The Diasporic Experience: Home and Identity in V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River

• Main Author: 張惠菁
• Other Authors: 劉建基
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/64408591927640177969

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 外國語文研究所 === 94 === While most postcolonial writers and critics such as Salman Rushdie and Homi K. Bhabha celebrate the concepts of hybridity, heterogeneity, multiplicity and colonial mimicry, V. S. Naipaul’s works instead reveal his nostalgia for the loss of “Englishness” and his longing for singularity rather than plurality. Apparently, he is not popular with many postcolonial critics such as Edward Said, Chinua Achebe, and Derek Walcott. Unlike Irving Howe, who admires Naipaul for his disinterested representation of the instability, violence, poverty, and corruption of the Third World, they criticize Naipaul’s allegiance to the West and his attempt to court European readers. On the one hand, Naipaul’s bipolar essentialism should be put into question because it reduces complex social relations to absolute and fixed divisions and also limits the possibilities of the social mobility. On the other hand, too much emphasis on the problematic of Naipaul’s ideologies will reduce the contradictions, complexity and ambivalence in Naipaul’s works. Thus, rather than just accusing Naipaul of his bias against postcolonial societies, the thesis attempts to have a deep and comprehensive understanding of Naipaul’s A Bend in the River (hereafter BR). The thesis aims to analyze Naipaul’s BR from the perspective of “diaspora.” The concept of diaspora is annexed for anti-essentialism and anti-nation. However, in BR, the two protagonists, Salim and Indar, cannot embrace but try to get rid of their hybrid selves. Either to assume the new solidarity in the host country or to obtain a sense of belonging to the ancestral homeland is the way out. Their journey from East Africa to the interior of Africa, and finally to London reveals their reminiscence of the imperial past and their desire to leave the “margin” and head for the “center.” Their nostalgia for the loss of “Englishness” can be seen as the result of modernity, brought about by imperialism. Besides, as colonial subjects, they are not simply alienated but also made to alienate themselves; they adopt the identity of the “Other” as opposed to the “Self” that the British Empire represents. To solve their inferiority complex brought about by their self-alienation, they make efforts to imitate colonizers, seeing their success solely in terms of their acceptance by the “center.” However, it is never easy for the outsiders to assimilate themselves to host countries. Failing to making himself part of the “center,” Indar instead attempts to regain his sense of belonging to the ancestral homeland. However, the India he experiences is different from what he has imagined. The Indians he sees try to make themselves look like Britons but they are unable to shake off what the caste system has imposed on them. Indar’s disgust at his ancestral homeland should not be merely attributed to his belief in the hierarchical binarism of West/East. Instead, his contempt for those Indians can also be regarded as self-contempt. He sees himself in those Indians, aware that he is one of them, who dress like Britons but always feel alienated and inferior in the “center.” The theoretically celebrated concepts of “mimicry” and “hybridty” become marks of cultural fracture in Naipaul’s BR. Salim’s essentialism is reflected not only in his quest for home but also in his efforts to maintain his identities constructed within the imperial discourse. As a colonial subject, Salim has identified himself with an ideal image, a white male bourgeois. However, after the withdrawal of the Empire, the substantive and privileged “I” Salim has taken for granted is threatened as a result of political disorder. In the process of restoring what he sees as the coherent and unified self, he is somehow aware that the seeming fixed and essentialized self is constructed in his relation to others and is subject to change in different historical and cultural contexts. Nevertheless, Salim disavows what he has realized and keeps struggling to maintain his identity. The reason is that only by doing so can he at least have a secure sense of self in such a turbulent world. The foregoing argument is neither to show my disapproval of critics’ harsh remarks about Naipaul nor to make excuses for Naipaul’s tendency towards essentialism. Instead, the thesis not only criticizes Naipaul’s belief in essentialism but also explores the reasons why essentialism holds an appeal to Naipaul. The thesis is comprised of five chapters. The first chapter presents critics’ attitudes towards Naipaul and his works, which can be divided into two opposed camps, and points out why BR can be textually analyzed from the perspective of “diaspora.” The second chapter provides overviews of the term “diaspora.” Particularly, Avtar Brah’s and James Clifford’s theoretical and methodological approaches to “diaspora” are mostly stressed for they help illustrate the way the politics of home and identity will be dealt with in the following two chapters. Besides, the emergence of Indian diaspora in history will also be discussed in this chapter. The third chapter focuses on the politics of home. Bhabha’s discourse on modernity in postcolonial world and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1967) explain the two protagonists’ ambivalent and contradictory attitudes towards their motherland and ancestral homeland. By discussing the reasons for their imperialist ideologies, disclosed in the process of uprootings and regroundings, this chapter aims to present the dilemma colonial subjects lapse into, that is, inferiority complex, self-contempt and homing desire. Thus, “diaspora” cannot be merely seen as a celebratory term. Instead, in-betweenness, homelessness, multiple belongings, and mimicry anguish diasporans rather than empower them. The fourth chapter explores how diasprans solve their identity crises. This chapter not only explores why the protagonists have identity crises but also criticizes their tendency towards essentialism, emphasizing that identity, as Stuart Hall in his “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” argues, is both a matter of “being” and “becoming.” Though this chapter reveals that identity is constructed rather than fixed, the appeal of essentialism to diasporans should not be subject to the total negation particularly after the discussion of the reasons for diasporans’ identity crises. The fifth chapter is the conclusion of the thesis, briefly explicating the theme of the thesis. This chapter argues that diasporans’ obsession with essentialist notions of “center” and “essence” respectively disclosed in the process of seeking for/returning home and in the process of maintaining his “idealized” identity in BR should not lead to the rash accusation of Naipaul’s imperialist intention. By discussing what leads to Naipaul’s ideological interests, the thesis discloses the dilemma ex-colonials and post-colonial societies may be faced with. The humanistic approach to Naipaul’s work reveals that this very concept of essentialism should be understood in the specific historical context instead of being universally considered negative. The concepts of “hybridity,” “mimicry” and “border crossing” are emphasized and celebrated by most post-colonial critics; however, Naipaul’s BR reveals that those concepts which have inscribed in the two Indian diasporans make them suffer. Rather than accusing Naipaul of the problematic of his ideologies, the thesis attempts to focus on the dilemma both diasporans and postcolonial societies lapse into.