Abstract
The basis of most criticism of Naipaul is epitomized by a disagreement early in the careers of Naipaul, Sam Selvon and George Lamming after they moved to England. The three were among the first of what was to be regarded as the start of a modern West Indian literature and their writing was thought an expression of the politics that had led to decolonization and the formation of newly independent nations. Lamming did write novels pondering racial identity and politics. While Selvon is now best remembered for his amusing novels of black immigrant life in London, most of his novels concern Trinidad where Selvon sees the need for the Indians to accommodate themselves to the creolized Afro-Caribbean society that he regards as the future.
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Notes
Andrew Robinson, ‘Stranger in Fiction’, The Independent on Sunday (16 August 1992), 13.
V. S. Naipaul, ‘The Writer and India’, Reading & Writing (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), 54–5.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 88–91.
Edward Said, ‘Bitter Dispatches from the Third World’, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 98–112, 100.
For his review of Beyond Belief see Edward Said, ‘Ghost Writer’, Progressive, 62.11 (November, 1998), 40–42, also published as ’An intellectual catastrophe’, Al-Ahram Weekly, http://www.ahram.org.eg/ weekly/1998/389/cul.htm.
Edward Said, ‘Among the Believers’, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 113–7, 116.
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992).
Lillian Feder, Naipaul’s Truth: The Making of a Writer (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001);
Selwyn Cudjoe, V. S. Naipaul, A Materialist Reading (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, Press, 1988);
Rob Nixon, London Calling. V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);
Fawzia Mustafa, V. S. Naipaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Another book of this kind is Suman Gupta, V. S. Naipaul (Northcote House in Association with the British Council, 1999).
Feder 98; Peggy Nightingale, Journey Through Darkness: The Writings of V. S. Naipaul (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1987), 59.
See, for example, Victor Ramraj, ‘The All-Embracing Christlike Vision: Tone and Attitude in The Mimic Men’ in Anna Rutherford, ed., Common Wealth (Aarhus: Akademisek Boghandel, 1972), 125–34;
Victor Ramraj, ‘Sly Compassion: V. S. Naipaul’s Ambivalence in “A Christmas Story”’, Commonwealth, 6 (1983), 61–70.
John Thieme, The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction (Mundelstrup: Dangeroo/London: Hansib, 1987);
John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts (London: Continuum, 2001).
Malise Ruthven, ‘The light of a dead star’, Times Literary Supplement (24 April 1998), 13.
For Walcott’s background, finances and his relationship to Naipaul, see Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Naipaul’s financial situation was far worse.
Caryl Phillips, ‘The Enigma of Denial’ The New Republic (29 May 2000), 43–49;
Caryl Phillips, ‘V. S. Naipaul’, A New World Order: Selected Essays (London: Secker & Warburgh, 2001), 187–219.
In the Trinidad Guardian Walcott during the 1960s regularly reviewed and praised Naipaul’s writing. Derek Walcott, ‘A Great New Novel of the West Indies/ The man who was born unlucky’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (5 November 1961), 17;
Derek Walcott, ‘History and Picong in The Middle Passage’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (30 September 1962), 9;
Derek Walcott, ‘The Achievement of V. S. Naipaul’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (12 April 1964), 15;
Derek Walcott, ‘Mr Naipaul’s Passage to India’, Sunday Guardian [Trinidad] (20 September 1964), 2, 4;
Derek Walcott, ‘Is V. S. Naipaul an Angry Young Man?’, Sunday Guardian Magazine [Trinidad] (6 August 1967), 8–9.
Landeg White, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan 1975);
Dolly Zulakha Hassan, V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies (New York: Peter Lang, 1989);
Paul Theroux, V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work (London: André Deutsch, 1972);
Robert K. Morris, Paradoxes of Order. Some Perspectives on the Fiction of V. S. Naipaul (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1975);
Amitava Kumar, ed., The Humour & The Pity - On V. S. Naipaul (British Council India and Buffalo Books, 2002).
James Wood’s review of Half a Life traces in Naipaul’s work the relationship of pain to freedom and discusses why this annoys his critics. James Wood, ‘Damage’, The New Republic (5 November 2001), 31–5.
Pankaj Mishra, ‘A dream of order: Naipaul, India and Islamic fervour’, Times Literary Supplement (2 November 2001), 18–19.
Graham Huggan, ‘V. S. Naipaul and the Political Correctness Debate’, College Literature (October 1994), 200–6, 205.
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© 2003 Bruce King
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King, B. (2003). Naipaul’s Critics and Postcolonialism. In: V. S. Naipaul. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3768-1_13
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