Naipaul's Nobel Speech, Dec. 7,2001
Two worlds
"I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now...."
VS Naipaul won this year's Nobel prize for literature. This is the full text of his
Nobel lecture, given on December 7, 2001
by VS Naipaul
Friday December 7, 2001
This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people
who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem
strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly 50 years
shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in
my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I
am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me
during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise
is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which
is never an easy thing to do.
Proust has written with great penetration of the difference between the writer as
writer and the writer as a social being. You will find his thoughts in some of his
essays in Against Sainte-Beuve, a book reconstituted from his early papers.
The nineteenth-century French critic Sainte-Beuve believed that to understand a writer
it was necessary to know as much as possible about the exterior man, the details
of his life. It is a beguiling method, using the man to illuminate the work. It might
seem unassailable. But Proust is able very convincingly to pick it apart. "This
method of Sainte-Beuve," Proust writes, "ignores what a very slight degree
of self-acquaintance teaches us: that a book is the product of a different self from
the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices. If we would
try to understand that particular self, it is by searching our own bosoms, and trying
to reconstruct it there, that we may arrive at it."
Those words of Proust should be with us whenever we are reading the biography of
a writer - or the biography of anyone who depends on what can be called inspiration.
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for
us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however
fascinating, can take us there. The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography
- will always have this incompleteness.
Proust is a master of happy amplification, and I would like to go back to Against
Sainte-Beuve just for a little. "In fact," Proust writes, "it is the
secretions of one's innermost self, written in solitude and for oneself alone that
one gives to the public. What one bestows on private life - in conversation... or
in those drawing-room essays that are scarcely more than conversation in print -
is the product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can
only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world."
When he wrote that, Proust had not yet found the subject that was to lead him to
the happiness of his great literary labour. And you can tell from what I have quoted
that he was a man trusting to his intuition and waiting for luck. I have quoted these
words before in other places. The reason is that they define how I have gone about
my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even
now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively.
I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have
written only after some years.
I said earlier that everything of value about me is in my books. I will go further
now. I will say I am the sum of my books. Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the
case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows
out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said
that the last book contained all the others.
It's been like this because of my background. My background is at once exceedingly
simple and exceedingly confused. I was born in Trinidad. It is a small island in
the mouth of the great Orinoco river of Venezuela. So Trinidad is not strictly of
South America, and not strictly of the Caribbean. It was developed as a New World
plantation colony, and when I was born in 1932 it had a population of about 400,000.
Of this, about 150,000 were Indians, Hindus and Muslims, nearly all of peasant origin,
and nearly all from the Gangetic plain.
This was my very small community. The bulk of this migration from India occurred
after 1880. The deal was like this. People indentured themselves for five years to
serve on the estates. At the end of this time they were given a small piece of land,
perhaps five acres, or a passage back to India. In 1917, because of agitation by
Gandhi and others, the indenture system was abolished. And perhaps because of this,
or for some other reason, the pledge of land or repatriation was dishonoured for
many of the later arrivals. These people were absolutely destitute. They slept in
the streets of Port of Spain, the capital. When I was a child I saw them. I suppose
I didn't know they were destitute - I suppose that idea came much later - and they
made no impression on me. This was part of the cruelty of the plantation colony.
I was born in a small country town called Chaguanas, two or three miles inland from
the Gulf of Paria. Chaguanas was a strange name, in spelling and pronunciation, and
many of the Indian people - they were in the majority in the area - preferred to
call it by the Indian caste name of Chauhan.
I was 34 when I found out about the name of my birthplace. I was living in London,
had been living in England for 16 years. I was writing my ninth book. This was a
history of Trinidad, a human history, trying to re-create people and their stories.
I used to go to the British Museum to read the Spanish documents about the region.
These documents - recovered from the Spanish archives - were copied out for the British
government in the 1890s at the time of a nasty boundary dispute with Venezuela. The
documents begin in 1530 and end with the disappearance of the Spanish Empire.
I was reading about the foolish search for El Dorado, and the murderous interloping
of the English hero, Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1595 he raided Trinidad, killed all the
Spaniards he could, and went up the Orinoco looking for El Dorado. He found nothing,
but when he went back to England he said he had. He had a piece of gold and some
sand to show. He said he had hacked the gold out of a cliff on the bank of the Orinoco.
The Royal Mint said that the sand he asked them to assay was worthless, and other
people said that he had bought the gold beforehand from North Africa. He then published
a book to prove his point, and for four centuries people have believed that Raleigh
had found something. The magic of Raleigh's book, which is really quite difficult
to read, lay in its very long title: The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful
Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden city of Manoa (which the
Spaniards call El Dorado) and the provinces of Emeria, Aromaia, Amapaia, and other
countries, with their rivers adjoining. How real it sounds! And he had hardly been
on the main Orinoco.
And then, as sometimes happens with confidence men, Raleigh was caught by his own
fantasies. Twenty-one years later, old and ill, he was let out of his London prison
to go to Guiana and find the gold mines he said he had found. In this fraudulent
venture his son died. The father, for the sake of his reputation, for the sake of
his lies, had sent his son to his death. And then Raleigh, full of grief, with nothing
left to live for, went back to London to be executed.
The story should have ended there. But Spanish memories were long - no doubt because
their imperial correspondence was so slow: it might take up to two years for a letter
from Trinidad to be read in Spain. Eight years afterwards the Spaniards of Trinidad
and Guiana were still settling their scores with the Gulf Indians. One day in the
British Museum I read a letter from the King of Spain to the governor of Trinidad.
It was dated 12 October 1625.
"I asked you," the King wrote, "to give me some information about
a certain nation of Indians called Chaguanes, who you say number above one thousand,
and are of such bad disposition that it was they who led the English when they captured
the town. Their crime hasn't been punished because forces were not available for
this purpose and because the Indians acknowledge no master save their own will. You
have decided to give them a punishment. Follow the rules I have given you; and let
me know how you get on."
What the governor did I don't know. I could find no further reference to the Chaguanes
in the documents in the Museum. Perhaps there were other documents about the Chaguanes
in the mountain of paper in the Spanish archives in Seville which the British government
scholars missed or didn't think important enough to copy out. What is true is that
the little tribe of over a thousand - who would have been living on both sides of
the Gulf of Paria - disappeared so completely that no one in the town of Chaguanas
or Chauhan knew anything about them. And the thought came to me in the Museum that
I was the first person since 1625 to whom that letter of the king of Spain had a
real meaning. And that letter had been dug out of the archives only in 1896 or 1897.
A disappearance, and then the silence of centuries.
We lived on the Chaguanes' land. Every day in term time - I was just beginning to
go to school - I walked from my grandmother's house - past the two or three main-road
stores, the Chinese parlour, the Jubilee Theatre, and the high-smelling little Portuguese
factory that made cheap blue soap and cheap yellow soap in long bars that were put
out to dry and harden in the mornings - every day I walked past these eternal-seeming
things - to the Chaguanas Government School. Beyond the school was sugar-cane, estate
land, going up to the Gulf of Paria. The people who had been dispossessed would have
had their own kind of agriculture, their own calendar, their own codes, their own
sacred sites. They would have understood the Orinoco-fed currents in the Gulf of
Paria. Now all their skills and everything else about them had been obliterated.
The world is always in movement. People have everywhere at some time been dispossessed.
I suppose I was shocked by this discovery in 1967 about my birthplace because I had
never had any idea about it. But that was the way most of us lived in the agricultural
colony, blindly. There was no plot by the authorities to keep us in our darkness.
I think it was more simply that the knowledge wasn't there. The kind of knowledge
about the Chaguanes would not have been considered important, and it would not have
been easy to recover. They were a small tribe, and they were aboriginal. Such people
- on the mainland, in what was called B.G., British Guiana - were known to us, and
were a kind of joke. People who were loud and ill-behaved were known, to all groups
in Trinidad, I think, as warrahoons. I used to think it was a made-up word, made
up to suggest wildness. It was only when I began to travel in Venezuela, in my 40s,
that I understood that a word like that was the name of a rather large aboriginal
tribe there.
There was a vague story when I was a child - and to me now it is an unbearably affecting
story - that at certain times aboriginal people came across in canoes from the mainland,
walked through the forest in the south of the island, and at a certain spot picked
some kind of fruit or made some kind of offering, and then went back across the Gulf
of Paria to the sodden estuary of the Orinoco. The rite must have been of enormous
importance to have survived the upheavals of 400 years, and the extinction of the
aborigines in Trinidad. Or perhaps - though Trinidad and Venezuela have a common
flora - they had come only to pick a particular kind of fruit. I don't know. I can't
remember anyone inquiring. And now the memory is all lost; and that sacred site,
if it existed, has become common ground.
What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude. And we Indians,
immigrants from India, had that attitude to the island. We lived for the most part
ritualised lives, and were not yet capable of self-assessment, which is where learning
begins. Half of us on this land of the Chaguanes were pretending - perhaps not pretending,
perhaps only feeling, never formulating it as an idea - that we had brought a kind
of India with us, which we could, as it were, unroll like a carpet on the flat land.
My grandmother's house in Chaguanas was in two parts. The front part, of bricks and
plaster, was painted white. It was like a kind of Indian house, with a grand balustraded
terrace on the upper floor, and a prayer-room on the floor above that. It was ambitious
in its decorative detail, with lotus capitals on pillars, and sculptures of Hindu
deities, all done by people working only from a memory of things in India. In Trinidad
it was an architectural oddity. At the back of this house, and joined to it by an
upper bridge room, was a timber building in the French Caribbean style. The entrance
gate was at the side, between the two houses. It was a tall gate of corrugated iron
on a wooden frame. It made for a fierce kind of privacy.
So as a child I had this sense of two worlds, the world outside that tall corrugated-iron
gate, and the world at home - or, at any rate, the world of my grandmother's house.
It was a remnant of our caste sense, the thing that excluded and shut out. In Trinidad,
where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was
a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being
- to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading
India. It made for an extraordinary self-centredness. We looked inwards; we lived
out our days; the world outside existed in a kind of darkness; we inquired about
nothing.
There was a Muslim shop next door. The little loggia of my grandmother's shop ended
against his blank wall. The man's name was Mian. That was all that we knew of him
and his family. I suppose we must have seen him, but I have no mental picture of
him now. We knew nothing of Muslims. This idea of strangeness, of the thing to be
kept outside, extended even to other Hindus. For example, we ate rice in the middle
of the day, and wheat in the evenings. There were some extraordinary people who reversed
this natural order and ate rice in the evenings. I thought of these people as strangers
- you must imagine me at this time as under seven, because when I was seven all this
life of my grandmother's house in Chaguanas came to an end for me. We moved to the
capital, and then to the hills to the northwest.
But the habits of mind engendered by this shut-in and shutting-out life lingered
for quite a while. If it were not for the short stories my father wrote I would have
known almost nothing about the general life of our Indian community. Those stories
gave me more than knowledge. They gave me a kind of solidity. They gave me something
to stand on in the world. I cannot imagine what my mental picture would have been
without those stories.
The world outside existed in a kind of darkness; and we inquired about nothing. I
was just old enough to have some idea of the Indian epics, the Ramayana in particular.
The children who came five years or so after me in our extended family didn't have
this luck. No one taught us Hindi. Sometimes someone wrote out the alphabet for us
to learn, and that was that; we were expected to do the rest ourselves. So, as English
penetrated, we began to lose our language. My grandmother's house was full of religion;
there were many ceremonies and readings, some of which went on for days. But no one
explained or translated for us who could no longer follow the language. So our ancestral
faith receded, became mysterious, not pertinent to our day-to-day life.
We made no inquiries about India or about the families people had left behind. When
our ways of thinking had changed, and we wished to know, it was too late. I know
nothing of the people on my father's side; I know only that some of them came from
Nepal. Two years ago a kind Nepalese who liked my name sent me a copy of some pages
from an 1872 gazetteer-like British work about India, Hindu Castes and Tribes as
Represented in Benares; the pages listed - among a multitude of names -those groups
of Nepalese in the holy city of Banaras who carried the name Naipal. That is all
that I have.
Away from this world of my grandmother's house, where we ate rice in the middle of
the day and wheat in the evenings, there was the great unknown - in this island of
only 400,000 people. There were the African or African-derived people who were the
majority. They were policemen; they were teachers. One of them was my very first
teacher at the Chaguanas Government School; I remembered her with adoration for years.
There was the capital, where very soon we would all have to go for education and
jobs, and where we would settle permanently, among strangers. There were the white
people, not all of them English; and the Portuguese and the Chinese, at one time
also immigrants like us. And, more mysterious than these, were the people we called
Spanish, pagnols, mixed people of warm brown complexions who came from the Spanish
time, before the island was detached from Venezuela and the Spanish Empire - a kind
of history absolutely beyond my child's comprehension.
To give you this idea of my background, I have had to call on knowledge and ideas
that came to me much later, principally from my writing. As a child I knew almost
nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother's house. All children,
I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are. But for the French
child, say, that knowledge is waiting. That knowledge will be all around them. It
will come indirectly from the conversation of their elders. It will be in the newspapers
and on the radio. And at school the work of generations of scholars, scaled down
for school texts, will provide some idea of France and the French.
In Trinidad, bright boy though I was, I was surrounded by areas of darkness. School
elucidated nothing for me. I was crammed with facts and formulas. Everything had
to be learned by heart; everything was abstract for me. Again, I do not believe there
was a plan or plot to make our courses like that. What we were getting was standard
school learning. In another setting it would have made sense. And at least some of
the failing would have lain in me. With my limited social background it was hard
for me imaginatively to enter into other societies or societies that were far away.
I loved the idea of books, but I found it hard to read them. I got on best with things
like Andersen and Aesop, timeless, placeless, not excluding. And when at last in
the sixth form, the highest form in the college, I got to like some of our literature
texts - Moliere, Cyrano de Bergerac - I suppose it was because they had the quality
of the fairytale.
When I became a writer those areas of darkness around me as a child became my subjects.
The land; the aborigines; the New World; the colony; the history; India; the Muslim
world, to which I also felt myself related; Africa; and then England, where I was
doing my writing. That was what I meant when I said that my books stand one on the
other, and that I am the sum of my books. That was what I meant when I said that
my background, the source and prompting of my work, was at once exceedingly simple
and exceedingly complicated. You will have seen how simple it was in the country
town of Chaguanas. And I think you will understand how complicated it was for me
as a writer. Especially in the beginning, when the literary models I had - the models
given me by what I can only call my false learning - dealt with entirely different
societies. But perhaps you might feel that the material was so rich it would have
been no trouble at all to get started and to go on. What I have said about the background,
however, comes from the knowledge I acquired with my writing. And you must believe
me when I tell you that the pattern in my work has only become clear in the last
two months or so. Passages from old books were read to me, and I saw the connections.
Until then the greatest trouble for me was to describe my writing to people, to say
what I had done.
I said I was an intuitive writer. That was so, and that remains so now, when I am
nearly at the end. I never had a plan. I followed no system. I worked intuitively.
My aim every time was do a book, to create something that would be easy and interesting
to read. At every stage I could only work within my knowledge and sensibility and
talent and world-view. Those things developed book by book. And I had to do the books
I did because there were no books about those subjects to give me what I wanted.
I had to clear up my world, elucidate it, for myself.
I had to go to the documents in the British Museum and elsewhere, to get the true
feel of the history of the colony. I had to travel to India because there was no
one to tell me what the India my grandparents had come from was like. There was the
writing of Nehru and Gandhi; and strangely it was Gandhi, with his South African
experience, who gave me more, but not enough. There was Kipling; there were British-Indian
writers like John Masters (going very strong in the 1950s, with an announced plan,
later abandoned, I fear, for 35 connected novels about British India); there were
romances by women writers. The few Indian writers who had come up at that time were
middle-class people, town-dwellers; they didn't know the India we had come from.
And when that Indian need was satisfied, others became apparent: Africa, South America,
the Muslim world. The aim has always been to fill out my world picture, and the purpose
comes from my childhood: to make me more at ease with myself. Kind people have sometimes
written asking me to go and write about Germany, say, or China. But there is much
good writing already about those places; I am willing to depend there on the writing
that exists. And those subjects are for other people. Those were not the areas of
darkness I felt about me as a child. So, just as there is a development in my work,
a development in narrative skill and knowledge and sensibility, so there is a kind
of unity, a focus, though I might appear to be going in many directions.
When I began I had no idea of the way ahead. I wished only to do a book. I was trying
to write in England, where I stayed on after my years at the university, and it seemed
to me that my experience was very thin, was not truly of the stuff of books. I could
find in no book anything that came near my background. The young French or English
person who wished to write would have found any number of models to set him on his
way. I had none. My father's stories about our Indian community belonged to the past.
My world was quite different. It was more urban, more mixed. The simple physical
details of the chaotic life of our extended family - sleeping rooms or sleeping spaces,
eating times, the sheer number of people - seemed impossible to handle. There was
too much to be explained, both about my home life and about the world outside. And
at the same time there was also too much about us - like our own ancestry and history
- that I didn't know.
At last one day there came to me the idea of starting with the Port of Spain street
to which we had moved from Chaguanas. There was no big corrugated-iron gate shutting
out the world there. The life of the street was open to me. It was an intense pleasure
for me to observe it from the verandah. This street life was what I began to write
about. I wished to write fast, to avoid too much self-questioning, and so I simplified.
I suppressed the child-narrator's background. I ignored the racial and social complexities
of the street. I explained nothing. I stayed at ground level, so to speak. I presented
people only as they appeared on the street. I wrote a story a day. The first stories
were very short. I was worried about the material lasting long enough. But then the
writing did its magic. The material began to present itself to me from many sources.
The stories became longer; they couldn't be written in a day. And then the inspiration,
which at one stage had seemed very easy, rolling me along, came to an end. But a
book had been written, and I had in my own mind become a writer.
The distance between the writer and his material grew with the two later books; the
vision was wider. And then intuition led me to a large book about our family life.
During this book my writing ambition grew. But when it was over I felt I had done
all that I could do with my island material. No matter how much I meditated on it,
no further fiction would come.
Two worlds, continued
The second part of VS Naipaul's Nobel lecture
Friday December 7, 2001
Accident, then, rescued me. I became a traveller. I travelled in the Caribbean region
and understood much more about the colonial set-up of which I had been part. I went
to India, my ancestral land, for a year; it was a journey that broke my life in two.
The books that I wrote about these two journeys took me to new realms of emotion,
gave me a world-view I had never had, extended me technically. I was able in the
fiction that then came to me to take in England as well as the Caribbean - and how
hard that was to do. I was able also to take in all the racial groups of the island,
which I had never before been able to do.
This new fiction was about colonial shame and fantasy, a book, in fact, about how
the powerless lie about themselves, and lie to themselves, since it is their only
resource. The book was called The Mimic Men. And it was not about mimics. It was
about colonial men mimicking the condition of manhood, men who had grown to distrust
everything about themselves. Some pages of this book were read to me the other day
- I hadn't looked at it for more than 30 years - and it occurred to me that I had
been writing about colonial schizophrenia. But I hadn't thought of it like that.
I had never used abstract words to describe any writing purpose of mine. If I had,
I would never have been able to do the book. The book was done intuitively, and only
out of close observation.
I have done this little survey of the early part of my career to try to show the
stages by which, in just 10 years, my birthplace had altered or developed in my writing:
from the comedy of street life to a study of a kind of widespread schizophrenia.
What was simple had become complicated.
Both fiction and the travel-book form have given me my way of looking; and you will
understand why for me all literary forms are equally valuable. It came to me, for
instance, when I set out to write my third book about India - 26 years after the
first - that what was most important about a travel book were the people the writer
travelled among. The people had to define themselves. A simple enough idea, but it
required a new kind of book; it called for a new way of travelling. And it was the
very method I used later when I went, for the second time, into the Muslim world.
I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political.
I have no guiding political idea. I think that probably lies with my ancestry. The
Indian writer R K Narayan, who died this year, had no political idea. My father,
who wrote his stories in a very dark time, and for no reward, had no political idea.
Perhaps it is because we have been far from authority for many centuries. It gives
us a special point of view. I feel we are more inclined to see the humour and pity
of things.
Nearly 30 years ago I went to Argentina. It was at the time of the guerrilla crisis.
People were waiting for the old dictator Perón to come back from exile. The
country was full of hate. Peronists were waiting to settle old scores. One such man
said to me, "There is good torture and bad torture." Good torture was what
you did to the enemies of the people. Bad torture was what the enemies of the people
did to you. People on the other side were saying the same thing. There was no true
debate about anything. There was only passion and the borrowed political jargon of
Europe. I wrote, "Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where
jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies."
And the passions of Argentina are still working themselves out, still defeating reason
and consuming lives. No resolution is in sight.
I am near the end of my work now. I am glad to have done what I have done, glad creatively
to have pushed myself as far as I could go. Because of the intuitive way in which
I have written, and also because of the baffling nature of my material, every book
has come as a blessing. Every book has amazed me; up to the moment of writing I never
knew it was there. But the greatest miracle for me was getting started. I feel -
and the anxiety is still vivid to me - that I might easily have failed before I began.
I will end as I began, with one of the marvellous little essays of Proust in Against
Sainte-Beuve. "The beautiful things we shall write if we have talent,"
Proust says, "are inside us, indistinct, like the memory of a melody which delights
us though we are unable to recapture its outline. Those who are obsessed by this
blurred memory of truths they have never known are the men who are gifted... Talent
is like a sort of memory which will enable them finally to bring this indistinct
music closer to them, to hear it clearly, to note it down..."
Talent, Proust says. I would say luck, and much labour.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,615243,00.html
