SOURCE: "The Paradox of Freedom: V. S. Naipaul's In a Free State," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, pp. 81-91.

[In the following essay, Boxill discusses the paradoxical nature of freedom and the symbolic "prisons" in Naipaul's In a Free State.]

Prison is an important presence in V.S. Naipaul's first-written book, Miguel Street, and it is, if anything, more central in his recent In A Free State. Although the characters in Miguel Street live in the shadow of an actual jail, Naipaul suggests that Miguel Street and Trinidad itself are both so limiting as to deserve to be seen as wider prisons in which the characters find themselves trapped. In spite of its universal resonances, especially in the author's ability to create characters that live, Miguel Street implies that Trinidad is like a prison because of its remoteness and its past of colonialism and slavery. Its characters, many of whom are creative, are frustrated because they live in a community which lacks standards and does not value creativity. The book implies that freedom can be achieved by escaping to a country which has not been stunted by colonialism, for its narrator accomplishes such an escape.

No actual prison appears in In A Free State. Such a place is quite unnecessary in its world, because Naipaul manages to suggest that the whole world and, indeed, freedom itself function as the perfect prison from which escape is not possible, except possibly in death. The characters of the book are not artists—they are not frustrated creators. The book does not solicit sympathy for a select few; it concerns itself with all mankind, even the insane and the perverted; it does not try to pinpoint the oppressor of mankind. The enemy is not simply slavery or colonialism; it is life itself, mankind itself.

A sign of Naipaul's growing maturity is that he shies away more and more from categoric answers to human problems. In A Free State is an extremely provocative book because, while it draws attention to human problems and human suffering, it makes no pretense of identifying the enemy or of producing a simple scapegoat. Instead, it illustrates the innumerable facets of the human personality and the physical world with which humanity has to cope, and which contribute to the range of problems confronting mankind. Most of the serious problems of humanity have been created by man himself; since man is extraordinarily complex, one must expect his problems to reflect that complexity.

All of the important characters in In A Free State possess or achieve a greater degree of freedom than Naipaul has allowed any of his characters previously. His main characters up to now, from Ganesh to Mr. Stone, have been pinned down by historical, environmental, economic, and social stakes. Now these considerations take second place to the bonds imposed by freedom. In the Prologue, "The Tramp at Piraeus," the tramp on the steamer says, "What's nationality these days? I myself, I think of myself as a citizen of the world." The freedom of which the tramp boasts makes him the most vulnerable man on the boat. Being completely without attachment, he has no one to whom to turn when the rest of the world joins ranks against him. The wide cross section of nationalities represented on the ship makes it both a microcosm of the real world and a world of its own. Naipaul loses no time in introducing the tensions of the Middle-East—the ship is travelling to Egypt—into the community on the ship. On board is a group of Egyptian Greeks who have been expelled from Greece and are being sent back to Egypt, a country with which they have lost touch. The various nationalities on the ship quickly split into factions: the Arabs and the Germans gang up; the tramp remains an outsider. The pressures of living in a disrupted and tense world clearly affect the people on the ship. The hostility they feel toward each other is thinly disguised and accentuated by the ship's cramped passenger accommodations. A scapegoat must be found, someone to vent their hostility on. And who better than the tramp, the citizen of the world, the wandering Jew, everybody's victim and no one's responsibility? After sharing a cabin with the tramp for a night, the Lebanese businessman says, "I will kill him," identifying his enemy and resolving how to deal with him. The insane Trinidadian of the book's third section is more admirable than the Lebanese because, although he realizes that an act of violence against one's enemy might be purgating and liberating, he also realizes the impossibility of pinpointing a single enemy. His plea, "Tell me who to kill," is heartfelt and honest. No such honesty or scrupulousness marks the Lebanese and those who join him in baiting the tramp. They want a scapegoat and preferably a vulnerable one. To escape their national prejudices and hostilities, the tramp has to lock himself first in a toilet, then in his cabin. Actual prisons can prove more protective than freedom in a world which does not understand freedom.

After the passion of the Lebanese, the reader is left to ask himself of what possible use would have been the identifying and killing of such an "enemy." What liberation could result from the destroying of a man so weak, so tattered, so insecure, and so lonely that he "wanted only the camouflage and protection of company"? The answer is, of course, none; but man, wanting always simple answers and easy scapegoats, has ceased to wish to find the real enemy and has settled for sacrificing the handiest victim. The very notion of sacrifice has become meaningless.

Santosh, the narrator of "One out of Many," the second section of the book, after disentangling himself from the restrictions of his Indian nationalism, finds that America has not yet come to recognize citizens of the world. To be a free man in America he must become an American citizen: "Marry the hubshi. That will automatically make you a citizen. Then you will be a free man." When we first meet Santosh, he is a poor man who sleeps on the sidewalks of Bombay "although in our chambers a whole cupboard below the staircase was reserved for my personal use." He has friends, a regular job, a position in a rudimentary system. It does not seem to be much, but Santosh is proud of his achievements since he has started from very little in a remote Indian village. His sense of achievement in having liberated himself from the crippling destitution of his village, no doubt, urges him to pressure his employer to take him to America. He cannot go back to the limitations of his village, and the freedom of America beckons.

He is hardly on the plane which will take him from Bombay to Washington before he realizes that the freedom he has achieved is now threatened. He begins to feel claustrophobic: "From the aeroplane to the airport building to the motor car to the apartment block to the elevator to the corridor to the apartment itself, I was forever enclosed." In Bombay he had slept under the real sky, but "below that imitation sky" of his apartment in America he "felt like a prisoner." He also discovers that his new quarters are to be in another cupboard, this time more prison-like because he has no sidewalk to escape to.

The freedom Santosh achieves in America—being without friends or attachments, having no real point of contact with the life going on around him—is not what he had bargained for. "This isn't Bombay. Nobody looks at you when you walk down the street. Nobody cares what you do." With the isolation that Santosh's new freedom has brought, he is no better off than in prison. Having achieved it, having ceased to see himself as part of his employer's or anyone else's presence, having graduated from a cupboard to a real room, to a drab house, he cannot easily renounce his free state. By further advancing his freedom by increasing his isolation, he comes to the dismal conclusion that "all that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over."

While Santosh is moving to the freedom of his isolation, the hubshi (his word for the American Blacks) are seeking their freedom by acts of violence against their enemy. After they have burned a considerable portion of Washington, Santosh comments: "Happiness was on the faces of the hubshi. They were like people amazed they could do so much, that so much lay in their power." As with all violence, the freedom that it brings must be short lived and ultimately futile because the whole enemy has not been destroyed—nor can it ever be, since much of the enemy is within. Santosh helps prove it: he marries a hubshi woman to help him gain American citizenship, and the hubshi scrawl "Soul Brother" outside his house to protect it from new burnings. Santosh says that, though he understands the words, he feels no sense of brotherhood to anyone—and identifies himself to the reader as part of the enemy which has not been identified by the hubshi. His freedom has led him to want to dissociate himself from the brotherhood of man. The hubshi, too, are guilty for stressing a racial rather than a human brotherhood.

The narrator of the third section, "Tell Me Who to Kill," is free from even the direction of his mind. His story consists of the distraught interior monologue of a madman who senses that he is like a ship without a rudder which must go in whatever direction the stream of life takes it. His thoughts go through his mind, apparently without direction, as he makes a trip to attend his brother's wedding: "But I don't know what bus we will take when we get to the station, or what other train, what street we will walk down, what gate we will go through, and what door we will open into what room." The loss of control over his life is emphasized by the fact that he seems to be on a day's release from a mental hospital in the charge of an attendant, Frank. Frank, we feel, is in control, knows where they are going, and has decided how they are to get there. Even though he is kind to his charge, his watchfulness makes him somehow sinister.

These relationships prove richly complex and ironic for him since he can present the reader with an individual who has been freed by his illness from making decisions and from taking responsibility for his actions. Ironically, such an individual needs a jailer to make decisions for him and to control his actions. Not even the freedom which mental breakdown imparts is absolute.

The monologue of the narrator also makes clear that the freedom of the madman is paradoxical: while his thoughts are free, their very obsessiveness controls him very effectively. Their obsessiveness gives the monologue coherence and direction, for the madness of the narrator becomes evident not because his thoughts occur to him helter-skelter, but because they come to seem more and more inevitable as we pursue them. One becomes aware that his words reveal pent-up hatred and frustration which have driven him to breakdown since he has been unable to find release for these emotions.

His story begins with his memory of deprivation in rural Trinidad. Naipaul's description of the dreary, ugly, hopeless environment is executed with a precision he has demonstrated in his earlier works. Here again the house is used as a reminder of the sordidness of the characters' lives and as a symbol of their dreams. Surrounded by so much that is ugly, the narrator resolves to dedicate his life to preserving and developing the only thing of beauty that is close to him, his younger brother: "He is so pretty. If he grow up he will be like a star-boy, like Errol Flim or Fairley Granger. The beauty in that room is like a wonder to me, and I can't bear the thought of losing it." Unfortunately, physical beauty is finite; Dayo, the younger brother, does not possess the inner beauty which might have justified the self-effacement which his brother undertakes on his behalf.

Naipaul makes clear that to deny oneself completely, to be content as a part of someone else's presence, is to accept slavery, to condemn oneself to prison. As he has indicated frequently, Naipaul considers such denial an especially West-Indian tendency, encouraged by history and environment. The narrator, too cowardly to discover his own personal beauty, continually seeks to identify with other people; with film stars, such as Flynn and Granger; with a rich man of whom he says, "I worship this man"; with his uncle, Stephen, whom he adored when small. Like his brother, these men prove unworthy of his slavery, but his disillusionment does not prevent him from accepting Frank as his jailer and new master. Again, the awareness that he has willingly surrendered the conduct of his life disturbs him sometimes: "You are just going where the ship is going, you will never be a free man again." Instead of trying to take control, however, he wishes that he will be relieved forever from responsibility for himself: "I don't want the ship to stop, I don't want to touch land again."

The narrator's attempt to liberate himself from himself by sacrificing himself to others, achieved in a way by his mental breakdown, is as extreme as Santosh's attempt to isolate himself completely. Self-effacement proves ultimately to be as imprisoning as its opposite, complete isolation. The narrator of the third section, however, is more perceptive than Santosh, since he senses that something is wrong with his position: "O God, show me the enemy. Once you find out who the enemy is, you can kill him. But these people here they confuse me. Who hurt me? Who spoil my life?" That the section ends with these questions underlines its narrator's difference from Santosh who, having taken refuge in his isolation, ceases to question. Santosh never comes close to recognizing that he is his own worst enemy; the narrator of this section senses that he is himself most to blame, but he cannot understand why. Neither he nor Santosh understand that self-love prevents them from seeing the value of their own individuality and that of others.

The characters of "In a Free State," the fourth section, are never in any doubt about who the enemy is or that they must kill him. The story is set in a newly independent country in Africa. Political independence has its limitations, because the Africans, whose loyalties are tribal rather than national, have had little to do with creating the state they now possess. Inheritors of a way of life they have not developed for themselves, they are foreigners in their own country:

the capital, which, in spite of the white exodus to South Africa and in spite of deportations, remained an English-Indian creation in the African wilderness. It owed nothing to African skill; it required none…. It was still a colonial city, with a colonial glamour. Everyone in it was far from home.

Naipaul gives us glimpses of Africans whose lives have been unaffected by the West: two naked men covered with chalk who run along the road, and people seen tilling the soil with simple implements and living "the immemorial life of the forest." For such people political independence has no meaning; they are free of the burdens of independence that oppress the educated African, but they are the prisoners of their ignorance and poverty. The paths they have created and which they follow are "simple forest paths, leading to nothing else." Incongruous as they might seem in a modern independent state, these people have integrity and an identity of their own.

The Africans into whose hands the free state has been entrusted certainly lack these. Like the narrator in "Tell Me Who to Kill," they have attempted to efface their own identities to assume European ones, to cope with their new nation which they correctly recognize as European in design. They wear European suits which they have not paid for; their hair style is known among city Africans as "the English style"; they frequent the night clubs from which they had been barred before independence. Their incongruity is emphasized by the fact that Bobby, the Englishman in the story, wears a "native" shirt made of phony native fabric, designed and woven in Holland. Both of these dishonest styles of dress are contrasted with that of real Africans:

On a path on the wooden hillside just above the road about a dozen Africans in bright new cotton gowns were walking one behind the other in the rain, covering their heads with leaves. With the bright colours of their cottons, and the leaves over their heads, they were very nearly camouflaged.

Further on, two men run into the road:

They were naked, and chalked white from head to toe, white as the rocks, white as the knotted, scaly lower half of the tall cactus plants, white as the dead branches of trees whose roots were loose in the crumbling soil.

These two passages describe people who are so much a part of their environment that they are almost indistinguishable from it. The narrator seems to be saying, as Conrad did, that "they wanted no excuse for being there." These are the only free people in the book, though ironically they are probably unaware of and uninterested in the political status of their country. The political turmoil, the heritage of the political freedom that the novel describes, seems far away from them.

The city Africans, on the other hand, exchange their natural freedom for one they have not earned and which, being foreign, enslaves them. Like slaves, and like the narrator of the preceding section, they try to find fulfillment by assuming the identity of their masters who, ironically, have just liberated them politically. Of course, the Africans feel uneasy in their new positions. They sense that they can never feel free until they have the strength to assert their own identities and purge themselves of their European ones.

Violence is an important theme in the book, and it contributes considerably to the mounting tone of terror as the stories progress. Bobby and Linda, an English pair, are driving from the capital of the state to the compound in the collectorate in another part of the country. In the compound, the Europeans who have remained to help run the country preserve something of their old style of life. As Bobby and Linda progress in their long drive, one becomes aware that they are seriously threatened by the tribal hostility between the king and the President. As individuals, they are innocent of blame for the turmoil of the country, but they are obvious reminders of the colonial past. Since neither is especially intelligent, they are not sure how to handle the hostility and menace they sense in the attitude of the Africans they meet. Linda takes refuge in aggressiveness and in the prejudices of colonial Europeans towards Africa. Bobby, on the other hand, wears an "African" shirt, makes passes at African boys, wishes that his skin was black, and delights in announcing that his boss is an African. His attempts to free himself from himself fail miserably since his weakness and masochism are readily identified and violently dealt with by Africans seeking a stability which their freedom has denied them. The African continent quickly converts the little pockets of Europe which the whites had created into forest, a recurring image which Naipaul associates with Africa. The forest, relentless and foreboding, suggests the depth of the African past and emphasizes the superficiality of the changes which the Europeans have wrought on it. The image allows Naipaul to contrast those Africans who have remained close to the forest with those who have emerged freshly from it. Clothing, an important motif in the section, is used to illustrate the differences between these two groups. Those Africans who are just beginning to feel the influence of Europe are described as wearing "cast-off European clothes," "fighting the encumbrance of [their] dungarees," and, most incongruous of all, "in jodhpurs and riding boots, red caps and jackets." No doubt many readers will feel that these descriptions are unkind, snobbish, and used to ridicule. In the context of the novel, however, these pictures reveal the distress of the narrator who finds so much evidence of the enslaved mentality in a country which wants to think of itself as free. He seems to suggest that the African freshly emerged from the bush must have other alternatives than to turn himself into a pathetic mimic of the European. The African himself is not so much to blame for his mimicry as his former colonizers and his neo-colonizers, the liberal European and the citified African.

Such mimicry can ultimately bring only self-disgust and pathetic, futile attempts to purge through violence the revulsion at what the Africans have become. They choose Bobby as their sacrificial lamb, but Bobby, another version of the tramp in the first section, is quite incapable of bearing the burden of guilt they wish to impose on him. A homosexual, he is rejected and ridiculed in both England and Africa; he has severed relations with England but finds a relationship with Africa impossible to fuse. His homosexuality and his race make him truly free, but free in a way which renders him a casualty. He is not, like Santosh, one who takes pride in his complete detachment. He yearns for some lasting attachment but is repulsed and abused because he is vulnerable.

The acts of violence which he suffers, therefore, strike terror in the reader and bring no release for their perpetrators. In many ways the story seems to illustrate the shortcomings of Frantz Fanon's theory that the way for the colonized to rid themselves of their colonizers is by violence. The kind of violence implied to be effective is the violence of brutal self-appraisal. Without it, mimicry will continue to compound itself, and self-revulsion will continue to demand meaningless sacrifices, like the beating of Bobby. Free, unattached, and vulnerable people like Bobby will continue to be victimized by people seeking to liberate themselves from pressures—psychological, cultural, economic—that bind them.

The book concludes with "The Circus at Luxor," an Epilogue taken, like the Prologue, from a journal—but no journal in the ordinary sense. The careful selection of word and incident, the provocative and illuminating juxtaposition of superficially incongruous and unrelated scenes, suggests the same artistry and intensity as the fictional sections. In the Epilogue the narrator is more central to the action than he had been in the Prologue. A tourist in Egypt, he sees some children being treated in an inhuman way, and he takes steps to put an end to it. The narrator's action has been seen as an expression of "anger and a sense of injustice" with which callousness and inhumanity should be met. No doubt it is, but even the freedom to act in a humane way is compromised by the attention which the action calls to itself. "I felt exposed, futile," says the narrator after his gesture. Naipaul ends by suggesting that in this world no time has ever been pure and, consequently, absolute freedom can never exist. Purity and freedom are fabrications, illusions, causes for yearning, things for the tomb. Put this way the ending sounds trite, futile, and pessimistic in an adolescent way, but that is far from the truth. If man would recognize the impossibility and, indeed, the immorality of absolute freedom, then he would assume his responsibilities to vulnerable creatures, such as the tramp, Bobby, and the Egyptian children, whose freedoms he jeopardizes in his selfish search for his own. Yet the illusion of purity and freedom must be maintained as a safeguard against man's selfishness and ambition, which Naipaul symbolizes ominously with the image of the Chinese Empire announcing itself.

Man should neither reject completely or embrace fully the notion of freedom. In A Free State illustrates superbly that to be meaningful freedom must be understood to be paradoxical.