This essay appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.
This year marks the bicentennial of the publication of one of the great novels of the twentieth century. I suppose that the occasion will be noted in academic quarters with the publication of the customary collection of essays, many of the individual contributions ambivalent if not hostile to V. S. Naipaulâs lifelong project of conservative mythmaking. Certainly, in the half century since the appearance of A House for Mr. Biswas, critical opinion toward Naipaulâs fiction would appear to have been much tainted by liberal bias. Writing in The Nation, for example, Michael Wood, apparently oblivious to the fact that there might be cause for concern about the state of contemporary social norms, bemoaned âNaipaulâs serious devotion to his own gloom.â1 In a review of Magic Seeds, one of Naipaulâs more recent novels, Siddhartha Deb allowed that âNaipaulâs novels have often succeeded against the grain of his conservatism,â this after asserting that âthe old prejudices [against Maoists and peasants, among other objects] have expanded to devour almost everything appealing about his writing.â2 It would seem to many that a âprejudiceâ against Maoists is not such a bad thing, but in the groves of academe, in which most literary critics make their living, apparently it is.
Even more unkind is the review-essay that Terry Eagleton published in Harperâs two years after Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. As if to counteract the effect of the award, Eagleton attempts to reduce Naipaulâs career to the predictable terms of the ĂŠmigrĂŠ writer, one of those like Conrad, Yeats, or Eliot (not bad company, one would think) who âcompensate for their outsider status by becoming honorary aristocratsâ within the larger cosmopolitan society. Having laced Naipaul into the straitjacket of Marxist critique, Eagleton proceeds to lay on with ad hominem (âLike Gulliver, Naipaul finds the same pettiness, corruption, and betrayal everywhere he goesâ) and sheer derision: writing of Naipaulâs portrayal of guerilla leaders in the novel In a Free State, Eagleton opines that âNaipaul has only to sniff an ideal to detect in it the stirrings of self-aggrandizement.â3 Is it impolitic to remind Professor Eagleton that the colonial emancipators in questionâas in the section of the novel entitled âTell Me Who to Killââare all too often sinister, ruthless murderers, not âidealistsâ? Even more extraordinary is the charge that Naipaulâs realism is actually âthe lopsided antirealism of one who can hardly bring himself to acknowledge the realities of love and courage.â4 What else is Naipaulâs heroic career of undeviating devotion to the truth, even in the face of unrelenting attack on the part of the left-wing literary establishment, if not a testament to love and courage?5 For those who are in any doubt, a reexamination of A House for Mr. Biswas should suffice to clarify the nature of Naipaulâs moral compassion and artistic accomplishment.
Like all great works of art, A House for Mr. Biswas is deceptively simple in its design. Composed in a modest vernacular idiom, the novel is a chronological account of the life of a man who, through a lifetime of aspiration and effort, rises from his status as a village sign painter and store clerk to become a provincial journalist. The ruling passion of this simple man, Mohun Biswas, is to establish a secure abode for his family, separate from his oppressive in-laws. What he seeks on a deeper level, however, as becomes clear in the course of several painful relocations, is not merely physical shelterâa houseâbut a âhomeâ in which the noblest instincts of humanity will thrive. What he requires is liberty for himself and for his family: the freedom to exercise his mind and to pursue his dream of a decent, purposeful existence. In the course of telling this story, Naipaul expresses a profound sense of the goodness of life, and of its corollary, the virtue of continuity. Based on an underlying belief in goodness, one may be confident that life will continue into the future even after the demise of an individual human being. In the lives of our children and grandchildren, life may continue in much the same way as it has in the past.
Biswas, who is himself a writer (though a minor one compared to the author who created him), possesses an implicit if unarticulated knowledge of all of this. Because of his implicit knowledge of conservative truthsâincluding the fact that our survival necessitates a continuity of humane values passed down through generationsâBiswas is essentially an optimist even as he suffers one maddening setback after another and even as he glimpses the sad insufficiency of his own surroundings. Even with the dismaying raft of social upheavals that unsettle the world represented in the novel, changes arising from Afro-Caribbean politics or the broader convulsions accompanying the breakup of the British Empire, there still exists a continuity of civilization upon which Naipaul chooses to focus. It is not the superficial change of party or even the rise or fall of one ethnic faction that determines the future but rather the continuity of a âuniversal civilizationâ as represented by a vital legacy of values and beliefs. Alasdair MacIntyre has analyzed the relationship of this legacy to the system of practical reasoning that is indispensable for the sane and coherent functioning of any society. In the absence of a shared tradition of practical reasoning, civil society descends into a Mogadishu of sheer firepower of one sort or another. As MacIntyre points out, âAt this level debate is necessarily barren; rival appeals to accounts of the human good or of justice necessarily assume a rhetorical form such that it is as assertion and counterassertion, rather than as argument and counterargument, that rival standpoints confront one another.â6 From assertion and counterassertion it is a small step to blow and counterblow. What all modern tyrants from Stalin and Hitler to Mao and Saddam Hussein have perfectly understood is the impotence of rational argument in the context of a modernizing society with collectivist instincts. In the absence of recognition of the legitimacy of argument within a tradition of practical reasoning, how else can a dispute be decided other than by intimidation of one sort or another?
Naipaul has always displayed an acute awareness of the vulnerability of modernizing societies toward this kind of barbarism. Indeed, one of the chief virtues of his literary imaginationâone among a great many, I would sayâis the depth of humanity with which he has observed the failure of politics in so many developing countries, and while this matter may seem far removed from the modest domestic tale that he tells in A House for Mr. Biswas, it is not. The static defensiveness of the Tulsi family, the lack of opportunity in rural Trinidad, and the shifting politics of Port of Spain are all features of a provincial culture in which no shared tradition of belief or consensus of practical reasoning holds sway. All that holds this fragmented society together is the poorly understood, and increasingly conflicted, rationality of the British Empire, itself at the time of the novel undergoing great challenges both from without and within. Within this turbulent condition, characteristic not only of Naipaulâs fictionalized Trinidad but also, more broadly, of contemporary Western civilization in general, how can there exist a consensus concerning the central purposes and chief good of life? In the absence of agreement, there exist only competing goods and competing conceptions of lifeâs purpose. As Naipaul implies, this state of conflict leads to demoralization, waste, and decline. There are more than enough images of poverty, disorder, and sheer rot in Biswas to underline this perception.
It is hardly surprising that an author as deeply compassionate and perceptive as Naipaul should have been led to record the destructive consequences of the breakdown of a coherent cultural tradition. What is remarkable, and especially so in Biswas, is the sheer force of intellectual will with which Naipaul comprehends and confronts the distinctively modern form of apostasy. In doing so, he arrives at a comic vision of contemporary existence that is unprecedented in modern literature. Biswasâs instinct to build a house serves as microcosm for an entire realm of selflessness and humility among men and for the reassertion of a coherent rationality based on these values. His quest for a true home stands as well for the profound awareness of mortality shared by all men and for the consequent instinct for the preservation of a redemptive civilization. Through his noble efforts, Biswas seeks security against not merely the social ills of homelessness or hunger but against mortality itself. In terms of the survival of one individual, this astounding quest, of course, must end in defeat, but by way of the miraculous comedic effect of Naipaulâs art, it also ends in triumph. From one perspective, to be sure, Biswas is a lifelong loser, an easy mark readily imposed upon by those around him; from another and more correct point of view, however, he is a splendid hero worthy of emulation and respect. In essence Biswas is motivated by a resolute faith in the fundamental goodness of creation and in the furtherance of the abiding civilization in which he believes.
Naipaulâs ultimate faith in the goodness of life is everywhere in evidence in Biswas. Despite his protagonistâs star-crossed relationship with his domineering in-laws, the Tulsi family, Biswas retains an intense belief in the ethos of chivalric love. In the case of a marriage so blindly entered into, so lacking practical or emotional foundation, so buffeted by antagonistic forces, one can hardly imagine that conjugal love could blossom at all, much less that it could survive for thirty years. Yet faith in domesticityâin the chivalric ideal and in its modern manifestation, the nuclear familyâis one of the distinctive aspects of Western cultural belief that Biswas has adopted and that Naipaul celebrates in this novel. Despite all the trials, injustices, and humiliations to which he is subjected by his in-laws, Biswas retains his unconquerable faith in romantic love as one of the necessary foundations of identity. As it seems to the young, as yet unmarried Biswas, âLove was something he was embarrassed to think about; the very word he mentioned seldom, and then as mockingly as Alec and Bhandatâs boys. But secretly he believed.â7
From the very beginning, the novel is the record of a remarkable faith, focusing as it does on this aspiration toward goodness and purity. Indeed, Biswasâs enduring sense of loneliness is intimately connected with his greater aspirations, which often separate him from other human beings. During the early years of his marriage, for example, he is constantly involved in arguments with his wife, Shama, who answers with resentful silence. After Shama and Biswas move to a rough, uncivilized sugarcane-growing area (âThe Chaseâ) to operate a shop owned by the Tulsis, Shama derides her husband as âthe man who wanted to paddle his own canoe,â the phrase that the Tulsis have attached to him. Believing that he is irrevocably alienated from his wife, Biswas gives way to an overpowering sense of sadness and grief. At last, however, in line with her own nobler instincts, Shama sets to work cleaning, organizing, and improving the small mud hut that they have occupied as their first attempt at a real home. At this early stage of their life together, their humble furniture itself seems to embody their desperation and struggle for a better existence, as well as the fragility of their dream. The four-poster bed that they inherit from the previous occupant is horribly infested with bedbugs, and the small kitchen table possesses an intensely moving quality of diminutive modesty. These qualities are a reflection of their own lives, and, as if to enforce this reminder of constriction and impurity, the furniture continues for some time to follow them from one house to another, like ghosts of their own inadequacy.
Although Biswas and his wife must struggle to survive financially, they face an even more daunting challenge in their dealings with Shamaâs extended family. Everywhere around Hanuman House, Biswas seems almost an invisible man. An unwavering routine exists as part of the Tulsi familyâs attempt to defend their inherited privileges. It is precisely this status that has âawedâ Biswas upon first encountering the family, and it is preservation of this status that becomes the major sticking point in his relationship with his wife. Still, Hanuman House can never be a home for Biswas, because it partakes of a fragmented, displaced culture outside the larger civilization with which he has aligned himself. Tulsi ritual is an imperfectly remembered version of an ancient way of life and one that requires a brutalizing conformity; it is also a travesty of genuine religious practice. As it turns out, Biswas is not so much at odds with Hindu tradition, as he sometime believes himself to be, as he is at odds with a corrupt version of tradition deployed for present ends.
On one level, Biswasâs search for a permanent home is an attempt to prove himself in relation to the wealthier, more prominent Tulsi family. Yet Biswasâs dream of owning his own house is also a symbolic projection of a deeper aspiration: a desire to hold at bay the insecurity, indignity, dependence, and constriction of life. It is hardly coincidental that, when he decides to buy a Christmas present for his daughter Siva, he purchases an elaborate dollhouseâa miniature version of his lifelong ambition. This is a gift that evokes immediate resentment from the other residents of Hanuman House. When Biswas returns and finds that the dollhouse has been utterly destroyed, broken up by Shama herself, he is enraged, but in this he does not understand the necessity of his wifeâs actions. It is, after all, the only way to preserve her sanity and that of her children at Hanuman House.
The focus in Biswas, however, is not entirely or primarily on conjugal love. To a greater extent, it centers on the extraordinary attachment of Biswas and his son, Anandâa relationship that, in many respects, parallels the real-life bond of Naipaul and his father, Seepersad. As an autobiographical fiction, Biswas is an intensely felt tribute to the man who played such an important role in Naipaulâs development and particularly in his choice of vocation. It seems appropriate that Biswas, the first of Naipaulâs major novels, should focus on this paternal relationship. Knowing that he might never see his father again following his departure for university studies in Britain, Naipaul conjured up the cherished memory of his father through an imaginative act of fiction that attempts to preserve his fatherâs memory and, indeed, to ensure his immortality. As Patrick French notes, âIn his writing, [Naipaul] would revere his father, elevating him as an exemplar and applying a degree of sympathy and compassion to him that was lacking in his treatment of other people.â8 Much later in life, in an interview with French, Naipaul betrayed a less admiring opinion of the father who might be considered in practical terms largely a failure in life. Yet even fifty years after his fatherâs death, Naipaul was able to summon up this relationship in the most loving and vivid terms, as he did in his Nobel Prize lecture. His fatherâs natural curiosity and vitality, and the stories that his father wrote about Trinidad, provided âa kind of solidity,â Naipaul wrote. âThey gave me something to stand on in the world. I cannot imagine what my mental picture would have been without those stories.â9
But why is the relationship of father and son so essential, one might ask, especially in an era in which single-parent households are more the rule than the exception? Why is it that this, perhaps Naipaulâs finest novel and certainly among the finest novels of the past century, should be so out of step with the direction of society, and yet so important to its future? Why should it be that, in an age in which the paterfamilias has been made the endless butt of feminist derision, one of our great writers should choose to focus on just such a figure? Perhaps it is simply that in banishing from our sight that which we so much needâthe presence of a confident, manly, compassionate figure of authorityâwe have opened a spiritual abyss that has made itself felt more acutely with each decade that passes. In his case, what Naipaul gained from his father was a window into the humanity of a deeply caring individual, and not just any individual but that singular male presence among all the earthâs billions who cared most for his existence. What Naipaul gained from being allowed into the presence of his fatherâs tumultuous and joyful life was the priceless gift that lies at the root of all civilization: an affirmation of the sacredness of life and of the awesome responsibility to protect it. In his relationship with his son, Biswas is responding to the noblest instincts of concern, nurture, and aspiration.
This intimate relationship of father and son, so essential in Naipaulâs writing, is, of course, also a key element of Western civilization. It is part of the relationship of trust across generations that is a crucial aspect of the Judeo-Christian civilization. How else can teachings be passed down if generations are not linked by respect and faith? The paternal relationship is a keystone of that universal âconservative yearningâ10 that Russell Kirk viewed as underpinning the cohesion and permanence necessary for our very survival. In response to what he comes to understand about his father and in the developing relationship between them, Anand works hard at school in order to fulfill his part of the multigenerational bargain.
This bargain between father and son is apparent in the section of the novel that describes Anandâs school examination, as Naipaul manages to convey the tenderness that Biswas feels toward his son as he goes through meticulous preparation for the exam. One imagines that the same preparations are taking place in dozens if not hundreds of households in Trinidad at the same moment, as they do in millions of households throughout the Western world. In this microcosm of human solidarity, with Biswas lending Anand his pen, presenting him with a large bottle of ink and with blotters, pencils, and other necessities, we gain insight into the way in which human civilization itself works. Here is the painstaking care, the mutual concern, the earnestness and emotional support, and that profound bond of domestic love that is one pillar of civilization. To Anandâs surprise, terrified as he is that he has failed, he wins one of the five college scholarships. Biswasâs sensible appreciation of his own opportunities is passed down to Anand, and, as Anand comes to understand, his patrimonyâthe inheritance of lasting values of courage, constancy, and self-respectâtakes on crucial importance.
As he makes his way through life, Biswas tries several times to establish his independence: first at The Chase, then at Green Vale, where he works as an assistant estate manager for the Tulsis, and finally in Port of Spain. At Green Vale, Biswas unknowingly achieves an important step toward securing a permanent home, for here he first begins to communicate deeply with his son, who chooses for the moment to stay with his father rather than return to Hanuman House. In the midst of the fear and loneliness of Green Vale, Biswas attempts to comfort his son, and through this concern he discovers the depth of his love and need for his son, emotions connected with âthe most oppressive of all his fears: that Anand would leave him and he would be left alone.â11 As it turns out, Anand does return to his mother at Hanuman House, but the shared ordeal of his stay at Green Vale results in a new and lasting relationship between father and son. This love, sense of responsibility, and respect continue to develop, proving to be a source of satisfaction and strength for both. Clearly, the love for Anand is one of the transforming elements of Biswasâs life, a force that helps lift him out of the poverty and indignity of his circumstances.
It is not only in his commitment to family that Biswas reveals his faith in the ultimate purposefulness of life; it is also in his vocation. In the course of the book, Naipaul traces Biswasâs unfolding ambition to become something more than a village sign painter. Biswasâs youthful successes in this craft foreshadow his mature ambition to enter the literary world, but his thorny ascent involves decadelong service to the Tulsis. Beyond that, literary ambition must be pursued in precious moments of leisure stolen from his journalistic duties on the Port of Spain newspaper as well as those many, often demanding obligations to his extended family. Beyond these practical difficulties, an even greater hurdle exists: Biswas possesses no model for conceptualizing his experience as a stubbornly independent individual living within a remote province of a waning empire. Even as he is instinctively drawn to the classics of the Western literary tradition, he seems to find little in that tradition that relates directly to his anomalous situation. Enigma that he is, Biswas works with unflagging determination, pursuing one false start after another until, stirred by the intense emotion following his motherâs death, he discovers a narrative voice more compelling than all the âmodelsâ he has studied in the anthologies. Yet though the directness and simplicity of his newfound mode of expression might seem an escapeâan oppositionâto the standards and restrictions of the larger literary culture, they are not. Rather, his confident new voice reflects his arrival as a self-assured member of a larger civilization. It is because he has understood and aspired to the virtues of this broader tradition that he is able shape a narrative of his experience within it.
Some four decades ago John Updike pointed out precisely this âbiasâ in Naipaulâs writing: âan unexamined assumption,â Updike called it, âof metropolitan superiority.â12 Yet Updikeâs objection to the âunrealityâ of Western civilization actually reveals little more than that criticâs own predisposition based on a disavowal of his own âprivilegedâ status. This sort of liberal disdain of the West, parading as open-minded impartiality toward all cultures, has become all too familiar in the decades since Updike published his disparaging review. Indeed, the fraudulence of this adversary culture was already apparent to Naipaul himself in the years immediately following the Second World War in which it began to make a significant impact. By the time Updikeâs review appeared, Naipaul had already commented on the trahison des clercs as he had experienced it in Britain and America. For example, in his essay âWhatâs Wrong with Being a Snob?â (1967), Naipaul spoke of the âself-violation into which we are continually being tempted by our [liberal] principles.â13 He also understood clearly enough that the metropolitan society with which Updike identified his writing could not be comprehended in a simplistic manner. âThe great societies that produced the great novels of the past have cracked,â Naipaul wrote in his important essay, âConradâs Darknessâ (1974). As he stressed at the conclusion of that essay, âthe world we inhabit . . . is always newâ14 and must always be comprehended anew by the creative artist. It is not, as Updike believed, that Naipaul simply viewed âthe men of the West Indies as poor imitations of Europeans.â15 True, Naipaul viewed the lives of those of the West Indies and of other regions of the Third World as half-made, insufficient, and impoverished in cultural as well as material terms; but he also judged the lives of those of the metropolitan culture to be in their own way feckless, self-indulgent, and painfully confused. No one can read Naipaulâs âBritishâ novel, The Enigma of Arrival, with its central images of impermanence and decay, without a disturbing sense that the metropolitan center is at a point of crisis as its own privileged population, particularly the elite who most benefit from its liberties and affluence, seems gleefully committed to undermining the basis of its own happiness.
Yet it ought not to have been necessary to consult essays such as âConradâs Darknessâ; the clearest evidence of Naipaulâs view and the strongest evidence of its correctness appear in the extensive body of fiction he had already published by 1970. Updikeâs thesis was mistaken, I believe, for the simple reason that in the final analysis Naipaul was not writing about competing cultures but about men as they exist everywhere. Indeed, I do not believe that Biswas ever refers to himself as a âcolonial,â though clearly he resides in a deeply flawed environment that he is determined to transcend or to see his son transcend. To understand fully how mistaken the colonial thesis is, one needs to understand the idealism behind the character of Biswas and the enormous aspiration underlying Naipaulâs effort to tell his story. Biswas is a man who lives in expectation âfor the world to yield its sweetness and romance.â16 The frustration associated with this quest shadows him all his life and costs him his health, but Biswas can never forsake his quest for liberty.
At age thirty-one, Biswas begins work at the Port of Spain Sentinel, a salaried job not only in the city apart from his in-laws but also connected, however tenuously, with the Western tradition of law, reason, and individualism that he admires. Among other assignments, Biswas is designated special investigator of Deserving Destitutesâor âDeserving Destees,â as he prefers to call them. Here we see Naipaulâs sardonic humor at its most biting. Biswasâs role as investigator of the Deserving Desteesâin many cases, in fact, undeserving shams or aggressive bulliesâconfers power, since he is able to bring certain particularly âdeservingâ cases to public attention, but it also causes frustration and conflict as he is threatened by those who wish to be singled out as more deserving of charity than others. Biswas has entered the realm of competing victimhood where he discovers that rival victims can be utterly callous toward one another and menacing toward those who refuse to credit their special status.
This stage of his career comes to an end with the departure of Mr. Burnett, the editor who has been especially kind to Biswas, and who has sponsored his efforts at feature writing. Relegated to writing âcapital shorts,â Biswas suffers in his job, begins to take more frequent sick days, and searches for a way out of his predicament. He does so in part by attempting to compose his own fictionalized life history: for example, by making the effort to complete the autobiographical tale of Gopi, a âcountry shopkeeperâ who was âat the age of thirty-three . . . already the father of four children.â17 Unfortunately, the story merely marks another stage in the continual postponement of the writing of his life. Then, unexpectedly, the postponement is shattered with the death of his mother, Bipti. Out of the agony of grief that accompanies the death of his beloved mother, Biswas begins to write in earnest, not in the flowery speech that he imagined appropriate to an untested novice in âBritish Literatureâ but in a simple, dignified prose of his own: âHe addressed his mother. He did not think of rhythm; he used no cheating abstract words. He wrote of coming up to the brow of the hill, seeing the black, forked earth, the marks of the spade, the indentations of the fork prongs. He wrote of a journey he had made a long time before. He was tired; she made him rest. He was hungry; she gave him food. He had nowhere to go; she welcomed him.â18 In this writing, Biswas takes an important step, and one that will undergird his sonâs efforts to secure his place in the larger civilization. To express his grief, Biswas finds that he must discard the antiquated literary style through which he has attempted to gain recognition. Now he writes with a piercing honesty. Ironically, it is this transition from an imperfectly acquired style to genuineness and direct observation that secures his admission, for the first time, into a broader literary culture that, unknown to Biswas, has long since abandoned the âhigh styleâ that he has sought to emulate.
At this same period, Biswasâs professional life undergoes a significant change as well. Based on his experience of reporting on the Deserving Destitutes, Biswas obtains a civil service job with the newly founded Department of Community Welfare. Even this source of income, however, is precarious because it depends on the vagaries of political patronage. Also, Biswas remains dependent on the Tulsis because he lives in the back room of a family tenement house in which the front rooms are reserved for the younger son, Owad. When Owad returns from England to drive Biswas from his quarters, Owad no longer resembles the naĂŻve, open-eyed medical student: he is now consumed by radical politics, worshipful of Soviet Communism and of its leaders, especially Stalin, whom he defends against Biswasâs skepticism. The final break between Biswas and the Tulsis comes as Biswas and Anand ridicule these radical beliefs and the intellectual self-importance and arrogance that accompany them. (Ironically, as soon as Owad starts to mix with his medical colleagues at the India club, his enthusiasm for Communism abruptly abates, thus revealing the shallowness of his radical commitment.)
Toward the end of the novel, following his eviction from the Tulsi tenement house, Biswas is convinced that he will be reduced to joining the homeless who squat in Marine Square, a place that is familiar to him as it was one of the first places upon which he reported for the Sentinel. In this desperate strait, Biswas meets an acquaintance attempting to sell what he represents as his own longtime residence. The house in Sikkim Street seems the answer to Biswasâs prayersâyet like everything about his life in Trinidad, his dream home, the first accommodation obtained without the assistance of his in-laws, turns out to be less than satisfactory. Once again Biswas seems an easy markâyet in his faith, his inner strength, and his determination, and despite all that the world throws against him, he remains a noble individual, all the more so, in fact, because of his ambition to rise to a level of civilization beyond his immediate means.
Quite miraculously, this absurdly constructed house, on which Biswas has been deceived by an unscrupulous speculator, is gradually transformed into a true and happy home for his long-suffering family. As they complete the expensive improvements that are necessary, the structure takes on the character of a beloved refuge. In describing the actual house into which the Naipaul family moved on December 31, 1946, Patrick French emphasizes how the possession of their own home, no matter how modest, transformed the familyâs morale: âAt once, the dynamic between the parents and the children shifted: they became a unit, a nuclear family, a father, mother, brothers and sisters.â19 In this same way, Naipaulâs semiallegorical narrative suggests, civilization is the hard-won product of aspiration and sacrifice, paid for by improvementâor, at least, ameliorationâof our fundamental nature and development beyond our primitive cultural past. In their permanent home, the product of their sacrifice and initiative, Biswasâs family flourishes: âSoon it seemed to the children that they had never lived anywhere but in the tall square house in Sikkim Street. From now their lives would be ordered, their memories coherent.â20 However much it is disparaged by the intellectual class, this ambitionâorder and coherence, stability and the possibility of a better lifeâis, and has always been, the goal of life for most human beings.
The climax of the novel takes place with the acquisition of the house on Sikkim Street and, more important, the familyâs acknowledgement of this as their true and permanent home. By contrast, the novelâs final section consists merely of a brief denouement. When Anand leaves for England on a university scholarship, he understands he may never see his father again. Biswas has been increasingly troubled by heart disease, and, indeed, within five years he dies. But though he dies, his house, with all its defects, its questionable foundation, appalling construction, and ludicrous design, continues intact and, in the end, serves as the proper setting for the funeral attended by his extended family. Afterward, Shama, Savi, and the other children return to the house that itself now seems to mourn that âinvisibleâ human being responsible for its creation.
In his great novel, V. S. Naipaul reminds us of the necessity of discerning and securing our true home, especially in an era in which there exists so much confusion concerning the virtues of order and continuity suggested by that image. What Naipaul wrote fifty years ago is nothing less than a narrative dramatization of the necessity of Western ideals of liberty, personal accountability, and respect for individual life. Biswasâs quixotic pursuit of his dreamâthe dream, quite simply, to live freely and decently as a human being should be allowed to liveâcauses him to tilt at one windmill after another, but in the end he triumphs beyond his expectations. He not only secures a comfortable home for his family; he also comes to understand the full meaning of âhomeâ in terms of an inherited and operative culture of sustaining values. Such a belief rests upon a larger faith in an overriding system of purpose and order, as well as faith in the role of oneâs own civilization within this larger frame of telos. Yet the lessons of A House for Mr. Biswas are not in any sense peculiar to the novelâs protagonist or to his family or transplanted ethnic community: the quest for a settled, purposeful, civilized existence is the shared birthright of human beings everywhere. Like Mohun Biswas, all of us have experienced the pain of dispossession in one sense or another, and all of us must struggle to discover our true home. Yet in an age that appears to value frenetic change above all else, the security that Naipaulâs splendid protagonist seeks can be found. It is there in the prudence, fortitude, and faith that his beloved hero so greatly epitomizes. âŚ
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books, including Heartland of the Imagination: Conservative Values in American Literature from Poe to OâConnor to Haruf. He has written for Modern Age on literature, higher education, and other topics.
1 Michael Wood, âIs That All There Is?â The Nation 279 (December 27, 2004): 29.
2 Siddhartha Deb, âReview of Magic Seeds,â New Statesman 133 (September 6, 2004): 51.
3 Terry Eagleton, âA Mind So Fine: The Contradictions of V. S. Naipaul,â Harperâs Magazine 307 (September 2003): 81.
4 Ibid., 82.
5 Following the publication of Patrick Frenchâs authorized biography in 2008, several reviewers seized on the disclosure of certain unflattering aspects of Naipaulâs private life, including his apparent insensitivity toward his first wife, Patricia Hale, in an effort to undercut the authorâs literary reputation. Among these was Christopher Hitchens, who attempted to connect Naipaulâs supposed coldness, callousness, and defensiveness with the scrupulous realism of his fiction. By the end of the review, Naipaul has been downgraded in Hitchensâs view from a defensive âarrivisteâ deserving of pity to a dangerously âreactionary and triumphalist writer.â âCruel and Unusual,â Atlantic (November 2008):138.
6 Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 343.
7 V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas, intro. Karl Miller (New York: Everymanâs Library, 1995), 76.
8 Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (New York: Knopf, 2008), 64.
9 âNobel LectureâLiterature 2001,â Nobelprize.org, accessed January 9, 2012, http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture-e.html.
10 Russell Kirk, âWhat Is Conservatism?â in The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays, ed. George A. Panichas (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007), 20.
11 Biswas, 270.
12 John Updike, âFoolâs Gold,â in Critical Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul, ed. Robert D. Hamner (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1977), 158. Originally published as âFoolâs Gold,â New Yorker (August 8, 1970).
13 V. S. Naipaul, âWhatâs Wrong with Being a Snob?â in Critical Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul, ed. Robert D. Hamner (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1977), 36. Originally published as âWhatâs Wrong with Being a Snob?â Saturday Evening Post (June 3, 1967).
14 V. S. Naipaul, âConradâs Darkness,â in Critical Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul, ed. Robert D. Hamner (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1977), 65. Originally published as âConradâs Darkness,â New York Review of Books (October 17, 1974).
15 Updike, 158.
16 Biswas, 76.
17 Biswas, 460.
18 Biswas, 464.
19 French, 50.
20 Biswas, 556.