ABSTRACT
Since the publication of his travelogue The Middle Passage (1962), Naipaul has alternated between fiction and nonfiction writing. Among his numerous nonfiction works are three books about India, a study of Islam (Among the Believers, 1981), and an account of a journey through the American South (A Turn in the South, 1989). Increasingly, his later work has eroded the borderline between fact and fiction. His 1987 "novel" The Enigma of Arrival (1987) is autobiographical, describing the life of a Caribbean-born writer who settles in Wiltshire-just as Naipaul himself did. Generic categories are also blurred in the central tale, which gives the novel its title (taken from a painting by the surrealist artist Giorgio De Chirico). This novel resembles the fiction of a postmodern writer like Jorge Luis Borges; it has less in common with classic realism or conventional autobiography. Naipaul asserts that the novel form is dead, and his 1994 book A Way in the World, which follows The Enigma of Arrival in blending fact and fiction, refuses status as a novel, preferring to call itself "a sequence." It intersperses a range of public and personal histories to illustrate a complex investigation of origins, which suggests that pasts are layered and cannot be described through a unitary narrative method. Naipaul's compulsive storytelling complicates the issue of how to narrate the past. Despite the view that he is no innovator, Naipaul's approach has much in common with the French philosopher Michel Foucault's archaeological approach to the discursive inscription of the past, which has influenced several postcolonial critics of European historiography.
