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there may be no correspondence in what is present before one's
eyes.
Naipaul's stress on clear-sightedness at the expense of ideology
and related forms of conceptualization brings to mind George
Orwell, who generalized his attitude into a hatred of intellectuals,
men blinded by the ideas that possess them . Orwell' s plebeian
feeling for ordinary reality distinguishes him from Naipaul ' s man–
darin sensibility, but the intersections in their work are remark–
able-even in their uninhibited expression of prejudice and their
common admiration of Kipling.
The ideological character of literature is not an open and shut
case, and Naipaul does not have a corner on wisdom or knowledge
about ideology and literature . Naipaul is a tourist who cannot
pretend to know the inner life of a country, no matter how clearly he
sees and how well he reads . When Nadine Gordimer, for instance,
represents the career of Marxist ideology in her novel,
Burger's
Daughter,
we can feel confident that she writes out of an intimate
experience of that ideology within South Africa over an extended
period of time . We need not trust her judgments about Marxism or
those of her characters to be persuaded that the representation is
genuine . Naipaul' s glimpses are those of a prejudiced Western
observer. His perspective is "After the Revolution" : the perspective
that makes us keenly aware of revolutionary cruelty. His precocious
sensitivity to resentment would probably make him an insensitive
observer of, say, apartheid in South Africa, where the important fact
is the exploitation and suffering of large masses of people by a
privileged minority. It is hard to imagine what a book on South
Africa by Naipaul would be like . All this is to suggest the limits of
Naipaul's perspective, not to denigrate it; for it is always valuable
for a writer from an underdeveloped country to refuse the ideologi–
cal role that is usually conferred on literature about the colonies,
whether on the side of the colonists or on the side of the natives. The
best writing comes out of a resistance to the ideological role.
One does not expect to find a mandarin sensibility in a scion of
a displaced Hindu family on an unimportant Caribbean island.
From an outsider and a member of the nonpossessing class, one
expects resentment or, on a higher level, a revolutionary sense of
injustice. Naipaul, however, turns out to be one of our severest
critics of social and political resentment and of every ideological
articulation of it .
It
is tempting for those who share the revolution-
