A Reading of V.S. Naipaul’s Half a Life - Dr. Gagan Bihari Purohit
Dept of English, R.N. college, Dura, Berhampur, Odisha
Mobile: +91 943 725 9420
Complex and cantankerous
personality, Naipaul has thrown more challenges to his life than any other
writer of acclaimed accomplishment. Both banal and serious issues of life have
been depicted with consummate ease and aplomb. Although accused of running away
from people, he is always ahead of his time in unraveling inherent
contradictions in human life. He is in search of ecstasy amidst agony. The
present essay argues about how Naipaul finds out meaning from half lifes. In
other words, he tries to stitch up all incomplete holes of life to find meaning
out of it. Like his protagonist Willie Chandaran, Naipaul has undergone many
initiations of life in search of completeness. It appears like a utopia, an
ideal state from which human beings are always at unreachable distance. One
inherent conclusion of life is laid bare; the eternal search for composure and
completeness of life is like a mirage, but the search is on even when the going
is squarely difficult. Key words: Dispossession, utopia, exile, incompleteness,
dilemma of life, identity.
The unexamined life is
not worth living.
- Socrates
V.S. Naipaul or Sir
Vidia, the name he acquired after receiving Knjghthood, winner of Nobel Prize
in 2001, is a self-made man, not deterred by compliment or criticism that came
in his way. That he reacted to his detractors in an ingenuous way speaks about
his greatness as a writer; he preferred not to be moved by any derogatory
remark, his writing does the trick for him. His multicultural lineage, born in
Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago to a family of Indian origin, Naipaul
achieved stupendous success what his father had struggled for achieving
throughout his life. What stood out is his one-point pursuit of success. Tobias
Khair’s obituary on Naipaul in the Hindu on Aug 13, 2018 where
he cites W.H. Auden’s remark about W.B. Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”
aptly corroborates the predicament of dispossession that Naipaul exhibits in a
brilliant fashion in his fiction and memoirs. Khair goes on to argue that “The
madness of the world is also essential to Naipaul’s oeuvre. But while Yeats,
the poet influenced by a Romantic sensibility, wore his hurt on literary sleeve,
Naipaul kept it deeply hidden. That is why Yeats’s hurt translates into
beautiful lyrical poetry with little humour in it, and Naipaul’s hurt
translates into humourous, ironic or satirical fiction at its best”.
The Dilemma of
Dispossession
An underlying sense of dispossession seems to be at the
heart of Naipaul’s controversial career, the readymade recluse being writing to
cast a shadow on all consuming time. Being in the periphery for so long a time,
assuming a commanding position in intellectual circles is not at all an easy
go. But Naipaul does it superbly both in his fiction and non-fiction. Like
Edward Said, who exploits politics of dispossession brilliantly, Naipaul is
also fontal in his attack on Left ideology of economic equality. Assuming
economic and political power cannot stop abuse of power as there is no
certainty that after assuming power the poor will stop abusing it. One cannot
safely conclude that the deprived lot will behave in the same manner after
getting to a position of strength. Here is what Khair observes about Naipaul’s
power equation: “Naipaul knew that our house is not perfect and that it is
ludicrously incomplete, but he preferred living ironically in it to pulling it
down.”
Like Said, Naipaul has also undergone a nightmarish
exilic consciousness of dispossession in his formative years. The former
recalls his split consciousness in an interview to Imre Salusinszky:
My background is a series of
displacements and expatriations which cannot be recuperated. The sense being
between cultures has been very, very strong for me. I would say that’s the
single strongest strand running through my life. The fact that I’m always in
and out of things, and never really of anything for long (Said, Power, Politics
and Culture 70; Singh 101)
Said speaks his troubled
heart out in Out of Place and Politics of Dispossession; the failure
in reclaiming his roots and past glory becomes his issue of concern in these
works. The former exclusively deals with the subject matter of dispossession.
It simply records Said’s lost ground on Palestinian front:
The underlying motifs for me have
been the emergence of a second self buried for a long time beneath the surface
of often expertly acquired and wielded social characteristics belonging to the
self my parents tried to construct, the ‘Edward” I speak of intermittently, and
how extraordinarily increasing number of departures unsettled my life from its
earliest belongings. To me, nothing more painful and paradoxically sought after
characterizes my life than many displacements from countries, cities, abodes languages,
environments that have kept me in motion all these years. (Said 217; Singh 102)
Homelessness
being the most acute among the dispossessions, Said has been reduced to a
rootless realm, increasingly distancing him of his strong cultural
affiliations. The social space is squeezed, making it all the more difficult
for an individual to identity establishment in a foreign land.
Naipaul has also undergone the same kind of
exilic consciousness in the many countries he has either lived or visited for
purposes, subsistence and otherwise. Naipaul’s Indian lineage, West Indian
origin and London settlement do not enjoy a hand and glove relationship among
them. He is alienated from both the places at the expense of his troubled self
from which he hardly recovered. Living in London, away from his origin and
Brahminical roots, has never been easy for Naipaul all these years. Speaking
about his exilic consciousness in London, he makes a forthright comment:
London is my metropolitan centre, it
is my commercial centre; and yet I know that it is a kind of limbo and that I
am a refugee in the sense that I am always peripheral. One’s concerns are not
the concerns of the local people (Joshi 10; Khan 113).
Naipaul keeps him abreast
of the world through his literary world- fiction and non-fiction and
travelogues- no wonder that every conceivable literary award under this sun has
followed his creative pursuit. The artist, more than the writer, is central to
his writing. His imploring attempt to understand definitive position in the
world as a writer; writing is the means of survival for Naipaul, is key to his
troubled world of dispossession. The
connection he draws upon from three different roots helps him resituate his
artistic world but his personal loss of homelessness and a perforated anchorage
contributes to shaping up his writing sensibility. Dispossession, migration,
exile, banal belonging, unsafe anchorage, and a disruptive and disillusioned
vision in a vibrant postcolonial world of globalization- become his vintage
point of relishing creativity.
Salman Rushdie also
writes about this fluid situation in his epoch making book Imaginary
Homelands. He writes:
In my own case, I have constantly
been asked whether I am British or Indian. The formulation ‘Indian-born British
writer’ has been invented to explain me. But as I said last night, my new book
deals with Pakistan. So what now? ‘British-resident Indo-Pakistan writer’?
You see the folly
of trying to contain writers inside passports. (67) As for myself, I don’t. Is
it always necessary to take up the anticolonial—or is it post-colonial?—cudgels
against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those peoples who
were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating
it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it—assisted by the
English language’s enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large
territories for themselves within its frontiers. (64)
For Rushdie it is
impossible to return to home because it is “a lost home in a lost city in the
midst of lost time”(9). He makes his position clear a little later when he says
:
It may be that writers in my
position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of
loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated
into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do so in the
knowledge—which gives rise to profound uncertainties–that our physical
alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be reclaiming
precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not
actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of
the mind. (10)
Ramanujan’s
view goes one step further when he uses English language to good effect to get
mastery over the native culture staying abroad. He has done great service to
his native culture by staying in America. He admits it in a nonchalant way:
I don’t even call myself an expatriate,
because I’ve done a lot of work on India since coming to this country. I’ve
done more comfortably here than I could even have done it in India. For
instance, in the Chicago Regenstein Library, there are books in Kannada and
Tamil which probably only I will read. It’s great library that is more or less only
for a couple of people like me. When I went to Delhi—I was working on some
classical Tamil poems—I had to go for miles to find a classical Tamil book.
Another interesting thing is that one can
be an internal alien in India, as one goes from the one province to another. I
have not lived in my own language region since my 20th year. If you go a
hundred miles away, you are in a language that you cannot read or speak
(Daniels– Ramanujan and Harrison 52-53).
Any
writer who has opted out of India has done so with pleasure and profit without
forgetting his or her own roots. That is the best thing about it. But
dispossession and rootlessness become a dominant discourse of operation through
which a Naipaul protagonist perceives and projects his fictional world view.
Every writer we have considered here is great in his own right. But the
in-between-zone, where he can neither belong nor withdraw from his rearguard
roots, amounts to an intense agony of apathy, from which there seems to be
hardly any respite. The more intense the suffering, the more varied is the
trajectory of creative oeuvre. Naipaul does discover this dilemma very well in
his numerous writings. For him, like Rushdie, home serves as a metaphor for
incomplete assignments and agendas derived from memory counting upon an
indelible past. The discontinuity between past and present becomes acute;
subtle complexities of self, society and cultural void characterize Naipaul’s
fictional world. The writer travels extensively to cope with the loss of
identity from which he along with fellow travelers suffers. A visit to India spurs
him intellectually and creatively to reclaim his lost roots if not in actual
terms, at least in fiction. His apt observation proves our point:
I had learned my separateness from India
and content to be a colonial without a past, without ancestors … India is not
my home and cannot be my home, yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it:
I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far
(Naipaul 85).
Such a long-standing
dilemma becomes representative of all diasporic writers who consider ‘home’ as
myth of utopia; an ideal that looks all right from a distance but a closer
experience reminds one of distrust and disappointment. Geographical proximity
can never fulfill the psychological void. India remains a perforated locale in time
and space for Naipaul. A detached attachment is what explains Naipaul’s
ambivalent response to India. In a sense, he becomes cosmopolitan without
allegiance to either a fixed root or ‘home’. A man with no home has a number of
homes away from home. The psychology of dispossession and many lives he
experiences through his travels and writings help him to depict human
predicament in a poignant way. This is what Federer observes about his vibrant
creative world; Naipaul moulds “autobiographical material into poignant fiction
and his neuroses onto his narrators and characters” (1).
Cosmic dispossession of Half a Life
Dispossession and
homelessness is a leit-motif that one encounters frequently in the writings of
Naipaul. The internationally acclaimed and autobiographically enriched novel Half a Life (2001) is just a vindication
of it. His poignant past, vibrant present and unclaimed future- are projected
into this eponymous write up. The problem of belonging, multicultural plight,
and multilingual inadequacy find expression with a profound sense of loss in
respect of “being and belonging” (Khan 117). The novel unravels multiple layers
of accountability as a scintillating travel account, an engrossing
autobiographical unmasking, as a recurrent cultural matrix, as a subtle and
complex text and above all as a persistent and invigorating search for
identity. The world of half-completed culture and society is destined to remain
unchanged for ever. Identity crisis is at the centre of the novel, a recurrent
theme in all Naipaul write ups; small town people failing to cope with the
demands of a larger cosmopolitan culture - draws readers’ attention.
A tale of
dispossession and dilemma of three generations relating to an immigrant Brahmin
family is portrayed with vigour and poignancy in the novel. Estrangement and
psychological vagueness are being projected as underlying motifs, the novel
projects fictional requirement onto autobiographical tenacity. Three different
locales, rather three different continents –India, England (Europe), and
Africa—are chosen as the locales of the novel. The politically correct court of
the Maharaja belonging to a princely state and unfazed by the colonial agitation
is the locale of the first part, “A Visit from Somerset Maugham”. The suave
second section, “the First Chapter” takes place in the aftermath of world war
in London. The final section, “A Second Translation” is presented in a province
of Portuguese Africa, reminiscent of modern-day Mozambique, on the sidelines of
the shadow of colonialism, before finally making the region free. The ordeals of childhood of the protagonist
Willie Somerset Chandaran passes in India before leaving for London at a brisk
pace and then goes to Africa in quest of discovering himself. With him, the
narrative also moves squarely. The first part deals with the father’s lasting
impression on the protagonist; the writers dilemma and inquisitiveness to cope
with demands of a writer in making forms the crux of the second section. And
the third part in Portuguese Africa depicts the colonial plight.
Naipaul dives deep
into unraveling the life of dispossession, question of identity, delinking with
the original ancestry, distortion of history and constant attempts to restore
it, which is, more often than not, an exercise in futility, the ‘hurt’
sentiment arising out of being a nowhere-man. The Trisanku myth vindicates the
plight of Wille Chandaran on account of being an Indian by origin (Khan 118).
Again, the London of his dreams and reality concerning the disgusted life of
the hero is few and far between. The neither here nor there zone (plight of
Trisanku) that Chandaran experienced in India owing to dalit origin of his
mother and his father’s “misplaced idealism”, continues haunt him in London as
well; he is caught between appearance and reality. The novel, like The Mimic Men and an Enigma of Arrival, depicts in detail, life of a man dispossessed
from his origin and ancestry, his Sisyphean futility in making meaning out of a
frustrated life; the change the protagonist encounters in life does not
contribute, in any way, to any positive move in reality.
His father’s
existential crisis has made a profound impact on the psyche of the protagonist.
Poor financial background has made it difficult for his grandfather to make his
ends meet. He survived on ‘Prasad’ and consecrated food meant for God for days
on end before his tryst with destiny begins with job of a letter writer, before
finally getting a somewhat respected job of a clerk at Maharaja’s court.
However, Willie’s father learnt English and was appointed as one of the
secretaries of the Maharaja. His ambitions were dealt a fatal blow when his
plan to complete B.A. degree and marry the daughter of the principal of the
Maharaja College failed miserably which reminded him of his ancestry of “… the foolish, foreign-ruled starveling
priests” ( Half a Life 10). He then
turns to an idealistic plane propagated by Gandhiji to make life worth the
salt. It is “… not an empty sacrifice, the act of a moment – any fool can jump
off a bridge or throw himself in front of a train – but a more lasting kind of
sacrifice, something the Mahatma would have approved of” (10).
Thus, he marries a
Dalit woman, unwilling though, out of this choice of circumstance, Willie and
his sister Sarojine were born. Willie’s identity was subject to scrutiny out of
the half position in the society; instead of respect for his father, he is all
contempt for his father. He finds himself in a fix for being half Brahmin and
half Dalit, deprived of Brahminical identity and not accepting Dalit ideology
completely, in confirmation with his neither – nor zone status in society. Any
attempt to cover up the ghost of past only results in further agonizing
complications, a sort of an impasse from which he can hardly come out.
Inferiority complex
– resulting out of his Dalit mother and not financially well-off father
-consumes him from within. A scholarship from London comes as a godsend. But
dilemma of a wanderer with no set destination,
“… with no idea of what he wanted to do, except to get away from what he
knew” (51) follows him everywhere. He becomes a victim of disillusionment in
London too. The London of his mind and the London that he actually encounters
disappoints him:
The only two places he knew in the city
were Buckingham Palace and Speaker’s Corner. He was disappointed by Buckingham
Palace. He thought the Maharaja’s palace in his own state was far grander, more
like a palace, and this made him feel, in a small part of his heart, that kings
and queens of England were imposters, and the country a bit of sham (52).
His
disillusionment has no sign of receding spree whatsoever: “He was unanchored,
with no idea of the scale of things, no idea of historical time or even of
distance” (58). Even his college lessons are contributing to addition of his
agony:
The learning he was given was like the
food he was eating, without savour. The two were inseparable in his mind. And
just as he ate without pleasure, so, with a kind of blindness, he did what the
lectures and tutors asked him, read the books and articles and did the essays
(58)
Willie becomes the spokesperson for
Naipaul to expose maladies of London life. He resorts to hypocritical standards
relating to himself and his agonizing past for which he feels ashamed. He becomes
a pseudo gentle man to raise his standards in London metropolis:
He could within reason, re-make himself
and his past and his ancestry…he spoke of his mother as belonging to an ancient
Christian community of the subcontinent, a community almost as old as
Christianity itself. He kept his father as a Brahmin. He made his father’s
father a ‘courtier’. So playing with words, he began to remake himself. It
excited him and began to give him a feeling of power (60-61).
In
this new avatar, Willie befriends a Jamaican, Percy Cato and acquaints himself
with the ‘fast’ London life. He falls to the lure of life of pleasure as a
“sexual athlete” in his various encounters with English girls. However, all
these sexual promiscuities probe deep into his mind proving to be an exercise
in futility in the long run, more so when his friend Percy leaves for Panama.
His
deep psychological void as a result of hectic and increasingly pervasive life
in London reminds him about the past ghost of failure in India. Unknowingly he
is being dragged towards life of failure and meaninglessness his father has
once been subjected to. Willie’s access to imaginative writing with lucid style
becomes his temporary recluse now, helps him to be correspondence in BBC and a
budding short story writer. In the process he writes a book ‘Sacrifice’ with no real recognition.
Just when he is contemplating on relinquishing his writing career, it is Anna
from Africa who comes to his rescue with fulsome praise and appreciation for
his creativity as she found resemblances relating to her own life.
In
the company of Ana, Willie rediscovers a spurious sense of completeness which
has been eluding since beginning. He resolves to leave for an unknown
destination in Africa in the company of Ana. But before leaving, he receives a
letter from his sister Sarojini accusing him of being a namesake of his father,
reminding him of his typical past. Her assertion that, “you are like your
father, holding onto old ideas till the end” (131) gives a derogatory account
of Willie’s character. The myth of his unsuccessful origin haunts him again in
the wake of the frustrated London life. This also prompts Willie’s resolve to
accompany Ana to Africa.
His
African safari is also not a successful one. The thought of not being adaptable
to the place makes him return from Africa as soon as possible. Ironically, he
stays there for eighteen years as Ana’s life partner, although under strange
circumstances. His sexual encounters trap him as a disillusioned individual.
Recounting his utter failure and frustration in a poignant moment Willie admits
thus: “I am forty-one, in the middle life … I have been hiding from myself. I
have risked nothing. And now the best part of my life is over” (136).
Underlying pessimism is the order of the day for rookie Chandaran and Naipaul
himself. Half a Life leaves a lasting
impression on the readers’ mind as incomplete account of an aspiring
individual. Even its writer is in a guessing mode about the uncertain future of
the human life.
Naipaul
refutes the linear time by ending the novel abruptly in the middle. The
protagonist in his mid-forties is in disarray unable to decide his future
course of action. Roger, the journalist becomes the mouthpiece for Naipaul as
to what would be the right form of writing as well as life. By way of opening
up Roger gives this essential knowledge about life and art to Willie:
I know your great namesake and family
friend says that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But actually,
if you think about it, life isn’t like that. Life doesn’t have a neat beginning
and a tidy end. Life is always going on. You should begin in the middle and end
in the middle and it should all be there (83)
Conclusion
Such
an enigma of life and cultural dispossession is what stands out for Naipaul as
a great and representative writer of colonial plight. The rootlessness of
dispossessed contemporary diasporic life has been displayed superbly in the
novel. What has been clear over a long writing career, however, is that
Naipaul’s greatness lies in his dissent in accepting the established standards.
He has learned the art of dissent, disagreeing with society to achieve a
remarkable turnaround of sorts, achieving success and winning every coveted
literary award in the world as no other writer has achieved. His greatness lies
in the simple fact that Naipaul has presented a worldview which best suits and
merges with the agenda of a postcolonial project. Whether alive, or (now) dead,
he will be always remembered for creating a new world order by finding flaws
with his illustrated peers, and breaking boundaries set by an old-world order.
Works
Cited
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Ed. B.K. Das 18 (Jan 2012), Print.
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Exile, New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1994. Print.
Naipaul,
V.S. Half a Life, London:Picadoor,
202. Print.
----------- An
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----------- The
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---------------- Reflections
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