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Abstract
This essay examines V.S. Naipaul’s analysis of the “idea of England” in *An Area of Darkness*. Though his travelogue is ostensibly about India, Naipaul finds that the “truth about India has to be looked for not in India, but in England.” This “truth” takes the form of a literary history of the formation of English national culture in the nineteenth century, and organizing category for which is “fantasy.” In stark contrast to how scholars of nationalism have suggested, Naipaul sees a crisis in historicism to emerge once the nation emerges as the hegemonic form of political community. This crisis, moreover, leads to a stagnation in the critical capacity of culture as such, from its literature to its architecture. I argue that Naipaul’s peculiar literary history of England, written in a text about his travels to India, is best understood as a Saidian “voyage in,” and in direct conversation with C.L.R. James’s history of Victorianism in *Beyond a Boundary*.
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Notes
1 For discussions of the centrality of travelogues to Naipaul’s novelistic imagination, see Mustafa (Citation1995, 88–120); Nixon (Citation1992, 66–87); Matos (Citation2005).
2 Said is much harsher on Naipaul in Reflections on Exile (Citation2002, 98–104).
3 For a helpful discussion of Naipaul’s relation to the Victorians, especially early in his career, see Nixon (Citation1992, 45–51).
4 Chatterjee defines the “moment of arrival” as “when nationalist thought attains its fullest development. It is now a discourse of order, of the rational organization of power” (Citation1986, 51).
5 For an extended analysis of Naipaul and James’s relationship, see Cobham-Sander (Citation2016).
6 Sangita Gopal stages a similar “voyage in” in her reading of Enigma of Arrival (Citation2005).
7 The Bombay docks have a similar impact on Naipaul (Area 9, 199).
8 For a history and overview of Raj architecture, see Metcalf (Citation1989, 55–104).
9 It is worth noting that Naipaul suggests that by having “continuity and flow,” precolonial India had a temporality we might otherwise associate with the nation-form. This is a problematic formulation in large part because it naturalizes precolonial India – an epoch prior to the nation-form – as having the temporality of modern nationalism. The formulation risks giving nationalism – a historical formation – a transhistorical quality.
10 Recent studies of Raj architecture note a similar tendency. As Metcalf explains, the buildings of the Raj were “Neither English nor Indian,” and “made tangible and helped define the uniquely colonial culture of which it was a part” (Citation1989, 7). Furthermore, his historical dates for the transition from an India of imperial romance to one of colonial governmentality are identical with Naipaul’s (21). Unlike Naipaul, however, Metcalf highlights the ways in which Indian architectural idioms influenced metropolitan buildings.
11 I borrow the phrase “architecture of independence” from Manuel Herz’s groundbreaking survey of postcolonial architecture in Sub-Saharan Africa (Citation2015).
12 Kenneth Frampton describes Corbusier’s achievement at Chandigarh as a “monumental vernacular,” where the designs for the buildings “were derived in part from the livestock and landscape of the region. The evident intent was to represent a modern Indian identity that would be free from any association with its colonial past” (Citation1992, 230). This achievement, for Frampton, belies the material reality of India: “the tragedy of Chandigarh – a city designed for automobiles in a country where many, as yet, still lack a bicycle” (230).
13 It is worth noting that Naipaul’s notion of national fantasy is markedly different from what Lauren Berlant calls the “fantasy of national integration,” for which monuments also play a central role. For Berlant, “fantasy” designates “how national culture becomes local – through images, narratives, monuments, and sites that circulate through personal/collective consciousness,” and have both “‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ meanings, stated and unstated” (Citation1991, 5). In other words, national fantasy describes the way in which the tension contained in the category “Citizen-Subject” – political collective and political subjectivity – is realized as a political community. In stark contrast, Naipaul’s conception of “fantasy” concerns not the demographic and geographic components of the nation, but the historicism of national identity. For a discussion of national fantasy in the Victorian context, see Zarena Aslami, The Dream Life of Citizens (Citation2012).
14 For a discussion of Chandigarh as a transnational accomplishment, see Prakash (Citation2002).
15 For an important discussion of Naipaul’s relation to Conrad, see Mukherjee (Citation2014, 50–78).
16 Hannah Arendt identifies playfulness in Kipling’s fiction as a technique of New Imperialism (Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 216–218).
17 Is this not exactly Naipaul’s narrative style, and precisely what makes him both troublesome and troubling? An Area of Darkness is obviously a travelogue, but it is also an interrogation of what Naipaul describes as his “despair”: “true despair lies too deep for formulation. It was only now, as my experience of India defined itself more properly against my own homelessness, that I saw how close in the past year I had been to the total Indian negation, how much it had become the basis of thought and feeling” (290). For useful discussions of the slippage in Naipaul’s writings from subject and object of interrogation, see Bewes (Citation2014); Krishnan (Citation2020, 74–90).
18 It is worth noting that Naipaul uses “British” and “English” interchangeably, hence my own slippages.
19 Ian Baucom argues that the novel’s repetition of the question “who is Kim?” “invokes the barely hidden anxiety of that vast project of imperial adoption dramatized in Kipling’s narrative,” and ultimately sounds the imperial ambivalence at the heart of the text (Citation1999, 88).
20 I am grateful to Harris Feinsod (Citation2020) for introducing me to cabotage as a literary historical category.
21 Naipaul’s praise for James is unequivocal: “Beyond a Boundary is one of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West Indies, important to England, important to the West Indies. It has further value: it gives a base and solidity to West Indian literary endeavour” (Naipaul Citation1984, 22). And the feeling was mutual. In the 1963 Appendix to The Black Jacobins, James characterizes Naipaul as an important contributor to the “literature of anti-colonialism” in the West Indies, a writer who shows how “the East Indian has become West Indian as all other expatriates” (James Citation1989, 414, 416).
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Nasser Mufti
Nasser Mufti is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on nineteenth century British and postcolonial literature. He is the author of Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture (Northwestern University Press, 2018).