ABSTRACT
While Chateaubriand's political evolution took him from a disaffected, disenchanted sympathy with the outsider to the pious conservatism of the statesman, and Hugo moved from Monarchist to Republican icon, Flaubert affected an apolitical stance. Orientalism is absolutely anatomical and enumerative: to use its vocabulary is to engage in the particularizing and dividing of things Oriental into manageable parts. One of the effects of the recurrent 'enumerative' structure of Salammbo is to underline the presence of many different languages. The style of the novel itself ensures that the reader is constantly reminded of language as a problematic medium, because of the use of non-French elements with an exotic sonority. If language itself is opaque and observed from the outside as an imperfect object, other semiotic systems are equally opaque in the novel, and most strikingly the highly developed symbolism of religion.
