从后殖民主义到世界主义
摘要
对于奈保尔其人其作的研究可谓林林总总，褒贬不一。然而鲜有学者使用从后殖民主义到世界主义的研究视角对奈保尔作品中发展的追寻主题进行研究，而该视角恰恰与奈保尔看待世界的动态眼光并行。后殖民主义兴起于二十世纪七十年代形成于九十年代，观照殖民统治的历史现实对第三世界民族文化心理造成的悖谬状态，包括殖民文化所造成的文化身份与认同的不确定性，本土与西方关系的紧张性以及永远的暂时性。现代意义上的世界主义随着玛莎·努斯鲍姆1994年在《波士顿评论》上对其重新定义而进入主流，并赋予差异以无限的可能性。
对于奈保尔和他作品中的人物而言，身份和归属之谜是他们纠结在心的恒久情结，是必需面对的问题和必需要做的选择。无论是其“记忆文学”还是“旅行文学”无一例外聚焦的都是强烈的自我身份意识。本文尝试以奈保尔的文化身份追寻为切入点，选择了他与特立尼达—印度—英国三地相对应的作品作为研究对象，即《毕司沃斯先生的房子》、《印度三部曲》和《魔种》，试图在细读文本的基础上，多层次多角度论述奈保尔对家园身份的追寻历程：逃避—流动—杂糅—重新确定，分析其从后殖民主义到世界主义的思想转变，探索全球化背景下造成他身份困惑与追寻的社会、文化根源，揭示作品对当前移民身份归属的映射和借鉴意义。
本文由导言、三章正文和结语五部分组成。
导言部分首先审视了国内外评论界对奈保尔的批评与研究，指出围绕奈保尔及其作品的争议不仅仅是一个文学现象，也是解殖运动和全球化进程的结果。在对身份、流亡等概念及其意义的嬗变进行了全面梳理分析的基础上，提出了论文的理论框架和论点。
第一章运用拉康的主体发展阶段理论对奈保尔的早期杰作《毕斯沃斯先生的房子》进行了研究。通过聚焦一位双重边缘化人在背井离乡的环境里追寻独立身份和生命意义而失败的故事，展示特立尼达的后殖民窘境，揭示殖民地并不能为后殖民主体提供他们一心向往的独立身份的社会现实。毕斯沃斯先生穷其一生所得到的粗制滥造的房子体现了兰格德·怀特的悖论“在一个充满矛盾的社会里，成功和失败是一次经历的两个方面”。
第二章从东方主义视角对奈保尔的旅行游记“印度三部曲”进行了解读。奈保尔对其文化之根的执着追寻在循序渐进的过程中得到升华，而对印度评判中的东方主义色彩则逐渐减弱。《幽暗国度》中的印度肮脏、蒙昧、未开化，奉行丛林哲学；他找不到对祖先文化的认同感，最后逃离印度。《受伤的文明》中的印度颓废、停滞、智识无力。而《百万叛变的今天》中的印度是一个充满变化、叛变、具有活力的社会，奈保尔似乎从动乱的、多样化的社会力量中看到了希望。但这只是某种程度上的接受，而非认同。
第三章对奈保尔的封笔之作《魔种》进行了研究。本小说见证了奈保尔从一个后殖民主义者向世界主义者过渡的过程。早在《抵达之谜》中，奈保尔已经表达了英国乡村恬静的生活使得他的灵魂不再漂泊。奈保尔的新世纪作品展现了他的世界主义观。本土与全球，特殊性与普遍性，家园与世界的关系超越对立，互相建构。对于奈保尔和《魔种》的主人公威利而言，离散不仅意味着创伤和失去，也意味着人生更多的可能性。他们拥有不止一个历史、家园和身份。但归根结底，他们是英国公民而且乐于如此。
结语部分简要总结了一个后殖民主体对身份与精神家园的追寻之旅。本文的结论是，通过写作，奈保尔对于他所生活的这个世界的思考是动态发展的，他最终明确了他的归属。本研究也例证了阅读文学作品可以为人们提供更深入地理解世界现实的方法，可以促使人们的观点与时俱进。同时，本研究强调在全球化的今天，超越文化特质与民族倾向，世界主义文学在批判性地、多层面地规划世界秩序方面彼此联接、互为支撑。
Much has been written about Naipaul’s travel and fictional works and hispostcolonial identities, but few as yet has dealt with Naipaul’s progressive quest foridentity and imaginary home on frameworks from postcolonialism tocosmopolitanism, which parallels Naipaul’s dynamic vision on the developing world.Postcolonialism emerged in the1970s and attained its established place in the1990s.It looks at the paradoxical state of the third world’s ethnic cultural psychology causedby the historical reality of colonial domination, including identity uncertainty, tensionbetween locality and the West and sense of temporality. The contemporary sense ofcosmopolitanism first entered into the mainstream with Martha Nussbaum’sredefinition of it in The Boston Review in1994, which ensures diversity limitlesspossibilities.
For Naipaul, as well as his protagonists, identity and home are problems theyhave to face and make choices. Based on a close reading of Naipaul’s major fictionsand non-fictions from his early, middle and late periods：A House for Mr. Biswas，TheIndia Trilogy， and Magic Seeds, this dissertation explores the journey of apostcolonial subject searching for identity, cultural roots and imaginary home andanalyzes the transition of Naipaul’s perspective from postcolonialism tocosmopolitanism. It argues the postcolonial subjects’ identification is constructedfrom escaping, floating and hybridizing to becoming, from being homeless toattaining an imaginary home in an era of globalization, and discloses the referentialsignificance of Naipaul’s major works to the present issues of immigrant identity.
This dissertation comprises three chapters between an introduction and aconclusion. The introduction provides a general review of commentaries on Naipauland his writings, points out that few writers have as many acclaimers as well asdisclaimers for their works. Disputes around Naipaul the person and his works are notliterary phenomenon alone, but part of the consequence of the prevailingdecolonization movement and the process of globalization. It traces the evolution ofthe concepts of identity, displacement and homelessness, provides a critical review and builds up the basic theoretical framework and arguments of this study.
Chapter One is a study of Naipaul’s early masterpiece A House for Mr. Biswaswith Lacan’s theory. It focuses on Naipaul’s dramatization of the failure of uprootedcultures to survive in an alien environment and a doubly marginalized man’s struggleto resist communal and colonial pressures and to give meanings to his existence andexplores the postcolonial predicament of Trinidadians. This chapter also draws outthat the colony can’t provide the postcolonial subjects with independent identity. Thehouse on Sikkim Street Mr. Biswas finally achieves embodies a paradox by which“achievement and failure are aspects of a single experience typical of a world which isshot through with contradictions”(White,1975:99).
Chapter Two is on Naipaul’s Indian Trilogy from the perspective of Orientalism,an important theory of Postcolonialism. His persistent spirit of pursuing cultural rootsand discovering more about himself has been sublimated. Here he is hoping to find atradition of continuity and a sense of wholeness of existence which he feels lacking inthe fragmented Trinidad society. After examining India in an overall and thoroughway, he comes to understand India and then becomes sympathetic, concerned aboutIndia and at last live with it in a gradual and orderly process. An Area of Darknessviews Indians as an uncivilized and barbaric lot, who merely adhere to the philosophyof the bush; India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) complicates epistemologicalbackwardness, as Naipaul sees it, with psychic disability; India: A Million MutiniesNow constitutes a radical departure from or retreat from his earlier representations.This book depicts a society full of changes and mutinies, from which Naipaul seemsto see the hope of India. It is a feeling sort of approbation but not identification.
Chapter Three is a study on Magic Seeds，which witnesses the process ofNaipaul’s development from a postcolonialist to a cosmopolitan. Early in The Enigmaof Arrival, Naipaul narrates the change of perspective in his mind that the tranquil lifein the British countryside eases his soul and he is beginning to heal and more thanheal. The changing world vision reveals his cosmopolitanism in his works in the newcentury. Cosmopolitanism demonstrates that the relationship between the local andthe global, the universal and the provincial, the home and the world are mutually constitutive rather than merely opposite. The protagonist of Magic Seeds, Willie, is agood representative of Naipaul, for him, the experience of Diasporas not only meanstrauma and loss, but also the gains of possibility. They have more than one history,home and identity. But all in all, Naipaul fashions for himself and Willie Englishrather than postcolonial and he is willing to be so.
The concluding chapter briefly summarizes the pursuing route of postcolonialsubject’s identification and imaginary homeland. The final conclusion is that throughwriting, Naipaul progresses towards his meditation on the world, and finally assertshis identity and imaginary homeland. This dissertation also exemplifies that readingliterary works may provide a method for people to have a deeper understanding of theworld reality with updated perspectives. Another central point of this study is to showhow beyond cultural specificity and national contemplation, cosmopolitan narrativesare interlinked in mapping the global order critically from multiple points of referencein our globalized times.
对于奈保尔和他作品中的人物而言，身份和归属之谜是他们纠结在心的恒久情结，是必需面对的问题和必需要做的选择。无论是其“记忆文学”还是“旅行文学”无一例外聚焦的都是强烈的自我身份意识。本文尝试以奈保尔的文化身份追寻为切入点，选择了他与特立尼达—印度—英国三地相对应的作品作为研究对象，即《毕司沃斯先生的房子》、《印度三部曲》和《魔种》，试图在细读文本的基础上，多层次多角度论述奈保尔对家园身份的追寻历程：逃避—流动—杂糅—重新确定，分析其从后殖民主义到世界主义的思想转变，探索全球化背景下造成他身份困惑与追寻的社会、文化根源，揭示作品对当前移民身份归属的映射和借鉴意义。
本文由导言、三章正文和结语五部分组成。
导言部分首先审视了国内外评论界对奈保尔的批评与研究，指出围绕奈保尔及其作品的争议不仅仅是一个文学现象，也是解殖运动和全球化进程的结果。在对身份、流亡等概念及其意义的嬗变进行了全面梳理分析的基础上，提出了论文的理论框架和论点。
第一章运用拉康的主体发展阶段理论对奈保尔的早期杰作《毕斯沃斯先生的房子》进行了研究。通过聚焦一位双重边缘化人在背井离乡的环境里追寻独立身份和生命意义而失败的故事，展示特立尼达的后殖民窘境，揭示殖民地并不能为后殖民主体提供他们一心向往的独立身份的社会现实。毕斯沃斯先生穷其一生所得到的粗制滥造的房子体现了兰格德·怀特的悖论“在一个充满矛盾的社会里，成功和失败是一次经历的两个方面”。
第二章从东方主义视角对奈保尔的旅行游记“印度三部曲”进行了解读。奈保尔对其文化之根的执着追寻在循序渐进的过程中得到升华，而对印度评判中的东方主义色彩则逐渐减弱。《幽暗国度》中的印度肮脏、蒙昧、未开化，奉行丛林哲学；他找不到对祖先文化的认同感，最后逃离印度。《受伤的文明》中的印度颓废、停滞、智识无力。而《百万叛变的今天》中的印度是一个充满变化、叛变、具有活力的社会，奈保尔似乎从动乱的、多样化的社会力量中看到了希望。但这只是某种程度上的接受，而非认同。
第三章对奈保尔的封笔之作《魔种》进行了研究。本小说见证了奈保尔从一个后殖民主义者向世界主义者过渡的过程。早在《抵达之谜》中，奈保尔已经表达了英国乡村恬静的生活使得他的灵魂不再漂泊。奈保尔的新世纪作品展现了他的世界主义观。本土与全球，特殊性与普遍性，家园与世界的关系超越对立，互相建构。对于奈保尔和《魔种》的主人公威利而言，离散不仅意味着创伤和失去，也意味着人生更多的可能性。他们拥有不止一个历史、家园和身份。但归根结底，他们是英国公民而且乐于如此。
结语部分简要总结了一个后殖民主体对身份与精神家园的追寻之旅。本文的结论是，通过写作，奈保尔对于他所生活的这个世界的思考是动态发展的，他最终明确了他的归属。本研究也例证了阅读文学作品可以为人们提供更深入地理解世界现实的方法，可以促使人们的观点与时俱进。同时，本研究强调在全球化的今天，超越文化特质与民族倾向，世界主义文学在批判性地、多层面地规划世界秩序方面彼此联接、互为支撑。
Much has been written about Naipaul’s travel and fictional works and hispostcolonial identities, but few as yet has dealt with Naipaul’s progressive quest foridentity and imaginary home on frameworks from postcolonialism tocosmopolitanism, which parallels Naipaul’s dynamic vision on the developing world.Postcolonialism emerged in the1970s and attained its established place in the1990s.It looks at the paradoxical state of the third world’s ethnic cultural psychology causedby the historical reality of colonial domination, including identity uncertainty, tensionbetween locality and the West and sense of temporality. The contemporary sense ofcosmopolitanism first entered into the mainstream with Martha Nussbaum’sredefinition of it in The Boston Review in1994, which ensures diversity limitlesspossibilities.
For Naipaul, as well as his protagonists, identity and home are problems theyhave to face and make choices. Based on a close reading of Naipaul’s major fictionsand non-fictions from his early, middle and late periods：A House for Mr. Biswas，TheIndia Trilogy， and Magic Seeds, this dissertation explores the journey of apostcolonial subject searching for identity, cultural roots and imaginary home andanalyzes the transition of Naipaul’s perspective from postcolonialism tocosmopolitanism. It argues the postcolonial subjects’ identification is constructedfrom escaping, floating and hybridizing to becoming, from being homeless toattaining an imaginary home in an era of globalization, and discloses the referentialsignificance of Naipaul’s major works to the present issues of immigrant identity.
This dissertation comprises three chapters between an introduction and aconclusion. The introduction provides a general review of commentaries on Naipauland his writings, points out that few writers have as many acclaimers as well asdisclaimers for their works. Disputes around Naipaul the person and his works are notliterary phenomenon alone, but part of the consequence of the prevailingdecolonization movement and the process of globalization. It traces the evolution ofthe concepts of identity, displacement and homelessness, provides a critical review and builds up the basic theoretical framework and arguments of this study.
Chapter One is a study of Naipaul’s early masterpiece A House for Mr. Biswaswith Lacan’s theory. It focuses on Naipaul’s dramatization of the failure of uprootedcultures to survive in an alien environment and a doubly marginalized man’s struggleto resist communal and colonial pressures and to give meanings to his existence andexplores the postcolonial predicament of Trinidadians. This chapter also draws outthat the colony can’t provide the postcolonial subjects with independent identity. Thehouse on Sikkim Street Mr. Biswas finally achieves embodies a paradox by which“achievement and failure are aspects of a single experience typical of a world which isshot through with contradictions”(White,1975:99).
Chapter Two is on Naipaul’s Indian Trilogy from the perspective of Orientalism,an important theory of Postcolonialism. His persistent spirit of pursuing cultural rootsand discovering more about himself has been sublimated. Here he is hoping to find atradition of continuity and a sense of wholeness of existence which he feels lacking inthe fragmented Trinidad society. After examining India in an overall and thoroughway, he comes to understand India and then becomes sympathetic, concerned aboutIndia and at last live with it in a gradual and orderly process. An Area of Darknessviews Indians as an uncivilized and barbaric lot, who merely adhere to the philosophyof the bush; India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) complicates epistemologicalbackwardness, as Naipaul sees it, with psychic disability; India: A Million MutiniesNow constitutes a radical departure from or retreat from his earlier representations.This book depicts a society full of changes and mutinies, from which Naipaul seemsto see the hope of India. It is a feeling sort of approbation but not identification.
Chapter Three is a study on Magic Seeds，which witnesses the process ofNaipaul’s development from a postcolonialist to a cosmopolitan. Early in The Enigmaof Arrival, Naipaul narrates the change of perspective in his mind that the tranquil lifein the British countryside eases his soul and he is beginning to heal and more thanheal. The changing world vision reveals his cosmopolitanism in his works in the newcentury. Cosmopolitanism demonstrates that the relationship between the local andthe global, the universal and the provincial, the home and the world are mutually constitutive rather than merely opposite. The protagonist of Magic Seeds, Willie, is agood representative of Naipaul, for him, the experience of Diasporas not only meanstrauma and loss, but also the gains of possibility. They have more than one history,home and identity. But all in all, Naipaul fashions for himself and Willie Englishrather than postcolonial and he is willing to be so.
The concluding chapter briefly summarizes the pursuing route of postcolonialsubject’s identification and imaginary homeland. The final conclusion is that throughwriting, Naipaul progresses towards his meditation on the world, and finally assertshis identity and imaginary homeland. This dissertation also exemplifies that readingliterary works may provide a method for people to have a deeper understanding of theworld reality with updated perspectives. Another central point of this study is to showhow beyond cultural specificity and national contemplation, cosmopolitan narrativesare interlinked in mapping the global order critically from multiple points of referencein our globalized times.
引文
2See Robert Sennet,“Cosmopolitanism and the Social Experience of Cities,” for more on thisconnection.
3For Butler’s detailed critique of the concept of “universality,” see her essay entitled“Universality in Culture.” For Sissela Bok’s critique of Nussbaum, see her essay entitled,“FromPart to Whole.” For Hilary Putnam’s essay on emphasizing the need for patriotism, see “MustWe Choose between Patriotism and Universal Reason?” Gertrude Himmelfarb argues that theterm “world citizen has little meaning except in the context of a state”(See in Cohen112).
4Fischer-Tiné, Harald (2011), Postcolonial Studies, retrieved16November2011.
5Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake. Film Theory: An Introduction. Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press,1988:68.
6Said addresses, in particular, the Islamic world, but implies a broader applicability for his thesesfor other colonized regions.
7Some of these Eurocentric generalizations are castigated as part of the myth of grand narratives,such as that of progress and universality. For further details, see Jean-Francois Lyotard, ThePostmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), and Edward Said, Orientalism (1979).
8For a nuanced discussion of the “new cosmopolitanisms” today, see Bruce Robbins,“Introduction: Part I” to Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyong the Nation. ed. PhengCheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1998),1-19. HereRobbins aptly notes that “Like nations, cosmopolitanisms are now plural and particular”(2) andsignify not “an ideal of detachment” but rather “a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment,or attachment at a distance”(3).
9Naipaul has commented on writers and their legend on various occasions. See Interview withHamilton and his “Two Worlds” Nobel lecture, Literary Occasions York: Vintage.181-205
10Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake. Film Theory: An Introduction. Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press,1988:68.
11Naipaul has called the novel “very much my father’s book.” Quoted in Ian Buruma,“Introduction,” V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas. xii.
12In the Foreword of The Adventures of Gurudeva, Naipaul writes that he is not quite sure howthe wish to be a writer came to his father.“But I feel now, reading the stories after a long timeand seeing so clearly (what was once hidden from me)the Brahmin standpoint from which theyare written, that it might have been the caste-sense, the Hindu reverence for learning and theword, awakened by the beginnings of an English education and a Hindu religions training”(Seepersad:12-13)
13This structure has largely determined how the novel has been read. A brief survey of titlesprovided in a bibliography compiled by Bruce King (2003) reveals that the points ofconcentration that structures the interrogation of A House for Mr. Biswas are exile,(dis)placement and building. It seems that a study of the house that Mr. Biswas builds has sofar neglected the domesticity invoked by the presence of the “house” in the title, insteadfocusing on its construction. While it is perhaps impossible to completely escape the gravity ofthe notion of buildings that the novel addresses as its concern, it seems remiss to ignore thefiguration of domesticity in the houses in which Mr. Biswas lives.
14This marks the shift from space to site. Sites are formed when our activities in space givespaces meaning. This work refracts Kylie’s (Crane,2007:71-85) interrogation of how this shiftoccurs in her analysis of the outback and the Australian. Immigrants can claim and occupyspaces in the nation through knowing them, moving through them, measuring them with theirbodies, and manipulating them. Our activities in space give that space its three-dimensionalnature. A failure to perform means a failure to occupy.
15Buildings and houses are not only shelters but also presuppose the acquisition of land—whichwas the main concern of colonialism. This colonial attitude towards nature is also expressed bythe careless destruction of places which Naipaul’s characters perform. Naipaul uses thisdestruction in order to symbolize how his characters are not native to the Caribbean whointended to cultivate the land for profit.
16In “Jasmine”, Naipaul recounts an incident in the1950s when he visited an elderly lady of adistinguished Christian Indian family in whose veranda he smelt a flower he has known sincehis childhood in Trinidad but the name of which he never found out. He asked the lady for thename of that flower and she told him it was called ‘jasmine’. As a youth in Trinidad he wasfamiliar with the scent of the flower. But he never could link the dull vegetation to thebeautiful and romantic name of ‘jasmine’, which was “a word in a book, a word to play with,something removed from the dull vegetation”(OB19). Both ‘bower’ and ‘jasmine’ are namesonly belonging to the British textbooks, the romance of them is separated from the dull realityof the colonial island. It takes more than education to bridge the gap between the signified andthe signifier. A lot more actions are needed to be taken, like the construction of a house on thesite of “bower”.
17Cudjoe’s other remark on this issue appears somewhat imprecise:“Whereas The MiddlePassage draws heavily on English imperialist writers to explain the West Indian world, An Areaof Darkness draws upon Bhagavad Gita and other religious texts to explain the Eastern worldand thereby reveals Naipaul’s ambivalent relationship to both Trinidad and India and hispeople”(Cudjoe82). Whatever reading of Bhagavad Gila Naipaul offers is heavily stamped byhis orientalist bias, which is the weight in this chapter.
18By chance, the chapter is titled “A Resting for the Imagination,” here, a quote from Darwin.
19Naipaul explains the origin of the term–“boxwallah” in “Jamshed into Jimmy,” an article thatfirst appeared in New Statesman in1963and was subsequently reprinted in The OvercrowdedBarracoon. He thinks it derives from “the Anglo-Indian office-box of which Kipling speaks sofeelingly in Something of Myself”(52).
20Nixon demonstrates that Naipaul’s censure of mimicry in postcolonial cultures resemblesFrantz Fanon’s disdain of the same in The Wretched of the Earth (137-39).
21Richard Cronin, An Area of Darkness, Imagining India. New York: St. Martin’s Press,1989,103-13.
22Civilizations are usually tied to religion or some other belief system. The concept ofcivilization is central to the historical theories of Arnold J. Toynbee who described history asthe process of the rise and decline of civilization. It is also central to the political beliefs ofSamuel Huntington who argues that the defining characteristic of the21st century will be theinteraction and conflict between civilizations. The concept of empire overlaps with that of“civilization”, and therefore it is important to take into account what actually constitutescivilization and whether any western analysis can take into its fold the connotations that holdtrue in the Indian context.
23Tagore, Rabindranath. Lectures and Addresses. Civilization and Progress.(Madras: Macmillan,1970), pp.45-55.
24Das, Sisir Kumar. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore. Vol. II The Center of IndianCulture.(Delhi: Sahitya Akademi,1999), pp.475-78.
25V. S. Naipaul,“A Million Mutinies,” India Today International August18,1997:21.
26It is clear that Naipaul delights in being different from the others. Compare, for example, thisattitude to his dislike for being an “Indian” in An Area of Darkness:“And for the first time inmy life I was one of the crowd Now in Bombay I entered a shop or a restaurant and awaited aspecial quality of response. And there was nothing. It was like being denied part of my reality.Again and again I was caught. I was faceless. I might sink without a trace into that Indian crowd.I had been made by Trinidad and England; recognition of my difference was necessary to me. Ifelt the need to impose myself, and didn’t know how (AD39).
27Theroux, Paul. Sir Vidla's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents. American Scholar68.1(1999):329.
28Keay, John. Kaleidoscope. A cassette recording of John Keay’s conversation with Naipaul,September21,1990. Naipaul Archive.
29Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon,1994),54. Or rather, he praisesthe early Naipaul, but in fact Naipaul continues to do this throughout his literary career.
30Magic Seeds: pp.5,10-13,17-19,110,167,230,239,278.
31Transcript of interview with Ronald Bryden (literary editor of Spectator) for the BBC, January29,1973. Naipaul Archive, University of Tulsa.
32Wilailak Saraithong, author of Citizen of the World: Post-Colonial Identity in the Works of V.S.Naipaul, a doctoral dissertation, found a photocopy of this article among Naipaul’s papers inthe Naipaul Archive in Tulsa, unfortunately the page numbers were missing.
33Interview with Dileep Padgaonkar,1983; reprinted in V.S. Naipaul: An Anthology of RecentCriticism. Ed. Purabi Panwar,2003.
34Ibid.
35Fanon, Frantz Black Skin, White Masks, published by Editions du Seuil1952, a new editiontranslated by Richard Philcox with a foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah,2008.
36Naipaul’s lecture,“The Universal Civilization,” appears as a “postscript” in his collection TheWriter and the World. Though dated1992in the book, the lecture was first given at theManhattan Institute in New York in1990.
37Mr. Lu Jiande published “Naipaul, the Adoptive Son of British Culture” in Global Times,15.Oct.19,2001
38Press Release,11Oct.2001, www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2001/press.html
39See Walcott,“The Garden Path: V.S. Naipaul”127-28on Naipaul’s numerous predecessors andcontemporaries 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 […]”128.
40Associated Press. October11,2001. http:/www.msn.com
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3For Butler’s detailed critique of the concept of “universality,” see her essay entitled“Universality in Culture.” For Sissela Bok’s critique of Nussbaum, see her essay entitled,“FromPart to Whole.” For Hilary Putnam’s essay on emphasizing the need for patriotism, see “MustWe Choose between Patriotism and Universal Reason?” Gertrude Himmelfarb argues that theterm “world citizen has little meaning except in the context of a state”(See in Cohen112).
4Fischer-Tiné, Harald (2011), Postcolonial Studies, retrieved16November2011.
5Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake. Film Theory: An Introduction. Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press,1988:68.
6Said addresses, in particular, the Islamic world, but implies a broader applicability for his thesesfor other colonized regions.
7Some of these Eurocentric generalizations are castigated as part of the myth of grand narratives,such as that of progress and universality. For further details, see Jean-Francois Lyotard, ThePostmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), and Edward Said, Orientalism (1979).
8For a nuanced discussion of the “new cosmopolitanisms” today, see Bruce Robbins,“Introduction: Part I” to Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyong the Nation. ed. PhengCheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1998),1-19. HereRobbins aptly notes that “Like nations, cosmopolitanisms are now plural and particular”(2) andsignify not “an ideal of detachment” but rather “a reality of (re)attachment, multiple attachment,or attachment at a distance”(3).
9Naipaul has commented on writers and their legend on various occasions. See Interview withHamilton and his “Two Worlds” Nobel lecture, Literary Occasions York: Vintage.181-205
10Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake. Film Theory: An Introduction. Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press,1988:68.
11Naipaul has called the novel “very much my father’s book.” Quoted in Ian Buruma,“Introduction,” V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas. xii.
12In the Foreword of The Adventures of Gurudeva, Naipaul writes that he is not quite sure howthe wish to be a writer came to his father.“But I feel now, reading the stories after a long timeand seeing so clearly (what was once hidden from me)the Brahmin standpoint from which theyare written, that it might have been the caste-sense, the Hindu reverence for learning and theword, awakened by the beginnings of an English education and a Hindu religions training”(Seepersad:12-13)
13This structure has largely determined how the novel has been read. A brief survey of titlesprovided in a bibliography compiled by Bruce King (2003) reveals that the points ofconcentration that structures the interrogation of A House for Mr. Biswas are exile,(dis)placement and building. It seems that a study of the house that Mr. Biswas builds has sofar neglected the domesticity invoked by the presence of the “house” in the title, insteadfocusing on its construction. While it is perhaps impossible to completely escape the gravity ofthe notion of buildings that the novel addresses as its concern, it seems remiss to ignore thefiguration of domesticity in the houses in which Mr. Biswas lives.
14This marks the shift from space to site. Sites are formed when our activities in space givespaces meaning. This work refracts Kylie’s (Crane,2007:71-85) interrogation of how this shiftoccurs in her analysis of the outback and the Australian. Immigrants can claim and occupyspaces in the nation through knowing them, moving through them, measuring them with theirbodies, and manipulating them. Our activities in space give that space its three-dimensionalnature. A failure to perform means a failure to occupy.
15Buildings and houses are not only shelters but also presuppose the acquisition of land—whichwas the main concern of colonialism. This colonial attitude towards nature is also expressed bythe careless destruction of places which Naipaul’s characters perform. Naipaul uses thisdestruction in order to symbolize how his characters are not native to the Caribbean whointended to cultivate the land for profit.
16In “Jasmine”, Naipaul recounts an incident in the1950s when he visited an elderly lady of adistinguished Christian Indian family in whose veranda he smelt a flower he has known sincehis childhood in Trinidad but the name of which he never found out. He asked the lady for thename of that flower and she told him it was called ‘jasmine’. As a youth in Trinidad he wasfamiliar with the scent of the flower. But he never could link the dull vegetation to thebeautiful and romantic name of ‘jasmine’, which was “a word in a book, a word to play with,something removed from the dull vegetation”(OB19). Both ‘bower’ and ‘jasmine’ are namesonly belonging to the British textbooks, the romance of them is separated from the dull realityof the colonial island. It takes more than education to bridge the gap between the signified andthe signifier. A lot more actions are needed to be taken, like the construction of a house on thesite of “bower”.
17Cudjoe’s other remark on this issue appears somewhat imprecise:“Whereas The MiddlePassage draws heavily on English imperialist writers to explain the West Indian world, An Areaof Darkness draws upon Bhagavad Gita and other religious texts to explain the Eastern worldand thereby reveals Naipaul’s ambivalent relationship to both Trinidad and India and hispeople”(Cudjoe82). Whatever reading of Bhagavad Gila Naipaul offers is heavily stamped byhis orientalist bias, which is the weight in this chapter.
18By chance, the chapter is titled “A Resting for the Imagination,” here, a quote from Darwin.
19Naipaul explains the origin of the term–“boxwallah” in “Jamshed into Jimmy,” an article thatfirst appeared in New Statesman in1963and was subsequently reprinted in The OvercrowdedBarracoon. He thinks it derives from “the Anglo-Indian office-box of which Kipling speaks sofeelingly in Something of Myself”(52).
20Nixon demonstrates that Naipaul’s censure of mimicry in postcolonial cultures resemblesFrantz Fanon’s disdain of the same in The Wretched of the Earth (137-39).
21Richard Cronin, An Area of Darkness, Imagining India. New York: St. Martin’s Press,1989,103-13.
22Civilizations are usually tied to religion or some other belief system. The concept ofcivilization is central to the historical theories of Arnold J. Toynbee who described history asthe process of the rise and decline of civilization. It is also central to the political beliefs ofSamuel Huntington who argues that the defining characteristic of the21st century will be theinteraction and conflict between civilizations. The concept of empire overlaps with that of“civilization”, and therefore it is important to take into account what actually constitutescivilization and whether any western analysis can take into its fold the connotations that holdtrue in the Indian context.
23Tagore, Rabindranath. Lectures and Addresses. Civilization and Progress.(Madras: Macmillan,1970), pp.45-55.
24Das, Sisir Kumar. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore. Vol. II The Center of IndianCulture.(Delhi: Sahitya Akademi,1999), pp.475-78.
25V. S. Naipaul,“A Million Mutinies,” India Today International August18,1997:21.
26It is clear that Naipaul delights in being different from the others. Compare, for example, thisattitude to his dislike for being an “Indian” in An Area of Darkness:“And for the first time inmy life I was one of the crowd Now in Bombay I entered a shop or a restaurant and awaited aspecial quality of response. And there was nothing. It was like being denied part of my reality.Again and again I was caught. I was faceless. I might sink without a trace into that Indian crowd.I had been made by Trinidad and England; recognition of my difference was necessary to me. Ifelt the need to impose myself, and didn’t know how (AD39).
27Theroux, Paul. Sir Vidla's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents. American Scholar68.1(1999):329.
28Keay, John. Kaleidoscope. A cassette recording of John Keay’s conversation with Naipaul,September21,1990. Naipaul Archive.
29Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon,1994),54. Or rather, he praisesthe early Naipaul, but in fact Naipaul continues to do this throughout his literary career.
30Magic Seeds: pp.5,10-13,17-19,110,167,230,239,278.
31Transcript of interview with Ronald Bryden (literary editor of Spectator) for the BBC, January29,1973. Naipaul Archive, University of Tulsa.
32Wilailak Saraithong, author of Citizen of the World: Post-Colonial Identity in the Works of V.S.Naipaul, a doctoral dissertation, found a photocopy of this article among Naipaul’s papers inthe Naipaul Archive in Tulsa, unfortunately the page numbers were missing.
33Interview with Dileep Padgaonkar,1983; reprinted in V.S. Naipaul: An Anthology of RecentCriticism. Ed. Purabi Panwar,2003.
34Ibid.
35Fanon, Frantz Black Skin, White Masks, published by Editions du Seuil1952, a new editiontranslated by Richard Philcox with a foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah,2008.
36Naipaul’s lecture,“The Universal Civilization,” appears as a “postscript” in his collection TheWriter and the World. Though dated1992in the book, the lecture was first given at theManhattan Institute in New York in1990.
37Mr. Lu Jiande published “Naipaul, the Adoptive Son of British Culture” in Global Times,15.Oct.19,2001
38Press Release,11Oct.2001, www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2001/press.html
39See Walcott,“The Garden Path: V.S. Naipaul”127-28on Naipaul’s numerous predecessors andcontemporaries 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 […]”128.
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