LITERARY PROFILE

Searching for a centre: the writing of V SNaipaul

John Thieme

Few writers arouse more controversy than V S Naipaul. Comments he hasmade for his disaffected reports on the Third World, such as 'Africa has nofuture"," 'It was on Mauritius that the dodo forgot how to f1y,2and 'Muslimfundamentalism has no intellectual substance to it, therefore it must collapse',"have stirred up considerable animosity towards him in many ofthe countries hehas visited. His dismissal of his native Trinidad as 'unimportant, uncreative,cynical,4and of the West indies as the 'Third World's third world's has elicited asimilar response in the Caribbean, while his 'two books about his ancestralhomeland of India, An Area of Darkness (1964) and India: A WoundedCivilization (1977), which dwell on the outdoor defecating habits of Indiansand the way in which the Hindu doctrine of karma has enmeshed the populacein a quietism tantamount to psychic paralysis, have brought his name into fairlygeneral disrepute among intellectuals on the sub-continent.

His most serious criticisms of the Third World, which have guaranteed thatthe critical response to his work has seldom been lukewarm, have mainlyappeared in his non-fiction. In his novels and short 'stories there is a moreoblique approach to the malaise that he finds endemic in colonial andpost-colonial societies, and social themes are subsumed in narratives whichfocus primarily on the psychology of trapped and displaced individuals.Non-fiction works such as An Area of Darkness and India: A WoundedCivilisation, which initially appear to be social diatribes, can be read asintensely personal documents dramatising the author's own sense ofderacination. Similarly, novels such as A House for Mr Biswas (1961),Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979), which initially appear to beconcerned with specific inter-personal relationships, can be read as allegoriesof colonial and post-colonial experience.It is his continuing concern with theconsequences of imperialism and its aftermath-particularly the psychologicalconsequences-which makes Naipaul difficult to ignore, despite his manydismissive remarks about the Third World.

Naipaul's origins cast considerable light on the theme of personal

1 'Meeting V S Naipaul', Naipaul interviewed by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York Times BookReview, 13 May 1979,p 36.

2 The Overcrowded Barracoon, London: Andre Deutsch, 1972,p 256.3 Naipaul interviewed by Edward Behr, Newsweek, 18 August 1980, p 38.4 The Middle Passage, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969,p 43.< 711e Overcrowded Barracoon,p 2S(),

LITERARY PROFILE

displacement which looms so largein his work. Although his subsequentabsorption into the English tradition has tended to obscure his West IndianEast Indianness, his early life and the family structure into which he was bornprove to have been crucial determinants of his personality and writings. Hisgrandparents migrated to Trinidad from India under the system ofindentureship, but both the Naipauls and the Capildeos (Naipaul's maternalancestors) were untypical of the majority of Trinidad's East Indian populationin that they were brahmins, and both sides of the family could boast pundits(who ministered to the spiritual needs of the new agricultural work-force)among their members.

To be a high-caste Hinduin Trinidad was to be something of a contradictionin terms, since, as Naipaul's younger brother Shiva points outin his Africantravel journal North of South, 'Our ancestors, when they crossed the blackwater (the kala pani) , lost caste. Complex purification rituals would have to beperformed if they were to be cleansed of their defilement and restored to thefold." Naipaul frequently illustrates the problematic situation of the high-casteEast Indian West Indian and provides extended commentary on it in A Housefor Mr Biswas, where the Tulsi family, closely modelled on the Capildeos, aredepicted as a bastion of the old India in Trinidad, fighting a losing rearguardaction against the encroachments of the larger Creole society of the WestIndian melting-pot.

Yet displaced Hinduism is only one aspect of the sense of deracination thatpervades Naipaul's early fiction .. In The Mimic Men (1967) the narrator/protagonist, Ralph Singh, says this of the history of Empire he once dreamed ofwriting:Itwas my hope to give expression to the restlessness, the deep disorder, which the greatexplorations, the overthrow in three continents.of established social organizations, theunnatural bringing together of peoples who could achieve fulfilment only within thesecurity of their own societies and the landscapes hymned by their ancestors, it was myhope to give partial expression to the restlessness which this great upheaval has broughtabout."

And, while Singh's narrative persona should not simply be identified withNaipaul, these sentiments provide a useful summary of both this novel's largerconcerns and those of Naipaul's writing more generally. The disharmonyengendered by the sundering of supposedly organic links with ancestrallandscapes lies at the heart of his view of the colonial predicament.

On a more personal level, his father, Seepersad (1906-53), proved a crucialformative influence, as Naipaul makes cleat in his Foreword to The Adventuresof Gurudeva (1976),8 the revised British edition of a volume of short storieswhich Seepersad Naipaul had originally published in Trinidad in the early

h North 0/ South, London: Andre Deutsch, 1978, p 73.I '111(· Mimic Men, London: Andre Deutsch, 1967, p 38.H 'f111' 11I/1'1'lIIl1ft'.v o/Gllrlu/I"I'II, London: Andre Deutsch, 1976, pp 7-23.

~~ I~~~_______ L.............. ~~ __ ~~_~~~~_~~ .......... t LUW.ioU

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1940s.9 Seepersad was for many years a journalist on the Trinidad Guardian,the island's leading newspaper, and both his journalism and his fictionprovided an inspiration for the young Naipaul. This is particularly evident inAHouse for Mr Biswas, where, following his father's advice to take him for asubject.i" he wrote a fictionalised version of Seepersad's life-story, based onaspects of his fiction and journalism and details from his life, particularly hisresponse to the practices of Hinduism.

Naipaul was born in Chaguanas in central Trinidad in 1932. His actualbirthplace was the 'Lion House', an imposing building in the town's main streetwith a unique Indian design. The house provided the original on whichHanuman House in A House for Mr Biswas was based and it was here thatNaipaul spent his earliest years until his family moved, in 1938, to Port ofSpain. In 1942, like Anand in A House for Mr Biswas, he came third in the'island's 'exhibition exam (from which free secondary school places could begained) and won a place at Queen's Royal College, Trinidad's leadingsecondary school. Naipaul attended the school from 1943 to 1949, specialisingin French and Spanish in the upper forms. During these years, in a manner akinto the nomadic wanderings of Mr Biswas and his family, the Naipauls movedseveral times, before-eventually settling, in 194:7, in a house in the St Jamesarea of Port of Spain. This house was the original for the final house inMr

Biswas.In 1949 Naipaul was awarded a Trinidad government scholarship to study

abroad and the following year left Trinidad to take up a place at UniversityCollege, Oxford. It was a wish come true. In an oft-quoted passage he recordshis desire to escape from his colonial homeland:When I was in the fourth form I wrote a vow on the endpaper of my Kennedy's RevisedLatin Primer to leave within five years. I left after six; and for many years afterwards inEngland, falling asleep in bedsitters with the electric fire on, I had been awakened by thenightmare that I was backin tropical Trinidad.I'

So, like the unnamed boy narrator of Miguel Street (1959), Naipaul was able toleave Trinidad through the escape route offered by a metropolitan education.Yet the island society and, more specifically, his Hindu origins had left anindelible mark on him.

At Oxford Naipaul read English, but was disappointed to find himselfstudying a syllabus 'seemingly aimed at juvenile antiquarians'.12 Although hedistinguished himself at Oxford-l R R Tolkien, who was one of "hisexaminers, rated his Anglo-Saxon translation the best of his year

13-he was

disenchanted with the academic curriculum and already determined to become

9 Gurudeva and other Indian Tales, Port of Spain: Trinidad Publications, n.d. (1943?).10 The Adventures of Gurudeva, Foreword, p 17.II The Middle Passage,p 43.12 'An Area of Brilliance', The Observer (London) 28 November 1971, P 8.13 ibid.

LITERARY PROFILE

a writer. While still at Oxford, he completed a long novel, which was notpublished.

After coming down from Oxford in 1954, Naipaul worked briefly in theCataloguing Department of the National Portrait Gallery, London. Apartfrom part-time jobs in Trinidad while waiting to take up his scholarship, and aperiod of ten weeks writing advertising copy after reading an unfavourablereview of his first novel, this is the only non-literary work Naipaul has everundertaken and it is one of his proudest boasts that he has known no otherprofession than that of writer. During his early years in London, he lived inseveral areas. After initially staying with relatives in Paddington, where hesuffered from asthma attacks for four months, he subsequently lived inKilburn, Muswell Hill and Streatham.ltwas in Streatham thatA House for MrBiswas, a novel which he has referred to as 'very much a South Londonbook'l"was written. His experience of living there also clearly lies behind his one'English' novel; Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963). In'1955 Naipaulmarried Patricia Anne Hale, an English woman he had met at Oxford.

From 1954 to 1956 Naipaul worked for theBBC'S Caribbean Voices, aprogramme of which he became editor.It was broadcast weekly from Londonto the West Indies and had already built up a considerable reputation as ashowcase for new Caribbean writing; it had provided several of the importantgeneration of West Indian writers who came to the fore in the 1950s with aninvaluable early outlet for their work.Itwas while he was working for theBBC

that Naipaul began to write stories for what was eventually to take shape asMiguel Street (1959).15 The book was written quickly ina period of six weeks, atthe end of which time Naipaul 'felt he.had found himself as a writer. A publisherwas not, however, immediately forthcoming and it was only after thepublication of his first two novels, The Mystic Masseur (1957) and The Suffrageof Elvira (1958) that Miguel Street found its way into print.

io these early books the colonial situation of the characters is for the mostpart implicit, but it is nevertheless central to an understanding of theirpredicament. In Miguel Street the inhabitants of the fictional Port of Spainstreet which gives the book its title either imitate foreign role models or striveto find a sense of identity through a macho ethic similar to that embodiedin calypso, Trinidad's most important folk narrative medium. Yet theywas not, however, immediately forthcoming and it was only after thetheir quest for self-fulfilment. In The Mystic Masseur the narrative takes theform of a rogue's progress, as the picaroon hero gradually rises to the top of thesociety. In The Suffrage of Elvira the formula is reversed: the action focuses noton a trickster, as in The Mystic Masseur, but on a protagonist who is the victimof trickery, a candidate from Port of Spain who comes to the rottener-than-

14 'Portrait Gallery', Naipaul interviewed by David Bates, Sunday Times Magazine (London),26May 1963, p 13.

I' Sl'l' Fi",Ii"/l,hl' (,,,"1,(,, London: Andr~ Deutsch,1984, pp 17-33.________I_.~~ ~ ~ ~ JL -J~~~ ~

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rotten constituency of Elvira in South Trinidad to buy himself a seat inTrinidad's second election under universal suffrage, and finds himself no matchfor the locals' sharp practice as he is forced to bribe and bribe again. Aspolling-day approaches, he begins to fear defeat, but there is no suchperipeteia. He has paid through the nose for the seat and he wins it. This,Naipaul's dead-pan manner suggests, is the way things work in Trinidad.Everyone and everything has a price and to succeed one must pay it. Theground rules are clear enough. The irony of this, Naipaul's most richly comicnovel, emerges not from exposure of the characters' moral aberrations, butfrom the implicit suggestion that this is a society in which concepts of justiceand morality do not operate.

It is aview of society which is articulated more clearly in Naipaul's CaribbeanI

travel journal, The Middle Passage(1962), in which he writes about thesupremacy of the trickster figure in Trinidad and claims an affinity between: thesociety in which he grew up and the amoral world of the Spanish picaresquenovel:Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in asociety which denied itself heroes .... For talent, a futility, the Trinidadiansubstituted intrigue; and in the exercise of this, in small things as well as large, hebecame a master.16

By 1960 Naipaul's British reputation was already considerable. He was theauthor of three successful books, two of which won prizes, and he had beenreviewing fiction for the New Statesman since1957. He was, however, stillstruggling to make a living as a writer. He was hard at work onA House for MrBiswas, his longest novel and the work which many critics regard as hismasterpiece.

Mr Biswas is both a minutely circumstantial account of an individual life anda novel which may be read as an allegory of the East Indian's situation inTrinidad, or of the colonial predicament more generally. Naipaul has describedthe colonial mentality as a kind of existentialist impotence, a condition in whichthe individual feels powerless to exercise freedom of choice:... to be a colonial is, in a way, to know a total kind of security. Itis to have all decisionsabout major issues taken out of one's hands.It is to feel that one's political status hasbeen settled so finally that there is very little one can do in the world.!"

From early on in his life Mohun Biswas is a victim of this condition; he feels asense of displacement and resolves to own a house of his own. The succession ofhouses in which he lives-mostly as a tenant-formsastructural pattern whichcovers many aspects of Hindu life in pre-Independence Trinidad and, byextension, the colonial psychology. Central to this pattern is Biswas'salternation between periods of passive dependence on his in-laws, the Tulsis,

16 The Middle Passage,pp 43-4.17 'Without a Place', V S Naipaul in conversation with Ian Hamilton, Times Literary Supplement

(London), 30 July 1971,p 897.

LITERARY PROFILE

who represent the older Hindu way of life, now struggling to maintain a senseof distinctiveness in the larger Creole society of Trinidad, and attempts toassert his independence (to decolonise himself?) which are mainly channelledinto the Ideal of the house.

Two early attempts at buiJding his own house fail and, since throughout thereis a correlation between Biswas's psychic health and the houses in which helives-he breaks down when the first of these two houses is destroyed in astorm-the suggestion seems to be that he is not yet a sufficiently emancipatedperson to stand alone. Finally he is dupedinto-paying too much for a jerry-builtmodern house where he dies at the age of forty-six. The wheel has come fullcircle, since the novel's Prologue has adumbrated this conclusion, butnOW thatthe full story has been told, the ending is fraught with ambiguity. ThoughBiswas has been cheated and though the expense and worry of the final housemay well have contributed to his early death, he has succeeded in attaining hisideal of the house, in claiming his own 'portion of the earth'.18The Prologuehas concluded with the remark that itwould have been 'terrible' for Biswas tohave died 'unnecessary and unaccommodated'I? and this has been averted,since he is accommodated both literally and metaphorically. The acquisition ofthe final house may be seen as representing a partial freedom, a limitedmovement beyond the colonial psychology.

After completing A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul was awarded athree-month scholarship by the Trinidad and Tobago government, whichenabled him to return to Trinidad. While he was there, the Prime Minister anddistinguished West Indian historian, Dr Eric Williams, suggested that heshould write a book about the Caribbean, and the scholarship was extended toenable him to visit other parts of the region. Naipaul spent a total of sevenmonths travelling in the Caribbean, visiting Dutch and French societies as wellas other Anglophone territories. The Middle Passage, the first of Naipaul'smany non-fiction works, was the result of these travels. The book; is as much asocial investigation as a traveller's journal and throughout it demonstrates aconcern with cultural identity in the Caribbean and Guianas. While the sectionon British Guiana (Guyana) is the longest, the Trinidad chapter looms largest,for here Naipaul is writing as much from past experience as from his presentvisit, and the result is a response characterised by provocative remarks aboutthe island's inhabitants, such as: 'Port of Spain is the noisiest city in the world.Yet it is forbidden to talk,'20 and 'Like monkeys pleading for evolution, eachclaiming to be better than the other, Indians and Negroes appeal to theunacknowledged white audience to see how much they despise each other. ,21

Not surprisingly, such remarks have made the book notorious in the West

IH A House for Mr Biswas, London: Andre Deutsch, 1961,p 13.I', ibid.III Till' Mi(/flll' Passag«,p 58.JI n.u., P H7.

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Indies and attacks on it include a review by the Jamaican novelist, JohnHearne, who raises the charge of negrophobia,22Outside the Trinidad chapter,the writing is more matter-of-fact and, while the remainder of the work is notwithout its moments of waspish satire, it lacks the vitriolic and tendentiousquality of this section.

Now launched on a second career as a travel writer, Naipaulin1962 receiveda Phoenix Trust Award to write a book about India. He has always felt itnecessary to bephysically absent from the places he is treating in his fiction andwhile in India he wrote his only novel with an entirely English setting andprotagonist, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion(1963). Despite the changein setting, this is a work which demonstrates considerable similarity with thetwo masterpieces of Naipaul's fictional oeuvre so far, A House for Mr Biswasand The Mimic Men. Like these two novels, it is a fable about cultural identityand like his most recent work, The Enigma of Arrival(1987), it is a 'Conditionof England' novel.P

In a 1971 interview Naipaul said:In writing my first four or five books (including books which perhaps people think of asmy big books) I was simply recording my reactions to the world; I hadn't come to anyconclusions about it. ... But since then, through my writing, through the efforthonestly to respond, I have begun to have ideas about the world. I have begun toanalyse.24

This suggests that a change occurred in his attitude to writing and responding toexperience about the time he first went to India and the journey to thesub-continent did mark a watershed in Naipaul's development. Never havingfelt at home in Trinidad or England, he travelled to India in the hope that itwould offer a culture where' he woufd experience a sense of belonging. He cameaway feeling'It was a journey that ought not to have been made; it had brokenmy life in two. ,25 His experiences in India are recorded in An Area of Darkness(1964), but an article reprinted in The Overcrowded Barracoon(1972) providesthe most succinct account of his reactions as a returned colonial:A colonial in the double sense of one who had grown up in a Crown colony and one whohad been cut off from the metropolis, beit either England or India, I came to Indiaexpecting to find metropolitan attitudes. I had imagined that in some ways the largenessof the land would be reflected in the attitudes of the people. I have found ... tbepsychology of the cell and the hive.26

An Area of Darkness is a highly personal book, finally far more an account ofpersonal trauma than an analysis of the social malaise Naipaul detects in India.

22 Caribbean Quarterly, 8 December 1962, p 65--6.23 This theme is developed in my article 'Naipaul's English fable: Mr Slone and the Knights

Companion', Modern Fiction Studies 30(3) Autumn 1984,pp 497-503.24 'The Writer as Colonial', V S Naipaul interviewed by Adrian Rowe-Evans, Transition (40)

1971, pp 56-7.25 An Area of Darkness, London: Andre Deutsch, 1964, pp 279-80.26 'In the Middle of the Journey'. The Overcrowded Barracoon, p 44.

LITERARY PROFILE

It does, however, attack India on several levels. The hierarchical division oflabour occasioned by the caste system, the Indian lack of a sense of history andthe conflicts he finds between Hindu, tenets on cleanliness and the omnipresentexcrement he sees are all particular objects of his irony. Though Naipaul mayappear to be attacking a variety of targets, virtuallyall the Hindu failings whichhe documents in An Area of Darkness can be traced to the influence of karma,the doctrine that says that one's fate in lifeis determined by one's behaviour inprevious incarnations. Naipaul sees it as a paralysing, defeating philosophy,which induces a quietism that precludes Western-style self-realisation andprogress.27

Naipaul's voice in An Area of Darkness purports to be that of a detachedoutsider. Throughout, however, he emerges.as an irritable and hypersensitivetraveller and this has the effect of undermining the credibility of his reportage.Towards the end, this pattern comes to a head, when he goes on a pilgrimage tosee the Shiva lingamin the Cave of Amarnath. Disgusted by the insanitaryhabits of his fellow-pilgrims, he finally refuses to enter the cave. His Muslimcompanion returns to say that no lingam has formed this year, but this does notobviate the fact that Naipaul has declined to encounter the symbol of the Hinducontinuity. He remains a spectator, retaining an aura of detachment throughnon-participation. It is an attitude which is close to the karma-inducedresignation that he deplores and, to his credit, Naipaul subsequently admits asmuch in a passage which links Indian non-involvement with his own: 'It is onlynow, as the impatience of the observer is dissipated in the process of writingand self-inquiry, that I see how much this philosophy has also been mine.,28 Itwould appear to be this discovery that makes for the more analytical stance inNaipaul's later work.

In 1966 Naipaul spent six months as Writer-in-Residence at MakerereUniversity inUganda. During this period he traveJJed in East Africa and Zaire.It provided the materialfrom which the title-novella of In a Free State (1971)grew. Towards the end of his time in East Africa, Naipaul lived in a hotel inwestern Kenya. While in Uganda and Kenya he wrote the London sections ofThe Mimic Men; the West Indian parts were written in London.

The Mimic Men (1967) is another major exploration of the colonialpsychology, as the protagonist, Ralph Singh (ne Ranjit Kripalsingh), seeks,like Mr Biswas andMr Stone, to impose order on his life. The novel takes theform of Singh's autobiographical memoir and finally he concludes that the actof writing has provided the order for which he has previously searched withoutsuccess. This is a direct development of themes explored in Naipaul's previoustwo novels. One of the avenues through which MrBiswas seeks self-fulfilmentis writing and Mr Stone's Knights Companion scheme is very much a literaryproject.

rr See India: A WOIlflfl('(1 Civilization, London: Andre Deutsch, 1977, p 25.'K All IIr('(1 u] Darkness, p 19~.

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For the first time in his career Naipaul is strongly indebted to Joseph Conrad,the novelist who supplanted his early masters, Charles Dickens, and H GWells, as the most significant literary influence on his work. In The Mimic Menthe Conradian influence can be seen in incidental allusions, but more generallyit is manifest in the use of a fragmentary and unchronological narrativestructure, a form employed by Conrad in such novels as Lord Jim andNostromo, and in the use of a narrator through whom events are filtered to thereader. In Conrad Naipaul found a kindred spirit. Both are non-English writers(Conrad was Polish) whose absorption into the English tradition has done littleto dispel their sense of displacement. Such displacement shows itself in theirwork on both formal and thematic levels. Formally, the disjointed narrativemethod and the use of a narrator whose values may be questioned, have theeffect of creating a relativistic atmosphere, far removed from the certitudes ofmost traditional English novels. On a thematic level, Naipaul attempts todramatise the relationship between the socio-political and the psychologicalconsequences of imperialism in The Mimic Men and, in words he was later to usein an essay on Conrad, follows the Pole in writing:Not as a man with a cause, but a man offering, as in Nostromo, a vision of the world'shalf-made societies, as places which continuously made and unmade themselves, wherethere was no goal, and where always 'something inherent in the necessities of successfulaction ... carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.,29

Singh's quest for an ideal order takes many forms: he looks fOTit in London('centre of the worLd,30),the Aryan past of his ancestors, the Edenic state ofpre-Colum bian America, the pastoral world of.Latin literature and even, whenhe dreams of retiring to one of the few cocoa estate houses remaining onIsabella, in the heyday of the plantocracy. Yet, from the outset, the voice ofSingh the narrator makes it clear that 'All landscapes turn eventually to land,the gold of the imagination to the lead of reality ..31 He fails to find thefulfilment he is seeking through any of these avenues and turns all too easily tovapid sexual encounters and a cynical political role which involves' "the moraldegradation of the idea" '. Only writing appears to offer any release from thedisorder that he feels characterises his life, but even here the problematic use ofSingh as the narrative persona leaves open the question of whether he has trulyprogressed. More complex than any of Naipaul's previous novels, The MimicMen ushered in a new period in his writing, in which there is a more overtconcern with imperialism and its latter-day consequences.

In The MiddLe Passage Naipaul had written about the difficultiesencountered by historians trying to find an appropriate tone in which to writeabout the West Indies. In The Loss of El Dorado (1969), a highly personalhistory of Trinidad, he faced the ptoblem himself. The method he adopted was

29 The Return of Eva Peron, London: Andre Deutsch 1980, p 216.30 The Mimic Men, p 22.31 ibid., P 13.

LITERARY PROFILE

unusual. He decided to confine himselftoan account of 'the two momentswhen Trinidad was touched by "history"732: the latter stages of the quest for EIDorado by Sir Walter Raleigh and the Spanish conquistador, Antonio deBerrio; and the attempt to make Port of Spain a lucrative trading-post duringthe period of political turmoil in the Caribbean at the end of the eighteenthcentury.

Both stories are fully documented and bring to life figures who receivecomparatively little attention in other historical. accounts: de Berrio; ThomasPicton, the British governor of Trinidad at the end of the eighteenth century;and Luisa Calderon, a mulatto girl falsely 'accused by her lover of theft, in thelatter period. But despite the scholarship which informs The Loss of ElDorado, it is 'a novelist's history',33 characterised by an accretion ofcircumstantial detail and an authorial stance which denies colonial society anyautonomous life of its own. The tone is much less dispassionate than that ofmost historians and one is always aware of a voice which, without ever quiteidentifying itself with the coloniser, holds itself aloof from the society that isbeing discussed.

By this point in his career Naipaul had won all Britain's leading literaryawards, with the exception of the Booker Prize which he received in 1971 for Ina Free State. In a Free State (1971) brings together a novella, in which twoEnglish expatriates journey through an independent East African country, anda number of shorter pieces: a Prologue and Epilogue from an otherwiseunpublished Egyptian travel-journal and two stories about displaced Indians.All the sections treat the theme of displacement in the neo-colonial world. Inthe first story, 'One Out of Many', Santosh, a Bombay domestic, goes toWashington with his diplomatic employer and finds himself lostin the 'capitalof the world'r'" in 'Tell Me Who to Kill' two Trinidadian brothers are affectedin different ways by their experience of deracination in England; in the novellawhich gives the work its title, neither 'of the two protagonists belongs inEngland any longer. The excerpts from the travel-journal centre initiallyaround an elderly English tramp, a self-styled 'citizen of the world!35 who,during a crossing from Piraeus to Alexandria, succeeds in stirring up hiscabin-mates' enmity through an unspecified offence, and, in the Epilogue,around the ultimate displaced character of Naipaul's fiction, the authorhimself. Naipaul has confessed to being 'totally involved,36 inall the charactersof In a Free State, and herein the final section the mask drops, at least partially,as he intrudes himself as the central persona.

In each of the sections freedom proves to be an uneasy, anguished state. The

32 The Loss of EI Dorado, Harmondsworth: Penguin: 1973, p 15..11 Robert Hamner, liS Naipaul, New York: Twayne: 1973, p 30.I. III a Fr(,1! SUI/e, London: Andre Deutsch, 1971.,p 25."iNd., P II.I!, 'I ife Oil Approval', Naipuul interviewedby Alex Hamilton, The Guardian (London), 4 October

ICIII, II H

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geographical freedom of the tramp-of the Prologue renders him an outcast andthe reader is left feeling that his unrevealed crime may well be his failure tobelong, Santosh runs away from his employer, only to find he has exchangedone kind of bondage for another, since he is now an illegal immigrant. In 'TellMe Who to Kill', the Trinidadian Indian narrator, nourished on Hollywoodmyths, devotes himself to furthering his younger brother's education inEngland, but comes to realise that metropolitan achievement is as far beyondhis brother as.himself. He is left with a desire to kill the 'enemy' who is theauthor of his sufferings. But no enemy is to be found. Once again Naipaul isdramatising the psychology of the colonial, who has been denied freedom byforces beyond his control. And in the title-story Naipaul's English expatriatesare seen to be leading equally constricted mental existences intheir East

African 'free state' .Thus far, In a Free State follows the negative vision of Naipaul's earlier

fiction, but in the Epilogue the author becomes involved in the action with apositive gesture of commitment. As.he watches desert children being lured toapproach an oasis rest house for scraps of tourists' food and then horse-whipped by the coffee waiter for coming too near, he suddenly becomesincensed, rushes into the middle of the scene in protest and abruptly stopsthe flagellation. Subsequently he feels the act has been futile, but it hasdemonstrated the extent of Naipaul's movement away from the inertia of thekarma-psychology and the colonial mentality. Similarly, the more analyticalmode of In a Free State represents a development in Naipaul's approach and, inthe year of its publication,. he said in an interview, 'I've decolonised myselfthrough the practice of writing, through what I've learned from writing,

looking at the worId.>37After his first journey to India in 1962, Naipaul began to travel widely, often

recording his impressions of the societies he visited in articles for the Britishand American quality press. The Overcrowde4 Barracoon (1972) broughttogether twenty-one journalistic pieces he had published between 1958 and1972. Since its publication Naipaul has continued to engage in such journalisticwriting, but has preferred in-depth pieces which have sometimes furnished himwith the raw material for his fiction. In 1973 he travelled to Trinidad to doresearch for two long Sunday Times articles on the Abdul Malik ('Michael X')killings in Trinidad38 and this material providedhim with the germ for his nextnovel Guerrillas (1975), where Malik's career is paralleled by that of JimmyAhmed, another self-styled 'black' radical of mixed parentage.Y

There are, however, considerable differences between these two portraits of

37 'Portrait of an artist: what makes Naipaul run', Caribbean Contact (Bridgetowll) May 1973,

p 18.38 Sunday Times Magazine, Part One, 12 May 1974, pp 16-35; Part Two, 19 May 1974, pp 24-41.39 For a discussion of similarities between Malik and Jimmy Ahmed, see myarticle'"Apparitions

of Disaster": Brontean parallels in Wide Sargasso Sea and Guerrillas', Journal ofCommouweolth tIterature 14(1) Augus! 1979.pp 125-{i.

LITERARY PROFILE

the false redeemer. IIi Guerrillas the treatment of Jimmy Ahmed is lessconcerned with the damage such a figure does to a certain section of society(the'major emphasis in Naipaul's treatment of Malik) than with his ownpersonal tragedy. The emphasis is shifted so that it falls mainly on Jimmy as adisplaced person, a typical Naipaul protagonist, trying, like Ralph Singh, toorder his life through writing and also very close to Mr Biswas in his belief that'''men must claim their portion of the earth" '.40Jimmy is, however, only oneelement in a larger design, one of a triptych of main characters. The others areJane, a middle-class Englishwoman who becomes involved. with Jimmy, buthas come to the island secure in her sense of being privileged and herknowledge that she has a return air ticket, .and Roche, her lover, who, thoughhe has the best of white liberal credentials (having been imprisoned andtortured in South Africa) is revealed as a man lackingin ideology or any form ofpersonal belief. Both characters provide case-studies in what Naipaul hasreferred to, in his essay on Conrad, as the 'corruption of causes' .41

A 1975 return visit to Zaire provided Naipaul with source material both' foranother in-depth journalistic essay,'A New King for theCongo'F(included inThe Return of Eva Peron (1980), and for his next novel,A Bend in the River(1979). The relationship between fictional and non-fictional accounts is similarto that between 'The Killings in Trinidad' and Guerrillas. It is well summed upby Elaine Campbell who argues that 'a refinement of rage,43 takes placebetween the writing of the essay, which is characterised by Naipaul's by nowfamiliar dismissive approach to tbe Third World, and the novel, which is moreconcerned with the plight of individuals. In both works the presentpredicament of Africa is vividly encapsulated in a powerful image of a worldgradually becoming increasingly clogged up and moving towards stasis, theimage of the water-hyacinthsoil the Zaire river which in the last generationhave increasingly disrupted navigation. However, whereas in 'A New King forthe Congo' these are seen as threatening to 'imprison the river people in theimmemorial ways of the bush' /~4in A Bend in the River they become a moremultivalent image, relating to personal as well as social paralysis. Both textsshow post-independence Africa as reverting back to the bush, after what thenovel calls 'the miraculous peace of the colonial time' ,45but in A Bend in theRiver, while the personal and the public cannot finally be separated from oneanother, this situation is more the backcloth for another Naipaul study ofindividual displacement than the epicentre of the narrative.

The narrator/protagonist, Salim, begins his story with the words 'The World

411 Guerrillas, London: Andre Deutsch, 1975, p 17.'II The Refilm of Eva Peron, p 216 .•2 7111' New York Review of Books,26 June 1975, pp 19-25.I' •A refinement of rage:V S Naipaul's A Bend in the River', World Literature Written in English

11l(2) November 1979,pp 394-406.'" nil" Return of II'I'll Pl'dlll, p 11K" II /ll'IIti ill II". Rivrr, 1.011(1011'Alld,~ Dl:lltsch. 11J79, P41.

TffiRD WORLD QUARTERLY

is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing,have no place init. ,46 Survival is at the very heart of the fiction from thismoment until the very end, which sees Salim taking flight from the town at thebend in the river (primarily based on Kisangani), where, after previouslyfleeing from the East African coast, he has built up a business as a shopkeeper.Salim, like so many of the characters of Naipaul's later novels, emerges as acasualty of Empire, a man who finds himself running short of places which offerhim a secure existence. Where he differs from many of these characters,however, is in his capacity for pragmatic.action to ensure his own survival.Naipaul has said that he chose the title of the novel for the 'uplift'?"in it and,while at first sight this remark may puzzle many readers, Salim's capacity toadapt and take a new direction, when his world falls apart at the end, does offera more positive vision than Guerrillas. On the other hand the presentation ofAfrica in A Bend in the River is remorselessly negative.

Naipaul's next book, The Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad(1980), brought together fOUIof his journalistic essays: the pieces on MichaelX and Zaire, already mentioned; the long title-essay on Argentina; and ashorter piece on Conrad. While initially this volume may appear, like TheOvercrowded Barracoon, simply to be a collection of Naipaul's journalism,infact there are clear thematic parallels between the various component parts.The accounts of Malik, Eva Per6n and Mobutu (the Congo's 'new king') andtheir societies all show how charismatic leadership ministers to the fantasies ofthose who find their lives in some way deficient. Yet it ultimately fails to offeranything other than a leadership cult which can destroy leaders and followersalike, while contributing nothing to the improvement of society. The essay onConrad places everything which has preceded it into context by focusing onConrad's absorption with the forerunners of today's Third World societies, thejuxtaposition of cultures and the 'corruption of causes'. In each of the previouspieces there has been at least one reference to Conrad's work and now, inretrospect, his influence appears to have been underlying the whole volume.

During the latter part of 1979 and early 1980 Naipaul spent seven monthstravelling in Muslim societies in the Middle and Far East and this experienceprovided the subject of his next book, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey(1981). He visited four non-Arab Muslim countries-Iran, Pakistan, Malaysiaand Indonesia-and his account presents itself as a personal attempt to explainthe 'Islamic revival'. The picture of contemporary Islam which emerges is forthe most part a negative one, characterised by confusion and contradiction.The believers' passionate conviction is seen as a force which is impotent tobring about greatly needed social change. As in The Mimic Men, Naipaulsuggests that it is paradoxical that Third World societies which reject the Westnevertheless depend on it for its technology and material goods. Among the

46 ibid., P 9.47 Naipaul interviewedby David Pryce-Jones, Radio Times (London), 24-30 March 1979, p 1L

LITERARY PROFILE

Believers has been criticised by Muslim intellectuals, who have found itsuperficial, biased towards Western rationalism,guilty of identifying the'Islamic revival with fanaticism'r" and, finally, unrepresentative because of itsexclusion of Arab and African Islamic societies. It is hard to disagree with suchevaluations. Despite the considerable amount of penetrating first-handobservation and analysis offered in the text, its point of view remains blinkeredand guaranteed to reinforce Western prejudices. The disenchanted polemicalstance is comparable with An Area of Darkness and India: A WoundedCivilisation. All three works offer an account of how one of the world's greatreligions is stultifying individual development in Asia. But whereas the twoIndian books are written out of a passionate love-hate relationship withHinduism and considerable knowledge of the culture, Among the Believersfinally comes across as more of a tourist's-eye view, redeemed only by sensitivewitness and a sense of authorial integrity.

Naipaul's two most recent books, Finding the Centre (1984) and The Enigmaof Arrival (1987) incorporate a greater amount of autobiography than anythinghe has written hitherto, and reveal the extent to which his personal experiencehas informed all his work. Finding the Centre is comprised of two very differentnarratives: 'Prologue to an Autobiography', described by Naipaul as 'not anautobiography, a story of life or deeds done', but 'an account of something lesseasily seized: my literary beginnings and the imaginative promptings of mymany-sided background'j=? and 'The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro', a travel-piece about a recent journey to the Ivory Coast. The two pieces have much incommon, for both-like so much of Naipaul's work-concern a quest forsignification. The search for a centre comes to stand both for the attempt bymarginalised countries and peoples to find order, and for the writer's search forkernels of narrative which can express this predicament. In his Foreword,Naipaul says 'both pieces are about the process of writing' and 'seek in differentways to admit the reader to that process'.50 The Enigma of Arrival (reviewed

"below) presents itself as a novel, but is in fact mainly autobiography-autobiography of the same kind as William Wordsworth's Prelude or DerekWalcott's Another Life, that is to say a text in which the writer explores thegenesis and growth of his artistic impulse. Taken together these two recentworks provide a fitting climax to Naipaul's career so far. They show .himdiscussing his origins and how these have shaped him as the kind of writer heis-tetchy, alienated and elitist, yet unfailingly committed to documenting hispersonal vision of the world with a consistency of purpose and an integritywhich make him difficult to put aside even when he is at his most illiberal.

"K Amin Malak, 'V S Naipaul and the believers', Modern Fiction Studies, 30(3) Autumn 1984,p SM.

~'I"11U1I1I/( till' Centre, p 9,~II IMtl,

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