Who Paid the Bills at Mansfield Park?
By MICHAEL GORRA
CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM
By Edward W. Said.

The title of Edward W. Said's grandly conceived and long-awaited new book, "Culture and Imperialism," deliberately echoes the titles of two great works of criticism -- Matthew Arnold's "Culture and Anarchy" (1869) and Raymond Williams's "Culture and Society" (1958). Arnold saw culture ("the best which has been thought and said") as a safeguard against anarchy; the "and" in his title really means "or." That sense of opposing terms shapes Williams's work as well, a study of the way 19th-century social critics, Arnold included, came to view culture as a critique of "the bourgeois ideal of society."

The "and" in Mr. Said's own title seems more accurately chosen, since he argues that the terms it links are best seen not in opposition but in conjunction. Yet even so, I can imagine replacing it, not with "or," but with "of" or "as"; culture as imperialism, imperialism as a culture. For Mr. Said uses the word "culture" in both its Arnoldian meaning, to denote the realm of art and learning, and in the more inclusive sense employed by anthropologists. The two definitions fall into one. Or, rather, what the book shows is the involvement of culture in the first sense of the word -- the novels, poems, operas of high art -- with imperialism, itself a central fact of Western culture in the second sense.

"We assume," Mr. Said writes, "that the better part of history in colonial territories was a function of the imperial intervention." Yet in doing so, Mr. Said believes, we also assume "that colonial undertakings were marginal and perhaps even eccentric to the central activities of the great metropolitan cultures." And that assumption, he argues, is inextricable from our desire to excuse the cultural monuments through which we know the past for their participation in empire. (In consequence, a writer like Rudyard Kipling, who is inescapably linked with imperialism, has been pushed to the margins of the canon.) Charles Dickens provides an example for Mr. Said's argument, one that paradoxically enables him to demonstrate imperialism's centrality by detailing its peripheral status in the world of Dickens's novels.

Critics have traditionally considered the empire irrelevant to Dickens, for the simple reason that he set his books in England. Yet Mr. Said points out that his characters enact a steady commerce between the metropolis and its colonial margins, and that the empire's role on the outer borders of the novels' geography belies the degree to which it underwrites -- in both a financial and a literary sense -- Victorian society as a whole. It is the place in which fortunes are made and to which social misfits, like Mr. Micawber, are consigned. Yet everything connected with the colonies happens offstage, Mr. Said continues, as if the culture's participation in imperialism is not only to be excused, but excised.

One of the best chapters in "Culture and Imperialism" describes Jane Austen's assumption, in "Mansfield Park," of "the importance of an empire to the situation at home." But when her character Sir Thomas Bertram has to visit the Caribbean sugar plantation that supports his country house, Mr. Said says, Austen falls into "esthetic silence." We never get to see him walk across that other, slave-run estate.

That Mr. Said's accounts of Dickens and Austen -- or of figures like Verdi, Camus, Gide and Yeats -- no longer sound so startling is attributable in large measure to his own earlier work. He has argued elsewhere that what is most interesting about art is its "worldliness," the way it both reflects and helps constitute the political realities of its society; this emphasis calls into question any belief in an autonomous or "pure" realm of art and learning.

Mr. Said, now University Professor at Columbia, has long had a particular worldliness of his own, a double fame -- in the news media as a spokesman for Palestinian causes and a fierce critic of American policy in the Persian Gulf, and in the academy as the author of "Orientalism" (1978). There he described the ways the "Orientalist discourse" -- through which European scholarship came to define the Middle East as Europe's stereotypically exotic Other -- both legitimized and served French and British colonialism.

For Mr. Said the inescapability of that discourse kept -- and keeps -- the West from engaging with the actuality of the lands it sought to dominate, and his pioneering attempt to chart what one might call the textual manifestations of colonialism has had an enormous impact. He was among the first critics to show how one might mount the kind of sophisticated analysis of the close relations between literature and politics, knowledge and power, that now prevails in literary studies. No one examining the relations between the metropolitan West and the decolonizing world can ignore his work. If very little of what "Culture and Imperialism" has to say seems absolutely fresh, that is because other critics, working within the lines that "Orientalism" suggested, have already begun to explore the issues this new book raises (some examples: Gauri Viswanathan's "Masks of Conquest," Christopher L. Miller's "Blank Darkness" and Kwame Anthony Appiah's "In My Father's House").

But the model of "Orientalism" did have problems. In mapping the ways in which Orientalist discourse works, it fell, inadvertently but perhaps inevitably, into the very type of binary thinking it sought to attack, suggesting that there is indeed some "real" Orient whose radical difference remains unrepresentable in or by the Occidental mind. Appropriately, some of Mr. Said's most interesting chapters in "Culture and Imperialism" stand as an implicit response to the limitations of his previous work. For after describing the culture of imperialism, he turns, in the book's second half, to the "culture of resistance," to the anticolonial vision of writers like the Trinidadian C. L. R. James. Those chapters amount to an attack on "nativism," the systematic turning away from the West and its products that is often a response to colonial oppression.

The cultural "authenticity" that nativism demands -- the call for Afrocentric education is a good example -- is at best reactive; a phase through which most liberation movements must go, but one that Mr. Said echoes Frantz Fanon in seeing as a pitfall on the way to a more far-reaching liberation. For "to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism, the racial, religious and political divisions" that colonialism imposes on its subject peoples. Nativism, he says, believes that we each have one absolute and essential identity, as blacks or whites or Serbs or Croats. Its other name is nationalism, and in the name of the people it can as easily build an empire as oppose one.

Mr. Said's account of the dialectical relation between imperialism and resistance is the most persuasive one I know. And I admire as well the equipoise of his call for a similarly "contrapuntal" approach to the canon of Western literature; asking, for example, that we play off a full awareness of the history that shapes the world of "Mansfield Park" against our "enjoyment or appreciation" of Austen's "irony and taste," while losing sight of neither. Yet even for readers like myself, whose sympathies are already engaged by his project, reading "Culture and Imperialism" can at times seem frustrating.

Its great scope means that it must settle for being suggestive rather than exhaustive about any one issue, any one text. And despite the overall strength of its polemical frame, its separate chapters remain too heavily marked by their origins as lectures. The lecturer wants to send his audience away thinking, so he throws out a great many ideas. But on the page they too often read as digressions, as a repetition of the ideas Mr. Said has developed in other lectures -- other chapters -- or simply as a string of names, as if that in itself constituted an argument: thus, "To speak today of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Carlos Fuentes, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and many others like them is to speak of a fairly novel emergent culture unthinkable without the earlier work of partisans like C. L. R. James, George Antonius, Edward Wilmot Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jose Marti."

Yet that telegraphic style does not finally mar either the usefulness of "Culture and Imperialism" or its importance. If it is not a conceptual breakthrough on the same order as "Orientalism," it nevertheless stands as an urgently written and urgently needed synthesis of the work in a field that, more than any other critic, Edward W. Said has himself defined.

Michael Gorra, who teaches English at Smith College, is the author of "The English Novel at Mid-Century." He is at work on a study of imperialism and the novel.

Time is our most valuable possession: we are obsessed with schedules and multitasking to save time, say the authors of this insightful study of the importance of time in our lives. Yet people spend time less wisely than money. Zimbardo (The Lucifer Effect), professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford, and Boyd, research director for Yahoo!, draw on their two decades of research to explain why people devalue time. They blend scientific results into a straightforward narrative exploring various past-, present- and future-oriented ways of perceiving time and argue against becoming imprisoned or obsessed by any one of these. Zimbardo and Boyd have cogent insight into all of time's elements and show how they can be used for success, better health and greater fulfillment. For instance, understanding the role of time in investment can lead to wiser financial decisions, and a relationship will not work if one partner is focused on today's pleasure while the other wants to plan for the future. This is a compelling and practical primer (filled with quizzes and tests) on making every moment count.

llustrating decades of research with compelling and often bizarre examples of glitches and miscues, Daniel L. Schacter's The Seven Sins of Memory dusts off an old topic and finds material of both practical and theoretical interest. Chairman of Harvard's Department of Psychology, Schacter knows his stuff and how to present it memorably. Organizing the book by examining each of seven "sins," such as absent-mindedness and suggestibility, Schacter slowly builds his case that these sometimes enraging bugs are actually side effects of system features we wouldn't want to do without. For example, when we focus our attention on one aspect of our surroundings, we inevitably draw attention away from others:

Consider this scenario: if you were watching a circle of people passing a basketball and someone dressed in a gorilla costume walked through the circle, beat his chest, and exited, of course you would notice him immediately--wouldn't you? [Researchers] filmed such a scene and showed it to people who were asked to track the movement of the ball by counting the number of passes made by one of the teams. Approximately half of the participants failed to notice the gorilla.

Scientists concerned about interesting a general audience would do well to use more gorilla suits. Schacter elegantly weaves this curiosity into his text along with clinical stories and frontline research. Recent advances in brain imaging have boosted his field considerably, and the formerly remote psychological territory has yielded plenty of exciting discoveries. Though some of the practical material seems like reheated common sense (Haunted by a traumatic memory? Talk about it.), it's backed up by solid scientific work. Write a note, tie string around the finger, or hire an assistant for reminders, but by all means remember to pick up a copy of The Seven Sins of Memory.