Comparative_Analysis_of_V.S.Naipaul's_'Miguel_Street'_and_Curdella's_Forbes_Songs_of_Silence

THE UNIVERSITY OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO SCHOOL FOR STUDIES IN LEARNING COGNITION AND EDUCATION IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR: COURSE : TEACHING THE SHORT STORY -- WRITING THE SHORT STORY CODE: EDLL405B. SUSAN CHARLES. ASSIGNMENT:ESSAY 8TH, NOVEMBER 2010. “The human condition: lost in thought.” (Tolle 13). The relevance of this statement can be found in the achievements of Naipaul and Forbes in their collection of short stories; Miguel Street and Songs of Silence. As manifestations of their thoughts, these stories reflect the craft of thinkers of a West Indian literary sensibility: ‘A common history of colonization, displacement, slavery, indenture, emancipation and nationalism has shaped most West Indian environments, creating a unity of experience that can be identified as particularly West Indian.’ Hence the literature of this region is a product of this experience as an innate expression not only of the intellect, but of the passions of the heart. The texts of these authors aforementioned reflect the progress of an engagement with history, with political and social adjustments and therefore with the problems of definition, identity and aesthetics. The short fiction art form is generally characterized by cohesiveness and timelessness with comments that can stand on their own. Meaning can be derived at various levels. The writer does not incorporate the density of the novel, but rather employs brevity as there isn’t any space for leisurely analysis. Central incidents often carry the development of the plot with a spare narrative that gives artistry high visibility due to a tight structure. Notably, there is diversity in prose fiction. An example can be seen in Naipaul’s ‘The Night Watchman’s Occurrence Book,’ page 208 of The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories. The narrative is revealed through a series of dated log entries that portray the mind and growing frustration of the watchman in response to recorded instructions that border on nonsensical. The structure clearly differs from the general short story form, but the work of art is deliberately crafted to highlight the increasing length of entries. The language lacks beautiful imagery and it is this absence that promotes the stark nature of observations, and the foolish nature of the demands made upon the watchman. As a result he tells the tale of detail as required, which unfolds the whereabouts of non-speaking characters. In essence he does “so much writing I dont have time to do anything else,” (213) not even the job of a watchman, which is ‘to watch’. Edgar Allen Poe wrote in his ‘Philosophy of Comparison’ that “unity of effect” and a logical method are important considerations for good writing. Within the mind of the author/creator must therefore be a literature crafted to portray technical elements that are connected to meaning. It is this organic unity that we the readers must locate in the stories that reveal the ‘sense’ of the individual writer. Thus, organic unity is structural – as all parts are necessary to complete the whole and to bring the work to life. This unity is also personal to the writer and reader as ‘co-writer.’ It is also didactic, symbolic and flexible. Consequently both Naipaul and Forbes represent some similar and differing stylistic and message modes, but they both expand and contract in knowledge and language through the voice of the child narrator. Miguel Street as a semi-autobiographical novel is not just a collection of comic sketches interlinked by a common narrator. Like Songs of Silence, there are character sketches within a setting that gives unity and complexity to community life. Naipaul’s and Forbes’ characters are seen through a memoir with the work of the former being recalled in exile, with the accompanying nostalgia and feeling of alienation this will arouse. The narrative structure of Naipaul’s text is revealed through a male child narrator whose waking consciousness reconstructs his past. The street is seen as another world distinct from the author’s own world of exile. The character’s are typically West Indian and reflect the universal experience of alienation. They reinforce each other, by their link to inevitable disillusionment. The text contains a number of idiosyncratic characters, including Mr. Popo, the carpenter who never finishes making anything and is always working on the thing without a name; the poet B. Wordsworth (taking his last name from English Romantic poet William Wordsworth) who is working on the greatest poem ever written but has never written past the first line; and Man-Man, the mad man who becomes a prophet and Bogart whose identity shadowed by Americanism, fails “to be a man among we men.” The book is the story of great ambitions that never went anywhere and are only left for the narrator to remember and record. The story is written primarily in the first person, with each character getting his or her own chapter; the narrator's experiences are woven in-between, except for the last two or three chapters, which are primarily about the narrator himself. Naipaul’s characters form two groups: the ‘insiders;’ the narrator, Hat, Boyee and Errol who are ever present and the ‘outsiders;’ the street residents who come and go as the story develops. Hence organic unity is structural and symbolic. The character George is revealed as a bully whose failure to manage his family leas to a future of demise. Like all the other characters, his description is from a sense perspective, “short and fat….big belly….like the donkey he tied in the front of his yard.” George and his son Elias represent frustration and failure. Naipaul’s characters present the variety common in all human existence. B. Wordsworth is crafted as a Romantic who is close to nature and it is through this relationship that the narrator experiences the grief of a poet. The poet’s house is torn down, “It was just as though B. Wordsworth had never existed.” The element of escapism is expressed in man’s vulnerability and the change seen in nature. In comparison, the characters in Songs of Silence, are also being revealed through the perspectives of a child narrator, who however is female. Largely, they are crafted through interior monologue, for the child has many songs of silence. She learns to speak in her head; a conversation within. Hence she bears a strong understanding and perception to the point of spiritual sight. Like Naipaul’s work, events and circumstances do portray culture, but the imagery is more sensuous in Forbes’ text. In both texts, the communal memory tells the story. By its very construction, the stories and its voice prepares us for the total meaning of the text. These writers are self conscious .creators of art. The West Indian sensibility develops characters in stories that explain reality. A sequence of imagery laden and sensuously crafted tales, Songs of Silence is a colorful mix of observations of life in rural Jamaica, as seen through the eyes of a young girl. Held together by simple voice of a child, this collection is organically connected to folk and the popular culture of the day. “The inner space or awareness in which the words on this page are being perceived and become thoughts,” (Tolle 3) can speak to Forbes’ text. Between what is said and what is felt, what is conveyed and what is perceived, silence becomes a metaphor of rage and fear, of loneliness and contentment, confusion and clarification in these songs that explore social change and individual growth. This text carries stories in a spiritual world and reveals characters on the verge of transition, change and ‘silence,’ are given instead as the motif in the text. “My brother was a man of dark blue silences,..I knew silence as a different thing, a Joseph’s coat of many colours. Mine was a silence of moons…my teenage years when I knew the red heart of silence…” (28). This text is therefore characterized powerfully by the first person narrator. Brother and sister are: “welded together by our common need of silence. Silence was a snail’s house on my back that I crawled in to escape the stare and ceremony of eyes.” (29). Reminiscent of B. Wordsworth, yet without the intensity, nature was a profound connector of these songs of silence. “There I lived among the roots of thing, holding conversations with ants….. My brother’s need for silence was his need for an economy of existence…” In the story titled ‘Nathan’ the sentence “I knew ants like silence, intimately,” is repeated at the beginning of two consecutive paragraphs and serve as a dramatic device that emphasizes the deep acquaintance with silence. Oscillating between Jamaican Creole and Standard English, Songs of Silence is an accomplished piece of writing distinguished by an extraordinary imagistic use of language and style. Told with intimacy and detail, recollections are translated into a series of tales in which the narrator becomes a mouthpiece for a multiplicity of voices, each with their own story to tell. This novel comprises a series of episodes, all of which focus on different members of a rural community in Jamaica, seen through the eyes of a young girl growing up and remembered by the adult she became. Both authors successfully demonstrate the short fiction art form through the unfolding of both Trinidad and Jamaican sub-culture. Infused with the speaking and narrating techniques, the melding of Dialect and Standard English, pulls wisdom, poses questions, extends suspense in stories and bring out the persona of the speaker. The use of dialogue is tactfully incorporated, reveal power relations between street characters and those of Jamaican rural life. Naipaul’s use of episodic plot structure also enhances his narrative texture. His plots follow the classic short story features and are pervaded by many transition words. Hence his writing is easy to follow and to maintain interest due to the comic relief and humorous situations found in his writing style. In ‘George and the Pink House,’ there is ample use of classic story words or phrases, such as; “one day, and so, and while, one evening” to relate events seen through the eyes of the child narrator who must discover his world in retrospect. Both Forbes and Naipaul incorporates the childlike expressions about sexuality with the characters of the no name lady who it was rumored to have a baby that could belong to the narrators father, or Laura who was the first to give the narrator a biology lesson due to her consistent state of pregnancy. Taboo subjects are indeed food for the short story as seen in ‘Rosena on the mountain’ in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, which dealt with the Catholic Church’s confrontation with the passions, temptations and sexuality of those desiring a priestly vocation. Like the aforementioned authors, this story is also narrated in the first person narrator, but in Standard English. The use of profanity breaks the barriers of sensibility, together with ample descriptions of sensuality. Dialogue is used to unveil sexual tension and philosophical discussions about chastity. The story is divided and partitioned for change of mood, tone, setting and events. Castration, nakedness, arousal, sexual violence and love or lusts are all brought to climax. The child narrator technique stands out prominently with West Indian writers. In the story ‘Do angels wear brassieres'’ the nature of a questioning and inquisitive child is revealed. Her frankness embarrasses family. The author often suspends punctuation to show the fluid and dynamic nature of a child’s mind. Interestingly enough, it is the relations with an adult mentor that resolves the conflict within the child’s mind. Naipaul has his child narrator (even in relation to the adults ) leave as a mark that is permanent in order to escape the disillusionment. This seems reminiscent of James Joyce’s character Stephen, in The Portrait of An Artist As a Young Man, who also transits childhood and leaves his kinsmen. “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” (Joyce 273). The narrator of Forbes text leaves on a more positive and exhilarating mood for the people were all she had been. Naipaul’s stories are told from a point in the future after this departure, and thus they are filled with nostalgia for something that was lost. But this is a kind of nostalgia that does not romanticize things. He sees the flaws in the people who surround him, in his city, in his home country. The stories depict both poverty and a great sense of community. It is clear then that the creative minds of these authors craft stories that show how our society, history and culture, speak to us. They reveal what is reality in terms of the individual voice and the collective voice of ancestral memory. Forbes’ narrator says, “Memory which lies and weaves new truths with words, tells me we spoke without words.” (33). Much truth is hidden in the unspoken which was also deliberately used by Naipaul as part of the organic sense of structure. Mood shift is important to overall attitudes which Naipaul expresses. The lightness of the mood seems to manifest with an underlying sense of the boundaries and anxieties that the characters are in. He does not imply a love or affection for the place, as is commonly associated with remembrances of childhood. The mood shifts are indicative of a sense of disillusionment in the author over the environment that he lived in as a child. Forbes however writes with a labor of love and the live giving power of the river and the sea. The short story art form clearly demonstrates a continuum of variety of structure, content and style. The story by Jamaica Kincaid, ‘Blackness,’ reveals a journey that expresses the mystical, philosophical and imaginative. Hence it lacks a classic plot that is unfolding to the reader. A discovery that expresses duality; it takes the reader into the world of the ‘mystery of being.’ “In the blackness, then, I have been erased. I can no longer say my own name.” “My form has become formless” (362). The story presents elevated sight of looking down from above. This technique is used to present a sense of detachment to the reader. “How frightened I became once on looking down to see an oddly shaped, ash colored object that I did not recognize at once to be a small part of my own foot.” The story is also written in Standard English and reveals a didactic and philosophical tone. One can note however that Naipaul and Forbes have used different language registers to structure their fictional world. To unify these authors’ positions is to accept that both of them have achieved the purpose for which the stories were written. Yet there are opposing forms and styles which add to the tension. Hayden White says that history becomes “a story of a particular kind” (60). The past is an empty space that is written upon ultimately by language. Race, ethnicity, economics and class provide fertile interpretative grounds for the short fiction art form. Since we are all products of our culture, our language, our myths and our history it is acceptable to identify negative, positive or even stereotypical images in our literary work. Hence it is suitable to identify domestic violence in one work, sexual culture issues or religion and spirituality in another. It is the achievement of these authors to tell of our lives, and to construct stories that are timeless in their portrayal. These stories tell of the authors’ view of life in an emergent society. Life in the West Indies is impossible without humor that overshadows an often bitter reality. The short story art form of the Caribbean reminds us of an awareness of one Caribbean cultural entity of creativity. The language of speech has become the language of narration. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, Stewart, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). Forbes, Curdella. Songs of Silence. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 2002. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Naipaul, V.S. Miguel Street. London: Penguin Books, 1971 Tolle, Eckhart. Stillness Speaks, California: New World Library, 2003. http://www.thingsmeanalot.com/2007/11/miguel-street-by-vs-naipaul.html http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2021463.songs_of_silence http://www.educationcaribbean.com/resources/collection/caribbean/eBooks/songs_silence.asp