Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction

3 “No Admittance”

3 “No Admittance” V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone. —Rainer Maria Rilke, “Autumn Day” The approach to identity as an outcome of spatial practice constitutes one of the most important aspects of V. S. Naipaul’s semi-autobiographical novel A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). This novel is a prime example of the correlation between spatial theory and Caribbean postcolonial discourse and draws into sharper focus a number of questions that I have been raising. The novel consists of a central triad—space, self, and writing—that, in its triple orientation, allows me to examine the material significance of the house, its impact on identity, and its symbolic relevance in the protagonist’s quest for autonomy and authorship. This intimate connection between space and identity allows Naipaul to question the process by which spatial dispossession deprives the protagonist of a sense of self. In response Mr. Biswas seeks to reclaim his individual autonomy by struggling to acquire a house of his own, but when this quest repeatedly fails, his only remedy for the indignities of material deprivation resides in repetitive and frustrated attempts at writing. Naipaul’s narrative of spatial dispossession is thus inextricably woven into a gradual crumbling of the self and shows that, in the end, the absence of location (physical and psychological) can only be contested through authorship. Nevertheless the attempt to resolve material destitution narratively turns out to be an inadequate substitution, which only emphasizes the absence at the heart of the story. In this chapter I address the triplicity of A House for Mr. Biswas (space, self, and writing) by relying on Lefebvre’s theory of appropriation of repressive spaces through imaginative spatial practice. Naipaul’s novel certainly offers a rich literary instantiation of Lefebvre’s lived space in which the ordinary user strives to reclaim through daily symbolic practice those abstract spaces that embody various structures of power. We know, often implicitly, that “the built environment mediates, constructs 78 “No Admittance” and reproduces power relations” (Dovey, 1) but are less clear on how such relations can be contested and transformed. In order to elucidate the role of imagination in this process of spatial appropriation, I will also refer to Gaston Bachelard’s “topoanalysis,” which seeks to understand space as the dialectical interplay between the material and imaginative dimensions of daily human activity. A House for Mr. Biswas is, in my view, a compelling example of the individual engagement with material spatial limitation , which metaphorical spaces seek to challenge. The production of an alternative kind of space, even when that space is imaginary, represents Mr. Biswas’s attempt at contesting and transforming the already produced spaces in which his autonomy and freedom are denied. Naipaul’s tragicomic protagonist, Mohun Biswas, is an Indo-Trinidadian depicted primarily in relation to the spatial configurations of his unaccommodated existence. Despite the fact that Mr. Biswas is housed throughout the novel, he continues to think of himself as destitute. This is because his dwelling, no matter how squalid or cramped, is always provided for him by his wife Shama’s family, the matriarchal Tulsi clan, who owns property and houses throughout Trinidad and treats Mr. Biswas as a rather contemptible, although inevitable, tenant. The quest for the house in A House for Mr. Biswas is therefore not just a matter of physical shelter but, more important, a dream of ownership through which Mr. Biswas wishes to assert his independence and dignity in relation to any form of authority. The wealthy in-laws’ spatial handouts, instead of helping, only confirm Mr. Biswas’s position as a perpetual dependant. Consequently we find that the individual and the space he inhabits become interchangeable. This equation of identity with its spatial setting suggests that, like many other Caribbean authors, Naipaul turns to spatial images to explore the questions of geographic limitation and denied autonomy, which lie at the core of the colonial predicament. Mr. Biswas’s sense of marginality arises from his economically driven spatial dispossession, suggesting that any form of autonomy, whether personal or political, depends on the acquisition or recovery of the place of one’s own. The physical places described in A House for Mr. Biswas crystallize the protagonist’s ambiguous relationship to the New World, where, through the practice of indentured servitude, his ancestors faced the loss of their geographic, cultural, and linguistic grounding. As an inheritor of this aspect of...