For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  9

  An Enquiry into the Nature of a Certain Twentieth-Century Polemic

  A possible riposte could be that one neutralizes Pooh’s ideological effect in the very act of exposing and denouncing it. That’s one up on the empire, true enough, and I shall be doing a spot of such neutralizing myself in just a twinkling. Yet the mode of indignant alarm wears precious thin after a while. If, instead, we make full use of postmodern postcolonial conceptions – among others, “aporia, ambivalence, indeterminacy, the question of discursive closure, the threat to agency, the status of intentionality, the challenge to ‘totalizing concepts’” – our critique can be immeasurably more efficacious, even revolutionary.

  Das Nuffa Dat, ‘Resident Aliens’ in

  Frederick Crews, Postmodern Pooh (2001)

  THE MAN OF THE BOOK

  Edward Said, who died on 25 September 2003, had many friends and even more admirers. He was handsome and always sharp-suited. He was also stylish, sensitive, witty, learned and cultured. He played the piano and was exceptionally knowledgeable about classical music. He was a subtle and well-respected literary critic. An intellectual himself, he had always taken the duties of the intellectual extremely seriously. He was also a tireless campaigner for Palestinian rights and was appropriately sceptical about the Oslo agreement and the later ‘road map’ for peace in the Middle East. He opposed the corrupt and oppressive regime of Yasser Arafat and his coterie of favoured friends on the West Bank. When not actually engaged in furious debate with those whom he had identified as Zionist and imperialist enemies (and he took no hostages in debate), he was by all accounts a gentle and soft-spoken man. He was widely honoured in his lifetime, being, among other things, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935. This seems to have been because his parents preferred Jerusalem’s hospitals to those of Cairo. However, his parents, who were Christian Protestants, came from the Lebanon and Said, who was mostly educated in Egypt and then in the United States, had Egyptian and American citizenship. His family usually summered in Lebanon. In his memoir, Out of Place, Said wrote about his childhood and his life in Egypt with an overbearing father and an indulgent mother.1 He spent only a few months in a school in Jerusalem. So his self-presentation as a Palestinian is questionable. But perhaps the matter is not important. He certainly thought of himself as a Palestinian and passionately identified with their sufferings. He grew up in a wealthy household in which Arabic was used only to speak to the servants. (He only mastered literary Arabic much later in life after taking lessons.) Most of his schooling was at the smart Victoria College in Cairo, ‘a school designed to be the Eton of the Middle East’. The school houses were named after the heroes of British exploration and imperialism: Kitchener, Cromer, Frobisher and Drake. It was forbidden to speak Arabic within the grounds. Said was a rebel and an outsider in the school. The head prefect, Omar Sharif (the actor; original name Michael Shalhoub), was one of those who beat him. In Out of Place, Said describes his response to another flogging, this time by a master: ‘a ruthless fury took over as I vowed to make “their” lives miserable, without getting caught, without allowing myself ever to get close to any of them, taking from them what they had to offer entirely in my own way’.2

  His further education took place in the United States from 1951 onwards. As he himself presented it, his youth was gilded yet unhappy. He was a driven young man, struggling to live up to his parents’ expectations and always looking for new goals to achieve, forever unwilling or unable to relax. All his life he suffered from insomnia. He was an undergraduate at Princeton and then did a doctorate on Joseph Conrad at Harvard. From 1962 to 1967 he was unhappily married. In 1970 he married again. In 1967 (the year of the Six Day War) he started teaching in the English department of Columbia University in New York and he continued to teach there for the rest of his life. Though he became an acclaimed and comfortably-off author and academic, who taught at an elite university and jet-setted all over the world, he chose to see himself as an outsider all his life.

  The literary critic Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) was one of Said’s role models. Auerbach was a leading practitioner of romance philology and his great book, Mimesis (1946), was an exercise in comparative literature and, more specifically, a study of men’s changing perceptions of reality as reflected in literature. The range of texts was impressive, as he began with the Bible and Homer and ended with Proust. Auerbach used to work from the Ansatzpunkt (starting point) of the study of a particular text, or part of a text, in order to understand history and the world as a whole. One incidental factor behind Said’s adulation of Auerbach was the fact that the latter had written his masterpiece in exile in Istanbul. Said, who considered himself to be an exile from Palestine, used to quote Auerbach’s citation of Hugh of St Victor: ‘The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.’

  Auerbach particularly revered the historian and professor of rhetoric, Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), and Said also followed him in this. Vico’s Principi di una scienza nuova (1725) attempted to study the cultures of past times on their own terms and argued that it was pointless to judge men according to the ethos of later times. Vico argued that cultures were very largely shaped by their own perception of their past. In every society, laws and codes of behaviour were based on a ‘senso commune’, a consensus based on common structures of thought and feeling. Said praised the ‘oppositional quality to Vico’s work – his being anti-Cartesian, anti-rationalistic and anti-Catholic’.3 Additionally Vico’s use of philological evidence to make broad historical points fascinated Said. But the adulation of Vico was a little odd, given Vico’s ferocious racialism. For example, Vico’s derisive and patronizing comments about Chinese philosophy and painting would strike most modern readers as really rather shocking.

  In 1966 Said published Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. Conrad was an appropriate choice, for not only was he an exile, but he was a specialist in fictions set in exotic locales and his Heart of Darkness must be read as a dark parable about colonialism. Said used Conrad’s letters to study the ease with which Conrad presented his past life in order, as it were, to invent himself. Said’s next book, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), was strongly influenced by Vico and by Michel Foucault (on whom see below). The notion of individual literary works being shaped by the discursive formation of the age rather than by the individual author is distinctively Foucaldian. In Beginnings, Said promoted the literary critic to the same status or even higher than the creative artist. He also fired off some early salvoes at the adventurer and literary fantasist, T. E. Lawrence. (Lawrence’s self-invention in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was even more flagrant than that of Conrad.) Beginnings, which was produced before Said had thought of reinventing himself as the defender of Islam against stereotypes and generalizations, contains some remarkable instances of just that sort of thing, for example: ‘It is significant that the desire to create an alternative world, to modify, or augment the real world through the act of writing… is inimical to the Islamic world-view.’4 While on the subject of stereotypes, it is worth considering whether it is possible or even desirable to dispense with them altogether. As a leading mathematician has pointed out: ‘many stereotypes permit the economy of expression necessary for rapid communication and effective functioning. Chair is a stereotype, but one never hears complaints from bar stools, recliners, bean bags, art deco pieces, high-back dining-room varieties, precious antiques, chaises longues, or kitchen instances of the notion.’5

  THE POLITICIZATION OF ALITERARY CRITIC

  The young Edward Said was not particularly political. But 1967 saw the Six Day War and the consequent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The catastrophe of 1967 was no
t just a military defeat for the Arabs, it was also a challenge to their self-image and it drove Arabintellectuals to consider what was wrong within the Arab world, as well as the obvious injustices of an American and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. Increasingly, Said identified with Arab causes and he started taking lessons in Arabic in the 1970s. However, it seems to me that, though he was to become an enthusiastic partisan for a handful of contemporary Arabnovelists, he never acquired a profound knowledge of the Arabliterary heritage.

  In March 1973 Palestinian terrorists seized the Saudi embassy in Khartoum and three American diplomats were killed. Later that year, in October, Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal and attempted to take back the Sinai Desert and Gaza Strip from Israel. Egypt’s war was supported by the Soviet Union. But American support of Israel was more whole-hearted and more effective. In a series of bold manoeuvres Israeli troops encircled a large part of the Egyptian army. Arabregimes cut back oil production in protest at American intervention in the region. Arabs, whether wealthy shaykhs or Palestinian freedom fighters, were the victims of an outrageously bad press in American newspapers as well as on television (a phenomenon that has persisted to the present day). It was the Middle East crisis of 1973 that provoked Said to research and write Orientalism, which was published in 1978. Despite early highly critical reviews, the book went on to become a cult classic and has been translated into thirty-five languages. Although the English language version has been reprinted again and again, Said made no attempt to correct any of the factual errors that were pointed out when it first appeared. Indeed, Said subsequently added a smug ‘Afterword’ in which he refused to concede any points and roundly abused critics of the book.

  Orientalism is not a history of Oriental studies, but rather a highly selective polemic on certain aspects of the relation of knowledge and power. Its style and content strongly suggest that it is addressed exclusively to a Western readership. Said’s targets included academic Orientalists, but they also included proconsuls, explorers and novelists, as he believed that all these groups participated in a common Orientalist discourse. Said restricted his argument to the Arabheartland and offered no substantial discussion of Persian or Turkish studies and he even neglected the Arablands in North Africa (which meant that French Orientalists get off relatively lightly). In his introduction he set out his aims and methodology. Vico, Foucault, Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Schwab(the author of the muddled but interesting study of European interest in India, La Renaissance orientale, 1950) are invoked as the presiding maîtres à penser for the exercise. The first chapter, ‘The Scope of Orientalism’, swoops backwards and forwards through the centuries, as it indicts Arthur Balfour, Aeschylus, Dante, Gibb and many others for racist and colonialist attitudes. The next chapter, ‘Orientalist Structures and Restructures’, contains a more sustained criticism of certain leading nineteenth-century figures, such as Lane and Renan. ‘Orientalism Now’ is the most polemical chapter. Jewish academics and journalists are the particular objects of Said’s denunciations here. It is obvious that bitterness about what had been happening to the Palestinians since the 1940s fuelled the writing of this book. But rather than blame British, American and Soviet politicians, Zionist lobbyists, the Israeli army and, for that matter, poor Palestinian leadership, in a weird kind of displacement Arabist scholars of past centuries, such as Pococke and Silvestre de Sacy, were presented as largely responsible for the disasters of Said’s own time.

  SOME PROBLEMS WITH ORIENTALISM

  Orientalism has the look of a book written in a hurry. It is repetitious and contains lots of factual mistakes. Said refers to ‘Peter the Venerable and other Cluniac Orientalists’.6 Which other Cluniac Orientalists? It would be interesting to know their names. (But, of course, the idea that there was a whole school of Cluniac Orientalists is absurd. Peter the Venerable was on his own.) As Bernard Lewis pointed out, Said has Muslim armies conquering Turkey before they conquered North Africa. That really does suggest a breathtaking ignorance of Middle Eastern history, as does his belief that Britain and France dominated the eastern Mediterranean from about the end of the seventeenth century.7 Said says many of Bonaparte’s Orientalist translators were students of Silvestre de Sacy, but he does not trouble to produce any evidence for this and, as has been noted in an earlier chapter, de Sacy began teaching only in 1796. Bonaparte’s chief interpreter was a dragoman, rather than an academic product, and, since de Sacy did not know colloquial Egyptian, his tuition would in any case have been of limited assistance. Said has the Swiss historian JacobBurckhardt (famous for his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy) working on Egyptian proverbs.8 That is absurd. Said claims that Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians was addressed to an academic public, but, as we have seen, the book was published by an organization dedicated to educating a broad reading public. Said claimed that Muir’s nineteenth-century Life of Mahomet and his book on the Caliphate were still treated as authoritative in the 1970s (as if the later books on the same subjects and articles by Wellhausen, Nöldeke, Goldziher, Lammens, Brockelmann, Watt and Rodinson had never been written). Said claimed that Gibb insisted on the title Mohammedanism for his little monograph on Islam, when in fact, if Said had bothered to read the introduction to that book, he would have learnt that the title was imposed on Gibb by the publisher, because that was the title of the previous guide by Margoliouth.

  One could go on and on listing the mistakes. Some are small ones, but others are large indeed. Sophisticated allies of Said have suggested that facts, or factual errors, are not the point. Indeed, recourse to ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ are, it is hinted, a time-honoured recourse of reactionary Orientalists. It is suggested that such is the essential truth of Said’s indictment of Orientalism that the sweep of his argument is not undermined by the lack of a detailed factual basis. The ‘tensions and contradictions’ that so obsess his critics (including me) are ‘fundamental to his transnational framework’.9 Said himself, in a later essay ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, appeared to have (obscure) doubts about the value of consistency, suggesting that ‘the claim made by some that I am ahistorical and inconsistent would have more interest if the virtues of consistency, whatever may be intended by the term, were subjected to rigorous analysis’.10 One may feel tempted by this sort of argument, though, of course, if Said and his allies do not feel bound to respect facts, there is no reason why their critics should do so either, for if it is permissible to misrepresent Orientalism, Christianity and British imperialism, it would not be so obviously wrong similarly to misrepresent Islam, Arab History or the Palestinian predicament. As Sir Thomas More observed in Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons, ‘This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – Man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly.) Yes, I’d give the Devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake.’11 Others have suggested that, though Orientalism is full of mistakes, the book is still of enormous value because it stimulated discussion and debate about major problems. However, the value of a debate that is based on a fantasy version of past history and scholarship is not obvious.

  Though there may indeed be a problem with the unanalysed ‘virtues of consistency’, that is as nothing compared with the problems that arise from an argument that is frequently and flagrantly inconsistent, as it then becomes difficult even to discover what the argument is. To take one example, Said cannot make up his mind about when Orientalism began. A lot of the time he wishes to link its origins to Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. Orientalism is repeatedly presented as a secular Enlightenment phenomenon. (This would loosely parallel Foucault’s argument in The Order of Things that before the late eighteenth century Man did not exist and that it was only then that God was displaced from the centre of the universe and Man became both the object and subject of knowledge.) But at other times, Said seems to rega
rd d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale (1697) as the founding charter of Orientalism. But then again, maybe Postel was the first Orientalist? Another possible date offered by Said is 1312when the Council of Vienne set up chairs in Hebrew, Arabic and other languages (though Said seems unaware that the Council’s decrees regarding the teaching of Arabic were a dead letter).

  We have already encountered the legendary Cluniac Orientalists of the twelfth century. But one can go further back to discover typical Western and sinister anti-Oriental attitudes in the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides. Their plays distilled distinctions between Europe and the Orient which ‘will remain essential motifs of European emotional geography’. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm (one of Said’s many Arabcritics) describes the ensuing muddle rather well: ‘In other words, Orientalism is not really a thoroughly modern phenomenon, as we thought earlier, but is the natural product of an ancient and irresistible European bent of mind to misrepresent the realities of other cultures, peoples and their languages, in favour of Occidental self-affirmation, domination and ascendancy.’12