Exile itself was central to Said’s intellectual self-fashioning

Evidence

The literary critic Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) was one of Said’s role models. Auerbach was a leading practitioner of romance philology and his great book, Mimesis (1946), was an exercise in comparative literature and, more specifically, a study of men’s changing perceptions of reality as reflected in literature. The range of texts was impressive, as he began with the Bible and Homer and ended with Proust. Auerbach used to work from the Ansatzpunkt (starting point) of the study of a particular text, or part of a text, in order to understand history and the world as a whole. One incidental factor behind Said’s adulation of Auerbach was the fact that the latter had written his masterpiece in exile in Istanbul. Said, who considered himself to be an exile from Palestine, used to quote Auerbach’s citation of Hugh of St Victor: ‘The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.’ — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 503

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s protagonist who is likewise an educated exile caught between worlds and identities.