Perhaps it shouldn't have done, but in many ways it came as something of a surprise to hear that V. S. Naipaul had won the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature. His name had first been mentioned in connection with the Prize at least three decades before, at a time when his reputation was riding high with both the British literary establishment and in academic circles; and the succession of accolades that had been showered on him in the U.K. had culminated in the award of the Booker for In a Free State in 1971. At that time it seemed likely that, given the political rotations that appeared to characterize the award of the Nobel, there might be well be a Caribbean winner and, if so, then surely Naipaul was a front runner. Then came the rumours that he had been short-listed, but rejected on the grounds that his work lacked insufficient humanitarian concern. They may have been unfounded, but the word was that the Nobel jury had been more sympathetic to the claims of Wilson Harris. There could be little doubt as to his humanitarian concern, but Harris, like Naipaul, was also to remain a bridesmaid in the ensuing years, allegedly nominated on several occasions but never finally finding favour with the jury.

When the Prize was awarded to Derek Walcott in 1992, it looked as though the door had been closed on both Naipaul and Harris. It seemed unlikely that another anglophone Caribbean writer would be in the frame for a generation or more. In the meantime, Naipaul's star had continued to ascend in certain spheres, while waning somewhat with academe. His American reputation had been established when Guerrillas (1975) was widely (mis?)read as an attack on black radicalism and consequently found favour as part of the backlash against 'sixties Black Power activism. And in the West more generally, as he increasingly turned from fiction to non-fiction, as well as producing works that conflated the two genres, his renown as an impartial observer of the malaise of post-colonial societies kept on growing and he was widely praised for a forthright clear sightedness that provided an antidote to the shibboleths of political correctness. No matter that his supposed lucidity consigned whole continents and religions to oblivion, as he sweepingly declared that “Africa has no future”¹ and “Muslim fundamentalism has no intellectual substance to it, therefore it must collapse”² and in so doing played his own small part in widening the rifts between the world's “haves” and “have-nots”. No matter that from the outset he had dismissed his home island of Trinidad as “unimportant, uncreative, cynical”,³ while allowing himself to be exempt from the charge of lack of creativity as a lone genius, who had heroically made a career for himself by escaping to the metropolis. No matter that he had dismissed the Caribbean as the “Third World's third world”.⁴ Naipaul's polemics served the needs of those among the Western intelligentsia who clung to the myth that there was a gaping chasm between “them” and “us”, appeared to regret the demise of colonial “order” and believed that the only solution to the problems of “the wretched of the earth” lay in the adoption of Western values. As they praised the perspicacity of his searing indictments of post-colonial societies, he, intentionally or otherwise, vicariously became their hatchet man. This, of course, says more about Naipaul's readers than the writer himself and, to be fair, his critique of non-Western societies as “half-made”⁵ seems to have been born out of genuine conviction, but it still ministered to a metropolitan market for reactionary cultural commentary.

In any case, while Naipaul's writing continued to attract an increasing amount of adverse criticism outside the West, his popularity remained high in British establishments circles: he was knighted in 1990 and became the first winner of the David Cohen Prize for “lifetime achievement by a living British writer” in 1993. He had, after all, repudiated his Caribbean roots many years before and chosen to call himself a British writer. There were still numerous expressions of doubt about the writer's character: most notably in Paul Theroux's often acerbic account of his lengthy friendship with Naipaul, Sir Vidia's Shadow,⁶ and also in books such as Diana Athill's Stet,⁷ in which the author describes the apprehension she felt when dealing with VSN, as a senior editor at his long-time publisher, André Deutsch. Moreover, the level of interest in his work in Western academic circles declined as critics and students increasingly preferred the post-Rushdie generation of writers' stress on hybridity to Naipaul's emphasis on displacement. True, he could be seen as the forerunner of such writers, the literary scout who had disturbed monocultural assumptions many years before Rushdie, Ondaatje, Mo and others helped establish the migrant as the representative protagonist of the last quarter of the twentieth century, but then Walcott and Harris had both developed their nuanced accounts of the cross-cultural experience at much the same time as the early Naipaul and had done so without concessions to gesture politics or overt self-dramatization. Both Walcott and Harris were, and are, of course, “difficult” authors, building metaphor into metaphor in their writing; and so perhaps it was not surprising that for many years they attracted less attention in this respect. Naipaul, in contrast, has worked in transparent modes, documenting concrete particulars in a spare style that appears to provide his readers with immediate access to actual situations rather than making them work their way through levels of interlocking imagery to find meaning. And perhaps it is the simple elegance of his prose style that has persuaded certain sections of his readership that he is a deft and discerning witness.

However, despite his brilliance in this vein, by the end of the last millennium it looked as though the Nobel should have passed Naipaul by. It seemed unlikely that there would be another Caribbean winner for the time being and in intellectual circles he was beginning to seem a yesterday's man, a writer whose penchant for pricking the bubble of political correctness had lost valency, as the debates moved on and became subtler. Despite the challenge to monoculturalism implicit in some aspects of his writing, he had from the first demonstrated a hostility to hybridity, for example in dramatizing a classically conservative attitude to the supposed perils of miscegenation in a novel such as The Mimic Men (1967). Given that Rushdie, Bhabha, Ondaatje, Ghosh and numerous other writers had pointed up the positive dimensions of migration and hybridity, Naipaul's nostalgic longing for a pure. Edenic moment in the past, when cultures were homogeneous.⁸ seemed to be out of step with contemporary thinking, whether in the academy or, in this case, the world at large. Derek Walcott even found him provincial, when he located The Enigma of Arrival (1987) in the very English tradition of the “elegiac pastoralist”.⁹

Some of the reductiveness and harshness of Naipaul's polemical attacks on post-colonial societies began to disappear. In A Way in the World (1994), he unearthed traces of the Amerindian cultures that underlay the Spanish foundations of Trinidad¹⁰ and in so doing effectively overturned his earlier view of the island's past as centred on “the two moments when Trinidad was touched by history”,¹¹ two moments of contact with Europe; and he problematized issues of ancestral origins with a greater degree of humility than hitherto: “We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves”.¹² Slightly earlier, in India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), he had taken a very different view of the sub-continent from that of his two previous books on India,¹³ which had represented the country as irrevocably trapped in the quietism of a paralysing Hinduism that precluded Western self-realization and progress.¹⁴ Now India was reconstructed as a mosaic of communal pieces, each asserting its distinctive capacity for creativity through “mutiny”. Yet even this change left one uncomfortable, not so much because there was no real acknowledgement of the fairly total about-face he had taken, but because the book's evidence was assembled from a myriad of interviewees and, although most of it was written in inverted commas, the various interlocutors seemed to share a common sub-Naipaulian way of speaking. At the same time, Naipaul's public appeal continued to depend in part on his power as a gadfly. So, despite some evidence of a quieter, more humane Naipaul, if the criterion of humanitarianism remained important, he seemed an unlikely candidate for the Nobel as we entered the new Millennium.

However, other criteria were clearly at work. His name was still being mentioned and, after all, he had succeeded in reconstructing himself as British (while retaining the right to boldly comment where few Britons had commented before) and consequently the unlikelihood of their being another Caribbean laureate was not really relevant. So perhaps it should not have been a surprise to hear he had won the Prize. In any case, I'd like to speculate on why he may have found favour with the Nobel jury at this moment in time and also on whether he deserved the Prize. One thing that Naipaul has shared with Wilson Harris over the years is an extraordinary capacity to reinvent himself, while in a sense producing books that are all one work. Whether fiction or non-fiction, or an amalgam of the two, whether ostensibly about individuals or communities, this work is a continuing, often displaced, autobiography and Naipaul's more recent interviews have emphasized the highly personal nature of his writing. So much so that he now expresses surprise that he has touched a chord in other people, when his subject has been his own very particular experience. This is perhaps where his main achievement lies: in, consciously or unconsciously, having created a persona, with which, despite his testy polemics, we can identify all too readily. In his Nobel Lecture, he spoke of having “moved by intuition alone” without having any “guiding political idea”,¹⁵ comparing himself with R. K. Narayan in this respect and identifying this lack of any overriding political conviction as an ancestral Indian trait. This involves a disturbingly stereotypical view of India, which again predicates an essentialist view of a particularly heterogeneous nation; and whether it is correct to characterize Narayan as he does presents a further difficulty, though at least it is endorsed by the creator of Malgudi's own habitual way of presenting himself—and certainly Narayan is less frequently and less overtly concerned with politics than Naipaul. But where Naipaul is concerned, it is extremely difficult to accept the writer at his own self-evaluation. In the Nobel Lecture, he intermingles autobiography with comments on phenomena such as “colonial shame and fantasy”¹⁶ and one is left feeling—and again the author may be blissfully unaware of this—that the personal is highly charged with the political.

In his presentation speech at the Nobel ceremony, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy referred to Naipaul's having praised the West for recognizing “the right to individual endeavour” and for being devoted to European civilization as “the only one of the alternative cultures available to him that made it possible for him to become a writer”.¹⁷ In short, personal endeavour is possible in the West and not elsewhere—or at least this is so as far as Naipaul is concerned. The Academy seems to have chosen him at this moment in time, because of his ostensible concern with the individual rather than the macro-political, without having grasped the extent to which his vision is suffused with politics and the extent to which his micro-politics embody a very particular pro-Western ideology. So could it be that it has arrived at a moment in its own evolution, when it wishes to distance itself from the charge that its decisions are influenced by political considerations, but has not appreciated just how politically charged Naipaul's writing is? Or, worse still, has it, in the wake of September 11^th, fallen into line with America's declared war on the opponents of “freedom” and found a laureate who has frequently seen the West as the ultimate arbiter of freedom? If either of these speculations—and they are, of course, no more than speculations—has any substance, then the Academy has scored a spectacular own goal. In any case, Naipaul's expressed attitudes make it possible to imagine such a scenario.

Does Naipaul deserve the Prize? Individuals will have to decide for themselves. If a brilliant espousal of pro-Western conservative ideology and a revitalization of the tradition of pastoral elegy (the Academy's press release saw The Enigma of Arrival and not A House for Mr Biswas or The Mimic Men as his masterpiece¹⁸) are qualifications, then he surely does. And then there are his wonderfully pithy short sentences. To quote Derek Walcott's essay on The Enigma of Arrival once again, “There isn't a better English around, and for me this is wonderful without bewilderment, since our finest writer of the English sentence by praising the beauty of England, however threatened with industrial encroachment preserves it from itself”.¹⁹ Yet one doubts that prose style was at the top of the Nobel jury's shopping list when it came to choosing its 2001 laureate. Besides, Walcott's own sentences in this essay, and in many others, are at least as wonderful, albeit in a different vein; and so are those of a number of Naipaul's other contemporaries. The published citation does mention style, but puts more emphasis on other factors. The press release describes Naipaul as “a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice” and refers to him as “[s]ingularly unaffected by literary fashion and models”.²⁰ This suggests that it has taken Naipaul at his own estimate and in so doing succumbed to his self-perpetuated myth of himself as a lone genius who transcended his Caribbean origins.²¹ The press release goes on to call him “a modern philosophe, carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide”, saying that “he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony”.²² The lack of awareness of the extent to which irony is culturally encoded and dependent on the agency of its author would be troubling in an undergraduate essay. Here it is more so, since it is compounded by the emphasis on Naipaul's adoption of Western values as the only means by which he could achieve fulfilment as a writer. There is a contradiction: on the one hand, Naipaul is a neutral witness, uninfluenced by cultural trends, who allows events to speak for themselves; on the other, he is a writer who has found himself through “his devotion to European civilisation” and its recognition of “the right to individual endeavour”.²³ There appears to be a blindness to the extent to which Naipaul works within a Western discourse, which presents itself as unfashionable, but is in fact part of the conservative mainstream. The Academy's comments echo Naipaul's own numerous remarks on the failings of post-colonial societies, which of course are remarks that construct the irony that is supposedly inherent in events. In such a reading of world culture, individual endeavour has become the monopoly of the West, but Walcott, Harris and a million other mutineers suggest otherwise. Perhaps, then, it is best to make the case for Naipaul's Nobel in terms of his “wonderful” English sentences, but, as Walcott so astutely points out, they themselves are but the formal expression of his predilection for pastoral elegy.

Notes

1. “Meeting V. S. Naipaul”, Naipaul interviewed by Elizabeth Hardwick, New Times Book Review, 13 May 1979, p. 36.

2. Naipaul interviewed by Edward Behr, Newsweek, 18 August 1980, p. 38.

3. The Middle Passage, 1962; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p. 43.

4. The Overcrowded Barracoon, London: André Deutsch, 1972, p. 250.

5. E.g. in his essay “Conrad's Darkness” in The Return of Eva Perón with The Killings in Trinidad, London: André Deutsch, 1980, p. 216.

6. Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship across Five Continents, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

7. Diana Athill, Stet, London: Granta Books, 2000.

8. E.g. in the Epilogue to In a Free State: “[…] Perhaps that had been the only pure time, at the beginning, when the ancient artist, knowing no other land, had learned to look at his own and see it as complete”, In a Free State, London André Deutsch, 1971, p. 255.

9. Walcott, “The Garden Path: V. S. Naipaul”, What the Twilight Says: Essays, London: Faber, 1998, p. 122.

10. E.g. A Way in the World, London: Heinemann, 1994, pp. 8 and 41.

11. The Loss of El Dorado, 1969; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, p. 15.

12. A Way in the World, London: Heinemann, 1994, p. 9.

13. An Area of Darkness, London: André Deutsch, 1964; and India: A Wounded Civilization, London: André Deutsch, 1977.

14. See particularly India: A Wounded Civilization, p. 25.

15. Naipaul, Nobel Lecture, 7 December 2001, Official Website of the Nobel Foundation, www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture.html.

16. Ibid.

17. Horace Engdahl, Presentation Speech: The 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, Official Website of the Nobel Foundation, www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2001/presentation-speech.html.

18. Press Release, 11 October 2001, www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2001/press.html.

19. “The Garden Path: V. S. Naipaul”, p. 126.

20. Press Release, 11 October 2000, op. cit.

21. See Walcott, “The Garden Path: V. S. Naipaul”, pp. 127-8 on Naipaul's numerous predecessors and contemporaries who negate “The myth of Naipaul as a phenomenon, as a singular, contradictory genius who survived the cane fields and the bush at great cost […]” (p. 128).

22. Press Release, 11 October 2000.

23. Horace Engdahl, Presentation Speech, op. cit.