House for Mr. Biswas: Naipaul

The Nobel Laureate of 2001, Naipaul’s view of art reminds one of Carlyle’s perception o the writer as a kind of secular-clergy as Ian Baruma suggests. A House for Mr. Biswas, “The marked signature of failure” of hero is the story of Naipaul’s father Seeparsed, leads one to the disquieting realization:

When everybody wants to fight, there’s nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla.

The hero was born at he inauspicious midnight hour, like Salim Sinai in The Midnight’s Children, as the narrator describes Mr. Biswas:

Malnutrition gave him the shallowest of chests, the thinnest of limbs; it stunned his growth and gave him a soft rising belley. And thus, perceptibly, he grew.

Mr. Biswas “the barking puppy dog” was a hero lacking in heroism but has been talked about as if he were heroic, and has been described passing “his tongue above his upper lip to make it tough the knobby tip of his nose,” then he is shown, “spitting carefully, trying to let his spittle hand down to the floor without breaking it.”

The theme of individual fulfillment and of the crumbling of the society comes together. The novel is set against the background of the socio-political changes in Trinidad during the Second World War when England had leased to the American forces its military based in Carribbean. The search for self on the part of Mr. Biswas began as early as he developed a consciousness of the world around him. At Pegotes, living in a one-room tenement with his mother, Bipti, at Bhandat’s sharing a room with his rowdy sons—Rabidat and Jagdat, at Pandit Jairam’s—wherever he is “before the Tulsis,” he has been shown greatly concerned with his identity and his role in life. For him

It is far more difficult to sever relationship between the old and new or the past and the present, than a simple desire to do so may imply.

The most significant trait of Mr. Biswas is his rebelliousness at the moment he realizes that he is trapped into Hanuman House “a blasrws zoo” by Tulsi Family “this blasted fowl run”. He called Shama’s, his wife, brother are called “the little gods,” Seth as “the big Boss”, Mrs. Tulsi as “Old Queen,” “The Old Hen”, “A she-fox” and son on.

Mr. Bsiwas is so firmly ensconced in Tulsidom that it is only Deu ex Machina, i.e., divine intervention or the role of chance that finally succeeds in wearing him away from it. It was chance that he revealed to him his gift for painting letters in Mr. Lal’s classroom. It was chance which made him write a note of love to Shama under the provocation of Jagdat and Rabidat, which ultimately landed him in Hanuman House. All in all, Mr. Biswas, the failed Pandit, is not a wholly admirable character.

Mr. Biswas “was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it” but he failed to make it. He wanted to forget “The memories of Hanuman House, The Chase, Green Vale, Shorthills, the Tulsi in Port of Spain would become jumbled, blurred; events would be telescoped, many forgotten.” At the end, he found himself in his own house, even though he has had a heart attack and he is on rather frail health, he would not mind dying in his own house:

How terrible it would have been …. To have died among the Tulsis …. Worse to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth.”

The impression left is undeniably of the futility of the whole endeavor. Shelly’s Ozymandias like, Mr. Biswas fretted and fumed all his life for something which could not outlast. The last sentence of the novel runs:

“Afterwards the sisters returned to their respective homes and Shama and the children went back in the perfect to the Empty house.”

Here the house rendered “empty” after Mr. Biswas’s death at the age of 46.

One can perhaps conclude by suggesting that as regards the portrayal of the lives and activities of the immigrant Hindus in Trinidad, it can be averred that A House for Mr. Biswas anticipates Naipaul’s triology on India—India: A Wounded Civilization (1964); India” An Area of Darkness (1977) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).