Naipaul’s Nobel

D uring last month’s remembrances for the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many Americans reflected on the lingering effects of and reactions to the terrible event. One of the more gratifying subsequent events has been under-discussed. Exactly one month after the al-Qaeda attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, the Swedish Academy announced that Sir V. S. Naipaul (1932–2018) was the recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Naipaul, born in Trinidad but a British resident for most of his life, had been nominated for the prize as early as 1972. By 2001, he had written several exceptional novels (A House for Mr. Biswas, 1961; A Bend in the River, 1979; The Enigma of Arrival, 1987) and remarkable nonfiction narratives (The Loss of El Dorado, 1969; Among the Believers, 1981; Beyond Belief, 1998). These works depict the demeaning and destructive elements of colonial rule yet also critique postcolonial activism and the dangers of fundamentalist Islam. In the wake of Islamism’s deadliest attacks, Naipaul’s perspective was particularly timely.

Not that the Swedes put it quite that way. The press release announcing the prize declared that Naipaul earned it “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” It praised him for writing “fictional narratives [in which] autobiography and documentaries have merged . . . without it always being possible to say which element dominates.” It lauded his account of “the appalling colonial history of Trinidad.” Only toward the end does it mention “his powerful description of the eastern regions of the Islamic world, Beyond Belief.”

In Beyond Belief, Naipaul returned to non-Arab Muslim countries that he had first visited in 1979 for Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey. The earlier of these books considered the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, including the Iranian Revolution. As he would explain in a speech delivered at the Manhattan Institute in 1990, this was when the “Muslim rage” fueled by fundamentalism “was just beginning to be apparent.” Naipaul learned from his travels that “no colonization had been so thorough as the colonization that had come with the Arab faith.” He repeated this warning in Beyond Belief:

There probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs. The Gauls, after 500 years of Roman rule, could recover their old gods and reverences; those beliefs hadn’t died; they lay just below the Roman surface. But Islam seeks as an article of the faith to erase the past; the believers in the end honor Arabia alone; they have nothing to return to.

This passage suggests a point Naipaul made in other contexts, which is that just because Western colonialism was often condemnable does not necessarily mean that the West’s opponent is preferable. He made similar claims about Islam the week before his Nobel was announced.

Naipaul also distrusted Western posers and activists who embraced postcolonial revolution. In Guerrillas (1975), the cruelty of a revolutionary (based on a real Trinidadian figure), the manipulations of a white liberal reformer, and the naïveté of a female English activist compose a clear and brutal commentary. In A Bend in the River, a troubled African country descends into chaos when its new strongman leader tries to cast off Western influences; here again, Western liberals are dangerously naïve.

Naipaul’s recognition of the absurdity behind the anti-Western sentiment that fueled the postcolonial movement drew the ire of activists and academics such as Edward Said, whom Eli Lake appropriately calls “the intellectual godfather of today’s pro-Palestine protesters.” In his remarkable 1990 speech, Naipaul suggested that one reason Islam is “held up in opposition to Western values” — and why Islamicists reject Western ideals — is what he calls “philosophical hysteria.” (The term alludes to a phrase used by one of Naipaul’s major influences, Joseph Conrad.) He saw an “unconscious contradiction” in renunciations of the West, because such rejections assume “there will continue to be people striving out there, in the stressed world, making drugs and medical equipment” and advancing other technologies that benefit the entire world.

Conversely, Naipaul praised what he called “the universal civilization” offered by the West, particularly after World War II. This civilization allowed him to move from the periphery of Trinidad to the center of London, to establish himself as an author — that is, to move upward and flourish intellectually based on his abilities. The universal civilization separated him from “the rituals and the myths” of his Hindu ancestors, but in their place he gained “the ideas of inquiry and the tools of scholarship,” he said. “I could carry four or five or six different cultural ideas in my head.”

His speech concluded with praise for “the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness,” which he called “an immense human idea [that] cannot be reduced to a fixed system” and that “cannot generate fanaticism.” However, “it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

Eleven years after those words, Naipaul saw with the rest of the world what the fanatics would do to blow away the “immense human idea” behind the American experiment. Yet even then, some of his esteemed peers were deluded by “philosophical hysteria.” On this website, after Naipaul’s death, his friend David Pryce-Jones shared an anecdote from the Nobel Prize dinner:

On the program with him were two previous Nobel winners, Nadine Gordimer and Günter Grass. They were agreeing that poverty is the whole motivation of Islamist terror. Vidia shot back that like millions of others he came from a poor family and did not commit terror. Infuriated by the liberal twaddle, he went to his room without dinner.

Those previous winners expressed political views you tend to expect from Nobel winners, but occasionally — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970), Czesław Miłosz (1980), and Mario Vargas Llosa (2010) come to mind — the prize goes to a great writer whose works capture the world as it is. Naipaul’s prize in 2001 was an especially important and timely such occasion.