Predestination, Frustration And Symbolic Darkness In Naipaul's "A House For Mr.

Biswas"
Author(s): F. G. ROHLEHR
Source: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1 (March, 1964), pp. 3-11
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40652876
Accessed: 03-05-2019 12:16 UTC

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 Predestination, Frustration And

Symbolic Darkness In Naipaul's

"A House For Mr. Biswas/'

F. G. ROHLEHR

WEST INDIAN fiction is distinctive for its intense social conscious-

ness. Faced by a society formed through slavery and colonialism, whose
values have never been defined before, the novelist in the West Indies
must recreate experience and simultaneously create the standards
against which such experience is to be judged. Since such standards
are lacking in his society, his task becomes even more complex, and
not infrequently, characters in West Indian fiction appear as sociological
norms, and speak as though they were forever conscious of the burden
of defining their society. The Boy narrator in Lamming's Castle is a
good example of this. Criticism of West Indian fiction, like the fiction
itself, has tended to be an evaluation of sociological truth, perhaps to
the detriment of analysis which aims at making statements about
literary merit.
The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to see Naipaul's A House
for Mr. Biswas in its context as a superb artistic achievement. Com-
ments will be made on its prevailing tone, on the quality of the author's
personality as it is seen reflected in the book, and on its structure and
symbolic pattern. It is beyond the scope of this article to evaluate the
book as, say, a picture of the East Indian's acculturation, as he evolves
in the multi-racial Trinidad society. Comments to this end will be
made only insofar as they aid criticism of Naipaul's presentation of a
human being placed in a particular environment.
A House for Mr. Biswas which will henceforth be referred to as
The House, includes and transcends the three novels before it but
is most akin in tone to Miguel Street. Although the cover of the
paperback edition of Miguel Street proclaims this book "a riotous and
colourful novel of the West Indies", its prevailing tone is one of frustra-
tion. Almost every person fails to obtain his objective in life. Ellas
after failing several exams makes the leap in aspiration from doctor to
scavenger. Man-Man fails even as an eccentric. Morgan's fireworks
are successful only when his house is burning. Laura, the jovial pro-
ducer of illegitimate children, cries when her daughter follows in the
great tradition.
"And for the first time I heard Laura crying. It wasn't ordinary
crying. She seemed to be crying. . . all the cry she had tried

Editor's Note: Allen Lane Prize Essay 1963.

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 to cover up with her laughter. It made me feel that the world
was a stupid sad place/'

This feeling that the world is a stupid sad place, comes across
forcibly in The House. As in Miguel Street, there is always a wry
edge to the humour, something unhappy and grey beneath the riot and
the colour.

Miguel Street is therefore important in any study of Naipaul's

tone, and the personality which produces it. Here we see his peculiar
dry-eyed restraint in operation. Emotion is suggested by its very
absence and irony is the painful left side of sympathy, which enables
Naipaul to retain detachment in presenting the frightening realities
of his self-drama. For there is no doubt that much of Naipaul is
autobiography, set at a distance through irony. This irony is not
assumed, but grows out of a timid evasive personality, which shrinks
in the presence of a largeness of emotion, and a full vital life, and can
therefore only express itself negatively and indirectly.
It is not accidental that the essential character in The House,
Mr. Biswas himself, is isolated in the lonely task of self-discovery and
psychic self-preservation. There can, therefore, be little tenderness in
his life, and he fails to make emotional contact with his wife and
family. The relationship between father and son, for example, which
is so prominent in the book, can only show itself in the most indirect
and painful of ways - through "exaggerated authority" on the part
of the father, and "exaggerated respect" on the part of the son. Con-
scious of the danger of emotionalism degenerating into maudlin senti-
mentality, Naipaul tries to keep both his pity and emotion dry. This
is both his deficiency and his success. To put it more precisely, his art
lies in his successful handling of negative states of emotion, and in the
heightening of a personal drama which reveals a decided deficiency in
the author himself.

It is important to the satirist that he interpose between his vision

of society, and his emotional response to this vision, a screen of rational
levelheadedness. Satire is, perhaps, the most intellectual of all artistic
genres, and deals with emotion at one remove. We see not emotion,
but its effect on the behaviour of individuals. The House goes beyond
satire, and points out central incongruities, not merely in the behaviour
of individuals in society, but in life itself. It depicts an individual
carrying out a pathetic rebellion against a society, which he neither
likes nor can discard, which offers him both protection and imprison-
ment. The dry restraint mentioned above, is ideally suited to the
theme. The futility of the struggle is embodied in the irony, which
always shows Mr. Biswas's littleness and frequent absurdity.
He is "Mr. Biswas" even as a baby, a separate individual, bent on
preserving his personality against the frustration of life and society.
None of the characters of Miguel Street is clearly defined. Most of
them have nicknames, and are caricatures of real human beings, in-
dividuals only in their eccentricity, and human in their common failure.
At the end of Miguel Street, the narrator, who is obviously Naipaul
himself, has to escape from the engulfing world of the street which

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reduces everyone to its own level of amorality, violence, farce, and
eccentricity. For Mr. Biswas there is no escape. He fights till death
against a reductive society which is the enemy of individuality.

"Mr. Biswas had no money or position. He was

expected to become a Tulsi. At once he rebelled".
A strange, futile rebellion! The theme of one man pitted against a
whole way of life is tragic in scope, and The House is nearly so.
Predestination is suggested in the structure of the book, and in the
symbols of darkness and stagnation which recur almost like themes
throughout. The book begins with a prologue.
"Ten weeks before he died, Mr. Mohun Biswas

Death is present even in the overture. The Prologue is really a sum-

mary of all the action of the book, succint and anticipatory of the long
story which is to follow. We know the outcome beforehand, and as we
read the book we are the spectators of a particular human being's life,
seeing with the eyes of Eternity and Destiny, and the whole struggle,
the created pain and inevitable defeat. Much of the powerful irony of
the book, stems from just this fact. When in the last chapter of the
book on page 511, a conversation which we first heard in the Prologue
on page eleven is repeated, in which Mr. Biswas tells one of the Tulsi
women to return to her goats at home, we feel that a circle has been
completed, that predestination has been fulfilled and the whole long
life of Mr. Biswas is at its prophesied end.

The house which Mr. Biswas is perpetually trying to build, is more

than a place in which he can lead a private life with his family. It is
his personality symbolised, the private individuality which he must not
only build, but preserve against society and life itself; the external
symbol of an inner significance. For Biswas, hell is certainly other
people. The house is described in detail in the prologue. It is the
summit of Mr. Biswas's achievement in life, and it seems that the
struggle has hardly been worthwhile. It has "no protection from the
sun", is "irretrievably mortgaged", rickety, grotesque, and dangerously
cracked in places. Yet it is his own, and his only alternative to having
lived

"without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion

of the earth, to (having) lived and died as one (is)
born, unnecessary and unaccommodated".

The struggle for personality The House is at times reminiscent of

King Lear, although I do not suggest that Naipaul had the play
in mind when he wrote the book. For one thing, Lear starts out
accommodated and rich, though mentally and spiritually deficient,
and moves downwards, losing everything until he is naked in the storm.
Mr. Biswas starts with nothing except a dubiously potent sneeze, and
moves upwards until the storm finds him with his house half-built, his
personality barely able to survive the shock which ensues from a
realisation of both his inner and outward insignificance. Both Lear
and Biswas sufTer mentally before they can accept the vision of their
frailty, and proceed into "the trailing consequence of further days and

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hours" before the final extinction. Although the parallels must not be
laboured, it is true that both works explore in widely different ways, a
centre of terror and nakedness in humanity. Further reference to
King Lear will therefore be made, since such comparison may enable
us better to appreciate the core of experience in The House.

The weakness of Biswas is stressed at every point. His birth has

not been recorded; all marks of his birthplace are obliterated. "The
world (bears) no record of Mr. Biswas's existence". His clothes are
always too big, and we at one time see him contemplating them in
shame at his littleness. He is physically weak, has chronic indigestion,
and is useless at any job where neither his wit nor art can find a warped
expression. At the end of the first section of the book he leaves
Hanuman House as he entered it, with bundle and paint brushes.
Conscious of this weakness at every turn, he can only go through the
motions of rebellion against society. He has to use his wit to reduce
the Tulsis to mere caricatures. . . "the old hen", "the gods", "the monkey-
house", "crab-catcher". At such caricature he has no equal. It shows
itself in the grotesque wit of his "Sentinel" articles, the type of wit
which Naipaul himself demonstrates in scenes such as Cuffy's wake in
The Suffrage of Elvira and the burning of Morgan's house in Miguel
Street. Where, however, Naipaul's sympathy is suggested, Biswas*
irony is always reductive. He learns to lose a regard for other people,
as Shama so rightly points out.

He blames everyone and everything for his position - fate, his

parents, the Tulsis, life itself - never his gullibility and lack of drive.
To admit these is to admit defeat, and in the storm he is nearly
defeated by a recognition of his helplessness. Biswas accepts the idea
that he is predestined to fail, and as the Prologue suggests, Naipaul is
almost as fatalistic. The only thing man is left with in his struggle
against nonentity, he seems to say, is a sense of his individual reality.
To strip him of that (as does life in Hanuman House) is to leave
nothing at all. Moreover, a man must own something concrete and
tangible to be convinced that his life is meaningful.
"Allow not nature more than nature needs
Man's life is cheap as beast's".
The sense of failure is always present in the symbolic patterns
throughout the novel. The shop in which Biswas works as a boy, is
described as having
"thick edges of darkness".
It is a place of frustration with
"useless people crying in corners, their
anguish lost in the din and press of
standing drinkers" (page 54).
the gas lamp's hissing assumes a sinister tone. Biswas's ambition is to
leave all this and his mother's house with its
"mud walls and low sooty thatch" (page 61)
"Hanuman House" the
"alien white fortress, bulky, impregnable
and blank

sinister" (page 73)

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from outside, is even more forbidding inside. Woodlice
"left wood looking so new where it was
rotten"

It was lower than the hall and completely

without light. The doorway gaped black;
soot stained the wall about it and the
ceiling just above, so that blackness seemed
to fill the kitchen like a solid substance" (page 78)
It is possible that such symbolism is unconscious, but its constant
recurrence throughout the book bears all the marks of a structural
design, and shows at least Naipaul's clear grasp and coherent realiza-
tion of the world he creates. In Hanuman House, even the furniture
suggests the type of world into which Biswas has been betrayed by his
own timidity and inexperience.
"Scattered about were a number of unrelated chairs,
stools and benches

choked the staircase landing . . . The vacated space, dark

and dusty, was crammed with all sorts of articles.
Mr. Biswas couldn't distinguish" (page 79).

Every little detail suggests decay, frustration, crampedness and stagna-

tion. Darkness is ever present in any reference to the Tulsi world.
There the people, like the furniture are "scattered about", "unrelated"
except in a fantastic pettiness and capacity for intrigue. It is "chocked"
and "crammed" with generations of Tulsis, all without any obvious
individuality. As in Miguel Street, people are only distinguished by
eccentricity. Sushila is the widow, Chinta the maker of dubious ice-
cream, Hari is constipated and religious, and Biswas is recognised as a
buffoon. Far from being King Lear, he is seen as The Pool! Against
all this he has to fight alone. His wife remains a Tulsi and deserts the
old ritualistic life only when Biswas gains his house. He fails to make
psychological contact with his children, and his attempts to recapture
his lost fatherhood are, like all his other attempts, pathetic.
But he is many things besides the Fool. At the moment of infinite
weakness he disclaims fatherhood of Anand
"God is your father"

he says. In a most subtle declaration of his own irresponsibility for

Anand's suffering in the world, he shifts the weight on the shoulders
of Destiny.

"I am just somebody. Nobody at all. I am just a man

you know". (Page 251).

He is ourselves, or at least a part of us - the Fool, irrelevant humanity

of death is man's elemental struggle for significance. Were Biswas less

weak as a man, his fate would cease to be deeply pathetic, and be a
true tragedy. Part of Naipaul's achievement lies in the fact that he
has presented a hero of such limited stature, and has yet been able to
preserve a sense of the man's inner dignity. He has been able to
elevate man's inherent littleness by dramatizing it.

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 Biswas's shop at The Chase is immediately identified as a Tulsi
world. It is

"a short narrow room with a rusty galvanized iron roof"

(127). "The walls were black and fluffy with soot,
as though a new species of spider had been bred there,
with the ability to spin webs as black and furry as
its legs" (128).

It is not long before this spidery out-post of Hanuman House is

invaded by the Tulsis with their empty ritual and petty intrigue. His
wife deserts hinv for Hanuman House, and he too is forced to return
for a companionship which ironically reminds him of his isolation. He
has no alternative either in a sense of personal worth, or in a sense of
new social values, to replace the Tulsi-world against which he rebels.
Although we can see the necessity for rebellion against such a reductive
world, we also recognise its uselessness in the absence of an alternative
way of life. Rejecting the Tulsis, Biswas is a man displaced in life,
possessing nothing.

"As soon as he stepped out of the yard he returned to

nonentity" (170).

He remembers a boy he once saw

"a boy leaning against an earth house that had no reason

for being there, under the falling sky, a boy who didn't
know where the road and that bus went" (171),

Again the picture of the boy suggests a littleness, an irrelevance

almost; and a perplexity at a life which, like the bus, is always rushing
away. Biswas's next place of abode is at Green Vale, in another Tulsi
house referred to as The "Barracks". Part of the Hanuman House is
called "the old-barracks" earlier in the book. "Green Vale" is iron-
ically named, because here nature itself mirrors the stagnation of
Biswas's whole life, and predicts the pain which he is soon to endure.

"Half the leaves were dead; the others at the top were a
dead green. It was as if all the trees had, at the same
moment been blighted in luxuriance, and death was
spreading at the same pace from all the roots

death was forever held in check and new leaves came,

sharp as daggers. ... ; they came into the world old,
without a shine, and only grew older before they too
died" (185).

It needs but little comment to draw the parallel between Biswas's life
and the scene just depicted. He too has "come into the world old" and
is "Mr. Biswas" since birth. His death has been mentioned in the very
first sentence of the book, and he is only growing older before he too
dies.

The images of darkness and stagnation and decay again appear

"The trees darkened the road, and their rotting leaves
choked the grass gutters. The trees surrounded the
barracks" (185).

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It is another Hanuman House eaten out within by woodlice, crumbling
but persistent, and again Biswas is powerless to rebel or escape. He
cannot "step out of the yard" lest he "return to nonentity", so he has
to withdraw into himself.

"The dead trees ringed the barracks, a well of flowless

black. He locked himself in his room" (213).

Biswas is confined and bound in, by this dead social order, but unable
to face himself. For him there can be no escape anywhere. The new
leaves, "sharp as daggers" suggest the anguish which he will experience
in this chapter - the claustrophobia, fear of people, darkness and
himself.

Wavering helplessly he surrenders to the darkness at one point.

"The dark cloud billowed in. How heavy, how dark.
He surrendered to the darkness" (240).
But Biswas is incapable of surrendering to anything and on the next
page

"Bravely, exposing himself to menace, he stripped to

bath at the water-barrel"

The anti-climax is fantastic, but not funny. It is too much like life.
Biswas is man, pathetic in his imagined fears, yet brave in his trembling
attempts to face them. Flashes of insight such as this raise the novel
far above satire by uncovering the incongruities and icy sense of fear
at the heart of life itself.

Again one can draw a parallel to King Lear. Lear in the storm
recognises just this, "the frail, the bare shivering human soul, stripped
to the last shred, the naked force of the human psyche for which
nothing has changed, because it was always frail and shivering and
reaching out to its nearest neighbour, as cold and lonely as Itself".
These words quoted* hopelessly out of their context in Doctor Zhivago,
yet serve to identify the timbre and distinctive quality of The House.
In a restrained voice which refuses to be maudlin, Naipaul probes at the
raw nerve of experience. The appropriate quotation in King Lear I
will state merely because it also illuminates the situation of Biswas
stripping, "bravely exposing himself" to an imagined menace. It is an
image central to the tone of The House as this quotation is to that
of King Lear. "Is man no more than this? consider him well . . . Thou
art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such, a poor,
bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you tendings! Come;
unbutton here (tearing off his clothes)". Perhaps here we remember
the close of the Prologue.

"How terrible it would have been. ..to have lived and died as
one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated".
Biswas and Anand are isolated in the storm, but even here the sympathy
between father and son can find no articulation. The "frail shivering
psyche" reaches out to its equally lonely neighbour, but can make no
contact. Biswas lies on the bed, uttering the formulae of a religion he
has rejected, "Rama, Rama, Sita, Rama". Even here the irony is

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ruthless and directed at Biswas, for the satirist must be scrupulously
fair although it pains. We remember Mr. Biswas the boy, who leaves
Pundit Jairam and Hindu ritual, ironically defecating on such a life.
At Hanuman House he gargles and spits on it, while he scoffs at Shama
having "her share of the established emotions". In the storm he
desperately clings to it. Even here the dead trees form a circular wall
of flawless black around the barracks of his personality and he cannot
escape.

In the storm, Anand also recognises his own situation and the fate
of weakness in the world of Nature. Black biting ants attack and kill
weaker winged ants. Life is governed by the law of the jungle. Later
in the Tulsi world, the mouldering order collapses and only the fittest
survive. The widows are therefore no match for Govind or W. C. Tuttle.
This return to the law of the jungle which follows the break-up of
established order, is brillan tly depicted in the Shorthills' episode. One
notes how the beautifully described scenery is steadily marred until
everything goes to waste and ruin. There is even a landslide, and the
brothers-in-law sell not only the trees, but the very earth. In the
midst of the general scramble there is the ridiculous picture of Biswas
sneaking off with a few fruits in his saddle bag which he sells in town.
The true complexity of the irony of the storm scene lies in our
knowledge that Biswas's fears are largely self- dramatizations, while
we also know that his success will be strictly limited. The Prologue
and other hints have fixed this in our minds. After the storm, Biswas
awakens from a sleep, numb, and sets out into the world

"to test it for its power to frighten" (274).

This is Naipaul at his wryest and best. The second half of the book
never achieves the sense of pained futility which we see in the first
part. We have an accumulation of horrors and then a slow inevitable
movement down-hill, until Biswas does gain his house and is saddled
with debt for the rest of his life. At the climax in the storm his house
is half -built; at Shorthills he does complete a house but it is remote
and uninhabitable. These advances parallel his material and psycho-
logical development. Hence it is no surprise that he feels frustrated
and duped even in ownership.
Death is for him a natural climax.

"Living had always been a preparation, a waiting. And

so the years had passed; and now there was nothing to
wait for" (528).

Biswas has no escape from society as has Anand through education, or

the narrator of Miguel Street, or of The Mystic Masseur or Naipaul
himself. It is a terrible comment either on West Indian society or on
Naipaul, that the alternatives which it offers him are escape or frustra-
tion. Naipaul is afraid of something vital but crude in Trinidad society,
as he shows in Miguel Street, or more openly in The Middle Passage.
Tttfs timidity in the presence of other people, shows itself, as I stated
above, in his avoidance of scenes demanding tenderness, or of the
depiction of a reciprocal emotional relationship. But he is also afraid

10

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of the Hindu family organization, and this quotation from The Middle
Passage may be compared with the description of Hanuman House
- "an enclosing self-sufficient world absorbed with its
quarrels and jealousies, as difficult for the outsider
to penetrate as for one of its members to escape. It
protected and imprisoned, a static world awaiting
decay".

This description of Hindu life in Trinidad exactly parallels all the

descriptions of Hanuman House, The Chase, The Barracks, Green Vale,
and finally the house in Port-of -Spain around which the Tulsis build
a wall. The whole story has shown the difficulty of escape and the
uselessness of rebellion.

But, comments on Naipaul's supposed quirks of character are only

marginal to the literary merit of A House for Mr. Biswas. A pessimist
can produce great art by dramatizing his depression and setting it at a
distance. The characteristic dry voice closes the story.

"Afterwards, the sisters returned to their respective

houses and Shama and the children went back in the
Prefect to the empty house" (531).

Biswas is private at last, the sisters depart to ritual and Tulsidom, and
Mr. Biswas' house is empty. For all his littleness he does make a
difference. By preserving his unattractive individuality he is defeated
but not disgraced in the struggle to be accommodated. He has also won
his family's loyalty. Life after all, it is suggested, is not entirely use-
less, although its ultimate reward may closely resemble failure and
frustration. The positive conclusion is in typical Naipaul fashion,
negatively suggested.

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