Opinion A book for Mr Naipaul
Dont waste your time on his provocation
Reading lists are being churned out for V.S. Naipaul. In the sort of flaky commentary that is now his staple,he said this week that he could think of no woman writer hed consider his literary match. It prompted outrage of an order that is mystifying,with critics parading their better selves by rustling up names of women writers among the greats.
So the great man,once master of the perfect sentence,is being sought to be persuaded,reformed even,by a reading list. Even his former editor,the now legendary Diana Athill,with whom he had a churlish falling out when she dared suggest that a book of his was not up to his own high standards,has chosen to sidestep the withering remarks he appended on her writing (all this feminine tosh). I dont mean this in any unkind way, he clarified,allowing us to imagine the entire episode as yet another familiar Naipaulian eruption. One only needs to consider the works of Jane Austen or George Eliot,said Athill,before adding none too kindly: He has been asked what he genuinely feels and what he feels seems to me to be foolishness.
Naipauls remarks,of course,were couched in a larger disregard for women. He could have,remember,said he considered no other writer his equal,and gotten away with it. But,as the comments reported in The Guardian suggest,this was about gender: I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know if it is by a woman or not. I think (it is) unequal to me. And then,the revealing line about womens sentimentality,the narrow view of the world: And inevitably for a woman,she is not a complete master of a house,so that comes over in her writing too. In translation: its not that a woman has not proved herself his equal,she cannot.
While it betrays a rather limited view of the novels purpose,perhaps that line can be a take-off point for a more muted,yet pervasive look at how women are regarded as writers,readers,critics. But dont waste your breath on Naipaul. Because,you know what,what hed call writing by a woman and what most of us would call writing that happens to be by a woman has already dealt with his comments.
In her last novel,Unless (2002),Carol Shields used an actual incident to convey the hurt inflicted by such a comment on a random listener. Reta Winters,the narrator,is trying to come to terms with her eldest daughter abandoning university and all else to sit in silence on a Toronto street corner,with the word goodness strung around her neck,and subsist on what may be left at her feet. She projects her impatience at what Shields calls the casual disregard of women onto her daughter,matching the teenagers project of self-extinction with her own rage.
She finds evidence of such disregard in the crevices of an average day,in magazine articles,book reviews,advertisements. And she shoots off letters to those who betray disregard but just will not look squarely at what this disregard does to the ecosystem. She repeatedly berates them for excluding women from their lists of great writers. She sees each of their generalisations to be somehow related to her daughters exile,and she lets them know. Later,Shields would explain the pause it gave her when the critic George Steiner said he did not believe there were any important women writers of the 20th century. (She had asked the question.)
We are now well into the 21st century. Lets not bother with Naipaul. His comments have already been dealt with in a most extraordinary novel by a woman.
mini.kapoor@expressindia.com
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