The Wake of Edward Said

Edward Said died in 2003, leaving a complex and peculiar legacy. Many, even those who were unsympathetic to his work, would agree that he had become one of the foremost Anglophone critics of the last thirty years; certainly he is one of the most famous. Of course, Said's fame was partly due to the factors which made his enemies disparage him—his status as a public intellectual and his activism in the cause of Palestine. One of the recurring themes of Said commentary has been to determine the relationship between the political activity and the literary critical concerns and arguments.

In the introduction to his large retrospective collection of essays, Reflections on Exile, which brought together his writings on Palestine and on literary and theoretical issues for the first time, Said himself made one major connection clear when he explicitly linked "criticism" and "exile" (Said 2000, xi). If the cover-image of the British edition of the book was of Dante, the great exiled writer, Said's interest has always been more in exiled intellectuals than in exiled literary writers as such. So while he has written extensively of Conrad (of which more below) and Swift, his critical focus was always more on figures such as Erich Auerbach, Theodor Adorno, C.L.R. James, and Frantz Fanon. These were figures who Said believed had made a break with what he called filiative intellectual and political relations, and alienated by exile, had forged new affiliative relations and structures for themselves. Rather than depend on or benefit by the structures—social, political, intellectual—in which they were formed, they all made crucial breaks in their careers and created new forms of work, intellectual practice, and political alignment. Auerbach produced in his exile in Istanbul his masterwork, Mimesis; his American exile from Nazism drove Adorno not towards a sense of identification with liberal capitalism but into the most trenchant critique, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia; assigned to work for the French government in Algeria, Fanon joined the FLN and produced The Wretched of the Earth.

Said's trajectory has been similar in many ways, but there are also crucial differences. In the reviewing Said's political essays in the 1990s, Tom Nairn sympathetically wrote of Said's fate as a member of the exiled Palestinian haute-bourgeoisie:

an intellectual earmarked for escape and successful metropolitan assimilation has turned back, and tried to assume the burden of those left behind. The burden is a crushing one. In a sense frankly admitted in these pages, it is too much for him or for any other individual … [The Politics of Dispossession] reads like a memoir of the Stations of the Cross, one continuous journey through the agonies and humiliations which have broken him apart.

(Nairn 1994, 7)

Nairn is recognizing here that in the context of a late-colonial struggle like that in Israel/Palestine, Said's radical affiliative move was, to a degree, to reassert his link with his national patrimony, to reach back from his metropolitan location and training in the American academy and the Atlantic intellectual avant-garde, to his familial and national history, and to try to do them justice. This goes a long way to explaining Said's apparently paradoxical Tory radicalism, his ambivalent humanism, his combination of Palestinian advocacy and polyglot cosmopolitanism.

It was these contradictions and swerves that made Said the compelling figure he was, and also that allows us to review together the three very different books in hand here. Firstly, we have Said's own first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, now reissued in a...