Literary Criticism:All good writing carries the pressure of a felt experience, and most bad books develop at the instigation of other books.
Yet an author needs a cultural tradition of some sort in order to create a persuasive tale. Some cultural tradition, but not too much. Or so V S Naipaul implies in this book of meditations on his chosen trade.
He has always been dismayed by the thinness of culture in his native Trinidad. With no native language of their own, his classmates in the 1930s and 1940s studied England's classics, converting the London drizzle of Dickens to monsoons, without ever feeling convinced by the strained equation. Naipaul's own father, though a man of talent, failed to capture his local life, for want of exemplars. The diary kept by his nine-year-old son was no better: self-obsessed musings of one quite unaware of the tragic material that lay all around him, unused.
Indians had migrated from the sub-continent to the islands between 1880 and 1917, but their "India" was soon forgotten and lost by those busy adjusting to a new life. Hence Naipaul's own repeated visits to and books on the land of Nehru and Gandhi. Some of those books attributed the under-development of India to the under-development of ego in Hindu culture. The implied thesis of a "self-inflicted wound" annoyed many radicals, who felt that colonial expropriation might also take much of the blame.
Sir Vidia is unrepentant, however. He finds on his repeated visits not the vaunted cultural riches, but a prevailing thinness. People know their own family and circle, but little more. Even the classic books by nationalist leaders seem wan. Nehru's account of Harrow and Cambridge is so lacking in detail as to suggest that its author, at this formative period, was "a perfect blank". Gandhi's philosophy is nothing but "bits and pieces", a strange medley of his mother's fasting, common law, Ruskin's theories of labour, and Tolstoy's vision of a religious commune.
For some positive paragraphs, Gandhi is compared with the Buddha, another Indian exponent of the journey to enlightenment. This is interesting. For all his fabled rationalism, Naipaul himself seems such a figure, voyaging the globe only to discover that the world may not be his home, after all.
If the indictments of Nehru and Gandhi sound like an apology for old Blighty, they are anything but. The same thinness is to be found there. Befriended as a young novelist by Anthony Powell, Naipaul is at first honoured by the great man's interest, only to be deflated by the poor quality of A Dance to the Music of Time, when he finally gets around to reading it. County England, he concludes, was used up as a subject long before poor Tony got to it. Literary tradition is a bit like monoculture - soon worn out.
But whenever a great man describes others, he is often offering a version of himself. Criticism of this quality is autobiography by other means. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (about his own removal to rural England as writing locale) is a pained account of how the culture to which he tried to assimilate himself lacked, after all, a centre of meaning.
In Naipaul's world, no centre can hold; and the greatest provincials of all are those naive idiots who write "as if they are at the centre of things". Such people have no sense of their own presence, no sense of how they might look in the eyes of others at some other nodal point on a global network which has no absolute core.
Slim pickings all round, it seems. Even a Flaubert may only achieve a Madame Bovary just once, by a blend of close observation, cunning narrative and sheer instinct. Afterward, such a success can breed the over-ambition of books which pile on effects drawn from reading rather than life. Or else a powerful author may take too much for granted, as when Caesar, in his Gallic Wars, resorts to euphemisms about persons being executed "in the old Roman way".
For Naipaul, there are only two kinds of language: that which confronts, or that which avoids, an experience. Creative writing schools don't really teach people how to grapple with reality, merely how to colour by numbers. Clearly, he considers many of the current crop of Indian authors in English to be products of such writing schools.
Each author seems able to hack out an extended-family romance and then . . . little enough. Naipaul asks whether the phenomenon tells less about India than about "the publishing culture of Britain and the United States". No other national literature, he says, has been created in this way through texts aimed at an overseas audience. Russians in the 19th century, even when based in Paris, addressed fellow Russians back home; and so on.
There are answers to such strictures. Irish writers in the London of the 1890s produced a black-on-white negative, before going home in the new century to print the positive photograph. Perhaps many of those Indian authors will do likewise, especially if their country grows as rich as is predicted in the next decade.
Equally, apart from these expatriate novelists (of whom Naipaul himself is a leading West Indian example), there have been others, such as RK Narayan, content to stay in India and celebrate village culture, albeit in English. Beyond these again, there have been gifted storytellers and film-makers, such as Satyajit Ray, producing world-class material in Bengali and other languages for Indians.
At times, Naipaul is bleaker than bleak, Beckett without the laughs. His world has been utterly decentred - so much so that he has no place to call home, nowhere to hang his hat. But he is no apologist for colonialism. His concern is good writing. It's hard to find, but it is there. The opening essay registers, in deeply moving passages, the exhilaration created by the early poems of Derek Walcott in young West Indians. And there are fine sections here celebrating Flaubert and others.
Naipaul is, in fact, a deconstructor, far more so than Derrida, Barthes or the usual suspects. He offers just one formula for really good writing: it "undermines its subject". In other words, it stands as much in opposition to its age as in alignment. It contains the essential criticism of the codes to which it finally adheres. Naipaul's own art does just that.
Some years ago a TV crew came to interview Naipaul. After it had taken them more than an hour to set up lights, cameras, sound-checks, he asked what his fee would be. They named the usual derisory, token sum. He told them to switch off their cameras at once, unless they were willing to pay him the going rate for a top London surgeon. Spoken like the artist he was, and still is.
Declan Kiberd is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at UCD. His most recent book is The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge University Press)
V S Naipaul's surgical criticism is autobiography by other means A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling By V S Naipaul Picador, 194pp. £16.99