Autonomy and Autocracy in V. S.

Naipauls In a
Free State
The title of Naipauls In A Free State (1971)[1] is a fertile and suggestive one that has set many critical puzzles. Immediately, it
seems to refer to a state which is politically free, such as the independent, postcolonial nation-states from which the characters
in the stories come and in which the title novella is set: respectively, India and Trinidad, and a conglomerate of African nations.
This freedom, however, turns out to be largely theoretical and ironic since most of the countries featured in the book are
perceived, one or even two decades on from independence, as still being the playthings of colonial powers. More commonly, the
title has been taken to refer to freedom as a psychological state, a state of mind and being which causes anguish,
abandonment, and the loss of personal attachments.[2]Alternatively, it has been suggested that in his choice of title Naipaul is
drawing upon a scientific metaphornamely, the idea of the free-floating movement of subatomic particles around a nucleus [3]
and there is ground for this view in the books structure. In a Free State is an assemblage of unblended, discrete elementstwo
stories and a novella loosely joined by a prologue and an epiloguewhich seem not to be formed around any nucleus and
therefore fail to cohere as a single work. In the following pages I attempt a brief survey of these different dimensions of freedom
political, psychological, scientificbut my main concern is to investigate another aspect of freedom, one which has received
surprisingly little direct or detailed comment. This has to do with Naipauls fictional ontology, that is, the degree of autonomy of
his characters and the extent to which they create the illusion of a separate, independent reality. In my examination of the books
range of ontological modes and their positive and negative ramifications, I shall endeavor to show that In a Free State is a
contradictory work in which the relationship of the two stories (One Out of Many, Tell Me Who to Kill) to the title novella (In a
Free State) is perhaps less one of either orbiting satellites or careering particles but more a relationship that closely resembles
the situation of polar magnets: contrary gravitational pulls, like the opposing pressures that hold the keystone in position in an
arch, preserve the books precarious equilibrium.
Naipaul said in an interview during the year of the books publication that with each novel he was finding it harder and harder to
do the artificial side of making up big narratives and simply decided to let the book fall into its component parts. [4] Though the
individual sections of the book are each set in a 1960s postcolonial world and feature common themes of displacement and
transplantation to alien cultures, they alsoin their diverse speaking voices, geographical settings, and narrative techniques
have the randomness of component parts left to lie where they fall. The first story, One Out of Many, explores the traumatic
cultural adjustments forced upon a humble Indian servant, Santosh, when he is uprooted from the pavements of Bombay by his
diplomatic employer and taken off to a new life in Washington, D.C. The second, Tell Me Who to Kill, charts an unnamed West
Indians pursuit of his scapegrace brother Dayo to London, where he becomes a victim of racial violence, lapses into a world of
Hollywood cinematic fantasy, and appears to suffer a mental breakdown. The novella, In a Free State, describes the 400-mile
road journey of two British expatriates, Linda and Bobby, across a newly independent African country in the throes of a tribal civil
war, their growing alienation from both Africa and each other, and their powerlessness to withstand the senseless violence and
brutality raging around them. These three pieces are flanked by a Prologue and an Epilogue in which an almost identical motif
unfolds: a traveler (a narrator, then Naipaul himself) looks on in painful detachment while scapegoat figures (an old English
tramp, a group of Egyptian boys) are cruelly tormented by groups of tourists in neutral territory (a Greek passenger steamer, a
hotel resort).
In each of these compositions, questions of freedom and determinism, both political and psychological, are well to the fore. To
be a colonial, said Naipaul in an early interview, is to have every move monitored from the imperial metropolis: it is to know a
total kind of security. It is to have all decisions about major issues taken out of your hands, to feel that ones political status has
been settled so finally that there is very little one can do in the world.[5] To escape this facile determinism, the colonialor, in this
book, the newly ex-colonialpursues freedom through travel. In In a Free State, however, this pursuit of elsewhere, a quest for a
greater individuation and independence, leads only to alienation and dislocation, and the expatriate, in his reverse-crossing,
meets much the same fate in his attempt to satisfy the mysterious yearnings and cravings he brings with him to the ex-colony.
The result is that the plight of the uprooted former colonial becomes a metaphor for modern restlessness, and homelessness
and exile are perceived as a contemporary state of mind, afflicting all. To be in a free state is thus to be abroad and adrift in the
modern world. In Naipauls early writings, his characters are victimized by a succession of narrow environmental and historical
determinants which to withstand they need all of their immense vitality and resourcefulness: poverty and unemployment (Miguel
Street, 1959); cramped domesticity and debt (A House for Mr Biswas, 1961); borrowed political machinery and ideologies (The
Mimic Men, 1967); and, overshadowing all of these in each book, the oppressive Caribbean heritage of slavery and indentured
labor. In In a Free State, Naipaul frees his protagonists from these constraints and transplants them into a larger, more spacious
world: a repeated pattern in the book is the emergence from small, self-enclosed placescupboards, cabins, basements, cars,
compoundsinto a larger space. But this expansive movement is largely illusory, since the larger world in which the characters

are cast adrift is one that they are not equipped to understand. The subsequently empty freedom which moving in this world
brings them is therefore a condemned space, consigning people to loneliness, to confused identities, and to incomprehension of
the surroundings from which they are cut off. Because the protagonistsSantosh in the United States, Dayos brother in Britain,
Bobby in the unnamed African countryhave no idea of the state as a polity or organized society in their troubled sojourns, they
exist in a social vacuum, unmoored and anchorless. Freedom here is punitive, destructive, and nihilistic, and its casualties
retreat from it into the safety of their cabins, cupboards, and expatriate compounds.
Next, there is the notion of freedom as a scientific metaphor. The reference here is apparently to the random motion around the
atomic nucleus of electrons whose speed and position can be measured, but never at the same time, and which are said to be
in a free state since their movement is impossible to plot exactly. The accidental, unpredictable travel of particles is comparable
to that of the books characters. Santosh, Dayos brother, and the tramp in the Prologue seem to move without any clear
direction in a space without any gravitational pull or magnetism which would hold them together around a common center.
During the long car journey across Central Africa in the title novella, the ill-matched travelers Bobby and Lindahe a liberal and
homosexual, she a racist and nymphomaniacdo not relate to or attract each other in any way and seem to have the
unconnectedness of free-floating particles, as indeed do the tribes flung randomly together, without any basis for unity, in the
recently formed postcolonial free state through which they drive. And what is true of these relationships is, arguably, true of the
books individual sections. These are superficially linked by an abundance of arbitrary plot connections, parallel incidents, and
echoing motifs: the characters American involvements; the motif of the journey which removes people from their normal
surroundings; shifting alliances of the strong against the weak; the scapegoat-victim seeking refuge from freedom in a locked
space; personality breakdowns and outbursts of groundless anarchic violence. But none of these amounts to a single unifying
framework or principle of organization, and it is finally difficult to say exactly what kind of structure or unity, if any, they constitute,
or what kind of logic it is that carries the narrative from the hounding of the old tramp in the Prologue to the beating of the
Egyptian boys in the Epilogue. The narratives movement has a roaming, associative kind of logic that invites any number of
possibly spurious correspondences between its episodes and, like the erratic progress of the subatomic particles, is finally
unplottable.
Perhaps the most positive and least-discussed kind of freedom experienced by the books characters exists not in their relation
to other characters, to the world they find themselves in, or to the texts structural elements, but in their relation to the author;
that is, in Naipauls fictional ontology, to which I shall devote the remainder of this article. In a Free State is unique among
Naipauls fiction for the number of virtuoso performances which the author turns in. The principal characters, Santosh the Indian,
Dayo the West Indian, and Bobby the Englishman, are all completely different from each other and, of course, from the author
who created them. Each one of them speaks, thinks, and tells his story in his own peculiar style; they might be called inspired
feats of literary ventriloquism through which Naipaul turns himself each time into a different fictional character, to be at once all
and none of them.[6] These characters can be seen to be in a free fictional state to the extent that their differences in
temperament, education, and experience distance them from their author and his own distinctive speaking voice, quirks of
personality, and worldview. The autocratic third person authorial voice, deadpan aloof or bleakly dismissivewhich is a
privileged narrative presence in Naipauls early novels and stories and which resurfaces again in Guerillas (1975)is less
conspicuous in this work.
The characters of In a Free Stateall autonomous, free-standing presences who create the illusion of having seized control of
the narratives of their own livesare not identifiable in any way with Naipaul himself, who, in fact, does not appear in his own
person until the Epilogue. However, the author, inevitably perhaps, projects onto them his own restlessness and sense of
placelessness. Dayos story can be seen as a debased version of his own life: the studies in England to escape the cultural
deprivations of Caribbean life, the cinematic fantasies which are drawn from the authors own Trinidadian childhood. But there is
no transparent authorial explanation of the characters or direction of the narratives, both of which develop with minimal authorial
interference. What adds to the impression of authentic lifelikeness created by the narrators, in fact, is that all their opacities,
obscurities, and myopias are left in; although they express themselves, they refuse to tell us everything about themselves and
seem to lie beyond the reach of the authors omniscience. Thus, there remain opaque areas, aporias, unexplained mysteries,
notably in the story Tell Me Who to Kill. At the climax of this story, the narrative veers off into one of the narrators preoccupying
Hollywood fantasies, leaving a number of things unclear: whether he has committed murder or had a mental breakdown;
whether his attendant Frank is his jailer, psychiatric nurse, social worker, or friend; and whether the enemy to be killed is his
Caribbean family, the group of vandals who destroyed his London restaurant, his wastrel brother, or the whole white society into
which Dayo has married. The narrator is unable to explain any of these events, either to the reader or to himself, and Naipaul, in
his obscurantist respect for his characters freedom, has abrogated the right to speak for him.
Naipauls style is crucial in this autonomizing exercise. Peter Hughes has suggested that Santosh in One Out of Many is a not
wholly believable or, at best, a disingenuous character who is less simple than he makes himself out to be, since the elegance
and sophistication of his English are far beyond the capabilities of the narrative selfthe uneducated peasantwhom he

supposedly represents.[7] There are a number of possible inferences from this observation. One suggests that the author intends
Santosh to be seen as a duplicitous character; a second sees the portrait as artistically flawed because Naipaul takes
insufficient trouble to suppress or disguise his own speaking voice, carelessly intruding his own more rarefied perceptions about
freedom and identity into his uneducated domestics closing peroration; a third is that attention is being drawn, quite deliberately,
to the authorial presence, thus eroding the boundaries between fiction and journal, between narrative and personal history. None
of these, however, has much validity because the original observation on which they are premised partly misses the point.
Santoshs English, as in much postcolonial writing from superficially anglophone parts of the Commonwealth, functions merely
as a standard, conventional rhetorical device for presenting another language. We are to assume that Santosh is thinking and
narrating in Hindi, his native language, and to realize that, as Peggy Nightingale correctly observes, [8] the story mainly narrates
his thoughts. Here, as in early novels like A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul is adopting the familiar convention of using formal,
correct English to represent Hindi, in the same way as the Nigerian Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart (1958) uses English to
represent Igbo, namely, to imply that the characters are speaking a form of English deemed subcultural, such as patois, argot,
pidgin, or another creolized linguistic register, whenever they lapse into incorrect, ungrammatical English. Santosh, quite
credibly, is being simple and sophisticated in his own language. Naipaul is neither open to the charge of artistic failure in the
stories of In a Free State nor prone to postmodern self-reference and reflexivity.
What is a strength and a virtue at the level of characterization, however, proves to be of much more dubious value in the matter
of Naipauls use of history. What works well for people is less suited to countries and cataclysmic political events. While the
books characters cut themselves free from the authors personal history, its narratives similarly untether themselves from public
history, with the result that the narratives background incidents cannot be tied to any single historical point of reference or
located in any specific event. It has been noticed, for example, that the impossible southward journey traveled in the title
novella, In a Free State, takes the two British expatriates through at least four countries, from which are drawn the abundance of
African surnames and place names that fill the narrative.[9] Naipauls central African state is really an amalgam of Uganda, Zaire,
Rwanda, and Kenya, and actually exists nowhere except in his private fictional world as what could be called a conglomerate
patchwork Africa of the literary imagination. The novelists conflations issue in what Landeg White has called a free state
sufficiently located in recent history to seem real, and sufficiently generalised to seem representative. [10] The double seem here
is a crucial qualifier. In practice, Naipauls appropriation of recent African political history into an autonomous fictional realm
sacrifices the real to the representative (to use Whites terms), or, expressed in another way, it privileges figurative over literal
representation. His projection of his African state into a free state, in fact, liberates him from any obligation to observe historical
fidelity, or even to maintain plausibility, and the outcome is somewhat tendentious and misleading.
In his early career, Naipaul acquiredand seems to have cultivateda reputation for some rather sour, disdainful opinions of
Africa and Africans,[11] and they are present in abundance in the title novella of In a Free State. The only part of Africa depicted
here is a decayed, dilapidated settler colony in the eastern part of the continent in which the indigenous people inherit nothing on
the day of independence. The African, identified mainly by his smell in the narrative, is simply the man flushed out from the
bush, to whom, in the city, with independence, civilization appeared to have been granted complete (104). Naipauls abrupt
conferral of civilization takes no account of the fact that this unidentified African too, like the expatriates, is a displaced person,
uprooted from societies with their own intricate customs, beliefs, ancestral traditions, and language; and, unlike the other stories
in the book, there is no indigenous perspective to press the point.
All of this has received copious critical comment and need not detain us here. [12] What, disconcertingly, seems to have escaped
notice and is more germane to our discussion of Naipauls fictional ontology is the way in which this basically primitivist colonial
concept of the African continent is licensed and reinforced by Naipauls treatment of Africas recent political history. In this light,
the fictional manipulation of known facts seems to be deliberately obfuscatory and confusing. Basically, the title novella willfully
conflates two quite separate historical episodes: the tribal war in 1965 in postindependence Uganda, between the forces of
President Obote and King Freddie, and the Mau Mau insurrection with its oath-taking and blood-rituals in colonial Kenya during
the War of Independence against the British, which ended with national independence in 1963. [13] In Naipauls fictitious African
state, the Ugandan and Kenyan episodes are pressed into one and made to happen at the same time and in the same place.
The resulting impressions, presumably intended, are that Africans, immediately upon gaining self-government, naturally revert to
primitive tribalism, oath-taking, and blood-letting, and that they waste their independence, throw away opportunities for national
unity in the postcolonial phase, and go back to the bush. This implied argument, to which past events may have lent plausibility
in some African contexts, is disingenuous in the one at hand because it casually ignores the facts that in 1963 Kenya was not
yet in a postcolonial situation but was still a colony, engaged in a militant struggle for its independence, and that its own
postindependence future, partly as a result of this very struggle, was to take a completely different course from Ugandas. With a
cavalier disregard of historical process, the novelist unfairly extrapolates what might, conceivably, happen after independence in
one country from what went on during the independence struggle, under the extraordinary pressures of that conflict and in
wholly different circumstances, in another country. In the absence of any detailed investigation of local particulars, phenomena
as geographically distinct and dissimilar as internecine ethnic pogroms (Zanzibar in 1964), private political vendettas (Uganda in

1965), and morale-boosting, structured rituals serving nationalist military strategies (Kenya in 1963) are all carelessly jumbled
together under the vague rubric of tribal behavior without any qualifying differentiation.
As Robert Boyers has observed,[14] the presentation of political reality in Naipauls fiction is generally not very complex, but tends
to be sketchy and atmospheric, consisting of a few striking, powerful symbolic gestures and tableaux: for example, the
mysterious naked men running by the roadside, or the prisoners in the civil war, roped neck-to-neck and reduced to their
ancestral status as slaves, invite the facile inference that, in Africa, history repeats itself and nothing changes. The title novella
of In A Free State is essentially the work of an expatriate sensibility which, in spite of its profusion of political sound effects and
atmospheric effusions, contains no political analysis; such would entail details of the ideologies and strategies of the rival forces
and the relative merits of their policies. In this work, however, the habitual blurring of particulars combines with certain historical
sleights-of-hand and disingenuous shifts of locale to rig the case against postcolonial Africa, apparently to present it in the worst
possible light.
In a Free State is a work of unresolved tensions in which the two stories neither rotate around the nucleus of the title novella nor
career randomly in its vicinity; rather, they act like the opposite poles of a magnet. In both the stories and the novella, fictional
ontology expresses the state of the nation, and there is an implied matching of individuals and countries, but in ways that stress
differences more than the similarities. In both stories, the characters are set anarchically adrift from their author, discharged into
an unprotected independence that is largely unwanted and unwelcome and to which their countries of origin, by implication,
aspire with a corresponding lack of conviction or success. In the title narrative, on the other hand, the characters autonomy
appears to be compromised and curtailed by authorial predispositions, to the extent that the imperial sentiments and prejudices
expressed at different times by the expatriate charactersBobby, Linda, the Colonelreflect almost identical views stated baldly
by the autocratic third-person narrator in the opening paragraphs. While in the stories the viewpoints and psychologies of
character, indeterminate narrator, and implied author are often undefined and at odds, they are, pervasively, one and the same
in the novellas oppressively monolithic narrative vision; the characters merely turn up evidence to support the narrators
generalizations and to rig the facts in advance for the encroaching author to discover exactly what he set out to find. This
peremptory eclipsing of the characters freedom is then matched, at the national level, by a similarly preemptive treatment of
their postcolonial country of residence and its history. Wisdoms drawn from postindependence Africa are mischievously
retroacted into pre-independence situations, thereby confusing tribal civil wars with nationalist independence struggles,
neocolonial dependency with colonial subordination. The starting assumptions in this endeavor are at times perilously and
transparently close to those of the veteran expatriates and old colonials featured in the narrative. Indeed, the authors personal
colonization in the novella of characters who are given their manumission in the stories can be seen as the narratological
equivalent of the excolonial powers continuing neocolonial interference in the affairs of their former territories.
Thus, in the fragments that constitute In a Free State, Naipaul plays the roles of both the imperialized and the imperialist. In the
stories and the novella, freedom is the characters and the authors, respectivelyby turns a burdensome affliction and an
authorial privilegeand confusion is both an involuntary psychological state endured by the characters and a deliberate
narrative ploy practiced upon the reader. In this book Naipaul grants autonomy with one hand and snatches it autocratically
away with the other.