Culture and imperialism
In a series of essays, Said argues the impact of mainstream culture (mainly British writers of the 19th and early 20th century, like Jane Austen and Rudyard Kipling) on colonialism and imperialism, and conversely how imperialism, resistance to it, and decolonization influenced the English and French novel. In the introduction to the work, Said explains his focus on the novel: he "consider[s] it the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France is particularly interesting to study. The prototypical modern realistic novel is Robinson Crusoe, and certainly not accidentally it is about a European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant, non-European island." On the connection between culture and empire, Said observes that "The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them." Hence he analyzes cultural objects in large part to understand how empire works: "For the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire...
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- The problem as I see it is in the fact that the book describes the world very naturalistically. The first half of the book is basically Proust, if Proust were less introspective and didn't care to inflate his word count. It's actually rare to find a book where the events of day-to-day life -- running to catch a tram, or spending a lazy Sunday afternoon on one's balcony -- are relayed with such clarity and directness.
Then the murder happens -- which was a highly contrived and even quite ridiculous scenario, in that (a) Mersault's party was quite literally being stalked by an armed gang, (b) Mersault separated himself from the pack and was menaced by one of his stalkers, who was armed with a knife, (c) the naked knife was in the man's hand, as that man was blocking Mersault's path, (d) there were no witnesses, and (e) Mersault was a Frenchman in colonial French Algeria.
Not 1 in 10000 times does that go to court for murder, and not 1 in 1000000 times does it result in the death penalty.
But, anyway, back to my point: The minute the murder happens, we're yanked out of the naturalistic world and thrust directly into the world of Kafka's The Trial. Nothing makes sense any longer. What once was so true-to-life becomes something akin to the hallucinatory descent of divine justice -- a bad trip, a fever dream. "Yeah, you're off to the guillotine because you didn't cry at your mom's funeral. What kind of monster are you?" The most parsimonious interpretation is that the narrator has simply lost his mind.
Don't even get me started on the fact that every reviewer thinks that Mersault was executed, when that never actually happens in the book, and would result in him not being able to write the book in the first place. (Further confused by the variety of tenses used in the construction of the prose.) The book, which is written something like a memoir, ends with his appeal still pending, and the prison chaplain "sure of its success."
As to the critiques, the Orientalist one is in Edward Said's "Culture and Imperialism" but I don't think that the full version is online. As I recall, it basically concerned point (e) above, and noted that the trial would not have happened -- so the notion of the trial may be a sort of cope.
- This is from the section of Edward Said's "Culture and Imperialism and Jane Austen, and feels, in some sense, like a helpful clue about the value of Austen's work to recent US legal culture.
"As in Austen's other novels, the central group that finally emerges with marriage and property "ordained" is not based exclusively upon blood. Her novel enacts the disaffiliation (in the literal sense) of some members of a family, and the affiliation between others and one or two chosen and tested outsiders: in other words, blood relationships are not enough to a sure continuity, hierarchy, authority, both and international."
The full section from the book is here: http://oldemc.english.ucsb.edu/emc-courses/JaneAusten-2011/A...
