EUGENE GOODHEART
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projects of revenge , inarticulate or half-articulate (unable , as
Naipaul puts it, "to fit words to feelings, " "feeling, uncontrolled by
words"), the resentful man is the opposite of the aristocratic or man–
darin personality, who possesses the earth and feels secure in his pos–
session and his power of expression .
It
is under mandarin eyes that
we perceive resentment, and it is through Naipaul's eyes that we
perceive the resentfulness of the under- and half-developed personal–
ities of the societies to which they correspond.
If
Naipaul moralizes against anything, it is against resentment,
which he regards as a passion that disfigures self and truth. He
understands it as the necessary consequence of modernization . He
writes of Indonesia: "Jakarta boomed . The city and the country
needed wealth and skills. But these things created wounding
divisions, and there was rage about the loss of the old order, the loss
of the old knowledge of good and bad. " Naipaul has little feeling for
the old order and he regards the new one as a necessity. His realism
tells him that the old order is not what it is now imagined by its
elegists to be, and that in any case it can never be rediscovered.
How trustworthy is Naipaul as a witness?
If
prejudices, let
alone ideologies, control our seeing, the observation of resentment
simply may not be empirical truth.
If
the Shah was an oppressor
(Naipaul does not deny the suffering of the Iranian people before the
revolution, though he makes little of it in his book), how does one
draw the line between the understandable hatred felt for the
oppressor and the resentful distortion of the truth that then becomes
the basis for a new tyranny? And even if one could draw the line, it
would not, perhaps could not , be respected by those engaged in
making the revolution. There is a "logic" to revolutionary passion
that confuses truth and falsity, cruelty and justice, to a point where
they are inextricably bound together. Moralizing against resentment
may become a mandarin sentimentality, an exercise in futility.
Naipaul speaks of the political incapacity of Islam. How would he
distinguish it from the political capacity of Marxism, which can
produce a comparable cruelty, perhaps a worse cruelty, because it is
organized and not anarchic? I am trying to suggest the limitations of
Naipaul's clear seeing, indeed the limitations of all clear seeing. His
clear seeing depends upon an anesthetizing of compassion for the
suffering of the oppressed, since sympathy with suffering can easily
lead to the abyss of resentment. It depends upon an inhibition of
those powers of conceptualization and understanding for which
