Friction, Voice, and the Rough Ground of Feeling: V.S. Naipaul after Twenty-Five Years

J.J. HEALY Friction, Voice, and the Rough Ground of Feeling: V.S. Naipaul after Twenty-Five Years We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground. (Wittgenstein , Philosophical Investigations, 107) In a somewhat Forster-like flourish, Irving Howe recently finished his intellectual autobiography, Margins ofHope, with an invitation: '... Let me bid four writers of my own time to an imaginary but not wholly unimaginable meeting. They sit in my apartment: Octavio Paz, the Mexican; Milan Kundera, the Czech; V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidadian; George Konrad, the Hungarian.'1 On the face of it, this is an unusual quartet. One does not usually see V.S. Naipaul in this company. What, according to Howe, do they have in common? This is his answer: 'God died in the nineteenth century, utopia in the twentieth. The writers gathered here, all endowed with a keen political sense, have sung their dirge of utopia. Their voices ring with scepticism, doubt, weariness: they are the poets of limitation.'2As the poets of limitation, they are also the authentic voices of their time and of their societies. Yet what would be conceded in the case of Kundera and Konrad, admitted in the case of Paz, is often withheld in the case of Naipaul. Perhaps because the historical and social shape of the Caribbean is either less visible or less pressing, the voice of scepticism, doubt, and weariness is often seen as idiosyncratic and perverse in a personal sense in Naipaul's work; a keen political sense is what he is felt emphatically not to have. A case could be made, of course, that the acidic and bitter clarity of Kundera and Konrad is 'sustained' by the tangible oppression they work in and against. After Orwell, Koestler, Bruno Schultz, we know what Kundera and Konrad are up against and why they write as they do. They are backed by central miseries and perceptions of our time. Czeslaw Milosz has noted the connections between the old empires of the Caribbean and the new empire of Eastern Europe which place the Baltic states, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia as well as Trinidad and Mexico under the rubric of colony.} But the focus for Kundera and Konrad is more total, more totalitarian, more rigorously supervisedby ideology and power. There is an oppressively assertive set of abstractions - Marxism UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 1, FALL 1985 46 J.J. HEALY and a tangible concrete force - the Red Army, - both working within a concentrated geographical area and over a time frame (thirty years) the edges of which remain graspable. The time, the manner, the place, the personae of empire are more dispersed for Naipaul and Paz. The claustrophobia of marginality, the sense of futility and guilt, the ambiguities of the empire-colony phenomenon are very close to both men, but the Spanish and the English have departed, and Mexico and Trinidad have always, as entities of fact and memory, had the capacity to flow away from them, to slip through the fingers of either writer whether he is working as a poet, a novelist, or an historian. Consequently, Paz and Naipaul have had, in the process of their careers, to construct versions of the history and social forms of their native lands. The Labyrinth of Solitude and The Loss of El Dorado have this impulse in common, however unlike they are in sensibility and manner. The predicament of limitation within which Paz and Naipaul have seen themselves has been more difficult of focus, and the focus that they have managed to salvage for themselves has often, for their readers, had a dispersed quality. The urgency is there, but so is a kind of blur. Yet it is easier to place Paz into the company of Kundera and Konrad than Naipaul. He has, in the final resort, seen himself as a writer within a . national context, as a politician-diplomat-poet working with that most politicized of aesthetic instrumentalities of this century, surrealism. Naipaul has remained...