In defence of Edward Said
Sir, – Apparently, although it doesn’t say so, the TLS chose (in the issue of
May 9) to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Edward
Said’s Orientalism with two long, indirect attacks by Robert Irwin and
Kenneth M. Newton. These are indirect attacks in the sense that Irwin is
endorsing two polemical books about Said, and Newton is revisiting in
passing Said’s critical reading of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, which
occupies only two pages in Orientalism but is also the subject of a separate
essay. Unfortunately, neither Irwin nor Newton appears to have consulted the
new Penguin edition of Orientalism, which was published shortly before
Said’s death five years ago; it has an extensive new introduction by the
author. Irwin would have discovered that Said was very much aware that he
had given insufficient attention to German Orientalists. He might have found
there also a corrective to his erroneous dismissal of the book as an
“assault on Western culture”. What it is, in fact, is a critical examination
of an ideological thread that runs through a great deal of Western
scholarship about what was long known as “the Orient”. Irwin prefers,
instead, to attack Said by way of the use that has subsequently been made of
his work by art historians (Linda Nochlin and the writers of catalogues for
recent exhibitions and conferences at the Tate and the Courtauld).
Admittedly, the influence of a scholar’s work is important. But surely it is
more important that Said offered a forewarning of Bernard Lewis’s
ideological support for Western Orientalist imperialism that would
eventually develop into the current Iraq war, than whether he might have
been wrong about the decipherability of an inscription in Arabic on a wall
in a painting by Gérôme.
MICHAEL PAYNE
Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania 17837.
Sir, – It is odd yet inevitable that your wide coverage last week of Edward
Said and Orientalism should omit any word of China. Said’s most obvious
difficulty in extending his strictures to the Western treatment of the
Chinese is that, far from scorning their habits and customs, in the
eighteenth century the West idealized them. And while the overall Western
view of its civilization was most often de haut en bas, the Chinese returned
the compliment. To adapt Said’s formula, in early relations between Europe
and the Chinese, each was the “self” and each was “the other”. In its
treatment of the Western “other” as barbarians whose culture and industrial
ingenuity held nothing of interest to them, and as people who owed
allegiance to the Middle Kingdom, Chinese arrogance and deprecation could
outdo that of the West.
The Said thesis can, however, be said to apply to China in a sense its author
would not have welcomed. For what is the disregard for the suffering of the
victims of Mao Zedong’s rule by his sympathizers in the West if not a form
of contempt for “the other”? In minds driven by partisan political passions,
the Chinese “other” had ceased to be human and become an ideological cipher.
The disciplined, puritanical, ascetic, egalitarian and bloody life of
permanent revolution in China was never for the English, French, Italian and
American intellectuals, writers, philosophers and film stars who enthused
about it: it was for the “others”. The indulgence of people like Said
himself towards the Mao regime was a classic case of Orientalism, in his own
definition of the word.
GEORGE WALDEN
43 Edwardes Square, London W8.
Sir, – I read your lead article on Edward Said, and did not recognize certain
aspects of my former teacher. I was Said’s first doctoral student at
Columbia University, in the late l960s. The claim that his language skills
were deficient rings false. Two instances: having put me to the task of
translating a brief passage from Edmund Husserl, he berated me (in class)
for certain inaccuracies in my version of the German text. In addition, when
the French epistemologist Piaget visited Columbia during that era, Said was
designated by the administration of Columbia as his official escort because,
said one dean, of his “classic French”. Of his Arabic competence I cannot
speak. As his former student, I can, however, testify that he was the finest
instructor and mentor that any graduate student could wish for.
DANIEL O’CONNELL
English Department, Hobart College, Geneva, New York 14456.
Sir, – “Even as a noun, does critique have more meaning than criticism?” asks
Robert Irwin. Kant provides an answer. Critique, unlike criticism, implies a
two-way process. The philosopher who investigates rational cognition submits
to the claims of reason in return.
EDWARD TIMMS Centre for German-Jewish Studies, University of Sussex, Falmer,
Brighton.
Thomas Middleton
Sir, – I am a little puzzled by Gary Taylor’s response regarding Thomas
Middleton (Letters, May 9). The list of contributors at the start of his
edition has Taylor’s name and sixty-two others. I called this “nearly
seventy” whereas Taylor calls it seventy-four. Taylor accuses me of writing
a Shakespeare-centred review, but he courted the comparison by leading on a
quotation that calls Middleton “our other Shakespeare”. I deliberately chose
not to dwell on the most Shakespearean aspect of the edition, namely its
inclusion of Measure for Measure, Macbeth and Timon of Athens.
My point about the edition’s longevity in the making was to suggest that we
needed a Middleton edition in the last century: if Taylor had produced a
working text then, he might have done a little to stem the theatrical tide
of recent years, which I deplore, that has seen more and more productions of
Shakespeare, and fewer and fewer of his contemporaries. I can’t see that
changing now. And I maintain that a freely available online edition rather
than a marmoreal print text would have been a better way to disseminate the
sophisticated work of his admirable team of scholars.
Though I would not wish to go to the stake for the claim, my assessment of the
conflicting stylometric evidence still leads me to the tentative belief that
“The Spanish Gypsy seems to be a revision by John Ford of an earlier script
by Middleton and Rowley with input by Dekker somewhere along the way”. And I
still think of A Game at Chess as a contemporary political drama, not a
history play. As for whether Mistress Harebrain impersonates the Succubus or
vice versa, I had been under the impression that for the audience in the
theatre it is an open question – a mark of the metadramatic sophistication
of Middleton’s Mad World, which neither Gary Taylor nor I would wish to
dispute.
JONATHAN BATE
Department of English, University of Warwick, Coventry.
AIDS and Africa
Sir, – I wish to clarify something in Steven Epstein’s thoughtful review of my
book The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West and the fight against AIDS (March
7). My thesis is that the African AIDS epidemic is largely explained by
concurrent (or overlapping) long-term sexual partnerships and not by typical
“promiscuity”.
Professor Epstein claims that the 1994 US National Health and Social Life
Survey (NHSLS) found large numbers of multiple partnerships among unmarried
Americans. But as I point out in Chapter Three of my book, the sociologist
Martina Morris concluded from the NHSLS that, although heterosexual
Americans have more lifetime sexual partnerships than Ugandans do, Americans
mostly practise serial monogamy or casual/commercial sex.
Those American relationships that did overlap, generally did so for much
shorter periods than did Ugandans’ concurrent relationships.
HELEN EPSTEIN
424 West 144th Street, New York 10031.
Thomas Kyd
Sir, – I am glad that Bernard Richards (Letters, May 2) finds my attributions
to Thomas Kyd of Arden of Faversham and part of 1 Henry VI “largely
convincing”. I accept his point that “self-plagiarism” is perhaps not the
most felicitous term to describe Kyd’s habit of self-repetition or
self-echoing. But I must take issue with his comment that “there is a
tendency in Vickers’s piece for him to regard his insights as more novel
than they actually are, since some examples of what he identifies count as
‘image-clusters’ – recognized years ago by Caroline Spurgeon”. This term
refers to Shakespeare’s habit of associating certain ideas and images, such
as a link between fawning dogs and melting sweets (“candy”), first noted by
William Whiter in 1794 and explained as proving Locke’s associationist
theory. Spurgeon independently noted the same phenomenon in the 1930s, using
it to speculate about “Shakespeare’s subconscious mind”, his likes and
dislikes, while a decade later Edward Armstrong took it as shedding light on
his “imaginative activity” and the workings of his memory.
My method has nothing in common with these. It deals not with imagery, but
with sequences of three to seven words that recur in different texts by the
same author. Its novelty resides in the fact that it uses new software
programs that can quickly detect recurrences of such sequences in two or
more play texts, and check their individuality against all the drama
performed up to a given year. The results partly confirm long-standing
authorship attributions to Kyd, such as Arden of Faversham, first made by F.
G. Fleay in 1891, as Adam C. Green rightly observes (Letters, April 25), but
they add a brand new one, Kyd’s authorship of about two-thirds of 1 Henry
VI. The data from this study are currently being posted on the website of
the London Forum for Authorship Studies, to which I unfortunately gave an
incomplete URL. The correct one is
http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/seminars/LFAS/index.htm
BRIAN VICKERS
7 Abbot’s Place, London NW6.
Awe-inspiring
Sir, – In his review of Amir D. Aczel’s The Artist and the Mathematician
(April 18), Alexander Masters paints a misguided picture of Alexandre
Grothendieck. According to Masters, the mathematician Grothendieck, having
written a thesis “which contained enough discoveries for six seminal papers”
(correct), then turned to “advocating” some sort of “idea” against which
mathematics “fought back” and which “drove [him] mad”. His madness aside,
this couldn’t be further from the truth. After his thesis, Grothendieck
produced a breathtaking series of articles, books and lectures, performing
mathematical research of unparallelled single-mindedness, breadth and
inventiveness. His work led to a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the course of
twentieth-century mathematics.
In the late 1960s, Grothendieck developed a deep interest in current affairs.
As well as “hitting a couple of policemen” (to quote Masters), he refused to
attend the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1966 in Moscow, where
he was to be presented with the Fields Medal, as a protest against the
Soviet government.
From the 1980s onwards, Grothendieck’s state of mind can indeed be
characterized as “mad” . Despite this, he still managed to produce
outstanding, though enigmatic, treatises on very difficult mathematical
problems. Even in his “madness”, he commands our awe and respect.
BALAZS SZENDROI
St Peter’s College, Oxford.
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