V. S. Naipaul: Native SonAuthor(s): HENRY CHARLESSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 2/3, V.S. NAIPAUL: NOBEL LAUREATE FORLITERATURE, 2001 CALL AND RESPONSE (June-September 2002), pp. 22-24Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654265 .

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22

VS Naipaul : Native Son*

by

FR. HENRY CHARLES

James Joyce referred to Ireland as "the sow that eats her own farrow". As a young writer, he fled Ireland, too narrow, too stultifying, to spend most of his life in self imposed exile in Paris. Naipaul, similarly, left Trinidad early - "escape" was his word for it.

In The Middle Passage he wrote of awakening from sleep in England in terror from the nightmare that he was back in "tropical Trinidad".

Trinidad was, and remained, irrelevant and unimportant, somewhere "on the other side of the real world."

Ireland has an annual "James Joyce festival," I am told. I am not sure we're ready to do Naipaul a similar honour, or favour. The point to be underlined, however, is that a writer is not the best guide or interpreter of his work or his life. Joyce remained inescapably Irish, just as Naipaul, a chauvinist of note, remains inescapably Trinidadian.

No one, not even Selvon at his best, captures the cadence and nuance of Trinidadian speech as accurately, as dead to rights, as Naipaul. To recall some of Naipaul' s lines, especially in the early works, is to be flooded by the laughter of recognition.

In an instant one inhabits a culture. This is not simply the effect of style. Language, as Heidegger pointed out, involves more than representation or style. It is the instrument that "unveils" reality. It discloses where we dwell.

Naipaul's ability to occasion that disclosure is simply without peer. His assess- ment of new world possibility, on the other hand, provokes ongoing controversy. He leaves anger in his wake wherever he goes.

There is little doubt that Naipaul indirectly absolves the imperialist and colo- niser, in the Caribbean, Africa, or India. At the same time, there is a truth about the colonial experience which he has relentlessly dissected and laid bare.

It is the enormous void at the heart of it. India, Africa, and the Caribbean are not all the same in this regard. In the former two, the end of colonialism meant some return in those societies to (what he called) "their own internal reverences".

In the Caribbean, things were different. With colonial rule in place you had absorption or mimicry. With rule relinquished, absorption and mimicry became forlorn options. You lived, as Meredith put it in Guerrillas, in "a house without walls".

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This, in my view, is the one thing Naipaul has said again and again and again. The Swedish Academy praised him, among other things, for compelling us "to see the presence of supressed histories". I am not sure this quite fits, what Naipaul compels is the perception of absence.

It is all in the history, finally. In the Mimic Men, Ralph Singh longed to make sense of:

the deep disorder, which the great explorations - the unnatural bringing together of peoples who could achieve fulfilment only within the security of their own societies and the landscape hymned by their ancestors - brought about.

What Singh longed to do, of course, is what we're still trying to do, that is, interpret history in such a way that the future becomes a horizon of expansion, not simply the anticipation or repetition of disorder.

Order and disorder, Singh's preoccupation, as Robert Morris wrote, are key preoccupations for Naipaul. The underlying question is, how can order be generated - and maintained - in societies that came into existence as creations of empire", or, as Sydney Mintz put it, through "demography by fiat"?

It's a question whose existential, political, and cultural implications are still being worked out. For Naipaul: the issue is settled.

Miguel Street (more perhaps than A House for Mr. Biswas) may be taken as the classic existential exploration.

"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street," says the boy-narrator, "and just say 'slum', because he could see no more. But we who lived there saw our street as a world."

The characters who people this world struggle valiantly against everyday chaos. Like people everywhere, they have their projects, dreams, and hopes. The gap between reality and aspiration, however, between actuality and possibility, proves impossible to bridge.

They get nowhere, but not because of lack of effort or desire. They are stymied by conditions of the "street" itself. If they wanted to get somewhere, they couldn't start from there.

Naipaul's later judgment, with cynicism and contempt added, is this judgment deepened, writ large, and delivered with the force of an incantation.

The controlling feature is the disorder, the void, in which the society began, to which it returned when the coloniser left. This is what determines Naipaul's outlook.

Given its terms, there is no history to unfold. Change is always illusory. Thus, his "guerrillas" of the 70s may well have come from the 50s. They were only "playing

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24

badjohn", and they got "licked down". Whether in the fifties or the seventies, politics, too, is a charade. It's only "playacting", and it moves, predictably, "from playacting to disorder".

Caribbean origins and history may be looked at differently, more positively, as other artists have done. This outlook involves more than simple affirmation, or the philosophy of the tourist brochure. You don't get beyond Naipaul by proposing hope cheaply. Hope worthy of the name requires a more complex statement, and more arduous achievement.

To dismiss Naipaul as lacking nationalism or patriotism is understandable. His chauvinism can be deeply offensive. But there is more to a great writer than moral flaws. We don't go to Naipaul to learn how to live, though we should read him to know something of where we live. Naipaul' s is a clinical diagnosis of ramifications of the imperial experiment, through colonialism and beyond. All serious reflection, whether or not it acknowledges him must keep coming to terms with the issues he raises.

* Reprinted with permission from Sunday Guardian, Trinidad, October 28, 2001

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