A General Overview of V. S. Naipaul's A Way in the World

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Abstract
Naipaul has paralleled much of his individual experience with his observation of the contemporary world. His struggle and success as a writer coincide with worldwide changes after the collapse of imperial power and the tide of immigration during the second half of the twentieth century. Being a product of these social and cultural changes himself, Naipaul has played an influential role in redefining the meaning of Englishness and reforming the landscape of English literature by re-examining and rewriting the history of colonisation from the perspective of a Third-World individual. However, in this review of Naipaul’s A Way in the World, a summary shall be given and a lucid appraisal of its thematic preoccupation shall be considered.


INTRODUCTION
A Way in the World is a 1994 novel written by the 2001 Nobel Laureate, V. S. Naipaul. In this book, A Way in the World, V. S. Naipaul has been brilliantly alert to the gratifying details which hint at historic commotions which have transferred from the colonial experiences into the post-colonial Caribbean society. Through this book, Naipaul re-emphasizes the feeling of displacement, and cultural alienation. The first person point of view is the narrative technique adopted by Naipaul in this work to reverberate the reality that so many people in the Caribbean islands, with himself included, are not from where they think they are. Just as depicted in this book, Naipaul has shown obviously that there is no Trinidadian who can comprehensively affirm of his/her Amerindian root due to the reality of racial mixture of Africa and Asia which characterizes the socio-cultural framework of the country.


Mixing semi-autobiography, travel writing, documentaries, character analysis and fiction, A way in the world: a novel (1994) is a book of nine sectionalised meditations through which V.S. Naipaul arrives at a deeper understanding of his multicultural heritage and hybrid identity. The novel also celebrates Naipaul’s masterful skill of using different literary genres to illuminate “areas of darkness” surrounding him and to transmit his diasporic experience. ZHU Ying (2006: 98)


Naipaul includes several characters of historical importance, some under a pseudo identity and others directly referenced in pressing home his major themes in the novel. Foster Morris, for example is fashioned greatly after the similitude of Arthur Calder-Marshall, (whose documentary, Glory Dead (1939)), provides a detailed account of the political background to the 1930s oilfield riots in Trinidad. Such a striking character like Lebrun can be said to be modeled after the likeness of such historical figure like C. L. R. James, a Trinidadian who is internationally known as a thinker and a writer. However, Naipaul does not change the names of all of his loosely historical character: Sir Walter Raleigh and the Spanish adventurer Miranda remain Raleigh and Miranda. Henry Swanzy, the producer of Caribbean Voices Programme and an associate of Calder-Marshall, remains Henry Swanzy. On the whole it seems that only the characters whose lives he must manipulate in order to produce the effects he needs are given new names.


Unequivocally, it is an incontrovertible fact that this book is a faction, i.e. the juxtaposition fictional inventions and factual human experiences and realities. Nevertheless, a definition of literary classification is of paramount importance. The reason being that the book cannot be totally classified as a full novel compared to his other fictional works like Miguel Streets. Though upon publication he agreed to call it a novel, he himself asserts that the book is best called a Sequence i.e. a collection of several document sequentially ordered.


However, the displacing and alienating effects of a colonial past on today’s post-colonial peoples have been Naipaul’s leading theme that is so prevalent throughout this book. Via a combination of autobiographical experiences and fictional creations, he was able to create a perfect work that depicts alienation and search for identity.


A Brief Summary of A Way in the World (1994)


He begins the book with a prologue, “Prelude: an inheritance.” In this opening chapter of A way in the world, the narrator could not help having the “half-dream” of “knowing and not knowing” and a “shifting” sense of reality (Way: 4). Listening to stories about Leonard Side, the decorator of cakes and arranger of flowers, from the woman teacher who seemed to know him quite well but could not explain his idiosyncratic “feeling for beauty”, makes the narrator wonder whether Side himself had come to any understanding of himself and his ancestors (Way: 10). Interestingly, the narrator recreates an ancestry for Side through the association of his name with Syde, linking him to a Shia Muslim group in India or the dancing Lucknow, “the lewd men who painted their faces and tried to live like women” (Way: 10). The narrator therefore reveals how little one knows about one’s inheritance.


This idea is further developed in the second chapter, “History: a smell of fish glue”. During his short-term job in the Registrar-General’s Department in Trinidad before his departure to England, the narrator was told that “all the records of the British colony, since 1797, together with a copy of everything that had been printed in the colony” were kept in the department vault (Way: 41). The narrator’s vivid memory of “the smell of fish glue” with which these documents were bound implies a correction of his childhood feeling that the island was out of history due to “the light and the heat that had burnt away the history of the place” (Way: 74).


Acknowledging the strangeness within and around him, the narrator returns to his native Trinidad as an aspiring writer with a mission to revisit and rediscover his and the nation’s historical past. Although documents may “hunt up” the story of the land, the narrator points out that a “historical bird’s eye view” cannot really explain “the mystery” of what one has inherited (Way: 11). As shown in A way in the world, Naipaul has portrayed his characters – the disillusioned Columbus, the half-demented Raleigh, the dishonoured Miranda, the doomed Blair, as well as the omniscient narrator who resembles Naipaul himself – as unique individuals whose life or death, histories or mysteries constitute different ways in the world.


Chapter 3 of the novel, “New clothes: an unwritten story”, indicates how a “real” story can be written by asking the question “Who is this narrator? What can he be made to be?” (Way: 47). If the narrator were made a writer or a traveller, the story would have been identified as true to the author’s experience, but the invention of a story seemed to “falsify what [he] felt as a traveler” (Way: 46). Finally the author decides to create his narrator as a “carrier of mischief” and “revolutionary of the 1970s”, who seeks the help of Amerindians to overthrow the African government on the coast (Way: 48).

The narrator of “New clothes” is the author’s creation of a protagonist for failed attempts to understand people of an entirely different background in a changing situation. While the story remains unfinished and unwritten, the author, fortunately, could “move into and out of the narrator’s consciousness at will and narrate through him, withholding the illusion of control over his own story that comes with first-person narration” (Barnouw, 2003:136). In so doing, the author allows his readers to observe his process of shaping and depicting this English narrator, who is at the same time trying to transcend narrative limitations. Ricoeur’s perception of reenactment, derived from joint powers of documentary interpretation and imaginative construction, reveals that the re-enacted history is and is not what can be assumed to be a “real” past. In this unwritten story, Naipaul’s experiment with narrative strategy shows that discovery and invention are indispensable in representing a recent or a remote past.


Chapter 6, “A parcel of papers, a roll of tobacco, a tortoise: an unwritten story”, opens with the narrator’s wish to write “a play or a screen play, or a mixture of both” about Sir Walter Raleigh’s last expedition to find the gold mines of El Dorado (Way: 163). Even if the screenplay is unwritten, Naipaul’s reinterpretations of Raleigh’s mission filter through the ship surgeon who questions Raleigh on the truthfulness of his book, The discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful empire of Guiana (1595). The surgeon reminds Raleigh that when he writes about the Trinidad side of the Gulf, everything is correctly and clearly recorded, “real knowledge, real enquiry,” but on the Orinoco side, where the gold mines are supposed to be, he depicts “a strange land of diamond mountains and meadows and deer and birds” as if written by someone else (Way: 175).


In contrast, the surgeon reveals that the Spaniard chronicles everything, gets it attested and ships it back to Spain in duplicates and triplicates. Having a great deal of historical information and underscoring the inconsistencies in Raleigh’s account, the surgeon regards Raleigh’s version of his explorations in the Gulf as a “deliberate mixture of old-fashioned fantasy and modern truth” (Way: 175). Perhaps right in his judgment, the surgeon may never understand Raleigh’s actions, his motivations and fears, and his sense of the world shaped by personal experience. The question whether the surgeon will rationally and judgmentally be a suitable narrator to tell and pass down Raleigh’s story even though it is unwritten can rightly be asked. Apparently, the surgeon and Raleigh personify dissimilar attitudes toward the historical past. Whereas history means documentary evidence to the surgeon, it is a repository of personal stories to Raleigh. Above all, Naipaul seems to be more interested in exposing the complication of multiple perspectives on the historical past than in providing an ultimate solution to how history might be written.


In Chapter 8, “In the gulf of desolation: an unwritten story”, Naipaul portrays Francisco Miranda at the end of his life. This chapter once again begins with the narrator’s idea of doing a play or a film about the history of the Gulf as “a three-part work: Columbus in 1498, Raleigh in 1618, and Francisco Miranda, the Venezuelan revolutionary, in 1806” (Way: 245). Despite Miranda’s legendary fame, Naipaul perceives the apprehension, estrangement and disillusionment of a revolutionary, as well as his inability to find a way in the world. Through the first-person narrator, Naipaul remarks that the crucial reason why Miranda is not well known and his story is unwritten is because “on the day he was betrayed he was separated from his papers” (Way: 251). Therefore, “where Miranda should have been in historical accounts there was a void,” says the narrator, who tries to fill in the void by inventively rediscovering Miranda’s lost papers (Way: 350). As a result, Miranda’s anxieties and fears become known through the re-created epistolary discourse, which shows an integration of fictional and factual elements. Interestingly, Naipaul has rendered Raleigh’s and Miranda’s historical adventures in his major work on the history of the New World, The loss of El Dorado (1969). Nonetheless, taking a new angle a quarter of a century later in A way in the world, Naipaul repatterns the documentary material and rewrites a historical fiction about Raleigh and Miranda.

Rediscovering and re-plotting the same documentary facts differently in the former book subtitled as “history” and in the latter subtitled as “novel”, Naipaul illustrates Ricoeur’s idea of the Same, namely, the re-enactment of the historical past in the present. In so doing, Naipaul has questioned the generic boundaries between history and fiction, and transformed historical incompleteness and liminality by re-constructing and re-enacting personal stories within the history of the place.
Speaking through the narrator in the last Chapter “Home again”, Naipaul comments on Blair’s inability “to remake himself” because he was not a writer (Way: 373).


With the gift of writing, Naipaul tries to bridge “the gap separating the self and its other” and the chasm between himself as man and as writer (Ricoeur, 1984:17). Naipaul has paralleled much of his individual experience with his observation of the contemporary world. His struggle and success as a writer coincide with worldwide changes after the collapse of imperial power and the tide of immigration during the second half of the twentieth century. Being a product of these social and cultural changes himself, Naipaul has played an influential role in redefining the meaning of Englishness and reforming the landscape of English literature by re-examining and rewriting the history of colonisation from the perspective of a Third-World individual. Being an exile and ex-colonial in a post-war, postcolonial Europe has provided Naipaul with the momentum for a narrow sense, taking a distance means uncovering strangeness in the self, recognising an otherness of the historical past in relation to the present. In parallel, decentring suggests repudiating an unchanging view on self and challenging a conventional attitude toward history.


Thematic Preoccupation
A Way in the World is not just an entertainment literature, it is a book which encompasses the historical issues of enslavement, exile, colonization, poverty, racial segregation, and alienation.
Destitution and impoverishment.
In the first premise, it is overt to establish that one of the dominant themes in this book is that of poverty, impoverishment, destitution and hunger. Naipaul reveals in so many places the overreaching effects of defaulted colonial policies which engendered this societal evil copiously in this book.
Most of the people were Indians. Many of them have been would have been indentured immigrants from India who had served out their indentures on the sugar estates… they… have found themselves with nowhere to live. These people were without money, job, without anything like a family, … without any kind of representation. They are utterly destitute.(19)


Theme of Alienation
V. S. Naipaul reveals in this book that cultural alienation is tantamount to the situation where the humanity of the Blacks and the Indians are progressively eroded, and they are separated several miles from their cultural identity.
They were people who had been, as a fairy story, lifted up from pleasantry of India and set down thousands of miles away___ weeks and weeks of sailing___ in Trinidad in the colonial setting of Trinidad where rights were limited, you could have done anything with these people, they were tormented by the people of the town. (19)
He also commented through his narrator that “I understand why as a child I felt that history had been burnt away in the place where I was born” (110) All these are pointers to the fact that cultural alienation and rootlessness is a prevailing experience on the Caribbean island.


Racial discrimination
Without much ado, the theme of discrimination and segregation is obviously a paramount one as far as the literature of the Caribbean is concern. The Caribbean socio-political society is a highly stratified one with the White categorized as the supreme or aristocratic race while the Blacks are seen as the unfortunate race. All these characters (i.e. the White, Coloured, Mullato, Indians, Blacks etc.) where clearly represented in the book. The narrator himself is an Indian, Belbenoit is a coloured man (23), Blair is a black man (24) and Columbus is a white man. However, just as he hinted on page 25, privileges are allocated to everyone in Trinidad according to the colour of their skin. The Blacks and the Indians most especially are denied some certain privileges enjoyed by the Whites.
Speaking about Belbenoit for example, Naipaul wrote:
Though every kind of racial assumption is shown on his garrulous face, he felt he has been discouraged for racial reasons from aiming higher: at the time when he had entered the service, the best jobs were reserved for people from England… he was famous in the office for been an unhappy man. (24)
Belbenoit permanent countenance is however that of a general feeling of separation which was collectively felt by the Blacks and the Indians _the disadvantaged of the system.


References
NAIPAUL, V. S. 1994. A Way in the World
NAIPAUL, V.S. 1959. Miguel street. London: Deutsch.
NAIPAUL, V.S. 1969. The loss of El Dorado: a history. London: Deutsch.
NAIPAUL, V.S. 1979. A bend in the river. London: Deutsch.
NAIPAUL, V.S. 1984. Prologue to an autobiography. (In Naipaul, V.S. Finding the center: two narratives. New York: Knopf. p. 1-72.)
NAIPAUL, V.S. 1994. A way in the world: a novel. New York: Vintag Books.
Udofia, J. American Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences