Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul

10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Authority and Authorship in V. S. Naipaul

Also by the Author

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The Wedding (2001) Green-eyed Thieves (2006) High, Low, In-between (2009)

10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

Imraan Coovadia

10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Authority and Authorship in V. S. Naipaul

authority and authorship in v. s. naipaul Copyright © Imraan Coovadia, 2009.

First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-61535-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coovadia, Imraan. Authority and authorship in V. S. Naipaul / Imraan Coovadia. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-230-61535-9 (alk. paper) 1. Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932—Literary style. 3. Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932—Political and social views. 4. Authority in literature. 5. Authorship—Political aspects. 6. Authorship—Social aspects. I. Title. PR9272.9.N32Z595 2009 823'.91—4dc22

2008045303

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: July 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments Introduction: Authorship and Authority

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1

Authority and Misquotation in A Bend in the River

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2

The Cold Joke

39

3

V. S. Naipaul and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad

63

4

V. S. Naipaul and the Muslims

93

5

V. S. Naipaul and the Uses of South Africa

127

Conclusion: Style and Naipaulian Transformations in the Indian Travel Narratives

151

Notes

159

Bibliography

183

Index

187

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Contents

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I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the following individuals and institutions: Tony Morphet, Fawzia Mustafa (as Palgrave reviewer), the external reviewers for Postcolonial Text, Gail Fincham, the Teaching Relief Fund and Office of the Humanities Dean at the University of Cape Town, and Lyn Holness and the University of Cape Town Emerging Researcher’s Program.

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Acknowledgments

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Authorship and Authority

KING LEAR. Dost thou know me, fellow? KENT. No, sir; but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master. KING LEAR. What’s that? KENT. Authority. The small, twinkly eyes that might at first, in that wrinkled head, have seemed only peasant’s eyes, always about to register respect and obsequiousness combined with disbelief, could be seen now to be the eyes of a man used to exercising a special kind of authority, an authority that to him and the people around him was more real and less phantasmal, than the authority of outsiders from the city. His face was the face of the Master, the man who knew men, and whole families, as servants, from their birth to their death. —India: A Wounded Civilization

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he construction of authority—what we call legitimacy in politics, tradition in culture, and imaginative strength, or plausibility, in literature—is the key problem in V. S. Naipaul’s career, from his Caribbean comedies of the late 1950s and sub-Saharan fiction of the 1970s, through the travel writings and his more recent

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INTRODUCTION

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Authority and Authorship in V. S. Naipaul

essays and narratives, including Magic Seeds (2004) and A Writer’s People (2007). Throughout his work, Naipaul studies societies on the periphery of the world system where political authority is fragile and cultural authority has yet to be established. With their focus on English subjects and landscape, Mr. Stone and the Knight’s Companion (1963) and The Enigma of Arrival (1987) are exceptions to the general rule. Naipaul sets his fiction on Caribbean islands and in invented sub-Saharan states while his travel writing encircles the globe. His imaginative energies have been consistently invested in regions far removed from his British residence and from the sureties of metropolitan existence. For Naipaul literature alters the obscurities of the postcolonial situation. Literature brings definition and, therefore, a kind of tact or style to its object; as he puts it in The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972), “until they have been written about, societies appear to be without shape and embarrassing.”1 Writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, has the almost magical ability, according to Naipaul, to confer form on postcolonial societies. It functions as a substitute for the long-standing conventions and understandings that make up a metropolitan culture, giving it “shape.” The internal organization in a verbal work of art allows the reader to see the component parts of a disorganized Third World society. Writing, moreover, has a psychological effect on the relation between the outside observer and the observed. Like a garment clothing an unsightly body, it forestalls “embarrassment.” Naipaul does not locate this particular “embarrassment,” but one senses it belongs to his own psychological makeup and, perhaps to his readers, more than to the postcolonial peoples he represents. To italicize the word as Naipaul does makes the existence of this “embarrassment” an assumption imposed on the reader rather than an argument about what it means for a writer to take on postcolonial subject matter. Naipaul’s prose, which he seems to drape on the offending body of the postcolonial situation, makes a decorous and civilized scene out of the encounter. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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In a world of many cultures, many states, and many contrasting levels of development, it is often unclear what can and should be said and who has the right to say it. This crisis of authority is at once a theme in Naipaul’s works and a literary-critical problem in understanding the power and scope of his prose. The competence by which Naipaul claims to describe and define a great number of societies across the globe is, as I will show, a product of his own writing from the level of the individual phrase and sentence all the way to the location and narrative structure of his novels and other prose narratives. Even Naipaul’s jokes, such as they are— “A banana a day keeps the Jamaican away”—are, as we shall see, attempts to position himself and his audience within the postcolonial situation. Understanding Naipaul’s claims for himself and his writing means, in addition, reckoning with a certain view of literature as a cross-cultural institution. The problem of imaginative authority is a deep one in literary studies; understanding Shakespeare, or Leo Tolstoy, is inseparable from offering an account of their power to convince. Shakespeare’s alchemy of characters and situations—ranging from monarch to beggar, and from Danish Hamlet and a New World Tempest to the Tudor propaganda of the Henry plays—has frequently been ascribed to his own reticence as a personality. Shakespeare is supposed to have had so little need to assert his individuality that he could be fully possessed by the many distinct individualities of his characters. Tolstoy’s imaginative power, on the other hand, is usually understood as inseparable from Tolstoyan personality. The panoramas of War and Peace and Anna Karenina are the creation of a particular man who finds universal relevance in each particular situation. In the case of Shakespeare as well as Tolstoy, critics have often looked for one disposition that explains the work’s hold over our imaginations. With Naipaul, born in Trinidad but at home in the United Kingdom and at large in the world from Muslim Asia to sub-Saharan Africa and the American South, the problem of literary authority 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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also takes center stage. Naipaul’s power as a writer, unlike that of Shakespeare or Tolstoy, is more obviously a product of Naipaulian rhetoric than of Naipaul’s psychology or his imaginative powers. The political attitudes of his readership do much to determine the responses to his long career. On the right, where Naipaul’s diagnosis of the postcolonial condition falls on willing ears, Naipaul’s style and range have been enthusiastically affirmed. His writing is seen to be offering home truths about the ideological confusions and practical deficiencies of Third World societies. On the left, broadly speaking, and among academic critics, Naipaul’s authority has been strenuously resisted, in, for example, Rob Nixon’s London Calling (which in its subtitle identifies its subject as a “post-colonial mandarin”), or redefined and redescribed, as in Sara Suleri’s Rhetoric of British India, Fawzia Mustafa’s monograph V. S. Naipaul, and Homi Bhabha’s more general study The Location of Culture.2 Suleri, Mustafa, and, in passing, Bhabha suggest the line of argument that is developed here; that is, instead of contesting or consolidating Naipaul’s authority, one might better examine how it is formed and deformed. Although Naipaul might not entirely agree with this group of critics, their analysis of his work is at least continuous with Naipaul’s self-understanding. Bhabha, for example, in assimilating Naipaul to his model of colonial culture as subversive mimicry, borrows directly from Naipaul’s sketch of independent India’s culture in India: A Wounded Civilization.3 For Bhabha, one cannot, as it were, read Naipaul with a straight face. Suleri and Mustafa, also relatively sympathetic to their subject, see in Naipaul’s prose a demonstration of postcolonial consciousness that acts in counterpoint to the author’s public statements on the many weaknesses of postcolonial societies. Here, I study how aspects of Naipaulian rhetoric go to the construction of his authority. These rhetorical features include the patterns of Virgilian allusion and misquotation one finds in A Bend in the River, the “cold jokes,” which pepper Naipaul’s nonfiction and public speeches as well as his fiction; the use of motifs, which convince by repetition rather than by argument; Naipaulian 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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ekphrasis, which diagnoses a culture through its images; and the sensory intensity of Naipaulian description, which stamps his recitals as authentic and produces a literary language distinguished from ordinary reportage and observation. These many devices of Naipaulian rhetoric are, I argue, essential to the Nobelist’s literary power. In separate chapters on Islam and on South Africa, I examine how particular choices of topic exercise and extend Naipaul’s authority over his subject matter. In the case of Islam, which falls at once inside and outside Naipaul’s expertise, the subject represents an opportunity to introduce complex autobiographical material that is nonetheless distanced from the novelist; Salim, the Indian Muslim narrator of A Bend in the River, exemplifies this logic. It is a mistake, I argue, to reduce the writer’s complex experiments with Islamic motifs and societies to some of the more shrill judgments proffered in the course of his travels around Muslim Asia. In fact, given the close reading that Naipaul’s writing requires, Muslim characters and themes make what is often a subtle contribution to the form and texture of his work. Naipaul’s employment of South African characters and motifs belongs, as I argue, to his attempt to undermine the enlightened opinion of the 1960s and 1970s about the now defunct South African regime. Naipaul sees the legitimacy of the anti-apartheid struggle as a false form of moral authority, which he subverts in a complex series of jokes and provocations. One may certainly disagree with Naipaul’s antiliberalism and the relish with which he undermines the tenets of twentieth-century liberal humanitarianism. His interest in seeing the good side of the apartheid regime comes out today, even under the most charitable interpretation, as benighted. But, for analytic purposes, it is useful to understand how Naipaul’s authority often emerges in a head-on confrontation with enlightened political opinion. In the most historically minded of my chapters, I consider the various forms of authority at play in the Michael Abdul Malik case, which Naipaul reported for the London Sunday Times before turning it into an essay included in The Return of Eva Peron and 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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the Killings in Trinidad (1980) as well as the novel Guerrillas (1975). Around Malik, or Michael X, a well-known black nationalist in 1960s London who was hanged in Port-of-Spain in 1975, we find a variety of narratives that attempt to capture his story and translate his charisma and notoriety into literary reputation. These include Naipaul’s essay and the novel Guerrillas he released in the same year as Malik’s execution, Malik’s own abortive novel and his 1968 autobiography, accounts published in the tabloid press, sensationalist biographies published in the wake of Malik’s execution, including Derek Humphry and David Tindall’s False Messiah (1977) and even Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play Emperor Jones and Joseph Conrad’s short story “An Outpost of Progress” (1897), which Naipaul retrospectively identifies as keys to understanding the Malik phenomenon. In a sense the novel Guerrillas stands at the endpoint of a small literary tradition, beginning with Conrad, which examines the nature of radical and charismatic African and African American politics. To put the point differently, Naipaul affirms the existence of this small tradition in his novel and the related essays. He constructs Guerrillas with this transnational set of political and literary texts as the context of his own novel. The historical and geographical range of the texts Naipaul selects as precursors to Guerrillas suggests something of the freedom, and the intricacy, of his imaginative situation. Indeed imaginative complexity and a clash of perspectives seem to enable Naipaul. His imaginative power—his ability to define a situation and to assert which texts and genres apply to it—is inseparable from his own situation as a writer. Here I try to understand how the authority of Naipaul’s literature emerges in a contest with other ways of telling and retelling the material on which he draws for the novel Guerrillas. Both in his reporting and in Guerrillas, Naipaul deploys the tools of literary criticism, as well his freedom to reimagine Malik, to assert the primacy of his own account of the case. I suggest that the Malik case shows us Naipaul’s career in miniature. In the confusion of the case, Naipaul first inserts 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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himself through his contemporary reportage and then transforms the details into his novel Guerrillas. By casting the Malik case alongside Conrad’s story and O’Neill’s play, Naipaul asserts his own authority over the situation. Moreover, through Guerrillas, Naipaul defines the very situation, both politically in its British and Caribbean circumstances, and imaginatively, in its relation to Conrad, O’Neill, Malik’s own writing, and the sensationalist productions of the Trinidadian press. In the concluding portion of this book, which deals with the three travel books on India, I look at the way in which Naipaul’s style—with its mixture of precise observation, rhythmic control, and widespread use of indirect discourse—establishes the writer’s power at the level of the individual sentence. Sentences, details, and observations, as I will show, are the atoms of Naipaulian authority. It is often by sheer force of repetition that Naipaul builds and extends his power to convince. As a writer, he repeats words and details within a sentence and across a paragraph and from chapter to chapter. This method of assertion is so basic to the writer that he even repeats his journeys across the decades, visiting India to revise and remember his perceptions of the subcontinent, in three separate books. Because authority is the most general problem of Naipaul’s career and at the core of his diagnosis of postcolonial societies, it may seem to lack literary-critical definition. In fact, Naipaul addresses the problem of authority directly in almost every one of his major publications. His own writing thematizes the ongoing creation, destruction, and displacement of authority. That is why critics such as Bhabha, Mustafa, and Suleri can be described as the most interesting students of Naipaul because their judgments about his authority are closely related to the ways in which Naipaul represents and undermines his own authority and the nature of authority in general. Authority is a problem because, in a colonial situation, it is so often absent. This applies to cultural authority, or tradition, as much as to political order. The more reflective of Naipaul’s characters are 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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My family were Muslim. But we were a special group. We were distinct from the Arabs and other Muslims of the coast; in our customs and attitudes we were closer to the Hindus of north-western India, from which we had originally come. When we had come no one would tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived… we never recorded.4

India, for Salim (as often for Naipaul himself ), is felt as the center of his own “customs and attitudes.” The order of Salim’s list of group identities is significant. He begins with “my family,” which he extends into “a special group” of Indian Muslims who have moved along the rim of the Indian Ocean from “north-western India” (probably the old trading ports and hinterland of Gujarat) to the sub-Saharan coast. The community is in essence a large and sprawling family, a set of people who take kinship as their basic mode of attachment. Engagement with the external world, whether with other groups or with the historical past, is almost entirely absent. The near sources of authority are tradition and community while in the distant background is the ancient and religiously diverse world of “north-western India.” Salim, like his Indian Muslim community as well as his Trinidadian creator, inherits a sense of difference from those around him—his “special group…[is] distinct from the Arabs and other Muslims of the coast [in its] customs and attitudes.” Yet his community’s perception of difference is unreflective. It is realized only through the reproduction of “customs and attitudes” without a corresponding historical and literary consciousness (“when we had come no one would tell me”). Because there is no writing, Naipaul’s argument runs, there is no opportunity for self-understanding. When someone has “recorded,” as Naipaul does, the difference between past and present, near and far, can be established. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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aware that the source of their own traditions lies elsewhere. They do not live in their ancestral homelands and are cut off from the living institutions of their culture. As Salim explains in A Bend in the River,

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Where India is the absent point of reference for Salim and his “special group,” for others of Naipaul’s characters—Pundit Ganesh Ramsumair of Mystic Masseur, for instance, who metamorphoses into the English gentleman “G. Ramsay Muir, Esq., M.B.E” by the end of the novel—this center is the United Kingdom. Finally, for Naipaul, the journey to the center of literary tradition that he represents in The Enigma of Arrival (1987) is perhaps the most complex imaginative transaction of career. His views on English society and landscape are, of course, mediated by his reading: “I saw with the literary eye, or with the aid of literature. A stranger here, with the nerves of the stranger, and yet with a knowledge of the language and the history of the language and the writing, I could find a special kind of past in what I saw.”5 Literature, painting, and the arts in general are almost always associated in Naipaul not with transformation or deformation, disfigurement or pure invention, but with discovery and insight (“I could find a special kind of past in what I saw”). Yet the works of art that he quotes rarely belong to the solid and determinate world of nineteenth-century realism. In Enigma, Naipaul fittingly posits de Chirico’s painting, with its uncertain frame and truncated chessboard, as an unreliable emblem of his own experience in the English countryside from which so many of his own colonial coordinates have been drawn. The Enigma of Arrival is unusual for its British setting. Beyond Trinidad, the absence of authority in Naipaul’s prose is felt not only in the cultural sphere but also often in the dangerous spaces of the African city and countryside. Instead of Naipaul’s register being comedy, it strays far closer to something like horror in these instances, especially when the writer deals with societies with which he has at best a sophisticated traveler’s acquaintance. Violence is a constant possibility in Naipaulian Africa. And fear, which is the natural response to this Hobbesian world, is one of the principal emotions evoked by Naipaul’s fiction. There is, for example, a current of sudden and atavistic violence in the fictional Uganda (or Zaire) of A Bend in the River. Salim, 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Naipaul’s Indian Muslim narrator, sees fighting in the streets of the town without ever feeling a need to intervene. In this case, Salim is little more than Naipaul’s eye. He watches as one might watch a duel, or a lynching, without a moral connection to either victim or attacker. These are things that happen, in a postcolonial state, and there is nothing one would want to do about it. Indeed, there is almost no sense of moral agency in such violence: More than once [Salim remembers] I saw what looked like a drunken pushing and shoving, a brawl with slaps, turn to methodical murder, as though the first wound and the first spurt of blood had made the victim less than a man, and compelled the wounder to take the act of destruction to the end. (56)

The incident, which is typical rather than singular (“more than once”), begins as an ordinary disagreement, which, one might think, could occur in any city, even in London. At first the fight involves “what looked like drunken pushing and shoving,” but this soon becomes “a brawl with slaps.” It is not a one-sided affair since both participants seem to be “pushing and shoving.” The “slaps,” of course, are intended to humiliate; yet, it is difficult to unite in a single image the crude brutality of “a brawl” with the stylized and psychological violence of “slaps.” One suspects that Naipaul is simply lumping various forms of physical conflict into one occasion. He wants an atmosphere of violence rather than a specific incident. There are other inconsistencies in the description. At some point in the fight, it would seem, one of the participants uses a weapon; “slaps” surely would not produce a “spurt of blood.” The “spurt” indicates a sudden violation of bodily integrity—a key moment in the Naipaulian demonology of popular behavior. But it would seem to be the effect of a knife or some solid object rather than the use of hands and fists. Perhaps it is not necessary that these different forms of violence should be logically connected. Violence, in Naipaul, has an internal logic or dynamism that is reflected in vocabulary like “methodical” 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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and “compelled.” Naipaul’s Salim describes an escalator of violence, which—on him as on the reader—has something of the grand guignol effect of watching a horror movie. No policeman steps in to assert order; nor is there any sense in the passage that people nearby should interfere with such “methodical murder.” There is no form of legal or popular authority in Naipaul’s imagined version of Kisangani that can prevent “the act of destruction” being taken “to the end.” Postcolonial societies, in Naipaul, are always at the point of becoming Hobbesian anarchies ruled by violence. In his narratives, Naipaul returns to such motifs as if to convince his readers by repetition. As I will show, it is typical of Naipaulian style to state a theme, almost in passing, and then restate it in greater detail in a new context. In A Bend in the River, the scene is recapitulated during the rebellion when the legitimacy of the state reaches its lowest point. Salim observes an officer who “invited the first blow [against himself ] with one of the concrete blocks; and the sight of blood…then encouraged a sudden, frenzied act of murder by dozens of small hands” (207). Yet, like the backdrop of violence that Salim observes in the town, this murder—“by dozens of small hands”—has no role in the plot. It has absolutely no connection to Salim’s own circumstances. The officer is never named. His killers are not mentioned again. Nothing, then, is ever made of this act of popular violence. It is a point in the novel with very high emotional impact but low, or nonexistent, relevance to the narrative. It is offered as a piece of anthropological detail much as one might find out about some peculiar custom. Here, as elsewhere in Naipaul’s prose, the reader confronts a scene in which political authority collapses. It is significant that violence breaks out at the “sight of [the officer’s] blood.” Authority is brittle. Appearances count. In an axiom that Naipaul repeats throughout his career, when authority is once successfully challenged it collapses. Moreover, the “brawl with slaps” and the “dozens of small hands” indicate a postcolonial violence that is intimate, collective, 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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feminized, and infantilized. At any moment, order can disintegrate into collective murder. The reader, like Salim the narrator, is forced to confront his or her own feeling of physical vulnerability. In this way, Naipaul’s novels of the 1970s make a powerful argument to his readership about the character of life in the new states of sub-Saharan Africa. When authority is violated, the integrity of the body is at risk, not just abstractions like private property and due process. This is an observation that is far more effectively conveyed in a narrative, with its capacity to arouse fear and distaste, than in a newspaper article or essay. It is no wonder that Naipaul has been celebrated by conservative commentators who insist on the negative consequences of postcolonial disorder. Naipaul suggests what is being ignored by sympathetic Western observers of decolonization. At least he brings home to his readers what it means to live in a society where personal safety is not an expectation. In Beyond Belief (1999), Naipaul uses his primal motif of sudden violence to impress his view of the Iranian revolution on the reader and therefore to place the Iranian revolution on a matrix alongside sub-Saharan Africa and postcolonial Trinidad (the only comparable scene in the Caribbean comedies comes when Harbans’s Jaguar burns rather peacefully in the election-day crowd of The Suffrage of Elvira). In Tehran, Naipaul hears “about people who had been shot by the Shah’s police during the demonstrations before the revolution [in 1979]. Even a slight wound could be fatal, because when a man fell his fellow demonstrators ran to him to force their hands in the wound in order to stain them with the warm blood of a martyr.”6 There is the same indirect quality to Naipaul’s narration here as in A Bend in the River; one senses that Salim, like Naipaul, has heard about such acts of violence only second hand. I return to these scenes of dismemberment in my discussion of A Bend in the River—indeed several of the same passages are examined in more than one chapter of what follows because they exemplify more than one aspect of the author’s postcolonial project—but here it is interesting that 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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the violation of bodily integrity, and death, comes literally at the hands of “fellow demonstrators.” The Iranian protestors are killed, rather than murdered, by their comrades and not by the Shah’s police. Revolutionary violence is to blame, not the security forces of the unpopular and Western-oriented regime of the Shah. But there is little sense of individual moral condemnation on Naipaul’s part. The demonstrators behave in a swarm. In each case of dismemberment, the sight of blood is the trigger. Yet if Salim sees both “methodical murder” by individuals and “sudden, frenzied act[s] of murder” by mobs, then Naipaul, in Tehran, identifies an ecstatic current of religion in these protests (and by extension in the Iranian Islamic revival). Blood doesn’t spurt out, as in A Bend in the River. Rather it serves to sanctify the protest and all its participants. Instead of horror, there is a sense of religious gratification. Indeed the scene resembles nothing so much as a Greek myth (and specifically Virgil’s Latin retelling of the death of Orpheus in the Georgics). In each case, the scene of dismemberment enacts a specific variant of the crisis of authority: in Africa there is no external force to stop the contagion of “methodical murder”; in Iran the “warm blood of a martyr” gives divine sanction to the protestors and their cause. While a reader is terrified by the threat of violence in A Bend in the River, the breach of authority in Beyond Belief is not so directly affecting. The problem of authority, in this way, is as much a part of Naipaul’s poetics as it is a part of his politics. One therefore needs to understand Naipaul’s political attitudes in connection to his inventory of style and theme. This study is more interested in the nuances of Naipaul’s prose than in the ideological deficiencies of the author. Indeed, it suggests that Naipaul’s geopolitical attitudes are often determined by his imaginative situation as a transnational novelist. In Beyond Belief, as in Among the Believers (1982), the Muslim world is not represented as a threat to the outside world. Instead, Naipaul sets out a view of the Muslim societies he studies, from Iran and Pakistan to Indonesia and Malaysia, which emphasizes their self-enclosed, 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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self-defeating, and self-destructive nature. Here Naipaul’s commitment to his own views about literary texts collides with monotheistic commitments to the value of religious writing. Because the ultimate source of authority is scripture and the category of the sacred, Muslim societies, according to Naipaul, cannot manage the transition to the modern world. While this late-twentieth-century Islam appeared to raise political issues. But it had the flaw of its origins—the flaw that ran right through Islamic history: to the political issues it raised it offered no political or practical solution. It offered only the faith. It offered only the Prophet, who would settle everything—but who had ceased to exist. This political Islam was rage, anarchy.7

As I show in my discussion of Naipaul’s writings on Islam, the issue of political authority gives way here to the problem of the excessive authority of the past and of the sacred (asserted, as Naipaul suggests, over day-to-day experience and practical needs). There is “only the Prophet, who would settle everything.” Authority in Islam undermines itself, according to Naipaul, and becomes “rage, anarchy.” No real difficulty is ever settled; all conflict is reduced to conflict about who has authority to speak for the religion. Naipaul criticizes “the thuggish public life of the Muslim polity, where in practice the only morality (also the eternal balm) was the possession of the faith” (Among the Believers, 99). He suggests that the “public life of the Muslim polity” is peculiarly amoral because “the only morality” is an assertion of religious legitimacy. Naipaul’s carefully balanced phrase—“the only morality (and also the eternal balm)”—indicates the carefully controlled attitude toward Islam, which is prescribed in his two-part study of Muslim countries. While it does not represent Islam, by and large, as externally threatening it is, in its essence, satirical rather than suffused with horror as are the sub-Saharan writings. The Pakistani rioters in Beyond Belief are described, accordingly, in what is a remarkably temperate and good-humored vein of Naipaulian satire that

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precisely matches the burning of Harbans’s Jaguar in Suffrage of Elvira: “It was winter, the best season in Lahore, and they shouted slogans against the United States and broke up a couple of minibuses” (306). The comedy resides in the phrasing as well as the choice of example. The protestors haven’t even burned a bus on this day of “the best season in Lahore.” They only “broke up a couple of minibuses.” It is characteristic of Naipaul’s writing, I will argue, that it sets in parallel various crises and consolidations of authority—literary, religious, political, cultural, and, perhaps most importantly, Naipaul’s own rhetorical and anthropological authority. Language, inevitably, is at the center of his understanding of power. His writing is populated with characters who build up their own power with style, both in their clothes and in their ways of speaking. In his analysis of the Malik case, Naipaul points to O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones as a key to understanding the redemptive politics of the black Caribbean. O’Neill’s Jones is open about the source of his charisma: Ain’t a man’s talking big what makes him big—long as he makes folks believe it? Sho’, I talks large when I ain’t got nothin’ to back it up, but I ain’t talkin’ wild just de same. I know I kin fool ’em—I knows it— and dat’s backin’ enough fo’ my game.8

Politics, in O’Neill’s play, is a zero-sum game that involved deceiving a colonial population. The point is made repeatedly, in dialect more acceptable to contemporary ears, by characters in Guerrillas and A Bend in the River; the power of command (“what makes him big”) follows from “talking big.”9 All there is to politics, it seems, is “talk[ing] large when I ain’t got nothin’ to back it up.” Authority, in politics as in literature, is earned by assertion. I suggest that Naipaul’s flamboyant leaders represent deliberately diminished forms of his own writerly method. This is, of course, one of the strategems by which the Nobel Prize winning

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novelist sustains the power of his own voice; a reader tacitly contrasts the brazenness of Jones’s “talking big” with the subtlety and power of Naipaulian prose. Literature, like the charismatic leader, has no authority except its own success and has no power when its power to move or convince readers happens to fail. It lives or dies in the performance. In succeeding chapters I study the stage apparatus that Naipaul brings to that performance.

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n a “ruined monument near the dock gates” of the town in A Bend in the River, the operators of the steamer have carved a Latin inscription that serves as the municipal motto. The narrator Salim leaves the words untranslated— “Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi” (62).1 Later Salim learns from the Belgian missionary Huismans, the formula’s provenance in Virgil. The source in the Aeneid addresses Jupiter’s attitude toward the Trojan refugees in Carthage (bk. 4, l.112). The refugees have become comfortable in Carthage. Aeneas, in particular, has become involved with the Carthaginian Queen Dido. Jupiter wishes the Trojans to continue to Italy where, in Virgil’s invention of a heroic past for Octavian’s new first-century empire, the descendants of Aeneas will found the city of Rome. In the Virgilian original—“si Iuppiter unam / esse velit Tyriis urbem Troiaque profectis / miscerive probet populos, aut foedera jungi”—Venus warns that Jupiter may not approve of the “mingling of peoples and their bonds of union” (emphasis added).2 For if Trojans mix with Carthaginians, they will never arrive in Italy, derailing the imperial destiny ultimately expressed in Virgil’s patron Octavian. In Naipaul’s colony, Virgil’s revised formula celebrates the linking of the town to the capital by steamship. The country, much like Zaire, lacks internal lines of communication, and its great

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river must serve as a marine highway between the major cities. The modified Virgilian phrase is, therefore, tied to a matter of state significance. As Fawzia Mustafa points out, “perhaps the most persistent trope of Naipaul’s image of Africa is related to misreading represented in the deliberate misquotation of Virgil.”3 Latin, as a language, brings the authority of Roman government and classical literature. Yet this classical prestige has been misappropriated, Salim contends, by the misquotation, which, by amending “or” (“-ve”) to “and” (“-que”) and removing the first part of the sentence, overturns the prohibition: “God approves of the mingling of peoples, and their bonds of union.” Virgil’s epic instruction has been turned upside down. His words are used to endorse the efforts of the steamship company, a change of sign as well as a bathetic descent of subject matter from the imperial concerns of Rome to the commercial and provincial arena of a small sub-Saharan state. Salim’s reaction to such colonial overreaching and perhaps to the suggestion of miscegenation, sounds a note out of Naipaul’s contemporaneous travel writing set in India as well as sub-Saharan Africa. “I was staggered,” Salim exclaims. “Twisting two-thousandyear-old words to celebrate sixty years of the steamer service from the capital! Rome was Rome. What was this place?” (63). The statement of identity—“Rome was Rome”—is a building block of Naipaulian rhetoric in A Bend in the River. It asserts the force of common sense and logic against the grandiosity of “the steamer service” and the state that it at once serves and helps to construct. When Salim accuses the steamship company of “twisting two-thousand-year-old words,” he is not only defending classical literature from its misappropriation by nationalist propaganda. Salim is also, and Naipaul through him, affirming the intellectual virtues of clarity and accuracy above postcolonial misreading and incoherence. Proper quotation, and a decent respect for Virgil’s original text, go hand in hand with a pitilessly accurate understanding of the poverty of the new African states—“Rome

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was Rome. What was this place?” The literature and language of empire can enter the colony on privileged terms, Salim suggests, but it must not be tampered with or revised. Yet Naipaul’s ventriloquism is disingenuous throughout A Bend in the River. The misquotation of the Aeneid is no accident. Virgil’s “two-thousand-year-old words” have, in fact, been carefully insinuated into the postcolonial context of A Bend in the River. The quotation is tied to Naipaul’s core concerns. The “movement” or “mingling of peoples,” which the inscription praises, is a stock phrase in Naipaul’s prose, used in place of “imperialism” to denote modern and early modern empire.4 The Aeneid itself rationalizes Roman overlordship by imagining a prehistory that it connects with the Greek epics Rome had inherited for its own. Virgil connected the heroic age of the Iliad and Odyssey to the first-century empire constructed on the ruined foundations of the Roman republic. In the Aeneid, then, literature and political ideology are intimately connected. Virgil’s language naturalizes empire by decentralizing its territorial expansion. Instead of an imperial state, there are merely “peoples” who “move” or “mingle” in “bonds of union,” which may be sexual as well as political. Virgil shows one such relationship in the couple of Dido and Aeneas who represent, in miniature, the aborted union between Troy and Carthage. Aeneas is forced to give up Dido to pursue Rome’s future in Italy. But his Trojan followers are a tiny band of heroes, and they are outnumbered from start to finish. The argument of Virgil’s poem about the “mingling of peoples” varies considerably from Naipaul’s novel. The phrase is accurate in the Aeneid because Aeneas and his followers are refugees among the Carthaginians. Yet there is no fear of contamination or pollution through “mingling” in the Aeneid as in A Bend in the River. Indeed Virgil’s romanitas expressed confidence in Rome’s ability to govern and transform foreign societies. Carthage threatened the future Romans by seducing them and delaying them rather than by rendering them impure. Naipaul’s new Africa, with its degraded politics

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and cuisine and sexuality, poses a threat that is far more insidious to Salim, as to the various foreigners and outsiders who populate its cities. The Aeneid affirms Roman political ideals in a preimperial setting, whereas A Bend in the River is psychological in its concerns and postimperial in its setting. Naipaul’s interest in Virgil dates to his school days, although only in A Bend in the River does he select Virgil as a fellow theorist of empire. However, the Virgilian formula was not simply a curiosity of his schoolboy learning. It would have been visible to him, in the updated version, every time the young Naipaul saw the joint flag of Trinidad and Tobago, which incorporated the very words Salim reads on the “ruined monument.” (The phrase was removed at independence.) Virgil’s words had long been associated with the British claim of sovereignty over the islands. This fact, along with the long history of the phrase, is, of course, withheld from the reader of A Bend in the River. As I have suggested, Naipaul’s literary authority is frequently established in a contest with the reader, by means of concealed information, cold jokes, satire, and political provocation. A Bend in the River is the outstanding example in Naipaul’s corpus of this phenomenon. The novel parallels the construction of political and literary authority, characteristically for Naipaul, and returns obsessively to the scene of authority’s collapse. Postcolonial politics, it seems, suffers from a cycle of assertion and exposure that resembles the vulnerabilities of Naipaul’s postcolonial literature. I suggest that, in A Bend in the River, Naipaul reads the conditions of his own career into the unstable circumstances of postcolonial government. *

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Naipaul’s use of Virgil, and especially his concealed relationship to Virgil’s language, is a key to his concerns in A Bend in the River. Salim is contemptuous of the steamer company “twisting twothousand-year-old words” but, in fact, the modification of the 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Virgilian instruction from “miscerive” to “miscerique” was first enacted in Naipaul’s native West Indies as a British response to the universalism of revolutionary France. The imaginary steamship company in sub-Saharan Africa, in other words, follows a real-life Caribbean precedent. The adjusted formula is credited to Sir Ralph Abercromby, Scottish author of the revival of British power after the disastrous Flanders campaign, who was appointed commander of British forces in the West Indies in 1795. He was equally successful in his new expeditionary role, and he had an interest in Britain’s reputation as a conqueror. When Abercromby conquered Trinidad from Napoleon’s Spanish allies, he therefore provided the island with a badge that was subsequently included in the flag of united Trinidad and Tobago.5 The top section shows a British trading ship arriving in harbor. At the bottom is printed the revised Virgilian motto which, by force of misquotation, confers classical prestige on what is publicized as benevolent British rule. In revising Virgil, Abercromby meant to reassure Spanish settlers on the islands of the good faith of their new British rulers. They could live and trade freely under international British power, which, like romanitas, respected the “peoples” that fell under its authority. Their common god might be Christian rather than pagan, but, in any event, Christian readings of Virgil were commonplace; and the Roman past was a common inheritance of both European groups. But culture was perhaps a secondary matter at the time. Abercromby’s concern, even more than Virgil’s, was political, and his attention would have fallen on the second item of Virgil’s pair— “foedera jungi”—that is, a political framework to unite British and Spanish residents. For Abercromby, as for Virgil, there is no explicit fear of “mingling” construed as miscegenation or contamination.6 The Caribbean was not so far developed as to be a colonial environment of its own. It was a far outpost of European expansion rather than a milieu in its own right, rather in the way South Africa’s base in the Antarctic would be regarded today. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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At the time of Trinidad’s independence, Abercromby’s motto was felt to be inappropriate for a country establishing its own sovereignty. While the British Commonwealth preserved the fiction of “bonds of union” between center and colony, Trinidad wanted to emphasize its own identity. Abercromby’s language was removed from the flag in June 1962, an event that would have been present in Naipaul’s mind when he began writing A Bend in the River in July 1977. The deletion of the Virgilian phrase marked the boundary between the Trinidad in which Naipaul had grown up and the independent nation in which he never lived after moving to the United Kingdom. Thus a cycle of falsification and misquotation, in the service of projecting authority, is completed with Naipaul’s use of Abercromby’s imperial gesture to discredit postcolonial pretensions, a cycle begun with Virgil’s retrospective construction of a heroic Roman past and continued in Abercromby’s application of Roman prestige to Britain’s new Caribbean hegemony.7 Virgil wished to consolidate Octavian’s prestige by connecting the genesis of Rome to the Homeric cycle. Abercromby asserted Britain’s Rome-type role in the New World islands, which had been settled by different sets of European colonists. Naipaul argues that the alteration and mutilation of Virgil’s language, seen as pure literature, is the result of postcolonial grandiosity although the alteration in question was Abercromby’s, not the steamship company. Through these transactions, Virgil’s literary language is employed at the center of imperial ideology. Yet in the critical literature on A Bend in the River, only Regelind Farn notes, and only in passing, the connection between the “Old Motto” of Trinidad and Naipaul’s steamer service; nor has there been discussion of the significance of Virgil’s formula in Naipaul’s prose.8 This is surprising because the Latin phrase in A Bend in the River is perhaps the most striking example of Naipaul’s quotation

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from classical sources for reasons, which are central to his own project as a writer. I argue that Naipaul adds his own misrepresentation to the series, concealing his source in Abercromby, because the assertion and collapse of authority—whether political or literary, Virgilian or Naipaulian—is his core concern in A Bend in the River, his first successful novel after the triumph of A House for Mr. Biswas in 1961.9 I have suggested that an interest in authority is central to Naipaul, and in this sense, A Bend in the River, set in a fictional state and executed almost without plot or chronology, is the most characteristic of Naipaul’s works. The Virgilian tag is one of a number of the novel’s references to the classical past. Naipaul’s characters, as well as their author, exploit classical authority. The use of Latin inside A Bend in the River simultaneously obscures and empowers. It obscures because it is not available to those without some classical education; and at the very least, a Latin phrase in an English text is bound to slow down even a reader with some knowledge of school Latin. Of course Latin empowers for precisely the same reason, advertising a costly investment in nontechnical education, as well as attachment to the classicist model of education preferred by the British elite. The language is also, of course, for Naipaul as for Abercromby, associated with Roman ideals of government and dominion. Its prestige is enjoyed by Zabeth’s son Ferdinand, one of the country’s up and coming men. Ferdinand proudly wear his school “blazer with the Semper Aliquid Novi motto.” The quotation from Pliny the Elder (who was himself quoting a Greek commonplace) is truncated and reads in full “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi”: “There is always something new from Africa.”10 One never knows what marvel to expect from the continent. The significance is, to a large degree, in the absent words. To understand the suitability of the school’s motto to its situation (“ex africa”), one must recall the entire proverb and fill in the first two words for oneself. As we shall, this is a characteristic device of Naipaulian

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style. The reader completes the text in his or head by remembering the opening words. Unlike Abercromby’s alteration of Virgil, and the steamship company’s inscription, which use Latin to project authority, Ferdinand’s blazer means to create a sense of community, however exclusive, around knowledge of the original phrase. This old boy’s club comes to include the reader him- or herself. Pliny’s observation is taken straight by Ferdinand who identifies himself as this “novi,” or new man in a new and emerging continent. While his mother is a simple trader, Ferdinand is ambitious, educated, and his prospects are good as long as the country is viable. Yet for Naipaul, who insists on the circularity of African history, the motto is ironic, an irony shared by author and reader (although not by Huismans, a believer in African progress as well as a reader of Virgil, who suffers the fate of Naipaul’s true believers by having “his head cut off and spiked” in the Naipaulian bush [82]). In the case of the Virgilian quotation, however, the irony is Naipaul’s alone and represents, as an insider’s joke, a cache of hidden authority. The novelist knows something that he chooses not to reveal to his readership. *

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In A Bend in the River, Naipaul ascribes elements of his own situation—as a postcolonial writer almost without a society and a literature to call his own—to three of the novel’s personages. Salim, the narrator, inherits the author’s well-known anxieties about racial difference and erotic experience.11 Although Salim’s community is Muslim rather than Hindu, and he is born on the Indian Ocean rim of Africa rather than in Trinidad, Naipaul goes out of his way to minimize the differences between his own background and that of Salim. Salim, like Naipaul, is an alienated consciousness born into a highly traditional Indian expatriate community. The resemblance between character and author go further than attitude and social position. Salim’s experiences with Yvonne are based on Naipaul’s own relationship 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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with his Argentinian mistress Margaret.12 This, I will suggest, is significant not because of the match between biography and fiction but because it indicates that Salim is constructed as a narrator as a conduit for certain of Naipaul’s experiences. It should focus our attention on how Naipaul simultaneously identifies with and distinguishes himself from his narrator. Indar, the foreign-educated intellectual who is recruited by Western governments for his impartiality, benefits from his claim, like Naipaul’s own, of being “a man without a side” (154). Like Naipaul, Indar is responsible for reporting on African conditions to the metropolis. He is a creature of the new world of international organizations like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. Indar scrupulously preserves his appearance of neutrality in the awareness that it is his principal asset. Finally, the court historian Raymond rehearses the author’s anxieties about writing. Raymond’s European birth, and his relationship to the ruler of the country, lend him prestige, but it also means that he has no standing in his own right. Salim’s description of Raymond summarizes the conditions of Naipaulian authority, the remarkable capacity of the West Indian writer to assert his control of materials far beyond his apparent competence, and the equally remarkable exposure of each such assertion.13 As Salim puts it, His [Raymond’s] position in the Domain required him to display authority. But at any moment he might be stripped of this authority, reduced to nothing, with nothing to fall back on. In his place I don’t think I would have been able to pretend to have any authority—that would have been the hardest thing for me. (190)

In his mixed strength and vulnerability, I argue, Raymond, and even the novel’s Mobutu-like Big Man, resembles the author.14 At the back of Naipaul’s mind may well be the Emperor Jones from O’Neill’s play who also “talks large” without being able to back up his authority. Naipaul sees this form of display and assertion as characteristic of postcolonial situations. Given Naipaul’s controversial pronouncements on these new states and societies, questions about his 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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right to make these judgments arise naturally. Yet similar debates— think of the charged discussions of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace or, in an earlier decade, Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet—have been equally heated without the question of authorial competence emerging with equal urgency. One might disagree with Coetzee’s diagnosis of the South African situation in Disgrace or object to Bellow’s depiction of African American characters like the pickpocket in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, without denying their right and ability to represent such material. There is some obvious connection between the writer and the way in which he imaginatively renders his experience. Naipaul’s circumstances are different and this is particularly evident in A Bend in the River. I argue that the assertion of Naipaulian authority is an effect of the author’s literary style and, indeed, that authority is the principal effect to which his style aspires. Authority is exerted forcefully in Naipaul’s work, from book to book and sentence to sentence, and to the exact degree to which it is asserted, courts forceful rejection. In A Bend in the River, as in his travel writings and public pronouncements, Naipaul deliberately polarizes his readership. The serious divisions in the reception of his work are, therefore, not only political and ideological. These disagreements derive directly from the author’s strategy of assertion. *

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The picture is clearest in A Bend in the River because it is, I argue, the first successful extension of Naipaul’s fiction to subject matter beyond the Caribbean.15 The negative emotions of fear, contempt, disgust, and self-hatred are redirected from Naipaul’s Trinidad to environments distant from the author’s childhood.16 Where the squalidness of Trinidadian society was something in which Mohun Biswas was implicated, the unattractiveness of the cuisine and the mores of the country of A Bend in the River is set off distinctly from the narrator Salim (and from his creator). 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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The effect is to create a sharp boundary between Naipaul, as an observer of sub-Saharan Africa, and the postcolonial situations he represents. Yet this very boundary calls into question the adequacy of Naipaul’s understanding of the new cultures and countries that enter his writing. In her book-length study, Fawzia Mustafa puts the paradox succinctly: “If Naipaul’s disconnection from ‘belonging’ to the ‘world’ is indeed a sign of his ‘objectivity,’ then what is to be the basis for the proprietary nature of his claim to ‘authority’ about the greater Third World?”17 It is a paradox to assert that one is at once a neutral observer and one armed with inside knowledge, but it is, of course, Indar’s paradox in A Bend in the River, and Naipaul’s paradox throughout his career. Neutrality is not necessarily a recommendation for a writer although it may be for a pundit. Mustafa argues that Naipaul establishes his authority over his subject matter by privileging the written text and the writer’s profession. It is the prestige, style, and portability of a writer that allows Naipaul to move from one country and one culture to the next. This explains why Naipaul, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, insists on his career as a writer and nothing else and often rehearses the story of how he came to be a writer and came to understand his subject matter. The idea of writing is central to his control over his material. In a kind of reductio ad absurdum of his many narratives of writerly apprenticeship, Naipaul even traces his fascination with writing to the physical artifact and not just to the book but to the printing apparatus. In India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)—after having traced and retraced his beginnings as a writer throughout his career without having mentioned this particular reason for his choice of a career— Naipaul remembers that In colonial Trinidad…I had developed—largely through my father, a journalist—a love for print, the shapes of letters, the variety of typefaces, a wonder at the way words were transformed when handwriting turned to type. Out of a love for that process I had decided to be a writer.18

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Whether we take Naipaul’s late account at face value, the point is that writing makes up a good deal of the subject matter of his writing. Naipaul, Mustafa shows, constructs a hierarchy of written enterprises in Biswas. It ranges from Mohun’s clumsy attempt at a love letter to Shama, and his months spent as a sign painter, to his years as a journalist writing sensational articles. A Bend in the River reproduces the motif. There are numerous types of writing in the novel. Salim records, for example, Mahesh’s idea to supply name plates to the town (89) as well as the Liberation Army pamphlet composed by guerrillas who have, it seems, some knowledge of Clausewitz: “The ANCESTORS shriek…The cult of the woman of Africa kills all our mothers, and since war is an extension of politics we have decided to face the ENEMY with armed confrontation” (211). It is Naipaul’s point that the letter offers only a simulation of logic (“since war is an extension of politics”) rather than the rock bottom common sense to which Salim often returns in the novel (“Rome was Rome”). The capitalization, interpolation of Western reading, paradox—“the cult of the woman of Africa kills all our mothers”—and overstatement are signs of postcolonial incoherence and hysteria. At one point, Ferdinand conveys a letter of thanks to his benefactor: “Salim! You took me in that time and treated me as a member of your own family. F.” Salim offers a sustained criticism of Ferdinand’s missive. He complains that “everything in the letter was deliberately crude—no envelope, the lined paper torn down one side, the very big and careless handwriting, the absence of the direct word of thanks, the ‘Salim!’ and not ‘Dear Salim,’ the ‘F.’ and not ‘Ferdinand.’” Despite these defects Salim concludes that “I found [the letter] funny and moving” (83). Salim does not object to Ferdinand’s command of English so much as to his style, manners, and attitude. Ferdinand wants to be at once familiar and commanding, at once idiomatic and impressive. Although Salim’s criticisms of Ferdinand may reveal the measure of his own insecurity, he nonetheless insinuates Naipaul’s own criteria of literary style: deliberate elegance where Ferdinand is 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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“deliberately crude,” care and precision where Ferdinand is “careless,” straightforwardness where Ferdinand refuses to provide “the direct word of thanks.” Such acts of condescension assert the superiority of literary language and of literary qualities of irony, precision, and realism. At the top of Naipaul’s hierarchy of written forms, as Mustafa argues, stands the modern novel. The gesture—which belongs more to the author than to the character of Salim—is an imperial and authoritative one; the world is the writer’s empire. In prestige terms, as conceived by colonial education, the classical equivalent of Naipaul’s novel is Virgil’s Latin poem. *

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A Bend in the River initiates the assertion of Naipaulian authority in its title. Whether Naipaul adapted the name of his book from Anthony Mann’s 1952 Western Bend of the River, starring Jimmy Stewart and Rock Hudson, the title at once specifies a location and decontextualizes it (“a bend in the river”). While Naipaul fuses aspects of Uganda, Rwanda, and Zaire, that the country is unnamed bolsters his imaginative rights over the terrain, as so many nameless African countries have served other writers.19 It belongs purely to the world of the novel, which cannot be criticized by reference to real-life circumstances. The picture of the circuitous river, on its way to nowhere in particular, differs from Conrad’s mighty river in Heart of Darkness. Instead of joining the currents of Roman, British, and African history as in Marlowe’s famous meditation, the river images the circular and ahistorical time of his anonymous country. It is an emblem of what he diagnoses as a “half-made” society, one that perpetually meanders back to its starting point. Naipaul’s fictional town is based, in large part, on Kisangani. The bend in the river situates the town at the intersection of Arab and European authority where “the Arabian energy that had pushed [the Arabs] into Africa had died down at its source, and their power was like 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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the light of a star that travels on after the star itself has become dead” (21). Here the decline of authority takes a quite different cast. (Naipaul typically reuses the image in Beyond Belief to criticize subcontinental Islam for “its devastation of India proper, turning the religiouscultural light of the subcontinent…into the light of a dead star” [25].) The Arabs, with their “energy,” “power,” and “light,” have the ability to illuminate a dark territory until their own civilization is extinguished. Then, like Raymond or the Emperor Jones, they suddenly find themselves without authority. Because the place marks the limit of Arab expansion, “at the bend in the river there had grown up a European, and not an Arab, town” (21; emphasis added). The change from the indefinite pronoun (“a bend”) to the definite is one of the fine transformations typical of Naipaulian style. In place of the despecified location of the title we are positioned at the terminus of a centuries-long contest. The falling Arabs and the rising Europeans have met at this particular bend in the river. Naipaul’s slow-motion metaphor of starlight is grand and gracefully phrased, inducting the reader into the Khaldunian scheme of civilizational rise and fall that underpins the narrative.20 *

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The opening lines of A Bend in the River have been much noticed: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it” (3).21 22 The reader comes to this free-floating line without preparation and is invited by its form to treat it as a syllogism or deduction. There is no obvious speaker and one might infer that A Bend in the River was composed in free indirect discourse rather than as a first-person narration. The language in these lines expresses an impatient desire to be done with the illusions and euphemisms of liberal opinion. There is no such thing as universal human dignity, only a constant struggle for power and survival in which many people will be annihilated. Naipaul’s tone is stern. His antiliberalism is unyielding. One must not entertain illusions about politics and humanity; literature’s 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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task is to cut through these illusions and replace them with more accurate images. The declaration of world weariness (“the world is what it is”) is also a statement of identity (of the form “a=a” or “Rome was Rome”) signaling a logical mood. Naipaul usually employs the semicolon for rhythm but here the mark conceals the function of logical implication. If we fill in the implied connectors, the statement reads, “the world is what it is therefore men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” Yet the second statement by no means follows from the first without some further unstated assumption.23 One must accept some implicit axiom about the nature of the world. The reader is challenged to accept this presupposition, if provisionally, or to reject the argument altogether. The polarization of the reader’s response here is deliberate, an instance, at the microscopic level, of the means by which Naipaulian authority is exerted. It is not that the reader is allowed to participate imaginatively in the text but that he, or she, in the process of following the text, is forced to fill in the missing connector (as we saw with the phrase “semper aliquid novi”). Much of the work of the novel takes place, in this way, in the head of the reader although the process does not necessarily grant the reader any real degree of freedom of response. Because it is free floating, the opening declaration inaugurates A Bend in the River as a piece of writing rather than as the record of an unreliable first-person consciousness. Salim exerts only fitful control over his own narrative. There is no obvious story and no clear way in which Salim develops in the course of A Bend in the River. Like Conrad’s narratives, the book is held together less by plot, scene, and character development and more by a flow of observation and generalization alongside Naipaul’s typically extensive use of indirect discourse and verbal repetition. Imitating the cycle of progress and reversion it diagnoses in postcolonial Africa, A Bend in the River refuses to move to a point of crisis or recognition.24 The novel is almost plotless and the events that impinge on Salim’s life from outside—the rise and decay of 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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political authority in the country and countryside around the town—seem entirely unmotivated. Naipaul concedes the narrative’s static character through Raymond.25 Raymond observes that “the most difficult thing in prose narrative is linking one thing with the other. The link might be just a sentence, or even a word. It sums up what has gone before and prepares one for what is to come” (136). This emphasis on “linking one thing with the other” affirms that the novel is not organized by a narrative, which has a large-scale shape and a sense of motion greater than can be provided sentence by sentence. Instead A Bend in the River is closer to Naipaulian travel writing, which combines historical and political judgment with a string of character portraits. Thus lines provided to Salim have the hysterical ring of Naipaul’s travel writing—“too many of the places on the way have closed down or are full of blood” (3)—or the exact sense of remarks Naipaul has offered about his own Trinidadian community—“When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded” (11).26 Naipaul mixes observations derived from his own experiences with those of his narrator. In so doing, he consolidates his own authority and assimilates a region of the world of which he has little knowledge to one in which his own imaginative comprehension is well established. *

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Through Salim, Naipaul studs A Bend in the River with provocations that either intensify the reader’s alienation or claim a kind of melancholy wisdom. A Bend in the River should not be described as a reactionary text so much as a consistently antiliberal one. Naipaul frequently presents the paradoxical sentiments of the most powerless because these sentiments challenge enlightened orthodoxy.27 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Such Naipaulian snares are a key aspect of his style.28 Salim’s diagnosis of African society’s attitude toward outsiders perhaps captures Naipaul’s attitude to his readers: “You don’t feel malice towards your prey. You set a trap for him. It fails ten times; but it is always the same trap you set” (55).29 The psychology of the slave is one principal subject Naipaul studies in A Bend in the River. Like Biswas’s Tulsis, Salim’s ethnically Indian family has constructed a housing compound to keep out the surrounding society. In the compound live two slave families who resist emancipation. They prefer slavery, challenging perhaps the most widely accepted assumption of modern liberal belief. The “last thing they wanted to hear was that they had to go.” While they are officially servants they wanted it known—to other Africans, and to poor Arabs and Indians—that they were really slaves. It wasn’t that they were proud of slavery as a condition; what they were fierce about was their special connection with a family of repute. They could be very rough with people they considered smaller fry than the family. (13)

The semicolon joins the concession—“it wasn’t that they were proud of slavery”—to the contention that the slaves “were fierce about‚… their special connection with a family of repute.” The concession strengthens the point about slaves taking pride in their masters; the semicolon signals the making of a judicious distinction (“it wasn’t x, it was actually y”), which underwrites the second assertion. The passage, unlike its parallels in a slave narrative like Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is farcical rather than humanizing. With their perverse pride, the slaves make themselves ridiculous. The reader is forced to alienate himself from the narrative or, alternatively, to smile at a society of proud slaves who condescend to “poor Arabs and Indians.”30 One feels no indignation at the fact of enslavement just as Salim feels no moral response to butchery on the streets. Power and status, not morality, are what counts in the cosmos of A Bend in the River. The slaves are even violent (“very rough”) with those they consider beneath themselves. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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The comedy of these lines, like much of A Bend in the River and the related travel writing, goes a long way to extinguishing a reader’s enlightened impulses. The reader is enrolled in a Naipaulian condescension toward the slaves and even more toward “smaller fry” who refuse to accept the standing of slaveholders “of repute.” While Naipaul’s point is that even the most oppressed members of society create their own lines of distinction and their own hierarchies, he puts this point in a way that is most damaging toward liberal assumptions about universal human dignity and about where dignity comes from. Here the slaves feel significance not in their own persons but rather in “their special connection with a family of repute.” Salim emphasizes the slaves’ surprising suspicions. There is “no one like the slave for spotting the slave,” he tells us, “or knowing how to deal with the slave” (104). There is a rough and ready wisdom at the bottom of the pile that liberal outsiders ignore. Moreover, this lower world is dominated by fear and strength (“spotting the slave‚…knowing how to deal with the slave”). It is a world in which every black stranger is a potential threat. So Ferdinand, Zabeth’s son and one of Africa’s new men, is, according to Salim, “possessed by all the African terror of strange Africans” (71).31 The novel repeats this motif of “African terror of strange Africans.” Salim’s version of slavery posits captives who the further away they got from the centre and their tribal area‚…the more nervous they became of the strange Africans they saw about them, until at the end, on the coast, they were no trouble at all, and were positively anxious to step into the boats and be taken to safe homes across the sea. (4)

The crossing to “safe homes” delivers the captives from “strange Africans.” They are “positively anxious” to complete their reduction into slavery. The captives, unlike Salim, inhabit their own “centre and their tribal area,” outside of which everybody is potentially hostile. Even slavery is better than encountering other Africans. By giving “no trouble” to their captors, they are effectively, or 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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so Naipaul seems to suggest, tacitly consenting to their condition. In this example of one of his coldest jokes, Naipaul presents the slaves as ridiculous, slavery as benign. It is only on inspection that a reader becomes uncertain whether to laugh or cry at the promise of “safe homes across the sea.” It is not clear whether the captives are being taken to slavery in the Middle East or in the Americas but, since Salim comes from the eastern coast, the Middle East is the more likely destination. This fits with Naipaul’s frequent insistence that Arabs are as much to blame for African slavery as Europeans. *

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The key difference between the comedy of Biswas and that of A Bend in the River is, as I have suggested, that Naipaul enforces the negative emotions of fear, disgust, and contempt more rigorously in the later work.32 The fear of pollution or contamination (“mingling”), which is absent in Virgil, is an emphatic presence in A Bend in the River as it is, of course, in much writing of the colonial period. Virgil’s words take on a very different meaning in this new situation. Disgust, as in Biswas, is expressed primarily through meals because it is by eating that the observer becomes part of his new environment. By resisting the need to eat, however, he keeps himself apart and strengthens his objectivity. Thus Salim catalogs what is for sale on the steamer plying the river: “Sometimes there was a smoked snake or a smoked small crocodile, a black hunk barely recognizable for what it had been—but with white or pale pink flesh below the charred crust” (7). The delicate description of the trailing clause (“but with white or pale pink flesh”) aestheticizes the “black hunk” of an unfamiliar African reality while affirming the power of Naipaulian observation. Repetition, alliteration, and assonance (“smoked snake‚…smoked small crocodile”) all lend further authority to the short description. To the young unnamed Belgian who works alongside Huismans, Naipaul ascribes a disgust that the reader is permitted to feel 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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at second hand. Huismans’s school serves “caterpillars and spinach in tomato sauce. Or what looked like tomato sauce‚…Of course, it was only for the boys, but the sight of it turned my stomach. I couldn’t stay in the hall and watch them chew” (60). There is a particular discomfort evoked in the reader who observes along with the Belgian: “I couldn’t stay in the hall and watch them chew.” Naipaul mixes the familiar with the uncanny to produce an unsettling effect: “caterpillars and spinach in tomato sauce. Or what looked like tomato sauce.” The tomato sauce is denatured along with the schoolboys who are so enthusiastic about their meal. Even in his offhand descriptions of meals, Naipaul makes a point.33 Yvette makes Salim “some scrambled South African eggs” (172; emphasis added). In 1977, to insist the only productive chickens on the continent flourish under white rule, is an astonishing provocation.34 It seems unlikely, at the very least, that there would have been no chickens in contemporary Uganda or Zaire (although perhaps the distribution network was inadequate). I return to this point in my discussion of South African motifs in Naipaul, but it is worth noticing that the phrase insinuates a political point about sub-Saharan Africa almost without seeming to do so. It may be the only occasion in literature in which a writer emphasizes the national origins of a plate of scrambled eggs. Fear is just as important a register as disgust in A Bend in the River. As I suggested in the introduction, there is a current of sudden violence in the novel that Salim refuses to pin down. It seems to happen everywhere and almost at the drop of a hat. “More than once,” he remembers, “I saw what looked like a drunken pushing and shoving, a brawl with slaps, turn to methodical murder, as though the first wound and the first spurt of blood had made the victim less than a man, and compelled the wounder to take the act of destruction to the end” (56). Again, repetition (“the first wound and the first spurt of blood”) and alliteration (“methodical murder”) organize the passage, making it seem more an artful piece of rhetoric, perhaps, than an act of memory, as is generally true of the remembrances Salim provides in A Bend in the River. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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The scene of killing is recapitulated in the novel during the rebellion when, in a scene we have already quoted, an officer “invited the first blow [against himself ] with one of the concrete blocks; and the sight of blood‚…then encouraged a sudden, frenzied act of murder by dozens of small hands” (207). While there is just the suggestion of cannibalism here the controlling point concerns the appearance of weakness and the puncturing of bodily integrity. The officer’s aura of authority collapses at once when he is unable to defend himself. This postcolonial violence emphasizes Salim’s (and the reader’s) feeling of physical vulnerability. It installs psychic distance between a reader and these “strange Africans.” I suggest that the intensity of these scenes in A Bend in the River, unbound as they are to the narrative, indicate that Naipaul is setting in parallel problems of political authority in the postcolonial world as well his own authority as a postcolonial writer. In these scenes of dismemberment, Naipaul implicitly ties authority to physical safety. Without stable government every person is potentially vulnerable. There is a strong fear of popular violence in Naipaul, oddly so because lynching and mob violence are not aspects of the political culture of the Caribbean. Popular violence is more a matter of fantasy and hearsay in Naipaul than personal observation. In the other scene of dismemberment we have quoted, from Beyond Belief, he hears “about people who had been shot by the Shah’s police during the demonstrations before the revolution [in 1979]. Even a slight wound could be fatal, because when a man fell his fellow demonstrators ran to him to force their hands in the wound in order to stain them with the warm blood of a martyr” (193). In a typically Naipaulian inversion of responsibility, the demonstrators are responsible for their own deaths, not the Shah’s police. That Naipaul reports hearsay protects his account from refutation, just as the imaginary land of A Bend in the River cannot be compared with the real history of a state or region. In Naipaul’s descriptions of dismemberment, there is a hint of the death of Orpheus. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is one principal 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Scorned by which tribute the Ciconian dames, Amid their awful Bacchanalian rites And midnight revellings, tore him limb from limb, And strewed his fragments over the wide fields. (Georgics, bk. 4, ll.xx)

In Georgics Virgil associates mob violence and dismemberment with the fate of the classical world’s representative poet. Virgil’s verse is an early point in a tradition of identifying the ungovernable mob as the adversary of the literary artist and dismemberment as his characteristic end. Naipaul may have recalled the passage from Georgics because it concentrates his own situation as a literary intellectual observing an empire’s disintegration. In his own writing, Virgil’s text is at once remembered and dismembered, misquoted and truncated, as is Pliny’s remark on Ferdinand’s school blazer. It is characteristic that Naipaul treats dismemberment as a brutally physical end, a kind of ultimate unmasking of the body in the harsh conditions of Third World societies. Yet, with only the lightest interpretative pressure, one might see in the passage from Georgics Virgil’s own account of the logic of literary history: that it is a writer’s fate to be dismembered—to be quoted and misquoted, to be translated and mistranslated, to be revised and corrected and cut short—by his readers.

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account of Orpheus, but the other is to be found in Georgics IV where Virgil paints Orpheus “lost Eurydice / Lamenting.”

The Cold Joke

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aipaul’s Caribbean comedies published in successive years—The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), and Miguel Street (1959)—differ markedly in tone and subject matter from his prose of the subsequent decade, beginning with the Hardyesque A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) and concluding with the historical scope of The Loss of El Dorado (1969). The three comedies, which are written in the subcontinental register of Narayan and which minimize problems of race and state construction, have generally been grouped together as rehearsals for the more comprehensive treatment of the islands in Biswas. In Biswas Naipaul absorbs the comic mode into a far graver and more serious fictionalized biography of his father. Later, in A Bend in the River and after, he seems to abandon comic writing altogether or to move toward an undeclared form of satire. But, in fact, the Caribbean comedies pioneer the very forms of Naipaulian comedy that develop further in the subsequent prose. The device of the joke, as one might expect, structures Naipaulian comedy. It appears in the strict form that announces that a joke is in progress and provides a setup, a delivery, and a punch line, which reverses the audience’s expectation.1 2 In this case, the joke determines the generic mode of the narrative, which becomes an occasion to tell jokes (like, for example, The Importance of Being

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CHAPTER 2

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Earnest). There are frequent throwaway lines in the early novels, which reduce the joke to its shortest form in a single sentence—as Foam Baksh’s “enthusiastic slogan” has it in The Suffrage of Elvira, “VOTE HARBANS OR DIE!”3 Here the humor is at the expense of Foam Baksh and his vehement support for Harbans as well as the inexperienced political culture of the Caribbean. As the line appears in Suffrage of Elvira, it is presented as a piece of “found comedy,” since Foam Baksh is himself the author. The joke may also appear in the more relaxed recital of a comic anecdote, which has a jokelike structure but is not explicitly declared as such. In The Mystic Masseur, the first book Naipaul published, the following self-standing episode appears in the narrative: Last Christmas Suruj Mooma take up the children by their grandmooma and this boy just come up to she cool cool and say he taking up dentistry. You could imagine how Suruj Mooma was surprise. And the next thing we hear is that he borrow money to buy one of them dentist machine thing and he start pulling out people teeth, just like that. The boy killing people left and right, and still people going. Trinidad people is like that.4

Dialect here, as elsewhere in the Caribbean comedies and Biswas, carries a good deal of the comedy, from items of vocabulary— “mooma” and “grandmooma” and “cool cool”—to deformations of syntax—“one of them dentist machine thing and he start pulling out people teeth.”5 As a description “the dentist machine thing” is almost a joke in itself, the redundancy of “machine thing,” indicating the confusion of Trinidadians in the face of modern technology. The authorial voice of Mystic Masseur is intimate, even affectionate. Of course, one might object to Naipaul’s condescension, performed as it is to a metropolitan audience, yet the reader is, in a sense, welcomed into the community and its self-understanding. The punch line turns on an insight into provincial human nature, which might be the same for Alabama or the Australian Outback:

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the “boy killing people left and right, and still people going. Trinidad people is like that.” Naipaul’s jokes have more than the responsibility of sustaining his comedy; as I show, they play a central role in his literary rhetoric both in the early comedies and in the prose works of the 1960s and 1970s. They even serve as elements of narrative structure. In The Mystic Masseur, for example, the concluding cadence of the novel is provided by a joke that substantially alters the shape and tone of the fictional biography. Naipaul’s masseur and mystic, Ganesh Ramsumair, has enjoyed a colonial career as a writer, spiritual healer, publisher, and politician and is known to his admirers as Pundit Ganesh or Ganesh Pundit. At the end of the narrative, Ramsumair has been dispatched to the United Nations in the United States where, as Naipaul cannot resist informing us, “his defence of British colonial rule is memorable” (219). Ramsumair is appointed to the Executive Council governing the colony on London’s behalf. In the epilogue to Mystic Masseur, Naipaul’s narrator is at an English university, waiting for the results of an examination. “One morning I got a letter from the Colonial Office. A party of Colonial Statesmen were in Britain for a conference…It was arranged that I should be host for a day to G. R. Muir, Esq., M.B.E.” The day of the visit came and I was at the railway station to meet the 12.57 from London. As the passengers got off I looked among them for someone with a nigrescent face. It was easy to spot him, impeccably dressed, coming out of a first-class carriage. I gave a shout of joy. “Pundit Ganesh!” I cried, running towards him. “Pundit Ganesh Ramsumar!” “G. Ramsay Muir,” he said coldly. (220)

Because a joke evaporates at the punch line, disappearing from the reader’s mind after doing its cognitive work, the reader absorbs the satire of Ramsumair’s transformation into a “Colonial Statesman” without necessarily registering the details of the criticism.

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In fact, the short joke is intricately organized; it is a hallmark of jokes to display very high degrees of symmetry. “Pundit Ganesh” is the mirror image of “G. R. Muir, Esq., M.B.E.” just as the Indian guru is the mirror image of the London gentleman and member of the British establishment. The honorific—the Indian “Pundit”— is moved from a preface to a suffix and anglicized into the imperial decoration “Member of the British Empire.” Meanwhile “Ganesh,” with its invocation of India’s immediately recognizable elephantheaded God, is truncated to its initial “G.” and thereby disguised. The name, which one might have thought was the one feature of a person most resistant to self-invention, has turned into Pundit Ganesh’s vehicle of Anglicization. Because they are homonyms “Ramsumair” and “Ramsay Muir” could, of course, be mistaken for each other or be misspellings of the other. This is an implicit argument that Ramsumair advances. Naipaul’s masseur, in a symbolic disfigurement of his colonial identity, has interpreted his name “Ramsumair” as if it is a failed attempt to spell out an Anglophone original. “Ramsumair” is retrospectively interpreted as a creolized, or pidgin, form of “Ramsay Muir.” As Ramsumair revises his own name, he elevates himself above the Caribbean speaker, and Caribbean accent that preserve the original pronunciation. He is, as far as Naipaul’s narrator is concerned, an incongruous sight. While Ramsumair may be “impeccably dressed” and “coming out of a first-class carriage,” he is also “someone with a nigrescent face.” The Latinate adjective “nigrescent”—meaning “blackish,” or “turning black”—is a term that stands out in the passage. It forces the reader to pause, perhaps to look it up in a dictionary or infer its meaning (perhaps from the racial insult it resembles) and register Ramsumair’s complexion as the most significant fact about him. Naipaul’s jokes, here and elsewhere in his prose, are typically double sided. On the one hand, the masseur’s desire to extinguish his Indian last name is satirized. On the other hand, the colonial

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circumstances he repudiates are also held up to ridicule, just as the slaves and the “poor Arabs and Indians” were rendered ridiculous in the passage we examined from A Bend in the River. Here the joke simultaneously affirms the authority of the teller and asserts a knowing solidarity between Naipaul and his audience. In this way, it differs from the kinds of provocations and layers of irony that we saw at work in A Bend in the River. The joke, moreover, works before political and cultural prejudices can be brought to bear. The reader is asked to go along with the joke, or provocation, before he or she is able to reflect on its assumptions about what is ridiculous. This is particularly true in the case of Naipaul’s deadpan humor, where the fact that a joke is in progress is almost never declared. Deadpan humor is, in fact, the form of comedy that most establishes the authority of the comic. Because the comic does not indicate that a joke is being told the discrepancy in power between teller and listener (or reader) is greatly heightened. If every joke creates and limits its own community of reception—those who are in on the joke—then the concluding lines of Mystic Masseur define a community of writer and his readers who are equidistant from Caribbean Pundit Ganesh and London’s G. Ramsay Muir, M.B.E.6 This is a principal method by which Naipaul creates his imaginative authority and the transnational audience for that authority. For Naipaul, who writes self-consciously outside a national tradition, the joke performs the key function of binding his readership. Even if the Caribbean comedies are distinct in mood and content from the novels and travel narratives that follow, their rhetoric already orients them toward an international audience. One feature of the conclusion of Mystic Masseur prefigures a significant aspect of Naipaul’s later prose and may remind us of the use of Virgil in A Bend in the River. Information about Ramsumair’s name is withheld from the reader, or, at least, it is left to be tacitly registered in the reader’s mind. Ramsumair’s new identtity

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—“G. Ramsay Muir, M.B.E.”—may have had a familiar ring to readers, at least in the contemporary United Kingdom, who might recognize the name. In fact, Naipaul’s Pundit Ganesh has claimed membership in the family of John Ramsay Muir (1872–1941). Muir was a figure of the literary and the political establishment in Great Britain. At one time a member of Parliament for the Liberal Party, he was also a historian of European empire and a vice-chancellor at Manchester University. Under the pen name Solomon Slack, moreover, Ramsay Muir was the author of the novel Robinson the Great: A Political Phantasia (1929), a comic treatment of political ambition, which Naipaul may mean to compare with Mystic Masseur and Suffrage for Elvira. In the course of his academic career, Ramsay Muir published numerous monographs and pamphlets on geopolitical topics, including, in 1915, The Making of British India, 1756–1858 and, in 1917, at the height of the conflict with Wilhelmine Germany, an apologia entitled The Character of the British Empire. As these titles suggest, John Ramsay Muir was a sympathetic theorist of British empire building, which he compares favorably with the German and other European variants. He was unusual in the period, if not altogether alone, in combining political liberalism with his emphatic defense of British overlordship. By adopting Ramsay Muir’s family name, in other words, Ganesh Ramsumair aligns himself with a liberal twentieth-century strain of imperial sentiment. From what we know of Naipaul’s own beliefs in the 1950s, they may not have been very different from those of Ramsay Muir. It is striking that Naipaul refuses to describe the British empire as such, preferring tendentious phrases such as “the Great Peace” and the Virgilian “mingling of peoples” to characterize modern and early modern European states expanding into Africa and Asia. 7 8 The re-description of imperialism is unmotivated in Naipaul, where it serves as something of a provocation, but in Ramsay Muir, the missing argument is supplied: “The terms ‘Empire’ and ‘Imperialism’ are in some respects unfortunate, because of the suggestion 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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of purely military dominion which they convey; and their habitual employment has led to some unhappy results.”9 Much of the logical work in Muir’s apology is accomplished by what is almost ostentatious—perhaps ostentatiously British—understatement (“in some respects unfortunate” and “some unhappy results”). For Ramsay Muir and, one might reasonably assume, for Naipaul and his masseur, the British empire is better described as a trusteeship, or even a partnership of peoples, under British leadership. The empire offers a set of ideals to which any of its colonial subjects can subscribe. *

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With this invocation of Ramsay Muir and his apologetics in the closing sentence of Mystic Masseur, then, Naipaul relies on knowledge that is not readily accessible to many, if not most, of his readers. In swift succession the joke that concludes the novel defines a series of inside positions with the author himself in the insidemost position.10 Perhaps because of the prereflective nature of the joke—to get a joke, after all, one cannot easily interrogate it and, to some degree, to analyze a joke is to destroy it in the process of inspection—the device attracts little attention in the theoretical literature on Naipaul. In what follows, I examine a number of Naipaulian jokes, and jokelike provocations, to understand their political and imaginative functions. The device of the cold joke is pioneered first in A House for Mr. Biswas where various characters use it against one another. It is particularly associated with Naipaul’s protagonist Mohun Biswas who is distinguished by his covert defiance of the forces arrayed against him. Biswas’s mixture of aggression and cowardice means that he is fond of expressing his frustrations with a sotto voce joke. Irritated by the peripheral character Bhandat, the young Biswas passes a funeral parlor: “Get a job there,” he thought, “and help to bury Bhandat.”11 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Later Biswas writes a sensational newspaper article about an unfortunate American explorer in the form of a letter to his children: “Well, I have news for you, kiddies. Daddy is on his way home. Yesterday he passed through Trinidad. In a coffin” (314). The final sentence fragment—“In a coffin”—functions as a considered punch line to Biswas’s article. Nor is Mohun Biswas the only one in the novel who uses the device. Seth, the Tulsi family enforcer, remembers that Biswas’s father was drowned in a pond while searching for his son Mohun. “They tell me,” he remarks to Mohun, “your father was a great diver” (104). The target in each of these early cases is another character, and the joke is enacted for the benefit of the reader. After Biswas, however, Naipaul’s target is, in some sense, the reader him- or herself. These jokes and provocations are not confined to the Caribbean comedies and Biswas. On the contrary, I argue, by the midpoint of his career, with the 1979 publication of A Bend in the River, Naipaul extensively develops a peculiar comedy of “cold jokes” intended to work on the reader’s sympathies and his or her political commitments. The cold joke transmits Naipaulian arguments about race, colonialism, and culture that would encounter significant resistance if they were put directly. Naipaul does not always press his authority on the reader directly. Indeed, as a literary device, the cold joke can achieve emotional and cognitive effects that are difficult to produce by a more direct method; it is a central device in the construction of Naipaulian authority both on the page and off it. The concept of a cold joke is set out by Jonathan Glover in his recent work of descriptive moral psychology, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (1999). In Humanity Glover considers the role of humor in situations of extreme maltreatment of other human beings. Comedy, as Glover points out, is not always integrative and irenic in its effects. It is not simply that a joke can create scapegoats or rely on the presence of a “straight man” although these are both potentials built into the occasion

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of joke telling. The joke is the way in which individuals set the boundaries of the ridiculous. Certain kinds of comic utterance can demean others and create defenses against recognizing a common humanity. In situations such as concentration camps or torture chambers, a joke at the expense of the victims does a good deal of cognitive and emotional work for those in charge. So, “during the occupation of Kuwait, some Iraqis who had killed a boy told his family they wanted money to pay for the bullet.”12 As Glover writes, the cold joke mocks the victims. It is an added cruelty and it is also a display of power…It adds emphasis to the differences between “us” and “them”: we the interrogators are a group who share a joke at the expense of you the victims. It is also a display of hardness: we are so little troubled by feelings of sympathy that we can laugh at your torment; but the display may be a clue that suppression of sympathy is not so easy and needs help. (37)

The primary function of the cold joke, then, is as a distancing device. It allows the suffering of others to be admitted to consciousness without evoking a sympathetic response. For the group in power, Glover observes, the cold joke enables “a defensive flippancy, enabling the torment they are preparing for other people to be referred to without being taken seriously” (37). To be able to “laugh at your torment” reinforces our ability to cause suffering to another person. Laughter of this kind, in fact, forecloses the possibility of pity; it follows the model of Thomas Hobbes who ascribes all laughter to a “sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.”13 The Hobbesian model is reductive, even as applied to the later Naipaul.14 But, if we restrict our attention to Glover’s cold joke, Hobbes is correct that the device (a “sudden glory” and “sudden conception,” which operates before conscious understanding) reinforces social hierarchy and power. The mixture of pleasure (“glory”) and thought (“conception”) is difficult to resist. Such a

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device flatters us and, indeed, everyone who is part of the community of the joke. The joke, or at least the punch line, reveals a gratifying picture of inequality and privilege, thanks to the “eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.” Pity disappears in “glory” and a feeling for universal human nature dissipates in the comparison between our “eminency” and the “infirmity of others.” Not only does the cold joke, as Glover indicates, construct a limited community (“we the interrogators as a group”) and its antithesis (“you the victims”). Such a joke is “a display of power” and “display of hardness,” attitudes or dispositions that Glover identifies as agents of moral disinhibition. Besides enforcing its prereflective assumptions about the boundaries of the group and the nature of the ridiculous, then, the cold joke prescribes to its audience the appropriate response to meet a scene of profound suffering; one should make a “display of power and hardness.” The “display,” of course, is just as important as the very sentiments of “power and hardness” because “display” coordinates and deepens group feeling among the more powerful faction. I argue that it is precisely such a display of “power,” and even more of “hardness” that characterizes the fiction Naipaul published in the 1970s about the new independent states of sub-Saharan Africa, including In a Free State (1971), Guerrillas (1975), and A Bend in the River (1979). For it is African material, far more than other disfavored objects of Naipaul’s attention like Islam and India, which attracts his coldest comedy. *

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A good example of Naipaul’s use of the cold joke turns up early in the narrative of A Bend in the River. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator, Salim, travels from his home on the Indian Ocean to the interior of the continent where he is going to take over a shop in a fictional version of Uganda. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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In a passage we have seen before, and which is not marked as a joke, but which follows the logic Glover describes, Salim considers people moving in the same direction, but from the interior to the slave ships on the Atlantic Coast (or perhaps the Indian Ocean), in previous centuries. He imagines the processions of unhappy captives who become “more nervous” the “further away they got from the centre and their tribal area” because of “the strange Africans they saw about them, until at the end, on the coast, they were no trouble at all, and were positively anxious to step into the boats and be taken to safe homes across the sea” (4). The passage, which is inset in the narrative rather than connected to Salim’s experiences, is brief and may pass with little notice as a sympathetic observation on the misfortunes of slavery. But, like much of Naipaul’s rhetoric, it bears much closer inspection. In the paragraph, Naipaul’s well-known anxieties about alterity and difference, especially in Africa, are expressed first by his narrator Salim and then by the captives themselves.15 Salim’s (and, we can assume, Naipaul’s) xenophobia is channeled through the captives who, taken from their ancestral lands, now fear “the strange Africans they saw about them.” Later on this motif is repeated when we discover that Ferdinand, Zabeth’s son and one of Africa’s new men, is, according to Salim, “possessed by all the African terror of strange Africans” (71).16 Salim’s own resistance to otherness is made legitimate because he is not adopting the narrow prejudices of a European or Indian visitor (which an enlightened reader could immediately dismiss). On the contrary, he merely replicates this decidedly “African terror of strange Africans.” Racial fear, which would be unpalatable in the mouth of a European or Trinidadian émigré, is more convincing because it is shown in captives “nervous…of the strange Africans they saw about them.” It is precisely because of such fears that the captives cease to resist their condition. The further they travel the more they suspect the inhabitants. Indeed, they are more frightened of the inhabitants than of the men who have taken them prisoner to sell into slavery. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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They do not grasp what Naipaul means the reader to see immediately—that is, the relativity, or symmetry, of their anxieties. To those around them, of course, they are equally strange. To Salim, Naipaul, and Naipaul’s readers both groups are similarly strange. Ultimately, Naipaul suggests, the captives offer a kind of tacit consent to their predicament—“at the end, on the coast, they were no trouble at all.” Indeed, the captives are “positively anxious” to “be taken to safe homes across the sea.” Here the “safe homes” are, of course, the slave plantations of the Americas where they face a lifetime of servitude. This final phrase of Salim’s paragraph—“safe homes across the sea”—functions as a punch line (which shifts the audience from one set of expectations to another). The phrase moves our attention suddenly from the unsettled condition of the captives to a dramatic irony. Without the invitation being explicit, we are invited to smile at the captives’ misconceptions about what awaits them in Virginia or, perhaps, Brazil or the Middle East. There is, in Hobbes’s language, “some eminence in ourselves,” whether it is of historical knowledge or intellectual maturity or reflexivity, that contrasts with the “infirmity” of these future slaves. Naipaul renders the naiveté of the prisoners, with their fantasy of “safe homes,” as childlike. They do not seem to be distressed by adult fears or nostalgia for the communities from which they have been abducted. Instead, terrified by “strange Africans,” they are enchanted by the prospect of “safe homes across the sea.” The location of these homes “across the sea” is itself a fairy tale locution, emphasizing the vagueness and incoherence of the worldview of the captives. Like many of the disfavored groups in Naipaul’s writing the captives harbor unrealistic hopes and fantastic ideas about their prospects. They are therefore presented as legitimate objects of satire. The cold joke, in this meditation of the narrator, is ultimately at the expense of the captives; indeed, as Glover suggests, it “mocks the victims.” They may be bound for the terrible circumstances of slavery, but Naipaul has presented them as objects of ridicule. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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There is, moreover, something gratuitous in Naipaul’s introduction of the material into his narrative, as there is about many of the comic sallies in his writing after the early Caribbean novels. Here the passage functions as a freestanding provocation. The narrator Salim, after all, has no access to the thoughts of the captives he imagines; throughout A Bend in the River, he reads no history book or any other source from which he might deduce that the slaves of an earlier period of African history would have suffered from a profound “fear of strange Africans.” Nor is there a prompt in the narrative, apart from unconfessed and unrepresented prejudice, which could have sent his thoughts in this direction. There is nothing in his circumstances or that occurs later in the novel to make the episode a necessary link in the narrative chain. Therefore Salim—Naipaul through him—introduces a digression about the slave trade as a cold joke told at the expense of the millions captured and sold into slavery. It inculcates in the reader the “defensive flippancy,” which, Glover argues, allows suffering “to be referred to without being taken seriously.” Naipaul’s joke, then, has one nonnarrative objective: to disperse the moral prestige (and natural indignation) that attaches to the topic of African slavery. Instead of being a subject of condemnation, thanks to a “display of hardness,” slavery becomes an object of comedy. Accomplishing such a reversal in his readers’ minds, even if it occurs only for the length of the paragraph, is a mark of Naipaul’s power as a novelist. A good deal of the imaginative thrill of reading Naipaul comes from such moments when such peculiar and antiliberal propositions about ethics and human nature are injected into a reader’s mind. Slavery, or rather antislavery sentiment, is not Naipaul’s only target. As we shall see, in his South African characters from In a Free State to Guerrillas and beyond, Naipaul was particularly concerned to undermine international revulsion against apartheid.17 Critics of Naipaul’s pronouncements on Third World societies in his travel writing, like Rob Nixon in London Calling, and the Nobelist’s most sophisticated defenders, in particular Sara Suleri 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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in Rhetoric of English India, do not address this ideological feature of Naipaulian rhetoric. Humanitarianism, particularly liberal and radical humanitarianism, is a set of convictions against which Naipaul reacts. In the friction between generally accepted beliefs and Naipaul’s contrarianism, his authority as a writer emerges. In a culture that had not absorbed the assumptions of liberal thought, the irony of Naipaul’s later comedy would, I think, be entirely lost. Beyond his explicit politics and his recycling of tendentious Conradian imagery, then, Naipaul’s objective is the deconstruction of liberal opinion. The cold joke, which works directly if tacitly on the reader’s sympathies and point of view, is the principal device by which he pursues this objective. The cold joke is a highly effective aspect of his rhetoric because it operates, so to speak, at the margins of a reader’s attention, without introducing itself as an argument, or historical or political generalization that might attract doubt or refutation. Naipaul is not always so circumspect, as we have seen in our discussion of A Bend in the River, but the cold joke is at once a direct and a concealed way of making a point and challenging a conviction. *

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In his fiction, Naipaul employs several of the black and African characters to the same end. These characters frame a conception of sexual fulfillment, or sexual paradise, which involves access to foreign, and particularly white, women. The motif occurs through Naipaul’s prose and counts, I argue, as a cold joke (not to say a stereotypically racist axiom about black male sexuality). In The Mimic Men (1967), a study of the deformations of postcolonial consciousness whose alliterative title suggests it is a revision of The Mystic Masseur, Ralph Singh, Naipaul’s narrator, describes his schoolmates on the fictional island of Isabella. Singh is distressed by their ideals and aspirations, which reflect the narrowness of their culture. One of his schoolmates in particular, known only 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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as Eden, is “something of a buffoon. He was the blackest boy in the school and for some time was known as Spite because some boys said he was black for spite.”18 Eden’s name is itself a kind of joke, and his skin color is regarded by “some boys” as in itself a practical joke (“black for Spite”). His presence in the narrative is gratuitous; he seems to have been introduced merely as “something of a buffoon” and is soon set aside. Eden has an especially deformed relationship to sexuality (and there is more than a suggestion in the text that his perversion is correlated to skin color—he is, after all, “the blackest boy in the school”). As Ralph Singh explains in a thumbnail sketch of his schoolfellow, Eden wished to join the Japanese army: the reports of their rapes were so exciting. He elaborated the idea crudely and often; it ceased to be a joke. He recognized this; in his conversation he sublimated the wish to rape foreign women into a wish to travel…[Another schoolboy] drew a grotesque picture of Eden with cloth cap, dark glasses, camera and white suit leaning over the rails of a ship, while sarong-clad Asiatics and Polynesians, abandoning their dances, rushed to the water’s edge to look at the strange tourist. For Eden had fixed on Asia as the continent he wished to travel in; he had been stirred by Lord Jim. His deepest wish was for the Negro race to be abolished; his intermediate dream was of a remote land where he, the solitary Negro among an alien pretty people, ruled as a sort of sexual king. Lord Jim, Lord Eden. Poor Eden. (151)19

The passage contains more ironies and provocations than can be easily unpacked; part of its force, like that of any joke, is the compression of a great deal of cognitive material into so short a space. Although Eden’s name suggests idealism, his vision of paradise has been corrupted into “the wish to rape foreign women” and to “rule [in a parody of Conrad’s Jim] as a sort of sexual king… among an alien pretty people.” Eden shows no interest in literature elsewhere in Mimic Men; one can only assume that his grotesque misreading of Lord Jim is a joke that occurred to Naipaul in another context and is recited 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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here at the expense of his character as well as his literary predecessor. One has the sense of a joke finding an occasion. Eden’s fantasies also seem to be overdetermined. The Japanese invasion of British possessions in Asia was justified in Japanese propaganda (and to some limited extent understood by Britain’s colonial subjects) as an assault on Western colonialism. Yet Eden ignores this political motive and focuses on “the reports of their rapes [which] were so exciting.” It is a typically Naipaulian strategem, in Mimic Men and in other writings of the 1960s and 1970s, to define colonial discontent downward, from the political to the merely violent and sexual, and finally to a kind of sexual fantasy that is also a grotesque joke—“a remote land where he, the solitary Negro among an alien pretty people, ruled as a sexual king.”20 Politics is understood purely in terms of access to women. Eden’s colonial self-hatred—“his deepest wish was for the Negro race to be abolished”—is more terrible than, say, that of Pundit Ganesh in The Mystic Masseur. This goes to the heart of Naipaul’s distinction between Britain’s ethnically Indian and her ethnically African subjects and former subjects. Ganesh Ramsumair, with his “impeccable clothing” and “nigrescent face,” merely wants to be taken for an English gentleman. Whereas Eden’s self-loathing is not sublimated into a wish to assimilate to metropolitan culture, instead he acquires the “wish to rape foreign women” and from this “a wish to travel.” On the one hand, Eden is diminished into a figure of ridicule. He is pictured as “the strange tourist” armed with “cloth cap, dark glasses, camera and white suit” whom “sarong-clad Asiatics and Polynesians” rush to examine, presumably because a black tourist is a rarity. On the other hand, Eden’s desires, and his designs on the outside world of “alien pretty people,” are palpably threatening; he wants to rape foreign women.21 The combination of the ridiculous and the fearful is one Naipaul applies to other black characters in his writing after the Caribbean comedies; it can only plausibly be described as racial fantasy. That it takes as its target the most

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deprived member of the colonial community of Isabella—Singh informs us that “Eden’s background was of the simplest” (136)—is a display of “power and hardness,” and the creation of so sharp a distinction between the community of the joke and its target, which is difficult to stomach. The failed colonial politician Ralph Singh, like Salim in A Bend in the River, is an unreliable narrator. But apart from the condescension embodied in his final words about his schoolmate—“Lord Jim, Lord Eden. Poor Eden”—we are given no reason to think that the substance of his character sketch is inaccurate. If anything, the wit, perversity, and demeaning racial psychology of the passage is closer to Naipaul than to anything Singh offers elsewhere in the narrative. As a character, Ralph Singh is generally humorless. It is difficult to conclude otherwise that Eden (“the blackest boy in the school”) has been constructed by the author merely to be the butt of a series of racially charged jokes and fantasies. That Naipaul would do so in a period that was becoming aware of the demeaning power of racial stereotypes is a demonstration of his resistance to liberal opinion and, perhaps, of his desire to assimilate to those who can comfortably entertain such prejudices. While the portrait of Eden in Mimic Men is highly discomforting Naipaul’s study of a Trinidadian commune in Guerrillas marks the extreme point of his cold style. The 1975 novel, based on real-life circumstances Naipaul reported as a journalist in 1971 to 1972 and later as essayist in 1979, concludes with a series of cold jokes that have as their target the English woman Jane (a fictional version of the real-life Gale Ann Benson who was murdered in Trinidad in 1972). Jane, like Gale Benson, is a visitor to the island who becomes sexually involved with the racial agitator Jimmy Ahmed (based on the figure of Michael X). Naipaul makes Jane a victim of her own middle-class and metropolitan assumptions because, as he argues, they allow her to experiment with situations beyond her control or understanding. Yet Jane, even more than Eden, is the particular

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object of Naipaulian vitriol for her sexual pathology as much as her bohemian leanings. One sees Naipaul’s punitive attitude toward his character in almost every significant scene in which Jane appears. When she rejects a “left-wing journalist,” she is “slapped, so hard that her jaw jarred…and then she was slapped again…then she discovered to her dismay and disgust that she was moist.”22 Naipaul suggests a connection between the politics of the “left-wing journalist” and his violent behavior, a perhaps paradoxical correlation that is often made in his writing. Moreover, Jane’s sexuality works at cross-purposes to her feminist convictions. When she is beaten, she finds “to her dismay and disgust that she was moist.” In the concluding scenes of Guerrillas, Jimmy Ahmed rapes Jane in preparation for her murder. In a sentence that Naipaul imagines rather than finds in the court proceedings, Ahmed tells his victim that “a big girl like you should always take her own Vaseline when she goes visiting” (238). The crudity of the language, and the obvious violence of the act, discredit the black nationalist Jimmy Ahmed, but the joke (if that is not too neutral a term for the beginning of a rape) is at Jane’s expense. It is, in Jonathan Glover’s words, “an added cruelty and it is also a display of power,” and it is ultimately at the expense of a real-life victim of rape and murder. The novel concludes with Jimmy Ahmed at liberty (unlike Michael X who was convicted and executed). In many ways, Jane is the protagonist of Guerrillas, and it is difficult not to conclude that Naipaul has been keener to administer his lesson to each Jane who flirts with Third World radicalism, and every potential Jane, than to Jane’s murderer. Naipaul’s attack on left-wing political consciousness was, as the themes of his novels indicate, at its maximum in the 1960s and 1970s. One particular irritant to Naipaul in this period was the problem of the apartheid government in South Africa. More specifically the general condemnation of South African racial policy was the cause of Naipaul’s irritation.

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Naipaul pursued the target of his irritation in his novels and travel writings as well as on the podium, perhaps a unique example of a man of Indian descent going out of his way to challenge concern about apartheid. In Sir Vidia’s Shadow, an account of his long friendship with Naipaul, Paul Theroux relates the following incident that followed a lecture: the audience was disappointed that he [Naipaul] took no questions afterwards. When his host tried to ask him why he would not relent, he pretended he had not heard the question and showed her his tweed jacket, saying, “It’s rather fine, don’t you think? Made in South Africa.”23

Naipaul’s joke, or if you prefer provocation, assumes, of course that the audience would support what was then a boycott of South African exports. Naipaul’s punch line—“Made in South Africa”—fits with his argument in Bend in the River that, in sub-Saharan Africa, only apartheid South Africa is capable of manufacturing commodities.24 South Africa even makes clothes that somebody living in the United Kingdom, like Naipaul himself, might want. It pleases Naipaul that the jacket in question is tweed, a quintessentially academic garment. He shows off his appreciation of the fabric— “rather fine, don’t you think?” This is one of the rare cases of Naipaul wearing his heart, so to speak, on his sleeve. For Naipaul, as we have seen, the production of commodities, along with the protection of order and property, are key attributes of a civilized society; and on these measures, he finds South Africa under white rule superior to all its neighbors. To say that this point was arguable in the 1970s, given the status of the property and liberties of nonwhite South Africans, is to state the obvious. But because the point is made as a joke no argument ensues. In the 1971 novella “In a Free State,” set in a disintegrating African republic, Naipaul extends his campaign against the moral legitimacy of the South African cause. Bobby, his protagonist, runs into a South African revolutionary of Zulu descent (who is

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“Why do all these white women want to be with the natives? A couple years ago the natives couldn’t even come in here. Now look. It isn’t nice. I don’t think it is nice.” “It must be different in South Africa,” Bobby said. “What do you want to hear, mister? Listen, I’ll tell you. I did pretty well in South Africa. I bought my whisky. I had my women. You’d be surprised.” The Zulu’s voice dropped. His tone became conspiratorial as he began to give the names of South African politicians with whose wives and daughters he had slept.25

The Zulu is a revolutionary version of the miles gloriosus. Like Jimmy Ahmed and other Black Power militant of the 1970s, he plays up his sexual bravado (“[the white politicians’] wives and daughters” with whom “he had slept”). The Zulu, like other South African characters in Naipaul, has little in the way of actual complaints about his life under apartheid—“I did pretty well in South Africa…I had my women.”26 Of course, a black man would be unlikely to have encountered so many wives and daughters of white politicians, but perhaps Naipaul means this exaggeration, or falsification, which he places in his character’s mouth, to be part of the joke. Naipaul’s point is that the Zulu, however African he may be, insists on distinguishing himself from “the most ignorant natives” (and in this, he follows Salim’s captives in Bend in the River with their dislike of other Africans). The Zulu asserts a community between himself and the other outsiders rather than identifying a divide between black and white, or colonized and colonizer, or metropolitan and colonial. This point is an extension of the “African fear of strange Africans” emphasized in A Bend in the River, and it is a principal contention advanced in Naipaul’s antiliberal portrait of the decolonized states of sub-Saharan Africa. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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identified in the narrative rather crudely and implausibly only as “the Zulu”). Naipaul’s Zulu criticizes local mores. “In this town,” he explains, “there are even white whores now…It isn’t nice.” For, he asks,

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There is no solidarity between Africans (as there was no solidarity between Mauritians and oppressed South Africans); Western liberals who sympathize with Africans as a category are making a mistake that is not made by Africans themselves, like the Zulu. A generous reading of Naipaul, as offered by Suleri and Homi Bhabha, might infer from this passage a Fanonian critique, through the character of the Zulu, of the internalization of colonial domination. But this would be to ignore the fact that the passage amounts to a joke. The people at whose expense the joke is played are, in turn, the natives, Bobby, the Zulu himself, and finally Naipaul’s liberal readers. As we have seen, it is characteristic of Naipaul’s jokes that they define a sequence of inside positions with the author himself in the inside-most position. This is as close as we can come to seeing the construction of literary authority at a moment in a text. Imaginative power, and contrarian, antiliberal politics, go hand in hand here as elsewhere in Naipaul’s work. Indeed “In a Free State” concentrates on the problem of the well-meaning liberal. Doris Marshall never appears directly in the narrative but is reported to say, quite sincerely, “I bend over blackwards” (126). The passage in which she is discussed has the form of a joke, complete with setup and punch line, but its effect is not straightforwardly comic: He [Carter] said, “I can’t get used to this word boy.” “Doris Marshall tried to call hers a butler,” Linda said. “Isn’t that typical!” Bobby said. “In the end she settled for steward. It always seems to me such an absurd word,” Linda said. Bobby said, “It offended Luke. He said to me afterwards, ‘I am not a steward, sir. I am a houseboy.’” “Who is Doris Marshall?” Carter asked. “She’s a South African,” Linda said. (142–43)

In a well-meaning gesture Doris Marshall wishes to confer more dignity on her male servant than the notorious term “boy” permits. She first calls Luke a “valet,” a European and aristocratic classification, 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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but is forced to use “steward.” Nonetheless, Luke is offended because his dignity has been undermined among his own community. His thinking is similar to the slaves of A Bend in the River who take pride in their connection to an important slaveholding family. The very term, which is demeaning in Doris Marshall’s eyes, is elevating for Luke because it attaches him clearly to a white household: “I am not a steward, sir. I am a houseboy.” This last line is a joke within a larger joke. The punch line of this larger joke is, of course, that Doris Marshall, so sensitive to the demands of etiquette and determined to affirm her servants’ dignity, should be a white South African. “In a Free State” portrays Doris Marshall, as well another white South African character who is not named in the narrative, as ridiculous on account of their excessive concern for the dignity of black Africans. Other Europeans, and nonnative Africans, are much more brusque with the locals. Naipaul, amazingly, advances the proposition that white South Africans of the apartheid period are the very models of racial liberalism on the continent. To be able to make such a point as an outsider, even in an indirect manner, is a sign of extraordinary authority on Naipaul’s part or, at the very least, of chutzpah. *

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Jokes are, of course, highly susceptible to recent changes in cultural attitudes about what and, perhaps even more, who can be shown to be ridiculous. This is particularly true of comic devices that deal in racial and sexual stereotypes (as opposed to the psychological comedy of Jane Austen or the verbal comedy of Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest). Yet while Naipaul’s prose has evolved significantly since the 1970s, he has resisted any concession where it concerns his use of controversial material. Indeed, in his most recent collection of essays, A Writer’s People (2007), Naipaul laments the new climate of sensitivity. It is a familiar conservative complaint about the humorlessness of modern culture. The same joke he inserted into

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the pages of New Statesman as literary editor would, he complains, be impossible to get away with today. In the 1950s, Naipaul had recommended reducing imports of bananas to control the influx of Caribbean immigrants—“A banana a day,” as he put it in New Statesman, “will keep the Jamaican away.”27 The joke, surely one of the author’s least sparkling efforts, is an odd occasion for Naipaul’s nostalgia. For it was not only a revision of the old saw—“an apple a day keeps the doctor away”—but in fact a modification of a wartime slogan publicized in the West Indies (and therefore well known to the very people who are the target of the joke): “A banana a day will keep Hitler away.”28 To have replaced Hitler with “the Jamaican” as the unwelcome visitor to the United Kingdom, to do so within a decade of the war’s end, to do so as a Trinidadian emigrant in London, and to be defiantly proud of the substitution half a century later, counts, I suggest, as a cold joke in its own right. But to be able to make such a cold joke, and to restate it without regret, suggests that much of Naipaul’s authority as a writer derives from an unrelenting and unapologetic strategy of assertion.

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The Cold Joke

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V. S. Naipaul and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad

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n May 16, 1975, Michael X, or Michael Abdul Malik, born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad and notorious in the United Kingdom for racial incitement and his use of a “slave collar” on London businessman Marvin Brown, went to the gallows in Trinidad for his part in the murders of a local, Joseph Skerritt, and the visiting Englishwoman Gale Ann Benson. The decomposing bodies of Skerritt and Benson had been dug up by the police from the garden of Malik’s commune at Christina Gardens outside the capital of Port-of-Spain. The case, reported by V. S. Naipaul for the London Sunday Times in 1972, was the fictionalized subject of Naipaul’s novel Guerrillas (1975) as well as an expanded essay, “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad” (1973–79). A sometime associate of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Muhammad Ali, and supported in prison by luminaries such as Gloria Steinem, Leonard Cohen, and Colin MacInnes, Michael Abdul Malik was a literary and political celebrity. He had worked as an enforcer, organized poetry conferences, welcomed Malcolm X to the United Kingdom, and had even written to Mao Tsetung (over the India–China dispute) and received a reply. Andre Deutsch had published his autobiography, From Michael de Freitas to Michael X, in 1968; it had been ghostwritten with Stephen John or John Stevenson, the coauthor of, among other works, Roman

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CHAPTER 3

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Orgy.1 Copies of Malik’s autobiography were handed out in the courtroom in 1972.2 The book, along with his associations with Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, had made Malik the British representative of a cross-Atlantic black consciousness although, under scrutiny by the police for his violent behavior, he was soon forced to leave the United Kingdom. By the time of his arrest in Trinidad, Malik, like Naipaul’s Jimmy Ahmed, had also composed part of a novel that Naipaul quotes in his essay and then parodies in Guerrillas. Malik and Naipaul were not the only figures on the scene. It seemed that everybody, including Naipaul’s respectable publisher Andre Deutsch, who obtained the services of a ghostwriter and published the autobiography From Michael de Freitas to Michael X, had tried to cash in on the Malik phenomenon. In London, Désirée Ayesha de Souza, Michael’s wife, tried to sell her own autobiography, Wife of Michael X, through a literary agent.3 Within days of Malik’s execution, the Trinidad weekly The Bomb began to publish excerpts from “The Malik Papers…said by the ingenious editor to have been discovered in the charred ruins of the Christina Gardens house—the first installment began with a letter from Malik himself [criticizing Trinidadian Prime Minister Eric Williams] stated to have been posted on his behalf on the Tuesday after the execution.”4 In the Malik case, revolution became propaganda; propaganda became sensationalism; and, with Naipaul, sensationalism became literature. The Bomb was only the first periodical to try to profit from Malik’s notoriety both in the islands and in the United Kingdom. Naipaul began Guerrillas in September 1973 and finished the manuscript, by his own account, in November 1974. The novel was to revive his own career and mark him as a commanding analyst of the left-wing radicalism of the previous decade. In 1977, Derek Humphry, a Sunday Times reporter and author of Because They’re Black (1972), coauthored False Messiah: The Story of Michael X, a title that sums up Humphry’s orientation to his subject. Naipaul returned to the material even after finishing Guerrillas. The long 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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version of “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad” is dated 1979. In 1981, James Sharp, “who lived for some years in the West Indies,” published The Life and Death of Michael X with a foreword by Judge Evan Rees, the judge who had presided over Malik’s trial;5 Rees’s involvement signals the attitude of Life and Death toward the Trinidad establishment. It is a statement of local disapproval about imported radical politics in Trinidad. Finally, after Naipaul’s 2001 Nobel Prize, his own essay was reissued in the collection The Writer and the World edited by the Indian novelist and critic Pankaj Mishra. In this enormously complex series of literary and political transactions, authors and would-be authors, agents, publishers, judges, and reporters contest one another’s authority and narratives, offer new perspectives and information, and exploit a variety of literary styles, effects, and sources of prestige. These narratives are intended to win their authors fame or, far more often, money. Thirty-odd years after Malik’s execution, almost all trace of these different forms of writing has disappeared, apart from Naipaul’s prose. The literary texts outlive their competitors and predecessors. To step back from Naipaul’s canonized novel and essay, then, reveals a literary sphere that for disorganization and unpredictability looks early modern rather than postmodern. It also allows us to see the strategies employed by literary texts, whether fictional or nonfictional, to ensure their own reproduction. Here, I look at specific alterations in fact, emphasis, and tone that distinguish the various written accounts, and I try to understand where these accounts differ from the actual circumstances of the case. As I argue, Naipaul constructs his authority over the Malik case not merely by asserting the rights of literature but by a series of controlled changes in the material and the constant pressure of his irony on the facts of the case. This cannot simply be reduced to translating history into literature. The literary strategy is taken by James Sharp in Life and Death, but it is ineffective because Sharp’s tone is uncontrolled and his register is sensationalist rather than mandarin. Sharp opens each 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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chapter with an epigraph drawn from Shakespeare—Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, and Hamlet (“Foul deeds will rise / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes”)—while, for example, publishing a photograph of the decomposed head of Joseph Skerritt (plate 35) and another of the similarly decayed body of Gale Benson in a Port-of-Spain mortuary (plate 36). Shakespeare confers imaginative grandeur on the squalid subject matter, while the sensational photographs are intended to titillate the reader of a true crime story. But, as I will show, Sharp’s attitude is too ostentatiously aligned with the establishment to convince in the Malik case; it is Naipaul who is strongly attracted to yet strongly repelled by the murdered Englishwoman, who seems to come much closer to capturing (and recapitulating) Malik’s own attitude toward Gale Benson. Like Sharp, with his quotations from Shakespeare, Naipaul, in his fiction as well as his reportage, attempts to impose a literary genealogy on the situation: Wuthering Heights (with his fictional equivalent of Malik placing himself in the role of Heathcliff); Eugene O’Neill’s early play The Emperor Jones (1920), which studies the fall of a Caribbean strongman in minstrel’s dialect and was turned into a 1933 film with Paul Robeson as the title character; and Joseph Conrad’s short story “An Outpost of Progress” (1897).6 Each of these influences (or analogies) has to be understood in its own right; they all belong to Naipaul’s attempt to substitute his own canon for the circumstances of the case. He is creating a small tradition, including the Conrad story and O’Neill’s play, which controls how the Malik case will be understood. With the publication of his journalism and then of Guerrillas, Naipaul is also, of course, asserting an imaginative proprietorship over Trinidadian themes. If anyone is going to have the right to transmit Trinidadian subject matter to the metropolis, one senses, it will be Naipaul rather than Malik or any of his would-be biographers. One of the building blocks of Naipaul’s authority, quite separate from his literary rhetoric, is a claim to a certain geographical section of the planet as well as a certain ethnic group. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha remarks that in Naipaul, as in Kipling and Forster, “what emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history.”7 Such writing involves, according to Bhabha, “a process of displacement, distortion, dislocation, repetition.”8 Bhabha’s suggestion, which is not pursued in relation to Naipaul in The Location of Culture, is potentially fruitful and deserves inspection. He uses cognitive and psychoanalystic language, whereas I am interested in power and assertion. Bhabha also glosses the relationship between writing and “the monumentality of history” more rapidly than I would, especially in this case where what is at issue are the specific links between history, literature, and literary history rather than a stark opposition between writing and silent historical fact. Nonetheless, Bhabha is correct to remind us of the complexity of these links and to prevent an easy identification between a writer’s circumstances and his or her “mode of representation.” Literature acts in complicated ways on the texts and contexts it takes for its subjects, a point that is not always emphasized in historicist or historically minded criticism. The Location of Culture correctly insists on the complexity of the relationship between postcolonial circumstances and postcolonial literatures. Indeed, in what follows, I study precisely these chains of “displacement, distortion, dislocation, repetition,” which link Conrad’s story and Wuthering Heights, on the one hand, with Naipaul’s Guerrillas and Life and Death of Michael X, on the other, and which have at their center the uncertain and disputed figure of Michael Abdul Malik, once Michael X, and born Michael de Freitas, whose changing name embodies these very forms of repudiation and correction. An Outpost of Progress In “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” Naipaul identifies each of the two victims of Malik’s Christina Gardens 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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commune with a distinct literary narrative. For Naipaul, they divide on racial lines. Black and white belong not only in different narratives, according to Naipaul, but also in different genres, one in a play and the other in a short story: “the tragedy of Joe Skerritt… is contained in O’Neill’s 1920 drama of the false redeemer” (The Emperor Jones, which Naipaul does not name), while “the tragedy of Gale Benson is contained in an African story of 1897 by Conrad which curiously complements it: ‘An Outpost of Progress,’ a story of the congruent corruptions of colonizer and colonized, which can also be read as a parable about simple people who think they can separate themselves from the crowd.”9 For Naipaul, Benson—“more profoundly than Malik…a fake”—is the core of the story. It is due to Benson’s murder and, even more, her flirtation with black radicalism and dangerous sexualities that Naipaul chooses to investigate in his novel. The killing of the white woman outsider quickly dominates Naipaul’s interest in the case. Indeed, there is no parallel for Skerritt’s murder in Guerrillas. A pattern quickly emerges if we compare the relative importance of Skerritt and Benson (and their literary equivalents). As Naipaul’s control over the material increases, looking from Sunday Times journalism to the essay and then to Guerrillas, the murder of the Englishwoman Benson, and its psychosexual dimension, eclipses the murder of the black Trinidadian Skerritt with its aspect of scapegoating and group consolidation. Naipaul’s objection to Benson summarizes his grievance against European liberals, radicals, and bohemians with Third World sympathies. Benson (and in Guerrillas, Jane) “took, on her journey away from home, the assumptions…not only of her class and race and the rich countries to which she belonged, but also of her ultimate security.” Naipaul encourages our resentment at Benson’s conviction of “her ultimate security.” Of course, Benson was not, in fact, protected by her “ultimate security.” If anything, she was betrayed by her confidence, if that was indeed her mistake, and if

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she was indeed responsible in some sense for the circumstances of her own murder. What Naipaul seems to have against her is that Benson was psychologically capable of moving into situations in which he would have felt uncomfortable himself.10 Because he was a Trinidadian and had no inherent sense of “ultimate security,” he could not have experimented with the bohemian and racially mixed milieu to which Benson was attracted. The sense of separation, or alienation, from his surroundings, that characterizes Salim in A Bend in the River is also a quality of his creator. A writer such as Naipaul was likely to resent the freedom of others to investigate his own subject matter and enter subcultures that were closed to him. Naipaul’s dislike of Benson—whom he fictionalizes as the Londoner Jane in Guerrillas—is remarkable and serves as the focus of his novel. Yet, the conclusions he draws about her fate are not obviously related to the facts of her situation. Nor is it at first clear why Naipaul selects Conrad as the lens through which he understands Benson’s story. There is no obvious equivalent for Benson, or Jane, in Joseph Conrad’s 1897 story, “An Outpost of Progress,” but as a final judgment (“her epitaph”), Naipaul aligns her with the two men in charge of the trading station: Some words from the Conrad story can serve as her epitaph…and on those who…substitute doctrine for knowledge…They were [Conrad wrote] two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character…are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. (190)

Naipaul provides Benson an “epitaph” from Conrad, an allusion to the fact that, like Skerritt, she was unceremoniously buried in the garden of Malik’s commune. This cold joke indicates the punitive nature of his treatment of Benson. The author has uttered the final word on her character and destiny.

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It is, however, difficult at first to line up the extract from Conrad with Benson’s circumstances and to see why Naipaul believes that the short story and Benson’s situation in Trinidad match up. In his story, Conrad’s overarching argument, which applies to the company employees Kayerts and Carlier, who have been sent to a remote trading station in the Congo, may suit Naipaul because it connects a sociological view of the metropolis—“the high organization of civilized crowds”—with a satirical image of his characters in the style of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet—“two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals”—and situates them on the periphery of European empire where they cannot rely on “the safety of their surroundings.” In other words, Conrad creates a psychosocial link between the center and the periphery. The same mind-set that works in Europe is dangerous on the colonial periphery. Kayerts and Carlier go wrong at the outpost because they have brought with them “their belief in the safety of their surroundings.” Yet, it is not clear how far Conrad’s generalization applies to his own characters, who may start as Bouvard and Pecuchet but soon prefigure Kurtz of Heart of Darkness in their covert aggression. The relationship of the two Europeans soon deteriorates: “[Kayerts] thought: ‘If I give way to that brute of a soldier [Carlier], he will begin this horror again tomorrow—and the day after—everyday— raise other pretensions, trample on me, torture me, make me his slave—and I will be lost! Lost!’”11 Like Kurtz, the similarly named Kayerts is a study in how enlightened views go wrong when situated in an unfriendly environment; Kayerts, after all, “had been all his life, till that moment, a believer in a lot of nonsense like the rest of mankind” (23).12 Kayerts is exactly the kind of character to whom Naipaul applies the most strenuous antiliberalism in his own fiction. Yet Conrad’s intention in “An Outpost of Progress” is quite different. His political motive is far more complex and as much a warning against any form of empire as a satire on enlightened thinking. It is significant,

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for example, that Conrad chose to publish his story in the jingoistic periodical Cosmopolis. Like Conrad, Naipaul often chooses to publish material at odds with the general political tendencies of his publishers and readers. Jane, in Guerrillas, has no similar ideological commitments to Kayerts or Kurtz and therefore experiences no change of heart. We assume that her politics are generally left wing but Naipaul does not make them explicit. Jane’s mistake—if that is the right word for her affair with Jimmy Ahmed—is to become involved in a bohemian milieu and in politically charged circumstances that are difficult to control or predict. Naipaul’s claim that the issue concerns the substitution of “doctrine for knowledge” is even more difficult to sustain with respect to Benson. There is little evidence of any doctrine at work in Benson’s case besides a willingness to associate with Malik and his followers. What led her to Christina Gardens may have been a diffuse rejection of her father’s position in the British establishment, but she does not seem to have formulated her rejection in doctrinaire terms. Her romantic or sexual attachment to her radical African-American companion Hakim was, after all, a matter of personal life rather than doctrine. One might perhaps say that novelistic “knowledge” is psychological and individual, whereas Jane’s (Benson’s) trust in her “ultimate security” is political and abstract. However, this seems like a stretch. Significantly, Naipaul alters the motive of the killing of the outsider woman. In Guerrillas, Jane is murdered to confirm the homosexual bond between her sometime lover Jimmy Ahmed and his companion Bryant. At Christina Gardens, however, Gale Benson, an English interloper, was killed in a sense, by the homosocial bond between Malik and his followers. “The best way to free Hakim [Benson’s African American boyfriend] from his mental strain,” Malik told his group, “is by getting rid of the woman Halé [Benson’s African name]. She must be liquidated.”13 Malik was playing out his fantasies of political leadership, taking care of his

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follower Hakim by freeing him “from his mental strain.” Malik was also, of course, employing the hard masculine language of the spy novel or the terrorist group: “She must be liquidated.” None of this turns up in Guerrillas where Jimmy Ahmed is a far less decisive leader, far more exercised by his homosexual love affair with one of his followers. It is characteristic of Naipaul, as we have seen, to reduce politics to sexuality or, in this case, homosociality to homosexuality. In both cases, correctly or incorrectly, Naipaul diagnoses a suicidal impulse at work in an individual separated from “the high organization of civilized crowds.” Indeed, Conrad’s story ends with a grotesque image of Kayerts hanging himself over Carlier’s grave—“standing rigidly at attention, but with one purple cheek playfully posed on the shoulder. And, irreverently, he was putting out a swollen tongue at the Managing Director” (25). The tonality of the scene, with its mixture of sarcasm, exposure, and cold humor (which seems to be directed at the Managing Director but is also a grotesque image of the victim) is more reminiscent of Naipaul than of the generally reserved and compassionate Conrad. The scene is arranged as a practical joke—“he was putting out a swollen tongue at the Managing Director”—yet this is a matter of literary artifice. The butt of the joke, however, is Kayerts. Like the enthusiastic Foam Baksh in Suffrage of Elvira (“Vote Harbans or Die!”) Kayerts is, in a sense, the author of a joke directed against himself. Reading “An Outpost of Progress” alongside Guerrillas suggests that Naipaul’s principal borrowing from the story is not Conrad’s analysis of modern individuality but rather his picture of the trading outpost. Jimmy Ahmed’s commune in Guerrillas is named for Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights (which centers our attention on Ahmed as Heathcliff ); yet, its model seems to be Kayerts and Carlier’s outpost and the “fellowship of their stupidity and laziness”

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(7; a different model for the narrative that centers our attention on Jane instead). Like the rundown Thrushcross Grange, the “outpost of progress” had been founded with high ideals by an “unsuccessful painter…weary of pursuing fame on an empty stomach” (3). The ideals of an artist have been destructively displaced into a political experiment; imaginative labor, for Conrad as for Naipaul, must be restricted to the imaginary world. Like Thrushcross Grange, the outpost is a place where no proper work is carried through. It is very different to Crusoe’s obsessively transformed island. As the director of the company complains, “I told those fellows to plant a vegetable garden, build new storehouses and fences, and construct a landing-stage. I bet nothing will be done!” (4). Naipaul is careful to indicate that the commune in Guerrillas is similarly neglected. There is no ethic of work, or care, among his Caribbean radicals. The homosexual bond in Guerrillas follows the bond in Conrad’s short story. It in this instance that Naipaul diverges dramatically from the Malik case, perhaps because he is imposing a literary framework on his real-life material. At least five people in the Michael Malik group participated in either the murder of Skerritt or Benson. In Guerrillas, Naipaul reduces the effective number of participants to two, Bryant, Jimmy’s lover, and Jimmy Ahmed. Their combination of childishness and violence resembles Kayerts and Carlier who “walked arm in arm, drawing close to one another as children do in the dark” (5). The childishness of this scene prevents the homosocial bond between Conrad’s two Europeans from having any greater suggestion of homosexuality just as the childishness of the characters in Wuthering Heights situates them before the onset of sexual awareness.14 In Conrad’s story, there is a constant and ironic motif of burial. The theme may have attracted Naipaul’s attention since, after all, the bodies of Skerritt and Benson had been discovered unceremoniously buried in Malik’s yard at Christina Gardens. There is the

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same slapdash approach to burial in the Conrad source. For on the outpost, “under a tall cross much out of the perpendicular, slept the man who had seen the beginning of all this [the ‘unsuccessful painter’]; who had planned and had watched the construction of this outpost of progress” and had “die[d] of fever in the just finished house” (3–4). The “tall cross much out of the perpendicular” is a detail Conrad uses to highlight the incompatibility between the painter’s values and this colonial situation. Nobody has bothered to restore the cross to the vertical. There is no real tradition possible in a place where memory and sacred sites are neglected in this slapdash fashion. Even when they are on the best of terms Carlier and Kayerts have reciprocal if undeclared fantasies about each other: “The idea that he [Kayerts] would, perhaps, have to bury Carlier and remain alone, gave him an inward shiver. He felt suddenly that this Carlier was more precious to him here, in the centre of Africa, than a brother could be anywhere else.” Both men “laughed loudly while Carlier thought: ‘That poor Kayerts; he is so fat and unhealthy. It would be awful if I had to bury him here” (5–6). Carlier’s laughter, here, is close to a cold joke. However, Conrad deliberately refuses to individuate the two characters in his story. Like personages in a comedy, Carlier and Kayerts, with their similar-sounding names, are almost interchangeable. This morbid fellowship of Carlier and Kayerts is played out to its logical conclusion in “An Outpost of Progress,” as it would be at Malik’s real-life Christina Gardens. In Guerrillas, however, the South African Peter Roche assists Jimmy Ahmed in keeping Jane’s murder a secret. While Conrad’s story revolves around the relationship of the two Europeans, Naipaul’s novel studies a number of dyadic relationships—between Jane and Jimmy Ahmed, Jane and Peter Roche, Jimmy and Bryant. But each of these relationships contributes to the destructive dynamism, which, as in “An Outpost of Progress,” ruins or kills all of the major characters by the end of the novel. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Naipaul’s invocation of O’Neill’s early play, The Emperor Jones, as the key to Skerrit’s death is as misleading, or at least as tendentious, as his use of Conrad. There is no camp follower in Emperor Jones that one might associate with Skerritt. Indeed the only casualty, and the only victim of Jones’s postcolonial charisma, is Jones himself. O’Neill’s play, which examines the fall of the ruler of “an island in the West Indies [where] the form of native government is…an Empire,” advances a model of Third World leadership that accords with Naipaul’s own from In a Free State (1971) to A Bend in the River (1979).15 Grandiosity is the key to Jones’s charisma, as he sees it himself in a passage I have already quoted as Naipaul’s creation of a diminished figure of a writer: “Ain’t a man’s talking big what makes him big—long as he makes folks believe it? Sho’, I talks large when I ain’t got nothin’ to back it up, but I ain’t talkin’ wild just de same. I know I kin fool ’em—I knows it—and dat’s backin’ enough fo’ my game” (1036). Jones’s authority, and its threatened collapse, closely resembles the situation of the historian Raymond in A Bend in the River. Jones needs to keep up appearances to maintain his power. It is entirely a matter of style: “dat’s backin’ enough fo’ my game.” The moment his authority is successfully challenged, Jones fears, it will entirely disappear, just like Raymond’s, and like the unlucky policeman who is murdered by a mob in A Bend in the River. As O’Neill’s play emphasizes, Jones’s rise has been swift in the new politics of the Caribbean. He has gone from “stowaway to Emperor in two years” (1035). His will-to-power is manifested in his style, and his style is revealed not only in his manner of talking but also in his way of dressing. O’Neill’s stage directions emphasize Jones’s clothing; he “wears a light blue uniform coat, sprayed with brass buttons, heavy gold chevrons on his shoulders, gold braid on the collar, cuffs, etc…Patent leather laced boots with brass spurs, and a belt with a long-barreled, pearl-handled revolver…Yet there 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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is something not altogether ridiculous about his grandeur. He has a way of carrying it off ” (1033). This is a point Naipaul carries over into Guerrillas. Jimmy Ahmed, like Malik himself, takes a great deal of care with his appearance and wears ostentatious clothing. Like Jimmy, Jones is granted a measure of charisma in his physical presence, which means “there is something not altogether ridiculous about his grandeur.” O’Neill’s rendering of African or Afro-Caribbean speech patterns in Emperor Jones can best be described as condescending—“I ain’t talkin’ wild just de same.” They may strike a modern reader, certainly this reader, as a rather cold sort of humor practiced at the expense of O’Neill’s black countrymen. However, Paul Robeson agreed to play the role in the film version of the play, as one might play Othello today, and one might see in Jones’s kingdom a fulfillment of Marcus Garvey’s hopes for black emigration from the United States. It is to Naipaul’s credit that, despite his use of dialect for comic purposes in the Caribbean comedies, he does not emphasize the device when he depicts black characters in the later narratives. From Michael de Freitas to Michael X In his essay and novel, Naipaul draws on Malik’s own writing, both his autobiography From Michael de Freitas to Michael X and the unpublished novel fragment, although he does not characterize the autobiography as a literary source. Malik’s autobiography, however, introduces an element that is not present in either O’Neill’s play or Conrad’s story: racial selfhatred. As Malik explains, I began to go to school around five years old—a mixed private school which was very snobbish. My mother was determined I should have a good education. When I grew up I would get a good job, she said, because, unlike her, I had a good colour. We had my father to thank for that. Whenever she referred to him she used the same phrase to describe him: “white and pretty.”16

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In advancing his argument about racial self-assertion, Malik emphasizes his mother’s colonial desire for upward mobility—“a mixed private school which was very snobbish”—as it acts on her feelings of racial inferiority. Her motivations are partly economic— “I would get a good job [because] I had a good colour”—they are also psychological. Malik goes back to the subject later in From Michael de Freitas, remembering that “my mother told me later that she was so surprised to see so many black people in London that she almost fainted on arrival. It had never occurred to her I would not be married to an English girl and it took her days to recover from the shock” (96). Malik portrays his mother, who has no fictional equivalent in Guerrillas, as an object of comedy. He emphasizes that her aspirational desires never quite leave her even under the most unlikely circumstances: “My mother ended her days in a three-bedroomed flat in St Stephen’s Gardens, lording it over her prostitutes and a group of little old ladies” (99). Malik’s own racial pride is achieved, it seems from reading his autobiography, at the price of severe misogyny. In Guerrillas, Naipaul adopts the same equation, but Jimmy Ahmed’s misogyny is fueled by his desire for homosocial bonding with his group and then his homosexual relationship with his follower Bryant. While there is a strong element of homosociality in Malik’s writing, there is no suggestion of homosexuality. At various points in From Michael de Freitas, Malik registers some discomfort with his own misogyny. Yet his self-criticism has little practical result. Indeed his concern is entirely self-involved, in that he sees his own readiness to exploit women as a disfiguring consequence of racial oppression. Of one of his white woman benefactors, he tells us that “from being a chick it was nice to make, Carmen became for me purely a source of income…It was only then I saw the real effect the ghetto had achieved in reducing my humanity and enabling me to look on a woman as a commodity” (160).

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More often Malik’s tone about women is boastful rather than regretful. He recalls that at a conference of radical poets, which he organizes, “all of the young girls in Cardiff and beyond seemed to be making themselves available and were all over the poets’ rooms— and the poets—all hours of the day and night” (181). His note of surprise—“seemed to be making themselves available”—is disingenuous. For Malik, as for Naipaul, left-wing radicalism and access to women seem to be naturally related. There is, of course, a cavalier note in his mention of “young girls.” There is no feeling of concern for the young women involved. In his memories of the same conference in Cardiff, Malik’s grandiosity, not to say his facile political ideals, are on particular display. When the conflict between the socialist powers of India and Chinese proxy Pakistan is raised, he suggests a simple plan to the delegates: “‘I would like to raise a motion that this conference send a message to Chairman Mao Tse-tung, whom we consider a fellow poet, asking him to use poems against India—if he must use anything—and not guns,’ I said” (181). One isn’t certain whether to believe Malik’s coda to his proposal: “Some six weeks later a telex message arrived at my house. It was from Mao, thanking me for the beautiful poems. He never did interfere in the Indo-Pakistani dispute” (183). Elsewhere in From Michael de Freitas, Malik brings up acquaintances such as John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Malcom X. It is significant that Naipaul’s Jimmy Ahmed has no such connections to the outside world. Perhaps the characteristic moment of Malik’s autobiography combines his attitudes toward women and his relationship to celebrities. He escorts Muhammad Ali around the United Kingdom and observes his effect on the locals: Not that women saw him as a little boy. The man exudes sex as far as they’re concerned. They love him. I provided one of my men to do his secretarial work while he was in England and this poor guy was inundated with scores of letters every day from women who wanted to marry Mohammed and offered him everything. Some were rather funny to read; others a little pathetic. (196)

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The Caribbean setting of Emperor Jones, like that of Malik’s commune, is undoubtedly a primary factor in Naipaul’s interest in the play. Throughout his career, Naipaul has been interested in shaping the political and cultural understanding of the region. In addition one of O’Neill’s models for Jones was Henri Christophe (1767–1820), a one-time slave,general in the Haitian Army, president, declared King of Haiti in 1811, but dead by his own hand in 1820. Haiti, which liberated itself from French rule by 1804, was the first black postcolonial society. Its unhappy postrevolutionary history is, in Naipaul’s view, a warning to every society in the neighborhood: “In Trinidad, as in every black West Indian island, the too easily awakened sense of oppression and the theory of the enemy point to the desert of Haiti” (“Michael X,” 189). As Naipaul understands the Michael Abdul Malik case, it is a modern manifestation of radical black politics that can be traced back to the Haitian revolution. The Malik essay, “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” composed between 1973 and 1979, is a nonfictional parallel to the novel, Guerrillas, which Naipaul published at the midpoint of that period. The ideological point of the Malik essay is direct. The “desert of Haiti” is a warning. For Naipaul, “Malik’s career proves how much of Black Power [at least in the former colonies] is jargon, how much a sentimental hoax” (189). Political language (“jargon”) and excessive feeling (“sentimental hoax”) are two important features of Haitian-style millenarianism. In Naipaul’s argument, the assumptions and ideologies of the center of the world system become dangerous when applied (or misapplied) in situations on the periphery. So Gale Benson’s sense of security proves fatal in Trinidad where the rules of the metropolis do not apply, and Conrad’s Kayerts and Carlier wind up dead on their “outpost of progress.” Just as destructive is the Black Power politics of Benson’s boyfriend Hakim Jamal: “Jamal, turning Malik 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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into an American, infecting Malik, in the security of Trinidad, with the American-type racial vehemence Malik had so far only parodied, was creating a monster” (181). The concept of “security” is central to Naipaul’s analysis of the situation at Christina Gardens. Trinidad, in Naipaul’s rendering, is at once insecure, for Benson, and much more secure than the United States for Jamal and Malik. Naipaul is not entirely forthcoming in his nonfiction about the Malik case. Neil ten Kortenaar points out some of the important omissions in Naipaul’s essay, particularly those dealing with “Naipaul’s own relationship to Malik…Malik’s autobiography was published by Andre Deutsch, Naipaul’s publisher as well… Hakim Jamal, Gale Benson’s lover…was a houseguest at the home of Diana Athill, Naipaul’s editor at Andre Deutsch.”17 The effect of these omissions is to sever any connections between Naipaul’s own writing and that of Malik and the Malik group. It is not that there is a conflict of interest the evidence of which Naipaul suppresses. The point is that Naipaul does not want to include his own career and his own convictions alongside that of Malik and his associates. It has always been important to Naipaul, and to his authority as a writer, that he form a literary class of one instead of being compared with other West Indian and postcolonial writers. There are several voices that can be distinguished in Naipaul’s essay. They include the cold and perhaps mocking realist who tells us that Gale Benson was “held by the neck and stabbed and stabbed. At that moment all the lunacy and play fell from her; she knew who she was then, and wanted to live” (143). Here “lunacy and play” are Gale Benson’s defects, not her sense of security. They are the same qualities Naipaul criticizes in the revolutionary temperament. In Naipaul’s essay, one also hears a specifically Trinidadian (or calypso) voice with its apparently shrewd understanding of the paradoxes of race and identity. Malik “wasn’t even black,” Naipaul reminds us, “he was ‘a fair-skin man,’ half-white. That, in 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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the Trinidad phrase, was the sweetest part of the joke” (155).18 In a more dispassionate or metropolitan register it would be far more difficult to record the fact of Malik’s appearance while at the same time expressing such pleasure—“the sweetest part of the joke”—at the outward contradiction between his skin color and his political identity. This calypso voice is not dissimilar to the perspective of the Caribbean comedies, but it is more political in intent. The controlling voice in “Michael X” is that of the literary critic. Naipaul reads Malik’s novel in fragments and concludes that “this [Benson’s killing] was a literary murder, if ever there was one. Writing led both men there…writing had for too long been a public relations exercise, a form of applauded lie, a fantasy” (192). The list functions as an analysis of Malik’s radical ideology, which begins merely as “a public relations exercise,” succeeds in the public sphere as “a form of applauded lie,” and then returns to its creator as “fantasy.” In his essay, Naipaul interprets Malik’s manuscript just as Salim examines Ferdinand’s letter in A Bend in the River. Malik’s papers, like Ferdinand’s, show no sign of writerly meditation, “solid unparagraphed pages in pencil or ballpoint, the writing small, very little crossed out” (182). The lack of paragraphing indicates Malik’s inability to see form as an aspect of writing. Moreover, it “is not the story of a life or the development of a personality… Events accumulate confusedly around him; he is without a personality; he is only a haphazard succession of roles” (157). Malik is incapable of seeing a narrative in his own life; there is no “development of a personality.” He is not detached from the stream of events. He cannot objectify his personality on the page. Instead, he fulfills a “succession of roles” without identifying with any one of these. This is not a literary flaw, Naipaul suggests, so much as the symptom of a psychological and cultural deficit. In his criticism, Naipaul focuses on Michael’s narrator, the “30 year old Englishwoman, Lena Boyd-Richardson. She has been four years in Guyana, doing a bogus job created for her in the 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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firm of Clarkson’s” (182). In Guerrillas, Peter Roche, an exiled South African revolutionary, has Boyd-Richardson’s “bogus job” at the firm of Sablich’s. Naipaul sees Boyd-Richardson herself, or rather Malik’s interest in glamorizing himself from the outside perspective of an Englishwoman, as the key to Benson’s murder. For “Malik’s primitive novel is like a pattern book, a guide to later events” (184). In fact, the pattern is one that Naipaul imposes on the material by focusing on one of the two murders. Naipaul, as I have mentioned, gives Skerritt short shrift in the essay and excludes him altogether from Guerrillas. Boyd-Richardson’s attraction to Malik’s fictional Mike is rendered in the same terms as the Clarissa who is the narrator of the fragmentary novel Jimmy Ahmed is writing in Guerrillas. BoydRichardson, reflecting Malik’s view of himself, is struck by his (or rather Mike’s) charisma. In a line Naipaul quotes from Malik, “We could not tear ourselves away from the Presence of this man” (184). Naipaul remarks on the instability of Malik’s narrator: something extraordinary happens. There is a stumble in the narrative: the writer, without knowing it, suddenly loses his narrator, Lena. In a few connected lines the writer moves from the first-person narrative to third person and then back to first. But now it is Sir Harold, Lena’s father’s friend, appearing in Guyana, who is the narrator. (183)

The change in narrators reveals a lack of self-control and selfunderstanding. It is doubly revealing because it is done unawares. This unconscious instability is the perspectival equivalent to the “haphazard succession of roles” Malik’s Mike takes on. For Naipaul, the “stumble in the narrative” is a literary indication of the forces at play in the Malik murders. The white woman’s perspective is first invited and then violently rejected. It was, in fact, only under Hakim’s direction that Malik succumbed to the racial and political passions that would doom Gale Benson. In the new climate at Christina Gardens, Benson “was alien, impenetrable. It was felt that she was an agent; there was talk of an especially secret branch of British Intelligence called M10” (143). The 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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talk of espionage fits with Malik’s insistence that Benson “must be liquidated.” But it is the “alien, impenetrable” quality of Benson that seems to have disturbed Malik. In the fragment, as Naipaul reports, it is matched by “the mystery of Lena Boyd-Richardson, repelled, fascinated, involved, and then abruptly disappearing as narrator” (185). Naipaul investigates these interlinked opacities in his Englishwoman Jane in Guerrillas and, in parallel, in the novel that Jimmy Ahmed writes from the perspective of a Clarissa who resembles both Jane and Lena Boyd-Richardson. The symmetries are complicated. The real Gale Ann Benson becomes Malik’s Boyd Richardson and Naipaul’s Jane, and the imagined Jane becomes the imagined Jimmy Ahmed’s Clarissa. In “Michael X,” Naipaul finally dismisses Malik on literary grounds. Indeed Malik had no skills as a novelist. He was too self-absorbed to process experience in any rational way or even to construct a connected narrative. But when he transferred his fantasy to real life, he went to work like the kind of novelist he would have liked to be. Such plotting, such symbolism! The blood of the calf at Christmas time, the blood of Gale Benson in the New Year. (202)

Naipaul focuses his criticism of Malik on his crude and sensationalist style (“the blood of the calf at Christmas time, the blood of Gale Benson in the new year”). Novelistic values, according to Naipaul, include an interest in others, rationalism, and the ability to “construct a connected narrative” (the difficulty of which is noted by the historian Raymond in A Bend in the River). These aesthetic and intellectual values are at odds with the crude plotting and symbolism of the Benson murder. There is a suggestion in Naipaul’s comment that detachment, objectivity, and aesthetic sense of a true novelist help to sublimate the aggression that otherwise flows into real-life violence. If Malik had been a real writer, as Naipaul has it, he would not have been a murderer. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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While Guerrillas follows the patterns of analysis established in “Michael X,” both pieces exclude significant portions of Malik’s (and Jimmy Ahmed’s) biography, in particular his rise in London from street tough and pimp to founder of the Racial Adjustment Action Society. Jimmy Ahmed has none of the complex trajectory between metropolis and periphery that Malik experienced. In the novel, Jimmy has almost no connection to the greater society. Malik’s mother, who ran a brothel, is also, as we have seen, excluded from the invented world of the novel. Significantly, Malik’s West Indian wife, Desiree Ayesha de Souza, is converted into a white Englishwoman in Guerrillas. The effect of Naipaul’s changes is to concentrate attention on Jimmy Ahmed’s commune and his place on the island. The real-life Michael Abdul Malik was much more articulate than Naipaul’s Jimmy Ahmed. He became notorious for his confrontational views on racial self-defense. During the 1958 race riots in Nottingham, Malik disavowed political discussion and organization: “You don’t want committees and representatives. What you need is to get a few pieces of iron and a bit of organization so that tonight when they come in here we can defend ourselves” (False Messiah, 34). Malik had a direct and aggressive political method, whether the issue was personal security or cultural politics. His scope was far greater than his literary equivalent. Convinced that the Beatles’ Liverpool sound was borrowed from black musicians, for example, Malik used his prestige as a hard-line advocate to press his claims on John Lennon and Yoko Ono: “You have stolen the rhythms of the black people you know in Liverpool…You might have done it consciously or unconsciously. Anyway now you owe us a debt” (False Messiah, 91). All this is left out of the novel, and the effect is to excise Malik’s nationalist politics. Where Malik fused politics, sexuality, and criminality, Jimmy Ahmed is more closely defined by his complex 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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sexuality. Jane and Roche in Guerrillas are aware that Jimmy Ahmed has left the United Kingdom under the cloud of what Ahmed-critic Herbert Meredith defines as a “white-woman rape,” but this is Naipaul’s substitution for the notorious “slave collar” case where Malik forced a “slave collar” onto British businessman Marvin Brown.19 Where Michael de Freitas had renamed himself first Michael X, in imitation of black nationalist Malcolm X, and then Michael Abdul Malik, in solidarity with a wider world of Islam, Jimmy Ahmed styles himself “Jimmy Ahmed, Haji,” in the way that Naipaul’s Pundit Ganesh Ramsumair became “G. Ramsay Muir, esq., M.B.E.,” at the end of The Mystic Masseur. And, in fact, Roche tells Jane that Jimmy “uses [Haji] to mean ‘mister’ or ‘esquire.’ When he remembers, that is” (12). Naipaul’s substitutions in Guerrillas have a pattern. He substitutes race for politics, sexuality for race, white women for women of color, homosexuality for heterosexuality, and violence for homosexuality. One of the oddest of these substitutions is the replacement of the Portuguese father of Michael de Freitas with the Chinese father of Jimmy Ahmed. As Jimmy describes the popular view of himself in his novel, he is “a half black nobody, just a Chinaman’s lucky shot on a dark night” (62). In fact, Naipaul’s alteration of his radical activist’s ancestry is something of a sly joke. Toward the end of his brief career, the real-life Malik waged a campaign to take control of Chineserun brothels in Port-of-Spain, having an associate write to the ethnically Chinese governor-general attacking “certain Chinese crooks operating brothels and bordellos in this country who are doing more than sully your name” (False Messiah, 118).20 Moreover, if Jimmy Ahmed’s father is Chinese rather than Portuguese, the character is positioned even further from European identity. The aspirational element of Malik’s mother’s relationship with the older de Freitas is excluded from Naipaul’s novel. In general, Naipaul reduces the elements of Malik’s biography to form Jimmy Ahmed’s story. Gale Benson’s African American lover, Jamal, is replaced by the white South African exile Peter Roche. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Roche, unlike Jamal, is emotionally unattached to Gale/Jane and to the male world of the radical commune. Roche’s relationship with Jane resembles the unhappy couple of “In a Free State,” while Roche himself inserts a disillusioned and postrevolutionary outlook into the narrative.21 Jimmy Ahmed’s provocative label for the South African Roche (“Massa”) attempts to undermine Roche’s detachment and return him to a crude dialectic of oppressor and victim. By reducing the circumstances of the Malik case, Naipaul focuses on the commune, his version of Conrad’s outpost, and identifies the homosexual bond between Ahmed and Bryant as the primary reason Ahmed murders Jane.22 There is no figure, like Joseph Skerritt, who is a scapegoat from inside the commune. Jimmy Ahmed’s revolutionary cell does not manifest the numerous divisions that existed at Malik’s Christina Gardens. Naipaul makes a number of other significant alterations to the original story. In the Malik group, two of the men associated with the murders were of Indian ancestry, Adolphus Parmassar and Edward Chadee. Naipaul does not specify race precisely in Guerrillas but, with the problematic exception of Jimmy Ahmed, Thrushcross Grange seems to be entirely a group of black men, a significant alteration in the material that emphasizes feelings of racial assertion and self-hatred (at least in Jimmy’s case), which may well not have been so important in the Malik group. It is troubling, given Trinidad’s demography, with its large populations of Indian and African descent, that Naipaul excludes evidence of the racially mixed nature of the Malik group. Doing so creates a starker opposition between the white interlopers, Jane and Peter, and the black members of the commune. This foregrounds race as the driver of the interaction rather than, say, radical politics or group solidarity. Naipaul’s antiliberalism is emphatic after Biswas, but in Guerrillas, he very closely identifies destructive revolutionary radicalism with black politics. One oddity in the narrative is that, in Jimmy Ahmed’s novel, very high status is ascribed to Clarissa (his equivalent to Jane). 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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While there is no sign of Jane’s status in the novel, the real-life Gale Ann Benson was in fact the daughter of Tory MP, and founder of the International Broadcasting Company, Captain Leonard Frank Plugge. Clarissa seems to have inherited Gale Benson’s high social standing without it benefiting Jane, Naipaul’s middle term. By using the name “Clarissa” for Jimmy Ahmed’s Englishwoman Naipaul may also be alluding to Samuel Richardson’s heroine who was raped in the course of the novel. But it is Naipaul’s Jane, not Jimmy’s Clarissa, who suffers the Richardsonian Clarissa’s fate. The Malik case and Naipaul’s revisions create a sequence of outside female observers, or putative observers, who play an important part in what follows. Having finally constructed Clarissa as a privileged observer, Jimmy can explore his own image from this imagined point of view (and Naipaul can indirectly study Jimmy’s self-involvement). “No one is indifferent to him,” Clarissa observes, “he is discussed in every quarter…this man with his naked torso, not black but a lovely golden colour, like some bronze god, I am amazed, my heart is in my mouth” (39). Because Naipaul chooses not to explain the nature of Jane’s attraction to Jimmy Ahmed, the reader is left to decide how much of Jane Jimmy Ahmed has captured in the figure of Clarissa. The emphasis on skin color—“not black, but a lovely golden colour, like some bronze god”—is an attempt to bring out, as Naipaul put it in the essay, “the sweetest part of the joke,”—that is, that the radical black nationalist is a man of mixed ancestry. The strangest, or perhaps the most overdetermined, point in Clarissa’s imagined observation of Jimmy Ahmed is when she asks to examine his bookshelf: I said “Do you mind” and went to the shelves. He said “By all means, they’re not dummies” and I took up Wuthering Heights. “Ah” he said breaking into my thoughts “you are looking at that great work of the Brontës. What a gifted family, it makes you believe in heredity. Would you like some tea?” (40)

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Wuthering Heights is the fictional model that Jimmy Ahmed proposes for his relationship with Jane, presumably with himself in the role of Heathcliff and Jane as Catherine. Yet his choice of Clarissa for his heroine suggests, as we have noted, Samuel Richardson’s heroine who is raped by Lovelace and eventually dies as a result.23 Jimmy Ahmed represents himself in the novel fragment as a stereotype of a literary Englishman; or rather Naipaul shows us how Ahmed imagines such a man, from the offhand “Ah” and the cultural capital—“that great work of the Brontës”—to the aristocratic assumption—“it makes you believe in heredity”—and the conventional gesture: “Would you like some tea?” Naipaul means us to read Ahmed’s self-description as a sign of colonial consciousness concealed beneath the black nationalist rhetoric of Christina Gardens. Moreover, on the evidence of his writing, Jimmy Ahmed is racist toward his own followers. The first thought he places in Clarissa’s voice (and thus a thought that Naipaul places in the head of his character) is her surprise that “a man of those attainments can waste his life in place like that with all those good for nothing natives” (38), a sentiment that would not have been out of place in Conrad’s story. It is also reminiscent of the Zulu in “In a Free State” who distinguishes himself from other Africans. Clarissa, like her original Jane (and in Naipaul’s view, one assumes, Jane’s original Gale Benson), is simultaneously a dangerous presence on the island and an endangered one because she stands for a desired perspective as well as being desired in her own right. Through her Jimmy Ahmed can indulge his self-absorption. Naipaul echoes the Mystic Masseur’s title (“G. Ramsay Muir, esq, M.B.E.”) in “JAMES AHMED (Haji)” because he identifies the same subjection to a metropolitan gaze in the black nationalist Jimmy Ahmed as in the Trinidadian Indian masseur Pundit Ganesh. In a sense, Naipaul structures Guerrillas as a competition between two attempts to capture Jane’s voice on the page, his own, as the novelist, and Jimmy Ahmed’s as the would-be novelist. As 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Neil ten Kortenaar has observed, “Guerrillas is a novel about a failed novelist, and it can be read as a struggle between two writers, Jimmy Ahmed the would-be novelist and Naipaul his creator, over the right to tell Jimmy’s story.”24 But Jane rather than Jimmy is at the center of Naipaul’s novel. Jane is also the privileged reader in Guerrillas. When she reads pages from Jimmy Ahmed’s manuscript, she “found that it soon became what Roche had said: a fairy story, a school composition, ungrammatical and confused” (17). The criticism of a character and his culture by criticism of his writing is, of course, a typically Naipaulian move. If the lines with which Naipaul dispatches Gale Benson in his Malik essay have a summary quality—“all the lunacy and play fell from her; she knew who she was then, and wanted to live”—then the death of Jane in Guerrillas excludes the victim’s perspective even more rigorously. The distress in the passage is almost entirely Bryant’s (Jimmy’s lover), not Jane’s: “Sharp steel met flesh. Skin parted…and Bryant could only cut at what had already been cut. He cried out, in tears, in pain, in despair, ‘Help me, Jimmy!’” (243). The silencing of the female victim is already present in the Malik case; Naipaul notes in “Michael X” that Benson’s “papers were destroyed the day she was killed” (192). For Naipaul, this marks the erasure of Gale’s humanity. In the novel, Peter Roche, her former lover, burns Jane’s passport to conceal her murder. There is no record of her appearance on the island or of her disappearance. False Messiah The two biographies published after Guerrillas are, given the nature of the case and their own commercial purpose, predictably sensational. False Messiah, coauthored by Derek Humphry and David Tindall, uses the language of unmasking and a register of political disappointment: “While he [Michael X] was head of the Black Power movement in Britain, lecturing to academic audiences, giving television and newspaper interviews, he was fooling 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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us all” (vi). The book approvingly quotes Dilip Hiro’s no-nonsense judgment on Malik’s autobiography in The Times: “On the whole Michael emerges as a guy who had a ball and most of the time on white people’s money and indulgence” (73). The chapter titles of False Messiah carry the authors’ connected arguments about black consciousness and self-hatred, violence, and white counterculture. The titles include “Pretending to be White,” “Into Black Power,” “Flower Power and Prison,” “Send for the Killers,” and “The Blood Ritual.” In lines that, on a charitable interpretation, verge on racial resentment (or seem intended to evoke it in the reader), we are told that “during his years in Britain [Malik] had many white girls as mistresses, flaunting them in front of his colleagues and his wife. It was the black pimp setting out in classic style to prove that he had broken out of the ghetto and was now able to ‘use’ white women” (14). It is hard to deny the accusation, but False Messiah ignores Malik’s literary and political ambitions, and his genuine successes, in the course of reducing him to “the black pimp setting out in classic style.” At moments, the authors of False Messiah trot out an even more troubling line of argument about race in Trinidad than those to which Naipaul occasionally resorts. In “Michael X,” Naipaul wrote that Malik “was ‘a fair-skin man,’ half-white. That, in the Trinidad phrase, was the sweetest part of the joke” (155). But Naipaul’s observation has, at least, a certain delight. His rivals are far more crude and reductive, picking up only on the racial self-hatred of Malik’s mother. In False Messiah, Humphry and Tindall observe, on no stated grounds, that in Trinidad “white skin was delicate, pretty…The very word [black] had ugly connotations: black magic, blackmail, black list” (9). False Messiah characteristically advances its perspective of racial psychology by clumsy, direct, and unconvincing means; Trinidad’s racial views can hardly be determined, more than those of other Commonwealth countries, by the existence of the word “blackmail.” By contrast Naipaul is indirect, culturally astute (“the Trinidad phrase”), and alert for the subversive power of comedy (“the sweetest part of the joke”) to assert his perspective. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Where False Messiah borders on racial stereotyping, James Sharp’s 1981 contribution, The Life and Death of Michael X, adopts a Toryish manner that is quite different from both Naipaul’s and Humphry and Tyndall’s (and perhaps closest to Jimmy Ahmed’s style in the Wuthering Heights passage). “At no time,” Sharp insists in the voice of a man who does not anticipate disagreement, “did [Malik] really understand what he was doing—parading insults, to the Sovereign’s person, to the reigning Prime Minister, to the party in power, which was favourably inclined to improving the lot of immigrants already in residence by limiting the inflow with no stated skills” (emphasis added).25 One imagines, despite Sharp’s assertion, that immigrants might not be well disposed to a “party in power” that seeks to “limit the inflow.” But the point of Sharp’s contention is to demand gratitude and deference from “immigrants already in residence.” Here Sharp speaks for a wounded establishment while criticizing “‘Progressive’ forces [which] considered [Malik] as a possible candidate for martyrdom, a dreadful instance of human sacrifice to that still-breathing monster, colonialism and its latter-day ally, black capitalism” (3). This establishment is closely allied to the sensible members of the immigrant community. Life and Death reminds us that “West London contained several people of his own race who would gladly have helped to lynch Michael X” (40; emphasis added). Whether Malik’s fellow Trinidadians were disappointed or disillusioned with him, it seems unlikely that they would have resorted to the symbol of violent white supremacy, not to say, however seriously intended, an act of violent collective murder in London. Life and Death contains too many tonalities to be successful, from the high-toned quotations taken from Macbeth and Julius Caesar to the sensationalist photographs of corpses that Sharp reprints, from the satirist of “Progressive forces” to the irritated defender of the establishment. Moreover, the small book contributes 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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little to the debate around Michael X except for its Tory voice. There is no reason for the book to exist except, perhaps, that it incorporates the voice of the establishment into the scandal of Michael X, a stylistic feature that is confirmed by the inclusion of a foreword penned by the judge presiding over Malik’s 1972 trial, Judge Evan Rees, also the first Ombudsman for Trinidad. Unlike the biographies Naipaul’s prose is controlled, ironic, indirect where necessary, surprising, and capable of imposing a literary history (Wuthering Heights to “An Outpost of a Progress” to The Emperor Jones alongside Naipaul’s essay and Malik’s fragmentary novel) on the material. Where Malik is resentful and expansive, moreover, Naipaul is cool and subversive. Where Humphry and Tindall are sensationalist Naipaul is controlled and focuses on the Englishwoman victim and Roche, his injected observer, rather than Skerritt or Malik. And where Sharp takes on the voice of a Tory, Naipaul is not so fast to pigeonhole the nature of his counterrevolution. When Naipaul, for example, observes that Malik’s fair complexion was “in the Trinidad phrase, the sweetest part of the joke,” he combines an earthiness about race with the precision of his literary style. From this complicated series of narrative choices, evasions, deletions, and alterations of tone—Bhabha’s mixture of “displacement, distortion, dislocation, repetition”—Naipaulian authority is born and reborn on every page.

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or V. S. Naipaul, Islam simultaneously confirms and disturbs his authority as a writer. Islam is a phenomenon of global width and great historical depth that has occupied a good deal of Naipaul’s attention. His writings on the subject, like his depictions of sub-Saharan Africa and his pronouncements on Caribbean culture, have polarized his readership. Naipaul has devoted two separate books to Islam. The state of the religion in Muslim Asia is charted in Among the Believers (1981), a journey reprised in Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998). This return to a previous subject, as a chance to confirm previous impressions and follow a phenomenon over time, is characteristic of Naipaul’s career, given the three travel narratives on India and the numerous fictional and nonfictional explorations of sub-Saharan and Caribbean societies (as well as the way Naipaul has repeatedly retold the story of how he came to be a writer). At the microscopic level, Naipaul seeks to establish his authority by repetition of sentences, phrases, and images. At the macroscopic level, he does much the same by returning to the same continent, society, and subject matter. While Naipaul devotes two travel books to contemporary Islam, the topic is a significant leitmotif in his fictional corpus. It is too simple to reduce Naipaul’s representation of Islam to the explicit assessments offered in the travel narratives. The Muslim

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CHAPTER 4

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presence in Naipaul’s prose can be as particular and undistinguished as the occasional chauvinist Baksh in The Suffrage of Elvira (“Everybody know that Muslim girl prettier than Hindu girl” [129]) or as familiar and untheorized as the dedication to Beyond Belief—“For Nadira Khannum Alvi”—which publicizes Naipaul’s marriage to a Muslim Pakistani and suggests some relationship between the book’s addressee and its subject matter. Beyond Belief, one might infer from the dedication, develops an analysis of the situation of Islam and the Muslim states consonant with that of his new wife (who, like Salim of A Bend in the River, was born in Africa). The dedication certainly goes some way toward defusing any question of a personal prejudice on Naipaul’s part. But then, for an intellectual whose express judgments about Third World societies have been so often gloomy, Naipaul has spent a great deal of his time in the very same parts of the world. Islam is at once familiar and distant, somehow transparent to Naipaulian generalization and yet obscure to the Nobelist. This indeterminacy means that as a topic of Naipaul’s attention Islam is a singular window into the construction of his literary and ideological authority. On the one hand, modern political Islam attracts a good deal of Naipaulian opprobrium in the wake of the Iranian revolution. On the other hand, as Salim indicates in A Bend in the River, a character’s Muslim religion may be almost a distinction without a difference. As we have seen, Salim’s own background in A Bend in the River is as close to his creator’s as possible: “My family were Muslim. But we were a special group. We were distinct from the Arabs and other Muslims of the coast; in our customs and attitudes we were closer to the Hindus of north-western India, from which we had originally come” (11). With Salim, who shows no sign of religious observance, Islam is, as I will argue, merely a way of signaling his difference from the author without giving any content to this difference.1 Moreover, there are substantial differences between Indian Muslim communities in Africa—who may be Gujarati-speaking, Urdu-speaking, Ismaili, or Memon—which 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Naipaul glosses over in the way that he forms a unity of global Islam. Superficially Naipaul’s attitude toward Islam is difficult to dispute and perhaps to defend from liberal criticism, certainly if one goes by the generalizations that do so much to create the writer’s sweep while polarizing the response of his readers. Some are struck by his authoritative judgments, which of course long preceded the September 11 attacks. Others refuse to grant Naipaul’s views credibility, seeing in them the same animus that informs his views on sub-Saharan Africa and independent India.2 Most of Islam’s mischief, according to Naipaul, has been done in the past. He is especially concerned with its effect on Indian civilization and what he sees as an ancient and continuous Hindu tradition. It is hard to detect any sympathy for Hinduism in Naipaul’s early career. Indeed, in his first evaluations of Indian society, Naipaul identifies Hinduism as the principal force holding back the region’s development.3 Later in his career Naipaul’s view changes, becoming far more protective of political Hinduism and far more critical of Islam’s impact on the subcontinent. In Beyond Belief, for example, Naipaul compares the effect of Indian Islam (“after its devastation of India proper”) on the Asian continent to a solar catastrophe, “turning the religious-cultural light of the subcontinent…into the light of a dead star.”4 The sense behind these words is of a cosmic murder perpetrated on Indian civilization. Islam outside India has no better claim on our respect. For in its early centuries, as it spread out of the Arabian peninsula, it was “the most uncompromising kind of imperialism” (64). In fact, Naipaul concludes, “there has probably been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs” (331) because those conquered by the Arabs, by becoming Muslims, cease to see themselves as the victims of Islam. The background to Naipaul’s comments on Islamic and Arab imperialism is, of course, the postwar debate on European decolonization. One can reasonably align Naipaul’s views with John Ramsay Muir, the liberal imperialist who gave his name to The 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Mystic Masseur’s Pundit Ganesh Ramsumair. The era of British and European imperialism—what Naipaul calls “the Great Peace” or “the mingling of peoples”—was, on this argument, far more compromising than that of the Arab ascendancy between the seventh and eleventh centuries. The obvious objection to such a view is that the standards of the seventh century do not apply to the nineteenth, and certainly not to the twentieth, but on this topic, Naipaul seems to suffer from the same absence of historical imagination as the Muslim ideologues whom he studies. In what seems to be a similar contraction of sympathy, if not of historical understanding, Naipaul particularly objects to what he sees as the wing of Islam that is resentful and conscious of victimhood. For “late twentieth-century Islam…had the flaw of its origins…It offered only the Prophet, who would settle everything—but who had ceased to exist. This political Islam was rage, anarchy.”5 In Naipaul’s analysis “political Islam,” which is quickly made equivalent to “late twentieth-century Islam,” is strongly oriented toward an illusion it locates in the distant past: “the Prophet, who would settle everything—but who had ceased to exist.” The conflation of one part of the religion to the religion as a whole, while insisting that no such conflation has taken place, is by now a standard move in arguments of this form about Islam. Islamic understanding, according to Naipaul, is childish because it cannot conceive of legitimate disagreements and disputes, dreaming instead of a “Prophet, who would settle everything.” The religion is structured by this error, incapable of escaping “the flaw of its origins.” The same “rage, anarchy” that Salim sees in A Bend in the River is amplified to a geopolitical scale by “late twentieth-century Islam.” Naipaul’s tone here borders on sarcasm, as his sentence seems to unveil some new observation (“but who had ceased to exist”), yet it is hard to see the grounds of either the criticism or the insight. Religions are, after all, traditions that assert some relationship between the present and a privileged past. For Naipaul to frame the problem of Islam in this way in Beyond Belief permits 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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him to treat it as one case in his more general inquiries into the failure of authority in countries and cultures on the periphery of the world system. One might reasonably conclude that this is a move dictated by his need to establish authority rather than by the nature of the object he studies. However, the problematic nature of Naipaul’s own authority on the subject runs in parallel, as I will suggest, with the problematic source of authority within Muslim tradition. In the two decades that separate A Bend in the River from Beyond Belief, Naipaul’s reputation rested in large part on his skill as an interpreter of the Islamic world and its various political and historical currents. Despite Naipaul’s reputation as an analyst of Islam— which after September 11 and the award of the Nobel has to some degree eclipsed his interest in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and the Caribbean—there is almost no distinct concern with Muslims as anything beyond a sectional group until the midpoint of his career. Roughly speaking, Naipaul’s views on Islam change as the era of decolonization is succeeded by a new era of conflict between Islam and the West. (Communist societies have never been of particular interest to Naipaul. Nor, one senses, has he been especially interested by the United States despite his journey to the American South in A Turn in the South.) Although he credits the 1979 Iranian revolution with provoking his journey to Muslim Asia, which is reported in Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, Naipaul had apparently taken a dramatic turn to Muslim subjects with Salim, the narrator of Indian Muslim descent in A Bend in the River, which Naipaul began in July 1977. But Salim is nominally rather than substantially Muslim. In A Bend in the River, Naipaul foregrounds his interest in Islam as a way of differentiating himself from his narrator. In other words, there is a complex relationship between Naipaul’s depictions of Islam and his strategies as an international writer. Many of his sketches of Muslim characters are unusually sympathetic. Indeed, in 1994’s A Way in the World, which deals principally with Caribbean history, Naipaul opens the narrative 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Whether or not the essayistic and touristic mode of the travel narratives is capable of assessing the generality of Islam (and Naipaul’s critics are justifiably dubious), too little attention has been paid to Naipaul’s Muslim characters as well as to the complex rhetoric he uses in Among the Believers and Beyond Belief. Because the subSaharan context of “In a Free State” and A Bend in the River is relatively unfamiliar to Naipaul, it forces him to adopt, even in a novella and novel, the framework of a travel narrative. In his African writings, moreover, Naipaul’s authority depends very heavily on his claim of being, like A Bend in the River’s Indar, “a man without a side.” Islam, by contrast, and especially its Indian and Trinidadian instantiation, is more familiar to Naipaul and yet less transparent. On occasion the nature of the obscurity seems to follow from his long familiarity. As he explains in Among the Believers, “I had known Muslims all my life. But I knew little of their religion… the animosities our Hindu and Muslim grandfathers had brought from India had softened into a kind of folk wisdom about the unreliability and treachery of the other side” (11). Naipaul offers no direct cause for his knowing “little of their religion,” but he implies that it is this suspicious “folk wisdom” that stands in the way of greater and more precise knowledge. He is acquainted with Muslims, yet he has no curiosity about their beliefs. This absence of curiosity is not, however, a matter of religious difference; even Hindus in Trinidad, according to Naipaul, show little curiosity in their own background. Like religion, sectarian distrust is a kind of inheritance “brought from India” and handed on by “our Hindu and Muslim grandfathers.” Trinidad, perhaps because it is divided between many 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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with a sketch of an explicitly Muslim character, the mortuary worker and flower arranger Leonard Side (or “Sayeed”), who is paralleled with the author as an artist in his own medium.

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more groups and its Indian population found itself a minority, has “softened” these sentiments of alienation. What was once political, immediate, and a subject of emotional distress (“animosities”) has become mellowed into the cultural background. In addition, the rhetoric of the passage (“our Hindu and Muslim grandfathers,” “the unreliability and treachery of the other side”) matches Naipaul’s analysis: the situation is formally symmetrical between Trinidadian Hindus and Muslims. Each side distrusts the other on the same unreliable basis; narrator, writer, and reader are equally distant from either side.6 Such symmetry is, of course, a generic feature of comedy. In fact, the symmetrical representation of Trinidadian Muslims is a hallmark of Naipaul’s early Caribbean narratives up to and including A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). Yet religious identification was very much on Naipaul’s mind early on in his career. The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), which deals with the first election on a newly independent Caribbean island, studies the problem of communal loyalties at length. Indeed the election will turn on the decision of the various communities—Hindu, Muslim, black—as to which candidate best represents their interest. Almost no question of political ideology arises in the course of the election campaign. Since no community is predominant, candidates attempt to build coalitions across religious and racial lines by promising rewards to the various communities. Naipaul emphasizes that the sides are equal from his standpoint. His assertion of symmetry is part of his mastery of the comic genre. Candidate Harbans, trying to recruit the Muslim family of the Bakshes to his cause, argues that “in this modern world everybody is one. Don’t make no difference who you is or what you is. You is a Muslim, I is a Hindu. Tell me, that matter?”7 Harbans’s argument is corrected by the plot of The Suffrage of Elvira, which shows that sectarian identities are always options that the islanders can take. Voting on Elvira by and large goes by community, but the comic ending, in which all the communities delight in the burning of Harbans’s Jaguar, bears Harbans out. The island finds unity 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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not in modernity but in an old-fashioned festival of destruction. But the destruction is presented as victimless (apart from the hapless Harbans and his ostentatious Jaguar). In The Suffrage of Elvira, Naipaul’s satire is mathematically symmetrical and the author seems to be poised above any of the sectarian identities. Celebrations of the elections are sponsored in each of the communities: “The people of Elvira were to get religious consolation. The Muslims were to get their kitab, the Hindus their kattha, the Christians their service. But nobody was really pleased” (235). There is no difference, from the point of view Naipaul imposes on his readers, between kitab, kattha, and Christian service. They are formally equivalent, and in the Caribbean comedies, formal equivalence is all that counts. The specific content of each religion is minimized. Indeed sectarian identity in The Suffrage of Elvira is a kind of team sport: “Everybody know,” as Baksh announces, “that Muslim girl prettier than Hindu girl.” This basic level of prejudice shades into mere communal pride. Even these identities are attenuated by the hybridities of the island. In a passage that indicates the idealizations and symmetries generic considerations impose on Naipaul’s material, we are told that Things were crazily mixed up in Elvira. Everybody, Hindus, Muslims and Christians, owned a Bible; the Hindus and Muslims looking on it, if anything, with greater awe. Hindus and Muslims celebrated Christmas and Easter…Everybody celebrated the Muslim festival of Hosein. (74)

This shared attention to festivals and holidays—Christmas, Easter, Hosein, the election campaign, as well as the burning of Harbans’s Jaguar—makes for a common culture that transcends sectarian boundaries. Indeed, in the “crazily mixed up” generic perspective of The Suffrage of Elvira, the Hindus and Muslims admire the Bible more than its Christian readers (although they seem to admire it as an object rather than as a piece of religious literature). Naipaul, in his Caribbean comedies, takes as his subject

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Trinidad as a whole, including its Muslims, without distinguishing or criticizing any particular sect. *

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If the representation of Muslims in The Suffrage of Elvira is regulated by genre and by Naipaul’s own metropolitan self-understanding (as somebody outside or beyond narrow sectarian attachments, like his readers), then A House for Mr. Biswas merely sharpens Naipaul’s tone without altering the substance. Biswas, of course, is not generally classified with the Caribbean comedies, given the Jude-like travails of its protagonist. Yet the texture of Biswas is more often than not comic, and almost always so when the subject matter is religious difference.8 Of course, each sect in Biswas has its partisans. They are represented satirically. The Tulsis look for a bride for the elder god who must be “an educated, beautiful and rich girl from a caste family who had been converted to Christianity and had lapsed. Finally, it was agreed that any educated, beautiful and rich Indian girl would do, provided that she had no Muslim taint.”9 It is true that the mutual admiration of the sects in the Caribbean comedies is replaced by a darker strain of prejudice (“no Muslim taint”). Yet the elaborate requirements the Tulsis construct and then give up are rendered in an entirely comic fashion. On the other side of the communal divide Biswas encounters a Pagotes’ solicitor, F. Z. Ghany, who “made most of his money from Hindus but, as a Muslim, distrusted them” (41). In Biswas each of the religious communities has become more modern and more internally divided. For Naipaul this intensifies comic symmetry rather than undermining it. The novel sketches divisions between traditionalists and adherents of Reform Hinduism and points out that “between Naths [another large Hindu clan] and Tulsis of all ages there was an enmity as established and unexamined as the enmity between Hindu and Muslim” (110).10 The

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pressure on the reader of Biswas to choose between Naths and Tulsis is as nonexistent as the need to choose between Hindu and Muslim Trinidadians. Biswas is the work of an author who takes Indian expatriate life as a whole to be his subject. Despite the rural Hindu setting of the novel’s opening, then, the narrative’s attitude toward Muslims is controlled by the same symmetries as in The Suffrage of Elvira. When Mohun is exiled to a shop in rural Trinidad, he finds a group of Hindu stick fighters in existence. One of his Hindu neighbors, Mungroo, “had organized the young men of The Chase into a fighting band, ready to defend the honour of the village on the days of the Christian Carnival and the Muslim Hosein” (166). Festivals may not be jointly celebrated in Biswas, as in The Suffrage of Elvira. They may even be occasions for conflict between one village and another, but they are nonetheless interchangeable (“the Christian Carnival and the Muslim Hosein”). There is, at any rate, nothing to make author or reader prefer one to the other; and there is no detail offered about the content of any religion except Hinduism. Later in Naipaul’s career, the symmetry between Hinduism and Islam is deliberately violated. To put it another way, Naipaul becomes more interested in the asymmetries between the two great subcontinental traditions. In India: A Wounded Civilization, for example, Naipaul reports that “while Muslim gangsters were heroes to the Muslim community, Hindu gangsters like themselves were outcasts” (74). The first significant appearance of a Muslim character in Naipaul’s travel writing can be found in his survey of the Indian diaspora in The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972). On a visit to Mauritius, Naipaul observes that, despite the international unpopularity of apartheid, the situation is different on the Indian Ocean island. Mauritius, despite its majority Indian population, Naipaul determines, “is no place for the anti-apartheid campaigner.” Indeed South Africa is a generous neighbor across the Indian Ocean: it “buys, at more than a fair price, every kilo of the somewhat

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flavourless tea that Mauritius produces.” Moreover, “as visitors the South Africans are popular.”11 Picking up the Mauritius Times, Naipaul finds the front-page headline: “BLACKS IN SOUTH AFRICA SHOULD NOT COMPLAIN.” The reader naturally expects the argument to be one advanced by a white South African. Yet the article is a question-and-answer session with an Indian South African tourist, a Mr. Ahmed Cajee Khan (whose name reveals his Muslim religion and Indian nationality). To the question “how do Indians fare in South Africa?” Cajee Khan replies, “Some of our people are multi-millionaires” (109). Cajee Khan further proposes that “all countries have their domestic problems.” There is no reason to follow the international consensus about South Africa’s racial policies. His “happiness about this regime” is not, Cajee argues, simply because, as an Indian in South Africa, he is relatively more privileged than black Africans: “No! Nobody feels the pinch [in South Africa]. Everybody has a job…although we should make allowance for the eternal grumblers” (110). Cajee Khan is a simple character, transcribed from a newspaper interview, but his appearance in The Overcrowded Barracoon carries more than a trace of irony. Superficially Cajee Khan’s views on South Africa are meant to dislocate the assumptions of Naipaul’s readers. They might assume that their own repudiation of apartheid would be shared by Indian Mauritians, and an Indian South African, but, according to Naipaul, nothing could be farther from the truth. So there is an explicit political provocation that Naipaul intends. At the same time, the passage verges on comedy although the author does not entirely confirm its comic register. Can it really be the case that 1960s South Africa has achieved full employment? As I have argued, Naipaul characteristically advances his least plausible assertions through characters of Indian ethnicity because his own credibility is greatest in precisely these instances. Naipaul

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himself may or may not be committed to the proposition that South Africa has a perfect employment rate, although one suspects that it is a characteristic exaggeration, underlining the point that apartheid South Africa’s economy is stronger than its independent neighbors. The irony he enjoys is finding (or placing) this apology for apartheid in the mouth of a nonwhite character. With his matter-of-fact point of view, his narrow consciousness, and his apparent innocence of political conditions, Ahmed Cajee Khan is a nonfictional and Muslim translation of the caricatures of Naipaul’s early Caribbean novels. If he is translated from the Mauritius Times, he is equally a creature of the Caribbean comedies (and before them, of Narayan’s fiction). “We should make allowances for the eternal grumblers” is a piece of dubious wisdom one might encounter in The Suffrage of Elvira or the collection Miguel Street (1959). In other words, Naipaul extends the techniques of his early comedy to Mauritius and South Africa as he deployed comic techniques inside the far more serious framework of Biswas. In Cajee Khan’s narrow-minded authority, which seems designed to provoke disagreement on the reader’s part, Naipaul offers a diminished and satirical version of his own literary strategies. Moreover, by singling out a character of Indian Muslim descent, Naipaul at once distances himself from the character while claiming the authority of his own transnational view of the fragile and uncertain Indian diaspora. Here religion marks difference without such a difference needing to be worked out. Naipaul has as much authority to talk about Cajee Khan as about Salim or, indeed, Mohun Biswas. He continues to be a writer whose authority and scope are international even if he has particular insight into Indian diasporic communities. One senses the imposition of this transnational and transhistorical perspective in the concluding paragraph of “The Overcrowded Barracoon”: “tranquility recedes. The barracoon is overcrowded;

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the escape routes are closed. The people are disaffected and have no sense of danger” (133).12 13 The “sense of danger” Naipaul wished to instill in the inhabitants of Mauritius was more a matter of projection than rational inference. Here Naipaul’s insistence on a grander and historically informed perspective is no more accurate than other, more mundane points of view on Mauritian society. It seems worth noting that, as of 2008, Mauritius is one of the developing world’s success stories, politically stable and, with the second-highest per capita gross domestic product in the Africa region, economically vigorous. *

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During the 1970s, some time after Naipaul’s view of Africa and majority black societies in the Caribbean sours, his perspective on Islam also darkens. The alteration takes place first in his fiction. At first, in Guerrillas, this is incidental to the main fact. Jimmy Ahmed has picked up on the prestige of Islam in the United States as practiced by Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali (both of whom, as we have seen, were associated with the real-life Michael X). In an echo of the renaming of G. Ramsay Muir at the end of Mystic Masseur, as we have seen, Jimmy Ahmed styles himself “James Ahmed (Haji).”14 Ahmed’s religion is nominal although his honorific tacitly connects him with Pundit Ganesh of Mystic Masseur who in London retitled himself “G. Ramsay Muir.”15 As Roche explains to Jane, “a Haji is a Muslim who’s made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Jimmy uses it to mean ‘mister’ or ‘esquire.’ When he remembers, that is” (12). Later on Jimmy Ahmed declines to drink alcohol, but there is no other sign of his conformity to Muslim doctrine. Islam, for Jimmy Ahmed, is really a vehicle of resistance to Christian Europe and America. Naipaul’s inconsistent use of Islam continues in A Bend in the River. The first-person novel, with the Muslim narrator Salim, is by some length Naipaul’s longest study of a Muslim character. Yet

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Salim, as he tells us, has “rejected the ways and comforts of religion.”16 He never goes to a mosque, never considers religious difference, and never associates with coreligionists in Naipaul’s town at the bend in the river (except Nazruddin and Metty whom he has known from childhood). Salim’s conduct is not different from what we know about Naipaul. As Naipaul had previously written in An Area of Darkness, “I had been born an unbeliever. I took no pleasure in religious ceremonies.”17 By and large the use of Muslim motifs in A Bend in the River is offhand as it is in Guerrillas. Metty, a household servant sent to stay in town, “threw himself into my arms,” Salim complains, “converting the Muslim embrace into a child’s clinging” (31). Salim’s dislike of “the Muslim embrace” suggests his dislike of religious community; moreover, Metty’s “child’s clinging” indicates the measure of hysteria and immaturity that Naipaul identifies in the collective life of Islam. But these are also traits Naipaul has observed in his own character and in subcontinental culture. The relationship of Salim’s community to the native societies among whom they live is cold, manipulative, and disrespectful. They tell fond stories of slave trading: “I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber” (11). One imagines this story being told as a proud joke. In addition, Naipaul wishes to change the general belief that enslavement of Africans was a purely European crime. One senses from Salim’s description of Metty who is of mixed birth—yet who would “go on a little bit, too, about the savagery of the kafar, the Africans” (31)—that prejudice toward non-Muslim Africans is common; Metty is criticized only for his “go[ing] on a little bit.” Perhaps this prejudice is meant to go unspoken, as if the subject is embarrassing. Salim himself is careful to distance himself from local Arabs as well as Muslims of other communities. He lets pass with comment his mentor Nazruddin’s paranoia about the presence of Arabs in London. The Arabs, according to Nazruddin, have brought down London’s property prices: “And the Arabs are in the street outside” (236).18 It is hard to know whether to 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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take this statement as a sign of Nazruddin’s prejudice or as a statement of Naipaul’s own belief that Arabs have overrun the imperial capital. In either event, it is not plausible that Arab oil money, much noticed in contemporary London, could have depressed property prices. A Bend in the River constructs its realist credibility by admitting that the reader may have reservations about its subject matter. Naipaul, through Salim, goes almost so far as to concede the implausibility, or lack of imaginative authority, of his narrative: “This talk of Mustafa and Arabia and dhows and slaves might sound like something out of the Arabian Nights. But…I think of the squalor of our family compound, a mixture of school yard and back yard: all those people, someone always shrieking” (13). It is the Middle Eastern subject matter of his narrative—“Mustafa and Arabia and dhows and slaves”—which Salim recognizes as incongruous in the setting of a sub-Saharan state. At the beginning of A Bend in the River, Salim situates his community on the Indian Ocean (“Arabia and dhows”) rather than on the African mainland. He offers as proof of the reality of his recital “the squalor of our family compound.” This is, in fact, a hallmark of literary realism and of Naipaul’s authority as a stylist and observer, to emphasize the disorderliness, grittiness, and mingledness of the imagined object (“a mixture of school yard and back yard: all those people, someone always shrieking”). The Arabian Nights, with its choice of fantasy rather than mundane realism, is generically distinguished from the novel form, which is down to earth and chockablock with sensory impressions (“someone always shrieking”). In his own and unprompted meditation on the nature of his community, Salim tells us, in a passage I have already quoted, that my family were Muslim. But we were a special group. We were distinct from the Arabs and other Muslims of the coast; in our customs and attitudes we were closer to the Hindus of north-western India, from which we had originally come. When we had come no one would tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived…we never recorded. (11)

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Salim’s perspective on the absence of historical consciousness in his community—“we simply lived…we never recorded”—is, of course, an almost word-for-word formulation of observations Naipaul has made about his own Trinidadian Hindu background.19 The similarity of language indicates that Naipaul comes very close to conflating Salim’s background with his own. Islam, in A Bend in the River, is not construed as a source of identity or even as a reservoir of “customs and attitudes.” Instead, it is merely one of the branches of Indian society. At the very beginning of the narrative, Salim tells us that, on Naipaul’s fictional version of the Congo River, “you heard yourself as though you were another person” (8). We can read his statement as a comment on the author’s unwillingness to individuate his narrator from his own person. Salim’s religious identity (“customs and attitudes”) is, to some degree, an ornament from his own point of view and from that of the narrative. In An Area of Darkness (1964), Naipaul recalls that in his childhood home in Trinidad race was never discussed; but at an early age I understood that Muslims were somewhat more different than others. They were not to be trusted; they would always do you down; and point was given to this by the presence close to my grandmother’s house of a Muslim, in whose cap and gray beard, avowals of his especial difference, lay every sort of threat. For the difference we saw as the attribute of every group outside our own was more easily discernible in other Indians and more discernible yet in other Hindus.20

Here the difference between Hindu and Muslim is presented as a matter of tokens (“cap and gray beard”) rather than anything more substantial. It is a view that Naipaul has either transcended or generalized to all sects—“They were not to be trusted; they would always do you down.” The presence of a Muslim in his grandmother’s neighborhood is carefully noted, while the general perception of danger in the Muslim’s presence (“every sort of threat”) is neutralized in Naipaul’s own language. The folk perspective, alert to “the attribute of every group outside our own,” is 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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incompatible with the Naipaulian perspective in which the Indian diaspora makes a single unit. Nonetheless, it is important that the narrator of A Bend in the River should be a Muslim. The small but unyielding difference between Salim and his creator (“we were closer to the Hindus of north-western India”), I suggest, enables Naipaul to express certain kinds of autobiographical and psychosexual material; Indian Islam, because it is simultaneously aligned with and distanced from Naipaul’s own rural Hindu background, is uniquely situated to channel repressed or disfavored imaginative material. Although Salim does not describe a specific encounter until late in his narrative, he does make us aware, as Naipaul has about himself, that he visits prostitutes on a regular basis and that he takes an interest in pornography: “I knew only women who had to be paid for. The other side of the life of passion, of embraces freely given and received, I knew nothing of ” (127). The language is matter of fact, neither moralistic nor erotic, a tone that is sustained in Salim’s encounter with a Brussels prostitute and which seems to flow from the prostitute herself as much as from Salim: “The woman, naked, unruffled, stood in front of a long mirror and looked at herself. Fat legs, roundish belly, chunky breasts” (245). There is no separation of Salim’s gaze and the woman’s. In an appraising glance they both see “fat legs, roundish belly, chunky breasts.” The insistence on fleshiness in the description (“fat… roundish…chunky”) emphasizes matter over form, touch and sensuality over sight and formal beauty. Because sight and form are devalued while touch and matter are privileged, the reader is not allowed to remain at a voyeuristic distance but is instead made complicit with Salim’s act. Throughout A Bend in the River, Salim compartmentalizes his interaction with prostitutes—what he calls “brothel fantasy”— and the more romantic affair with Yvette, foreign wife of the court historian Raymond in the Domain. Indeed Salim, who seems to be speaking on Naipaul’s behalf, argues that writing is itself a way of breaking down this necessary compartmentalization. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Salim refuses to describe his sexual experiences with Yvette because “to write about the occasion in the manner of my pornographic magazines would be more than false. It would be like trying to take photographs of myself, to be the voyeur of my own actions, to reconvert the occasion into the brothel fantasy that, in the bedroom, it ceased to be” (175). Photography, voyeurism, and pornography are opposed to Salim’s meaningful experiences with Yvette because they are external modes of observation (“fantasy”). Naipaul consistently positions his prose as an antidote to forms of political, cultural, and personal fantasy. This is, of course, a crucial part of his claim to authority throughout his career. In A Bend in the River, with its Muslim narrator, Naipaul extends this authority to complex forms of psychosexual experience. Like Naipaul himself, Salim tries to keep his sexual experiences with prostitutes and his romantic-sexual life distinct. Yvette’s jealousy threatens Salim’s effort at such compartmentalization, especially if, as he suspects, she is feigning jealousy to arouse him. It “was so much the kind of thing I had heard from whores who thought they should pretend to be jealous in order to please” (218–19). Yvette threatens the careful boundaries Salim has created to manage his psychosexual experiences.21 Salim’s response to Yvette’s jealousy (or simulation of jealousy) is unexpected and unprepared in the novel. He assaults his lover: “I used my foot on her then, doing that for the sake of the beauty of her shoes, her ankles, the skirt I had watched her raise, the hump of her hip” (219). His violence is directly aimed at the qualities that attract him. Finally he spits on her vagina, hits her again, and, as he later confesses to Ali, “I spat on her. She made me spit on her” (221). Salim’s disavowal of agency is likely to be seen unsympathetically by contemporary readers, but Naipaul seems to be making a point about the psychic effects of compartmentalization. One might be tempted to interpret the strength and violence of Salim’s compartmentalization as Naipaul’s critique of Muslim sexual repression.

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But there is no suggestion in the text that religion plays any part in determining Salim’s actions toward Yvette. In sum Salim, as a first-person narrator who shares a good deal of Naipaul’s own background and predispositions, can be seen as a device of compartmentalization, allowing the novelist to deploy in his fiction complicated and perhaps embarrassing material through a surrogate. It is precisely Salim’s Muslim religion that allows him to resemble his creator in many ways even as the reader—and, perhaps even more, the novelist—remains conscious of this one point of dissimilarity. One might say that A Bend in the River uses Islam as a device to liberate the novelist’s personal psychosexual experiences for literary purposes. It is not surprising that in the new biography of Naipaul Patrick French reports that Salim’s encounter with Yvette is based on Naipaul’s relationship with his Argentinian mistress Margaret.22 At moments, Naipaul seems to concede the serviceability of Muslim characters to his writing. In The Enigma of Arrival (1987), he remembers (or invents) a peculiar encounter with a fellow passenger on the ship that is taking the young Naipaul from New York to Southampton to begin his residence in the United Kingdom. The passenger turns out to be a man, originally from the Middle East but now in spite of his Muslim name entirely American, who said he was an entertainer…I was having it both ways with him: making use as a writer of his metropolitan knowingness, appropriating it, yet keeping myself at a distance from him…as though he, being only an entertainer (traveling tourist) and dubiously American, was a kind of buffoon (the kind of buffoon such a person should be, in writing of the sort I was aiming at) and as though I—now adrift, supported only by the abstractions of my colonial education—stood on firmer ground than he. (123)

Almost forty years would have separated the sea voyage from the point at which Naipaul began to write about it in The Enigma of Arrival. In long retrospect the writer is often unusually self-critical. Here he recognizes his imaginative exploitation of the Middle

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East–born entertainer (“making use as a writer of his metropolitan knowingness, appropriating it”) and the complex relationship between writer and Muslim subject (“yet keeping myself at a distance from him”). The rhetoric of the passage employs subjunctive clauses (“as though…and as though”) to advance Naipaul’s state of mind at the time (“I…stood on firmer ground than he”) while casting doubt on whether the writer continues to see the situation as he once did. One senses that, in retrospect, Naipaul feels his situation was much more closely aligned with the “entertainer,” “traveling tourist,” and “dubiously American…buffoon.” Here, I suggest, as in A Bend in the River and A Way in the World, Muslim characters are closely and covertly paralleled with Naipaul himself, allowing him to explore disfavored materials and perspectives about his own deracinated situation.23 In Among the Believers, written in response to the Iranian revolution of 1979, Naipaul advances many of the propositions and observations that have made him a controversial analyst of Islam alongside such scholars of the region as Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington. Naipaul’s portrait of the Muslim world is meant to emerge through a series of character portraits and conversations, a technique that he applies in his novels. These portraits and sketches, however, are often overshadowed by his grander judgments about Islam as a culture and a force on the world stage. One might be uncertain how far to trust his random encounters in the course of his journeys because of the unreliability of travel as a method of investigation. For Naipaul, however, his interactions are charged with significance and precisely because of the presence of the religion he is pursuing. “Just below appearances in Karachi,” he informs us, “was the faith [which]…nearly always gave a phantasmagoric quality to an encounter” (109). This presence of “the faith” in almost every encounter licenses Naipaul’s imposition of an allegorical or symbolic frame on many of his conversations and interactions. A skeptical reader, however, is inclined to interpret

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this “phantasmagoric quality” as the most obvious sign of projection on the author’s part. His first guide in Tehran, for example, Sadeq, seems to be a suspiciously neat sketch of postcolonial consciousness, or perhaps an incarnation of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man: “a man of simple origins, simply educated, but with a great sneering pride, deferential but resentful, not liking himself for what he was doing. He was the kind of man who, without political doctrine, only with resentments, had made the Iranian revolution” (3). The guide is defined by the magnitude of his contempt (“great sneering pride”) as well as his self-hatred (“not liking himself for what he was doing”). In one of the absolutely certain judgments that define Naipaulian style, we hear that there “was a lot of the Iranian hysteria and confusion locked up in his smiling eyes” (5). This is the same hysteria Salim complained about in the case of Metty. Because the guide is offered as a representative of the revolutionary movement—“he was the kind of man who…had made the Iranian revolution”—Naipaul can use his familiar strategy of reducing large-scale political shifts to psychological disturbances such as “hysteria” and “rage.” Throughout Among the Believers, Naipaul offers a series of historical and theological generalizations that are unsupported by the experiences he relates and often uncorrelated to them. Naipaul’s provocations and pronouncements appear almost as motifs, from the contention at the beginning of the text that “Islam, almost from the start, had been an imperialism as well as a religion” (7) to the apparent recognition later on that “it turns out now that the Arabs were the most successful imperialists of all time, since to be conquered by them (and then to be like them) is still, in the minds of the faithful, to be saved” (142; emphasis added). This is one of numerous places where Naipaul identifies nonArab Muslim religious faith with an acceptance of military defeat by the Arabs, thus rendering illegitimate the faith of several hundred million Muslims outside the Middle East. Perhaps aware of

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the sweeping nature of the generalization Naipaul buttresses the plausibility of the statement by simple rhetorical means. The language in the passage indicates that a historical conclusion has been drawn or an outcome has now been observed that was previously in doubt (“it turns out now”). In fact, as the restatement suggests, Naipaul seems to have been armed with this conclusion since the beginning of his travels; he is merely giving the weight of discovery to a tendentious view. While the statement takes empirical form (“it turns out now”), it is unclear what would count in favor of, or against, accepting such a conclusion. There is no new evidence of what happened in the Middle East between the seventh and nineteenth centuries that Naipaul discovers in the course of his journey. In general Naipaul’s analysis of the logic of Islam and Arab identity seems to be unrelated to his own experiences in Among the Believers. The Muslim countries are, as Naipaul puts it, parasitic on the West, for “all the rejection of West is contained within the assumption that there will always exist out there a living, creative civilization, oddly neutral, open to all to appeal to…Rejection, therefore, is not absolute rejection…It is to be parasitic” (168).24 While the passage has the scaffolding of a logical proof—“all the rejection of the West is contained within the assumption”—it is more an assertion than a demonstration. One wonders what would count as “absolute rejection” and how much more sympathetically Naipaul would regard the more consistent position. Naipaul’s authority is more rhetorical, and theoretical, in his travel narratives than in his fiction. Rob Nixon points out that Naipaul does not speak the language of the countries that he visits and has no access to these societies beyond a web of intermediaries: translators, guides, acquaintances.25 It is true that a travel writer usually needs far less experience with a culture to write about it than a novelist. A three-week stay in a place might be sufficient for a travel book while it would be difficult to see how a novelist could achieve the necessary knowledge in so short a time. Indeed, one can criticize Naipaul for asserting a novelist’s competence and 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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novelistic penetration into situations in which he has only a travel writer’s insight as well as for writing a novel like A Bend in the River in which he fictionalizes a region of the continent with which he has only months of acquaintance. Naipaul quotes long conversation in Among the Believers to make up for his relative lack of authority about the four states he visits— Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The conversation is, of course, the form of experience that prose excels in capturing. However, Naipaul’s principal strategy in the book is to mount a critique of the images around him, a strategy that is also found, for obvious reasons, in Roland Barthes’s 1970 meditation on Japan, Empire of Signs, which Barthes wrote with no knowledge of the Japanese language.26 Like Barthes, Naipaul is intensely aware of the semiological character of the society he is visiting: “Signs on every floor shrieked the names of imported things—Seiko, Citizen, Rolex, Mary Quant of Chelsea, Aiwa” (22). These are signs of the continued attraction of Western consumer goods to Iranians, showing that Iranian society desires what it cannot manufacture just as the sub-Saharan societies of A Bend in the River had to import eggs from the detested South African regime. As a way of establishing his authority over his unfamiliar environment, Naipaul launches into his study of the politics of images immediately on arrival at Tehran airport: The arrival hall was like a big shed. Blank rectangular patches edged with reddish dust—ghost pictures in ghostly frame—showed where, no doubt, there had been photographs of the Shah and his family or his monuments…there were colour photographs of the Ayatollah Khomeini, as hard-eyed and sensual and unreliable and roguishlooking as any enemy might have portrayed him. (20)

The description of Khomeini is repeated, and therefore confirmed, later in the narrative when Naipaul passed “a big colour photograph of Khomeini. I stopped to consider his unreliable face again: the creased forehead, the eyebrows, the hard eyes, the sensual lips” (56). This ekphrastic description is, of course, a stereotypically 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Orientalist reading of the image. In a hard variant of Orientalism that it would be difficult to match in the twentieth century, Khomeini is depicted (in Naipaul’s depiction of the depiction) as calculating, lustful, treacherous, and deceitful. Khomeini’s “hard-eyed” and “sensual” features are twice drawn attention to, in a typically Naipaulian repetition of a particularly tendentious observation. Sensuality, of course, is denied by the puritanism of the Iranian revolution. The photograph is unintentionally revealing (“as any enemy might have portrayed him”). Iranian society, which is unable to see what is unattractive in such photographs, seems to lack self-consciousness. Because of this absence of self-understanding, Iranian photographs and other images are Naipaul’s royal road to understanding the society; they confirm, or enable, his authority as interpreter, just as Salim’s Muslim religion enabled Naipaul’s authority as a describer of psychosexual experience. Naipaul registers what is absent as well as what has been newly installed. Some photographs in the airport, as he tells us, dealing with “the Shah and his family or his monuments,” have been removed and have left only blank spaces on the wall. The erasure represents a willingness to deface or to erase the past (except the far distant past of religious time), which Naipaul associates with Islam as with sub-Saharan Africa; it is an aspect of what he diagnoses as post-colonial “rage.” The forms of piety and sentimentality in Iranian images attract Naipaul’s attention: They also offered [in Tehran] paintings of children and beautiful women. But the women were weeping, and the children were weeping. Big, gelatinous tears, lovingly rendered, ran half-way down the cheeks. Behzad, whose father was a teacher of Persian literature, said, “Persian poetry is full of sadness.” I said, “But tears for the sake of tears, Behzad—” Firmly, like a man who wasn’t going to discuss the obvious, and wasn’t going to listen to any artistic nonsense, he said, “Those tears are beautiful.” (9)

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The motif recurs later in the text—“Behzad loved those tears” (61)—as if Naipaul means to convince by repetition and echo rather than by argument or incident. In these “paintings of children and beautiful women,” Naipaul identifies a kind of voluptuousness (“Big, gelatinous tears, lovingly rendered”) that is at odds with his own astringent literary style. There is, in addition, a repulsive quality in such an emotional style that is confirmed by the adjective “gelatinous.” Even the sense of beauty in Persian culture is corrupt. Through the painting, Naipaul diagnoses a tendency of the culture as a whole. The Iranians, as Naipaul puts it, shed “tears for the sake of tears.” Even for Behzad, “whose father was a teacher of Persian literature,” such sentimentality cannot be questioned. For Behzad, beauty is defined by the kitsch and the emotionalism of “Persian poetry” and painting. Therefore, he “wasn’t going to listen to any artistic nonsense.” Presumably the “artistic nonsense” Behzad preempts involves the assertion of form and control over this moving subject matter. For a writer as provocative and assertive as Naipaul, it is remarkable that he almost never asserts his own aesthetic values except, as in the passage above, by indirection. Tehran itself, as Naipaul suggests, has become a sentimental tableau just like “the paintings of children and beautiful women.” Where a man had been killed months before by the Shah’s soldiers, “the blood was barely visible: just dark specks on the dirty concrete. In two places someone had written, with a black felt-tip pen, in Persian characters of a size that might have been used for a private note: ‘This is the blood of a martyr’” (60). Naipaul advances his critique of the image through a study of political kitsch, “posters of the revolution…and magazines of the revolution.” One magazine cover has “a composite photograph of the Shah as a bathing beauty: the head of the Shah attached to the body of a woman in a bikini—but the bikini had been brushed over with a broad stroke of black, not to offend modesty” (22). The misogyny of the collage is matched by repressive sexual mores. The mocking montage fuses incoherent elements of what 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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revolutionary morality rejects, the hated Shah and the westernized mores of the Iranian elite. Another poster, which shows Yasser Arafat on one side, similarly demonstrates a strange resistance to incongruity. Each element of the painting is independent of every other: on the reverse was an allegorical painting of blood and revenge…Out of that blood, higher up the road, giant red tulips had grown, breaking the heavy crust of the black road with the white markings; and above the tulips, in the sky, was the face of Khomeini, the saviour, frowning. Khomeini saved and avenged. But the tulips he had called up from the blood of martyrs had damaged the modern road…that road in the wilderness now led nowhere. Also, in this allegory of the revolution, personality had been allowed only to the avenger. (25)

The kitsch of the painting—“giant red tulips…and above the tulips, in the sky, was the face of Khomeini, the saviour, frowning”—also suggests its underground impulses; it is, after all, a “painting of blood and revenge.” The Iranian revolution has no practical sense; “that road in the wilderness now led nowhere.” In this image, Naipaul discovers his key to the psychological effect of the revolution: “Facelessness had begun to seem like an Islamic motif ” (25). This psychological abnegation is a religious version of what Naipaul sees in sub-Saharan Africa and India, where people sacrifice their individuality in a collective attachment to a “Big Man.”27 One might ask why Naipaul’s diagnosis of Iran, and through Iran of Muslim civilization, relies on criticism of popular Iranian images. One reason, as we have seen, is that, without the necessary languages and cultural expertise, Naipaul has to rely on pictures. Another might be that, given Islam’s iconoclastic bent, it is a kind of cold joke to assess “late twentieth-century Islam” on the basis of its images. Above all, ekphrasis authorizes and enables the interpreter of images. Naipaul offers an interpretation while reminding his readers of the images that this interpretation decodes. Of course these images are not reproduced in the text so that the reader has to imagine them for him- or herself on the basis of Naipaul’s interpretations. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Naipaul calls the A Way in the World (1994) a “sequence” to distinguish it from a novel or travel narrative. One can place a good deal of emphasis on the opening section of a “sequence,” perhaps more so than in a novel, because the opening is what lends generic definition to the text as a whole. Naipaul’s sequence opens with a character sketch but instead of Naipaul providing an experience at firsthand, he relates to us what was told to him by a Trinidadian schoolteacher. The schoolteacher tells Naipaul about a man she has encountered, Leonard Side, a “decorator of cakes and arranger of flowers,” whose Anglicized name at first disguises his religious origin (rather like the newly minted G. Ramsay Muir).28 Naipaul’s informant is looking for a man to judge a school flower-arranging contest. She visits Side at his place of work: “I could hardly believe what I saw. A dark Indian man was doing things with his fingers to a dead body on a table or slab in front of him…And really he was quite a good-looking man, in spite of the hairy fingers” (4). The scene has a sinister necrophiliac implication (“doing things with his fingers to a dead body”), which is contradicted by the fact that Side (or “Sayeed,” as Naipaul later observes) is, in fact, a mortician. There is also a suggestion of camp in the description of Side—“quite a good-looking man”—which perhaps implies homosexuality. Salim’s family compound in A Bend in the River was defined by its mixed squalor. Likewise Leonard Side is both a “decorator of cakes” and an embalmer. Naipaul’s informant becomes fixated on his hands, which seem to violate a taboo. Naipaul seems to identify a certain mixedness as a Muslim trait. As Side decorates a cake he pressed on and then into the moulds with his hairy fingers, and out came a pink or green rosebud or a flower, which he then fixed with icing-flecked fingers on to the soft iced cake…But I didn’t like seeing those fingers doing this kind of work, and I liked it less when, at the end, with those same fingers he offered the women little things he had iced, to eat on the spot, as a treat…They were offered almost like a wafer in church. (5)

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By focusing on Side’s “hairy fingers” and “icing-flecked fingers,” Naipaul (and his informant) emphasize the mingling of things, and the fear of pollution, which Side’s two professions—mortician as well as cake and flower decorator—suggest. Side threatens the category of the sacred as the “little things he had iced” are “offered almost like a wafer in church.” Side himself sees no contradiction, whereas Naipaul’s schoolteacher is more refined and more dependent on the imposition of categories: “That idea of beauty—mixing roses and flowers and nice things to eat with the idea of making the dead human body beautiful too—was contrary to my own idea. The mixing of things upset me. It didn’t upset him” (7). Yet the very same “mixing of things”—of stylistic precision and sordid postcolonial circumstances—gives Naipaul’s fiction its unusual power. We saw it, for example, in Salim’s rejection of the Arabian Nights as the model for his narrative in favor of the squalid and mixed circumstances of his family compound. There is a suggestion in the passage about Side, moreover, that the handling of dead bodies, a lower-caste occupation in traditional Hinduism, has been farmed out to Muslims. Naipaul picks up on the idea in Beyond Belief where the Pakistani Qaim Khan (also described by one of Naipaul’s informants) serves as “the handler of dead bodies, and also the cook, a man of low Hindu caste absorbed into Islam” (Beyond Belief, 318). Like Qaim Khan, Leonard Side mingles and seems to corrupt the categories of food and the corpse. The fear of pollution or contamination, which plays so important a part in nineteenth-century imperial ideology, is applied in Way of the World only to Side. Oddly enough, Side is not an entirely disfavored character in the narrative. If anything, like Salim and the Muslim ship passenger, Leonard Side is a carefully distanced alter ego for the novelist. Leonard Side mingles religions as well; in words that sound suspiciously like Naipaul himself (as is typical of Naipaulian indirect discourse), we are told that Side is

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a Mohammedan, everyone knew. But he was so much a man of his job—laying out Christian bodies, though nobody thought of it quite like that—that in that bedroom of his he even had a framed picture of Christ in Majesty, radiating light and gold, and lifting a finger of blessing…I knew that the picture wasn’t there for the religion alone: it was also for the beauty, the colours, the gold, the long wavy hair of Christ. And I believe I was more shocked than when I saw him dressing the body. (6)

Side, with “his picture of Christ in Majesty,” has the same taste for sensuousness and sentimentality as Persian Tehran—“the beauty, the colours, the gold, the long wavy hair of Christ.” But Naipaul’s shock has an unusual cause, that Side has chosen to treat a sacred object as an aesthetic object instead. In the familiar Trinidad of Beyond Belief, unlike the revolutionary Tehran of Among the Believers, Naipaul interprets Side not as a figure of the Middle Ages but as a stylist, aesthete, and even artist, proposing that “his feeling for beauty was like an illness; as though some unfamiliar, deforming virus has passed through his simple mother to him” (7–8). Even if Side seems to have altered by “some unfamiliar, deforming virus,” Naipaul’s gesture of imaginative fellowship is undeniable. The qualifying adjective here—“simple mother”—creates quite a different effect to the “man of simple origins” in Tehran. Here “simple” means something like “essential” or “universal” rather than “narrow” or “provincial” as in the case of Naipaul’s Iranian guide Sadeq. Naipaul closes his sketch by reasserting the long view that his historical understanding allows. For Leonard Side, as he tells us, “would have had almost no idea of where he or his ancestors had come from. He wouldn’t have guessed that the name Side might have been a version of Sayed, and that his grandfather or greatgrandfather might have come from a Shia Muslim group in India” (8). Naipaul asserts the long view of the literary arts over the short view of Side’s mechanical and manual arts. He draws the heavy shutters of historical understanding over the sense of artistic fellowship with Leonard Side.

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This closing shot, with its invocation of large-scale historical process, resembles the final fearful statement Naipaul made about fragile Mauritius in The Overcrowded Barracoon. It is a reminder that historical understanding, in Naipaul’s case, is as much due to rhetorical assertion as it is due to larger imaginative comprehension. *

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Beyond Belief, Naipaul’s most recent and perhaps his final articulation of a relationship to Islam, inevitably recapitulates many of the motifs of Among the Believers. Islam “is the most uncompromising kind of imperalism,” Naipaul insists (64). India’s “light… had been put out” by Islam (129). In the fantasy of non-Arab Muslims, “the convert forgets who or what he is and becomes the violator” (247). The tone of Beyond Belief is more autumnal than Among the Believers. Naipaul is concerned to see where his predictions have matched up or fallen short or where his memories from his earlier journeys are incorrect (79). The narrative seems to wish to bear out Naipaul’s claim that “irony comes with the English language, enters the simplest texts” (109). Naipaul even treats mob violence in Pakistan with the same moderate and satirical view as the burning of Harbans’s Jaguar in The Suffrage of Elvira: “It was winter, the best season in Lahore, and they shouted slogans against the United States and broke up a couple of minibuses” (306). AntiAmericanism simply leads to futile and self-defeating violence. On his return to Iran, he notices the change in signage: “In 1979 there were revolutionary posters and graffiti everywhere. The graphic art of the revolution was high, like the passions. There was almost none of that now; instead, there were the signs and exhortations of authority” (140). It is characteristic of Naipaul, with his obsessive interest in “the signs and exhortations of authority,” to recognize this transformation from turbulence to order. After destroying the 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Western-oriented order of the Shah and the legitimacy of tradition, the Iranian regime needs to recreate some form of stability. Naipaul’s sketch of an Indian Muslim South African is the most jarring moment in Beyond Belief. The character, who remains anonymous, quite different from anyone in Naipaul’s Caribbean comedy. His antecedents can be found in Conrad’s Secret Agent and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Moreover, like Ahmed Cajee Khan, he comes to us in a story transmitted by another character. Naipaul’s two portraits of Indian South Africans, then, are summaries provided at second hand. This unnamed character appears in the narrative of a Pakistani, Shahbaz, whom Naipaul befriends. Shahbaz had joined a group of revolutionaries whose doctrine is a mixture of Islamic messianism and Marxism. The group “was now dominated by a South African Indian” (278). Naipaul relates Shahbaz’s narrative with a characteristically elusive employment of indirect discourse. Indirect discourse is one of the most important devices sustaining Naipaulian authority. We do not know how much of the discourse is a transcription of his informant’s words and how much is Naipaul’s invention and interpretation. Nor, for that matter, do we know how many of the South African’s own words are interpolated into the capsule biography: His family had moved to Karachi and had a shop there. He met the group when he came to London on a visit. He was very young, nineteen or twenty, but he said he had been a Marxist all his life, and he was full of revolutionary and guerilla stories. He said that he and all his family belonged to the African National Congress; he himself had been underground in South Africa. He had more, young as he was: he had been underground in Pakistan itself, in Baluchistan. That shut the Pakistani Marxists up completely. The South African had no formal education, and they liked it when he abused them for their privileged backgrounds. (278)

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they are cosmopolitan. They have found the resources to move from South Africa to Pakistan (an exceptional emigration in the 1960s). The South African—“full of revolutionary and guerilla stories”—is a left-wing version of the miles gloriosus, the classical figure of the “boasting soldier.” His account of his adventures is subtly discredited by the repetitions of the conventions of indirect discourse: “but he said” followed by “He said that.” It is not clear whether the doubt is Naipaul’s or his informant’s. Naipaul’s focus is on the psychology of the revolutionary cell. The group members are masochistic and therefore vulnerable to the radical chic of their leader—“they liked it when he abused them.” The “South African was…more ambitious. He was aiming at a total revolution, and he said that he was following the precept of Lin Pao, Mao’s second-in-command during the Cultural Revolution.” The cell members are “awed by the South African’s vision” (279). Shahbaz, Naipaul tells us, finds his leader “inspiring and ‘charismatic’ (that was one of Shahbaz’s words). He was a good-looking man, short, and very stocky, with piercing eyes. He had no time for people’s personal problems. The cause was all” (278–79). Shahbaz and the other members of the group believe that “the South African’s wish for power was all right, because he was ‘leadership material.’ Power, in this argument, was something the world owed South Africans” (282). Naipaul criticizes this expectation of moral admiration. The expectation derives from the prestige of the South African struggle. Naipaul weaves his own analysis into the report of his informant. The “South African was different. He wanted power, Shahbaz thought. Perhaps he wanted (this was my idea rather than Shahbaz’s) to be in Baluchistan what, as an Indian, he couldn’t be in South Africa, in or out of the African National Congress” (282; emphasis added). A member of the Indian minority, Naipaul argues, cannot expect to acquire power. It is startling to think that when Naipaul

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concedes the existence of South African racism he is criticizing not so much the government’s policies as the racism of the African National Congress. Just as the demonstrators against the Shah were responsible for their own deaths, so here Naipaul holds the African National Congress responsible for South African racism. Like Jimmy Ahmed’s cell in Guerrillas, this group disintegrates from the top down. The “South African began to say that Shahbaz and the others were traitors; they had betrayed the revolution and should be killed…the South African would now be trying to poison Shahbaz” (286). In Naipaul’s grim but overdetermined conclusion the piercing eyes that attracted Shahbaz turned out to be the eyes of a paranoiac. Twenty five years later, when all guerilla wars were over for him, and he [the South African] was back in Africa, in Zimbabwe, he committed suicide after trying to kill his son. (279)

The movement from “piercing eyes” to “the eyes of a paranoiac” suggests here, as in Guerrillas, that at the core of left-wing revolution is psychological disturbance. It is only revolutionary ideology that passes off paranoia as political charisma. The revolutionary’s suicide, after trying “to kill his son,” is an act of despair connected to the collapse of revolutionary ideals (“when all guerilla wars were over for him”). But its primary motivation has to do with the man’s being “back in Africa, in Zimbabwe.” The revolutionary’s attempt to murder his son expresses his understanding that Indians have no place in sub-Saharan Africa (a lesson that the narrator Salim learns in A Bend in the River). Naipaul’s Muslims, here in Beyond Belief as in his fiction, live on a parallel track to his non-Muslim Indian characters. Because their difference is constantly emphasized they are at liberty to express much of the author’s own experiences and prejudices. They allow Naipaul to present concentrated and extreme forms of consciousness as in Shahbaz’s “paranoiac” as well as alternative forms of piety, taste, and sentimentality as in the case of Leonard Side, on

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the one hand, and Behzad, on the other. After Biswas, and particularly with the publication of A Bend in the River, Naipaul’s Muslims allow the writer to exercise and extend his imaginative authority. They are at once part of Naipaul’s subject matter and an essential element in Naipaulian rhetoric.

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V. S. Naipaul and the Uses of South Africa But the audience was disappointed that he [Naipaul] took no questions afterwards. When his host tried to ask him why he would not relent, he pretended he had not heard the question and showed her his tweed jacket, saying, “It’s rather fine, don’t you think? Made in South Africa.” —Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia’s Shadow

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aipaul’s sly allusion to South Africa at the end of the talk Theroux recollects is characteristically provocative and oblique. He means, of course, to substitute his question time with a political provocation directed at his presumably leftleaning audience and host who would support the boycott of South African goods because of the regime’s racial policies. His gesture, moreover—“It’s rather fine, don’t you think?”—establishes him as a connoiseur of fine things. Naipaul’s aesthetic sense and his political contrarianism are indissolubly fused in this brief incident, as they are throughout his career. In this case reported by Theroux, however, the South African situation, and international views on South Africa’s racial policies, are indispensable components of the joke Naipaul is playing on his audience and host. South Africa and South African themes are almost never at the center of the novelist’s attention. South Africa is more often the subject of a joke, or offhand remark, or anecdote

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that bears no causal relationship to the narrative in which it appears. With the exception of Peter Roche in Guerrillas (1975), the South African characters in V. S. Naipaul’s writing appear at the margins of his texts, from the fiction (the novella “In a Free State” from the collection of the same name), to travel writing (Beyond Belief, 1998), and his essays on postimperial predicaments (The Overcrowded Barracoon, 1972). Indeed they are often nameless, exiles or expatriates, and sometimes are merely reported in the recollections of more substantial characters. Naipaul’s South Africans, more than half their creator’s projection, are a limited yet significant part of his political and imaginative inventory. They are, I argue, essential components of the rhetorical traps that structure his work. Like most interesting writers, Naipaul goes to considerable lengths to engage his readers’ responses in complicated and uncomfortable ways. South African themes make for some of the most politically uncomfortable moments anywhere in his corpus. I classify and considers Naipaul’s South African characters below according to their race and political sympathies, beginning with two figures of Indian descent and ending with Naipaul’s representation of white South African identity. This theme is closely related to the other ways in which we have seen Naipaul establish his imaginative authority. Through his South African characters, white, black, and Indian, Naipaul develops a peculiar comedy of cold jokes intended to work, as I have suggested, on the reader’s sympathies and his or her political imagination. In some cases, we have seen Naipaul polarize his readership by foregrounding his most controversial views and assumptions. But such directness is not his principal strategy. Indeed it is precisely the positioning of the South Africans at the margins of his texts that enables a literary and ideological process that might fail if it were to operate too much in the open. Even inside Naipaul’s sentences South Africa is reduced to adjectival form. One example that we have already noted in passing

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makes this clear. Yvette, in A Bend in the River (1979), makes her lover Salim “some scrambled South African eggs” (172, emphasis added). Yvette is the wife of a historian with left-wing sympathies. Her husband is the court historian to the ruler of an unspecified African country. One can be almost sure that such a country would not be openly trading with its southern neighbor in the 1970s. The economic boycott of apartheid South Africa was getting under way and, for reasons of political solidarity, most newly independent states in sub-Saharan Africa subscribed to it. Yet, as Naipaul wishes to make clear, the economic realities in southern Africa made the boycott almost wishful. South Africa’s economic predominance continued to exert great influence on all the nearby sub-Saharan countries. The claim of economic dependence on apartheid South Africa is tacit in this sentence, insinuated almost casually between “scrambled” and “eggs,” but it is central to the argument of the novel. A Bend in the River opens with a sketch of the marchande Zabeth who trades manufactured goods to the interior. Zabeth is one of the few favorably portrayed African characters in Naipaul’s writing about the continent and this is because her work is entirely practical and constructive; she takes factory goods like enamel basins, manufactured outside the country, to the African countryside where such objects can make an enormous difference to people’s day-to-day lives. But these objects, according to Naipaul (who is entirely ignoring the significant success of Third World manufacturing), always come from outside the postcolonial society. In its Khaldunian vision of civilizational rise and fall, the novel suggests that a society is defined by its ability (or inability) to make useful things rather than by its political ideology.1 In a considered provocation, Naipaul insists on the irony that the new nations of sub-Saharan Africa rely on the economic muscle of apartheid South Africa. To make this claim directly would highlight its tendentiousness, but, in its adjectival location, it buttresses Naipaul’s contention that valuable commodities must be

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imported to these new countries. They cannot fend for themselves. Their political independence, and utopian ideologies, have not led to any practical results. This, at any rate, is the demanding criterion by which Naipaul judges the postcolonial states and finds them wanting. It is with this argument in the foreground of Naipaul’s mind that contemporary South Africa became important for him (rather than as a subject in its own right).2 Apartheid South Africa, during the composition of A Bend in the River in 1978 and 1979, was constructed by Naipaul as a middle term between Europe and its former colonies. At the same time, the racial policies of the South African government were, as we have noted, the subject of considerable international criticism. Yet there is almost no fiction written about South Africa by nonnatives. In fact, as far as I am aware, Naipaul is the only writer without biographical connection who uses South Africa’s standing in the international system of the 1970s to such decided effect. Yet Naipaul’s forced insertion of the adjective (“scrambled South African eggs”) typifies the awkward deployment of South African motifs in his writing. There is something rather mechanical and emphatic about the appearance of South African motifs in Naipaul. His South Africans, for instance, fall into exact racial and ideological categories: black (specifically Zulu), Indian (specifically Muslim), and white (English-speaking and, perhaps, in Peter Roche’s case, Jewish). One might have thought that, in writing about a country with rigid racial categories, Naipaul could have relaxed his own racial typologies (or at least shown how his characters resist their apartheid-era classifications). Perhaps Naipaul’s antiliberalism did not allow him to take this imaginative step, or perhaps race is an inescapable category of his novelistic imagination when he deals with unfamiliar societies. The political commitments of the South Africans are, then, as explicit and conventionalized as their racial and cultural identities. The unnamed Zulu of “In a Free State” declares his revolutionary sympathies, for example, as does the similarly nameless Indian 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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militant in Beyond Belief. Most, though not all, South Africans in Naipaul are politically on the far left. The most significant exception is the one that that proves the rule. Peter Roche, in Guerrillas, has been tortured and exiled from South Africa for his act of anti-apartheid sabotage yet, as we shall see, Roche admires the very authority against which he has revolted. It is through the disillusioned revolutionary Roche, paradoxically, that Naipaul finally endorses white South African society, perhaps because it is responsible for a stern order that is otherwise missing in postcolonial societies. *

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The substantial Indian population in South Africa is Naipaul’s point of entry to the situation. One of his first significant South Africans to whom we have already been introduced, Ahmed Cajee Khan of The Overcrowded Barracoon, expresses the author’s profound irritation at the antiapartheid movement. This early instance comes in the context of Naipaul’s interest in the Indian diaspora. The Overcrowded Barracoon, which is nonfiction, considers the experience of those parts of the British Empire that experienced immigration from the subcontinent, creating forms of racial hostility between the various strands of the colonized population, in particular between blacks and Indians. The topic of conflict between two non-European groups, rather than between Europeans and non-Europeans, interests Naipaul. In The Overcrowded Barracoon, Naipaul studies India, his native Caribbean, and Mauritius (which as a former slave barracks, or “barracoon,” gives the book its title). He sees Mauritius as a close analogue to the West Indies with its complex forms of racial hostility and coexistence between populations of African and subcontinental descent. Naipaul attempts to study Mauritius as one instance of the postcolonial situation. In 1968 Mauritius had, after all, gained its political independence. Therefore, Naipaul’s 1972 publication of The Overcrowded Barracoon coincides with the early years of 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Mauritian self-determination. Although his contemporary readers might have expected independent Mauritius to support anticolonial struggles, Naipaul insisted that there was no brotherhood of the oppressed of this sort. The illusions of international liberalism and humanitarianism would be dispersed by the selfishness of each section of the oppressed (or the supposedly oppressed). There was certainly no brotherhood with oppressed South Africans in Mauritius, as far as Naipaul could detect. Attitudes to South Africa’s regime, internationally unpopular after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, were the touchstone of international solidarity for enlightened Westerners. Yet Mauritius, Naipaul explains, “is no place for the anti-apartheid campaigner.” In the Mauritius of the 1960s and 1970s, the economic dominance of South Africa over the region is openly admitted rather than swept under the table as it is in other postcolonial states. One hardly knows what to make of Naipaul’s insistence, quoted in the previous chapter, that apartheid South Africa happily pays “more than a fair price” for Mauritian tea. It is so provocative and so implausible a statement that a reader who pauses to consider it will be inclined to reject Naipaul’s views altogether. We will see that it is not the only occasion on which Naipaul ascribes extraordinary generosity and racial liberalism to apartheid South Africa and white South Africans (an ascription that is roughly equivalent to seeing an abiding love of Africans in the antebellum South). But the tone Naipaul takes here suggests that Mauritians should be grateful for South Africa’s assistance. After all, South Africa is the kind of generous neighbor that is prepared to buy even “the somewhat flavourless tea that Mauritius produces.” It is not just a matter of trade across the Indian Ocean. In person the warmth between Mauritius and its larger neighbor is just as evident to Naipaul. He informs us that, “as visitors the South Africans are popular” (109).3 Cajee Khan, the visitor whom Naipaul has in mind, has a name that reveals not only his Muslim religion but probably his somewhat elevated socioeconomic status among South African Indians 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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as a so-called passenger Indian rather than the descendant of indentured laborers. We have seen Cajee Khan before in the context of Naipaul’s representations of Muslims; here I would like to consider him as a kind of South African. To the question, “how do Indians fare in South Africa?” Cajee Khan replies, as we have seen, that “some of our people are multimillionaires” (109). This is not an entirely direct answer but it does suggest the narrowness of Cajee Khan’s definition of civic equality; it is merely the freedom of a few members of the community to become rich (rather than, say, educated or influential, or to possess the right to vote, or live in areas of their own choice). He is concerned only with “our people,” that is, Indians, rather than with all disenfranchised South Africans. One’s understanding of the South African situation comes into immediate conflict with the uncomplicated views of Naipaul’s character. Cajee Khan himself may or may not be invented although, in fairness to Naipaul, his Ahmed Cajee Khan is not an entirely implausible personage. His two last names do exist in South Africa, and his reactionary opinions would not have been unknown in the 1960s and early 1970s. But one may reasonably ask why Naipaul seizes so readily at this point in his career on this one particular representative of Indian South African consciousness. There were many other Indian South Africans involved in anti-apartheid activity; indeed Naipaul focuses on them later in his writing. Naipaul characteristically advances his least plausible assertions—about, for example, South Africa’s “full employment”— through characters of Indian ethnicity because his own credibility is greatest in precisely these instances. Naipaul himself may or may not be committed to the proposition that South Africa has a perfect employment rate, although one suspects he is not especially committed to the facts of the situation. But the irony he enjoys, one suspects, is finding (or placing) this apology for apartheid in the mouth of a nonwhite character. It is sure to unsettle his readers. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Naipaul’s second sketch of an Indian South African occurs in a later piece of travel writing, Beyond Belief (1998), a sequel to his study of the Islamic world in Among the Believers (1981). Here the character, who we have also examined in the previous chapter, is an agent of revolution. (It is significant that Naipaul’s two Indian South African characters are drawn from the somewhat more prosperous and perhaps more traditionally minded Muslim minority.) Like Cajee Khan, he is presented indirectly, a young man of “nineteen or twenty,” who “said he had been a Marxist all his life” and “was full of revolutionary and guerilla stories.” He “had been underground in Pakistan… That shut the Pakistani Marxists up completely. The South African had no formal education, and they liked it when he abused them for their privileged backgrounds” (278). The young leader (“nineteen or twenty”) comes from a modest family who have nonetheless attempted an emigration out of South Africa, a journey that would have been very unusual at the time. South African emigration to Pakistan was limited in this period although not entirely nonexistent. It is notable that Naipaul does little to make the details of the situation more plausible. This may be because he claims authority over Indian diasporic material. As I have suggested, Naipaul is least believable where he expects to be most credible. The South African’s power in Beyond Belief is based on the moral authority of the anti-apartheid cause, a moral legitimacy that Naipaul finds as susceptible to abuse as the absent authority of the Prophet and the textual authority of the Quran in Muslim Asia. This abuse is particularly marked, as in Guerrillas, in the closed atmosphere of a radical political group. In Beyond Belief, the other members of the revolutionary cell are the masochistic pole of a sadomasochistic relationship—“they liked it when he abused them.” The observation resembles Naipaul’s point that non-Arab Muslims have come to seek the religious approval of their Arab conquerors. (The rule extends to personal life. Almost all, if not 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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all, dyadic relationships in Naipaul’s fiction are exploitative and operate by a dynamic of submission and domination.) Disfavored forms of authority, according to Naipaul, degenerate rapidly into abusiveness. Just as Arab Muslim armies created religious legitimacy the revulsion against South Africa’s racial policies has created an international revolutionary chic: the “South African was…more ambitious. He was aiming at a total revolution, and he said that he was following the precept of Lin Pao, Mao’s secondin-command during the Cultural Revolution.” The South African’s language indicates that he is succumbing to fantasy (“total revolution”) rather than obeying the dictates of political realism. Yet the cell members are “awed by the South African’s vision” (279). “International revolutionary chic,” is, of course, one of the principal targets of Naipaul’s antiliberalism, not least because it represents a competing way of understanding the international order to his own postcolonial literature. Such dangerous political charisma as the South African possesses is an individual expression of “international revolutionary chic,” like the prestige of Khomeini in Iran. In a small way, the South African is doing what Khomeini did in Iran, or the Big Man did in A Bend in the River, setting himself up as a false source of authority. One of the key points Naipaul makes in the course of his character sketch is that Indians are not really at home on the African continent. The “South African was different. He wanted power, Shahbaz thought. Perhaps he wanted (this was my idea rather than Shahbaz’s) to be in Baluchistan what, as an Indian, he couldn’t be in South Africa, in or out of the African National Congress” (282; emphasis added). The idea is interpolated by the author: “this way my idea rather than Shahbaz’s.” We can read this interpolation as one of Naipaul’s cold jokes, in that the first time he concedes the existence of South African racism it is not in the context of apartheid but rather where the African National Congress is concerned. The South African situation may have been racially complex but the African National 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Congress has consistently been open to nonblack South Africans over the past four decades. Yet according to Naipaul, an Indian South African cannot aspire to any kind of leadership in South African revolutionary society, a fact contradicted by the historical record at the time Naipaul was writing Among the Believers or Beyond Belief and up to the present day. Of course, in a passage we have discussed, the young revolutionary turns out to be “a paranoiac” and kills himself in Zimbabwe after unsuccessfully trying to murder his own son (279). Here, as elsewhere, Naipaul reduces political and ideological conflict to the psychological states of rage, hysteria, and paranoia. But the suicide of this international guerilla is not just psychologically motivated. In fact it has to do, Naipaul implies, with his return to Africa and to a sub-Saharan state that is not his place of birth. He is described as “back in Africa, in Zimbabwe.” His attempted murder of his own son is the result of his newly found conviction “back…in Zimbabwe” that Indians have no secure place on the continent, as they have no certain place in the African National Congress (according to Naipaul, at any rate). The attempted murder, in other words, is a representative act of communitarian suicide that Naipaul to some extent endorses. If Naipaul proposes an alternative to the comic simplicity of Ahmed Cajee Khan and the murderous paranoia of the revolutionary, it is simply that Indians in Africa have to be aligned with the stable framework of European authority, as in A Bend in the River.4 Throughout Naipaul’s writings on Africa, diasporic Indians are threatened and depend on foreign passports and multinational organizations. They are de facto wads of the European powers. “In a Free State,” for example, posits the self-contained unity of Indian and European talent in its picture of a “capital [city that]… remained an English-Indian creation in the African wilderness. It owed nothing to African skill; it required none” (111).5 The capital is defiantly independent of the surrounding population: it “owed nothing to African skill; it required none.” Yet there is no case

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of an African city being built without African labor. Nor is there any viable way in which diasporic Indians could have collaborated with European powers to keep the age of European empire alive in Africa. Naipaul’s fantasy updates the fantasy of a self-enclosed British empire inside Africa by including the vanishingly small minority of Indians within it. But Naipaul seems to recognize this as a backward-looking fantasy and seems to believe that, in the African future, there will be no Indian presence on the continent. In a perverse way, for Naipaul of the 1960s and 1970s, the white South African regime is the best hope for Indians on the continent. *

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In the novella “In a Free State,” Naipaul sketches his only black South African character, the Zulu whom we considered as part of the discussion of Naipaul’s cold jokes. It may be that Naipaul’s South African characters are overdetermined; that is, the author has multiple reasons for deploying them in his narratives, and South African identity is only of these reasons and often not the determining consideration. Bobby, the principal consciousness in Naipaul’s novella, meets the exiled South African in a seedy hotel. The “small young African at Bobby’s table was not a native. He was, as he had quickly let Bobby know, a Zulu, a refugee from South Africa” (112) and is later identified in the narrative only as “the Zulu.” The order of the items is significant. The emphatic tribal designation is repeated dozens of times in a few pages. Instead of recognizing the Zulu as the oppressed citizen of a modern nation, the narrative ties the character to a tribal identity, one of many thousands of such local identities on the continent. Yet the Zulu sets himself apart from the natives of the unnamed setting. He “had quickly let Bobby know.” He insists to Bobby that “we are not like your natives here. These people are the most ignorant people in the world. Look at them” (114). The deictic

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gesture—“look at them”—reveals a contempt toward the “most ignorant” natives that surpasses metropolitan condescension. The statement, like many such declarations in Naipaul’s writing, discredits both the man who utters it and the people to whom it refers. Moreover, it licenses similar prejudices as they would have been held by metropolitan outsiders. As Fawzia Mustafa argues, Naipaul contrasts literary language, with its qualities of order, precision, and discrimination, to the incoherent language of undisciplined minds.6 Thus “conversation with the Zulu wasn’t easy. There too he was fidgety. The king and the president, sabotage in South Africa, seminars, tourists, the natives: he hopped from subject to subject, never committing himself, never relating one thing to another” (113). The nature of the criticism here is similar to the objections Salim makes to Ferdinand’s letter in A Bend in the River or that Naipaul mounts to Michael Abdul Malik’s novel—“Events accumulate confusedly around him; he is without a personality; he is only a haphazard succession of roles.” Indeed, like Malik, the Zulu’s logical incoherence is matched with a psychological incoherence (“succession of roles”). The incoherence manifests in the Zulu’s clothing. The “cloth cap was part of his elusiveness. The cap made the Zulu appear now as a dandy, now as an exploited labourer from the South African mines, now as an American minstrel, and sometimes even as the revolutionary he had told Bobby he was” (113). Naipaul again exploits the conventions of indirect discourse to discredit his character—“the revolutionary he had told Bobby he was.” Like Malik, as well as Salim’s protégé Ferdinand in A Bend in the River, the Zulu tries out various identities.7 A reader’s sympathies with the Zulu are undermined because his oppression is made to seem unreal. He seems to have no real experiences at all. He is not really “an exploited labourer” or a “revolutionary”; he just looks like it. The most explosive item in the list—“an American minstrel”—may be placed third because in this position it is 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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rhetorically minimized. (This is similar to the insertion of “South African” into “scrambled eggs.”) In this passage, Naipaul invokes a racial stereotype a century out of date. The “American minstrel” refers, of course, to the convention of whites playing blacks in “blackface”—or perhaps blacks appearing in “blackface”—for the enjoyment of white audiences. The Indian revolutionary performed his radicalism to intimidate his cell, while the Zulu performs his race to impress Bobby and the other Europeans in the town. The performance is an emotional transaction. So “Bobby, looking at the Zulu’s tense little face, the eyes that held such hurt, felt compassion, and excitement. It was the African thrill: Bobby forgot his nervousness” (114). The “African thrill” Naipaul specifies here is specific to outsiders in Africa; it seems to be the excitement of pity, or condescension, felt by a spectator confronted by “such hurt.” It is a voyeuristic “African thrill” rather than an instance of fellow feeling. As in A Bend in the River, spectatorship entirely replaces compassion, a substitution that is perhaps an occupational hazard for a travel writer. In the course of the conversation in “In a Free State,” Naipaul poses a puzzle to his readers. The Zulu criticizes the country’s sexual license to Bobby. “In this town,” he explains, “there are even white whores now…It isn’t nice” (113). The nature of his objection to the “white whores” is undefined until he returns to the topic: “Why do all these white women want to be with the natives? A couple years ago the natives couldn’t even come in here. Now look. It isn’t nice. I don’t think it is nice” (114). Where the Indian South African insurgent insisted on his revolutionary élan (“full of revolutionary and guerilla stories”), the Zulu, like Jimmy Ahmed, plays up his sexual bravado. He claims, as we saw in our earlier discussion, to have slept with many of the wives and daughters of South Africa’s white male political class. The Zulu’s boast suggests that apartheid South Africa is a sexual paradise for black men quite in the way that Cajee Khan presented South Africa as an economic paradise.8 To call this a counterintuitive formulation is an understatement. Whether we give any credit 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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to the sexual boast, Naipaul’s point is that the Zulu conceptualizes racial privilege in terms of access to white women (“wives and daughters”). Politics is, typically for Naipaul, reduced to sexuality. Moreover, by contrasting himself with the “most ignorant natives,” the Zulu situates himself on the privileged side of a divide drawn not between white and black but between natives of the country and nonnatives. Like the Mauritians who valued their apartheidera neighbor rather than revolutionary solidarity with other independent nations, the Zulu rejects African solidarity and looks to Bobby and the other expatriates for fellowship. We should also note that Naipaul’s control over his fictional materials is imperfect. Lines of dialogue—“What do you want to hear, mister?”—are hard-boiled slang and not a plausible representation of South African speech patterns. This is an instance of where Naipaul’s lack of familiarity with the cultures he writes about undermines his authority as a describer. Despite the heterosexual boasting he hears about white South African women, Bobby, a homosexual, attempts to proposition the Zulu, admiring his looks. With this the transaction between the well-meaning Bobby and the Zulu reaches the point of crisis. Bobby, reaching out, tells his companion that “if I come into the world again I want to come with your colour.” It is an expression of solidarity although it is likely to make many readers cringe. The prose continues in slow motion: “The Zulu didn’t stir. His face, when he lifted it to Bobby’s, was without expression. Bobby’s blue eyes went moist and seemed to stare; his thin lips trembled and seemed set in a half-smile. There was silence between the two men.” Finally, “without moving his hand or changing his expression, the Zulu spat in Bobby’s face” (115).9 The contemptuous act echoes Salim’s spitting on Yvette in A Bend in the River although here Naipaul leaves undefined the specific nature of the Zulu’s grievance against Bobby (although it may be in some degree directed against Bobby’s homosexuality). As in A Bend in the River, the spitting seems to be an attempt to reverse a perceived humiliation. This action may represent the interruption 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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of dialogue between the representative of liberal sentiments and the radical performer (and, in a parallel sense, between Naipaul’s liberal audience and the antiliberal novelist himself ). In the context of the passage, it seems that the Zulu is angered because Bobby has refused to forget his skin color. Where the Zulu wants to assimilate to a joint identity with the expatriates Bobby has forced him back into the position of an African under European observation. Doris Marshall is never directly represented in “In a Free State,” but we are told that she says, quite earnestly, “I bend over blackwards” (126). The passage in which she is discussed has the form of a joke, complete with setup and punch line. We looked at it in our consideration of the Naipaulian cold joke; yet, its effect is not straightforwardly comic, and it bears reexamination in the context of Naipaul’s South African motifs: He [Carter] said, “I can’t get used to this word boy.” “Doris Marshall tried to call hers a butler,” Linda said. “Isn’t that typical!” Bobby said. “In the end she settled for steward. It always seems to me such an absurd word,” Linda said. Bobby said, “It offended Luke. He said to me afterwards, ‘I am not a steward, sir. I am a houseboy.’” “Who is Doris Marshall?” Carter asked. “She’s a South African,” Linda said. (142–43)

A small comedy is sketched by Naipaul in these few lines. It is hard to overstate Naipaul’s reliance on the most reactionary kinds of story an unequal society tells itself about the perils of egalitarianism. Of course, Naipaul is also extending a theme he pioneered in A Bend in the River, that African servants and slaves are paradoxically proud of their servitude because it distinguishes them in the eyes of those who don’t serve important families. The astonishing feature of the conversation is Naipaul’s revelation of the fact that Doris Marshall should be a white South African. It is the group of white South Africans in the territory of “In a Free State” who conduct themselves like the most enlightened 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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liberals, although there is no suggestion that they are politically opposed to the apartheid regime. The other Europeans in the novel are not so delicate with the locals as Doris Marshall or the other South Africans. Indeed the imaginary country is in a Hobbesian state of anarchy, and the expatriate white South Africans, amazingly, have become a byword for liberal stupidity. The Europeans have to defend themselves because, like the weak state portrayed in Bend in the River, police are almost nonexistent. The colonel, a “very settler settler” of indeterminate European origin, is determined to avoid the fate of the other white South African who has been murdered. The colonel is unsentimental toward the native Peter who is traveling with Bobby: “Of course you hate me, and I know you hate me. Last week you killed that South African. Old, helpless. Didn’t you? Lived here for twenty years. Married one of your women” (190). The colonel’s hateful monologue is, for Naipaul, an honest account of the situation in the new African state. His summary of the relationship between Europeans and Africans—“you hate me and I know you hate me”—is tacitly endorsed by the novella that makes Doris Marshall’s (very limited) humanitarianism a matter of ridicule. One assumes that the “old, helpless” South African the colonel mentions was white because his marriage to “one of your women” is so notable. Intermarriage, of course, is one of Naipaul’s bugbears. The millennial guerrillas in The Mimic Men, Ralph Singh reports, make the most fantastic promises to their supporters. They “promised to abolish poverty in twelve months. They promised to abolish bicycle licenses…They promised intermarriage” (199; emphasis added). Placed at the end of the list of unrealistic ambitions “intermarriage” here means something more like Eden’s rape fantasies recounted elsewhere in The Mimic Men than merely the relaxation of laws prohibiting cross-racial relationships. It is characteristically Naipaulian to conflate the humanitarian demand of

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“Who do you hate more? The Indian or me?” “I hate the Indian.” “You are ungrateful. Who do you hate more? The Indian or me?” “I will always hate you, sir.” “Don’t you forget it. Your hate will keep me alive. One night, Peter, you will knock on my door…I won’t behave like the South African, Peter. When you say, ‘Good evening, sir,’ I won’t say, ‘Why, it’s Peter, my own boy. Come in, Peter. Have some tea. How are you? How’s your family?’ There’ll be no cups of tea. I won’t behave like that. I’ll be waiting. I’ll say, ‘It’s Peter. Peter hates me.’ And you won’t come past that door. I’ll kill you. I’ll shoot you dead.” (191)

The use of “boy,” in this case, is not, Naipaul intimates, racially demeaning. The term suggests, on the contrary, that the imagined white South African, with what seems to be colonial British bonhomie, welcomes the intruder into his family as “my own boy.” Where liberal readers would see “boy” as the expression of South African racism, Naipaul (or to be accurate the colonel) imagines it as an expression of affectionate paternalism. This strangely imagined episode—“Come in, Peter. Have some tea. How are you? How’s your family?”—foregrounds what Bobby and Linda satirize as the rigidity of “Suffafrican Ittykit” (126–27). “In a Free State” develops the argument that white South Africans of the 1970s are excessively courteous toward black Africans, a thesis that is so preposterous that it is hard to repudiate rationally. Naipaul prefers the colonel’s hardheadedness to white South African gentility—“It’s Peter. Peter hates me.”10 For Naipaul, as for many antiliberals, there is something refreshing about open hostility, or at least literary portrayals of such hostility. The collection In a Free State, which includes the novella, elaborates on Naipaul’s interest in the conflict between blacks and

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allowing people to marry whom they choose with the threatening fantasies of Eden and the guerrillas. In “In a Free State,” the colonel pursues the issue of the murdered South African with Peter the local:

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Asians. In “One out of Many,” the Indian valet Santosh regards the “hubshis” (derived from the word for Abyssinian) as a threat to people like himself. Naipaul replaces the conflict between black and white—for which the South African experience is a synecdoche—with the threat Indians face as a minority. While Naipaul reflects the experience of Indians expelled from Uganda in 1972, he is also, as Selwyn Cudjoe argues, projecting onto the continent his childhood experiences of a racially divided Trinidadian society where Indians formed a far larger fraction of the population.11 In Trinidad, as Naipaul has pointed out, there was a consensus to maintain British-type institutions as a postcolonial inheritance.12 There was no such consensus in the sub-Saharan states who changed, in the era of decolonization, from imperial possessions to members of a Commonwealth. *

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The most important of Naipaul’s South African characters, Peter Roche in Guerrillas, is white and possibly, judging from his name and biography, Jewish. Roche has been imprisoned for revolutionary sabotage but has been released. After a period in London he has washed up in the Caribbean as an exile. Roche is the one major character in Guerrillas who is completely interpolated into the situation (although he is not entirely invented, having been adapted from the real-life South African exile Murray Carlin).13 In the long article of Naipaul’s on the real-life incidents on which Guerrillas is based, “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” there is no equivalent figure to the South African former revolutionary.14 Nor is there any such character in the Conrad story, “An Outpost of Progress,” which Naipaul used to structure his fictional treatment of the Caribbean murder. It is the first and only occasion on which a South African character plays a prominent and decisive role in a Naipaul narrative. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Roche’s function in the antiliberal politics of Guerrillas, as we shall see, is appropriately paradoxical. Despite his revolutionary history Peter Roche is a complex and sympathetic character who is pragmatically working for the colonial-era corporation Sablich’s (“great slave-traders in the old days” as Jimmy Ahmed writes [42]). Roche’s surname, in fact, recalls the trading name of a pharmaceutical company that would have been much in the newspapers in the 1970s. Like other left-wing South Africans in Naipaul’s writing Roche’s revolutionary credentials are valued highly by those he encounters. Only the charismatic commune leader Jimmy Ahmed (“a half black nobody, just a Chinaman’s lucky shot on a dark night” [62]) reduces Roche to his suspect racial origins by calling him “massa.”15 (Jimmy may be trying to reassure himself of his own racial credentials.) “Massa,” in fact, is the last word of the text, suggesting that the relationship between Ahmed and Roche is as insoluble and circular as between Bobby and the Zulu of “In a Free State.” But then Jimmy Ahmed, in his mixture of madness and political charisma, exemplifies the Naipaulian diagnosis of leftwing revolution in very much the way of the “paranoiac” South African Maoist in Pakistan. While he may have been a saboteur, Peter Roche seems to have reverted to far more conservative political views. During the riots on Isabella, Roche dismisses the rioters’ attitudes: “The world isn’t what it was. So it must go up in flames” (189). These words, with their freight of world-weariness and their decided antipopulism, are, of course, a variant of the opening lines provided to Salim in A Bend in the River: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it” (3). Here Roche is sarcastic about the response of the rioters to historical change. When he identifies nihilism in their attitude— “it must go up in flames”—he speaks quite self-consciously as a conservative, or at least with somebody who has a stake in protecting the existing order. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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Just as significantly Roche is unapologetic about his pride in his white countrymen: “Roche had spoken of the climate, of the passion for sport, of the fine physiques of the white people” (52). He admires the Spartan virtues of his white South African virtues and expresses absolutely no criticism of the regime’s racial policies (which, presumably, led him to armed revolt). Nor is Roche angry because he was tortured in prison. He defends the men who tortured him by pointing out that “they’re not thugs… They like going to good restaurants” (11). “Thugs,” presumably, have no taste for fine dining, whereas the white South African establishment does. This insistence on South African “fineness” is also behind Naipaul’s pride in his South African tweed jacket, and it is an idiosyncratic defense, to say the least, of the South African regime. It turns out that Roche’s fundamental commitment to order is not dissimilar to that of his creator’s. As Roche explains to Jane, “You must understand, I have always accepted authority. It probably has to do with the kind of school I went to” (54). Roche is a practical and observant character. He has “no political dogma” (91). He is willing to take people and institutions at their word, especially the firm for which he works (203). Appointed by Sablich’s to manage its relationship with Jimmy Ahmed’s commune he warns Ahmed about the sanitary conditions among his followers: “You’re going to have an epidemic on your hands” (19). Halfway through Guerrillas, Roche is reacting to events on the island in a tone of disgust that is perhaps closer to Naipaul’s travel writing than to Kurtz’s final declarations in Heart of Darkness: “I loathe all these people. I hate this place” (160). This is the same paradoxical transition between enlightened views and misanthropy that Conrad charted in “An Outpost of Progress.” Roche is alert to the dangers of his companion Jane’s sexual provocativeness. He “feared that her presence there was wrong, and looked like an intrusion” (14). In the most unexpected development in the narrative, Roche helps to cover up the rape and murder of Jane by Jimmy Ahmed.Roche burns Jane’s passport and 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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pretends to others, even to Ahmed, her murderer, that he is leaving the island with her (251).16 Roche’s action is not well explained and is therefore not transparent to the reader. It may be that he views Jane’s affair with Ahmed as a disguised form of suicide. By destroying her documents and staging her disappearance, Roche washes his hands of Jane as well as of the island. In a condition of postcolonial disorder, Naipaul may be suggesting, it is not reasonable to obtain justice for those who involve themselves in radical sexual and political experiments. Jane, like Conrad’s Europeans Kayerts and Carlier, has nobody to blame but herself and her own illusions. Roche’s willingness to abandon a revolutionary situation and move back to the metropolitan center is one that Naipaul wholeheartedly endorses. Ultimately, despite Roche’s revolutionary past, he is a carrier for what Naipaul regards as the good sense of white South Africans. His advantage over Jane, which allows him to survive Isabella and leave in time, are the advantages of a hardheaded white South African relationship to postcolonial reality rather than Jane’s bohemian idealization of Third World revolution. He understands authority and the dangers of postcolonial radicalism. Like Naipaul, then, Roche has finally little sympathy for Jane’s fate. *

*

*

In Half a Life (2001), Naipaul returns to his use of South African motifs for the first time since Beyond Belief. For the first time, moreover, in Half a Life, Naipaul sets a character in the period following the 1994 elections in South Africa, which brought the African National Congress to power. Half a Life hints at a process of racial degeneration under way in the country. In London Naipaul’s protagonist encounters a South African “who was white, or looked white” (72).17 The racial ambiguity is tied to moral disintegration: this man may have “looked white,” but, Naipaul suggests, he does not behave “white.” The 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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unnamed character has the vicious habits as well as the conversational style of a Restoration rake. He leaves Willie responsible for the unpaid rent on his apartment. Later the same man offers a laconic explanation to Willie. His reason returns Naipaul to the connection between his Trinidadian Indian origins and the Indian community of South Africa: “Sorry, old boy. But in South Africa we always said that you Indians were loaded, and I thought you would want to help” (79). The Britishism—“Sorry, old boy”—is a reflex on the character’s part. Democratic South Africa, Naipaul suggests, is becoming the same kind of an environment as the imagined nation of A Bend in the River. It has become predatory and the wealthy, the educated, the prudent, the non-African are the prey. The racial mixing of the new South Africa (“white, or looked white”) has, at the very least, gone hand in hand with moral degeneracy. This white (or nearly white) South African is a far cry from Peter Roche. Naipaul underlines the lesson of the compressed parable offered in Beyond Belief. The only role that Africa under black rule, and now South Africa under majority rule, offers Indians, and other minorities, is to be the target of exploitation on account of their perceived economic success. It is a lesson that was made explicit in A Bend in the River as well as in the portrait of Ahmed Cajee Khan in The Overcrowded Barracoon. In four decades of Naipaulian manipulation of the same South African material, from the 1970s to the first decade of the twenty-first century, the writer’s ideological message remains consistent and reactionary. Naipaul uses South African material for the same political purposes because his South African characters are generated not by his own experience and observation but by their place in a geopolitical matrix, which makes them a common and supplemental term in the agon Naipaul stages between empire and colony. There is, however, one character whom Naipaul investigates at numerous points in his writing life and who, to some degree, 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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complicates the story of Naipaulian South Africa. In India: A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul discusses the experiences of Gandhi early in his career in colonial-era South Africa. South Africa gave Gandhi a political education. As Naipaul writes, it “was in South Africa that he became the Mahatma, the great-souled, working through religion to political action as leader of the Indian community, and through political action back to religion.” For Gandhi’s understanding of politics was, Naipaul suggests, framed and confined by Hindu tradition. So the “adventure never ceased to be internal: so it comes out in the autobiography. And this explains the most remarkable omission in Gandhi’s account of his twenty active years in South Africa: Africans” (104). There is one exception to Gandhi’s repression of the presence of the majority of the local population. Naipaul observes that the African inhabitants of the country appear only fleetingly at a time of a “rebellion,” [the Bambatha rebellion of 1906] when for six weeks Gandhi led an Indian ambulance unit and found himself looking after wounded Africans. He says his heart was with the Africans; he was distressed by the whippings and unnecessary shootings…But the experience did not lead him to a political decision about Africans. He turned inward and, at the age of thirty seven…took the Hindu vow of brahmacharya, the vow of lifelong sexual abstinence…So the Africans vanish in Gandhi’s heart-searchings; they are the motive of a vow, and thereafter disappear. (104–5)

In An Area of Darkness, of course, Hinduism is severely criticized for its retarding effects on Indian consciousness and advancement. While Naipaul concedes the importance of Gandhi’s South African experience to his ideological development, South Africa is finally a theater in which Gandhi can complete his transition to a higher form of Hindu humanitarianism. The sufferings of the Africans—“whippings and unnecessary shooting”—are a stimulus rather than an object of compassion or political thought. Naipaul’s customary caveats about humanitarianism are relatively quiet when he studies Gandhi although they are not entirely absent (“he says his heart was with the Africans.”) 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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But finally Naipaul’s interest in South Africa is controlled in the passage by the much more central role played by his criticism of Hinduism in An Area of Darkness. In this way, Gandhi’s relationship to South African reality may be not so different from that of Naipaul’s. One might say about Naipaul, he says his heart was with the Africans.

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Style and Naipaulian Transformations in the Indian Travel Narratives

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aipaul published three narratives of his travels to India in three different decades. Titles and subtitles carry the assumptions of each volume. First came An Area of Darkness, with its Conradian premise squarely embedded in the title, in 1964. The journey was repeated in India: A Wounded Civilization, published in 1977, which assessed the damaging effects of tradition on the subcontinent. Finally, in 1990, came India: A Million Mutinies Now in 1990, a book that studied the centripetal forces that possessed and destabilized India—those familiar Naipaulian postcolonial demons of “rage,” “anarchy,” “mutiny”—and yet which, as Naipaul surprisingly decides, were also busy creating a new, better, and more modern society. Repetition of subject matter, as we have seen, is one of the grounds of Naipaulian authority. Not only do the three narratives cover the same territory and rehearse the same arguments, but phrases, sentence, and motifs repeated from page to page and volume to volume saturate their language. Naipaul even understands the landscape as a set of repetitions. One merely has to sample one microscopic instance of the enormous landscape to comprehend the whole. In A Wounded Civilization, he observes that during the rest of that day’s drive North Bihar repeated itself: the gray-black hut clusters; the green paddy fields whose luxuriance and

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CONCLUSION

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Here Naipaul’s authoritative gaze moves from the atomic structure of the province (“gray-black hut clusters…green paddy fields”) to the miniature detail (“a brisk, mincing walk”). The qualifying adjectives (“gray-black,” “springline”) and the concluding mot juste (“curious feminine daintiness”) belong to one of the establishing facts of Naipaulian authority: a ravishing style that is sensuous, precise, comprehensive, matter of fact, and rhythmically firm.1 We have examined many of the rhetorical facets of Naipaul’s authority, but it is necessary to say that one of the ways in which he compels us as readers is by the astonishing power of his literary language. His style goes to the essence of his authority. If he is a mere observer, or travel writer, or “travelling tourist” in India, Africa, and the Middle East, then Naipaul is also one of the great observers, and one of the great communicators of observation, in twentieth-century literature. In the first two parts of his Indian travel trilogy, and particularly in Wounded Civilization, Naipaul poses as a critic of Hinduism.2 He associates repetition of a bad kind with the influence of Hindu doctrine on Indian psychology, complaining about “karma, the Hindu killer, the Hindu calm, which tells us that we pay in this life for what we have done in past lives” (Wounded Civilization,17). The extravagant language (“the Hindu killer”) is made plausible by a balancing phrase (“the Hindu calm”). The widespread Hindu belief in reincarnation, moreover, with its fatalism about how “we pay in this life,” creates large-scale results that are also iterative: “Hinduism… has exposed us to a thousand years of defeat and stagnation…So that again and again in India history has repeated itself: vulnerability, defeat, withdrawal” (50). Here Hinduism leads to the historical circularity and futility, which, in A Bend in the River, Naipaul diagnoses in the emerging states of sub-Saharan Africa. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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springlike freshness can deceive earth-scanners and cause yields to be overestimated; the bare-backed men carrying loads on either end of a long limber pole balanced on their shoulders, the strain showing in their brisk, mincing walk, which gave them a curious feminine daintiness. (21)

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To the extent that Gandhi himself represents a specifically Hindu response to the colonial and postcolonial situation, it is vital that India transcend its Gandhian coordinates. For “no government can survive on Gandhian fantasy; and the spirituality, the solace of a conquered people, which Gandhi turned into a form of national assertion, has soured more obviously into the nihilism that it always was” (Wounded Civilization, 189). Just as A Bend in the River refuses to provide a straightforward narrative in imitation of postcolonial circularity, so the Indian trilogy circles around similar points, places, and arguments. Indeed, in constructing the conclusion of Wounded Civilization, Naipaul quotes his own observations from the previous travel narrative (191). And Naipaul will repeat the civilizational criticisms he levels at Hinduism at new targets in subsequent writing: postcolonial Africa and Islam. While the terms of his criticism remains the same, his objects change. In this sense, Naipaul’s entire career is something of a continuous meditation on the global phenomenon of “uneven development.” In the Indian trilogy Naipaul proceeds by his usual combination of ordinary travel writing, character sketches, and dramatized episodes. Bunty, in An Area of Darkness, works for a foreign company and incarnates a peculiarly Naipaulian hybridity: “His food is a mixture of Indian and European; his drink is wholly European. But this mixture of East and West in Bunty’s home tells more of the truth about Bunty than either his friends or enemies believe. For Bunty is only pretending to be a colonial. He sees himself as every man’s equal and most men’s superior” (63). The biographical sketch of Bunty—“his food is a mixture of Indian and European”—is generalized into a perspective on civilization (“this mixture of East and West”). Like Bunty, others in India appropriate the intellectual and material products of the West. In Wounded Civilization, an idealistic Indian woman declares that “the poor people in Bombay…are beautiful.” Naipaul objects to this modern and sentimental view of poverty, observing that the “idea that the poor are beautiful 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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was, with this girl, a borrowed idea [presumably from the West]. She had converted it into a political attitude, which she was prepared to defend. But it had not sharpened her perception” (125). The same unperceptive adoption of foreign ideas is stigmatized in Wounded Civilization. In an image that picks up on Naipaul’s childhood memory of typefaces, he denounces India’s “mimicry within mimicry, imperfectly understood idea within imperfectly understood idea…the second-year girl in the printing department… playing with type like a child with a typewriter” (132).3 One occasionally detects a note of strain in Naipaul’s imposition of a grand historical frame on his experiences as a traveler. In the Alexandria of Area of Darkness, for example, Naipaul’s civilizational authority wear thin when he decides that “it was clear that here, and not in Greece, the East began: in this chaos of uneconomical movement, the self-stimulated din, the sudden feeling of insecurity, the conviction that all men were not brothers… Thereafter, feature by feature, the East, known only from books, had continued to reveal itself ” (13; emphasis added). What seems to be a concession on Naipaul’s part—that he knows the East “only from books”—is overshadowed by his Orientalist insistence on the characteristics of the East, from “uneconomical movement” and “din” to the incongruous new certainty that “all men were not brothers.” In fact the Indian narratives bolster their authority by returning to books, especially in Area of Darkness, to spell out Naipaul’s grander claims about subcontinental civilization. Area of Darkness is substantially composed of literary criticism, using Indian plays and novels as a vehicle for commentary on Indian civilization as a whole. This replacement of lived experience by literary interpretation allows Naipaul to extend his authority as an explainer of the Third World and its former European rulers. We hear, for example, for “Forster’s characters their Englishness is like an extra quality which challenges, and is challenged by, all that is alien” (Area of Darkness, 206). 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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An Area of Darkness invests a good deal of significance in R. K. Narayan’s works. They reveal the relative impermeability of Indian society to the values and attitudes of its conqueror: “In the early novels the British conquest is like a fact of life. The British themselves are far away” (10). Indeed Naipaul’s comments on Narayan read like a reflection on Naipaul’s abandonment of the generic form of his own Caribbean comedies: To get down to Narayan’s world, to perceive the order and continuity he saw in the dereliction and smallness of India, to enter into his ironic acceptance and relish his comedy, was to ignore too much of what could be seen, to shed too much of myself: my sense of history, and even the simplest ideas of human possibility…I did not lose my admiration for Narayan; but I felt that his comedy and irony were not quite what they had appeared to be, were part of a Hindu response to the world, a response I could no longer share. (13)

“Dereliction and smallness” are, of course, exactly what Naipaul foregrounds in his descriptions of postcolonial situations, as in Salim’s invocation of the squalidness of his family compound in A Bend in the River. Naipaul’s principal interest in Narayan in Area of Darkness, however, is identifying the self-defeating logic of Hinduism. He examines Narayan’s late novel Vendor of Sweets at length, finding in its hero Jagan’s withdrawal at the end “the ultimate Hindu retreat.” In one of the most remarkable passages to be found anywhere in his prose, Naipaul generalizes Jagan’s retreat to “a retreat from civilization and creativity, from rebirth and growth, to magic and incantation, a retrogression to an almost African night, the enduring primitivism of a place like the Congo, where, even after the slave-trading Arabs and the Belgians, the past is yearned for as le bon vieux temps de nos ancetres. It is the death of a civilization, the final corruption of Hinduism” (38–39). The implicit hierarchy of Naipaul’s geography is brought to the surface: Hindu India, at its stereotypical worst, may suffer “a retrogression to an almost African night.” In a familiar Naipaulian move, the slave trade is blamed principally on the Arabs, not Europeans, 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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since the grammar of the sentence leaves it unclear whether we should read “Belgians” or “slave-trading Belgians.” Finally, there is the grand, even sublime, overstatement.4 Thus a workaday reading of Narayan’s novel allows Naipaul to marshal his rhetorical powers into a view of cosmic disaster—“the death of a civilization, the final corruption of Hinduism.” The scale of this disaster will be recapitulated in Naipaul’s later interpretations of Islamic decline and Islam’s destruction of Hindu Indian tradition (“a dead star”). But into the catastrophe envisaged by Area of Darkness, Naipaul injects a measure of light. Preparing for a study of the plays of Vijay Tendulkar, more modern in their attitudes than Narayan’s stories, Naipaul argues that “out of this chaos, out of the crumbling of the old Hindu system, and the spirit of rejection, India was learning new ways of seeing and feeling” (45). Civilization, for Naipaul, is propelled by what seem to be literary modes of perception—“new ways of seeing and feeling.” This remark in Area of Darkness is especially interesting because it is an early point in a Naipaulian transvaluation of values. “Chaos” and “crumbling” are unambiguously negative in Naipaulian Africa. Here, in the India of the 1960s, they are giving birth to something quite positive. Naipaul’s style is typically precise. In the above sentence, as the reader may tacitly register, the “spirit of rejection” may be what India is transcending or what is allowing India to transcend “chaos” and “crumbling.” The strange position of the phrase “spirit of rejection” (to which “out of ” may or may not apply) perhaps suggests the unusual place of this endorsement in Naipaul’s scheme of values. In India: A Million Mutinies Now, his final expedition to India (thus far), Naipaul deepens this unusual and uncharacteristic desire to see something unexpectedly positive in what he had denounced elsewhere as unrelievedly negative. Farhad Idris argues that “the most dialogic book Naipaul has ever written about India is India: A Million Mutinies Now, which so far is his last book on the subject. The title derives from the motif of mutiny with which Wounded Civilization ends—mutiny being India’s attempt to seek a modern

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destiny.” Idris suggests that Naipaul’s authoritative voice gives way in Million Mutinies to an unexpectedly new and receptive form: the narrative “resonates with polyphonic voices, including the narrator’s own voice, of many Indians who tell the narrator stories of their individual mutinies” (“The Traveler and His Hushed Companion,” 135). While Naipaul has often used indirect discourse and numerous character sketches in his travel writing, A Million Mutinies engages far more sympathetically with Third World societies and biographies. In his reconciliation with India, Naipaul also reconciles with a good form of revolution that is distinctively Indian. For what the mutinies were also helping to define was the strength of the general intellectual life, and the wholeness and humanism of the values to which all Indians now felt they could appeal. And—strange irony— the mutinies were not to be wished away. They were part of the beginning of a new way for many millions, part of India’s growth, part of its restoration. (518)

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Style and Naipaulian Transformations

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Introduction 1. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon, 25; emphasis in original. 2. The case against Naipaul has been most thoroughly articulated by Rob Nixon in his study of the travel writings, London Calling. Nixon aims “to account for and contest Naipaul’s distinctive authority by exploring the rhetorical character and political circumstances of his nonfiction” (6). He attacks Naipaul’s authority through his rhetoric: the author’s insistence that he stands outside national and cultural allegiance and therefore can be expected to deliver a verdict on the postcolonial situation devoid of parti pris; and the rhetorical figures on which Naipaul draws to dissect postcolonial societies (such loaded images and phrases as “area of darkness,” “barbarism,” and colonial “mimicry”). Yet the same mixture of provocation and judgmentality, and very much the same lines of argument, can be found in Naipaul’s fiction as in his travel writing. Here an analysis conducted on Nixon’s lines is not convincing because of the contribution of aesthetic and stylistic features that establish Naipaulian authority. Other critics modulate and reverse Nixon’s arguments (see Suleri, “The Rhetoric of English India and ‘Naipaul’s Arrival,’” 25–50, as well as Rhetoric of English India). In her brilliant defense of Naipaul in Rhetoric, Suleri points to his “uncanny ability to map the complicity between postcolonial history and its imperial past” (156). Naipaul is, in fact, engaged in a “highly sophisticated ironizing of imperial mythmaking” (154–55), and therefore, as Suleri puts it in Yale Journal of Criticism, Naipaul’s “graphic indictment of the postcolonial world…cannot be read literally” (30). Naipaul does not exempt himself from his own critique; indeed, according to Suleri, novels such as A Bend in the River demonstrate and rehearse the postcolonial condition.

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Notes

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

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Mustafa’s V. S. Naipaul points to the emphasis the Nobelist places on the written word in his analysis of postcolonial situations: “What is brought to maturity in Biswas’ story, therefore, is the gradually discernible independence and authority provided by a faithful adherence to a belief in literacy and writing” (73). It is not so much that Naipaul opposes the metropolitan and the colonial as that he seeks to bring the colonial into literary view. Bhabha, in The Location of Culture, also sees Naipaul outside the binary of center and periphery; “what emerges between mimesis and mimicry,” Bhabha observes of Naipaul as well as Kipling, Forster, and Orwell, “is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history” (87–88). While “the discovery of the book installs the sign of appropriate representation…the institution of the Word in the wilds is also an Enstellung, a process of displacement, distortion, dislocation, repetition—the dazzling light of literature sheds only areas of darkness” (105). I discuss, and for the most part, rely on Suleri and Mustafa in subsequent chapters. Bhabha’s emphasis on the literariness of Naipaul’s writing, as opposed to its historicity, is salutary, as is his insistence on the “process of displacement, distortion, dislocation, repetition” in Naipaulian narrative. However, it is only in the mind of the critic where “the light of literature” is at the center of this process. For Naipaul, I suggest, what matters is his own authority, rather than the broader authority of “appropriate representation.” See, in particular, the chapter “Synthesis and Mimicry,” in Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization, 124–44. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 11. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, 18. Naipaul, Beyond Belief, 193. Naipaul, Among the Believers, 355. O’Neill, The Emperor Jones, in Complete Plays 1913–1920, 1036. Authority is always about to collapse in Naipaul and is kept in existence only by perpetual assertion or accident. Salim, in A Bend in the River, tells us about the sub-Saharan coast that the “authority of the Arabs— which was real enough when I was a boy—was only a matter of custom. It could be blown away at any time. The world is what is” (15). Later on, he observes about the court historian Raymond that “his position in the Domain required him to display authority. But at any moment

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he might be stripped of this authority, reduced to nothi ng, with nothing to fall back on. In his place I don’t think I would have been able to pretend to have any authority” (190). Naipaul’s narrator in Mimic Men, Ralph Singh, speaks on behalf of colonial politicians when he confesses that “we lack order. Above all, we lack power, and we do not understand that we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost” (Naipaul, The Mimic Men, 8).

Chapter 1 1. Naipaul, A Bend in the River. 2. Olli—sensit enim simulata mente locutam, quo regnum Italiae Libycas averteret oras— sic contra est ingressa Venus: “Quis talia demens abnuat, aut tecum malit contendere bello, si modo, quod memoras, factum fortuna sequatur. Sed fatis incerta feror, si Iuppiter unam esse velit Tyriis urbem Troiaque profectis, miscerive probet populos, aut foedera iungi.” (Aeneid, bk. 4, ll. 105–12) Then Venus, who her hidden fraud descried,

Which would the scepter of the world misguide To Libyan shores, thus artfully replied: “Who, but a fool, would wars with Juno choose, And such alliance and such gifts refuse, If Fortune with our joint desires comply? The doubt is all from Jove and destiny; Lest he forbid, with absolute command, To mix the people in one common landOr will the Trojan and the Tyrian line In lasting leagues and sure succession join? (Aeneid, bk. 4, trans. John Dryden)

3. Mustafa, V. S. Naipaul, 143. 4. The phrase was common in early twentieth-century imperial apologetics, a tradition that Naipaul enthusiastically picks up. In Beyond Belief, for example, Imaduddin, an American convert to Islam, is criticized for his lack of understanding of the “extraordinary movements of peoples” involved in the United States’ “overwhelming movement

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westward over Indian territory late in the nineteenth century” (Beyond Belief, 45). Naipaul uses the concept of “extraordinary movements of peoples” to disguise the process of conquest and dispossession by which the American West was won. “Mingling,” however, denotes a process by which different peoples mix, either under conditions of colonial subjection or in the postcolonial circumstances of A Bend in the River where neither Salim, of Indian descent, nor any of the other characters, whether African or European, can claim to represent a hegemonic power. In the case of either term, Naipaul seeks to identify a social change that is deeper and more important than what he apparently considers the superficial incorporation of non-European societies into European empires. Naipaul is most likely to employ the concept of imperialism, paradoxically, when considering non-Western regimes. Islam, he tells us in Beyond Belief, “is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism” (64). In fact “there has probably been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs” (331). By implication the statement establishes, on the one hand, an extreme and “uncompromising” imperialism of “Islam and the Arabs,” and, on the other, a moderate and accommodating imperialism of the West (although Naipaul does not, as far as I know, use the term to describe British rule). Naipaul does not argue for the distinction but, characteristically, offers it as a provocation. Moreover, he does not acknowledge that the “imperialism of Islam and the Arabs” has been long ago dismantled by Western societies. For Naipaul Islam seems to be an immediate and pressing danger, along with other formations which have been long suppressed by the West. 5.

6. The extent to which a rejection of “mingling” expresses metropolitan fears of contamination and racial interbreeding is, of course, an important topic in postcolonial studies. It is at least arguable that sexual and racialist fears intensify in the course of the nineteenth century, and that

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Abercromby’s eighteenth-century context was far less concerned with the dangers of “mingling.” The critical literature is extensive but, for a historical discussion of this point, see, for example, Dalrymple, 34. See Naipaul’s comments on Mauritius and apartheid South Africa: “Mauritius is no place for the anti-apartheid campaigner…As visitors the South Africans are popular” (Overcrowded Barracoon, 259); goes on to quote an Indian South African who defends South Africa by saying, “Everybody has a job…although we should make allowance for the eternal grumblers” (260). See Suleri, Rhetoric of English India. In her brilliant defense of Naipaul, Suleri points to his “uncanny ability to map the complicity between postcolonial history and its imperial past” (156). Here Naipaul maps symmetries between Roman, British imperial, and postcolonial histories. Farn, Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of Heart of Darkness. Farn points out that Naipaul uses “the ‘Old Motto’ of his birthplace Trinidad as the motto of Kisangani” (51). The point has usually been neglected in the critical literature. See, for example, Seeber’s “Salim’s Truth about the ‘Mingling of Peoples’ in Africa, 141–148. Despite focusing on the Virgilian phrase, Seeber makes no mention of the colonial context in which Naipaul would have first encountered it—that is, on the Trinidadian flag. Twenty-six years separate the release of Guerrillas (1975), the novel that precedes A Bend in the River, from Half a Life (2001), which succeeds it. On the Greek antecedents of Pliny’s remark, see Feinberg and Solodow, “Out of Africa,” 255–61. The following passage indicates Naipaul’s complicated and conflicted reaction to racial difference: “In 1961…I remember my shock, my feeling of taint and spiritual annihilation, when I saw some of the Indians of Martinique, and began to understand that they had been swamped by Martinique, that I had no means of sharing the world view of these people whose history at some stage had been like mine, but who now, racially and in other ways, had become something other” (A Turn in the South, 33). See French, The World Is What It Is, 354, 383, 386. Naipaul’s writing is temporally circumscribed—there are no historical novels in his corpus and only a few forays into situations that predate the birth of his father Seepersad—but his geographic scope is

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unequaled, beginning with his native Trinidad and broadening out to include the postcolonial Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, India, Muslim geopolitics, the southern United States, and the home counties of the United Kingdom. Naipaul’s transnational enquiries postdate the publication of A House for Mr. Biswas in 1961. It is this middle phase of his career, from The Middle Passage (1962) to Among the Believers (1981), which elevated Naipaul to his highly visible place in the literary world and which has, at the same time, provoked the greatest dispute on the meaning, value, and ideological location of his writing. Michael Gorra makes this connection explicitly, arguing that “just as Raymond in A Bend in the River is known as the Big Man’s White Man, the African dictator’s pet European intellectual, so Naipaul came in the 1970s to seem something like the White Man’s Brown Man. He became the writer to whom many in Europe and North America looked for authoritative reports on the state of the third world, believing that because of what Irving Howe called the ‘steely perspective’ of his attacks on that world—attacks by someone with his biography—they must necessarily carry the note of truth. And the angrier the attacks grew, the more they were taken as a sign of his own impartiality” (Gorra, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie, 72). To make this claim, of course, I must exclude In a Free State, published in 1971 and the one work of Naipaul’s to be awarded the Booker Prize. Here the weight of critical opinion, and the decision of the Booker judges, diverges. After A Bend in the River, in a real sense, the world outside the Caribbean lay open to Naipaul’s appropriation. His publications in the fifteen years after A Bend in the River have been consistently more interesting and better received than in the fifteen years before it. Compare, for example, the relative reception of Naipaul’s two studies in British society: Mr. Stone and the Knight’s Companion, published fifteen years before A Bend in the River and subsequently neglected, with The Enigma of Arrival, published eight years after it and presently a key text in Naipaul studies. Mustafa, V. S. Naipaul, 121. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now, 414. On this issue of invented countries, see Kortenaar’s “Fictive States and the State of Fiction in Africa,” 228–45.

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20. The precision of Naipaul’s style is such that he runs through the variations of his title on several further occasions. Father Huismans, the sympathetic Belgian missionary, offers a more sanguine description of the place, observing that there “would always have been a settlement at that bend in the river…It was a natural meeting place. The tribes would have changed, power would have shifted, but men would always have returned there to meet and trade”(64; emphasis added). Later Salim reflects on “this piece of earth—how many changes had come to it! Forest at a bend in the river, a meeting place, an Arab settlement, a European outpost, a European suburb, a ruin like the ruin of a dead civilization, the glittering Domain of new Africa, and now this” (260). 21. Note that both “authority” and “nothing” are key terms in the text, perhaps the most extended use of the concept of “nothing” since King Lear. As the quotation about Raymond’s authority collapsing into “nothing” suggests, in Naipaul’s world “authority” is haunted by the perpetual possibility of its collapse into “nothing.” Naipaul, I suggest, has translated his literary dilemma of the simultaneous absolutism and vulnerability of literary authority, always subject to readerly doubt, into an imagined political dilemma. 22. These lines were moved to the beginning of the narrative, and therefore highlighted, on the suggestion of Paul Theroux (or so Theroux claims). See Theroux, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, 287. 23. This missing assumption is provided in Beyond Belief where Naipaul argues that “without that idea [of honor in a postcolonial state] men who have no voice or representation in the world can become nothing” (322). 24. This point has been made by a graduate student at the University of Cape Town, Anna Neal-Shute. 25. Raymond has the same anxieties as Naipaul about the significance of his postcolonial subject matter. See, for example, p. 137. As for Indar, a better formulation of peculiar Naipaul’s self-conception can hardly be found than Indar’s defiant statement: “I exploit myself. I allow no one to exploit me” (155). 26. Compare Naipaul’s remarks on historical consciousness petering out in the Hindu Trinidadian community of his birth in Beyond Belief: “We who were Indian were an immigrant people whose past stopped quite abruptly with a father or grandfather” (51).

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27. Critics of Naipaul’s politics such as Rob Nixon, in my view, misunderstand the scope and subversive power of his writing. The Naipaul problem is not so much that the author takes public positions on the newly independent societies of Africa and the Caribbean that offend enlightened opinion (although he certainly does and has). Nor is it simply the fact that he claims to be, like Indar in A Bend in the River, “a man without a side” (154) or that he recycles Conradian imagery. The Naipaul problem, I argue, is that one of the principal objectives of his style is the deconstruction of liberal opinion. 28. Perhaps the most important of these snares is the fact that Salim is Muslim. Salim’s self-hatred, and self-exposure, plays a crucial role in Naipaul’s repudiation of alterity. (“I spat on her. She made me spit on her,” Salim tells us about Yvonne, Raymond’s wife [221]). Yet because Naipaul has parceled out his experiences to figures such as Salim and Raymond, the rejection is not quite as total, and dehumanizing, as the portraits of the Africans. 29. Discussing Naipaul’s invocation of “the great peace” of the colonial period, Sara Suleri argues that the phrase is deliberately provocative and that the essay “hides in its oblique prose an astonished awareness of the rhetoric of reading that indicates a far more impacted understanding of imperialism than the one to which Naipaul admits” (Rhetoric of English India, 28). It seems to me that the provocation is one of Naipaul’s attempts to control the terms of the debate on imperialism rather than to subvert its terms. 30. In the section following, Naipaul achieves a further reversal. We read that “the blood of Asia had been added to those people [the slaves]… This, though, was a transferring of blood from master to slave. With the Arabs on our coast the process had worked the other way. The slaves had swamped the masters; the Arabian race of the master had virtually disappeared…[The Arabs] knew only that they were Muslims; and in the Muslim way they needed wives and more wives… Soon, therefore, the Arabs, or the people who called themselves Arabs, had become indistinguishable from Africans” (14). The subtlety of the passage, such as it is, lies in the insinuation of a fear of racial mixing into the mind of the reader. Yet it is an astonishing mix of crude racial and religious prejudice ventriloquized through Naipaul’s invented Muslim narrator.

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31. Compare the following passage from A Turn in the South: “It was easy to enter into the terror of the new man from Africa…who might have been snatched weeks or months before in the interior of Africa…finally transferred to a ship for the passage across the Atlantic…Easy too to enter into the heart of the other man, the trusty slave on the other side of the partition, who sat with him and talked to him and tried to present the new life to him as one of ease and plenty” (82). 32. One such motif is Salim’s (and Naipaul’s) diagnosis of rage. We hear of “African rage” (26); Ferdinand’s rage, “which destroyed the town” (59); nameless rage, which erases writing (81); Indar’s self-confessed “colonial rage” (146); Yvette’s “little rage” (169); and Salim’s long-delayed rage (267). 33. On the issue of cuisine in Naipaul, see Franklyn, “Grenada, Naipaul, and Ground Provision,” 67–69. 34. See Naipaul’s comments on Mauritius and apartheid South Africa: “Mauritius is no place for the anti-apartheid campaigner…As visitors the South Africans are popular” (Overcrowded Barracoon, 259); goes on to quote an Indian South African who defends South Africa by saying, “Everybody has a job…although we should make allowance for the eternal grumblers” (260).

Chapter 2 1. The now classic accounts of the structure of the joke can be found in Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and in Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, in Comedy. For Freud the joke, which allows the listener to take pleasure in nonsense, is principally a device that suspends the need to speak and think sensibly required of an adult: “the hearer of the joke laughs with the quota of psychical energy which has become free through the lifting of the inhibitory cathexis” (182). For Bergson, who is more interested in the internal logic of the joke, laughter is produced by a clash between two different logics, that of the mechanical (the system, the rule, the predictable) and the organic (the individual, the body, the unpredictable); in his famous phrase, comedy detects “something mechanical encrusted on the living” (37). Moreover, laughter has a disciplinary function: “what life and society require of each of us is a constantly alert attention…together with a certain elasticity of mind and body”

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3. 4. 5.

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(18). Laughter corrects us when we are not so alert or are insufficiently “elastic.” It brings us into the particular set of circumstances, as society requires. For Bergson, therefore, laughter, “being intended to humiliate…must make a painful impression…It would fail in its object if it bore the stamp of sympathy or kindness” (197). The joke, as a device, has a simple structure: (a) an indication that a joke is in progress, such as “Have you heard this one?”; this indicator is, of course, suppressed in deadpan humor; (b) a short narrative, which may be as brief as a single line—“Vote Harbans or Die!”—or prolonged into a “shaggy dog” story; (c) A punch line, which may or may not be signaled; (d) An interpretative frame A for the narrative material that gives way at or after the punch line to a second interpretative frame B; and (e) a point at which the reader moves from interpretation A to interpretation B in the way long described by gestalt (or frame) psychology. Around this simple structure, a great deal of variety is possible. For example, as mentioned, deadpan humor suppresses the “joke is in progress” signal. In certain jokes, the punch line is not signaled and therefore the reader may only move between frames at a later point. Good jokes generally force this transition at the highest speed. Other jokes, which take more time to get, may require further explanation from the teller. Naipaul, The Suffrage of Elvira, 43. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur, 71–72. In After Empire, Michael Gorra clearly identifies the issue in a discussion of one of Ganesh’s appearances in Mystic Masseur, remarking that “the scene is also comic, and that comedy is itself problematic. For what makes it funny? What makes one laugh at this counterpoint of dialect with the master’s tongue?” (85). Gorra argues that “the opposition between these different forms of English is less stable than it appears, and if his British English seems impoverished, his Trinidadian tongue has an invigorating freshness…the seemingly disparaged has here an energy that won’t let it be so easily dismissed” (85). It has been long recognized that joke telling brings together the teller and his audience and that, indeed, this is one of its motivations. Freud refers to “the generally recognized experience that no one can be content with having made a joke for himself alone” (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 175). Freud concludes that “telling my joke to

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another person would seem to serve several purposes: first, to give me objective certainty that the joke-work has been successful [in myself ]; secondly to complete my own pleasure by a reaction from the other person upon myself; and thirdly—where it is a question of repeating a joke that one has not produced oneself—to make up for the loss of pleasure owing to the joke’s lack of novelty” (191). See Chapter 1, n. 4. Discussing Naipaul’s invocation of “the great peace” of the colonial period, Sara Suleri argues that the phrase is deliberately provocative and that the essay “hides in its oblique prose an astonished awareness of the rhetoric of reading that indicates a far more impacted understanding of imperialism than the one to which Naipaul admits” (Rhetoric of English India, 28). It seems to me that the provocation is one of Naipaul’s attempts to control the terms of the debate on imperialism rather than to subvert its terms. Ramsay Muir, The Expansion of Europe: The Culmination of Modern History, 1. Ramsay Muir presents a considered defense of British rule where “a long tradition and a long experience saved the subject peoples from [Germantype] iniquities. We dare not claim that there were no abuses in the British lands; but at least it can be claimed that government has always held it to be its duty to safeguard native rights…the native populations…were generally able to feel that they were justly treated” (205). Compare, as we saw in the previous chapter, Naipaul’s unacknowledged use of the “Old Motto” of Trinidad—“Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi”—as the slogan of the steamboat company in A Bend in the River (62). On this issue, see Regelind Farn, Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of Heart of Darkness, 51. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas, 65. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth, 36. Hobbes, Elements, I, 9.13. It doesn’t apply, of course, to a good deal of the joke telling in the early comedies, up to and including A House for Mr. Biswas. Even in Biswas, despite the Hardyesque travails of the protagonist, a considerable fraction of the dialogue has a comic, or jokelike, texture. The following passage indicates Naipaul’s complicated and conflicted reaction to racial difference: “In 1961…I remember my shock, my feeling of taint and spiritual annihilation, when I saw some of the Indians

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18. 19.

20.

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of Martinique, and began to understand that they had been swamped by Martinique, that I had no means of sharing the world view of these people whose history at some stage had been like mine, but who now, racially and in other ways, had become something other” (A Turn in the South, 33). Compare the following passage from A Turn in the South: “It was easy to enter into the terror of the new man from Africa…who might have been snatched weeks or months before in the interior of Africa…finally transferred to a ship for the passage across the Atlantic…Easy too to enter into the heart of the other man, the trusty slave on the other side of the partition, who sat with him and talked to him and tried to present the new life to him as one of ease and plenty” (82). Compare his attitude toward another liberal cause, the civil rights movement in the United States. In 1989, in A Turn in the South, Naipaul discovers the “civil rights groups, their major battles and indeed their war won long ago, now squabbling, and looking for causes” (53). Naipaul, The Mimic Men, 135–36. The passage is, of course, reported through Singh’s consciousness, but even the use of indirect discourse—“the reports of their rapes were so exciting”—is inconsistent with Eden’s conversation elsewhere in the narrative. Before this scene, Eden’s speech is represented in a vernacular pattern: “Eh…I don’t see why for you grudge a poor black man. After all is they who does drink the blasted thing” (135). The millennial guerrillas in The Mimic Men, for example, as Ralph Singh reports, make the most fantastic promises to their supporters. They “promised to abolish poverty in twelve months. They promised to abolish bicycle licenses…They promised intermarriage” (199; emphasis added). Compare Naipaul’s view of black Caribbean celebrations in The Overcrowded Barracoon: “not far below, perhaps even unacknowledged [in Trinidad carnival], there has always been a vision of the black millennium, as much a vision of revenge as of a black world made whole again” (The Overcrowded Barracoon, 247). Naipaul, Guerrillas, 48. Theroux, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, 276. As we saw in the previous chapter, Yvette, in the fictionalized 1970s Uganda of A Bend in the River, makes her lover Salim “some scrambled

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South African eggs” (172, emphasis added). The claim of economic dependence is tacit, insinuated almost casually between “scrambled” and “eggs,” but it is central to the argument of the novel. A Bend in the River opens with a sketch of the marchande Zabeth who trades manufactured goods to the interior. In a considered provocation, Naipaul insists on the irony that the new nations of sub-Saharan Africa rely on the economic muscle of apartheid South Africa. To make this claim directly would highlight its tendentiousness, but, in its adjectival location, it buttresses Naipaul’s contention that valuable commodities must be imported to these new countries. They cannot fend for themselves. Naipaul, In a Free State, 113–14. Compare his use of an Indian South African in The Overcrowded Barracoon. On a visit to Mauritius, Naipaul discovers and relays the front-page headline of the Mauritius Times: “BLACKS IN SOUTH AFRICA SHOULD NOT COMPLAIN.” The article is a questionand-answer session with an Indian South African tourist, a Mr. Ahmed Cajee Khan (whose name reveals his Muslim religion). To the question, “How do Indians fare in South Africa?” Cajee Khan replies, “Some of our people are multi-millionaires” (109). Cajee Khan further proposes that “all countries have their domestic problems.” His “happiness about this regime” is not, Cajee argues, simply because, as an Indian in South Africa, he is relatively more privileged than black Africans: “No! Nobody feels the pinch [in South Africa]. Everybody has a job… although we should make allowance for the eternal grumblers” (110). Naipaul, A Writer’s People, 59. For a fuller consideration of this provocation and Naipaul’s own understanding of it, see French, The World Is What It Is, 193.

Chapter 3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Humphry and Tindall, False Messiah, 60. Sharp, The Life and Death of Michael X, 95. Humphry and Tindall, False Messiah, 118. Sharp, Life and Death, 116. Ibid., cover matter. In “Writers and Readers, the Written and the Read: V. S. Naipaul and Guerrillas,” Ten Kortenaar argues that “Naipaul’s allusions to other works of literature are a means of communicating with his reader, over

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the heads of his characters, as it were, appealing to past works of literature which have readers will have read to judge the events of his novel. The presence of allusion is itself the meaning intended by the allusion” (330). Ten Kortenaar may be correct about many of Naipaul’s allusions but others—to Wuthering Heights, Passage to India, and Wide Sargasso Sea—seem to bear a more direct relationship to the events of the narrative. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 87–88. Peter Hughes, however, offers a salutary view on such deconstructive approaches to Naipaul, arguing that “what sets a limit to [such an] account’s value is its skewed translation into shibboleths—‘dislocation,’ ‘destabilizing,’ ‘split,’ ‘severance’— of a discourse that has more confident and craftier designs on us than a deconstructive reading can do justice to” (“Tropics of Candor: V. S. Naipaul,” 207). This seems perfectly correct in the case of Naipaul. While Bhabha’s list of operations is instructive, at least in Naipaul’s case, these operations are the service of Naipaulian authority. In almost every case, they are applied to make a point, to condense the circumstances for literary purposes, to set up comparisons, and so forth. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 105. Naipaul, “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” 190. Something of Naipaul’s discomfort with racial identity is recorded in the memory of his first trip to the United Kingdom in the thinly fictionalized memoir Enigma of Arrival. On the ship, the staff bring the only black passenger to Naipaul’s cabin to sleep with him. Naipaul resents being grouped with the black man, but he is open about the emotional vulnerability that fuels his resentment: “I was also ashamed that they had brought the Negro to my cabin. I was ashamed that, with all my aspirations, and all that I had put into this adventure, this was all that people saw in me—so far from the way I thought of myself, so far from what I wanted for myself ” (126). Conrad, “An Outpost of Progress,” in Watts, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, 22–25. The text of “An Outpost of Progress” prefigures Heart of Darkness in detail. When Carlier dies, for example, Makola, the native assistant attached to the trading post, calls the other man: “Come along, Mr. Kayerts. He is dead” (22). Humphry and Tindall, False Messiah, 149.

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14. On the relationship between homosocial and homosexual bonds in fiction, see Sedgwick, Between Men. 15. O’Neill, The Emperor Jones, in Complete Plays 1913–1920, 1029. 16. Malik, From Michael de Freitas, 12. 17. Ten Kortenaar, “Writers and Readers,” 333. 18. Naipaul’s occasional use of Trinidadian vernacular is only part of his reliance on local knowledge. Evrin Beck points out that, in general, Naipaul “indigenized English fiction writing by using a calypso-influenced, Trinidadian form” (“Naipaul’s B. Wordsworth,” 175). According to Beck, “Naipaul shows his mastery of creative mimicry insofar as his story replicates a kind of European realism, but in a calypso-like form. Snatches of lines from calypsos appear in other stories in Miguel Street, namely, ‘The Thing without a Name,’ ‘The Pyrotechnist,’ ‘The Maternal Instinct,’ ‘The Blue Cart,’ ‘Love, Love, Love Alone,’ ‘Caution,’ ‘Until the Soldiers Came,’ and ‘Hat.’ But, more important, each short story itself is calypso-like in being a gossipy, satiric sketch of a socially aberrant character. Naipaul’s book illustrates the more recent value placed on mimicry in postcolonial thought, as in the work of theorist Homi Bhabha, who sees mimicry as always imperfect and therefore creative in its own mongrelized way” (175). 19. Naipaul, Guerrillas, 145. 20. Herbert Meredith, an island politician, is the most severe critic of Jimmy Ahmed in the novel, and he insists on Ahmed’s ethnicity: “I was in London when this great Negro leader burst upon the scene. And I must say it was news to me. I had always thought of him as Mr Leung’s son, trying to get into the Chinese scene over here and talking about going to China to advise Mao-Tse-tung” (141). Meredith, following Naipaul’s lead on the changeability of the revolutionary figure, sums up Jimmy Ahmed’s resume as follows: “The white-woman rape, running away from England, the hater of the Chinese: he can touch many chords” (145). 21. With the exception of the sketch of C. L. R. James as Lebrun in A Way in the World, Peter Roche is the by far the most sympathetic political radical in Naipaul’s prose; he is also the one person in the story whom Naipaul has clearly inserted into the historical narrative. Oddly, for someone who has been involved in a campaign of sabotage directed against the South African government, Roche has “no political dogma”

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(91). Moreover, he is unapologetic about his pride in his white countrymen, having “spoken of the climate, of the passion for sport, of the fine physiques of the white people” (52). Nor is he angry because he was tortured in prison. He defends the men who tortured him by pointing out that “they’re not thugs…They like going to good restaurants” (11). As he explains to Jane, “You must understand, I have always accepted authority. It probably has to do with the kind of school I went to” (54). It is Roche’s perversely respectful attitude toward the same authority he has violently opposed, as well as his having passed through and repudiated a period radicalism, which recommend him to his creator. On the reduction of the Malik group to two lovers, and Naipaul’s suppression of their politics, see Hemenway, “Sex and Politics in V. S. Naipaul,” 189–202. On this point, see Zahlan, “Literary Murder: V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas,” 98. Zahlan notes that the three principal characters in Guerrillas are related to the trio in Forster’s Passage to India (90). She also recognizes affinities between the novel and Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Wide Sargasso Sea. Ten Kortenaar, “Writers and Readers,” 324. Sharp, The Life and Death of Michael X, 32.

Chapter 4 1. Compare, for example, Naipaul’s understanding of his own relationship to Indian material in India: A Wounded Civilization: “India is for me a difficult country…I am at once too close and too far. My ancestors migrated from the Gangetic plain a hundred years ago; and the Indian community they and others established in Trinidad…was more homogenous than the Indian community Gandhi met in South Africa in 1893”. 2. A good summary of the state of the debate on Islam up to 2002 is given in Lawrence, “Conjuring with Islam II,” 485–97, especially n. 6, pp. 489–90. 3. In his 1977 reprise of his Indian travels, India: A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul even sees Hindu India through the eyes of its Muslim conquerors. Of Vijayanager, “the great Hindu kingdom of the South,” he tells us that “its architecture, even at the time, and certainly to the surrounding Moslems, must have seemed heavy and archaic…The Hinduism

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5. 6.

7. 8.

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Vijayanagar proclaimed had already reached a dead end, and in some ways had decayed, as popular Hinduism so easily decays, into barbarism” (6–7). Moreover, Naipaul makes explicit the reasons for his break with the Narayan-type novels that he had published before Biswas. He links his generic evolution to a repudiation of Hindu attitudes: “To get down to Narayan’s world, to perceive the order and continuity he saw in the dereliction and smallness of India, to enter into his ironic acceptance and relish his comedy, was to ignore too much of what could be seen, to shed too much of myself: my sense of history, and even the simplest ideas of human possibility…I did not lose my admiration for Narayan; but I felt that his comedy and irony were not quite what they had appeared to be, were part of a Hindu response to the world, a response I could no longer share” (13). Naipaul, Beyond Belief, 25. The natural comparison, as I have suggested, is to the description of the town in A Bend in the River where “the Arabian energy that had pushed [the Arabs] into Africa had died down at its source, and their power was like the light of a star that travels on after the star itself has become dead” (21). In this instance, Islam as a civilization dies or stagnates in the Middle East. In Beyond Belief, it destroys medieval Indian civilization on the subcontinent. Naipaul, Among the Believers, 355. Here, by insisting on the formal considerations that govern Naipaul’s early representations of Muslims, I differ with Rob Nixon who argues in London Calling for “a diametrical difference between Naipaul’s empathy for Brahminical Hindus and his experiences of Muslims as opaque” (146). As I suggest in a reading of the passage about mutual distrust, the difference is not so much “diametrical” as “symmetrical.” Naipaul, The Suffrage of Elvira, 17. Naipaul often uses techniques pioneered in fiction in his nonfiction. The religious symmetries of the Caribbean comedies turn up again in An Area of Darkness (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964). The attitude of one of Naipaul’s Sikh informants in An Area of Darkness could have been drawn from Biswas: “I [Naipaul] mentioned one Sikh religious leader. ‘He’s a bloody Hindu,’ the Sikh said. I mentioned another. ‘He’s a damned Muslim’”(238). Naipaul, A House for Mr., 220.

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10. Reform Hinduism, in the novel, argues that “idols were an insult to the human intelligence…birth was unimportant; a man’s caste should be determined only by his actions” (110). 11. Naipaul, “The Overcrowded Barracoon,” in The Overcrowded Barracoon; rpt. in V. S. Naipaul, The Writer and the World, ed. Pankaj Mishra (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 109. 12. On the issue of Naipaul’s historicizing perspective, see Jabbar, “Naipaul’s ‘India,’” 99–120. 13. Naipaul’s historicizing perspective (what he calls “a sense of history”) is, of course, supposed to frame and give perspective on modern postcolonial experiences. As he puts it in An Area of Darkness, the “[Indian] medieval mind could assess a building as five thousand years old, and do so casually; with like facility it buried events three and four hundred years old. And it was because it was without a sense of history that it was capable of so complete a conversion [to Islam]” (136–37). Here historical consciousness is an antidote to religion (and, presumably, to other patterns of belief ). Yet the historical perspectives Naipaul imposes on his material often have an arbitrary quality, which makes them seem like acts of interpretative assertion rather than a careful balancing of events past and present in a careful manner. 14. Naipaul, Guerrillas, 12. 15. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur, 220. 16. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 108. 17. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness, 34. 18. In his contemporary travel narrative, India: A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul more conventionally identifies the Arabs overseas as the representatives of “pure money.” In a Bombay airport, he finds “a few Arabs in the desert costumes which now, seen in airports and foreign cities, are like the white gowns of a new and suddenly universal priesthood of pure money” (vii). These Arabs represent a modern version of a Muslim stereotype (“white gowns of a new…priesthood”). 19. As Naipaul points out in Beyond Belief, “we who were Indian were an immigrant people whose past stopped quite abruptly with a father or grandfather” (51). 20. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness, 33. 21. For a fuller discussion of this issue, see Michael Gorra, After Empire: “Fanon’s words only begin to suggest the complexities of the sexual

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dynamic that Naipaul describes. Salim beats Yvette both because he thinks she has another lover, making him as one with her cuckolded husband, and because her manner has started to remind him of ‘whores who thought they should pretend to be jealous’…Yet his rage grows out of something other than that simple desire for revenge. He beats her because their intimacy has both fostered and destroyed his illusions… her position in the world has proved as vulnerable as his own…He spits on her as a crowd in the novel attacks a policeman who stumbles” (97–98; emphasis added). See French, The World Is What It Is, 386. Not all Muslim characters in Naipaul are surrogates for the author or satirical portraits. Many are treated with remarkable respect, especially Muslim women. In India: A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul encounters an aristocratic Muslim woman, Parveen, who “was a defender of the faith. But the faith—complete, fully formulated—sat lightly on her. At her social level it was even part of her certainty and strength, and seemed to equip her for the public life she wanted to enter” (363). Compare this analysis of Middle Eastern Muslim “parasitism” to the picture of Indian mimicry offered in India: A Wounded Civilization, especially pp. 124–44. In Indian culture’s appropriation of modern forms, Naipaul finds nothing but “mimicry within mimicry, imperfectly understood idea within imperfectly understood idea…the second-year girl in the printing department…playing with type like a child with a typewriter” (132). Rob Nixon points out that in “Among the Believers, the sense of disconnection [between Naipaul and his surroundings] becomes acute. As Naipaul spoke, none of the languages, his interlocutors had to convey their ideas and their personalities through English or, at times, through the mediations of an interpreter” (145). In “Ekphrasis and V. S. Naipaul’s: The Enigma of Arrival,” Robert Hamner points out the complexity of Naipaul’s use of images in his memoir cum novel: “Naipaul’s pivotal act of ekphrasis, reading de Chirico’s painting, alerts the wary reader to an intertextual nexus wherein we must attend to three levels of meaning: the narrator’s candid act of explication, its authorial and autobiographical application, and the implications of interrogating the artistic motive behind the entire novel” (37).

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27. As Indar in A Bend in the River tells us about the Indian embassy in London (and by extension about postcolonial nationalism), “In that room the photographs of those great men made me feel that I was at the bottom of a well. I felt that in that building complete manhood was permitted only to those men and denied to everybody else. Everyone had surrendered his manhood, or a part of it, to those leaders” (148). 28. Naipaul, A Way in the World, 2.

Chapter 5 1. Naipaul, to his credit, has been consistently interested in the practical uses of Western technology in Third World situations (though perhaps as an antidote to greater hopes for economic development). In India: A Wounded Civilization, for example, Naipaul visited Rajasthan where he “began to see my own ideas of village improvement as fantasies…one man said, fantastically, that he would like a telephone, to find out about the price of grain in Kotah without having to go there” (23). 2. As late as 1965, Naipaul was insisting that the freeing of South Africa’s blacks was one of the two political causes he could support, and equating apartheid with Nazism. See French, The World Is What It Is, 255. 3. Naipaul, “The Overcrowded Barracoon,” in The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972); rpt. in V. S. Naipaul, The Writer and the World. 4. In “The Traveler and his Hushed Companion: Problems of Narration in an Area of Darkness,” Farhad Idris links Naipaul’s analysis of black and Indian relations to his understanding of colonial mimicry. Idris writes that a “major motif in Naipaul’s travel-writing, which almost always treats third-world countries, is the apish imitation of the west in decolonized societies, what Naipaul calls ‘mimicry.’ Perhaps, the harshest condemnation of such mimicry appears in Passage when he castigates the two major Trinidadian ethnic communities, the African and the Indian, for their mutual hatred toward each other but shared fascination for the white: ‘Like monkeys pleading for evolution, each claiming to be whiter than the other, Indians and Negroes appeal to the unacknowledged white audience to see how much they despise one another’” (135). 5. Naipaul, “In a Free State,” in In a Free State. 6. See Fawzia Mustafa on “Naipaul’s Privileging of the Word and the Book,” in V. S. Naipaul, 73.

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7. Naipaul’s models of native or subaltern psychology are strikingly similar across continents and cultures. Compare, for example, the playacting of the Zulu of “In a Free State” with that of Ferdinand of A Bend in the River. See also Naipaul’s analysis of Muslim Iranians in Among the Believers: “What had attracted these Iranians to the United States and the civilization it represented?…the attraction wasn’t admitted; and in that attraction, too humiliating for an old and proud people to admit, there lay disturbance—expressed in dandyism, mimicry, boasting, and rejection” (13). 8. This idea that Naipaul’s black characters have of sexual paradise—as involving a wealth of available nonblack women—occurs on several occasions in his writing and counts, I argue, as both a piece of stereotypical racism and as a kind of cold joke. See, for example, the black schoolboy Eden, a contemporary of Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men, who “wished to join the Japanese army: the reports of their rapes were so exciting… in his conversation he sublimated the wish to rape foreign women into a wish to travel.” Eden “had been stirred by Lord Jim. His deepest wish was for the Negro race to be abolished; his intermediate dream was of a remote land where he, the solitary Negro among an alien pretty people, ruled as a sort of sexual king. Lord Jim, Lord Eden” (151). 9. Compare the episode in Guerrillas where Jimmy Ahmed spits in Jane’s mouth before raping her. The intent is at once to humiliate the target as well as to affirm racial boundaries. There is also a sense in which Naipaul is reading Frantz Fanon against the grain in his representation of revolutionary racial psychology. After all the Zulu’s response to Bobby’s racial admiration incarnates in a satirical form Fanon’s contention that “to us the man who adores the Negro is as ‘sick’ as the man who abominates him” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 10). 10. For a discussion of the colonel, see Weiss, On the Margins. Weiss writes that “although the novella portrays the colonel as an unlikable racist, it supports his attitude toward Africa and Africans through the events of the plot” (173). 11. Cudjoe, V. S. Naipaul. 12. As Naipaul points out in An Area of Darkness, in Trinidad “people of many races accepted English rule, English institutions and the English language without questioning; yet England and Englishness, as displayed in India, were absent” (210).

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13. French, The World Is What It Is, 261. 14. Naipaul, The Return of Eva Peron, with the Killings in Trinidad. 15. Here Jimmy Ahmed insists on establishing or imagining a racialized relationship of domination and dominated with Roche. Like the Zulu revolutionary of “In a Free State,” Jimmy Ahmed behaves in a Fanonian mode, which is heavily ironized in its Naipaulian context. In Black Skin, White Marks, Fanon had argued that “not only must the black man be black; he must black in relation to the white man…The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man” (110). Whatever the concrete circumstances of the bond between white and black, Fanon continued, “the white man is not only the Other but also the master, whether real or imaginary” (138). In Naipaul’s disturbing picture of Ahmed’s sexual assault of Jane, he may be taking literally Fanon’s comment in the same work that “whoever says rape says Negro” (166). 16. Burning the passport is Naipaul’s own invention rather than an incident drawn from the real-life killings. However, there was a short delay in discovering the murder of the real-life woman (Gale Benson). In Jane’s case, however, there is no indication she will ever be found or missed…and the fault of her disappearance is, Naipaul implies, half her own, half Roche’s. It is as if the real-life Gale Benson has been split into two literary characters in Guerrillas, Jane and Peter Roche. Roche’s participation in covering up Jane’s murder, then, can be seen as an extension of the simultaneously sexual, masochistic, and suicidal impulse that brings her to the island and into contact with Jimmy Ahmed. 17. Naipaul, Half a Life.

Conclusion 1. As Michael Gorra observes in After Empire, “no one now writing can use the pace of an English sentence, its punctuation and pauses, to greater effect” (73). Indeed “a prose so beautifully modulated carries something of the status of fact” (74). 2. Gorra points out that the career of Mohun Biswas is explicitly posited as a break from this Hindu world: “Mr. Biswas’s childhood home is not only lost but destroyed, pulled down and replaced by the oil derricks of a subsequent, and more fortunate, owner…What’s lost is the past, the ancestral world of those who have crossed the black water or survived the middle passage” (67).

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3. This is, according to Naipaul, a civilizational trait. Farhad Idris argues that “a substantial part of Darkness is devoted to the excoriation of Indian mimicry, the prime example of which is the class of ‘Boxwallahs’ or privileged Indians occupying cushy positions in British business firms and living mostly in Bengal” (58–62). As Idris observes, “Naipaul is quick to add that more often than not mimicry is a survival skill among Indians, who belong to a country that has been invaded by many conquerors— in other words, mimicry is not superficial to the Indian culture” (“The Traveler and His Hushed Companion” [Ariel 34.2–3], 135). 4. The imaginative deficiencies of Naipaulian overstatement, and overreaching, are often corrected by the author’s insistence on the immediate, the sensual, and the practical; we have already noted the favorable treatment of the marchande Zabeth in A Bend in the River, who trades immediately useful goods. Naipaul’s writings on India extend this interest in labor and the practical sphere. In Wounded Civilization, for example, he observes a man who “was small and slightly built. He was troubled by his chest and obviously weary. He managed the pickaxe with difficulty; it didn’t go deep, and he often stopped to rest. His wife, in a short green sari, squatted on the stony ground, as though offering encouragement by her presence; from time to time, but not often, she pulled out with a mattock those stones the man had loosened; and the white capped boy stood by the woman, doing nothing. Like a painting by Millet of solitary brute labor, but in an emptier and less fruitful land. A picture of the pain of old India, it might have seemed. But it contained so much that was new” (Wounded Civilization, 76–77). Naipaul goes on to mention the new institutions of modern India, from the bank to the engineer, which make this “painting by Millet of solitary brute labor” a misleading one. It is the rare occasion, if not a unique one in Naipaul’s prose, where the movement of history provides an optimistic counterpoint to the rigors of the present scene. There is obvious sympathy here with the laborer—“troubled by his chest and obviously weary”—which may remind us of the peculiar emotional transaction between Naipaul the novelist and his character Mohun Biswas based on Seerpersad Naipaul. Moreover, the generalization that rounds off the scene (“solitary brute labor”) is set deliberately at odds with the family situation Naipaul sketches, with a wife and a son (“white capped boy”) who do not work alongside the man.

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Notes

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Beck, Evrin. “Naipaul’s B. Wordsworth.” The Explicator 60, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 175–76. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. In Comedy. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan, 1913. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Conrad, Joseph. “An Outpost of Progress.” In Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, edited by Cedric Watts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990; rpt. 2002. Cudjoe, Selwyn R. V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Dalrymple, William. White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-century India. London: Harper Perennial, 2003. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Farn, Regelind. Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of Heart of Darkness: A Century of Dialogue with Joseph Conrad. Dissertation.com. December 31, 2005. Feinberg, Harvey, and Joseph Solodow. “Out of Africa.” Journal of African History 43 (2002): 255–61. Franklyn, David Omowale. “Grenada, Naipaul, and Ground Provision.” Small Ave 22 (February 2007): 67–69. French, Patrick. The World Is What It Is. London: Picador, 2008. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1963. Glover, Jonathan. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Gorra, Michael. After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Hamner, Robert. “Ekphrasis and V. S. Naipaul’s: The Enigma of Arrival.” The Comparatist 30 (May 2006): 37–51 Hemenway, Robert. “Sex and Politics in V. S. Naipaul.” Studies in the Novel 14, no. 2 (1982): 189–202. Hobbes, Thomas. Elements. Vol. 1, 9.13. London: Routledge, 1969. 10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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———. “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad: Peace and Power” (1973–1979). In The Writer and the World, edited by Pankaj Mishra. New York: Knopf, 2002. ———. Miguel Street. London: Penguin, rpt. 1971. ———. The Mimic Men. London: Andre Deutsch, 1967; rpt. London Penguin, 1977. ———. The Mystic Masseur. London: Andre Deutsch, 1957; rpt. London: Penguin, 1987. ———. The Overcrowded Barracoon. London: Andre Deutsch, 1970; rpt. 1972. ———. The Return of Eva Peron, with the Killings in Trinidad. New York: Vintage, 1981. ———. Mr. Stone and the Knight’s Companion. London, Penguin: 1963; rpt. 1981. ———. The Suffrage of Elvira. London: Andre Deutsch, 1958; rpt. 1968. ———. A Turn in the South. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1989; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1990. ———. A Way in the World. London: Heinemann, 1994. ———. A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling. London: Picador, 2007. Nixon, Rob. London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. O’Neill, Eugene. The Emperor Jones. In Complete Plays 1913–1920. New York: Library of America, 1988. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Seeber, Han Ulrich. “Salim’s Truth about the ‘Mingling of Peoples’ in Africa: A Comment on Naipaul’s A Bend in the River.” In English Literatures in International Contexts, edited by Heinz Antor. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag, 2000. Sharp, James. The Life and Death of Michael X. Waterford, Ireland Uni Books, 1981. Suleri, Sara. Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. “The Rhetoric of English India and ‘Naipaul’s Arrival.’” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 1 (1989): 25–50. Theroux, Paul. Sir Vidia’s Shadow. New York: Mariner, 2001. Virgil. Aeneid. Bk. 4. Translated by John Dryden. New York: P.F. Collier and Son/Harvard Classics, 1969. Weiss, Timothy F. On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V. S. Naipaul. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1992. Zahlan, Anne R. “Literary Murder: V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas.” South Atlantic Review 59, no. 4 (November 1994): 89–106

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Abercromby, Ralph, 21–23 Among the Believers, 13, 14, 93, 97, 98, 112–15, 121, 122, 134, 136 Arabs and Arab “imperialism” in Naipaul, 95, 106–7, 113–15, 135 Area of Darkness, An, 108, 151, 153–56 authority in Naipaul’s fiction, 1, 3, 4, 8, 11, 16, 23, 25, 26, 65–66, 75, 80, 92, 93, 97, 104, 133 Bend in the River, A, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12–15, 17–38, 48–51, 106–9, 129; character of Ferdinand, 23–24, 28; character of Huismans, 17, 24; character of Raymond, 25, 75; character of Salim, 5–6, 8, 9–11, 17, 18, 24–25, 28, 48–51, 94, 97, 105–6, 107–11; resemblances to Naipaul, 24–25, 107–10; character of Yvette, 110–11, 129; town “at the bend in the river,” 29 Benson, Gale Ann, 55, 63, 68–69, 80, 82–83, 87, 88 Beyond Belief, 12, 15, 30, 93, 120, 122–26, 134–36 Bhabha, Homi, 7, 59, 67. See also colonial mimicry Bomb, The (Trinidad periodical), 64 Caribbean comedies by Naipaul, 39, 40, 43, 46, 54, 76, 81, 100–101, 104, 155 colonial mimicry, 4, 178 Conrad, Joseph, 6, 7, 29, 31; and Naipaul, 53, 66, 146. Heart of

Darkness, 70. “An Outpost of Progress,” 67–74 Cudjoe, Selwyn, 144 De Freitas, Michael. See Michael X Enigma of Arrival, The, 9, 111 False Messiah, 64, 84–85, 89–90 From Michael de Freitas to Michael X, 63–64, 76–78 Gandhi, Mohandas, 149–50, 153 Glover, Jonathan. Humanity, 46–51, 56 Guerrillas, 6–7, 48, 51, 55, 56, 63–92, 144–47; character of Jane, 55–56, 69, 71, 83, 88–89, 147; character of Jimmy Ahmed, 55, 56, 77, 78, 84, 85–86, 88, 105, 145; character of Peter Roche, 74, 82, 85–86, 89, 131, 143–47 Half a Life, 147 House for Mr. Biswas, A, 23, 39, 45, 99, 101, 164 hybridity, 100–102, 121, 153 Importance of Being Earnest, The, 39–40, 60 “In a Free State,” 57, 130; character of Zulu, 58–59, 130, 137–44 India: A Million Mutinies Now, 27–28, 151, 156–57 India: A Wounded Civilization, 149–54 Indian Muslims, 8, 109 Indian Ocean, 24, 132

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Index

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Index

Iran, 115–18, 122–23 Islam in Naipaul, 5, 12, 14, 93–126; African Islam, 94–95; and Comic Symmetry, 98–102, 108–9; in Trinidad, 98, 108–9; political Islam, 14, 94–97; turn to Muslim subjects, 97 jokes in Naipaul, 39–61, 69, 81, 106, 141–42; and foreclosure of sympathy, 47; Hobbes’ analysis, 47; structure of jokes, 39–40, 47–51, 60 Khomeini, 115–16, 118, 135 Latin, prestige of, 18, 23 Life and Death of Michael X, 65, 67, 91 Malik group, 73, 80, 86 Malik, Michael Abdul. See Michael X Michael X, 6, 63–68, 71, 76–83; as novelist, 81–83 “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” 65, 79–83, 144 Mauritius, 131–33 Mimic Men, The, 52–55; character of Eden, 52–55; character of Ralph Singh, 52 misquotation, 17–38 Muhammad Ali, 78 Muir, John Ramsay, 44, 95–96 Mustafa, Fawzia, 4, 7, 18, 27, 28, 29, 138 Mystic Masseur, The, 9, 39, 40, 41, 42; character of Ganesh Ramsumair, 41, 54 Naipaul; and dialect, 13, 40, 76; and homosociality, 73–74, 77, 86; and left-wing radicalism, 56, 78, 85, 123–24, 131, 134–36; 144–45; and sexuality, 56–58, 72–74, 77, 85, 109–11, 142–43; antiliberalism, 70, 51–52, 86, 130, 135, 141. See also South Africa, anti-apartheid struggle; attitudes

toward Black Power, 79–92; attitudes toward colonialism, 17, 44, 54, 79, 96, 129, 136–37; attitudes toward Hinduism, 95, 152, 155–56; impartiality, 25, 27, 98; misogyny, 77–78; negative emotions in fiction, 10, 12, 26–35, 76–77, 86, 120; on Indian-African relationship, 48, 54, 86, 106, 134– 35, 149–50, 155; racial attitudes, 51–55, 80;rhetoric, 4–5, 15, 18, 36, 41, 43, 49, 83, 117, 123, 129, 151; travel writing, 102–5, 111–15; use of ekphrasis, 118 Nixon, Rob, 4, 51, 114 O’Neill, Eugene: “The Emperor Jones,” 15, 25, 66, 68, 75–76, 92 Overcrowded Barracoon, The, 2, 102–4, 122, 128, 131, 148 Pliny the Elder: “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi,” 23 Return of Eva Peron and the Killings in Trinidad, The, 6 Skerritt, Joseph, 63, 66, 68–69 South Africa, 102–5, 127, 149–50; antiapartheid struggle in Naipaul, 5, 51, 56–60, 102–5, 127–46; Indians in, 123–26, 131–37 Suffrage of Elvira, The, 40, 94, 99, 100 Suleri, Sara, 4, 7, 51, 59, 159 Theroux, Paul, 57, 127 Trinidad: colonial-era flag, 21–22; racial attitudes, 80–81, 143–44; religious hybridity, 100–102, 121 Violence in Naipaul’s fiction, 13, 15, 122 Virgil: Aeneid, 17, 19–20, 44 Way in the World, A, 97, 112, 119 Writer’s People, A, 60 Wuthering Heights, 87–88

10.1057/9780230622463 - Authority and Authorship in V.S. Naipaul, Imraan Coovadia

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