting everything to its use, intellectually and materially, keeping the Orient selectively organized (or disorganized). Yet this could be done only through clarity of vision and analysis. Unless the Orient was seen for what it was, its power—military, material, spiritual—would sooner or later overwhelm Europe. The great colonial empires, great systems of systematic repression, existed to fend off the feared eventuality. Colonial subjects, as George Orwell saw them in Marrakech in 1939, must not be seen except as a kind of continental emanation, African, Asian, Oriental:

Aside from the picturesque characters offered European readers in the exotic fiction of minor writers (Pierre Loti, Marmaduke Pickthall, and the like), the non-European known to Europeans is precisely what Orwell says about him. He is either a figure of fun, or an atom in a vast collectivity designated in ordinary or cultivated discourse as an undifferentiated type called Oriental, African, yellow, brown, or Muslim. To such abstractions Orientalism had contributed its power of generalization, converting instances of a civilization into ideal bearers of its values, ideas, and positions, which in turn the Orientalists had found in “the Orient” and transformed into common cultural currency.

If we reflect that Raymond Schwab brought out his brilliant biography of Anquetil-Duperron in 1934—and began those studies which were to put Orientalism in its proper cultural context—we must also remark that what he did was in stark contrast to his fellow artists and intellectuals, for whom Orient and Occident were still the secondhand abstractions they were for Valéry. Not that Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Arthur Waley, Fenollosa, Paul Claudel(in his
Connaissance de l’est
), Victor Ségalen, and others were ignoring “the wisdom of the East,” as Max Müller had called it a few generations earlier. Rather the culture viewed the Orient, and Islam in particular, with the mistrust with which its learned attitude to the Orient had always been freighted. A suitable instance of this contemporary attitude at its most explicit is to be found in a series of lectures given at the University of Chicago in 1924 on “The Occident and the Orient” by Valentine Chirol, a well-known European newspaperman of great experience in the East; his purpose was to make clear to educated Americans that the Orient was not
as far off as perhaps they believed. His line is a simple one: that Orient and Occident are irreducibly opposed to each other, and that the Orient—in particular “Mohammedanism”—is one of “the great world-forces” responsible for “the deepest lines of cleavage” in the world.
⁵⁹
Chirol’s sweeping generalizations are, I think, adequately represented by the titles of his six lectures: “Their Ancient Battleground”; “The Passing of the Ottoman Empire, the Peculiar Case of Egypt”; “The Great British Experiment in Egypt”; “Protectorates and Mandates”; “The New Factor of Bolshevism”; and “Some General Conclusions.”

To such relatively popular accounts of the Orient as Chirol’s, we can add a testimonial by Élie Faure, who in his ruminations draws, like Chirol, on history, cultural expertise, and the familiar contrast between White Occidentalism and colored Orientalism. While delivering himself of paradoxes like “le carnage permanent de l’indifférence orientale” (for, unlike “us,” “they” have no conception of peace), Faure goes on to show that the Orientals’ bodies are lazy, that the Orient has no conception of history, of the nation, or of
patrie
, that the Orient is essentially mystical—and so on. Faure argues that unless the Oriental learns to be rational, to develop techniques of knowledge and positivity, there can be no
rapprochement
between East and West.
⁶⁰
A far more subtle and learned account of the East-West dilemma can be found in Fernand Baldensperger’s essay “Où s’affrontent l’Orient et l’Occident intellectuels,” but he too speaks of an inherent Oriental disdain for the idea, for mental discipline, for rational interpretation.
⁶¹

Spoken as they are out of the depths of European culture, by writers who actually believe themselves to be speaking on behalf of that culture, such commonplaces (for they are perfect
idées reçues
) cannot be explained simply as examples of provincial chauvinism. They are not that, and—as will be evident to anyone who knows anything about Faure’s and Baldensperger’s other work—are the more paradoxical for not being that. Their background is the transformation of the exacting, professional science of Orientalism, whose function in nineteenth-century culture had been the restoration to Europe of a lost portion of humanity, but which had become in the twentieth century both an instrument of policy and, more important, a code by which Europe could interpret both itself and the Orient to itself. For reasons discussed earlier in this book, modern Orientalism already carried within itself the imprint of
the great European fear of Islam, and this was aggravated by the political challenges of the
entre-deux-guerres
. My point is that the metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological subspecialty into a capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man’s difficult civilizing mission—all this is something at work within a purportedly liberal culture, one full of concern for its vaunted norms of catholicity, plurality, and open-mindedness. In fact, what took place was the very opposite of liberal: the hardening of doctrine and meaning, imparted by “science,” into “truth.” For if such truth reserved for itself the right to judge the Orient as immutably Oriental in the ways I have indicated, then liberality was no more than a form of oppression and mentalistic prejudice.

The extent of such illiberality was not—and is not—often recognized from within the culture, for reasons that this book is trying to explore. It is heartening, nevertheless, that such illiberality has occasionally been challenged. Here is an instance from I. A. Richards’s foreword to his
Mencius on the Mind
(1932); we can quite easily substitute “Oriental” for “Chinese” in what follows.

Richards’s argument advances claims for the exercise of what he calls Multiple Definition, a genuine type of pluralism, with the combativeness of systems of definition eliminated. Whether or not we accept his counter to Gilson’s provincialism, we can accept the proposition that liberal humanism, of which Orientalism has historically been one department,
retards
the process of enlarged and enlarging meaning through which true understanding can be attained. What took the place of enlarged meaning in twentieth-century Orientalism—that is, within the technical field—is the subject most immediately at hand.

Because we have become accustomed to think of a contemporary expert on some branch of the Orient, or some aspect of its life, as a specialist in “area studies,” we have lost a vivid sense of how, until around World War II, the Orientalist was considered to be a generalist (with a great deal of specific knowledge, of course) who had highly developed skills for making summational statements. By summational statements I mean that in formulating a relatively uncomplicated idea, say, about Arabic grammar or Indian religion, the Orientalist would be understood (and would understand himself) as also making a statement about the Orient as a whole, thereby summing it up. Thus every discrete study of one bit of Oriental material would also confirm in a summary way the profound Orientality of the material, And since it was commonly believed that the whole Orient hung together in some profoundly organic way, it made perfectly good hermeneutical sense for the Orientalist scholar to regard the material evidence he dealt with as ultimately leading to a better understanding of such things as the Oriental character, mind, ethos, or world-spirit.