Inner Workings

by J. M. Coetzee

  Half a Life does not give the impression of having been carefully worked on, and the technical weaknesses that result are not negligible. Naipaul’s plan is to present the whole story as if recounted by Willie. Even the story of Chandran père is to be based on what Willie heard from his lips. But the plan is carried out only halfheartedly. Despite the coldness between father and son, Willie is given access to his father’s most secret feelings, including his physical repugnance at his wife. At moments the pretence that Willie is guiding the story line is dropped in favour of interventions from an old-fashioned omniscient narrator.

  There are other weaknesses too. Scenes of literary life in London read as if from a satirical roman à clef to which most readers will lack the key. The youthful Willie’s love for Ana comes close to falling into cliché. Most strikingly of all, Willie’s story ends not only without a resolution but without any glimpse of what such a resolution might be. Half a Life reads like the cut-off first half of a book that might be called A Full Life.

  Strictures such as these will not trouble Naipaul. In his view the novel as a vehicle for creative energies reached its high point in the nineteenth century; to write impeccably crafted novels in our day is to indulge in antiquarianism. Given his own achievements in pioneering an alternative, fluid, semifictional form, this is a view worth taking seriously.

  Nevertheless one is left at the end of Half a Life with the feeling that not only Willie Chandran but Naipaul himself does not know what will happen next. And what indeed does a forty-one-year-old refugee do who has never worked for a living and has only one accomplishment to his name, a book of stories published decades ago? Who is Willie Chandran anyway? Why is Naipaul, a prolific and famous writer, pouring his energies into an anti-self whose distinguishing mark is that he has turned his back on what might have become a literary career?

  One of the more consistent strains in the story Naipaul tells of his own life is that it was by a pure effort of will that he became a writer. He was not gifted with fantasy; he had only his childhood in paltry Port of Spain to call on, no larger historical memory (this was where Trinidad failed him, and, behind Trinidad, India); he seemed to have no subject. Only after a decades-long labour of writing did he finally come to the Proustian realisation that he had known his true subject all along, and his subject was himself – himself and his efforts, as a colonial raised in a culture that did not (he was told) belong to him and without (he was told) a history, to find a way in the world.

  Willie is not Naipaul, and the outline of Willie’s life only intermittently corresponds with his creator’s. Nevertheless, when it explores self-denial and what an ingrained heritage of self-denial turns into when it is itself denied, Half a Life carries the urgent and unmistakable accents of personal truth.7 Is it possible that the immense feat of self-construction that Naipaul undertook during his third and fourth decades seems in retrospect to have exacted too high a price in denial of the body and its appetites, a price amounting to no less than half of a human life?

  In the person of Chandran senior, Naipaul has diagnosed self-denial as the road of weakness taken by loveless spirits, an essentially magic way of winning victories in the natural dialectic between a desiring self and a resistant real world by suppressing desire itself. In the life-story of Chandran junior, Naipaul has tracked the unhappy consequences of being nurtured in such a culture of self-denial.

  It is instructive to read the story of Willie Chandran side by side with the story that Anita Desai tells in her novel Fasting, Feasting (2000) of a young man similarly transported from his Indian home to a land where appetite reigns.8

  Like Willie, Desai’s Arun has been brought up under the rule of a father to whose standards he can never quite measure up. Like Willie, Arun wins a scholarship and finds himself more or less rudderless in a foreign city, in this case Boston, where he finds lodgings off campus in the home of an American family named Patton. His host-father, he discovers, is a hearty carnivore who likes to barbecue steaks on the patio. Mealtimes become rituals of embarrassment: his caste rules forbid the eating of meat, and though the taboo was not observed in his home, Arun finds meat distasteful. His dietary habits soon become a pretext for a feud between the Pattons. Mrs Patton declares herself a convert to vegetarianism and produces for Arun her version of a meatless diet: lettuce and tomato sandwiches, cereal and milk. Enveloped in woe, he dutifully eats: ‘How was he to tell [her] . . . that his digestive system did not know how to turn [this food] into nourishment?’ She even persuades him to cook, and with feigned enjoyment swallows down the unappetising messes that the morose boy – who in India never saw the inside of a kitchen, having been waited on by servants and sisters – dishes up. (p. 185)

  Mr Patton and his son Rod retreat in bafflement to the barbecue, while the daughter of the family hides out in her bedroom, devouring chocolate bars and vomiting them up, loathing herself all the time. In the bulimic girl Arun sees an uncanny resemblance to his epileptic elder sister, who, unable to find words for her protest against having ‘her unique and singular being and its hungers’ ignored, resorts to frothing at the mouth. How strange, he thinks, to encounter the same sort of hunger in America, ‘where so much is given, where there is both licence and plenty’. When he had first arrived, he had exulted in anonymity: ‘no past, no family . . . no country.’ But he has not escaped family after all, just found a ‘plastic representation’ of it. What he had in India was ‘plain, unbeautiful, misshapen, fraught and compromised’. What he has found in its stead in America is ‘clean, bright, gleaming, without taste, savour or nourishment,’ and equally loveless. (pp. 214, 172, 185)

  The gross excess of food that Arun encounters in America, and the dysfunctional dietary habits of the Patton household, clearly bear a relation, albeit a skewed relation, to the feasting of Desai’s title. What of fasting?

  Arun is too young and unsure of himself to repudiate the way of life exemplified by the Pattons. Dutifully he tries to emulate the athletic exploits of Rod Patton. But it soon becomes clear to him that ‘a small, underdeveloped and asthmatic boy from the Gangetic plains, nourished on curried vegetables and stewed lentils’, can never hope to compete with a specimen of well-nourished American manhood. One way of remedying this state of affairs would be to switch from an Indian to an American diet, to cease being a faster and become a feaster too. But this is not a step he finds himself capable of taking. Arun remains vegetarian for reasons that are neither religious nor ethical and are certainly not social. By temperament or perhaps simply by physiological make-up he is not a carnivore. Flesh and (when Mrs Patton dons her swimsuit) fleshiness repel him, not because his dietary taboos have been insulted or because he is a moral puritan but because in his being he is an ascetic, just as in her being his epileptic sister is a religious devotee. The pathos of the boy – it is hard to call it tragedy, since Desai works with so determinedly muted a palette – is that he is barely able to find words for his misery, much less articulate its wider significance, namely that the modern world, including India in its modern aspect, offers less and less of a home to the fasting temperament. (p. 191)

  Even at home in India, Arun’s vegetarianism has been a source of strife. His father wants him to play manly sports and more generally be a success in life, by which he means that he should be less fatalistic and more enterprising, less passive and more active, less feminine and more masculine, less of an Indian and more of a Westerner. Having tried and failed to build up Arun’s strength by feeding him beef, he interprets the boy’s distaste for meat as a reprehensible atavism, a turning back to ‘the ways of the forefathers, meek and puny men who had got nowhere in life’. (p. 33)

  Consciously or not, Arun and his father thus embody the two sides, traditional and progressive, of a debate on national character that goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, a debate set going by the Hindu reformers Swami Dayanand Saraswati (1824–1883) and Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902). Both Saraswati and Vivekananda saw the Hindus of their day as ha
ving lost touch with the masculine, martial values of their ancestors; both advocated a return to ‘Aryan’ values, a return that would, if necessary, have to be accomplished by incorporating those features of the culture of their colonial overlords that most evidently gave the British their power. In the sphere of religion, Hinduism would have to be organised like a Christian church, with clear lines of internal governance. At a philosophical level, it might have to be accepted that history is linear rather than cyclical, and therefore that progress is not an illusion. At a more mundane level, dietary taboos might have to be relaxed: in a moment of what the historian Ashis Nandy brands as ‘terrible defeatism’, Vivekananda advocated that Hindus look to the three B’s for salvation: Bhagvad-Gita, biceps, and beef.9

  The tussle between Arun and his father over the Brahmanic taboo on beef is thus more than a simple family quarrel. The two stand for opposed views on what price the Hindu – and the Indian – should be prepared to pay – what he is required to give up – to become an actor in the modern world. In his confused and utterly unheroic refusal of the beef that Mr Patton slaps down on his plate, his reluctance to deny what looks to the strangers like self-denial, and more generally in his failure to find in the New World feast the kind of food that will nourish him, Arun not only preserves a minimal personal integrity but complicates and casts doubt over prescriptions like Willie Chandran’s for getting on in the world. At a precultural level, the level of the body itself, he resists the pressures of assimilation: this ‘underdeveloped’ Indian body is not an American body and will never become one.

  (2001)

  Notes and References

  1 Italo Svevo

  1 Livia Veneziani Svevo, A Memoir of Italo Svevo, translated by Isabel Quigly (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001).

  2 Italo Svevo:The Man and the Writer (London: Secker, 1966), p. 172.

  3 Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience, translated and with an introduction by William Weaver (New York: Knopf, 2001; London: Penguin, 2002), p. 404. I amend Weaver’s translation slightly.

  4 Italo Svevo, As a Man Grows Older, translated by Beryl de Zoete (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), p. 102.

  5 Italo Svevo, Emilio’s Carnival, translated by Beth Archer Brombert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 16, 117, 170.

  6 Quoted in John Gatt-Rutter, Italo Svevo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 163.

  7 Gatt-Rutter, pp. 281, 297.

  8 ‘The Story of the Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl’, trans. L. Collison-Morley, in Italo Svevo, Short Sentimental Journey and Other Stories (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967; volume 4 of the Uniform Edition), p. 81.

  9 Quoted in Gatt-Rutter, p. 307.

  10 In Weaver’s translation the passage reads: ‘Unlike other sicknesses, life . . . doesn’t tolerate therapies.’ (p. 435) Weaver consistently uses ‘therapy’ for Svevo’s cura, which can mean either the process of being under cure or the end result, being cured. But sometimes ‘cure’ gets Svevo’s meaning more exactly than ‘therapy,’ as here, or in Zeno’s vow to himself that he will recover from Dr S’s cura.

  11 Gatt-Rutter, p. 328.

  2 Robert Walser

  1 For instance, a police photograph is reproduced in Elio Fröhlich and Peter Hamm, eds., Robert Walser: Leben und Werk (Frankfurt a/Main: Insel Verlag, 1980).

  2 Quoted in Katharina Kerr, ed., Über Robert Walser (Frankfurt a/Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), vol. 2, p. 13.

  3 George C. Avery, Inquiry and Testament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), p. 6.

  4 Jakob von Gunten, trans. Christopher Middleton (New York: New York Review Books, 1999), p. 3.

  5 ‘Robert Walser’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith; trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 259.

  6 Quoted in Avery, Inquiry and Testament, p. 11.

  7 Quoted in K.-M. Hinz and T. Horst, eds., Robert Walser (Frankfurt a/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 57.

  8 Quoted in Werner Morlang, ‘The Singular Bliss of the Pencil Method’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 12/1 (1992), p. 96.

  9 Quoted in Mark Harman (ed.), Robert Walser Rediscovered (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985), p. 206.

  10 Quoted in Idris Parry, Hand to Mouth (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981), p. 35.

  11 Quoted in Peter Utz, ed., Wärmende Fremde (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), p. 64; in Kerr, ed., Über Robert Walser, bd. 2, p. 22.

  12 Quoted in Utz, ed., Wärmende Fremde, p. 74.

  13 Quoted in Agnes Cardinal, The Figure of Paradox in the Work of Robert Walser (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1982), p. 39.

  14 Quoted in Morlang, ‘The Singular Bliss of the Pencil Method’, p. 96.

  15 The Robber, trans. Susan Bernofsky (University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Jakob von Gunten, trans. Christopher Middleton (see note 4 above).

  16 Susan Bernowsky, ‘Gelungene Einf älle’, in Utz, ed., Wärmende Fremde, pp. 123–4.

  17 Bernofsky, ‘Gelungene Einf älle’, p. 117.

  18 Walser, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Jochen Greven (Frankfurt a/Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), bd. X, p. 323.

  19 Kerr (ed.), Über Robert Walser, bd. 2, p. 12.

  20 The original is in Fröhlic and Hamm, eds., Robert Walser: Leben und Werk, p. 279.

  3 Robert Musil,The Confusions of Young Törless

  1 Musil, Diaries 1899–1941, ed. Mark Mirsky, trans. Philip Payne (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 209.

  2 Brecht quoted in Werner Mittenzwei, Exil in der Schweiz (Leipzig: Reclam, 1978), p. 19; Musil quoted in Ignazio Silone, ‘Begegnungen mit Musil’, in Robert Musil: Studien zu seinem Werk, ed. Karl Dinklage (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1970), p. 355.

  3 Quoted in Karl Dinklage, ‘Musil’s Definition des Mannes ohne Eigenschaften’, in Robert Musil: Studien zu seinem Werk, p. 114.

  4 Quoted in David S. Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture 1880–1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 108.

  5 Diaries 1899–1941, p. 465.

  6 The Confusions of Young Törless, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 157.

  7 The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Knopf, 1996; London: Picador, 1997), vol. 2, p. 826.

  8 Diaries 1899–1941, p. 384.

  4 Walter Benjamin, the Arcades Project

  1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 948. Hereafter referred to as AP.

  2 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Stanley Corngold, Edmund Jephcott, Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 446. Hereafter referred to as V1.

  3 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Volume 2: 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 473. Hereafter referred to as V2.

  4 Quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing:Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), p. 21.

  5 Letter to Martin Buber, in Walter Benjamin, Correspondence 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred Jacobson and Evelyn Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 313.

  6 Quoted in Buck-Morss, p. 383.

  7 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 7 volumes, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972–89), vol. 3, p. 52; V2, p. 559.

  8 ‘The Work of Art . . . ,’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969; London; Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 238.

  9 ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ in Illuminations, p. 190.

  10 Quoted in Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers (London and New York:Verso, 1996), p. 239.

  11 Quoted in Buck-Morss, p. 220.

  1
2 Letter of 1931, quoted in Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), p. 31.

  13 Quoted in Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art:The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), p. 133.

  14 AP, p. 460; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1998), p. 34.

  15 Quoted in Buck-Morss, p. 228.

  16 Quoted in Buck-Morss, p. 291.

  17 See V1, p. 360, note 38.

  18 Illuminations, p. 3.

  5 Bruno Schulz

  1 Bruno Schulz, letter to Andrzej Ple´ sniewicz, quoted in Czeslaw Z. Prokopcyk, ed., Bruno Schulz: New Documents and Interpretations (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), p. 101.

  2 Jerzy Ficowski, Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, A Biographical Portrait, translated and edited by Theodosia Robertson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 105.

  3 Letter to Romana Halpern, August 1938, in Collected Works of Bruno Schulz, ed. Jerzy Ficowski (London: Picador, 1998), p. 442. Hereafter referred to as CW.

  4 Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories, trans. Alicia Nitecki (New York: Penguin, 2002).

  5 The Street of Crocodiles, trans. Celina Wieniewska, introduction by Jerzy Ficowski (New York: Penguin, 1977).

  6 Bruno Schulz, Drawings and Documents from the Collection of the Adam Mickiewicz Literary Museum (Warsaw, 1992).

  6 Joseph Roth, the stories

  1 Quoted in William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), p. 238.

  2 Quoted in Sidney Rosenfeld, Joseph Roth (University of South Carolina Press, 2001), p. 45.

  3 Quoted in Helmuth Nürnberger, Joseph Roth (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981), p. 38.