Review of Edward Said's "On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Edward Said, perhaps best known for “Orientalism,” one of the most-recognized and important contributions to post-colonial studies, wrote the essays in “On Late Style” shortly before his death. The sense of “lateness” – of mortality, of obsolescence – permeates them, and they cover everything from the music of Strauss, Mozart, and Beethoven, to the political activism of Jean Genet, to “Il Gattopardo” (as envisioned by both Lampedusa and Visconti). In many ways, this is Said’s last conversation with Theodor Adorno, whose presence deeply informs his criticism in many of these essays.

The book begins by reading around lateness as an aspect of chronological development – as synonymous with maturity – and opens the concept up as something that can realize “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction,” instead of the facile harmony and resolution that seeks the end of all tension. Said claims that late style refuses to reconcile what is impossible to reconcile, and that this reconciliation is oftentimes just a refusal to accept difference. It “grasps the difficulty of what cannot be grasped and then goes forth to try anyway.” Musicologist Rose Subotnik says of the late work of Beethoven, no doubt with his Missa Solemnis or the Ninth Symphony in mind, “no synthesis is conceivable [but is in effect] the remains of a synthesis, the vestige of an individual human subject sorely aware of its wholeness, and consequently the survival, that has eluded it forever.” It is this idea of lateness – which is quite distinct from, but not completely unrelated to, mortality and death – which Said puts to critical use in these wonderful essays.

While I think that everything in the book is worth reading, a few essays especially jumped out as being worthy of attention. In “Return to the Eighteenth Century,” Said sets out to carve a middle path between two radically different opinions on the late operas of Richard Strauss. Adorno’s rejection and derision of them is total, saying that he “intended to master music without submitting to its discipline” and that “his ego ideal is now fully identified with the Freudian genital-character who is uninhibitedly out for his own pleasure.” Compare this with Glenn Gould’s hagiographic characterization of Strauss as “more than the greatest man of music of our times.” In one of the most convincing arguments made in the book, Said argues against Adorno’s accusation of Strauss being a Beidermeier relic, and that he went a long way in countering Wagner’s theatrical idiom of “history as a grand system to which everyone and every small narrative is subject,” becoming the “keeper of the art of our fathers.” 

The most compelling and readable essay in the collection is “On Jean Genet,” an autobiographical account of Said’s two encounters with Genet during the early 1970s. The second of these, which took place in Beirut, allowed Said to learn about Genet’s role in Palestinian activism, which was passionate and total. Through a reading of “Les Paravents,” Said argues that because of Genet’s lifelong marginality as a thief, prisoner, and homosexual, that he was able to sympathize with Palestinians without the Western rose-colored glasses of Orientalism. 

I recommend this for anyone, especially those seriously interested in classical music. For Said admirers who have only known him as a literary critic, these essays open up whole new vistas by displaying the full panoply of his concerns and academic interests. While I have the suspicion that many musicologists would disagree with his characterizations of, for example, Mozart and late Beethoven and perhaps Strauss, these are nevertheless well-wrought essays constructed with lapidary reasoning. These essays are all the more poignant because Said knew that he was in the last stages of his fight with leukemia as they were being written. Readers who admire Said for his clear presentation of sometimes very opaque ideas will not be disappointed with this collection.

Review of Edward Said's "Representations of the Intellectual"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

“Representations of the Intellectual” is a compilation of the six Reith Lectures that Edward Said delivered over BBC Radio in 1993. The title is somewhat misleading: Said doesn’t really examine representations of intellectuals so much as offers a prescriptive way he thinks they should function within a society. His particular interest is the intellectual in the late twentieth century, confronted as they sometimes are on all fronts with ideological and political concerns. How is the intellectual to align himself or herself with these, or should they?

The title essay was for me the most interesting, drawing a sharp distinction between the conceptions of the intellectual developed by Antonio Gramsci and Julien Benda. Gramsci himself discerns between two types of intellectuals. Traditional intellectuals are the “teachers, priests, and administrators, who continue to do the same thing from generation to generation,” while organic intellectuals are “directly connected to classes or enterprises that use intellectuals to organize interests, gain more power, get more control” (p. 4). Gramsci thought that everyone has the potential to be an intellectual, even if some people do not function as intellectuals in society. In his 1927 essay “The Betrayal of the Intellectuals,” Julien Benda’s decidedly less demotic, even Platonic, ideal of an intellectual suggests that they are “a tiny band of super-gifted and morally endowed philosopher-kings who constitute the conscience of mankind” (p. 4-5). Benda thought intellectuals had largely given up the objective, dispassionate analysis of issues and had become corrupted by special interests, politics, and vulgar nationalism. Said uses Gramsci and Benda as touchstones throughout the essays for what he thinks the intellectual should, and shouldn’t, strive toward. 

The rest of the essays revolve around a small number of reoccurring themes. The intellectual should always wear the mantle of the exile if not literally, then at least figuratively. Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski are two such figures, even though Said displays sublime self-control in not pointing out that they both used their intellectual firepower to further the hegemonic interests of the most powerful nation in the world. Said also favors the approach of the amateur over that of the professional. The professional is epitomized by the “impossible to understand classroom technician, hired by committee, anxious to please various patrons and agencies, bristling with academic credentials and a social authority that does not promote debate but established reputations and intimidates non-experts” (p. 72). Instead, the amateur (literally, one spurred on by care and affection) works outside, or at least in addition to, his or her narrow specialization in an effort to understand matters in a broader context.

This is a solid foundation, but left a lot of important questions are completely unconsidered. What about those intellectuals who seemingly do align themselves with avowed political concerns? Do Noam Chomsky’s endorsement of anarcho-syndicalism and continued skepticism regarding many American foreign policy decisions mean that he cannot be considered an intellectual? Apparently not, as Said refers to him approvingly at least once. 

And while the scope of a set of six lectures, each originally a radio address with a duration of thirty minutes, is almost necessarily narrow, the essays don’t address the dynamic change in the role of the intellectual over the centuries. While Said’s ideal of the intellectual is almost necessarily a public intellectual, such a thing would have never existed in medieval Europe. Would the fact that a member of the medieval clerisy was almost always a member of the Church change anything here? Or that the Renaissance artist was always beholden to a wealthy Maecenas, whether religious or secular? I realize that these questions are beyond the scope of Said’s project, but I found myself wishing for a book-length treatment that would have given them thoughtful consideration.

Most of the material here is a noncontroversial adumbration of what has been said about intellectuals by others: the intellectual should (excuse the cliché) “speak truth to power,” shouldn’t be the tool of political or ideological interests, should eschew narrow professionalism. Having previously read Said’s “Orientalism” and “On Late Style,” both of which were innovative and thought-provoking, I found these essays to be relatively conservative. For the most part, the intellectual as exile, as someone not beholden to deeply entrenched ideological or political interests, and as passionate amateur are not new. Reading Said always leaves me wanting the wild-eyed radical that he is so often accused of being by predominant American neoconservatives, although in this case, I was left with something much more pragmatic and altogether cautious.