Joseph Conrad and V. S. Naipaul: The status of fiction

Naipaul sees his writing as contributing to the progress of Western civilization. To pair Conrad with him is apparently to accept this vision. Here Naipaul's work is read as the conflicted expression of a self-made colonial subject in a postcolonial world. Naipaul attempts in mid-career to base his enterprise on a reading of Conrad's work as a response to the latter's estrangement from mainstream English life. From the formal consequences of this attempt arise a grandiose poetics. Rather than contest Naipaul's account of his literary origins, I examine its implications for both his work and Conrad's.Had Conrad kept on writing sea stories, had Naipaul kept on writing comic novels set in Trinidad, neither would have been regarded as more than exotic: neither would have become an English writer. Lacking the insider's knowledge needed to produce conventional domestic fictions, they enlist the novel in the service of imperial history. Conrad oddly insists that "fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing." The writer who invents too much neglects his duty to interpret the visible world the novel should describe the advance and retreat of the West to which this conception of "human history" is moored.Being true to "human history" requires Conrad and Naipaul to invent the past, but because of their principled reluctance to do so they take half measures: aesthetic congruity is sacrificed to an historical program from which their work finally shrinks. In Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, Conrad attempts to impose an historical order on the events being depicted, an order the events themselves resist. By rejecting the private for the public novel that he identifies with Conrad, Naipaul restrains his own powers in The Loss of El Dorado. He carries this rejection further in A Bend in the River, which is an attempt to impose an epic severity on the novel in the name of the writer's duty to his civilization. Naipaul hopes to redeem the tropes of the supposedly decadent novel for their properly historiographic purpose, but his landscapes are so dismal as hardly to be places worthy of the name.