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TRANSITION W UnderReview
V.S. NAIPAUL,
POSTCOLONIAL MANDARIN
Rob Nixon
With the passing of each decade, Naipaul it is, paradoxically, equally important to
has invested more and more of his energy recognize his impassioned efforts during
in travel writing, producing less and less the late I98os to terminate his travels. His
fiction. During the ten years that followed writing during the early part of the decade
the appearanceof his first novel, The Mys- (Amongthe Believersand the Grenadian es-
ticMasseur(I957), he published nine titles, say, "An Island Betrayed") was cast in
seven of them novels or collections of Naipaul's standard, brittle categories-
short stories. Between I968 and I975, his mimicry, barbarism, world civilization,
industry was split equally between fiction parasitism, and simple societies. But the
and nonfiction, generating two books of split title of Finding the Center: Two Nar-
each. But in the fifteen years since Guerillas rativesindicated a threshold text: the long
(1975), he has produced only one full novel travel essay on the Ivory Coast was vin-
(A Bendin theRiver, I979), while his travel tage, predictable Naipaulia, while the
and autobiographical writings have grown book's other half, "A Prologue to an Au-
ever more prolific. In addition to The tobiography," pulled in a contrary direc-
Enigmaof Arrival (1987), a hybrid work of tion, anticipating the new developments
autobiography and fiction, the period that would ensue in The Enigmaof Arrival,
since 1975 has seen seven works of non- A Turn in the South, and India: A Million
Discussed in fiction: India: A Wounded Civilization Mutinies Now.
this essay
(I977), The Returnof Eva Peron (1980), A Each of his three latest books marks an
India: A Million Congo Diary (1980), Among the Believers attempt to make his peace with one of the
Mutinies Now, the Center A Turn in three cultures that have contributed most
(I98I), Finding (I984),
V. S. Naipaul,
New York: Viking the South (1989), and India:A Million Mu- to his identity-England, Trinidad, and
tinies Now (I990). India. In the process, each includes an el-
A Turn in the South,
V. S. Naipaul, New While it is crucial to observe Naipaul's ement of muted self-criticism. The Enigma
York:Knopf increasing commitment to travel writing, of Arrival, as the title intimates, is suffused
since. His newfound conciliatory mood
toward Trinidad does not prevent him,
however, from reanimating his bigotries
toward the black cultures of the New
World.
A Turn in the South, too, was an-
nounced as his last travel book. But, hav-
ing faced first England, then Trinidad, he
returned to India to resolve his differences
I.
>1
there. The prevailing restraint, even ten-
@
derness, of India: A Million Mutinies Now
V. S. Naipaul, inatrnoreal inalldarinland travel makes for an astonishing contrast with his
writer ...
earlier writings about the subcontinent.
Significantly, Naipaul closes A Million
with a sense of an ending. In the central Mutiniesby reviewing his first Indian trav-
section of the book, Naipaul reviews his elogue, An Area of Darkness,anatomizing,
life and ponders, among other things, the in the process, the youthful rawness that
distortions of his identity that prompted contributed to its limitations.
iim to ignore the rich lode of immigrant
experience in London during the 195os and
I960s. Naipaul's condensed, revisionist
rewriting of his collective travels in Enigma For three decades, Britain and the United
was meant to be a kind of terminus. He States, the sites of Naipaul's residence and
would, he insisted, write travel no more. his principal audiences, had been consti-
Yet he went on to produce A Turn in tutively absent from his travel writing. So
the South. His first American travel book,
it brought him unexpectedly face-to-face
with his Trinidadian ancestry and child- ... Or itinerant handkerchief-head?
hood. The bonds he discovered between
the South and Trinidad-bonds of slavery,
racial conflict, and plantation society-
stirred in him a mixture of anguish and
serendipity. A powerful strand of the book
contains an attempt to review, from the
paradoxical distance and proximity of the
South, the roots of his old rage at Trin-
idad. As in Enigma, we observe a cautious bo
_C
homecoming, this time as he becomes (at c3
'I
least in spirit) more accommodating of the
>1
X
society that he fled in bitter shame and to- 2
o