The Language of Paradox by Cleanth Brooks

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   Cleanth Brooks is an American teacher and critic. He is a strong proponent of new criticism and focuses on close reading and structural analysis of poetry. His books like Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) are highly influential in establishing new criticism as an academic discipline. New criticism ignores the role of reader’s response, historical background, author’s intention, and moral biases in interpreting literary texts.

This approach considers literary texts as an autotelic entity and looks for an organic whole in the text. This wholeness is achieved by analyzing the relation of various parts to each other. Irony and paradox are two key words in new criticism.  Irony refers to “the obvious warping of a statement by the context”, whereas paradox is the tension at the surface of a verse that can lead to apparent contradictions and hypocrisies. It ‘involves the resolution of the opposites”.

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Brooks begins the essay by discussing common prejudices on paradox. He says that paradox is often considered as intellectual than emotional, clever than profound, and rational than divinely irrational. He dismisses these notions and argues that ‘paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry’. He points at the contradictions that are inherent in poetry and states that if those contradictions do not exist, some of the best poetry will not exist today. He illustrates this by citing examples from canonical poems.

Brooks comments that William Wordsworth is a poet who distrusts sophistry and relies on simplicity. Though he will not provide too many examples for paradox, some of his best poems emerge out of paradoxical situations. He quotes from the poem It is a Beauteous Evening and illustrates that the poem is based on paradoxical context. Looking at the evening sky, the poet is filled with worship whereas the girl who walks with him is not at all moved by the sight. The paradox is revealed when the poet says that the girl is deeply devotional because she unconsciously sympathizes with all forms of nature throughout the year whereas the poet’s worship is temporary and sporadic. The self righteous nun like evening sky is contrasted with the innocence of the girl who wears no sign of devotion but is in communion with nature.

 In Wordsworth’s sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge, the poet is surprised to see a man made city-London- is able to wear the beauty of morning. The poet used to look at the city as inanimate and mechanical and this morning vision offers him the glory of the city. This paradoxical situation resolves the tension between the mechanical and the organic, and the poet realizes that the city is also part of nature, lighted by the sun of nature. These testify what Wordsworth has stated in The Preface to Lyrical ballad; ‘to choose incidents and situations from common life’ but to treat them that ‘ordinary things should be preserved to the mind in an unusual aspect’. Paradox is employed to evoke romantic preoccupation with wonder and surprise. Neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope invoke irony, though irony and wonder often happen together. The fusion of irony and wonder is found in the poems of Blake, Coleridge and Gray. Paradox unites the opposites and contradictory through the imagination of the poet.

Paradox springs from the very nature of poetic language. In poetic use, both connotation and denotation gain prominence. The poet has to make up his language as he goes. In scientific use of language, terms are stabilized and frozen in strict denotation. The poet has to work with metaphors to express the subtle nature of human emotion. Poetic language involves continual tilting of the planes, necessary overlapping, discrepancies and contradictions. The nature of poetic language forces poets to be paradoxical. In Wordsworth’s Evening sonnet, the evening is described as “beauteous, calm, free, holy, quiet, breathless”. By placing the adjectives calm and breathless-which suggests excitement that upsets the calm and quiet- together, the poem invokes paradox.

Brooks delves into an in-depth analysis of the poem Canonization by John Donne. According to him, this poem provides a concrete example for extension of the basic metaphor into a paradox. In the poem, profane love is treated equal to divine love. The poet has daringly used religious terms to describe two lovers who have renounced the world and have hermitage in each other’s body. By describing the lovers fit for canonization, the poet has produced an effective parody of Christian sainthood.

The double and contradictory meaning of the word ‘die’ for is another instance of paradox. The lovers are willing to die if they cannot live by love.  Here the poet hints at the double meaning of the word. In 16 and 17 century, the word ‘die’ refers to experience the consummation of the act of love. In that sense, it also means their love is not exhausted by lust. At another instance, the poet stresses on the duality and singleness of love. The lovers are compared to phoenix, which dies to be born. Similarly the lovers have renounced life in order to gain most intense life.  He also quotes Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to emphasize the metaphor of love and pilgrimage to the holy land.

Brooks has offered a detailed analysis of the poem and states that the only way the poet could say what canonization says is by paradox. Donne has maintained love and religion and has effectively portrayed the complexity of the experience. According to Brooks, Donne is obsessed with the problem of unity and resolves the contradictory ideas by employing paradoxes. Imagination, according to Coleridge, brings together the opposites such as sameness with difference, general with concrete, idea with image, individual with representative etc…By quoting Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and Turtle”, he establishes that paradox is the only solution to unite the double/ multiple names of life. He concludes by commenting that the urn in which the ash of the lovers is kept is the poem itself. Like the phoenix it rises from the ashes and we have to be prepared to accept the paradoxes of imagination.

Critical Analysis of A House for Mr Biswas by V S Naipaul - Part 2

Diasporic writing is an essential part of postcolonial literature. Though Diaspora bridges cultures through widening of experience,it  always involves loss and unhappiness. The role of the colonial regime in displacing the colonised people is widely studied. These communities are uprooted from their social settings and eventually move to strange territories. One of the key components of diasporic writing is the search for cultural roots and the realisation that the country of their origin is an illusion they can never get access to. Naipaul himself has articulated this disappointment in this futile attempt to trace the roots of his own past “our own past was, like our idea of India, a dream”(Finding the Centre). The alienation one suffers in a strange place is intensified by the realisation that the country of one's origin is also erased. This hyphenated identity is well articulated in the diasporic literature.

Critical Readings of the Novel

i) Diasporic Novel

One of the striking features of Naipaul’s fictional narrative of the indian diasporic community of Trinidad is his engagement with the descendants of indentured labourers. The indian immigrants in the Caribbean are unskilled labourers and they were displaced by the colonial administration in India.The famine and scarcity of resources force these groups of people to flee from the country and studies have shown that famine was also a result of colonial mismanagement of Indian food grains. The establishment of plantations in the caribbeans is also a colonial enterprise. These groups of people were displaced from their homeland and later employed in the colonial plantations. Thus, it is clear that these diasporic communities are created by the colonial process.

The cultural alienation and the impossibility of returning to home make the life of the diaspora often hard to bear. The first generation of indentured labourers desired to return home as they undertook the voyage as an escape from misery. In the novel Pundit Tulsi, the patriarch of the Tulsi family fails to return home and gradually this is forgotten. It is also significant that there is displacement within a country, for example Mr. Biswas’ journey from Arwacas to Port of Spain brings a change in his fortune. The novel also portrays the migration of second generation Indian Trinidadians like Owad to  European countries for higher studies. The epilogue testifies that Anand spends his time in England and refuses to return even when he is informed of his father's illness. Biswas’ journey from Pagotes to Port of Spain marks the impact of the alien environment on the lives of the migrants.

It is a common feature of diasporic writing that those communities upheld the cultural values of the communities they were part of. Most of the labourers compared their exile from home to that of Rama’ s exile from Ayodhya and believed that they  would return home triumphantly as Rama reclaimed his kingdom. In the novel, people and houses are given names from Indian puranas; for example the Tulsi household is known as Hanuman House, -Hanuman was a close aide of Rama- Mr. Biswas’ father as Raghu andTara’s husband as Ajodha.  In this novel, most of the indian characters attempt to reproduce indian cultural values and rituals in Trinidad. The Tulsi family observes most of the rituals in their everyday life. It is also worth noting that the local community is involved in a ceremony of mounting sticks which is a desperate attempt to cling on certain regional celebrations of north indian villages.

ii) Home as a Motif

The novel records the search and failure of Biswas to create a house of his own expectations. Various factors contribute to this failure; In the first case he is unable to live in the ancestral house of the Tulsis because of the power struggle within the family and number of inhabitants in the family. It is also important that  the house reconciles with him and often helps to recover from illness. The novel also narrates the rise and fall of the ancestral home. In more than one way, this house resembles the brahmanic ancestral houses in India and Biswas desire for privacy and recognition is ignored. The house may represent India as such with its crowded streets and power imbalance in the patriarchal household.

The house at The Chase depresses with loneliness and his inability to cope with the people around. He had to deal with thugs like Mungroo and work with raw men like Seth. His refined tastes meet with the aggressive manners of the local people. In Green Vale, his house was broken by the alien climate of the region. Here again, the strange land he lives makes it difficult to survive. His life at Port of Spain was the best he ever had, though he was thrown out of the house whenever Mrs. Tusi was in need of the house. The house he buys in Sikkim Street is defective but he gradually makes it customised to his requirements.

Biswas’ search and failure mark the helplessness of the diasporic communities to feel at home in countries they were forced to live.

iii) Root and Route

In his analysis of the diaspora, Paul Gilroy introduces these terms. The first one “root” refers to attempts made by migrants to reconstruct from memory a pristine, pure, uncontaminated homeland to which the first generation of immigrants dreamt of returning. In the novel the other term “route” refers to the journey and the historical interactions between masters and indentured immigrants which have forever contaminated the diasporic ethos and meaning, His analysis throws light into the complexity of migration and how their cultural roots are contaminated by the colonial regime

Critics have also studied the impact of long ship voyages on the migrants. The existing social relations were subject to negotiations and many rigid social practices such as caste related rituals were violated. This also led to forming new social organizations such as brotherhood among the immigrants. Unlike many other diasporic communities, the Caribbeans have invented new myths and also have reinvented old ones to suit their present condition.

iv) Struggle over Place

The title itself implies the spatial concern in the novel. A house is a social construct and his engagement with the alien geography of Trinidad leads to his discontentment.It is commonplace that Biswas notion of a home is modelled after colonial notions. His dissatisfaction with Hanuman House is partly because of its joint family system in which individuals are nonentity and everything is shared among the inhabitants. He also resists the collective way of bringing up children in the Tulsi household, and wishes to bring them up with taste which the Tulsis did not permit.

Biswas is also very critical of the inequality of spatial distribution. For example, in the house no one gets enough space except the dominant people in the house such as Mrs. Tulsi, Seth, Owad and Shekhar. They enjoy absolute control over the house and the premise and sons-in-law and widows in the family are denied domestic space. The episode in which a doll’s house gifted by Biswas was broken down by Shama to please the Tulsis indicates the domination of the Tulsis in imagining and distributing spaces.

Click here to read Critical Analysis of A House for Mr Biswas by V S Naipaul - Part 1

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Critical Analysis of A House for Mr Biswas by V S Naipaul - Part 1

Click here to get a copy of the novel

    V S Naipaul is a Trinidadian writer of Indian Origin.  He is a prolific writer and his novels are based on the lives  of Indian migrants in Trinidad. He portrays the complexities of the life of people in the Caribbean Islands, which are settlement colonies. In these countries, bulk of the population are immigrants from different parts of the world; for example, there are people from France,Africa, England, America, China, India etc... The Caribbeans do not share a common language, culture, nationality, race and religion, though they are part of a single nation. In other words, the people of Trinidad and other countries in the Caribbean are strangers to themselves. This absence of a collective identity intensifies the search for cultural roots and this is a recurrent theme in the writings of Naipaul. His novels record  the predicament of postcolonial subjects who have lost their country of origin and failed to build a cultural home in the countries they live in. It is reported that Naipaul’s great grandmother  migrated from India to Trinidad at the end of the nineteenth century.

Naipaul and India/ Indians at Trinidad 

        In the 19th century, Indians migrated to countries like Trinidad, Fiji, Mauritius etc...for survival. There were two types of migration; Indentured labourers and free migration. The first group were unskilled labourers from Indian villages who were reduced to penury by the exploits of the colonial government and the later were usually traders from Sindh and Gujarat who left the country to improve their social standing. The indentured labourers signed an agreement with a specific employer to work with him/her for five years at a fixed wage. 

These labourers are free once they complete their five year term and most of them desire to go home. This is never materialised and they continue to live in the colony. They try to reproduce Indian cultural, religious life in the new country; thus becoming a new social group. Naipaul traces his cultural roots in India and is often disappointed by the vast geography and hybridity of India. He desires to have pure ancestral roots in the country but India baffles him with its heterogeneous multitudes of languages, races,cultures and geography. This leads to his ambiguous relation with the home country. He maintains an ironic detachment from his Indian characters

Plot Outline of the Novel

The novel begins with a prologue and ends with an epilogue. In the prologue, the narrator portrays the last days of the protagonist Mr. Biswas. He buys a house in Sikkim Street and is returning home from hospital. Though the house is defective, he is happy to own a home and tries his best to make the house more hospitable. His family also feels anchored in the house.

Part One

The novel is divided into two parts: Part One and Part Two. In part one, the narrator records the life of Mr. Mohun Biswas from childhood to his journey to Port of Spain. Part two begins with his life in the port city and concludes with his life in the Sikkim Street. In the epilogue that follows, the narrator ties the loose ends and offers a glimpse at the future life of his major characters including the death of the protagonist.

In the first chapter of part one titled The Pastoral, readers are taken to the hut of a plantation labourer named Raghu (Mr. Biswas’ father) and his family. His wife Bipti and two sons-Pratap and Prasad- and daughter Dehuti and the youngest Biswas live in the hut. They lead a miserable life; limited resources, quarreling parents,and an alienated life in rural Trinidad. The birth of Mr. Biswas adds to the misery of the family as Pundit Sitaram predicts that the child may harm the life of its father. Raghu, the miser, is restricted from visiting the child before 21 days of its birth. The prediction turns true and Raghu drowns and the family, after offering him a ceremonial burial as per Indian traditions, leaves the hut in the plantation. They seek refuge in the household of Bipti’s sister Tara at Pagotes and they are given a tenement. His brothers work in the plantation and sister Dehuti elopes with Ramchand, a lower caste hindu worker, and Biswas is sent to Canadian Missionary School where people are hostile and a teacher named Lal, a lower caste christian convert, ridicules him for not having a birth certificate. At school, he befriends with Alec who teaches him to write letters exquisitely and later they take up the job of painting signs.

Later, Mr. Biswas lands in Arwacas and Seth, a prominent member of the Tulsi family, hires him to paint the sign board of Tulsi store. During his work in the store, Mr. Biswas falls in love with one of the Tulsi daughters named Shama and writes a love letter to her. The next day, Mrs Tulsi, the matriarch of the house, asks him to come to the magnificent Hanuman House. He is quizzed on his love letter and to his surprise, she offers him Shama’s hand in marriage. He consents, marries and regrets. Nevertheless, he is given a room in the Hanuman House with so many other sons-in-law. He resents the house and the huge crowd in it and describes it as ‘monkey house’ and the two privileged sons as ‘gods’. He insults Owad by spitting and throwing food onto him. He is beaten and is asked to leave the house.

In the next phase, Biswas lives in a remote village named The Chase. The Tulsis offer him a shop they have purchased and a house with two rooms and a kitchen. He feels insecure and lonely at The Chase and develops symptoms of hysteria. Though Shama’s presence provides security and stability to his existence, he fights with his wife and she leaves for Hanuman House. He is left with meager resources and hostility of other shopkeepers. The Chase episode comes to an end when a local thug Mungroo appears at the shop and he buys provisions on credit and never pays him. Mungroo is a self proclaimed guardian of the village who has assembled a group of young people from the locality and they practice stick fighting. They organise a yearly ritual mounting sticks and this is a reproduction of a north Indian village ritual. Mungroo refuses to pay and files a suit against Biswas on damaging his credit and his business turns sour. Meanwhile, Biswas symptoms of hysteria become more evident. He returns to Hanuman House and Seth proposes to insure and burn the shop so that he may be credited with an insurance amount. Biswas agrees to this.

Next, Biswas moves to Green Vale as a driver cum supervisor of the Tulsis. He is provided with a room in the barracks where the plantation labourers are living. Barracks are constructed in a long line to offer only shelter to its occupants; it lacks basic facilities like toilet, kitchen.He finds life tedious and miserable and plans to build a home behind a grove of trees nearby. He gifts Savi with a doll's house, which was broken by Shama to please the Tulsi households. His attempt to claim Savi fails as she refuses to leave Hanuman House and then his attention turns to his son Anand who sticks to him. Using the money he gets from the insuraburn, he builds a house. He lives in the new house with Anand and on a stormy night, the house collapses and they are taken to Hanuman House. He falls unconscious and  rests in the Blue Room and gradually recovers. The Tulsis do their best to improve his condition.

        
Part Two

The Part Two of the novel presents Mr. Biswas walking along the road holding a suitcase. He is determined to start life afresh and has left the family with the Tulsis. He gets into a bus to Port of Spain and lands at the house of Ramchand, his brother in law. He ran into the editor of The Sentinel, Mr. Burnett, who is impressed by Biswas’ story and he is appointed as a reporter of the newspaper with a salary of fifteen dollars per fortnight. He visits his family at Hanuman House and he is warmly welcomed by the members. His wife Shama also respects him and his new role as a popular reporter of the Sentinel. He takes his family to Port of  Spain and they occupy a vacant room rented to them by Mrs. Tulsi. They enjoy life in the port city. Meanwhile Owad leaves for England to study medicine and the family assembles and celebrates; thus initiating new rituals.

A shift in power at The Sentinel leads to fading the glory of Mr. Bisawas. Mr. Burnett is fired and Biswas is directed to factual, dull, and tedious reporting. Later, he is asked to enquire and prepare the list of ‘Deserving Destitutes,’an initiative by the Sentinel to attract public attention by funding welfare schemes. During this period, a conflict of interest leads to the breaking up of the Tulsis; Seth on one side and the rest of the Tulsis under Mrs Tulsi leave for an estate in Shorthills. Mr Biswas joins the Tulsis at Shorthills and builds a house for his family in the estate. This house catches fire and they leave for Port of Spain.

Back at Port of Spain, Biswas shares the house with Shuttles, Govind and Besdai, the widow. As the urge to get educated gains momentum, the widows send their children to the house and the house gets crowded. Biswas’ desire to have a house fades as he is suffering from illness and the overcrowded house suffocated him. His long service as special investigator of Deserving Destitutes helps him to get a new job as Community Welfare Officer. This government  job offers him money and power to pursue his dream. He buys a car, new suits and goes for a holiday to Balandra.

Owad’s return to Port of Spain diminishes the prospects of Biswas’ dreams. He is kicked out of the house and later restored to a single room in the house. An altercation between Mr. Biswas and Owad lead to the ousting of Biswas from the home and hastily he buys a defective home in Sikkim Street. He is late to realise the flaws of the house and later he accepts the flaws and makes it habitable for him.

Critical Analysis of A House for Mr Biswas by V S Naipaul - Part 2