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PARTISAN REVIEW
which keep him apart. In one of the rare moments of self-revelation
in
Among the Believers,
he describes a meeting with a young Pakistani
intellectual who reflects Naipaul's own life. The Pakistani had tried
to go to America or England to further his education, but was
prevented from doing so by a lack of funds.
He didn't know how directly he was speaking to me. The idea
of struggle and dedication and fulfillment, the idea of human
quality, belongs only to certain societies. It didn't belong to the
colonial Trinidad I had grown up in, where there were only
eighty kinds of simple jobs, and the quality of cocoa and sugar
was more important than the quality of people. Masood's panic
now, his vision of his world as a blind alley (with his knowledge
that there was activity and growth elsewhere), took me back to
my own panic of thirty-five years before.
This does not mean that in going to England to be educated
Naipaul wanted to become an Englishman and repudiate his
Trinidadian background. Ethnic, national, or class affiliation is
irrelevant to Naipaul's ambition. This is clear enough from the
novels
Mimic Man
and
Mr. Stone and the Knight's Companion,
novels set
in England, in which displacement or separateness is as strong as it
is elsewhere in his work. Naipaul writes in
Mimic Men:
"We walked
through the streets like disrespectful tourists." And elsewhere in the
same novel he speaks of a "vision of a disorder which it was beyond
anyone man to put right." But for Naipaul England is a society in
which "the quality of people" is important and where he can
cultivate his intellectual and imaginative powers.
It
was a way out of
"the blind alley" of arrested personal development. This is quite
different from an experience of the sense of community or belonging
in England. Naipaul remains separate and "disrespectful": a tourist
wherever he is. Traveling for Naipaul one feels is the natural
condition of his life, for it is always a way of living in a place without
being part of it.
The societies in which the quality of people is held to be
important are advanced technological societies.
If
technology does
not humanize, it creates the conditions for a society in which the
quality of people is valued. This may seem an odd view to those who
have thought of technology as the enemy. Humanist critics have
complained about the pernicious ascendancy of quantitative and
mechanistic values in advanced technological society and have often
constructed myths of a past that was more humane, more organic,
