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The Big Picture: Race, Politics, and History in V. S. Naipaul's Caribbean Nonfiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Robert M. Greenberg
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Extract

In Articulating his artistic objectives for his fiction, V. S. Naipaul speaks in a 1994 interview about “delivering truth” and a “form of reality” (Hussein, 154). While he seems to be speaking about an idea of reality he shares with his readers, he is really only indicating his own subjective confidence about the significance of what he has created. He does not share a frame of reference about his Trinidad or Central Africa settings with many of his readers (especially his American readers), nor does he have any reason to assume that his novels will be accepted as culturally authoritative. Naipaul includes in his recipe for “pinning down reality (Hussein, 155) the search for and invention of the most revealing narrative. But again here he does not seem to be referring to a familiar pattern of events concerning a familiar world – for this he pejoratively designates the term “plot” and applies it to the stories of television dramas and “blockbuster” novelists. His means for exploring new strata of experience, on the other hand, is “narrative,” the formal orchestration of events in order to excavate and dramatize the most significant elements residing in his material (Hussein, 154–55; Schiff, 148).

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 26 , October 2001 , pp. 611 - 638
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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References

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