V. S. Naipaul. A World in Tension Judith Misrahi-Barak To cite this version: Judith Misrahi-Barak. V. S. Naipaul. A World in Tension. Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 262 p., 2004, 2-84269-618-2. hal-03145637 HAL Id: hal-03145637 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03145637 Submitted on 18 Feb 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Publication de Montpe l lier 3 Une question? Un problème? Té léphonez au 04 67 14 24 06 ou au 04 67 14 24 03. i naipaul Départ imprimerie 2004-5-5 8 h 54 page 1 i i i i i i i Publication de Montpe l lier 3 Une question? Un problème? Té léphonez au 04 67 14 24 06 ou au 04 67 14 24 03. i naipaul Départ imprimerie 2004-5-5 8 h 54 page 2 i i i i i i i Publication de Montpe l lier 3 Une question? Un problème? Té léphonez au 04 67 14 24 06 ou au 04 67 14 24 03. i naipaul Départ imprimerie 2004-5-5 8 h 54 page 3 i i i Centre d'études et de recherches sur les Pays du Commonwealth V. S. Naipaul A World in Tension Une œuvre sous tension Texts collected by Judith Misrahi-Barak Textes réunis par Judith Misrahi-Barak Coll. « Les Carnets du Cerpac » no 1 Université Montpellier III i i i i Publication de Montpe l lier 3 Une question? Un problème? Té léphonez au 04 67 14 24 06 ou au 04 67 14 24 03. i naipaul Départ imprimerie 2004-5-5 8 h 54 page 4 i i i Merci aux membres du Cerpac, Michèle Lurdos, Gilles Teulié et Chantal Kwast-Gre, pour leur aide lors de la préparation de ce recueil. i i i i Publication de Montpe l lier 3 Une question? Un problème? Té léphonez au 04 67 14 24 06 ou au 04 67 14 24 03. i naipaul Départ imprimerie 2004-5-5 8 h 54 page 5 i i i CONTENTS Judith Misrahi-Barak Introduction ......................... 7 Éric Tabuteau La moitié d'une vie entre deux mondes : V. S. Naipaul, prix Nobel controversé ................... 17 Beena Anand Entrapment and release in A House for Mr Biswas .... 31 Hédi Ben Abbes The creative tension of Emptiness in V. S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men .......................... 47 Rita Christian “Coolie” come lately : incompleteness and the making of The surage of Elvira ..................... 63 i i i i Publication de Montpe l lier 3 Une question? Un problème? Té léphonez au 04 67 14 24 06 ou au 04 67 14 24 03. i naipaul Départ imprimerie 2004-5-5 8 h 54 page 6 i i i 6 Contents Jesús Varela-Zapata Not one of us : Naipaul's negative portrayal of western characters .......................... 89 Florence Labaune-Demeule V. S. Naipaul's Half a Life : Moving Away from Tension ? 117 Bénédicte Ledent The Same, Yet Dierent : Caryl Phillips's Screen Adaptation of V. S. Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur .... 155 Florence D'Souza V. S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South : Playing Devil's Advocate or a step towards a more serene inclusivity ? 171 Jean-Paul Engélibert L'Écriture hors l'histoire : A Way in the World ...... 185 Alexis Tadié V. S. Naipaul : the Writer as Anthropologist ....... 211 Contributors ........................... 235 Abstracts ............................. 239 Selected Bibliography ..................... 247 Cerpac .............................. 259 i i i i Publication de Montpe l lier 3 Une question? Un problème? Té léphonez au 04 67 14 24 06 ou au 04 67 14 24 03. i naipaul Départ imprimerie 2004-5-5 8 h 54 page 7 i i i INTRODUCTION Judith MISRAHI-BARAK Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III This collection of essays springs forth from a conference held at Paul Valéry University, Montpellier III, in November 2002, organ- ised by the Cerpac (Centre d'étude et de recherche sur les Pays du Commonwealth / Research Centre on the Commonwealth). I wish to thank the University and particularly the Conseil scien- tique as well as the Pôle universitaire européen du Languedoc- Roussillon for making the conference possible, along with the Équipe d'accueil for giving nancial support for the publishing of the proceedings. The conference was organised around the general concept of tension, a theme that the research team (Équipe d'accueil EA 741 “Étude des pays anglophones”) has decided to keep as its main axis of study until 2006. A few academics among the specialists of V. S. Naipaul's work delivered papers on dierent aspects and periods of the writer's œuvre, and the papers were selected so as to reect both the evolution between 1957 and 2002, and the i i i i Publication de Montpe l lier 3 Une question? Un problème? Té léphonez au 04 67 14 24 06 ou au 04 67 14 24 03. i naipaul Départ imprimerie 2004-5-5 8 h 54 page 8 i i i 8 Judith Misrahi-Barak richness of the writing. V. S. Naipaul not only writes ction and non-ction, he covers a wide spectrum of the literary practice, writing short stories and novels, essays and travel writing. But while listening to the speakers and reading their papers, it is eas- ier to understand how generic boundaries are not what matters here. The sense of form and creation is simply at work in every text, going well beyond the outside shape. It is the same furrow that is being ploughed with dierent tools. Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul has been either praised to the skies or held up to public obloquy; he is considered as the greatest writer in the English language, or as a writer whose prose is scarred by the scrofula (to use Derek Walcott's terms) of what is sometimes considered his dubious ideological and politi- cal attitudes—there is no golden mean when speaking of Sir Vidia and steering a middle course seems to be a tricky endeavour. His being knighted in 1990 for services rendered to literature and his obtaining the Nobel Prize in 2001 only made matters worse if possible . The winner of the Nobel Prize may often be at the centre of heated debate, but few writers have been as controver- sial as V. S. Naipaul. If the tensions that surround the man and his œuvre are numerous, they are only echoed by the multiple strands and shapes that his writing has been taking over the past fty years—multifarious and yet paradoxically more and more centred. V. S. Naipaul's biography is now well-known—he was born in a very poor rural, Hindi-speaking, area in Trinidad on 17 August 1932; his Brahmin grand-father had come from India as an indentured labourer, forced by a near-destitute situation in Uttar Pradesh. V. S. Naipaul rst left Chaguanas on a Trinidadian schol- arship that took him to Port of Spain. When he came to Eng- i i i i Publication de Montpe l lier 3 Une question? Un problème? Té léphonez au 04 67 14 24 06 ou au 04 67 14 24 03. i naipaul Départ imprimerie 2004-5-5 8 h 54 page 9 i i i Introduction 9 land in 1950 on a British scholarship, he had already had the experience of exile through the displacement of his family and thousands of other Indians who had come to the plantations of Trinidad and British Guiana as cheap labour in replacement of the recently freed slaves, on what should have been short-term contracts between 1840 and 1917. He spent four years at Uni- versity College, Oxford, lifted out of his family background by literary ambitions, both his father's—Seepersad wrote articles for the Trinidad Guardian, but also short stories about village life— and his own. He soon became a freelance writer for the BBC and edited until 1956 the inuential “Caribbean Voices” which launched postcolonial writing and particularly Caribbean liter- ature on to the literary scene of the time. Bruce King says of him that he is “a former colonial who has become a homeless cosmopolitan”.1 Indeed, as early as the mid-1950s, England had already become one of his homes; the Caribbean would oer him his rst writing material and he was to turn into one of the modern world's most ecient postcolonial circumnavigator and chronicler of clashing worlds. V. S. Naipaul's need to make sense of the world and achieve order through writing, was rst to nd its expression through the mode of comedy. His rst four books are often lumped together by critics, as the rst steps of the writer searching for his material and focus. The Mystic Masseur, a very funny comedy on the rise of a West Indian politician, was the rst book published, in 1957, and it is also the one which nds another lease of life through the medium of the cinema: Bénédicte Ledent (University of Liège, Belgium) in her paper “The Same, Yet Dierent: Caryl Phillip- 1. King, Bruce. V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1993): 2. i i i i Publication de Montpe l lier 3 Une question? Un problème? Té léphonez au 04 67 14 24 06 ou au 04 67 14 24 03.