Chun Fu, Kuang-wu College, Taipei The Heritage of the Present: V. S. Naipaul and 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).

As a child, Salim learns to look at things through a European lens. Africa is dwindled on a stamp into a dhow, stripped everything down to a bare minimum. In this synecdochical reductionism Salim discovers not only his own "ignorance", but the need to see things together as does the episode in which he learns that for the masks to have meaning they must be related. Viewing these dead collections, Salim becomes fully aware that at the collisions of cultures, one should maintain an open attitude, an attitude undoubtedly Naipaul shares.⁸ Raymond the imported Belgian historian, whom Indar calls the Big Man's "white man," serves as the presidents' consultant and is in charge of recording all the important events in this post-independent country. To his dismay, Salim finds out that Raymond accumulates nothing but clippings from white men's newspaper. He is but a white man's parrot.

Fawzia Mustafa observes that in A Bend in the River Naipaul employs an objective perspective, by which all principal players are seen to be engaged in an narrativization of events from the outside looking in. Such a perspective provides an appropriate device for a "full exploration of existential questions" confronting Salim and his like (142). Naipaul makes Salim maintain a tangential position toward the development of events. This way he can make the best use of such a position to comment on the matter of things. Salim's lamentation and uncertainty as to where he should be going are loud and bitter. Despite the fact that there is no immediate solution for him, Salim is impatient with the existential cul-de-sac. The present, according to the OED definition can be the place where the speaker is at, of being before, besides, with, or in the same place as the person to whom the word has relation, or being in the place considered or mentioned (my italics). In other words, perception of time is made in spatial terms, or in one that person-to-person relation is implicated. If this definition is viable, then for Salim to alleviate his present plight he needs to establish a relation with other people in spatial terms. To Salim the present is equivalent to the painful experience substantiated in here at home in Africa, then the future must be projected as a yet-to-be there. If home is where hope is, then it is never here. Follows Nazruddin's footsteps, Salim starts his travel from here/Africa to there/England. There in London he witnesses the life of his predecessor immigrants who lead a life not entirely different from the one back in Africa.

Back home in Africa, the Domain and the Bigburger turn out to be a sham for under the glaring appearance lie ruin, decay, bribery and corruption. The hypocrisy and absurdity are best illustrated in an anachronism of inscribing "[the] two-thousand-year-old words to celebrate sixty years of steamer service from the capital" (63). While Salim is in Europe, on the other hand, Europe looks strange to him. It is far from the one he had learned from books as a child.

The Europe I had come toÉwas neither the old Europe nor the new. It was something shrunken and mean and forbidding. It was the Europe where Indar, after his time at the famous university, had suffered and tried to come to some resolution about his place in the world; where Nazruddin and his family had taken refugee; where hundreds of thousands of people like myself, from parts of the world like mine, had forced themselves in, to work and to live... Of this Europe I could form no mental picture. But it was there in London; it couldn't be missed; and there was no mystery. (229-30)

The place strikes Salim as strange, and the impact of alienation he feels runs deep. In this strangeness he loses his usual footing. Salim's flight to London offers him no salvation. The spatial transition in turn alters his temporal reference. He finds no matching form to orient his present being. This London represents neither the old [read: the past] that he was once familiar with, nor the future. Now he knows only the grim present here in London. It offers no promise and no future. The present continues to be extended and expanded. That is, in the conflation of African future with London's "present", he still sees no future. In other words, adoption of a Eurocentric frame of reference offers no possible salvation. To examine time in light of Johannes Fabian's theory, I find what he calls "a schizogenic use of time" provides a solution with which Salim's difficulty may find an escape (35). Contrary to what previously agonizes him, anachronism corresponds with Fabian's "denial of coevalness" (31) in the sense that differences in time are registered and the Other time is just as legitimate. That is, it de-tracts from Eurochronological synchronization. A deep-seated emptiness felt by Salim characterizes his present. The home Salim, and arguably Naipaul, pursues is neither London nor the chthonous Africa embodied by the town at the bend in the river. In London Salim understands that that is a place he does not belong.

The idea of going home, of leaving, the idea of the other place---I had lived with it in various forms for many years. In Africa it had always been with me. In London, in my hotel room, I had allowed it on some nights to take me over. It was a deception. I saw now that it comforted only to weaken and destroy. (244; my italics)

Where, or rather what is home? To Salim, constantly moving between places, home transforms from a location in space into an idea of "the other place." The other and not this one defines his predicament. It sets him on the run, pursuing the home in his mind. This location and concept of home is constituted in "the present." Home becomes the present and displace homeless inhabit in its extension.

There could be no going back, there was nothing to go back to. We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed. (244)

Home transforms itself into the present. It is a state of being in time.
Zabeths' expectation for Ferdinand's success serves as another example of looking forward to what is to come, but to no avail. Naipaul's thought is adumbrated in his characterization of Zabeth and Ferdinand. Zabeth the native sorceress must pole the dugout to the bend in the river to meet regular tradesmen from ashore. "Regular" accentuates a synchronization with the global capitalist order embodied by the periodic business dealings at the bend in the river. She represents the bush Africa and material poverty. For her life is difficult. Here hope for a better education as a means of climbing higher in the social ladder for her son Ferdinand is predicated on, again, the Enlightenment. Eventually, European education embodied by the lycee penetrates like a double-edged sword in an integral self-sufficient time reference. European education plunges Ferdinand into, rather than saves him from, an abyss where he could find no escape. Ferdinand's redemption is manifested in his last good deeds to Salim. A product of bastard culture, and Naipaul's "postcolonial mimicry" as Mustafa maintains (142) , Ferdinand is made to assist Salim to get out of prison and make the last steamer out of the heart of darkness.

A Bend in the River depicts the illusion of nation-building. The notion of nation is as problematic for Naipaul as that of home. In fact, he could have defended himself against a host of critics accusing him of betrayal of Trinidad. Moreover, he could be deciphered as a prophet of the postnational in the sense that national borders are disavowed after the intensified flows of transnational migrants and capital. Is it possible that Naipaul has already seen the inadequacy and implausibility of nation-building in Africa in the high tide of African nationalism? The Big Man embodies Westernization in a vulgar sense along with a complete set of twisted ideological apparatus. He plays an omnipresent and omnipotent absenteeism, controlling and haunting all that are within his territory. Throughout the entire story, the Big Man never appears; he intimidates his people by an almost presence. This absenteeism constitutes his being everywhere at all times. That is, he resides nowhere, only a ghost presence. The Big Man as the leader of a new nation can guide his people to nowhere. There is only extended and expanded moment of the impending presence of the Big Man; and it is a present forever delayed.⁹

It is important to note when Salim is caught in a desperate condition with no clear sense of direction and feels wounded because Metty betrays him, his present plight is mainly incurred by an unvaried rigid distinction of the past and the present. The same rigidity is also reflected in the master-slave power relationship between Salim and Metty. To rub another grain of salt into Salim's wound, Naipaul makes Indar's debut in the narrative. In Naipaul's words, Indar is someone "from the past" (108). Naipaul has a clear picture in mind and is meticulous enough to make Indar a device to break up the rigidity that contains Salim. The importance of Indar does not intend to bring us back to the past, instead through a dialectic of the past and the present the importance of the present is accordingly underscored. While for Salim the former wound has not yet been cured, one new confusion further complicates his present symptoms. Naipaul deliberately highlights the present and amplifies the plight Salim feels at this present moment. Indar's long monologue stresses the trampling of the past and "that's the way we have to learn to live now" (112-13) ¹⁰

Is there a glimpse of hope once the past is trampled as Indar instructs? What does the past mean in Indar's words and does Salim understand as Indar wants him to? Timothy Weiss once commentss that the metaphor of crushing a garden suggests repression and masking (187). Salim has explored different possibilities in his pursuit. The past of Africa or Europe could not provide him any solution. He abhors any form of adjustment of his time to that of others. He wants to have his own way in his own pace. Despite his insightful words, Indar himself does not carry out what he believes in, instead he returns to India to look for "some dream village in his head" (244) Indar finds the ground to base his present being, i.e., in the past¹¹ Indar betrays his own words. He never tramples his own past; he embraces his past and looks himself in there. Salim, however, takes his words to heart and starts to search a way out of his impasse in the present. He veers between here and there, past and present, travelling to different places. For Salim, "Time move[s] in jerks" (224). And in this confusion he finds his way in the world.

What is the heart of darkness Naipaul intends to expose since as he acknowledges in "Conrad's Darkness" that Conrad has been everywhere before him (207-8) ? In the beginning of A Bend in the River Naipaul seems to foreshadow the end of Salim's journey. "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." (3) A nihilistic atmosphere shrouds the entire narrative from the beginning. All characters in A Bend in the River are deracinated to a certain degree. And Salim particularly becomes a ghost from the future to address the present (27). He has been to everywhere and now acts as Naipaul's spokesman for the underdeveloped Third World. For Africa and the Third World countries at large to develop the urgency to renounce the Eurocentric frame of reference is here underscored. For Africa, if not civilizations, to evolve, "the new thing in the river" (46) , the water hyacinths, which to Africans is another enemy, transplanted from abroad maladapts to the bush-and-jungle way of life needs to be uprooted and cleared away. A Bend in the River proposes a plea for multiple forms of developments and an imperative of heterogeneities. Transplantation of water hyacinth that clogs the flow of African river illustrates Naipauls's apprehension that the Western model does not fit.

Notes

¹ Naipaul's reminiscence of his father's influence is documented in his latest Reading and Writing, see p.7, 8, 17-9.

² See Reading and Writing, p.8, 9,17-8. And The Return of Eva Peron, p. 199-200.

³ Wilson Harris's lecture was first delivered to the London West Indian Students' Union in May 1964. The lecture text referred to here is reprinted in M. G. Cooke, ed. Modern Black Novelists. Eaglewood Cliffs, N. J.,: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

⁴ Nana Wilson-Tagoe, Historical Thought and Literary Representation in West Indian Literature. Gainsville: UP of Florida, 1998.

⁵ See Lynda Prescott, "Past and Present Darkness: Sources for V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River", Modern Fiction Studies, 30.3 (Autumn 1984) :547-60.

⁶ In his On the Margins Timothy Weiss remarks that "Huismans represents a certain Western viewpoint that looks at Africa as a museum (or wildlife reserve) rather than as a changing, human world of cultures in conflict and collision" (188).

⁷ Weiss also notices the dichotomy of light and darkness used in the narrative. The following example also testifies to this dominant metaphor of lightness.

⁸ Joshi notes that Salim speaks what Naipaul has in mind. "There can be little doubt that Salim's conviction echoes Naipaul's own and represents the end of his own long quest, both in his personal life and in his work, for home and roots." (216)

⁹ Mustafa sees "A New King" as a "factual" base to establish a sense of historicity for A Bend in the River (142). See also Rob Nixon's London Calling, especially p.98-104.

¹⁰ Joshi comments on Indar's only function is his impassioned speech to Salim: "It is almost as if Naipaul gets so carried away by the need to say what he feels on this subject that he cannot be bothered with inventing the proper fictional context for Indar's statements. Nothing else can explain the passion and the deep involvement with Indar that this chapter conveys. Nothing certainly in the character of Indar as projected in the book prepares adequately for such a vehement outburst." (217-18)

¹¹ The inconsistency in Indar's character further endorses Joshi's comment. See Note 10.

Works Cited

Harris, Wilson. "Tradition and the West Indian Novel." Modern Black Novelists. Ed. M. G. Cooke. Eaglewood, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Joshi, Chandra. V. S. Naipaul: The Voice of Exile. New Delhi; Sterling Publishers, 1994.

Mustafa, Fawzia. V. S. Naipaul. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

Naipaul, V. S. A Bend in the River. New York: Vintage, 1979.

-----. The Return of Eva Peron with the Killings in Trinidad. London: Penguin, 1981.

-----. Reading and Writing: A Personal Account. New York: New York Review Books, 2000.

Nixon, Rob. London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.

Prescott, Lynda. "Past and Present Darkness: Sources for V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River." Modern Fiction Studies 30.3 (Autumn 1984) : 547-60.

Weiss, Timothy. On the Margins: The Art of Exile in V. S. Naipaul. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992.