“忽悠”的后殖民境界：冷漠之一种

The New York Review of Books

Volume 48, Number 17 · November 1, 2001

The Razor's Edge

By J.M. Coetzee

Half a Life
by V.S. Naipaul
Knopf, 211 pp., $24.00. To be released in early 2002.

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Chandran the charlatan sadhu and his son the inept lover: they might seem the stuff of comedy, but not in Naipaul's hands. Naipaul is a master of English prose, and the prose of Half a Life is as clean and cold as a knife. The male Chandrans are defective human beings who leave the reader chilled rather than amused; the "backward" wife and Willie's sister, who grows into a smug left-wing fellow traveler, are little better.

Both father and son believe they see through other people. But they detect lies and self-deception all around them only because they are incapable of imagining anyone unlike themselves. Their shrewdness of insight is grounded in nothing but a self-protective reflex of suspicion. Their rule of thumb is always to give the least charitable interpretation. Self-absorption, minginess of spirit, rather than inexperience, are at the root of Willie's failures in love.

As for his father, a measure of his constitutional meanness is his response to books. As a student, he does not "understand" the courses he is taking, and in particular does not "understand" literature. The education he is subjected to, principally English literature taught by rote, is certainly irrelevant to his life. Nevertheless, there is in him a deep impulse not to understand, not to know. He is, strictly speaking, ineducable. His bonfire of the classics is not a healthily critical response to a deadening colonial education. It does not free him for another, better kind of education, for he has no idea of what a good education might be. In fact, he has no ideas at all.

Willie is similarly blank-minded. Arriving in Britain, he is soon made aware of how ignorant he is. But in a typical reflex action he finds someone else to blame, in this case his mother: he is incurious about the world because he is the child of a "backward." Inheritance is character is fate.

College life shows him that Indian etiquette is as irrational and quaint as British etiquette. But this insight does not spell the beginning of self-knowledge. I know about both India and England, he reasons, whereas the English know only about England, therefore I am free to say what I like about my country. He invents a new and less shameful past for himself, turning his mother into a member of an ancient Christian community and his father into the son of a courtier. "He began to re-make himself. It excited him, and began to give him a feeling of power."

Why are this unappealing pair the way they are? What do they reveal about the society that produced them? Here the key word is sacrifice. Willie has been quick to identify the joylessness at the heart of his father's brand of Gandhianism because he knows at first hand what it is like to be given up. One of Willie's schoolboy stories is about a Brahmin who ritually sacrifices "backward" children for the sake of riches, and ends up sacrificing his own two children. It is this story, titled "A Life of Sacrifice," with its not so covert accusation against him, that determines Chandran—a man who makes a living out of what he calls self-sacrifice—to send his son to England: "The boy will poison what remains of my life. I must get him far away from here."

What Willie has detected is that sacrificing your desires means, in practice, not loving the people you ought to love. Chandran reacts to detection by pushing the sacrifice of his son one step further. Behind Chandran's fiction that he has sacrificed a career for the sake of a life of self-mortification lies a Hindu tradition embodied, if not in Gandhi (whom Willie and his mother despise), then in what Indians like Chandran have made of Gandhi in turning him into the holy man of the nation; embodied more generally in a fatalistic philosophy that teaches that best is least, that striving toward self-improvement is ultimately pointless.

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