Culture and imperialism.

• Author: Landau, Saul

What does Jane Austen have to do with the war in Vietnam? Edward W. Said provides the clues to solve this riddle.

April headlines featured a "discovery" by a Harvard-based researcher in a Moscow archive indicating that, in the mid-1970s, the Vietnamese government claimed some 600 prisoners of war when it actually held about 1,200. If true, said White House spokespeople, members of Congress, outraged heads of veterans' groups, and the punditburo, the U.S. Government should freeze the process of re-establishing relations with Hanoi. The document "proved" the rotten character of the Vietnamese communists.

When U.S. military authorities subsequently cast doubt on the document's authenticity, this "hot item" disappeared from the "news." The incident offers one illustration of the modern narrative's perspective, in which Western culture is inherently superior.

Lost in this incident and much other reporting on the Vietnam war is the fact that U.S. planes bombed Vietnamese cities, killing as many as a million civilians. In media portrayals, however, U.S. pilots and bombardiers, several hundred of whom became POWs, shine as unsung heroes who bravely bore the tortures of their captors.

Said's new book, Culture and Imperialism, offers readers a pathway of understanding to the ever-present but oftunstated premises of Western culture, from words in newspaper headlines through passages of great novels, operas, and literary criticism. From the Nineteenth Century on, Said argues, the reality of imperialism as a global political and economic system infected the premises of world culture. Indeed, its epistemology blanketed human thought, shaping the minds of the most talented literary figures as well as the most courageous and noble resistance leaders in the colonies and mother countries. The conquerors virtually asphyxiated the narrative of the vanquished, by belittling its forms (or turning them into exotica) and imposing the imperial story as the universal way of telling.

To demonstrate his thesis, Said explores the subtexts of great Nineteenth Century English, French, and American literature, taking the reader on a journey between the lines of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Andre Gide, and a host of other writers whose work students either enjoyed or fought their way through in high school and college.

Austen and empire? The sensitive narrator of Nineteenth Century moral ambiguities does not indulge in imperialist polemics...