(Download) "Modern Migration in Two Arabic Novels ('Season of Migration to the North,' 'the Enigma of Arrival' and 'the Lamp of Umm Hashim') (Critical Essay)" by Ikram Masmoudi * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Modern Migration in Two Arabic Novels ('Season of Migration to the North,' 'the Enigma of Arrival' and 'the Lamp of Umm Hashim') (Critical Essay)
- Author : Ikram Masmoudi
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 103 KB
Description
In the middle of his life and experience as a writer living and writing in England, the main character and narrator of V.S. Naipaul's autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival, an Indian from colonial Trinidad retires to the English countryside to heal and reflect on a series of aspects of his life: his metropolitan encounters, his career, and his early attempts at writing. In the cottage he rents he stumbles upon a few books left there by pervious tenants. Among them was a booklet with reproductions of famous paintings. One of these catches his attention because of what sounds to him like a poetical title: The Enigma of Arrival: "I felt that in an indirect, poetical way the title referred to something in my own experience; and later I was to learn that the titles of these surrealist paintings of Chirico's hadn't been given by the painter but by the poet Apollinaire" (98). Intrigued by this title, the narrator/writer soon begins an attempt to verbalize the visual representation and to fantasize about the situation depicted in the painting: "A classical scene, Mediterranean, ancient Roman or so I saw it. A wharf; in the background beyond walls and gateways (like cutouts) there is the top of the mast of an antique vessel; on an otherwise deserted street in the foreground there are two figures, both muffled ... The scene is of desolation and mystery: it speaks of the mystery of the arrival. It spoke to me of that as it had spoken to Apollinaire" (98). Feeling unanchored and out of place in the rural English countryside, the Trinidadian narrator relates the scene to his own experience, as a man who arrived from colonial Trinidad and to his aesthetic ambition to become a writer in England. He soon identifies with the character in the painting. Naipaul's description of the painting is brief compared with the length of the novel, but its relevance to his story and his borrowing of the title are indicative of its importance to his plot and the situation of his Trinidadian character/narrator, who, like the two muffled human figures lost on the wharf of the painting, felt out of place in the English countryside and out of place in the metropolis with his abstract knowledge of England and the world and what it meant to be a writer. His first attempts at writing alienated him from his memory and his experience which he muted for the sake of outdated imperial literary ideas and trends: "The idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estate and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. .. I felt that presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of that country" (15). Naipaul tried to break the silence of the scene by trying to establish a link and a parallel between two different art forms through the human experience of arrival. Although the scene on the painting does not evoke the countryside but a realistic, metropolitan atmosphere, there seem to be a clear disconnect between the space and the subjects it represents, i.e., the imposing buildings, their style and architecture, and the two human figures. These two figures look out of place, and unanchored amidst this decor.