Abstract
This chapter examines V. S. Naipaul’s mobilization of Romantic lyric form in The Enigma of Arrival. While the novel is overtly concerned with how the colonial tradition furnishes the postcolonial subject with a burdensome array of languages of sense, it ultimately finds and refines a redemptive formal power within the structure of the greater Romantic lyric. If Walcott extends and confirms a Wordsworthian negativity, Naipaul overcomes such negativity: he places his novel within the tradition of the Romantic poetics of disappointment only to provide the formal compensation often aborted by Romantic texts themselves.
Anita Desai’s novel Fire on the Mountain provides the locus of this countervoice. Like Naipaul’s novel, it takes the enclosive ideal of Romantic ideology as its concern, but only to point to its brittleness, frailty and fakery, and to open it onto the presences it seeks to exclude. In Desai there is no reconciliation possible: hers is a radicalized and inconsolable poetics of disappointment, but for this reason the novel takes us beyond disappointment itself, with the coherent centre of experience and the formal recompense that the concept demands. There is for Desai no poetics that can function as the expressive compensation valued by Romantic lyric form, and no affective vocabulary to negotiate with and ultimately contain the shocks of historical life.
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- 1.
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 9.
- 2.
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 12.
- 3.
Robert Marzec, An Ecological and Postcolonial Study of Literature: From Daniel Defoe to Salman Rushdie (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 8.
- 4.
See Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Quentin Bailey, Wordsworth’s Vagrants: Police, Prisons, and Poetry in the 1790s (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
- 5.
V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Vintage, 1988), 114, 120.
- 6.
Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 122.
- 7.
Many readers of the novel, including Rushdie, identify the novel’s narrator as ‘Naipaul ’ and read the text as a memoir. The novel calls itself a novel, however, and in deference to this self-identification I refer to it as such. The book is not simply a memoir: key details, such as his marriage and the death of his brother, have been omitted or modified (in the novel, it is the narrator’s sister who dies). Nevertheless, the text is unambiguously grounded in Naipaul’s personal experiences, and belongs to the first-person tradition of post-Romantic writing.
- 8.
See Dennis Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 24–46; Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 176; Stuart Murray, ‘Naipaul Among the Critics’, Moving Worlds 2, no. 1 (2002), 58.
- 9.
Walcott, Twilight, 123.
- 10.
Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, 335.
- 11.
The idea of ‘two consciousnesses’ comes from the second book of The Prelude , ‘School-Time (continued): ‘A tranquillising spirit presses now/ On my corporeal frame, so wide appears/ The vacancy between me and those days/ Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,/ That, musing on them, often do I seem/ Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself/ And of some other being.’
- 12.
Included in this large body of pedestrianist writing would be many of Wordsworth’s poems, some of Coleridge’s and John Clare’s, and Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker. See Robin Jarvis for a study of this writing: he attends to how ‘intellectual processes and textual effects are grounded in the material practice of walking’ (Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 33). In these texts as in Naipaul’s novel, walking is associated with solitude and withdrawal, but also with communication: there is always a companion, even if it is only the implied auditor or imagined future reader.
- 13.
I take this characterization of disappointment from Laura Quinney, who observes that disappointment has to do with the idea of losing one’s place, of being ‘cast out’, of ‘ceasing to be ‘à point’, in the right place at the right moment, and thus implie[s] a breakdown in one’s relation to time, a falling out and away from a recognizable order’ The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 1. I say more on Quinney and disappointment below.
- 14.
In his essay ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ de Man explains that the temporality of Romantic form allows the subject to lay out in narrative what is simultaneous within the subject, to ‘spread [it] out over a temporality which is exclusively that of the poem and in which the conditions of error and wisdom have become successive’ (Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 225).
- 15.
William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting (London: R. Blamire, 1792), 6.
- 16.
Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 69.
- 17.
Gilpin, Three Essays, 43.
- 18.
Gilpin, Three Essays, 8.
- 19.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 94.
- 20.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 246–8.
- 21.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London: Penguin, 2003), 84.
- 22.
Austen, Mansfield Park, 85.
- 23.
Austen, Mansfield Park, 85–6.
- 24.
‘landscape’, OED.
- 25.
Austen, Mansfield Park, 93.
- 26.
Gilpin, Three Essays, 43–54.
- 27.
Gilpin, Three Essays, 48–49.
- 28.
William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty: Made in the Summer of the Year 1770 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1800), 50.
- 29.
Baucom, Out of Place, 15.
- 30.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The 1805 Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 213.
- 31.
Saree Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1998, 12.
- 32.
Walcott, Twilight, 83.
- 33.
Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, 12.
- 34.
Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the monastic tradition to which Naipaul here alludes explains that reading is the remedy to acedia, but this reading should not depend upon the comfort of books alone: nature itself must appear as a book, such that the ‘perfect life coincides with the legibility of the world’ (The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-life, trans. Adam Kostko (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 27). The lesson is an appropriate one: Naipaul’s narrator must move beyond an absorption in the supposed ‘emanations of literature’ in order to read things as they are, to bear—and often painfully—their landing.
- 35.
Baucom, Out of Place, 176.
- 36.
Gilpin, Three Essays, 3.
- 37.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), xi.
- 38.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 5.
- 39.
Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Literary Communism’, in The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 72.
- 40.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 52–3.
- 41.
Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 58.
- 42.
Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 54.
- 43.
Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 51.
- 44.
Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 52.
- 45.
Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, 16.
- 46.
Forest Pyle, ‘“The Power is There”: Romanticism as Aesthetic Insistence’, in Romanticism and the Insistence of the Aesthetic, ed. Forest Pyle 2005), 5: https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/aesthetic/index.html (accessed 7 November 2017)
- 47.
Quinney, Poetics of Disappointment, ix.
- 48.
Quinney, Poetics of Disappointment, xi.
- 49.
Quinney, Poetics of Disappointment, xi.
- 50.
Quinney, Poetics of Disappointment, 2.
- 51.
Quinney, Poetics of Disappointment, 1.
- 52.
Quinney, Poetics of Disappointment, xi.
- 53.
Quinney, Poetics of Disappointment, 2.
- 54.
Sarah Casteel, Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 33.
- 55.
Anna-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), xx.
- 56.
William Wordsworth, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 132.
- 57.
M. H. Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York: Norton, 1984), 77.
- 58.
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 10.
- 59.
See the passage beginning ‘Everything is in constant flux on this earth …’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Peter Walker (London: Penguin, 1979), 88.
- 60.
This compensatory aesthetic is to be distinguished from the modernist idea of aesthetic autonomy, whether articulated in terms of W. K. Wimsatt’s ‘verbal icon’ (W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954)), or more radically by Adorno’s aesthetic autonomy (Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004)), precisely by the importance of consolation: the work of subjective composition/consolation the novel undertakes (according to its own theory of itself) degrades its modernist autonomy.
- 61.
23, 52, 210, quoted in Baucom, Out of Place, 181.
- 62.
Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 116–17.
- 63.
Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism, 77.
- 64.
Following Paul de Man , it ought to be impossible to idealize Romanticism, since the nature of literary language prevents such idealization. It is perhaps for this reason that Naipaul describes his own prose as attaining to a transparency of style: ‘I wish my prose to be transparent – I don’t want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I’m saying to what I’m describing’ (‘The Art of Fiction No. 145 (Interview With Jonathan Rosen, Tarun Tejpal)’, The Paris Review 148(1998)).
- 65.
Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 30.
- 66.
Timothy Bewes, ‘Late Style in Naipaul: Adorno’s Aesthetics and the Post-Colonial Novel’, in Adorno and Literature, ed. David Cunningham, and Nigel Mapp (London: Continuum, 2006), 185.
- 67.
Nicholas Spice is closer to the mark in his perceptive reading of A Way in the World , the text in Naipaul’s corpus most similar to Enigma and belonging, too, to his late phase in Bewes’s periodization. Spice thinks of the book as a palimpsest: ‘I felt at times almost as though, were I to be able to scrape away the surface of the text, I should find earlier layers underneath.’ His work makes us understand ‘how a thing may be the same yet not the same, an effect usually reserved for music’. Naipaul offers an ‘intricate but utterly coherent network of pathways’ (‘Inspector of the Sad Parade’, London Review of Books 16, no. 15 (1994), 10).
- 68.
McGann, Romantic Ideology, 90.
- 69.
See Peter Simonsen, ‘Reading Wordsworth After McGann: Moments of Negativity in “Tintern Abbey” and the Immortality Ode’, Nordic Journal of English Studies 4, no. 1 (2005) for an interesting reading of this critical history.
- 70.
This is to leave aside the other deletions and excisions that readers of the book as memoir have seen; for Rushdie, the word most notably absent from the text is ‘love’ (Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York: Penguin, 1991), 151).
- 71.
Susan Wolfson, ‘Questioning the Romantic Ideology’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 44, no. 3 (1990), 439.
- 72.
Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision: An Interpretation of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Rilke, and Valéry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 173.
- 73.
François, Open Secrets, xix.
- 74.
Terada, Looking Away, 3.
- 75.
See Jill Didur, ‘Guns & Roses: Reading the Picturesque Archive in Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain’, Textual Practice 27, no. 3 (2013), and Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley: U California P, 1996), for more on this. Didur writes that the hill stations were ‘therapeutic and Edenic spaces’ (517) and quotes Kennedy’s reading of them as ‘apart from the influence of the plains, a refuge from its troubles’ (221). My final chapter returns to this landscape via Gayatri Spivak’s reading of the landscape of the Himalayan foothills.
- 76.
Anita Desai, ‘A Fire Had to be Lit’, in The Writer on Her Work, Vol. II, ed. Janet Sternburg (New York: Norton, 1991), 97–101.
- 77.
Anita Desai, Fire on the Mountain (London: Minerva, 1977), 9, 27–8.
- 78.
Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 3.
- 79.
Terada, Looking Away, 6–7.
- 80.
Terada, Looking Away, 23.
- 81.
The novel’s interest in smoke as an ambiguous indicator of something unseen invites comparison with the smoke of the unseen vagrant dwellers in ‘Tintern Abbey ’, similarly tracing, in aestheticized abstraction, the presence of historical life. To draw such a connection is admittedly, in this instance, to approach an enigmatic echo rather than an explicit allusion, but the interpretive implications make the connection intriguing all the same, since images of smoke provide a way of patterning the landscape with proximate social realities that are not directly addressed by the text.
- 82.
Desai, Fire, 4.
- 83.
Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, 335.
- 84.
Desai, ‘A Fire Had to be Lit’, 102.
- 85.
Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787–1814 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 17.
- 86.
Chelva Kanaganayakam, Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2002), 89.
- 87.
Hartman, The Unmediated Vision, 156.
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Dickinson, P. (2018). Chapter 3: Dis-Enclosure: Landscape, Lyric Form, and The Enigma of Arrival . In: Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70341-1_3
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