Abstract
Beginning an essay on Edward Said with George Eliot’s use of the word “worldliness” is quite anachronistic. But despite the difference between Said’s more specialized theoretical vocabulary and Eliot’s mundane signifier for cosmopolitan, cultivated, or urbane, a brief exchange at the beginning of Middlemarch’s second book entitled “Old and Young” is uncanny nonetheless. The scene in question comes as we are just being introduced to the novel’s supporting cast; learning their values, character, and seeing how their existence in the first half of the nineteenth century anticipates Eliot’s, and by extension our own, modern world. It is in this respect that I begin with an exchange between Mr. Vincy and Mr. Bulstrode concerning the upbringing of the former’s son, Fred, and his profligate lifestyle. Both are businessmen, but Bulstrode believes that Vincy’s faith in a “father’s duty to give his sons a fine chance,” that is a college education, engendered bad habits under the auspices of some idea of “worldliness.”1 The conversation goes as follows:
“I don’t wish to act otherwise than as your best friend, Vincy, when I say that what you have been uttering just now is one mass of worldliness and inconsistent folly.”
“Very well,” said Mr. Vincy, kicking in spite of resolutions, “I never professed to be anything but worldly; and, what’s more, I don’t see anybody else who is not worldly. I suppose you don’t conduct business on what you call unworldly principles. The only difference I see is that one worldliness is a little bit honester than another.”2
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Notes
George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Bert G. Hornback (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1977), 87.
My use of the phrase “close reading” will become clearer as this essay progresses. I should note now, however, that while a close reading clearly invokes the New Critics and their poststructuralist avatars, I want to help extend the scope of its usage. On these issues, see Jane Gallop, “The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading,” Profession (2007), 181–186; and Jane Gallop, “Close Reading in 2009,” ADE Bulletin 149 (2010), 15–19.
Michael Wood, “Beginnings Again,” in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, ed. Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 60. I should also emphasize that Wood’s eloquent essay further contextualizes Beginnings in relation to the theory moment.
We would be lucky if students being introduced to Said for the first time have even heard of Beginnings, let alone understand its significance not just for literary studies, but also in the context of Said’s career. The following three introductory books exemplify how the critical community represents his legacy or, at the very least, how such a legacy is taught to subsequent generations. Valerie Kennedy’s Edward Said: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) begins her introduction with Orientalism and devotes one paragraph to Beginnings.
Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia’s Edward Said (London: Routledge, 2009), part of the Routledge Critical Thinkers series, uses The World, the Text, and the Critic as its theoretical master text and builds upon Kennedy’s work by discussing Beginnings in two paragraphs.
Conor McCarthy’s The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) ameliorates the major defects of the previous introductions, but McCarthy, in the final chapter discussing Said’s reception and lasting influence, discusses only Orientalism. 9. William Spanos provides a definitive account of Said’s relationship to poststructuralism and corroborates much of the context I’ve provided here: “Said was […] an antihumanist humanist or at any rate was engaged in thinking a humanism that was in its errancy more truly humanist than the traditional humanism [of, for example, Arnold or Trilling] […] that became hegemonic in the West in the wake of the apotheosis of Man—the anthropo-logos—in the Renaissance and especially after the Enlightenment. Indeed, he was, despite an increasing negativity toward poststructuralism, thinking a humanism that was consistent with the posthumanism (i.e., ‘antihumanist humanism’) that was the unsaid assumption of the so-called poststructuralists from Heidegger, through Derrida [and company].” Through superb readings of Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism, and Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Spanos demonstrates Said’s continuously fraught relationship with theory. However, in his focus on the still untapped revolutionary potential in Said’s thought, Spanos only provides a brief discussion of Beginnings. I hope that the present essay can bolster Spanos’s emphasis on the political stakes of critical theory by thinking through the more pedestrian concept of how Said understands the role of the critic’s engagement with literature.
See William V. Spanos, The Legacy of Edward Said (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 5.
For concise essays on Said’s use of different terminology, see R. Radhakrishnan, A Said Dictionary (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 58; hereafter cited in text as B.
Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), xiv. I should note that the preface to Bloom’s Map appears in the second edition published in 2003.
Bloom’s essay “Poetic Crossing,” which powerfully contrasts his position with that of Derrida and de Man, also demonstrates the correlation between his work and Said’s. The essay’s opening makes this perfectly clear: “A poem begins because there is an absence. An image must be given, for a beginning, and so that absence ironically is called a presence. Or, a poem begins because there is too strong a presence, which needs to be imaged as an absence, if there is to be any imaging at all” (emphasis mine). Harold Bloom, “Poetic Crossing,” Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 375. Such a passage, coupled with Bloom’s emphasis on the Vichian imagination, albeit in its romantic, un-secularized form, suggests that of all the major theorists of the 1970s, his work is closest to that of Said’s. This similarity might account for the huge emphasis placed on Bloom by both Said and his interlocutor in the interview that appeared in the special issue of diacritics.
See Edward W. Said, “Interview: Edward W. Said,” diacritics 6.3 (1976), 30–47.
Edward Said, “Secular Criticism,” The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 25–26.
See Daniel Rosenberg Nutters, “Between the Romance and the Real: Experiencing Jamesian Reading,” Henry James Review 35.1 (Winter 2014), 12–22.
See Lionel Trilling, “Reality in America,” in The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, ed. Leon Wieseltier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008).
Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 207.
Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 14; hereafter cited in text as HDC.
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 23.
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), no pag.
F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), xiv.
While Said tacitly implies a distinction between, to put it baldly, good and bad literature, he cautions one to stay away from such overdetermined and discussed qualifications. Nonetheless, the following dictum might suggest how he would approach the question of value: “Texts that are inertly of their time stay there: those which brush up unstint-ingly against historical constraints are the ones we keep with us, generation after generation.” See Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003), 26–27.
John Carlos Rowe, “The Resistance to Cultural Studies,” in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton and Jeffrey Rhyne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 112.
Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 7.
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© 2015 Robert T. Tally Jr.
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Nutters, D.R. (2015). Back to Beginnings: Reading between Aesthetics and Politics. In: Tally, R.T. (eds) The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487209_5
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