Derek Wright, Northern Territory University, Darwin, Australia
The title of Naipaul’s In A Free State (1971)[1] is a fertile and suggestive one that has set many critical puzzles. Immediately, it seems to refer to a state which is politically free, such as the independent, postcolonial nation-states from which the characters in the stories come and in which the title novella is set: respectively, India and Trinidad, and a conglomerate of African nations. This freedom, however, turns out to be largely theoretical and ironic since most of the countries featured in the book are perceived, one or even two decades on from independence, as still being the playthings of colonial powers. More commonly, the title has been taken to refer to freedom as a psychological state, a state of mind and being which causes anguish, abandonment, and the loss of personal attachments.[2] Alternatively, it has been suggested that in his choice of title Naipaul is drawing upon a scientific metaphor—namely, the idea of the free-floating movement of subatomic particles around a nucleus[3]—and there is ground for this view in the book’s structure. In a Free State is an assemblage of unblended, discrete elements—two stories and a novella loosely joined by a prologue and an epilogue—which seem not to be formed around any nucleus and therefore fail to cohere as a single work. In the following pages I attempt a brief survey of these different dimensions of freedom—political, psychological, scientific—but my main concern is to investigate another aspect of freedom, one which has received surprisingly little direct or detailed comment. This has to do with Naipaul’s fictional ontology, that is, the degree of autonomy of his characters and the extent to which they create the illusion of a separate, independent reality. In my examination of the book’s range of ontological modes and their positive and negative ramifications, I shall endeavor to show that In a Free State is a contradictory work in which the relationship of the two stories (“One Out of Many,” “Tell Me Who to Kill”) to the title novella (In a Free State) is perhaps less one of either orbiting satellites or careering particles but more a relationship that closely resembles the situation of polar magnets: contrary gravitational pulls, like the opposing pressures that hold the keystone in position in an arch, preserve the book’s precarious equilibrium.
Naipaul said in an interview during the year of the book’s publication that with each novel he was finding it “harder and harder to do the artificial side of making up big narratives” and simply decided “to let the book fall into its component parts.”[4] Though the individual sections of the book are each set in a 1960s postcolonial world and feature common themes of displacement and transplantation to alien cultures, they also—in their diverse speaking voices, geographical settings, and narrative techniques—have the randomness of “component parts” left to lie where they fall. The first story, “One Out of Many,” explores the traumatic cultural adjustments forced upon a humble Indian servant, Santosh, when he is uprooted from the pavements of Bombay by his diplomatic employer and taken off to a new life in Washington, D.C. The second, “Tell Me Who to Kill,” charts an unnamed West Indian’s pursuit of his scapegrace brother Dayo to London, where he becomes a victim of racial violence, lapses into a world of Hollywood cinematic fantasy, and appears to suffer a mental breakdown. The novella, In a Free State, describes the 400-mile road journey of two British expatriates, Linda and Bobby, across a newly independent African country in the throes of a tribal civil war, their growing alienation from both Africa and each other, and their powerlessness to withstand the senseless violence and brutality raging around them. These three pieces are flanked by a Prologue and an Epilogue in which an almost identical motif unfolds: a traveler (a narrator, then Naipaul himself) looks on in painful detachment while scapegoat figures (an old English tramp, a group of Egyptian boys) are cruelly tormented by groups of tourists in neutral territory (a Greek passenger steamer, a hotel resort).
In each of these compositions, questions of freedom and determinism, both political and psychological, are well to the fore. To be a colonial, said Naipaul in an early interview, is to have every move monitored from the imperial metropolis: it is “to know a total kind of security. It is to have all decisions about major issues taken out of your hands, to feel that one’s political status has been settled so finally that there is very little one can do in the world.”[5] To escape this facile determinism, the colonial—or, in this book, the newly ex-colonial—pursues freedom through travel. In In a Free State, however, this pursuit of elsewhere, a quest for a greater individuation and independence, leads only to alienation and dislocation, and the expatriate, in his reverse-crossing, meets much the same fate in his attempt to satisfy the mysterious yearnings and cravings he brings with him to the ex-colony. The result is that the plight of the uprooted former colonial becomes a metaphor for modern restlessness, and homelessness and exile are perceived as a contemporary state of mind, afflicting all. To be “in a free state” is thus to be abroad and adrift in the modern world. In Naipaul’s early writings, his characters are victimized by a succession of narrow environmental and historical determinants which to withstand they need all of their immense vitality and resourcefulness: poverty and unemployment (Miguel Street, 1959); cramped domesticity and debt (A House for Mr Biswas, 1961); borrowed political machinery and ideologies (The Mimic Men, 1967); and, overshadowing all of these in each book, the oppressive Caribbean heritage of slavery and indentured labor. In In a Free State, Naipaul frees his protagonists from these constraints and transplants them into a larger, more spacious world: a repeated pattern in the book is the emergence from small, self-enclosed places—cupboards, cabins, basements, cars, compounds—into a larger space. But this expansive movement is largely illusory, since the larger world in which the characters are cast adrift is one that they are not equipped to understand. The subsequently empty freedom which moving in this world brings them is therefore a condemned space, consigning people to loneliness, to confused identities, and to incomprehension of the surroundings from which they are cut off. Because the protagonists—Santosh in the United States, Dayo’s brother in Britain, Bobby in the unnamed African country—have no idea of the state as a polity or organized society in their troubled sojourns, they exist in a social vacuum, unmoored and anchorless. Freedom here is punitive, destructive, and nihilistic, and its casualties retreat from it into the safety of their cabins, cupboards, and expatriate compounds.
Next, there is the notion of freedom as a scientific metaphor. The reference here is apparently to the random motion around the atomic nucleus of electrons whose speed and position can be measured, but never at the same time, and which are said to be “in a free state” since their movement is impossible to plot exactly. The accidental, unpredictable travel of particles is comparable to that of the book’s characters. Santosh, Dayo’s brother, and the tramp in the Prologue seem to move without any clear direction in a space without any gravitational pull or magnetism which would hold them together around a common center. During the long car journey across Central Africa in the title novella, the ill-matched travelers Bobby and Linda—he a liberal and homosexual, she a racist and nymphomaniac—do not relate to or attract each other in any way and seem to have the unconnectedness of free-floating particles, as indeed do the tribes flung randomly together, without any basis for unity, in the recently formed postcolonial “free state” through which they drive. And what is true of these relationships is, arguably, true of the book’s individual sections. These are superficially linked by an abundance of arbitrary plot connections, parallel incidents, and echoing motifs: the characters’ American involvements; the motif of the journey which removes people from their normal surroundings; shifting alliances of the strong against the weak; the scapegoat-victim seeking refuge from freedom in a locked space; personality breakdowns and outbursts of groundless anarchic violence. But none of these amounts to a single unifying framework or principle of organization, and it is finally difficult to say exactly what kind of structure or unity, if any, they constitute, or what kind of logic it is that carries the narrative from the hounding of the old tramp in the Prologue to the beating of the Egyptian boys in the Epilogue. The narrative’s movement has a roaming, associative kind of logic that invites any number of possibly spurious correspondences between its episodes and, like the erratic progress of the subatomic particles, is finally unplottable.
Perhaps the most positive and least-discussed kind of freedom experienced by the book’s characters exists not in their relation to other characters, to the world they find themselves in, or to the text’s structural elements, but in their relation to the author; that is, in Naipaul’s fictional ontology, to which I shall devote the remainder of this article. In a Free State is unique among Naipaul’s fiction for the number of virtuoso performances which the author turns in. The principal characters, Santosh the Indian, Dayo the West Indian, and Bobby the Englishman, are all completely different from each other and, of course, from the author who created them. Each one of them speaks, thinks, and tells his story in his own peculiar style; they might be called inspired feats of literary ventriloquism through which Naipaul turns himself each time into a different fictional character, to be at once all and none of them.[6] These characters can be seen to be in a free fictional state to the extent that their differences in temperament, education, and experience distance them from their author and his own distinctive speaking voice, quirks of personality, and worldview. The autocratic third person authorial voice, deadpan aloof or bleakly dismissive—which is a privileged narrative presence in Naipaul’s early novels and stories and which resurfaces again in Guerillas (1975)—is less conspicuous in this work.
The characters of In a Free State—all autonomous, free-standing presences who create the illusion of having seized control of the narratives of their own lives—are not identifiable in any way with Naipaul himself, who, in fact, does not appear in his own person until the Epilogue. However, the author, inevitably perhaps, projects onto them his own restlessness and sense of placelessness. Dayo’s story can be seen as a debased version of his own life: the studies in England to escape the cultural deprivations of Caribbean life, the cinematic fantasies which are drawn from the author’s own Trinidadian childhood. But there is no transparent authorial explanation of the characters or direction of the narratives, both of which develop with minimal authorial interference. What adds to the impression of authentic lifelikeness created by the narrators, in fact, is that all their opacities, obscurities, and myopias are left in; although they express themselves, they refuse to tell us everything about themselves and seem to lie beyond the reach of the author’s omniscience. Thus, there remain opaque areas, aporias, unexplained mysteries, notably in the story “Tell Me Who to Kill.” At the climax of this story, the narrative veers off into one of the narrator’s preoccupying Hollywood fantasies, leaving a number of things unclear: whether he has committed murder or had a mental breakdown; whether his attendant Frank is his jailer, psychiatric nurse, social worker, or friend; and whether the enemy to be “killed” is his Caribbean family, the group of vandals who destroyed his London restaurant, his wastrel brother, or the whole white society into which Dayo has married. The narrator is unable to explain any of these events, either to the reader or to himself, and Naipaul, in his obscurantist respect for his character’s freedom, has abrogated the right to speak for him.
Naipaul’s style is crucial in this autonomizing exercise. Peter Hughes has suggested that Santosh in “One Out of Many” is a not wholly believable or, at best, a disingenuous character who is less simple than he makes himself out to be, since the elegance and sophistication of his English are far beyond the capabilities of the narrative self—the uneducated peasant—whom he supposedly represents.[7] There are a number of possible inferences from this observation. One suggests that the author intends Santosh to be seen as a duplicitous character; a second sees the portrait as artistically flawed because Naipaul takes insufficient trouble to suppress or disguise his own speaking voice, carelessly intruding his own more rarefied perceptions about freedom and identity into his uneducated domestic’s closing peroration; a third is that attention is being drawn, quite deliberately, to the authorial presence, thus eroding the boundaries between fiction and journal, between narrative and personal history. None of these, however, has much validity because the original observation on which they are premised partly misses the point. Santosh’s “English,” as in much postcolonial writing from superficially anglophone parts of the Commonwealth, functions merely as a standard, conventional rhetorical device for presenting another language. We are to assume that Santosh is thinking and narrating in Hindi, his native language, and to realize that, as Peggy Nightingale correctly observes,[8] the story mainly narrates his thoughts. Here, as in early novels like A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul is adopting the familiar convention of using formal, correct English to represent Hindi, in the same way as the Nigerian Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart (1958) uses English to represent Igbo, namely, to imply that the characters are speaking a form of English deemed “subcultural,” such as patois, argot, pidgin, or another creolized linguistic register, whenever they lapse into incorrect, ungrammatical English. Santosh, quite credibly, is being simple and sophisticated in his own language. Naipaul is neither open to the charge of artistic failure in the stories of In a Free State nor prone to postmodern self-reference and reflexivity.
What is a strength and a virtue at the level of characterization, however, proves to be of much more dubious value in the matter of Naipaul’s use of history. What works well for people is less suited to countries and cataclysmic political events. While the book’s characters cut themselves free from the author’s personal history, its narratives similarly untether themselves from public history, with the result that the narratives’ background incidents cannot be tied to any single historical point of reference or located in any specific event. It has been noticed, for example, that the impossible southward journey traveled in the title novella, In a Free State, takes the two British expatriates through at least four countries, from which are drawn the abundance of African surnames and place names that fill the narrative.[9] Naipaul’s central African state is really an amalgam of Uganda, Zaire, Rwanda, and Kenya, and actually exists nowhere except in his private fictional world as what could be called a conglomerate patchwork Africa of the literary imagination. The novelist’s conflations issue in what Landeg White has called “a ‘free state’ sufficiently located in recent history to seem real, and sufficiently generalised to seem representative.”[10] The double “seem” here is a crucial qualifier. In practice, Naipaul’s appropriation of recent African political history into an autonomous fictional realm sacrifices the “real” to the “representative” (to use White’s terms), or, expressed in another way, it privileges figurative over literal representation. His projection of his African state into a “free state,” in fact, liberates him from any obligation to observe historical fidelity, or even to maintain plausibility, and the outcome is somewhat tendentious and misleading.
In his early career, Naipaul acquired—and seems to have cultivated—a reputation for some rather sour, disdainful opinions of Africa and Africans,[11] and they are present in abundance in the title novella of In a Free State. The only part of Africa depicted here is a decayed, dilapidated settler colony in the eastern part of the continent in which the indigenous people inherit nothing on the day of independence. The African, identified mainly by his smell in the narrative, is simply “the man flushed out from the bush, to whom, in the city, with independence, civilization appeared to have been granted complete” (104). Naipaul’s abrupt conferral of “civilization” takes no account of the fact that this unidentified African too, like the expatriates, is a displaced person, uprooted from societies with their own intricate customs, beliefs, ancestral traditions, and language; and, unlike the other stories in the book, there is no indigenous perspective to press the point.
All of this has received copious critical comment and need not detain us here.[12] What, disconcertingly, seems to have escaped notice and is more germane to our discussion of Naipaul’s fictional ontology is the way in which this basically primitivist colonial concept of the African continent is licensed and reinforced by Naipaul’s treatment of Africa’s recent political history. In this light, the fictional manipulation of known facts seems to be deliberately obfuscatory and confusing. Basically, the title novella willfully conflates two quite separate historical episodes: the tribal war in 1965 in postindependence Uganda, between the forces of President Obote and King Freddie, and the Mau Mau insurrection with its oath-taking and blood-rituals in colonial Kenya during the War of Independence against the British, which ended with national independence in 1963.[13] In Naipaul’s fictitious African state, the Ugandan and Kenyan episodes are pressed into one and made to happen at the same time and in the same place. The resulting impressions, presumably intended, are that Africans, immediately upon gaining self-government, naturally revert to primitive tribalism, oath-taking, and blood-letting, and that they waste their independence, throw away opportunities for national unity in the postcolonial phase, and go back to the bush. This implied argument, to which past events may have lent plausibility in some African contexts, is disingenuous in the one at hand because it casually ignores the facts that in 1963 Kenya was not yet in a postcolonial situation but was still a colony, engaged in a militant struggle for its independence, and that its own postindependence future, partly as a result of this very struggle, was to take a completely different course from Uganda’s. With a cavalier disregard of historical process, the novelist unfairly extrapolates what might, conceivably, happen after independence in one country from what went on during the independence struggle, under the extraordinary pressures of that conflict and in wholly different circumstances, in another country. In the absence of any detailed investigation of local particulars, phenomena as geographically distinct and dissimilar as internecine ethnic pogroms (Zanzibar in 1964), private political vendettas (Uganda in 1965), and morale-boosting, structured rituals serving nationalist military strategies (Kenya in 1963) are all carelessly jumbled together under the vague rubric of “tribal behavior” without any qualifying differentiation.
As Robert Boyers has observed,[14] the presentation of political reality in Naipaul’s fiction is generally not very complex, but tends to be sketchy and atmospheric, consisting of a few striking, powerful symbolic gestures and tableaux: for example, the mysterious naked men running by the roadside, or the prisoners in the civil war, roped neck-to-neck and reduced to their ancestral status as slaves, invite the facile inference that, in Africa, history repeats itself and nothing changes. The title novella of In A Free State is essentially the work of an expatriate sensibility which, in spite of its profusion of political sound effects and atmospheric effusions, contains no political analysis; such would entail details of the ideologies and strategies of the rival forces and the relative merits of their policies. In this work, however, the habitual blurring of particulars combines with certain historical sleights-of-hand and disingenuous shifts of locale to rig the case against postcolonial Africa, apparently to present it in the worst possible light.
In a Free State is a work of unresolved tensions in which the two stories neither rotate around the nucleus of the title novella nor career randomly in its vicinity; rather, they act like the opposite poles of a magnet. In both the stories and the novella, fictional ontology expresses the state of the nation, and there is an implied matching of individuals and countries, but in ways that stress differences more than the similarities. In both stories, the characters are set anarchically adrift from their author, discharged into an unprotected independence that is largely unwanted and unwelcome and to which their countries of origin, by implication, aspire with a corresponding lack of conviction or success. In the title narrative, on the other hand, the characters’ autonomy appears to be compromised and curtailed by authorial predispositions, to the extent that the imperial sentiments and prejudices expressed at different times by the expatriate characters—Bobby, Linda, the Colonel—reflect almost identical views stated baldly by the autocratic third-person narrator in the opening paragraphs. While in the stories the viewpoints and psychologies of character, indeterminate narrator, and implied author are often undefined and at odds, they are, pervasively, one and the same in the novella’s oppressively monolithic narrative vision; the characters merely turn up evidence to support the narrator’s generalizations and to rig the “facts” in advance for the encroaching author to discover exactly what he set out to find. This peremptory eclipsing of the characters’ freedom is then matched, at the national level, by a similarly preemptive treatment of their postcolonial country of residence and its history. Wisdoms drawn from postindependence Africa are mischievously retroacted into pre-independence situations, thereby confusing tribal civil wars with nationalist independence struggles, neocolonial dependency with colonial subordination. The starting assumptions in this endeavor are at times perilously and transparently close to those of the veteran expatriates and old colonials featured in the narrative. Indeed, the author’s personal colonization in the novella of characters who are given their manumission in the stories can be seen as the narratological equivalent of the excolonial powers’ continuing neocolonial interference in the affairs of their former territories.
Thus, in the fragments that constitute In a Free State, Naipaul plays the roles of both the imperialized and the imperialist. In the stories and the novella, freedom is the characters’ and the author’s, respectively—by turns a burdensome affliction and an authorial privilege—and confusion is both an involuntary psychological state endured by the characters and a deliberate narrative ploy practiced upon the reader. In this book Naipaul grants autonomy with one hand and snatches it autocratically away with the other.
NOTES
[1]
V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State, 1971
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Page references are given in parentheses in the
text.
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[2]
John Thieme, The Web of Tradition: Use of
Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction (Hertford: Hansib, 1987) 151; and
Anthony Boxhill, V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction:
In Quest of the Enemy (Fredericton: York Press, 1983) 58-59.
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[3]
William Walsh, V. S. Naipaul
(Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1973) 69.
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[4]
“Life on Approval,” Interview with Alex Hamilton, The Guardian, 4 October 1971: 8.
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[5]
“Without a Place,” Interview with Ian Hamilton, The Times Literary Supplement, 30 July 1971: 897.
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[6]
Naipaul has admitted to being “totally involved” in the book’s entire
personnel, affecting a kind of “negative capability” by which he is equally
engaged or disengaged with each of his characters, whether the narrative tone
is fastidiously impersonal, as in the title novella, or intimately
compassionate, as in One Out of Many.
“Life on Approval” 8.
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[7]
Peter Hughes, V. S. Naipaul (London:
Routledge, 1988) 33.
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[8]
Peggy Nightingale, Journey Through
Darkness: The Writings of V. S. Naipaul (Brisbane: University of Queensland
Press, 1987) 156.
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[9]
Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul: A Critical
Introduction (London: Macmillan, 1975) 195-96.
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[10]
White 196.
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[11]
See “V. S. Naipaul,” in Paul Theroux, Sunrise
with Seamonsters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) 91-100.
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[12]
See White 201; Walsh 70-71; and Adewale Maja-Pearce, “The Naipauls on Africa:
An African View,” Journal of Commonwealth
Literature 20.1 (1985): 111-17.
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[13]
Less importantly, there is a suggestion of the Tanzanian army mutiny and
President Nyerere’s going into hiding in 1964 and, in the same year, the
massacre of Arabs in Zanzibar.
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[14]
Robert Boyers, Atrocity and Amnesia: The
Political Novel Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) 39-41.
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