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| Kathmandu Sunday March 17, 2002 Chaitra 04, 2058. |
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Naipaul in the banal continent
By BASANTA LOHANI
Twenty days after October 11 when Swedish
Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in literature "for having united perceptive
narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of
suppressed histories", VS Naipaul made a momentous announcement over an American
Broadcasting Company relayed all over Sweden. He expressed his gratitude to the
prostitutes for the comfort they provided him at a time when he was so busy in writing
that he had no time for courtship outside his marriage.
The Swedish Academy was visibly embarrassed and
dubbed it his personal matter. And, this is precisely where I found Naipaul a hero and
wrote thus: "this has, in fact, increased his height further not because he went to
prostitutes but because he showed the guts to admit it publicly." To the lot basking
on the glory earned through deceitful manoeuvres, he certainly was a nincompoop making
such an uncalled for and self-damaging utterances not in line with the worldly wisdom of
hypocrisy as the pervading vista to success and prosperity. But this is precisely where I
found him taller than the height he had gained twenty days ago as that of a Nobel
laureate.
A creative writer the way he is, Naipaul seems
particularly obliged to Marcel Proust, the French writer, who has influenced the world
literature in terms of digging the lost memory by triggering it with the details of our
day-to-day incidents. This is possible if the writer is creative enough to be aware of his
self as distinct from what is manifested from our habits. In his forty minutes address to
the Nobel ceremony on December 7, Naipaul starts from quoting Proust thus: " if we
try to understand that particular self, it is searching our own bosoms and trying to
reconstruct it there, that we may arrive at it."
I believe this requires patience and cheerful
attitude to play with solitude where one can hear its music of bliss. For someone who has
never heard this music it may be frightening in the beginning. In this process of giving
oneself to writing, beauty radiates unravelling the happiness of life. Like Proust who
relied on intuition and good luck, Naipaul has done the same thing. He underscored this
theme in his Nobel lecture: "I have trusted to my intuition to find subjects and I
have written intuitively." He ended his lecture quoting Proust who considered talent
as "the memory of a melody though we are unable to capture its outline" It is
this type of "blurred memory" that one may not be aware he is gifted can pour
out beautiful things in terms of writing. To this end, Naipaul quipped "I would say
luck, and much labour" This brings intuition, luck and labour in the confluence of
literary outpour flowing with a rhythm of grandeur and magnanimity.
When this blend of creativity is polluted with
increasing dozes of banality as we have seen more so in this continent, a true artist gets
suffocated and reacts in a kind of outburst the way Naipaul did recently. He was in India
and created uproar when a kind of commonplace discussion leading to nowhere triggered the
volleys of his anger. Mediocrity, the way it has taken the cockpit of our sociopolitical,
economic and cultural life even in our own country, speaks volumes of degenerating values
and ethos. When I see even Nepalese literary criticism, it is in the spirit of eulogizing
one another forming groups or even a so-called ‘scholastic cartel’ in the
typical rhythm of ‘you scratch my back and I scratch yours’. Our society has
become so decadent that social milieu has become suffocating because of this swamp of
mediocrity or banality. I will have occasions to talk about this perspective later. Let us
try to examine Naipaul’s outburst against banality now.
His ancestors from father’s side were
Nepalese as he said, " I know only that some of them came from Nepal." This
Trinidadian novelist and essayist, in his literary span of over 42 years, starting with
his first novel The Mystic Masseur in 1957, has shown marked revulsion against banality.
His 1977’s novel India: a wounded civilization is an all time powerful expression of
defiance. Here he portrays the agony of the continent with his incisive imagination and,
thus, capturing its hidden pangs of alienation. The foreign rule has wounded the country
so much that it has still not healed. The reason is simple. It is just the lack of
regeneration that has constantly agonized India. No wonder the turbulence is oozing out.
The inability of asserting as an Indian race and talking of emotional integration,
instead, in the backdrop of a blank civilization has the disastrous effect while coping
with the borrowed institutions. This is how Naipaul has concluded that the problem of
India is the lack of ideology. And, the solution he has found is a swift decay of the
decaying civilization.
It is for this kind of ingenuous diagnoses that
Naipaul was hailed as having done a work that the economist are yet to delve into. His
ideas generated violent reactions too .It did create a controversy especially when he
remained harsh not even to give the country’s liberator Mahatma Gandhi his due. But
it is also true that Naipaul has never been a writer at the periphery. He manages his way
to the centre to sneak into human vulnerability because of his intuitive way. I trust him
when he said, "every book has amazed me, up to the moment of writing I never knew it
was not there" The fact that he himself is amazed of his won creation is the proof
how significant is his writing in terms of inner sense of "incorruptible
scrutiny."
It is the creative writers like Naipaul who can
perceive and narrate such flow of time blended with the flow of emotion. And, it is
exactly here that Naipaul has found mediocrity taking the lead in a society. The first
thing that comes to any inquiring mind is: how is it possible? To be a leader means, at
least, rising above the average where the vision could extend much beyond the present. The
answer, as expected, is that it is the myth that transforms an individual from mediocrity
to an exulted position of a leader or even that of a messiah. Interestingly, this is what
history has corroborated mostly. The 7000 years old human history starting from Egypt with
the end of Stone Age passed through the ‘painted pottery civilization’
encompassing Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian and Chinese, so diverse, so separate, but
converging on the same plank of time leading us to where we are today.
All along this period, human passion for
violence has been mostly for creating the myth so that it can take the front seat covering
the mediocrity driving the canopy of human lives. Civilizations flourished and died
perhaps in the rhythm Aristotle once described about 2300 years ago when he said anything
that has a beginning also has an end. Many empires were built and destroyed. It was a
trading on the ignorance of the people. When religion became the vehicle to drive human
passions, religious institutions and state came in tandem and colluded to condition human
lives so that the process of dehumanization could take its further root as a socially
accepted way of living. This is how the common lot became like a commodity for the use and
gratification of the rulers whose mediocrity was wrapped up in the myth of a saviour.
William Wordsworth has reason to lament when he
remarked, "have I not reasons to lament what man has made of man?" Paulo Freire,
in his magnum opus, The pedagogy of the oppressed, has brilliantly explained its dynamics
how the rulers keep the disadvantaged lot ‘submerged’ so that the critical
awareness of the masses remains elusive. To quote him " the struggle is possible
because dehumanization, although a historical fact, is not the given destiny but the
result of an unjust order that endangers violence in oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes
the oppressed." I think this is very close to the governing reality of our own
county. Forget about the past when wars were fought and won for an extra space of the
deserving most or for their righteousness or purity even if many such wars were nothing
more than absurdity bordering onto lunatic extravaganza.
When such events are lost in the suppressed
histories where banality have been the order of the day, Naipaul gets obsessed because his
intuitive reflex gets to its depth through his sense of incorruptible scrutiny. That is
what makes him different from others. When he does not get to write and has to use his gab
instead, his violent outburst becomes frightening. The New York Times, in its editorial
the next day he was declared Nobel laureate, has rightly described it thus: "Mr.
Naipaul is often a better guide to the world in his prose than his spoken remarks which
has resulted in accusations of homophobia and racism." Once he is in writing he does
not loose his patience even to lift the microscopic details so delicately that it is
possible for him to do so because he is gifted with that craftsmanship.
Banality has different components like greed,
corruption, callousness and betrayal. These are powerful areas of literary investigation
where writers can exert powerful pressures and produce great literary works. The emotion
of the writer itself involved in such literary outpour has to flow transversing the
contours to get the closest feel of these emotional shades and the gradient of the
socio-economic and political setting. One of the chosen areas of the great Russian
dramatist and short story writer Chekhov is banality like lovelessness.
Naipaul is very powerful in his writing when the
focus is on exposing banality or bathos from where he gains his literary height in a
magnificent way. But when he himself has to be a character or a party of an ongoing
banality, furious he becomes the way he recently was in a symposium in India. As the media
coverage goes, he shouted and disrupted the Indian literary festival on February 21st when
writer Nayantara Shegal opened discussion on issues of colonialism and an author’s
responsibility with gender and oppression. An infuriated Naipaul reacted by bellowing,
" my life is short. I can not listen to banalities. This thing about colonialism,
this thing about gender oppression, the very word oppression wearies me. I don’t know
why, I think it is because banality irritates me."
Bikram Seth, another writer, who was sitting
next to him tried to calm him down by gently patting over his shoulder but this only
fuelled his anger further when he thundered, "why are you doing this. This is only
the second literary conference I have come to. The first was a calamity. I have attended
two sessions here. This has been the least fortunate session for me. If writers just sit
and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing. And my difference to
that type of attitude is that I have to make a living by writing" He questioned the
validity of talking about colonialism when the British rule in India ended over fifty
years ago and said "give me the date of colonialism, when does it begin, otherwise it
is dancing in the air."
I would think that the Naipaul’s outburst
against banality was true to that of a creative writer the way he is. And, I am glad that
persons like him still exist in this world even if as a misfit to many. It is a difficult
time now because human beings are gradually degenerating to become vegetables due to
pervasive banality triggering a competition not to excel but to degenerate further.
Naipaul has proved to be as symbolic as a misfit. And, I remember Rajneesh saying that it
is the misfits who can make this world beautiful. Let us be what we are and not get scared
to be a misfit in this endemic mediocrity. This is the only way not to succumb to be
consumed by the pervasive banality, which has become the order of the day.
(Based on the paper presented at the 14th Annual
Conference of Literary Association of Nepal held recently in Kathmandu)
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