V. S. Naipaul - Critical Essay by Christopher Wise

Critical Essay by Christopher Wise

SOURCE: Wise, Christopher. “The Garden Trampled: or, the Liquidation of African Culture in V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River.” College Literature 23, no. 3 (October 1996): 58-72.

In the following essay, Wise contrasts the views of Chinua Achebe and Naipaul on the subject of modern African history and culture as evinced in Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Naipaul's A Bend in the River.

Works of art can fully embody the promesse du bonheur only when they have been uprooted from their native soil and have set out along the path to their own destruction. Proust recognized this. This procedure which today relegates every work of art to the museum, even Picasso's most recent sculpture, is irreversible. It is not solely reprehensible, however, for it presages a situation in which art, having completed its estrangement from human ends, returns to life.

—Adorno, Prisms

In the beginning it is like...
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