Critical Departures: Salammbo 's Orientalism

Abstract

Critical Departures: Salammbô’s Orientalism E.L. Constable (bio) “P.S. Exactitude et mystère!” 1 adds Flaubert to the invitation he sends to the Goncourt brothers on the occasion of a reading of Salammbô, to be preceded by an “Oriental” dinner. Any incongruity in the pairing of the two terms fades in the context of nineteenth-century Orientalism, where exactitude and mystère provide an apt shorthand designation for the combination of positivistic objectivity and exoticist fantasy which characterizes post-Romantic nineteenth-century Orientalizing texts. Said emphasizes just such an “amalgam of imperial vagueness and precise detail,” 2 a blending of “radical realism”(72) and projected mystery, central to his definition of nineteenth-century Orientalism’s constitutive role in colonial ideology. Yet, Flaubert’s unsettling text, and the bravura of his postscriptum, provoke us to ask whether his hyperbolic use of detail might not only represent, but persistently critique as it represents, Orientalist strategies. Flaubert’s correspondence leaves us in no doubt that Salammbô exhibits, if not to say flaunts, the fragmentary treasures of the archeological archives, precisely the positivistic findings associated with Orientalist connaissance. Moreover, commentaries on Flaubert’s exoticism, [End Page 625] from critics with quite different, even opposed, aesthetic and political stakes in the text, have contributed to classifying its blend of Romantic exoticism, and pseudo-scientific objectivity as representative, rather than also critical, of nineteenth-century Orientalism. 3 “Flaubert sought to make archeology vivid, and fantasy solid, by fusing the two,” writes Henry Levin, expressing succinctly the assumptions underlying many readings of Salammbô, by suggesting that it results from an unproblematic exchange between the material and the immaterial. 4 Exoticist fantasies would bring to life inanimate (archeological) material details, while those same positivistic findings would concretize abstract exoticist fantasies. Writing more recently, from a postcolonial perspective, Lisa Lowe reads Salammbô as an articulation of ideological Orientalizing formations, which she defines in Flaubert’s case as “a regressive topos of sentimentality” (217). Such interpretations rely upon an implicit biographical framing of the question of Flaubert’s Orientalism—Flaubert as nostalgic exoticist—and read Salammbô through two interrelated lenses provided by the early correspondence of the 1840s. Flaubert the voracious reader of histories of Antiquity meets Flaubert the traveler. His frequently stated desires to have lived in the ancient world, in a barbaric, extravagant civilization, 5 are read together with his laments over the apparent disappearance in the contemporary world of an “Oriental difference.” 6 Both provide external, and I would argue, somewhat misleading, frames which profile Salammbô as the work of a Romantic exoticist, determined to deploy the fragmentary details provided by [End Page 626] positivistic historiography to resuscitate and represent an entire lost world. However, if we resist the imposition of such external interpretive frames for Salammbô, and examine the text itself, we find instead, quite tellingly, the notable absence of a framing lens for the fragments and details. Indeed, those same terms, exactitude and mystère, serve equally well to describe the baffled, and somewhat indignant, reactions of readers, from Flaubert’s contemporaries, Sainte-Beuve and Froehner, through to contemporary critics. 7 Exactitude et mystère define what critics have often deemed an overwhelming profusion of abstruse technical details and arcane religious practices which misfires, becomes meaningless, and results in exasperating textual confusion rather than an exoticizing enigma. They find an incomprehensibly baffling text about obscure incidents in the ancient world: Carthaginian civilization, and the mercenary revolt during the Punic Wars. What appears, however, to disqualify Salammbô as a successful Orientalist representation—the uneasy relationship between parts and whole—leads us directly to the nexus of issues crucial to any treatment of Salammbô’s representativeness as Orientalist text. By representativeness, I refer both to the possibility of interpreting the text as representative (or exemplary) of nineteenth-century Orientalism, and then to questions that a reading of Salammbô raises about Orientalizing representations. Details, and more specifically, the representativeness of textual details, have everything to do with nineteenth-century Orientalism. Said comments on the use of detail to corroborate and confirm further the illusion of an “Oriental difference”: “We have remarked how, during the nineteenth century in such writers as Renan, Lane, Flaubert, Caussin de Perceval...