Writing to the moment

Edward Said combined politics with scholarship, and showed how the two are intertwined.
Deeply affected by the Arab-Israeli war, he became an inspiring guide to both history and
culture, and his prose remains a joy to read. On the anniversary of his death, Tom Paulin
celebrates a brilliant mind

Saturday September 25, 2004

The Guardian

On September 25 last year, I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to write an
essay on Camus's La Peste. In order to analyse a pattern of words in it, I opened
Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, which has an incisive chapter on Camus.
I'd read it several times -most recently at Columbia University where I'd taught
during the previous year in the same English faculty as Said, and discussed
Camus and many other authors with him. Said criticises Camus's plain style, his
"extraordinarily belated, in some ways incapacitated colonial sensibility", and his
declaration that an Algerian nation never existed.

I wanted to link this to the way Camus plays on the French word but (target, goal),
when the phone rang - it was a friend from Columbia telling me that Edward Said
had died that morning. It was very distressing and also uncanny - I could see his
words on the page in front of me, hear his voice in their cadences alongside the
voice of my friend telling me how Edward had slipped into a coma the previous
night and died in the early hours. Ten minutes later I was on the phone to a friend
of Edward's and mine in Israel - the three of us had last met one long summer's
evening in a country garden outside Stratford-on-Avon three months before - and
we reflected on how grief is compulsive in its need to share memories and stories.
Then, some time later, I went back to Said's writings to remember him and write
about the epic intellectual endeavour that was at the centre of his life.

In 1988 he came to London for the launch in the National Theatre of his pamphlet,
Yeats and Decolonisation, which had been commissioned by the Derry-based Field
Day Theatre Company, of which I was a member. I met him there and we
immediately became friends - our conversation, I recall, was mostly about Gerard
Manley Hopkins, whose poetry fascinated us both. Three years later, he was
diagnosed with the debilitating form of leukaemia he fought for the last 12 years
of his life, enduring every month the most terribly painful treatment. He never
gave in, and I remember trying to persuade him not to travel to Spain in August
last year, because his health was so bad. "I want to go," he said, "I'm going to
make a film with Daniel [Barenboim]." So he flew to Spain and took part in the
film with Barenboim and the young Arab and Israeli musicians of the East-West
Divan Orchestra, which was shown on the South Bank Show last winter.
Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, and educated at Victoria College, Cairo (Omar
Sharif and Ralph Nader were fellow pupils). During his rebellious adolescence, his
father, a successful businessman, sent him to a boarding school in Massachusetts.
He survived the displacement and culture shock to become a brilliant student at
Princeton and Harvard. He became a professor at Columbia in 1963, and
succeeded to Lionel Trilling's chair there. His major work, Orientalism, was
published in 1978, and made him world famous. It was translated into 36
languages, and continues to prompt debate and inform argument against certain
ideological and racist attitudes that still shape ideology in the United States and
Britain.
For many people, academic works exist outside politics and history but, as Said
shows, generations of scholars have shaped and lent credence to imperialist
expansion. In a new introduction to Orientalism, written a few months before he
died, Said states that among the major influences on George W Bush's Pentagon
and national security council were "experts on the Arab and Islamic world" such
as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami who helped the American hawks to think about
such "preposterous phenomena" as the Arab mind and "centuries-old Islamic
decline" that only American power could reverse. For Said, the role of the
intellectual was to "say truth to power", and it was this Promethean truth-telling
that drove him tirelessly, ceaselessly until his death. He was attacked in print,
received death-threats, had his office at Columbia vandalised, was libelled and
dubbed "the professor of terror" - he was also attacked for wearing stylish clothes
and living in Manhattan - but he refused to stop telling the truth or to stop arguing
for peaceful progress towards institutions in Israel and Palestine that were not
ethnically based. The solidarity he proclaimed was multi-racial, and he rejoiced in
an enormous circle of friends that stretched across the world.
Although his many enemies attacked him as an ideologically driven writer, the
foundation of all his work is the concept of disinterested aesthetic pleasure. Like
Hazlitt, whom he greatly admired, he refused to allow his political principles to
distort his admiration for particular works of art. When Culture and Imperialism
was published in 1993, the chapter on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park aroused anger
among some critics, because of his discussion of the "dead silence" (Austen's
phrase) that occurs when its heroine, Fanny Price, asks her uncle about the slave
trade. The family owns a sugar plantation on Antigua, and Fanny is troubled by
this, though to no real narrative purpose (the film in which Harold Pinter plays
Fanny's uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, draws on Said's discussion to make the point
more sharply).
Discussing the novel, Said argues that it is silly "to expect Jane Austen to treat
slavery with anything like the passion of an abolitionist or a newly liberated
slave". Said refused to engage in what he termed "the rhetoric of blame", and
attack Austen retrospectively for being "white, insensitive, complicit". Rather, he
criticised card-carrying postcolonial critics for such attacks, and insisted that
Austen's novel is a "rich work" whose "aesthetic intellectual complexity" requires
a longer and slower analysis. Austen belonged to a slave-owning society, but we
should not therefore jettison her novels as "aesthetic frumpery". This affirmation
of aesthetic pleasure, which is the central energy of all his writing, is made again
in Culture and Imperialism, where he says that Kipling should not be dismissed as
an "imperialist minstrel". Kim is a work of "great aesthetic merit", and cannot be
dismissed as the racist imaginings of one "disturbed and ultra-reactionary
imperialist". Almost uniquely, Said combines an unrelenting appreciation of a
literary text or a piece of music with the pizzazz and ethical witness of what that
great Puritan writer Samuel Richardson called "writing to the moment".
Said didn't begin his academic career as a politicised writer, and anyone reading
his first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, would be hard put
to detect a political subtext. Only a short passage on the tragedy of Polish history
and on "doubleness" glances at a political theme. The Conrad book was published
in 1966, but the Arab-Israeli war the following year affected Said deeply, and he
began to combine political writing with literary criticism and scholarly research. It
was this ability to move from discussing a sonnet by Mallarmé to indicting the
Israeli authorities and their supporters in Europe and the US that was to make
Said into what one scholar has called "probably the best-known intellectual in the
world". Like Mallarmé, he had read all the books, and it is one of the daunting
pleasures of his work to be given reading lists - Auerbach, Adorno, Blackmur,
Derrida, Foucault, Lukacs, Vico, whom he had read in depth, as well as a host of
other critics, scholars, historians, musicologists. A brilliant linguist who was also a
gifted pianist, and in his last years a devoted friend and collaborator with
Barenboim, he wrote and lectured and broadcast with the rapt inspiring delight
and joy of a great performer.
One of his heroes was that supreme Tory anarchist, Jonathan Swift, whom he
praises in an essay, "Humanism's Sphere", written in the last months of his life.
He saw Swift, as Yeats did, as the most "demonic and tigerish writer as has ever
lived". Swift did not settle into untroubled patterns of tranquillity and unchanging
order - instead he remained "unsatisfied, unappeased, unreconciled".
Said's death, in his 68th year, was untimely, and it is the theme of untimeliness
which he confronts in another, posthumously published essay, "Thoughts on Late
Style", where he challenges the received idea that old age confers a spirit of
reconciliation and serenity on late works, and argues that in late Beethoven and
Ibsen there is instead "intransigence, difficulty and contradiction". The word
"intransigence" is a favourite with him (sometimes he gives the Arabic sumud),
and it informs his writing without ever making it seem rigid, narrow or obsessive.
Like his friend, Noam Chomsky, he takes issue with the separation of politics from
art and scholarship, and he also draws on Barthes and Foucault, on whose work
he was an expert, to argue against the platonic view of an author or, say, a novel
as set apart from history and circumstance.
This rejection of the separation of history from culture can be seen in The
Question of Palestine, which was published in 1979, a year after Orientalism. After
discussing the demolition of more than 16,000 Arab houses during the early years
of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which began in 1967, he
turns to the moment some 50 years before, when the British foreign secretary,
Arthur Balfour, issued a declaration in which the British government undertook to
"view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish
people".
In this powerful, always gracefully written polemic, we see several important
themes emerging. One is the failure of western intellectuals to recognise how the
Palestinian people were made invisible: "Check the disgraceful record and you will
find only a small handful - among them Noam Chomsky, Israel Shahak, IF Stone,
Elmer Berger, Judah Magnes - who have tried to see what Zionism did to the
Palestinians not just once in 1948, but over the years. It is one of the most
frightening cultural episodes of the 20th century, this almost total silence about
Zionism's doctrines for and treatment of the native Palestinians."
Said celebrates the work of certain contemporary intellectuals, who were often
dear personal friends, like Chomsky and Shahak. His work brings the life of the
mind and high culture to the struggle for justice and recognition. This struggle is
pitched against powerful forces - vested interests, embedded ideologies, racism,
and those so-called intellectuals whom, quoting Gramsci, he characterised as
"experts in legitimisation" - the paid scribes of power who are silent about its
excesses.
We don't tend to see critical writing as performance - at least not those of us who
were brought up on the lumpy writings of FR Leavis. But Said's prose, unlike
Leavis's, always sings, and has epic, bravura moments, like this immense
sentence from the opening chapter of Orientalism :
"To restore a region from its present barbarism to its former classical greatness;
to instruct (for its own benefit) the Orient in the ways of the modern West; to
subordinate or underplay military power in order to aggrandise the project of
glorious knowledge acquired in the process of political domination of the Orient;
to formulate the Orient, to give it shape, identity, definition with full recognition of
its place in memory, its importance to imperial strategy, and its "natural" role as
an appendage to Europe; to dignify all the knowledge collected during colonial
occupation with the title "contribution to modern learning", when the natives had
neither been consulted not treated as anything except as pretexts for a text
whose usefulness was not to the natives; to feel oneself as a European in
command, almost at will, of Oriental history, time, and geography; to institute
new areas of specialisation; to establish new disciplines; to divide, deploy,
schematise, tabulate, index, and record everything in sight (and out of sight); to
make out of every observable detail a generalisation and out of every
generalisation an immutable law about the Oriental nature, temperament,
mentality, custom, or type; and, above all, to transmute living reality into the stuff
of texts, to possess (or think one possesses) actuality mainly because nothing in
the Orient seems to resist one's powers: these are the features of Orientalist
projection entirely realised in the Description de l'Égypte, itself enabled and
reinforced by Napoleon's wholly Orientalist engulfment of Egypt by the
instruments of Western knowledge and power."
Again, this is like one of those magnificent moments in Hazlitt, where he will
suddenly unleash vast sentences which assume an unchallengeable authority and
take written prose into the living flow of intense oratory (as everyone who
attended his lectures knows, Said was a wonderfully inspired and inspiring
speaker).
It's unusual for critical prose to be submitted to any kind of formal analysis;
indeed, if we survey literary criticism we'll find few discussions of the prose style
of novelists, let alone critics, but it is one of the joys of reading Said that we are
prompted to examine his formal strategies. He dislikes what, discussing the
distinguished Orientalist Hamilton Gibb, he called "quietly heedless but profoundly
sequential prose". Said breaks with such prose by using parentheses in the long
sentence I've just quoted, introducing a pause and change in vocal rhythm which
acts as a counterpoint. He had a strong interest in the contrapuntal, noting it in
the music he admired, and characterising it as essential to the practice of
criticism. This effect is extended by the three stressed nouns "shape", "identity",
"definition", and by those six, again strongly stressed verbs, "divide", "deploy",
"schematise", "tabulate", "index", "read". Said's prose gives character to the
arguments of the Orientalist scholars, travellers, members of government think
tanks, whom he then confronts and challenges.
His ambition is to prevent sentences from becoming routine, tranquil, unchanging,
and his use of dashes and parentheses helps to shape the vocal inflections and
pauses of his prose, and to assist a quick passionate intelligence, which knows
that often abstract vocabulary, which critical discourse necessarily demands,
could dull the prose.
Conrad, like Swift, is a conservative anarchist and a major influence on Said, and
it is this openness to a point of view that is other than progressive which gives
Said's thinking and his style its complexity. In a passage from Heart of Darkness,
Conrad offers this seminal image of western imperialism:
'Near the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up
that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar,
white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished
boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a
big white hand. He was amazing, and had a pen-holder behind his ear ... His
appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser's dummy; but in the great
demoralisation of the land he kept up his appearance. That's backbone.'
This passage and Conrad's whole novella, which also influenced TS Eliot,
particularly in The Waste Land, is near the centre of Said's imagination, and helps
shape his writing.
Part of the effectiveness of Said's analysis stems from his attention to Orientalist
prose style. Gibb speaks of "the characteristic difference in the Oriental". But
what is the meaning of "difference", Said asks, when the preposition "from" has
dropped from sight altogether? Said argues that Camus's "plain style and
unadorned reporting" conceal complex contradictions. In "Reflections on Exile", he
says that a plain reportorial style can "coerce" history and knowledge into "mere
events being observed". Out of this has grown the eye-witness, seemingly
opinion-less politics of contemporary western journalism.
The cadences of Said's prose resist the consistency of plain style, as when he
argues that the intellectual must choose "the method, the style, the texture" best
suited for the purpose of saying the truth to power. The texture of his prose
challenges that blurred, evasive, timid judiciousness which lies at the heart of
much academic writing. His prose is pitched against what he calls "the academic
flaccidity" of English Studies, the determination of its practitioners to show
themselves "to be silent, perhaps incompetent" about the social and historical
world.
Here, we return to the subject of silence, and in Orientalism he explores how a
liberal, progressive confidence in civilisation sought to denigrate the
achievements of other civilisations. This confidence is enshrined in a famous
minute on Indian education, written by Macaulay for the East India Company in
1832, which Said discusses early in Orientalism.
Macaulay admitted he had "no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic", but went
on to assert: "The intrinsic superiority of the western literature is indeed fully
admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of
education ... It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical
information which has been collected in the Sanskrit language is less valuable
than what may be found in the paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools
in England."
As Said remarks, this is no "mere expression" of an opinion, because Macaulay
has an ethnocentric opinion with ascertainable results: speaking from a position of
power he was able to make an entire subcontinent submit to studying in a
language not its own. It was reading Said on Macaulay and then reading the
complete minute that made me realise that the beautiful standard English RK
Narayan employs in his subtle novels is pitched at such a perfect level - a level
with no vernacular resonance - that it reads, with a deliberate irony, as though it
is translated from Narayan's native Tamil. Narayan, I remember, was attacked by
VS Naipaul, and from time to time Said criticises Naipaul as a writer who tells
western power what it wants to hear about its former colonies. He is "a sensibility
on tour". For Said, the yeast of culture, as Louis MacNeice phrased it, is debate
and argument - his address as a lecturer was never shrill or monologic, and the
same is true of his written prose.
Looking at the legacy of critical theory, which had challenged traditional critical
assumptions, his conclusion in the early 1980s was that oppositional Left criticism
contributed very little to debate in the culture. Though he lectured to packed
audiences throughout the world, and though he had many followers and admirers,
I think he always felt that too many people were evasive, too concerned with
making careers and with not giving offence. Many liberals had made common
cause with the ANC and criticised the apartheid state of South Africa, but they
turned their backs on the Palestinians. It's here that we can begin to see the grief
and anguish that informs his writing, as he details the "vulgarities" of the White
House ceremony where Arafat and Rabin made a hopeless doomed peace in
1993. He discusses this humiliating ceremony in Peace and its Discontents (1996),
where he speaks of the "shabby, undemocratic Palestinian Protectorate" over
which Arafat still presides.
Said's frustration with Arafat is discussed in the introduction to The Politics of
Dispossession (1995), where he discusses the shaping influence he very nearly
had on the Camp David agreements of 1978. He felt the Palestinian position was
"extraordinarily rigid", and along with others who had contacts in the Carter
administration, made an effort to make it more flexible. Through his old friend and
college classmate, Hodding Carter, who was then assistant secretary of state in
Jimmy Carter's administration, he met the secretary of state, Cyrus Vance. That
year Said had become a member of the Palestinian National Council (he was
never a member of the PLO). Without mentioning his predecessor, Henry
Kissinger, Vance made it clear he was trying to shake off the "hobbles" that had
been placed on the process. The way was now open to a direct dialogue between
the PLO and the United States. A message was sent to Arafat, he received it, but
nothing happened.
The Carter administration gave Said a document agreeing the text of the
statement the PLO would issue to get US recognition. Said flew with it to Beirut.
He met Arafat around midnight the same day, but the discussion was inconclusive
and confused; they met the following midnight and Arafat and his advisers
rejected the American offer. Deeply disappointed, Said returned to New York and
conveyed the refusal to Vance. The PLO went on to make many more mistakes,
which Said details, and the result eventually was the hopeless Oslo agreement,
and its sequel Oslo Two. The PLO became more and more bureaucratic, as
wealthy Arab governments and states stopped funding it, and still Arafat
blustered "we are on the threshold of a state".
The story of Said's attempt to influence the PLO and shape a settlement is a
haunting missed opportunity, and it stayed with him for the rest of his life. In The
End of the Peace Process (2000), Said concluded that Oslo Two gave the
Palestinian Authority the "trappings and appurtenances" of rule without the
reality. Like a defeated figure in one of Baudelaire's Spleen poems, Arafat and his
people "rule over a kingdom of illusions, with Israel firmly in command". The
genius of Said's prose, his passionate communicativeness, the warmth and love
and marvellous wit of his conversation - captured in print and on film - survive his
untimely death. Reading him, talking to him, listening to him lecture, watching
him take questions after a lecture or in a seminar, I was inescapably reminded of
how Milton characterises Abdiel and the Archangel Michael in Paradise Lost as
immortal forces who have the courage to dissent and try to build what Milton calls
"the great place now of light".
· Tom Paulin will speak at a conference on Edward Said to be held at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, London, on October 3. For details see:
www.palestinesociety.org/said