"The World Is What It Is": Naipaul's quarrel with Conrad in a bend in the river

Abstract

V. S. Naipaul's engagement with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) in his 1979 novel, A Bend in the River, has elicited much comment, discussion often taking its cue from Naipaul's remark that Conrad "had been everywhere before me" ("Conrad's Darkness" 4). Naipaul does indeed traverse Conradian tropes and territory to create his dyspeptic vision of an Africa where all efforts to modernize and develop inevitably sink back into primeval chaos and "darkness." It is precisely this reliance on a mythicized Africa, packed with inflated generalization, that attracts the ire of postcolonial critics. Naipaul's vision of post-independent Africa remains substantially the Africa of Conrad (cf. Coetzee 5). There is irritated puzzlement and genuine anguish among contemporary Africanists about why Naipaul should recapitulate a Conradian approach to writing about Africa eighty years after the publication of Heart of Darkness.