Journal Article

Texts of the self : Edward Said's Out of place and on Late Style

Sallam, Maha Mohamed

2011

Overview

The present paper attempts a reading of Edward Said's Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), an explicitly autobiographical text that narrates Said's childhood and formative years in Cairo, Jerusalem, and the United States. The theoretical frame of reference is the corpus of critical theories informing the problematic genre of autobiography, as well as the posthumously-published text of Said entitled On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2004). The paper argues that the difficulty of appropriating a specific niche for Said's Out of Place in the context of the multiple positions assigned to texts of Western autobiography by a plethora of theoretical arguments is basically a function of the \"late style\" evinced by Said's text The phenomenon of \"late style\" is the focus of Said's On Late Style, a critical study of the aesthetic features of the late works of a number of artists during their last years. Out of Place complies with Philippe Lejeune's definition of autobiography as, \"a retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality\" (193), and also with Lejeune's stipulation that the defining prerequisite for autobiography is the \"identity between the author; the narrator, and the protagonist (193). On Late Style is a work of literary and music criticism that studies the \"unresolved contradictions\", the \"inevitable irreconcilabilities\", and the \"unproductive productiveness\" that characterize the late style of many artists. Belonging to \"personal criticism\" as will be discussed, On Late Style is also a \"text of the self\" that includes both the personal and the academic aspects of Said's life. In the preface to his autobiographical text Out of Place, Said professes that the primary motivation for his undertaking to write an autobiography was his being diagnosed as terminally ill and thus his desire to, \"leave behind a subjective account of the life I lived in the Arab world, where I was bom and spent my formative years, and in the United States, where I went to school, college, and university\" (ix). It is of special interest that Out of Place begins with the seemingly-opposed dualities of life and death as well as east and west. Most important is that in his endeavour to recapture (and immortalize) a lost world that played a crucial role in shaping his individual identity (ies) as well as shaping the external collective experience(S) of the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century, Said does not embrace a simplistic or reductive resolution of the contradictions of the above dualities, opting to preserve the complexities that characterize his \"late style\". The present paper investigates a number of issues raised by Said's preface insofar as these issues are among the most contested points by critics of the genre of autobiography. These include: the problematics of subjectivity, representation, and narrative in autobiographical texts; the intertwining of the opposing notions of life and death in autobiographical writing; and the cross-fertilization between autobiographical and other modes of writing by the same author. The paper aims to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of Said's position among a broad spectrum of positions taken by a number of critics in relation to the afore-mentioned issues. Ranging from the conventional position of James Olney who argues for a unitary wholeness of the self captured in autobiographical texts through metaphor, to the diametrically opposed position of Roland Barthes who stresses the impossibility of the autobiographical subject's ever authenticating his reality, the present paper reviews the theoretical background of the genre of autobiography and posits Said's text in its appropriate context As mentioned above, the difficulty of appointing a specific niche for Said's autobiography among established categories of the genre is partly due to its \"lateness\", a feature that will be discussed in detail in this paper.

• Publisher: جامعة القاهرة - كلية الآداب
• Subject: سعيد، إدوارد / كتاب خارج المكان / كتاب عن الأسلوب المتأخر : الموسيقى و الأدب ضد التيار / نقد الكتب