Abstract
This chapter examines V.S. Naipaul’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Enigma of Arrival. While Naipaul appears to have complete faith in canonical values and virtues of an English countryside learned from his colonial education and literary readings, his Caribbean experience surfaces when coming to terms with an imagined literary geography of his new home. While Naipaul may perceive solace and healing in the Wiltshire Downs in which he makes his home, some of that peace in fact comes from associations he makes with images and memories of his childhood in Trinidad. Naipaul’s view of his rural English surround also reveals an English pastoral literary tradition he learned as a boy, and while much of it is celebratory of the English tradition, it is nonetheless shaped by his Caribbean upbringing in significant ways.
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Notes
- 1.
Enigma “presents itself as fiction, but is properly to be seen as autobiography, much like Wordsworth’s The Prelude, which charts the anxious steps towards maturation of the artistic spirit” (Phillips, A New World Order 194). It is in this spirit that I use Naipaul in this chapter to refer to the narrator in the text.
- 2.
The Mystic Masseur (1957), Miguel Street (1959), and A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), all set in Trinidad .
- 3.
The manor’s grounds in which Naipaul lived belonged to the socialite Stephen Tennant, who was the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s character Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited (Waters).
- 4.
“This book” refers to The Loss of El Dorado, which Naipaul was writing at the time of the narrative; “earlier books” probably refer to The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, and A House for Mr. Biswas , novels set in Trinidad .
- 5.
The churches in Trinidad Naipaul would have seen are Victorian replicas of Gothic style churches. It is not possible to know whether the church he sees in Wiltshire is also a replica, or original Gothic, but nonetheless, it adds more complexity and another layer to the artificiality of the constructed landscape .
- 6.
In A House for Mr. Biswas , Naipaul’s novel set in Trinidad , the first chapter is entitled “Pastoral ”, a title which establishes a connection between the two countrysides , English and Triniadian.
- 7.
See also Walcott’s epigraph in the first chapter from the same essay.
- 8.
Walcott goes on, however, to suggest the novel, in later sections, suffers from Naipaul’s prejudice, and “nasty little sneers”, where the book “sours” and becomes tainted with self-disfigurement (123, 132).
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Johnson, J. (2019). Befitting the Landscape. In: Topographies of Caribbean Writing, Race, and the British Countryside. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04134-2_3
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