The eternal stranger – Declan Kiberd on Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said

Author: Timothy Brennan

ISBN-13: 978-1-5266-14650

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Guideline Price: £25

Edward Said was arguably the most influential literary critic in the later decades of the 20th century. In an age when scholars retreated from the barricades of the 1960s into the practice of abstruse theories addressed mainly to one another, he was a model of the engaged and lucid public intellectual. Denounced as a “professor of terror” by some in the US press, he worked himself to a standstill in the cause of the Palestinian people, to whom his former student, Timothy Brennan, dedicates this impressive and rigorous study.

The book has its surprises. Said wrote poetry (what is quoted here is rather good); and he also attempted and abandoned two novels. His late memoir Out of Place shows him to have had the sensibility of an artist, unerringly evoking the sights, sounds and smells of his boyhood in Zamalek, Egypt. It would be a fine thing if Prof Brennan were to bring out an edition of the unpublished drafts of the creative and critical writing.

Elegant in attire and suave in address, Said gave the impression of nonchalance. But this was only an impression. Brennan’s trawl through a sizeable archive establishes that Said found much writing difficult. For instance, he developed two separate projects on Jonathan Swift but decided not to publish (apart from the brilliant pages which appear in The World, the Text and the Critic). There were long periods of despondency and silence.

And when he wrote, it was often in white heat. Orientalism, a volume produced after further Israeli annexation of his people’s land, is now widely regarded as the book which founded postcolonial studies.

Orientalism has its blind spots (little or nothing about Germanic scholarship on the East). Said once confessed that, if he had known how famous and controversial the book would become, he would have gone about the work more methodically. But then it might have lacked that passion which crackles off every page and which has spoken so urgently to readers keen to understand the ways in which the western world constructed a fairytale of the East. The volume finally professes to tell us less about the Orient than about the people who needed such fictions.

The book might, indeed, be more aptly titled Occidentalism, because part of its argument is that the “East” doesn’t really exist. Orientalism turns out to be, as V I Lenin said of religion, “a subject without an object”. It spawned hundreds of books by American-based scholars intent on attacking European cultural imperialism. (And this in decades when the EU was the very acme of social democratic policy.)

Said watched all this in some dismay, noting the failure of many of his “followers” to construe the comforts of the US imperium from within which they made their diagnoses. He was troubled also by their failure to admit the critique of empire launched even at the time of the Enlightenment by such figures as Kant and Diderot. Eventually, he disowned such simple-minded disciples, insisting that he belonged to no school of thought.

They seemed to achieve little more than a recognition of the rights of Palestinians to police their own ghettos

He became a member of the Palestinian National Council, often seeking to steer Yasser Arafat away from violent campaigns and towards more inflected positions. He never really got through to the old man’s thinking, likening him to an exhausted once-charismatic general in a García Márquez novel. Even as he was recruited by Jimmy Carter’s administration to advise on ways of forging a peace in the Middle East, a chunky file was being kept on Said by the FBI.

The Oslo accords were a bitter disappointment to him. They seemed to achieve little more than a recognition of the rights of Palestinians to police their own ghettos. His essays on Arafat became so critical that his books were banned in the West Bank and Gaza. Which simply added to their fame.

At the core of his analysis was the need for those seeming opposites---Jews and Arabs---to recognise that they were secret doubles: peoples haunted by dispossession through history. The ancient caricature of the wily Jew with hooked nose and swarthy face had simply been transferred to Arabs in the second half of the twentieth century---but was just another toxic example of anti-Semitism in action.

To counter all this, Said (a gifted pianist and writer on music) set up with Daniel Barenboim the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra for young musicians from both traditions. “I am the last Jewish intellectual,” he used to quip in some desperation. Brennan demonstrates how the contrapuntal techniques of music underlay the dialectic of Culture and Imperialism, a book which in one now-famous chapter explored the subterranean links between the economy of Caribbean plantations and the sedate world described by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park.

For a man with the surname Brennan, this biographer is remarkably silent on Said’s superb analysis (in Culture and Imperialism) of WB Yeats as a foremost poet of decolonisation – of the ways in which Yeats was not only the Irish Shakespeare but also (as Emer Nolan has wittily put it) its Salman Rushdie. It could be argued that Said’s contrapuntal method also lay behind the creation of the Famine Museum at Strokestown, which recognised how enmeshed are the histories of landlord and tenant: one cannot be narrated without full attention being given to the other.

He saw such teaching as his democratic duty and, despite leukaemia, kept at it to the end.

In the end, Edward Said was, like the Swift in his pages, a sort of Tory Anarchist. At a conference of literary theorists, a couple of years before his death, he quickly grew bored and said to me “in 20 years’ time they’ll all be vice-principals of human resources”. (They are). Back in Columbia University, he showed me how there was by then no major poet on the college’s English syllabus between Donne and Blake – all had made way for courses in “theory”. I looked at him in some amazement as he began to chuckle: “Did you ever think that the most left-wing critic in the world would become a boring old fart?”

Still, Columbia, being both Ivy League and a city university, suited him well, as long as he could teach the classics that so many were ditching. He saw such teaching as his democratic duty and, despite leukaemia, kept at it to the end.

Timothy Brennan has his teacher’s aphoristic gifts, reading On Late Style as revelling “in the Promethean desire to disrupt conventions”. He captures the lonely integrity of a man castigated as “a designer Arab” by some of those he did most to defend. Said was, like Auerbach, Spitzer and the founders of the discipline of comparative literature, “out of place” everywhere---alert, noble, wise--- the eternal stranger.