Dear Editor,
Ameena Gafoor says among other things in her letter on Naipaul, that the main question we ought to be asking when we approach the oeuvre should be “Is it art?”
Her contribution to the subject raises important questions and includes interesting observations. We do not agree with everything.
Consider this example. She offers the point that Naipaul’s “brutal frankness” should be beneficial to us all since he is telling us the truth about ourselves. She speaks about Naipaul’s depiction of us as “stark reality” and proposes that there is a “truth to be gained” on our part by paying heed to the litany of despondencies which Naipaul scatters throughout his works
So we suppose, when Naipaul writes that nothing would ever be created in the West Indies, and that the races of sub-men that inhabit the space are destined to forever continue in their brutish mediocrity, one of the questions that arises in our minds should be the one cited above. “Is it art?”
Or when he characterises Islam as a retarding force the question could be “Is he writing well?” But I conclude, from her recommendations, that we, in turn, ought to be “brutally frank” about Naipaul. Somewhere, someone will benefit by it. And there lurks in our minds an unsettling suspicion. It presents itself in the form of questions.
Can a mysogonistic, or anti-Indian artist find the same safety from condemnation we are asked to extend to Naipaul? The question that responds to Ms Gafoor’s point about art and “truth” would therefore be, “Is what Naipaul wrote about the Caribbean and the countries he has visited truth?”
Then, are Caribbean Indians using Naipaul’s success as a writer as a form of self-validation, as a compliment and source of reassurance to the community as other peoples do and have done elsewhere?
The social utility and features of “art” go way beyond considerations of style or medium or mastery of the form and all art has to be considered in a cultural and ideological context. Who is the artist, who is his patron and client and what is his message, are questions that can and are legitimately raised in consideration of the work or movement. A criticism of Mr Naipaul must admit of these.
Ms Gafoor therefore takes the reflection on Naipaul into the area of literary criticism and aesthetics, after having evoked the social utility of a Naipaul who looks at the distress in the world and declares that the suffering castes not only deserve it by virtue of their congenital incapacities, but that they can never evolve into any thing else. This kind of nihilism is what ensures that there is no progress in some parts of the world. It is what has justified the existence of the untouchables of the world, of the existence of slavery, of the rigid class or gender discriminations. The art is at the service of an ideology of negation that it would be unhealthy for us to find acceptable.
Besides, Mr Naipaul’s travel books and essays are found in a literary genre in which, like journalism, the scribal skills are essentially subservient to the ideology and the fidelity to truth that is seen in the work. One judges form as well as content. And content is what, from a critical standpoint, often takes precedence.
But in Mr. Naipaul’s case, even the fictional works now bear the stain of his complexes. Theo Taitt, in reviewing Naipaul’s last novel, Magic Seeds notes that the writer has slithered out of the bounds of the politically incorrect and now wallows in the “politically obscene.” The reviewer writes in the London Review of Books that he finds the novel, “icy, misanthropic” etc. And the angst fuelling Mr Naipaul’s embarrassing attitudes is all the more pitiful when we recall his own origins. A bright lower-middle-class scholarship boy from a minority community. The condition has bred a strange complex.
So, when we are considering a man’s “oeuvre”, and not a single book like Biswas, we look for common themes and attitudes.
How does one consider the soft-pornographic, scatalogical obsession with sex that has now afflicted him. Taitt speaks of Naipaul’s obsession with sex between races and castes, between the free and the prostitute, and we may add, between the normal and the perverted, obsessions that are detected in Half a Life and Magic Seeds, the two last novels.
It is only in the most comprehensive, and multi-perspective reading of the work that the art in it can be explicated and appreciated. Liking a turn of phrase or a characterisation or the calligraphy is to settle for the surface. One has to go beneath and see what the artist is saying. The question that always follows would be “Is it truth, is this the stark reality?” Or is it the artist’s rendering?
Is Naipaul’s work concerned with economic development and is Biswas an example of his economic philosophy? This is an economist’s reading. An agronomist reading a novel set in a rural community might equally find matters of interest in terms of agricultural practice. But these would always be incidental. Biswas was one of those several “novels of growing up” that come out of young writers. It is a work of quality and the first to have dealt in such detail with the existence of the Indian overseas community of the descendants of indentureds. But it is not all that Naipaul wrote. It is not the sole work by which he may be judged.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
