Edward Said Is Remembered for Influential Scholarship and Political Activism By SCOTT MCLEMEE
Edward Said, whose advocacy of the Palestinian cause made him among the most prominent and controversial figures in American intellectual life, died early Wednesday evening, following a long struggle with leukemia. He was 67 years old. Mr. Said was a professor of English at Columbia University, where he joined the faculty in 1963. He was the recipient of numerous awards for his scholarship in literary studies, and in 1999 served as president of the Modern Language Association.
A prolific author, Mr. Said had recently published an essay in The Guardian, a London newspaper, on the 25th anniversary of Orientalism -- his enormously influential study of how literary and scholarly representations of "the East," including the Islamic world, reinforced European and American imperial designs. "I wish I could say that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs, and Islam in the US has improved," wrote Mr. Said in his essay, "but alas, it really hasn't. ... What American leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, so that 'we' might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow."
As that reference to "intellectual lackeys" may suggest, Mr. Said did not shy away from polemic. From 1977 to 1991, he was a member of the Palestine National Council (often described as the government in exile of Palestine). Following the Oslo accords in 1993, Mr. Said became one of Yasser Arafat's most outspoken critics, saying that under Mr. Arafat's leadership, the Palestine Liberation Organization had made too many concessions to Israel. His columns for the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram reached a wide audience in the Islamic world. The fact that no one could accuse him of sympathy for Israel gave added impact when he criticized contemporary Arabic society for "all its political failures, its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetences, its decreasing production, [and] the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development."
Few readers of his early work in literary criticism would have expected Mr. Said to emerge as a political figure. The son of a prosperous Palestinian Christian family, he was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and attended elite prep schools in Cairo and in Massachusetts. At Princeton University in the late 1950s, he came under the influence of R.P. Blackmur, whose subtle and idiosyncratic analyses of modernist writing stressed close attention to how poetic language worked. That formalist emphasis was evident in his dissertation on "Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography," completed at Harvard University in 1964, and published two years later by Harvard University Press.
In the early 1970s, when scholars in the United States were only beginning to hear about such European intellectual developments as structuralism, Mr. Said was contemplating their implications for literary study. His book Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975) was no mere introductory guide to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Rather, Mr. Said plunged into their thinking as if joining them in conversation.
That dialogue continued in his next book, Orientalism, which drew on Foucault's analysis of the deep links between power and knowledge. Mr. Said contended that the scholarship on Asia and the Middle East produced by experts in Europe and America was part of a longstanding cultural process in which "the West" created and nurtured fantasies about the Oriental "other," treating "the East" as both an object of knowledge and a territory to be conquered.
"Orientalism is a book that rests upon an almost superhuman ability to read very complex literary texts, such as those of Flaubert, alongside political and historical texts," says Paul Bové, a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the editor of Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power (Duke University Press, 2000). "It was a strong and exemplary, an influential and representative example of what could happen if a very powerful literary mind adapted the most advanced forms of critical theory to the study of political issues as they are embedded in culture and society."
The influence of Orientalism has been lasting, and a source of continuing debate. Critics of Mr. Said's book treat it as an effort to disarm any criticism of the politics and culture of Arab and Asian societies. And Western intellectuals sympathetic to his argument were left in a rather paradoxical position. If any effort to analyze non-Western societies is complicit with efforts to dominate them, just what is left for scholars to do?
Those who worked with Mr. Said deny that his attitude toward Western culture was one of simple denunciation. "He was a great lover of classical music," says Victor Navasky, the editor of The Nation. "One of his last writings was an essay on Beethoven that we published this month." Mr. Bové recalls that Mr. Said "had very strong and deeply rooted humanistic criteria for the judgment of what was and was not serious work in literature and culture." He points out that one of Mr. Said's final scholarly projects was an extensive introduction to the new edition of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press). It was one of his favorite books, and as consummately Eurocentric a work of scholarship as any ever published.
There was no real gap between Mr. Said's political militancy and his rather traditional cultural tastes, says Lindsay Waters, the executive director for the humanities at Harvard University Press. "I read him as having held that, essentially, art provides a key for reconstituting society," he says. "If you are going to reconstitute Palestine, you'll be able to do it by the pleasure of some of the artworks that come from Palestine. Without access to that sort of pleasure, life isn't worth living. Which makes him very old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy, I guess."
It is an observation that resonates with Mr. Navasky's memory of an occasion when Mr. Said expressed really intense anger. The outburst had nothing to do with politics. "He wanted to write about opera for The Nation," says Mr. Navasky, "and the opera companies wouldn't give him free tickets. He was furious."
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Quotations from articles by Edward Said, excerpts of which have appeared in The Chronicle:
"The time has come where we [Arabs] cannot simply accuse the West of Orientalism and racism ... and go on doing little about providing an alternative. If our work isn't in the Western media often enough, for example, or isn't known well by Western writers and scholars, a good part of the blame lies with us." Arabs Are Of This World (February 27, 1991)
"Connections between barbarism and culture are common. If one is to care about art and humanity sincerely, there must never be banning of books or ideas. The real task is how, not whether, to read them, to try to see them whole, to appreciate that art and judge the morality together, as actualities of human history." Art and Evil Ideas (January 22, 1992)
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Chronicle of Higher Education - May 19, 1993
Exploring the Complicity of Literature and Empire By Scott Heller
Edward W. Said is trying to explain how music works to a person who doesn't know music. That the conversation is happening by long-distance telephone doesn't help.
Patiently he tries to describe the differences between monophonic and contrapuntal music. Monophonic music is organized vertically, he says, with the melody line dominant and other aspects working in support. In contrapuntal music the melodic lines don't always come together, but rather weave in and out, transform, comment on each other.
His listener still doesn't understand. "You can just do this," Mr. Said says, and suddenly he is playing a quick, simple melody on a nearby piano. "I prefer this -- " he plays again, this time a richer, more pungent fragment.
Music is rarely far from the mind of Mr. Said, who has published a book on the subject along with his better-known works of literary criticism and Middle East political analysis. But on the telephone, Mr. Said, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, describes himself as "completely obsessed." He is practicing several hours a day for two piano recitals, the first times he has played in public in 30 years.
The recitals come soon after a flurry of reviews and interviews for Mr. Said's latest book, Culture and Imperialism, published this spring by Alfred A. Knopf. Based on lectures he gave in the mid-1980's, the book expands on the themes of his ground-breaking 1978 work, Orientalism (Pantheon). In the new book, Mr. Said argues that Western literary texts of the 19th century directly and indirectly provided the moral grounds for colonial expansion throughout the world.
The book includes readings of novels by Rudyard Kipling, Albert Camus, and Joseph Conrad, as well as an atypical analysis of Jane Austen. In the book's second half, Mr. Said discusses how writers of the colonies resisted domination and laid the cultural groundwork for decolonization and liberation movements.
Music makes an appearance in the book in an analysis of Verdi's Aida. More than that, Mr. Said uses music as a metaphor to develop a theory of reading that takes into account history and politics without reducing literature to ideology. He calls for "contrapuntal reading," a methodology that doesn't synthesize literature and history into a single, melodic line. His model is not the symphony, but rather the "atonal or polytonal ensemble" in which various elements can be heard within the whole of the music. It is like the Brahms piece he and a second pianist will play at the recital. In such a piece, "voices respond to each other, echoing each other, contrasting each other," says Mr. Said. "That's always been the kind of music I've liked."
While it has become increasingly unfashionable to say so, Mr. Said, a Palestinian who received undergraduate and graduate degrees in the United States, likes Western literature, too. In Culture and Imperialism, he maintains that certain novels represent a kind of literary excellence that deserves admiration. But he argues that at the same time they are implicated in colonialism, helping to make natural the idea that one people should rule another.
While Orientalism is a founding text for academic post-colonial studies in the United States and Britain, Mr. Said stands as a traditionalist in relation to the next generation of scholars. He is not a Marxist, for which he has been attacked in the recent book In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Verso), by Aijaz Ahmad. In his own book, he is critical of identity politics as well as the various contemporary literary theories that minimize the aesthetic pleasures of literature.
"In studying cultural texts that happily co-existed with or lent support to the global enterprises of European and American empire," he writes, "one is not indicting them wholesale or suggesting that they are less interesting as art for being in complex ways part of the imperialist undertaking."
Several reviewers have pointed out that the emergence of post-colonial studies makes some of the arguments in the new book familiar. But Timothy Brennan, a former graduate student of Mr. Said who now teaches English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, says the book demonstrates an important shift in Mr. Said's attitudes. "He's trying to say, `I've spent my whole life in love with literature. But literature is complicit. Art itself must be held in suspicion.' This is new for him."
In Orientalism, Mr. Said discussed how certain images and ways of scholarly thinking dominated Western representations of the Middle East. In Culture and Imperialism, he expands the thesis to deal with writings on Africa, India, Australia, the Caribbean, and parts of the Far East. He looks at works that coincided with British and French colonial expansion in the 19th century. The book finishes with thoughts about American expansionism, the Persian Gulf war, and battles over the curriculum in this century.
Cultural forms, especially the novel, helped to lay the groundwork for the most massive period of national consolidation in history, Mr. Said writes. "The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans for its future -- these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative," he writes.
British novelists, for example, generally accepted and transmitted the racial attitudes of their time, which helped make easier the British control of India and other colonies, he maintains. Rudyard Kipling's Kim, he writes, is both a "work of great aesthetic merit" and a novel that takes as a given "the inferiority of non-white races, the necessity that they be ruled by a superior race, and their absolute unchanging essence."
In another chapter, Mr. Said teases out the implications of Jane Austen's silences in Mansfield Park. An Antiguan sugar plantation helps the character of Sir Thomas Bertram support his English country house. But when the narrative should take the character to the slave-run plantation, Austen offers no representation of life on the island.
Just as "the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire," so too does the idea of decolonization depend on the work of writers and intellectuals, according to Mr. Said. In the second half of the book, he praises the writings of C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and Aime Cesaire, among other intellectuals who wrote in opposition to colonial authority. But while he notes the importance of novelists such as Salman Rushdie and Chinua Achebe, he spends less time with their novels than he does with those by Western writers.
Mr. Said considers nationalism and forms of ethnocentrism as phases along the way to liberation, phases from which many formerly colonized nations have not yet passed. He is disappointed in the Western intellectuals who champion resurgent nationalisms. Instead, he maintains that one of the hopeful legacies of imperialism is the fact that histories and literatures of the colonizer and colonized are intertwined. "Partly because of empire," he writes, "all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic."
If Culture and Imperialism is Mr. Said's exercise in musical counterpoint, then In Theory is a long, loud dissonant note that has infuriated the professor and his supporters. Mr. Ahmad, the book's author, is a professorial fellow at the Centre of Contemporary Studies of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi.
"It's very pointed, very detailed. It isn't just vitriolic or personal," says Michael Sprinker, a professor of English and comparative literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Mr. Sprinker, a friend of Mr. Said and the editor of Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Publishers, 1992), arranged for In Theory to be published in this country, a decision that Mr. Sprinkler says has put a strain on their friendship. "Basically you've got to be for it or against it," he says.
A member of India's Communist Party, Mr. Ahmad rebukes Mr. Said for emphasizing literary texts at the expense of politics and economics. Of Orientalism, he writes: "What is remarkable is that with the exception of Said's own voice, the only voices we encounter in the book are precisely those of the very Western canonicity which, Said complains, has always silenced the Orient."
Scholars will discuss In Theory in a special section of the journal Public Culture. Mr. Said turned down a chance to answer his critic in the journal. He dismisses In Theory as "browbeating and dogmatic," more a reflection of its author's political stance than a serious engagement with his own. "I don't think I fit the categories he assigns to me. I've been much more involved in politics than he has, for example."
In certain ways, the book points to the fact that since Orientalism, thousands of scholars in literature, history, and anthropology are walking in Mr. Said's footsteps, if not stepping on them. Generational battles are inevitable, especially for a figure such as Mr. Said who toes a fine line on matters of literary value.
To Camille Paglia, who favorably reviewed Culture and Imperialism for The Washington Post, Mr. Said has become a victim of his own erudition and influence. "He's seeing the forces he's unleashed on the profession are barbaric forces and there will not be art left after they're done," she says. By contrast, Mr. Sprinker sees Mr. Said's influence as positive. "The generations who were empowered by Edward will carry the project further than he could," says Mr. Sprinker. "It will look like patricide. But if only people in literature could look at this the way people in science do -- it's a matter of extending the project."
For a man in a whirlwind of lectures and commitments, Mr. Said seems resigned and philosophical. He wrote many parts of the new book during the Gulf war and says he is discouraged by how easily Orientalized images of a barbaric Arab world were used to amass American support.
About his work now, there is an air of summing up. Mr. Said was recently found to have chronic leukemia, a diagnosis that has not affected his schedule. He has officially turned down a job offer from Harvard University. His writing and lecturing plans are the work of a senior statesman. Next month he will deliver four prestigious lectures in England on representations of the intellectual. He has a contract to write a memoir which will deal at length with his education at a British school in Egypt. It is the school where Mr. Said became grounded in the classics of the West, classics that he admires yet questions in Culture and Imperialism.
Reached after his piano recitals, Mr. Said reports that they went well. "They were both, I'm happy to say, sold out," he says. He has sent along a copy of his 1983 magazine article on the pianist Glenn Gould, an artist whose "contrapuntal vision" he admires enormously. In an accompanying note, he writes: "Funny how things come together when someone asks the question."
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