Edward Wadie Said

Said, Edward W.

James J. Sosnoski

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In The World, The Text, and the Critic, Edward W. Said (b. 1935) writes that "texts have ways of existing that even in the most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society--in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly" (35). This idea, variously articulated as a motif in his work, marks a return to and repetition of the "beginning intention" of his career. "The writer's life, his career, and his text," Said remarks in Beginnings, "form a system of relationships whose configuration in real human time becomes progressively stronger (i.e., more distinct, more individualized and exacerbated). In fact, these relationships gradually become the writer's all-encompassing subject" (227). Said's work as a critic emerges from his life as a dislocated Palestinian. Such "engagements," which he calls "worldly," have characterized his career and have set him apart from other critics. Few other critics have been so often interviewed as partisan political commentators in the public media. By refusing to divorce his work from his life, Said has made his life's work relevant to the public.

Born in Palestinian Jerusalem, Said studied there and in Cairo before moving to the United States. Although he is a Palestinian by birth, his education has been "Western" (B.A., Princeton, 1957; M.A. and Ph.D., Harvard, 1960, 1964). Since 1963 he has taught at Columbia University, where he is now Old Dominion Professor in the Humanities. He is also a music critic for the Nation (see his Musical Elaborations). As a displaced Arab studying European literature in America, Said has fashioned a career out of the fabric of his own dislocation. From this singular perspective he has developed an influential type of cultural criticism. His importance to contemporary critics is that in refusing to accept the cloak of neutrality that most scholars wear he has shown how literary criticism can be applied to the most volatile and current of struggles for cultural hegemony.

Were it not for Said's own admonitions about attributing beginnings from which supposed continuities follow, one might be tempted to say of his career that his most recent views on the question of Palestine were already implicit in his dissertation on Joseph Conrad, a novelist of Western imperialism. Instead, applying his "postnarrative" (Beginnings 282) or nonlinear conception of a career to his own, it is more appropriate to say that three "configurations" appear as "beginning intentions" in his criticism- a desire to make critical work out of the fabric of life, a refusal to separate the imperialism of mind from that of nations, and a will to forge literary criticism into an act of political intervention in the production of cultures. These themes in Said's thought reconfigure correlative themes in the thought of Giambattista Vico, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor W. Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Raymond Williams, and Michel Foucault--the thinkers who most influenced him.

Said's first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, is a study of Conrad's letters (as autobiographical fictions) in relation to his work (as fictionalized autobiography). This study, informed by the reading strategies of the Geneva School of phenomenological criticism, correlates the process of self-definition apparent in Conrad's letters to the development of his fiction. Said shows how the past was always being renarrated in Conrad's writing as a remedy for his ongoing fear of personal disintegration. In Beginnings Said continues his study of the narrativization of experience, tracing the changes that culminate in the modern novel. Combining Sigmund Freud's nonlinear interpretation of texts with Foucault's and Vico's methods of analysis leads Said to an understanding of the novel as a complex of authority and molestation (83 ff., 169 ff.). His study of narrativization takes a political turn in Orientalism, which is a history of the characterizations through which Western scholars have fictionalized the Orient in unconscious collusion with governmental agencies. This work leads directly to his rewriting of contemporary history in The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam in order to protest fictions such as "Arabs" and "Islam." He theorizes that affiliations to cultural institutions replace the filiations of birthright. Throughout his writing the history of cultures and personal histories are inseparable.

The main topic of Said's work is Eurocentrism, especially as it manifests itself in imperialism. In his earliest work, Said shows that Conrad's identification with "Europeanism" was an act of secular salvation by which he rescued himself from "the heart of darkness." Then, a shift in Said's thinking occurs in Beginnings. Although implicitly a history of the modern novel, the book is also about the imperialism of the mind, which, in acts of linear narrativizing, reduces human subjects to functions of systems. In it, Said rejects the "linguacentrism" of structuralists. Undertaking in this work the development of a postnarrative mode of history-telling leads him in his subsequent work to retell the history of the orient. Orientalism explores, for example, relations between the imperialism that results from the production of knowledge and that which results from the invasion of territories. Imperialist history is the precondition of imperialism. Orientalism is the precursor of European empires in the Orient. In linking such discursive formations as "Arabs," "Islam," and "the Orient" with current political situations as he does so forcefully in his writings on Palestine, Said practices a committed form of cultural criticism.

Intervention in the formation of cultures is a goal of Said's work. The question of taking responsibility broached in his study of Conrad as a problem of authorship and in Beginnings as a problem of the authority of a "beginning intention" becomes in his later work the problem of political agency. Whether an author is a force of cultural production or a mere refraction of a cultural system is a question that permeates Beginnings. The issue is resolved in his practice, for example in Orientalism. The critic's responsibility is to analyze the prevailing cultural system of representation and to intervene in this discursive formation by retelling its history. In Orientalism, Said retells the history of Orientalism and in so doing intercedes decisively in its discursive formation. Similarly, he writes a history of Palestine to arbitrate The Question of Palestine. Again, explicitly using the techniques of literary criticism developed in his previous work, he disrupts the media's Covering Islam. In each case, like Foucault before him, Said intervenes to show how a particular discourse is formed.

In The World, the Text, and the Critic, he theorizes his view of cultural criticism. Critics, Said argues, should be "oppositional." As intellectuals, they have a responsibility to intervene in the formation of cultures, which are ensembles of pretexts, texts, and paratexts. "In the first place," he writes,culture is used to designate not merely something to which one belongs but something that one possesses and, along with that proprietary process, culture also designates a boundary by which the concepts of what is extrinsic or intrinsic to the culture come into forceful play. . . . But, in the second place, there is a more interesting dimension to this idea of culture . . . by virtue of its elevated or superior position to authorize, to dominate, to legitimate, demote, interdict, and validate: in short, the power of culture to be an agent of, and perhaps the main agency for, powerful differentiation within its domain and beyond it too. (8-9)

The critic's responsibility is to challenge the hegemonic power of cultural formations. This cannot be accomplished by the deconstructive strategies of Derrideans, Said argues, because of "Derrida's elimination of voluntarism and intention in the interests of what he calls infinite substitution" (191). Moreover, these strategies are "based on a theory of undecideability and desemanticization [that] provides a new semantic horizon, and hence a new interpretive opportunity" (191) that replaces one orthodoxy with another. In brief, deconstructive interpretive strategies characteristically intervene in cultural formations in unworldly ways practiced with "nihilistic radicality" in pursuit of "the traces of writing that shimmers just a hair beyond utter blankness" (Beginnings 343). For Said, deconstructive practices ultimately relinquish responsibility for texts and therefore for what the culture becomes.

As his work amply testifies, Said is a critic who accepts the responsibilities of being a critic of cultures. "Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism," he writes,it would be oppositional. If criticism is reducible neither to a doctrine nor to a political position on a particular question, and if it is to be in the world and self-aware simultaneously, then its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of thought or of method. In its suspicion of totalizing concepts, in its discontent with reified objects, in its impatience with guilds, special interests, imperialized fiefdoms, and orthodox habits of mind, criticism is most itself and, if the paradox can be tolerated, most unlike itself at the moment it starts turning into organized dogma. (World 29)

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Notes and Bibliography