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Literary Review
Home and exile
Falstaff: Why? She's neither fish nor flesh; a man knows not where to have her.
King Henry IV, Part I.
IN the Nobel Prize award citation, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences praised the works of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul for having "united perspective narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed societies" and added that "his authority as narrator is grounded in the meaning of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished." Though Naipaul abundantly inherits the collective unconscious of the Indian ethos — and therefore the Third World heritage — he is by no means a flag-waving propagandist for the erstwhile colonies of British Imperialism. By outlook and mental make-up, he is a cosmopolitan, but riven (sadly) by several inherent contradictions, most of which puzzle our will. Did not his onetime protégé turned foe Paul Theroux angrily remark that "he could be the monomaniac in print that he was in person?"
Naipaul is eternally an outsider — an Indian in the West Indies, a West Indian in England, and, as described by many a critic, a nomadic intellectual in the non-descript Third World. A writer without roots, so to say. In Imaginary Homelands Rushdie poses this irresistible existential question of what it is to be an Indian outside India and answers fittingly that "to forget that there is a world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers would be to go voluntarily into exile." Good news for Naipaul. Belonging nowhere, he belongs everywhere.
Naipaul is a habitual and seasoned traveller for whom the real voyage of discovery lies — as Marcel Proust would recommend — not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Seeing with new eyes and searching for Truth, says Lillian Feder (Distinguished Professor Emerita of English, Classics, and Comparative Literature, Graduate School, City University of New York), the author of Naipaul's Truth, is the controlling, reiterative motif of his works. This search and the journeys involved in such a search — "to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield" — is not just geographic but more in the nature of an inward journey, given to review and reconsideration.
In 1964, when he wrote An Area of Darkness, he was just a traveller — and a fearful one at that — an immigrant's descendant visiting the land of his forbears; in 1977, his India: A Wounded Civilization became a book of reflection and analysis questioning the conventional wisdom of the developing world and did not bear even a remote resemblance to the previous one which was charged by his detractors as just a drain-pipe report. India, a Million Mutinies Now (1990) was a revaluation of his earlier perception made some 27 years ago. India is seen herein, as Homi Bhabha would have it, as a "national will, a central idea." "To look and look again, to relook and rethink." That has been Naipaul's way in his search of Truth.
Assuredly Naipaul is the most polemical among contemporary writers. His admirers have lauded him for his objectivity in presenting the case of the history of exploitation (his role model was Joseph Conrad), while his detractors have vilified him as a reactionary and an apologist for neo-colonialism. He is attacked for his "tone of outrageous superiority that blends easily into racism." One is readily reminded of the Milton controversy of the 1950s when the battle lines were clearly drawn up on both sides. Lillian Feder would not like to be a party to these ideologically motivated reactions to Naipaul's works. "At worst such approaches dehumanise Naipaul: they strip him of his ambivalence, his spontaneity, his `eye', the immediacy of his experience, and his ever-changing reactions, and they recreate him as the offspring of his own formulas" (p.5).
She would rather try to seek out the right keys to unlock the meanings in the Naipaulian search for truth. She engages herself in a close-reading and local analysis of Naipaul's works in the three central chapters of the book, "Autobiography," "Travel Narratives, History, and Journalism," and "Fiction", named after the genres he has used. It would be wrong to classify his works into distinct genres since there is always the "genre blur" or, better still, the "genre fusion" among his works. Autobiography, fiction and history merge in such works as The Enigma of Arrival or A Way in the World. Feder's book is a search for Naipaul's truth as expressed in a narrative form. In one of his interviews Naipaul has confessed that he tries "to arrive at some degree of self-knowledge and it is the kind of knowledge that cannot deny any aspect of truth." Through deft observation and critical examination, he explores traditions, values and even the history of peoples. His responses do undergo changes and modifications depending on the relationship between the "self" and the observed phenomenal world. "Naipaul's truth is the sum of continuous investigation in which his `eye' becomes keener and his knowledge of the seeker himself deepens." It is this constantly evolving self-creation which acts as the cultural lens with which to scrutinise and understand the world and the people.
Feder says that Naipaul developed a distinct technique that characterises his travel narratives. She calls it a "serendipitous method" in which there is minimum of advance planning, and openness to new situations and the recording of instant reactions, all of which leading to a self-discovery. Right from the Middle Passage onwards this method works marvellously for Naipaul. Such a method — or at least the apparent artlessness of it — becomes beautiful because it is interesting and interests us because it is beautiful. Often there is a continual revision of his first impressions. Naipaul regrets that R. K. Narayan's fiction has not conveyed the actuality of India that he himself could find in his sojourns in the Subcontinent. He finds himself unable to "enter into" Narayan's world because he lacks history. The India of Narayan — Malgudi being its microcosm — is an unchanging thing, existing in a bolus, as far as Naipaul is concerned. So was it in Swami and Friends (1935) and so is it in The World of Nagaraj (1990). For Naipaul many of the modern writers — and he has in mind writers of the first world — have internalised imperialist values from which they derive their sense of security. They are blissfully oblivious to the existence of the three-quarters of the globe that is out there beyond their ken and it is to this world that he is nostalgically drawn and to which he belongs. As Feder concludes, "his concern for the `three-fourths' who are generally neglected informs all his writings, as does his personal involvement in their history" (p.252).
It was said of Walt Whitman that all his lifetime he was writing one book, Leaves of Grass. And so it is with Naipaul. And this ambiguous and complex big book of his (in 24 different titles) has virtually been discussing themes of exile, dislocation, alienation, displaced histories and, what is more, the most painful dilemmas in the postcolonial societies. Lillian Feder's style is laboured; her findings are neither fresh nor imaginative. Naipaul's Truth is not a book we can read with profit. All the same one must concede that a lot of research (as evidenced in the documentation) has gone into the work. Naipaul has been admitted — nay assimilated — into the rubric of the historical and cultural studies of the academia in every part of the world. Hence Feder's literary biography is bound to be a useful addition to the prevailing scholarship on the Nobel Laureate.
M.S. NAGARAJAN
Naipaul's Truth: The Making of a Writer, Lillian Feder, New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001, p.269, Rs. 295.
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