War On Earth: Edward Said And Romantic Literary History

"Can art give a law to politics?"

—Geoffrey Hartman (2002, 219)

"Style neutralizes…wordlessness."

—Edward Said (1983, 33)

To include Edward Said among the major visionary theorists of Romantic literary history might seem an anomaly.¹ Despite his training as a comparativist, Said is better known as a herald of postcolonial studies and political activist. Michael Wood corroborates: "There is a temptation, given the direction and importance of Edward Said's later work…to treat his literary work as subordinate to his political essays and to see his early work as a mere prelude of what was to come" (60). The unfortunate consequence of yielding to Wood's "temptation" is the obfuscation of Said's contribution to our understanding of literary history as it revises itself across the modern period and overlaps with critical practice. For example, Beginnings is often remembered as a timely intervention into the burgeoning field of French structuralism that developed a malleable theory of human agency. However, it may also be read as a theorization of modernity on par with the groundbreaking work of Geoffrey Hartman or Paul de Man. If these two Romanticists understand belatedness to be the marker of the modern, whether discovered in the pursuit of an unmediated vision or the painful recognition of a temporally divided self, Said's early work examines the conditions under which writing gains authority in a secular world without sacred origins.² As he puts it in Beginnings: "The methods of the old muse are insufficient, and so too is the modern writer, for he is no muse inspired seer" (67). But more than merely rehearse the secularization thesis, Beginnings offers a historical poetics whose idiosyncratic vocabulary and use of Vico supplements the work of de Man, Hartman, Frank Kermode, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, and other Romantic revivalists.³

Given the apparent shape of his career, however, it is not surprising that we fail to associate Said with the literary and critical tradition of Romantic vision.⁴ Orientalism quickly overshadowed Beginnings and many of its contemporaneously written essays that would later be collected in The World, the Text, and the Critic. In addition, Said's expressed desire to escape "a universe defined in advance as an endless misreading of a misinterpretation" (1983, 25) as well as his critique of Derrida and Foucault suggest a move away from the debates surrounding poststructuralist theory. William Spanos has recently corrected this view by showing how Said "was, at least in practice, an antihumanist humanist" who thought "a humanism that was consistent with the posthumanism…that was the unsaid assumption of the so-called poststructuralists" (5).⁵ Though Spanos persuasively recovers Said's longstanding debt to French theory, particularly how his later work builds upon the critique of the liberal humanist subject, he does not address how the worldly critic works within, and thus revises, a Romantic aesthetic tradition that continues to frame our imaginative horizon.

While a full-blown study of Said's early publications would complicate and clarify the Yale school's apparent monopoly over the theoretical envelopment of Romanticism, his final writings on humanism and late style better illustrate his place in this still important conversation.⁶ Reading On Late Style, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and Freud and the Non-European within this larger context does more than simply correct a teleological understanding of Said's career or recover an unacknowledged chapter in the history of criticism. These texts shed significant light on what Akeel Bilgrami calls "The Political Possibilities of the Long Romantic Period."⁷ Read as a mythopoeic history modifying post-Hegelian thought, On Late Style returns us to Said's early interest in beginnings and presents a theory of irony as a historical experience that transforms an apparently insurmountable limitation into a fertile ground from which we may begin again and continue our pursuit of a desired end. Said thus recalibrates a familiar trope to lay the foundation for the style of revisionary reading described in Humanism and Democratic Criticism and practiced in Freud and the Non-European. Reading these texts in tandem highlights the creative interplay...