“Naipaulexity”: critical convention, “Theory Renaissance” and V. S. Naipaul

Abstract

The works of the Nobel laureate Sir Vidiadhar Surajparasad Naipaul, generally known as V. S. Naipaul, have been more criticized than critiqued. This tends to put his creative aspiration in oblivion and initiate a discourse that is quite personal, subjective, and degenerative in nature. This paper using the idea of “Naipaulexity’ and “Theory Renaissance” as elaborated below and adopting a deconstructive model of analysis of four of his fictions as examples, contends that a prolific writer like Naipaul has suffered the offense of a judgmental, critical fallacy, in its conventional readership and therefore it needs a serious scrutiny. It aims to arrive at this contention through the analysis of four of his fictions, demonstrating how there evolves a counter-discourse from his texts that virtually underscores the myopic conventional criticism. Naipaulian texts are dense and thick, and accordingly demand a similar approach to their understanding.

Keywords:

• Theory
• renaissance
• theory renaissance
• studies
• complexity
• discourse

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Oliver Nyambi, English, University of the Free State, South Africa

SUBJECTS:

• Art & Visual Culture; Philosophy; Literature

1. Introduction to V. S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul wrote and published from 1957 to 2010, a sustained literary career of fifty–three years. This is also the time, as Bruce King (2003) puts it, that can be “seen as part of the worldwide political and cultural changes that produced such significant writers as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje and Salman Rushdie” (3). This was the time of sweeping political and cultural changes that were triggered by the collapse of the European empires and the decolonization that followed in different parts of the world. Naipaul has to his credit thirteen fictional works written with the contentious subject–matter from this time frame. They are The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959), A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion (1963), The Mimic Men (1967), A Flag on the Island (1967), Guerillas (1975), In a Free State (1971), A Bend in the River (1979), The Enigma of Arrival (1987), A Way in the World (1994), Half a Life (2001), and Magic Seeds (2004), covering the cartographic, historical, cultural and colonial/postcolonial realities and nuances of the Caribbean Islands, Europe, India and Africa during periods of significant political and cultural changes. In the non–fiction, mostly travel writings, he has sixteen works encompassing the time frame- The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America(1962), An Area of Darkness (1964), The Loss of El Dorado (1969), The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (1972), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), A Congo Diary (1980), The Return of the Eva Peron (1980), Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981), Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (1984), A Turn in the South (1989), India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998), Between a Father and Son: Family Letters (1999), The Writer and the World: Essays (2002), A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (2007) and The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010), actively sensing the same political and cultural changes in the Caribbean Islands, India, Africa, Europe and South America. Naipaul received the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1958 for his first work, The Mystic Masseur, a literary prize in England for the writers from the Commonwealth countries; the Booker Prize in 1971 for In a Free State; and, he was awarded with the Trinity Cross in 1989, the highest national honour in Trinidad and Tobago; he received a Knighthood in England in 1990 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. He died on 11 August 2018, at the age of eighty–six.

2. Research problem

It is quite striking to see that on the other side of the creative achievement and recognition of this Noble laureate, lays quite a defamatory critical convention across the ages. The convention has been often dictated by the subjective elements, the subjective fallacy, or oriented under the influence of the marginal Twentieth Century perspectives, or a perspective fallacy, or sometimes both. But categorically all negative and therefore damaging. The writings of Naipaul are complex in terms of subject matter, narrative geography, themes and the spaces as they cover America, Africa, Asian and Europe and frequent transaction of ideas between them. But the adjectives used for him in understanding this complexity are obsessed with quite a destructive intention, are personal, rather than oriented towards the exploration of the complexity. In general he is charged of the following: he has a colonial sensibility, is horrific in nature, has full of contempt, is pessimist, fatalist, hopeless, casual and unpleasant, canonical; his characters are failure, religious, often landing in crisis, foolish and having dissociation of sensibility. This paper, however, does not attempt to acquit Naipaul of this charge. Rather, it contends that in them there is a serious misunderstanding between a complex literary aspiration of a creative writer, understood as “Naupaulexity” in this paper, and its political correctness. In case of Naipaul, it can be seen that the convention of criticism has often remained dormant, oblivious, to the former and has constant obsession with the later, which this paper intends to confront.

3. Aims and objectives

The aim of this paper is to explore how the “Naipaulexity” in the works of V.S.Naipaul downplay the narrow and limited critical conventions on him. The objective is to arrive at this contention through a review of the dominating conventions and analysis of four of his fictions: A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), The Mimic Men (1967), Half a Life (2001) and Magic Seeds (2004) as evidence in the light of the idea of “Naipaulexity” and “Theory Renaissance”.

4. Research questions

During the course of this paper, it will try to answer the following questions:

1. What is the nature of the critical convention of Naipaul?

2. What are “Naupaulexity” and “Theory Renaissance” and how do they correlate to this reading of Naipaul?

3. How can the sense of “Naupaulexity” and “Theory Renaissance” deviate from the conventional criticism of Naipaul, in terms of substance and approach to it, and help in a re-assessment of his complex works?

5. Literature review

A few of the critical reviews on Naipaul are worth exemplified here. Henry Charles (2022) writes, for instance, that, “Naipaul indirectly absolves the imperialist and colonizer, in the Caribbean, Africa, or India” (p. 22). Joan Dayan (1993) observes him as “racially specific and horrific in their implications for the so–called Third World” (p. 159). Golam Gaus Al–Quaderi and Md. Habibullah (2012) jointly indict him as “plagued by limitation of vision, orientalist ideas, islamophobia, prejudice and misconceptions” (p. 23). Beyond these, he has been scathingly indicted in terms of a series of bestial imageries. For instance, he is termed as “inquiline” (Pathak et al., 2012, p. 27), “gadfly” (Bakari, 2003, p. 243), “mongoose…” (Walcott, 2018) and “scavenger” (Said, 2000, p. 100). Graham Huggan (2013) writes, “Certain writers, like Naipaul, are best not spoken about at all; and if they are spoken about, then it is in terms of stunned disbelief… or thinly guised contempt…” (p. 200). Robert Hemenway (1982) thinks that the vision of Naipaul is “fiercely pessimistic, singularly unsentimental, somewhat lacking in charity and sympathy…” (p. 191). Bruce King (2003) charges he always ends in “inactivity, Indian fatalism” (p. 22). John King (1983) assets that he denies “the West Indian any hope for development or salvation” (pp. 231–32). George Lamming, quoted by John King (1983), diminishes Naipaul as “…too small a refuge for a writer who wishes to be taken seriously” (qtd. in King, p. 231). Robert Boyers (1981) humiliatingly finds his books “unpleasant” and not appealing. He concludes, “His books are demanding and, in the main, unpleasant, and there is no reason to feel that they should appeal to everyone” (p. 359). Fawzia Mustafa (1995) charges that he is in a quest for a European model of history: “…Naipaul’s map is Conrad’s writing rather than colonial history and his quest canonical rather than historical” (p. 3). However, contrary to these limited bestial, unsympathetic, inactive, hopeless, casual, unpleasant and colonialist imagery, a close reading of Naipaul’s texts will suggest that the observations are superfluous and have seriously downplayed the literary aspiration of a complex creative writer in him. The limitation lies not in the critics but the critical convention of the time behind wanting the sense of “Theory Renaissance”.

6. Methodology

This paper uses Dorsia Smith’s (2010) term “Naipaulexity” as a perspective to understand the complexity of the fictions of Naipaul in terms of their thematic, social, political, historical and cultural depths that the conventional criticism is reluctant to endorse and hence, as this paper puts, it needs an orientation from the sense of “Theory Renaissance”. It is used in reference to Africa to show how explicitly Naipaul “manipulates his portrayal of African societies in his texts to reflect… African history” (81), which, nevertheless, is also true of his portrayal of other societies-Indian, Caribbean, European- beyond Africa.

The paper also use the idea of “theory renaissance” from the text Literary Theory in the 21st Century: Theory Renaissance (2014) to throw light on the nature of criticism that Naipaul demands. The text is an attempt to negotiate the conflict that has gradually crept in between the preference for the terms “theory” and “studies” with the turn of the Twentieth Century. Gradually the term “studies” had overtaken “theory”. Jeffery R. Di Leo (2015) writes that “Word on the street [today in early 21^st century] is that theory is dead—superseded by a multitude of studies” (p. 412). Leitch (2005) explores and catalogues ninety four critical disciplines in practice out of which only two of them are suffixed with “theory” whereas all others with “studies” suggesting the death of theory. It is quite interesting to note the catalogue of the studies from Jeffery R. Di Leo (2015) here:

Of these ninety- four subdisciplines, fifty include adjectives followed by the noun “studies”: patronage, subaltern, working- class, debt, object, technoscience, animal, food, postcolonial, border, diaspora, new American, resistance,…Another twenty clearly imply the noun “studies”, but for one reason or another it is not stated. For example, the field “media studies” has eight subdisciplines. All but three (“new media”, “social media”, and “book history”) include the noun “studies”—and for at least two of these (“new media” and “social media”) the noun “studies” is clearly implied. The final one, “book history”, is probably more accurate with “studies” replacing the noun “history”. Among the ninety- four subdisciplines, the noun “theory” is only used twice: in “cognitive theory” and “affect theory” (p. 412).

This already suggests a sense of inconvenience in the emerging theoretical perspectives to get attached with the designator “theory” (a singular term) while attempting to incorporate and interpret disseminating ideas that a discipline probably tigers, in terms of the “studies” (a plural term). This is surely a flexible tenet and hence more rewarding to approach a text with it. Leitch is of the opinion that the studies owe their origin in preceding theory, as Jeffery (2015) puts they “stem directly from recognizable contemporary schools and movements of theory” (p. 413). Although Leitch (2005) endorses the role of “theory” in the emergence of “studies”, at the same time he also recognizes the role of “studies” as more flexible, incorporating, humane and democratic by referring to it as “Theory Renaissance”. This further implies that any Twentieth Century movement of theory, such as Russian formalism, New Criticism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Marxism, Structuralism, Queer Theory, New Historicism, and Postcolonial Theory” (p. 412) can be given a sense of Renaissance spirit: democratic, making them more opening and exploring in nature for a free enquiry. In this sense the methodology of enquiry in this paper incorporates Derridean idea of “deconstruction” to mount a critique on the conventional reading on Naipaul to make them more accommodative. This idea of possibility of transformation of a sense of theory into the sense of “Theory Renaissance” and its application in reading perhaps can only do justice in the interpretation of the writer like V. S. Naipaul whose works have high sense of “Naipaulexity” towards which the conventional criticism is highly oblivious.

7. Discussion

7.1. “Naipaulexity” and “Theory Renaissance” in Naipaul

“Napaulexity” implies thus the complex nature of the Naipaulian discourse that a reader needs to realize and “Theory Renaissance” the nature of the reading the discourse demands. Two comments that hint at the presence of the Renaissance sprit- intellectuals and artists, convention which add to “Naipaulexity”- in Naipaul are quite significant here to give a direction to the analysis further. They hint at an intellectual potential of the protagonists that has seldom figured in the template of the conventional criticism designated as subjective and perspective fallacies above. Roland Suresh Robert (1995), in this regard mentions the working of a group of “genuinely diagnostic intellectuals” in the works of Naipaul:

Naipaul’s claim to be contributing to real–world solutions recur in his innumerable dismissals of postcolonial politics as mere drama. The real solution is, for Naipaul, beyond politics. It is in the hands of the small phalanx of genuinely diagnostic intellectuals—those rare, stern, tellers of unpalatable truths such as Naipaul. Naipaul claims that the intellectual’s caustic appraisals (and corresponding actions) are the sole authentic means of progress. It is fair to say that this is an incessant theme of Naipaul. (178)

Further, there are opinions that Naipaul puts emphasis on art as a tool of negotiation with paradoxes and contradictions. Thus Kh. Kunjo Singh (2002) writes:

Naipaul’s fiction, combining the accuracy of empirical fact and the objectivity of psychological insight, furnishes a coherent view of the human predicament in all its paradoxes and contradictions. His fiction is the testament of the desperate faith of a man without ancestors, without traditions, and without a patria, seeking to arrive at a point of rest in his own mind through the power of art… (p. 252)

In other words, intelligence and art are also other narrative concerns in Naipaul. The observations point to a possibility in shift in thought from the sense of the dominating critical convention towards an exploration of a creative impetus, a sense of the “Theory Renaissance”, in Naipaul. In the light of the “Theory Renaissance” identifying creativity and intelligence as other depth of “Naipaulexity”, this paper intends to explore next how they have become a focused narrative concern in Naipaul in resolving many of the confronting postcolonial issues-anxiety of identity, culture, dislocation, displacement, sense of loss etc.- that protagonists come across and accordingly how they confront the conventional understanding of Naipaul.

It should be noted that the characters in Naipaul are painters, journalists or writers, the men of varying degrees in creative and intellectual capacities. They are also good dreamers. This affords these figures—Ralph Singh (in The Mimic Men), Mr.Biswas (in A House for Mr. Biswas) and Willie (in Half a Life and Magic Seeds) – degree of freedom, the figurative home, an escape from the multiple complexities of dislocations and displacements of the postcolonial world. Put another way, writing becomes a metaphor in Naipaul that, as in the words of Susheila Nasta (2002), gives “a new architecture for the imagination which would move beyond a sense of recurrent ‘shipwreck’, and give expression to the ‘restlessness’ and ‘disorder’ brought about by the psychic and physical upheavals resulting from a history of Empire” (p. 94). It can be seen that through writings a sense of freedom becomes their aim. Naipaul claims that “I’ve decolonized myself through the practice of writing, through what I’ve learned from writing, looking at the world” (Naipaul qtd. in Tsomondo, 1988, p. 18). Thorell Tsomondo (1988) further writes, “Naipaul’s identity, his awareness of himself ‘as a presence’ both as writer and as man, is through language, through writing, to be exact” (p. 18). The parallel can be seen in his fictions too. This can be validated while considering Mr. Biswas, Willie Chandran and Ralph Singh, as examples to show how these characters attempt to come to terms with the paradox of their postcolonial existence for freedom in terms of their revolutionary creativity, art of painting and writing, carried over through “enormous pain” of their situation in life.

Mr. Biswas is first a sign–painter and then a writer. The fiction, as Bhoendradatt Tewarie (2011) argues, “focuses on one man’s story of his life of 41 years and the interweaving narratives and people which connect to that life in various ways as he struggles to meet his multiple obligations and yet find space to pursue his dreams” (p. 185). On Naipaul’s painter–protagonists, Leigh Winser (2013) comments that “the painting created by Naipaul’s characters can indicate depths of personality, suggest an essential theme… and even advance the action of a story” (67). It can be agreed with Winser in the sense that the painting in Mr. Biswas suggests the theme of intellectual protagonists that the narrative emphasizes and at the same time anticipates as part of the action of the story: as a painting is also an attempt to create something out of nothing, so it hints at the prospect of giving a pattern to his life. Andrew Gurr has precisely observed what the fiction achieves at the end. Its subject, Gurr (1982) writes, “…is the house which becomes [Mr. Biswas’] his castle and his freedom. This ‘stupendous’ achievement… is the conclusion of a struggle he recognizes at the outset of the second half of the book. He has reached Port of Spain… at last, and has been enjoying the sense of space—free space and free time” (9). Although this sense of freedom as the ultimate achievement through the “struggle” is temporal and very brief, how Mr. Biswas achieves it is quite interesting.

The narrative has strategically put Mr. Biswas in the world of signs and sign–making from the very beginning:

Mr. Biswas could never afterwards say exactly where his father’s hut had stood… when Mr. Biswas looked for the place where he had spent his early years he saw nothing… His grandparents’ house had also disappeared, and when huts of mud and grass are pulled down they leave no trace… The stream where he had watched the black fish had been dammed, diverted into a reservoir… The world carried no witness to Mr. Biswas’s birth and early years (Naipaul, 1961, p. 39).

The presence of Mr. Biswas is defined by his absence, a signifier–signified paradox, a writing exhibits. Oindrilla Ghosh (2011) observes Mr. Biswas thus, “Just as through his writing Naipaul attempts to salvage his own family history and the history of the Trinidadian Indian community so also the hero of his novel makes a final effort to create a new world out of nothingness, thereby leaving behind his footprint on history and escaping annihilation and attaining fulfillment” (p. 584). Ghosh draws a parallel between Naipaul’s father (Seepersad Naipaul who worked as a reporter at Trinidad Guardian and also published a book of stories) and the protagonist.

However, beyond this parallel what is significant is the emphasis that Naipaul gives to creativity to make something out of nothing, to get freedom from “annihilation” and its transformative potential in his protagonists. Mr. Biswas is fond of writers like Hall Craine, Marie Corelli, Jacob Boehme, Mark Twaine and Samuel Smiles. Mehmet Recep Taş (2011), writes, “Mr. Biswas’s personal battle with the stronghold of the Tulsi household (the symbol of the colonial world) is a quest for existential freedom and the struggle for personality” (p. 117). Mr. Biswas arrives at some degree of this freedom through his creativity. Put another way, from the beginning to the end, he is a creative man; he begins with painting, grows with writing and ends with reading. Being a creative person, he is also an alienated character. His family is dispersed irredeemably, his own wife does not stand with him and he is always an outsider at the Hanuman House. However, it is the same alienation which becomes his drive for struggle showcasing his art of painting and writing at various points of his life which transforms him. Mehmet Recep Taş (2011), to quote again, citing Melvin Seeman’s highly influential five-fold classification of the theme of alienation, sees this as a narrative strategy in Naipaul to come to terms with formlessness. Tas writes, “Naipaul… tries to instill in the… colonized people a sense of alienation in the form of normlessness and ‘alienation as separation’. Thus… they will be able to leap into a phase of creativity which will consequently supply them with original and authentic identities of their own” (p. 118).

What Taş underlines is the creativity in the protagonist as freedom from “normlessness”. Seeman (1959) correlates the normlessness to Emile Durkheim’s idea “anomie” (p. 787). According to Seeman (1959), anomie is a situation “in which there is a high expectancy that socially unapproved behaviors are required to achieve given goals” (p. 788). The rebellion of Mr. Biswas at the Hanuman House, to go against its expectation of becoming a Tulsi like other in-laws can be taken as the instance of this “socially unapproved behaviour” in the fiction. As such creativity in the form of painting and writing becomes a means to freedom to rebel against the “anomie” of the Hanuman House. Sign painting by Mr. Biswas is innate. The same skill takes him to the Hanuman House and although it leads him to a stifling and mundane domestic situation, it is the same house that triggers his struggle for freedom which he attends to a certain degree through his art of writing. He becomes a reporter of the Sentinel, starts earning with it and with all his savings and a heavy borrowing from his relative he is able to buy his “own” house. “V. S Naipaul’s 1961 classic A House for Mr Biswas”, writes Kunhambu (2014), “finds a Home in the World on Paper, looks closely the different varieties of writing –sign painting, journalism and literary attempts –that define the life of Mr. Biswas” (p. 233). The role of writing in the life of Mr. Biswas is further correctly assessed by Thorell Tsomondo (1988) as a central motif in the fiction:

The materiality of writing, Naipaul’s linking of writing to history and identity, Mr Biswas’s determination to leave a mark or dwelling behind to speak for him, connects the theme of writing to the central motif in the novel, the house. Moreover, the acquisition of the house is the laying of one’s claim to one’s portion of the earth, an attempt to ground or pin down an elusive dream (p. 27).

Tsomondo’s linking of the act of writing to the identity of Mr. Biswas in terms of his aspiration for a house is very significant. Although the degree of freedom that Mr. Biswas eventually has in terms of his own house is leveraged by his writing, it does not totally commensurate his dream; although he cannot totally “pin down” his “elusive dream”, yet the small sense of freedom from the Tulsi empire and the trauma of the family history and his fear that would have kept on frustrating him from within in the absence of it and its significance in his old age now has been best captured by the narrator:

How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it (the house): to have died among the Tulsi, and the squalor of the large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated (Naipaul, 1961, p. 8).

Besides painting, Mr. Biswas is also a reporter at the Sentinel and later, works at the Social Welfare Department. The nature of the subject matter he reports and the way he struggles to give it an order reflects how he is trying to give course to a chaotic life through his writing. He has gradually become an “expert” on reporting on matters related to social welfare. His duty primarily involves interviewing the organizers of “charity”. With this experience he gets the job of a Community Welfare Officer, a government job. Accordingly, he is charged with conducting a community survey, house to house, filling in questionnaires prepared by his office:

…it was Mr. Biswas’s duty to analyze the information he had gathered. And here he floundered. He had investigated two hundred households; but after every classification he could never… get two hundred… He was dealing with a society that had no rules and patterns, and classification were a chaotic business. He… worked late into the night, squatting on a chair before the dining table. (Naipaul, 1961, pp. 538–539)

Thus, both sign–painting and journalism in Mr. Biswas can be understood as strategies indicating that he continuously tries to give shape to a modern chaotic life, particularly his own, through intellect and art and has his brief but “stupendous” achievement. Reporting is an intellectual art. The intertextuality between the journalism and the fiction in the narrative also indicates that the narrative considers Mr. Biswas as engaging with history. “Just as through his writing Naipaul attempts to salvage his own family history and the history of the Trinidadian Indian community”, writes S. Leela (2012) succinctly, “so also the hero of [A House for Mr. Biswas] makes a final effort to create a new world out of nothingness, thereby leaving behind his footprint on history and escaping annihilation and attaining fulfillment” (p. 37).

The Narrative’s portrayal of writing as an emancipatory act also figures in Half a Life and its sequel Magic Seeds. “This article will tackle the different manifestations and sources of tension in Half a Life”, writes Florence Labaune Demeule (2004) in “V.S.Naipaul’s Half a Life: Moving Away from Tension”, proposing that “as well as the ways in which Willie, [the protagonist], tries to reduce tension, that is to say mostly through story–telling” (p. 121). In other words, Naipaul is using story–telling as a tool of negotiation of crisis. There are frequent references to books in Magic Seeds and Half a Life as well. In Magic Seeds, for instance, Ramachandra asks Willie what books he read as a child. To this Willie answers: “I tried reading The Vicar of Wakefield. I didn’t understand it… Hemingway, Dickens, Marie Corelli… I had the same trouble with them… The only things I understood and liked were fairy stories. Grimm, Hans Andersen” (112). There are also references to The Mayor of Casterbridge, Browning, Arnold and Hamlet that Willie had to go through while at school. Willie’s father too derived his son’s name by incorporating the initial from Willie Somerset Maugham as a mark of reverence to the writer.

Each time Willie has a fantasy, he takes refuge in writing and, interestingly, writing always fulfills his dream, though temporarily. Quite early and while in the school, he is fascinated by Canada under the influence of his Canadian teacher. He begins “to long to go to Canada” (39). One day his teacher asks him to write a “composition” in English and in this composition, he pretends he is “Canadian” and thus fulfills his fantasy about Canada. Writing then becomes both a negotiation and an escape. Willie’s anger toward his father is expressed in self composed story of “King Cophetua and the Beggar–maid” and “A Life of Sacrifice”. James Atlas (2004) in his review “Magic Seeds: A Passage to India” observes what Willie does through these early writings:

Willie, like so many of Naipaul’s protagonists, is a writer. As a student, he writes stories and fables in his exercise book that depict, in allegorical form, the shameful history of his family: his father’s reluctant marriage to a low–caste woman; the births of his father’s two unwanted children, Willie and his sister, Sarojini; the torment of lives ruined by the loss of status.

The stories are beautifully crafted allegories of the life of his father’s pretensions; they are ironical and scathing attacks on him. Willie finds in them freedom from the repressed anger he harbours even as these remain temporary measures.

Next, London shocks him the moment he lands there. He quickly becomes part of its bohemian culture. The pursuit of higher education does not prove promising for him. Willie realizes that he has to re–invent himself. He has been introduced to script–writing at the BBC by his friend Roger and this encourages him to try composing short stories that might give him new direction. He presents Roger the stories that he had composed. With suggestions for changes he manages to publish a book. Ali Falakdin and Bahman Zarrinjooee (2014) see a parallel between what Naipaul does in reality and that Willie achieves in fiction. They write:

Naipaul continues to write at the age of seventy… [which] indicates a continuing effort to make sense of the world and of his standing in it… In writing, Naipaul himself is struggling to imagine an alternative to Willie. It should not be disregarded that even writing was a resource for conquering identity (p. 529).

Willie shows a similar “continuing effort” and the struggles of being a creative writer. Roger suggests to him in Half a Life that a story, unlike what he has written, does not have a proper beginning or end, it begins in the middle and ends there. He suggests that Willie read Hemingway’s “The Killers” as a model, which is only a few pages in which two killers come to a café at night and wait for the old man they have been hired to kill. The rest is suspense. Willie feels belittled; he says “I will never see Roger again. I shouldn’t have shown him those old stories” (Naipaul, 2001, p. 84). But this criticism does not please him. After some days he buys a copy of “The Killers”, goes through it and starts thinking that he should re–write “A Life of Sacrifice” the way Roger has suggested. Roger introduces him to his editor in an “intellectual London dinner party” who recounts the course of his obscure provincial life, the struggle and pain that he had to undergo to find his space as an editor, which he has drafted as his obituary. Willie remakes the story with the editor as one of the characters in “A Life of Sacrifice”:

The next day Willie wrote a story about the editor. He set it in the quarter–real Indian town he used in his writing, and he fitted the editor to the holy man he had already written about… Up to this point the holy man had been seen from the outside… Now, unexpectedly, the holy man showed his own unhappiness… In mood the story was like the story the editor had told (Naipaul, 2001, p. 101).

Willie becomes more receptive and more inclusive in his subject matter thereafter; he is no longer confined to the narrow domestic world that he initially covers. This objective shift from domestic to international, homogeneous to heterogeneous, gives him more understanding and with it he becomes more mature. The process of shift in his writing technique is interesting to recount:

The stories came quickly to him. He wrote six in a week. High Sierra [The Hollywood movie] gave him three stories and he saw three or four more in it. He changed the movie character from story to story, so that the original Cagney or Bogart character became two or three different people. The stories were all in the same vague setting, the setting of Sacrifice. And as he wrote the vague setting [the domestic setting at his place in India] began to define itself… To Willie’s surprise, it was easier, with these borrowed stories far outside his own experience, and with these characters far outside himself, to be truer to his feelings than it had been with his cautious, half–hidden parables at school. He began to understand –and this was something they had to write essays about at the college–how Shakespeare had done it, with his borrowed settings and borrowed stories, never with direct tales from his own life or the life around him (Naipaul, 2001, p. 86).

What is significant in the process is that Willie learns to juxtapose international settings to the domestic subject matter and this enables him a greater understanding of the world. With this he writes twenty–six stories in all and publishes them in the form of a book. All through these experiences, he eventually gains insights and negotiates with the view of life that he was being driven by. He concludes, and his conclusion also gives him a sense of freedom, that it is wrong to have the “ideal view” of life; indeed the story of life is not just fancying it in terms of what should be; it is also a surpassing of the barren reality that one has to face.

Yet, in Mr. Biswas and Willie the writing is still occasional, that is they invoke it when they need to reinvent themselves as in Willie or when one needs it for survival as in Mr. Biswas. Interestingly, the sense of freedom that Mr. Biswas feels at the end of the narrative is still not whole. However, in The Mimic Men, this becomes the central attraction, and accordingly, the whole narrative turns totally inward and becomes a window to the nature of life as a colonial subject. The Mimic Men is the memoir of Ralph Singh. As a writer–recluse at a hotel in London, he reflects on the causes of failure in his life and traces it to a “restlessness”, of which he himself is a part:

It was my hope to give expression to the restlessness, the deep disorder, which the great explorations, the overthrow in three continents of established social organizations, the unnatural bringing together of peoples who could achieve fulfillment only within the security of their own societies…it was my hope to sketch a subject which, fifty years hence, a great historian might pursue (Naipaul, 2002, p. 32)

Ralph indicates the subject of contemplation as the history of colonisation and its expression in terms of the fiction enlightens him in the matter of freedom from restlessness and identity. Throughout the story he is seen as a worried man, always in crisis and thrown about by disorder. But at the end he says that he is overwhelmed by his “formlessness”. Put another way, writing and life merge together in Ralph; his life gets textualized and hence opens the boundaries for more interpretations for more possibilities. This is reflected in his newfound understanding. He is a happy man at forty, to start his life afresh with much more vitality than ever. He feels a free and awakened man now. He says, “It does not worry me now, as it worried me when I began this book, that at the age of forty I should find myself at the end of my active life… I feel… I have prepared myself for fresh action. It will be the action of a free man” (Naipaul, 2002, p. 274). Anthony Boxill (1976) has seen the arrival of this understanding in Ralph Singh as exemplary of how a modern man can transcend his superficial world. He writes, “Far from being hopeless about the predicament of the modern West Indian and of modern man, Ralph Singh, by his example, shows how modern man can transcend and be extended by his plastic world” (p. 19).

Through writing, Ralph brings in the question of freedom, that is, what does it take to be free in fact? He has questioned freedom in terms of its material attachments. He reflects on his experience, explaining:

I no longer yearn for ideal landscapes and no longer wish to know the god of the city. This does not strike me a loss. I feel, instead, I have lived through attachment and freed myself from one cycle of events. It gives me joy to find that in so doing I have also fulfilled the fourfold division of life prescribed by our Aryan ancestors. I have been student, householder and man of affairs, recluse (Naipaul, 2002, pp. 276–74)

Eventually he has detached himself from all the attachments, the desires of a colonial subject. He claims to no longer belong to the colonial stock now. The memoir is also a meditation on the paradox of human identity and freedom from it, a general philosophical question beyond the postcolonial. Ralph initially has a different perception of human existence. In the beginning, he thinks it is what one sees in others: “A man was only what he saw of himself in others…” (Naipaul, 2002, p. 107). Next, whether the identity is what others see in us: “I question now whether the personality is manufactured by the vision of others” (Naipaul, 2002, p. 199) and eventually recognizes “that in conditions of chaos, which would appear hostile to any human development, the human personality is in fact more varied and extended. And this is creation indeed!” (234). Reeta Harode (2012) refers to Richard Kelly to establish a similar argument in “Postcolonial Chaos in V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men”, noting that “the act of writing his memoirs provides [Ralph] the final solution to his sense of dislocation, for through writing he is at last able to take control of the fragments of his past and shape them into a spiritual and psychological autobiography” (p. 3).

8. Result

The narratives in reference, thus, eventually become Renaissance texts in spirit and tendency, having more sense of freedom and flexibility, quite transversal to the claim of the conventional criticism. The message of Naipaul’s texts is clear, although the conventional and habituated subjective and one dimensional theoretical perspectives were reluctant to recognize it, that in the interpretation of a writer and his/her corresponding texts there is an urgent essentialism for evolution in the conventional practice of criticism towards a sense of “Naupaulexity” leveraged by the sense of “Theory Renaissance”. The sense of the “Naipaulexity” orients us towards the recognition of the complexity of a work, Naipaul in particular and the others alike in general, and the sense of the “Theory Renaissance” teaches us how to delay our judgment, unlike the conventional criticism of Naipaul, of this complexity. This will be a deconstructive, an enabling phenomenon for the literary endeavor of a writer like Naipaul in particular and the tradition of criticism in general.

9. Conclusion

Conclusively then, through the mapping of some of the dominating conventional criticisms on Naipaul and exploring their limitations, shortfalls in understanding his works, as exemplified by the fictions under enquiry, and through the deconstructive analysis of the fictions in the light of the idea of “Naipaulexity” of the texts and “Theory Renaissance” as the spirit of the reading, the paper arrives at the point that Naipalean discourse is continuously evolving in nature, it is dense and thick hence downplays any single attempt to devalue him as “inquiline” or “racially specific…” or as such cited above. The experience of Ralph Singh, Mr. Biswas and Willy Chandran with extreme exposure to world, encounter of the exotic cultures and people around, and their eventual understanding of them goes beyond a reductionist mapping. In this sense Naipaul ever opens vast and spiraling areas for exploration, an enabling and not a degenerative phenomenon, for the critics and the readers for their cerebral experience through a critical rigor having the “renaissance” spirit.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study is supported via funding from Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University project number [PSAU/2023/R/1444].

Notes on contributors

Mohammad Rezaul Karim

Mohammad Rezaul Karim is currently working as an Assistant Professor of English in the College of Science and Humanities, Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, KSA. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Gauhati University, India. He has been teaching English language to the undergraduate students for the last 6 years. He has presented papers at both national and international conferences, published research articles and papers in various journals, and also authored two books. His main area of interest is comparative literature and English language.

Ramesh Sharma

Ramesh Sharma is an Associate Professor and Head, Department of English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Assam Don Bosco University, India. He has a Ph.D. in English from Dibrugarh University, India. He has been teaching literature at UG and PG levels for the last 9 years. He is also a Ph.D. supervisor. He has presented paper at national and international conferences. He has authored four books and edited four others. He has published papers in various journals and also several books’ chapters. He keeps interest in Diaspora Studies, Ethnography and Oral Literature.