Unit 18 Immigration and Identity
Now read the following book review of the novel Half A Life.
HALF A LIFE
V.S. Naipaul
Knopf, 2001, 211 pp.
V.S. Naipaul marks his rise to Nobel laureate, however accidentally,
with a strange new novel that is at once of a piece with and apart from
most of his previous work. On the one hand it is a continuation of
his preoccupation with the innumerable questions raised by cultural
and racial identity; on the other hand its spare, melancholy, elusive,
somewhat heavily ironic tone contrasts with the more animated
quality of his best fiction (A House for Mr. Biswas, for example),
and the graphic sex with which its final sections are filled is a stark
departure from his almost priggish treatment of the subject previously.
The heart of the novel can be found in a brief scene three-quarter of the way through. At
a rough restaurant on the coast of the African nation where he is living, Willie Chandran
English: Grade 11 163
encounters a "big light-eyed man" man who is being abused by his Portuguese boss as
he goes about his work as a tiler. Afterward Willie's lover, Ana, herself part Portuguese
and part African, tells him that the tiler is illegitimate, with an African mother and an
important Portuguese landowner for a father. "The rich Portuguese put their illegitimate
mulatto children to learning certain trades," she tells him: "Electrician, mechanic,
metal-worker, carpenter, tiler," to which Willie responds: "I said nothing more to Ana.
But whenever I remembered the big sweating man with the abused light eyes, carrying
the shame of his birth on his face like a brand, I would think, 'Who will rescue that
man? Who will avenge him?' "
It is a question of the utmost urgency to Willie, and the central motif of Half a Life,
Naipaul's 13th novel. It is about a man -- the phrase is used to describe someone else,
but it clearly is meant to describe Willie as well -- "who appeared to have no proper
place in the world." He is spending this, what we are to take to be the first half of his
life, trying to find such a place, "just letting the days go by," trusting "that one day
something would happen, an illumination would come to him, and he would be taken
by a set of events to the place he should go."
Willie was born in India 40-some years ago. His father was a "man of high caste, high
in the maharaja's revenue service," who heard the call of Mahatma Gandhi in the early
1930s and decided to make a sacrifice of himself, a "lasting kind of sacrifice, something
the mahatma would have approved of." Rather than marry in his own caste he would
choose "the lowest person I could find." He settled upon a fellow college student, who
was "small and coarse featured, almost tribal in appearance, noticeably black, with two
big top teeth that showed very white," clearly a woman of "a backward caste."
This man of sacrifice is noticed by the eminent British writer Somerset Maugham,
who comes to India (in a cameo role) to research a book. Eventually he emerges in
Maugham's portrait as someone of great spirituality and self-sacrifice, a role he knows
is far from accurate but into which he finds himself slipping easily and comfortably.
But those of whom the greatest sacrifice is exacted are the two children of this strange
and unhappy relationship, Willie and his sister. Bitterly unhappy in India, loving his
mother and despising his father, Willie manages to get a scholarship to a second-rate
college in London and flees there.
In college and in London itself, Willie "thought he was swimming in ignorance, had lived
without a knowledge of time." Yet in and out of school, his education proceeds apace.
Thousands of miles from home, he begins to sense the condescension and indifference
164 English: Grade 11
with which the British had treated his father, and disdain gradually metamorphoses
into empathy. He also begins to understand that "the old rules [of India] no longer
bound him," that "freedom . . . was his for the asking." It is a revelation: "No one he
met, in the college or outside it, knew the rules of Willie's own place, and Willie began
to understand that he was free to present himself as he wished. He could, as it were,
write his own revolution. The possibilities were dizzying. He could, within reason,
remake himself and his past and his ancestry."
This is exactly what he does. He fabricates a past for himself that denies his divided
identity and presents himself as whole. For a while he participates in "the special,
passing bohemian-immigrant life of London of the late 1950s," though eventually he
realizes that "the lost, the unbalanced, the alcoholic, the truly bohemian -- those parties
in shabby Notting Hill flats no longer seemed metropolitan and dazzling." By this
point he has created a minor career for himself as part-time author of scripts for the
BBC, which gives him courage to try his hand at writing stories. He takes scenes and
plots from movies with Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart and reworks them to
his own purposes, finding that "it was easier, with these borrowed stories far outside
his own experience, and with these characters far outside himself, to be truer to his
feelings than it had been with his cautious, half-hidden parables at school."
For a time it works: "Whenever Willie felt he was running out of material, running out
of cinematic moments, he went to see old movies or foreign movies." It doesn't last. In
time -- inevitably -- his writing "began to lead him to difficult things, things he couldn't
face, and he stopped." He cobbles together a little book of stories that is published and
almost universally neglected, save by a young woman of mixed African background
who tells him in a letter that "in your stories for the first time I find moments that are
like moments in my own life." This is Ana. They meet, though he is apprehensive: "But
as soon as he saw her all his anxieties fell away, and he was conquered. She behaved
as though she had always known him, and had always liked him. She was young and
small and thin, and quite pretty. She had a wonderfully easy manner. And what was
most intoxicating for Willie was that for the first time in his life he felt himself in the
presence of someone who accepted him completely. At home his life had been ruled by
his mixed inheritance. [But with Ana] there was, so to speak, nothing to push against,
no misgiving to overcome, no feeling of distance."
So when she decides to go back home to her Portuguese African country, he accompanies
her. In "that regulated colonial world" in which "to be even a second-rank Portuguese
was to have a kind of high status," he finds "a complete acceptance." Though this does
English: Grade 11 165
not change, he "began to understand -- and was helped in this understanding by my
own background -- that the world I had entered was only a half-and-half world, that
many of the people who were our friends considered themselves, deep down, people
of the second rank." Wherever he turns, he finds people whose place in the world is no
more certain or secure than his own, though at the end of his African sojourn he is still
so caught up in his own fears, resentments and anxieties that he fails to grasp that this
is, in truth, a universal condition.
It is for Naipaul, not Willie Chandran, to make this central point. He does so with
subtlety and nuance. The novel is told by an omniscient narrator -- perhaps to distance
Naipaul and his own experience from Willie and his story -- but the point of view is
self-evidently Willie's. He is a man of intelligence and character who is blind to the full
truth about himself, at once worldly and self-deceiving. It is a state of mind that is, or
should be, familiar to all too many of us.
Jonathan Yardley
The Washington Post
Homophones are words with the same pronunciation but having different meanings
and spellings. For example, board and bored, meet and meat are homophonous.
D. Choose the right word to fill in the blanks.
a. Can you …… the box in the back garden? (bury/berry)
b. Alex could not …… the branch off the tree. (break/brake)
c. …… pencil is on the floor? (Who's/Whose)
d. We have got very …… (phew/few) tasks left.
e. Some tribes worship their gods before they …… (prey/pray)
f. …… it. Everything is messed up.(Dam /Damn)
g. What a wonderful …… the professor presented. (lesson/lessen)
Comprehension
Answer these questions.
a. How is Willie Chandran different from the rest of his family?
Willie Chandran is different from the rest of his family because he lives in a foreign country. He feels an identity crisis after the immigration from India to London.
b. Who is the main character of Half A Life? How is he described?
c. Why does Willie leave India?
d. What is the revelation that Willie begin to feel in college and in London?
He begins to understand that he was free to present as he wishes and can write his own revolution including his past and ancestors.
e. Why does Willie accompany Ana?
f. What is the central issue Naipal has raised in the novel?
The central issue Naipal raised in the novel is the identity crisis in Immigrants due to racial and cultural differences.
Comments
Post a Comment