Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

Summary

A collection of forty-six essays written over roughly thirty-five years, framed by an Introduction, “Criticism and Exile”, as the record of a criticism practiced from exile in New York: against formalist criticism’s flight from historical experience, for re-reading the canon with the experiences of the colonized, the displaced and the excluded reinstated, and with Palestine — identified in Said’s experience with dispossession and Exile — as the experience that predisposed his attention toward unaccommodated, expatriate forms of existence, while insisting that “no return to the past is without irony, or without a sense that a full return, or repatriation, is impossible” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.28).

What the file is

• The file is Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, title page GRANTA (PDF p.2), dedicated “To the memory of F. W. Dupee” (PDF p.3). The Acknowledgments are signed E. W. S., New York City, June 2000 (PDF p.4). The edition statement and ISBN are printed at the end of the ebook file (PDF p.574, examined for edition identification only, outside the range read in this part): first published in Great Britain by Granta Books 2001, ebook edition published by Granta Books 2013, copyright 2000 by Edward W. Said, ISBN 978 1 84708 921 2.
• Length: 574 PDF pages, about 239,116 words in the supplied text copy (the request’s count). Contents (PDF p.5-6): Introduction, forty-six numbered essays, Credits, Index, Also By Edward W. Said, Copyright. The essays and their subjects are listed in full in the reading notes.
• Text copy: the supplied text copy (raw/2000-said-reflections-on-exile-and-other-essays.txt) has a page marker for every page, 1-574. PDF p.1 is blank. In this part the original was checked at PDF p.4, 34, 38, 44, 49 and 50: the original reads “indebted tomy assistant” (PDF p.4, spacing as printed) and “amaelstrom” (PDF p.50, as printed); a phrase reported garbled in rendered output at PDF p.49, “knowledge without information.”, is clean in the raw bytes and in the original.
• In part 2 the original was checked at PDF p.56, 66, 77, 80 and 89: the original reads “themas they are tome” (PDF p.56, spacing as printed), “magama” (PDF p.66, as printed), “Kana-fani” (PDF p.77, as printed) and “Ma’na al-nakba mujada-dan” (PDF p.75-76, hyphenated across the line break as printed); essay 7 opens at PDF p.89, in the original as in the text copy, mid-sentence with “Conrad and yet admiring students of Schopenhauer.” A passage at PDF p.66 is set in the text copy with each word on a separate line and is reassembled in reading order in the reading notes.
• Attribution inside the work: the Introduction and essays 1-3 in this part are Said’s own, apart from the quotations he credits to the writers he discusses, recorded in the Section by section entries. The Acknowledgments are signed E. W. S. (PDF p.4).

Section by section

Front matter — PDF p.1-6

Blank page (p.1), title page (p.2), dedication to F. W. Dupee (p.3), Acknowledgments (p.4): several essays appeared in Raritan Review, The London Review of Books, and Critical Inquiry; thanks to Richard Poirier, Mary-Kay Wilmers, and Tom Mitchell, and to his assistant Dr. Zaineb Istrabadi. Contents (p.5-6) lists the Introduction and forty-six essays, from “Labyrinth of Incarnations” on Maurice Merleau-Ponty to “The Clash of Definitions” on Samuel Huntington.

Introduction: Criticism and Exile — PDF p.7-28

The essays are the intellectual results of thirty-five years teaching and studying at Columbia University, where Said arrived in the fall of 1963 (PDF p.7). New York — “what Paris was a hundred years ago, the capital of our time” (PDF p.7) — is an immigrants’ and exiles’ city, formed by Ellis Island arrivals (Irish, Italian, East European Jewish and non-Jewish, African, Caribbean, Middle and Far Eastern peoples, PDF p.7), now in tension with its status as center of the globalized late capitalist economy of the only superpower (PDF p.8). On Said’s arrival the New York intellectuals around Partisan Review, City College and Columbia, including Lionel Trilling and F. W. Dupee, were still fighting over Stalinism, which did not interest Said’s generation, for whom civil rights and resistance to the U.S. war in Vietnam were formative (PDF p.8). Dupee — essayist, subversive, free of the group’s Anglophilia — encouraged Said’s French theorizing, experimental fiction and the art of the essay, and after 1967 supported him “in my lonely fight on behalf of the Palestinian cause” (PDF p.8); Dupee and his wife Andy were the only academic New York friends to visit Said in Beirut in fall 1972, where Said spent a sabbatical year in daily Arabic philology and literature tutorials (PDF p.8-9).

“The experience of 1967, the re-emergence of the Palestinian people as a political force, and my own engagement with that movement was what New York in a sense made it possible for me to live” (PDF p.9), despite death threats and vandalism. Against the New York intellectuals, discredited in Said’s account by their involvement in the cultural Cold War managed by the CIA as exposed by Frances Stonor Saunders in The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, his concerns became explicit in Beginnings: Intention and Method, then Orientalism, then his Palestine writings, magnified by the other New York of diasporic Third World communities and the canon wars (PDF p.9). “The greatest single fact of the past three decades has been, I believe, the vast human migration attendant upon war, colonialism and decolonization, economic and political revolution, and such devastating occurrences as famine, ethnic cleansing, and great power machinations” (PDF p.9). Against calls to go back to the great books of “OUR culture”, the critique of Eurocentrism has shown cultures are always mixed, heterogeneous and contradictory, and no authoritarian figure can speak for a whole culture (PDF p.10). Exile and up-rooting give writing urgency, precariousness of vision and a freight of anxiety, elaborateness and overstatement — in Conrad, Nabokov, Joyce and Ishiguro — that settled criticism has scanted (PDF p.10-11).

Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh and its phrase for a clergyman, “a kind of human Sunday” (PDF p.11), stand for experience that formalist and deconstructive theory, focused on purely linguistic matters, shies away from (PDF p.12). Said traces a twentieth-century critical consensus against immediacy: Lukács’s “If those are the facts,” “then so much the worse for the facts” (PDF p.12) and History and Class Consciousness behind Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Horkheimer, Habermas, Goldmann, Althusser and Jameson (PDF p.12-13); Eliot and the New Criticism, Frye, Burke, semiology, deconstruction and Foucault as commonly received, isolating “text” from experience (PDF p.13); Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), brilliant but treating its tropes as necessary and closed, silent about power, institutions and “the force, the passion, the drive to write and invest texts with history and not the other way around” (PDF p.13-14). Lukács and Eliot are linked by refusal of the middle-class order, each establishing distance from immediate history (PDF p.14).

The breach comes from feminist criticism — Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, a female presence banished by programmatic exclusion (PDF p.14-15) — from a new Irish reading of Joyce as a writer of “the reality of experience” under colonialism (critics Seamus Deane, Emer Nolan, Declan Kiberd, David Lloyd, Tom Paulin, Luke Gibbons, PDF p.15), from ethnic and minority testimonial (Douglass to Du Bois and Hurston to Toni Morrison, Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates; Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence, PDF p.16), and supremely from Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, which re-includes the Africanist presence the master narrative disguised, without attacking literature as literature (PDF p.17). Such readings, not reading-list management, were always the historical norm of canonical dispute (PDF p.17-18).

The third approach reinstates experiences excluded from the mainstream canon, whose authority is a nation’s social authority (PDF p.18). National identity was brought to a new pitch by imperialism (PDF p.19): Eric Hobsbawm is quoted on the nineteenth century’s “simple global economy” (Age of Empire, 62, quoted PDF p.18-19); the rigid colonizer/colonized division Fanon called the Manicheanism of colonial rule; mission civilisatrice against négritude and Pan-Africanism; and after decolonization national identity as the program of newly independent countries, while the U.S. and the Soviet Union took the roles of Britain and France (PDF p.19). Fanon was proposed at Stanford in the 1980s because he signified opposition to empire, and writers like Fanon, C. L. R. James, Du Bois, Walter Rodney, Aimé Césaire and José Marti supplied an alternative consciousness from a metropolitan pedigree (PDF p.20). The liberation movements, at their best, discriminated liberation from reverse racism (Tagore’s critique of nationalism’s resentment, PDF p.20-21), though nativism and separatism marred them — Soyinka first attacked Senghor’s négritude, then thirty years later attacked Ali Mazrui for not being a “pure” African (PDF p.21). Césaire, quoted: “no race has a monopoly on beauty, or intelligence, or strength, and there is room for everyone at the convocation of conquest” (PDF p.21). Liberation meant inclusion in one irreducibly secular world and one universal language of rights; Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism used Voltaire and Marx to rescue their liberating ideas, and a discredited Western humanism was to be exposed and replaced by a more universal humanism enacted and taught (PDF p.21-22).

Said’s own method re-situates canonical writers in their history rather than rejecting them, following E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams: Williams’s The Country and the City restores the dispossessed peasants whose absence structures Penshurst’s landscape of control and command (Williams, 125, quoted PDF p.23) and traces cultural centralization to London (Williams, 229, quoted PDF p.23). The canon is that process of cultural centralization, a direct consequence of imperialism (PDF p.24). Insider privilege is rejected — Naipaul, Orwell and Lippmann are all criticized in this book for styles complicit with power (PDF p.24). Historical experience — the lived, contested, immediate — is set against both professionalized jargon and “traditional” pseudo-healthiness, and against an empty humanism that leaves war, slavery, imperialism, poverty and ignorance to politicians (PDF p.24-25). Music, with Adorno as model, cross-fertilizes the worldly concerns (PDF p.25).

Palestine enters the Introduction at length only here (PDF p.25-28): a significant territory and site of ongoing conflict for control, identified in Said’s experience “partly elegiacally, partly resolutely with dispossession and exile”, while for others it is Israel, an “empty” land returned to by biblical fiat — “an irreconcilable, antinomian conflict embodied in the land” (PDF p.26). Exile brings estrangement, dispersion and precarious expression; the exile’s critical task is to refuse counter-conversion to a new allegiance and remain skeptical, the intellectual vocation of his Reith Lectures (PDF p.26). Because Palestine is close to the Jewish experience of genocide, state-supported policies sought to make its name and memory not exist; Palestine is the test-case for a true universalism on terror, refugees and human rights, before which liberal human rights discourse has stood in embarrassed silence (PDF p.26-27). The book is not an extended political message: the aesthetic — Tahia Carioca, Johnny Weissmuller — expresses unadministered force politics has not absorbed, in Jacqueline Rose’s “states of fantasy” interchange (PDF p.27). Two later changes are recorded: severe illness obliged Said to leave activist struggle, and the secular liberation movement was transformed by the “peace process” into a confined West Bank/Gaza entity (PDF p.27). The Introduction closes: exile can produce rancor and regret, or a sharpened vision and different lenses; exile and memory determine how one sees the future; “no return to the past is without irony, or without a sense that a full return, or repatriation, is impossible” (PDF p.28).

1. Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty — PDF p.29-40

Emile Bréhier’s task for early twentieth-century French thinkers was to re-situate man in “the circuit of reality” (PDF p.29); against mechanism, determinism and sociologism, French thought from about 1936 — Marxism, existentialism, phenomenology — concerns concrete situations, not abstractions or simple causation, a turn strengthened by the fall of France in 1940, when philosophy changed from professionalism to humanistic amateurism and German thought (Marx, Husserl, Heidegger) restored man’s own life and language as philosophy’s starting point (PDF p.29-30). Maurice Merleau-Ponty — normalien, Resistance worker, cofounder with Sartre of Les Temps Modernes in 1945, professor at the Collège de France in 1953 in the chair held by Bergson and Gilson, dead suddenly in 1961 at fifty-three (PDF p.30-31) — held that we are in and of the world before we think about it; perception, in The Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception (both 1945), is access to truth against empiricism and idealism: “the world is not what I think, but what I live through” (quoted PDF p.32). His thought intensifies participation in experience rather than uncovering secrets; after 1945 he wrote in essay form (PDF p.32-33). The essay volumes — Sense and Non-Sense (1945-1947), Signs (from 1958), The Primacy of Perception with “Eye and Mind”, plus Humanism and Terror, The Adventures of Dialectic and the posthumous Visible and Invisible (1964) — explore laterally, in a style like R. P. Blackmur’s, taking up “this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it” (quoted PDF p.33-34); we are condemned to meaning, incarnated mind in a thinking body, in compresence (PDF p.34). Perception is “a nascent logos” (quoted PDF p.35); expressing what exists is an endless task, subjectivity is intersubjectivity, and history is an adventure not guaranteed by any rational structure (quoted PDF p.36). As philosopher of language — the speaking subject, Lebenswelt, Saussure’s diacritical signs, structure/infrastructure — and of art (Cézanne’s doubt, “Eye and Mind”), society is for him “a true labyrinth of incarnations” (PDF p.38), and philosophy reanimates the whole past in the “living present” (quoted PDF p.38-39), in the tradition of Vico and of a radical humanism whose hero is man (PDF p.39). The essay ends on Cézanne: “We never get away from life. We never see our ideas or our freedom face to face.” (quoted PDF p.39-40). Note 1 (PDF p.40) gives the Northwestern University Press translations of 1964: The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, ed. James M. Edie, trans. William Cobb; Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus; Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary.

2. Sense and Sensibility — PDF p.41-47

On R. P. Blackmur, Georges Poulet and E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch’s Validity in Interpretation divides criticism into intuitive and reflexive moments and argues the second: meaning (intention, in Husserl’s sense) against significance, genre as literature’s broadest category of intention, no general practical rules and “no rules for generating insights” (quoted PDF p.41), and “to understand is to understand as necessary” (PDF p.41). Against Hirsch, validation in Poulet and Blackmur is in the necessary beauty of their understanding: “Criticism is notorious for its imperialism, carried out in the name of understanding: method swallowing work, argument dividing to conquer and variety colonized into periods” (PDF p.42). Poulet prolongs literature, Blackmur reveals it taking from “the enormous lap of the actual” (Henry James, quoted PDF p.42); both reconstruct experience from its origin to its incarnation in form — Poulet’s “quietistic” explorations (J. Hillis Miller), Blackmur’s “ideated sensations” (Joseph Frank, PDF p.42) — at the cost of Blackmur’s hedging and Poulet’s cosmic-consciousness tone (PDF p.43). Poulet’s The Metamorphoses of the Circle (the third of his books translated) attributes measurable dimension to style as consciousness in duration: the circle — center as identity, circumference as progress through time, area as inhabiting space — across eighteen chapters, four on periods and fourteen on writers, from medieval spherical wholeness through eighteenth-century “pure sinuosity” to Rousseau, Lamartine, Balzac, Flaubert, Mallarmé and James, triumphing in Amiel, whose diary of fifty thousand plus pages becomes the “brief abstract” of mind (PDF p.43-44). Poulet’s criticism is essentializing, an Olympian daydream resolving consciousness toward totality (PDF p.44-45). Blackmur, mentored by James, does his “sums” — analysis, comparison, elucidation, judgment — with Montaignean skepticism and radical imperfection (PDF p.45). In A Primer of Ignorance (essays 1943-1959, culled by Frank) his “terms” set theorizing intellect (administration, convention, formulation, bourgeois humanism as “the treasure of residual reason in live relation to the madness of the senses”) against representative imagination incarnating that madness (PDF p.46-47): technique is imagination aspiring to reason, form reason aspiring to imagination, knowledge “a fall from the paradise of undifferentiated sensation” (PDF p.46). Alone reason constricts and imagination is chaos; with Croce’s “art gives theoretic form to our feelings” and Maritain’s “art bitten by poetry longs to be freed from the control of the reason” (quoted PDF p.47), Blackmur’s criticism behaves like art, while Poulet resolves life into world consciousness — between them, life translated into literature (PDF p.47).

3. Amateur of the Insoluble — PDF p.48-53

On E. M. Cioran (begins PDF p.48, part 1). Writing, the first human activity with a permanent chronicle, is now undergoing its own revolution: modern literature isolates writing from the natural, so that Mallarmé’s and Eliot’s writing does not want to be a text (PDF p.48). The essay alone — strictly, an attempt — needs only the hope of inscribing words on a page; Lukács in The Soul and Its Forms makes Plato the primal essayist and the essay’s form hesitating trial without fate (PDF p.48-49). Montaigne and Wilde are expatriations from things; the essay’s subject is a choice, in Cioran’s phrase, for “a break with the quietude of Unity” (PDF p.49). Cioran’s essays, in The Temptation to Exist, give “knowledge without information.” (PDF p.49, checked against the original), and his project is “to pulverize the acquired” (quoted PDF p.49), the essential tendency of the modern mind. His consciousness is based on self-hatred: “It is from self-hatred that consciousness emerges, hence it is in self-hatred that we must seek the point of departure of the human phenomenon. I hate myself: I am absolutely a man.” (quoted PDF p.50). A Rumanian writing French, in Richard Howard’s translation and in Hudson Review essays translated by Marthiel Mathews and Frederick Brown, Cioran is the hybrid intellectual of the “voyeurism of the void”, suffering the inability “to take place”, taking positions only briefly before abandoning them (PDF p.50).

The essay concludes (PDF p.51-53): the Word is capitulating, emancipated from reality and experience; Cioran’s premise is not Marx’s criticism of religion but the attack upon time and history — writing is a moving image of time, and the urge to add to, the demiurge in man, is a disease, the result “of centuries of attention to time” (PDF p.51). Most writing is fraudulent, a mask for the void, and the novelist is “an archeologist of absence” (PDF p.51). Applying his strictures to his own writings, his essays are a biography of movements, reduced to an energetic variety of what Roland Barthes called writing at the zero degree (PDF p.51-52). Against Susan Sontag’s introduction claiming him for Novalis, Rilke and Kafka, he is a mocking ghost of all traditions, and still less does he resemble John Cage; he is “a fanatic without convictions”, and his highest praise is for the Jews, who represent what his writing wishes to accomplish, “failure on the move” (PDF p.52). Cioran is to the essay what Borges is to fiction — the mask and the apocryphal utterance, one undercutting the other (PDF p.52-53). Note 1 (PDF p.53): E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, trans. Richard Howard, intro. Susan Sontag (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968).

4. A Standing Civil War — PDF p.54-62

On T. E. Lawrence. Roger Stéphane’s Portrait de l’aventurier held that the solitary adventurer — Lawrence, Malraux, Ernst von Salomon — had been succeeded by the political militant; Sartre’s Preface refused the dichotomy, joining “constituted” reason with dynamic “constituting” reason, a formula that forecasts the revolutionary-adventurer like Che or Régis Debray (PDF p.54). With Lawrence the disparity between his extraordinary human means and the ends they appeared to serve is bewilderingly clear: no definite aim except the cultivation, and subsequent stalemating within himself, of contradictory gifts; in letters to Lionel Curtis in spring 1923 he proved, he said, that man was “a civil war”, and of himself that he was “a standing civil war” (PDF p.54-55). Lawrence is the best example of the decentered life: highly developed tendencies none of which he could make permanently dominant; E. M. Forster calls him a “joy for experts” and records Cloud’s Hill, where he could “reject intimacy without impairing affection” (PDF p.55). In each activity — Arabist, revolutionary, intelligence expert, imperialist politician, archeologist, scholar, tactician, administrator, social and literary critic, historian, writer — he devised a pied-à-terre, yet in none completely rested or took possession; R. P. Blackmur: “Lawrence never produced a character, not even his own.” (PDF p.55-56).

The latest Lawrence-hunting effort, Knightley and Simpson’s The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia (note 1, PDF p.62), contributes a documented extent of Lawrence’s enmeshment in imperial dealings and double-dealings with the Near East, and the description of his ritual of flagellation; as psychologists or literary critics they do not begin to exist (PDF p.56). Lawrence was useful in getting the Arabs to a position where they could be nationally identified and then pushed around by the Franco-British entente; Suleiman Mousa’s T. E. Lawrence: An Arab View (Oxford, 1967) depicts him, as Aldington did, as a liar and a subtle braggart (PDF p.56). He foreswore the conclusion of his own work and was contented with Churchill’s arrangements: the Arabs driven out of Damascus by the French, Iraq and Transjordan endowed upon Feisal and Abdullah, and the ambiguously promised Palestine held in mandate by the British (PDF p.57). His retreat from schemes he concocted — like the one involving the Arabs and the Zionists, who were to supply money at 6 percent — was rooted in his congenital desire to remain always the lonely exception: “I made it a rule to avoid rules in food; and by a course of exceptions accustomed myself to no custom at all.” (quoted PDF p.57). The Deraa capture, torture and rape; the arrangement with John Bruce for periodic beatings under orders from a mysterious Old Man (an invention); the “mind-suicide” of enrolling in the ranks of the RAF, then the Tank Corps, then the RAF again (PDF p.58). His illegitimacy, against John E. Mack (The American Journal of Psychiatry, February 8, 1969), was transformed from a primal weakness into the basis of his deliberate singularity — isolation and strength, strength lending itself only provisionally to a cause or a person, self-born and self-originating (PDF p.59). His writing, fastidious as Flaubert’s or James’s, was masked in the as-if technique: to Edward Garnett, August 23, 1922, “These are all good frauds” (quoted PDF p.60); to Ernest Altounyan ten years later, “The everlasting effort to write is like trying to fight a feather-bed.” (quoted PDF p.60). The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922) and The Mint (1936) are stages in his consciousness of this process: in the first he builds a monument to betrayed hopes (from the Arab viewpoint) and a structure of hypocrisy (his own); in the second he gives himself up to a machine that mints replicas (PDF p.60-61). André Malraux, quoted: “art insensibly supplanted action. The Arab epic became in his mind the medium for a grandiose expression of human emptiness.” (PDF p.61, note 2: Malraux, “Lawrence and the Demon of the Absolute”, Hudson Review 8:4, Winter 1956). Lawrence will not endure as guerrilla fighter, political militant, or psychological oddity, but as a writer for whom writing replaced character with ceaseless, self-nullifying activity (PDF p.61).

5. Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction After 1948 — PDF p.63-80

Reading is a complex, comparative process; all novels belong to a family. The Western European novel has a recognizable genealogy from The Odyssey and Don Quixote, concentrated in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries; non-European novels are not colonial copies or imitations — originality is the art of recombining the familiar, and novels imitate reality and each other (PDF p.63). The Arabic novel, which effectively begins in this century, differs in the form’s existence, the circumstances of history, and the aesthetic method (PDF p.63-64). The Western novel is the creation of a particular historical development and the rise and triumph of the middle class, the most time-bound and circumstantial as well as the most universal of postclassical forms; to write one, for Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert and Balzac, was to receive and sustain the institution of prose fiction, each novel imitating every other novel, its transmitted institutions a defense against the unmediated urgency of imagination or the historical moment; Lukács: “the novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (quoted PDF p.65). The modern Arabic novel has a variety of forebears — qissa, sira, hadith, khurafa, ustura, khabar, nadira, magama (as printed, PDF p.66) — none of which became the major narrative type; its talents, styles, critics and readers are mostly unknown or deliberately ignored outside the Middle East, for which the ruling Western obsession with Arabs exclusively as a political problem is largely to blame; Trevor Le Gassick’s translations (Mahfouz’ Midaq Alley, Halim Barakat’s Days of Dust) and Denys Johnson-Davies’ begin to gain currency (PDF p.66).

The period after 1948, and after 1967, is taken as shaping an intelligible historical period for the novelistic imagination; Arabs who wrote undertook a fundamentally heroic enterprise, a project of self-definition and autodidactic struggle (PDF p.66-67). 1948 made an extraordinary cultural and historical demand: no Arab could say he was in any serious way detached from the events in Palestine, and nothing in his history gave him an adequate method for representing the Palestine drama to himself (PDF p.67). The word Nakba: its most celebrated use is the title of Constantine Zurayk’s 1948 book Ma’na al-nakba [The meaning of the disaster]; in its root disaster is linked by necessity to deviation, a veering out of course — in marked contrast to naksa for 1967, a relapse, a temporary setback (PDF p.67-68). The disaster caused a rift between the Arabs and the very possibility of their historical continuity as a people; at the intersection of past and future stands the disaster, revealing both deviation from a unified collective Arab identity yet to happen and the possibility of Arab extinction; Zurayk made clear the problem of the present, a problematic site of contemporaneity, occupied and blocked from the Arabs, and placed a very high premium on the creative elite (PDF p.68-69). Anwar Abdel Malek: Arab-Islamic civilization is most seriously endangered, in the long run, by its susceptibility to cultural imperialism (PDF p.69). The writer’s role was as a producer of thought and language whose radical intention was to guarantee survival to what was in imminent danger of extinction; writing became a historical act and, according to Ghali Shukri, after 1967 an act of resistance; after 1948 the Arab novel became a novel of historical and social development (PDF p.69).

The unit of composition is the The scene, not the period: connection between scenes is tenuous, with a tendency to episodism and repetition of scenes; entrances are ontological affirmation, absences threaten extinction, and the act of telling guarantees actuality, the Islamic tradition of the isnad vitalized to aesthetic purpose (PDF p.70). Tawfiq al-Hakim’s masrah al-hayat (“the theater of life”) and the episode of the dead village patient under God’s protection (sitr rabbuna) exemplify it (PDF p.71). After 1948 the scene is itself contemporaneity in its most problematic form, seen most effectively in Ghassan Kanafani’s Rijal fil shams (fiction), whose opening scene is quoted in Said’s translation: Abu Qais at the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates, awaiting smuggling into Kuwait, who with two other refugees dies of suffocation in the tanker-truck (PDF p.71-72). In Kanafani the Palestinian must make the present — not an imaginative luxury but a literal existential necessity — and the present, the disaster preventing continuity, is intelligible only as achievement (PDF p.73). The scenic method also informs Nagib Mahfouz (the Trilogy, 1956-57; Awlad Haritna, 1959; “realistic existentialism”), Yousef Idriss’s Al-farafir (1964) and Hussayn Fawzi’s Sindibad misri (PDF p.74); the maqama story-telling tradition, Scheherazade’s recital postponing death, and Nasser’s Philosophy of the Revolution — Arab history as a role in search of an actor, a scene in search of a drama (PDF p.74-75). The tension between system and occurrence underlies the tension between scene and drama; there may be no “Arab” whole giving the scene-events synchronic meaning, yet the formal characteristics are the problems themselves in a privileged way (PDF p.75).

After 1967 the scene became an arena of gladiatorial struggle: Zurayk’s Ma’na al-nakba mujada-dan [The meaning of the disaster renewed] (as printed, PDF p.75-76), and Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, the activist-author entering the arena against passivity, backwardness, custom, religion and ossified tradition — self-criticism based on revolutionary presupposition, against absurdist pastiche (Raymond Gebara’s Taht ri’ayit zaqqur) as quietism (PDF p.76-77). Palestinian writers rose in prominence after 1967 — Mahmoud Darwish, Samih el-Kassem, Kana-fani (as printed, PDF p.77), Fadwa Touqan — alongside a more intense focus on distinctions between varieties of Arab experience. Mahfouz’ Taht al-mizalla (1969), written in the months immediately following the 1967 June War, is called certainly the most brilliant writing produced during the past generation: its scenes are shot through with extreme Egyptian loneliness, Egypt a vast hospital bounded by the military fronts, its problems mediated by journalism or the cinema (PDF p.77-78). Over all post-1967 writing hangs profound disappointment; Barakat’s Days of Dust (fiction) is its stage of disillusion, as Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale is post-1848 Europe’s, but with genuine kindness to its cast and sentiment heightening poignancy: Barakat is a novelist of good will, his scene an arena for continual struggle (PDF p.78-79). The crises of Arab writers are precisely, and more so than elsewhere, those of the society at large; the unsung heroic role played by the Arab writer since 1948 will surely receive its due acknowledgment (PDF p.79). Notes 1-19 (PDF p.79-80) give the works cited, including note 11 on analyses purporting to deliver literature’s “content” as evidence of the so-called Arab “mind” or “character”, a tradition deriving from the profession of “Orientalism”, with Gen. Yehoshafat Harkabi’s Arab Attitudes to Israel (1972) as a typical and influential example, and note 12: Kanafani, Rijal fil shams (Beirut, 1963), pp. 7-8, Said’s translation.

6. Between Chance and Determinism: Lukács’s Aesthetik — PDF p.81-88

On György Lukács. Béla Királyfalvi’s The Aesthetics of György Lukács, on the two-volume Die Eigenart des Aesthetischen (1963), covers the main points reliably but misses Lukács’s concrete examples and his eccentric, inclusive relation to his pre-Marxist period (PDF p.81). His work has been worked over for political bad faith, moral cowardice and compromises with Stalinism (George Lichtheim; the rancorous G. Zitta, Georg Lukács’ Marxism, 1964); with G. H. R. Parkinson’s collection Georg Lukács: The Man, His Work, and His Ideas (1970) an intellectually serious view has begun to emerge (PDF p.81-82). Since his death in 1971 his influence is lacking in modern critical discourse; he stood always for the nineteenth century — Hector’s culture against Achilles’ — and for the big writers, Shakespeare, Goethe, Marx, Hegel, Balzac, Tolstoy (PDF p.82-83). Marxism for Lukács was not merely truths or a method but a necessity, first for correcting, then for transforming and conducting, his relations with the world; after 1918 it did not transform his triad of temporal phases — an unrecoverable unity in the past, an intolerable disjunction in the present, an all-conquering future: loss, alienation, and obliteration — but gave the intellectual a discipline (the dialectic) and a place (the essay) in which to objectify them (PDF p.83-84). His problematics — reification, proletariat class consciousness, alienation, totality — have less to do centrally with history than with marginality and eccentricity vis-à-vis history: “History is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man.” (quoted PDF p.85). From History and Class Consciousness: class consciousness surpassing immediacy is “an aspiration towards society in its totality” by “the dialectical process by which immediacies are constantly annulled and transcended” (quoted PDF p.85-86); the core of that argument can neither be proved nor disproved. His technique of repudiation allied with republishing what was repudiated — the 1967 preface to History and Class Consciousness, the 1926 review of Moses Hess — is left as a set of unanswered questions (PDF p.86). Art for Lukács is reflection, of man, of society, of itself; in the late aesthetics its main category is speciality, particularity, concreteness (Besonderheit), totality become the category through which art overcomes infinite mediation, with novelties including Das Signalsystem I and the resolution of what Agnes Heller called “the false dilemma of receptivity”, and the evident imprint of Ernst Bloch and Max Weber (PDF p.86-88). As an achievement the Aesthetik is next to matchless in this century; his wholly controlled dialectic between the artwork and its circumstances lets him steer confidently between determinism and chance as forces building the artwork (PDF p.87-88). No notes are shown for essay 6 in this range.

7. Conrad and Nietzsche — PDF p.89-95 (continues past PDF p.95)

On Joseph Conrad and Friedrich Nietzsche. The essay opens, as printed in the original checked at PDF p.89, mid-sentence: “Conrad and yet admiring students of Schopenhauer.” Each was in agreement with Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy while critical of its principal arguments: Nietzsche saw the Will inclining always to the acquisition of power; Conrad’s Kurtz, Gould and Nostromo are willful, deliberately egoistic overreachers; Nietzsche’s criticism of Schopenhauer’s stoic withdrawal is echoed by Conrad’s treatment of Heyst in Victory (PDF p.89). The Professor in The Secret Agent superficially resembles Nietzschean nihilism; Conrad’s letter of October 26, 1899 to Garnett mentions Garnett’s essay on Nietzsche (note 1, PDF p.89), and Conrad was arguably familiar with the will to power, the Overman and the transvaluation of all values, but the two are best read in terms of a common tradition of which Nietzsche is the apogee (PDF p.89-90). Conrad has been systematically treated as everything except a novelist with links to a cultural and intellectual context, his work analyzed as accidents that happened to a Pole writing in England between the nineties and 1924 (PDF p.90). The tradition is named the radical attitude toward language: for both, the life of language was the first fact of the writing life (PDF p.90). Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human (1878) through The Will to Power (1883-1888), examined language for its concealed duplicity and its alliance with power and rank, which he called perspective; as early as 1873: “truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are” (quoted PDF p.91). The position develops from the new philology’s discovery — Bopp, Grimm, von Humboldt, the two Schlegels — that there is no first, or original, language and no first text: every utterance interprets a prior utterance, and human history is a battle of interpretations, which is what the genealogy of morals is all about (PDF p.91). Language heightens the “pathos of distance” yet makes common, betrays and coarsens experience; melos is a more authentic expression of reality than logos; language is at once excess and poverty — the first of three ways Conrad and Nietzsche are brought together, with Conrad’s reported, secondary speech and multiple narrative time (PDF p.92). The genius of Conradian narrative, especially Heart of Darkness, arrives at the same discoveries: utterance leads endlessly to another utterance without a privileged first fact; Kurtz, Jim and Nostromo are fundamentally unknowable, delivered by narrative from many perspectives; Marlow names something which has no name in order for it to be seen, as Kurtz named the horror (PDF p.93). Conrad’s narrators create an audience even as they fashion their tale (Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness), a strategy for the controlled play of meaning: “One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.” (Nietzsche, quoted PDF p.94). Conrad’s disclaimers appeal from logos to melos, to a lyrical domain words cannot penetrate: “Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the uncommon common.” (quoted PDF p.94). The second rapprochement is their sense of intellectual adventure and the inevitable antitheses in human existence — landfall and departure in The Mirror of the Sea — rooted in linguistic logic: good and evil, cause and effect are “conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication — not for explanation” (Beyond Good and Evil, quoted PDF p.95); Kurtz’s power, and Jim’s in Patusan, is to create free from logical, social and grammatical constraints (PDF p.95). The part ends mid-essay, on Nietzsche’s thesis argued for the first time in Human, All Too-Human (as printed, PDF p.95).

Key passages

• “The greatest single fact of the past three decades has been, I believe, the vast human migration attendant upon war, colonialism and decolonization, economic and political revolution, and such devastating occurrences as famine, ethnic cleansing, and great power machinations.” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.9)
• “no race has a monopoly on beauty, or intelligence, or strength, and there is room for everyone at the convocation of conquest” (Césaire, quoted PDF p.21)
• “I have argued that exile can produce rancor and regret, as well as a sharpened vision.” (PDF p.28)
• “the world is not what I think, but what I live through” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, quoted PDF p.32)
• “Criticism is notorious for its imperialism, carried out in the name of understanding: method swallowing work, argument dividing to conquer and variety colonized into periods” (PDF p.42)
• “failure on the move” (Cioran on the Jews, PDF p.52)
• “I made it a rule to avoid rules in food; and by a course of exceptions accustomed myself to no custom at all.” (Lawrence, The Seven Pillars, quoted PDF p.57)
• “the novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (Lukács, quoted PDF p.65)
• “History is the history of the unceasing overthrow of the objective forms that shape the life of man.” (Lukács, quoted PDF p.85)
• “truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are” (Nietzsche, quoted PDF p.91)
• “One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.” (Nietzsche, quoted PDF p.94)

Evidence the work relies on

• In this part, the works Said reads and quotes: Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh; Lukács, History and Class Consciousness and The Soul and Its Forms; Hayden White, Metahistory (1973); Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (quoted at its pages 4, 50 and 33, PDF p.17); Frances Stonor Saunders, The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (PDF p.9); Arthur Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America (PDF p.18); Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Empire (quoted at its page 62, PDF p.18-19); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (quoted at its pages 125 and 229, PDF p.23); Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior, Phenomenology of Perception, Sense and Non-Sense, Signs, The Primacy of Perception, Humanism and Terror, The Adventures of Dialectic and Visible and Invisible, with the Northwestern translations listed at PDF p.40; Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation; Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the Circle and Le Point de Départ (1964); Blackmur, A Primer of Ignorance and “My Critical Perspective” (1959, quoted PDF p.46); Cioran, The Temptation to Exist and “The Evil Demiurge” (Hudson Review, Summer 1967).

• In part 2, the works read and quoted additionally: Cioran, The Temptation to Exist (note at PDF p.53); Roger Stéphane, Portrait de l’aventurier with Sartre’s Preface; Knightley and Simpson, The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970); Suleiman Mousa, T. E. Lawrence: An Arab View (Oxford, 1967); John E. Mack on Lawrence (The American Journal of Psychiatry, February 8, 1969); Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922) and The Mint (1936), and his letters to Lionel Curtis (spring 1923), Edward Garnett (August 23, 1922) and Ernest Altounyan; André Malraux, “Lawrence and the Demon of the Absolute” (Hudson Review 8:4, Winter 1956); Zurayk, Ma’na al-nakba (1948) and Ma’na al-nakba mujada-dan; Anwar Abdel Malek, Sociologie de l’impérialisme (1971); Ghali Shukri, Thawrat al-fikr fi adabina al-hadith (1965) and Adab al muqawamah (1970); Raja al-Naqqash, Adab wa urubah wa hurriya (1964) and Udaba’ mu’asirun (1968); Kanafani, Rijal fil shams (Beirut, 1963), pp. 7-8 in Said’s translation; Peter Dodd and Halim Barakat, River without Bridges (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1968); Gen. Yehoshafat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel (New York: Halsted Press, 1972); Béla Királyfalvi, The Aesthetics of György Lukács; Lukács, Die Eigenart des Aesthetischen (1963), History and Class Consciousness, Die Seele und die Formen and Goethe und seine Zeit; G. H. R. Parkinson (ed.), Georg Lukács: The Man, His Work, and His Ideas (1970); Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-92), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Genealogy of Morals (1887), Twilight of the Idols (1889) and The Will to Power (1883-1888); Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Victory and The Mirror of the Sea.

Analysis

• Method in this part: autobiographical framing (Columbia, New York, Dupee, 1967, Beirut 1972, illness and the “peace process”) is used to situate a critical program, not as memoir for its own sake; canonical works are re-read for the historical experience they encode or exclude, following Williams and Thompson, rather than rejected on political grounds (PDF p.22-24).
• Method in part 2: the same re-reading program is applied to Lawrence (the imperial agent read through his writing and his self-foiling exceptionality), to Arabic prose after 1948 (form — the scene — read as the historical problem itself, not its reflection), to Lukács (Marxism read as a regulatory necessity rather than a doctrine) and to Conrad with Nietzsche (a shared attitude toward language rather than a claim of borrowing).
• Perspective and limits in this part: the Introduction is a retrospective written in 2000 (Acknowledgments signed June 2000, PDF p.4) over essays from about thirty-five years; its claims about other critics (White, Hirsch, the New York intellectuals) are Said’s characterizations, attributed as such on the pages that draw on them. Essays 1-6 are complete in parts 1-2; essay 7 is incomplete in this part.

People, organizations, places and events

Edward Said, F. W. Dupee, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, R. P. Blackmur, Georges Poulet, E. D. Hirsch, E. M. Cioran, Toni Morrison, Raymond Williams, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, T. E. Lawrence, Ghassan Kanafani, Nagib Mahfouz, Constantine Zurayk, Halim Barakat, Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, György Lukács, Joseph Conrad, Friedrich Nietzsche

Concepts

Exile, Historical experience, Worldliness, Nakba, The scene

How it relates to other sources

• The Introduction restates, in retrospective form, positions developed in the already ingested Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), both named in this part (PDF p.9, p.19), and frames the essay “Reflections on Exile” (essay 17 in the Contents, PDF p.5) that Rhetorics of Belonging quotes in its reading of Said’s Exile — that essay itself is in a later part of this book.

• Essay 5’s reading of Kanafani’s Rijal fil shams opening scene — the same passage, in Said’s translation, with the same reading of the Palestinian present as an achievement — appears in the already ingested The Question of Palestine (1979), where it is set in a chapter on Palestinian identity among other Arabs; the two accounts agree.

• Essay 4’s Lawrence supplements the Orientalism Lawrence: where Orientalism reads him as Orientalist-as-agent whose vision becomes a whole history, this essay reads him as a decentered writer whose exceptionality, formed from his illegitimacy, made him useful to the Franco-British entente and unable to tolerate any resolution of his own work.

Open questions

• Essay 7, “Conrad and Nietzsche”, continues past PDF p.95, and its notes 1-16, referenced at PDF p.89-95, are not in this part; both are in part 3.
• Essay 7 opens at PDF p.89, in the original as in the text copy, mid-sentence with “Conrad and yet admiring students of Schopenhauer.”; no opening words are supplied in this part.
• The Introduction announces a forthcoming book on humanism in America (PDF p.24-25); the work does not name it in parts 1-2.
• The Prison House of Language is given at PDF p.13 as a Fredric Jameson title, as printed; checked against the original, which reads the same.
• “Illusion and Reality” is given at PDF p.39 as Gombrich’s title, as printed; checked against the original, which reads the same.
• The fifty thousand plus pages of Amiel’s diary (PDF p.44) is Poulet’s figure as Said reports it; no other figure is given in parts 1-2.
• “themas they are tome” (PDF p.56, spacing as printed in the original), “magama” for the Arabic narrative form (PDF p.66, as printed in the original), “Kana-fani” (PDF p.77, as printed in the original) and “Ma’na al-nakba mujada-dan” (PDF p.75-76, hyphenated across the line break as printed) are held as printed, not smoothed.
• Essay 5 gives Hussayn Fawzi’s first name also as “Hussein” at PDF p.74 (“Hussein’s method”); both forms are held as printed.
• In essay 5 the spelling of Mahfouz’ 1973 novel title is given as Hubb taht al-matar (PDF p.78); The Question of Palestine gives the title as printed there in a different form (see Nagib Mahfouz). Both are held as their works print them.

Coverage

PDF p.1-95 of 574, read in full. Parts remaining: part 3 PDF p.96-141; part 4 p.142-189; part 5 p.190-236; part 6 p.237-283; part 7 p.284-328; part 8 p.329-373; part 9 p.374-417; part 10 p.418-464; part 11 p.465-507; part 12 p.508-574.