1To the city of Port of Spain, where with one short break he was to spend the rest of his life..., Mr Biswas came by accident.... At the road junction Mr Biswas had still not decided where to go. Most of the traffic moved north: tarpaulin covered lorries, taxis, buses. The buses slowed down to pass Mr Biswas, and the conductors, hanging out from the footboard, shouted to him to come aboard.... And it was while he was trying to decide whether Ramchand’s invitation could be considered genuine that a bus, its engine partially unbonneted, its capless radiator steaming, came to a stop inches away with a squeal of breaks and a racking of its tin and wood body, and the conductor, a young man, almost a boy, bent down and seized Mr Biswas’s cardboard suitcase, saying imperiously, impatiently, ‘Port of Spain, man, Port of Spain’. (HB, p. 3071)

2This quotation from V.S. Naipaul’s early novel A House for Mr Biswas shows that means of transport is more important to Naipaul’s fiction than it might seem at first. At a crucial moment in his life, Mohun Biswas, standing at the main crossroads outside Arwacas, does not know what to do with his future life. The bus, stopping near him by chance, is not merely a bus. It is essential to Biswas’s fate. Its description symbolically evokes Biswas’s physical and psychological state of dereliction as well as his vital impulse to keep going.

3Other types of transport used by Naipaul’s protagonists also carry such symbolic purport. Only those referred to in Naipaul’s later fiction (The Enigma of Arrival, A Way in The World, Half a Life and Magic Seeds2) will be analysed in order to reduce the span of the corpus. This study will try to describe which means of transport are often mentioned in Naipaul’s later fiction. Although some sort of catalogue will have to be established, the aim is to emphasize the relationship between these and the notions of time and space: using a means of transport signifies travelling (however short the trip), an act which generates new approaches to the temporal and spatial background. A further link with point of view—whether perceptual or conceptual—should be drawn, since changes affect the traveller’s personality, his worldview, his conception of life. As travelling can also be viewed as a metaphor for life, the links with space and time are emphasized in the symbolic approach to the notion of transport.

4Travelling and writing are also profoundly interdependent in Naipaul’s later fiction: although travelling often spurs the writer to go on with his literary activity, it can also be used as a metaphor for the creative process: writing is introduced as the artist’s (mostly the writer’s) journey through life and the kind of transport used may symbolically affect the writing process by creating hindrances or by stimulating literary creation which, in its turn, takes the reader to unknown shores in emotional transport.

5Firstly, though almost all existing means of transport are mentioned in Naipaul’s later fiction, some appear to be of lesser importance, and as such, they will only be quickly studied. Trains for instance are mentioned mostly to present the traveller with a detached vision of the place he is travelling through as occurs in The Enigma of Arrival, when the young man arriving from Trinidad takes a train bound for London: the traveller from the Caribbean discovers his own new world, Britain, in a reversed movement and experiences all kinds of new physical and perceptual sensations. The changes in colours and light, the continuing and bustling life of the city, all contrast with what he had known before,3 entailing a conceptual change; his new surroundings have an unreal, intangible, almost dreamlike quality (EA: 118).

6Because he is not used to it, it all seems fictitious, as if he had been propelled into an unreal form of existence. And the gap between what was expected and what he is confronted with in reality gives way to disillusionment (EA: 120-1). But trains are of limited impact in Naipaul’s later fiction.

7Planes are more frequently used, being an illustration of the gradual technical, social and cultural evolution of modern societies. Yet, in Naipaul’s later novels, they are also used either to grant the traveller a new perceptual knowledge of his familiar place of living or to emphasize the cultural gap between the country left behind and the country of destination, stressing the extreme rapidity of the changes undergone. Thus, the young protagonist in The Enigma manifests an unusual, unexpected behaviour with other travellers, offering bananas to an English mother and child and trying to make conversation with a fellow Trinidadian in the airport shed.4 This unusual behaviour leads him to question himself. Thus the narrator highlights the unexpected transformation in his personality, located primarily in his conceptual point of view:

The fact was, I made the offer. Though really, I didn’t want this woman’s friendship or conversation, and was not interested in the child.
Was there some fear of travel, in spite of my longing for the day, and in spite of my genuine excitement?
Was this reaching out to people a response to solitude—since for the first time in my life I was solitary? Was it the fear of New York? Certainly. (EA: 102)

8Since this is the protagonist’s first trip outside his island, the novelty of his confrontation with the unknown raises uncontrollable anxiety.

9Such conceptual changes are the consequences of a prior shift in perceptual point of view. The plane described is a small aeroplane, droning on to Puerto Rico and New York. Due to its limited size, it enables the young man to see his familiar world in a new way, to discover his island from a bird’s eye view, giving it a new scale and appearance, unsuspected beauty and value. It subverts the protagonist’s preconceived ideas. What he thought trivial or ugly now appears orderly and beautiful (EA: 97-8).

10Similarly, observing the sea and sky above the clouds leads to new revelations concerning the wider world (EA, p. 99). The limited background of childhood becomes extensive, even infinite. This new vision generates a newfound ability to compare things, enabling him to reach a more universal understanding of his surroundings now endowed with symbolic meaning. As Jack’s garden reminds the protagonist of his father’s tropical garden, the vision of the rivulets in Trinidad and of the snow in Wiltshire indirectly echo his new vision of his island:5 microcosm and macrocosm are reunited in a new, symbolic vision. Meaning is generated by the mental confrontation of similar images. The observer is given a new perception of time and space, which transports him back to a virgin atemporal world.

11In both Half a Life and Magic Seeds, purposely written to form a diptych,6 planes are mentioned to insist on the speed of the journey, and the almost immediate, disturbing changes one has to face. Sometimes, for example in the first report of Willie’s departure from Africa (HL, p. 137), the means of transport used is elided; the flight to Germany can only be inferred. The narrative ellipsis reflects the abrupt change in Willie’s life.

12However, in Magic Seeds, planes and airports are mentioned more openly. Willie’s flight back to India shows that his life has not evolved since his departure from India several decades earlier, thus drawing the reader’s attention to the sterility of Willie’s previous life: he appears to go back to his departure point. Although he is given a more detached outlook,7 the airport and the plane seem to reflect an altogether faithful and painful image of what he had left behind. They offer him condensed visions of the India he had earlier rejected.8

13His flight to India brings him face to face with his past. Halfway into adulthood he has not yet been able to create anything that might have taken him away from that hated reality. When he later goes back to London after his jail sentence, the trip is merely summed up (MS: 175). Only his arrival (the distance to be walked to the immigration desk and the time needed to get the luggage back) is recorded. It is then more abrupt and painful, obliging him to face the void in his own life once more. It teaches him humility and acceptance. Travelling makes him aware of man’s insignificance and of his limited scope af action:

But then he thought, ‘I have been there.... I cannot go there again. I must let that part of me die. I must lose that vanity. I must understand that big countries grow or shrink according to the play of internal forces that are beyond the control of any one man. I must try now to be only myself. If such a thing is possible’. (MS: 176-7)

14The only perceptible evolution is psychological, conceptual. Flying from one country to another does not only bring about changes in places. It also includes changes in cultural and social terms as well as personal ones: the image of oneself is put in perspective and one’s viewpoint must adapt accordingly, even if this is painful and means losing many illusions. To accept the limitations of life is to achieve wisdom.

15Ships are also regularly mentioned in Naipaul’s later fiction. Many different kinds of vessels can be inferred.9 Like other means of transport, ships generate a profound change in point of view. Firstly, sailors or passengers do not have the same viewpoint as land travellers. Perception, anchored at sea, makes the object of observation more distanced as when the narrator in A Way in the World describes his drive to the point the Galley10 and tries to understand the name given to the place by Christopher Columbus: he realizes that it can be meaningful only to observers who can reconstruct Columbus’s precise vision. Only an appropriate superimposition of points of view (the present-time observer’s and Columbus’s) can give access to the reality of the land observed11. Without adopting this point of view people could ‘feel that the old maps had got it wrong, that in the two-hundred and fifty years of depopulation and wilderness that had followed the discovery... knowledge of Columbus’s landfall had been lost’. (WW: 71) The discoverer’s vision must be reconstructed from the present through layers of history. The perception of the sailor, once reconstructed, reveals his vision, as if time and space had become transparent. This makes synchronic and diachronic vision coincide, breaking the limits of passing time.

16In Half a Life Willie Chandran also catches a first glimpse of the African continent from the ship as he is on his way to Ana’s estate. This provides him with a particular view of the land: it contrasts with his mental construct of the place, taking him unawares, destabilizing him. Overwhelmed by the beauty of the place, he loses all personal landmarks, succumbs to utter mental confusion.12 Furthermore, his journey on board a coasting ship to the northern province enhances his malaise. For him, such overpowering beauty is no more than a luring sight concealing a monster-like landscape ready to swallow him and prevent him from organizing a return journey (HL: 133-4).

17However, as travelling by ship takes longer than going by plane, travellers experience the changes in time and space more gradually. The reader could then expect to learn about the journey in greater detail. Yet travelling onboard a ship develops a new reflexive vision on the part of the traveller: it causes much emotional pain, feelings of ignorance and insecurity, of unease, disturbance and vulnerability, as well as an exacerbated impression of placelessness, of non-belonging.

18Ship travellers, therefore, are not to be mistaken for tourists. They do not enjoy the sights. Travelling means thinking about oneself, one’s identity, one’s place in the world, about the meaning of existence. Travelling is synonymous with self-reflexive vision, with potential self-dissolution. Hence, Willie’s first perception of Egypt on his way to London: it almost gives way to a narrative blank because at that time he is psychologically locked inside himself, emotionally blind to the sights around him; he is incapable of admiring the landscape, his global perception of the world being distorted and spoilt by worry (HL: 52).

19Similarly, when Willie moves to Africa, he is not truly himself. He almost becomes somebody else, overcome as he is by panic at seeing his own self dissolve, at becoming a stranger to himself in this new experience. The cabin, an enclosed space cut off from the outer world, facilitates self exploration (HL: 132-3), and is then no more than the objective correlative for Willie’s state of mind at that time.

20Such a fear of self-dissolution, of death also pervades the images of ships in two ‘unwritten stories’ imagined by the narrator in A Way In the World: the stories of Sir Walter Raleigh and of Francisco Miranda. In both cases, the protagonists’ situations are desperate, doomed to failure, to death and oblivion. Their ideals will never become real. Both men die thinking of their sons: their attention is turned inwards, to their own past actions, decisions and memories.

21Ships, therefore, do not merely illustrate the most commonly used means of transport in those times; they also represent the journey through life, with all its hazards, lucky ventures or awful predicaments. Ships are perfect places for thinking, for drawing up the schedule of assets and liabilities of one’s life.

22At the same time, ships are the epitome of transience. They are moving vessels on the greater flow of life in the universe: man’s actions are given another dimension by being set in a more macro-cosmic dimension: life, whether successful or not, is nevertheless always bound for death and the unknown world of the dead. The ship is no longer a symbol of security, and the cabin is no longer a harbour against the various tempests or ills in life. Contrary to what Pascal said ‘Il y a plaisir d’être dans un vaisseau battu par l’orage, lorsqu’on est assuré qu’il ne périra pas’13, Raleigh and Miranda know that their ventures are doomed to fail. Moreover, as the place of destination is usually unknown — though it can be philosophically imagined—arrival is the source of overpowering anxiety. In such a representation of the ship, perceptual point of view is evidently superseded by conceptual viewpoint, as Suman Gupta says:

Both accounts [‘A parcel of Papers, A Roll of Tobacco, A Tortoise’ and ‘In The Gulf of Desolation’] delineate similar patterns: Raleigh and Miranda are shown to be failed visionaries... who are at odds with the realities they encounter.... In colonial history this is the colonizer (Raleigh here) and the revolutionary (Miranda), both of whom, despite their fixity of purpose and determination, are made subject to and defeated by the process of history. The reality of their times defeats them, and that reality is the reality of the world in its historical continuum. There is continuity too in the failure of idealistic and visionary human efforts.14

23Then ships are representations of temporality and they are described as such in the different sketches for stories entitled ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ in the eponymous novel. In the stories, ships are symbolic vessels endowed with universal characteristics. At first, the narrator thinks of setting the story in the Mediterranean, in classical times. The antique ship is at the heart of the story: it is supposed to be the hero’s salvation board, his only means of leaving the town in which he gets lost and feels threatened. But the ship has suddenly gone and escape is impossible. The hero’s life is close to its end. The ship then becomes the atemporal symbol of one’s disappearing life and of the everflowing, unseizable and inescapable quality of life. The atemporal characteristic of the ship here is also well illustrated by the writer’s new awareness granted to him by his life in Wiltshire, which generates his second birth. The image of the ship cristallizes many different, yet comparable and finally universal experiences:

And it did not occur to me that the story of ‘The Enigma of Arrival’... was really no more than a version of the story I was already writing.
Nor did it occur to me that it was also an attempt to find a story for, to give coherence to, a dream or nightmare which for a year or so had been unsettling me. (EA: 93)

24Whatever the place and time period, the experiences described are transposed and can be superimposed. Man’s individual life is part of a grander scheme, of continuous flux.

25But ships are not the only means of transport which symbolically unites or merges perceptual and conceptual approaches. Cars and walking also partake in that fusion.

26Cars are mostly four wheel drives and are used to different purposes, all of them establishing a deep link between their drivers and the land. They are essential means of transport in the remote Wiltshire countryside (EA: 31) mostly because they enable their drivers to establish communicational links with their neighbours, enabling them to acknowledge each other’s presence, without having to commit themselves. Cars, therefore, stand midway between the security of an enclosed space and the opening to the outer world which they make possible.

27But the farm manager’s Land Rover in The Enigma is also used for a more symbolic purpose. He uses it for professional reasons, on his inspection rounds. The repetition of these rounds leads the narrator to discover his familiar circular route: he always uses the same portion of modern asphalt road and ‘the rocky lane that led up from the bottom of the valley, where the old farm buildings and cottages were, to the new barn at the top of the hill.’ (EA: 28). The farm-manager stands for modernity in a valley which is at the very crossroads of antiquity and modernity: his rounds take him to use mostly modern paths leading to the modern farm-buildings (EA: 27). He himself lives in a bungalow which stands for ‘a little bit of suburbia at the very edge of antiquity’ (EA: 30).

28Yet this character, the embodiment of modernity, also lives close to Jack’s and Jack’s father-in-law’s cottage. He stands in sharp contrast to Jack’s father-in-law, described as a survivor of Romantic times through the repeated comparisons with a Wordsworthian figure.15 Each of these men is the embodiment of a different epoch—the present and the past, or modernity and antiquity respectively. In fact, they are united by their very actions which consist, in both cases, of roaming the land: the farm manager’s Land-Rover is no more than a modern representation of the older man’s habits of roving the land, hence the symbolism of the name of the car. The Land-Rover materializes the presence of modernity exactly as Jack’s father-in-law gives the landscape his own antiquated vision by creating his own paths made of plastic bags rolled around the barbed wire (EA: 27).

29But what is striking is that the farmer’s rounds are described by the narrator with the same word as Jack’s father-in-law’s and the narrator’s walks: he speaks of their ‘runs’ (EA: 30, 26, 27). Walking and driving ultimately have the same aim, which is to inscribe someone in a routine and therefore in a particular relationship with space and time. The repetition of the trips or walks grants a new understanding of the place and reveals the person’s own perception of the land, not only his visual perception but also his mental image of the landscape, which is finally translated into his ‘run’. The narrator himself, who writes his African story in the mornings and walks over the Wiltshire downs in the afternoons, realizes that his repeated walks enable him to discover new landmarks. For him they are a means of coming to terms with his ignorance of Wiltshire as a newcomer, of appropriating the new places. Roaming the land means integrating the landscape, inscribing one’s existence in reality. Each man can even leave his own mark on the landscape, long after his death.

30The repeated habit of walking the downs also grants the narrator another form of knowledge: he becomes aware that his first interpretation of his surroundings may have been wrong. Repetition restores the truth of the landscape16. As the observer’s understanding becomes clearer and as he gets familiar with his surroundings, truth can finally be restored.

31In Half a Life, the use of four-wheel drives is close to the one mentioned in The Enigma: in Ana’s African country, cars are essential to the estate owners’ survival, since the latter live far away in the wilderness. Four-wheel drives are the only protection they have against the landscape and the threat embodied in the lines of walking Africans (HL: 134). They are crucial to the owners’ security, as the women’s habit of asking for ‘take-away portions of lunch in paper bags’ suggests. Sunday lunches represent potential danger (HL: 144, 159).

32But four-wheel drives also link the wilderness with the town. They provide Willie with new landmarks and knowledge—sexual knowledge this time (HL: 148). It is to a new kind of activity that he now drives in Land-Rovers. Alvaro becomes his town-guide and introduces him to new pleasures. Whether the Land-Rover takes him to the town or to Graça, his lover, it is finally the vehicle which enables him to reach a new form of self-awareness.17 Yet, his new ‘life of sensations’ (HL: 211), while giving him a new idea of his wholeness, also gives him ‘some half feeling of the inanity of my life’ (HL: 211). So, when Graça decides to put an end to their relationship, he finally realizes that following Ana to Africa had been a mistake. However, this discovery ultimately leads to a form of personal redemption. The four-wheel drive then represents a means of getting closer to freedom, happiness and self awareness, of reaching a form of truth.

33But as walking is essential to the narrator in The Enigma, it is also important for Willie in Magic Seeds. But instead of giving him a better understanding of the world, it represents sterile repetition: Willie’s numerous marches as a revolutionary in India are to no personal avail. However, the use of transport in Willie’s revolutionary engagement evolves alongside his involvement in the revolutionary movement, so that once more transport can be said to underline personal evolution. At first, it is synonymous with freedom since he can freely move about the country, using all kinds of transport: trains, scooters, buses, etc. Such freedom grants him a unifying vision of the land he travels through, a more complete knowledge of his surroundings, his vision being less fragmented than before.18 As he becomes a courier his status in the guerrilla war is that of ‘the man who travelled’ (MS: 75). But this actually emphasizes Willie’s bogus feeling of belonging:19

34So, when Willie becomes a squad member in Ramachandra’s unit, marching through the forest becomes meaningless. Orders are disconnected from any general plan of action; military actions appear to be uncoordinated, useless, lacking coherence and unity, most of the liberated people showing very little enthusiasm (MS: 107-8). Marching through the forest therefore awakens a feeling of timelessness, of atemporality that makes the world around him almost unreal, evoking death. In such monotonous repetition, he can feel himself dissolve; rather than elevating him, this passage in his life is a mark of regression (MS: 108-9).

35Such a feeling, leading to his surrender, is nevertheless viewed as positive. It is yet another mistake, but an enriching one, which makes him progress towards self-awareness, towards better understanding of life. The music he has been listening to at a wedding enables him to make all the different stages in his life fuse into a more general process of evolution: beyond apparent sterility, the magic seeds he has found can be seen to be germinating at last. While in the past his sister had often warned him against wasting his life, she finally appears to be the one who has been misled because of her idealistic outlook. Willie has finally managed to reach a more comprehensive understanding of life:

All night Willie heard the music.... All night it seemed to him as well that he had found something good to write to Sarojini about. This thing eluded him. He looked for it, through all the slave music, and in the morning all he was left with was: ‘It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unravelling. But I can’t write to Sarojini about that.’ (MS: 293-4)

36When one knows what a passionate traveller Naipaul is, it is not surprising that travelling and writing are intricately entwined. Nowhere is the relationship between travelling and writing more clearly developed than in The Enigma of Arrival. In this novel, the narrator describes his first experience as a traveller as the sine qua non condition for his future as a writer: when he was eighteen years old the narrator-protagonist travelled to England to become a writer, echoing Naipaul’s own decision when he was a boy.20 Yet, such a situation caused a psychological rift in the protagonist’s personality, a fracture between what he calls the man and the writer.21 In the narrative, such a division is reflected at times in the use of heterodiegetic narration (materializing in the form of third-person pronouns) in the middle of a predominantly homodiegetic narrative (first-person narration). This introduces more distance between the middle-aged narrator, now a successful writer, and the young writer he was then.

37Believing that the writer should adopt particular attitudes and poses, the young man sometimes found himself very much estranged from his own self in order to stick to his mental image of the writer (EA: 134): although his first pieces of writing were based on personal experiences, the young boy only retained, at that time, those supposedly noble elements that he viewed as literary material deserving attention.22 But this also led him to be unfaithful to personal experience, and to ‘edit out’ many important events in his life—mostly because they were too personally acute.23 Even if travelling had given him the opportunity to write,24 the young man’s first journey had also been responsible for a deep fracture in his own self.

38At the same time the middle-aged protagonist and narrator in The Enigma, like Naipaul himself in real life, realizes that most of his books have been inspired by travelling:25 writing and travelling cannot be dissociated from each other in the narrator’s works.

39But healing the fracture in the narrator’s personality means reconciling this two-sided self (the man and the writer), and this takes time. It can only be achieved through a long and gradual process. It is when the middle-aged protagonist feels lonely in his new Wiltshire cottage and feels dispirited about the book that he is writing that such a slow process of reunification may begin. Lasting several years, it is paralleled by the literary creation of the novel The Enigma of Arrival.

40At first, ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ was to be a simple, short project generated by an overwhelming emotion that swept through him when he watched a painting by Chirico (EA: 91). The first project is then anchored in the narrator’s subjectivity as a man. But the first sketch also served as a release from the extreme stress he underwent when writing his African narrative echoing a period of high tension in his own life as a stranger in Wiltshire (EA: 156). The conjunction of different places and feelings already paved the way to reconciliation: ‘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.’ (EA: 156)

41The writing of the sketches for the stories ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ was a moment of pure pleasure, without tension: as such it was the first creative act of reconciliation between the man and the writer even if the writer was still unaware of it (EA: 157). Only the repetition of his walks, paralleled by the repetition of different trips and the writing of different books could lead to such complete knowledge and re-union of his two-sided self: ‘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.’ (EA: 102)

42For the middle-aged writer such a reconciliation could only be achieved in the final novelistic account published as The Enigma of Arrival. There he actually achieves the fusion or reconciliation before the reader’s eyes, in the very act of writing the novel, by showing all the different stages necessary to the composition of the book, from the very first ideas germinating in the writer’s mind to the final text which unreels gradually, page after page with the reading act. It is therefore by introducing the writing of ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ as a trip towards self-knowledge that the narrator finally manages to reconcile his two selves. Writing is a performative act which unites and reconciles in its very process.

43At the same time, as such an act of reconciliation is above all personal, he can no longer continue with his earlier project of setting ‘The Enigma of Arrival’ in antique surroundings. Classical Rome is not relevant any longer. An autodiegetic mode of narration which puts his personal experience into relief, and sets it in his modern everyday context is to be privileged. By being a performative act of reconciliation, the writing of The Enigma is a new journey beyond self-knowledge, which stages the complete reconciliation of his personality, placing it at the core of the narrative.

44Reading The Enigma is also another journey for the reader who embarks on a ship taking him to far away, unknown shores, which finally seem to be concealing their inner meaning behind what might appear to be a transparent surface. As the reader is carried away by the narration of the protagonist’s memories and analyses, the final lines come to him as a surprise when the anamorphotic device suggested by these last lines reveals a new meaning. The reader has to begin reading the novel again, but this time by following the perspective mentioned in the last sentences:

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. (EA: 318)

45The titles of Naipaul’s other novels, with the exception of Magic Seeds at first sight, stress the fact that writing and travelling are still intricately linked. A Way in the World draws the reader’s attention more to the very action of travelling, of moving from one place to another than to the ultimate moment of arrival. Strangely enough, in A Way in the World travelling is thematically important but the narrator himself is introduced as a figure moving from one narrative to another, from one historical period to another. The different sections or chapters lead to different places in different ages. The reader is then asked to share the same experience, moving from one continent to another and from one period to another. He is asked to adopt the same untainted vision of the Caribbean as Columbus on his third voyage to the West Indies (WW: 69-72), to be plunged in the Port of Spain of the narrator’s youth (WW: 11 for instance), to project himself into a ‘small boat on a highland river’ in South America (WW: 43), to move to East Africa (WW: 343) and then to go back to Foster Morris’s and Lebrun’s time (WW: 77), to approach Sir Walter Raleigh’s age of colonialism (WW: 157) and to witness Miranda’s failed revolution (WW: 237). So, the journeys the reader is invited on are voyages of geographical displacement and journeys backwards and forwards in time. Temporal and spatial limits are abolished by writing, enabling the narrator and the reader at the same time to experience unequalled sensations and feelings very different from real life. Only literary writing makes possible the juxtaposition of such unusual experiences.

46By writing several stories ironically subtitled ‘Unwritten Stories’, the narrator also questions the status of writing itself, insisting on the narrative devices at work in writing and proposing some sort of narrative ‘mise en scène’ of the story called ‘New Clothes’: after a few general statements about ideas for potential stories, the narrator reveals his modus operandi, insisting on all the steps that may go into the making of a narrative, from a mere evanescent idea to a fully developed narrative account. This narrator is also a writer, who speaks in his own name (‘I’), and who decides to write the sketch of a new story before the reader’s eyes, introducing the writer’s preoccupations more directly than in the sketches for ‘The Enigma of Arrival’: he stages the various forces at work in narration and highlights the theme of embedded narration. The choice of a narrator within the framework of the story is a particularly careful one (WW: 45). There are therefore two embedded narrative figures: one which represents the figure of the creating and manipulating author, and one which is also the main character inside the story, who chooses to narrate his experience in an autodiegetic mode. It is only gradually that the narrator’s persona is outlined in detail26. Then the plot becomes more elaborate; the story unfurls, getting more and more independent from the first narrator’s grip: through scenes of dialogue the characters are given a voice and are finally perceived as completely emancipated from the first narrator’s hold on the story, imposing themselves, existing in their own fictional world, or so it seems.

47The juxtaposition of such stories, ironically introduced as yet unwritten stories, gives unity to A Way in the World. Set in different periods and places these stories constitute a literary whole, as if to emphasize yet another form of reconciliation: from bits and pieces from the past, from mere fictional ideas and sketches, from various memories of jouneys, the writer brings together the broken elements of his life and creates a new vision, generating a jigsaw-puzzle-like version of his own Way in the World, a journey granted unusual temporal and spatial scope by the very act of writing.

48Similarly, Half a Life highlights the main character’s way in the world, his moves from India to Britain and to Africa. The novel is introduced as a possibly mimetic account of Willie’s progress on earth in the first part of his life. Yet, the narrative suggests that a profound link exists between Willie’s life and writing. His Indian life is anchored in a dual literary tradition, as recalled in the first chapter ‘A Visit from Somerset Maugham27’. Willie’s life in England is then narrated in ‘The First Chapter’, as if his life were to unreel in an epic narrative. The chapter ‘A Second Translation’ is an account of Willie’s journey to Africa, of his geographical ‘translation’ to another place. But it can also be viewed as a metatextual reference to the narrative itself, the narrator being introduced as ‘a translator’, guiding the reader in his interpretation of Willie’s journey to Africa. He could then be perceived as a persona standing in-between the character’s diegetic world and the reader’s extra-diegetic universe. This chapter headline could also suggest that Willie himself has become the interpreter of this part of his life in the oral account he is relating for his sister Sarojini. Becoming the autodiegetic narrator of his past, he could be viewed as a real tale-teller addressing his limited audience. By being embedded in the heterodiegetic narrator’s account of Half a Life, this oral account could be interpreted as a ‘second [degree] translation.’ The reader’s journey is an interpretative journey setting the text in a more general literary perspective.28

49Such an unusual position is also required in order to understand the double meaning of the enigmatic title Magic Seeds. The relationship between travelling and writing is not obvious here unless we have a close look at the various chapter headlines and at the summary in italics placed at the beginning of the novel. As Magic Seeds is intended to be a sequel to Half a Life, the reader expects such a summary to give him a short account of what happened before, in Half a Life. Surprisingly this summary draws the reader’s attention to the text of Magic Seeds itself: it sums up the different stages of Willie’s trip through life and provides us with a condensed vision of the main actions to come. It looks like a conclusion to Magic Seeds and as such is unsettling. The summary is unambiguously introduced as a narrative prolepsis. But it is at the same time built on a general analepsis concerning Willie’s way in the world.29 While it stimulates the reader’s curiosity, it also short-circuits it. Its role is to introduce the text as a moral tale leading the protagonist from difficult death-like situations threatening the integrity of his own self, to salvation and renewal:

Later... it was possible to work out the stages by which he had moved from what he would have considered the real world to all the subsequent areas of unreality: moving as it were from one sealed chamber of the spirit to another. (MS, prologue)

50His journey leads him from real life (‘the real world’) to different forms of unreal life, as if he were descending into his own realm of darkness. Experiences are juxtaposed (‘sealed chambers’) but perceived as spiritual experiences, not material ones. So, Willie’s apparently sterile stages in the journey of life lead towards meaning. But ultimate meaning can only be reached late in life. When he travels down from the Indian ‘Rose-Sellers’ in chapter one to Indian ‘Peacocks’ in Chapter two and to ‘The Street of the Tanners’ in chapter three, his way in the world moves downwards, as if he were falling into a pit, the awareness gained with each stage appearing useless at that point.

51But when Willie is back in London, the chapter headlines evoke slow ascent again by referring to the semantic field of the fairy tale. The headlines all stress the constructive part of the experience. After Willie has reached the bottom of the pit, he begins ascending in spirituality as is illustrated by the titles ‘The London Beanstalk’, ‘The Giant of the Top’, ‘An Axe to the Root’, ‘Suckers’, and finally ‘Magic Seeds’. Most of these are explicit references to the famous fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk. Like Jack, the little boy whose adventure makes him grow, Willie’s experiences act as the branches of the beanstalk, leading him to face danger and truth but giving him enough strength and self-knowledge to destroy the beanstalk of idealism. This implicit moral fable can only serve Willie’s purposes. If other people can suck at the beanstalk to try and get some magic from it, Willie knows that his magic seeds are the secret seeds that he found within himself, and as such they are to be treasured all the more. His valuable discovery is not money or social success but the magic seeds of wisdom and knowledge.

52This sets Willie’s story in a new perspective. Far from being another ‘little man’ in Naipaul’s fiction, he becomes a symbolic character: his story of descent and ascent is granted universal status as well as metaphorical and philosophical meaning. His travels are symbolic ones and to read about them and his different attempts at defining himself leads to more wisdom and knowledge; the reader can partake of the protagonist’s experience.

53Although Naipaul said that The Enigma of Arrival was to be viewed as his last book, all subsequent ones being more or less punctual addenda to his global work,30 the reader is in fact transported by Naipaul’s later novels along a great philosophical route leading him through Western culture to what looks more like Indian wisdom, or perhaps even universal wisdom. To use Walcott’s beautiful lines:

‘a man lives half a life,
the second half is memory,
the first half hesitation
for what should have happened but could not...’31

54one might conclude by saying that the second half is resignation, humility, and knowledge. These are the new shores Naipaul leads us to.