Strange News From Sweden
The Nobel Prize goes to a writer of actual merit. What happened?

by TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Friday, October 12, 2001 12:01 A.M. EDT

The "V" in V.S. Naipaul, this year's Nobel laureate for literature, stands for Vidiadhar, a Sanskrit compound word that translates literally into English as "a bearer of learning" or, more effectively, as "erudite." The name is fussy and uncommon--I have met only one other person so called in all my years, and he was a most unpromising boy in my grade school in India--and, as such, is rather appropriate for Mr. Naipaul, who is fussy and uncommon, and undeniably wise.

For the Swedish Academy, Mr. Naipaul was an odd and unexpected choice, and one is tempted to ask, on hearing of his success, what the academicians have been puffing in their pipes of late. After all, the writer recently administered a very public spanking to both E.M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes for being homosexual. This must, surely, have counted against him in the collective consciousness of a corps whose record shows a marked bias in favor of the liberal and the leftist, not to mention the meretricious--one that has given us such tawdry laureates as Dario Fo and Toni Morrison. And a week ago, as the West paused briefly on the brink of war in Afghanistan, Mr. Naipaul spoke out loud, with exquisite political incorrectness, of the "calamitous effect" of Islam on the peoples who converted to that religion in the course of its history.

A decade ago, in a lecture to New York's Manhattan Institute, Mr. Naipaul referred to Western civilization as "our universal civilization." His manner was not triumphal, and the tone of his words was quiet, even gentle. The beauty of this civilization is that it enshrines "the idea of the pursuit of happiness . . . the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement." Such a society, he said, "cannot generate fanaticism." To be fanatical, after all, would be to be intellectually dishonest, and sterile.

There is a flavor of this idea in the opening lines of "A Bend in the River," his novel from 1979. The lines echo the chilling admonition in "King Lear," in which Lear tells Cordelia that "nothing can come of nothing": "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." Mr. Naipaul has, in fact, courted great unpopularity with this idea, especially in its extension to entire societies, which he often condemns for their sterility and dysfunction.

In a refinement of this idea (made in the Manhattan Institute lecture), he laments the case of a young poet in Java, whose mother does not understand her son's vocation. How could he write poetry, she wonders, if the epics had already been written? What more is there to say? Indeed, the sacred texts--note, here, the inability of some societies to take seriously the idea of a text that is not literally sacred--"already existed." They had "only to be learnt or consulted."

This--our respective approaches to texts and words--is at the heart of Western civilization's differences with the Islamic world and the place where the greatest chasm lies. Mr. Naipaul, for whom the word is a vocation, is disturbed by Islam's textual rigidities and by its inability to allow the word to slip into secular grasp. Above all, he is disturbed by that religion's tendency to turn men into "nothing" and by the willingness of that religion's adherents to "allow themselves to become nothing."

This nothingness, this embrace of cipher status, extends also to the erasure, as Mr. Naipaul sees it, of history in Muslim lands. He has written--in "Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples"--that the conquests, and conversions to Islam, conducted by Arab armies in lands to the east of Arabia were more destructive of local histories, and of local self-images, than even the worst excesses of Western colonialism. It is not uncommon to hear Pakistanis, for example, describe dates as their favorite fruit, instead of the local mango. In this cultural genuflection to the desert lands of Arabia, one sees trivial, but telling, evidence of what Mr. Naipaul detests--the deracination by Islam of "converted peoples."

These intellectual strengths are also his literary forte. Overt displays of erudition are not his style, which is, instead, to convey in his writing a deeper, slower accumulation of profundity. His literary method, even so, ranges widely, from the palpable menace of "Guerrillas" to the serene storytelling of his masterpiece, "A House for Mr. Biswas," where his scrupulousness of observation is shown in all its elegance.

Perhaps Mr. Naipaul's greatest achievement, in an incontinent age, has been to add a layer of orthodoxy to the tradition of English literature. He is not experimental, not obsessed with form, and hence cannot be given distracting labels. Comparisons with Joseph Conrad are made, and are useful, because Conrad was a Pole who fell in love with the English language and literature. Like Conrad, Mr. Naipaul came to live in Britain--"from the periphery to the center," to use his own words, the periphery being his native Trinidad--and made good by absorbing the great, solid virtues of Western values as practiced (and preached) in that country. He was once much hated for taking that metropolitan position by Third World, postcolonial intellectuals, but how wise it all seems now.

Mr. Varadarajan is the Journal's deputy features editor.