the context of writings based on myths and archetypes. As David N. Elkins says:

Mythology is a container for the spiritual and existential wisdom of a culture in the form of stories, rituals and symbols. It provides a map, as it were, to guide us through the various passages and major events of life. We are all novices when it comes to life; we have never made the journey before and each section of the road presents questions and dilemmas we have not previously encountered. But millions of others have preceded us. Countless generations have gone through birth, childhood, adulthood, parenthood, midlife, old age and death. Mythology is the code that contains the record of their journey; it is the depository of the archetype wisdom they have left behind. So when we are faced with a major life event, we are not alone. These ancient mentors surround us in a great circle, and through the stories, rituals, and symbols of mythology they share their wisdom, helping us understand what is happening and how to deal with it.(p.194)

The majority of the writers in the Indian languages today seem to me to have reached such a dead end. Not only are they imperfectly aware of what is best in the myth-values of the western traditions, they are only vaguely familiar with the durable values in their own traditions. The only possible revival will take place if one’s own myth-values and structures are studied and loved and absorbed and used with creative and critical imaginations.

Indian writers of many hues seem to be ignorant of little things like, why the Indian male will not, as a rule, hold his wife, or indeed any girl, by the hand and escort her across the street; or why the beloved, in an Indian painting or a sculpture always sit on the left of her lover, never on his right; or a girl stands with her eyes lowered in front of male members; or why a wife will not address her husband by his first name. The list is endless and the present scholar feels that without an absorption in the myths of the lands of the forefathers, it is not even possible to live a meaningful life. It is not possible to make love, because the nuances of love-making are to be found in the story of Sakuntala, in Savitri, in Damayanti, in the relationship of Draupadi with her five husbands. There is a marvellous passage in The Mahabharata in which Draupadi explains to Krishna’s wife Satyabhama who is curious to know how to properly please and hold a husband. So we can say that no self-respecting writer, no person eager to discover his identity, can remain in protracted isolation. No intelligent and sensitive man can afford – this is what it really boils down to – to be permanently ignorant of the myths that surround him. Precisely that is the reason why writers like V.S. Naipaul find the loss of not belonging to this larger mythical tradition a serious lacuna.

1.2 MATERIAL AND METHODS:

John J. White in his stimulating book Mythology in the Modern Novel classifies mythological fiction into four types:

1. the complete re-narration of a classical myth,

2. a juxtaposition of sections narrating a myth and others concerning with the contemporary world.

3. a novel, set in the modern world, which contain a pattern of references to mythology running through the work, and

4. a novel in which a mythological motif prefigures a part of the narrative, but without running consistently through the whole narrative.

One distinctive feature of all these four types is that all of them refer to some traditional mythology and carry with them the dogmatic belief attached to them. However, White’s approach is very cautious. From the very outset he distinguishes a mythological work from what is called a mythical one and maintains that a mythical novel is one which is commonly associated with a dynamic quality, a “mana” seldom present in work that he describes as mythological. Being divested of this kind of religious connotation mythology becomes an equivalent of any ordinary allusion and this is further reinforced by his use of the term “pre-figuration” instead of myth. He considers the use of myth as a technique and explains that a myth introduced into a novel can prefigure and anticipate the plot in several possible ways. Ordinarily the term “pre-figuration” means “coming before” and it offers a system of comments on modern events. Liberally extending the term he maintains that even these pre-figurations include literary plot “pre-figurations” such as Shakespeare’s plays in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Chekhov’s The Seagull in Macdonald Harris’s Trepleff. As it is well known, many novels refer to other works and discourses. As a genre, the novel consciously gives space to other works. This is what nowadays goes by the name of intertextuality and this is a feature which Bakhtin appreciated in the novel. Going back to the middle ages; it was often seen, the relationship to another’s word was equally ambiguous and complex. The thin separation between one’s own speech and someone else’s speech were ambiguous, flexible, confusing and often deliberately distorted. Certain texts were constructed like patchwork from others text. The term intertextuality writes Pramod K. Nayar, “refers to the allusions, references to other works, echoes, quotes and citations and even plagiarized sections of a work”. (p.30)

Intertextuality, it seems, has come to stay as a feasible method of influencing not only literature but also other works of art. Casablanca, a film by Michael Curtiz is a brilliant example. A reading of the book and a visit to the film make it amply clear that it is not true that works are created by their authors. Umberto Eco feels that “works are created by works, texts are created by texts, altogether they speak to each other independently of the intention of their authors. A cult movie is the proof that, as literature comes from literature, cinema comes from cinema”.(p.413) When in an inter-textual collage the author does not know what to do with the story, he puts a stereotype situation in it because he expects that they will work as they have already worked elsewhere. So powerful is the influence of stereotypes that without any reason whatsoever Laszlo, a man with ascetic temper orders something to drink and he changes his choice of drink at least four times. Obviously, Michael Curtiz was unconsciously quoting similar situations in certain other movies. At times Casablanca the film is compared with the play Hamlet by Shakespeare. It is really interesting to know what T.S. Eliot said about the play. Umberto Eco writes:

He viewed Hamlet the result of an unsuccessful fusion of several earlier versions of the story, and so the puzzling ambiguity of the main character was due to the author’s difficulty in putting together different topoi. So both public and critics find Hamlet beautiful because it is interesting, but believe it is interesting because it is beautiful. (p.415)

1.3 THEORY:

When science undermined the literal truth of myths, millions of people in western culture concluded that there was nothing to believe in, nothing to hold on to. The result is that our society is disintegrating. “The centre cannot hold”, Yeats asserted in one of his poems and accordingly, the centrifugal forces of our time are causing pieces to fly up in all directions. Just as a research paper needs an itinerary to be followed for its successful completion; life needs an approximate roadmap for its fulfilment.

But what are the ingredients for achieving this fulfilment?

Is it mere accumulation of money?

Is just communication with others?

Is it leading a life of scientific temper?

Or is it preference for literature with all its all encompassing ideology combined with pleasure?

I presume the answer is obvious. Literature is the obvious choice. And what is literature without mythology! What a creative writer will be writing about if not emotions of love and hate, war, peace and pride? And where will he find the complexities of these feelings and activities if not in the myth-world. The gods and goddesses are not out there, separated permanently from us; not are the anti-gods and rakshasas. They populate the earth: to know them is really to know ourselves.

1.4 RESULT:

Looking at the wide spectrum of things that are considered mythological in the modern times, the emphasis on the aspects of mythology changes from one author to the other. In case of V.S.Naipaul emphasis lies on pre-figurations and intertextuality and that does not, of course, imply that there is no classical myth. One feels tempted to seek their origins in that far-off literary great of all times i.e. Shakespeare. As it is well known, Shakespeare without the classical myths and references to pre-christian compositions of Homer, Virgil and Euripides etc. is no Shakespeare. In the same vein it may be emphatically said here that without copious references to classical myths and modern pre-figurations writer like V.S.Naipaul are non-entities. All these myths and pre-figurations, as it has been often said, surely are not blots or plagiarisms in this writer. Instead these borrowed elements have rotted to compost in the crucible of his creative endeavour and new things have been born. There, just like Shakespeare, lies the beauty of his creation which never fails to give the readers the education and pleasure that they expect from writers of distinction.

1.5 DISCUSSION:

In spite of the uproar regarding Naipaul’s nativity, attitude and his education, he remains an integral part of the Indian diasporic writers of his generation. His depiction of India in the three travelogues, like that of Conrad, as dark, wounded, mutinous and hollow does not go down well with the readers in this country.But that description is not totally incorrect and baseless, and this reflects his underlying affinity for his roots. Bruce King rightly felt that Naipaul though a “rationalist” yet was emotionally inclined “towards Indian fatalism, passivity and philosophical notions of the world as illusion.”(pp.7-8)

Sir Vidia is thoroughly critical of Indian novelists over dependence on myths and lack of concern for the present condition of men. In An Area of Darkness he writes:

The novel is of the west. It is a part of that western concern with the condition of men, a response to the here and now. In India thoughtful men have preferred to turn their back on the here and now. (p.214)

However, Naipaul’s Half a Life is not strictly a novel in the western sense of the term. According to Bruce King “…….he created his own, original, blend of fiction, reportage and autobiography” and again “he was at the forefront of bringing together various kinds of writing in fiction.”(p.5) One can find small doses of mythology in the fictional writings of Mr Naipaul, apart from modern variants of myth such as pre-figurations and intertextuality, that are sometimes extensively used in his fiction. Again it must not be forgotten here that a myth or its modern variants in literature may be used either in affirmation or in denial i.e. a myth may be used as an ideal and point of reference or one may espouse the cause of a different ideology as a reaction to a particular myth. A pointed analysis of Half a Life vividly brings out the mythological motif behind this non-fiction novel of Naipaul.

The Hindu religious mythology, as it is used in novels of Naipaul is not of the purest kind.The religion of the displaced and half-made people may have been compromised but that certainly does not warrant acerbic attacks of the kind that only a Naipaul can make. Naipaul, the unsparing critic has many bitter things to say about anything that is Indian especially that is based on myth or fantasy. Though no admirer of Indian ways of life, he justifiably lauds the traditional Indian attitude to sex and sensuality. True, in Half a Life his protagonist Willie Chandran is dismissed by the prostitute with the words: “Fuck like an Englishman”(p.121) As it is mentioned earlier, this is a novel with an autobiographical content and this leads the author to candidly confess:

We are all born with sexual impulses, but we are not born with sexual skill, and there are no schools where we can be trained. People like me have to fumble and stumble on as best they can, and wait for accidents to take them to something like knowledge.(p.189)

Obviously, Willie did not possess this knowledge. Naipaul takes this opportunity to talk about the traditional Indian view of sex and how in course of time this has become a taboo for most Indians. Santwana Haldar writes:

“Through Willie’s views on sex Naipaul expresses some of his own. One such view is that the ancient Indian philosophical practical way of dealing with sex was destroyed by the Muslim invasion and the thing became worse during the British period. Sex used to be a taboo and stood on the way of one’s self-assertion. Willie’s lack of self-assertion was also related to this taboo.”(p.241)

However, it is perhaps worthwhile to mention here that the attitude of traditional Indians to love and sex is opposed to that of religion and ethics. The traditional Hindu approach glorifies love and sex and portrays “Shringara Rasa” as the ideal emotion for people in love. Adya Rangacharya in his essay Sex and Indian Literature writes:

It is enough to note that an early and well known proponent and commentator of the theory describes the distinctive feature of ‘Rasa’ as the quality of ‘losing oneself’ in the enjoyment. It is not pleasure or joy or even ecstasy as such but the state where one loses one’s identity. This is exactly a feeling that distinguishes sexual experience. This particular feeling in literary appreciation is called ‘Rasa’ a word which has no equivalent in English. It is no surprise in view of the origin of the conception, to find that Rasa of Love (Shingara) is called the king of all the Rasas. Sex experience is at the root of the conception.(p.144)

How different is this from the Muslim purdah (veil) system which keeps love and sex under wraps and Christian sense of guilt which arises because man is a fallen creature.

The opening section of the novel spanning fifty-six pages and entitled as A Visit from Somerset Maugham sets the tone for the entire novel. A peep into some of the incidents of this chapter only reinforces the belief that Naipaul as a writer is polemical in nature and hence, is able to see only one half of life. Through the pages of the section, Naipaul creates the character of Willie’s father who is said to have influenced the saintly figure in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. Larry of Somerset Maugham is impressed by the Indian saint Shri Ganesha who purifies the mind but Naipaul, the author is no taker for this piece of traditional wisdom. Rather he accuses, writes Haldar, “the Indians hankering after the stamp of foreign approval.”(p.232)

It may be mentioned here that Naipaul’s portrayal of Indian reality is portrayal of half-a-life only. Nowhere an appreciation of Indian mythico-religious reality finds a place. And it is perhaps appropriate to quote here what Nidhi Tiwari says about the matter:

If an artist imitating life as Aristotle stated, should the artist imitate it only ‘as it is?’ The artist can easily depict it ‘as it ought to be’ which can serve a therapeutic purpose for the cultural neurasthenia which casts a dark shadow all over the globe.(p.275)

Obviously, Naipaul the iconic writer is falling a prey to “the commercial drive which is rampant globally” and “is reaping the harvest of India bashing.”(p.278)

The second incident, the marriage of Willie’s father to a harijan girl, strangely enough, raises the eyebrows of Naipaul, through his writings, advocates a cosmopolitan world with an egalitarian outlook, it is to be found here in the action of Willie’s father who was imbued with the teachings of Gandhi which envisaged a classless society in independent India. But that even angers Sir Vidia, the writer. May be because of the idealism involved. But when one’s idealism is as per the needs of a just society, the criticism of the writer seems to be unwarranted. It is another matter that initially Willie’s father was a reluctant spouse and he experienced what Alpana Mishra calls “the ambivalent pleasure of embracing an untouchable woman.”(p.185) May be Naipaul is critical of this kind of hypocrisy but that is also understandable. In India, discarding the mythico-religious status of various castes is a task of tall order and Willie’s father, despite his idealistic leanings, takes some time to adjust to the situation. The negative description of the girl in the novel makes the job even more difficult by using phrases like “Her very dark top lip…wetness of a snail”, “I saw she used powder” and “I was repelled, ashamed, moved.”(p.13)

He does adjust with the situation. In fact, in tune with his idealistic leanings; he is moved at the sad plight of this downtrodden girl. And the result of all this is there for everybody to witness. Despite the Gandhian view of brahmacharya, two children, Willie and Sarojini were born. He even names the boy after Somerset Maugham, the famous writer, a votary of Indian philosophy and Sarojini Naidu, the poet-cum-freedom fighter from India who is a pillar of Indian culture and philosophy. Castigating this courageous decision of Willie’s father taken against all odds, indeed does not speak well of Naipaul, the writer. His ironic comments in this situation, is a sign of his parochial and jaundiced vision.

As it has been categorically mentioned in the Introduction, Naipaul the writer despite his open aversion to myths makes use of mythological motifs in the form of pre-figuration and intertextuality. Predictably enough, most of these earlier texts are ironically used to drive home his point of view. As a writer Naipaul most often crosses the barrier of the literary form and makes use of history and autobiography in the body of a novel. At the beginning of Half a Life Naipaul calls it an invention suggesting thereby that in spite of influences of all kinds, the authorial voice is something discernible. Michael Bakhtin describes novel as essentially polyphonic or dialogic and hence, it is basically different from mono-logical discourses of all kinds. In Half a Life the first section is entitled as “A Visit from Somerset Maugham”. According to Florence D’Souza it is nothing but a satirical rendition of R.K.Narayan’s famous novel The Guide. In Narayan’s novel the tourist guide Raju, takes refuge in the courtyard of a temple and starts a new career “as a holy man, receiving alms and donations in exchange for his wise advice.”(p.54) In Half a Life the elder Chandran stays put in the temple courtyard which amounted to “turning his back on a glittering career, living as a mendicant on the alms of the poorest of the poor”. (p.3)The irony involved in the use of Narayan pre-figuration is clearly evident in another situation. The relationship between the Railway Raju and dancer Rosie is platonic while in case of Naipaul it is an “iconoclastic relationship, deliberately outside the strict Brahmanical norms for endogamous marriage, between elder Chandran and his low-caste wife.”(p.55)

Another important example of intertextuality in V.S.Naipaul is his use of Mulk Raj Anand’s The Bubble. As an intellectual he was a close follower of Joseph Conrad. As Binod Mishra writes:

Like Conrad, he too knew that every novelist must begin by creating for himself a world, great or little in which he could ‘honestly behave’ and this world cannot be made otherwise than in his own image.(p.130)

The days of darkness (An Area of Darkness) are over. The writer Naipaul is no more there in a stifling situation. Rather increasingly he understands the fact that self-consciousness cannot come without proper self-analysis. And as Binod Mishra points out:

The essence of existentialism is transcendence which is a leap from the self to the absolute.…… Krishnan in Anand’s The Bubble and Willie in Half a Life symbolize the act of will and decisive engagement. Those critics who blame Naipaul for profaning the ‘exalted vocation of a writer’ speak only the half-truth. Naipaul’s philosophy is the philosophy of transformation. It is a philosophy of hope, harmony and happiness………… Willie’s journey to meaning and maturity reminds us of Krishan’s.(p.137)

It is often believed that most of the Naipaul protagonists are unanchored souls. The variegated experience of one’s life is dependent on human whims, desires and attitudes. Hence, finding a centre for all this is ordinarily considered to be difficult. Added to all this, is their post-colonial status. But here also there is the cementing factor.

The dual affinity and the broken history not only adds charm and meaning to the post-colonial experience, it also make use of what Noam Chomsky feels, the bio-physical structure below the threshold of mind to deduce a unified language from the aforesaid variegated experience. In the language of Chomsky “a mass of schematisms, innate governing principles, which guide our social and intellectual and individual behavior” (p.136) is also responsible for bringing unity to the composition of a writer. This also inevitably leads us to believe that despite the polemics and irony involved, his novels give us a positive vision. Peter Hughes is right when he says,

…….. I want to step sideways to compare the remarkable tone of Naipaul’s prose with that of some other writers, mostly American, who share with him the power to underwrite the disorder and poignancy of the world. He is in the end, and has been almost from the start, one of those writers who convey intensity not by raising but rather by lowering their voices; who give a new dimension to friction by seeming to undercut its claims. Naipaul to my mind stands and rises to greatness as or writer because his prose has such precision and strength. His feeling for language, his mastery of style, show that Gibbon was right. However belated and Byzantine the cultural conditions may be, however sunk in servitude and depression, the discourse of literature can still restore to the human spirit what might otherwise seem lost beyond recall.(p.93)

It is perhaps pertinent to point out that in spite of Naipaul’s strong affinity to realism and allergy for mytho-poeic imagination, the undercurrent of mythological motif is very strong in him. This is even more so on the face of a critical onslaught made by Irving Howe in his book Politics and the Novel. Howe calls himself one of the “uneasy admirers of Naipaul and explains:

Uneasy because of his surplus of disgust and paucity of tenderness, but an admirer because he writes with a strict refusal of romantic moonshine about the moral charms of primitives or the virtues of blood stained dictators. (p.265)

On the surface of it, Naipaul may have rejected the moral charms of the primitives and enhanced his image as a realistic and cosmopolitan writer but a close scrutiny reveals that he is not a writer who is oblivious of the other half of life. As a diasporic writer he has the dual affinity with both the countries and in fact, with several countries and hence, his portrayal of in Half-a-Life is not an incomplete one as it is often made out to be. The novel in question here, in the fitness of things, makes use of modern variants of myths i.e. pre-figuration and intertextuality to confer that wholeness of vision which is ordinarily denied to Naipaul, the writer.

Critics like Prof. Colon tell us as to how “Naipaul’s use of memory to create a myth of origin through an Indian character, William Somerset Chandran”(p.168) is instrumental for understanding a novel like Half a Life. Very many things have been said about Naipaul’s use of history. But at times his sense of history is only skin deep. At least that is what Willie Chandran makes us believe, to be disconnected while being connected with the world around him, “he learned to shut out the main stories, the ones with far-off wars or election campaigns in the United States that meant nothing to him…….”(p.54)It may be averred without hesitation here that this “manipulation and appropriation” of memory and history both has the sanction of Naipaul, the author. And the reasons are not far to seek. This is the first explicit attempt of Willie to scuttle what Naipaul calls non-fiction novel writing. Secondly, from the mytho-poeic point of view, fear of history is necessarily embedded in the Indian psyche.

History believes in the mundane, the finite but for an Indian life does not come to an end with the death of the physical body. Accordingly, it is atman which has an essence of brahman and hence, is immortal. By trying to ignore certain vicissitudes of history, Willie is only trying to be true to the author’s Indian origin. Naipaul writes:

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, re-make himself and his past and his ancestry.(p.60)

And this possibility is not for Willie alone but also for his creator, V.S.Naipaul. At least it is a sign that Sir Vidia has ultimately made certain compromises, his self-avowals notwithstanding. Non-fiction novel writing has yielded place to something that is fictional, may be, myth in undertones.

Willie’s remaking of the past and ancestry becomes self-evident in an interesting episode of the novel Half a Life. When he was a boy of ten a rich merchant who was generous enough to donate to religious charities came to his father. With his immature boyish mind he was given to understand that the merchant was “shameless in his private life”, he “reached some crisis in his life” and hence he was “in a difficult situation”.(p.206) Later Willie came to know the merchant claimed himself to be “like King Dasaratha”.(p.206) This enraged Willie’s father because he thought it audacious on the part of the merchant to compare himself to gods. The merchant rectified himself a little and said, “perhaps I am not quite like Dasaratha. He had three wives. I have two.”(p.206) At that point of time it was not only Willie’s father but also Willie who “found out about the shamelessness of the merchant’s life”(p.207) and he was equally appalled.

Discarding the myth of King Dasaratha may have come very easy to the boy Willie. But not so to Willie Somerset Chandran some twenty-five years after. And he is fully conscious about that. A liberal individualistic life-style may be order of the day according to a progressive Naipaul but that was also the order of the mythical times. It is no wonder that Willie embraces this progressive yet mythical outlook when he picks up two women, just like King Dasaratha perhaps. Naipaul writes:

To have two wives and two families was two violate nature. To duplicate arrangements and affections was to be perpetually false. It was to dishonor everyone; it was to leave everyone in quicksand.

This was how it had looked to me when I was ten. Yet every day I faced Anna without shame, and whenever I saw Luis, Graca’s husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was offered out of gratitude for Graca’s love.(p.207)

1.6 CONCLUSION:

In spite of allegations by various critics that Naipaul’s Half a Life portrays only half of Indian life that’s mostly dark and dingy, we can say that it hardly finds much substance of truth in it.In general Sir Vidia may have considered India a wounded civilization but grown up Willie Somerset Chandran in his acceptance of the reality contained in the myth of Dasaratha unequivocally confirms Naipaul’s dual affinity. Thus, Nidhi Tiwari’s contention about him stands nullified with a great degree of certainty. Tiwari writes:

Willie’s decision to discard his roots reveals what Sir Vidia fails to see in India, not ‘A Wounded Civilization’ only, but a country that is rich in several aspects with a capacity to heal all wounds – a capacity to see life as not ‘Half a Life’ but as ‘Poorna’. Can you rise out of the banality in which you’ve trapped yourself, Sir Vidiadhar?(p.278)

But this assertion that the novel is only the duplication of one half of life, certainly does not cut ice with a sensible reader who reads between the lines and gets the real essence of what the writer means to say. In a way, it is like T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Landthat gives the readers an overall negative vision but an inkling of the positive aspects of life is deeply ingrained in the same. From that standpoint, the novel which is a unique blend of fiction, reportage, autobiography and myth achieves what a similar book in the hands of a lesser writer can never hope to and hence, it categorically proves the title of the novel to be a misnomer.

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Received on 31.05.2017

Modified on 16.06.2017

Accepted on 27.06.2017

Research J. Humanities and Social Sciences. 8(3): July- September, 2017,293-300.

DOI: 10.5958/2321-5828.2017.00043.2