V. S. Naipaul and the worlds of postcolonial realism

Abstract

V. S. Naipaul’s career as a novelist, travel writer, and journalist presents a case study for exploring the links between realist form and the global imagination as they evolve over a 60-year period. This article argues that his work is shaped by an aesthetic of “world realism” that constructs plausible models, through form and content, of the contemporary world as a totalized, structurally-differentiated system. At the same time, it examines how Naipaul’s realism mediates the divisions between metropolitan and peripheral space that shape his entry into the world-literary sphere. Analysed in these terms, Naipaul’s career falls into three phases, in each of which a distinctive “world-concept” emerges from the conjunction of historical and biographical events, and aesthetic contradictions. Naipaul’s world realism complicates critiques in postcolonial studies that he is a puppet of imperial ideology, and unveils the latent commitment to totality underpinning the global novel. World realism reflects an under-theorized conjunction of aesthetics and the global imaginary that unlocks an alternative history of the modern novel produced in frontier spaces.