The best of Said

THERE are two types of intellectuals, academic and public. Academic intellectuals are found in university departments which are staffed with over-reachers methodically building careers, critics and scholars whose interest in power, gender, class, race and all the rest appears to transcend the everyday. "Most of them," as Edward Said, himself a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, has said "engage each other in recondite terminological debates or complicated disputation, too serious and abstract to any one except fellow acolytes. Thus the Marxist reconfirms Marxism, the deconstructionist deconstruction, the postmodernist postmodernism, and so on." Because of the in-breeding and also because intellectuals are known to move gingerly to judgments about people to slide away at the first hint of trouble and then decamp when their friend is in trouble or worse, in disgrace, the "intellectual" is often used as a pejorative now. (Sartre had put it well when he said that the intellectual had the ability to turn a concrete situation into an abstraction.)

On the other side of the fence is that rare breed, the public intellectual who contributes to public discussion and is "an incorrigibly independent soul answering to no one," committed to "not simply a professional or private domain but to a public world and to a public language, the vernacular" or a language that the reasonably educated could understand. In his 1993 Reith Lectures published as Representations of an Intellectual, Said described the intellectual's public role as that of "an unaccommodated" yet engaged outsider and amateur, divorced from the "professional" expert who serves power while pretending to detachment. A public intellectual speaks the truth to power, "personal interest be damned". Edward Said fits both caps, the academic literary critic and the public intellectual, a glimpse of which can be gleaned from the selections from all his writings in The Edward Said Reader, Ed: Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin.

Said's work crosses the boundaries of many disciplines from English literature, history, sociology to western classical music, anthropology, the arts, the Palestinian Question and much else besides. The Reader is therefore divided into three major sections and an interview. "Beginnings", "Orientalism and After" and "Late Styles". "Beginnings" sets the ground plan for Said's early investigations both in literary criticism and his Palestinian interventions. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography was Said's first book that explored Conrad's consciousness with which Said identified himself completely as an exile. Homeliness was an irreparable breach between the self and home, Said was to say later, but it enabled him to see two points of view, if not more. "No one," Said says, "could represent the fate of lostness and disorientation better than Conrad and no one was more ironic about the effort of trying to replace that condition with arrangements and accommodations." Conrad provided the inspiration for Said's continuing explorations into literature and politics.

The wide compass of Said's work revolutionised swaths of the academia and launched the entire field of postcolonial studies by insisting that western culture could not be understood outside its links with imperialism and that knowledge, far from being politically neutral, was tainted by power and interests. It was his seminal work Orientalism (1978) in which Said set out the ways in which Europe saw and sneered at the Orient. He established nothing less than a new way of seeing, giving rise to a dedicated following in Indian universities and elsewhere in the Third World and finally in the West. (The book has been translated into 28 languages.)

Orientalism was followed by a sweeping sequel, Culture and Imperialism (1993) which took as its territory "the contrapuntal" appreciation of the currents of culture which went along with the great imperial adventure of Europe. The argument in the book was prompted by America's succession to the imperial theme as seen by the wars in Korea, Vietnam and finally the Gulf that was based on the assumption of the aridity, even sub-humanity of the Arabs.

This observation led to a difficult contention that forms the central thesis of the book: that a consciousness of the values that enabled empire and imperial exploitation pervaded the novels of even those who were rarely associated with imperialism, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and Henry James. Revealingly, Said quoted the Marxist historian Victor Kierman's list of 15 campaigns of territorial conquest to be found in Tennyson from the Opium Wars in China through the Abyssinian expedition to the Afghan wars. It was only after Orientalism and its sequal that many of us woke up to the fact that the empire and the novel were born and grew together. In Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) and Swift (Gulliver's Travels), we see the domestic concerns of the imperialist being played out on discovered or conquered soil. The same impulses do not inform the 19th Century Russian novelists - Tolstoy, Dostoevesky and others in the pantheon. Or for that matter, George Eliot though Said made a case for Dickens' creative world resting on Australia to which Magwitch could be transported and from where he could illicitly return to endow the grown up Pip in Great Expectations.

Here, then, we are in the presence of a great theme: culture as the handmaiden of imperialism but is somehow excused for it. Said has brought it up front or at least put it in the dock where we can see the role it played in strengthening imperialism. If Said has criticised cultural imperialism, it was not because it was a "politically correct" thing to do: he has just brought together the facts from diverse sources and left it to us to take out decisions. Or put it another way, he saw what all of us had seen but he saw more than the rest of us recognised was there. It was this ability to penetrate beyond the screens of immediate experience that has marked Said out from the "herd of independent minds." His was a secular criticism which he elaborated in The World, the Test and the Critic in which he said that literary criticism is itself bound up with social realities, human experiences and the institutions of authority and power. "Criticism can no longer cooperate in or pretend to ignore this enterprise. It is not practising criticism either to validate the status quo or to join up with the priestly class of acolystes and dogmatic metaphysics". The stance against the "priestly class" of all structures of authority and dogma called "a critical consciousness", Said described as secular criticism. In fact, Said constantly distanced himself from the vulgarity of arguments from nationally oriented interest groups that carried on "oppositional discourse" because it was politically correct.

The Reader also contains Said's most influential literary essay, "Travelling Theory" that appeared in The World, the Text and the Critic. Here Said investigates how ideas or theories "travel" from place to place and what happens in the process. He argues that theories develop in response to specific historical or social reasons but, when they move from the points of their origin, the power in them dissipates and they become "domesticated, dehistoricised and assimilated" in their new location. Said was to revise his thesis to propose that there was a possibility of the theory being reinterpreted and thus reinvigorated by a new political situation.

The natural penchant of a public intellectual is not to go deeper but wider - to turn the criticism of literature or art or movies or politics into broader statements about culture. Said's critical essays on a range of subjects have forced western culture to confront its views of the non-European world and to seriously assess its own ideas of itself. To take the on-going Palestinian struggle, without Said's constant interventions, the whole Palestinian Question would have remained shielded from us, buried under acres of academic stereotypes and histories of oppression. Much of this prejudice, or myopia if you like, arises (as Said said in an extensive interview with The Hindu in May 1996) because "most traditions of education are (not only) narrowly nationalistic but indicate that other traditions are inferior: now that goes on and it is terrible and we need urgently to change that to emphasise a larger and more comprehensive and more generous view of humanity." This is what The Reader does by bringing the diverse readings spread over 18 books under a single cover.

Noam Chomsky summed up Said's contributions as "devoted to unravelling mythologies about ourselves and our interpretation of others, reshaping our prescriptions of what the rest of the world and what we are. The second is the harder task: nothing is harder than looking into the mirror." We could go on listing Said's contributions in various fields but the essential fact about The Reader is that it is full of arguments on many vital subjects and your time would be very well spent on reading it.

RAVI VYAS

The Edward Said Reader, edited by Mustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Robin, Vintage, 2000, Special Indian price $12.50.

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