[In the following excerpt, Weiss argues that Miguel Street is told in two voices—that of a child who loves the spirit and people of Trinidad and that of an adult who needs to explain why he had to escape the futility and imprisonment of life in Port of Spain.]

MIGUEL STREET (1959)

The narrative strategy of Miguel Street responds to a split between the author's Trinidad and English cultural selves and attempts to resolve that split through double perspectives. First, by viewing Miguel Street from the perspective of a narrator who tells the story as if he were again a boy growing up in Port of Spain, the author can write from the base of his colonial Trinidad experiences, reentering, reconstructing, and revising that world. Second, by standing outside as well as within the narrator's viewpoint, the author can evaluate that world from the distanced perspective that he has acquired through his life in England. In short, he can write from the double perspective of exile, viewing one culture through the lens of another.

The narrator of Miguel Street is both a teller of the story and a character in it. I sometimes refer to him as the boy-adult narrator because he looks from a split perspective, that of a boy and that of an adult selecting and arranging his recollections. In the chapter entitled “The Pyrotechnicist,” the narrator alludes to his age and experiences, remarking: “I have travelled in many countries since, but I have seen nothing to beat the fireworks show in Morgan's house that night.”¹ The narrator as adult is worldly-wise; he can contrast Miguel Street with other places he has traveled to. However, most of the story is not told from this larger, worldly-wise perspective, but from the narrow perspective of a boy discovering his world, awakening to its dangers and patterns. In this respect the narrator resembles those of “Araby” or “An Encounter” in Dubliners. He has been formed by his world to see what he sees, and he sees it as if from the inside only, as if he had never left the “slum” and colony. The deterministic sameness of Miguel Street as an imprisoning milieu is before his eyes all along, but he can only dimly perceive it as such. This is presented symbolically in an incident in which the boy, losing his way while on a walk, discovers something of the extended sameness of his neighborhood, where all streets look alike; “I found about six Miguel Streets, but none seemed to have my house,” he remarks (73). Here, as throughout his story, he often says more than he knows—or says one thing by saying another or nothing at all. His neighborhood is full of Miguel Streets, and the plight of the people who live on these streets is no different from those of people who live on the boy's street. Only at the end of his account does he give words to what is there in his environment—and in him—and through this awakening, he resolves to leave the colony. The narrow perspective of the boy shifts to the larger perspective of the adult, who is already in exile at the time of the writing of this story.

Through the counterpoint between the split perspective of the boy-adult narrator and the comprehensive, evaluative attitude of the author, Miguel Street sets up a double discourse in which what is said may have two opposed meanings, and what is left unsaid may be as important or more important than what is said. Comprising seventeen chapters or sketches of inhabitants of a multicultural neighborhood, the narrative's form would seem to emphasize the variety of life and richness of human difference in this one street of Port of Spain. The boy wants to impress this variety and difference on the reader: “A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say ‘Slum!’ because he could see no more. But we, who lived there, saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else” (63). The boy is right. He can see what the outsider cannot; he sees details of human difference that the outsider might overlook or dismiss and he feels the neighborhood's special pulse or esprit. But what the boy does not see, though his story shows it, is the essential similarity of the lives of Miguel Street. The narrative's form suggests variety and difference, but its content is a collection of variations on the same story of entrapment, failure, and erasure. Thus, its multistory form contrasts with the depressing sameness of each story's unhappy ending; the play of Miguel Street contrasts with its underlying harsh realities. This is the world that the author in exile constructs—one not without affection, but chiefly a world to justify his and the boy's escape.

Although the boy intends to describe his world's uniqueness and to show its value to outsiders who might think of it as just another slum, the adult-narrator's and author's evaluative attitude impart an ironic accent to his descriptions and thus intimate that Miguel Street may be quite different from what the boy initially perceives. The irony suggests the other side of Miguel Street, its deterministic patterns. Trouble with the law, sadness, and failure abound. The boy's friend, Bogart, admired for his imitation of Humphrey Bogart's “cool” style, is jailed for bigamy. Popo the carpenter, always leisurely making “the thing without a name,” is jailed for furniture theft. Hat, the boy's best friend, is imprisoned for murder. George, the father of the boy's friend Elias, batters his wife, who dies prematurely—she “had the shabbiest and saddest and the loneliest funeral Miguel Street had ever seen”—and flogs his son and daughter with a rope soaked in the gutter of a cow pen (24). Thus prepared for failure, Elias has his ambitions for a profession slip away until he ends up a driver of “scavenging carts” (37). The title of Elias's story, “His Chosen Calling,” counterpoints the adult-narrator's and author's ironic perspectives with the boy's nonjudgmental account of Elias's failures and sad fate (30). There is little choice involved in Elias's “calling”; he repeatedly fails because his father and his milieu have programmed him to fail.

The boy's interpretation of Miguel Street often relates inversely to the adult-narrator's, author's, and reader's interpretation of it. Thus, for example, what the boy finds humorous, the author and reader often consider pathetic—or humorous and pathetic—and what the narrator says and describes often turns out to be less important than what he does not. Double-voicedness and double perspectives create a dissonance in the boy's and other characters' humor, a dissonance that we hear in funny or unfunny stories about the failure of human relationships in the slum. For example, the stories of Laura, Mrs. Hereira, and Toni show the damaging effects of the slum on sexual-marital relationships, yet the boy recounts these stories with an unsettling humor. He begins Laura's story with a joke that falls badly flat:

I suppose Laura holds a world record.
          Laura had eight children.
          There is nothing surprising in that.
          These eight children had seven fathers.
          Beat that! (84)

The boy's remark shows a certain playfulness and esprit, but it also shows a contamination by the macho street attitudes of the slum. Laura is victimized by her ignorance and by a cultural reduction of women to objects, and here in the boy's joke she is turned into an object of sorts, reduced to a “world record.” She is the perfect ghetto-female victim; her vivaciousness—the narrator says that she was “quite gay about what was happening to her”—is as unsettling as the boy's bad joke (84). Her ignorance is treated as both laughable and disturbing: “She used to point to [her expanding stomach],” the boy recalls, “and say, ‘This thing happening again, but you get use to it after the first three four times. Is a damn nuisance, though’” (84). The humor is counterpointed by a barely audible anger and by the evaluations of the adult-narrator and author: as if slowly succumbing to waves, Laura is suffocating under the burden of pregnancies and children fathered by feckless men. To emphasize the determinism of her predicament, the novel extends it to her child; her daughter Lorna, like her mother, becomes pregnant in her teens. But rather than repeat the cycles of the mother's pregnancies, Lorna drowns herself by swimming out into the ocean that encloses the colony; for her, unlike the boy-narrator, there can be no escape, which is also to say that Lorna is a kind of specter in the narrator's imagination, an emblem of his latent fear of being swallowed by the ghetto and by the colony. “According to the newspapers,” Lorna's was “just another week-end tragedy,” the boy-narrator explains; like Laura's pregnancies, Lorna's suicide is pushed aside, as if, in this harsh milieu, there is only time for each individual's attention to his or her own survival (91). The adult-narrator and author introduce a dissonance into Laura's (and Lorna's) story; entitled “The Maternal Instinct,” the story suggests through its ironic accents that her plight has much to do with something other than instinct as well, that is, with imprisonment in one's milieu.

Toni and Mrs. Hereira's story creates a similar dissonance between the boy as “experiencing self” (“knower”) and the adult as “narrating self” (“sayer”), between the evaluations of the narrator and those of the author (“authorial narrator”).² Toni is a hopeless alcoholic; Mrs. Christiani, alias Mrs. Hereira, is a woman who has temporarily left her husband and middle-class life in a well-to-do Port of Spain suburb. Toni and Mrs. Hereira have a relationship seemingly based on battering and degradation; in drunken fits he batters her, and she accepts it, or accepts it to the point that she continues to live with him. No one on Miguel Street can understand this couple and their living arrangement, which the neighbors interpret according to what their culture has taught them. Hat, for example, expressing the male, streetwise attitude, tells the boy that men need to beat their women occasionally to keep them in line: “Is a good thing for a man to beat his woman every now and then.” But even Hat is surprised by the vigor with which Toni batters Mrs. Hereira: “this man does do it like exercise” (106). Hat's “wit and wisdom” create uneasiness, a dissonance caused by the counterpoint of the adult-narrator's and author's attitude and perspectives.³ Reciting the lines of a calypso, the boy's mother offers another explanation of Mrs. Hereira's submission to Toni's batterings: “Is love, love, love alone / That cause King Edward to leave the throne” (105). But like Laura's “maternal instinct” as an explanation of her repeated pregnancies, “love” as an explanation of Toni's and Mrs. Hereira's relationship explains nothing. Latent in the boy's story of Toni and Mrs. Hereira lies a class-related, milieu-oriented explanation for their violent relationship. As a response to the failure and dehumanization of his lower-class, slum existence, Toni strikes out at Mrs. Christiani, the middle-class woman who can change her identity, so to speak, and return to her secure, suburban world. Unlike her, he cannot escape from the slum and his self-degradation, and therefore he punishes her for this. But such an explanation lies in the text like a dimly perceived puzzle to be pieced together. The boy begins to understand the milieu-related source of violence in male-female relationships in Miguel Street only later, after his best friend, Hat, kills his wife, and after he himself has left the colony and his perspective has changed.

The people of Miguel Street are “romancers,” the adult-narrator says, by which he means that they live a “double life” of actuality and fantasy (72). Through some “eccentricity” or “violation of the usual and the generally accepted,” they seek to draw life “out of its usual rut.”⁴ Bogart, Popo the carpenter, Man-man the savior,⁵ Morgan the pyrotechnicist, Titus Hoyt the Latinist, Big Foot the pugilist, Hat as Mr. Cool, Edward the would-be American—each character has an eccentricity that raises him out of the rut of ghetto life and imparts to him a stylized, special identity. Shaped by their culture and by imperial forces such as Anglo-American films and advertising, they live out a fantasy as a way of defending against or escaping from a milieu that does not satisfy their desires for meaningful work and identity. B. Wordsworth, for example, who imagines himself the soul-brother of William, has ambitions of writing the “greatest poem” in the English language—at the breathless rate of one line per month. Does Wordsworth mimic the English poetic tradition, or rather, does he try to appropriate and transform it? Is he shaped by his milieu or is he also its shaper? On Miguel Street, hierarchy can be challenged and life raised out of its rut only momentarily. Wordsworth's life ends in erasure, not immortality, with poem unwritten, his death, the demolition of his house, and the cutting down of the mango, plum, and coconut trees around it. “It was just as though B. Wordsworth had never existed,” the boy observes with sadness (52).⁶

Even more eccentric than Wordsworth, Morgan has fantastic, impossible ambitions: to make fireworks for the “King of America.” Whether by plan or accident, ironically he burns down his own house—setting off a spectacular fireworks display—and is charged with arson. What finally becomes of Morgan no one really knows, the adult-narrator writes: “They said Morgan went to Venezuela. They said he went mad. They said he became a jockey” (72). Morgan, like Wordsworth, disappears, is erased—as if the “romancers” of Miguel Street are finally no more substantial than the stuff of their fantasies. Edward the “American,” Eddoes the saga-boy, Bhakcu the mechanical genius, Big Foot the pugilist, Man-man the savior: everyone in Miguel Street seems, at least part of the time, to be dressed in masquerade. And the narrator, viewing the world as if from the perspective of a boy, is fascinated by the play and fantasies of its personages. To him, Bogart is like Bogie, Hat is like Rex Harrison, and Popo—the furniture thief who is always making “the thing without a name”—is a kind of magician. But as the boy's perspective shifts to an adult's-exile's, as it does forcefully at the end of the narrative, the personages of Miguel Street lose their fantastic identities. The masks drop. An implied critique of the double reality in which the people of Miguel Street live is thus built into the novel's narrative strategy; it is situated in the narrator's split, boy-adult perspectives and the author's evaluative attitude expressed, for example, in ironic juxtapositions between the fantastic and the mundane, between romance and actuality. The boy-narrator celebrates a people's unique spirit and voices, but he also shows indirectly the futility of their lives. Gaiety and pathos mix together.

Through the events that overwhelm his best friend, Hat, the boy feels the traps of the slum closing around and within him and determines to escape any way he can. Hat seemed to have succeeded in living life in his own way; “I never knew a man who enjoyed life as much as Hat,” the boy says. “He did nothing new or spectacular … but he always enjoyed what he did. And every now and then he managed to give a fantastic twist to some very ordinary thing” (157). Hat seems to have the world by the tail, leisurely dividing his time between reading the newspapers and watching cricket, football, or horse races, taking life in a style much admired by the people of Miguel Street. He succeeds in transforming life into play and eluding the slum's stultification; he seems free, “self-sufficient,” the boy says admiringly (160). But Hat's luck comes to an end. He marries unhappily, lives a brief, unhappy married life, and eventually kills his unhappy wife. In the end he goes to prison, the pattern of his life repeating the pattern of the lives of other inhabitants of Miguel Street who either go to jail or run from the law. Hat's failure confronts the boy with contradictions: everyone in Miguel Street is different and interesting, yet everyone's life there is shaped similarly by stultification and the threat of imprisonment. Miguel Street has play and gaiety, but it also has a basic, ineluctable harshness against which “romancing” is a feeble mask and no lasting protection. Faced with these conflicting aspects of his world, the boy looks at Miguel Street in a new way: “it was three years … in which I had grown up and looked critically at the people around me. I no longer wanted to be like Eddoes. He was so weak and thin, and I hadn't realized he was so small. Titus Hoyt was stupid and boring, and not funny at all” (165). The boy sees the “other side” of Miguel Street, and if he now unfairly diminishes its inhabitants, he does so as a stripping away of his earlier, naive perception of them.

As if by magic, the boy obtains a scholarship to study abroad, and at the end of his collection of portraits of Miguel Street describes himself striding across the runway to the plane that will carry him away to a distant land: “I left them all … not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac” (172).⁷ He leaves them behind, but he does not walk alone; he is accompanied by his shadow, the past extending into his future. He carries Miguel Street within him in that he has been formed by it and must, through the writing of this story, try to understand his reasons for leaving it. He celebrates it—and exorcises himself of it.

When we read Miguel Street, we need to read its double story. The first portrays an inner-city neighborhood alive with a unique spirit and a folk symphony of voices; there is something in it of the street theatricality of the Trinidad carnival. The second, conversely, portrays a pattern of frustration and imprisonment through cultural and social forces turning lives toward fantasy and away from accomplishment; this second story emphasizes the futility beneath the gaiety, the uneasiness within the humor, the entrapment at the end of the imagined escape. The first story shows the author's affection for the personages and voices of his childhood in Port of Spain, while the second manifests an exile's fears and his need to justify leaving the West Indian colony.

Notes

1. V. S. Naipaul, Miguel Street (New York: Penguin, 1971), p. 72. All further quotations are taken from this edition, which henceforth will be abbreviated as MS in parenthetical citations.

2. For a discussion of these concepts, see F. K. Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative, trans. Charlotte Goedsche, preface Paul Hernadi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 112-14, 146-47. Stanzel also makes a distinction between “teller-characters” (e.g., the adult of Miguel Street as narrating self) and “reflector characters” (e.g., the boy of Miguel Street as experiencing self): “A teller-character always functions as a ‘transmitter,’ that is, he narrates as if he were transmitting a piece of news or a message to a ‘receiver,’ the reader. Communication proceeds differently with a reflector-character. Since he does not narrate, he cannot function as a transmitter in the above sense. In this case the mediacy of presentation is characteristically obscured by the reader's illusion that he is witnessing the action directly—he feels he is perceiving it through the eyes and mind of the reflector-character. These differences between the two processes of communication have consequences for the interpretation of a narrative text, in that the narrative assumes varying degrees of credibility or validity depending on whether it is conveyed by a teller-character or by a reflector-character.”

3. The casual acceptance of violence, particularly violence against women, children, and the powerless, is a disturbing aspect of the ghetto and what Naipaul calls the “picaroon” world of the colony; directly and indirectly, both he and his father (in The Adventures of Gurudeva) critique this acceptance of violence as part of husband-wife and parent-child relationships. In the latter Seepersad Naipaul describes the brutal beating of Ratni by her husband Gurudeva: “And he pounced on her … and bundled her out into the yard. Artfully he entwined her long hair around his fists and dragged her in a circle over the rough ground as though she were a sack of potatoes. And when she neither wailed nor wept, he disengaged his hands from her hair and cuffed her and kicked her frantically” (31). For his part, V. S. Naipaul writes that nowhere are children beaten as harshly as they are in the West Indies. See The Middle Passage: Impression of Five Societies—British, French and Dutch—in the West Indies and South America (London: Andre Deutsch, 1962; New York: Vintage Books, 1981), pp. 183, 190. Henceforth abbreviated as MP in parenthetical citations.

4. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics,ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 126.

5. Of the sources of the characters and stories of Miguel Street, Landeg White notes: “It is significant that much of the material is based on anecdotes which are still widely current in Trinidad. See V. S. Naipaul, A Critical Introduction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975), p. 50.

6. See V. S. Naipaul, “The Mourners,” A Flag on the Island (London: Andre Deutsch, 1967), pp. 55-62.

7. In 1949 Naipaul won a government scholarship to study in England; in 1950, at the age of eighteen, he left Trinidad. For a lively account of the scholarship process in Trinidad, see C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (London, 1963; New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).