Editor's note
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of Palestinian Arab-American scholar Edward Said (1935-2003). Said's father immigrated from Jerusalem to Cairo in 1947, and four years later Said's Xi in the United States. He is adept at examining literature from a socio-cultural-political perspective, and the study of language and literature has always been his weapon. In 1978, Oriental Studies, which was later regarded as a masterpiece of twentieth-century scholarship, was published. In his book, Said pointed out that early Western humanities scholarship was full of prejudice against the "East" (especially the Arab and Islamic world), and that "Orientalism" was "an academic research discipline, a way of thinking, and a way of discourse of power". In the aftermath of 9/11, Said dismissed the "clash of civilizations" theory, arguing that it stemmed from the Western tradition of Orientalism.
At one point, Said "made literary and social criticism something that every enterprising student of the next generation would want to practice and possess, by virtue of the strength of his personality" (Timothy Brennan). A few years later, in a rapidly changing world, he has become a symbol, bound to academic terms such as "Orientalism", "Otherness" and "Postcolonial". Are the concepts he invented and the humanist tradition he represents still valid? Let's revisit where he came from.
Today, Edward Said, who is known today as a thinker, literary critic, and even classical music critic, has seriously considered writing novels twice. One was in Beirut in the summer of 1962 when he wrote "Elegy", an attempt to reconstruct Cairo, Egypt in the forties, and the fragments that have survived to this day are still impressive:
Today, as usual, Mufeld had been in his small, dusty and stuffy office, his chair away from the table, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, cigarettes in his mouth, staring at the ink-stained floor. The huge ledger on the table was something he couldn't take seriously, and he pondered, feeling a little ridiculous about the nakedly little numbers—his own—that confidently covered page after page of ledger. For him, numbers are real only in a neat state. This is his neat achievement: Muffield knows nothing about the sales, profit and loss statistics that his boss wants to see. He's busy with other things, things that no one else knows.
After graduating from Princeton University in 1957, Said did not go directly to graduate school at Harvard University, but returned to Cairo for a year, where he wanted to play the piano without distractions, even though the path of a professional pianist no longer worked. For a year, he drove to his father, Wadi's standard stationery company, at 8 a.m. every day, but couldn't get any specific work. At the end of the month, he had to queue up with other employees to receive a salary of two hundred Egyptian pounds, and when he got home, Wadi would politely ask his son to return the money, "a matter of money flow".
Can't hide
The excerpt from the novel quoted above is apparently from Said's experience in Cairo in 1957-1958, where Mufid "found those starkly little numbers a little ridiculous", reminiscent of the memoir "Out of Place," nearly forty years later, when his father, Wadi, asked him when he would be able to read the balance sheet. As Said expected, the four younger sisters were indignant when they read his memoirs – your parents gave you the best, and you described them like this. However, the reader can appreciate the psychological reality that "Out of Place" strives to create, as the daughters see their parents cultivating their only son, and the son remembers and wants to record the embarrassing details of the miscommunication.
After all, the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, the Second Middle East War, and the Fifth Middle East War in 1982, Said was far away and worried about the safety of his family. "Out of Place" includes a photograph of a holiday home where I spent the summer in the small town of Cuiwei every year as a child being pierced by Israeli shelling. Said was absent from the scene of several of the great changes that had affected the Middle East world, but he boasted of having a camera-like memory, and "Out of Place" preserved the Arab world that no longer existed.
In fact, the plausible contradiction between Said's self-narrative and his real experience is not only evidenced by his memoirs published in 1999, but by many commentators, Said's self-description of the fact that before 1967, when Said's teaching of comparative literature at universities had nothing to do with politics, such as his account of the origin of The Portrait of an Arab (1969):
[After 1948] I said that I was from Lebanon, which was as cowardly as silence because it meant not wanting to say something that seemed provocative. Over time, I got my degree and I became a professor...... During that terrible week in June [1967], I didn't feel any better than that. I am an Arab, and we – for most of my friends whom I find embarrassed, "you" – are being punished. I wrote a letter or two with a clear theme, addressed it to Time magazine (which was not published), and discussed it regularly with a few other Arabs, which was really a group therapy...... It was with a sense of self-pity that I wrote The Portrait of an Arab.
This statement is obviously not intended to deny his long-standing concern for the Palestinian question (the events of 1948 have forced many relatives and friends to leave their homes, and Aunt Nabiha, who is known as the "Palestinian mother" with whom she is very close, has been constantly campaigning between government agencies and charities in Cairo to persuade them to help the refugees – both in Saeed's eyes), but rather a reflection and a need to face up to the squeeze of dual identity, the Arab side of which can no longer be hidden.
When I first started teaching at Columbia University (1963...... I'm like two people...... Teachers and ...... who teach literature Another person, like Dorian Gray, does things that are difficult to put into words and can't say...... I have a good relationship with Lionel Triling...... But in fifteen years, we have never once put another topic on the table, and I have trained myself to adapt to such a life.
This passage is from Said's conversation with Raymond Williams, a pioneer of British cultural studies, and is included in the appendix to Williams's The Politics of Modernism: Revolting the New State Sect, published in 1989, a year after his death. The two met only a limited number of times, but Said was able to pour out his heart, and what is even more overlooked is that Raymond Williams is far more likely than Michel Foucault to be the source of speculative inspiration for Said's Orientalism.
"Secular Criticism"
Literary critic and professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Amir A. According to R. Mufti, in contrast to the "postcolonial criticism" pioneered by Orientalism, or the "counterpoint reading" in Culture and Imperialism, Said has been able to repeatedly define his critical practice through "secular criticism". The article "Secular Criticism", written ten years after the publication of Orientalism, serves as an introduction to the book "World, Text, and Critic", published in the same year, and clearly expresses the author's attitude: critical thinking is always located somewhere in the world, somewhere between "cultures and systems".
It should be remembered that this Arab-American, who received a British education in Cairo since he was a child and began to be educated in the United States at the age of 16, witnessed and helped to turn the academic trend again and again. When Said was an undergraduate at Princeton, New Criticism was still the dominant school in academia, and "pale formalism" was still prevalent during his five years at Harvard. His study of Conrad may seem traditional, but in fact it is a complex reading pleasure, with Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss, and even Heidegger hiding between the lines like easter eggs. It was also in 1966, the year of the revised publication of this doctoral dissertation, that Johns Hopkins University convened a conference on "The Language of Criticism and the Science of Man", which marked the spread of French structuralist theory among American universities. Said went from listening to the discussions of French avant-garde scholars such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Georges Play to being invited to participate in the seminar on "Theory and Practice of Literary Interpretation" held in Zurich, Switzerland, in less than two years.
After the death of his father, Wadi, in 1971, Said turned to Arabic again in the seventies: to re-study Arabic and to read the works of Arabic philologists and lexicographers. In 1975, the first Lionel Trilling Prize's Beginnings: Problems and Methods were awarded the first Lionel Triling Prize, and his mentor, Monroe Engel, bluntly admitted that he lacked the philosophical training necessary to understand the beginning, and that the key themes listed in The Beginnings were only to be developed by Said in the future. Cornell University's journal Diacritical Note published a special issue to discuss it, and by the time this interview was published, Orientalism was largely complete.
In the interview, Said pointed out that "literature is never mentioned in any book written in the West about modern Arabs" and that "the emergence of Orientalism implies the invisibility of any interest in Oriental literature, and does not regard Oriental literature as an indispensable part of social development". In fact, this has already responded to the judgment of "Orientalism" (both Western scholars and Third World scholars) that will appear every once in the future, that is, that "Orientalism" is an attempt to apply Foucault's discursive concept to the construction of foreign cultures, and even say that Said is a "Foucaultian". For Said, "the invisibility of interest in Oriental literature" means that the Oriental people as the object of study are hidden from history, which is precisely the fundamental difference between him and systematic theories such as discourse theory and semiotic analysis. The danger of systemic theory can be found in Lukács's quotation from the eighteenth-century rhetorician and Roman jurist Giambattista Vico in History and Class Consciousness:
The paradigm of knowledge, represented by the ideal of the object of knowledge as a pure refinement of formal concepts, mathematical organization, and laws of nature, is increasingly transforming knowledge into a systematic and conscious reflection on formal connections, and these "laws" work in reality, objectively, without the intervention of the subject.
It is no wonder that Said was keenly aware in the late 'seventies, shortly after the end of the Vietnam War), that "American literary theory had retreated from bold interventions across various professional boundaries into the labyrinth of 'textuality,'" a trend that grew stronger in the eighties, in concert with the neoliberalism advocated by the Reagan administration, against which "secular criticism" was directed.
Drawing on the experience of Erich Auerbach, a German-Jewish scholar who lived in exile in Turkey during World War II, wrote The Theory of Imitation, Said developed an elaboration of filiation and affiliation. It was precisely because of his exile in Turkey and the lack of a well-stocked professional library that Auerbach had the courage to write a "ridiculously ambitious" title (a realistic representation of Western literature), and "The Theory of Imitation" remains a classic to this day, turning exile, severed from his roots, into an opportunity to fulfill a unique mission. As the last generation of erudite historical philologists, Auerbach certainly believed in the unquestionable centrality of European culture to human history. The resulting cultural affiliations show that "whatever is ours is good", "systems ranging from Northrop Frye to Foucault have emerged, all claiming to have the power to show once and for all how things work", and "this new structure of affiliation and its ideology more or less directly recreate the structure of family authority" (Secular Criticism).
between ideas and events
The fact that Oriental Studies included literature in its examination was dismissed by orthodox Orientalists did not prevent Said from continuing to look at literature historically in Culture and Imperialism, published fifteen years later. Timothy Brennan's Saeed (2021, 2023) discovers this overlap in time and space: Culture and Imperialism "defends the reading of the relevant histories revealed by the novel", just as Said's Harry Levin, Harry Levin, wrote thirty years ago in the practice of literary criticism.
The title of The Horned Gate is derived from verse 19 of Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey:
Bizarre dreams have two gates to pass through: a pair
The other pair is made of ivory.
The ivory door is for shimmering illusions to pass through, and it never comes true
Those dreams that can walk through the sturdy, polished Horn Gate
But they would become a reality, if the world only knew about them.
Entitled five French realist novelists (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust – you read that right), the book takes twenty-five years from conception to completion, with Levin arguing that "literature is a kind of regulation"—a dialectical influence between ideas and events, and a "flirtatious aesthetic" tendency to focus solely on the study of literary form and structure.
That year, Levin recommended Said's doctoral dissertation on Conrad to Harvard University Press, and was estranged by the fact that he had seen his students become pioneers of new French theories. But then he should have found out that the student was never really far away. By the way, in April 1979, Qian Zhongshu visited the United States with a delegation from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and among the three famous comparative writers he met was Levin.
Narrative is never just narrative. The most notorious example is the concoction and circulation of the Jewish Elders' Protocol. The Russian Tsar's secret police obtained a pamphlet attacking Napoleon III and concocted the Jewish Elder's Protocol to spread hatred against the Jews. It was soon translated into various European languages, including German, French, and English, and became a classic anti-Semitic text of the first half of the twentieth century. The events associated with it quickly changed the fate of Palestine.
* * *
In September 1991, when Said was diagnosed with leukemia, two years later, he seriously considered accepting an offer from Harvard University, and as death approached, Cambridge seemed like a good choice, but in the end he chose to stay at Columbia, in the increasingly lonely New York. For the first time in 45 years, after leaving Palestine in 1947, he was able to return to his homeland to show his wife, Mariam, daughter, Najra, and son, Wadi, where he was born.
In the Handbook of Postcolonial Theory, Said, Homi Baba, and Spivak are mentioned as the "Holy Trinity" of postcolonial theory, and when it comes to the division between colonial and postcolonial periods, Said, who spoke with Connor Cruz O'Brien and the Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs, admits that "I don't think the word 'post' is of much use" because for him, it is not a thing of the past.