Naipaul and the Barbarians

JEFFEREY FOLKS has taught literature on several continents, most recently at Doshisha University in Japan. His article on the fiction of Kent Haruf appeared in the Spring issue.

At the end of a long journey, it is the
wastefulness of his life that impresses
Willie Chandran, the protagonist of two
late novels by V. S. Naipaul. Not only
has he squandered his own talent, he has
turned his back on the contributions of his
family and culture. Like his revolutionary
colleague in India, Bhoj Narayan, Willie is
the ungrateful product of a family that has
struggled for generations to work itself out
of poverty. In squandering his opportunities
for an education and foregoing a productive
career in favor of a life of fantasy,
Willie thwarts not only his own hopes but
those of his parents and grandparents. As
Naipaul writes, speaking directly of Bhoj
but perhaps of Willie as well: “All that
work and ambition had now been wasted;
all that further possibility had been thrown
away.”¹

Surely, Naipaul’s crucial insight in Half
a Life and Magic Seeds is that Willie’s proud
quest for self-liberation leads only to a selfabsorbed,
barbaric condition that is the
opposite of genuine civilization. Despite
what Willie and many of his contemporaries
believe, culture is not merely chosen
from the postmodern menu or “constructed”
by individuals within the fleeting
culture of their times: it is truly an inheritance,
one that limits and restricts but also
enriches, and lacking which, a fruitful life
is unimaginable.

Sadly, Willie Chandran’s young life
begins with the repudiation of a father
whom he considers a dinosaur of social
striving and bourgeois pretension, but
what he fails to recognize is the enormous
danger that lies outside the customary
and accepted boundaries of the very
civilization that his father has embodied.
His naïve gesture of rebellion, “to make
a sacrifice” of himself by marrying a girl
from a much lower caste than his own,
turns out to be a fiasco, for Willie understands
nothing of the consequences of his
action both for himself and for the timid,
frightened young woman with whom
he becomes involved at school. Willie’s
romantic conception of this action as a
momentous self-assertion in which he will
be swept away by passion, removed from
“a dull and ordinary place where ordinary
people walked and worked,”² is savagely
undercut in Naipaul’s narrative: rather
than torrents of passion, Willie is granted a
future of emptiness and failure. Although
he considers himself a young man stepping
proudly outside the narrow bounds of his
father’s world, he will spend much of his
future idling away his time in pointless
fantasies and in flight from actual human
affairs. As a result of the impulsive actions
of his youth and the escapism of his adulthood,
Willie will drift further and further
from the civilized norms of responsibility
and restraint that he ought to have learned
as a child. Although he considers himself
culturally advanced, freed from the petty
restrictions of traditional culture, Willie
in fact has joined the barbarians who live
only for the sake of self-gratification.

The conviction that modern culture has
declined into a condition of thoughtless
impulse and even tribalism is one that has
preoccupied Naipaul for quite some time
and that has equally mystified, and continues
to mystify, his critics. The modern barbarians,
Naipaul discovers, are those who
refuse to look at the world as it is and to
reflect on the causes of its inadequacy. Not
least among these are the many unsympathetic
or hostile critics of Naipaul’s fiction,
including such well-known figures
as Edward Said, Terry Eagleton, Jonathan
Yardley, and J. M. Coetzee, whose novel,
Waiting for the Barbarians, I will discuss later
in some detail. In a reading oddly focused
on Willie’s “spiritual journey” as a progress
toward sexual self-discovery, “identifying
the sexual embrace as the ultimate arena
of truth,” Coetzee mistakes Willie as an
“alter ego” of Naipaul himself, one that,
Coetzee believes, intimates “where Naipaul
himself might have gone if . . . he had,
instead of secluding himself with his typewriter,
followed his heart.”³ Aside from
the unwarranted personal attack in which
it appears to engage, Coetzee’s reading
fails to appreciate that Willie is a character
who follows the line of least resistance,
not one who follows his “heart.” More
extreme is the response of Terry Eagleton
who, in a sneering review of Dagmar Barnouw’s
Naipaul’s Strangers, manages several
thousand words without ever emerging
from the cocoon of blinkered radicalism.
Refusing to take Naipaul seriously for one
moment, Eagleton fails to credit the profound
humanity of Naipaul’s writing even
as he accuses him of being “short on sympathy”
for just about everyone.⁴ For his part,
Yardley misses the point that Willie fails
because he is cynical and disaffected, not
because disaffection is a “universal condition”
that Willie need only accept in order
to “fit in.”⁵ Finally, Said’s view of Naipaul
as “a kind of belated Kipling,”⁶ aside from
its apparent ignorance of Naipaul’s detractive
critique of Kipling (which appeared as
“Theatrical Natives” fifteen years before
Said’s article in the same publication, The
New Statesman) is, I believe, a gross simplification of Naipaul’s complex understanding
of colonialism.

What each of these critics fails to perceive
is the remarkable relevance of Naipaul’s
writing to our times. Naipaul’s
characterization of Willie Chandran has
particular relevance for our culture, for it
is the story of one who wishes to “transcend”
all parochial and local definitions
of identity and attain a sort of universality
that will vaguely align him with the causes
of human rights and social equality, without
placing any actual demands or limits
on his own conduct. With his “feeling of
being detached, of floating, with no links
to anyone or anything,”⁷ Willie seems a
familiar sort of modern barbarian, a contemporary
Everyman of universalist and
humane sympathies possessed of a most
furtive and expedient moral nature. By the
time he is thirty, Willie’s good intentions
have already been perverted into hypocritical
justification for his own moral passivity;
his passion for justice, such as it is,
has been dulled by the conviction that the
world is universally unjust; his ideal of ser
vice to others has been transformed into
cynical self-indulgence. All of Willie’s liberal
instincts point to a constriction of life
as, bit by bit, he lowers the bar of what he
expects from himself and others.

After he arrives in England on a postsecondary
scholarship, Willie comes to
believe that his entire civilization in India
is an arbitrary construction—”the old rules
were themselves a kind of make-believe,
self-imposed”⁸—and once he is convinced
that the rules of his culture are arbitrary,
he concludes that no rules have binding
power over him. Willie’s conception of
the arbitrary nature of culture, however,
overlooks the crucial role played by inherited
systems of belief within all advanced
civilizations. All of us have grown up
within a distinct historical culture, and
while that culture evolves over time, it
also retains a core of inherited wisdom of
a sort that individual human beings cannot
simply summon up on their own. We
can never really step outside of the world
that we know, if only because the fact of
stepping outside of itself presupposes a
certain knowledge of the sort that enables
that transgressive act.

The difficulty is that, amid the mischievous
clutter of information circulating
through our “advanced” media culture of
the past forty years, the role of inherited
knowledge has been overwhelmed by an
incoherent and thoughtless load of trivia.
Those of us living in the West at the present
appear to have access to an abundance
of information and novelty of culture that
make possible a range of personal freedom
unknown in the past when, in fact,
the overload of information, analysis,
and “expert” advice results in a desperate
confusion. As Naipaul writes in an essay
entitled “Reading and Writing: A Personal
Account,” our historical period is
“surfeited with news, culturally far more
confused [than the nineteenth century in
Europe], threatening again to be as full of
tribal or folk movement as during the centuries
of the Roman empire.”⁹ Faced with
a thousand indiscriminate suggestions and
opinions, critical choices become, in effect,
random acts, and with the very choices
that are most influenced by that abundance
of news, we exhibit our own limitations.
The World Wide Web, as its pretentious
moniker suggests, reflects this millenarian
aspiration, as do the assortment of cable
networks that offer news “24/7.” Acting
on the basis of an indiscriminate flow of
knowledge, we revert to “tribal” reactions
based on purely emotive responses or on
crude measures of affiliation. Those critics
who misjudge the damage of this arrogant
culture tend to regard Naipaul’s writing
as reactionary or even misanthropic. Paul
J. Griffiths finds that Naipaul’s assessment
of the human condition is “not much different
from Gulliver’s (and Swift’s) at the
end of his travels.”¹⁰ By Griffiths’ account,
Naipaul would have us serving up babies
and sleeping with horses in the company
not only of Gulliver but of Swift himself.
Yet this misreading (of both Naipaul and
Swift) fails to credit the necessity of satire
in the face of widespread cultural illness of
the sort that Swift and Naipaul, each in his
particular context, have had to confront.

Naipaul’s acute awareness of the incompleteness
of modern culture helps to explain
the central themes as well as the titles of
his two recent novels, Half a Life and Magic
Seeds. It is part of the human condition, of
course, to function within the limitations
of what we know, but the great danger of
contemporary existence is that, as it disregards
the fact of its own limitations, the
birthright of human imperfection devolves
into something far worse. Ignoring its
essential condition of limitation, contemporary
culture shifts restlessly from one
intellectual fashion to another in search of
the magic seeds that deliver instant grati
fication. It is the heedlessness of contemporary
culture that is the central thematic
concern of Naipaul’s two novels and that
explains his sense that modern humans,
not just Willie Chandran as a “postcolonial”
figure but so many of Willie’s contemporaries,
have been granted only half
a life. It is not just in India, Africa, or the
Caribbean that Naipaul detects a fracturing
or insufficiency of inherited structures of
order: it is in Britain, Continental Europe,
and America as well.

Naipaul’s first publishable writing, the
stories collected as Miguel Street, revealed
the barren level to which colonial society
can be reduced, but it is not only within a
colonial setting that the barbarians make
their presence known. As Naipaul’s protagonist
in Guerillas, Peter Roche, tells us,
the state of anarchy in which law ceases
to function and civil order breaks down,
in which even the most fundamental services
are unavailable and in which human
beings resort to brute force can come to
pass anywhere: “Every country is that kind
of country. People would be frightened if
they know how easily it comes.”¹¹

For his part, Willie’s path toward this
condition of anarchy begins with the
exploration of his own sexuality. As a
young man who has grown up within a
conservative culture, one not far removed
from the mores of rural India, Willie is
totally inexperienced and lacking in confi-
dence in his relations with women, and the
modern ethos of sexual liberation offers
him an illusion of unlimited gratification
and choice. After Willie’s Jamaican friend
at school, Percy Cato, introduces Willie to
his girlfriend, a young woman who works
at the perfume counter of Debenhams
department store, June briefly becomes
Willie’s mistress as well, though in the perfunctory,
no-nonsense manner of bohemian
youth culture. Sinking further into
rebellious libertinism, Willie then seeks
out the joyless company of a hard-bitten
prostitute and engages in a brief fling with
the girlfriend (or fianceé—the point is that
one is not quite sure which) of his friend,
Roger.

Through all of this, Willie remains a
solitary figure within a cruelly unfeeling
society, one in which sexual liaisons are
more readily initiated than are genuine
friendships. In this regard, it is important
to note the connection that exists between
the enduring loneliness of Willie’s life and
his instinct to escape reality by way of erotic
pursuits of one kind or another. As Hannah
Arendt noted in The Human Condition,
“the modern discovery of intimacy seems
a flight from the whole outer world into
the inner subjectivity of the individual,”¹²
and one result of this flight is a culture of
unprecedented personal freedom and, at
the same time, of pervasive isolation and
loneliness. Willie’s brief, pointless sexual
encounters while a student in London, and
his later, more protracted but fruitless relationship
with Ana, the young woman from
Portuguese East Africa who becomes his
wife, constitute a dream-world beyond the
reach of everyday affairs, but for this very
reason, they fail to afford the emotional
shelter and spiritual reward of a functioning
private life grounded in the practical
affairs of the family. In an admiring letter,
Ana introduces herself to Willie after
the publication of his book of stories, but
even before he actually meets her, Willie
perceives Ana’s essential nature and the
basis of her identification with his writing:
the fact that “she belonged to a mixed
community or stood in some other kind
of half-and-half position.”¹³ Like Willie,
Ana “floats” on the surface of existence,
seeking to escape her insecure condition as
a Creole within a failing colonial society.
Not surprisingly, Willie finds that he and
Ana are compatible, and when his scholarship
runs out, Willie decides to accompany
Ana back to Africa. The “magic” in which
he has believed has proven inefficacious,
and at this decisive point in his life, Willie
takes the easy way out.

The significance of Willie’s decision is
underlined if we consider what Naipaul
has disclosed about his own choices early
in life. In “Prologue to an Autobiography,”
the author reveals his enormous anxiety at
a similar point after his university scholarship
lapsed and he was forced to confront
the world with no resources beyond his
raw, undeveloped talent and his passionate
ambition to be a writer. Not unlike Willie,
Naipaul was at first “practising magic,”
putting his faith in a whole host of superstitions
(writing only on “non-rustle BBC
paper . . . less likely to attract failure”;
refusing to number the pages “for fear of
not getting to the end”). Less obvious at
first was the genuinely redeeming “knowledge
of [his] subject” that came as he actually
began to produce something of value.¹⁴
The danger for Willie, as for so many
others (and perhaps, initially, for Naipaul
himself ), is that he may never arrive at a
rewarding life because of his continued
expectation of the bounty that is to be
magically bestowed. Like so many others,
he expects to acquire with little effort
the magic seeds that will transport him up
the beanstalk to the treasure. This sort of
fantasy is damaging not only to Willie but
to everyone around him because it breeds
attitudes of passivity and expediency, qualities
that are apparent in Naipaul’s account
of Willie’s relationship with Ana. A huge
irony underlies the sense of identification
and comfort that he and Ana discover in
each other, since their immediate sense of
mutual attraction rests to a large extent on
mutual convenience. Ana finds it convenient,
not to say necessary, to secure a male
partner before she returns to Africa. For
his part, both financially and emotionally,
Willie is less than self-sufficient, and so for
the next eighteen years he allows himself
to be supported by his wife—a wife to
whom he is never really committed. What
is missing in this relationship is that core
of love and respect that form the basis of
true intimacy.

After Willie relocates with Ana to
Mozambique, he enters a long, unproductive
period of escapism. Lacking an actual
role in the management of Ana’s estate or a
definite position in society, Willie retreats
into a private life that requires little connection
to Creole society and almost none
to the majority African population. Given
the poor condition of provincial roads,
social life is restricted to visiting nearby
estates, and even among this society a
pervasive sense of inadequacy prevails. As
Willie tells us, “Many of the people who
were our friends considered themselves,
deep down, people of the second rank.”¹⁵
Willie himself hails from a mixed-caste
background similar in its own way to that
of the Creole culture and so shares many of
the social anxieties of Ana and her neighbors,
but he never commits himself to the
particular society he has entered. When
the country is finally overrun by insurgents
from the independence movement,
Willie simply decides to leave.

As its turns out, Ana and her friends are
living the same sort of provisional existence,
grasping at straws as their colonial
order dwindles. In their case, Jacinto and
Carla Correia are convinced that their
investments, including a beach house on
the coast that they intend to sell at a profit,
will protect them no matter what, but
when Willie and Ana visit the property in
the company of the Correias, they discover
a house in ruin. The Correias’s half-Portuguese
caretaker has gone missing, windows
and doors are broken, the house is
rusted, unpainted, and littered with refuse.
It is only at this point that Willie comes
to understand the madness of Jacinto’s life,
constructed as it is on the illusion of economic
control rather than moral order.
What he does not understand at this point
is the similarity of his own life to that of
the Correias.

When the Correias finally depart for
a visit to Portugal, a brief trip that turns
into a stay of many months, they leave
their property in the hands of Álvaro, an
estate manager who is both unscrupulous
and immoral. It is Álvaro who introduces
Willie to the seamy underworld of African
prostitution. Willie accompanies Álvaro to
a seedy bar populated by native prostitutes,
and soon Willie is himself a regular customer.
Characteristically, it is not so much
the objective act, Willie believes, but the
deception—not the offense itself but the
dishonesty of concealing it—that constitutes
a betrayal of his wife, Ana (as if any
behavior were acceptable as long as one
acknowledges it); yet Willie’s conscience
does not deter him from initiating a more
serious affair with one of Ana’s acquaintances.
When Álvaro is sacked, he is replaced
by the husband of one of Carla’s convent
school friends, Graça. When he first meets
her, Willie is immediately struck by Graça’s
sensuality, and he and Graça fall into
a passionate affair. So convinced is Willie
of the momentous nature of this affair that
he comments: “How terrible it would have
been if, as could so easily have happened,
I had died without knowing this depth of
satisfaction, this other person that I had
just discovered within myself.”¹⁶ Willie’s
sudden discovery of the depth of passion,
however, appears to be yet another example
of his acting only from within what little
he knows. The overwhelming sense of
having discovered something of enormous
worth within himself reflects a prudish, sheltered
upbringing and the fact that he has
spent the last two decades in Africa in a
marriage of convenience with a woman
of very limited feeling. More important,
it reflects Willie’s long-standing inability
to credit any reality outside his own ego,
and, once again, his ignorance of reality
leads him astray. What Willie overvalues
at this point is the sensuality of a woman
who, for her part, has been involved in a
series of shallow romantic adventures. For
Graça, the affair is not half so momentous
as it is for Willie.

As if to countermand Willie’s naïve discovery
of passion, Ana, after she confronts
Willie with the affair, asks him to meet
her half-brother, of whose existence Willie
has been unaware. In this climactic scene,
Willie is introduced to a deluded, halfliving
barbarian who may be the novel’s
closest double of Willie. When Ana and
Willie arrive at the half-brother’s house in
the African community that has sprung up
on the edge of the city, they find the residence
surrounded by dust and littered with
vehicles in various states of disrepair. There
they encounter the half-brother occupying
a mere travesty of a formal parlor, a space
cluttered with shabby furniture and with
the radio playing too loudly. Ironically, the
half-brother’s charade suggests his aspiration,
however hopeless, toward the very
same values of respectability and decency
that Willie spurned in his youth. In the
case of the half-brother, however, one
discerns quite the opposite of bourgeois
decorum. His wife, a small, middle-aged
white woman, seems menacingly controlled
by her husband, and, once seated,
the half-brother performs the aggressive
gesture of which Ana has warned Willie:
“He stroked the inside of his thighs slowly,
as though he was caressing himself.”¹⁷ The
half-brother then displays a bottle containing
a spitting cobra, which he torments in
a repellent manner.

Ana has taken Willie to see her halfbrother,
as she tells him, so he will realize
what she has had to put up with, yet the
effect of the meeting, however disturb
ing it is to Willie, does not influence his
decision to divorce his wife. In narrative
terms, however, the meeting is the decisive
figurative element in a novel replete with
images of incompleteness, fraudulence,
and insufficiency. In the context of Half a
Life as a whole, the meeting seems a final
confirmation of the total exhaustion of the
late-colonial culture in which Willie has
been living for so long, but, even more
so, it points to the fraudulence of Willie’s
moral being. Shortly afterward, when he
suffers a painful fall on the steps of Ana’s
estate house—a fall that seems to confirm
that he has arrived at a moral nadir—Willie
decides to leave Africa for good. Willie
believes that by abandoning Ana, he has
entered a new phase of life, but he soon
reverts to a condition of dependence and
anonymity. After living for a time in Berlin
with his sister, Sarojini, and her husband,
Willie returns to India, where he
allows himself to be convinced by Sarojini
to join a revolutionary movement. In this,
as in everything, Willie is less than resolute,
even if his sister is fully committed to
the classic Marxist struggle for the liberation
of the masses.

It is important to understand how
utterly opposed Naipaul’s writing is to a
vision of existence that finds meaning in
political revolution, particularly in violent
revolutionary struggle of the sort with
which Willie becomes associated. In this
respect, Naipaul’s account of Willie’s revolutionary
phase warrants comparison with
any number of conventional postcolonial
novels. Naipaul’s ethos of self-restraint and
respect is the very opposite, for example,
of the moral defeatism suggested by J. M.
Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, an allegorical
novel in which an aging and ineffectual
Magistrate, one who has survived
for decades on an isolated frontier post,
experiences that most hackneyed epiphany
of the liberal imagination: a sudden realization
that the world as we know it is unjust
and that a vast conspiracy exists to protect
the interests of the oppressors. A willingness
to discern conspiracy among those
who are charged with governing is one
of the curious and insidiously destructive
elements of modern political culture, and
it may be that this single-minded fascination
is attributable in the end to a perverse
anxiety grounded in the disparity between
the remarkable success of our own civilization
and the abject failure, and yet presumed
virtue, of non-Western cultures. As
Naipaul has it: “The conviction that is at
the root of so much human anguish and
passion, and corrupts so many lives [is] that
there [is] justice in the world.”¹⁸ Certainly,
Coetzee’s main character, the Magistrate,
is obsessed with justice, but justice implies
that power must be handed over to those
who challenge one’s privileges, thereby
creating a new center of power and one far
less democratic and humanistic than what
had existed before. Naipaul’s recent writing
is in part an attempt to comprehend
the anomalous sympathy on the part of so
many in the West for insurgencies of just
this sort: barbarian revolutions that intend
to replace democratic freedoms with the
reign of savage tyranny.

Like those who condone such insurgencies,
Coetzee’s protagonist foresees the
inevitable destruction of his own civilization
and the rise of the barbarians, who,
in his view, are not barbarians at all but a
noble, healthy, vital people to whom we are
privileged to bare our throats. The same
masochistic fantasy has preoccupied nearly
every major postcolonial writer of the past
fifty years, with the exception of Naipaul.
David Malouf ‘s much admired novel, An
Imaginary Life, is a fictionalized account
of the exile of the Roman poet Ovid to a
barbarian region on the Black Sea. Among
these primitive tribes, quite the opposite of
the urbane society from which he has been
exiled, Ovid is befriended and, for the first
time in his life—in his guardianship of and
intense involvement with a feral child—
truly learns to love (though the affair conveys
the disturbing appearance of pederasty,
intended, I suppose, as an assault on
repressive Western cultural norms). Even
more transgressive in its implications,
Nadine Gordimer’s novel, July’s People,
dwells on the capability and virtue of the
native African people in contrast with the
hapless ruin of a white South African family
after the props of their decadent civilization
have been removed. In Coetzee’s
Waiting for the Barbarians, a similar message
of defeatism is suggested by the Magistrate’s
attitudes, even in what he expects to
find in his archaeological pursuits. Digging
in an area near his own fortification, he
uncovers earlier forts, established like his
own in the no-man’s-land between civilization
and barbarism, and he suspects that
any number of previous lost civilizations
may be found further down: “Perhaps ten
feet below the floor lie the ruins of another
fort, razed by the barbarians, peopled with
the bones of folk who thought they would
find safety behind high walls.”¹⁹

From the beginning Coetzee assumes
the existence of a vast cultural conspiracy
in which the Empire (read: “the West”)
exploits colonial peoples for its own profit.
In order to justify this exploitation, settlers
resort to the timeworn definition of
barbarians as less than human; but as the
Magistrate comes to understand the mechanisms
of power—the way in which the
barbarians, once they are defined as “lazy,
immoral, filthy, stupid,”²⁰ can be systematically
displaced, cheated, and abused—he
sets himself against his own civilization,
and as he becomes more and more isolated,
he is consumed by a perverse instinct of
self-contempt. As he confides to us: “Shall I
tell you what I sometimes wish? I wish that
these barbarians would rise up and teach us
a lesson, so that we would learn to respect
them.”²¹ The thinly veiled sympathy with
the wretched of the earth has been echoed
by radicals at every turn of modern history,
from the sympathy of the French Left with
insurrections in Indochina and Algeria to
those today who fancy a million Mogadishus,
the perverse indulgence of intellectuals
who revel in the gruesome images of
Americans killed and mutilated. When the
Magistrate, however, undertakes a journey
into the land of the barbarians as an
effort, as he sees it, to “repair the damage”
that the Empire has wrought, the result is
disastrous. His meeting with the barbarian
leader concludes with no communication
at all, and the subsequent march back
to his fortress in the thick of winter is a
near catastrophe. Still, against all evidence
to the contrary, the Magistrate believes in
the absolute virtue of the barbarian, just
as he is convinced of the inevitability of
his own culture’s demise. He notes that the
sophisticated farming techniques of civilized
people can easily be devastated by the
actions of a few insurgents who can open
the floodgates and wipe out an entire crop
within minutes. “How can we win such a
war? What is the use of textbook military
operations, sweeps and punitive raids into
the enemy’s heartland, when we can be
bled to death at home?”²²

The most difficult lesson that the Magistrate
has to learn, however, is that of his
own complicity. For one who has never
wished to be “contaminated” by power, it
comes as a shock to realize that he is part of
“the lie that Empire tells itself when times
are easy.”²³ When Colonel Joll, the caricature
of the Afrikaner sadist, returns from
his disastrous expedition against the barbarians,
the Magistrate peers through the
murky glass of Joll’s carriage window and
suddenly recognizes his twin in evil. The
point that Coetzee is making is particularly
relevant to an understanding of the
nature of radical consciousness, for he suggests
that since everyone (except the barbarians)
is immoral, there exists no possibility
of goodness in anyone connected
with imperial society (and all societies that
presume to conduct trade beyond the local
marketplace or that impose order beyond
the clan are defined as “imperial”). Given
the existence of a single grain of evil
within a society, no moral distinctions
can be legitimate: our civilization, with
its perpetration of civilian casualties and
prisoner abuse, is “entirely” blameworthy,
while the most ruthless terrorist organization
is somehow magically virtuous, perhaps
because it is “honest” about its uses
of terror. Since such “corrupt” societies as
our own will always be tainted and thus
“entirely” incapable of virtue, they must be
replaced by more virtuous ones like that of
the barbarians who will, as the Magistrate
so tastefully puts it, “wipe their backsides
on the town archives.”²⁴ So history comprises
a preordained cycle of civilizations
arising from primordial virtue and declining
into civilized decadence. With Rousseau,
Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, and a host
of their wistful followers, Coetzee worships
the innocent virtue of the primitive,
and he accepts as inescapable the notion
that advanced civilizations are inherently
corrupt and doomed to extinction.

Yet somehow in the midst of the Magistrate’s
gratification of his quasi-erotic
instincts for justice, the actuality of the
world’s suffering gets lost. The act of
massaging the feet of a brutalized young
woman, itself a crude travesty of Christian
myth, devolves step-by-step into the selfrighteous
fantasy of serving as the godlike
agent of salvation. What the Magistrate
seeks, for the moment anyway, is not sexual
gratification but a more insidious form
of pleasure based on an overweening pride
in his own salvific role. When the relationship
later becomes sexual, its exploitative
nature is hidden from the Magistrate
because he interprets the affair’s consummation,
an explosion of erotic release that
seems a recompense for the “senseless hesitancy”
of the previous five months, as an
epiphany beyond the comprehension and
strictures of ordinary humanity.

“Senseless hesitancy”—the phrase reveals
a great deal about the centrality of the
erotic impulse within the scheme of liberal
values. From the Magistrate’s perspective,
to restrain sexuality in his relationship with
the captive girl makes no sense because that
restraint is a violation of a code of ethics
that exhorts every human being to extract
the maximum degree of gratification from
life. To overlook any opportunity of gratification, whether it be sexual or otherwise,
is a violation of liberal ethics because at
the root of that ethics is the assumption
that reality consists of nothing beyond the
individual’s material existence. The central
government and its representative, Colonel
Joll, are evil because they deny physical
comforts, not to say life, to the barbarians,
but also because the necessity of defending
the hegemonic culture wastes resources
that could otherwise be devoted to an even
higher degree of gratification (“healthcare,
not war,” as some would have it). From
within this ethic, since immanence is all
that matters, physical pleasure becomes a
privileged category of experience, yet by
its very nature, sexuality seems particularly
vulnerable to hypocrisy, offering as it does
the illusion of an escape from the ordinary
ground of responsibility into a rarefied
sphere in which existence has been emptied
of everything except for sensual experience
of a kind that is paradoxically so intense as
to suggest its opposite.

The relationship of this radical conception
of sexuality to the essential understanding
of the self within radical politics
should be apparent, for the radical
understanding of the self is grounded in
the overriding motive of self-denial to the
point where one arrives at a blissful condition
of emptiness and moral detachment.
The “blankness” that the Magistrate discovers
as the final outcome of his sexual
relationship with the servant girl reflects
this ecstatic condition and his goal of emptying
the self. Yet the Magistrate, like the
radical values that he embodies, ultimately
comes across as a futile and somewhat
pathetic hypocrite. What is absent in all
of this, and what Naipaul grasps so clearly,
is the fact that self-gratification, especially
the “higher” gratification of the instinct
to control others by “saving” them, can
never constitute the basis of a meaningful
life. Beyond a certain level of security
and comfort, the fullness of existence does
not entail simply amassing more and more
pleasure or infl uence or credit for redeeming
the lives of others. Ultimately, the
goal of existence is to achieve understanding
of one’s place within creation and to
live according to the implications of this
understanding.

In the case of Willie Chandran, twenty
years of escapism are not sufficient to instill
this lesson: it will take another decade
before the consequences of his fruitless
rebellion begin to sink in. After his return
from Africa, Willie joins a group of revolutionaries
in India—young men from
middle-class backgrounds possessed by
the dream of liberating the peasantry from
their supposed oppression. Naipaul records
the tragic farce of Willie’s joining the wrong
faction of revolutionaries, with whom he
serves as a courier and ultimately participates
in the murder of at least three persons.
After he is apprehended and charged
with being an accessory to murder, it
comes as something of a surprise to Willie
that his interrogator considers him a dangerous
criminal, since Willie in fact views
himself as a nonentity who has never taken
responsibility for anything. As he says of
the superintendent, “He takes me twenty
times more seriously than I took myself.
He wouldn’t believe that things merely
happened around me. He just counts the
dead bodies.”²⁵ But, of course, here Naipaul
undercuts his protagonist with the
biting irony that he has always lived with a
false idea of “things merely happen[ing].”
From within his abstract view, the objective
fact of murder does not exist. Willie
does not believe that he can be held
responsible for the revolutionary violence
in which he has participated because he has
never believed himself to be a participant
in any actual society.

After some months, through the influence
of his London friend, Roger, Willie
is pardoned and exiled to Britain. While
staying with Roger and his wife, Perdita,
in London, Willie begins for the first time
to reflect seriously on “an idea of the man
he had become.”²⁶ While it is unclear
exactly what Willie has become, there is at
least a suggestion that he may now begin to
acquire a definite personality and a sense of
responsibility. Thinking of the multi-ethnic
population of London, a city so much
changed from what he had known thirty
years before, Willie questions the sanity of
a contemporary world filled with turmoil
and change. At the same time, he now
seems more self-sufficient and purposeful.
He thinks, “Now I don’t have to join anybody.
Now I can only celebrate what I am,
or what I have become.”²⁷

For many of Willie’s contemporaries,
the lesson of humility and restraint has
proved difficult as well, perhaps because the
arrogant dream of human perfectibility is
deep-seated within the human consciousness.
Willie’s ideal of self-liberation, though
modern in terms of the radical character it
takes on, may be viewed as the culmination
of a long-standing Gnostic challenge
to Western civilization. As Leszek Kolakowski
points out, in its reduction of the
“inevitable tension” existing within Christian
belief between the conception of the
immanent world as evil and saved, fallen
and divinely created, Christianity “has had
to wage an unceasing battle with heretical
tendencies which affirmed one of the elements
of this tension while neglecting or
forgetting about the other.”²⁸ As Naipaul
dramatizes it in the case of Willie Chandran,
those who begin life with the aspiration
to sacrifice worldly existence to a millenarian
ideal, whether it be perfect justice,
perfect beauty, or a purification of mankind
or of nature, are soon led along the
path of moral indifference that draws one
eventually to violence, whether authoritarian
or anarchic. As Kolakowski asserts,
“To succumb excessively to the Gnostic
temptation of condemning the body and
the physical world as the kingdom of the
devil . . . is to declare one’s indifference
to, indeed to condemn, all that takes place
within civilization; it is morally to cancel
secular history and secular time.”²⁹

“It is wrong to have an ideal view of the
world. That’s where the mischief starts.”³⁰
Willie’s conclusion is based on a lifetime of
mischief, but it points toward the possibility
of a return to sanity. In the end, Willie
comes to understand that much of the
inadequacy of modern life results from an
unrealistic expectation of perfection. After
thirty years in which this quest has drawn
him into every sort of moral compromise,
Willie now comprehends the deathly consequences
of this arrogant faith. He has
taken a long and unnecessarily difficult
path toward this understanding, but perhaps
he has at last come to understand the
paradoxical truth that it is the barbarian,
not the civilized man, who seeks perfectibility
and who, in the quest for a perfect
world, is capable of any crime. As we exist
today, the barbarian is always with us, just
beyond the gates of our own self-restraint,
waiting for reason to devolve into reflex
and civility to degenerate into tribalism.
The barbarian hopes to gain by magic or
luck what civilization affords to those who
labor carefully and patiently, but, as Naipaul
makes clear in the case of Willie Chandran,
a reliance on magic or luck does not lead
to treasure but to impoverishment. There
are no magic seeds, only ordinary ones that
must be planted, watered, and weeded in
the uncertain hope of a bountiful reward.
Unlike the magic variety, however, ordinary
seeds produce real crops. With the
harvest brought in, there is the prospect of
joyful celebration, nourishment, and health
rather than a future of disillusionment,
emptiness, and grief.

NOTES

1. V. S. Naipaul, The Magic Seeds (New York: Knopf, 2004),
   95.

2. V. S. Naipaul, Half a Life (New York: Vintage International,
   2002), 18.

3. J. M. Coetzee, “The Razor’s Edge,”
   New York Review of Books (1 November 2001), 10.

4. Terry
   Eagleton, “A Mind So Fine: The Contradictions of V. S.
   Naipaul,” Harper’s 307 (September 2003), 81.

5. Jonathan
   Yardley, “Review of Half a Life by V.S. Naipaul,” Washington
   Post Book World (21 October 2001), 2.

6. Edward
   Said, “Expectations of Inferiority,” New Statesman 102,
   No. 2639 (16 October 1981), 21.

7. Naipaul, Half a Life,
   29.

8. Ibid., 57.
9. Naipaul, Literary Occasions: Essays, ed.
   Pankaj Mishra (New York: Knopf, 2003), 30–31.

10. Paul
    J. Griffiths, “The Center Does Not Hold,” Commonweal
    132, No. 3 (11 February 2005), 23.

11. V. S. Naipaul,
    Guerillas (New York: Vintage, 1980), 254.

12. Hannah
    Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of
    Chicago Press, 1958), 69.

13. Naipaul, Half a Life, 117.
14. Naipaul, Literary Occasions, 65.

15. Naipaul, Half a Life,
    150.

16. Ibid., 190.
17. Ibid., 200.
18. Naipaul, Literary
    Occasions, 77.

19. J. M. Coetzee,Waiting for the Barbarians
    (New York: Penguin, 1982), 15.

20. Ibid., 38.
21. Ibid., 51.
22. Ibid., 100.
23. Ibid., 135.
24. Ibid., 143.
25. Naipaul,
    Magic Seeds, 150.

26. Ibid., 181.
27. Ibid., 188.
28. Leszek
    Kolakowski, “Looking for the Barbarians” in Modernity
    on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
    1990), 27.
29. Ibid.
30. Magic Seeds, 280.