|
REVIEW
| September 17, 2001
The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals
by Edward Said
n everyday usage in the languages and cultures with which I am familiar, a "writer" is a person who produces literature--that is, a novelist, poet, dramatist. I think it is generally true that in all cultures writers have a separate, perhaps even more honorific, place than do "intellectuals"; the aura of creativity and an almost sanctified capacity for originality (often vatic in scope and quality) accrues to writers as it doesn't at all to intellectuals, who with regard to literature belong to the slightly debased and parasitic class of "critics." Yet at the dawn of the twenty-first century the writer has taken on more and more of the intellectual's adversarial attributes in such activities as speaking the truth to power, being a witness to persecution and suffering, and supplying a dissenting voice in conflicts with authority. Signs of the amalgamation of one to the other would have to include the Salman Rushdie case in all its ramifications; the formation of numerous writers' parliaments and congresses devoted to such issues as intolerance, the dialogue of cultures, civil strife (as in Bosnia and Algeria), freedom of speech and censorship, truth and reconciliation (as in South Africa, Argentina, Ireland and elsewhere); and the special symbolic role of the writer as an intellectual testifying to a country's or region's experience, thereby giving that experience a public identity forever inscribed in the global discursive agenda.
The easiest way of demonstrating this is simply to
list the names of some (but by no means all) recent Nobel Prize
winners, then to allow each name to trigger in the mind an
emblematized region, which in turn can be seen as a sort of platform
or jumping-off point for that writer's subsequent activity as an
intervention, in debates taking place very far from the world of
literature. Thus Nadine Gordimer, Kenzaburo Oe, Derek Walcott, Wole
Soyinka, Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Elie
Wiesel, Bertrand Russell, Günter Grass, Rigoberta Menchú,
among several others.
Now it is also true, as Pascale
Casanova has brilliantly shown in her synoptic book La
République mondiale des lettres, that, fashioned over the
past 150 years, there seems to be a global system of literature now
in place, complete with its own order of literariness
(littérarité), tempo, canon, internationalism
and market values. The efficiency of the system is that it seems to
have generated the types of writers that she discusses as belonging to such different categories
as assimilated, dissident and translated figures--all of them both
individualized and classified in what she shows is a highly
efficient, globalized, quasi-market system. The drift of her argument
is to show that this powerful and all-pervasive system can go even as
far as stimulating a kind of independence from itself, as in cases
like Joyce and Beckett, writers whose language and orthography do not
submit to the laws either of state or of system.
Much as I
admire it, however, the overall achievement of Casanova's book is
nevertheless contradictory. She seems to be saying that literature as
globalized system has a kind of integral autonomy to it that places
it in large measure just beyond the gross realities of political
institutions and discourse, a notion that has a certain theoretical
plausibility to it when she puts it in the form of un espace
littéraire internationale, with its own laws of
interpretation, its own dialectic of individual work and ensemble,
its own problematics of nationalism and national languages. But she
doesn't go as far as Adorno in saying, as I would too, that one of
the hallmarks of modernity is how, at a very deep level, the
aesthetic and the socialneed to be kept in a state of irreconcilable
tension. Nor does she spend enough time discussing the ways in which
the literary, or the writer, is still implicated--indeed frequently
mobilized for use--in the great post-cold war cultural contests of
the world's altered political configurations.
Looked at
from that perspective, for example, the debate about Salman
Rushdie was never really about the literary attributes of The
Satanic Verses but rather about whether there could be a literary
treatment of a religious topic that did not also touch on religious
passions in a very, indeed in an exacerbated, public way. I don't
think that such a possibility existed, since from the very moment the
fatwa was released to the world by Ayatollah Khomeini, the
novel, its author and its readers were all deposited squarely inside
an environment that allowed no room for anything but politicized
intellectual debate about such socioreligious issues as blasphemy,
secular dissent and extraterritorial threats of assassination. Even
to assert that Rushdie's freedom of expression as a novelist could
not be abridged--as many of us from the Islamic world did assert--was
in fact to debate the issue of the literary freedom to write within a
discourse that had already swallowed up and occupied (in the
geographical sense) literature's apartness entirely.
|