Fictional Presentation Naipaul example essay topic

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 rooted ness 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 un wavered 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's tresses 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 historic ized 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 trajectory 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 Euro chronology.

For the West Indians this ancestral connection is severed by Western imperialism's. 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: Me tty, In dar, 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 lychee, an action typical of imperialistic exotic ization 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-territorialize d, de contextualized, and stripped of life and meaning, these dated masks produce an anachronism to Salim: "So old, so new' (65)..