In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

boundary 2 28.1 (2001) 1-18



[Access article in PDF]

Under Eastern and Western Eyes

Seamus Deane

Book Reviewed: Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Granta Books, 1999). This book is cited parenthetically by page number only.

"Eventually we realise that the work is actually constituted by the experience of exile or alienation that cannot ever be rectified."1 This is Edward Said writing about Joseph Conrad in 1998. Clearly, he was also writing about himself and his own forthcoming memoir, in which a Conradian idiom is often audible. We hear, on one page of Out of Place, of "my starved and repressed hidden self," "that underground part of my identity," "the other self I was always aware of but was unable easily or immediately to reach" (284). On other pages we meet with similar phrasings: "the emergence of a second self buried for a very long time" (217); "I could not . . . lay the ghosts that continued to haunt me" (137). Diagnostic moments retain the same Conradian aroma: "The overall sensation I had was of my troublesome identity as an American inside whom lurked another Arab identity from which I derived no strength, only embarrassment and discomfort" (90); or "my entire [End Page 1] sense of self during my formative years was always experienced in the present tense, as I frantically worked to keep myself from falling back into an already established pattern, or from falling forward into certain perdition" (19).

In "Between Worlds," Said explains, or seems to explain, his fascination with Conrad:

In the first book I wrote, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, published more than thirty years ago, and then in an essay called "Reflections on Exile" that appeared in 1984, I used Conrad as an example of someone whose life and work seemed to typify the fate of the wanderer who becomes an accomplished writer in an acquired language, but can never shake off his sense of alienation from his new-that is, acquired-and, in Conrad’s rather special case, admired home.2

Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski’s mutation into a neo-British classic was a compelling example of a writer who explored the disintegration of the idea and experience of a secure self-identity by assuming the role (in Marlow) of someone sententiously wise about a human condition that nevertheless mystified him. The imperial narrator, like the imperial system to which he belonged, was beginning to find that the world was becoming increasingly uncontrollable. It was reverting to the primal condition of foreignness and barbarism from which it had been temporarily rescued by the strenuous efforts of the British, whose universal pretensions were in danger of shrinking back to their provincial origins unless some heroic last defense for them could be found. Said’s response to this moral exoticism is understandably muted, but it is also important.

For all that has been said about Said’s indebtedness to Erich Auerbach, Antonio Gramsci, and Michel Foucault, it is in Conrad that a particularly Saidian combat is engaged. This is a Nietzschean Conrad, and for the present purpose, the bond between the two is most telling in their view of the relationship between the exceptional and the ordinary. In Said’s own words, there is "a tendency in Conrad-and in Nietzsche . . . to move his characters and his narrative structures unceasingly from a reliance on novelty, exceptionality, egoism, exoticism to a perspective where after all they are repetitive instances of some common all-too-human pattern.3 The copresence [End Page 2] of a Marlow and a Kurtz allows the uniquely individuated and the historically typical to be understood as aspects of one another. A similar mode of representation dominates, for example, Thomas Hardy’s fiction, but it lacks the critique of the imperial project, along with an almost pious regard for it, that we find in Conrad. However, Conrad is the most important, even more so than Gustave Flaubert, of a number of novelists whose achievement was exemplary in an obvious way for Said’s early writings and less obviously for Orientalism (1978) and Culture and...

pdf

Share