On Wednesday we published an essay by the Beirut-based novelist Dominique Eddéthat was an exasperated love-letter to her city of residence and her country of birth, Lebanon—a place she describes as “all extremes and all clumped together.” To this noisy synthesis of contradictions Eddé brings a delicious facility for a kind of riddling aphorism. “In Lebanon,” she writes, “everything can be explained and nothing can be understood.” By her account, “every Lebanese invents a personal Lebanon for a country that does not exist.”
In light of that, my first question for her, as someone who has lived in Rome (where she worked for a branch of the UN) and in Paris (where she worked, first, for Éditions du Seuil, and later practiced as a psychotherapist), was where she feels most at home. “Home, for me, is less a matter of a country than a matter of love surrounded by some beauty. It can be almost anywhere,” she replied. “I fully agree with [Edward] Said, quoting Adorno: ‘It is part of morality not to feel at home in one’s home.’”
All this whetted my appetite for her forthcoming book in English, to be published by Verso in August, Edward Said: His Thought As a Novel. Eddé’s same love of paradox seems evident in that subtitle, since the book sounds less a novel than an intellectual memoir about her long and close friendship with the celebrated Palestinian-American professor, who died at the age of sixty-seven in 2003. “Said’s entire mental universe is grounded in novels,” she explained to me this week via email. “Conrad’s, to begin with. James, Austen, Tolstoy, or Flaubert were as important, if not more so, than Vico or Foucault in the weaving of his thought. These novelists and their characters became major companions in his own life.”
Photo by Augustine Doublet
Among Said’s score and more of books, which—arguably more than those of any other intellectual of the late twentieth century—established the field of postcolonial study in comparative literature, Orientalism (1978) still casts the longest shadow. Indeed, that was precisely the premise of Adam Shatz’s recent essay for the Daily, “‘Orientalism,’ Then and Now.” But beside this donnée, I wondered what Eddé most cherished in his work.
“His way of moving from politics to literature to music, his love of counterpoint. His own ‘late style’ is my favorite,” was her answer, also referring to his posthumously published meditation on music and literature, On Late Style (2004). “The more he knew, read, wrote, experienced, suffered, the more subtle and precise he became. He passed away at the moment when the form and the content of his writing reached their peak.” And with this came a way of seeing, Eddé said, that had “very little hope but no resignation.”
This perception chimed with something else of hers I’d read recently, an article for the Lebanese newspaper L’Orient–Le Jour (available in English via Verso) in the form of an open letter to the conservative French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut after he’d suffered anti-Semitic abuse at the hands of gilets jaunes protesters in Paris. While expressing her sympathy yet defining her own sharp political differences with him, she talked about the need for “the renunciation of the ideal.” I was curious to learn what she meant by that—an idea of restraint, the necessity for realism?
“The ideal includes, by definition, a denial of reality that could turn easily into a denial of the Other,” she elaborated. “It can keep one trapped in adolescence, in sort of a narcissism that refuses to take death for what it is: the absolute and equal limit.”
This interested me with regard to Edward Said’s political evolution. I recall feeling perplexed, even disappointed, by what I saw then as his growing intransigence over Israel–Palestine in later years. How did she square his critical attitude toward the peace process in the 1990s with such a renunciation of the ideal?
“His rejection of the Oslo Agreements was not the luxury of a radical mind,” she argued. “It was based on facts—and it proved to be right. He was very critical of both the Palestinian Authority’s corruption and incompetence and of the Israeli and American arrogance, colonial mindset, and policies.” And yet, she insisted, “Said was much too aware of human contradictions and paradoxes not to acknowledge the necessity of taking the other side's memory into account. He struggled for a peace that would be rooted in reciprocity.”
Which returned us nicely to what Eddé describes in her essay as “the Lebanese miracle”—the unexpected, improbable moments of friendship and connection. Or, as she put it better: “A sort of shared pleasure in saying the same thing differently.”
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