Risky Business: Edward Said as Literary Critic

In the months since Edward Said’s death, many of us have reflected on his legacy, which traverses a formidable spectrum of disciplines. Yet, while the fact is often overshadowed by his interventions in politics and history, Said was first and foremost a literary critic. He was trained in comparative literature at Harvard, where he was well steeped in the German philological tradition; his dissertation and first book were a study of Joseph Conrad; and a bedrock of Western literary texts—by Conrad, Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Gérard de Nerval, for example—remained constant points de repères throughout his intellectual life. In this essay, therefore, I wish to focus on both the revolution that Said’s work initiated in literary studies and the ways in which his training in comparative literature inflected his politics: that is, to examine what his politics did to literary study and what his literary training brought to history and politics. I also want to develop a critique of Said’s categorical denunciation of what he termed “textuality” and suggest that in his fervor to stave off the hermetic and disembedded form of criticism practiced by certain deconstructive critics, he dispensed with aspects of their work—particularly their theories of linguistic indeterminacy and misreading—that are vital to carrying out his own theoretical project. To make this argument, I elaborate the notions of belonging and distance that Said employs to describe his own critical endeavor and to further theorize his depiction of the critic as foreigner. Ultimately, I contend that Said’s resistance to engaging linguistic indeterminacy—or what I am calling the “foreignness in language”—is an attempt to forge a risk-free ethics. In the final section of this essay, I argue against this sort of risk management in language and representation, contending that it is both a fantasy of mastery that, in significant ways, mimes imperial practice and a refusal of social responsibility.

Edward Said, Literary Critic

In order to sketch Said’s vocation as a literary critic, I concentrate on one of his somewhat less frequently discussed books, The World, the Text, and the Critic, which won the René Wellek prize of the American Comparative Literature Association in 1983 and in which Said articulated his position within contemporary literary criticism.¹ That position insisted, above all, on the worldliness of texts and argued for a politics of interference—between disciplines, cultures, and histories. If, for some literary critics, Said’s tactics were merely an unseemly practice of dragging ruffians such as history and politics into the polite drawing room of literature—where they left unpleasant and disturbing mud stains on the fine carpet of aesthetics—for Said, those tactics were a politically crucial resituation of literary texts within the historical and material contexts of their production and reception. The essays in The World, the Text, and the Critic were written, significantly, at the same time that Said was working on Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Covering Islam (published in 1978, 1979, and 1981, respectively), all of which, albeit in differing ways, elaborate on the arguments about literary studies staked out in The World, the Text, and the Critic.

This period of writing, by Said’s own testimony, marked for him a significant intellectual departure. He had kept apart until that time his role as literature professor and his connection to Palestine, discreetly segregating the two into quarantined domains of the “professional” and the “personal.” But “when the Six Day War broke out,” he said in an interview with Tariq Ali, “[I] was completely shattered. The world as I had understood it ended at that moment…. By 1970, I was completely immersed in politics and the Palestinian resistance movement”—and, one might add, in writing the four books just mentioned.² It was at this...