V'S' Naipaul Chaguanas, Trinidad, 1932

1
V.S. Naipaul(Chaguanas, Trinidad, 1932-)

• 1938 Port of Spain
• 1950 Oxford
• 1954 London
• 1970s Wiltshire
• Travels
• India, Pakistan
• Indonesia, Malesia
• Africa
• South America

2

• Trinidad ?
• Venezuela ?

3
From Naipauls Nobel lecture (2001)

• Everything of value about me is in my books... I
  am the sum of my books... I feel that at any
  stage of my literary career it could have been
  said that the last book contained all the others
• http//nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laur
  eates/2001/naipaul-lecture-e.html

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Naipaul and Postcolonial Culture

• Cosmopolitan writer
• Lack of roots
• Sense of homelessness
• Nomadism
• Search for a new literary form, a new
  architecture for the imagination
• Hybridity

5
A Way in the World (1994)

• A cross between fiction, memoirs and history,
  consists of nine independent but thematically
  linked narratives in which Caribbean and Indian
  traditions are blended with the culture
  encountered by the author when he moved to
  England at the age of 18
• http//nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laur
  eates/2001/bio-bibl.html

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Interplay

• A new literary form
• that intertwines memory and history
• The action shifts rapidly in both time and space

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Main issues

• In our blood and bone and brain we carry the
  memories of thousands of beings
• Personal and collective history
• (Colonial) past and (postcolonial) present
• Hybrid identities
• Fragmentation

8
Autobiographical details

• A narrator who bears a telling resemblance to
  Naipaul himself, a Trinidadian writer of Indian
  ancestry and English residence trying to come to
  terms with the mystery and transience that is his
  inheritance
• Homecoming
• I left home more than forty years ago
• Everything was strange and not strange
• All the people on the streets were darker than I
  remembered

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Characters

• Historical characters
• Columbus, Raleigh, Miranda
• Fictional characters
• Leonard Side
• Foster Morris, English writer
• Lebrun, West Indian communist revolutionary of
  the 1930s
• Manuel Sorzano, a self-made man
• De Groot, lecturer at an East African university
• Blair, black clerk then adviser for a newly
  independent African state

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Geographical details

• Trinidad Port of Spain (Red House, St. Vincent
  Street, ), St. James (a Western quarter), the
  aboriginal settlement of Cumucurapo
• Venezuela
• Guiana
• London
• East Africa

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Port of Spain - map
My father was my guide to the city in the very
early days. One Sunday afternoon he took me to
the city and walked me down two or three of the
principal streets (12)
12
Geographical details

• I had grown up with a small-island geography in
  my head. But the Gulf I had looked out on as a
  child was far bigger than the island. The Gulf,
  with its confused currents, between an island and
  the estuary of a continental river, had always
  been part of the fabulous New World (218)
• Cf. vegetation and colours of the landscape

13
Geographical details

• Geographically, Trinidad was an outcrop of
  Venezuela for three hundred years they had been
  part of the same province of the Spanish empire
  (211)
• The Orinoco remained the river of my story (211)

14
Geographical details

• Because I had written about it, because for many
  months Venezuela had existed for me as an
  imaginary country, created in my mind from the
  documents I read in London, I felt I had a claim
  on it. Over a number of journeys I began to think
  of Venezuela as a kind of restored homeland (214)

15
Columbus

• 1498
• Point Galera experience of visual continuity
• I thought that before I settled into the writing
  of this book I should go and look at old scenes.
  And, when I was in Trinidad, I did the longish
  drive one day to the north-easternmost point of
  the island, Point Galera, Galley Point. Columbus
  gave the name (69)

16
Columbus

• The trees on the rocks flourished where they did
  because they were native to those rocks, the
  Point, the island, the continent. And it occurred
  to me that, in spite of everything that had
  happened here, in spite of everything at our
  back, what I was looking at was, miraculously, a
  version of the very first thing Columbus had seen
  after his crossing of the Atlantic on his third
  voyage not the same rocks, but rocks created out
  of those he had seen, and the wind-beaten trees
  like the ones before me, ten or twelve or fifteen
  cycles before (70-71)

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Sir Walter Raleigh Eldorado

• The Gulf had always been a place of blood and
  revenge, of Indian dispossession and
  resettlement But you went away and wrote a book
  about an untouched paradise on the rivers, a
  place where the Indians lived in beautiful
  meadows and didnt know the value of the gold and
  diamonds by which they were surrounded (174)

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Sir Walter Raleigh Eldorado

• Perhaps if you hadnt taken back the sand and
  been mocked for it, you might have written
  nothing But you had to prove that you were not a
  fool, that you had found something more difficult
  than gold or booty. You had found a new empire
  for England, an empire of willing Indian
  subjects. So you wrote your difficult book,
  mixing up fantasy and history with your own real
  explorations. Everything on this side of the Gulf
  was real, everything on that side was fantasy
  (177)

19
Sir Walter Raleigh Eldorado

• There was never any El Dorado in Guiana. The
  Spaniards stopped looking many years ago. The
  French have stopped looking. The Dutch never
  looked. They always came only to trade, to get
  tobacco and salt. Neither you nor Keymis saw
  anything on the river. You both thought only that
  where so many had looked for El Dorado, El Dorado
  existed. Keymis in his book said El Dorado had to
  exist, if only as a sign of Gods providence to
  give England an empire as Spain had been given
  one (178)

20
Sir Walter Raleigh

• 1618
• The surgeon the old and sick explorer
• Don José his tale to
• Fray Simón, the historian of the New World

21
Raleighs

• Route
• ?
• Orinoco

22
Francisco Miranda

• 1806
• In the Gulf of Desolation
• Turbulent life, a man driven by ambition, a rebel
  
• Final failure

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Francisco Miranda

• There is this kind of madness and self-deception
  followed by surrender in the later career of
  Francisco Miranda, the Venezuelan revolutionary
  who came before Bolivar. Miranda is not as well
  known as Columbus or Raleigh. His career is just
  as fabulous and original, but he has no
  historical myth, and it is necessary at this
  point to establish his story (238)

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Manuel Sorzano The New Man

• He took out his passport. It was Venezuelan,
  reddish-brown, and he handled it very carefully
  (the way I handled my own British passport,
  always nervous, when I was travelling, of losing
  it, and doubting whether, if I lost it, I would
  be able to explain myself to anyone in
  authority). He passed it to me, and I saw his
  photogrph, and his name, Manuel Sorzano (220)

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Manuel Sorzano

• Then, as though rewarding me for filling in his
  disembarkation form and not asking difficult
  questions, he showed me the new records in the
  plastic bag. They were of Hindi devotional songs.
  Some had been done by a Trinidad group It was
  his way of saying that he was an Indian from
  Trinidad and at the same time letting me know I
  wasnt to ask him any more about it (221)

26
Blair

• Blair might have come to the realization that
  the character he had been presenting to the world
  the self-made man, still striving, looked up to
  by all, correct, with the manners of his special
  community was in some essential way false to
  himself. He might have been granted another
  vision of his isolated community living in the
  debris of old estates he might have taken their
  story back, to unmentionable times. And he might
  have decided then like me as a writer to
  remake himself (363)

27
Blair

• His homecoming
• At the airport in Trinidad the flaps would have
  opened, and when the time came the box would have
  been transferred to a low trailer, and perhaps in
  some way hidden or covered I was told that the
  box would have been taken in an ambulance to Port
  of Spain, and then the shell of the man would
  have been laid out in Parrys chapel of rest
  (370)

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Unwritten Stories

• At once historical and invented
• Imaginative recontruction to recover a lost
  history
• Documentary mode
• People who had to find their way in the world in
  very different times and places

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A Way in the World

• Home again
• Disorder of the decolonized world
• Also eulogizes a certain way in the world, the
  way of experience, of looking, questioning and
  reflecting on life
• The way out of this century is through history,
  memory, and a concrete experience of living among
  cultural others