Ludic Caribbean - OPUS Würzburg - Universität Würzburg

299 Pages·2006·1.65 MB·English

Ludic Caribbean

Cultural Representations of Trinidad
in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction

Inaugural-Dissertation
zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der
Philosophischen Fakultät II
der
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

Vorgelegt von

Horatiu-Lucian Nickel
aus Deva/Rumänien

Würzburg
2006
Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Rüdiger Ahrens, OBE

Zweitgutachter: PD Dr. phil. Ralph Pordzik

Tag des Kolloquiums: 27. Juni 2006
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Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................6

1.1. Methodology and Objectives......................................................................7
1.2. Overview of Criticism on V.S. Naipaul....................................................11
1.3. Con-textualizing Trinidad.........................................................................19
1.4. “Play-Culture”...........................................................................................25
1.5. Representation...........................................................................................30
1.5.1. Cultural Representations................................................................30
1.5.2. Eurocentrism..................................................................................31
1.5.2.1. “Our Universal Civilisation”...................................................37
1.5.2.2. Naipaul’s Treatment of Progress.............................................41

2. THE PLAYFUL LITTLE WORLD OF CHILDHOOD..................................48

2.1. Childhood as Cultural Construct...............................................................49
2.2. Infantilising Stereotypes............................................................................51
2.2.1. “A Tiny Little Dot on Some Maps”...............................................54
2.2.2. The Social-Darwinist Dilemma: Play-Boys or Apes?...................64
2.2.3. Man-man, the Madman and other Barbarians................................73
2.2.4. Half Children, Half Devils.............................................................76
2.2.5. Protestant Ethic versus Ludic Idleness...........................................79
2.2.6. The Jail and the Movement of Play “Indoors”..............................81
2.3. Colonial Education....................................................................................84
2.3.1. The Schoolmaster Syndrome.........................................................84
2.3.2. Sports, Courage and Fair Play........................................................85
2.3.3. “Invented Traditions”: Britishness on Dis-play.............................91
2.4. Anti-Eurocentric voices............................................................................96
2.4.1. Demystifying the Familial Idyll.....................................................96
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2.4.2. Children with Power......................................................................98
2.5. The Autobiography of Childhood and Adolescence...............................101
2.5.1. Trivia............................................................................................101
2.5.2. Changing Points of View.............................................................102
2.6. Summary.................................................................................................106

3. FESTIVE TRINIDAD...................................................................................109

3.1. Prelude.....................................................................................................110
3.2. Lila or Hindu Play...................................................................................111
3.2.1. Trinidad as Site of Displacement.................................................115
3.2.1.1. East Indians in the West Indies.............................................115
3.2.1.2. Symbolic Ethnicity: The Fragments of a Civilisation...........119
3.2.1.3. Rituals as Cultural Memory..................................................123
3.2.2. The Might of Ceremonies............................................................125
3.2.2.1. The Family Fortress..............................................................125
3.2.2.2. Forms of Protest and Resistance...........................................131
3.2.2.3. Symbolic Violence: Gender and Caste.................................133
3.2.3. God’s Game, Fate, Orientalism....................................................136
3.3. Black Carnival.........................................................................................142
3.3.1. Afro-Trinidadians.........................................................................143
3.3.2. Fashioning the Black....................................................................144
3.3.3. Carnival and Slavery....................................................................149
3.3.4. Clownish Revolutionaries............................................................154
3.3.5. Religious Hysteria........................................................................157
3.3.6. The Feast of the Senses................................................................160
3.3.7. Carnival: Self-Image or Heterosterotype?...................................163
3.4. Liminal Spaces........................................................................................165
3.4.1. The Race of Races.......................................................................165
3.4.2. Hybrid Festivals...........................................................................167
3.5. Summary.................................................................................................173
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4. THE PLAYGROUND OF THE IMAGINATION........................................177

4.1. Play and Imagination...............................................................................178
4.2. Adventure................................................................................................180
4.2.1. Native Romancers........................................................................181
4.2.2. Exploring Death...........................................................................187
4.2.3. Myths of the New World..............................................................189
4.2.3.1. Columbus and the Garden of Eden.......................................189
4.2.3.2. El Dorado..............................................................................193
4.2.3.3. Crusoe’s Shipwreck..............................................................196
4.2.4. Visitors to the Island....................................................................198
4.2.5. Leisure Realms: the Estate, the Beach, the Club.........................203
4.2.6. Exotic Sceneries...........................................................................213
4.2.6.1. Aestheticising the Other........................................................213
4.2.6.2. Landscape and History..........................................................221
4.3. The Postmodern Game of Writing..........................................................224
4.3.1. Neo-Baroque Labyrinths of Mirrors............................................224
4.3.2. Intertextual Theatricality..............................................................231
4.3.2.1. Shakespearean Allusions.......................................................233
4.3.2.2. The Theatre of the Absurd....................................................238
4.3.2.3. From Theatre to Cinema.......................................................241
4.3.3. Popular Culture............................................................................247
4.3.4. Playing with Language.................................................................250
4.3.5. Metafictional Constructs..............................................................256
4.3.6. Postmodernism/Postcolonialism..................................................263
4.4. Summary.................................................................................................265

5. CONCLUSIONS............................................................................................267

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY..........................................................................................269

7. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG...............................................................................295
1. INTRODUCTION
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1.1. Methodology and Objectives

Long before he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, Vidiadhar
Surajprasad Naipaul had already been a highly controversial personality.1 Sometimes
decried as a neo-colonial writer, a “postcolonial mandarin”,2 Naipaul has also called
forth extremely positive remarks. According to Feroza Jussawalla, he would be “the
most beloved and widely read British author”.3
Both opinions are debatable; on the contrary, a certain fact is that V.S.
Naipaul represents one of the most prolific contemporary writers.4 He has published
29 books so far, to which one must add an impressive number of articles, reviews
and interviews. Within this literary corpus, Trinidadian themes occupy a privileged
place, underlying the majority of Naipaul’s writings. I focus on 10 fictional works,
namely The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street
(1959), A House for Mr Biswas (1961), A Flag on the Island (1967), The Mimic Men
(1967), In a Free State (1971), Guerrillas (1975), The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and
A Way in the World (1994),5 without neglecting, however, important non-fictional
works like The Middle Passage (1962), The Loss of El Dorado (1969), Between
Father and Son: Family Letters (1999) or the essays and lectures collected in the
following volumes: The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (1972), The
Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad (1980), Finding the Centre
(1984), Reading & Writing (2000) and The Writer and the World (2002).
My purpose is to analyse representations of Trinidad in the aforementioned
writings by situating the respective images in a larger discursive context. Naipaul

1 An essay discussing the controversy surrounding Naipaul’s Nobel Prize is Éric Tabuteau’s article,
“La Moitié d’une Vie entre Deux Mondes: V.S. Naipaul, Prix Nobel Controversé”, in: Judith
Misrahi-Barak, ed., V. S. Naipaul: A World in Tension; Une Oeuvre sous Tension, Montpellier:
Cerpac, 2004, pp. 17-30.
2 In an influential study on Naipaul’s nonfictional works, Rob Nixon writes that “by diversifying into
nonfiction he has achieved a reputation of a quite different order, not merely as a powerful
imaginative writer, but as a mandarin and an institution” holding conservative views with regard to
the Third World; see Robert Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin, New
York: Oxford UP, 1992, p. 5.
3 Feroza Jussawalla, ed., “Introduction” to Conversations with V. S. Naipaul, Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1997, p. x.
4 Cf. Fawzia Mustafa, V. S. Naipaul, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995, p. 1.
5 Labelling this group as “Trinidadian fiction” is problematic since in the case of V.S. Naipaul one
cannot speak of a clear-cut distinction between his fictional and non-fictional works. Secondly, in
many of these “Trinidadian” works, Trinidad is indeed the main setting (with the exception of In a
Free State and The Enigma of Arrival), but not the only one. And thirdly, sometimes we come across
a Trinidad in disguise, e.g. in The Mimic Men, where the Caribbean island has the name “Isabella”,
but the features of Naipaul’s native place.
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makes extensive use of ludic tropes in order to depict his native island; therefore, we
can speak of a portrayal of Trinidad as “play-culture”. Of extreme complexity, this
image should not be interpreted only by means of the concept of mimicry, which has
aroused the interest of many critics as the subsequent chapter will point out.
An analysis of Trinidad as sociocultural construct is not an easy task because
V. S. Naipaul emigrated at an early age to Great Britain, where he has been living
ever since.6 The situation is even more complicated, for Trinidadian society itself is
not a homogenous one, comprising several ethnic groups: Afro-American, East
Indian, Creole, white and Chinese, to name just the most important.7 This happened
as a result of colonial politics, which cruelly displaced people, leaving them rootless
and with no other reference point than the British Empire. It is natural then that
Naipaul's work should reflect a certain tension between diverse worldviews and
mentalities, an opinion to which Judith Misrahi-Barak, the editor of the bilingual
book significantly entitled V. S. Naipaul. A World in Tension; Une Oeuvre sous
Tension, subscribes by saying: “What is brought forward through this new selection
of essays about a writer already much written upon, is the singularity of vision
coupled with the multiplicity of perspectives that shape Vidiadhar Surajprasad
Naipaul’s oeuvre, as well as the multiplicity of the angles that can be adopted to read
him.”8 According to Judith Levy, who adopts a Lacanian approach in V. S. Naipaul:
Displacement and Autobiography, tension represents a kind of literary catalyser in
the case of the writer born in Trinidad; thus, she traces the following pattern: “from
the enactment of the split and the severance from the colonial past, through different
stages in the quest for origin and for a form in which to find and express self, to
resolution – the creation of a myth of origin and the construction of a postcolonial
self through the writing of an autobiography.”9
Miranda’s words from the novel A Way in the World may be read as
Naipaul’s confession: “Because of the way I have lived, always in other people’s

6 Consequently, Naipaul’s representations of Trinidad derive from an interplay between self-
fashioning and the fashioning of the other, having not only autostereotypical but also
heterostereotypical features.
7 Cf. Peter van Koningsbruggen, Trinidad Carnival: A Quest for National Identity, London:
Macmillan Caribbean, 1997, p. 8 note 3.
8 Judith Misrahi-Barak, “Introduction” in: Judith Misrahi-Barak, ed., op. cit., p. 15.
9 Judith Levy, V. S. Naipaul: Displacement and Autobiography, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.,
1995, p. xi. A similar opinion is held by Hédi Ben Abbes; cf. Hédi Ben Abbes, “The Creative
Tension of Emptiness in V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men”, in: Judith Misrahi-Barak, ed., op. cit., p.
48.
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countries, I have always been able to hold two or more different ideas in my head
about the same thing. Two ideas about my country, two or three or four ideas about
myself. I have paid a heavy price for this. You mustn’t rebuke me now.”10 This
sounds like an apology on the part of Naipaul in what is his last fictional work set in
Trinidad. Indeed, there are serious reasons for rebuking the writer: rather than
explore the emancipating possibilities of his hybrid context, he allows the
Eurocentric standpoint dominate African and Indian voices. At times, Naipaul
nevertheless avoids the dangers of essentialism by stating the following: “Since I
went to India I’ve become interested in the way different cultures have different
ways of seeing”11 or “We all inhabit ‘constructs’ of a world. Ancient peoples had
their own. Our grandparents had their own; we cannot absolutely enter into their
constructs. Every culture has its own: men are infinitely malleable.”12
These constructionist assumptions inform my study, too – Naipaul’s
representations of Trinidad as “play-culture” are sociocultural and in this way, they
reflect the writer’s various cultural codes, resulting in an ambiguous picture of his
native island. To my mind, only an interdisciplinary approach can do them justice: I
have consequently tried to initiate a methodological dialogue between postcolonial/
cultural studies on the one hand and performance studies, play theory, as well as
cultural anthropology on the other hand.13
The book is divided into three parts corresponding to the three main facets of
Trinidad as it appears in Naipaul’s writings: firstly, as a childish world; secondly, as
a festive place and thirdly, as a playground for the western imagination. The image
of Trinidad as a childish space stands at the intersection of the autobiographical
genre with the colonial/ Social Darwinist discourse of the so-called “child races”. In
both cases, we have to do with a cultural construct of childhood whose main
stereotypical features are smallness, imitation, irrationality and of course,
playfulness. In the second part of my analysis, I focus on the importance of rituals
and festivals in shaping up Indian and African identities in Trinidad. Roughly, Hindu
rituals are capital means to create diasporic Indias, whereas Carnival is a powerful

10 V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World: A Sequence, London: Heinemann, 1994, p. 332.
11 Ian Hamilton, “Without a Place: V. S. Naipaul in Conversation with Ian Hamilton”, in: Feroza
Jussawalla, ed., Conversations with V.S. Naipaul, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997,
p.19.
12 V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World, pp. 154-155.
13 For a more detailed treatment of the concepts of “play-culture” and “cultural representation”, see
pp. 25-30 of the present study.
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symbol of the Afro-Trinidadian community. Nevertheless, they carry the potential of
becoming genuine liminal spaces, where ethnic boundaries are transgressed. The
third section is devoted to a discourse of play as imagination. In this respect,
Trinidad appears as an adventure playground where the Westerner projects his/her
desires, sometimes under the mask of scientific respectability. The eye of the
European sees the tropical island as an exotic Garden of Eden, as an aesthetic space
with strong pictorial and theatrical qualities. But if Trinidad occurs as an artistic, a
fictional object, then Naipaul’s novels and stories describing it are fiction about
fiction, and so have a very important metafictional component. At this stage, since
metafiction is also a capital element of postmodernism, I trace back Naipaul’s ludic
metaphors to the present-day Zeitgeist, pointing out the postmodern elements in his
texts dealing with Trinidad.
All in all, one could regard this study as an homage paid to an island that in
spite of its size is one of the most significant places on the literary map of the
world.14

14 Except for V. S. Naipaul, Trinidad has given the world important writers such as Samuel Selvon, C.
R. L. James, Merle Hodge or Earl Lovelace. Another Nobel Prize winner, Derek Walcott, has
strong ties to the island, as he has spent many years of his life there; Walcott has massively