Time In The Field: V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma Of Arrival As Periplus

1 Time in the Field: The Enigma of Arrival as Periplus. The anonymous narrator of V.S Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival has set himself upon a voyage of discovery in time. The walks about the hills and fields around his secluded rural cottage are not conducted toward awareness of space but rather as movements in time through layers of remembrance and imagination. The visual field he is met with in these walks is a multi-stratum expanse of history, not of linear progression and dates but individual experiences and interactions. Outside the main location of the novel, the farm in Wiltshire, the episodes around the London boarding house and the trips to and from Trinidad and Africa are as well exercises in historical manifestation where emotion and memory are exposed in a prose monologue on the nature of selfhood in time. I propose that this is the ‘enigma of arrival’, in that arrival does not happen so much in the spatial sense of actual coming to a place, but rather it occurs in time, with the gradual realization that one has become a feature of that place and it has become part of the individual’s imaginative and emotional awareness. This characteristic of the text I would compare to the periplus1, an ancient narrated map in which the map as written text presents the temporal locations of the traveller, rather than the omniscient visualized overview of the cartographic map2. As the traveller progresses through the temporal narrative of the periplus the space which that narrative represents is simultaneously transversed. In reading The Enigma of Arrival as periplus the narrator is identified as an explorer and the creator of the map. This performs a shift in the colonial experience in one sense as the narrator has come from Trinidad, a Crown Colony, to the heart of the fading British Empire. In Trinidad he was a member of an Indian family that had been brought to the island as workers by the English. He has been educated by the system administered by the English and has a highly developed context of English history and literature. Despite this familiarity his time in England is portrayed as one of discovery and this is the how the periplus is expressed, not necessarily as a navigational device for others to follow but rather as a report or testimony of one man’s experiences in discovery. This unfolding of a landscape or location in a temporal sequence occurs throughout the narrative of the novel but to take just one example I choose the narrators approaching one of the major symbolic structures of England, Stonehenge: The grassy way, the old river bed (as I thought) sloped up, so that the eye was led to the middle sky; and on either side were the slopes of the downs, widening

2 out and up against the sky. On the one side there were cattle; on the other side, beyond a pasture, a wide empty area, there were young pines, a little forest. The setting felt ancient, the impression was of space, unoccupied land, the beginning of things. There were no houses to be seen, only the wide grassy way, the sky above it, and the wide slopes on either side. (Naipaul 1987:15) By making reference to the path of the eye it is as if the narrator is the exterior observer looking at a painting rather than standing in a rural landscape. The vision is acknowledged as a subjective one, “as I thought”, and the principles and judgments of that speaking subject shape a central part of the narrative, in such words as “ancient” and “empty” the emotional values of the place are suggested. These carry connotations of mystery, origins, and insignificance on the part of the narrator in comparison with the grand space he is occupying at the time of the relating. The significance of the narrated space is registered in the encompassing temporal terms of “ancient” and “beginning”. The grammatical tempus of the passage is one of continuous past tense, the experience is related as a recorded event spoken of in hindsight as a journey now completed. It is this construction of the temporal in the negotiation of space that connects the subjective narration of the text to the periplus reading. In the Enigma of Arrival the temporal manifestation of space is also represented by narrative descriptions of seeing time preserved in a landscape. In passages reminiscent of Hardy’s Return of the Native the earth is given a historical memory which can be read by the aware witness, …my feeling for the age of the earth and the oldness of man’s possession of it was always with me. A vast sacred burial ground, bounded by the sky – of what activity those barrows and tumuli spoke, what numbers, what organization, what busyness in these now virtually empty downs! (Naipaul 1987:24). It is not a covered over (cement) or exploited (technology) earth but an earth that is permeable and breeched, with openings such as graves which provide a texture which can be entered into with understanding. In the more contemporary army training school at Larkhill there is also an effort to imbue the earth with a narrative based in history but it is not of openings and underground. Here on the surface the trees are planted to represent the positions of the ships at the Battle of Trafalgar “or was it Waterloo” (Naipaul 1987:24). The unreliable narrator shifts the emphasis of this example from the old to the newer and doing so

3 builds a stronger connection to the ‘natural’ manifestations of geographic narrative as opposed to those made during recorded history. Some features of place are more “purer” in their connection with the place and therefore their manifestations of their narratives are as well. In the Wiltshire episodes the most profound connection to the landscape is expressed as the synthesis “Of literature and antiquity and the landscape [of which] Jack and his garden and his geese and cottage and his father-in-law seemed emanations.” (Naipaul 1987:25). It is by degrees that all are held by the place and must act out their time accordingly, including the narrator of the The Enigma of Arrival. However the sense of this narrative matrix being under threat is also included in the progression of time which the spatial landscape contains and nurtures. The beginning of change in the lives of the characters is manifest in conjunction with changes in the landscape; “I looked for cracks and flaws in it and hoped that the little abrasions and water erosions I noticed would spread and make it impossible – fantasy taking over from logic – for the machines to lay down a new asphalt mixture.” (Naipaul 1987: 44). In this passage there is the naïve wish (fantasy) that if the physical space can be maintained then the temporal state will be so as well. The nature of this change is compared to that of Columbus bringing unevenness into “the evenness of history on the other side” (Naipaul 1987:44) with his voyages to the Americas. In this change from perfectly even time and proper form there is a particular conceptualization of nature which is important. Once again nature is the pre-arrival untouched state, a purity which is constructed as before the history of those using machines and covering over the earth. The sterility of the imposed concrete skin is taken up in several places in The Enigma of Arrival such as the appeal over Jack’s garden demands “But surely below all that concrete over his garden some seed, some root would survive, and one day perhaps…” (Naipaul 1987:86). It is as if the anonymous narrator needs to see the land in order to be able to read it and map it, and not being able to read it means that it has been included into the uneven time of those that use the machines. The gardener is also such a character who can read the space of nature being a “magician, herbalist, in touch with the mystery of seed and root and graft. (Naipaul 1987:214). This mythologizing of the garden and the gardener provides for a strong modernist flavour to the work and is also consistent with The Enigma of Arrival being a periplus map developed around the subjective

4 emotions and memories of the narrator. In the same way that author of an ancient periplus was both story teller and guide. Like the returning traveller here we have a man telling us the landscape as he saw it through all the subjectivity and we may follow his narrative map in order to reach a similar, but perhaps not the same destination. The periplus reading of the text which constructs the map as being provided for the reader by the omniscient narrator is a non-diegetic textual characteristic. In it not overtly stated in The Enigma of Arrival that the narrator is mapping the Wiltshire Downs or the journey from Trinidad to London via New York. In many sections of the text the mapping is not a physical description of the topography or physical features encountered by the travelling narrator, rather it is about the emotional or connotative reactions he experiences in these places. There is until the very end of the novel an unfolding of new ground in the sense of the periplus due to an emotional map merging with the descriptive map being constructed by the narrator. This psycho-geographic mapping can be broken down into well defined segments in the non-diegetic landscape: Jack’s Garden and Wiltshire being allegoric with memories of childhood and birth, The Journey section being connected to Africa and growth and education, The Ivy being based on people, and depicting the adult stage and society. Finally The Rooks is heavily laden with themes around community and old age and death. To move through each of these stages is to map a life, both as it progresses and in retrospect. The final chapter The Ceremony of Farwell is the funeral and the departure from the great map planet earth that is; “Our sacred world – the sanctities that had been handed down to us as children by our families, the sacred places of our childhood, sacred because we see them as children and had filled them with wonder, places doubly and trebly sacred to me because far away in England I had lived in them imaginatively over many books and had in my fantasy set in those places the very beginning of things, had constructed out of them a fantasy home…” (Naipaul 1987.318) Here the alignment between place, emotion and the subjective experience based on imagination and fantasy is synthesised. The being in a place is not just about physical presence but psychic presence whereby one can “live in them imaginatively” while being “far away”, as we all construct periploi maps in our heads, subjective versions of place. Central to every one of these subjective places is time as once we have captured the image of a place in out minds it does not progress outside the time we experienced it. The narrative

5 associated with a particular place becomes that place in our imaginative recollection of it. In the case of the narrator of The Enigma of Arrival he had been given a pre-constructed “official” version of England as a subject of the British Empire, going to school in Trinidad and gaining a scholarship to attend Oxford University as a young Indian West Indian Commonwealth citizen. With his physical arrival at the places he had learnt and imagined about from reading books he begins his own synthesis of knowledge, fantasy and the experiences undergone in the place itself. Just as a place becomes a feature of living memory and imagination, the periplus is also a living narrative for those who follow it as a map. The descriptive narrative provided by Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival is his periplus but this in turn goes on to feed the imagination of others. Of those who read the text perhaps some even become wanting to experience in the physical the image they have from it of the Wiltshire Downs. Just as the narrator and the author as well had a desire at early stages of their lives to travel to the heart of the British Commonwealth and experience it directly. Naipaul does employ stereotypes and the literary sources he sites in the text show his canon of literature is clearly conservative in many ways, but the quality of the prose and the craft of his language is evident. Of the book the author says “It's about England, a kind of country life, but not as others write about it. It sets ideas about country life on their head.” (The Guardian Saturday September 8, 20013). This again is a subjective appraisal, even coming from the author, but a periplus map is acknowledged as subjective (they all bear the tile of their author) and perhaps for this reason it was abandoned in navigation in favour of the visualised map projections we use today. The periplus instead could be seen as the ancestor of the travel book, for which Naipaul is also well known.

1

A periplus (literally "a sailing-around' in Greek, roughly corresponding to the Latin navigatio, a "ship-voyage") in the ancient navigation of Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans was a manuscript document that listed in order the ports and coastal landmarks, with approximate distances between, that the captain of a vessel could expect to find along a shore. Several examples of periploi have survived; the Periplus of Hanno the Carthaginian being the oldest known (6th century BCE). 2

“A periplus is a map that projects the stages of a journey as they succeed each other for the traveller, as opposed to a map that gives an image from the outside and above the terrain of every point on it simultaneously. Such a map forms a temporal narrative rather than a spatial one.” Conner Steven, Postmodern Culture. An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Oxford, Blackwell, 1989 p118. 3

Found at http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,548473,00.html