Kyle’s Reviews > Beginnings: Intention and Method > Status Update

Such an intriguing and unexpected author to draw together so many ideas about beginnings, why didn’t Said start off by discussing him at length rather than Vico’s “Doctrines” epigraph that gets quoted again in the final chapter? How the New Science addresses the old world in eloquent ways is a sign that perhaps the academic camps poststructuralist theorists find themselves in are in over their heads.

A catalogue of structuralist authors soon become a collection of greatest hits from post-structuralist literary critic Foucault, it soon becomes all about him an the authors he read (Borges, Freud, Nietzsche, etc.) than about the ideas each theorist wrote about. Props to a post-poseur of philosophy who developed an anthropological attitude towards what gets read, but how come McLuhan is only mentioned once as an ism?

Taking examples of a handful of authors from between the 1850s and 1950s, Said considers the span of individual careers as the text they each produce. It makes sense as the novel was starting to come into its prominence with the rise of an educated middle class in most Western countries and the mechanical process of text through typewriters. But neither of these, nor the economics of publishing, are where they begin.

The study settles on the novel as a space of authority and molestation bringing the beginnings of Great Expectations and Nostromo under observation. There are a host of other novels to critique, briefly, but Said’s interests seem to be with unpacking non-fiction such as The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and The Interpretation of Dreams to examine what each author claimed to have begun.

The study settles on the novel as a space of authority and molestation bringing the beginnings of Great Expectations and Nostromo under observation. There are a host of other novels to critique, briefly, but Said’s interests seem to be with unpacking non-fiction such as The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and The Interpretation of Dreams to examine what each author claimed to have begun.

Meditations are for dwelling in the moment, in this case, beginning at the beginning. Of course, someone like Nietzsche or Husserl or Auerbach has already said something related to what is about to be said, yet still takes that moment of pause to take it all in - and you start gasping for breath! And yet following the meditative practices, perhaps it is as simple as finding a mantra that works for individual readers.

A clever attempt at literary induction, Said peers into a crystal ball to determine how writing begins and what came before such beginnings. Strange that he relies so much in his opening chapter on how critics write about an author, since this would necessarily come after the novel or other work is already done. Unlike the movies, nobody seems to care about the “making of” a book, so Said starts with Chapter Two.