THE SECULAR ETHIC AND THE PITFALLS OF V. S. NAIPUAL’S NON-FICTION

Abstract

So what then are the inter-relations between literature, ethics and the secular in contemporary cultural practice? And how does V. S. Naipaul’s non-fiction fail in terms of the secular-ethic, proposed by the interrelations between the literary, the secular and the ethical? Any response to the above questions will depend on a) the way one conceptualizes the literary, the ethical and the secular and b) reading Naipaul in and through the matrix of the secular-ethic as cultural practice. Hence what I propose to do in this article is to divide the debates into three parts: the first will discuss the varied conceptions of the literary and its tensions with the secular and the ethical; the second will demonstrate by exposition as evidence – not by argument but by narrative – the pitfalls of Naipaul’s writing with regard to the secular-ethic; and the third will argue by way of conclusion that Naipaul’s writing is ideologically islamophobic bearing distortions of history, based on an overwhelming anti-Islamic discourse, which then makes his writing unjust and anti-secular. My argument rests in the first and third parts, while the second will bear the evidence of the same. My method here combines Michel Foucault’s exposition of discursive power and Antonio Gramsci’s explanation of hegemonic violence. My reading of Naipaul as a result will be “contrapuntal”1 in nature, and will expose Naipaul’s ideological pitfalls and biases as an explanation of his Islamophobia.