ABSTRACT
Great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.
Edmund White, New Republic, May 13, 1985
If Said were to assume the roles of activist, columnist, pamphleteer, and caricaturist that he identified in Swift, he must engage in performance, accepting all the risks entailed in adopting that role. Leaning again on Poirier, he defines performance as effort and risk: “Yet performance is not merely a happening but rather ‘an action which must go through passages that both impede the action and give it form.’ ”1 This arduous process involves some risk. “Thus, ‘performance comes to function at precisely the point where the potentially destructive impulse to mastery brings forth from the material its most essential, irreducible, clarified, and therefore beautiful nature’ (Poirier xiv)” (ME 2). Typically, Said pushes Poirier away as he embraces him: “Poirier’s rather melodramatic ideas about brutality, savagery, and power can be moderated,” he demurs. In the main, however, he thrills to “Poirier’s purpose,” which “is to separate the academic, liberal, and melioristic attitudes toward literature, attitudes that serve codes, institutions, and orthodoxies, from the processes of literary performance that are, he argues, essentially ‘dislocating, disturbing impulses’ ” (ME 2). Thus the Weberian conundrum continues to occupy Said. The emergence of Michelangelo’s figure from a block of stone, or the Goldberg Variations out of noise, disrupts and disturbs more than it tames and lulls. For Said, history was all about risk and irre-
versibility-a musician turning over two pages of sheet music and spoiling a performance, an assassin’s gun backfiring and killing the shooter, or a suburban mom failing to notice the baby playing behind the car as she backs out of the drivewaysome things cannot be undone. He agreed with Vico that none of this was done by chance, and yet none of it was just a given, either. He loved purely secular historians like the innovative thirteenth-century Muslim historian Ibn-Khaldun who denied the intervention of the gods and insisted on the uniqueness and irreversibility of every historical event.2
