Summary
Gérard de Nerval, whose Voyage en Orient (from a voyage of 1842-1843) Said presents in Orientalism, with Gustave Flaubert’s Oriental work, as connected to and dependent upon orthodox Orientalism yet independent from it: his Orient was not so much grasped, appropriated, reduced or codified as lived in and exploited aesthetically as a roomy place full of possibility (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.189-193 / printed p.180-184).
Details
- Nerval said disingenuously in Les Filles du feu that all he knew about the Orient was a half-forgotten memory from his school education; the evidence of his Voyage en Orient flatly contradicts this, although it shows a much less systematic and disciplined knowledge of Orientalia than Flaubert’s (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.189 / printed p.180).
- For Nerval the Orient had to be infused with vitality by his own fertile efforts, since, in the passage quoted in French with Said’s translation, “but the earth is dead, dead because man has killed it, and the gods have fled”; armed with two Arabic words, tayeb for assent and mafish for rejection, he recognizes the Orient as, in his phrase, the land of dreams and of illusion (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.191 / printed p.182).
- Unlike Edward William Lane, Nerval does attach himself to a woman in the Orient: his liaison with Zaynab is, in the passage Said quotes, an investment of himself in a sacred soil that is “our first homeland”, and his Voyage produces not a novelistic narrative but an everlasting, never fully realized intention to fuse mind with physical action — an antinarrative, a parapilgrimage (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.191 / printed p.182).
- Nerval’s Voyage incorporates numerous pages copied out of Lane’s Modern Egyptians, whose lucid confidence dissolves in the endlessly decomposing, cavernous element which is Nerval’s Orient; after his voyage the earth remained dead, and the Orient seemed retrospectively to belong to a negative realm in which failed narratives, disordered chronicles and mere transcription of scholarly texts were its only possible vessel (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.192-193 / printed p.183-184).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Gustave Flaubert, Edward William Lane, François-René de Chateaubriand