Naipaul, Postcolonial Identity Politics and Totalitarianism: Zizekian Re-reading of the Novel, a Bend in the River

Abstract

Based on the fictional evidence in the novel A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul, this essay examines how the ‘totalitarian symptoms’ are sustained within the identity politics in the postcolonial world. This interpretation uses the theoretical insight developed in the Zizekian school of thought on totalitarianism as well as the literary evidence given through the observatory eyes of an insideoutsider, namely the main character Salim in the above novel. It then suggests that ‘the Big Man’ (presumably Mobutu in Zaire) displays totalitarian potential when he gradually exploits the fragile nationalism and identity politics inspired by the fantasy of the bush, void of the river and the forest in this imaginary African country for his steady ascend to power. He manipulates the ‘refined’ symbolic background to elevate himself to be an agent-instrument of historical Will, absorbing all the rational content constructed under postcolonial liberalism. The presentation of the totalitarian ‘kingship’ in his regime is such that its unconditional authority demands nothing but submission to its irrational order that ‘externalizes’ the social Other; ‘the foreigners’ and ‘the whites’. The totalitarian madness in the Big Man allows all sorts of irrational violence, murders and plunders performed by his political followers who seek some obscene jouissance that is derived through the violation of symbolic Law. Within the above context, through a critical hermeneutic analysis of this novel, this essay concludes that the ‘fantasy of the bush’ that alienates the social/ethnic Other eventually leads to hysterical rise of totalitarianism that destroys the whole symbolic life in this imaginary African country. The final exodus of the main character Salim indicates that the multi-ethnic composition of the former colonial setting is drastically transforming into something dangerous for traders of foreign origin and is gradually replaced with a monolithic and totalized African hegemony that takes over the life-world in the Bend.