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A leukemia diagnosis (and a lifelong fascination with Proust) motivated Edward Said to begin writing his memoir, Out of Place. The book embodies the self-spectating gaze of exile to articulate the critical division between the Edward he performs and the Edward who studies the performance.
In childhood, Said studied his father’s refusal to express emotion alongside his mother’s disdain for physical touch as a means of comforting her children. From these two inhibitions, he became aware of his own “sensitivity”, a hyperawareness that he monitored like a vulture preying on its carcass. Mired by shame, the young Edward feared the public disgrace of being legible in his feelings. It was the possibility of being recognized by others as an Edward that felt foreign to him, a possibility that materialized in the power of teachers and peers to write the foreign, the weird, the unusual, the less comprehensible:
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"Princeton in the fifties was unpolitical, self-satisfied, and oblivious.” It prepared Said to be a manager of elite machines—- and he knew this. He resented the facility of the superficial gestures that kept American appearances intact. He loathed and feared the aura of complacency, which might explain why he found it difficult to make friends at Princeton. “I felt that there was no depth, no ease, to the Americans, only the surface jokiness and anecdotal high spirits of teammates, which never satisfied me,” Said wrote. Uneasiness inflected his bilingual existence:
There was always the feeling that what I missed with my American contemporaries was other languages, Arabic mainly, in which I lived and thought and felt along with English. They seemed less emotional, with little interest in articulating their attitudes and reactions. This was the extraordinary homogenizing power of American life, in which the same TV, clothes, ideological uniformity, in films, newspapers, comics, etc., seemed to limit the complex intercourse of daily life to an unreflective minimum in which memory has no role.
“Immersion in reading and writing was the only antidote to Princeton's poisonous social atmosphere,” he wrote of Princeton’s fraternity-boy feel:
Like Walker Percy’s alien anthropologist, Said conducted a close reading of the environment in which he had been placed, and found only two professors who inspired him to think critically, the first of which was literary critic R. P. Blackmur. What Said loved about Blackmur is what he would come to celebrate in his formulations of the “amateur” critic. Lacking a doctorate or “even a high school diploma,” Blackmur had become an English professor, at Princeton. “A lonely, difficult-to-follow writer and lecturer, whose sheer genius in uncovering layer after layer of meaning in modern poetry and fiction (despite his gnarled and frequently incomprehensible language),” Blackmur, to Said, was “utterly challenging.” And the challenge is precisely what Said craved:
[Blackmur’s] example for me opened the secret delight of interpretation as something more than paraphrase or explanation. I never took a course with him or met him, but apart from reading him avidly I intermittently used to go to his lectures on poetics and modern fiction. He was one of the two readers of my senior thesis on André Gide and Graham Greene, a tortured affair …
The “other figure of distinction” was Professor of Philosophy Arthur Szathmary: “a spritely, energetic little figure who was everyone's gadfly, whether student, colleague, or great writer.” To the jaded students and “disaffected outsiders,” Said says that “Szathmary came to represent, and even embody, the intellectual life”:
He was intensely skeptical, asked irreverent questions, and generally made one feel that the accurate articulation of objections and flaws were activities of the highest order. There was nothing of the Princeton "tweedy" ethos about him or anything that suggested careerism and worldly success.
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"Manipulated seriality is the heart of fascist politics", Jairus Banaji wrote in "Trajectories of Fascism: Extreme-Right Movements in India and Elsewhere" (2013). Banaji predicted Modi could function as a figurehead around which to build a cult of national greatness, a cult complicated by the polyvocality of Hinduism that doesn't automatically privilege a male god. [Note also a lack of "political culture" willing to do battle against burgeoning national greatness mythos on the left.]
“At the heart of fascist politics lies a manipulated seriality”: a refrain that continues touching the world, a leitmotif that exile admonishes against and often, unintentionally, prevents. By virtue of never belonging, one is given to know that belonging is illusory, a temporal construction that cannot persist across time in a globalized world. But one one mourns it nonetheless. One mourns this beautiful monster named Belonging; one samples its unrealizable iconographies. This is the marrow of Svetlana Boym's theories on nostalgia, and her call for off-modern nostalgia that settles no place, that requires no drawing of boundaries or war to map it. A nostalgia that subverts the sacralized nation for the daydream: this appears in Said’s writings as well.
The gradual evolution towards religious extremism among friends and family disoriented Said. Listening to political discussions in Washington, Said found his own unsettledness:
… the inherent irreconcilability between intellectual belief and passionate loyalty to tribe, sect, and country first opened up in me, and have remained open. I have never felt the need to close the gap but have kept them apart as opposites, and have always felt the priority of intellectual, rather than national or tribal, consciousness, no matter how solitary that made one.
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The final paragraph of Said’s memoir also locates his life and mind in this contrapuntal motion:
Although Said never really goes after the therapy industry or takes the pedagogies of self-esteem to task, his criticism continuously challenged the “solid self” reaches toward certainty. Like the nation-state or the Virgin Mary, the solid self is a fragile construction that lives on the defensive. The solid self (again, like the ethno-state) invents new rules and boundaries that prevent it from being violated by reality.
Edward Said knew that the price of purity was an immaculate, fossilized stupidity, an ignorance so solid that not even millions of tons of bombs dropped on innocent children could move it.
"The Music Itself: Glenn Gould's Contrapuntal Vision" by Edward Said (PDF)
"Glenn Gould, the Virtuous as Intellectual" by Edward Said (PDF)