Discourse doesn’t shape reality and Said’s approach never makes that claim. Err affirmative because only we have a theory of state interests.

Said counterimposes upon the discourse he calls Orientalism the reading of the fiction genre as fueling imperialism. In Culture and Imperialism , the novel as the mega-text of imperialism replaces the more mundane historical sources of treaties, archives, and memoirs. “Without empire,” claims the critic of novels, “. . . there is no European novel as we know it, and indeed, if we study the impulses giving rise to it, we shall see the far from accidental convergence between the patterns of narrative authority constitutive of the novel on the one hand, and, on the other, a complex ideological configuration underlying the tendency to imperialism.” 640 This is, as John Sutherland points out, a “sweeping proposition.” 641 Said positions the “novel” as both a product of empire and a productive shaping of imperialist ambitions. As a product, the novel understandably rises from a bourgeois public of authors who have the leisure to write and readers who have the education and time to read. For Said it is enough that the novel, “as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other.” 642 If this only means that the novel and imperialism “fortified each other” so much that it is impossible “to read one without in some way dealing with the other,” 643 then we are only being asked to admit that fiction is not divorced from social context and that the study of history can be informed by contemporary fictional narratives. Few historians would doubt this in the abstract. The problem is that Said goes well beyond the abstract without making an adequate concrete case for his chosen particulars. Said appeals to establishment literary texts to explain the origin of the canon: “By the 1840s the English novel had achieved eminence as the aesthetic form and as a major intellectual voice, so to speak, in English society.” 644 On closer inspection, this Defoe-defying claim follows from the fact that Jane Austen and George Eliot, among others, were then writing texts that later critics have relentlessly lauded as aesthetic genius. For the record, Said goes on in Orientalism to cite novels ( Adventures of Hajji-Baba of Ispahan , Bouvard et Pécuchet , Les Chimères , Daniel Deronda , Don Quixote , The Guermantes Way , Heart of Darkness , Louis Lambert , Middlemarch , Les Orientales , A Passage to India , La Peau de Chagrin , Salammbô , The Talisman , Tancred , Victory ), plays ( The Bacchae , The Persians , Mahomet , Othello ), epics ( The Arabian Nights , Chanson de Roland ), poetry ( The Divine Comedy , Don Juan , El Cantar del Mio Cid , the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam , Westöstlicher Diwan ), and operas ( The Abduction from the Seraglio , the Magic Flute ), among other imagined texts. The issue is not, or certainly should not be, whether these authors were creating great literary works, but the extent to which such texts were actively shaping imperialism rather than reflecting personal spins on the obvious empireness the authors and their readers at the time experienced by default. Did the British admiralty— at least before Gilbert and Sullivan— need to be inspired by subliminal readings of Mansfield Park before setting sail? Does the mere fact that novels were being written and read prove that they were indispensible to the imperial ambitions of the British Crown abroad? If Said is right about the Anglo-French attitude to the Orient, how had England, Spain, Portugal, and France colonized the New World without requisite novels as an aid to conquest? Were all novels equally complicitous in abetting imperial ambition? A great deal of Western literature, even more so at the vulgar level of dime novels and tabloid prose ignored by Said, has been unflattering to Muslims, Arabs, and virtually all Orientals. But did every writer of fiction necessarily add to the friction between East and West? The point has come to provide counterpoint. In Culture and Imperialism Said points to contrapuntal reading as a critical lens for reading between the lines to note what is revealingly absent. There is a considerable discussion of this literary coinage with widely different views on what a contrapuntal criticism could mean. 645 The aim is to get underneath the skin of the text, to expose the conscious or unconscious choice of the author by searching for what is missing and at the same time overwhelmingly unrepresented by its absence. This is not simply another reading of the text, but another way of reading. “By looking at the different experiences contrapuntally, as making up a set of what I call intertwined and overlapping histories,” states Said, “I shall try to formulate an alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility.” 646 Who could fault such a goal? Said wants the reader to join with him in reading with a purpose. That purpose, overtly stated, takes both imperialism and resistance into account “by extending our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded.” 647 Nowhere does Said elaborate a concise methodology for such reading-into; he develops his reading by forcing an example, such as why “a colonial sugar plantation is seen as important to the process of maintaining a particular style of life in England.”