Abstract
This chapter analyses various stylistic features which contribute to the discursive construction of the tragic in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas. While not arguing for the explicit placement of the novel within the genre of “tragedy” itself, this paper contends that a recurrent focus on physical suffering/illness and a teleological preoccupation with ruin and loss nonetheless speak to a sense of “ontological homelessness” that is a hallmark of the tragic (Steiner, New Literary Hist 35(1):2, 2004). Key to the analysis is a focus on psychological perspective—who observes the events that take place and the types of discourse that are used by that narrative voice (Fowler, Linguistic criticism. Oxford University Press, p. 134, 1996)—and on agency as mediated through transitivity. Analyses of transitivity, when coupled with those of psychological perspective, provide insight into ideological and conceptual positions towards narratological models of reality, highlighting the various constructions of the tragic in A House for Mr Biswas.
The analysis shows Biswas to often be powerless, frequently the subject of his family’s and society’s desires. Various techniques used by the narrative voice are suggested to be “distancing,” working to compound a sense of aloneness through representations of psychological perspective such as Free Indirect Thought. The teleological aspect of the novel also characterises the narrator as withdrawn from the narrative, both through discursive choices (referring to Biswas as “Mr” as a baby and a child) and through narrative ones (psychological perspective which evaluates Biswas’ life at a remove). On a larger, metadiscursive level, the chapter argues that the stylistic features inherent to the narrative’s representation of suffering and the narrator’s withdrawal are intimately linked to the novel’s interrogation of the colonial enterprise.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Steiner asserts that “tragedy” in particular is a difficult term to define and that this may have always been the case:
radical indeterminacies make arbitrary and sterile the innumerable formal definitions of “tragedy” offered since Aristotle. At best, each is only a more or less local classification, a more or less ad hoc ruling towards moral, aesthetic, or political ends. Polonius’ catalogue of tragical modes captures the fatuity of normative categorizations. There are those, Kafka perhaps, Beckett, who have been inclined to dispense with the term altogether. (p. 2)
- 3.
Simpson (1993) states that evaluation in discourse can be realised through the following modal categories: positive shading (where the narrator’s desires, duties, obligations and opinions of events are foregrounded), negative shading (where the narrative voice relies heavily on external signs in narration due to a lack of understanding; this form of evaluative shading is realised through the epistemic modal system) and neutral shading (wherein categorical assertions are prominent due to a lack of subjective commentary by the narrative voice) (pp. 126–127).
- 4.
The “hound” metaphor is particularly apt, reinforcing Nandan’s reading of the Tulsi/Biswas dynamic in terms of slavery, with the offending son-in-law being rounded up and brought back into the fold after his punishment.
- 5.
Silence is often a vehicle used to enforce powerlessness in Naipaul’s works (cf. Durgasingh 2013).
- 6.
I have synthesised Simpson’s elaboration of Direct Speech, Indirect Speech, Free Direct Speech, and Free Indirect Speech (1993, pp. 22–23) into these definitions.
- 7.
I have also written about this complex shifting of narrative in time in Miguel Street (Durgasingh 2012).
- 8.
We are told that his sixth finger was due to “malnutrition”—a condition that leads to “eczema and sores” as a child (p. 22).
- 9.
Skeete (2007) makes a similar argument about the literalising of metaphors which deal with the Caribbean propensity to see HIV and non-heteronormative sexualities as linked.
- 10.
The superstitious belief in an “unlucky sneeze” can be traced back to beliefs held in Northern India that it would be unlucky to sneeze at the beginning of a task or journey (Crooke & Chaube 2002, p. 161). Indeed, in one of the novel’s comic conceits, Raghu will not head out to work in the fields if Biswas sneezes within his earshot. The family’s conviction that Biswas’ sneeze causes ill-luck is seemingly confirmed when his father is injured after deciding to ignore the sound of Biswas’ sneeze when already past the gutter between the house’s yard and the road.
- 11.
Illness is not always the case—Bhandat beats Biswas severely over a misunderstanding, thus ending his tenure at the rumshop.
- 12.
It is hard not to read the novel’s preoccupation with stomach and bowel issues as a commentary on the decaying, fossilised rituals of Hinduism: Pundit Jairam must have bicarbonate of soda after part-taking of the food at pujas (p. 51); Biswas’ own chronic stomach troubles come as a result of punishment for not meeting Jairam’s ascetic values; and Hari is chronically constipated (p. 114). By its recurrent use of this motif, A House for Mr Biswas may be suggesting that the rituals of Hinduism in the Trinidadian, colonial state are stagnant and stultifying processes which impede the development of their practitioners.
- 13.
One anonymous reviewer has pointed out that this and other stylistic effects like it can be seen as metonymic ways in which the colonial condition is juxtaposed against the “monumental” scale of tragedy, thus highlighting the littleness (and associated comic stature) of Biswas/the colonial state.
- 14.
Rohlehr also explores an intertextual link between A House for Mr Biswas and Shakespeare’s King Lear, the focal point being a quote at the end of the novel’s prologue in which Biswas is glad that he does not have to suffer at the end of his life because he has his own home, not “to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated” (p. 14). This, Rohlehr asserts, is an overt reference to King Lear’s speech: “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 lendings! Come. Unbutton here. (Tearing off his clothes) (Shakespeare, 3.4. 102–109). This comparison adds yet another dimension to the layers of tragedy inherent to the novel, maintaining my position that its thematic concern with tragedy is more complex than can be accounted for by any single canonical genre.
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Durgasingh, R. (2024). “He Was Oppressed by a Sense of Loss”: Stylistic Constructions of the Tragic in A House for Mr Biswas. In: Durgasingh, R., Selvon-Ramkissoon, N. (eds) Caribbean Discourses. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45047-1_8
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