Edward Said's Literary Humanism

Is Edward Said just a humanist, pure and simple; or is he a literary humanist? What role do Said's literary-critical expertise and sensibility play in the shaping of his humanistic imagination? What indeed are the differences between Edward Said the specific practitioner of literary taste and analysis, and the humanist Said who finds in "literature" and "literary style" a point of entry into the worldliness of the world? In which site is Said the "generalist" and critically conscious organic intellectual, and in which is he the expert practitioner of a professionally cultivated and sustained erudition? How does Said's "purposelessly purposive" passion for literature turn into the means toward a humanist end? When it comes to thinking through the literature–worldliness nexus, is Said a theoretical thinker or an instrumental interventionist; or would he disallow even such a distinction? My purpose in this essay is to examine the many subtle ways in which Said resorts to the ambivalence of literature—i.e., "literature" that is both of the world and the result of rigorous shaping and generic styling—in his two-pronged recuperation of humanism, from the high-theory tout court antihumanists as well as from the status quo humanists.

I begin with an interesting anecdote that Said reports and comments on in the introductory chapter of his book The World, the Text, and the Critic.

The degree to which the cultural realm and its expertise are institutionally divorced from their real connections with power was wonderfully illustrated for me by an exchange with an old college friend who worked in the Department of Defense for a period during the Vietnam War. The bombings were in full course then, and I was naïvely trying to understand the kind of person who could order daily B-52 strikes over a distant Asian country in the name of the American interest in defending freedom and stopping communism. "You know," my friend said, "the Secretary is a complex human being: he doesn't fit the picture you may have formed of the cold-blooded imperialist murderer. The last time I was in his office I noticed Durrell's Alexandria Quartet on his desk." He paused meaningfully, as if to let Durrell's presence on that desk work its awful power alone. The further implication of my friend's story was that no one who read and presumably appreciated a novel could be the cold-blooded butcher one might suppose him to have been. Many years later this whole implausible anecdote strikes me as typical of what actually obtains: humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that you can read classy fiction as well as kill and maim because the cultural world is available for that particular sort of camouflaging, and because cultural types are not supposed to interfere in matters for which the social system has not certified them. What the anecdote illustrates is the approved separation of high-level bureaucrat from the reader of novels of questionable worth and definite status. ¹

It is worth analyzing how Said puts this anecdote to work, for it seems to me that the moral of the anecdote is by no means self-evident; nor is Said's interpretation the only possible way of looking at it. Before I go any further, I would like to throw into the argument yet another episode, by way of making certain critical connections between the world of books and literature and the worldliness of the world.

During that fateful summer of 1982, when Beirut was being brutalized by Israeli attacks, many of us were Said's students for six weeks at the School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University. In an informal conversation with a group of us—I don't remember if it was over a cup of coffee or a glass of beer—Said recounted a bizarre incident in his life. Soon after the publication of Orientalism, he told us, he got a call from a government official in Washington, D.C., that went something like this: "As the author of Orientalism, could you please meet with us and help us understand "the...