Homage unadulterated by critique would have been the easy choice for the Edward W Said Memorial Lecture sponsored by the American University in Cairo (AUC). Thankfully this was not the case, writes Hala Halim, who interviewed the lecturer David Damrosch The Edward W Said Memorial Lecture was delivered on 1 November -- the day that would have marked the Palestinian scholar's 70th birthday -- by distinguished visiting professor David Damrosch, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and most recently author of What is World Literature? (Princeton University Press, 2003). Damrosch, while warmly remembering his former colleague and reflecting on his legacy, paid Said the tribute of avoiding hagiography. The lecture, "Secular Criticism Meets the World: The Challenge of World Literature Today" (the full text appears in the Cairo Review of Books in this issue of Al-Ahram Weekly ) offered a critical engagement with Said's work through the terms of Damrosch's own scholarship that at moments bore the inflections of a continuing dialogue among colleagues. The talk played off Said's essay "Secular Criticism" in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), elaborating on Said's use of the term "'secular'... [as] worldly, rather than anti- religious" -- part of the late scholar's "argu[ing] eloquently for the social and political engagement of literature and of criticism" -- and his pitting of "affiliation", as choice actively taken by individuals to go against orthodoxy and "build... new modes of thought and interaction" against "filiation", the unquestioning serving of the status quo of "existing power relations" following a kinship model (to quote Damrosch's gloss on the terms). Suggesting that the "challenge" of the opening of the canon beyond Eurocentrism that Said insistently called for had not been fully explored in his work, despite his key contribution to bringing about this change, Damrosch went on to explore, among other things, the "affiliative" power of world literature. Later, in conversation, Damrosch elaborated on the question of secular criticism in Said's scholarship. The lecture had invited us to pursue the implications of Said's work in directions taken only partially by the Palestinian scholar. Drawing on past criticism of Said's work, I asked how Damrosch would adumbrate a reading of his "secular criticism" no longer defined mainly as "worldly" but reappropriated to reflect on the increasing religiosity and sectarianism in different parts of the world. Fine-tuning Said's position on the issue, Damrosch suggests that "it is not coincidence that he was concerned about religious dogmatism; in practice his 'secular criticism' also meant non- religious criticism". He cites the work of one of Said's students, Gauri Viswanathan's Outside the Fold, in which she "acknowledges her debt to Said but also pushes against his work" by looking at religious conversion in India in the late-19th and in the 20th century to analyse how conversion "often presented a religious form of resistance to colonialism, and a chosen affiliation" thus demonstrating that "religion is not a frozen dogmatism but a dynamic force for change in people's lives". "It's important to find a middle ground between literature as a purely secular approach and as a purely dogmatic, sectarian approach, because it's often infused with religious ideas even as it is questioning strict orthodoxy," continues Damrosch, noting that a lot of literature scholars "don't serve the text well if they don't take the religious issues seriously" and citing instances of the banning of the Thousand and One Nights as a misreading of a text that "is not anti-religious but deeply infused with the Qur'an. It treats religion with some irony but it would be wrong to see it as either anti-secular or anti-religious." Would he then endorse a renewed turn by literary critics, especially comparatists, to anthropology as a discipline providing the theoretical tools with which to approach the religious in society and literature while offering -- in its latter- day form -- something of a buffer against doctrinaire attitudes? Comparative study is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, says Damrosch, citing his colleague Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Death of a Discipline in which she advocates a turn by Comparative Literature to Area Studies and mentioning that there are several anthropologists on the board of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. "At the same time," he adds, "one wouldn't want to reduce literature to [being] a reflection of its society as [Claude] Lévi- Strauss has done... literature is an oblique refraction of society." In What is World Literature ? Damrosch is rightly keen on distinguishing his theorisation of Weltliteratur "from a notional 'global literature' that might be read solely in airline terminals, unaffected by any specific context whatever". But the book leaves little doubt that globalisation underlies his optimism in proposing a new interpretation of the notion of world literature. With this in mind, two questions beg to be asked. Justifiably rejecting a notion of world literature as all that has been written or as a discrete canon of texts, Damrosch provides three yardsticks for his own definition. It must be an "elliptical refraction of national literatures" as the text circulates in the world "connected to both [local and host] cultures, circumscribed by neither alone"; a "mode of reading, a detached engagement with a world beyond our own" and "writing that gains in translation". But to what extent does this globalisation of the literary text extend to theory? And, perhaps brushing against the grain of Damrosch's model, isn't translation into English, on which the worldwide circulation of texts, whether literary or theoretical, depends, itself over-determined by the selectiveness of globalisation (see the example of Arabic literature) and its tendency towards Americanisation? In response, Damrosch asserts that "literary and cultural theory are being globalised at an even faster rate than literature, and there's an emerging canon of global theory that's being used by people all over the world, for example postcolonial theory -- Said and Fanon are being read all over the world." Yet he does concede that on the level of theory there is a form of American hegemony: "it's important to fight this form of globalisation, which is one of American theory, or even French or German theory that has come via America and is circulated out again. It's in the nature of literary theory to have a general application, and what's important for people who use it, whether in the West or elsewhere, is to expand the terms beyond the Euro-American context where it was developed, especially since most theory develops out of a given literature. And it's very important for US students to become aware of the variety of literary modes of understanding." He gives examples from the Longman Anthology of World Literature (2004), of which he is general editor, which in addition to a section on European conceptions of poetry includes one on Sanskrit aesthetics and another on Chinese literary theory "so that undergraduate students are exposed to this and know that theory is not simply a European and American invention". In terms of translation of literary texts Damrosch adds that the anthology has a much larger "representation of Arabic and Islamic literature than" previous editions, providing American students with the exposure to writing from the Arab world that is all the more crucial post-9/11. Damrosch's doctoral dissertation was entitled "Scripture and Fiction: Egypt, the Midrash, Finnegans Wake " (1980). A chapter in What is World Literature?, "Love in the Necropolis," focuses on Ancient Egyptian love poetry and its various translations, while an image of the Sphinx, its body largely buried in sand, drawn by Dominique Vivant Denon during the French occupation of Egypt, serves as the cover illustration of the same book and is read in the conclusion in relation to world literature. So what lies behind Damrosch's fascination with things Egyptian? Although this is his first visit to Egypt Damrosch started learning Hieroglyphics when he was an undergraduate and continued his studies as a graduate student in Comparative Literature. "I was interested in both the literature and culture of the oldest continuous culture in the world," he explains, adding that there have been two touchstones he has used as a counterbalance to Europe, the Ancient Near East, specifically Egypt and Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica. In his concluding comments in the book Damrosch reads the French savants' discovery of the Rosetta stone and Champollion's subsequent deciphering of the hieroglyphs as heralding not only the recovery of Ancient Egyptian literature but also the recovery of other long-lost Near Eastern textualities. The excitement surrounding 19th-century discoveries in the field of Egyptology, he elaborates, spurred the decipherment of cuneiform script and was to lead to the recovery of Gilgamesh. Having already devoted a chapter of What is World Literature? to Gilgamesh Damrosch is currently developing his research on the subject into a full-length book written for the general public. It was this new project that formed the basis of "Archaeology and Empire: Gilgamesh after Orientalism", his second lecture, delivered at AUC on 8 November. In treating Gilgamesh both in antiquity and, via its 19th-century discovery, its modern adaptations as something of an exemplary world literature text, Damrosch's argument is animated by a desire to undermine recent binary attitudes to East and West and the othering discourse of "us" versus "them," the immediate motive being the war on Iraq. Taking stock of Samuel P Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Damrosch critiqued Huntington's "Manichaean" rhetoric and his "very stark view of civilizations as inherently in conflict", most apparent in his Islamophobia. In countering Huntington's argument Damrosch drew on "the Book of Genesis and the Qur'an [which] agree on seeing Jews and Arabs as Abraham's children, descended from his sons, the half-brothers Isaac and Ishmael," going on to assert that " The Epic of Gilgamesh is a prime example of the underlying unity of the extended family... that has recently [been] called 'Islamo-Christian civilization'. Our distinctively different cultures ultimately build on similar cultural resources, even at times the very same texts, such as the Flood story that underlies the Genesis account and the version told to Gilgamesh at the end of his epic..." The "many parallels between Gilgamesh and the Homeric epics... suggest that the Homeric poets had heard Gilgamesh performed either in Syria or Cyprus, where there was an extensive Assyrian presence." The epic's circulation in antiquity, which flies in the face of binary thinking, is paralleled by its discovery, dissemination and adaptation in modern times. Reading the discovery of Gilgamesh via Orientalism, the speaker endorsed Said's central thesis about the textual strategies employed by poets, scholars and travel writers to construct a discourse that enables the imperial project but nuanced it by bringing out the "multiplicity of [the Orientalists'] motives" as exemplified by Henry Rawlinson. Damrosch argues that Rawlinson, an army officer based in Persia and then Iraq for several decades in the 19th century who was instrumental in deciphering cuneiform script, combined both political motives and "purely intellectual" ones. It was Rawlinson's labours in deciphering cuneiform that enabled George Smith, an employee of the British Museum, to make the preliminary translation in 1872 of the Flood story as narrated in Gilgamesh that occasioned much controversy regarding the different traditions, apart from the biblical, of the deluge. "From almost the moment of its rediscovery," Damrosch elaborated, " Gilgamesh and its Flood story thus began to undermine cherished Western views of the truth of sacred Scripture, and more generally the many finds in Egypt and Mesopotamia slowly began to undermine Western views of the origins of Western culture itself." Damrosch then turned to two 20th-century adaptations of Gilgamesh that "show an ongoing connectedness of 'Middle Eastern' and 'Western' cultures, even despite their own divisive intentions". The first of these, Philip Roth's 1973 novel The Great American Novel, centres on a fictional baseball league, the Patriot League, and a pitcher of Babylonian origin called Gil Gamesh. When Gil is barred from baseball on account of his temper he moves to the Soviet Union where he is trained as a spy, after which Stalin sends him back to the US to manage and ruin the Patriot League and thus "weaken... America's will to succeed". "The brilliant satire in Roth," said Damrosch, "is that the Soviets have sent Gil as a single agent to foment a witch hunt against dozens of falsely accused Communists: this is their ploy to... weaken... the American fabric through paranoia and conspiracy theories." The second example was Saddam Hussein's novel Zabibah wal Malik (Zabibah and the King, 2000), the publisher's foreword to the German translation of which, says Damrosch, cites a laudatory blurb by an unnamed CIA agent who read the book in search of clues to the author's psyche. Contextualising the novel, Damrosch spoke of Saddam's fascination with Iraq's pre-Islamic history and the comparisons he drew between himself and such figures as Nebuchadnezzar, Sennacherib and Gilgamesh as partly indicative of the Baathist appeal to a secular pan-Arab nationalism capable of surmounting sectarianism, and mentioned the plan announced in 2002 to create the Saddam Institute of Cuneiform Studies and "revive" the site where The Epic of Gilgamesh was found. Set in ancient Assyria, Zabibah and the King narrates the love story between an unnamed king and a plebian young woman, Zabibah, who "instructs him in the principles of just rule". Zabibah is killed defending the palace against an attack by conspirators backed by "a Jewish moneylender... and his blue-eyed foreign friends" on 17 January, the date of the first Gulf War, while the king dies of heartbreak leaving the people to select their next leader. Damrosch then went on to bring out the parallels between the novel and Gilgamesh (as well as the Thousand and One Nights ) to decode the ideological baggage that the political allegory carries, before tracing thematic resonances between Zabibah and the King and The Great American Novel to reassert that "more fundamentally, quite apart from any allegorisation or metaphorical application, The Epic of Gilgamesh speaks to our present situation by the very fact of its circulation across the boundaries of culture that so often seem to separate 'us' from 'them', 'Middle East' from 'the West.'"
