Recognising the Stranger

When I was wondering what to talk about in this lecture, I started thinking about Edward Said and lateness as a point of departure. Then I went back to his early book Beginnings. And then I decided after all that I preferred to start in the middle, and more specifically that I wanted to talk about the middle of narratives—their turning points, which I’ll relate to the shifting narrative shape of the Palestinian struggle in its global context.

It’s difficult, in life, to pinpoint with any real sense of confidence where a turning point is located. As Said said of beginnings—whether of texts, epochs or ideas—the turning point is likewise a human construction, something we identify in retrospect. We look back on our lives, or on the course of history, and according to the shape of the particular narrative we are telling we can say—ah, see, that is how the course of the story developed, and that was a key node when everything changed. We can see these moments quite clearly from the vantage of hindsight; we can assert the significance of past events with relative confidence. In the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s 2020 novel Time Shelter, the narrator notes that history becomes history only after the fact: ‘Most likely,’ he says, speaking of the beginning of the Second World War, ‘1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid.’ But if we cannot always know the significance of the moment in the moment, it is also true that our moment, the one in which we now live, feels like one of chronic ‘crisis’: political, economic and climate crises besiege us, along with other existential crises posed by the exponential development of artificial intelligence, and the recurring nightmare of nuclear war. In narrative time, the crisis should suggest the encroachment of the end, even if, in real life, the end is a receding horizon. The flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it. Generations continue to be born, and we experience neither total apocalypse nor a happily-ever-after with any collective meaning beyond the endings of individual lives. Yet this narrative sense remains with us, flickering like a ghost through the revisions of postmodernism: we hope for resolution, or at least we hope that retrospectively what felt like a crisis will turn out to have been a turning point.

Novels reflect the perpetuation of a human impulse to use and experience narrative form as a way of making sense of the world.

The novel—specifically, the European novel—was the grounds of Said’s training as a reader and a scholar, and it was one of his long-standing intellectual passions. The novel was the principal lens through which he viewed the world, and it lay at the heart of many of the ideas and arguments that he has given to us. In North American popular discourse, Said may have been painted as a radical political figure, but he was first and foremost a literary scholar. The relationship between European traditions of representation, literary and otherwise, and the operations of imperial power was a relationship that he specifically trained our eyes upon. Still, the novel remained his subject, one that he loved. He held the complications of its heritage in his sight. He chose to read the so-called canon ‘contrapuntally’—a helpful Saidian term—rather than disavowing texts written in previous eras out of retrospective feelings of disgust, based on what he saw as their implication in systems of oppression and domination. Of course, later on, he himself saw this literary tradition less and less as a sole privilege of the West but rather as something shared by everyone, complexly; a tradition interpenetrated by cultures of the East and the South, and also inherited by them. In what often feels like a cynical age, I have found Said’s engagement with fiction as an heir to a particular kind of humanism encouraging and even consoling: a humanism that can evolve and expand beyondits exclusionary, bourgeois European and largely male origins, and that commits itself to crossing boundaries between cultures and disciplines—a humanism that holds the practice of criticism close to heart.