Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
V. S. Naipaul and the Lure of the Redneck
Leigh Anne Duck
University of Chicago
lduck@midway.uchicago.edu
This paper provides a close reading of V. S. Naipaul's 1989 A Turn in the South in order to consider one way in which, in travel writing, the study of local spaces and narratives can be subsumed by a fascination with local bodies. Travel writing concerning the U. S. southeast has, from colonial days, often featured "grotesque" images of the poor white: in their relentlessly asserted alterity, poor whites both expose and alleviate white American anxieties concerning claims of racial supremacy and national character. Naipaul's work uses the grotesque in a more carnivalesque fashion, celebrating the redneck as a figure who has achieved what other southerners (and this travel writer) so painfully seek--a relationship to space not compromised by history or change, an abiding, affective connection to a "home." But just as the work begins to suggest that this desire for an uncompromised relationship to one's home contributes to the symbolic register of southern racial antagonisms, it projects the fulfillment of that desire in the figure of the redneck, only to negate that fulfillment as the extinction of the redneck is proclaimed to be near. Thus the desire itself is mourned, but its effects on the living (so-called rednecks and others) remain unexamined.
In this travelogue, Naipaul displays new tolerance toward the fascination with the past: though the work is not devoid of the racism seen in his earlier writings, that problem is mitigated here to some degree by his recognition that he, too, longs for the sense of "home" sought by his interviewees - a desire that inevitably confronts the subject with the imbrication of the loved space in oppressive, divisive histories. Thus, observing both black and white southerners in their attempts to understand their individual relationships to a troubling regional history, he begins to understand race as a factor in interpretation both of historical narratives, and of contemporary spaces. Through his attempt to understand the relationship of these categories (space and time), he suggests a disjunctive experience of time, the persistent, uneven influence of the past on contemporary southerners. This account is disrupted, however, by his sudden introduction to the figure of the redneck: though he includes no dialogue from any selfproclaimed rednecks, he questions all of his interviewees about their behavior and their "habitat," rather gleefully comparing himself to a naturalist. Thus his elegiac, yet often analytical, account of a fragmented disjunctive time is displaced by the image of redneck culture as an intantiation of the past in the present: despite the fact that he describes the redneck strictly in terms of consumption, Naipaul claims that the redneck constitutes a figure from the past, one who maintains a relationship to space that is inaccessible to modern subjects. Accordingly, he sees redneck commodities, and even aspects of the redneck body, as prophylactics, protecting the redneck from modernity. Though Naipaul's "rednecks" are presented as grotesque delights, rather than grotesque horrors, the work continues the tradition of positing redneck alterity as the great discovery to be made in southern travel.
University of Chicago
lduck@midway.uchicago.edu
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