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Time in the Field: The Enigma of Arrival as Periplus.

The anonymous narrator of V.S Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival has set himself upon
a voyage of discovery in time. The walks about the hills and fields around his secluded rural
cottage are not conducted toward awareness of space but rather as movements in time through
layers of remembrance and imagination. The visual field he is met with in these walks is a
multi-stratum expanse of history, not of linear progression and dates but individual
experiences and interactions. Outside the main location of the novel, the farm in Wiltshire, the
episodes around the London boarding house and the trips to and from Trinidad and Africa are
as well exercises in historical manifestation where emotion and memory are exposed in a
prose monologue on the nature of selfhood in time. I propose that this is the ‘enigma of
arrival’, in that arrival does not happen so much in the spatial sense of actual coming to a
place, but rather it occurs in time, with the gradual realization that one has become a feature
of that place and it has become part of the individual’s imaginative and emotional awareness.
This characteristic of the text I would compare to the periplus1, an ancient narrated map in
which the map as written text presents the temporal locations of the traveller, rather than the
omniscient visualized overview of the cartographic map2. As the traveller progresses through
the temporal narrative of the periplus the space which that narrative represents is
simultaneously transversed.

In reading The Enigma of Arrival as periplus the narrator is identified as an explorer

and the creator of the map. This performs a shift in the colonial experience in one sense as the
narrator has come from Trinidad, a Crown Colony, to the heart of the fading British Empire.
In Trinidad he was a member of an Indian family that had been brought to the island as
workers by the English. He has been educated by the system administered by the English and
has a highly developed context of English history and literature. Despite this familiarity his
time in England is portrayed as one of discovery and this is the how the periplus is expressed,
not necessarily as a navigational device for others to follow but rather as a report or testimony
of one man’s experiences in discovery. This unfolding of a landscape or location in a temporal
sequence occurs throughout the narrative of the novel but to take just one example I choose
the narrators approaching one of the major symbolic structures of England, Stonehenge:

The grassy way, the old river bed (as I thought) sloped up, so that the eye was
led to the middle sky; and on either side were the slopes of the downs, widening
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out and up against the sky. On the one side there were cattle; on the other side,
beyond a pasture, a wide empty area, there were young pines, a little forest. The
setting felt ancient, the impression was of space, unoccupied land, the beginning
of things. There were no houses to be seen, only the wide grassy way, the sky
above it, and the wide slopes on either side.
(Naipaul 1987:15)

By making reference to the path of the eye it is as if the narrator is the exterior observer
looking at a painting rather than standing in a rural landscape. The vision is acknowledged as
a subjective one, “as I thought”, and the principles and judgments of that speaking subject
shape a central part of the narrative, in such words as “ancient” and “empty” the emotional
values of the place are suggested. These carry connotations of mystery, origins, and
insignificance on the part of the narrator in comparison with the grand space he is occupying
at the time of the relating. The significance of the narrated space is registered in the
encompassing temporal terms of “ancient” and “beginning”. The grammatical tempus of the
passage is one of continuous past tense, the experience is related as a recorded event spoken
of in hindsight as a journey now completed. It is this construction of the temporal in the
negotiation of space that connects the subjective narration of the text to the periplus reading.

In the Enigma of Arrival the temporal manifestation of space is also represented by

narrative descriptions of seeing time preserved in a landscape. In passages reminiscent of
Hardy’s Return of the Native the earth is given a historical memory which can be read by the
aware witness,

…my feeling for the age of the earth and the oldness of man’s possession
of it was always with me. A vast sacred burial ground, bounded by the sky
– of what activity those barrows and tumuli spoke, what numbers, what
organization, what busyness in these now virtually empty downs! (Naipaul
1987:24).

It is not a covered over (cement) or exploited (technology) earth but an earth that is
permeable and breeched, with openings such as graves which provide a texture which can be
entered into with understanding. In the more contemporary army training school at Larkhill
there is also an effort to imbue the earth with a narrative based in history but it is not of
openings and underground. Here on the surface the trees are planted to represent the
positions of the ships at the Battle of Trafalgar “or was it Waterloo” (Naipaul 1987:24). The
unreliable narrator shifts the emphasis of this example from the old to the newer and doing so
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builds a stronger connection to the ‘natural’ manifestations of geographic narrative as

opposed to those made during recorded history. Some features of place are more “purer” in
their connection with the place and therefore their manifestations of their narratives are as
well. In the Wiltshire episodes the most profound connection to the landscape is expressed as
the synthesis “Of literature and antiquity and the landscape [of which] Jack and his garden
and his geese and cottage and his father-in-law seemed emanations.” (Naipaul 1987:25). It is
by degrees that all are held by the place and must act out their time accordingly, including the
narrator of the The Enigma of Arrival. However the sense of this narrative matrix being under
threat is also included in the progression of time which the spatial landscape contains and
nurtures.

The beginning of change in the lives of the characters is manifest in conjunction with
changes in the landscape;

“I looked for cracks and flaws in it and hoped that the little abrasions and
water erosions I noticed would spread and make it impossible – fantasy taking
over from logic – for the machines to lay down a new asphalt mixture.”
(Naipaul 1987: 44).

In this passage there is the naïve wish (fantasy) that if the physical space can be maintained
then the temporal state will be so as well. The nature of this change is compared to that of
Columbus bringing unevenness into “the evenness of history on the other side” (Naipaul
1987:44) with his voyages to the Americas. In this change from perfectly even time and
proper form there is a particular conceptualization of nature which is important. Once again
nature is the pre-arrival untouched state, a purity which is constructed as before the history of
those using machines and covering over the earth. The sterility of the imposed concrete skin
is taken up in several places in The Enigma of Arrival such as the appeal over Jack’s garden
demands “But surely below all that concrete over his garden some seed, some root would
survive, and one day perhaps…” (Naipaul 1987:86). It is as if the anonymous narrator needs
to see the land in order to be able to read it and map it, and not being able to read it means
that it has been included into the uneven time of those that use the machines. The gardener is
also such a character who can read the space of nature being a “magician, herbalist, in touch
with the mystery of seed and root and graft. (Naipaul 1987:214). This mythologizing of the
garden and the gardener provides for a strong modernist flavour to the work and is also
consistent with The Enigma of Arrival being a periplus map developed around the subjective
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emotions and memories of the narrator. In the same way that author of an ancient periplus
was both story teller and guide. Like the returning traveller here we have a man telling us the
landscape as he saw it through all the subjectivity and we may follow his narrative map in
order to reach a similar, but perhaps not the same destination.

The periplus reading of the text which constructs the map as being provided for the
reader by the omniscient narrator is a non-diegetic textual characteristic. In it not overtly
stated in The Enigma of Arrival that the narrator is mapping the Wiltshire Downs or the
journey from Trinidad to London via New York. In many sections of the text the mapping is
not a physical description of the topography or physical features encountered by the
travelling narrator, rather it is about the emotional or connotative reactions he experiences in
these places. There is until the very end of the novel an unfolding of new ground in the sense
of the periplus due to an emotional map merging with the descriptive map being constructed
by the narrator. This psycho-geographic mapping can be broken down into well defined
segments in the non-diegetic landscape: Jack’s Garden and Wiltshire being allegoric with
memories of childhood and birth, The Journey section being connected to Africa and growth
and education, The Ivy being based on people, and depicting the adult stage and society.
Finally The Rooks is heavily laden with themes around community and old age and death. To
move through each of these stages is to map a life, both as it progresses and in retrospect.
The final chapter The Ceremony of Farwell is the funeral and the departure from the great
map planet earth that is;

“Our sacred world – the sanctities that had been handed down to us as
children by our families, the sacred places of our childhood, sacred because
we see them as children and had filled them with wonder, places doubly and
trebly sacred to me because far away in England I had lived in them
imaginatively over many books and had in my fantasy set in those places the
very beginning of things, had constructed out of them a fantasy home…”
(Naipaul 1987.318)

Here the alignment between place, emotion and the subjective experience based on
imagination and fantasy is synthesised. The being in a place is not just about physical
presence but psychic presence whereby one can “live in them imaginatively” while being
“far away”, as we all construct periploi maps in our heads, subjective versions of place.
Central to every one of these subjective places is time as once we have captured the image of
a place in out minds it does not progress outside the time we experienced it. The narrative
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associated with a particular place becomes that place in our imaginative recollection of it. In
the case of the narrator of The Enigma of Arrival he had been given a pre-constructed
“official” version of England as a subject of the British Empire, going to school in Trinidad
and gaining a scholarship to attend Oxford University as a young Indian West Indian
Commonwealth citizen. With his physical arrival at the places he had learnt and imagined
about from reading books he begins his own synthesis of knowledge, fantasy and the
experiences undergone in the place itself.

Just as a place becomes a feature of living memory and imagination, the periplus is also
a living narrative for those who follow it as a map. The descriptive narrative provided by
Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival is his periplus but this in turn goes on to feed the
imagination of others. Of those who read the text perhaps some even become wanting to
experience in the physical the image they have from it of the Wiltshire Downs. Just as the
narrator and the author as well had a desire at early stages of their lives to travel to the heart
of the British Commonwealth and experience it directly. Naipaul does employ stereotypes
and the literary sources he sites in the text show his canon of literature is clearly conservative
in many ways, but the quality of the prose and the craft of his language is evident. Of the book
the author says “It's about England, a kind of country life, but not as others write about it. It
sets ideas about country life on their head.” (The Guardian Saturday September 8, 20013).
This again is a subjective appraisal, even coming from the author, but a periplus map is
acknowledged as subjective (they all bear the tile of their author) and perhaps for this reason
it was abandoned in navigation in favour of the visualised map projections we use today. The
periplus instead could be seen as the ancestor of the travel book, for which Naipaul is also
well known.
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A periplus (literally "a sailing-around' in Greek, roughly corresponding to the Latin navigatio, a "ship-voyage") in the
ancient navigation of Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans was a manuscript document that listed in order the ports and coastal
landmarks, with approximate distances between, that the captain of a vessel could expect to find along a shore. Several
examples of periploi have survived; the Periplus of Hanno the Carthaginian being the oldest known (6th century BCE).

2
“A periplus is a map that projects the stages of a journey as they succeed each other for the traveller, as opposed to a map
that gives an image from the outside and above the terrain of every point on it simultaneously. Such a map forms a temporal
narrative rather than a spatial one.” Conner Steven, Postmodern Culture. An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary.
Oxford, Blackwell, 1989 p118.
3
Found at http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,548473,00.html