ABSTRACT
V.S. Naipaul’s oeuvre constitutes the core of this chapter. It is the postcolonial schizophrenia of Naipaul, revealing his simultaneous commitment to a distant canon and the anthropological reality of the colony, that secures his unusual circulation in Anglophone world literature. Indeed, this chapter demonstrates, through sustained readings of his fiction and non-fiction, that he struggles to find an adequate language that would satisfactorily represent the distant colonies into the charmed canon of the metropole. Various author figures in his early novels like Miguel Street (1959) and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) testify to this schizophrenic gap between the canonical and the anthropological. In his own case, Naipaul uses the innovative trope of belatedness to unite these two, and eventually finds a narrative strategy in novels like The Mimic Men (1967) and The Enigma of Arrival (1987) to creatively engage with the histories of global capitalism and its more immediate incarnation in plantation economy, slavery, and indentured labor.
