Champa Bilwakesh
Final Semester
Supervisor: Kevin McIlvoy
MFA Program for Writers
Warren Wilson College
Information Emerging Through the Contemplation Of Character's Being
Naipaul, V.S. A House for Mr.Biswas. 1961. New York: Penguin Books, 1969.
A House for Mr.Biswas is a good example of a novel that is written across borders: borders of nationality, class, ethnicity, language and culture. What Naipaul does best in this book is the way he allows for total immersion into the characters by means of letting us observe minutely what they are doing. What characters do and the way they do it shape who they are inside. The exposition that emerges through this observation and immersion cuts across all those borders, because what we see is the inner and secret being of the character, their essential humanity.
In the chapter about Mr. Biswas's birth and later his childhood as he grows up among the impoverished plantation workers of Trinidad, Naipaul uses clear, plain, prose to describe the many rituals of their daily life. What emerges for the reader is an understanding of survival on the barest minimum and a life governed by a sense of destiny that dulls any outrage at their own condition. What distinguishes the work from becoming a mere record of horrendously oppressive colonial life is the clear grounding within the being of the characters, as they act, as they are.
Here are Biswas's brothers, Prasad and Pratap, while Biswas plays house with his sister:
(Mr. Biswas) played house with his sister Dehuti. They mixed yellow earth with water and made mud fireplaces; they cooked a few grains of rice in empty condensed milk tins; and, using the tops of tins as baking-stones, they made rotis.
In these amusements Prasad and Pratap took no part. Nine and ten respectively, they were past such frivolities and had already begun to work, joyfully cooperating with the estates in breaking the law about the employment of children. They had developed adult mannerisms. They spoke with blades of grass between their teeth; they drank noisily and sighed, passing the backs of their hands across their mouths; they ate enormous quantities of rice, patted their bellies and belched; and every Saturday they stood up in line to draw their pay. Their job was to look after the buffaloes that drew the cane-carts. The buffaloes' pleasance was a muddy, cloyingly sweet pool not far from the factory; and here with a dozen other thin-limbed boys, noisy, happy, over-energetic and with full sense of their importance, Pratap and Prasad moved all day in the mud among the buffaloes. When they came home their legs were caked with the buffalo mud which on drying had turned white, so that they looked like the trees in fire-station and police-stations which are washed with white lime up to the middle of their trunks.
. . . In another two or three years, when he could be trusted with a sickle, Mr. Biswas would be made to join the boys and girls of the grass-gang. Between them and the buffalo boys there were constant disputes, and there was no doubt who were superior. The buffalo boys, with their leggings of white mud, tickling the buffaloes and beating them with sticks, shouting at them and controlling them, exercised power. Whereas the children of the grass-gang, walking briskly along the road single file, their heads practically hidden by tall, wide bundles of wet grass, hardly able to see, and, because of the weight on their heads and the grass over their faces, unable to make more than slurred, brief replies to taunts, were easy objects of ridicule.
Not only is the image of children wading in chemical runoff from the sugarcane processing factory or teetering under the weight of the wet grass bundles vivid, we are drawn right into the sensibility of a nine year-old wielding a sickle and the "power struggle" and taunting that occurs among children at this age. The central intelligence that narrates the story never loses track of the "child" in these children as they toil and play, staying anchored inside their state of being while also fully cognizant of the harm that this work is causing the children. Naipaul achieves this by very clear delineation of the way they are as they act, making rotis on tin can tops, imitating "adult" behavior, the sense of self-importance of the "buffalo-boys" and the pathetic attempts to return the taunts by the "boys and girls of the grass-gang" as if they are at summer camp.
While the first passage describes in detail the two brothers at work and the way this shapes their image of what being adult means, the second is more general in its descriptions of what lay ahead for Mr. Biswas until destiny, again, interferes, making it "possible for him to console himself in later life with the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, while he rested on the Slumberking bed in the one room which contained all of his possessions."
It was in one of these walks that Mr. Biswas discovered the stream. It could not be here that Raghu brought Pratap and Prasad to swim: it was too shallow. But it was certainly here that Bipti and Dehuti came on Sunday afternoons to do the washing and returned with their fingers white and pinched. Between clumps of bamboo the stream ran over smooth stones of many sizes and colors, the cool sound of water blending with the rustle of the sharp leaves, the creaks of the tall bamboos when they swayed and their groans when they rubbed against one another.(24)
This piece of narrative meditation is anchored in Biswas's sensibility, having been denied the opportunity to go swimming due to his dangerous affinity to water as predicted by the astrologer. Embedded in this meditation is another piece of exposition, that of the women's ritual of washing clothes and this too, as is with much of Naipaul's writing in this work, captures the characters purely in the act of doing, working. While the stream here has triggered the exposition into background, what follows in the narrative meditation draws us into Biswas's inner and secret being. It is his being that observes the colors, the sounds, the beauty. It is this quality of his being, the way he observes his world and sees beauty in it, that is preserved through his strange and pathetic travel into adulthood and all his wanderings and tribulations and search for a home. And it is this that later spurs him towards his artistic endeavors with painting signs, writing and poetry so that towards the end of his life he finds these periods when he was writing to be his happiest and most hopeful times. It is when we touch this depth of inner being of the character that we understand how our inner spirit survives poverty, anguish and despair and still stays whole.