Authority and Authorship in V. S. Naipaul PDF
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Authority and Authorship in V. S. Naipaul Also by the Author The Wedding (2001) Green-eyed Thieves (2006) High, Low, In-between (2009) Authority and Authorship in V. S. Naipaul Imraan Coovadia authority and authorship in v. s. naipaul Copyright © Imraan Coovadia, 2009. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61535-9 All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-37919-4 ISBN 978-0-230-62246-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230622463 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coovadia, Imraan. Authority and authorship in V. S. Naipaul / Imraan Coovadia. p. cm. 1. Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932—Literary style. 3. Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932—Political and social views. 4. Authority in literature. 5. Authorship—Political aspects. 6. Authorship—Social aspects. I. Title. PR9272.9.N32Z595 2009 823'.91—4dc22 2008045303 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: July 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Authorship and Authority 1 1 Authority and Misquotation in A Bend in the River 17 2 The Cold Joke 39 3 V. S. Naipaul and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad 63 4 V. S. Naipaul and the Muslims 93 5 V. S. Naipaul and the Uses of South Africa 127 Conclusion: Style and Naipaulian Transformations in the Indian Travel Narratives 151 Notes 159 Bibliography 183 Index 187 Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the following indi- viduals and institutions: Tony Morphet, Fawzia Mustafa (as Palgrave reviewer), the external reviewers for Postcolonial Text, Gail Fincham, the Teaching Relief Fund and Office of the Humanities Dean at the University of Cape Town, and Lyn Holness and the University of Cape Town Emerging Researcher’s Program. INTRODUCTION Authorship and Authority KING LEAR. Dost thou know me, fellow? KENT. No, sir; but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master. KING LEAR. What’s that? KENT. Authority. The small, twinkly eyes that might at first, in that wrinkled head, have seemed only peasant’s eyes, always about to register respect and obsequiousness combined with disbelief, could be seen now to be the eyes of a man used to exercising a special kind of authority, an authority that to him and the people around him was more real and less phantasmal, than the authority of outsiders from the city. His face was the face of the Master, the man who knew men, and whole families, as servants, from their birth to their death. —India: A Wounded Civilization The construction of authority—what we call legitimacy in politics, tradition in culture, and imaginative strength, or plausibility, in literature—is the key problem in V. S. Naipaul’s career, from his Caribbean comedies of the late 1950s and sub-Saharan fiction of the 1970s, through the travel writings and his more recent 2 (cid:2)(cid:3) Authority and Authorship in V. S. Naipaul essays and narratives, including Magic Seeds (2004) and A Writer’s People (2007). Throughout his work, Naipaul studies societies on the periph- ery of the world system where political authority is fragile and cultural authority has yet to be established. With their focus on English subjects and landscape, Mr. Stone and the Knight’s Com- panion (1963) and The Enigma of Arrival (1987) are exceptions to the general rule. Naipaul sets his fiction on Caribbean islands and in invented sub-Saharan states while his travel writing encircles the globe. His imaginative energies have been consistently invested in regions far removed from his British residence and from the sure- ties of metropolitan existence. For Naipaul literature alters the obscurities of the postcolonial situation. Literature brings definition and, therefore, a kind of tact or style to its object; as he puts it in The Overcrowded Barracoon (1972), “until they have been written about, societies appear to be without shape and embarrassing.”1 Writing, whether fiction or nonfiction, has the almost magical ability, according to Naipaul, to confer form on postcolonial societies. It functions as a substi- tute for the long-standing conventions and understandings that make up a metropolitan culture, giving it “shape.” The internal organization in a verbal work of art allows the reader to see the component parts of a disorganized Third World society. Writing, moreover, has a psychological effect on the relation between the outside observer and the observed. Like a garment clothing an unsightly body, it forestalls “embarrassment.” Naipaul does not locate this particular “embarrassment,” but one senses it belongs to his own psychological makeup and, perhaps to his read- ers, more than to the postcolonial peoples he represents. To italicize the word as Naipaul does makes the existence of this “embarrass- ment” an assumption imposed on the reader rather than an argu- ment about what it means for a writer to take on postcolonial subject matter. Naipaul’s prose, which he seems to drape on the offending body of the postcolonial situation, makes a decorous and civilized scene out of the encounter. Authorship and Authority (cid:2) 3 In a world of many cultures, many states, and many contrasting levels of development, it is often unclear what can and should be said and who has the right to say it. This crisis of authority is at once a theme in Naipaul’s works and a literary-critical problem in understanding the power and scope of his prose. The competence by which Naipaul claims to describe and define a great number of societies across the globe is, as I will show, a product of his own writing from the level of the individual phrase and sentence all the way to the location and narrative structure of his novels and other prose narratives. Even Naipaul’s jokes, such as they are— “A banana a day keeps the Jamaican away”—are, as we shall see, attempts to position himself and his audience within the postco- lonial situation. Understanding Naipaul’s claims for himself and his writing means, in addition, reckoning with a certain view of literature as a cross-cultural institution. The problem of imaginative authority is a deep one in literary studies; understanding Shakespeare, or Leo Tolstoy, is inseparable from offering an account of their power to convince. Shakespeare’s alchemy of characters and situations—ranging from monarch to beggar, and from Danish Hamlet and a New World Tempest to the Tudor propaganda of the Henry plays—has frequently been ascribed to his own reticence as a personality. Shakespeare is supposed to have had so little need to assert his individuality that he could be fully possessed by the many dis- tinct individualities of his characters. Tolstoy’s imaginative power, on the other hand, is usually understood as inseparable from Tol- stoyan personality. The panoramas of War and Peace and Anna Karenina are the creation of a particular man who finds universal relevance in each particular situation. In the case of Shakespeare as well as Tolstoy, critics have often looked for one disposition that explains the work’s hold over our imaginations. With Naipaul, born in Trinidad but at home in the United King- dom and at large in the world from Muslim Asia to sub-Saharan Africa and the American South, the problem of literary authority
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