An even later reflection...

The “Seepersad & Sons: Naipaulian Creative Synergies” conference was held at the UWI St. Augustine’s Open Campus from October 28^th to 30^th, 2015 and although my plan was to attend the opening sessions on the 28^th and all those scheduled for the 29^th, this was not to be. I made it to the final session on the 30^th and caught the following three presentations in Session 6: “The Naipauls’ Karma” by Ms. Fariza Mohammed, “Spaces Created by A Way in the World” by Mr. Varistha Persad, and “Sex and the Naipaul Brothers” by Ms. Meghorn Cleghorn.

It was something of a relief to discover that a number of the presenters had explicitly articulated their topics around various theoretical frameworks that were familiar to me. In the paper “Spaces Created by A Way in the World”, Mr. Persad applies techniques of postmodern criticism to his examination of the V. S. Naipaul novel, and goes to on explore Naipaul’s treatment of real, imagined and re-imagined spaces in the novel through the lens of geocriticism, a term/theory that was new to me. In “On Literary Cartography: Narrative as a Spatially Symbolic Act”, Robert T. Tally defines geocriticism thus:

An approach to narrative as a spatially symbolic act [that] enables us to navigate literature and the world in interesting new ways, by asking different questions, exploring different territories, and discovering different effects. As writers map their worlds, so readers or critics may engage with these narrative maps in order to orient ourselves and make sense of things in a changing world (Tally).

In “Sex and the Naipaul Brothers”, Meghorn Cleghorn finds in the works of V.S. and Shiva Naipaul a critique of the postcolonial Caribbean with regard to the existence of perverse sexuality in the Hindu community, with a focus on sado-masochism and incest, while “The Naipauls’ Karma” by Fariza Mohammed examines the concept of karma as represented in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies. Mohammed touches upon a number of significant issues in postcolonial criticism. The paper explores the tensions between karma which may be interpreted as simply fate, and which cripples many in the postcolonial Hindu community with passive resignation and lack of responsibility for one’s life, versus karma that encompasses responsibility for one’s fate in the sense that good actions will bring rewards and negative actions will be punished—the emphasis being on taking intentional action. According to this presenter, the main characters' rejection of metanarratives and focus on the “mininarratives” of agency within the contexts of the novels is an apparent embrace of a postmodern ethos on the part of the Naipauls.

I have been deeply suspicious of “theory” with respect to literary works, but found the exploration of cultural and critical theory in the LITS 6007 course and in the conference presentations  I attended to be surprisingly enjoyable and stimulating. Theory addresses the pressing concerns of thinking humanity as we seek to make sense of ourselves and the world, and I look forward to furthering my knowledge in this field, moreso since I am in the process of discovering new (to me) and intriguing approaches to literary criticism such as ecocriticism, ecofeminism and geocriticism, approaches which appear to merge the things about which I am passionate—literature, philosophy, ecology and women’s issues.