The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  One last thing. You were talking about the importance of memory for developing a kind of resistance movement, and at the same time, your own work of late has been itself a kind of research into memory and its function. Is there a way to link these two ideas of memory? That is, the one idea of memory, which is the political idea, is the notion that we make sure we recall what is being obfuscated by power, what you called resistance by recollection. The other idea of memory is that of personal memory, private memory, as found in your memoir.

  I think that’s a very good question. For me, they’re connected in an attempt not to just resist the amnesia induced on the public level by the official narratives and the official systems of knowledge, which are growing more and more powerful, through the media, through standardization, and through the insistence on ethnic loyalty, but also on the private level. I’ve tried to resist the confinements imposed by age and, in my case, by my illness. I’ve tried to remain within the collective experience, hoping that my personal predicament might be helpful in the public realm.

  All though the period that I was writing my memoir, I was also constantly maintaining my interest in and commitment to the public realm. I’ve found myself more and more connected to other places. I’ve found that a number of places have crystallized in my mind as significant, obviously one is the Middle East, and there is also Ireland, India, South Africa, North Africa, West Africa, Korea, Japan, and selected places in Latin America. I owe a lot to friends from those parts of the world who have drawn me closer to their experiences and their literatures. For me, this has been tremendously valuable, to look at the much vaster collective experience and memory that turns into a kind of anti-provincialism, anti-isolationism, and anti-exclusivism that is almost automatically imposed on you if you are very involved in a local struggle. I’ve always tried to bring to bear upon what I say about the Middle East or Palestine a cosmopolitan awareness of what has taken place in Algeria, what has taken place in Latin America, what has taken place in Ireland. That’s the job. To make them aware is a service that one can do for one’s own people. There isn’t only one struggle. There are other struggles that you can learn from. In that respect it’s been an education for me as well.

  ENDNOTES

  1 A dunam is roughly a quarter of an acre.

  2 I have discussed this at length in The Politics of Dispossession (New York and London: Pantheon, Chatto and Windus, 1994; Vintage, 1995), pp. 372– 411.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1999), 216.

  2. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 328.

  3. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 29.

  4. Edward W. Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 157.

  5. Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 12.

  6. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections for Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1974), 39.

  7. Edward W. Said, “The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile,” Harpers (September 1994): 55.

  8. Mary McCarthy, “Exiles, Expatriates and Internal Émigrés,” The Listener (November 25, 1971): 706.

  9. Quoted in Maya Jaggi, “Out of the Shadows,” The Guardian (September 11, 1999).

  10. Said, Representations of the Intellectual, 12.

  11. Said, Out of Place, 215.

  12. Said, Out of Place, 12.

  13. Said, Out of Place, 9.

  14. Said, Out of Place, 42.

  15. Said, Out of Place, 90.

  16. Said, Out of Place, 115.

  17. Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 116.

  18. Said, Out of Place, 120.

  19. Said, Out of Place, 278.

  20. Said, Out of Place, 124.

  21. Said, Out of Place, 126.

  22. Said, Out of Place, 293.

  23. Edward Said, “The Arab Portrayed,” The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 5.

  24. The Politics of Dispossession, xiv.

  25. Hayden White, “Beginning with a Text,” Diacritics 6, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 19.

  26. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia, 1985): 349.

  27. Edward W. Said, “Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts,” MLN 91, no. 5 (October 1976): 820.

  28. Edward W. Said, “Arabs and Jews,” The New York Times, October 14, 1973.

  29. ”Summary of Statement,” “Prepared Statement of Edward W. Said,” (with Abu Lughod) “Questions and Discussion.” In U.S. Congress. House. Special Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on International Relations. The Palestinian Issue in Middle East Peace Efforts. 32. 94th Cong., 1st sess. September 30, 1975.

  30. Nubar Hovsepian, “Connections with Palestine,” Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Boston: Blackwell, 1992): 13.

  31. Orientalism, 12.

  32. Leon Wieseltier. New Republic (April 7, 1979): 29.

  33. Bernard Lewis, “The Question of Orientalism,” The New York Review of Books (June 24, 1982): 49–55.

  34. Talal Asad, English Historical Review 95(376): 648.

  35. Edward W. Said, “Orientalism: An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books (August 12, 1982): 44. Cf. Said, “Afterword,” Orientalism, 341–45.

  36. Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992), 69.

  37. Edward W. Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Communities,” Critical Inquiry, 9:1 (September 1982): 25.

  38. ”Reflections on American ‘Left’ Literary Criticism,” The World, the Text, and the Critic, 163.

  39. Ibid, 159.

  40. David Gilmour, Lebanon: The Fractured Country (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983).

  41. Tabitha Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987): 288.

  42. Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Vintage, 1994): 249.

  43. Quoted in The Politics of Dispossession, 256.

  44. Edward W. Said, “The Essential Terrorist,” Blaming the Victims (New York: Verso, 1988): 153

  45. Norman Finklestein, In These Times, September 11, 1984. See also, Finklestein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (New York: Verso, 1995).

  46. Edward W. Said, “Conspiracy of Praise,” Blaming the Victims, 30.

  47. Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky, 2d ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999): 4.

  48. After the Last Sky, 6.

  49. After the Last Sky, 4.

  50. After the Last Sky, 24.

  51. ”Reflections on Exile,” Granta 13 (Winter 1984): 159, 172.

  52. ”Glenn Gould’s Contrapuntal Vision,” Vanity Fair (May 1983): 98.

  53. W. J. T. Mitchell, “In the Wilderness,” The London Review of Books (April 8, 1993): 11; Michael Wood, “Lost Paradises,” The New York Review of Books (March 3, 1994): 44–47; Michael Gorra, “Who Paid the Bills at Mansfield Park,” The New York Times Book Review (February 28, 1993): 11.

  54. John Leonard, “Novel Colonies,” The Nation (March 22, 1993): 383.

  55. The Politics of Dispossession, 305.

  56. Representations of the Intellectual, 101.

  57. Edward W. Said, The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with David Barsamian (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1994): 110.

  58. Edward W. Said, “The One State Solution,” The New York Times Magazine (January 10, 1999): 36.

  59. We have been limited to drawing upon Said’s books for the Reader; those interested in Said’s other essays are directed to a forthcoming work (by Harvard University Press) where Said’s essa
ys will be collected.

  Chapter 1: The Claims of Individuality

  1. Edward Said, “Between Worlds,” London Review of Books 20:9 (May 7, 1998): 3.

  2. “Henry James to Joseph Conrad,” in Twenty Letters to Joseph Conrad, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (London: First Edition Club, 1926).

  3. Richard Curle, The Last Twelve Years of Joseph Conrad (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1928), p. 25.

  4. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), p. 48.

  5. The sufferings and concerns of Conrad in the letters thus form the freely speculative and painful background of his fiction. A few sentences from Heidegger’s essay on “The Essence of Truth” illuminate this kind of connection. In what follows, “letting-be” is what I have called Conrad’s suffering, and “exposition” is the result of this in his personal idiom: “To let something be (Seinlassen) is in fact to have something to do with it (sich einlassen auf). . . . To let what-is be what it is means participating in something overt and its overtness, in which everything that ‘is’ takes up its position and which entails such overtness. . . . ‘Lettingbe,’ i.e. freedom, is in its own self ‘ex-posing’ (aussetzend) and ‘existent’ (ek-sistent). “The nature of freedom, seen from the point of view of the nature of truth, now shows itself as an ‘exposition’ into the revealed nature of what-is.” Martin Heidegger, “The Essence of Truth” (trans. R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick), in Existence and Being (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co. 1949), pp. 307–8.

  6. Letters of Joseph Conrad to Marguerite Poradowska, 1890–1920 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940): 84.

  7. Joseph Conrad, “A Personal Record,” Complete Works, vol. VI (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1925): 17.

  8. Joseph Conrad, “Notes on Life and Letters,” Complete Works, vol. III (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1925): 13.

  9. R. L. Megroz, A Talk with Joseph Conrad: A Criticism of His Mind and Method (London: Elkin Matthews, 1926), p. 54.

  10. Johan Huizinga, “The Idea of History,” in The Varieties of History, ed. Fritz Stern (New York, 1956), p. 292.

  11. Georg Lukács, Histoire et conscience de classe (Paris: Le Edition de Minuit 1960). See also Lucien Goldmann, “Introduction aux prémiers écrits de Georges Lukács,” Les Temps modernes, no. 195 (August 1962), pp. 254–80.

  12. R. P. Blackmur, The Lion and the Honeycomb (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955), p. 123.

  Chapter 2: The Palestinian Experience

  1. Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession (New York: Pantheon, 1994): xiii.

  2. Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther (New York: Norton, 1962): 14.

  Chapter 3: Molestation and Authority in Narrative Fiction

  1. J. Hillis Miller, ed., Aspects of Narrative (New York: Columbia University, 1971).

  2. See, for example, Edward Said, “A Configuration of Themes,” review of J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality, The Nation (May 30, 1966): 659–61. Miller was of the second generation of the Geneva circle.

  3. Beginnings, 194–95.

  4. Beginnings, 319.

  5. See Levin’s discussion of this throughout his Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). See also his essay “Literature as an Institution,” Accent 6, no. 3 (Spring 1946): 159–68.

  6. In Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1966). Originally published as Pour un nouveau roman (1963).

  7. Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (New York: Macmillan, 1966): 32.

  8. Sören Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, trans. Walter Lowrie (London: Oxford University Press, 1939): 17.

  9. Ibid., 40.

  10. Ibid., 65.

  11. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941): 6.

  12. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).

  13. Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1968): 14.

  14. Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941): 6.

  15. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates, trans. Lee M. Capel (London: William Collins, 1966): 270.

  16. Ibid., 276.

  17. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1899): 15.

  18. Marx, Capital and Other Writings, ed. Max Eastman (New York: Modern Library, 1932): 183–84.

  19. Vico, The New Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948): 121.

  20. Ibid., bk. 2, “Poetic Wisdom,” 109–297.

  21. See Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 120 ff.; also see Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969): 173–209.

  22. See Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966): 17, for a description of Wemmick as bricoleur.

  23. Dickens, Great Expectations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902): 562.

  24. Ibid., 540–41.

  Chapter 4: Orientalism

  1. V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of the Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, White Man in the Age of Empire (Boston: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1969).

  2. Said, Orientalism, 12.

  3. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks: Selections, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 324.

  4. “In Search of Palestine,” narrated and written by Edward Said (London: British Broadcasting Company, 1998).

  5. Edward Said, “The Arab Portrayed,” The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 5.

  6. “Afterword,” Orientalism, 337.

  7. “Afterword,” Orientalism, 339.

  8. Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic (April 7, 1979): 29.

  9. Bernard Lewis, “The Question of Orientalism,” The New York Review of Books (June 24, 1982): 49–55.

  10. Talal Asad, English Historical Review 95(376): 648.

  11. Edward Said, “Orientalism: An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books (August 12, 1982): 44. Cf. Said, “Afterword,” Orientalism, 341–45.

  12. Gyan Prakash, “Orientalism Now,” History and Theory (October 1995): 199.

  13. Thierry Desjardins, Le Martyre du Liban (Paris: Plon, 1976), p. 14.

  14. K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959).

  15. Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968).

  16. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (1966; reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 200–19.

  17. Principally in his American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969); and For Reasons of State (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973).

  18. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), 71.

  19. Harry Bracken, “Essence, Accident and Race,” Hermathena 116 (Winter 1973): 81–96.

  20. In an interview published in Diacritics 6, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 38.

  21. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp. 66–67.

  22. In my Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

  23. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), pp. 65–67.

  24. Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950); Johann W. Fück, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1955); Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977).

  25. E. S. Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

  26. George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1956), p. 164.

  27. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks: Selections, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 324. The full passage, unavailable in the Hoare and Smith translation, is to be found in Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi Editore, 1975), 2: 1363.

  28. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), p. 376.

  29. Quoted by Henri Baudet in Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man, trans. Elizabeth Wentholt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), p. xiii.

  30. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6: 289.

  31. Baudet, Paradise on Earth, p. 4.

  32. See Fieldhouse, Colonial Empires, pp. 138–61.

  33. Schwab, La Renaissance orientale, p. 30.

  34. A. J. Arberry, Oriental Essays: Portraits of Seven Scholars (New York: Macmillan Co., 1960), pp. 30, 31.

  35. Raymond Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-Duperron suivie des Usages civils et religieux des Perses par Anquetil-Duperron (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1934), pp. 10, 96, 4, 6.

  36. Arberry, Oriental Essays, pp. 62–66.

  37. Frederick Eden Pargiter, ed., Centenary Volume of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1823–1923 (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1923), p. viii.