Savors of place: V.S. Naipaul’s enigma of departure

Abstract

V.S. Naipaul often refers to his native Trinidad in terms of size: Trinidad is Naipaul’s “small island”, which he measures against the alleged historical grandeur of his metropolitan destination, England. By focusing on Naipaul’s philosophical novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and his early “Trinidadian” novel Miguel Street (1959), this article argues that the author’s persistent juxtapositions between his adopted English countryside and the memories of his native island allow us to understand Naipaul’s work as a geographically inflected palimpsest expressed through his view of place as either a matter of sensuous immediacy or distant contemplation. Although he insists on the intellectual benefits of departing from the small colonial world, Naipaul actually affirms the inevitable centrality of his Trinidad childhood and youth in all of his subsequent work. Ultimately, in Naipaul’s writing, the world is measured against Trinidad, not Trinidad against the world. The article argues that this paradoxical vastness of the small constitutes the central question of Naipaul’s literary corpus.

Keywords:

• postcolonial
• place
• home
• belonging
• exile
• smallness

Notes

1. For Achille Mbembe, “the notion ‘postcolony’ identifies specifically a given historical trajectory – that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship, par excellence, involves” (1992, 3).

2. For a fascinating analysis of the metaphorical significance of the miniature and the gigantic, see Stewart (1993).

3. Writings of Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Arundati Roy, Michael Ondaatje, J.M. Coetzee and many others, in addition to Naipaul’s own work, particularly in A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), all attest to the postcolonial focus on the miniaturization of vast historical questions in order to make palpable and more poignant the effects of abstract colonial systems on specific individual and communal lives.