Beyond the Dragon's Mouth: Stories and Pieces, and: Finding the Center: Two Narratives (review)

reviews 123 tradictory nature of reality. And existential skepticism retreats to the non-transferable world of the private subject, negating history as a collective undertaking. Alegría proposes a reading of the world as a process in constant ebullition, a volcanic force in which there are fires and ash, lifting not a definitive line but a laborious spiral which humanity ascends in search of its center. The act of seeking this center creates the circumstantial shell of the century in movement, touching the edges of time and attempting to predict through song "the secret murmur of history." JUAN ARMANDO EPPLE Beyond the Dragon's Mouth: Stories and Pieces by Shiva Naipaul. New York: Viking, 1985. 432 pp. $17.95 (hardcover). Finding the Center: Two Narratives by V.S. Naipaul. New York: Knopf, 1984. 192 pp. $13.95 (hardcover). In Stranger Than Paradise, Jim Jarmusch's Eddie breaks off his hibernation in Manhattan 's Lower East Side and travels to Cleveland for the first time, only to arrive in a city disconcertingly familiar. "Isn't it funny," he deadpans "You go some place new and everywhere looks the same." For two-and-a-half decades the peripatetic V.S. Naipaul has borne witness to a version of the Eddie Principle: the more you move about the more variety becomes routine, until habit and novelty fuse. And in the past decade V.S.'s junior brother, Shiva, has followed suit, threatening to out-Naipaul Naipaul with his embittered grumbles about the monotony of cultural difference. The Naipauls habitually visit countries that are both economically underdeveloped and discursively underrespresented; readers of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review ofBooks, and The New Republic in the U.S., and The London Magazine, The Spectator, The Observer, and The Sunday Telegraph in the U.K., would scarcely ever hear mention of Surinam, Zanzibar, and Mauritius were it not for the Naipauls' customary forays into what used to be called the far-flung corners of the globe. In generalizing about such Third World nations, the Naipauls deceive all the more insidiously because their deceits are only partial: clearly, jettravel , package-tours, Club Med, curio industries, transnational television and transnational corporations, the IMF, and the legacy of colonialism have all helped skew the old homology between geographical and cultural remoteness. And yet there remains something so overwhelmingly reiterative about the Naipauls' themes that one is finally persuaded it is less the blend of superstition, borrowed ideas, irrationality, barbarism, the bombast of nationalist rhetoric, the cult of the leader, and Ignorance (with an accusatory capital "I") that repeats itself from one marginalized country to the next, than it is an ineradicable tedium emanating from the brothers Naipaul themselves. The themes of their travelogues are so stable or monotonous (depending on one's bias) in large part because the Naipuals insist, quite unreasonably, on treating every Third World nation as a variant of "home," of that natal Trinidad each fled in his late adolescence. And so, in an essay on Conrad, V.S. will suddenly speak sweepingly of all "the half-made societies " of the earth and, discussing Venezuela, will gesticulate in the general direction of the world's "retarded communities." 'The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro," the longer of the two narratives that make up Finding the Center, is a case in point. This account of a trip to the Ivory Coast buckles under the combined weight of V.S.'s attempts to generalize his way out of a specific locale and his assumption that a Trinidadian childhood equips him for understanding generic Third World society. The long history of heart of darkness reportage about Africa has rendered African coun- 124 the minnesota review tries especially vulnerable to the extremes of essentialist thinking to which the Naipauls are so prone. From the outside, the forty-seven states in Black Africa have never been permitted the texture of distinctive nations, which makes it easier for V.S. to get away with generalizing on a continental scale: "She spoke of the two worlds, the world of the day and the world of the night, the two ideas of reality that made Africans so apparently indifferent to their material circumstances." This...