V. S. Naipaul’s Journeys: From Periphery to Center

THREE IMPORTANT works—Finding the Centre (1984), The Enigma of Arrival (1987), and A Way in the World (1994)—establish the new direction taken by Naipaul’s work in the third and last phase of his career. In A Bend in the River and “In a Free State,” Naipaul probed the deranging effects of historical upheaval on individuals; in these later works, he explores how people from peripheral backgrounds develop emotional resources and imaginative strategies in the face of disorienting change. This phase is also marked by Naipaul’s experimentation with different ways of writing about his own life, mingling autobiography with fiction and history, such that the boundary between fact and fiction is often troubled.

By the early 1980s, Naipaul had begun to take a greater interest in how peripheral peoples were describing their societies. New forms of wealth and mobility, the exchange of ideas between countries of the global South, the emergence of new religious ideologies, the rise of populist and ethnic movements, all called for an exploration of emergent ways of looking. In this context, Naipaul began to modulate his approach to postcolonial societies, which he had previously treated as reactive formations. Beginning with Among the Believers (1981), Naipaul attended more closely to transcribing and interpreting the ways people were actually making sense of their circumstances, even when he disagreed with them. As a result, the people Naipaul met in different parts of the world played a more active role in shaping the narratives he produced than they had in his earlier work.

A comparison of two autobiographical essays published ten years apart, “Prologue to an Autobiography” (1984, in Finding the Centre) and the earlier “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine” (1974), helps illustrate the shift in tone and sensibility that Naipaul’s writing underwent in the 1980s.1 Whereas the tone of “Conrad’s Darkness” reveals a writer obsessed with a project of global comprehension that he merely seeks to communicate to his readers, Finding the Centre is disarmingly intimate in its focus on the comic details of Naipaul’s effort to get started as a writer.

In a startling break from the bleak tone of his works in the preceding decade, the 1984 essay “Prologue to an Autobiography” is a quietly self-deprecating account of Naipaul’s beginnings as a writer. The sensuous details of the “smooth, ‘non-rustle’ BBC script paper”2 on which the young Naipaul had, thirty years before, typed out “Bogart,” the first story in Miguel Street, are “reality effects” that do not serve to confirm a referential truth so much as to humorously convey the mood of anxiety and superstition in which the twenty-three year old Naipaul had begun and completed his first publishable work. There was a ritual immobility to the “unusual” typing posture Naipaul adopted in the hope that the “magic” would hold as he hammered out the first of several stories over several days in the BBC freelancers’ room: shoulders thrown back, spine arched, “my knees were drawn right up; my shoes rested on the topmost struts of the chair, left side and right side. So, with my legs wide apart, I sat at the typewriter with something like a monkey crouch.”³ There is even an ironic aura surrounding the “foldmarks and the wine stains” left on the manuscript by its sympathetic (and alcoholic) first reader⁴ as Naipaul offers warm sketches of the men, several of them aspiring writers, working in the same room as he typed out his story in 1955.

Separated by ten years, “Conrad’s Darkness” and “Prologue to an Autobiography” occasionally touch on the same autobiographical details, but they give the impression of having been written by two very different people. The author of “Conrad’s Darkness” seems completely alone, a grimly austere figure cursed with the gift of being able to look into the mad eye of history and not blink, in the words of one reviewer.⁵

In contrast, “Prologue to an Autobiography” bustles with a feeling of easy camaraderie in the BBC freelancers’ room that its author transmitted onto the page in his depiction of the Port of Spain street he was writing about in Miguel Street: “the freelancers room was like a club: chat, movement, the separate anxieties of young or youngish men below the passing fellowship of the room.”⁶ Besides the Guianese Gordon Woolford, there were John Stockbridge, the Englishman, and Andrew Salkey, the Jamaican writer who would introduce Naipaul to Diana Athill, the editor at André Deutsch who would prove so important to his early success. Their advice was not only literary but also sartorial. They made him get rid of his working-class overcoat (“It had been chosen for me, before I went to Oxford, by the Maltese manageress of an Earl’s Court boarding house”), which they deemed “wrong” for a writer.

“Prologue” also suggests that the origins of Naipaul’s realism lay in the struggle to overcome an emotional investment in the idea of historical justice that was connected to his father’s literary aspirations:

From the earliest stories and bits of stories my father had read to me, before the upheaval of the move, I had arrived at the conviction—the conviction that is at the root of so much human anguish and passion, and corrupts so many lives—that there was justice in the world. The wish to be a writer was a development of that. To be a writer as O. Henry was, to die in mid-sentence, was to triumph over darkness. And like a wild religious faith that hardens in adversity, this wish to be a writer, this refusal to be extinguished, this wish to seek at some future time for justice, strengthened as our conditions grew worse in the house on the street.⁷

Old memories, chance encounters, and fugitive scenes from childhood are all dredged up in “Prologue” and looked at in a new light; possessed of an unexpected power, they provide the narrator with new ways of assessing his life and the wider history of his society. During this period, Naipaul experimented with mixed genres in which fiction and autobiography were combined—most notably in The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World. He allowed himself to move away from the constraints of character and plot to focus on questions of a more psychological and historical kind. Naipaul also juxtaposed new impressions or encounters with memories from childhood in Trinidad, allowing the latter to appear as a residual form that haunted his contemporary life.

In Enigma, Naipaul experimented with techniques that allowed him to express material factors that had gone into the shaping of his life. Even though the events in Enigma are nearly all drawn from Naipaul’s life story, realist conventions governing the autobiography and the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman are ironized inasmuch as the story of the writer’s origins and growth is not disentangled from or rendered independent of the manner of its presentation. For one thing, the writer’s autobiography implicates him in a peripheral past that he has ostensibly left behind. Naipaul presents his formation as a deformation, requiring and enabling disjunctive temporalities of style and thought. Proust-like remembrance occurs in the sense that Naipaul emphasizes the suggestible manner in which events are experienced; sensations and often fallible introspection take precedence over a concern with the objective depiction of events. By way of a formally distinctive description of his own life, Naipaul engages a mode of critical reflection that thoughtfully broaches historical divisions and tensions within societies formed by the colonial encounter.

The first four days it rained. I could hardly see where I was. Then it stopped raining and beyond the lawn and outbuildings in front of my cottage I saw fields with stripped trees on the boundaries of each field; and far away, depending on the light, glints of a little river, glints of a little river, glints which sometimes appeared, oddly, to be above the level of the land.

The river was called the Avon; not the one connected with Shakespeare. Later—when the land had more meaning, when it had absorbed more of my life than the tropical street where I had grown up—I was able to think of the flat wet fields with the ditches as “water meadows” or “wet meadows,” and the low smooth hills in the background, beyond the river, as “downs.” But just then, after the rain, all that I saw—though I had been living in England for twenty years—were flat fields and a narrow river.8

The phrases “I saw” and “I knew”9 have a subtly undermining effect in that they take apart the realistic presuppositions that the narrator clings to for his orientation. The sentences that follow the passage above are aimed at evoking sensations attending a memory rather than portraying the event itself: “If I say it was winter when I arrived at that house in the river valley, it is because I remember the mist”; “and this picture of the rabbits…calls up or creates the other details of the winter’s day.”¹⁰ “I saw what I saw very clearly. But I didn’t know what I was looking at. I had nothing to fit it into.”¹¹ Broken impressions give way to familiar words and phrases that are disembedded from their everyday assignations. Thus, winter was “a word” that “had lost some of its romance for me”;¹² “Salisbury” is the “name of the town I had come to by train.”¹³ Even when the narrator becomes familiar with the proper designations for objects, they are encased in quotation marks (“I was able to think of the flat wet fields and the ditches as ‘water meadows’ or ‘wet meadows’ ”). A disjunction appears, then, between the realistic description, which does not acknowledge any instability in perspective, and representations indicative of a fractured perception.

This approach marks a fundamental shift in Naipaul’s writing. In his earlier work, he used realist techniques to depict the periphery as the product of an historical disordering. Colonial powers relied on alien norms to reshape local practices and institutions that the natives were poorly equipped to criticize or reform. Nineteenth-century plantation societies of the sort Naipaul grew up in were artificial spaces created by imperial fiat—articulated within an international market but sustained by unfree labor. The periphery was defined by modes of uneven development that were experienced in the form of disjunctive temporalities.

The breakthrough represented by Enigma lies in the way this state of affairs is captured not so much through its content but its form. Naipaul does not merely depict this condition; he seeks to incorporate its effects into the fabric and style of his writing, revealing through verbal texture how such a disordering influenced the kind of writer he became. One of the central insights yielded by this approach is that the narrating subject is the product of a disturbance that he cannot overthrow, only channel. The originality of The Enigma of Arrival lies in its attempt to engage, at the level of form, the disorienting effects of the periphery’s induction into modernity.

Enigma reworks motifs drawn from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927). Memory for Naipaul acts as a portal to new ways of seeing the familiar past and how he has been formed by it.14 However, his development is also an effect of disjunctive temporalities. This is revealed in the way his perception (of his surroundings in Wiltshire) intersects with and is overlaid by recollections of his childhood (in colonial Trinidad). Naipaul tells the reader that, although he has lived in England for twenty years, he still has the “rawness of the colonial’s nerves” and is bothered by the sense that he is “in the other man’s country.”¹⁵ As recently as two decades earlier, he would have been “a racial oddity in the valley.”¹⁶ Attempts to make himself inconspicuous backfire. When curious locals ask him where he lives, Naipaul makes up a cottage, not realizing that all the cottages would be known to them. Throughout the first section, and indeed the entire book, first impressions are repeatedly withdrawn or qualified, as the narrator has difficulty orienting himself to his surroundings. Strikingly, however, these false impressions have a productive role to play in the text: even when ostensibly corrected, they are returned to and reworked for the insights and perspectives they afford. The shifts in points of view previously noted prepare the reader for a new way of thinking about the narrator’s mistakes; they become the misdirection by which the peripheral writer orients himself.

At first, Naipaul indulges in the melancholia of one who believes he has come to the valley at a time when it is undergoing change, his presence there being a “portent” of that change.¹⁷ At the same time, he also hints that this impression is mistaken: indeed, the “ruins” of the valley are later revealed to be only a century old, and to have been deliberately made.¹⁸ The migrant laborers, whom he initially takes for country people, turn out to be refugees from the nearby towns, unemployed, rootless, looking for jobs with little security.¹⁹

Brenda, a working-class woman who repels and attracts Naipaul with her frankly sexualized and irreverent behavior, is regarded with hostility. However, after her death, Naipaul discovers in her family story, particularly in the thread of destroyed hopes and ambition, an echo of his own childhood. This revelation casts a retrospective light on Brenda that makes us now read her as one of the narrator’s secret-sharers. Brenda’s vanity is recast as a version of Naipaul’s mortification at the cruelty and humiliation he took for granted, traits of people who have been “hurt by poverty.”²⁰

Similarly, the narrator first describes Jack, the farmhand who works hard on his garden despite the fact that it borders on a much-used, muddy drove way, as follows:²¹ “I saw his life as genuine, rooted, fitting: man fitting the landscape. I saw him as a remnant of the past.”²² He then corrects this characterization, informing the reader of his mistake: Jack is no peasant; he came of his own choice.²³ The garden is not the continuation of traditional activity, but an artistic expression.

Despite disabusing himself of Jack’s peasant origins, however, Naipaul does not completely relinquish his false first impression. He deliberately holds to that early way of looking at Jack. Falsehood is not opposed to truth; it is the means by which truth of a limited, fragile sort is produced by the existentially and geographically dislocated writer.24 Through his impressions of Jack, the narrator fashions a deliberate and extraterritorial connection to the land. It is a feeling that no one from that place is likely to share with the narrator. He identifies with (a certain image of) Jack, the artist-as-working-man (a man with Naipaul’s background). Naipaul’s discovery of this strategy enables him to make a connection with figures from his own past in Trinidad.

Naipaul admires but cannot identify with the values that went into making the “reconstructed church” in the valley, with “a special idea of the past, the assertion—with the wealth and power of an unbelievably extensive empire—of racial and historical and cultural virtue.”²⁵ He feels greater affinity with the “insecurity” from which working-class English people like Jack seek to make things and, through such making, seek to invent themselves anew: “In the middle of the farmyard dereliction and his own insecurity in his job and cottage, Jack kept his elaborate gardens and did his digging for vegetables and flowers and kept his plots in good heart.”²⁶ This condition reminds Naipaul of the earlier dislocations and global insecurity that had brought Indians to Trinidad. The story is told through an exploration of how the term “gardener,” so much a part of the culture of the English manor, did not exist in Trinidad. Sugarcane, the old slave crop, “was what the people still grew and lived by; it explained the presence, on that island, after the abolition of slavery, of an imported Asiatic peasantry.”²⁷ Sugarcane “explained the poor Indian-style houses and roughly thatched huts beside the narrow asphalt roads” that were built to carry the crop to the town.²⁸ The gardener evoked pictures of an Indian who was little more than a “worker in a garden, a weeder and a waterer, a barefoot man, trousers rolled up to mid-shin, playing a hose on a flower-bed.”²⁹ It conjured pictures of “unskilled and debased” work.³⁰

Nevertheless, it was out of this group that “a new kind of agriculture began to develop” in Trinidad after the Second World War.31 Naipaul sees this kind of work as a creative form of self-invention that is more suited to people of his background. The example here is Jack, so to speak, not the reconstructed church in the valley. The racial and historical pride of the latter is not for Naipaul because it is associated with the kind of wealth and cultural forms associated with his landlord, whose “grandeur had come from the consolidation and extension in imperial times of a family fortune established earlier, during the beginnings of the industrial revolution.”³² Two forms of dispossession and relocation are narrated here, that of an English peasantry and that of slave labor—moments within the grand historical narrative described by Karl Marx as the “primitive accumulation of capital.”³³

The fake hut and the cottage, like the reconstructed church, were built to express this grandeur. Naipaul, like Jack, is a product of the processes by which, to cite Marx, producers had been separated from their means of production. Interestingly, it is by reasserting a certain relationship to the land that Jack and the Aranguez laborers create a new form of valuation. It is in the careful working on oneself that a new kind of postcolonial culture can also be imagined:

The vegetables they grew—aubergines, beans, okras—had a shorter cycle than sugarcane and they were correspondingly more demanding. They required finer attentions; and every day during a vegetable cycle the vegetable growers could be seen weeding or digging or watering or spraying, even when there was horse racing or an international cricket match in Port of Spain or some big festive event, working the way men work only when they work for themselves.³⁴

There is little doubt that Naipaul is subtly comparing the work of the laborers to creative labor. This is what he had seen in Jack’s garden. He recalls the tightness with which Jack trimmed his hedge when he reports that he was able to write at times of acute anxiety because it was like entering a “walled garden or enclosure.”³⁵ Jack’s hedge spoke to Naipaul of such an enclosure from the muddy drove way and the farm vehicles that spattered mud on his garden.

The Enigma of Arrival presents Naipaul as a writer who seeks to create out of a sense of insecurity. Naipaul draws on models like Jack and the Aranguez farmers to situate his own efforts at self-creation. It is through the mediating figure of Jack, both working man and artist, that Naipaul comes to see an affinity between himself and the Indian farmers of Aranguez, who had presumably been a source of pain and embarrassment for middle-class urban Indians in the postwar years. These men worked hard on their crops (eggplant, beans, okra) with a concentration and creativity that paralleled Naipaul’s own arduous labor to remake himself through his writing: “the way men work only when they work for themselves.”36

This revaluation, in turn, allows the reader to grasp the deeper psychological connection for the narrator between gardening and writing:

I saw [Jack] turning over the soft, dark, much-sifted earth below the old hawthorn tree. That brought back very old memories to me, of Trinidad, of a small house my father had once built on a hill and a garden he had tried to get started in a patch of cleared bush: old memories, of dark, wet, warm earth and green things growing, old instincts, old delights.³⁷

The mature narrator’s delight in Jack’s labor infects (the representation of) the event it calls up. Yet here too we see a discordant note, which stands in the way of a simple reconciliation between the two temporalities. The words “he had tried to get started” focalize the child’s premonition that his father, a failed writer who had been born on a plantation, would not succeed at this endeavor; it casts a shadow over the wished-for immediacy of “old instincts, old delights.”³⁸ The different but intersecting temporalities of the writer, gardener, and plantation worker, mediated by the metropole and the periphery, are drawn together in holistic fashion by means of Naipaul’s falsely but productively romantic view of Jack.³⁹

Naipaul’s account of his unreliable impressions has a history in English and European letters. Joseph Conrad used it to powerful effect in Heart of Darkness. However, in Enigma, Naipaul makes errancy a central way of grasping the distinctive makeup of the peripheral writer. This stance allows the peripheral writer to discover his voice by working through rather than suppressing his disorientation, which is grounded in history. Similarly, literary genres and concepts, including autobiography and Bildung, function as pretexts for Naipaul to discover a language adequate to his (de)formation.

This self-consciously errant way of taking up such conventions contrasts instructively with a ruling stereotype of postcolonial criticism, whereby the autobiographical subject from the periphery expresses, in Jed Esty’s formulation, her “alienat[ion] from any available moral and psychological schemes for self-formation.”40 Esty’s approach to postcolonial modernism tends to highlight metropolitan concepts and historical templates that are, at bottom, forms of false or distorted consciousness that Naipaul embraces. They are the misleading yet indispensable points of reference that serve as the raw material through which the peripheral writer gains his bearings.

As I will show, this strategy provides Naipaul with an original way of engaging in historical reflection. He intensifies the dislocations of the past, making a virtue of having been misled. Indeed, we have already seen one instance of this process at work in the interplay of contradictory perspectives on gardening: Jack, the Aranguez laborers, and Naipaul’s father all belong to different temporalities. As these temporalities are brought into contact with one another, they elicit different and mutually interruptive forms of reading. Just as the narrating self is created through the shifting points of view, so too is the autobiographical subject consolidated through disjunctive temporalities whose influence on him cannot be adequately inventoried.

Such a strategy is an expression not of authorial freedom but of constraint. The narrator is aware that capitalist Europe’s venerable concept-metaphors (progress, stasis, decline) risk becoming exercises in unintended parody when applied to the colonies. The struggles of the metropolitan core are not those of the systemically underdeveloped periphery, which is not premodern or modern in the sense implied by the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism that for Franco Moretti entails the revaluation of the youthful hero of Bildung.41 Others, like Gregory Castle, see in modernist Bildungsromane in England and Ireland a critique and recuperation of the form in the context of economic and political rationalization in the era of high modernism.⁴² But these studies do not focus on the specific problems of peripheral writers who, like Naipaul, are defined by the dependent character of their induction into modernity.⁴³

Naipaul’s early ambition to be an artist was tied to the metropolitan education he received in the periphery, from which he acquired a deep regard for “the writer [as] a person possessed of sensibility…someone who recorded or displayed an inward development.”⁴⁴ However, objective conditions in the periphery meant that such aesthetically informed ideologies were necessarily incorporated in distorted ways.⁴⁵ Lacking any experience of a modern state or civil society, the historical condition of possibility of bourgeois interiority, Naipaul writes:

I hardly knew our own [Indian] community; of other communities I knew even less. I had no idea of history…I had no idea of government. I knew only about a colonial governor and a legislative council and an executive council and a police force. So that almost everything I read about history and other societies had an abstract quality. I could relate it only to what I knew: every kind of reading committed me to fantasy.⁴⁶

He wryly inverts received accounts of European discovery, likening his backwardness to the attitude of the “earliest Spanish travelers to the New World, medieval men with high faith: traveling to see wonders, parts of God’s world, but then very quickly taking the wonders for granted, saving inquiry (and true vision) only for what they knew they would find even before they had left Spain: gold.”⁴⁷ In the journey from the New World to the Old, the peripheral subject was on a quest for inward development, much as the Spanish—traveling in the opposite direction centuries earlier—had hoped to discover gold. Setting up as a novelist in such terms, then, unavoidably meant worsening the disorientation that Naipaul sought to overcome.

Comparing himself to the impoverished older people in his Asian-Indian community who “looked back to an India that became more and more golden in their memory,”48 the narrator describes how his youthful desire for metropolitan fulfillment and inner development were variants of a broader pattern of peripheral distortion, grounded in objective historical conditions that he could not name but clues to which existed all around, and indeed “within” him:

I didn’t look back to India, couldn’t do so; my ambition caused me to look ahead and outwards, to England; but it led to a similar feeling of wrongness…. I was used to living in a world where the signs were without meaning, or without the meaning intended by their makers. It was of a piece with the abstract, arbitrary nature of my education, like my ability to “study” French or Russian cinema without seeing a film, an ability which was, as I have said, like a man trying to get to know a city from its street map alone.⁴⁹

The modern education that Naipaul receives is meant to shock him out of this condition of historical retardation, but his excellence as a student results only in intensifying these disparate feelings. In Enigma, he suggests that the peripheral writer’s path to maturity cannot be achieved solely by a desire to overcome his ignorance and accede to the inner development or Bildung (which cannot be merely rejected either). Naipaul’s vision is created out of a formative dislocation. This dislocation gives shape to the narrator’s discovery of a form responsive to the order in which he grew up, where “signs are without meaning or without the meaning intended by their makers.”

Most crucially, he came to believe “that my subject was not my sensibility, my inward development, but the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in.”50 Growing up in Trinidad, a space shaped by Asian, African, and Caribbean influences, Naipaul is at one level referring to his complex cultural background, as well as the many places which he would repeatedly travel to and write about in his fiction and nonfiction. However, the phrase “worlds I contained within myself” hints also at his search for forms that adequately express the underlying affinity that connects him to those who have been shaped by pasts akin to his. The places he visits are almost always shaped by pasts similar to his own: the fictional situations and travel encounters staged in his work are what make possible an understanding of “inward development” adequate to a peripheral subject who has exhausted the avenues to think of himself in relation to his own situated past (in Trinidad). He purportedly seeks out new perspectives from which to reflect upon his peripheral historicity by visiting other parts of the global South.

Naipaul presents himself as being unlike the European or American traveler, who is at best capable of sympathetic or disinterested understanding. In contrast, travel forces him to reflect on the objective conditions by which he has been produced, discovering formally innovative ways of expressing the ideas he (and the people he meets) have inherited and improperly repurposed.⁵¹ Modernist technique enables Naipaul to explore self-formation as irreducibly implicated by the very historical disorientation it purports to examine:

Several weeks of original composition lay ahead of me when I left Gloucester and went to Wiltshire, to the valley. For the first four days it rained and was misty; I could hardly see where I was…. And that Wiltshire valley fog was right. In my imagination, at that stage of my story, I was living in a made-up Africa, a fairy-tale landscape that mixed (according to my need) the high, rainy plateau of Rwanda with the wet, terraced, cultivated hills of Kigezi in western Uganda…. Now, in Wiltshire in winter, a writer now rather than a reader, I worked the child’s fantasy the other way. I projected the solitude and emptiness and menace of my Africa onto the land around me. And when four days later the fog lifted and I went walking, something of the Africa of my story adhered to the land I saw.⁵²

This passage is an account of the writing of “In a Free State,” the novella in Naipaul’s Booker Prize–winning In a Free State, a fictional account of expatriate anxiety during the turbulent aftermath of formal political independence in an African country modeled on Uganda, which is discussed in chapter 5.

I have shown how, in Naipaul’s autobiography, representational unsureness stands as an enigmatic, even paradoxical, way of indicating arrival for an artist whose formidable reputation continues to be founded in his authoritative pronouncements on the global South. Thus, when Naipaul writes “I projected the solitude and emptiness and menace of my Africa onto the land around me,” he implicates himself, and at the same time, mobilizes valuations born of the types of racialized and ethnocentric perspectives that characterize the postcolonial polity’s structure. Mutatis mutandis, such feelings and attitudes take the form of cultural media: they make up the terms in which postcolonials weave the fabric of everyday life. To the extent that he does indeed channel unstated but widespread attitudes there, Naipaul makes available a style of presentation that is appropriate to the historicity of the periphery. He does not just make racialization an object to be read; he sets it to work by creating forms that speak to the way everyday hostilities and mutual suspicions coexist with unspoken forms of tolerance and diversity. Such traits are conjoined in Naipaul’s work, notably in the hotel scene discussed toward the end of this chapter.

In Naipaul’s powerfully compromised performance, then, literature becomes the form in which to stage and reflect upon a historical predicament from which there is no easy escape.53 He formally engages the power of his deformation, revealing the fault lines of peripheral societies by way of a deployment of socially conditioned prejudices. Such moves typically provoke condemnation from postcolonial scholars aprioristically committed to expressions of agency, resistance, and the formation of hybrid collectivities “from below”; identitarianism and communalism have become entrenched as the dominant idiom of postcolonial politics. Many postcolonial artists and thinkers, who censure politically reactionary developments as a betrayal of the utopian ideals of certain strains of anticolonialism, fault Naipaul for failing to shed his prejudices and for not assuming a nonracist viewpoint that repudiates prejudice.

Such attitudes are, of course, laudable. But what is uniquely compelling about Naipaul’s work is its refusal to falsify the historicity by which it is produced. Naipaul does not uncritically accept the cultural prejudices or reflexive assumptions of his past, but seeks, by making that past visible through aesthetic staging, to present it as an objective condition that needs to be worked through. This response does not affirm a utopian attitude disconnected from the reality of actually existing postcolonial society. Naipaul’s art is, for better or worse, irreducibly marked by the legacy of ethnicist thinking. But from this position, Naipaul stages discomfiting scenes that invite critical scrutiny and reflection. This represents an effort on Naipaul’s part to think out of the historical disorientations by which he was produced.

Disavowal of prejudice would have been much easier to accomplish, but it would have produced less disturbing and memorable works of art. Owning this trait enables him to express, rather than repress or disavow, the negative sentiments and affect by which he and other peripheral subjects have been shaped. Often in oblique and even unintended ways, Naipaul’s self-implicating reflections open up the question of how a new critical consciousness might emerge from subjects in whom he sees “aspects of himself.”54

The challenges to developing such a style of thinking cannot be overstated, because the epistemic fractures inflicted by the colonial legacy were dispersed and ramified in the wake of the global movement of peoples that took place after the Second World War. Naipaul situates his attempts to begin writing fiction in this disorienting time:

Because in 1950 in London I was at the beginning of that great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century—a movement and a cultural mixing greater than the peopling of the United States, which was essentially a movement of Europeans to the New World. This was a movement between all the continents.⁵⁵

The young Naipaul, in the age of decolonization, was given “an intimation of a world in flux, a disturbed world.”⁵⁶ As a colonial, he is the product of a disturbance whose origins and consequences he was unable to grasp when he first encountered it—in himself. Although he did not realize it at the time, he would eventually be convinced that his task as a writer was to discover a form adequate to “the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in.”⁵⁷

With this in mind, we can discuss how the theme of development is presented in Enigma. It is presented in two ways: first, as a story of Naipaul’s overcoming his repression of his race,58 and second, as the story of Naipaul’s development in comparison with that of others who, from similar backgrounds, moved toward ideologies of “separateness,” including black power and, later, Islamic fundamentalism.⁵⁹ Naipaul traces the links between his own development and these culturally or religiously separatist movements as they evolved, respectively, in Trinidad and across Asia and Africa.

Naipaul makes the origin of all these movements the new global dynamic set in motion at the end of the Second World War. In 1950, brown or black people whose societies had been modernized in disorienting ways claimed their agency by demanding that they be treated as equals. They “had asserted propriety, their wish to live within an old order, their wish to be treated as others.”⁶⁰ Two decades later, he observed that this desire for equality was being replaced by ideas of “separateness” based on ideas of ethnic and religious ideologies.⁶¹

When Naipaul first traveled to England, he experienced racial “humiliation.”⁶² At the time, however, he was unable to acknowledge or, as we say, process this violation, because racial questions were “too close to my disturbance, my vulnerability.”⁶³ Despite his education, Naipaul had also grown up in a closed, inward-looking group. Before he left Trinidad in 1950, he tells the reader, he had only been to restaurants on three occasions. And, on the day he was to leave on the liner that would take him from New York to Southampton, England, Naipaul suffered from “hideous anxiety” about “sharing a cabin” with unnamed others,⁶⁴ mostly because of this background.

When he boards the SS Columbia, the purser leads Naipaul to an isolated cabin, far from the other passengers. Naipaul cannot believe his luck, but the joke is on him. He does not realize that, far from being shown special consideration, he is being segregated from the white passengers. The truth is painfully revealed when, in the middle of the night, someone walks into his cabin and turns on the light switch. Instead of expressing surprise or outrage at this intrusion, a timid Naipaul keeps his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. What follows is a comic sequence of events. It turns out that another passenger, a black man, is being shown into the room. This man takes one look at the pretend-sleeping Naipaul and becomes angry: “It’s because I’m colored you’re putting me here with him,” the black man says, before leaving the room.⁶⁵

Although he is aware of what has occurred, the young Naipaul is in too fragile a state to acknowledge it, for “racial diminution formed no part of the material of the kind of writer I was setting out to be.”66 The black man nonetheless communicates to Naipaul the experience of what W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk called “double consciousness”—the sense of “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”⁶⁷ Nothing in his life in Trinidad has prepared Naipaul for this experience, commingling the subjective experience of class insecurity and the objective expression of racial hostility.

Naipaul’s ironic description of his younger self’s attempt to deny a reality that seemed too humiliating recalls Frantz Fanon’s 1956 discussion of the black man’s “slow construction of [his] self as body in a spatial and temporal world…a definitive structuring of my self and the world,”⁶⁸ in which Fanon accounts for the constrained framework in which the experiences of the black man unfold in a European context. It is a tacit acknowledgment of this structure that lies at the heart of Naipaul’s assent to the black man’s refusal to be his cabinmate. Speaking at the Congress of Black Writers and Artists, George Lamming observed, “[The Negro] encounters himself in a state of surprise and embarrassment. He is a little ashamed, not in the crude sense of not wanting to be this or that, but in the more resonant sense of shame, the shame that touches every consciousness which feels that it has been seen.”⁶⁹ It is the desire to escape the shame of being seen in this racialized way that prompts the peculiar reaction of both men to one another, where a mutual rejection is belied by a deeper, if unacknowledged, solidarity. Historical conditions dictated that Naipaul’s desire to be recognized as a free and unique individual be reciprocated by the black man, another vulnerable being who was holding to an idea of his own unique selfhood. Both men were, in 1950, asserting their “need for a new idea of the self”⁷⁰defined by equality.

In Enigma, Naipaul recalls this personal experience in 1950 alongside his musings on the growing black power movement he witnessed in the Caribbean in 1970: the “Negro on the Columbia had asserted propriety, [his] wish to live within an old order, [his] wish to be treated as others. Twenty years later, the Negroes of Trinidad…were asserting their separateness. They simplified and sentimentalized the past.”71

My vision of the history [of Trinidad] was not the vision that set the young black people marching in the streets and threatening another false revolution. The story had not stopped where my book had stopped; the story was going on. Two hundred years on, another Haiti was preparing, I thought: a wish to destroy a world judged corrupt and too full of pain, to turn one’s back on it, rather than to improve it. After the book I had written [The Loss of El Dorado (1969)], after my two years’ exaltation, I saw this anger from two sides: from the side of the Negroes, the people with the hair, and also from the side of the Asian-Indian community, the people mainly threatened, not black or white.⁷²

The past was also accessible in the eighteenth-century main square, called Pall Mall, of the little town, where newly arrived slaves from Africa were put up for sale after being rested in the barracoons. For one hundred and fifty years in St. Kitts the memory of this past had lain dormant. Now, in a mimicry of Trinidad and the United States and other places, the memory revived, when the memory had really ceased to humiliate, serving instead as a political stimulus, a communal rhetoric of sentimentality and anger.⁷⁴

Despite the critical tone, it is striking how different Naipaul’s tone in Enigma is from that found in The Middle Passage, where he first wrote about his travels in the West Indies. In the earlier work, Naipaul held himself apart from the situations he wrote about. In Enigma, by contrast, his criticism of the ascendancy of black power in the Caribbean is juxtaposed with his earlier account of the encounter with the black man in the ship’s cabin, a scene underpinned by a feeling of quiet solidarity.

Moments such as these reveal the crucial turn that Naipaul’s writing had taken. In works such as Enigma, he was no longer seeking to establish, as he had often been until the late 1970s, his separateness from other people with backgrounds similar to his own. Instead, the orchestration of narrative in Enigma underscores how its narrator was formed by experiences very similar to those of the people about whom he wrote. The autobiographical aspects of his fictional and nonfictional writings would become central to the writings in this late phase, for the simple reason that they allowed Naipaul to fuse two components of his work: a desire to open his work to multiple perspectives and also to imagine the possibility of shared feelings.

Naipaul’s story connects his development to the larger arc of history by linking the era of decolonization that began after the end of the Second World War with the spread of Islamist politics in the late 1970s, which presented itself as a second wave of decolonization that had not been anticipated by either the departing colonial masters or their appointed nationalist leaders. In a circular movement, at the end of Naipaul’s decade-long stay in the Wiltshire cottage in 1980, he receives a letter from Angela, the young Maltese housekeeper of the London boardinghouse where he had stayed in 1950. Angela’s letter recalls to Naipaul his young, unformed, self, which links him to a group of young Muslims in emerging societies who were drawn to the ideals of Islamic fundamentalism. “I was also deep in a book. My thoughts were of a whole new generation of young people in remote countries, made restless and uncertain in the late-twentieth century not by travel but by the undoing of their old certainties, and looking for false consolation in the mind-quelling practices of a simple revealed religion.”75

These observations suggest that Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998) is not an anti-Muslim polemic, but a peculiar form of historical interpretation. In this work, Naipaul describes the rise of Islamism as part of a longer trajectory of decolonization and self-discovery to which he is connected. Even though Naipaul finds little to celebrate in the ideology of black power in Trinidad or of those who advocate an Islamic state, he nonetheless sees their struggles as responses that exhibit similarities to his manner of reacting to violent or disorienting experiences on the SS Columbia. They are the disparate but connected products of a “world in flux, a disturbed world”76 that Naipaul first saw, but failed to recognize, when he arrived in London in 1950.

What makes the approach of Enigma distinctive is Naipaul’s exploration of the ways in which postcolonial subjects who are victims of racial oppression or exclusion reproduce the racist ways of looking they have inherited from diverse sources. Thus, although Naipaul is the object of racial exclusion on the SS Columbia, he reveals his own racially marked perceptions elsewhere in this work. Naipaul reproduces racial stereotypes that presumably reflect the nature of his socialization in Trinidad.

In this way, Naipaul discovers a form that addresses the objective complexity of living in fractured societies. As we see in the following passage, Naipaul implies a connection between the artist’s reflection on his own formation and the steps through which a critical or reflective consciousness attuned to the historical predicament of the periphery might be nurtured. The scene is a hotel in New York, and the focalizer is the eighteen-year-old Vidia on his way to the University of Oxford to begin his undergraduate studies:

A charming picture unexpectedly turns into a shocking advertisement for unhinged racist stereotypes. In Naipaul’s account, the focalizer of the passage is the provincial eighteen-year-old whose repugnantly comical sketch of dirty Indians, wizened Chinese, and happy black concubines is presented—through free indirect discourse—as an effect of the naturalized, unselfconscious channeling of sensibilities in the colonial society. The young Naipaul is in this sense no more than a vessel for a socially recognizable performance that would be accessible to all members of the fractured colonial society. Naipaul’s distortions, exaggerations, resentments, and sweeping pronouncements put into play the mutually belittling ethnic or sectarian perspectives that dominate peripheral societies.

The focalizer of the scene alternates between seeing others and imagining himself seen by others. The line separating the two perspectives, as with the distinction between the older narrator and the younger observer at the beginning of Enigma, is at once upheld and troubled. This passage culminates with the narrator submitting himself to the Trinidadian stereotype of the Indian from the country. He ends his day “like a peasant, like a man reverting to his origins, eating secretively in a dark room, and then wondering how to hide the high-smelling evidence of his meal.”⁷⁸ Such ironic tensions are generated by a fluid combination of comic and hostile perspectives that oscillate between being directed at the self and at the other. A twist is added when Naipaul attempts to overcome the unenlightened attitudes instilled by his family and community, attitudes that he “took for granted”⁷⁹ and that later “mortified” him:⁸⁰

Ironically, in the earlier passage, Naipaul repeats the very “ridiculing” rhetoric he unequivocally condemns in this passage.⁸² Should he not now also feel retrospective mortification and shame at the way his Trinidadian formation programmed him to stereotype Indian-, Chinese- and Afro-Trinidadians in that memory from 1950? Does this last passage repudiate, then, the sentiments expressed in the one before, in which people are reduced to crude stereotypes?

This does not seem to be the case. The narrator simply fails to make the connection between his use of racism as a practice of everyday life in one passage and his efforts to overcome the deformations resulting from his upbringing in another. But we could propose a different interpretation. These two moments in the text supplement and interrupt one another; they exist as two disjunctively productive moments in the unevenly developed writer (and society). They do not cancel each other out so much as set the terms for a possible space of critical reflection, one attuned to the fractures of the postcolonial context. In one case, prejudice is depicted as a wrong that should be stamped out; in the other, it serves as a text where offensive images are played with and intensified, made into a cultural form that needs to be analyzed and repurposed. Both are strategies of cultural criticism and social reflection that the peripheral writer’s narrative of self-formation make visible.