SOURCE: Allen, Richard. “A Post-Colonial World: Look Back in Anger and The Enigma of Arrival.” In Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990, edited by Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi, pp. 138-53. London: Routledge, 2000.

[In the following essay, Allen compares the treatment of British colonial culture in Look Back in Anger to V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival.]

INTRODUCTION

In a famous speech delivered in Africa in 1958 the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan declared that a ‘wind of change’ was sweeping through the continent. Nationalism in the colonies was no longer something to be contested or absorbed but something to be recognized as simple political fact. For Britain and its colonies the post-colonial world had arrived. Consideration of events before and after 1958 suggests, however, that the adjective ‘post-colonial’ needs to be thought of as applying to a process happening over time rather than to a simple culture- or history-changing event. Those listening to Macmillan's speech, for example, could hardly forget the Suez crisis of barely two years before. In an almost Victorian imperialist gesture, Britain and France (with Israel) had invaded Egypt with the aim of seizing the Suez Canal. Twenty-six years later, as if to prove the empire were still a living thing, Britain sent not just a gunboat but an entire fleet to the South Atlantic to ‘reclaim’ the Falkland Islands from Argentina.

The Suez crisis is generally acknowledged to be a pivotal point in the remaking of British national identity. The events are described in all general histories of Britain covering this period: see, for example, Keith Robbins, The Eclipse of a Great Power: Modern Britain 1870-1992 (London: Longman, 1994). A more detailed study written closer to the time is Hugh Thomas, The Suez Affair: The Story of Suez (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967). Equally interesting are accounts by those involved, especially Anthony Nutting, No End of a Lesson (London: Constable, 1967), and Evelyn Shuckburgh, Descent to Suez: Diaries 1951-56, selected by John Charmley (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986). Two particular aspects of the affair are worth mentioning here. First, although the events of 1956 had their specific causes in 1956, there was inevitably an element of ‘looking back’ because of the symbolic resonances the Suez Canal and Egypt had carried for the British Empire. The opening of the canal had cut the travelling time to India dramatically, allowing for a closeness of access and control in government which were vital both to British rule there and to the ease of trade within the Anglophone areas on which the structure of the empire rested. Maintaining what was in effect a controlling interest in Egypt was—according to most historical accounts—a driving force in British policies during the dividing up of Africa amongst the colonial powers after 1880. President Nasser's nationalizing of the Suez Canal Company in 1956 was presented by some in the West at the time as a threat to the Western capitalist free world. The British and French invasion might, more cynically, be seen as an attempt to protect British and French property—by owning the Suez Canal Company, Britain and France owned a piece of Egypt just as much as Cecil Rhodes had owned Rhodesia. The invasion might also be seen as a final act of nostalgia for the empire in Britain and France.

The second aspect of the affair I want to refer to here is connected to the question of how far it was possible for this ‘nostalgia’ to be successfully turned into reality in the 1950s; this is to do with the power of the USA, and its willingness to exercise that power in the world. In the later part of the nineteenth century the European powers divided Africa and ruled the Indian subcontinent without any intervention from the USA beyond an occasional anti-imperialist protest. By 1956 the situation was quite different. Through the first half of the twentieth century the USA had become increasingly active politically and militarily outside its own borders. In the aftermath of the Second World War, furthermore, US economic power was so great that neither Britain, France nor Israel could ignore US policies. The British and French governments acted secretly in planning the invasion of Egypt, knowing that the American government would be hostile. Once the invasion began, the USA brought all influence to bear to stop it and—to put matters bluntly—two almost-failing imperial powers gave way to a new one.

That the ramifications of the Suez crisis and the ensuing crisis of identity for British ruling culture (and particularly the ruling Conservative Party) were not more extreme may as much as anything be due to the fact that elsewhere the empire did continue to exist. Decolonization was beginning, particularly in the Caribbean, but the British presence in East Africa, in Aden and in Cyprus was still strong. There were other counter-balancing events too, particularly associated with economic recovery in Britain. There had been rationing of almost all consumer goods during the war but these measures persisted long after as Britain attempted to recover from its victory. Food rationing was finally ended in 1954, a year after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Through all kinds of cultural events the new queen's reign was evoked as a return to the high success of the era of Elizabeth I, and the full panoply of colonial and Commonwealth allegiance was put on view to support the assertion of British importance in the world.

Many qualifications, needless to say, have to be added to this broad-brush account of the context for literature in Britain in the 1950s. It is axiomatic that such events are differently experienced according to class, gender, race and ethnicity. Equally, the effect of other cultures and economies beyond the empire needs to be taken into account. Some groups were clearly and dramatically influenced by events in the empire, notably those men and their families who had served in the Indian Civil Service or in the Indian Army. The repatriation and resettlement of these people after 1947 had quite a marked effect on the social structure of certain areas of southern and rural Britain. It impinges briefly but importantly in Look Back in Anger. In Act 2, Jimmy remembers Alison's father at their wedding, ‘upright and unafraid, dreaming of his days among the Indian Princes, and unable to believe he'd left his horsewhip at home’ (John Osborne, Look Back in Anger, London: Faber & Faber, 1996, pp. 55-6). Almost everyone in some way felt the effects of changes in the empire through, for example, the changing patterns of trade which affected manufacturing and consumption, and through what appeared in newsreels, on radio and on television. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins speak of the effects of the empire (with the exception of India) being ‘reglued’ economically after the end of the war before becoming ‘unstuck’ again in the mid-1950s (British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction 1914-1990, London: Longman, 1993 p. 285). A similar process can be said to have happened in other areas of life.

Equally, there were myriad differences within the newly decolonized states and between them. Of particular interest here, though a minor element in the whole picture, is the situation of those who had identified themselves with the colonizer, particularly through education and government service. Here V. S. Naipaul can stand as an example of the process and its intricacy. His family had arrived in Trinidad from India very much as servants of the empire, to work on the sugar plantations. Naipaul himself was born in 1932. Through his application at school he achieved the accolade of winning a scholarship to go from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘metropolitan centre’ of the empire to study English at Oxford University. This is a story of success for the colonial subject and for the colonizing power. An Oxford education opened the door to opportunity and prosperity for anyone from the colonies just as the evidence of the continuing pull of British culture testified to the continuing power of the colonial hegemony. But it is not a tale without ironies. First there is the near coincidence of Naipaul completing his studies at Oxford in 1954 and Trinidad becoming self-governing in political terms in 1956. Then there is a complication in this particular drama of colonial identity and belonging. Conventionally for someone moving to education in England there were competing answers to the question, ‘where are you at home?’. Perhaps ‘home’ involved going back—to your birthplace or your parents' house. But equally it might be to do with the culture into which you have been absorbed—the country whose culture produced the literature that filled your mind and conditioned your imagination.

For Naipaul, there was a third answer, which enabled him to break out of this dilemma and yet which fixed him still more firmly in the inheritance of imperialism. His father had been brought to Trinidad to work as an indentured labourer on the sugar plantations; by race, then, home was somehow neither Trinidad nor Britain but India. However, he can still stand as representative, this time of another process whereby cultural and political relationships have shifted from being a series of colonizer/colonized relationships to being a set of relationships between a number of different independent countries. It is almost certainly overly Anglocentric to see everything in the British colonial world—trade, politics, culture—as having been exclusively focused on London. But there is enough truth in the notion to make a contrast with what happened after colonies started to become more independent. Of course discrepancies of power persisted, keeping Britain in a favoured place economically and culturally, but there was a greater recognition of English as a language that could have distinct and valuable forms outside Britain and an increased rejection of the notion that certain cultures were inferior or primitive and hence rightly silenced. This process is parallel to the political one whereby under the Thatcher government of the 1980s it became customary for the Commonwealth meetings to speak of Britain as just another member of the group.

CONTRASTING POST-COLONIAL WORLDS

One possibility for this chapter would have been to explore how British writers (writers born in Britain or born in India in British families) wrote about India after 1947. Comparisons would have been made with the work of Kipling and Forster and continuities and discontinuities identified. We have chosen a different route from this one, but you may be interested to follow the British-India tradition yourself. If so, a straightforward way of doing this would be through analysis and exploration of the work of Paul Scott (1920-78). Though he lived for a relatively short time in India almost all of his fiction is set there, beginning with Johnnie Sahib (1952) and The Alien Sky (1953). His most famous work is the sequence of novels known as ‘the Raj Quartet’, which begins with The Jewel in the Crown (1966) and was adapted for television under that name in 1982. Scott's work is interestingly discussed in Margaret Scanlon, Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), and Michael Gorra, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul and Rushdie (London: University of Chicago Press, 1997). It also features in a longer time frame in Sujit Mukherjee, Forster and Further: The Tradition of Anglo-Indian Fiction (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1993). There are many other writers less well known (or pretty much forgotten) in Britain of whom I will mention just two. First—and in the ‘pretty much forgotten’ class—there is Christine Weston, who was born in India in 1904 and lived there until 1923 before moving to the USA. Weston published a number of novels, including Indigo (1943), and stories such as ‘A Game of Halma’ (1948) and ‘Be Still, She Sleeps’ (see Text 10.1). (This last might form an intriguing comparison with certain parts of The Enigma of Arrival since in both the search for identity is imagined through memory and a visit to an old house.) A second better-known writer is Ruskin Bond (b.1934), who is still publishing regularly in India; among the works that might seem particularly relevant here are stories such as ‘The Man Who Was Kipling’ and ‘The Last Time I Saw Delhi’ (see Texts 10.2 and 10.3).

Our decision, however, was to focus on Look Back in Anger and The Enigma of Arrival, and since this is the first time we have focused on two texts in a chapter a word of explanation as to our aims is in order. Both Look Back in Anger and The Enigma of Arrival can be said to have some link with our Literature and Nation: Britain and India theme. Osborne's play is generally recognized as part of the canon of English Literature and was written in a context of change after the Second World War and at a time of progressive decolonization; The Enigma of Arrival is by a writer of Indian descent whose life and work generally have been marked by colonial cultural processes. But each also offers something of a challenge.

Naipaul—Indian by descent, Trinidadian by birth and education—has become what might be described as ‘international’ or perhaps ‘mixed-national’, a hybrid of Caribbean, English and Indian. Moreover, The Enigma of Arrival pretty much eschews mention of either the Caribbean or India. It is plainly very different from Kanthapura or Sunlight on a Broken Column, which are rooted in the cultures they depict and from which they emerge; it has little in common either with Midnight's Children, discussed in the next chapter. So part of the reason for including The Enigma of Arrival is to provide you with a different kind of opportunity to think again about the validity of the hypothesis put forward in Chapter 1, ‘if the particular text under discussion comes from a period of colonialism or decolonization, then it follows that the particular text must be marked in some way by colonialism or decolonization’ (p.11).

Look Back in Anger offers a more extreme test of the hypothesis. From its first production it has been read as primarily reacting to—and attempting to fracture—class attitudes in Britain. References to the overseas world do occur, but the whole play is severely fixed in one room in the Midlands in Britain. Maybe here you will feel the hypothesis does fail. If so, that would itself be provocative of thought. Is Look Back in Anger perhaps evidence of a kind of ghetto of ‘little England’ culture which turns inwards from the problems of decolonization? Or was the British Empire by the 1950s just no longer important in British culture?

APPROACHING LOOK BACK IN ANGER

THE TEXT AND OTHER RESOURCES

Look Back in Anger was first performed on 8 May 1956 at the Royal Court Theatre, London. It was published by Faber & Faber in the following year; at the time of writing the current edition is John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (London: Faber & Faber, 1996). The play is also available in Plays One (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), one of a series of compendium volumes of Osborne's works. The most entertaining account of Osborne's life is his own, to be found in his two volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography 1929-1956 and Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography 1955-1966 (London: Faber, 1981 and 1991). Also available is a collection of Osborne's prose writings, Damn You, England (London: Faber, 1994). Osborne's plays attracted considerable academic attention when they were first performed and some of these early books still offer a good introduction to his work at this time; see, for example, Martin Banham, John Osborne (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969), or Simon Trussler, The Plays of John Osborne: An Assessment (London: Gollancz, 1969). Early assessments and reactions specifically to Look Back in Anger are collected in John Russell Taylor, John Osborne's ‘Look Back in Anger’: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1975). A more recent general reference book is John Osborne: A Reference Guide, ed. by Cameron Northouse and Thomas P. Walsh (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1994).

LOOK BACK IN ANGER, ENGLAND AND A NEW KIND OF DRAMA

Contemporary writers regularly credited Look Back in Anger with creating a new kind of drama on the English stage. The situation seemed a little akin to the way in which earlier in the century Modernism had supposedly made everything new and banished for ever the older ways of writing. In both cases, such evaluations seem in retrospect to tell us as much about the attitudes of those detecting a new world as they do about the works they wrote about. Was this new world identified as in any way post-colonial? Looking back to contemporary reactions to the play, it seems not. The emphasis was on matters of class and on the outraging of social and theatrical conventions. Critics compared Look Back in Anger with the contemporary commercial theatre, declaring that Osborne's play rendered more or less everything about the latter obsolete. In the comparison the old world was often taken to be represented by the plays of Terence Rattigan. Rattigan's first major success—French without Tears—dated back to 1936; in the 1950s he was one of the senior figures of British theatre, whose work was familiar to theatre audiences from well-dressed and well-spoken plays such as The Winslow Boy (1948) and The Browning Version (1951) and films such as The Way to the Stars (1945). These were clearly serious works but they seemed resolutely middle-class. Particularly in the Second World War films scripted by Rattigan there was an assertion of a nation able to come together to defeat a common enemy and to stand for common decencies. In this world, the notion that seriousness might involve showing a woman ironing in a bedsit, as in Look Back in Anger, seemed unthinkable. In such a context Osborne's work could only seem avant-garde.

It is surely possible, however, to make a link with British imperial identity here, even though it seems sometimes as if the empire risks being written out of British imaginings in favour of the Second World War. Surely the kind of high seriousness that was portrayed by Rattigan as being at the heart of the British military victory was the same seriousness that imbued the ideology of imperial service, carrying the white man's burden and decent government across the globe. If so, then Osborne's avant-garde perspective declares that these values too lie in the past, that hope now lies with Jimmy Porter and not Arthur Winslow. However, one should perhaps not accept this assessment of Osborne and Rattigan too easily. Alongside the genuinely realistic elements in Look Back in Anger is there not a kind of emotional melodrama which seems much less radical? Rattigan's work has also been reassessed; his portrayals of moral dilemmas perhaps now seem as ‘modern’ as those presented by Osborne. Comparison of Look Back in Anger and Rattigan's ‘Table by the Window’, the first part of Separate Tables (1954; in The Collected Plays of Terence Rattigan, 4 vols, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953-78; III, 1964), for example, might produce a different result from that which has been conventionally accepted.

Look Back in Anger might also be set beside another icon of innovation in drama from the same period, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (first performed in French in Paris in 1953 and then in English in August 1955). In literary-historical accounts, as Osborne's play is representative of a new realism on the stage, so Beckett's is representative of the ‘theatre of the absurd’. Other names associated with this kind of drama are Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet and Harold Pinter. In a classic account of this movement—Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (1961; 3rd edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980)—the ‘absurd’ is described as follows:

In one of its aspects it castigates, satirically, the absurdity of lives lived unaware and unconscious of ultimate reality … In its second, more positive aspect, behind the satirical exposure of the absurdity of inauthentic ways of life, the Theatre of the Absurd is facing up to a deeper layer of absurdity—the absurdity of the human condition itself in a world where the decline of religious belief has deprived man of certainties. When it is no longer possible to accept complete closed systems of values and revelations of divine purpose, life must be faced in its ultimate, stark reality.

(pp. 400-01)

This seems to suggest again that we are dealing with another kind of literature which has little to do with politics or nation. The absurd can readily be described in the kind of almost metaphysical language used by Esslin, drawing, for example, on the idea that the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre is a key influence. (The possibility of a similar reading of Osborne's work is explored in E. G. Prater, An Existential View of John Osborne, Freeman, SD: Pine Hill, 1993.) But it can be argued that to read the absurd in this way involves largely rejecting the notion of the forming power of ‘context’. Taking that ‘context’ more into account can bring the movement closer to issues of literature and nation. For example, the absurd drama emerged as much as anywhere in France, that is, from a society marked by the liberation of 1945 but also by the continuing memory of the conflicts of the Vichy regime (Beckett himself had played a significant part in the Resistance in Paris). The year 1954 is, meanwhile, the date of the French defeat by the Vietnamese at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The battle marked the end of attempts to re-establish French colonial power in South East Asia after the defeat of the Japanese in 1945. It is also the start of the final phase of the struggle for independence in Algeria, France's nearest colonial possession. Maybe the more apt questions, then, are akin to ones raised already, namely, are we dealing here with literature that exists in a ghetto isolated from the questions of nation and identity that press outside, or is it that these issues are embedded in the texts but indirectly and in encoded ways?

In summary, I am aiming to suggest that it is possible to acknowledge the different styles of these writers—Rattigan's seriousness, Osborne's anger and Beckett's absurdity—while seeing all three as engaged within the same kind of matrix of ideological and historical issues. What then might we see as the particular inflection offered by Osborne's ‘anger’? An early discussion of this topic is Michael Anderson, Anger and Detachment: A Study of Arden, Osborne and Pinter (London: Pitman, 1976). More recently the issues have been explored by Aleks Sierz in ‘John Osborne and the Myth of Anger’ (New Theatre Quarterly, 12.46 (May 1996), pp. 136-46). Towards the end of the article, Sierz writes, ‘the audience for the new drama is usually characterised as being young, lower middle class, and left liberal. For this group, the myth of anger offered a radical identity which helped them cope with the insecurity of rapid social change’ (p. 145). Sierz then takes issue with this, suggesting that the drama remained the property of a more traditional middle-class audience: ‘audiences might flatter themselves by thinking that “working class” drama could help change society, but all it did was to change drama. Cultural images of the working class were a place where the middle class worked out its idea’ (p. 145; original italics).

That is to say, perhaps what we witness in Look Back in Anger is not so much an outbreak of working-class anger on the stage but, by a sleight of hand, an outburst of anger in the middle-class theatrical establishment that had produced the play and in the middle class that constituted the majority of its audience at the Royal Court. The anger was prompted by a sense of social crisis and change that was particularly relevant to the middle class—arising from the collapse of ideologies of imperial Britain, shifts in national identity, the growing assertiveness and economic power of the young—but which was then projected onto the working-class characters on the stage. It was all very different from the vision of social harmony and optimism that was central to the idea this was a new Elizabethan age.

Finally, you might wish to think about whether these possible readings and linkings are peculiar to the theatre. Critics of the novel in Britain in the 1950s regularly also make references to the development of a new realist style in that genre, so connections with ‘anger’ and Osborne seem possible there (see, for example, John Braine, Room at the Top, 1957, and Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958). But what of poetry? The 1950s saw the publication of, for example, Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived (1955), Ted Hughes, Hawk in the Rain (1957), and Geoffrey Hill, For the Unfallen (1959). Decolonization and the changing nature of Britain's role in the world seem even less prominent here. Maybe it is just that poetry as a genre lacks an engagement with politics from that of prose or drama. But an alternative view is possible which would involve decoding apparently unpolitical language and metaphors to reveal political meanings. Maybe for example one could put the angry emotions that are often present in Hughes's poetry alongside the anger which is a keynote of Osborne's play and see both as responding to contemporary changes and events. In this way poetry could be seen to show signs of the same kind of link between politics and culture that we can see in prose and drama, contributing just as much to the development of new metaphors, new imaginings of community and new inventings of tradition to represent the British nation. In this latter context it might be interesting to follow up the emphasis on history in Geoffrey Hill's work, for example, or the new attention to the lower orders in Larkin, or—in all three poets—the way nature figures in their work.

SEX, THE KITCHEN SINK AND EMPIRE

In 1956 Look Back in Anger shocked London audiences not just through its presentation of lower-class life but also because of the sexual promiscuity that seemed to go on there. In all sorts of ways the Second World War had disrupted family life in Britain, and much public policy thereafter was dedicated to reassembling the family as a coherent form, by attempting to re-establish that the woman's place was in the home, for example. With hindsight it seems that Osborne is arguing quite accurately that this ideological endeavour would fail. (The 1999 National Theatre revival of the play brought this aspect of the play to the fore, suggesting that this was the element of the play that had survived best.) Through Alison he offers a highly critical account of the home-making woman. He also presents the ‘family’ as being anything but domestic through the sexual tension that runs through the play. Osborne has Alison say that Jimmy wants women to be ‘a kind of cross between a mother and a Greek courtesan, a henchwoman, a mixture of Cleopatra and Boswell’ (p. 97). The allusive language present here runs alongside the realistic dialogue throughout the play, and both warrant further study. The sexual radicalism in the play seems, however, distinctly heterosexual—an issue which has also provoked comment. In his biography of Terence Rattigan, Geoffrey Wansell suggests that there was a ‘distaste’ for Rattigan's work amongst the key members of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court because of his homosexuality and that this worked in favour of Look Back in Anger (Terence Rattigan: A Biography, London: Fourth Estate, 1996, p. 409). This might seem ironic given that some of the scenes between Jimmy and Cliff in Osborne's play have the potential to be played in a quite erotic way (but in a way which is very different from the covert and camp gay world associated with Rattigan). If the sexual radicalism of Look Back in Anger interests you, then you may be interested to compare this first-performed play of Osborne's with one produced when his reputation was assured and he was able to be freer, namely A Patriot for Me (1965). As written—it was censored for performance—this play presents homosexuality on stage far more radically and directly than heterosexuality is shown in Look Back in Anger; one scene opens with a younger man creeping from the bed of the older central character after what has obviously been a one-night stand.

Again, however, we need to come back to the question, why should these matters be of interest for our investigation of literature and nation? The most direct answer would be that Osborne and others writing in the 1950s offer representations of a changing aspect of the British nation, a step on the way from the ‘stiff upper lip’ of the British Empire to the post-colonial ‘swinging sixties’ perhaps. There might also be a connection to be made with the notion discussed in relation to A Passage to India above that writings about the empire had offered a place for the open expression of desires which it was taboo to connect with ‘home’. Other examples of this kind of writing are Rumer Godden, Black Narcissus (1938, filmed 1947), and John Masters, Bhowani Junction (1954, filmed 1955). Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), and Gail Ching-Liang Low, White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996), offer complementary accounts of the colonial experience in this context.

APPROACHING THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL

THE TEXT AND OTHER RESOURCES

V. S. Naipaul began to write and to publish in the mid-1950s but his reputation was fully established by his fourth novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), which has rapidly acquired a canonical status and a place on school and college syllabuses. Naipaul's fiction has been honoured by the award of a conspicuously large number of literary prizes, including the Somerset Maugham Award in 1959 for Miguel Street, the W. H. Smith Award in 1968 for The Mimic Men, and the Booker Prize in 1971 for In a Free State. The Enigma of Arrival dates from 1987 (paperback edn, London: Penguin, 1987). Naipaul has also been a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines and has published a number of books of travel writings (see below for details of those about India). Naipaul himself has edited a collection of his letters to his father (V. S. Naipaul, Letters Between a Father and a Son, London: Little, Brown, 1999). Academic writing about Naipaul's work began to appear around 1971 with, for example, William Walsh, V. S. Naipaul (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1973), and Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1975). More recent general studies include three works all entitled simply V. S. Naipaul, by Bruce King (London: Macmillan, 1993), Fawzia Mustafa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Suman Gupta (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999). Discussions of his work from a more specialized perspective include Selwyn Cudjoe, V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), and Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

NAIPAUL, THE ‘ENIGMA’ AND BRITAIN

From the beginning, readers of The Enigma of Arrival are likely to feel surrounded by enigma and puzzle. Instinctively, perhaps they will feel that their key task is to solve that puzzle, to understand the novel's form (why it is so explicitly declared to be ‘A novel in five sections’), its meaning and its style. At the very beginning, for example, what are we to make of the way the first section begins? It seems unliterary, almost childlike. Yet a moment's reflection suggests the opposite may be the case and that the opening pages of The Enigma of Arrival carry echoes of two of the most literary of all novels. The preponderance of short sentences seems almost consciously to evoke the opening pages of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Compare for example the two paragraphs beginning ‘And then one afternoon it began to snow …’ (Enigma, p. 12) with those beginning ‘The wide playgrounds …’ (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960, p. 8). A little later in The Enigma of Arrival there is an allusion—which is, if anything, apparently more self-conscious—to the Swann's Way part of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Naipaul's narrator refers to there being ‘two ways to the cottage’ (p. 13); paradoxically given that they go to the same place, for one he turns left from the road while for the other he turns right. Proust's narrator refers to ‘two “ways”’ both leading to a local village, ‘so diametrically opposed that we would leave the house by a different door according to the way we had chosen’ (Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, trans. by C.K. Scott-Moncrieff, London: Chatto & Windus, 1943, p. 182; here and later I quote from Moncrieff's classic translation completed by Stephen Hudson, as the one Naipaul himself is likely to have read, rather than from the more recent revised versions).

Then there is the puzzle of how to connect the parts. One of the threads seems to be Naipaul himself, but how are we to be sure the ‘I’ of the novel is really Naipaul? Such details as we have about Naipaul's life suggest that he has heavily adapted the reality for his fiction. However that may be, a good deal of the emotional seriousness of the novel rests with our involvement with the first-person narrator, as for example, in the following extract from the end of ‘Jack's Garden’:

I had thought that because of my insecure past—peasant India, colonial Trinidad, my own family circumstances, the colonial smallness that didn't consort with the grandeur of my ambition, my uprooting of myself for a writing career, my coming to England with so little, and the very little I had to fall back on—I had thought because of this I had been given an especially tender or raw sense of an unaccommodating world.

(p. 87)

The closeness of this account to the facts of Naipaul's life and the emotional rawness involved in ‘arrival’ at this point in the narrative are striking. How are we to reconcile them with the coolness of the title of the novel? Perhaps overall the prevailing mood is not this rawness but a mixture of emotion and detachment that is much closer to De Chirico's work (see p. 91 for the narrator's description of the particular painting).

Unravelling the relationship between the narrator and the fictional world he inhabits and creates is one of the most interesting projects so far as The Enigma of Arrival is concerned. Equally intriguing for me is the way the realist world of the novel (matters of geography and history, of facts and evidence) runs together with something different—a whole set of ideologies and metaphors that are embodied in the buildings and landscapes. Examples of what I mean occur throughout the novel, but you might look at the page or so following ‘The rutted droveway …’ in the ‘Ivy’ section (p. 169), or later in the same section the paragraphs beginning ‘The Manor …’ (p. 198). As the realistic details resonate with metaphorical implications, Hobsbawm's ‘invented tradition’ and Anderson's ‘imagined community’ (see Chapter 1, p. 14 above) persistently come to mind. So complete and compelling are both strands that eventually it is almost as if I am reading two novels at the same time; one in which the language appears transparently to record the everyday life of rural England, the other in which every detail can be read as carefully symbolic of post-colonial identity and culture and in which there is a continual harping on some of the most crucial images of past British culture. In the centre, holding them together, is the narrator ‘Naipaul’. The resulting style of writing, in its different way, seems to me every bit as complex as the magic realist style developed by Salman Rushdie which is discussed in the next chapter. In the way it manages to combine—both realistically and through allusions—different time frames The Enigma of Arrival might be interestingly compared with two of Tom Stoppard's plays, Arcadia (London: Faber & Faber, 1993), which deals with ideas of British identity, and Indian Ink, which deals directly with the British experience in India (see Text 10.4).

The way of writing I am describing here is discussed further in John Thieme, The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul's Fiction (London: Hansib, 1987). By way of a closer analysis of the style, consider the brief sentence early on when the narrator says of Jack, ‘I saw him as a remnant’ (p. 20). A ‘remnant’ may be a collective noun—we might speak of the remnant of the army—but it can also be singular—the final piece off a roll of cloth which is too small to be of any proper use. In the world of the 1980s it is, then, rather as if Britain has made up all the proper garments into the imperial culture; the job is finished, all that is left is something which is to be thrown away or perhaps used up for some odd purpose. The idea of Jack as a remnant also sets resonating cultural images that we can most obviously anchor in the poetry of Wordsworth. In Lyrical Ballads (1798), for example, Wordsworth gives a new value to the beggar or the old woman in the stark rural landscape, not just as a person but as a central point of value in the English Romantic tradition and in the English national identity (Naipaul refers specifically to Wordsworth on page 26 of the novel). Once established, this kind of detail becomes a source of further meanings later in the book. It lends a resonance, for example, to the details towards the end of the ‘Jack's Garden’ section, creating something of a parody of the Wordsworthian principle. After Jack's death, rather than his widow remaining enduring and alone in his cottage, with hardly a pause the building is dismantled and she leaves for the town: ‘For her, Jack's wife, the move away from the cottage had been good. She saw her life as a small success story. Father a forester, a gamekeeper of sorts; Jack the farm worker, the gardener; and now she half a townswoman’ (p. 88).

If you wish to explore a further example for yourself, I suggest you take the manor house at the centre of the story, the various descriptions of which seem to me particularly rich in possibilities for metaphorical reading. As I read, ‘The house was not old … but built to look old’ (p. 184), for example, I feel Naipaul has picked up on just that characteristic of British and imperial culture which is caught in the title of Francis Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Equally, reading about the manor my mind is carried back to the country-house gentry culture of Mansfield Park, by the twentieth century this world has become fragile indeed: ‘a boiler exploded in the manor one day; another time a bit of the roof was blown off’ (p. 235).

NAIPAUL AND INDIA

Putting The Enigma of Arrival alongside Naipaul's non-fiction writing can be as interesting as putting it alongside others of his novels. Chief among these non-fiction writings are the three books he has written about India—An Area of Darkness (1964; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), India: A Wounded Civilisation (1977; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990; London: Minerva, 1991). At first we seem to be dealing with contrasts; these books are closer to serious journalism and travel writing than fiction and they deal with India and not Britain. Just who is telling the story seems unproblematic since here we can be in no doubt that we are dealing with direct transcriptions of Naipaul's experiences. As soon as we start reading, however, connections emerge. Naipaul does not, for example, seem to me to think that different styles are required for fiction and non-fiction. Consider, for example, the two following paragraphs:

For the first four days it rained. I could hardly see where I was. Then it stopped raining and beyond the lawn and outbuildings in front of my cottage I saw fields with stripped trees on the boundaries of each field; and far away, depending on the light, glints of a little river, glints which sometimes appeared, oddly, to be above the level of the land.

(Enigma, p. 11)

Traffic into the city moved slowly because of the crowd. When at certain intersections the traffic was halted, by lights or by policemen or by the two together, the pavement seethed the more, and such a torrent of people swept across the road, in such a bouncing froth of light-coloured lightweight clothes, it seemed as if some invisible sluice gate had been opened …

(India: A Million Mutinies Now, p. 1)

The ‘torrent’ of people and the ‘light-coloured lightweight clothes’ give away that the second of these is about India. But in both there is the same combination of the very short simple sentence and the longer extended and quite highly wrought one, the same detached tone in the narration, and the same almost poetic elements in the description (‘stripped trees’, ‘bouncing froth’).

There are also thematic connections to be made. Once past the ‘Traveller's Prelude’ section of An Area of Darkness we find Naipaul writing that India is ‘the background of my childhood’ (p. 27), something that he describes in the evocative title of the section as ‘A resting place for the imagination’. India is Naipaul's racial home as England (through education and through his scholarship to Oxford) is his cultural and figurative home. In both respects ‘home’ and ‘identity’ are bound together. In An Area of Darkness Naipaul's journey to India seems to involve the kind of searching for an essential identity that Stuart Hall describes in the extract I analyse in Chapter 1 (see pp. 18-20); in the last chapter of An Area of Darkness Naipaul gets to his own ‘great aporia’ when he finally visits his ancestral village. The result is deeply dissatisfying for him. (For a further discussion of ‘home’ and identity in Naipaul, see Timothy Weiss, On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V. S. Naipaul, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.)

The first publication of An Area of Darkness provoked an outcry in India; readers there saw only hostility and an almost ultra-European fastidiousness in Naipaul's portrayal of people and customs. The shared feelings of independence and commonwealth between post-colonial peoples seemed not to have worked. Where there should have been concord and sympathy between colonial voices, all that we hear from Naipaul is mimicry of the old colonial world. It is sometimes suggested that there is a racial as well as a cultural element in Naipaul's work beyond The Enigma of Arrival that deserves investigation (for example in In a Free State and A Bend in the River), but questions should also perhaps be prompted about how, particularly in a post-colonial world, different inventions of the same culture can more easily be in play at the same time. A reference to The Enigma of Arrival seems possible here. British readers' reactions to Naipaul's imagined England are likely to be less stridently rejecting than the Indian readers of An Area of Darkness who found their country imagined as a place of dirt, inefficiency and trickery. But those who begin by seeing a nostalgic ‘National Trust’ world in The Enigma of Arrival are likely to end up thinking Naipaul breaks the fine china even while he fondles it.

I want to end this section by putting An Area of Darkness and The Enigma of Arrival together to suggest a line of thought relating to the last section of the novel. Schematically, during the period of colonialism literature works in the interest of the colonizing power and—as suggested in the title of Gauri Viswanathan's book on the topic, Masks of Conquest (London: Faber, 1990)—conceals that it does so. The remaking of traditions and histories is a silent process. Naipaul's relationship with India begins as an attempt to get past that process, but the result of his first endeavours is in fact a different kind of silence—in An Area of Darkness he writes, ‘I had learned my separateness from India, and was content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors’ (p. 252). At the risk of tidying Naipaul into a simple and coherent narrative, perhaps by the end of The Enigma of Arrival both the silencing of history and the denial of the past have been transmuted into something else. The book is bracketed by memorials; Naipaul's opening dedication is to the memory of his brother, Shiva Naipaul, and he ends the book with a recollection of a journey back to Trinidad for the funeral of his younger sister, Sati. He writes that ‘at her death there was … a wish for old [Hindu] rites, for things that were felt specifically to represent us and our past’ (p. 316). Here perhaps Naipaul is coming close to an unravelling of the enigma, a statement of what specifically represents him. After the ceremony an old man offers a different representation, a historical account of Trinidad which might be described as a pack of lies but which the narrator dignifies with the lightly ironic phrase ‘a composite history’, adding:

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are … we remade the world for ourselves; every generation does that, as when we came together for the death of this sister and felt the need to honour and remember.

(p. 318)

It seems now that to have a past is valuable and necessary but that the past is not a simple and static thing to be discovered but something to be ‘remade’. This seems a quite dynamic possibility, and the idea of remaking the world for ourselves, surely, has a clear post-colonial ring—a sense of the narrator taking charge. The novel continues towards its end in this vein with a strong forward movement as the narrator now lays ‘aside [his] drafts and hesitations’ to write his book (p. 318). But with the last words the enigma of arrival returns. Just what is the significance of this new project being the book we have just read? Perhaps we are left with the sense of the solving of the puzzle of meaning that has run through the sections. But equally, maybe we catch an echo of Proust here at the end to match that at the beginning. Towards the end of the final volume of the In Search of Lost Time sequence Proust's narrator writes, ‘I intended to start afresh from the next day to live in solitude but, this time, with a real object’, namely the writing of his book about time and memory (Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans. by Stephen Hudson, London: Chatto & Windus, 1944, p. 359). If so, the message is that knowledge is a circling and circular process. Maybe the enigma is that both possibilities are true. We learn that literature can be a quest in which we remake ourselves, our history and our nation; simultaneously we learn that the journey is circular and self-consuming.