Said who?

In his new memoir, "Out of Place," Edward Said brings his exile into focus and finds a home between his past and his future.

By Chris Colin

Oct 4, 1999 | When a philosopher publishes a memoir, he or she threatens to make the inaccessible accessible. A career's worth of abstrusity promises to be illuminated by that ultimate searchlight, the personal narrative. So when America's foremost Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said -- admittedly not so abstruse in the murky theory department -- released his long-awaited "Out of Place" this month, it seemed that he, too, just might snap open the shades and show us night in broad daylight for a moment.

"Out of Place" is a guilty pleasure for the recovering theory nut. With Barthes and then Foucault, we renounced our fascination with the author of a text, recognized that his or her religion, family life -- even his or her other texts -- have no bearing on the work in question. The domain of the enlightened critic, it was decided, is textual interplay and nothing more; to let the author's biography color our reading in any way is to grant him or her an undemocratic tyranny over a text that should belong exclusively to the reader.

But then Said's work has always collapsed text and "text producer," as theory's unbearable prose would put it; we read about Palestine, visions of the East, even Joseph Conrad, and Said is always present as a persona, weaving in his own experience and biases. The Columbia English professor's scholarship comes with a self-consciousness that constantly directs our attention to the scholar responsible. What facilitates this criticism? he asks. How does my background inform my perspective?

This time, though, the background is the foreground. From birth in Jerusalem in 1935 to his childhood years divided between Cairo and Palestine, then on to boarding school and university in the United States, the book traces a life characterized predominantly by exile and displacement. As a Christian Palestinian, and a Palestinian outside Palestine, Said suffered -- and occasionally nurtured -- a perpetual sense of marginalization. Out of place became something of a hometown.

If Said's story unfurls in a jumble of alien places, these places assume an impressive vividness. He describes his life as a series of incongruities and amalgams, each sending him further from what he deems center. First his name: the English Edward, the Arabic Said. Throughout the book, as the apparent contradictions in his life grow more pronounced -- his mother's love was "both beautiful and withheld"; he's neither 100 percent Palestinian nor 100 percent Egyptian; he supports Palestinian self-determination but criticizes the PLO -- he returns to the dissonance in his name as a sort of de-centering mantra.

Next Page: Is Said a rebel or a good boy trying to please his daddy?

• View blog reactions