EUGENE GOODHEART
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ignorance.
"The Heart of the Matter,
)) Naipaul informs him. "I
wouldn't call that political."
The young man's confidence is undisturbed.
"It is political . There is some dialogue there about natives
being liars . But nobody said that it was because of colonialism
that people called natives liars . People were made by
colonialism. By history. But nobody says that."
Naipaul does not engage in this "argument" directly: he
simply responds: "But if you think like that, then everybody is a
political writer." To which the young man had no response, because,
Naipaul surmises, he "hadn't thought deeply about his thesis." The
young man then asks Naipaul about Kipling, whom he knows only
by name . "Nobody has written as accurately about Indians. You
can't fault Kipling there," Naipaul replies.
Though this passage does not contain any deep thought about
the young man ' s "little idea," the basis for judging it is in the
exchange I have just cited. First, there is the ignorance of the young
man, who scarcely knows the first thing about his subject. What the
young man has is an ideology that holds that colonialist ideology has
invented the idea that the natives are liars . The possibility that there
is native lying and that it may be a defense against colonialism is not
even considered. Natives simply do not lie . Everything without
the scruple of actual observation can be placed at the door of co–
lonialism. Naipaul's remark about Kipling has a special force.
Despite his imperialist ideology, Kipling wrote accurately about
Indians.
It
is a misreading of Naipaul to see him as accepting or
endorsing imperialist ideology. He is instead declaring its
irrelevance to matters of art. It is not ideology that distorts or
controls artistic perception: it is rather the ideologue who attributes
ideology to all writing who prevents us from seeing the truth of the
scene.
But for Naipaul the issue is not simply esthetic . In this rough
ideological indifference to truth, Naipaul sees the intellectual
counterpart of Islamic revolutionary cruelty.
How
could
he read, how could he judge, how could he venture
into the critical disciplines of another civilization, when so
much of his own history had been distorted for him and
declared closed to inquiry? And how strange, in the usurped
