The Writer and the World

by V. S. Naipaul

  So I not only began to understand what people in Pakistan meant when they told me that Islam was a complete way of life, affecting everything; I began to understand that—though it might be said that we had shared a common sub-continental origin—I had travelled a different way. I began to formulate the idea of the universal civilization—which, growing up in Trinidad, I had lived in or been part of without quite knowing that I did so.

  Starting with that Hindu background of the instinctive, ritualized life; growing up in the unpromising conditions of colonial Trinidad; I had—through the process I have tried to describe earlier—gone through many stages of knowledge and self-knowledge. I had a better idea of Indian history and Indian art than my grandparents had. They possessed rituals, epics, myth; their identity lay within that light; beyond that light there was darkness, which they wouldn’t have been able to penetrate. I didn’t possess the rituals and the myths; I saw them at a distance. But I had in exchange been granted the ideas of inquiry and the tools of scholarship. Identity for me was a more complicated matter. Many things had gone to make me. But there was no problem for me there. Whole accumulations of scholarship were mine, in the sense that I had access to them. I could carry four or five or six different cultural ideas in my head. I knew about my ancestry and my ancestral culture; I knew about the history of India and its political status; I knew where I was born, and I knew the history of the place; I had a sense of the New World. I knew about the literary forms I was interested in; and I knew about the journey I would have to make to the centre in order to exercise the vocation I had given myself.

  Now, travelling among non-Arab Muslims, I found myself among a colonized people who had been stripped by their faith of all that expanding intellectual life, all the varied life of the mind and senses, the expanding cultural and historical knowledge of the world, that I had been growing into on the other side of the world. I was among people whose identity was more or less contained in the faith. I was among people who wished to be pure.

  In Malaysia they were desperate to rid themselves of their past, desperate to cleanse their people of tribal or animist practices, all the subconscious life, freighted with the past, that links people to the earth on which they walk, all the rich folk life that awakened people elsewhere cultivate and dredge for its poetry. They wished, the more earnest of these Malay Muslims, to be nothing but their imported Arab faith; I got the impression that they would have liked, ideally, to make their minds and souls a blank, an emptiness, so that they could be nothing but their faith. Such effort; such self-imposed tyranny. No colonization could have been greater than this colonization by the faith.

  While the faith held, while it appeared to be unchallenged, the world perhaps held together. But when there appeared this powerful, encompassing civilization from outside, men didn’t know what to do. They could do only what they were capable of doing; they could only become more assiduous in the faith, more self-wounding, more ready to turn away from what they didn’t feel they could master.

  Muslim fundamentalism in places like Malaysia and Indonesia seems new. But Europe has been in the East for a long time, and there has been Muslim anxiety there for almost all of this time. This anxiety, this meeting of the two opposed worlds, the outgoing world of Europe and the closed world of the faith, was spotted a hundred years ago by the writer Joseph Conrad, who with his remote Polish background, his wish as a traveller to render exactly what he saw, was able at a time of high imperialism to go far beyond the imperialistic, surface ways of writing about the East and native peoples.

  To Conrad the world he travelled in was new; he looked hard at it. There is a quotation I would like to read from Conrad’s second book, published in 1896, nearly one hundred years ago, in which he catches something of the Muslim hysteria of that time—the hysteria which, a hundred years later, with the greater education and wealth of the native peoples, and the withdrawing of empires, was to turn into the fundamentalism we hear about.

  A half-naked, betel-chewing pessimist stood upon the bank of the tropical river, on the edge of the still and immense forests; a man angry, powerless, empty-handed, with a cry of bitter discontent ready on his lips; a cry that, had it come out, would have rung through the virgin solitudes of the woods as true, as great, as profound, as any philosophical shriek that ever came from the depths of an easy-chair to disturb the impure wilderness of chimneys and roofs.

  Philosophical hysteria—those were the words I wanted to give to you, and I think they still apply. They bring me back to the list of questions and issues that the senior fellow of the Institute, Myron Magnet, sent to me when he was in England last summer. Why, he asked, are certain societies or groups content to enjoy the fruits of progress, while affecting to despise the conditions that promote progress? What belief system do they oppose to it? And then, more specifically: why is Islam held up in opposition to Western values? The answer, I believe, is that philosophical hysteria. It is not an easy thing to define or understand, and the Muslim spokesmen do not really help. They speak clichés, but that might only be because they perhaps have no way of expressing what they feel. And some have overriding political causes; and others are really religious missionaries rather than scholars.

  But years ago, while the Shah still ruled, there appeared in the United States a small novel by a young Iranian woman that in its subdued, unpolitical way foreshadowed the hysteria that was to come. The novel was called Foreigner; the author was Nahid Rachlin. Perhaps it was as well that the novel appeared while the Shah ruled, and had to avoid politics; it is just possible that the delicate feeling of this novel might have been made trivial or ordinary if it had run into political protest.

  The central figure of the book is a young Iranian woman who does research work in Boston as a biologist. She is married to an American, and she might seem to be all right, well adapted. But when she goes back on a holiday to Teheran she loses her balance. She has some trouble with the bureaucracy. She can’t get an exit visa; she begins to feel lost. She is disturbed by memories of her crowded, oppressive Iranian childhood, with its prurient sexual intimations; disturbed by what remains of her old family life; disturbed by the over-grown, thuggish city, full of “Western” buildings. And that is interesting, that use of “Western” rather than big: it is as though the strangeness of the outside world has come to Teheran itself.

  Disturbed in this way, the young woman reflects on her time in the United States. It is not the time of clarity, as it might have once appeared. She sees it now to be a time of emptiness. She can’t say why she has lived the American life. Sexually and socially—in spite of her apparent success—she has never been in control; and she cannot say, either, why she has been doing the research work she has been doing. All this is very subtly and effectively done; we can see that the young woman was not prepared for the movement between civilizations, the movement out of the shut-in Iranian world, where the faith was the complete way, filled everything, left no spare corner of the mind or will or soul, to the other world where it was necessary to be an individual and responsible; where people developed vocations, and were stirred by ambition and achievement, and believed in perfectibility. Once we understand or have an intimation of that, we see, with the central figure of the novel, what a torment and emptiness that automatic, imitative life in Boston has been for her.

  Now, in her distress, she falls ill. She goes to a hospital. The doctor there understands her unhappiness. He too has spent some time in the United States; when he came back, he said, he soothed himself by visiting mosques and shrines for a month. He tells the young woman that her pain comes from an old ulcer. “What you have,” he says, in his melancholy, seductive way, “is a Western disease.” And the research biologist eventually arrives at a decision. She will give up that Boston-imposed life of the intellect and meaningless work; she will turn her back on the American emptiness; she will stay in Iran and put on the veil. She will do as the doctor did; she will visit shrines and mosques. Having decided that, she
becomes happier than she has ever been.

  Immensely satisfying, that renunciation. But it is intellectually flawed: it assumes that there will continue to be people striving out there, in the stressed world, making drugs and medical equipment, to keep the Iranian doctor’s hospital going.

  Again and again, on my Islamic journey in 1979, I found a similar unconscious contradiction in people’s attitudes. I remember especially a newspaper editor in Teheran. His paper had been at the heart of the revolution. In the middle of 1979 it was busy, in a state of glory. Seven months later, when I went back to Teheran, it had lost its heart; the once busy main room was empty; all but two of the staff had disappeared. The American embassy had been seized; a financial crisis had followed; many foreign firms had closed down; advertising had dried up; the newspaper editor could hardly see his way ahead; every issue of the paper lost money; waiting for the crisis to end, the editor, it might be said, had become as much a hostage as the diplomats. He also, as I now learned, had two sons of university age. One was studying in the United States; the other had applied for a visa, but then the hostage crisis had occurred. This was news to me—that the United States should have been so important to the sons of one of the spokesmen of the Islamic revolution. I told the editor I was surprised. He said, speaking especially of the son waiting for the visa, “It’s his future.”

  Emotional satisfaction on one hand; thought for the future on the other. The editor was as divided as nearly everyone else. One of Joseph Conrad’s earliest stories of the East Indies, from the 1890s, was about a local raja or chieftain, a murderous man, a Muslim (though it is never explicitly said), who, in a crisis, having lost his magical counsellor, swims out one night to one of the English merchant ships in the harbour to ask the sailors, representatives of the immense power that had come from the other end of the world, for an amulet, a magical charm. The sailors are at a loss; but then someone among them gives the raja a British coin, a sixpence commemorating Queen Victoria’s jubilee; and the raja is well pleased. Conrad didn’t treat the story as a joke; he loaded it with philosophical implications for both sides, and I feel now that he saw truly.

  In the one hundred years since that story, the wealth of the world has grown, power has grown, education has spread; the disturbance, the philosophical shriek, has been amplified. The division in the revolutionary editor’s spirit, and the renunciation of the fictional biologist, both contain a tribute—unacknowledged, but all the more profound—to the universal civilization. Simple charms alone cannot be acquired from it; other, difficult things come with it as well: ambition, endeavor, individuality.

  The universal civilization has been a long time in the making. It wasn’t always universal; it wasn’t always as attractive as it is today. The expansion of Europe gave it for at least three centuries a racial tint, which still causes pain. In Trinidad I grew up in the last days of that kind of racialism. And that, perhaps, has given me a greater appreciation of the immense changes that have taken place since the end of the war, the extraordinary attempt of this civilization to accommodate the rest of the world, and all the currents of that world’s thought.

  I COME BACK NOW TO THE FIRST questions Myron Magnet put to me earlier this year. Are we only as strong as our beliefs? Is it sufficient merely to hold a worldview, an ethical view, intensely? You will understand the anxieties behind the questions. The questions, of course, for all their apparent pessimism, are loaded; they contain their own answers. But they are also genuinely double-edged. For that reason they can also be seen as a reaching out to a far-off and sometimes hostile system of fixed belief; they can be seen as an aspect of the universality of our civilization at this period. Philosophical diffidence meets philosophical hysteria; and the diffident man is, at the end, the more in control.

  BECAUSE my movement within this civilization has been from the periphery to the centre, I may have seen or felt certain things more freshly than people to whom those things were everyday. One such thing was my discovery, as a child, a child worried about pain and cruelty, my discovery of the Christian precept, Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. There was no such human consolation in the Hinduism I grew up with, and—although I have never had any religious faith—the simple idea was, and is, dazzling to me, perfect as a guide to human behaviour.

  A later realization—I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk—has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvellous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my father’s parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

  1992

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 2003

  Copyright © 2002 by V. S. Naipaul

  Introduction copyright © 2002 by Pankaj Mishra

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published

  in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Some of the essays in this work were originally published in the following Alfred A. Knopf titles: The Overcrowded Barracoon, copyright © 1972 by V. S. Naipaul; The Return of Eva Peron, copyright © 1980 by V. S. Naipaul; Finding the Centre, copyright © 1984 by V. S. Naipaul.

  The following essays were first published in the publications below: “The Air-Conditioned Bubble” in The New York Review of Books (October 25, 1984); Section 6 of “Argentina and the Ghost of Eva Perón” was previously published as “Argentina: Living with Cruelty” in The New York Review of Books (January 30, 1992); “A Handful of Dust: Cheddi Jagan in Guyana,” in The New York Review of Books (April 11, 1991); “Heavy Manners in Grenada” in Harper’s Magazine (March 1984).

  “Our Universal Civilization” was a speech given at the Manhattan Institute.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Naipaul, V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad), [date]

  The writer and the world : essays / V. S. Naipaul.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-56129-9

  I. Title.

  PR9272.9.N32 W74 2002

  824′.914—dc21

  2002020813

  CIP

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