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Literary Review
A beautiful mind
Ravi vyas.
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A book of essays and another of interviews, by a man many consider one of the most important thinkers of our times.
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... the intellectual represents emancipation and enlightenment, but never as abstractions or as bloodless or distant gods to be served. The intellectual's representations — what he or she represents and how those ideas are represented to an audience... are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless. These are equally concrete and ongoing; they cannot survive being transfigured and then frozen into creeds, religious declarations, professional methods.
The intellectual is a secular being. However much intellectuals pretend that their representations are of higher things or ultimate values, morality begins with their activity in this secular world of ours — where it takes place, whose interests it serves, how it jibes with a consistent and universalist ethic, how it discriminates between power and justice, what it reveals of one's choices and priorities. Those gods that always fail demand from the intellectual in the end of a kind of absolute certainty and a total, seamless view of reality that recognises only disciples or enemies.
What strikes me as much more interesting is how to keep a space in the mind open for doubt and for the part of an alert, skeptical irony (preferably self-irony). Yes, you have convictions and you make judgements, but they are arrived at with work, and by associations with others, other intellectuals, a grassroots movement, a continuing history, a set of lived lives.
Representations of an Intellectual, Edward Said, 1993 BBC Reith Lectures
IF this is an extensive quote, it is to tell you in a nutshell what two extensive anthologies, the first by Edward Said himself: Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays and the second Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said edited with an Introduction by Professor Gauri Vishwanathan, are all about. That the intellectual must move, as Marx fatefully had said, from relatively discrete questions of interpretation to much more significant ones of social change and transformation.
Very simply, Said is one of those rare endangered species called a public intellectual who "contributes to public discussion and is also an incorrigibly independent soul answering to no one, committed not simply to a professional or private domain but to a public world — and a public language, the vernacular." To describe him as a polymath would be an easy way out, but it is not just encyclopaedic learning that boggles the imagination; it is the passion and the intellectual rigour that is brought to these essays and extensive interviews written or given over the last three decades or so that makes it so difficult to pin him down to some kind of one-dimensional man.
The range in both anthologies is very wide and covers a surprisingly large range of topics from literature, history and politics to music, and so much else besides. Although there is an overlap at some points, they also complement each other in the sense that Said's own anthology are essays, Vishwanathan's are interviews centred around the essays that were written over time. They clarify several points in the essays and, as Said says in his preface to Vishwanathan's anthology, "the back-and-forth, the informal question-and-answer language, the circling round, the making and remaking of a point or argument... they are a composite of direct discourse and later clarification... Interviews play a role that essays and books do not."
There is an embarrassment of intellectual riches in the two anthologies, so where does one begin and why Reflections on Exile? "Exile can produce rancour and regret," Said says in his own Introduction, "as well as a sharpened vision. What has been left behind may either be mourned or it can be used to provide a different set of lenses. Since almost by definition exile and memory go together, it is what one remembers of the past and how one remembers it that determines how one sees the future." Exile, "the unhealable rift between a human being and his native place... the crippling sorrow of estrangement" drives a man within, who then emerges from the underground transformed into a scholar which he may not otherwise have become. "Modern western culture," Said adds, "is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees."
Begin with "historical experience," a phrase Said uses almost throughout his essays because the words are neither technical nor esoteric but suggest an opening, away from the formal and technical toward the lived, the contested and the immediate. Orientalism, an examination of western interpretations of the Middle East, is, in many ways, the seminal essay and has been the point of departure for many subsequent essays on culture and imperialism, "decolonisation of the mind" and to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, "the whole (western) consort dancing together." Said had argued in 1978 that the whole notion of the Orient was a construct of the West. By foisting its erotic fantasies on the Orient, the West exercised power and disenfranchised the people who lived there. The basic concepts of Orientalism have been anthologised often enough in post-colonial studies and radical political science texts, but what we have here is "Orientalism Reconsidered" and two interviews, "Orientalism and After" and "Culture and Imperialism."
In "Orientalism Reconsidered" Said has taken the general issues discussed earlier further: the representation of other cultures, societies and histories, the relationship between power and knowledge or the politics of knowledge; the role of the intellectual, the methodological questions that have to do between different kinds of texts, between text and context, between text and history. The interviews that follow in Vishwanathan's selections further clarify the issues discussed. Since it is patently impossible to condense the overlapping arguments of the changing historical and cultural relationship between Europe and Asia in a few sentences all one can say is that the essay and the interviews that follow are as seminal as the original thesis for an understanding of postcolonial societies. Many of the other essays and interviews, particularly on the relationship between power and knowledge, the methodological questions on the meanings of different kinds of texts are crucial for an understanding of how western imperialism colonises (or had) the third world mind-set.
If Orientalism has been Said's signal contribution to contemporary history and politics, Travelling Theory (1982) has the same place in literary theory. Here, Said investigates how ideas and theories "travel" from place to place and what happens to them in the process. He takes off from the Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukacs's theory of "reification" (in Marxist terms, this means an extreme form of alienation) and argues that theories develop in response to specific historical and social reasons, but when they move from their points of origin, the power and rebelliousness attached to them dissipates as they become "domesticated, historicised and assimilated (often by academic orthodoxy)" into their new location. Said was to revise his thesis in the 1990s, Travelling Theory Reconsidered, in which he proposed that there was a possibility that a theory could be reinterpreted, and thus reinvigorated, by a new political situation, using the work of Franz Fanon and arguing for an influence of Lukacs on Fanon.
Apart from Orientalism and Travelling Theory that would be familiar to some academics in their respective disciplines, there are marvellous essays on individual writers and thinkers: Merleau-Ponty, T.E. Lawrence, Conrad and Nietzsche, George Orwell (another public intellectual), Walter Lippman, V.S. Naipaul, ("Bitter Despatches from the Third World" and a review of Among the Believers need to be read before we get too carried away because of his Nobel) Michel Foucault, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Naguib Mahfouz, Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan, on the historian Eric Hobsbawm, on John Berger and Jean Mohr's Another Way of Telling, on the visual arts and John Berger's own position on the social functions of art in capitalist (or socialist) societies, on Samuel Huntington's thesis on the clash of civilisations entitled The Clash of Definitions, (Said also wrote an essay, "The Clash of Ignorance" after September 11 but that is not included here) on Music, Literature, and History, the Palestinian Struggle — and so much, much more. Given the sweep, you may as well agree with the Americans, "you name it and it's there."
Noam Chomsky had described Said's intellectual contribution in a newspaper interview in September 1999 in this manner: "His scholarly work has been devoted to unravelling mythologies about ourselves and our interpretation of others, reshaping our perceptions of what the rest of the world is and what we are. The second is the harder task; nothing is harden than looking into the mirror." Indeed it is, because, if our intellectuals, past and present, were to look into the mirror held up by the corpus of Said's writings, it will crack from side to side.
Ravi vyas.
Reflections on Exile and other Literary and Cultural Essays, Edward Said, Penguin India reprint, Rs. 495.
Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, edited with an Introduction by Gauri Vishwanathan, Pantheon Books, hardback, special Indian price, Rs. 1220. Both late 2001 publications.
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