Man and writer were the same person. But that is a writer’s greatest discovery. It took time – and how much writing! – to arrive at that synthesis. (p. 102)

• 10 A similar feeling is expressed on p. 111: ‘Less than twenty-four hours had passed But already 1 cou (...)

I witnessed this change in my personality but, not even aware of it as a theme, wrote nothing of it in my diary. So that between the man writing the diary and the traveller there was already a gap, already a gap between the man and the writer. On that day, the first of adventure and freedom and travel and discovery, man and writer were united in their eagerness for experience. But the nature of the experiences of the day encouraged a separation of the two elements in my personality. (p. 102)10

5The first pages of the novel bring back feelings which he had when he first arrived. However, instead of appearing as a negative experience, the new arrival becomes a new beginning: the narrator’s repeated walks give him access to the sacred nature of the land. Yet it is only in Chapter Two that the discrepancy between the narrator’s later arrival in Wiltshire and his first one really becomes clear: he now reports the smallest events in his life, whereas, as a young man, he left out of his writings anything that did not fit in with his stereotypical mental categories:

• 13 There are many other illustrations of this point, as for example, on page 100: ‘I did not note down (...)

So I wrote my diary. But it left out many of the things that were worth noting down, many of the things which, some years later, I would have thought much more important than the things I did note down. The diary I wrote in the airplane left out the great family farewell at the airport in Trinidad (p. 99)

So that, though travelling to write, concentrating on my experience, eager for experience, I was shutting myself off from it, editing it out of my memory. Editing out the airport taxi-driver, who had overcharged me – the humiliation had been too great; editing out the Negro at the hotel. (p. 115)13

6At the time, writing for him was an act of concealment, not of self-revelation. On the contrary, the middle-aged man now knows that the writer’s role is a quest for truth, his own truth, and that this can only be found in personal experience. That is why the now older narrator views his past self with more distance, using third-person pronouns to refer to the young man he was then. Ellipsis is now replaced by confession, a mode used throughout The Enigma of Arrival. Instead of deleting information about himself, he tries to be as exhaustive and as faithful to experience as possible. Only by confessing the smallest and least significant elements in his everyday life can the writer attempt to unify his divided personality. Yet reconciling the two points of view does not prove easy for the mature narrator. The past fracture still exists:

After all my time in England I still had that nervousness in a new place, that rawness of response, still felt myself to be in the other man’s country, felt my strangeness, my solitude. And every excursion into a new part of the country... was for me like tearing at an old scab (p. 13).

7The schizophrenic division in the narrator’s personality materializes in two haunting images which echo Naipaul’s fear of extinction: the image of his head exploding, which recurs in his dreams (see pp. 93 or 97), and the vision of his drowned corpse floating on the surface of the river. He introduces this as a ‘waking fantasy’ (p. 156). The narrator can then observe himself from a distance, ‘witnessing [his] own death’ (p. 93). Such images are paralleled by a similar experience in the man’s life when he suffers from a choking fit (pp. 82, 96).

8Finding one’s place in the world presupposes the close observation of one’s surroundings as well as the repetition of actions. While the first stage of the quest should be carried out in the present, the second requires duration, which gives time more density and depth. The circular movement of repetition is superimposed on the linear movement of exploration in the present. Walking on the downs and discovering the manor-grounds give the narrator a precise knowledge of the ‘New World’ that was born before his eyes at the time of arrival. Yet repetition, introduced from the very beginning as an essential element in his analysis, also grants him new knowledge. Even though at first his mind is confused, he finally glimpses at the deeper meaning of things. His repeated walks near Jack’s cottage help him to decipher the meaning of Jack’s presence in the valley and the significance of Jack’s puzzle-like garden. Repetition in time is viewed as a new initiation, a new awakening to reality. It also gives the narrator a symbolic vision of the world around him. Thus in the narrator’s eyes, Jack is not only a skilful gardener, but also the symbolic representation of time:

I saw too, as the months went by, his especial, exaggerated style with clothes.… I grew to see his clothes as emblematic of the particular season: like something from a modern Book of Hours. (p. 31)

From such intimate knowledge he develops a religious-like feeling. The repetition of actions makes him aware of the sacred elements lying at the heart of any profane action. He repeatedly refers to Pitton as ‘the last of the sixteen gardeners’ who follows his own ritual acts and evokes a living Book of Hours (p. 247). While watching other people’s lives and actions, the narrator manages to obtain a better knowledge of himself. He meets people who are either exact doubles (Alan, for example) or antithetic representations of himself, such as the landlord, who stands for the past splendour of the Empire. When he first arrives, the narrator views himself as ‘a racial oddity in the valley’ (p. 174). Later, his mature point of view gives him a more global understanding of his own presence in a place built at a time of great prosperity for the British Empire. Both reflections (of sameness and of otherness) help him to define himself.

History, glory, religion as a wish to do the right thing by oneself – these ideas were still with some people in the valleys round about.... These people – though they had come, many of them, from other places – still had the idea of being successors and inheritors. (pp. 50-1)

Yet, to the narrator, ‘history here... seemed to be plateaux of light, with intervening troughs and disappearances into darkness’ (p. 50). He must find other means to reconstruct the historical continuum.

11To the horizontal movement of discovery is added the vertical movement of knowledge. Through his trans-historical point of view, the narrator manages to see beyond the observable reality of the landscape. The snow covering the downs triggers a change in scale and gives the narrator a reduced scope of vision: the miniature landscape reveals a view of the place in primeval, ante-diluvian times:

• 16 Another passage helps to define the transhistorical point of view: on one of his walks, the narrato (...)

So the texture and shapes and patterns of the snow here on the down in the windbreak and in its lee created, in small, the geography of great countries.... And this geography in miniature was set, as I thought, or as I liked to think, in a vaster geography. The valley of the droveway between the smooth low hills spoke of vast rivers hundreds of yards across, flowing here in some age now unimaginably remot: a geography whose scale denied the presence of men.... In that vast geography created by the miniature landscape, and the fantasy of the droveway as river channel, there was no room for men; that vision was a vision of the world before men. (pp. 45-6)16

12This conception leads him to a double discovery: death and creation are always linked and the historical continuum can in fact be interpreted as the fusion of fluctuating moments. The present is ephemeral, half-way between the past and the future. Instead of viewing his presence on the manor-grounds as odd, out-of-place, the narrator finally feels integrated. Everything seems to fall into a new coherent pattern. His presence is not only the individual expression of his own history. He is, in the light of this theory, the representative of a much more global historical evolution:

Fifty years ago there would have been no room for me on the estate; even now my presence was a little unlikely. But more than accident had brought me here. Or rather, in the series of accidents that had brought me to the manor cottage, with a view of the restored church, there was a clear historical line. The migration, within the British Empire, from India to Trinidad had given me the English language as my own. (p. 52)

One day, later in the summer, walking past the old farm buildings and what had been Jack’s cottage and garden ... I heard the sound of a great fire behind the young wood.... I heard the sound behind the trees.... And I thought of another sound I had heard more than twenty-five years before in the highlands of north-eastern South-America: the sound of a big waterfall. Water, fire – in great disturbance they made the same sound. And fleetingly to me, walking on the downs in that overpowering noise, it seemed that all matter was one. (p. 76)

As the narrator is also a writer, no complete personal harmony can exist without the fusion and reconciliation of the man’s and the writer’s points of view.

14In The Enigma of Arrival, the narrator is always aware of the deep intermingling of personal and professional level. As he says, ‘with me, everything started from writing. Writing had brought me to England, had sent me away from England; had given me a vision of romance; had nearly broken me with disappointment. Now it was writing, the book, that gave savour, possibility, to each day, and took me on night after night’ (p. 154). The narrator becomes aware of this when he comments upon the African narrative he was writing when he arrived in Wiltshire. This book alters his vision of Wiltshire and, conversely, some of his own experiences are reflected in his writing:

And I continued easily in that rhythm of creation and walk, Africa in the writing in the morning, Wiltshire in the hour-and-a-half or so after lunch. I projected Africa on to Wiltshire. Wiltshire – the Wiltshire I walked in – began to radiate or return Africa to me. So man and writer became one; the circle became complete. (p. 156)

15The fusion of both points of view cannot be effective until the narrator reaches the ultimate stage in his multiple quest. The fracture created by his preconceived ideas about the writer’s role must be gradually bridged. This is only made possible by memory and thinking, leading to self-analysis. Remembering abolishes time limitations since memory can make temporally distant events coincide. Spatial barriers can also be destroyed in the permanent oscillating movement of memory between past and present. Analogies and contrasts thus reveal knowledge. Yet in the writer’s career, no true knowledge can ever be gained without sudden inspiration, which the narrator calls ‘vision’:

The separation of man from writer which had begun on the long aeroplane flight from Trinidad to New York became complete. Man and writer both dwindled. And then, but only very slowly, man and writer came together again. It was nearly five years. before I could shed the fantasies given me by my abstract education. Nearly five years before vision was granted me, quite suddenly one day, when I was desperate for such an illumination, of what my material as a writer might be. (p. 135)

His first revelation was therefore an essential step in the process leading to artistic self-knowledge: the metropolitan material the writer wanted to use was useless and sterile.

17Writing as self assertion, as a means of escaping death and nothingness, takes on particular meaning in The Enigma of Arrival where the narrator is faced with many deaths, whether real (Jack, Brenda, Mr Phillips, Old Mr Phillips, Alan, Mrs Gandhi, Sati, to mention a few) or symbolic (the destruction of Jack’s garden, of the farm, the felling of trees, etc.). Death itself gives the narrator the first spark to begin a new book, The Enigma of Arrival:

But we remade the world for ourselves; every generation does that, as we found when we came together for the death of this sister [Sati] and felt the need to honour and remember. It forced us to look on death. It forced me to face the death I had been contemplating at night, in my sleep. It showed me life and man as the mystery, the true religion of men, the grief and the glory. And that was when, faced with a real death, and with this new wonder about men, I laid aside my drafts and hesitations and began to write very fast about Jack and his garden. (p. 318)

19Writing is also explicitly introduced as a repetitive act in the last lines of the novel. The book, which could not be written before the end of the narrator’s quest, is then the re-enactment of experience. This therefore leads the readers to adopt a circular vision of the book: in the very last lines, they are asked to begin reading the novel anew from another perspective.

20In this novel, the linear act of writing has a performative quality. Anamorphotic displacement is suggested by the last lines which send the readers back to the beginning of the novel (‘Jack’s Garden’) in order to obtain a more meaningful understanding of the narrative. Only the combination of these two approaches can reveal the reconciliation of the narrator’s points of view. Reading thus vecomes yet another form of double reconciliation: the reconciliation of the readers with the narrator, and the reconciliation of the readers with the world and themselves. Yet this double strategy is undoubtedly the ultimate enigma of arrival experienced by both readers and narrator: is the novel to be understood as the point of arrival of the quest or as a new departure with a second reading? Beyond this, it also represents the ultimate enigma of arrival for V.S. Naipaul who plays on the mirror-like figure of the narrator. Is he to be viewed as his exact double? To what extent should the narrator’s world be perceived as fictional? In ‘On Being a Writer’, Naipaul declares:

• 22 New York Review of Books, 23 Apr. 1987, p. 7.

My aim was truth, truth to a particular experience, containing a definition of the writing self. Yet I was aware at the end of the book that the creative process remained as mysterious as ever.22