Naipaul's New World: Postcolonial Modernity and the Enigma of Belated Space

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2006 by Bhattacharya, Baidik

London is my metropolitan centre; it is my commercial centre; and yet I know that it is a kind of limbo and that I am a refugee in the sense that I am always peripheral.

I

V.S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul's novels present a postcolonial dilemma for us: how to read his works and his politics together, in a frame of co-production, and how to locate his "bio-graphy" within this framing. His novels, many of which are set in the Caribbean islands and describe the "passions and nerves" of his early life and literary ambition ("Foreword" 1), are often informed with a regressive, even reactionary, vision of the New World. Satire in these narratives frequently deteriorates into odious and objectionable readings of history, reducing the sociopolitical complexity of the New World to what he sees as a derivative and perfunctory political modernity. And yet, these novels present a unique opportunity to explore a buried history of British imperialism-the history of indentured labor, the nineteenth-century mass migration of cheap laborers from the Indian subcontinent to different parts of the New World following the formal abolition of slavery. Without his fiction and his staging of the familial/autobiographical in them/ the imaginative and emotional life of this "other" globalization of the nineteenth century, and the resultant diaspora that continues through the present moment of history, would have been quite inaccessible. The reader of Naipaul's early novels, in other words, is in a constant dilemma to find effective reading strategies that would take into account Naipaul's perverse political agenda and explain what has been characterized as the "immorality" of his texts in terms of their narrative premises and failings. Homi Bhabha has voiced this unease with Naipaul in a recent essay:

[Naipaul's] political opinions on the history of the Third World can be provocative ana offensive, even as his insights upon the lifeworld of postcolonial societies are subtle, sharp, surprising. It would have been easy to condemn the former and applaud the latter; and I could have argued, as critics often do, that artists and writers are most creative when they are most contradictory and that literary language works best when it embraces the arts ofagonism and ambiguity. My task, however, was tougher than that because the imaginative value of Naipaul's writing lies in its peculiar perversity. ("Adagio" 373)

This sense of embarrassment and discomfort is quite widespread in Naipaul criticism. Ashis Nandy, for example, describes Naipaul (along with Nirad C. Chaudhuri) as one of the "inverted modern gurus" of our time, peddling a certain version of "materialist" India and a dubious loathing for it "for not being either a true copy of or a true counterplayer of the West" (83). Such positioning of himself vis-à-vis India, as Nandy's argument implies, can be extended to much of the postcolonial world that Naipaul writes about. Anthony Appiah has identified this dilemma as the "Naipaul fallacy" that always tries to make sense of non-Europe by "embedding [it] in European culture" (146). Sara Suleri, on the other hand, takes Naipaul as one of the last representatives of a "dying generation," a generation that is simultaneously the product of a "given 'third-world' history" and expresses the inability of that history to repeat itself meaningfully in a postcolonial world (150). It is, however, Edward Said's acerbic indictment of Naipaul as the "immoral" and uninformed native informant that has more or less framed postcolonial critical responses to his work:

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. There are others like him who specialize in the thesis of what one of them has called self-inflicted wounds, which is to say that we "non-Wlntes " are the cause of all our problems, not the overly maligned imperialists. Two things need to be said about the small band whose standard bearer Naipaul has become.... One is that in presenting themselves as members of courageous minorities in the Third World, they are in fact not interested at all in the Third World-which they never address-but in the metropolitan intellectuals whose twists and turns have gone on despite the Third World, and whose approval they seem quite desperate to have.... Second, and more important, what is seen as crucially informative and telling about their work-their accounts of the Indian darkness or the Arab predicament-is precisely what is weakest about it: with reference to the actualities it is ignorant, illiterate, and cliche-ridden. (53)

I open this essay with this critical dilemma about Naipaul's work not to salvage him or his work, but for two completely different purposes: first, I suggest that this "political incorrectness" or immorality on Naipaul's part is not an occasional and individual problematic in our understanding of postcolonial modernity and its chroniclers, not simply an idiosyncratic expression of Naipaul's "peculiar perversity," but a thematic paradigm that demands serious critical engagement. Several variations of this narrative are still in circulation, even in this "age of globalization." second, and more importantly, I propose this paradigm as symptomatic of the postcolonial space that his novels attempt to capture. Naipaul's apathy towards the indigenous political formations in the Caribbean, his oft-repeated disdain for the "half-made societies," and his claim to be an authentic chronicler of third-world derangement, I argue, suggest a narrative framing of postcolonial modernity that we have yet to analyze on its own terms. Such gestures demonstrate, among other things, a particular mode of "subjectformation" (the Foucauldian assujettissement) that draws its provenance from colonialism as a cultural project and depends on various spatial practices ("Genealogy of Ethics" 352-58).