The Nobel Prize in Literature 2001
V.S. Naipaul
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2001 is awarded to the British writer, bornin Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul
"for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in worksthat compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories".
V.S. Naipaul is a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home inhimself, in his inimitable voice. Singularly unaffected by literary fashion andmodels he has wrought existing genres into a style of his own, in which thecustomary distinctions between fiction and non-fiction are of subordinateimportance.
Naipaul’s literary domain has extended far beyond the West Indian island ofTrinidad, his first subject, and now encompasses India, Africa, America fromsouth to north, the Islamic countries of Asia and, not least, England. Naipaulis Conrad’s heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moralsense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded inhis memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.
The farcical yarns in his first work, The Mystic Masseur, and the shortstories in Miguel Street with their blend of Chekhov and calypso establishedNaipaul as a humorist and a portrayer of street life. He took a giant stridewith A House for Mr. Biswas, one of those singular novels that seem toconstitute their own complete universes, in this case a miniature India on theperiphery of the British Empire, the scene of his father’s circumscribedexistence. In allowing peripheral figures their place in the momentousness ofgreat literature, Naipaul reverses normal perspectives and denies readers at thecentre their protective detachment. This principle was made to serve in a seriesof novels in which, despite the increasingly documentary tone, the charactersdid not therefore become less colourful. Fictional narratives, autobiography anddocumentaries have merged in Naipaul’s writing without it always beingpossible to say which element dominates.
In his masterpiece The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul visits the reality ofEngland like an anthropologist studying some hitherto unexplored native tribedeep in the jungle. With apparently short-sighted and random observations hecreates an unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial rulingculture and the demise of European neighbourhoods.
Naipaul has drawn attention to the novel’s lack of universality as a form,that it presupposes an inviolate human world of the kind that has been shatteredfor conquered peoples. He began to experience the inadequacy of fiction while hewas working on The Loss of El Dorado, in which after extensive study of thearchives he described the appalling colonial history of Trinidad. He found thathe had to cling to the authenticity of the details and the voices and abstainfrom mere fictionalisation while at the same time continuing to render hismaterial in the form of literature. His travel books allow witnesses to testifyat every turn, not least in his powerful description of the eastern regions ofthe Islamic world, Beyond Belief. The author’s empathy finds expression in theacuity of his ear.
Naipaul is a modern philosophe, carrying on the tradition that startedoriginally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which hasbeen deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events tospeak with their own inherent irony.
