ARABIC-L:LIT: Edward Said: Literature and Literalism
Dilworth B. Parkinson
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Mon Feb 1 23:32:21 UTC 1999
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1) Subject: Edward Said: Literature and Literalism
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1)
Date: 01 Feb 1999
From: Muhammad Deeb <mdeeb at gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
Subject: Edward Said: Literature and Literalism
Edward Said's essay, "Literature and Literalism," could not be more
timely. If it is not prompted by the infringement on the integrity of
university education in the Arab world, through the censorship of free
thinking and free expression, it arguably has an immediate bearing on the
sorry state of affairs that has been the subject of recent debate on other
lists and the e-mail exchange between a respectable colleague of ours and
the AUC president.
Said's essay is comparatively and enjoyably long. Due to time
constraints, some may not be able to read it in its entirety. Therefore,
with due respect to all and to Said himself, I have taken the liberty to
present a few excerpts as close-ups, (and perhaps as appetizers):
----------------------------------------------------
| When it comes to literary texts -- novels, poetry,
| and drama -- and how they are taught in schools and
| universities the whole question of what is "suitable"
| for the young is immediately engaged. Literalism in
| the interpretation of literature is simply and
| plainly out of place.
--------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
| But to say that certain books, ideas and authors should
| not be taught because they violate arbitrary definitions
| of what is proper and suitable is to violate the whole
| idea of the university, as John Henry Newman, Taha Hussein
| and a whole host of other thinkers saw it.
-----------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------
| [...] In the United States and the Arab world we are
| dangerously close to a situation where political pressure
| emanating from religious authorities outside the academy
| is beginning to encroach on our hard-won freedom of
| expression and on the freedom of artists to write and
| represent what is most important and interesting for them.
---------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
| Wherever books and ideas are banned on fraudulent "moral"
| grounds it is the duty of all intellectuals, writers and
| teachers to stand forth explicitly unafraid
| and in solidarity.
-----------------
* * *
Literature and Literalism
By Edward Said
Al-Ahram Weekly 28 Jan. - 3 Feb. 1999 Issue No. 414
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It is one of the oldest debates and unresolved disputes in
the history of culture: what does literature really mean? In many
traditions (and specially within monotheism) literature and, more
paricularly poets and artists, are regarded with suspicion
because they deal in what appear to be images of reality but do
not seem to be bound by ordinary considerations either of truth or
of moral behavior. In The Republic, which is Plato's attempt to
construct an ideal state, poets are specifically banned as
dangerous to the common good; they are moved by inspiration, what
they recite or put into print is tremendously attractive to their
audience but, Plato adds, they do not feel it is necessary always
to represent the true and the good. Their primary consideration is
beauty of form and expression, which because it is not principally
responsible to concerns of good character and virtuous behavior
Plato interprets as outright mischievous. There can be no place
for poets in a republic whose main purpose is the education and
maintenance of a law-abiding, truth-inspired and morally
enlightened citizenry.
All classical literature and criticism is thereafter guided by
what the Roman poet Horace considered the beautiful and the good
together, for which the Latin phrase dulce et utile served as a
formula for centuries. This was partly a way of taking account of
Plato's influence of course, but the belief that literature ought
to be beautiful as well as morally useful was strengthened and
consolidated by generations of poets as well as teachers whose
vision of their role always stipulated moral instruction in
addition to novelty and delight. According to the great
Renaissance English poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney the poet
was a prophet (vates), someone whose great powers of articulation
and vision gave him a special insight into what was good, moral,
virtuous. Until the middle of the l8th century this general view
of poetry and morality largely prevailed, even though several
great artists came dangerously close to subverting, if not
altogether cancelling, literature's moral message.
There is the case of Frangois Rabelais, the noted 16th century
French writer, whose great series of books on Gargantua and
Pantagruel narrate the riotous adventures of a pair of giants
with enormous, unrestrained appetites; the style of the book is
like its subject, unrestrained, extravagant, overwhelming, and it
is this, despite Rabelais's overt commitment to Christianity,
that has made the work problematic for future generations of
readers.
Recently a celebrated American critic meditated on how
difficult it was for him as a believer in women's rights
to read Rabelais's enormously detailed assault against women,
even though he concluded that as literature the attack had to be
permitted. There was just no way one could censor or remove it
an offense either to women or to young readers who might get the
wrong ideas from it.
By the end of the 18th century a new confessional and
subjective element crept into the realm of the aesthetic, an
element that was justified as emanating not from nature itself
but from the effects of nature on the imagination. From Rousseau
to Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Novalis, Hugo, Chateaubriand
and many others, literature's role was in effect to express the
formerly inexpressible from the privacy of one's heart and mind
to an audience both ready and eager to absorb a new style that
knew virtually no restraints. Goethe's character Werther typified
the emotionally intense extremes to which strong emotion might
go, stripped of any obligation to represent the "objective" world
or any morality or virtue. All across Europe young people read
about Werther, suffered what he suffered, and in some cases
committed suicide the way he did.
What mattered was authenticity of expression, fidelity to one's
creative self rather than middle class virtue or common sense.
And for at least 300 years this has generally been true not only
of literature, but also of music and the figurative arts. No
admirer of Beethoven, or of Picasso, Joyce and Ezra Pound could
pretend to enjoy their work and at the same time complain that it
violated all sorts of canons of good behavior as well as
realistic representation. Art was supposed to be different from
life; it was intended to subvert ordinary reality; it was created
in order to be extreme, not to be "normal".
All of this is a summary of a great many complicated issues
pertaining to the way literature, or indeed any written text, is
interpreted. It is important nevertheless to insist that all
written texts are themselves interpretations, just as all
readings of texts are also interpretations. Language is not
reality; words are not interchangeable with objects. The science
of linguistics teaches us that, and thus we have come to realise
that all written objects require interpretation, that is, the
need to decipher a text's meaning so as to make clear the
writer's intention. But about this there can be consensus but not
absolute unanimity since every interpretation depends on the
skill, circumstances and perspective of the interpreter.
Problems set in when one interpreter asserts unilaterally that
a novel, for example, means something very specific and only
that, or when a reader says that novels should mean x or y and
not a,b or c. Many of the major cultural debates of recent years
are about such issues, so I can neither pretend here to deal with
all of them, nor to settle every question. All I want to
demonstrate is that interpretation itself is and must always be,
for the sake of culture and a decent coexistence for citizens
within it, a many-sided and unending thing that can never be
settled once and for all.
This is obviously true whenever sacred texts are concerned. If
there were one simple reading there wouldn't be so many schools,
orthodoxies, currents and tendencies: they would all be resolved
and everyone would follow the same interpretation, and that would
be the end of it. Part of what is now going through the Islamic,
Jewish and Christian worlds is precisely the battle over
interpretations and literalness, i.e. the literal meaning of a
sacred text, which to the fundamentalist's chagrin can never be
confined to a single meaning. The source of major controversy in
Israel today is the contest over interpretation, and it is
splitting that society apart as the orthodox Jews try to impose
their will on the largely secular majority by saying that there
is only one reading of orthodox law and only they have it: the
rest (liberals, conservatives, etc) are really not Jews because
they do not accept this view. The same type of issue is being
disputed in the United States, and also in the Islamic world.
When it comes to literary texts -- novels, poetry, and drama --
and how they are taught in schools and universities the whole
question of what is "suitable" for the young is immediately
engaged. Literalism in the interpretation of literature is simply
and plainly out of place. Otherwise there is only dogmatism. I
recall that when I first went to Poland in l972 I was told by
university colleagues of mine that it was very difficult to teach
or write about Karl Marx in a critical way; the government
imposed a ban on any deviation from the strict communist line.
Thus only one reading of Marx was allowed, and only Marx was
considered fit for teaching in philosophy classes. Plato,
Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Bertrand
Russell were all considered secondary, and barely tolerated at
all.
Yet there can be no civilized society in which the life of the
mind is ruled dogmatically by laws of what is forbidden and what
cannot be read. This is especially urgent in the case of
universities where it is precisely the role (and the rule) of
academic training to teach the young that the mind has capacities
for investigation, criticism and inquiry that it would be a crime
to stifle, abridge or forbid. This is not to say that academic
discipline neglects the training of young people in the arts of
interpretation, discriminating reading and critical detachment:
those are essential. But to say that certain books, ideas and
authors should not be taught because they violate arbitrary
definitions of what is proper and suitable is to violate the
whole idea of the university, as John Henry Newman, Taha Hussein
and a whole host of other thinkers saw it. For if a teacher or
senior official rules as to what is proper and suitable,
prescribes what should not be read, forbids or bans books from
the classroom or the library the question to be asked is: who is
going to control the controller, who sits in authority over him,
who regulates who the most suitable person is for deciding what
the young should or should not read? Such questions take us into
an infinite regress because they cannot possibly be settled once
and for all.
Moreover when it comes to literature in particular, and art in
general, we must not forget that art is not religion, a novel is
not philosophy, poetry does not provide models of good (or for
that matter bad) behavior. At most the arts are representations
or, as Aristotle said, imitations of reality, not reality itself,
and the way reality gets into literature or music and painting is
the subject of centuries of discussion, debate, controversy,
scholarship and philsophical investigation. This is the case not
just in the European tradition but also in the Indian, Arabic,
Chinese, and Japanese traditions, among others. To say of a novel
that it is immoral is to suggest that novels are supposed to be
moral, which is almost pure nonsense, since the only morality or
good behavior that literature is really about directly is either
good or bad writing. To treat fiction as if it were a religious
or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature
as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the
purest form of intellectual barbarism.
Anyone who mistakes literature for reality, thereby treating it
literally, has a severely deranged view of things; remember that
one of the first and greatest novels ever written, Cervantes's
Don Quixote, is about a man who makes precisely that mistake and
is therefore considered to be crazy. The whole point of educating
university students in the liberal arts generally, and literature
specifically, is to train them to read not just pious books about
good behavior, but all books, particularly those that are morally
and intellectually challenging. What would become of literature
if it was to be subjected to rules formulated by a committee of
experts as to what can and cannot be read? This is more like the
Spanish Inquisition than it is the curricular practice of a
modern institution of learning.
I say all this because in the United States and the Arab world
we are dangerously close to a situation where political pressure
emanating from religious authorities outside the academy is
beginning to encroach on our hard-won freedom of expression and
on the freedom of artists to write and represent what is most
important and interesting for them. For years now a vociferous
American lobby has tried to bully schools and universities to
eliminate books considered "immoral" on grounds that they do not
seem to conform to religious dogma or that they are not
anti-communist enough. In the Arab and Islamic world such
practices as dancing and singing are similarly threatened, and
considered to be immoral, as are certain books and authors. The
only answer to this is not to retreat in cowardice but to open
these issues to frank and courageous debate. Let the opponents of
freedom stand forth and make their case openly, and let the
defenders of freedom make theirs. Let all this be public. But to
pressure from behind the scenes, to threaten, to intimidate and
above all, on the other side, to capitulate to censorship of
literature and the arts on purely literal grounds is a disaster.
As Arabs we have already paid too high a price for the absence
of democratic freedoms. To be asked now to keep silent is to be
asked to give up still more, and to do so in a cowardly and
irrational way. Wherever books and ideas are banned on fraudulent
"moral" grounds it is the duty of all intellectuals, writers and
teachers to stand forth explicitly unafraid and in solidarity.
Otherwise there is no saying what book or idea will be banned
next, especially in institutions of learning where it is
extremely, indeed, ridiculously easy to say that banning a book
is done to protect the young and teach them only "moral" books
that are good for them. This is utter nonsense of course,
disguising authoritarianism and obscurantism in the ready
currency of acceptable ideas. Such practices are the opposite of
morality and education and should immediately and openly be
revealed as exactly that, authoritarianism and obscurantism,
neither of which has a place in education.
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