The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [143]
Another important book of this period, by the literary critic Edward Said, might seem at first to be the obverse of “the sense of an ending” or “how poems end,” since its title is Beginnings. But Said’s list of words and ideas that “hover about the concept of ‘beginnings’ ” is also a list that has everything to do with the impossibility of closure: innovation, novelty, originality, revolution, change, convention, tradition, period, authority, and influence.12 Said’s study, as he explains in a preface to an edition released ten years after the first, was at least in part intended to “describe the immense effort that goes into historical retrospection as it set out to describe things from the beginning, in history.”13 So “beginning” itself is a concept viewed—and possibly constructed—retrospectively from some later position. In the end is the beginning.
Said ends his book about beginnings with some remarks about its relevance to literary scholarship. “A beginning,” he says, “is what I think scholarship ought to see itself as, for in that light scholarship or criticism revitalizes itself.” And “a beginning methodologically unites a practical need with a theory, an intention with a method.” And again, “beginnings for the critic restructure and animate knowledge.”14 If we link this idea to Kermode’s apt paraphrase of Wallace Stevens, “the fictions must change, or if they are fixed, the interpretations must change,” we can ourselves begin to see that the activity of rebeginning, of making new, of revitalization is the work not only of the poet or the novelist but also of the literary critic, the literary theorist, and the literary reader.
That such new beginnings have social and cultural effects and motives is part of Said’s argument. Beginning, he insists, is a very different concept from origin: “the latter divine, mythical, and privileged, the former secular, humanly produced, and ceaselessly re-examined.” The work of critics writing in the years following the appearance of his book, he notes approvingly, engaged such topics as “the critique of domination, the re-examination of suppressed history (feminine, non-white, non-European, etc.), the cross-disciplinary interest in textuality, the notion of counter-memory and archive, the analysis of traditions … professions, disciplines and corporations,” and the “social history of intellectual practices, from the manipulation and control of discourse to the representation of truth and ‘the Other.’ ”15 Citing some by name and others by the catchwords and phrases that had become associated with their work, Said thus argues that new beginnings were undertaken by theorists from Michel Foucault to Eric Hobsbawm to Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas. That some of the seminal work of these theorists appeared prior to the publication of Beginnings and was being newly read and put to new critical uses, presumably would have supported, rather than undercut, the central point.
“There are,” suggests Jacques Derrida, “two interpretations of interpretation.” The first “seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth and an origin.” The other, “which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play,” what he calls “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world,” “the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin.” The two kinds of interpretation, he says, were “absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously.”16 Both are part of the history of the interpretation of literature and also of its practice. Arguably, they are not only co-extensive but also complementary. But it is the second that accords more directly with what I have called the literary.
We have already seen, in the chapter called “Why Literature Is Always Contemporary,” that however deeply rooted in a particular time period a work may be, it is always being read in “the present,