Champa Bilwakesh
Final Semester
Supervisor: Kevin McIlvoy
MFA Program for Writers
Warren Wilson College
Narrative Triggers
Naipaul, V.S. A House for Mr.Biswas. 1961. New York: Penguin Books, 1969.
The novel, because of its expanse and leisurely pace, grants many opportunities where the writer can flesh out the background information in creative ways, without jarring the reader out of the 'fictional dream.' Often these occasions rise in a very natural way and I would like to examine what triggers Naipaul's narrative to dip into background history.
When Mr Biswas came back from the hospital for the first time, he found that the house had been prepared for him. The small garden had been made tidy, the downstairs walls distempered. The Prefect motor-car was in the garage, driven there weeks ago from the Sentinel office by a friend. The hospital had been a void. He had stepped from that into a welcoming world, a new, ready-made world. He could not quite believe that he had made that world. He could not see that he should have a place in it. And everything by which he was surrounded was examined and rediscovered, with pleasure, surprise, disbelief. Every relationship, every possession.
Biswas is in his present moment, back from the hospital, back in his house. It is a humble house, defective and flawed in many ways, but the meaning it has for him is immense. Once he and his family "accommodated themselves to every peculiarity and awkwardness of the house . . . it simply became their house." Recovering from a heart-attack, the possession of such a world, the one that he has made, fills him with awe, gratitude, and humility. He examines his possessions and relationships with this new awareness.
Well, what could be more natural than to examine with Biswas his possessions and relationships? As we pick up each possession, memories cling to it, as it is the memory and the recollection of it that makes the object meaningful. Those objects are situated in time and space far removed from the present. We are in background city, folks.
The kitchen safe. That was more than twenty years old. Shortly after his marriage he had brought it, from the carpenter at Arwacas, the netting unpainted, the wood still odorous; and then for sometime sawdust stuck to your hand when you passed it along the shelves. How often he had stained and varnished it! And painted it too. Patches of the netting were clogged, and varnish and paint had made an uneven skin on the woodwork. And in what colours he had painted it! Blue and green and even black. In 1938, the week the Pope died and the Sentinel came out with a black border, he had come across a large can of yellow paint and painted everything yellow, even the typewriter. That had been acquired when, at the age of thirty-three he had decided to become rich by writing for American and English magazines; a brief, happy, hopeful period. . . .
What background information do we glean from this? The kitchen safe was bought shortly after his marriage, new, twenty years ago, which makes his marriage the same age. He painted it yellow in 1938. The Pope had died. He was then working for the Sentinel. At that time he owned a typewriter. He hoped to become rich at thirty-three by writing to English and American magazines.
This is just the skeleton of the background. Memories that arise from association with objects and events also reveal the characters' state of being at that particular time, as well as who they have become now. As poor a condition as the kitchen safe is, it hold his imprint, his fingers remember the sawdust on the shelves. We learn of Biswas's creative urges, his fondness for colors, his creative use of paint, his need for aesthetics. He writes, he invests in a typewriter. Even if the get-rich scheme did not pan out, he considers it a "brief, happy, hopeful period." A shape of Biswas's inner being emerges and so it is only natural that upon his return from the hospital he would notice a "garden that has been made tidy" and take pleasure in it.
The present and the past need a bridge to go back and forth, a link. Often this is accomplished through a "narrative meditation."
But bigger than them all was the house, his house.
How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it: to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of the large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one has been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.
We are back in Mr Biswas's present time. This "meditation" which is from the character's interior links the background to the present. Actually it imagine a future, a future that is heart-breaking, and makes the necessity of owning this house, however humble and mortgaged, that much more poignant. It begins with possessions, the house that contains them, a home for his family and then it goes beyond it and steps back at the same time. It points to his origin, his birth, his childhood, his adulthood, his entire life and all the pain and struggle associated with it.