Notes from the Fourth World

By R.Z. Sheppard

Notes from the Fourth World A BEND IN THE RIVER by V.S. Naipaul; Knopf; 288 pages; $8.95

"The tall lilac-coloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it 'the new thing' or 'the new thing in the river,' and to them it was another enemy. Its rubbery vines and leaves formed thick tangles of vegetation that adhered to the river banks and clogged up waterways. It grew fast, faster than men could destroy it with the tools they had. The channels to the villages had to be constantly cleared. Night and day the water hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it travelled."

V.S. Naipaul is not the sort of writer who needs a metaphor to improve the clarity of his art. Yet this passage from his new novel, A Bend in the River, colors a simple botanical fact with the suggestion of a broader truth. Alex Haley notwithstanding, uprootedness remains the predominant theme of the times. The good modern novelists know this, and Naipaul is one of the best. He is also one of the most exotically unrooted, an Indian, born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, who has spent most of his life in England. Like his friend Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar), Naipaul can haunt the dusty corners of the world for months on end. His nonfiction reports are Baedekers of forgotten history and cultural schizophrenia. Former colonies in the West Indies and Africa, for example, may denounce the ways of their previous masters, but they are fatefully wedded to them. It is a condition frequently encountered in Naipaul's work. He once wrote about asking for the local guava jelly in one of Trinidad's intellectual clubs, only to be told that they only had English greengage jam.

In his new novel, the elite of an African river town gather daily at Bigburgers. The Dr. Livingstones of market research have left no port uncalled. "They don't just send you the sauce, you know, Salim. They send you the whole shop," boasts the franchisee.

To Salim, a coastal African descended from fastidious Indian immigrants, Bigburgers resemble "smooth white lips of bread over mangled black tongues of meat." Salim is the novel's narrator who, like the self-seeding hyacinth, drifts through the swirls of political and social change. The result is a sensitive fictional character with the detachment of an anthropologist.

Although the river, the town and the nation of the book are not named, a compact and teeming world is irresistibly realized. There are those special breeds of Levantines and Greeks who stick it out on the ragged edges of free enterprise; the inevitable scholars, priests and primitive-art collectors; old servants who have made parasitism an honorable profession; and promising young men who will go directly from dugout to jet. The economy of the town remains fairly simple. Villagers from the bush sell smoked monkey meat to steamer passengers. The money is used to buy pots, cloth and razor blades from the shops in town. The shopowners can then eat Bigburgers.

Salim himself owns a dry-goods store, bought cheaply when revolution depressed real estate values. It was not only a business decision but a chance to flee from his confining family compound on the coast, not truly African but an "Arab-Indian -Persian -Portuguese place." He arrives in time for the next cycle of boom and bust, and is drawn into a number of loose but illuminating relationships. In the Domain, a modern enclave built by the President for useful foreigners and technocrats, Salim is introduced to the casual sophistications of the Big Man's white men and the records of Joan Baez. He is moved but not duped: "It was make-believe ... You couldn't listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time."

Life in the Domain also improves Salim's sex life and his understanding of young, European-educated Africans hurtling into the 20th century. "The airplane is faster than the heart," one of them tells him. "You arrive quickly and you leave quickly ... You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn't exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground."

Sad but true, especially when that past is distant and fragmented. So it is in much of the Third World. Naipaul once again confronts it, not with the conscious ironies that often front for self-pity, but with the disciplined eye of self-awareness.

--R.Z. Sheppard

"I am a man of a certain race from a certain place, looking at the world in a certain way and coming to certain conclusions," says Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul as he neatly vacuums a pinch of snuff from the back of his small brown hand. The face is Uttar Pradesh, the author's ancestral home before his grandfather emigrated from India to Trinidad nearly 100 years ago. But the accent is utter Oxford, where in the early '50s young "Vidia" headed to escape what he calls the "colonial squalor" of his tropical island.

"Trinidad," he recalls, "was incomplete in every way. Everything was imported. Every book, every machine, every idea came from abroad. I felt I was lost,very far away."

In some respects Naipaul still is. One might say that he belongs to the Fourth World, that highly intelligent, talented minority of the formerly colonized who, like Salim in A Bend in the River, have "no flag, no fetish." One of seven children of a journalist father, Naipaul grewup surrounded by aunts, uncles and 50 cousins. "I got all my knowledge about human behavior before I was ten," he remarks without a trace of nostalgia. "I made the amazing discovery that if you don't like someone it is certain that he doesn't like you."

His early fiction, The Mystic Masseur (1957), Miguel Street (1959) and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), drew on the substance of those early years. Some reviewers chided him for his satirical treatment of the underdeveloped world. He answered them in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement: "Imagine a critic in Trinidad writing of Viles Bodies: "Mr. Evelyn Waugh's whole purpose is to show how funny English people are. He looks down his nose at the land of his birth. We hope that in future he writes of his native land with warm affection.'"

Despite a shower of literary prizes in Britain, Naipaul did not become widely known in the U.S. until the publication of Guerrillas (1975), a novel that balefully viewed the corruption and selfishness behind most revolutionary rhetoric. He still refuses to draw ideological or color lines between tyrants left or right, black or white. When he speaks of backward nations, he means those where solutions are assumed to be political: "In countries without institutions, law and an honest sense of history," he believes, "politics usually means no more than identifying the enemy. And there are always new enemies to be got rid of."

Naipaul also sees peril in the West. His critism and warning after teaching this past year at Connecticut's Wesleyan University: "The students I have met think that they, by being Americans and well-to-do, bring privilege to what they touch. This vanity is becoming an empty caste arrogance. Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes."

Excerpt

"I said, 'You should look at this. They're working on a new kind of telephone. It works by light impulses rather than an electric current...' Ferdinand said, 'Who arethey?' 'What do you mean?' 'Who are the "they" who are working on the new telephone?' I thought: We are here already, after only a few months at the lycee. He's just out of the bush; I know his mother; I treat him like a friend; and already we're getting this political nonsense. I didn't give the answer I thought he was expecting. I didn't say, 'The white men.' Though with half of myself I felt like saying it, to put him in his place. I said instead, 'The scientists.' "

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