SAID IN HISTORY

Further attrition of personal glamour can be laid to journalistic over-exposure and simplification. Overuse is bound to take the shine off a reputation. But perhaps it is time to amend the familiar view of Said as a gifted critic deformed by the needs of propaganda. Sometimes his work was too openly polemical and coarse-grained, too attached to empty platitudes like oppositional intellectual and speaking truth to power. These portentous banalities offended the etiquette of post-humanism as well as the canons of clear thought. Too bad! He was still an inventive dynamo and an engine of vitality. He could not hold a coherent political line, but at least he never became a conservative. His liberation politics were as instinctive and antitotalitarian as Pete Seeger’s, but more deeply rooted in the intellectual culture of Europe and the United States. Then why has such a great gap opened to part the live rebel from the dead bore? Said’s career as a provocateur is partly at fault. As an expert inciter, he turned himself into one of the few visible figures of late-century literary culture. By 1970, little in American public life could have been more alien, remote, and irrelevant than literary criticism. Said grasped that the way to attract notice was to generate fresh copy. The papers and newscasters wanted to run sensational pieces on tenured radicals and nutty professors, not orotund rehearsals of intricate semiotics. A brilliant rabblerouser who had been annealed by years of public conflict, he took his cues from avant-gardist promoters who knew how to get the public worked up about art. He brilliantly combined the American public’s appetite for weirdness with its fixation on health and self-help. Thus, when he declared Orientalism to be a silent, creeping disease of the West, the diagnosis tripped a thousand alarms. The Tehran hostage crisis of 1979 suggested that he might have been right in 1978 about Western incomprehension of the Middle East.1 For the next twenty-five years he remorselessly goaded the one demographic that more than any other comprised the vital center of serious American culture. By egging on the most refined and sensitive intellects in the land, and by flushing out certain liberals’ covert double standards, he

caused uproar after uproar. No provocateur ever had a better target than Israel: every pebble he threw released an avalanche of rejoinders. The yield of his criticism was easily ten-fold. But Said became a historic figure in ways that mere controversialists cannot be. Engaging in “particular struggles of a very limited sort” (WTC 83) means that these “occasional” (WTC 77), “marginal” (WTC 77) and “sporty” (WTC 77) writings will soon have “disappeared or lost their significance,” “will not survive their occasions,” and “can pray for no transcendence.”2 Although pouring his energies into ephemera appeared selfdefeating for Said’s long-term literary reputation, it nonetheless augmented his institutional stature. The university and its society required someone with his academic pedigree at his precise historical moment, for as Said finished Princeton and Harvard and began teaching at Columbia, the institutions of higher education had toppled into social revolution. He had just the right profile to take a commanding role. In that sense, Said’s life offers one of the most vivid narratives of class in the history of American academia: a humanist-and a very great one-inventing the university as it invented him. His revolution was social, symbolic, and permanent. The American university of Woodstock, SDS, and Black Panther rallies may have gone, but a Said-sponsored worldliness remains a defining feature of contemporary departments of English and Comparative Literature. The result is that today one cannot enter an English department without seeing Saids on every hand. The made-to-measure English shoes and the Loden-green cape have gone; the courses on repetition and molestation have been replaced by hybridity seminars and subalternity studies. But to see a young professor range freely across a spate of disciplines is to experience déjà vu and glimpse Said drawing his farflung parallels and defying the cult of expertise. His scorn of disciplinary border-fences has become the expected transgression underlying all Cultural Studies. A talk on “Instant Global Distribution and the Future of Thought” or “Literary Studies as a Symptom in the Pedagogical Space” recalls Said’s demand for a more worldly perspective.3 A book such as Andreas Huyssen’s

Other Cities, Other Worlds or Chenxi Tang’s The Geographic Imagination of Modernity summons up the macaronic variety of Said’s Beginnings, just as Laura Winkiel’s Modernism, Race, and Manifestos or Frederic Spotts’ The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation will make some remember Said’s Politics of Dispossession and Representations of the Intellectual.4 Whether Said initiated this change or an institutional need produced him is unimportant. What matters is that he was among those who restored charisma and gave direction to the departments of English and Comparative Literature. Said entered the disciplinary fray just at the moment when donnish, well-mannered English departments decided to become insurgent enclaves of interdisciplinary raiders. A helpful simplification would be to say that Said allied himself strategically with mutinous post-structural French-trained theorists and then, once the tottering ancien régime had succumbed to their joint assault, turned against his erstwhile deconstructive allies. The issue of that subsequent contest now is clear. In the words of one prominent historian of criticism, Said’s position has won:

Could it be that Said is out of touch with the fact that his side in the struggle for hegemony in the profession has won? Can he not know that his legions-the partisans of experience, particularly when the experience is of dislocation, alienation, and the exile occasioned by differences in identity and the politics derived therefrom-are in power?5