8 - Conclusion

Summary

The book before always turned out to have been written by a man with incomplete knowledge.

(V.S. Naipaul, Finding the Centre)

The critical industry that Naipaul's works have generated has taken on an aspect similar to his own agenda of rewriting. In March 1994 the University of Tulsa inaugurated and opened its Naipaul archive, which houses all his existing manuscripts through 1984, as well as his professional correspondence. Thus, it is only a matter of time before another generation of scholars produces a body of critical writings that document, in even more detail than Naipaul has himself, the process whereby a Writer emerges from the recesses of Europe's old imperial world. Nevertheless, the query that can always be reiterated is the one that looks into the relationship that has developed between Naipaul the writer and the Naipaulian world view. Whether one is discomforted or illuminated by Naipaul's investigations into the failures of modernity, the fact persists that his language, his style, his attention to form, and his expressive dimensions have maintained a brilliance and mastery that have become landmarks in contemporary writing in English. Naipaul the writer, who I understand to be distinct from the romantic young colonial aspiring to become a Writer, embodies one of the possible paradoxes of postcolonial literature – namely, the disjunction between the materiality of language and the materiality of history.