2011.09 V. S.奈保尔和无国籍状态的艺术回报

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Man Without a Country
V. S. Naipaul and the artistic rewards of statelessness

By Joseph O'Neil
SEPTEMBER 2011 ISSUE
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From time to time I fantasize about commissioning nonfiction books. Two writers—no others—figure in these fantasies: Janet Malcolm and V. S. Naipaul. Currently I dream of sending Naipaul to Ireland. From the tearoom at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin (in Room 112 of which, he wryly reminds us, the Irish constitution was allegedly drafted), he extracts from a series of interlocutors detailed, thoughtful life stories illuminative of the condition of Ireland, currently in its post-post-colonial Shit Creek period. Propelled by his abnormal curiosity and diligence into various outings (I see Belfast, Roger Casement’s grave, the ruins of Clonmacnoise), overcoming the difficulties created by his advanced age, Naipaul hyper-notices random mundane stuff (a new road, an unsatisfactory sandwich) and productively examines local newspapers, all of which results in a picture of the Irish national malaise that, in its subtle grasp of lingering primitivities, its alertness to suffering and self-deception, and its firm overruling of local sensitivities, religious ones especially, knocks into a cocked hat Tocqueville’s Journey to Ireland (1835) and Böll’s Irish Journal (1957). If you’re going to fantasize, fantasize.


Perhaps the most basic wishful element of this scenario is that Naipaul still has it in him to travel. Last year saw the publication of The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief and the statement by Naipaul to the effect that he is too physically frail to write another book involving travel (the book comes out in paperback next month). It would seem that, unfortunately, a complete panorama of his wanderings is now available. What exactly has he been up to? I confess that one purpose of my Irish fantasy is to get a clearer sense of this. I know something about Ireland; I know very little about Pakistan, India, Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mauritius, Argentina, or most of the other places from which, for half a century, he has brought us his distinctive version of news. I don’t for a moment suspect Naipaul of the surreptitious if ultimately valuable falsifications committed by Bruce Chatwin and Ryzsard Kapuscinski. But readers of travel literature have always been in a relatively weak position. They have few means of verifying what is offered by the traveler, who as a consequence is a kind of trustee of his truth.

The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African BeliefV. S. NAIPAUL,KNOPF
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Of course, some have never found Naipaul trustworthy. I’m particularly fond of this explosion from his old adversary Edward Said:

Naipaul’s account of the Islamic, Latin American, African, Indian and Caribbean worlds totally ignores a massive infusion of critical scholarship about those regions in favor of the tritest, cheapest and the easiest of colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies, myths that even Lord Cromer and Forster’s Turtons and Burtons would have been embarrassed to trade in outside their private clubs.

There are two criticisms here. First, the reportage is methodologically flawed. A response might be: it is what it is. Naipaul is not an ethnologist or a professional historian and does not hold himself out as one. He obviously writes in the tradition of the attentive visitor, and his work is an assertion of the continuing importance of that tradition: seeing for yourself, talking to people, embracing the randomness of experience, putting faith in your perceptiveness and your hobbyistic research, drawing your own conclusions. This is an imperfect modus operandi but a transparent one. The reader is not duped and can decide for herself what weight, if any, she will give to what she reads.

The other criticism is that his work evinces racist neo-colonialism. Naipaul certainly does not shrink from asserting that the imperial project had some constructive consequences. Thus he credits the British with introducing to India ideas of human association that had the effect of disturbing India’s ancient, paralyzing ways of seeing itself, thereby stimulating the growth of a new national self-consciousness. Is this neo-colonialism? Either way, Naipaul’s references to the horrors and failings of colonization are extensive, and it’s hard to see how the criticism, which these days feels anachronistic, can be made to stick; at least, not without recourse to the either/or fallacy very powerful 20 years ago and before, when it was difficult to draw attention to the infirmities of post-colonial societies, or indeed of pre-colonial societies, without being categorized, by serious people, as an apologist for the imperial era.

However, Said’s hyperbolic accusation of racism turns out to be substantive: the publication, in 2008, of Patrick French’s hair-raising authorized biography, The World Is What It Is, revealed that nigger is a venomously active word in Naipaul’s vocabulary. Other deplorable personal traits were revealed as well. Paul Theroux—author of the inimical memoir Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998) and, according to Naipaul, writer of “tourist books for the lower classes”—thought that French’s book would

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probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions, his whoremongering, his treatment of a sad, sick wife and disposable mistress, his evasions, his meanness, his cruelty amounting to sadism, his race baiting.

I think Theroux was being optimistic. It’s true that the mess of the life can sully the work and its reception. However, most of us are able to hold an opinion of a book that is at odds with our opinion of its author (if we care to form one), and most of us are aware that writing carefully and at length is almost necessarily an act of self-transcendence. A deep formal rationale for going to the enormous trouble of committing words to paper over time is to find respite from the intellectually and morally chaotic buffoon who goes through the world minute by minute, and to bring into being that better, more coherent human entity known as the author. There is a remarkable difference, for instance, between the grandiose, reckless, and occasionally offensive Sir Vidia of the interviews, and the vigilant, empathetic, and impressive V. S. Naipaul of the writing. Once we have acknowledged Sir Vidia’s racism—it would be hard not to—there remains the question of V. S. Naipaul and of the kind of trust we may place in him.

The trajectory of V. S. Naipaul’s life is as familiar as that of any living writer. The biographical note that prefaces his books invariably begins,

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession.

The rest of the story is equally well known: his self-establishment as a writer in, but not of, England; the early masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961); the retreat to the Wiltshire countryside in 1970; the second great novel, The Enigma of Arrival (1987); the years of eminence (knighthood, Nobel); and, after the biography, the years in or around the doghouse. All the while, from about 1960 onward, he has traveled and traveled and written and written—15 books of fiction, 19 of nonfiction. But however far he journeys, he returns again and again, with never-ending distress and wonder, to himself and to the circumstances of his youth in colonial Trinidad.

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What follows, then, is a Naipauline story—Naipauline because it is about displacement and disorientation, but also because it is about me, the writer: My mother is Turkish, but she belongs to a tiny minority of Syrian Christians that established itself in Mersin, a Mediterranean port, in the second half of the 19th century and in the early 20th century. (Naipaul knows about scattered Syrians, some of whom washed up in Port of Spain and prospered.) My mother’s great-grandfather moved to Mersin to set up a business shipping juniper logs to the builders of the Suez Canal. He, his brother, and other Syrians formed a community that was both insular and mutable. My grandmother spoke Arabic as a first language, her children French, and her children’s children, depending on where they have lived, Turkish or English or French. When I eventually began to think about this group of people to which I half-belonged, I understood that we were almost inexplicable to ourselves. We were unanalytically who we were, ourselves almost by virtue of who we were not—not Armenians or Greeks, not Chaldeans, not Assyrians, not Maronites, not totally Turks, not really Arabs, not French. (Because of France’s old colonial influence on the region’s Christians, some had a feeling that they were almost French, even though France was a faraway, mostly imaginary country where their existence was completely unknown.) There was almost no dwelling on the old days and little historical perspective or information on our identity. Our languages and Christian religions and food and distinctiveness pointed in directions—Greater Syria, the Ottoman Empire, the ancient Eastern churches, the Arab world—that did not compel attention. We were rooted, without unusual trauma, in the here and now.

So I connect with this remark offered by Salim, the narrator of V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (1979) and an East African of Indian descent:

We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time … the past was simply the past.

Naipaul knows this mentality well. His grandfather emigrated to Trinidad from northern India at some point in the 1880s or 1890s to work as an indentured servant. As a boy, Naipaul heard Hindi spoken by his grandmother, whose domestic arrangements were leftovers from the old country; but when her generation passed, his evidence of India consisted of little more than double hearsay: “I know my father and my mother, but beyond that I cannot go. My ancestry is blurred.” He experienced the colony as a place of “spiritual emptiness,” of cultural signposts, British and Indian and American, that led to nowhere real. The flimsiness of this inheritance still torments him. As recently as 2007, he wrote,

I don’t, properly speaking, have a past that is available to me, a past I can enter into and consider; and I grieve for that lack.

There is a danger of over-extrapolating from the grief particular to V. S. Naipaul in order to reach general conclusions about post-colonial societies and their deep psychic wounds. We should remember that, by Naipaul’s own account, the overwhelming majority of Trinidadians were and are okay with not having an intelligible family history, were able to live with being “mimic men”: that is, with the inauthenticity of the colonial situation. Of course, that particular situation no longer exists. Trinidad and Tobago achieved independence in 1962 and, whatever its problems, now form a country with a deep and vigorous sense of selfhood. The colony Naipaul grew up in is gone. This is a cause of suffering for him, this

scarcely bearable idea of the beginning of things now existing only in my heart, no longer existing physically in the ravaged, repopulated Trinidad of today.

V. S. Naipaul, then, is anomalous in his pain. This is hardly surprising, since he is a writer and therefore in the business of taking too personally the world’s shortcomings; but the anomaly must be reckoned with, not least by Naipaul. In the profoundly autobiographical The Enigma of Arrival, the protagonist moves to the Wiltshire countryside and into a fixed culture of great antiquity—or so he thinks. He soon recognizes that his “idea of an unchanging life was wrong,” and reflects,

I had thought that because of my insecure past—peasant India, colonial Trinidad, my own family circumstances, the colonial smallness that didn’t consort with the grandeur of my ambition, my uprooting of myself for a writing career, my coming to England with so little, and the very little I still had to fall back on—I had thought that because of this I had been given an especially tender or raw sense of an unaccommodating world.

This constitutes an acknowledgment that all of us are burdened with the impermanence of things, not just those of us deprived of enduring tradition and a stable identity. The latter group may not even be especially fraught. In my own deracination, for example, I make V. S. Naipaul look like one of those redwoods you can drive a car through. He was born into the same situation as hundreds of thousands of other Trinidadians. He subsequently left the island for good; but he could still write about Trinidad, as he did in Biswas, from the viewpoint of one who belongs. I have never belonged anywhere. I am half Irish, half Turkish-Syrian, partly Anglophone, and partly Francophone. My pre-school memories are of South Africa, Mozambique, Iran, Turkey; the rest of my boyhood was spent in Holland, where I had one foot in the multinational expatriate community and another among the Dutch. Aside from my siblings, I share this background with nobody. And yet I do not feel that I am at an existential disadvantage.


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I was, however, eventually placed in artistic difficulty: that of finding, in Naipaul’s phrase (appropriated from Darwin), “a resting-place for the imagination.” I could not write an Irish, Dutch, English, or Turkish novel. Later I saw that I had no option but to try to write stuff of no nationality. Naipaul was way ahead of me and practically everyone else on this front, though starting from a different place. Very early on, he decided that Trinidad alone was not a viable creative territory for him—in his view, “small places with simple economies bred small people with simple destinies”—and he consciously decided, early in his career, “to withdraw completely from nationality and loyalties except to persons.” French’s biography explores Naipaul’s capacity for personal loyalty. But what could it mean to withdraw from nationality?

With the exception of a charming oddity, the thoroughly English Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion (1963), V. S. Naipaul’s early, comic novels are distinctly Trinidadian: The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959), Biswas (1961), and The Mimic Men (1967). The darker, global phase begins with the Booker Prize–winning multi-narrative In a Free State (1971), set in Washington, D.C., and England and, mostly, an unnamed East African state. Guerrillas (1975) unfolds on an unnamed Caribbean Island, A Bend in the River (1979) in an unnamed country in central Africa, The Enigma of Arrival (1987) in England. His third act comprises A Way in the World (1994), a quasi-fiction that imagines its way into a history of colonialism; Half a Life (2001), whose main action is in London and a Portuguese-speaking African country; and its sequel, Magic Seeds (2004), in which our hero finds himself in Germany and India.


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Then there are the nonfiction books. These include three travel books about India (1964, 1977, 1990); two about non-Arab Islamic nations (1981, 1998); and two about Africa (1980, 2010). There are also four books about the Caribbean and the Americas (1962, 1969, 1980, 1989). Whether or not we assent to Naipaul’s impressions or theses, the intensity of his effort to see and understand must be acknowledged. Indisputably, he has devoted a large part of his life to talking with people very different from himself, gone to extraordinary lengths to meet them and listen to them and think carefully about them. This is someone who, deep into his 70s, went to Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Gabon, and South Africa to report The Masque of Africa.

An overview of the whole enterprise makes one wonder: Is there another writer of English literature who has paid so much attention to the foreign? Plenty of books—by Greene, Waugh, Forster, Hemingway, Lowry, the Bowleses—are set abroad, but their core drama concerns Britons or Americans: the far-off countries are merely host nations (the Olympic Games come to mind). Naipaul proceeds differently. He privileges the alien place and its people with his most passionate scrutiny, so that, for example, the Congo-like locale of A Bend in the River comes to function as that novel’s brooding, highly complex protagonist. That novel is clearly responsive to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But Conrad writes from the perspective of the riverboat. Naipaul writes from the perspective of the riverbank.


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This is an extremely demanding task, and it leads even Naipaul into technical trouble. A revealing flaw mars Bend. The novel’s first half is the story of the arrival of Salim and his slave in the town by the river, of Salim setting up his little business, and of his encounters with the various people living in the town and the surrounding bush; it has a wonderful novelistic grip. But the second half consists significantly of formally dubious scenes in which characters offer Salim a succession of lengthy self-explaining monologues. In his determination to get to the bottom of things, Naipaul abandons the invented story in favor of a nonfictional method, the oral testimony.

This impatience with literary priorities even affects his nonfiction, so that later books can read like a series of well-organized witness statements. Naipaul is well aware of this and untroubled by it: his idea of prose has always been an instrumentalist one. In Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998), he disparages his earlier, more literary cultural explorations and suggests that in those books he “got away with autobiography and landscape.” Beyond Belief begins with a declaration: “This is a book about people. It is not a book of opinion.” He adds,

It was years before I saw that the most important thing about travel, for the writer, was the people he found himself among.


Note the key phrase: for the writer. Naipaul is not writing for the other. He is writing for V. S. Naipaul. His books, in their obsession with alterity, justice, and belief systems, may easily be understood as an imaginative exercise in descriptive ethics. But identifying him as an author driven by ethics or anthropology or indeed by some reactionary ideology is like mistaking a lawyer for a crusader for justice. Naipaul has strong feelings and definite ideas, but these are collateral to what actually pushes him, again and again, out into the difficult world and then back to the still more difficult page.

I think this push may be traced to two sources. The first is a private anguish that, as one of his fictional protagonists puts it, “the whole world is being washed away and that I am being washed away with it.” This feeling, endemic in his work, is inextricable from a phobia, or nausea, he shares with W. G. Sebald, namely a sense of history as a vertiginous, terrifying, expanding darkness before which human schemes of enlightenment are helpless. His voyages into the depths of civilizations around the world only nourish this fearful vision. The same applies to his voyages into his own depths. He has written,

Increasingly I understand that my Indian memories, the memories of that India which lived on into my childhood in Trinidad, are like trapdoors into a bottomless past.


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The second impetus comes from the logic of his elective statelessness. Having neither a domestic territory nor a viable alternative (as Conrad had, with his ships), Naipaul is forced to travel. He is self-displaced, in effect, into a rare and valuable dimension of inquiry that, it turns out, prefigures the post-national realities of the 21st century. Chief among these are the transformations brought about by new technologies of communication and new ideas of doing business. People from different places live in a new situation of proximity with each other. Consequently, a nation-state is less than ever an impermeable container of a person’s culture and identity; is less than ever an adequate delimitation of his ethical or political or economic concerns; is less than ever, it follows, a sufficient artistic canvas.

In this way, Naipaul has made his own luck. The Trinidadian upbringing he considered to be an artistic short straw is turned by him into a long straw. We cannot trust V. S. Naipaul, or indeed anyone, to get the world right. But he has emancipated himself from the facility enjoyed by the writer securely accommodated by a national viewpoint, and we can trust him to be free from the price payable for such facility.

The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African BeliefV. S. NAIPAUL, KNOPF



没有国家的人
V. S.奈保尔和无国籍状态的艺术回报

作者：Joseph O'Neil
2011年9月号

我不时地幻想着委托出版非小说类书籍。在这些幻想中，有两位作家--没有其他人--出现了。珍妮特-马尔科姆和V.S.奈保尔。目前我梦想把奈保尔送到爱尔兰。在都柏林谢尔本酒店的茶室里（他诙谐地提醒我们，爱尔兰的宪法据说就是在这个房间里起草的），他从一系列对话者那里提取了详细的、深思熟虑的生活故事，说明了爱尔兰目前处于后殖民时期的屎溪镇的状况。在他异常的好奇心和勤奋的推动下，他进行了各种外出活动（我看到了贝尔法斯特，罗杰-卡西门特的坟墓，克隆马克努斯的废墟），克服了他年事已高造成的困难，奈保尔过度注意到了随机的平凡事物（一条新路，一个不满意的三明治），并富有成效地研究了当地报纸。所有这一切的结果是描绘了爱尔兰的民族弊病，其对挥之不去的原始性的微妙把握，对痛苦和自欺欺人的警觉，以及对当地敏感问题，特别是宗教敏感问题的坚决反对，将托克维尔的《爱尔兰之旅》（1835）和伯尔的《爱尔兰杂志》（1957）打成了鸡肋。如果你要幻想，就幻想吧。


也许这个场景中最基本的愿望元素是奈保尔仍然有能力去旅行。去年，他出版了《非洲的面具》。去年，《非洲的面具：非洲信仰的一瞥》出版，奈保尔发表声明说，他身体太虚弱，无法再写一本涉及旅行的书（该书下个月推出平装本）。看来，不幸的是，现在可以看到他流浪的完整全景了。他到底在做什么？我承认，我对爱尔兰的幻想的一个目的是为了更清楚地了解这个问题。我对爱尔兰有所了解；我对巴基斯坦、印度、伊朗、马来西亚、印度尼西亚、毛里求斯、阿根廷或其他大多数地方知之甚少，半个世纪以来，他从这些地方为我们带来了他独特的新闻。我丝毫不怀疑奈保尔会像布鲁斯-查特温和雷兹萨德-卡普辛斯基那样偷偷摸摸地造假，即使最终是有价值的。但旅行文学的读者一直处于相对弱势的地位。他们几乎没有办法核实旅行者所提供的内容，因此，旅行者是他的真相的一种受托人。

非洲的面具》。非洲的面具：非洲信仰的一瞥V. S.奈保尔，诺夫出版社
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当然，有些人从未发现奈保尔值得信赖。我特别喜欢他的老对手爱德华-萨义德的这段爆料。

奈保尔对伊斯兰、拉美、非洲、印度和加勒比世界的描述，完全忽视了关于这些地区的大量批判性学术研究，而倾向于最垃圾、最廉价和最简单的关于猪和黑人的殖民神话，这些神话甚至连克罗默勋爵和福斯特的特尔顿和伯顿都会不好意思在他们的私人俱乐部外交易。

这里有两个批评意见。首先，该报告在方法上有缺陷。一种回应可能是：它就是它。奈保尔不是民族学家或专业历史学家，也没有把自己当作民族学家。他显然是按照细心的访问者的传统来写作的，他的作品是对这种传统的持续重要性的断言：亲自去看，与人交谈，接受经验的随机性，相信你的感知力和你的业余研究，得出自己的结论。这是一个不完美的工作方式，但却是一个透明的工作方式。读者不会上当受骗，可以自己决定对她所读的东西给予什么样的重视，如果有的话。

另一种批评意见是，他的作品表现出种族主义的新殖民主义。奈保尔当然不会回避断言帝国项目有一些建设性的后果。因此，他认为英国人向印度介绍了人类联合的思想，这些思想扰乱了印度古老的、麻痹的看待自己的方式，从而刺激了新的民族自我意识的发展。这是新殖民主义吗？不管怎么说，奈保尔对殖民化的恐怖和失败的提及是广泛的，而且很难看到这种批评，如今感觉是不合时宜的，如何能够坚持下去；至少，不需要求助于20年前和之前非常强大的非此即彼的谬论，当时很难引起人们对后殖民社会，甚至前殖民社会的弱点的注意，而不被严肃的人归类为帝国时代的辩护者。

然而，萨义德对种族主义的夸张指责被证明是实质性的：2008年，帕特里克-弗伦奇令人发指的授权传记《世界就是这样》的出版，揭示了黑鬼是奈保尔词汇中一个毒辣的活跃词汇。其他令人遗憾的个人特征也被揭露出来。保罗-特鲁（Paul Theroux）--充满敌意的回忆录《维迪亚爵士的影子》（1998年）的作者，据奈保尔说，他是 "为下层社会写的旅游书 "的作家--认为法国人的书会

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我认为特鲁是乐观的。诚然，生活的混乱会玷污作品和它的接收。然而，我们大多数人都能对一本书持有与我们对其作者的看法不一致的意见（如果我们愿意形成一个意见的话），而且我们大多数人都知道，仔细和长时间地写作几乎必然是一种自我超越的行为。在形式上，我们花大力气把文字写在纸上的深层原因是为了从智力上和道德上混乱的小丑中找到喘息的机会，他每分钟都要经历这个世界，并把那个更好的、更连贯的人类实体带入，即作者。例如，在采访中，宏大的、鲁莽的、偶尔令人反感的维迪亚爵士与写作中警惕的、有同情心的、令人印象深刻的V.S.奈保尔之间存在着显著的区别。一旦我们承认了维迪亚爵士的种族主义--不承认是很难的--剩下的就是V.S.奈保尔的问题，以及我们对他的信任问题。

V.S.奈保尔的生活轨迹和任何在世的作家一样熟悉。他的书前的传记总是这样开始。

V. S. 奈保尔1932年生于特立尼达。他于1950年获得奖学金去了英国。在牛津大学学习了四年后，他开始写作，从那时起，他就没有从事过其他职业。

其余的故事同样众所周知：他在英国自立为作家，但不是在英国；早期的代表作《给比斯瓦先生的房子》（1961年）；1970年撤退到威尔特郡的乡村；第二部伟大的小说《抵达之谜》（1987年）；杰出的年代（骑士勋章、诺贝尔奖）；以及在传记之后，在狗屋或附近的年代。与此同时，从1960年起，他一直在旅行，旅行，写作，写作--15本小说，19本非虚构作品。但无论他走得多远，他都会带着无尽的苦恼和好奇，一次又一次地回到自己身上，回到他年轻时在特立尼达殖民地的环境中。

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接下来，是一个奈保尔式的故事--奈保尔式，因为它是关于流离失所和迷失方向的，但也因为它是关于我这个作家的。我的母亲是土耳其人，但她属于极少数的叙利亚基督徒，在19世纪下半叶和20世纪初在地中海港口梅尔辛建立了自己的地位。(奈保尔知道零散的叙利亚人，其中一些人冲到了西班牙港，并获得了繁荣。） 我母亲的曾祖父搬到梅尔辛，做起了向苏伊士运河建设者运送桧木的生意。他和他的兄弟以及其他叙利亚人组成了一个既封闭又易变的社区。我的祖母以阿拉伯语为第一语言，她的孩子讲法语，而她的孩子的孩子，根据他们的居住地，讲土耳其语、英语或法语。当我最终开始思考这群我有一半归属的人时，我明白，我们对自己来说几乎是不可解释的。我们无法分析我们是谁，我们自己几乎是由于我们不是谁--不是亚美尼亚人或希腊人，不是迦勒底人，不是亚述人，不是马龙派，不是完全的土耳其人，不是真正的阿拉伯人，不是法国人。(由于法国对该地区的基督徒有着古老的殖民影响，有些人觉得他们几乎就是法国人，尽管法国是一个遥远的、大多是想象中的国家，他们的存在完全不为人所知）。几乎没有人纠缠于过去的日子，也没有什么历史观点或关于我们身份的信息。我们的语言、基督教、食物和特色都指向大叙利亚、奥斯曼帝国、古老的东方教会、阿拉伯世界等方向，这些都不需要关注。我们扎根于此，没有不寻常的创伤，就在此时此地。

因此，我同意萨利姆的说法，他是V.S.奈保尔的《河流的拐弯处》（1979年）的叙述者，也是印度裔的东非人。

我们从骨子里感到我们是一个非常古老的民族；但我们似乎没有办法衡量时间的流逝......过去只是过去。

奈保尔很了解这种心态。他的祖父在19世纪80年代或90年代的某个时候从印度北部移民到特立尼达，做契约仆人。小时候，奈保尔听到他的祖母说印地语，她的家务安排是旧国家的遗留物；但当她那一代人过去后，他对印度的证据就只剩下双重道听途说了。"我知道我的父亲和母亲，但除此之外，我无法了解。我的祖先是模糊的"。他认为殖民地是一个 "精神空虚 "的地方，充满了英国人、印度人和美国人的文化标志，而这些标志却没有任何实际意义。这种继承的虚无感仍然折磨着他。就在最近的2007年，他写道。

正确地说，我没有一个可以利用的过去，一个我可以进入和考虑的过去；我为这种缺乏感到悲伤。

从奈保尔（V. S. Naipaul）特有的悲痛中过度推断，以得出关于后殖民社会及其深层心理创伤的一般结论，是有危险的。我们应该记住，根据奈保尔自己的说法，绝大多数特立尼达人过去和现在都能接受没有可理解的家族历史，能够忍受作为 "模仿者 "的生活：也就是说，忍受殖民状况的不真实性。当然，这种特殊情况已经不存在了。特立尼达和多巴哥在1962年实现了独立，不管它有什么问题，现在形成了一个具有深刻和充满活力的自我意识的国家。奈保尔成长的那个殖民地已经不复存在。这对他来说是一个痛苦的原因，这个

几乎无法忍受的事情开始的想法现在只存在于我的心中，在今天被蹂躏的、重新居住的特立尼达岛上不再存在实物。

V. 那么，奈保尔在他的痛苦中是反常的。这并不令人惊讶，因为他是一个作家，因此，他对世界的缺点过于亲近；但这种反常现象必须加以考虑，特别是奈保尔。在具有深刻自传性质的《抵达之谜》中，主人公搬到了威尔特郡的乡下，进入了一个固定的古老文化--或者他是这么认为的。他很快就认识到，他 "对不变的生活的想法是错误的"，并反思。

我曾以为，由于我不安全的过去--印度农民、特立尼达殖民地、我自己的家庭环境、与我的雄心壮志不相称的殖民地的渺小、我为了写作事业而背井离乡、我带着那么少的东西来到英国，以及我仍然有那么少的东西可以依靠--我曾以为，由于这些，我对一个不适应的世界有一种特别温柔或原始的感觉。

这构成了一种承认，我们所有人都被事物的无常所困扰，而不仅仅是那些被剥夺了持久传统和稳定身份的人。后一类人甚至可能并不特别令人不安。例如，在我自己的贬低中，我让V.S.奈保尔看起来像那种你可以开车穿过的红杉树。他和其他几十万特立尼达人一样，出生在同样的环境中。他后来永远离开了这个岛；但他仍然可以写特立尼达，就像他在《Biswas》中所做的那样，从属于一个人的角度来写。我从来没有属于过任何地方。我有一半爱尔兰血统，一半土耳其-叙利亚血统，一部分是英语国家，一部分是法语国家。我的学前记忆是关于南非、莫桑比克、伊朗和土耳其的；我的其余童年是在荷兰度过的，在那里我一只脚在多国侨民社区，另一只脚在荷兰人中间。除了我的兄弟姐妹外，我与任何人都没有这种背景。然而，我并不觉得我在生存上处于劣势。


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然而，我最终陷入了艺术困境：用奈保尔的话说（从达尔文那里挪用），就是要找到 "想象力的休息场所"。我无法写一部爱尔兰、荷兰、英国或土耳其的小说。后来我发现，我别无选择，只能尝试写一些没有国籍的东西。奈保尔在这方面远远领先于我和几乎所有其他人，尽管他的出发点不同。很早以前，他就认为特立尼达岛对他来说不是一个可行的创作领域--在他看来，"经济简单的小地方孕育着命运简单的小人物"--在他职业生涯的早期，他有意识地决定 "完全退出国籍和对人以外的忠诚。" 弗伦奇的传记探讨了奈保尔对个人忠诚的能力。但退出国籍意味着什么呢？

除了一部迷人的怪异作品--彻底的英国《石头先生和骑士伙伴》（1963年）之外，V.S.奈保尔早期的喜剧小说明显是特立尼达的。神秘的按摩师》（1957年）、《埃尔维拉的选举》（1958年）、《米格尔街》（1959年）、《比斯沃斯》（1961年）和《模仿者》（1967年）。更加黑暗的全球阶段从布克奖获奖作品《在一个自由国度》（1971年）开始，背景是华盛顿特区和英国，主要是一个未命名的东非国家。游击队》（1975年）在一个不知名的加勒比岛国展开，《河的拐弯处》（1979年）在非洲中部一个不知名的国家，《抵达之谜》（1987年）在英国。他的第三部作品包括《世界之路》（A Way in the World）（1994年），一部想象着进入殖民主义历史的准小说；《半生缘》（2001年），其主要行动是在伦敦和一个讲葡萄牙语的非洲国家；以及其续集《魔种》（2004年），我们的英雄在德国和印度发现自己。


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然后是非小说类书籍。其中包括三本关于印度的旅游书（1964年，1977年，1990年）；两本关于非阿拉伯伊斯兰国家的书（1981年，1998年）；以及两本关于非洲的书（1980年，2010年）。还有四本关于加勒比和美洲的书（1962，1969，1980，1989）。无论我们是否同意奈保尔的印象或论点，都必须承认他在观察和理解方面的努力。毋庸置疑，他将自己生命中的大部分时间用于与与自己截然不同的人交谈，不遗余力地与他们见面，倾听他们的声音，仔细思考他们。这个人在70多岁时还去了乌干达、尼日利亚、加纳、象牙海岸、加蓬和南非，报道《非洲的面具》。

对整个事业的概述使人感到奇怪。还有另一位英国文学作家如此关注外国的情况吗？格林、沃、福斯特、海明威、洛瑞、鲍尔斯夫妇的很多书都以国外为背景，但他们的核心戏剧都是关于英国人或美国人的：遥远的国家只是主办国（我想到了奥运会）。奈保尔的处理方式不同。他以最热情的审视方式对陌生的地方及其人民给予特权，因此，例如，《河流的拐弯处》中类似刚果的地方就成了该小说中忧郁的、高度复杂的主人公。这部小说显然是对康拉德的《黑暗之心》的回应。但康拉德是从河船的角度来写的。奈保尔则是从河岸的角度来写的。


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这是一项要求极高的任务，它甚至导致奈保尔陷入技术困境。一个露骨的缺陷玷污了《弯曲》。小说的前半部分是萨利姆和他的奴隶来到河边小镇的故事，萨利姆建立了他的小生意，以及他与生活在小镇和周围灌木丛中的各种人的相遇；它有一种奇妙的小说式的抓取。但后半部分主要由形式上可疑的场景组成，其中的人物向萨利姆提供了一连串冗长的自我解释的独白。奈保尔决心弄清事情的真相，他放弃了虚构的故事，转而采用非虚构的方法，即口头证词。

这种对文学优先权的不耐烦甚至影响了他的非虚构作品，所以后来的书读起来就像一系列组织良好的证人证词。奈保尔很清楚这一点，也不为之困扰：他对散文的想法一直是一种工具主义。在《超越信仰。在《超越信仰：皈依者中的伊斯兰远行》（1998年）中，他贬低了他早期的、更具文学性的文化探索，并表示在那些书中他 "摆脱了自传和风景"。超越信仰》以一个声明开始。"这是一本关于人的书。它不是一本观点的书"。他补充说。

多年后我才看到，对作家来说，旅行最重要的是他发现自己身处其中的人。


注意这个关键短语：对作家而言。奈保尔不是在为他人写作。他是在为V.S.奈保尔写作。他的书，在其对改变性、正义和信仰体系的迷恋中，很容易被理解为描述性伦理的想象力练习。但是，将他认定为受伦理学或人类学或实际上受某种反动意识形态驱使的作者，就像将一名律师误认为是正义的十字军。奈保尔有强烈的感情和明确的想法，但这些都是附属于实际推动他的东西，一次又一次地进入困难的世界，然后又回到更困难的页面。

我认为这种推动力可以追溯到两个来源。首先是一种私人的痛苦，正如他的一个小说主人公所说，"整个世界正在被冲走，而我也正在被冲走"。这种感觉在他的作品中普遍存在，与他与W.G.Sebald共同的恐惧症或恶心感密不可分，即对历史的感觉是一种令人眩晕的、可怕的、不断扩大的黑暗，在人类的启蒙计划面前束手无策。他对世界各地文明深处的航行只会滋长这种恐惧的视野。这也适用于他在自己的深处的航行。他曾写道

我越来越明白，我的印度记忆，那个活到我在特立尼达岛的童年的印度记忆，就像通往无底的过去的陷阱门。


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第二个推动力来自于他的选择性无国籍的逻辑。奈保尔既没有国内领土，也没有可行的选择（就像康拉德有他的船一样），他被迫旅行。实际上，他是自我置换，进入了一个罕见的、有价值的探索层面，事实证明，这预示着21世纪的后国家现实。其中最主要的是新的通信技术和新的商业理念所带来的转变。来自不同地方的人们生活在一个相互接近的新环境中。因此，民族国家不再是一个人的文化和身份的不可渗透的容器；不再是一个人的道德、政治或经济关注的适当界限；不再是一个足够的艺术画布。

这样一来，奈保尔就创造了自己的运气。他认为特立尼达的成长环境是艺术上的短板，但他却把它变成了长板。我们不能相信V.S.奈保尔，或者说不能相信任何人，能把世界搞好。但他已经把自己从作家享有的、被国家观点牢牢容纳的便利中解放出来，我们可以相信他不会为这种便利付出代价。

非洲的面具》。The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African BeliefV. S.奈保尔，Knopf