V. S. Naipaul and the worlds of postcolonial realism

Abstract

V. S. Naipaul’s career as a novelist, travel writer, and journalist presents a case study for exploring the links between realist form and the global imagination as they evolve over a 60-year period. This article argues that his work is shaped by an aesthetic of “world realism” that constructs plausible models, through form and content, of the contemporary world as a totalized, structurally-differentiated system. At the same time, it examines how Naipaul’s realism mediates the divisions between metropolitan and peripheral space that shape his entry into the world-literary sphere. Analysed in these terms, Naipaul’s career falls into three phases, in each of which a distinctive “world-concept” emerges from the conjunction of historical and biographical events, and aesthetic contradictions. Naipaul’s world realism complicates critiques in postcolonial studies that he is a puppet of imperial ideology, and unveils the latent commitment to totality underpinning the global novel. World realism reflects an under-theorized conjunction of aesthetics and the global imaginary that unlocks an alternative history of the modern novel produced in frontier spaces.

The bestselling, Nobel Prize-winning, critically-acclaimed and -excoriated writer V. S. Naipaul makes an ideal case study for exploring the nexus between aesthetics and world-making in the modern novel. Few postcolonial authors have had careers so ridden with apparent contradictions. The “early” Naipaul wrote social comedies about Trinidad that unlocked the artistic potential of ironic vernaculars and small tragedies of colonial mimicry (Bhabha, 1994: 85–92; Ashcroft et al., 2007: 125–27). The later Naipaul then allegedly capitulated to metropolitan racism as the price of success. Wandering the globe as a scribe of corruption, this Naipaul is accounted a sell-out whose pretence of objectivity masked an intention to give the West what it wanted: proof that natives cannot look after themselves (Casanova, 2004: 209). One Naipaul is an exuberant parodist reclaiming English for the margins (Ashcroft et al., 1989: 54); the other is a stooge betraying the bankruptcy of realism. Form, content, and politics align, producing an author considered out of step with his time.

The ambiguities of Naipaul’s career reveal something important about the relationship between literary realism and novelists’ and readers’ shared desire for truthful depictions of the world-as-a-whole. As early as 1988, Selwyn Cudjoe pointed out that perceptions of Naipaul were divided along geographical and political lines, with both admirers and detractors evaluating his work against unspoken criteria of realist representation:

[W]hile Third World critics argue that Naipaul does not adequately reflect the complexities of life in colonial and postcolonial worlds, First World critics assume that because Naipaul was born in a colonial country, he must be telling the “truth” about that experience. (Cudjoe, 1988: 7)

In evaluating his work in terms of its truthfulness, plausibility, accuracy, and insightfulness, readers have been applying terms Naipaul established for himself. His first five books, written between 1955 and 1961, are set in a Caribbean he presented from the point of view of a culturally-alienated — and hence “objective” — yet well-informed insider (see Naipaul, 1962: 40–41; 1969b/1958: 11; 1999b: 263–64). Beginning in 1962 but with real momentum from 1965, he remade himself as an expert on global affairs, travelling widely and appropriating a vast range of settings for his fiction and non-fiction. In addition to the Caribbean, his novels take place in the United Kingdom, India, Uganda, and the Congo, and his travel writing stretches to the United States, Japan, Argentina, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, West, Central, and Southern Africa, and elsewhere. In all of his work, Naipaul presents himself as an impartial recorder, a clear-sighted observer of truth whose status as a universal outsider unveils the world as it is and in its entirety (Folks, 2007: 172).

This equation of rootlessness and realism has been the source of much critical anxiety. The foundational text of postcolonial studies — Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979/1978) — exhorts us to suspect outside experts who claim objectivity about the non-Western world. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said argues that the realist novel was fundamental to empire-building, constructing “colonial territories [as] realms of possibility” (1993: 75) open to exploitation by “socially desirable, empowered space” (1993: 61). Influential critics have suggested that realism produces a “violent hierarchy of Subject and Object” (Bhabha, 1984: 113) derived from its formal analogies to commodity exchange, in which objects of colonized culture are (symbolically) appropriated and put into (aesthetic) circulation for metropolitan profit (Spillman, 2012: 4). Neil Lazarus observes that it has become a critical commonplace in postcolonial studies to see realism as incompatible with the anti-colonial project (2011: 82). Realism’s opponents draw a direct line between aesthetics and politics:

That realism has been a European, or first world, export, in conjunction with its mimetic program, its claim to fashioning an accurate portrait of the world, has in some instances tended to ally it with imperialism — Spanish, English, French, Russian, US — endowing it with an implicitly authoritarian aura for writers in colonial situations. (Faris, 1995: 180)

The anti-realist reflex of postcolonial studies makes Naipaul seem redeemable only insofar as an anti-mimetic dimension can be found in his work (Ashcroft et al., 1989: 33; Bhabha, 1984: 115; Nixon, 1992: 6). He seems most respected when his realist “guiding spirit” has been brought into question (Krishnan, 2013: 610) ¹ – a fact that, in my view, obscures much of what is most interesting about him.

At the beginning of his career, Naipaul did write for an English audience in a disparaging tone that “connect[s] him with the discursive traditions of imperialism” (Nixon, 1992: 110). The Middle Passage (1962), for example, begins, “There was such a crowd of immigrant-type West Indians on the boat-train platform at Waterloo that I was glad I was travelling first class” (1962: 11). Such moves align him with metropolitan readers, viewing non-white peoples with curiosity and ridicule. From the mid-1960s he was presenting himself as a new Graham Greene of the colonies, equally perspicacious everywhere he went (Nixon, 1992: 21, 51). “[A]n author who [takes] the world as his subject” (French, 2008: 390) is open to criticism from those with more at stake in the places he describes. For instance, novelist Caryl Phillips regrets Naipaul’s inability “to confin[e] his often clichéd and ill-informed commentary to the pages of his books” (2002: 211) — a not-unfair critique of literary realism produced an author who, in one infamous case, dismissed the entire continent of Africa as having “no future” (qtd. in Hardwick, 1979). On this reading, Naipaul’s early fiction is defensible because it is rooted in the specifics of culture and language, with a comic tone less explicitly cynical than his later work. The rootless global realist, however, is complicit with neo-colonial representations (Said, 2000: 98–104, 113–17) — proof of the danger intrinsic to the totalizing gaze.

It is true that Naipaul’s comments about ethnic and religious minorities have often gone beyond fair-minded criticism to simple prejudice (see King, 2003: 1–2; French, 2008: xii–xii). Selwyn Cudjoe plausibly identifies an “unresolved hostility toward black people” subtending much of Naipaul’s most problematic work (1988: 219), and as early as An Area of Darkness (1964) Naipaul himself acknowledged that he had inherited suspicion of Islam from his childhood (1968/1964: 31). I do not intend to challenge the claim that as a social commentator and interview subject Naipaul has fed the nostalgia of those who regret the passing of empire. Nonetheless, I suggest that the recent shift in postcolonial studies toward more sympathetic readings of realism presents an opening to reconsider the entanglement of “realism” and “world” in Naipaul’s oeuvre. Whatever his personal views, it is too simple to equate realism with epistemic imperialism per se. If we pay attention to the formal elements and representational projects that collectively constitute Naipaul’s realism — read in light of his orientation toward “world” as universal object of study — we can examine how realist aesthetics mediate a complex, dynamic spatio-temporal imaginary that evolves across a career spanning more than 50 years. From this perspective, Naipaul presents a case study for interrogating the nexus of “realism” and “world” insofar as it shapes the work of an iconic postcolonial novelist.

The time is ripe for a reconsideration of postcolonial realism via an analysis of Naipaul’s oeuvre. The flood of work on literary realism produced in the past ten years has complicated the late twentieth-century consensus that realist form is cognate with imperialist consciousness (Lazarus, 2011). Critics have traced the degree to which realist works are important to the national canons of many postcolonial societies (Andrade, 2009; Anjaria, 2012), and have explored how authors mobilize mimetic discourses to engage strategically with socio-political phenomena and economies of material exchange (Anjaria, 2016; Ganguly, 2016; Spillman, 2012). Such work has entailed a renewal of interest in the critical legacy of Georg Lukács. Where Fredric Jameson was excoriated for his (1986) reading of “third world” texts as political allegory (Ahmad, 1987; Bhabha, 1994: 140–41), recent postcolonial scholarship has been sympathetic to Lukács’ language of critical totalization and belief that realist aesthetics can de-reify and thereby critique the mystifications of bourgeois society (Sorenson, 2010; Spillman, 2012; Dalley, 2014; WReC, 2015). Focusing on the historicizing effects of particular representational or narrative forms sidesteps the need to define realism normatively via a contrast with some other, allegedly more experimental or avant-garde style — which, in the case of postcolonial literatures, has typically been magical realism. Of most relevance to my analysis here are the questions raised by Jed Esty and Colleen Lye concerning the global reach of postcolonial (or “peripheral”) realisms. They observe that “the artistic and critical zeitgeist seems to be reorienting itself to the question of what can, rather than what cannot, be represented in global capitalism” (Esty and Lye, 2012: 285). Such a focus directs our attention to the possibilities of a realist aesthetics that strives to capture political dynamics and social structures encompassing the world as a whole. What happens when we read postcolonial realism as a project directed toward the aesthetic mapping of totalities exceeding national boundaries, producing universalizations extending across the entire globe?

Esty’s work is also useful in pointing to the rhetorical stakes of realism within the world-literature system — an overlapping but different way of thinking of how literary forms are entangled with social structures. In his 2016 article “Realism Wars”, he draws attention to a pattern of international literary competition in which critics elevate the global status of their own traditions by contrasting their alleged universality and formal innovation against the tired, aesthetically unadventurous products of nationally- or ideologically-defined others (Esty, 2016). Esty’s argument puts a twist on Pascale Casanova’s (2004) model of world literature as a one-but-unequal global system for distributing cultural capital in relation to centrally-defined criteria of value. Read in this complementary light, we can see realism as a term of critical contestation, mobile in definition, playing an intrinsic role in the processes by which authors like Naipaul position themselves vis-à-vis transnational systems of literary production and valuation.

The goals of the analysis in the remainder of this article are therefore twofold. First, I ask how Naipaul, born in the colonial periphery of Trinidad and hyperaware of himself as the twice-displaced Caribbean descendent of indentured labourers, constructs aesthetic models of the world-as-a-whole that purport to be truthful. In this sense, I read Naipaul as pursuing goals analogous to the de-reifying realists theorized by Lukács (see, e.g., Lukács, 1970: 110–48), but drawing upon universalizing traditions (such as Hinduism) that differ radically from the latter’s Hegelian Marxism. Second, I trace how Naipaul’s self-construction as a realist of surpassing perspicacity underwrites his quest for “universal” significance and, to use Casanova’s (2004) term, “consecration” — a task he undoubtedly achieved by winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. This double focus reveals the extent to which Naipaul’s oeuvre is defined by what I will call a “world realism”, an aesthetic and intellectual orientation to the (putatively) accurate mapping of the world-as-a-whole. Tracing the development of this form across his long career reveals both the extent to which rhetorical appeals to realism traverse a diverse body of work — one that increasingly blurs the division between fiction and non-fiction over time — while allowing Naipaul to position himself dynamically at the boundary points of the unequal global system he strives to model. As arguably the most well-known and influential writer of the postcolonial canon, Naipaul’s work presents a case through which to advance a particularized reading of realism in contemporary world literature.

From the beginning of his career, Naipaul’s options as a writer were defined by his status as a socially-marginal migrant, often desperately short of money, from a colony only just beginning to achieve recognition as a subject for literature. Born in 1932 and resident in the UK from 1950, Naipaul’s letters to his family describe the impossibility of a writing career in Trinidad, and the imperative to win British readers. His earliest works bridge this divide by adopting the form of the social comedy, finding humour in a peripheral society as depicted by one close enough to see its details and distant enough to know their absurdity. He celebrated as a great success the moment when a change in style convinced André Deutsch to publish his first books, a novel and story collection about the linguistic and cultural quirks of Trinidad’s Indian and African communities. To this end, Trinidad became a source of raw material to be processed for a metropolitan readership craving amusement (Donnelly, 2014; Naipaul, 1999b: 242).

In a letter dated 1953, Naipaul names James Joyce’s Dubliners as a model for his attempts to “see Trinidad more clearly” and turn it into literature (1999b: 257). Like the young Joyce, Naipaul’s early fiction pays intense, focused attention to local speech, thought, and material culture. Viewed by an informed but detached narrator, seemingly objective details morph into symbols of colonial inauthenticity. A passage from A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) exemplifies this method:

The marble topped bedside table was a confusion of bottles, jars and glasses. There were little blue jars of medicated rubs, little white jars of medicated rubs; tall green bottles of bay rum and short square bottles of eyedrops and nosedrops; a round bottle of rum, a flat bottle of brandy and an oval royal blue bottle of smelling salts; a bottle of Sloan’s Liniment and a tiny tin of Tiger Balm; a mixture with a pink sediment and one with a yellow-brown sediment, like muddy water left to stand from the previous night. (1969a/1961: 199–200)

The simplicity of the prose creates an uncanny effect. Simple nouns repeat, modulated by plain adjectives of size, shape, and colour. In addition to conveying the character’s ill health, and satirizing the pharmaceutical quackery marketed to fix it, Naipaul’s sparse language invokes the stasis of life in Trinidad, and the paradoxical unreality of objects gazed at so closely they become unseeable. In the words of Deborah Shapple Spillman, this is an instance “when we can no longer completely look through the objects of realist narrative” as they “acquire a thing-like opacity” and resist straightforward symbolization (Spillman, 2012: 9). For her, such moments occur at points of representational contestation, as the universalizing gaze of the metropolitan observer encounters an alternative system of meaning and confronts its inability to know (and thereby symbolically possess) the colonized society. But in Naipaul’s case, his comic persona turns this representational crisis back on the Trinidadian subject. Positioning himself as an outsider who sees what locals cannot, he affirms the capacity of his realist project to mediate between metropole and periphery even in moments when a differently positioned observer would be undone by the “thing-like opacity” of Caribbean culture (Spillman, 2012: 9). His role is to depict a community that does not know — cannot even see — itself.

These factors shape how Naipaul’s first-phase realism posits an implicit conceptualization of the world as a totality — what I call a “world-construct” immanent to the representation. As the reified stasis of the medicine table implies, this world-construct is divided between spaces where time passes and where it does not. The former includes metropolitan centres like Britain and the United States, but also ancient civilizations like India. The latter zone is comprised of small, diasporic plantation communities cut off from their cultural origins. Vijay Mishra describes this metaphysical stasis as “the charged temporality of girmit [indenture] when experience altered time into relentless, ever-present labour” (Mishra, 2007: 71). Naipaul’s Caribbean of the diasporic Indian is a “familiar temporariness” rather than a permanent home (1969a/1961: 194). Discontinuous temporality produces a modulated aesthetics of space, with a variant of realism required to make the Caribbean comprehensible to readers with a different understanding of time.

The comedic tone (and undercurrent of despair) of Naipaul’s early work is shaped by its world-concept. His atemporal object is external to the universal narrative of world history, and hence incapable of tragic grandeur. He observes in The Middle Passage that

Trinidad was too unimportant and we could never be convinced of the value of reading the history of a place which was, as everyone said, only a dot on the map of the world. Our interest was all in the world outside, the remoter the better; Australia was more important than Venezuela, which we could see on a clear day. (1962: 42)

Even as the narrator strives to capture the particularities of Caribbean society, he draws attention to their worthlessness from the point of view of that society’s inhabitants. For example, Bogart, the title character of Naipaul’s first published story (Miguel Street, 1957), is “a man of mystery” who disappears on an unexplained journey (2011: 7). His heroic name belies his true nature; no Casablanca, his adventure is the “sad and small” matter of a failed marriage (2011: 10). “To be a man, among we men” in Trinidad is impossible; one can only hope to be a “dancing dwarf” who might escape to the larger world (2011: 10, 144; see also Strout, 2012). Thus proximity and value are inverted: what is seen clearest, matters least.

The division between valued and unvalued space underpins a deeper distinction that becomes increasingly important to Naipaul’s realist practices over time. Naipaul implies that ahistorical, fragmentary objects are, in some way, unreal. For instance, the protagonist of Mr. Biswas is tormented by the conviction that his home is not a country but a void, “a place that was nowhere, a dot on the map of the island, which was a dot on the map of the world” (1969a/1961: 237; emphasis added). Like Bogart’s empty heroism, Trinidad Hinduism is “rites without philosophy” (1962: 82), and Caribbean politics empty ritual (see The Mimic Men, Naipaul, 1967). Sanjay Krishnan names this fragmentary quality “historical derangement”, in which colonial intrusion “diverted the social trajectories of the peasant formations of the precapitalist world” (2012: 434). Naipaul expresses fragmentation formally, via the reifying gaze that brings objects to the foreground only to render them invisible:

The very day the house was bought they began to see flaws in it. The staircase was dangerous; the upper floor sagged; there was no back door; most of the windows didn’t close; one door could not open; the celotex panels under the eaves had fallen out and left gaps between which bats could enter the attic. […] [I]t was astonishing how quickly this disappointment had faded, how quickly they had accommodated themselves to every peculiarity of the house. And once that happened their eyes ceased to be critical, and the house became simply a house. (1969a/1961: 12)

Naipaul’s method is thus entangled with his conceptualization of the world’s material and ontological divisions. The Caribbean requires meticulous attention to detail because there only fragments — and perhaps not even them — are real.

This division generates narratorial problems. If the world is divided between the real, whole, historical zone of the metropolitan readership, and the unreal, fragmentary, ahistorical zone of the setting, then the narrator must span these two spaces. Like an electrical transformer converting one voltage to another, he must turn unreal objects into meaningful discourse. Naipaul’s narrators risk stumbling on this divide. The wry insiders of Miguel Street or The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) know their people, but cannot place them in historical perspective. The Oxford-educated expert, by contrast, can interpret, but only in generalizations:

Slavery, the land, the latifundia, Bookers, indenture, the colonial system, malaria: all these have helped to make a society that is at once revolutionary and intensely reactionary, and have made the Guianese what he is: slow, sullen, independent though deceptively yielding, proud of his particular corner of Guiana, and sensitive to any criticism he does not utter himself. (1962: 119)

Rendered self-contradictory by its underlying world-construct, Naipaul’s first-phase realism oscillates between objective reification and historical abstraction. The former slides into unreality with close inspection, while the latter obscures the particulars it names.

Naipaul’s first-phase realism thus threatens to disintegrate, as incompleteness engulfs and delegitimizes the narrator. Each of Miguel Street’s stories of self-deception adds social breadth until the last, which reveals the narrator to have also been compromised by social decay: “Without really knowing it, I had become a little wild. I was drinking like a fish, and doing a lot besides” (2011: 139). Because the threat to representation is Trinidad itself — “What else anybody can do here except drink?” (2011: 140) — the only solution is to leave. Paradox: clarity of perception cannot coexist with proximity to its object. Structured around a foundational division in the world, Naipaul’s early realism tends to self-negation.

In the second phase, Naipaul resolves this contradiction by reformulating his world-concept, a shift that alters the aesthetic mechanisms through which he posits totalizing models of the world-as-a-whole, without altering his rhetorical claim to significance as a realist. He sublimates the spatial distinction that underpins his first phase world-concept, which ceases to be a geopolitical divide between centre and periphery, and becomes an ontological one between reality and fantasy. Four factors coincide with this shift. First, by the mid-1960s Naipaul felt he had exhausted his subject matter and risked becoming merely a Caribbean author (French, 2008: 266; King, 2003: 5). Second, A House for Mr. Biswas had led him from the comedic tone of his early work toward a darker, melancholy style — a change apparent in the difference between the absurd humour of The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) and the elegiac pessimism of The Mimic Men (1967). Third, research for The Loss of El Dorado (1969) uncovered a massacre of Amerindians in Naipaul’s hometown, perpetrated by Spanish conquerors in the seventeenth century. He later declared that this discovery was “unbearably affecting”, a demonstration of the willed ignorance of a community that “inquired about nothing” of the “world outside” (Naipaul, 2001b: n.p.). Fourth and most important, Naipaul’s international travel undermined his belief that authentic lives are possible in large countries. Disillusioned with Britain from the 1950s (1999b: 215), visiting India in 1962 forced him to reconsider his view that the Caribbean was unusual in its spiritual aridity (Naipaul, 2007: 120–21). The world-concept of the first phase no longer made sense because fragmentation, atemporality, and existential falsity now seemed universal. With this shift, Naipaul’s realism ceases to be the chronicling of particularities, and becomes a method for demystifying others’ self-deception.

At this point, Naipaul introduces a phrase that becomes central to his subsequent work: “complete worlds”. This term emerges as a description of the transplanted Indian culture of Trinidad from the perspective of one now familiar with its origins. In An Area of Darkness, he describes Indo-Caribbean civilization as a transplanted “whole” that eroded over time, revealing a “completeness” that “was only apparent” (1968/1964: 29, 35). For Naipaul, a complete world is a construct that encompasses lived practices, material objects, and metaphysical perceptions. It is a culturally-inflected claim about the totality of objects that constitute the universal, limited in purview, and possessed by a defined group — such as a religious community, caste, or political cadre. Complete worlds exclude heterogeneity and disregard what lies beyond their borders — an exclusion that makes them vulnerable to collapse. A complete world is thus always a delusion.

The motif becomes Naipaul’s central object of study. His novels and travel writing examine characters who believe they inhabit complete worlds, presenting their belief as a denial of the reality obvious to narrator and implied reader. For example, the protagonist Salim’s aunt in A Bend in the River (1979) is an Indian trapped in the dying East African diaspora. She creates a world that is limited physically, culturally, and imaginatively: “The squalling yard had contained its own life, had been its own complete world for so long. How could anyone not take it for granted?” (1979: 22). Readers know her isolation cannot survive the changes that are coming with independence — that her complete world is doomed to dissolution. Later in the novel, Salim’s best customer is a Congolese trader for whom the only “true, safe world” is her village, “protected from other men by forest and clogged-up waterways” (1979: 10). Naipaul’s emphasis on safety in both instances recalls Peter Sloterdijk’s description of the “Aristotelian-Catholic” world-image — in which humanity is “encase[d] in a layered system of ethereal domes [that] provide security within a dense totality” (2014: 16). Naipaul explores the emotional appeal of metaphysical boundedness, while warning that complete worlds will inevitably collapse. Their inhabitants face the intrusion of peoples with competing life-ways, and in that clash they learn that the posited world was never, in truth, all that there is.

Naipaul’s thorough analysis of the concept in India: A Wounded Civilization (1976) presents the complete world as a mark of self-deception and cowardice. Reflecting on Indian novelist R. K. Narayan, Naipaul declares that artificially bounded totalities appear “whole and unviolated” only to “small men”, with “a life so circumscribed” as to be blind to their own ignorance (1977/1976: 9). The ruins of Rajasthan show that self-imposed limitations appeal to those for whom reality is too painful to confront:

Where the world had shrunk, and ideas of human possibility had become extinct, the world could be seen as complete. […] Life itself was turned to ritual; and everything beyond this complete and sanctified world — where fulfilment came so easily to a man or a woman — was vain and phantasmal. (1977/1976: 22)

In this way, Naipaul reconfigures realism as a critique of narrow world-concepts. His ironic detachment posits, by implication, a broader, more adequate world inhabited by the reader. Like the concentric spheres of Ptolemaic cosmology, Naipaul’s world is a set of larger and larger wholes, with the writer occupying a zone further out — and hence more real — than the people he describes.

This shift transforms the imagined geography of his world-as-a-whole. While the first phase presumed that a real life could be lived elsewhere, the second assumes that anyone who believes in the actual existence of a complete world is delusional. Such people typically project completeness onto the past, as in religious nostalgia (see Naipaul, 1985/1967: 140), or the future, as for revolutionary optimists like Black Power radicals (Naipaul, 2005b: 189). Present-day complete worlds can exist only in constricted, impoverished zones — like the subsistence villages of Rajasthan. The Mimic Men offers a good example, in which the protagonist fantasizes about an authentic life in an imaginary elsewhere made of historical fantasy and projection:

I am like that child outside a hut at dusk, to whom the world is so big and unknown and time so limitless; and I have visions of Central Asian horsemen, among whom I am one, riding below a sky threatening snow to the very end of an empty world. (Naipaul, 1985/1967: 81–82)

By this stage, incompleteness has become an existential feature of Naipaul’s real. Any claim to the contrary is a fantasy that marks a refusal to see the world as it is.

Relocating the real produces a new set of aesthetic tropes for capturing and communicating the significance of the objects being described. In the earlier phase, Naipaul was trying to capture the particularities of “a mixed colonial world seen from the outside” (2003: 10; emphasis added). Representation was therefore directed to “the externals of things” (2003: 27), resulting in the reifying aesthetic of the atemporal object. Now, realism is reconstituted as a critical attack on fantasy, and becomes an irony of double negation that denies the denial of the real happening in the projection of complete worlds.

The most unexpected example of ironic negation is The Enigma of Arrival (1987), a novel-slash-memoir late in the second phase that demystifies Naipaul’s own fantasies. He begins with an idyllic image of English rural life, which to the “stranger” — a postcolonial arrivant modelled on young Naipaul — appears to be “an unchanging world” (1987: 32), quintessentially complete, “real” (129) in comparison to the “unaccommodating world” of the Caribbean (92). The novel’s non-linear narrative dismantles the complete world by looping around Naipaul’s impressions from a later perspective. He observes that his initial view was “profoundly ignorant” and wilfully blind (111) to the contexts of imperialism (53) and migration (141) that shaped the countryside’s economic development. Tempted at first to see his arrival as cultural dilution, Naipaul gives up his idealized version of Wiltshire, recognizing that the notion of “decay implied an ideal, a perfection in the past” that is untenable (210). The Enigma of Arrival thereby enacts the double-negation that finds the real not in positive content but the moment when illusion dissipates. This negative quality is “the idea of flux” (278) and “imminent dissolution” (92) that remains when the “perfection” of “a complete, untouched, untroubled world” (282) is relinquished.

These passages complicate the view of Naipaul as “need[ing] to conform” (Casanova, 2004: 209) to metropolitan desires, for they are targeted primarily at English delusions. If the early Naipaul petitioned metropolitan readers for approval, he now presents himself as an all-knowing, cosmopolitan seer, tasked with un-concealing the real wherever it might be found. The realism seen here shows up the limits of postcolonial critiques of the form. The Enigma of Arrival does challenge the “realist conventions governing the autobiography and nineteenth-century Bildungsroman” (Krishnan, 2013: 611), but it does so not because it has despaired of the possibility of representing a mutually agreed-upon world, but because it models that world differently. For Krishnan, Naipaul’s irony is an “attempt to engage, at the level of form, the disorienting effects of the periphery’s induction into modernity” (2013: 613), but I see his aesthetic as even more ontologically radical. Naipaul is locating the real world-as-a-whole in a “beyond” that is universally distant from all culturally-specific models of it. In his self-presentation, he is the realist par excellence because he — and only he — can see that all world-concepts are reductive abstractions.

The typical narrator of this phase is no longer the bemused insider, a shift lamented by readers who mourn the more openhearted Naipaul (Phillips, 2002: 209). The new Naipaul is less tolerant, a judgemental figure who can write of an Indonesian village school, for instance, that “it wasn’t traditional, and it wasn’t education […] it was stupefaction” (1982/1981: 325). Critics often explain this stylistic shift biographically. For example, Said called the middle-period Naipaul “bitter” and “obsessive” (2000: 99), while Salman Rushdie suggested that Naipaul’s “affection for the human race [had] diminished” with age (1992: 148). Biographical explanations miss something important, however, because the new attributes of Naipaul’s narrators parallel the ontological reorientation of his world-concept. The division between phantasmatic projections and a real accessible by negation maps onto the subject–object divide of representation, making the narrator the locus of the no that undoes illusory completeness, un-concealing the real. His role is defined by the incommensurability between his subjectivity and the inauthentic objects he is presented in the place of the real. Hence the form of Naipaul’s dismissal of the Indonesian school: a repeated negative (not traditional; not education) followed by a diagnosis of “stupefaction”. Realism in these books is not gazing intently at particulars, but is an effect of the critical irony of a narrator who must know better than everyone else.

Surprisingly, this construction of world — as fragmentary, always in flux, accessible only by negation — seems to have emerged at least partly from Buddhist and Hindu ideas. Hinduism occupies an ambivalent place in Naipaul’s historical consciousness. While the pre-Oxford Naipaul wrote of “the invigorating air of atheism”, and the happiness of “one who ignores [religion] completely” (1999b: 5), his published work exhibits a sustained engagement with South Asian philosophies and ambivalence about the role of religion in society (French, 2008: 223, 460; King, 2003: 15). His 1964 travels to India seem to have reinforced his feelings of alienation from his grandparents’ religion. In An Area of Darkness he notes that as a child he “took no pleasure” in religious ceremonies, seeing them as “touched with fraudulence” (Naipaul, 1968/1964: 32). At the same time he leverages his melancholy at the loss of ancestral practices into a world-historical consciousness of Indians as “an old people [who] belong to the old world” (1968/1964: 36). While Cudjoe goes too far in claiming that Naipaul’s “Hindu sensibility” was “the primary influence on his historical-literary vision” (1988: 6), it is nonetheless the case that elements of the sacred traditions play an important role not only in determining his subject matter but also in shaping his notions of realistic representation. In 2007 he described himself as “attracted to the Buddha story” (Naipaul, 2007: 112), and references to Hindu gods recur throughout his career to signify a perspective beyond — and superior to — the illusory consciousness of those embedded in historical events. For example, Mr Stone and the Knight’s Companion, written in Srinagar in 1962, ends with a vision of the world as illusion, and the protagonist as a Shiva-like destroyer who sustains by negation (see also 1968/1964: 266; 1987: 54):

He stripped the city of all that was enduring and saw that all that was not flesh was of no importance to man. All that mattered was man’s own frailty and corruptibility. The order of the universe […] was not his order. So much he had seen before. But now he saw, too, that it was not by creation that man demonstrated his power and defied this hostile order, but by destruction. (1973/1963: 125)

This figure is a prototype of the ironic debunker of the second phase, whose role is to tear aside the veil of illusion and reveal a truth that is Zen-like in its lack of positive content: “The world is what it is” (Naipaul, 1979: 3; emphasis added). Once again, Naipaul complicates traditional readings of realism. Often seen as the aesthetic correlate of modern, bourgeois consciousness (Lukács, 1962; Watt, 1957), Naipaul’s realism draws upon older “mystical” traditions that persist in conjunction with his rationalist commitment to empirical plausibility.

As this phase comes to an end, Naipaul’s narrators become less visible, as though consumed by the negativity of their role and the impossibility of substantive representation. His travel writings on Islam (Among the Believers, 1981 and Beyond Belief, 1998) and India (India: A Million Mutinies Now, 1990) let their subjects speak for themselves, with long passages transcribed verbatim from interviews. This is logical: insofar as he understands the real to arise through negation, he can let others do the talking, and watch their complete worlds collapse by themselves. Naipaul’s claim in his Nobel Prize speech to have “no system, literary or political” and “no guiding political idea” (2001b: n.p.) is not only the expression of a conservative mindset (Folks, 2009: 252; see Bertonneau, 2009), but also an aesthetic claim based on a subtractive conception of realism as a method of access to a world not amenable to positive description.

Patrick French, his biographer, claims that by the 1980s Naipaul was “fully formed”, “his years of creation […] behind him” (2008: 419) — a view mirrored by others who see the work of the latter Naipaul as a recapitulation of earlier themes (Cudjoe, 1988: 140). I think this is mistaken because there is a recognizable third stage to his career that builds upon but substantively redirects his project of realist totalization. Books written from the late 1980s double back on previous assumptions in search of aesthetic synthesis. First, the narratorial retreat to invisibility enables sympathy to return for certain examples of complete worlds — especially religiously-inflected ones. For example, in A Turn in the South (1989) Naipaul does not dismiss all southern Americans as fantasists. It is hard to see much difference between retired State Supreme Court Judge Sugg — who “had grown up in an isolated, inward-looking community” with a worldview determined by white Baptism (1989: 203) — and the Rajasthani peasants patronized in India: A Wounded Civilization (1977/1976: 22–23). But there is no ridicule of Sugg: “His faith had seen him through all the changes of his circumstances. At every moment his faith had been part of the completeness of his world” (1989: 203). This is not simply racial bias, because Naipaul shows the same sensitivity elsewhere. For instance, a Muslim politician in Lucknow has beliefs that are “complete” and “fully formulated”, providing “certainty and strength” that “equip her for public life” (1990: 363). The tone has changed. Instead of reflexive negation, Naipaul seems more open to alternative worlds and spiritually-inflected readings of contemporary social and political issues.

The shift parallels global and professional developments. In India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), Naipaul finds achievements to commend, like increasing living standards and secure democratic norms (1990: 517). He seems to have been heartened by evidence of social and political stability in the postcolonial world. His 1982–1983 essay on Côte D’Ivoire, for instance, is sympathetic, describing Africa — without much irony — as “complete, achieved, bursting with its own powers” (Naipaul, 2005b: 231). Such changes may have induced a more sympathetic attitude towards his interviewees.

The period also seems marked by introspection afforded by success — a lessening of the professional anxiety that subtended his authorial self-positioning as the amused insider of the first phase and ironic cosmopolitan of the second. No longer fearing failure, Naipaul appears to have seized the chance for reflection. A Way in the World (1995) extends the self-critique of Enigma, ironizing the pretentions of a lightly-fictionalized young Naipaul, whose judgements are now seen to be limited by youth:

What was the basis of this writer’s attitude? What other world did he know, what other experience did he bring to his way of looking? How could a writer write about this world, if it was the only world he knew? (1995: 29)

From the 1990s Naipaul becomes less acerbic. He now suggests that the writer’s role is simply to “listen very carefully and with a clear heart to what people say […], and ask the next question, and the next” (1999a/1998: xii). This is an extension of the earlier asceticism, producing a realism that empties the narrating subject to let the world shine through.

To claim that Naipaul becomes more sympathetic to religious world-concepts contradicts the usual view that he was an Islamophobe. It is true that he was enthusiastic about the destruction of the Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists in 1992, an event that sparked widespread violence against Muslims in India (French, 2008: 460). Critics have debunked his reductive view of Islam, tracing his theory of Muslim imperialism to British colonial stereotypes (Dalrymple, 2004; Jabbar, 2006). Even more overtly, his 2015 opinion piece on Islamic State atrocities in Syria and Iraq — published in the right-wing British tabloid The Daily Mail — implies that fundamentalist violence is, to some degree, a logical outgrowth of conservative Muslim education (Naipaul, 2015). Naipaul remained suspicious of Islam (and strongly committed to secularism) throughout his career. But for the purposes of this analysis what matters is how changes to his form are associated with changes in his conceptualization of the world-as-a-whole — a process that cannot be understood without noting subtly altered attitudes toward the world-making effects of religion in this period. From this perspective, it is no accident that Naipaul’s later work focuses on questions of faith.

Just as in the second phase, Naipaul’s realism presumes an ironic gap between the objects of analysis, which exist within self-made worlds, and the encompassing world of reader and writer that contains them. Now, however, the internal line of division is drawn between two categories of religious belief, each of which posits a world-concept, together constituting two halves of a totalized whole. The larger part of the world is the zone of the revealed religions — especially Christianity and Islam. These faiths differentiate between privileged centres and devalued peripheries. Like the first-phase Naipaul, their believers presume an inverse relationship between proximity and value that, in the case of Islam, makes much of the world a periphery of the Arab Middle East — the only place with “a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages, and earth reverences” (1999a/1998: 64). “[T]o be part of a great world faith” is to be “tempt[ed] to look away from the much smaller thing that was one’s own” (Naipaul, 2010: 31). The second, less powerful half of the world is the zone of “earth religions”. These faiths are local and anti-universalist, predicated on a sacred bond between a group and their land. Free of the presumption that non-locals should revere their holy sites, they make the land rich with meaning. The young Naipaul had “thought that [Trinidad] was unhallowed because it hadn’t been written about”, and because an “agricultural colony” could not produce “honour[able]” life. He now realizes the problem was spiritual all along, a product of the island’s history of slavery and indenture that created a population worshipping holy centres elsewhere:

[I]t was much later, in India, in Bombay, in a crowded industrial area — which was yet full of unexpected holy spots, a rock, a tree — that I understood that, whatever the similarities of climate and vegetation and formal belief and poverty and crowd, the people who lived so intimately with the idea of the sacredness of the earth were different from us. (1999a/1998: 52)

Earth religions produce faiths that are “a celebration of the natural world and a claim on that world” (Naipaul, 2010: 27). They make “the earth a sacred place”, and this “beautiful idea” (2007: 141) reveals that completeness is a real attribute of the world for certain people inhabiting particular parts of it.

Naipaul’s world-concept thus comes full circle. Just as in his early period, authentic existence is possible — elsewhere. Naipaul’s work now becomes properly tragic for the first time, exploring characters who chase complete worlds that could in principle exist, but whose personal flaws and willingness to self-deceive ensures failure. In a fit of revolutionary enthusiasm, Willie Chandran — protagonist of Half a Life (2001a) and Magic Seeds (2005a/2004) — rejects his Brahmin heritage in search of a “modern” source of meaning. His life takes him from England to Mozambique and back to India, including a horrifying interlude with Naxalite militants, to the realization that he will never find what he was looking for. Breaking his spiritual connection to place, and abandoning the real for idealistic abstractions, makes the world inaccessible and phantasmatic for Chandran, the exemplary disillusioned protagonist of Naipaul’s late style.

Naipaul’s final travel book, The Masque of Africa (2010), tests this hypothesis that earth religions enable a deeper reality for believers. He meets figures who describe, in good faith, the holiness of sacred sites and the authenticity that appears to come with an intimate connection to place — but he finds their world-concepts impossible to enter imaginatively. He is too much a child of the enlightenment to accept the supernatural metaphysics upon which their myths of transformation depend:

It was a tale for believers. I was not a believer. I fell at the first hurdle. In this fairytale the cutting up of the great man was too easy. He was like a worm, soft and uniform in texture; he could be sliced. No bones or muscle or delicate organs met the knife; there was no blinding spurt of blood. (2010: 148)

The ghost-ridden world of earth religions is too improbable to be real. But the tone here is fundamentally different: it is now the observer, not the observed, who has failed. The younger Naipaul saw contradiction and self-containment as a retreat from the real. The new figure accepts that worlds he does not understand can exist. The world-concept of the third phase thus brings world realism’s contradictions to the fore: an aesthetic that contrasts the particularity of here to the reality of elsewhere cannot grasp a spiritual world in which here and real are the same thing.

In the opening to this article I raised two questions with regard to Naipaul’s oeuvre: first, the degree to which his work reflects a desire (shared by other postcolonial novelists) to produce aesthetic mappings of the world-as-a-whole, a de-reifying critical realism directed at understanding global history as a systemic totality; and, second, the function of realism (as rhetoric and form) in mediating the postcolonial author’s traversal of an unequal world-literary system. “World realism” names this conjunction. My primary goal has been to explore how approaching Naipaul’s work in terms of this nexus allows us to trace the complex ways in which he manoeuvres across the representational – geopolitical divides between global and local, peripheral and metropolitan space, and the cognate distinction between what has universal value and what does not. Reading from this perspective, not only can we historicize Naipaul in new ways — highlighting the importance of aesthetic shifts obscured by other frameworks — but also highlight the diversity of realism as a dynamic representational agenda not reducible to other forms. A lot of work is presently being done reading literary realism as a form of critical engagement with historical processes operating at a global level. Naipaul should be at the heart of the discussion.

Colleen Lye raises an important concern about this critical conjunction, however. Recent discussions of realism have steadily broadened the term, pointing to realism’s ambiguity and formal diversity, and challenging perceptions of it as aesthetically unadventurous, anachronistic, or naively mimetic. But “[w]hat is to be learned from critical use” of a concept defined “in very different, even contradictory ways” (Lye, 2016: 343)? The thrust of this article has certainly been to move further in the direction of conceptual widening. I see Naipaul’s realist objectives as immanent to his construction of ironic personae, as well as to his blurring of boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, attention to the details of material culture and linguistic particularity, his interviewing practice, and, perhaps most important, his savage debunking of others’ allegedly deluded “complete worlds”. I also see his multilayered temporalities — juxtaposing the (perceived) stasis of colonial space to the (illusory) dynamism of the imperial centre, or the contradictory processes of postcolonial decay and regeneration — as intrinsic to his attempts to posit truthful accounts of an interconnected global system and universal world history. Realism in this sense is less a set of discrete genre identifiers than an ethos for orienting oneself toward the world.

Lye also notes the paradox that the Lukácsian analyses of realism that dominate the contemporary postcolonial debate — such as those posed by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC, 2015) — tend to find the form anywhere but in works that appear, on the surface, to be realistic (Lye, 2016: 345). Counterintuitively, and in opposition to Lukács’ own preferences for traditional-looking novels, it is implied that the critical de-reifying totalization needed by our interconnected postcolonial present emerges best in texts that look a lot like modernism. Lye asks, “Does this mean that a realist-appearing realism is impossible to describe?” (2016: 345). I submit that Naipaul presents exactly that missing case of “realist-appearing realism”. Critical analysis of his work thus allows us to advance a historically-specific and contextually-grounded account of the modern novel not indebted to metropolitan norms.