Emilia Ivancu Ways of Seeing, Illusion and Memory’S Time in the Novel the Enigma of Arrival by V

Caietele Echinox, vol. 23, 2012: Imaginaire et illusion 142 Emilia Ivancu Ways of Seeing, Illusion and Memory’s Time in the Novel The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul

1 ABSTRACT “To walk is to lack a place” – this pro- Building on John Berger’s theory regarding position expresses all the essence of V. S. the multiple ways of seeing constitutive of a Naipaul’s works, particularly of The Enig- contemporary work of art, the present paper ma of Arrival, a novel full of verbs and aims to prove that, in the autobiographical phrases denoting movement against a space novel The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Nai- not empty of meaning, on the contrary, but paul (named after a painting of Georgio de empty of warmth and shape, a space which Chirico’s, whose title was given in its turn by could never become a place. Half autobio- Apollinaire), the painting which stands at the graphy, half a novel, The Enigma of Arrival centre of the novel is turned into a personal revolves around the errand of a man who is mirror of the narrator’s life. The painting is trying really hard to make a connection with an illustration of the personal experience of the territory he decides to turn into his dwel- the narrator as regards his relation to the ling place, but all his effort to feel the land, newly discovered territories of Britain, and to feel the spirit of the place remains echo- the history of the place under the aesthetic less and the shivers of solitude and home- experience of the painting and his memory’s lessness become even more acute. The time. Under the aesthetic experience of the stranger who arrives in England comes with painting and his memory’s time, the narra- an imaginary map in his mind, an imaginary tor’s life becomes in the end, a prolongation map which was supposed to become real. of his own experience of the painting, that is This imaginary map induced by the literary a self-projection onto it, which results in a and historical works the character has fed delusionary experience of space and time, himself with for years turns out to be cold and thus of his own life. and deserted, lacking the will to open to the eyes of the stranger except in a form of a KEYWORDS decaying illusion, whose taste will turn V. S. Naipaul; Mirror; Home(ly); the Other; bitter in the end: Narrative. The history I carried with me, together EMILIA IVANCU with the self-awareness that had come Université Adam Mickiewicz, Poznan, Pologne/ with my education and ambition, had Université 1 Decembrie 1918, Alba Iulia, sent me into the world with a sense of Roumanie glory dead; and in England had given [email protected] me the rawest stranger’s nerves. Now Ways of Seeing, Illusion and Memory’s Time in the Novel The Enigma of Arrival ironically – or aptly – living in the identity and alterity and the 143 grounds of this shrunken estate, going mystery one lives in the pre- out for my walks, those nerves were sence of the Other. The ar- soothed, and in the wild garden and rival is the ultimate end of a journey and orchard beside the water meadows I Naipaul’s book is a book of a double jour- found a physical beauty perfectly sui- ney: one is that of a Trinidadian to the East, ted to my temperament and answering, to become a writer and the other is that of besides, every good idea I could have an uprooted person who is striving to find had as a child in Trinidad, of the phy- his roots in a land constructed by then only sical aspect of England.2 with illusions. The novel The Enigma of Ar- rival is a representation in frame, it is the From the point of view of aspect, the personal meaning and experience of the stranger’s imaginary map overlaps with the mystery that man carries everywhere he geographical map, but the lands, decayed should go: and under powerful industrial changes, stir emotions. The peaceful feeling at the begin- I felt that in an indirect, poetical way ning disappears, while moments of the per- the title referred to something in my sonal past and of the historical past of En- own experience; […]. What was inte- gland overlap with the slowly but irever- resting about the painting itself, “The sibly changing lands. The text abounds both Enigma of Arrival”, was that – again in chronicity and topology, in chronotopy. because of the title – it changed in my But even the multiple historical points memory. The original (or the repro- which meet in the novel cannot make up for duction in the “Little Library of Art” the desolation of being, cannot offer accom- booklet) was always a surprise. A clas- modation for the self, and under the dissolu- sical scene, Mediterranean, ancient – tive background of England, which resonates Roman – or so I saw it. A wharf; in the into the melancholic heart of the stranger, background, beyond walls and gate- and which seems a journey through a ways (like cut-outs), there is the top of painting, and consequently through another the mast of an antique vessel; on an story. otherwise deserted street in the fore- The painting, which inspires the title of ground there are two figures, both muf- the novel itself, seems to be both a mirror of fled, one perhaps the person who has the stranger’s destiny, as it speaks about a arrived, the other perhaps a native of meeting point between one and the Other. the port. The scene is of desolation and Before transmitting the message of its repre- mystery: it speaks of the mystery of the sentation, the painting is first a symbol in arrival. It spoke to me of that, as it had itself through the function it has, that of spoken to Apollinaire.3 representing, of creating a double of a rea- lity it mirrors. On the other hand, Giorgio de The narrator, whose writing is inspired Chirico’s painting is a painting of illusioned by this painting, manifests the need to get limits; it presents two identities, one who out of himself and transfer to another reality has just arrived and another one who disco- that the painting brings. It is the need that vers the mystery of the seashore, comprising the status of the migrant, which comprises the mystery of a journey, but also the mys- both solitude and unsettlement, urges within tery of one’s journey to the Other. Hence, with the aim of finding another identity in a the painting contains the dimensions of limited space to make one’s home. It is the Emilia Ivancu 144 desolation and the mystery conveying the message of its representation, that spoke to the narrator is first a symbol in itself through the func- from the painting and which tion it has, that of representing, of creating a mirrored the solitude expressed throughout double of the reality it mirrors. On the other the novel. The narrator’s identity is, in this hand, Giorgio de Chirico’s painting is a way, shaped and coloured by the enigma of painting of illusioned limits; it presents two the arrival he himself experienced and re- figures, one who just arrived and another created in his memory time and time again. one who discovers the mystery of the sea- Only that this meeting in reality never shore, comprising the mystery of a journey, seems to take place and the result will be but also the mystery of one’s journey to the only a journey of solitude and self-refe- Other. Hence, the painting contains the di- rence, a walk with no place to attach to. The mensions of identity and alterity and the narrator can only identitfy this scenery he mystery one lives in the presence of the meets with the part in himself that spoke to Other. The arrival is the ultimate end of a the new location, to the new unhomely journey, and Naipaul’s book is a book of a home. The narrator tries a transgression of double journey: one is that of a Trinidadian identity, but what he actually accomplishes to the East, to become a writer, and the o- is an extreme feeling of alterity that the ther is that of an uprooted person who is illusion produces. And the cleavage that ap- striving to find his roots in a land construc- pears rises from the very attempt of the ted up to then only of illusions. The novel stranger to adjust to the space he intends to The Enigma of Arrival is a frame represen- make his home. tation, it is the personal meaning and expe- In his book Ways of Seeing, John Ber- rience of the mystery embedded in a per- ger states that the visual arts have always e- son’s personality, and carried along inside, xisted within a social preserve, and this pre- no matter where he might go. serve was initially magical or sacred4. Thus The Narrator, whose writing starts the experience of art was the experience of from this painting, manifests the need of the sacred, and art was conesquently set getting out of himself and relocating to ano- apart from life so that it could maintain its ther reality, created by the painting, thus influence upon it. Together with the arrival confirming what Sanda Berce opines when of modernism, art was deprived of its sa- analysing the work of art of the Norwegian cred, magical function, and became ephe- artist Jeannet Christiansen: “The viewer meral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, [here the Narrator of The Enigma of Arrival valueless, free. In other words, it became and the viewer of de Chirico’s painting] part of the everyday life, and part of the sees oneself framed in history, a narrative of everyday experience. As John Berger puts passed/past event. It sees oneself as another it, the images of art have entered the main- because such work can live only as a piece stream of life over which they no longer in of memory and ‘narrative’ about the work as themselves have power. One consequence, I the trace of the recall.”5 would argue, is that man creates and inter- It is the need implicit in the status of prets art according to his or her own expe- the migrant (which comprises both solitude rience, sometimes even turning the object of and unsettlement) that urges the individual art into a mirror in which he or she looks for to find another identity in a limited space, to himself or herself. make his home. It is the desolation and the De Chirico’s painting, which inspires mystery that the narrator heard speaking the novel The Enigma of Arrival, before from the painting, and which found an echo Ways of Seeing, Illusion and Memory’s Time in the Novel The Enigma of Arrival in his solitude expressed all over the novel. arrival. He has been 145 The Narrator’s identity is, in this way, saved; the world was as shaped and coloured by the enigma of the he remembered it. Only arrival he himself experienced and recrea- one thing is missing now. Above the ted in his memory time and time again. It is cut-out walls and buildings there is no this enigma of arrival that triggers off the mast, no sail. The antique ship was frame of a story that will be repeated in both gone. The traveller has lived out his these books about memory several times. life.6 The summary of the story that the Narrator in The Enigma of Arrival offers is the The story summarised here definitely following: contains the mystery which surrounds de Chirico’s painting. The Narrator, who is in My story was to be set in classical the end the character of this short story, times, in the Mediterranean. My narra- upon his arrival on the island, will start tor will write plainly, without any writing (and we do not know what exactly attempt at period style or historical he will write about). Meanwhile, all his explanation of this period. He would feelings turn into fear, all his life will be arrive – for a reason I had not yet lived, the ship which brought him will be worked out – at the classical port with gone as the ship will be his beginning, and the walls and gateways like cut-outs. his end will mean facing the life he has He would walk past that muffled figure lived, the journey he has made. This will on the quayside. He would move from now remain encompassed only in his me- that silence and desolation, that blank- mory and the narrative that he himself cre- ness, to a gateway or door. He would ates in his mind through memory. The most enter there and be swallowed by the curious thing is that this story created by the life and noise of a crowded city (I Narrator in The Enigma of Arrival is the imagined something like an Indian ba- same story that will later be woven into one zaar scene). The mission he had come of Naipaul’s novels, Half a Life, the story of on – family business, study, religious Willie, who arrives in the heart of Africa at initiation – would give him encounters his wife’s family, and realises it is not his and adventures. He would enter inte- life he lives, but another life, that he is a riors, of houses and temples. Gradually stranger to himself and wants to leave: there would come to him a feeling that he was getting nowhere; he would lose […] Willie was trying to deal with the his sense of mission; he would begin to knowledge that had come to him on the know only that he was lost. His feeling ship that his home language had almost of adventure would give way to panic. gone, that his English was going, that He would want to escape, to get back he had no proper language left, no gift to the quayside and his ship. But he of expression. […] But all this while wouldn’t know how. I imagine some Willie felt there was another self inside religious ritual in which, led on by him, in a silent space where all his kindly people, he would unwittingly external life was muffled.7 take part and find himself the intended victim. At the movement of crisis he The same narrative frame is to be would come upon a door, open it, and found in New Clothes. Here the character is find himself back on the quayside of a nameless Narrator who is taking a trip into Emilia Ivancu 146 the heart of a country like dangerous classical city – which had Guyana on a mission, ‘a car- come to me as a kind of release from rier of a mischief’. He meets the creative rigours and the darkness of aboriginal people on the island, and feels my own African story, it did not occur proud of himself and initially analyses the to me that the Mediterranean story was people and places with detachment. Howe- no more than a version of the story I ver, after some time, his feelings turn into was already writing. [Half a Life][…] despair and a sense of meaningless, just like So that again, years after I had seen the those of the Narrator in the story inspired by Chirico picture and the idea for the The Enigma of Arrival. While accompanied story had come to me, again, in my by two local boys as his guides on the way, own life, was another version of the he starts feeling as follows: story of “The Enigma of Arrival”.9

The march begins. The Narrator is no Painting with V. S. Naipaul, as in The longer at ease, no longer the man he had Enigma of Arrival, is a duplication of been. The path moves away from the reality, yet it is not part of the world itself, it upland river to the forest. Such beauty is not born in the novel, as a manifestation there; but something of the safety and and thus healing means of the selves of wholeness of the previous has left the those involved, but appears as an aesthetic narrator. Something nags; he never has object and remains so. to search far for reason. As often as he rejects it, as often as he applies his mind In the book Ways of Seeing, John to it, unease returns, to come between Berger gives an example in which the view him and the moment; and below all of on a painting can be mediated by words and this now, and adding to his agitation, thus the meaning is conveyed through the there is the idea of his cause, the starting prism of those words: first we are shown a point of the journey. […] He begins to painting by Van Gogh, entitled Wheatfield feel, too, that the journey is lasting too with Crows, and on the next page, the same long. […] he begins to wonder – at first painting sports the following handwritten in a light-headed way, and as though the commentary below it: “This is the last pic- idea is quite absurd – what would ture that Van Gogh painted before he killed happen if he were to withdraw from himself.”10 Then we are shown how the what he has undertaken to do.8 words influence the way we see the pain- ting, as now “the image illustrates the sen- As we can see, the discourse is similarly tence”11, showing the fact that when we constructed, echoing the same sense of loss, look, “We never look at just one thing: we the same strangeness, the same sense of not are always looking at the relation between belonging. All these are equally present in things and ourselves”12 , in this case we the structure of The Enigma of Arrival, the relate rather to the knowledge of the fact narrative which recounts the story of the that the painting was Van Gogh’s last pain- Narrator’s (and Naipaul’s) arrival in England ting before he died. In the same manner, for in order to become a writer: the narrator in The Enigma of Arrival, the function of De Chirico’s painting is that of And it did not occur to me that the illustrating the title it bears – a title added to story of “The Enigma of Arrival” – a it by Apollinaire – and the relation he has sunlit sea journey ending in a with the painting, but through the filter of Ways of Seeing, Illusion and Memory’s Time in the Novel The Enigma of Arrival the title and the echo thus created in his revelation, and in conse- 147 mind. quence the narrator sees in Hence for Naipaul’s narrator, the pain- the painting the relation be- ting is regarded aesthetically and thus be- tween his own past experience and the pos- comes objectified, implying a distance of sible interpretation offered by the title ac- observation in the relation with the object of companying it. In this case, the relation art. The narrator can find himself in the between the viewer, in our case, the narrator painting, yet, there is no direct, organic rela- and the object if his gaze is one which re- tionship between him and the painting. In flects in a rather selfish way the feeling in- The Enigma of Arrival, the title overlaps the side him projected on the canvas in this painting itself and is stronger than the manner. The image projected is ectoplasmic message that the painting might have because it does not speak of the painting without its title, in this case, the self of the itself but of a ghostly, lonely feeling the narrator being projected onto the canvas narrator has when looking at the painting, with the desire to see his own experience as where, unconsciously, he can actually see reflected on it. Yet, because the meaning is himself. In this case, the narrator transforms induced, the painting and thus the image it- the painting into a mirror, but a false mirror, self are barred from continuing to be crea- in the attempt of the viewer to re-establish a tive in their own way, the title preventing connection with his own past. The mystery this, and also the viewer from working on he can find in it is the mystery of a recon- all its other possible meanings. Moreover, nected past situation, that of his arrival, when looking at an image, either painted or changed into an object of reflection and photographed, the paradox springing from it forced upon the painting to acquire the attri- is, as in the case of a mirror, that it shows butes of a mirror, which is specular and the absence of the represented object while spectral, but on account of its fake nature, bringing it for observance. This is why in producing ectoplasmic images. the case of Naipaul, the painting accentuates Consequently, the painting which stands or is a ghostly sign of something that maybe at the centre of the novel in order to illustrate once was or that he wishes it was but is not the personal experience of the narrator as there (anymore). As compared to the mirror regards his relation to the newly discovered which shows something that is present in its territories of Britain, and the history of the front, as a mirror shows only as long as place is turned into a personal mirror of the something is there, the painting or the pho- narrator’s life. His life becomes in the end, tograph, though more creative in their po- under the aesthetic experience of the painting tential are the sign of something or some- and his memory’s time a prolongation of his body that is absent. Through this very func- own experience of the painting, that is a self- tion, the reality it projects and the echo of projection onto the painting, whose result is a this reality upon the viewer is a prismatic delusionary experience of space and time one, but prismatic in the sense of ectoplas- themselves, and thus of his own life. Time mic, a presence that is absent or an absence and space in the novel are insoluble as is the that is absent. Consequently, the narrator in narrator’s experience of the painting, and The Enigma of Arrival looks at the painting consequently his own life, and the novel through the filter of its title, thus the pain- proves in the end John Berger’s statement ting conveying its meaning as disembodied that “We never look at just one thing: we are in a way from its possible initial intention always looking at the relation between things and its potential of future meaning and ourselves”.13 Emilia Ivancu 148

References

Berce, Sanda, “Explorations in the her- Geographies, 1994; 1; 65. meneutics of vision: The rhetoric of mo- 2 V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, dernity (Dialogue, difference and the O- London: Penguin Books, 1987. p. 52. ther)” in http://www.ceeol.com/aspx/getdo- 3 V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, p. cument.aspx?logid=5&id=40D98CFF- 91-92. 876A-4E47-AE6B-43AD038A326C, 4 John Berger et al., Ways of Seeing (Based nd retrieved on March, 22 , 2008. on the BBC television series with John Ber- Berger, John et al., Ways of Seeing ger, London: British Broadcasting Corpo- (Based on the BBC television series with ration and Penguin Books, 1972, p. 32. John Berger, London, British Broadcasting 5 Sanda Berce, “Explorations in the herme- Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972. neutics of vision: The rhetoric of modernity Naipaul, V. S., The Enigma of Arrival, (Dialogue, difference and the Other)” in London, Penguin Books, 1987. http://www.ceeol.com/aspx/.aspx?logid=5& Naipaul, V. S., Half a Life, London, id=40D98CFF-876A-4E47-AE6B- Basingstoke and Oxford, Picador, 2001. 43AD038A326C. Naipaul, V. S., A Way in the World, 6 V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, p. London, Heinemann, 1994. 92. Sharp, Joanne P., “A Topology of 7 V. S. Naipaul, Half a Life, London, Ba- “Post” Nationality: (Re)mapping Identity in singstoke and Oxford: Picador, 2001, p. The Satanic Verses”, Cultural Geographies, 132, 133. 1994; 1. 8 V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World, p. 57, 61. 9 V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, p. Notes 93, 97. 10 John Berger et al., Ways of Seeing, p. 28. 1 De Certeau in Joanne P. Sharp, “A To- 11 Ibid., p. 28. pology of “Post” Nationality: (Re)mapping 12 Ibid., p. 9. Identity in The Satanic Verses”, Cultural 13 John Berger et al., Ways of Seeing, p. 9.

Ways of Seeing, Illusion and Memory’s Time in the Novel The Enigma of Arrival 149

Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of Arrival and the Afternoon, 1911-1912