Study on the Novel The Mimic Men of Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

INTRODUCTION

V. S. Naipaul is a literary circumnavigator, only ever really at home in himself, in his inimitable voice. Singularly unaffected by literary fashion and models he has wrought existing genres into a style of his own, in which the customary distinctions between fiction and non-fiction are of subordinate importance. ‖ Naipaul‘s literary domain has extended far beyond the West Indian island of Trinidad, his first subject, and now encompasses India, Africa, America from south to north, the Islamic countries of Asia and, not least, England. Naipaul is Conrad‘s heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in his memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished. The farcical yarns in his first work, The Mystic Masseur, and the short stories in Miguel Street with their blend of Chekhov and calypso established Naipaul as a humorist and a portrayer of street life. He took a giant stride with A House for Mr. Biswas, one of those singular novels that seem to constitute their own complete universes, in this case a miniature India on the periphery of the British Empire, the scene of his father‘s circumscribed existence. In allowing peripheral figures their place in the momentousness of great literature, Naipaul reverses normal perspectives and denies readers at the centre their protective detachment. This principle was made to serve in a series of novels in which, despite the increasingly documentary tone, the characters did not therefore become less colourful. Fictional narratives, autobiography and documentaries have merged in Naipaul‘s writing without it always being possible to In his masterpiece The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul visits the reality of England like an anthropologist studying some hitherto unexplored native tribe deep in the jungle. With apparently short-sighted and random observations he creates an unrelenting image of the placid collapse of the old colonial ruling culture and the demise of European neighbourhoods. Naipaul has drawn attention to the novel‘s lack of universality as a form, that it presupposes an inviolate human world of the kind that has been shattered for conquered peoples. He began to experience the inadequacy of fiction while he was working on The Loss of El Dorado, in which after extensive study of the archives he described the appalling colonial history of Trinidad. He found that he had to cling to the authenticity of the details and the voices and abstain from mere fictionalisation while at the same time continuing to render his material in the form of literature. His travel books allow witnesses to testify at every turn, not least in his powerful description of the eastern regions of the Islamic world, Beyond Belief. The author‘s empathy finds expression in the acuity of his ear. Naipaul is a modern philosophe, carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony. The post-colonial writings are characterized by the fact that these writers sought to represent the daily life realities of the colonized communities such as poverty, tyranny, corruption, chaos, restriction, political views clash, and educational decline. These

first-hand experience of this life. They were so accurate in depicting the social status to the extent that these works can be seen as a kind of autobiography of some of them. To this type of writings Naipaul‘s The Mimic Men belongs. It gives the impression that there is a kind of interrelation between the fictional and the real. Thus it is natural that he comes across the inquiry raised by one of his scholars about this particular novel. In an interview held with Naipaul in 1981, he was asked, to what extent can the narrator in the novel (The Mimic Men) be similar to speak for you? His response was clear, No, no, no. That isn‘t me. (Cited in Dooley, 2006, 184) The reason behind raising such a question is the fact that there is no clear differentiation between the author and character. They handled the psychological status of their characters that experienced ideological duality, estrangement, confusion, and moral conflict.

The Mimic Men is one of the remarkable post-colonial novels written by the Caribbean writer V. S Naipaul. It handles the situation of confusion that affected the community of Isabella, an imaginary island in the Caribbean Sea. It handles all the topics of identity problems, social chaos, ideological confusion, political subordination, and corruption. It can be considered as a successful example of the post-colonial novels as it drew the attention of the critics and was able to win the Nobel Prize for its significant treatment of the above-mentioned topics. Divided into three major parts, the novel discusses the life of an ex-colonial politician Ralph Singh. Following the stream of consciousness style narration, it narrates the events of Singh‘s life experiences as memories. He exhibits his life as a series of misfortunes starting from his present stage, going back to his childhood and his life as a young man. Through a successful first person omniscient narration, Singh tells the readers all the thoughts and feelings of the other characters in the story. He shows his full awareness of what was happening around him although he was so confused and not able to take proper decisions. Thus, one can say that Singh is a reliable narrator, despite his weaknesses and moodiness.

The Mimic Men is Naipaul‘s most thoughtful work that portrays and recreates the fragmented history of his homeland in Trinidad. Naipaul confesses that:

V.S Naipaul, in The Mimic Men, expresses his discontent towards colonization and its chaotic impact on the psychological, social and political aspects of the individuals of the colonized countries. Through the character of a former expatriated politician who tried to examine his interests and character as an independent personality, Naipaul emphasizes the role of colonization in creating a case of psychological confusion and social conflict, A more than autobiographical work, the exposition of the malaise of our times pointed and illuminated by personal experience and that knowledge of the possible which can come only from a closeness to power. The Mimic Men seeks to see and judge the colonial experience on people‘s attitudes, reactions and understanding of things around them. In other words, this novel has its action centered on the past, the life in Isabella and how its rhythm has been drastically affected. Thus the collective tone of the following paragraph ―we‖ is fully emphasized.

The last sentence in the quotation above is very expressive and typically the state of rootlessness which characterizes the attitude of the colonized people in Isabella. They have nothing to hide and their actions are marked by superficiality: In that fortnight we got to know as much about the group as there was to know. The deep feeling of inferiority as a result of being colonized increased their sense of alienation and displacement. The British colonial education and culture were presented as a substitute or at least arrival for the original Aryan education, culture, traditions and even religion. They were introduced as new systems of discipline, success, and achievement. As a result they dominated these people‘s lives to the extent that the colonized started to identify themselves with the colonizers rather than with their original culture. The great city, centre of the world, in which, fleeing disorder, I had hoped to find the beginning of order. Singh‘s repeated phrase ‗the great city‘ shows his fascination with London more than his homeland Isabella. It reflects his standpoint as a really colonized character unable to judge this experience of colonization properly. This cultural domination is certainly a key point in this novel and its striking title of imitating others literally. However, not able to digest the colonizers‘ culture, tradition, and religion, they were not able to Isabella they were linked less by their background and professional standing than by their expatriate and fantastically cosmopolitan wives or girlfriends. Americans, singly and in pairs, were an added element. We also find that this attitude of mimicry overwhelming others like Sally, Cecil‘s elder sister who finds her pleasure in ―reading American magazines for the fashions, which she discussed with these girls. Another example is Nana, the rich bottler on the island, travelling to America to buy a pipe.

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Assistant Professor, Department of English, G. S. H. College, Chandpur Siau, UP (India) druditarajputdc@gmail.com