V.S. Naipul's House for Mr. Biswas

An axiomatic reality for post-colonial literature: The novel acts as a site of subversion - subversion, as an aesthetic marker, a tome, a storybook of dramatic arcs and artistic galvanization. It can be this, but as a strategy to resist the imperialistic monolith, to resist the close-quarters colonization, the post-colonial novel seeks to redraw the world as the post-colonial subject (or Other) knows, or does not, know it.

From metaphysics to dialectics, from accidental collusion with the antinomies of essential oppositions (self/other) to a stress on mediations, contradictions, the dynamics of relationality - whatever such critical shifts are called, they involve futher engagement with 'history' on one hand and 'narrative form' on the other. (Chrisman, 500)

Thus, in the local and global redrawing of the world, a central motif to these novels is the lack of a clean-sweep conclusion. In effect, the writer leaves the territory open, allows it breath, space -in a word, freedom. Whereas, the traditional, or Eurocentric novel, begins and ends a life, the post-colonial writes the pre-beginning, and by the end of the novel, the subject can essentially begins. V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, a thinly-veiled biography of Naipaul's father's life has often been misread as beginning and ending cleanly. In fact, the novel is a prompt for the son. If it is the son, writing the father, the son refiguring the world of the father, then by the novel's end, with Biswas's death, the son now begins his life. As a cue of resistance, the son - or under the fictional gauze Anand Biswas - must mold the father's life.

There is no scene where Mr. Biswas is absent. The novel attains a kind of claustrophobia with his hovering characterization. And, slipping here and there, in the cracks and hallways, is Anand. If the father is molded by both colonialist and familial paralysis, then the son must negotiate his terms of influence. In Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, he writes:

Because of a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly, "In reality, who am I?" (Fanon, 250)

Mr. Biswas is the boy's primary influence, and also his lamest, his most confused and contradictory.

Shama gave birth to a son. He was not given the names that had been written on the endpaper of the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare. Seth suggested that the boy should be called Anand, and Mr. Biswas, who had prepared no new names, agreed. (176)

This naming process, the process of ownership and power, displays the marked contrast between Hanuman House traditionalism and Biswas's Eurocentric (the Renaissance, in this case) paroxysmal pastimes. In this case, he is empty; his son is given the Indian name for "happiness," in Sanskrit. It is an ironic misnomer: For the boy is frail and weak, maudlin and shouty, gloomy and overly-affected.

Anand is witness to his father's neurotic sweats, his father's business and anger mismanagement; his father's mimetic yellow journalism; his father's abuse, pressures, lapses of digression; his father's belief and disbelief in religions; and, metaphorically and physically, his father's indefatigable search for a house. Through this peripatetic movement, the son molds and deconstructs the father, molds and deconstructs himself, always searching, questioning, and attaining awareness through his father's failures to correct his own, attaining erectness as the father crumbles. He is born into a multiplicity of mothers and fathers, agonized aunts and unctuous uncles, bizarro brothers and sickly sisters. In an interview with Adrian Rowe-Evans, Naipaul states:

I sought to reconstruct my disintegrated society, to impose order on the world, to seek patterns, to tell myself - this is what happens when people are strong; this is what happens when people are weak. I had to find that degree of intellectual comfort, or I would have gone mad.

(Rowe-Evans, 59)

It is then Naipaul's aim to recover the past, to rewrite the past, yet to finesse this in a tone so distant, so grimly ironic that it's hidden central voice - that of a struggling, grieving son - it needs to affix family history to that of the history undermined by colonization.

Although the "unhomely" is a paradigmatic post-colonial experience, it has resonance that can be heard distinctly, if erratically, in fictions that negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a range of historical conditions and social contradictions. (Bhabha, 142)

Bhabha's resonance creates an anxiety of hybrids: family history, local history, national history, and imperialism's re-written history upon the collective unconscious of all involved.

The pastness of the past can never be accurately re-exhumed. Neither memory nor any other historical activity can reconstitute past reality. All that can be done is to engage in activities of mind which quicken the historically charged meaningfulness of the present. (White, 234)

Naipaul-as-son then writes his novel with this meaningfulness pointing the finger at his father's complicity in the imperialistic confines. "[Skepticism] frees us to listen to what literature has to tell us about the past," Susan Mizruchi writes, "and about ways of recovering it" (Mizruchi 10.) In one of the novel's more touching moments, though not any less emotionally embattled, are the episodes between Anand and Biswas at the Green Vale. It is exceptionally fierce, psychologically raw. As a heartbreaking gesture, Biswas offers his colored pencils to Anand as a gift. "Take them. They are yours. You can do what you like with them." (266). But Anand refuses the gift. He stays not for the gift but, "'Because -' The word came out thin, explosive, charged with anger, at himself and his father. 'Because they was going to leave you alone.'" (266). The gesture is not simply a saccharine melody of a father-giving-a-toy and the-son-wanting-fatherly-love. No, no: The colored pencil become symbolic of the world of knowledge, the world of signs and symbols, words, the tools for knowledge production; the son's refusal is essentially a waiting period. Anand holds off with the tools until he can see how his father will put use them to use; or, how his father will instruct his world.

Tellingly, the following sections in the novel are detailed with that very instruction: Biswas waxes metaphysical God and humanity, "Coppernickus" and "Galilyo:"

"Who is your father?"

"You."

"Wrong. I am not your father. God is your father."

"Oh. And what about you?"

"I am just somebody. Nobody at all. I am just a man you know." (267)

Yet, in the time of antagonism between the two he not only orders Anand to give him back the colored pencils, but, in a natural and hallucinatory disaster, also instructs Anand to recite the Hindi "Rama Rama Sita Rama" again and again, as a method of channeling safety through Hindu ideal man and ideal woman.

Throughout the novel, Biswas, without any mode of agency, except that of perhaps the agency of constant burden, seeks only to impress in order to survive, eventually seeking to impress England, though indirectly. This influence is a direct finger at son, then to the core: At Naipaul himself.

Writers who use forms of "appropriation" recognize the colonial discourse itself is a complex, contradictory mode of representation which implicates both the colonizer and the colonized. Nowhere is this more evident than in V.S. Naipaul who is so very conscious of writing from within the shadow of an English master like Conrad.

(Mishra and Hodge, 281)

Several weeks ago, when giving a discussion (a discussion that was in all events more trite than right) on Stuart Hall's "When Was the Post-Colonial?" I realized Hall's glibness in the title: In essence, when wasn't the post-colonial? Yet, the fiction is relatively young. Who then are Colonial Writers? (If Post-Modernism needs Modernism for its prefix, so does Post-Colonial.) What color, what stripe of fiction is it that they write? In my estimation, I disqualify European writers such as Conrad, Kipling, and Forster, by the virtue of their indsiderness, their European-ness, their placement in the center, writing away from the center (India, the Congo, etc.), yet unwittingly informed and responsive back to that center which they seek to write against. No, no: Only a colonized subject can write Colonial Literature: Out of the center, below the center, under the unsympathetic surveillance of imperialism's stranglehold, yet seeking to impress, always seeking to satisfy the master. Perhaps this fiction is represented in the journalism of Mr. Biswas: A colonized subject, an Other, writing by and for the imperialistic center, with the language and training and prosody of the colonizer. Allessendro Manzoni's On the Historical Novel lays bare the forces upon Naipaul's writing the father as a colonized writer, writing for historical fact and literary immortality.

But suppose this writer were not to deal with his readers just as he deals with himself, were not simply to convey to them the pure unadorned knowledge that his painstaking research has earned him. Suppose instead he were to set it aside…. Suppose to make it more vital, he were to make it two different lives and take as a means what before was strictly an end? (Manzoli, 77)

The novels that inform Mr. Biswas's voice are mixture of second-raters and philosophic fat-chewers - none of whom embodying Indian or West Indies voices: Samuel Smiles, Epictetus, Hall Caine, Mark Twain, and Marcus Aurelius. When writing for the Sentinel, his editor asks him to train his writing voice.

He gave Mr. Biswas copies of London papers, and Mr. Biswas studied their style until he could turn out presentable imitations. It was not long before he developed a feeling for the shape and scandalizing qualities of every story. To his he added something of his own. (310)

The language and structure he uses are completely fantastic, sensationalistic, perversely tantalizing, written towards the center, written unwittingly disenfranchised; a sell out compliant to the attitudes of ridicule seen from above, seen from the center. Again, I must turn to a familiar Fanon standby, yet time and time again, the standby proves its poignancy in driving the fist into the core of the post-colonial subject:

To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization...Mastery of language affords remarkable power. 917-8)

He writes, as I would imagine Colonial Fiction would be written, unknowingly insulting and disempowering to himself and his own audience; a peddler for insults and the continual removal of national pride, or even national identity; an ironically bitter portrayal of language taking language away from itself. Kenneth Ramchand writes in his brief "Decolonisation in West Indian Literature:"

The West Indian writer in English is aware of the original culture which his language implies, and he has to avoid the temptation to over-localize as a reaction. Over-localization takes the forms of an insistence on West Indian geographical detail, a stress on blackness, pudding and souse, an exaggerated reproduction of dialect and a generally painful barrack-room vulgarity. (Ramchand, 48)

He writes to remind Trinidad that it is an embarrassment, that it is a country deservedly colonized and ruled from without, that its local news is an animalistic circus comprising of beggars, thieves, scoundrels, and dead babies losing beauty pageants. In other words, propaganda, flatly non-ambivalent propaganda. He writes for the metropolis, and Anand is often victim of his father's selling out, his advertising of Eurocentric consumerism:

"They have a new sweet drink in Port of Spain. Something called Coca Cola. The best thing in the world. Come with me to Port of Spain, and I will get your father to buy you a Coca Cola and some real icecream. In cardboard cups. Real icecream. Not homemade." (321)

The emphasis that the icecream (why the Joycean compounding - here and throughout?) is not homemade furthers Anand's mental make-up that home is no good, that home is to be devalued and distrusted, that home is flavorless. Biswas becomes for his son the premiere, uncostly billboard for the metropolitan center.

It is then telling that Anand's first sample of narrative should so starkly contrast his father's. When recapturing the near-fatal drowning for a composition class, he refuses to use the wildly exaggerated expressions suggested by his teacher. Instead, he writes lucidly, vividly: "I raised my hand but I did not know if it got to the top. I opened my mouth to cry for help. Water filled it. I thought I was going to die and I closed my eyes because I did not want to look at the water" (342). Anand writes straight into the line of truth. In an interview with Adrian Rowe-Evans, Naipaul discusses the voice of responsibility (a voice diametrically opposite to that of Mr. Biswas's):

One of the terrible things about being a Colonial… is that you must accept so many things as coming from a great wonderful source outside yourself and outside the people you know, outside the society you've grown up in. That can only be repaired by the sense of responsibility, which is what the colonial doesn't have. Responsibility for the other man. As a colonial, you must first seek to remove yourself from what you know, and become blest personally, before you can become responsible for others. (Rowe-Evan, 58-9)

This responsible voice, the voice outside of himself markedly contrasts his father's voice - a ruptured, counterproductive gimmick. Perhaps he senses the slight. As Mr. Biswas reads the composition, "anxious to share the pain of the previous day" (542), pride and joy is elicited from him: "Mr. Biswas wished to be close to [Anand]. He would have done anything to make up for the solitude of the previous day. He said, 'Come and sit down here and go through the composition with me'" (342). This need for closeness is not merely the act of familial intimacy reacquainting itself, but also the need for Mr. Biswas to feel the warmth of something so directly caustic towards both towards truth and hypocrisy. It is a hug for the language of identity, for the form of nationality, for the voice of a not-quite Othered man-child. And it is only appropriate that Anand's response to his father's request is denied with a loud "No!" (343).

Anand yearns not for intellectual gravity, but magical brilliance. Any voice but his father's. His influences in school are fraught with bribery, Hinduism, and the colonizer's extended monopolization of mental placement: During his English composition: "Shama gave him two shillings. She didn't say what this was a precaution against, and he didn't ask" (452). Once the test is over, once again a disgusted Anand rejects Biswas's tools of mimicry: "'Here. Take back your pen.' Mr. Biswas took back his pen. It dripped with ink" (456). The symbolic nature of the dripping implies the blood of the Trinidadian native, sopped up, not with the national bandaging, but with the sandpaper grain of British rule. However, identity preserves itself:

"In the spelling paper. The synonyms and homonyms. They were so easy I thought I'd leave them for last. Then I just didn't do them" (457). Unconsciously, Anand rejects the simplest mode of imperialistic influence.

Perhaps these rejections and examples of rebellion are only indications of the grandiose metaphor implied in the novel's title: Naipaul seeks to give his father a house. Remember: The title is not a Home, but a House. Not a site to build a family, to flower a community of Biswases, to provide care or the bosom of safety and warmth. But only a site. A final destination. A place to finally die. Yet, it is his own, only his own, regardless of the excrement and corrosion. "The septic tank became choked. The lavatory bowl filled and bubbled; the yard bubbled; the street smelled" (551). And perhaps it is Anand's final plea that proves to enact the move. If the house, is the area that protect the intellect, the cranium protecting the brain, then the influence from outside is the damaging agent, and Anand is in trouble. Like his father, Anand is easily impressed with what he believes to be otherworldliness; yet unlike his father, he is a stubborn critic to this same otherworldliness: Declarations and pronouncements pulled and plopped from the ether, braggadocio, arrogance. The greatest example of this is game cards for matches with the blowhard Owad. Anand's attitude is shown in a trajectory of sycophancy ("his pleas for sophistication;" "he had adopted all of Owad's political and artistic views"), sarcasm ("Anand scattered his heap, and said, 'Portrait by Picasso.' Everyone laughed, except Owad"), humiliation and rejection ("Owad said, 'Why don't you look in the mirror if you want to see a portrait by Picasso?'"), and nervousness ("Anand bid stupidly") (525-6). And then the final rejection:

[Owad] said, "That's what we get from your genius."

The tears rushed to Anand's eyes. He jumped up, throwing his chair backwards, and shouted, "I didn't tell you I was any blasted genius."

Slap! His right cheek burned then trembled." (526)

At this moment, Anand finally pleads to Mr. Biswas to leave the house, to find their own: "We must move. I can't bear to live here another day." (527).

In the final stages of Mr. Biswas's life, Anand leaves home on a scholarship and studies in England. In an interview with Adrian Rowe-Evans, Naipaul unveils the divisiveness of self on this departure.

I come from a small society; I was aware that I had no influence in the world; I was apart from it. And then I belonged to a minority group, I moved away, became a foreigner, became a writer; you see the degrees of removal from direct involvement, from the direct fear. (Rowe-Evans, 59)

These degrees of removal, of inner and outer, from within and without, can be seen in the stunted, infrequent correspondences between father and son, a thematic motif in the novel's Epilogue. Letter writing acts as another kind of resistance to the essentialist disenfranchisement of colonialism. "The idea of a society as an integrated culture," writes J. Michael Dash in his essay "Psychology, Creolizatoin, and Hybridization, "organically whole, insulated by language and tradition from relentless advance of modernity and its supposedly alienating values, has now become unpersuasive" (Dash, 45). Letter writing, then, is the preservation of language and personal history, an act of unadorned privacy, a flowering of the unconscious.

He missed Anand and worried about him. Anand's letters, at first rare, became more and more frequent. They were gloomy, self-pitying; then they were tinged with a hysteria which Mr. Biswas immediately understood. He wrote Anand long humorous letters; he wrote about the garden; he gave religious advice; at great expense he sent by air mail a book called Outwitting Our Nerves by two American women psychologists. Anand's letters grew rare again. There was nothing Mr. Biswas could do but wait. Wait for Anand. (562)

It is interesting to note the positionality of these letters: Finally, Biswas is writing to England, and finally England is writing back to him - the postage excites Biswas. Anand then becomes the center for which the mimetic Biswas strives. He represents location and attitude of the metropolitan center, and his responses are just as impersonal: He is distant, as personally thin as the paper he writes on. This is distant period is perhaps the period of denial of existence as the Other, as a subject. Kenneth Ramchand writes: "If West Indian writers write more intimately about the social/racial group with which they are most familiar, they are less spokesmen for the group than recorders of different forms or aspects of what constitutes the West Indian experience (Ramchand, 96)." As Mr. Biswas mentally and physically deteriorates, Anand becomes more distant: "Writing to Anand was like taking a blind man to see a view" (562). Naipaul posits himself throughout the Epilogue as heartless, hollow. "[Mr. Biswas] continued to write cheerful letters to Anand. At long intervals the replies came, impersonal, brief, empty, constrained" (562). Once in the hospital, where his state grows less hopeful, Shama writes to the son to relate this condition. "Anand wrote a strange maudlin letter" (563). Even so, Biswas continues writing.

When, after three weeks, he had received no reply from Anand, he wrote to the Colonial Office. This elicited a brief letter from Anand. Anand said he wanted to come home… [Mr. Biswas] was prepared to take on a further debt to get Anand home. But the plan fell through; Anand changed his mind. And Mr. Biswas never complained again. (563)

Martin Amis talks about this time period for Naipaul. "In 1972 V.S. Naipual asked his mother what form her husband's madness had taken. 'He looked into the mirror one day,' she replied, 'and he couldn't see himself. And he began to scream.'" (Amis, 417)

Thus, in the last letter to Anand, the tone of meditative calm, psychologically atypical of Biswas, is a display of this screaming through silence - perhaps Naipaul screaming at his own neglect: "'How can you not believe in God after this?' It was a letter full of delight" (564). The reader never sees Anand again. There is no mention of him attending his father's funeral. It is assumed that he remains in England furthering his studies, furthering himself from the decentered home life. In the interview mentioned earlier, Naipaul, in more lucid and vulnerable voice, states:

In many practical ways, things are harder for the writer who comes from an undeveloped country. Apart from the sheer difficulty of getting away, in order to get started at all. I can't help thinking that I might have had greater success, been much better understood as a writer, if I had been born in England. As it is, one has no cultural attaches in a hundred countries pushing one's work. (Rowe-Evans, 61)

Anand's life begins. Another history takes shape: Naipaul, the son, the writer. It is telling that the son, fraught with so many anxieties, so many models of corruption and traditionalism, should begin anew in the very center which rejects him, in the very center that de-homes his father.

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