ABSTRACT
In Orientalism, Edward Said gives us some insights into the Romantic pilgrimages to the Orient made by famous French writers, such as Chateaubriand, Alphonse Louis de Marie Lamartine, Theophile Gautier, Gerard de Nerval and Gustave Flaubert. The aesthetics of Nerval are for Said an inevitable collusion with Orientalism as well as a form of resistance to it and he sees the structure of their work as an independent, aesthetic, and personal fact, and not the ways by which one could effectively dominate or set down the Orient graphically. Nerval's originality can be explained by the fact that his aesthetic project is underpinned by a Romantic conception of knowledge. For Nerval, art is a privileged cognitive tool, an exploratory device that allows knowledge to happen, where aesthetics are all about process and openness and not about product and closure. Nerval's modernism aims to reconcile the rationality of the enlightenment with the spiritual inheritance of past religions and paganism.
