Modern Age - Winter 2016 - 60

MODERN AGE

WINTER 2016

recovery of the higher forms of civilization that comfort and console, and also restrain, men in the face of their own weakness. In A
Bend in the River, Naipaul achieves a brutally honest and insightful
work of fiction and one of particular relevance for our time.
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V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (New York: Vintage, 1980), 3. Subsequent references to
this work will be cited parenthetically in the text.
V. S. Naipaul, "Argentina and the Ghost of Eva Perón, 1972-1991," The Writer and the
World: Essays (New York: Knopf, 2002), 403.
Ibid.
See, for example, Harold Farwell, who finds Naipaul's vision "limited" as a result of the
restriction of the narrative point of view to Salim, the "outsider" in black Africa ("A Bend
in the River: Overview," Reference Guide to English Literature, ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick, 2nd ed.
[Chicago: St. James Press, 1991]). See also Christopher Wise, who suggests that African
culture has been "liquidated" in the novel ("The Garden Trampled: or the Liquidation of
African Culture in V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River: [(De)Colonizing Reading/(Dis)Covering the Other]," College Literature 23, no. 3 [1996]: 58). Neither critic credits Naipaul's
own explanation that as an ethnic Indian from Trinidad, it was impossible for him to
write convincingly from the point of view of a native of central Africa.
Such a recognition scene, in which the vulnerability of a disengaged modern is
revealed, is a familiar element in Naipaul's later writing. It is repeated in his account of
various fictional personae, in autobiographical accounts of his own youth and early
adulthood, and even in his reading of the lives of historical figures such as Mohandas Gandhi. As Naipaul wrote in "Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way," Gandhi's
experience as a student and particularly as a young lawyer in South Africa was unsettling. The shock of South African racial laws "taught him in the most brutal way about
the political shape of the world, and his unprotected place as an Indian in the general
scheme" (A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, An Essay in Five Parts [New York:
Knopf, 2008], 110).
Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul (New
York: Picador, 2008), 177.
A Bend in the River is perhaps the most difficult of Naipaul's novels for critics to evaluate. For many such as Roger A. Berger ("Writing without a Future: Colonial Nostalgia in
V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River," Essays in Literature 22, no. 1 [1995]: 144), Christopher
Wise (op. cit., 58), and Fadwa Abdel Rahman ("V. S. Naipaul: The White Traveler under
the Dark Mask," Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 26 [Annual 2006]: 168), Naipaul
seems a distressing example of a "colonized" writer who has chosen to identity with his
oppressors. Shashi Kamra finds a similarly reductive quality in the novel: the message
that "survival is possible only in power groups" (The Novels of V. S. Naipaul: A Study in
Theme and Form [Delhi: Prestige, 1990], 119). Though more circumspect, Irving Howe's
review of the novel concluded that it offered "no intimations of hope or signals of

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