Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:20 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof page 100 13.12.2009 4:36pm 5 Mimicry and Classical Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men Emily Greenwood The most definitive feature of antiquity is our absence. Joseph Brodsky1 We among the blacks who received a good education learnt what we knew from the classical writings of Western civilization. We knew that the principles which were enshrined in those classical works did not apply in the Caribbean. But when we went abroad we found to our astonishment that they did not apply there also. C. L. R. James2 I have read that it was a saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city. It is one of those sayings which, because they deal with the particular and the concrete, like the instructions on a bottle of patent medicine, can appear flippant, except to those who have experienced their truth. To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder. From an early age, almost from my first lesson at school about the weight of the king’s crown, I had sensed this.3 V. S. Naipaul 4 Joseph Brodsky’s statement about the relationship between antiquity and the present is easily inverted: if the most definitive feature of antiquity is our absence, then it follows that an important aspect of this relationship will be 1 Brodsky 1995: 272. Personal communication with Reinhard Sander, 26 January 1979; quoted in Sander 1988: 112, with n. 24 (114). 3 Plutarch attributes this saying to the author of the epinician ode for Alcibiades, whom he takes to be Euripides; Plutarch Life of Demosthenes 1.1. 4 Naipaul 2002a: 127. The Mimic Men was first published in 1967. However, all references to the novel in this article are to the 2002 edition (Naipaul 2002a). 2 Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:20 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof page 101 13.12.2009 4:36pm Mimicry and Classical Allusion in Naipaul 101 the attempt to establish a presence, to pursue dialogues between modernity and antiquity in spite of gaps, distance, and absences. The second epigraph to this chapter reflects on such an absence or gap, in the form of C. L. R. James’s realization that the ideals contained in the classical texts, which he had studied as part of the colonial curriculum in Trinidad, were absent in British society.5 As a colonial subject, not only was James not an equal in British society, but the British themselves were not equal to the ideals they professed.6 However, in his published work James never made the additional leap of questioning to what extent these ‘principles’ enshrined in ancient Greek literature actually applied in the ancient societies in which they were first expressed.7 On the contrary, James’s Athens is the ideal Athens of Pericles’ funeral oration, without the Thucydidean critique, and he secures a presence for the Caribbean in Greece by constructing an analogy between the demographic structure of the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Barbados and the ancient Greek city-state (which he depicts as a homogeneous entity).8 In The Mimic Men (1967), James’s fellow Trinidadian, V. S. Naipaul, exposes the gap in this analogy between Athens and Trinidad by pointing to the anomaly between being born in a famous (Greek) city and being born in ‘an island like Isabella,9 an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand 5 James attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain, Trinidad, from 1911 to 1918. He gives an account of his schooling in the early chapters of Beyond a Boundary (James 1994 [1963]: 1–46). For discussion of James’s classical education in the context of the British West Indies, see Greenwood 2009: ch. 2, passim. 6 James’s disillusionment with London is recorded in his Letters from London (James 2003; the letters were originally published in the Port of Spain Gazette in 1932). For criticism of social inequality in Britain (contrasted with Athens), see James 1980: 168. 7 For James the classical roots of Western civilization lay overwhelmingly in ancient Greece, specifically in Athens. James’s most explicit discussion of ancient Athens is the essay ‘Every Cook Can Govern: A Study of Democracy in Ancient Greece’ (James 1980: 16–74, first published in the journal Correspondence in June 1956). On p. 167, after quoting from Pericles’ funeral oration (Thucydides 2.35–46), James makes the following claim: ‘Marx and all the men who have written of a society of democracy and equality had to place it in the future. For our Greek, this conception of the city was not an aspiration. It was a fact.’ James sidesteps the problematic issue of the institution of slavery in ancient Greece by arguing that critics who mention Greek slavery ‘are not so much interested in defending the slaves as they are in attacking the democracy’ (ibid., 164). 8 James 1980: 186–7; discussion in Greenwood 2005: 78–9. 9 There has been much critical discussion about the relationship between the fictional island of Isabella and the islands of the Caribbean archipelago. The inspiration for the name Isabella may come from the detail that Columbus named an island in the Bahamas ‘Isabela’ (modern Crooked Island), after the Spanish sovereign Queen Isabella I, on his first voyage to the Caribbean (see Theroux 1972: 105). However, John Thieme points out that the name may allude to islands called ‘The Isabels’ in Conrad’s Nostromo (Thieme 1987: 111). Hayward 2002: 68 sees strong parallels with the contemporary history and politics of British Guiana, while Cudjoe 1988: 243 argues that Isabella is a composite of, and representative of, all societies in the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism. For the historical/biographical information behind Naipaul’s novel, see King 2003: app. A, 207–8. Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:21 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof 102 page 102 13.12.2009 4:36pm Emily Greenwood and barbarous’, where the students are made to study the remote achievements of famous Greeks, not to mention the more proximate culture of Britain (the reference to the king’s crown), the imperial power that was both geographically absent and inaccessible, and yet everywhere present in the form of legal, economic, and cultural imperialism. Both the comments of James and Naipaul reflect the psychology of the colonial subject for whom civilized principles such as freedom are sublimated, along with culture, as part of a larger colonial fantasy.10 The shattering of the illusion in postcolonial criticism comes in the realization that these ideals of culture and civilization are a fantasy for the colonizers themselves, as well as for the Athenians or Romans whose remote civilizations are appropriated to support the myths of order at the heart of modern European empires. Whereas C. L. R. James uses an ideal image of Athens to bring into view the disappointing reality of London as metropolitan capital, Naipaul uses the myth of Rome to achieve a similar effect. In this chapter I will examine Naipaul’s ironizing use of classical allusions in The Mimic Men (1967), a novel that explores the mimic dependency of colonial societies. I will suggest that Naipaul uses classical allusions to show that not only were the British in the Caribbean themselves mimics of the cultures of Greece and Rome, but also that the presence of mimicry in these very cultures reveals the absurdity of the appropriation of the civilizations of Greece and Rome in the service of colonial mythmaking. T H E M I MI C M E N Naipaul’s novel, published in 1967 and written during a fellowship at Makerere University in Uganda 1965–6, is a fictional autobiography or, in the words of Helen Hayward, ‘a novel masquerading as an autobiography’ (2002: 69). The novel is narrated by a first-person narrator, R. K. Singh, who is writing his memoirs from the perspective of exile in London, having been forced out of politics in his native Caribbean island of Isabella. The title of the novel refers to Singh’s obsession with the condition of imitative dependency in colonial 10 For parallels between James and Naipaul, see the latter’s review of James’s seminal work on cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963). Naipaul writes, ‘Our backgrounds were dissimilar. His was Negro, Puritan, fearful of lower class contamination; mine was Hindu, restricted, enclosed. But we have ended up speaking the same language; and though England is not perhaps the country we thought it was, we have both charmed ourselves away from Trinidad’ (Naipaul 1972: 22); the review was first published in The Encounter in September 1963. Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:22 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof page 103 13.12.2009 4:36pm Mimicry and Classical Allusion in Naipaul 103 society according to which nothing is original, leading to a profound sense of psychic alienation where colonial subjects are not real, or not real men.11 But it is not only colonial subjects who are embroiled in a drama of colonial shame and fantasy, impersonating alien ideals. Under the influence of imperialism and colonialism, filtered through Singh’s first-person narrative, all the characters in the novel are affected by cultural mimicry. The mimicry extends to the metropolis as well, where everyone—not just the immigrants and the foreign women tourists with whom Singh flirts—is reduced to a racial caricature.12 Even when characters in the novel show allegiance to other cultures, such as Ralph Singh’s father who becomes a Hindu Guru (Gurudeva), their actions are ridiculed by the narrator as mimicry of a code that they do not properly possess or understand.13 Browne, one of Ralph Singh’s Afro-Trinidadian peers, mimes his own blackness in degrading school performances.14 For Ralph Singh, life in the colony of Isabella is schizophrenic because everything that takes place on Isabella takes place in relation to two remote cultural centres: primarily in relation to Britain, and more specifically to London, as the seat of colonial government, but also in relation to India, the ancestral and spiritual home of the East Indian population in the Caribbean who arrived in the region in the 1880s as indentured labourers. The notion that everything that happens is a flawed copy or re-enactment of foreign manners, values, and institutions leads to the suspicion that reality occurs elsewhere and that life in the colonies is a fantasy in which everyone pretends to be what they are not. The narrator anglicizes his name (Ranjit Kripalsingh) to R. R. K. Singh, inserting the name Ralph, while secretly reading and fantasizing about Ancient Asiatic and Persian Aryan culture.15 When the narrator loses a race at the school sports day for which he has trained assiduously, playing the role of the professional athlete, and is credited by one of the schoolmasters with good sportsmanship in apparently allowing someone else to win, his sense of shame at this fraudulent 11 The term ‘psychic alienation’ is used by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) to describe the crisis of personal identity and selfhood of the black man in colonial society. See Fanon 1986: 10, ‘At the risk of arousing the resentment of my coloured brothers, I will say that the black is not a man.’ 12 Mustafa 1995: 104–5 argues that Ralph Singh’s cosmopolitanism in London is reduced to a series of ‘fetishistic’ sexual relations with these women. 13 On the ambivalence of Naipaul’s depiction of Hinduism in The Mimic Men, see Thieme 1987: 132–8. 14 Naipaul 2002a: 99; see French 2008: 38 for the incident on which this is based—a performance that Naipaul witnessed at a Christmas concert in 1941. 15 Naipaul 2002a: 100–1 (Singh’s name); ibid., 104–5 (Singh’s fascination with Aryan culture). For discussion of Singh’s reinvention of his name, see Thieme 1987: 132, Feder 2001: 189, and King 2003: 71–2. There is a precedent for the anglicizing of a Hindu name in the epilogue to the earlier novel The Mystic Masseur (1957), where the protagonist Ganesh Ramsumair changes his name to G. Ramsay Muir (Naipaul 2001a: 208). Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:22 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof 104 page 104 13.12.2009 4:36pm Emily Greenwood semblance precipitates his meditation on the ‘saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city’ (127). In contrast, to be born in a country like Isabella, which he describes as ‘an obscure New World transplantation’ is ‘to be born into disorder’ (ibid.). And yet the order of the imperial metropolis disintegrates up close; Ralph Singh is disappointed by London and the English identity that he has fashioned for himself, and Singh’s English wife Sandra is herself disorientated and overwhelmed by London.16 REV I SI N G T H E MY T H O F ROM AN O RDER The civilization of ancient Rome functions as an ever-present counterpoint in the novel. There is an attempt to reproduce this civilization in Singh’s construction of a Roman villa—modelled on the House of the Vetii in Pompeii—on his home island of Isabella: I was looking through a picture book about Pompeii and Herculaneum. I was struck by the simplicity of the Roman house, its outward austerity, its inner, private magnificence; I was struck by its suitability to our climate; I yielded to impulse.17 As Anthony Boxill observes, Singh gives us all the information we need to deconstruct this ideal villa; the architecture is dissonant, with an illuminated swimming pool in place of the impluvium.18 This absurd villa embodies the hollowness of a return to an idealized past, and its collapse is indicative of the unreality of ancient Rome as a vanished civilization, rather than as a fixed and timeless reality against which to measure the shortcomings of the present. Singh’s remark about the suitability of the architecture to the local climate merely serves to highlight more fundamental incongruities. Not only is the architecture incongruous, but the template of the Pompeiian villa is also unsettling, particularly when we reflect that these villas were themselves gaudy edifices whose ruins now stand tinged with tragedy because of the accident of Vesuvius’s eruption. What is more, cracks of a different kind undermine Singh’s villa, as he reveals to the reader that ‘I had built it a few years before, when my marriage was breaking up’ (38–9). As though the motif of ruin at the core of this Roman house was not explicit enough, Singh’s housewarming party turns into a scene of vandalism as the guests run riot 16 See King 2003: 73. King (ibid.) relates Singh’s disappointment at the reality of life in London to Naipaul’s comments in An Area of Darkness at his own regret in making London the centre of his world, only to become decentred and alienated. 17 Naipaul 2002a: 74. 18 References to the Roman villa: Naipaul 2002a: 38–9, 74, 76–9, 199, 203–5. Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:22 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof page 105 13.12.2009 4:36pm Mimicry and Classical Allusion in Naipaul 105 in the swimming pool and break the furniture and windows (76–9). The alienness of the villa is reinforced by the fact that, while there, Singh takes to reading Martial as an extension of his Roman posturing. There is nothing inherently fake about an East Indian reading Martial in the Caribbean—Martial is no more out of place in the Caribbean than he is anywhere else in the contemporary world—nor is the architecture of Pompeii, for that matter. The falsity comes from Singh’s use of the accoutrements of a vanished civilization in the construction of his Caribbean cultural identity, in order to project ‘the picture of a man’:19 The blue-and-white Hong Kong raffia chairs and table, the drinks, the illuminated swimming-pool, the Loeb edition of Martial: all this had been meant less to overawe Browne than to create the picture of a man who, whatever might be said about recent events in his private life, had achieved a certain poise. The Martial can be easily explained. I had taken up my Latin again. It was my own therapy. The acquisition in easy stages of a precise, dead language, through an easy author, was curiously soothing. It called for effort; it filled the time; it led from one day to the other.20 Like the Hong Kong raffia chairs, Martial is a cultural import. Naipaul’s allusive play here is particularly subtle: Singh makes light of the significance of Martial, suggesting that the choice of the Epigrams is dictated by linguistic criteria alone. Several critics have commented on the figure of Singh as a ‘limited’ or ‘unreliable’ narrator;21 this certainly seems to be borne out by his transparent appropriations of Roman culture and his approach to Martial as a way of reviving his schoolboy’s command of Latin (‘I had taken up my Latin again’), learned from Major Grant at Isabella Imperial.22 John Thieme rightly states that ‘Throughout, [Singh’s] allusions to Latin authors and his adoption of a Roman life-style seem to involve the calculation of a highly artificial persona.’23 And yet behind the narrator Singh is the author Naipaul, responsible for choosing a Roman poet from the Roman province of Hibernia (Spain) whose satiric visions of Rome challenge the very ideals of civilized Roman order repeatedly evoked by Singh.24 19 Feder 2001: 191–2 comments on Singh’s Roman posturing. On Singh’s performance of self in The Mimic Men, see Lindroth 1984. 20 Naipaul 2002a: 203–4. 21 See, e.g., Thieme 1984: 514–18, Hassan 1989: 263, and Greenberg 2000: 227–8. 22 Naipaul 2002a: 24, 140–1. 23 Thieme 1987: 120. 24 Much has been written about the blurring of fiction and autobiography in Naipaul’s oeuvre (see especially Hayward 2002: ch. 2). The Mimic Men frequently alludes to Naipaul’s own experience, and Singh’s Latin reading is no exception: Feder 2001: 192 (n. 21) cites an extract from Naipaul’s correspondence with Paul Theroux, in which the former is gratified that Theroux has taken up his recommendation of Martial: ‘I’m glad you have got on to Martial at last; he is a delicious writer and brings Rome back more vividly than others.’ The letter is dated 21 Feb. 1967, the year in which The Mimic Men was published. Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:22 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof 106 page 106 13.12.2009 4:36pm Emily Greenwood The version of Rome in The Mimic Men reflects the turmoil of the shift from a colonial to a postcolonial society. It is significant that specific allusions to Rome and Latin literature occur at crisis points in the novel. We have seen how the Roman villa furnishes a stage for the collapse of Singh’s marriage, and also provides a backdrop for his crumbling career as a politician. Correspondingly, the beginning of Singh’s impulsive marriage to Sandra is punctuated by a specific Latin allusion to Virgil’s Aeneid 2.274: The dark romance of a mixed marriage! Think of me sitting in the Holborn bar, drinking Guinness for strength, holding an evening paper for the ordinariness it suggested—cheatingly, the greyhound edition, it being too early for the others— and being really very frightened. So at the time I thought of myself. I stood away from the pensive figure and considered him and his recent, terrible adventure. Quantum mutatus ab illo! The words ran through my head until they were meaningless, until they became the emotion of loss and sadness and sweetness and apprehension. So nemesis came to the dandy, the creation of London, the haunter of British Council halls, art galleries and excursion trains. Quantum mutatus ab illo!25 The Latin phrase quoted here occurs in the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid in the context of Aeneas’ flight from Troy. Against all odds, the Trojan prince clings to a nostalgic vision of Troy’s power and fights to save his city, overwhelmed by the Greek forces and the overarching imperative of the fate whereby he is destined to leave Troy and found the future city and civilization of Rome. One of the messengers sent to stir Aeneas to leave Troy is the ghost of Hector (2.268–97), once the foremost Trojan warrior, heroized in Homer’s Iliad, now a gory wreck of a man. Aeneas reacts with disbelief to this vision of Hector, which forces him to confront the gap between his ideal image of Troy and the devastating reality: ei mihi, qualis erat, quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore qui redit exuuias indutus Achilli uel Danaum Phrygios iaculatus puppibus ignis! (274–6) What a sight he was! How changed from the Hector who had thrown Trojan fire on to the ships of the Greeks or come back clad in the spoils of Achilles.26 In Virgil the phrase ‘quantum mutatus ab illo’ refers to Hector, whereas Singh uses it self-reflexively to refer to his own demise. This passage has been interpreted as a mock-heroic allusion to the Aeneid, where the self-pitying use of the Latin phrase exposes the banality of Singh’s experience through juxtaposition with an epic past.27 The repetition of ‘quantum mutatus ab illo’ 25 26 27 Naipaul 2002a: 51–2. Translation by West 1991: 38. Thieme 1987: 119, Feder 2001: 186. Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:22 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof page 107 13.12.2009 4:36pm Mimicry and Classical Allusion in Naipaul 107 is indeed melodramatic and self-pitying, and yet this is another instance of a classical allusion, which although used superficially by the narrator, serves a deeper purpose for Naipaul. In Virgil the comment about Hector’s transformed appearance, focalized through Aeneas, can also be understood in terms of Aeneas’ consternation for his own situation. The exclamation ‘ei mihi’ (‘woe is me’) draws our attention to Aeneas and reminds us that Hector’s tragedy is his tragedy too. David West’s translation glosses over the grammar of the phrase ‘ei mihi’, which is a selfregarding expression of personal distress. Although the phrase ‘quantum mutatus’ (‘how changed’) in the past tense refers to Hector’s fate, it is also a proleptic marker for the changes that Aeneas will have to undergo in the poem as he leaves behind his Trojan identity in the process of becoming Roman. The more we dwell on Naipaul’s engagement with Virgil at this point in the novel, the more appropriate the allusion seems. Viewed as an alter-Aeneas, Singh has just failed in the fulfilment of his supposed destiny, through becoming married to Sandra—a Dido figure. Singh muses that the marriage to Sandra diverts and indeed subverts his planned trajectory in life: ‘Also, it might have been that as a result of my marriage to Sandra I had begun to surrender the direction of my life, not simply to her, but to events.’28 Although Virgil’s Aeneas avoids marriage with Dido, his progress towards Italy and the goal of a future Rome is beset with anxiety about cultural identity. Aeneas is faced with a choice between trying to found a new Troy, in the image of the old, and founding a new civilization altogether.29 The former option (a new Troy) is exposed as a nostalgic illusion as the poem depicts the attempts of other Trojan exiles—Helenus and Andromache—to do just this, and exposes the falsity of their attempt. Their reconstruction of the citadel of Troy is described as an imitation (‘simulata’).30 But if this is a ‘mimic Troy’, to use Jenkyns’s phrase (1998: 439), Rome is no less an artificial construction that has to be imagined into existence, and Roman cultural identity is a behaviour that Aeneas must learn through observing others.31 In 28 Naipaul 2002a: 53. See Syed 2005: 210. 30 Aeneid 3.349–50: ‘paruam Troiam simulataque magnis Pergama’ (‘a little Troy, a citadel modelled on great Pergamum’). See Jenkyns 1998: 438–9 on the falsity and futility of Helenus’ second Troy. Compare Naipaul’s observations about the ‘fraudulence’ of attempts by the local East Indian population to re-create India in Trinidad: ‘East Indians, British Indians, Hindustanis. But the West Indies are part of the New World and these Indians of Trinidad are no longer of Asia. The temples and mosques exist and appear genuine. But the languages that came with them have decayed. [ . . . ] There is no Ganges at hand, only a muddy stream called the Caroni. [ . . . ] It is the play of a people who have been cut off.’ (Naipaul 1972: 35; the essay ‘East Indian’ was first published in the Reporter, 17 June 1965). 31 Syed 2005: 209, ‘the Aeneid seems almost consciously to draw attention to the artificiality involved in its own definition of Roman identity’. 29 Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:25 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof 108 page 108 13.12.2009 4:36pm Emily Greenwood Reed’s words, ‘lacking a final nationality, [Aeneas] most plainly embodies the desirer of the national identity that the poem aims at’.32 The Aeneid that emerges from recent scholarship is not a receptacle of secure Western cultural identity, but rather a poem in which the intermingling of Asia and Europe, represented by the cities of Troy and Rome, destabilizes the idea of a simple cultural and national identity. As Craig Kallendorf observed at the conclusion of his study of appropriations of the Aeneid’s pessimistic vision in early modern European culture, the historical context for the Aeneid was the turbulent transition from the Roman Republic to the Empire, and consequently the poem lends itself to contexts of change and revolution.33 It is easy to imagine how the famous pessimistic sensibility of Virgil’s Aeneid might have appealed to Naipaul in the composition of a novel, which the Jamaican novelist John Hearne noted for ‘the unremitting integrity of its pessimism’.34 Ralph Singh’s insecurity about his cultural identity is closely bound up with anxiety about his masculinity. In fact his perception of the colonial predicament entailing a status of dependency, reliant on a borrowed culture, leads to the sense that the world of the ex-colony is not real and that he and the other citizens of Isabella are not real men. Another of the classical allusions in the novel occurs after an encounter with a German-Swiss woman, Beatrice, with whom Singh enters into a short-lived, unconsummated fling. Singh clearly feels emasculated by Beatrice; reflecting on their first date he is appalled at his passivity: I returned to the boarding-house in an agony of disturbance. I doubted whether I even knew what she looked like. I had fallen in so completely with her mood. She had led; I had followed.35 When Beatrice returns the Isabella dollar note that he had given her as a token of intimacy, he speculates about her reasons for rejecting him: She had sensed more than the absurdity of our relationship; she had sensed its wrongness. And, perhaps, she had seen the absence of virtue. Let me explain. Virtus: how could anyone who had gone through Isabella Imperial and studied Latin with Major Grant fail to know the meaning of that word?36 32 Reed 2007: 173. Kallendorf 2007a: 216. 34 Hearne 1977: 31. 35 Naipaul 2002a: 23. 36 Ibid. 24. See Feder 2001: 186 on the significance of the typographic arrangement of this paragraph: ‘Implicit in the contrast between the capitalized Latin and the lower case English is Singh’s ideal image of himself and his inability to live up to it in his relations with the people he comes to know.’ 33 Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:25 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof page 109 13.12.2009 4:36pm Mimicry and Classical Allusion in Naipaul 109 In supplying the Latin etymology of virtue, Singh offers only an implicit explanation, which presupposes the reader’s knowledge of Latin. The Latin etymology, according to which virtue is the property of being a man (vir), makes it clear that it is manliness and its absence that are at stake here. There is a childish aspect to Singh’s recourse to Latin and his pointed reference to his classical schooling; it is as if he seeks refuge in colonial clubbability, founded on a classical curriculum. Again an incidental, apparently superficial, Latin quotation may conceal a profounder use of classical allusion. Given that Singh later identifies himself with Aeneas, his lack of virility in this passage may also suggest Aeneas, whose infamous bottling out of his relationship with Dido casts a shadow over his virility in the Aeneid. Although Aeneas’ dutiful adherence to the realization of a future Roman civilization establishes an alternative model of virtus in the poem, it still does not entirely recuperate his manliness. Once the Trojan Aeneas leaves home, he encounters subjective stereotypes about gendered ethnicity, such as Iarbas’ famous sneer that Aeneas and his companions are only half-men (semiviro comitatu; Aeneid 4.215). Singh’s rhetorical question is significant (‘how could anyone . . . fail to know . . . ?’): he talks of knowing the meaning of the word rather than embodying the quality of virtus.37 This distinction echoes one of the novel’s central themes: the gulf between words and reality, and between words and action, which the narrator identifies as being inherent in the postcolonial politics of the ex-colony of Isabella, where real independence and power to act is an illusion: ‘We lack power, and we do not understand that we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost.’38 In a retrospective statement about the novel in his Nobel lecture, Naipaul claims that the book is ‘about colonial shame and fantasy’ and argues that ‘it was not about Mimics. It was about colonial men mimicking the condition of manhood, men who have grown to distrust everything about themselves.’39 While Naipaul’s attempt to distinguish between ‘mimicry’ and ‘mimicking manhood’ is not wholly convincing, his remark highlights the recurrent intersection of gender and ethnicity throughout his works. This is evident in the recent novel, Half a Life (2001), where the protagonist Willie Chandran discovers the courage that had eluded Singh in The Mimic Men. In some respects Willie and Singh are parallel narrators: Willie is East Indian whereas 37 See Thieme 1987: 118–19 for the use of the word ‘virtue’ elsewhere in the novel. Naipaul 2002a: 6. 39 Naipaul, ‘Two Worlds’, The Nobel Lecture, 7 Dec. 2001 (Naipaul 2004: 181–95, quoting from p. 193). 38 Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:26 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof 110 page 110 13.12.2009 4:36pm Emily Greenwood Singh is West Indian. They both have their lives derailed by women and endure periods of time in London, the colonial metropolis, during which they experience painful disillusionment about colonial cultural identity. Willie takes flight from London with a Portugese Mozambican woman and spends eighteen years in Mozambique in a society not unlike the multiracial society of Isabella in The Mimic Men.40 Expatriate Portugese society in the novel is afflicted with the same anxieties about hierarchy, status, and the authenticity of identity, and it is against this backdrop that a character called Correia offers Willie the prospect of a career as politician-cum-entrepreneur, reminiscent of Singh’s ill-fated career in Isabella in the earlier novel. Correia appeals to the familiar idea of virtus: ‘You could do what I do, Willie. It’s just a matter of courage.’41 Instead, Willie pursues courage in the field of sexual conquest, first with local prostitutes and then through an adulterous affair with Grac¸a, an unhinged woman from the local expatriate community. Willie’s version of courage is to divorce Ana and to take flight again: ‘When Ana came to the hospital courage came to me, and I told her I wanted to divorce her.’42 The novel ends with an affirmation of virility, and the simultaneous demonstration of his lack of virtus, in the sense that Willie lacks a clear sense of his own identity and in that sense perceives himself as not a man, not a person. His courage is exposed as an illusion, as virility and virtus are shown to be quite different things. As with classical allusions in The Mimic Men, which expose the pretence of borrowed cultural identities, in Half a Life Rome and Roman culture also function as metaphors for the mirage of colonial grandeur. When Willie Chandran arrives in London as a foreign student he is disconcerted by the ‘disjunction between expectation and experience’, which Helen Hayward has identified as a recurrent motif in Naipaul’s exploration of colonial, and postcolonial, cultural displacement.43 Willie compares Buckingham Palace unfavourably to the palaces of Indian maharajas: He thought the maharaja’s palace in his own state was far grander, more like a palace, and this made him feel, in a small part of his heart, that the kings and queens of England were impostors, and the country a little bit of a sham.44 He also begins to poke holes in the fiction of a Western civilization descended from ancient Rome: when he enquires about the black academic gowns which 40 For analogies between the society of Isabella and the society of colonial Mozambique, see King 2003: 192. 41 Naipaul 2001c: 171. 42 Ibid. 227. 43 Hayward 2002: 41. 44 Naipaul 2001c: 52. Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:27 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof page 111 13.12.2009 4:36pm Mimicry and Classical Allusion in Naipaul 111 they have to wear on formal occasions at his London college, one of the lecturers tells him ‘that it was what was done at Oxford and Cambridge, and that the academic gown was descended from the ancient Roman toga’.45 His research in the college library reveals that the dress of Islamic seminaries was the more likely model for the academic gown, ‘and that Islamic style would have been copied from something earlier. So it was a piece of make-believe’ (ibid.). Elsewhere in Naipaul’s oeuvre, appropriations of Roman culture are used deceptively to lend apparent probity to self-serving colonial interests.46 Michael Gorra cites the misquotation of Aeneid 4.112 in The Bend in the River (1979), where a colonial steamship company glosses over its self-serving presence in Zaire with a Latin inscription on one of its memorial monuments, alleging divine approval for the mixing of peoples: ‘Miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi’ (‘he approves the mixing of peoples and forming of treaties’).47 But the inscription omits the context for the quotation and alters the grammar, turning what in the Aeneid is an indirect question in the subjunctive ‘si Iuppiter . . . misceriue probet populos aut foedera iungi’, into a statement of fact in the indicative.48 Gorra remarks that in the Aeneid ‘the gods emphatically do not approve’, and notes that when Salim, Naipaul’s protagonist, discovers the misquotation (p. 69), ‘he both marvels at and is appalled by the way the imperial powers have manipulated the past in the service of their rule. It means that the city is based on a lie.’49 However, as Imraan Coovadia has shown in a recent article, Naipaul’s use of this misquotation from the Aeneid is even more penetrating than previous studies have realized.50 This particular misquotation has a Caribbean providence: exactly the same misquotation of Aeneid 4.112 was used (and possibly coined) as an early motto for Trinidad by Sir Ralph Abercromby, the British general who took Trinidad from the Spanish in 1797.51 In 45 Ibid., 59. For further discussion see Greenwood 2009: ch. 3.3. 47 Naipaul 2002b: 62, Gorra 1997: 98. See especially Thieme 1987: 186–8. Like Thieme, King 2003: 124–8, comments on the Virgilian intertext and traces parallels between Aeneas and Salim, the protagonist of A Bend in the River. See also Mustafa 1995: 143–4. 48 In the Aeneid the relevant lines are spoken by Venus, Aeneas’ mother, in response to a dissimulating speech from Juno: ‘sed fatis incerta feror, si Iuppiter unam/ esse velit Tyriis urbem Troiaque profectis,/ misceriue probet populos aut foedera iungi’ (4.110–12) (‘But I am at the mercy of the Fates and do not know whether Jupiter would wish there to be one city for the Tyrians and those who have come from Troy or whether he would approve the merging of their peoples and the making of alliances’; West 1991: 84). 49 Gorra 1997: 98. 50 Coovadia 2008: passim. 51 See Coovadia 2008: 3: ‘When Abercromby conquered Trinidad from Napoleon’s Spanish allies, he provided the island with a badge which was subsequently included in the flag of united Trinidad and Tobago. The top section shows a British trading ship arriving in harbour. At the 46 Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:29 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof 112 page 112 13.12.2009 4:36pm Emily Greenwood A Bend in the River Naipaul relocates this misappropriation of Virgil to another theatre of imperial power—Zaire rather than Trinidad—but the implication is the same: Roman culture has been repeatedly appropriated by colonial powers as a way of shoring up their authority through deceptive recourse to alleged classical precedents. Over the course of Naipaul’s novels we see a sustained process of ironizing, and indeed satirizing, of the artificiality of the relationship between British colonial power and Greco-Roman classical antiquity.52 In The Mimic Men, Major Grant, the Classics teacher at Isabella Imperial—modelled on Naipaul’s own teacher at Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad53—commits a racist faux pas in Latin, in the course of trying to extract the meaning of the Latin colour adjective caeruleus out of Browne, one of Singh’s black classmates. Grant’s slip, an inadvertent pun on Browne’s blackness, gives the lie to the idea that a classical education bestows nobility on those who master it (Naipaul 2002a: 140–1). On this occasion the potential hollowness of the Classics is suggested by the fact that the Major retreats into his edition of Virgil, turning away from the complicated racial politics of Isabellan society.54 In Half a Life the vacuity of many colonial appropriations of the Classics is exemplified by the name of Willie’s slick Jamaican peer, Percy Cato, the aetiology of whose name is explained in a letter from Willie’s sister Sarojini: This man says he knows you. He is a Latin American from Panama and his name is Cato, because his family has spent much time in the British colonies. He says that in the old days people gave their slaves Greek and Roman names as a joke, and his ancestor was landed with the name of Cato.55 In the version of his identity that Percy has told Sarojini, he has shifted from a Jamaican of mixed parentage to a Latin American from Panama, who has assumed a Latin American revolutionary identity. In this context the absurdity of his classical name (‘a joke’) is a symbol for the fluid constructedness of all bottom is printed the revised Virgilian motto which, by force of misquotation, confers classical prestige on what is publicised as benevolent British rule.’ The motto was jettisoned at Independence in 1962. 52 See Suleri’s apposite description of Naipaul’s ‘highly sophisticated ironizing of imperial mythmaking’ (Suleri 1992: 155). On the connection between mimicry and satire in Naipaul, see Ball 2003: 59–60. 53 See White 1972: 159, ‘from the obituary which appears in the Q.R.C. Chronicle for 1949 it is not difficult to guess that Captain Achilles Daunt, who joined the school in 1920 and who taught Naipaul Latin and English from 1945 to 1947, must be the original of Major Grant.’ See also p. 000 above. 54 Naipaul 2002a: 141: ‘Major Grant went red. He fitted his monocle carefully into his eye and looked down at his Vergil.’ 55 Naipaul 2001c: 129; Percy Cato is first introduced on p. 61 of the novel. Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:29 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof page 113 13.12.2009 4:36pm Mimicry and Classical Allusion in Naipaul 113 identities.56 Accordingly, rather than serving as a model for the integrity of the imperial metropolis, Naipaul’s revised Rome—the Rome of Aeneas the Asian immigrant—is remodelled as a symbol of chaotic cosmopolitanism, as in the following passage from The Enigma of Arrival:57 Cities like London were to change. They were to cease being more or less national cities; they were to become cities of the world, modern-day-Romes, establishing the pattern of what great cities should be, in the eyes of islanders like myself and people even more remote in language and culture. They were to be cities visited for learning and elegant goods and manners and freedom by all the barbarian peoples of the globe, people of forest and desert, Arab, Africans, Malays.58 Hayward remarks that ‘Naipaul courts controversy with the term “barbarian”’.59 However, Naipaul’s relentless exposure and ridiculing of the old colonial certainties implied by terms such as ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’ means that there is little sting in these deeply ironical terms. Even in triumphalist writings on empire the potential for the breakdown of colonial order is apparent, with events threatening to diverge from myths of imperial identity. This tension is evident in The English in the West Indies (1887), a bigoted travel account of the Caribbean by the Victorian English author, historian, and biographer James Anthony Froude. Froude’s book promotes an ideal of imperial masculinity, and yet it also represents a crisis in this very masculinity. The subtitle—The Bow of Ulysses—refers to Froude’s thesis that proposals to grant self-government to Britain’s colonies in the West Indies reflect the emasculation of contemporary politics with the ascendancy of orators and the decline of men of action.60 In Froude’s argument, ‘Ulysses’ symbolizes the character of previous generations of Englishmen who fought to acquire and preserve the empire and who, Froude points out, were able to string the bow of Ulysses.61 The 56 Compare Hayward 2002: 72, who argues that Naipaul’s predilection for autobiographical revisions through fiction implies a fluid conception of personal identity: ‘His multiple reworkings of the materials of his life suggest, moreover, the provisionality of constructions of the self.’ 57 In an article on the new cosmopolitanisms of Naipaul and Edward Said, Joan Cocks suggests the phrase ‘negative cosmopolitanism’ as a description for Naipaul’s own version of cosmopolitanism (Cocks 2000: 50). 58 Naipaul 2002b: 130. For comment see Hayward 2002: 42. 59 Hayward 2002: 42. 60 Froude 1888 [1887]: 14, ‘I do not believe in the degeneracy of our race. I believe the present generation of Englishmen to be capable of all that their fathers were and possibly of more; but we are just now in a moulting state, and are sick while the process is going on. Or to take another metaphor. The bow of Ulysses is unstrung. The worms have not eaten into the horn or the moths injured the string, but the owner of the house is away and the suitors of Penelope Britannia consume her substance. . . .’ Froude made this argument for great-Britainism in the context of a political climate dominated by the Gladstonian policy of little-Britainism. 61 See ibid.: 31, ‘The bow of Ulysses was strung in those days.’ Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:30 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof 114 page 114 13.12.2009 4:36pm Emily Greenwood subtitle of Froude’s book, and the metaphor of epic masculinity on which it depends, undoubtedly suggests another subtext: a racist sneer at the masculinity of Britain’s colonial subjects in the Caribbean.62 But the fact remains that the occasion for writing is a crisis in British masculinity which cannot therefore function as an ideal with which to contrast the masculinity of Britain’s Caribbean subjects. Froude’s mimicry of the Classics through his high-handed epic allusions is as fake as the pretenders to Ulysses’ bow who are the objects of his criticism. Some of the most vituperative attacks on Naipaul’s ‘racist’ ethnography of his native Caribbean and the Third World more generally have exploited his alleged affinity for Froude’s vision.63 Rob Nixon concludes that ‘in the decisiveness and scope of his racism, Naipaul concedes little to Trollope and Froude’.64 Several critics have seized on Naipaul’s choice of a quotation from Froude’s work as the epigraph for his first travel work: The Middle Passage: A Caribbean Journey (1962), an account of travels in the West Indies in 1960–1, sponsored by the government of Trinidad and Tobago.65 Naipaul chose as his epigraph the notorious passage in which Froude denied personhood to the populations of the Caribbean: ‘There are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own.’66 However, as Michael Gorra has suggested, Naipaul’s reason for placing this passage at the head of his work may not have been motivated by the ‘relentless negativity’ and racism that Rob Nixon discerns in this work (1992: 46). Instead, Gorra points to prevailing regional anxieties in the 1950s and 1960s about how to create national, Caribbean identities in the absence of a ‘native civilization’ and in the shadow of colonial rule.67 According to Gorra’s revisionist reading of Froude’s passage as quoted by Naipaul, the sense is ‘Not that there are no people in the Caribbean, but that there is not a people, that there is not a Caribbean people as such. Just who are they?’68 Gorra concedes that the difference between Naipaul’s response to this crisis of national identity and the response of other contemporary Caribbean writers, such as Derek Walcott, is that while they have adopted creolization as a positive model for cultural identity, Naipaul has clung to the negative model of a region void of a coherent cultural identity.69 62 See Richmond 1982: 129 on the jingoism of Froude’s subtitle. See especially Nixon 1992: 43–51. More generally, see Nixon 1992: ch. 2. 64 Ibid.: 50. 65 See Dissanayake and Wickramagamage 1993: ch. 2. 66 Froude 1887: 306. For further discussion of this passage see Greenwood 2007: 203, with n. 22. 67 Gorra 1997: 78; Gorra takes the phrase ‘native civilization’ from C. L. R. James’s essay on Caribbean federation, first published in 1958 (James 1984: 97). 68 Gorra 1997: 79. 69 Ibid.: 81. On Derek’s Walcott’s artistic conception of the Caribbean nation see Breslin 2001. On the difference between Naipaul and Walcott in this context, see Terada 1992: 79. 63 Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:30 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof page 115 13.12.2009 4:36pm Mimicry and Classical Allusion in Naipaul 115 Naipaul’s fascination with Froude is such that the Victorian writer features in The Mimic Men (pp. 80–2), where Naipaul interpolates the fictional island of Isabella into the itinerary of Froude’s travel narrative.70 The irony of this interpolation is that Froude has become part of the historiography of Isabella, giving Isabellans a sense of their past through the work of this ‘imperialist pamphleteer’, and yet Froude’s work emphatically denies any native history to the Caribbean. An ex-colony that derives its sense of its own history from Froude’s book is in a very confused state indeed. In view of Froude’s status as a colonial mythmaker, it is no surprise that he turns up in The Mimic Men.71 It is time to move beyond the critique of Naipaul’s engagement with Froude, which sees Naipaul in sympathy with the racist, Victorian colonial gaze, or the critique which attributes to Naipaul the same flaw of ‘imitative/ mimic dependency’, which it accuses him of projecting onto the Third World.72 Neither critique leaves room for subtle readings of Naipaul’s own exploration of imitative dependency. As Anthony Boxill mused in a perceptive review discussion of A Flag on the Island (1967) and The Mimic Men: In these two works Naipaul seems to be asking himself how can a society which is profoundly mimic produce anything which is not itself mimic; how can a man who is not sure what he is produce anything which is genuinely his own.73 Rather than contempt, Boxill discerns sympathy: In fact, throughout both these novels there is great sympathy and understanding for the predicament of the modern West Indies. How can a small country lacking in resources be expected to withstand the onslaught of the American plastic world? How can a society nurtured in mimicry and self-disgust by a history of slavery and colonialism remain uncontaminated by the unreality of its controllers?74 Conversely, for Selwyn Cudjoe, the fact that Singh’s persona as writer is linked with the concept of mimesis implicates Naipaul in the same relationship of mimetic dependency.75 However, author and narrator are not identical, and to claim that they are is a false critical move. Moreover, this line of interpretation 70 See White 1972: 165; White points out that in his fictional description of Froude’s visit to Isabella, Naipaul merges two different episodes from Froude’s narrative—one from Froude’s travels in Dominica, and one from his travels in Trinidad. 71 In the Caribbean reception of his work, the idea of Froude as a fraud dates back to J. J. Thomas, whose 1889 rebuttal of Froude’s book bore the title Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas. 72 On Naipaul’s colonial gaze, see Nixon 1992: 131–2 and ch. 6, passim. On Naipaul’s own mimetic dependency, see Cudjoe 1988: 102. 73 Boxill 1976: 13. 74 Ibid.: 16. 75 Cudjoe 1988: 102. Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:30 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof 116 page 116 13.12.2009 4:36pm Emily Greenwood confuses mimicry with artistic mimesis.76 Although I disagree with Cudjoe’s identification of Singh the writer with Naipaul the author, his claim goes right to the heart of the matter: is the climate of mimetic dependency so all-encompassing that in his analysis of the subject, Naipaul, too, is condemned to mimicry, forfeiting originality and insight? Can judgement only come from the outside; is there no legitimate space for an internal critique of imitative dependency in Caribbean letters? According to Cudjoe’s analysis, Naipaul is arrested in ‘the mirror stage of development’, unable to ‘assume a social identity separate and distinct from that of the mother (country)’.77 Naipaul’s conception of mimicry in The Mimic Men has been read in several different ways: for Homi Bhabha, the novel’s treatment of mimicry explores the ambivalence of colonial cultural mimicry that both sublimates a desired culture through imitation and yet, in the process of imitation, exposes the fantasy behind this culture. In Bhabha’s reading, colonial mimics such as Ralph Singh generate what he calls a ‘double vision’ that disrupts the authority of colonial discourse (2004: 126); this ‘double vision’ refers to the fact that the otherness, or difference, of colonial mimics is visible in their ‘flawed colonial mimesis’ (ibid. 125), thereby deforming the culture which is the object of imitation.78 In an essay entitled ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry’, originally published in 1974, Derek Walcott understands Naipaul as lamenting the inescapable and unproductive mimicry of all Caribbean culture (Walcott 1997). While Naipaul does sometimes articulate this view, most notably in his damning conclusion in The Middle Passage that ‘nothing has ever been created in the Caribbean’,79 the representation of mimicry in Mimic Men is more sophisticated than this. Walcott argues that Naipaul’s theory of mimicry entails that all art in the Americas—not solely the Caribbean—is derivative (Walcott 1997: 53).80 In a 76 Contrast Lindroth 1984: 529, who sees mimesis as a way out of the cycle of mimic dependency: ‘Ralph recreates himself as a “free man” [p. 300] and certifies himself as artistmagician who has passed from the mimicry of fraudulent pretence to the mimesis of authentic creative performance.’ 77 Ibid.: 111. 78 See Nixon 1992: 156–8 for a discussion of Bhabha’s theorization of colonial mimicry in relation to The Mimic Men. Nixon does not accept that Naipaul’s model of mimicry is capable of the sophistication demonstrated by Bhabha: ‘Naipaul’s account of “mimicry” leaves no room for retaliatory, knowing, partial, appropriations’ (ibid.: 157). See also Mustafa 1995: 106. 79 Naipaul 2001b: 20. 80 ‘[I]f I understand Mr Naipaul correctly, our pantomime is conducted before a projection of ourselves which in its smallest gestures is based on metropolitan references. No gesture, according to this philosophy, is authentic, every sentence is a quotation, every movement either ambitious or pathetic, and because it is mimicry, uncreative. The indictment is crippling, but, like all insults, it contains an astonishing truth. The only thing is that it is not, to my mind, only the West Indies which is being insulted by Naipaul, but all endeavor in this half of the world, in broader definition: the American endeavor.’ Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:30 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof page 117 13.12.2009 4:36pm Mimicry and Classical Allusion in Naipaul 117 careful discussion of Walcott’s essay,81 Rei Terada attributes a larger thesis to Naipaul, drawing on the whole of Naipaul’s oeuvre: It is already clear in Naipaul that the English in India were not really English. In the Indian context their mannerisms were absurd; Anglo-India even when it existed was a ‘fairytale land’. Shouldn’t we take the next step of wondering whether the Indian context merely underscored an absurdity that existed in England itself? Weren’t real English clubs, for example, largely mimicking prior English clubs, a distant subculture of mythic grace?82 It is precisely this idea of an originary culture of ‘mythic’ grace, and mimetic homage to this culture that Naipaul satirizes so relentlessly, both in his own life and that of others. P E RI C L E S ’ MY T H IC AL AT H E N S A S I M I TAT I V E S OC I E T Y At the beginning of this chapter we saw how Athens was used by Trinidadian writers such as C. L. R. James and Eric Williams as a stable locus of civilization. Indeed, Naipaul’s narrator Ralph Singh also contrasts the disorder of the colonial society in which he finds himself with the ideal of the ‘famous’ city of Athens (p. 000 above). In recent decades classicists have relentlessly exposed the gap between the Athenian ideal of Athens, and whatever of the reality we can glean from surviving texts and material culture. In a new reappraisal of the ‘ideal’ Athens of Pericles’ funeral oration, and the psychic experience of the Athenians to whom the oration is addressed, Victoria Wohl examines the slippage between the eroˆs (passionate love) which the Athenians are encouraged to feel for their powerful city (2.43.1), and the pathological eruption of this eroˆs when they focus their longing on an imperial venture in Sicily in Book 6 of Thucydides’ History. Furthermore, Wohl draws an analogy between the Athenians, whom the general Nicias warns not to be duseroˆtes toˆn apontoˆn—‘impossibly enamoured with absent things’ (6.13.2)—and modern readers who turn and return repeatedly to an Athens which ‘is itself a distant and elusive object’.83 Wohl questions what ‘our own histories of Athens’ seek in Athens: ‘Do we seek in Athens itself what the Athenians sought both in Sicily and in the tyrannicide legend, a secure and masterful masculinity, a free and autonomous subject, a 81 Terada 1992: 18–25. Ibid.: 19. 83 Wohl 2002: 214 See, generally ibid., ch.1 (on Pericles’ Funeral Oration), and ch. 4 (on the Sicilian Expedition). Wohl stresses that the object of ‘Athens’ diseased longing for what is absent’ is not just Sicily, but the very ideal of democratic masculinity itself (ibid.: 173). 82 Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:30 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof 118 page 118 13.12.2009 4:36pm Emily Greenwood cure for contemporary anxieties?’ (ibid.) Soundings from the Caribbean reveal that readers have indeed sought ‘a secure and masterful masculinity’ in both Athens and Rome (Singh’s virtus), as well as the ideal of ‘free and autonomous’ subjectivity. Although Froude does not mention Pericles’ funeral oration in Thucydides among the numerous classical works that he cites in The British in the West Indies,84 it is nevertheless revealing to compare his argument that Englishmen need to play the role of Ulysses to the empire, personified as Penelope (‘Penelope Britannia’), with Pericles’ vision of the Athenians ‘gazing at the power of Athens in operation on a daily basis and becoming her lovers’ (Thucydides 2.43.1).85 Pericles proclaims that Athens is what ‘the heroism of these [men] and their like have made her’ (2.42.2), but the logic is circular insofar as the Athenians of the funeral oration are shaped by their consciousness of their identity as Athenians and the expectation of living up to (and dying for) Athens. Victoria Wohl expresses this idea well when she writes that the deeds of Athens’ war dead ‘take their visibility from the city whose greatness they reflect: Athens is the paradeigma [2.37.1], the original of which everything else—the dead, the living, the logos—is an imitation’ (Wohl 2002: 39).86 In Thucydides’ account of the late fifth-century bce, the conduct of Athens in both its domestic and foreign policy seldom lives up to the ideal image of the funeral oration. According to this reading of Pericles’ funeral oration, the ‘famous’ city of Athens in which Ralph Singh sought a model of civilized order is subject to the same disorder as colonial societies, the same gap between ideal and actuality that is ‘an intrinsic component of an imitative society’.87 C ON C LU S I ON Notwithstanding the different languages in which classical scholarship is written, and the growing body of work on classical reception, it is still 84 There is a passing reference to Thucydides at Froude 1888: 172. There is some ambiguity in the Greek text here, since the pronoun ‘her’ can refer to ‘power’ or to ‘Athens’—both are feminine nouns. I assume that the pronoun refers primarily to Athens and that Pericles is urging Athenians to become lovers of the city, whose power is one of her most attractive qualities. This is the reading taken by Hornblower 1991: 311, ad loc.; see also Monoson 2000: 73. Wohl 2002: 57, with n. 61, preserves the ambiguity and argues that, when translating the pronoun ‘her’ we should not separate the city and its power. 86 See also Wohl 2002: 76. 87 Quoting Ball 2003: 59. 85 Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:30 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof page 119 13.12.2009 4:36pm Mimicry and Classical Allusion in Naipaul 119 common to proceed as though there is only one history of Greco-Roman antiquity. However, insofar as this history is manifestly influenced by modern nationalisms and empires, it is important to acknowledge that these same nationalisms and empires have provoked quite different histories that have a place in the historiography of ancient Greece and Rome. All the same, there is no reciprocal exchange between Greco-Roman antiquity and the Caribbean, not least because, as Joseph Brodsky reminded us, ‘While antiquity exists for us, we for antiquity, do not’ (1995: 267). But there is also no reciprocal exchange because images of Athens and Rome in the Caribbean have been filtered through a colonial ideal, in which these civilizations were appropriated to legitimate the cultural imperialism that was embodied latterly in the British Empire. While nationalism retains force as a historical category, globalization studies dispute the extent to which nationalism matters in the era of transnationalism. From the perspective of postcolonial studies, the nationalisms that played such an important part in independence struggles in the twentieth century are receding as the result of a paradigm shift away from the categories of ‘nations’ and ‘national sovereignty’, a shift that occludes the extent to which the new global ‘empire’ is itself a reinvention of first-world nationalisms.88 As Vilashini Cooppan has argued, the current trend for diaspora studies poses a healthy counterargument to the postnational or supranational model of globalization. Diaspora studies have redefined the study of nations, but they have not done away with the category of the nation: ‘The critical lens of diaspora has undoubtedly altered the terms in which we think nations, forcing us to see them as more culturally heterogeneous, more spatially unbounded, more fractured and fissured by the constant flows of the global into and out of the space of the state.’89 I contend that Naipaul’s ‘negative cosmopolitanism’ is the perfect complement to this diasporic rethinking of nationalism.90 If we accept Cocks’s view, and I acknowledge that many of Naipaul’s readers do not, that Naipaul ‘grasps the heterogeneity and intricate intermixtures of peoples, along with their reciprocal aversions and affections, cruelties and generosities’ (2000: 48), then his collective body of work speaks urgently to present debates about the formation of diasporic, national cultural identities. To return to Naipaul’s use of the misquotation of Aeneid 4.112: many of Naipaul’s critics imply that he has a violent aversion to creolization and the concept of ‘misceri populos’. Whereas in fact, Naipaul resurrects this misquo88 89 90 For the articulation of this new global ‘empire’ see Hardt and Negri 2000. Cooppan 2005: 87. See p. 0000, above. Comp. by: PG2689 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001141774 Time:16:36:30 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001141774.3D Date:13/12/09 Stephens 0001141774 Page Proof 120 page 120 13.12.2009 4:36pm Emily Greenwood tation of Virgil precisely to show that colonial empires, whether in the Caribbean, India, or Africa, had a tendency to simplify complex realities, to turn a deliberative proposition (si . . . probet) about the legitimacy of one culture’s interference with and imposition on another, into an affirmative statement (probat). Many readers, myself included, reject Naipaul’s pessimistic response to this proposition, but he cannot be accused of oversimplification. Given that modern studies of the phenomena of empire and imperialism continue to attribute the invention of empire to Rome, Naipaul’s re-reading of Virgil in The Mimic Men serves an important historiographical purpose in the modern Caribbean, exposing the gap between colonial appropriations of the classics and the deeply ambivalent messages contained in these texts.91 91 For a facile appeal to Virgil as a spokesperson for an idealized vision of empire in the context of ancient Rome, see Hardt and Negri 2000: 167.