I have often been interpreted as retrospectively attacking great writers and thinkers like Jane Austen and Karl Marx because some of their ideas seem politically incorrect by the standards of our time. That is a stupid notion which, I just have to say categorically, is not true of anything I have either written or said. On the contrary, I am always trying to understand figures from the past whom I admire, even as I point out how bound they were by the perspectives of their own cultural moment as far as their views of other cultures and peoples were concerned. The special point I then try to make is that it is imperative to read them as intrinsically worthwhile for today's non European or non-Western reader, who is often either happy to dismiss them altogether as dehumanizing or insufficiently aware of the colonized people (as Chinua Achebe does with Conrad's portrayal of Africa), or reads them, in a way, "above" the historical circumstances of which they were so much a part.
My approach tries to see them in their context as accurately as possible, but then - because they are extraordinary writers and thinkers whose work has enabled other, alternative work and readings based on developments of which they could not have been aware–I see them contrapuntally, that is, as figures whose writing travels across temporal, cultural and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways to emerge as part of a new ensemble along with later history and subsequent art. So, for instance, rather than leaving Conrad's compelling portrait of Leopold's Congo in an archive labelled as the dead-end rubbish bin of racist thinking, it seems to me far more interesting to read Conrad's late-nineteenth-century work as - in all sorts of unforeseen proleptic ways - suggesting and provoking not only the tragic distortions in the Congo's subsequent history but also the echoing answers in African writing that reuse Conrad's journey motif as a topos to present the discoveries and recognitions of postcolonial dynamics, a great part of them the deliberate antitheses of Conrad's work...The interesting result is not only that Salih and Naipaul depend so vitally on their reading of Conrad, but that Conrad's writing is further actualized and animated by emphases and inflections that he was obviously unaware of, but that his writing permits.
Thus later history reopens and challenges what seems to have been the finality of an earlier figure of thought, bringing it into contact with cultural, political and epistemological formations undreamed of by–albeit affiliated by historical circumstances with–its author. Every writer is, of course, a reader of her or his predecessors as well, but what I want to underline is that the often surprising dynamics of human history can–as Borges’ fable of Pierre Menard and the Quixote so wittily argues–dramatize the latencies in a prior figure or form that suddenly illuminate the present. The horribly attenuated and oppressed black porters and savages that Conrad portrays in terms that Achebe finds so objectionable not only contain within them the frozen essence that condemns them to the servitude and punishment Conrad sees as their present fate, but also point prophetically towards a whole series of implied developments that their later history discloses despite, over and above, and also paradoxically because of, the radical severity and awful solitude of Conrad's essentializing vision.
The fact that later writers keep returning to Conrad means that his work, by virtue of its uncompromising Eurocentric vision, is precisely what gives it its antinomian force, the intensity and power wrapped inside its sentences, which demand an equal and opposite response to meet them head on in a confirmation, a refutation, or an elaboration of what they present. In the grip of Conrad's Africa, you are driven by its sheer stifling horror to work through it, to push beyond it as history itself transforms even the most unyielding stasis into process and a search for greater clarity, relief, resolution or denial. And of course in Conrad, as with all such extraordinary minds, the felt tension between what is intolerably there and a symmetrical compulsion to escape from it is what is most profoundly at stake–what the reading and interpretation of a work like Heart of Darkness is all about. Texts that are inertly of their time stay there: those which brush up unstintingly against historical constraints are the ones we keep with us, generation after generation.--Edward Said (2003) Freud and the Non-European, p. 23-27
The quoted passage is a digression, an apologia really, from the main argument of Said's lecture; this lecture is primarily about the nature of personal and political identity (as represented by Freud in Moses and Monotheism (recall) and the success of Zionism). Said's analysis in the passage quoted here presupposes a distinction between inert or sterile texts and fertile or forceful work. This is a qualitative difference which Said attributes to the capacity of the ("extraordinary") minds of the authors of these text. That is, Said comes close to embracing a cult of genius. And if it is not genius, it is definitely a form of elevated admiration.
This (the near embrace of the cult of genius) surprised me because it would have been open to Said to claim that the fertility of some works may be an accident a product of path dependency such that later writers keep returning to such texts is itself what makes them fertile. There is a hint of (as Said notes) final or circular causation in my proposed alternative (which is compatible with the thought that the authors of fertile texts are themselves distinctive in various ways), but it may be preferable to the idea that (say) Conrad's extra-ordinariness resides, in part, in something rather reductive: his 'uncompromising Eurocentric vision' which, simultaneously and paradoxically, brushes up unstintingly against historical constraints.
It's not wholly reductive because a key feature of such genius is the capacity to make the reader feel the tension of what is intolerably there and a need to escape from it. That is, to put the reader in a state of performative contradiction.
Regular readers know that I think Said is wrong in thinking that earlier writers cannot anticipate the later, fertile uses of their works. With other historicists, Said traps, even entombs authors in their own historical context, and yet gives their texts an otherwise magical ability to travel across temporal, cultural and ideological boundaries. Said repeatedly, even neurotically, asserts the epistemic limitation of an author in his/her historical moment: 'could not have been aware;'' "unforeseen;" "obviously unaware;" "undreamed of" (etc, including surprising dynamics). By contrast I think one can deliberately write in a way such that one permits later uses even if one cannot know all the features of such creative re-animations. That is, while radical uncertainty is a reality, sending a signal, means knowing it could be picked up in the surrounding noise. For a reader of Freud there is, or should be, nothing mysterious in deliberately provoking a reaction in an unknown or symbolic other.
Let me close with two observations: first, Said assumes a shared, bourgeois humanistic world of readers -- us, generation after generation -- that itself instantiates a kind of infinite mode ("whole series"), or his secular faith. We are the custodians of the fertile texts in virtue of our passing it on to those who, through creative, even contrary responses, will revive and animate them.
Second, Said presents himself, in part, as an exemplar to the 'non European or non-Western reader' who can find (recall, by contrast, Lorde) the utility in the tools of the master's house. One may well wonder whether all non Europeans are non Western,* but let's leave that aside. The more important point is that while presenting himself as such an exemplar he is doing so to very European intended and implied audiences (first, abortively in Vienna, then actually in Hampstead).** And oddly he tells them, in the last sentence of the work, that they/we almost don't need Said in order to understand non Europeans, because they/we have Freud, if only we/they knew how to read him and accept (with Said as our informant) that Freud's analysis of unresolved senses of identity+ can be applied quite generally.
*In the first sentence of his lecture, Said makes clear he uses "non-European in two ways: (i) one related to Freud's own life and times exhibited by Freud's writing, "that beyond the confines of Europe, Freud's awareness of other cultures (with perhaps one exception, that of Egypt) is inflected, and, indeed shaped by his education in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, particularly the humanistic and scientific assumptions that give it its peculiarly "Western" stamp." And another (ii) "is the culture that emerged historically in the post-World-War-Two period - that is, after the fell of the classical empires and the emergence of many newly liberated peoples and states in Africa, Asia and the Americas."
**Said's lecture was supposed to be delivered to the Freud Institute in Vienna, but it was delivered to the Freud Museum in London
+That's for another occasion.
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