Above the Fray: Thoughts on V.S. Naipaul

Matthew Hinds, an IHP Visiting Research Fellow for 2010-2011 from the International History Department at LSE, sends this contribution to Past Present:

"Once again, the Nobel Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul’s latest work has been lambasted by his fellow writers. This time in a most scathing fashion, the novelist Robert Harris, in a recent review for the Sunday Times blurred the lines between personal attack and objective reflection, calling Naipaul’s Masque of Africa, a non-fictional account of the author’s travels to the continent, “repulsive.” Ever since Patrick French’s 2008 fascinating biographical portrait of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, reviewers such as Harris have gravitated towards the shortcomings of Naipaul’s personality, rather than the writer’s contribution to literature. The insufferable egotism of Naipaul was put on full display for everyone to see in French’s biography, but should this really be such a surprise? Most writers, particularly the good ones, are more often than not unabashed egotists.

What critics have neglected in their anger is the importance of contextualizing Naipaul’s background and the correlative relationship it has had with his writing. A Trinidadian of Hindu descent as well as a resident of Britain for over 50 years, Naipaul has always viewed himself as a foreigner, even when he is “home.” Looking beyond the parochialisms of Trinidad and the Caribbean, Naipaul’s view of the world was greater than his surroundings. Publishing his first book in the 1950’s, he fought against all those who tried to pin him into categories on account of his race. Labeling him as a “West Indian writer” was a backhanded way to highlight, yet at the same time, minimize the full contribution of his work. Arguably, the unifying force behind Naipaul’s writing is the happy sense of disconnection to any one community. It has inspired his uncompromising writing style, which has no doubt resulted in him making a legion of enemies of many different stripes. Throughout his career, Naipaul’s own unique brand of iconoclasm has rubbed many people the wrong way. Once asked to comment on the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, he mischievously described it as “an extreme form of literary criticism.”

Therefore, it is no wonder that decades earlier, Naipaul was subverting stereotypes by writing such books as The Middle Passage and An Area of Darkness, both prominent works that were highly critical of the post-colonial eras in the West Indies and India. Naipaul, unlike many of his contemporaries, was skeptical of anti-colonial nationalism in terms of the corruption, poverty and politicization that animated some of these movements. In this view, his sharp critique of the emerging third world countervailed those post-colonial narratives that championed the anti-imperial struggle. This is not to say that Naipaul was a reactionary or an apologist for imperialism, as his detractors claim. In fact, much of that famous “Naipaul rage” manifests from the insipid racism and class ridden bigotry he felt when he arrived at Oxford in 1950.

So why then was Naipaul, at the height of decolonization and the growing trend of cultural relativism, more severe in his criticism of post-colonial states as opposed to the former imperialists? The reason is that given his platform as a writer, Naipaul was adamant that it also meant being above the fray of orthodoxy. When confronting such contentious topics like race, class, and country, Naipaul lives by the maxim “fiat justitia ruat caelum” -Let justice be done, though the heavens fall. In this sense, like all great writers, Naipaul has always possessed an unwavering single-mindedness; to tell the truth as he believed and saw it."