The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  Probably the most serious psychological obstacle preventing close and fair political scrutiny of Palestinianism is, as I said above, the heavy emotional pressure of the Holocaust. To this pressure every civilized man must of course submit, so long as it does not inhibit anyone’s political rights, particularly those of people who are absolutely dissociable from what has been an entirely European complicity. It cannot be emphasized enough, I think, that no Arab feels any of the sort of guilt or shame that every Westerner (apparently) feels, or is impelled to show he is feeling, for that horrible chapter in history. For a Palestinian Arab, therefore, it is not taboo: to speak of “Jews” in connection with Israel and its supporters, to make comparisons between the Israeli and the German occupations, to excoriate journalism that reports Jewish suffering but ignores, or discounts, Israel’s razing of Arab homes and villages, Israeli napalm bombing, Israeli torture of Palestinian resistance fighters and civilians, Israel’s deliberate attempt to obliterate the Palestinian Arab, Israel’s use of its understanding of “Arab psychology” to offend the Arab’s human status, Israel’s callous use of Jewish suffering to blackmail Christians and Moslems by toying with “plans” for Jerusalem—and so on.

  The Palestinian organizations active today have Palestinianism in common. They do not project too far ahead of plans somehow to open Palestine to all Palestinians. Despite Israeli disclaimers, their penetration into occupied territory and the surprisingly tough resistance of the Arab residents in those territories are keeping the possibility of Palestine very alive. During a period of a few weeks this past spring al-Fatah claimed 168 raids within Israel: this is a considerable toll on Arabs and Jews, but given the self-defeating Israeli inflexibility, it is not a senseless toll. If Jews are to stay, the Palestinians argue fairly, then Christians and Moslems must be allowed the same, equal privilege. Interestingly, past tension between Arab Christians and Moslems has been surmounted among the Palestinians. Christians sit on the Fatah Executive Committee, and the leader of the Popular Front is a Christian. While in Amman I spoke with a clergy-man who had been active in West Bank resistance—he had been imprisoned by the Israelis, abused, then deported; to him, the Moslems and the Christians in the village were exactly alike in their interests and in their enemy. But the plight of Arabs in occupied Palestine is morally awful. To believe in a democratic, progressive, multi-confessional Palestine and yet to be forced to live “cooperatively” under Israeli domination is a condition not borne easily. Only the merchant class, never particularly admirable, has found life not so bad, cooperating with whomever has seemed most profitable to it.

  As to methods for achieving Palestine, they are shrouded in circumstances as yet not fully known. The essential point is that the goal has to be won from the ground up. It might mean—if Israel were to expand still further—the turning of many more Arabs (Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrians, for example) into “Palestinians.” The present regimes everywhere in the Arab world are in a state of tricky balance, but for the moment the Palestinians anxiously avoid involving themselves too deeply in the mire of Arab politics. Most Arab leaders presently can win a measure of popular favor, and much-needed glamour, by openly consulting with Yasir Arafat. For example, al-Fatah still plays its part independently of Nasser, Hussein, or the Syrians. To what extent this can continue, and to what extent the Americans and the Russians are (or will be) involved in Palestinian affairs are hard questions to answer. What matters most is that the Palestinian has made of his dismal experience an important political weapon for his purposes, and so long as it remains his own, developed as it is out of attachments to his native land, the cost will not have been too high.

  from The Politics of Dispossession

  3

  Molestation and Authority in Narrative Fiction (1971)

  Published in 1971 in a collection of essays edited by J. Hillis Miller,1 “Molestation and Authority in Narrative Fiction” was the first of several essays in which Said seriously engages the problem of authority in works of literary fiction, an issue that would find full expression later in Orientalism. Lengthened and revised as Chapter 3 of Beginnings (1975), it was also among one of the first essays wherein Said juxtaposed the European novel to developments in Arab literature. Although Said would rethink many of the original claims he put forward in “Molestation and Authority,” the essay marked for Said a methodological shift from the phenomenological criticism of Georges Poulet, Jean Rousset, and Merleau-Ponty to the narrative theory of the structuralists like Tsvetan Todorov and Roland Barthes.

  Throughout Said’s earliest critical work—in his book on Conrad, for example, and his reviews for journals and magazines such as the Partisan Review and The Nation,2 Said showed a keen interest in the work of the Geneva School, a movement of literary critics centered on the work of George Poulet, Jean Rousset, and Jean Starobinski, among others. Espousing a view of literature and criticism based on the phenomenological writings of philosophers Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the Geneva critics held that literary works were embodiments of authorial consciousness. Until the mid-1960s, the Geneva School thus offered literary critics a secular and serious philosophical alternative to the southern agrarian and spiritual undertones that had come to characterize many of the threads of the American New Criticism of the postdepression and postwar era.

  Yet by 1966, the emergence of French structuralism had challenged many of the suppositions of phenomenological criticism. In Tristes Tropiques, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss charged that phenomenological criticism had “promoted private preoccupations to the rank of philosophical problems.” Merleau-Ponty, whose Phenomenology of Perception had inspired the Geneva School, had also conceded that much of phenomenological criticism was in fact solipsistic. Structuralism thus became, in the words of Said’s mentor Harry Levin, “the Alexandrianism of our time.” Said wrote: “The structuralists were like men who [stood] at the beginning of a new era and at the twilight of an old one.”

  Yet neither current of criticism entirely appealed to Said. Phenomenological critics such George Poulet had failed to account not only for the “brute temporal sequence” of an author’s production, but also for the authors’ “shaping of the works into independent formal texts.”3 And the structuralists, in their somewhat crusading drive to isolate the general structures of human activity, had, Said claimed, domesticated the human subject to the tyranny of system. “A major criticism of the structuralists,” he wrote, “is that the moving force of life and behavior . . . has been, in their work, totally domesticated by system.”4

  Literary criticism, as Said had come to know it, was thus in crisis, and Beginnings, Said’s second book, was his attempt to assimilate and adapt many of the insights of phenomenological criticism to methods of a structuralist interpretation of narrative form.

  In its fully developed form as the great classical novel, from Defoe to Dickens and Balzac, narrative prose fiction is by no means a type of literature common to all traditions. Even in those traditions of which it is a part, the novel has had a limited life. This, I think, is an important fact. It may not tell us what the novel is, but it can help us to understand what needs the novel has filled and what effects it has produced among readers, societies, and traditions in which the genre is significant. Let me limit myself to a brief example that illustrates some of what I mean. Modern Arabic literature includes novels, but they are almost entirely of this century. There is no tradition out of which these modern works developed; basically at some point writers in Arabic became aware of European novels and began to write works like them. Obviously it is not that simple; nevertheless, it is significant that the desire to create an alternative world, to modify or augment the real world through the act of writing (which is one motive underlying the novelistic tradition in the West) is inimical to the Islamic world-view. The Prophet is he who has completed a world-view; thus the word heresy in Arabic is synonymous with the verb “to innovate” or “to begin.” Islam views the world as a plenum, capable of neither dimin
ishment nor amplification. Consequently, stories like those in The Arabian Nights are ornamental, variations on the world, not completions of it; neither are they lessons, structures, extensions, or totalities designed to illustrate either the author’s prowess in representation, the education of a character, or ways in which the world can be viewed and changed.

  Thus even autobiography as a genre scarcely exists in Arabic literature. When it is to be found, the result is wholly special. One of the finest and most famous books in modern Arabic letters is Taha Hussein’s three-part autobiography Al-Ayam (sometimes translated as Stream of Days), of which the first part (1929) is the most interesting. It describes the author’s boyhood in an Egyptian village early in the century. At the time he wrote the book, Hussein was already a learned man of letters and ex-Azharite whose later European education wrought in him a unique fusion between the traditional Islamic and occidental cultures. Hussein’s achievements as a scholar, however, do not explain a remarkable feature of Al-Ayam. For almost every childhood occurrence narrated by Hussein is in some way connected with the Koran—not as a body of doctrine, but as a presence or fact of everyday life. Thus the boy’s greatest ambition is to memorize the Koran; his father is happy when he does his recitation well and angry when he does not; his friends are all fellow learners; and so on and on. The book’s narrative style bears no resemblance to Koranic Arabic, so there is no question of imitation and hence of addition as in the Christian tradition. Rather one’s impression is that life is mediated by the Koran, informed by it; a gesture or an episode or a feeling in the boy’s life is inevitably reduced (always in an interesting way) back to a relationship to the Koran. In other words, no action can depart from the Koran; rather each action confirms the already completed presence of the Koran and, consequently, human existence.

  Examples like this make it apparent that a central purpose of the Western novel is to enable the writer to represent characters and societies more or less freely in development. Characters and societies so represented grow and move in the novel because they mirror a process of engenderment or beginning and growth possible and permissible for the mind to imagine. Novels, therefore, are aesthetic objects that fill gaps in an incomplete world: they satisfy a human urge to add to reality by portraying (fictional) characters in which one can believe. Novels are much more than that, of course. Nevertheless, I should like now to consider the institution of narrative prose fiction as a kind of appetite that writers develop for modifying reality—as if from the beginning—as a desire to create a new or beginning fictional entity while accepting the consequences of that desire.

  Every novel is at the same time a form of discovery and also a way of accommodating discovery, if not to a social norm, then to a specialized “novelistic” reading process. As Harry Levin has said, the novel is an institution, wholly differentiated from the more generalized idea of “fiction,” to which even the most unusual and novel experiences are admitted as functions.5 Every novelist has taken the genre as both an enabling condition and a restraint upon his inventiveness. Both these factors are time- and culture-bound, but how exactly they are bound has yet fully to be studied. My thesis is that invention and restraint—or as I shall call them, “authority” and “molestation,” respectively—ultimately have conserved the novel because novelists have construed them together as beginning conditions, not as conditions for limitlessly expansive fictional invention. Thus the novel represents a beginning of a very precisely finite sort insofar as what may ensue from that beginning. In this respect the classical novel has been a far more conservative and more precisely constraining beginning than would otherwise be expected of a genre so explicitly committed to fabulation. Alain Robbe-Grillet makes this point in his polemic attacking outdated conceptions of the novel, “Sur quelques notions périmées” (1957),6 an essay that accurately notes just how severe and timebound are critical constraints upon the form.

  By my two terms, authority and molestation, I wish to indicate the kind of perspective I am now adopting. Authority suggests to me a constellation of linked meanings: not only, as the OED tells us, “a power to enforce obedience,” or “a derived or delegated power,” or “a power to influence action,” or “a power to inspire belief,” or “a person whose opinion is accepted”; not only those, but a connection as well with author—that is, a person who originates or gives existence to something, a begetter, beginner, father, or ancestor, a person also who sets forth written statements. There is still another cluster of meanings: author is tied to the past participle auctus of the verb augere; therefore auctor, according to Eric Partridge, is literally an increaser and thus a founder.7 Auctoritas is production, invention, cause, in addition to meaning a right of possession. Finally, it means continuance, or a causing to continue. Taken together these meanings are all grounded in the following notions: (1) that of the power of an individual to initiate, institute, establish—in short, to begin; (2) that this power and its product are an increase over what has been there previously; (3) that the individual wielding this power controls its issue and what is derived therefrom; (4) that authority maintains the continuity of its course. All four of these abstractions can be used to describe the way in which narrative fiction asserts itself psychologically and aesthetically through the technical efforts of the novelist. Thus in the written statement, beginning or inauguration, augmentation by extension, possession and continuity stand for the word authority.

  Now, molestation is a word I shall use to describe the bother and responsibility of all these powers and efforts. By that I mean that no novelist has ever been unaware that his authority, regardless of how complete, or the authority of a narrator, is a sham. Molestation, then, is a consciousness of one’s duplicity, one’s confinement to a fictive, scriptive realm, whether one is a character or a novelist. And molestation occurs when novelists and critics traditionally remind themselves of how the novel is always subject to a comparison with reality and thereby found to be illusion. Or again, molestation is central to a character’s experience of disillusionment during the course of a novel. To speak of authority in narrative prose fiction is also inevitably to speak of the molestations that accompany it.

  Authority and its molestations are at the root of the fictional process; at least this is the enabling relationship that most fiction itself renders. Later we shall examine some reasons why this is so. But the problematic of novelistic fiction from the early eighteenth century on is how narrative institutes, alongside the world of common discourse, another discourse whose beginning is important— indeed, crucial—to it, located as it is in the responsibility taken for it by the begetting writer/speaker. Yet this fictional progenitor is bound by the fact that he is always at a remove from a truly fundamental role. It is no accident, I think, that James and Conrad, those exceptionally reflective autumnal craftsmen of fiction, made this tantalizing distance from a radical beginning the theme of much of their best work. Heart of Darkness explores beginnings paradoxically through a series of obscuring narrative frames; borne from one narrative level to another, Marlow’s African adventure gains its power from the uniqueness, the strangeness, of its persistence in those levels, not unequivocally from the strangeness of the experience itself. The heart of the matter—Kurtz’s experience—is posited outside Marlow’s discourse, which leaves us to investigate, if we can, the speaker’s authority. By the end of the tale we are aware of something that Marlow has given birth to that eludes empirical verification, even as it rests most securely upon the fact that Marlow has delivered it. Here, in most of its senses, authority is involved, except that we are required to accept that authority as never final. There is derivation, begetting, continuity, augmentation—and also a nagging, molesting awareness that beyond these there is something still more authentic, beside which fiction is secondary.

  No writer before Freud and Nietzsche to my knowledge has so obsessively investigated some of these notions as Kierkegaard, whose meditations examine more than a century of fictional authorit
y. To read The Point of View for My Work as an Author (written in 1848; published 1859) simply as commentary on his own work is to rob it of its most useful insights. For there Kierkegaard probes what is fundamental to all writing (preeminently fiction and personal discourse) in the center of which is the relationship between a focal character whose voice for the reader is authoritative and the nature of the authorship such a voice entails. It is of a kind with the relationship between Isabel Archer, for example, the movement of whose consciousness the reader attends to very carefully, and the type of writing James had to practice in order to produce her. Behind both is the generative authority that as secular critics we characterize as “imaginative,” but which Kierkegaard the Christian called “divine governance” (Styrelse). The role of such governance is described only after Kierkegaard lays out the principles that have distinguished his work. He has been writing two sorts of books, he says: aesthetic and religious. The former sort seems to contradict the more obviously urgent religious works, but Kierkegaard wants it understood that the aesthetic books have been designed, in manner at least, to deal with serious questions in a mode suitable to the frivolity of his contemporaries. Taken alone, then, the aesthetic works would be confusing, not to say hopelessly lacking in seriousness. But viewed as necessary preparations for the directly religious works, his aesthetic writings become indirect, ironic communications of higher truths.