V.S. Naipaul and Kevin Starr:
My History of Thinking about Place

September 21, 2006

Last week the New Yorker had a review by David Denby of the recent movie The Black Dahlia. The movie is based on the book by LA noir writer James Ellroy. Denby begins his review by noting the image of LA as constructed by these films:

Events from decades ago—a famous murder, a Hollywood scandal, a corrupt real-estate deal—serve as the basis of L.A. novels and screenplays, and the movies made from these fictions become part of the cities sense of itself, and that, in turn, gets fed into new novels, screenplays, and journalism.

Denby is describing something like a feedback loop. Long ago something happened.. some crime was committed.. but then that crime is written about, filmed, re-written about, and filmed again. Pretty soon that feedback loop takes on a life of its own and comes to define the version of Los Angeles that lives in our imagination. Images from Chinatown and Raymond Chandler novels becomes somehow more real to us than the city itself.

I have been thinking recently about the origins of my interest in place. I think it goes back to my fascination with California and its socially constructed meanings. In my early twenties I read through the first three of Kevin Starr's history of California series (which continued on to several more volumes after my interest had wandered). The opening volume concludes with a chapter entitled "Americans and the California Dream":

In the years of its emergence as a regional civilization, what California meant, and what it would continue to mean, was never resolvable into a clear formula. The experience had been so haphazard, so bewildering in variety, that even its most devoted protagonists could not agree on one single interpretation. [415]

Starr's history is essentially a record of the "meaning" of California through its short history. As we expect from a serious historian, Starr does not read a contemporary interpretation back into the earliest periods of the state, but stops at each period and looks for the ways that the meaning of California is contested and transforming.

In the second volume of this series, Inventing the Dream, Starr writes concerning early Hollywood:

...Southern California found its function and identity further fixed by the presence of Hollywood, which by 1920 or so had become its leading social metaphor. By the mid-1920s myth and reality, dream gesture and landscape had so interpenetrated each other in an actual place... that each aspect of architecture and lifestyle, social psychology and infrastructure bespoke an integrated condition based upon the Hollywood myth. [334]

There, once again, is reference to a feedback system. This interchange between actuality and meaning is the crucible of place construction. Geographical space comes to hold a certain weight and value in the imagination.. hold certain associations. California, being perceived as a land devoid of historical references, is an especially interesting case study of place construction.

My continued reading of V.S. Naipaul has brought me to a book of collected essays entitled The Writer and the World (see on right). The essays at the beginning of the book focus on India, and these are also his earliest travel-writing pieces. India is quite a place on which to cut one's travel writing teeth. It seems like a bewildering country.. although I think that is itself a view constructed by my reading of Passage to India and such works. India stands in my mind as many-voiced and complex. Contemplating India is like looking into a deep well.

One can feel Naipaul working through that received version of complex India, searching for mental leverage. Naipaul starts to get this leverage as he departs from that view of India:

To see mysteriousness is to excuse the intellectual failure or to ignore it. It is to fall into the Indian trap, to assume that the poverty of the Indian land must also extend to the Indian mind. It is to deal in Bengal Lancer romance or Passage to India quaintness. It is, really, to express a simple wonder. [18]

Naipaul is not about to blame the versions of India peddled by Forster and others on western "orientalism".. a move which Edward Said would make a decade or so later.. The "mysteriousness" of India is—for Naipaul—a version of the country generated by Indians themselves. A few pages later, commenting on the Indian novel, he offers the following critique:

The ritual of Indian life smothers the imagination, for which it is a substitute, and the interpretation of India in the Indian novel, itself a borrowed form, is at a low, unchanging level. [27]

Right there he identifies the "mystery" of India as a result of a feedback system. A version of India is propagated and re-used by generations, and India is raised in the imagination as a spiritual land.. and that version is spread to the rest of the globe by writers less analytical than Naipaul.. who buy into the self-presentation of the country.

Naipaul works to pull away the cover of mystery.. that is his foothold. We get critical passages such as the following:

Magic is an Indian need. It simplifies the world and makes it safe. It complements a shallow perception of the world, the Indian intellectual failure, which is less a failure of the individual intellect than the deficiency of a closed civilization, ruled by ritual and myth. [24]

But Naipaul is a lonely critic.. his books hardly popular enough to sway the public imagination. The forces that create the world of our imagination.. the Indias and Californias that live in our heads.. are much grander than any single critic. They are the products of national cultures.. which by definition have myth-making capability.