It is not surprising that there exists no great English novel in which the growth of national or imperial consciousness is chronicled. It is useless to look for this in the work of historians. They, more than novelists, work within the values of their society; they serve those values. –V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness
Said’s argument runs through four stages. First, he explains that in any society committed to building an empire, as England was in the last century, imperialism has to be seen as an essential part of the culture. This is obviously true, though you’d never know it the way Said labors the point. Second, he argues that novels written in that imperial culture not only make assumptions appropriate to it (as, say, novels written in America today might make assumptions about our obsession with sexuality or consumerism), they also promote the values of that culture, whether consciously or not. Joseph Conrad presents an interesting case because his ambivalence about European adventurism is well known–indeed, it’s at the center of all his books. But Conrad was so locked into the culture of imperialism, according to Said, that he could not help being its medium: Nostromo, for example, “embodies the same paternalistic arrogance of imperialism that it mocks.”
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This is mere sloppiness. More troubling is Said’s penchant for tendentious, even fallacious glosses. In order to make a point about the outlying territories of empire being “available for use, at will, at the novelist’s discretion,” he claims that in Hard Times Dickens has Tom Gradgrind, the good-for-nothing son, shipped off to the colonies at the end. In fact, Dickens only refers vaguely to North or South America. After quoting a passage from Thomas Carlyle filled with the most appalling racism (and repeating the title of the work, The Nigger Question, just to make sure we get the point), Said goes on to suggest that Jane Austen shared its “essential attitudes.” There is not a single word in Mansfield Park–which never once mentions blacks, let alone “niggers”–to justify this preposterous slander.
Said opposes facts not with other facts but with texts. This is another value he serves. In recent years the air of academic criticism has gotten even thinner as reality has been pumped out; the argument runs that everything is a representation created in the treacherous medium of language, so texts, when interpreted by experts, are more useful for understanding the world than facts naively gathered “out there.” (A book written 15 years ago by Said himself, Orientalism, was a milestone in the development of this line.) Interpretation is what really matters, and as raw material one text is as good as another. This explains why we now have Madonna experts inhabiting university departments of literature and why Said can, with perfect blandness, describe Khomeini, the pope, and Margaret Thatcher as coevals in “the age of Ayatollahs.” One “primordial faith,” you see, is the same as another.
