The Endless Reading of Interpretation? Said, Auerbach, and the Exilic Will to Criticism

Guilan Siassi

doi:10.5130/portal.v2i1.69

Abstract

In this paper I consider how Edward Said elaborates his concept of exile—as both a physical displacement and as a hermeneutical situation or mode of critical activity—in a transhistorical dialogue with Erich Auerbach. In his efforts to delineate the interrelation between cultural discourses and historical ‘regimes of knowledge,’ Said shows intellectual exile (which gives rise to secular criticism) to be the preliminary step in a concrete act of cultural recuperation: namely the re-appropriation and mobilization of texts, through an exilic will to interpretation and synthesis. Through a close examination of Auerbach’s ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’ and Said’s ‘Secular Criticism’ I compare the writers’ consciousness of their worldly socio-political situations, their humanistic goals, and their readings of cultural history—which they evaluate in the form of literary representations and interpretations of reality. Said locates agency in the exile’s liminal situation, his ‘unhomely’ un-belonging, which affords him a unique perspective and a certain mobility of critical thought. He believes that Auerbach, in his cultural alienation as a Jew exiled to Istanbul during World War II, adopted such a threshold position and could thus exercise precisely this exilic will to criticism as he wrote his magisterial Mimesis. Through a ‘worldly self-situating’ between inside and outside and a refusal of all binding filiations or affiliations that would limit his ability to move freely between the two spaces, the secular critic following the model of Auerbach, can mediate contrapuntally between dominant and minority culture, challenge authority, and indeed, redistribute cultural capital to produce ‘non-coercive knowledge in the interests of human freedom.’ Exilic readings thus become a tool and weapon of resistance, which simultaneously enable a critical recovery of one’s lost world and a reconstitution of the cultural mythos of ‘home,’ to impart historical, or at least aesthetic, coherence to the traumatic experience of loss.

Highlights

In one of his last public appearances less than a year before his death, Edward Said gave a series of four lectures at Cambridge University on the theme of Humanism and Knowledge.1 Having outlined the changing bases of humanistic study and called for a ‘return to philology,’ Said devoted his final talk to ‘The Example of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis2.’ It is no mere coincidence, in Said’s view, that Auerbach composed this ‘greatest book of general humanistic practice since World War II’ (Said 2004, 6) during his Turkish exile from Nazi Germany
Said shows himself to be far less interested in the deconstruction of culture through critical thought than he is, as we will see, in the reconstruction of humanistic values through critical engagement with the world. He holds up the model of Auerbach to demonstrate how an intellectual must unearth cultural artifacts through the reading of texts, and transform those historical fragments, through an act of synthetic interpretation, into both an artillery for resistance and a tool kit for reparation of the cultural machine
It is in the exercise of a personal ‘interpretive art’ enabling such cultural recuperation and synthesis that Said brings his own worldly and historical situation, his humanism, and his exilic subjectivity and agency into dialogue with his intellectual forebear

Summary

Introduction

In one of his last public appearances less than a year before his death, Edward Said gave a series of four lectures at Cambridge University on the theme of Humanism and Knowledge.1 Having outlined the changing bases of humanistic study and called for a ‘return to philology,’ Said devoted his final talk to ‘The Example of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis2.’ It is no mere coincidence, in Said’s view, that Auerbach composed this ‘greatest book of general humanistic practice since World War II’ (Said 2004, 6) during his Turkish exile from Nazi Germany. Said insists that more important than this academic isolation, which allowed Auerbach to write his philological interpretations without inhibition, was his cultural alienation and the corresponding exilic perspective, which permitted him to read literary history anew.

Results

Conclusion