Displaced In This World

?Modern Fiction explores issues primarily concerned with identity and home. V.S. Naipaul examines the Trinidadian Indian Hindu community, traditions, remnants of the Indian caste system all amid which he grew, and explores themes of identity and place through the life of Mohun Biswas in his European realist novel A House For Mr. Biswas. W.G. Sebald similarly examines personhood and place in Austerlitz by taking the reader through a novelistic memoir, and he explores the experience of an orphan’s rootlessness and lost past, setting the holocaust as a looming backdrop for the young Jaques Austerlitz. There is moral and political potential gained by literature, and the modern novel is a repository of social conscience.? In a world keen on person and place, Naipaul and Sebald’s distinctive voices belong to the age of modern man. A House For Mr. Biswas is a humanistic plot: a man who vows to overcome a crippled identity and make a place in society through the achievement of owning his own house. Austerlitz is an austere, poignant story about familial roots and identity where Jaques Austerlitz recounts his past to an unnamed narrator: how he arrived in Britain in 1939 as a refugee at age four from German occupied Czechoslovakia, how he found safety and love in an adopted Welsh home, how he traced the fate of his parents--who suffered brutality and perished under the Nazi regime--, and how he rediscovered and rescued his heritage, and himself, from oblivion. The reader faces two complications. Mister Biswas is without a home. Jacques Austerlitz is without a past. Naipaul and Sebald's thematic novels rest on the universal human search for identity, the struggle to own one’s own life, and the heroic effort to make a life of value. Without surprise, A House For Mr. Biswas and Austerlitz pull readers into a conscientious conversation surrounding identity, home, and human value.?

Mr. Biswas is without a home. From A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul aims to describe the life of a man who’s been metaphorically shipwrecked even before having a ship of his own. The story captures in a poignant way the almost near heroic effort of Mr. Biswas, who tries to have a life of his own, especially one with dignity.? As the midwife speaks doom instead of blessing over Mr. Biswas’ life, the author sets him on a pitiful journey to overcome alienation, cultural disregard of personhood, and the failure of an unsecured living wage and displacement from home. Naipaul diagnoses Mr. Biwas with the misfortune of ‘having been born in the wrong way’ and discerns the root of his sorrow came from the day of his birth (Naipaul, A house for Mr. Biswas, pp. 5). For 46 years, Mr. Biswas has sought a place he can call his own, searching for independence after a series of misfortunate events. He is a cursed six fingered man. He has eczema and boils on his skin. His father drowns. He marries into a Tulsi family. He is a slave to manipulation and familial hold. The International Journal of English and Education calls A House for Mr. Biswas:

a work of art that deals with the problems of isolation, frustration, anguish, negation of an individual as well as the exploration for identity. A House for Mr. Biswas is Naipaul’s unforgettable third novel, often regarded as his masterpiece, which tells the tragic comic story of the search for independence and identity of a Brahmin Indian living in Trinidad. The protagonist Mohun Biswas has been unlucky from his birth but all he wants of his own- it is the solid basis of his existence. Each section deals with different phases of Mr. Biswas’s life, follows his struggle in variety of Jobs, from sign painter to journalist. The story which fuses social comedy and pathos evokes a man’s quest for autonomy “against the backdrop of postcolonial Trinidad” (Gourevitch 1994:27).?

With the backdrop of postcolonial Trinidad, a place called ‘land of the hummingbird’ by the Discoverer Christopher Columbus, paints a narrative of life, energy, brilliance, and joy which contrasts the many sorrow that make up the life of Mr. Biwas. From his first steps to his first day in the classroom as a young scholar, he is made to write an objectively degrading trope for displeasing his teacher. ‘I am an ass’ he writes on the chalkboard under the scrutiny of teachers and peers (Naipaul, pp. 108). Mr. Biswas does not experience the wonder, joy and freedom of an education that transcends all aspects of the human soul and culture. Relief and promise should have followed him from the public education system, but instead poverty and poor luck trails behind. He moves from occupation to occupation almost as many times as he does from residence to residence. In the cracks of his sorrow, Mr. Biswas read.

He read political books. They gave him phrases which he could only speak to himself and use on Shama [his wife]. They also revealed one region after another of misery and injustice and left him feeling more helpless and more isolated than ever. Then it was that he discovered the solace of Dickens. Without difficulty he transferred characters and settings to people and places he knew. In the grotesques of Dickens everything he feared and suffered from was ridiculed and diminished, so that his own anger, his own contempt became unnecessary, and he was given strength to bear the most difficult part of his day: dressing in the morning, that daily affirmation of faith in oneself, which at times for him was almost like an act of sacrifice (Naupail, pp 198).

He clashed with the culture, nourished his soul with Charles Dickens, made acts of faith and sacrifice, and dreamt. Literary scholar A. Prasad observes of the text, “it is the clash of culture between the old and the new in a multi racial society; a quest for identity in a conservative framework” (Prasad, 2003). The main preoccupation of Mr. Biswas is a house, and every house is described with great detail. It is not a structure of four walls, it is a source of identity. Mr Biswas’s journey from Hanuman House to The Chase, from The Chase to Green Vale, from Green Vale to Hanuman House and finally to Port of Spain, with a brief span at Shorthills anticipates not only a broken man’s search for a place in this world, but also the search for an independent identity out of the Tulsi clan. For Mr. Biswas, he thought:

How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it [the house]; to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalour of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; or worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.

He constantly attempted to build a separate house, but “the world contemptuously and consistently denied all of Mr. Biswas’s attempts to find a home for himself and his family” (Udofia, pp. 58). Mr Biswas’ biggest desire in life is to prove himself worthy of respect and commendation of the Tulsis, which having a house of his own becomes a prerequisite. This desire, however, soon becomes a necessary good for Mr Biswas when his growing children start feeling belittled living in their maternal grandmother’s house at the cost of their self respect (Prasad, 2003). Mr. Biwas’ son, Anand, shows restlessness and his ideological differences with his uncle Owad, making the demand for a separate house more necessary (Naipaul pp. 583).? A glimpse of home comes from his honest employment from the Trinidad Sentinel. His four children are the gift of his life, and his homelessness strengthens his resolve to provide. Then, the house on Sikka street drew Mr. Biswas in. It was imperfect. It was uncomfortable in some places. It was unconventional. It was his. Though it is a symbolic text about a simple man’s wish to make a home for himself in a homeless world, it is the persistence of Mr. Biswas which serves as inspiration and self realization in readers. He assumes dignity out of all proportion to his achievement.? In A House For Mr. Biswas, Naipaul awakens the moral conscience of the reader, begs the question ‘where do I belong?’ and deals with the search for identity amidst personal failure while reaffirms the dignity of personhood. Mr. Biswas’ life was worth living, and no place or person could devalue his life. Finally, Mr. Biswas had a home.

Jacques Austerlitz is without a past. Sebald’s protagonist recounts what he knows of his past to an unnamed narrator: how he arrived in Britain from German occupied Czechoslovakia as a refugee at age four, how he was welcomed into a home away from home, how he searched for the fate of his parents-- in an effort to rescue his heritage and himself from oblivion. For Sebald, the story’s focus is about Jacques’ laborious search for information. Pictures, recollections, propaganda, and censuses pass through his hands as he looks for the truth. It starts with his new name: Dayffyd Elias. It ends with never knowing his father’s identity. This new-old alias sends Jaques away from the comfort his foster parents had intended; away from the studies of architecture at Oriel College, which is part of the University of Oxford; away from the woman whom he falls in love with. It is the harrowing search that he endures for a fragment of knowledge that would tell him who he is. The question of origin, the ‘who am I?’ forges the path to the past so he can know his future. Of this past, The Guardian opinions:

The hero of the book, or more properly the anti-hero since he essentially does nothing especially useful with his life...By way of long, gloomy, maundering accounts of his life which sometimes have the character of shaggy dog stories, the narrator builds up a sense of his persona which is essentially a deeply melancholy one, bereft of any friendships, save for that of a girl in the library who takes pity on him and goes on holiday with him to Marienbad, and later a librarian in the Bibliothèque Nationale who goes to visit him when he is confined to hospital with a nervous disorder induced by the discovery of the circumstances of his youth. What are we to make of this? In some ways, the account is emblematic of many ostensibly ineffectual lives, of an academic intelligence wasted in a grandiose intellectual project that requires years of taking notes but never leads to the grand book that should have resulted from it, until the narrator decides to burn all the accumulation of material in a small bonfire in the garden of his terrace house. But, at the same time and in a way that is highly distinctive, the book provides a strangely transcendent and hypnotic sense of the power of history and of the relationship between an individual and the accidents of their life.

The trauma of an unknown past leads to a breakdown was born in Prague, the son of a moderately successful opera singer and the manager of a small slipper-making factory who was also active in left-wing politics. The rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the subsequent German invasion of Czechoslovakia meant that his father had to flee to Paris, never to be seen or heard from again, his letters to his family confiscated by the German authorities. His mother managed to arrange for her son to be sent on a Kindertransport to London. He was adopted by a Nonconformist preacher and his wife, near Bala in North Wales. From the recounting of Austerlitz’s past, the narrator observes, “No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open” (Sebald, 2013. pp. 98).?

Both men were displaced. One searched for a home, and with it his dignity; the other searched for a family, and with it his roots.?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Naipaul, V.S. & Cole, T., 2016. A house for Mr. Biswas, London: Picador.?

Sebald, W.G., 2013. Austerlitz, Milano: Adelphi.?

Prasad, A N. “Identity Crisis in V S Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas.” Critical Response to Mulk Raj Anand and V S Naipaul. Ed. A N Prasad. New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2003.?

Grover, S. & Prasad, V. 2019, “Displacement and Rootlessness in A House For Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul”, Language in India, vol. 19, pp. 340.

Hentea, M. 2010, “A Pastoral for Mr. Biswas”, Journal of Commonwealth literature, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 97-114.

Tewarie, B. 2002, "A House for Mr.... Biswas Revisited: Ethnicity, Culture, Geography and Beyond", Caribbean quarterly, vol. 48, no. 2-3, pp. Vii-xxix.

Anon, 2001. Observer review: Austerlitz by WG Sebald. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/30/travel.highereducation [Accessed May 6, 2021].?