The pilgrim’s Orient is consumed beyond history, in a timeless healed world

Evidence

No longer is the author dealing with natural primitivity and romantic sentiment: here he is dealing with eternal creativity and divine originality themselves, for it is in the Biblical Orient that they were first deposited, and they have remained there in unmediated and latent form. Of course, they cannot be simply grasped; they must be aspired to and achieved by Chateaubriand. And it is this ambitious purpose that the Itinéraire is made to serve, just as in the text Chateaubriand’s ego must be reconstructed radically enough to get the job done. Unlike Lane, Chateaubriand attempts to consume the Orient. He not only appropriates it, he represents and speaks for it, not in history but beyond history, in the timeless dimension of a completely healed world, where men and lands, God and men, are as one. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 441

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with Lane’s documentary appropriation; connects to the distinction between scientific and spiritual Orientalist modes later chapters formalize.
• DEFINE: Distinguishes the ‘consuming’ mystical-pilgrim mode of Orientalism from Lane’s ethnographic-representational mode.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 441