The Riddle of Identity

V.S. Naipaul hates poverty. He hates the miserable material and intellectual conditions he encountered in his travels to Islamic countries; he hates the sordidness of Third World regimes. He is less interested in the suffering imposed by colonialism, which he knows and acknowledges, than he is in the suffering that he observes in the urgent present.

For Naipaul’s critics, however, it is rank snobbery merely to record the degradations of poverty or to register one’s disgust at poverty. Rather, one must uncover the long history, often the long colonial history, that produced such conditions. Rewriting the standard, deceitful version of this history will set the record straight. Dwelling on the repellent condition of the poor alone perpetuates the great historical lie of the lower classes predestined to their doom. Better to tell a littler lie about the history-beleaguered poor and their virtue and modest heroism.

Yet Naipaul’s repulsion at squalor in the present moment implies that life could be different, just as his critics’ deep contextualizing of squalor implies that conditions will never change. And so for all Naipaul’s fictional evocation of colonial and post-colonial history, he is ultimately concerned with life in its immediate variety, in the same way as, in his travels, he is more concerned with the living human fact of poverty than with its dead roots. An aura of presentness envelops every historical detail in Naipaul’s fiction.

This intangible, intuited presentness is the metaphysical dimension in Naipaul, which rests lightly on his physical and historical particulars like beads of dew on a blade of grass. Call it the metaphysics of private life, a realm that persists like the African interior in Naipaul’s “Bend in the River”: “You felt the land taking you back to something that was familiar, something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there.”

“Half a Life,” a masterpiece of implicitness, is explicitly concerned with drawing out the metaphysical-private while keeping it embedded in society and history. This small, sparely written tale embodies a fragile idea of freedom, a vision of human life disentangling itself from the encumbrances of time and place. It is the artistic version of Naipaul’s obsession, in his nonfiction, with the living fact of poverty rather than its inanimate antecedents. In this novel, the intuited, secret relations between people are even more the agents of personal change than history is.

Told partly in the third person and partly in the first person, the novel itself is divided in half. Its main character is Willie Somerset Chandran, but the book begins with a narrator informing us that we are about to hear the story of Willie’s father, who commences to recite the tale himself.

The father, who significantly is never given a name, was born a Brahmin, but he rebelled against his origins for both Oedipal and political reasons. Or at least he thought he rebelled. Naipaul has him tell his hilarious tale as the classic story of the ne’er-do-well at cross-purposes with himself--but prevailing in the end.

Willie’s father tries various types of defiance, all futile, finally hitting on the most scandalous gambit of all, “to marry the lowest person I could find,” a “backward,” a woman below the lowest caste, the niece of a revolutionary. Meeting such a woman, he hides her away in an image-maker’s shop, run by a man who “looked blind ... because his glasses were always dusty with the chippings of his workmen.” The shop is full of statues and ancestral busts, some of the busts wearing, most strangely, “the real glasses of the people” that they represented. Shortly afterward, the father goes off on a pilgrimage, as Gandhi, his hero, had once done. His ordeal makes the father a holy figure, which incidentally has the effect of protecting him from charges of Robin Hood-like theft, and attracts journalists and writers from all over the world. One of these is W. Somerset Maugham, after whom the father names his only son, Willie.

From the father’s first-person tale, the novel shifts back into a third-person narrative about Willie’s life. This division of the novel into the third and first person reflects the hybridness of any individual life, with its combination of historical and family influences on the one hand and our own creative will on the other.

Himself the product of two very different halves--Brahmin and “backward”--Willie struggles throughout the novel, as do so many of Naipaul’s characters, to find an identity and a way in the world. He despises his father, who never fails to misunderstand his son in often affectionate and well-meaning ways, and he constantly checks his own experience against his father’s to make certain that he is following a better path through life. This is, one might say, the “backward”-glancing side of him.

Willie starts his education at a mission school, at the behest of his mother--who quickly began to dominate Willie’s father--but he is soon off to a small, obscure college in London, where he starts to make his way as a writer, enters London’s literary bohemia and modestly publishes his vignettes.

Willie had started writing in school back in India, where he composed parables in which monstrous fathers are foiled, richly humorous stories that he left out of his composition book for his father to read. Through writing, Willie begins to question the boundaries of his identity. His first literary efforts in England disappoint him. Then he begins borrowing characters from old American movies and weaving new stories around them. Writing about experiences different from his own, he learns to better express his true feelings. This is one more step in his gradual understanding of the arbitrariness of identity and culture.

Willie sees life partly--halfly, as it were--through his father’s experience, so his attempts to make a different destiny for himself often echo his father’s experience. “This habit of non-seeing I have got from my father,” Willie reflects, and he resolves to look harder at the world. The dark delicious irony is that by constantly seeing his father’s habit of non-seeing (or half-seeing), Willie is doing it himself by looking back at his father rather than forward and outward. One recalls the image-maker with his dusty glasses and his bespectacled ancestral busts. But Willie does not exactly repeat his father’s fate.

In London, Willie feels what it means to be a stranger in a strange place. The rudiments of living escape him. His sole means of experiencing women is to seduce his friends’ girlfriends, which he very comically blames on his father’s influence and his cultural background. Once again, his father becomes a formative reference point and a determining one. Yet at the same time, Willie learns through women the essential “halfness” of life. June, a friend’s girlfriend, is slatternly and coarse; she also wholesomely marries her high school sweetheart and embarks on a conventional middle-class life. Willie later sees a prostitute, who services him while she is “half-dressed,” waiting for a train, looking no different than any other working-girl from the provinces.

The word “half” is repeated like a soft incantation throughout this novel. It is the metaphysical-private dimension, the “something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored,” a door onto a way in the world. If Willie’s halfness is the product of history, his slow-dawning perception of life’s essential incompleteness teaches him to navigate a permanent condition that exists beyond history. This theme is seamlessly knitted into every one of the novel’s particular events.

Lying about his life in London in order to more completely escape from his past (as his father had once lied about himself), Willie is living one kind of half-life. Meeting a woman named Ana, and then traveling with her to her ancestral home in Mozambique, is another. Ana, however, offers a better kind of half-life, despite the fact that Willie has married her out of despair at having no prospects in London. It is something like his father marrying the “backward” for all the wrong reasons. Yet Willie’s choice is also better; he and Ana are in love, and she turns him into a man. With each misstep that Willie makes, he also comes a little closer to a fuller existence.

Willie himself takes over the narration of his life in Africa, where he ends up staying for 18 years, living with Ana, who is half African and half Portuguese, and among her “half and half” friends. Ana is more comfortable with her past than Willie is with his. Her name, after all, runs forward and backward without changing. After a time, though, Willie grows tired of this kind and sympathetic woman. He betrays her with prostitutes, discovering first a new sexual side of himself, then feeling a revulsion against heartless sex--thus stumbling upon a new harmony of identity. His final infidelity, with a forlorn woman named Graca, completes him as a sexual being, granting him a desire and fulfillment that he never knew before.

That is not to say that Willie has achieved anything like wholeness. His efforts at becoming a full human being with an achieved identity are often as mistaken and ingenuous as his father’s perceptions of the world. “I wish you could be in the room when we make love,” he brutally says to Ana about him and Graca. “Then you would understand.” When, at the end of his stay in Africa, he slips on the wet steps of the estate where he has been living with Ana, he says that “the physical pain of my damaged body was like the other pain that had been with me for months, and perhaps for years.” Though he has learned to grow by seeing one side of life, then another, Willie is still wracked by his own enigma.

For Willie ends by telling his story to his sister Sarojini, who has inherited his mother’s backwardness and has always repelled him. He joins her in Germany, where she lives with her husband, a German revolutionary. In other words, he is to some extent repeating his father’s experience with a “backward” spouse, the niece of a revolutionary, and reliving the alien life his father found himself in with her.

And Willie is relating his story to his sister, just as his father told his story to his son. Yet Willie is telling his own story, in his own voice. Yet it is a story about how he did not live his own life. Yet he has lived only the first half of his life, though the beginning of the second half of his life finds him in a situation similar to his father’s. Yet the father’s namelessness signifies both a determining influence and a harmless cipher. And although the story that Willie recites to Sarojini concludes with Willie’s declaration to Ana that he is tired of living her life, he is, after all, telling it to Sarojini in Germany and very far from living his own life.

The ironies in “Half a Life” wind like a fugue into infinity, away from those colonial and postcolonial conditions that dog Willie’s existence. The novel gently swells to such a chord of mystery and tentativeness that it is as if Naipaul wants to say that there can be no resolution of identity, but that the perception of the riddle of identity, as it unfolds through intimate relations in the present moment, discernible to the open mind, is a potent freedom. Life’s meaning lies in the way its meaning never ends.

“How can anyone say who he is?” asks Graca, who suddenly strikes the still comically myopic Willie as insane. He looks at her and thinks, “I was making love to a deranged woman.” As usual, he is half right. To recognize that identity is an enigma is a cause of derangement but also a mark of sanity. To make that sentiment breathe in the mouth of a living character, and then rise from the page with silent laughter, is a beautiful completion: the mark of a genius and a cause of unending delight.