Edward Said: a tribute

Michael binding Satan, by William Blake

In Book 6 of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the good angel Abdiel rebukes Satan and says:

“All are not of they train; there be who faith
Prefer, and piety to God, though then
To thee not visible, when I alone
Seemed in they world erroneous to dissent
From all: my sect thou seest, now learn too late
How few sometimes may know, when thousands err.” Here, Milton presents Abdiel as a lonely dissenter who belongs to a small sect, while Satan and his legions are the thousands who err.

Edward Said always appeared to me as one of Milton’s angels – Abdiel, the Archangel Michael – who stood out against power and injustice to build through his writings, his lectures and broadcasts and ceaseless passionate communicativeness what Milton call “ the great palace now of light.”

In that seminal work Orientalism he shows how culture and imperialism are so intertwined in the west as to be virtually images of each other – yet at the same time he always held and holds to a fierce disinterestedness that is part of the legacy of Dissenting culture – from Francis Hutcheson, William Hazlitt and beyond. In his heartfelt and inspiring introduction to his 1987 edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, he says that we are obligated to read it “in the light of decolonization, but, we must immediately add, it is neither to slight its great aesthetic force, nor to treat it reductively as imperialist propaganda.”

We can see this disinterestedness in his essay on Albert Camus in Culture and Imperialism, where he points out that there is an “elision and compression” in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s “otherwise tough-minded analysis” of Camus, when he considers him as an individual artist “anguished over difficult choices.” As Edward shows, Camus’s writing is informed by “an extraordinarily belated, in some ways incapacitated colonial sensibility,” which enacts an imperial gesture in a form – the realist novel – which was well past its greatest achievements in Europe. Camus declared that an Algerian nation never existed, yet he describes “a community with nowhere to go.”

Edward Said’s writing is characterised by this deep appreciation of the formal beauties of a literary text with an unrelenting eye for its possible affiliations with power. At the heart of his writing there is an ecstatic, irenic, witty intelligence and beauty – his prose is that of an intensely gifted pianist – he makes prose sing and never lets it be blown off course by what Matthew Arnold in a jibe at Milton’s prose calls “the dust of dismal polemics.”

It was at school in the United States, as Edward records in his autobiography, that he began what he described as “a lifelong struggle and attempt to demystify the capriciousness and hypocrisy of a power whose authority depended absolutely on its self-image as a moral agent, acting in good faith, and with unimpeachable intentions.”

In the teeth of great adversity – great physical and spiritual suffering caused by the chronic lymphatic leukaemia which he suffered from for over twelve years, he sought to demystify power – his was an epic, a Miltonic ambition and achievement – long is the way and hard, Milton says, that out of darkness leads to light – Edward led and will always lead us to the light – to the great palace now of light.