Naipaul at Home
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/books/review/07DONADIO.html?pagewanted=1
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: August 7, 2005
Two monuments rise like emblems from the green countryside of Wiltshire,
England, not far from the secluded house of V. S. Naipaul: Stonehenge and
Salisbury Cathedral. They are signposts in a landscape Naipaul has been
traversing for more than half a century, one in which the impulses of
culture, civilization and progress have always existed in close and uneasy
proximity to the impulses of paganism, religion and disorder.
A prophet of our world-historical moment, in his more than 25 works of
fiction and nonfiction, Naipaul has examined the clash between belief and
unbelief, the unraveling of the British Empire, the migrations of peoples.
They are natural subjects for a writer who, as he has recorded in his many
fully, semi- and quasi-autobiographical books, was born in Trinidad, where
his grandfather had emigrated from India as an indentured servant. His
father, a newspaper reporter and aspiring fiction writer, was the model for
what is arguably Naipaul's finest novel, ''A House for Mr. Biswas'' (1961).
At 18, Naipaul left Trinidad on a scholarship to University College, Oxford,
and has lived in England ever since. Alfred Kazin once described him as ''a
colonial brought up in English schools, on English ways and the pretended
reasonableness of the English mind.''
Knighted in 1990, Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is Britain's only living
Nobel laureate in literature, having been awarded the prize in October 2001,
a season when many were just awakening to realities Naipaul had been writing
about for more than 20 years. Also significant is that he had explored
Islamic fundamentalism and other issues of global import not through
fiction, but through nonfiction reportage. The novel's time was over, he had
said. Others had made the claim before, but it resonated more deeply coming
from a contemporary giant. What is more, Naipaul said, only nonfiction could
capture the complexities of today's world. It was a profound observation.
But did it speak to a larger cultural situation, or was it simply the
personal judgment of one cantankerous writer, who in fact continued to
publish a novel every few years even after declaring the form dead?
Naipaul recently offered some thoughts on the matter, in an interview in the
cozy sitting room of his cottage in Wiltshire. Photograph portraits were on
the mantle. French novels lined one bookshelf. The sounds of the outside
world could be heard: a lawnmower, the buzzing of a fighter jet from a
nearby airbase. A compact man of 72, Naipaul has been ill in recent months,
and said he is not working on a book at the moment. Although it was
unseasonably hot on the splendid sunny afternoon of the longest day of the
year, he wore a tweed jacket and corduroy pants. Unsmiling, he settled
somewhat stiffly onto a straight-backed armchair and began to chart the
trajectory of his thinking.
''What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are
going to falsify your material,'' he said. ''And the fictional form was
going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a
certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world,
the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.'' Naipaul's voice is
rich and deep and mellowed by tobacco, and when he pronounced the word
''world,'' he savored it, drawing it out to almost three syllables. ''I
thought if I didn't have this resource of nonfiction I would have dried up
perhaps. I'd have come to the end of my material, and would have done what a
writer like Graham Greene did. You know, he took the Graham Greene figure to
the Congo, took him to Argentina, took him to Haiti, for no rhyme or
reason.''
Naipaul has said he wrote the novel ''Half a Life'' (2001) only to fulfill a
publisher's contract, and that ''Magic Seeds'' (2004) would be his last
novel. (Over the years, he has often hinted at retirement, only to publish
another book soon after.) Yet the fact that Naipaul has continued to write
novels does not undercut his acute awareness of the form's limitations;
indeed, it amplifies it. His is the lament of a writer who, through a life
devoted to his craft, has discovered that the tools at his disposal are no
longer adequate. ''If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little
narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account,'' Naipaul said. ''If
you're a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in
love, etc., give a little narrative here and there. But again, it's of no
account.''
What is of account, in Naipaul's view, is the larger global political
situation -- in particular, the clash between belief and unbelief in
postcolonial societies. ''I became very interested in the Islamic question,
and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple
questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery,'' he said. To what
extent, he wondered, had ''people who lock themselves away in belief . . .
shut themselves away from the active busy world''? ''To what extent without
knowing it'' were they ''parasitic on that world''? And why did they have
''no thinkers to point out to them where their thoughts and their passion
had led them''? Far from simple, the questions brought a laserlike focus to
a central paradox of today's situation: that some who have benefited from
the blessings of the West now seek to destroy it.
In November 2001 Naipaul told an audience of anxious New Yorkers still
reeling from the attack on the World Trade Center that they were facing ''a
war declared on you by people who passionately want one thing: a green
card.'' What happened on Sept. 11 ''was too astonishing. It's one of its
kind. It can't happen again,'' he said in our conversation. ''But in the end
it has had no effect on the world. It has just been a spectacle, like a bank
raid in a western film. They will be caught by the sheriff eventually.'' The
bigger issue, he said, is that Western Europe, while built on tolerance,
today lacks ''a strong cultural life,'' making it vulnerable to
Islamicization. He even went so far as to say that Muslim women shouldn't
wear headscarves in the West. ''If you decide to move to another country and
to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of
the culture,'' he said. ''It's a form of aggression.''
No matter how uncomfortable or debatable, there is a painful prescience to
Naipaul's observations on Islam and the West. That prescience was in
evidence once again when, just two weeks after our meeting, bombers struck
the London Underground and a city bus, killing more than 50 people. Naipaul
was at home in Wiltshire that day, and professed no surprise that the
attacks appeared to have been carried out by British citizens. ''We must
stop fooling ourselves about what we are witnessing,'' he said in a
telephone conversation a week after the July 7 attacks. The debate in
Britain about British detainees held at Guantanamo Bay was evidence of the
foolishness. ''People here talk about those people who were picked up by the
Americans as 'lads,' 'our lads,' as though they were people playing cricket
or marbles,'' Naipaul said. ''It's glib, nonsensical talk from people who
don't understand that holy war for Muslims is a religious war, and a
religious war is something you never stop fighting.''
These remarks, like so many of Naipaul's utterances over the years, seem
calculated to provoke. In his interviews as in his life, Naipaul is famously
irascible, difficult, contradictory, an ideological lightning rod. Yet in
his writing, he is an artist on whom nothing is lost. Naipaul addressed this
split in his Nobel acceptance speech, in which he seconded Proust's argument
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.'' Naipaul's work is as
subtle as his interviews are clamorous. In ''Among the Believers: An Islamic
Journey,'' his 1981 travelogue through the ironies and intricacies of
non-Arab Islamic countries, and in its 1998 follow-up, ''Beyond Belief,''
Naipaul listened seriously and empathetically to people in Iran, Pakistan,
Indonesia and Malaysia: countries that were converted to Islam over the
course of centuries and, in the late 70's, witnessed a rise in both power
and Islamic fundamentalism. The books raise but don't necessarily answer
deep and vexing questions: Is secularism a precondition of tolerance? Does
one necessarily have to abandon one's individual cultural and religious
identity to become part of the West? Why do people willingly choose lives
that restrict their intellectual freedom? What becomes of modern societies
founded on Islam, whose strictest aherents long for a return to the time of
Muhammad?
Like Salim, the protagonist of his classic novel ''A Bend in the River,''
who describes himself as ''a man without a side,'' Naipaul has cultivated
political detachment. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he said: ''I have
always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I
have no guiding political idea.'' This is both true and incomplete.
Naipaul's cold, unsparing look at the corruption and disarray of the
postcolonial world, his disdain for Marxist liberation movements and his
view that Islamic society leads to tyranny are implicitly political
positions, and have made him the object of much political criticism. He has
been sharply criticized by, among others, Derek Walcott, the Caribbean poet
and Nobel laureate, and Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, who said
''although Naipaul was writing about Africa, he was not writing for
Africans.'' The scholar and critic Edward Said, who died in 2003, called
''Beyond Belief'' ''an intellectual catastrophe.'' Naipaul, he added, thinks
''Islam is the worst disaster that ever happened to India, and the book
reveals a pathology.''
But what spares Naipaul's work from the ideology of critics who would
dismiss him as anti-Muslim and admirers who would laud him for essentially
the same thing is its unsentimental, often heartbreaking detail. In ''Among
the Believers,'' Naipaul speaks with Mr. Jaffrey, a newspaper journalist and
British-Indian-educated Shiite in Tehran who supported Khomeini as a way of
bringing about the Islamic dream of a ''society of believers.'' Mr. Jaffrey
ate a plate of fried eggs as he spoke. In ''Beyond Belief,'' Naipaul
revisits one of the journalist's colleagues, who also relishes his lunch.
Ideology is abstract; fried eggs are not. Naipaul's nonfiction has the
force, the almost unbearable density of detail and the moral vision of great
fiction. It comes as no surprise that Dickens and Tolstoy are his heroes.
For all Naipaul's talk about the limitations of the novel, the power of his
work is ultimately rooted in a novelist's preternatural attentiveness to
individual human lives and triumphs, to the daily things we do that make us
who we are, and are the key to our survival.
A breakthrough in Naipaul's own understanding of himself as a writer and his
turning away from the novel toward nonfiction came in a remarkable essay he
wrote on Joseph Conrad. First published in The New York Review of Books in
1974, it appears in his 2003 collection, ''Literary Occasions.'' It is not
entirely surprising that Naipaul would turn to the work of the Polish
émigré; both were raised in one world and willed themselves into becoming
artists in another, England. ''I suppose that in my fantasy I had seen
myself coming to England as to some purely literary region, where,
untrammeled by the accidents of history or background, I could make a
romantic career for myself as a writer,'' Naipaul wrote in that essay.
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''It came to me that the great novelists wrote about highly organized
societies,'' he wrote. ''I had no such society; I couldn't share the
assumptions of the writers; I didn't see my world reflected in theirs. My
colonial world was more mixed and secondhand, and more restricted. The time
came when I began to ponder the mystery -- Conradian word -- of my own
background.'' Along the way, Naipaul kept coming up against Conrad. ''I
found that Conrad -- 60 years before, in the time of a great peace -- had
been everywhere before me,'' he wrote. ''Not as a man with a cause, but a
man offering . . . a vision of the world's half-made societies as places
which continuously made and unmade themselves, where there was no goal, and
where always 'something inherent in the necessities of successful action . .
. carried with it the moral degradation of the idea.' Dismal, but deeply
felt: a kind of truth and half a consolation.''
Yet in our conversation, although Naipaul said he thought Conrad was
''great'' because he ''wished to look very, very hard at the world,'' he
also insisted that Conrad ''had no influence on me.'' ''Actually, I think 'A
Bend in the River' is much, much better than Conrad,'' he said. ''I think
the best part of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is the reportage part. The
fictional part is excessive and feeble. And there is no reportage in my
thing. I was looking and creating that world. I actually think the work I've
done in that way is better than Conrad.'' Naipaul also dismissed the idea
there might be a direct link between his Conrad essay and subsequent works
in which he explored some of the same places and themes. ''These things
might appear like that. But that's only for a person on the outside,'' he
said.
A different picture emerges from Naipaul's bibliography. After the Conrad
essay, Naipaul in fact followed Conrad's itinerary to the Congo -- the
subject of his nonfiction essay on Mobutu, ''A New King for the
Congo''(1975), and of ''A Bend in the River'' (1979); and to Aceh,
Indonesia, for ''Among the Believers'' and ''Beyond Belief.'' Naipaul has
also gone where Conrad went as a narrator, cultivating a kind of finely
wrought ambiguity and moving toward reportage. ''To understand Conrad,'' as
he wrote in his essay, ''it was necessary to begin to match his experience.
It was also necessary to lose one's preconceptions of what the novel should
do and, above all, to rid oneself of the subtle corruptions of the novel or
comedy of manners.''
In conversation, another dynamic becomes apparent, in which the more
dismissive Naipaul is of a writer, the more likely it is that he has engaged
deeply with that writer's work. Sitting a few feet away from a bookshelf of
French novels, Naipaul called Proust ''tedious,'' ''repetitive,''
''self-indulgent,'' concerned only with a character's social status. ''What
is missing in Proust is this idea of a moral center,'' he said. Naipaul also
had little respect for Joyce's ''Ulysses'' -- ''the Irish book,'' he
sniffily called it -- and other works ''that have to lean on borrowed
stories.'' Lately, he has found Stendhal ''repetitive, tedious,
infuriating,'' while ''the greatest disappointment was Flaubert.''
All this points to another idea: Modernism is over. ''We are all overwhelmed
by the idea of French 19th-century culture. Everybody wanted to go to Paris
to paint or to write. And of course that's a dead idea these days,'' Naipaul
said. ''We've changed. The world has changed. The world has grown bigger.''
Which brings us back to the limitations of the novel. The writer must leave
the sitting room and travel abroad into the active, busy world. It is the
tragic vision only a novelist can reach: that the world cannot be contained
in the novel.
And yet, for all his laments, Naipaul is not invested in the notion that
Western civilization is in decline. ''That's a romantic idea,'' he said
brusquely. ''A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to
be dying. . . . It's a university idea. People cook it up at universities
and do a lot of lectures about it. It has no substance.'' The
''philosophical diffidence'' of the West, he maintains, will prevail over
the ''philosophical shriek'' of those who intend to destroy it. Naipaul
formulated those terms in a lecture he delivered in 1992 at the Manhattan
Institute, a conservative think tank in New York. (Called ''Our Universal
Civilization,'' it appears in his 2002 essay collection, ''The Writer and
the World.'') In it, he cites a remarkable passage from Conrad: ''A
half-naked, betel-chewing pessimist stood upon the bank of the tropical
river, on the edge of the still and immense forests; a man angry, powerless,
empty-handed, with a cry of bitter discontent ready on his lips; a cry that,
had it come out, would have rung through the virgin solitudes of the woods
as true, as great, as profound, as any philosophical shriek that ever came
from the depths of an easy chair to disturb the impure wilderness of
chimneys and roofs.''
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As for evidence of the diffidence: ''I think it actually is all around us.
It's all around us,'' Naipaul said. But where, exactly? ''There are millions
and millions of people all around us,'' was all he would say. In ''India: A
Million Mutinies Now'' (1990), his third nonfiction book about India,
Naipaul celebrated the million manifestations of daily life, of lives
undefeated by the chaos, disarray and poverty of the larger society. A Hindu
by birth, though not observant, Naipaul finds India a place of great hope.
It is, he says, the country where belief and unbelief coexist most
peaceably. The economic development of India -- and China -- he said, will
''completely alter the world,'' and ''nothing that's happening in the Arab
world has that capacity.'' Yet Naipaul called it ''a calamity'' that, even
with its billion people, ''there are no thinkers in India'' today. India is
also where he turns for a theory of history. ''The only theory is that
everything is in a state of flux,'' he said. This is his own ''personal
idea,'' he said, but one linked to a philosophical concept in Indian
religion.
''I find it impossible to contain the history of Europe in my head. It's so
much movement, so much movement,'' he said. ''Even when you go back to the
Roman times there are these tribal groups pressing all the time, pressing
and pressing and pressing,'' he continued, pushing his fists together for
emphasis and fixing his gaze intently at the near distance. He has recently
been reading the letters of Mary Wortley Montagu, an Englishwoman who
traveled across the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century. The chaos of history
pressed in on the Wiltshire sitting room. ''You have this picture of the
devastation the Turks had created in Hungary,'' he said. ''Who ever thought
that world would have changed if you were living at that time? But it has
changed. And what we're living in will of course change again.''
Dismal, but deeply felt: a kind of truth and half a consolation.
GWhyte
By Naeem ul Haque
http://www.dawn.com/2005/08/08/op.htm#1
WHETHER we like it or not, the clash of civilizations has begun. The clash
is between what can best be described as predominantly Christian but secular
West (excluding Latin America) and the Muslim world stretching from Morocco
to Indonesia. Although the primary issues creating this clash are political,
the powerful western media as well as the governments have successfully -
but wrongly - managed to give it a strong Islamic religious tint.
The political premise is simple: it would be fair to say that for more than
five decades, Muslims struggling for self-rule and independence in different
parts of the world have met with stiff resistance from western powers and
their lackeys who include many Muslim leaders. Having seen through the
western powers, duplicity and with no hope of resolving their conflicts,
Muslims have reached a level of anger unseen for centuries. Some of this
anger has spilt out in a variety of ways, including those which led to the
events of 9/11 and 7/7.
Today, the western hemisphere is obsessed with and consumed by the war on
terrorism. Already barriers have started going up in the West denying
access, particularly to Muslims, to the fruits of their prosperity.
Educational institutions, job opportunities, immigration rules and
investment opportunities are becoming more and more distant to the Muslims.
The West's hypocrisy continues to exhibit itself in a number of ways. As
Radovan Karadzic, the killer of more than two hundred thousand Muslims in
Bosnia, roams freely in Europe, the US and its allies are spending billions
to get hold of Osama bin Laden who is allegedly responsible for the death of
three thousand people in New York.
As the world order continues to be based on the inequitable principles of
yesteryear, the divide between these two civilizations has become bigger and
bigger. The West controls the United Nations, World Bank, and most major
financial institutions of the world. In the UN four out of five Security
Council seats are held by the West and through those they can block any move
on the world stage.
In the World Bank, only America has the right to appoint the president and
the IMF can only be headed by a European. There is only one formal military
alliance left in the world today - Nato which has lost its raison d'etre
after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and fall of communist regimes
in Europe. Yet America and its allies continue to run it, strengthen it and
prepare it for a war which may never take place.
The European Community continues to enlarge itself by carefully adding other
European countries while, at the same time creating obstacles for those with
heavy Muslim populations. While Bosnia has been denied the right to be a
sovereign country, Turkey's attempts to join the EEC are being hindered.
The Greek Cypriots have been allowed to join the European Union, but Turkish
Cypriots have been excluded and remain unrecognized as a political entity
after the Greek Cypriots' refusal to accept them. In Chechnya, the western
powers have supported the brutal suppression of a brave people by Russia.
This support would almost certainly not have been there if the Chechens were
not Muslims.
As the only superpower in the world today, America's main aim is to secure
its position by using all and any means necessary to achieve that objective.
In this pursuit America has waged unnecessary and brutal war, invaded
defenceless countries and occupied them, ignored world opinion, violated
international law, tortured prisoners of war, thwarted United Nations and
killed thousands of innocent civilians. Europe has watched this, condoned it
and become an almost silent spectator as America continues to maintain
military bases on the continent with thousands of troops and huge stock of
weapons.
For almost forty years now America has supported the Israeli occupation of
Palestinian land and the suppression of the Palestinian people, while Europe
turned its attention away. The West's hollow support of an independent
Palestinian state remains conditional and is "subject" to institutional
reforms by the Palestinian Authority and the "establishment" of undefined
secure borders for Israel. The road map for the Middle East remains a piece
of paper as Sharon, with support from the West, continues to impose
impossible conditions on the Palestinians for starting negotiations. East
Jerusalem's future status remains beyond discussion.
As the world becomes more independent, America's highhandedness has reached
new heights. It has embarked on a collision course with Iran and North Korea
in its attempts to restrict their nuclear plans.
While Israel has been allowed a free hand to develop nuclear weapons without
any restrictions or checks, a worldwide campaign has been launched to punish
Iran and North Korea. Fully aware of China's potential to surpass the United
States as the world's most powerful nation within a decade, America has
started encircling China in a variety of ways.
It has established bases in two Central Asian countries by bribing their
corrupt rulers and continues to maintain substantial - and unnecessary -
military presence in South Korea and Japan. The doctrine of
non-proliferation so espoused by the Americans in respect of Iran and North
Korea was blown to smithereens by President Bush when he signed with India
last month the agreement pertaining to the exchange of nuclear technology.
He has also refused to provide more financial help to Africa in its struggle
against poverty and disease. The sum involved is "less than one week's
expenditure" of the American forces in Iraq.
Under Bush, America has also refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol ensuring a
better environment for the world. The new WTO regime, largely designed to
save the economic interests of the western powers has in effect done more to
protect the rich countries of the world than ensuring economic security for
the poor ones.
The unquestionable supremacy of the western powers is now threatened by
forces within and without. The West has started to pay a price, in different
ways, for failing to address equitably the most critical issues confronting
the Third world which includes Muslim countries. The Muslim opposition to
the West's domination remains political in nature so far.
They do not object to the western way of life or western values. They do not
seek western territory or its strategic assets. Yet the West has thought fit
to cultivate, support and strengthen pro-West monarchs, autocrats and
dictators throughout the Muslim world putting aside its cherished values of
freedom and human rights. It has allowed these autocrats and dictators to
suppress their own people in their efforts to remain pro-West
The clash of the West and the Muslim world is not a clash of religions. If
anything, it is a clash of right and wrong, of haves and have-nots, of a
desire to be free and a desire to suppress. However, it is not too late to
stop this clash from getting worse. There is a way out and that is for the
West to be just and fair in dealing with Muslim peoples and their countries.