Many Exits

In the fall and winter of 1991, I spent a few cloistered months reading Joseph Conrad with Edward Said. There were twelve of us in his class, and our task was to read every work of fiction Conrad wrote and discuss them together twice a week. Said assumed that all of us cared as much as he did about what we were reading, so no time was wasted on details of class administration, and we approached our task with a sense of high purpose. From Almayer's Folly to the late existential works like The Shadow-Line, we would take turns reading a brief passage and discussing why it was there, what Conrad meant for us to see. Said wanted to know what Conrad meant on every page, in every paragraph, in every line. Why this word and not some other? In class, Said had the pugnacious charm of a boxer, and his response to a wayward effort to make sense of what we were reading could be fierce. "No, Mr. Weiland," he would say. "That isn't it at all." There was an intense restlessness in that room, as though a bomb needed defusing and the clock was ticking down. I was glad to be working with wires and explosives.

One day in the middle of the semester Said arrived, as usual, after we had arranged ourselves around the table. Unlike every other classroom I've known, there was no talk between students in those anxious moments before class began: we waited, always, in silence. But on this day a student we hadn't seen before was standing in the doorway. As Said took his seat, the student addressed him, saying he was a one-time visitor who'd come to audit the class.

"Is it still OK if I join you today?" he asked good-naturedly.

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