‘Eternal grumblers’: V.S. Naipaul and the uses of South Africa

Abstract

The essay studies the uses of South African characters and motifs in V.S. Naipaul's fiction and non fiction.

Keywords:

• Naipaul
• post colonial literature
• South Africa
• race
• imperialism
• Indian diaspora

Notes

1. On the issue of the ‘cold joke’ as a distancing device, see Glover (1999, pp. 36–37). Glover writes that ‘the cold joke mocks the victims. It is an added cruelty and it is also a display of power … It adds emphasis to the differences between “us” and “them”: we the interrogators are a group who share a joke at the expense of you the victims. It is also a display of hardness: we are so little troubled by feelings of sympathy that we can laugh at your torment; but the display may be a clue that suppression of sympathy is not so easy and needs help’ (p. 37). A good example of Naipaul's cold jokes comes early on in A Bend in the River when Salim imagines the movement of slaves towards the Atlantic Coast. Salim imagines captives who ‘the further away they got from the centre and their tribal area … the more nervous they became of the strange Africans they saw about them, until at the end, on the coast, they were no trouble at all, and were positively anxious to step into the boats and be taken to safe homes across the sea’ (Naipaul, 1979, p. 4). Here the ‘safe homes’ are, of course, the plantations of Virginia and Brazil which the prisoners are ‘positively anxious’ to reach. The joke here is at least partly, or altogether, at the expense of the future slaves. It functions to remove the reader's moral indignation at the practice of slavery. Another example of a Naipaulian cold joke can be found in Guerrillas. When Jimmy Ahmed rapes Jane, he insists on telling her that ‘a big girl like you should always take her own Vaseline when she goes visiting’ (Naipaul 1975, p. 238) Here the joke is at Jane's more than Jimmy's expense. Naipaul is keen to discredit Jane's sexual license, her bohemian politics, and her flirtation with Third World radicalism. Jimmy Ahmed is the agent of narrative nemesis. The joke here, as above, is without mirth. It is best described according to Thomas Hobbes' well‐known model of laughter as a ‘sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others’ (Elements, I, 9.13).

2. Naipaul's models of native or subaltern psychology are strikingly similar across continents and cultures. Compare, for example, the play‐acting of the Zulu of ‘In a Free State’ with that of Ferdinand of ‘A Bend in the River’. See also Naipaul's analysis of Muslim Iranians in Among the Believers: ‘What had attracted these Iranians to the United States and the civilization it represented? … The attraction wasn't admitted; and in that attraction, too humiliating for an old and proud people to admit, there lay disturbance – expressed in dandyism, mimicry, boasting, and rejection’ (Naipaul 1981a, p. 13).

3. This idea that Naipaul's black characters have of sexual paradise – as involving a wealth of available non‐black women – occurs on several occasions in his writing and counts, I argue, as both a piece of stereotypical racism and as a kind of cold joke. See, for example, the black schoolboy Eden, a contemporary of Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men, who ‘wished to join the Japanese army: the reports of their rapes were so exciting … in his conversation he sublimated the wish to rape foreign women into a wish to travel’. Eden ‘had been stirred by Lord Jim. His deepest wish was for the Negro race to be abolished; his intermediate dream was of a remote land where he, the solitary Negro among an alien pretty people, ruled as a sort of sexual king. Lord Jim, Lord Eden’ (Naipaul 1967, p. 151).

4. See, in particular, Bhabha (1994, pp. 85–92). In her engaging defence of Naipaul, Sara Suleri points to his ‘uncanny ability to map the complicity between postcolonial history and its imperial past’ (Suleri 1992, p. 156). See also Suleri's earlier article, ‘The Rhetoric of English India and “Naipaul's Arrival”’ (Suleri 1989, pp. 25–50). In the Yale Journal of Criticism Suleri argues that Naipaul does not exempt himself from his own critique. Naipaul's ‘graphic indictment of the postcolonial world … cannot be read literally’ (p. 30), for novels like A Bend in the River demonstrate and rehearse the postcolonial condition. Naipaul, Suleri contends in Rhetoric of English India, is in fact engaged in a ‘highly sophisticated ironizing of imperial mythmaking’ (pp. 154–155). For instance, in considering Naipaul's description of the imperial period as ‘the great peace’, Suleri concedes that the phrase is deliberately provocative but suggests that the essay ‘hides in its oblique prose an astonished awareness of the rhetoric of reading that indicates a far more impacted understanding of imperialism than the one to which Naipaul admits’ (Suleri 1992, p. 28). I would argue, instead, that the ‘oblique prose’ employs a sophisticated rhetoric of cold jokes and rhetorical provocations which are designed to work against liberal imagination.

5. Compare the episode in Guerrillas where Jimmy Ahmed spits in Jane's mouth before raping her. The intent is at once to humiliate the target as well as to affirm racial boundaries. There is also a sense in which Naipaul is reading Frantz Fanon against the grain in his representation of revolutionary racial psychology. After all the Zulu's response to Bobby's racial admiration incarnates in a satirical form Fanon's contention that ‘to us the man who adores the Negro is as “sick” as the man who abominates him’ (Fanon 1967, p. 10).

6. For a discussion of the colonel, see Weiss (1992). Weiss writes that ‘although the novella portrays the colonel as an unlikable racist, it supports his attitude towards Africa and Africans through the events of the plot’ (p. 173).

7. Here Jimmy Ahmed insists on establishing or imagining a racialised relationship of domination and dominated with Roche. Like the Zulu revolutionary of ‘In a Free State’, Jimmy Ahmed behaves in a Fanonian mode which is heavily ironised in its Naipaulian context. In Black Skin, White Marks Fanon had argued that ‘not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’. ‘The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man’ (p. 110). Whatever the concrete circumstances of the bond between white and black, Fanon continued, ‘the white man is not only the Other but also the master, whether real or imaginary’ (p. 138). In Naipaul's disturbing picture of Ahmed's sexual assault of Jane he may be taking literally Fanon's comment in the same work that ‘whoever says rape says Negro’ (p. 166).

8. Burning the passport is Naipaul's own invention rather than an incident drawn from the real‐life killings. However, there was a short delay in discovering the murder of the real‐life woman (Gale Benson). In Jane's case, however, there is no indication she will ever be found or missed … and the fault of her disappearance is, Naipaul implies, half her own, half Roche's. It is as if the real‐life Gale Benson has been split into two literary characters in Guerrillas, Jane and Peter Roche. Roche's participation in covering up Jane's murder, then, can be seen as an extension of the simultaneously sexual, masochistic and suicidal impulse which brings her to the island and into contact with Jimmy Ahmed.