Naipaul\'s Nobel Poise

September 6, 2017 | Autor: Ranga Rao | Categoria: Post-Colonial Literature
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Naipaul's Nobel Poise?



Ranga Rao


Vidia's victims can take heart; they are one big family. Though
not exactly happy, they are trans-world, with kin like Paul Theroux who
'took it on his chin and moved on' to make a sizeable book out of Vidia's
rejection; and Salman Rushdie,1 following his brilliant review of
Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival: "I reviewed that book and maybe that's what
Naipaul has against me."2 After the writers' conclave starring Vidia in
Rajasthan, the Indian chapter appears to have burgeoned greatly; the body
language of the participants had said it all. Daphne Merkin calls Naipaul's
obiter dicta 'verbal grenades' and quotes from an early letter: "I think a
man is doing his reporting well only when people start to hate him."3 
This seething mass of humanity would be surprised to know, however,
that some acts of elegant revisionism from Vidiadhar Naipaul occurred but
recently. "And you must believe me," he said in his Nobel acceptance speech
late last year, with a new concern for his reader's sceptical
possibilities, "when I tell you that the pattern in my work has only become
clear in the last two months or so". The latest phase of his self-discovery
must have occurred, in other words, after the announcement of the prize and
in time for his address in Stockholm.
Naipaul's acceptance speech 'accepts' more than the coveted prize. I
shall take just one example here: the only Indian author he mentions in his
Nobel discourse, R.K.Narayan.


1

To appreciate fully what Naipaul says about Narayan in his Nobel speech we
must go back a little in time.
These two writers, both Brahmins, differed so completely in
background and temperament. Both writers did their stint in the Pit:
Narayan after his wife Rajam's premature death; and Naipaul in Oxford. Yet
in his conversation with Ved Mehta Narayan makes a remarkable self-
discovery, "I find I write best when I have no burden on my mind, when I am
absolutely at peace with myself. That's why for many years after Rajam died
I couldn't write anything."4 That is a useful piece of self-analysis,
summing up for us the secret of his unique success, both literary and
worldly.
On his return from yet another tour abroad, Narayan tells an
interviewer in New Delhi, "If I had to live again, I would want nothing
different. I live from moment to moment…. Nothing really has gone wrong
with me" [The bereavement of his beloved wife Rajam not excepted!]. "I am
deeply interested in life as a writer. That is perhaps why I have not gone
mad."5 
Narayan's tradition and roots had led him to seek control over his
mind. Narayan says towards the conclusion of Chapter Eleven of his memoirs,
My Days (1975), "A sixteenth century Tamil mystic had sung: 'One may learn
to walk on water, mesmerise a mad elephant, muzzle a tiger or a lion, walk
on fire, and perform other feats, but yet the real feat would be to still
the restless mind and understand one's real self'."6 
To 'still the restless mind and understand one's real self' is the
central theme of Narayan's novels, and especially of his early comedy.
Consider the young hero, Chandran, in his early twenties, of The Bachelor
of Arts: after the crisis in his life '[He felt that his greatest striving
ought to be for a life freed from distracting illusions and hysterics.'7 
(132)]
Narayan's uncommon temperament ("absolutely at peace with myself")
leads to no self-centred withdrawal. His integrity results in social
participation, "If I have to worry, it's about things outside me, mostly
not concerning me."8 
Viewed against the commitment of Anton Chekhov, the nineteenth
century short-story writer (to whom he was compared early on by Graham
Greene), Narayan's social involvement was minimal. Chekhov, a patient
suffering from tuberculosis, had travelled 3000 miles to Siberia to
investigate the condition of prisoners in the notorious penal colony on
Sakhalin island. But, as John Updike pointed out in his review of My Days,
Narayan played his social role: 'writer as citizen.'9 
If madness is a sombre image of the human predicament, the Indian
novelist offers an uncommon counterpoint, as Mehta describes him: 'smiling
with his eyes and teeth.' Narayan is spiritually kin to Mahatma Gandhi and,
in the West, to Thereaux and Robert Frost than to any Indian writers.
Now here is another valid view of life and literature. "I think
literature should be read privately," Vidia said. "Literature is not for
the young. Literature is for the old, the experienced, the wounded, the
damaged, who read literature to find echoes of their own experience and
balm of a certain sort."10 
Andrew Robinson quotes Naipaul:

"Compassion' is a political word. Isn't it? A word of literary
criticism—like 'well-crafted' and 'honed.' Whenever someone talks
about something being crafted or honed, and full of compassion, you
know you must stay away."11 

Yet Narayan is the only Indian writer honoured with repeated
attention by Naipaul. He first mentions Narayan in An Area of Darkness
(1964); he first develops his thesis on Narayan in India: A Wounded
Civilisation (1979); he more or less repeats it in interviews in The Hindu
of 5 July 1998 and the Literary Review (London) April 2001; and in the
obituary essay in Time (4 June 2001) he drives home the same position.
In Wounded Civilisation Naipaul offers a reading of Narayan's early
novels; and in particular a deliberated study of Mr Sampath. His dismal
prognostication of India absorbs Narayan with ease: the problem with
Narayan is that he is not 'political;' he is 'anti-historical;' the
'spirituality' of India, abundantly evident in Narayan's novel, will be its
undoing; as a writer Narayan 'succeeded almost too
well.'
Naipaul changes his views later about the performance and prospects
of India; he grows to be more optimistic about the future of the country
(India: A Million Mutinies Now, 1990). He doesn't, however, modify his
assessment of Narayan as a writer. In his obituary to Narayan in Time he
repeats the familiar charge: "He was not interested in Indian politics or
Indian problems….While the British ruled, Narayan never wrote about the
Independence movement….The high feelings of the Independence movement would
have been too radical for it [Malgudi]". The very caption of his Time
'Tribute' conveys his disdain: "Master of Small Things."12 
Now comes the Nobel address.


2

Naipaul's Nobel speech is, understandably, an intimate piece of writing; an
apologia. He opens with set simplicity, "This is unusual for me. I have
given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures
that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange
that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly 50
years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak."
He goes on to give no fewer than 5500 words. He digs into his
background steadily like a geologist prospecting for oil-bearing shale. The
Spanish; the pre-Columbian Indians (with feeling: 'unbearably affecting
story'); post-Spanish Indians; and his forebears, the East Indian
immigrants. He establishes his credentials as a writer of dispossession,
the author who went after 'the silence of the centuries.'
All this is predictable stuff for any Naipaul enthusiast.
Almost towards the end comes a revealing paragraph, "I have always
been moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I
have no guiding political idea. I think that probably lies with my
ancestry. The Indian writer R K Narayan, who died this year, had no
political idea. My father, who wrote his stories in a very dark time, and
for no reward, had no political idea. Perhaps it is because we have been
far from authority for many centuries. It gives us a special point of view.
I feel we are more inclined to see the humour and pity of things."
The innocuous passage of less than one hundred words carries one
serious implication: Narayan's a-politicality, his being non-political, is
not only explicable; but advantageous, a positive. Naipaul has accepted
Narayan, a father figure, as part of his background.13 
Naipaul has of course prepared the ground for it early in his speech.
He has quoted Proust with approval (somewhat like our dear dainty Nirad
Babu): that "a book is the product of a different self from the self we
manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices." This translates
in our context: Narayan the man who said naively, "India will go on," and
profoundly disturbed the youthful Naipaul in 1961 see An Area of
Darkness—should not be confused with Narayan the author of the novels.
And the Laureate goes on to root for intuition (the word and its
variants appear at least a dozen times in the speech) and inspiration; the
sacred; the mystery of creation of fiction; and more important, the role of
luck: and what I could not associate with Naipaul earlier, a new
valedictory humility—"when I am nearly at the end…I am near the end of my
work now." He talks of 'self-assessment, which is where learning begins.'
He recalls that "this shut-in and shutting-out life lingered for quite a
while…." He even concedes, "With my limited social background it was hard
for me imaginatively to enter into other societies or societies that were
far away… At every stage I could only work within my knowledge and
sensibility and talent and world-view."
What could have led to the turn-around on Narayan? Naipaul's own
nascent self-discovery led to a rediscovery of Narayan? Perhaps it was only
a matter of time before Naipaul's growing respect for the Indian experiment
led him to greater understanding of Narayan. Will he go forward and revise
his verdicts on the others, such as the Africans; and his own fellow
Caribbeans? Naipaul's visit to Stockholm was no iteration of routine
Royals.


3

Or did Naipaul realise the seminal enormity in his analysis of Mr Sampath?
For Naipaul had drawn his evidence in India: A Wounded Civilisation mainly
from Mr Sampath, the final novel of Narayan's early phase: and dropped into
a simplification of Procrustean proportions lasting almost a lifetime.
As he recalls it in India: A Wounded Civilisation, Naipaul had met
Narayan in 1961 and Narayan said to him, "India will go on." For Naipaul
this Indian author's conviction about India, fourteen years after
Independence, is like the conviction of Narayan's earliest novels, 'written
in the days of the British,' that India was going on: in the early novels —
from Swami and Friends to Mr Sampath — 'the British presence is only hinted
at.' Naipaul finds that the Indian writer contemplates 'the lesser life'
that goes on below, 'small men, small schemes, big talk, limited means.'
Narayan's comedy and irony are, according to him, part of a 'Hindu response
to the world.' Drawing generously and definitively from Mr Sampath, he
discovers that as Srinivas, the hero of Narayan's novel, Mr Sampath,
settles down in his new task in Malgudi, he sees, according to Naipaul on
his second visit to the novel, more and more clearly 'the perfection of
nondoing.' "Why really bother?" wonders Narayan's hero; his idle
speculations push him deeper into quietism. After his involvement with the
making of a film, Srinivas finally withdraws. He has returned to himself
and to his contemplative life. In the rush of eternity nothing mattered.
Within just two decades of Gandhi's first call, Gandhian nonviolence has
degenerated, as in Srinivas, into a means of securing an undisturbed calm:
'nondoing, noninterference, social indifference.' Back to Karma, that
means, 'the Hindu killer, the Hindu calm.' Srinivas's calm is, Naipaul
concludes, a religious response to worldly defeat.
Naipaul elegantly defends his original error in highly valuing Mr
Sampath: "Because we take to novels our own ideas of what we feel they must
offer, we often find, in unusual or original work, only what we expect to
find, and we reject or miss what we aren't looking for."
The irony here to me in retrospect is layered as a yuppie burger.
Still unsure of his reversed opinion, dismissing a major novel by a
major writer, Naipaul buttresses his analysis of the novel with untypical
syntax.

Now, reading Mr Sampath again in snatches on afternoons of rain
during this prolonged monsoon, which went on and on like the
Emergency itself—reading in Bombay, looking down at the choppy sea,
and the 1911 Imperial rhetoric of the British-built Gateway of
India that dwarfed the white-clad crowd; in suburban and secretive
New Delhi, looking out across the hotel's sodden tennis court to
the encampment of Sikh taxi-drivers below the dripping trees; on
the top veranda of the Circuit House in Kotah, considering the
garden, and seeing in mango tree and banana tree the originals of
the stylized vegetation in the miniatures done for Rajput princes,
their glory now extinguished, their great forts now abandoned and
empty, protecting nothing, their land now only a land of peasants;
in Bangalore in the south, a former British army town, looking
across the parade ground, now the polo ground, with Indian army
polo teams—reading during the Emergency, which was more than
political, I saw in Mr Sampath a foreshadowing of the tensions that
had to come to India philosophically prepared for defeat and
withdrawal (each man an island) rather than independence and
action, and torn now between the wish to preserve and be
psychologically secure, and the need to undo.

For a writer of fastidious simplicity, that is one poetic—and
defensive—period of over 200 words—perhaps a record of sorts for Naipaul.
Another sign that Narayan seems to have forced Vidia on to his
backfoot follows. Concluding his exposition of Mr Sampath, Naipaul is
astonished that he missed out so much when he had read it twenty years
earlier; which he discovers now: that Mr Sampath is not speculative and
comic, aimless and 'Russian': that the novel is an almost hermetic
philosophical system: a classic exposition of the Hindu equilibrium, a
fable. The novel makes it abundantly clear to him that Narayan's novels are
less the purely social comedies Naipaul had thought they were, than
'religious books, at times, religious fables, and intensely Hindu.'
Now Naipaul's choice of Mr Sampath is as astonishing as his analysis
of it; for the novel happens to be one of Narayan's masterpieces, the peak
of his early phase, a novel which, with its energy and humour — from
slapstick recalling the vigour of Fielding to subtle wit — probably
anticipated — as fiction has a way of auguring societal verve — India's own
zest for life to come later, its economic surge in the nineties which is no
longer derided as 'Hindu.'
What went wrong? One of the acute minds in modern literature, Naipaul
makes the simple error of identifying the hero of Mr Sampath totally with
the novelist.
Let us visit Mr Sampath. The novelist renders it amply — engagingly —
clear in the novel: Srinivas, the hero of Mr Sampath, is different from
his precursors in the early novels, from Swami and Friends to The English
Teacher. The novelist achieves this distancing in two ways. First, in the
domestic perspective of Narayan's early comedy Srinivas is shown to fall
short. Narayan has presented the family — the joint family, especially — in
the first four novels as an institution of tremendous value and appeal.
After our experience of The English Teacher in particular, among the novels
of Narayan's early comedy this hero's conduct of his family relationships
is irregular; he talks and behaves at times rather like the nauseous
husband in Narayan's 'feminist' third novel, The Dark Room.
To take an example. Srinivas, the hero of Mr Sampath, is engaged with
his characteristic earnestness in exploring a vexing philosophic question:
"Why really bother?" This is an attitude Naipaul identifies Narayan himself
with; let us see how attentive Naipaul's second visit is to the text before
him:

Awaiting the right sentence for his philosophy he had spent several
hours already; he must complete the article by the evening if he
was to avoid serious dislocation in the press.….He suddenly flung
out his arm and cried: "I have got it, just the right"— and turned
towards his table in a rush. He picked up his pen; the sentence was
shaping so very delicately; he felt he had to wait upon it
carefully, tenderly, lest it should elude him once again; it was
something like the very first moment when a face emerges on the
printing paper in the developing tray—something tender and fluid,
one had to be very careful if one were not to lose it for ever…He
poised his pen as if he were listening to some faint voice and
taking dictation. He held his breath, for fear that he might lose
the thread, and concentrated all his being on the sentence, when he
heard a terrific clatter up the stairs. He gnashed his teeth. "The
demons are always waiting around to create a disturbance; they are
terrified of any mental concentration." (31)14 

With due courtesy Naipaul would have noticed that the 'demons' turn
out to be Srinivas's own family, his loving wife and son; a timely reminder
to Narayan's hero of his temporal obligations on which he has defaulted;
and a cue to the reader, too, that Narayan moves nimbly away, beyond a
point, and allows the hero of this novel to undermine himself. The whole
scene nicely illustrates Narayan's ambivalence in Mr Sampath.
One may be preoccupied with the self, in search of self-knowledge,
Narayan seems to say; self-realisation may be a laudable objective and sole
aim in life; one is best moored, all the same, to one's family, human
relationships, one's society. Srinivas may believe at times in reclusive
existence; not his author. This practical wisdom — this earthy balance we
associate with the novelist himself — his hero realises through a series of
episodes in the fiction squaring up metaphysical speculation with the
reality of existence.
Srinivas himself laments his weakness early in the novel:

In 1938, when the papers were full of anticipation of a world war,
he wrote: "The Banner has nothing special to note about any war,
past or future. It is only concerned with the war which is always
going on—between man's inside and outside. Till the forces are
equalised the struggle will always go on." Reading it over a couple
of weeks later, Srinivas smiled to himself. There was a touch of
comicality in that bombast. It struck him as an odd mixture of the
sublime and the ridiculous…

That passage serves timely notice of a game, the second device, that
Narayan enjoys in Mr Sampath: puncturing solemnity and self-importance.
Srinivas wishes — twice in a short passage — that he could write all that
stuff here; this 'here' unfolds itself soon enough as part of this world,
harsh, stupid, comic, human. Srinivas is not aware of it; but even here he
is capable of grand flights: and Narayan hauls him down, promptly, subtly,
amusingly.
To illustrate again. Srinivas plans a grand format for his journal:
only to be told by his printer that all that his press can offer is but 12-
point in English—'a type that looks like the headings in a Government of
India Gazette (20).' And when his journal is finally printed, 'his heart
sank. It was nowhere near what he had imagined. He had hoped that it would
look like an auctioneer's list, but now he found that it looked like the
handbill of a wrestling tournament' (20). Srinivas's fancy is ever
admonished by reality. Srinivas's wife—unnamed — offers her husband— and
the reader— a corrective view of his journal: "That Banner was so dull!"
(96)
Let us take yet another example of Naipaul's 'select' episodes in Mr
Sampath in support of his thesis of Hindu withdrawal. He cites the
'brinjal' philosophy of the novel.
Srinivas is relaxing on his mat at home, having given himself a
holiday:

Mixed sounds reached him — his wife in the kitchen, his son's voice
far off, arguing with a friend, the clamour of assertions and
appeals at the water-tap, a pedlar woman crying "brinjals and
greens" in the street — all these sounds mingled and wove into each
other. Following each one to its root and source, one could trace
it to a human aspiration and outlook…What great human forces meet
and come to grips with each other between every sunrise and
sunset!" "…That's clearly too big, even for contemplation," he
remarked to himself "because it is in that total picture we
perceive God." (49-50)

Naipaul clips off his part-summary, part-quotation of the passage
here — too much 'big talk' has apparently got on his nerves — and he does
not find it necessary to take the passage the way the novelist does:

Nothing else in creation can ever assume such proportions and
diversity. This indeed ought to be religion.Alas, how I wish I
could convey a particle of this experience to my readers. There are
certain thoughts which are strangled by expression. If only people
could realize what immense schemes they are components of!...

That is as far as 'extravagant seriousness' can go; and Narayan lets
it build up because it is 'big talk.' The passage does not end there,
however; it concludes with the episode. Naipaul could have moved with the
tempo of the event to its logical conclusion, experiencing its formal
rhythm and realising its fictional purport:

At this moment he heard over everything else a woman's voice
saying: "I will kill that dirty dog if he comes near the tap
again."
"If you speak about my son's dog I will break your pot," another
voice cried. "Get away both—I've been here for half an hour for a
glass of water."


Immediately follows the novelist's own punch-line:

Now they formed to him a very different picture.

'A very different picture' is what matters in Mr Sampath; a very
different picture is what Naipaul could have got with a little more
patience, or rather, with a little less impatience. Nothing can be more
obvious of what the novelist feels about his hero: 'extravagant
seriousness.' Here we have an illustration actually of Narayan's tidy
punching of transcendental speculation with solid reality, a deflative act
that lands his hero with a soft thud.
Such passages are anything but 'aimless' in the dramatic context of
the novel; they are fully comic when set off against harsh reality.
Let us take yet another passage cited by Naipaul to highlight the hero's
philosophy of noninterference which he identifies as Narayan's own.
Srinivas decides not to disclose to his friend Sampath that the young
artist Ravi does not want to do a portrait of Sampath's child because he
does not feel inspired enough by the child's features.

"There's no sense in interfering in other people's lives…. For a
moment it seemed to him a futile and presumptuous occupation to
analyse, criticize and attempt to set things right anywhere…he
seized his pen and jotted down….he felt thrilled by the thought
that he stood on the threshold of some revolutionary discoveries in
the realm of human existence….

By now we have learned from our experience of Narayan's early comedy to
suspect anything revolutionary; the only exception is The English Teacher.
Here, in Mr Sampath, the narrative strategy is far more complex; what we
have is a highly pliable point of view: we totally identify the author with
Srinivas only at our peril. For all that is needed to put the passage in
harmony with the design of the fiction is for the reader — even an
enlightened one—to move a wee step further to the very next sentence: 'The
expected revolution in The Banner came in another way:' Srinivas's journal
collapses! And all because of Srinivas's own financial mismanagement.
Narayan's
tongue-in-cheek thrust in the crucial statement is characteristic, we are
familiar with it by now. No grandeur, please, but plain truth every time:
that could be a motto for Narayan's best work.
Even after Srinivas enters the film world, the narrative ploy comes
in handy. When his fancy catches fire, it is doused by a domestic
confrontation. His wife brings him face to face with himself. "And he
smiled weakly realising at once what a hopeless confusion his whole outlook
was. He could not define what he wanted."(96)
Srinivas's flaw could not have been confirmed more explicitly.
The frailty of human poise is predictable; not so its resilience. It
is distinctive of Narayan that his 'self-centred' hero of Mr Sampath ends
up finally tethered to the earth, this here and now, this world. Towards
the end, Srinivas takes the demented young artist out of the police
station; puts him in his own house; protects him with all he has; and lets
him go out of sight only on a short pilgrimage with his mother. Though his
own funds are meagre, he decides to support the poor man's family; takes
over the responsibility of the young man's grouchy father in their absence.
He gives up his share of ancestral property — Naipaul's 'limited means' —
to revive The Banner, his journal of social reform — which enjoys a good
track record— with support from an unlikely subscriber, the police
inspector of the town. For which he receives no thanks from Mr Naipaul;
such are, in Naipaul's dismissal, the 'small men, small schemes, big talk,
limited means.' A hero of such affirmative social action Naipaul accuses of
'nondoing and social indifference.'
'Tell the truth': for a writer who practised one single motto all his
life—Naipaul's disaffection for fictional detail in Narayan's novels is
baffling. Mr Sampath offers little evidence to support Naipaul's casual
claim that Srinivas's revived journal is no longer humorous. Narayan's
novels 'did not prepare me for the distress of India,' complains Naipaul in
the same discussion; the 'reality' of Narayan's early novels, laments
Naipaul, is a simplification of the reality of India, 'cruel and
overwhelming.' As I have shown in this journal a couple of years ago this
observation too has little basis in Narayan's fictional reality.15 
V.S.Naipaul's yorkers turn out to be no-balls.
Tailpiece:
"Would you agree with V.S.Naipaul that your novels are about 'small
men, small schemes, big talk, limited means' ?"
"I suppose so."16 

End Notes
1. Interview Outlook 15 November, 1999.
2. That Naipaul has: he said about the fatwa, 'Assassination is an
extreme form of literary criticism,'. See Suresh Menon's 'The Enigma of
Arriving,' The Indian Express 14 October 2001.
3. The New York Review of Books, September 1, 2002.
4. 'The Train Had Just Arrived at Malgudi Station' in John is Easy to
Please London, Secker & Warburg, 1971.
5. The Hindustan Times, Dec 9, 1973.
6. Narayan, R.K.: My Days London, Chatto & Windus 1975, p149
7. The Bachelor of Arts, Indian Thought Publications, Mysore, 1965,
repr. 1985, p 132
8. My Days 182.
9. John Updike: 'R.K.Narayan : A Writer Immersed in his Material' Span
(USIS) Vol. XVI, Number 4, April 1975 reprinted from The New Yorker
September 2, 1974.
10. Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents, New York,
Houghton Mifflin, 1998; Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia's Shadow, p349.
11. The Asian Age, 22 September 2002.
12. Anthony Spaeth, the editor of Time Asia and an admirer of the late
Indian novelist, had commissioned the piece.
13. Incidentally, compare Naipaul's Nobel statement on Narayan and
'politics' with what Chekhov said in a famous letter: he did not belong
to any movement or see himself as a social activist: "I would like to be
a free artist—and nothing else . . ." Letter to Alexei Pleshcheyev,
October 4, 1888; Online: http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/ : Nebraska
Centre for Writers; accessed on 11 May 2003
14. All quotes from Mr Sampath are from the Indian Thought edition, 1956,
repr.1985
15. Indian Literature No 203, May-June 2001
16. Interview: 'A Writer's Trials', Sunday, Calcutta, 3-9 January 1988.
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