Contiguity is a form of continuity, too, and brings with it new sets of meaning.
It seems too late in the day, especially after historians such as Hayden White, to talk of form and content separately, but there’s no way to think about a disease without naming it first. Because form seems to have historically been considered-and is still seen as-a white guy’s thing, and because Naipaul never strayed from the realist mode, In a Free State was never acknowledged for the ways it pushed the boundaries. I am of the view that Naipaul’s earlier decision was the correct one: it had resulted in a formally original and dazzling book, over and above being a remarkable, clear-eyed, truthful and brutal meditation on exile and displacement. Though Naipaul refused the suggestion at the time, he came round to her point of view nearly four decades later, in 2008, when he issued only the novel, shorn of all the “supporting narratives,” with a short introduction explaining his decision.
I mentioned “contestation” because Naipaul and his editor at Andre Deutsch, the formidable Diana Athill, amicably disagreed over the final form: it was Athill’s opinion that the (short) novel bearing the title In a Free State should be published as a stand-alone book. It is, therefore, more accurately, a novel with four supporting narratives. Naipaul’s 1971 masterpiece features the eponymous novel, two stories which he calls “supporting narratives,” and the bookends of a prologue and an epilogue, taken from his own journal during his travels. Subtitled A Novel with Two Supporting Narratives, V. There appears to have been some contestation in the published form In a Free State was to assume.
Naipaul’s In a Free StateĮthics today means not being at home in one’s house.
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