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).