EUGENE GOODHEART
247
Naipaul has no counterfaith to offer as did the philosophes of
the Enlightenment when they took on what they regarded as the
barbarism of Christianity, though he values rationality, clarity,
progress-all Enlightenment virtues. He does not, however,
compose them into a philosophy. His responses are intellectual
reflexes to bad faith and false consciousness. Thus in Hyderabad he
examines history textbooks and finds them falsifying in their
selective treatment of the past.
History as selective as this leads quickly to unreality. Before
Mohammed there is blackness: slavery, exploitation . After
Mohammed there is light: slavery and exploitation vanish. But
did it? How can that be said or taught? What about all those
slaves sent back from Sind to the caliph? What about the
descendants of the African slaves who walk about Karachi?
There is no adequate answer, so the faith begins to nullify or
overlay the real .
There is a rapidity and abundance of observation in
Among the
Believers
and N aipaul' s other travel books that is at once
disconcerting and revealing. In the passage above, one would expect
a pause for speculation after the questions . "What about all those
slaves sent back from Sind to the caliph? What about the
descendants of the African slaves who walk about Karachi?" But
Naipaul quickly moves on as if the authority of his discourse
depends upon continuous uninterrupted observation of the par–
ticulars of the scene. Edward Said complains somewhere that
Naipaul is all observation and no theory. We do not require of our
witnesses who are imaginative writers that they be theorists, but in
Naipaul the absence of a certain kind of speculation commensurate
with his intelligence suggests an almost deliberate suppression-as if
such speculation might interfere with the unadorned truth. Nothing
must estrange us from a clear sight of the scene. Naipaul's anti–
faith, anti-ideological skepticism is wedded to a kind of radical
empiricism, a passion for observation. Observations do not gather
into neat generalizations or conceptions. Given the frequent
criticisms that he makes of people who do not seem to have thought
beyond a certain point or deeply enough, Naipaul's speculative or
analytical reticence (is it a journalistic limitation in him?) is at times
disappointing.
But it is compensated for by another kind of attention: that of
the novelistic eye or ear. One can hear something significant in the
