Introduction Authorship and Authority

Abstract

The construction of authority—what we call legitimacy in politics, tradition in culture, and imaginative strength, or plausibility, in literature—is the key problem in V. S. Naipaul’s career, from his Caribbean comedies of the late 1950s and sub-Saharan fiction of the 1970s, through the travel writings and his more recent essays and narratives, including Magic Seeds (2004) and A Writer’s People (2007).

KING LEAR. Dost thou know me, fellow? KENT. No, sir; but you have that in your countenance which I would fain call master. KING LEAR. What’s that? KENT. Authority.

The small, twinkly eyes that might at first, in that wrinkled head, have seemed only peasant’s eyes, always about to register respect and obsequiousness combined with disbelief, could be seen now to be the eyes of a man used to exercising a special kind of authority, an authority that to him and the people around him was more real and less phantasmal, than the authority of outsiders from the city. His face was the face of the Master, the man who knew men, and whole families, as servants, from their birth to their death.

—India: A Wounded Civilization