Reading Edward Said.

AuthorPetranek, Li'ana M.
PositionBook Review

Bayoumi, Moustafa and Andrew Rubin. The Edward Said Reader. New York: Vintage Books, 2000. XXXIV & 472 pages. Paper $15.00.

Molestation and authority, the pleasures of exile, extreme performances, and brutal actualities. These are all tantalizing subjects that Edward Said does a command performance on.

One could begin reading Edward Said by first looking at what he says about "molestation and authority." However, this directive should not be confined to narrative fiction since any interpretation of reality or the imagination should be subject to the proper deconstructions that Said provides for us in this and several other pieces that are appropriately provided in this Reader.

Bayoumi and Rubin have done a wonderful job in presenting a preeminent thinker of the latter half of the 20th century in a thoughtful and sympathetic light. Their "Introduction" to Said's works does justice to this elegant and gallant scholar whom I also hold in high esteem. I can imagine a lot of thought and consideration went into the judicious selection of sixteen of Said's vast repertoire of writings. There is also an interview from 1999 at the back of the book and notes for each of the sixteen selections, all compactly presented in a 472-page book.

Bayoumi and Rubin provide insight into Said's work by prefacing each selection with introductory remarks. These prefaces provide historical markers, synopses, context, background and interesting information on Said's books and how they were received by the world. They also provide us with a window to view this remarkable man and his equally remarkable work as a critically conscious, engaged intellectual.

The writings appear chronologically. However, they are grouped into three parts that speak to Said's genealogical foundations, as well as his social, philosophical and political development. Part I: "Beginnings" includes three of his earlier works: "The Claims of Individuality" from Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966); "The Palestinian Experience" (1968-1969); and Molestation and Authority in Narrative Fiction (1971). In these three works we can already see the methodological underpinnings, sensitivity and sentiment that provide the foundation of Said's works. We also see the emergence of three important themes that color his work and that are subsequently revisited and further developed from this point forward. They are: (1) the notion of "beginnings" which he attributes to the work of Giambatista Vice; (2) the concept of "identity," the historical process and the phenomenology of time and space, power (Foucault) and hegemony (Gramsci) in the construction of this notion; and (3) "exile" and the unique viewpoint this position allows one as an observer on the margins of society.

In 1978, Said's work Orientalism, catapulted his stature as a critical interventionist in the world of political and literary theory. The selections in Part II: "Orientalism and After" illustrate Said's impressive scope of knowledge in the field of literature, his keen insight into the politics of representation and his creative use of political theory and literary interpretation. Part II includes the "Introduction to Orientalism" and "The Scope of Orientalism"(1978), "Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims" (1979), "Islam as News" (1980), "Traveling Theory" (1982), "Secular Criticism" (1983), "Permission to Narrate" (1984), "Interiors" (1986), and "Yeats and Decolonization" (1988).

Part III: "Late Styles", are a further development and articulation of the historical traces that etched out an identity on Said's life. In this we see Said as only he can interpret with his unique insight and experiences and his fascinating and sometimes humorous observations. Part HI shares with us, "Performance as an Extreme Occasion" (1989), "Jane Austen and Empire" (1990), "Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals" (1993), "The Middle East 'Peace Process': Misleading Images and Brutal Actualities" (1995), and "On Writing a Memoir" (1999).

Part IV: "Spoken Words" (1999) is an interview with Edward Said conducted by the editors of the Reader, Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin. It is a poignant account of the trials and tribulations, as well as the signifiers and historical markers that constitute Said as a significant and Palestinian intellectual. In this interview Said speaks about his criticism of Arafat (pp.438-440), resistance by recollection and the importance of memory to this resistance (pp.441-443), the need to develop a "cosmopolitan awareness" (p.443), and the job of the intellectual (p.444).

Perhaps we should start here with the exhortation by Joseph Conrad, "I am living a nightmare" and transpose it for interpretive purposes to "I AM a living nightmare." In that way we can get a lot more mileage out of Edward Said's first piece in the Reader, "The Claims of Individuality" (Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, 1966). Here, Said deconstructs Conrad's conception of his identity out of eight colossal volumes of his voluminous letters. It is rescue work par excellence, "action in its essence" (p.10) since he is not only taking Conrad out of himsalf, "Take me out of myself!"--Conrad relays to James in his essay (Ibid.). What we are looking at in this chapter is a "game of mirrors" (Albiac, 1998). Said's own creative art as a writer is a reconstruction of Conrad and perhaps, I should say, a discovery of Edward in Joseph. Said points out that the "real adventure of Conrad's life is the effort to rescue significance and value in their ['struggling forms'] from within his own existence" (Ibid.). It is within these "significant dynamic structures" (Goldmann) that character is shaped and formed (p.12). It is here, in his early writings that one may recognize a displacement and transference in the subject, "a man of action urgently in need of a role to play so that he could locate himself solidly in existence" (Ibid.). This is where Said values the "character" of his character and where character would figure largely in the role of the intellectual. No wonder why Said loves Conrad. I would love them both. It is a good thing they found each other at this very early stage of the game. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography was a revision of Edward Said's dissertation and his first book. The dislocation, instability and strangeness of both of their "afflicted" (p.4) existences gave Said the opportunity and medium to see and speak through the fiction of autobiography.

It is very interesting to see how Said uses Marx's Capital and Marx and Engel's German Ideology to discuss requisite conditions for fiction. It is also interesting to see how he uses Freud, of all people, to discuss the "economy" of reconstructive techniques. In "Molestation and Authority in Narrative Fiction" (1971) we get a taste of Said's vast knowledge in the literary field with his glib usage of literature from Dickens, Flaubert, Proust, Balzac, Goethe, Laclos, Twain, Eliot, James, Conrad and others to illustrate his points. In this piece Said discusses the strategy and tactics of an author and the authoritative molesting that goes on when an author is given liberties with their defenseless subjects. This, of course should be of huge concern to the reading public since the practice is not only a violation of the interpretation of reality using "assumed" voices that "intentionally" determine its own way using acceptable and sometimes "dramatic" (p.46) means to validate their pronouncements. Do not be surprised if these deceptive ironic voices seduce and usurp totality as well. These fabulist authors have gone even further by establishing themselves as an "institution" that is juxtaposing its narrative form in contradistinction to the common banal discourse of society. These activities of brazen and covert novelists are dutifully and forthrightly exposed by Said. He bashes solipsistic phenomenologists and criticizes structuralists for domesticating human subjects to the tyranny of a system (p.39). I would help him in this job in any way I could, but I think he handles this quite well. I just hope that Said does not include Foucault and Althusser in this category (like some people do). Foucault has already told everyone that he never used concepts that could be considered "characteristic of structuralism" (Foucault, 1989, p.80). His main preoccupation is talking about knowledge and power and splitting and decentering subjects (Foucault, 1989). I also hope Althusser is not in this category since in my mind he has vindicated himself with overdeterminism (Althusser, 1993).

In this piece Said grapples with "mediated" truth and summons "primal elements" (identity, history and language) as elaborated by Giambatista Vico (p.50). He also references Kierkegaard's "divine governance" (pp.44-45), or the generative authority (imagination) of authorship and their dialectical reduplications of...

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