Extract: Recognising the Stranger by Isabella Hammad

When I was wondering what to talk about in this lecture, I started thinking about Edward Said and lateness as a point of departure. Then I went back to his early book Beginnings. And then I decided after all that I preferred to start in the middle, and more specifically that I wanted to talk about the middle of narratives – their turning points, which I’ll relate to the shifting narrative shape of the Palestinian struggle in its global context.

It’s difficult, in life, to pinpoint with any real sense of confidence where a turning point is located. As Said said of beginnings – whether of texts, epochs or ideas – the turning point is likewise a human construction, something we identify in retrospect. We look back on our lives, or on the course of history, and according to the shape of the particular narrative we are telling we can say – ah, see, that is how the course of the story developed, and that was a key node when everything changed. We can see these moments quite clearly from the vantage of hindsight; we can assert the significance of past events with relative confidence. In the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s 2020 novel Time Shelter, the narrator notes that history becomes history only after the fact: ‘Most likely,’ he says, speaking of the beginning of the Second World War, ‘1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid.’ But if we cannot always know the significance of the moment in the moment, it is also true that our moment, the one in which we now live, feels like one of chronic ‘crisis’: political, economic and climate crises besiege us, along with other existential crises posed by the exponential development of artificial intelligence, and the recurring nightmare of nuclear war. In narrative time, the crisis should suggest the encroachment of the end, even if, in real life, the end is a receding horizon. The flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it. Generations continue to be born, and we experience neither total apocalypse nor a happily-ever-after with any collective meaning beyond the endings of individual lives. Yet this narrative sense remains with us, flickering like a ghost through the revisions of postmodernism: we hope for resolution, or at least we hope that retrospectively what felt like a crisis will turn out to have been a turning point.

The novel – specifically, the European novel – was the grounds of Said’s training as a reader and a scholar, and it was one of his long-standing intellectual passions. The novel was the principal lens through which he viewed the world, and it lay at the heart of many of the ideas and arguments that he has given to us. In North American popular discourse, Said may have been painted as a radical political figure, but he was first and foremost a literary scholar. The relationship between European traditions of representation, literary and otherwise, and the operations of imperial power was a relationship that he specifically trained our eyes upon. Still, the novel remained his subject, one that he loved. He held the complications of its heritage in his sight. He chose to read the so-called canon ‘contrapuntally’ – a helpful Saidian term – rather than disavowing texts written in previous eras out of retrospective feelings of disgust, based on what he saw as their implication in systems of oppression and domination. Of course, later on, he himself saw this literary tradition less and less as a sole privilege of the West but rather as something shared by everyone, complexly; a tradition interpenetrated by cultures of the East and the South, and also inherited by them. In what often feels like a cynical age, I have found Said’s engagement with fiction as an heir to a particular kind of humanism encouraging and even consoling: a humanism that can evolve and expand beyondits exclusionary, bourgeois European and largely male origins, and that commits itself to crossing boundaries between cultures and disciplines – a humanism that holds the practice of criticism close to heart.

In my experience, a writer of novels has to at various points and to varying degrees sustain a split consciousness. On the one hand, we must admit that novels are a form of entertainment, existing somewhere between movies and poems. They are narrative objects made of language with, usually, a beginning, a middle and an end. They are a form that was born in the age of mechanical reproduction, and they are sold as commodities, an activity that today has rather a lot more to do with branding and marketing than it used to – a fact that is particularly confusing and troubling to exactly the type of person who might end up spending their time reading and writing novels. And on the other hand, there is a relationship between novels and what for want of a better phrase you might call our spiritual lives. Some of us read them for comfort, or to escape; some to learn about the world; some because it’s a rare chance for concentrated solitude, to be neither working nor passively consuming the content of a screen but thinking deeply about experiences other than our own, using some of the tools of our dream life, and listening carefully to the voices of others, in ways that ask for our imaginative participation and that might also shed light upon our own experiences of being alive on this planet. Novels reflect the perpetuation of a human impulse to use and experience narrative form as a way of making sense of the world. This may seem obvious. As a person who tries to spend most of her time reading and writing novels, I sometimes find that these two realities coexist without issue. But often I find myself distracted by and even anxious about the mystery of what these texts really do in the world, beyond providing mere escapism or misguided attempts at moral instruction, which I don’t believe in either as a proper use of the form. Said tells us that ‘texts are worldly, to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted’. This may be true, but it doesn’t really help me, a writer, in thinking about what it is that I am doing when I sit down at my desk. Frank Kermode said that ‘fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change’ – which I find a helpful formulation for thinking about how the novel, shape-shifting, strives for novelty, and how this relates to our need to find and create meaning. But most helpfully of all, for me, is what Sylvia Wynter said about the novel being a revolutionary form because it ‘is in essence a question mark’. Perhaps a writer doesn’t need to have a clear sense of what her text will do in the world. Perhaps a writer can relax a bit. Perhaps it’s enough to ask a question, and hope, perhaps, to glimpse the meaning of that question in retrospect.