Ekphrasis and V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival

The critic Mark McWatt finds V. S. Naipaul's conflation of factual and imaginative experience in The Enigma of Arrival to be an ironic reversal. Narrative details conform to known facts in Naipaul's life, yet he subtitles the book A Novel. McWatt argues, "It is fiction, the shaped and patterned product of the imagination (which, in a sense, denies reality), that is perceived as having greater authority and power than 'truth' or 'reality.' This is an inversion of the values of the previous ages of the novel, when authors such as Defoe sought the disguise of truth in order to make their fictions more powerful and more acceptable" (26). Such an inversion of values is a departure from tradition, but, as Bruce King points out, Naipaul's genre breach is not without precedent.

Characteristics shared by Enigma with modernist autobiographical novels by Proust,Mann and Joyce include the developing sensitivity and awareness of the artist, the alienation of the artist, the circularity of the form (so that the conclusion leads back to the beginning), the role of memory in recovering the past, the multiple time scheme that memory imposes on the narrative, the continual revealing of realities to be illusions, the unusual position of the narrator in relationship to the story, the privileging of art as a means of arresting the flux of the world and giving life significance, and the originality of the novel in comparison to its models.

(139)

Naipaul inserts a construct of himself into his novel; thus, his authorial presence—his narrative persona—complicates matters owing to the particularity with which he insists on the outsider's tentative perspective. As he struggles to map his orientation, it is as though the points of his compass are askew, his place in the world difficult to ascertain for the narrator as well as the reader.

The result of Naipaul's aesthetic choice is the freedom to walk the indefinite line between fact and fiction so that reality is held in suspension. In keeping with Giorgio de Chirico's manipulation of perspective in The Enigma of Arrival and the Afternoon, a surreal conflation of event and imagination opens the way for psychological examination. The reader is confronted with an aesthetic balancing act, weighing factual elements known to be drawn from the author's life against his virtual doppelgänger, which may be a transparent concept of himself or a calculated construct. Naipaul's pivotal act of ekphrasis, reading de Chirico's painting, alerts the wary reader to an intertextual nexus wherein we must attend to three levels of meaning: the narrator's candid act of explication, its authorial and autobiographical application, and the implications of interrogating the artistic motive behind the entire novel. Obviously, the reference to this metaphysical painting serves Naipaul as more than an excuse for a title.

From at least as far back as Homer's description of Achilles' mythical shield in the Iliad, classical ekphrasis has often provided to an unfolding narrative the verbal equivalent of visual experience. This device, which has typically been regarded as relatively straightforward written description of an art object, has evolved, according to James Heffernan, until it has emerged as a virtual literary genre for poets over the last half century: "Ekphrasis entails prosopopeia, or the rhetorical technique of envoicing a silent object. Ekphrasis speaks not only about works of art but also to and for them. In so doing, it stages—within the theater of language itself—a revolution of the image against the word" (6–7). Although Heffernan addresses generations of poets, building toward our postmodern era, I wish to borrow at least part of his argument and apply it to Naipaul's novel. Since Naipaul's description of the de Chirico painting itself is relatively brief, his immediate adaptation of it to his own experience suggests the encounter's deeper relevance lies in the autobiographical application he makes of it to the life of his thinly disguised narrator.

Juxtaposition of documented facts from the author's background with his purportedly nonfactual text thrusts Naipaul's novel into the heart of...