Thinking about Edward Said: Pages from a Memoir

When I had contracted with the University of Massachusetts Press—in 1967 or 1968—to translate De la grammatologie, my editor sent me a copy of Edward Said’s “Abecedarium culturae: Structuralism, Absence,Writing” that had just appeared in TriQuarterly and was later included as a chapter in Beginnings. It must have been 1971. Later that year I found out that my contract was with Hopkins and that J. Hillis Miller, who was then at Yale, and had already started organizing Derrida’s U.S. career, had something to do with it. I never solved that puzzle. The editor atMassachusetts had stuck a note on the article, something like, What on earth is going on here? Perhaps he was beginning to realize, in givingme a contract for translatingand introducing JacquesDerrida, that the press hadbitten offmore than it could chew. Well, I read the piece. I had ordered Derrida off a catalogue, on impulse, not knowing his name, or anything about the French scene. It was a sort of self-help project, to which I still subscribe, shamefacedly. I have no general education, whereas Edward’s piece seemed to be incredibly knowledgeable in just that way. I read the piece carefully, made notes in the margin, and filed it. Those years were full of turmoil inmy personal life, but I kept translating Derrida andkept teaching the “poststructuralists,”whowereall stillwriting. (I think I invented that ugly and imprecise word, a few years later, in my introduction to the Grammatology.) I sometimes think I developed a sort of comradeship with them precisely because I was so untutored, plugging away in remote Iowa City. “French” feminism, contained in the red covers of Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron’s book, appearing in 1980, was a different matter entirely. The opening pages of this memoir, trying to