The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the Orient itself as the object of study

Evidence

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. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 342

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘pedagogical tableau’ — the sealed discursive space into which the Orientalist’s constructed Orient is drawn and from which it never returns to reality. Core Orientalism vocabulary.
• ADDENDUM: Parallel to ‘Grafting & Growth’: just as the grafted tree becomes what culture makes of it, the Orientalist’s doctored Orient replaces the raw Orient — the ‘less important than what the Orientalist made of it’ dynamic mirrors grafted specimens displacing wild stock.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 342
• XREF: connects to: Expanding the interpretive horizon transforms the object of study itself. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1738