THESIS: HAS V S NAIPAUL CONTRIBUTED TO AN INDIGENOUS VOICE AND AS SUCH BE CONSIDERED IN CARIBBEAN INTELLECTUAL TRADITIONS.

SUBJECT: VIDIADHAR SURAJPRASAD NAIPAUL. PREPARED BY: JEPTER LORDE

CONTENTS
ABOUT V S NAIPAUL HIS LITERARY WORK AN ANALYSIS THE INDIGENOUS VOICE THE BIOGRAPHY THE INDIVIDUAL A CARIBBEAN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION THE EVALUATION REFERENCE PAGE

Taken at about the time of his third book aged 40, the year is 1972. Naipaul is married and has taken a lover.

WRITER SIR VS NAIPAUL WITH HIS THEN LOVER, MARGARET MURRAY

ABOUT V S NAIPAUL
Born in Chaguanas Trinidad 17 August 1932, a then third generation West Indian of East Indian descent. Grand father a Banaras trained Braham, indentured himself to teach among Trinidad indentured cane workers. Father , Sepersad , was a reporter for the Trinidadian Guardian and a short story writer seemed to be the model for his sons literary interest.

ABOUT V S NAIPAUL
While in 4th form at Queens Royal College he wrote in his Kennedys Revised Latin premier a vow to escape Trinidad within 5 years. Emigration was 6 years later. He studied English at the University of College Oxford B.A.(Hamner 1977). Suffers mental breakdown 1951. Marries Patricia Hale 1955. A House for Mr. Biswas 1961. A Bend in the River 1979 January: Patricia Hale dies; April: marries Nadira Alvi 1996.(Jussawalla 1997)

HIS LITERARY WORK AN ANALYSIS

In an interview with Shankar Israel, Naipaul had this to say: The people I saw were little people who were mimicking upper-class respectability. They had been slaves, and you can't write about that in the way that Tolstoy wrote about, even his backward society for his society was whole and the one I knew was not. Veena Singh, 'A Journey of Rejection: V S Naipaul's The Mimic Men' in ed, Mohit K Ray, V S Naipaul: Critical Essays, p156

HIS LITERARY WORK AN ANALYSIS

In the Middle Passage (1962) the Caribbean is judged to be a derelict land Tourism, a new kind of slavery, continues to degrade the populace, keeping it a materialist, immigrant society, without substance. Legitimate criticism of Naipaul view, is that it is narrow, isolated to East Indian segment of society and that it excludes recent progressive efforts made on behalf of negritude. Naipaul response is that the society is not cohesive, the communities were juxtaposed and mutually exclusive, that he could only speak from his own experience.(Hamner et al 1977.)

HIS LITERARY WORK AN ANALYSIS

The house is a central focus in Miguel Street, A House for Mr Biswas and The Mimic Men. None of them are homes, islands of order, centres of light and beauty and achievement. They are the temporary residences of shipwrecked people; their meanings culminate in that London hotel where the fatigued narrator seeks truth, the final emptiness. V S Naipaul A Critical Introduction Landeg White.

THE INDIGENOUS VOICE

A Caribbean person can live anywhere in the world, can speak various languages and hence cannot be described with one characteristic. Apart from a sometimes very distant Caribbean ancestor they have in common only one aspect: their own image of the Caribbean and a kind of relationship to a place within it. (Schmidt 2008).

THE BIOGRAPHY

Or of a great cricketer whod made a political statement: Hes South African negro and is saying that because hes a slave. Africans need to be kicked thats the only thing they understand, he said in Uganda. Whip them was also a frequent Naipaul rejoinder. Is it West Indian waggishness when he speaks of negroes at [Princess Dianas] shrines, weeping openly, or little negro children running up and down the street [in London], causing me distress. Or consider his reaction to the news that the cricketer Viv Richards and his Indian wife have had a baby: How could she have a child by that nigger? Or this comment on the Nobel prize (1988): Of course I wont get it theyll give it to some nigger or other. To Naipaul, West Indians are slaves and Indians have a slave mentality. The word trips off his tongue. But I see these cruel and vulgar remarks as an expression of hostility: a Caliban-like way of saying, Keep away from me.

THE INDIVIDUAL

After years of using prostitutes, the turning point in Naipauls life comes in 1972 when he finds a woman he desires: Margaret, whom he has met in Buenos Aires. She apparently refused to be interviewed for the book, but her archived love letters supply the missing narrative. They are rapturous, despairing, pleading, speaking of his cruel sexual desires. She acknowledges that he is her black master, that he regards his penis as a god, that she will worship it, abase herself. This word master, used often in the letters, is interesting. It is a slave word. In role playing and most of these love letters refer to highly eroticised power games the master is regarded as dominant; but, paradoxically, it is usually the submissive person, the masochist, who has the ultimate power maddening for the sadist. Here is one instance. Margaret shows up unexpectedly in Wiltshire. Naipaul is displeased with her. He beats her and afterwards explains, I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt . . . She didnt mind at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldnt appear really in public. My hand was swollen. Margaret was Vidias ideal woman, French writes. He could string her along and mistreat her with her abject consent. He later writes, in paraphrase, She said she had done things to Vido that would have made her sick with anybody else, and yet she longed for the time when she could do them again. It is no exaggeration to describe the relationship between Naipaul and Margaret as a version of The Story of O. The World is What It Is: The authorised Biography of VS Naipaul.

CARIBBEAN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION

The Caribbean intellectual traditions seeks to recognize, study, understand and evaluate the ideas, concepts, debates and theoretical viewpoints of our intellectuals that have shaped our increasingly interdependent and complex Caribbean. They are signs in the University of the West Indies of an institution where rich intellectual traditions are being developed with regard to Sir Arthur Lewis, Dereck Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite and Sir Erskine Sandiford.

THE EVALUATION
For he accepts that his affair with Murray undid Pat's life, and that his publicly airing the fact that he had once been a great prostitute man devastated her, and brought her cancer back after a period of remission - It could be said that I had killed her. Derek Walcott, the West Indian poet who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1992, noted: "If Naipaul's attitude toward Negroes, with its nasty little sneers... was turned on Jews, for example, how many people would praise him for his frankness?"

EVALUATION

V S Naipaul is simply not the kind of man that I or for that matter any Caribbean man would want to copy; the facts however are what they are. Naipaul has been recognised internationally and regionally for his work, he has a right to write about the Caribbean and he cannot be denied his reviews by his peers a necessary requirement for academic acceptance. An intellectual he is, a contributor to an emerging indigenous voice he has been and is therefore part of an intellectual tradition but should remain on the fringes of the tradition because the man cannot be separated from the writer.

REFERENCE PAGE
Hamner, Robert D., et al Critical Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul. Washington, D.C: Three Continents Press. Jussawalla, Feroza., et al Conversations with V.S. Naipaul. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. White, Landeg., et al V.S. Naipaul A Critical Introduction. London: The Macmillan Press. French, Patrick., The World is What it Is: Knopf Publishers. Schmidt, Bettina., Caribbean Diaspora in the USA. UK: Ashgate.