Edward Said and the Authority of Literary Criticism

Nicolas Vandeviver

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030273507
• eBook ISBN: 9783030273514
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the earliest writings of Edward Said and the foundations of what came to be known as postcolonial criticism, in order to reveal how the groundbreaking author of Orientalism turned literary criticism into a form of political intervention. Tracing Said's shifting conceptions of 'literature' and 'agency' in relation to the history of (American) literary studies in the thirty years or so between the end of World War II and the last quarter of the twentieth century, this book offers a rich and novel understanding of the critical practice of this indispensable figure and the institutional context from which it emerged. By combining broad-scale literary history with granular attention to the vocabulary of criticism, Nicolas Vandeviver brings to light the harmonizing of methodological conflicts that informs Said's approach to literature; and argues that Said's enduring political significance is grounded in his practice as a literary critic.

© The Author(s) 2019

N. VandeviverEdward Said and the Authority of Literary Criticismhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27351-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Nicolas Vandeviver¹

(1)

Ghent University, Gent, Belgium

Nicolas Vandeviver

Keywords

Postcolonial studies Orientalism Literary criticismPolitical interventionLiteratureAgency

End Abstract

1 Edward Said, ‘Father’ of Postcolonial Studies

Few scholars can claim to have founded a discipline in the way in which Marx is said to have fathered Marxism, Durkheim sociology, and Freud psychoanalysis. Fewer still can claim to have written a book that inaugurated an entire academic worldwide industry with specialist journals, conferences, and professorships. Edward Said is one of them—and he hated it.

Published in 1978, Orientalism is arguably one of the most influential works across the entirety of the humanities and social sciences. Its impact is enormous. Despite his denials, Said is widely credited with having produced a book that almost single-handedly defined, initiated, and shaped the scholarly field that was initially referred to as ‘colonial discourse analysis’, then ‘postcolonial theory’, and nowadays more simply as ‘postcolonial studies’ (Young 2012, 23–24, 2016, 385). The conventional wisdom in literary departments today is quite succinctly put by Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan: “no Orientalism, no postcoloniality” (2012, 86). Orientalism initiated postcolonial studies. Edward Said is the field’s father. That is the consensus.¹

This authoritative image of Said as founder of postcolonial studies is an obstacle to any study of his career as a literary critic. To begin such a study, I need to get rid of this image that has pressed too hard on postcolonial studies and studies of Said’s writings, and would equally be too much of a constraint on this book. And so as a first ground-clearing gesture it is imperative to get rid of the authority of Said as ‘father’ of a scholarly field. By way of introduction, I therefore mean to dispose of or at least nuance this dominant image by highlighting the disjunctions between Said’s strand of criticism and postcolonial studies as it found institutional expression. To be clear from the outset, I do not mean to argue that his writings are irrelevant to postcolonial studies or that the field has fundamentally misunderstood some ‘essential’ Said, in which I do not for one moment believe. My beginning intention is quite simply to clear a space from which I am able to study the authority of Said as a literary critic.

To do so, let us look at some of the possible reasons for Said’s antipathy toward postcolonial studies or at least toward the way in which it turned into an institutionalized school of thought. In a book chapter aptly called “Edward Said: Opponent of Postcolonial Theory” (2012), Robert Young rightly remarks that Said always reacted quite indifferently and sometimes even downright hostilely to anyone claiming that he initiated the discipline by setting up the paradigm for the general postcolonial methodology of the 1980s and 1990s in Orientalism. That methodology can be summarized as follows: a comparative reading of literature with other discursive statements that focuses on literature’s representation and mediation at a particular historical imperial moment, as well as an analysis of its connection to imperial practices, attitudes, and beliefs, and its embeddedness in, contribution and possible resistance to a Eurocentric discursive framework that influences the formation of subjectivity (Young 2012, 25).

The paradigmatic postcolonial reading is a symptomatic reading whose goal is to disclose a literary text’s obscured and repressed relations with imperial power and to reveal the latent socio-political meaning behind its manifestly aesthetic one. Though Young’s description of postcolonial studies may strike anyone working in the field as reductive and simplistic even—as, indeed, it is—it does serve to highlight that to the early generation of postcolonial scholars questions of aesthetics and form were generally deemed less important than inquiries into the socio-political uses of literature (Young 2012, 25).

Young goes on to analyze Said’s critical position toward postcolonial studies pronounced in various interviews, talks, lectures, and interventions at conferences worldwide since the publication of Orientalism in 1978 up until his passing in September 2003. According to Young, it is crucial to link that stance to Said’s general impatience with what he considered to be the kind of abstract and opaque theorizing of postcolonial studies’ other foundational figures, Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose works drew heavily on French postmodern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard (2012, 39). Though Said made significant theoretical contributions himself, in what is clearly an act of discursive positioning, he publicly distanced himself from his postcolonial colleagues by fashioning a self-image of a literary critic who produces worldly readings of literature to be distinguished from theorists who posit unworldly laws, mystified models, textual doctrines, and theoretical orthodoxies. For the literary critic Said, questions of aesthetics and form are at the heart of postcolonial studies. One cannot talk about let alone understand imperialist stereotypes and their embeddedness in historical and social circumstances while ignoring such formal characteristics as tone, sentiment, rhythm, style, figures of speech, setting, narrative structure, and devices (Eagleton 2005, 262). The abstract, mystified language, and lack of attention to literary form of postcolonial theory, Said seemed to argue, makes it a religious and unworldly form of criticism. By elaborating such notions as ‘secular criticism’ and ‘worldliness’ to designate his own critical practice, Said on the other hand attempted to show that literary criticism is secular, man-made, and always inescapably in and of this world (1983c). In short, Said opposed postcolonial studies as worldly, secular critic.

Another possible reason for Said’s antipathy to postcolonial studies has a lot to do with his critical relation to the French thinker Michel Foucault, who is known for his antihumanistic philosophy of human nature that questions the idea that humans are free agents and considers them to be determined by a whole machinery of impersonal historical forces instead (see Davies 2008, 67). Highly skeptical about the very possibility of radical freedom, Foucault was dubious that literature or its criticism can explain our oppression let alone provide the keys to our liberation. Ironically, Said’s very own application of Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’ and ‘power/knowledge’ in Orientalism contributed to the fact that the influence of the French thinker became the greatest theoretical influence on the discipline of the 1980s and 1990s (Nichols 2010). Though I do not mean to argue that postcolonial studies is antihuman nor to reduce the complexity of Foucault’s writings to a pigeonholed parody, the application of Foucault’s model of reading, as I attempt to make clear throughout this book, often leads to conclusions that highlight the determination of individuals by impersonal historical forces. While prominent critics such as James Clifford (1988, 263) and Aijaz Ahmad (1992, 159–219) have accused Said of precisely such determinism in Orientalism, he himself always explicitly tried to steer clear of such antihumanistic claims. And so, though Said to a considerable extent drew on Foucault’s antihumanistic toolbox to criticize the underlying humanistic tradition of Orientalism and its ideological commitment to empire, he paradoxically defined himself as a humanistic literary critic willfully affiliating himself with philology and the New Criticism against the antihumanism commonly associated with Foucault (Young 2012, 29–33). As a humanist, Said defended the power of individuals to topple determining systems of thought like imperialism and Orientalism and change society for the better. His involvement in the Palestinian cause reflects a profound belief in the political role of the intellectual whose work is guided by the ethical imperative to criticize, unmask, and oppose determining systems of thought and ‘speak truth to power’ (1994, xiv)—a tag which Said used to designate his own intellectual vocation and has since become inextricably tied to his practice. In short, Said opposed postcolonial studies as oppositional humanistic intellectual.

A third possible reason can be found in Young’s discussion with Timothy Brennan, one of Said’s most eminent and outspoken commentators. Through the years Brennan has also come up with an explanation for Said’s antipathetic relation to postcolonial studies. According to him, Orientalism did indeed inaugurate the discipline, “although an Orientalism that Said did not write” (2006, 103). Brennan’s argument revolves around the important theoretical influence of Foucault, which he considers to be the result of what he calls a fundamental misreading of Orientalism as a Foucaultian work of criticism, as “a good deal of postcolonial studies drew on Orientalism without being true to it” (2000, 577; my emphasis). Said cannot have fathered postcolonial studies, Brennan argues, because his work has nothing to do with the overall Foucaultian tone of the discipline—a statement which he corroborates with a reading of Orientalism that goes against the evidence of the text in a way that obscures the influence of Foucault and highlights that of the historical materialist Antonio Gramsci. Though Brennan is right to insist that Orientalism is far more complex than the simplified, one-sided image of the work in postcolonial studies today, Young is equally right to dismiss this argument by replying that such is the fate of all works of criticism and that no field is ever ‘true’ to its founding text. Surely, Young notes, “Said did not dislike postcolonial studies simply because it did not turn the method of Orientalism into a repetitive orthodoxy” (2012, 25).

And yet, my argument in this introduction is precisely what Young all too easily dismisses, namely, that Said disliked postcolonial studies because it did turn the method of Orientalism into a repetitive orthodoxy. As Foucault shows in “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (1994), the foundation of a new discipline happens not intentionally by a decision of an individual author at the beginning of his or her writing, but accidentally after the writing is produced and the impersonal rules of discursive formation come to exert their determining force on it. ‘Karl Marx’, ‘Émile Durkheim’, ‘Sigmund Freud’, or ‘Edward Said’ have become authoritative names in the history of thought not because their writings are intrinsically better but because they have been attributed such authority by the impersonal discursive feedback process in which respectively Marxist, sociological, psychoanalytical, and postcolonial texts refer to their writings. New texts locate themselves in the discursive field of the discipline by referring to these foundational writings and, in the process, gain part of their authority from these references. The accumulation of references over time sets in motion a never-ending discursive spiral in which these foundational writings are accrued with more authority and, in their turn, confer even more authority to the texts that refer to them.

This feedback system ultimately turns authors like ‘Marx’, ‘Durkheim’, ‘Freud’, and ‘Said’ into author-functions or what Foucault calls “fondateurs de discursivité” (1994, 804), who are to be distinguished from other authors, because they have gained such enormous authoritative power in the order of discourse of a certain discipline that “ils ne sont pas seulement les auteurs de leurs oeuvres, de leurs livres. Ils ont produit quelque chose de plus: la possibilité et la règle de formation d’autres textes … ils ont établi une possibilité indéfinie de discours” (1994, 804–805). And so these writers come to authorize and determine an entire dynasty of thought, an entire academic discipline within which other writings can take their place by conforming or, as Brennan calls it, being ‘in the true’ to the foundational writing.

As Brennan’s ex negativo attempt to be more ‘truthful’ to Said suggests, this discursive practice is exactly wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Cold Reading
• 3. Beyond Formalism
• 4. Beginning Anew
• 5. Disorienting Vision
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter