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<\/a>V. S. Naipaul, Nobel Literature Laureate. Pinterest<\/p><\/div>\n
He once said that fiction never lies, and while this may or may not be true, it is true that writers whose politics one may find repulsive can also, despite their conscious intentions, write books that glow with an extraordinary prose luminescence that mesmerizes and reveals deep insights.\u00a0 This is the case with Naipaul\u2019s The Enigma of<\/em> Arriva<\/em>l, a work he calls a novel but that reads like an autobiography.\u00a0 While his novel, A House for Mr Biswas<\/em>, is considered his finest work and the book that made him famous, I think The Enigma of Arrival <\/em>is a masterpiece. <\/em>Deeply melancholic, it allows Naipaul\u2019s shadow side to reveal truths that go far beyond the man himself.<\/p>\n The prototype for all journeys is life itself.\u00a0 This being so, it follows that every destination prefigures death and of necessity poses an enigma.\u00a0 For although one travels in part to arrive, at the same time one\u2019s anticipation of arrival harbors the fear of cessation.\u00a0 It is because every elsewhere contains the worm of death that some people never embark on the voyage, while others go from \u201cplace\u201d to \u201cplace\u201d in search of paradise.<\/p>\n Naipaul cast anchor at the age of 18, leaving Trinidad for a scholarship at Oxford in England where \u2013 aside from numerous travels, especially in the Third World \u2013 he lived most of his life.\u00a0 Setting out with a wish not \u201cso much to go to Oxford as a wish to get out of Trinidad and see the great world and make myself a writer,\u201d this young man of Indian ancestry, a child of crumbling colonialism, took with him a temperament \u201cto see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment of creation.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, a true writer\u2019s temperament, the sensibility of one who knows intuitively that the journey into the unknown never ends; \u201cthat,\u201d as he would gradually learn, \u201cto be a writer was not (as I had imagined) a state \u2013 of competence, or achievement, or fame, or content \u2013 at which one arrived and where one stayed\u2026It was always necessary to pick oneself up and start again.\u201d<\/p>\n Outwardly at least, the story Naipaul tells in The Enigma of Arrival <\/em>is impersonal, slow-paced and almost boring in its progression (much like ordinary life).\u00a0 After twenty years in England \u2013 \u201csavorless and much of it mean\u201d \u2013 having failed in his effort to leave England with its history of colonial exploitation and become \u201ca free man,\u201d his spirit broken and his nerves shattered, he settles in a \u201ccottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past\u201d on the Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge.<\/p>\n There, in a part of England renowned for its historical and religious past \u2013 \u201ca vast sacred burial ground\u201d \u2013 he finds in his solitude and daily walks \u201ca second chance, a new life, richer and fuller than any I had had anywhere else.\u201d\u00a0 He learns to see nature with new eyes and to take solace in \u201cthe child\u2019s dream of a safe house in the wood.\u201d\u00a0 In the garden of a local man \u2013 \u201cJack\u2019s Garden,\u201d the book\u2019s opening section \u2013 he comes to see a celebration of \u201csomething like religion.\u201d\u00a0 Jack, in his way of life, \u201chad sensed that life and man were the true mysteries.\u201d<\/p>\n But Jack dies; the estate\u2019s slow decay precipitates; the deadly sounds from the nearby army training grounds echo in the author\u2019s ears; a fellow writer, one who suffered, like Naipaul, from a \u201ctoo-literary approach to his experience,\u201d kills himself; a woman is murdered.\u00a0 In short, into his natural paradise, albeit a ruinous and derelict one (its appeal for Naipaul, the unanchored, dispossessed outsider), the snake of death and destruction crawls.\u00a0 Having stayed too long in this place that he loved, Naipaul falls ill; his \u201csecond childhood of seeing and learning\u201d comes to an end.\u00a0 He moves, but just a few miles away, to a few old agricultural cottages that he converts into a house.\u00a0 A mistake, he later realizes.\u00a0 \u201cI should have made a clean break, gone elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n But where?\u00a0 For at the heart of his pilgrimage is an image from which his book\u2019s title derives.\u00a0 It is a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, \u201cThe Enigma of Arrival,\u201d so named by the poet Apollinaire.\u00a0 It is a scene of a wharf; in the background rises the mast of an antique sailing ship; in the foreground stand two figures, muffled and mysterious.\u00a0 In his fascination with this painting, Naipaul imagined a story of a man who arrived at this port, enters the city, has encounters and adventures, but gradually has the feeling that he is getting nowhere.\u00a0 In his lostness and panic, he miraculously finds his way back to the quayside in order to escape.<\/p>\n But to where?\u00a0 And how?\u00a0 In the concluding section of this moving book \u2013 \u201cThe Ceremony of Farewell\u201d \u2013 Naipaul\u2019s sister dies of a brain hemorrhage.\u00a0 He returns to Trinidad to be with his family.\u00a0 During a Hindu ceremony for his sister, her husband says to the Hindu pundit conducting the rites, \u201cI would like to see her again.\u201d \u00a0There were tears in his eyes.\u00a0 \u201cThe pundit didn\u2019t give a straight reply\u2026.Sati\u2019s son asked, \u2018Will she come back?\u2019\u00a0 Sati\u2019s husband asked, \u2018Will we be together again?\u2019\u00a0 The pundit said, \u2018But you wouldn\u2019t know it is her.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was,\u201d writes Naipaul, \u201cthe pundit\u2019s interpretation of the idea of reincarnation.\u00a0 And it was no comfort at all.\u00a0 It reduced Sati\u2019s husband to despair.\u201d<\/p>\n And with that recollected dialogue, with its abstract commentary on everyone\u2019s last port of call, Naipaul reveals the anguish at the heart of his journey.\u00a0 \u201cThere was no ship of antique shape now to take us back,\u201d he sadly notes.\u00a0 The old sanctities, the sacred world had vanished.\u00a0 He concludes:<\/p>\n Every generation now was to take us further away from those sanctities.\u00a0 But we remade the world for ourselves; every generation does that, as we found when we came together for the death of this sister and felt the need to honor and remember.\u00a0 It forced us to look on death.\u00a0 It forced me to face the death I had been contemplating at night, in my sleep; it fitted a real grief where melancholy had created a vacancy, as if to prepare me for the moment.\u00a0 It showed me life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men, the grief and the glory.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n And it brought Naipaul to begin writing this book and to discover in the end that one arrives at oneself or not at all.\u00a0 Whether he did or not, no one can say.\u00a0 Is he still sailing?\u00a0 No one can say?\u00a0 Has he arrived?\u00a0 No one can say.\u00a0 But he left us with this deeply evocative meditation on life and death in the modern world, a world in which, despite science and technology, the old questions remain to haunt us \u2013 the enigmas.<\/p>\n ________________________________________________<\/p>\n V. S. Naipaul, the Nobel winning author who just died, was, like so many people, an enigma, at least in his writing. He once said that fiction never lies, and while this may or may not be true, it is true that writers whose politics one may find repulsive can also, despite their conscious intentions, write books that glow with an extraordinary prose luminescence that mesmerizes and reveals deep insights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":116803,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"