The Real World of Reading

In an essay lamenting V.S. Naipaul's personal failings, Joseph Bottum conludes that Naipaul's documented bad behavior is "a grand literary joke on all his readers, for we gave Naipaul our admiration, and he turns out to have been someone we wouldn't have touched with a barge pole." He continues:

Perhaps, in some abstract sense, a novel is an independent thing, with the person who wrote it utterly beside the point. But in the real world of reading, when we know certain facts about a writer, we read them into the story and find them buried there. Books are responsible for their authors; in a kind of child labor, they carry their fathers on their backs. And the works of V.S. Naipaul are now so weighted down they feel like blocks of lead.

Shame not on V.S. Naipaul but on Joseph Bottum for having given Naipaul his "admiration" based on such a weak connection to the work that revelations of flaws in the author's life could break it so easily. For all of his despair that "we can no longer read A Bend in the River or A House for Mr. Biswas in the way we used to," Bottum's attachment to these books must have been superficial indeed if biographical details, even those sanctioned by Naipaul himself, could now loom so large that alone they alter his judgment of books he once enjoyed.

I myself have never read "certain facts" into novels or stories and found them "buried there." Perhaps because I do not care about these "certain facts" in the first place I haven't really looked very hard, but finally I just don't understand why anyone would want to read fiction in this way, would not actively fight the temptation to do so, would allow such facts to so readily overwhelm the reading experience. Perhaps I just don't understand the mechanism by which the act of reading becomes an act of composing a competing fiction about the author, so that subsequent information that doesn't comport with this fiction somehow distorts the actual fiction, the text, the arrangement of words that is finally the only tangible manifestation of the "real" writer we encounter. Interest in the writer as other than this ultimate arranger--at least as we're reading the work--seems to me so misplaced as to make the act of reading superfluous. Google the author's name instead and see what you find.

What Bottum describes here is not "the real world of reading" at all. It's a substitute for reading, a cop-out. The "abstract sense" of fiction as "an independent thing"--this is the only sense in which reading fiction really makes sense. Fiction, like all art, exists in a created imaginative space, an alternative world that, no matter how much it must be built out of the elements of "real life," takes us out of that life and allows our capacity for experience to be refreshed. To the extent that we insist the details of the real world, our own or the author's, be imported back into this space, we cut off the possibility of such fresh experience. If we bizarrely contend that "Books are responsible for their authors," we convert books into the accessories of literary personality cults. (And are disappointed when the personalities turn rancid.) Why not accept that some people have the skill and vision to create compelling works of literary art, the power of which is unaffected by facts about the author's personal behavior, whether those facts be flattering or incriminating.

Comments

[J.]

"Bottum's attachment to these books must have been superficial indeed if biographical details, even those sanctioned by Naipaul himself, could now loom so large that alone they alter his judgment of books he once enjoyed."

Praise for Naipaul's books, as the recent drama surrounding his biography only further reveals, has always been rooted in his controversial ideas not his technical achievements. Naipaul owes his status as a "great living writer" to the fact that he "demystified" the postcolonial world for Europeans and confirmed their deepest prejudices about blacks, Arabs, and Indians. Naipaul is a mediocre writer, who would not be tolerated or praised if he were writing about Jews (as Derek Walcott once pointed out). If people read Naipaul's books for their literary merit alone they would find that he takes few artistic risks and has an unremarkable prose style. Naipaul probably knows he has been praised for the wrong reasons, which is what Bottum means when he says that the biography is a bit of a hoax. Naipaul, I think, wants to show how European literary paternalism made him into a monster who corrupted nice English women. He got over on his audience, but in doing so lost his humanity, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't take a genius to see the trick he's playing. To paraphrase Gilbert Sorrentino on Eldridge Cleaver, he has slipped into Melville's Confidence Man and there's nothing poor Melville can do about it.

[Dan Green]

My post is not a defense of V.S. Naipaul per se, but a critique of the more general habit of reading the work for clues about the author. However, I don't agree that Naipaul's work has no literary merit. Much of the early fiction--as opposed to the nonfiction, which I agree has been overpraised--is quite good, especially Biswas. The more overtly poliitical and sociological Naipaul's work got, the weaker it got.

[bdr]

It doesn't have to be an either/or.

And, serendipitously, a long article by James Wood on Naipaul appears online today at New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/12/01/081201crbo_books_wood

This could be a perfect storm.

[LML]

1. Dan: Don't tell me you expected intelligence from The Weekly Standard.

2. J: Your argument is so full of assumptions it's hard to know which one to take on. I won't try to convince you of the greatness of Biswas and Bend in the River, though both are demonstrably great. I will say that if you read either of those books as embodiments of the author's politics--which, it has been known for decades, are abhorrent--then the problematic agenda is yours, not Naipaul's. Walcott, you didn't bother pointing out, was talking about one of Naipaul's weaker books, The Enigma of Arrival I believe, not the oeuvre as a whole, which I'm sure he would not simplistically dismiss the way you have.

[Richard]

If The Enigma of Arrival is one of Naipaul's weaker books, then they must all be utterly marvelous.

[LML]

It may have been Guerillas Walcott was reviewing. I shouldn't have said "weaker," probably, since I haven't read Enigma. Point stands, though, that I'm pretty sure Walcott would give Naipaul credit for his good stuff, as anyone who reads honestly must.

[Richard]

(Yeah, I'm not contesting the point; just felt the need to stick up for Enigma!)

[J.]

Dan: I understand the point of your post and agree wholeheartedly that to judge an author's books based on his or her personal life is ludicrous. In my post I was trying to explain Bottum's reaction within the context of the larger mainstream critical discussions of Naipaul's work. And I did not say that Naipaul's work has no literary merit, only that he is a mediocre writer.

LML: Naipaul's politics, like any writer's, are unquestionably in his works. Of course, "abhorrent" politics do not necessarily detract from a work's literary merit. They also, however, don't make a work "great." I happen to think A Bend in the River is a fine book. Yet I don't think it stands up alongside, say, Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim. I do not read Naipaul's or anybody's novels for their politics. You will agree that it is just as silly to praise works for their politics as it is to condemn them. Reviews of Naipaul's works consistently show that his literary reputation rests not on his technical gifts, but on his supposedly unsparing take on the Third World (read: his politics), a take that, in my opinion, amounts to little more than a bunch of puerile cliches about dark-skinned people. It's a sham, and Naipaul's biography is just the latest chapter in an ongoing con, which may turn out to be his greatest work of art.

[LML]

J: First of all, I do happen to think A Bend in the River compares favorably to Heart of Darkness. The reason Conrad's work remains intact despite emanating from a pretty diseased opinion of Africa and Africans is the same reason A Bend in the River eludes your (vague) charges against it: neither book is "about" Africa except incidentally. Reviewers who read it as some sort of postcolonial journalistic essay are dumb, and I am not defending them. I was a kid when the book came out, so I can't speak for its initial reception, but I do know that plenty of writers read the book precisely because it is technically masterful. I'm assuming that you mistake cool precision for affectlessness, in denouncing his prose. His powers of selection are staggering.

And none of your comments about his politics applies in even a surface way to A House for Mr. Biswas, which is as humane a book as any that was written in the 20th century, while still being wickedly funny.

I don't think it's silly to damn or praise a writer's work for his politics if the work is used as a vehicle for those politics. But Naipaul's good books emphatically do not operate on that level. If they did, they would be mediocre.

[Richard]

I know why you say it, LML, but there's a huge range of positions between saying those books are only "incidentally" about Africa and saying they are "some sort of postcolonial journalistic essay". I agree that those who opine the latter are "dumb", but the former makes it sound as if there aren't reasons why those books are set in Africa.

[LML]

Yeah, you're right, Richard, "incidentally" was probably problematic phrasing. What I mean is that both books could be set in any society where civil order is dissolving (in Naipaul's case) or has dissolved (in Conrad's). Africa happened to provide concrete examples for both writers. Naipaul found a metaphor, in a certain failing African state, for communicating a view of humanity that is pretty grim, sure, but that is hardly limited to any race or country or continent. The first sentence of A Bend in the River is not "Africa is what it is," it's "The world is what it is."

[J.]

LML: I respectfully disagree with your view that A Bend in the River is in the same class as Heart of Darkness. Conrad's work remains intact because of how he ingeniously marshalled and eventually popularized certain literary techniques that anticipated modernism. He was a technical master whose influence on the modern novel, or at the very least the American novel, is profound. Moving along, both Heart of Darkness and A Bend in the River are certainly "about" Africa, although this is not all that they are about. Your suggestion that their settings are "incidental" discounts how these writers are playing with the associative powers of blackness and Africa. To miss this is to miss certain registers at which the books resonate for a Western audience. The opening to a A Bend in the River is: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." This can quite easily be construed as a racialist statement, not simply within the larger world, but also the context of the book. Many Naipaul admirers in the literary establishment find such implicit racial fatalism appealing, although most won't come out and say it. Anyway, this does not ruin the book for me, any more than Celine's larks through Africa ruin Journey to the End of the Night. It does, however, win Naipaul undue praise, which is my main point.

I did not "denounce" Naipaul's prose. I said it is unremarkable. I think much of his writing reads like journalese, which is perhaps why so many journalists go gaga over him. Look, I never said Naipaul hadn't written some good books. Mediocre writers can in fact write good books. Just look at Herzog. But to put these people on a pedestal, to gush over every piece of paper they wipe their asses on, to ignore the ways in which they have upheld and not challenged our ideas about art, to write about them with wide-eyed, unqualified admiration as the press does with Naipaul--this just won't do. I mean, you'd think he was James Joyce or something.

[LML]

J: I know I'm repeating myself, but I submit that A House for Mr. Biswas would have guaranteed Naipaul a place, yes, in Conrad's class (although the book is more in the Thackeray/Tolstoy mode), even if he hadn't remade himself as a writer of disquieting Conradian near-fables like A Bend in the River, which probably, I agree, were what put him in Nobel contention because of their presumed "social relevance." But that is the Nobel committee's problem. They misread Naipaul if they presume that his best work is political in the sense of taking a side among social groups. And I believe that you have misread if you think A House for Mr. Biswas and A Bend in the River are "mediocre" or that they are stylistically no richer than journalism. It is possible, obviously, to be a great writer without being a fancy prose stylist (Tolstoy and Chekhov come to mind). If you really have read Naipaul's best books and come away believing that he can't do whatever he wants with a sentence, then you have read lazily, or you just don't know what you're talking about.

And anything at all can be read as a "racialist statement." As I think I started out commenting, it is your choice to read Bend through that lens. It might be useful sociologically to read it like that, and probably it's a good strategy for advancing an academic career, but it is literary malpractice, in my opinion. And I'd bet that it's the secondary and biographical material that's encouraging you to read it that way, rather than the book itself.

[J.]

*Sigh*

LML: Either you are deliberately misreading my posts or you do not understand what I am saying. Since, I don't know you and prefer to give strangers the benefit of the doubt I will assume it is the latter. First of all, I never disparaged either A House for Mr. Biswas or A Bend in the River. Secondly, I never said I read the latter entirely through the lens of race. However, to ignore questions of race or dismiss them as irrelevant to that book or much of Naipaul's writing, especially when many of the most evocative passages in his work touch directly upon this very issue, is to read him just as carelessly as any fascist multiculturalist. Naipaul, like it or not, is fascinated by questions of race and identity. If you don't believe me read A Turn in the South or the Middle Passage. It does not help your case for Naipaul to declare one of his major themes irrelevant, simply because you do not like other people's objections to how he treats that theme. Finally, I never indicated that biographical material influenced the way I read any of Naipaul's books. I am perfectly capable of judging the worth of a novel on my own without the aid of "secondary and biographical material." Your insinuation that if I don't like Naipaul's novels it must be because I'm some politically correct left-wing ideologue trying to get a tenure track job teaching postcolonial studies is more than a little presumptuous. It's also a reactionary cliche. I have said very plainly what I dislike about Naipaul's writing and it has nothing to do with his politics. What I have said about his politics is that they have helped him gain an undeserved reputation as a great writer when he is, in fact, mediocre. Naipaul can do anything with a sentence? You must be confusing him with James Joyce.

[LML]

J: Just keep saying "mediocre." Very convincing.
Agreed: Turn in the South is a racist book. Naipaul is some variety of racist, almost certainly. A Bend in the River transcends its author's personal limitations. House for Mr. Biswas transcends its author's personal limitations. It is possible to be great without being James Joyce. I am sorry I took you for a cliche. You sounded like one.

[Nigel Beale]

I agree with bdr: It doesn't have to be an either/or.

"Reading the life and the fiction side by side makes for fine entertainment, as we discover what is included and excluded, what is made up, what not. The line joining authorial text and reader experience morphs into a triangle; a new perspective is introduced, another set of life experiences. The work of art remains independent, but for those who wish to play the game, another dimension is available." http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2008/jun/10/fictionandbiographysomerset

[Luz Maria]

"It's also a reactionary cliche."

Not a reactionary cliche. As long as literature professors' A's continue to be reserved for the political radicals (i.e. reductive pieces of shit) in the class, people who actually care about literature are going to complain about it. For obvious reasons, this makes some of us suspicious about vague claims like, "This can quite easily be construed as a racialist statement." That said, I agree with J. that race and identity play huge roles in Naipaul's novels, and since he has proven himself to be a less than stand-up citizen, it's not completely odd that readers in certain quarters might be suspicious of the way he discusses those issues of race and identity.

For my part, I don't think you have to be (or even necessarily should be) on the side of Justice and Righteousness in order to say something interesting about race. I think of Eminem, whose homophobia allowed him to articulate a lot of very interesting and otherwise inaccessible ideas about masculine insecurity.

I agree with LML; Naipaul is a great author, despite the fact that I usually prefer more formally innovative writing.

[Daniel Green]

"The work of art remains independent, but for those who wish to play the game, another dimension is available."

Of course it is available, but I myself don't understand why anyone would want to play the game. It seems pretty boring to me. And please don't tell me that, after playing the game, you've suddenly discovered something that has rescinded the "independence" of the art after all.

[J.]

A sober reflection on the biography and Naipaul's literary worth can be read here:

http://www.hudsonreview.com/au08/autumn08.html.

William Pritchard is, by the way, NOT a professor of postcolonial studies, in case one feels compelled to erect that little straw man again. He happens to be one of the last great formalists around. And he's right on the money with respect to Naipaul's books.

[J.]

Forgot to drop the period: http://www.hudsonreview.com/au08/autumn08.html

[Frances Madeson]

In the sometimes longish waits between Daniel's posts, I sometimes read past pieces to stay connected to his voice and wisdom. I just read Reckonings, the piece on Sorrentino. What fun! I cannot wait to dig in.