The only independence which they [the Africans and East Indians] would desire is idleness, according to their different tastes in the enjoyment of it; and the higher motives which actuate the European labourers … that to be industrious is a duty and a virtue; that to be independent in circumstances, whatever his station, raises a man in the moral scale amongst his race; and that his ability to perform his duties as a citizen, and, we may add, as a Christian, is increased by it. These, and such motives as these, are unknown to the fatalist worshippers of Mahomet and Brahma, and to the savages who go by the names of Liberated Africans.

—Lord Harris, quoted in Eric Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago

I suppose … there is barely a society without its major narratives, told, retold and varied; formulae, texts, ritualized texts to be spoken in well-defined circumstances, things said once, and conserved because people suspect some hidden secret or wealth lies buried within.

—Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

THE NEED FOR A TRADITION

The movement toward literary and cultural autonomy in Trinidad and Tobago roughly parallels the social and political development of the society.¹ The only discernible cultural activity during the period from 1833 to 1870 was the struggle to continue the annual carnival celebrations. From 1870 to 1890, however, interest in cultural pursuits arose among the more progressive black and colored citizens. As Bridget Brereton has argued, “The coloured and black intelligentsia prided itself on its literary and intellectual attainments and boasted of being more ‘cultured’ than the whites, who were accused of crass materialism. Often movements of a literary character were initiated by non-whites; for instance, the Athenaeum Club or, the Trinidad Monthly Magazine.”²

Publications such as the Trinidad Monthly Magazine (1870), the San Fernando Gazette (1874-95), and the Indian Kohinoor Gazette (1898) served as avenues for the rudimentary literary productions of some of the island's inhabitants and defended the interests of the oppressed black and East Indian masses. Public Opinion, first published in 1884, edited by Philip Rostant and designed to reach the lower classes, “speedily obtained a large circulation among all classes, both on account of its cheapness, the soundness of its views on matters of importance and the excellence of its literary matter.”³ In his autobiography, Trinidad and Trinidadians (1919), L. O. Lewis noted that dramatic plays were being performed as early as 1870; Brereton's history alludes to two satirical sketches by J. J. Thomas written around 1890; Grenidge produced his Bohemian Sketches in 1890; and Ignacio Bodu produced his Trinidadiana in 1890. Thus the literary activity during this period in addressing the need for national autonomy paralleled the impulse of the masses to regain their cultural autonomy.

In the period from 1900 to 1940, the movement toward nationalism and self-determination among the working people had its counterpart in the literary and cultural arena in the struggle to create an authentic literary tradition, as evidenced by the influence of radical literature on the public. The Sedition Ordinance, which was passed in Trinidad in 1920, to stymie industrial and political unrest, prescribed severe penalties for the circulation of newspapers and publications deemed subversive, and publications such as Negro World, Crusader, and the Messenger were banned.⁴ Alfred Mendes, a leading figure in the literary movement of this period, argued that the individuals who spearheaded the literary movement were veterans returned from World War I who were influenced by the achievements of the Russian Revolution.⁵ The content and form of the literature, however, were a part of and were fashioned by the larger movement toward nationalism and self-determination.

This twentieth-century literary movement began as an attack against what were thought to be the recalcitrant elements of the dominant culture and the members of the oppressed class who believed all things foreign and European were inherently superior. As a result, most of the writers used as their subject matter the residents of the barrack yards of Port of Spain. The termination of the indenture system and the fragmentation of the traditional Indian way of life also became sources of much East Indian writing. Thus emerged an urban proletarian literature that dealt primarily with the Africans and a peasant literature that dealt primarily with the East Indian.

A debate in two periodicals, Trinidad and the Beacon, published in Trinidad between 1929 and 1933, “formulated basic postulates for an indigenous West Indian literature.”⁶ The short story, which remained the dominant form of West Indian literature until 1949,⁷ was the vehicle through which this tradition and the incipient nationalism best expressed themselves, whereas the periodicals provided a forum in which writers could discuss the parameters of West Indian literature.⁸

Writers such as C. A. Thomasos argued that when the West Indies produced a literature of its own, it would “use a tradition, culture, and temperament of its own to pass judgment on its literature.” Ernest A. Carr argued for the universality of tradition in general and commented that “the artist who attempts a new formula will deserve success only if the content of this formula draws its sustenance from the well of the past, in other words, if the artist pays due respect to tradition.”⁹

More spirited critics condemned the imitativeness of West Indian writers, and the editors of the Beacon criticized the attempt by some critics to force Trinidadian writers to conform to English and American practices. In one of its early editorials, “Local Fiction” (1932), the editors accused young writers who had submitted short stories to its local fiction-writing competition of copying these models and warned:

We fail utterly to understand, however, why anyone should want to see Trinidad as a miniature Paradiso, where grave-diggers speak like English M.P.'s and vice-versa. The answer is obviously that the average Trinidadian writer regards his fellow-countrymen as his inferiors, and uninteresting people who are not worth his while. He genuinely feels (and by this, of course, asserts his own feeling of inferiority) that with his people as characters his stories would be worth nothing. It is for this reason that he peoples them with creatures from other planets, American gangsters and English M.P.'s and revives familiar plots and characters from True Story and other nth rate periodicals.¹⁰

They were just as acerbic in their editorial on poetry, complaining that “intellectual dropsy is a popular form of ailment.”¹¹ The periodical also castigated the literary pretensions of some Trinidadians who imitated the English “classics” and waged war on any intellectual production from the island. In encouraging the production of a literature that reflected the local landscape and used local themes, the editors of the Beacon argued that they were “able to squeeze more beauty out of watching Ramirez glide rhythmically over the fresh, green grass of the [Queen's Park] Savannah than in witnessing the pathetic spectacle of a group of pretentious and artificially-spirited young men and women dissecting Keats.”¹²

The editors of the Beacon realized, as perhaps V. S. Naipaul never did, that a national literature would grow out of the confluence of social forces peculiar to the island and, in fact, shape its growth. Thus they attacked Dr. Laurence for comparing C. L. R. James's short story, a local piece, to the works of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott on the grounds that “the sociological forces” at work in the islands were so different from those of Dickens's or Scott's England that no comparison was valid.

Inherent in the struggle to articulate the indigenous tradition in literature was the attempt by the more progressive elements of the emerging nationalist movement to anticipate, through literature, a sense of national consciousness. As a result of the agitation in the society and the insistence on a national tradition in the literature, a large body of local short stories, a few novels, and other literary works emerged in the period from 1929 to 1949. Of particular importance were the short stories of C. L. R. James, Alfred Mendes, W. Therold Barnes, Daniel Samaroo Joseph, Frank Collymore, Edgar Mittelholzer, Claude Thompson, Roger Mais, H. D. Carberry, Seepersad Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, and Cecil Gray, who concentrated primarily on local themes. Of special importance to V. S. Naipaul's development were his father's Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales (1946), Joseph's “Taxi Mister” (1947), Selvon's “The Baby” (1949) and “Cane Is Bitter” (1950), and Gray's “Merely for the Record” (1951), in which one encounters many of the topics V. S. Naipaul later examined in his early short stories and the local style he emulated.¹³

When V. S. Naipaul began to write, he thus drew upon a collective tradition for both his style and his content. And although his father's work must have had some influence on him simply because of its proximity and familiarity, he drew heavily from the island's folk life and stories. As Landeg White has suggested, “Much of the material in Miguel Street is based on anecdotes which are still widely current in Trinidad. I myself … had heard the adventures ascribed to Bolo many times before I read Miguel Street, and ‘Man-Man’ exists in other versions.”¹⁴ Many of the themes in Miguel Street are found in short stories written from 1929 to 1951 by other writers, and Miguel Street itself is a composite of streets in Port of Spain.

To be sure, the immediacy, urgency, urban focus, and rhythm of Naipaul's early stories and the definite break with the East Indian tradition which he suggested and Selvon undertook were not found in the fiction of other writers of this period or in the work of Seepersad Naipaul. Even The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira, in which Naipaul returns to the themes of his father, bear the unmistakable imprint of the short stories of the period from 1929 to 1949. A House for Mr. Biswas is a more complex exercise than Seepersad Naipaul's “They Named Him Mohun,” despite the “cannibalization” of the latter, of which V. S. Naipaul speaks in his introduction to his father's stories.¹⁵ V. S. Naipaul preferred to use the artistic unity and vision of the short story to give his world a sense of order. In Miguel Street and his early short stories, we first see Naipaul's tendency to consolidate and reshape his early experiences.

THE EARLY SHORT STORIES

When Naipaul went to Oxford in 1950 he became a privileged colonial subject thrust into the colonizer's world of “learning” and “culture.” In that year he wrote a poem entitled “Two Thirty A.M.,” which was read by John Figueroa on “Caribbean Voices” on September 24, 1950.¹⁶ Because the poem is little known and has been reproduced in a dissertation that is not easily available (see n. 18), I planned to reproduce it here, but unfortunately, V. S. Naipaul, through his literary agent, denied permission to reproduce the full poem (Gillion Aitken to the author, Feb. 12, 1988). I therefore must limit myself to a few lines. Yet one cannot read those lines without recognizing the darkness that possessed Naipaul's soul when he arrived in England. In her very courteous response to a letter I wrote requesting permission to quote this poem, Patricia Naipaul noted that her husband “says that this poem, written by him at school before he left Trinidad, was a joke poem, ‘a prank,’ not to be taken seriously, about modern poetry—showing how things could be written, words strung together without feeling” (Patricia Naipaul to the author, Jan. 11, 1988). Aitken, in his “official” response to my letter, claims that Naipaul “views” this poem as his “juvenilia” that ought not “to be published just yet.” Both these claims, it seems, reflect retrospective readings of what may be Naipaul's later embarrassed response to his first encounter with London. Certainly when the poem was read over the BBC no indication was given that it was a prank about modern poetry. Indeed, it was aired because it so truly represented colonials' fears as they encountered the “reality” of the [m]other country. The fact that similar sentiments, the sense of being lost, alone, and afraid, are repeated in many of his early works, tends to support the conclusion that “Two Thirty A.M.” represents Naipaul's authentic feelings when he arrived in London.

The poem itself is very revealing. It is sparse, cryptic, and economical in its sentiments. Viewing that dreadful world and the frenzied activity of that ghost-laden time of morning/mourning, the poet recoils at the immensity of the city and his seeming helplessness in coming to terms with the endless sense of “futility” that it engenders. He asks: “does it [the futility] begin today / tomorrow or last night” or is it ever present, “an overpowering now,” re-presenting “eternity transfixed”? This inability to control his time or to locate himself in that “overpowering now [world],” generates a sense of fear that leaves him feeling trapped, as though it is “forever,” as though it were “death / and nothing / and mourning.”

The poem reflects the powerful fear and dread that pervaded Naipaul's soul when he arrived in that at once most sought after and indifferent country of the master. Years later he still felt the same fear of London. In An Area of Darkness, he lamented: “I came to London. It had become the centre of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. London was not the centre of my world. I had been misled; but there was nowhere else to go.”¹⁷ Helen Tiffin has argued that, on one level, “Two Thirty A.M.” is about “time, darkness, and futility—concerns (and even images) which become more pervasive in Naipaul's later work.”¹⁸ This powerful poem conveys the ambivalence and dread Naipaul felt in those early years, which would set the tone for everything he wrote afterward.

“This is Home” (1951), the first of Naipaul's short stories to be broadcast on “Caribbean Voices,” tells of man's solitary condition and his terrible desire, despite his doubts and fears, to cling to extraneous emotions (in this case, love) to hold him together. The story reflects Naipaul's continuing desire to examine the fear expressed in “Two Thirty A.M.” It is about a man and a woman who go to the top of a hill to begin their lives together and is told from the point of view of a man who is trying to reconcile the twin emotions of fear and joy. Beset by a growing panic, he looks at the woman and is overcome by “a weight of immense solitude.”¹⁹ As the narrator reflects on the man's condition, he expresses the fear and aloneness the man feels: “We are always so much alone; the crowd gave us solace for the moment, yet the crowd was stronger than the individuals who made it up. And always within us was a whole private life, that was stark and solitary. The responsibility was too great. Whatever we did, we could never free ourselves from that solitude—the solitude of one's mind.” The same sense of dread of tomorrow is also encountered in “Two Thirty A.M.” Here it anticipates an emotion that would come full circle when Naipaul tried to find his center.²⁰

In the end, the major character of “This is Home” tries to overcome his fear of the future—the solitude he expects to darken his days—by assuring his woman that “this [the top of the hill] is home.” But even as he tries to comfort her, the man feels that “he was lying.” The questions of the proper relationship between the East Indian man and woman which is raised here occurs in other early short stories. Although Naipaul does not deal as explicitly with Hindu culture in “This is Home” as he does in some of his later stories, he alludes to it when the major protagonist says:

He saw the tasks of the world split in two. Man the author, man the worker. Woman the anvil of man's passion: the feeder and lover of her master. Good God! The responsibility was too much for him. It wasn't the mere physical satisfaction that disturbed him. It was the idea of fitting into a primaeval pattern of living to mate, and mating to create that filled him with dread. Sex was the whole works and he knew it; and it hurt him. He was ashamed. Why must flesh be so weak and so powerful at the same time? Why couldn't people be made out of rubber, insensitive to touch and passion? He sought to control his own passions, but he had failed. It cropped up, triumphant, again and again. … We never can live alone. We need protection. We created a mutual protection society and called it love: called it marriage and home.

Naipaul's second story, “The Mourners,” confronts his concerns more concretely. The story is about an East Indian couple who have begun to acquire many of the traits of the creolized or Western world. The story is told from the point of view of Ann, a young East Indian girl just beyond her tenth year, who seems to be confused by the behavior of adults. It hints at the caste/class conflicts within the East Indian community, the relations between the poorer and richer sides of the extended family, and the changing social attitudes. These incidents reflect the changing world of the East Indian in Trinidad and Tobago and the resulting conflicts. Ravi participates in carnival, a predominantly Negro festival, Sheila shortens a servant's name from Soomintra to Soomin (“a thing that was ordinarily forbidden, even to the children”), and the doctor wishes to have his son enter the “Cow and Gate Baby Contest.”²¹

The conflict between the Western and Eastern worlds, the creolized and the Hindu, which would become central to Naipaul's work, is examined in greater detail in his next short story, “Potatoes” (1952). Most of Naipaul's early concerns are included in this eight-page story, thus making it central to an understanding of the stories of this period. Here can be seen the seeds of A House for Mr. Biswas. The story centers upon Mrs. Gobin, who comes from a leading Hindu family on the island and is trying to free herself from her mother's dominance by entering the potato business. Her father “had been recognized as the leader of the new Hindu aristocracy in the island; the family was venerated for its caste, its piety, and its wealth. Mrs. Gobin, nevertheless, was poor.”²² Her poverty had disgraced her family, and she also had become somewhat ashamed of herself. She was determined, however, once her husband was dead, to remove herself from poverty and to become “independent” of her family. As she tells her mother: “I say it now, I say it before, and I will always say it, it never does pay to be dependent on anybody. But mark my words, Ma. I am going to make myself independent.”²³

In her effort to become independent, Mrs. Gobin experiences the same isolation the man in “This is Home” felt:

The cart jogged away; Mrs. Gobin felt that she was alone, felt it poignantly—alone in a big, bad world. The people she met walked with firm feet, always knowing where they were going, and, most importantly of all, how they were going about it. But always she was lost. If she could have formulated her thoughts, Mrs. Gobin would have cursed the life she had been brought up to live. Perhaps her method of thinking, her way of life, was all right in an all-Hindu society, but in this cosmopolitan hotch-potch where nothing was sacred and everything was somehow flat and unsatisfying, in this hotch-potch, it is totally inadequate.

The conflict between the sacred and the profane and Mrs. Gobin's painful awareness that she is neither trained nor prepared to act in the creole world creates the powerful sense of aloneness and loss first encountered in “Two Thirty A.M.” This conflict between East and West, the feudal and the colonial-capitalist, runs through all of Naipaul's work.

This social conflict is evident even in the descriptions of landscape, a technique Naipaul would use frequently. Mrs. Gobin's home, for example, became familiar to many of Naipaul's readers. The house, it can be assumed, is in the country district.

She came from a family that prided itself on its business skill. Her father, starting from almost nothing, had established himself as a prosperous landowner and businessman. Before he died he had erected, as a monument to his enterprise, and unquestionable proof of his wealth, a magnificent white palace, built in a mongrel Hindu style by architects who had come all the way from India. The walls were four feet thick; the balustrades were lavishly ornamented with religious carvings; and figures of elephant gods and monkey gods appeared in the most unlikely places. On the top of the grand facade two stone lions stared forever in different directions.

A new phase of her life begins when Mrs. Gobin goes to the city to begin her potato business. The shop to which she goes to transact her business contrasts sharply with “the magnificent white palace built in a mongrel Hindu style”:

On Thursday morning she went to the city, and entered the shop of an Indian merchant, a man she knew. The shop was a small, square room that smelled of curry and onions. An obsolete cash register was opened by a venerable-looking man with a beard, who could pass for a religious prophet, but who was, in fact, merely a Hindu of mediocre caste. The two girl assistants who glided skillfully among the crates of onions, the sacks of flour, and the barrels of potatoes were conveniently tiny, underfed creatures.

The city is inhabited by that feared other, “the nigger world.” The fear this world evokes is first made known to the reader when Mrs. Gobin informs her mother that she intends to be independent of her. Her mother mutters some quotations from the Gita and then responds: “I know what you will do. I know what your type always does. Well, go ahead, go to hell, and walk the streets. I wash my hands of you since I married you off. … Your father used to warn me all the time about you; and ever since you have been living in the town, you have been playing white woman. Well, go ahead, and turn nigger. I am not going to stop you.”

In the story the “nigger world” is represented by a nameless “old negro man,” whom Mrs. Gobin engages to carry her potatoes home, and his family, to whom Mrs. Gobin goes when the Negro man is late in delivering the potatoes. On one occasion when he is two days late, she goes to his home and is terrified by his alien world. She is greeted by the familiar taunts the Negro directs against Indians. The old Negro's wife, who is also nameless, tells Mrs. Gobin: “All you Indians smart as hell. Making money like hell, and not spending a cent. Just saving up to be rich. I don't know an Indian who ain't rich. All you people does always help one another.” The irony of this statement is that it expresses a stereotype of the East Indian. Mrs. Gobin is indeed poor, has no help from anyone, and is trying to survive on her own. The author's concern, however, is the misconceptions about the “other” and the fear that ensues when the East Indian encounters that other world of the profane. The Negro world is painted as threatening and intrusive. Mrs. Gobin fails in her business venture, but she does attempt to break out of the rigid hold that “the magnificent white palace” and its major occupant have on her.

In the end, the vehemence Mrs. Gobin's mother feels toward the “nigger world” reflects the changes that seem to threaten the somewhat closed East Indian community. The fear in “Potatoes” is not so much of the “nigger” or the “nigger world” as what they represent: the encroachment of the colonial-capitalist way of life on the ordered feudal world Mrs. Gobin's mother had known. In Mrs. Gobin we see the first sign of rebellion that is so celebrated by Mr. Biswas, the first attempt to break out of a way of life that seemed “fated.”

Naipaul's next short story, “The Old Man” (1953), opens up another theme that became important to his work: the isolation of individuals in Trinidad, especially those who emigrated around the middle of the nineteenth century, and their difficulty in calling the island “home.” In this story, the major characters are Chinese, and like the East Indians, they seem to feel an isolation and lack of attachment to the island.

In “The Old Man,” the Chengs, a family of ten, save money to return to China. They are forced to abandon that ambition when Mr. Cheng dies. (The theme of a man dying and leaving women to face the world alone is typical of Naipaul's early stories.) The children soon forget their parents' plan and begin to reconcile themselves to the remoteness and isolation of Trinidad. The items on the society page of the Trinidad Guardian assume more interest to them than the important events of the outside world. The narrator observes:

In Trinidad, the grand affairs that rock the hemispheres are remote, and do not have any immediate interests for us. Besides, we are worried by our own political problems. Should we kill off tubercular cows? One member of the Legislative Council thinks it is a wicked plan to impoverish a large part of the community. Another thinks it is a grand step forward.

We find life in Trinidad full and trying. We are not greatly disturbed by the world's great week-end crisis. We are amused and detached. It is only when we leave Trinidad for some time that we see how truly [in the original manuscript the words “unimportant we are” and “how” are deleted] amusing we have been. Tubercular cows dwindle into their proper importance. But we realize, too, that our approach to world affairs was correct. For when we are abroad, you see, we realize that Trinidad, with its blending of peoples, and with its burning political problems of no significance, is really the world in small.²⁴

To Naipaul, even at this stage in his career, Trinidad is remote and unimportant. No group other than the Africans can call the island home. When Mary Cheng is asked, “Why don't you stay here [in Trinidad], as so many other Chinese have done?”, she responds disdainfully: “Stay in Trinidad? What for? I want to go home. Nobody can call Trinidad home, even if he is born here. The place is like one big camp. That is all. I want to go home.” The narrator comments: “Yes, Mary wanted to go home. Home meant very much. In Trinidad she was an exile, not belonging to any group, and feeling separated by ages from the smart Chinese set, who belonged to exclusive clubs, who owned race horses, and who had completely adopted what they considered the Western way of life.”

In this story, as in “Potatoes,” the separation of the parents from the younger generation is very evident. The children, for example, speak Chinese only when they are at home, and Mr. Cheng seems utterly “indifferent to the world” around him. Mrs. Cheng owes all her allegiance to Mao Tse-Tung, who to her was the only true leader. She, it seems, keeps up with important world affairs. According to the narrator, Mr. Cheng “kept Mary and her family thoroughly Chinese in an atmosphere that would otherwise have swamped them with the frustrating emptiness of a [here “Trinidad” is crossed out in the manuscript] isolated existence.” Both Mary and Mr. Cheng wished to return to mainland China, where life was more secure and ordered and where, presumably, the civilization was older and more ordered. The problem remains the same as in the other stories: isolation in a remote and unimportant island. And even though the privileged Chinese seek to lose themselves in the emptiness of Western culture, the older, more traditional members feel sadly misplaced. The younger Chinese, with much difficulty, attempt to adapt “themselves to their new social environment.”

The breakdown of the Hindu family is spelled out in “A Family Reunion” (1954), which tells the story of a dispersed family coming back to their modest house for Christmas and the problems they confront. Although Naipaul addresses some of his central concerns in this story—the breakdown of the Hindu family, East versus West, the conflict between the sacred and the profane—the story is more about the injustices within the East Indian family than those it meets in the outside world. The text hints at the traditional injustices against women, particularly daughters who are dominated by their mothers and mothers-in-law.

The tension in the story involves the injustices experienced by daughters who have served their mothers faithfully, while sons, who have done little for their mothers and have discarded their traditional Hindu ways, receive the best their mothers can offer. This treatment of daughters is exemplified by the concern accorded the boys' education and the neglect of the well-being of the daughters:

The old woman had given her sons a good education. Suraj was a doctor, and he had a flourishing practice. Krishna occupied a good position in the Civil Service. They, the women, were barely literate, and they had been married not because they wanted to, but because of their mother's will. Hindu sense had been scandalized that girls of eighteen should wander around unmarried.²⁵

When the mother's property is divided, the bulk of it goes to her sons and very little to the daughters, even though they know they have served her well. Although the daughters do not rebel outwardly, they recognize that their mother has wronged them gravely, for, as the narrator observes, “In their hearts they considered their mother malevolent and intriguing.” Yet they are accepting and placid. They know their mother has wronged them and that their brothers are indifferent and cruel to them, yet they are constrained from expressing their feelings. Unlike Mrs. Gobin, they tend to accept their lives, which have been “fated to them.” This fate, the author suggests, is the terrible injustice to which the Hindu woman is a victim. As the narrator observes: “In a way the women accepted, as natural, that their brothers should be treated with great respect, and should get most of any legacy. It seemed so right, so proper.”

The problem of stasis and decay and the persistence of obsolete social practices that deny and negate the personhood of these women is at the root of this story. One must break out of that “destined position” to be free. It is within this context that we must understand the decaying nature of the landscape, of the very house to which the family returns for the reunion. Indeed, on their return, they recognize that decay, symbolized by the house. In the end the mother lives alone in the same wooden house, which had “faded like herself … [where] everything smelled of dampness and decay.” In the broken-down house, blind and close to death, the old woman dispenses her not-too-kind justice and bemoans that education turns girls into prostitutes. “The boys,” she says, “never let you down.”

The old order is dying. Something is fundamentally wrong with the social arrangement. There is the feeling that a historical wrong has been committed against the daughters, yet their acceptance of their fate seems to suggest compliance, which adds an unsatisfactory dimension to the text. Naipaul does not explore the feelings of the daughters, and he depicts the mother only as a malevolent figure. The women's fate seems to be unalterable. Clearly, the author is struggling with some of the problems of his society, particularly the role of women and the decay of the world order.

“My Aunt Gold Teeth” (1954) is a much more comprehensive examination of the conflict between Eastern and Western ways of life. Like “The Mourners,” this story is told through the eyes of a young person who is bewildered by the conflict of cultures. His aunt Gold Teeth, knowing “little apart from the ceremonies and the taboos” of Hinduism and childless at the age of forty, is willing “to trap and channel the supernatural Power”²⁶ of both Hinduism and Christianity to give birth to a child. In the alien wilderness of Trinidad she is forced to compromise between these two cultures. Fearing that her praying to “Christian things” may have led to the illness of her husband, a Hindu pundit, she asks Pundit Ganesh (who is reintroduced in The Mystic Masseur) whether she has committed an error of judgment. He replies:

“And do you think God minds, daughter? There is only one God and different people pray to Him in different ways. It doesn't matter how you pray, but God is pleased if you pray at all.”

“So it is not because of me that my husband has fallen ill?”

“No, to be sure, daughter.”

Although Gold Teeth calls upon both Hinduism and Christianity, her husband dies, leaving her believing that her infidelity (nay, idolatry) caused his death. In a fit of self-abnegation she destroys “every reminder of Christianity in the house.” Her mother forgives her for turning to Christianity, yet its intrusion into the highest level of the Hindu world—“for Gold Teeth's husband was a Brahmin among Brahmins, a Panday, a man who knew all five Vedas”—left an indelible mark. Like his counterpart in “The Mourners,” the young narrator is left confused by the behavior of his elders.

Naipaul's early stories clearly present a more creolized version of East Indian life than does Seepersad Naipaul's work. The society of “The Mourners” is opening itself up to the influence of the larger community and thus presents the changing behavior of the Trinidadians of East Indian descent. In “This is Home,” “Potatoes,” “The Old Man,” “A Family Reunion,” and “My Aunt Gold Teeth” the author expresses an ambivalent position toward his society. Although his ideas are still tentative, they are nonetheless being articulated.

NAIPAUL AND HIS ART

Naipaul confessed in 1964 that he wrote The Suffrage of Elvira to prove to himself that he could construct a sustained text around one central incident.²⁷ The short stories, however, preceded that effort by about seven years. He may have been motivated to write the novel by the comments he made about Samuel Selvon's inability to construct a much longer and sustained narrative.²⁸ Speaking about Selvon's work in “The Literary Output of West Indian Writing in 1955,” Naipaul argued, “It is curious that the West Indian whose inventiveness and humour and gift of repartee is shown up so advantageously in the calypso … should be so uninventive in his novels.”²⁹ Writing much later, in 1968, about the difficulty West Indian writers had in using the novel form, Naipaul said: “The trouble about novel writing is that it is such an artificial form. It is something that people in my culture have borrowed from other people and the danger is that we tend, when we are beginning, however honestly we may work—we tend to recreate an alien form, an alien novel, the whole form and concept of life is totally alien to the society. We impose one on the other. My attempt has been, in a way, to dredge down a little deeper to the truth about one's own situation.” And even though he found “the confirmation of simple societies … inadequate to a serious writer immersed, as he [was], in the English literary tradition,”³⁰ this conscious struggle to find the appropriate form in which to express his experiences characterized Naipaul's early (and, perhaps, his entire) art.

In speaking about his place in West Indian literature in 1960, Naipaul declared unequivocally that he was a Trinidadian writer—“a writer from Trinidad”—and in discussing the nature of the society about which he wrote, he announced that he was writing about “an Indian society in Trinidad, which is still, to a certain degree, a coherent society, with its own flavour and without, yet, an American flavour … [a] people set in a certain society within a certain framework. That framework is now breaking up, but that is giving me materials for fresh work.”³¹ Clearly, when Naipaul began his career as a writer he was well aware of his own position in a particular tradition, which he perceived to be in transition. Naipaul's perception of his relationship to his society changed as he became a more sophisticated craftsman. Indeed, even in this early period a certain ambivalence in his relationship to his society is evident. When Naipaul began his career, however, he was particularly aware of his Trinidadianness, and this fact cannot be dismissed simply in light of his later realizations or rationalizations.

Certain themes that related directly to his early experiences prevailed throughout his early stories: a sense of being lost and alone, a sense of isolation and exile, a recognition that his society was decaying and that it committed injustices against its members, and the conflicting pull of the Eastern (Hindu) and Western (Christian) worlds, a subset of which was the rising conflict between the feudal world of the Hindus and the colonial-capitalist world. As an inescapable result of these concerns, the subtheme of home (what or where is home?) and displacement (trying to find a center) arose with enormous force, persistence, and urgency in these early texts. Adaptation and change carried a price; the resulting psychic pain subtends his work.

In a way, these stories represent Naipaul's attempt to make coherent and intelligible his early experiences and to form some meaningful link with his parents' generation. As he explained to Nigel Bingham in a radio discussion in New Zealand:

I grew up with about fifty cousins and that was like a crash course in the world. You learn then about cruelty, about propaganda, about the destruction of reputations. You learn about forming allies. It was that kind of background to which my father was reacting. This world—I have written about this—to a large extent, and certainly for most of my childhood—appeared to me in my own mind to exclude what was outside, although one was living in a multiracial society. I don't think the child formulated it like that. I think the child simply understood that what was outside that large clan was somehow not it. It was outside. It was something else. No judgment was to be made on it and I perhaps didn't make any judgments on it as a child. … It was different. The food would be different, the manners would be different, that was all, a sense of difference, great difference.³²

Naipaul's childhood was very unhappy, “largely,” he says, “because of feeling a kind of helpless unit in this large family organization.” Naipaul therefore passionately wanted to become an adult, “to be responsible for myself, to be able to look after myself and to look after my father as well.”³³ His early texts attempted to capture the urgency, helplessness, and unhappiness of those early years.

In May 1954, just two months after he had finished writing “A Family Reunion,” Naipaul wrote to Grenfell Williams of the BBC for a job. Naipaul had stayed on at Oxford for a few months to complete a B. Litt., but, as he phrased it in his letter, “with one thing and another, I no longer have the desire to go through with the work.” It was time to face the world, to be responsible for himself. Perhaps the most important decision he made was not to return to the West Indies, as he explained to Williams:

One thing I certainly do not want to do: go back to Trinidad or any other island in the West Indies if I can help it. I very much want to go to India. But there are many difficulties. I cannot be employed on the Indian side because I am British, and on the British side, I cannot be employed because I am not English. I think it is almost impossible for me to do anything worthwhile in this country, for reasons which you doubtless know. … I am applying for jobs in places as far apart as Turkey and Indonesia, but with little hope of success.³⁴

There is a myth, perpetuated by Naipaul particularly in his writings of the 1980s, that he never wanted to or gave very little thought to any other career but writing. His letter to Williams and his attempt to do a B. Litt. certainly contradict that position. Writing came very hard to Naipaul. As he said to Jim Douglas Henry, “I don't think of myself as a born writer. I've learnt the very hard way.”³⁵ In 1954, however, Naipaul's life and his direction as a writer were at a crossroad. His not getting a job was the best thing that happened to him. At any rate, the themes of his stories began to resonate with the choices that he had to make. As he developed and matured as a writer, the interplay of these two dimensions became the base of his work.

MIGUEL STREET

By the time Naipaul wrote Miguel Street (the text was completed in 1955 but was not published until 1959), he was a much more conscious artist than he was when he wrote his first short story some four years earlier.³⁶ He could speak much more authoritatively than he could in his earlier efforts. Some years later he wrote about the stories in Miguel Street:

It was through them that I began to appreciate the distorting, distilling power of the writer's art. Where I had seen a drab haphazardness they found order; where I would have attempted to romanticize, to render my subject equal with what I had read, they accepted. They provided a starting point for further observation; they did not trigger off fantasy. Every writer is, in the long run, on his own; but it helps, in the most practical way, to have a tradition. The English language was mine; the tradition was not.³⁷

In 1983, Naipaul said that he wrote Miguel Street to “ease” himself into knowledge. He asserted that the book “seemed to have been written by an innocent, a man at the beginning of knowledge both about himself and about the writing career that had been his ambition from childhood.”³⁸ Yet these stories represented a West Indian tradition of which he was a part.

The stories in Miguel Street are set in Port of Spain. The characters are modified products of the barrack yard whose social existence has been twisted severely because of the social pressures of the city's slum. But because the book lacks sustained dramatic tension and a coherent plot and unified theme of a novel, it is more in the tradition of the early short stories of Trinidad and the West Indies.³⁹

Miguel Street examines a colonial society in which the characters' traditional values have no organic connection with the social environment and their quest for a meaningful existence seems to be denied because of the apparent chaos that surrounds them—hence the major theme that one cannot achieve anything in Trinidad because of the futility and the sterility of the society. This position is exemplified best in the story “How I Left Miguel Street,” when, in response to his mother's complaint that he was “getting too wild” and by his own recognition that he was drinking too much, the character asserts: “Is not my fault, really. Is just Trinidad. What else can anybody do here except drink?”⁴⁰ This sentiment also appeared in the earlier story “The Old Man.” It is expressive of an ideological position that informs much of Naipaul's later work.

At the beginning of the book, Bogart, one of the major characters, is described as “the most bored man I ever knew” (Miguel Street, 10). Almost inevitably, Bogart, as well as all the other characters, have to do something insane to relieve the tedium of their existence. More important, this boredom, taken to an extreme, makes all the characters absurd reflections of the social totality.

Such is the case of Man-man, who tries to reenact the crucifixion of Christ, which for him is the only way to escape the meaninglessness of his existence. When this crucifixion act is taken seriously by other inhabitants of Miguel Street, he reverts to his normal existence and finally goes insane because he is unable to withstand the pressures of the changing social order. The tensions between the real and the unreal and the attempt to separate the meaningful from the meaningless exact too high a price in a colonial society.

Two major concerns emerge from this text that further structure Naipaul's work. First, he presents absurdity as the normal mode of behavior for the inhabitants of Miguel Street and, in so doing, commences to construct an elaborate philosophical and ideological superstructure on which to ground his work. Second, he presents the alienating aspects of a colonial society and how it marginalizes its subjects. As Geoffrey Broughton observed: “Here is the first statement of the theme of cultural deprivation; a first sketch of individuals struggling for a new way of life, both within the ambit of colonial society, and within the strangling grip of an isolated community within that society.”⁴¹

Miguel Street is Naipaul's first sustained piece of work. As he argued in 1964, it was through Miguel Street that he discovered “the trick of writing after a lot of fumbling and the book was written out of the joy of that discovery.”⁴² Elaborating on this theme in 1983, he said that in writing Miguel Street he achieved “self-awareness” and “self-knowledge.” The language of the text takes shape because of his enlightened and surer perception of the society. Somewhat in the tradition of Cecil Gray's “Merely for the Record,” his sentences are terse and crisp, and repetitions abound, which make his assertions believable. There is a lightness and frivolity of tone that tends to obscure the central concerns of the text and accentuate the natural patterns that characterize Trinidadian speech.

“The Perfect Tenants” at first seems to be outside the pattern of Naipaul's development, but it in fact fits into his overall work. In many ways it is simply an examination of the social concerns Naipaul addressed in his first collection of stories—social status, behavior, and attitudes—which he felt he had left behind when he left Trinidad and Tobago. Indeed, the story can be seen as Naipaul's attempt to understand his home situation through an imaginative projection into another society, a device he would use again in Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. Written at a time when a great deal of discussion about social status, behavior, and attitudes was taking place in England, it helped Naipaul work out some of his specific, local concerns against the larger background of the English landscape.⁴³ The articulation of such problems within an English background was particularly important for Naipaul because previously he had identified them only within his local Trinidadian landscape.

The early stories, Miguel Street, and “The Perfect Tenants” constitute the first stage of Naipaul's writing career when the short story predominated. These stories served to establish Naipaul's perception of the colonial society, which he would expand as his writing career developed. In particular, the incident of Man-man in Miguel Street is expanded and refined in The Mystic Masseur. Whereas Man-man goes from politics to the priesthood, Ganesh goes from the priesthood to politics. Whereas Man-man is fascinated by the world and spends entire days poring over and shaping one word, Ganesh attempts to appropriate his world through writing and by studying books. Whereas Man-man is taken away and considered insane (the logical progression of his development, as it were), Ganesh becomes a statesman and a respected member of the community because he is able to manipulate words and his social environment. Many of the thematic concerns of The Mystic Masseur are already evident in Miguel Street. So, too, is the manner in which Naipaul perceived his society.

NAIPAUL AND HIS PERCEPTION OF HIS SOCIETY

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement in August 1958, Naipaul articulated his views about the society that would shape his work:

Superficially, because of the multitude of races, Trinidad may seem complex, but to anyone who knows it, it is a simple colonial philistine society. Education is desirable because it may lead to security, but any unnecessary acquaintance with books is frowned upon. The writer or the painter, unless he wins recognition overseas, preferably in England, is mercilessly ridiculed. This is only slowly changing. Respectability and class still mean very little. Money means a good deal more, and the only nonfinancial achievements which are recognized are those connected with sport and music. For these reasons Trinidadians are more recognizably “characters” than people in England. Only a man's eccentricities can get him attention. It might also be that in a society without traditions, without patterns, every man finds it easier “to be himself.” Whatever the reason, this determination of people to be themselves, to cherish their eccentricities, to reveal themselves at once, makes them easy material for the writer.⁴⁴

Naipaul was not alone in condemning what he regarded as the philistine nature of West Indian society. Bridget Brereton refers to its presence in very early Trinidad society, and two eminent West Indian scholars, C. L. R. James and the martyred Walter Rodney, shared many of Naipaul's concerns in this regard. But whereas James and Rodney identified this condition as residing at the top of the society, Naipaul saw it as plaguing the entire society, with the inhabitants at the bottom of the social ladder being both the worst offenders and the victims.

To demonstrate his position, James used the example of the Mighty Sparrow, the calypsonian. James makes three important observations about his artistry. First, “He is in every way a genuine West Indian artist, the first and only one I know.” Second, “He is the living proof that there is a West Indian nation.” Third, his artistic achievement compares favorably with the highest literary achievements of the colonizer's culture, and even though the calypso would not be “ranked very high in the hierarchy of the arts. … I believe that Shakespeare would have listened very carefully to him, and Aristophanes would have given him a job in his company.” Sparrow's work was important within the overall context of the culture, James argued, because it extended the calypso medium. He concluded: “When our local dramatists and artists can evoke the popular response of a Sparrow, the artists in the Caribbean will have arrived.”⁴⁵

Rodney contended that all the creativity of the society came from what had been considered its “dregs.” In his book The Groundings with My Brothers, Rodney paid tribute to the creativity of the masses of the Caribbean and argued that the black masses (Africans and East Indians) had produced all its culture. He argued that “some of the best painters and writers are coming out of the Rastafari environment. The black people in the West Indies have produced all the culture that we have, whether it be steelband or folk music. Black bourgeoisie and white people in the West Indies have produced nothing!”⁴⁶ Further, whereas Naipaul sees the society as being static, depicts the inhabitants as generally philistine, and perceives existence in the Caribbean (and, by extension, in all colonial countries) as futile, both James and Rodney take the opposite view. In structuring his arguments against colonial peoples, Naipaul uses the social and cultural values of the colonizers' culture as the norm by which to measure the behavior of the colonial person. Anything that does not conform to those standards becomes futile, meaningless, and worthless. This position is demonstrated by Hat, one of the more eccentric characters of Miguel Street, who reflected the rather ambivalent relations that many of the characters felt toward their social environment when, in appreciation of the 150 runs Gerry Gomez and Len Harbin (both Trinidadians of European descent) scored to save Trinidad from defeat against Jamaica in an intercolonial cricket match, Hat dances gleefully and shouts, “White people is God, you hear!” (Miguel Street, 155).

Rodney, however, makes the most telling case against this perception of the society when he insists that it is perpetuated by the dominant culture through an elaborate ideological system of manipulation and control. Thus he argues in his article on black power that “white people have produced black people who administer the system and perpetuate the white values. … This is as true of the Indians as it is true of the Africans in our West Indian society.” He concludes that “the road to Black Power here in the West Indies and everywhere else must begin with a revaluation of ourselves as blacks and with a redefinition of the world from our own standpoint.”⁴⁷

For Rodney, part of the tragedy of West Indian society was that certain elements had appropriated and become entrapped by the ideological apparatuses of the dominant class. Part of the process of social reconstruction lay in revaluating those judgments through ideologies such as black power and the imperative that West Indian society be viewed through West Indian eyes.

Naipaul, however, was prepared to see West Indian society through the eyes of the English. This is the dominant perspective from which he analyzed and judged it, and it may be one reason why he attacked the concept of black power so savagely. His three years at Oxford tended to magnify the ills of West Indian society and to structure his method of analysis and his manner of depicting it. The additional years he spent in London did not change his view significantly. Where Rodney was prepared to conduct his analysis of West Indian society (and colonial reality) at the level of what Edward Schillebeeckx calls the plane of “conjectural” history, Naipaul was content to leave his arguments at the “ephemeral” level of history and culture. He remained secure in the judgment that English culture was the standard against which social, historical, and cultural development should be measured.⁴⁸

Yet a paradox stands at the center of Naipaul's work and that of many other colonial writers who left their societies to practice their craft in the home of the colonizer. They left, in Naipaul's words, because the society was “unimportant,” “uncreative,” and “cynical”; one could not practice one's craft. Yet as Nancy Fitch pointed out in referring to James Joyce, Edna O’Brien, and Naipaul, “The force which propelled them outwards remained in their consciousness and formed their art, providing a theme in their work.”⁴⁹

The first phase of Naipaul's work belongs to a specific historical tradition in literature. That Naipaul, from the inception of his writing, gave a privileged status to the culture of the colonizer and chose that site in which to anchor his work should not detract from his central dependence on the experiences of the colonial world to fashion the content of his work and the historical tradition of West Indian literature to shape his specific “mode of writing.” The central tension between his Eastern sensibility (subjective) and the material condition of his Western experiences (objective) had not yet begun to articulate itself with any insistence, even though it can be perceived in its nascent form. As his career unfolds, this central tension generates the major problematic of his work.

Notes

1. The social development of Trinidad and Tobago can be divided into four periods: 1833-1870, when new villages were established by the former slaves and when large numbers of East Indians, Portuguese, and Chinese arrived; 1870-1900, when the society evolved into a more cohesive pattern, though still demarcated along class lines; 1900-1940, when the development of social consciousness among the black masses (both the East Indians and the Africans) took center stage; and 1940-1962, when national independence was achieved. See Bridget Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), for a discussion of the first two periods.

   Raphael Sebastien argues for a Marxist division of the society along the lines of political economy. He lists three periods: 1797-1833, when slave labor became generalized and systematic colonization of the society took place; 1833-1921, when agrarian capitalism was organized and an urban-industrialized proletariat formed; and 1921-1956, when the national bourgeoisie consolidated its dominance over the economy. See “The Political Economy of Capitalism of Trinidad and Tobago,” Tribune 1 (1981): 5-52.

2. Brereton, Race Relations, p. 58.

3. Jose Bodu, quoted in Anthony de Verteuil, The Years of Revolt: Trinidad, 1881-1888 (Port of Spain: Paria, 1984), p. 233.

4. In subsequent years, the list of banned publications included the Negro Worker, all publications of the National Campaign Committee of the Communist party of the U.S.A., the Daily Worker, the Young Worker, Russia Today, pamphlets by the Trinidadian George Padmore, the father of pan-Africanism, Negro Anthology by Nancy Cunard, and many others.

5. See the excerpt from Sander's interview with Alfred Mendes in Reinhard Sander, From Trinidad: An Anthology of Early West Indian Writing (New York: Africana, 1978), p. 4. See also Ralph de Bossiere's account of that period in “On Writing a Novel,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 17 (1982): 1-12. De Bossiere's first novel, Crown Jewel, is set in the turbulent 1930s.

6. Sander, From Trinidad, p. 1.

7. W. I. Carr (“Reflections on the Novel in the British Caribbean,” Queens Quarterly 70 [Winter 1964]: 585) and Gerald Moore (The Chosen Tongue [London: Longmans, Green, 1969], p. 6) argue that West Indian literature merited serious attention in 1949.

8. I will argue that the essential aspect of the culture resides at the unofficial level, in the “culture of carnival,” as I call it. Needless to say, I do not endorse the argument for a “life without fiction” prior to a written culture, except in its most narrow sense (see Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background [London: Faber, 1970]). Neither do I privilege the written discourse over the nonwritten. Calypsos, for example, still remain an extremely effective means of communicating with the populace of Trinidad and Tobago. See Selwyn R. Cudjoe, “Revolutionary Struggle and the Novel,” Caribbean Quarterly 25 (December 1979), for some notion of how the novel functioned before and after the achievement of independence.

9. Sander, From Trinidad, pp. 36, 39.

10. Ibid., p. 27.

11. Ibid., p. 28.

12. Ibid., p. 31.

13. See Selwyn R. Cudjoe, “Tradition, Miguel Street, and Other Stories,” Trinidad and Tobago Review 5 (1982), and 6 (1983) for an examination of the short stories of the period.

14. Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975), p. 50.

15. Seepersad Naipaul, The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories (Port of Spain: Guardian Commercial Printery, 1946), p. 19.

16. BBC Written Archives Centre, “Caribbean Voices Scripts,” September 24, 1950. All quotations are taken from this source.

17. V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (London: André Deutsch, 1964), p. 45.

18. Helen Tiffin, “The Lost Ones: A Study of the Works of V. S. Naipaul” (Ph.D. diss., Queens University, 1972), p. 14.

19. “This is Home,” BBC Written Archives Centre, “Caribbean Voices Scripts,” June 24, 1951.

20. See V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Center (New York: Knopf, 1984).

21. This story appears in A Flag on the Island (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) but is changed somewhat from the original version. I quote from the original text as it appeared in 1951: “The Mourners,” BBC Written Archives Centre, “Caribbean Voices Scripts,” September 16, 1951.

22. BBC Written Archives Centre, “Caribbean Voices Scripts,” April 27, 1952.

23. In 1972 Naipaul spoke about his sense of shame at being among the poor relatives in his family and his lifelong ambition to be wealthy: “I think that perhaps one was ashamed of the poverty because one was so close to what was a great deal of wealth. I think that my father's uncle who was killed the other day—he died a millionaire—and I think that my mother's family, after all, were quite well off. But our little group within the clan was impoverished and I think that one sensed the disgrace of this poverty because one was fairly close to people who had a certain amount of money. … For a long, long time, I used to worship people who had made their own money. I would look at them as nearly divine beings” (“Myself When Young,” August 24, 1972, BBC Radio Broadcast).

24. “The Old Man,” BBC Written Archives Centre, “Caribbean Voices Scripts,” April 26, 1953.

25. “A Family Reunion,” BBC Written Archives Centre, “Caribbean Voices Scripts.”

26. A Flag on the Island, p. 9.

27. Times (London), January 2, 1964.

28. In reviewing Selvon's Turn Again Tiger, his sequel to A Brighter Sun, Naipaul wrote: “Mr. Selvon is without the stamina for the full-length novel, and he has here found the undemanding form which suits his talents best: the flimsiest of frames which can, without apparent disorder, contain unrelated episodes and characters. … Mr. Selvon's gifts may not be important but they are precious” (New Statesman, December 6, 1958, pp. 826-27).

29. BBC Written Archives Centre, “Caribbean Voices Scripts,” January 22, 1956.

30. “Pooter,” Times Saturday Review, November 9, 1968, p. 23.

31. Quoted in Victor Ramraj, “A Study of the Novels of V. S. Naipaul” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Brunswick, 1968), pp. 117, 11.

32. “Myself When Young,” BBC Radio Broadcast, August 24, 1972.

33. Ibid.

34. Letter to Grenfell Williams, BBC Written Archives Centre.

35. “Unfurnished Entrails—the Novelist V. S. Naipaul in Conversation with Jim Douglas Henry,” The Listener, November 25, 1971, p. 721.

36. V. S. Naipaul, “Prologue to an Autobiography,” Vanity Fair 46 (April 1983), tells how Miguel Street was born. One ought not, however, be carried away by Naipaul's romantic and somewhat idealist recounting of that process some thirty years later.

37. The Overcrowded Barracoon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 27.

38. V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Center: Two Narratives (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1984), p. 20.

39. That “The Enemy,” written as a part of Miguel Street (it later appeared in A Flag on the Island), could be extracted from the text without damaging its unity demonstrates that Miguel Street ought not to be considered a novel. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement on April 24, 1959, a reviewer concluded: “Miguel Street is not properly a novel at all but a series of character sketches, concerned with the most singular or significant of the street's inhabitants, most of whom turn up in one another's sketches” (p. 237). Naipaul confirms this view in “Prologue to an Autobiography.”

40. V. S. Naipaul, Miguel Street (London: Heineman, 1959), p. 216; hereafter MS.

41. Geoffrey Broughton, “A Critical Study of the Development of V. S. Naipaul as Reflected in His Four Major West Indian Novels” (Master's thesis, University of London, 1968), p. 18.

42. Times (London), February 1, 1964.

43. See the introduction to the abbreviated version of The Perfect Tenants and the Mourners, ed. Francis Curtis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

44. The Overcrowded Barracoon, pp. 9-10.

45. C. L. R. James, The Future in the Present (London: Allison & Busby, 1977), pp. 191, 188.

46. Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers (London: Bogle L’Ouverture, 1969), p. 68.

47. Ibid., pp. 33-4.

48. In his work Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, trans. Hurbert Hoskins (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), Schillebeeckx identified three different planes of history which he says “enfold and interpenetrate one another”: (a) “ephemeral” history, which consists of everyday events; (b) “conjectural” history, which is more expansive and comprehensive but possesses a slower rate of change than the first: (c) “structural” history, which lasts for centuries and borders “on the central point of what moves and what does not, although not standing outside history” (p. 577). There is a suggestion in Schillebeeckx's understanding of history that certain historical judgments which are made and solidified by intellectuals (usually of the dominant class) become so impermeated in the minds of men that it takes a broad epochal movement (perhaps revolutionary struggle) to break its hold. The difference between Rodney's and Naipaul's judgments can be thought of as lying at the “conjectural” and “ephemeral” planes of historical judgments.

49. Nancy Fitch, “History Is a Nightmare” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1981), p. 28.