Embarrassing Origins: Colonial Mimeticism and the Metropolis in V.S. Naipaul's The Mimetic Men and Sam Selvon's Moses Ascending

Abstract

When Naipaul did write about the Caribbean, he chose the narrative authority of a Western form and his characters identified with Western ideals, rejecting their "embarrassing", "petty and ridiculous" West Indian backgrounds. Peggy Nightingale sympathises with Naipaul's depiction of "the failure of a shattered society to provide an individual with a coherent self-concept" (Nightingale, 105), and with his use of history, which "promise[s] a means to the discovery—or imposition—of order [and] imposes a pattern on events that are themselves unplanned, chaotic, unrelated in most people's minds" (Nightingale, 1034). However, Naipaul's attempts to impose literary order on his chaotic homeland, to "hallow [his] subject", have resulted in a collection of tragic heroes whose inability to comprehend their environment forces them into madness, death and exile.