Edward W. Said

REPRESENTING THE COLONIZED: ANTHROPOLOGY'S INTERLOCUTORS

agitated and somewhat turbulent field. It is now almost impossible, for example, to remember a time when people were not talking about a crisis in representation. And the more the crisis is analyzed and discussed, the earlier its origins seem to be. Michel Foucaults argument has put somewhat more forcefully and more attractively perhaps a notion found in the works of literary historians like Earl Wasserman, Erich Auerbach, and

Reflections on Exile

ions, from terrorism, Communism, Islamic fundamentalism, and instability, to moderation, freedom, stability, and strategic alliances, all of them as unclear as they are both potent and unrefined in their appeal. It is next to impossible to think about human society either in a global way (as Richard Falk eloquently does in A Global Approach to National Policy [1975]) or at the level of everyday life. As Philip Green shows in The Pursuit of Inequality, notions like equality and welfare have simply been chased off the intellectual landscape. Instead a brutal Darwinian picture of self-help and self-promotion is proposed by Reaganism, both domestically and internationally, as an image of the world ruled by what is being called “productivity” or “free enterprise.” Add to this the fact that liberalism and the Left are in a state of intellectual disarray and fairly dismal perspectives emerge. The challenge posed by these perspectives is not how to cultivate one’s garden despite them but how to understand cultural work occurring within them. What I propose here, then, is a rudimentary attempt to do just that, notwithstanding a good deal of inevitable incompleteness, overstatement, generalization, and crude characterization. Finally, I will very quickly propose an alternative way of undertaking cultural work, although anything like a fully worked-out program can only be done collectively and in a separate study. My use of “constituency,” “audience,” “opponents,” and “community” serves as a reminder that no one writes simply for oneself. There is always an Other; and this Other willy-nilly turns interpretation into a social activity, albeit with unforeseen consequences, audiences, constituencies, and so on. And, I would add, interpretation is the work of intellectuals, a class badly in need today of moral rehabilitation and social redefinition. The one issue that urgently requires study is, for the humanist no less than for the social scientist, the status of information as a component of knowledge: its sociopolitical status, its contemporary fate, its economy (a subject treated recently by Herbert Schiller in Who Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500). We all think we know what it means, for example, to have information and to write and interpret texts containing information. Yet we live in an age which places unprecedented emphasis on the production of knowledge and information, as Fritz Machlup’s Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States dramatizes clearly. What happens to information and knowledge, then, when IBM and AT&T—two of the world’s largest corporations—claim that what they do is to put “knowledge” to work “for the people”? What is the role of humanistic knowledge and information if they are not to be unknowing (many ironies there) partners in commodity production and marketing, so much so that what humanists do may in the end turn out to be a quasi-religious concealment of this peculiarly unhumanistic process? A true secular politics of interpretation sidesteps this question at its peril. At a recent MLA convention, I stopped by the exhibit of a major university press and remarked to the amiable sales representative on duty that there seemed to be no limit to the number of highly specialized books of advanced literary criticism his press put out. “Who reads these books?” I asked, implying, of course, that however brilliant and important most of them were they were difficult to read and therefore could not have a wide audience—or at least an audience wide enough to justify regular publication during a time of economic crisis. The answer I received made sense, assuming I was told the truth. People who write specialized, advanced (i.e., New New) criticism faithfully read one another’s books. Thus each such book could be assured of, but wasn’t necessarily always getting, sales of around three thousand copies, “all other things being equal.” The last qualification struck me as ambiguous at best, but it needn’t detain us here. The point was that a nice little audience had been built and could be routinely mined by this press; certainly, on a much larger scale, publishers of cookbooks and exercise manuals apply a related principle as they churn out what may seem like a very long series of unnecessary books, even if an expanding crowd of avid food and exercise aficionados is not quite the same thing as a steadily attentive and earnest crowd of three thousand critics reading one another. What I find peculiarly interesting about the real or mythical three thousand is that whether they derive ultimately from the Anglo-American New Criticism (as formulated by I. A. Richards, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and company, beginning in the 1920s and continuing for several decades thereafter) or from the so-called New New Criticism (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, et al., during the 1960s), they vindicate, rather than undermine, the notion that intellectual labor ought to be divided into progressively narrower niches. Consider very quickly the irony of this. New Criticism claimed to view the verbal object as in itself it really was, free from the distractions of biography, social message, even paraphrase. Matthew Arnold’s critical program was thereby to be advanced not by jumping directly from the text to the whole of culture but by using a highly concentrated verbal analysis to comprehend cultural values available only through a finely wrought literary structure finely understood. Charges made against the American New Criticism that its ethos was clubby, gentlemanly, or Episcopalian are, I think, correct only if it is added that in practice New Criticism, for all its elitism, was strangely populist in intention. The idea behind the pedagogy, and of course the preaching, of Brooks and Robert Penn Warren was that everyone properly instructed could feel, perhaps even act, like an educated gentleman. In its sheer projection this was by no means a trivial ambition. No amount of snide mocking at their quaint gentility can conceal the fact that, in order to accomplish the conversion, the New Critics aimed at nothing less than the removal of all of what they considered the specialized rubbish—put there, they presumed, by professors of literature—standing between the reader of a poem and the poem. Leaving aside the questionable value of the New Criticism’s ultimate social and moral message, we must concede that the school deliberately and perhaps incongruously tried to create a wide community of responsive readers out of a very large, potentially unlimited, constituency of students and teachers of literature. In its early days, the French nouvelle critique, with Barthes as its chief apologist, attempted the same kind of thing. Once again the guild of professional literary scholars was characterized as impeding responsiveness to literature. Once again the antidote was what seemed to be a specialized reading technique based on a near jargon of linguistic, psychoanalytic, and Marxist terms, all of which proposed a new freedom for writers and literate readers alike. The philosophy of écriture promised wider horizons and a less restricted community, once an initial (and as it turned out painless) surrender to structuralist activity had been made. For despite structuralist prose, there was no impulse among the principal structuralists to exclude readers; quite the contrary, as Barthes’ often abusive attacks on Raymond Picard show, the main purpose of critical reading was to create new readers of the classics who might otherwise have been frightened off by their lack of professional literary accreditation. For about four decades, then, in both France and the United States, the schools of “new” critics were committed to prying literature and writing loose from confining institutions. However much it was to depend upon carefully learned technical skills, reading was in very large measure to become an act of public depossession. Texts were to be unlocked or decoded, then handed on to anyone who was interested. The resources of symbolic language were placed at the disposal of readers who it was assumed suffered the debilitations of either irrelevant “professional” information or the accumulated habits of lazy inattention. Thus French and American New Criticism were, I believe, competitors for authority within mass culture, not other-worldly alternatives to it. Because of what became of them, we have tended to forget the original missionary aims the two schools set for themselves. They belong to precisely the same moment that produced Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas about an engaged literature and a committed writer. Literature was about the world, readers were in the world; the question was not whether to be but how to be, and this was best answered by carefully analyzing language’s symbolic enactments of the various existential possibilities available to human beings. What the FrancoAmerican critics shared was the notion that verbal discipline could be selfsufficient once you learned to think pertinently about language stripped of unnecessary scaffolding: in other words, you did not need to be a professor to benefit from Donne’s metaphors or Saussure’s liberating distinction between langue and parole. And so the New Criticism’s precious and cliquish aspect was mitigated by its radically anti-institutional bias, which manifested itself in the enthusiastic therapeutic optimism to be observed in both France and the United States. Join humankind against the schools: this was a message a great many people could appreciate. How strangely perverse, then, that the legacy of both types of New Criticism is the private-clique consciousness embodied in a kind of critical writing that has virtually abandoned any attempt at reaching a large, if not a mass, audience. My belief is that both in the United States and in France the tendency toward formalism in New Criticism was accentuated by the academy

Invention, Memory, and Place

Over the past decade, there has been a burgeoning interest in two overlapping areas of the humanities and social sciences: memory and geography or, more specifically, the study of human space. Both of them have spawned an extraordinary amount of interesting work, work that has in effect created new fields of study and inquiry. The concern with memory, for example, has branched out to include such increasingly prevalent forms of writing as personal memoirs and autobiography, which nearly every fiction writer of note has attempted, to say nothing of the outpourings of academics, scientists, public figures, and so forth. The national fixation on recollection, confession, and witness has run the whole gamut from public confession-as in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal-to various studies of the meaning of collective memory, extended reflection and analyses of instances of it, plus numerous chronicles embodying it. I shall have more to say about that later. In addition, and somewhat on the margins, has been a serious, sometimes bitter inquiry into the authenticity of certain memories, as well as, at the other, calmer end of the spectrum, a remarkable academic analysis of the role of invention in such matters as tradition and collective historical experience. Some examples of intense and even anguished controversy are the following: Was Anne Franks diary really hers, or was it so altered by publishers, members of her family, or others in its published form so as to conceal the disturbances in her domestic life? In Europe there has been a great and often acerbic debate over the meaning of the Holocaust, with a whole range of opinions as to what happened, why it happened, and

Blaming the victims : spurious scholarship and the Palestinian question

Since the 1948 war which drove them from their homeland, the Palestinian people have consistently been denied the most basic democratic rights. Blaming The Victims shows how the historical fate of the Palestinians has been justified by spurious academic attempts to dismiss their claim to a home within the boundaries of historical Palestine and even to deny their very existence. Beginning with a thorough expose of the fraudulent assertions of Joan Peters concerning the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine prior to 1948, the book then turns to similar instances in Middle East research where the truth about the Palestinians has been systematically suppressed: from the bogus - though still widely believed - explanations of why so many Palestinians fled their homes in 1948, to todays distorted propaganda about PLO terrorism. The volume also includes sharp critiques of the wide consensus in the USA which supports Israel and its territorial ambitions while maintaining total silence about the competing reality of the Palestinians. Contributors include Norman G. Finkelstein, Peretz Kidron, Noam Chomsky, G. W. Bowerstock, Ibrahim Abu-Loghod, Rashid Khalidi, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Muhammed Hallaj, and Elia Zureik.

An Ideology of Difference

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 seems to have broken, for the first time, the immunity from sustained criticism previously enjoyed by Israel and its American supporters. For a variety of reasons, Israels status in European and American public life and discourse has always been special, just as the position of Jews in the West has always been special, sometimes for its tragedy and horrendous suffering, at other times for its uniquely impressive intellectual and aesthetic triumphs. On behalf of Israel, anomalous norms, exceptional arguments, eccentric claims were (and still are) made, all of them forcibly conveying the notion that Israel does not entirely belong to the world of normal politics. Nevertheless, Israel-and, with it, Zionism-had gained this unusual status politically, not miraculously: it merged with a variety of currents in the West whose power and attractiveness for supporters of Israel effaced anything as concrete as, for example, an Israeli policy of rigid separation between Jew and non-Jew, or a military rule over hundreds of thousands of Arabs that was as repressive as any tyranny in Latin America or Eastern Europe. There are any number of credible accounts of this, from daily fare in the Israeli press to studies by Amnesty International, to reports by various U.N. bodies, Western journalists, church groups, and, not least, dissenting supporters of Israel. In other words, even though Israel was a Jewish state established by force on territory already inhabited by a native population largely of Muslim Arabs, in a part of the world overwhelmingly

Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World

The influence and enduring reputation of books of criticism are, for the critics who write them and hope to be read for more than one season, dispiritingly short. Since World War Two the sheer volume of books appearing in English has risen to huge numbers, thus further ensuring if not ephemerality, then a relatively short life and hardly any influence at all. Books of criticism have usually come in waves associatedwith academic trends, most of which are quickly replaced by successive shifts in taste, fashion, or genuine intellectual discovery. Thus only a small number of books seem perennially present and, by comparison with the vast majority of their counterparts, to have an amazing staying power. Certainly this is true of Erich Auerbach’s magisterial Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,

Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative

In this essay I hope to be able to show that both in his fiction and in his autobiographical writing Conrad was trying to do something that his experience as a writer everywhere revealed to be impossible. This makes him interesting as the case of a writer whose working reality, his practical and even theoretical competence as a writer, was far in advance of what he was saying. Occurring at the time at which he lived and wrote, this irony of Conrads writing therefore has a critical place in the history of the duplicity of language, which since Nietzsche, Marx and Freud has made the study of the orders of language so focal for the contemporary understanding. Conrads fate was to have written fiction great for its presentation, and not only for what it was representing. He was misled by language even as he led language into a dramatization no other author really approached. For what Conrad discovered was that the chasm between words saying and words meaning was widened, not lessened, by his talent for words written. To have chosen to write then is to have chosen in a particular way neither to say directly nor to mean exactly in the way he had hoped to say or to mean. No wonder that Conrad returned to this problematic concern repeatedly, a problematic concern that his writing dramatized continuously and imaginatively.

Conrad and Nietzsche

Conrad and Nietzsche were disaffected and yet admiring students of Schopenhauer. Each was temperamentally in agreement with Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy, although each — in similar ways — was critical of its principal arguments. Nietzsche did not believe that the Will was blind, nor did he think that it was simply a Will to live. Rather he saw the Will as inclining always to the acquisition of power; so too Conrad, for whom such men as Kurtz, Gould and Nostromo were nothing if not wilful and deliberately egoistic over-reachers. What troubled Nietzsche about Schopenhauer was the latter’s weakening before the amoral picture of the world he had drawn. Whereas Nietzsche acknowledged life’s uncompromising and inescapable disdain for either man or morality, he felt that his once-revered teacher had devised a cowardly retreat from life by preaching stoic withdrawal. Nietzsche’s repeated statements of this criticism are echoed by Conrad’s treatment of Heyst in Victory, whose code of philosophic disengagement from life is articulated only to be violated by Lena, Schomberg, Mr Jones, and the others. These, plus a lifelong interest in Wagner, are part of a common cultural patrimony shared by Nietzsche and Conrad.

Reflections on Recent American "Left" Literary Criticism

Never before in the history of American literary culture has there been such widespread and, on the whole, such serious, sometimes technical and frequently contentious discussion of issues in literary criticism. Certainly this symposium is one indication of richness of effort, if not always of result, and I doubt that any participant thinks that this contemporary battle of the books does not concern what he or she does as a teacher, critic, or scholar of literature. On the other hand there will not be automatic agreement on what the main or even the important issues are in the critical hurly-burly. It is probably true, for example, that even though many of the critical schools (among others, semiotics, hermeneutics, Marxism, and deconstruction) still continue to have their strict apostles, it is the case that the critical atmosphere is a mixed one, with everyone more or less in touch with, if not necessarily completely involved in, most of the reigning methods, schools, disciplines. Nevertheless it is almost certain that no one will underestimate the sociological as well as the intellectual importance of the large division separating adherents of New new criticism from those of the old, or traditional criticism. Not all critics are polarized

Punishment by Detail

Aside from the obvious physical discomforts, being ill for a long period of time fills the spirit with a terrible feeling of helplessness, but also with periods of analytic lucidity, which, of course, must be treasured. For the past three months, now I have been in and out of the hospital, with days marked by lengthy and painful treatments, blood transfusions, endless tests, hours and hours of unproductive time spent staring at the ceiling, draining fatigue and infection, inability to do normal work, and thinking, thinking, thinking. But there are also the intermittent passages of lucidity and reflection that sometimes give the mind a perspective on daily life that allows it to see things (without being able to do much about them) from a different perspective. Reading the news from Palestine and seeing the frightful images of death and destruction on television, it has been my experience to be utterly amazed and aghast at what I have deduced from those details about Israeli government policy, more particularly about what has been going on in the mind of Ariel Sharon. And when, after the recent Gaza bombing by one of his F-16s in which nine children were massacred, he was quoted as congratulating the pilot and boasting of a great Israeli success, I was able to form a much clearer idea than before of what a pathologically deranged mind is capable of, not only in terms of what it plans and orders but, worse, how it manages to persuade other minds to think in the same delusional and criminal way. Getting inside the official Israeli mind is a worthwhile, if lurid, experience.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.