Table Of ContentAuthority and Authorship
in V. S. Naipaul
Also by the Author
The Wedding (2001)
Green-eyed Thieves (2006)
High, Low, In-between (2009)
Authority and Authorship
in V. S. Naipaul
Imraan Coovadia
authority and authorship in v. s. naipaul
Copyright © Imraan Coovadia, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61535-9
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coovadia, Imraan.
Authority and authorship in V. S. Naipaul / Imraan Coovadia.
p. cm.
1. Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932—Criticism and
interpretation. 2. Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932—Literary
style. 3. Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), 1932—Political and
social views. 4. Authority in literature. 5. Authorship—Political aspects.
6. Authorship—Social aspects. I. Title.
PR9272.9.N32Z595 2009
823'.91—4dc22 2008045303
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
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First edition: July 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Authorship and Authority 1
1 Authority and Misquotation in A Bend in the River 17
2 The Cold Joke 39
3 V. S. Naipaul and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad 63
4 V. S. Naipaul and the Muslims 93
5 V. S. Naipaul and the Uses of South Africa 127
Conclusion: Style and Naipaulian Transformations
in the Indian Travel Narratives 151
Notes 159
Bibliography 183
Index 187
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the following indi-
viduals and institutions: Tony Morphet, Fawzia Mustafa (as Palgrave
reviewer), the external reviewers for Postcolonial Text, Gail Fincham,
the Teaching Relief Fund and Office of the Humanities Dean at the
University of Cape Town, and Lyn Holness and the University of
Cape Town Emerging Researcher’s Program.
INTRODUCTION
Authorship and Authority
KING LEAR. Dost thou know me, fellow?
KENT. No, sir; but you have that in your countenance
which I would fain call master.
KING LEAR. What’s that?
KENT. Authority.
The small, twinkly eyes that might at first, in that wrinkled head,
have seemed only peasant’s eyes, always about to register respect and
obsequiousness combined with disbelief, could be seen now to be
the eyes of a man used to exercising a special kind of authority, an
authority that to him and the people around him was more real and
less phantasmal, than the authority of outsiders from the city. His
face was the face of the Master, the man who knew men, and whole
families, as servants, from their birth to their death.
—India: A Wounded Civilization
The construction of authority—what we call legitimacy in
politics, tradition in culture, and imaginative strength, or
plausibility, in literature—is the key problem in V. S. Naipaul’s
career, from his Caribbean comedies of the late 1950s and sub-Saharan
fiction of the 1970s, through the travel writings and his more recent
2 (cid:2)(cid:3) Authority and Authorship in V. S. Naipaul
essays and narratives, including Magic Seeds (2004) and A Writer’s
People (2007).
Throughout his work, Naipaul studies societies on the periph-
ery of the world system where political authority is fragile and
cultural authority has yet to be established. With their focus on
English subjects and landscape, Mr. Stone and the Knight’s Com-
panion (1963) and The Enigma of Arrival (1987) are exceptions to
the general rule. Naipaul sets his fiction on Caribbean islands and
in invented sub-Saharan states while his travel writing encircles the
globe. His imaginative energies have been consistently invested in
regions far removed from his British residence and from the sure-
ties of metropolitan existence.
For Naipaul literature alters the obscurities of the postcolonial
situation. Literature brings definition and, therefore, a kind of tact
or style to its object; as he puts it in The Overcrowded Barracoon
(1972), “until they have been written about, societies appear to
be without shape and embarrassing.”1 Writing, whether fiction or
nonfiction, has the almost magical ability, according to Naipaul,
to confer form on postcolonial societies. It functions as a substi-
tute for the long-standing conventions and understandings that
make up a metropolitan culture, giving it “shape.” The internal
organization in a verbal work of art allows the reader to see the
component parts of a disorganized Third World society.
Writing, moreover, has a psychological effect on the relation
between the outside observer and the observed. Like a garment
clothing an unsightly body, it forestalls “embarrassment.” Naipaul
does not locate this particular “embarrassment,” but one senses it
belongs to his own psychological makeup and, perhaps to his read-
ers, more than to the postcolonial peoples he represents. To italicize
the word as Naipaul does makes the existence of this “embarrass-
ment” an assumption imposed on the reader rather than an argu-
ment about what it means for a writer to take on postcolonial
subject matter. Naipaul’s prose, which he seems to drape on the
offending body of the postcolonial situation, makes a decorous
and civilized scene out of the encounter.
Authorship and Authority (cid:2) 3
In a world of many cultures, many states, and many contrasting
levels of development, it is often unclear what can and should be
said and who has the right to say it. This crisis of authority is at
once a theme in Naipaul’s works and a literary-critical problem in
understanding the power and scope of his prose. The competence
by which Naipaul claims to describe and define a great number of
societies across the globe is, as I will show, a product of his own
writing from the level of the individual phrase and sentence all
the way to the location and narrative structure of his novels and
other prose narratives. Even Naipaul’s jokes, such as they are—
“A banana a day keeps the Jamaican away”—are, as we shall see,
attempts to position himself and his audience within the postco-
lonial situation.
Understanding Naipaul’s claims for himself and his writing
means, in addition, reckoning with a certain view of literature as a
cross-cultural institution. The problem of imaginative authority is
a deep one in literary studies; understanding Shakespeare, or Leo
Tolstoy, is inseparable from offering an account of their power to
convince.
Shakespeare’s alchemy of characters and situations—ranging
from monarch to beggar, and from Danish Hamlet and a New
World Tempest to the Tudor propaganda of the Henry plays—has
frequently been ascribed to his own reticence as a personality.
Shakespeare is supposed to have had so little need to assert his
individuality that he could be fully possessed by the many dis-
tinct individualities of his characters. Tolstoy’s imaginative power,
on the other hand, is usually understood as inseparable from Tol-
stoyan personality. The panoramas of War and Peace and Anna
Karenina are the creation of a particular man who finds universal
relevance in each particular situation. In the case of Shakespeare as
well as Tolstoy, critics have often looked for one disposition that
explains the work’s hold over our imaginations.
With Naipaul, born in Trinidad but at home in the United King-
dom and at large in the world from Muslim Asia to sub-Saharan
Africa and the American South, the problem of literary authority
