In addition to their general cultural attitudes, Nerval and Flaubert brought to the Orient a personal mythology whose concerns and even structure required the Orient. Both men were touched by the Oriental renaissance as Quinet and others had defined it: they sought the invigoration provided by the fabulously antique and the exotic. For each, however, the Oriental pilgrimage was a quest for something relatively personal: Flaubert seeking a “homeland,” as Jean Bruneau has called it,95 in the locales of the origin of religions, visions, and classical antiquity; Nerval seeking—or rather following—the traces of his personal sentiments and dreams, like Sterne’s Yorick before him. For both writers the Orient was a place therefore of déjà vu, and for both, with the artistic economy typical of all major aesthetic imaginations, it was a place often returned to after the actual voyage had been completed. For neither of them was the Orient exhausted by their uses of it, even if there is often a quality of disappointment, disenchantment, or demystification to be found in their Oriental writings.
The paramount importance of Nerval and Flaubert to a study such as this of the Orientalist mind in the nineteenth century is that they produced work that is connected to and depends upon the kind of Orientalism we have so far discussed, yet remains independent from it. First there is the matter of their work’s scope. Nerval produced his Voyage en Orient as a collection of travel notes, sketches, stories, and fragments; his preoccupation with the Orient is to be found as well in Les Chimères, in his letters, in some of his fiction and other prose writings. Flaubert’s writing both before and after his visit is soaked in the Orient. The Orient appears in the Carnets de Voyage and in the first version of La Tentation de Saint Antoine (and in the two later versions), as well as in Hérodias, Salammbô, and the numerous reading notes, scenarios, and unfinished stories still available to us, which have been very intelligently studied by Bruneau.96 There are echoes of Orientalism in Flaubert’s other major novels, too. In all, both Nerval and Flaubert continually elaborated their Oriental material and absorbed it variously into the special structures of their personal aesthetic projects. This is not to say, however, that the Orient is incidental to their work. Rather—by contrast with such writers as Lane (from whom both men borrowed shamelessly), Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Renan, Sacy—their Orient was not so much grasped, appropriated, reduced, or codified as lived in, exploited aesthetically and imaginatively as a roomy place full of possibility. What mattered to them was the structure of their work as an independent, aesthetic, and personal fact, and not the ways by which, if one wanted to, one could effectively dominate or set down the Orient graphically. Their egos never absorbed the Orient, nor totally identified the Orient with documentary and textual knowledge of it (with official Orientalism, in short).
On the one hand, therefore, the scope of their Oriental work exceeds the limitations imposed by orthodox Orientalism. On the other hand, the subject of their work is more than Oriental or Orientalistic (even though they do their own Orientalizing of the Orient); it quite consciously plays with the limitations and the challenges presented to them by the Orient and by knowledge about it. Nerval, for example, believes that he has to infuse what he sees with vitality since, he says,
Le ciel et la mer sont toujours là; 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 rêves 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:
I 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 novel, 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.97
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 para-pilgrimage, 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.98 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, 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 parallax, all the dimensions of the snare harbored by the normal centers. Wandering the streets or environs of Cairo, 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 Itinéraire].…
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.99
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 déjà l’Orient n’est plus pour moi qu’un de ses rêves du matin auxquels viennent bientôt succéder les ennuis du jour.”100 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 étrangères). Souvenirs d’y avoir vécu.” The second elaborates a bit on the first: “Les rêves et la folie … Le désir de l’Orient. L’Europe s’élève. Le rêve se r�
�alise … Elle. Je l’avais fuie, je l’avais perdue … Vaisseau d’Orient.”101 The Orient symbolizes Nerval’s dream-quest and the fugitive woman central to it, both as desire and as loss. “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. Therefore 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 is on 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.”102 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, Salammbô versus Saint Anthony103—are powerfully validated by what he saw in the Orient, what, given his eclectic learning, he could see there of the partnership between knowledge and carnal 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.104
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 formally 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 hum-drum routine, the perennially mysterious in place of the all too familiar.”105 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 Salammbô 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 Bibliothèque des idées reçues has it that an Orientalist is “un homme qui a beaucoup voyagé,”106 only unlike most other such travelers Flaubert put his voyages to ingenious use. Most of his experiences are conveyed in theatrical form. He is interested not only in the content of what he sees but—like Renan—in how he sees, the way by which the Orient, sometimes horribly but always attractively, seems to present itself to him. Flaubert is its best audience:
… Kasr el-’Aini Hospital. Well maintained. The work of Clot Bey—his hand is still to be seen. Pretty cases of syphilis; in the ward of Abbas’s Mamelukes, several have it in the arse. At a sign from the doctor, they all stood up on their beds, undid their trouserbelts (it was like army drill), and opened their anuses with their fingers to show their chancres. Enormous infundibula; one had a growth of hair inside his anus. One old man’s prick entirely devoid of skin; I recoiled from the stench. A rachitic: hands curved backward, nails as long as claws; one could see the bone structure of his torso as clearly as a skeleton; the rest of his body, too, was fantastically thin, and his head was ringed with whitish leprosy.
Dissecting room: … On the table an Arab cadaver, wide open; beautiful black hair.…107
The lurid detail of this scene is related to many scenes in Flaubert’s novels, in which illness is presented to us as if in a clinical theater. His fascination with dissection and beauty recalls, for instance, the final scene of Salammbô, culminating in Mâtho’s ceremonial death. In such scenes, sentiments of repulsion or sympathy are repressed entirely; what matters is the correct rendering of exact detail.
The most celebrated moments in Flaubert’s Oriental travel have to do with Kuchuk Hanem, a famous Egyptian dancer and courtesan he encountered in Wadi Haifa. He had read in Lane about the almehs and the khawals, dancing girls and boys respectively, but it was his imagination rather than Lane’s that could immediately grasp as well as enjoy the almost metaphysical paradox of the almeh’s profession and the meaning of her name. (In Victory, Joseph Conrad was to repeat Flaubert’s observation by making his musician heroine—Alma—irresistibly attractive and dangerous to Axel Heyst.) Alemah in Arabic means a learned woman. It was the name given to women in conservative eighteenth-century Egyptian society who were accomplished reciters of poetry. By the mid-nineteenth century the title was used as a sort of guild name for dancers who were also prostitutes, and such was Kuchuk Hanem, whose dance “L’Abeille” Flaubert watched before he slept with her. She was surely the prototype of several of his novels’ female characters in her learned sensuality, delicacy, and (according to Flaubert) mindless coarseness. What he especially liked about her was that she seemed to place no demands on him, while the “nauseating odor” of her bedbugs mingled enchantingly with “the scent of her skin, which was dripping with sandalwood.” After his voyage, he had written Louise Colet reassuringly that “the oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another man.” Kuchuk’s dumb and irreducible sexuality allowed Flaubert’s mind to wander in ruminations whose haunting power over him reminds us somewhat of Deslauriers and Frédéric Moreau at the end of l’Education sentimentale:
As for me, I scarcely shut my eyes. Watching that beautiful creature asleep (she snored, her head against my arm: I had slipped my forefinger under her necklace), my night was one long, infinitely intense reverie—that was why I stayed. I thought of my nights in Paris brothels—a whole series of old memories came back—and I thought of her, of her dance, of her v
oice as she sang songs that for me were without meaning and even without distinguishable words.108
The Oriental woman is an occasion and an opportunity for Flaubert’s musings; he is entranced by her self-sufficiency, by her emotional carelessness, and also by what, lying next to him, she allows him to think. Less a woman than a display of impressive but verbally inexpressive femininity, Kuchuk is the prototype of Flaubert’s Salammbô and Salomé, as well as of all the versions of carnal female temptation to which his Saint Anthony is subject. Like the Queen of Sheba (who also danced “The Bee”) she could say—were she able to speak—“Je ne suis pas une femme, je suis un monde.”109 Looked at from another angle Kuchuk is a disturbing symbol of fecundity, peculiarly Oriental in her luxuriant and seemingly unbounded sexuality. Her home near the upper reaches of the Nile occupied a position structurally similar to the place where the veil of Tanit—the goddess described as Omniféconde—is concealed in Salammbô.110 Yet like Tanit, Salomé, and Salammbô herself, Kuchuk was doomed to remain barren, corrupting, without issue. How much she and the Oriental world she lived in came to intensify for Flaubert his own sense of barrenness is indicated in the following:
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