Vis sue Naipaul (1932-2018)
In 2001, on the night that Trinidad and Tobago-born British Indian writer Vis sue Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in Literature, The port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, was lit to celebrate. For this remote Caribbean island nation, Naipaul is undoubtedly their hero. Naipaul's teenage years were spent primarily in Trinidad and Tobago. In 1950, at the age of eighteen, Naipaul graduated from the Port of Spain Secondary School, received a generous scholarship from the government, entered Oxford University to study literature, and has since embarked on the road of literary creation.
In fact, Naipaul showed a special talent in literary creation very early on, and was widely recognized from the beginning of his creation. In the early 1990s, he was already influential in the English literary scene. In 1994, the University of Tulsa in the United States "snapped up" Naipaul's letters, manuscripts, etc., and stored them together with Joyce's manuscripts.
Kuche, a South African writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, said Naipaul's novels had "obscure autobiographical features." This is particularly evident in Naipaul's early collection of short stories, Rue Miguel, a book written by Naipaul out of memories and a true account of his former home country of Trinidad and Tobago. In this book, in the tone of his first-person memories, he presents the vast array of beings on Miguel Street to readers all over the world: tramps, carpenters, coachmen, drunkards, teachers, barbers, cleaners, debauched women, poor mothers, fashionable young people with a lot of money, and so on. On closer inspection, they are all losers or marginalized people in modern civilization, and what they have in common is that no matter how hard they struggle and struggle, they are futile and cannot change the position of their marginalized groups. In the text of "Rue Miguel", there is helplessness, bitterness, ridicule, and ridicule. Its greatest value is that through the characters on Miguel Street, we can re-examine our relationship with the world.
In the novel Career Choice, the dreams of the children on Miguel Street are to become drivers of blue garbage trucks, because "those who drive can be counted as aristocrats, who only do some work in the morning and do nothing during the day." Nevertheless, they went on strike at every turn." The protagonist, Elias, is a maverick man with a different ideal and a very "tall": he wants to leave Miguel Street and go out to work as a doctor. However, he could not go to a better school, and despite his hard work, his grades were in a mess, and he had to lower his goals, from being a doctor to being a sanitary quarantine officer. But this was also difficult to achieve, and finally had to become a "driver driving a blue garbage truck". Naipaul borrowed Elias and said, "[Trinidad] has become such a ghost place, and if you want to cut off your own fingernails, you have to pay a bribe." As a member of the vulnerable marginalized group, Elias, although self-motivated, could not turn around in the real society where the class was becoming more and more solidified, and had to be at the mercy of fate and become as mediocre as the people on the streets of Miguel.
The few words that Naipaul said at the beginning of the novel "The Instinct of Motherhood" still make me remember that I still can't forget —
I guess Laura holds a world record.
Laura has eight children.
This is not surprising.
Eight children have seven fathers.
That's damn it!
It was Laura who gave me my first biology lesson.
In the novel, Laura is unable to raise the children alone, but relies on friends to help her, and several husbands occasionally give her a small amount of money to make ends meet. She loves her children very much, but life makes her often shout and insult these children. This is the daily life of the people on the fringes of Miguel Street. When she learned that her daughter was having an affair with someone else and about to give birth to a child, she let out a creepy cry: "Completely different from the cries of ordinary people, she seems to be releasing all the cries that have been gathered since she was born, as if she is pouring out all the cries that she has been hiding with laughter." ”
Naipaul's Miguel Street, both men and women, their lives are humble and even desperate, with universal tragedy. They are full of complaints about life and reality, although they have struggled, but in vain, the unchanging life is still going on every day, they can not change anything after all. But Naipaul clearly didn't want to stop there, and what he wanted the reader to know was that, despite life's obscurity and hopelessness, everyone lived happily and could always find good things through trivial things, even if they were fleeting and worthless.
Focus on the marginalized, Naipaul is not the first, nor will he be the last. Unlike many writers, Naipaul's narrative is not heavy. He chose to narrate the story in a light-hearted tone, which made us smile at the same time as bitterness, because we are no strangers to his characters. The people of Rue Miguel do not consider themselves marginal, and even they think that Rue Miguel is the center of the world, even if this center is not pleasant in every way.
(Literary Freedom Talk, No. 3, 2021.) Image from the web)
