The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said (review)

Conor McCarthy presents a lucid and highly readable overview of the oeuvre of one of the major intellectuals of our time. For readers who think of Edward Said primarily as a postcolonial critic whose chief work was Orientalism, this introduction should prove to be a compelling corrective that shows the eclectic trajectory not only of Said himself, but also of the field of postcolonial theory. Chapter one provides a helpful overview of Said’s life and work that goes on to explore their imbrication, while chapter two offers an excellent account of intellectual influences on Said. Chapter three discusses five of Said’s key works: Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975); Orientalism (1978); The Question of Palestine (1979); The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983); and Culture and Imperialism (1993). Finally, chapter four sketches out the “crucial and representative reactions” to Said’s work (123).

The opening chapters seek to explain why Said was not just “the most widely known intellectual in the world” (1) at the time of his death, but also one whose “reputation and work polarized and polarizes opinion” (3). Within the academy, McCarthy notes, Said “was controversial because his work crossed disciplinary boundaries,” and outside it, “because [he] was active in the cause of Palestine” (3). The study lists phenomenology (represented chiefly by the critics of consciousness, or the Geneva School), philology (Giambattista Vico and Eric Auerbach), Marxism (Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Frantz Fanon, and Raymond Williams), and poststructuralism (chiefly Michel Foucault) among the “various intellectual currents and traditions” that contributed to the catholicity of Said’s oeuvre (13). McCarthy argues that what some of his detractors saw as Said’s “interfering . . . in areas outside . . . his professional expertise” was in fact a “kind of methodological principle” (3). By pursuing the project of “bringing disparate knowledges and epistemologies into unexpected conjunction,” Said’s writing was “concerned . . . not only with the production of knowledge, but with the conditions of possibility of the production of knowledge” (3, 13, emphasis original).

In discussing these diverse strands of thought, McCarthy provides a succinct overview of the key ideas in each field as applicable to an understanding of the development of Said’s own work. So, we learn that Said’s early interest in phenomenology is carried further not only in his second book, Beginnings, with its sustained meditation on intention, but also in The World, the Text, and the Critic, with its insistence, for instance, on the “worldly self-situating” act of T.S. Eliot’s well-known essay on “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (20). While the influence of philology could be seen as an indirect one, emerging out of Said’s training in comparative literature and intersecting with the influence of phenomenology and other abiding themes in his work, Said learned from Auerbach, a German Jewish intellectual exiled in Turkey, about the “relationship between distance, exile, and alienation, on the one hand, and profound knowledge, on the other” (22). This insight becomes axiomatic in later work as the form of an exemplary relationship of distance necessary to criticism. “The dialectic between distance and closeness, home and exile, rootedness and alienation,” the subject of recurrent rumination by Said, is rearticulated, McCarthy reminds us, in Culture and Imperialism: “exile is not a matter of utter disconnection from a home or culture; rather it is a matter of proximity to a native place of which one is fully aware but to which one may not return” (23).

Said learned much from several Marxist thinkers without ever being a fully committed Marxist. He assimilated many of Lukács’s insights about the novel form—“as the genre of alienation, disillusionment, and ‘transcendental homelessness’”—to his own idea of criticism: as an “anti-dynastic,” “non-linear [and] decentred process” that is “modern and modernist” in its being “homeless in the world of language and writing, restless, perpetually reinventing itself, . . . perpetually re-examining and reinstating its own conditions of possibility” (30). More...