The Universal Human Condition in V S Naipaul's Novels

chillibreeze writer — Radhanand Anantha

The ‘universal human condition’ is not the figment of imagination of a fevered critic but is a state that is at once recognizable when a writer can provide form, structure and substance to it and it finds resonance in the readers’ experience of the world around him. The universal appeal of a writer stems from the fact that his works reflect this essential human condition.

A writer should be able to observe external occurrences and events, place them in their historical and cultural contexts and make an effort to sieve out the details and frills that detract from the essential, the core. The writer who can connect the dots in seemingly unrelated events and see patterns, discern motives, understand how history and culture can influence people, can produce a literary work that can transcend barriers of region, race and religion. In this endeavor, the lonely journey of the writer, there is always the temptation to take the easy way out – to write what sells rather than be true to one’s intuitive self.

V.S. Naipaul is one writer, who has faithfully recorded the images, impressions, views and interpretations as per the dictates of his intuition. Concerns for political correctness, his Caribbean background, his Indian ancestry, and his domicile in England may have altered his perspective but were never allowed to distort and detract the essential reality he could perceive with such startling and sometimes uncomfortable clarity. This perception of reality is tempered by a concern for and an empathy with the universal desire of the individual to improve his lot and move on to a better state.

This concern and empathy are not always obvious in his writings – more often than not, they lie submerged under a veneer of criticism, apparent snobbery and detachment that can put off the casual reader. For the cursory observer, Naipaul’s body of work, both fiction and non-fiction appears to be the product of a disjointed, fragmented vision – the early light comedies of Trinidadian life, the more sombre stories of Mr. Biswas and Mr. Stone, the travel books with their caustic comments on the Third World (India, Africa and non-Aram Islamic nations) and his later fictional works. However, the observant reader can discern patterns, themes and motifs that recur.

Naipaul’s work represents a journey undertaken by a writer with a gift of intuitive awareness, a height of heightened perception of people and places and a keen sense of history and the driving forces that make people do what they do and become what they are. Naipaul’s writing is economical, the tone matter-of-fact and the narrator is unobtrusive. Intense dramatic scenes do not unfold in Naipaul’s novels.

Life is unraveled in all its frailty and futility, embellished with the small details that make each person’s life the same yet different from a million others with the same race, nationality and history. Naipaul’s eye for detail that highlights the absurd, the hilarious, the comic and the pitiable in life finds expression in his works in characters, plots and themes that seem plausible and stories are narrated less as a careful dénouement of plot but more as vignettes of actual life caught in intuitive flashes by a creative mind.

An intelligent, enquiring mind with an intuitive understanding of the compulsions and legacies that motivate human behavior and the ability to represent the ‘half-lives’ with uncompromising clarity in unemotional tones defines Naipaul, the writer. This uncanny perception combined with an uncommon felicity with words and a fluid prose style make Naipaul, a ‘high-fidelity’ recorder of life par excellence.

Naipaul was very aware of his intuitive creative abilities and encouraged by his father, he made a conscious decision to make writing his vocation. The issue was the subject matter onto which this considerable talent could be applied. For Naipaul, the familiar – Trinidad, the land and its people were never the subjects of any literary work. It required a leap of faith to attempt a transportation of these familiar things into literature.

Miguel Street was the first book that Naipaul wrote although it was published later. It is a series of character sketches with exaggerated personal eccentricities rather than any attempt at an in depth study of human nature. As Naipaul himself says-

I wished to write fast, to avoid too much self-questioning, and so I simplified. I suppressed the child-narrator’s background. I ignored the racial and social complexities of the street. I explained nothing. I stayed at ground level, so to speak

The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira and Miguel Street, Naipaul’s first three novels are light satirical comedies. Naipaul is still unsure of the kind of reception that his novels will enjoy. He feels that an understanding of the region he writes about is required in order to appreciate his work. He feels that the major obstacle between him and an adequate audience is a geopolitical boundary.

The social comedies I write can be fully appreciated by only someone who knows the region I write about. Without that knowledge, it is easy for my books to be dismissed as farces and my characters as eccentrics. It isn’t easy for the exotic writer to get his work accepted as being more than something exotic, something to be judged on its merits.

However, he himself transcends that boundary as he sets his next novel Mr Stone and the Knights Companion in England. As he moves over from the West Indies to England there is a greater conviction that the issues he grapples with in his works and the problems he encounters in writing about them are not peculiar to regional writers.

The problems of Commonwealth writing are really no more than the problems of writing; and the problems of reading and comprehension are no more than the problems of reading the literature of any strange society.

There is thus a self-assessment of the appeal of his works to a wider audience. Naipaul also becomes more acutely aware of the artistic responsibilities and functions of the writer, the need to be free from doctrines, to be ‘universal’ so to speak. As he says in the conclusion of his essay, Images:

In the end it is the writer and the writing that matter. The attempt to perfect Indian English or achieve Canadianess is the private endeavor of an irrelevant nationalism … a country is ennobled by its writers only if the writers are good.

A House for Mr Biswas transcends provincial boundaries and evokes concepts that are universal in their human implications. This novel has been called an epic and its protagonist an Everyman. A House for Mr. Biswas is the culmination of the early phase of Naipaul’s artistic development. Naipaul has successfully converted his personal experience into books that were acquiring a universal appeal, his artistic vision has broadened and he was more ambitious as a writer.

But personal experience has its limitations – that was when travel came to his rescue as he recalls:

Accident, then, rescued me. I became a traveler. I traveled in the Caribbean region and understood much more about the colonial set-up of which I had been part. I went to India, my ancestral land, for a year; it was a journey that broke my life in two. The books that I wrote about these two journeys took me to new realms of emotion, gave me a world-view I had never had, extended me technically.

Naipauls’s first travel book was The Middle Passage. It is an over-simplification to call his non-fiction books, travel books, because there is so much of the writer’s individualistic comment on the societies he travels through. Though the genre is different, the vision and the intuition remain the same as in his fictional works. Naipaul wrote three books on India – An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, India: A Land of a Million Mutinies. The books were a voyage of self-discovery as Naipaul himself recalls the reasons that prompted him to go to India:

I had to travel to India because there was no one to tell me what the India my grandparents had come from was like. There was the writing of Nehru and Gandhi; and strangely it was the writing of Gandhi, with his South African experience, who gave me more, but not enough. There was Kipling …The few Indian writers who had come up at that time were middle-class people, town-dwellers; they didn’t know the India we had come from. And when that Indian need was satisfied others became apparent: Africa, South America and the Muslim world. The aim has always been to fill out my world picture, and the purpose comes from my childhood: to make me more at ease with myself.

Naipaul’s works take the reader geographically across continents – Trinidad, England, India, Africa and so on. Naipaul makes a corresponding journey inward as the breadth of his vision increases, as a world-view emerges, as seemingly unrelated experiences and observations coalesce to form patterns that make sense. The writer moves from the local to the global in the external geographic sense and in the internal journey from a narrow perspective to a broader more encompassing vision.

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—About our writer:

Radhanand,

Love to write about anything from mellifluous old world melodies to choppy, chirpy SMS lingo of GenNext. Love watching movies the old way - in a theater, with family and popcorn. Teach grad students embedded systems.

The Universal Human Condition in V S Naipaul's Novels

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