Worldless Affairs

The term "worldless" echoes in Edward Said's literary criticism like the worst of reproaches: as if scholarship in the West had the chance of a world and lost it or threw it away, willfully opted for the habitation of some kind of quietist void. Did anyone have the chance of such a world? Would the chance necessarily be an advantage? What about those scholars, eloquently attacked by Said, whom he thought had too much of a world, or at least too much of a say in the world's political affairs? When he spoke of the virtues of "distance" from the world, what did he mean?¹

This essay is an attempt to track some of the meanings of the word world in Said's work and in so doing to approach an answer to the above questions. My suggestion is that Said's thought on this subject is entirely coherent but more complicated than it may look—and perhaps more complicated than he himself entirely wanted it to be.

An obvious place to start, but none the worse for that, is the title of Said's sixth book, The World, the Text, and the Critic, published in 1981, two years after Orientalism. The echo from the seventeenth-century Book of Common Prayer is no accident and sets an interesting agenda. In the old Protestant litany we are invited to pray for release from "all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil." The world is not exclusively deceptive, even in this stern theology, but much of it is. The flesh is mostly deception, above all outside of wedlock, and the devil is deception personified. The trio represents a downward slope, three stages in one unmistakable direction, and that's what the antiphonal prayer is about: "Good Lord, deliver us." Said wants us to hear this plea, or perhaps just catch a subliminal aftertaste of it, and then turn the whole story inside out, and indeed unravel it still further than that. The introduction to the book is titled "Secular Criticism," and not for nothing.

Said doesn't want us to be delivered from the world, the text, or the critic, but he doesn't want sheer surrender either. He invites us to contemplate constantly shifting relations among these terms and to find new work for ourselves, as critics and readers. More important, his terms are far from forming a single unit and do not all progress in the same direction. The world is what, Said suggests, a certain theory of the text is determined to reject, and the critic has to choose one way or another, to go along with this rejection or go against it. The text, we might say, is in this polemical view a version of the liturgical prayer. It says, with intricate philosophical backing, deliver us from worldliness, give us a world without world.

There is an interesting shift in Said's thought between the argument in Beginnings (1975) and the general claims of The World, the Text and the Critic. In the earlier book, particularly in the chapter called "Beginning with a Text," Said insists firmly on the worldliness of the text, but he is not really expecting anyone but genuinely old-fashioned academic conservatives—old-fashioned by the American standards of the later 1970s—to argue with him. He invites us to consider writing not as "the solitary act of the individual, nor the imprisonment of sense in graphological inscription, but rather as an act that constitutes participation in various cultural processes." "To put pen to paper" is already to enter a world of circulation and combat, and publication of a text is a repetition of this act that is already not original but an instance of "the text-as-beginning as copy." "A text is an actuality," and "there are no innocent texts."²

Said refers to this chapter in an endnote in The World, the Text, and the Critic, where he says he has "discussed this" earlier (296), but the "this" in fact has become substantially different, a considerably more embattled claim. What has happened in the (rather few) intervening...