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Thomas Rommel, Professor of Literature at IUB, speaks about the controversial author, V.S. Naipaul, who this past week was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. An excerpt from his lecture follows.
[
Oct
17, 2001]
A few days ago, the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to the writer V.S. Naipaul. This is not only important for the world of publishing and literature, but the choice of the author Naipaul itself is a significant aesthetic and - even more - an important political statement.
Critics praise Naipaul's penetrating insights into cultural differences. One reason may be his self-fashioning as an author without a clearly defined cultural, intellectual, or geographic heritage. Naipaul frequently undermines sentimentalised views, both by authors from the centre and the margin, of non-Western countries. At the same time, however, he does not spare Western culture.
Naipaul's critical attitude towards complacent societies, his ambivalence as to who is to blame for the dismal social, cultural and political situation in Africa, India or the West Indies has resulted in outspoken hostility towards some of his books. Both his fiction and his travel writing has triggered ambivalent responses, ranging from admiration to dismissive comments.
But Naipaul deserves the praise he gets for his insights into the minds of people who have lost a feeling of belonging - people who travel the world and who feel outcast, not accepted. His protagonists long for an intellectual, cultural home, a society they can identify with, a culture they can inhabit, but very frequently Naipaul's characters perceive society as hollow, and they are reluctant to join a community, although they long to belong.
The ability to portray this agony of intellectual, emotional and even physical "otherness" was the reason the Swedish Academy awarded Naipaul the travel writer this year's Nobel Prize for literature.
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