The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  Edward Said: It is difficult to describe what you feel when you get a peculiar diagnosis, such as the one I received in September of 1991. I was told that I had a very obscure disease, though it is quite common among the leukemias. While I showed no symptoms, I was told that I had a sword of Damocles hanging over my head. It suddenly dawned on me that I was going to die.

  I don’t think that I was ever consciously afraid of dying, though I soon grew aware of the shortage of time. My first impulse was to go some place quieter than New York, but that idea didn’t last very long. And then, from out of the blue, I think probably left over from the death of my mother, who died in July of 1990, I considered writing about my early years, most of them connected with her. Two and a half years later, in March 1994, I began the memoir.

  During the treatment, writing the memoir became a kind of discipline for me. I would use the time in the mornings to write and to follow my memory to reconstruct a world that I had lost and was losing more and more of everyday. As a way of shaping the book, I tried to recall the places that had changed irrecoverably in my life: Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon. During that period I visited those places. I went back to Palestine in 1992 for the first time in forty-five years, and I went back to Lebanon in 1992, my first visit there since the Israeli invasion of 1982.

  What does it mean for you to recover loss in your own mind as opposed to responding to the objective and political experience of national loss?

  With Out of Place, I was trying to free myself from the responsibility that, whether I liked it or not, was imposed on me whenever I wrote about the Middle East. There was always a political issue to respond to. My whole engagement after the 1967 war was predicated on that basis, and I never really had time to do much else.

  Out of Place was written in a setting of a certain amount of suffering. A lot of the time I was quite ill. I would write a few sentences and then I would have to get up and take some medicine, or lie down. Writing Out of Place was a completely different kind of experience for me. I wasn’t trying to address an audience, though I had some idea of addressing my children’s generation. Neither of my children knew my father, for example, whereas both of them knew my mother. The memoir was an attempt to describe my past for them and to record events and experiences that had made a great impression on me, as is the case with both of my aunts about whom I write. My maternal great-aunt and my paternal aunt had been very important in my life and in the life of our community when I was younger. A feeling of Virgilian sadness gave a life to things that had passed. Out of Place is also, in a way, a Proustian meditation.

  How would you compare this to your other longer autobiographical meditation, After the Last Sky?

  After the Last Sky was written in response to a particular political situation. It arose from a conference at the United Nations in Geneva in 1983 and from the fact that the United Nations would not allow us to place captions beneath the photographs of Palestinians. At roughly the same time, I had met the photographer Jean Mohr and the writer John Berger, whose work together—Another Way of Telling and the Seventh Man—had greatly influenced me. After the Last Sky was a political occasion geared at reconstructing the experience and lives of Palestinians. In contrast, Out of Place had to do with my own sense of my life ebbing away.

  You begin Out of Place with the idea of the invention of families and of the self, which has echoes of your first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. More than Foucault or Frantz Fanon, why has Conrad occupied such a central place in your writing?

  I first read Conrad when I was about seventeen or eighteen years old as an undergraduate at Princeton. It was my freshman year, and I was reading Heart of Darkness, which completely mystified me at the time. It presented a kind of writing that I had never encountered before. As a child I had read a lot—Walter Scott, Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, Dickens, Thackeray—and I had acquired a very strong background in what I would call not just novels of adventure, but novels of openness—novels where everything seems available to you. Heart of Darkness had the form of an adventure story, but the more I looked at it, the more the adventure story dissolved. I remember having discussions with my friends in the dormitory trying to figure out what “the horror” meant, who Kurtz was, and so forth. Sometime later, a year before I went to graduate school, I then began to read an enormous amount of Conrad, and the more I read, the more I wanted to know about him. As a graduate student at Harvard, I looked through a volume of letters that he wrote to Cunningham Graham and I was struck that there was a certain back and forth between his letters and his fiction—many of the things that appeared in his letters would turn up in a different way in his fiction.

  Conrad always seems to come back to me in one way or another. I think that his exile, the overtones of his writing, its accents, its slip-pages, his sense of being in and out of language, being in and out of worlds, his skepticism, his radical uncertainty, the sense that you always feel that something terribly important is going on, what Forster made fun of—a tremendous crisis happening but you can’t tell what it is—has just gripped me more than any other writer has.

  How did the relatively little-read Giambattista Vico come to have such marked presence in your work?

  Vico was an accidental discovery through a dear friend, Arthur Gold, who was a classmate of mine at Princeton and Harvard. What interested me most about Vico was that he was self-made and self-taught. Vico represented somebody who succeeded on his own by the act and strength of his imagination. Throughout his writings, for example, there are wild and fantastic images—of giants, of men and women copulating, of ferocious settings with thunder striking, and so on. For him, imagery was inextricably related to the writing of history, and added to that was the connection between imagery and words, and how words are, at the first stage onomatopoeic— primitive imitations of emotions of fear and of disorganization. Vico completely disrupted the Cartesian paradigm.

  What also attracted me to Vico was his interest in philology, and, I must say, his relative obscurity. He was a philologist, a professor of eloquence and Latin jurisprudence at the University of Naples in the early eighteenth century. The more I read about him, the more he attracted me. He led me to Erich Auerbach, since Auerbach had translated Vico into German. In addition, there was something private about Vico, just as there was something private about Conrad that neither one of them every fully disclosed. I focused on that and tried to make of it what I could, as a way of validating what I was trying to do outside the given academic track. Lastly, as with Conrad, I found the organization of Vico’s work, The New Science, completely original, almost artistic. Vico was a great theoretician of beginnings.

  Is that how you came to write Beginnings?

  Beginnings is really the product of the 1967 war. I was at Columbia in the summer of 1967, and I had been awarded a fellowship at the University of Illinois, where I spent 1967 and 1968 at the Center for Advanced Study.

  Around that time I was serving on a jury. The day the war began, June 5, was my first day as a juror. I listened to the reports of the war on a little transistor radio. “How were ‘we’ doing?” the jurors would ask. I found I wasn’t able to say anything—I felt embarrassed. I was the only Arab there, and everybody was very powerfully identified with the Israelis. Also, during that summer, which I spent in New York, I became connected with the Arab political world because of the UN meetings. I started to meet diplomats, and I suddenly found myself, after sixteen years of being in this country, back in touch directly with the Middle East and the Arab world.

  My project for Illinois was to be a book on Swift. But when I arrived in Illinois, I found myself in a difficult situation because of the war, I became increasingly concerned about my family still in the Middle East, and became increasingly aware of a part of the world that now had been thrust upon me. Furthermore, my marriage was coming apart. One day I found myself talking about beginnings. I began writing an essay entitled “Meditation on Beginnings,” which was really a
n attempt to reformulate where I was. I remember the room in the Center for Advanced Study with rows of books on and by Jonathan Swift, but the question of beginnings obsessed me. I divorced the following year and began to work on a study of the relationship between beginnings and narrative, which brought me back to Vico. Beginnings was thus really a project of reaction to a crisis that caused me to rethink what I was doing, and try to make more connections in my life between things that had been either suppressed, or denied, or hidden.

  Orientalism also addresses this theme of denial, or suppression, through a cultural paradigm. It has been a tremendously influential book, translated into many languages, but, as you write in the afterword, it has, in a Borgesian way, become more than one book. It has been interpreted in many different ways. Why do you think this book has produced so many different reactions and readings?

  Every context produces different readers and different kinds of misinterpretations. In Orientalism, I begin with a notion that interpretation is misinterpretation, that there is no such thing as the correct interpretation. For instance, I recently got a letter from the publisher of the Bulgarian edition of Orientalism, asking if I would write a preface for it. I didn’t know what to say. Orientalism is about to appear in Hungary, in Vietnam, and in Estonia. These are all places that I’ve never been to and I know very little about. So you can see how uncontrolled all these interpretations can be. In that respect, I think certain kinds of distortions and deviations are inevitable.

  What you can control is your own ideas. If you keep repeating them, simplifying them, and making them more accessible, through disciples, through rewritings and lectures on the same subject, then you can induce the kind of Borgesian trap that you referred to. I’ve been very conscious about not doing that. I’ve always tried to develop my ideas further, in ways that paradoxically make them in a certain sense ungraspable and unparaphrasable. I’ve found myself, for example, being more interested in some of the inconsistencies and irreconcilabilities of historical experience, including that of Orientalism. There are certain contradictions, what I call antinomies, that cannot be resolved, and it’s important to explore and to deepen investigation of them. I want to say, well, they’re there, we can’t wish them away, we can’t reconcile them under duress, as Theodor Adorno says. As intellectuals, we have to be able to make them more apparent, to make their influence more profound and more felt, which requires more work and more of an understanding of different kinds of political organizations and intellectual efforts.

  This notion of irreconcilable antinomies sounds very much like dissonances in music. In your essay on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, for example, you discuss Austen’s silence around Thomas Bertram’s slave-holding in the sugar plantations in Antigua. Figures of silence and sound have been very important in your literary criticism. How do you think your training as a musician has affected your reading of literature?

  That’s a very interesting question. The idea that I have borrowed from R. P. Blackmur, the idea of bringing literature to performance, is certainly connected to the notion of music. The idea is that works of art place a premium on expression, articulation, clarity. All the things that we associate with writing and with performance involve a discourse that needs to be unfolded and then presented.

  But at the same time, I’ve always been interested in what gets left out. That’s why I’m interested in the figure from the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the “silent form” that “dost tease us out of thought.” That’s why I’m interested in Raymond Williams’s discussion of the country house poems, where the representation of the country house necessarily excludes the silence of the peasants who have been driven off the land; or the fields that have been manicured to produce the beautiful spaces that Jane Austen exploits in her novels, where livelihood is transformed into property. I’m interested in the tension between what is represented and what isn’t represented, between the articulate and the silent. For me, it has a very particular background in the questioning of the document. What does the document include? What doesn’t it include? That’s why I have been very interested in attempts of the Subaltern Studies Collective, and others, to talk about excluded voices.

  In the particular case of the Palestinians, one of our problems is that we don’t have documents to substantiate what we said happened to us. Take one of the Israeli new historians, Benny Morris, for instance. He’s very literal-minded, and he’s done very important work, but his assumption is that he can’t say anything about what happened in 1947–1948 unless there’s a document to show for it. I say, well, why not try to animate that silence? Why not look at the poetry of Mahmoud Taha, who writes about al-Nakba in a very interesting way? Why not look at oral history? Why not look at geographical evidence? Why not look at the landscape? Why not go through the process of trying to reconstruct out of the silence what was either destroyed or excluded?

  A lot of my work has this very strong geographical as opposed to Hegelian dimension. The contrast between Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci is very important to me here. For Gramsci (in contrast to Lukács, who is more concerned about time) there is a territorial, geographical, and material basis for art that isn’t always expressed in the document. For Gramsci, territoriality is represented in many forms: the testimony of victims, the refugees who still carry keys to the houses from which they’ve been driven. Silence and territoriality has been crucial to a lot of the work I’ve been doing and the work I’ve done.

  Is this concern with silence and sound reflected in the types of music that interest you, and what’s the relationship between music and the idea of the “contrapuntal,” an idea borrowed from music and elaborated in Culture and Imperialism, where you discuss ways of reading works of literature from the First and Third Worlds as overlapping experiences?

  One of the things that has been commented on—and which I’ve responded to—is that I’m only interested in a particular kind of Western music. Why, for example, does the music of Bach or of Wagner interest me more than the music of Bellini, Donizetti, or Verdi, who emphasize the solo voice and the melodic fioritura? It’s simply because I’m not interested in monophony. Polyphony, the organization of more than one voice, is what really interests me. I’m attracted to the combination of voices, the way one voice becomes subordinated by another. I’m interested in the possibilities for the interpreter to bring out voices which, to the author or to the composer, may not have been apparent. Bach, for example, had a fantastic capacity for predicting what combinations of sounds could come out of a single phrase. In the interpretation of polyphonic compositions, there is no predictability. In the case of Glenn Gould, there is no predicting which voice he wants to highlight at any given moment. There are voices that are fundamentally present, yet not always apparent in polyphony. There is therefore a certain amount of leeway given to the interpreter to highlight one voice against the other, while not eliminating voices, so that other voices can come out in a different way. The effect is of a multilevel sound.

  Is there something about music itself that fosters a rupture between the artist and the world?

  Absolutely. Most musicians are completely wrapped up in the world of music. First, it’s incredibly demanding technically. By virtue of its language, it’s non-denotative, and therefore isolated from the world of everyday intercourse. Second, it’s extremely competitive, especially for performers. They have to keep up at a certain level of physical practice. The intellectual component for most performers is very small because they tend to play the same pieces over and over again.

  But I’m very interested in the social component of music. For example, what is the moral problem, which Adorno posed, of music in the context of Auschwitz, where the camp commander would be killing people by day and playing Bach by night? There is a shocking contemporary example which I raised once with Daniel Barenboim and has been confirmed by several reports. One of my son’s friends, who had been a member of Hamas, told me that he can’t tolerate the sound of Beethoven. I asked h
im why. He said that in Israel, where torture is legal and euphemistically called “moderate physical pressure,” the Israelis would put him in a cell at night with loudspeakers and play classical music as loud as possible just to continue the strain on him. What about that? The use of classical music by a people who have a very high level of musical culture, whose philharmonic orchestra plays Beethoven as well as any orchestra in the world—for use in interrogation centers against Palestinians, well, it’s simply indefensible.

  Musicians exist on the stage in an extreme position where the performance blocks everything out. What I’m interested in seeing is certain kinds of connections that might not otherwise be seen, like the connections between music and patronage, between music and culture, the connection between music and power.

  This is what has attracted me to Adorno in the first place and has kept me interested in him all along. For Adorno, from the beginning of his career to the end of his life, music is in a permanent, contradictory, and dialectical tension with society. As few critics of Adorno acknowledge, music is at the core of his philosophy and understanding of culture. Whereas most intellectuals have a certain fluency with films, photography, and the figurative arts generally, most have no connection at all with music. But the more you read of Adorno, the more you realize that music is in that state of tension with everything, including itself, and including the music that matters the most to him. He isolates certain figures like Arnold Schoenberg and late Beethoven as examples of the most intransigent, the most unreconciled, the most irreconcilable music. This kind of starkness of what is unreconciled and can’t be synthesized is what attracted me to Adorno. Yet he doesn’t give this irreconcilability the kind of tragic dimension that for me it has always had.