The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  It is a story of extended horror. But it isn’t only the horror that numbs response. Nor is it that the discoverer deteriorates so steadily after the discovery. It is the banality of the man. He was looking less for America or Asia than for gold; and the banality of expectation matches a continuing banality of perception. At the heart of the seamanship, the toughness, the avarice, the vindictiveness and the brutality, there is only this:

  16 September. Here the Admiral says that on that day and all succeeding days they met with very mild breezes, and the mornings were very sweet, with naught lacking save the song of the nightingale. He adds: “And the weather was like April in Andalusia.”

  29 September. The air was very sweet and refreshing, so that the only thing lacking was the song of the nightingale; the sea was as calm as a river.

  This is from The Book of the First Voyage, when he was at his most alert. The concrete details are deceptive. The sea and its life are observed, but mainly for signs of the nearness of land; just as, at the moment of discovery, the natives are studied, but only by a man “vigilant”—his own word—for gold. “Their hair is not curly … they are not at all black.” Not an anthropological interest, not the response of wonder—disappointment rather: Columbus believed that where Negroes were, there was gold. Beyond this vigilance the words and the perceptions fail. The nightingale, April in Andalusia: the props of a banal poetry are used again and again until they are without meaning. They are at an even lower level than the recent astronaut’s “Wow”—there is nothing like this pure cry of delight in Columbus. After the discovery, his gold-seeking seaman’s banalities become repetitive, destroying romance and making the great adventure trivial. A book about Columbus needs to have pictures, and this is why Mr. Landström’s book is so valuable.

  The medieval mind? But Queen Isabella wrote during the second voyage to find out what the climate was like. April in Andalusia wasn’t enough: she wanted pictures, and the romance. Marco Polo, whom Columbus had read, dealt in romance; and Amerigo Vespucci, after whom the continent is not unfairly named. Vespucci thought it worth mentioning that the natives of the islands and the Main pissed casually into the hot sand during conversation, without turning aside; that the women were wanton and used a certain animal poison, sometimes lastingly fatal to virility, to increase the size of the male member. Perhaps he made this up; but though he too was vigilant and his own voyage ended in profitable slave-trading, he sought in the tradition of travel-romance to awaken wonder at the fact of the New World.

  The facts about Columbus have always been known. In his own writings and in all his actions his egoism is like an exposed deformity; he condemns himself. But the heroic gloss, which is not even his own, has come down through the centuries. When the flagship ran aground at Haiti on the first voyage, the Indians were more than helpful: they wept to show their sympathy. Columbus was vigilant: he noted that it would be easy to subdue this “cowardly” unarmed race. This is what he presently did. Mr. Landström suggests that it was unfortunate and not really meant: it is the traditional gloss. On the third voyage Columbus thought he had discovered the Terrestrial Paradise. Mr. Landström, again following the gloss, says that Columbus wasn’t very well at the time. But it was just this sort of geography that had made him attempt the Ocean Sea.

  In this adventure, as in today’s adventures in space, the romance is something we ourselves have to supply. The discovery needs a hero; the contempt settles on the country that, in the legend, betrays the hero. The discovery—and it would have come without Columbus—could not but be horrible. Primitive people, once exposed, have to be subdued and utilized or somehow put down, in the Indies, Australasia, the United States, Southern Africa; even India has its aboriginal problems. Four hundred years after the great Spanish debate, convened by the Emperor, on the treatment of primitive people, Rhodesia is an imperial issue. The parallel is there; only the contemporary debate, conducted before a mass-electorate on one side and a dispossessed but indifferent primitive people on the other, is necessarily more debased.

  There is no Australian or American black legend; there is at the most a romantic, self-flattering guilt. But the black legend of Spain will persist, as will the heroic legend of Columbus. The dream of the untouched, complete world, the thing for ourselves alone, the dream of Shangri-la, is an enduring human fantasy. It fell to the Spaniards to have the unique experience. Generosity and romance, then, to the discoverer; but the Spaniards will never be forgiven. And even in the violated New World the Spaniards themselves remained subject to the fantasy. The quest for El Dorado became like a recapitulation of the whole New World adventure, a wish to have it all over again; more men and money were expended on this in twenty expeditions than on the conquest of Mexico, Peru and New Granada.

  Robinson Crusoe, in its essential myth-making middle part, is an aspect of the same fantasy. It is a monologue; it is all in the mind. It is the dream of being the first man in the world, of watching the first crop grow. Not only a dream of innocence: it is the dream of being suddenly, just as one is, in unquestionable control of the physical world, of possessing “the first gun that had been fired there since the creation of the world.” It is the dream of total power. “First, I made him know his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life. I called him so for the memory of the time. I likewise taught him to say master, and then let him know that was to be my name.” Friday is awkward about religion; Crusoe cannot answer. Power brings problems. Crusoe sees some cannibals about to kill and eat a man. He runs to liberate. But then he stops. What is his right to interfere? Is it just the gun? Some Spaniards are to be rescued. How will his freedom and power continue? How will they obey? Where do sanctions start in the empty world? They must sign a contract. But there is no pen, no paper: a difficulty as particular and irrational as in a nightmare. It is from more than a desert island that he is rescued. The issues can never be resolved.

  Later Crusoe makes good, in that very New World, but in the settled, beaten-down slave society of Brazil. The horror of the discovery, of being the first totally powerful man in the world: that happened a long time before.

  1967

  Jacques Soustelle and the

  Decline of the West

  FROM A DISTANCE Jacques Soustelle appears to be two men. There is the exiled politician whose cause, Algérie française, Algeria is France, has been destroyed. And there is the ethnologist and scholar, the imaginative interpreter of ancient Aztec life, whose first book, published when he was twenty-three, was Mexique, Terre Indienne: Mexico is Indian, you might say. Both careers have been remarkable and both are likely to continue. In the serenity of the last two or three years of exile, Soustelle has become a prolific scholar again. Arts of Ancient Mexico, published in England a few months ago, has been recognized as a major work. And he is still only fifty-five: he will not be a political exile forever.

  Serenity is Soustelle’s own word. It is one of the unlikely things that has come to him in his exile which, when it began in 1962, was “dreary and dangerous.” He was then on the run, a figure of newspaper melodrama, alleged to be plotting in Italy, Portugal, Vienna.

  Early in his exile he was denounced to the Italian police by a newspaper reporter who spotted him in a Brescia hotel. The name Soustelle used then was Jean Albert Sénèque. It “amused” him. (The Stoic philosopher Seneca, when he was very old, was accused of conspiring against the Emperor Nero, and was required to commit suicide.) But exile presently became less amusing. Soustelle was expelled from Italy, banned for a time by Switzerland and West Germany. After someone tried to kill de Gaulle in August 1962, French government agents became active all over Europe. During a carnival dance at a Munich hotel in February 1963, ex-Colonel Argoud, another exile, was kidnapped; he was found in Paris the next morning, badly beaten up, in a van near Notre Dame. After this Soustelle dropped out of the news. When, a year later, he was arrested in a Lausanne hotel and expelled from Switzerland, he was using a more commonplace name: Jacques Lemaire
.

  “Two attempts were made to kill or kidnap me. The first time I didn’t know. The second time I knew. A clumsy attempt had been made to bribe someone with $100,000. We played hide-and-seek for a few days. Then I shook him off.”

  Now the pressure has lessened. France is still closed to him but he can move about freely outside. General de Gaulle is reported to have asked recently after Monsieur and Madame Soustelle and to have sent his good wishes to M. Soustelle through a common acquaintance. Mme. Soustelle still lives and works in Paris. She, too, is an Aztec scholar. She and Jacques Soustelle were married in 1932, when he was nineteen; they have no children. They keep in touch; Soustelle confirms the Paris story that the language of the Aztecs is their secret language, which they use, or used, on the telephone.

  Last March, Soustelle was a candidate in the French elections in his old constituency of Lyon. Election would have given him immunity. But he would have been arrested if he had entered France to campaign; in that month a traveller saw his name prominent among the list of proscribed people at Orly airport. Soustelle sent over a tape-recorded speech. He came in second with eight thousand votes. Some people think that Soustelle should have gone to France then, that his arrest would have been a one-night affair. But Soustelle is cautious. Though he is open now to interviews and no longer feels he has to sit facing the main door of hotels, he still requires meetings to be arranged through his lawyer. And the lawyer sits in on all conversations. It is a remnant of the theatre that has surrounded Soustelle since his flight from Paris to Algiers in May 1958, when his aim was to use Algérie française to bring de Gaulle back to power. He was reported then to have escaped from Paris—where he was being watched—in the boot of a car.

  He says it isn’t true; and all that high adventure now seems so unlikely as, among the flowers and carpets of a grand hotel in the slack season, Soustelle breaks off to consider the wine list or to ask a solicitous waiter for a packet of Players médium. The pronunciation is for the waiter’s benefit. Soustelle’s own English is brisk, complex, colloquial. The occasional French words he uses—éveilleur, acharné—are those for which there is no ready English equivalent.

  Photographs emphasize Soustelle’s heaviness, his double chin, the firm set of the wide mouth, the rimless glasses and the dark pouches under the assessing eyes. But the face is mobile; eyes and lips are easily touched with humour. He knows about wine and will talk about it, but precisely: “I know the vineyard,” “I know the owner.” He draws your attention to the cigarettes he smokes. They are Players; they hold a story. In Lyon in 1927 Soustelle won an English essay competition. The prize was a fortnight in London. He stayed in a house near Clapham Common. He travelled a lot on the Underground, and it was from a machine in an Underground station that he bought his first packet of cigarettes. They were Players; he has smoked them ever since.

  His manner is like that of a university lecturer who knows his own reputation and will not be drawn beyond his own subject. “If you have nothing to say to him,” his lawyer says, “he has nothing to say to you.” Soustelle is not interested in ideas for their own sake. He always appears to speak from a well-prepared position; and this is more than an attribute of exile. He gives the impression that he came to terms with himself a long time ago, perhaps even in his precocious adolescence, and that his areas of interest have been defined by his experience: his scholarship, Mexico, the war, Algeria. He still seems able to survey his experience with wonder; he seems continually to process and refine this experience as it expands within its defined limits. It is the method neither of the scholar nor of the politician, but of both together; and it comes close to the method of the novelist, making art of egotism, creating a private impenetrable whole out of fragments which from a distance might appear unrelated.

  Consider the Players cigarettes. Soustelle is conscious of them as a link with his adolescence, his early academic brilliance, his first trip to London—and the Elgin Marbles. In that fortnight he spent much time among them in the British Museum. They made him want to go to Athens; and it was only last spring, in the serenity of exile, that he was able to go. He was overwhelmed; he had expected Greek monuments to be on a smaller scale. And there was another surprise. He had always liked Roman monuments; he found he didn’t like them as much in Athens: they seemed so crude. The visit helped him to clarify his ideas about the United States and the “provincialization” of Europe. And these ideas have come directly from his experience as a scholar and politician.

  Europe has been provincialized because she has withdrawn from the “wide spaces” of Africa. Civilizations are limited in space as well as in time; and this withdrawal, like the Roman withdrawal from Dacia and Britain, is “the first sign, the first wrinkles, of old age.” Rome incorporated Gaul; France ought to have incorporated Africa. Instead, France yielded to the “idol” of decolonization and the pressures of mercantile capitalism and converted the low cultures of black Africa into a poussière of petty dictatorships.

  “They will use what France left there to the last tractor, to the last bolt, to the last little teaspoon. After that, as in Tripolitania, they will let the goats graze where wheat formerly grew.”

  True decolonization would have come from incorporation, with equal rights and an equal advance for all. But this was rejected; it was too difficult.

  France has failed and has retreated across the Mediterranean into her own “hexagonal” territory not through defeat—militarily Algeria was a French victory—but through decadence, through bourgeois selfishness, les week-ends et les vacances d’été et d’hiver, and through racialism: the unwillingness of the French to accept that Africans, Arabs, Berbers, and the Maltese, Spanish and Greek colons of Algeria might also have been made Frenchmen.

  All civilizations have perished; even their ruins will go one day; there is no pattern and no goal. But it is Hegelian nonsense to say that the world’s history is the world’s justice; the stoic must always fight. Ideas which do not lead to action are just dreams; action without an “ideological orientation” is only nihilistic opportunism.

  So, until the serenity and release of exile, Soustelle the scholar-politician has been trapped in his dual role. The politician is only a part of Soustelle; and his political views, when separated from his experience, can be simplified and used by people to whom they give comfort. Like de Gaulle himself in 1958, Soustelle can be all things to all men.

  ALL SOUSTELLES must originally have come from the area around Soustelle, a hamlet in the Cevennes which today has a population of about one hundred, many of whom are named Soustelle. Jacques Soustelle was born in Montpellier and grew up in a semi-rural suburb of Lyon. He never knew his father; his mother remarried when he was ten; his stepfather, “a very good man,” was a motor mechanic and worked at his trade until recently. The family was Protestant. Jacques Soustelle was an only child in a house which at one time held a grandfather and three aunts, one of whom managed the household. During the first war his mother worked in a post office; later she worked in an office. “We were not lumpen-proletariat. But we were proletariat.”

  It was his class teacher, “a very good man,” who suggested to Mme. Soustelle that her son should look beyond the certificat d’études and go to a lycée. He was the first of those teachers, those very good men, as Soustelle today remembers them all, who helped and guided and arranged the scholarship examinations which led to Paris and the Ecole Normale Supérieure when he was seventeen, the agrégation and the diploma in ethnology three years later. “By the time I was twenty I had sat twelve competitive examinations. I wasn’t very good in mathematics, but I came first in everything else.” In Paris he had also ghosted a Fourier anthology and some detective stories, to supplement his scholarship money; and he gave lessons.

  He had always read a lot, and his interests had set early. He read natural history and history; even as a boy he liked reading about the Roman Empire in its third-century decline, “that majestic and terrible spectacle”; and a taste for Jules Ve
rne had led on to books of travel and books about exotic peoples. In Paris his thoughts turned naturally to ethnology after he met three scholars who were outstanding in the subject. Paul Rivet was one of these. Rivet was director of the Musée de l’Homme, then the Musée d’Ethnographie. Soustelle worked in the Musée de l’Homme for half the day, among the artefacts of the people he studied. To him these artefacts were works of art and not quaint; and through them he felt linked to the makers. He had developed the almost religious feeling that the finest and most comprehensive study was Man. About this time some dancers from New Caledonia came to Paris, and Soustelle was able to spend an evening with them. He remembers it as a privilege, part of his luck.

  The peoples of Oceania—visited for the first time in 1945, when he was de Gaulle’s Minister for the Colonies—were then his special interest. But Paul Rivet had visited Mexico in 1930 and had come back enthusiastic about the Otomí tribe, about whom little work had been done. Rivet said he would send Soustelle out to Mexico, where there was a French cultural mission, if Soustelle became agrégé. Soustelle shifted his interest to Mexico. And Rivet was as good as his word. The agrégation results came out in August 1932; in October Soustelle and his wife—they had not long been married—sailed for Mexico.

  The Soustelles worked among the Otomí in Central Mexico. They also worked among the very small tribe called the Lacandones in the south-east. In the rainy season the Soustelles went to Mexico City. There they fell among Mexican intellectuals; they became friendly with the painter Rivera. “There was still something of the post-revolutionary fervour, a general awareness of the Mexican past. I remember that someone even organized a velada, a vigil, in honour of the old Aztec god Quetzal-coatl. On the other side there were people, sometimes of Indian ancestry, who thought that the Indian past was bloody and barbaric and should be forgotten. Of course I took the Indian side. But Mexico can be neither Indian nor Spanish. It is what it is: Indian and Spanish.”