Naipaul Getting His Nobel Prize

January 12, 2007

There is not a lot about V.S. Naipaul on the internet. He has a quite short Wikipedia entry, and there appears to be no website devoted to his works.. no legion of fans willing to track his life. (Compare the external links for Naipaul on Wikipedia with the much longer list for Salman Rushdie.) I am sure Naipaul would not be bothered a bit by this state of affairs. He has settled into his cultural niche.. a niche defined by a rather stodgy concept of books.

Although YouTube carries no footage of Naipaul, the official website for the Nobel Prize (which Naipaul was awarded in 2001) held a virtual bonanza of photos and even the video of his acceptance speech. In a spare window of time this past week I listened to Naipaul's speech.. and I was reminded once again why I like his work so much.

The lecture began with the careful distinguishing of one's life from one's work. He quotes Proust on this point admiringly, and then adds his own moral:

Those words of Proust should be with us whenever we are reading the biography of a writer - or the biography of anyone who depends on what can be called inspiration. All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain.

This strikes me as a response to Paul Theroux's vivid description of his lengthy friendship with Naipaul. "Details of the life and the quirks and friendships" is exactly what Theroux set down.. and Naipaul has plenty of quirks. But the listener here is persuaded to put aside the oddities that make up the man V.S. Naipaul.. and to gaze instead at his works.

The lecture then sketches the cognitive journey made by Naipaul over the course of his life.. beginning in Trinidad:

My background is at once exceedingly simple and exceedingly confused. I was born in Trinidad. It is a small island in the mouth of the great Orinoco river of Venezuela. So Trinidad is not strictly of South America, and not strictly of the Caribbean. It was developed as a New World plantation colony, and when I was born in 1932 it had a population of about 400,000. Of this, about 150,000 were Indians, Hindus and Muslims, nearly all of peasant origin, and nearly all from the Gangetic plain.

One can't help but be amazed at the way this man from nowhere found a literary voice. (And by the way what a contrast with Edward Said.. who was a voice for the colonized, but who came from a wealthy and privileged background.)

Naipaul goes on the describe the cultural world surrounding him.. a world transplanted from India but ignorant of itself and its past. He does us the favor of not calling that mixture of people "stimulating" or "colorful". He calls it what it undoubtedly was: confusing.. exceedingly confusing.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are. But for the French child, say, that knowledge is waiting. That knowledge will be all around them. It will come indirectly from the conversation of their elders. It will be in the newspapers and on the radio. And at school the work of generations of scholars, scaled down for school texts, will provide some idea of France and the French.

The picture is of a tiny and restless consciousness.. surrounded by "areas of darkness" (as he will call them). There was no real cultural tradition.. no agreed-upon framework that one could grab hold of to understand the self or to gain an identity.

It is from this initial bewilderment, Naipaul wants us to understand, that his long string of books proceeded. Every book represented a chance to fill in something about himself and his confused cultural past. Those areas of darkness became areas of understanding.

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. That was what I meant when I said that my books stand one on the other, and that I am the sum of my books.

That note brings us back to the beginning of this lecture and his plea to set aside biographical inquiry.. to let his quirks remain just quirks. This is the kind of personal project that many people undertake.. to slowly acquire knowledge and understanding about their past as they grow into life. But with Naipaul that personal project was strangely externalized. What for others is acquired personal wisdom is for Naipaul a shelf of books.

The goad for all this writing was a confusing and bewildering past. That rings true to me. Genuine intellectual penetration is not so much a product of computational ability.. like one's IQ.. but rather a product of having to find one's way out of a confusing maze. The process of having to work one's way out of a false outlook.. and to find an identity.. is a work beset with false paths and illusory stops. At the end of that intense effort, though, is a peace.. areas of understanding. (I know that it is more than just cultural mazes from which one must escape.. there are other kinds as well, equally challenging.)

This idea marks what I respond to in Naipaul's work. The works flow from a hunger to understand himself and his past. There is no desire on his part to become an expert at anything (that prime motivator for the academic). He can flit from topic to topic, yet not disintegrate into unconnected projects. There is a center, and it holds. That center is an enigmatic self.. which has taken many volumes to partially work out.