A Nod to Values We Embrace

Every truly modern writer is a nation without a flag--a sovereign consciousness, a government of the imagination.

When it awarded V.S. Naipaul the Nobel Prize for Literature lastweek, the Swedish Academy resoundingly affirmed the importance of those facts and of the values--pluralism, tolerance and democracy--that are literary modernism’s moral companions.

Those who care about the modern culture that is the West’s great contribution to the world stand badly in need of such an affirmation. Locked in physical and intellectual combat with the obscurantism of Islamic fundamentalism, people everywhere can take heart from this prize and its implications.

Born to East Indian parents on the West Indian island of Trinidad, Naipaul, now 69, was educated at Oxford on a scholarship. Since then, he has made England his home and displacement, alienation and history his subject. His adopted country has honored him with its own greatest literary prize, the Booker, and a knighthood.

Those who doubt the aesthetic and, indeed, moral inclusiveness of Western literature might consider this: Of the eight English-speaking writers and poets to win the literature prize over the last 20 years, only one--William Golding--was born in England. The others have enriched the English-language canon with sensibilities formed in the Caribbean, Nigeria, South Africa, Ireland, the United States and Bulgaria. There is strength, as well as richness, in pluralist variety.

“I don’t stand for any county,” says Naipaul, who describes himself as “the world’s writer.” The Swedish Academy called him “a literary navigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice.” The academy praised his 26 novels and nonfiction books as “having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.”

Whatever its quarrels with tradition, modernism has not overthrown history but, rather, deeply imbibed the consciousness of history as a process, an ongoing experience through which truth is freshly and continuously apprehended.

This historical consciousness is the enemy of every inflexible political or religious orthodoxy, which inevitably sees itself as the possessor of a final revelation at history’s inevitable endpoint.

Naipaul’s singular contribution to modern literature has been to place individual experience artfully--but firmly--at the center of this historical unfolding.

In what remains perhaps the most elegant critical appraisal of his work, Alfred Kazin wrote in 1971: “Though he is a marvelous technician, there is something finally modest, personal, openly committed about his fiction, a frankness of personal reference that removes him from the godlike impersonality of the novelist.”

But, when it comes to quarrels, Naipaul has had the courage not only of his convictions, but also of his animosities. His acute but gloomy portrayals of post-colonial Afro-Caribbean and African societies are acutely observed, but so unrelieved by mitigating reflection that his fellow West Indian Nobel laureate, poet Derek Walcott, has dubbed him “V.S. Nightfall.”

Walcott also has accused Naipaul of an “abhorrence of Negroes,” though other critics disagree. Similarly, Naipaul’s preoccupation with what he deems the malevolent effects of John Maynard Keynes’ and E.M. Forster’s homosexuality is shabbily homophobic. Shabby, too, are his bitter quarrels with other contemporary writers.

Often he has been more prescient. Twenty-two years ago, in “Among the Believers,” Naipaul cast a cold eye on the spread of fundamentalist Islam in the wake of Iran’s theocratic revolution. He described the fundamentalist creed as a political wasteland with nothing to offer its inhabitants but delusions. “It is like a wish--with intellect suppressed or limited, the historical sense falsified.” The result, he wrote, was the re-creation of “a tribal or city-state that--except in the theological fantasy--never was.”

Following a recent reading in London, he assailed the “calamitous effect” of political Islam’s fundamentalist Wahabi sect, whose adherents include Osama bin Laden and the Taliban and which is subsidized by the Saudi Arabian government. Naipaul, in fact, compared the impact of this trend to Western colonialism.

One of Naipaul’s most eminent contemporaries was another immigrant, a Latvian-born Jew, who made his career at the very heart of the British establishment as Sir Isaiah Berlin, one of the 20th century’s greatest political philosophers. The shadow he cast as Britain’s foremost public intellectual was so encompassing that not long before his death in 1998, the Sunday Times of London published a conversation with Berlin under the headline: “Is This the Wisest Man Alive?”

Like Naipaul, Berlin was a child of the periphery, who was drawn to the modern cause of democratic pluralism and put his gifts powerfully and indefatigably at its service. In his 87th year, Berlin was asked by the faculty and students of China’s Wuhan University to provide them with an introduction to his work that could be translated into Chinese. It became the last thing he wrote and contained a paragraph that eloquently summarizes the values--democratic, pluralist, universalist--he and Naipaul shared and which the Nobel committee implicitly honored with last week’s prize:

“I came to the conclusion that there is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and temperaments. I am not a relativist; I do not say, ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps’--each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false. But I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ. There is not an infinity of them: the number of human values, of values which I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character is finite--let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite, whatever it may be. And the difference this makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding.”

Willful flight from the responsibility of understanding--which is to say, from freedom itself--is the essence of the fascist fundamentalism with which the world’s free people now are at war. Those who flee in this fashion are, in another of Berlin’s phrases, “wickedly mistaken.” The embrace of this fundamentalism is not an act of affirmation through faith; it is an act of self-annihilation and, as such, a descent into moral nothingness.

And, as Naipaul wrote in the unforgettable first lines of his African novel, “Bend In the River”:

“The world is what it is. Those who are nothing, those who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”