The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  I said parenthetically above that the novel is a literary form of secondariness; here we can refine this generality to say that the novel makes, procreates, a certain secondary and alternative life possible for heroes who are otherwise lost in society. In a sense, the novel’s attitude as a formal institution toward its dramatis personae is that of a chiding father who has endowed his children with a patrimony and an abode he himself cannot really ever relinquish. In being the author—and notice how this applies equally to the writer/author, the novel-father/author and the character/author— one engages oneself in a whole process of filiation not easily escaped. In this (as in so much else) Don Quixote is exemplary. There is the Cervantes-Sidi Hamete-Quixote relationship. There is the Amadis-Quixote relationship, there is the astonishingly fertile link between Quixote and Panza—now one, now the other rears his partner in the furthering and fathering forth of illusion; and there is, as every novelist and historian of the novel avers, Don Quixote itself as parent novel. James Wait’s “I must live till I die” is an alternative way of saying that as a novelistic character he must live in that abode, in the family of men (the crew) which is taken by the novelist to be the stuff of fiction and which is, so far as the plot is concerned, inherited from life and from the life of novels, therefrom to be fashioned into a line of succession. This line and this sense of heritage, it seems to me, stands at the absolute center of the classical novel; and yet how interestingly secondary, how intentionally flawed and derived a line it is. I shall return to it presently.

  In using Marx, Kierkegaard, and Vico to point up requisite conditions for fiction I have tried to parallel their thought with the novel’s ground in human experience. Thus the philosopher or historian belongs in his work to a common mode of conceiving experience of which another version is the novel. I refer, of course, to such common themes as succession, sequence, derivation, portrayal, and alternation, to say nothing of authority itself. Here we may remark the similarities between thought that produces philosophical works, for instance, and thought that produces novels. Yet the difference is no less crucial. It is a difference in degree. The difference between Kierkegaard’s anthropology of authority and, say, Pip’s in Great Expectations is that Pip is more of an augmenter, continuer, and originator, both because Dickens willed it so and because that is Pip’s essence as a character. As to the productive impulse that has such staying power that is not commonly diverted into either philosophy or history (Tolstoi is an exception), we can look ahead briefly to Freud for an explanation.

  In any of the reconstructive techniques, whether history, philosophy, or personal narrative, the objective, according to Freud, is both to create alternatives to a confusing reality and to minimize the pain of experience. In other words, the project is an economic one. Yet insofar as it is also a repetitive procedure it has to do with instincts leading the mind over ground already traveled. Some instincts are life-promoting, others return one to the primal unity of death. The novelistic character gains his fictional authority, as we saw, in the desire to escape death; therefore, the narrative process endures so long as that essentially procreative will persists. Yet because a character’s real beginning takes place in the avoidance of the anonymity of pure negation—and this is nowhere more beautifully described than in the first and last volumes of Proust’s novel—there is a simultaneous pressure exerted upon him by that which he is always resisting. The demystification, the decreation or education, of illusions, which is the novel’s central theme—and, paradoxically, its own alternate theme—is thus an enactment of the character’s increasing molestation by a truer process pushing him to an ending that resembles his beginning in the midst of negation. The sheer length of the classical novel can almost be accounted for by the desire to initiate and promote a reduplication of life and, at the same time, to allow for a convincing portrayal of how that sort of life leads inevitably to the revelation of a merely borrowed authority. The element that contains as well as symbolizes the whole enterprise is, as recent critics have shown, the language of temporal duration.21

  But whether we depict the narrative in temporal or strictly verbal terms, the important thing is that one must understand narrative as wholly qualified by the extremely complex authority of its presentation. Pip, Dorothea, and Isabel (in The Portrait of a Lady) are flawed by their illusions, by a skewing of their vision of themselves and of others. Yet all three of them move: out of them rises, from them begins, a sense of motion and of change that engages our serious interest as readers. For Pip’s illusions there are, as an unforgettable counterpoise, Miss Havisham’s solitary paralysis: whereas he generates a life for himself whose falseness is more and more manifest, she does next to nothing, memorialized in the sarcophagus of Satis House. Late in the novel he tells her accusingly, “You let me go on”; what is enough for her is only the beginning for Pip. And Dorothea’s affections and aspirations contrast sharply with Dr. Casaubon’s frigid personality, symbolized by his unfinished, locked-up manuscript. Lastly, James contrasts Isabel’s flights with Osmond’s perfect retreat at Roccanera, the one whose manner is that of a beautiful projector, the other the creature of a prison from which all humanity has been excluded. Within a novel, then, the principle of authority provides a motion always attempting to steer clear of obstacles that emerge to inhibit, maim, or destroy it utterly.

  In historical novels of the early nineteenth century there are figures of authority to whom the protagonists are subordinate. Cardinal Borromeo in I Promessi Sposi and the King in Quentin Durward, to mention only two examples, each serves within the novel as a reminder of the limits to a character’s secular power, limits that are vestiges of the “real,” historical world, the truer realm, which persist into the fiction. Yet the function of each will become incorporated into the character’s increasing self-consciousness of his weakness in the world, in the same way that the Marshalsea Prison in Little Dorrit is still more a psychological molestation of poor Mr. Dorrit when he is free than even it was in reality. The incorporation of reality into the great realistic novels of the mid-nineteenth century is performed by converting figures of secular authority into forms of sociomaterial resistance faced by the protagonists. If these forms are not imaginatively represented by cities—as in the Paris of Balzac and Flaubert, Dickens’s London, and so forth—they are nevertheless felt by such figures as the Underground Man to be the generally hostile outer reality.

  Such exterior circumstances exist at the level of plot. I want now to return to the authoritative character as the novel’s conceptual matrix. Sometimes, as in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften or Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses, the fiction is sustained by pairs whose destiny is always intertwined. Edward, Ottilie, and Charlotte produce Goethe’s story through a complex series of partnerships whose permanence is practically ontological in terms of the novel’s existence; similarly Valmont and Merteuil, whose schemes together are the veritable abstract without which the plot could not be. Richardson’s Clarissa, in comparison, is an example of private authority resisting interventions, yet beseeching Lovelace’s interventions by the deep attractiveness of her inviolate privacy. In the case of Pip— which I want to analyze in some detail—we have a remarkably economical individual character. From Pip, Dickens is able to derive a very diverse range of originating circumstances (circumstances that give rise to an entire world), which taken as a group provide a perfect example of the authoritative or authorizing fictional consciousness. The more remarkable is this economy when we realize that Dickens makes use of every traditional narrative device—development, climax, linear plot sequence, physical setting, realistic accuracy of detail—together with a thoroughly imaginative method of using them, in so complete a way that even James and Eliot cannot match him. Great Expectations reposes upon Dickens’s portrayal of Pip as at once the novel’s condition for being, the novel’s action, and the character in it: this gives the notions of authority and molestation I have been discussing an archetypal form. The firstperson narration adds to th
e purity of Dickens’s achievement.

  Pip’s name, he tells us at the outset, is the sort of beginning sign for the identity he is left with after he mixes and shortens his given name Philip Pirrip, words no longer meaningful to him but inherited by him “on the authority” of his parents’ tombstones and by his sister’s command. He lives, then, as an alternative being: as an orphan without real parents and as a harassed surrogate son of a much older sister. Throughout the novel the initial division will be perpetuated. On the other hand, there is Pip’s natural, true genealogy that is banished from the novel at the outset, but which makes its appearance fitfully through Joe, Biddy, and the new little Pip who springs up near the novel’s end. The fact that Joe Gargery is like a father to him, though in fact being his brother-in-law, makes Pip’s alienation from the family continuity all the more poignant. On the other hand, the second branch in the novel’s order is a substitute family, which has its roots in the unpleasant household of Mrs. Joe. Once established by Dickens, this order recurs throughout, with Pip going from one incarnation of it to another. This is the novel’s most insistent pattern of narrative organization: how Pip situates himself at and affiliates himself with the center of several family groups, families whose authority he challenges by trying to institute his own through the great expectations that finally destroy him. Each family is revealed successively to belong within the sphere of another, more dominant, prior one. Miss Havisham and Estella’s circle later admits Jaggers, then Magwitch, then Molly and Compeyson. And after each revelation Pip finds himself a little more self-implicated and a little less central. Each discovery informs him that his beginning has been preceded by compromises that emerge, one after the other, to wound him.

  In this sequence of discoveries Dickens allows Pip, even though he seems occasionally to be fortunate, to see how there is a necessary connection between himself and prison and crime. Those fearful things are real enough, as are, too, the harshness of his childhood, the schemes of Magwitch and Miss Havisham (his alternate parents), and the bankruptcy to which he arrives later on. Set against this theme is the motif of reassembling unpleasant fragments—for nothing is given whole to Pip, or to anyone else—into new, fabricated units. A brief sojourn at Miss Havisham’s is transformed by Pip into an extraordinary adventure which, despite Joe’s solemn warnings, he will repeat again and again. The ironical significance of Pip’s constructions is accentuated by Wemmick’s house, that fantastic melange of remnants fabricated into a mock-medieval castle by the man’s irrepressible desire to create a better life at Falworth—and also by Wopsle’s acting, for which Shakespeare is only a beginning excuse for a rather free improvisation. These, like Pip, are bricoleurs, who, “brought up by hand,” by fits and starts, assert their authority over the threats of unpleasant dispersion.22 The image of a fabricating hand and its cognates is carried over into almost every corner of the novel: for example, chains are filed through, a release effected, and the hands retied in a different manner. Pip is linked by strong hands with Magwitch’s and with Miss Havisham’s compensatory impulses and, through Estella, with Molly’s exceptionally powerful hands. After his breakdown, Pip finds himself reposing like a baby in Joe’s paternal arms.

  The basic scheme I have been describing is the cycle of birth and death. Pip’s origin as a novelistic character is rooted in the death of his parents. By his wish to make up for that long series of graves and tombstones he creates a way for himself; and yet, over the novel’s duration, Pip finds one route after another blocked, only to force open another. Like Isabel and Dorothea, Pip as a character is conceived as excess, wanting more, trying to be more than in fact he is. The augmentations are finally all rooted in the death from which he springs, and to which he returns in the end. Only by then a new, more authentic dispensation has been bred, which finally yields up a new little Pip:

  For eleven years I had not seen Joe nor Biddy with my bodily eyes— though they had both been often before my fancy in the East— when, upon an evening in December, an hour or two after dark, I laid my hand softly on the latch of the old kitchen door. I touched it so softly that I was not heard, and I looked in unseen. There, smoking his pipe in the old place by the kitchen firelight, as hale and as strong as ever, though a little grey, sat Joe; and there, fenced into the corner with Joe’s leg, and sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire, was—I again!

  “We giv’ him the name of Pip for your sake, dear old chap,” said Joe, delighted when I took another stool by the child’s side (but I did not rumple his hair), “and we hoped he might grow a bit like you, and we think he do.”23

  Between them, the two Pips cover an expanse whose poles are true life, on the one hand, and novelistic life on the other. Both Dickens in Great Expectations and Flaubert in Madame Bovary use money to signify the protagonists’ transitory power to shore up their authority to dream and even for a while to be something they cannot long remain being. Catherine, the aged farmworker, little Pip, Joe and Biddy—these are the inarticulate, abiding natures that money cannot touch nor illusion tempt.

  Together little Pip and old Pip are Dickens’s way of aligning the molestations of truth against an imperious authority badly in need of restraint. That Dickens makes the alignment explicitly only near the novel’s end is a sign of how, relatively late in his novelistic career, he had come to see the problem of authority as rooted in the self and therefore to be checked primarily also by the self: hence little Pip appears only to confirm Pip’s transgression, his subsequent education, and his irremediable alienation from the family of man. One indication of Dickens’s later acute understanding of the self’s way with itself is that in Great Expectations Pip undergoes the experiences of mystification and demystification on his own, within himself; whereas in Martin Chuzzlewit two estranged Martins, one young and one old, educate one another into a family embrace. In the later novel Dickens represents the harsher principles of authority—that at bottom the self wants its own way, unshared, and that its awakening to truth entails a still more unpleasant alienation from others—which in the earlier novel he had divided between a pair of misunderstanding, willful relatives. The self’s authority splits apart again later in the century—for example, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and, later still, in “The Secret Sharer.” In all three of these works, however, the alter ego is a hidden reminder of the primary self’s unstable authority. Jekyll’s sense of “the fortress of identity” includes as well a recognition that the fortress has hideous, molesting foundations. Dickens refused to embody these recognitions outside the individual, as would Wilde, Stevenson, and Conrad: it is imperative in Dickens’s view that such an individual as Pip should become the architect equally of his expectations and of their destruction. Doubtless he saw Pip’s predicament as one communally shared and even abetted. But nowhere is there any excuse for Pip—neither orphanhood, nor poverty, nor circumstance—that can reduce the deliberateness of his choices, his individual responsibility, and his often venal compromises with reality, all of which return finally to burden him:

  That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that I often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a brick in the house wall, and yet entreating to be released from the giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part in it hammered off; that I passed through these phases of disease, I know of my own remembrance, and did in some sort know at the time.24

  Here the severe repetitiveness of his realizations and their insistent parallelism appear to Pip as the actual material of a reality from which he has hitherto hidden himself. After such knowledge he can only be “a weak helpless creature” and thankful for the Gargery family’s solicitude; but he remains an orphan.

  Yet Pip’s history begins with the loss of a f
amily and—no less important—with a favor performed out of fear. Pip’s act of terrified charity is the germ of his later experience; so far as the plot is concerned, it is the author of his history and, of course, of his troubles. One might be perhaps too rash to say that in its bases at least, Pip’s act, with its extended consequences, is an aesthetic dialectical reduplication, even an ironic one, of the charity we associate with Christ’s ministry and agony. And yet, directly or not, novels too reflect the ethos of the Christian West. The original instance of divine errancy, the Incarnation, transformed God into man, an alternative being—the record of that mystery is given in language that only approximates the deed.

  So, we might say, novels represent that process and its record at many removes, and after many secular transformations. The beginning attribution of authority to a character by a writer; the implementation of that authority in a narrative form, and the burdens and difficulties admitted as a result—all these are ways by which the almost numinous communal institutions of language accept and conserve the imprint of an individual force. This is why the novel is an institutionalization of the intention to begin. If in the end this institution chastens the individual, it is because he needs to be reminded that private authority is part of an integral truth that it nevertheless cannot fully imitate. The authority of any single piece of fiction repeats that insight, for invariably the central consciousness of a novel is found wanting in the wholeness which we normally associate with truth. Each piece of fiction, therefore, excludes a larger truth than it contains, even though it is the novelist’s task to make his readers see active relationships among various orders of reality or truth both inside and outside the text.