“La feria de Junio”

a lycée full of Ferdinands made me nervous.

As elsewhere, that which cannot be interpreted is readily ascribed a menacing quality. Eclecticism is said to form the substance of his character:

He had since learned to accept all sides of himself and all sides of the country; he rejected nothing. . . . He was at home in every setting; he accepted every situation; and he was himself everywhere.

A failure to comprehend him is implied by a reliance on the traditional image of the mask to describe his physiognomy, with its suggestions of impassivity and concealment: "I saw the whites o f his eyes, and I thought I saw the comers of his mouth pulling back in a smile. That face, that reminder of frightening masks

In his face I felt I could see the starting point of certain kinds of African mask, in which features were simplified and strengthened; and, with memories of those masks, I thought I saw a special distinction in his features.

When Ferdinand is not impassive, he seems prone to hysteria: "His face had been like a mask at the beginning. Now he was showing his f r e n z y W h e n Salim confronts him over the fraudulent collection of money, "Ferdinand’s eyes went bright, and the whites showed clearly. . . . He was spitting with rage; his sense of injury had driven him mad".^“

Bend in the River, p. 228.

Bend in the River, p. 74. ®^A Bend in the River, p. 55. ^^A Bend in the River, pp. 170-1. ^^A Bend in the River, p. 64. ^^A Bend in the River, p. 43. ^^A Bend in the River, p. 291.

The doubts and mystery which surround the details of the novel’s political action form an element of its political analysis. The novel is concerned with the workings of tyranny; and, like

M idnight’s Children, it implies that there is a symbiotic relation in a dictatorship between a disregard for the truth and violations of law and rights. Things are put to improper uses; officials are seen as failing to perform their functions; and newspapers don’t report the news: they either misrepresent and elide the facts or peddle propaganda, aggrandizing the Big Man. In prison, Salim reflects on the oblivion in which atrocities may be engulfed: "I remembered what Raymond used to say — about events being forgotten, lost, swallowed up".^°' Historical amnesia is seen, in part, as willed, and as producing the violence inflicted on monuments, which expresses a rage against the past.

The Big Man is at first mentioned casually by Salim, but becomes an increasingly pervasive presence. This recalls the way in which, in Things Fall Apart, the English initially appear as the stuff of rumour or legend, but progressively invade the territory of the novel and the society — a movement which culminates in the sudden shift in perspective at the end, to the consciousness of the District Commissioner. The President is depicted as a remote "guiding intelligence"^^ behind the apparent chaos of events, who brings an ambiguous and sinister kind of order, which involves copious bloodshed. His imagery is based on Mobutu’s style of leadership — the blend of African and European dress, the accoutrements of the chief — and he reproduces the contradictions Naipaul ascribes to Mobutu in "A New King for the Congo": "He is the modernizer and he is also the African who has rediscovered his African soul. H e’s conservative, revolutionary, every thing Like Mobutu, he seeks to conjure up a modem country out of the void, as an assertion of pride and as a cure for the wounds of the colonial period. Eventually it comes to seem to Salim that "we all were serving him".^°^ His voice is heard directly only late on in the novel, and shocks by virtue of its crude populism:^®^ its message of hatred recalls Orwell’s depiction of the political uses of the manipulation of hatred in 1984?^ The Big Man is due to visit the town at the bend in the river; Ferdinand anticipates that his presence will amount to a loosing

^°'/4 Bend in the River, p. 286.

Bend in the River, p. 84.

Bend in the River, p. 149.

Bend in the River, p. 200.

Bend in the River, p. 224.

206 Orwell, an author like himself whose output comprises a substantial element of non­

fiction and a concern with politics, Naipaul has declared: "Orwell remains very interesting . . . He is the most imaginative writer, most imaginative man in English history" (Interviewed by Bharati Mukherjee and Robert Boyers, p. 11), a contention which Naipaul justifies by arguing that Orwell questions the English class system, and discusses aspects of colonial experience.

of "mere anarchy"?®^ The depiction of the increasing influence of the Big Man is compatible with Irving H owe’s definition of the workings o f the political novel - his sense that its drama unfolds in the tension it sets up between the personal and the political, in the conflict it creates between the abstract forces of ideology and private experience.^”^ The conclusion of A Bend in the River

comes as something of an anti-climax, with Salim resolving this tension by fleeing the country for the security of his community in exile. The possibility of escape belies his sense that he has no refuge or home; the Big Man is diminished by Salim’s ability to flee.

A Bend in the River seeks to consider the basis of its own viewpoint, and to meditate on the validity of the outsider’s perspective. Salim is a different kind of outsider to the protagonists o f Guerrillas and In a Free State', he is less of a transient, and he has made more o f an investment in his adopted society. Nevertheless, he remains an outsider, and mixes with other outsiders. Naipaul establishes a contrast between his behaviour and that of Metty, who integrates more successfully than Salim. Salim is therefore part-insider and part-outsider, a position in which Naipaul portrays himself when he visits India.

While Salim feels that it is only thanks to Europeans that he is able to understand the history of his community, the novel gives rise to a contrasting recognition of the limitations of an external perspective. Like Naipaul in The Enigma o f Arrival, and Meredith in Guerrillas, Indar explains that he was initially unable to interpret his social milieu in England, or even to perceive the passing of the seasons. Salim is able to piece together only an unsatisfactory and fragmented idea of London from his forays up from the Underground. Their restricted view of English life recalls the viewpoint of Santosh, or of the narrator of "Tell Me Who to Kill": the ironic effect of the writings in question presupposes that the reader will see beyond the limitations of the narrator’s view. Such ironies are made less easy to detect — in so far as they are detectable at all — in the representation of Africa and the Caribbean in Guerrillas, A Bend in the River and "In a Free State" by the difficulty there is in determining how far the author’s viewpoint transcends the limitations of his characters’ perceptions in these three works. Naipaul seems at times to imply that it is only Third World migrants in metropolitan countries who cannot read their adopted environment.

A Bend in the River is ambivalent towards Father Huismans’ anthropological eye for the wonder and richness of African carving. Contradictions are associated with his position: he appears to treasure the products of traditional African civilization just as much as he does those of the

^°^W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming", which provides the title and the epigraph to Achebe’s

Things Fall Apart.

colonial presence. He sees himself as "part of an immense flow of h i s t o r y " , a n d it appears that it is his confident belief in progress which allows him to indulge in an affection for traditional societies. His story is similar to Naipaul's conception of Gale Benson’s: security brings him into contact with danger. His viewpoint is portrayed as incomplete and irresponsible as well as enviable:

And yet, though Father Huismans knew so much about African religion and went to such trouble to collect his pieces, I never felt that he was concerned about Africans in any other way; he seemed indifferent to the state of the country. I envied him that indifference; and I thought, after I left him that day, that his Africa, of bush and river, was different from mine. His Africa was a wonderful place, full of new things.^'®

This last sentence recalls an allusion to Pliny made earlier in the novel {"Semper Aliquid Novi")?'^^

After his death, Salim both pays tribute to Father Huisman’s view — "a little bit of the world was lost with him"^’^ — and questions its basis: "His idea of his civilization was also like his vanity

Salim is not without ambivalence in his assessment of the point of view entertained by the foreigners on the Domain. In so far as it is critical of African society, it is treated as perspicacious. The outsider’s perspective causes him to reassess his life in the town: "And really, looking at the place with his [Indar’s] eyes, I was amazed at the little I had been living with. And I had stopped seeing so much".^’'* Salim participates in the view held by the people on the Domain, which offers a new idea of the possibilities of human association, transcending the meanly mundane considerations of economic survival which engross the inhabitants of the town. The Domain initially seems to satisfy Salim’s longings for a wider world. In the light of day, however, his notion of the glamour of the Domain is observed by him to be fraudulent; the shabbiness, cracks and dilapidation of its buildings are subjected to merciless narrative scrutiny, and suggest deeper flaws: "What fantasies I had built around this room!"^’^ The Domain is thereafter seen as a place where unrealistic and romantic notions of Africa’s future are nurtured. It is a "hoax", though an appealing one.

It was always reassuring to return to the town I knew, to get away from that Africa of words and ideas as it existed on the Domain (and from which, often, Africans were physically absent). But the Domain, and the glory and the social excitements

Bend in the River, p. 70.

Bend in the River, p. 68.

Bend in the River, p. 42. ^’^A Bend in the River, p. 89. ^'^A Bend in the River, p. 90.

Bend in the River, p. 126. ^'^A Bend in the River, p. 184.

of the life there, always called me back.^"^

The fantasies of the Domain are reliant on the security of its inhabitants: "You couldn’t listen to sweet songs about injustice unless you expected Justice and received it much of the time"/'^

The treatment of the Domain is in keeping with the way in which Naipaul elsewhere portrays what he refers to as liberal delusion, by which he means a tendency to sentimentalize and romanticize Third World societies. The portrait of Raymond is designed to illustrate Naipaul’s proposition that there are

chaps in universities who make a speciality of putting things in political grooves. These are men who think they have a calling. They make investments in a political-academic stock market. Some are at present trading in African futures, creating a little calling.^'^

Raymond is the "Big Man’s white man",^’^ and, dependent on the President’s favour, he lacks the security which Naipaul customarily attributes to Europeans abroad; a kind of pathos attaches to him when he falls out of favour but remains constant in his misguided allegiance to the President.

It is a charge which has been made against Naipaul that, secure in the possession of a return air ticket, he is able to indulge in despair about the prospects of the Third World countries he visits and writes about. In A Bend in the River, unusually, Naipaul thinks himself into the position of those who are left behind: "Satire like this from people who were just passing through, . . . people who were safe it their own countries, satire like this was sometimes w o u n d i n g " . T h e novel shows an awareness of the limitations both of a critical and of an unduly approving view, and of the different forms of blindness produced by an insufficient knowledge of, and by an excessive familiarity with, a given society. There is some sense in the novel of a play of various viewpoints: Salim wonders, "Was there a truth outside men? Didn’t men make the truth for themselves?"^^’ Ultimately, however, although the novel can be found to question its own assumptions, the scruples that are associated with such questioning give the impression of amounting only to cosmetic gestures. Salim is presented as a narrator who combines the virtues both of insider and outsider, his clear-sightedness set off by the delusions of the Domain. A range of opinions regarding the place is made to appear possible in the novel, but it is the voice of disenchantment which carries the greatest weight in the novel; the events it describes justify nothing other than pessimism. No other viewpoint can begin to challenge the authority of Salim’s

Bend in the River, p. 135.

Bend in the River, p. 139.

^‘^Interviewed by Bharati Mukherjee and Robert Boyers, p. 6. ^’^A Bend in the River, p. 136.

^^A Bend in the River, p. 210. ^^‘A Bend in the River, p. 135.

narration, and the action of the novel bears out his judgements.

A Bend in the River is deeply ambivalent in its account of European society. Europe represents a lost ideal of peace and order, but has also given rise to a junk civilization. The novel suggests that its deeds fall short of its ideals; Europe itself has succumbed to the pull of disorder, and it exports naive ideologues to the rest of the world. In setting out to discredit what Naipaul sees as their sentimental delusions about Africa, the novel draws on an older set of myths. Africa remains what it has always been to Europeans — a threateningly chaotic place where destructive forces are unleashed without restraint. The novel employs traditional images of Africa to give symbolic form to a confusion and disruption not confined to Africa; it recalls Naipaul’s portrayal of the chaos which afflicts other Third World societies, and gives expression to his perception of a crisis in metropolitan civilization. The African setting of the novel supplies Naipaul with a familiar stock of images of social breakdown in which to clothe his pessimism and fear of disorder.

Five

THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND REVISION

Much of Naipaul’s writing — both his fiction and non-fiction — draws on autobiographical material, to furnish overlapping accounts of his life. These various accounts serve, in some measure, to revise each other. This process of revision affects both the relationship between Naipaul’s works, and the structure of The Enigma o f Arrival. It is possible to perceive analogies between the practice of revision and certain of the motives which produce an autobiography. To write an autobiography is, in a sense, to engage in an act of revision — an act which involves the reworking of a life, the editing out of unsuitable material, and a tidying-up of the confusions of experience according to some ordering principle. The writing of autobiography is shaped by an interplay between the desire to assert a connection between a past and present self — to establish a continuity over time which could be thought to define the very notion of identity — and an opposing sense of distance from the earlier self. The revision of a literary text similarly implies a dialogue between past and present selves, and a continuity of concerns — those of the earlier writer remain those of the later writer - which is balanced by the assumption that the older writer is better able to express what the younger writer has endeavoured to articulate, or that the emphases are now different. Revision need not involve a disowning of the writing of the earlier self; the work of the younger writer is not necessarily superseded by the efforts of the older. Both autobiography and revision invite meditations on the nature of identity within difference.

The Enigma o f Arrival combines elements of fiction and of non-fiction, and blends autobiography with material not directly concerned with the personality of the author. It interweaves a description of Naipaul’s development as a writer with a detailed narrative of rebirth in the Wiltshire countryside, in the course of which the lives of the local inhabitants are subjected to Naipaul’s intense and wondering scrutiny. Attention is distributed equally between the consciousness which perceives and the object of its perceptions: the writer is "defined by his writing discoveries, his ways of seeing".’ The Wiltshire sections have a fullness of detail which suggests that they derive from observation, but they also incorporate elements of invention, as Naipaul indicates:

There are two kinds of truths: I couldn’t take the real life I saw in Wiltshire and hang philosophical ideas about change on it. You can’t do it, legally or imaginatively, so you create your own construct, which sums up the truth, to talk

about flux and so on?

The Enigma o f Arrival is concerned to record with scrupulous fidelity Naipaul’s initial impressions of the Wiltshire landscape, and faithfully recapitulates his every erroneous assumption concerning his new location. The first line of the book introduces the subject o f perception which is the work’s abiding preoccupation: "For the first four days it rained. I could hardly see where I was".^ The work proceeds to depict with painstaking clarity what it was that Naipaul failed to see, and the process of learning to interpret it: "I saw what I saw very clearly. But I didn’t know