The importance of the Tableau historique for an understanding of Orientalism’s inaugural phase is that it exteriorizes the form of Orientalist knowledge and its features, as it also describes the Orientalist’s relationship to his subject matter. In Sacy’s pages on Orientalism—as elsewhere in his writing—he speaks of his own work as having uncovered, brought to light, rescued a vast amount of obscure matter. Why? In order to place it before the student. For like all his learned contemporaries Sacy considered a learned work a positive addition to an edifice that all scholars erected together. Knowledge was essentially the making visible of material, and the aim of a tableau was the construction of a sort of Benthamite Panopticon. Scholarly discipline was therefore a specific technology of power: it gained for its user (and his students) tools and knowledge which (if he was a historian) had hitherto been lost.15 And indeed the vocabulary of specialized power and acquisition is particularly associated with Sacy’s reputation as a pioneer Orientalist. His heroism as a scholar was to have dealt successfully with insurmountable difficulties; he acquired the means to present a field to his students where there was none. He made the books, the precepts, the examples, said the Duc de Broglie of Sacy. The result was the production of material about the Orient, methods for studying it, and exempla that even Orientals did not have.16
Compared with the labors of a Hellenist or a Latinist working on the Institut team, Sacy’s labors were awesome. They had the texts, the conventions, the schools; he did not, and consequently had to go about making them. The dynamic of primary loss and subsequent gain in Sacy’s writing is obsessional; his investment in it was truly heavy. Like his colleagues in other fields he believed that knowledge is seeing—pan-optically, so to speak—but unlike them he not only had to identify the knowledge, he had to decipher it, interpret it, and most difficult, make it available. Sacy’s achievement was to have produced a whole field. As a European he ransacked the Oriental archives, and he could do so without leaving France. What texts he isolated, he then brought back; he doctored them; then he annotated, codified, arranged, and commented on them. In time, the Orient as such became less important than what the Orientalist made of it; thus, drawn by Sacy into the sealed discursive place of a pedagogical tableau, the Orientalist’s Orient was thereafter reluctant to emerge into reality.
Sacy was much too intelligent to let his views and his practice stand without supporting argument. First of all, he always made it plain why the “Orient” on its own could not survive a European’s taste, intelligence, or patience. Sacy defended the utility and interest of such things as Arabic poetry, but what he was really saying was that Arabic poetry had to be properly transformed by the Orientalist before it could begin to be appreciated. The reasons were broadly epistemological, but they also contained an Orientalistic self-justification. Arabic poetry was produced by a completely strange (to Europeans) people, under hugely different climatic, social, and historical conditions from those a European knows; in addition, such poetry as this was nourished by “opinions, prejudices, beliefs, superstitions which we can acquire only after long and painful study.” Even if one does go through the rigors of specialized training, much of the description in the poetry will not be accessible to Europeans “who have attained to a higher degree of civilization.” Yet what we can master is of great value to us as Europeans accustomed to disguise our exterior attributes, our bodily activity, and our relationship to nature. Therefore, the Orientalist’s use is to make available to his compatriots a considerable range of unusual experience, and still more valuable, a kind of literature capable of helping us understand the “truly divine” poetry of the Hebrews.17
So if the Orientalist is necessary because he fishes some useful gems out of the distant Oriental deep, and since the Orient cannot be known without his mediation, it is also true that Oriental writing itself ought not to be taken in whole. This is Sacy’s introduction to his theory of fragments, a common Romantic concern. Not only are Oriental literary productions essentially alien to the European; they also do not contain a sustained enough interest, nor are they written with enough “taste and critical spirit,” to merit publication except as extracts (pour mériter d’être publiés autrement que par extrait).18 Therefore the Orientalist is required to present the Orient by a series of representative fragments, fragments republished, explicated, annotated, and surrounded with still more fragments. For such a presentation a special genre is required: the chrestomathy, which is where in Sacy’s case the usefulness and interest of Orientalism are most directly and profitably displayed. Sacy’s most famous production was the three-volume Chrestomathie arabe, which was sealed at the outset, so to speak, with an internally rhyming Arabic couplet: “Kitab al-anis al-mufid lil-Taleb al-mustafid;/wa gam’i al shathur min manthoum wa manthur” (A book pleasant and profitable for the studious pupil;/it collects fragments of both poetry and prose).
Sacy’s anthologies were used very widely in Europe for several generations. Although what they contain was claimed as typical, they submerge and cover the censorship of the Orient exercised by the Orientalist. Moreover, the internal order of their contents, the arrangement of their parts, the choice of fragments, never reveal their secret; one has the impression that if fragments were not chosen for their importance, or for their chronological development, or for their aesthetic beauty (as Sacy’s were not), they must nevertheless embody a certain Oriental naturalness, or typical inevitability. But this too is never said. Sacy claims simply to have exerted himself on behalf of his students, to make it unnecessary for them to purchase (or read) a grotesquely large library of Oriental stuff. In time, the reader forgets the Orientalist’s effort and takes the restructuring of the Orient signified by a chrestomathy as the Orient tout court. Objective structure (designation of Orient) and subjective restructure (representation of Orient by Orientalist) become interchangeable. The Orient is overlaid with the Orientalist’s rationality; its principles become his. From being distant, it becomes available; from being unsustainable on its own, it becomes pedagogically useful; from being lost, it is found, even if its missing parts have been made to drop away from it in the process. Sacy’s anthologies not only supplement the Orient; they supply it as Oriental presence to the West.19 Sacy’s work canonizes the Orient; it begets a canon of textual objects passed on from one generation of students to the next.
And the living legacy of Sacy’s disciples was astounding. Every major Arabist in Europe during the nineteenth century traced his intellectual authority back to him. Universities and academies in France, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and especially Germany were dotted with the students who formed themselves at his feet and through the anthological tableaux provided by his work.20 As with all intellectual patrimonies, however, enrichments and restrictions were passed on simultaneously. Sacy’s genealogical originality was to have treated the Orient as something to be restored not only because of but also despite the modern Orient’s disorderly and elusive presence. Sacy placed the Arabs in the Orient, which was itself placed in the general tableau of modern learning. Orientalism belonged therefore to European scholarship, but its material had to be re-created by the Orientalist before it could enter the arcades alongside Latinism and Hellenism. Each Orientalist re-created his own Orient according to the fundamental epistemological rules of loss and gain first supplied and enacted by Sacy. Just as he was the father of Orientalism, he was also the discipline’s first sacrifice, for in translating new texts, fragments, and extracts subsequent Orientalists entirely displaced Sacy’s work by supplying their own restored Orient. Nevertheless the process he started would continue, as philology in particular developed systematic and institutional powers Sacy had never exploited. This was Renan’s accomplishment: to have associated the Orient with the most recent comparative disciplines, of which philology was one of the most eminent.
The difference between Sacy and Renan is the difference between inauguration and continuity. Sacy is the originator, whose work represents the field’s eme
rgence and its status as a nineteenth-century discipline with roots in revolutionary Romanticism. Renan derives from Orientalism’s second generation: it was his task to solidify the official discourse of Orientalism, to systematize its insights, and to establish its intellectual and worldly institutions. For Sacy, it was his personal efforts that launched and vitalized the field and its structures; for Renan, it was his adaptation of Orientalism to philology and both of them to the intellectual culture of his time that perpetuated the Orientalist structures intellectually and gave them greater visibility.
Renan was a figure in his own right neither of total originality nor of absolute derivativeness. Therefore as a cultural force or as an important Orientalist he cannot be reduced simply to his personality nor to a set of schematic ideas in which he believed. Rather, Renan is best grasped as a dynamic force whose opportunities were already created for him by pioneers like Sacy, yet who brought their achievements into the culture as a kind of currency which he circulated and recirculated with (to force the image a little further) his own unmistakable re-currency. Renan is a figure who must be grasped, in short, as a type of cultural and intellectual praxis, as a style for making Orientalist statements within what Michel Foucault would call the archive of his time.21 What matters is not only the things that Renan said but also how he said them, what, given his background and training, he chose to use as his subject matter, what to combine with what, and so forth. Renan’s relations with his Oriental subject matter, with his time and audience, even with his own work, can be described, then, without resorting to formulae that depend on an unexamined assumption of ontological stability (e.g., the Zeitgeist, the history of ideas, life-and-times). Instead we are able to read Renan as a writer doing something describable, in a place defined temporally, spatially, and culturally (hence archivally), for an audience and, no less important, for the furtherance of his own position in the Orientalism of his era.
Renan came to Orientalism from philology, and it is the extraordinarily rich and celebrated cultural position of, that discipline that endowed Orientalism with its most important technical characteristics. For anyone to whom the word philology suggests dry-as-dust and inconsequential word-study, however, Nietzsche’s proclamation that along with the greatest minds of the nineteenth century he is a philologist will come as a surprise—though not if Balzac’s Louis Lambert is recalled:
What a marvelous book one would write by narrating the life and adventures of a word! Undoubtedly a word has received various impressions of the events for which it was used; depending on the places it was used, a word has awakened different kinds of impressions in different people; but is it not more grand still to consider a word in its triple aspect of soul, body, and movement?22
What is the category, Nietzsche will ask later, that includes himself, Wagner, Schopenhauer, Leopardi, all as philologists? The term seems to include both a gift for exceptional spiritual insight into language and the ability to produce work whose articulation is of aesthetic and historical power. Although the profession of philology was born the day in 1777 “when F. A. Wolf invented for himself the name of stud. philol.,” Nietzsche is nevertheless at pains to show that professional students of the Greek and Roman classics are commonly incapable of understanding their discipline: “they never reach the roots of the matter: they never adduce philology as a problem.” For simply “as knowledge of the ancient world philology cannot, of course, last forever; its material is exhaustible.”23 It is this that the herd of philologists cannot understand. But what distinguishes the few exceptional spirits whom Nietzsche deems worthy of praise—not unambiguously, and not in the cursory way that I am now describing—is their profound relation to modernity, a relation that is given them by their practice of philology.
Philology problematizes—itself, its practitioner, the present. It embodies a peculiar condition of being modern and European, since neither of those two categories has true meaning without being related to an earlier alien culture and time. What Nietzsche also sees is philology as something born, made in the Viconian sense as a sign of human enterprise, created as a category of human discovery, self-discovery, and originality. Philology is a way; of historically setting oneself off, as great artists do, from one’s time and an immediate past even as, paradoxically and antinomically, one actually characterizes one’s modernity by so doing.
Between the Friedrich August Wolf of 1777 and the Friedrich Nietzsche of 1875 there is Ernest Renan, an Oriental philologist, also a man with a complex and interesting sense of the way philology and modern culture are involved in each other. In L’Avenir de la science (written in 1848 but not published till 1890) he wrote that “the founders of modern mind are philologists.” And what is modern mind, he said in the preceding sentence, if not “rationalism, criticism, liberalism, [all of which] were founded on the same day as philology?” Philology, he goes on to say, is both a comparative discipline possessed only by moderns and a symbol of modern (and European) superiority; every advance made by humanity since the fifteenth century can be attributed to minds we should call philological. The job of philology in modern culture (a culture Renan calls philological) is to continue to see reality and nature clearly, thus driving out supernaturalism, and to continue to keep pace with discoveries in the physical sciences. But more than all this, philology enables a general view of human life and of the system of things: “Me, being there at the center, inhaling the perfume of everything, judging, comparing, combining, inducing—in this way I shall arrive at the very system of things.” There is an unmistakable aura of power about the philologist. And Renan makes his point about philology and the natural sciences:
To do philosophy is to know things; following Cuvier’s nice phrase, philosophy is instructing the world in theory. Like Kant I believe that every purely speculative demonstration has no more validity than a mathematical demonstration, and can teach us nothing about existing reality. Philology is the exact science of mental objects [La philologie est la science exacte des choses de l’esprit]. It is to the sciences of humanity what physics and chemistry are to the philosophic sciences of bodies.24
I shall return to Renan’s citation from Cuvier, as well as to the constant references to natural science, a little later. For the time being, we should remark that the whole middle section of L’Avenir de la science is taken up with Renan’s admiring accounts of philology, a science he depicts as being at once the most difficult of all human endeavors to characterize and the most precise of all disciplines. In the aspirations of philology to a veritable science of humanity, Renan associates himself explicitly with Vico, Herder, Wolf, and Montesquieu as well as with such philological near-contemporaries as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Bopp, and the great Orientalist Eugène Burnouf (to whom the volume is dedicated). Renan locates philology centrally within what he everywhere refers to as the march of knowledge, and indeed the book itself is a manifesto of humanistic meliorism, which, considering its subtitle (“Pensées de 1848”) and other books of 1848 like Bouvard et Pécuchet and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is no mean irony. In a sense, then, the manifesto generally and Renan’s accounts of philology particularly—he had by then already written the massive philological treatise on Semitic languages that had earned him the Prix Volney—were designed to place Renan as an intellectual in a clearly perceptible relationship to the great social issues raised by 1848. That he should choose to fashion such a relationship on the basis of the least immediate of all intellectual disciplines (philology), the one with the least degree of apparent popular relevance, the most conservative and the most traditional, suggests the extreme deliberateness of Renan’s position. For he did not really speak as one man to all men but rather as a reflective, specialized voice that took, as he put it in the 1890 preface, the inequality of races and the necessary domination of the many by the few for granted as an antidemocratic law of nature and society.25
But how was it possible for Renan to hold himself and what he was saying in such a paradoxical posi
tion? For what was philology on the one hand if not a science of all humanity, a science premised on the unity of the human species and the worth of every human detail, and yet what was the philologist on the other hand if not—as Renan himself proved with his notorious race prejudice against the very Oriental Semites whose study had made his professional name26—a harsh divider of men into superior and inferior races, a liberal critic whose work harbored the most esoteric notions of temporality, origins, development, relationship, and human worth? Part of the answer to this question is that, as his early letters of philological intent to Victor Cousin, Michelet, and Alexander von Humboldt show,27 Renan had a strong guild sense as a professional scholar, a professional Orientalist, in fact, a sense that put distance between himself and the masses. But more important, I think, is Renan’s own conception of his role as an Oriental philologist within philology’s larger history, development, and objectives as he saw them. In other words, what may to us seem like paradox was; the expected result of how Renan perceived his dynastic position within philology, its history and inaugural discoveries, and what he, Renan, did within it. Therefore Renan should be characterized, not as speaking about philology, but rather as speaking philologically with all the force of an initiate using the encoded language of a new prestigious science none of whose pronouncements about language itself could be construed either directly or naively.
As Renan understood, received, and was instructed in philology, the discipline imposed a set of doxological rules upon him. To be a philologist meant to be governed in one’s activity first of all by a set of recent revaluative discoveries that effectively began the science of philology and gave it a distinctive epistemology of its own: I am speaking here of the period roughly from the 1780s to the mid-1830s, the latter part of which coincides with the period of Renan’s beginning his education. His memoirs record how the crisis of religious faith that culminated in the loss of that faith led him in 1845 into a life of scholarship: this was his initiation into philology, its world-view, crises, and style. He believed that on a personal level his life reflected the institutional life of philology. In his life, however, he determined to be as Christian as he once was, only now without Christianity and with what he called “la science laïque” (lay science).28