In 1833 Slavery Was Abolished

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

INTRODUCTION:

I am the sum of my books

"… everything of value about me is in my books…

I am the sum of my books."

(Two Worlds, Nobel Lecture)

In 1833, slavery was abolished all over the territory of the British Empire, with unforeseen social and economic consequences. The black slaves on the sugar plantations in Trinidad left their former masters, who found themselves in the unpleasant situation of not being able to ensure the ever increasing requests for sugar. The enterprising British politicians and traders came with a solution which saved the situation – the system of indentured labour, which allowed for the transportation of a large number of workers from India to the British colonies in South Africa and the Caribbean. They came by their own consent, having signed a contract and hoping to return to India at the completion of the indentureship period. Indeed, some of them returned, while others lost all connections with their native Gangetic Plain, and stayed. Among the Trinidadian Indians, the Naipaul family of Port of Spain gave the country three writers – father and two sons. One of them was to become Sir Vidia, and a Nobel Prize laureate in 2001. Author of an impressive number of books of fiction (novels and short-stories) and non-fiction (travelogues and essays), Naipaul delivered his Nobel acceptance lecture, Two Worlds, abounding in references to his (or any other writer’s) (auto-) biography "who depends on inspiration," which should be approached in the light of a profound understanding of one’s soul. The conclusion is that

"All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there. The biography of a writer – or even the autobiography – will always have this incompleteness." (Two Worlds)

He then continued with a concise presentation of the history of his native Trinidad, the adoptive home of his parents and the other indentured Indian workers in the West Indies. It is like an incursion into the colonial past and postcolonial present, an attempt at self-discovery and self-understanding, an invitation to the two worlds of his childhood – his grandmother’s house and the world outside which, by its excluding attitude allowed the new the new arrivals to live their own private lives in their own ways, in in their own "fading India". In the world outside young Naipaul learned the rudiments of his Indian heritage – language, traditions, religion – and by meeting his Indian Muslim neighbours he became aware of the existence of the other. But the world outside was much more powerful. Even if the his elders were observing the ancient customs and religion, organizing ceremonies and readings of sacred Sanskrit texts, their "ancestral faith receded", with a sense of not belonging to the present, and all possible links with India were severed.

We are witnessing the colonizing process in a nutshell. Naipaul’s Trinidad is a cosmopolitan world, surrounded by areas of darkness, where the Hindu meets the Muslim, the Africans or other people of African descent meet the whites and the non-whites – English, Portuguese, Chinese – all surrounded by areas of darkness.

And here we come to another connection we have been looking for: the writer’s motivation of his subsequent trips to India, the source of his Indian travelogues, the essence of the present study. Naipaul testifies to his indebtedness to Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, to Rudyard Kipling and John Masters’ books on India and the British Raj, even the romances written by women writers.

(Un-)willingly we have touched upon a few of the concepts we will develop upon: biography and autobiography, the travelogue as literary genre, colonial/post-colonial literature, orientalism, the backlash of the Empire – all meant to draw a portrait of Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, the Indian who shocked the Indians in his attempt to find his roots in the areas of darkness surrounding him and his world. If a writer, according to Naipaul, is the sum of his books, then, to cite Naipaul again, "each book […] stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others." (Two Worlds)

*****

In the last thirty years or so, theoretical writing on autobiography has blossomed, autobiographies written from a specifically female perspective or from the perspective of members of ethnic minorities have proliferated, and the genre has been a fertile ground for experimental writing. The reasons for this interest in life-writing are many and varied, but one important factor is that autobiography – in its various guises – can capture and address many contemporary concerns, for example the status of the subject, the relations and representations of ethnicity and gender, and perhaps most importantly questions the individual’s relationship with the past. Autobiographical writing can thereby reflect some of the main preoccupations of postmodernism, which has often been defined in terms of questions about our knowledge of the past and the difficulty of articulating our relationship to it. Such issues abound in recent life-writing.

With travel writing we situate ourselves in the much larger field of life-writing, with its numerous avenues for exploration. The ethno-historical significance and the narrative problematics confer travel writing a privileged status, much enhanced during recent decades, and the reputation of a hitherto neglected genre rose considerably. Bookshops abound in travel guides, travel books – dutifully accompanied by conversation books in as many foreign languages – and the more history-conscious customers would look for the ancient Greek and Roman travelogues with an obvious rise in the reputation of travel writing towards the end of the twentieth century. Paul Theroux, Bruce Charwin, Ryszard Kapucinski and Robyn Davidson are widely acclaimed authors, to whom Naipaul should be dutifully added. His estimation of his own writing justifies it:

"My books have to be called ‘travel writing,’ but that can be misleading because in the old days travel writing was essentially done by men describing the routes they were taking. . . . What I do is quite different. I travel on a theme. I travel to make an inquiry. I am not a journalist. I am taking with me the gifts of sympathy, observation, and curiosity that I developed as an imaginative writer. The books I write now, these inquiries, are really constructed narratives." (Naipaul, 1996)

In his Aspects de la biographie (1928), André Maurois theoretically justifies the biographer’s perspective. According to him, "the modern biographer, if honest, will never say: ‘Here is a great minister, a great writer. A legend has been built around his name. This legend and only this is the one I want to tell.’ No. He thinks: ‘Here is a man. I am in the possession of a number of documents and testimonies on him. I want to try and draw a true portrait of him. What will it look like? I do not want to know the answer before finishing it.’" Nevertheless, the "historical" character is introduced by another "historical" character, the author. And this particular author – in Naipaul’s case – is neither Caribbean, nor Indian, and not even European. But, if we consider literature in English as post-colonial literature, our approach is entirely justifiable.

Intention

The keywords for my paper are – not necessarily in this order – life writing/travel writing, biography/autobiography, colonial/postcolonial. It sets out to analyse the meaning of the concept of travel writing as seen in Naipaul’s non-fiction, with a particular stress on the writer’s Indian trilogy – An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) – in the broader context of post-colonial writing. One reason would be Naipaul’s singular position among the post-colonial writers dealing with the matter of India, and what Chaubey calls "his curious love-hate relationship with his country… the tension emanating from Naipaul’s desire to remain apart from the mainstream tradition of the country visited." (Chaubey, 2011)

It is my declared intention to decipher the more or less hidden meanings that the author inserted in both his novels and his travel writing, with the precise purpose – appropriate in the perspective of Naipaul’s fiction – of making room for doubt and questioning and creating both a complex interior debate and many peer discussions.

I am also considering the relation, if any, between biography, autobiography and the travel writing which might contain elements of both. Autobiography – such as Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery or Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and Freedom – is a special literary genre, which situates itself somewhere between literature and history but its position is not clearly defined.

If autobiography was considered by some "a kind of stepchild of history and literature, with neither of those disciplines granting it full recognition" (Olney, 1988), the publication of Georges Gusdorf’s essay "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," changed the condition of the genre. It will be our declared task to discuss the importance of the (auto-) biographical elements in Naipaul’s writings which may be of interest to scholarly debate for literary critics and historians alike.

Limitations of my approach

My thesis is not a treatise on Naipaul as a postcolonial writer, even if he is considered within the mainstream of postcolonial literature.

It is not a treatise on Indian travel literature; it will analyse Naipaul’s three Indian travelogues only, but without forgetting his other fictional and non-fictional works published in his more than forty years of literary career so far.

Research questions

Before positioning Naipaul on the chess-board of postcolonial writing, it is necessary to consider his position as a British writer. How does he fit into the picture of a globalized culture?

In the background of globalization constructed on technological novelties such as the television and internet – considered "the most effective medium in accomplishing time-space compression" (Waters, 1995) – Britain is also confronted with an important change of population. (Christopher, 2006) In the context of the social – political changes related to "the disintegration of the British Empire, the expansion of the Commonwealth, and the immigration of people of numerous nationalities, languages and cultures" (Christopher 5), the entire fabric of English society has changed radically, becoming "a multi-ethnic country with a plurality of identities and heritages" (Christopher 5). Moreover, theorists consider that due to the women’s movement, the attitude of youth, immigrants’ traditions and the post-war baby boom, British society transformed into a multicultural one (Christopher 5). The need for manual labour in areas which supported the new technologies led to a big wave of immigration from many distinct parts of the globe to a small but technologically developed location. As "Britain has continued to play a fairly substantial part in the world’s intellectual and scientific development" (Powplaski, 2008), it also became the new home of an important number of immigrants.

How much of an Indian is the Trinidad-born Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, a subject of the British crown? What is the extent of Naipaul’s Indian-ness? Does it justify his often unfavourable comments on the country of his ancestors?

Discussing the concept of Indianness as applied to the condition of the former indentured Indians now living in non-Indian territories of the British Empire, and confronted with a multi-ethnic, multicultural environment, analyst Eriksen states that they

"cannot adequately be viewed simply as Indians. They are Indians embedded in a particular historical and socio-cultural context, and this fact is an inextricable part of their life – even those aspects of their life which pertain to their very Indianness" (Hylland, 1992).

Indianness then, will be viewed as a two-dimensional concept: (1) as a geographical identity, and (2) as a state of being. It is noteworthy that Indians in the Caribbean islands continue to identify themselves as Indian, although their ancestors migrated from India years before the establishment of the Indian nation-state in 1947. Indian identity is often assumed to be a homogenous identity, derivative of India with its histories and traditions. Also, Indianness is a state of being attuned to certain philosophical beliefs and values that are distinctly unique from what the Western world has dictated. Some conclusions of a study devoted to the Indian community in South Africa may be easily applied to the West Indians. Thus, "recreations of Indianness can be seen in a number of themes identifiable within the discourse of essentialist Indianness" and identifications are being made (or at least called for) in terms of these six themes: (1) A Romanticised Past; (2) Eternal/Timeless Essence; (3) Charitable Nature; (4) Mahatma Gandhi Influence and Resistance; (5) Morality; and (6) Industrious/Hard Working. (John-Naidu, 2005) This is the context in which Naipaul’s Indian travel writings will be carefully considered.

What are the specific traits of Naipaul’s Indian travelogues? How do they fit into the context of travel writing as a literary genre further considered a subcategory of ‘life writing’? What is their relation to biography and autobiography?

The Concise Oxford Dictionary offers several definitions for memoirs and autobiography. Summing up, we are dealing with a historical account or biography written from personal knowledge or special sources, a personal account of one’s own life, meant to be published, which may take literary form. The literary form is not compulsory.

Generally speaking, memoirs – or autobiographies, as the case may be – are rather special categories of a diary, having certain sources and functions. Autobiographies are not written to remain unknown. Moreover, they have been written by artists or non-artistic personalities who use the word, the sound, and their art to justify themselves in front of their contemporaries and even posterity. They do not represent a justification by their own form, but by the events they describe and comment upon. It is very possible that they will later become literary works in themselves, and that the author will later be considered as their own character, but the initial function of memoirs has never been aesthetic.

How does Naipaul manage his search for his (Indian) identity? If it proves successful, offering (un)expected answer to initial questions, does the (postcolonial) writer’s return from the margins to the centre render him culturally enriched?

Naipaul’s writing is informed by the paradox of a dystopian realization of England – the land which offered a growing writer numberless possibilities of achievement – as a place of imprisonment. One example is Enigma of Arrival (1987). On the other hand, Miguel Street England is both praised as the epitome of colonial aspiration, and as an example of failure and deception. The minority writer’s departure from the margin to the colonial centre, leaving behind his colonized self for a new development in the country of the colonizer, means the corruption of the colonized self and his traditions. This is then the essence of England and Englishness. What, then, is the basis for this perception of England? What, in the other words, accounts for Naipaul’s particular crisis about Englishness?

The paradox of the civilizing mission of the great European nations is fully understood by Naipaul who accuses European culture of racially-based exclusivism which undermines its universality. According to Gandhi, "while England (with its European counterparts) represents the only possible cultural/civilisational truth, only some are chosen, by accident of birth, to have natural access to the privilege of this truth." (Gandhi, 2009) Considering the compromises – both ethical and existential – which characterize colonised subjectivity, we are wondering what Naipaul has to say about the mentality of Empire. This is another question that my dissertation will hopefully answer.

Corpus and method

The autobiographies written by different celebrities are justified as far as the respective celebrities are characterized by a richness of actions they accomplished, or events they witnessed or even ordered. Thus, we have the autobiographies of Saint-Simon, Churchill and De Gaulle, Chaplin and Louis Armstrong – to quote but a few. The question is: Are they literary works? Maybe not, but they have all the chances to become so. According to Philippe Lejeune, an autobiography is

"a retrospective narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality." (Lejeune, 1982)

Recent evolutions in postcolonial criticism also determined Naipaul’s reception in the academy; the former "apologist for the empire" and even "collaborator," he is now viewed as a "victim", a "casualty of imperialism" (Gandhi, 2010). It all started with Edward Said’s Orientalism: one preoccupation of the ’80’s was the depiction of the Orient, of the postcolonial Other, to be followed by an opposite direction, in which the colonized conferred England the status of ‘mother country’. These opposing directions will offer a full-scale estimation of Naipaul’s writing.

Structure

In terms of structure, this study is divided into three distinct but closely connected main parts, subdivided into three chapters each, the first two parts more theoretical in nature, while all the analytical Third Part – namely Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine – covers each individual travelogue.

PART ONE: A Theoretical Approach is subdivided into three chapters, establishing the basic concepts followed in this dissertation.

Chapter One: Travel Writing as a Literary Genre is meant as a general definition of travel writing, with a concise but necessary incursion into the evolution of the genre over the centuries. The key words are journey – a movement in space which can lead to discovery –, alterity, identity, difference, similarity, while the connective and points to the dual nature, or complexity of the discovery to follow the journey. Then, if travel is "the negotiation between self and other brought about by movement in space" (Thompson, 9), then "all travel writing is at some level a record or product of this encounter, and of the negotiation between similarity and difference that is entailed." (Thompson, 10) We shall also consider such pertinent opinions, such as those formulated by A. C. Ward and Edward Said. Said’s authority challenges and informs all interpretations of postcolonial discourse.

Chapter Two, Naipaul and Life Writing, is an approach to Naipaul’s non-fiction work, which connects his writing – not necessarily the Indian trilogy – to his nonfiction. It is mostly theoretical in substance, and will provide definitions of biography and autobiography, with examples from the writings of Naipaul’s authorized or unauthorized biographers (Patrick French and Paul Theroux), as well as the close connection between these biographies and the autobiographical elements in his novels. The purpose of this chapter is three-dimensional:

to delineate the critical reception of Naipaul;

to identify Naipaul’s position as a diasporic writer by defining such basic notions as: diaspora, mobility (migration and home-coming), globalization;

to comment on Naipaul’s post-colonialism and Indian-ness in the context of Indian diasporic writing.

Chapter Three, Naipaul: A Bio-Bibliographical Sketch, considers the author’s triple cultural heritage – West Indian, Indian and British. The fact that he is a citizen of an adoptive country directs us toward discussing how these spaces, both enriching and creators of cultural ambivalence, cross from reality into fiction. This chapter is a bibliographical survey of Naipaul’s fifteen works of fiction and nineteen works of non-fiction. From The Mystic Masseur to Magic Seeds, his fiction is a life-long search for an identity. Whatever the title, the author finds himself in his books, which obsessively take the reader to his native Trinidad – The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, Miguel Street, A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men – but also to London, Berlin, India or Africa. His characters are either Indo-Trinidadians or Indians. Naipaul’s travelogues are as many journeys of (self-) discovery. The writer travelled across the continents in search of himself, carrying with him his Indo-Trinidadian identity which he tries to decipher against the new backgrounds.

PART TWO: Naipaul, the Traveller and His World covers Naipaul’s position in the context of post-colonial theory, considering him as a member of the Indian diaspora – two approaches leading to a discussion of his Indianness. After a bio-biographical introduction to Naipaul (the man and his work) a first step would be to determine those elements in Naipaul’s writings which allow us to consider him from the point of view of his belonging to the post-colonial literature in general, and to the Indian diasporic writing, in particular. A second step would be to establish the relationship between the biographical and autobiographical elements in Naipaul’s travelogues, with a special stress on his Indian heritage: to what extent does Naipaul’s Indianness inform his fiction and non-fiction? What triggers the numerous adverse reactions to some of his writings (such as his comments on Islam and the Muslim world, or even on India? What justifies an unfavourable response such as Derek Walkott’s? Is Naipaul’s decision to stop writing fully motivated and acceptable?

Chapter four: Naipaul and post-colonial theory starts from the assumption that Naipaul, dangling between the two worlds of the colonizer and the colonized – or between the colonial and postcolonial – faces a double-sided challenge, that of pleasing both readerships. More than often, Naipaul’s comments on contemporary issues have triggered adverse reactions, most of them from readers of the Third World, preponderantly of the former British Empire. The chapter is an attempt at answering a number of questions: First, one may wonder whether Naipaul’s writings demonstrate the author’s critical consciousness. Over and over again, Naipaul has been the target of fierce attacks due to his so often not very favourable positions on realities encountered in the countries visited. Also, we may wonder whether Naipaul reflects a writing culture largely steeped in Western traditions, and if he adopts stereotypical representations of non-Western peoples. More than often, parallels have been drawn between Naipaul and Conrad, one of the few writers he has been associated with. One last question would be that his writings may be emblematic of a peculiar kind of mimicked postcolonial mentality which Homi Bhabha would phrase as: White but not quite. Naipaul’s novel The Mimic Men offers a good answer to this question.

Chapter five: Naipaul and Indian diasporic writing defines diaspora, stressing that the contemporary use of the concept of diaspora emphasizes that its modern forms are closely linked with the ever-increasing development of global capitalism that moves capital and labour from one space to another, wherever cheap workers are needed. The narratives of diaspora do not only consist of writings telling of free-floating subjects entering new worlds and acquiring new identities in an unproblematic manner. There are instances of representations of history, or stories addressing the formation of the identity of the second-generation immigrant. The question triggered by this statement is whether a diasporic writer as complex as Naipaul did become the master of his destiny, avoiding the constraints and limitations of his past. I consider it necessary to go deeper into the theory of diasporic writing.

Chapter six: Naipaul and Indianness views Indianness as a two-dimensional concept: (1) as a geographical identity, and (2) as a state of being. It is noteworthy that Indians in the Caribbean islands continue to identify themselves as Indian, although their ancestors migrated from India years before the establishment of the Indian nation-state in 1947. Indian identity is often assumed to be a homogenous identity, derivative of India with its histories and traditions. Considering India’s tremendous diversity – a subcontinent comprising many different, ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups – defining Indianness comes as a difficult task as, giving this notion a certain ethnic, religious, or linguistic dimension we might be in the position of excluding millions of people who do not belong to that particular religious, ethnic, or linguistic group we are considering, by calling them Indian. On the other hand, there are attempts "to define Indianness along one particular ethnic, religious, or linguistic line."

PART THREE: Three Case Studies – Naipaul’s Indian Travelogues goes even deeper into the analysis of Naipaul’s Indian trilogy, in which Naipaul critically evaluates India’s history, culture and politics. These books take its reader on a voyage from an India that was ‘an area of darkness ’that has lost its values and culture to an India which is ‘a wounded civilization,’ where, as Naipaul later on discovers ‘a million mutinies’ are happening. Naipaul’s writings can be read as a record of the history of the first four decades of post-independence India. Instead of theorizing/fictionalizing India his travelogues offer a realistic picture of her society, culture, politics and economy.

Chapter seven: An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India offers a picture of India which Naipaul finds completely shattered with no central idea or will of her own, and discovers that nationalist elites have surrogated colonizers. Naipaul’s India is adrift by its social and political crises. The economic situation is shattering due to a high extent of corruption and ineffective governance. His reactions to the country of his origins were shock and despair. The picture of India, which he describes during his first visit, was too severe and cruel for him to be able to maintain an objective eye. Instead, he let all his emotions burst out of him. Naipaul’s search for India ends in bitterness, a bitterness that has carried over into his writing since that time. The notion of a search can, if we are to read Naipaul carefully, reveal only the simulacra; the copy of a copy from which there is no original. He discovered that he was not what he thought he was, which caused him a profound sense of anxiety. The danger resides in finding oneself, as Naipaul did, completely cut off from the past:

The starting point of Chapter eight: India: A Wounded Civilization is the Forward to this second volume of the Indian trilogy, in which Naipaul openly states his difficulty at understanding the country of his ancestors from "the Gangetic plain," Estranged from India – a country he "cannot reject or be indifferent to it" – Naipaul confesses the contradiction in his feelings towards it: simultaneously "too close and too far" (x-xi), he grew up in a community characterized by both its homogeneity (as compared to the Indian community Mahatma Gandhi had found in South Africa), and its isolation from India (which accounts for his estrangement). If An Area of Darkness has been considered a much too personal reaction to the shocking realities of present-day India, and its orientation less analytical and cultural – far from the idyllic image of the Indo-Trinidadians – then A Wounded Civilization proves exactly to the opposite. Though it starts as an autobiography, the autobiographical element loses in force and importance, and Naipaul resorts to a close analysis of the cultural and economic realities he encounters in Indian society.

Chapter nine: India: A Million Mutinies Now deals with the last volume of the Indian trilogy. It is an account of the writer’s third visit to India, and records his postcolonial impressions. This book stands closest to the idea of home coming for Naipaul. It marks Naipaul's surfacing after a long quest amongst the now diminishing ripples of socio-political and cultural paradoxes of India. He sees a million mutinies breaking out in the margins: mutinies of castes, of class and of gender. Naipaul had a very explicit goal when writing his third Indian narrative: to atone the prejudice brought about by An Area of Darkness, which the author himself confessed to have been written "in the grip of neurosis." Naipaul’s obsession with his nineteenth century Indian roots apparently found an answer in his third voyage to India twenty-eight years later, when Naipaul proves his maturity in dealing with the realities of India, openly and objectively.

Final Conclusion Naipaul’s Self-Referentiality – from the Margin back to the Center rounds up this incursion into the domain of cultural studies. Naipaul’s mobility as a traveller neither obsessed with his own past nor enfeebled by other people's needs and woes takes on the force of an argument identifying humanism with the categories of health, strength, and freedom. Naipaul withdraws into baffled uneasiness whenever his Indian subjects show signs of being unfree, even when their forms of bondage follow recognizably appealing human patterns. The nostalgia in the Dalit Panther’s recollections of his impoverished and humiliating past, for example, has enough analogy in Western literature and life to seem rather less incomprehensibly pitiable than Naipaul implies when he calls him "the prisoner of an Indian past no one outside could truly understand" (116).

PART ONE:

A theoretical approach

"My books have to be called ‘travel writing,’ but that can be misleading because in the old days travel writing was essentially done by men describing the routes they were taking.... What I do is quite different. I travel on a theme. I travel to make an inquiry. I am not a journalist. I am taking with me the gifts of sympathy, observation, and curiosity that I developed as an imaginative writer. The books I write now, these inquiries, are really constructed narratives."

(V.S. Naipaul, Death of the Novel)

I TRAVEL to discover other states of mind. And if for this intellectual adventure I go to places where people live restricted lives, it is because my curiosity is still dictated in part by my colonial Trinidad background. I go to places which, however alien, connect in some way with what I already know. When my curiosity has been satisfied, when there are no more surprises, the intellectual adventure is over and I become anxious to leave. It is a writer’s curiosity rather than an ethnographer’s or journalist’s. So while, when I travel, I can move only according to what I find, I also live, as it were, in a novel of my own making, moving from not knowing to knowing, with person interweaving with person and incident opening out into incident. The intellectual adventure is also a human one: I can move only according to my sympathy. I don’t force anything; there is no spokesman I have to see, no one I absolutely must interview. The kind of understanding I am looking for comes best through people I get to like.

(V.S. Naipaul, The Writer and the World)

Chapter one

Travel writing as a literary genre

A web site publishes a chart of the different genres of popular literature, built up by American students of literature, and based on internet resources, enumerating as many as thirty-six different genres, among them the travelogue (or travel writing). The definition provided is as simple as comprehensive:

"Travel literature is travel writing of a non-fiction type. Travel writing typically records the experiences of travellers in some interesting places and circumstances. It will include vivid descriptions, illustrations, historical background, and possibly maps and diagrams."

It is given an equal status with: romance, action adventure, fantasy, mystery, detective fiction, and the list might continue. Surprising is the students’ including of a different category which they call creative non-fiction, followed by the following explanation:

"According to Columbia College Chicago, creative non-fiction ‘...comes in many forms: memoir, narrative journalism, travel writing, personal essay, descriptive storytelling... What they all have in common is a basis in reality from careful observation to honest emotional truth.’" [1] 

Among the writers included we find David Sedaris (‘the rock star of writers’), Dave Eggers (author of the autobiographical volume A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and Zeitoun) and Hunter S. Thompson, author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. It is not a surprise that the American students do not mention Naipaul, both definitions may be said to contain elements which also apply to Naipaul’s travel writing.

*****

Whatever the definition we decide to take for granted, there are two terms in the phrase travel writing which might be re-worded as writing about travel. Carl Thompson, in his Travel Writing (2011), suggests that

"To travel is to make a journey, a movement through space. Possibly this journey is epic in scale, taking the traveller to the other side of the world or across a continent, or up a mountain; possibly, it is more modest in scope, and takes place within the limits of the traveller’s own country or region, or even just their immediate locality. Either way, to begin any journey or, indeed, simply to set foot beyond one’s own front door, is quickly to encounter difference and otherness. All journeys are in this way a confrontation with, or more optimistically a negotiation of, what is sometimes termed alterity. Or, more precisely, since there are no foreign peoples with whom we do not share a common humanity, and probably no environment on the planet for which we do not have some sort of prior reference point, all travel requires us to negotiate a complex and sometimes unsettling interplay between alterity and identity, difference and similarity." (Thompson, 9, emphasis in the original)

The key words are journey – a movement in space which can lead to discovery –, alterity, identity, difference, similarity, while the connective and points to the dual nature, or complexity of the discovery to follow the journey. Then, if travel is "the negotiation between self and other brought about by movement in space" (Thompson, 9), then "all travel writing is at some level a record or product of this encounter, and of the negotiation between similarity and difference that is entailed." (Thompson, 10)

Over the centuries, travel literature has preoccupied literary critics and historians alike, and more than once these theorists have questioned the literary value of such an enterprise as a travelogue. The holy scriptures of all religions include epics which cover large expanses of time and space. Attempts have been made at including such important imaginary ancient epics – like Homer’s Odyssey or the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – in the category of imaginary travel literature, while writers like Herman Melville (with his travelogues of the South Seas), Mark Twain (with his American travelogues), or Charles Doughty (with his surprising Travels in Arabia Deserta) are warmly regarded by readers and critics alike. In fact, all literatures, of all times, use journey as a metaphor.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, mad Ophelia sings of her lover and resembles him to a pilgrim:

How should I your true love know

From another one?

By his cockle hat and staff

And his sandals shoon.

(Hamlet, Act IV, Scene V)

In his Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift uses travel as a satire, while – as early as the 18th century, Joseph Addison defines the "citizen of the world":

"There is no place in the town which I so much love to frequent as the Royal Exchange. It gives me a secret satisfaction and in some measure gratifies my vanity, as I am an Englishman, to see so rich an assembly of countrymen and foreigners consulting together upon the private business of mankind, and making this metropolis a kind of emporium for the whole earth... I have often been pleased to hear disputes adjusted between an inhabitant of Japan and an Alderman in London, or to see a subject of the Great Mogul entering into a league with one of the Czar of Muscovy. I am infinitely delighted in mixing with these several ministers of commerce, as they are distinguished by their different walks and different languages. Sometimes I am jostled among a body of Armenians; sometimes I am lost in a crowd of Jews; and sometimes make one in a group of Dutchmen. I am a Dane, Swede, or Frenchman at different times; or rather fancy myself like the old philosopher, who upon being asked what countryman he was, replied, he was a citizen of the world" (Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 19 May 1711, emphasis added). [2] 

Fielding’s picaresque novels – Joseph Andrews (1742), The Life of Jonathan Wilde the Great (1743) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) – all inspired by their Spanish predecessor Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), are all based on travel adventures. Irrespective of the historical period they belong to, travelogues all share a common trait: they are personal renderings of relevant information related to the narrator’s travel experience.

The twentieth century saw a growing interest in providing a suitable definition of the genre. Theoreticians have taken turns in expressing their views. As early as 1955, A. C. Ward considered the travelogue a difficult literary form that depends more on the character and vision of the traveller than on the strangeness or remoteness of locality. [3] Thirty years later, and fifteen years Edward Said – a declared admirer of the genre – wrote in his Culture and Imperialism about its specificity of travelogues:

"In your narratives, histories, travel tales and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority, an active point of energy that made sense not just of colonizing activities but of exotic geographies and peoples. Above all, your sense of power scarcely imagined that those ‘natives’ who appeared either subservient or sullenly uncooperative were ever going to be capable of finally making you give up India or Algeria. Or of saying anything that might perhaps contradict, challenge, or otherwise disrupt the prevailing discourse.

The great cultural archive, I argue, is where the intellectual and aesthetic investments in overseas dominion are made. If you were British or French in the 1860s you saw, and you felt, India and North Africa with a combination of familiarity and distance, but never with a sense of their separate sovereignty. In your narratives, histories, travel tales, and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority, an active point of energy that made sense not just of colonizing activities but of exotic geographies and peoples." (Said, xxi, emphasis added)

For the reason that the travelogue reveals the traveller’s motivation for travelling, Sutherland equals it to what he calls "an autobiography of the traveller," autobiography being used in its dictionary sense: "an account of a person’s life written by that person." [4] 

Last but not least, according to O’Brien – in the Introduction to Gertrude Bell’s The Desert and the Sown, travelogues "… describe a journey in which the traveller passes through towns and villages, jungles and rivers – or desert tents and palaces – and communicates with the inhabitants who are contemplated from a certain perspective." [5] O’Brien differentiates travel from tourism (seen as simply a pastime); to her,

"the real purpose of travel is a personal affirmation outside the narrow confines of one’s normal life. Travel literature ultimately is about the traveller. Artists and writers discovered exotic themes that evoked in them new realizations while discovering themselves. The resulting works reflected not just objective reality, but, as one scholar observes, a ‘subjective rhythm – the perceptions and feelings of a body moving through a space that is both real and visionary.’" (ix)

Nevertheless, it seems that Naipaul could not resist the temptation to combine the two: in 1994 he contributed to Bombay: A Gateway to India, a joint venture with the famous Indian colour photographer Raghubir Singh. The end product is not exactly a touristic guide book: in the introduction to this photographic impression of the great city, Naipaul finds artist’s motivation and method, which combines the minute attention for the detail with an insider’s view on the city called "the gateway to India." Here is Naipaul’s comment: "One can’t just look at this work about Bombay and say: ‘Good, I have looked at these pictures.’ They need attention. The pictures have to be read." (See Fig. 1)

But there is a great difference between travelogues and the touristic publications that make the main merchandise in all the airport bookstores. The presence of the traveller-narrator supplants the maps and shiny pictures. Naipaul – like all the other authors of travelogues – prefers to record and share his own experiences and those of the people he meets, and the countries visited. To cite Lin Sutherland, the emphasis is on the meaning of the author’s "personal travel experience." He compares travel writers to those explorers who "have all learnt their knowledge eyes to travel and to capture the soul of other countries." (Sutherland, 2002)

Fig. 1: City from Malabar Hill (p. 21)

http://www.subir.com/rushdie/images/bombayrs21.jpg

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Writing about pilgrimages during the early Middle Ages, Claude Jenkins reached the conclusion that there is a close relationship between travel writing and "the instinct for travel" which he sees as "innate in some natures in all ages, perhaps in far more than we often realize." [6] No wonder that travelogues have often been regarded as the first literary production of mankind. The almost legendary epics of the Sumerians and the ancient Greeks – The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s The Odyssey – abound in the adventurous journeys of the two heroes, and their encounters with half-legendary and half real people in surroundings more or less real, thus connecting them to travelogues. In his book on Renaissance travels and discoveries, Boies Penrose thinks that the mentality of explorers of all ages has been informed by "the magnetism of the myth," and that these epics "lured men to their fate in sandy deserts and tropical jungles." [7] (1955: 10)

It is well-known that a particular dimension of the English Renaissance was given by economic factors: the development of trade combined with the expansion of the British Empire, closely supported by the advances in ship-building and navigation made it possible for subjects of the British Crown to travel to all corners of the Empire. Robert Ralston Cawley comments upon this propensity for travel of the English:

"No wonder that with this vast variety of motives Englishmen were eager to engage in the great discoveries which were taking place. Whether their end was gain or game, whether they went to convert the heathen or improve their own minds, for country’s honour or out of sheer curiosity to see what these new regions and peoples looked like, they went with an enthusiasm which swept the country. (p. 169)

Travel literature continued during Romanticism which, according to H. V. D. Dyson and John Butt, was rich in travel writing and important geographical discoveries. (1940: 283) Landmarks of Romantic travel and travel writing would be Arthur Young’s Travels in France (1792), William G. Browne’s Travels in Africa, Egypt and Syria, from the Year 1792 to 1798 (1799), John Franklin’s A Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819, 1820, 1821, 1822 and 1823, Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), or Matthew G. Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834).

Another defining feature of the Romantic Age is a growing interest in the countries and peoples of the Middle East, a direct consequence of the translation into English and publication of the Arabian Nights in 1706. There are a number of factors which explain the Romantics’ attraction to the Orient, such as the decision of the great powers to put an end to piracy in the Mediterranean, and the more relaxed relations between the Ottoman Empire and Iran. Thus Europeans had access to regions where Christians had not been previously allowed, and even visited the holy cities of the Muslim faith, even if in disguise. The British readers were demanding books on a larger variety of subjects, while the exploits of adventurous spirits like Byron contributed to this demand.

A prevalent feeling of dissatisfaction, alienation, and restlessness which characterized the Victorian Age saw an exodus of a large number of intellectuals to exotic locations. In a review to one of Gertrude Bell’s travel writings, The Arabian Diaries, 1913-1914, Lawrence Davidson has the following to say:

"Among the Europeans there was a small group of people who sublimated their dissatisfaction with the Victorian culture of the time into an exploration of those territories and peoples that were the subject of the West’s imperial expansion. Ironically, their activities as explorers, soldiers and administrators facilitated the spread of the very western culture they sought to escape." (Davidson, 2001)

Gertrude Bell’s travel writings are only an example. Besides the archaeologists, who had their undeniable contribution to the Victorian view of the world, some of these travellers were individualists who took advantage of the Oriental travels and travel writings in order to satisfy their personal ambitions. "Keen anthropologists" turned into "epic heroes", they "pursued some interest like biology, geology, archaeology, or missionary work, which added an extra dimension to the story of their adventures." Paul Turner states that the Victorian travelogue is famous for being "a rich mixture of elements from other genres, from epic, the picturesque novel, the scientific or religious treatise, and from autobiography." (Turner, 261)

One particular trait of the Victorian Age is the presence of women travellers and, implicitly, of travel literature written by women. On the other hand, one of the elements which contributed to the increasing popularity of travel and travel writing was the expansion of the British Empire, the empire "on which the sun never sets." The significance of such travelogues – as those written by Edward W. Lane (Orientalist, translator and lexicographer, the translator of One Thousand and One Nights, 1840), Richard F. Burton (geographer, explorer and translator, known for the pilgrimage to Mecca, recorded in his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al Madinah and Mecca, 1855-6), or Alexander W. Kinglake (Eothen; or Traces of travel brought home from the East, 1844) – resides both in their artistry and for sparking up the imagination of their fellow writers.

To conclude this short review of the development of British travel writing, we should mention that the twentieth century, marked by the two World Wars and their influence on the further development of the British Empire, led to unexpected changes in the relations between continents and cultures. Commercial and political interests in England triggered a growth of the interest in other countries and societies. It is the reason for which the literary value of the travelogues was greatly diminished – they were more functional and distant. There are positive examples as well: the Syrian travels of Gertrude Bell (The Desert and the Sown, 1907), Thomas E. Lawrence (The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1935), or Freya Stark (The Southern Gates of Arabia: A Journey in The Hadbramaut, 1936). Though not meant to be, these travelogues may be favourably considered for their literary value: to their authors, their experience of travelling abroad is nothing but a pretext for intellectual and philosophical considerations.

Chapter two

Naipaul and life writing

"Autobiography is the mirror in which the individual reflects his own image" (Gusdorf).

The main objective of my research is to find out the relationship between Naipaul – the homo viator, and Naipaul – the homo (auto)biographicus – and the extent to which his novels and travelogues may be regarded as biographies of the former subjects of the British Empire. I am also considering the relation between biography, autobiography and travel writing which might contain elements of both. A special mention will be later made to Naipaul’s autobiographical novels, which definitely stress the autobiographical dimension of his writings.

Before we proceed, it is necessary to define the basic notions that inform our critical endeavour. A rather general, simple, but useful definition of the term "life writing" is the following one, collected from the web:

"Life writing is a fluid term used to describe the recording of selves, memories and experiences, whether one’s own or another’s. It is a term deliberately designed to describe many genres and practices, under which can be found autobiography, biography, memoir, diaries, letters, testimonies, auto-ethnography, personal essays and, more recently, digital forms such as blogs and email." [8] 

The definition offered by the PMLA is even more detailed, including a large assortment of forms and different notions – such as memoirs, diaries, and journals, mixed media, hybrid forms, print, film, photography, notions of self, genre, life story, and new development (MLA Newsletter 29.1, Spring 1997: 11). Two years later, the PMLA Convention Program included: "Life Writing and the Visual" (the diary, family album, multimedia and women’s life writing); "Life Writing and Nature" (representations of the self in the desert or the garden); "Life Writing and Addiction" (sex, anorexia, alcoholism). Obviously, life writing and cultural studies are joined together. Such a joint venture is supported by Stuart Hall who favours an all-including definition of cultural studies which he views as a mediator between "experience as a lived process" and "a textualized critique". In A Cultural Studies Reader (1995) Stuart Hall is in favour of a broad view of cultural studies and views it as "mediating between experience as a lived process and as a textualized critique" (7, emphasis added). Then, life writing describes the actual words and experiences of the participants in a particular era. Considering Hall’s description of the two paradigms of cultural studies, a textual wing and a sociological wing (194), we shall deal primarily with the textual side as a work of recovery for cultural study. Cultural studies may be easily be subjected to an interdisciplinary analysis due to its tendency to free itself from the specialized vocabulary that is evident in many of the "isms" of critical theory. Linda Hutcheon notes the dangers of a specialized discourse in which the "in-groups" deliberately create a "problematic of meaning" between those who "get it" and "those who do not." She suggests that cultural and post-colonial representation and analysis require a direct and simple prose capable of being understood by all (Hutcheon, 1994: 17, 43, 176, 203-04).

Irrespective of the segment of Naipaul’s writings we choose to interpret, the result is the same: they all abound in references to his personal – direct or indirect – life experiences. A close reading of Naipaul’s work – fiction or non-fiction – will undoubtedly lead to the conclusion that all his books closely mirror – directly and indirectly – the reviewers’ references to his personal experiences. We shall then proceed to an analysis of the reviewers’ and biographers’ position vis-à-vis of the (auto-) biographical elements provided by his writings.

Naipaul’s multifaceted and so often controversial writings have more than once placed him in a personal, particular relationship to London, the centre of the British colonial Empire. If the 1980’s – with the imperial constructions and representations of the Orient – viewed him as an apologist of the British Empire, and a collaborator, Naipaul was later viewed as a casualty of imperialism, a victim of the colonial system. A possible explanation for this change of attitude is to be found in a different orientation of postcolonial critique, questioning the changes brought about by the colonized expatriates’ return to the UK.

In 1999, Naipaul authorized Gillon Aitken to edit and publish his letters exchanged with his father, Seepersad Naipaul, and other family members while a student at Oxford. [9] The editor’s task was not an easy one: In the Introduction, he confesses:

"The task of introducing this extraordinary and moving correspondence is a delicate one. In these letters between a father and a son, the older man worn down by his cares of a large family and the distress of unfulfilled ambitions, the younger on the threshold of a broad and brilliant literary career, lies some of the raw material of one of the finest and most enduring novels of the twentieth century: V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas."

In case of Naipaul, his full list of works comprising more than thirty different titles – both fiction and non-fiction – does not include the writer’s autobiography. His too often mentioned essay, Prologue to an Autobiography written as a foreword to Finding the Center: Two Narratives (1984), is an unusual, unconventional mixture of a memoir and autobiography in which Naipaul tried to capture "something less seized: my literary beginnings and the imaginative promptings of my many-sided background." More than two decades later, Naipaul authorized British writer and historian Patrick French to write his biography. Published in 2008, French’s ‘authorized’ biography fully complies with Donald S. Winslow’s definition: it is "a life written by a biographer who has been chosen or approved by the person or persons who have authority over the subject’s estate or literary remains, possibly a surviving family member or executor." (Winslow, 3)

Authorizing a person to write your own biography implies your giving full credentials to that particular biographer, access to each and every aspect of one’s private life, to say nothing about the sometimes almost insurmountable amount of information available: Patrick French mentioned his access to Naipaul’s full archive, which provided him the chance to work on "the last literary biography to be written from a complete paper archive." (Outlook 48, Mar 31, 2008)

But French’s biography is also literary in that it offers an insight into the making of a writer, revealing his literary sensibility, and the intimate processes and personal events shaping his identity. What is interesting about French’s ‘authorized’ biography is that it is three-levelled: the first level covers the writer’s childhood in Trinidad, his education at the Queen’s Royal College and Oxford, and his apprenticeship at the BBC, supported by his strong ambition to become a successful writer; the second level is his mature, though unhappy relationship with Patricia Hale; finally, the biography deals with his journeys and travel writing, his personal experiences in Trinidad, England, and the other countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean. It is an experience which will be fully represented in Naipaul’s novels and travelogues as well.

*****

The Concise Oxford Dictionary offers several definitions for memoirs and autobiography. Summing up, we are dealing with a historical account or biography written from personal knowledge or special sources, a personal account of one’s own life, meant to be published, which may take literary form. The literary form is not compulsory.

Generally speaking, memoirs – or autobiographies, as the case may be – are rather special categories of a diary, having certain sources and functions. Autobiographies are not written to remain unknown. Moreover, they have been written by artists or non-artistic personalities who use the word, the sound, and their art to justify themselves in front of their contemporaries and even posterity. They do not represent a justification by their own form, but by the events they describe and comment upon. It is very possible that they will later become literary works in themselves, and that the author will later be considered as their own character, but the initial function of memoirs has never been aesthetic.

The autobiographies written by different celebrities are justified as far as the respective celebrities are characterized by a richness of actions they accomplished, or events they witnessed or even ordered. Thus, we have the autobiographies of Saint-Simon, Churchill and De Gaulle, Chaplin and Louis Armstrong – to quote but a few. The question is: Are they literary works? Maybe not, but they have all the chances to become so. According to Philippe Lejeune, an autobiography is "a retrospective narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality." [10] 

Writing about autobiography, anthropology and the postmodern condition, anthropologist Michael, M. J. Fischer discusses what he calls "the three deep attractions of anthropology." [11] First, he mentions its privileged position as "a site of interplay between the modernist vision of autonomous bounded egos, and postmodernist decentred selves" (80). Secondly, autobiographies "can help sketch out cultural and social terrain where traditional social theory is blind or archaic" (81). Last but not least, autobiography is seen as a "vehicle", meant to reflect on the "discovery and construction" of all aspects of humanities: anthropology, science, knowledge, human sciences and other cultural products (82-3).

If "autobiography is written by the source subject about oneself to depict their semireal life or a historical event in a narrative form," its purpose being "to reveal the author‘s experiences or to justify facts or events to the public," (Qasim, 2011), Naipaul’s recording of his life and various experiences covers the most unexpected settings: not only his native Trinidad and Tobago, and neighbouring Jamaica and Venezula, but also India, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia, England, Congo, Ivory Coast, not to mention the USA and South America. Then, the "autobiographical discourse is not only culturally conditioned; it is also symptomatic of the cultural moment. Thus it is important to explore the varieties of self-presentation, and not assume a fixed paradigm" (Ghazoul 6).

Naipaul, the international traveller, offers an all-encompassing panorama of the human condition of his (and our) world, in his original blending of fiction and autobiography, his writings acquiring an undeniable confessional dimension. Returning to the above-mentioned Prologue to an Autobiography, he writes – without complaining - about "the writer’s destiny of carrying the whole world on his shoulders", and "his own burden of experience" (ix), both human and literary. He is even more specific about the task of the writer and he does not forget to mention the "upheavals and moves" in his life:

"Half a writer’s work . . . is the discovery of his subject. And a problem for me was that my life had been varied, full of upheavals and moves: from grandmother’s Hindu house in the country, still close to the rituals and social ways of village India; to Port of Spain, the negro, and G.I. life of its streets, the other, ordered life of my colonial English school, which is called Queen’s Royal College, and then Oxford, London and the freelances’ room at the BBC. Trying to make a beginning as a writer, I didn’t know where to focus."

It is also interesting to mention the writer’s view on his travels and the extent to which the experiences gained during his travels find way in his fiction. Here are some of his own comments on The Middle Passage:

"I travelled as though I was on holiday, and then floundered, looking for the narrative. I had trouble with the ‘I’ of the travel writer; I thought that as traveller and narrator he was in unchallenged command and had to make big judgements. For all its faults, the book ... was for me an extension of knowledge and feeling. It wouldn’t have been possible for me to unlearn what I had learned. Fiction, the exploration of one’s immediate circumstances, had taken me a lot of the way. Travel had taken me further" (Reading and Writing, 30, emphasis added).

*****

If we were to consider a chronological approach to autobiography as a genre, we may travel as early as the late 1790s, when Taylor d’Israeli decided to use this new term as a substitute for "self-biography". One century and a half later, Georges Gusdorf, world-acclaimed for his seminal essay, Conditions and Limits of Autobiography (1956), actually started the debate regarding the meaning and importance, if any, of the genre. Since 1956, numerous theoreticians of the genre have approached the field, contributing different definitions and comments.

The last four or five decades hav