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Profile is a writer and editor at the Book Review.

The Irascible Prophet: V. S. Naipaul at Home

By RACHEL DONADIOPublished: August 7, 2005

Two monuments rise like emblems from the green countryside of Wiltshire, England, not

far from the secluded house of V. S. Naipaul: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. Theyare signposts in a landscape Naipaul has been traversing for more than half a century, one

in which the impulses of culture, civilization and progress have always existed in close

and uneasy proximity to the impulses of paganism, religion and disorder.

André Carrilho

A prophet of our world-historical moment, in his more than 25 works of fiction and

nonfiction, Naipaul has examined the clash between belief and unbelief, the unraveling of the British Empire, the migrations of peoples. They are natural subjects for a writer who,

as he has recorded in his many fully, semi- and quasi-autobiographical books, was born

in Trinidad, where his grandfather had emigrated from India as an indentured servant. His

father, a newspaper reporter and aspiring fiction writer, was the model for what isarguably Naipaul's finest novel, ''A House for Mr. Biswas'' (1961). At 18, Naipaul left

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Trinidad on a scholarship to University College, Oxford, and has lived in England ever

since. Alfred Kazin once described him as ''a colonial brought up in English schools, on

English ways and the pretended reasonableness of the English mind.''

Knighted in 1990, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is Britain's only living Nobel

laureate in literature, having been awarded the prize in October 2001, a season whenmany were just awakening to realities Naipaul had been writing about for more than 20

years. Also significant is that he had explored Islamic fundamentalism and other issues of global import not through fiction, but through nonfiction reportage. The novel's time was

over, he had said. Others had made the claim before, but it resonated more deeply coming

from a contemporary giant. What is more, Naipaul said, only nonfiction could capture thecomplexities of today's world. It was a profound observation. But did it speak to a larger

cultural situation, or was it simply the personal judgment of one cantankerous writer, who

in fact continued to publish a novel every few years even after declaring the form dead?

Naipaul recently offered some thoughts on the matter, in an interview in the cozy sitting

room of his cottage in Wiltshire. Photograph portraits were on the mantle. French novelslined one bookshelf. The sounds of the outside world could be heard: a lawnmower, the

buzzing of a fighter jet from a nearby airbase. A compact man of 72, Naipaul has been illin recent months, and said he is not working on a book at the moment. Although it was

unseasonably hot on the splendid sunny afternoon of the longest day of the year, he wore

a tweed jacket and corduroy pants. Unsmiling, he settled somewhat stiffly onto a straight- backed armchair and began to chart the trajectory of his thinking.

''What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your

material,'' he said. ''And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the

material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to

explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.'' Naipaul's voiceis rich and deep and mellowed by tobacco, and when he pronounced the word ''world,'' he

savored it, drawing it out to almost three syllables. ''I thought if I didn't have this resourceof nonfiction I would have dried up perhaps. I'd have come to the end of my material, and

would have done what a writer like Graham Greene did. You know, he took the Graham

Greene figure to the Congo, took him to Argentina, took him to Haiti, for no rhyme or

reason.''

Naipaul has said he wrote the novel ''Half a Life'' (2001) only to fulfill a publisher's

contract, and that ''Magic Seeds'' (2004) would be his last novel. (Over the years, he has

often hinted at retirement, only to publish another book soon after.) Yet the fact that

Naipaul has continued to write novels does not undercut his acute awareness of the form'slimitations; indeed, it amplifies it. His is the lament of a writer who, through a life

devoted to his craft, has discovered that the tools at his disposal are no longer adequate.

''If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it'sof no account,'' Naipaul said. ''If you're a romantic writer, you write novels about men and

women falling in love, etc., give a little narrative here and there. But again, it's of no

account.''

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What is of account, in Naipaul's view, is the larger global political situation -- in

particular, the clash between belief and unbelief in postcolonial societies. ''I became very

interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots,ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery,'' he said. To

what extent, he wondered, had ''people who lock themselves away in belief . . . shut

themselves away from the active busy world''? ''To what extent without knowing it'' werethey ''parasitic on that world''? And why did they have ''no thinkers to point out to them

where their thoughts and their passion had led them''? Far from simple, the questions

brought a laserlike focus to a central paradox of today's situation: that some who have benefited from the blessings of the West now seek to destroy it.

(Page 2 of 4)

In November 2001 Naipaul told an audience of anxious New Yorkers still reeling from

the attack on the World Trade Center that they were facing ''a war declared on you by people who passionately want one thing: a green card.'' What happened on Sept. 11 ''was

too astonishing. It's one of its kind. It can't happen again,'' he said in our conversation.

''But in the end it has had no effect on the world. It has just been a spectacle, like a bank raid in a western film. They will be caught by the sheriff eventually.'' The bigger issue, he

said, is that Western Europe, while built on tolerance, today lacks ''a strong cultural life,''

making it vulnerable to Islamicization. He even went so far as to say that Muslim women

shouldn't wear headscarves in the West. ''If you decide to move to another country and tolive within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture,'' he

said. ''It's a form of aggression.''

No matter how uncomfortable or debatable, there is a painful prescience to Naipaul'sobservations on Islam and the West. That prescience was in evidence once again when,

just two weeks after our meeting, bombers struck the London Underground and a city

bus, killing more than 50 people. Naipaul was at home in Wiltshire that day, and

professed no surprise that the attacks appeared to have been carried out by Britishcitizens. ''We must stop fooling ourselves about what we are witnessing,'' he said in a

telephone conversation a week after the July 7 attacks. The debate in Britain about British

detainees held at Guantanamo Bay was evidence of the foolishness. ''People here talk about those people who were picked up by the Americans as 'lads,' 'our lads,' as though

they were people playing cricket or marbles,'' Naipaul said. ''It's glib, nonsensical talk

from people who don't understand that holy war for Muslims is a religious war, and areligious war is something you never stop fighting.''

These remarks, like so many of Naipaul's utterances over the years, seem calculated to

provoke. In his interviews as in his life, Naipaul is famously irascible, difficult,

contradictory, an ideological lightning rod. Yet in his writing, he is an artist on whomnothing is lost. Naipaul addressed this split in his Nobel acceptance speech, in which he

seconded Proust's argument that ''a book is the product of a different self from the self we

manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.'' Naipaul's work is as subtle as hisinterviews are clamorous. In ''Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey,'' his 1981

travelogue through the ironies and intricacies of non-Arab Islamic countries, and in its

1998 follow-up, ''Beyond Belief,'' Naipaul listened seriously and empathetically to people

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in Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia: countries that were converted to Islam over the

course of centuries and, in the late 70's, witnessed a rise in both power and Islamic

fundamentalism. The books raise but don't necessarily answer deep and vexing questions:Is secularism a precondition of tolerance? Does one necessarily have to abandon one's

individual cultural and religious identity to become part of the West? Why do people

willingly choose lives that restrict their intellectual freedom? What becomes of modernsocieties founded on Islam, whose strictest aherents long for a return to the time of

Muhammad?

Like Salim, the protagonist of his classic novel ''A Bend in the River,'' who describes

himself as ''a man without a side,'' Naipaul has cultivated political detachment. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said: ''I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no

system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.'' This is both true and

incomplete. Naipaul's cold, unsparing look at the corruption and disarray of the postcolonial world, his disdain for Marxist liberation movements and his view that

Islamic society leads to tyranny are implicitly political positions, and have made him the

object of much political criticism. He has been sharply criticized by, among others, Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet and Nobel laureate, and Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian

novelist, who said ''although Naipaul was writing about Africa, he was not writing for

Africans.'' The scholar and critic Edward Said, who died in 2003, called ''Beyond Belief''

''an intellectual catastrophe.'' Naipaul, he added, thinks ''Islam is the worst disaster thatever happened to India, and the book reveals a pathology.''

But what spares Naipaul's work from the ideology of critics who would dismiss him as

anti-Muslim and admirers who would laud him for essentially the same thing is its

unsentimental, often heartbreaking detail. In ''Among the Believers,'' Naipaul speaks withMr. Jaffrey, a newspaper journalist and British-Indian-educated Shiite in Tehran who

supported Khomeini as a way of bringing about the Islamic dream of a ''society of believers.'' Mr. Jaffrey ate a plate of fried eggs as he spoke. In ''Beyond Belief,'' Naipaulrevisits one of the journalist's colleagues, who also relishes his lunch. Ideology is

abstract; fried eggs are not. Naipaul's nonfiction has the force, the almost unbearable

density of detail and the moral vision of great fiction. It comes as no surprise thatDickens and Tolstoy are his heroes. For all Naipaul's talk about the limitations of the

novel, the power of his work is ultimately rooted in a novelist's preternatural

attentiveness to individual human lives and triumphs, to the daily things we do that makeus who we are, and are the key to our survival.

(Page 3 of 4)

A breakthrough in Naipaul's own understanding of himself as a writer and his turning

away from the novel toward nonfiction came in a remarkable essay he wrote on JosephConrad. First published in The New York Review of Books in 1974, it appears in his

2003 collection, ''Literary Occasions.'' It is not entirely surprising that Naipaul would turn

to the work of the Polish émigré; both were raised in one world and willed themselvesinto becoming artists in another, England. ''I suppose that in my fantasy I had seen myself

coming to England as to some purely literary region, where, untrammeled by the

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accidents of history or background, I could make a romantic career for myself as a

writer,'' Naipaul wrote in that essay.

''It came to me that the great novelists wrote about highly organized societies,'' he wrote.''I had no such society; I couldn't share the assumptions of the writers; I didn't see my

world reflected in theirs. My colonial world was more mixed and secondhand, and morerestricted. The time came when I began to ponder the mystery -- Conradian word -- of my

own background.'' Along the way, Naipaul kept coming up against Conrad. ''I found thatConrad -- 60 years before, in the time of a great peace -- had been everywhere before

me,'' he wrote. ''Not as a man with a cause, but a man offering . . . a vision of the world's

half-made societies as places which continuously made and unmade themselves, wherethere was no goal, and where always 'something inherent in the necessities of successful

action . . . carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.' Dismal, but deeply felt: a

kind of truth and half a consolation.''

Yet in our conversation, although Naipaul said he thought Conrad was ''great'' because he

''wished to look very, very hard at the world,'' he also insisted that Conrad ''had noinfluence on me.'' ''Actually, I think 'A Bend in the River' is much, much better than

Conrad,'' he said. ''I think the best part of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is the reportage part. The fictional part is excessive and feeble. And there is no reportage in my thing. I

was looking and creating that world. I actually think the work I've done in that way is

better than Conrad.'' Naipaul also dismissed the idea there might be a direct link betweenhis Conrad essay and subsequent works in which he explored some of the same places

and themes. ''These things might appear like that. But that's only for a person on the

outside,'' he said.

A different picture emerges from Naipaul's bibliography. After the Conrad essay, Naipaul

in fact followed Conrad's itinerary to the Congo -- the subject of his nonfiction essay onMobutu, ''A New King for the Congo''(1975), and of ''A Bend in the River'' (1979); and to

Aceh, Indonesia, for ''Among the Believers'' and ''Beyond Belief.'' Naipaul has also gonewhere Conrad went as a narrator, cultivating a kind of finely wrought ambiguity and

moving toward reportage. ''To understand Conrad,'' as he wrote in his essay, ''it was

necessary to begin to match his experience. It was also necessary to lose one's

preconceptions of what the novel should do and, above all, to rid oneself of the subtlecorruptions of the novel or comedy of manners.''

In conversation, another dynamic becomes apparent, in which the more dismissive

Naipaul is of a writer, the more likely it is that he has engaged deeply with that writer's

work. Sitting a few feet away from a bookshelf of French novels, Naipaul called Proust''tedious,'' ''repetitive,'' ''self-indulgent,'' concerned only with a character's social status.

''What is missing in Proust is this idea of a moral center,'' he said. Naipaul also had little

respect for Joyce's ''Ulysses'' -- ''the Irish book,'' he sniffily called it -- and other works''that have to lean on borrowed stories.'' Lately, he has found Stendhal ''repetitive, tedious,

infuriating,'' while ''the greatest disappointment was Flaubert.''



All this points to another idea: Modernism is over. ''We are all overwhelmed by the idea

of French 19th-century culture. Everybody wanted to go to Paris to paint or to write. And

of course that's a dead idea these days,'' Naipaul said. ''We've changed. The world haschanged. The world has grown bigger.'' Which brings us back to the limitations of the

novel. The writer must leave the sitting room and travel abroad into the active, busy

world. It is the tragic vision only a novelist can reach: that the world cannot be containedin the novel.

(Page 4 of 4)

And yet, for all his laments, Naipaul is not invested in the notion that Western civilization

is in decline. ''That's a romantic idea,'' he said brusquely. ''A civilization which has takenover the world cannot be said to be dying. . . . It's a university idea. People cook it up at

universities and do a lot of lectures about it. It has no substance.'' The ''philosophical

diffidence'' of the West, he maintains, will prevail over the ''philosophical shriek'' of thosewho intend to destroy it. Naipaul formulated those terms in a lecture he delivered in 1992

at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York. (Called ''Our Universal

Civilization,'' it appears in his 2002 essay collection, ''The Writer and the World.'') In it,he cites a remarkable passage from Conrad: ''A half-naked, betel-chewing pessimist stood

upon the bank of the tropical river, on the edge of the still and immense forests; a man

angry, powerless, empty-handed, with a cry of bitter discontent ready on his lips; a cry

that, had it come out, would have rung through the virgin solitudes of the woods as true,as great, as profound, as any philosophical shriek that ever came from the depths of an

easy chair to disturb the impure wilderness of chimneys and roofs.''

As for evidence of the diffidence: ''I think it actually is all around us. It's all around us,'' Naipaul said. But where, exactly? ''There are millions and millions of people all around

us,'' was all he would say. In ''India: A Million Mutinies Now'' (1990), his third

nonfiction book about India, Naipaul celebrated the million manifestations of daily life,

of lives undefeated by the chaos, disarray and poverty of the larger society. A Hindu by birth, though not observant, Naipaul finds India a place of great hope. It is, he says, the

country where belief and unbelief coexist most peaceably. The economic development of

India -- and China -- he said, will ''completely alter the world,'' and ''nothing that'shappening in the Arab world has that capacity.'' Yet Naipaul called it ''a calamity'' that,

even with its billion people, ''there are no thinkers in India'' today. India is also where he

turns for a theory of history. ''The only theory is that everything is in a state of flux,'' hesaid. This is his own ''personal idea,'' he said, but one linked to a philosophical concept in

Indian religion.

''I find it impossible to contain the history of Europe in my head. It's so much movement,

so much movement,'' he said. ''Even when you go back to the Roman times there arethese tribal groups pressing all the time, pressing and pressing and pressing,'' he

continued, pushing his fists together for emphasis and fixing his gaze intently at the near

distance. He has recently been reading the letters of Mary Wortley Montagu, anEnglishwoman who traveled across the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century. The chaos

of history pressed in on the Wiltshire sitting room. ''You have this picture of the

devastation the Turks had created in Hungary,'' he said. ''Who ever thought that world

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would have changed if you were living at that time? But it has changed. And what we're

living in will of course change again.''

Dismal, but deeply felt: a kind of truth and half a consolation.

The Crisis of Civilization

August 6, 2007

As Independent India

1

turns 60 on August 15, we present a collectionof inspiring words by our visionary leaders, extracted from the book,Great Speeches of Modern India, with the kind permission of thepublishers, Random House India. Before we read the immortal words of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore at the height of the Second WorldWar, it's over to journalist and historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee, whoedited the book:

Tagore had been unwell for sometime. He was making preparations to

leave Santiniketan for Calcutta, and was perhaps aware that he wouldnot return to his beloved university. On Bengali New Year's Day, he

spoke in Viswa Bharati of his anguish at the killing and destruction hesaw around him. This speech, given at the height of the Second WorldWar, turned out to be not only the last speech he made in Santiniketanbut also his last public pronouncement. For these reasons it is aprofoundly moving and powerful speech -- the final testament of a mandisillusioned by history but clinging to his faith in man.



Rabindranath Tagore(1861–1941)

Santiniketan, April 1941

Today I complete eighty years of my life .As I look back on the vast

stretch of years that lie behind me and see in clear perspective the

history of my early development, I am struck by the change that hastaken place both in my own attitude and in the psychology of mycountrymen -- a change that carries within it a cause of profoundtragedy.

Our direct contact with the larger world of men was linked up with thecontemporary history of the English people whom we came to know inthose earlier days. It was mainly through their mighty literature thatwe formed our ideas with regard to these newcomers to our Indianshores. In those days the type of learning that was served out to uswas neither plentiful nor diverse, nor was the spirit of scientific enquiry

very much in evidence. Thus their scope being strictly limited, theeducated of those days had recourse to English language andliterature. Their days and nights were eloquent with the statelydeclamations of Burke, with Macaulay’s long-rolling sentences;discussions centred upon Shakespeare's drama and Byron's poetry andabove all upon the large-hearted liberalism of the nineteenth-centuryEnglish politics.

At the time though tentative attempts were being made to gain ournational independence, at heart we had not lost faith in the generosityof the English race. This belief was so firmly rooted in the sentimentsof our leaders as to lead them to hope that the victor would of his owngrace pave the path of freedom for the vanquished. This belief wasbased upon the fact that England at the time provided a shelter to allthose who had to flee from persecution in their own country. Politicalmartyrs who had suffered for the honour of their people were accordedunreserved welcome at the hands of the English.

I was impressed by this evidence of liberal humanity in the character of the English and thus I was led to set them on the pedestal of myhighest respect. This generosity in their national character had not yetbeen vitiated by imperialist pride. About this time, as a boy in England,I had the opportunity of listening to the speeches of John Bright, bothin and outside Parliament. The large-hearted, radical liberalism of those speeches, overflowing all narrow national bounds, had made sodeep an impression on my mind that something of it lingers eventoday, even in these days of graceless disillusionment.

What is civilization?



Certainly that spirit of abject dependence upon the charity of our

rulers was no matter for pride. What was remarkable, however, wasthe wholehearted way in which we gave our recognition to human

greatness even when it revealed itself in the foreigner. The best andnoblest gifts of humanity cannot be the monopoly of a particular raceor country; its scope may not be limited nor may it be regarded as themiser’s hoard buried underground. That is why English literature whichnourished our minds in the past, does even now convey its deepresonance to the recesses of our heart.

It is difficult to find a suitable Bengali equivalent for the English word'civilization'. That phase of civilization with which we were familiar inthis country has been called by Manu 'Sadachar ' (literally, proper conduct ), that is, the conduct prescribed by the tradition of the race.

Narrow in themselves these time-honoured social conventionsoriginated and held good in a circumscribed geographical area, in thatstrip of land, Brahmavarta by name, bound on either side by the riversSaraswati and Drisadvati. That is how a pharisaic formalism graduallygot the upper hand of free thought and the ideal of 'proper conduct'which Manu found established in Brahmavarta steadily degeneratedinto socialized tyranny. During my boyhood days the attitude towardsthe cultured and educated section of Bengal, nurtured on Englishlearning, was charged with a feeling of revolt against these rigidregulations of society.

A perusal of what Rajnarain Bose has written describing the ways of the educated gentry of those days will amply bear out what I have said just now. In place of these set codes of conduct we accepted the idealof 'civilization' as represented by the English term.

In our own family this change of spirit was welcomed for the sake of itssheer rational and moral force and its influence was felt in everysphere of our life. Born in that atmosphere, which was moreovercoloured by our intuitive bias for literature, I naturally set the Englishon the throne of my heart. Thus passed the first chapters of my life. Then came the parting of ways accompanied with a painful feeling of

disillusion when I began increasingly to discover how easily those whoaccepted the highest truths of civilization disowned them with impunitywhenever questions of national self-interest were involved.

There came a time when perforce I had to snatch myself away fromthe mere appreciation of literature. As I emerged into the stark light of bare facts, the sight of the dire poverty of the Indian masses rent myheart. Rudely shaken out of my dreams, I began to realize that perhaps



in no other modern state was there such hopeless dearth of the mostelementary needs of existence. And yet it was this country whoseresources had fed for so long the wealth and magnificence of theBritish people.

While I was lost in the contemplation of the great world of civilization, Icould never have remotely imagined that the great ideals of humanitywould end in such ruthless travesty. But today a glaring example of itstares me in the face in the utter and contemptuous indifference of aso-called civilized race to the wellbeing of crores of Indian people. Thatmastery over the machine, by which the British have consolidated theirsovereignty over their vast Empire, has been kept a sealed book, towhich due access has been denied to this helpless country. And all thetime before our very eyes Japan has been transforming herself into amighty and prosperous nation. I have seen with my own eyes theadmirable use to which Japan has put in her own country the fruits of

this progress.

'An intellectual people driftinginto the disorder of barbarism'

August 6, 2007

I have also been privileged to witness, while in Moscow, the unsparing

energy with which Russia has tried to fight disease and illiteracy, andhas succeeded in steadily liquidating ignorance and poverty, wiping off the humiliation from the face of a vast continent. Her civilization is free



from all invidious distinction between one class and another, betweenone sect and another. The rapid and astounding progress achieved byher made me happy and jealous at the same time.

One aspect of the Soviet administration which particularly pleased mewas that it provided no scope for unseemly conflict of religiousdifferences, nor set one community against another by unbalanceddistribution of political favours. That I consider a truly civilizedadministration which impartially serves the common interests of thepeople.

While other imperialist powers sacrifice the welfare of the subject racesto their own national greed, in the USSR I found a genuine attemptbeing made to harmonise the interests of the various nationalities that

are scattered over its vast area. I saw peoples and tribes, who, only theother day, were nomadic savages being encouraged and indeedtrained, to avail themselves freely of the benefits of civilization.Enormous sums are being spent on their education to expedite theprocess.

When I see elsewhere some two hundred nationalities -- which only afew years ago were at vastly different stages of development --marching ahead in peaceful progress and amity, and when I look aboutmy own country and see a very highly evolved and intellectual peopledrifting into the disorder of barbarism, I cannot help contrasting the

two systems of governments, one based on co-operation, the other onexploitation, which have made such contrary conditions possible.

I have also seen Iran, newly awakened to a sense of national self sufficiency, attempting to fulfil her own destiny freed from the deadlygrinding-stones of two European powers. During my recent visit to thatcountry I discovered to my delight that Zoroastrians who once sufferedfrom the fanatical hatred of the major community and whose rightshad been curtailed by the ruling power were now free from this age-long repression, and that civilized life had established itself in thehappy land. It is significant that Iran's good fortune dates from the day

when she finally disentangled herself from the meshes of Europeandiplomacy. With all my heart I wish Iran well.



'The social fabric is being rent into shreds'

Turning to the neighbouring kingdom of Afghanistan I find that thoughthere is much room for improvement in the field of education andsocial development, yet she is fortunate in that she can look forward tounending progress; for none of the European powers, boastful of theircivilization, has yet succeeded in overwhelming and crushing herpossibilities.

Thus while these other countries were marching ahead, India,smothered under the dead weight of British administration, lay static inher utter helplessness. Another great and ancient civilization, forwhose recent tragic history the British cannot disclaim responsibility, isChina. To serve their own national profit the British first doped herpeople with opium and then appropriated a portion of her territory. Asthe world was about to forget the memory of this outrage, we werepainfully surprised by another event. While Japan was quietlydevouring North China, her act of wanton aggression was ignored as aminor incident by the veterans of British diplomacy.



We have also witnessed from this distance how actively the Britishstatesmen acquiesced in the destruction of the Spanish Republic. Onthe other hand, we also noted with admiration how a band of valiantEnglishmen laid down their lives for Spain. Even though the Englishhad not aroused themselves sufficiently to their sense of responsibility

towards China in the Far East, in their own immediate neighborhoodthey did not hesitate to sacrifice themselves to the cause of freedom.

Such acts of heroism reminded me over again of the true English spiritto which in those early days I had given my full faith, and made mewonder how imperialist greed could bring about so ugly atransformation in the character of so great a race. Such is the tragictale of the gradual loss of my faith in the claims of the Europeannations to civilization.

In India the misfortune of being governed by a foreign race is daily

brought home to us not only in the callous neglect of such minimumnecessities of life as adequate provision for food, clothing, educationand medical facilities for the people, but in an even unhappier form inthe way people have divided themselves. The pity of it is that theblame is laid at the door of our own society. So frightful a culminationof the history of our people would never have been possible, but forthe encouragement it has received from secret influences emanatingfrom high places.

One cannot believe that Indians are in any way inferior to the Japanesein intellectual capacity. The most effective difference between these

two eastern peoples is that whereas India lies at the mercy of theBritish, Japan has been spared the shadow of alien domination. Weknow what we have been deprived of. That which was truly best intheir own civilizations, the upholding of the dignity of humanrelationships, has no place in the British administration of this country.

If in its place they have established, with baton in hand, a reign of 'lawand order', in other words a policeman's rule, such mockery of civilization can claim no respect from us. It is the mission of civilizationto bring unity among people and establish peace and harmony. But inunfortunate India the social fabric is being rent into shreds by

unseemly outbursts of hooliganism daily growing in intensity, rightunder the very aegis of 'law and order'.

In India, so long as no personal injury is inflicted upon any member of the ruling race, this barbarism seems to be assured of perpetuity,making us ashamed to live under such an administration.

'Perhaps that dawn will come from this horizon, from the East'



August 6, 2007

And yet my good fortune has often brought me into close contact with

really large-hearted Englishmen. Without the slightest hesitation I maysay that the nobility of their character was without parallel -- in no

country or community have I come across such greatness of soul. Suchexamples would not allow me to wholly lose faith in the race whichproduced them.

I had the rare blessing of having Andrews -– a real Englishman, a realChristian and a true man -– for a very close friend. Today in theperspective of death his unselfish and courageous magnanimity shinesall the brighter. The whole of India remains indebted to him forinnumerable acts of love and devotion. But personally speaking, I amespecially beholden to him because he helped me to retain in my oldage that feeling of respect for the English race with which in the past I

was inspired by their literature and which I was about to losecompletely. I count such Englishmen as Andrews not only as mypersonal and intimate friends but as friends of the whole human race. To have known them has been to me a treasured privilege.

It is my belief that such Englishmen will save British honour fromshipwreck. At any rate if I had not known them, my despair at theprospect of Western civilization would be unrelieved. In the meanwhilethe demon of barbarity has given up all pretence and has emergedwith unconcealed fangs, ready to tear up humanity in an orgy of devastation. From one end of the world to the other the poisonous

fumes of hatred darken the atmosphere.

The spirit of violence which perhaps lay dormant in the psychology of the West, has at last roused itself and desecrates the spirit of Man. Thewheels of Fate will some day compel the English to give up their Indianempire. But what kind of India will they leave behind, what starkmisery? 'When the stream of their centuries' administration runs dry atlast, what a waste of mud and filth they will leave behind them! I hadat one time believed that the springs of civilization would issue out of the heart of Europe. But today when I am about to quit the world thatfaith has gone bankrupt altogether.

As I look around I see the crumbling ruins of a proud civilization strewnlike a vast heap of futility. And yet I shall not commit the grievous sinof losing faith in Man. I would rather look forward to the opening of anew chapter in his history after the cataclysm is over and theatmosphere rendered clean with the spirit of service and sacrifice.Perhaps that dawn will come from this horizon, from the East wherethe sun rises. A day will come when unvanquished Man will retrace his



path of conquest, despite all barriers, to win back his lost humanheritage.

Today we witness the perils which attend on the insolence of might;one day shall be borne out the full truth of what the sages have

proclaimed: 'By unrighteousness man prospers, gains what appearsdesirable, conquers enemies, but perishes at the root.'

Rachel Donadio

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Landscapes of sea and snow: V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men

Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Spring, 2008 by Atreyee Phukan


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In an interview conducted in 2002, V.S. Naipaul claims that his relationship with India

and Indianness belongs to "the history of where I came from--the forgotten people"

of indentured ancestry in the Caribbean islands. (1) A similar relationship withhistory, that of neglect, can be applied to read Naipaul's The Mimic Men as an

examination of the predicament of East Indians during the decolonization of the

West Indies in the 1960s and 70s. In this decade of postcolonial nationalization,escalating ethnic violence between Africans and East Indians in Trinidad and

Guyana was one result of the nations' political reformations after colonial

independence, which also led to the latter community's departure from thesehomelands. The Mimic Men captures the experience of the internal and external

migrations of post-indentured East Indians in their search for political authenticity

within the "new" decolonized West Indian island of Isabella.

In choosing the name Isabella for an island closely modeled on his native Trinidad,

Naipaul forces the reader to remember Trinidad's colonial past--conquered

first by the Spanish before its long colonization by the British (1797-1962). The

association with an imperial queen known as a primary sponsor of Columbus'svoyages symbolically aligns the fictive island of Isabella to the history of

discovery and dispossession in the Caribbean. As the plot shifts from

Gurudeva's (the father) story to Ralph Singh's (his son), the "birth" and

growth of Isabella's new national consciousness also occurs as does the

beginning of the exclusion of the East Indian "voice" in the nation's new

identity.

In The Mimic Men, the birth of the nation's political freedom is also the context in which

Ralph Singh and Gurudeva choose to "remember" Indianness during Isabella'snationalization process. The single narrative of their contrasting political careers allows

for a close examination of East Indianness as subaltern before and after its independencefrom colonial rule. Though most criticism on this novel highlights the role of RalphSingh, my analysis focuses equally on his father, Gurudeva, (2) in order to demonstrate

that the different political personalities adopted by father and son are specific to a

particular political climate. Gurudeva represents a creolized political identity which, Iargue, is impossible for Ralph, whose life Naipaul situates in a political climate

comparable to the demise of the actual West Indies Federation in 1962. (3)

In this article, I analyze Naipaul's The Mimic Men as a representation of the political

voice of East Indians in Independent West Indies, which he portrays as a language thatshifts from one of inclusion and integration (Gurudeva) to one of exclusion only (Ralph

Singh). This negation of the positive principles of creolization is connected to the novel's

thematic play between the politics of identity for post-indentured Indians in Isabella andthe political identity of Ralph and Gurudeva, Isabella's two most famous post-indenture

Indian politicians. At least, their fame is the claim made by Ralph Singh, who is the

author of the semiautobiographical, political memoir which is the novel. I suggest that

The Mimic Men is a novel of decolonization that employs the rhetoric of indigeneitycharacteristic of anticolonial and postcolonial Caribbean and Latin American literatures.

The overarching focus on post-indentured Indian identity explores, I contend, the



meaning of "indigenous," or native identity in the West Indies. Thus, Naipaul's explicit

portrayal of East Indianness as "other" is linked to an implicit examination of how "new"

political identities are formed, erased, or forgotten in the changing political climate of theWest Indies during decolonization. Naipaul depicts the successful and legitimate

creolization of Indians through Gurudeva, but frames this positive mood within Ralph's

voice, the omniscient narrator who is unable to live in either Isabella or England--theother island he gradually deconstructs. The novel's contrapuntal exposition of Isabella's

political freedoms, before and after its independence, corresponds to Gurudeva's

acceptance by Isabella and Ralph's exteriorization from it.

Contradictions of Place and Space

The available or availability of "place" for Ralph and Gurudeva as East Indian in the new

nations of the West Indies, in so far as this depends on their own creations of "authentic"

identity, can be read as an attempt to project East Indians as "native." However, Naipaul

connects their search for authenticity with the inevitable erasure of their status as such,

which is one effect of postcolonial "hybridity." In the Caribbean, an early example of anovel that provoked readers and critics to define a "native" Caribbean aesthetics in

several, and contradictory, ways was The Kingdom of this World (El reino de este mundo1949). (4) According to Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, one of the major contributors in

the development of literary modernity and literary history in the Caribbean region was

the Cuban author Alejo Carpentier. Carpentier's literature, he argues, explores in particular the "history of the Caribbean [which] is one of beginnings or foundations"

(125). In this novel, Carpentier retells the history of Henri Christophe's rise to power

which C.L.R. James, the noteworthy Trinidadian philosopher and writer, has termed the

"landmark" revolt for the "Negro people" of the Caribbean. It was, he asserts, the "onlysuccessful Negro revolt, the only successful slave revolt in history [that] had its roots in

the French revolution, and without the French revolution its success would have beenimpossible" (James 2). Carpentier's novel came under criticism for several reasons. Thenovel's strategic depiction of Haiti from a non-modern viewpoint was perceived to be one

consequence of Carpentier's "inauthentic" appreciation and illustration of Haiti's slave

history. As C.L.R. James pointed out, how could an outsider, one who is neither racially"native" (i.e. indigenous or African) nor politically "native" to Haiti, use a native subject

in his poetics? (James 3).

Carpentier's novel, however, utilized what Lloyd King has called the "native" aesthetics

of Latin American writers whose works were the "logical" result of imperialism in theCaribbean and Latin America--the relentless extinction of original inhabitants and the

slow integration of colonial Europeans. Thus, Caribbean and Latin American fiction have

been caught in a post-imperial logic in which "native" Europeans use "Indian" myths andvalues to depict their relationship to the land. As Lloyd King has argued, "primitive"

subjects became Latin American writers's first powerful symbol of self-identification

with the South American continent and liberation from Europe (1-2). Early postcolonial

Latin American fiction featured indigenous cultures as the "lost" world in order tounderline their protest against Spanish colonialism. Since Latin American literature was

largely written by the region's colonial Spanish population, the theme of independence



was directly connected to legitimizing their status as "native" to South America and

"foreign" to Spain. In so far as this relationship with Spain remained in the foreground, it

can be argued that these early fictions did in fact manipulate indigenous culture as an"essence," meaningful because it signified a "lack" that could be utilized to relate a

powerful anticolonial message.

The landscape of sea that surrounds the Caribbean island of Isabella serves as a constant

reminder to Ralph that his life lacks the real substance of his fantasy, in which heimagines himself to be a descendent of a Himalayan warrior tribe. To him, the ocean is an

annihilating entity and the landscape of snow full of the promise of civilization and order.

These contradictory landscapes, each both physical and psychological, haunt the childand adult Ralph, and his early experience of self-alienation in native Isabella

predetermines his unsuitability in England. Eventually, each island, England and Isabella,

are threatening places he impatiently waits to be rescued from by his imaginaryHimalayan ancestors on the Asian continent. Perhaps not so ironically, even snow, which

once embodied the landscape of perfection and purity for Ralph, later becomes a

threatening element when he is faced with its reality in England. When Ralph sees hisfirst snowfall his mood shifts from the ecstatic to the morbid: "Snow. At last; my element

... Yet what was I to do with so complete a beauty?" (The Mimic Men 4-5). His gaze

turns from the perfection of snow to the "empty room with the mattress on the floor [and]

I felt all the magic of the city go away and had an intimation of the forlornness of the cityand of the people who lived in it" (5). His perception of snow combines with his fear and

dislike of the sea, the eternal "devouring element", which everywhere surrounded his

horizon in Isabella. Ultimately, the only landscape Ralph finds any sense of belonging inis an imaginary landscape of another kind, the white pages of his memoir. The

contradictory landscapes are, therefore, eventually brought together in this complete

retreat into the writing of a book.

Such demonstrations of the misanthropy of Naipaul's narrator and authors (such as Ralph

Singh), Ruth Juneja argues, have often been misinterpreted as Naipaul's pessimism

towards the decolonized postcolonial nations such as those in the Caribbean West Indies.

According to Juneja, characters like Ralph, who discredit the realities they see andreplace them with fantasies, are acts of "self-creation." "Through writing," she claims,

"he [Naipaul] has been able to resist his psychological inheritance as a colonial. He has

objectified the process through a very self-conscious exploration of the trope of writing,"and this is how, Juneja suggests, "in a manner of speaking (and writing), [Naipaul] has

decolonized himself. In making the process visible, he makes the inaugural marks

(inaugural because the journey is individual and not a template) of similar self-initiatingstrategies available to others" (Caribbean Transactions 163-164). Juneja argues that

Naipaul makes visible the ways in which he is "a colonial subject" as a Hindu post-

indentured Indian from Trinidad, displaced due to his multiple marginality in the

Caribbean, Europe, and India (Juneja 157). This multiple displacement is true of Ralph,whose political memoir makes visible his colonial subjugation and alienation in Isabella

and England.



Having divorced himself from physical and imaginary landscapes, Ralph comes to enjoy

his cohabitation with stationery objects, whose every scratch and design he claims aid the

final aim of his life--the "continuous, quiet enjoyment of the passing of time" (The MimicMen 267). Ralph's lives through the memoir he writes in his seclusion; thus, his

authenticity as citizen becomes indelibly linked to the authenticity of his text and of his

own value as a writer. Indeed, Ralph closely connects his mortality with his writing. Inone early scene, Ralph holds a picture of his dead landlord, Mr. Shylock, and is overcome

with thoughts of mortality "Death? Let it not happen to me [...] let me leave more behind.

Let my relics be honored. Let me not be mocked." The "relic" comes in the form of whatRalph describes as "more than an autobiographical work" and "not [a] political memoir"

but as an in-between form and a work continually in process (6).

As the novel comes to an end, Ralph writes that the "writing of this book [has] become an

end in itself ... the recording of a life ... an extension of that life" (267). Both the writingof the book and his habitation in the hotel are what Ralph calls the "most fruitful" of his

experiences (271). No longer concerned by the limitations of the New World islands, he

begins to think of his life, and that of the other boarders, in terms of exile's rewards:

We are people who for one reason or another have

withdrawn, from

our respective countries, from the city where we find

ourselves,

from our families. We have withdrawn from unnecessary

responsibility and attachment. We have simplified our

lives. I

cannot believe that our establishment is unique. It

comforts me to

think that in this city alone there must be hundreds and

thousands

like ourselves. (270)

Ralph's life eventually becomes centered on the writing of the text of his past life which,

like his current existence in the boarding house, helps him slowly detach from any sense

of community. Throughout his narrative, Ralph brings us back to the "rough, narrow

table" (34) in a "far-out suburban hotel" which gives Ralph the "feeling of impermanence" (9) that helps him write this book. He revels in this atmosphere,

surrounded by other exiles and expatriates to whom he mentally ascribes playful names

such as "Garbage," whose "long, middle-aged, educated hands" perform a daily"Christian ritual" to a plate of food that is never really eaten (268-269). Ralph is

strengthened by the comfort of such strangers, looking forward to the dining room drama

among others equally at ease with their own deracination and isolation from the rest of the world. In the novel's penultimate scene, the calm and order of his hotel is rudely

interrupted by the appearance of Lady Stella, a recent former lover. The last image is of

Ralph's final withdrawal behind a pillar and the reappearance of Garbage, whose knife is

raised to attack his cheese plate. The peculiar curiosity Ralph shows towards Garbage,and in particular the latter's relationship to food, reveals Ralph's perception of himself as

victim, a colonial subject who methodically reorders, rearranges, and transforms the



residues of colonization. Like Garbage, or so Ralph perceives, he sees a certain strength

in identifying and sorting out elements of trash without, however, allowing it to

contaminate his body.

The graphic clash between sea and snow, characterized by each island Ralph chooses to

inhabit, highlights at another level the tension between purity and contamination which, Isuggest, can be used to further understand the contradictory careers of father and son. In

main, Ralph is unable to reach Gurudeva's level of success due to his strong convictionthat any mixing of Africans and Indians, their hybrid collaborations, would prove

irrevocably the social bastardization of colonial subjects. Gurudeva's politics is, thus, a

form of creolization repulsive to his son. It is important that the landscape of Gurudeva'scareer is definitively Caribbean--the seashore retreat of his final years, burning sugarcane

fields, dock yards where slaves once disembarked--whereas Ralph's own attempts a

mixing of the postcolonial Caribbean with the western and cosmopolitan--such as theextravagant and out-of-place Roman House used as the headquarters of his career with

Browne. In this, he is, of course, aspiring to purify the sea and its association with

colonization and passage by superimposing symbolisms connected with western orders of civilization.

In the West Indies, they claim, the severing of an ideal whole produced "small nations for

whom political independence was more a gift from the metropolis than an actively and

independently worked achievement." They point out that the "sadly ambiguous" divisionof a community into political nation states was a subject concerning "the very politics of

freedom" that "most writers ... reacted deeply to" (Dabydeen 58). On a similar note,

Frank Birbalsingh has pointed out that West Indian writers after 1965, belonging to what

he calls the "third stage" of West Indian Caribbean literature, "espouse post-Independence interests," which include the challenge freedom from colonialism poses to

nationalism or national identity and "post-Independence strategies of regeneration andreintegration" (xi-xii). (6)

Naipaul, therefore, portrays the double-edged form of hybridity in the Caribbean. It is, on

the one hand, a racial and/or cultural characteristic assumed of every transported member

of the Caribbean. On the other, because of its ties with mimicry (productive or negative),

certain forms of hybridization are rendered impotent. Most clearly, Naipaul demonstratesthat, perhaps, only "Africanized" forms of creolization can succeed in the new world

order of Isabella. Renu Juneja claims that in West Indian literature, hybridity is possible

only through mimicry; both are acts of representation and resistance that "usuallyinvolves indigenization" (12). Thus, mimicry and fantasy work together to portray Ralph

and Gurudeva's mutation, or indigenization, of "Indianness" in Isabella. In Ralph's case,

his own hybridization is seen as an impurity, a threat that speeds his refusal to belong inIsabella. For him, a hybrid identity lacks authenticity.

Though creolization is often associated with cultural and racial integration, Naipaul

shows that this process imposes a deliberate identification with race and ethnicity which

reveals the otherness of Indianness. In other literatures of the Caribbean, creolization hasmeant the new way of envisioning identity and community. What Naipaul's novel



demonstrates, however, is that the politics of creolization, however well-intentioned,

privilege certain identities while alienating others. The very word creolization, as Shalini

Puri points out, is a reworking of the term "creole" which, in the Caribbean, is attached toa very specific form of racial interculturation. Creolization, she argues, reflects the

rhetoric of nationalistic discourses that promote cultural hybridity even while condoning,

or rather ignoring, issues surrounding miscegenation. Puri suggests that the application of the rhetoric of creolization by artists not surprisingly proffered a vision of acculturation

favored by "official nationalists." For artists, "a hybrid creole aesthetic [envisioned an]

aesthetic unity achieved before social unity and [offered] a bridge toward that unity"(Puri 62). Creolization is, therefore, a contradictory process, which indeed no Caribbean

author would deny, but, at the same time, the privileging of cultural hybridity over a

racial one serves particular political objectives that brings to the fore the outside position

of East Indians in their relation to creolization. This, she says, is evident from the factthat:

[t]he term "creole," even as it is used today in the

Anglophone

Caribbean, does not include people of East Indian or

Chinese

descent, groups that together constitute about 20 per

cent of its

population; in Guyana and Trinidad people of East Indian

descent

are the largest ethnic group. Using "creolization" as a

figure for

Caribbean hybridity thus has its own complex legacy of

exclusion.

(65)

In the present case, Gurudeva performs several acts of creolization by deliberately using

the "sameness" between Africans and East Indians to heighten the spirit of

anticolonialism on the island. His legacy is carried through by Ralph who, however, believes that the "malaise of our times" is fixed in a "new world" condition in which

colonialism's discourse of enslavement has irreparably damaged the future communion of

once colonized peoples (The Mimic Men 6). Ralph believes that there are no homelandsin the "New World" because people only "pretended to be real, to be learning, to be

preparing ourselves for life." In Isabella, they were "mimic men of the New World ...

with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new" (157). Though both Ralph and Gurudeva are shown to utilize the only form of "access" available to

them--that of mimicry--in order to become "visible," Ralph's attempts to belong fail dueto his conviction that East Indians can only be "outsiders" in the West Indies.

The novel's provocative title makes apparent the power in mimicry for Ralph andGurudeva, for whom it is as much a postcolonial phenomenon as it is a social necessity in

order to belong in the "new" Isabella. Mimicry becomes integral in their substitution of



fantasy with reality, and to the reconstruction of their identity in the newness of

postcolonialism. To a large extent, it is in the characters' ability to reimagine the meaning

of Indianness on the island that their political careers and their identities are affirmed.Imposing a contingency of ethnic identity and social acculturation in this manner, The

Mimic Men is an exegesis of East Indian identity during decolonization, in which

"mimicry" is both resistance against and withdrawal from racial alterity. Mimicry is, thus,the vehicle with which both Ralph and Gurudeva bring visibility to their versions of East

Indianness and attempt to creolize their identities. Descendants of the indentured, they

undertake an embodiment of Indo-European Aryan ideals categorically associated withuppercaste (and Brahmin) Asian Indians and bring the ancient roles of priest and warrior

to Isabella's new political framework.

In his critical essay, "Of Mimicry and Man," Bhabha identifies Ralph Singh's mimicry as

"[t]he desire to emerge as 'authentic' through mimicry--through a process of writing andrepetition [which] is the final irony of partial representation" (88). Naipaul uses Ralph's

increasing ambivalence, marginality, and near self-erasure to present, in Bhabha's sense,

the gaze of Ralph's otherness from Isabella and England to represent East Indian identityas one of homelessness. Ralph ends his story, which he writes in fourteen months of

seclusion, by admiring the great distance he has placed between himself and Isabella:

"And really, I thought, in the French patios of the cool cocoa valleys of Isabella, je vens

d'lue. I had come 'from far, from the brink'" (The Mimic Men 271). The displacement has become, he claims, the basis for his "recovery" from paralyzing fantasies: "I no longer

yearn for ideal landscapes and no longer wish to know the god of the city. This does not

strike me as loss. I feel, instead, I have lived through attachment and freed myself" (273-274). He has been "freed" from Isabella, which he first left during his teens to seek an

education in England, and later when he is granted political asylum, then a second final

time after the failure of his political collaboration with Browne in Isabella.

Gurudeva's successful entry into Isabella's public image demonstrates his creolization of Indianness, which he establishes through serial acts of self-mutation. Like his son, the

father changes his name and is guided by others in his appropriation of an ideal Hindu

male identity. As Ralph remembers it, his father left them suddenly and without warning.Though the family attempted to keep his disappearance a secret, unbeknownst to them,

our secret was known to a large section of the

island ... we went

out and found we had become notorious. It was like that.

We went

out and found that my father, so far from disappearing

quietly, had

become a figure of sorts. He was in the hills, a

preacher, a

leader, with a growing frenzied following. (135)



As a young adult, Ralph's father had lived with a Christian missionary whose wife had

seen in him the qualities of an "aboriginal young man in the high collar, fighting his way

up and out of poverty and darkness" (138). Though little concrete information is availableabout the day that his middle-aged father suddenly decides to leave his middle-class life,

Ralph attempts to imagine the scene. Most likely frustrated with his government job in

the Education Department, his early missionary schooling made it possible for him toidentify with the oppression of the dockworkers. Impulsively, he will have started to

speak to the oppressed, and people listened. Among the crowd is an admiring Indian

widow, who Ralph thinks convinced his father to call himself Gurudeva (heavenlyteacher). Like his mother, Ralph looks down on the lower classes who formed the body

of Gurudeva's followers. By extension, he seeks to distance himself from any association

the island assumed for him, his mother, and sister, "us who were of the family of

Gurudeva [which] was the name my father now took" (139).



Victimary Rhetoric and the Politics of Decolonization in V. S. Naipaul’s‘Mimic Men’ (1967)

From the desk of Thomas F. Bertonneau on Tue, 2009-08-04 10:35

Novelists often make subtler political scientists than do the political scientists themselves, perhaps because a competent novelist nourishes himself on his observation of human

actuality whereas the political scientist is typically the subscriber to some party-

orthodoxy or the proponent of someone’s special-interest agenda. The names of JosephConrad and Fyodor Dostoyevsky come to mind, as men of keen political perception.

Competent novelists are anthropologists, interested supremely in reporting human facts

as they see them and in making their way to essential structures of communal existenceand the cultural tradition. The tenured political-science professors strive mightily to avoid

those cases where facts contradict doctrine, while the genuine novelists relish both the

paradox of human nature and the tragicomic accent of the historical chronicle.

I.

Such a percipient connoisseur of structural irony and the law of opposite results is thenative Trinidadian, of Indian ancestry, and longtime naturalized Briton, V. S. Naipaul

(born 1932; knighted 1990), whose Nobel Prize (2001) came at the last possible moment,

after which, the Prize Committee’s politicization being complete, no dissenter from thereigning orthodoxy – about race, the market, the West, or modernity – would receive an

honor. Naipaul had diagnosed the spiritual paralysis of the West in that morbidity’s

emergent phase; he foresaw, in fact, in the chaos of decolonization in the 1960s, much of what afflicts western society at large forty years later.

The title of The Mimic Men (1967), a key entry in Naipaul’s development of hisnovelistic oeuvre, suggests how important mimesis, or imitativeness, is to the author’s

view of humanity. Few people, as Naipaul sees it, manage to escape the trap of lettingothers define their identity; rather, most people meekly assimilate to a few readymade

stereotypes, the range of which diminishes in the age of mass communication and the

“consumer lifestyle.” Modern people tend swiftly to assume the indignation of theresentful; they tend just as swiftly to imitate the posturing of self-described victims. The Mimic Men’s narrator, Ranjit “Ralph” Kripalsingh, usually just “Singh,” who stems from

the Hindu Diaspora in the British West Indies, frequently uses the bland term “placidity”

to describe how he has often yielded to base impulses contrary to his conscience.

Singh writes in England. He has come there after a scandal of race-politics forces himinto exile from his ministerial position in the newly independent government of

“Isabella.” Naipaul loosely based this fictional ex-colonial polity on Jamaica. Singh

attempts, in his narrative, to find the pattern in his life and to seek out that “moral balancein human events” that explains his entanglement with the zealous, fatally ineffectual

politics of his insular home country. Morality for Singh, as for Naipaul, indicates

causality, so that, “if only we look down deeply enough, we can spot the beginning of

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misfortunes that eventually overtake us in [some] small suppression of truth, in just such

a tiny corruption.”

Despite his dependency on the esteem of others, and despite his having imitated the free-floating stereotypes, Singh insists that, “I never thought of myself as a victim.” Singh’s

rejection of the tantalizing and exploitable victim-status is the trait that redeems him, in part, from the general moral-political squalor that his memoir describes. That squalor

characterizes both Isabella, with its humiliating legacy of caste and race, and postwar London – with its disintegrating social structures, bomb-damage, and new commercial

tawdriness – where Singh comes to take up a college scholarship in his early twenties.

Disdaining victimary subjectivity, Singh retains a degree of honesty and integrity, notonly as the belated frank assessor of his own life, but also as an analyst of the prevailing

social order or lack thereof both in the former colonies and in Europe. The confessional

character of Singh’s self-account can generate a type of Augustinian gravity: “There arecertain states into which, during periods of stress, we imperceptibly sink; it is only during

the climb back up that we can see how far, for all the continuing consciousness of

wholeness and sanity, we had become distorted.”

“Shipwreck,” a recurrent metaphor of Singh’s story, enters into configuration with other recurrent motifs such as “distortion,” “disorder,” “drama,” and “chaos.”

Singh says that he originally conceived the idea of becoming an author, and more

particularly a historian of Europe’s imperial enterprise, in order that he might “give

expression to the [modern] restlessness” that sprang from “the deep disorder” wrought inequal parts by “the great explorations,” by “the overthrow in three continents of

established social organizations,” and finally by “the unnatural bringing together of

peoples who could achieve fulfillment only within the security of their own societies [in]

the landscapes hymned by their ancestors.” Naipaul himself had written something likeSingh’s study, in his non-fictional Middle Passage (1962), his earliest travel book, and he

would return to the theme in that hybrid of fiction and non-fiction, A Way in the World (1995). As for Naipaul’s narrator in The Mimic Men, Singh’s manuscript corresponds to

something else than the history of empires he had contemplated. Singh adduces an

explanation: “There is no such thing as history nowadays; there are only manifestos and

antiquarian research; and on the subject of empire there is only the pamphleteering of churls.”

Singh lets on that he has inflicted some of that journalistic churlishness, those manifestos

and pamphlets, on an undiscriminating audience. He wrote cynically, without conviction.

Others, however, contributed inflammatory words from inflamed righteousness, believingtheir own simplifications, merging with the stereotype of the political activist, the man

with a cause, the cause invariably one either of class or race. Such people take life, Singh

says, from “frenzy, the sense of mission, the necessary hurt.” In his meditative exile,Singh has come to believe that “the order to which the colonial politician succeeds is not

his order,” so that he confronts it as “something that he must destroy.” Respecting the

colonial politician, Singh observes in an epigram, “Destruction comes with hisemergence and is a condition of his power.” With wider application, dropping the



specific reference to the independence of ex-colonies, Singh observes that politicians

generally “have few gifts to offer,” being neither “engineers or artists or makers,” but

rather mere “manipulators,” so that “they offer themselves as manipulators.”

In one of those monologue-outbursts that – because they imply a hierarchy among

societies, and an imperative of judgment – so infuriate Naipaul’s politically correctcritics, Singh says: “To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World

transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder.”

One notes that Naipaul, through Singh, never conducts anything like an apology for

empire, whether Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, or British; nor does he make

ontological ascriptions about the Caribbean. He merely calls attention to a result of imperial projects, which he understands not to have been plotted out like predatory

conspiracies, but improvised from decade to decade under countless influences and

considerations until, in the middle of the Twentieth Century, they found their natural

terminus and spontaneously dissolved. The empires produced effects justifiable and

lamentable, but equally important, so did their dissolution. The racial-political spasms of decolonization never drove the retreat of empires (although the participants fervently

thought so), Naipaul implicitly argues, but rather they followed in the wake of decolonization, as “symptoms of disease.” These spasms “generated disorder where

previously everyone had deluded himself that there was order,” and “disorder was

drama,” which dispirited people “discovered to be a necessary human nutriment.”

II.

The phrase “victimary rhetoric,” prominent in my title, comes from the work of Eric L.

Gans, where it communicates with the observation that modern political radicalism

exhibits a distinctively sacrificial character. A number of Gans’ “Chronicles of Love andResentment” from recent years ( see Nos. 310 and 311) have explored this phenomenon,seeing it as a peculiarly modern, post-Holocaust expression of the resentment that

informs culture from culture’s beginnings in the primitive sacred. The relation of

“victimary rhetoric,” in particular, to the sacred and to sacrifice, has an implication for Naipaul’s Mimic Men. Naipaul sees the racial separatist movements in the era of

decolonization as atavistic religious disturbances, saturated in resentment, that have

tended to achieve their climax in resurgences of sacrificial violence. Gans remarks thatresentment originates in a subject’s perception that centrality on the cultural scene

belongs elsewhere than in himself, primitively, let us say, in a tribal Big Man. Many

myths represent communal revenge against the Big Man, culminating in his immolation

or expulsion – his sacrifice by the community. Think, for example, Abel or Oedipus.

But centrality is not so much any contingent person or fetish as it is an abstract position,

belonging integrally to symbolic systems. One might immolate a person or fetish that one

construes to monopolize the central position on some social scene, but the position itself will remain. The resentful subject’s irate act thus invariably fails to assuage his sense of

exclusion from a desired primacy or privilege or plenitude. The subject then feels guilt in

his failure. As Gans argues: “Resentment and guilt are inseparable, since [even] the

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/vw310.htm







imaginary expulsion of the central figure that fulfills the fantasy of resentment… leaves

the place (imaginarily) empty.” Resentment, driven by perceived exclusion, entails for

the complainant a scandalous conviction of inalterable subordination and pariah-hood.The conviction of inalterable humiliation then generates a second – a compensatory and

humblement-alleviating – fantasy: the one in which the subject imagines that the injustice

of his situation stems from a lie about ontological priority by which wicked othersmanipulate the social scene for their own welfare.

The abstractions are necessary, but concrete terms can serve understanding. Gans writes

that, “Guilt for segregation or colonialism ends with the phenomenon itself” and “to end

de jure privileges is to create a society of equals, a meritocracy.” That is all well andgood. Nevertheless: “The meritocratic ideal is vulnerable to the resentment inevitably

generated in those less successful than they would like to be, and our political system

dictates that if these individuals are members of ascriptive groups that can with anycredibility claim to be stigmatized, movements will arise to promote their interests by

appealing to the white guilt of the rest of society.” The resentful subject endows himself

with status, not by occupying the center, which no one can do, but by presenting himself as a victim of “oppression,” who is therefore entitled to special deference and privilege.

The Mimic Men shows Naipaul’s acute awareness of the social-existential scandal that

Gans describes; it also shows that Naipaul has discovered the conjoint phenomena of “victimary rhetoric” and “white guilt” on his own. Singh’s father, with whom the son has

a testy, ambiguous relationship, demonstrates the uncanny power of proclaimed victim-

status when, suddenly leaving his post with the island’s Education Department, he rebelsagainst Anglicization, Christianization, and bureaucratic servitude, and reverts, with

speeches, to fanciful Hindu primitivism, his “Aryan” heritage. “It was the Hindu

mendicant’s robe that he wore in the hills; and for all the emblems and phrases of

Christianity that he used, it was a type of Hinduism that he expounded, a mixture of acceptance and revolt, despair and action, a mixture of the mad and the logical.” The

father takes the name “Gurudeva,” meaning something like “Teacher of God.” The

guru’s followers, from every ethnic faction on Isabella, live on the charity of the poor intheir hill-country camp; in “a statement of despair” and “without a philosophy or cause”

they set fire to cane-fields while the colonial authorities placidly ignore their protest.

This “Exodus” itself failing magically to transform Gurudeva’s resentment into a providential utopia, the folk hero contrives to kidnap a racehorse belonging to the locally

prominent Deschampsneufs family. He slaughters the horse in a parody of the Brahmanic

Asvamedha ceremony: “An ancient sacrifice,” Singh writes, “in my imagination a thing

of beauty… now rendered obscene.” Despite the deed’s obscenity, “it became anacceptable rallying-point of righteous, underground emotion.”

The racehorse serves as an obvious symbol for Isabella’s social hierarchy, hence as a

focus for pervasive resentment. To eviscerate and quarter the animal, as Gurudeva does,

re-asserts, in a perverse and violent way, the Gospel-dictum that the last will be the first.The Asvamedha ceremony also seeks blatantly to revive the primitive sacred in protest

against the more or less modern, more or less secular meritocratic system on Isabella that



seems arbitrarily to exclude Asiatics (Hindus), blacks, and Chinese. The social protest

thus veers towards a cultural atavism. Singh sees in the event “an attempt at awesome

sacrifice, the challenge to Nemesis, performed by a shipwrecked man on a desert island.”It is not, in other words, practical, but thaumaturgical: it is a resort to voodoo-like

gestures intended to make others guilty for what the perpetrator has done. The deed can,

however, be interpreted pragmatically. The slaughter in its context, says Singh, “revealssociety as an association of consent and teaches, dangerously for all, that consent can be

withdrawn.”

But Singh’s father counts by no means as the solitary futile rebel on Isabella. Others too

feel spurred to bootless protest by sieges of desperation that they cannot fully understand.Singh’s cousin Cecil, who inherits a profitable bottling company, lets the business go to

seed while “dramatizing his decline [and] seeing himself as a victim of fate alone.”

Monsieur Deschampsneufs, owner of the unfortunate racehorse, becomes obsessed with asingle, throwaway phrase in Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black , which he takes as a

slur on the Créoles, and which he believes to have stemmed from a conversation that the

novelist once had with a female-ancestral Deschampsneufs; being an insulted party, whocan proclaim injustice and demand from his audience that they empathize with his

offense, is a prospect that attracts Deschampsneufs. This should not surprise anyone

because nothing lends itself to imitation quite as much as resentment: Deschampsneufs’

determination to find cause for offense absurdly mimics the offense that Gurudeva directsagainst him. Excluded-ness has become vogue, even de rigueur .

That meritocracy, while reviled, actually rewards discipline proves itself the case,

however, when Singh and some of his classmates at the local preparatory school acquit

themselves academically well enough to earn scholarships abroad for higher studies.Singh, of course, is an Asiatic, and Browne, what the novel calls a “Negro.”

III.

As Gans writes: “Historically… white guilt,” with the rhetoric to evince it, “derives from

the Holocaust.” And yet, “That a society appalled by Auschwitz would liberate itscolonies and end racial segregation reflects a moral defect in [the] de jure classifications”

that victimary rhetoric typically employs. The Mimic Men’s timeline acquires new

interest against the background of Gans’ assertion. Jamaica, Naipaul’s model for Isabella,enjoyed quasi-independence already before World War Two, but also suffered from

internal, largely race-driven social paroxysms. The cane-field worker and dockworker

strike, aimed in protest at the colonial administration, happened in 1938. The deadly anti-

Chinese riots, inseparable from the Black Consciousness movement on the island, camelater, in 1966. Gurudeva’s Exodus corresponds to events of 1938; but the son’s story

belongs to the postwar era, beginning with his student years in London, living among the

West Indian immigrant community and other elements of the foreign-born proletariat – the milieu that would erupt violently in the Notting Hill Riots of 1958.

Singh encounters his school chum Browne in London only once, brushing shoulders with

him near Earl’s Court Station. Browne strikes Singh as buoyant and incongruously happy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Notting_Hill_race_riots

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Notting_Hill_race_riots



after having been spat on in the street by a woman (so he says), whom he calls a “bitch.”

Singh is unsure of Browne’s story, “whether he had made it up… whether he had

mistaken me for someone else; or whether the story was true and when he saw me he wasstill in a state of shock.” But the insult possesses manipulative potential. In endowing

Browne with its quantum of useful offense, it serves the “blackmailing” element that

Gans identifies in white guilt. Browne can now invoke this indignity, whether real or imagined, against the majority collectively, just as he can gather a following by

convincing a constituency that, in him, they have received offense collectively. Back on

Isabella, Browne appears again as “a scholarship boy… running to seed,” who “had givenup his teaching job and had become a pamphleteer.”

Browne, who once struck Singh as a clown, starts a newspaper, The Socialist . He trades

in “distress,” seeking to unify Isabella’s fractious lower classes against the existing

establishment. Browne nevertheless cannot help but imitate establishment attitudes, or hisfantasy of them, the same ones that he exploits as a rhetorical target. “It was Browne

again who, while campaigning for the employment of Negroes in the firm of Cable and

Wireless, supported their exclusion from the banks.” Browne tells Singh: “If I thought black people were handling my few cents I wouldn’t sleep too well.” Singh becomes a

real estate developer and lives high with his English wife Sandra, but he suffers an

underlying boredom. Sandra later leaves Singh. Browne then draws Singh into The

Socialist when he asks him to write about his father for an edition of the journalcommemorating the dockworkers’ strike. “He invited me to share distress.”

In imagery that reflects Singh’s earlier Augustinian remarks on moral desuetude, he

records how, “I was now committed to a whole new mythology, dark and alien” and to “a

series of interiors I never wanted to enter.” The Gurudeva-article, “deeply dishonest,”nevertheless increases readership until Singh and Browne find themselves leading a

movement that is “less a political awakening than a political anxiety,” its constituencyrequiring plain cues. What generates the “anxiety”? Singh knows that in truth Isabella is“a benevolently administered dependency” and that “as long as our dependency remained

unquestioned our politics were a joke.” Pamphleteering and The Socialist having “made

public a public joke,” the new politics, which treats the old politicians as “dead andunimportant” (an anticipatory equivalent of postmodernism’s proverbial “dead white

males”), suddenly threatens the play-acting radicals with a prospect of responsibility. The

logic of complaint and agitation portends only one outcome: “drama,” as Singh calls it,his euphemism for violence, as a magical gesture with a millennial goal.

Given the benevolence of the colonial administration, the radicals find themselves

rhetorically hard pressed to lodge plausible indictments. Browne and Singh and their

cohorts now confront a paradox of “victimary rhetoric” in the postwar world. As Ganswrites, steady incremental moral concessions in response to minority agitation gradually

forced Third-World intelligentsia, who had benefited from Westernization and who now

constituted its exponents under a new guise, “to recognize the essential identity of what

had previously appeared as two ontologically distinct and opposed entities: the class of oppressors and the class of their denouncers.” To overcome this blockage of their agenda,

Gans writes, the radicals, being “no longer the voice of the proletariat who stand outside



the power structure,” needed to recast themselves as “the conscience of the universal

bourgeoisie.” Now, in fact, “the purveyors and the sufferers, the subjects and objects of

white guilt are the same,” and “the only difference… is that the intellectuals would purgetheir guilt by undertaking to spread its awareness to those who continue to ignore it.”

Gans’ term “purgation” reminds us of Naipaul’s insistence that imperial withdrawal

created “chaos” and that chaos generates panic and that panic spurs a desperate search for opportunities of direct social intervention – for scapegoats.

What did we talk about? We were, of course, of the left. We were socialist. We stood for

the dignity of the workingman. We stood for the dignity of distress. We stood for the

dignity of our island, the indignity of our indignity… We spoke as honest men. But weused borrowed phrases, which were part of the escape from thought, from that reality we

wanted people to see but could ourselves now scarcely face. We enthroned dignity and

distress. We went no further.

The hotheaded element in Browne’s regime knows no reluctance, however: “They

promised to abolish poverty in twelve months… to discipline the police… [to facilitate]intermarriage… to kick the whites into the sea and send the Asiatics back to Asia.” Singh

compares the “frenzy” that these hyperbolic promises conjure to the religious expectancy

“generated [by] the street-corner preacher who thrills his hearers with a vision of the

unattainable rich world going up in a ball of fire.” The immolation connoted by the “ballof fire” recalls the Asvamedha. Rapidly, then, the radical program ramps up from the

rhetoric of social dignity to prophecies of a retributive millennium. An election brings the

radicals to power, with Browne at the helm, and with Singh in an unspecified subalternrole. Now, suddenly, “Our grievances were our reality.”

IV.

Gans writes, in Signs of Paradox (2001), concerning victimary rhetoric, that all oratory

tends to the imperious and annoyed; oratory makes demands and typically makes them byaccusing the addressee of maintaining a position illegitimately asymmetrical with respect

to his accuser. Victimary rhetoric thus always participates in a certain utopianism because

“it is… only at the horizon that symmetry is the measure of ethical progress.” Moreover,

as “interaction in concrete situations requires the speakers to occupy stable positions,” theaggression implicit in victimary rhetoric “interferes with dialogue,” until, ratcheting up

its conviction of indignity, “resentful denunciation of centrality engenders the deadly

configuration of the sparagmos.” Or again: “The ultimate rhetorical achievement is the panic sown in the resentful crowd by the orator [who is] skillful in augmenting [the

crowd’s] indifferentiation as against the designated adversary’s central specificity,” a

culturally disintegrative process, characterized by “the indefinite proliferation of themimetic,” that exhibits “the structure of scapegoating.”

Naipaul, too, understands these intersections of oratory, politics, violence, and modern

recursions to the sacred. In a causal sequence that has all too many models in the

aftermath of the rather swift retraction of European overseas rule, Isabella descendsthrough convulsive stages into a bloody episode of mob-rule and lynching.



The climax in The Mimic Men comes with the fatal aggravation of Isabella’s usual racial

hostilities. Cynical rhetorical obfuscation abets the episode. Thus: proletarian annoyance,

focused at first on Singh himself, has reduced its discrimination to embrace a collectivescapegoat vulnerable to direct action, as Singh, in his ministerial post, is not. While Singh

is away in London to renegotiate Isabella’s share in local mining revenues, Browne’s

most radical followers provocatively urge “nationalization” of the sugar cane plantations.The cane field workers, largely “Asiatic,” resist this scheme. They stage a strike at

harvest-time. “Nationalization had become a word,” with “no meaning” except “Asiatic

threat” against the regime, with the main cash crop as hostage; and it soon degenerates to“less than a word… an emotive sound.” The field hands set fire to the standing cane; their

sympathizers attack rural police stations and loot shops. “We were in the midst of a racial

disturbance,” says Singh, “but we spoke of it as nationalization.”

Browne’s government organizes – or at least cynically acquiesces in – extreme black-on-Asiatic counter-violence: “Women and children assaulted… hackings… families burnt

alive in wooden houses.” Singh, back in Isabella from his failed London mission, finds

that the “Asiatics” have now turned to him personally to rescue them from the lynch-mobs: “One poor man had brought a stone stained and sticky with blood and fine hair, the

hair perhaps of a child.” Singh can do nothing. His diplomatic failure leaves him in a

position of conspicuous weakness perfectly suited for political usage.

The rest of the government indeed now sharply repudiates Singh, stripping him of his portfolio and demanding his immediate departure for London with what luggage he can

carry and fifty thousand dollars, “a fraction of my fortune.” It is one more gesture of

“drama,” of politics as crude public theater. The killing presumably goes on but Singh

has grown fatalistic: “They were simple, frightened men… they offered me only whatthey hoped they might be offered when their time came.” The pattern of events in The

Mimic Men recurs in Guerrillas (1971), A Bend in the River (1979), and most recently in Half a Life (2001). In Guerrillas and A Bend , Naipaul adds a new element to hisunderstanding of decolonization. He sees the inexpugnable racial resentment of post-

colonial politics as seeping back into the domestic politics of the former imperial nations.

In Guerrillas, and in a number of essays related to that novel, Naipaul reveals the often-

direct relation of the Caribbean Black Power movements to the American Black Power movements. In A Bend in the River , leftwing European and American academics,

imported to an African nation to staff a new university, provide theoretical justifications

for factional oppression in the same nation, just as they seem to take vicarious excitementin the brutal violence that their Marxist views help the Big Man to foment. The factotum

excuse for all policy failures in the society is “colonialism.”

In Signs of Paradox, Gans refers to this feedback from the Third World into the First

World as “the minoritization of culture.” Gans notes, with allusion to Nietzscheanterminology, that: “Today culture has become ever more clearly the property and

occupation of the ‘weak.’ Group resentment has replaced individual resentment – the

point of essential difference between the high and the popular – as the primary object of cultural deferral.” In minoritized culture, “the emphasis on the cohesion of the minority

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0802/naipaul.htm

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0802/naipaul.htm



group in opposition to the noncommunal larger society leads members of the majority to

identify with and participate in the minority community’s victimary status by the very

fact of their exclusion from this minority… The white guilt that motivates this paradoxical identification is ultimately indistinguishable from the desire to participate in

the cultural privilege conferred on blacks [or other minorities] by their victimary status.”

No less than Eric L. Gans, V. S. Naipaul has identified the strange emotional and

sophistical contortions that bind together culturally, in an ambiguously globalized world,the endlessly projecting, guilt-mongering antinomians of the West and their resentment-

driven and minoritarian clientèle both at home and abroad.

[P.S. I wrote this essay early in July before the much-publicized Henry Louis Gatesincident and Barack Hussein Obama’s reflexive public condemnation of the Cambridge

policeman, who, in entirely an uninformed presidential opinion, had behaved “stupidly.”

Were anyone wondering how to apply, or where to begin to apply, the foregoing

discussion of V. S. Naipaul and Eric L. Gans to the contemporary scene (I believe that

Naipaul and Gans have much to teach us about our predicament), then the Gates incidentwould be an excellent starting place. – TFB]

[P.P.S. I write in full awareness of the “scandal” of V. S. Naipaul, itschief propagators being Paul Theroux in a notorious memoir and theauthor of a recently published “unauthorized” biography of thenovelist. I take these denunciations of Naipaul’s character with a largegrain of salt, in Theroux’s case because it involves the ego of one artistin relation to the ego of another, both egos being large, no doubt; andin the case of the new biography because the leftwing-dominatedpublishing establishment, in concert with the politicized literature

departments of the universities, has been intent on diminishingNaipaul’s reputation for at least a decade. I sense a campaign. But, forthe sake of argument, let us say that all the charges are true and thatNaipaul is a wretched person who mistreats women and throws awayhis friends. So what? The first question I ask about a book – it might bea novel – is not, is the author a nice guy, but does the book holdtogether, does it give us a glimpse into human truths? I leave adhominem criticism to the School of Resentment. – TFB]

Documents

The Irascible Prophet Naipaul at Home.doc