garden trampled: Or, the liquidation of African culture in V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River, The

College Literature, Oct 1996 by Wise, Christopher

INTRODUCTION The extent of Joseph Conrad's impact on both Chinua Achebe and V.S. Naipaul has been copiously documented by both literary critics and scholars, and even by the authors themselves in numerous occasional writings, interviews, and literary essays.1 But if Achebe's Things Fall Apart contests and negates Conrad's previous negation and distortion of Africa and Africans in Heart of Darkness, Naipaul's more recent A Bend in the River not only reaffirms Conrad's more pessimistic-if not overtly racialist-perspective on Africans and their history, it also serves as the historical and determinate negation of Achebe's now widely influential (but not conclusive) negation of Conrad's novel. Like the history of the novel in Europe then (or anywhere, for that matter), the history of the novel in Africa involves a basic process of determinate negation in which one literary work often criticizes and complicates another. In other words, as competing ideologemes or discursive formations that seek (however unsuccessfully) to resolve the contradictions and crises of material necessity within their very formal or generic structures, novels such as Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Naipaul's A Bend in the River tend to demonstrate not the appropriateness or finality of any one structural variant or "cultural dominant" over another (Achebe's politically engaged realism versus, say, Naipaul's cynical or epic modernism),2 rather they tend to demonstrate the bewildering complexity of recent history itself within the postcolonial African context.

For this reason among others, the contemporary caricature of Naipaul as postcolonial "mandarin" (i.e., pariah) does not really do justice to his complexity and importance as a writer of the Third World, especially in Rob Nixon's London Calling: VS. Naipaul, Post-colonial Mandarin. Many of the remarks that follow are therefore intended as a dialogical response to critics like Nixon (but also Peter Nazareth, Edward Said, and others), who see only bad faith, cynicism, and "hatchet-jobbing" in the writings of Naipaul. To contest the by-now familiar stigmatization of Naipaul as postcolonial mandarin, I will seek instead to excavate the historical truth-content within Naipaul's controversial novel A Bend in the River, thereby dialectically preserving it as a crippled monad of historical truth.3 More specifically, I will argue that in diametrical opposition to Achebe's appropriation of traditional Igbo folk-culture in Things Fall Apart, Naipaul's A Bend in the River proposes a wholly different but no less significant situational response to the predicament of modern African history and culture: whereas Achebe advocates the reinvestment of semantic richness into the traditional cultures of Africa's past, adopting a hermeneutic position that avoids European and essentializing forms of ethnocentrism,4 Naipaul paradoxically seeks the regeneration of African society through the systematic destruction or liquidation of its traditional cultures, a strategy that is a hallmark of European modernist aesthetics.5 Though problematic at best, Naipaul's suggestion that Africans today must deliberately "trample" upon the gardens of their past, eschewing all that is not absolutely modern, is not merely reactionary; it also belies Naipaul's utopian hope for the future redemption of African culture and history.

NAIPAUL AS "DISINTERESTED" TRUTH-SEEKER

In the published results of a round table discussion between Edward Said, Conor Cruise O'Brien, and John Lukacs, Said fueled recent debates on Naipaul by attacking Naipaul as a racist and self-hating flatterer of Western white liberals. "[Naipaul] is a third worlder denouncing his own people," Said stated, "not because they are victims of imperialism, but because they seem to have an innate flaw, which is that they are not whites" (Lukacs 79). Much of the disagreement between Said and other discussion participants centered on John Lukacs's attempts to defend Naipaul as a disinterested "truth-seeker" who impartially criticizes nearly everyone he writes about (68). In countering Lukacs's argument, Said argued that Naipaul does not impartially "tell the truth;" rather he flatters the prejudices of "ignorant" Western audiences that have of late grown weary of the problems of the Third World and of the decolonization process itself (79-80).

Taking his cue from Said, Rob Nixon has argued in London Calling that "Lukacs's style of reasoning [in describing Naipaul as a "truth-seeker"] is characteristic of the way attention is diverted from any admission of Naipaul's strong, well-established position in England and the effect that might have on his `neutrality"' (181 ft 37). In fact, Nixon even catalogues contemporary critical response to Naipaul into two separate camps: those neo-colonial critics (like Lukacs) who tend to legitimate Naipaul's claims to objectivity and those more responsible critics (like Said) who "resist the recurrent style of reasoning about Naipaul's disinterestedness" (33). Nixon further argues that, while the former camp is made up of British and American critics, the latter camp tends to consist of South Asians, Indians, West Indians, Latin Americans, Arabs, and Africans-those Third World intellectuals who are fully aware of the "naked bias" in Naipaul's writings.6