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COPYRIGHT 2005 American University in Cairo
This article explores Said's views of the contemporary French milieu, focusing on an important writer, equally open to wide-ranging interests, Michel Foucault. It analyzes the relationship among some recurring themes in Edward Said (culture, literature, reality, imagination, critical conscience, and intellectual praxis), in their explicit or implicit relation to Foucauldian thought. Foucault's relevance to the Saidian project is assessed with an explanation of how and why Said admired as well as criticized him.
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Bird, my sea-bird, rising from the depth of darkness, God's blessings upon you for the good news you bring. For I know now Something happened ... the horizon parted, and the house greeted the light of day.
Fadwa Tuqan (1)
The Context: Texts, Discourse, and the World
Texts are in the world. That is a recurring, far from trivial theme in Edward Said. For the statement is not a truism. It lies at the core of a secular outlook. There are different ways of being, and of being in the world. To some people, being and being-in-the-world are indistinguishable, so long as one conceives of the world in a sufficiently broad sense. However, one can set apart symbols from what is not symbolic. To a large extent, culture is a matter of symbols. Through symbols and signs we can invent, and imagine, especially through language. What humans imagine may have no counterpart in the already existing, but when that is the case we still put something in the world: at least our imagining itself, be it transient or fixed in a relatively permanent medium. We can imagine in order to make: to create objects, artifacts, physical or otherwise, works of art, for instance, but also institutions (parliaments, universities, etc.). (2) Texts, in general, have connections to the physical environment, to society, to culture. Literary texts certainly do. This connectedness really matters for literary studies; it does not deny the autonomy of literature, however.
We can speak (or write) diversely. Let us go back to one of the ancients, Apuleius, in his booklet on logic, known as Peri Hermeneias. In it, he recounts various species of discourse (oratio), according to the purposes they serve (we might as well speak of speech acts):
ut imperandi, vel mandandi, narrandi, succensendi, optandi, vovendi, irascendi, odiendi, invidendi, favendi, miserandi, admirandi, contemnendi, obiurgandi, poenitendi, deplorandi, tum voluptatem afferendi, turn metum incutiendi.... Est una inter has ad propositum potissima, quae pronuntiabilis appellatur, absolutam sententiam comprehendens, sola ex omnibus veritati aut falsitati obnoxia. (3)
The question of referring is significant for truth or falsehood, and so is representation, one of the sign's functions according to Karl Buhler, in his Organonmodell:
[Das sprachliche Zeichen] ist Symbol kraft seiner Zuordnung zu Gegenstanden und Sachverhalten, Symptom (Anzeichen, Indicium) kraft seiner Abhangigkeit vom Sender, dessen Innerlichkeit es ausdruckt, und Signal kraft seines Appells an den Horer, dessen ausseres oder inneres Verhalten es steuert wie andere Verkehrszeichen. (4)
As expected, he recognizes among the three the dominance of representation (Darstellung: the representative or presentative function of language). (5) It is the nature of the relationship between representation and states of affairs which makes the difference in telling the truth (or failing to do so), as when speaking truth to power, (6) where the speaker expresses his/herself and appeals to his/her interlocutor in a generally asymmetrical way.
Why, if the existence of entities referred to in literary texts is not supposed to be relevant for the reader--at least in modern times (7)--do critics sometimes, or frequently, search for real experiences in those texts? Traditionally, it has been thought that literary texts, no matter how fictitious they are, carry (some) truth in them. Quite often, Said uses a particular art form--mostly the novel--as a witness to reality (in addition to its other values), specifically regarding the colonial-imperialist venture. The world enters into the critic's activity through the pragmatic dimensions of literary texts (therefore including their connotations), not necessarily because of their referents, which can be wholly imagined and purposely so. Among the pragmatic dimensions are, naturally, situation, context, emitter, receptor, and culture.
The overall sense of what a text (and its producer) purports to do is decisive in judging that text. In this respect, one of the relevant factors to have in mind is the crossing of borders between disciplines and genres, something discussed by many writers and critics nowadays. Both characteristics are usually described (wrongly) as having been initiated by post-modernism. The example of J. L. Borges could be illuminating. The phenomenon of mixing genres is many-sided and has different functions and effects. Once again, one should look at the writer's intention. As illustrations, we could cite the essays which formally merge disciplines, incorporating rhetorical techniques from the short story, or we might bring up the works of fiction, incorporating the mode of the essay or the scholarly study--or Dos Passos's technique of the newsreel collage. Certainly, there are many literary essays by Borges where fiction is absent from the composition itself (e.g., on Nathaniel Hawthorne or the Nordic Eddas, just to mention a couple). It is not implausible that some readers (not exclusively novel ones, certainly), faced with the huge number of names brought forward by the Argentinian "fictioner," can get confused once in a while. On the one hand, there could be fictitious narratives mistaken for real ("Pierre Menard," say); on the other hand, once the readers have had the experience of hybrid fictions--recognized as such--in the form of learned essays, there could be critical essays taken for fictions (viz. Borges on Marcel Schwob or Evaristo Carriego). This has something to do with the different, somewhat non-canonical, formation of present readers, writers, and critics alike in respect to previous generations, as Said comments in Beginnings. But no doubt, that is not the whole picture.
Sometimes it is not easy to discern what sort of text one is dealing with. One can even devise ambiguous texts (riddles, in a sense), as a sort of entertainment, so that the listeners or readers must guess whether what is being told really happened or has been made up. To that end, traditional marks of the fabulous can be used to disguise real events, like the formula Kan ma kan fi qadim az-zaman (there was, there wasn't, in ancient times)--or you can go on inventing, weaving around real people, so to speak. Needless to say, such exercises do not abolish the boundary between truth and falsehood.
The critic can choose all sorts of texts as his/her field of attention, no matter how complex or straightforward, no matter how particular or general. Consequently, critics sometimes choose to limit themselves to the study of literary works traditionally fashioned, or of more or less hybrid modern forms, and, in their activity, produce formal articles or books, or avail themselves of the essay, or even allow themselves to mix several sorts of genre.
The Humanist Drive
Edward W. Said's work is multidimensional, as almost everybody knows, spanning literary and musical criticism (or, more broadly the cultural realm), criticism of culture and its standards or norms, and political activity, chiefly--but not exclusively--advocating the Palestinian cause.
In this multiplicity of interests, he is one among a number of contemporary intellectuals and past writers. The pluarlism of Said's interests is not at all a new phenomenon. One can say that for centuries this has been a usual occurrence. Maybe the difference in recent time lies in the stress put on the reflection around texts and non-texts, and language versus non-language, including the relationship within sets of terms. But the tone and the general outlook of Said belong to some recognizable currents in the contemporary critical scene. One of the pluralistic currents looming large in West European thought during the last few decades has been led by some outstanding authors active in France. In such a trend, too, a wide range of subjects is treated, both from the world of fiction and from the non-fictional domain. It is pertinent to recall that criticism is expected to tell the truth about what it comments on, even when it deals with fiction (from a second-degree viewpoint, in this case), and even though the tools it marshalls are often insufficent to convince everybody. Critics are not expected to make up their essays through and through, nor to put forward arbitrary interpretations of a text, nor to leave in the dark part of the evidence.
Said is multidimensional, albeit not disparate. I think his vision of humanism plays an integrating role, without becoming a full-fledged theoretical framework, nor claiming to do so. Humanism in what sense?--one may wonder. In a plurality of senses, some traditional; some less so. It is close to philology, as practiced by Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, for example, but not yet fully secular, or as practiced in the twentieth century by Curtius, Spitzer, or Auerbach. In all of these humanists the search is for knowledge of man as a creative (and sometimes conflictive) being, and not merely as a creature reducible to the physical world, a creature that can be apprehended completely through the natural sciences. (8) "Worldly humanism v. the Empire-builders" is the subtitle of an article written by Edward Said on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Orientalism, published a little before his death; it is a sort of recapitulation and vision for the future. (9) On some points, his positive valuation of humanism in the article is in sharp contrast, one might say, to Foucault and a few of the structuralists (the less tradition-minded, probably), who, more often than not, show some disdain for humanistic values. In particular, there is the critique by Foucault concerning the Enlightenment, a movement whose indebtedness to West European Renaissance is undeniable. (10) I have the impression that Sartre's "L'existentialisme est un humanisme" is more congenial to the way Said sees the tasks of modern humanism. Said does not defend, in the aforementioned article (nor elsewhere), every kind of humanism, especially not the nation-centered variety, or those varieties subservient to one's own culture. (11) He specifically insisted on condemning ethnocentrism in his notion of humanism. (12)
Said's stance is somewhat similar to Noam Chomsky's, who has not attempted to put forward a unified theory encompassing both language, on the one hand, and politics and public matters, on the other, but whose views in both realms are consistent, mutually compatible. It is possible to make some connection between Chomsky's activity as a linguist and his political views; in each the responsibility of...
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