，

國立中山大學外國語文學系

碩士論文

Department of Foreign Languages and Literature

National Sun Yat-sen University

Master Thesis

奈波爾小說《畢斯華茲先生的房子》《米格爾大街》

《神秘的推拿師》中的現代性與認同

Modernity and Identity in V.S. Naipaul’s

A House for Mr. Biswas, Miguel Street, and The Mystic Masseur

研究生：李依珊

Yi-shan Li

指導教授﹕張錦忠 博士

Dr. Tee Kim Tong

中華民國100年7月

July 2011

i

Acknowledgements

When a work proceeds to this part, the author is approaching the finish line.

Weeks ago, I was for a time doubting, while suffering from severe depression, if I

could ever make it to this section of my thesis. Fortunately, with a lot of help and

encouragements from people and friends, now I am composing the

acknowledgements.

First, I would like to start with my advisor, Dr. Tee Kim Tong. I want to thank

him for supporting and tolerating this “ignorant” student for such a long time. He is a

very devoting teacher. It is a great pity, because of my full-time job, that I could not

have spent more time meeting and discussing with him about either my thesis or

academic studies.

Next, I have to thank, with all my heart, my beloved younger sister, Yi-ling.

She is one of the rare people who understand me to a great extent. During these years

of my seeming everlasting study at NSYSU, she has offered whatever necessary to me:

time, care, shelter and support. My appreciation for her is beyond words. I feel so

grateful to have you in my life, Yi-ling.

There are also some precious friends that I need to dedicate my gratitude to.

Ming-cha Li, my colleague and friend, kindly lent me her laptop until I finished this

ii

thesis. Moreover, she is like a family member to me in Taichung. We have spent so

much time together talking or just keeping each other’s company. Lungchu Lin, who I

met at high school, answered my phone at 2:00 a.m. and instilled courage in me when

I was extremely anxious. Ray Tsai, also a friend from high school, has been always

there for me.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my mother, who gives me a lot of sense

of security and allows me freedom as an independent individual. She is in general a

very traditional woman. However, when it comes to raising children, she is quite

advanced and liberal. She always surprises me by showing how courageous and

open-minded she can be. The reason I can explore the world and life is that I know

she has been and will always be there for me. It was because of her that I could finish

this thesis. To have a headstrong daughter is such a challenge and she has taken it so

well. I feel so luck to be her daughter. Thank you, Mom. You mean a lot to me!

iii

論文名稱：奈波爾小說《畢斯華茲先生的房子》《米格爾大街》《神

秘的推拿師》中的現代性與認同

校所組別：國立中山大學外國語文學系研究所

畢業年度及提要別：九十九學年度第二學期碩士論文提要

研究生：李依珊

指導教授：張錦忠 博士

論文提要：

本文以安東尼．紀登斯與霍爾談論的現代性與身份認同理論為輔，嘗試討論

奈波爾三本千里達小說《畢斯華茲先生的房子》《米格爾大街》《神秘的推拿師》

中因現代性所造成的社會變遷與斷層，及其所衍生出的個人與國家認同問題。筆

者主張千里達因殖民背景加上現代性而產生的種種變化與衝擊，將其人民與社會

由過去農耕生活抽離後產生了斷層與不連貫，因而個人必須在現代社會中重新檢

視並建立身份認同。第一章主要介紹紀登思與霍爾的理論及奈波爾身平與三本小

說。第二章以《米格爾大街》為主，討論現代化對於千里達的衝擊。第三章則以

《畢斯華茲先生的房子》為主軸，討論千里達現代化同時，個人尋求自我身分認

同與文化認同的過程與重要性。最後，筆者斷定現代化與自我、文化認同皆為必

須持續變動的過程，隨著社會演變而不斷修正，而奈波爾身為作家的自我認同也

持續不斷的在變化著。

關鍵字：現代性、身份認同、文化認同、斷層、不連續性、逃離

iv

Abstract

This thesis aims to, with the aid of Anthony Gidden’s and Stuart Hall’s theories

on modernity and identity, discuss the process of changes initiated by modernity in

the societies of V. S. Naipaul’s three Trinidad novels in his writing career: namely,

The Mystic Masseur (1957), Miguel Street (1959), and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961).

My argument is that in these Trinidad novels, the process of modernization is

fragmenting the old and agrarian Trinidadian society, and therefore has caused rupture

and discontinuities in people’s life. This fragment is actually a pertinent chance for

both the protagonists and Naipaul to regain their genuine self and cultural identity by

escaping from the limiting environment.

In Chapter One, there is basic historical background information of Trinidad and

of V. S. Naipaul. I will list out some key concepts of Anthony Gidden’s ideas of

modernity, along with the ones of the importance of self-identity in a modern society.

Moreover, Stuart Hall’s concepts of modernity and identity will be presented as well.

Chapter Two, with some comparisons with The Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr.

Biswas, will mainly focus on Miguel Street and on the impact of modernity on it. The

institutional and economical changes caused by modernity lead to rupture and

discontinuity in people’s life, and consequently, force them to search for self-identity.

Chapter Three will move on to discussion of the self-identity formation of Mr. Biswas

v

in A House for Mr. Biswas. During his growth and struggle in Trinidad, he finally

gains his identity as an individual in a modern society. Moreover, his newly

established sense of cultural identity will be inherited by his son, Anand. Anand

serves an analogy to the boy narrator in Miguel Street whereas Ganesh in The Mystic

Masseur is seen as an antithesis to Mr. Biswas. At last, I will define Naipaul’s sense

of identity as a Trinidad-born writer.

Keywords: modernity, self-identity, cultural-identity, rupture, discontinuity, escape

vi

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Introduction…………………………………………………………..……………..1

Chapter Two

Modernity, Rupture and Discontinuity in Naipaul’s Trinidad Novels:

The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, and A House for Mr. Biswas………………..38

Chapter Three

Escape and Identity formation in Naipaul’s Trinidad Novels:

The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, and A House for Mr. Biswas……………......70

Chapter Four

Conclusion……………………………………….……………………………….106

Works Cited……………………………………………………………….....……...110

1

Chapter One

Introduction

Historical Background of Trinidad and V.S. Naipaul

Ever since discovered by Christopher Columbus on behalf of the Spanish crown

in 1492, the Caribbean, also known as the West Indies, has been a highly disputable

area. Colonized by different Western/European empires, even after the abolition of

slavery starting in 1850s, each country in the Caribbean has its own problems and

dilemma. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert calls this place “the site of the world’s first

multicultural experiment, the cradle of ethnic and cultural fusion, or syncretism” (1).

Having been respectively ruled by England, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, and

Denmark, each colony inherits different cultural heritage because every empire owns

its own language, culture, religion and institution. The colonial as well as multi-racial

background makes it difficult for those countries in the Caribbean to find either an

acceptable identity for their inhabitants or a consensus for their national development.

This identity problem is getting more serious as the Caribbean is undergoing the

process of modernization. This process is described by Anthony Giddens, in The

Consequences of Modernity (1990; henceforth, Consequences), as that of “being

aboard a careering juggernaut” which is assumed as dangerous and out of control

2

because of the dynamism in modernity (53). This risky process and uncertainty of

modernization make the future for these former colonies even more complex and

difficult to predict.

This thesis mainly focuses on Trinidad, an island in the Caribbean. It was

claimed by Spain in 1498, and later in 1797 came under the rule of the British; it

consequently “experienced the heyday of their sugar production” in the eighteenth

century (Paravisini-Gebert 7). The ethnic background of the Caribbean is also very

complex. Since the labor was needed on sugar plantations, the western empires

imported estimated millions of African slaves.1 But after the British’s declaration of

emancipation in 1838, the estates owners needed to “rely on imported Asian laborers,

mostly Chinese and Indian,” who arrived in the Antilles in large numbers in the

second half of the nineteenth century (Paravisini-Gebert 7).2 After ruled by the

British Empire for decades, Trinidad gained its independence on the 31 August, 1962

and became a republic in 1976, but remains a part of the Commonwealth of Nations.

Its two major ethnic groups predominate, including Afro-Creoles of African descent

and Indians of Asian descent, and they are of almost equal size (Premdas 25-6).

1 Paravisini-Gebert suggests that African slavery in the Caribbean, recorded since 1511, “at the very beginning of the conquest and colonization of the region, would not end completely until abolished in Cuba in 1886” (2).

2 These Chinese and Indian workers were indentured works. They brought new languages, cultures, and religious beliefs and practices to the amalgam of the region’s Creole religions (Paravisini-Gebert 7).

3

V.S. Naipaul belongs to the latter of the ethnic group. He was born into a Hindu

family of Brahmin descent in the village of Chaguanas, Trinidad, on August 17, 1932.

At the age of six, his family moved to the capital of Trinidad, Port of Spain. His

paternal grandfather had been an indentured laborer, lured or tricked into coming to

Trinidad from India to work on the sugarcane plantations. At that time, numerous East

Indian indentured workers came from India to replace the newly emancipated African

slaves. After the contract was expired, his grandfather, like most of the other Indian

workers, chose to stay in Trinidad. Naipaul’s father, Seepersad Naipaul, was a

remarkable man and lucky enough to receive some basic education though his family

was poor. Seepersad was married to Droapatie Capildeo, one of eleven children of an

influential and comparatively wealthy rural Hindu family, and spent most of his

subsequent life in a challenging struggle to escape dependence on his in-laws. He

eventually became a correspondent for the Trinidad Guardian in Port of Spain, and

nursed an ambition to become a real writer. This very ambition that he later heartily

transmitted to his son, and Seepersad influenced the younger Naipaul greatly.

Seepersad’s life was the model for the central character in Naipaul’s fourth novel, also

considered his masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961; henceforth, HMB).

As a writer, Naipaul was, from a very early age, aware of the social and political

4

tensions that existed between the Trinidadian society. The complex race, nationality,

religion, and traditions were issues that created deep fissures between the two groups

of Indo- and Afro Trinidadians. These conflicts prevented Naipaul from feeling

completely comfortable in the culture of his home island. The disconnection as an

Indo-Trinidadian “from the mainstream culture of his island” would follow Naipaul

throughout his life, and he is often described as “a wanderer never entirely

comfortable anywhere” (Paravisini-Gebert 160). This background has considerably

influenced Naipaul and his works as well. Naipaul attended Queen’s Royal College in

Port of Spain, and then won a scholarship to study at Oxford, from which he

graduated in 1953. After the graduation, he decided to live in England, and only

travelled back to Trinidad several times. Though Naipaul has spent most of his

lifetime in Britain, some of the most recurring themes in his early works are about the

life and people in Trinidad: their loss of identity, and their particular lifestyle resulted

from British colonization. Naipaul is seen as a gifted but also very controversial writer.

Some critics think he is “oddly misanthropic” and not always sympathetic, and “his

descriptions can be brutally honest and his judgments, more often than not, quite

harsh” (Paravisini-Gebert 160). This thesis aims to discuss his three early Trinidad

novels, The Mystic Masseur (1957), Miguel Street (1959), and A House for Mr. Bi

swas (1961), and compare the way how modernity has changed the life and identities

5

of the protagonists. My argument is that in these Trinidad novels, the process of

modernization is fragmenting the old and agrarian Trinidadian society, and this

devastation of society has caused rupture and discontinuities in people’s life. This is

actually a pertinent chance for both the protagonists and Naipaul to regain their self

and cultural identity by escaping from the limiting environment.

Plots of V.S. Naipaul’s Trinidad Novels

I. A House for Mr. Biswas

In A House for Mr. Biswas (1961; henceforth, HMB), the protagonist Mohun

Biswas was born at midnight, an ominous hour to Hindu Indians. His life is doomed

to be a tragedy. Assuming Mr. Biswas having been drowned in the pond, his father

dived to search for him, and instead drowned there. After that, Mr. Biswas starts an

almost lifelong journey drifting from house to house until he finally buys one for

himself and his family. However, the purchase of the house seems to mark the end of

his life, and his task of life thus completes. Mr. Biswas dies at the age of 46,

coinciding Seepersad’s untimely death. Throughout the novel, Mr. Biswas has the

sense of loss as well as the confusion of his life and of his existence. Not only does he

feel smothered and trapped by the family of his wife, Shama, but he longs for

6

fulfilling his dream to be a great writer. From time to time, he blames Shama and her

family, the Tulsis, for dragging him down to the void of life. He is, from time to time,

craving for freedom and new possibilities in life. Consequently, he tries to get loose

from the bond of Shama’s family, including Shama herself, whenever he gets a

chance. His most significant way of breaking loose from the Tulsi family is to get his

own house, a real secured residence for his own family, either through renting or

buying. These previous attempts all fail until he reaches forty-one years old when he

buys a house on Sikkam Street, and therefore gets into a huge debt. The process of his

struggle against the Tulsi family and to get his own independence is a progress of

searching for and establishing his own identity as an independent individual in this

world.

Mr. Biswas’s struggle for his own identity also influences his wife and children.

After moving into the house on Sikkam Street, Shama detaches herself from the

Tulsis to which she has been devoted for almost all her life. Moreover, his children

therefore have started a new life of their own, leaving behind the memories and life

with the Tulsis. Because of the loss of his father, Mr. Biswas has spent his lifetime

searching for a sense of belonging and identity. Things that his father fails to pass on

to him have cast him into a void. Though feeing repressed and restrained by his

7

marriage, Biswas does not run away from his responsibilities as a father. With this

house, he offers his children this sense of safety, and they can initiate a different and

profounder stage of searching for their identities. Anand, Mr. Biswas’s only son,

represents this further searching of a national and cultural identity which needs a solid

base. Anand has a unique father who Mr. Biswas never has the chance to have, so that

he is, in some sense, more secured than Mr. Biswas. He goes abroad for an advanced

study, and suffers from existential and cultural-identity crises.

II. The Mystic Masseur

Similar to Mr. Biswas, Ganesh Ramsumair in The Mystic Masseur (1957

henceforth, MM) also takes pains to establish himself as an important figure in

Trinidad. Both Ganesh and Mr. Biswas gain nearly no essential help and aid from

their biological families in their childhood or in their careers. One of the differences is

that Ganesh is much luckier than Mr. Biswas during his struggle. With a limited

education and training that he gets in adolescence, as well as with sheer luck, he

gradually makes himself a respectful pundit, and in the end a household name. His

reputation helps him become a prominent political leader. Similar to Mr. Biswas,

Ganesh also faces a lot of bitterness when he is poor and unimportant, but he is

fortunate enough to be very successful toward almost every step he moves except the

8

last one which leads his retirement from public life. Ganesh is neither controlled nor

repressed by his in-laws. As moving up in the society, he is also much surer of

himself. Ganesh’s identity formation seems to be easier and less painful than Mr.

Biswas’s. But his courage in fighting against vicissitudes in life is much weaker than

that of the latter.

III. Miguel Street

Miguel Street (1959, henceforth, MS) comprises of seventeen short stories,

viewed as a “collection of vignettes of urban life in Port of Spain,” each depicting a

very remarkable and flamboyant character living on a street which resembles the

name of the book title (Paravisini-Gebert 160). The narrator (also the protagonist) is a

boy who seems to be very pre-mature and shrewd to be friends with the adults

(mainly male) on Miguel Street. Through the interaction with and depiction of the

seventeen characters, the thoughts and character of the narrator are revealed to us.

Readers witness his growing through questions and confusions that he expresses in

these stories. Similar to Mr. Biswas, the boy narrator is also a fatherless child, and

gets very confused about his life when Hat, who serves as a father figure to him, goes

to prison. Hat’s imprisonment marks not only the closure of his carefree childhood but

also his initiation of identity searching and formation in his own life. This also has the

9

significance of showing his independence from his social milieu. At the end of the

novel, this young narrator lets his mother bribe pundit Ganesh to win a scholarship

and goes to England—a very different ending from the two novels mentioned above.

He leaves for England, Ganesh retires, and Mr. Biswas dies. It seems that there are

more possibilities for him in the world outside Trinidad whereas the end of the novels

represents an end to both Ganesh and Mr. Biswas.

Literature Review

V.S. Naipaul is undoubtedly regarded as a talented writer whereas his works also

arouse the polarity of criticism—some praise his works fully of images and meanings

whereas the others think his works are speaking for the neo-colonialism. Anthony

Boxill thinks Naipaul has “written courageously and honestly about his society” and

his talent is “completely original” (9). Naipaul attacks the imperialists’ flabby devil of

greed and “castigates the Western countries for cold-bloodedly exploiting their

colonies and former colonies” because they are small, poor, and therefore vulnerable

(Boxill 35). However, there are others holding a totally opposite opinion of Naipaul’s

writing; George Lamming, for example, once describes Naipaul, “with the diabolical

help of Oxford University, has done a thorough job of wiping [the West-Indian

10

peasant sensibility] out of his guts” (225).3 M. Keith Booker thinks that Naipaul’s

depiction of colonial Trinidad as “a land of backwardness and futility” and this style

lays the foundation of colonial for a negative depiction of the Third World for which

Naipaul’s writing would eventually become infamous (148).

A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) is seen as Naipaul’s most acclaimed work.

Amar Nath Prasad claims this is a beautiful work, dealing with “the theme of isolation,

frustration and negation in a colonized society,” and this society turns cruel and

callous to the aspiration of the protagonist, Mr. Mohan Biswas (1). The book also

embodies issues of “a quest for identity” and “the clash of cultures" between the old

and the new in a multi racial society (Prasad 1). Prasad emphasizes the theme of

identity search, suggesting Naipaul has to go through difficulties in order to “assert

his identity in a disinherited tradition” (2). He believes Naipaul’s anger and anguish

come from his sense of cultural disinheritance, and that Naipaul transforms his inner

anxiety into his novels which become a sustaining course for all those who are

rootless or homeless (2). Robert D. Hamner also thinks the house is “Symbolic of Mr.

Biswas’s desire to establish his own identity” (360). Mr. Biswas wishes to build a

house not only for himself but also for his family since living with his in-laws allows

3 Naipaul’s father anticipated “the reactions of many West-Indian critics who object strongly when they feel that a writer has “let down his group” by describing an ugly side of West-Indian life” (Boxill 10).This is the very antagonism that some critics hold toward V.S. Naipaul.

11

him no freedom or independence.

Satish Barbuddhe shares similar ideas with Prasad on the theme of searching for

self-identity, suggesting that Mr. Biswas’s house is a symbol of order and identity

(15). In contrast, the House of the Tulsis represents “typical joint which functions on

the same principles as those of the British Empire in the West Indies” (12). The Tulsis

rule in a hierarchical way, with Mrs. Tulsi, Seth and her two sons on the top, and the

rest of the family members are given food, clothing and shelter but not freedom in

personal matters. Their situation is similar to that of slaves. During the whole novel,

the two houses of the Tulsis’ and of Biswas’s (either the final complete one or the

other unfinished ones) are tugging against each other, and between them Mr. Biswas

constantly swings until the last house he acquires. This process is extremely

unpleasant and full of conflicts. And this darkness is not rare in Naipaul’s work. Louis

Simpson describes the view of Naipaul’s works as “pessimistic” (571).

In addition to identity, escape and exile are also considered recurring themes in

Naipaul’s novels. Robert D. Hamner explains the relation between the Tulsis and Mr.

Biswas is “sociological implication for colonial dependency” (360). Hamner says Mr.

Biswas escapes his mother’s shanty by marrying into a powerful family, only to find

that he is allowed no room for personal growth (360). Therefore, Mr. Biswas has to

12

escape from the Tulsi family for his own freedom. This theme of escape reenacts in

both Naipaul’s life and his novels.4 In his other novels, we can also see the

protagonists trying to escape the unsatisfactory social status and environment. Louis

Simpon considers that in The Mystic Masseur (1957), “Naipaul was reenacting his

own escape by way of an education” for Ganesh; as an East Indian of lower caste,

Ganesh “set[s] himself up as a Brahmin pundit” with the help of his limited education

(574). To Naipaul, going to Queen's Royal College was his first escape from the

disorder of his family and the outside chaotic Trinidadian world, and writing was his

second; in his novels, most of the characters are struggling to escape (Simpon 574-6).

Getting an education in Trinidad is not the only method of escaping. Leaving the

society for good is also one of the ways to cut loose from it. After graduating from

Oxford, Naipaul was afraid of going back to Trinidad because of the fears of

anonymity so that he would not return physically; instead, he started writing, and

Miguel Street (1959) was the immediate result (Hamner 357). Naipaul applies this

escape to Miguel Street. As the boy narrator finally leaves Trinidad for England to get

an education, he is also escaping from Miguel Street and fromTrinidad.

4 Simpson asserts that “Naipaul has chosen to live in England where people leave you alone and you need have no loyalty except to persons. In this neutral environment he is able to write novels that reenact his escape from disorder and his father's struggle to escape. The novels tell us how corrupt and violent life can be, and that it is necessary to fly from others in order to preserve all that is “good and pure” within oneself” (577).

13

The story in Miguel Street ends with its young narrator leaving for England,

never looking back. Naipaul is similar to the narrator, not physically going back but

cast his “return glance at the island” (Hamner 359). However, this escaping is not

leaving things behind. On the contrary, as Anothny Boxill argues, escaping from

Trinidad does not mean the boy in Miguel Street finds it impossible to recapture his

innocence. Quite to the opposite, it is by remembering and reliving his boyhood in

Miguel Street that he recaptures, as he writes, the innocence which made it possible

for him to accept and respect the dignity of all living things (27).5 There is a narrative

strategy of Miguel Street that responds to a split between the author’s “Trinidad, and

English culture selves.” This split of cultural selves is being answered by double

perspectives—one is from the perspective of the boy narrator in Miguel Street and the

other is from the author who is now living in England. Through Naipaul’s writing, he

is “reentering, reconstructing and revising the world [of Trinidad]” from the world

outside. In short, with the split in cultural selves, he can write from “the double

perspective of exile” (Weiss 23-4).

The styles in The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, and A House for Mr. Biswas

5 Lillian Feder observes that “[u]niting the ‘personal historian,’ remembering, traveling, observing, with the reporter and storyteller, [Naipaul] has forged his own method of exposing what is withheld in the very act of telling as his narrators and characters reveal more of their truth than they can bear to acknowledge (162).

14

are all seen as comic by Lillan Feder. She does not consider they are comedies, but

they all contain elements like “comic action” and “comic dialogue” (163-73). Many

critics do not deny the tone in Naipaul’s works is usually “comic—at times highly

satiric” (Hamner 358-9). Amar Nath Prasad also describes Mr. Biswas has “fiercely

sardonic humor” especially when giving nicknames to the Tulsi family members

(590). The Mystic Masseur is ranked as “a lighthearted satire of a country healer or

masseur” and the novel is in “the mock-heroic mode, written in a grandiose style”

(Paravisini-Gebert 160). Being ironic and comic is a way for Naipaul to express the

truth in these novels even when the truth can be cruel and heavy.

Theoretical Framework

I. Modernity

In this thesis, the concept “modernity” is mainly based on Anthony Giddens’s

The Consequences of Modernity (1990; henceforth, Consequences). According to

Giddens, “‘modernity’ refers to modes of social life or organization which emerged in

Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became

more or less worldwide in their influence. This associates modernity with a time

period and with an initial geographical location (Consequences I). Therefore,

15

modernity that he asserts is mainly a European phenomenon. The stance that Giddens

takes on modernity is “a ‘discontinuist’ interpretation of modern social development.

[. . .] modern social institutions are in some respects unique—distinct in form from all

types of traditional order” (3). The discontinuities Giddens emphasizes are ones

associated with the modern period, instead of those at other various phases of

historical development and of those “at the points of transition between tribal societies

and the emergence of agrarian states” (4). He further defines modernity,

The modes of life brought into being by modernity have swept us

away from all traditional types of social order, in quite

unprecedented fashion. In both their extensionality and intentionality

the transformations involved in modernity are more profound than

most sorts of change characteristic of prior periods. On the

extensional plane they have served to establish forms of social

interconnection which span the globe; in intensional terms they have

come to alter some of the most intimate and personal features of our

day-to-day existence. Obviously there are continuities between the

traditional and the modern, [. . .]; it is well known how misleading it

can be to contrast these two in too gross a fashion. But the changes

16

occurring over the past three or four centuries [. . .] have been so

dramatic and so comprehensive in their impact that we get only

limited assistance from our knowledge of prior periods of transition

in trying to interpret them. (Consequences 4-5)

So Giddens believes the impact of modernity is overwhelming and encompassing.

Since the social changes are unprecedented, they inevitably cause discontinuity in the

connections between older and modern societies. Discontinuities and changes do not

only occur in extensional plane of our daily life. Modernity, to almost every modern

individual, also has changed the personal connections and intimacy. Moreover, there

have been no proper interpretations on this phenomenon because, with limited

knowledge of the social transformations, we still do now know where modernity will

lead us to.

Giddens further suggests that there are some features of discontinuities which

separate modern social institutions from the traditional social orders: One “is the sheer

pace of change which the era of modernity sets into motion;” the second is “the scope

of change;” and the third feature of discontinuity is “the intrinsic nature of modern

institutions” (Consequences 6). It is not difficult to tell that a modern society is

considered more fast-paced than traditional ones. As for the scale of the influence of

17

modernity, which we all can see, starting from Europe, then spreading to the rest of

the world; it has caused many large-scale changes to the globe. Moreover, many

modern social forms and concepts are only found in modern societies, such as

nation-state, production upon inanimate power sources and etc. The emergence of

these social institutions or forms has altered most people’s lives so that their ideas of

being an individual in the modern society have also changed.

People today can see that modernity is “a double-edged phenomenon”

(Consequences 7). Modernity grants people a wealthier and more sufficient life in

terms of material world whereas this world in which we live today is also a “fraught

and dangerous one” (10). Therefore, Giddens warns us that it is wrong to assume that

the emergence of modernity would lead to the formation of a happier and more secure

social order. He thinks, quite to the contrary, the disillusion of modernity can lead to

“loss of a belief in progress,” and this sense of loss is also “one of the factors that

underlie the dissolution of ‘narratives’ of history”. He, consequently, believes that we

have to develop an “institutional analysis of the double-edged character of modernity”

(10). It is too optimistic for people to assume that modernity is all promising and

hopeful.

II. Sociology and Modernity

18

In his book, Giddens implies that the institutional diagnosis of modernity stems

from the writings of Marx, Durkheim and Weber. To Marx, the major transformative

force shaping the modern world is capitalism. [. . .] The emergent social order of

modernity is capitalistic in both its economic system and its other institutions

(Consequences 11). Marx’s most influential concept is that human labor power

becomes commodified.6 And Marx’s view on economical production is employed by

Giddens in The Consequences on Modernity. But economical production only plays a

part in the formation of modernity. From Gididens’s point of view, capitalism or

industrialization, whether being rational or irrational, plays the keynote in modernity,

and it has helped shape the modern world.

Another key concept in modernity is “society.” But, what is a society? Giddens

offers two categories: Society is “an ambiguous notion, referring both to ‘social

association’ in a generic way and to a distinct system of social relations”

(Consequences 12-3). Here he is more concerned only with the second of the

definitions. Moreover, societies defined nowadays in sociology are plainly

6 But Durkheim holds a different view that “capitalistic competition is not the central element of the emerging industrial order”, and that some of the characteristics upon which Marx laid great stress are “marginal and transitory.” Durkheim lays more emphasis on the “energising impulse of a complex division of labour, harnessing production to human needs through the industrial exploitation of nature”. He asserts, “We live, not in a capitalist, but in an industrial order”. As for Weber, he uses the term “[r]ational capitalism” to characterize capitalism, and this concept also includes the commodification of wage labour. Yet Weber’s idea of capitalism is different from that in Marx's writings. Weber puts in a lot of effort on the importance of the concept of rationalization. In Weber’s system, “‘Rationalisation,’ as expressed in technology and in the organisation of human activities, in the shape of bureaucracy, is the keynote’ (Consequences 12).

19

“nation-states.” A nation-state is a newly formed institute, emerging with the

formation of modernity. Giddens specifies that the nation-state is a type of social

community which contrasts “in a radical way with pre-modern states” (13). Giddens

here considers that society is a distinct system of social relations, instead of a

narrowly-defined political body. He aims to discuss how modernity has changed or

influenced the way how these social relations function.

The three dominant sources of the dynamism in modernity that Giddens aims to

discuss are connected with one and the other: the first is “The separation of time and

space;” the second is “The development of disembedding mechanisms” and the third

feature is “The reflexive appropriation of knowledge” (Consequences 53). The

separation of time and space means “the condition of time-space distanciation of

indefinite scope,” so that it provides means of “precise temporal and spatial zoning.”

The development of disembedding mechanisms refers the lifting out social activity

from “localised contexts, reorganising social relations across large time-space

distances.” As for the reflexive appropriation of knowledge, it means that “the

production of systematic knowledge about social life” and therefore it becomes

integral to system reproduction, rolling social life away from the fixities of tradition

(53). The following paragraphs will be a more thorough explanation of these features.

20

III. Modernity, Time, and Space

Giddens believes that there are intimate connection between modernity and the

transformation of time and space. The time-space relation in the pre-modern world

“possessed modes of the calculation of time” (Consequences 17). Take the calendar

for example, it was a distinctive feature of agrarian states and people’s daily life relied

on it. This time reckoning model always linked time with place and “was usually

imprecise and variable. [. . .] No one could tell the time of day without reference to

other socio-spatial markers: ‘when’ was almost universally either connected with

‘where’ or identified by regular natural occurrences” (17). The older way of observing

the passing of the time was neither very precise nor detailed; and it was usually

related to and concerned with natural phenomena, like the moon, harvest or four

seasons. The invention of the mechanical clock is considered to have great

significance in the separation of time from space, which took place in the late

eighteenth century. This represents “a uniform dimension of ‘empty’ time,” and

permits the precise designation of “‘zones’ of the day (e.g., the ‘working day’)” (17).

This uniformity of time measurement by the mechanical clock was not completed

until 20th century. Nowadays, people across the world all follow the same dating

system. This is a “standardising of time across regions” and plays an important part in

21

modern society (17-8). And this standardizing of time causes the “emptying of time,”

which is in large part of the precondition for the “emptying of space.” The

coordination across time is the basis of the control of space. This empty of time means

“separation of pace from time” because in pre-modern societies, space and place

largely coincided. Many spatial dimensions of social life were, for most of the people,

“dominated by ‘presence’ by localised activities.” But the advent of modernity

gradually and increasingly tears space from place by “fostering relations between

‘absent’ others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face

interaction.” Thus, place becomes increasingly “phantasmagoric” in conditions of

modernity (Consequences 18-9).

With the development in technology, time and space do not have to be closely

interlaced. This separation of time from space provides a basis for their recombination

in relation to social activities. One example is the timetable, like a schedule of the

times at which trains run. This timetable makes it possible for a complex coordination

of trains and passengers across large scale of time-space (Consequences 20). People at

different locales can show up at different stations according to the schedule, and catch

the train on time. Moreover, this distancation of time and space makes other social

activities possible and more convenient to carry out; and thus, it becomes the basis of

22

the following features in Giddens’ theory.

IV. Disembedding

The separation of time and space is crucial to the extreme dynamism of

modernity because this separation is the “prime condition of the processes of

disembedding” (Consequences 20). Disembedding refers to a condition in which

institutions and social relations are no longer so fixed and predictable as they used to

be.7 The standardized time measurement has freed social connections from place.

Time, events and locales are no longer rigidly bounded together. Therefore,

disembedding is enhanced by distanciation of time-and-space; consequently, it begets

flexible and freer social activities as well as more dynamic societies, which are

considered specific features in modern days.

After the discussion of the disembedding of time and space, Giddens further

moves on to the disembedding of social systems” (Consequences 21).8 He

7 The separating of time and space and their formation into standardised, “empty” dimensions cut through the connections between social activity and its “embedding” in the particularities of contexts of presence. Disembedded institutions greatly extend the scope of time-space distanciation [. . .] This phenomenon serves to open up manifold possibilities of change by breaking free from the restraints of local habits and practices. [. . .] Modern organisations are able to connect the local and the global in ways which would have been unthinkable in more traditional societies [. . .]. (Consequences 20-1)

8 To Giddens, it is problematic that some sociologists used the concepts of “‘differentiation’ or ‘functional specialisation’” to discuss the transition from the traditional to the modern world, since these terms give no attention to the “‘boundary problem’ in the analysis of societal systems,” quite often they solely depend upon “functionalist notions”, and also fail to address the “the issue of time-space distanciation.

23

distinguishes two types of disembedding mechanisms intrinsically involved in the

development of modern social institutions: the first is the creation of symbolic tokens,

and the second is the establishment of expert systems. The symbolic tokens here refer

to “the media of interchange which can be ‘passed around’ without regard to the

specific characteristics of individuals or groups that handle them at any particular

juncture” (21). Giddens here concentrates upon “the token of money”. Money

intensifies time-space distanciation because it “provides for the enactment of

transactions between agents widely separated in time and space” (21-4). With money,

individual can perform economical activities without being limited to certain locales.

As Georg Simmel points out, money enhance “self-mobility” and it bridges distances

to enable “the owner and his possessions to exist so far apart that each of them may

follow their own precepts to a greater extent” (332-3). Simmel suggests the

self-mobility that money helps thrive and this mobility makes economical productions

and activities flexible, too.

Simmel’s words explain how money disembeds economical activities from time

and space. One of the most characteristic forms of disembedding in the modern period,

for instance, is the expansion of capitalistic markets, which are from relatively early

on international in scope. Another important concept in Simmel’s system is “money

24

proper.” It is “an inherent part of modern social life as well as a specific type of

symbolic token and is also fundamental to the disembedding of modern economic

activity generally. One of the most characteristic forms of disembedding in the

modern period, for instance, is the expansion of capitalistic markets (including money

markets). Expansion of the markets is essential to the nature of property ownership

and alienability in modern economic activity. However, money would not be of any

importance and function without trust. Giddens reminds us that “trust is involved in

fundamental way with the institutions of modernity.” For instance, people who use

money in fact have “public confidence in the issuing government.” In short, trust is

also a “faith” in things rather than just a cognitive understanding in them (26-7).

Without trust, money will lose it power and will not be able to disembed the

economical activity from the locale.

In addition to money (symbolic tokens), expert systems also depend upon trust.

By expert systems Giddens means systems of technical accomplishment or

professional expertise that organize large areas of the material and social

environments in which we live today (Consequences 27). The systems here are related

to almost every aspect of our lives in a continuous way, from cars to houses in which

we’re living. In most cases, we know very little about these things, but still believe

25

that they can function well; that is how trust is needed in terms of expert system.

Expert systems are also disembedding mechanisms because they “remove social

relations from the immediacies of context.” Like symbolic tokens, expert system also

provides “‘guarantees’ of expectations across distanciated time-space.” It is achieved

“via the impersonal nature of tests applied to evaluate technical knowledge and by

public critique (upon which the production of technical knowledge is based), used to

control its form” (28). Therefore, trust also reinforces time-space distanciation

because it encourages disembeddedness in both economical and expert systems as

well.

V. Trust

The main definition of trust in Oxford English Dictionary means “to believe in

the reliability, truth or ability of, to have confidence to allow someone to have, use, or

look after,” and to accept “the truth of a statement without evidence or investigation”

(1549). Giddens suggests that “confidence and reliance” are clearly somehow bound

up with that “faith” (Consequences 30). According to Niklas Luhmann, though trust

and confidence are closely allied, “[T]rust should be understood specifically in

relation to risk, a term which only comes into being in the modern period” (qtd.

Consequences 30). The notion of risk means the unanticipated results from our

26

decisions or activities, rather than “expressing hidden meanings of nature or ineffable

intentions of the Deity” (30). Trust presupposes awareness of circumstances of risk,

whereas confidence does not. Trust and confidence both refer to expectations which

can be frustrated or cast down. However, confidence refers to a more or less

taken-for-granted attitude that familiar things will remain stable. If a person is

confident, he is certain that his expectations will not be disappointed. Living in this

modern world, a person needs to learn how to neglect things or contingents of very

rare possibilities. This is the confidence that an individual needs to acquire in order to

live with ease. In other words, if an individual consciously has alternatives in mind

upon deciding to follow a particular course of actions, which means this individual

performs an act of trust. In contrast, if the alternatives are not considered by an

individual, that is in a situation of confidence. Furthermore, Luhmann asserts that the

notion of risk is relatively recent in origin so that the idea of separating risk and

danger must derive from social characteristics of modernity. Risk and danger are from

contingencies, and most of which are “humanly created, rather than merely given by

God or nature” (32).9

Giddens thinks Luhmann's approach can help clarify a number of conceptual

9 Fortuna (fortune or fate) refers to disasters made by God or nature (Consequences 30). In contrast to fortune, risk is about man-made predicaments.

27

discriminations when it comes to understanding trust. Yet he does not think the

latter’s definition is satisfactory, “if you refrain from action you run no risk— in other

words, nothing ventured, nothing (potentially) lost” (Consequences 32). While

Luhmann thinks inaction will elicit no risk, however, Giddens argues, “Inaction is

often risky,” and he believes that there are some risks which we all have to face

whether we like it or not, such as the risks of “ecological catastrophe or nuclear war”

(32). To consolidate the concept of trust, he makes a list of some elements in regard to

trust.

The first element is that “Trust is related to absence in time and in space”

(Consequences 33). Giddens thinks if anyone’s activities are visible and thought are

transparent, there would be no trust to be involved; the prime condition of

requirements for trust is not lack of power “but lack of full information” (33). People

have weak knowledge of what they are involved in. The second is “Trust is basically

bound up, not with risk, but with contingency” (33). Despite contingent outcomes,

trust always carries the connotation of reliability, whether these concern the actions of

individuals or the operation of systems. In the case of trust in human agents, the

presumption of reliability involves the attribution of “‘probity’ (honour) or love.” So

trust in persons is usually “psychologically consequential for the individual who trusts:

28

a moral hostage to fortune is given” (33). Therefore, judging from Giddens’s words, it

is inevitably involved with risks in human relationships when we offer trust. The third

is “Trust is not the same as faith in the reliability of a person or system; it is what

derives from that faith.” Giddens believes that “Trust is precisely the link between

faith and confidence.” He thinks confidence is based upon some sort of mastery of the

circumstance, but trust is not. “All trust is in a certain sense blind trust!” (33)

The next point is that we can speak of trust in symbolic tokens or expert systems,

but this rests upon faith in the correctness of principles of which one is ignorant, not

upon “faith in the ‘moral uprightness’ (good intentions) of others” (Consequences

33-4). This trust in symbolic tokens and expert systems is based on the presumption

of the reliability of principles and knowledge that one does not fully understand, but

not on the trust on any individual. Moreover, trust exists in the general awareness that

human activity is socially created, rather than “given in the nature of things or by

divine influence.” The next element of trust is “Risk and trust intertwine,” trust

normally serving to reduce or minimize the dangers to which particular types of

activity are subject (34). Normally risk is consciously calculated and acceptable risk

varies in different context. This is usually central in sustaining trust. The example is

that the demonstrated statistics of low deaths in crashes to elicit trust in traveling by

29

aircrafts. The last point is that “Risk is not just a matter of individual action.” We

have to face “environments of risk that collectively affect large masses of individuals,”

such as the risk of ecological disaster or nuclear war (35).

VI. The Reflexivity of Modernity

Giddens then moves on to discuss the reflexivity of knowledge in modern society.

The formation of knowledge is of great significance in modern days. Since modernity

is a sharp contrast with tradition, he starts by discussing the formation of tradition.

Giddens believes we can find combinations of the modern and the traditional in many

concrete social settings. In traditional cultures, the past is honored and symbols are

valued because they contain and perpetuate the experience of generations. But

tradition is not wholly static because it has to be reinvented by each new generation as

it takes over its cultural inheritance from those preceding it. Giddens suggests that the

invention of writing expands the level of time-space distanciation and creates a

perspective of past, present, and future in which “the reflexive appropriation of

knowledge can be set off from designated tradition” (Consequences 37). But he

believes that pre-modern civilizations reflexivity is still largely limited to the

reinterpretation and clarification of tradition (36-7). Therefore, tradition still plays a

key role in modernized society, “tradition in sham clothing and receives its identity

30

only from the reflexivity of the modern” (38). The reflexivity of modern social life

consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in

terms of incoming information about those very practices; thus these practices are

altering their character accordingly. He emphasizes that in most cultures, social

practices are routinely altered and fused new discoveries into the cultures. But only in

modern era is the revision of convention more radicalized “to apply (in principle) to

all aspects of human life, including technological intervention into the material world”

(38). But Giddens warns us that the reflexivity of modernity is not always rational; it

“actually subverts reason, [. . .] where reason is understood as the gaining of certain

knowledge. Modernity is constituted in and through reflexively applied knowledge,

but the equation of knowledge with certitude has turned out to be misconceived” (39).

We cannot be sure that the knowledge applied today will not be revised. No

knowledge in sciences, either in social or natural, is certain, and neither can be the

knowledge in social science. The attitude that people should hold, Giddens believes,

is that we should bear in mind that knowledge in modern societies is not fixed. Rather,

it changes with time. We should be aware that a lot of knowledge formation should be

a reflexive process, and should be open to modification. Since this concept of

reflexivity of knowledge is not emphasized in this thesis. We will leave it here and

moves on to the next main idea—identity.

31

VII. Identity

After analyzing the changes caused by modernity in social structures, Giddens

moves on to discuss this impact on the individual in his Modernity and Self-Identity

(1991; henceforth, Modernity) He suggests modernity has aroused some existential

questions and these questions lead to anxiety. Giddens further divides the existential

questions into four types: namely, “existence itself,” “ human life,” “the existence of

other persons,” and “self-identity” (Modernity 48-50). The first category refers the

daily life reality from which one can find the evidence of his/her own existence, such

as doing everyday activities and from interactions with other people. One has to make

sure of his/her own existence with the reference from the external material world. The

second question is about the finitude of human life; in short, the death. Giddens

believes that we learn the anxiety of death from “subjective death”—death from other

people around us (49). And this anxiety of finitude is “utterly fundamental” (50).

Third, the “the problem of the other” concerns the “the inherent connections which

exist between learning the characteristics of other persons and the other major axes of

ontological security” (51). By this Giddens means the interactions with and responses

from the important/familiar others help consolidate one’s sense of security. The last

question, self-identity, according to Giddens, presumes “reflexive consciousness,” and

32

is something that has to be “routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities

of the individual” (52). Therefore, self-identity is an ongoing journey without a

destination. Stuart Hall, in Modernity and Its Futures (1995; henceforth, Futures)

also considers the impact that modernity has caused on identity. He believes

modernity has changed the concept of identity which is stabilized ever since the

eighteenth century. But features in modernity foster new identities which are

fragmenting the individual “as a unified subject” (Futures 274). Hall thinks this is

“crisis of identity” and this change in identity formation is “dislocating the central

structures and processes of modern societies and undermining the frameworks which

gave individuals stable anchorage in the social world” (274).

Stuart Hall first distinguishes three concepts of identities: (a) Enlightenment

subject (b) sociological subject (c) post-modern subject. The Enlightenment subject

was based upon a presumption of the human person as a “fully centred, unified

individual, endowed with the capacities of reason, consciousness and action.” The

Enlightenment subject was a rational person and his (at that time the subject was

usually described as male) center consisted of an inner core which emerged when the

subject was born. This inner core remained “essentially the same—continuous or

‘identical’ with itself—throughout the individual’s existence. The essential centre of

33

the self was a person’s identity.” Therefore, we can discern that the Enlightenment

subject was assumed to own a very stable center of his identity, and it did not change

much throughout his own life. The identity was rather fixed (Futures 275).

The sociological subject reflected the growing awareness the inner core of the

subject was not “autonomous and self-sufficient,” and this awareness also reflected

the growing complexity of the modern world. The sociological subject had to be

formed in relation to “‘significant others’, who mediated to the subject the values,

meanings and symbols —the culture—of the worlds he/she inhabited” (Futures 275).

An individual does not form self-identity from nothing. Self-identity is formed

through the “interactive conception of identity of the self,” which means that identity

is formed “in the ‘interaction’ between self and society” (276). The subject still has an

inner core or essence that is “the real me,” but this is constituted and modified in a

continuous dialogue with the culture worlds “outside” and with the identities which

they offer. And this view has become the classic sociological conception of the

identity formation. They think the identity bridges the gap between the “inside” and

the “outside”—between the personal and the public worlds (Futures 276). In short, we

project ourselves to the cultural identities, and meanwhile, we internalize their

meanings and values, making them part of us. Identity “sutures” the subject into the

34

social structure; it stabilizes both subjects and the cultural worlds, making both “more

unified and predictable” (276).

But this concept of classic sociological identity has also been contested because

people have realized that identities are “shifting” and becoming “fragmented;” not

composed of a single, but of several, sometimes contradictory or unresolved,

identities (Futures 276-7). The identities which used to be viewed as unified and

stable are “breaking up as a result of structural and institutional change” (277). Since

there is no fixed, stabilized identity, Hall asserts that the process of identification,

through which we “project ourselves into our cultural identities, has become more

open-ended, variable and problematic” (277). The post-modern subject is formed

from this point of view. A post-modern subject has no fixed, essential or permanent

identity. Shifting identities are affected by the change of modern societies which are

changing constantly, rapidly and permanently. Hall accepts Giddens’s view that

traditional societies were more stable and slow in changes whereas the modern ones

are changing swiftly. These changes in social organizations, structures and lifestyles

resulted in “discontinuities” (278). David Harvey also speaks of modernity as “a

ruthless break with any or all preceding conditions,” and as “characterized by a

never-ending process of internal ruptures and fragmenting within itself” (12). Modern

35

societies are no longer unified and well-bounded ones. They are constantly being

“de-centred” or “dislocated by forces outside [themselves]” (Futures 278).

Stuart Hall concerns more than self-identity in the modern world. Starting from

evolution of self identity from a traditional to a modern society, Stuart Hall then

moves on to the question of how the fragmented subject is placed “in terms of its

cultural identities” (Futures 291). He suggests that “In the modern world, the national

cultures into which we are born are one of the principal sources of cultural identities”

(291). He thinks we do believe our cultural identities are one part of our essential

natures. We need to identify with something greater—“as a member a society, group,

class, state or nation” when we exist as an autonomous being. Ernest Gellner also

believes that “without a sense of national identification the modern subject would

experience a deep sense of subjective loss” (6). Therefore, a modern individual needs

to own national and cultural identities which are formed and transformed within and

in relation to representation (Futures 292). Hall observes that a nation is more than

just a political entity but also something that produces means—“a system of cultural

representation” (292). A nation is a symbolic community and this accounts for its

power to generate a sense of identity and allegiance.

36

The formation of a national culture and identity requires some elements: general

standards of universal legacy, generalization of a single vernacular language as a

dominant medium of communication in the nation, a homogeneous dominant culture

and maintained cultural institutions, such as a national educational system (Futures

292). These elements all help build symbols and representation of a nation. Stuart

Hall puts in a lot of effort analyzing the process of national culture formation, and

furthermore, how independent countries like those in the Caribbean should see

themselves as a country. How they can form a consensus as a nation, in spite of their

various ethnical backgrounds. Still this is a reflexive process. Naipaul’s writing, by

refusing to take sides with either Trinidad or Britain, represents a different perspective

in creating the cultural identities.

There are four chapters in this thesis. Chapter One contains three sections: the

first is an introduction to the historical background of Trinidad and of Naipaul; the

second section includes plots and literature review of Naipaul’s three Trinidad novels.

The last section of Chapter one is the theoretical framework of Anthony Gidden’s and

Stuart Hall’s theories on modernity and identity. Chapter Two focuses on Miguel

Street. In this chapter, I want to argue that modernity has changed the Trinidad

drastically so that people’s lives have been ruptured from the past traditional agrarian

37

past. Therefore, they have to find a new identity to position themselves in the modern

world. Chapter Three aims to discuss the self-identity searching process in A House

for Mr. Biswas. The argument is that Mr. Biswas while searching for his own house

and resisting the imposition from the Tulsis, he is gradually establishing his

self-identity and cultural/national-identity. But the latter is not yet accomplished by

the time of his death. This cultural/national-identity has been passed on to his

son—Anand, who goes to England for advanced study and establishment of himself

as an independent individual. Chapter Four is the conclusion.

38

Chapter Two

Modernity, Rupture and Discontinuity in Naipaul’s Trinidad Novels:

The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, and A House for Mr. Biswas

In The Consequences of Modernity, Anthony Giddens suggests that modernity

“refers to modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about

the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently become more or less

worldwide in their influence” (1). According to him, this modern social development

is “discontinuist” because “modern social institutions are in some respects

unique—distinct in form from all types of traditional order” (3). What he refers to is

that, under the influence of modernity, social institutions have transformed, and thus

are no longer the same as the traditional ones. Giddens holds the attitude that

modernity initiated from the western societies and then is spread to the rest of the

world. Giddens, Guiminder K. Bhambra, in Rethinking Modernity (2007), points out

that a most-wildly accepted definition of modernity rests on two fundamental

assumptions: “rupture and difference” though he has a different opinion of explaining

the origin of modernity (1). Bhambra suggests that “a temporal rupture [. . .]

distinguishes a traditional, agrarian past from the modern, industrial present; and a

fundamental difference [. . .] distinguishes Europe from the rest of the world” (1).

39

Both Giddens and Bhambra agree that modernity hence has distinguished Europe

from the rest of the world; consequently, with political and economical power brought

around by modernity, Europe has changed the rest of the world, especially its colonies.

Colonies ruled by the empires have undergone the process of modernity, but at a

costly price. Each colony has its own dilemma, and the Caribbean, compared with

other European colonies, unfortunately, faces the most complex situation. Even all

belonging to the Caribbean, each country has its own unique social and population

composition so that each has its respective difficulties when establishing itself as an

independent modern nation-state. Naipaul’s three early Caribbean fictions, Miguel

Street (1959), The House for Mr. Biswas (1961) and The Mystic Masseur (1957),

reflect how the changes, imposed during the process of being modernized, have

greatly affected the lives of these protagonists and the society, namely, Trinidad.

Changes in the lives of these fictional characters synchronize with the development of

modernity; and their successes, even if temporal, are enhanced by it as well. However,

Naipaul’s novels also reveal a problem: though thriving in economical and material

life, people in Trinidad, inevitably have to confront a difficulty derived from

modernity—the problem of forming identity: both as a country and as an individual.

This chapter will mainly focus on Miguel Street while making some references to the

other two novels. The argument of this chapter is that modernity, enforced by

40

European colonialism, has caused discontinuity in lives of Trinidadian people, and

also caused the Trinidadians great difficulties in the process of searching for their own

personal/national identities.

Among works in Naipaul’s writing career, Miguel Street, The House for Mr.

Biswas and The Mystic Masseur share many similar features in the social milieu: from

the outset of the stories, people first live in agrarian and tradition lifestyle, and as the

stories develop, the society has transformed from an agrarian society to a

modern/industrialized one. Being part of Trinidad, a former colony under the rule of

British, the community in Miguel Street can be seen as a miniature of the lower social

rank in the colony; hence it can represent the lifestyle of people belonging to this

social class in Trinidad. By depicting the life of people on Miguel Street, Naipaul

elaborates the impact of modernity imposing upon the colony, which used to be an

agrarian society. People on Miguel Street certainly are experiencing the transition,

transformation and changes caused by modernity. Consequently, all these changes of

life result in a rupture—a rupture from their traditional life style and toward an

unpredictable future. However, due to the predicament of colonialism, this

unpredictable future seems to be an endless odyssey for the protagonists.

The concept of “rupture” must be clarified here. Rupture, according to Gidden

and Bhambra, is the outcome of discontinuities brought about by dynamism in

41

modernity. First, we should understand that Giddens considers that discontinuist is the

main feature of modern social development:

How should we identify the discontinuities which separate modern

social institutions from the traditional social order? Several features are

involved. One is the sheer pace of change which the era of modernity

sets into motion. Traditional civilisations may have been considerably

more dynamic than other pre-modern systems, but the rapidity of

change in conditions of modernity is extreme. (Consequences 6)

The pace of change in life has caused discontinuities which are distinctive features in

modernity. Gidden suggests that the discontinuities result from fast-paced lifestyles

and that the “reflexivity of modernity,” derived from the discontinuities, “makes a

break, not only with preceding eras, but with other cultures” (Consequences 175-6).

Therefore, modernity makes cultures, along with other perspectives in life,

inconsistent and unable to have smooth connections with one another. Bhambra, on

the other hand, points out that the features of modernity should be rupture and

difference (1). Differences in many respects of modern social life cause

discontinuities, and consequently, rupture from the past—eradication from the

familiar and traditional life style.

42

In addition to the concept of “rupture,” the span of time in this novel has to be

clarified. Trinidad remained under Spanish rule until the British captured it in 1797

and it did not “achieve full independence” until 1962. Naipaul actually gives us some

clues about the span of time during which the stories in Miguel Street take place, “I

suppose [Hat] was thirty-five when he took me to that cricket-match, and forty-three

when he went to jail. Yet he always looked the same to me” (MS 166). The narrator

leaves Trinidad some years after Hat comes back from jail. Moreover, in some

chapters, the narrator talks about the arrival of American militaries because of the

Second World War: “Then the war came. Hitler invaded France and the Americans

invaded Trinidad” (148). Judging from the above information, we can tell that stories

in Miguel Street take place before the full independence of Trinidad and during a time

span of about a decade, which overlaps World War II.

Systematic Capitalistic Production

Giddens adopts Karl Marx’s assertion that one of the major transformative forces

shaping the modern world is capitalism (Consequences 5). He thus concludes that

“History ‘begins’ with small, isolated cultures of hunters and gatherers, moves

through the development of crop-growing and pastoral communities and from there to

the formation of agrarian states, culminating in the emergence of modern societies in

the West” (5). Modern societies are developing from small, agrarian ones, and one of

43

the main forces which accelerate the social development is capitalistic production. A

convincing feature in Miguel Street is that the life of people on the street is changed

by “systematic capitalistic production”—one of the “distinct organizational

complexes [which] are of significance in the development of modernity” (174).

Giddens summarizes from Marx, suggesting that capitalism is a system of commodity

production that “centred upon the relation between private ownership of capital and

propertyless wage labour” (55). The private ownership of capital is the first element

which initiates changes on Miguel Street.

Ever since the first story, starting from “Bogart” to “Hat,” Naipaul keeps

reminding readers of the power of capital, and of different ways in which these

characters in the stories employ to gain money; noticeably, the ways of earning it are

no longer concerned with agrarian society. The first character, Bogart, a mysterious

man even without a real name, with no money when he first showed up on Miguel

Street, does not seem of much importance until he comes back to Miguel Street from

his first absence—acquiring a big fortune turns him into a different man. His way of

pursuing money gives a significant meaning: “[Bogart] became a cowboy on the

Rupununi, smuggled things (he didn’t say what) into Brazil, and had gathered some

girls from Brazil and taken them to Georgetown. He was running the best brothel in

the town [. . .].” (MS 5). There is a first distinct feature of modernity here; namely,

44

capitalistic mode of production: “The emergent social order of modernity is

capitalistic in both its economic system and its other institutions. The restless, mobile

character of modernity is explained as an outcome of the investment-profit-investment

cycle” (Consequences 11). Being the first one among the people on Miguel Street,

Bogart no longer uses traditional/agrarian method to earn his living. His investment

on smuggling and brothel helps him accumulate capital easier and faster.

Not only Bogart but also George runs his brothel in a modernized system. They

both employ a capitalistic mode: putting in capitals and then trying to accumulate

money within a short time. One more capitalistic–related example is Bhakcu. He buys

a “lorry,” though, at the initial stage, not intentionally to use the car as an investment;

nevertheless, with his wife’s advice, he later hires two “big black Grenadian

small-islanders who were just beginning to pour into Port of Spain” in order to use the

lorry as a taxi, and he gets two real taxis later, trying to get into the business more

seriously (MS 127-9). One by one, in the community of Miguel Street as American

troops station there during World War Two, most of the people start employing

methods which are not related to agrarian ones to gain money. However, though with

different reasons, these three main characters all fail in their attempt to make a fortune

in this modern capitalistic production mode. Their attempt inspired by modernity

cause their rupture from the traditional agrarian way of life. But they do not really live

45

a more modernized life from then on, but nor can their go back to their old way of

living which seems more carefree and jolly. Bogart thus becomes a different person,

George passes away, and Bhakcu goes into a different profession and becomes a

pundit.

Similarly, in The House for Mr. Biswas, people change their way of acquiring a

livelihood as a response to the changes in society. In the Tulsi family, except Shama’s

two brothers, most of the men earned their living by working as farmhands when Mr.

Biswas first joined the family. He was despised for refusing to work as a hand on the

farm. After some unsuccessful attempts to run a grocery shop, and to work as an

overseer on the farm, Mr. Biswas is considered incompetent to the Tulsis. In the

traditional agrarian society, being physically weak and small, Mr. Biswas isn’t

suitable for the work on the farm so that he cannot fit in Shama’s family, and is

clearly seen as a failure. His abilities in words are completely ignored. Nevertheless,

in the end, as Mr. Biswas has expected, he starts to gain his respect from the Tulsi

family by becoming a famous journalist working for a newspaper—the

newspaper/media is a product of modern society. As Giddens observes,

Yet industrialism has also decisively conditioned our very sense of

living in "one world." For one of the most important effects of

industrialism has been the transformation of technologies of

46

communication. [. . .] Mechanised technologies of communication

have dramatically influenced all aspects of globalization since the first

introduction of mechanical printing into Europe. They form an

essential element of the reflexivity of modernity and of the

discontinuities which have torn the modern away from the traditional.

The globalising impact of media was noted by numerous authors

during the period of the early growth of mass circulation newspapers.

(Consequences 77)

From this perspective, Mr. Biswas is benefited from modernization/modernity for

certain. In Trinidad, as a reporter relying the power of words and media, he therefore

earns the respect and reputation which he could never have achieved in the agrarian

society. As for the rest of the Tulsis, the widows in particular, when the society

develops into a modern one, especially during and after WWII, they are all forced to

run different business since the income from farming cannot support their living and

working on the farm seems very inadequate in winning people’s attention and respect.

However, their every trying on capitalistic way of earning money fails as well.

It is not difficult to find out evidence of loosening ties between family members

in A House for Mr. Biswas. Throughout the novel, the Tulsis try hard sticking together

as an economical unit. When they rely on the harvest on the farm for a living, it is

47

easier for them to stay together. However, when modernization and the war change

their lifestyle, they have to find other ways to support their lives and which leads to

the division of the Tulsi family. One by one, the sisters start moving out the shelter

that is guarded by Mrs. Tulsi and Seth.

Ganesh in The Mystic Masseur performs a more complex way of earning his

living. With a little help from some scientific skills and knowledge acquired in his

limited education, he gradually builds up his reputation as an important pundit. But it

is in the middle of his career as a pundit that the accumulation of his fortune starts to

be a rather capitalistic investment. With increasing rise in the number of his patients,

he organizes taxi drivers to serve as shuttle bus for the patients, and his wife begins

selling food and drink to these patients waiting in the yard. These services further help

and accelerate the speed of building up Ganesh’s fortune. By the time he leaves the

town where he has started his career, it has become a modernized location. He is

benefited from modernity; however, he also employs the power and fortunate from

modernity to help development the region in which he starts his career, turning it from

a barren place into a modernized town.

Time-Space Distanciation

Examples of modernity pervade in Miguel Street. From Bogart’s and George’s

stories, another feature of modernity can be discerned—“time-space distanciation,”

48

and this distanciation is “much greater than in even the most developed agrarian

civilisations” (Consequences 14). Giddens suggests:

The dynamism of modernity derives from the separation of time and

space and their recombination in forms which permits the precise

time-space “zoning” of social life; the disembedding of social systems

[. . .] and the reflexive ordering and reordering of social relations in

the light of continual inputs of knowledge affecting the actions of

individuals and groups. (Consequences 17)

Time-space distanciation means that people can act according to a more abstract

measurement of time, not to the natural phenomena, and events are no longer

restricted to some certain locations; they can take place in many other places. The

locale of events is not placed upon so much emphasis anymore. Giddens considers the

invention of mechanical clock initiates this concept of time-space distanciation and

also helps it spread. But the mechanical clock is one of the advantages which help

modernity develop. Here in Miguel Street, in addition to mechanical clock, one of the

factors which make the separation of time and space possible is the introduction of

modern vehicles.

These methods of mass transportation make rapid and large-scale movement

possible so that many businesses bloom and, accordingly, people are changed. It

49

becomes much easier for Bogart to travel back and forth between Rupununi and

Brazil; thus, his smuggling business grows prosperous and he has become important

to others on Miguel Street. Moreover, George’s pink house is, though only for a short

while, full of American soldiers (who are brought in Miguel Street by modern

transportation and the war). Their cases show that the separation of time and space

here is caused by modern technology. The scale and movement of people/American

soldiers and of events/war are no longer limited to a small and certain locale; instead,

they are spread because of modern inventions. This proves Gidden’s observation

about features of discontinuities of modernity: that the pace and scope of change are

both made possible by technology.10 The scope of change has also resulted in

discontinuity because different areas of globe are drawn into interconnection with one

another, and waves of social transformation crash across virtually the whole of the

earth’s surface” (Consequences 6).

Therefore, modernity does cause great changes in the pace and scope of lives of

people on Miguel Street. At least in Bogart’s and George’s cases, the social systems

(economical systems) on Miguel Street is disembedded and ruptured from the past.

More than that, the two men’s social relations with others on the street are thus

10 One is the sheer pace of change which the era of modernity sets into motion. Traditional civilisations may have been considerably more dynamic than other pre-modern systems, but the rapidity of change in conditions of modernity is extreme. If this is perhaps the most obvious in respect of technology, it also pervades all other spheres. (Consequences 6)

50

reordered. With a big fortune, they are no longer unimportant and looked down on by

inhabitants on the street. In short, modernity makes it possible for Bogart and George

to change their lives and to make a difference. In Bogart’s case, after he has made a

fortune, his change is easy to see, and he moves to a higher social position than the

one in which he used to be ranked, changing from a no-name person to a ferocious

man:

Bogart now became the most feared man in the street. Even Big Foot

was said to be afraid of him. Bogart drank and sore and gambled with the

best. . . . He became a regular sight, standing against the high concrete

fence of his yard, hands in his pocket, one foot jammed against the wall,

and an eternal cigarette in his mouth. (MS 6)

With money in his pocket, he is uprooted from his past and moved into a different life

style, though not necessarily to a better one. As the reader can discern, within a short

time span, that Bogart’s new life is ruptured from the old one.

Bogart is not the only case of social mobility. The move that George sells all his

cows to Hat to gain money, additionally, can be interpreted a rupture from the

traditional agrarian way of living and also from his past. Then, his going into a

business which is closely related to American soldiers is considered a more

“modernized” way of earning money: he invests capital in his business/house to give

51

the house a new look (the house is turned into a brothel). The brothel exists because

of those American soldiers. From this respect, compared with other people on Miguel

Street, George expands his way of living to an international scope. Like Bogart,

George’s American soldiers are brought to Trinidad via modern vehicles and they

move around on Miguel Street “in jeeps” (MS 21). Both George’s and Bogart’s

transformations of their lifestyle, whether to better or worse, are enhanced by

modernity/modern technology.

If modernized vehicles play a key role in causing rupture in people’s life in

Trinidad, then in The Mystic Masseur, taxis make this rupture possible for Ganesh.

Taxis make it easier for patients to get to Ganesh’s house which is situated in a remote,

undeveloped small town, and afterwards Ganesh becomes thriving. His investment in

the taxis to incorporate them into his business, and Leela’s selling food in the yard are

also methods of capitalistic production. They accumulate their fortunate rapidly by

seizing this chance offered by modernity. Their fast gathering of fortune also helps

them move high up to the social rank.

What to Trust in a Modern Society

Changes in the mode of economical activities are only one of the respects of

modernity which people on Miguel Street are experiencing. Some other parts of the

society are also being contested. Giddens points out that trust in expert system is also

52

one of the consequences of modernity. By expert systems, he means “systems of

technical accomplishment or professional expertise that organise large area of the

material and social environments in which we live today” (Consequences 27). This

practice of expert systems also relies on tests applied to evaluate the reliability of

these experts and professional knowledge. Expert systems are disembedding

mechanisms because, in common with symbolic tokens, they remove social relations

from the immediacies of context. An expert system “disembeds in the same way as

symbolic tokens,” by providing “guarantees” of expectations across distancicated

time-space (Consequences 28). Technology can be applied and employed in almost

everywhere. This “stretching of social systems” is achieved via the impersonal nature

of tests applied to evaluate technical knowledge and by public critique used to control

its form. (28).

Giddens asserts that the expert systems are sustained by an evaluating system

(exams or critiques) which is based upon specified knowledge. These expert systems

are nothing like empirical practices in agrarian societies. In Miguel Street, Naipaul

mentions some examination systems deeply affecting people’s lives. Elias’s failure in

passing “The Cambridge Senior School Certificate” and “sanitary inspector’s

examination” can be seen as a counter-example in the attempt to carry out expert

systems (MS 29-31). He blames his failure in the assuming biased-system in Trinidad

53

because he does not pay the bribery, “But what the hell you expect in Trinidad?” (31).

He refuses to admit his failure is in fact resulted from his incompetence. However, the

narrator passes the Cambridge Senior School Certificate Examination and gets a

second grade. The narrator does not bribe anyone to pass the exam—apparently he

gets a better achievement than Elias’s, and it is clear that Elias’s defeat in these exams

is caused more by his deficiency/incompetence (or maybe the lack of ability to carry

out professional knowledge) than by the crooked evaluation system which he claims

to cause his failure. But Elias’s accusation on the system reveals his distrust which is

a contrast to Giddens’s definition on trust, “Trust may be defined as confidence in the

reliability of a person or system, regarding a given set of outcomes or events, where

that confidence expresses a faith in the probity or love of another, or in the correctness

of abstract principles (technical knowledge)” (Consequences 34). Elias’s distrust on

the evaluation system gives him an excuse to avoid facing his own failure so that he

can blame his on others instead of his incompetence.

Elias, Morgan, and Bhakcu all fail in their unsuccessful attempts to master the

professional modern technology and knowledge. They fail because of the same

reason—lack of modern professional knowledge and of enough knowledge from the

expert systems. Giddens suggests when trust is involved, “the prime condition of

requirements for trust is not lack of power but lack of full information”

54

(Consequences 33).Trust always carries the connotation of reliability, whether these

concern the actions of individuals or the operation of systems. Trust is something that

derives from “faith in the reliability of a person or system,” and “is precisely the link

between faith and confidence” (33). Giddens asserts all trust is in a certain sense blind

trust because it is not based on the mastery of the circumstance. Trust in expert

systems is based on the presumption of the reliability of principles and knowledge

that one does not fully understand, but not on the trust on any individual. Giddens

thinks trustworthiness have two-fold meanings; one is established between individuals

“who are well known to one another and who, on the basis of long-term acquaintance,

have substantiated the credentials which render each reliable in the eyes of the other”

(Consequences 83). The other kind of trustworthniess in respect of the disembedding

mechanisms is different, “although reliability is still central and credentials are

certainly involved.” Trust in abstract systems does not presuppose “any encounters at

all with the individuals or groups who are in some way ‘responsible for’ them” but

most of time these abstract systems can be presented in the encounters on the part of

lay actors at access points and these encounters are more periodic and transitory (83).

Encounters happening at the access points are “facework commitments” which tie lay

actors into trust relations ordinarily involve displays of manifest trustworthiness and

integrity (84). In modern society, expertise usually requires the absence of the

55

facework commitment and therefore, the blind trust seems important when the expert

system functions.

Both of Morgan and Bhakcu have no trust in the expert systems, and they try to

figure out the skills/knowledge themselves without any real professional help.

Morgan busies himself at home with fireworks, without many references or any help

from the world outside Trinidad, and consequently, without much success. He only

accomplishes one magnificent work in his life, which is probably an accident—at the

cost of burning down his own house:

And what a fire! Photographers from the papers were climbing up into

other people’s houses to get their pictures, and people were looking at

[the fireworks] and not at the fire. Next morning there was a first-class

picture with me part of the crowd in the top right-hand corner.

But what a fire it was! It was the most beautiful fire in port of Spain

since 1933 .

What really made the fire beautiful was Morgan’s fireworks going off.

(MS 70-1)

Poor Morgan, though with his “best achievement” in life, has to run away from

Miguel Street in order to get away from the charge with arson. Like Bogart and

56

George, his life on Miguel Street is therefore changed and he can never go back to his

old days.

Bhakcu’s futile attempt to master car engines is another painful lesson. After

buying an expansive lorry and breaking it down (by dismembering and joining it

back), he no longer can get any profit from the car. Discouraged from this experience,

he stops meddling with cars, and has to become a Brahmin in order to bring bread on

the table. Neither Bhakcu nor Morgan really understands or trusts the expert systems,

and which leads to their failure in their pursuit of modern technology and in their faith

to get a better life in a modernized world no matter how hard they try. However, their

life has already been ruptured from the familiar one to a new and seeming

uninteresting one—Morgan is in exile and Bhakcu chooses to go into a different

profession. Neither of them have any further achievement in their lives. But their lives

have already be changed by modernity because “The impact of industrialism is plainly

not limited to the sphere of production, but affects many aspects of day-to-day life, as

well as influencing the generic character of human interaction with the material

environment” (Consequences 76). Even in states which remain primarily agricultural,

modern technology is often applied in such a way as to alter substantially preexisting

relations between human social organization and the environment.

Rupture in Friendship and Future

57

On Miguel Street, one more change brought around by modernity is the

dismemberment of their community. As Giddens suggests, “[T]he development of

modernity is breaking down the old forms of ‘community,’ to the detriment of

personal relations within modern societies” (Consequences 15). He thinks that in

pre-modern societies, friendship, kinship, and bonds between family members are of

great importance to people and there existed little room for outsiders, “In traditional

cultures, with the partial exception of some larger city neighbourhoods in agrarian

states, there was a quite clear divide between insider and outsiders or strangers”

(Consequences 118). Here the personal relations (also identify with “communal

relations”) mean “kinship ties; relations of personal intimacy between peers

(friendship); and relations of sexual intimacy” (117). According to Giddens, the

vicissitudes of breaking in the intimate ties between relationships are unavoidable.

Modernity has caused the private sphere “deinsitutionalised” whereas the sphere of

public life “has become overly institutionalised” (115). Since the plots in Miguel

Street reflect the process of a society evolving from a traditional to a modern one,

they coincide with Gidden’s theory on a large scale, encompassing this alienation in

the private lives between characters in the novel.

In these stories, people living on the street form the bigger community which

encompasses other small ones; one of the smaller and more noticeable community is

58

led by Hat—a man-based community within the one formed by the street residents.

The narrator names this male-oriented circle as “the Miguel Street Club” (MS 167).

Way before these male characters experience rupture in their lives, almost all the time,

men and boys alike cluster together on the side of the street, doing nothing but talking

and smoking. This community that they form functions in a special way: it intervenes,

not very frequently and only when it is urgent and necessary, in one another’s

business. Most of the time they leave alone others’ domestic lives, trying to be neutral

and objective. They just focus on the moment shared among them on the street. This

male community serves as a strong social connection between these men and

boys—their own brotherhood is consolidated here.

As Giddens’s observation suggests, this male-based circle clearly draws line

between insiders and outsiders. It is difficult for outsiders/newcomers to fuse with the

original members. The comradeship between them can also been considered a kind of

kinship—even to some degree, it performs a filial function, and replaces real

relationship between family members. Being a fatherless child, for example, the

narrator’s affection for Hat is like that of a son’s for a father. Hat not only takes care

of the narrator but also serves as the head of this community—tightly binding all the

members together in this circle. He plays a multiple roles in this community—a

faithful friend to Bogart and to other men as well; he is also a mentor (maybe a

59

philosopher) to people who rely on his advice. Hat is happy about his role as a care

giver. When inquired if he is the father of twelve boys whom he takes to a cricket

game, Hat “smiled, weakly, and made people believe it was so” (MS 161). More

important, he severs as a father figure to the fatherless nephews, Boyee and Errol, and

as mentioned above, to the narrator as well. Since Hat plays a major part in the

narrator’s adolescent life, as a result, after Hat goes to jail, the narrator feels “part of

him had died” (172).

Even after Hat returns from the prison, to the narrator, he still has some

significance and influence in the latter’s life, and plays a vital part in pushing the

narrator away from Miguel Street to go into the world:

I said to my mother, ‘Let we go back to Port of Spain.’

[. . .]

And back in Miguel Street the first person I saw was Hat. He was

strolling flat-footedly back from the café, with a paper under his arm. I

waved and shouted at him.

All he said was, ‘I though you was in the air by this time.’

I was disappointed. Not only by Hat’s cool reception. Disappointed

because although I had been away, destined to be gone for good,

60

everything was going on just as before, with nothing to indicate my

absence.

I looked at the overturned brass jar in the gateway and I said to my

mother, ‘So this mean I was never going to come back here, eh?’(MS

178-179)

Hat’s indifference hurts the narrator. We can tell that the narrator, though claiming

part of his heart has died with Hat in the prison, still craves for Hat’s attention. But

Hat’s passion for the male community and for the Miguel Street has gone after his

pursuit of a better and modern life has failed. His wife leaves him and he has become

an invalid, no long owning the power to care and to love. Moreover, his imprisonment

makes his life even worse than before. He is not the easygoing and influential man in

his neighborhood. His failed attempt results in the breaking apart of his community.

That means that the modernity has not changed Hat’s life to a better one; quite to the

contrary, it has broken up the community which used to own a tight tie between him

and his friends. His imprisonment also symbolizes the end of this male community,

and of the liveliness of Miguel Street. Moreover, in the case of trust in human agents,

the presumption of reliability involves the attribution of “‘probity’ (honour) or love.”

So trust in persons is usually “psychologically consequential for the individual who

trusts: a moral hostage to fortune is given” (Consequences 33). Therefore, judging

61

from Giddens’s words, it is inevitably involved with risks in human relationships

when we offer trust. After the changes occurring to people on Miguel Street and cause

the rupture and discontinuity in their lives, this trust among the men in Miguel Street

Club has gone.

Stability in Inner Self

After the breakdown of community, the next step that Giddens advocates should

be “that personal life becomes attenuated and bereft of firm reference points: there is a

turning inward toward human subjectivity, and meaning and stability are sought in the

inner self” (Consequences 115). This searching “in the inner self” can explain why the

narrator decides to break loose from his tie with Miguel Street, and to leave for

England to pursue an advanced education. After Hat goes to prison, the boy narrator

has been drifting and wandering around without a concrete goal in his life in the small

world of Trinidad. He describes the growing numbness after Hat is gone,

But as the months passed I became more and more concerned with

myself, and I wouldn’t think about Hat for weeks on end. It was

useless trying to feel ashamed. I had to face the fact that I was no

longer missing Hat. From time to time when my mind was empty, I

would stop and think how long it would be before he came out. But I

was not really concerned. (MS 171)

62

The inner void compels the boy to leave. When blamed by his mother for getting too

wild, the narrator replies, “‘Is not my fault really. Is just Trinidad. What else anybody

can do here except drink?’” (MS 174). He does not know what to pursue for life in

Trinidad. Going into a bigger world seems to be a solution for his sense of loss.

Similar self-searching process also happens to Mr. Biswas and his son Anand. The

former is trapped in a cycle of depression and struggling for meaning of his existence

whereas Anand, like the boy narrator in Miguel Street, leaves Trinidad for England

and refuses to go back, also suffering from a crisis of finding no self-identity.

This loss of self-identity can be represented in a very different way. Giddens

asserts that “modernity is distinctively Western in terms of the reflexive knowledge

fundamental to its dynamic character,” so he sees modernization as a process of

westernization (Consequences 175). The way Naipaul/the narrator depicts Edward is

very different from that of other characters—Edward’s adherent and strong

admiration toward American (western) culture grows with time, “To hear Edward talk,

you felt that America was a gigantic country inhabited by giants. They lived in

enormous houses and they drove in the biggest cars on the world” (MS 150). While

others only seek to change part of their life, Edward wants for himself a complete

transformation from head to toe:

63

Edward surrendered completely to the Americans. He began wearing

clothes in the American style, he began chewing gum, and he tried to

talk with an American accent. We didn’t see much of him except on

Sundays, and then he made us feel small and inferior. He grew fussy

about his dress, and he began wearing a gold chain around his neck. He

began wearing straps around his wrists, after the fashion of

tennis-players. These straps were just becoming fashionable among

smart young men in Port of Spain. (MS 149)

Edward evidently proves his westernization is a doomed process. No matter how hard

he tries to mimic Americans, he can never become one of them. His wife‘s elopement

with an American soldier reinforces the futility of his attempt at the modernizing

transformation. Also, like George, Edward performs a symbolic action representing

his rupture from the traditional past, “Edward sold his share of the cows to Hat, and

that marked the beginning of his drift away from us” (MS 149). Cows symbolize the

ability of production in agrarian society. Selling the cows means Edward does not

want to rely on the traditional way of earning a living. He waves goodbye to his

traditional past, moves away from his male community on Miguel Street, and

therefore deviates to a different life. Edward has become neither a Trinidadian nor an

American. He has lost his self-identity.

64

Most characters in Miguel Street undergo the changes and rupture that modernity

imposes on them. However, almost all of them are disillusioned, and the rupture has

made it impossible for them to go back to the older mode of life from which they have

departed. Stories in Miguel Street tell us that it is not easy to foretell where modernity

will lead us to. Giddens once warns us that modernity is not always promising and

does not always lead us to an optimistic future. However, as the stories enfold, readers

can tell that the rupture causes disillusion and hope as well. The open ending

represents hope for the narrator and also for some more possible interpretations of

modernity.

Modernity seems an inevitable process for most societies. Have people ever had

completed the process of modernization? According to Giddens, the answer is no, “we

have not moved beyond modernity but are living precisely through a phase of its

radicalisation” (Consequences 51). It is still difficult for people to determine what

modernity is because of its dynamic characteristic. With Gidden’s assertion, the

radicalization of modernity in Miguel Street is not yet complete, even though in the

novel the lives of some characters, after they all going after modernity, seem to go to

nowhere but to a dead end. Indeed, almost all of them, like George, Bogart, Edward

and many others, have to face the disillusion and disappointment from having

experienced the rupture caused by modernity. Take Hat for an example, after having

65

facing Edward’s failure in pursuing modernity, his rupture from his past leads him to

nowhere but a more meaningless life. His failure represents an end—an end for the

era of an old and traditional Miguel Street, and the end of the narrator’s juvenile life.

However, to the narrator, the rupture of modernity means more than disillusion. The

rupture leads to his departure and something beyond it.

The rupture can also be seen as hope. At the very end of the novel, the narrator is

going to England—a place much more modernized—in order to seek his future. This

can be read as a pursuit of a more complete and thorough modernization; nevertheless,

the result is unknown. But there is a trace of hope. The rupture of modernity can be

both cause and consequence, though it has caused Hat, along with many other adults

on Miguel Street, disillusioned. These are tragic Consequences for them. However,

these adults’ disillusion attribute to the narrator’s hope of future. Their failure make

the narrator feel like to break loose from Trinidad and from Miguel Street. He needs

to find something to compel the sense of loss and to complete himself. Giddens thinks

“the decline of community” actually contributes to:

[T]he quest for self-identity . . . Some see a preoccupation with

self-development as an offshoot of the fact that the old communal

orders have broken down, producing a narcissistic, hedonistic concern

with the ego. Others reach much the same conclusion, but trace this

66

end result to forms of social manipulation. Exclusion of the majority

from the arenas where the most consequential policies are forged and

decisions taken forces a concentration upon the self; this is a result of

the powerlessness most people feel. (Consequences 122-3)

Because of the rupture from the older generation and from the community formed by

these adults, the narrator loses an important social connection and is therefore forced

to break apart from his life on Miguel Street and, accordingly, to go into the West.

Yet, compared with those failed adults, his consequence is still unknown—it can be

another disillusion but can also be a more successful case of appropriation of

modernity.

And the open ending and its possibility echo the dynamics in modernity. It is

clear for readers to tell, in the last story in Miguel Street, the sense of loss revealed by

the narrator. This young man apparently does not know what to follow in life expect

getting into smoking, drinking and fooling around. Nevertheless, this void in him

pushes him forward to the world; in the end, he is willing to take a chance to leave his

motherland in order to begin a journey of searching the meaning of life. He fears not

the obscure and unpredictable future. Since this novel is also seen as Naipaul’s

autobiographical novel, his interview with Adrian Rowe-Evans may reveal his

intension of self-realization:

67

You have to become adept in looking for the truth of your own

responses. I think it’s much more important for me, coming from a

place which is not real, a place which is imperfectly made, and a place

where people are, really, quite inferior, because they demand so little

of themselves. They are colonials, in a type of perpetual colonial

situation. Coming from such a society, I didn’t really have views of my

own; I didn’t know what I thought about anything, because the world

was out of my hands. So this establishing a position, an intellectual

stance, has come to me quite recently. In writing my first four or five

books [. . .] I was simply recording my reactions to the world; I hadn’t

come to any conclusion about it. [. . .] But since then, through my

writing, through the effort honestly to respond, I have begun to have

ideas about the world. I have begun to analyse. First of all, the

deficiencies of the society from which I came; and then, through that,

what goes to make this much more complex society in which I have

worked so long. (56-7)

In this paragraph, Naipaul seems not very satisfied with the place where he is from.

To him, his homeland (Trinidad) is a colony and people there are extremely limited,

without much intellectual and cultural legacy.

68

He desires to go out to see the world, and to search for some meanings of his life.

He needs to construct an identity and a life of his own. Naipaul’s desire here in this

interview actually echoes some features which Giddens points out when his referring

to “trust and personal identity” in modern society:

The construction of the self as a reflexive project, an element part of

the reflexivity of modernity; an individual must find her or his

identity amid the strategies and options provided by abstract systems.

[. . .] A concern for self-fulfillment, which is not just a narcissistic

defense against an externally threatening world, over which

individuals have little control, but also in part a positive

appropriation of circumstances in which globalised influences

impinge upon everyday life. (Consequences 124)

Giddens believes the construction and searching the self is a necessity for individuals

in a modern society whereas the outside world is getting out of control. Losing the

more controlled traditional milieu, the individual needs to construct a better

understand of the self so that to respond to the outside world better.

Naipul’s Miguel Street befits the features and steps of modernity suggested by

Giddens. Starting from a breakthrough in capitalistic production mode, the modernity

process is followed by a change and breakdown in the communal circle, and finally

69

goes to the inner search of the individual—to seek for the meaning of living in this

modernized world. Seeking for the meaning of self seems like the most fundamental

existential request for the human, no matter which ear they live in. The narrator

decides to take a step forward and to search inside himself by going outside of his

familiar milieu. It looks like Naipaul is encouraging people to seek answers to their

questions, especially the ones concerning their faith in life. The last paragraph is a

heroic act, the narrator “left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not

looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac”

(MS 179). Thus, ruptured from his root, this young man goes into the unknown,

gigantic western world to face the modernity, and hopefully, to complete his search of

modernity and self.

70

Chapter Three

Escape and Identity formation in Naipaul’s Trinidad Novels:

Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, and A House for Mr. Biswas

In one of his analyses on the institutional development in modern society,

Anthony Giddensm points out the impact of modernity on individuals, emphasizing

on its influence on an individual’s ontological security, personal relations and

intimacy. He shifts his attention from institutions in modern society to people living in

this modernized world. He believes the traits of modernity have transformed the

content and the nature of day-to-day social life, and that therefore, the extensional

transformations of modern societies have inevitably interlaced “in a direct way with

individual life and therefore with the self” (Modernity 1). The self has become a

“reflexive project” in modern society (32), which means the self has to be “explored

and constructed” as part of a reflexive process of connecting personal and social

changes (33). In short, the self has to be reflexive in constructing his/her own identity

as the society changes dynamically so that the individual can form the continuity of

the self.

Stuart Hall also offers similar perspectives when talking about self-identity in

modern days: he claims that “modern identities are ‘de-centred’”—namely,

71

“dislocated or fragmented;” the self-identity is no longer fixed (Futures 274).

Moreover, Hall believes that the individual should require, in addition to self-identity,

national identities. Without national identities, the individual will feel a deep sense of

loss. He further points out that the formation of nationhood is a process a construction

of cultural identities. This chapter aims to discuss the formation of protagonists’

self-identities and national identities in Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. Compared

with Miguel Street, A House for Mr. Biswas offers thorough social background

information of Trinidad and a longer time span to depict the process of modernization

in Trinidad and how the protagonists have changed with the modernization. Ruptured

from the agrarian society and then forced into a modern one, Mr. Biswas needs to

escape from the environment in order to search for his own identity as a modern

individual. The building of his own house is seen as the construction of his

self-identity. Starting from constructing his self-identity, he then moves to initiate his

awareness as an individual in a former colony when he starts working for the

government. This novel reflects how the process of modernization has influenced Mr.

Biwas’s concept as an individual and the way he sees Trinidad as a nation. And this

process is of identity formation, as Giddens suggests, is reflexive, and is therefore

endless.

72

Giddens asserts that self-identity has to be “developed in terms of an overall

picture of the psychological make-up of the individual” (Modernity 35). The

individual, most of the time, reflexively monitors his/her daily social activities, and

normally they are able to provide discursive interpretations of the behavior in which

they engage. Most of the people can carry out everyday activities at the level of

“practical consciousness” (36). Giddens thinks this practical consciousness is the

“cognitive and emotive anchor of the feelings of ontological security characteristic of

large segments of human activity in all cultures” (36). What he means is that only

when a person acquires ontological security can this individual perform practical

consciousness in daily life. So the ontological security is of great significance in a

normal person’s life. This ontological security is first provided by the child/infant

caretaker. At this stage, an infant acquires the confidence and trust through the

attention of the caretaker. This “basic trust” forms the “original nexus from a

combined emotive-cognitive orientation toward others, the object-world, and

self-identity emerges” (38). Therefore, when an infant, through substantial attention

from its caretaker, can thus feel secured to trust the outside world, and also forms its

early self-identity.

Infant Biswas definitely receives enough attention and care from his family. He

73

was “six-fingered, and born in the wrong way” (HMB 15). Biswas’s birth is seen as an

ominous one and has to be remedied with some traditional rituals.

In the days that followed Mr. Biswas was treated with attention and

respect. His brothers and sisters were slapped if they disturbed his

sleep, and the flexibility of his limbs was regarded as a matter of

importance. Morning and evening he was massaged with coconut oil.

All his joints were exercised; his arms and legs were folded

diagonally across his red shining body; [. . .] finally, all his limbs

were bunched together over his belly and then, with a clap and a

laugh, released. (HMB 18)

Mr. Biswas surely gets a lot of attention from the rest of the family members,

especially from his mother and maternal grandmother. The daily oil massage and

exercise does offer him enough physical contact with his prime caretaker. Giddens

believes that through routines in an infant’s early days of life, a fundamental forging

of relations can be achieved between the infant and caretakers (Modernity 39).

Therefore, we can judge from the quotation above, Mr. Biswas has owned the

ontological security when he was a newborn. Though these rituals cease after Mr.

Biwas moving back to his father’s house, his sense of security and his trust are still

74

consolidate. He was named, “Mohun,” meaning “the beloved” (HMB 17). This

naming shows the love and care from his parents. As the youngest son in the family,

he did live some years of carefree childhood until the untimely death of Raghu, Mr.

Biswas’s father. The death has certainly caused rupture in Mr. Biswas’s life.

The process of establishing this ontological security has not completed yet and is

ceased all of a sudden when Raghu is drowned in the pound. Mr. Biswas, along with

the rest of his mother and siblings, is deprived of a stable environment and of

development of intimate connections with one another. Mr. Biswas, as the youngest

child, has not fully gained the ability and “emotional inoculation against existential

anxieties” (Modernity 39). Emotional inoculation refers to a protection against future

threats and angers and it allows the individual to sustain hope and courage in the face

of whatever “debilitating circumstances she or he might later confront” (Modernity

39). Bipti, Biswas’s mother, has become an almost invalid after Raghu’s death. She

can neither provide Mr. Biswas the love he needs nor offer him a stable living

environment; both are necessary for Mr. Biswas to build up the sense of trust and

confidence in the outside world. According to Gidden, the process of building

self-identity is reflexive, so Mr. Biswas’s development of the self-identity has stopped

abruptly at this point. After his father’s death, Mr. Biswas moves to Tara’s, his aunt,

75

back trace. He never finds himself happy in Tara’s back trace, where he was not

happy because he considers it a “temporary arrangement” (HMB 48). His brothers and

sister are not close to him ever since Raghu’s death. The brothers stay on farms to

work, and Dehuti, the sister, works as a servant in Tara’s house. His relationship with

his mother is “unsatisfying because she was shy of showing affection in a house of

strangers” (48). The last paragraph in Chapter 1 shows Mr. Biswas’s loneliness when

he leaves his father’s house,

And so Mr. Biwas came to leave the only house to which he had

some right. For the next thirty-five years he was to be a wanderer

with no place he could call his own, with no family except that

which he was to attempt to create out of the engulfing world of the

Tulsis. [. . . ] his father dead, his brothers on the estate at Felicity,

Dehuti as a servant in Tara’s house, and himself rapidly growing

away from Bipti who, broken, became increasingly useless and

impenetrable, it seemed to him that he was really quite alone. (HMB

40)

Biswas’s later sense of insecurity of life proves Giddens’ observation, “The feelings

of unreality which may haunt the lives of individuals in whose early childhood basic

76

trust was poorly developed may take many forms. They may feel that the object-world,

or other people, have only a shadowy existence, or be unable to maintain a clear sense

of continuity of self-identity” (Modernity 43). Mr. Biwas, therefore, because of the

lack of secured sense of self, starts wandering in the society and drifting from house

to house; in the meantime, he suffers from self-identity crises.

Mr. Biwas’s life with the Tulsis family seems to be the most important struggle

of building his own self-identity. After marrying to Shama, Biswas moves into

“Hanuman House,” which “stood like an alien white fortress” (HMB 80). The Tulsis

is seen in Trinidad among the Hindus “as a pious, conservative, landowning family”

(81). They remain as a powerful traditional Indian family, insisting on observing

Indian traditions. Biswas gets the job of painting their signs just because “he was an

Indian” (81). Moreover, his marriage to Shama is also because he is “of the proper

caste” (97). The Tulsis and the Hanuman House represent the old and traditional

power, and they seem to be content with the situation, trying to isolate themselves

from the outside world. The economical system of the family is old-fashioned. The

assistants of the Tulsi store “were all members of the House” (82). Though the

appearance from the outside of the house looks like a fortress, the inside of the store

“was disappointing” (82). The composition and relationships of the family are like the

77

condition of the house. Its outside looks magnificent; the concrete walls look “as thick

as they were” and “bulky, impregnable and blank” (80). However, the inside is a

different scene; the walls inside are “of uneven thickness, curved here and jutted there,

and the shop abounded in awkward, empty, cob-webbed corners. [. . .] the thick

columns, whose number dismayed Mr. Biswas [. . .]” (82). The house and the Tulsi

family may seem very grand and impressive from the outside; however, the inside is

decaying and unpleasant.

The Tulsi store is not the major economical system on which the Tulsis rely.

When Biswas joins the family, he is expected to work on the farm as a hand. Though

he refuses to comply, the rest of the male members all work on the field, “The

husbands, under Seth’s supervision, worked on the Tulsi land, looked after the Tulsi

animals, and served in the store” (HMB 97). They receive food, shelter and a little

money and their children are looked after by the wives at the House. Both the

husbands and sisters seem to be content with what they get and with their status in the

family: “they were treated with respect by people outside because they were

connected with the Tulsi family. Their names were forgotten; they became Tulsis”

(97). These husbands are those who have no money and positions so they choose to or

are forced to be fused into the Tulsis. They lose their self-identities as independent

78

individuals; their names are forgotten. Mr. Biswas has no money or position, but he

refuses to accept such an expectation, and “[a]t once he rebelled” (97). He pretends he

knows nothing of what the Tulsis expect of him and decides to escape. Moreover, he

has not “attempted to establish any relation with [Shama] in the long room” (98).

Though Biswas has not really established his self-identity by the time he gets married

to Shama, he knows too well to sacrifice it for anything. Thus, he begins his long-term

opposition against the Tulsis, refusing to be part of them and trying to defend his own

independence as an individual.

Unlike Mr. Biswas, the rest of the husbands take part in the organization of the

Tulsis in order to find themselves a shelter and a position in the family. Erich Fromm

has characterized “authoritarian conformity,” explaining the phenomenon occurring to

the husbands in the Hanuman House,

The individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of

personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore

becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be . . . this

mechanism can be compared with the protective colouring some

animals assume. They look so similar to their surroundings that they

are hardly distinguishable from them. (160)

79

These husbands and sisters all acquire the “protective colouring” which they need to

survive in the House. As long as their obligations and roles are carried out dutifully,

they are safe and secured in the family. Seth and Mrs. Tulsi stand for the authority

which expects the other family members to conform. So both the husbands and the

Tulsi sisters all adopt the personalities and responsibilities offered to them, and

moreover, they even take sides against those who refuse to comply. Giddens calls this

offered identity “false self.” This false self “overrides and blankets out the original

acts of thinking, feeling and willing which represent the true motivations of the

individual” (Modernity 191). Biswas’s brothers-in-law all employ false selves while

Mrs. Tulsi and Seth remain powerful and dominant. However, it does not mean their

true self is forgotten.

But at this time when these husbands are not powerful and independent enough

to win themselves proper statuses in the family, the true self is experienced as empty

and inauthentic. One thing can be sure is that even though different “pseudo-selves”

are brought into play by the individual in different contexts, the true self cannot be

replaced. Later in the stories, the Tulsi husbands and sisters, along with their families,

leave the House one by one. This proves the husbands and sisters do not really forget

their desire to form a house/family of their own. They, in order to survive in the

80

House, temporarily takes on pseudo-selves just because the lack of money and social

position. But once the chances come, they forsake the false selves and regain their

true selves, escaping the House where they have to wear masks to survive. Unlike Mr.

Biswas’s flamboyant defiance, the false selves they employ help them break loose

from the control of the Tulsi family more peacefully.

Though from the very early stage in his marriage Mr. Biswas has made up his

mind that he needs to defend his own self-identity, he is not always courageous and

determined during the process. Without any support from outside the Tulsi family, he

is often devastated and therefore discouraged. Truly, the ontological security of the

individual is “weakly founded” since the individual “only feels psychologically secure

in his self-identity in as far as others recognize his behavior as appropriate or

reasonable” (Modernity 191). Apparently Mr. Biswas gains neither recognition nor

attention from the House where is another temporary arrangement to him. He

therefore feels weak and frustrated every now and then. After his first short escape

from the House, Biswas went back to it, anxious awaiting condemnation or bitter

remarks from the Tulsis, however, instead,

No other comment was made. [. . . ] No one referred to his absence

or return, not Seth, not Mrs. Tulsi [. . . ] hardly to notice him. He

81

heard of nothing about the visits of Bipti and Tara. The house was

too full, too busy; such events were insignificant because he

mattered little to the house. His status there was now fixed. He was

troublesome and disloyal, and could not be trusted. He was weak

and therefore contemptible. (HMB 102)

Biswas feels deserted by his biological family and belittled by the Tulsis. No one even

cares about his existence and behavior in the family. He is held in contempt so that he

feels lonely and helpless whenever defeated in his wars against the Tulsis. Even

Shama, his wife, has never taken his side until they settle down in their last house.

Not until moving into the last house of hisown is Biswas’s ontological security fully

developed and established.

Biswas’s marriage to Shama is more a “business” deal than a love union, a deal

arranged by Mrs. Tulsi and Seth. His fate seems to be controlled when negotiating

with them, “The world was too small, the Tulsi family too large. He felt trapped”

(HMB 91). This foreshadows the impossibility of developing a pure relationship

between Shama and Mr. Biswas. Giddens considers that in contrast to close personal

ties in traditional contexts, “the pure relationship is not anchored in external

conditions of social or economical life – it is, as it were, free-floating” (Modernity 89).

82

Accordingly, a pure relationship should not be restricted to social or economical life.

Marriage used to be a contract “often initiated by parents or relatives rather than by

the marital partners themselves” (Modernity 89). The contract was usually strongly

influenced by economic considerations, and formed part of wider economic networks

and transactions. Though in modern times, the old framework of marriage has

substantially disintegrated, some of the traditional characteristics of it still persist. But

Giddens claims that in general, the tendency is “toward the eradication of these

pre-existing involvements—a phenomenon originally accompanied by the rise of

romantic love as a basic motive for marriage” (89). Marriage becomes more and more

a relationship initiated for, and kept going for as long as, it delivers emotional

satisfaction to be derived from close contact with another. Therefore, romantic love as

the base of marriage is a modern phenomenon, and is considered as a necessity for

keeping the contract valid. But the union of Shama and Biswas engages with no such

love.

Yet young Biswas does believe in romantic love. After visiting brothels with his

friend, Alec and his cousins, his longing for romantic love is intensified, “Love was

something he was embarrassed to think about; the very word he mentioned seldom,

and then as mockingly as Alec and Bhandat’s boys. But secretly he believed” (HMB

83

80). Unlike his friends and cousins, Mr. Biswas cannot be satisfied with sex. His void

inside his heart longs for love. That is why he keeps trying to convince himself and

others that the marriage to Shama is based on love when, in fact, he is forced into it

under Mrs. Tulsi and Seth’s calculation. He tries to defend for himself, when

confronted by Alec with the forthcoming marriage, “Well, I see this girl, you know. I

see this girl and she was looking at me, I was looking at she. So I give she a little of

the old sweet talk and I see that she was liking me [. . .]” (HMB 92-3). Deep inside his

heart, nevertheless, Biswas knows he has lost his romantic love for good, “But he was

worried [. . .] was unwilling to believe that he had acted foolishly. And, after all,

[Shama] was good-looking. And there would be a handsome dowry. Against he could

set only his fear, and a regret he could explain to no one: he would be losing romance

forever, since there could be no romance at Hanuman House” (93). Biswas is

self-contradictory in this marriage. While longing for romantic love, he marries to a

girl whose dowry becomes the strength in the marriage—a more traditional

economical consideration for getting married. And in return he has to mourn for his

lost romance and to spend many following years lamenting his loss.

Shama herself is the main force responsible for destroying the formation of a

pure relationship with Mr. Biswas. His longing for a real house of his own is

84

embodied with the doll house bought for Savi. Getting the doll house for his daughter

is also a declaration of his identity and rebellion against the whole Tulsi family

though he does not do so on purpose. Of course this action evokes apathy from the

rest of the family members. Shama has to burn down the doll house in the presence of

her family in order to win the alliance with her sisters and their husbands. Marriage

between Biswas and Shama also proves that a failed “creative involvement” with

others and with the object-world can result in “chronic melancholic or schizophrenic

tendencies” since the psychological satisfaction and the discovery of moral meaning

are not achieved (Modernity 41). Since an individual cannot live creatively either

because of the compulsive enactment of routines, or because they have been unable to

attribute full “solidity” to people and objects around them, they become melancholic

(41). The compulsive routines and expectation from the Tulsis and from Shama are

nothing close to creative involvement with Biswas. Shama and her family live in a

traditional, rigid, and compulsive lifestyle which smothers Biswas, and keeps him

from having his self-identity, which can be represented as having his own house. The

apathy of Shama and of the Tulsis clan reinforces the inside void and darkness in Mr.

Biswas, and leads to his mental breakdown which occurs in a storm. Anthony Boxill

considers this mental breakdown as a “symbolic death” (41). And the ruined

unfinished house represents the “unfinished skeletal state of his identity” (Boxill 41).

85

Before and after his mental breakdown, every now and then, Mr. Biswas feels

anxious about his existence; not only fights against the Tulsi but also new challenges

in life disturb him. When first moving into The Chase, he finds himself alert and

afraid, “How lonely shop was! And how frightening!” (HMB 145) The pressure of

swinging between the escapes from the Tulsis and the fights against the anxiety

strikes Biswas repeatedly and overwhelmingly. The thought of the future also

frightens him, “the fear of the future. The future wasn’t the next day or the next week

or even the next year, times within his comprehension and therefore without dread.

The future he feared could not be thought of in terms of time. It was blankness, a void

like those in dreams, into which [. . .] he was falling” (190). Mr. Biswas lives in great

anxiety which Giddens explains as the following passage:

Anxiety is felt as a ‘cosmic’ experience related to the reactions of

others and emerging self-esteem. It attacks the core of the self once

a basic security system is set up, which is why it is so difficult of the

individual to objectify it. Rising anxiety tends to threaten awareness

of self-identity, since awareness of the self in relation to constituting

features of the object-world becomes obscured. It is only in terms of

the basic security system, the origin of the sense of ontological

86

security, that the individual has the experience of self in relation to a

world of persons and objects organized cognitively through basic

trust. (Modernity 45)

Therefore, since Mr. Biswas’s main experiences all come from interactions with the

Tulsi clan, his security system is constantly under contest and the defeats against them

causes his low self-esteem.

His awareness of self-identity is negative and obscured, because he cannot seek

security from his own relatives, “Then [Biswas] knew that as soon as he stepped out

of the yard [of Tara] he returned to nonentity” (HMB 190). The basic trust formation

was not yet complete when he was a boy and moreover, now it is under trial among

the Tulsis. Discouragement of interactions with his family and the Tulsis makes it

unable for him to experience the slef in relation to a world of persons and objects. The

rising anxiety twists Biswas’s perception of the object-world and results in the

hallucinations that he sees in the house he is building on a stormy night in Green Vale.

However, the symbolic death experienced on the night also signifies a re-birth.

Mr. Biswas initiates in Port of Spain a new stage of identity formation after

recovering in the Hanuman from the mental breakdown. Ironically, when turning into

an invalid, he receives care and attention from the people who try to break him down.

87

After the recovery, he escapes from the House again to find his independence. His

new job as a famous correspondent helps him gain some respect from the Tulsi for he

has acquired some fame in Port of Spain. Mr. Biswas has established himself as a

celebrity in a higher social position. In addition, Shama and their children all move to

Mrs. Tulsi’s vacant house in Port of Spain because of her temporary recognition of

Mr. Biswas’s achievement. Remote from the rest of the Tulsi, they start to have a

more regular and stable family life in the house. Though still not satisfactory enough,

this can be seen as a turning point in Mr. Biswas’s life, “It was the climax of his

current good fortune” (HMB 332). At this stage of life, Biswas regains his identity of

the self—his family relying on his support, and his role as the head of the house is

consolidated.

But Biswas’s identity of the self is a process of “reflexive awareness” (Modernity

52). The self-identity has to be won; it is not “something that is just given, as a result

of the continuities of the individual’s action-system, but something that has to be

routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual” (52).

Therefore, one has to, continuously, take actions to create and sustain a series of

activities to assume his/her own identity. And Mr. Biswas never gives up trying to set

up his self identity until his death, though he has to go through the two extremes of

88

complying with the Tulsi family and of escaping from them to build his own

house/identity. The polemic experiences and activities usually tear him apart and

cause great anxiety in his life; but he never gives up trying. Of course he, every once

in a while, feels weak and defeated, but he is like the heroes whom he identifies

himself with when he was a young men, “Mr. Biswas was himself in many Samuel

Smiles heroes: he was young, he was poor, and he fancied he was struggling” (HMB

78). Even though Biswas does not have the “rigid ambitions” like these heroes, he

persists with his dreams of being independent and of having a house of his own (HMB

79). The perseverance and courage in pursuing dreams distinguish him from the rest

of the Tulsi husbands, and turn him into a real hero.11

Throughout the book, readers can discern that Mr. Biswas has been placed in

very difficult social and familial environment ever since his childhood, and such

circumstances provide Mr. Biswas with limited “personal engagement with some of

the most fundamental issues that human existence poses for all of us” (Modernity 201)

This limited and harsh social milieu actually helps Mr. Biwas accomplish the project

of the self, because this self has to be “reflexively achieved in a technically competent

11 Biswas’s courage even wins the recognition from his brother-in-law, Govind, who beats Mr. Biswas because of Biswas’s refusal to comply with the rules in the House when he is just newly-wedded to Shama. But as time passes by, Govind shows his sympathy toward Mr. Biswas when the latter has a fight with Owad. Govid’s kind voice moves Mr. Biwas and he “was overwhelmed to tears” (HMB 557).

89

but morally arid social environment” (201). In order to fight back the looming threat

of personal meaninglessness, Mr. Biswas is repeatedly required to discover and to

define the meaning of his own existence.

How can one prove the meaning of his/her own existence? Giddens’s believes

that the individual’s biography can answer the above mentioned question,

The existential question of self-identity is bound up with the fragile

nature of the biography which the individual ‘supplies’ about herself.

A person’s identity is not to be found in behavior, nor –important

though this is—in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep

a particular narrative going. The individual’s biography, [. . .]

cannot be wholly fictive. It must continually integrate events which

occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’

about the self. (Modernity 54)

A biography of the individual is considered as a necessity in remaining the

self-identity. Here Giddens restricts the form of narrative to biography. But I would

like to suggest that this desire of keeping a particular narrative should not be limited

only to biography; instead, it can be any form of writing, since a biography cannot be

as fictive and free as some other forms of writing. The method of writing should be

90

creative to keep one’s self-identity alive.

In A House for Mr. Biswas, Biswas does show this desire of writing throughout

his life. When he is newly-wedded, he tries to write romance stories when he

imagines himself as the hero of the stories. The title of the story is “Escape” (HMB

344). But Mr. Biwsas never gets to finish these stories. The stories usually begin with

these sentences, “At the age of thirty-three, when he was already the father of four

children [. . .]” (HMB 345). The stories have a leitmotif: the heroes, whether

handsome or not, are always “trapped into marriage, burden with a family, his youth

gone, meets a young girl. She is slim, almost thin, and dressed in white. She is fresh,

tender, unkissed; and she is unable to bear children” (344-5). These unfinished and

recurrent stories show Mr. Biswas’s feelings toward his marriage, and that how he

laments his youth and life. These barren heroines of the stories represent his

disappointment at his marriage and life. The unfinished stories echo his helplessness

in changing his own situation. He keeps his marriage as a “heavy, shameful secret”

(345). He comes to realize he can only accept his role as a father and a husband,

though there are still dreams the he wants to pursue, like going to England to study

there. He becomes envious when Owad can go and study in England to become a

doctor but deep inside, he knows it is impossible to realize dreams like that. He

91

probably can escape from the Tulsis, but never from Trinidad.

Moving into the last house on the Sikkim Street seems to be the final reflexive

step of Mr. Biswas’s self-identity formation. Not only Mr. Biwas but also his family

members settle down to their own roles and positions in life,

Soon it seemed to the children that they had never lived anywhere

but in the tall square house in Sikkim Street. From now their lives

would be ordered, their memories coherent. The mind, while it is

sound, is merciful. And rapidly the memories of Hanuman House,

The Chase, Green Vale, Shorthills, and Tulsi house in Port of Spain

would become jumbled, blurred; events would be telescoped, many

forgotten. [. . .] and a fragment of forgotten experience would be

dislodged, isolated, puzzling [. . .] So later, and very slowly, in

securer times of different stresses, when the memories had lost the

power to hurt, with pain or joy, they would fall into place and give

back the past. (HMB 581)

It is easy to tell from the paragraph that the pressure of surviving in the Tulsi family

actually enfolds the children, even Shama. Though buying the house is an impulsion

decision, it helps Mr. Biswas stabilize his own identity and position as a man, a father

92

and a husband. More than that, his final independence from the Tulsis also frees his

family from the shadow of living under the control and manipulation of Mrs. Tulsi

and the clan. The clan is so big that no one is allowed to have his/her own voice and

will to make decisions as an individual. Even Anand knows the importance of

escaping from the Tulsis; he tells Mr. Biswas resolutely, “Pa. We must move” (HMB

551). The episode of the novel is under the title “The Revolution” (533). At first it

refers to the communists’ revolution to overrule the government and it should bring

equality to the people; but till the end of the episode, it turns out to be the revolution

of the Biswas family against the ruling Tulsi family.

It is not only the self-identity that is being developed when Mr. Biswas moves to

Port of Spain. His sense of national identity also initiates at this time, especially when

he starts working for the government as a “Community Welfare Officer” (HMB 496).

He is then considered “the Sentinel’s expert on matters of social welfare” (495). Since

it is a time during “postwar development,” everything is unclear, including the

direction of his new job. He conducts a small research on reconstruction, going

through related books and information. But his passion for the new job is discouraged

by the real world and by people in Trinidad. Soon after he starts analyzing the

questionnaires he collects, he realizes “He was dealing with a society that had no rules

93

and patterns, and classifications were a chaotic business” (510). This is probably the

first time in his life when Mr. Biswas notices the problems that the former colonial

society has to deal with. However, without any aid and practical methods, he is

helpless and dismissed from the new job. At the end, he has to go back to Sentinel to

work as a correspondent again. As Stuart Hall suggests that transformations of society

can shift our personal identities, and undermine “our sense of ourselves as integrated

subjects,” Mr. Biswas is undergoing such impact of the postwar society (Futures 275).

The confidence, for Mr. Biswas, in being a government office has gone; instead, the

following helplessness in this new job makes him more confused and gloomy as an

individual. This new position and the postwar social milieu have changed Mr.

Biswas’s concept and awareness of his society. Hall thinks this is modern identities

being “de-centred”; “dislocated or fragmented” (Futures 274). Mr. Biswas, according

to Ernest Gellner, is experiencing a “deep sense of subject loss” because he fails to

see a “sense of national identification” (6). In modern times, this sense of national

identification constitutes part of self-identities. This is the part that Mr. Biswas fails to

gain from Trinidad.

It is obvious that the Trinidad at that time, as a former colony, has not formed the

national identity which Hall believes a nation-state should require. National cultures

94

are distinctly a modern form since a nation-state is also considered a modern

phenomenon. The allegiance and identification with the country are things that the

Trinidadians lack. Without a national identity, the society looks chaotic and ruthless.

Consequently, they have no idea of the direction to which the whole nation should

head. This may be the reason why Biswas’s program for which he works has to be

ended abruptly.

As a government official, Biswas has contemplated ways to help his fellow

Trinidadians whom he is supposed to help develop their communities and organize

village life. However, he finds it impossible to apply ideal and successful

reconstruction models to Port of Spain because he receives no support from the milieu,

“But [Biswas] knew what the villages were by night, when the rumshop empted”

(HMB 498). He feels helpless and his devotion to the job is futile in the end. At this

moment, his identity as a subject in his country is experiencing being “de-centred,”

“fragmented” and “dislocated” by the outside forces in the society. Since the postwar

phenomenon is also a new stimulus in the dynamic modern world (Futures 278).

At that time, there was no consensus among people in Trinidad of how to

develop itself as a nation. Stuart Hall says national identities are not things “we are

born with, but are formed and transformed within and in relation to representation”

95

(Futures 292). A nation is not only a political entity but something which produces

meanings—a nation is in fact “a system of cultural representation” (292). This system

of representation has to be carefully and intentionally created and built up. This

formation of a national/culture representation involves a creation of standards of

universal literacy, generalized a/some vernacular language(s) as the dominant medium

of communication throughout the nation as well as a homogeneous culture and

mtaintained national cultural institutions (292). But from A House for Mr. Biswas, we

can see that the country has not yet been through this stage of generating national

cultural identities. They have no symbols or representations of the country, let alone

of dreams and ambitions to build it into a modern nation-state. When doing his survey

in an area, Biswas is faced with puzzles from the peasants, “Who send you?

Government? Think they really care? [. . . ] You mean they paying for this? Just to

find out how we does live. But I could tell them for nothing man” (HMB 507). To

Biswas and other people, this is probably just a beginning of initiating a national

identity. They are just about to sense the importance to transform the Trinidad from a

former colony into a real nation.

The second time that Mr. Biswas has the chance to think about the national

identity is when he listens to Owad’s speech on communism. In the beginning,

96

Owad’s tales on communism does fascinate Mr. Biswas. But when he asks Owad if

the latter is a member of the Communist Party, Owad just smiles. Owad’s description

of the communism is so attractive that by the end of the week, “the house was in a

ferment. Everyone was waiting for the revolution” (HMB 544). Difficulties in life

make communism sound tempting to Mr. Biswas, but he soon realizes the problem in

Owad’s provocation of communism: the revolution will not take place and that Owad

is not a real advocator of communism. He is living in the old way as he used to when

in the Hanuman House, except that how he has the title as a doctor. The society

cannot be saved with communism. Judging from Mr. Biswas’s envy on communism,

which is proved to be a failed political system, we can see his ideas of a better society

can be immature and biased. He is very envious after hearing the experiences of

Owad, who has met many important people while studying in England, “To think that

[Owad] who had met those people was sleeping under the same roof! There, where

Owad had been, was surely where life was to be found (HMB 540). As post-colonial

critics may criticize, Biswas still considers the western society, represented as

England in the story, is a paradigm for them. As John Docker suggests, “[I]n most

post-colonial nations (including the West Indies [. . .]) the nexus of power involving

literature, language, and a dominant British culture has strongly resisted attempts to

dismantle it” (4). Biswas does have the strong belief and worship in the British

97

cultures.

Though worshiping the western cultures, Mr. Biswas devotes himself to the

development of Trinidad and thus he forms a very sharp contrast with Ganesh in The

Mystic Masseur. While Mr. Biwas spends all his life time struggling to get his own

house, which some critics embody as his self-identity, Ganesh seems luckier. His rise

and success is enhanced by the social milieu, which helps him establish the reputation

as a wise and reliable pundit. The reputation helps him become a political leader with

great influence and fortune. But the respective social statuses of the two men form a

sharp contrast between them—as an unimportant government official, Biwas has a

dream of helping his fellow people to build up communities, whereas Ganesh flees

away from his duties as an important political leader once he fails in the negotiation

with the farmers. He complies with the British government and is made an “M.B.E.”

(MM 207). He surrenders his national identity once it is under trial and his abilities are

contested. That is why he is an antithesis of real heroes like Mr. Biswas, who cares

about people and development of Trinidad though there is not much he can do.

The national identity that Mr. Biwas fails to fully develop is then shifted to his

son, Anand. Anand is seen as the extension of Mr. Biwas’s life. He is the one who

carries out Biswas’s unfulfilled dreams. But he also has to experience the identity

98

crises that his father has not quite encountered when he studies in England; but the

father can definitely feel sympathetic for his son’s suffering, “[Biswas] missed Anand

and worried about him,

Anand’s letters, at first rare, became more and more frequent. They

were gloomy, self-pitying; then they were tinged with a hysteria

which Biswas immediately understood. He wrote Anand long

humorous letters [. . .] Anand’s letters grew rare again. There was

nothing Mr. Biswas could do but wait. (HMB 586)

Biwas knows that he son is feeling the anxiety of living abroad and is struggling to

find his own position and identity in England but as a father, he can only comfort

Anand and let him experience these painful phases to reach his own conclusion.

Ernesto Laclau argues that late-modern societies are characterized by

“difference”; and “they are cut through by different social divisions and social

antagonisms which produce a variety of different “subject positions” –i.e.

identities –for individuals” (40). This emphasis on difference is not rare in societies

even before the late-modern ones; back to the days in the 1970s in Trinidad, people

emphasized differences vehemently. After Owad returns from England, one of his

99

most attractive descriptions is about the differences between Trinidadian Indians and

those from India. Owad dislikes all Indians from India,

They were a disgrace to Trinidad Indians; they were arrogant, sly

and lecherous; they pronounced English in a peculiar way; they were

slow and unintelligent and were given degrees only out of charity;

they were unreliable with money [. . . ] (the only true Indian food

meals Owad had in England were the meals he had cooked himself)

[. . .]; incomprehensibly, they looked down on colonial Indians.

(HMB 539)

The way Trinidadian Indians define themselves is to point out the differences between

them and the Indians from India. The interesting part is that, here in the Tulsi family,

they regard themselves as the real Indians whereas their religion, rituals and lifestyles

have been mixed with those in the colony. The Tulsi sisters “grew grave as they

realized their responsibilities as the last representatives of Hindu culture” (HMB 540).

Being far from the motherland for years, the Tulsis have regarded themselves as real

representatives for the genuine Hindu culture. But the question is what the real

paradigm for Hindu culture is? Who can define it? Laclau thinks if differences in

societies can hold together at all, it is not because these differences are unified, but

100

“because their different elements and identities can, under certain circumstances, be

articulated together” (40). But this articulation is always partial and the structure of

identity remains open. Therefore, there are no real standards to measure up the

differences between societies. We need to remain open to the articulations of different

people’s concept of identities and to welcome possible interpretations of others.

Differences should be the strength when it comes to identity formation. Stuart

Hall explains how we should view differences when building up our identities. When

talking about “Black identity,” Stuart Hall uses himself as an example (Culture 54). It

is also a reflexive process of forming this Black identity. When he first moved to

England, he thought he was going “home” (Culture 54). But later he realized he was

labeled as an immigrant by others in the society, and moreover, “You’re Black!” (55)

Hall felt very confused because when back in Jamaica, he never “heard anybody

either call themselves, or refer to anybody else as ‘Black’” (53). But he heard “a

thousand other words” (53). His grandmother could differentiate about “fifteen shades

between light brown and dark brown.” In Jamaica, “it had the most complicated color

stratification system in the world” (53). Concepts of differences of colors were more

detailed and less arbitrary there. In comparison, the way white people define things

looks too abrupt. He further finds out that there is no such essentialism which can

101

entail all differences between all the black and colored people. He does not agree with

the term multi-culturalism because this term tries to impose some concepts to people

of great differences (56). Refusing to be categorized by over-simplifying concepts,

Hall encourages people to search for the identities they own by emphasizing their own

differences. The differences should not be hid and silenced; instead, they should be

presented. He gives an example of a movie, “My Beautiful Laundrette.” The movie is

in fact not beautiful at all.12 Its producer, Hanif Kureishi, says, “There is sometimes

too simple a demand for positive images. Positive images sometimes require cheering

fictions. [. . .] I am glad to say that the more I look at My Beautiful Laundrette, the

less positive images I could see” (60). Kureishi claims his grotesque movie is a

genuine way of showing Britain today, its “mix of races and colors, its hysteria and

despair [. . . ] It can’t attempt to represent any one group as having the total, exclusive,

essential monopoly on virtue” (60). What Kureishi tries to express is that you cannot

idealize the differences and darkness of modern day Britain. By presenting the

unpleasant negative truths, you tell the truth and reflect the real society and thus find

your own voice in the society.

12 This film was made by Stephen Freers and Hanif Kureishi. This was “originally made as a television film for local distribution only, and shown once at the Edinburgh Festival where it received an enormous reception” (Culture 60). Stuart Hall describes it as “the most transgressive text there is” (60). The central characters of the narrative are two gay men. However, anyone who wants to separate the identities into their two clearly separate points will “discover that one of these Black gay men is white and one of these Black gay men is brown. Both of them are struggling in Thatcher’s Britain” (60).

102

Hall agrees with Kureishi’s idea of presenting ugly truths in art works. He

argues,

If contemporary writing which emerges from oppressed groups

ignores the central concerns and major conflicts of the larger society,

and if these are willing simply to accept themselves as marginal or

enclave literatures, they will automatically designate themselves as

permanently minor, as a sub-genre. They must not allow themselves

now to be rendered invisible and marginalized in this way by

stepping outside of the maelstrom of contemporary history. (Culture

61)

Hall does not think an author from a minority group attempting to beautify his/her

work can present the truth in life, and the way can never help the author find a

position in the society. Hall’s assertion seems to justify Naipaul’s presentation of the

unpleasant truths about Trinidad. Naipaul believes that, as a writer, he should pursue

of honesty above all things (Conversations 24). He was simply “recording [his]

reactions to the world; [he] hadn’t come to any conclusion about it” (Conversations

25). The only thing can be sure is that in Naipaul’s work, “he has consistently refused

to take sides. He has trained himself to be a dispassionate observer, and he quite

103

fearlessly tells what he sees no matter how unpleasant it might prove to some readers”

(Boxill 82). Naipaul’s work presents many unpleasant truths and scenes in Trinidad,

but he certainly gets attention and finds a position and self-identity in the British

society. The empire has to face the unpleasant truths which she had caused in her

former colony. Boxill believes that Naipaul shows great insight into “the psychology

of being small, poor, and exploited” (82). But Naipaul is not interested in presenting

Trinidadians only a former colonials. He believes they are human beings and as such

have rights and responsibilities. Trinidadians, West Indians, Africans, Indians,

members of the Third World cannot go on forever seeking sympathy because they

have been exploited in the past. Boxill does not thing Naipaul wants people in

Trinidad pity themselves for too long, because “The longer they continue to be

satisfied with making history the excuse for what they are, the longer they will

continue to lead mimic lives and not real ones” (82). This is the ugly truth that

Naipaul wants to express. Presenting and facing the ugly truth is necessary for people

in Trinidad to form their identities.

Stuart Hall asserts the post-modern subject should be conceptualized as having

no fixed, essential of permanent identity. “Identity becomes a ‘moveable feast’:

formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or

104

addressed in the cultural systems which surround us” (Futures 277). We can never pin

down any specific and fixed identity in this modern world because of its dynamic

system. On the contrary, each individual should acquire different identities according

to diverse occasions and positions in which he/she is placed. Since an individual

should acquire different identities in different social contexts, the process of identity

search and adjusting will never stop. V.S. Naipaul, like Anand in A House for Mr.

Biwas and the boy narrator in Miguel Street, has to look for his multiple-identities in

the constantly changing world and without an end. This is a painful process.13 In his

early Trinidad novels, Naipaul employs “escape” as a strategy for the protagonists to

seek their identities: Mr. Biswas escapes from the Tulsis, and Anand and the boy

narrator escape from Trinidad; but Ganesh, serving as an antithesis to the previous

characters, escapes from his duties and identities instead of facing them. But Boxill

discovers this escape cannot be the ultimate answer to the identity searching,

“Readers familiar with Naipaul’s later work will of course realize that for Naipaul the

mere escape from Trinidad is no final answer” (27). It is how you position yourself

that matters but this position, according to both Giddens’s and Hall’s ideas, cannot be

a fix one in modern society. Hall believes “The fully unified, completed, secure, and

13 As Boxill observes, “From the beginning of his career as a writer, [Naipaul] has been trying to identify and isolate what it is that causes man so much anguish, that renders his efforts in this world so futile, that frustrates his ability to understand himself and to relate to his fellows” (7).

105

coherent identity is a fantasy” (Futures 277). The only way is to remain open and

flexible when confronting different possibilities and interpretations of our

self-identities.

106

Chapter Four

Conclusion

Giddens concludes, in The Consequences of Modernity, Modernity is a

“double-edged phenomenon” (7). The development of modern social institutions and

their worldwide spread have created vastly greater opportunities for human beings to

enjoy a more secure and rewarding existence than any type of pre-modern system. But

modernity also has a somber side, which has become very apparent since the

twentieth century. New methods of economical production have transformed our

lifestyles, such as rapid mass transportation, mass media, science, technology and

many other newly invented tools and concepts. They all change the distance and

relationships between people. To individuals, modernity has opened up more

unimaginable possibilities which may lead to a better self-fulfillment. But in the

meantime, the dynamic and fast-paced modern societies also expose individuals to

crises that their antecedents did not confront. Individuals may be caught up in events

that they may not understand or control. One of the possible crises is that

fragmentation and dislocation of self-identity.

This identity fragmentation and dislocation may occur to any modern individual.

However, to some people, this identity issue can be more complex and problematic.

107

V.S. Naipaul and Stuart Hall both come from a former colony and have lived in

England since their teenage. Before living in London, neither of them recognized the

truth they were different. Before embarking for London, Hall thought, like most

people, that he was going “back home” (Culture 52). However, upon realizing his

difference and blackness from the gaze of other people in London, he undertakes a

journey of finding his own identities. He describes this is a struggle, because it is a

“change of consciousness, a change of self-recognition, a new process of

identification, the emergence into visibility of a new [individual]” (54). As the

quotation suggests, the process of an individual’s search for his identity is not easy. A

subject has to change many concepts and recognition of herself in order to get a new

identity. The old concepts need to be modified or discarded and the new ones can be

slotted in the proper location. Moreover, this is an ongoing process without an end.

Hall believes identities have to be learned, to be acquired and to be won. An

individual has to be aware of the problem of identities so that one can know what to

build up for oneself. He says to his daughter that the question of her identity

formation is “[t]he question of learning, learning to be Black. Learning to come into

an identification” (55).

Naipaul is also undergoing this journey of searching for self-identity. But his

108

way of looking for his identification is through writing. From his works, readers can

find the clues that he is trying to locate the identity to which he belong: Is he a

Trinidad Indian, an English or just an Indian? Cristina Emanuela Dasclu thus

describes Naipaul, “[Even] in his homeland, Trinidad, Naipaul is an exile, an exile

from India. In England, he is an exile from Trinidad. In India, he is not ‘at home’

because it is a country he has never known” (93). It seems Naipaul has never really

found his position in this world and nor can he find proper identities for himself.

Readers can see his confusion of identities from his early works. In his novels

mentioned in the previous chapters, we can see that the main characters are dealing

with their identity issues: in Miguel Street, the boy narrator is about to cope with the

problem; in A House for Mr. Biswas, Anand is actually experiencing the process of

identification; as for The Mystique Masseur, Ganesh has already given up his identity

and surrendered it to the colonist, the Birtain. He refuses to be a Trinidadian.

The time in these three novels overlap the time of modernization in Trinidad.

The protagonists’ lives are affected and changed by it. Modernity accelerates changes

and also leads to discontinuities in their lives. One of the most important features

brought about by modernity is the necessity of searching for one’s self-identity.

Because modernity has changed the relationships between people, and the individual

109

has to search for the stability from inside. Identity gives us “a sense of depth, out there,

and in here. It is spatially organized. Much of our discourse of the inside and outside .

[. . .] It helps us [. . .] to sleep well at night” (Culture 43). This inner stability eases

anxiety for the individual in the modern world. With identity, an individual would

clearly know what to say, how to behave and interact with others. It helps an

individual to live a life without transgressions or confusion.

Identity is the production of the interaction between the individual and

environment; it is “always in the process of formation” (Culture 47). Since

modernity is an “unfinished project,” the world keeps changing and evolving, so does

identity need to adjust itself to the world outside (Consequences 138). It is easy for us

to discern this identity searching and adjusting process in Naipauls works. His later

works discuss different origins and topics related to his question of identities. He is

always searching “for his spirituality and his identity as a solitary figure making his

‘way in the world’” (Conversations xi).

110

Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. New York:

Routledge, 1989.

Barbuddhe, Satish. “ Individual’s Search for Identity.” Critical Response to V. S.

Naipaul and Mulk Rai Anand. Ed. Amar Nath Prasad. Darya Ganj: Sarup, 2003.

Bhamabra, Gurminder K. Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the

Sociological Imagination. New York: Palgrave, 2007.

Booker, M. Keith, and Dubravka Juraga. The Caribbean Novel in English: An

Introduction. Kingston: Ian Randle, 2001.

Boxill, Anthony. V. S. Naipaul's Fiction: In Request of the Enemy. Fredericton: York,

1983.

Dascalu, Cristina Emanuela. Imaginary Homelands of Writers in Exile: Salman

Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, and V. S. Naipaul. New York: Cambria, 2007.

Feder, Lillian. Naipaul's Truth: The Making of a Writer. Lanham: Rowman, 2001.

Fromm, Eric. The Fear of Freedom. London: Routledge, 1960.

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.

Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP 1990.

---. "Modernity and Self-Identity." Cambridge: Polity, 1991.

111

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." Identity: Community, Culture,

Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence, 1990.

---. Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the

Representation of Identity. Ed. Anthony D. King. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,

1997.

---, ed. Modernity and Its Futures. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995.

Hamner, Robert D. “V.S. Naipaul.” Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical

Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Daryl Cumber Dance. Westport: Greenwood, 1986.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Post-modernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of

Cultural Change. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

Jussawalla, Eroza, ed. Conversations with V.S. Naipaul. Jackson: Mississippi UP,

1997.

Khan, Md Akhtar Jamal. V.S. Naipaul: A Critical Study. New Delhi: Creative, 1998.

King, Bruce. V.S. Naipaul. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Laclau, Ernesto. New Reflections on the Revolutions of Our Time. London: Verso,

1990.

Lamming, George. The Pleasure of Exile. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992.

Naipaul, V.S. A House for Mr. Biswas. London: Penguin, 1961.

---. Miguel Street. London: Picador, 1959.

112

---. The Mystic Masseur. London: Picador, 1957.

Ormerod, David. "In a Derelict Land: The Novels of V. S. Naipaul." Contemporary

Literature 9.1 (1968): 74-90.

Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. Literature of the Caribbean. Westport: Greenwood,

2008.

Prasad, Amar Nath. “Identity Crisis in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas.”

Critical Response to V. S. Naipaul and Mulk Rai Anand. Ed. Amar Nath Prasad.

Darya Ganj: Sarup, 2003.

Premdas, Ralph. Trinidad and Tobago. Ethnic Conflict, Inequality, and Public Sector

Governance. New York: Palgrave, 2007.

Rowe-Evans, Adrian, and V. S. Naipaul. "V. S. Naipaul: A Transition Interview."

Transition 40 (1971): 56-62.

Rutherford, Jonathan. "'A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of

Difference'." Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford.

London: Lawrence, 1990.

Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. Trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby.

London: Routledge, 1978.

Simpson, Louis. "Disorder and Escape in the Fiction of V. S. Naipaul." The Hudson

Review 37.4 (1984-1985): 571-7.

113

Soanes, Catherine, ed. Concise Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Oxford UP,

2008.

Weiss, Timothy F. On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V.S. Naipaul. Amherst: U of

Massachusetts P, 1992.