AGAINST FRENZY :

'The Writer and the World': The Blunt Opinions of a Professional Provocateur (DAPHNE MERKIN, September 1, 2002, NY Times)

One would think that the mere fact of his wide-ranging interests -- he has written (clairvoyantly, it now seems) about the numbing facelessness at the heart of fundamentalist Islam, the complex legacy of racism in the American South, the depleted energies of India, the genocidal history of Argentina and the disorder and instability of the postcolonialist third world -- would gain him a large readership. But the mirror that Naipaul holds up to contemporary civilization is a less than flattering one: the tragic view he has expressed from the very beginning, which has seemed to afford him a strange kind of comfort, offers little in the way of ordinary solace. (''Suffering,'' he explained in a letter from Oxford to his older sister, Kamla, ''is as elemental as night'' and ''makes more keen the appreciation of happiness.'') Indeed, the very gloominess of his beliefs, marked by his obsession, as he described it in ''The Enigma of Arrival,'' with ''the idea of decay,'' and his sense of having been born into ''a world past its peak,'' have ensured him a relatively small audience. [...]

Unlike those writers who travel in deliberate search of the exotic or mystical, Naipaul travels in order to find glimmers of the recognizable: ''I go to places which, however alien, connect in some way with what I already know.'' I suppose this attitude can be labeled insular or ethnocentric, but one can also perceive in it a refusal to go along with the guilt-racked, reflexive tendency among Western liberals to idealize the once-despised Other and to countenance the depredations of self-rule in former colonial outposts. Naipaul's strongest influence -- or, at least, one of the few he doesn't disavow -- is Joseph Conrad's unblinking (some might say reactionary) depiction of the ignoble savage who stirs within the genial primitive. His 1975 essay on the plundering of independent Zaire under the radical programs of Mobutu ''in the name of Africanization and the dignity of Africa'' is astonishing in its prescience. One can look to it and to a short essay (''Power'') in which Naipaul reflects on the ''carnival lunacy'' inherent in the ''vision of the black millennium, as much a vision of revenge as of a black world made whole again,'' for a deeper understanding of what took place in Uganda under Idi Amin and is taking place now in Zimbabwe. One can read them as well to get a clearer sense of the twin ideas that fuel Naipaul -- a terror of ''frenzy for the sake of frenzy'' and the conviction that the only valuable life is one that is shaped by the anguish of aspiration and that is engaged in a struggle against ''the void of nonachievement.'' There is no magical way around this obstinate psychological truth, he tells us, no shortcut: ''Identity,'' he observes, ''depends in the end on achievement.''

It was disturbing to read Mr. Naipaul's Among the Believers : An Islamic Journey (1981) twenty years later and to realize how clearly he'd perceived the pathology at the heart of radical Islam. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 2, 2002 5:34 AM