Finding the Novel in Your Experience:
The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul

November 11, 2006

In 1979 Naipaul finished the essay "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad." The theme will not be surprising, since Naipaul is once again writing with disdain for the political fantasies that take root on the margins of our global civilization. But the essay is atypical in its willingness to follow a single storyline.. that of the self-styled Michael X who made a name for himself in London before returning to Trinidad and setting up a commune. The project ends in horror as he orders the slaughter of both a worker and the English wife of a partner.

The essay stands out as Naipaul's attempt at "new journalism." It is built out of good old-fashioned investigation and reportage. Were it not for the locale and the fixation on a certain type of racial politics, one could read this as a strong essay by Joan Didion, belonging in a collection such as Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Alternatively, it could be a Trinidadian In Cold Blood. The interest of the reader is captured by the oddity of the central characters; the personal experience of the narrator recedes into the background.

This is not a typical essay from Naipaul. In fact, it helps spotlight what is unique in his work: a confident personal aimlessness in his prose. The image I have of Naipaul in his best non-fiction is of a writer who just shows up somewhere and then begins to stitch together small events and impressions.. until some kind of theme arises. This kind of essay hardly counts as journalism, since it involves no investigation or even interviews with important people. It is not a travelogue because the goal is not to report some kind of journal of sites seen.. or to paint the experience of travel. The goal is to get at a place.. to describe it in a lasting way.

To catch Naipaul at his best one could do worse than starting with "The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro." Visiting the Ivory Coast Naipaul fixates on the presidential palace in the village of Yamoussoukro.. and the aged crocodiles that are kept in an artificial lake there. The long essay (70 pages) then hops around a small constellation of people, describing how they were met and what they had to say about themselves and their country. And of course Naipaul is always enquiring about the crocodiles.

Naipaul himself provides some meta-commentary on his methodology in this essay:

It is a writer's curiosity rather than an ethnographer's or journalist's. So while, when I travel, I can move only according to what I find, I also live, as it were, in a novel of my own making, moving from not knowing to knowing, with person interweaving with person and incident opening out into incident. The intellectual adventure is also a human one: I can move only according to my sympathy. I don't force anything; there is no spokesman I have to see, no one I absolutely must interview. [239]

That paragraph deserves to be unpacked carefully. First, I love the distinction between a "writer's curiosity" and that of a journalist or ethnographer. I think I have felt that distinction, but not mentally defined it. It is the difference between a scholar and a journalist.. both of which approach a topic with a quite different level of interest. Naipaul situates the writer in an altogether unique place.. one that neither scholar nor journalist readily understands.

Next Naipaul speaks about his travel experience as the creation of a novel. A few pages later he expands on this idea:

My days became full and varied. After the random impressions and semi-official meetings and courtesies of the first days, I began to discover themes and people, I began to live my little novel. [245]

Just as a novel is filled with interpersonal drama and probing of characters.. so Naipaul looks for the novel present in the midst of his travels. Characters come into focus, and motives appear. On the world-scale these are minor characters.. not the type that a journalist seeks out.. but the types who could be characters in a novel.

In the quotation Naipaul specifies that his work moves from "not knowing to knowing".. and I think I detect there another important principle: his essays are not about creating the illusion of an all-knowing gaze (the goal of journalists and scholars), but to write a particular personal drama.. which we could call the "coming-to-be-of-knowledge." That is an essentially novelistic way of approaching the experience of travel.. It involves a certain reckless allowance for a personal voice and the vagaries of daily life. It is distinct from the "new journalism" that establishes its credentials by linear narrative drive and the inherent interest of a marginal character.. but in which the narrator himself is distant, only a teller, not an experiencer.