Description

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 periplus , 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 map . As the traveller progresses through the temporal narrative of the periplus the space which that narrative represents is simultaneously transversed.