‘Childless couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths, and unregenerately celibate men and women,’ writes Edward Said, ‘populate the world of high modernism with remarkable insistence, all of them suggesting the difficulties of filiation.’ For Said, ‘filiation’, as Abdirahman A. Hussein explains, ‘is premised on narrative linearity, familial procreation, biological succession, and the “vertical” transmission of traditionary authority. Said allegorizes it into the authority of an immediate community or specific culture to which one belongs “by birth, nationality, profession.” ‘ The difficulties of filiation that Said perceives in modernism constitute for him the first in a three-part pattern originating in this ‘large group of late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury writers, in which the failure of the generative impulse – the failure of the capacity to produce or generate children – is portrayed in such a way as to stand for a general condition afflicting society and culture together, to say nothing of individual men and women’ (Said 1983, p. 16). The second part of this pattern, ‘immediately consequent upon the first, [is] the pressure to produce new and different ways of conceiving human relationships’ (Said 1983, p. 17); to move, in other words, ‘from a failed idea or possibility of filiation to a kind of compensatory order that, whether it is a party, an institution, a culture, a set of beliefs, or even a world-vision, provides men and women with a new form of relationship’ (Said 1983, p. 19) – what Said calls ‘affiliation’. The third and final part of the pattern is ‘the deliberately explicit goal of using that new order to reinstate vestiges of the kind of authority associated in the past with filiative order’ (Said 1983, p. 19). As Said (1983, pp. 19–20) explains,