The word ‘criticising’ in my title allows me to talk about and carry on literary criticism of the written work of V. S. Naipaul. It is important to my drift that I give you in this section a hint of what ‘literary criticism’ means to me.

Some caveats are necessary. Most books are capable of being read at several levels. Famous examples are Gulliver’s Travels and Alice in Wonderland which are read in one way when we are children and in more complex ways when we are adults. It should be obvious then that there are different kinds of readings. I am concentrating here on the kind of reading/s a literary criticism depends on.

Literary criticism involves skilful and sensitive reading; personal engagement and response; the use of scholarship and research to position you to read more sensitively; experience and knowledge to help you to better come to terms with the content of the work before you.

It is not only a craft with skills that you can learn and apply to suit yourself. It is a joyful and dangerous act of surrender. It is having the courage to immerse yourself in the world the writer has created (you become a murderer, a lesbian, a postman, a houngan, a prince of Denmark, a mocking pretender), after which you must collect yourself and meditate on the complex encounter you have had with yourself and with all the thoughts and feelings and images that the object before you has summoned up.

The ideal literary critic does not locate himself outside and above the work. He has to submit himself to a process that is as exhilarating and exhausting and frightening as that undergone by the great writers. It can take me days, and one or two Clint Eastwood movies or Agatha Christie detective novels to come back to myself after reading a book that draws me into itself. And after all that you must have manners and discretion - you have to decide how much of what you have experienced and imagined you can talk or write about. What secrets you must hide.

In short, the base and foundation of literary criticism is engaged reading, and the purpose of literary criticism is to serve reading. The great poet, in awe of the masters of whom he would like to become one, is ready to humble himself and become a reader:

One could abandon writing for the slow-burning signals of the great, to be, instead, their ideal reader, ruminative, voracious, making the love of masterpieces superior to attempting to repeat or outdo them, and be the greatest reader in the world.

Derek Walcott ‘Volcano’

So the greatest praise you can bestow upon literary criticism is to say that it made you want to experience the work of a writer and helped to clear the way for you to do so.

I often wonder whether we are afraid to experience the work of writers like VS Naipaul who look at the world more uncompromisingly than we do, and whether most of what passes for literary criticism has been complicit in this fear.

The word ‘criticising’ also gives me space to recognise difference and take account of some of the other kinds of criticism that have been applied in the case of this author. The defining characteristic of these other kinds of criticism is that they are more concerned with the man they think the author is than with the written work.

At the most primitive level, the criticising of VS Naipaul I have just mentioned includes a barrage of blunt denunciation by persons who do not pretend to be readers or critics. Here is a familiar selection. The first group consists of comments on his alleged opinions about people and places: He is always bad talking Trinidad. He thanks England and India for helping him to get the Nobel Prize and he didnt’even see fit to mention Trinidad. He doesn’t really like any country. He started off by exposing the secrets of Indian people, his close friends, and even his own family. He makes Indian people look bad. He has a problem with people of African origin, he calls them Negroes and worse, and he describes them in insulting ways. He has contempt for the West Indies. He says Africa has no future and India doesn’t know its own past.

The second group consists of more personal judgments on the man: He is a Black Englishman, with a colonial mentality; knighthood from the Queen is just what he was looking for. He feels he is better than everybody, he so special. He feels he is the only one who suffer in his family as a child, the only one who had to work like a donkey in school and in college, the only one who had to bear poverty and cold weather in a foreign University. He doesn’t like anybody. He doesn’t even like himself. He is too discouraging. He is over- pessimistic.

But there is more. What I have called “the other kinds of criticism” also include judgments which are offered as literary criticism or are added on to literary criticism or are subsumed under ‘cultural criticism’ by intelligent people who have read, even studied and taught the works, and whose opinions, therefore, cannot be dismissed just so.

In 1956 one commentator refers to Naipaul as “a colonial, ashamed of his cultural background and striving like mad to prove himself through promotion to the peaks of a ‘superior’ culture whose values are gravely in doubt…” (George Lamming The Pleasures of Exile 1960). And in a 1968 essay that is appreciative of Miguel Street and A House for Mr Biswas, another critic finds in Naipaul’s work an “unconscious acceptance of a typical European view of Third World inferiority” which shows itself in “his contemptuous rejection of all things West Indian.” He poses the summary that “Naipaul is a Trinidad East Indian who has not come to terms with the Negro-Creole world in Trinidad, or with the East Indian world in Trinidad, or with the greyness of English life, or with life in India itself where he went in search of his roots.” (Gordon Rohlehr ‘The Ironic Approach’ in The Islands in Between ed. Louis James 1968)

This is bacchanal country so let me make myself clear. The opinions I’ve just quoted were expressed between forty and fifty years ago. They can’t be taken as complete or typical, and over the years the critics may well have modified their views. But I want to notice two things: these opinions have been handed down in one way or another to students in secondary schools and Universities; secondly, these opinions are not unrelated to the kinds of remarks I have identified earlier as coming from non-readers and casual readers, and that is probably why they have passed so easily into popular currency.

I am not ravished by the beauty of numbers, and I believe that the majority is more likely to be wrong than right, but I would concede that if fifty million are doing it, the matter is at least triable. We may ward off danger by chanting “Never trust the teller, trust the tale”. A formula that programmes us to pay attention to the work not the man is trustworthy not least because it keeps our fastness in check; but it could deny us the pleasures that come from intellectual curiosity.

The problem of the relationship between the man and the work is too subtle and complex to be disposed of by a rule of thumb. So I must come back later to try and work out why commentators of all degrees of competence gravitate from the work to make pronouncements about what or who they think is the man VS Naipaul.

Misprision

contempt or disdain for something or somebody considered of little value

failure to understand or see the value of something or someone

If there is one Naipaul sentence that makes its way from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation like a fragment of sacred text or a bad poem one was forced to memorize in primary school, it is the following from 1962: “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies.” A celebratory symposium given the title ‘Created in the West Indies’ has revived this remark by offering, wittily, I suppose, to give the lie to it. I want to examine this text because it is one that has been quarried by all those who want to pelt stones.

As you can see from the first paragraph on the screen, Naipaul has been talking about the grossness of plantation White society where, and I quote, “men ‘ate like cormorants’ and ‘drank like porpoises’; a society without standards, without noble aspirations, nourished by greed and cruelty”. Naipaul points also to its illiteracy and ignorance, and takes from Sir Alan Burns’ History of the West Indies the judgement passed on Barbados by a seventeenth century traveller: “This Iland is the Dunghill whare one England doth cast forth its rubidg…”

In the second paragraph, the writer who is to produce, seven years later, a major philosophically challenging historical work entitled The Loss of El Dorado (1969), begins to wonder how to write the history of what he calls “this West Indian futility” and what should be the tone of the historian. He speculates. The European historian noticing the appalling brutality and self-brutalisation of chattel slavery may seek to disperse it in the wider perspective of European brutality; or he might plead that his country was being unfairly stigmatised as the most brutal of the European countries. West Indian historians only now beginning to face their history might play for objectivity and distance by treating the slave trade as “just another aspect of mercantilism.” (Is he thinking here about Capitalism and Slavery?)

Naipaul then concludes impatiently that the history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. And it’s not only because of the brutality. The White people built no museums, libraries or historical monuments. They did not create a civilisation. They achieved nothing. They created nothing. They left nothing to build a history around.

This is not a denial of the folk culture of the enslaved and indentured peoples; or of the history of survival and resistance; or of the astounding bursting out of creativity and self-expression in song story, dance, music, religion, festivals, the Trinidad Carnival, and the shaping of a society in the period between Emancipation and adult suffrage. It is not pronouncing a curse or putting blight on anybody. It is an indictment of the free people of the island.

It is obvious from the second paragraph, however, that at the time of writing The Middle Passage, Naipaul saw history as being written around big names, large events, and certain concrete manifestations. It is an approach many historians still hold and one that has only just begun to disappear from the schools. He seemed to have the same notion of how to write history when he set about The Loss of El Dorado. The narrative ploy, according to Naipaul was “to attach the island, the little place in the mouth of the Orinoco River, to great names and great events: Columbus; the search for El Dorado; Sir Walter Raleigh. Two hundred years after that, the growth of the slave plantations. And then the revolutions: the American Revolution; the French Revolution and its Caribbean by-product, the BlackHaitian Revolution; the South American Revolution and the great names of that revolution, Francisco Miranda, Bolivar.” (The Enigma of Arrival p. 155)

The magic of The Loss of El Dorado however is that Naipaul peoples the dusty documents with voices and bodies floating into the presence of the great men and disappearing into the background again, voices and bodies which refuse to stay out of mind when they are squeezed out of sight. Luisa Calderon and the common life around her spill into Port of Spain, penetrate every level of island society and reach into a shocked and titillated metropolis. The great men great events theory of history crumbles before the simmering, secret and entangled life of the place.

In The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul registers the awe he felt as this life emerged from off-centre: “Reading the transcript (miraculously preserved) of the trial of a Negro slave for the murder of another slave in Port of Spain in the Spanish time, and picking up inconsequential details about the houses, the street life, the backyard or slave-yard love affairs and jealousies, I found I could easily think myself back into that Port of Spain street of two hundred years before. I could see the people, hear the speech and accents. In that street I could see the origin of the Port of Spain street I had spent part of my childhood in the street whose life and people had been the subject of my first book… It was astonishing to me to discover that the street life I had written about had such a past, that the street life I had witnessed as a child, or something like it, had existed in Port of Spain in 1790. While Trinidad was still part of the great and old Spanish Empire; while slavery still existed, and was forty-four years away from being abolished; when the French Revolution was still new, and the Black Haitian revolution was still a year away.” (p. 156).

And in the Epilogue to The Loss of El Dorado, Naipaul calls like Wilson Harris in History Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and the Guianas (1970) for an imaginative and researched history that would reconstruct the lives of faceless storyless voiceless natives of our person:

Port of Spain was a place where things had happened and nothing showed. Only people remained. History was a fairytale about Columbus and a fairytale about the strange customs of the aboriginal Caribs and Arawaks; it was impossible now to set them in the landscape. History was the Trinidad five-cent stamp; Raleigh discovering the Pitch lake. History was also a fairytale not so much about slavery as about its abolition, the good defeating the bad. It was the only way the tale could be told. Any other version would have ended in ambiguity and alarm. The slave as slave was never real. Like the extinct aboriginal, he had to be reconstructed from his daily routine. So he remains, existing, like Vallot’s jail (of which no plan survives), only in the imagination. In the records the slave is faceless, silent, with an identification rather than a name. He has no story.

Why do people want to continue to misinterpret the sentence, “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies”?

According to Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival, the eighteen year old boy who went to England in 1950 was “in the profoundest way, untutored”. Just how untutored and ignorant Naipaul elaborates on pages 110-111. All that the boy had outside the world of school and the imaginary life of books and the cinema was the half-Indian world of his immediate village community whose language he hardly understood. He was close to its ways but he had not participated in the life or the rituals of that community. That was the only social world he could say he knew. He did not know the other Indian communities in Trinidad which included Muslims. He knew nothing of the non-Indian communities in Trinidad. He was unhappy in his extended family, and distrustful of larger communal groupings.

The reader can see from the account of the first day that the boy is not at ease with himself. In his Nobel lecture, ’Two Worlds’, Naipaul declares: “When I became a writer those areas of darkness around me as a child became my subjects. The land; the aborigines; the new world; the colony; the history; India; the Muslim world to which I also felt myself related; Africa; and then England where I was doing my writing. …The aim has always been to fill out my world picture, and the purpose comes from my childhood: to make me more at ease with myself.” (Literary Occasions ed. Pankaj Mishra pp. 190-191)

The other part of the story is not so special. His life from childhood had been devoted to study of an abstract sort, and that studying had committed him to withdrawal from the life of the island and had filled his head with the idea of a real life, his literary life, elsewhere, in England.

None of us might have had it so bad, perhaps not even Naipaul. But it is true of the generation who received “a sound colonial education”. Walcott’s Another Life (1973) explores the condition. This is how CLR James puts it in Chapter 3 of Beyond a Boundary (1963): “…As far back as I can trace my consciousness the original found itself and came to maturity within a system that was the result of centuries of development in another land, was transplanted as a hot- house flower is transplanted and bore some strange fruit.” James makes this statement with the caveat that he would not deny unidentifiable early influences or innate characteristics. In the last paragraph of ‘Prelude’ in A Way in the World (1994), Naipaul declares that “we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings” but in The Enigma of Arrival there is no suggestion of innate characteristics that might inform resistance to total makeover.

No West Indian writer treating with the subject of his childhood and his colonising island education has been as hard on himself as Naipaul. We are privy to an abject confession of gaucherie, ignorance, incompetence, alienation on the one hand, and of the saving fantasy on the other that fulfillment is waiting in the metropolis.

In the early collection In a Green Night (1962) Walcott “watched the island narrowing” as the plane taking him to Barbados divides him from the landscape he has written about with love (‘Tales of the Islands: Chapter x’. This makes a nice compare and contrast exercise with pp.104-105 of The Enigma of Arrival where young Naipaul, too, views from above, the landscape he is leaving at last. We are dealing not only with ignorance and alienation, we are dealing with blindness in the man.

At ground level the adjectives that fixed the place for him included “poor” “messy”, “bare”, “straggly”, “shabby”. Now he is astonished by its logic and order, its colours, its fields, its swampland, its peaks and valleys, its pattern and contours, its camouflaging dark greens and dark browns absorbing all the messiness and disorder: “At the moment of take off almost, the moment of departure, the landscape of my childhood was like something I had missed, something I had never seen.” Minutes later he sees the aboriginal sea “so that again, the world in which I had lived all my life so far was a world I had never seen.” This vision does not have any immediate effect on the fantasy of the literary life in the metropolis in which the boy is locked. The way The Enigma of Arrival is written we don’t know if the boy articulated any of this to himself or if it just waited in his mind. We know he did not turn around and start all over again in his island.

Years later, working on The Loss of El Dorado and immersed in the documents of his island in the British Museum, he was amazed by the antiquity of the place to which he belonged, and is aroused to feel his island as a vital part of the globe. He was nurtured by the discoveries he had made: “Ever since I had begun to identify my subjects I had hoped to arrive, in a book, at a synthesis of the worlds and cultures that had made me. The other way of writing, the separation of one world from the other, was easier, but I felt it false to the nature of my experience. I felt in this history I had made such a synthesis.” (p.157) For Naipaul, then, the research and the writing carried out to write the book The Loss of El Dorado yielded the gold of recognition of his island and enrichment of the untutored social being.