Conrad does not make the task easy, of course. His combination of evasion with a seemingly artless candor in his autobiographical pronouncements poses intricate problems for the student of his fiction. His bent for the revisional, sometimes petulant interpretation of his life needs, for the moment, only the briefest recall. There is one story told by R. L. Megroz concerning an interchange between Conrad and his wife: “On one of his naughty days he said that the Black Mate was his first work, and when I [Jessie] said, ‘No, Almayer’s Folly was the first thing you ever did,’ he burst out: ‘If I like to say The Black Mate was my first work, I shall say so.’”9 The often willful inaccuracy of Conrad’s memory about his works and life—of which this is almost certainly an example—is too persistent a habit to be glossed over. He chose to consider the facts of his life as an historian, according to Huizinga, considers his subject, as if the actual facts are not yet determined. Huizinga writes:
The historian . . . must always maintain towards his subject an indeterminist point of view. He must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors still seem to permit different outcomes. If he speaks of Salamis, then it must be as if the Persians might still win; if he speaks of the coup d’état of Brumaire, then it must remain to be seen if Bonaparte will be ignominiously repulsed. Only by continually recognizing that possibilities are unlimited can the historian do justice to the fulness of life.10
The link of self-awareness forged by Conrad in each letter (of which I spoke earlier) in reality describes the spiritual act of comprehension he performed as he viewed his own being in the past in connection with his being in the present. The indeterminist viewpoint to which Huizinga refers is a constant feature of Conrad’s recollection of his past and, necessarily, a function of that harassed insecurity which spurs the novelist-historian to execute judgment. Between Conrad’s life, then, and his fiction there exists much the same relation as between the two divisions (past and present) of his life. The critic’s job is to seek out the common denominator of the two sets of relations. As Conrad’s history of his past is to his present, so his historical being as a man is to his fiction. And the only way the relation can be articulated is, as I said earlier, to identify certain dynamic movements or structures of experience (mechanisms) that emerge from the letters. In one of his earliest works, History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács has described structures similar to these: Lucien Goldmann calls them significant dynamic structures, because they maintain a context by which every human act preserves an individual’s past evolution as well as the inner tendencies that drive him toward the future.11 But the Marxist conclusion, class consciousness, does not suit the bias of this study. Because I am more concerned with the individual, I shall concentrate on the exigencies of Conrad’s personal situation.
Conrad’s stake in the structures of experience he had created was absolutely crucial, since it was rooted in the human desire to make a character of and for himself. Character is what enables the individual to make his way through the world, the faculty of rational self-possession that regulates the exchange between the world and the self; the more cogent the identity, the more certain a course of action. One of the curious facts of history is that it is the compulsive man of action who feels the need for character more strongly than the man who is only on the verge of action. T. E. Lawrence, Conrad’s notorious near-contemporary, has been described by R. P. Blackmur as a man capable only of creating a personality for himself: his failure to forge a character, Blackmur argues, is the secret of his life and writing.12 Conrad’s predicament was, I think, not unlike Lawrence’s: he, too, was a man of action urgently in need of a role to play so that he could locate himself solidly in existence. But whereas Lawrence failed, Conrad succeeded (although at immense cost). This is another aspect of Conrad’s life of adventure. To Conrad it seemed as if he had to rescue himself, and, not surprisingly, this is one of the themes of his short fiction. Marlow and Falk, to take two examples, are faced with the terrible dilemma of either allowing themselves to vanish into “native obscurity” or, equally oppressive, undertaking to save themselves by the compromising deceit of egoism: nothingness on one side or shameful pride on the other. That is, either one loses one’s sense of identity and thereby seems to vanish into the chaotic, undifferentiated, and anonymous flux of passing time, or one asserts oneself so strongly as to become a hard and monstrous egoist.
It is important, therefore, to distinguish the dominant mode of Conrad’s structures of experience: quite simply, it can be called their radical either/or posture. By this I mean a habitual view of experience that allows either a surrender to chaos or a comparably frightful surrender to egoistic order. There is no middle way, and there is no other method of putting the issues. Either one allows that meaningless chaos is the hopeless restriction upon human behavior, or one must admit that order and significance depend only upon man’s will to live at all costs. This, of course, is the Schopenhauerian dilemma, Conrad’s solutions always had one end in view—the achievement of character—and his fiction is a vital reflection of his developing character. The mechanisms of existence discernible in the letters are Conrad’s portrayal of himself in the process of living. They are sections of a long drama in which the arrangements of setting, act, and actor are Conrad’s consciousness of himself in the struggle toward the equilibrium of character.
from Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography
2
The Palestinian Experience (1968–1969)
First published in Europe in 1970 (and reprinted in The Politics of Dispossession), “The Palestinian Experience” is one of Said’s earliest exercises in political analysis and reportage. Said has written in other places that he was almost completely apolitical in his work and life until the June 1967 war, but the destruction of the war left the Arab world—and him—shattered. “For the first time since I had left to come to the United States, I was emotionally reclaimed by the Arab World in general and by Palestine in particular,” he writes.1 This dawning consciousness of both the plight of his people and of his own identity within that collective world would lead him to marshal his talents to the best of his abilities and to become, with time, the most important spokesperson the Palestinian cause has had.
“The Palestinian Experience” is an interesting example of Said’s early writings for several reasons. First, we can immediately recognize the candid style of addressing a reader on both a personal and a political level simultaneously. Said would use this same method of narrating politics—of involving the reader in suppressed stories, hidden histories and autobiographical moments—many times over the years, and most splendidly in his After the Last Sky. There is an urgent political need for such narration in the Palestinian situation. To testify to the very existence of the Palestinians as a people (and as people), with a history, a culture, and a right to self-determination, was a radical and unsettling move for a culture that denied them all this, even refusing them the opportunity to represent themselves.
Second, despite its slightly awkward prose, reticent tone, and sometimes clumsy terminology (“Palestinianism”), “The Palestinian Experience” shows how remarkably consistent Said has been in his political and moral vision from the very outset. Palestinian history is asserted as being multiracial and multireligious from the get go. No exclusivism can be found here; rather we see that the same drive for coexistence that propels much of Said’s later writings is already present. Yet the recognition that Palestinian suffering has been at the hands of those who suffered in the Holocaust, a point Said would later develop into a major essay (“Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims”), can also be found here, along with the indignation that the American liberal establishment refuses to recognize the Palestinians’ plight. Said excoriates the failures of nationalism—both Arab and Israeli—without losing the argument for Palestinian self-determination. His brief analyses of Western cultural figures such as T. E. Lawrence prefigure the argument in Orientalism.
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bsp; Finally, what is perhaps most remarkable about this essay is that by detailing the slow emergence of an indigenous, Palestinian resistance movement through the device of analysis and personal experience, “The Palestinian Experience” is in fact narrating to us Said’s own emergence as an engaged Palestinian intellectual.
Anyone who has tried seriously to examine the contemporary Near East is frequently tempted to conclude that the project is unmanageable. Every sort of distraction gets in the way; after a time, a distraction seems as inherent a necessity as an essential. Yet if one believes that the crux of the Near East today is the conflict between Israel and a dispersed, or occupied, population of Palestinian Arabs, then a clearer view of that problem becomes possible. For the major distraction to any scrutiny of the region has been everyone’s unwillingness to allow for a Palestinian presence. This has been no less true of the Palestinians themselves, than it has of the other Arabs, or of Israel. My thesis is that since 1967 the confusions have somewhat diminished because the Palestinians have had to recognize this truth, and have gradually begun to act upon it. This recognition is the source of what I call Palestinianism: a political movement that is being built out of a reassertion of Palestine’s multiracial and multireligious history. The aim of Palestinianism is the full integration of the Arab Palestinian with lands and, more importantly with political processes that for twenty-one years have either systematically excluded him or made him a more and more intractable prisoner.
It seems to me to be a useless dodge to assert—as most anti-Palestinian polemics do—that the Palestinian popular resistance to the exclusions of Zionism is simply a version of Arab anti-Semitism, or still another threat of genocide against the Jews. I have felt that the best way to disprove this view would be to put the Palestinian experience to the reader on both a personal and a public level. Each, I think, is as honest as I could make it, and that has required an approach to Palestinianism by a passage through other Arab countries, notably Lebanon and Egypt. By a happy coincidence both countries have been familiar to the Western reader, accessible to me, and logical geographic and ideological ways of getting to Palestinianism and to its temporary headquarters in Jordan. Another virtue of the approach is that it helps to reduce the difficulty of writing about the Palestinian experience in a language not properly its own. For by moving to the Palestinian through the screens that have surrounded him and are now unsettled by him, even as he continues in exile, an English transcription of the process dramatizes the real difficulties of peripherality, silence, and displacement that the Palestinian has suffered. Palestinianism then is an effort at repatriation, but the present stage of the Palestinian experience (as this essay tries to show) is a problematic early transition for being in exile to becoming a Palestinian once again.
Two of the oldest beach facilities in Beirut are called Saint Simon and Saint Michel; they are also known together in Arabic by a different name, Al-Ganah’, that does not approximate a translation of their French titles. To this peculiar cohabitation of French and Arabic, tolerated by everyone without much attention, was recently added a third beach establishment adjacent to the other two: Saint Picot. In June 1969, when I was in Beirut, the new place and its name assumed a powerful symbolic value for me, as did all the discordia concors that makes up Beirut. Clearly someone had assumed that “Saint” meant “beach,” and since Georges Picot was still a name to be reckoned with, what better conjunction than Saint Picot. But then the contradictions and ironies multiply without control. Lebanon was in the midst of its worst internal crisis in many years, a crisis whose dimensions, depending on whom you talked to, seemed at once definitively critical and endlessly analyze-able. The fact was that only a caretaker government held office since no cabinet could be formed. One supervening reason for this state of affairs was the lack of a workable definition of Lebanon’s sovereignty: an undetermined number of Palestinian fedayin were encamped in the South (next to the Israeli border), and although “accepted” as Arab brothers engaged in a legitimate struggle against Israel, the presence of these men had in some very fundamental way unsettled Lebanon’s identity, if not its remarkable economy. Yet they remained, the crisis continued, as did Lebanon’s suspense for many weeks. Beirut contained this paralyzing collision of views, just as it has contained, indeed exposed and incarnated, almost every contradiction of the Arab Near East. Thus in a small way the endowment of Picot’s name (to which the Arabs have no reason to be grateful) with sainthood, and the entitlement of a Lebanese beach to so oddly decorated a European name, was a reflection of the cabinet crisis, of reverberations that came from Syrian, Jordanian, Israeli, Egyptian, American, and Russian unrest, but above all, of Beirut’s unique status as a place of natural entry from the West onto the confusing modern topography of the Arab world.
Engaged in the astonishing variety of history the Lebanese is used to finding himself split several ways, most of them contradictory and, as I have been suggesting, utterly Lebanese in the near freakishness of their resolution. (I use Beirut and Lebanon interchangeably, despite an inevitable slurring of nuances. There are enough nuances to be taken account of, however, without worrying too much about these.) What is Lebanese is the public and direct availability for daily use of these contradictions in so tiny a country. They are Lebanon, and have been for at least a century. The order of Lebanon is how miraculously it accommodates everything, and how its citizens can stand the accommodations that might cripple everyone else. To live in Beirut means, among other things, having the choice of doing, feeling, thinking, speaking, and even being, the following, in a huge assortment of possible combinations: Christian (Protestant, Maronite, Greek Orthodox, Melchite, Roman Catholic, etc.), Moslem (Sunnite or Shiite), Druze, Armenian, Jewish, French, American, British, Arab, Kurdish, Phoenecian, part of pan-Islamism, part of Arab nationalism, tribal, cosmopolitan, Nasserite, communist, socialist, capitalist, hedonist, puritan, rich, poor or neither, involved in the Arab struggle against Israel (i.e., for the fedayin, for the Israeli airport attack as a sign of involvement), disengaged from the Arab struggle against Israel (i.e., against the fedayin, for the airport attack insofar as it demonstrated Lebanon’s peaceful position by the absence of any resistance given the raiders), and so on. The poverty of labels like left-wing and right-wing is immediately apparent.
Lebanon then has stood for accommodation, tolerance and, especially, representation. It is no accident, for example, that such disparities as the ideas of Arab nationalism, the renaissance of Arabic as a modern language, the foundations of the Egyptian press, the living possibility and continuity of the good life and commercial entrepreneurism (at least for the twentieth-century Arab) originated in Lebanon. Yet the crisis of 1969 developed out of the wealth of what was represented in the country and the lack of suitable Lebanese instruments, for once, to extract the best possible combination for Lebanon’s destiny. For if past, present, and future are all readily negotiable with most interests, as I felt they were in Beirut, then crisis ensues. Call it equilibrium, and it still remains critical. As I saw it, Beirut was a victim of its openness and its true cultural virtuosity, as well as of the absence of an articulable foundation upon which to draw.
By comparison Damascus was scarcely visible at all. An accident of personal history made it impossible for me to visit the city: no Americans are permitted there, and since I had American citizenship, despite my birth in Jerusalem into a Jerusalem Arab family, I could not even drive through Syria on my way to Amman. As the plane to Amman flew over Damascus, the city’s appearance from the air confirmed my impression of it as the most impenetrable Arab city I had ever known. It seemed gorged on its hermetic involutions. The Syrian regime, which tangled the rhetorical mysteries of Baath politics with the secret intricacies of Aliwite religion, had closed the country off and turned away the flavor of its life from the observer.
Everything about Amman, whose central position for the Palestinian has been strengthened since June 1967, testifies to austerity and Ersatz. Scarcely a
town before 1948, its helter-skelter growth has made it a city by default. Many refugee camps surround it of course, but unlike Beirut, whatever internationalism Amman possesses remains only in a lingering sense of British discipline one encounters here and there. The streets are hopelessly crowded with pedestrians and cars, although a kind of martial informality pervades all activity. At first, I kept asking myself and others which people were Palestinians and which were Jordanians. The number of men in uniforms or green fatigues prompted my questions, but a few hours after arrival I gave up asking. By then it had become evident to me that in spite of its Hashemite throne, all of Jordan had become a temporary substitute for Arab Palestine. So far as I could tell—and this was certainly true for me—no one really felt at home in Amman, and yet no Palestinian could feel more at home anywhere else now. Aside from a few places on the hills where rather commonly despised parvenus had built ostentatious villas, Amman is a city carrying the single-minded Palestinian energy. No particularly apparent heroism or self-conscious cause mongering are in the air: both Amman’s setting and its means are too daylit in their poverty to permit these futile games. The city has a bustling commercial life, but an impressive dedication to Arab Palestine overrides even that. In Amman, one cannot escape the necessity of that cause (and this accounts for the city’s austerity): everyone, you feel, has been touched in a concrete way by “the Palestinian question.” Cafés, television, movies, social gatherings—all these amenities are permanently subordinated to an overwhelmingly powerful experience.