[In the following review, Wilson examines Said's notion of "contrapuntal reading" exemplified by Said's close reading of Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism.]

Edward Said's rich and powerful new book, Culture and Imperialism, offers, as one strand of its multifaceted discussion, methodological reflections on the reading and interpretation of works of narrative fiction. More specifically, Said delineates and defends what he calls a "contrapuntal" reading (or analysis) of the texts in question. I am sympathetic to much of what Said aims to accomplish in this endeavor, but I am also puzzled about some key aspects of his proposal. I will begin by presenting a brief sketch of my understanding of what a contrapuntal reading involves, and I will then explain some of the doubts and puzzlement I feel. Unfortunately, there is much that Said says about even this limited topic that I will have to by-pass, but I hope to say enough to initiate some helpful discussion of the issues. I should note that although the topic of "contrapuntal reading" recurs with significant emphasis throughout his book, Said's direct explication of the enterprise is scattered across several chapters, and the relevant remarks tend to be, in each instance, fairly brief. Given this state of affairs, I have tried to extract a reasonably unified account from a wide range of passages, and I hope to have done so as sympathetically and accurately as possible. Nevertheless, the fact remains that what follows is my reconstruction of the view that Said adumbrates.

Contrapuntal readings are meant to interweave, mutually qualify, and above all, superimpose the legitimate claims of internal or intrinsic readings of a work, on the one hand, and the claims of various forms of external critique, on the other. Such readings rest upon the fact that any literary fiction refers to or depicts a complex of materials that have been drawn from the actual world, e.g., actual people, places, institutions, and practices. These items are taken up and variously deployed within the wider imaginative project of the work. It is crucial to this deployment that the intended audience can be expected to bring to the text a set of background "attitudes" concerning the relevant real world materials, and that these beliefs, concerns, ideological presuppositions, etc., are elaborated within the work's embedded patterns. Thus, the text is anchored in what Said calls "a structure of reference and attitude," and this structure constitutes the base from which a contrapuntal reading chiefly proceeds. Reading contrapuntally, interpreters move back and forth between an internal and external standpoint on the work's imaginative project, with special attention to the structure of reference and attitudes it contains. From an internal standpoint, interpretation aims at explanation that respects the strategies and the density of the textual elements they implicate. It is important that the internal standpoint articulate the work's vision as compellingly as possible, not only because this has an obvious interest of its own, but because the persuasiveness of commentary from an external standpoint depends upon giving full credit to the sophistication of the text. (We will return to this point shortly.)

An external standpoint examines the problematic seductiveness of the work's capacity to guide its audience's responses and seeks to define the limited degrees of freedom within whatever complexity it establishes. By reminding us of information about the structure of reference that the work ignores, distorts, or minimizes and by reminding us that the structure of invoked attitudes has plausible alternatives that the work has effectively excluded, the external standpoint situates the text critically within a wider field of imaginative possibilities. As Said formulates the point, we read from an external perspective "… with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented" in the work.

In elaborating the account above, I have spoken of "intrinsic readings" of narrative fictions, and it will help to fill in my sketch if I specify the fairly standard conception I have in mind. Said does not address this as a separate topic, but I believe that the following remarks are fully compatible with what he seems to presuppose. In reading a story, it is fictional for the reader that he or she is learning of a sequence of narrative events, and the reader is generally licensed to ask after explanations of why and how the fictional history transpires as it does, where these explanations are to be framed in terms of the "implied" workings of the fictional world. The agents, events, and situations of that world are configured into various significant connections, and it is this network of fictional explanatory connections that readers try to infer. In searching for a global meaning of the work, audiences hope to arrive at a surveyable pattern of narrative-based explanation and thus to survey the narrative events in a manner that opens them up to plausible perspectives of moral, psychological, or political evaluation. When they read from an internal standpoint, readers employ a framework of explanatory background assumptions and normative principles that they take to be authorized for the work in question—authorized, perhaps, in the light of the author's intentions concerning such matters. However, when these same readers move contrapuntally outside their internal standpoint, they will knowingly adopt explanatory and evaluative frameworks that depart more or less radically from anything that the author or the intended audience could be expected to endorse. And they will do so on the grounds that the alternatives chosen are relevant to the questions raised by the work and are justified by what is independently known or seriously contended about its real world references. Within the internal dimension of a contrapuntal reading, one constructs the articulated upshot of participation in an authorized game of make-believe. Within the external dimension, one's reading rides piggy-back upon this participation and is responsive to whatever grounds one has for rejecting or, at least, resisting full involvement in the imaginative enterprise encouraged by the text.

As I mentioned earlier, Said does not attempt to work out in detail an explicit account of contrapuntal analysis. It is clear, in fact, that readers are intended to be instructed by the various extended examples of the practice that he provides. The first such extended instance is given in his commentary on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and it is the special role of this analysis to initiate readers into the methods and rewards that contrapuntal reading purports to offer. This sample interpretation does seem to me to be highly instructive, but I think we are taught equally about the prospects and the problems that a contrapuntal strategy engenders. Since Said discusses the novel at some length, I will consider only some of the arguments he puts forward, but, for reasons I will subsequently explain, the issues that emerge are, in my judgement, symptomatic of deficiencies or lacunae in his overall account.

Said reminds us that Thomas Bertram, Sr., the owner of Mansfield Park, is also the owner of extensive plantations in Antigua. In fact, through most of the first half of the book, he is absent from his home and from England because he has had to attend to his troubled business affairs on that island. This absence is crucial to the early development of the plot. Because he is away and his rather stern domestic management has lapsed, the normal ordering of life at Mansfield Park is falling into serious disarray. The situation is dire: heavy and improper flirting has been dangerously intermixed with indecorous preparations for an amateur theatrical. Fortunately, Mr. Bertram returns from his journey just in time to rout the imminent production and to quash the immediate causes of this decline into impropriety.

As Said notes, references to Mr. Bertram's Antigua holdings are relatively few in number, and they are made almost in passing. For example, it is never explained just what business it is that calls him to his plantation, and we learn nothing about how this business is resolved. From Austen's point of view—or so it seems—the visit to Antigua is little more than a plot device designed to motivate Mr. Bertram's lengthy absence, and that absence is made to last just long enough to build to a significant mid-point crisis. On a standard reading of the novel, the fact that it is at his Antigua plantation that Mr. Bertram is occupied appears to be incidental to the main narrative and thematic concerns.

However, Said's contrapuntal analysis of Mansfield Park insists that we are not to accept the targeted fictional fact as being merely incidental in this way. If the book invites us to unthinkingly and unblinkingly pass over the point that the economy and well-being of Mansfield Park substantially depends upon a distant Caribbean plantation, we are required to resist this heavily freighted invitation. And this is so, Said contends, because we need to reimagine the novel in full cognizance of the imperialistic presuppositions that lie only thinly buried beneath the apparently casual references to Mr. Bertram's overseas ventures. Whatever Austen did or didn't know about British colonialism in the Caribbean and elsewhere, we know that Mr. Bertram's fortune is sustained by the exploitation of foreign territory, the oppression of native peoples, and, more specifically, upon slavery among the workers on his land. Out of all these matters and more, in the novel only the question of slavery flutters equivocally into sight for just an instant and then immediately disappears.

Now, it is important that we be tolerably clear about what is supposed to be at stake in connection with a contrapuntal reading here. We can surely grant that Jane Austen and her readers accept, apparently without hesitation or demurral, most of the ideological underpinnings of British imperialism in the early 1800s. Moreover, as Said repeatedly points out, this situation remains largely unchanged as we pass through the ranks of major and minor British writers during the century. Said is also absolutely right to claim that it is disturbing to observe how thoroughly even the crudest presuppositions of empire are left unquestioned within English literature despite the wealth of liberal and humanistic values that much of this literature supports and even celebrates. Still, as deplorable as this massive historical circumstance may be, it is by now a familiar fact that the English public, from economic top to bottom, were deeply and unreflectively imbued with the precepts, perceptions, and assumptions that underwrote for them the legitimacy of colonialism. It is really not surprising to discover that a stringently imperialist ideology recurs in work after work during the period in question. It may shock for a moment that even Jane Austen is implicated in the framework of imperialist thought, but, having registered the shock, we should conclude that it would be more amazing if she were not. Suppose, therefore, that all of this is granted. Nevertheless, none of these reflections do much to clarify the more particular promise that contrapuntal readings of Mansfield Park and other canonical novels will alter, in substantial detail, our comprehension of fine-grained narrative development. How, according to Said, is this elaborate counterpoint of interpretative vision supposed to be achieved?

In his analysis of Mansfield Park, Said advances several lines of commentary that might seem to help us with this question. For example, he suggests that we should view the heroine, Fanny Price, as a value-laden import into the Bertram household. That is, much as imports from the Antigua plantation are needed to support the domestic arrangements at Mansfield Park, so also, but in a complementary fashion, Fanny should be seen as the bearer of resources from outside which serve to reconsolidate and strengthen the Bertram family's power and standing. Working from this analogy, Said is able to read much of Fanny's story as a kind of allegory of the Bertram's unacknowledged dependence upon the wealth and other goods that they must regularly appropriate and employ. He says, "It is no exaggeration to interpret the concluding sections of Mansfield Park as the coronation of an arguably unnatural (or at very least, illogical) principle at the heart of a desired English order."

However, the comparison of Fanny to exports from Antigua strikes me as thin and arbitrary. It is simply too easy to propose linkages of this ilk and to spin alternative "allegories" from them. First, the sense in which Fanny has been imported into the Bertram circle is equivocal. It is true that they have brought her from her home in Portsmouth to live at Mansfield Park, but it is also true that the Bertrams are her kin—she is their niece and cousin. Second, and more important to present concerns, it is arguable that Fanny embodies the natural piety and virtue that give moral sense to Mr. Bertram's principles and a spiritual foundation to the proper way of life at Mansfield Park. Of course, the influence of this piety and virtue has been, like Fanny herself, neglected and misunderstood by the Bertrams. It takes the sundry disasters occurring toward the end of the novel to recall them to the true nature and importance of these underlying values. If one chooses to adopt this analogy instead, one will not be inclined to view Fanny as an import from outside, but rather as the unlikely receptacle of the values that have always supplied the Bertrams with their solidity and strength as a family. When the hearts and heads of others have been temporarily distracted, it is Fanny who holds fast to the family's ethical heritage. At any rate, this suggestion, quite different in force from Said's, seems at least its equal in plausibility.

Said also elaborates a different proposal that is considerably more promising. Our basic conception of Mr. Bertram and all that he stands for in the novel can seem to be transformed if we attempt to grasp and assess the character of the man while bearing sharply in mind the implications of his undepicted role as owner of a plantation in Antigua. On the whole, the book treats him as a worthy and honorable person. In particular, it endorses the strictness of his management of Mansfield Park. The estate will not run properly without his constant surveillance of its daily affairs, without his rigorous regimentation of his family's behavior, and without the overall discipline he enforces. The novel plainly demonstrates the vigilance that is demanded if plausible but pernicious threats like the Crawford siblings are to be rebuffed. And yet, when we imaginatively consider what Mr. Bertram's surveillance, regimentation, and discipline might amount to in the Antiguan context, we can easily form a vivid idea of how his stern, uncompromising 'virtues' could have a darker, more disturbing cast. Said suggests that we should view Mr. Bertram's rule over his plantation as a natural extension of the regime he has established at Mansfield Park. But, the former, we may be sure, will not have been tempered by familial affection nor by the laws and civilities that govern genteel life in the English countryside. Thus, according to Said, we are licensed to use our presumptive knowledge of Mr. Bertram's activities in Antigua to fill out our sense of his values, attitudes, and temperament. When we do refashion our moral portrait of him in this manner, the novel's largely benign conception of the man will be significantly disturbed.

In some ways, it seems to me that this proposal has considerable force, but, at the same time, it is also difficult to place it coherently within a broader reading of the novel. Let me offer just one illustration of what I have in mind. Said nowhere mentions the fact that Jane Austen renders some stern judgments of her own about Mr. Bertram, and one can wonder where these judgments fit within a contrapuntal reading in Said's mode. For instance, it is made very clear that Mr. Bertram has enthusiastically pushed his oldest daughter into a disastrous marriage with a rich and fatuous neighbor, and his enthusiasm for her nuptials derives significantly from the prospect of the vast, adjoining properties that the united families will control. Similarly, Mr. Bertram turns rather ferociously upon poor Fanny when she perspicaciously rejects Henry Crawford's proposal of marriage. In his view, Fanny has been offered a startling promotion in wealth and social standing, a promotion to which she has no natural claim, and her perversity in refusing the offer moves him to considerable harshness towards his niece. There is no question but that Austen shows Mr. Bertram to be seriously wrong in his actions and judgments in these two cases. He is convicted, at a minimum, of greed, pride of place, cold insensitivity, and a considerable degree of outright cruelty. Mr., Bertram is supposed to be a "good man," but, in these matters and some others, he is unambiguously condemned. Now, if we are reading Mansfield Park contrapuntally, it seems as if we should be allowed to employ these indictments to condition and modify our sense of the novel's relations to its Antiguan references. If Mr. Bertram is found to be at fault within his own family in the ways just described, why shouldn't we extend the verdicts and read him as even more strenuously faulted for his conduct as a colonial exploiter? Certainly, these very same "faults" would yield much graver consequences when exercised at his West Indian plantation. On Said's approach, as we have seen, we are entitled to bring our knowledge of British imperialism to bear upon our assessments of Mr. Bertram when he is portrayed at home. This is held to be a reasonable extension of our background knowledge into our imaginative involvement with the story. But then, why isn't it equally legitimate to bring the novel's negative moral judgments to bear upon the character when we imagine him in his business in Antigua? Isn't this an equally reasonable extension from the contents of the novel to our broader impressions of the implicit background? And, if this kind of extension is sanctioned, do we have in Mansfield Park a very early exemplar of an anticolonial novel, albeit one that is framed within the trappings of a domestic moral tale?

Naturally, I regard these last interpretative suggestions to be as absurd as Said himself would take them to be. Nevertheless, I don't see that there is anything in Said's discussion of and methodology for contrapuntal reading that would rule them out. We cannot object, as we might naturally wish to, that the whole subject of Antigua in Mansfield Park is too incidental to bear this sort of interpretative weight. As I indicated earlier, Said insists that the topic is not to be dismissed upon these grounds. What troubles me, in this and other of Said's examples, is the following. For all the merit of Said's objectives in developing the concept of contrapuntal reading, the constraints he appears to recognize upon acceptable analyses are far too weak. Given the goal of opening up a work to a range of alternative external perspectives, readers are permitted to employ any background assumptions and evaluative principles that have some relevance to some facet or dimension of the work. After all, even perspectives that are severely marginalized within the work are to be admitted. What is more, readers are not to rely upon their normal perceptions concerning the relative weight and importance of various elements in the text. And, finally, there can be no overall requirement that contrapuntal interpretative views must be consistent with the work taken in its entirety. The contrapuntal reader will often take special interest in the contradictions that a text can be forced to reveal. But then it is no wonder that, when these and similar constraints have been dropped, readers find themselves floundering among a confusing motley of radically diverse possibilities. (I have only hinted at the ease with which a host of possibilities can, with a little ingenuity, be constructed.)

The chief difficulty, in my opinion, is not that there are somehow too many possibilities, as if we knew the number of satisfactory readings that a work can generate. Rather, we should be troubled by the following consideration. Whenever we have a particular, powerful contrapuntal reading, such as the ones that Said produces in his book, it is usually a minor exercise to conceive of alternatives which apparently have equal force and epistemic status but which also contradict or stand in significant conceptual tension with the original. And then, viewing the overall situation from this perspective of interpretative conflict, it is likely to strike a reasonable critic that the choice of any one of the competing readings will be arbitrary and tendentious. It is liable to seem that each of the alternatives generated is less the result of sensitive but responsible attention to the text and more the product of an adamantly insisted upon outside agenda. Since Said, in his impressive investigations, plainly wants to avoid this insidious appearance, he needs to tell us more about the nature and evidential requirements of interpretation in the style he favors. He needs to fill out, as he has not yet done in Culture and Imperialism, the conditions that a convincing contrapuntal reading must satisfy.