His third world

Almost all of V.S. Naipaul's writings have to do with politics, race and personality — the real world — rather than exclusively with 'literary fictions'. But few writers of his stature have been so consistently and aggressively misunderstood on account of ethnic and racial literary politics, says RAVI VYAS.

"I have no memory at all. That's one of the great defects of my mind. I keep on brooding whatever interests me, by dint of examining it from different mental points of view I eventually see something new in it, and I alter its whole aspect. I point and extend the tubes of my glasses in all ways, or retract them."

Stendhal: The Life of Henry Brulard, Stendhal

NAIPAUL uses this quote as an epigraph to his essay Reading and Writing (now published as a book) to which he appends a story of Conrad's encounter with H.G.Wells who thought him too wordy, not giving the story straight. "My dear Wells," Conrad said, "what is this Love and Mr. Lewisham all about? What is all this about Jane Austen? What is it all about?" Unlike the English who have little taste for ideas disguised as Literature — and not much for ideas at all — the vast corpus of Naipaul's writings reveal he has even less for creative work without theories to support it. In an extensive interview with the Times Literary Supplement on September 2,1994, Naipaul said that "he wanted to deliver the truth, to deliver a form of reality.based on what I have observed, seen, experienced.Western writers come from the imperial period without knowing it, without considering themselves imperial writers. They inhabit a world where they do not see the other half or three-quarters. For that reason they think reality's all been chartered. I carry many cultures in my head, and these people are much more restricted."

Almost all of Naipaul's writings have to do with the real world, with politics, race and personality rather than exclusively with "literary fictions". But few writers of Naipaul's stature have been so consistently and aggressively misunderstood on account of ethnic and racial literary politics. One fears that much of this criticism stems not from what Naipaul writes (he said a few days after The Prize that Indians do not read) but from expectations about what he ought to write given that he is a Brown man (of Indian descent) born into the Black and Brown society of Trinidad.What most of our intellectual elite want is hagiography even though this would be an impoverished way of seeing and tantamount to not reading at all.

Naipaul takes his readers into the farthest reaches of the Third World — Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and the Central Asia all the way to South Asia — literally to places where the lice lurk, to test one or both his obsessions: what it means to become and finally to be a writer; what happens to post colonial societies when the imperial power recedes, leaving cruelty and chaos to fill the breach. The range is very wide — travel writing, history, religion, different civilisations, personal portraits, and so on. But his central question, the "moral centre" as it were has been the question what happens to the individual and society after the imperial power has packed up and gone. It is the second question that has provoked more drama than the first.

The news from the newly freed societies as conveyed through novels like The Way in the World, The Enigma of Arrival, A Bend in the River, Guerillas, In a Free State, The Mimic Men, A House for Mr Biswas and his non-fiction like Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey and its sequel, Beyond Belief, An Area of Darkness , The Return of Eva Peron and so on has been deeply and remittingly grim. Corruption, brutality, and tribal hostilities like those driving the slaughters of Rwanda and Bosnia recur again and again. Time and again, we encounter "half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made" which has been finally been driven home in his latest novel, Half a Life.

Naipaul has 25 books to his credit, many of them displaying the coolest literary eye and the most lucid prose that we can find anywhere today.

But many of his novels can only loosely be termed as "novels" and are well outside the limits of what one expects from a traditional work of fiction. Some are historical, some personal, some traditionally novelistic. Perhaps, it would be more accurate to describe his novels as "faction"— part fact, part fiction or as he explained in an interview "there is a crust of fact but beyond that the writer's fantasy is working". In his essay on Reading and Writing, Naipaul approvingly quotes Evelyn Waugh's definition of fiction as "experience totally transformed".

Naipaul's writing has often been seen in the Third World as caustic and personal (an impression often been carried away by many in their personal encounters with him). The Palestinian scholar, Edward Said has characterised Naipaul's posture as that "of a White man's nigger" always "looking down". The Poet and Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, born in St Lucia, not far from Naipaul's native Trinidad, has derided his fellow West Indian, for an alleged "abhorrence of Negroes" and for revering England, once Trinidad's colonial mistress over the Afro-Caribbean heritage that he mythologised in his epic poem, "Omeros". As a matter of fact, The Guardian in Britain suggested in 1992 that Naipaul had been passed over for the Nobel because of "reservations about his suitability to represent the Caribbean". (In place of "reservation" read "celebrate".) But since when has a "celebratory" view of one's home ground been a mark of great literature? If any anything, literature has always been a criticism of the private life of nations. (Dostoeveksy, Saul Bellow, fill up the rest yourself.) Keep in mind also that much of the Third World despite all the picture postcards of the swaying palm trees and glistening beaches of Kovalam and Goa has historically been a place of slaughter, slavery and indentured servitude as nasty as any in the world.

If Naipaul has been attacked from the Left and by nationalist historians, he has also been "damned with faint praise" by the First World defenders who are just fixed on race, and just as colonist and condescending as his Third World critics. These "defenders" characterise Naipaul as "brave" for telling "the truth" despite all those who want him to paint to paint a rosier picture. One writer has even described him as "the Solyzenitysn of the Third World!"

Any assessment of Naipaul and the Prize has to be done yourself because some of his books do arouse deep passions. But the books are demanding and in the main unpleasant because in the final analysis, he is a novelist of disorder and breakdown.

Like Stendhal, he is interested in the phenomenon of revolution though he feels that revolutions in our times have come to nothing and justly brought despair to both adherents and opponents. Is he wrong about this? Look around, there is nothing to support, no party to stand by, no social class or character type to esteem. The more one looks at the Third World, the more the idea of mimicry is raised to a new pitch.

"Creativity itself begins to appear as something that can be looted, brought into being by a decree. So the borrowed ideas of colonialism and alienation, the consumer society and the decline of the West are made to serve the African (read Third World) cult of personality; or more pointed still: "It is with people like Simon (in The Return of Eva Peron) educated, money-making, that the writer feels himself in the presence of vulnerability, dumbness, danger. Because their resentments, which appear to contradict their ambitions, and which they can never satisfactorily explain, can at any time be converted into a wish to wipe out and undo, an African nihilism, the rage of primitive men coming to themselves and finding they have been fooled and affronted."Time and again Naipaul has been described as "politically incorrect" because he has described the Third World as "trapped and static", all presumption, grandiosity, pathetic mimicry. But enthusiasm is one thing, genuine advance another. Like it or not, the new man here is trapped by his pride and inability to get past programmed responses to questions he hardly understands. But what probably hurts most is that the burden of Naipaul's fiction is that human beings are fundamentally unequal and that "right thinking" cannot alter what are facts of life. "The sad fact about prejudice," he has said somewhere, "is that they are an accretion of observation and cannot be destroyed by simple contradiction." You may disagree but great works, like Kafka said, "must come like an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us".

Even if Naipaul disturbs you, read him all the same for the way language flows.

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