IDEAS OR COLORS?:

BORROWED CULTURE: V. S. Naipaul out-Englishes the English (HILTON ALS, 2003-02-24, The New Yorker)

Naipaul, like the Indians Prashad writes about, is too busy being a "good immigrant" to recognize the falsity of his own "whiteness."

A prodigious student but not a naturally gifted writer, Naipaul admits, in "Reading & Writing" (1999), that his ambitions, which began when he was eleven, were "for many years a kind of sham. I liked to be given a fountain pen and a bottle of Waterman ink and new ruled exercise books (with margins), but I had no wish or need to write anything; and didn't write anything, not even letters: there was no one to write them to. . . . I wished to be a writer. But together with the wish there had come the knowledge that the literature that had given me the wish came from another world, far away from our own." Naipaul could not write about the place he knew because the place he knew was not the place that fed the literature he most admired, the literature of the British Empire. He could only play the role of a writer, and, when he did so, he played the writer he planned to become—an English one.

England has been his home, more or less, for fifty-three years now, and one of his goals as a writer has been to continue the tradition of British travel writing. Along the way, he has done more than he set out to do. He has created an influential voice for colored travel writing—a way of both being and not being a part of the Third World he describes—which other black West Indian writers have emulated. But Naipaul himself had no models. His only examples were Englishmen such as George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, who could go out into the world, to Paris, to Burma, and always have their homeland as a point of reference, a standard of identity. Naipaul didn't want Trinidad as a point of reference; it carried little distinction for him. The traditionally "picturesque" way of writing about Indians in the Caribbean seemed to him to "distort and trivialise . . . because it indicates a special attitude towards yourselves: it says that you don't consider yourselves really serious people . . . that the place you inhabit is only a kind of bongo paradise." In his introduction to "East Indians in the Caribbean," a series of papers presented at the University of the West Indies in 1975, he wrote, "A book has just been published in which an Anglo-American television man 'introduces' the island and introduces articles about the island, mainly by local people. . . . It indicates how strong and ineradicable the wish is, among the bongo islanders, to act up to the tourist image. . . . England is selling itself, its history, its achievements. Trinidad sells only its 'picturesqueness,' its 'cosmopolitan' population, and such tourist concepts harden simplicities and ignorance." Between the master narrative of Englishness (Forster in India, Orwell in Spain) and the blank page of the West Indies, Naipaul chose the former. But, in doing so, he chose a page that was just as blank, because England was not really his to choose. His absorption of the country's history, with its exhausted imperialism, its entrenched class system, only hampered his work; writing in a voice that wasn't his own, Naipaul simply confirmed his difference.

Naipaul's latest collection of essays, "The Writer and the World" (Knopf; $30), some of which appeared in this magazine, is fat (five hundred and twenty-four pages) with information, details, and accounts that range across three decades of Naipaul's writing life, but its intellectual curiosity remains oddly limited. Naipaul relies too much on the reporter's tools—description, quotation, narrative—while rarely questioning why he is where he is. For most of the book, he's just there, writing it all down, his pen dipped in a kind of imperialist "I told you so," particularly when any question of the African diaspora arises. The Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra, who edited the collection, refers in his introduction to the characters who populate the essays as "unsettled men with peasant or tribal backgrounds." What follows is ample evidence of Naipaul's dismissive approach toward everything "peasant" and "tribal"—which is to say, black, poor, illiterate, and backward, as far as one can get from the educated Europeans of his dreams. Consider the first paragraph of "A New King of the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa":

The Congo, which used to be a Belgian colony, is now an African kingdom and is called Zaire. It appears to be a nonsense name, a sixteenth-century Portuguese corruption, some Zairois will tell you, of a local word for "river." So it is as if Taiwan, reasserting its Chinese identity, were again to give itself the Portuguese name Formosa. The Congo River is now called the Zaire, as is the local currency, which is almost worthless.

There is plenty of disdain here, but where is the history of colonialism? How did the Belgians get to the Congo? And why is the faded identity of a people who, for centuries, have been colonized and bastardized by a European nation a subject of ridicule?

As Naipaul writes in an autobiographical essay in "Finding the Center: Two Narratives" (1984), he is not interested in facts per se. He'd rather chase his own preconceptions: "I follow a thread till I find something that I was looking for. When I find it I stop." Whether he is in Tehran or British Guyana, he is not a journalist but a fiction writer who travels. He has little inclination for historical analysis, and he makes sweeping generalizations where specificity might help. In a review of "Finding the Center," Joan Didion noted, "What interests a writer like . . . Naipaul is only rarely what interests, in the same situation, a reporter. For one thing, whether the project at hand is fiction or reportage, the novelist's interest in the situation wanes at that precise point when the reporter begins to consider himself competent: when the place is understood." [...]

Still, to make any conclusive statement about Naipaul is to risk making a fool of oneself. There is simply too much writing to encompass. Naipaul's ambivalence about identity—his own and others'—confounds, frustrates, and enlightens. His relentless focus on man making a mess of his own humanity limits his scope.

If I'm understanding Mr. Als correctly he seems to be saying that the Third World can't be judged by Western standards, but only by the standards that existed prior to colonization, and that Mr. Naipaul can't access Western standards anyway because he's of the Third World. That strikes me as quite wrong. The entire point of Western Culture--not that we live up to it as often as we should--is that it is constructed around a set of ideas that are universalist and accesible to everyone, no matter their origin, race, etc. This is why America, which represents the West's highwater mark, is able to assimilate so many different and diverse immigrant groups so thoroughly. It is why those countries that were colonized by the British--from America to India to South Africa--are uniquely susceptible to liberal democracy and institutions that seek to maximize human freedom. And it is why a V.S. Naipaul can be among the leading authors of the West and such a perceptive critic of the Third World. Comprehending and valuing the ideas of the West--one of the most important of which is that men make a mess of humanity--he can perceive how failure to adopt them is crushing various parts of the Third World--he was particularly devastating and prescient about Islam--rather than remaining locked in a parochial and essentially racialist view of the world that would require him to celebrate anything that smacks of color and oppose anything touched by "whiteness". Ultimately isn't Mr. Naipaul's ambivalence about race one of the most important things about his writing and one of the best influences he's gotten from and given back to the West? Isn't that kind of ambivalence, which takes note of race but makes it determinative of nothing, what we're aiming for? Posted by Orrin Judd at March 5, 2003 9:05 PM