askchapo

Just gonna say that Said is a very enjoyable read. I've read some of his other works (never cracked Orientalism proper, I'm bad), and he is a very good thinker.

Here he is from "Secular Criticism" pgs 2-3. It gets a bit dense in the back half and he's still an academic, but there's always moments of lucidity like this in the Said I've read (again, can't speak to Orientalism sadly).

The degree to which the cultural realm and its expertise are institutionally divorced from their real connections with power was wonderfully interested for me by an exchange with an old college friend who worked in the Department of Defense for a period during the Vietnam war. The bombings were in full course then, and I was naively trying to understand the kind of person who could order daily B-52 strikes over a distant Asian country in the name of the American interest in defending freedom and stopping communism. "You know," my friend said, "the Secretary is a complex human being: he doesn't fit the picture you may have formed of the cold-blooded imperialist murderer. The last time I was in his office I noticed Durrell's Alexandria Quartet on his desk." He paused meaningfully, as if to let Durrell's presence on that desk work its awful power alone. The further implication of my friend's story was that no one who read and presumably appreciated a novel could be the cold-blooded butcher one might suppose him to have been. Many years later this whole implausable anecdote (I do not remember my response to the complex conjunction of Durrell with the ordering of bombing in the sixties) strikes me as typical of what actually obtains: humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that you can read classy fiction as well as kill and maim because the cultural world is available for that particular sort of camouflaging, and because cultural types are not supposed to interfere in matters for which the social system has not specified them. What the anecdote illustrates is the approved separation of high-level bureaucrat from the reader of novels of questionable worth and definite status.