The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  In 1979 Said began writing Covering Islam, the third book in the Orientalism trilogy. The United States was in grips of the “hostage crisis,” after Iranian students seized the American embassy in Teheran on November 4, 1979, and demanded that the United States turn over Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlevi for trial. Hardly a day went by that the media didn’t give special coverage to the “revival of Islam.” Said broadened the Orientalism argument to expose the underlying ethnocentric assumptions of the view that “Islam” was a homogeneous and monolithic threat to U.S. hegemony. He advocated that reporters and critics develop a sense of internationalism and “worldliness” to grasp the events in Iran in the greater context of U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Mossedegh and the brutality of the U.S.-trained Iranian secret police known as SAVAK.

  At the same time that Said was engaged with international affairs, he continued to devote a lot of his attention to the state of the literary profession. In essays such as “Traveling Theory,” “Reflections on American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism,” and others that made up his sixth book, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Said assailed a different kind of provincialism and unworldliness that he saw threatening the study and interpretation of literature. He perceived that a great deal of literary theory was provincial in its connection to a cult of professionalism that transformed scholars into myopic specialists. He urged academics “to break out of the disciplinary ghettoes in which . . . [they] have been confined.”37 Even among the post-structuralists—whom he originally admired—he lamented the cultivation of “corrosive irony.” Of the influential literary critic Paul de Man, Said wrote: “De Man is always interested in showing that when critics or poets believe themselves to be stating something, they are really revealing . . . the impossible premises of stating anything at all, the so-called aporias of thought to which de Man believes all great literature always returns.”38 Leftist criticism faired no better in his judgment: “We argue in theory for what in practice we never do, and we do the same kind of thing with regard to what we oppose.”39 For Said, it was imperative that literary criticism not lose sight of its own conditions in the world and the political circumstances that demanded critical attention.

  The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 deeply troubled Said, who feared for the safety of his own family and relatives there. That summer, Israel relentlessly bombarded Beirut from the air and from the sea, with cluster bombs, vacuum bombs, phosphorous rockets, and mortars.40 On the evening of September 16, 1982, with prior knowledge and support of the Israeli Defense Forces, Christian Phalangist militias massacred 2,062 Palestinians and Lebanese at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.41 The attack was a coordinated part of Israel’s invasion. Yet few in the West raised concern about Israel’s attack. “How is it,” Said asked in “Permission to Narrate,” an article published in the London Review of Books, “that the premises on which Western support for Israel is based are still maintained even though the reality, the facts, cannot possibly bear these premises out?”42 By labeling Palestinians as terrorists, Said answered, Israel and the West had systematically suppressed the reality of the Palestinian experience of dispossession. In the Raritan Quarterly, Richard Poirier reiterated Said’s charge: “Feelings about the victims of the siege [on Beirut] could not . . . be attached to an idea for the creation of a Palestinian homeland, since . . . no such idea has yet managed to find an enabling vocabulary within what is considered ‘reasonable’ political discourse in the . . . [United States].”43 In Le Monde diplomatique, Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk offered proof that the goal of Israeli policy in the mid-1970s was to undermine Palestinian nationalism by defining its main expression—the PLO—as terrorist. “The better,” Said wrote, “to be able to ignore [Palestinians’] undeniable claims to Israel.”44

  As Said recognized, it was becoming increasingly important to represent Palestinian experience in all its facets. In the spring of 1984 this exigency acquired a renewed urgency: Harper and Row published Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, a compendium of historical fabrications that incredibly sought to deny the historical existence of Palestinians. Despite its reliance on spurious and contrived evidence, the work received widespread acclaim. Barbara Tuchman, Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow, Theodor White, and other prominent authors praised the book. Few reviewers in the United States questioned the book’s veracity. It was Norman Finklestein, then a graduate student at Princeton University, however, who exposed the book as a complete hoax.45 Said wrote in The Nation, “To read Peters and her supporters is for Palestinians to experience an extended act of ethnocide carried out by pseudoscholarship. Tom Sawyer attends his own funeral as a kind of lark, whereas we are being threatened with death before being permitted birth.”46

  If Palestinians existed at all in the imagination of the West, they were represented “not so much a people as a call to arms.”47 In an effort to demystify everyday Palestinian life, Said, who was serving as a consultant for the United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine (ICQP), proposed a UN exhibition of Swiss photographer Jean Mohr’s work, which presented the daily reality of the Palestinian experience. Said viewed the purpose of the exhibition as to “deny the habitually simple, even harmful representations of Palestinians, and to replace them with something more capable of capturing the complex reality of their experience.”48 Although the United Nations approved of the photographs, it found Said’s accompanying captions “controversial” and decided to permit the exhibit only if Said’s captions were removed. A number of Arab states, it seemed, had disagreed with Mohr and Said’s intentions. “Palestine to them was useful to a point—for attacking Israel, for railing against Zionism, imperialism, and the United States. . . . Beyond that point,” Said wrote, “when it came to the urgent needs of Palestinians as a people, or to the deplorable conditions in which many Palestinians live in Arab countries as well as Israel, lines had to be drawn.”49 Together the photographs and captions were published in After the Last Sky (1986), Said’s first major autobiographical work.

  In After the Last Sky, Said dwelled on the themes of loss and exile, echoing the themes expressed in his first book on Joseph Conrad. Exile was an existential reality for Said who, as a member of PNC, was prohibited from visiting Israel. “Our truest reality,” he wrote, “is expressed in the way we [Palestinians] cross over from one place to another. We are migrants and perhaps hybrids, in but not of any situation in which we find ourselves. This is the deepest continuity of our lives as a nation in exile and constantly on the move.”50 Said’s work acquired a more mournful tone as he considered exile a symbolically powerful, yet tragic condition. In “Reflections on Exile,” he observed, “exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. . . . [I]t is life outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal; . . . no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew.”51

  In the face of loss and exile, Said devoted more and more of his energies to writing about music, which had always for him had the Proustian capacity to recover lost time and place. A talented pianist, Said began writing a music column for The Nation magazine in 1987. Of all the performers he reviewed, he had the highest regard for the pianist Glenn Gould, whose technical and intellectual majesty recalled Said’s interest in Vico and Auerbach’s philological method. “[A]s you listen to [Gould’s] music,” Said wrote in Vanity Fair, “you feel as if you are watching a tightly packed, dense work being unfolded, resolved almost, into a set of intertwined links held together not by two hands but by ten fingers, each responsive to all the others, as well as to the two hands and the one mind really back of everything.”52 His work on music continued. In 1989 Said delivered the prestigious Wellek Library Lectures at University of California, Irvine, in which he accompanied his talk with his own performance on the piano. The result, in printed form, was Musical Elaborations (1991), which further extended his reflections on the place of music in society.

  Said’s reflections on Gould’
s contrapuntal technique had far-reaching implications for his cultural and literary criticism. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), he adapted a musical term for literary criticism, arguing that literary works should be considered contrapuntally. By contrapuntal criticism Said meant that European culture needs to be read in relation to its geographic and spatial relations to empire as well as in counterpoint to the works the colonized themselves produced in response to colonial domination. In his widely debated chapter “Jane Austen and Empire,” for example, Said argued that “we should . . . regard the geographical division of the world—after all significant in Mansfield Park—as not neutral, but as politically charged, beseeching the attention and elucidation its considerable proportions require. The question is not only how to understand and with what to connect Austen’s morality and its social basis, but what to read of it.”

  Almost without exception, reviewers of Culture and Imperialism focused on “Jane Austen and Empire.” The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Nation, and Dissent all published articles that emphasized Said’s criticism of Mansfield Park.53 In The Nation, John Leonard wrote: “See Jane sit in the poise and order of Mansfield Park, not much bothering her pretty head about the fact that harmonious ‘social space,’ Sir Thomas Bertram’s country estate, is sustained by slave labor.”54 Said’s argument was that Austen’s vision of Fanny Price’s moral improvement rested on the estate’s dependency on its slave holdings in Antigua, largely absent from the groomed and ordered grounds of Mansfield Park. Many critics misunderstood Said’s argument. Irving Howe, for example, saw Said’s essay as an attack on Austen’s status as a novelist. Yet Said was not demeaning Austen’s literary value; he was urging readers to develop a critical awareness of the European novel’s relations to the colonial enterprises and imperial projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  By the early 1990s, Said’s reputation had assumed international proportions, through both his eloquent pleas for justice for the Palestinians and the innovative humanistic scholarship he was producing. Orientalism had been translated into French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, and Swedish. The work had an enormously wide-ranging impact in the humanities and social sciences. An entire field of postcolonial studies was beginning to develop around Said’s work. While a younger generation of scholars were actively pursuing the critiques of culture and power found in Said’s work, Said himself was making a greater effort to situate the Palestinian struggle in relation to other national liberation movements around the world—in Vietnam, Algeria, Latin America, the Caribbean, Ireland, and South Africa. This effort to look critically and comparatively at other colonial resistance movements represented Said’s own expanding vision of the relevance of his work both as a Palestinian exile and as an engaged scholar. Culture and Imperialism, a work seeking to discover “the general relationship between culture and empire,” was Said’s attempt to theorize this comparative outlook culturally and systematically.

  The 1991 Gulf War confirmed for Said the extent to which American intellectuals had abandoned their responsibility to criticize and expose the abuses of American power abroad. In an interview published after the war, Said roared, “The intellectual community doesn’t operate according to principles and doesn’t consider itself bound by responsibilities toward the common weal. . . . The large body of American intellectuals is basically provincial, drawn only by virtue of expertise.”55 Increasingly, the necessity of the nonaligned intellectual to pursue scholarship away from the corruptions of authority and the abuses of professionalism came to figure importantly in his written work. In September 1991, Said resigned from the PNC. Although he cited his recently diagnosed leukemia as the reason for his departure, his decision had in fact been sealed by the Palestinian leadership’s support of Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. In 1992 Said returned to Palestine for the first time in forty-five years.

  His illness did not deter him from his commitments and his passions. In the face of the diagnosis, he struggled even more intensively and actively as he became aware of the ebb of his life. In 1992 he was promoted to University Professor, the highest rank of professorship at Columbia University. He continued to teach and write, in spite of the debilitating side effects of the chemotherapy and radiation treatments. In 1993 he delivered the prestigious Reith Lectures for the BBC and seized the opportunity to emphasize the importance of independent critical activity: “Despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for himself or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual. . . . The great euphoria produced by . . . [the Oslo Accords] . . . obscured the fact that far from guaranteeing Palestinian rights, the documents in effect guaranteed the prolongation of Israeli control over the Occupied Territories. To criticize this means in effect taking a position against ‘hope’ and ‘peace.’”56

  From the beginning, Said saw through the pomp of the Oslo Accords between the PLO and the Israeli government. For a long time, he remained the only major critic of the Accords, their process, and their signatories. Negotiated in secret in 1993, the agreements were, in Said’s words, the equivalent of the Palestinian “Treaty of Versailles.” They made no mention of the end of the Israeli occupation and conceded Israel ultimate authority over the majority of the West Bank and Gaza. Even in the zones of Palestinian control, the Palestinians were granted no meaningful sovereignty. “There was Clinton,” Said declared, “like a Roman emperor bringing two vassal kings to his imperial court and making them shake hands in front of him.”57

  The agreement amounted to an effort by Arafat to preserve the PLO and Arafat’s own authority, which had been profoundly weakened by the PLO’s support of Iraq during the Gulf War. Said called on Arafat to resign, only to have the Palestinian authority respond with a ban (still in effect) on his books. Said continued his caustic criticism, largely through his biweekly columns in Al-Hayat and Al-Ahram Weekly. The pieces were tough and uncompromising in their demands for clear vision and justice, stating that if peace were to have any substantive meaning, it could not be brought about under duress. For Said, the history of imperially administered partitions in India, Pakistan, Cyprus, and Ireland was the source of violence, not a solution to it. Observing that Oslo amounted to little more than an enforced policy of demographic separation between two peoples whose lives were inextricably intertwined, Said, in a 1999 article in the New York Times Magazine,58 called for the establishment of a binational Israeli-Palestinian state. He argued that real and lasting peace was possible only if the terms of citizenship were made inclusive, democratic, and not based on principles of racial or religious difference.

  To that end, Said drew upon his musical interests to encourage a common understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. In January 1999 he organized a performance by the celebrated Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim at Bir Zeit University. Barenboim and he had become close friends in the early 1990s, partly through their deep appreciation of music and partly through their experience of 1967. The two had collaborated before. In 1998 Said wrote a new libretto replacing the spoken dialogue for Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, and Barenboim conducted the work at the Chicago Symphony. Barenboim’s performance of Beethoven’s “Pathetique” and Opus 109 at Bir Zeit deeply stirred the audience.

  In the meantime, while passionately pursuing redemptive cultural exchanges, Said, aware that he had entered the last phase of his life, continued to work quietly on a memoir, a work he had begun in 1994. In September 1999, Out of Place: A Memoir, a “subjective chronicle of an essentially lost or forgotten world, that of my early life,” appeared. In 1999 Said also assumed the presidency of the Modern Languages Association. Despite his leukemia (which, after experimental therapy in the summer of 1998, went into remission but is slowly creeping back), he continues to teach, write, play music, lecture, advocate, opine, argue, research, and live with the same indefatigable energy
as ever.

  To squeeze the life’s work of a major intellectual as prodigious and prolific as Edward Said into the pages of a single volume is no easy task. The sum total of the work defies easy condensation, and each selection bears more commentary than we can provide here. Nevertheless, The Edward Said Reader is an attempt to offer readers the opportunity to view the remarkable scope, the critical rhythms, the intellectual affinities, and the sheer strength of Said’s criticism in his role as an internationally renowned literary critic and as a passionately engaged public intellectual. Drawing on material from Edward Said’s books to date—beginning with his 1966 revised doctoral dissertation Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography and working through to his 1999 memoir Out of Place—we have been guided by a belief that a single, easily accessible book that spans Said’s career will be as useful to the new reader seeking to understand what Saidian criticism is all about as it will be to the scholar searching for Said’s own genealogical foundations and historical development.”59

  The Edward Said Reader is divided into three major sections and an interview: “Beginnings,” “Orientalism and After,” and “Late Styles.” “Beginnings” draws the arc of Said’s early investigations, both in literary criticism and in his burgeoning Palestinian interventions. The early Said is forever attached to Conrad and fully invested in all the literary and philosophical trends of his time and seeking to make them his own. “Orientalism and After” acknowledges the tremendous impact that work had on both the life and the work of Said and on the humanities in general. Said’s tone changes to that of the fully engaged intellectual, often angry, frequently profound, and always fabulously erudite. In “Late Styles” Said meditates more on the life of the intellectual, on the relationship between music and culture, on politics and commitment, and on his own life after having been diagnosed with leukemia. The book concludes with an interview we conducted with Edward Said in the summer of 1999.