256
PARTISAN REVIEW
displacement that I have described is the strongest element in his
personality, the most persistent theme in his work. It has its origins,
I believe, in a residual Hinduism. On his return from his first trip to
India, which he described in his book
An Area
oj
Darkness,
Naipaul
discovers to his surprise that the society that he had seen and judged
under Western eyes had entered his soul. He had seen India as a
series of dung heaps, afflicted by fIlth and disease, only to find on his
arrival in Rome from India "the deeper and richer Indian
negation," which underlies his Westernized personality.
It
was only now, as my experience of India defined itself more
properly against my own homelessness, that I saw how close in
the past year I had been to the total Indian negation, how much
it had become the basis of thought and feeling. And already,
with this awareness in a world where illusion could only be a
concept and not something felt in the bones, it was slipping
away from me. I felt it as something true which I could never
adequately express and never seize again.
The mood is not a temporary one: it is the strain of stoicism that
runs through
all
of Naipaul's work. In
A Free State,
the book that
follows
An Area of Darkness,
the narrator declares: "All that
my
freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have
a body, that I must feed this face and clothe this body, for a certain
number of years, then it will be over." This is the voice of Hindu
consciousness, enforced in Naipaul's case by the experience of
displacement. For what is the ultimate condition of displacement but
the feeling that neither your face nor your body is finally your own?
In Naipaul, the "No" has its ultimate metaphysical source in a
vision of the abysmal nothingness of life. The vision is not to be
confused, however, with continental versions of the abyss , whose
chief sponsorship has been existentialism. Naipaul's "nothingness"
is an agnostic version of Hinduism, without the promise of
reincarnation. Unlike existentialism, for which the abyss is an
occasion for a creative leap, Naipaul's nothingness is an ultimate
condition. And to the extent that it forms his sensibility, it provides a
perspective on the futility of all created things. This feeling for
metaphysical nothingness is, I suspect, a source of strength in
Naipaul.
It
gives his vision equanimity. It permits him to gaze at the
created forms of life without illusion-that is, with a knowledge of
their final destiny.
