This is a personal account of how a person inclines to accept ‘getting into the game’ of reading and writing. But when the same person gets a Nobel in the same game, it’s worthy enough to have a glance at the process!
At one place he talks about the blankness in him about which way to go. He was on his hard-earned scholarship at Oxford. The idea of fiction or a novel puzzled him. He says that the idea of a novel is something that is made up, that is precisely its definition. At the same time, it is expected to be true. It is expected to be drawn from life. How? later he finds an answer through Evelyn Waugh,
“Later when I had begun to identify my material and had begun to be a writer, working more or less intuitively this ambiguity ceased to worry me. In 1955 the year of this breakthrough, I was able to understand Evelyn Waugh’s definition of fiction (in the dedication to “Officers and Gentlemen” published that year) as “experience totally transformed”. I wouldn’t have understood or believed the words the year before.”
V S Naipaul
Naipaul has a whole gamut of his Non-fictional work, he talks about the reasons,
“Fiction had taken me as far as I could go. There were certain things it couldn’t deal with. It couldn’t deal with my ears in England. There was a social depth to the experience it seemed more a matter of autobiography, and it could not deal with my growing knowledge of the wider world. Fiction, by its nature, functioning best within certain fixed social boundaries seems to be pushing me back to worlds- like the island word or the world of my childhood- smaller than the one I inhabited. fiction which had once liberated me and enlightened me now seemed to be pushing me towards being simpler than I really was. for some years three perhaps four I did not know how to move. I was quite lost.”
V S Naipaul
It was interesting to know Naipaul’s take on R.K. Narayan and his characters of small people, talking big and doing small things,
“Narayan’s world is not after all as rooted and complete as it appears. His small people dream simply of what they think has gone before, but they are without personal ancestry. There is a great blank in their past.”
V S Naipaul
Literature, like all living arts, is always on the move and it should constantly change, thinks Naipaul. Tho it was a simple yet circumstantial account, if you do not know much about the author’s take on his writing and reading, It will give you an idea of his progression and how he gained ground in the game!
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