The British novelist VS Naipaul owes his notoriety as much to his cruelty as to his genius. A callous and fanatical narcissist, he destroyed his first wife (“You could say I killed her”) and treated his friends with contempt. His admirers often invoke the usual pretext, the need to “separate the work from the artist”. Recently, while reading his travelogue The Illusion of Darkness and his great novel on postcolonial Africa, At the bend of the river, a more unpleasant thought came to my mind. Cruelty is a cause of attraction for this author. At least in part.
Naipaul seized upon subjects carefully avoided by his more civilized contemporaries: poverty, failing states, destinies shattered by the tectonics of history. His fanaticism sometimes distorts his words, but the best of his work is without illusion or comfort. Where a nicer man would have sentimentalized, Naipaul, through his cruelty, showed the world as it was. The cold, cruel shock of truth is what its readers seek.
An admiration tinged with hypocrisy
That Naipaul’s cruelty could be an essential feature of his charisma is particularly disturbing to today’s reader. Like the Victorians, we are hypocritical in our admiration of certain qualities in man. From smug-looking Pre-Raphaelite Christs to invalid and devout children, to Dickens’ oval-faced, dull-faced heroines, Victorians believed they only loved virtue. Today, the symbols have changed, but the spirit remains the same.
The rejection of the 19th century cult of innocencee century was an integral part of the backlash against Victorian morality. In the XXe century, the informed citizen prided himself on being mature enough to know that women liked sex and that Dickens had been as much a humane artist as a monster.
Naipaul fits precisely in the triumph, at the end of the XXe century, of this cult of lucidity, which venerated in the artist
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The Times (London)The oldest of the British dailies (1785) and the best known abroad has belonged since 1981 to Rupert Murdoch. It has long been the reference newspaper and the voice of the establishment. Today, it has lost some of its influence and gossip accuses it of reflecting the conservative ideas of its owner. The Times switched to tabloid format in 2004.
Determined to no longer provide all its content for free, the British daily inaugurated in June 2010 a paid formula which obliges Internet users to subscribe to have access to its articles. Four months after the launch of the operation, the newspaper publishes the first results eagerly awaited by other press players: 105,000 people have become customers of its electronic offers. Among them, about half are regular subscribers to the various versions offered [site Internet, iPad et Kindle]. The others are occasional buyers. These figures, considered satisfactory by the management of the Times should encourage other newspapers to accelerate their march towards paid access.
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