The Paper's reporter Cheng Qianqian compiled
Edward Said, the scholar we know as edward, is an internationally renowned literary theorist and critic, the founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies, and an activist in the Palestinian Statehood Movement. His most widely known book, Orientalism, put forward the concept of "Orientalism" and made a famous postcolonial critique of the Western description of the "East", which had a profound impact on literary theory, cultural studies and human geography, as well as on history and Oriental studies.
Edward Said
Sayyid has always maintained a clear and firm view that the work of critics is more important than the work of poets and novelists. He once pointed out that public intellectuals are the ones most capable of challenging power and changing the world.
However, There is also a lesser-known side to Sayyid. A new biography of a well-respected Palestinian scholar and literary critic reveals that Said had written poetry and novels in private, but had not even mentioned it to his friends.
The biography, places of mind: a life of edward said, is expected to be published on March 18 by Bloomsbury. Author Timothy Brennan first revealed in this biography that after his death from leukemia in 2003, Edward Said left behind two unfinished novels, a retracted short story and at least 20 poems.
Timothy Brennan's Place of the Soul: The Life of Edward Said will be published in March
Brennan was a former student of Said and is currently a professor of comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. He received unprecedented access to these unpublished manuscripts from Said's family. In addition, he also revealed in his biography how Said, a tenured professor of literature, began to gradually reject the novel as a literary form in 1992.
"I think he found a huge flaw in writing novels." Brennan said, "He found that if your intention is to change the world, then the act of writing a novel is doomed to failure." He argues that Said concludes that "writing fiction is not the best tool for achieving ambitions for those who want to drive political change," stemming in part from his own experience as an unsuccessful novelist.
By then, Said had already seen firsthand the challenges writers faced in trying to intervene in politics by writing novels, but he chose to keep this potentially embarrassing personal insight a secret along with his unpublished manuscript.
When his famous novelist friend wrote to him to persuade him to consider writing a novel, his letters showed that he either ignored their demands or asked them vaguely what he was really going to write about. "It's clear that he's trying his best not to let people know [his attempts at writing novels], and he's misleading them." Brennan said.
Brennan believes that at most one or two people "probably" only know that Sayyid wants to write fiction. "I ask people who have known him all their lives again and again, and they say they don't know anything about it."
Both of Sayyid's unfinished novels are political and autobiographical, both set in the Middle East.
The first novel, titled Elegy, is 70 pages long and takes place in Cairo in the 1940s, where Sayyid spent his childhood. He began writing the novel in 1957, when he was 22 years old, more than 20 years before he wrote Orientalism.
Brennan argues that Said was trying to find a way to explain something that most Americans simply did not understand, namely, that "there was an independent Arab culture that successfully coordinated and rejected foreign influence in places like Cairo."
Brennan said Said's poetry was also "soaked in Arabic." Some of his poems written in the 1950s express "a definite anti-colonial sentiment", exploring the feeling of being "caught between two worlds" and being large in the Levant (Note: The Levant is a historically vague geographical name that broadly refers to a large area south of the Torus Mountains in the Middle East, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, north of the Arabian Desert, and west of Upper Mesopotamia, excluding the Torrus Mountains, the Arabian Peninsula, and Anatolia, but sometimes chilicia). The Sinai Peninsula is sometimes included within the Levant, although it is generally seen as a marginal area between the Levant and northern Egypt.) In the Levant, as Sayyid wrote in one of his novels, "everyone's head is like a weathervane turning to the West."
Other poems are more personal. "My favorite of his poems is a very sexy and horrible poem, which was written in 1962, and I think it was about his terrible relationship with his first wife," Brennan said. ”
The poem, titled "Little Transformation," was first published in The Observer on Feb. 21. The poem reads: "You suddenly find yourself alienated and fearful of someone you were once intimate with. This expresses one's doubts about whether the woman you love is faithful or not. ”
Writing His biography, Brennan found that Said was "very obsessed" with the poems of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, and would often read poems to his second wife. "I think he was eager to write poetry. This is his secret self. His secret self is more emotional and fragile than the self he allows others to see. ”
His only completed novel was called An Ark for the Listener, the title of which was taken from a poem by Hopkins. It is a short story about how a young man from Beirut is gradually confronted with the "obvious harm" caused by Palestinian family and friends who have been forced to leave their homes. In 1965, the novel was rejected by The New Yorker, and for 25 years Said did not write a novel.
In 1987, Said finally picked up his pen again and began writing his second novel, a political thriller about betrayal. Set in Beirut in 1958, the story was "full of espionage, very much like John Le Carré's novel," Brennan said, "surrounding the american invasion and the political conspiracy of the different forces involved in it." ”
The novel Saeed wrote about 50 pages, but after being diagnosed with leukemia, he abandoned it to write a memoir. Since then, he has even become more convinced that "in the end, intellectuals are more important than writers, they are the ones who change agendas and challenge power".
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