Abstract
“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” (V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 1979)
It is a truism that the opening sentence in a novel is the most important because ideally it piques readers’ interest and begins to draw them into the narrative, perhaps setting the tone and hinting at ideas to be later developed or explored. Very occasionally, that opening sentence becomes the stuff of legend, shaping and defining popular perceptions of a famous book or its author. Well-known examples include Jane Austen’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (Pride and Prejudice, 1813) and Herman Melville’s “Call me Ishmael” (Moby-Dick, 1851). The opening sentence to V. S. Naipaul’s 1979 novel A Bend in the River has achieved similarly legendary status, partly because of the fame — or, some would say, infamy — of the author, and partly because of its appropriation for the title of one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the past few decades: Patrick French’s The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (2008).
It is of course reductive to associate any writer with one particular quote, especially in the case of a writer like V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018), whose literary output was substantial and varied by any standards. Nevertheless, the opening sentence of A Bend in the River does seem in some ways to encapsulate many of the attitudes and concerns that preoccupied him as a writer throughout his long life. Stylistically, too, this sentence is characteristic of Naipaul as a writer who combined clarity, economy and precision of expression with tantalizing suggestiveness in opening out to multiple possible interpretations. Each phrase in this compound sentence is significant and carefully chosen. “The world is what it is” reflects not only Naipaul’s consistent deployment of literary realism but also his lifelong interest in “the world” and every part of it. Almost as well-known for his travel writing as for his literary fiction, Naipaul spent a good portion of his life travelling all over the world, observing, questioning, and recording his impressions and reflections in his fictional and nonfictional works. Based in Trinidad during his childhood and in Britain during most of his adult life, Naipaul also spent extensive periods of time in various parts of India, Africa, the Caribbean, and North and South America, in addition to his shorter journeys throughout other parts of the world.
In the context of this huge and varied world through the resolutely unvarnished perspective of Naipaul and his fictional narrators, the phrase “men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it” is rich with implications. Perhaps the most obvious starting point is the strikingly masculinist language, notable even for the context of the late 1970s when A Bend in the River was first published. This, too, was characteristic of Naipaul, whose frequent use of the masculine pronoun was not simply an old-fashioned way of referring to “men and women”; on the contrary, his references to “men” invariably applied to males only, reflecting the decisively androcentric nature of his literary vision throughout his career. Coupled with this androcentrism is a more ambivalent expression of ideas about self-determination. Is the narrator gesturing toward a ruthless ideology which in its heyday was called “rugged individualism” or the idea of the “self-made man” (with all its gendered implications)? Put simply, is he suggesting that each man (each adult male) should make something of himself, regardless of his circumstances and opportunities? Or is this statement a more sympathetic commentary on the fate of the (male) “losers” in what he sees as our ruthless world? Although none of these questions can be definitively answered, they must be considered in light of the narrative perspective in A Bend in the River. Framed in this way, the first-person narrator Salim appears to be articulating his own sober truth, gradually learned through his bitter experience, which forms the substance of the narrative to follow. Finding — or, more precisely, failing to find — one’s place in the world is another central thematic concern in this novel, as in so many of Naipaul’s other literary works.
I dwell on these issues because they are so quintessentially Naipaul. The search for individual identity was a central preoccupation of his literary oeuvre, and even his nonfiction can be seen as an exploration of the individual’s place in history and in the contemporary world. In contrast to many other postcolonial writers — most notably Salman Rushdie — who have celebrated the idea of cultural hybridity as a positive, productive phenomenon that challenges exclusionary notions of “race” and cultural belonging, Naipaul consistently emphasized the negative aspects of colonial and postcolonial displacement. Famously bleak in his literary vision, he relentlessly called attention to what he saw as the shortcomings and failures of each culture and each society he encountered, including his native Trinidad, his ancestral homeland of India, his adopted home of Britain, the newly independent African nations, and everywhere else he travelled. Predictably, these attitudes earned him notoriety among many readers and scholars — including Rob Nixon, whose description of Naipaul as “unstintingly derisory” (1992: 28) of the former colonies is perhaps a fair assessment.
The facts of Naipaul’s life and literary achievements are well known. Born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, in 1932, he was the grandson of indentured labourers brought from India to work on the sugar plantations after the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. One of his earliest and best-known novels, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), is often assumed to be a fictional recreation of the young Vidia Naipaul’s family life, though in conversation with me, his sister Savi Naipaul Akal has insisted on the fictional nature of this now-classic book. She has recently written her own family memoir, The Naipauls of Nepaul Street (2018), which was published just a few months before her brother Vidia’s death. Although a family memoir is by nature different from a work of fiction, Savi Naipaul Akal’s sympathetic focus on the women in the family can be seen as a welcome divergence from the unshakeably masculinist — some would say misogynist — narrative perspective of A House for Mr Biswas, in which the Tulsi women are portrayed as monstrous embodiments of domestic power. The most obvious parallel between the novel and the “real” early life of Vidia Naipaul is that he, like the young Anand, was the son of a journalist in a large, relatively prosperous Indo-Trinidadian extended family. Educated at the prestigious Queens Royal College in Port of Spain, he won a coveted scholarship to Oxford University in 1950, thereafter settling permanently in Britain, as a base for his extensive world travels.
Like numerous other London-based Caribbean writers of his generation — including Sam Selvon, Derek Walcott, George Lamming and Gloria Escoffery — V. S. Naipaul had his work featured on the BBC programme Caribbean Voices during the 1950s as part of the beginning of his successful literary career. Suman Gupta has offered a useful summary of the trajectory of Naipaul’s oeuvre from his first four books, all set in Trinidad — The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959) and A House for Mr Biswas (1961) — through his books of the 1960s in which Trinidad is apprehended within broader cultural and historical horizons, to the 1970s and beyond when “Naipaul extends his gaze to other cultures” (1999: 2). Naipaul himself would probably have concurred with the use of the word “gaze” in this context. Always reflective about himself and his writing practice, he wrote in his foreword to Finding the Centre (1984) that through travelling, he had learned to be content “to be what I had always been, a looker. And I learned to look in my own way” (1984: 11). Looking in his own way, Naipaul evidently found colonial Trinidad to be an unsatisfactory culture: narrow, inauthentic and prone to mimicry. Although Miguel Street, for example, is often read as a humorous text, not least in Trinidad itself, its scornful portrayal of ordinary Trinidadians is difficult to ignore.
Eschewing humour in most of his later works, Naipaul went on to publish an astonishing quantity and range of fiction and nonfiction, set at various times and in various locations, all of which is written with his characteristic clarity and elegance of style. Following his early Trinidad novels, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963) was his first novel with an English setting. His growing discontentment with the postcolonial world found its expression in his next major novel, The Mimic Men (1967), followed by a collection of previously unpublished short stories along with the title story, A Flag on the Island (1967). Transcending generic boundaries, In a Free State (1971) consists of short stories, a novella, and two excerpts from a travel diary (which might be fiction), linked by their setting in several decolonizing African nations. The novel Guerrillas (1975) took as its background the US Black Power demonstrations in 1970 and the 1973 guerrilla movement in Trinidad. It explores the social and cultural forces that created such movements and led to the founding of a commune in Trinidad by “Michael X”, who killed two of his followers. Another major novel, A Bend in the River (1979), critically examines postcolonial developments in the Congo under Mobutu Sese Seko from the perspective of a young Indian narrator–protagonist. The Enigma of Arrival (1987) is a complex, densely written novel that explores the boundaries between autobiography and fiction, while Half a Life (2001) and Magic Seeds (2004) are works of “pure” fiction.
Naipaul’s first travel book, emerging from a tour of the West Indies, was The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies — British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America (1962). This is the book that contains his notorious remark that “history was built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (1962: 29). To put the quote into context, he was explaining why “the history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told” (1962: 29), which was in effect a criticism of colonial society. However, soundbites like this, along with other selected Naipaul quotes, have provided ample ammunition to those who have viewed him as an apologist for colonialism and an unfair critic of its victims. In a beautifully ironic commentary on this quote, scholars from the University of the West Indies have identified Naipaul himself as a product of the West Indies in the title of their edited collection of illuminating essays, Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul (2011). Notwithstanding his statement that the history of the West Indian islands can never be satisfactorily told, Naipaul’s book The Loss of El Dorado (1969) examines the early history of Trinidad, situating it within such wider events as the European search for gold, and the American, French, Haitian and South American revolutions. The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972) is a collection of articles, several of which offer a disillusioning analysis of recurring problems of the small former colonies. The Return of Eva Peron: With the Killings in Trinidad (1980) also includes an article discussing Conrad and “A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa”.
In addition to his interest in history, Naipaul’s travel writing reflects his interests in issues of identity, and in popular interpretations of religion, not least in India, which formed the subject of three critical books: An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). Also critically interested in the culture and practice of Islam, he published Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998). Investigations of popular religious beliefs and practices are prominent in his travelogue of the American South, A Turn in the South (1989), and they are central to his final book, The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010).
To me, Naipaul’s most interesting works are those which transcend generic boundaries and those in which he candidly examines himself as a writer and as a human being. From this perspective, my favourite Naipaul novel is The Enigma of Arrival, which mixes fiction and autobiography. Another interesting, generically indeterminate work is A Way in the World (1994), a “sequence” of nine narratives, including autobiography, fiction, history, scholarship, and imagined versions of actual lives. As Bruce King has explained, “Many of the characters in the stories are real persons, some are fictionalized or composite versions of well-known people, while still others are invented. Details of Naipaul’s life can be found placed throughout the volume which offers some of the most personal remarks he has made concerning the ways colonialism had limited the possibilities of self-realization in Trinidad” (2003). In his study Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation (2009), Bart Moore-Gilbert analysed the ways in which Naipaul challenged traditional approaches to self-representation in A Way in the World and Finding the Centre (1984). Always reflective about himself and his writing, Naipaul also published The Writer and the World: Essays (2002) and A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (2007).
In terms of his literary legacy, it is impossible to overstate the importance of V. S. Naipaul as a controversial but key figure among the world’s best-known postcolonial writers. His many prizes for individual books include the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize for The Mystic Masseur (1957), the Somerset Maugham Award for Miguel Street (1959) and the Booker Prize for In a Free State (1971). In 1990 he received Trinidad and Tobago’s Trinity Cross and also a British knighthood, and in 2001 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In terms of popular recognition, many people who know little about Trinidad and Tobago still know that this Caribbean nation is the birthplace of V. S. Naipaul. When I first took up my position at the University of the West Indies in 2011, friends and family from Britain and the US were curious to hear about how Naipaul is perceived in his original homeland. My response was — and is — that he is as controversial in Trinidad as everywhere else. There are many who enjoy and admire his writing, even when they do not necessarily share his vision, and there are others who dismiss him as “racist” and “misogynist”, among other epithets. The most interesting responses are self-consciously complex and conflicting. In this regard, I would like to give the final word to Nicha Selvon-Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian lecturer who posted a tribute to V. S. Naipaul on the day after his death in August 2018: To the man who made me aware of the shared traditions of Indo-Caribbean families. Who made me believe in a literary tradition that could come from my own home. Who taught me to separate an immensely flawed, miserable rascal from his genius craft. Who brought out tumultuous, intense feelings whenever I read his works. To the man who is a huge part of my love of literature — you once mused: “How terrible it would have been, at this time … to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.” You lay your claim as one of the greatest writers of your generation, a necessary voice accommodated among literary giants. Rest in peace now, V. S. Naipaul. (Selvon-Ramkissoon, 2018: n.p.)