A Bend In The River Essay, Research Paper

After the completion of his earlier Caribbean novels, V. S. Naipaul began his extended travels and

subsequent writings inspired by those travels. A Bend in the River (1979) results from such an

undertaking. The story in A Bend in the River depicts how an emergent African nation struggles against

all odds to be a modernized one. Despite episodes on internal warfare and corruption that effect

migration in and out of the country, it is obvious that there is a continuous thematic concern in the

novel. This thematic concern is structured around a dualism of rootedness and displacement, one that

Naipaul explores the identity and cultural formations of the diaspora. This thematic consistency,

therefore, does not preclude Naipaul’s credibility of being a superb world novelist as Ian Watt once said

of him. On the contrary, issues that engross the novelist’s unwavered attention become particularly

urgent under the turbulence due to faster and more intensified exchanges under globalization.

In this paper through a reading of A Bend in the River, I want to suggest that not only does the notion

of home is interrogated, but by means of travelling back and forth in time the present can be extended

and expanded. The concern of this paper calls our attention to a renunciation of temporal axis, to

which post-imperial and Third World nations at large refer in their development layouts. I argue that

the past haunts Naipaul constantly and throughout his narratives he explores the meanings of the past

to constitute his present being. The heritage he is born in and bred is of India and England. His father

Seepersad, a second generation East Indian West Indian with a failed literary career, exerts

tremendous influence upon the young Naipaul.1 And Joseph Conrad, first introduced by his father,

plays his literary father.2 His two fathers and subsequent travels constitute a triangular structure, in

which his present identity is continuously being forged. My argument here will be that through a

dialogue with the past and the future one can realize more about his present situation and the

emphasis is accordingly laid in the here and now.

In his epochal address of “Tradition and the West Indian Novel” Wilson Harris proposes a radical new

perspective for the West Indian novel.3 In it he repudiates the consolidation in the nineteenth century

realism, appealing to fulfillment and advocating the importance of imagination (35). For the West Indian

literary tradition mired in Western colonial education and haunted by the shadow of canon, imagination

can be seen to provide the only possible channel of liberation from this containment. Recently, Nana

Wilson-Tagoe has given us an exceptional account on how an alternative historiography could be of

vital importance to the West Indian literary imagination.4 Both Harris and Wilson-Tagoe provide

adequate theoretical framework in which the politics and aesthetics of the West Indian novel could

engage a creative conversation with both colonialism and global culture.

In his rendition Naipaul tends to disrupt generic rigidity and strews throughout his writings traces of

temporal permeation. I take this generic fusion as Naipaul’s political gesture of an alternative

historiography. Critics tend to see “Conrad’s Darkness” (1974) and ” A New King for the Congo” (1975)

as non-fictional sources for A Bend in the River.5 Then A Bend in the River appears as an a posteriori

account of the Mobutu government in Zaire. The novel not only captures moments in its sociopolitical

scenes, but initiates a dialectic with the present. The novel blends different moments in time, factual

or imaginary; and by means of fictional presentation Naipaul is endowed with a detached position to

better understand his historical positioning and to comment on the societies he has been to. Naipaul’s

concern, therefore, lies less on an indictment of the past than on the urgency of the present here and

now. “Here and now” in a contextualized, globalized palimpsest imagination can be seen as postcolonial

critics’ lever in overthrowing what San Juan calls postcolonial metaphysics. It is important to note that

for the West Indian cultural production globalization cannot collapse the differences between

pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial. “Here and now” stresses the present with a constant reference

back to “there and then” to better situate the West Indian culture in the present under globalization.

“Heritage” is defined as a property received from a prior generation. This definition bases its

assumption on an unbroken lineage. My usage of “the heritage of the present” is inspired by Fredric

Jameson’s “nostalgia for the present.” Both terms are rested upon a paradox. In Jameson the present is

not only historicized but seen as something already lost and it triggers a pursuit of what is “lost”.

Likewise, “the heritage of the present” does not suggest an ancestral inheritance, but an emptiness

currently experienced. Manifested in the paradox is an importance of the present. Many postcolonial

writers, however, chart an imaginary space with a center in the past. My contention is that by so

doing they will only straddle their present with a fixed point of reference, viz., Western modernization.

Then the trojectory of the present development is but an arc already catapulted by Western

industrialization. That is, their future is always the West’s past trapped in Eurochronology.

For the West Indians this ancestral connection is severed by Western imperialisms. This imperialistic

intervention does not pose as a clean cut-off, but a process of complication and confusion. In turn, it

engenders bastard cultures. This intervention introduces Naipaul to his second father and it also

ushers in his continuous and ambivalent relationship between and with the past and the present. The

result of this dialogue is dramatized by Naipaul in his depiction of the afflicted here and now. The

existential difficulty shared by all major characters in A Bend in the River is accounted for by the

overall predicament and uncertain feeling. Naipaul is effective with his strategy to extend and expand

the present to amplify the absurdity and inadequacy in A Bend in the River. In the following I will

analyze the predicament of the present to accentuate: 1. The temporal reference, especially one that

is accorded with the Western rationalization, must be disavowed; and 2. Imagination, as a liberating

agency for the West Indian cultural production, must be totally devoid of constraints of any kind. In

terms of characterization, major characters in A Bend in the River are descendants of Mr. Biswas:

Metty, Indar, Ferdinand and Salim. That is, they share a perpetual obsession of the pursuit of a home,

besides a common hereditary trace of homelessness and failure. Unlike Mr. Biswas eventually builds and

owns his house, those of his descendants cat not be rooted due partly to domestic upheaval and

partly to their questioning of what a home should mean. Father Huismans and Raymond represent the

stereotypical white supremacists.6 Their views of Africa differ little from imperialistic desire to see

Africa as a dark continent awaiting for enlightenment and civilization.7 Father Huismans collects

African masks and deposits them as his private collection in the lycee, an action typical of imperialistic

exoticization as Salim’s comment succinctly shows. He notices that there is “no window” in the room

that houses those African masks. The room lets in no light and no air. The visual register brings

readers to a dungeon. Salim is amused by this absurdity of this spatial confusion: “This is Zabeth’s

world” (65). At this moment he is aware that Africa is contained on African soil by Europe. This

topsy-turvy world unsettles his sense of being and takes away his identity anchor.

This is the world to which [Zabeth] returns when she leaves my shop. But Zabeth’s world was

living and this was dead. That was the effect of those masks lying flat on the shelves, looking

up not at forest or sky but at the underside of other shelves. They were masks that had been

laid low, in more than one way, and had lost their power. (65)

This disorderly world is further intensified by the effect of a renewed time framework. Father Huismans

plays God by marking every collected mask a date, cutting off the masks from its immediate temporal

and spatial references. De-territorialized, decontextualized, and stripped of life and meaning, these

dated masks produce an anachronism to Salim: “So old, so new” (65).