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BOOKS: V. S. NAIPAUL
About
Lives Half Lived
The
master chronicler of half-made societies returns to India of his ancestral
memory. This time for a novel.
By S. Prasannarajan
 It
was not the end of the journey, but it looked like the end of the story
for Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul when he famously witnessed the funeral
rites of an art form called the novel. It was some years ago, and the
privileged witness to the finale was not yet another storyteller without
a story to tell, but the master chronicler of mutant beings, the narrator
of historical traps and civilisational conceits. When Naipaul saw the
fin of fiction's private siecle, he was one of its finest practitioners
in English, and the man himself, in the eulogy of his admirers, was larger
than his text, standing there in the arid landscape of imagination, standing
tall amidst wilted words and dead stories, with a notebook in his hand
and disillusion in his eyes.
 That
was then. Naipaul is back with the story; rather, the story has brought
him back to one of fiction's rare moments. That way, the arrival of Half
A Life (Picador; Rs 395; 300 pages) is steeped in the enigma of return.
The novel, stretching from a nameless, pre-Independence Indian town to
London to Portuguese Africa, revisits some of the familiar Naipaulian
provinces, topographically as well as intellectually. But what drives
the novel forward, maybe backward, is the energy of ancestral memory.
A novel of permanent displacement and renewal, of arrivals and departures,
every movement or discovery an updated version of the first, original
sacrifice. The world it portrays is as merciless as the one in his A Bend
in the River: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who
allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." There will
be place in it for Sir Vidia, always, and there will be stories in it
for him, in spite of his disillusion. So, you ask him, does this comeback
mark Naipaul Regains Faith in the Novel? He, from his London apartment,
explains through a telephonic conversation: "What I meant was that
the novels written in the past century do not have the absolute arresting
quality of the originals that were done in the 19th century. By the originals,
I mean those novels which were absolutely new-new in form, new in approach,
and new in substance. In our century the form that really awakened the
people and spoke to them directly was the cinema, and people learned to
use it to tell complex narratives. The public learned to understand stories
told in fast-moving pictures, which has never happened in history before,
you know, stories being told like that." So, for Naipaul, the form
of story telling in the twentieth century was the cinema.
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| THE KNIGHT'S LADY: Naipaul with wife Nadira |
This end-of-the-novel was not a Naipaulian anxiety
alone, after all. A few years ago Milan Kundera saw the novel, abandoned
by the society of the novel, Europe, migrating to the tropical pages of
Asia and Latin America. Naipaul is aware of that. "I'll tell you
what Kundera probably meant. He probably meant the actual societies that
are being described in the writings from Asia and Latin America are new
in so far as they have never been written about before. This is probably
the part of their glamour at the moment-the novelty of their societies.
In Europe the same thing was said about the Russian novels of the nineteenth
century. People liked reading about large state homes and the great snow.
When that society has been described, it didn't appear so glamorous after
people came to know about it. And I think you will find the same thing
is about to happen in the Indian writing in English too. They will be
soon asking more from the writers about the descriptions of the society.
I think this has begun already." Are they getting it? "No. The
new Indian writing in English is just beginning. You have got to give
it a chance."
So, for the moment, take a journey with Half
A Life's Willie Chandran, the first Indian hero of a Naipaul novel. His
individual journey runs parallel to the passage of what Naipaul calls
half-and-half worlds-also half-and-half lives. The first part sets the
stage for his take off, and unravels his ancestral grammar that will make
him a bonafide citizen of his future worlds. For his birth itself is defined
by the sociology of sacrifice, with enough potential for future alterations
and adjustments. Father, who comes from a line of priests, is a kind of
rebel who rages against his own inheritance: "I adored the great
names of the Independence movement. I felt rebuked in my idleness, and
in the servility of the life that was being prepared for me. And when
sometime in 1931 or 1932 I heard that the mahatma had called for students
to boycott their universities, I decided to follow the call. I did more.
In the front yard I made a little bonfire of The Mayor of Casterbridge
and Shelley and Keats, and the professor's notes, and went home to wait
for the storm to beat about my head." And the rebellious student
gets gravitated towards a backward caste girl with a firebrand uncle.
He leaves his Wordsworths as well as his job at the maharaja's land tax
department, marries the girl-an act of sacrifice-and takes refuge in the
temple, which is shut off from the national struggle raging outside.
Mother, that backward girl, is the other defining
factor in Willie's back-story. She is the quintessential backward-"perhaps
after a few hundred rebirths she will be more evolved", and "like
so many backwards nowadays she wants to jump the gun". Willie, born
out of this destabilising mix (Why have I forced this taint on you? goes
his father's pity), has no choice but to rage against his own origin and
the burden of it, and he does it through school compositions, his first
attempts in creative writing. Every story is a protest as well as an intentional
shift in the script, stories of sacrifice and no salvation. Father thinks,
"His mind is diseased. He hates me and he hates his mother, and now
he has turned against himself. This is what the missionaries have done
to him with Mom and Pop and Dick Tracy and the Justice Society of America
comic magazine, and Christ on the Cross movies in Passion Week, and Bogart
and Cagney and George Raft the rest of the time. I cannot deal rationally
with this kind of hatred. I will deal with it in the way of the mahatma.
I will ignore it. I will keep a vow of silence so far as he is concerned."
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