Did the Swedish Academy have a fit of
conscience? A sudden access
of common sense? A literary metanoia? Whatever happened, we were
both pleased and astonished at the news that this year’s
Nobel Prize in literature was to be awarded to the Trinidad-born
British novelist V. S. Naipaul. We were pleased because there is
no one now writing who is more deserving of the honor than
Mr.—since 1989, Sir Vidia—Naipaul. His novels—we think
particularly of A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), Guerrillas
(1975), and A Bend in the River (1979)—are among the most
penetrating, gracefully written, and psychologically subtle of
our time. And his cultural reportage—especially Among the
Believers (1981) and Beyond Belief (1998), his two books about
Islamic fundamentalism—provides a courageous and devastatingly
accurate look into the furnace of religious fanaticism.
Naipaul’s oeuvre makes important contributions both to
contemporary literature and to our understanding of contemporary
life. For many years, he has been an obvious candidate for this
high honor.

Nevertheless, we were astonished to hear that Naipaul had won
the Nobel Prize. His defense of civilized values—and his
corresponding criticism of “Third Worldism” and Islamic
fanaticism—has earned him the undying enmity of the politically
correct literary establishment. It is said that he
even had the distinction of attracting
an informal coterie whose declared task it was to prevent him
from winning the Nobel Prize. For many years his enemies prevailed. No
group is more sensitive to the winds of political correctness
these days than the eminences in Stockholm who dispense the Nobel
laurels. Hence their eagerness to embrace third-rate novelists of
victimhood (Toni Morrison),
Fascists-turned-Communists-turned-anarchists
(Dario Fo), out-and-out Stalinists (José Saramago), and
reliable dispensers of left-wing, anti-American sentiment
(Gunther Grass, Nadine Gordimer). How anomalous Naipaul
seems in such company!

Whatever the reasons for the Nobel committee’s burst of clarity,
we can be grateful that it happened now, when the
values that Naipaul champions are so conspicuously under
attack. We have in these pages occasionally cited Naipaul’s
essay “Our Universal Civilization,” which was first delivered in
1990 as the Wriston Lecture sponsored by the Manhattan Institute in New York. Naipaul
describes there his literary development as a journey from the
“periphery” to the “center”: from his native Trinidad—the
periphery of universal civilization—to London, its center. The
autobiographical movement he traces is at the same time the
long, sometimes difficult movement of Western civilization as a
whole. It embodies, Naipaul writes, a capacious idea of human
fulfillment.

It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind
of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don’t imagine my
father’s Hindu parents would have been able to understand the
idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual,
responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of
vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense
human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot
generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of
that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

But not, we might add, without the brisk wind of moral
self-assurance, a commodity that has until recently too often
been lacking in Western democracies.

It was precisely for daring to extol Western civilization as
something “universal,” which “fits all men,” that Naipaul has
been so vehemently attacked by the left. Writing in 1998 about
Beyond Belief, the radical-chic academic critic Edward Said
assured readers that Naipaul’s criticism of Islamic
fundamentalism represented “an intellectual catastrophe of the
first order”: “so much is now lost on Naipaul,” Said wrote.
“His writing has become repetitive and uninteresting. His gifts
have been squandered. He can no longer make sense.”

In fact, in Beyond Belief, as elsewhere, Naipaul came bearing
that most unwelcome instrument: a mirror in which were displayed
the shattered illusions of fond hopes, the rancid pieties of
baseless “ideals”—chief among which has been the multicultural
ideal of the moral equality of all cultures. Naipaul ruthlessly
exposed the mendacity of this dogma. “There probably has been no
imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs,” Naipaul noted,
because “Islam seeks as an article of faith to erase the past;
the believers in the end honour Arabia alone; they have nothing
to return to.” As the journalist Tunku Varadarajan observed
recently in a perceptive piece on Naipaul in The Wall Street
Journal, “for telling this truth, Mr. Naipaul has been attacked
in the Islamic world, as well as in the West by liberals who see
no harm in projecting all societies as equal and as equally
‘valid.’” Naipaul made sense, all right, but it was not the sort
of sense that Edward Said and his intellectual confrères wanted
to hear.