Late Said
Fakrul Alam examines two of the posthumously published works of the great Palestinian scholar
In the long, and characteristically eloquent, interview Edward W. Said gave a few weeks before he died on September 25, 2003 -- an interview now available on videotape -- the Palestinian-American critic talks about the difficulty he was having in reading, writing, talking, and even coping with the simplest demands of everyday life; the twelve-year struggle with leukemia had apparently drained the sixty-seven year old intellectual of all energy. And yet what strikes anyone watching the video is his alertness and the effortlessness and compulsiveness with which he wants to tell posterity about his life and his works. Undoubtedly, Said was losing out in his battle with cancer, but, obviously, here was a man determined not to go gently into the night and bent on explaining what he had been up to in a lifetime devoted to Palestine, art and culture, as well as the profession of English and comparative literature.In fact, late in his life, Said seemed to have found an immense source of energy, as if, before losing out in his race with time, he would do everything he could to leave behind a legacy that would be truly distinctive. It was as if he had decided that his life should be as rounded as he could make it to be. Out of the 20 or so books that he authored, around ten were published in the last twelve years of his life; at least four more have come out posthumously. Of them, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (2004) is about the Middle East as seen by one of the fiercest critics of American foreign policy of recent decades; Humanistic and Democratic Criticism discusses the function of criticism in our time (2004), and the other two, Freud and the Non-European (2003) and On Late Style (2006) deal with a phenomenon that fascinated the dying scholar-critic, lover of classical western music and aesthete, something that he characterized as "late style." What is late style? It is something that Said sees heralding the culminating phase of a great artist's career; a phase when the artist as an old man (Said does not discuss any woman artist who has distinguished herself by her late style in these books) has intimations of mortality and, therefore, forges a distinctive but disturbing manner of envisioning times past, the present, and the future. It is worthwhile here to remember that Said's second book was called Beginnings (1975), as if to intimate that with it he was beginning again, decisively, swerving away from the conventionally scholarly inaugural book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. In the works under review, on the other hand, Said seems to have veered off towards an exploration of the repercussions of lateness in his favourite artists in the winter of his own life. Dr Fakrul Alam is Professor of English, University of Dhaka. To read the full version of this article please ask your hawker for a copy of this month's Forum.
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