(Note: I wrote this as a short column for a New York-based publication that accepted my pitch — then turned it down without explanation).
V.S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 for “having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny” that helped his readers “see the presence of suppressed histories,” according to the prize committee. His journalism, however, has been overlooked. Naipaul was a sharp observer of lands foreign and familiar, and his approach could enliven the approach of journalists today.
Naipaul wasn’t much of a data wonk, a writer who thought in numbers and statistics—that approach threatened to make people into numbers, losing the underlying power and action of society.
Instead, Naipaul dealt in minor details that showed human motivation and beliefs. He used stats judiciously. He took to journalism as a novelist, focusing on a person’s character and the virtues and vices of a society. Personal and social powers must be understood and interpreted; thus, the scrutiny on individual and national habits, on modes of thinking, revealed what statistics could not.
Like Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion, his socio-political observations could be devastating.
In “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” he issued an acerbic judgment on “those who continue to simplify the world and reduce other men…to a cause, the people who substitute doctrine for knowledge and irritation for concern, the revolutionaries who visit centers of revolution with return air tickets, the hippies, the people who wish themselves on societies more fragile than their own, all those people who in the end do no more than celebrate their own security.”
Naipaul knew better than most the fragility of a society, of culture, of ideas.
Born in Trinidad in 1932 to a family of Indian descent, Naipaul wrote of post-colonial societies in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Asia; of outposts of colonialism set adrift without direction, of dictators combining the ancient and the imperial for a new tyranny, of societies turning to faith and magic when no reliable institutions or codes of law exist. Naipaul’s conservative (or, if one is a Democratic Socialist, reactionary) perspective was a rare one in an era of utopian post-colonialism.
“Politics have to do with the nature of human association, the contract of men with men. The politics of a country can only be an extension of its idea of human relationships,” Naipaul wrote when reflecting on Argentina in “The Return of Eva Perón.”
Data without humanity cannot enlighten readers as to the politics of a country.
Naipaul offered his interpretations in spades. On Argentina: “To be European in Argentina was to be colonial in the most damaging way. It was to be parasitic…It was to accept, out of a false security, a second-rateness for one’s own society.” He could dissuade us of any hope in gaining knowledge, too, as when he quoted a priest who explained, “Only an Argentine can understand Peronism. I can talk to you for five years about Peronism, but you will never understand.”
Or, closer to home, when reflecting on Trinidad: “It is a ‘consumer’ squalor. It is not supported by agriculture, which declines, or by industry, which, where it exists, is rudimentary, protected and inflationary. It is supported by what the visitor seldom sees: oil.” The consumer squalor made much of the population “superfluous,” the physical squalor “generates great tensions; cynicism is like a disease.”
The philosophical summations Naipaul doles out, his de-romanticization of the world to show what animates it, gives his readers the chance to notice disorder, fantasy, and self-deception by people great and small.
The future is not always progress, the present is not always what it seems, and journalism has a role to play in emphasizing those hard truths.
A revival of Naipaul’s approach, if nothing else, could give readers a stylistic flair — a human touch — in an era of journalism that too often gets bogged down in numbers and glib assertions about an idealized world.