'I know that I have to draw on terrible reserves of conviction...'

Musings on V. S. Naipaul

#onhisbirthdaytoday

V. S. Naipaul is a British novelist and travel writer of Indian and Trinidadian descent, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.

Influences on Naipaul: One author Naipaul has publicly cited as an influence is Joseph Conrad, another British immigrant (from Poland) whose novels forced the British, and the world, to examine the disturbing implications of empire.

Critics have noted that the dark, brooding atmosphere, tropical settings, and alienated perspective in Naipaul’s prose resemble similar qualities in Conrad’s writing, including the latter’s most famous work of fiction, Heart of Darkness (1899).

As in that work, some of Naipaul’s European characters come emotionally undone as their pretensions are exposed in the alien African setting. A Bend in the River bears direct comparison with Heart of Darkness in the journey each work’s protagonist undertakes. However, some critics have interpreted Naipaul’s work as a defense of the colonial project rather than an indictment of its bitter consequences.

Literature of Displacement: Naipaul has contributed richly to the body of modern literature dealing with the theme of displacement, exile, and rootlessness, as dealt with by major authors such as James Joyce, Albert Camus, Ezra Pound, Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, and Conrad.

This theme is embodied in characters such as Salim in A Bend in the River, an Indian Muslim living in Africa who is treated like an outsider during his country’s political upheaval. It is also shown in the story ‘‘One out of Many’’ from In a Free State, in which an Indian servant finds himself in New York and realizes he is utterly lost regarding matters of money and law in the strange land.

In the late 1950s, the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, once colonies of the British Empire, began the process of becoming an independent nation. In his first four novels, culminating in A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), Naipaul drew on his Trinidadian background and current events for subject matter.

A House for Mr. Biswas marks a turning point for Naipaul. Many critics regard A House for Mr. Biswas as Naipaul’s first masterpiece. In 1998, The Modern Library listed the work among the finest one hundred novels written in English.

Reader’s Guide to the Novel: A House for Mr. Biswas follows the life of Mr. Mohun Biswas, a protagonist inspired by Naipaul’s father, as he struggles to find his freedom and a house of his own.

The son of a poor labourer in Trinidad, Mr. Biswas is forced to live as a guest in one crowded, inhospitable house after another. After his father dies, his family moves in with his mother’s sister, Tara, and he is humiliated and beaten by Tara’s brother-in-law Bhandat.

Mr. Biswas vows, "I am going to get a job on my own. And I am going to get my own house too. I am finished with this" [p. 64].

He goes to work as a sign-painter for the Tulsi family, and there he begins a flirtation with Shama.

After his love letter is discovered by Mrs. Tulsi, Mr. Biswas is bullied into marrying Shama, thus beginning a long and unhappy marriage that produces four children, a constant struggle for money, and countless bitter quarrels. After a brief and failed attempt to run a dry goods store in The Chase, Mr. Biswas and his family return to live with the Tulsi family, a pattern that recurs thoughout the novel.

It is in Port of Spain that Mr. Biswas comes closest to happiness, working as a journalist for the tabloid Sentinel, writing outlandish stories, and achieving a degree of local fame. Here, too, his son Anand excels in school and shows signs of talent as a writer. But Mr. Biswas’s fortunes suffer several reversals, and it is not until the very end of his life that he is finally able to buy a house–only to find the experience much different than he had imagined.

A vivid portrait of a man who fights to free himself from the entanglements of family, custom, and religion, A House for Mr. Biswas is also an unforgettable look inside colonial society at the beginnings of great transition.

Professor Homi K Bhabha in a LiVE interview at 8.30 PM on 01 February 2021, gave his delightful thoughts on the wondrous Naipaul and his spell on him!

Says he -

Question: You’ve started your journey from Mumbai and then to London and then to Chicago. As a boy from Mumbai, what made you interested in Postcolonial theory and criticism?

Homi K Bhabha: I didn’t start off with the availability of a Postcolonial theory as we know it today, although it is a term that has many definitions and many takes on the definition.

It was not a term of art, criticism or school or theory.

I did my English literature from Elphinstone College [University of Mumbai] and then at Oxford. [M.A., M.Phil., and D.Phil. in English Literature from Christ Church, Oxford University]

When I did my dissertation, at Oxford, I decided to work on V S Naipaul. He was a controversial choice, because as you know, he is greatly admired by many writers, including me, but many people from the postcolonial world at that time found that he was not sympathetic to the postcolonial cause. They found him as a ‘19th century liberal’.

I found that problem very fascinating. I found the conflict or the tension between admiring a writer profoundly for his vision, insights and the richness of his perspectives, and yet having differences with that writer’s politics and his views on history and society.

When I started working on Naipaul, there was no postcolonial theory to appeal to, or to address or to help in my own work. The available theories that were actually quite useful were the Marxist and Structuralist theories at that time.

That’s how I got into this area, and then of course I discovered the work of Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak.

Even at that time, Said had been known for his work on Orientalism – the idea of postcoloniality emerged only later.

My own journey started through English literature. But then, when I started reading texts from the colonial world and the postcolonial world, I began to see the kind of critical apparatus of European literary theory didn’t quite answer the questions I was asking. It didn’t look at the history of literature from the perspective that I wanted to. And Naipaul for me was very important.

Because if you think of one of his famous books, A House for Mr. Biswas, you begin to see the tensions or paradoxes I’m taking about. 

The book is avowedly a kind of Dickensian novel. Naipaul was a great admirer of Dickens, and so he wrote a kind of 19th century Dickensian style of novel full of anecdotes, full of characters, depth of perspective on the society of the Caribbean, Trinidad in particular from which it came. It was saturated with the spirit of the 19th century novel, partly a historical novel, partly a novel of everyday life.

But at the centre of a 19th century novel, is the notion of a hero, that’s why they call it a Bildungsroman – a character whose biography as it were, works through the novel, creating a sense of accommodation to his or her society although there are moments of dissatisfaction with that society.

At the end of the day, the Bildungsroman is a novel of coming to terms with your society, coming to terms with your fate. And here at the heart of this novel, you have this tragic-comic character Biswas who never felt accommodated!

That’s why the title – A House for Mr. Biswas! Right through the novel, he lives is various people’s houses, he builds his own houses, but he never has a sense that he really belongs – that he’s really been able to occupy a space that he feels at home in!

And so I thought how interesting that the formal apparatus of a bildungsroman or a 19th century European form is being used to tell the story of a figure from a colonial world, a descendant of indentured labour, - a novel which looks at slavery and indentured labour, huge forms of displacement and diasporic upheavals after all the families like the one that Naipaul describes, came in the 1850s, from India and settled in the Caribbean, and the Indian indentured labourers were also misfits between the black slave society and the white slave owners.

So these kinds of social and cultural conflicts made me think about what we then began to formulate as ‘postcolonial critical thought’.

Now over to Derek Walcott’s take on V. S. Naipaul -

INTERVIEWER: How do you respond to V. S. Naipaul’s repeated assertion—borrowed from Trollope—that “nothing was created in the British West Indies”?

WALCOTT: Perhaps it should read that “Nothing was created by the British in the West Indies.” Maybe that’s the answer. The departure of the British required and still requires a great deal of endeavor, of repairing the psychological damage done by their laziness and by their indifference.

The desolation of poverty that exists in the Caribbean can be very depressing. The only way that one can look at it and draw anything of value from it is to have a fantastic depth of strength and belief, not in the past but in the immediate future.

And I think that whenever I come back here, however desolate and however despairing I see the conditions around me to be, I know that I have to draw on terrible reserves of conviction. To abandon that conviction is to betray your origins; it’s to feel superior to your family, to your past. And I’m not capable of that.

So trueyyy that, ain’t it?

To conclude, then -

‘I am the sum of my books’, says Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul.

Indeed he is the sum total of the aura of ‘postcolonial critical thought’ in all its magnificent glory!

Suchmuch is Naipaul’s way and sway over the Postcolonial literary credo!

Image courtesy: trtworlddotcom

Sources: From our past blogposts on Naipaul & added inputs