I just took the ‘Naipaul test’ in The Guardian and scored a pathetic four out of 10. Darn it! Turns out Mr Naipaul does have a gift! The Nobel laureate (for literature) recently claimed in an interview that, “I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.”
“I think (it is) unequal to me,” he modestly adds and, knowing Mr Naipaul, he just could not have stopped there. “Inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.” He just goes on and on and on to the extent of even disparaging Jane Austen who was, in all precision, simply the best.
One would have wondered this pitiful oversimplification that ‘men are macho’ and ‘women are…well…hormonal’ to be a thing of the past. But, then again, so is Mr Naipaul himself. The writer is 79 years old! In fact, to cut him some slack, one could say he may have been consumed by some degenerative senile relapse that led him into such unmindfully egotistic and chauvinistic babble.
Austen, in all likelihood, would have understood where Mr Naipaul is coming from with all this since this was her literary panache — dealing with the ‘little’ things in life. Mr Naipaul’s statement being littler than little, of course!
One wonders still if Mr Naipaul has ever even read Austen or any other female writer for that matter since he never really goes beyond a paragraph or two. The slightest sense of “feminine tosh”, as he pejoratively calls it, and who knows he might even toss it aside for the lowly womenfolk to dwell on.
In which case, would it not be so much more convenient to just read the author’s name on the cover? Maybe this was too much ‘common’ sense for the literary Adonis to even consider for his high intellect palate. Besides the remark that since a woman is not a ‘master’ of the house that insecurity somehow shows in her writing, is so absurdly archaic that one cannot help but feel sorry for the maestro for being so domestically outdated.
I cannot really remark on how things are in Mr Naipaul’s nest — maybe he sits on a throne and orders his morning cuppa coffee, hence the master(hood) but people are too busy to fester on who wears the pants in a family in this ‘dog eat dog’ world. This whole concept of a subdued woman serving the whims of a controlling alpha male is getting as old as Mr Naipaul.
It is a medieval sensibility stuck in the heads of those thick headed men who cannot overcome the idea of an emancipated and liberated world of equals.
Modern men and women would rather share a family than adopt the traditional concept of leading or running it. This struggle is still on in more viciously patriarchal set-ups such as the one that Mr Naipaul also takes his roots from. The perception may therefore be a reminiscent genetic itch that just could not hold itself back anymore. Besides, literature and the people who have anything to do with it should be a liberating force from such atavistic dogmas and not be pressing on them for the sake of silly biases.
So what if female writers have a tendency to be more ‘sentimental’ (which, by the way, is an over-assumption) let us be reminded that no piece of literature has become a bestseller just by saying, “Me want food! Me want sex! Me go to sleep! Bang! Bang! Go to hell! The end!”
Not even the macho-est of men would want to read such unsentimental a piece. Even Mr Naipaul’s own works are no less devoid of such shameful emotions, which he attributes to the woman’s ‘narrow’ view of the world.
Of course, for women, the world is all about their children, their families, their husbands, their husband’s families, careers, groceries, gardening, work to home, home to work — that is the sum total of a woman’s life, and what a narrow total it is!
If she chooses to write about these trivialities instead of making a comment on Chernobyl or Iraq, her writing would still be so much more practical. She would be touching on more tangible topics rather than some hypothetical or imagined pursuits.
This does not completely rule out women’s grip on more global and universal matters though. Karen Armstrong is a case in point. It may take Mr Naipaul just a paragraph or two to decipher the gender of the writer yet it only took him one line to lose the countless fans that he has made over the years with such an out of proportion and insolent generalisation.
Naipaul’s comments may not so much as even twitch Austen’s popularity as an all time great who — guess what — was not even a Nobel laureate but, then again, if only a Nobel Prize could bring home some ‘sense and sensibility’ to those with ‘pride and prejudice.’
The writer is a Fulbright scholar and a freelance columnist. She can be reached at [email protected]