THE point has already been made the author is extremely cynical about his people.
This week we now delve into the actual short stories to demonstrate Naipaul’s conditioned consciousness.
The opening story, ‘Bogart’ illustrates some of the important premises in Naipaul’s portrait of ‘Trinidad’s flawed modernity’.
By representing the composition of the Trinidadian self through the ‘Hollywood B-man’, he traces the uneven division in social space by dramatising the disjunctive condition of this self exactly as ‘frozen between two points of existence’.
In ‘Bogart’, Naipaul confronts us with Trinidadian mass society in the 1940s, influenced by American movies in which, ‘hundreds of young men began adopting the hardboiled Bogartian attitude’.
Here the ‘Bogartian attitude’ signals an aesthetic response towards the dilemmas of Trinidadian working class life.
Naipaul does not explore the philosophy indicated in the act of appropriating the ‘hardboiled’ attitude for a Trinidadian context.
Instead, he exteriorises it into an assemblage of gestures.
“Hat recalled Rex Harrison, and he had done his best to strengthen the resemblance.
“He combed his hair backwards, screwed up his eyes, and he spoke very nearly like Harrison.”
Through the repetition of these gestures, “Bogart was hardly opening his lips when he spoke.
“His mouth was twisted a little, and his accent was getting slightly American. “‘Sure, sure’,” Bogart said, and he had got it right.
“He was just like an actor.”
Naipaul renders the absurdity and pathos of these characters.
“Bogart became the Bogart of the films. Hat became Harrison. And the morning exchange became this: ‘Bogart!’ ‘Shaddup, Hat!’”.
These characters are presented as good for nothings who have nothing solid of their own.
Naipaul’s delineation of the historical roots of this particular way of knowing is found in his identification of a ‘picaroon society’.
The picaro, lower class anti-hero of the picaresque novel, adapts and advances in a corrupt and hypocritical society through the cynical use of wit and satire.
A society formed by the mutual derision of slavery and colonialism has given shape to the consciousness of the hustler: Power was recognised, but dignity was allowed to no one.
Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible.
For Naipaul, the origin of such consciousness can be found in the failure to cohere a culture from fragments of the British inheritance —‘the cultures represented by the buildings in Maraval Road’ — and the various cultures — Naipaul’s ‘racial groups’ — of Trinidad.
Since these ‘have not coalesced to form’ a culture, “they have all been abandoned under the pressures of every persuasive method: second-rate newspapers, radio services and films.”
Bogart responds to his lack of place and history through Naipaulesque fantasy.
After his return, encouraged to inform the others where he had been for so many months, Bogart eventually tells his story.
We learn that he ‘became a cowboy on the Rupununi’ savannah in Guyana, returned to Georgetown and set up ‘the best brothel in town’.
“‘It was a high-class place’,” he said, “no bums.”
“Judges and doctors and big shot civil servants.’”
Bogart’s inferior class position is compensated through a shared masculinity and his story imaginatively links the traditional icon of the regenerative male, the cowboy, with power over women as commodity.
Indicative of the changes in the barrack-yard novel with Miguel Street is to notice how women have receded from the foreground and have become objects of male desire.
The early barrack-yard novel, like Minty Alley or Black Fauns, are dominated by women and this transition reflects, in the words of Rhoda Reddock, demonstrates how “the domestic ideology increased with the separation of women from wage-labour” into the post-war period.
It shows that the consolidation of Bandung modernisation was achieved not simply by turning the Caribbean masses into objects in general, but by excising women from the national narrative in particular.
Whereas in Minty Alley or Black Fauns, men are dependent on women’s waged labour, the men of Miguel Street attempt to deny their relationship to women.
After the police come to arrest Bogart, who remains in ‘character’, Hat has “to find out all the inside details.”
Naipaul now reveals the real reason for Bogart’s absences.
We learn he left his wife in Tunapuna because she ‘couldn’t have children’.
However, ‘feeling sad and small’, Bogart leaves to “find a girl in Caroni and he give she a baby.”
After, he is forced to marry, but when asked, “why he leave she?”, Hat answers the group assembled on the street: “to be man, among we men.”
Naipaul unmasks ‘the hardboiled Bogartian attitude’ by revealing how it cannot escape the empirical and material realities of Trinidad represented by women.
The condition of non-synchronicity is marked by the failure to create, and in Bogart’s story it is symbolically expressed by his failure to generate himself — both literally and aesthetically.
This affects all the men of Miguel Street.
In Naipaul, Bogart’s rejection of this society is translated into a rejection of all society.
Bogart is an approximation of the bad-john and an antecedent of the rude-boy.
But also captured in general in the qualitatively different musical rhythms of the ‘planet of the slums’ in the 1970s reggae and afro-beat, and reflecting the structure of feeling of semi-proletarianisation.
In America, its affinities are found in the birth of hip hop and later crystallised in the gangster persona; but also the punk and its parallel attitude to the conditions of decay with the onset of neo-liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s.
Naipaul can only see the self-negation/annihilation in these forms, but not its productive critique, its utopian/dystopian quality.
What Naipaul misses is that Bogart’s persona posed an increasingly universal problem.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that he appears in Trinidad, adapted to particular national or regional expressions of this problem.
To contrast James’s method to Naipaul’s is instructive.
Naipaul displaces the effects of his ideology onto his characters.
Isn’t repetition and non-movement define his writing.
And, as Derek Walcott implies, doesn’t surface style without dialectical depth characterise The Middle Passage, describing his writing as ‘style without truth’ and relates it to his historical narrative defined by Naipaul’s ‘pluperfect tense’.
This process identifies how the aesthetic experience in Miguel Street helps structures Naipaul’s social ideology.
Repetition is part of the work of comedy in general, but in Miguel Street it takes on specific meaning.
The gestures of these characters gain force because they are repeated as a habit in each character, and in each chapter, until each one becomes interchangeable, and generalised.
It becomes a condition.
The reader becomes part of this conspiracy because once we pick up the pattern, we expect it, and imaginatively complete it before the end of each chapter.
We ‘know’ with Naipaul soon enough.
You get this sense though that he is still waiting to see his reaction and ours.
He hasn’t made this part of his permanent persona; he hasn’t elevated his cynicism into an ideology and a formalism completely yet in Miguel Street.