Horatiu-Lucian Nickel

• Trinidad, V.S. Naipaul’s native island, is consistently represented in the 2001 Nobel Prize winner’s fictional works, above all in "The Mystic Masseur" (1957), "The Suffrage of Elvira" (1958), "Miguel Street" (1959), "A House for Mr Biswas" (1961), "A Flag on the Island" (1967), "The Mimic Men" (1967), "In a Free State" (1971), "Guerrillas" (1975), "The Enigma of Arrival" (1987) and "A Way in the World" (1994). The present dissertation analyses representations of Trinidad as “play-culture” in the aforementioned writings by initiating aTrinidad, V.S. Naipaul’s native island, is consistently represented in the 2001 Nobel Prize winner’s fictional works, above all in "The Mystic Masseur" (1957), "The Suffrage of Elvira" (1958), "Miguel Street" (1959), "A House for Mr Biswas" (1961), "A Flag on the Island" (1967), "The Mimic Men" (1967), "In a Free State" (1971), "Guerrillas" (1975), "The Enigma of Arrival" (1987) and "A Way in the World" (1994). The present dissertation analyses representations of Trinidad as “play-culture” in the aforementioned writings by initiating a methodological dialogue between postcolonial/cultural studies on the one hand and performance studies, play theory, as well as cultural anthropology on the other hand. The study is divided into three parts corresponding to the three main facets of Trinidad as it appears in Naipaul’s fiction: firstly, as a childish world; secondly, as a festive place and thirdly, as a playground for the western imagination. The image of Trinidad as a childish space stands at the intersection of the autobiographical genre with the colonial/Social Darwinist discourse of the so-called “child races”. In both cases we have to do with a cultural construct of childhood whose main stereotypical features are smallness, imitation, irrationality and of course, playfulness. The second part of the dissertation focuses on the importance of rituals and festivals in shaping up Indian and African identities in Trinidad. Roughly, Hindu rituals are capital means to create diasporic Indias, whereas Carnival is a powerful symbol of the Afro-Trinidadian community. Nevertheless, they carry the potential of becoming genuine liminal spaces, where ethnic boundaries are transgressed. The third section is devoted to a discourse of play as imagination. In this respect, Trinidad appears as an adventure playground where the Westerner projects his/her desires, sometimes under the mask of scientific respectability. The eye of the European sees the tropical island as an exotic Garden of Eden, as an aesthetic space with strong pictorial and theatrical qualities. But if Trinidad occurs as an artistic, a fictional object, then Naipaul’s novels and stories describing it are fiction about fiction, and so have a very important metafictional component. At this stage, since metafiction is also a capital element of postmodernism, I trace back Naipaul’s ludic metaphors to the present-day Zeitgeist, pointing out the postmodern elements in his texts dealing with Trinidad.…
• Die vorliegende Dissertation, eine Studie zu V.S. Naipauls Darstellung von Trinidad als Spielkultur, untersucht das Bild, das der berühmte, aber auch umstrittene Literatur-Nobelpreisträger von seinem Heimatland durch fiktionale Mittel kreiert. Der Hauptakzent liegt auf Naipauls Romanen und Kurzgeschichtensammlungen "The Mystic Masseur" (1957), "The Suffrage of Elvira" (1958), "Miguel Street" (1959), "A House for Mr Biswas" (1961), "A Flag on the Island" (1967), "The Mimic Men" (1967), "In a Free State" (1971), "Guerrillas" (1975), "The EnigmaDie vorliegende Dissertation, eine Studie zu V.S. Naipauls Darstellung von Trinidad als Spielkultur, untersucht das Bild, das der berühmte, aber auch umstrittene Literatur-Nobelpreisträger von seinem Heimatland durch fiktionale Mittel kreiert. Der Hauptakzent liegt auf Naipauls Romanen und Kurzgeschichtensammlungen "The Mystic Masseur" (1957), "The Suffrage of Elvira" (1958), "Miguel Street" (1959), "A House for Mr Biswas" (1961), "A Flag on the Island" (1967), "The Mimic Men" (1967), "In a Free State" (1971), "Guerrillas" (1975), "The Enigma of Arrival" (1987) und "A Way in the World" (1994); jedoch auch folgende nicht fiktionale Schriften, die Trinidad erwähnen, werden in Betracht bezogen: "The Middle Passage" (1962), "The Loss of El Dorado" (1969), "Between Father and Son: Family Letters" (1999), "The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles" (1972), "The Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad" (1980), "Finding the Centre" (1984), "Reading & Writing" (2000) und "The Writer and the World" (2002). Der diskursive Ansatz ist der gemeinsame Nenner einer interdisziplinären Methode, die sowohl kulturwissenschaftliche und postkoloniale Fragestellungen, als auch anthropologische und ludistische Konzepte in sich vereint. Mithilfe dieses Ansatzes wird bewiesen, dass das Trinidadbild in Naipauls Schriften nicht eine objektive Widerspiegelung der “Wirklichkeit”, sondern ein soziokulturelles Konstrukt ist, das aus “kulturellen Repräsentationen” (“cultural representations”) besteht.…