Preparations For Travel: Naipaul’s Conradian Atavism

Abstract Emotionally and culturally, Naipaul’s childhood had prepared him for a Victorian Britain that had long since passed. He never fully recovered from that chimera. Thus, when he speaks of being educated toward the Old World, the epithet Old takes on a particular resonance: Coming from a place like Trinidad, which I always felt existed on the edge of the world, far away from everything else, not only physically but also in terms of culture, I felt that I had to try very hard to rejoin the Old World. In his symptomatic phrasing, “rejoin” testifies to the ease with which he confuses the feeling that he ought to have belonged to the Old World with the illusion that he once did. And in fantasy, his bond is not to Every detail of behaviour is regulated-the bowels to be cleared before breakfast and never after, for instance, the left hand and not the right to be used for intimate sexual contact, and so on. Relationships are codified. Here Naipaul the moody traveler is withheld from view and Indian cultural practices are brought center-stage. He comes closer to a style of ethnography: the language is unemotive, diagnostic, nonnarrative, and he strives to sound formal and impartial.