Closet Imperialists

ELT 37:4 1994 nature of my love. From saying that it "inclined to the solicitous and cherishing mood," which I would have contested anyway, he altered the passage to say that my love "inclined to the imaginative and ethereal." Now to my ear and eye that seems just nonsense. . . . there was, I promise you, nothing of the ethereal in my image of her. But Mr Hardy needed to feel that there weis, for his own purpose, I suppose. He must have forgotten what he had written earlier: "It was for herself that he loved Tess; her soul, her heart, her substance." Gatrell makes Angel's return and his reconciliation with Tess seem plausible by re-conceiving the scene of their wedding night. In his version Angel is not cool and cruel, and Tess is not passive and abject. He feels angry at being duped; she responds vigorously to his accusations ; they quarrel quite emotionally and say harsh things to each other that they cannot forget quickly. He regrets the rash parting soon after it occurs, but circumstances keep them apart. In the end, however, he accepts full blame for the ensuing tragedy, for not being wiser, insisting that the "President of the Immortals" had nothing to do with it. I found myself wishing that there were a chapter entitled "Sue Bridehead's Story." In sum, the value of this book lies in its specific insights on miscellaneous subjects and its new approaches to specific works. Billie Andrew Inman University of Arizona Closet Imperialists Edward W. Said. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. xxviii + 380pp. $25.00 CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM is an unsettling book: insightful, yet sobering. Said envisions a globalized connection between narration as metaphor and the history of imperialism. Western imperial policy in the nineteenth century, for instance, is treated paradigmatically as an extended narrative—the novel accompanying the process by not disturbing the status quo, keeping life and empire regulative, normative, and comfortably in place among readers at home. The luxury of "going native" or romanticizing those primitive "others," like the joys of "slumming " for bored socialites, was dependent on the preservation of political power. Not until the last quarter of the century, Said argues, is empire anatomized as anything other than another manifestation of the proof 544 BOOK REVIEWS that "God's in His heaven; all's right with the world"—at least that part of the world under western domination. Although Kipling, Forster, and Conrad address the evils of imperialism , they wouldn't have had things any other way. Conrad's Marlow in Heart of Darkness ultimately restores Africa to Western control by historicizing away its primitive wildness. The real magnificence of Africa and its people eludes Marlow, and also, Conrad himself. Forster, at least, according to Said, recognized that native resistance was real, something that Kipling, who downplayed the 1857 Indian Mutiny in Kim, refused to treat seriously. Said's reference here is specifically to the episode in chapter three of Kim where the old soldier and the Lama debate the virtues of the mutiny. The point of the scene in its entirety, however, is less a commentary on the mutiny than it is an opportunity for Kipling to register, through the Lama, a pacifist objection to killing of any sort. Yet, in light of Said's claim, the episode and the lines that emerge from the chapter are not the references to the mutiny but are the Lama's pacifist advice at the end of the passage to give up "dreams" and follow "the Middle Way." The advice supports the kind of logic that discourages "dreams," or, in this case, read "active resistance"—which is not exactly the point that Said makes, but is tangentially related. It is just this kind of insight that makes Culture and Imperialism, though written with clarify and grace, a book that one needs to read slowly and with a copy of the primary texts at hand. Since fiction as a cultural form is primarily Said's focus, it is as literary criticism that Culture and Imperialism finally should be judged. Reviewers who insist on addressing what they think a book should be about instead...