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)

صدق الله العظيم

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.

Introduction

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.

Chapter I Early Seeds of Said's Value

System

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.

Chapter II Value System &Humanism of

Knowledge: Toward the

Theoretical Values of Said's

Criticism

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.

Chapter III Said's Strategy for a Value

System: Theory and Practice

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

101

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.

Chapter IV Culture and Imperialism

Toward a Strategy for a Value

System

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

121

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.

Conclusion

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.

Appendix

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.

Bibliography

176

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Said, Edward. Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1978.

---------------. Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus,

1993.

---------------. Out Of Place: A Memoir, London: Granta, 1999.

---------------. Humanism and Democratic criticism, New York:

Columbia University, 2004.

Secondary Sources A. Books and Articles in Books: Ahmed, Ajaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations and Literature.

London: Verso, 1992.

Arnold, Mathew. Culture and Anarchy (1869), ed. J. Dover

Wilson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1932.

Ashcroft, B. & Pal Ahuwalia. The Paradox of Identity. London:

Rutledge, 2000.

Barry, Peter. An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory,

Manchester: London, 1995.

Bove , Paul A. ''Hope and Reconciliation: a Review of Edward W.

Said,'' Boundary 20 (1993): 50-60.

Bruce, Robbins. ''The East is a Career: Edward Said and The Logics

of Profession,'' Edward Said: A critical Reader,

Michael Sprinkle. ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

177

Dunn, Allen. ''The Ethics of Mansfield Park, Macintyre, Said, and

Social context,'' Edward Said III, Patrick Williams. ed.

Sage: London, 2001.

Ghezoul, Ferial. "The Resonance of the Arab-Islamic Heritage in the

Work of Edward Said,'' Edward Said: A Critical

Reade, Michael Sprinker, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Hallows, Peter. Absolutely Post Colonial: Writing between the

Singular and Specific, London: Manchester, 2001.

Jan Mohamed, Abdul R. "Worldliness - without World,

Homelessness – as - Home: Toward a Definition of the

Specula Border Intellectual,'' Edward Said: A Critical

Reader, Michael Sprinker, ed. Oxford: Blackwell,

1992.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All too Human. London: University of

Nebraska Press, 1984.

Parry, Benita. Overlapping Terrortries and Intertwined Histories:

Edward Said's Postcolonial Cosmopolitism,'' Edward

Said: A Critical Reader, Michael Sprinker, ed.Oxford:

Blackwell, 1992.

Peter, D. "Orientalism and its Problems,'' The politics of Theory, Peter

Hulme, Margert Iversen and Dianne Loxely, eds.

Colchester: University of Essex, 1983.

Said, Edward. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography,

Cambridge Harvard UP: 1966.

178

---------------. Beginnings: Intention and Method. NY: Basic Books,

1975.

---------------. Reflection on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge:

Harvard University press, 2000.

----------------. After the Last Sky, New York: Pantheon, 1986.

---------------. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith

Lectures, NY: Pantheon, 1994.

---------------. The Politics of Dispossessions, London: Windus

1994b.

---------------. Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward

Said, Pantheon Books: New York, 2000.

Turner, Bryans. Marx and the End of Orientalism, London: George

Allen, 1978.

Sohat, E. "Antinomies Of Exile: Said At The Frontiers Of National

Narration,'' Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Michael

Sprinker, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Tabori, Paul. The Anatomy Of Exile. London: Harrap, 1972.

Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture

and Race. London: Rutledge, 1995.

Williams, Raymond. A Preface to Film: New York: Double Day

company, 1979.

179

B. Articles in Periodicals:

Chuaqui, Ruben. "Notes on Edward Said's View of Michel Foucault,''

Alif 25(2005):89-118.

Eagleton, Terry. "Edward Said, Cultural Politics, and Critical Theory,"

Alif 25 (2005): 254-269.

Elom, Amos. ''Exile's Return" New York Review Book.18.Novmber.

1999:15-18.

Hays, Michael. ''Representing Empire: Class, Culture and the popular

Theatre in the Nineteenth Century,'' Theatre Journal

47(1995): 55-82.

Imbabi, Do'aa. "A Reading of Edward Said's Critical Concepts,'' Alif

25(2005):55-73.

Ismail, Ezzeldin. ''The Methodologies of Literary Criticism:

Evaluative and Descriptivism, ''Fosoul 68(2006):13-29

Jalal Al Azm. Sadik, ''Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,''

Khamsin 8 (1980) 5-26.

O'Hara, Daneil. ''Criticism Worldly and Other Worldly: Edward W.

Said and The Cult of Theory,'' Boundary 13 (1984): 379-

403.

Siddiki, Yumna. "Edward Said, Humanism, and Secular

Criticism,''Alif 25(2005):65-88.

Zakia, et. ''The Prison House of Orientalism,'' Textual Practise

2(1991):50-54.

180

C. Online Articles:

"Guardian limited Book," www.book.Guardian.co.uk./ reviewstory/0.

12084.1010417.00.html0/august:2007

'' Dictionary of World History,'' WWW. encylopeida. com/ doc/ 1048-

humanism .html.20 October, 2007.

''Essential life Encyclopedia,'' www. essentiallifeskills. net/personal

valuesystem. htmlValue system. Htm 15 March.2008

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

جامعة حلوان كلية اآلداب

قسم اللغة اإلنجليزية

مفهوم إدوارد سعيد النقدي إسرتاتيجية لنسق قيمي

رسالة لنيل درجة الماجستير

إعداد السيد حممد علي إمساعيل

إشراف هشام حممد . د حورية سرحان . د

محاضر األدب اإلنجليزي أستاذ مساعد األدب اإلنجليزي

)٢٠٠٩(