Helwan University Faculty of Arts
Department of English Language and Literature
Edward Said's Concept of Criticism
A Strategy for a Value System
Thesis Submitted to the Fulfillment of the Requirement of Master Degree in English Literature
Prepared by Al Sayed Mohamed Aly Ismail
Supervised by
Dr. Houreya Sarhan Dr. Mohamed Hesham Associate Professor Lecturer of English of English Literature Literature
(July 2009)
Contents Acknowledgments…….………………………………………..
Introduction ……………………..……………………………1
Chapter One: …….……………………………………………
Early Seeds of Said's Value System …………………………
16
Chapter Two: …………………………………………………48
Value System &Humanism of Knowledge: Toward t
Theoretical Values of Said's Criticism………………………
Chapter Three: ………………………………………………84
Said's Strategy for a Value System: Theory and Practice……
Chapter Four :……………………………………………..106
Culture and Imperialism: Toward a Strategy for a Value
System ..……………………………………………..…..
Conclusion ……………………………………………………149
Appendix ……………………………………………..…….…167
Bibliography……………………………….………………….175
Abstract …………………………………….……………
Arabic Summary……………………………………………...
Acknowledgements
My great and immense thanking to Allah, almighty, whose
providence never leaves me at all. God's providence and Divine
intervention, especially in the obstinate, recalcitrant problems that I
have encountered unwillingly during the preparation of the thesis, is
the principle and sole stimulus for challenging and passing
triumphantly all unreal and oppressive obstacles that I faced since I
have started such a thesis. Thanks to my great love, Prophet
Muhammad, Peace Upon Him. I express my thanking to good
believers in Allah and Sufism whose companion were a source of
purity and refreshment to my inner soul. Many times I have decided
to abstain from completing the thesis; however, their faithful advices,
spiritual support and sincere love that is away from any worldly
interest was a steaming power to both my self and soul; it helps me
more to complete such thorny, rocky, agonizing, painful, passionate
and bitter journey of such a thesis. Allah's support, Prophet's love,
good believers' companion, and mother's praying have provided me
with a clear belief that I have devised highly academic work of
literary criticism.
It is to express my great gratitude, respect and favor for the
Godly chosen of Dr. Houyria as my supervisor. I am indebted much
to her intellectual guidance, thorough remarks, innovative knowledge
in the filed of literary of criticism as a highly academic specialized in
such difficult field of knowledge. Indeed, her guidance, academic
knowledge and concise notes turns the thesis into an academic study
of literary criticism.
It is to express my immense gratitude and respect Dr. Hesham.
The thorough knowledge of Dr. Hesham, his more directive and wise
comments and his well-disciplined stream of thought have helped me
much to prepare the thesis in a better way. Indeed, the student who is
accepted by Dr. Hesham to supervise his thesis is lucky as he gains an
elder brother and very professional master of English literature, who
criticizes your work through his highly sensitive feeling
It is to ventilate my deep thanking and unlimited gratitude to
Professor Rashad Ahmed Abd Al-latif , the vice president of Helwan
University for Students Affairs, as his sincere and honest situations
uproot all obstacles and thorny problems that I have encountered
during the journey of the thesis.
It is to express my grand, deep thanking and gratitude to my
great Professor of English literature Dr. Gamal Abd El-nasser. Indeed,
without his intellectual guidance and courageous situations, the
making of such a thesis would be a question of ridiculousness. I also
express my immense thanking to Professor of English literature Dr.
Gamal Eltellaway, whose knowledge of literary criticism turned my
thesis into academic work of literary criticism. I also express my deep
and friendly thanking to Professor of Arabic literature, Dr. Abd
Alnesser Helal, Dr. Mohammed Eltonusi and Professor Sayed Amean.
It is to express my deep gratitude and great thanking to my mother
whose support and love were –are- with me all time; her kind praying
to Allah helped me so much and protected me during the more agony
journey of preparing the thesis. Thanks so much to my kind father
whose worldly life was ended before the completion of my thesis.
1
This research endeavors to investigate Edward
Said's use of criticism as a strategy for a value system.
Accordingly, it attempts an analytical study of his
critical concepts explained in a selected set of his
critical works Orientalism (1978), The World, the Text,
and the Critic (1983), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Out
of Place (1999), and Humanism and Democratic Criticism
(2004) in order to put more convincing answers for the
following questions: First, what are the seeds of Said's
value system? Second, what is the connection between
value system and humanistic thinking? Third, what are
the conditions that allow the author to think of criticism
as a strategy for a value system? Fourth, what are the
steps applied by him to use criticism as a strategy for a
value system? Fifth, it examines whether his strategy
for a value system can affect his apparently disparate
critical concepts homogenizing them under the rubric
of a central theory. Finally, it elucidates whether such
value system can affect the cognizance of the intellectual
of the outside reality and help him or her produce an
objective criticism.
2
Indeed, the objective of this research does not rest
in the analytical study itself since there are abundant
theses that have studied. Said's works from an
analytical perspective. However, it applies the
analytical or descriptive methodology to settle the most
controversial points that have not been resolved yet and
that have been misconceived by other studies dealing
with Said's critical venture.
Thus, it expounds the early seeds of Said's value
system via analyzing critically his book Out of Place.
Out of Place looks into the autobiography of Said from
historical, social and philosophical perspective that helps
reveal the misinterpretation of his critical concepts and the
biased criticism directed against him through tracing the
greatest events that influence both his attitudes and
inclinations, and produce his value system.
Meanwhile, the research attempts to elucidate the
influence of his value system on his critical theory.
Accordingly, it tries to explain the liaison between
Said's value system and his concept of humanism
analyzing his book Humanism and Democratic
Criticism. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism
3
Said displays his notion of humanism, and its
correlation with value system; how the idea of
humanism helps the intellectuals to use Said's concept
of criticism as a strategy for a value system. In brief,
this book is considered the referential framework
through which Said's critics can appreciate his critical
theory and notice the transparent and inconspicuous
coherence among his different critical concepts
scattered in his works.
Furthermore, the thesis attempts to highlight the
main traits of Said's critical concepts and their clear
relationship with his concept of humanism through
analyzing his book The World, the Text and the Critic.
In The World, the Text and the Critic Said attempts to
clarify the failure of the Western literary theory to
provide an objective criticism as the forms of literary
criticism epitomized in Practical Criticism, Academic
Literary Criticism and Appreciation falls into the trap
of specialization that detaches the interpretation of text
from its circumstantial reality and strip text off its
humanistic values. Accordingly, part of Said's value
system rests in establishing the theoretical values of his
4
critical theory that helps lay bare the specialization of
text and its inhumanistic values.
Subsequently, the thesis attempts to analyze
Said's Orientalism in order to foreground whether his
theoretical values could deconstruct professionalization
of. Orientalists and replace it with humanistic
perception of others or such theoretical values could
embody a mere methodology for laying bare the truth
of Orientalists knowledge without presenting any
alternative. Indeed, Orientalism is the masterpiece of
Said's several works, whose intellectual influence runs
steadily till the present time affecting numerous
branches of knowledge ranged from philosophy,
history, feminist studies, anthropology and political
studies to literary criticism. In Orientalism Said
depicts wittily the methodological misconceptions of
the Orientlists applied for representing others.
The thesis attempts to present the practical
values of Said's critical theory via studying Culture
and Imperialism. Explaining the practical values can
clarify their interdependent connection with his
theoretical values and the necessary steps for using
5
criticism as a strategy for a value system. In Culture
and Imperialism, Said displays universalist concept of
culture. He dispenses a set of values shared by all
world cultures, which have cognitive force on the mind
of the intellectual in a way that can convert his or her
rigid perception and dogmatic beliefs that detach him
or her from reaching the reality of his or her
interpreted text. In addition, such values allow him or
her to put Said's theoretical values into practice.
Furthermore, the thesis attempts to illustrate
whether Said's critical concepts are contradicted with
the main objective of his value system epitomized in
the neutrality and impartiality of the intellectual. The
majority of the pervious studies explain that Said's
critical stance repudiates the filiations of the intellectual
to his or her culture. However, Said himself states, on
more than one occasion, that the intellectual can not be
detached consciously or unconsciously from both his or
her culture and the conditions of his or her society.
Subsequently, Said's critics utter their dismay
over the clear ambivalence between his concept of
criticism and the burden that he shoulders on the
6
intellectual; that it is to say, how the intellectual can
criticize the inhumanistic practices prevalent in his or
her society without having a distance that allows him or
her to see such negative practices from a neutral
position. In his essay'' Overlapping Territories and
Intertwined Histories: Edward Said's Postcolonial
Cosmopolitanism ''Benita Parry states that:
Said apparently contradicting himself, is when in the
same breath he acknowledges the importance of
moving from one identity to another, and affirms that
''(O)ne of the virtues of being a Palestinian is that it
teaches you to feel your particularity in a new way,
not only as a problem but as a kind of gift.(20)
Thus Said's critical and cultural stances reflect a
state of strict and intense filiations to his Palestinian
cause. His concept of criticism, as Parry puts it,
clarifies a state of ambivalence between ''the cognitive
recognition of cultural heterogeneity and the political
need for solidarity'' (20).
Accordingly, the research attempts to get to the
bottom of the claimed contradiction in Said's critical
stance through explaining the most important historical,
political, and cultural events that construct his value
7
system and contribute to make his thinking humanistic.
It also expounds whether the practical values of his
concept of criticism can solve the claimed
contradiction.
Accordingly, the thesis attempts to examine
whether Said's concept of criticism is consisted of a set
of explicit norms and definite criteria through them the
intellectual or critic could be guided to criticize a given
text objectively. In his book Edward Said: Criticism
and Society (2000) AbdIrhaman A. Hussein shows
that Said's concept criticism neither presents critical
standards nor delineates fixed norms of humanistic
values, which can be taken as a theoretical framework
for displaying an objective criticism. He puts it clearly
in the following lines:
How can Said make strongly perspective (and
not value.– natural descriptive) about
epistemological, ethical, and political matters
without at the same time offering us a strong
theory of validity –i.e., a set of objectively
determinable standards or criteria which could
be as final court appeal ? (279)
8
According to Hussein, though Said's critical
tendency can be designated as a humanistic, fighting
back against all forms of corruption either in life or in
critical theory, it does not constitute a set of explicit
critical norms valid to make a unified critical theory
that helps critics analyze and criticize a given work of
art in an objective way. In other words, Said's critical
thinking does not apply a certain strategy for advancing
an objective criticism.
Taking a different point of view from what is
assumed by Hussein, other studies show that Said could
devise a set of critical norms dispersed in his books
such as Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975)The
World the Text, the Critic, Orientalism, Culture and
Imperialism and Humanism and Democratic Criticism.
However, the pervious studies neither attempt to trace
the intellectual mellowness of Said's critical thinking
nor divulge the consistency and interconnectedness
among his critical concepts. These studies analyze each
critical value in an autonomous way.
Accordingly, these studies announce that Said
neither engenders a systematic critical theory nor
9
devises a critical strategy for providing an objective
criticism. For instance, Said works out a new critical
term calling it the contrapuntal reading of literature,
which means that the text should be situated in its
world in order to mirror its correlation to the outside
reality and to restore the concealed historical
experience implied in it. In this way, the intellectual or
the critic may reach an objective interpretation. Indeed,
most of Said's critics study the idea of contrapuntal
reading in isolation from his other critical and
humanistic values. Therefore, they declare that Said's
contrapuntal reading neither reflects unified nor
theorized critical concepts. Marry Lousie Pratt explains
that ''Said's Culture and Imperialism is a decidedly
untheorized book. In fact, the contrapuntal method is
not readily compatible with normative theorizing,
which. calls for a fixed subject position''(40).
In his essay ''Edward Said, Cultural Politics, and
Critical Theory '' Terry .Eagleton states.that ''I think it's
vital to appreciate that Edward Said wasn't primarily
theorist….in fact, he ended quite hostile to so-called
theory''(258). Furthermore, in her essay ''A Reading of
10
Edward Said's Critical Concepts '' Doaa Imbabai argues
that Said's concept of criticism repudiates the
systematic structure of the forms of the traditional
criticism:
According to Said, system is one of the terms
which hardly represents anything but very
flaccid references. Thus he devotes a major
portion of his thought to the traits of literary
criticism concluding that the quintessence of
the objective literary criticism is that it
opposes the critical systems. Said mulls over
such form of criticism, turned into critical
system, as a solid criticism that is in short of
the basic elements of the universal criticism.
(57, trans of mine)
Imbabi clarifies that Said's critical thinking snubs
the theoretical structure of literary theory.
Subsequently, the current study attempts to establish a
certain methodology that helps to survey, analyze and
criticize certain literary works knitted by Said, inferring
a set of critical norms and literary standards known as
the theoretical values of Said's concept of criticism.
Furthermore, the applied methodology attempts to
present the practical values of his concept of criticism.
11
Therefore, it studies the concept of culture as explained
in Culture and Imperialism, deducing a set of
humanistic values whose function is to instruct the
intellectual or the critic how to apply Said's theoretical
values to interpret a given text objectively.
Finally, this research attempts to clarify Said's
critical methodology, which causes an irresistible
agony for the most of his or her critics. Hussein
explains the difficulty of defining Said's methodology
as follows:
One of the most challenging problems to be
confronted by interpreters of Edward Said's
large, seemingly disparate body of writing
concerns the issue of methodology. Any
commentator on him is bound to pose questions
like those to him self or her: how does one
approach a critic whose interests ranges from
intellectual history to current affairs, from
philosophical to journalistic discourse?. (1)
In his essay ''Methods of Literary Criticism:
Evaluative and Descriptivism'' Ezz Eldin Ismail divides
the methodologies of literary criticism into two distinct
methodologies. The first is called the evaluative
methodology that imposes its norms, views and values
12
upon the critic. The second is the descriptivism
methodology that inspires .the critic. to .analyze .the
.literary work objectively without being enslaved to a
certain intellectual authority. These two methodologies
are espoused by different critical tendencies. However,
there is no such literary tendency that tries to reconcile
the evaluative methodology with the descriptivism,
constituting a unique methodology that can build its
analysis and critique of text on the basis of certain
literary criteria without removing the importance of the
objective analysis of the text.
Thus the thesis attempts to shed light onto Said's
critical methodology or his critical strategy: How Said
could reconcile the materialist values with the
humanistic values producing a critical theory that has
its singular critical standards without confiscating the
freedom and creativity of the intellectual; the critic,
therefore, is able to criticize and analyze his or her
text in terms of certain critical standards- to use his
criticism as a strategy for a value system- without
being blindly shackled by such critical norms. In other
words, it reflects how Said could make use of criticism
13
as a strategy for value system. A strategy for a value
system refers to a set of consequent steps followed by
the critic for presenting an objective criticism; the main
objective of the thesis is to explain these steps and to
show how the critic can put them into practice for
providing unbiased criticism. In other words, Said's
strategy for a value system is concerned mainly with
the functionality of the literary theory; how criticism
can be oppositional, present an objective analysis to the
text, and make the critic handle his or her text
objectively without being enslaved by his or her
cultural restraints and by the external forces of his or
her society. Accordingly, this thesis is divided into the
following chapters and conclusion:
The first chapter demonstrates the early seeds of
Said's value system. Therefore, it amply discusses the
social, historical and political conditions in which Said
grew up and their corollary on his thinking and his
perception of the outside world.
The second chapter attempts to discuss the
relationship between Said's value system and his
humanistic thinking. It explains the reciprocal
14
relationship between his humanistic thinking and his
perception of contemporary American critical theory.
That is to say, it attempts to reveal how the credence in
the humanism of knowledge could present the first step
toward using criticism as a strategy for a value system.
The third chapter attempts to elucidate the
theoretical values of Said's value system in
Orientalism. It explains how Said's theoretical values of
humanistic criticism could reveal the methodological
misconceptions applied by the Orientalists that allow
them to subjugate Orientalism to the idea of
specialization and professionalization. It attempts to
answer the question of whether Said's theoretical values
could emancipate Orientalism from its specialization
and professionalization.
The fourth chapter attempts to discuss the steps
applied by the intellectual to use criticism as strategy
for a value system. In other words, it explains the
critical strategy devised by Said to emancipate the
theoretical values of his concept of criticism from their
narrow theoretical lines in order to put them into
practice.
15
Conclusion: This thesis reaches conclusion that
Said's concept of criticism can be used as a strategy for
a value system. The strategy for a value system entails
both theoretical values and practical values. The
theoretical values help highlight the methodological
misconceptions which strip knowledge off its
humanistic values. The practical force of Said's value
system is taken from linking his concept of literary
criticism with the humanism of knowledge, constituting
a humanistic critical theory that represents an
alternative to the idea of professionalization.
17
This chapter attempts to demonstrate the early
seeds of Said's value system. Therefore, it applies the
biographical approach that helps examine the
relationship between his early life and his value system
and critical theory. Accordingly, it discusses the effect
of the Palestinian experience, the colonial education
and the experience of exile on the construction of both
his value system and his critical concepts. Furthermore,
it also tries to foreground Said's own notion of value
system. The Essential Life Skills encyclopedia defines it
as follows:
It is a set of principles or ideals that drive and
guide your behavior. Your personal value
system gives you structure and purpose by
helping you determine what is meaningful and
important to you. It helps you express who
you are and what you stand for. Your values
define your character. They impact every
aspect of your life including personal and
work behaviors, your interactions with family,
friends and co-workers; your decision-making
processes and the direction you take in life.
This is why it is so important to know what
you value and what is important to you.
18
It is clear that the value system represents a set of
ideals, values and principles that constitute and guide
human's behavior. It helps construct man's character
and identity. Such value system results from one's own
confrontation with the outside reality, and from the
interaction with the cultural, political and social
conditions. Therefore, understanding Said's own value
system and its impact on his critical thinking necessitate
us to examine critically the conditions of his life,
highlighting the political, educational and cultural
conditions that shaped both value system and critical
theory.
The Predicament of Childhood and the Palestinian
Experience
Said is Palestinian by birth. He was born in 1935,
after Balfour Declaration of 1917 that promoted the
plan to establish the Israeli state for the Jewish people
in Palestine. Not so long after his date of birth, the state
of Israel was established and obtained the international
recognition in 1948. Subsequently, the life of
Palestinians - definitely that of Said- has been changed
drastically since 1948. Clearly, Said's date of birth was
19
concomitant with the striking political events that
altered the Middle East map as it also had a
considerable repercussion on the construction of his
value system. In Out of Place (1999) Said speaks about
his early confrontation with the tragic event of the war
of 1948 and its consequences in the following terms:
What overcomes me now is the scale of
dislocation our family and friends experienced
and of which I was a scarcely conscious,
essentially unknowing wittiness in 1948. As a
boy of twelve and half in Cairo, I often saw the
sadness and destitution in the faces and lives of
people I had formerly known as ordinary middle
class people in Palestine but I couldn’t really
comprehend the tragedy that had befallen them
nor could I piece together all the different
narrative fragments to understand what had really
happened in Palestine. (Out of Place 114)
Said’s identity was constructed in extremely
tensioned political atmosphere. His experience of
Palestine as history and cause came at him early in his
life. The war of 1948 had the worst fallout on the
Palestinians; many Palestinian families were
dislocated from their fatherland as they were forced to
20
leave it for ever. Their original places of birth, and
their homes were settled by alien Jewish people
befalling from Europe, Russell and so on. In 1948,
when Said was about eleven years age, his family was
also displaced from Jerusalem. Thus Said was
bystander to the miserable conditions of his people.
Despite his inability as a child to utterly fathom out
the travail of his people, it drew his attention to his
early estrangement. Said realized how it was painful
to be without a country to return.
Though Said did not endure the feeling of
material deprivation, a rich family descendant, he
repulsed to live in an ivory tower away from the
miserable conditions of his people. Yet Said shared
the feelings of oppression, misery and deprivation
with the poor people of his nation. From such
perspective, Amos Elom states, in his article ''Exiles
Return'' published in New York Review Book, that
Said’s predicament is moral and humanistic rather
than material. He explains it as follows:
He has evoked losses far beyond the material-
the “loss of home” and “identity” the abiding
21
dislocation of hundreds of thousands of
refugees .suffering. “raw, .relentless. anguish.
and pain” he has spoken bitterly of the
network of the Palestinian towns and villages
where his extended family once lived having
become “a series of Israeli locales, Jerusalem,
Haifa, Nazareth and Acre”. The pathos of the
chattered past of his own family and their
many relatives has never left him. The
sincerity of the pain he felt is beyond doubt.
An Israeli reader has much to learn from his
book. (12)
The oppression falling upon the Palestinians and
their forceful dislocation from their motherland affect
both Said's value system and his critical thinking. With
respect to his value system, these early conditions
endow it with a humanistic spectrum that opens up the
tender and delicate psyche to the most shocking reality
of the outside world; to lose your identity and your
nation. However, concerning his critical concepts, they
help relate them to the circumstantial reality and give
rise to the oppositional criticism. Subsequently, Said
thinks of criticism ''as life-enhancing and constitutively
opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and
abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge
22
produced in the interests of human freedom'' (The
World, the Text, the Critic 59).
According to Said, the Israeli perpetual attempts of
demolishing both the historical relics of his nation and
the Palestinian identity portray a living literary text
before its being an imperialist act of aggression. ''The
main battle in imperialism is over land but when it came
to who owned the land, who had the right to settle …it,
who kept it going… -these issues were reflected,
contested, and even for a time decided in narrative''
(Culture and Imperialism XII). The living literary text
shows that the motivating power behind such
aggression is mainly cultural. It is a contextual cultural
commitment that let ''decent men and women to accept
the notion that distant territories and their native
peoples should be subjugated… and could think of the
imperium…as metaphysical obligation'' (Culture and
Imperialism 7).
Subsequently, the voices of the oppressed are
suppressed in order to convey the shared and
overlapped human experience–Israeli–Palestinian
historical experience- according to the oppressor's point
23
of view. Said considers literary text the embodiment of
the human historical experience. The cultural force rests
in the exclusion of the historical experience of the
Palestinian people by expelling them completely from
their own lands and obliterating their identity. Thus the
intellectual or critic should restore the text to its living
reality by reviving its historical experience. Accordingly,
Said calls for revisiting the historical experience
presented in literary text. ''There was never a history that
could not to some degree be recovered and compassionately
understood in all its suffering .and .accomplishment''
(Humanism and Democratic Criticism 22). Therefore, his
critical concepts attempt to deconstruct the preceding
literary critical trends that consider the function of
literary criticism should be sweetness and delight. For
him, criticism should help communicate to the world
the suppressed voices of oppressed.
However, his fervent celebration of his Palestinian
identity and his assertion of the intervention of literary
criticism into the circumstantial reality make his critics
accuse him of contradiction. In other words, the
majority of his critics dwell on his great passion toward
24
his identity- his marvelous case of belonging to
Jerusalem- claiming that it is contradicted with his
value system. They claim that Said's humanistic
tendency disdains the unintelligible filiations to certain
culture or nationality. Yet in Out of Place Said
ventilates his absolute belonging to Jerusalem:
I saw none of the newly residents Jewish
immigrants except elsewhere in West Jerusalem
so when I hear references today to West
Jerusalem they always connote the Arab sections
of my childhood haunts. It is still hard for me to
accept the fact that the very quarters of the city in
which I was born, lived and felt at home were
taken over by Polish, German, and American
immigrants who conquered the city and have
made it the unique symbol of their sovereignty,
with no place for Palestinian life, which seems to
have been confined to the eastern city, which I
had already known. West Jerusalem has now
become entirely Jewish, its former inhabitants
expelled for all time by mid-1948 (Out of
Place110- 111)
Thus settling the question of whether Said's
belonging to Jerusalem is contradicted with his own
value system, it had better shed light onto his definition
25
of humanism. In his book Humanism and Democratic
Criticism Said defines humanism as follows:
There can be no true humanism whose scope is
limited to extolling patriotically the virtues of
.our culture, our .language, and. our
monuments. Humanism is the exertion of one's
faculties in language in order to understand,
reinterpret, and grapple with the products of
language in history, other languages .and .other
histories. In my understanding of its .relevance
today, humanism is not a way of consolidating
and affirming what ''we'' have always known
and felt, but rather a means of questioning,
upsetting, and reformulating so much what is
presented to us as commodified, packaged, and
uncritically codified certainties.(Humanism
and Democratic Criticism 24)
Humanism motivates the intellectual to think of
what is beyond his or her own culture and tradition. In
addition, it requires a neutral investigation of the past
history as it does not acknowledge the validity of any
thing without panoptic and thorough checking. Thus the
intellectual should be equipped with the necessary
ethical and humanistic values that allow him or her to
depict the shared and overlapped historical experience
26
in an objective manner. Furthermore, humanism helps
create a parallel world for the intellectual that does not
acknowledge the ideas of self-centrism or cultural
purity. Accordingly, the intellectual's blind filiations to
his nation are replaced with wider filiations to the entire
world.
Thus, revealing such contradiction requires
understanding Said's notion of belonging to Jerusalem.
According to Judaism, Christianity and Islam,
Jerusalem is the kingdom of heaven; it is a divine place.
It is neither possessed by the East nor by the West. It
represents a realm of spiritual values shared by the
entire world. The three main religions, whose
revelations were descended in the Middle East -
particularly in Jerusalem- set one's sight on spreading
values of reconciliation, tolerance and love among
different cultures genesis. For Said, Jerusalem is
nothing but the main source of his values. Thus Said
does not belong to the place itself, Jerusalem, but to the
values endowed with it. Subsequently, it is manifest that
Said's belonging to Jerusalem epitomizes his value
27
system; there is no contradiction between value system
and his belonging to Jerusalem.
Yet Jerusalem, his utopia, is occupied by the
Zionist power. Subsequently, its inhabitants are
humiliated and dislocated from their homeland. It is no
longer the place in which the hybrid people belonging
to different races, color, cultures and so on can co-exist
peacefully. Accordingly, Said espouses the oppositional
criticism to restore to the place its lost values of justice,
peace and humanity. Subsequently, Said's biographical
approach stands for his hard and difficult aspirations to
restore to the contemporary American theory its derelict
value system.
In his book In theory, Classes, Nations and
Literature (1993) Ajaz Ahmed states that Said’s critical
concepts are constructed as a result of biographical
approach. Ahmed explains:
One could.see. that. in Said’s own. intellectual
biography and in the history of his sentiments,
the writing of Orientalism has been in some
ways a preparation for the writing of that essay
on Zionism and its victims. One was in a sense
grateful for that preparation, that will settle the
28
rage inside as much as possible, so that he
could speak with scholarly precision and
measured eloquence, about the most difficult
place inside the self where the wound had
once been, where the pain still was. (161)
The biographical element has sharply affected
Said's critical enterprise to the extent that he brings to
bear his critical concepts in order to support his
political case. However, Said's experience of Palestine
is the beginning or the first element of his value system
as his experience of Palestine is a mere childhood
fainted memory, which was attested but not completely
realized. In addition, these memories were void of any
real encounter with the outside colonial world.
Accordingly, it is vital to vestige Said's growth up, his
encounters with the colonial world, and the
repercussion of such early encounters on the
construction of value system and their effect on his
critical thinking.
29
The Experience of the Western Education: An Early
Confrontation with Imperialism.
Said's Palestinian experience has a fabulous effect
on the critical enterprise as it represents the first
nucleus of his value system. Yet Said's Palestinian
experience is not the only event that constitutes his
value system; the experience of the colonial education
seems also to have a vital role. It highlights the
rudimentary awareness of the outside world where he
stayed with his family in a cosmopolitan city, Cairo. In
addition, it mirrors the early consciousness of
colonization via tracing back his confrontations with
the colonial world at both his education and daily life in
Cairo.
In late 1947, Said's family moved from Palestine
to lead a permanent life in Cairo. Said joined Gezira
preparatory school (GPS) in Cairo; it was a colonial
school that modeled itself on the Western tradition of
education that propagated the Western culture. Said
explains, in Out of Place, his first experience with
colonialism as an organized system at GPS as follows:
30
GPS gave me my first experience of an
organized system set up as a colonial business
by the British. The atmosphere was one of
unquestioning assent framed with hateful
servility by teachers and students alike. The
school was not interesting as a place but it
gives me my first extended contact with
colonial authority in the sheer Englishness of
its teachers and many of its students. (Out of
Place 42)
Said admits that he encountered early the British
colonial system at GPS. The educational system
applied at GPS was a minor example of the Western
colonialism; the colonial system of education supplied
its students with a severe hatred against others. It
celebrated the Western culture. ''Our lessons and books
were mystifyingly English: We read about meadows,
castles and Kings Johns, Alfred, and Canute '' (Out of
Place 39). The colonial schools propagated the
superiority of Western culture, trying to sustain others'
inferiority. "To impose coherence on the thousand or so
boys of VC, the authorities had divided us all into
"houses" which incalculated and naturalized the
31
ideology of empire. I was a member of Kitchener
House" (Out of Place181).
Said himself was a victim to the educational
colonial system. The British system of education forced
him to feel his fabricated inferiority and his weakness.
It made him an eye-witness to the inhumanistic values
of the Western culture that constituted the perception of
its students against others. When Said was eight years
old, his teacher at GPS School drove him out of class
room because he was a trouble maker. Instead of
considering him a little child with whom she should be
patient and kind, she treated him as a rational man.
Thus she sent him to Mr. Bullen, the manager of
school, in order to receive his punishment. Said
expresses the severity of punishment and his inability
to protect himself in the following terms:
I was instantly frightened of this large, red-
faced, sandy-haired and silent English man
who beckoned me toward him….He pulled me
forward by the back of my neck which he then
forced down away from him so that I was half
bent over. With his other hand he raised the
stick and whacked me three times on the
32
behind….The pain I felt was less than the
anger that flushed through me with everyone
of Bullen’s silently administered strokes.
Who was this ugly brute to beat me so
humiliatingly and why did I allow myself to be
so powerless, so" weak" -the word was
beginning to acquire a considerable resonance
in my life- as to let him assault me with such
impunity? (Out of Place 41-42)
From the very early beginning of his life, Said was
acquainted with terms like inferior, colonial, weaker,
subjects, mandatory and so on. Though he was
oblivious of their significance, they were unconsciously
engraved in his memory. Such terms were a source of
long-lived agony and torment for Said's intellectual
enterprise. Actually, Said tried to deconstruct such solid
terms, replacing them with other concepts that may lead
to reconciliation. In his book Orientalism Said attempts
to deconstruct the idea of distinction and inevitable
inequality which takes the superiority of the Western
culture for granted. In Culture and Imperialism Said
explains how the Western culture, epitomized in the
narrative forms, could cultivate into the minds of its
people the concepts of colonized and colonizer, master
33
and slave, superior and inferior and the purity of
Western culture. Thus Said's Culture and Imperialism
attempts to break out such antagonistic duality through
inventing a formula of reconciliation among all
allegedly antagonistic cultures.
The Experience of Exile: Alienation and Neutrality
of the Critic.
Said's early life allows him to share the same
historical experience with others. Yet after his
dislocation from his own land, Said led the nomadic
life of exile. However, before getting into the influence
of the experience of exile on Said's critical concepts, it
had better define the concept of exile, tracing back the
development of the exile in his life. Paul Tabori defines
the exile in his book The Anatomy of Exile (1978) as
follows:
An exile is person compelled to leave or
remain outside his country of origin on
account of well- founded fear of persecution
for reasons of race, religion, nationality or
political opinion: a person who considers his
exile temporary (even though it may last
lifetime) hoping to return to his father land
34
when circumstances permit- but unable or
unwilling to do so as long as the facts that
made him an exile persists. (27)
Tabori's definition of exile explains Said's
humanistic dilemma: In Said's life, the significance of
exile is both poignant and stirring as it is interconnected
with the exile of a whole nation and their desperate
hopes for returning back to the motherland. Thus Said's
suffering of exile was not personal; a whole nation was
forcefully transferred to exile and destined to lead a
permanent life there. Such exiled nation has no right to
dream of coming back to his homeland as his identity is
replaced by the Jewish identity, buttressed and
wholeheartedly accepted by the international society.
The Arab-Israeli conflict disseminated the early
seeds of Said's feeling of exile. Yet his feeling of exile
was matured after the overwhelming control of the
Israeli power over Palestine. In the years preceding
1967, Said's sense of exile was futile; it was a mere
condition of sadness and solitude: Said paid his
attention completely to the academic affairs. Yet the
war of 1967 meant the Israel conquest of the West
Bank and Gaza and therefore the loss of the whole
35
historical Palestine. "I began to feel that what happened
in Arab world concerned me personally and could no
longer be accepted with a passive political
disengagement''(Politics or dispossession XIV). In The
Paradox of Identity (1999) Bill Ashcroft explains the
grand influence of the war of 1967 on Said's feeling of
exile and on his critical engagement in turn:
Said was well on the way to establishing a
distinguished but an unexciting career as a
professor of comparative literature when 1967
Arab-Israel war broke out. According to
him, that moment changed his life, because he
suddenly found himself in an environment that
was hostile to Arabs, Arab ideas and nations.
He was surrounded by an almost universal
support for the Israelis, and the Arabs seemed
to be 'getting what they deserved', and, more
specifically he realized that he, a respected
academic was an outsider and target. (2)
The war of 1967 had a clear influence on both
Said's feeling of exile and his critical concepts. In the
years preceding the war of 1967, Said did not think
about linking literature to its parallel historical, cultural,
social and political conditions. For in instance, his first
36
work Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography
(1966) is a purely academic work which does not
connect literary criticism to the politics of its age. It is
just a study of Conrad's letters as it connects the
process of self-definition in Conard's letters to his
fiction. However, the war of 1967 called to mind his
childhood memories in which he was witness to the
displacement of his nation and the abolishment of his
national identity. It helps burgeon his notion of exile;
Said's feeling of exile is turned into positive.
Accordingly, Said began to highlight the deep
correlation between the text and its world and to think
about the revolutionary function of the purely academic
critical theory. There is a shift in Said's thinking occurs
in Beginning. Although it analyzes mainly the history
of the modern novel, the book discusses the
imperialism of mind. Furthermore, though, at the
surface, Orientalism seems cultural and critical book, it
is mainly political book that reveals how literary
criticism could help highlight the political connotations
implied in the text.
37
Furthermore, Said's living in America bestows him
a worthy prospect to fly in the face of reality at both
sides; to disclose the concealed aspect of the discrepant
historical experience. Said has an American citizenship
by inheritance from his father. In addition, he is an
American professor of comparative literature; so he
delivers his speech from the posture of the self who
endures the suffering of others. Thus Said undergoes
the contrapuntal experiences of both self and other
without relegating any of them to a lesser status: Said
unwillingly keeps the same distance from the position
of self and others. Such contrapuntal position
participates mainly in the construction of his value
system.
Subsequently, the world of exile provides Said
with the practical critical instruments that help depict
the reality of text as it is originally portrayed. In other
words, the sense of exile provides the intellectual with
a true feeling of others' suffering and predicament. If
the intellectual can share with others their feelings of
oppression, dislocation and predicament, he or she can
portray and depict their human experiences in an
38
objective and neutral way. Such objectivity may be
considered the subjectivity in itself because the
intellectual adopts an oppositional strand that supports
one party at the expenses of other.
However, in Said's case, he challenges the
hegemonic power defending the fair rights of the
subaltern and oppressed. Thus Said's vision of the
objectivity of the intellectual seems to have been the
embodiment of his value system. The main purpose of
his value system is to provide the critical theory with
the sense of human feeling, ignored or forgotten by the
preceding literary critical trends. Thus there is no
wonder to note that his notion of the exile explained in
his book Reflections on Exile (2000) comes to be
identified with the human experiences of his life as
follows:
Exile, in the words of Wallace Steven, is ''a
mind of winter'' in which the pathos of
summer and autumn as much as the potential
of spring are nearby but unobtainable. Perhaps
this is another way of saying that a life of exile
moves according to different calendar and is
less seasonal and settled than life at home.
39
Exile is life led outside habitual order. It is
nomadic, decentered, and contrapuntal; but no
sooner one gets accustomed to it than its
unsettling force erupts anew. (Reflection on
Exile 186)
Said refers to the exile as the season of winter in
which the year is feeble and debilitated. Yet it is heavy-
laden with the memories of juvenile spring, feverish
summer, and caliginous autumn. It is like an aged man
whose memory is full to the brim with the ephemeral
memories of his childhood, exhilarating experiences of
his youthfulness and the valuable experiences of
maturity. Thus the exile means a stoppage terminal in
man's life in which he can recollect, reminisce,
mediate, and categorize safely his childhood memories,
the youthfulness adventures and the experiences of
maturity. It is a stage in which man can be sincere with
himself as he is far from all life's pressures; he is
neither subject to the power of his national filiations
nor to his cultural restraints. Said, therefore, claims that
"the sense of being between cultures is the single
strongest strand running through my life" (Politics of
Culture 30). Thus Said explains that the exiled
40
intellectual could break out the barriers of thought and
experience. In his book The World, the Text and the
Critic Said quotes a speech delivered by St. Victor
Hugo that shows us the necessity of being an exiled
intellectual to have a value system:
The man who finds his homeland sweet is still
a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as
his native one is already strong; but he is
perfect to whom the entire world is as a
foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his
love on one spot in the world; the strong man
has extended his love to all places; the perfect
man has extinguished his. (The World, the
Text and the Critic 9)
Said's contemplation of the world and the idea of
belonging seems humanistic and utopian. According to
him, the exiled intellectual is a perfect man whose
filiations are diverted to the entire world as he or she
views the whole world as a foreign land. The native
people are aware of one culture, but the exiled
intellectual is aware of more than one culture. Thus he
or she is able to understand all the perspectives of
human experience. The exiled intellectual is "free from
any links to an ancestral home land, the exiled
41
intellectual is released into a clarity of thought and
public action" (Ashcroft Paradox 30). Subsequently,
the exiled intellectual could achieve independence and
detachment. The humanistic thinking of exiled
intellectual is viable and telling as he or she can feel the
discrepancy of the historical experience and depict it
from its origin, not from his cultural reservoir.
Subsequently, he or she can provide an objective
criticism or a value system.
Yet this research poses the following question:
Does each intellectual need the exilic condition to be a
neutral or objective in his views? Said's concept of
exile presents to literary criticism a new literary term
which reflects the interrelated connection between the
humanistic and psychological aspects generated in the
exile world and their clear effect on the critical values
of the intellectual. The psychological aspect refers to
the alienation of the intellectual from his or her place of
birth; such alienation may be real or imaginative as the
intellectual chooses to live in a parallel world inside his
or her homeland or he or she is forced to leave it. The
humanistic aspect shows how the exile could replace
42
the narrow sense of belonging to a certain race or
certain culture by a wider concept of affiliations to the
entire humanity, and how the intellectual could equally
undergo the human experience of both self and others.
However, the critical aspect is that methodology that
makes use of the psychological and humanistic values
for presenting an objective criticism by relating text to
its world and providing the intellectual with the
convenient position for depicting the reality of text
from a panoramic view. Thus Said's value system can
be defined as the representative formula of the
objective criticism. It includes a set of cultural, social,
historical and cultural values which are mostly
humanistic. These values affect both the text and the
critic. It helps change the fixed and old-rooted cultural
moulds of thought adopted by the intellectual that
prevent him or her from depicting the other's human
experience in an objective way. It also helps connect
text interpretation to the outside reality.
Said's exile gives him the chance to be in the
position of Westerner as an occidental who shares the
same historical experience with others. In other words,
43
the exile builds up Said's value system. The exile
allows him to depict reality somewhat objectively at
both sides. For instance, in his book Orientalism, the
main idea is that how the intellectual could depict the
historical experience of others from its origin, not from
its cultural reservoir. Though Said lived in the States
and belonged to the Western academy, he attacked the
methodological misconceptions applied by the Western
academy for representing the Oriental. Indeed, his
childhood experience of Palestine and his experience of
colonial education in Cairo shape a remarkable cultural
background that helps him to reflect more clearly the
relationship between the Orient and the Occident.
Subsequently, his living in the exile allows him to
depict the truth from a panoptic perspective, searching
only for the truth. Accordingly, his intellectual
enterprise or his use of criticism as a strategy for a
value system is implicit in his attempts to instruct the
intellectuals and critics how to have the feelings of the
exiled intellectual without leading the exile's life; how
to reproduce the value system prevalent in the exile
world without being exile's residents. It is a truly value
44
system which Said pursues it till the end of his life ; so
the research attempts to vestige it, cluster its dispersed
parts, synthesize them and put them into their
theoretical and practical framework.
However, several critics refuse Said's claim that
the exilic condition is an essential element to neutralize
the intellectual's critique of others. In his article ''The
Anatomies of Exile: Said at the Frontiers of National
Narrations'' Elia Shohat argues that despite the clear
link between the idea exilic state and the neutrality of
the critic, "Edward Said writes his position as an Arab-
Palestinian into his work, refusing the illusory
transparency of much academic work"(122). Yet Said's
transparency does not mean a state of non-involvement
in the conditions of society. It is an instrument that
resists all forms of oppressions, speaks the truth to
power and stands by the side of subalterns, and
oppressed. Said admits that it is insurmountable for the
intellectual to achieve the absolute illusory
transparency; he explains it, in his book Culture and
Imperialism, in the following terms:
45
I do not believe that authors are mechanically
determined by ideology class, or economic
history. But authors are I also believe very
much in the history of their societies, shaping
and shaped by that history and their social
experience. (Culture and Imperialism xiv)
Said argues that the social and historical
experiences construct the identity of the intellectual;
they also shape his or her perception of the outside
world. Subsequently, it is abstruse for the intellectual to
detach himself or herself absolutely from the social
conditions of his or her society even though he or she
tries to do so. Out of Place is nothing but the historical
experience and the social conditions of Edward Said.
Genuinely Said's strategy for a value system seems
something controversial and contradictory: Said
acknowledges that the intellectual is mixed up with the
social, historical, religious, political and ideological
conditions of his or her society; such components are
melted with blood, running with it in his or her arteries.
Thus they reproduce his thoughts, views, attitudes in
life and so on. The intellectual can not escape such
strong and well-mixed blood influences. Yet at the
46
same time, Said himself burdens the intellectual the
responsibility of dispensing with all these influences
that built his or her identity, intuitions, views, and
attitudes .in order to. criticize society. from .within,
challenge its systems of authoritative thought and
present and objective criticism. Such ostensible and
unattainable requirement substantiates Said's strategy
for value system, which the researcher tries to elucidate
it in the next chapters.
Indeed, the polemic does not rest in the Saidian
value system itself, but in how to find such form of
criticism that can accomplish the utopian value system,
called the strategy for a value system. In other words,
understanding the Saidian value system and its effect
on his critical concept, it is vital to show his own
concept of humanism and its connection with his
critical concepts. In addition, it is important to analyze
critically his concept of culture as explained in his book
Culture and Imperialism as it illuminates the valences
of Said's concept of culture in his critical thinking.
Said's biographical approach has a tremendous
effect on the construction of his value system. The
47
Palestinian experience and the colonial education
construct the early seeds of his value system. However,
the experience of exile helps much to make his value
system reach to maturity. It supplies him with the
contrapuntal position - his direct experience of both self
and others- whose main result is to get his thinking
neutral and somewhat objective.
49
This chapter attempts to foreground the
relationship between Said's value system and his
critical concepts. Accordingly, it tries to shed light onto
the interrelated and reciprocal connection between his
value system and his concept of humanism. In addition,
it revisits Said's critical concepts analyzed in his book
The World, the Text and the Critic through perceiving
his concept of humanism. In other words, it attempts to
discuss whether there is any kind of contradiction
between Said's value system and his critical concepts.
Subsequently, it attempts to show whether the credence
in the humanism of knowledge can result in
deconstructing the contemporary American critical
theory, foregrounding the deep link between criticism
and life, and constituting a set of coherent theoretical
values.
A Reciprocal Relationship: Said's Value System and
Humanism of Knowledge.
Said's value system is constructed as a result of his
early life conditions. Though his early life conditions
represent unrelenting state of oppression, estrangement
and permanent dislocation from homeland, his value
50
system is distilled out of any contaminants or any kind
of hatred against any culture. It is the enigmatic power
that makes ''someone able to speak the truth to power, a
crusty, eloquent, fantastically courageous and angry
individual, for him no worldly power is too big'' (The
Representation of the Intellecutal8). Accordingly, his
value system aspires to achieve humanistic ideals via
informing the mind of the intellectual or critic of all
necessary ethical and critical values that let him or her
present an objective criticism. Therefore, it is essential
to understand the Western concept of humanism, Said's
concept of humanism and its relationship to both his
value system and his critical concepts.
Humanism is highly controversial term. Corliss
Lamont defines humanism in his book The Philosophy
of Humanism (1997) as follows:
Humanism believes in an ethics or morality that
grounds all human values in this-earthly
experiences and. relationships; one that holds as
its. highest. goal. is happiness, freedom, and
progress (economic, cultural, and ethical).of. all
humankind, irrespective of nation, race, or
religion.(15)
51
Lamont defines humanism from a philosophical
perspective. He clarifies its importance to the progress
and prosperity of human being as it supplies all world
cultures with the necessary ethical values and the
principles of high morality. The Dictionary of World
History defines humanism as follows:
Humanism is philosophical and literary
movement in which man and his capabilities are
the central concern. The term was originally
restricted to a point of view prevalent among
thinkers in the Renaissance. The distinctive
characteristics of Renaissance humanism were
its emphasis on classical studies, or the
humanities, and a conscious return to classical
ideals and forms. The movement led to a
restudy of the Scriptures and gave impetus to
the Reformation..The term humanist is applied
to such diverse men .as .Giovanni Boccaccio,
Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Lorenzo de' Medici,
Erasmus, and Thomas More. In the 20th cent.,
F. C. S. Schiller and Irving Babbitt applied the
term to their own thought.
Humanism definition is more intricate and
interrelated. However, in the main, it is concerned with
human being and his prosperity as it derives its
52
legitimacy from constituting a set of humanistic values
whose main objective is the pleasure of all humanity.
Leela Gandi, in her book Post Colonial Theory: A
Critical Introduction (1998), discusses humanism
definition from historical and cultural perspective. She
brings to light the historical development of humanism
into two stages, Renaissance humanism and
Enlightenment humanism. Renaissance humanism
emerged in Italy in the sixteenth century. It posits that
man is made human by the things he knows, that it is,
by the content of his knowledge and education. Two
centuries later, in the eighteenth century Renaissance
humanism was replaced with Enlightenment
humanism. Enlightenment humanism proposes that the
measurement of the legitimacy of any given knowledge
is the universal values disseminated by it such as peace,
justice, equality and love. According to Gandhi, both
Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment humanism
consider Europe the center of universal values and
knowledge; thus the Western culture grants itself the
right to disseminate them to other world cultures
inhabited by irrational and simple-minded people.
53
''Needless to say, this moves also instantiates and sets
into motion a characteristically pedagogic and
imperialist hierarchy between European adulthood and
its childish colonized other'' (Gandhi 32). Thus such
form of Western humanism, whose appearance reflects
more humanistic vision toward all world cultures,
propagates imperialism and racial ideas because its
knowledge takes the Western superiority for granted.
Subsequently, Said neither espouses Renaissance
humanism nor Enlightenment humanism.
Yet in her essay ''Edward Said, Humanism, and
Secular Criticism'' Yumna Siddiqi announces that Said
adopts the Enlightenment concept of humanism which
believes that '' the rational, secular, critical pursuit of
knowledge can lead to human emancipation and
progress''(69). On the contrary, in his essay ''Notes on
Edward Said's View of Micheal Foucault'' Roben
Chaqui admits that Said's concept of humanism does
not espouse Enlightenment humanism as he
''specifically insisted on condemning ethnocentrism in
his notion of humanism'' (93).In his new preface to
Orientalism published in the Guardian Unlimited
54
Books (2003) Said ventilates his point of view toward
humanism as follows:
I have called what I try to do “humanism", a
word I continue to use stubbornly despite the
scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated
postmodern critics. By humanism I mean first
of all attempting to dissolve Blake's “mind-
forg'd manacles”. So as to be able to use one’s
mind historically and rationally for the purposes
of reflective understanding. Moreover
humanism is sustained by a sense of community
with other interpreters and other societies and
periods: Strictly speaking, therefore, there is no
such a thing as an isolated humanist. Thus it is
correct to say that every domain is linked, and
that nothing goes on in our world has ever been
isolated and pure of any outside influence. We
need to speak about issues of injustice and
suffering within a context that is amply situated
in history, culture and socioeconomic reality.
Said's concept of humanistic knowledge explains
that literary text can not be quarantined from its
historical, social, political and cultural context.
Knowledge production process is in imperishable
interaction with the outside world. The worldly
circumstances affect both writer and text. The
55
humanistic knowledge could be acquired on the
condition of its identification with a set of humanistic
values. Such type of knowledge is neither coincided
with Westerners nor with others. According to him,
humanism is:
not about withdrawal and exclusion. Quite the
reverse: its purpose is to make more things
available to critical scrutiny as the product of
human labor, human energies, for
emancipation and enlightenment, and, just as
importantly, human misreading and
misinterpretation of the collective past.
(Humanism and Democratic 22)
Said’s concept of humanism is concerned with the
practical aspects of knowledge; in what way the
humanistic thinking could be used to foreground the
reality of any given text; how knowledge could resist
oppression and present a value system. ''Here, he
imagines the possibility of a kind of knowledge that
traverses cultural difference and serves the end of
liberation without being falsely universalist'' (Siddiqi,
Edward Said, Humanism 70). Subsequently, Said's
humanism of knowledge represents the first step
toward using criticism as a strategy for a value system
56
as it encourages the intellectual to be involved in the
conditions of his or her society and to situate text in its
world.
However, elaborating the relationship between
humanism and Said's critical strategy requires, in the
first place, to study its influence on the critical theory
and to make sure whether it could help highlight the
inevitable connection between criticism and life. It is
also important to know whether Said's humanism helps
present new interpretation to his critical concepts that
preceded the publishing of both Humanism and
Democratic Criticism and his new preface to
Orientalism in which Said explains in detail the
significance of the humanistic critique to settle down
the most controversial and polemical points in his
critical theory. Said's critics state that there is more
obvious contradiction between his claim that critical
theory can not be detached from its circumstantial
reality and the idealistic vision of his critical concepts.
According to his critics, Said's critical concepts are
only valid in utopia or in a more perfectible world that
has no connection with the drastic reality of world as
57
they are completely separable from the reality and the
actuality of our world.
Nevertheless, Said believes that criticism can not
be separated from its circumstantial reality: Criticism is
the art of life making because of its prophetic message,
its main objective is to resist all forms of oppression
and corruption prevalent in any society. In her essay
''The Arab Islamic Heritage in the Works of Said''
Freial Ghazoul states that Said's critical theory is
related to life:
On one hand he develops a critical theory that
links text to their social and circumstantial
origins….But then the linking, as practiced by
Said, is clearly not done in the traditional
sociological mode of criticism (such as
conventional Marxist approach or an old-
fashioned sociology of literature).He elaborates
the relationship of the literary texts to the life
of the author, as in Joseph Conrad and the
Fiction of Autobiography (1966), the scholarly
text to colonial practices, as in Orientalism,
narrative to history, as in Beginnings: Intention
and Method (1975), criticism to the socio-
political scene, as in The World, the Text and
the Critic (1983).(160)
58
However, ''literary criticism as practiced in the
academy tends generally for Said to confirm the status
quo by confirming critics to the role of (at best) good
ministers of ''sweetness and light''(O'Hara, Criticism
Worldly 389). Thus it is substantial to re-read Said's
deconstruction of the contemporary American theory
revisiting his critical concepts from a humanistic
perspective.
Toward Said's Theoretical Strategy: Humanistic
Deconstruction of Professionalization.
Reconsidering Said's critical concepts from
humanistic perspective, the research attempts to re-
evaluate his criticism of the idea of specialization and
professionalization. In his book The World, the Text,
and the Critic Said explains that the main reason
behind separating criticism from life is the forms of
specialization and professionalism, which dominate
the traditional criticism and contemporary American
critical theory. For him, professionalization is the
main obstacle for using criticism as strategy for a
value system. Using criticism as a strategy for a
value system means that the function of criticism
59
should not be limited to entertainment and nourishing
the mind with the best thoughts but it should lay bare
the text relation to its world and to provide the
intellectual with the concealed or absent historical
experience of others, represented from a monolithic
spectrum, in order to present an objective
interpretation of his or her text. Thus Said's critical
strategy attempts to foreground:
The connection between texts and the
existential realities of human life, politics,
societies and events. The realties of power and
authority-as well as resistance offered by men,
women, and social movements to institutions,
authorities, and orthodoxies-are the realities that
make the texts possible and deliver them to their
readers, that solicit the attention of critics. I
propose that these realities are what should be
taken account of by criticism and the critical
consciousness. (The World, the Text and the
Critic5)
Said demonstrates that professionalization is a
literary technique that detaches the intellectual from
the circumstantial reality or outside reality; it shapes
his or her prospect of others via limiting knowledge
60
to fixed moulds of thoughts. It turns the intellectual
blind to see the social, historical and political
conditions that create his or her text. Furthermore, it
isolates the text from its reality. In other words, it
dedicates the intellectual to depict the historical
experience portrayed in literary text through the
lenses of his or her culture and tradition downplaying
the shared, overlapped and intertwined historical
experience of others. Thus the final product is
an intellectual whose authority forces him or her to be
subject to professionalization not to a true value
system. Accordingly, the literary techniques of text
interpretation do not derive its power and strength
from an objective and neutral analysis, which is
accessible to all opposed point of views. Yet the
techniques of text interpretation adopt a certain
standpoint that refuses any antagonistic views.
Accordingly, Said's critical strategy or his strategy
for a value system aims at explaining ''how the absence
in the work of art, what is not being Said, what is not
being articulated, is a form of suppression that
foregrounds certain elements in the pictures and
61
excludes others'' (Ferial, The Arabic Islamic 160).
Therefore, Said wants to break out the idea of
specialization ''in order to shock critics into re-
examining their practices and assumptions and into
abandoning their ''home,'' that is, the ideological
attitudes constraining a freer, more ''neutral'' pursuit of
knowledge'' (JanMohamed, The Specular Border 111).
Said explains how the idea of specialization practices
an inhumanistic force on the critic and text:
barely sublimated Eurocentricism and
nationalism, as well as surprisingly insistent
quasi-religious quietism, have transported the
professional and academic critic of literature–
the most focused and intensely trained
interpreter of texts produced by the culture- into
another world altogether. In that relatively
untroubled and secluded world there seems to
be no contact with the world of events and
societies, which modern history, intellectuals
and critics have in fact built. (The World, the
Text and theCritic38)
In his book Orientalism .Said states. That
.professionalization of Orientalists does not allow them
to depict the reality of Orient. Therefore, their
62
representation of the Orient came in the form of
misrepresentation. Accordingly, professionalization
constitutes the consciousness of Orientalists. Once
again in his book The World, the Text and the Critic
Said foregrounds the pitfalls of the idea of
professionalization, but he formulates his critique of it
in a theoretical framework. Thus his deconstruction of
specialization allows him to identify its inhumanistic
force on both the text and critic. In first place, it
empties the text of its humanistic values by detaching
it from reality or concealing certain facts that may help
present an objective interpretation. Second, it
reinforces all forms of coercive and manipulative
knowledge, celebrating Ethnocentrism and culturalism.
Finally, it discredits criticism its main function as a
means of change and resistance of oppression.
However, in his essay “The East is a Career:
Edward Said and the Logic of Professionalism”
Robbins Bruce argues that Said's critique of the idea of
professionalization is both unwarranted and equivocal.
According to him, it is illogical to admit that
professionalization can detach text from its world
63
because text is a part of its world; it has no place to
exist but its world. Bruce puts it in the following lines:
Along with ''guild consciousness, consensus
collegiality, professional respect "(p.20), he
targets "a cult of professional expertise whose
effect in general is pernicious" because it
accepts "the principle of non interference "(pp-
2-3), a neglect of "connection between text and
the existential actualities of human life,
politics, and events". One can agree
conjuncturally and still want .to .insist. that
literary. theory .would. not have .enjoyed the
.professional. success .it has, indeed would not
exist at all, if it was cut off from" the social
world" as Said suggests-if it did not somehow
accomplish, however unsatisfactorily, as a task
of representation. (52 italics of mine).
Bruce states that if professionalization,
according to Said, separates text from its world, then,
where does the text exist? He adds that
professionalization is an integral part of any literary
work. If the text is neither constrained nor shaped by
its professionalization, it is abstruse to differentiate
between the literary text and scientific. Specialization
distinguishes the critical text from other literary
64
genres. Subsequently, Said's presumption that
professionalization separates the text from its world is
delusive and ambivalent. According to this research,
Said never announces that professionalization detaches
the literary work from the world as conceived by us.
Nevertheless, Said explains that professionalization
separates both the intellectual and text from the
Saidian concept of world, which is different from our
concept of world. Said's world is a world of
worldliness. It neither means the actual world nor the
East nor the West. In contrast, it refers to a world of
altruistic humanistic values which is not divided by
man into different areas, each area is remarked by
certain features and qualities corresponded to its
fabricated reality. Subsequently, specialization
dissociates the intellectual not from the ordinary
world, but from worldliness; from the world as it
should be. Accordingly, it is essential to elucidate
Said's concept of worldliness and its relationship to
both specialization and his concept of criticism in
order to understand more clearly how criticism could
be used as a strategy for a value system.
65
The Value System World : World of Worldliness.
Clearly, Said defines the concept of worldliness as
follows:
My contention is that worldliness does not come
and go nor is it here and there in the apologetic
and soupy way by which we often designate
history, a euphemism in such cases for the
impossibly vague notions. that .all. things take
place in time. Moreover, critics. are not merely
the alchemical translators of texts into
circumstantial reality or worldliness: for they
too are subject and producer of circumstances,
which are felt regardless of whatever objectivity
the critic's method possess. The point is that
texts have. ways of existing that even in their
most rarefied form are always enmeshed in
circumstances, time, place and society. (The
world, the Text and the critic35)
Said explains that worldliness is neither fixed nor
is it identified to certain culture. It neither exists in the
East nor in the West. It is an abstract realm of
humanistic values as it represents a sense of belonging
to all humanity. For him, worldliness is a critical term
that helps the intellectual to provide an objective
criticism without detaching both the text and the
66
intellectual from circumstantial reality. In addition, it
bestows upon Said's critical strategy the most
convenient humanistic milieu that endows the
intellectual with a lofty position over all the worldly,
cultural and material forces that prevent him or her
from presenting a neutral point of view toward the
interpreted text.
According to Said, the preceding literary methods,
based on separating text from its life, fail to present an
objective interpretation for their literary texts. I.A
Richard ''pioneered the technique called Practical
Criticism. This made a close study of literature
possible by isolating the text from history and context''
(Barry, Literary Theory, 15). Practical Criticism
believes that linking history and context to the text
helps produce subjective and non-neutral criticism.
However, other literary methods like, Marxism, New
Historicism and Cultural Materialism that connect text
interpretation with its historical, cultural and political
context have been accused of being subjective as the
intellectual can not escape the overwhelming force of
these conditions while interpreting his text.
67
Subsequently, amid the idealistic objectivity of
Practical Criticism and the materialist subjectivity of
Marxism, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism,
Said's strategy for a value system or his critical
strategy implicitly advocates a middle or contrapuntal
critical approach that could bring together the idealistic
objectivity of Practical Criticism and materialist
subjectivity of Marxism in a homogonous theoretical
framework. Thus the clandestine faculty of worldliness
rests in its reconciling the intellectual's filiations that
get his or her criticism and analysis and judgment of
his text built around his or her own cultural values
with the objectivity of the intellectual. That it is to say,
worldliness paves the way for the critic to loyally
belong to the world of humanistic values without
uprooting his natural filiations to his own society and
culture.
According to Said, worldliness revokes the world
of intellectual: Yet it confirms it. It conceals the
world of intellectual by replacing the spatial belonging
with a sense of belonging to the world of humanistic
values prioritizing his or her belonging to the entire
68
world. However, it asserts the world of intellectual by
informing him or her that he or she is a part of world
and society; the intellectual can not be detached from
his or her circumstantial reality. Subsequently, Said's.
concept .of worldliness:
does not imply the rejection of universalism per
se. It implies a scrupulous recognition that all
claims of a universal nature are particular
claims. Furthermore, and most importantly, it
means rescuing the marginalized perspective of
the minority as one from which to rethink and
remake universalist (ethical, political, cultural)
claims, thus displacing its assignation as the site
of the .local (Mufti, Auerbachin Istanbul 109)
Said's .worldliness. creates. a state of
psychological balance into the depth of the intellectual
between two oppositional powers; the first is that of his
or her filiations to his or her culture and nation that
makes him or her espouse consciously or unconsciously
his or her cultural values; the second is the power that
widens and mitigates his or her filiations to his or her
nation and mother culture, substituting it with a wider
sense of belonging to all humanity, allowing him or her
to start his or her thinking from a humanistic
69
perspective. Thus worldliness instructs the intellectual
to establish the Saidian value system into him or herself
before constructing it upon the ground of reality. Thus
the intellectual can get the suitable conditions for
weighting fairly the opposed and antagonistic human
experiences.
Clearly, weighting fairly the human experience of
Self and others is an arcane profession that requires a
contrapuntal intellectual whose sense of belonging is
equally affiliated to the different spots of globe. Thus
he or she could fairly assimilate the two opposed
experiences without relegating any of them to a lesser
status. Accordingly, worldliness helps the critic to
interpret his or her text as follows:
In reading a text, one must open it out both to
what went into it and what its author excluded.
Each cultural work is a vision of a moment, and
we must juxtapose that vision with various
revisions it later provoked….Each text has its
own particular genius, as does each
geographical region of the world, with its own
overlapping experiences and interdependent
histories of conflict.(Culture and Imperialism
67)
70
Said's worldliness never searches for the
availability of the perfect truth; it is impossible to
provide a perfectible interpretation of the text. Said
explains that the text is not created by a divine. It
results from an interaction between the author and his
world:
That a written text of the sort we care about is
originally the result of some immediate contact
between the author and medium. Therefore it
can be reproduced for the benefit of the world
and according to conditions set by and in the
world; however much author demurs at the
publicity he or she receives, once the text goes
into more than once copy the author's work in
the world and beyond authorial control. (The
World, the Text and the Critic 33).
However, the contemporary literary theory
surrogates worldliness with textuality, dealing with the
text as a holy revelation. Accordingly, the text relations
to the world are downplayed from any type of
interpretation or analysis. The historical experience is
replaced by the textual attitude:
Textuality has therefore become the exact
antithesis and displacement of what might be
71
called history. Textuality is considered to take
place yet, but by the same token it does not take
place anywhere or anytime in particular , it is
produced , but by no one at no time. It can be
read and interpreted, although reading and
interpreting are routinely understood to occur in
the form of misreading and misinterpreting.
(The World, the Text and the Critic 3)
The contemporary American literary criticism
confines its interpretation to the structure of text,
overlooking its historical experience, its political
condition, the autobiography of its author, and the
worldliness of the text. It does not also consider the
connection between text and the circumstantial realities
of human life.
In her essay ''Politics, the Profession and the
Critic'' Catharine Gallagher argues that Said makes use
of the concept of worldliness at its best to be
convenient to his concept of critical consciousness.
Said's idea of worldliness provides his critical concept
"a cosmopolitan critical distance from all cultures that
expands the possibilities for attachment to the world
"(34). It supplies the intellectual with an objective point
of view toward different cultures; to apply fairly the
72
same critical values to both his culture and other world
cultures. Yet Catharine notes a state of ambivalence
within the Saidain worldliness, particularly, when it is
applied to the ground of reality:
The word" worldly" thus comes to have two
opposite meanings: it signifies both the
rootedness of every cultural product in
particular commitment and detached
universalism (especially vis a vis state power)
that Said claims would follow from the
identification of those commitments (33).
As explained above, Said does not contradict
himself to admit that his concept of worldliness
signifies both a sense of universality and cultural
commitment. In fact, Said's critical concept neither
pursues perfect truth nor pure objectivity. However,
worldliness solicits a sense of balance into the depth of
the intellectual between his inevitable filiations to his
culture and his or her wider affiliations to the entire
world as it expands the intellectual's sense of belonging
to more than one culture without denying his or her
cultural commitment. Accordingly, worldliness helps
more to create the fair critical consciousness of
73
intellectual. Said's "worldliness originally mean to me,
at any rate, some location of oneself, one's work, or the
work itself, the literary works, the text and so on, in the
world, as opposed to some extra worldly, private
context'' (The World, the Text and the Critic 30).
In his book Criticism and Society AbdIrhaman A.
Hussein highlights the interpretative technique implicit
in Said's concept of worldliness in the following terms:
Said's conception of worldliness calls for a
historical materialist interpretation of literature
that is, a careful examination of the socio-
cultural formations, practices, institutions, and
agencies in which texts in general, literary texts
included; are caught up at a given historical
moment (162).
Hussein demonstrates that Said's worldliness
draws a remarkable attention to the historical and
material conditions of its text. Therefore worldliness
presents specific, accurate and limited interpretation of
the given text. ''Worldliness is concerned with the
materiality of text's Origin, for. in this material being is
embedded .in the very materiality of matters of which
74
it speaks: dispossession, injustice, marginality,
subjection'' (Ashcroft, The Paradox of Identity, 33)
The Intellectual Power of Said's Critical Strategy:
The Fair Critical Consciousness.
The concept of worldliness is very essential to
understand the underlying meaning of Said's critical
consciousness. It represents a fertile soil in which the
fair critical consciousness can effectively grow up.
Critical consciousness is a critical value coined by Said
that elucidates the importance of the universalist sense
of belonging to understand his critical concepts. It
represents the intellectual power of Said's critical
strategy that reproduces the fair critical consciousness
into the mind of the intellectual. According to Said,
criticism is nothing but what is produced by the critic.
Subsequently, the critical thinking of the critic should
be adjusted and modified before coming into reality in
order to have an objective and disinterested criticism.
Said's critical strategy is to adjust the critical vision of
intellectual:
All this, then, shows us the individual
consciousness place at sensitive nodal point,
75
and it is this consciousness at the critical point
which this book attempts to explore in the form
of what I call criticism .On the other hand, the
individual registers and is very much aware of
the collective whole, context, or situation in
which it finds itself, on the other hand, precisely
because of this awareness or worldly self-
situation, a sensitive response to the dominant
culture –that the individual consciousness is not
naturally and easily and child of the culture, but
a historical and social actor in it.(The World ,
the Text and the Critic35)
Said states that the critical consciousness in itself
does not produce an objective criticism. It is an abstract
concept, which naturally exists in the intellectual's
mind; it is governed by a set of conditions that directs,
controls and constrains the critical values of the
intellectual, whose result is either to present an
objective or subjective criticism. Thus appreciating the
critical consciousness necessitates knowing the
conditions which affect its function. The critical
consciousness is formed of a set of filialtive and
affiliative relationships; it is constituted as a result of
filialtive modes (natural bonds, the belonging to
culture), and then it interacts with the more complex
76
affiliative modes, (trans-personal bonds, belonging to
the complex world), whose result is the critical
consciousness. Accordingly, it is of great importance to
elucidate Said's concept of filiations and affiliation and
their relationship to the critical consciousness. Said
explains the concept of filiation and affiliation in the
following terms:
Thus if a filial relationship was held together
by natural bonds and natural forms of authority
involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and
instinctual conflict–the new affiliative relation
change these bonds into what seem to be
transpersonal forms-such .as guild
consciousness, consensus, collegiality,
professional respect, class and legitimacy of
dominant culture. The filialtive scheme belongs
to the realm of nature and of life, whereas
affiliation belongs to exclusively to culture and
society. (The world, the Text and the Critic 20).
Said explains that the critical consciousness is
firstly constituted because of the interaction between
one and his or her filial relationship, which is the
product of natural bonds such as belonging to family,
to society, to mother culture and to nation. The
77
filialtive mode is older and romantic than affiliative as
it survives only in the rural and primitive societies: It
is not accessible to its world. Therefore its drawbacks
can be embodied in self centrism, cultural purity,
venerations of one's own culture, and the racial
thinking. In other words, it elicits keen state of
identification between the intellectual and his or her
culture, obliterating any attempt to see what is beyond
the mother culture. Thus the intellectual's views on the
world are limited to such narrow stream of thoughts
imposed on him or her by allegedly pure culture.
Subsequently, such critical consciousness enslaves the
intellectual to the filial mode of thinking. Yet such
filial mode of thinking is no longer valid in our
modern and complex world, whose system of
relationships are extremely overlapped, intertwined
and hybrid in a way that makes it difficult for the
intellectual to confine his or her knowledge and
interpretative techniques to a sole mode of thinking.
Subsequently, such filial mode of thinking is
unwillingly changed into new affiliative mode that can
assimilate the new and more complex changes of our
78
today world in which the human bonds are replaced by
the guild bonds, and the transpersonal ones.
The world has become more hybrid than it was in
the past time. There are many immigrants and
expatriates intellectuals from the third world nations
who stay permanently in the metropolitan cities. In
addition, the mass media, internet and the very
advanced means of communications have broken out
the geographical barriers among different nations.
Subsequently the intellectual or critic is no longer
identified with his or her culture as his or her critical
consciousness is constituted as a result of interaction
with the rapid world changes, which widens, either
consciously or unconsciously, his or her set of
belongings and his or her thoughts of his or her
culture. Accordingly, such affiliative mode '' frees the
critic from a narrow view of texts connected in a
filiative relationship to other texts, with little attention
paid to the 'world' in which they come into being''
(Ashcroft, The Paradox of Identity 42).
Thus, it grants the critic a thorough awareness of
his or her world circumstances, obliterating the very
79
strong links between the intellectual and his or her
own culture which make him or her criticize, and
analyze the text without linking it to its worldly
circumstances. It creates a distance between critic and
his natural bonds, or what we might call criticism. It
makes the intellectual aware of the importance of the
knowledge of history, and the essence of the analytical
capacity for providing an objective criticism.
Subsequently, ''critical consciousness thus understood
entails'' interference'' in the business of the world''
(Hussein, Criticism and Society 223). Nevertheless,
the Western humanities deliberately focus on the filial
system of thought. Quoting Said at length may reflect
more clearly the techniques applied by the Western
humanities to interpret and syntheses their literary text
within the scope of the filial mode of thinking:
What.I am criticizing is two particular
assumptions. There is the first almost
unconsciously held ideological assumption that
the Eurocentric model for humanities actually
represents a natural and proper subject matter
for the humanities scholar. Its authority comes
not only from the orthodox canon of literary
monuments handed down through the
80
generations but also from the way their
continuity reproduces the filial continuity of the
chain biological procreation …Second is the
assumption that the principle relationships in
the study of literature-those I have identified as
on representation-ought to obliterate the traces
of other relationships within literary structures
that are based principally upon acquisition and
appropriation. ((The world, the Text and the
Critic 22).
Despite the inevitable replacement of the
affiliative modes with the filialtive modes, the
contemporary literary criticism is still reproducing the
filial modes. Such reproduction of the filial relationship
enables the intellectual to dismiss and derive away all
modes of thinking resulted from affiliative relationship
such as the hybridity of cultures, the discrepancy of
historical experience, the idea of worldliness and so on,
biasing his or her critical consciousness. Thus all non-
European elements are excluded; text interpretation
avoids mentioning the socio-political, historical and
autobiographical circumstances that help to produce the
literary text. Said supports his point of view by
mentioning Raymond Williams' note on the Western
81
critic's interpretation of the seventeenth century
English poems. Said explains such point more clearly:
His extraordinary illuminating discussion there
of the seventeenth century English county –
house poems does not concentrate on what
those poems represent, but on what they are as
the result of contested social and political
relationship.(The World, the Text and the Critic,
23).
Raymond Williams notes that the critics of the
seventeenth century English poems do not focus on the
political, social and historical experience in which text
was composed. However they present an explanation
to the structure of the text in itself. Thus, their critique
and analysis is more descriptive than analytical.
Said's critical strategy shows us the interrelated
connection among his theoretical values on one hand
and the clear relationship between such theoretical
values and his value system on the other hand.
However, the theoretical values of Said's criticism have
a limited role which does not exceed its function as
means of highlighting the inhumanistic values of the
traditional forms of criticism. Accordingly, the
82
theoretical values of Said's value system represent
impractical critical strategy.
Indeed, dissociating the critical values form their
humanistic referential framework, Said's critics
conclude that they are contradicted with their objective
as means of opposition and resistance to all forms of
oppression and manipulative knowledge because they
are simply unrealistic, seeking a perfectible world that
it is impossible to realize in the more drastic reality of
our world.
However, considering Said's value system as the
referential framework for understanding his critical
theory can lay bare the underlying inhumanistic
inclinations of the Western literary theory, embodied in
the pitfalls of professionalization. In addition, it
represents new interpretation to his concept of
worldliness, solving the apparently contradiction in it.
Furthermore, it also highlights an important fact,
mostly ignored by his critics, that his strategy for a
value system does not search for the critical
consciousness of the intellectual or critic, but it
endeavors hard to reach the fair critical consciousness,
which is mainly humanistic.
83
In brief, Said's value system epitomizes the thread,
un-noted, transparent, but felt that connects skillfully
his different critical values and unifies them into an
organic constitution; that it is to say the absence, or
ignorance or forgetting of any of his critical value leads
to the failure of Said's critical venture to present sound
and objective interpretation. Subsequently, the Saidian
humanistic thinking makes his critical concepts much
related to the life. Thus, Said’s critique of a given
literary work does not confine itself to investigate the
structure of the text.
However, it considers mainly the circumstances
that made the text and affected its production. In
addition, it also considers the conditions affecting the
author of the text and their relationship to the text
written. Subsequently, the most accurate description of
the Saidain critical value system is humanistic. Thus,
the idea of worldliness, filiations and affiliations and
the fair critical consciousness constitute Said's literary
value system or the theoretical values of his humanistic
criticism.
85
This chapter elucidates the role played by the
theoretical values of Said's value system in highlighting
the methodological misconceptions applied by the
Orientalists in Orientalism. It explains how the idea of
worldliness reflects Orientalists notion of belonging,
based mainly on the idea of division; the division of the
world into two unequal parts; the superior Occident and
the inferior Orient. In addition, it highlights how
Orientalists belief in their positional superiority could
constitute their perception of both themselves and
others, shaping the foundation of literary, cultural, and
historical production. Furthermore, it reflects how the
idea of the fair critical consciousness could reveal the
biased critical consciousness of Orientalists that allow
them to subjugate Orientalism to the idea of
professionalization. In other words, it explains how the
idea of fair critical consciousness reflects the
Orientalists deliberate ignorance of the reality of the
historical experiences of others portrayed in their text,
depicting it from their cultural reservoir, not from its
reality. It attempts to answer the question of whether
86
Said's theoretical values could emancipate Orientalism
from its narrow specialization and professionalization.
The Idea of Distinction and Inevitable Inequality.
Said's theoretical values of humanistic criticism
explained in Orientalism discuss the Orientalists
methodological misconceptions that stripe knowledge
off its humanistic values and subjugate Orientalism to
the idea of specialization and professionalization. Said
states that the knowledge of Orientalism is “a style of
thought based upon an ontological and epistemological
distinction made between ''the Orient and (most of the
time) the ''Occident” (Orientalism 2). Said's critique of
the idea of distinction and inevitable inequality derives
its authority and effectiveness from both the idea of
worldliness and the value of fair critical consciousness.
According to Said, the idea of distinction is
antagonistic to both the fair critical consciousness and
the idea of worldliness as it helps to divide the human
reality into different categories and to create unrealistic
barriers among different cultures. It is a methodological
instrument exploited to manifest the superiority of the
Occident over the Orient-al. Said’s choice of the word
87
“distinction is signifying power and status hierarchy
rather a mere difference'' (Mutant, Islam 176).
Subsequently, in Orientalism, Said's critical strategy
testifies itself in his rejection of the Orientalists
unchecked belief in the idea of distinction as it detaches
the Orientalist from depicting the reality of his or her
text:
Thus a very large mass of writers, among
whom are poets novelists, philosophers,
political theorists, economists, and imperial
administrators have accepted the basic
distinction between East and West as the
starting point for elaborate theories, epics,
novels, social descriptions and political
accounts concerning the Orient, its people,
customs "mind," destiny, and so on.
(Orientalism 2)
The Orientalists representation of others does not
attempt to develop a model of fair knowledge that
could view the human and historical experiences of
both self and other from a panoptic perspective. Such
form of the Orientalists knowledge conceals the reality
of the others' historical experience. The Orientalists
replicated the consequences of their unchecked belief in
88
the idea of distinction in their works depicting the
Orient- al; they considered it the starting point of their
thinking about the Oriental. Subsequently, such form of
knowledge is manipulative, biased, and intervened by
power and inhumanistic values. However, in his essay
''Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse'' Sadik Jalal
Alazem posits that the idea of distinction and inevitable
inequality does not stand for the starting point of the
Orientalists thinking about the Orient. In addition, he
explains that Said’s critique of the idea of distinction
explained in Orientalism is incompatible with the
reality of our world; Said attempts to alleviate both the
Occident and the Orient in the name of common
humanity. Thus Said's critical strategy, in Orientalism,
is principally irrational and contradicted with the reality
of our world (6).
Obviously, Alzem's critique of Said's humanistic
criticism, in Orientalism, lacks understanding of his
critical strategy. Said's critique of the idea of distinction
does signify his desire of eradicating both the Occident
and the Orient, replacing them with a prototype of
utopia. Yet Said launches his severe criticism into all
89
types of inhumanistic thinking resulted from the idea of
distinction such as the feeling of superiority, the
concealment of others' human experience, the
relegation of others to a lesser status and so on.
Therefore, Said's critical strategy entails the dominance
of the humanistic values over the idea of distinction
and inevitable inequality. Moreover, Alazem does not
show why the principle of distinction is not the starting
point for the Orientalists thinking about the Orient.
The Authoritative Position and the Limitation on
Thoughts (Idea of Professionalization).
Said's theoretical values of his critical strategy
explain the intertwined, overlapped and reciprocal
relationship between the idea of distinction and the
authoritative position and the limitation on thoughts.
''This opposition was reinforced not only by
anthology, linguistics, and history…by the rhetoric of
high cultural humanism'' (Orientalism 180). The idea
of distinction contributes mainly to construct the
perception of Self against others, who in turn conveys
such consequences to his or her text. Orientalists
devise the authoritative position and limitation on
90
thoughts in order to depict others according to the
dedications of idea of distinction and inevitable
inequality, which helps to conceal the shared and
intertwined historical experience. ''Flaubert, Vigny,
Nerval, King Lakes, Disraeli, Burton, all undertook
their pilgrimages in order to dispel the mustiness of
the pre-existing Orientalist archive'' (Orientalism
168). Thus the authoritative position and the
limitation on thoughts can be defined as a
methodological instrument that helps to subordinate
the Orientalists knowledge to the idea of distinction
and inevitable inequality as it allows the intellectual
to detach text from its intertwined and overlapped
historical reality by concealing the historical
experience of others. Said expounds the Orientalists
deep restriction to the authoritative position and
limitation on thoughts in the following terms:
I believed no one writing, thinking or acting on
the Orient could do so without taking the
account of the limitations on thought imposed
by Orientalism. In brief, because of
Orientalism the Orient was not (is not) a free
subject of thought or action. This is not to say
91
that Orientalism unilaterally determines what
can be said about the Orient, but that it is the
whole network of interests inevitably brought
to bear on (and therefore always involved in)
any occasion when that peculiar entity “the
Orient" is in question”. (Orientalism 3)
According to Said, the authoritative thought and
the limitation on the Orientalists thoughts is divided
into two integrated stages, which are interconnected
with one another. Ignoring such two interrelated stages,
the researcher finds out that the idea of specialization
neither controls the intellectual nor detaches text from
its reality. These stages involve the intellectual
authority and the textual attitude. Said defines the idea
of intellectual authority as follows:
It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is
instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it
establishes canon of taste and values; it is
virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas
it dignifies as a true, and from, traditions,
perceptions, and judgment it forms,
transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority
can, indeed must be analyzed. All these
attributes of authority apply to Orientalism,
and much of what I do in this study is to
92
describe both the historical authority in and
the personal authorities of Orientalism.
(Orientalism 19-20)
The intellectual authority is the power that
constitutes, governs and regulates the perception of the
intellectual against others. According to Said's
Orientalism, the intellectual authority is defined as a
methodological instrument that constitutes the
Orientalists knowledge, perception, canon and value
system. ''From these complex rewriting the actualities
of the modern Orient were systematically excluded,
especially when a gifted pilgrims like… Flaubert
preferred Lanes description to what their eyes and mind
showed them immediately'' (Orientalism176).
Subsequently, according to Said, the intellectual
authority is in oppositional strand to the idea of the fair
critical consciousness, whose main goal is to
emancipate the intellectual from his or her cultural and
national filiations while criticizing any text related to
others. In his article ''Orientalism in Crisis'' Anwar
Abdel Malek argues that Orientalists limitation to the
intellectual authority forces them to produce unchanged
93
and static picture of the Orient-al. ''The result was the
production of material about the Orient, methods for
studying, and examples even the Orientals did not
have'' (Orientalism 127).
Obviously, the intellectual authority disengages
the intellectual or the critic from depicting the truth of
historical experience or the reality of text. However, the
textual attitude helps to detach the text itself from the
circumstantial reality. ''It seems a common human
failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the
disorientations of direct encounters with the human''
(Orientalism 92). According to Said's Orientalism, the
textual attitude is defined as a methodological
misconception that detaches Orientalist text from the
reality of the Orient-al, focusing on the inherited text of
predecessors. ''He literally abolishes himself as a
human subject by refusing to marry into human society.
Thus, he preserves his authoritative identity as a mock
participant and bolsters the objectivity of his narrative ''
(Orientalism 163). It dedicates the intellectual to get his
knowledge from his or her Orientalistic archive and
cultural fixed moulds of thought, textually recorded.
94
"The rapport between an Orientalist and the Orient was
textual” (Orientalism 52). Therefore, the textual
attitude provides us with a fabricated reality
corresponded to the intellectual authority, not to the
reality of historical experience. Hence, the received
reality is imposed upon him or her from above.
Furthermore, part of this reality is metamorphosed
when it is rehearsed from an intellectual to another.
Each intellectual may slightly change the depicted
historical experience as he or she depicts it from its
inherited text in a way that is corresponding to his or
her subjective and personal perspective, to have at the
end a form of knowledge that is wholly different from
the original. Thus, it perverses knowledge; it does not
convey the reality of its text:
A text purporting to contain knowledge about
something actual, and arising out of
circumstances similar to the ones I have just
described, is not easily dismissed. Expertise is
attributed to it .The authority of academics,
institutions, and government can accrue to it,
surrounding it with still greater prestige than its
practical success. Most important, such texts can
create not only knowledge but also the very
95
reality they appear to describe. In a time such
knowledge and reality produce a tradition or what
Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose
material. presence. or weight, not the originality
of a given author, is responsible for the texts
produced out of it. (Orientalism 94)
The strict correspondence between the Orientalists
knowledge of the Orient-al and their cultural reservoir,
which is best designated as the Orientalistic
professionalization, resembles Frederic Nietzsche's
concept of the 'appearance and thing in itself'
explained in his book Human All Too Human(1884).
Nietzsche's concept means that there is no real
connection between the reality of situation and its
appearance. Moreover, in most cases, the intellectual
depicts the appearance rather than reality. Nietzsche
argues that life and human experience constitute the
appearance of the world. Thus this appearance is
constantly renewable, and not fixed. Therefore, there is
no connection between the experience of life and its
reality; the experience of life reflects no more than the
appearance; it is a mere fantasy of the world. In his
96
book Human All Too Human Nietzsche puts it clearly
in the following lines:
Conversely, stricter logicians, after they…
established the concept of the metaphysical as
the concept of that which is unconditioned and
consequently unconditioning, denied any
connection between the unconditioned (the
metaphysical world), and the world we are
familiar with. So that the thing in itself does not
appear in the world of appearances, and any
conclusion about the former on the basis of the
latter must be rejected… the human intellectual
allowed appearance to appear and projected its
mistaken conceptions onto things. (23)
It is manifest that Said makes use of Nietzsche's
concept of 'appearance and the thing in itself' in his
book Orientalism. Said believes that Orientalism
including its thoughts, ideas, notes, and perception
about the Orient is not coincided with the reality of the
Orient-al; it is the appearance of reality. Likewise, in
his book Marx and the End of Orientalism (1978)
Brayn S.Turna argues that the end of Orientalism
requires escaping the Orientalists circular manner for
depicting the Orient-al. They should break out the solid
97
and fixed Orientalist tradition, which results in
“Oriental despotism, mosaic societies, and the Muslim
city” (85). Thus Said's critical system explains that
Orientalism is not a free subject of thought that has no
corresponding reality other than such fabricated reality,
taken from the Orientalists inherited predecessors'
archive and the Western tradition.
However, John Mackenzie explains in his book,
Orientalism History, Theory and the Arts (1995), that
Orientalism thought is a free subject of thought because
it is not subjugated to the rules of specialization and
professionalization. He concedes that Orientalism as a
field of knowledge is neither static nor monolithic. Yet
it is changeable and renewable. Proving the validity of
his argument, he avoids analyzing the contradictions in
the wide range of texts, through which the East has
been explored by the West. However, he concentrates
on studying art because the investigation of art, the
Eastern influence on the Western counterpart, can
reflect the reciprocity between the East and the West
more obviously. Thus his argument can be explained
clearly in the following lines:
98
In design it produced new sensations over a
whole range .of. artifacts, .revolutionary
approach to. ornament, different ways of
handling. space, color... In case of music
composers sought in the East an extension of
instrumental language, different sonorities…
In doing so, they attempted to establish both
national and cosmopolitan styles. While in
the theatre, character, spectacle, movement,
design and fabric created a fresh visual and
dramatic language, opportunities both for
display and for satire, often a parodying of Self
through the portrayal of the Other. In all these
arts, the result was often profound extension of
mood and of psychological state, a dramatic.
liberation from existing. conventions .and.
constricting restraints; and in each of them the
repeated appeal to a different cultural tradition
infused radical movements more frequently
than it propped up existing conservative
ones… Orientalism was but one of a whole
sequence of a perceived invented traditions
invoked by restless art. (209)
Mackenzie demonstrates that the Western art states
that the Orientalists neither deal with the Orient as an
object nor reduce it into monolithic entity. Yet it is a
99
source of inspiration, innovation, and revival for the
Western art in particular and the Western culture in
general. The Western borrowings from the Eastern arts
liberate the Western culture from Ethnocentrism and
Self-centrism. Accordingly, Orientalism emancipates
Orientalists thoughts through its permanent process of
borrowing new elements from the Orient that help
change its inherited thoughts and create a state of
hybridity. Subsequently, Orientalism assimilates the
Western culture and makes it heterogeneous. Moreover,
it also affects the culture of the Orient. Therefore,
Orientalism is a style of thought based upon reciprocal
relationship between two different cultures, namely the
Orient and the Occident.
Mackenzie's invocation of the artistic Orientalism
is convenient to his case. Yet- does the artistic
Orientalism bear any ideology? The artistic Orientalism
bears no ideology. In contrast, the textual Orientalism
is manifestly ideological at most of its aspects- and this
is Saidian Orientalism. Therefore, Mackenzie's appeal
of the artistic Orientalism is impractical as the artistic
Orientalism is void of any ideological and inhumanistic
100
thinking, which Said attempts to deconstruct in
Orientalism.
Intervention of Power to Knowledge
Said explains that putting the idea of distinction
into its cultural framework via limiting knowledge to
professionalization facilitates the intervention of power
to knowledge. In other words, the intervention of power
to knowledge derives its validity, legitimacy and
correctness from subjugating such form of knowledge
to the idea of professionalization. ''Every thing they
knew, more or less, about the Orient came from the
books written in the tradition of Orientalism''
(Orientalism 94). Such form of knowledge was
exploited as a typical instrument for the Western
imperialist enterprise in the Orient. Said's reference to
Balfour's lecture about the English occupation of the
Egyptian lands highlights the intervention of power to
knowledge in Orientalism. Balfour states that England
grants itself the right to dominate Egypt because of its
knowledge of Egypt; simultaneously, Egypt beseeches
such domination. Said's critical strategy explains that
the intervention of power to knowledge results in
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misinterpreting, misusing and manipulating of
knowledge:
Knowledge to Belfour means surveying a
civilization from its origins to its prim to its
decline. The object of such knowledge is
inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is
a “fact” which, if it develops, changes, or
otherwise transforms itself in the way that
civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is
fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To
have such knowledge of such a thing is to
dominate it, to have authority over it. And
authority here means for “us” to deny
autonomy to ''it”. (Orientalism 32)
The intervention of power to knowledge is a
deteriorated and degraded stage of the forms of the
inhumanistic knowledge. Such form of knowledge is to
be considered better case of Said's critical strategy that
connects the apparently isolated and professional forms
of knowledge with its world and its society. Though the
traditional forms of criticism and the contemporary
American critical theory cut off text relations to its
world, Said provides us with various examples
reflecting the intervention of power to knowledge; how
102
the alleged pure knowledge could motivate people to
colonize and destroy others; how such knowledge is
more interconnected with its outside reality. Thus
Said's theoretical values could help render the critical
theory to its world and lay bare the scandals of what is
known as the humanistic and fine forms of Western
knowledge that claim its detachment and isolation from
its outside world.
Subsequently, the theoretical values of Said's
value system argues that the idea of distinction and
inevitable inequality, the intellectual authority, the
textual attitude and the intervention of power to
knowledge are the Orientalists methodological
misconceptions that guide, control, present and
represent the Western discourse on the Orient. The
Western discourse is to be regarded as the medium
through which knowledge is filtrated from its
humanistic values and turned into inhumanistic.
Said contends that "without examining Orientalism
as a discourse one can not possibly understand the
enormously systematic discipline by which European
culture was able to manage and even produce the
103
Orient politically, sociologically, militarily,
ideologically'' (Orientalism3). Subsequently, his
invocation of the Foucauldian discourse, in this book
Orientalism, makes it instrumental. Said admits that
knowledge, discursively formed, is different from the
reality. However, it is coincided with the inherited texts
of the Orientalists traditions. Thus his invocation of
Foucault's concept of discourse shows us the
importance of value system to understand the structure
of the Orientalism.
However, in his book The Predicament of Culture
(1988) James Clifford argues that Said’s value system
is impractical because, in first place, Said levels his
critique to the tradition from which he could get his
value system. Second, his claim of value system is
corrupted by adopting oppositional strand. Finally, it
denies the local cultural traits, which distinguishes each
group from the other.
In his essay ''Orientalism and its Problems'' Denis
Porter argues that Said’s value system, in Orientalism,
fails to present a model of humanistic knowledge or an
alternative to Orientalism (179). Said is not clear
104
enough to differentiate between ideology and the value
system. There is a kind of blurring within the Saidian
concept of value system. Said concedes that the value
system can be obtained, but its explanation is a difficult
requirement. In other words, Said concedes that there
is a value system; however, it is difficult to find such
fertile soil in which the value system can grow up more
effectively. Accordingly, Said undergoes a condition of
ambivalence regarding his concept of value system.
In their essay ''The Prison House of
Orientalism'' Zakia Parkash, Swswati Sengupta and
Sharmila Purkeyastha argue that Said refuses to place
the dominated and dominating in the same field of
discourse. In other words, Said’s refusal to admit the
difference between the Orient and the Occident makes
him resort to establish humanistic and critical value
system in order to put an end to the strife between the
long-term opposed parties, the Orient and the Occident.
Nevertheless, Said’s value system reverses its quest:
''Not surprisingly the influence of Orientalism can be
traced, in large measure, to the critique of dichotomies
and essentialisms it has inspired'' (55).
105
Accordingly, Said's theoretical values of value
system shed light onto the methodological
misconceptions, which make the Orientalists
knowledge inhumanistic. In other words, it reveals the
intellectual instruments that help Orientalists to comply
with the idea of professionalization, concealing the
reality of the historical experiences of others from their
texts. However, such theoretical values do not help to
break out the professionalization of Orientalism; they
are regarded as methodology for revisiting Orientalism.
Subsequently, Said's theoretical values are not valid to
represent a practical strategy applied to the ground of
reality; they do not represent any alternative to
Orientalism.
107
This chapter attempts to discuss to what extent the
theoretical values of Said's concept of criticism are
valid to constitute an integrated critical theory, which
has both the theoretical and practical lines. Thus it
explains the cognitive facets of Said's value system
through investigating his concept of culture explained
in Culture and Imperialism. It also expounds how the
concept of culture helps use criticism as a strategy for a
value system via the following steps: The first step
refers to how the concept of culture helps convert the
intellectuals' rigid cognizance of their cultural purity,
replacing it with a prototype of hybrid culture that
allows him or her to belong to the idea of worldliness,
transgressing all cultural filiations. Secondly, it
elucidates how to stir up the fair critical consciousness
of the intellectual via instructing him or her that the
historical experience is not monolithic, but it is
overlapped and shared by two parties at least.
Subsequently, the intellectual can break out
professionalization of critical theory. Finally, it outlines
whether digesting the concept of worldliness and the
discrepancy of the historical experience can allow the
108
intellectual to apply Said's critical strategy in an
objective and unbiased way, epitomizing the
indispensable strategy for accomplishing the value
system that helps achieve the forms of objective
criticism.
Said's strategy for a value system does not confine
itself to foreground the pitfalls of the contemporary
American critical theory, epitomized in the arcane
professionalization. However, it attempts to break with
professionalization; it helps surrogate professionalization
with a critical strategy that connects the critical theory
with its world and motivates the intellectual to depict
the unnoticed discrepancy of the overlapped and
intertwined historical experience portrayed in the
interpreted text.
The Hybridity of World Cultures: Toward the First
Step of Said's Critical Strategy.
The first step toward the accomplishment of Said's
critical strategy is to convert the intellectual's cognitive
modes of thinking that control and guide his or her
thoughts and views about both himself or herself and
others. According to Said, the main reservoir of such
109
cognitive modes of thinking is culture. Therefore,
cognizing, assimilating and applying Said's own
concept of culture represents the hallmark of his critical
strategy because of its clandestine influence on the
intellectual's stiff perception of both his culture and
other world cultures. Subsequently, it had better discuss
Said's definition of culture at length in order to
underscore its interrelated and interdependent liaison
with his critical strategy:
There is a more interesting dimension to this
idea of culture as possessing possession. And
that is the power of culture by virtue of its
elevated or superior position to authorize, to
dominate, to legitimate, demote, interdict, and
validate: in short, the power of culture to be an
agent of, and perhaps>the. main. agency for,
powerful differentiation within its domains and
beyond it too.…What is more important in
culture is that it is a system of values saturating
downward almost everything within its
purview; yet paradoxically, culture dominates
from above without at the same time being
available to every thing and every one it
dominates. (The World, the Text and the
Critic9)
110
Said's concept of culture focuses mainly on the
inhumanistic values that differentiate between Self and
others. According to him, culture is a value system,
either humanistic or inhumanistic, that reproduces,
shapes, regulates, and directs the consciousness of its
people toward others. With respect to the Western
culture, such value system strips culture off its
humanistic values as it concentrates only on the
centrality of Westerners and their inevitable superiority.
Subsequently, it revives the hierarchical division
among the different cultures. In other words, it
emphasizes the singularity and purity of its own
culture. It endows itself with the sole right of judging,
issuing views, constituting and communicating
knowledge to other cultures, which are supposed to be
inferior and lesser, excluding the overlapped,
intertwined and discrepant historical experiences shared
by all world cultures.
Said's concept of knowledge declines the value
system adopted by the Western culture. Said tries to
deconstruct it in his book Culture and Imperialism
substituting it with a prototype of humanistic value
111
system that drives its intellectual authority from
building up a set of common values shared by all world
cultures. Such value system, standing for the typical
model of universal culture, helps get to the bottom of
Saidain polemic of how the intellectual could critique
his or her society objectively from within without being
detached from it, either consciously or unconsciously.
In other words, it epitomizes Said's critical strategy that
is perquisite for putting his theoretical values into
practice.
Indeed, the concept of culture analyzed in Culture
and Imperialism rebuffs the absolute identification of
culture with nation or state because it so strongly
contributes to asserting man-made geographical
boundaries, and enriches the xenophia. ''Culture in this
sense is a source of identity, and a rather combative one
at that, as we see in ''returns'' to culture and traditions''
(Culture and Imperialism ii). Thus, the devotion to the
idea of cultural purity can result in spreading ignorance
and hatred rather than enabling knowledge:
112
In our wish to make ourselves heard, we tend
very often to forget that the world is a crowded
place and that if every one were to insist on the
radical purity or priority of one's own voice, all
we would have be the awful din of unending
strife, and a bloody political mess, the true
horror of which is beginning to be perceptible
here and there in the re-emergence of racist
politics in Europe, the cacophy of debates over
political correctness and identity politics in the
United States. (Culture and Imperialism XXI)
Nevertheless, the Westerners are unable to note
that their culture is hybrid: It is the resultant of long-
standing process of permanent exchange with other
cultures. “Far from being unitary or monolithic or
autonomous things, cultures actually assume more
foreign elements alterities, differences, than they
consciously exclude” (Culture and Imperialism 15). It
is a state of constant reciprocity among all world
cultures whose result is:
Who In India or Algeria today can confidently
separate out the British or the French
component of the past from the present
actualities, and who in Britain or France can
drew a clear circle around British London or
113
French Paris that would exclude the impact of
India and Algeria upon those two Imperial
cities?(Culture and Imperialism 15)
In settling such a question, Said resorts to clarify
the point of view of Martin Bernal’s book Black Athena
(1987) in which Bernal critiques the exclusionary
model of self representation espoused by the Western
culture. The Western culture claims its purity by
excluding the shared and intertwined elements with
other world cultures. ''The great and pregnant elements
of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a
manner they make the genius of Indo-European people
vary from those of a Semitic''(Arnold Culture and
Anarchy 141). Despite the fact that the Greek
civilization is the root of modern Western civilizations,
it derives elements from Egyptians, Semitic, and
various other Southern and Eastern cultures. The Greek
writers themselves acknowledge the hybridity of their
past culture. However, the Western intellectuals
deliberately skip the texts pertaining to the hybridity of
their past cultures.
Robert Young, in his book Colonial Desire:
Hybridity in Theory, Cultural Race (1995), argues that
114
there is no pure culture. The progress of mankind
results from the cultural hybridity and reciprocal
communication. Perhaps believing that all world
cultures are hybrid can help the intellectual to produce
an objective criticism because, in the first place, it
adjusts his or her mind to digest easily the fact that his
or her own culture results from an un-endless series of
exchanges among different world cultures. Subsequently,
it furnishes the critic with the appropriate ambience of
presenting somewhat objective criticism as his or her
weighted and one-sided filiations to his or her nation
and culture is dwindled to a lesser degree, diverting his
or her sense of belonging to the entire world. Therefore,
it reinforces the intellectual's affiliations to the Saidain
unique world of worldliness. As a result, when the
critic criticizes and interprets any work of art related to
others, he or she prioritizes the value system to his or
her pre-existed and inherited ideas; the intellectual
thinks of others as a component of his or her own
culture, participants in its making process, not as a
strange element or as an enemy that represents a
permanent source of threat. Thus he or she attempts to
115
depict the historical experience of others from its
origins, not from its ready-made rigid moulds of
thoughts dedicated by his or her own culture: The
intellectual is consciously or unconsciously motivated
to start to think about the excluded facet of the
historical experience.
Accordingly, from a critical perspective, the idea of
the hybridity of cultures can be defined as the first
practical value of Said's strategy for a value system that
helps deconstruct professionalization and puts the idea
of worldliness, mostly theoretical paradigm, into its
practical framework via converting the intellectual's
ardent belief in the purity and superiority of his or her
culture that averts him or her from affiliating to the
world of worldliness and from situating the text in the
world in turn. It is worthy noting that Said’s concept of
hybridity of culture gains its relevance and power from
the discrepancy of the historical experience.
The Discrepancy of the Historical Experience:
Toward the Second Step of Said's Critical Strategy.
Said considers both culture and tradition mainly
historical experience. In other words, they originally
116
represent human experience that is transformed into
historical experience whose configuration as culture
and tradition is enunciated in discourse or in recorded
history. ''No experience that is interpreted or reflected
on can be characterized as immediate as no critic or
interpreter can be entirely believed if he or she claims
to have achieve perspective that is subject neither to
history nor to social setting ''(Culture and Imperialism
15). Everything occurring in the world brings history
into being. Therefore the historical experience yields
the world political, aesthetic, cultural, traditional
elements and so on. Said puts it in the following terms:
The poet, Eliot says, is obviously an individual
talent, but he works within a tradition that can
not be merely inherited but can only be obtained
''by great labor''. Tradition, he continues:
According to Eliot, tradition involves the
historical sense; this historical sense involves a
perception, not only of the pastiness of the past,
but of its presence; the historical sense compels
a man to write not merely with his own
generation in his bones but with his feeling that
the whole of the literature of his own country
has simultaneous existence and composes a
simultaneous order. (Culture and Imperialism1)
117
According to Said, the Western intellectuals
perceive the historical experience as monolithic and
unitary. Such unitary vision of the historical experience
procures its power and authority from replicating its
cultural forms, either in literary works or in any other
branch of humanistic knowledge, throughout the span
of time. When the intellectual thinks about devising a
work of art, he or she knits it within one's own
tradition, accumulatively constituted in connection with
a system of monolithic historical experience; the
intellectual does not attempt to ponder over what is
beyond his or her historical experience and tradition.
Said believes that ''the construction of the images of
European was mainly traditional'' (Culture and
Imperialism 15). In their book The Invention of
Tradition (1983) Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
explain that the Western culture keeps up its historical
experience unchanged and monolithic throughout the
relentless process of inventing its past tradition:
'Invented tradition' is taken to mean a set of
practices, normally governed by overtly or
tactically accepted rules and of a ritual or
symbolic nature, which seeks to inculcate
118
certain values and norms of behaviors by
repetition, which automatically implies
continuity with the past. In fact, where possible,
they normally attempt to establish continuity
with a suitable historical past. (1)
The invention of tradition is defined as a way for
bringing forward the past to the light of the present
without changing its significance. It curbs the
intellectual tight to his or her tradition and culture; it
helps to deliver both tradition and culture to the present
without any critical thinking. Thus the invention of
tradition clots the historical experience. It disengages
the Western culture from its historical reality, political
conditions and social circumstances. As a result, it
helps to depict history in a circular manner. Therefore,
it neither approves the Western culture its right to
examine its ancient relationships with other world
cultures nor does it permit it to accept and assimilate
others. In addition, it neither gives the Western culture
the chance to reconsider its values nor to think critically
about itself. Subsequently, the invention of tradition is
a mere technique to preserve both the Western tradition
and culture without any change.
119
However, Said regards the historical experience as
a double-faced concept, saddled with two underlying
senses; the first sense is connected with how the
historical experience is best represented by the critic or
the intellectual and the second is interrelated with the
internal sense of the historical experience itself, or its
universality. Said ventilates his point of view toward
the historical experience in the following lines:
In juxtaposing experiences with each other, in
letting them play off each other, it is my
interpretative political aim (in the broadest
sense) to make concurrent those views and
experiences that are ideologically and
culturally closed to each other and that attempt
to distance or suppress other views and
experiences. Far from reducing the
significance of ideology, the exposure and
dramatization of the discrepancy highlight its
cultural importance; this enables us to
appreciate its power and understand its
continuing influence. (Culture and
Imperialism 32)
In its broadest sense, the historical experience is
discrepant as it involves two opposed parties or more;
for example, colonialism was designated as a historical
120
experience as it occurred a certain time of history and
maintained the world archive a certain recorded history.
Though it was mainly executed by the colonizer, it is
impossible to wipe out or cover up the colonized
involvement:
We must be able to think through and
interpret together experiences that are
discrepant, each with its particular agenda
and pace of development, its own internal
formations, its internal coherence and
system of external relationships all of them
co-existing and interacting with others''
(Culture and Imperialism 33).
Furthermore, the historical experience has
universal or humanistic relevance; the universality or
the humanistic sense of the historical experience means
that it is against human's nature to confiscate one's own
feelings to the experiences that one has already
grappled or confronted. Such historical experience
could be felt by those who witnessed it, saw it and read
it. Said puts it clearly in the following lines:
If one believes with Gramsci that the
intellectual vocation is socially possible
as well as desirable, then it is an
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inadmissible contradiction at the same
time to build analyses of historical
experiences around exclusions, that
stipulate for instance that only woman
can understand feminine experience,
only Jewish can understand the Jewish
experience, and only the formally
colonial experience can understand the
colonial experience... The difficulty with
theories of essentialism and exclusiveness,
or with the barriers and sides, is that
they give rise to polarization that absolve
and forgive ignorance and demagogy
more than they enable knowledge.
(Culture and Imperialism 30)
In case of demarcating our thoughts and feelings
to the area of our own experiences and confrontations,
then how we can feel the torment, suffering and
miseries of others; man will be turned into machine
alike. If we believe that the historical experience is
exclusionary, then, it incites us to adopt a self-
defensive mode. It stirs us unconsciously to stick up for
our experience whether it is fair or oppressive.
Accordingly, we launch into sever critique against
others without trying to develop any type of objective
122
knowledge. “As a result, you will demote the different
experience of others to a lesser status” (Culture and
Imperialism 30). Said explains that the intellectual's
acknowledgement of the discrepancy of the historical
experience without losing its particularity avoids him or
her authorizing his or her own experience more
distinctive and superior status. Subsequently, though
the historical experience is subjective in its core, it
transgresses the national lines, the fabricated
geographical barriers among different nations and
different cultures and the supposed systems of racial
thinking.
Indeed, the humanistic valences of the historical
experience and its discrepancy affect to a greater extent
Said's critical strategy as it principally stimulates the
citric to search for or to inquiry about the concealed or
excluded facet of the historical experience and to
interpret it from a humanistic standpoint. The
intellectual's true feeling of the universality of the
historical experience creates a state of incarnation
between one and the oppressed, whose voices are
suppressed or conveyed according to what is decided
123
by the oppressor at the best conditions. Thus it enables
the intellectual to refuse the fabricated academic
principle of non-interference, whose reality is to make
the intellectual subservient to his or her own cultural
instructions.
In her essay ''Symposium on Edward Said's
Culture and Imperialism'' Marry Louis Part argues that
Said's discrepancy of the historical experience has a
considerable impact on his critical theory as he seeks
hard to restore ''the historical processes that text has
excluded them''(3). Nevertheless, his notion of
discrepancy of the historical experience is not
convenient to his critical strategy as it congeals the
distance between Self and others. ''The point of
reference in this quotation is still the metropolis-the
traditional others are still others'' (3).
In his essay, ''Hope and Reconciliation: a Review
of Edward Said W'' Paul A. Bove explains that Said's
critical strategy derives its legitimacy from conceiving
human experience as mainly historical experience:
He has mastered the historical scholarship on
imperialism, on national liberation struggles,
124
and on current efforts to relate the First and
Third Worlds after then end of the Cold war.
Second, the book is historical and as the very
basis of history: it depends upon and reinvents
the critical and creative possibilities of literary
history; it offers itself as a historical
document, not merely as record, as it were, of
a moment, but as an agency in the
reorganization of cross –cultural relations in
the current world. (267)
Bove argues that Said’s conceptualization of
human experience as discrepant historical experience,
involving more than one party, allows his or her critics
to deconstruct the claimed contradiction of his critical
strategy; how to emancipate the theoretical values of
criticism from their theoretical framework that
handicapped them to put an alternative to the idea of
specialization and professionalization. Thus Said's
conceiving of the human experience as a historical
helps put his critical concepts into practice, situate its
text in the world and elucidate the sheer and
interconnected relationship among his different critical
values. As a result, his critical strategy endeavors hard
to expose the concealed or excluded historical
125
experience from the Western novel written in the 19th
century that referred to the overseas colonies.
Subsequently, Said could conclude that the
narrative of the 19th century English novels depicted
only the historical experience of the dominant party and
excluded the historical experience of others. In his
article ''Representing Empire: Class, Culture and the
Popular Theatre in the Nineteenth Century'' Michael
Hays argues that Said's notion of the historical
experience as discrepant allows him to reinterpret the
narrative forms written in the nineteenth century,
showing how the supposedly autonomous works of art
have a set of reference to empire. In the following lines,
Said explains the deliberate concealment of the
historical experiences of colonized made by both the
mid-nineteenth century British novelists and the critics
who attempted critical interpretative enterprise to these
novels:
Every novelist and every critics or a theorist of
the European novel notes its institutional
character. Yet while distinguished studies of
eighteenth century English novel by Ian Watt,
Leonard Davis, John Richetti, and Michael
126
McKeon, have devoted considerable attention
to the relationship between the novel and the
social space, the imperial perspective has been
ignored. (Culture and Imperialism 76)
According to Said, though Western critics linked
novel with its social space, they did not consider its
imperial perspective. However, “novel and imperialism
are unthinkable without each other'' (Culture and
Imperialism 70). Novel is an encyclopedic work, which
has many complex and various references to its world
that follow the norms of the existing institutions of
bourgeois society. In reality, novel partook widely in
England’s over sea's empire. It was exploited as an
instrument for the articulation of the British power.
However, restoring the concealed historical
experience to the literary work is not sufficient to
interpret and critique the ambiguous and hidden parts
implicit in the text. Such reading is an abstract process
whose function is to highlight certain historical facts
connected with the interpreted work. Yet literary
criticism or criticizing a literary work is acted by man,
whose feeling of his or her text is an essential element
for presenting a sound interpretation. The sense of
127
critic's feeling should intervene inwardly into text in
order to shed light on those ambiguous and non-clear
points that can not be reached by the mental and
abstract process of traditional literary criticism.
Furthermore, the text is woven by a human being who
unwillingly portrays the prevalent feeling of his
society, nation and culture in such text. Thus Said
invokes Raymond Williams' structure of feeling in
order to show the importance of human feeling for
presenting an objective interpretation of the text and to
foreground what type of feeling reflected by literary
texts. In Preface to Film (1979) Williams explains his
concept of structure of feeling as follows:
In the study of a period, we may be able to reconstruct, with more or less accuracy, the material life, the social organization, and, to a large extent, the dominant ideas….To relate a work of art to any part of that observed totality may, in varying degrees, be useful, but it is common experience, in analysis, to realize that when one has measured the work against the separable parts, there yet remains some element for which there is no external counterpart. This element, I believe, is what I have named the structure of feeling of a period and it is only realizable through experience of the work of art itself as a whole. (14)
128
Raymond Williams explains that the external
elements such as the material life, the social
organization and the dominant ideas, the historical and
social conditions are not adequate to provide an
objective and thorough interpretation of the literary
work. Williams notes that though these elements are
convenient to interpret the available text, there is some
thing un-interpreted or still obscure in the text. Thus
such obscure signification necessitates the human's
feeling. In other words, the text is made by man. Thus
human's soul and feeling is mysteriously interceded in
the text. Therefore the critic should feel the text as a
whole; he should employ his sense of feeling in order
to realize what is difficult to reach through the
materialist elements. Such a notion is the real meaning
of Williams' concept of the structure of feeling.
According to Hussein's Criticism and Society the
structure of feeling can be defined as follows:
It is not only that we must go beyond formally held belief (in describing ''structure of feeling'')…It is that we are concerned with meaning and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs are in practice. (253)
129
Accordingly, the 'structure of feeling' can be
defined as a literary technique that helps interpret the
literary works through fixing the prevalent cultural
feeling of the nation against their life circumstances or
against an important event that touched deeply their
lives and had a mysterious and un-noted impact on the
production of the literary work in turn. For instance,
during the nineteenth and eighteenth century the British
people had a unified feeling of the importance of
empire to home, which disallowed them to resist the
idea of plundering the resources of other nations. They
had a feeling that what they did was no more than a
civilizing mission; we went there just to enlighten their
minds, not to steal their bodies. Subsequently, the
novelists and the intellectuals had copied unconsciously
or consciously such rampant feeling in their works
related to the empire.
As a humanistic critic, Said could conceptualize
the underlying meaning of Williams' concept of
'structure of feeling', renovate its stream of thought and
call it the' structure of reference and attitude'.
According to Said, the structure of reference simply
130
means the cultural allusions to the facts of empire taken
from the nineteenth century British novel. “Taken
together these allusions constitute what I have called a
structure reference”. (Culture and Imperialism 62).
Thus 'the structure of reference and attitude' can be
defined as the cultural attitude of the British intellectual
toward others, manifested by the diverse references to
empire displayed in the narrative forms.
Subsequently, the Western novel participates in
advancing the perceptions and attitudes of the Western
intellectual about England and periphery. For instance,
the nineteenth century English novel refers to others as
subjects, subordinates and backwarded and to the
British intervention in peripheries as a civilizing
mission. Subsequently, Said's invention of structure of
reference and attitude allows him to demonstrate both
the Westerners' feeling of others and their perception of
peripheries through fixing, analyzing and critiquing
such references.
Subsequently, the 'structure of reference and
attitude' exerts a major role in building up Said's
strategy for a value system as it helps him, in addition
131
to other humanistic values, to put the theoretical values
into practice. It affords the idea of the contrapuntal
reading a unique critical force that enables it to make
use of the more worldly concepts of the hybridity of
world cultures and the discrepancy of the historical
experience in the field of literary criticism. In other
words, the structure of attitude is the literary
equivalence of the sense of cultural hybridity as it
provides the critic with the convenient literary method
that not only highlights the cultural attitude of the
British culture depicted in a wide range of literary
works but also to deconstructs it by revealing its
opposite cultural attitude concealed from the text.
However, the structure of reference is the literary
equivalence of the discrepancy of historical experience
that not only reflects the excluded historical experience
from the text but also helps depict it from its original
reservoir.
Contrapuntal Reading: Toward a Strategy for a
Value System.
Said devises the contrapuntal technique as an
interpretative literary methodology which can yield up
132
the concealed historical experience. It is a literary
method that can emancipate the Saidain theoretical
values from their unchanged and fixed theoretical
frame work. Said borrows such technique from music.
“In the counterpoint of Western classical music,
various themes play off one another” (Culture and
Imperialism 51). According to Said, the contrapuntal
reading assumes reading more than one parallel
historical document related to the interpreted literary
text; each parallel historical document has a
straightforward connection with the interpreted literary
work. Said puts it clearly in the following lines:
We begin to read it not univocally but
contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness
both of the metropolitan history that is narrated
and of these other histories against which the
dominating discourse acts. (Culture and
Imperialism 51)
Such contrapuntal reading of the antagonistic
historical contexts helps disclose the concealed truth,
the manipulated knowledge and the biased system of
thought as it reflects equally the different point of
views of both Self and others. Thus Said makes use of
133
the notion of New Historicism to devise the
contrapuntal reading. In An Introduction to Literary
and Cultural Theory (1995) Peter Barry defines New
Historicism as follows:
It is a method based on the parallel reading of
literary and non-literary texts, usually of the same
historical period. That is to say, new historian
refuses (at least ostensibly) to 'privilege' the
literary text: instead of a literary 'foreground' and
a historical 'background' it envisages and practises
a mode of study in which literary and non-literary
texts are given equal weight and constantly
inform or interrogate each other. This 'equal
weighting' is suggested in the definition of new
historicism offered by American critic Louis
Montors: he defines it as a combined interest in
'the textuality of history, the historicity of texts'.
(172)
New Historicism attempts to emancipate text from
its ivory tower that splits it away from its circumstantial
reality as it links up the text interpretation and analysis
with the parallel historical document depicted in the
literary work. In brief, it interprets the literary text
throughout reading its paralleling historical document.
''A new historical essay will place the literary text with
134
the' frame' of a non-literary text'' (Barry 173). It seems
that Said's contrapuntal reading is indebted much to
New Historicism in focusing on the historical
experience as the major element for interpreting the
literary text.
However, New Historicism has many flaws which
may inactivate it from presenting a sound and
somewhat objective interpretation. It restricts its
analysis and critique of text to the parallel historical
document. In addition, its historical document is
monolithic, which turns blind eye to or downplays the
discrepancy of the historical experience. It does not
labor itself to ponder over the importance of the
autobiography of author of the text; thus it widens the
gab further between the author and his text.
Furthermore, it does not present the altruistic
humanistic values that make the intellectual neutral in
his or her depiction of the historical experiences. Thus
New Historicism has not any explicit theoretical lines
by which the intellectual or critic can interpret the
canonical text objectively.
135
Accordingly, Said attempts hard to avoid falling
into the faults of New Historicism. Therefore, his
critical strategy entails using both the theoretical and
practical values of humanistic criticism such as the
hybridity of world cultures, the discrepancy of
historical experience, the idea of worldliness, the fair
critical consciousness and the structure of reference and
attitude in order to apply the contrapuntal reading
effectively for interpreting a literary text. Subsequently,
when the intellectual applies the contrapuntal reading
of literature to interpret a given literary text, he should
be fully aware of the hybridity of world cultures and
the discrepancy of the historical experience. Therefore,
his belonging will be diverted to Said's concept of
worldliness, which embodies the convenient atmosphere
for establishing the fair critical consciousness of the
intellectual. In this way, the intellectual could highlight
the cultural references that reflect the general and
prevalent attitude of its people toward others or toward
certain facts.
At this stage, it is possible for the intellectual to
apply the contrapuntal reading more effectively as the
136
sense of narrow belonging to his or her culture is
surrogated with a sense of affiliations to worldliness
that endows his or her critical consciousness with a
sense of rationality. Subsequently, the intellectual can
spotlight the dominant cultural attitudes represented in
the work of art. To be knowledgeable of the prevalent
cultural attitude depicted by the literary work, the
intellectual should endeavor hard to know the
repercussion of such attitude on the representation of
reality in his or her text; does such attitude impel the
author of the text to refer only to one part of the
historical experience, excluding the other aspect which
is in opposition to the prevalent ideology of his culture?
Subsequently, the responsibility of the intellectual, in
such a case, is implicit in bringing back the concealed
historical experience to his or her interpreted text.
Supposing that the intellectual interprets British or
American novel which discusses the relationship
between the metropolitan and the periphery, Said's
critical strategy instructs the intellectual to discern both
the involvement of culture in depicting Self and others
and its effect on the representation of the historical
137
experience. However, focusing on the discrepancy of
the historical experience comes in concomitant with
other important factors that are inextricably related to
it. Without highlighting such factors, the reinstatement
process of the excluded historical experience will be
doomed to failure. First of all, it is indispensible to
emphasis the social, political and cultural modes
prevalent during the time of the production of literary
work. Second, the critic should examine to what extent
the author of the text was influenced by the ideology of
his or her society; thus the critic should study the
autobiography of the author of the interpreted literary
work. And finally, it is so vital to foreground other's
reaction to the historical experience; bringing to light
the other's point of view from its origin. In brief, Said's
contrapuntal reading is portrayed clearly in the
following words:
In practical terms, “contrapuntal reading” as I
have called it means reading a text with an
understanding of what is involved when an
author shows for instance that a colonial sugar
plantation is seen as important to the process of
maintaining a particular style of life in England.
Moreover, like all literary texts, these are not
138
bounded by their formal historic beginnings and
endings. References to Australia in David
Copper Filed or in India in Jane Eyre are made
because they can be, because British power (and
not just the novelist's fancy) made passing
references to these massive appropriations
possible. (Culture and Imperialism 66)
Said's contrapuntal technique attempts to anatomize
the mind of the intellectual and to trace what type of
thought delivered by him or her. It instructs its critic to
be acquainted with the attitude of the author toward his
or her text through fixing his or her set of references,
which points up an incontestable paradigm of his
feeling. For instance, Said’s interpretation of Mansfield
Park specifies the historical period in which the novel
was written. The specification of the historical
experience can echo more explicitly the social and
political conditions prevalent during such time.
Subsequently, the critic or the intellectual comes across
consciously or unconsciously the social, cultural and
political conditions which are prevalent during such a
time. Investigating the external conditions, whose
influence on the production of the text is sharply
remarked, stimulates the critic to study the
139
autobiography of the author of the text, his or her
attitudes, the motivations behind the writing of the text
and so on.
Then, the critic connects certain aspects of the
novel narrative to these conditions. For example,
Mansfield Park's reference to the Caribbean colonies,
in particular, Antigua- which was used as a sugar
plantation- reflects clearly the involvement of the
British culture in the imperialist project. Furthermore,
in case of considering the discrepancy of the historical
experience, it is revealed that the sugar plantation was
one of the most essential needs to the British society at
that time. Accordingly, Mansfield Park clarifies the
attitudes of British imperial power toward their
colonies. Said clarifies the relationship between the
cultural references and the attitude of its people as
depicted in the nineteenth century English novel and
their importance to the contrapuntal reading in the
following terms:
Since Austen refers to and uses Antigua as she
does in Mansfield Park, there needs to be a
commensurate effort on the part of her readers
to understand concretely the historical valences
140
in the reference; to put it differently, we should
try to understand what she referred to, and why
she gave it the importance she did and why
indeed she made the choice, for she might have
done something different to establish sir
Thomas’s wealth. Let us now calibrate the
signifying power of the reference to Antigua in
Mansfield Park: how do they occupy the place
they do, what are they doing there? (Culture
and Imperialism 89)
Said's contrapuntal reading helps to focus on the
excluded part of the historical experience in Mansfield
Park: The Western intellectuals do not meditate on
Austen's deliberate reference to Antigua as one of the
British over sea's colonies. However, in his essay ''The
Ethics of Mansfield Park: Macintyre, Said and the
Social Context'' Allen Dun argues that Said's
contrapuntal reading fails to present an objective
interpretation of Mansfield Park:
I think that both Macintyre and Said take
positions which imply unnecessary constraints
on our understanding of morality in Austen and
more generally on the scope of moral examples.
In their contrasting readings of Mansfield Park,
Macintyre and Said set unrealistically stringent
141
conditions for any one interested in novel as a
subject of moral reflection. Fanny’s ethical
commitment, like the ethical commitments of
most modem individuals, is much more
complex than either Macintyre or Said’s
account the novel will allow. (4)
According to Dun, Said’s contrapuntal reading of
Mansfield Park as an imperialist agent is both
ineffectual and apocryphal as it restricts the
construction of the ethical values of individuals to
their interaction with the world. Nevertheless, the
modern individual's values are labyrinthine and
heterogonous. Thus the construction of their values can
not be resulted from a monolithic factor, the politics of
culture. In addition, the author repudiates Said’s
proposal that the 19th century English novel casts the
culture and ideology of its society. “Said is mistaken to
claim that both Austen’s land fanny’s ethics are shaped
by the same underlying cognitive structure, they are
inseparable'' (4). Austen does not have an orchestrating
ethical system. Thus it is elusive to accept Said's idea
that both Austen's ethics and politics are the expression
of the same pattern of thought.
142
In his essay ''Edward Said and the Historians''
Mackenzie argues that Said's contrapuntal reading can
be applied only to the narrative forms written in the
imperialist Western project or to those works which
depict both colonizer and colonized (16). However, this
research has a different point of view from
Mackenzie's: Said's conceptualization of the idea of
contrapuntal reading theorizes and puts his critical
concepts into their practical frame work. It not only
interprets the canonical Western novels referring to
empire but also analyzes other works that have no
reference to imperialism. The vocal point of such
technique rests in its focus on the discrepant historical
experience, which entails two opposed parties or more.
Thus it is irrational to limit the opposition and
difference to both colonizer and colonized. However,
the difference is a code of life, without it life can not go
ahead. That is to say, the difference and the
discrepancy of the historical experience is a value from
which life takes its potentiality of existence.
Indeed, there is a difference between the members
of the same family, the inhabitants of the same village,
143
the citizens of the same country, and the members of
the same national culture and so on. Thus Said's
contrapuntal reading including his other humanistic
values can present a strategy for a value system that
can interpret its text on the basis of a set of explicit
theoretical lines. Peter Hallows, in his book Absolutely
Post Colonial (2001), explains that the contrapuntal
reading of literature is not only a good strategy for
depicting the historical experience of others, but also is
consistent with the hybrid nature of our modern
societies. ''Our truest reality is expressed in the way we
cross over from one place to another. We are migrants
and hybrid” (58).
However, in her essay ''A Reading of Edward
Said's Critical Concepts'' Do'aa Imbabi explains that
Said does not attempt to present a systematic and
detailed description of the contrapuntal technique.
Subsequently, he can not illustrate such a technique in
explicit and manifest lines. Moreover, Said does not
define what kind of texts should be read in terms of the
contrapuntal reading of literature:
144
Reading Said’s works shows us that he
deliberately abstained from presenting a
theoretical detailed style for his contrapuntal
reading. He mentioned that when he constructed
the idea of contrapuntality, he was stimulated to
produce an analytical type resembling art in
itself…. Such feeling of ambiguity regarding
the classification of Said’s works within an
organized scope of literary criticism may arise
from his earnest desire to describe himself as
''an intellectual who rejects to be a follower to
the hegemonic thoughts''. Throughout the span
of his life, he was conscious of the negative
attitude of the idea of being subordinate. He
disdains, in his works, to affiliate himself to any
intellectual. Subsequently, he refuses the
principle that other intellectuals affiliate
themselves to his thought. It seems that
undergoing the subjective experiences, even in
the most disciplined fields like literary criticism,
is the clandestine behind Said's singularity in
literary criticism. (66 trans of mine.)
Imbabi explains that the main reason behind the
non-presentation of detailed theoretical system of the
contrapuntal reading of literature is Said's subjective
experiences. For her, the subjective experience refers to
the effect of the personal experience on critical theory:
145
Said undergoes a long life of exile that entrenches in
his mind a state of non-belonging to any certain
physical entity. As a result, he repulses to belong to any
hegemonic culture as he repudiates to affiliate himself
to any intellectual tendency. Thus he concedes his
literary production to his state of exile, snubbing the
presentation of the academic limitation of a theory,
replacing it with the abstract belonging.
Indeed, this research has a different point of view
from Imababi's. The technique of contrapuntal reading
can not be detached from the Saidain practical and
theoretical critical values. These critical values have
constant reciprocal relationship to the contrapuntal
technique; that is to say, the practical values provides
the intellectual with. the. necessary .critical, humanistic
and cultural values that allow him or her to apply the
idea of contrapuntal reading in an objective way. Thus
contrapuntal reading in itself is not an archetypal of his
critical theory. It is the strategy for his value system as
it represents the critical instrument that allows the
intellectual to apply Said's critical values in a sound
way, reaching an objective interpretation of his text.
146
It is clear that Said succeeds to present a
thoroughly critical theory with clear and definite
critical lines. However, Said's declaration that he is
against all forms of specialization and professionalization
does not mean that his critical thinking is anti-theory or
he refuses the academic theory. Yet Said does not
reject professionalization and the academic theory of
literary criticism; if it is the case, why does Said
discuss and critique the critical theory and
professionalization? And why does he want to
deconstruct the contemporary American theory and all
forms of traditional criticism? In fact, Said views the
idea of professionalization from a different perspective
than his critics do so. Said refutes the mal-functionality
of the idea of specialization and professionalization,
which imposes forcefully its culture and tradition upon
its intellectual without giving him or her any chance to
revisit his or her cultural values. Simultaneously, it
does not allow the intellectual to develop any kind of
fair and objective understanding of different cultures.
Accordingly, Said has a clear critical theory which is
composed of a set of humanistic critical values.
147
Understanding these values allows the critic to handle
any text objectively.
Subsequently, Said's concept of criticism as a
strategy for a value system whose theoretical structure
is implied in the idea of worldliness, the fair critical
consciousness, and the idea of filiations and affiliations
not only help to break out the idea of
professionalization but also replace it with a new
critical term that can help produce an objective literary
criticism. According to Said, the theoretical structure of
value system could mange to provide an alternative to
professionalization if the intellectual espouses the
Saidain practical values which help convert his or her
cognitive modes of thinking that constitute the
perception of the outside reality. For Said, the
humanistic understanding of culture can change the
intellectual's cognitive modes of thinking about both
his culture and other world cultures through imparting
to his or her mind that all world cultures are hybrid and
the historical experience is discrepant; so the
intellectual's inherited values should be re-checked and
widely investigated via reading its opposed historical
148
narrations. In this way, the intellectual can see the
reality of his or her text from a different point of view.
Thus he or she is able to apply the idea of the
contrapuntal reading in a sound way, presenting an
objective interpretation to his or her text.
150
This thesis explains Edward Said's theorized
critical concepts, a claim denied by most of his critics.
It studies the inextricable liaison between critical theory
and the world. It also highlights the value system which
Said's critical theory addresses and communicates to
the world: Said's critical philosophy is best designated
as a strategic, whose upshot is to endow the
contemporary American critical theory with a value
system that helps the intellectual to present an objective
analysis of the text, to fight back all forms of
oppression, to speak the truth to power and to circulate
the justice and peace. Accordingly, Said's critical
theory focuses its attention on the intellectual, his world
and the text.
The early life of Said constitutes his value system.
The Palestinian experience and the colonial education
bring him to prompt confrontation with the Western
colonialism. Thus he was immersed in the historical
experience of colonized: He was in the position of other
as a displaced Palestinian child amid a system of
colonial education, mostly controlled and guided by the
Westerners. In addition, his exilic condition made him
151
very close to the colonialist circles in America.
Furthermore, his American citizenship and his academic
position as a professor of comparative literature at
Columbia University enabled him to deliver his speech
from the position of self. Accordingly, Said bears
within himself both self and others.
Though he witnessed the very drastic and
oppressive conditions of his people, it did not cultivate
into his depth the seeds of hatred or revenge on any
culture. However, such conditions enhanced his feeling
of others' suffering and oppression as they made him
fully aware of how self could conceive and depict
others. Thus the domineering conditions that constructed
his value system represent the genius of the personality.
In other words, on the personal level, his value system
takes its power from experiencing the reality of other
and self; as a dislocated Palestinian and as an academic
American citizen. Such unique position in which the
oppositional poles are overlapped and intertwined
allows him to keep the same distance from the position
of self and others. Accordingly, it furnishes Said with a
neutral value system that advocates truth and aspires to
152
find out reality. Therefore, the value system is the
intellectual and humanistic power that makes Said
subservient only to his fair critical consciousness, not to
his cultural restraints or any external authority.
Studying the autobiographical elements that
construct Said's value system does not lay down that
each intellectual should undergo the same
autobiographical conditions in order to criticize a given
text objectively. Nevertheless, these autobiographical
conditions are a mere approach to appreciate Edward
Said's human experience, which is deemed a vital gate
for conceiving his value system and its influence on his
critical theory. Said's critical theory derives its
theoretical and practical elements from surrogating the
autobiographical conditions, empowering him to
connect text interpretation with the circumstantial
reality and to put on view his unprecedented philosophy
about the idea of objectivity, with a set of humanistic
and critical values that allow the intellectual to use
criticism as strategy for a value system.
Using criticism as a strategy for value system does
not represent a sign of the perfectible objectivity.
153
However, it accentuates highly the functionality of
literary criticism; how criticism could be oppositional
and could highlight the unheeded liaison between text
and the world; how the critic could handle his or her
text objectively without being shackled by the cultural
restraints and the external forces of the society that
restrict him or her to a monolithic mode of thinking.
Said's value system concedes the great difficulty of
reaching the perfectible objectivity; it is irresoluble for
the critic to achieve a complete disengagement from the
conditions of the society, because he or she is a human
being not a divine. Nevertheless, it burdens the
intellectual the responsibility for critiquing the solid
moulds of thought prevailed in the society and
changing the deep-rooted faulty ideas accepted as
acknowledged facts. Yet it is abstruse for the
intellectual to reconsider his or her inherited values
transmitted from generation to generation without any
alteration. Thus Said's critical strategy seeks to instruct
the intellectual how to give off an objective criticism
without being detached from the social, historical and
cultural conditions of his or her world.
154
Accomplishing such challenging objectivity of the
intellectual entails a certain strategy whose power is
mainly cognitive. The main objective of this strategy is
to instruct the intellectuals the unassailable logic of
objectivity through changing their misleading concepts
about the sense of belonging, the dogmatic belief in the
purity of their own cultures and the flawed concept of
the unitary of the historical experiences. Such
disingenuous concepts should be pulled up from their
minds and changed into more humanistic concepts that
expand the intellectual's narrow and limited filiations to
his or her own culture and sort out the deceptive
thoughts about both his or her culture and other
cultures.
In addition, such strategy has to do with the
techniques of the text interpretation as it helps, in the
first place, to divulge the correlation between the text
and the circumstantial reality. Second, it helps the
critic to put Said's theoretical values into practice;
subsequently, it leads to substitute the idea of
specialization by new critical method that can open up
the text to distinct interpretations, each one assumes
155
opposed and different point of view, searches for the
excluded or the concealed aspects of the historical
experience and attempts an objective analysis of its
text.
Thus using criticism as strategy of value system
can be rationalized clearly in how the intellectual could
apply the humanistic and critical values of Said's
critical theory to interpret a given text objectively.
These values are divided into theoretical and practical.
The theoretical values are utilized to highlight the
methodological misconceptions applied by the forms of
Traditional criticism, Practical criticism and American
critical theory. However, the practical values illuminate
how the theoretical values can be put into action and
present an alternative critical concept for the idea of
specialization.
Yet Said's value system is theoretical in itself,
which is only used as an instrument to reflect the
manipulative and biased forms of knowledge. Thus
analyzing Said's concept of culture displays a set of
humanistic values that help the critics to put Said's
theoretical values into practice. Such humanistic or
156
practical values have a twofold effect on both the text
and the cognition of the intellectual. With respect to the
cognition of the intellectual, they widen the
intellectual's narrow sense of belonging to his or her
culture replacing it with a wider sense of belonging to
the entire world. Concerning the text, it reveals the text
hidden or ignored liaison with its world via its focus on
the excluded historical experience, paralleling it with
the historical experience directly disclosed by the text
within a humanistic framework.
The hybridity of the world cultures epitomizes the
first practical humanistic value of Said's critical
strategy. The critic should believe that all world
cultures are hybrid. Accordingly, the blind filiations to
his or her culture are lessened and therefore, the critic is
able to divert his or her filiations to the entire world
cultures. Subsequently, the idea of professionalization
focus its overwhelming power on the cognition of the
critic, which is implicit in dedicating the critic that his
or her culture is only worthy of consideration and
represents the main depositary of the intellectual
authority. In this way, when the intellectual or the
157
critic begins to criticize or interpret a certain literary
text, he or she can not be subservient to any intellectual
authority that may avert his or her attention from
depicting the reality of the interpreted text: As in such a
case, the sole intellectual authority springs from a sense
of belonging to all humanity. Consequently, the
intellectual gets the first step toward using criticism as
a strategy for a value system.
The second Saidain practical humanistic value is
the discrepancy of the historical experience. The
intellectual should be fully aware that there is no
monolithic historical experience as its occurrence
requires two parties at least. Since the early creation
God has created Adam and Eva to constitute the first
historical experience witnessed on the earth and
recorded in the history. It is shared by different parties,
whether they are the colonizer and colonized, or the
white and black, or the African and European or the
American and American and so on.
Clearly, one of the codes of life is the difference.
The idea of difference or conflict is the steam power of
the historical experience, which is shared by two parties
158
or more. The stronger party of the historical experience
conceals the shared and overlapped historical
experience of the weaker in order to deliver its reality
according to his or her own standpoint. However,
perceiving the discrepancy of the historical experience
allows the intellectual to reveal its concealed aspect,
and to depict it from its origin, not from his or her
cultural reservoir. In such a case, the intellectual will be
able to depict its reality as it is, not as it is imposed
upon him from above. Thus believing in the hybridity
of all world cultures and the discrepancy of the
historical experience leads the intellectual to belong to
the Saidain world of worldliness. In other words, they
help to put the idea of worldliness, mostly abstract and
theoretical idea, into practice.
Worldliness is the third Saidain humanistic critical
value. However, it is a theoretical value, not practical:
It is used only to foreground the text inextricable
relationships to the outside reality via linking the
interpreted text with the Saidain concept of world. The
world of worldliness is not split by the imaginative
geographical boundaries, which fragment the world
159
into tiny fragments; each geographical fragment is
identified to its fabricated cultural reality for achieving
a political interest. Nevertheless, it is an abstract realm
of humanistic values that represents a sense of
belonging to all humanity. Subsequently, it obliterates
the idea of distinction and inevitable inequality.
Accordingly, it purveys the intellectual or the critic
with a novel concept to the idea of world that helps the
critic to exhibit the text's relations to its world, culture
and historical and social experience without being fall
under their overwhelming control that impedes him or
her to put an objective analysis to the text. Thus it just
reveals text's system of manipulative knowledge
without fixing any alternative. In this way, the world of
worldliness is regarded as the fertile soil for
establishing the fair critical consciousness as it grants
the intellectual a lofty position over all his or her
cultural filiations and his or her worldly affiliation.
The idea of the fair critical consciousness is also
considered a theoretical value, not a practical. Indeed,
the fair critical consciousness adjusts and modifies the
critical output of the intellectual before coming into
160
reality in order to present an objective and disinterested
criticism. Subsequently, when the intellectual's cognitive
modes of thinking are turned into humanistic via
believing in the idea of hybridity of world cultures and
the discrepancy of the historical experience, he or she
could feel, conceive and practice Said's theoretical
concept of worldliness. In this way, the critical
consciousness of the intellectual turns out to be fair as
it secures the convenient atmosphere for creating a
neutral distance between the filiations of the intellectual
and his or her affiliations; the critic therefore can not
depict others from a superior position. Accordingly, his
or her knowledge is not dependent to the rules of
professionalization and specialization, but it is
subordinated to his or her true self or to the fair critical
consciousness. At this point, this research puts forward
the following question: Does Said's rejection of
professionalization refers to his refutation of the form
of theory? Said rebuffs professionalization and theory
that imposes forcefully its intellectual authority upon its
intellectual, detaches him or her from the outside reality
and restricts the forms of knowledge to the culture and
161
tradition of the intellectual. Accordingly, such
professionalization cuts off text relations to its world
and conceals or manipulates or distorts the historical
experience of others.
Thus conceiving Said's theoretical and practical
critical values allows the intellectual to use criticism as
a strategy for a value system. In other words, it helps to
highlight the text's relations to its world and the forms
of manipulative knowledge and to restore the excluded
historical experience via applying the contrapuntal
technique. The contrapuntal technique is the final
humanistic and critical value adopted by Said's critical
theory. It is the critical value that helps put the
theoretical and practical values into practice.
Said's strategy for a value system testifies itself
clearly in establishing the steps necessary for the
intellectual to apply the contrapuntal reading of
literature in an objective manner. The first step
requires, in the first place, a full awareness of the
discrepancy of historical experience. Such awareness
results in neutralizing the critic's perception and pre-
existed knowledge of others, making him rid of his or
162
her inherited filiations to his or her own culture that
disallows him or her to think more objectively of the
given literary work. The second step explains that the
contrapuntal reading of literature necessitates the
acknowledgment that all cultures are hybrid; so the
critic can not grant any culture an advantage over other
cultures. Finally, admitting that all world cultures are
hybrid and historical experience is overlapped permit
the intellectual to belong loyally to the world of
worldliness, which grants him or her sense of fair
critical consciousness. As result, the intellectual is able
to present somewhat objective knowledge.
Furthermore, the contrapuntal technique is not
only limited to interpret the novels that propagated
imperialism; however, it can interpret other works of
art which portray other cases of conflict than what is
shared by the colonizer and the colonized or those
cases that do not divulge directly any case of conflict.
It is not necessary that conflict is arisen only between
the colonized and colonizer or the Occident and the
Orient; so the works of art that do not have such
conflict can not be read by the idea of contrpunality.
163
However, the conflict may arise between the brothers,
the members of the same religion and so on. Yet Said
concentrates on the clash between the Occident and the
Orient because the conflict is clearer in this example.
Accordingly, Said's contrapuntal method, in addition to
the other critical values, is valid to interpret any literary
work objectively.
Said's strategy for a value system rests in his
devising a unified and systematic critical theory, which
consists of a set of practical and theoretical values.
These practical and theoretical values are integrated
with one another. They work together in a symphonic
manner whose orchestrating force extends to affect
both critic and his or her text: that is to say they start
from a wider base, which is the deep and strong link
between the culture and the intellectual. Said's critical
theory deconstructs such strong link and replaces it
with the idea of the hybridity of all world cultures.
Then, this broader base gets narrow a little through
imparting the second value of the discrepancy of the
historical experience into the mind of the intellectual
164
that allows him or her to search for the excluded
historical experience.
Subsequently, the affiliations and filiations of the
intellectual are directed to the world of worldliness.
In this world, the fair critical consciousness of the
intellectual can grow up faster and stronger.
Accordingly, when the intellectual has the fair critical
consciousness, he or she will automatically depict the
historical experience of his or her own society and
others form a humanistic reservoir; from its origin.
Accordingly, the intellectual will be able to apply his
contrapuntal reading correctly.
The contrapuntal technique is the transparent and
unseen thread that links Said's theoretical values to his
practical ones. It is the methodological instrument for
applying his humanistic values to literary criticism. It
enables the intellectual to present an objective
criticism; the intellectual is able to say something about
other culture without dressing the mantel of his or her
own culture. Such form of criticism is the Saidain long
-life critical enterprise. It is the criticism of
reconciliation, equality, love, peace and humanistic
165
relationships. Indeed, if any intellectual adopts the five
Saidain humanistic values, he will be able to present an
objective criticism. It is clear that Said has a critical
theory whose main components are humanistic.
Accordingly, the thesis reaches a conclusion that
using Said's criticism as a strategy for a value system
provides literary criticism with a new critical tendency
called Humanistic Criticism. According to the thesis,
Humanistic Criticism can be defined as a critical
tendency which reads and analyzes its text in terms of a
set of theoretical critical values such as worldliness,
filiations and affiliations, and the fair critical
consciousness, and a set of practical humanistic values-
the discrepancy of historical experience, the hybridity
of world cultures, the structure of attitude and
reference. The theoretical values establish the
theoretical structure of Said's critical thinking via
presenting a set of explicit and definite critical norms
that guide the critic to highlight the forms of
manipulative and biased forms of knowledge depicted
by his or her text without presenting any alternative.
However, the practical values help emancipate both
166
the critic and the theoretical values from their narrow
specialization and change the dogmatic and pre-existed
ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and ideology espoused by the
intellectual into more humanistic values that help him
or her to prioritize his true self and his humanistic
perspective. Accordingly, the intellectual can apply the
contrapuntal reading to interpret a text objectively and
present Humanistic criticism.
168
The Language of Literary Criticism
The Literary Value System: It can be defined as the
formula or the system of objective criticism. It includes
a set of cultural, social, historical and cultural values.
These values affect both the text and the critic. It helps
change the fixed and old-rooted cultural moulds of
thought espoused by the intellectual. It also helps con-
nect the text interpretation with the outside reality.
The Strategy for A Value System: It refers to a set of
consequent steps followed by the critic for presenting
an objective criticism that stress highly the functional-
ity of the literary theory; how criticism could be op-
positional, present an objective analysis to the text, and
make the critic handle his or her text
objectively without being shackled by his or her cul-
tural restraints and by the external forces of his or her
society.
The Literary Exile: It refers to how literary criticism
makes use of the humanistic and the psychological as-
pects generated in the exile world in order to produce
an objective criticism.
169
The Literary Concept of Humanism: It is a literary
term that aims at reading literary text in the light of its
historical, social, political and cultural context.
Professionalization: It is a literary technique that de-
taches both the intellectual and the text from the social,
historical and political conditions that create his or her
text. It dedicates the intellectual to depict the historical
experience via the lenses of his or her culture and tradi-
tion.
Worldliness: It is defined as a literary term that helps
the intellectual to provide an objective criticism with-
out detaching both the text and the intellectual from
circumstantial reality. It highlights the text relations to
its world and endows the intellectual with a lofty posi-
tion over all the worldly, cultural and material forces
that prevent him or her from presenting a neutral point
of view toward the interpreted text.
Filiations: It refers to the intellectual's narrow sense of
belonging to his or her mother society, nation and cul-
ture.
170
Affiliations: It refers to the replacement of the intellec-
tual's filiations to his or her mother culture with the af-
filiations to more complex and overlapped world.
Fair Critical Consciousness: It is a literary term
which refers to the adjustment and distillation of the
critical output of the intellectual from its biased and its
inhumanistic modes of thinking before coming into re-
ality. It teaches the intellectual or the critic the art of
having a distance in order to issue a sound and fair in-
terpretation for his or her text.
Orientalism: It is a literary term that refers to a set of
methodological misconceptions epitomized in the idea
of distinction and inevitable inequality, the intellectual
authority, the textual and the intervention of power to
knowledge that strip knowledge off its humanistic val-
ues and restrict it to the idea of specialization.
Idea of Distinction: It is a literary term that helps de-
tach the intellectual from depicting the reality of his or
her text as it is antagonistic to both the fair critical con-
sciousness and the idea of worldliness.
The authoritative Position: It is a literary term that
subordinates knowledge to the idea of distinction and
171
inevitable inequality; it allows the intellectual to detach
the text from its intertwined and overlapped historical
reality by concealing the historical experience of oth-
ers.
Intellectual Authority: It is defined as a methodologi-
cal instrument that constitutes the knowledge, percep-
tion, and canon and value system of the intellectual.
Textual Attitude: It is defined as a literary term that
detaches the text itself-not the intellectual- from its re-
ality, focusing on the inherited text of predecessors. It
dedicates the author or the critic to evaluate and inter-
pret a given literary text on the basis of the
intellectual authority.
The Hybridity Concept: It is a cultural value that
concentrates on the cognitive abilities of the intellectual
as it exerts a major force to change the ardent, dogmatic
and tightly adhered beliefs, ideology, and rooted cul-
tural values espoused by the intellectual into more hu-
manistic values that make him or her floats over all
natural and material bonds while criticizing a given
text.
172
.The Discrepancy of the Historical Experience: It is
a cultural value that allows the intellectual to interpret
the text on the basis of studying the excluded historical
experience from the interpreted text, comparing it and
paralleling it to the historical experience directly re-
vealed by the text. Accordingly, the intellectual or the
critic can reach more objective and unbiased interpreta-
tion of his text.
Structure of Feeling: It can be defined as a literary
technique that helps interpret the literary works through
fixing the prevalent cultural feeling of the nation
against their life circumstances or against an important
event that touches deeply their lives and in turn has a
mysterious and un-noted impact on the production of
the literary work.
Structure of Attitude : It is a critical term used to des-
ignate the concept of hybridity of cultures as it not only
highlights the dominant cultural attitude depicted by
the text but also deconstructs it via searching for its op-
posite.
The Structure of Reference: It is a critical term that
designates the concept of the discrepancy of the histori-
173
cal experience as it not only highlights the excluded
historical experience from the text but also parallels it
to the directly revealed historical experience in order to
reach an objective analysis of the text.
The Structure of Reference and Attitude: It is a criti-
cal term used to show the influence of the prevalent
cultural attitude on the representation of the reality of
the text as it is based mainly on identifying what is re-
ferred to and what is excluded from the text. Highlight-
ing the prevalent cultural attitude depicted by the text
requires us to search for the oppositional attitude
suppressed by the prevalent and hegemonic attitude. In
this way, the intellectual can reach to the excluded real-
ity of the text.
The Contrapuntal Reading of Literature: It is a liter-
ary term that applies the structure of reference and atti-
tude, the idea of worldliness, the fair critical conscious-
ness within a definite and explicit theoretical frame-
work for analyzing the literary text objectively.
Humanistic Criticism: It can be defined as a critical
tendency which reads and analyzes its text in terms of a
set of theoretical critical values such as worldliness,
174
filiations and affiliations, and the fair critical con-
sciousness, and a set of practical humanistic values –the
discrepancy of historical experience, the hybridity of
world cultures, the structure of attitude and reference.
The theoretical values establish the theoretical structure
of Said's critical thinking through presenting a set of
explicit and definite critical norms that guide the critic
to highlight the forms of manipulative and biased forms
of knowledge depicted by his or her text without pre-
senting any alternative. However, the practical
values help emancipate both the critic and the theo-
retical values from their narrow specialization and
change the dogmatic and pre-existed ideas, thoughts,
beliefs, and ideology espoused by the intellectual into
more humanistic values that help him or her to priori-
tize his true self and his humanistic perspective. Ac-
cordingly, the intellectual can apply the contrapuntal
reading to interpret a text objectively and present the
humanistic criticism.
176
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Abstract
This study attempts critical and philosophical analysis of Said's
concept of criticism as it goes beyond the normal interpretations of
his critical concepts that concentrate mainly on the correlation
between Said's concept of criticism and the circumstantial reality.
Subsequently, the study attempts to settle down the polemical points
in Said's critical venture such as the contradiction between his
critical stance and its practice, the un-theorized trait of his critical
concepts and the lack of a certain methodology in Said's critical
thinking. It focuses mainly on the functional traits of Said's critical
stance: How could Said use criticism as a strategy for a value
system? Resolving such polemical question, the study resorts to
apply the biographical methodology in order to show the influence
of Said's formative years on the construction of value system and his
critical theory in turn. Conceiving the value system helps revisit
Said's critical concepts and interpret them from humanistic
perspective. Said's critical concepts are divided into theoretical and
practical values. The theoretical values include the idea of fair
critical consciousness and the idea of worldliness. The idea of fair
critical consciousness and the idea of worldliness epitomize the
theoretical critical values whose function is confined to lay bare the
professionalization of literary Western text without presenting any
alternative to such idea. Subsequently, the researcher attempts to
elucidate the practical values of Said's critical theory that help to put
the theoretical value of Said's criticism into practice, breaking out
the idea of professionalization and devising an alternative to it.
Said's concept of culture analyzed in Culture and Imperialism
highlights certain cultural values, the idea of cultural hybridity and
the discrepancy of the historical experience,that may convert the
intellectual's inherited cognitive modes of thinking. Believing in the
hybridity of world cultures and the discrepancy of the historical
experience can put the idea of worldliness and fair critical
consciousness into their practical framework. Thus the intellectual
can apply the idea of contrapuntal reading in an objective manner
representing the Saidain strategy for a value system. Applying the
idea of the contrapuntal reading results in devising Said's concept of
humanistic criticism.
خص العربيلالم من اجل سبر أغوار الفكر النقدي لدي إدوارد سـعيد دءوبا تسعي الدراسة سعيا
ها تحـاول ن بمعني ا ،مستكشفة السمات النظرية والتطبيقية لمفاهيم سعيد النقدية المختلفة إذ ،كشف النقاب عن العالقات الكامنة والخفية بين المفاهيم النقدية المتعددة في فكر سعيد
السمة الغالبة والمميزة لمشروع سعيد النقدي تكمن في انطالقه من منظور إنـساني أن قيمي يحمل طبيعية المجابهة والمقاومة لكافة أنماط الهيمنة والتي أملت عليه ضرورة
تي تهدف بدورها إلي إيجـاد ال و،إيجاد إستراتيجية ذات معالم محددة لميدان النقد األدبي وكذلك فيما يتعلق ،لناقد والمثقف في قراءتهما للظروف المحيطة نسق قيمي يستند إليه ا
. برؤيتهما التحليلية والنقدية لمختلف النصوص األدبيةتأسيسا على ذلك تهدف الدراسة إلي تحديد وتوضيح مفهوم النسق القيمي لـدي
ـ ،إدوار سعيد ة تكون النسق القيمي عند سعيد من مجموعة من القيم الثقافية واالجتماعية سعيد وتحديد اتجاهاته ومذاهبـه ي ساعدت تلك القيم في بناء هو ،والتاريخية واإلنسانية
على الفكر النقـدي دراسة إلي تحديد أثر النسق القيم ذلك سعت ال لى فضال ع ،الفكرية وذلك من خالل تأصيل منهجيات مختلفة في ميدان النقد األدبي والتي ،لدي إدوار سعيد
. احث من تحليل وعرض مشروع سعيد النقديمن خاللها تمكن الب الدراسة منهجياتها المطبقة باستخدام الذاتية أو البيوجرافية مـن أجـل استهلت
وطريقة رؤيته للـنص ،توضيح األثر الكبير للظروف الحياتية للناقد على فكرة النقدي يد والـذي يمثل السيرة الذاتية لسع ) ١٩٩٩( إن كتاب خارج المكان ،وللعالم الذي حوله
يكشف بدوره عن نقاط وجوانب فكرية في مشروع سعيد النقـدي قـد أسـيئ فهمهـا فمن بين أهم المميزات الناتجة عن قراءة خارج المكان تحديد الفكر المهـيمن ،وتحليلها
،على سعيد والذي انبثق منه فكرا إنسانيا خالصا كان له أثر بالغا على مشروعه النقدي اإلنساني فكرا نقديا مركبا يضم بين طياته العديد من القيم النقدية وقد نتج عن فكر سعيد
فهناك تداخال بينا ظاهرا للعيان بين الجوانـب ،والتي تبدو ظاهريا متضاربة ومتناقضة تلـك التـداخالت ،السياسية والتاريخية واالجتماعية واألدبية في مشروع سعيد النقدي
العديد من نقاد سعيد يجدون صعوبة بالغة فـي البينية في اإلطار الفكري الواحد جعلت د إن العديد مـن نقـا ،إحالة فكر سعيد إلي ميدان أو ضرب من ضروب المعرفة بعينه
سعيد يكادون أن يضلوا طريقهم عن قراءة أحد أعمال سعيد حيث يتداخل النص األدبي اده أن سيعد ي سواء مف أ أن يجتمعوا على ر يهقدا مما دعا معظم ن ،والتاريخي والسياسي
يـة القيمالمنظومـة فليس بمقدور الناقد أن يطبق ،دبيلم يقدم نظرية في مجال النقد األ . سعيد ويصل إلي تحليل كامل للنص األدبيالنقدية لدى
د النقدي لم يقدم فكرا نقـديا ذا ي لذلك يري العديد من نقاد سعيد أن مشروع سع وكذلك مقبولـة مـن ، من الجانب النظري تبدو هذه التهم سليمة ،منهجية نقدية محددة
في أكثر من مقام معاداته للفكر النظري واالنساق حيث أن سعيد ذكر ،الناحية المنطقية ،ويض مـشروعه النقـدي ق مقدما بذلك وذريعة مبررا جاهزا لت ،النظرية بكل صورها
طـار نتيجة لذلك كانت مهمة الباحث شديدة الصعوبة في تحديد ونظم فكر سعيد في إ . نقدي نظري ذا ملمح تطبيقي محدد المعالم واالتجاهات
طبقت الدراسة مزيجا من المنهجية المعيارية والوصفية في ،بناءا على ما سبق كذلك رأي الباحث أنه مـن ،الهمتحليل مفاهيم سعيد النقدية المنتشرة في العديد من أع
ة فركزت الدراس، متصل وغير منفصل واحدااألفضل قراءة أعمال سعيد النقدية كعمالقدم فكرا نقـديا يري الباحث أن سعيد ،على النقاط المشتركة بين مفاهيم الدراسة النقدية
لذلك قامت الدراسة بتقـسيم ، فكرا نظريا تجريديا م أكثر من كونه قد ذا طبيعة مفاهيمية ،ة ذات طبيعة مفاهيميةالقيم النقدية لدي سعيد إلي قيم نقدية نظرية وأخري تطبيقية عملي
قيما نقدية ذات طبيعية نظرية والتي ) ١٩٨٣(ناقش سعيد في كتابة العالم والنص والناقد يظن الكثيرون أن فكرة ،"وقيمة الوعي النقدي" ،"والمفكردنيوية النص "تتمثل في فكرتي
ية لدي دنيوية النص والناقد توحي بحالة من التضارب والتناقض الجلي بين مفهوم النظرجمع بـين فكرتـي الماديـة البحتـة ي "الدنيوية" حيث أن مفهوم ،سعيد وفكرة التطبيق
قد يجـب أن سعيد أن الناى إذ ير،والطوباوية المثالية في ذات اإلطار المفاهيمي النقدي اته الفكرية واإلنسانية إلي عالم طوباوي يتسم بالمثاليـة الكاملـة فـي ذات ءنتمايوجه ا
ن بمنـآي عـن ثقافتـه األم ك على الناقد أو المثقف أو ينفصل أو أن ي الوقت ال ينبغي الستحالة حدوث ذات سواء علـى ،والظروف المحيطة سواء كانت ثقافية أو اجتماعية
إن اإليمان الكامل بفكرة دنيوية النص والناقد تجعـل الناقـد ،جانب الوعي أو الالوعي يتيح له للناقد مسافة تمكنه مـن رؤيـة يري أهميته فكرة الوعي النقدي العادل والذي
. جميع الجوانب الخفية غير البينية في النص المتاح له استقراؤهال يشكالن سوي "الوعي النقدي العادل "و" دنيوية النص والناقد "أن مفهومي غير
المـسيطرة علـى المنـتج ة يمفهومين نظريين يقتصر دورهما على تعرية فكرة المهن وتعرية القيم الالإنسانية التي تبثها مختلف المدارس النقدية الغربية بدون األدبي الغربي
كتـاب سـعيد قد ظهر ذلك بوضوح فـي ، تقديم بديل نظري يضع حدا لفكرة المهنية ات المستـشرقين على كتابمهنية الةالذي ركز فيه سعيد على هيمن ) ١٩٧٨(االستشراق
خاطئة تهدف إلي إثبات وجهة نظر معينة إنشاء معرفة ذات طبيعة منهجية ى إلمما أدى غير أن سعيد لم يقدم في كتابه االستـشراق وجـه ،بغض النظر عن مطابقتها للحقيقية
. نظر بديلة لما رآه المستشرقونأفكارا نقدية ذات طبيعة نظريـة " والوعي النقدي " دنيوية للنص "يظهر جليا أن فكرتي
إدراك الناقد وتفهمه لمفهوم الثقافة، لذلك فـإن تجريدية تستلهم قوتها التطبيقية من مدي لقـد ،)١٩٩٣ (واالمبرياليةالثقافة كما شرحه في كتابه ،الدراسة تناولت مفهوم الثقافة
مجموعة من القيم اإلنسانية التي تشترك فيها جميع الثقافات العالمية والتـي ،حدد سعيد تتمثل تلـك ، وكذلك إدراكه بثقافته ىاألخر بالغ على إدراك المثقف بالثقافات تأثيرالها
ينبثق عن تبني تلـك ،وتداخل التجربة التاريخية" هجانه الثقافات"القيم الثقافية في قيمتي القيم النقدية فكرا إنسانيا يجعل الناقد أكثر موضوعية حيال رؤيته لآلخر ومـا يترتـب
فضال على ذلك تحرر ،على ذلك من رؤيته لمنتجات اآلخر سواء كانت أدبية أو إنسانية تلك القيم الثقافية المفاهيم النظرية عند سعيد من إطارها النقدي الضيق إلي عالم أكثـر
حيث يتمكن النقاد من تطبيق مفهوم القراءة ،رحابه يتيح للناقد نظره وقراءة موضوعية قية على تحليل النص األدبي بصورة موضوعية تمكنه من تقديم ما يعرف باسـم االطب
.قدي اإلنسانيالن