Resumo de Ambivalence As A Metaphor

? Ambivalence As a Metaphor: A Study of V S Naipaul?s
Fiction? ( Article )
( by Dr Karanam Rao)

V S Naipaul has carved for himself a peculiar niche
with a vast repertoire of creative output that includes a
score of novels and umpteen non-fictional tomes. He has
forged ahead of his contemporaries from the Third World by
trying to implicate the whole cultural history as a point
of his fictional explorations while focusing his attentive
vision on the ambivalence of his double inheritance that
allows him an ironic distance from his perceptive
observations and narratology. It is rather hazardous to
attempt to an assessment of a writer who has a prodigious
output to his credit, and who has cornucopias of interests,
and shows up a protean variety every time he comes out with
a new book. As a fiction writer, committed to upholding the
tradition of his forbears ,and the lacerations of the
indentured culture that he has so unwittingly inherited,
Naipaul almost turns into castigating it. And his earlier
novels present him as a neophyte using the fictional art in
the service of documenting the West Indian culture with all
its miasma of openness and perforated cultural values.
Naipaul adopts an ironic distance as a fictional strategy
that allows him to implicate as much as possible- the
specificities of his own culture that offers contrapuntal
juxtapositons with the ramifications of the ?other?,

Naipual has to do some balancing act. Starting from the ?
Mystic Masseur? , ?Miguel street? and ?A House for Mr
Biswas?, Naipual attempts to examine the particularism of
the moment and of the specifics of the West Indian
culture , with all its ambient traditions and social
values. The first phase is thus marked by the euphoric
indulgences and uncertainties of the artist trying to find
his terra
firma.

In the second phase of his writing, which is more
prolific and prodigious, Naipaul has churned out a series
of non-fictional works like
?An Area of Darkness ,India:
A Wounded Civilization??, ?Among Believers: An Islamic
Journey? that manifestly bring out the Naipaul who is past
his earlier ambivalences and enigmas of that his exile has
imposed upon him. He now becomes reconciled to the post-
colonial facticities and overcomes his carping sense of
alienation to achieve a semblance with the reality. Almost
with the fervor of a pitiless raconteur, he exposes the
sham and glory of different cultures and religions. The
middle passage of his oeuvre thus pillories all empathy
both in ?India: Several Mutinies? and ?The Middle
Passage?.

As D J Enright points out, Naipaul loses his
cool and even oversteps the boundaries of orderliness and
critical decency in arriving at the strange finalities of
judgment. It is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects
of his personality that becomes revealed. The African
novels that closely followed them like ?IN A Free State?
and ?A Bend in the River?, Naipaul once again resurfaces
with the same penchant for judgmental cynicism that makes
him one of the most controversial literary figures in the
Third world. The Conradian gloom and Lwarentian darkness
enhances his importance but never overshadows his
achievement.

2..

In the last phase of his writing, the
novelist has once again returned to a clear-eyed perception
of the human values, and his enigma of arrival
crystallizes not into uneasy accommodation but into an
assured commitment that enforces him into accepting the
truth as a verifiable reality. His permanent expatriation
seems to have brought into him a changed perspective that
allows him to turn his ?exile? into an advantage, and
fiction into an exploration of the reality .He now lives in
England,
the ?middle ground? that becomes both his
strength and weakness as a fiction writer. As the Nobel
citation pinpoints his achievement, he is verily? a
literary navigator? par

excellence.

*****

Resumos Relacionados