V. S. Naipaul and the Political Correctness Debate
GRAHAM HUGGAN
Huggan teaches postcolonial literatures in the English department at
Harvard University. He is the author of Territorial Disputes: Maps and
Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction (Toronto
1994 ), and of numerous articles on post-colonial literatures and literary
theory. He is currently working on a book on contemporary travel writing.
Last year, an Indian student of mine, working at the time on a
thesis on V. S. Naipaul, and exasperated at the lack of help she was getting
from friends, suggested to me a new logo for her college sweatshirt. The logo
changes every year, she said. This year's model? "P.C.-ness envy."
P.C.ness envy, she complained, is sweeping the campus. Its symptoms include a
preference for black clothes; a predilection for earnest conversation at
fashionable coffee-shops; and a desire, above all, to speak about oppression
without speaking for the oppressed. Certain writers, like Naipaul, are best not
spoken about at all; and if they are spoken about, then it is in terms of
stunned disbelief (Naipaul!!) or thinly disguised contempt (Naipaul!!). Some
students, she said, were not impressed that I was teaching Naipaul; after all,
Naipaul is so politically incorrect.
It's difficult to know how to respond to
the knee-jerk reactions on either side of the so-called "P.C.
debate"; impossible, however, to ignore them. 1 Paul Berman, in his entertaining introduction to a collection of essays about the "P.C. controversy" on American college campuses, compares his position to that of Stendhal's Fabrice, bewildered on the plains of Waterloo:
debate"; impossible, however, to ignore them. 1 Paul Berman, in his entertaining introduction to a collection of essays about the "P.C. controversy" on American college campuses, compares his position to that of Stendhal's Fabrice, bewildered on the plains of Waterloo:
A murky fog hangs over the field. Now and
then a line of soldiers marches past. Who the they?
Which army do they represent? They may be Belgian deconstructionists from Yale, or . . . the
followers of Lionel Trilling in exile from Columbia. Perhaps they are French mercenaries. It is impossible to tell. The fog thickens. Shots go off. The debate is unintelligible. But it is noisy! (6)
Which army do they represent? They may be Belgian deconstructionists from Yale, or . . . the
followers of Lionel Trilling in exile from Columbia. Perhaps they are French mercenaries. It is impossible to tell. The fog thickens. Shots go off. The debate is unintelligible. But it is noisy! (6)
As teachers of postcolonial literatures, we
are also in the thick of it, like it or not. Most of us wish
-End of p 200-
to engage in the battle. Some of us, like
Fabrice, might prefer to escape from it. But all of us are involved. How are we
to set about teaching postcolonial literatures in this atmosphere of attrition:
in a climate in which academic debate frequently degenerates into an exchange
of angry accusations, into vituperative dialogues of the deaf?
Berman suggests, rightly I think, that the
best response to the crisis in the universities is to bring it into the
classroom: to make a study of the debate itself. 2 Edward Said, in an essay in
Berman's collection, makes the further suggestion that it matters less whom we
teach than how we teach. To enter into the "P.C. debate" is thus, in
part, to raise the issue of pedagogic authority, to challenge the notion of
literary pedagogy as providing, "via the student's dialogue with the
literary text, [the] means for a career of corrective self-formation conducted
in relation to the values invested in the teacher as an ethical exemplar"
(Bennett 271). Ironically, the "P.C. debate" has tended to accentuate
this traditional pedagogic role even as it sets out to deconstruct it. The complacency
of the right has been matched, at times, by the self-righteousness of the left.
There is a short, if crucial, step between coming clean about one's own
political views and imposing those views upon one's students.
Educational theorists such as Henry Giroux
believe that they have found a way out of the dilemma. In his recent book Border
Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (1992), Giroux
argues for a "border pedagogy of postmodern resistance." Border
pedagogy, says Giroux, must provide "the conditions for students to engage
in cultural remapping as a form of resistance. Students should be given the
opportunity to engage in systematic analyses of the ways in which the dominant
culture creates borders saturated in terror, inequality, and forced
exclusions" (33). Border pedagogy, says Giroux, enjoins students and
teachers alike to rethink the relations between centers and margins of power.
It "rejects . . . the conservative argument that collapses democracy into
the logic of the market or buttresses the ideology of cultural uniformity, but
[it] also rejects leftist versions of an identity politics that excludes the
Other as part of a reductive discourse of assertion and separatism" (135).
This sounds fine, but how does it work? Giroux supplies little practical
advice, few examples of how border pedagogy might translate into effective
classroom teaching. His argument founders on his inability to confront the
contradictions inherent in any form of oppositional pedagogy: how is the
"critical educator" (to use Giroux's phrase) to urge his/her students
to resist established authority without reinscribing an authority of his/her
own?
One of the main problems here, of course,
is the notion of resistance itself: a notion that, although undeniably central
to the study and teaching of postcolonial literatures, has been used loosely at
times to support totalizing theories of counter-hegemonic and/or
counter-discursive writing. The comparative treatment of postcolonial
literatures lends itself all too easily to abstract generalizations. These
generalizations are granted a spurious legitimacy by being inserted within
all-encompassing theories (Jameson's being the most egregious example) that
assert the oppositionality of postcolonial writing while incorporating it,
ironically, within metropolitan frames of reference. 3 Recent attacks on
postcolonial methodologies have emphasized their Eurocentric tendencies: their
reliance on "import theory" and on "mainstream" readerly
expectation. Postcolonial critics are aware, of course, that their work is
implicated in the hegemonies they seek to criticize; but these hegemonies are
not always as clearly identified, or as nuanced, as they might be. In its
preference for the underdog--its privileged romanticization of the marginal--postcolonial
criticism runs the risk of becoming a prisoner of its own oppositional
thinking. A similar point might be made for oppositional postcolonial pedagogy.
If one of the imperatives of postcolonialism is its "dismantling of
traditional institutions of colonial power" (Spurr 6), and if the colonial
education system is recognized as being one of those institutions, then
postcolonial thought might be seen as engaging radical educational
alternatives. The problem here, again, is the opposition between the
"traditional" and the "radical." At one level, postcolonial
pedagogy raises the issue of the instrumentality of "tradition." (Are
"traditions" inherited, or are they invented? Whose
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purposes do they serve? What is the status
of the "English literary tradition" as a selfprivileging
institutional phenomenon?) At another, however, it sets up
"tradition" as a stable target for its "radical"
interventions. These contradictions are embedded within its critical approach
to the colonial education system. For while colonial education certainly played
its part in upholding the "traditional" values of the Mother Country,
its aims were hardly uniform, nor its philosophy coherent. The colonial
education system (and the legacy it left) was by no means monolithic--its
hierarchies were structured differently across the various colonized countries.
The problem with so much postcolonial criticism is its obvious lack of
specificity. To conscript postcolonial writing automatically into the service
of an oppositional pedagogy is to beg the question of what, precisely, is being
opposed; and when; and where; and for what reasons.
In the case of a writer such as Naipaul,
the issue is blurred still further by an almost inbuilt critical hostility.
Naipaul has been accused of snobbery, of arrogance, of insensitivity. His
writing has been scanned for evidence of his reactionary political leanings.
Contained within much of the criticism is the view that Naipaul supports
colonial violence, and that he draws on his Western-style education as a means
of exporting cultural prejudice. This view has the benefit of unmasking
Naipaul's pretension to detachment, and of revealing him instead as a highly
interested, not to mention privileged, First World observer. 4 It overlooks,
however, the specific instances of oppositionality in Naipaul's work: it denies
his attack, for one, on the education system of his native Trinidad.
Naipaul's work is concerned, to the point
of obsession, with the subject of education. His own education in Trinidad in
the thirties and forties--charted semi-autobiographically through the figure of
Anand in his best-known novel, A House for Mr. Biswas--seems to have
been as unhappy as it was successful. Although he was obviously gifted, winning
scholarships to Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain and eventually to
Oxford, Naipaul felt tied down by a system that blunted his sensibilities at
the same time as it secured his social advancement. Education, in colonial
Trinidad, was conspicuously elitist: in pushing bright students such as Naipaul
to the top, it also alienated them from their colleagues (Hassan 60-64). 5
Naipaul's early works, in particular (The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, A
House for Mr. Biswas), are vigorous satires on an education system that reinforces
existing class hierarchies, and in which education confers prestige and
privilege upon its recipients only to distance them further from their native
society. Education, in Naipaul's work, is a powerful tool with which to
reconfirm preconceived attitudes and ideas. It provides a means by which
colonial societies such as Trinidad's are made to defer to the authority of
their metropolitan overlords: to consent, in Albert Wendt's words, to their own
abasement. Education plays a vital role in the production of the colonial
subject. By foisting inappropriate role-models onto its subjects, by forming
rather than informing them, to cite the ironic distinction made in Naipaul's
first novel, The Mystic Masseur ( 1957 ), the colonial education system encourages
West Indians to see themselves as "mimic men": "pretending to be
real in a society where no power [is] real that [does] not come from the
outside" (246). The Trinidad of Naipaul's early novels is a manufactured
society, a society fabricated, in part, by other people's fictions. (Naipaul
practises what he preaches here: episodes such as Ganesh's introduction to the
headmaster in The Mystic Masseur, or W. C. Tuttle's exhortations to his
congregation of "readers and learners" in A House for Mr. Biswas,
come straight out of Dickens.)
What room is there in a colonial society
like Trinidad's, however rapid its change from a feudal to a capitalist
economy, for an oppositional pedagogy? Does Naipaul's fiction acquiesce to the
conditions it describes, or does it resist them? Does it learn to speak out, or
does it teach itself to sit and listen? Conservative European critics, says
Helen Tiffin, have contrived to read Naipaul's writing as "an obedient
response to colonial interpellation." It is possible instead, she insists,
to read it "for the subversive strategies it contains" (45).
Incidentally, it is not just conservative critics who have seen Naipaul as
kowtowing to the West, nor just Europeans. In a memorable broadside
-202-
against Naipaul in the journal Salmagundi,
Edward Said, for example, has this to say: "[ Naipaul] has allowed himself
quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution.
There are others like him who specialize in the thesis of . . . selfinflicted
wounds, which is to say that non-Whites are the cause of all our problems [in
the Third World], not the overly maligned imperialists" (53).
Setting the polemic aside for a moment, I
would like to pick out one particular example for analysis here: the short
story "Man-man," in Naipaul's second and, I think, underrated book
Miguel Street (1959). "Everybody in Miguel Street said that Man-man was
mad," the story opens, "and so they left him alone. But I am not so
sure now that he was mad, and I can think of people much madder than Man-man
ever was" (31). We are thus asked, immediately, to reflect upon our own
criteria for madness: to question not only the norms that Miguel Street imposes
upon its heterogeneous, if circumscribed, community, but also those that are
imposed upon Miguel Street from without. Who decides? A key question in
Naipaul's work, as in so much postcolonial writing. One day the narrator meets
Man-man at the corner of Miguel Street:
"Boy, where you going?" Man-man
asked.
"I going to school," I said.
And Man-man, looking at me solemnly, said
in a mocking way, "So you goes to school, eh?"
I said automatically, "Yes, I goes to
school." And I found that without intending it I had imitated Man-man's
correct and very English accent. That again was another mystery about Man-man.
His accent. If you shut your eyes while he spoke, you would believe an
Englishman--a good-class Englishman who wasn't particular about grammar--was
talking to you. Man-man said, as though speaking to himself, "So the
little man is going to school."
Then he forgot me, and took out a long
stick of chalk from his pocket and began writing on the pavement. He drew a
very big S in outline and then filled it in, and then the C and the H and the
O. But then he started making several O's, each smaller than the last, until he
was writing in cursive, O after flowing O. (32)
Man-man, like Friday in J. M. Coetzee's Foe,
implicitly negates the schooling he has received, a schooling that privileges
writing and the "superior" achievements of literate cultures.
Man-man's meticulous script, like his "genuine" English accent,
betrays a spu-rious authority. In resorting to mimicry and meaningless
repetition, Man-man is not reconfirming his dependence upon his colonial
educators; he is signaling his disengagement from them. By piquing the
narrator's curiosity--by making him think without telling him what to
think--Man-man effectively subverts "standard" pedagogic practice.
Through his "mysterious" English accent and "crazy"
riddles, Man-man indirectly reveals to the narrator the process of his own
interpellation as a colonial subject. Manman's power to oppose the system
within which he is implicated--the system that forms if not informs him--is
limited, however. In a characteristically Naipaulian twist, he is reminded
painfully at the end of the story that his "lessons" have fallen
largely on deaf ears. (The prophet asks to be stoned; the prophet is stoned. In
Earl Lovelace's novel The Dragon Can't Dance, he is stoned again,
showing that Lovelace, unlike some of Naipaul's critics, has understood the
ironies of apparent acquiescence.)
Man-man's skills as a "critical
educator" are mostly lost on the narrator. The failed pedagogue turns
failed prophet, reinforcing the pattern of defeat and frustrated communication
that runs throughout the collection--a familiar Naipaulian scenario. But
"Man-man," like the other stories in Miguel Street, is more
than just another study in futility, more than just another illustration of
Naipaul's notorious dictum that "nothing has ever been created in the West
Indies, and nothing will ever be created" (Middle Passage12). Man-man's
rejection of his schooling, and his demonstration of that rejection to the
narrator, may not achieve very much, but they allow us to see the gulf that
separates the imported wisdoms of colonial education from the survival skills needed
for everyday life. Elsewhere in the stories, formal education serves primarily
as an instrument of deception, or as a means of acquiring status and/or wealth.
Above all,
-203-
however, education provides an opportunity
for imagined escape. The narrator eventually leaves Trinidad to go to London
and study pharmacy. A government scholarship to study drugs: the narrator's
further education holds out the promise of further hallucination. There seems
to be no escape from the cycle of fraudulence and (self-)deception. But it
would be a mistake, nonetheless, to see the assorted tricksters and charlatans
of Miguel Street as out-and-out failures. They may be frauds, but their
fraudulence sometimes wins them Pyrrhic victories. It also calls into question
the status of the "genuine" in their manufactured society. Critical
attempts to celebrate Miguel Street as an "authentic" Trinidadian
community are thus rendered hollow, for if Miguel Street is
"authentic" at all, its authenticity resides precisely in its capacity
for fraudulence. Miguel Street teaches its inhabitants to live on their wits,
to exchange one expedient role for another, to distrust--or perhaps better, to
exploit to their own ends--the traditional notion of education as a corrective
process mediated by teachers whose experience and breadth of knowledge mark
them out, in Bennett's words, as "ethical exemplars." The
street-wisdom of Miguel Street is shallow and self-serving, but it is no less
"genuine," and in some ways a great deal more useful, than the
education that the narrator receives: an education that teaches him to see his
country as inferior, that urges him to strive for universal values that
transcend the narrow confines of the local, and that does not prepare him to
live and participate in his native society, but wills him instead to escape
from it. For "universal values" here, read "European":
Man-man knows that, but not, it seems, Robert Hamner, who with unwitting irony
calls Naipaul "a supranational author with concepts and principles which
place him well within the mainstream of contemporary Western thought and
literary expression" (3). 6
Coming back now to the issue of
"P.C."--more specifically to its two countervailing myths, the
assertion of transcendence and the search for authenticity--I would like to
juxtapose two passages from Naipaul's critics. The first is from Hamner again,
the second from the Marxist critic Selwyn Cudjoe. "In moving progressively
away from nationalism, regionalism, and in the strictest sense all but the most
universal of causes," says Hamner, Naipaul"offers . . . what the
widest-ranging among his readers might well consider a greater contribution to
his homeland than is possible from the most devoted patriot" (158).
Hamner's rhetoric of transcendent universalism should be only too familiar to
postcolonial critics; but so, too, should Cudjoe's rhetoric of native
authenticity: "The further Naipaul gets from his society,"Cudjoe
complains of Naipaul's later novels, "the less genuine his relationship to
his society becomes, the weaker his work becomes, and the less perceptive he is
as an observer of postcolonial reality" (209). 7
As a response to Hamner and Cudjoe, I would
like to interpose a third passage, this time from Homi Bhabha. Bhabha is
referring here to colonial literature, but his comments seem applicable to
postcolonial writing too:
The debate between the Universalist and
Nationalist critics which constitutes the major controversy around the question
of colonial literature is fought essentially on the same aesthetic ground. Both
are representationalist theories [that] share a problematic form within which
these questions are posed. It is a predominantly mimetic view of the relation
between the text and a given pre-constituted reality . . . The text [in this view]
is not seen as productive of meaning but [as] essentially reflective or
expressive. (99-100)
Bhabha's words should remind us that the
"reality" represented by Naipaul's fiction is necessarily
mediated--that universality and authenticity are necessarily manufactured
categories. This, again, is nothing new to postcolonial critics; yet amid the
hurly-burly of the "P.C. movement"--the clash of ideological armies
into which I have propelled, unfairly no doubt, the likes of Robert Hamner and
Selwyn Cudjoe--such critical commonplaces are sometimes forgotten: categorical
imperatives are passed off, in the heat of the moment, as self-evident truths.
If we are to value ourselves as critical educators-as purveyors of a pedagogy
of resistance--then we must take care not to set ourselves up, in turn, as
ethical exemplars: inviting our students to engage in the battle is one
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Publication Information: Article Title: V. S. Naipaul and the Political Correctness Debate. Contributors: Graham Huggan - author. Journal Title: College Literature. Volume: 21. Issue: 3. Publication Year: 1994. Page Number: 205.
Publication Information: Article Title: V. S. Naipaul and the Political Correctness Debate. Contributors: Graham Huggan - author. Journal Title: College Literature. Volume: 21. Issue: 3. Publication Year: 1994. Page Number: 205.
Doomed to Smallness: Violence, V. S. Naipaul, and the
Global South.
by Pablo Mukherjee
ABSTRACT
This article traces the cultural authority
of V S. Naipaul's essays and travel writing to his use of violence to
represent and analyse the condition of the Global South. In this Naipaul may
appear to be drawing on the works of other social scientists and theorists of
decolonization /neocolonialism, but in reality he sharply veers away from
these. Instead, Naipaul uses violence to promote a homogenizing and
exclusivist vision of the Global South, so that it appears at once to be
irreducibly distant and essentially different from what, according to him, is
the core of human civilization. This faux-historicism is accorded substantial
cultural authority since it is a crucial component in the triumphalist
narratives of late capitalism and the 'new world order'.
Why Naipaul? Why now? These are more than
facetious questions, given the reams already devoted to heated debates and
analyses of the myriad aspects of the Naipaul canon. The Naipaul industry has
been in especially ruddy health since the writer won the Nobel Prize in 2001.
But there seem to be some good reasons at present to trace the development of
Naipaul's representation and analysis of global violence, in particular in
his non-fiction.
First, there is the writer's own
(renewed) claims to pertinence and relevance within a global situation marked
by endemic violence. During a BBC Radio programme in 2004, after the
publication of his latest novel The Magic Seeds, Naipaul ruefully
remarked that he had been speaking of the 'Muslim Rage' a couple of decades
ago and had 'got very little thanks for it'. The events that unfolded on and
after 11 September 2001 do not appear to be in any way surprising to Naipaul.
Rather, he sees these as part of endemic global violence that developed over
the past two or three decades and is 'Islamic' in character. It should now be
amply clear that the rumours about the 'end of history' and 'new world order'
that were circulated around the time of the collapse of the Soviet bloc in
1989 were, to say the least, premature. Indeed, the decade and a half since
the initiation of this 'new order' may instead be seen as the era when the
'cold' war turned 'hot', with four major US-led wars (Iraq, Kosovo,
Afghanistan, Iraq again) and the concomitant saturation of the global
environment with the violence of the so-called 'war against terror'. Clearly,
a rigorous analysis of contemporary violence is urgently required. But given
that Naipaul's analysis of this violence is in fact the dominant one in the
Atlanticist world (that is, the US and its allies in Western Europe), tracing
its genesis and blind spots is also, to say the least, pertinent.
Secondly, while the heritage of criticism
of Naipaul's fiction is abundant and venerable, analysis of his non-fiction
is relatively recent and mostly concentrated on his longer travel narratives.
(1) In one of the first and most important studies of this aspect of the
Naipaul oeuvre, Rob Nixon suggests that it is in his nonfiction that 'we
encounter his most direct, obsessive, elaborate, and politically charged
accounts of his understanding of the postcolonial world'. (2) Naipaul himself
has commented that while fiction took him a lot of the way, travelling and
writing about travelling took him further. (3) Nixon also notes the
discrepancy between the unusual reach and cultural authority of Naipaul's
non-fiction and what he calls the 'shallowness of its academic treatment'.
(4) As the works listed in note one below show, the past decade has seen
concerted critical efforts to address that lack. This essay sees itself as a
part of those continuing efforts.
Finally, the questions raised by Nixon
about the mode through which Naipaul's cultural authority as an 'expert' in
post-colonial affairs has been secured is, it seems to me, still relevant:
First, given his standard evocations of
the former colonies as 'barbarous', 'primitive', 'tribal' [...] how does his
choice of idiom make his readings of such societies easily assimilable to
imperialist discursive traditions that run deep in Britain and the United
States? Second, how has he managed to reproduce the most standard racial and
colonial positions while simultaneously presenting himself as a risk taker,
someone who swims against the prevailing ideological currents out of fidelity
to difficult and unpopular truths? In other words, how has Naipaul acquired a
reputation as an unconventional, extratraditional writer while producing an
oeuvre suffused with received notions about the barbarism and dishonesty of
Islam, cannibalism in Africa, the simple-minded irrationality of Indians, the
self-destructiveness of Black Power, and the inability of the Caribbean and
India to generate real history? (5)
A host of mutually exclusive and hostile
ethical, cultural, and aesthetic meanings have been assigned to Naipaul's
work. But how can a writer be understood so differently by different readers
and critics, and his work located on different sides of ideological and
material divisions? This essay submits that this question is answered by
looking at Naipaul's simultaneous engagement and hostility to a number of contradictory
cultural, analytical, and ideological positions, and that this is clearly
illustrated in his use of the idiom of violence. If he is said to be, at one
and the same time, both the truthful chronicler of the despair and rebellions
of the so-called Third World and the purveyor of malicious myths and
misrepresentations about it, this is because of his simultaneous alignment
with and hostility to the people and conditions there. There is an abundance
of powerful African, Indian, and Latin American writings that chronicle the
corruption, decay, and destruction of these societies after their formal
independence from colonialism. Naipaul echoes these chronicles, thus claiming
the role of an authentic recorder and transmitter of a global despair. On the
other hand, the majority of the writings and writers of the Global South
explain the violence and destruction that are their lived conditions in terms
of colonialism, the political defeats of socialism in these countries, and
the ongoing war waged by neocolonial powers and globalized capital against
them. This explanation and analysis is intolerable to Naipaul and he refuses
to engage with it. Naipaul is hostile to these nationalist, internationalist,
systemic, and historicist analyses. Even as he chooses to accept and amplify
the vision of Global Southern despair, he chooses to abandon and disregard
any meaningful Global Southern analysis of it. Thus he can routinely claim to
be simultaneously representing and misrepresenting the wretched of the earth
and the conditions of their wretchedness.
This paper, then, will begin by sketching
an outline of some of the critical debate about Naipaul; it will trace
Naipaul's development of violence as both symptomatic of, and an analytical
tool for, his understanding of the woes of the Global South in a series of
essays written during the 1960s and 1970s; it will show how Naipaul transfers
the idiom of violence to an 'Islamic' context around the early 1980s;
finally, it will run Naipaul's analysis of violence against competing
interpretations to suggest that the blind spots embedded in it are a result
of his decision to accept certain essentialist, anti-historicist, not to say
fundamentalist ideas about Western 'civilization'.
Temperatures rise when Naipaul is around.
Take this press report about a conference in 2001 in Rajasthan, India.
Passions were aroused after Naipaul, on a post-Nobel-prize-winning tour,
interrupted the novelist Nayantara Sehgal during her talk 'Shared Histories:
Issues of Colonialism and Relationship with the Past', exclaiming 'Why do you
keep drumming up the issue of colonialism?'. He went on to say that India had
been independent for fifty years and should stop harping on about the past,
adding, 'Banality irritates me. Life is too short'. Understandably, this led
to a verbal duel, with various writers joining in and the moderator, the
writer Amitav Ghosh, being forced to adjourn the session. (6)
This cantankerous exchange is hardly a
recent phenomenon. In 1986 Edward Said's comments in a discussion on
'Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World' ignited a famous and furious row
amongst his co-panelists. Contrasting the early Rushdie with Naipaul, Said
suggested:
The most attractive and immoral move,
however, has been Naipaul's, who has allowed himself quite consciously to be
turned into a witness for the western prosecution [...] what is seen as
crucially informative and telling about their (Naipaul and writers of his
ilk) work [...] is precisely what is weakest about it [...] the cheapest and
the easiest of colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies, myths that even
Lord Cromer and Forster's Turtons and Burtons would have been embarrassed to
trade in outside their private clubs. (7)
John Lukacs and Conor Cruise O'Brien took
strong exception to this. Against Said's suggestion that Naipaul recycles the
worst racist myths of empire, they contended that unlike most other
ex-colonial intellectuals, Naipaul was not concerned with injustices but
truth; and that if intellectuals failed to point out the true nature of the
tyrannies and dictatorship of the 'Third World', they were in breach of their
responsibilities. (8) In these heated exchanges the patterns of the Naipaul
debates become clear: there he is, on the one hand, playing Cassandra to the
doomed states of the Global South, dishing out unpalatable truths to people
who want to evade their responsibilities by blaming the past. On the other
hand, he has also been seen as the arch-compradore intellectual, writing, as
Said puts it, 'to the Western liberal who wants very much to be reassured
that after '"we" left [...] things got worse. To flatter a
prejudice is not "simply" to tell the truth'. (9)
These altercations have been recently
quickened by Naipaul's enshrinement in the Nobel pantheon. There is no doubt
that the admirers and defenders of Naipaul's work have seen the accolade as
the confirmation of what they have always known--the value and integrity of
the writer's unflinching gaze at truth. A particularly energetic intervention
has been made by Dagmar Barnouw. For Barnouw,
Critical readings of Naipaul's work have
generally been divided into two groups: a strongly focused postcolonialist
critique of his indebtedness to western cultural values that does not deal
with the textual complexity, and literary studies of his fictional and
non-fictional texts that do not deal with representational complexity, the
text's connectedness to social and political realities. (10)
It is to clear this thicket of critical
misreadings that Barnouw wades in with her critical scythe. Particular ire is
reserved for post-colonial critics who, according to her, are blinded by
their rigidly ideological vision, and have not only failed to read Naipaul
with the requisite degree of sophistication, but also used their cabalistic hegemony
in US Humanities departments to keep him off the university syllabuses. In
contrast, Barnouw herself finds these virtues in Naipaul: that he has
insisted on a historically situated, differentiating historiography of
colonialism; that he affirms the Enlightenment achievements of secularism and
a modern, complex, and mobile social intelligence; that he is appalled by
Third World desolation because 'out of his own experience he can imagine them
fully'; that he is accessible to the 'common reader,' and this provokes the
snobs who populate academe; that unlike cosmopolitan intellectuals he does
not construct the 'late-twentieth century shibboleth, the "other"',
but is interested in questioning 'otherness' itself; that he advocates
intelligent endeavour and the capacity for transformation in the victims of
imperialism, and not an unquestioning support for them; and that he can see
the problems as well as the benefits of European colonialism (pp. 1-51).
Much of Barnouw's work, it seems to me,
is marred by contradictory evidence and caricatured exaggerations, and these
are telling because they outline certain strategies in the culture wars over
Naipaul. Barnouw praises Naipaul's mobile, non-aligned, inquiline movement
between civilizations, and at the same time approvingly quotes another
critic:
As Boyers puts it sensibly: 'there is
something grotesque about demanding of a world-class writer that he hew to a
party line or an ethnic perspective. He's been very frankly associated with
western values and he's used that perspective to criticize what's happening
in the Third world.' (p. 110)
Leaving aside the profoundly
undifferentiated and dehistoricized notion of 'western values' for the
moment, in what way is Naipaul's 'frank' association with these values not already
a 'party line'? Similarly, Barnouw repeatedly contrasts Naipaul's
historicized consciousness to the ideological blindness of post-colonialists,
and then describes Among the Believers as his first exploration of Islamic
fundamentalism in Iran--'the explosive clash between religious and political
traditionalism and technocratic progressivism' (p. 54). It takes a quite
staggering amount of counterfactual wilfulness to portray the Shah's Iran as
technocratic or progressive, especially after the valuable studies of Iranian
revolution by historians such as Roy Mottadeah. (11) Barnouw then writes of
Pakistan that 'what by Western standards is considered corruption has been
common practice in Pakistan since the inception of the Muslim state' (p. 75).
Any intellectual value this sentence may have had is lost by Barnouw's
failure to tell us that what is, by 'Western' standards, corruption was in
fact common and institutionalized practice in the 'West' long before Pakistan
came into being, thereby making redundant any comparative perspective that
can be employed in a commentary on the Islamic state. When Barnouw attacks
the migrant postcolonial intellectual for silencing the 'others' in their
very act of representing them, she prefers to forget that she has just done
the same, when she, as a senior US academic, has purported to speak for the
'common reader'. As the earlier sample of 'non-academic' reportage from the
Indian media shows, the 'common readers' have scarcely been united in their
admiration for Naipaul's work.
In truth, Barnouw's reduction of
Naipaul's academic critics into intellectually stunted post-colonials and
dehistoricized 'literary' readers is not a little simplistic. When the Indian
historian Shahid Amin analyses Naipaul's construction of the Muslim to show
how his is a search for ahistorical sacredness and not historical
understanding, this is not a 'post-colonial' position. When Akash Kapur shows
how, in his idea of a primordial Indian national identity that must be
reclaimed from the obscurity of Muslim rule, Naipaul exhibits structural
kinship with Hindu fundamentalism, he is far from a dehistoricized critic.
The critic and writer Amitava Kumar would surely kindle Barnouw's wrath as a
migrant 'Third World' intellectual working in the US, but his reading of
Naipaul is politically and materially situated:
In his thinking, it is liberalism and not
the destruction of the welfare-state that needs to be blamed for many of the
ills of the society in which he finds himself a reluctant citizen. This is
wrong thinking, but it also involves, on Naipaul's part, a kind of amnesia.
(12)
The reasons I think Barnouw's book is a
good representive of the Naipaul debate is because it outlines both the
current critical positions on Naipaul and their various pitfalls. These have
formed and hardened within the context of an endemic global violence that has
been frameworked by the theses of 'clash of civilizations' and 'culture
wars'. I want, therefore, to see whether turning to the representation and
analyses of violence in Naipaul's essays helps in a proper appreciation of
his vision.
Violence and violation have always been
crucial to Naipaul's experience and representation of the Global South, be it
the Indian subcontinent, Africa, the Caribbean islands, Latin America, or
South-East Asia. The opening exchanges in his essay 'Jamshed into Jimmy'
(1963) is typical Naipaul:
'You've come to Calcutta at the wrong
time', the publisher said. 'I very much fear that the dear old city is
slipping into bourgeois respectability almost without a fight'.
'Didn't they burn a tram the other day?'
I asked.
'True. But that was the first tram for
five years'. (WW, p. 5)
Naipaul would later talk about how the
dereliction and 'many layers of wretchedness' of India had caught him
unprepared (LO, p. 21). But violence was the spice that made this taste of
wretchedness linger. Naipaul sees it etched in the very architecture of the
Raj: 'In India the confrontation of East and West was nowhere more violent
than in Calcutta, and two buildings, both now regarded as monuments, speak of
this violence: the Mullick Palace and the Victoria Memorial' (WW, pp. 10-11).
He sees in Indians an attitude of frenzied plundering, and this impression of
endemic, seemingly random violence will remain Naipaul's preferred key to an
understanding of India, as the title of his book about a much later journey
there, A Million Mutinies Now, reveals.
Violence also saturates Naipaul's
Caribbean. In 'Papa and the Power Set' (1969) he notices how in Basseterre
bullet marks on the walls of a police hut ('many shots were fired but no one
was killed') are preserved as a national monument that feeds the myth of
presidential invulnerability (WW, pp. 76-77). He sees the Trinidad carnival
primarily in terms of an atavistic outpouring of lunacy and terror: 'this
year there was a twist. After the carnival there were Black Power disturbances.
After the masquerade and the music, anger and terror. In a way it makes
sense' (WW, pp. 134-35). Perhaps his most elaborate statement on the
'mindless' violence of the Caribbean is made in 'Michael X and the Black
Power Killings in Trinidad: Peace and Power' (1979), where he chronicles a
series of murders that took place in one of the Black Power revolutionary
communes:
But the ground had given up its dead. Six
men were charged with the two murders. Five were Trinidadian; one was
American [...] Jamal gave interviews, and now he was as sober and anxious to
survive as anybody else. He spoke of 'the atmosphere of violence' at the
commune; he said he was lucky to be alive [...] So, in sobriety and
self-absolution, the Malik commune ended. (WW, p. 148).
For Naipaul the macabre events at the
Black Power commune summed up not only a particular Caribbean malaise, but
also an essence of the Global South.
Violence and blackness, violence and
race--these themes reach a predictable pitch in Naipaul's writings on Africa.
Like India, Mobutu's Africa resonates with words of terror and 'simple
official plunder' (WW, p. 209). A scene that becomes a metaphor for the sheer
atavistic violence of Africa is the one where Naipaul witnesses the feeding
of the 'royal' crocodiles in Yamoussoukro:
Again the bird was thrown. Again the jaws
snapped; again the bird escaped. But now the clucking calls had brought from
the water on the sand a crocodile even bigger and older than the other two
[...] His teeth looked stained and worn. The chicken's limp neck was placed
on the iron rail; the feeder began to bring down his knife. I didn't look.
(WW, p. 278)
In 'The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro'
(1982-83) decay, corruption, futility, nihilism, are all bound up in the
description of an act of ritual violence. Naipaul's act of averting his gaze
at the last moment is a testimony to the unbearable nature of this endemic
violence, rather than to any vegetarian instincts.
The writer travels in an insurrectionary
world. He catches something of the despair and bitterness of the former men
of empire. One of them, Jacques Soustelle, who led the French fight to keep
Algeria as its colony, explains that Europe has been provincialized because
of its withdrawal from Africa, that France had yielded to the 'idol' of
decolonization, which was responsible for converting the low cultures of
Black Africa into a poussiere of petty dictatorships (WW, p. 308). After
hearing Soustelle, Naipaul describes the Algerian war of independence as a
macabre dance of death:
When it was over in 1962, the French had
lost 14,000 men, the insurgents 140,000; 3,000 European civilians had been
killed, 30,000 Arabs [...] To hand the country over to a terrorist faction
would have been irresponsible, illiberal and stupid [...] The million colons
have left; one Algerian dictatorship has been replaced by another. Arab
Algeria sinks; an idea of France has been destroyed. (WW, p. 312)
In Argentina Naipaul sees deluded
middle-class guerrillas and a brutal army locked in violent embrace, a society
dictated by the rules of revenge and torture: 'No pattern can any longer be
discerned in the terror. It isn't only the guerrillas and the union men and
the country's few intellectuals who are threatened. Anyone can be picked up.
Torture is routine' (WW, p. 393). Although he will call the endemic violence
of the Global South 'patternless', this is a rhetorical sleight of hand in
Naipaul's writing. Again and again he will devote entire stretches of his
writing to the analysis of this persistence and pernicious nature of
violence.
For Naipaul violence in the former
colonies arises out of their derivative or mimic nature. His first encounter
with India was undoubtedly traumatic--'I felt I was in a continent where,
separate from the rest of the world, a mysterious calamity had occurred' (LO,
p. 21). If violence is the visible face of this calamity, it also offers
Naipaul a glimpse of deeper miseries. In 'In the Middle of the Journey'
(1962) he finds in the plundering frenzy of the Indians an attitude of the
conquerors: 'this attitude of plundering is that of the immigrant colonial
society. It has bred, as in Trinidad, the pathetic philistinism of the
reconcant' (WW, p. 6). This philistinism, this mimicking of the European
colonizers, indicates a severely depleted stock of national cultural capital
and leads to fatal, enraging dependency--'Incapable of lasting reform, or of
a correct interpretation of the new world, India is, profoundly, dependent'
(WW, p. 30).
The former colonies are, then,
essentially parasitic in nature. In 'The Overcrowded Barracoon' (1972)
Naipaul sees this in Madagascar:
Colonialism is a destructive institution.
It creates parasites and hangers-on. And they are still with us--people of
all races who profited from the stay in this country of a foreign power. I
don't know whether they've completely reconciled themselves to the changes.
(WW, p. 133)
Perhaps he is at his most corrosive and
dismissive when he describes the Caribbean 'dependency':
The island blacks will continue to be
dependent on the books, films and goods of others; in this important way they
will continue to be half-made societies of the dependent people, the Third
World's third world. They will forever consume; they will never create. (WW,
pp.137-38)
This dependency has catastrophic
consequences for all the revolutionary movements of the Third World. The
violence, for Naipaul, becomes directionless not transformative. Like the
compradore elites, the revolutionaries of the former colonies are hamstrung
by their hollow mimicry. Michael X and his murderous commune become a
metaphor for all Third World revolutions:
Revolution, change, system: London words,
London abstractions, capable of supporting any meaning Malik [...] chose to
give them [...] It was in London that Malik became a Negro [...] He was
shallow and unoriginal; but he sensed that in England, provincial, rich and
very secure, race was, to Right and Left, a topic of entertainment. And he
became an entertainer. (WW, pp. 153-55)
Third World revolutionaries, then, play
at revolution and, in the absence of any genuine aims, with murderous
consequences. Some of Naipaul's most detailed analyses of this condition are
to be found in his essays on Argentina and Grenada--'Argentina and the Ghost
of Eva Peron, 1972-1991' (1991) and 'Heavy Manners in Grenada' (1984). After
the kidnapping and killing of General Sanchez, notorious as a torturer and
commander of the Argentinian Second Army Corps, Naipaul writes of these mimic
guerrillas:
The guerrillas look for their inspiration
to the north. From Paris of 1968 there is the dream of students and workers
uniting to defeat the enemies of 'the people'. The guerrillas have simplified
the problems of Argentina [...] they have identified the enemy: the police.
(WW, p. 349)
Like Michael X, whose revolution is a
perverse entertainment for the Global North, Argentines play at mimicking
northern discontent: 'And I never thought the Argentine guerrillas had a good
enough cause [...] They were educated, secure, middle-class people [...] yet,
barely arrived at privilege, they were--as it seemed to me--trying to pull
their house down' (WW, p. 404).
Similarly, after the US invasion of
Grenada, Naipaul can find only the ruins of a mimic revolution:
The New Jewel Movement, founded in 1972,
represented the first educated generation in Grenada [...] It was a full
socialist revolution, Cuba became Grenada's ally; imperialism became
Grenada's enemy [...] As the mimicry was perfected, so the excitement grew
among the faithful in many countries [...] the mimicry was like the proof of
the naturalness and rightness of the cause [...] It was the story of a
retarded island community hijacked by people slightly more educated into the
forms of a grandiose revolution. (WW, pp. 464-70)
As plotted by Naipaul, this mimic
revolution then inevitably ends in internecine violence--'the revolution blew
away; and what was left in Grenada was a murder story'.
The mimicry of the maimed nations and
their incapacity for intellectually regenerating themselves lead to, in Naipaul's
equation, a destructive rage. In the essays of the 1960s and 1970s Naipaul
liberally adds the spectres of 'race' and 'culture' to explain this
degradation further. The lower the stock of 'racial culture', the more its
propensity to mimic the more highly organized societies (namely, those of the
'West'), and the more its rage and violence at the inability to become these
higher forms of life. After his first 'Islamic' journey, Naipaul would add
this dimension to his reading of global violence.
Naipaul's early representations of
African and Afro-Caribbean societies are already blueprints for this
analytical mode. After independence from Western colonial powers, these
societies regress to a cult of the folk hero: 'The Negro folk leader is a
peasant leader [...] They are linked forever to the primitives who were the
source of their original power. They are doomed to smallness' (WW, pp.
79-80). This leader, then, inevitably takes on an authoritarian role, as seen
in the case of Mobutu: 'these--the cap and the stick--are the emblems of his
African chieftaincy. Only the chief can kill the leopard [...] when the chief
sets his stick on the ground the people fall silent and the chief gives his
decision' (WW, p. 206). This regression into 'primitive terror' and
oppression occurs because culturally these societies can harness only a
mythic memory of Africa as the source of their identity, and this is no match
for the new and complex realities of the post-colonial condition. Their
'culture' is akin to a primitive religion and for Naipaul, is opposed to the
enlightenment bestowed by the superior education of Europe:
The idea of African completeness should
not have surprised me. Something like this, a similar religious feeling, was,
fleetingly, at the back of many of the slave revolts in the Caribbean [...]
Many of the recent political movements in the black Caribbean have had a
millenarian, ecstatic, purely African side. (WW, p. 231)
This inferiority sabotages movements like
Black Power, which are doomed to degenerate into anger and terror because of
the dislocation between its contemporary reality and themythic (or anti-modern)
source of its integrity and identity. This also makes it impossible for the
people of these societies not to fall prey to imported and misunderstood
ideas and ideals from the Global North. Michael X becomes a 'Negro' in
London, a panderer to British fantasies about race. He returns to Trinidad,
bringing that fantasy of revolution and resistance with him, promising a
return to African purity when 'Malik's Negro was, in fact, a grotesque: not
American, not West Indian, but an American caricatured by a red man from
Trinidad for a British audience' (WW, pp. 161-62). This hollowness of Black
Power movements betrays the larger cultural hollowness of black societies and
traps them in a cycle of rage and violence, as Naipaul points out after Black
Power troubles during the Trinidad carnival--'Excitement! And perhaps this
excitement is the only liberation that is possible. Black power in these
islands is protest. But there is no enemy. The enemy is the past' (WW, p.
137). In the absence of real enemies, the violence is self-mutilating and
suicidal.
Such rage and deluded religious ecstasy
can also be seen in other 'mixed' and 'second-hand' societies, like mestizo
Argentina. Like the Caribbean, Argentina was built on the back of a genocidal
displacement of the native Indian inhabitants. Like the Caribbean, it
attracted European immigrants, who built a 'simple colonial society created
in the most rapacious and decadent phase of imperialism' (WW, p. 388). Like
the black Caribbean, mestizo Argentina yearns for a whole identity, and in
its absence can only turn to rage and self-mutilation. Its most successful
politicians will only inflame this wound:
It was Peron's gift or genius to tap all
that rage, the rage not only of the European immigrants and their children,
most of them workers [...] the rage also of the dispossessed Indians in the
north, the dispossessed in the regions that were not serviced by the new
wealth. (WW, p. 421)
If the Trinidad carnival is, amongst
other things, a primitive religious cult, so is the cult of Eva Peron--'Saint
Evita' in Argentina: 'And they have a saint: Eva Peron [...] She preached a
simple hate and a simple love [...] a child's vision of power, justice and
revenge' (WW, p. 354). The African cult of the leader is also the mestizo
cult of the saints.
By the time he came to the 'converted'
Islamic lands in the late 1970s, then, Naipaul had a fully formed and
increasingly rigid understanding of the Global Southern states: that their
stock of cultural and intellectual capital was low or nonexistent; that their
material and non-material needs were met by imports from the West; that their
resultant state of agitation, inferiority, and rage was violent and
self-mutilating. In Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, he would largely
retain this interpretative framework. To these he would add his specific
understanding of Islamic imperialism. In a talk given at the Manhattan
Institute of New York on 'Our Universal Civilisation' in 2001, he spoke about
his first encounters with the 'alienated peoples' of Islamic societies far
from the Arab heartlands:
The Muslim rage was just beginning to be
apparent [...] I was among people who had been doubly colonized, doubly
removed from themselves. Because I was soon to discover that no colonization
had been so thorough as the colonization that had come with the Arab faith.
(WW, pp. 507-08)
In Naipaul's thinking, the areas of the
Global South like the Caribbean islands, Latin America, and Africa have had a
predominantly European colonial experience, and the damages they suffered are
held in balance with the benefits they had accrued from the
post-Enlightenment 'universal civilization'. But the countries of central,
southern, and South-East Asia have had the misfortune of being coated with an
added layer of a more pernicious (and, in most cases, older)
colonialism--that of Islam. In addition to the factors already mentioned,
this further retards their chances of participating in the 'universal
civilization' emanating from Europe and North America. This makes them more
deprived, more anxious, more violent:
I found myself among a colonized people
who had been stripped by their faith of all that expanding intellectual life,
all the varied life of the mind and senses, the expanding cultural and
historical knowledge of the world [...] This anxiety, this meeting of the two
opposed worlds, the outgoing world of Europe and the closed world of the
faith, was spotted a hundred years ago by the writer Joseph Conrad. (WW, pp.
512-13)
All the elements of his essays on the
violence and deprivation of the nonIslamic Global South are present in his
two book-length narratives of 'Islamic' journeys--mimicry, dependence,
cultural/material poverty, anxiety, and violence. Much like Michael X, The
New Jewel Movement, and the Argentine guerrillas, the Iranian revolution, the
Baluchi insurrections in Pakistan, and Fundamentalist movements in Indonesia
are built by people of 'simple origins, simply educated, but with a great
sneering pride'. (13) This pride is especially irritating for Naipaul because
it is in stark contrast to what he sees as immense cultural poverty. About
Indonesia he writes:
Sustained great writing, rather than
polemic, can only come out of societies that offer true human possibility;
and in Indonesia we have, instead, a pastoral people who have lost their
history [...] are without the means--the education, the language, and above
all the freedom--to reflect. (BB, p. 79)
In Pakistan he scolds a man who wants to
reclaim some of the burden of representing his country from 'Western' media:
'"Do you think the Americans and Canadians should be travelling around
talking to us about third world media?" "Yes. They know what
newspapers should do. You wouldn't be able to tell us much"' (AB, p.
188). Such cultural poverty is analogous to the material poverty of the
people--the former can be said to lead to the latter--and makes the Islamic
nations dependent:
The West, or the universal civilization
it leads, is emotionally rejected. It undermines; it threatens. But at the same
time it is needed, for its machines, goods, medicines, warplanes [...] All
the rejection of the 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. (AB, p. 194)
The awareness of such dependency and
inferiority triggers rage in these people--'the rage of a pastoral people
with limited skills, limited money and limited grasp of the world'--and Islam
is their way of getting even. Getting even, despite local variations, is
always violent and destructive. In Iran Naipaul feels that the Shia emphasis
on martyrdom, blood, and death is being serviced by Islam: 'To keep alive
ancient animosities, to hold on to the idea of personal revenge even after a
thousand years [...] it was necessary to be instructed' (AB, p. 8). Even
those local rebellions that are non-Islamic, ostensibly secular and even
Marxist, like the Baluchi uprising against the Pakistani government, fall
apart because they are led by a middle-class intelligentsia with garbled and
imported 'Western' ideologies.
This era of Islamic rage is contrasted
with two other 'historical' periods in Naipaul's writing. First, when the
'universal civilization' came to these lands under the auspices of Europe,
'Karachi in 1843 was a fishing village on the coast. In 1947, when the
British left, it was a modern port and the main city of the western half of
the new Muslim state of Pakistan' (AB, p. 106). Muslims could not take
advantage of this moment because they were handicapped by their atavistic
religion and resentment, and, as in India, fell behind intellectually as the
Hindus welcomed the 'New Learning' and surged ahead (BB, p. 265). Next are
the brief moments after formal independence when pro-Western leaders took
their backward people to the brink of modernity, only to be thwarted by the
ancient rage. Naipaul's exemplar for this is the Shah's Iran, as he comments
on an Iranian's trip abroad: 'In the late 1970s Paydar went to England [...]
this course of study in England was a tribute to Sha's Iran. It spoke of the
mobility that had come to people like Paydar [ ] it spoke of the economy that
had kept him in work' (BB, p. 193). But one of these eras was definitely
over, and the other had melted in the heat of alienated and resurgent rage.
Naipaul begins Beyond Belief by denying that his was a book of opinions, but
his analytical and representative framework propels him towards some absolute
conclusions: 'Islam ... makes imperial demands. A convert's world view alters
... he rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the
Arab story[ ] ... in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of
neurosis and nihilism' (BB, p. 1).
Naipaul's linkage of atavistic violence
to the Global South and, more recently, to the 'Islamic' South has gained the
status of dominant discourse in the states of the Global North. Despite this,
Naipaul persists in describing himself as an outsider, pricking the balloons
of Western Liberalism as well as post-colonial persecution complexes. His
writing is routinely described as prophetic about Islamic fundamentalism and
the 'clash of civilizations', ideas central to the establishment (perhaps
enforcement is a better word) of the post-Cold War 'New World Order'. Much before
Samuel Huntingdon and Bernard Lewis, Naipaul is said to have analysed the
poisonous and intransigent nature of the new enemy of civilization. In fact,
a glance at any study of the formation of global Islamophobia from the early
1970s to the present reveals that Naipaul was very much surfing the Zeitgeist
rather than anticipating it. This traffic between Naipaul's writing and the
wider formations of Islamophobia must be the subject of another paper, and
here we must return to the question of his analysis of violence. I will
suggest that Naipaul's vision is impaired by his refusal or inability to
accept two historical features of modernity. At the level of the 'local', he
is unable to accept that in monopolizing violence in the name of order, the
post-colonial states and their bourgeoisie reproduce the central values of
'Western' Enlightenment. Far from failing to learn from the European/American
colonizers, the states of the Global South have absorbed their lessons only
too well. And at the level of the 'global' he is unable to admit that the
achievements of Western 'universal civilization', colonial and post-colonial,
depend on ensuring conditions of material/cultural poverty and endemic
conflict in the countries of the Global South.
Non-state violence is routinely seen (and
not by Naipaul alone) as atavistic, anarchic, nihilistic, symptomatic of
deeper social decay and malaise. Anton Blok offers an explanation in his
essay 'The Enigma of Senseless Violence':
The comparative study of violence suffers
from several handicaps. The most important is the dominant conception of
violence in modern societies in which the means of violence have long been
monopolized by the state. Precisely because of the stability of this
relatively impersonal monopoly and the resultant pacification of society at
large, people have developed strong feelings about using and witnessing
violence. They are inclined to consider its unauthorized forms in particular
as anomalous, irrational, senseless and disruptive--as the reversal of social
order, as the antithesis of 'civilization', as something that has to be
brought under control. (14)
Thus, for Naipaul, challenges to this
monopoly in the states of the Global South--be they in Pakistan, Malaysia, or
Indonesia--are inevitably nihilistic and self-destructive. Added to this, he
refuses to take into account the formative role played by colonial and late
capitalism in the maintaining of endemic violence. As Catherine Besteman
explains:
The economic restructuring of the global
capitalist system has produced a well protected 'global archipelago of
wealth' and a global periphery characterized by 'brigandage,
mafia-domination, and marauding private armies'. New forms of flexible
warfare [...] match new forms of flexible capitalism. (15)
Since he does not admit the structural
relationship between this global wealth and global violence, he produces the
curious (yet seductive) picture of an advanced core and anterior or atavistic
periphery. The illusion of the Global South being locked in a temporal as
well as physical lag behind the advanced 'civilization' is the product of
this vision. Islam and a host of other cultural grids are produced as an
explanation of this lag; violence as the symptom of it.
Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth
has long been recognized as an important intervention in the theorizing of
violence. At first glance it might seem perverse to pair the Martiniquan
revolutionary with the ex-Caribbean defender of European 'civilization'.
However, there are illuminating convergences and divergences between the two.
It seems to me that much visceral unease produced by Naipaul's writing is
precisely a result of these moments of kinship with and emphatic rejection of
radical anti-colonialism. As Gail Presbey and others have argued, Fanon does
stress the rejuvenating and restorative effects of a violent struggle on the
colonized peoples, but he puts a 'Naipaulian' emphasis on education to
harness this violence:
Fanon predicts that the 'unmixed and
total brutality' of the colonized, 'if not immediately combated, invariably
leads to the defeat of the movement within a few weeks' [...] the immediacy
of muscles is a mirage; knowledge is needed. If violent rebels are not
educated, the colonists will infiltrate, try to divide the groups, and
redirect the violence. (16)
Similarily, Naipaul can be seen as
bearing witness to the fulfilment of Fanon's theses on violence and the
post-colonial condition of the Global South. Fanon writes: 'The colonised man
will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones
against his own people [...] the native is an oppressed person whose
permanent dream is to become the oppressor'. (17) Nor is this violence
limited to the phase of anti-colonial struggle: 'The atmosphere of violence [...]
continues to dominate national life, for [...] the Third world is not cut off
from the rest. Quite on the contrary, it is at the middle of the whirlpool'
(WE, p. 60). This is exactly what Naipaul describes in his travels in Iran,
the Caribbean islands, and Pakistan. His withering comments on 'dependency/
mimicry' have also been anticipated by Fanon:
This traditional weakness, which is
almost congenital to the national consciousness of under-developed countries,
is not solely the result of the mutilation of the colonised people by the
colonial regime. It is also the result of the intellectual laziness of the
national middle-class, of its spiritual penury [...]. (WE, pp. 121-22)
These parasitic middle classes, as
Naipaul testifies later, will 'step into the shoes of former European
settlement' and wave aloft 'the notion of nationalisation and Africanisation
of the ruling classes. The fact is that such action will become more and more
tinged with racism' (WE, p. 126). From Black Power to Mobutu, Naipaul's writings
precisely chart the course of such decay and racism. Fanon is no less
prophetic of the corruption and decay of the figure of national leader: 'In
spite of his frequently honest conduct and his sincere declarations, the
leader as objectively seen, is the fierce defender of these interests, today
combined of the national bourgeoisie and the ex-colonial companies. His
honesty [...] crumbles away little by little' (WE, p. 134). We recall
Naipaul's portraits of Bradshaw or Michael X or the New Jewel Movement. The
intellectually bankrupt, selfish middle classes and the corrupt leadership's
empty slogans of national autonomy soon take on the tinge of religious
tension: 'This merciless fight engaged upon by races and tribes, and the
aggressive anxiety to occupy the posts left vacant by the foreigner, will
equally give rise to religious rivalries [...] this religious tension may be
responsible for the revival of the commonest racial feelings' (WE, pp.
130-31). And as Fanon sees it, the post-colonial nation is not equipped to
combat this vicious cycle because 'By the time a century or two of
exploitation has passed there comes about a veritable emaciation of the stock
of national cultures [...] The poverty of the people, national oppression and
the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing' (WE, p. 191). Poverty
of culture, endemic violence, corruption, intellectual bankruptcy,
dependency, racial and religious conflicts--all the features that Naipaul
finds in the Global South are already present in Fanon's reflections.
On two telling points, however, Fanon is
different from Naipaul on the analysis of globalized violence of the
post-colonial condition. Consider Naipaul's earlier description of his first
traumatic encounter with India--'I felt I was in a continent where, separate
from the rest of the world, a mysterious calamity had occurred' (LO, p.
21)--and then recall Fanon's 'the Third World is not cut off from the rest.
Quite on the contrary, it is at the middle of the whirlpool'. Whereas for
Naipaul the maimed nations of the South have sealed themselves off from the
civilized centres through their self-immolating rage, Fanon is alive to the
fact that this horrendous state of affairs is maintained by a peculiar and
intimate relationship, which he calls neocolonialism.
Naipaul berates mimicry, but, in the
absence of any analysis of the global circulation of wealth and
impoverishment, his descriptions are essentially, perhaps deliberately,
misleading. The details have not escaped Fanon: 'The former dominated country
becomes an economically dependent country. The ex-colonial power, which has
kept intact and sometimes reinforced its colonial trade channels, agrees to
provision the budget of the independent nation by small injections' (WE, pp.
77-78). Naipaul blames morally bankrupt native elites for allowing this state
of dependency to continue, but he ignores the process by which they arrive at
this state--through the very 'civilized' education that the country has
received from the European colonizing forces. Fanon is very clear:
During the period of decolonisation,
certain colonised intellectuals have begun a dialogue with the bourgeoisie of
the colonialist country [...] during the period of liberation, the
colonialist bourgeoisie looks feverishly for contacts with the elite, and it
is with this elite that the familiar dialogue concerning values is carried on
(WE, p. 35).
He calls this class of compradore
intellectuals enfranchised slaves or, memorably, slaves who are individually
free. It is education and culture, the talk of universal civilizing values,
that under the conditions of colonialism produces the intellectual decay of
the post-colonial condition. With no intellectual leadership the middle
classes are blind to national concerns: 'Seen through its eyes, its mission
has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of
being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant
though camouflaged, which today puts on the masque of neo-colonialism' (WE,
p. 124). Naipaul cannot admit that it is the same European 'new learning'
that he sees as being the cornerstone of universal civilization.
The second crucial difference between
Naipaul and Fanon involves the question of the agency of the peoples of the
Global South. As Naipaul places the burden of enlightenment and progress
exclusively on the 'educated' postcolonial bourgeoisie, he can only write of
bewildering defeats. Fanon, on the other hand, employs a more generous
interpretation of 'education'/culture. As Nigel Gibson suggests in his essay
on the role of radio in the Algerian revolution, Fanon observed that the
peasants were much creatively in their use of 'foreign technology', using
technology to 'create and express their own versions of truth'. Unlike the
educated Algerian bourgeoisie, they did not mimic European
culture/civilization, but bent it to their own usages. Fanon suggested that
the 'uneducated' peasants could do this for two important reasons: first,
they were the ones most oppressed under colonialism and had no incentive to collaborate;
secondly, their own cultural resources (songs, oral story telling, poetry,
drama) were less impoverished than those of the middle classes, and hence
they could meet the ideological onslaught of Europe with more inventiveness
and imagination. (18) The very idea of the cultural resources of the
'uneducated'--resources that can be used to convert the impact of European
new learning to one's own advantage as well as to show its oppressive
functions--cannot be admitted by Naipaul. He is condemned to simultaneously
pinning his hopes on the 'educated' post-colonial bourgeoisie and somehow
explaining their failures on anything but their education/culture. Hence, his
essentialist readings of African voodoo, 'Islamic' fundamentalism, and the
spiritual desolation of Latin America. Hence also, his refuge in the deadly
mirage of 'pure cultures'--ancient Hinduism, for example.
This essay has attempted to trace
Naipaul's representations of violence from his early essays to his later
non-fictional travel narratives. What we see is the persistence of violence
as both a sign and an analytical tool in Naipaul's understanding of the
Global South. The alignments and differences of his interpretation with
Fanon's analysis is indicative of his eclectic engagement with the Global
South. He borrows and amplifies the trenchant rage and despair of Asian,
African, and Latin-American peoples and writers. But he refuses to engage
with or learn from their historicist and materialist analyses of their
condition. Naipaul is unable to attend to both the material and cultural
logic of colonialism/imperialism and their 'post'/'neo' conditions. By
eschewing capital and class as interpretative categories, Naipaul fails to
see the intimate and symbiotic relationship between the 'West' and the
'rest', and he seals off the Global South in its own hell of failure. By
accepting and indulging in fetishistic views of Enlightenment learning, he
offers fundamentalist dreams of cultural/racial essences that perpetually
recycle myths of European/American world orders.
Let us briefly return to the Naipaul
debates and to the Salmagundi exchanges about the post-colonial intellectual.
We recall Conor Cruise O'Brien and John Lukacs stridently defending Naipaul
as being deeply concerned with truth and public rhetoric, and conducting a
relentless exposure of the human evil. Edward Said naturally pointed out that
if exposing the evils of domination and dissembling was Naipaul's chosen
task, then he should be writing about these evils as they exist in the Global
North as well as the Global South. He goes on to suggest:
The moment Naipaul defines and
crystallizes for the western audience is the moment of our disappointment
with the prospects of other peoples. And that disappointment, based as it is
on our tendency to grow bored with something we can't control, is at the root
of the acclaim Naipaul has won. (19)
Said is surely correct in his explanation
of the lionization of Naipaul. 'A little room was made for me in the England
of the 1950s' says Naipaul humbly, but he prefers not to ask why. (20)
But let us leave Said for the moment and
accept at face value Naipaul's admirers' claim of what he is--a fearless
investigator of the heart of human darkness, albeit of humans who fall
outside the ambit of what he calls 'universal civilization'. As a chronicler
of maimed humanity, its rage, violence, and failures, how far does he go? His
admirers have no doubt that his is an authentic voice of Global South
despair, cutting through the faux-radicalism of metropolitan critics. Bruce
King, in his review of Nixon's 'London Calling', takes the author to task for
failing to recognize this:
Nixon should pay more attention to what
third-world intellectuals, scholars, and artists write about their societies
and less to progressive opinion in New York and London [...] Multinational
capital has, for the most part, gotten along happily with (Eric) Williams,
Saddam, and Mobutu; it would probably prefer that Naipaul and other critics
of postcolonial order kept their mouth shut. (21)
But as this survey of Naipaul's essays
shows, such attempts to align Naipaul with radical voices of the Global South
are misleading. Naipaul is not interested in solidarity with 'third-world
intellectuals', because he does not believe that they can ever be more than
second-rate mimics under any historical/material circumstances. Naipaul is
opposed to linking the 'post-colonial order' to the devastations wrought by
multinational capital. On the contrary, he sees the ills of the Global South
arising from its failure to be integrated within the world of late modern
capitalism. He fails to acknowledge the structural and causal relationship
between global privilege and global degradation. He refuses to analyse how
'universal education' has ensured endemic oppression. He does not engage with
the material, political, and cultural resistances of the 'wretched of the
earth', and he attempts to displace the productive messiness of human
interaction with the baleful phantom of cultural and spiritual purity. In all
this Naipaul is in breach of the most important duties of a conscientious
intellectual worker.
(1) See Rob Nixon, 'London Calling': V.
S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992);
The Humour and the Pity, ed. by Amitava Kumar (New Delhi: Buffalo, 2002);
Dagmar Barnouw, Naipaul's Strangers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2003); V. S. Naipaul: An Anthology of Recent Criticism, ed. by Purabi Panwar
(New Delhi: Pencraft, 2003); and Joan Cocks, 'A New Cosmopolitanism? V. S. Naipaul
and Edward Said', Constellations, 7 (2000), 46-60.
(2) Nixon, p. 6.
(3) Literary Occasions, ed. by Pankaj
Mishra (London: Picador, 2003), pp. 16-17. Naipaul's major essays have been
collected in this volume and the earlier The Writer and the World (London:
Picador, 2002). All the essays cited here are from these volumes, hereafter
abbreviated as LO and WW, repsectively, with references given in the text.
(4) Nixon, p. 7.
(5) Nixon, p. 6.
(6) Sir Vidia Loses Temper Again!, PTI
(Press Trust of India), 21 February 2002 [accessed 18 June 2006].
(7) dward Said, 'Intellectuals in the
Post-Colonial World', Salmagundi, 70-71 (1986), 44-64 (p. 53).
(8) Conor Cruise O'Brien, Edward Said,
and John Lukacs, 'Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World: Response and
Discussion', Salmagundi, 70-71 (1986), pp. 65-81 (pp. 67-68).
(9) Ibid., pp. 78-79.
(10) Barnouw, p. 1. Further references
will be given in the text.
(11) The Mantle of the Prophet: Learning
and Power in Modern Iran (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986).
(12) Humour and the Pity, p. 62.
(13) V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers:
An Islamic Journey (1981; Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador, 2001), p. 3;
hereafter abbreviated AB. Also, V. S. Naipaul, Beyond Belief (London: Little,
Brown, 1998), hereafter BB. All references appear in the text.
(14) Meanings of Violence, ed. by Goran
Aijmer and Jon Abbink (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), p. 23.
(15) Violence: A Reader, ed. by Catherine
Besteman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 303-04.
(16) Gail M. Presbey, 'Fanon on the Role
of Violence in Liberation: A Comparison with Gandhi and Mandela', in Fanon: A
Critical Reader, ed. by Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and
Renee T. White (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 283-96 (pp. 291-92).
(17) Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the
Earth (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1965), p. 42. Hereafter abbreviated WE,
with all references in the text.
(18) Nigel Gibson, 'Jammin' the Airwaves
and Tuning into the Revolution: The Dialectics of the Radio in L'An V de la
revolution algerienne', in Fanon: A Critical Reader, pp. 297-308.
(19) Said, in O'Brien, Said, and Lukacs,
p. 81
(20) For a good account of the formation
of Naipaul's cultural authority in the 'West' see Nixon, 'London Calling'.
(21) 'Review of London Calling', Research
in African Literatures 24, 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 132-3.
PABLO MUKHERJEE
University of Warwick
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Publication Information: Article Title: Doomed to Smallness: Violence, V. S. Naipaul, and the Global South. Contributors: Pablo Mukherjee - author. Journal Title: Yearbook of English Studies. Volume: 37. Issue: 1. Publication Year: 2007. Page Number: 209+. COPYRIGHT 2007 Modern Humanities Research Association; COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
Publication Information: Article Title: Doomed to Smallness: Violence, V. S. Naipaul, and the Global South. Contributors: Pablo Mukherjee - author. Journal Title: Yearbook of English Studies. Volume: 37. Issue: 1. Publication Year: 2007. Page Number: 209+. COPYRIGHT 2007 Modern Humanities Research Association; COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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