Mohun’s House, Naipaul’s Hiraeth: Dialectics of House and Home in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas

‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there
They have to take you in.’
‘I could have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’
    —Robert Frost, The Death of a Hired Man

In philosophy, the concept of house and home is often conflated and resists their resistance along blurred lines and tempts many interrogations. Is it home or is it house that is the prior—which one is basis of a society or an individual—can only be capitulated through the proper proposition of human history even when the human did not evolve as a race or a species. Of late, postmodern or poststructuralist thought leans more towards the house rather than the home. House/home is a space that has been customarily described as a personal space—a space of privacy, secrecy, peace, sharing, of bonding, and shelter. The dialectical relationship between house and home has evoked philosophical attention covering a wide range of issues and themes like space, spatiality, architecture, environment, nationalism, diasporic perspectives, vampire studies, postcolonialism, queer studies, and film studies, feminist criticism and many more. In V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, we find how Naipaul used ‘house’ in the title of the novel but is metaphorically as well as symbolically seeking the sense of the absence of ‘home’. The novel has a predominant under running theme which talks about Mohun Biswas’s search for identity in forms of personal identity, family identity, and social identity entangled with the crisis of social status and all these multiple fragmented identities hinge upon a single hub: house. On an elementary level, Naipaul’s use of the word house fails to decipher the longing for a house which Mr. Biswas bears in his heart all through his life; rather the word house is proper in an oxymoronic sense. Reading the text we understand that Mohun is searching for a home rather than a house which will confer him privacy, peace, safety, love and unity and would constitute his social status which he felt is at stake in the Tulsi household.

Mohun’s searching for a house symbolically equates with his searching for a home that has ever been sought to and longed for by the exilic souls like Mohun Biswas and Naipaul. The society only can see the search as a representative of the mode of desire which is largely shrouded by the yearnings dwelling at the heart of the seeker. Home becomes a distorted part of Mohun’s memory which haunts him and he tries to figure out the desire within a physical structure of a house which left him an ever failure. The physical house as a substitution of the home turns into an unattainable desire in Mohun which Lacan terms as “petit a”and a same sort of desire tears Naipaul’s heart apart which would find better expression in Heidegger’s “heimat”. As Heidegger never specifically defined the word heimat, it remained one of his most confusing and complex concepts, but the word may express two kinds of feelings both on individual level as well as on nationalistic level. On an individual level the word evokes the sense of ‘homelessness’ of the modern man on account of his busy attachment with science and technology and this kind of feeling not only troubled Naipaul but also Mr. Biswas in A House for Mr. Biswas. Mohun’s striving at business and job and his costly gift of a doll’s house to his wife Shama as a token of their private house/home sanguine Mohun’s feeling of homelessness. Heimat also signifies the nostalgia one feels for one’s homeland. As Naipaul’s ancestry rooted in India, and he being at the outside of his root place, always feels uprooted and a deep sense of hiraeth for a home to which he wants to return but which remains as a mirage forever. In the later part of the novel, we see that Mr. Biswas arduously gains his personal house but he fails to make it a home at its best due to fragmented relationships with his children. The broken physical condition of the house hints at Mohun’s distorted memory and frustrated mental condition. Like Miller’s Willy Loman, Mohun seems vanquished who “had all the wrong dreams” and lacked proper vision. Though he is at his personal house his sense of dissatisfaction is overshadowed by the real home of which he is an ever seeker. He only finds his house as a mere building—breathless, lifeless and probably homeless.

In a specific social periphery, house plays multifaceted roles and helps promoting different kind of identities or positions. We, as individual and social bodies, as in Bourdieu’s “field”, try to get hold of those identities or positions coping with our “habitus”, “capital”, and “doxa”. The concept of habitus begins from both an experiential and social-logical conundrum. We often feel we are free agents but it’s a false consciousness. Mohun also feels himself a free agent but he is not free in the regulatory macrocosmic house or the society he lives in rather he is a free agent in his microcosmic world through which he exercises his search and builds his home up and tries to materialize his dream and thus makes it a habitus. Mohun’s prior family background, social class, his ethnicity and his education make him react differently in the Hanuman House where he finds himself an “outsider” and an “alienated” being. Mohun’s symbolic capital marked him as distinct from the Tulsis. He has cultural capital, he is an educated product of the society which makes him culturally richer than that of the Tulsi family members and thus he helps in social mobility but he is poor by the economic capital. He is marked in the society as insignificant and often neglected, as no house belongs to him as personal property. House stands for high social status which brings symbolic capital like respect to the house owner, Mr. Biswas. 

The intensity which Mohun’s has in yearning for a home, and that he does not have for Shama may be the result of women’s traditional, general absence from home and it is better understood in terms of their antithetical dialectic relationship with the other. Dana Arnold states that while coming in association with the words like home and house, women have always been marginalized and ignored. Remarkably enough, women do not feel homesickness and they do not want to go to home because they are already-always there. The same goes with Shama. When Mohun asked her to leave Tulsi household she instantly denies estranging from it. Women are the part of the home to which men feel keen attachment. In A House for Mr. Biswas, from a Heideggerian view of metaphysics, house can be read as das seiende which is the entity and home can be read as dassein which the being. Home’s existence belongs to somewhere else; it does not have a physical or geographical location like house (if not a haunted house). A haunted house, according to Agamben, is an exception of the houses. Not owning a house makes Mohun homeless both physically and psychologically and his eventual death intensifies his hunger for a house/home which lives.

Works Cited:

Agamben, Giorgio: State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Print.

Arnold, Dana and Tim Clayton.The Georgian Country House: Architecture, Landscape, and Society. London: Stroud, Sutton, 1998.79. Print.

Clark, Timothy.Martin Heidegger. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.Routledge Critical Thinkers. Print.

Grenfell, Michael.Pierre Bourdieu. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008.Key Concepts. Print.

Hall, Gray and Birchall, Clare Birchall (Eds.).New Cultural Studies: Adventure in Theory, Orient Black Swan, New Delhi, 2009.Print.

Homer, Sean.Jacques Lacan. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.Routledge Critical Thinkers.Print.

Jenkins, Richard.Pierre Bourdieu. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Key Sociologists. Print.

Naipaul, V.S.A House for Mr. Biswas.London: Picador, 2002. Print.

Untermeyer, Louis. Robert Frost’s Poems: New Delhi: Pan Macmillan, 2002. Print.