The Labyrinth of Universality: Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of Fiction (Cross Cultures 86) (Cross Cultures Series)

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Author: Hena Maes-Jelinek

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The Labyrinth of Universality Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of Fiction

C

ross ultures

Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English

86 Series Editors

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

The Labyrinth of Universality Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of Fiction

Hena Maes–Jelinek

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Cover painting: Aeonia – Bride of the Waters by Leroy Clarke (1986; oil on canvas, 30" x 24"). Collection of Mr & Mrs Dennis Forget. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-10: 90-420-2032-6 ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2032-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2006 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

1 2 3

The Myth of El Dorado in the Caribbean Novel The Writer as Alchemist: The Unifying Role of the Imagination

xiii 1 19

Palace of the Peacock I Voyage into Namelessness II The Naked Design

4 5 6 7 8

ix

The Far Journey of Oudin: A Naked Particle of Freedom The Whole Armour: A Compassionate Alliance

29 49 91 103

The Secret Ladder: The Immaterial Constitution

115

Heartland: Between Two Worlds

129

The Eye of the Scarecrow I The Heart of Inarticulate Protest II The “Unborn State of Exile”

9 The Waiting Room: A Primordial Species of Fiction 10 Tumatumari: An Epic of Ancestors 11 Ascent to Omai I A “Novel-Vision of History” II Climbing Towards Consciousness

139 157 171 187 205 222

12 From The Sleepers of Roraima to The Angel at the Gate: The Novel as Painting

229

13 Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness: “Inimitable Painting”

269

14 The Tree of the Sun and Resurrection: Faces on the Canvas

15 Carnival and Creativity 16 Carnival and J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country: Ambivalent Clio

285 295 313

17 The Infinite Rehearsal I

“Immanent Substance”: Reflections on the Creative Process II “Re-Visionary Strategies”: The Wisdom of Uncertainty

325 343

18 The Four Banks of the River of Space: Unfinished Genesis

357

19 Carnival, The Infinite Rehearsal, and The Four Banks of the River of Space: Ulyssean Carnival of Epic Metamorphoses

20 Resurrection at Sorrow Hill: Charting the Uncapturable 21 Obscure Sorrow Hill: Seminal Ground of Endless Creation

377 395 405

22 “Tricksters of Heaven”: Visions of Holocaust in 23 24 25 26

Jonestown and Fred D’Aguiar’s Bill of Rights

419

The Dark Jester: “Unimaginable Imaginer”

439

The Mask of the Beggar: Transfigurative Art

451

The Ghost of Memory: A Meditation on the Nature of Art

469

“Latent Cross-Culturalities” in Harris and Soyinka: Their Creative Alternative to Theory

483

27 Ut Musica Poesis 28 Writing and the Other Arts 29 Wilson Harris’s Multi-Faceted and Dynamic Perception of the Imaginary

495 505 517

30 “Numinous Proportions”: Wilson Harris’s Alternative to All ‘Posts’

527

Conclusion: Straight Lines and Arabesques

549

Bibliography of Works Cited

553

In grateful memory of Jan and S’Zajndla Jelinek–Ring and for Jeanne Delbaere, my life-long friend

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Acknowledgements

I

W I S H T O E X P R E S S my deepest gratitude to Wilson Harris himself for the rewarding, enriching nature of his work and for the warm generosity and friendship with which he has always answered my questions. It is also with emotion that I recall the understanding, the support and the patience of my late husband through the many years I devoted to Wilson Harris’s work. I am deeply grateful to the friends and colleagues without whose help I could never have collected these essays: to Valérie Bada, who scanned them all from printed sources because I had no computerized version, a task I could not have performed; to Bénédicte Ledent for her unfailing support in everyday life throughout the years and for her careful proofreading of my manuscript; to both Bénédicte and Valérie for making up for my incompetence with computers; finally, to Jeanne Delbaere, who frequently tested the clarity of my essays, for her friendship in the fifty years of our acquaintance, and for sharing all the good and bad moments of my life. My warmest thanks go to Gordon Collier for his usual highly competent editorship and for the friendliness of our editorial meetings with Geoffrey V. Davis.

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x

THE LABYRINTH OF UNIVERSALITY

The essays collected in this volume (sometimes bearing a different title) were originally published in the following journals and collections of essays. (Chapter or part-chapter in the present book is given in parentheses.) “The Myth of El Dorado in the Caribbean Novel,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 6.1 (June 1971): 113–27. This article is based on a paper read on 27 February 1970 at a seminar on Commonwealth literature held at the University of Leeds. (ch. 1.) “The Writer as Alchemist: The Unifying Role of Imagination in the Novels of Wilson Harris,” Language and Literature 1.1 (Autumn 1971): 25–34. (ch. 2.) “The True Substance of Life: Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock,” in Common Wealth, ed. Anna Rutherford (Aarhus: Akademisk Boghandel, 1971): 151–59. (Excerpts in ch. 3.) The Naked Design: A Reading of Palace of the Peacock (University of Aarhus, Denmark: Dangaroo, 1976). (ch. 3.I I ) “The ‘Unborn State of Exile’ in Wilson Harris’s The Eye of the Scarecrow,” The Commonwealth Writer Overseas: Themes of Exile and Expatriation, ed. Alastair Niven (Brussels: Marcel Didier, 1976): 195–205. (ch. 8.I I .) “Ascent to Omai,” The Literary Half-Yearly 13.1 (January 1972): 1–8. (ch. 11.I I .) “‘Inimitable Painting’: New Developments of Wilson Harris’s Fiction; Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 8.3 (July 1977): 63–80. (ch. 13.) “Faces on the Canvas: The Resurrection Theme in The Tree of the Sun,” World Literature Written in English 22.1 (Spring 1983): 88–98. (ch. 14.) “Carnival and Creativity in Wilson Harris’s Fiction,” in The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris, ed. Michael Gilkes (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989): 45–61. (ch. 15.) “Ambivalent Clio: J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country and Wilson Harris’s Carnival,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22.1 (June 1987): 87–98. Originally a paper read on 20 June 1986 at the A C L A L S conference which took place at the University of Singapore, 16–23 June 1986. (ch. 16.) “‘Immanent Substance’: Reflections on the Creative Process in Wilson Harris’s Carnival,” C L R James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas 7.1 (Winter 1999– 2000): 59–77. (ch. 17.I .) “The Wisdom of Uncertainty: ‘Re-Visionary Strategies’ in Wilson Harris’s The Infinite Rehearsal,” in Semper Aliquid Novi: Littérature comparée et littératures d’Afrique, ed. János Riesz & Alain Ricard (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1990): 157–66. (ch. 17.I I .)

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Acknowledgements

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“Unfinished Genesis: The Four Banks of the River of Space,” in Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek (Mundelstrup & Sydney: Dangaroo, 2001): 230–45. (ch. 18.) “Ulyssean Carnival: Epic Metamorphoses in Wilson Harris’s Trilogy,” Callaloo 18.1 (Winter 1995): 46–58. (ch. 19.) “Charting the Uncapturable in Wilson Harris’s Writing,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 17.2 (Summer 1997): 90–97. (ch. 20.) “Obscure Sorrow Hill: Seminal Ground of Endless Creation,” in Routes of the Roots: Geography and Literature in the English-Speaking Countries, ed. Isabella Maria Zoppi (Roma: Bulzoni, 1998): 569–79. (ch. 21.) “Tricksters of Heaven: Visions of Holocaust in Fred D’Aguiar’s Bill of Rights and Wilson Harris’s Jonestown,” in Union in Partition: Essays in Honour of Jeanne Delbaere, ed. Gilbert Debusscher & Marc Maufort (Liège: L3–Liège Language and Literature, English Department, University of Liège, 1997): 209–23. (ch. 22.) “‘Unimaginable Imaginer’: The Dark Jester,” in Theatre of the Arts: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek & Bénédicte Ledent (Cross/Cultures 60; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002): 217–29. (ch. 23.) “Writing and the Other Arts in Wilson Harris’s Fiction,” in Places of Memory. Essays in Honour of Michel Fabre, ed. Jean–Pierre Durix (Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, SP 5 (2003): 17–26. Also forthcoming in The Literary Half-Yearly. Originally a paper read at the “Imagination Global Imagine” conference in honour of Wilson Harris, which took place at the University of Newcastle, UK, on 11 May 2002. (ch. 28.) “Transfigurative Art: Wilson Harris’s The Mask of the Beggar,” Moving Worlds 3.2 (2003): 12–26. (ch. 24.) “Wilson Harris’s Multi-Faceted and Dynamic Perception of the Imaginary,” forthcoming in The Warrior of the Imaginary (joint publication, University of Liège–L3 and University of Antwerp). (ch. 29.) “Music in Wilson Harris’s Writing,” in From ‘English Literature’ to ‘Literatures in English’, Festschrift in Honour of Wolfgang Zach, ed. Michael Kenneally & Rhona Richman Kenneally with Rüdiger Ahrens & Werner Huber (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2005): 267–77. (ch. 27.) “‘Numinous Proportions’: Wilson Harris’s Alternative to All ‘Posts’,” in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam & Helen Tiffin (1991; Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993): 47–64. (ch. 30.)

The following items, since revised, were individual chapters in Hena Maes–Jelinek, Wilson Harris (Twayne’s World Authors Series; Boston MA: G.K. Hall, 1982): “Voyage into Namelessness: Palace of the Peacock,” 1–15. (ch. 3.I .)

xii


“A Naked Particle of Freedom: The Far Journey of Oudin,” 16–27. (ch. 4.) “A Compassionate Alliance: The Whole Armour,” 28–39. (ch. 5.) “The Immaterial Constitution: The Secret Ladder,” 40–52. (ch. 6.) “Between Two Worlds: Heartland,” 53–62. (ch. 7.) “The Heart of Inarticulate Protest: The Eye of the Scarecrow,” 63–81. (ch. 8.I .) “A Primordial Species of Fiction: The Waiting Room,” 82–97. (ch. 9.) “An Epic of Ancestors: Tumatumari,” 98–114. (ch. 10.) “A ‘Novel-Vision of History’: Ascent to Omai,” 115–32. (ch. 11.I .) “The Novel as Painting,” 133–65. (ch. 12.)

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Introduction

T

H E E S S A Y S on Wilson Harris’s fiction collected in this volume have been written over a period of thirty-five years. They are the expression of my exploration of his work, of my attempt to convey its essence in both content and form and, as far as possible, to enlighten the reader on its meaning and original features. I must confess that when I first approached Wilson Harris’s work in the 1960s, my training and commitment to more traditional realist fiction in English made me react like the readers who are disconcerted by his unconventional and unusual writing and turn away from it, a reaction fortunately less frequent now than in those days. For Harris is indeed at present recognized as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. In 1968 I attended the second ACLALS conference in Brisbane where Harris was one of the key speakers. If I may presume to make my own the words of Keats in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken.

I was indeed discovering Guyana, of which I knew nothing, Caribbean, and what was then called Commonwealth, literature, which I only knew through the work of Patrick White and V.S. Naipaul. Above all, I became aware of the extraordinary inexhaustible possibilities of a poetic use of the English language, emerging from an unparalleled imagination. Wilson Harris has always refused to grant permission to anyone wishing to write his biography, arguing that whatever needs to be known about him is to be found in his work. He himself wrote an autobiographical essay1 which shows that the few major facts of his life he alludes to have 1

Harris, “Wilson Harris,” Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series 16 (Detroit

M I : Gale Research, 1992): 121–37. Also published in Joyce Adler, Exploring the

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been fictionalized in his work. I am thinking in particular of the recurring figure of the beggar inspired by a meeting with a real beggar when he was eight years old; of his reading Homer at the same age; and of the Guyana strike in 1948.2 However, the most important biographical experience which led him to explore new modes of writing and shaped his vision of art was his work as a hydrographic surveyor for seventeen years, when he led expeditions into the Guyanese interior. He has himself described the impact of the landscapes he discovered in an essay called “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination.”3 Also, in a major interview with Michael Gilkes, he explained the link between language and landscape: When I first travelled into the rain forest, I realized that I had to visualize the landscape of the Guyanas quite differently from how I had been conditioned to see the landscape on the coastlands [...]. I realized that if I were to write ‘the river is black, the trees are green’, I would have missed the reality of what lay before me. It was to take a long time for me to immerse myself in that landscape, to sense that there were connections that allowed one to break out of 4 that kind of partial position.

The jungle, with its contrary aspects of “season” and “eternity,” is in most of Harris’s novels a metaphor for the psyche, its conscious and unconscious components. Like its history, Guyana’s landscape has contributed to his dualistic view of existence, but it is its essential mobility and in-

“Palace of the Peacock”: Essays on Wilson Harris, ed. Irving Adler (Mona, Jamaica: U P of the West Indies, 2003): viii–xxxiv. 2 On this subject, see The Eye of the Scarecrow (London: Faber & Faber, 1965) and the essays on this novel in the present volume, as well as my study “From Living Nature to Borderless Culture” in Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson & George B. Handley (Charlottesville & London: U P of Virginia, 2005): 247–60. 3 Harris, “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” New Letters 40.1 (1973): 37–48, repr. in Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles 1966–1981, ed. & intro. Hena Maes–Jelinek (Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1981): 57–67. Further page references are from the reprint in Explorations. 4 “The Landscape of Dreams,” in Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek (Mundelstrup & Sydney: Dangaroo, 1991): 33–34. Harris told me that he wrote three or four versions of Palace of the Peacock before the published one. Unfortunately, these manuscripts are lost. It would have been interesting to examine the evolution of his writing.



Introduction

xv

stability5 that have convinced him that a similarly protean quality inheres in the human psyche, its conscious and unconscious components. Whether in content or form (characterization, narrative structure and style) Harris’s work is marked by a refusal to invest absolutely in one way of being or one mode of expression. He tends towards the reconciliation of contraries, not definitely, but in evanescent moments of vision within a constantly evolving pattern of separation and union. This partly explains the “unfinished” character of experience, as he presents it, and the lack of resolution in his narratives. His main concern is the creation of community. But despite the unity of being he intuits in all life, he does not think it can ever be finally achieved. As argued in several of his essays, wholeness is unfathomable, and his characters approach it only through a series of partial apprehensions. Despite their extreme variety in both form and subject-matter, Harris’s novels can be viewed as one narrative canvas, at once spiritual biography and unrelenting quest for a new art of fiction inspired by a long-eclipsed native tradition. They are all “novels of expedition” exploring the multilevelled inner space of the human consciousness, upsetting given categories of being and modifying the characters’ (and the participating reader’s) mode of perception. From the first Harris offers an alternative to the conventional English novel, and, through the re-creation of the Guyanese experience and of the dispossessed void-like condition of Caribbean man, he enlarges our view of existence and our conception of the human personality. Because Harris’s fiction is unclassifiable, it cannot be imprisoned within clearly defined or categorized literary trends. Insofar as one can allude to his affiliations, I would suggest that he has a lot in common with some modernists, although he has qualified his admiration for T.S. Eliot, questioning in particular his conception of tradition.6 He is utterly remote from postmodernism, which he considers to be nihilistic.7 On this subject I refer

5

On this subject, see T.J. Cribb, “T.W. Harris – Sworn Surveyor,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 28.1 (1993): 33–46. 6 See “Interview with Kerry Johnson,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 1.1 (Spring 1997): 92. 7 See, for instance, “A post-modernism that is bereft of depth or of an appreciation of the life of the intuitive imagination is but a game for a dictatorship of technologies aligned to sophistry and nihilism”; “The Fabric of the Imagination,” Third World

xvi


the reader to the essay entitled “‘Numinous Proportions’: Wilson Harris’s Alternatives to All ‘Posts’,” included in this volume. In a review of Carnival, Stewart Brown wrote that “seen in the context of South-American magic-realist tradition Harris’s work is much easier to comprehend, to read [... and he] emerges, rather, as a revolutionary writer, an outrider of the Adamic spirit.”8 However, Harris’s own response to magical realism is very ambivalent. He admired Alejo Carpentier and Octavio Paz but dissociated himself completely from García Márquez.9 Moreover, he thinks that the label “magical realism” is yet another kind of formula used by adepts of theory to which he strongly objects.10 In attempting to place Harris as a writer, critics have compared him to Blake, Yeats, T.S. Eliot (as just mentioned), Conrad, Melville, Joyce and Faulkner. As a thinker, he has been linked with existentialism, with Buber and with Jung. He clearly shares with the Romantics the belief that a spiritual reality is to be found within and beyond the phenomenal world. Like them, he wants to arouse a new sensibility among his contemporaries and regenerate their imagination, in Shelley’s words “to quicken a new birth.”11 But he does not idealize it as, for instance, Coleridge does, in “Dejection. An Ode.” He does not turn it into an absolute but sees it as the source of asymmetric, variable forces. Rather, he has expressed his affinity with Keats’s notion of “negative capability” concretized in the nameless character in several of his novels. Though universal in its implications, the origin of Harris’s art is, as already suggested, specifically Caribbean, rooted in both Guyana’s landscape and history which, unlike other Caribbean writers, he views as a cause for neither despair nor protest. He does not deny its terrifying episodes, the polarization of Guyana’s heterogeneous population into oppressors and victims, nor the psychological traumas that ensued from conQuarterly 12.1 (1990): 86, repr. in From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. Anna Rutherford (Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1992): 29. 8 Stewart Brown, “The Poet as Novelist [...] a Review? Carnival,” Race Today Review 17.1 (February 1986): 41. 9 “Interview with Wilson Harris for C A M Project” (11 February 1986, unpublished): 6. 10 “They [theorists] believe it’s all locked up. There’s a formula, whether they call it magic realism or they call it deconstruction or whatever”; “Interview with Kerry Johnson,” 94. 11 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind.”

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quest, from the dismemberment of peoples, from exile and exploitation. They recur obsessively as individual and universal tragedies in his novels, and throughout his fiction, one feels his passionate concern for those he calls the “Uninitiate.” But he rejects the finality of catastrophe which, he believes, when re-lived and “digested,” offers an occasion for change and renewal. Nevertheless, few writers have analysed with such devastating honesty and imaginative freedom the nature of the world in which we live and the mechanisms by which we react to it, or probed with his visionary insight the complex causes underlying the crisis of civilization in a conflictual and violent twentieth century. In the present political context of endlessly spiralling violence, the significance of Harris’s work, which originates in the violence of conquest, has never been more relevant. Prophetically, in Carnival, he denounced “fashionable cults of political violence that become the stuff of new heroic example, especially when such cults may be embalmed to resemble innocence [...] or courage.”12 Harris’s solution to violence is not political, at least not primarily so, but moral and, with increasing insistence, spiritual, although ultimately, personal conversion must have an impact on social transformation. His work calls for balance between the unacknowledged spiritual resources of the ‘primitive’ and the ‘civilized’ peoples as between Third World and First World, and so for an authentic cross-culturalism. It also points indirectly to the possible emergence of a creative solution to the world’s evils from its socalled marginal areas. Most of Harris’s essays deal with the nature, or what he calls the “fabric,” of the imagination and therefore implicitly with his conception of art, while the majority of his novels self-reflexively illustrate or even discuss it, especially the later ones. Art for him is an all-encompassing creative capacity. Significantly, the protagonists of his later fiction are, such as Anselm in The Four Banks of the River of Space, multifaceted artists “engineer, sculptor, painter, architect, composer.”13 One is reminded of Leonardo Da Vinci (who also appears as a character in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill), who was similarly engineer, architect, painter, sculptor, and mathematician. He left many of his works unfinished perhaps because he was more interested in creativity, as Harris is, who conceptualizes it in such notions as “the infinite rehearsal” in the novel of that 12 13

Harris, Carnival (London: Faber & Faber, 1985): 88. Harris, The Four Banks of the River of Space (London: Faber & Faber, 1990): x.

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title and “the unfinished genesis of the imagination”14 discussed in several of his essays and which applies not only to his own creative writing but to his perception of a continually gestating world and cosmos. Moreover, like Leonardo, Harris is deeply interested in both music and mathematics and the correlation between the two: “Music and numbers were (one sees it now) a revelation.”15 In his musical practice Leonardo “attempted to produce a convergence between the science of the painter [...], the technique of the engineer [...], and the ideal of the mathematician [...] consubstantially linked.”16 In his fusion of the Pagan (retrieved from oblivion) and the Christian/ Western traditions Harris sees a way of subverting humanity’s tendency to absolutize its necessarily partial views and of acknowledging that these are rooted in an immanent creative Spirit beyond them. This is the informing ethos of his religious thought and of his art. It explains his criticism of an excessively man-centred humanism and “the fallibility of human discourse,”17 which perceives one aspect of reality only. The creative spirit also accounts for his conviction of the “intact” and “complex reality”18 at the heart of the universe, and of the many forms of otherness that coalesce in it, that enables man to curb the claims of his ego (a major aspect of selfconfession) and to forego his thirst for power at all levels; hence also the violence manifest even in man’s depredations of nature: There is no economic solution to the ills of the world [he writes] until the arts of originality – arts that are driven by mysterious strangeness – open the partialities and biases of tradition in ways that address the very core of our pre19 possessions.

14

Hence his admiration for Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà, to be seen in Milan. The Four Banks of the River of Space, 46. 16 Patrick Boucheron, “Portrait historique d’un génie,” L’Histoire 299 (June 2005): 42 (tr. mine). 17 Harris, “Profiles of Myth and the New World,” in Nationalism vs Internationalism.(Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. Wolfgang Zach & Ken L. Goodwin (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996): 81. 18 Carnival, 87, 162. 19 “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination” (1992), in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination: Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. A.J.M. Bundy (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 251. 15

Introduction

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In a partly autobiographical essay which is also a superb poetic hymn to the livingness of nature Harris talks of “the implicit orchestra of living landscapes when consciousness sings through variegated fabrics and alternations of mood, consonance as well as dissonance, unfathomable age and youth, unfathomable kinships.”20 Several fundamental elements of Harris’s writing coalesce in this essay: the abstract and the sensuous or, more exactly, the abstract through the sensuous; consciousness, individual, communal and cosmic as it “sings” through both intangible and concrete environmental forms; Harris’s perception of living nature as essentially dynamic, expressing itself in a language of its own like the “whispering trees” that recur in the author’s writing from his early poems, the “singing rocks” in the essay or even in the human language partly acquired from “the sound of the rain falling, from the sigh of the leaves, from the music of the earth as we pressed on it.”21 The passage also suggests the musical design, at once silent and audible, that Harris hears at the heart of the universe (what Mallarmé called “mobile musical architectures”) and to which he became attuned when voyaging in the Guyanese interior. The concise density of the essay, its paradoxical juxtapositions and associations, typical of much of Harris’s writing, may have been influenced by his scientific training and be partly ascribed to his conviction that, while the language of fiction and the language of science are both partial, they should complement each other: Even as the language of science differs from documentary frames or linearities, so we must seek in the language of profoundest fiction startling differ22 ences from documentary codes.

The originality of Harris’s use of language, the “appropriate form” of his vision, though often considered difficult, is its major characteristic, though it must be pointed out that what some see as the mystery in his writing is not in his own supposedly inaccessible language but is part of the existential process and the complex reality he presents, its inexpressible arche20

Harris, “The Music of Living Landscapes,” in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination: Selected Essays by Wilson Harris, ed. A.J.M. Bundy (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 44. 21 “The Fabric of the Imagination,” in Harris, The Radical Imagination, ed. Alan Riach & Mark Williams (Liège: L3–Liège Language Literature: 1992): 78. 22 Harris, “The Age of the Imagination,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 1.2–3 (Spring 2000): 20.

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typal and spiritual features. A striking quality of Harris’s narratives is the evolution and conversion of metaphors which, by degrees, weave a kaleidoscopic vision of the creative essence. To give an example, “the wind of prayer” in The Dark Jester becomes the “wind of art” (62, 66) and thus of imagination which simultaneously infuses a reviving movement into a frozen historical past and into nature. Major characteristics of his prose are its endless capacity for metamorphosis as organizing agent, the mutation of concrete experience it potentializes and the corresponding dynamism of the cosmic, natural, philosophical and even religious dimensions of his fiction. For all its flexibility, the English language has seldom been energized as it is by Harris’s “convertible imageries” or stretched to such density of meaning. The convertibility of language in his writing does more than actualize the re-visionary strategies with which his readers are familiar. It is also a feature of his persistently optimistic and hopeful belief in man’s capability to disrupt consolidated and tyrannical structures despite his partial perceptions. However, one must refrain from idealizing Harris’s metaphors because they are not static and, as he never allows us to forget, they contain an element of terror. In Jonestown, Bone applies the bone-flute metaphor, frequently used by Harris, to his relationship with Jones, one of mutuality and terror. He suddenly recalls his “conversion of a primitive morsel into a feast of terrifying conscience within the furies of history.”23 Furies and daemons are inescapable archetypal dual figures in Harris’s creative process. Furies, especially as agents of revenge, have “a potency for terror and simultaneously, paradoxically, for the regeneration of cosmic love,”24 while the daemon is the Greek genius but also has a capacity for evil, as we see in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness. The religious, the secular, the animal or creature in nature,25 the vestiges of human experience, their innumerable related facets in the manylayered texture of both life and fiction are aspects of what Harris calls “the 23

Harris, Jonestown (London: Faber & Faber, 1996): 18. Harris, “Apprenticeship to the Furies” (1996), in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Bundy, 227. 25 On this subject, see Harris’s discussion of Titian’s painting “The Allegory of Prudence” in several essays and his comment: “When the human animal understands his genius, he roots it in the creature, in the forest, in the trees, in other words in the language that we are”; “The Fabric of the Imagination,” in Harris, The Radical Imagination, 78. 24

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genius of creation.”26 For Harris, genius is “community-in-creator,”27 an expression which combines the archetypal multitudinous sources of creativity, the endlessly renewed faces or shapes of all living creatures and nature erupting in the creator/artist. This is illustrated by shifts in narrative voices and by the mutuality between writer and his living subject: Hope had commenced his book when he met queen Butterfly, the priest had inserted his hand in Hope’s when he met the goddess June. And this was a signal of the phenomenon of creativity, linkages between characters and authors, linkages between a painted world that paints the painter even as the painter paints, a sculpted world that sculpts the sculptor as the sculptor sculpts, 28 a written world that writes the writer as the writer writes [...].

In some novels, particularly Carnival, Harris alludes to the “genius of love” and in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness to the eruption of “the genie” (“the spark” in The Tree of the Sun) as expression of variable, formerly unconscious forces, most eloquently represented in da Silva’s revisions of his paintings. In that novel he also clearly conveys the political implications of the artist’s creativeness in da Silva’s sketch of the Commonwealth Institute’s “INSOLUBLE CROSS-CULTURAL DEITY/ SOLUBLE UNIFORM ” with its dual, interacting composition of institutional tone/universal non-tone,29 the latter one possible representation of collective or, as Harris calls it, the universal unconscious. The phrase epitomizes what he sees as the roots of creativity: adversarial contexts and the collective unconscious, also the sources of consciousness and moral being.30 “Universal non-tone,” the “zero conditions” out of which the narrator in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness hopes that “original vision” will emanate, reminds us that the very origin of the creative momentum, “the indestructible nucleus [...] of creation [...] the very nail of moment in the universe”31 remains inaccessible.

26

Harris, Carnival, 163. Harris, The Tree of the Sun (London: Faber & Faber, 1978): 64. 28 Harris, Resurrection at Sorrow Hill (London: Faber & Faber, 1993): 147. 29 Harris, Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness (London: Faber & Faber, 1977): 69. 30 See Harris, “Adversarial Contexts and Creativity,” New Left Review 154 (November–December 1985): 124–28. 31 Harris, Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber & Faber, 1960): 130. 27

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This question has obviously preoccupied Harris from the very beginning.32 The Unknown, and largely unknowable, itself seems to be the seed of creation, what he has variously called a creative “enigma of Values,”33 “the riddle of the creator” and “riddles of spirit.”34 Harris himself has often explained the creative process as an encounter, an imaginative, endlessly gestating bridge between the unconscious and consciousness in both writer and concentrated reader.35 Which brings us to dream as creativity or at least as an essential condition in the creative process. In his introduction to The Four Banks of the River of Space and Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, W.H. explains that he has edited the protagonists’ “dream-book” at their request, while Jonestown opens with Francisco Bone’s request itself. Anselm, Hope and Bone emerging from W.H.’s unconscious to offer him the material of his fiction36 are individualized faces of the “multitude” which, as Bone says, inhabits one.37 At the same time, it is as if, like the moving beam of a lighthouse, the writer’s consciousness brought successive figures out of the shadows. At the beginning and the end of Jonestown, Bone seems at once closer to, yet still distant from, the many-layered reality he is exploring in his “dreambook” than the other two protagonists. One must remember that even the deepest layer of reality, the eruptive life towards which the author and, at another remove, his protagonists progress is not a homogeneous whole but is itself subject to “breaches that invite a strange intercourse of parts that surrender themselves to new associations or the birth of ideas, the re32 See, for example, “Who or what is the creator of man, the human being?” in Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society (1967; London & Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1973): 20. Questions about “who” or “what” lies at the heart of creation recur in Heartland (London: Faber & Faber, 1964): 40, 74, 78. 33 Harris, “The Enigma of Values,” New Letters 40.1 (October 1973): 141–49. 34 Harris, The Angel at the Gate (London: Faber & Faber, 1982): 51, 72. 35 See, for example, “Clues in the narrative [...] may surface in a reader’s imagination and throw a bridge from the collective unconscious into the domain of consciousness”; “Comedy and Modern Allegory: A Personal View,” in A Shaping of Connections: Commonwealth Literary Studies – Then and Now; Essays in Honour of A.N. Jeffares, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek, Kirsten Holst Petersen & Anna Rutherford (Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1989): 131. 36 Harris also explained that he was “visited” by one of his characters, who tore up the script of a lecture he was to give and told him to speak spontaneously “out of his vulnerability”; “The Fabric of the Imagination,” in The Radical Imagination, 69. 37 Jonestown, 5.

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visionary birth of creativity.”38 In other words, this is the moving, composite centre at the heart of reality and fiction, which is different from T.S. Eliot’s “still centre.” At the other pole of the encounter, the protagonist follows the dictates of the “living dreamer” within himself. Harris describes this movement towards each other of the erupting, “compositional,” reality and the “living dreamer” in the following terms: The ‘living dreamer’ in Anselm meets them again [the dead characters whose life he re-creates] as ‘live absences’ or metaphorically sculpted or painted presences. Each metaphoric sculpture or painting subsists on a sensation that flesh-and-blood in the re-creative imagination embodies a correspondence with – and a pregnant distance from – the material a sculptor sculpts, the fabric upon which and with which a painter paints, and that such numinous correspondence and distance provide the narrative substance of Dream with imageries that become ‘live fossil stepping-stones’ into an original space or dimension that is the genesis (curiously unfinished genesis) or infinite birth of 39 the imagination.

“Correspondence with” and “distance from” suggest a precarious balance like that achieved by Bone at the end of Jonestown, at once part of the substance and the object of the dream, or the “state of suspension” towards which Harris’s protagonists ceaselessly move. And, as Harris has himself explained, their “floating” between two poles “breach[es] linear bias or storyline function.40 Moreover, the end of the above quotation implies that imagination is both the instrument and a never achieved goal in the making. This explains the variety of titles, conveying different approaches, Harris gives to his many essays on the nature of the imagination. “The Age of the Imagination” does not just mean, as one might think, the age or period in which imagination prevails but its antiquity and agelessness, its ceaseless genesis through an endless “past that leaves its ruined clues” and “each ruin participates in the origins of consciousness.” The characters’ retracing of their steps towards the ruined past, recovering emotions now understood or perceived in a new light,41 also 38

“The Fabric of the Imagination,” in The Radical Imagination, 76. The Four Banks of the River of Space, xiii. 40 Vera Kutzinski, “The Composition of Reality: A Talk with Wilson Harris,” Callaloo 18.1 (Winter 1995): 19, 31. 41 Emotions play a considerable part in the reconstruction of the past. It is not an exclusively psychological, still less an intellectual process. 39

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opens onto Harris’s conception of time. He has himself sufficiently insisted on his rejection of linearity. Yet Harris does not ignore calendrical time, stating that even in quantum physics changes occur in “historical time,”42 and conventional time can usually be reconstructed in his fiction, as is the case in The Eye of the Scarecrow, Companions of the Day and Night and Jonestown. Nor is it simply discarded in favour of timelessness but is, rather, the dimension we live in and through which, when breached, timelessness can be apprehended. Timelessness is not the mere absence of time, either; it is an extra-human dimension with some attributes similar to space with which it interpenetrates. Though Harris says that “there is no absolute beginning,”43 “no determined beginning, no determined ending,”44 he does not refer to a static eternity.45 As there is a “womb of space,” so there is a “virgin womb of time,”46 an “apparent sexuality” to time which plays a “pregnant role.”47 Harris also alludes to an extra-human dimension called living time which he sees “partially” captured in “draperies upon living time” in Aubrey Williams’s paintings among others.48 After the crew have passed “the door of inner perception” in Palace of the Peacock, they enter this living dimension which in another context Harris calls time as “native ancestral aboriginal capacity”49: “they saw and heard only the boiling stream and furnace of an endless life without beginning and end.”50 The ruptures in conventional time, the shifts between, and blending of, past, present and future coincide with the spatial movements of advance and retreat in many novels, for instance at the end of Heartland and The Tree of the Sun. It is this movement, excluding any one-directional vision, which informs the characters’ “dreaming” experience and makes possible

42

Harris, “Judgement and Dream” (1989), in Harris, The Radical Imagination, 22. Jonestown, 5. 44 Fossil and Psyche (Austin T X : Occasional Publications, African and Afro-American Studies and Research Center, 1974): 10; repr. in Explorations, ed. Maes–Jelinek, 79. 45 “Eternity is unbearable womb of endless progression”; “The Quest for Form,” Kunapipi 1 (1983): 22. 46 Jonestown, 5. 47 Fossil and Psyche, 2 (in Explorations, 68). 48 “Aubrey Williams,” in Selected Essays, 222–23. 49 Fossil and Psyche, 2 (in Explorations, 68). 50 Palace of the Peacock, 94, 99. 43

Introduction

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what Harris called “backward resurrection.”51 As with space, Harris’s characters sometimes achieve or experience a “state of suspension” between time and timelessness,52 an ephemeral balance of a psychological, spiritual and aesthetic rather than scientific nature. Indeed, in spite of his many references to modern physics (mainly the quantum view of parallel universes), Harris’s original conception of space and time is not limited to the space-time concept; it posits both being and becoming. Harris’s rejection of “an absolute identity to time,” admitting of a “double movement between two time-scales,”53 as in Eternity to Season, underlies reversibility, clearly the crux of Harris’s narrative oscillations through multi-layered space and time. Reversibility is a key to a crossculturality rooted, as Harris insists, in the universal unconscious partially represented in forms of art apparently unrelated in space or time (like his frequent parallelling of a Titian painting and Mexico’s Quetzalcoatl) but also evident in the “cross-disciplinary vision” of Anselm in The Four Banks of the River of Space. It will be clear, I hope, that the aspects of Harris’s work evoked in this introduction are interdependent. Most are evoked in Hope’s deeply significant “manifesto of the ship of the globe” in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, characteristically as much question as answer: ‘When one descends into breakdown – part-physical, part-mental – and is drawn up into space, what equation exists between the multi-dimensionality of the mind and the multi-dimensionality of the ship of the globe written within one’s senses and non-senses? How shall I begin to put it? How shall I translate the untranslatable truth? For me – half-drowned, half-spatial creature (and more, much more I am, less, much less am I) – the equation that exists between metaphors of madness and metaphors of genius is the fluid nucleus of the mystery of truth (neither purely mental – of the body of the mind – nor purely physical – of the spring of the body).’ Hope’s manifesto was the language of such nuclearity. He felt an eruption in himself so acute, so dismantling, so reconstructive, it dawned on him that such a mysterious nucleus was the substance of the void of the dumb that had 51

The Tree of the Sun, 34. See, for example, “we floated on the mane of time,” Carnival, 168 or “the inner body of time” through which da Silva achieves a “middle-ground perception in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, 70. 53 “An interview of Wilson Harris conducted by Hena Maes–Jelinek,” Caribana 3 (1993): 27. 52

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uttered his name. Mixed metaphoric senses in voice-ness, voicelessness, 54 speech prior to speech, dumbness prior to eloquence.

This passage is a crucial expression of both Harris’s philosophy of existence and his vision of culture, counterpointing “the substance of the voice of the dumb” to the dominant voices. In Hope’s intuitive progression towards the source of creation, all contraries begin to interact, all partial elements in the existential process: part-physical, part-mental, ascent and descent, one’s senses and non-senses, Hope as half-drowned, half-spatial creature, “voiceness” and “voicelessness.” As Merleau–Ponty writes, Our view of man will remain superficial as long as we don’t go back to the origin [of expression], as long as we don’t recover the primordial silence under the noise of words, as long as we don’t describe the gesture which breaks that 55 silence.

The parallel Hope draws between the multi-dimensionality of the mind and the multi-dimensionality of the ship of the globe evokes corresponding partialities within the human person and on the world map. In their representation of such composite reality in inner and outer worlds Harris’s narratives move towards a harmonization of elements both within the human person and between cultures, a very different proposition from surface hybridity. It is through this in-depth cross-culturality, this crossfertilization of old worlds and new worlds, that he has imaginatively opened the way to a new, authentic Caribbean fiction. I am aware that this book contains many repetitions from one essay to another. This is mainly due to the fact that they were either read at different conferences to different audiences or else written for different journals. Inevitably, then, I felt the need to explain the premisses of Harris’s art before examining his separate fictions. In any case, this is not the kind of book one reads from beginning to end. It may, of course, best be consulted for its discussion of specific novels or aspects of Harris’s work.

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54

Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, 75. Maurice Merleau–Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945): 214. Tr. mine. 55

1

T

The Myth of El Dorado in the Caribbean Novel

H E P O S S I B L E E X I S T E N C E of a golden city in the South American heartland, has haunted men’s imagination since the days when the conquistadores were hoping to make it the centre of the third and richest province of the Spanish Empire. The legend told of a king who every year covered his body with gold dust and dived into a lake. Quesada, the conqueror of Colombia, who was hoping to reach Manoa, succeeded in having himself appointed by the King of Spain as Governor and Captain-General of El Dorado, Guiana, the Great Manoa and the Island of Trinidad. Before dying of leprosy, he bequeathed the title to his nephew, Antonio de Berrio, and enjoined him to pursue the quest. Berrio, then a sixty-year-old soldier, came to the New World to claim his inheritance, made Trinidad the base for his search and launched three unsuccessful expeditions before he was made a prisoner by Raleigh and left to die on an island on the Orinoco river. The legend was thereafter associated with the name of Raleigh, who appears to have been quite convinced of the existence of Manoa and wrote enthusiastically of El Dorado in his Discovery of Guiana. This was in 1595. Raleigh did not come back to the Guianas until twenty-two years later, and the disastrous failure of his second expedition cost him his life. The details of the story as it is told by V.S. Naipaul in The Loss of El Dorado do not sound very romantic. If Naipaul’s interpretation of events is correct, the modem history of Trinidad, which began inauspiciously with an act of treachery on Raleigh’s part towards the Spaniards continued so for three hundred years. Through the personal history of individuals who broke down one after another during their stay on the island, Naipaul shows the transformation of a dream into a mediocre reality. The myth of El Dorado served twice as an incentive to the colonization of Trinidad.


2

The first time was when Berrio, then Raleigh, made it the launchingground for their quest. The second time was two hundred years later, when Trinidad, already separated from Guyana, and a Spanish province in itself, was conquered by the British. The main purpose of the latter was to overthrow Spanish power in the New World and to make Trinidad a trading-post for commerce between South America and London as well as a profitable plantation island. Naipaul’s narrative concentrates on the two highlights of Trinidadian history. In a sense, the second rush on Trinidad as part of the El Dorado province at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a revival of Raleigh’s dream. He was not himself lured by gold mines so much as by the power and glory they promised England and by the wish to create a colonial empire. No greatness ever came to Trinidad, and the dream was wrecked a second time because of individual inefficiency, greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy. The colonization of the island was always a haphazard business, hampered by the conflicting interests of Spanish, French, and English settlers, by the intricacies of the slave society and by the abolitionist movement in England, already active when the English took over the island. Governors and officials apparently used Trinidad as a steppingstone to better positions or to the acquisition of personal fortunes, to the detriment of the island itself. It was thus a combination of personal ambition, lack of vision, and pettiness that set Trinidad on an irreversible course of mediocrity and nothingness. Even the once-dynamic English radical community lost its impetus, and for the next hundred and fifty years Trinidad was a remote municipality in which the complex cultural drives of the mother country were reduced to the simplicities of money and race. “As a British colony,” Naipaul writes, “Trinidad was as much an error and a failure as it had been as part of the Spanish Empire, ‘these provinces of El Dorado’.”1 Berrio and Raleigh had set a pattern of failure: the former died a lunatic, the latter a deluded man. After them, the island developed into a “land of failures,” as Naipaul calls it in The Middle Passage, an “unimportant, uncreative, cynical place,” a place with “no sense of community and no dignity.”2 1

V.S. Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado: A History (1969; Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1973): 372. 2

V.S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited (1962; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969): 43.

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3

The Loss of El Dorado is not the work of an historian. Nor is it a work of fiction, though Naipaul’s portrayal of real people definitely bears the novelist’s stamp, but of a novelist for whom human beings are in this particular instance either inefficient or bad. However, since it is partly an imaginative work, the work of an artist rather than a scholar, and one in which the mode of presentation is predominantly satirical, its relevance to his fiction is obvious: the one complements the other, and his description of the past in The Loss of El Dorado accounts for the picture of Trinidad that emerges from his novels. The discrepancy between men’s longing for material wealth or spiritual fulfilment represented by the myth of El Dorado and the pitiful outcome of their quest is nowhere better illustrated than in Mr Biswas, the anti-hero of the novel that remains Naipaul’s most impressive achievement.3 Mr Biswas is a little man whose attempts to acquire dignity and self-respect through his work are repeatedly frustrated. A descendant of Indian indentured labourers brought to Trinidad to replace the Negro slaves and contribute to the enrichment of the island, he is presented as a fairly typical product of his environment. Like the world to which he belongs, he remains hopelessly amateurish, torn between fear and insecurity on the one hand and his tragicomic audacity on the other. The depressing squalor of village life in Trinidad, the ramshackle architecture of the city and the utter absence of beauty and comfort are symbols of the futility and meanness of the colonial society. The double failure of Mr Biswas to become successful and to give his life significance is the failure of the island to come up to the norms of efficiency and achievement implied in the novel as an impossible ideal. In Naipaul’s later novel The Mimic Men, the sense of lost opportunity and wastefulness is even more obtrusive. It is a story of disorder on all levels, based on fear, the inescapable legacy of the slave society which makes people suspicious of one another. It corrupts them from their very childhood, making them dishonest, irresponsible impersonators who perpetuate the island’s tradition of inefficiency. Significantly, the narrator, a former politician forced into exile, is a would-be historian who once intended to analyse the restlessness and disorder in the world at large. Instead, he is left to write his own history, which, to some extent, is also that of his native island of Isabella, presumably Trinidad. The central 3

V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (London: André Deutsch, 1961).


4

symbol in the novel is that of shipwreck, which applies both to the narrator’s life and to the island cut off from the stream of life in the real world. “To be born on an island like Isabella,” Naipaul writes, “an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder.”4 And further: “in a society like ours, fragmented, inorganic, [there was] no link between man and the landscape.”5 The inner chaos on the island arises from “the unnatural bringing together of people who could achieve fulfilment only within the security of their own societies and the landscapes hymned by their ancestors.”6 In spite of Naipaul’s restrained and sensitive style, The Mimic Men falls short of his previous achievement because the narrator comments on his past and on the state of Isabella but does not always bring them to life. Even the shipwreck metaphor is explained and not worked out in the narrative. But this novel is, more explicitly than any of his work, an exploration of spiritual disease in individual and society. The satirical impact of Naipaul’s fiction is due to the discrepancy between men’s aspirations and their ineffectual, often comic, attempts to achieve them. The vision of an El Dorado hopelessly out of reach is always implicit in his novels. In retrospect, it is even possible to see that all the characters of Naipaul’s novels form a long gallery of “mimic men,” whether we think of Ramsumair in The Mystic Masseur, of Harbans in The Suffrage of Elvira, or of all those who achieve a fake success in their second-hand world. When his characters are genuine, they are inevitably failures, and not even tragic ones, because there can be no tragedy in a society which, in the author’s words, “denies itself heroes.” This attitude is very similar to Evelyn Waugh’s approach to his characters in his pre-war novels. Like Waugh, Naipaul satirizes his characters for having no fixed standards of conduct and for their comic misunderstanding of the benefits of civilization. Like the English writer, he sees his countrymen involved in a hopeless conflict between civilization and barbarism. But Waugh’s satire arose from his reverence for the English past and English traditions, whereas Naipaul believes that the barbarism of his countrymen is due to the island’s want of an historical past. This is, after all, logical, if we remember that Naipaul always questions the value of achievement. Even Mr Stone thinks: “All 4 5 6

V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (London: André Deutsch, 1967): 141. The Mimic Men, 246. The Mimic Men, 37.

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5

action, all creation was a betrayal of feeling and truth.”7 My impression, however, is that his obvious contempt for the colonial society is typical of his attitude to men in general. For all his assertions that real life, fed on values and achievement, is to be found in the Old World, his picture of London in Mr Stone and the Knights Companion is not very attractive. In The Mimic Men, the disorder of Isabella also stands for the disorder which prevails in the world at large. If Trinidad, as part of the province of El Dorado, did not come up to men’s expectations, it is because they themselves never live up to their dreams. According to Naipaul, “All landscapes eventually turn to land, the gold of the imagination to the lead of reality.”8 Not all Caribbean writers look upon El Dorado as a myth which generated only disillusion and a second-rate way of life. Nor do they necessarily consider their history as something to be ashamed of. Some of them have explored and re-interpreted their Caribbean past, and made this search for roots a necessary, if painful, requisite for self-knowledge and achievement. The myth of El Dorado was given fresh significance by such writers, who made it a symbol for a new quest closely related to the history and landscape of the country, Guyana, in which the legend may have originated. The history of that other part of the El Dorado province has been reconstructed in Edgar Mittelholzer’s Kaywana Trilogy, which retraces the development of the country from the time of Raleigh’s second expedition to the twentieth century. In spite of its shortcomings, particularly the author’s inability to deal with the moral problems he illustrates, this saga offers a fairly clear picture of the workings of the slave society and of the changing relationship between slave and master in the course of two centuries. Most important of all, it accounts for what Wilson Harris has called the “complex womb” – the composite ancestry of the Guyanese people which, in the eyes of many, appears today as an obstacle to the creation of a national consciousness. As a tale in which violence and sexual aberrations of all kinds are predominant features, Mittelholzer’s trilogy might equally have produced a picture of lost El Dorado. But it evokes a sense of achievement even if the courage and purposefulness of the Van Groenwegel family are sometimes romanticized. In a sense, this 7

V.S. Naipaul, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (London: André Deutsch,

1963): 149. 8

The Mimic Men, 13.

6


work illustrates the duality of the symbol. For, obviously, whether El Dorado suggested gold mines or a colonial empire to those who were looking for it, their quest was associated with a kind of idealism even when it was motivated by greed and involved cruelty and exploitation. This was already true of Raleigh, as clearly appears from the The Discovery of Guiana, and it is also true of the modern ‘pork-knocker’, as the Guyanese gold-miner is called, who is said to lose his heart to the jungle and never becomes rich. It is perhaps not surprising that the myth of El Dorado should keep haunting the Guyanese imagination: it is still nourished by the existing deposits of gold and by the country’s geographical complexion. Guyana must always be discovered anew, and the call of El Dorado is also the call of the unknown. Almost inevitably, the sheer physical hardships of the journey into the forest submit the traveller to a test, or process of initiation, of a moral kind, even when idealism is wholly absent from the initial purpose of the quest. Now, the journey through the forest, through an unknown underworld, is a commonplace symbol of moral or spiritual trial. But, as a way of access to El Dorado and what it stands for, it has become the instrument of a new approach in the exploration of man’s consciousness and of the conflicting values of life in the Caribbean. For the Guyanese writers in particular, even though the myth is an essential part of their history, the search for El Dorado implies more than the remembrance of the past. The myth remains as much a challenge as it ever was. The backward trip it invites man to undertake through an undefiled world does not merely evoke a particular period of history; it is a return to the very origins of the world. As we shall see, by discovering a new world, man feels he is given a new chance to start all over again. That is why the myth is so often related to the notion of creation and why it urges man to look to the future as much as to the past. Indeed, the writer whose characters travel up the river, which is also the river of time, is less concerned with the past as such than with the relation between man and the world he discovers. He may account for that relation in the past, for the kind of community created by those who came or were brought from all over the world to master the land, but there is always present the potentiality of, and the urging to, future achievement. Past, present, and future are inseparable in the imaginative experience inspired by the myth. The first novel with which I wish to illustrate this new approach is not the work of a Guyanese. The Lost Steps was written by the Cuban novelist

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Alejo Carpentier, but it exemplifies both the enduring fascination of the myth on Caribbean writers and its universal appeal. Travelling to the heart of the South American continent, the narrator moves back to the original world and during the journey develops a new sensibility which will enable him to escape the cold intellectualism and sensuality of the modern technological age. He is a composer who, out of boredom and to satisfy a whim of his mistress, agrees to go in search of rare musical instruments used by Indians in the jungle. As he is of South American origin, this trip is a return to his own past, but it soon becomes a pilgrimage through the past of humanity during which he gradually casts away the false values he has acquired in the intellectual circles of a big American city. His development is woven into the thick analytical texture of a narrative that teems with his views on the meaning of art and life, as these are aroused by the circumstances of the journey. As he enters the jungle, however, the narrator’s attention focuses on the relationship between his discovery of an unspoiled world and his own awakening as a man and an artist. Quite literally, he is faced at the different stages of his voyage with ways of life and customs which enable him to trace the historical development of a world from the modern period through the Middle Ages and back to prehistory. He feels he is actually living this backward flight in time by identifying himself, and the party of gold-miners with whom he travels, with the Spanish conquerors in search of El Dorado, until they eventually discover what he calls the “World of Genesis.” This gives him a bird’s-eye view of man, a picture that transcends the peculiarities of time and makes him reject what he comes to see as the futile aberrations of modern urban life. His new outlook takes shape gradually as he becomes familiar with the jungle and the men who roam in it: the pork-knockers. Entering the jungle itself is no easy task. Carpentier describes it as “a world compact, complete [...]. A hidden nation, a map in code, a vast vegetable kingdom with few entrances”: To penetrate this world, the Adelantado had had to find the keys to its secret entrances: he alone knew of a pass between two trees, the only one within a circumference of fifty leagues, leading to a narrow stairway of stones by which it was possible to descend to the vast mystery of immense telluric baroques.9

9

Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, tr. from the Spanish by Harriet de Onís (Los pasos perdidos, 1953; London: Victor Gollancz, 1956): 126–27.


8

This is a concrete representation of the strait gate and narrow way leading to real life, a life which the narrator experiences after a series of trials and his discovery of the unsuspected greatness of the land of the plateaux. Facing a landscape unsubdued by man, so disproportionate to human dimensions, he is humbled and forced to look upon himself with new eyes. His approach to life and even to art is also influenced by the goldminer, the Adelantado, whose own achievement in the jungle serves as an example of genuineness in the act of creation. The Adelantado, it is rumoured, has come upon a lode of gold. He has indeed done so, but he is no longer interested in it. “Gold,” he says, “is for those who go back there.”10 He has founded a city in the jungle, which is not Manoa, not El Dorado, but in a sense is the first city as Enoch’s city was. With the help of the Indians he has created a world in which the reverse side of the porkknockers’ dream has materialized. For the building of this city in the heart of the jungle is like the fulfilment of the soul in man’s innermost being. For most miners as they are represented in the Caribbean novel, the lure of gold becomes almost a pretext for living in the jungle. Having once tasted of this life, they cannot go back to the limitations and insincerities of life in society, which makes them perhaps the only people who actualize the symbolic meaning of the myth of El Dorado. Hence the ‘ruling wisdom’ which, as Wilson Harris suggests in Heartland, characterizes them. In Jan Carew’s Black Midas, Aron Smart says: Pork-knockers were a strange race of men. They took hardship and danger for granted, made and squandered fortunes, left the forest with thousands in their pockets swearing never to return, but they always came back, sometimes with only the shirt on their backs to call their own [...]. These men were adventurers. The forests, the rivers, the mountains, the high savannahs which stretched and tumbled, raised themselves to the sky or spread flat across the heart of a continent, reduced men to the size of a speck of dust. But they saw themselves as giants subduing a wide world. [...] They had a lust for gold and diamonds because, in searching for them, they could cut loose from everything that tied men down to life on the coast. During my first month with the porkknockers I realized that both Santos and I had too much of a sense of greed in our hearts, of a craving for security and order, to share the pork-knockers’ dream wholeheartedly.11

10 11

The Lost Steps, 193. Jan Carew, Black Midas (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958): 113–14.

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It is by sharing this dream that Carpentier’s narrator recovers his manhood. He composes a Prometheus Unbound which expresses his feeling of resurrection and is associated with his flight from the world. Eventually, he finds that he does need the world and goes back to it bringing with him the instruments he found in the Adelantado’s city as the reward for his pilgrimage and as tokens of a new integrity in his art. The Guyanese Jan Carew describes in Black Midas an experience in the jungle which is equally formative. Unlike Carpentier, who slowly elaborates his character’s introspective journey in parallel with his journey into the heartland, Carew relies on action to convey the moral significance of his tale, and presents in concrete terms the antithesis between material and spiritual achievement. Moreover, Aron Smart’s adventures, his restlessness, his response to the magnetism of the jungle, are distinctly those of a Guyanese sensitive to the atmosphere and the moods of the landscapes of his country. As long as he lives on the coast, Aron feels one with it: “The sun was in my blood, the swamp and river, my mother, the amber sea, the savannahs, the surf and wind closer to me than the smell of my sweat.”12 When he enters the jungle, however, he feels that he had been shut in on the coast, “cramped between the sea and an ocean of forest.” The variety of landscapes in Black Midas is matched by the variety of characters and of the races to which they belong. These characters tend to be romanticized, like the plot itself with its moralistic overtones. Aron finds gold and, making a quick fortune, squanders it as quickly in Georgetown, learning all the while that the city is more of a jungle than the bush. It is this urban jungle that makes him most aware of his weakness and brings home to him the fact that he has always run away from himself and has always sacrificed other people to his own needs. It happens again during his second search for El Dorado, when, like the man who was responsible for his father’s death, he endangers another miner’s life to get all the gold he can. The miner is killed and Aron loses a leg, substantiating the simple moral of his friend: “When you take thing out the earth and you en’t put nothing back the land and the river does claim sacrifice.”13 Aron understands at last the parable told him by his old teacher, the mean-

12 13

Black Midas, 42. Black Midas, 277.

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ing of which is that “the best of God’s gift ha[s] to be something no eye can see.”14 Black Midas illustrates the fairly plain proposition that “gold and diamonds make monsters out of men” and that the search for El Dorado is out of the reach of “mimic men,” for in the jungle it is impossible to cheat. For Carew, the richness of Guyana does not lie in its lodes of gold but in its people: he perceives close links between them and the landscapes in which they have been toiling and suffering for several centuries, and he thereby contributes, albeit tentatively, to the shaping of a Guyanese consciousness. It is in the work of Wilson Harris that the myth of El Dorado has been given the richest interpretation. Not only do his novels epitomize the different meanings of the quest offered by Carew and Carpentier, they also explore in a highly idiosyncratic language its possible implications on the individual, social, national, and even metaphysical planes. When analysing any work of Harris’s, one must bear in mind his conception of man’s position in the universe. Unlike Naipaul, who writes, in An Area of Darkness, that man is an island,15 Wilson Harris believes that man belongs to the ‘great chain of being’. This means more than fitting into an organic whole, though he does illustrate in Heartland the order and diversity of the phenomenal world in relation to an “Unmoved Being.” It also implies, so to speak, the sharing by men of their humanity, the “membership one of another,”16 as Harris says. It means the abolition of all barriers not only between human beings but between men and their environment; it suggests the interdependence of all forms of living and even of life and death, for death is seen as the mere passage from one mode of being into another. At this stage we can already see how influential this interdependence is on Harris’s view of man’s ancestry as part of his present and his future. Moreover, the reappearance of the dead among the living is a frequent occurrence in his novels, intimating that the dead live on among us and in us and modify our consciousness. Another major concept illustrated in his work is that of the dual nature of any form of being. It is perceptible, for instance, in man’s spiritual or moral development: each individual carries within himself the seeds of 14

Black Midas, 213. V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (London: André Deutsch, 1964): 198. 16 Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society, 53. 15


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good and evil and is constantly faced with choice between the two, though the potential inverse of his choice remains within his reach. This duality also determines his relation to his environment. Man is always acting, and at the same time submitting to the action of others. He is both victimizer and victim, hunter and hunted. In Heartland, for example, the main character, Stevenson, is watcher of a depot in the jungle, yet he is also watched by someone unseen whose presence he feels. At a particular moment, when the sense of being exposed and watched succeeds the feeling of security he has just experienced, he becomes aware that utterly contradictory moods can both urge him forward and restrain him in his progress through the jungle and towards self-knowledge: He was beginning to look into the obscurity he had once turned away from as if he now knew [...] that every climate of terror and [...] clearing of security were actually the same umbrella, capable of providing spiritual cover or becoming equally just another naked inhospitable material pole.17

There are always several layers of meaning in Harris’s compact sentences. The one just quoted refers at once to the contrast between darkness and light, fear and security, in the jungle and in man’s soul. It also states that the meaning of experience is what one makes of it. Stevenson does not seek El Dorado as others search for gold in the literal sense of the word. But as he becomes immersed in the forest, he identifies himself with all those who have done so, and with their “preColumbian spiritual ancestors [in search of] a heartland which had been created for them and which they had lost.”18 He has come to the jungle after the bankruptcy of the family business, and his father’s suicide. His journey into the heartland reveals him to himself and makes him see that he shares in the responsibility both for the bankruptcy and for his father’s death. Harris’s approach to his subject invites comparison with Conrad’s in Heart of Darkness. The themes of the two stories are not dissimilar. As Marlow travels deeper into the jungle, feeling, like all those who enter it, that he is travelling back “to the earliest beginnings of the world,” Conrad’s imagery evokes ever more insistently the darkness in the jungle, in the world, in the heart of Kurtz. The forest is a prison, a hell whose wild17 18

Harris, Heartland, 56. Heartland, 31.


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erness stands for the wilderness in man’s heart. Kurtz’s moment of selfrecognition is inspired by his vision of death and eternity. But the jungle remains a symbol for the darker side of man’s nature. In Harris’s Heartland, the jungle is also a symbol of moral blindness, but only so long as Stevenson, the watcher, remains blinded by his fear of the “directionless depth of the forest” and of his own heart. In the second part of the novel when he walks towards the storehouse of the heartland (which also stands for the storehouse in his heart), the forest plays an active role in bringing him to consciousness and making him acknowledge his former egotism and self-deception. The bush is humanized and man is described in the imagery of the jungle, so that each becomes an extension of the other. Stevenson’s spiritual and physical advance become one: It was extraordinary what unchartered poles arose out of the jungle which forced one to venture into an interior where one saw oneself turned inside out.19

Stevenson realizes that in spite of the close correspondence between the discovery in himself and in the storehouse of the forest, he cannot easily break out of the prison of his limited self. He must choose between attempting to reach an end that is greater than himself, materialized in the grandiose landscape around him, and remaining incapable of true selfrealization. It is only when he has received several shocks which throw light on the events of the past and confront him with his guilt that he lays bare his heart and sheds the last layer of self-deception. This is an oversimplified summary of Heartland, but I hope to have drawn attention to two important features of Harris’s interpretation of the quest in the forest. One is that the forest as such is not employed as a mere symbol corresponding to, but not directly involved in, man’s inner development. The other is that man’s self-discovery is not seen as a progression towards a fixed ideal. True, its final aim is the liberation of the self in view of a mystical union with the One, or what Harris might call the passage from season to eternity. But the stress is on the quest itself, which brings out, on the one hand, the duality of man’s reactions, the complexity and ambiguity of his states of mind, and, on the other, the necessity of the choice with which he is repeatedly faced. It is from these contradictions, and from the renewed assumption of responsibility inherent in the choice, 19

Heartland, 48.


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that change originates. There is no standing still in life. The first and second parts of Heartland (called respectively “The Watcher” and “The Watched”) merge into the third, entitled “The Creation of the Watch,” at the very end of which Stevenson enters an ancient river-bed to proceed further in the forest: The longest crumbling black road Stevenson followed [...] was but an endless wary flood broken into retiring trenches or advancing columns, all moving still towards the fashioning of a genuine medium of conquest, capable of linking and penetrating the self-created prison-houses of subsistence [...].20

Stevenson’s understanding at the end of the novel is thus not an end but a beginning. The emphasis is on such words as “retiring” and “advancing,” both of which contribute to the “fashioning” of a medium of self-conquest. El Dorado is rightly called by Harris an “open” myth; it is not for him a static object but, rather, the apprehension of the ever-shifting reality of the soul. West Indian writers often feel that, unlike African artists, they lack the support of a traditional society with an heroic past and a common ancestry. One might answer to this what Gerald Moore writes in The Chosen Tongue: “even if the West Indies had created nothing else, they have certainly created a people.”21 One of the important themes of Harris’s Guyana Quartet22 is precisely the creation of a people and the discovery of its unique and complex soul as the outcome of the search for El Dorado. Palace of the Peacock might be considered as an allegory of all El Dorado expeditions, one that epitomizes the many implications of the quest. On the surface, the story describes the progress of a skipper and his crew on a nameless river in Guyana. The setting of the novel (the savannahs, the dangerous river and rapids running between high cliffs and the thick walls of the jungle towards a huge waterfall) at once reflects and stimulates the physical and spiritual advance of the pilgrims. The journey on the river unfolds in the narrator’s consciousness. He and Donne, the skipper of the crew, are the two selves of the main character. Donne is the “gaoler and 20

Heartland, 90. Emphasis mine. Gerald Moore, The Chosen Tongue: English Writing in the Tropical World (London: Longmans, 1969): 8. 22 Originally termed the “Guiana Quartet,” this group of novels was later published by Faber & Faber as The Guyana Quartet: Palace of the Peacock (1960), The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962) and The Secret Ladder (1963). 21

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ruler” of his spiritual twin. His motto, “Rule the land [...] and you rule the world,”23 betrays the true spirit of the conquistador and indeed recalls Berrio’s assertion, reported by Naipaul, that “the devil was the patron of his quest.”24 The name of Donne and that of his men match those of a famous long-dead crew drowned in the same rapids. Each member of the crew represents one of the races of Guyana and the spirit within each racial strain and mixture. But we soon come to realize that they are also embodied in, and make one with, the dual personality of Donne. In other words, they stand for the various features, tendencies, and potentialities within one man, as well as for the latent possibilities of the Guyanese people. I shall not dwell on the details of the quest nor on its various possible interpretations but shall merely refer to those characteristics in the narrative which show how Harris achieves universality through his interpretation of a national myth and experience. One must bear in mind that throughout the journey the allegory is woven into the ‘reality’ of the narrator’s vision and reality as such. The alleged purpose of the crew is to pursue Mariella and the tribe to which she belongs to get cheap labour for Donne’s plantation. Actually, the boat in which the dead characters travel explores their own underworld until they reach the centre of their inner kingdom: their soul and consciousness. The journey to the waterfall takes seven days, the seven days of the creation, during which the crew re-live their past and re-enact their earlier trip. They discover that each is capable of the feelings and actions of the others, and they become increasingly frightened at the prospect of their “second death” and the loss of individuality it implies. When Donne, the last of them to die, falls from the ladder he is ascending at the side of the waterfall, they are said to have “all come home at last to the compassion of the nameless unflinching folk.”25 While they were pursuing the elusive tribe, Donne had begun to feel that they must find a new relationship with them: “The only way to survive,” he said, “is to wed oneself into the family.”26 He did not perceive then that his spiritual salvation depended on his integration into the community. Now, on the seventh day, the narrator, who has superseded 23

Harris, Palace of the Peacock, 19. The Loss of El Dorado, 29. 25 Palace of the Peacock, 143. 26 Palace of the Peacock, 58. 24

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Donne (or his material self), is seen taking part in the resurrection with the crew. Man and nature come alive, quickened by the “undivided soul and anima of the universe.”27 The last and most important symbol in the narrative, the “palace of the peacock,” is the clue to the novel, which by this time has become purely allegorical. It is an all-embracing symbol. Harris himself writes in the fourth part of the Quartet that “Palace of the Peacock” is El Dorado, the city of God, the city of gold. But what does the city stand for? At the moment of Donne’s resurrection, the “tree of life” he had seen in the waterfall turns into flesh and blood and the sun at its head breaks into stars which clothe the tree like an enormous dress until these stars become peacocks’ eyes and the tree of flesh and blood is metamorphosed into a peacock. “This was the palace of the universe,” Harris tells us, “and the windows of the soul looked out and in.”28 Thus palace and peacock coalesce, and by looking through the eyes of the peacock’s feathers the narrator and the crew look through the windows of the palace: that is to say, of their soul. The “multiplied vision” of the peacock stands for the multifaceted soul of the crew, of the Guyanese, and even of humanity, while the construction of a palace, a house, or a temple: i.e. of a “centre,” is a cosmogony, an act of creation. It will be recalled that the construction of a city by the gold-miner in Carpentier’s The Lost Steps was also the reiteration of a cosmogony. In Palace of the Peacock, this creation of a world is in fact the creation of a vision, a coming to consciousness which makes the crew see themselves as a whole. But the multiracial crew and the nature of Guyana are also reborn in a symbol of immortality. Indeed, if the peacock stands for vanity and conceit, it represents in various religions immortality, the power of transmutation, the eternal bliss of the soul facing God. And this is an aspect of the myth which we cannot neglect. One essential theme of the novel is that, by discovering the elements in his past and in his ancestry which have contributed to his making, man acknowledges what he is. He can then purge himself of the past and be reborn into a new life. This is symbolized by the “second death” or “baptism” of the crew, while after their rebirth their individual and collective soul is projected in the “palace.” But if the hardships these people of 27 28

Palace of the Peacock, 152. Palace of the Peacock, 146.

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different races have shared on the river of life have given rise to a Guyanese consciousness, this shaping of a Guyanese entity must clearly be of a spiritual kind. In other words, the creation of a national consciousness is a necessary stage, but only a stage, in progress towards cosmic integration and the regeneration of humanity as a whole. I don’t think it is possible to ignore the streak of mysticism in Harris’s novels; it is foreign to my present subject, but we should note that most of his characters become aware of the potentialities of achievement for the Guyanese as a result of a spiritual conversion. Harris himself has given significance to the Guyanese predicament by making it representative of humanity. He is not concerned with national consciousness in any limited sense. What his characters gain is a sense of responsibility and spiritual freedom, a kind of open-mindedness which makes it possible for them to respond to, and bring to maturity, every part of their nature, including what is derived from ancestry and environment. This is also the significance of experience in the three other novels of the Quartet, which bring into play different landscapes of Guyana, different generations of people, different races and social classes. In each of them, the rainforest plays its formative role; it is the theatre of an ordeal, the setting that stimulates their dreams and provokes their fear and uncertainty. However, the faith of Harris’s characters in the future is not the effect of blindness to Guyana’s complex past and present or to the sense of alienation and frustration experienced by some West Indian artists. Nor does that faith spring from an optimistic belief in man. Violence, hatred, greed, and fear are never absent from the world Harris portrays. But his characters come to realize that their prison is “self-created,” that freedom is possible, though seldom attained except in death. It is up to them to fructify their heartland or let it run to wasteland. In each of his novels, Harris presents the individual and, by implication, the Guyanese people, as if they were at a turning-point in their life or history. He lays bare their soul at the critical moment and explores the complexity, variety, and possibilities of human response. It is this inside view that gives his characters substance. Harris renders his vision of wholeness through his bold and original use of language. He achieves unity by an association of words, symbols, and images that expresses the interrelation in time between men, and between men and the universe, as well as between the ‘Near’ and the ‘Far’. It is significant that this experiment with form and meaning should be conducted by a writer from the New World, who not only universalizes

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the situation of his countrymen but also projects new light on man’s position in the universe, and illustrates the relativity of that position. The various interpretations of the myth of El Dorado I have examined indicate that the search leads to self-knowledge and a better understanding of past and present; the myth itself urges man to range beyond his limited self to find a reality that transcends his own. Although The Loss of El Dorado disparages this search, it does imply Naipaul’s regret that the quest did not produce a better world, and one suspects that, like many satirists, he is an inverted idealist. It would be possible to show that Naipaul’s vision of despair is shared by other West Indian novelists. The other tendency, that to which Carew and Harris belong (but which is not specifically Guyanese), includes writers who, like other artists in the New World, seek in their own country the germ of a positive meaning in art. These writers bring to light the specific bonds existing or forming between their country and its people and show that both can participate in the creation of a complex and cultivated sensibility of universal value. For all those artists, each man carries in himself his own El Dorado.

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The Writer as Alchemist The Unifying Role of the Imagination

The point I want to make in regard to the West Indies is that the pursuit of a strange and subtle goal, melting pot [...] is the main stream (though unacknowledged) tradition in the Americas. And the significance of this is akin to the European preoccupation with alchemy, with the growth of experimental science, the poetry of science as well as of explosive nature which is informed by a solution of images, agnostic humility and essential beauty, rather than vested interest in a fixed assumption and classification of things. 1

A

S H E H A S R E P E A T E D L Y S H O W N in his novels, this definition by Wilson Harris of the main tradition in the Americas applies both to the individual and to society in Caribbean life and literature. It obviously points to what he considers as the essential role of the West Indian writer: namely, to awaken his countrymen to their true nature and to make them realize the power of imagination to conceive and to generate a truly revolutionary life. Imagination, for Harris, is not the exclusive privilege of the artist; it must come alive in each person if modern humanity is ever to achieve the ‘reversal’ which its present, antiquated mentality calls for. The transforming power of imagination played a key role in the alchemist’s attempt to achieve a unity which was symbolized by gold but was as much psychological as physical in nature – the alchemist projected his own psychic background, his unconscious, into the matter on which he experimented, so that the latter became, as it were, his other self, with whom he entered into a living relationship equivalent to an “inner dia-

1

Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society, 32–33.

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logue.”2 It will be obvious to anyone familiar with Harris’s work that his characters are involved in a similar process of discovery and self-discovery. It is clear from his use of symbols that his writing is steeped in alchemical thought and that his characters’ progress towards their goal recalls the stages and difficulties of the alchemist’s search. From the Guyana Quartet to Tumatumari, the search for unity in man and society has led Harris to probe increasingly deeper into the power of imagination to stimulate the individual to a sense of responsibility towards himself and his fellow-men through a better understanding of his personal and historical background. Because of the glaring contrasts in its landscape and its highly diversified population, Guyana may appear as an ideal “vessel of experience” to the modern alchemist, intent on discovering a way to harmony within the human community. However, social harmony as indicative of a wider universal unity can only be achieved through the individual. Like D.H. Lawrence, Wilson Harris insists that social salvation lies in individual regeneration alone. Man must first come to terms with himself and his environment before he can ever hope to change society. That each person is responsible for the state of the world is suggested by Abram in The Whole Armour when he tells Cristo, who is accused of a crime he has not committed, “Nobody innocent” (17). In this novel, Book One of which significantly bears as its epigraph Goethe’s words “I am glad to have ideas without knowing it and to see them with my very eyes,” the spontaneous relation of reciprocity between the fundamental opposites of spirit and matter finds expression in the reciprocity between man and the landscape. In The Whole Armour, as in its original context, the Goethe quotation refers to the underlying unity between matter and spirit as well as to the concrete reality of ideas; these are projected in nature and can therefore be ‘seen’ or discovered by man. The landscape in Harris’s novels always acts as a prime mover to consciousness because man discovers in it a reflection of his own unconscious state, with which he must eventually come to terms. In The Whole Armour, the spiritual confinement of the people is paralleled by their position in the region, caught as they are between the sea and the jungle. By achieving self-knowledge, hence assimilating his personal and historical past after his experience in the forest, Cristo is able 2

C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Bollingen Series X X ; Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1953): 262.

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The Writer as Alchemist

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to point to the possibility of release and to the latent oneness of the Guyanese people while he himself becomes the symbol of that unity, the “backbone of the land [...] a watershed of hope between ancient terror and newborn love.”3 The natural environment plays a twofold role in Harris’s novels. It is first of all a mirror reflecting man’s dual role and as such is subjected to the same process of division, death and rebirth, which explains why it is capable of stirring man’s imagination and of helping him to define himself. Secondly, because it has a life of its own, it is not to be possessed but developed, as man should develop his own potentialities, with the help of science. Thus, even man’s relationship with the landscape involves the two elements which, according to Harris, should contribute to his rebirth: imagination and science. Whereas The Whole Armour throws light on the reciprocity between man and nature, in The Secret Ladder this very relationship acts as an incentive to the recognition of a similar reciprocity between men. Poseidon, who is identified with the river Canje and its swampy banks, awakens in Fenwick “a daemon of freedom and imagination and responsibility.” When Fenwick first sees him, it is “as if he saw down a bottomless gauge and river of reflection” (155), which suggests that he recognizes in the old man a part of himself of which he may have been unaware. Shortly afterwards, the river itself plays its role in making Fenwick alive to his twofold nature. Weng, his foreman, surprises him by appearing suddenly in the open doorway of the tent with his back to the water, and Fenwick experiences “the grotesque sensation that the frame of the tent and the placid river mirrored his own uneasy shadowy reflection” (175). In the ensuing conversation, Fenwick is not allowed to forget that instant of self-recognition. He finds that he and Weng seem to have switched positions, that he is being judged by his foreman, whom he intended to rebuke, and as he lies to placate him, he becomes uncomfortably aware of his own selfdeception. Gradually, Weng unsettles Fenwick’s reassuring image of himself, and the latter can no longer evade his own ambiguous two-sidedness. In Wilson Harris’s later works, such identifications are frequent; they take place spontaneously and are part of a larger pattern of associations: on the way to discovery, characters become linked in complete reciprocity 3 The Whole Armour, in The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder (London: Faber & Faber, 1973): 82. All references to The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder will be to this joint edition of these novels.

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and ‘informed’ about one another before they separate again. This movement of fusion and separation can be repeated a certain number of times before the fundamental unity between men is perceived as a reality; it allows man to discern, in the fluid and evanescent mirror of other people’s humanity, what he has always ignored, willingly or not, about himself. His unconscious self, at once an opposite and a complement to his conscious being, becomes perceptible. At the same time, he gains insight into other men, those ‘opposites’ with whom, as with his own other self, he is so often involved in a relationship of hunter and hunted, victim and victimizer. Man only learns to know himself by learning to know others equally well. Duality is the very substance of all life at all levels and in all forms in Harris’s novels; to become aware of this in oneself and in others is to start out on the path of discovery, but this duality will remain sterile or a source of strife unless it can be transmuted into dialogue. At this stage it is necessary to point out that Wilson Harris’s characters, however ‘refined’ into psychological entities, are also very much fleshand-blood people integrated into the physical universe. Only the Amerindians remain elusive, slightly unreal in body and soul. They are the lost tribe, the ghosts of a forgotten and therefore unconscious past, the social equivalents of one’s ignored and deeply buried self. But since they are an essential part of Guyanese life, they must be rescued and assimilated into the Guyanese whole. Just as the individual should face the reality of his own hidden being in order to progress towards fulfilment, so the community must reclaim and integrate those parts of itself now lost in the heart of the continent but still bound to the whole with the invisible ties of shared experience in a common melting-pot. The lost tribe appears in most novels, always suspicious of civilization and as reluctant to cooperate as their pursuers, whose main purpose is exploitation. Yet, as we see in Palace of the Peacock, the conquerors only find themselves when they at last join the fugitive tribe. In The Secret Ladder, these are not Amerindians but the descendants of runaway slaves, who resent the intrusion of technology, represented by Fenwick and his crew, into their region. The surveyor is of mixed African descent, and his efforts to ingratiate himself with Poseidon and his tribe amount to an attempt to confront and redeem both his personal past and a dark episode in the history of his country. Like the decapitated mare (165) of Fenwick’s

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dream or the misrepresented headwaters on his erroneous map (173),4 Poseidon, as a symbol of primitive humanity, is like a body whose head has been severed. Yet Fenwick rightly traces in him the dual effects of “ancient spirit and helplessness” and of “divine pride and human fallibility” (185). Poseidon is both god and man, and it is in this dual capacity that he arouses Fenwick’s conscience and becomes for him the mainspring of the rebirth of humanity. It is for the head, Poseidon’s thinking and progressive countrymen, to find its way back to its roots, to the body. “It’s a question of going in unashamed to come out of the womb again” (170), Fenwick writes. Exploring and coming to terms with the past, whether personal or historical, is not an easy and sentimental task. It is a slow and painful process of initiation, in which the neophyte sheds layer after layer of self-deception and illusion until he reaches “the void” and dies to his individuality before he can be reborn. In The Waiting Room, for instance, this psychological amputation is described in terms of the physical operation undergone by the character Susan, and conveyed with eloquent simplicity: “The sensation she recalled was pain, aftermath of living excision, of unconscious event [...] waking pain [...] acute confrontation between buried past and revival in the present.”5 In The Secret Ladder, Fenwick’s gradual recognition of his limitations is stimulated by his difficult relations with the crew and with Poseidon and is inseparable from his inquiry into the nature of authority and freedom. He discovers that freedom and responsibility, the concomitants of rebirth, are not free gifts; they must be “created” in conjunction with the process of self-conquest. In the course of his spiritual liberation, Fenwick realizes that he is contributing to a “new immaterial genesis and condition.” It is here that imagination tempered by humility plays an essential role in re-creating the past, in investigating, sometimes profitably, sometimes uselessly, the many connected rooms of memory. The unifying process towards self-knowledge is also a creative act through which opposites eventually merge on reaching the void that precedes rebirth. As Fenwick’s experience shows, this exploration is a plunge into the dark river of the unconscious. But the man who can face the disturbing truths he discovers emerges regenerated from this frightening confrontation. Nevertheless, harmony is more easily achieved on the personal 4 5

See also p. 119, below. Harris, The Waiting Room (London: Faber & Faber, 1967): 44.

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than on the social plane. To use Eliot’s words, Fenwick learns that “History may be freedom” and that both his personal and his historical past serve him as a bridge to a new vision of life. Conversely, for Poseidon’s frightened disciples “History [is] servitude,” and by re-enacting the escape of their ancestors they merely re-enter the “prison of the void.” In The Secret Ladder, the impossibility for the representatives of science, and those of primitive humanity, to initiate dialogue is obviously due to some extent to prejudice and unwillingness on both sides, with the exception of Bryant and Fenwick. But it also seems that the latter’s advances and his incapacity to reconcile imaginative understanding with action account for that failure. Not only is he accused of endangering the life of his own men by his tolerance, but to both sides his attitude seems ludicrous and naive. One shouldn’t deduce from this that, given the stubbornness and distrust displayed by both parties in such conflicts, Wilson Harris is suspicious of action. Yet it is perhaps significant that in the novels published after the Guyana Quartet his characters tend to achieve self-knowledge exclusively through the interplay of imagination, memory and foresight in re-living their past lives. Heartland takes us a step further in this direction, for it is not through any direct confrontation with another person that Stevenson is forced to look into himself. He has come to work in the jungle after a reversal of fortune, the death of his father and the betrayal of his mistress. Disturbed by his solitude, he starts struggling with both outer and inner heartlands in an attempt to unravel the truth about himself. The physical reality of the jungle and its role as a “climate of the mind” correspond so closely as to be inextricable. As the concrete source of terror and distress at the centre of Stevenson’s existence, the rainforest provides the stimulus to his memory and imagination in the re-creation of his past. Through the experimental working of his imagination on the ingredients of his former life Stevenson is able to discover its latent, previously ignored meaning and to try “to break through beyond himself.” From his initial realization that “he had never learned to surrender himself to a true vocation, dialectical and spiritual” and that “therein lay [...] the imprisonment of obsessed and frustrated being,” he comes to experience acutely the truth of Kaiser’s statement that “Man need man.”6 His imaginative perception of events alone makes him realize the full impact of his father’s self-sacrifice and allows 6

Harris, Heartland, 18, 20-21. Further page references are in the main text.

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him to identify himself with the latter to the extent of experiencing his father’s death as his own. It is also through such an effort of imagination that Stevenson perceives the intimate correspondence between himself and Petra, the Amerindian muse in whom he sees the mistress he still longs to possess. He helps her to give birth to her child at a time when both die to their former selves, becoming “equally strange in relation to themselves and to every cherished misconception they held” (79). He is profoundly shocked that she should have fled while he was getting food for her and interprets his mistress’s flight as a reiteration of her act of ingratitude. Actually, though he has gone far in the creation of responsibility and freedom, he has been easily deceived by his own generosity. By running away, Petra saves him from his former self and helps him to give birth to his new personality, since she makes him realize that his motive was selfishness and that she had seen through his duplication of sentiment to the core of his necessity to mount a guard over himself [...]. Stevenson was appalled at the spectre of his own dreaming mind locked in a cell of time in the forest [...]. Would one never learn to submit gently to the invisible chain of being [...]? (85)

What Harris is suggesting is that we are all “locked in a cell of time” from which the muse is trying to release us. As appears clearly in Heartland, the muse is also the archetypal mother, and she is usually of mixed white and Amerindian origin. She is obviously meant as a link between the modern and the primitive imagination. But modern man always tries to take advantage of her. And whenever she is pregnant by him, she is rejected by her Amerindian countrymen, a sure sign, it seems, that they refuse to cooperate with, and be regenerated by, modern civilization. In Tumatumari, the muse herself is divided, split into the two women who personify imagination: Prudence and her counterpart, Rakka, the “barren” Amerindian mistress of Prudence’s husband, Roi Solman. While Rakka, the muse of the Lost Tribe of the Sun, has been “crushed, despoiled,” and is like a “vacant lot in the depth of a wilderness,” Prudence, modern man’s creative imagination, is suffering from a nervous breakdown. Her husband, half-white, half-Amerindian, the “engineer of the future” and representative of science, embodies the spirit of man which, like the king of alchemy, is in need of regeneration. In alchemy, the king is often represented by the sun, a symbol of gold and of man’s spirit; the alchemical process describes his transformation from an imperfect state

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into a perfect whole. Prudence’s father, the Guyanese historian Henry Tenby, represents mankind. When he eventually unites with the soul and the spirit (Prudence and Roi), he takes part in the alchemist’s Aurora consurgens, the dawning of consciousness in mankind.7 But it is on Prudence, at once the creator and the protagonist of the “epic of ancestors” (133) she endeavours to write, that “the whole burden of conception [falls]” (46). She is the prime mover of unity, and achieves it while re-creating the history of her family and of Guyana that have made her what she is: a sick woman who has lost her newborn child and her husband, decapitated in the rapids of life, and who now hesitates between self-destruction and self-creation. In Tumatumari, Prudence embodies imagination as an independent character and takes the initiative of probing into her own soul and into the heart of those from whom she is inseparable – her father and her husband – to emerge liberated from her confrontation with the humiliating truths humanity conceals behind its multiple masks. Through her complex associations with each character or several of them at the same time, and with the mixture of generosity and jealousy common to most women, Prudence gropes towards understanding and self-realization in a series of alternating illuminations and blackouts. Simultaneously, her father’s and her husband’s lives, which recall the Guyanese experience in the first half of the twentieth century, are reconstructed in accordance with her free and unpredictable associations. Yet the reconstruction is not so haphazard that a logic of motives does not clearly emerge. Indeed, the two men are linked to each other as they are to the “blindfolded” Indians by having always acted in Prudence’s name. The Indians, who have lost their primal vision, and the men of Tenby’s and Roi’s generations, wrapped in their cloak of false emancipation, have all put reins upon their “underground imagination.” Only Prudence’s confession of weakness and humility will save them from the dreadful vision of the “Tumatumari of Tomorrow” (66). It is through her that they will be reborn, through her understanding of the need expressed by her father for a “far-reaching assessment of the collision of cultures,” a reconciliation of the “alien furnaces” of nature and society. On the threshold of consciousness, Henry Tenby realizes that in order “to forge a new treaty of relations between nature and society,” he must 7

C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 456.

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“crawl back into the interior [...] crawl back into the womb” (134) in which all oppositions are resolved. As in The Secret Ladder, the “opposites” in this novel are the social outcasts or the dispossessed whom Tenby and Roi have exploited in some way or other. As a matter of fact, both are to a large extent defined through their attitude towards those opposites. Roi is an intelligent man with a clear-sighted view of the world in which he lives, but he feels uneasy in this “age of marvel and transition.” Despite his single-mindedness he is his own worst enemy, a sceptic who wears a mask of self-deprecation. He is also a cynic, who sees the Indians as “the conscience of our age” (35) but goes on exploiting them “in the name of science, emancipation, industry, all rolled into one selfinterest” (34). When Roi is made whole in Prudence’s re-creation of his drowning in a waterfall, it is not by transcending his own contradictions but through the creation of reciprocity between Prudence and Rakka, who become the positive and negative poles on the circumference of a whirlpool spiralling down towards fulfilment. Henry Tenby’s Rakkas are all those he has betrayed in both private and public life while taking refuge behind his masks of Prudence, Virtue and Refinement: his dark-skinned son and the African past he represents, the East-Indian woman confined in her economic ghetto, and all those who have suffered from his acquiescence in the suppression of liberties. In all circumstances he has been an obstacle to evolution and real emancipation by succumbing to fear and weakness. Yet he also, like Roi, is aware of the possibilities of rebirth. His own “birth of conscience” (87) starts as an extension of Roi’s fulfilment. As he confronts each of his failures with Prudence’s eyes and rises with her from the bottom of the pool, as all the restricted elements of his life become “liberated and digested by [...] imagination” (142), we become aware of mankind’s miraculous power of recovery. In its extraordinary concise complexity, the novel presents an almost unlimited number of relationships on all levels of experience and their transformation into a “genuine open dialogue.” That all men need one another and can only reach fulfilment through one another is a major theme in Harris’s work. But again it is not inspired by an easy humanitarianism. Rather, it is a corollary to his belief that in the midst of the known and scientifically knowable world, there persists in nature, in ‘lost’ communities, in the individual human being, an unfathomable mystery which must be approached imaginatively and made to balance the achievement of civilized man, if the latter is not to be defeated by his own

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conquests. The jungle or its equivalent in nature, the victims, whether runaway slaves or lost tribe, his own hidden self – these are the mysterious opposites with which Harris’s modern characters must come to terms by tempering the role of science with imagination. This explains why Harris perceives in the process of discovery the “agnostic humility” of the alchemist or artist rather than a “vested interest in a fixed assumption and classification of things.”8

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8

See the epigraph to this chapter.

3 I

Palace of the Peacock

Voyage into Namelessness

P

P E A C O C K , the opening movement of the Guyana Quartet, is the first, preludial panel in the long narrative canvas in which, from one instalment, or novel, to the next, Wilson Harris untiringly explores West Indian consciousness while creating a new art of fiction. Retrospectively, it is seen to contain the germ of most future developments in his novels, as if, like the narrator in The Eye of the Scarecrow, the author “were a ghost returning to the same place (which was always different), shoring up different ruins (which were always the same).”1 His subject-matter is indeed different and explored in new forms in successive novels, yet similar insofar as, in each, a central consciousness is involved in a process of disintegration followed by, or concomitant with (particularly in the later novels), a revisualization of what Harris calls the “architectonic self”: i.e. a new construction of the self. His first experiment in fiction already evidences his desire to reject the conventional novel as inadequate to the rendering of the Caribbean experience, for he sees in the traditional English novel an accumulation of selected elements meant to consolidate the world-view of a dominant section of society and to persuade the reader that the plane on which the narrative develops has an inevitable and unquestionable existence. To the notion of consolidation, he opposes that of fulfilment, which implies a recognition of the self as “the latent ground of old and new personalities.”2 The modern history 1

ALACE OF THE

Harris, The Eye of the Scarecrow, 25. See Harris’s much-quoted essay “Tradition and the West Indian Novel,” in Tradition, the Writer and Society, 28. 2

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of Europe, where the traditional novel took shape, is marked by an accretion of power and the rise of the middle class, with which the novel mainly dealt. Over the same period, the West Indies were repeatedly invaded, their original inhabitants decimated, slaves and indentured labourers imported and exploited. Not the self-assertive individual but the “obscure human person”3 was, until fairly recently, the representative West Indian. However, though convinced that the West Indian was long confined to “a terrible void of unreality,” Harris does not believe in the socalled “historylessness” of the Caribbean, as asserted by the nineteenthcentury English historian James Anthony Froude4 and later by the Trinidadian novelist V.S. Naipaul. The void in Harris’s novels is peopled with the victims of history. Each character seems to contain the capacity to accept, yet implicitly transform, the limits of Caribbean experience, and in each the soul is the equivalent of the phenomenal world into which successive generations of victims (Amerindians and runaway slaves) have disappeared. The West Indian soul is ridden with images of a terrifying past, of antagonisms between the conquerors and the conquered. Harris’s narratives aim at freeing the individual from these polarizations in a manner which fulfils in the person the most nebulous instinct for a vocation of being and independent spirit within a massive landscape of apparent lifelessness which yields nevertheless the essential denigration and erosion of historical perspectives.5

Erosion and breakdown are key words for grasping the dynamics of his novels. They apply at once to the basic pattern of extinction in Caribbean and South American history and to the process in which the character who re-lives it is involved, for all the novels offer in part or in their entirety a re-vision of the past and an imaginative re-enactment of the dislocation imposed by circumstances on the psyche. This dislocation has inspired the form of Harris’s art and the philosophy that underlies it, the search for a nameless eclipsed dimension that eludes all polarizations. The breakdown of the apparently static world of appearances in order to discover this 3

Tradition, the Writer and Society, 36. On this subject, see particularly Wilson Harris’s essay History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas (Georgetown, Guyana: National History and Arts Council, Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lectures, 1970), repr. in revised and shortened form in Explorations, ed. Maes–Jelinek, 20–42. 5 “Tradition and the West Indian Novel,” 32. 4

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eclipsed reality within and beyond them is basic to all the novels. It entails a disruption of traditional forms, plot, character, and narrative structure, and a reshaping of these elements according to an intuitive, visionary perception of the interrelatedness which, in Harris’s eyes, is basic to all forms of being. Even the characters’ mode of apprehension is being shattered and reshaped, a process in which the imagination plays a major role. Indeed, few writers identify themselves with their work to such an extent that their imagination is at once the mainspring and the subjectmatter of their art. Yet this is the experiment that Wilson Harris initiates in Palace of the Peacock and continues in most of his novels. Imagination with Harris is not merely an exploratory and creative power: the essence of this power, its innumerable possibilities of development, and its capacity for self-renewal are themselves explored. The transformation of a relationship of opposition into one of reciprocity, which is a fundamental precondition for creativeness, obviously holds for imagination itself: the latter is both the directing principle of the novel and the directing principle, in the process of being created, of the character’s experience. In its dual role as both the creating and the created function, imagination transforms man’s response to the world in which he lives. It shocks the individual character into recognizing the limitations imposed on his consciousness by prejudice and custom; hence, it frees him from the intellectual and emotional conservatism which prevents him from accepting the necessity for continual exploration and regeneration. Through the history of his country and its multiracial society, Harris explores the plight of universal man and his neglected capacities for remodelling his own life and society by freeing himself from the contradictions and anguish that imprison him. There is a passage in Heartland in which the main character reflects as he enters the jungle: Nothing changed over the centuries. Long before European colonizer – Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, English – and African colonized arrived and ventured into nameless tributaries, their pre-Columbian spiritual ancestors had been on the selfsame ground, [...]. They had apparently failed in their mission to catch the unreality of themselves which they encountered in the rude nomadic tribes they came to rescue and civilize, who flitted like ghosts under a more compulsive baton [...] than any a human conqueror could devise. Legendary hunted creatures they all were and their legend was an extraordinary malaise, [...]. Their religion was an extreme capacity for avenues of


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flight they made for themselves to discover a heartland which had been created for them and which they had lost.6

This repetitive pattern of conquest and flight, driving both parties into a spiritual void, is the theme of Palace of the Peacock, a novel which also explores beyond the void the possibilities of rebirth and fulfilment. It is shaped by what the author calls an “act of memory” – an act by which memory combines with imagination to re-create the Guyanese experience of conquest and flight, the abortive meeting between two alien cultures and civilizations. The progress of a skipper and his crew on a nameless river in the Guyanese jungle is an allegory of all such expeditions. But it is also a spiritual quest in which the author revives a universal myth: the boat in which his dead characters travel explores their own underworld until they reach the centre of their inner kingdom and achieve consciousness. The allegory develops on two planes: the material and historical on the one hand; and the spiritual and psychological on the other. The ordeal imposed by historical circumstances on ordinary individual brings to light capacities of fulfilment by which man’s confused “nebulous” being can progress towards self-realization. The correspondence between the historical and the spiritual journey is not contrived; it arises from the conviction that the interpretation of history is, or should be, an act of the creative imagination. The writer, or artist–historian, re-creates, in order to understand them, the conflicting relationships and emotions in which the historical situation involves the individual, and which are capable of shaping his consciousness. Given the dual role of imagination in the novel, it not only brings to light potential lines of development that may have been ignored in the past. As the main agent of discovery, it is itself modified in the very act of shaping the individual’s consciousness. Palace of the Peacock initiates the movement of disruption followed by reconstruction or the promise of rebirth, which, in all of Harris’s novels, transforms catastrophe into a possible agent of release from an oppressive situation. The story-line is simple and evokes the quintessence and repetitive pattern of Guyanese history: the invasion of the country by successive waves of conquerors in search of a legendary El Dorado, motivated by the mixture of brutality and idealism that characterized all such expeditions, and the endless exploitation of land and people. Donne, the

6

Harris, Heartland, 30–31.

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main character, is a hard and ruthless colonizer, although, as his name suggests, he is also capable of imagination. He is the skipper of the boat in which he and his multiracial crew travel from the coastland savannahs to the inland mission of Mariella in the hope of enlisting cheap labour for his plantation. They relive “Donne’s first innocent voyage and excursion into the interior country,”7 and “the odd fact existed [...] that their living names matched the names of a famous dead crew that had sunk in the rapids and been drowned to a man” (23). When they reach the mission, the Amerindians have fled, leaving behind an old Arawak woman whom Donne decides to use as a guide in his pursuit of the folk. From then on, the narrative centres on Donne’s seven-day journey into the interior on dangerous nameless rapids between gigantic walls of forest and cliffs. One by one, members of the crew die, accidentally, or from exhaustion, or as victims of murder when the underlying violence and frustration among them erupt. They finally reach a huge waterfall, and with the two surviving members of the crew Donne embarks on an ascent of the cliff, until they fall and likewise meet their death. The story, however, does not end with the catastrophic ordeal towards which Donne has been travelling but with an illumination that grows out of his understanding of that very catastrophe. The characters in Palace of the Peacock are dead in more senses than one. They are not simply actors in a bygone drama; they are also dead to their real nature and to the life of the soul, and blindly allow their passions to get the better of them. Insofar as they are aware of spiritual possibilities at all, it is as something outside themselves which they do not really understand. DaSilva’s twin brother, for instance, seems to represent that part of himself unknown to him and of which he is most afraid. Donne, too, is a divided being. This duality is but one expression of the fundamental opposites that manifest themselves not only in in man alone but in every form of life – in the landscape, for instance, which reflects man’s dual nature and helps him to define himself. The novel opens with a flashing vision of the imperialist conquest and the spirit of vengeance it aroused among its victims: Donne, the galloping conquistador, is shot by Mariella, the Amerindian woman he has abused and exploited. It is this vision of vengeance and death that acts as a spur to the narrator’s recollection of the meeting between conqueror and con7

Harris, Palace of the Peacock, 24. Further page references are in the main text.

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quered. It is the content of a dream that seems to haunt the Guyanese consciousness and starts the nameless first-person narrator on his visionary quest. He is Donne’s inseparable double and his spiritual self, and together they represent the contrary aspects, subjective and objective, of one being, who is both dead and alive. It seems, indeed, that Donne’s death brings back to life the spiritual narrator, who reintegrates his material prison: i.e. Donne himself, his “gaoler and ruler” (14). This is the startingpoint of the revival of the past, which strikes one as both an actual occurrence and its imaginative reconstruction. The opening of the narrative on the frontier between life and death suggests that the narrator’s initial dream and his subsequent re-vision of the past take place in the timeless moment when man glimpses the whole of his experience in a flash. This timeless moment merges with the conventional time-frame, the three days’ journey to Mariella followed by the seven days’ progression towards the waterfall. In his later fiction, Harris often uses this double timestructure as a means of freeing experience from the single ‘inevitable’ plane of existence to which it would otherwise be confined. In Palace of the Peacock, the linear progression of the story tends to overshadow the timeless moment, although one is reminded of it whenever the narrator withdraws from the objective world around him and becomes lost in his apprehension of what he calls “the true substance of life” (59) – actually, the nameless dimension in which the Amerindian folk move. His mode of perception is also double and illustrates the contrasting possibilities inherent in each human being. At the beginning of the narrative, Donne’s “dead seeing material eye” evinces his brother’s “living closed spiritual eye” (14). But the latter’s recurring intuitions punctuate the gradual transformation of the quest into a wholly spiritual one. These intuitions are mostly stimulated by the landscape, which, as already suggested, reflects man’s dual nature and helps him to define himself. Man and landscape share a common experience (violation by the conqueror). The landscape at times takes on the features of a human body which can prove as treacherous as any ill-intentioned adversary. It is sometimes a mirror for man’s inner states and often a catalyst that modifies them. More important still, the glaring contrasts and uncertainties of the Guyanese natural world are a phenomenal and spatial equivalent of the psyche, and the two blend in the narrative. Like the poet John Donne in his “Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness,” the narrator identifies with the territory over which Donne, the explorer, rules. However, both “actual

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stage” and “symbolic map” (20) are more than they appear to be, since both are pregnant with immaterial vestiges of the past and future possibilities, “hidden densities” which the narrator discovers in his progress towards self-knowledge. Throughout the narrative, nature is alive with the unseen presence of the Amerindian folk, who also live in the consciousness (and unconsciousness) of their pursuers, for they are part of the “complex womb” (41) out of which the modern Guyanese have sprung and are their spiritual ancestors. The correlation between landscape and self can be seen in the following passage. in which Donne, as he forces his way further into the jungle, becomes overwhelmed by an unseen presence both within his surroundings and within himself: At last I lifted my head into a normal position. The heavy undergrowth had lightened. The forest rustled and rippled with a sigh and ubiquitous step. I stopped dead where I was, frightened for no reason whatever. The step near me stopped and stood still. I stared around me wildly, in surprise and terror, and my body grew faint and trembling as a woman’s or a child’s. I gave a loud ambushed cry which was no more than an echo of myself − a breaking and grotesque voice, man and boy, age and youth speaking together. I recovered myself from my dead faint supported by old Schomburgh, on one hand, and Carroll, the young Negro boy, on the other. (27–28)

The contrasts in the forest have evoked in N. contrasting personalities within himself, “man and boy, age and youth,” and these materialize in Schomburgh and Carroll, who belong to the crew that “every man mans and lives in his inmost ship and theatre and mind” (48). “Outline” and “dreaming skeleton” are aspects of what Harris has called “eclipsed perspectives of place and community”8 to which the narrator responds. Note the significance Harris is able to elicit from the fairly commonplace sense of undefined anxiety that nearly everyone experiences when faced with the mystery of the forest: he evokes an Other whom N. is unable to locate or recognize even though the “echo” is an expression of the community he will discover to be in himself at the end. Another similar moment of revelation occurs in Chapter 3 when the travellers detect on the river a pale smooth patch that seemed hardly worth a thought. [...] Formidable lips breathed in the open running atmosphere to flatter it, many a wreathed coun-

8

Harris, “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” 58.

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THE LABYRINTH OF UNIVERSALITY tenance to conceal it [...] [the crew] bowed and steered in the nick of time away from the evasive, faintly discernible unconscious head whose meek moon-patch heralded corrugations and thorns and spears we dimly saw in a volcanic and turbulent bosom of water. We swept onward, every eye now peeled and crucified with Vigilance. The silent faces and lips raised out of the heart of the stream glanced at us. They presented no obvious danger and difficulty once we detected them beneath and above and in our own curious distraction and musing reflection in the water. (32–33)

N. and the crew are aware of “corrugations and thorns and spears” which evoke crucifixion or the sacrifice that life seems to exact in order to perpetuate itself, and which they will experience when two members of the crew, Carroll and Wishrop, perish in the rapids. The “moon patch” also draws their attention to the buried existences (“the silent faces and lips raised out of the heart of the stream” 33) in the stream of life and in themselves, obstacles which they discover to be their own reflections in the water, and which are also inner obstructions. Here again the confrontation with danger in nature provokes awareness of the “ambush of soul” (34) that N. had already sensed when Mariella ambushed Donne to kill him, and in the “ambushing forest” (26). “Images in space”9 dramatize the characters’ inner condition. There is no apparent link between the major events in Book I – the narrator’s flashing vision of Donne’s death, his disorientation in the forest, and his perception of ghostly antecedents in the river. However, through the unsettling effects of these disconnected experiences and of the partial revelations they elicit, the narrator begins to perceive the double nature of their journey. Whereas Donne is obsessed by his will to rule, the narrator senses in the crew and in himself “a desire and need” (25), “the longing need of the hunter” (30), which gradually takes the shape of Mariella and transforms the journey into an “immortal chase of love” (31). In her different guises, Mariella has played a role in the individual lives of the crew and is a link between them as the inspiring muse through whom they hope to make a new start. She represents her people and identifies with the territory of the mission, also called Mariella. Like the crew, she is doublenatured and contains such opposites as age and youth, innocence and guilt. Except when she appears as the old woman Donne takes prisoner and in the re-creation of her past relations with the crew, Mariella remains 9

Tradition, the Writer and Society, 51.

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elusive and enigmatic to the very end of the novel, at once an absence and a presence to be recognized in oneself, since, like most as the crew, she is part of Donne’s complex personality and of Guyana’s heterogeneous population. The crew, too, inhabit Donne and the narrator’s inner territory. Though they are flesh-and-blood individuals, their emotional lives are such as “every man mans and lives in his inmost ship and theatre and mind” (48). They are living embodiments of those instincts and passions that are deeply buried, as unacknowledged and therefore “undigested” (54) sources of conflict. Unconsciously, they seem to enact the negative and positive potentialities contained in Donne and the narrator – possessive lust, cruelty, murder, as well as the desire to be free of these selfimprisoning iniquities and to reach fulfilment. It should be clear, then, that just as Harris presents a multiple reality which exceeds by far the limits of the perceptible world, so he enlarges our view of the human personality by conceiving the fictional character as a nucleus of selves, a “community of being.” In Book I I , particularly, the crew seem to be living variations of the contrary states and motives contained in Donne and the narrator. They make “one spiritual family” (40) and are united by close or ambiguous relationships: the DaSilva brothers are twins; old Schomburgh is afraid to recognize his son in the young negro boy Carroll. When not related, they seem to complement, or identify with, one another, like Donne and Wishrop, Jennings and Cameron, the narrator and Vigilance, who is also Carroll’s stepbrother. Though this part of the novel takes place entirely at the mission of Mariella, it is prefaced with a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland: “the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.” It is indeed while they stop at the mission that the hidden depths in the crew and their contrary impulses begin to manifest themselves in their present behaviour and in the re-creation of their past. On the deserted soil of Mariella they are caught in a spiritual storm, a battle between life and death, in the course of which evil appears to strengthen its hold on Donne, while the crew are paralyzed by the effects of his cruelty, material ambition and hatred. The narrator’s feeling that he is “drawn two ways at once” (48), towards death and life, comes from his nightmarish re-enactment of Donne’s death, which ends with an intuition of Mariella’s sorrow and is followed by a vision of perfection in an “eternal design” (47). In the ensuing calm, Donne is beset by his first doubts: “I am beginning to lose all my imagination” (56), he says, realizing at once that he must

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find a new relationship with the folk. At this stage, however, his spiritual self alone knows that union with the folk, what he calls “the unity of being” or “the true substance of life” (59), is made impossible by fear, a fear which none of them will acknowledge, though inwardly they have become reluctant to pursue Mariella and consequently to know the truth about themselves. They are temporarily “freed” and “lifted [...] out of the deeps” by Carroll’s laughter and music, which heralds their final coming together. Later in the day, the narrator becomes the medium of another visionary experience. When Donne arrests the old Arawak woman, the narrator is again obsessed by the undigested catastrophe that provoked the antagonism between conqueror and victim. The serial crimes committed by Wishrop are another example of the crew’s affinity with death, for he has enacted “the desire they too felt in their vicarious day-dream, to kill whatever they had learnt to hate” (65). However, by purging himself of the desire to kill and later through his own death he frees the crew from their death-wish. Carroll, by contrast, actualizes their birth-wish and need for harmony. When the crew quarrel over the necessity to pursue Mariella, his laughter strikes them “as the slyest music coming out of the stream” (63); it liberates them from the tormenting passions that still root them in the soil of Mariella: “something had freed them and lifted them up out of the deeps [...] a reverberating clap of thunder and still music and song” (64). Music is “heard” in the narrative whenever Carroll comes to the fore; it is the expression of the deeper harmony the narrator intuits intermittently. Indeed, the light of vision floods his consciousness at intervals, then fades again, and until Book I I I , when the crew begin to die, the narrative structure rests on this alternation between the narrator’s moments of perception (his intimations of the roots of community in outer and inner territory) and the more matter-of-fact episodes in which significant fragments of the crew’s lives are evoked. Book I I I describes the crew’s progression upriver until they reach the falls above the mission of Mariella. It is prefaced by lines from the poet Donne’s “Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness”: “I tune the instrument here at the door, / And what I must do then, think here before.” These lines announce the “second death” of the skipper and his crew, who will now travel seven days before reaching the folk and the door to resurrection. Each day is one of creation, for as Donne loses one by one the members of his crew: i.e., sheds layer after layer of his former self, he gradual-

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ly creates a new vision and makes room for unsuspected possibilities of life. On the first day, for instance, Carroll is engulfed by the waters and is soon followed in death by his alleged father Schomburgh. The death of the Son, which brings forth the long-wished-for recognition of their relationship by the Father, is reflected in the landscape as “a new and enduring spiritual summer of russet and tropical gold” (76). From then on, the spiritual nature of the quest comes increasingly to the fore, and we participate in the agonizing experiences of the crew through the more mature consciousness of the river-pilot, Vigilance. He watches his companions from the top of the cliff, to where he has followed the old Amerindian woman they brought with them from the mission. Despite their brief vision of unity with her, and despite the fact that they are inescapably involved in a common experience, the crew have not recognized in the old woman the Amerindian race and muse they have been pursuing. As they lose the sense of security they used to derive from the material world, they are forced to acknowledge the illusoriness of the reality they had cherished. All inward opposition collapses; increasingly helpless and exhausted, they fear the loss of individuality which they sense will result from their coming encounter with eternity. The seven days allotted to the crew for their journey are days of creation (117), which chiefly implies a process of dissolution: except for Vigilance, saved by his gift of vision and his fruitful relation with the Arawak muse, the crew are subject to growing uncertainty as “second death” depletes their ranks. The source of their disorientation seems to be their confrontation with namelessness, the third dimension, in which the elusive folk move. The word nameless is repeatedly used to denote an ‘otherness’ that the crew fear in the world around them yet without recognizing that they partake of it. It refers both to a primordial state and to the fallen or eclipsed condition of victimized people.10 Namelessness, as opposed to racial identity (“every material mask and label and economic form and solipsism” 85), is the source of genuine community and is experienced as a preliminary to spiritual rebirth. It is associated with the sacred or the divine, which is not a transcendental ideal but suffering humanity (here the “unwritten lives”11 of the folk) exiled beyond the pale of history. In the old Arawak woman, the narrator discerns 10 11

The Eye of the Scarecrow, 9, 10. The Eye of the Scarecrow, 9.

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THE LABYRINTH OF UNIVERSALITY the unfathomable patience of a god in whom all is changed into wisdom, all experience and all life a handkerchief of wisdom when the grandiloquence of history and civilization was past. (72)

The old woman’s ‘otherness’ exerts on the crew both fascination and terror as she briefly metamorphoses into the young Mariella, who seduces them once again and “embrace[s]” (73) them with the tumult of the waters surrounding them. There seems to be on either side a desire to engulf the other. When the crew symbolically rape the Arawak woman, they are sustained by an “incestuous love” (73) which is a denial of otherness and the cause of their own “self-oppression” (75). Conversely, by yielding to their irresistible attraction to the “daemonic-flowing presence and youth” (74) of the muse, the crew are in danger of complete self-surrender and annihilation. They are momentarily redeemed by Carroll’s sacrificial death, just as later Wishrop’s drowning bears them “into the future on the wheel of life” (102) and saves them for a further phase of erosion. As frightening as death itself is the ordeal through which they lose the support of the material world. When they reach the threshold of the unknown, they are “on the threshold” both “of the folk” (94) and of their own unconscious. Now the conventional boundary between life and a deathlike state appears to melt away. Images of shattering and dismemberment abound in Book I I I , expressing the crew’s horrifying experience of their loss of identity and reduction to a “nakedness” similar to that of the folk. From being the pursuers they have become pursued men longing for redemption by the folk; from this moment on, the Amerindians, who were so far little more than animals to be exploited, become potential saviours. Their invisible presence is detected in such messengers as a flock of ducks, heraldic parrots, and the wounded tapir which prefigures the image of sheer energy Donne perceives later in the waterfall (134). By the second day, the boat has “struck the bizarre rock and vessel of their second death” (100) yet continues upriver “driven by the naked spider of spirit” (102). Until the final extinction of the crew, Harris seems to contrast the illusory strength of the material world they are so reluctant to relinquish (“the childish repetitive boat and prison of life” 104) with a spiritual reality of which Vigilance alone is aware. Vigilance is the instrument of a vision “disruptive of all material conviction” (103). His “immateriality and mysterious substantiality” (103) recall “the substance of the folk” (59), of which the narrator had an intuition earlier in the quest. This emphasis on the immaterial is not a denial of material reality. Rather, to


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re-live catastrophe with understanding and the “eye of compassion” (108), as Vigilance does, brings about a visionary dislocation of the material world, which enables him to perceive beyond it the immaterial condition of the eclipsed folk. In this perception lies the mainspring of spiritual rebirth. There is now between Vigilance and the crew the same “spiritual distance” (104) as later between Donne and the carpenter at the waterfall (133). The still blind and confused crew must undergo disintegration and fall into the void, as waves of victimized people have in the past, before the saving union with the “folk” can take place. The final breakdown and breakthrough of Donne’s personality occurs in Book I V , “Paling of Ancestors,” a title inspired by two lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Starlight Night”: This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

These lines sum up the vision Donne perceives within the “paling” of the waterfall he has now reached and up the side of which he begins to climb with Jennings and DaSilva. They have reached a primordial world in which opposites become reconciled: “before them the highest waterfall [...] moved and still stood [...] the immaculate bridal veil falling motionlessly” (128; emphases mine). Donne now becomes conscious of an “invisible otherness” (141) around him and of existences that “contrast” with his domineering self. I referred earlier to the spatial equivalence between the landscape and the Caribbean psyche. The escarpment of the waterfall seems to represent the great divide that tore apart the West Indian soul (particularly its Amerindian element) in the wake of conquest.12 It is all the more significant, then, that, as he struggles up the cliff-face, Donne should visualize in the water and, to use a Harrisian term, “re-sense” images of his Amerindian spiritual ancestry. The waterfall has a homogeneous surface and has the inevitabile impact of fate (“the hammer of the fall shook the earth with the misty blow of fate” 131) yet is susceptible to breaking open and disclosing densities, “the subtle running depths of the sea, the depths of the green sky and the depths of the forest” (136). As earlier in the novel, the physical world opens onto a vision, though it is now Donne who gains visionary insight. As he keeps ascending, moved 12

In Tumatumari also, the fall down a high escarpment stands for the collapse of the Amerindians.

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by a longing to “understand and transform his beginnings” (130), he comes successively upon two windows in the misty veil of the waterfall and perceives first the image of a young carpenter or Arawak Christ, then a native virgin and child, not the glorified Virgin of the Christian church, though the two figures reconcile Christian with native elements. Since the beginning of Book IV the narrative has become wholly symbolic; though described as concrete action, the quest does not issue in an actual meeting with Mariella or the folk but in a reshaping of Donne’s imagination through what they represent. The rooms Donne envisions in the waterfall with their images of sacrifice and compassion seem to be projected from his (or the Guyanese and South American) unconscious. As he comes to realize, they are the native element he has always disregarded: A singular thought always secured him to the scaffolding. It was the unflinching clarity with which he looked into himself and saw that all his life he had loved no one but himself. He focused his blind eye with all penitent might on this pinpoint star and reflection as one looking into the void of oneself upon the far greater love and self-protection that have made the universe. (140)

The spiritual ancestors contained in the waterfall are bathed in a light that seems to flow from the very source of life: “all threads of light and fabric from the thinnest strongest source of all beginning and undying end” (138–39). See also: “All else was dream borrowing its light from a dark invisible source” (141). The futility of erecting barriers of the senses and the mind in the material world is suggested by passages of an extraordinary metaphoric richness. I can only allude briefly here to the swift animal in the carpenter’s room which, as already mentioned, seems to embody an energy or life impulse that assumes different shapes and defies the ordinary notions of space and time (134–35). It is the ceaseless movement of creation, “the sculptured ballet of the leaves and the seasons” (135), that Donne visualizes. He is involved in a double process, being gradually reduced to utter nothingness and complete blindness (of the formerly “dead seeing material eye”) while at the same time his true vision is being created: “He knew the chisel and the saw in the room had touched him and done something in the wind and the sun to make him anew [...]. He felt these implements of vision operating upon him” (132–33). The pictures in the waterfall of the sacrificial victims Donne used to ignore suggest that he himself now hangs in the terrifying void they have experienced before, but this very void is the starting-point of a reconstruction of

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the self: “the Void of themselves alone was real and structural” (141). Donne’s conversion is due essentially to his apprehension of the native figures in “images in space.” This spatialization of an otherwise ungraspable reality was to develop into Harris’s conception of “the novel as painting” in which he attempts to retrieve through an accumulation of visualized “pictures” a deeply buried and “inimitable” reality (or light) that cannot be trapped or fixed in a single total representation. The folk in Palace move in this elusive dimension and, as already suggested, are never actually reached. When Donne falls from the cliff, he and the crew have “all come home at last to the compassion of the nameless unflinching folk” (143). In the dawn of the seventh day, Donne has disappeared or, rather, merged with the spiritual narrator, who again takes up the narrative (from which he had disappeared in Book I I I ) in the first person to describe his and the crew’s resurrection as well as the return to life of the formerly deserted savannah. The narrator seems to have come to the very source of creation and to perceive together the material world and the reality that informs it: “a metaphysical outline dwelt everywhere filling in blocks where spaces stood” (144). More than this, it is his own vision, which he now shares with that of the muse (“the soul and mother of the universe” 146), that seems to give life to the world he looks upon, suggesting that the vision of consciousness is the prime mover of life in man and nature: I felt it was the unique window through which I now looked that supported the life of nature [...] in the way I knew my hands and feet were formed and supported at this instant. (145)

Together with “the newborn wind of spirit” (the muse?) the vision breathes life into dismembered creatures and transfigures the tree in the savannah into the peacock: I saw the tree in the distance wave its arms and walk when I looked at it through the spiritual eye of the soul. First it shed its leaves sudden and swift as if the gust of the wind that blew had ripped it almost bare. The bark and wood turned to lightning flesh and the sun which had been suspended from its head rippled and broke into stars that stood where the shattered leaves had been in the living wake of the storm. The enormous starry dress it now wore spread itself all around into a full majestic gown from which emerged the intimate column of a musing neck, face and hands, and twinkling feet. The stars became peacocks’ eyes, and the great tree of flesh and blood swirled into another

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THE LABYRINTH OF UNIVERSALITY stream that sparkled with divine feathers where the neck and the hands and the feet had been nailed. (146; emphasis mine)

Of all the metamorphoses of images in the novel, this is the most remarkable. It is worth pointing out that the sun, which at the beginning of the novel was a symbol of Donne’s implacable rule, splinters into stars which become in turn the peacock’s eyes: also that the palace of the peacock grows out of “the great tree of flesh and blood” and is therefore not a transcendental symbol but, rather, a metaphoric representation of community reconciling the human and the divine (the self and the Other), as its double vision shows: “This was the palace of the universe and the windows of the soul looked out and in” (146). The significance of the palace is enhanced when opposed to the “prison house” in which Donne’s spiritual self had its initial dream. From the “high swinging gate” of the house to the “lion door” at the foot of the waterfall, the perilous adventures of the crew on the river have bridged Donne’s way to his meeting with the folk. And in the process of converting their own imprisonment into freedom, the crew have retrieved the elusive tribe from the void in which they were seeking refuge. It is this process of mutual release that culminates in the creation of the palace. Other members of the crew appear at the windows of the palace, and Carroll’s song is the “organ cry” of the peacock. As with painting when Donne was looking into the waterfall, so now with music, which comes “from a far source within” (151) and is not so much an actual sound as an expression of harmony that defies all categories: light turns into “a musical passage” (145) while “the echo of sound” is “outlined in space” (147). One is reminded here of Keats’s line: “Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.” Fully conscious now of belonging to one undying soul and sharing in its music, the narrator exults in the reward of their journey: “Each of us now held at last in his arms what he had been forever seeking and what he had eternally possessed” (152). The figure of the peacock is part of the alchemical tradition, the symbolism of which the author was to use with consummate art in Tumatumari. Like the phoenix, it is an ancient symbol of resurrection, and it also suggests man’s power of metamorphosis and self-renewal. Its implications in the novel are numerous. The most obvious of them is that the peacock illustrates the duality of man: the “vanity and conceit” of the crew before their rebirth paralleled by the beauty and the transmutation of which they are also capable. Though various possibilities suggest themselves to the reader, at the very end of the novel the peacock strikes


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mainly as a symbol of wholeness and of harmonious diversity. Like the rainbow, it combines all colours, all qualities, and its multiplied vision stands for the manifold personality of Donne, of his people, and of humanity. The peacock’s tail is also said to stand for “the soul of the world, nature, the quintessence which causes all things to bring forth.”13 It is thus an appropriate symbol for the three aspects of the quest: the discovery of the source or roots of life with its personal and historical implications; rebirth; and the unity which apply both to the individual and to mankind.14 However significant the moment of fulfilment at the end of the quest, it is not a final achievement, for this would once more paralyze the crew into a fixed and therefore oppressive attitude. Nature is seen as a vast canvas, “perfect” but still “unfinished” (144). Carroll’s song “seem[s] to break and mend itself always” (147). And so the palace can only be an ephemeral construction, for life is a continuous ebb and flow, a repetitive pattern of dissolution and rebirth, whether in nature or in the individual human consciousness: I felt the faces before me begin to fade and part company from me and from themselves as if our need of one another was now fulfilled, and our distance from each other was the distance of a sacrament, the sacrament and embrace we knew in one muse and one undying soul. (152)

The novel ends with the expression of a paradox that Harris was to develop in The Eye of the Scarecrow, the idea that the Other is “near and yet far” (13). I would suggest, however, that the reality it conveys, that of a profound “unity of being” (59), is present, though as an underlying truth, in the body of the novel as much as at its climax, for the language creates throughout the interrelatedness that informs all life. Harris’s language not only merges the sensuous and the abstract (see, in particular, Donne’s ascent of the waterfall and the picture of the Madonna and child) but also the animate and the inanimate. For example, the “outboard engine [...] flashed with mental silent horror” (21); the word “embroideries” refers at once to the waves on the river, the design of the Arawak woman’s 13

C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy, tr. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963): 288. 14 See ch. 3.I I below (pp. 83–84) for a complementary interpretative slant on the two passages just discussed.

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kerchief, and the “wrinkles on her brow” (73). As already suggested, consciousness and phenomenal world overlap. Now other categories or dimensions, like space and time, also merge: “the animal light body [...] turned into an outline of time” (135). A word is sometimes used to describe opposites and convey their basic unity before this is realized; “nameless” and “volcanic” are cases in point. A single word or symbol will also cover a dual or even a multiple reality. The spider, for example, (recalling the African/New World trickster Anancy15) is a symbol both of oppression and of creativeness. A single motif often leads to many variations and lends itself to metamorphosis. I have already drawn attention to the splintering of the sun into stars, then into the peacock’s eyes. Another example is the house symbol and the “symbolic map” of Guyana (both referring to Donne’s and the narrator’s personality), which at the beginning of the novel appear in a spectrum of slightly differing images and are eventually transmuted into the palace of the peacock. The metamorphoses of images render the essential fluidity that Harris opposes to the fixity of human polarizations. Also contributing to the fluidity of the narrative is the presentation of opposites, first separately, then as a reconciled whole, as in “He seemed to sense [...] its congealment and its ancient flow” (103). Harris’s use of “and” is a distinctive feature of his style: it often links a series of varied images in an attempt to grasp an undefinable reality such as “a pearl and half-light and arrow,” which evokes the light that illuminates an “eternal design” (47); or creates a cumulative effect: “bottling and shaking every fear and inhibition and outcry” (73). These very brief remarks cannot, of course, do justice to the originality and richness of Harris’s language. They can only call attention to features that require detailed analysis if one is to appreciate the way in which his language disrupts the reader’s conventional perception of reality while stimulating him to unravel the poetic associations and metamorphoses of images through which the characters’ progress can be traced. The creation of a native consciousness is not the outcome of a facile reunion of the crew with the folk but of an alteration of their opposition into an awareness of what they share. This is as far as the novel goes, and 15

The African–New World spider-god and trickster-figure Anansi (or Anancy) pervades Harris’s fiction, often in key roles. See, for example, Helen Tiffin, “The Metaphor of Anancy in Caribbean Literature,” in Myth and Metaphor, ed. Robert Sellick (Essays and Monograph Series 1; Adelaide: C R N L E , 1982): 15–52.


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in this, too, it initiates an approach to the subject-matter to be found in all subsequent novels, since no final resolution ever takes place in Harris’s fiction but only an erosion of the certainties and imperatives that imprison the protagonists within a one-sided and rigid sense of self. In later novels, Harris warns against the danger of transforming the victim status into the instrument of a new tyranny and illustrates in his characters the need for an interplay of opposites. This freedom to move fluidly on both sides and so prevent new polarizations is, I think, conveyed in this first novel in the separation of those who have met in the palace (“I felt the faces before me [...] part company from me and from themselves” 152). The very moment of vision is apprehended in terms of a harmonious movement, and in this respect the dance of the peacock prefigures the liberating function of the “dance of the stone” in Ascent to Omai: It was the dance of all fulfilment I now held and knew deeply, cancelling my forgotten fear of strangeness and catastrophe in a destitute world. (152)

The rewarding quest of the dead in Wilson Harris’s first novel is a unique experiment which has no counterpart in his later work. Harris himself has written that “the colours of the peacock may be equated with all the variable possibilities or colours of fulfilment we can never totally realize.”16 This is in keeping with the myth of El Dorado, which supposes an ultimate goal repeatedly pursued but never attained. Nevertheless, despite its restrictive connotation, Harris’s description indicates that self-realization always remains an open possibility, and we know indeed that most of his novels end with what is a beginning for his characters. This is even true of Palace of the Peacock: This was the inner music and voice of the peacock I suddenly encountered and echoed and sang as I had never heard myself sing before. I felt the faces before me begin to fade and part company from me and from themselves as if our need of one another was now fulfilled. (152; emphasis mine)

By its mutability the peacock suggests that the crew’s coming together is not an end in itself but a stepping-stone to a new beginning and to a further development. In the passage just quoted, the quintessence of the soul finds expression in music, a music which has impressed itself with increasing insistence on 16

Harris, History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas, 20 (not in the Explorations version).

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the reader since the protean picture of Christ was transmuted into the peacock. During the journey upriver, the “broken speech” of the crew and their inability to communicate was repeatedly a source of tragic misunderstanding between them, but Carroll’s music already evoked the latent possibilities of harmony between the crew, and after their rebirth his melody expresses the love and sense of fulfilment of unified man: The dark notes rose everywhere, [...] they broke into a fountain – light as the rainbow – sparkling and immaterial as invisible sources and echoes. (148)

This interpretation of the diversity and harmony in the universe in terms of a musical and visual symphony reminds us that Donne’s pilgrimage is also a return to the source of art. As we have seen, the Amerindian woman is the muse who can regenerate his diseased imagination. The construction of the palace is an act of imagination on the part of the narrator. Imagination appears as the source of harmony which can reconcile man with himself and with his fellow-men: it is capable of fathoming man’s personal and historical past; by renewing itself, it blazes a path for man to rebirth; and finally, imagination alone makes possible the apprehension of “the true substance of life,” the fundamental unity of all life.

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II The Naked Design Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative [...] it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.1

I

that the names of two writers as dissimilar as Henry James and Wilson Harris should be associated. It becomes understandable if one remembers that James’s fiction heralded the psychological novel of the first half of the twentieth century, of which Harris is an original continuator. The above quotation is a most relevant description of the very substance of Harris’s work: the unfinished, evolving character of experience as a mental happening and the translation of invisible energy into perceptible forms. His fiction runs counter to the realistic trend in the novel that came into fashion again after the Second World War; it is predominantly inward-looking, and life, particularly in the later novels, is apprehended in the flow of the characters’ thoughts and dreams. The sophisticated techniques of novelists like Joyce and Faulkner are further developed in Harris’s rendering of specifically South American material: the impressive landscapes of Guyana and its heterogeneous population. These are the source of his vision of man and his role in the universe. The Guyana of Harris’s novels is obviously a microcosm standing for the world at large. His main subject is the growth in consciousness of his characters, their understanding of the past and of the diversified configuration of the Guyanese community; such understanding, however, does not only lead them to a sense of their own distinctiveness as a nation but makes them aware of what they share with the rest of mankind. The most traumatizing events in Guyanese history were exile (imposed or reluctantly accepted), the dismemberment of peoples (particularly Afri1

T MAY SEEM SURPRISING

Henry James, The Art of Fiction (1888; Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1970): 388.

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can), and the exploitation of man by man. All three are major themes in Harris’s fiction and take different forms according to the plane of existence on which they are experienced and the characters’ level of consciousness or unconsciousness. In the Guyana Quartet, for instance, the protagonists range from the most ignorant and illiterate labourer or peasant, through experienced money-makers and well-to-do farmers, to the educated younger generation and finally the intellectual representative of technological civilization. Each, however, has access in his own way to a creative vision. It is interesting to note that the first main character, the alien invader Donne, should eventually be succeeded by the highly cultivated Guyanese Fenwick in The Secret Ladder (both lead a multiracial crew into the interior), who not only grasps the full meaning of his country’s past but realizes that such understanding can give rise to a genuinely new conception of man and society. Exile, dismemberment and exploitation are shown to be interdependent and to involve separation and division. Exile, the original condition of most Guyanese, is now the lot of the Amerindians and the descendants of runaway slaves, of those whom prejudice excludes from the recognized and established society; but it is also the state of that part of oneself, of the inner community (ancestors, dead and unborn selves), that we all carry and often deny. The achievement of consciousness corresponds to a retrieval of those outer or inner outcasts but also involves for the protagonist a deliberate going into exile − an exile from the self and all the prejudices that imprison it in order to meet the Other or others on his (or their) own territory. The recognition of exile as a significant aspect of modern life and its transformation into a fruitful experience link Harris with the earlier great practitioners of the art of the psychological novel, Henry James and James Joyce. The theme is fully developed in The Eye of the Scarecrow. All of Harris’s novels, however, express the same need to renounce an authoritative, one-sided view of oneself or one’s group, which can only be maintained at the expense of others. Possessiveness, exploitation and/or self-exploitation are seen as distorting all human relations and pervading all fields of human activity. Harris shows that they are the more difficult to eradicate, as, except when deliberately ambitious or greedy like Donne in Palace of the Peacock or Ram in The Far Journey of Oudin, man is usually unaware that an instinct for possession lurks behind most of his attitudes.

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The dismemberment suffered by all who were transported to Guyana was a psychic as much as a physical ordeal, since the slaves snatched away from many different tribes had no common language in which to communicate and were suddenly thrust into a complete void, in which, isolated from familiar surroundings and people, they were unable even to give voice to the psychological collapse that must have followed the disintegration of their world. Harris sees in this inner and outer dislocation the condition of modern man and peoples, inwardly divided and outwardly cut off from their fellow beings. Yet it is characteristic of his optimistic faith in man that he should also see in this very dislocation a prelude to the discovery of a fundamental unity between all forms of being, the recognition of which is itself a preliminary to a regenerated consciousness. It is thus imperative that the Guyanese (and implicitly contemporary man) should re-live this disintegration imaginatively and grasp the true nature of the cleavage among and within themselves before attempting to progress towards wholeness and “community of being.” We have here the essential philosophy informing Harris’s narratives and the development of his major characters: the crumbling of existing premisses, of the hard crust of appearances, in order to reach what to human eyes must be the void but which in fact opens the way to a fluid, “nameless” and therefore (in Harris’s terms) more authentic dimension of being. In the Guyana Quartet, this basic process is enacted in different landscapes, thus insisting that possibilities of regeneration are open to different communities. Together, the four novels offer a broad picture of Guyana and its people and succinctly recall major historical facts from early colonization to later independence and the consequences that followed from this march of events. In each novel, the landscape is alive with a spirit born of the trials of the past; it is a mirror for man and a catalyst to his spiritual growth. In all four, the topography of Guyana with the omnipresent water full of obstacles (in Palace of the Peacock), flooding the land (in The Far Journey), gnawing into it (in The Whole Armour) or turning it into a swamp (in The Secret Ladder), is a chart of man’s soul; it exteriorizes the soul’s anxieties and reflects its instability and uncertainty. These have their origin in a cruel history. But they can be turned into assets if recognized as a necessary state to be experienced before partaking in a dynamic quest for wholeness. By making uncertainty into a positive element, Wilson Harris modifies the usually accepted conception of character. There is an unmistakable

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shift in values: the relatively self-sufficient, ‘strong’ character of the traditional novel is not necessarily aware of a need for change and might even consider as evil any alteration of his accepted standards, whereas in Harris’s fiction the characters must accept a state of flux. Evil for Harris is mainly the non-acceptance which excludes the Other from dialogue with the self. That is why he objects to fiction that upholds the perpetuation of given, unquestioned conceptions of the individual or society; in his view, neither can ever be taken for granted. Those of his characters who at the outset strive to maintain their position or to conform to a static order not only lack the open-mindedness required for constant development but are also obstacles to other people’s fulfilment. Donne is an obvious example, but Magda in The Whole Armour is a more difficult one to understand. By ordinary standards, she is a magnificently powerful character. But her very strength and self-assurance make her utterly blind to the potential for spiritual discovery and renewal that her less assertive son responds to. By the same standards, Fenwick must appear irresolute and weak. Yet he is the one who, with full maturity, recognizes his (or man’s) limitations and throws light on the whole Quartet by his unremitting analysis and revision of conflicting convictions. Moral strength in Harris’s characters demands a good deal of humility and the courage to face the often terrifying ordeal incurred by the breakdown of a familiar view of reality. However varied their experience, all of Harris’s main characters face this test, through which alone the hidden face of truth can be revealed. Before this breakdown is discussed any further, one frequent objection to Harris’s characters must be forestalled. Contrary to what has been suggested, they are rooted in the concrete world, particularly in the Quartet. As a matter of fact, it is only the experience of living and working in concrete situations that can generate the necessary tension to impel the characters towards self-discovery. But even the most concrete objects or situations suggest a quality of being (see the description of Oudin and his hut at the beginning of The Far Journey), just as descriptions of nature convey a reality beyond. Through the themes he develops in the Quartet (the discovery of unity and of the meaning of freedom, responsibility and genuine authority), Harris is concerned with the nature of man as defined by the philosopher Martin Buber, who sees man’s existence as constituted by his simultaneous participation in finitude and infinity. This view is cognate with the main feature of Harris’s fiction, its two-dimensional reality: the world of appearances and its spiritual counterpart, the “moving

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naked design” that informs it, invisible to human eyes but, as Harris suggests in Palace of the Peacock, “structural,” enduring and accessible to intuition. Although the characters do not consciously attempt to discover this dynamic reverse of the visible world, they sometimes perceive it in moments of vision or face it when they reach the frontier between life and death. What occurs in each case is a crumbling or erosion of what Harris sees as self-made fortifications imprisoning the mind (William Blake’s “mind-forged manacles”). Their disintegration is conveyed through the movement and structure of the narratives themselves, which destroy the illusory fixity and the impression of completion one gets from the concrete world. Thus form and content concur to produce the same effect. Reality is approached from many different angles and through different modes of perception. It is sometimes described objectively by a thirdperson narrator, who disappears at times and leaves the reader confronted with the content of a character’s mind; this subjective presentation itself alters as the character’s consciousness is laid bare through juxtapositions (without transition) of fully conscious thoughts or reasoning, moments of intense awareness, dreams and even hallucinations, while sometimes different levels of consciousness overlap. This discontinuity in the character’s mode of perception is often provoked by unexpected incidents and catastrophes, real or re-lived (the ‘crash’ that shatters self-created barriers), and is paralleled by a breakdown of chronological time. The character, however, is at once the instrument and the object of his exploration, and his changing mode of apprehension usually brings about a breaking apart of his rigid and self-contained world and makes possible his insight into a deeper reality. So that dismemberment, “breaking down things in order to sense a vision through things,”2 becomes discovery, just as in the later novels the diminished state of man (the scarecrow man) becomes a necessary stage prior to a new growth in consciousness and imagination. Although the general movement of Harris’s narratives is one of disruption followed by reconstruction or the promise of rebirth, the main character’s progress is not straightforward. Nor is the stripping of his soul complete except in Palace of the Peacock. He progresses in accordance with a switchback pattern in which growth and fulfilment alternate with reversals and frustrations or are interrupted by unpredictable circum2

“Interview with Wilson Harris,” in Kas-Kas, 52.

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stances which demand a new choice of him before his advance can be resumed and previous insights further explored. Within his all-encompassing consciousness, partial deaths are followed by partial rebirths as fragments of experience are understood and assimilated. Harris also allows for the haphazardness with which such fragments can appear on the slate of consciousness or disappear from it. One therefore gets a fluid, intricate, many-layered portion of life. The novels are often inconclusive, and even when they end with the death of the protagonist, as in Tumatumari, this death is also birth, for it is a death into what Harris calls “the ever-living present.” It should be increasingly clear by now that, however different from its predecessor in plot, subject and setting, each novel is a new instalment of a ‘work in progress’: themes and metaphors that are briefly presented in one novel receive ampler, ever more refined treatment in later ones. A good example is the fall of man: dealt with in a brief episode of The Eye of the Scarecrow, it is at the very centre of Harris’s preoccupations in Companions of the Day and Night. After the Guyana Quartet and Heartland (which can be seen as a transitional work, winding up the Quartet and anticipating further developments), the novels take place mostly in one character’s mind. Through the interplay of material dimensions with “immaterial perspectives,” Harris goes on exploring the “densities” of the individual consciousness and the buried content of former civilizations in present-day societies. His field of exploration extends to other landscapes and cultures (Scottish and Mexican). But it also deepens, so that much of Companions of the Day and Night seems to be written from that innermost, nameless state the protagonist has reached while travelling through the vestiges (material and psychological) of Mexican history. It is a state of ‘aloneness’ within as well as beyond the trappings of civilizations. It therefore evinces a basic nakedness and frailty common to all men that must be accepted with humility and compassion for the sake of a unity in the future, latent within the “naked design,” which cannot be reached by any easy path. Her ancient dress was her hair after all, falling to the ground and glistening and waving until it grew so frail and loose and endless, the straw in the cradle entered and joined it and the whole room was enveloped in it as a melting

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essence yields itself and spreads itself from the topmost pinnacle and star into the roots of self and space.3

The equation of self with space in Palace of the Peacock occurs at a crucial stage in the fashioning of Donne’s vision of consciousness, when he recognizes at last the “essence” that informs the inner depths he has been confronted with while climbing the waterfall. “Self and space” should also come with a shock of recognition to the reader, who has just been immersed in the description of the “implements of vision,” frames, rooms, dynamic structures that remould Donne as he ascends. But these metamorphoses of the veil of water into the many spheres of experience that Donne, unsuspectingly, has housed throughout his existence will appear to many as the most difficult part of the novel. It brings into play a store of images which convey more than a symbolic correspondence between the landscape and Donne’s inner life. These images are not a mere static projection of inner states. Their variability and dynamic relatedness of similarity and contrast express Harris’s vision of the universe and of man’s relative place in it. Since the publication of Palace of the Peacock, Harris has made numerous comments on the “drama of images in space”4 or “drama of consciousness”5 that is being enacted with such extraordinary creative intuition in his first novel. From his first book of essays, Tradition, the Writer and Society, to “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” Harris has expressed the need for “a new architecture of the world” or a new “architecture of consciousness” that can only be achieved through a “capacity to digest and liberate contrasting spaces.”6 This apparently puzzling proposition underlies Harris’s deep concern with both the art of fiction and the state of community in the world. By making space or images in space the basic and saving element of a dialectical process of renewal, he trusts the artistic imagination to be the prime mover of change not only in art but also in society. Space, Harris writes in History, Fable and Myth, is “our weakest resource in that we appear to move freely through it or bend it freely to our wills.”7 This malleable, intangible dimension, which offers man an unlimited field of 3 4 5 6 7

Palace of the Peacock, 139. Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society, 51. Palace of the Peacock, 81. “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” 57. History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas, 23 (in Explorations, 39).

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action, lends itself to the realization of all potentialities and can contain the best and the worst of human achievement (“contrasting spaces”). It is not merely the receptacle of good or evil existence; it is lived in but also lives, and is capable of embodying moral notions or expressing sensations and feelings that can sometimes find no other outlet. In Tradition, the Writer and Society, Harris gives a striking illustration of this spatialization of experience. Discussing Haitian voodoo, he explains that the dancers, moving in a trance, are “turned into objects” while the inner drama which arises out of their subconscious becomes externalized in space. Space is the medium, “the sole expression and recollection of the dance − as if ‘space’ is the character of the dance.”8 Similarly, West-Indian limbo is seen as a dramatization in space of the tribal dismemberment and inner dislocation that the Middle Passage imposed on African slaves. Harris sees in these dances an art of compensation, an attempt to express through space, however limited, as in the case of limbo, what could not be expressed in words, since most slaves were deprived of a common language; and he also reads in them the invocation of “a curious psychic re-assembly of the parts of the dead god or gods”9 – that is to say, the representation of an unconscious wish for wholeness that could be the source of a genuinely Caribbean art. What is the relation between the inarticulate dancer and the consciously creative/articulate writer? They share a common territory like “the complementary halves of a broken stage.” The kind of illumination that the dancer in a trance unconsciously expresses in outer space is visualized by the poet in his inner territory. “The ‘vision’ of the poet,” Harris writes, “possesses a ‘spatial’ logic or ‘convertible’ property of imagination.”10 This capacity to visualize, to open the “living eye” to the inner broken territory, is described in Palace of the Peacock. In his book La Poétique de l’espace, the French scientist–philosopher Gaston Bachelard explains that such an illumination is not the simple reflection of a light in the outer world but is truly a phenomenon of the soul which animates what would otherwise be an inanimate object for the mind. Like the poet Pierre–Jean Jouve, who writes “la Poésie est une âme

8

Tradition, the Writer and Society, 50–54. History, Fable and Myth, 11 (in Explorations, 31). 10 Tradition, the Writer and Society, 52. 9

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inaugurant une forme,”11 Bachelard considers images of space as more than mere substitutes for an outer reality, though they are in constant dialogue with it. Immensity, says Bachelard, is in us. “It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life restrains and that prudence checks, but it revives in solitude.”12 He also insists on the concreteness of that inner space, or “space as substance” (espace-substance), which expands with our awareness of our existence. Though it may be difficult for ordinary people to accept as real the inner world created by the poet’s language, he “lives this inversion of dimensions, the reversal of inner/outer perspectives.” By musing on his images, it is possible to participate in the interpenetration of inner and outer spaces that he experiences. The intimacy of the room he describes “becomes our intimacy.”13 Once we accept as real the inner spaces through which the poet guides us and the power of the redeeming and creative imagination to bring to life: i.e., to set in motion, the fixed or “fossilized” landscapes and ghosts which inhabit them, it becomes easier to follow Harris’s thought. What he is asking modern man to do is to “re-sensitize,” and so to experience in his being, through the sensuous impressions and the feelings that a truly lived poetic image can arouse, the contrasting and divisive situations of his past and present existences. The Guyanese consciousness, for example, is saturated with images of its terrifying past, frozen images of historical antagonisms between the different races that compose it. Yet it is a “variable” past, since its images can be re-animated and seen from different perspectives. The question which arises is how one can begin to let these parts act on each other in a manner which fulfils in the person the most nebulous instinct for a vocation of being and independent spirit within a massive landscape of apparent lifelessness which yields nevertheless the essential denigration and erosion of historical perspectives.14

Letting “these parts act on each other,” lending oneself to a dialogue with the past or between images of the past within oneself, is the process in 11 “Poetry is a soul inaugurating a form”; Jouve, En Miroir: Journal sans date (Paris: Mercure de France, 1954): 13. 12 Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974): 169. My tr. 13 Poétique de l’espace, 202. My tr. 14 Tradition, the Writer and Society, 31–32 (Harris’s emphasis).

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which the writer (and the reader with him) is immersed through the unpredictable (because genuinely new and creative) medium of language. In his “Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” Harris alludes to the creative energy that can be released by a juxtaposition or constellation of images, illustrating this with passages from Palace of the Peacock. My purpose here is to show how, in this novel, the architectural, dynamic revision and re-constitution of the past works itself out through a store of images intimately related to the Guyanese experience. Since another essay on Palace of the Peacock is included in this volume, I shall take it for granted that the story-line is known and understood. I shall deal specifically with the effects of language, the use of similar words in shifting contexts, and the interrelatedness and contrasts between words and expressions. In this way I hope to show that language is for Harris the mainspring of vision, “the life-blood of seeing and responding without succumbing [...] to what is apparently seen and heard.”15  The animated beginning of Palace of the Peacock creates the impression that the narrative is taking up, at a moment of crisis, a life-story that remains temporarily in the dark, and that it takes it up at the very moment when the main character’s life is passing through physical destruction into another state.16 The dual personality of Donne is presented both objectively and subjectively by a third-person and a first-person narrator. From the outset, the horseman and his inseparable double, who, we realize later, is also his visionary self, are represented as the contrasting and divided parts of one being, who is both dead and alive. At this early stage, the Inarrator is eclipsed by the powerful deadness of Donne, and as he bends over his twin brother, he realizes that “the sun blinded and ruled [his own] living sight” (13). That the sun can also be identified with their “dead seeing eye” becomes obvious at the end of Chapter 1, when the narrator17 says: “His dead eye blinded mine.” “Look at the sun,’ he cried in a stamp15

Harris, The Eye of the Scarecrow, 97 (Harris’s emphasis). This is in keeping with Harris’s frequent capturing in his fiction of slices of existence with no absolute beginning and no absolute end. 17 I shall henceforth refer to the first-person narrator as N., though he remains nameless in the novel. 16

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ing terrible voice” (19). As Harris has remarked, the sun in Guyana is often destructive; in the narrative, it is a fit symbol for both the destructive will-power of the conqueror and the opening consciousness with which it is identified towards the end of the novel. N.’s dream immediately follows the death of Donne, killed by the vengeful Mariella,18 and seems to have been triggered by it. We are free to imagine that the dream, and the whole of the novel, take place in the timeless flash in which man is said to re-live his past at the moment of death, or that Donne’s consciousness moves on after his physical death into an “ever-living present.” N.’s dream is a reconstruction of the significant events of Donne’s life. It is an imaginative experience which nevertheless strikes the reader with the immediacy of concrete life, for the phenomenal world, both outside and within N.’s consciousness, is the necessary setting of his “dreaming” quest. The word “dream” is used frequently in Books I and I V, intimating the subjective and intuitive character of the exploration and, within the limits of a linear and plausible story, giving it a freedom that a purely objective or rational approach would exclude. The word “musing,” also used frequently, combines “muse” with the notion expressed in the French word rêverie, which connotes the kind of contemplation that stimulates the imagination. N. awakes to his “second” life in an oppressive room that might be either a maternity ward or the cell of a prisoner sentenced to die: it contains the contrasting possibilities also focused in the “living closed spiritual eye” and the “dead seeing material eye.” When N. remembers an earlier similar experience and the primitive desire he had felt “to govern or be governed,” Donne appears as the “gaoler and ruler” who reigns over both their inner house and the outer savannah. Mariella also emerges as a part of themselves (“[her] breath was on my lips”) in the haze of N.’s eye, and the duality of the hero manifests itself in Donne’s ill-treatment of her and N.’s half-hearted attempts to appease her wrath. Mariella soon vanishes from their consciousness, for Donne “had conquered and crushed the region he ruled, annihilating everyone and devouring himself in turn” (24). Mariella is now an obsession and an enigma, the real purpose of their journey. 18 Actually, Donne may have died in other ways, as when he falls from the cliff at the end of the novel. This is in keeping with the historical uncertainty about what happened to some conquerors.

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As N. re-lives Donne’s “first innocent voyage” in quest of her, his brother’s original lust for her returns. Yet this thirst for possession is inseparable from “a desire and need” as yet undefined but related to the understanding and spiritual fulfilment with which Mariella will become more and more clearly identified in the- course of their journey. Its stimulating effect makes him see now the “bodily crew of labouring men [he] had looked for in vain” (25) in the savannah, the ghosts Donne has “rake[d] up in his hanging world and house” (24). Frightening as the expedition threatens to be, N. cannot leave the crew any more than he can separate from Donne. To perceive the significance of experience entails acknowledging the reality of all who take part in it, and the truth of experience now impresses N. as “the enormous ancestral and twin fantasy of death-in-life and life-in-death” (25). Though the reader may find it difficult at first to establish some connection between events in Book I , he will discover upon closer examination that they are linked by an inner logic, one vision or “dream” stimulating another. N.’s re-awakening to the ambivalence and the tyrannies of his and Donne’s personality is conveyed through a series of related images and word patterns that recur frequently in a slightly modified form, each time introducing a new association. They weave an intricate fabric in which each element is seen distinctly in its own right, yet all are intimately related. As a starting-point we can take the first description of Donne just after he has been shot by Mariella, and trace its ramifications in Book I (unless otherwise stated, emphases are mine): The horseman gave a bow to heaven like a hanging man to his executioner. (13) I put my [...] feet on the ground in a room that oppressed me as though I stood in [...] the [...] cell of a prisoner [...]. (14) Someone rapped on the door of my cell and room. (14) We walked to the [...] gate [...] taller than a hanging man [...]; the gate was as curious and arresting as the prison house [...]. (16) I [...] leaned [...] against the frail brilliant gallows-gate of the sky [...]. (16) The map of the savannahs was a dream. (20) I could not help cherishing my symbolic map, and my bodily prejudice like a well-known room and house of superstition within which I dwelt. I saw this kingdom of man turned into a colony and battleground of spirit [...]. (20) I pored over the map of the sun my brother had given me. (20) Trust Donne to rake up every ghost in his hanging world and house. (24)


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This was long before he had established himself in his brooding hanging house. (24) I saw [...] the nucleus of that bodily crew [...] I had looked for in vain in his republic and kingdom. (25)

The guiding thread in these sentences progresses from the “hanging man” to the “cell and room,” then to the “prison house,” the “room and house of superstition,” which is also the “kingdom of man” yet “colony” and “battleground,” then again to Donne’s “hanging world and house,” “his brooding hanging house” and finally “his republic and kingdom”; in this progression, the original outer-world image of Donne’s hanging body takes on the inner-world forms, first of a self-made prison and house of superstition, and then of the kingdom he has reduced to a desert by exploiting others and himself. “Prison” and “kingdom” suggest contrasting states, as does the expression “gallows-gate,” which juxtaposes Donne’s execution with a potential freedom (beyond execution) suggested by the gate. Even the word “hanging,” first used to qualify Donne’s execution, suggests in the other sentences in which it appears now imprisonment and death, now a link with heaven, as if Donne were sustained by it. The image of the hanging man recurs with this second significance when Donne has shed his destructive self and creates a new vision: “He slipped and gasped on the misty step and a noose fell around his neck from which he dangled until [...] he had regained a breathless footing” (130). In the midst of the progression, a new motif is introduced with “map,” described as a “dream” and thereby linked to the “dream-horseman” (14), Donne, then to the “house of superstition” and later to the sun, whose glare has been identified earlier with Donne’s clear, open eye. I have also highlighted the words “heaven” and “executioner” to indicate that they develop their own ramifications in relation to Mariella, herself a doublenatured muse. Practically every simile and metaphor in the narrative would lend itself to such an analysis and show that it is from the rich texture of its language that Harris’s “novel of associations”19 grows. Images typically suggest both the abstract and the concrete as well as the recognizably human quality Harris discovers in all living creation. Through a series of metamorphoses, the significant images are brought together at the end in the construction of the palace. Similarly, words or 19


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symbols are not necessarily conscripted into one meaning: their altering significance gives the narrative its peculiar fluidity. A good example is the word “sun,” which radiates a spectrum of destructive and creative possibilities. The intertwining of closely knit and overlapping word patterns often shows apparently contrasting spheres to be an extension of each other. As we shall see, the frontier between the two is not static; it even tends to disappear altogether or, rather, both spheres seem to be animated by a similar essence or ‘spirit’ which makes the frontier between them irrelevant. Donne’s exclamation, “Every boundary line is a myth” (17), can be taken in more senses than one. For example, when the jungle and the river become alive to N. as he pores over his brother’s map, he begins to re-live the trials of their first trip on the river in the following words: One’s mind was a chaos of sensation [...]. (21) From every quarter a mindless stream came through the ominous rocks whose presence served to pit the mad foaming face. (21) The outboard engine and propeller still revolved and flashed with mental silent horror now that its roar had been drowned in other wilder unnatural voices whose violent din rose from beneath our feet in the waters. (21)

In the first sentence quoted, it is the mind that sustains the assault of the river and is assailed by sensations which it registers but which the turmoil makes it impossible to analyse. The mind is reduced to a capacity to feel. The “mindless stream” of the second example, by contrast, implies that the stream is capable of having a mind, an assumption strengthened by the description of it as a “mad foaming face.” This personification of the stream is a first step towards its use as a metaphor for Mariella as well as the crew. Finally, the “mental silent horror” of the propeller also imputes mental activity to the mechanical energy of the vehicle that carries them, whereas at the end of Book I we see Donne and the crew identified with both the engine and the river, hence with a mechanical and a “mindless” natural energy: “A lull fell upon the crew, transforming them, as it had changed Donne, into the drumming current of the outboard engine and of the rapid swirling water around every shadowy stone” (34). In all these examples, all preconceived ideas of the categories of being are upset. So is our notion of ordinary mental activity in “I stifled my words and leaned over the ground to confirm the musing footfall and image I had seen and heard in my mind [...]” (31). Moreover, when Harris has N. say: “The

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whispering trees spun their leaves to a sudden fall wherein the ground seemed to grow lighter in my mind and to move to meet them in the air” (27), although “seemed” qualifies the poetic statement, he does not simply fuse inner and outer realms within one sphere but presents them both as unrestricted by our usually limited sense-perceptions. It is indeed our normal apprehension of the phenomenal world and of ourselves that is being modified and intensified through Harris’s poetic associations. These always develop from the physical and the concrete, and make us see through them to what N. calls “the true substance of life” (59). Such a discovery results from moments of intuition or vision which, like the revolving beam of a lighthouse, illuminates successively different areas of N.’s consciousness. The very opening of the novel is one such moment, when N.’s “dream” is stimulated by the death of Donne. Another intense moment of intuition occurs in Chapter 2 immediately after N. has recorded the impressions he receives from contrasting features in the rainforest: “ancient blocks of shadow and [...] gleaming hinges of light [...] inversions of the brilliancy and the gloom of the forest” (26). Harris himself has commented on these contrasts, which, he says, “are built into character.”20 N. sees them just as he hears the sigh which, like the “ubiquitous step” shortly afterwards (27–28), reveals a presence other than his in the jungle, and just as, in the next chapter, he senses danger in the innocuous surface of water.21 N. now recalls the three moments of intensity in Book I which have brought home to him the nature of the quest and given him the intimation of an invisible presence: “The murdered horseman of the savannahs, the skeleton footfall on the river bank and in the bush, the moonhead and crucifixion in the waterfall and in the river” (33). We have here in the diversified landscape of Guyana (savannah, bush, waterfall and river) all the parts of the heterogeneous community that will be brought together in the palace: Donne and Mariella, the muse who first existed as “a fleshly shadow in [his] consciousness” (25) before she became his victim and executioner; the phantoms of youth and age buried within N.; and, finally, the labouring crew, invisible in Donne’s deserted savannah but ambushing his vessel from within the deep stream of his consciousness. The light in which they appear to N. is also dual, “half-cloud, half-sun” (33). As in 20 21

“A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” 63. I comment on these latter two episode at some length in ch. 3 above (pp. 35–36).

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N.’s other moments of intuition, the light is an essential element and source of vision: “In this remarkable filtered light [...] it was as if the light of all past days and nights had vanished. It was the first breaking dawn of the light of our soul” (34). The moments of intensity in Book I are taken up again in Book I I and expanded through the deeper intuitions and emotions experienced by N., but their effects begin to erode Donne’s hard carapace of will-to-power and pride. The structure of the novel is based on alternate movements between these moments and the calmer, more matter-of-fact episodes in which significant fragments of the crew’s lives weave a background of circumstances typical of their relations with Mariella. The crew are representatives of Guyana’s heterogeneous and hard-working population. But, as we have seen, they also inhabit Donne and N.’s inner territory, and it is from the recognition and gradual integration of those inner selves in the individual consciousness of Donne that the novel draws much of its significance. The crew are “agents of personality,”22 living embodiments of those instincts and passions that are usually deeply buried, unacknowledged and therefore “undigested” sources of conflict. Through the crew, various areas of the accumulated experience of Donne, as a representative of man and of the human community at large, are brought to light and shown to be indissociable. The men seem to be living variations of the contrary states and motives that shape Donne’s existence: innocence and guilt, love and hatred. Unconsciously, they enact the negative and positive potentialities contained in Donne and N. – exploitation, cruelty, murder, as well as the desire to be free from these self-imprisoning iniquities, a desire expressed through Carroll’s song, Wishrop’s dance, and Vigilance’s gift of vision. Each member of the crew occupies the foreground by turns, as if pulling their common organism successively in a different direction, and every attitude or action affects the whole. When, for instance, da Silva acts out their murderous impulse and kills Cameron, the victim’s blood “ran and encircled their hand” and Donne expressed “surprise and horror as at himself” (115). Da Silva commits murder in a fit of despair, believing that by wounding the heraldic parrot, Cameron has thwarted his chance of reunion with the muse, whom, he thinks, he now wants to reach in order to love and not to exploit. Although he is still deluding himself, his reaction is typical of the ambivalent attitude of the crew: their obstinately 22

Ian Munro & Reinhard Sander, “Interview with Wilson Harris,” in Kas-Kas, 52.

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primitive lust for possession and their longing for a sense of fulfilment which they have always been incapable of achieving. This ambivalence develops through a series of juxtapositions illustrating their initial intention to hunt down Mariella and her people in order to exploit them, and the counterpoint to that pursuit: “the immortal chase of love” (31). Cameron illustrates the desire to rule and to possess at its most primitive. He belongs with those courageous but ignorant and unimaginative men who through the ages have embraced animism in its successive, different guises. And so he “had acquired the extraordinary defensive blindness [...] of dying again and again to the world and still bobbing up once more lusting for an ultimate satisfaction and a cynical truth” (42). He appears to be fixed on the crew’s common territory like “a melodramatic rock in mother earth” (41), unable to shake himself loose from what is actually both “grave” and “womb” (40) or to shake off “the stab of death” (44). Only when they have passed “the door of inner perception” does Cameron stand “heavy and bundled like rock, animal-wise, conscious of a rootless superstition and shifting mastery he had once worshipped in himself and now felt crumbling and lost” (98; my emphasis). By bringing together “grave” and “womb,” Wilson Harris emphasizes the paradoxical fertility of the grave in which the crew have long been buried − the grave of history and the grave of Donne’s sleeping consciousness. The two words point to the necessary ordeal of death and rebirth. They also express the two poles towards which N., like Schomburgh, feels himself “drawn two ways at once” (48). The old man is not without imagination but, out of a sense of shame and guilt, he has never dared to acknowledge his deeper intuitions, rejecting them as monsters within himself like the electric eels he sometimes fished and threw back into the river, thus rejecting not only the death-wish they all share but also the birth-wish on the strength of which strength he has given birth to Carroll, the son he is afraid to recognize. Only in death does he become reconciled to the two dimensions he had sensed and which finally meet in the cross he shares with Carroll: “One death, a cross for father and son” (92). Extremes of the birth- and death-wish in the crew are to be found in Carroll and Wishrop. While Cameron, Jennings and da Silva are entangled in the meshes of uncertainty, inertia or thoughtless daring, and quarrel over the necessity to pursue Mariella, Carroll laughs, and the sound of his voice strikes the crew “as the slyest music coming clear out of the stream” (63). Through Carroll they are all freed from the tormenting and destructive effect of the

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passions that have shaken them and are still rooting them in the soil of Mariella, as well as from the burden of their first death: “Something had freed them and lifted them out of the deeps, a blessing and a curse [...]. The sound was like a dreaming sword that had cut them from the womb” (64). Earlier in the novel, Carroll had been described as a boy “gifted with his paddle as if it were a violin and a sword together in paradise” (22). And we learn later that he wanted at all costs to keep the child he had conceived in Vigilance’s sister, who is one of the personae of Mariella. He does give life by cutting the crew free from the grave and womb, enabling them eventually to discover and recognize the mother and child as part of their community. In contrast to Carroll, Wishrop restores the crew to “the sense of their indestructibility” (68) by purging himself of his death-wish. In order to understand the full implications of the crew’s death-wish, one must first refer to the storm in which they are caught on the soil of Mariella. The storm arises from the shock N. receives when he sees Donne with the old Arawak woman he has arrested, and realizes that the tragic event − the meeting between conqueror and conquered − is undigested and can only evoke “a future time, petrifying and painful, confused and unjust” (54). The storm occurs when, in a crescendo of terror, N. confronts, and is enveloped by, the frightful ambition that drove Donne to possess Mariella, and he struggles to shake himself free from it: “He was an apparition that stooped before me and yet clothed me with the very frightful nature of the jungle exercising its spell over me” (55). The storm takes place in his head and gathers momentum from his own movements, with the effect of bringing into the open the motives that drive Donne on: “I shook my head a little,” “I shook my head violently,” “shaking my head,” “I could no longer feel myself shaken: dumb with a morsel of terror” (53–55). All this time the crew “blasted and rooted in the soil of Mariella like imprisoned dead trees” (55), while N. alone lives and is aware of Donne’s paralyzing hatred. This hatred has first been felt through the “burst of congealed lightning [that] hung suspended in the atmosphere [...] shap[ing] a noose in the air” (54) and recalling his death and execution by Mariella. At the height of the storm, when Donne addressed his companions, “Meaning was petrified and congealed and then flashing and clear” (55). “Congealed lightning,” which describes a frozen tension, has become “congealed and then flashing,” suggesting that the frozen meaning seeks release and breaks through in a flash. The release

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has a staccato quality also evident in the attempt of Wishrop (the member of the crew who most resembles Donne) to attain inner harmony: His desire for communication was so profound it had broken itself into two parts. One part was a congealed question-mark of identity − around which a staccato inner dialogue and labouring monologue was in perpetual evolution and process. The other half was the fluid fascination that everyone and everything exercised upon him − creatures who moved in his consciousness full of the primitive feeling of love purged of all murderous hate and treachery. (64)

The congealed mark of identity relates to the “roots of mortal and earthly sensation” (55) by which Donne and the crew are seeking to define themselves at this stage, while the “staccato inner dialogue and labouring monologue” stress the difficulty of real communication and consequently of acknowledging one’s kinship with others. The second element of Wishrop’s desire (the “fluid fascination that everyone and everything exercised upon him − creatures who moved in his consciousness”) refers to the many people he has killed and who go on “living and never dying in the eternal folk” (68). It is as if, by purging himself of the desire to kill, Wishrop had partly escaped the frozen condition created by his self-imprisoning hatred. His sacrificial death will free him and the crew completely from their death-wish (“They [...] spat their own − and his − blood and death-wish” 102); it will also resolve his inner contradiction, an achievement perceived by Vigilance: “He seemed to [...] experience its congealment and its ancient flow as if he waded with webbed and impossible half-spidery feet in the ceaseless boiling current of creation” (103). Significantly, it is Wishrop’s desire for communication that splits into contrary impulses. Communication is what makes real community possible, and the crew are mostly incapable of it. They usually “croak” or “bray,” noises that emphasize their animal instincts or their stupidity. Real communication and a sense of harmony develop through Carroll’s song and Wishrop’s dance. The other moment of intensity in Book I I takes place in Chapter 5. It gives N. a premonition of the dissolution into nothingness and the rebirth that Donne goes through when he reaches the waterfall. During their first night in Mariella, everything in the scenery partakes of the charcoal into which the fire subsides “spitting stars and sparks [...] and barking like a hoarse dog” (45). N. begins to dream and is under the impression that “Every grey hammock around [him] became an empty cocoon as hollow

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as a deserted shell and a house” (45). The “deserted shell” is also an image for Jennings (and, by extension, for Donne) just before the process of resurrection starts (119). N. feels “the soul of desire to abandon the world at the critical turning point of time” (46). It is then that Donne’s death is re-enacted in his dream through a series of images that seem to develop from the fire and the barking dog. The protean and menacing animal, which at first takes on the shape of creatures associated with Donne and the crew (“half-wolf, half-donkey”), turns into Mariella, and this metamorphosis suggests that both sides are responsible for the death of Donne. As the dream ends, N. recalls Mariella’s anguish of soul, and the fire, which earlier was “devoid of all burning spirit,” comes now “like a bullet, flooding [him] [...] with penitence and sorrow” (46). N.’s dream of death gives way to the ensuing vision, which takes place when he is awake and conscious. Whereas everything in the dream was grey and left him with “a grey feeling inside,” now The leaves dripped in the entire forest the dewy cold tears of the season of drought that affected the early tropical morning and left me rigid and trembling. A pearl and half-light and arrow shot along the still veined branches. The charcoal memory of the hour lifted as a curtain rises upon the light of an eternal design. The trees were lit with stars of fire of an unchanging and perfect transparency. They hung on every sensitive leaf and twig and fell into the river, streaking the surface of the water with a darting appearance crimson as blood. (47)

The “dewy tears” (those of Mariella, who has just expressed her sorrow?) which have become the “stars of fire [...] streaking the surface of the water with a darting appearance crimson as blood” prefigure the breaking of the sun into the stars which sparkle on the flesh and blood and feathers of the peacock when the palace is being constructed (146). As N. rightly understands, the significance of his vision is that if Mariella has killed, she will also save, and it is indeed soon after this that she appears in their midst in the guise of the old Arawak woman. Mariella, the persecuted and vengeful mistress of Donne, is a link between all members of the crew: they are all obsessed with her, for at one stage or other she has played a part in their individual lives. She is Carroll’s mother and presumably Schomburgh’s love, Vigilance’s sister, the Arawak woman Wishrop has killed, the woman da Silva made pregnant, and finally the old Arawak woman who stayed at the mission and was made prisoner by Donne. Like the crew, she contains opposites such as

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age and youth, innocence and guilt. She is the Amerindian muse who represents her people and their relation with the crew. Donne rightly says that the only way to survive and belong to the land is “to wed oneself into the family” (58). Significantly, however, no member of the crew ever married an Amerindian woman, for the Indians distrust the conquerors. Like the “clear fictions of imperious rocks” surrounding, and bending towards, the moonpatch in the water (32), Mariella’s people “turn into a wall around her” (38). The crew also encircle the old Arawak woman whom they have made prisoner. As a muse, Mariella is captive to both her people and the crew; she cannot yet unite fruitfully with anyone. Mariella is also the spirit of the place: not only is the territory of the mission called Mariella but through most of the narrative the imagery coalesces into one reality the woman (and, by implication, her people) with the country they penetrate. Their experience in this landscape, alive with the unseen presence of the folk, relates the crew to the fugitive natives, though they are not aware of it until their rebirth. Already in Book I I , the vanishing Amerindians and the mission of Mariella are shown to be part of the crew’s deeper, unconscious self (and Guyana as a whole is N.’s “bodily prejudice”). The epigraph to this second part is a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland: “the widowmaking unchilding unfathering deeps,” these deeps being Donne’s and the crew’s deeper instincts for possession and exploitation. As they leave with the old woman to pursue the folk, the mission of Mariella acquires a new meaning: it is the mission the woman will fulfil by guiding them into the unknown country ahead. In whatever form she appears, Mariella is a catalyst that stimulates N. or the crew to vision and memory. Book I I I , “The Second Death,” describes the crew’s progression upriver and the different stages of disintegration of their hard, self-oppressive cocoon of ambition and lust. As in Book I I , moments of tension alternate with spells of calm which enable them to move forward and reflect on the significance of their trials. The first of these occurs soon after their departure from the mission. The old woman among them is at first seen as “crumpled-looking, like a curious ball, old and wrinkled” (71). Her wrinkles are part of a mask she adopts in self-defence like Cameron’s “adopted wrinkle and mask” (41). But they also reflect the endurance of her race, “the unfathomable patience of a god in whom all is changed into wisdom, all experience and all life a handkerchief of wisdom when the grandiloquence of history and civilization was past” (72). When

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the crew enter “the straits of memory” they are confronted with the earlier insolence of the folk in the united form of the river and the woman who, from being old and devitalized, is transformed into the young Mariella they had pursued on their first voyage: Tiny embroideries resembling the handwork on the Arawak woman’s kerchief and the wrinkles on her brow turned to incredible and fast soundless breakers of foam. Her crumpled bosom and river grew agitated with desire, bottling and shaking every fear and inhibition and outcry. The ruffles in the water were her dress rolling and rising to embrace the crew. This sudden insolence of soul rose and caught them from the powder of her eyes and the age of her smile and the dust in her hair all flowing back upon them with silent streaming majesty and abnormal youth and in a wave of freedom and strength. [...] Earthquake and volcanic water appeared to seize them and stop their ears dashing the scales only from their eyes. (73)

Mariella (and the river) is the Circe who makes them all deaf. Although the crew have to fight like Ulysses “glued to the struggle [...] screwed to boat and paddle” (74), none of them hears the song of the muse. Nor does any of them enjoy the freedom of escape that was Ulysses’ through the deafness of his crew. They are unaware and blinded by the “unforgiving and unforgivable incestuous love” (74) in the heart of which they move and which is really what they are fighting, for they are imprisoned in it as Jonah was in the whale. It is only with the death of Carroll that “the cloudy scale of incestuous cruelty and self-oppression tumble[s] from their eye” (75), leaving them with a sense of compassion that had been concealed before. The sacrifice of the innocent Carroll has redeemed them from their sin and created a “new relationship” (76) with the woman/river. Like the woman before, the river has now become “a musing ball upon which they roll forward” (76). Carroll’s sacrifice and the understanding it entails in the crew also initiate the erosion of their stony personality: “a great stone of hardship had melted and rolled away” (76). In the pursuit of Mariella the landscape is a go-between: on the river the crew’s kinship with the folk is conveyed through the qualities each shares with particular elements in nature. For instance: — they first see the moon-patch “in a volcanic [...] bosom of water” (33) (we saw above that bosom and river are associated); — when the old woman is transfigured, her hair flows back upon them and the “volcanic water appears to seize them” (73);

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— while they are imprisoned in their incestuous love, the “rape and fury” in the hearts of the crew (which recalls Donne’s rape of Mariella on their first voyage) become the “lava of water” (74); — as the crew progress deeper into the unknown, they travel between cliffs “of volcanic myth and substance” (103), and shortly afterwards the boat rights itself “in the volcanic stream and rock” (105). In the last example, volcanic brings together the stream (mainly associated with the woman) and the rock (mainly associated with Donne and the crew). The repetitive use of volcanic not only weaves a relationship between the woman and the crew, it shows that both parties contain within themselves the substance of a shared past experience (as oppressed and oppressor) that can erupt and break down their monolithic make-up. The second frightening ordeal of the crew is the passage into the unknown world of their unconscious, the “second death” they must go through before rebirth. In the context of Guyanese experience, it is a regression into the “grave” and “womb” of history. As a re-enactment of their first death, the second offers the possibility of coming to terms with “undigested” experience. “They had passed the door of inner perception like a bird of spirit breaking the shell of the sky which had been the only conscious world they knew” (94). As Donne rightly understands, the “bird of spirit” has been hatched by the death of Carroll and Schomburgh. The comparison makes clearer the process of the crew’s dying into life, for, parallel with the uncertainties that increasingly disorientate them, something is being created, the beginning of a dialogue in which, for the time being, only Vigilance knows he is involved. In this part of the novel, the members of the crew come to the fore: each of them acts out, in turn, his deeper wishes, and all act upon one another, gradually purging their collective being of the destructive passions contained in Donne. This implies a recognition of what had previously been unconscious. N. is now absent from the narrative, and it is as though his intuitions of the nature of their pursuit were moving into the crew with various degrees of intensity, eliciting different reactions. The crew’s confrontation with their deeper self is the starting-point of their disorientation. As N. had been faced with Donne’s hatred on the soil of the mission, so their own dark currents manifest themselves in Jennings while they are on the river-bank. Obeying a “stubborn nameless streak” (95), the latter turns himself into an obstacle for the crew as a whole. The irritation and resentment that “[boil] within him” (95) seem to be of the

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same nature as “the boiling stream and furnace of an endless life without beginning and end” (99), though in Jennings this boiling current is always transformed into mechanical energy. The boiling stream also seethes within Donne, who puts a stop to the quarrel between Jennings and Cameron with “suppressed turbulence.” Jennings’s outburst has unsettled Cameron: “The ground felt that it opened bringing to ruin years of pride and conceit” (96). Cameron wishes the “grave under his feet” would close, for he experiences what is happening to them as an “acute dismemberment” (97). Indeed, soon afterwards on the river, “The monstrous thought came to them that they had been shattered and were reflected again in each other at the bottom of the stream” (99). “Shatter” and “splinter” occur frequently in Book I I I and pinpoint the necessary breaking-apart that the crew experience as a group in order to free themselves and Donne from the reassuring fixity of their collective being and create a truly harmonious relationship. The “exchange of soul” that they find so horrifying (even though after a while they cling to the shreds of earthly identity apparently re-established by this mutual recognition) is part of the psychic fragmentation they go through. Caught in the turmoil of both inner and outer stream, they are moved by forces which appear now to expand, now to shrink, the extent of their being, somewhat in the manner of the limbo dancer mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, stretching in space or shrinking on the ground. The fluidity of space is further emphasized by the “elastic frontier where a spirit might rise from the dead and rule the material past world” (100). The crew appear to have reached that frontier when “the vessel had struck a rock. And they saw it was the bizarre rock and vessel of their second death” (100). This encounter with themselves is the “crash” which in Harris’s novels usually explodes the hard shell of the protagonist’s personality and enables him to revise his one-sided outlook. It implies that one cannot really progress along a straight, unbroken line. The only way in which one can hope to have a glimpse of the truth is through broken, constantly revised perspectives. At this moment of crisis, the death of Wishrop, which, like Carroll’s, is a sacrifice and a baptism, a source of harmony expressed in his dance, saves the crew for further erosion. They are once more splintered and confounded by the whirling currents, but the boat continues to advance, driven now by “the naked spider of spirit” (102). Indeed, Jennings’s engine has lost “its vulgar mechanical fervour and its enthusiasm was dwindling into an indefatigable revolving spider,

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hopeless and persistent” (101). Similarly, when Cameron dies, Jennings loses “an opposition and true adversary within himself” (119). Other examples would show that the members of the crew continue to act on one another like the moveable parts of a whole. One of the most striking is the life-giving effect Wishrop’s death has on Vigilance, who, like N., has been from the start an instrument of vision contrasting with the blindness of the rest of the crew. Before I discuss Vigilance’s role, the phrase “naked spider of spirit” requires some explanation. The image of the spider is used initially to describe the crew, who swarm “like upright spiders half-naked, scrambling under a burden of cargo” (22). The picture this sentence evokes is of a slaving body of men, and indeed, we realize in the course of the novel that the crew are labouring people whom Donne has been exploiting. Shortly afterwards, just before N.’s intuition of another presence in the jungle, he says: “Spider’s web dangled in a shaft of sun, clothing my arms with subtle threads as I brushed upon it” (27). The subtle threads of the spider’s web evoke the weaving process of life as well as the subtle labour in the design of the old woman’s handkerchief described much later (72). The symbol of the spider is thus dual: on the one hand, it suggest the oppressed and enduring state of the exploited, also conveyed by “hopeless” and “persistent” in the sentence referring to the energy that drives the vessel on. On the other hand, it describes a creative process, as the use of “spider” after Wishrop’s death shows. Wishrop is the member of the crew in whom the duality of the spider symbol is eventually reconciled. That he is himself “persistent” is evident, since, after shooting himself, he is found “still alive [...] crawling into the bush” (67), where he meets an Arawak woman, who later reports that she saw him “crawling like a spider into the river” (67). Wishrop, Anancy-like,23 survives all catastrophes. When he dies his second death, his “fingers [cling] to the spokes and spider of a wheel” (101). Here the spider combines with the wheel in an image of life, the life that Wishrop transmits to the crew as he dies: “this taste and forfeiture of self-annihilation [experienced through Wishrop’s death] bore them into the future on the wheel of life” (102). After his death he is seen by Vigilance as “a spidery skeleton crawling to the sky” (103). The living quality of the spider has been transferred to Vigilance at Wishrop’s second death. The well-named Vigilance, 23

On the limbo–Anancy syndrome, see Wilson Harris’s comments in History, Fable and Myth, 9 (in Explorations, 25–26).

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the only Amerindian member of the crew, is also the only one who sees beyond appearances: “He was always there [...] or he always seemed to see something through a half-open door or window or crack” (85; author’s emphasis). Vigilance’s vision into the “nameless kinship and identity,” which, as we shall see, is the goal of the quest, has “liberated him from death and adversity” (85). After the crash, though he still steers the vessel “with spider arm and engine” (107) and is still part of the crew, his vision (and dream) also sets him apart from the “herd.” The sacrifice of Wishrop has united Vigilance with the old woman, and this union prefigures that of the crew with the folk. He finds himself “like a spider in a tree” climbing the cliff with her and wondering “at the childish repetitive boat and prison of life” (104). Vigilance has been wounded, and this identifies him with the wounded tapir injured by the huntsman of the folk, which serves as a link between them and the crew. It is as if his wound intensified Vigilance’s vision, letting him see, as through a crack in the imprisoning cliff, Wishrop’s spider, and transubstantiation: wheel and web, sunlight, starlight, all wishful substance violating and altering and annihilating shape and matter and invoking eternity only and space and musical filament and design. It was this spider and wheel of baptism [...] on which he found himself pinned and bent to the revolutions of life – that made his perception of a prodigal vessel and distance still possible. (105)

Vigilance alone understands the message of the “dancing” and “wheeling” parrots. In the ring of a bird that Cameron takes for a vulture, he recognizes the spirit of God, “the blue ring of pentecostal fire in God’s eye as it wheeled around him” (116). The word “naked” refers to the state of helplessness and vulnerability to which the crew are reduced in the unknown world “on the threshold of the folk” (94) when, as Cameron keenly feels, they are being deprived of former certainties: “They felt naked and helpless [...]. And the terror of the naked self-governing reality [of the boiling stream] made them feel unreal and unwanted” (99). So that the phrase “naked spider of spirit” expresses the sense of being stripped and weakened felt by the crew, yet implies, as we have seen, that they have in their midst a spirit which takes them forward with “responsible” insight. This contrast opposing Vigilance to the other members of the crew is emphasized in Chapter 9: Vigilance escapes higher up the cliff and, at once spider and parrot (“his limbs had crawled and still flew” 117), is now fully conscious of human primitiveness as well

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as of divinity within himself (117–18). His companions, by contrast, increasingly ghost-like, dwindle further into nothingness. Jennings’s face is an old dry mask, a “coconut shell” (119); da Silva is “the frailest shadow of a former self” (122). The word “crumble” is repeatedly used. But even though Jennings is only aware of crumbling into nothingness, Vigilance remembers the coconut shell that had crumbled “to an ancient door of life” (119). Vigilance’s vision is reflected “in the mirror of the dreaming soul” (122), of which, like N. earlier in the quest, he is a medium. The wall of the cliff is the mirror in which Vigilance sees “the blind dream of creation crumble as it was re-enacted” (124). His vision seems to anticipate Donne’s in the waterfall. A close reading of Book I I I shows that the language creates a dynamic pattern in which life disintegrates into death, itself a preliminary to new life. Though the crew have not yet reached the waterfall nor been reduced to the nothingness necessary before resurrection, the redemption of Vigilance even before the annihilation of the crew points to the complexity of the life-and-death process: Vigilance is a connecting thread between opposites, an indication that a “community of being” is never wholly dead or alive but consists of an intricate fabric of broken and alternate threads of life and death, a fabric of discontinuous elements within a continuous whole. The paradoxical juxtaposition of “creation” with “crumble” in the last sentence of Book I I I describes one stage in the continuous process of creation. It makes clear that creation involves destruction, the breaking down of what would otherwise be a rigid construction. Significantly, until Donne is refashioned by the Carpenter in the waterfall, the days of creation are days of growing uncertainty, fluctuation and breaking apart intended to confront the crew with their own limitations and with another, sacred reality of which N. has had intuitions in the jungle, on the river, and at the mission. This “otherness” (149) is the contrasting element which the crew ignore within themselves and pursue outside. It is associated with Mariella and the folk, and with their own roots as well as Donne’s. The word that links together the various shapes of otherness is “nameless.” It is applied to Carroll, who has been deprived by his mother of the kind of name that would have been but “a material mask and label and economic form and solipsism” (85). Harris is clearly suggesting that racial identity, connected as it is to selfish pride or economic interest, is but a meaningless “material mask,” whereas Carroll is identified with the folk through a more authen-

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tic and universal essence. Because he sees beyond the material mask into a “nameless kinship and identity,” Vigilance is saved from death. When the crew feel naked, they are in fact coming nearer to their original namelessness. It is important to stress that the nameless Other, although in a sense sacred because of the religious or spiritual meaning inherent in the suffering of the folk, is in no way an ideal of perfection. That it is itself dual shows, for instance, in the ambivalence of Mariella, in the poisonous electric eel first referred to as “nameless fish” (65), or in the “nameless streak,” recognized as irritation and resentment, that boils in Jennings like the turbulent currents of the “nameless rapids.” The Other is a moving and often elusive reality, rarely perceived through a crack in the wall of appearances. It is the reverse side of life or its lost and forgotten, but persisting, past. To sense and recognize this coincidental flow of life is part of the “drama of consciousness”; it is what Harris was to call “being dead in step with the swift runner of life.”24 When Donne reaches the waterfall on the fifth day, he comes to a point in his voyage of discovery at which a perception of the dual constitution of life becomes possible for him. Positive and negative elements within the crew were recognized and shed with the second deaths of Carroll, Schomburgh and Wishrop, and Donne is now left only with the wooden Jennings and the stupid da Silva to construct his new vision from the nothingness he has at last attained. The most striking impression conveyed by Chapter 10 is of the contrast and distance between that nothingness and the density and richness of what Donne sees in the waterfall. He has reached the El Dorado he was looking for, as the “melting gold” of the river indicates, but even that gold is “nothing” when he dips his hand in, because he cannot yet see it for what it is, just as he cannot clearly perceive the enduring value of the boat or “drowned man’s hulk” that he abandons at the foot of the waterfall. Indeed, as the images in the waterfall show, the paradox Donne eventually comes to terms with is that it is only through the physical world, the world of appearances, that one discovers the “immaterial constitution.”25 The emphasis at the start of the chapter is on the words “nothingness” and “abstraction.” These are at first a source of hopelessness, an expression of the utter negativeness of Donne’s life. As soon as he and his companions begin to ascend the escarpment of the 24 25

Harris, The Waiting Room, 67. Harris, The Secret Ladder (1963; London: Faber & Faber, 1973): 206.

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waterfall, however, and Donne realizes that his house in the savannah was “a horror and a hell,” he also understands that his dominion over the savannah was “a ruling function of nothingness” (130). His understanding gives him a desire “to understand and transform his beginnings” (130). From then onwards his state of nothingness turns into something positive; it gradually becomes identified with the “invisible otherness” (141), and the “structural void” (141) is shown to inform the world of appearances; it is “the remote and the abstract image and correspondence, in which all things and events gained their substance and universal meaning” (130). Just as for Vigilance earlier, the cliff that Donne ascends along the waterfall is a mirror which, at first reflecting nothing, soon becomes the theatre of his growing consciousness. The narrative is a tissue of contrasts and paradoxes. To take but a few examples: “The waterfall [...] moved and still stood [...] the immaculate bridal veil falling motionlessly” (128). The room Donne sees in the veil and window of the fall “was as old as a cave and as new as a study” (133). The protean hunted ram is at once “light and cloud” (136). Donne sees “his own nothingness and imagination constructed beyond his reach,” and even the light that he has not yet reached belongs to “a dark invisible source akin to human blindness and imagination” (141), which suggests that the informing spirit of essence is itself of a dual nature and cannot be idolized as one thing or another. Donne’s ascent also has a twofold character, since he climbs “as a workman in the heart and on the face of the construction” (131). In spite of the distance that separates him from what he sees, the world he discovers is actually part of himself, as he is part of it. Although on one plane he is surrounded by the nothingness he must go through before rebirth, on another he is being refashioned by the carpenter who, remote as he may seem, has been within him all the time and is one with the inner reality Donne must acknowledge as a kinship between all living elements and beings. This is expressed by a word (or words) which describe(s) a similar action yet acquire(s) a different meaning according to the spirit in which it is done. For instance: “the hammer of the fall shook the earth with the misty blow of fate” (131) suggests the inexorable action of an unbending element. With a very earthly impatience, Donne repeatedly hammers against the wall to draw the carpenter’s attention, and the panicking “ghostly men and women [...] hammer with the waterfall” (136), apparently submitting to its blow of fate. But hammering, which has so far suggested an implacable or a domineering action, is a creative one for the

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carpenter: “He raised his hammer and struck the blow that broke every spell. Donne quivered and shook like a dead branch whose roots were reset on their living edge” (134). The carpenter is the transforming and creative agent, the “craftsman of God” whose “implements of vision” operate upon Donne “to make him anew” (132–33). However, because he is one of the spiritual forbears Donne must rediscover in himself, he is also in a sense re-created or envisioned by him: “they alone [Donne and da Silva] were left to frame Christ’s tree and home” (137). The carpenter is indeed a Christ figure, but not one that conforms to the specific conception of Western Christianity. Rather, he is the spiritual redeemer peculiar to each people and place. As Donne looks at him, he realizes that he is made of all the primitive and natural elements among which both the conquerors and the Arawak folk have been living: A rectangular face it was, chiselled and cut from the cedar of Lebanon. He was startled and frightened by the fleshless wood, the lips a breath apart full of grains from the skeleton of a leaf on the ground branching delicately and sensitively upward into the hair on his head that parted itself in the middle and fell on both sides of his face into a harvest. His fingers were of the same wood, the nails made of bark and ivory. Every movement and glance and expression was a chiselling touch, the divine alienation and translation of flesh and blood into everything and anything on earth. The chisel was old as life, old as a fingernail. The saw was the teeth of bone. (132)

This passage anticipates the description of the grains in the woman’s hair and dress (139), and, while drawing attention to the moving grains of life common to the carpenter and all living elements, it seems to suggest that it is by looking through living matter itself that consciousness is achieved: “Finger-nail and bone were secret panes of glass in the stone of blood through which spiritual eyes were being opened” (132). “Stone of blood” also stresses the livingness of matter and can be related both to the wall of the cliff and to Donne’s “sides of rock” (105). Matter can express the duality of life as well as anything human can. Like “hammer” as analysed above, “wood” exemplifies this duality. Through most of the narrative, Jennings’s lifeless countenance is called “wooden,” then wood is seen to be alive first in the carpenter and, after the resurrection, in the moving tree of life and in N. himself: “I found the courage to make my first wooden steps [...]. My feet were truly alive” (145). See also: “[The animal] stood thus [...] with a curious abstract and wooden memory of its life and its death. The sense of death was a wooden dream, a dream of music in the


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sculptured ballet of the leaves and the seasons” (135). In these examples “wooden” means alive and moving, and the “sense of death” is shown to be part of the ever-moving reality of experience. The animal is one of the images and components of the vision Donne builds in conjunction with the carpenter. It belongs to his past experience and recalls at once the wounded Vigilance and the tapir wounded by “the huntsman of the folk” (104), who also appears in the waterfall. The animal can be seen as an embodiment of “the swift runner of life”;26 it appears to be life itself vibrating and changing into a thousand shapes: It was everywhere and nowhere, a picture of abandonment and air, a cat on crazy balls of feet. It was the universe whose light turned in the room to signal the approach of evening, painting the carpenter’s walls with shades from the sky − the most elaborate pictures and seasons he stored and framed and imagined. (134)

From the moment of its appearance in the carpenter’s room, the wounded creature appears to set in motion an extraordinary cosmic dance in which all elements and experience are orchestrated by the carpenter’s creative touch. Nothing exists in itself, everything can be or become everything else. The same light paints pictures of season and “impressions of eternity” (134). Space turns into time: “The animal light body and wound [...] turned into an outline of time” (135), and among other metamorphoses, “a stampede of ghostly men and women all shaped by the leaves” rains and runs against the sky like the animal “running for life” (136). The catastrophic image of running humanity makes it clear that even within their own species men are involved in a hunter/hunted relationship which, though inescapable, can at least be mitigated if the hunter, aware of his kinship, relates himself to the hunted as Donne and da Silva relate themselves to the animal by experiencing the same contradictory emotions: “The alert dreaming skin [of the animal] − radiant with spiritual fear and ecstasy − quivered where the mark of the old wound was” (135). Then, while Donne and da Silva continue to ascend, “They shook with the primitive ram again, scanning the endless cliff in fear and ecstasy” (137). The density of elements that Donne perceives in the waterfall (“the subtle running depths of the sea, the depths of the green sky and the depths of the forest” 136) is juxtaposed with the void into which he 26

The Waiting Room, 67.

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climbs. These “contrasting spaces” become related as the carpenter and Donne are related through sharing a common essence. The carpenter first appears to Donne when his domineering material vision is shattered in the misty waterfall: “A swallow flew and dashed through the veil and window. His eyes darted from his head and Donne saw a young carpenter in a room” (131). As the swallow breaks away from the waterfall, so Donne’s eyes break out of the shell he has become and enable him to see within the room and within himself. The carpenter’s eyes are window panes in the veil of the waterfall in which Donne sees reflected not only the swallow but also “clouds and star and sun” (133). The carpenter’s vision is related to all that is being shaped through the metamorphoses of the waterfall. Donne does not yet grasp this; he is only frustrated, because the carpenter looks through him, not at him, and he feels the distance between them as “Death,” the kind of death he used to impose on the Other in his earthly life. Actually, both life and death in the carpenter stare, through him in his state of nothingness: “The carpenter still looked through him as through the far-seeing image and constellation of his eye” (133); “The image of Death in the carpenter stared through him” (133). Similarly, Donne himself, achieving consciousness at last, “focuse[s] his blind eye on this pinpoint star and reflection [himself] as one looking into the void of oneself upon the far greater love and self-protection that have made the universe” (140). Only then does his earthly spiritual blindness melt away from him completely: though he is still blind, his is now a constructive kind of blindness, because he finds himself in the abyss or “endless void” that leads on to the resurrection. His nothingness is now like an invisible presence which he shares with “the invisible otherness around” (141). It is related to the “dark invisible source akin to human blindness and imagination that looked through nothingness all the time to the spirit that had secured life” (141). It is a way of saying that man is not important in himself. He is only one of the manifold shapes of living energy. The other picture that finally blinds Donne’s material eye is that of the woman and the child. Here again there is a strong contrast between, on the one hand, the impression of richness and warmth paradoxically arising from the “nakedness” of the woman’s garment and the furniture, “the insubstantial straw in the cradle, the skeleton line of boards [...] the gleaming outline of the floor” (139), and, on the other, the arrogance Donne has always represented. Within the room itself, the woman’s hair and dress made of threads of light yet threadbare, fusing with the humble straw,

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turn into the “melting essence” that, “frail and loose and endless,” “yields itself and spreads itself from the topmost pinnacle and star into the roots of self and space” (139). I have reversed the word order of the sentence, the better to draw attention to its meaning. Clearly, it is out of the contrast and conjunction between the material of the woman’s dress (its “grain” or “thread”) and its immateriality that the frail but endless essence grows that informs both star and man. We are now back at our starting-point, having witnessed the erosion of the rigid and tyrannical personality of Donne and the crew, and his visionary apprehension of fluid spaces within and without himself. The contrasts between various forms of material and immaterial being, between the density of matter and the mere outline of its many shapes, between light and darkness, have been seen in the metamorphoses of the waterfall as a harmonious orchestration of fluctuating images, at once part of Donne’s individual “architectonic self”27 and of the cosmos. The re-making of Donne is described entirely in terms of moving space or spaces. The picture of the room has changed into a “dancing hieroglyph” (135); Donne has envisioned “the sculptured ballet of the leaves and the seasons” (135), the “light [...] painting [...] pictures and seasons” (134) conceived in eternity by the carpenter. While Donne ascends, the emphasis is on “image” and on “skeleton,” “outline,” and “frame,” all of which evoke the structure supporting every visualized “space.” N. had perceived this dual constitution in his first vision on the bank of the river when he saw “A brittle moss and carpet [appear] underfoot, a dry pond and stream whose course and reflection and image had been stamped for ever like the breathless outline of a dreaming skeleton in the earth” (27). Now that Donne is at last fully aware of the correspondence between eternity and season, he falls and, significantly, is received into the earth by one of his own crew: da Silva. Once again we realize that the gateway to eternity is not opened by an external agent but that Donne and the crew are themselves the door through which they pass. The sentence “everyone was crumbling into a door” (127) calls to mind John’s “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved” (10:9). The “lion door” (143), which hints at Donne’s power in his earthly kingdom, suggests that salvation is to be found in the self as it enters into a dialogue with the Other. Now on the threshold of vision, Donne understands that the “wind of rumour and 27

For a discussion of this concept, see Enigma of Values, ed. Anna Rutherford & Kirsten Holst Petersen (Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1975).

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superstition” (143), so unlike “the wind of the muse” (130) that inspired him in his ascent, was the divisive force on earth: “they had all come home at last to the compassion of the nameless unflinching folk” (143). The expression “to come home” seems to have been inspired by a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Starlight Night” that Harris quotes as an epigraph to Book I V . It has been used before in the novel by Carroll, when he tells his mother of his intercourse with Vigilance’s sister (foreshadowing the meeting with the muse?) and clumsily attempts to express their sense of wonder and discovery: “a frighten sweet-sweet feeling like if I truly come home [...]. She cry a little and she laugh like if she was home at last” (88). “To come home” for Donne has obviously meant to “build” his vision of consciousness through the “Paling of Ancestors.” This phrase describes at once the action and the outcome of the construction, the working of Donne’s subjective will on a material reality which proved susceptible to change after all and yielded a passage towards the union with the folk when “the great cliff sprang open” (143). Like Donne’s ascent in the waterfall, the meaning of this sentence is symbolic and implies that the voyage through and beyond monolithic appearances is made possible by a change in one’s own perception of them. Donne’s first impression as he ascends comes from the memory of “that horror and that hell he had himself elaborately constructed from which to rule his earth” (130). His last impression arises from the image of the Arawak woman and the cradle. His liberating vision has developed out of the contrast between the two. After the opening of the cliff, Donne “comes home” to his origins, to a folk who are his true, if not his actual, ancestors because they share a common experience and have become rooted in the same place. This rediscovery of one’s roots is what Harris means by “native consciousness.”28 Donne, however, never actually catches up with the muse but envisions her in the waterfall, just as he does not actually meet the folk but discovers their compassion. While this indicates that the community between one and the Other is the fruit of the creative imagination, it also implies that Harris imagines not a facile reunion between conqueror and conquered but an alteration of their rigid relationship into an awareness of what they share: “This was the creation and reflection he shared with another and leaned upon as upon one frame” (141).

28

History, Fable and Myth, 20 (not in Explorations).

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The images Donne sees in the waterfall are the product of a poetic imagination translating into space elements of self-discovery and the sense of his participation in the ambient universe. Whereas, before, the main impression was of separation and death, after Donne’s re-entry into the earth (the “grave” and “womb” from which he and the crew have sprung?) everything is seen to partake of everything else, and the conventional divisions between forms of being and even between categories of perception have disappeared. The I-narrator, once again the organ of vision, looks at life from a double perspective as if he could perceive in one vision the world of appearances and its reverse side. The outcome is a firework display of images in which the contrasts in the cosmos are harmonized and nature is seen at once in its completed shapes and as a world in the making. The vision created by Donne in the waterfall now enables N. to see (Donne, we remember, had felt “sliced [...] in the window-pane of his eye” and through the “panes of glass [...] spiritual eyes were being opened” 132): “The eye and window through which I looked stood now in the dreaming forehead at the top of the cliff in the sky” (144). Clearly, this eye, consciousness or creative imagination, is not only the agent capable of translating experience into space (“A metaphysical outline dwelt everywhere filling in blocks where spaces stood” 144) but also the very power from which nature and men draw their substance: Rather I felt it was the unique window through which I now looked that supported the life of nature [...] in the way I knew my hands and feet were formed and supported at this instant. (145)

It is now easier to understand what was meant by “step by step up the support grew” (141) while Donne’s vision was being fashioned. N., however, is but one medium of a wider consciousness and creativity ascribable to life itself: “I had never looked before [...] through an eye I shared only with the soul, the soul and mother of the universe” (146). The vision of consciousness gives life to the world, informing creation with “the newborn wind of spirit” (146) and eventually uniting in the peacock, a symbol of totality, the disparate elements of creation: I saw the tree in the distance wave its arms and walk when I looked at it through the spiritual eye of the soul. First it shed its leaves sudden and swift as if the gust of the wind that blew had ripped it almost bare. The bark and wood turned to lightning flesh and the sun which had been suspended from its head rippled and broke into stars that stood where the shattered leaves had been in


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the living wake of the storm. The enormous starry dress it now wore spread itself all around into a full majestic gown from which emerged the intimate column of a musing neck, face and hands, and twinkling feet. The stars became peacocks’ eyes, and the great tree of flesh and blood swirled into another stream that sparkled with divine feathers where the neck and the hands and the feet had been nailed. (146; emphasis mine)

The end of the quotation evokes the sacrifice of Christ (the native Christ Donne saw in the waterfall) while the peacock visibly originates in the world of flesh and blood. The leaves, we remember, were so many “ghostly men and women” (136) in the waterfall, and the stars “thronged everywhere” (136), then, personified, “shivered” (136) while Donne and da Silva were crawling up the ladder, gathering into constellations as they constructed the palace. Having become the peacock’s eyes, they then become “windows,” the vision of men and women in a united world. The peacock is both human and divine, and its divinity lies precisely in its capacity to envision life in its duality: “This was the palace of the universe and the windows of the soul looked out and in” (146).29 I have alluded repeatedly to the “contrasting spaces” which in the course of the narrative are shaped from man’s moral or psychological attitudes. In Chapter 11, these contrasts are perceived together and reconciled. A few examples will suffice: the savannahs − though empty − were crowded. (144) Horsemen − graven signs of man and beast − stood at attention melting and constant. (145) Tall trees with black marching boots and feet were clad in the spurs and sharp wings of a butterfly. (148) Frail and nervous and yet strong and grounded. (148) mixing blind joy and sadness and the sense of being lost with the nearness of being found. (148)

As there is harmony in space and community between the individual and the universal soul, so the voice of men, primitive and an element of discord during the voyage, is now perceived solely as Carroll’s music and as an echo of an inner invisible source. A source of harmony within the previously impervious waterfall, it issues from the “construction” and is 29

See ch. 3.I above (pp. 43–45) for a complementary interpretative slant on the two passages just discussed.

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translated into space: “It was an organ cry almost [...] the echo of sound so pure and, outlined in space it broke again into a mass of music” (147). And further: “The dark notes broke into a fountain − light as the rainbow − sparkling and immaterial as invisible sources and echoes” (148). N.’s perception of the dance of creation contrasts with the incorrigible desire in men to impose on the world their own clearly cut-out pattern, which in reality closes them off from the quickening complexity of life: “[The change and variation] were induced by the limits and apprehensions in the listening mind of men and by their wish and need in the world to provide a material nexus to bind the spirit of the universe” (149). Little has been said so far about time in Palace of the Peacock, apart from my noting “moments” of intuition or intensity in N.’s consciousness. Time provides its own contrasts through the juxtaposition of the past with the present, and of an objective with a subjective perception of duration. The seven days of the creation provide an objective frame of reference. What takes place in these seven days shows that man’s creative imagination must see through appearances rather than consolidate them, in order to expose the “moving naked design”30 behind them. In The Secret Ladder, Harris writes: “Seven days it had taken to finish the original veil of creation that shaped and ordered all things to be solid in the beginning [...]. Perhaps seven, too, were needed to strip and subtilize everything.”31 Within the seven days of “stripping” in Palace of the Peacock, time expands or contracts, depending on whether the brothers explore their inner depths or whether the intensity of their vision is concentrated in a moment. Subjective time is as long or as short as the individual consciousness makes it. We have seen that in Donne’s vision it coincides with the projection of that consciousness into space: “The animal light body [...] turned into an outline of time” (135). Donne first has an intuition of the coincidence between time and space as he begins to ascend the waterfall: “he longed to see the atom, the very nail of moment in the universe” (130, author’s emphasis). After the resurrection, this coincidence is perceived by N. as the moment of illumination in which all things are reconciled: “It was the inseparable moment within ourselves of all fulfilment and understanding” (151).

30 31

The Secret Ladder, 195. The Secret Ladder, 206.

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Significant as this moment is, one must insist that it is not an expression of the timeless apprehension of a perfect reality. Through the creation of the palace, Donne and the first-person narrator, the objective and the subjective imagination, fuse into a third realm, “the undivided soul and anima in the universe from whom the word of dance and creation first came” (152). The outcome of the quest, the harmony or community created (“our need of one another” 152), is expressed solely in terms of dance and music, and this, while evoking a corresponding harmony in the cosmos, clearly implies that it moves and changes, and cannot be achieved once and for all. Carroll’s song, which “seemed to break and mend itself always” (147), epitomizes the repetitive pattern of dissolution and rebirth inherent in all living forms. The end of the novel confirms that it has been a search for an Other which is part of oneself. It also confirms that the creation of consciousness is necessarily a dialogue, an awareness of reciprocity between the self and the manifold shapes of creation, which partake of the same source and move abreast with the self, but, like the self, alternate between light and darkness and must always be found anew. The Other is as fluid and dynamic as the self, and would in turn become oppressive if idealized or confined to a timeless order. As the crew “part company from [N.] and from themselves” (152), it is the certainty of their kinship that they hold like a treasure. In the newly constructed palace, N. sees that “the wall that had divided [Wishrop] from his true otherness and possession was a web of dreams” (149). (In his endless march towards eternity Wishrop seems to embody the inescapable condition of man in his constant effort to keep in step with life.) At the very end “the starred peacock [...] was instantly transported [...] to hug to himself his true invisible otherness and opposition,” and each member of the crew “held at last in his arms what he had eternally possessed” (152). But duality and paradox remain essential aspects of life: “our distance from each other was the distance of a sacrament, the sacrament and embrace we knew in one muse and one undying soul” (152).  I have tried as far as possible to let the language of the novel speak for itself, and hope at least to have shown that, contrary to what even sympathetic critics of Harris’s novels have claimed, it does not resist critical analysis, although at all times intuition is as necessary as reason. I have

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not attempted to explain everything, and I realize that the choice of words, phrases and metaphors I have endeavoured to clarify may seem subjective or even arbitrary. My commentaries have been guided by what I consider to be essential motifs in the novel. Palace of the Peacock seemed difficult when it first appeared partly because the “drama of consciousness” which is the main theme of the novel is difficult to accept and requires of the reader the same erosion of prejudices and accepted ideas as that in which Donne is involved. Although some of Harris’s writing tends to be esoteric and becomes clearer in the light of his own critical essays, the language of his novels is itself the key to understanding, the topography of his vision of man in a particular world and in the universe. This sounds like a selfevident truth and can obviously be said of other novelists. The difference lies in the vision and the immediacy with which it is expressed. Clearly, Palace of the Peacock lends itself to many interpretations and, as Joyce Adler rightly asserts, “no one approach can give a true sense of what the totality contains and implies.”32 West Indian critics naturally insist on the correspondence between the social and political reality in Guyana and its rendering by Wilson Harris. Whatever aspect of his novels one responds to, this correspondence should be obvious, as it is equally obvious that Harris’s representation of Guyanese society could apply to other heterogeneous societies in the world. One need hardly repeat that the universal significance of experience derives from the particular, and it is well known that Harris’s experience in the Guyanese jungle was a decisive stimulus to his particular conception of the Guyanese community and of the art of fiction.33 Yet despite its specifically Guyanese setting, population and even dialect, the picture of the jungle and of the heterogeneous people in Palace of the Peacock is ‘quintessential’ in a way descriptions of the jungle and mixed populations in other novels (including Harris’s own) are not. Harris starts from a simple story-line (the search for El Dorado) and develops one important theme (the relationship between conqueror and conquered or exploiter and exploited) in a sensuously evoked or resensitized landscape. But the “drama of consciousness” he describes (and very often the language in which it is evoked) is abstract, the product 32 Joyce Adler, “Wilson Harris and Twentieth Century Man,” New Letters 40.1 (October 1973): 50. 33 For the relation between the two, see, for example, “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” 61–64.

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of an imagination challenging other imaginations, and the author keeps reminding the reader of this. For instance: “He fastened on this notion to keep his mind from slipping” (131). “A singular thought always secured him to the scaffolding” (140) / “In his mind he knew [da Silva] was dead” (142). Although it always derives from a concrete situation and never loses sight of it, this mental process, and the complex vision of life it elicits, requires patience and intellectual effort from the reader (as it is meant to do by its very nature). Its development in Palace of the Peacock lays the foundations of an art of fiction that Harris sees as tantamount to “an art of community.” In the light of the novels he has written so far, his vision is not so much an end as a much sought-after beginning. Unlike other novelists, Harris does not attempt to create a given or recognizable picture of man in society. What the critic normally sees as a coherent world-picture is all too often, in his view, one that confirms a world-view instead of deepening or modifying it. As should be obvious even from the initial situation in Palace of the Peacock, he evokes the configuration of a particular society and the individual attitudes that reflect it, only to show that they must be broken down and a new “vision” created. This is not to say that Harris necessarily views all existing social and moral premisses as wrong, nor that the unity achieved by the heterogeneous crew makes him a utopist dreaming of universal brotherhood. There is a factual side to his fiction and a deep scientific understanding of man’s environment which inspire his very real concern for the condition of modern man. The essential aspect of this concern in this novel is the fear- and hatred-laden divorce between the strong and the weak. As Donne’s experience shows, the situation can easily be reversed, but the pattern would remain the same if some effort were not made towards a consciousness of the nature of life, and towards the creation of a concept of identity that would unite men in the name of their humanity and common experience instead of economic interest or the colour of their skin. By retracing the experience common to all who have penetrated the Guyanese heartland, Palace of the Peacock calls upon memory to offer the imagination the elements of a past that must be understood in a new light if man is to build the future with a sense of individual freedom and responsibility. It juxtaposes successive historical journeys into the interior (by the pre-Columbian Indians, and by a contemporary conquistador and his crew whose names recall their Renaissance forebears), and the shock of recognition it gives their participants frees them from the prejudices of

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a particular time. Although the novel ends with a vision of unity, in his later writings Harris presents the possibility of attaining it as much more questionable.34 He has never ceased to insist on the “digestion of contrasting spaces,” but he does not optimistically believe they can be easily “liberated.” They are part of man’s nature (like good and evil) and of the physical world, and can never be eradicated. But underlying those contrasts and struggles within man, between men and, indeed, among all forms of being in the universe, there is a harmony capable of emerging through the most solid walls (physical and mental) as Carroll’s song emerges through the waterfall. From an attempt to dominate the country, Donne and his crew are moved to reintegrate the flow of life manifest in the phenomenal world around them. We have witnessed the contrasts and the emergence of a dialogue between them, whether in man or nature, conveyed through an alteration of the very texture of the narrative. Like men, words are unimportant in themselves; in the flow of the narrative, like men in the flow of life, they have a relative meaning and (as in the simple example of “wood” suggesting life) are boldly used to express the livingness, mobility and extraordinary energy that inform the creation, or to stress its duality. Language itself creates the interrelatedness that Harris finds basic to all life; as we have seen, it creates a community of existence, a vast complex of relationships even before the narrator consciously realizes their significance. In this sense, Harris’s art of fiction is truly an art of community. Such an art of fiction is incompatible with a static view of society, since it is based on constant discovery, on change − however empirical and difficult to achieve; on an attempt “to keep in step with life.” It lends man’s purpose a cosmic rather than a social scale, although in his subsequent novels Harris was to re-create all the particulars of life in society in various regions of Guyana. But the moral intent of his developing characters remains the same: a sense of responsibility towards oneself and others, humility and compassion (rather than some ideal fixed by society) are tentatively aimed at, in order to counteract one’s “fear of strangeness and catastrophe in a destitute world” (152).  34

See, for instance, “The Golden Age they wished to find − The Palace of the Peacock − may never have existed for all they knew”; Heartland, 31.


4

T

The Far Journey of Oudin A Naked Particle of Freedom

of the Guyana Quartet novels focuses on slavery as the most traumatizing West Indian experience and presents the attempt to enslave as the consequence of a possessive state of mind and as not only an historical reality but also a contemporary one. The old race of conquistadores has died out and their overseers’ old mansions are put up for sale. But their spirit is alive in the acquisitive peasants who have just achieved economic freedom and are prompt to forget that their forefathers were exploited. Their sole ambition is to replace the old plutocracy. While they harbour the illusion that progress, or what stands for it in their narrow outlook, will bring about a new age, the antiquated master/slave pattern reasserts itself in a different guise among the descendants of East Indian indentured labourers living on the coastal savannahs. The plot is based on the parable of the wicked husbandmen and raises the question of who shall inherit the earth and build a better future. The farmer Mohammed conspires with his brothers, Hassan and Kaiser, and his cousin, Rajah, to kill their illegitimate half-brother, to whom their father has left his property. By murdering the chosen heir, they sow the seeds of corruption and self-destruction; above all, they sin against the community, overthrowing “the secret participation and magic of ancient authority and kinship.”1 Shortly after the crime, the family begins to disintegrate as the brothers die one after the other. Mohammed’s downfall is precipitated by Ram, a money-lender and unscrupulous devil who represents the ruthless new power of capital and builds his empire on everyone else’s ruin. Oudin, who closely resembles the murdered half-brother, ap1

HE SECOND

Harris, The Far Journey of Oudin (London: Faber & Faber, 1961): 51. Further page references are in the main text.

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pears out of nowhere and at first agrees to serve Ram and help him carry out his Machiavellian projects. But out of compassion for Beti, Rajah’s daughter, whom he has been commissioned to abduct for Ram’s benefit, he elopes with her, frustrating Ram’s plans for the future. Thirteen years later, Oudin covenants his unborn child to Ram (probably a reminder that the slave’s offspring was the master’s property) and dies that very night. Beti swallows the paper of the covenant and deprives the devil of an heir. The ordinary peasant world is so vividly re-created that it is easy to overlook the other dimension of reality that pervades the narrative and can be perceived mainly through Oudin’s presence. He is a man of two worlds, in whom coalesce, with equal credibility, the historical and social role of the slave and that of the spiritual redeemer who sacrifices himself to free the community from their blind submission to fate. The two roles are interdependent; one mode of being does not prevail over the other but only makes sense in relation to it. Oudin’s spiritual freedom is not attained by denying the material world but by recognizing and breaking through its apparently permanent or monolithic forms. This release from a one-sided view of existence, the evidence of consciousness, grows out of Harris’s mode of presentation and the novel’s structure. At the beginning of Book I , life is seen from a double perspective through the eyes of the far-seeing Oudin, who has just died and whose vision unites the physical world with its immaterial counterpart. His hut is at first “drenched in dew [...] circled [by] the early light [...] with a vapour of spray” suggesting a “vague eternity and outline.” When the mist lifts, the hut loses its mystery and appears as “a few planks nailed together and roofed by bald aluminium” (12). Oudin himself lies on the floor in “vague harvested bundles,” but the early morning light, a “dim radiance of ancient pearl and milky rice [...] circulating within the room” (11), illuminates his “new freedom.” As he recedes from the “match-box world” of the living, this world asserts itself as the concrete, familiar setting of human passions and fear. His united vision has split, leaving only the ordinary world of appearances, although his presence is felt “watching” over it throughout Book I . Another way in which Harris conveys the duality of existence is by juxtaposing reality with memory and dream. The novel is shaped like a circle, a complete whole containing discontinuous time phases which correspond to different ways of apprehending life as the characters experience, remember, or foresee in dreams the coming of Oudin into their lives.

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At the centre is the murder of the nameless half-brother (chronologically, the beginning of the plot) and the subsequent disintegration of the family, which benefits Ram but eventually leaves him dissatisfied, for he has spent all his energy in consolidating his empire and has become an impotent old man. The real end of the plot comes at the beginning of the novel with its promise of renewal and change. Its significance arises from the interaction of the many facets of time and the specific meaning attached to them, since the quality of time varies with the nature of the characters’ experience. The time to which Oudin awakes on the dawn of his death is a fruitful extension of his life on earth, “the dream of the heavenly cycle of the planting and reaping year he now stood within – as within a circle – for the first time” (11). Kaiser, too, awakes after death to time as a mysterious dimension harmonizing all its parts (69) but still longs to return to the world of appearances. Liberation from objective time in dreams also gives the living access to knowledge that can either save or doom, depending on their willingness to trust what has been conveyed intuitively. Beti’s dream at the beginning of Chapter 6 enables her to see in Oudin “the [...] image and author of freedom” (35), while Mohammed’s, in the same chapter, only frightens him; he ignores its significance, preferring to “restore the time” (“his image of time” 39, 40; emphasis mine). Threatened with bankruptcy, he begins to sense a quality in time that he cannot understand rationally and therefore calls a curse (91). In the novel as a whole, the abrupt shifts from one period of time to another and from one mode of perception to another convey man’s capacity to travel imaginatively between past, present, and future and so to grasp the significance of events or to envisage their remote consequences. As Beti’s stand against Ram in Book I shows, this capacity can also stimulate action against the tyranny of particular circumstances. Oudin and Beti embody respectively the reality and the potentiality of freedom. Oudin is a disinherited peasant who, when he first appears to Beti, seems to be chained to the earth yet to possess a freedom of movement that those attached to material wealth cannot enjoy: Oudin’s extremities [...] had turned to mud. He had crawled and crept far. He had risen to his feet to follow her, but he carried with him rings around his ankles, and islands off the foreshore [...]. (34)

He evokes the freed slave and liberator Toussaint L’Ouverture, not in his role as a black leader, with whom Kaiser is proud to be identified (73), but


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as a man who, according to Harris, “may well have had peculiar doubts about the assumption of sovereign status and power.” Oudin represents the alternative to that status, “the promise of fulfilment [...] in a profound and difficult vision of the person.”2 And it is in a specifically Caribbean role, that of the trickster who outwits the exploiters (Mohammed and Ram), that he frees Beti and helps Ram’s debtors. Of unknown origin and indeterminate race, he represents all races that have been exploited at one time or another. He is throughout a catalyst who disturbs the established order and, for this reason, is called “a devil of freedom” (114). It may therefore seem paradoxical that, except when he abducts Beti, he should be a willing tool in Ram’s hands. This is because he is also part of Ram’s world, the world of men, and cannot avoid being corrupted by it. He is no hero rescuing the community from without; his influence shows that revolution in Harris’s terms is a slow process taking root in the individual amidst the evils of ordinary life. When Oudin is moved by compassion, he risks his life to save Beti. He thus re-lives the sacrifice of the nameless half-brother, because he feels that to tie himself to an ignorant girl, so representative of the enslaved and unenlightened condition of women in the community, is equivalent to death. The flight into the forest is for Oudin “a flying journey [...] a crucial rehearsal [...] that would be repeated once again over thirteen dreaming years of his marriage to Beti” (100).3 Through his sacrifice he also begins to redeem the crime of his “brothers”: The basket-head on the ground was his own decapitated one, he realized, that the first of his ghostly executioners and pursuers had fished from the sea [...]. It was the first [...] offering of repentance and sacrifice he must accept in himself and must overcome, to be the forerunner of a new brilliancy and freedom. (105)4

However, Oudin’s accomplishment remains limited by the circumstances in which he operates, and in the forest, to which he escapes with Beti, he 2

Tradition, the Writer and Society, 45. Harris comments on this “crucial rehearsal,” an expression which prefigures his novel The Infinite Rehearsal, that “there is no final performance – a civilization never arrives at a final performance.” See “Literacy and the Imagination: A Talk,” in The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris, ed. Michael Gilkes (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989): 21. 4 The severed head is a recurring symbol in Harris’s fiction and illustrates the dislocation of personality suffered by the slaves. Oudin ‘experiences’ this trial to redeem the community. 3

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becomes physically and spiritually exhausted when he has fulfilled his purpose. His exhaustion is in keeping with Harris’s refusal to consolidate a particular state: a “heroic” Oudin would soon be locked up in a new “fate” and involved in a new kind of tyranny. Beti is perhaps the best example in Harris’s fiction of the way in which even the most ordinary person can dismantle the prison in which she (or he) is confined by the joint power of fate and unenlightened tradition. Illiterate though she is, she has saving intuitions. When her father dies, for instance, she senses that he only wanted to spare her the servitude and pain that had killed her mother, and she recognizes in Oudin the liberator who will light “the tall reflective fire [...] which was to illumine the constructive and relative meaning of the time” (54). Warmed by this fire, she becomes a figure of fertility and is able to take the lead in the forest when Oudin begins to falter. Harris has commented that she possesses a different kind of literacy, “imaginative” as it were, which enables her to “read” Oudin “as if she is creating a fiction.”5 She is too ignorant of his motives to be capable of a detachment similar to his or to escape her condition altogether; she has “to keep one foot in a corner of the ruling past” (144) and cannot go further than her slender possibilities will allow. But she gains enough strength to defy the devil thirteen years later. When she swallows the paper of the covenant, an action typical of illiterate peasants who fear the power of the written word, she breaks the cycle of attempts to possess by dispossessing others in which Ram and her family were involved and so alters the order they wished to perpetuate. Limited as her achievement may seem, it unsettles Ram and brings to light his “insecure humanity” (18). When he eloped with her, Oudin wanted to “invent a human brain [...] and to ingrain it into the fibre of a race” (112). Ram sees that she is “a child [young but also newly created] and a daughter” (132), “the daughter of a race that was being fashioned anew” (136). Beti’s pregnancies at the beginning (123) and the end (23) of her union with Oudin link the two creative episodes in her life and contain the promise of the new age that, unknowingly, she is helping to build. Mohammed and his brothers also want change, but they can only conceive of renewal in terms of material wealth (see 52) and retain a primitive mentality. The brothers’ behaviour illustrates a major theme in Harris’s fiction: namely, that despite his tremendous material achievements, 5

“Literacy and the Imagination,” 21.

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modern man has not freed his mind from antiquated patterns of thought. His insecurity and confusion are exemplified by Mohammed (“half material hope, half spiritual despair” 59), whose downfall results from superstition and fear. The crime he has committed and the series of deaths that follow (these are accidental, although he reads punishment into them) merely strengthen the hold of fate over him. Oudin offers him a possibility of release when he initiates a train of events that should urge Mohammed to pull back and re-examine his outlook. But, to the end, he remains afraid of self-knowledge. The forest, into which he pursues Oudin and Beti, is like a hen ready to hatch him to real birth. When he resists, it shakes “its fluid feathers from him,” and “he [cracks] the premature egg of his dying time” (130): i.e. dies prematurely because he has not learned to live. All he understands is that by blindly agreeing to be Ram’s victim he has played into the devil’s hands and strengthened his power. Mohammed’s meaningless death contrasts with the d of his brothers to atone for their crime. The exploratory journey in Palace of the Peacock has already made it clear that physical death in Harris’s fiction does not necessarily entail the death of the spirit. One must insist, however, that spiritual freedom is never a postmortem consolation; it is the fruit of a painful growth in consciousness and of a mature understanding of the antinomies of existence. In this respect, Oudin differs essentially from the fisherman and the woodcutter in whom Hassan and Kaiser are, as it were, ‘resurrected’, for he embodies the sufferer in each man and in the community, the always resurging clown (he prefigures “Idiot Nameless” of The Eye of the Scarecrow), whereas Hassan and Kaiser seem to have returned to life to expiate their crime in much the same way as DaSilva in Heartland.6 At the moment of death, Hassan glimpsed redemption as a withdrawal into emptiness (75), while Kaiser longed to return to, and consolidate, the world of appearances (121). After their ‘second birth’, each makes a different use of his new opportunity. In the guise of the fisherman, Hassan repents and allows Oudin to escape (105), after which he enters the stream (and is perhaps purified by this baptism of water); “the black ball [of the sun]” and the “moonhead” appear to make one with his head on the surface of the water, testifying to his inner reconciliation. The woodcutter, on the other hand, is a romantic idealist who would “enslave 6

In Harris’s later novels, the dead seldom revive in so concrete a shape but, rather, haunt the characters’ consciousness as “ghosts.”

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the world, with the best of mistaken intentions” (119). He remains indebted to Ram and wants Oudin to prolong his contract with the devil.7 The fluid life of the river with which Hassan eventually merges (an indication that he himself has at last begun to move and change) is but one example among many of the way in which the mobility of the phenomenal world contrasts with man’s habitual resistance to change, an oppressive attitude that amounts to an attempt to arrest life. Throughout the novel, movement in nature conveys an intensity of livingness that men frequently deny. For instance, the circulation of the light in Oudin’s hut (11) heralds the new fertile cycle into which he awakens. But Mohammed fails to grasp the significance of the circulating light in his room after his dream of Oudin (37), just as later in the forest he refuses to surrender to its dynamic and maturing influence (130). Ram, too, is afraid of the movement and change he foresees when “a blue window in the cloud [opens]” (135). He wants a son to perpetuate his power and “fill the widening blue crack in heaven” (135). That movement is linked with freedom and may stimulate consciousness appears from Oudin’s “far journey” and Beti’s briefer migration. Twice in thirteen years, Oudin defeats Ram by starting on a journey which involves a progression in consciousness (the antidote to oppression). His first voyage frees Beti and possibly redeems the crimes of earlier exploiters in Caribbean history: “His first superstitious fears [...] were all the reflective faces of ancestral hate and killing turning weak and insubstantial in himself” (105). After his death, his “journey” is towards “a new freedom,” so that migration, a crucial factor in the formation of the Caribbean, is turned into an opportunity for spiritual emancipation. Unlike Mohammed, who feels threatened by the “conspiracy of time and history and migration” (38), Beti travels some way towards freedom (“it was as far as she had been able to [...] migrate” 127). The words “far” and “great distance” are used repeatedly (see 55, 58 & 116) to evoke an invisible plane of existence, the perception of which gives hope to some and disturbs others. So much so, that Ram is defeated and shattered only

7

In Heartland, Kaiser at last achieves fulfilment and helps those who reach the heartland to achieve it, too. Compare “Time will teach us to undermine every obstacle [...] in a kingdom he had a long way to go. To begin to learn to build” (The Far Journey, 75) with “I was a rich landowner and a teacher some years ago but I lose everything in a fire [...] and I finding since I got to begin to learn to live and help others live on next to nothing” (Heartland, 15). Emphases mine.

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when he can no longer ignore the duality of the living process and the creative energy over which he is powerless. A few words about the imagery will show that it carries some of the novel’s important implications. Harris not only uses contrasting images that release a stimulating energy (such as the marriage between the sun and the moon): most natural elements have no fixed symbolic meaning and express now one thing, now its contrary, depending on the character with whom they are associated. Light and darkness alternate throughout the narrative. The sun symbolizes now life and consciousness, now death. The black sun is a recurring motif; it either corresponds to an eclipse of consciousness or foreshadows death as a necessary ordeal before rebirth (see 56, 58, 84 and 105). The “spider-sun” seems to be Oudin in his Anancy role, and it is also Oudin who hides in “the gliding shadow of the sun” (15)8 which Ram fears just before Oudin “dispossesses” him. The fertile conjunction between the light and the dark is perceived by Beti after Oudin’s death: “It was as if noon [...] had become the stars of a universal night in which the fear of Ram had begun to vanish” (22). This prefigures her realization that Oudin has made her pregnant and that the emancipation she had dreamed of at the time of her marriage is now becoming real: “the smoothness of her skin was an intent and naked particle of freedom like one who had been stripped in truth at last” (23). Images related to birth also have a dual significance. The seed is fertile for Oudin and Beti but is a source of self-destruction for the conspiring husbandmen who impregnate “the womb of subversion” (52). Mohammed’s seed fails to give him the heir he wants, while his own rebirth is aborted in the forest. “Miscarriage and abortion” (85) have a literal and a figurative meaning, as does the word child. If the male heir both Ram and Mohammed crave is intended to perpetuate their material power, it is Oudin’s spiritual inheritance that Beti brings to life in her children, thus transforming the “bargain” he signed with Ram into a “covenant.” The umbilical cord (21, 136) is another ambivalent symbol linking Oudin with the “child” Beti (born to new life after he has eloped with her) and her future offspring. For Ram, it becomes a “twine of encirclement” foreshadowing his “possession” by Oudin (circle images abound, suggesting 8 Citing alchemists, C.G. Jung explains that the shadow is emitted by the sun since without it there is no shadow. The sun contains the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious (Mysterium Coniunctionis, 97–98).

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either imprisonment or cycles of fertility). I have pointed out that once he had accomplished his revolutionary feat, Oudin faded into a “faint servant.” But, as usual in Harris’s fiction, it is the indistinct, disregarded figure who carries the hope of rebirth and change. After Oudin’s death the fearful Ram begins to fade in turn under Beti’s contemptuous stare; the coiled twine stretches out and links the defeated master to his former slave, making Ram realize that he and Oudin are inseparable and forcing him to acknowledge that their contract is other than he thought: The twine [...] would uncoil before him, so that stretched taut at last it drew him forward as Oudin walked backward into the distance like a sleepwalker, till their vision met in a way that shattered him to the core. (21)

Ram’s disorientation is not a sure sign that he is finally defeated and will change. There is a suggestion (and an implicit warning) that the demon of possession will always try to reassert itself. Admittedly, he recognizes the ascendancy of Oudin in a realm over which he is powerless and realizes that he is dying to his former self. He appears to be moving at last when he sees fragments of his own reflection in the water “waving almost endlessly until the slices and fragments were drawn together on a loose sailing thread” (25). Awareness of this movement leads to an intuition of Oudin’s presence within himself. Soon, however, the “motion of the river” (26) is contrasted with the fixity he has always maintained. There is a subtle shift to the past when Ram first remembers Oudin’s wedding, which he now sees as “the launching and freedom of a release in time” (27), then he recalls his coming “across an incredible divide of time and reality” (29). The sense of someone at once near and remote reminds him of his fear when he used the telephone for the first time: He knew the distance and the divide was there between himself and the other [...] speaker, but his own reflection rose and deceived him until everything seemed nearer and narrower than it actually was. (29)

In other words, he gained new assurance by selfishly restricting the world to himself. By juxtaposing the expression of Ram’s sense of insecurity with a reminder of his self-assertiveness, Harris shows that no victory is ever final and emphasizes the need for constant revision of the premisses of life. In this respect it is interesting to compare the completed if shaky structure that symbolizes a desirable achievement in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas with Harris’s house symbolism in The Far Journey. For Har-

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ris, the finished house (the “palace” Mohammed wants for himself) is only a symbol of material welfare and dangerous consolidation of power (52), whereas the never-ended construction evokes a pattern of life unceasingly making and unmaking itself: Sometimes it seemed [to Beti] that one cruel face emerged, sometimes another [...] but containing all was a fascinating living house whose windows and walls crumbled and yet were able to erect themselves afresh in every corner, so that what dominated the phantasmagoria and cosmopolis of experimental life was a shattering and constructive mystery, rather than an ultimate and dreadful representation and end. (122; emphasis mine)

The necessity to allow all static frames of existence to crumble in order to perceive the reality within or beyond and follow its movement has been illustrated by the breaking up of time within a given sphere of duration, by the “crash” which shatters Rajah’s and Mohammed’s blindness (88, 132) when they die, and by the weakening of tyrannical obsessions in individual characters. The Far Journey owes its title to The Secret of the Golden Flower, a treatise of Chinese philosophy which describes the birth of consciousness that stimulates progress towards spiritual freedom. The treatise has also inspired some of the novel’s imagery and a few cryptic sentences such as “The pot spoon flew from [Rajah’s] hand, striking the forehead of the sky [Oudin’s] and burning a flashing place between two stars and eyes” (87). It is written in The Golden Flower that “the primal spirit is beyond the polar differences [...] [it] dwells in the square inch [between the eyes].”9 When Rajah sees Oudin, he is on the point of selling his daughter to Ram, and he takes Oudin for the murdered half-brother risen from the dead to warn him against another evil action, so that, instinctively, he tries to injure Oudin’s far-sightedness. Shortly afterwards a storm breaks out: The heavens changed again, and grew lighter in the flowering incipient reflection that one sees sometimes on a very dark night in the direction of Georgetown [...] as one wanders over the savannahs, miles and miles away from nowhere. The distance had blossomed into a spectacle far greater than this [...] a kind of crimson whiteness and spirit-fire and blush. (88; emphases mine) 9

The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, tr. & explained by Richard Wilhelm, foreword & commentary by C.G. Jung (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969): 24–25. The “square inch between the eyes” is the site of the “third eye”: i.e. the means of paranormal vision.


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Words like “blossom,” “crimson whiteness,” and “spirit-fire” clearly evoke the fulfilment represented by the golden flower. This extract is a good example of the way in which Harris uses a physical setting to convey a spiritual reality; it announces Rajah’s journey to “a land that is nowhere” (89), described in The Golden Flower as man’s “true home.”10 The “spirit-fire”11 is the light whose “circulation” marks a first stage in the journey inwards. The expression seems to have served Harris as a model for the phrase “thought-sun” (100), which conveys at once the materiality and the symbolic significance (consciousness) of the sun. This esoteric language can be mystifying and has given rise to baffled criticism.12 My objection to it is that, in spite of their poetic beauty, some passages are difficult to explain in their own terms. Harris, however, names his sources. The epigraph to Book I is from The Golden Flower; it alludes to the marriage between heaven and earth (a metaphor for the fruitful marriage between Oudin and Beti) and the freedom from all entanglements achieved by Oudin. Other expressions of the liberating union of opposites described both in The Golden Flower and in The Far Journey are to be found in the marriage between the sun and the moon and between water and fire. As if in answer to the fisherman’s question, “‘You believe fire and water ever mix?’” (104), they do mix on Hassan’s funeral pyre; also when part of the blazing rum-shop, in which Kaiser burns, is flung into the river; and when the rain “grows” to meet the sky immediately after Rajah’s “electrification” by lightning.13 Although Rajah himself has feared this kind of retribution, he is at last released from his frustrating existence and self-enslavement: The rain grew all around Beti and when she parted the grey curtain of the sky to approach him, she was conscious only of the gift and feast of freedom from travail and pain he had entertained for her, and of the fracture of a cruel bond within him [...]. (89)

There is a fundamental unity between the various religious and philosophical elements in the novel, which makes nonsense of religious prejudice 10

The Secret of the Golden Flower, 53. The Secret of the Golden Flower, 26. 12 See John Hearne, “The Fugitive in the Forest,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 4 (December 1957): 99–112. 13 See also the transformation of “seed-water” into “spirit-fire” (54) and note the generally illuminating role of the two elements in the novel. 11

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and points to Harris’s essential preoccupation with the spiritual in man. Like The Golden Flower, the parable of the husbandmen is concerned with the means of cultivating life. Through his symbolical decapitation, Oudin identifies with John the Baptist,14 then with Christ through his sacrifice and rebirth, as well as with Anancy, the African–New World spider-god. In the oppressed and saving Oudin, Harris brings together the heterogeneous religious heritage of the Caribbean and even of mankind, for the Norse god Odin, “left [...] hanging from a tree” (62), like the dead half-brother whom Oudin resembles, also comes to mind. Harris unites several spiritual traditions but shows that as institutions upholding “fossil symbols”15 religions can be instruments of oppression or self-oppression. Ram cynically advises Mohammed to take advantage of the mixture of Moslem and Hindu practice among East Indians to sell his cattle at a high price (actually, Ram has stolen and sold many of them himself), and Mohammed, who did not hesitate to kill his brother, is too superstitious to sell his cattle to the butcher. Clearly, the characters’ confusion is spiritual. The novel is a parable of modern times, in which man’s basically weak, self-deceptive, or sentimental attitude makes him an easy prey to those who, like Ram, strive to enslave him materially, the better to rule over his soul.16 That his hold over the future should be frustrated by the slave and trickster of Caribbean history suggests that in Harris’s view the truly revolutionary spirit that came to life in Toussaint L’Ouverture must be retrieved and inspire a groping towards an alternative to conventional statehood, a conception of wider possibilities and relationships which still remains unfulfilled today in the Caribbean.17

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14

The Baptist recurs in Harris’s fiction (e.g., Black Marsden); he is also evoked in the epigraph to Book I I I : “the dayspring from on high hath visited us” (Luke, 1:78). 15 Harris, “The Reality of Trespass,” Kyk-Over-Al 9 (December 1949): 21. 16 See “[Ram] trembled, unable to discern [...] the shadow of the sun he wished to corner and possess with [...] every acre of land he acquired from his tenants who had mortgaged their labour and their world to him” (15). 17 Tradition, the Writer and Society, 45.

5

The Whole Armour A Compassionate Alliance

T

H E S E T T I N G of The Whole Armour, a village on the Pomeroon River caught between the bush and the sea, is the only region in Guyana on which white imperialism and the large sugar estate have not left their mark. The inhabitants are nonetheless “capitalists [...] scraping together [...] every penny [...] without the ghost of a conception of what it means to belong to the grass-roots.”1 They have fertile land but don’t know how to exploit it. The river brings down silt from the interior, and the crops are often carried away from the unstable soil into the sea. Yet the people ignore this instability (which reflects their own inner state), just as they remain unaware of their physical and spiritual confinement. Their life is saturated with tension and unsatiated passion that periodically explode into violence and murder. In bare outline, the novel evokes the symbolic birth of a people from the “womb” (61) of the exile Abram, their failure to assume responsibility for their development as a community, and their potential redemption through the sacrifice of Cristo. It opens with Abram’s dream of his impending death and fall from the tree of community with its roots not in the earth but in the sky (an allusion to the covenant between God and the biblical Abraham, renewed by the birth of Christ). When he awakes, he leaves his hut at Jigsaw Bay to visit the whore Magda in the village. She, however, is obsessed with one thought: to save her son, Cristo, wanted by the police for the alleged murder of a rival. She wants Abram to hide him and argues that Cristo might be his son, although this is in fact impossible. 1

Harris, The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder (1962 & 1963; London: Faber & Faber, 1973): 115. Further page references are in the main text.

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Her persuasiveness is inspired by her intense concern for Cristo, yet there is a sense in which what she says is true, for she and Abram represent the alien and unlawful element in the origins of the community, their dark truth and history [which the people deny] written in the violent mixture of races [...] as though their true mother was a wanton on the face of the earth and their true father a vagrant [...] from every continent. (49)

Neither Magda nor Abram is aware of this deeper truth. Nor do they believe in Cristo’s innocence, although Abram has an intuition of it when he dies of a heart attack two months after taking in Cristo. When the frightened Cristo rushes back to his mother’s house, she becomes convinced that he has killed Abram as well. They go back together to his hut and find that his corpse has been dragged to the foreshore and mutilated by a jaguar (called “tiger” by the Guyanese). Magda forces Cristo to dress Abram’s corpse in his own clothes and so to exchange his identity with him. She is then able to tell the police that Cristo has been refused protection by Abram and has been torn to shreds by the tiger. Supposedly dead, Cristo is free to escape into the jungle, where he spends forty days and nights, while Abram is said to have set out, full of remorse, in search of the “tiger of death.” Forty days after the alleged death of Cristo, Magda holds a wake to which the Pomeroon people come, moved by the ambiguous desire to feed on Magda’s generosity in vengeful compensation for their secret attraction to her: Her mourning wake was a debt they must extract for the sovereignty she had exercised upon them in their weakness, men and women alike dominated by a furtive desire for unrestricted union with the goddess of identity, superior to a divided unsettled world. (50)

Paradoxically, the villagers, who refuse to recognize their real roots in Magda, their “true mother” (see above), are prepared to worship secretly in her, the “goddess of identity,”2 a wholly illusory strength, the fruit of mere primitive self-assertion rather than self-knowledge or consciousness. Her self-assertiveness is most obvious in her fierce love for Cristo, whom she will not allow to be himself, insisting on acting through him, “the 2 Magda looks like an idol: “Her brow and cheeks were a black fantastic mood of mahogany, her eyes narrow and unbelieving slits [...] her [...] limbs [were] strong like the most ancient sculpture” (25, 29).

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hiding mother in the son” (84). At the wake, however, several incidents occur which shatter the characters’ fixed sense of identity (though not yet Magda’s), forcing them to participate symbolically in an experience they would rather ignore. The people at the wake have chosen Peet as their “vessel of rehabilitation and defiance” (55), believing him to be equal to Magda, the “queen of fate,” and hoping to experience through him their own “vicarious uplift” (54). When Peet reaches Magda’s room, she is so repulsed by him and by the vulgar spirit in which he offers her money that she fights him and wounds him in the head. The stunned Peet first experiences Abram’s death in an hallucination, feeling that, like Abram, he is carried away by the tiger. Then he sees Cristo reborn out of his (Peet’s) wound, unclothing him as he had unclothed Abram. The new Cristo he sees bears the tiger’s mark, a long scratch from eye to lips, the stamp of his forty days’ ordeal in the forest and of his victory over the tiger of death. When Peet comes to himself, Magda urges him to put on a shirt of Cristo’s (as she had forced Cristo to clothe Abram in his shirt), so that Peet is a medium, though of an unexpected kind, having undergone the death of the father and envisioned the rebirth of the son. His vision of truth shatters him, and he is now figuratively the only dead person or “corpse” (55, 71) at the wake, but he becomes filled with a perverse need for release, for he has merely exacerbated the crowd’s sense of frustration, and his own. He finds a scapegoat in Mattias, his daughter’s new fiancé (her first fiancé was Cristo’s alleged victim); he identifies Mattias with Cristo, seeing in both of them the tiger that long ago provoked his wife’s death and now, so he says, has raped Sharon, his daughter. Mattias is killed accidentally, though there is a sense in which Peet’s and the crowd’s drunken excitement has been leading to this murderous climax. Meanwhile, Sharon has been called upstairs by Magda, who gives her a letter from the runaway Cristo. She is still a virgin, convinced that she is “innocent” although several men have died in the attempt to possess her. Throughout her confrontation with Magda, the older, jealous woman is like a tiger to her, as she had been to Peet. Her countenance is a “mirror” in which Sharon is invited to recognize her own guilt for the violence she has provoked. She tries to deny all responsibility, although she cannot help feeling “seduced, refracted and distorted and nearly shattered” (80) by Magda’s tigerish countenance. When she offers with equivocal innocence to show Cristo’s letter to Mattias, Magda shows her Peet’s dollar bills torn and plastered with his vomit, the evidence of “her own true

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roots” (84) and implication in guilt. Sharon can no longer resist Magda’s “mirror of seduction”; she is “raped” by “living nature,” the tigerish Magda. And as Sharon is forced by her to share in a guilt which at that very instant surfaces again in the killing of Mattias, her former self is symbolically annihilated and her cry fuses with Mattias’s death-cry. At this moment of climax, she experiences at once Mattias’s death (“dying on the scaffold [...] [his] murdered cry in her own virgin throat” 84) and her imminent union with Cristo. In the next scene, Sharon is making love with Cristo in the jungle and re-living “the terrifying process of enveloping seduction” (84) his mother had exercised over her. An important change has taken place, however. In her union with Magda she was brought into contact with the “incestuous tiger” (84) or “hermaphrodite of the species” (80). This is the mask of uniformity – the negation of all individuality – that Magda (the goddess of identity) has been wearing, matching in this Peet’s “incestuous persona” (49) (he represents a collectivity that denies its heterogeneous makeup). When the white Sharon unites with the black Cristo three weeks after the wake, they shatter the mask of uniformity, and “the gross burden [of the community’s unacknowledged origins and of their nature] flowered and moved” (85). This is also the moment of fulfilment and completeness, an encounter with “death and life” (84), followed by a revival in nature which mirrors the lovers’ rebirth. Animated with a new sense of responsibility, they jointly decide that Cristo will give himself up. It appears that after the wake Peet has committed suicide. Magda, no longer a powerful, enigmatic idol, has become a frightened and childlike woman. Cristo is now free of her influence, but she still lives only for him. When he abandons his earthly life, she has no inner resources left, an indication that her strength was rooted in her obsessive “incestuous” identification with Cristo:3 Something had drained out of him, blood or sap, and in passing out of him it had also served to reduce all her fantastic compelling ardour and frustration into powerlessness and petulance. (131–32)

When her mask falls (131), she is but a desperate and impotent mother who, for the last time, urges Cristo to escape. However, to flee like the 3

“Her part [...] was the hidden salvation of Cristo’s life out of hopeless loyalty and brutal maternal instinct” (48).

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Caribs, or the runaway slave he saw in himself in the heartland (123), would amount to assuming again the burden of guilt he and Sharon have managed to lift, and repeating an historical pattern that may have been inevitable at one time but must now be left behind. Indeed, for Harris history need not be repetitive. Cristo chooses to sacrifice himself so that a new conception of life may prevail. The pietà-like scene at the end of the novel shows him sitting with his head on Sharon’s lap, listening to their child crowing at the moment of his execution a year hence. The police surround the house, but Cristo now feels that “No one could intervene and trap the essential spirit” (130). The achievement of a sense of responsibility and of spiritual freedom is central to the novel and is inseparable from a mature understanding by the young, educated generation of “the meaning of individual innocence and guilt” (70). The development of these major themes brings out the possibilities of building up a real community (the genuine sharing of life and death experienced by the young) which contrasts with the superficial homogeneity4 that the collectivity (as distinct from community) is trying to preserve at all costs. Their herd-like unanimity on crucial occasions (the wake and the ensuing inquest) clashes with the genuine interrelatedness illustrated by the structure of the narrative, which progresses through the experience (real or symbolic) by some characters of what others have undergone, such as Cristo’s, then Peet’s identification with Abram’s death in Books I and I I . In Book I I I the first section juxtaposes Mattias’s death with Sharon’s symbolic annihilation by Magda, while in the second section Sharon re-lives her own experience and Mattias’s, grasping their meaning and giving it further depth when she unites with Cristo. As so often in Harris’s fiction, the unacknowledged elements in the characters’ personality or environment have an unreal and dreamlike quality until they become assimilated into their growing consciousness. Moreover, individual characters seem to form one whole in which the centre of experience shifts from one to another, though not all are aware of its significance. There is a chain-like recognition by the young of shared responsibility, stimulated by Magda and Peet, who force guilt on them though they themselves are incapable of facing it. Yet it is through the acceptance of guilt that real community is shown to exist potentially. Cristo, who knows he is innocent of the murders Magda imputes to him, 4

To the crowd, the wake is a “collective roll-call” (49).

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first accepts “the fabulous injustice of guilt” (29) only in order to escape, but his very flight makes him see the truth of Abram’s assertion: “Nobody innocent” (23). Mattias, who throughout the wake has grown aware of his former isolation and passivity, also accepts the guilt thrust on him by Peet, in order “to redeem the relics of crippled perspective” (77) and free the crowd of self-deception. They, however, deny their vision of truth: i.e. the proof given by Mattias’s death that Cristo is innocent. They must have a medium and a scapegoat because they reject all genuine participation in life or death. An essential feature of Harris’s organic concept of community is, as already suggested, the absence of a fixed boundary between the dead and the living as well as the need for the living to revive and digest in their own consciousness the experience of the dead. During the wake, the dead and the living merge in Peet; Mattias perceives the “serial features”5 of the dead in himself (69, 72), while the “serial fused moment” (84) or “serial vision” (87) of Sharon’s encounter with Magda links her with a violent past she has always denied. Their growing need to grasp the nature of the legacy of the dead in themselves (“all the restless spirits are returning to roost in our blood” 115) links together Mattias’s experience at the wake with Cristo’s in the bush. Mattias’s “waking eye”6 perceives the head of the “walking tree and family of mankind” (74). Cristo, who at Jigsaw Bay had lost his self-control when he sensed the presence of “long-dead ghosts” (23), identifies with the dead of the heartland. For the two young men, the “monsters” of the past become agents of transformation. Their retrieval by Cristo, together with what Harris calls “the compassionate alliance of the dead with the living” (42), demands a reinterpretation of history that must help to create a new vision of the future. Awareness that real community embraces the dead and the living is cognate with awareness of the double-faced view of reality and of the relativity of truth. The all-embracing symbol of the tiger brings together the many faces of truth and serves as a counterpoint to the numerous images of splitting and dismemberment. Harris hints at the tiger’s “symmetry” by juxtaposing in the epigraph to Book I I I (“Time of the Tiger”) the first two lines of William Blake’s poem “The Tiger” with two lines 5

“Serial” suggests a line of ancestors. Harris obviously uses “wake” in two interdependent senses: the mourning for the dead and the process of illumination it can engender. 6

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from St John of the Cross’s Cantico espiritual. The tigerish violence and passion of the participants in the wake reaches a climax in this part of the novel, and Mattias’s sacrificial death prefigures Cristo’s metamorphosis into “Christ the tiger.” But the symbol extends beyond any rigid duality. Its function in the narrative is a good example of Harris’s associative method, for the main themes of the novel (innocence and guilt rooted in violence, identification of the characters with the spirit of the place, and birth of a community from individual self-knowledge and retrieval of the past) develop from the tiger imagery. The different features of the tiger can be apprehended at some stage in all the characters and in many forms of the phenomenal world. The whole region seems to reflect this tigerish capacity and offers contrasts of darkness and light. Taken as a whole, the tiger’s attributes reveal a community of being in the living creation and even between the living and the dead. When Magda and Cristo approach the foreshore of Jigsaw Bay at the beginning of the novel, the subdued subterranean roar of the vital repression of the surf began to invade their stranded senses [...] the bay would grow violent and treacherous with the new erosive impact of the sullen seas [...]. Magda [...] was looking down [...] at a foul mixture of universal foaming soap. The water hissed and swirled hungrily and evilly around her powerful limbs. (34; emphases mine)

The bay evokes the destructiveness of the tiger, which Magda and Cristo are on the point of discovering, and foreshadows the suppressed instincts of the crowd as they gradually rise to the surface and erupt at the wake. When Peet re-lives Abram’s death, the sea and the tiger merge, in his hallucination, with the sound of the wake, which is in fact destroying him through Magda: [The sound] assailed him, full of pounding threatening sibilance, a striding breath of grandeur, whispering and overlapping and rising notes in a hushed vagrant roar that suddenly grew and became so deafening he was transported to see the flecks of tigerish foam on a dark fluid body, striped by the animal light of the moon, flying across the room towards him. The glistening dim fangs sank into the bellying sail of his chest. (57–58; emphases mine)

At this stage, the tiger becomes the symbol of Peet’s annihilation (“the void held him now in its frightful jaws” 58) before carrying him through the landscape of his and the crowd’s spiritual confinement: “[the shadows] ran between a dim wave of crested sea and a dark forest of cultivated

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night, the sensational corpse of the medium of man borne swiftly by the living tiger of death” (58). Throughout the scene, the tiger symbol conveys the aggressive impulses of both Magda and Peet: he has been attacked by her but has also tried to spring at her, so that he is assailant and victim like the tiger later killed by Cristo. Peet and the crowd see and fear the tiger in others yet are unaware of it in themselves.7 Magda is a superb incarnation of its attributes, now “soft and feline” (39), now menacing or ferocious and pitiless, as in her conversation with Sharon when she (Magda) truly becomes a universal symbol of the wilderness in mankind. We have seen that, as the “incestuous tiger of the jungle” (84) Magda is the possessive mother, keen on shaping her son’s life and acting through him: she is also the embodiment of the crowd’s narrow and gregarious sense of identity, equally represented by the tiger Peet had hunted and failed to catch years before. Peet’s failure to catch the tiger in the jungle was clearly due to his fear of facing the truth about his and the population’s origins, the “monster’s head” (90) of their dismembered body, which was nevertheless a “vision of buried fertility” (91), since, however distasteful their early history, to come to terms with it would be a first mature move towards renewal. Keeping in mind the fact that the jungle in Harris’s fiction also represents the characters’ inner self, it becomes obvious that the tiger is also the “free spirit” that the population have hounded more deeply into themselves (88); it is “the lost soul of all generations, the tiger roaming through the trackless paths” (88), so that the tiger of death represents not only the crowd’s “incestuous self-destructiveness” but also the unacknowledged soul of their heterogeneous ancestry.8 When Cristo kills the first, he resurrects the second and identifies with it. He has evoked a tiger from the

7

See, in particular, when Peet tells Mattias “the tiger is none other but you” and the accusation brings out the tigerish instinct of the crowd: “the voice of the crowd roared in Mattias’s ear as if the ancient tiger had truly entered the wake out of chaos and eternal nightmare [...]. He felt the desolating uprush of panic and rape and death reflected in every snarling face” (76; emphasis mine). 8 Harris’s use of the tiger symbol seems to fit in with the Arawak “counsel of prudence” mention by Michael Swan in The Marches of El Dorado. Swan further explains that “Jaguars are the most common first ancestor for the many tribes who claim an animal pedigree – and the original name of the Carib tribe – Carinye – means “arising from jaguar”; The Marches of El Dorado (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958): 97.

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beginning9 and is clearly the naked (42, 70), harmless (68) tiger that left no tracks in the courtyard at Sharon’s cousins’ (71). He tells Sharon that, having fallen in the muck, he was yellow and black (122) like the Caribs with whom he was running deep into the forest. He did not shrink, like Peet, from the dismemberment suffered by his historical ancestors. On the contrary, he submitted to it, and this symbolic splitting emptied him of all that he was prior to his rebirth. He was made whole again by the Caribs’ shaman, who gave him the tiger skin he (Cristo) is wearing as a reward for his moral victory. This visionary version of his ordeal complements the more prosaic one in which he simply killed the female tiger that ripped his cheek; it is a good example of the way in which vision frees the trials of the past from their merely destructive effect and discovers in them a spiritual asset. Cristo’s reappearance in the region coincides with the end of a drought. He is now the “universal bridegroom of love” (85), and his earthly and ‘divine’ roles coalesce in the poetic image of the tiger. This image also symbolizes the marriage between the earth and the moon and the illumination or coming to consciousness heralded in the phenomenal world: The moon stood high overhead. Its full radiance had been intercepted by the forest so that the light which still fell and painted stripes and bars under the trees was purplish and vague and blue. A branch in the air suddenly cracked like a pistol-shot, broke and descended, ripping open a shaft and a window, along which the thwarted flower of the moon now bloomed in a mysterious bulb of fulfilment in a dark confused room. (85)

Like the peacock in the first novel of the Quartet, the tiger is a dynamic symbol of harmony evoking the never-ending process of life and death: “Dark and light, light and dark: all stripes” (124); the tiger’s skin betokens wholeness, the concrete form of the “whole armour of God” that is Cristo’s reward when he overcomes his self-division and fear of death. The moon imagery is closely linked with the tiger symbol, since, in conjunction with the sea and the earth, the moon expresses the tigerishness of the phenomenal world and its own light partakes of the animal’s nature. Cristo first appears to the hallucinated Peet “with an incandescent 9 “He was of medium height, slenderly built, poise of a dancer. High questioning cheek-bones, penetrating eyes, a restless way of shaking hands and wrists, the sensitive nervous shuddering joints and limbs of a sprinter at the start of a race” (22).

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flame and eye [...] the colour of the skin was blue as one of the shadows of the moon” (59). From now on, and as long as he remains hidden in the forest, Cristo is to Peet at once the tiger and “the man in the moon” whom Peet fears as a reminder of his weakness (91, 93). Any particular exegesis of the poetic image of “the man in the moon” will perhaps seem irrelevant. Still, it seems to me that (though rooted in the concrete universe) it conveys the subjective and ‘other-worldly’ experience undergone by Cristo in the jungle. During those forty days while he was thought to be dead, he discovered the reverse side of reality, the death his ancestors went through in their dismemberment, and he also saw in those ancestors the unreclaimed part of the community. Significantly, Sharon, too, is said to be in the moon (89, 101) after she has heard “the brooding voices of the past mingling with apprehensions of the future” (102) and has joined Cristo in the forest. When she is able to see her father in a new spirit of compassion, she perceives him “in the moon’s blue effulgent eye” (85), free of his sense of guilt and at last appeased. The association between the moon and a ‘living’ death finds some support in traditional religious symbolism and in Jungian psychology, where the moon receives the souls of the dead before their second death and rebirth. The moon, which itself dies and is reborn after three days, is an obvious symbol of resurrection, transformation, and growth such as Cristo experiences. That it is linked with his rebirth becomes obvious when he envisions his coming execution and sees the trapdoor opening on the “Dawn on the moon” (126). I have suggested that Cristo’s symbolic dismemberment in the forest and Sharon’s annihilation return them to their origins by compelling them to recognize their ancestry. Characteristically, it is their physical environment that unites them with their forebears. Several times in the narrative, real community has been represented by a tree (see, among others, 65, 72, 74), and as Sharon and Cristo make their way back to the house, “the smell of a mingling of roots and leaves and branches [was] all turning into a web of cognition that entered their blood” (98). This identification with the land and its historical inhabitants enables Cristo to tell Sharon: “we’ve begun to see ourselves in the earlier grass-roots [...]. We’re reborn into the oldest native and into our oldest nature while [our parents] are still Guyana’s first aliens and arrivals” (114). And further: There’s a whole world of branches and sensation we’ve missed, and we’ve got to start again from the roots up even if they look like nothing. Blood, sap,

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flesh, veins, arteries, lungs, heart, the heartland, Sharon. We’re the first potential parents who can contain the ancestral house. (115–16, Harris’s emphasis)

The young people’s maturity and their identification with the land and its early inhabitants replace the superficial strength and cohesiveness of their elders. When Magda reappears, the roles are reversed: “The magical identity and heredity had departed” (132); the potential community is now in Sharon and Cristo. Since the first visitation of the tiger on the foreshore of Jigsaw Bay, the action, whether lived or imagined by one character, seems to have followed the movement of the sea, gathering momentum, then subsiding momentarily to return with greater energy. In Book I V , the conversation between Sharon and Cristo provides a long pause when time itself seems to have stopped to give him some respite. However convincing Cristo’s analysis of his own conversion in that conversation, its didacticism is perhaps too obvious. This is the only place in the Quartet in which the author appears to speak through the mouth of his protagonist. Cristo’s new outlook is a further development of the gradual psychological change first noticed in Mattias: it is more articulate and significant, but his own rendering of it compares unfavourably with Mattias’s intuitive discovery of unsuspected resources in himself under the pressure of the wake. It is probably this didactic section that elicited from one critic the comment that The Whole Armour is “Harris’s most obviously political novel to date.”10 Harris suggests, however, that no political solution will redeem the community. When Cristo says “Nobody need carry a self-righteous political chip when the only slave-driver we’ve had is ourselves” (115), his plea is to the effect that politics cannot redeem history or be a substitute for the self-knowledge that must precede regeneration. His faith is in the individual: “Now is the time to make a new-born stand, Sharon, you and me” (116), and his behaviour confirms Harris’s unashamedly spiritual alternative: “[the burden] of a total perceptive responsibility belonged only to the shadow of atonement in the Saviour of Mankind” (110). The conclusion is not, I think, that Harris subscribes to the recurring pattern of sacrifice imposed on innocent men by their insensitive fellow beings. Sacrifice, too, is a double-edged action in his fiction. It can be per10 Kenneth Ramchand, “Preface” to Palace of the Peacock (1960; London: Faber & Faber, 1968): [4], repr. in The West Indian Novel and its Background (London: Faber & Faber, 1970): 10.

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formed and even accepted by the victim as an inexorable ritual meant to placate whatever gods one believes in. But genuine sacrifice involves a surrender of all the trappings of personality in a spirit of compassion and humility. In order to be creative, it entails a voluntary reduction to what is vulnerable and frail. Cristo is clearly a victim of “the lust of the law” (101), of the people’s still-vivid hunter’s instinct (focused now in the police), and of their need to punish someone for the violence they are unable to eradicate from themselves. He is also a victim of their inhumanity: Mattias’s father is heartbroken after his son’s death, yet he still exacts the death of another young man. But Cristo’s attitude modifies the meaning of the sentence passed on him. By submitting to the law instead of escaping, he makes a free, responsible choice. He does not reject the ordinary world of men, because it is in and through that world alone that he can perceive the “immaterial and elusive” (130) reality of which the legacy of the past is so essential a part. Admittedly, he cannot be sure that his and Sharon’s changed outlook will be much more perceptible than the “miraculous dawning frailty” (99) in nature to which the people of the region have not yet awakened. While waiting, between life and death, for his arrest and inevitable execution, “his mind was so empty it had become a frame for the future” (129) – a “future” which thus resides in the individual human mind and its always renewable capacity to create. Cristo is now utterly free of the trammels of his earthly life and has reached the highest stage of consciousness accessible to man, the double vision by which he transforms the sanction of human law even before its “implacable strokes” have fallen on him. The immediate future will bring the reassertion of an inescapable division – the birth of his son in time and the timeless progress of his spirit towards making “its declaration to all the other spirits of light” (111). Spiritual freedom and consciousness are once again presented as man’s main purpose, a prerequisite to the forming of authentic community. In this incursion of the spiritual into the social, Harris clearly sees the redeeming feature of the sacrifice men are always prepared to impose on whatever Christ is among them.

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T

The Secret Ladder The Immaterial Constitution

S E C R E T L A D D E R centres on the confrontation between Russell Fenwick, a government surveyor, and Poseidon, an old farmer and fisherman who rules over the few survivors of a tribe of runaway slaves. Fenwick and his multiracial crew, an unruly body of men, have come to measure the average flow of the Canje River prior to the construction of a reservoir that will irrigate the East Indian coastal plantations but will also drown Poseidon’s poor land. An unusual spell of drought delays the completion of their task, and Fenwick is faced with the problem of keeping in hand his increasingly troublesome men while coming to terms with Poseidon, who tries to sabotage his work. Things come to a head when Poseidon is accidentally killed by Bryant, an African like him and the only member of the crew who worships the old man, seeing in him his spiritual grandfather. Embittered by the death of their ruler, the villagers decide to bring Bryant and Catalena, his mistress, to trial. As the night wears on and their despair increases, they even make up their minds to kill their two prisoners. Bryant and Catalena are saved in extremis by the return of the two messengers who had been sent to fetch the instruments of the law. They believe they have killed one of the crew, and the villagers, thinking the jungle police will turn up, take flight without even burying their dead leader. While bringing together the themes of the earlier novels (the unity of mankind, possession and dispossession, the nature of freedom and responsibility, innocence and guilt), The Secret Ladder explores the meaning of authority, another value that Harris deems essential to the creation of a new community. This novel counterpoints in many ways the voyage of self-discovery described in Palace of the Peacock, in which the ancient folk move further and further into the heartland. Poseidon’s tribe, by conHE

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trast, have become fixed physically on their barren land and psychologically in their condition of victim and must be retrieved on both levels from their underground world. In the first novel, Donne and the crew reach fulfilment by ascending the waterfall towards heaven and the folk. In the later one, the confined world of the Canje, in which Fenwick moves towards Poseidon, is repeatedly described as “hell”; each surveying trip entails a descent into unstable ground, shaking Fenwick’s convictions. The complementariness of the two novels is further exemplified in the self-realization specific to each protagonist. Once he begins to ascend the waterfall, Donne’s visionary task is a reconstruction of the ‘structure’ supporting the material world; Fenwick’s much more tentative vision is made possible by a stripping of veils which enables him to catch a glimpse of that structure. The world he lives in is denser, not reduced to its essential elements as in Palace of the Peacock, and he is himself a more fully conceived character than Donne, an ordinary man concerned as much with the physical comfort of his men as with the motives behind their behaviour. They, too, are solid characters but also personae in his consciousness. He must struggle with their various attitudes as with so many forms of deception to be discarded. Once again the narrative develops on several planes. Fenwick’s thoughts and emotions as well as the crew’s seem to radiate from one many-levelled consciousness that Fenwick charts as he charts the headwaters of the Canje. His encounter with Poseidon in the course of his surveying work confronts him with a tangible evidence of the most deeply buried element of Guyanese history, slavery, which, he realizes, is a monster he and the men of his generation must still learn to face. The usual correspondence in Harris’s narrative between landscape and man is illustrated in a masterly way by variations on a few basic images. One of them, the river, links Fenwick’s task with earlier explorations of Guyana in the Quartet: He liked to think of all the rivers of Guiana as the curious rungs in a ladder on which one sets one’s musing foot again and again, to climb into both the past and the future of the continent of mystery. [...] The Canje was one of the lowest rungs in the ladder of ascending purgatorial rivers, the blackest river one could imagine.1

1

Harris, The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder, 151–52.

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Unlike the nameless river in Palace of the Peacock, the Canje seems hardly to move, yet is no less threatening, since its apparent immobility not only covers unseen dangers but is a sign of arrested life such as Jordan, Fenwick’s cook, embodies: He pointed to the river which scarcely appeared to flow in the late afternoon light like a snake whose motion had been reined into graver stillness than ever and embalmed for good. (159)

The barely moving river reflects a deep-seated conservatism in the crew (manifested in Jordan’s stark opposition to hope and progress) and in Poseidon, who rejects integration into modern society. The old leader has lived for so long in the jungle that he is hardly distinguishable from its elements. At their first meeting, Fenwick observes him with wonder “as if he saw down a bottomless gauge and river of reflection” (155). “Bottomless gauge” and “river of reflection” suggest that Poseidon is a static mirror concealing nevertheless unknown depths to be surveyed by Fenwick. This meeting seems to have been long delayed (“He could no longer escape a reality that had always escaped him” 155); although it is followed by a shower of rain, the apparent harbinger of fertile change, dryness soon prevails again. Like his Greek namesake, Poseidon can be a source of both fertility and drought, and it is mainly this latter capacity that he shares with the crew. The crew are divided into day readers and night readers of the gauge installed by Fenwick to measure the heights and depths of the river. Throughout Book I (“The Day Readers”), the prevailing drought, as much an inner as an outer phenomenon, coincides with the manifestation among the crew of their worst impulses and prejudices. The malaise that oppresses Fenwick is exacerbated by his inability to point to its source with any accuracy and by the restlessness and suppressed violence he discerns in the crew. Jordan contributes more than a little to the stifling atmosphere of the camp. Equally merciless towards the crew and Poseidon, whom he would expel from his long-tenanted territory by calling in the jungle police, he advocates the letter of the law and does not hesitate, under its cover or in the name of order, to recommend oppression. Jordan (alias Gorgon) is the head cut off from the body and the heart of the community and a stubborn obstacle to their reunification. Fenwick has for some time found it convenient to shelter behind Jordan’s “mask of stone” and his authoritarian manner instead of attempting to create a genuinely human

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bond with the crew. As a result, the men “camouflage” their complaint, and the general distrust increases. Similarly, the meaning of Poseidon’s complaint is withheld from Fenwick although he is greatly disturbed by the old man. As a government agent, Fenwick is naturally bound to be looked upon as an oppressor by the villagers, and it makes him uneasy to realize that he is a tool of oppression, just as he is perturbed by the assertion of his foreman, Weng, that the latter has modelled his severity with the crew on Fenwick’s own. It confirms the surveyor in his suspicion that Weng, the merciless hunter, has so far acted as his own doppelgänger, a fact he had perceived intuitively and with great alarm just before their conversation started. Weng had come upon him suddenly, and for a moment a trick of the light gave Fenwick the illusion that Weng’s reflection on the river was actually his own (175). Exposure, erosion, and dismemberment offer other examples of analogy between natural phenomena and psychological truths. All three are a source of frustration but offer a possibility of change and renewal through Fenwick’s attempted dialogue with the “sacred” reality they bring to light. Whether accidental and resented or accepted as necessary (see Fenwick’s “loss of face” 193, 231), exposure runs counter to man’s obsessive need for shelter from the often frightening business of living which makes Fenwick use Jordan and his interpretation of the law as a shield. At the beginning of the novel, just after he has heard the complaining voices of his men die away, Fenwick sees them approaching in the clearing: The sun shone through dark flesh to illuminated skeleton, the greenest garment to the whitest bone. It was this sensation of exposure and defeat, amounting to confusion, one experienced standing in the clearing [...]. (143)

The crew’s fear of exposure (of revealing their inner self) is mainly a fear of being taken advantage of, as Jordan makes clear to Fenwick when he tells him “They [the crew] see naked sentiment on you brow and they get afraid at once you might be exposing them [...]” (215). Final exposure is experienced by Catalena, stripped naked and made vulnerable by Poseidon’s followers (255), and it is through her, the “muse of community,” that Fenwick symbolically reaches a painful state of bareness, the ultimate and necessary stage in his shedding of the biased attitudes in himself that are also embodied in the crew. For Poseidon, too, exposure (or, as Fenwick says, the “resurrection of the buried community” he represents)

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involves the erosion of a diehard self-protective posture. Erosion is characteristic of the Canje area; even the higher land near the riverhead is “uncertain ground [...] continuously threatened by an erosive design eating slowly across the river’s catchment” (152). Once more Harris makes remarkable use of a region’s topography to convey a psychological reality. Fenwick first discovers that “Every tributary had buried its grassy head in a grave of wilderness” (152); then he realizes that owing to a “misconception” based on deceptive aerial photographs the head of the Canje’s main tributary, the Kaboyary, appears to be cut off from its body: In the savannahs, he had discovered, the Kaboyary had lost its original banks, and its watershed, too, had been swamped and eroded..... No wonder an empirical hiatus or gulf existed, to a bird’s-eye view, severing the river’s head from its trunk and feet.... The mysterious foundation of intelligence, the unity of head and heart had become for him, Fenwick knew, an inescapable obsession [...]. (173–74)

The geographical and psychological dismemberment Fenwick reads in the river is the objective equivalent of a subjective vision conveyed by his dream of a decapitated white mare (see 164–65). The two images evoke the dismemberment of the Guyanese community, whose original founders (the former slaves now living at the riverhead) are ignored and cut off from the main body. But this dismemberment also prefigures the decapitation of the Gorgon, a sign that a petrified situation is being modified by qualities of the heart).2 From the first, Fenwick senses in Poseidon a catalyst, the “new divine promise” (164) that will counteract Jordan’s “Medusa-like” influence on the crew. Through Fenwick’s discovery of the divine in Poseidon, Harris makes it clearer than ever before that the divine is, in his eyes, a hidden, mysterious dimension in the human and that he associates it with the frail 2

In Greek mythology, the hero Perseus cut off the Gorgon’s head, and out of her neck emerged the winged horse Pegasus (whose name means ‘source’), the son of Medusa and Poseidon. Perseus then crossed Ethiopia and fell in love with Andromeda, who had been tied to a rock to free the country from a monster sent by Poseidon. In The Secret Ladder the role of Perseus seems to be divided between Fenwick (who slays the Gorgon in himself) and Bryant, who first opens Fenwick’s eyes to what Poseidon represents. Both men come to the rescue of Catalena (who has come to the Canje region on the Andromeda), though Fenwick does so indirectly, when she has been tied down by Poseidon’s followers. Bryant is, naturally, the Perseus who marries her.

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but undying victims denied by, or buried in, one’s consciousness. Characteristically, Fenwick sees a god in Poseidon when he is most sensitive to the vulnerable man in him: “I confess I owe allegiance to him because of his condition, allegiance of an important kind, that of conscience, of the rebirth of humanity. [...] It is the kind a man gives to a god.” (183)

When he reaches Poseidon’s house after his trying climb over the Gorgon’s neck, a fallen tree “wreathed by creepers and snakes of vine” (197) recalling “an old Gorgon’s head” (206), he is struck by its contrasting features (solid though disintegrating, foreign and native, ideal and primitive) and perceives in the crumbling human abode a “depth more lasting than time [...] the stamp of a multiple tradition” (200). Tradition is at once the expression of the endurance that links Poseidon with the gods and a stumbling-block in Fenwick’s attempt to enter into dialogue with him. Fenwick is not blind to Poseidon’s ambivalence. The old leader’s continued and voluntary burial in the Canje region and the static order of life it has engendered have made him into “an old monster of deception” (164) for the crew, who either deny him and his followers and are taken by surprise when accumulated feelings of resentment erupt and strike back at them, or turn him into an idol as Bryant does, thereby confirming him unwittingly in his state of self-oppression. In both cases, deception leads to what Fenwick calls a “misconception” of the African. Poseidon, however, protests in the name of an illusory freedom, since it has only served him to withdraw into a primitive condition from which he refuses to move, perpetuating the effects of “catastrophe and fate” (184) that had sent his ancestors to the Canje two hundred years before. This is where Poseidon and his followers differ from the folk in Palace of the Peacock. Harris shows here that victim-status can become a tool of oppression of both self and others (as Poseidon’s followers oppress Bryant and Catalena) in the same way as the victor exploits both his victim and himself. When Fenwick first saw Poseidon and tried to discern what he was saying, he “heard” “the silent accents of an ageless dumb spirit” (156), after which he “could never [...] rid himself of the daemon of freedom and imagination and responsibility” (156). Analyzing Poseidon’s condition in a letter to his mother, Fenwick explains that at the time of the abolition of slavery something went wrong and no real freedom was attained. Like Cristo in The Whole Armour, Fenwick is in fact proposing an alternative

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to what was then a political failure when he says “the issue for me is fundamental and psychological” (171; emphasis mine). It is an alternative that involves the individual rather than the state; hence the impact of his personal sense of guilt. His emphasis on “misconceive” (171) when he points to the danger of misinterpreting the African also throws light on the nature of his approach, for conception as a corrective to misconception rests on imagination, consciousness, and intelligence whose “mysterious foundation,” Fenwick says, is “the unity of head and heart” (173). Poseidon is still “the emotional dynamic of liberation” (171) his forebears had been, but not through the “blind emotional tide of excess” (184) he had first aroused in Fenwick through Bryant: instead, reduced as he is to a state of human nakedness and deprived of the apparel that usually hides man’s essential being, he has moved Fenwick to recognize in him this fundamental reality. There are frequent references in the novel to what Fenwick sees as the “parody3 of a universal and uncapturable essence” (246) which the various forms of exposure, erosion, and dismemberment in Book I have enabled him to glimpse. By the end of Book I, facing Poseidon’s house, he is able to interpret the visionary dismantlement in which he is now fully engaged and which complements the creation in Palace of the Peacock: The seven beads of the original creation had been material days of efflorescence and bloom to distinguish their truly material character. But now the very opposite realities of freedom were being chosen (not phenomena of efflorescence but shells and skeletons) to distinguish an immaterial constitution (which after all was the essential legitimacy of all creation). (206)

The “naked design” he has discovered earlier and the “immaterial constitution” partake of the spiritual tradition within and beyond all material existence that Fenwick has recognized in Poseidon’s house, and it is from this tradition that he wants to develop his new conception of authority. In Book I I (“The Night Readers”), it appears that the kind of authority Fenwick now wants to wield cannot be the tool of a rigid institution but grows out of his awareness of “the spirit of the law” (258). When Jordan tries to persuade him not to fire Perez, who has gambled away his wife Catalena, Fenwick is firm for the first time (“I’ve got an intuition now – 3

See, for instance, 165, 195 and 225, where “parody” suggests the existence of both an apparent and an authentic reality.

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the kind I can’t withstand” 212), drawing his strength from his intuitive perception of what is sacred in human beings and cannot be gambled with by individuals or the power they represent. The first effect of his insight into what Poseidon stands for is a change in his attitude towards the crew, with whom he now deals directly and treats with more discrimination. If he is stricter with Perez, he is also more generous and humane towards Chiung, to whom he gives his own coat and helmet, an act that will unexpectedly force him through a new frightening though fruitful disorientation. The day readers’ work in Book I has exposed their self-deception and led to Fenwick’s confrontation with Poseidon, giving him an intuition of the old man’s double nature. The night readers, Chiung particularly, bring to the surface their own (and Fenwick’s) darker impulses and teach him to ‘read’ his own personality. Fenwick’s cosmic reverie at the beginning of Chapter 6 extends his discovery of the “immaterial constitution,” making him feel that he, too, is one of the elements in space linked to all others by invisible threads and stamped with the “loftiest tradition” (224) discernible in Poseidon’s house. However, after he has experienced “the poetic frenzy and delirium of a god” (223), his elation suddenly shrivels up when he discovers Chiung apparently dead at his feet. Fenwick is now unsettled by reactions he would not have thought himself capable of, which shows that he can be deluded in the same way as Poseidon and can combine, like him, the essence of a godlike nature with the most primitive instinct for sheer physical survival. The hidden energy, both active and passive, associated earlier with Poseidon and the landscape over which he rules now rises in Fenwick and shakes him (emphases here are mine): the black Canje foamed and bristled and encircled a revolving purpose and propeller somewhere in the vague region under his feet. (152) it signified the resurrection of Poseidon, [...] whose flight from slavery had ended right here, in the ground, under one’s feet. (175) Fenwick was filled by a dark wave of uncontrollable panic which rose out of the black river under his feet. (224)

The first two sentences are quoted from Book I and suggest respectively the existence of an unknown threatening force under Fenwick’s feet in the river (which is also the river of his unconscious) and the trapped condition Poseidon wishes to perpetuate. In the third sentence, the panic rising from under Fenwick’s feet confronts him with the spectre of his own un-

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freedom. He sees immediately that Chiung has been mistaken for himself, since he was wearing Fenwick’s coat: His mind had turned into a sieve out of which everything fled save the mystique of selfish relief. The sensation of involuntary freedom was as automatic as the reflexes of panic and the springs which had moved his feet. (225)

By equating “the mystique of selfish relief” (the only sensation Fenwick experiences) with “involuntary freedom” (as opposed to freedom consciously and painfully achieved), Harris draws attention to the limitations of the sense of freedom experienced by those who are spared the torments imposed on the oppressed. When his spell of blind self-preoccupation is over, Fenwick becomes engaged in an uncompromising confrontation with himself. Much as he would like to run from the scene of his humiliation, he cannot; his feet grow “cold as stone,” and this fixity seems to externalize his instinct for self-preservation, which, he now discovers, is as strong in himself as in the Canje “primitives.” It is also this instinct that he must fight in the crew, who have responded to his call and who would go to war against Chiung’s assailants in the name of their own will to survive. The whole scene is a dramatization of the inner struggle that eventually frees Fenwick from the prejudices represented by the crew. In his precarious and vulnerable position on the stelling platform just above the water, he feels threatened as Poseidon must have felt, although, unlike him, Fenwick accedes to the dissolution of his earlier convictions and accepts the painful uncertainty it arouses in him. As he struggles towards a deeper consciousness, his inner state is reflected in the light his torch throws on Chiung (his unconscious?) at his feet: “the temperamental switch [of the torch]” (224), “the cowardly torch” (225), and “a disordered nervous beam” (225). Release comes when Chiung (who was merely stunned), pressed by Fenwick, gets rid of “the plaster of hypocrisy.” The alternation, in the scene, between Fenwick’s conscious introspection and Chiung’s barely articulate and hesitant account of what happened shows that their two contrasting approaches to the discovery of truth are complementary and necessary. The story told by Chiung (who admits he is guilty of the theft that provoked the wrath of Poseidon’s followers) is like a re-enactment of the conflict that has set the surveying team in opposition to Poseidon. The question here is not one of right or wrong, since both parties are wrong in some way and they could be drawn into an endless chain of vengeful acts; it is primarily one of self-knowledge, as

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Chiung’s difficult self-revelation shows. Like Weng, he is one of Fenwick’s alter egos and his confession, the deeper meaning of which escapes him but not Fenwick, gives the surveyor a glimpse of the depths registered on the bottomless gauge of his consciousness. Book I I I , “The Reading,” develops out of the juxtaposition of “The Day Readers” with “The Night Readers” and confirms Jordan’s inability to be of further use to Fenwick. The latter now turns to the “insubstantial models or witnesses” (239) he had summoned from his deeper self when he cried out in panic after discovering Chiung unconscious on the stelling. The suggestion is that his inner being is peopled with these “hallucinated ghosts” (the ghosts of his and Guyana’s past) whom he saw “when he flashed the light of his thought” (240). He now questions them, as it were, through the agency first of Van Brock, delirious with malaria, then of Bryant and Catalena, who have just returned after the latter’s delirious torment at the hands of Poseidon’s followers. The reading, which, as Beti’s ‘reading’ of Oudin in The Far Journey showed, requires imagination, takes the form of an inquiry that yields not so much definite answers as a method of interpreting experience and is therefore a conclusion to the Quartet as a whole. On first meeting Poseidon, Fenwick had been unable to read a meaning in the movements of his lips, but after his final rejection of Jordan (the storekeeper of a rigid past) he finds he has grown better “at reading the constitution of another man’s lips” (241). The rain has begun to fall, erasing the marks of drought and leaving “a clean but cracked slate” (239), an indication that the past is not wiped out but has been ‘displaced’ because revived and given new significance by the living. This is the point of the apparently irrelevant story told by Van Brock, who has involuntarily killed his grandmother (as Bryant kills his “grandfather” in Poseidon), though the old woman really dies of the death (“decapitation”) of memory. Her golden ring, lost by her grandson − a dual symbol of love and possession which recalls the theme of Palace – is her only link with a vanished past. By recovering it from the swamp in which she is to be buried and restoring it to her finger, Van Brock turns her grave into a womb, for his act of love brings her back to life in his consciousness. For Bryant, by contrast, killing Poseidon signifies the death of his hopes of recognition by his ancestor. He does not understand any more than Poseidon’s followers that the old god was a catalyst of a new age and could, as Fenwick sensed, lead to “a threshold of consciousness” that is

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equally “the ground of self-contempt and idolatry” (193). In these words, Harris expresses a concept that is fundamental to his whole work: namely, that any experience (such as meeting Poseidon) can either deceive or be a source of vision and that the material world is the only door to awareness of the reality that informs it or to a ‘reading’ of the “immaterial constitution.” The reading can never be final or wholly reliable, since, as Fenwick suggests, “every material image” as well as “the conception of a supporting canvas” (man’s understanding of what informs appearances, see 239) are basically untrustworthy. Put differently, The pure paint of love scarcely dries on a human canvas without a modicum of foreign dust entering and altering every subtle colour and emotional tone, which affects the painter as well as the painted property of life..... (247)

I have already suggested that Harris associates the sacred or the divine with the suppressed and unacknowledged victims of men’s ambitions. When Poseidon dies (having completed his inspiring mission) his role is taken over by Catalena, despoiled by Poseidon’s followers turned oppressors. Like Poseidon, she is now “weak” yet “indestructible,” “a naked spirit,” and the same “expiring breath” runs over her lips as ran over Poseidon’s when he fell (254–55). Her weakness, however, is, as with Van Brock’s grandmother, a channel for rebirth. The manner of her release (the unexpected chain of events set up by Fenwick’s generosity to Chiung) implies that the basest motives (the twins’ cupidity and wrath) can save, whereas the loftiest (such as Bryant’s boundless love for Poseidon) can kill or destroy. More important still, it shows that an unpredictable element can always release a frozen situation (see the “crash” in Harris’s later novels). Poseidon’s disciples intended “to execute a picture of the void,” (257): i.e. to bury Bryant and Catalena together with Poseidon and the instruments of the law, thus obliterating the actors in an attempted dialogue (for Bryant had been sent to Poseidon on a mission of conciliation). Instead of burying their own past and its unrecognized inheritors (Bryant and Catalena, who are phantoms to them as they themselves are phantoms to Fenwick), they decide to flee and are set in motion again, vanishing once more into the heartland: The law could not be buried, nor given to the dust. There were always copies and current records (since mankind began) of the covenant time would have stopped to imprison. No one could force a void in the spirit of the law even

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with an act of humility or the surrender of one’s land and property. Least of all by damming the ghost of responsibility. (258)

We know that by his sheer survival Poseidon has challenged Fenwick to the recognition of the moving reality behind static appearances and that Fenwick has derived his new conception of authority from that moving and free reality. This is the “spirit of the law” (of the covenant between god and man and therefore between man and man) in which, he says, no void can be forced because this spiritual essence can never be completely eradicated: The instant the prison of the void was self-created, a breath of spirit knew how to open a single unconditional link in a chain of circumstance. (258)

In other words, the self-created “prison of the void” or annihilation by man of what is most essential in himself: i.e., the consciousness of his relatedness to past and future generations, cannot stop this dynamic spiritual reality from breaking through and revealing itself. This philosophical conclusion is directly relevant to the concern with West Indian history implied in the passage from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” used as an epigraph to Book I I I . Harris is saying that the so-called void of West Indian history is self-created, and he has shown that the crew and the descendants of runaway slaves alike were prepared to create their own “historylessness.” The conflict between Fenwick and Poseidon’s followers is not resolved, since their fear puts them to flight and remains an obstacle to change. The very fact that these survivors of Guyana’s early history disappear again into a landscape that Fenwick sees as the necessary ground of exploration (a theme further developed in Heartland) shows that they remain an elusive element of Guyana’s population with whom those who seek to define themselves as Guyanese must still come to terms. To such a quest there can be no final conclusion. From Poseidon, “the grand old man of [Guyanese] history” (170), have risen “the silent accents of an ageless dumb spirit” (156). The distress of obscure men spoken in those silent accents, rather than the grand feats of recorded history, is for Harris the inheritance of a people and must be investigated. His quest reaches further than Guyana. Doesn’t Poseidon’s name link him with the origins of another civilization and even with primitive humanity as a whole? Allowing imagination to qualify the technologist’s task, Fenwick has gone through a disintegration of established habits of thought and experienced the insecurity of that primitive condition. The only cer-

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tainty that the Quartet offers – that of the existence of the invisible folk among the crew – has been reached at the end of Palace of the Peacock. The last paragraph of the Quartet brings together the ascent towards the folk described in the first novel and the “immortal descent” (Poseidon’s?) that has enabled Fenwick to enquire into Poseidon’s role in his own consciousness. This paragraph looks backward to the creation of the Guyanese soul in Palace and forward to the unending quest for that soul described in the subsequent novels, for the Quartet ends with what will always be an unfinished task in Harris’s fiction, “an inquiry into the dramatic role of conscience,” now hooked onto a “Secret Ladder” and experiencing “the dangers of mortal ascent and immortal descent.” In this respect, too – and not merely in the dawn of Fenwick’s more fluid consciousness, when he hears “the echoes of annunciation” (258) – the beginning is in the end.

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7

Heartland Between Two Worlds

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E A R T L A N D has received little critical attention although it is an essential fragment of the “infinite canvas”1 of Harris’s oeuvre. It can be seen as a novel of transition which unexpectedly revives characters from the Guyana Quartet. Also, the main character, Stevenson, stands midway between Fenwick and the narrator of The Eye of the Scarecrow, in that his “drama of consciousness” is stimulated by events and characters outside himself, while (like characters in the later novels) he becomes a vessel in which the past is re-enacted and modified as “vision” increases; in which also the tension between life and death plays itself out continually in different shapes. After a reversal of fortune, Stevenson has come to the heartland to work as a watchman for the government. He was working for a company headed by his father when the accountant ran off with a large sum of money. The accountant’s young wife, Maria, was Stevenson’s mistress, and she, too, disappeared suddenly. Although Stevenson was innocent (or thought he was), he was saved from a charge of conspiracy by the sacrifice of his father, who repaid the stolen money, then died in an accident that looked very much like a disguised suicide. After the “crash,” Stevenson began to lose his self-assurance. But not until his terror at being thought guilty mingles with his terror at being alone in the jungle does he start on the introspective adventure that turns his watch over the jungle into self-examination and self-judgment. Under the impact of his terror, Stevenson’s eyes open to the greatness of his father’s sacrifice, and only then does he experience the reality of his father’s death as if it were his own. At the same time, it is only when he 1

See “Interview with Wilson Harris,” in Kas-Kas: “I view the novel as a kind of infinite canvas, an infinity” (52).

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loses his inner certainty that he can see that the flight of his mistress was genuine, for she is not only “the muse of the soul”2 but the soul itself. That he should be able to experience and “re-sense” her flight and his father’s death shows these two individuals to be part of the “community of being” each man carries within himself and belongs to beyond himself. The quest they generate is for the meaning of death and its relation to life or for the reverse side of life and its mystery. At the beginning of the novel, Stevenson’s growing insecurity takes him to Kaiser, the caretaker of the heartland depot. Significantly, Stevenson’s three encounters in the jungle are with characters who either died or vanished in Harris’s first two novels: Kaiser; daSilva (here so spelt); and the Amerindian woman Petra. Their reappearance illustrates Harris’s conception of death as a passage into an “ever-living present.” Kaiser, who was burned to death and “resurrected” as a woodcutter in The Far Journey, combines the frailty of humanity with its endurance. His survival and the peace of mind he has achieved testify to the persistence of the substance of suffering and anxiety and its gradual transformation into understanding. While the earlier novels expressed the need to bring to light and redeem the errors of the past, Heartland shows the process of atonement taking place. DaSilva has survived the trials of the crew in Palace of the Peacock to expiate the murder of Cameron. In Palace he was clearly his brother’s shadow or doppelgänger, “a reporter who has returned from the grave.”3 Now he tells Stevenson: “I turning into the ghost of a reporter of the one court of conscience after all – comprising nobody else but the mystery of me (or you) [...]. DaSilva. DaSilva [...] Stevenson. Stevenson.” (44)

Through the repetition of their names, daSilva suggests that each man has two selves, one of which might be the disturbing, invisible presence in the heartland. Their conversation (38–44) contains hints to the effect that Stevenson is exploring an inner world (in Harris’s words, “a climate of the mind”) as well as moving towards a purgatory in which daSilva, like Virgil for Dante, serves him as a guide. It may be objected that this is an unlikely role for a poor, shadowy pork-knocker4 to assume, although 2 3 4

Harris, Heartland, 27. Further page references are in the main text. Palace of the Peacock, 123. A pork-knocker is a gold or diamond digger in the Guyanese interior.

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pork-knockers are apparently known for their speculative turn of mind. But daSilva is precisely one of the humble who are ignored in ordinary life and, for this very reason, whom Harris associates with the neglected inner self or with the dead. Both daSilva and Kaiser offer Stevenson the wisdom of the folk, which the old Arawak woman represented in the eyes of the crew in Palace. In Heartland, the legendary names of this original crew “were becoming their own shadowy essence at last” (43) as if daSilva’s trial and “self-judgment” (“I was condemn to remain back [...] like if I was jury and judge over myself all rolled in one” 43) were transforming the tensions of history into wisdom. That the refinement of digested experience into spiritual fulfilment adds to the mysterious content of the heartland depot will appear when Stevenson’s own trial takes place. When he decides to face his ordeal, however, he feels like a gambler “with visionary resources” (21). The key to Kaiser’s depot is “the paradoxical key of all substance” (21), and Stevenson fears that “there might be nothing at all within the storehouse of the heartland” (28). In other words, his fear, partly due at first to a selfish concern for his reputation, becomes a metaphysical angst arising from the possibility that he might be gambling his future on a nonexistent reward. To find an answer to the fundamental question “Is there anyone or anything in the heartland?” is the real purpose of Stevenson’s watch. As might be expected, the jungle is also a symbolic heartland. But rather than develop simultaneously on two planes, the narrative shifts from the material to the spiritual and sometimes shows Stevenson struggling between the two. He and Kaiser are the “watched” of Book I I . However, both watchers and watched play either role. Stevenson is constantly aware of another unseen presence watching him. Petra, who has obviously been watching Stevenson, feels watched and threatened by unseen pursuers. DaSilva, on the other hand, does not doubt there is an unseen potential interlocutor5 in the jungle and anticipates Stevenson’s inquiry by asking who or what the other might be. In response to that unseen presence, Stevenson feels an urge to explore roads previously unknown to him. The first time this happens he is on the 5

Da Silva seems to be “addressing” someone in the depths of the bush (39) and to be “addressed” by his other self (44). There are many instances of “address” in the novel. Note the first appearance of “address” to describe an attempt at dialogue with the unseen in Palace of the Peacock, 55, 59.

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point of opening the depot when he hears a branch crack underfoot and is led into a gloomy corridor in search of a possible trespasser. This dark portage is a ground of invasion and flight, for he follows in the wake of ancient tribes who have successively penetrated the heartland and been torn by the same doubts as modern prospectors: “The golden age they wished to find – the Palace of the Peacock – may never have existed for all anyone knew” (31). Stevenson loses his way and is trapped in the undergrowth of his own emotions and fears. His struggle to free himself from the rock-like “hand of death” (32) is a struggle between “form and being, matter and spirit” (32), contrasts which, perceptible in the phenomenal world itself, betoken the existential enigma he must unravel. His penetration of the heartland is towards a frontier of existence where life and death meet. This becomes clearer when he follows the “ancient line” towards the depot after his boat has disappeared, and the necessity to venture again “into an interior where one saw oneself turned inside out” (48) makes him conscious of the purpose of his march and the obstacles he must overcome: It was the selfish fear of experiencing fear, the selfish love of the possession of love one was being summoned to [...] see through by abiding to a [...] refusal to shrink from [...] the demoralizing contact and content of death. (48)

On this second occasion, Stevenson is involved in a “primitive ordeal of initiation” (51), and although he walks against the “hardening [...] arteries of the bush,” “a fluid passage” (a sign of movement and life) remains which makes “new communication, even community” (51) possible. Significantly, his own physical reactions to his sense of another presence bring forth a response to the steps he has taken towards “the contact of death”; it is a response from the intimate forest of relations like an army on the march branching to enlist him after their aeons of stubborn withdrawal from human contact. (52; emphases mine)

As he advances further towards the lower station, following daSilva, whose rations have been stolen from the depot, Stevenson’s eyes “grow sharper than a needle” and “his emotions [fall] into step within him upon a meaningful thread of being” (56). When Stevenson faces death in daSilva, who has fallen into a giant chasm between two boulders, he reads the potentiality of “being” in the fusion between life and death incurred by daSilva (58).

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From his first to his second experience of death (his father’s and daSilva’s), Stevenson has progressed between two worlds epitomized by “the light and the shadow” (13), or meeting in “the everlasting green vault [as] half-night, half-day” (29), until, after daSilva’s death, the creation of the watch begins “between the death of morning and the birth of afternoon, between individual darkness and light” (62). There is also a corresponding meeting of contrasting elements in nature (“half-air, halfearth” 121) or states (“half-monkey, half-man” 58) which show the constant interplay of opposites within man’s inner and outer world. The mysterious source at the root of these contrasts stimulates the gamble Stevenson feels he takes whenever he is faced with a fundamental choice: Would he be confronted finally by an impossibility of escaping from himself, living or dead, or would he discover an identity of abandonment which would inform him and sometimes lead him like his own shadow into the subtlest realization of time? (21)

“Identity of abandonment” is a key phrase in the passage (and in Harris’s fiction generally), for it describes the self-surrender Stevenson must achieve, not to one of two things but to a fluid state that allows for the free play of the two. At the end of Book I I , he has made some progress towards the renunciation of one-sided assertions when he recognizes the contrasting possibilities inherent in each situation: He was beginning to look into the obscurity he had once turned away from as if he now knew, [...], that every climate of terror and essential clearing of security were actually the same umbrella, capable of providing spiritual cover or becoming equally just another inhospitable material pole. (55–56)

As in The Secret Ladder, the juxtaposition of contrasting states (“The Watchers” and “The Watched”) gives rise to a dynamic process issuing from the two. When Stevenson reaches Kaiser’s depot, Petra, the Amerindian woman, appears. She is presented as the muse of Palace of the Peacock, who has now changed her name and is on the point of giving birth to a child conceived by Donne or daSilva. Her new name evokes the strength but also the fixity of rock. And, indeed, from the moment of her arrival she feels symbolically pinned to the caretaker’s house as daSilva was supported within the order of place and both had become the host of a besieged mankind, needing to draw into each other new flesh and blood from the helpful herd and pack. (65; emphasis mine)

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This sentence introduces one of several motifs adumbrated in Books I and I I , which now fuse to answer the question first asked by daSilva: Who and what is there to discover or “read” in the heartland (40)? The question itself recurs in different forms and generally implies a reciprocity which is the prime mover in the “creation of the watch.” The belief that, in Kaiser’s words, “man need man” (20–21) runs throughout the novel and is illustrated by the many instances of physical and spiritual hunger felt by Stevenson, daSilva, and Petra.6 Although Kaiser is the official supplier and keeper of the material heartland depot, there is clearly a storehouse of spiritual resources to which the other three contribute and on which they feed. DaSilva is aware of this, and tells Stevenson: “We got to nurse all our nonexistent resources to the last bitter farthing” (41). It becomes clear in Book I I I that this store of resources, maintained by the give-and-take (and sufferings) of human intercourse, is the “what” daSilva and Stevenson have tried to elucidate. At the beginning of the “creation,” Petra (the muse and soul), who in Palace had met the need of the crew, is, as suggested above, in need of being reinvigorated, for she and daSilva have long been struggling “across a faint landscape”: A faint landscape it was because of the eclipse of time, the end of a long hazardous phase of discovery and conquest, [...]. This faintness was akin to a constellation of renewal and rebirth appearing, for this age and time, in the underworld sky of the jungle, and upon a horizon which coincided with the end of empires when the darkness of rule becomes the absolute light of consciousness. (66–67)

It seems, therefore, that a long phase of “discovery and conquest,” during which the store of the heartland depot has both accrued and been eroded, is at last on the point of bearing fruit. As the crimes of the past are in process of being redeemed and daSilva is allowed to die, the heartland depot can be opened to enable Petra to give birth to the child conceived long ago. It matters little whether the crew in Palace was an historical or a modern one (it obviously stands for both), but it is certainly important that

6

Note the frequent use in the novel of words relating to food, as well as Petra’s role as a taker (she has stolen daSilva’s rations) and a giver of food (65, 68, 70).

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Stevenson, a modern Guyanese, should help bring to life the offspring born of the meeting between conqueror and conquered.7 The “creation of the watch” (the birth of vision or consciousness) begins to take place when Stevenson moves towards Petra (64–65). This enables her to move, too, and to re-live her journey from the time she was sent away by the tribe (because pregnant by Donne) to the moment of her delivery. She then offers herself to be “consumed,” “devoured alive,” and this complete self-surrender clearly entails the birth of her child (70). In the same way, Stevenson’s self-surrender, overcoming his fear of “abandonment,” must entail his own spiritual rebirth. While helping Petra give life to her child, he identifies her with Maria, his vanished mistress, so that her delivery appears as the denouement of both an historical and a personal tragedy. “Like a numinous boulder informed by legs and arms as well as by the universal heart of man,” Petra, no longer a static rock, is free to “resume the journey of the past” (71): i.e. to be on the move again as a dynamic source of inspiration fed by the experiences and sufferings of men and feeding them in return. Mutual self-surrender (hers and Stevenson’s) is the answer to the “who” and “what,” for they themselves (and the Other within each of them) are the mysterious watchers (and watched) in the heartland. The “what” is that which each is willing to give of himself or herself to the other. This “what,” the “process of relations” (42) created by a genuine opening to the Other, gives substance to “the law,” which, as we saw in The Secret Ladder, evokes the covenant between men. Another word for it is El Dorado, as Stevenson’s first impression of daSilva makes clear: “On his lips had been written such need it was almost as if the black cup were the transubstantiation of gold” (38). However, it later appears that the self-surrender implied is not so complete in Stevenson as he thinks. Stevenson’s meeting with Petra takes place on an “extreme frontier” (71), the frontier between life and death towards which he has been progressing. On his way to the depot, he imagines the construction of a road that would lead to the meeting point between the two: it was touch-and-go like fish to bait, flame to match, the essential inner and outer realities of construction, life-in-death, death-in-life. (53) 7 Like the muse in Palace of the Peacock, Petra contains both conqueror and conquered (see 65), an indication that rebirth and incentive to consciousness and imagination depend on a marriage between the two.

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When he approaches Petra, “the banquet of reality they shared, life-indeath, death-in-life, was now finished and indivisible” (65). Death (in daSilva) seems to serve as a gateway to life: “[Stevenson] was in a position to observe daSilva as if he saw through him into [Petra’s] mounting agony” (65). The birth of Stevenson’s vision of consciousness described in Chapter 7 stems from the juxtaposition of Petra’s travail in Chapter 5 with the description of daSilva’s death in Chapter 6, while in these two chapters their ordeals (Petra’s and daSilva’s) are shown to be indissociable. Before describing Stevenson’s own trial, however, a few words must be said about the implications of daSilva’s death. As already mentioned, physical death in Harris’s fiction does not necessarily entail the death of the spirit but, rather, offers it the opportunity to develop towards a maturity it was incapable of in life. After receiving a mortal blow, daSilva recalls that his dog had died that he himself might be cured of a bout of fever: This was an involuntary living function death would be totally incapable of achieving if one were allowed to lock oneself away in the absolute prison of oneself. (78)

This incident gives daSilva a clue to the double question: “Who [...] did one happen to be, ruling whom and ruled by whom?” (78), and the episode shows that it is in the individual person that an answer must be found both to the question of identity and to the mystery of conquest or “rule.” The sacrifice of daSilva’s dog illustrates Harris’s conception of the person as including innumerable agents or “substitutes,” capable of states of being that range from the highest spiritual consciousness to an animal-like existence of subjection and suffering. In the muse, too, such extremes coalesce, “from animal servitude to bearing the burden of the world’s need for love” (64). The substitutes or creatures within oneself are the actors in a drama of conquest that one exploits and feeds on. Self-discovery amounts to a recognition of those creatures within one’s heart (or the heartland of the country) and of the community one shares with them. That is why the death of daSilva after his atonement for past crimes and the understanding it gives him of the “process of relations” within himself means “the extinction of empire” (58, 67): [it] made one see how intolerable it was to succumb to the brittle wiles of servant or master one had acquired (or contracted oneself to) from birth into death. (78)

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For Stevenson, the “process of relations” has involved experiencing death (his father’s and daSilva’s) and facing again his mistress in Petra. Through other people’s predicaments, he has once more felt the shock of the crash (80), which made him aware that he shares with others “the vivid moment of accident or disaster [...] wherever it occur[s]” (80). He has thus reached the “ground of loss” on which he must surrender his instinct for selfishness and possession. But when he goes in search of food for Petra and finds on his return that she has disappeared with her child, he is as shocked as when his mistress ran away at the thought of having been robbed (psychologically) and humiliated. Now “the greatest and subtlest trial of himself” (85) begins with the need for self-judgment that the situation demands. If there is a “law” of the heartland, it is according to that law of reciprocal self-surrender that he must judge himself. He is forced to confess that after their “memorable embrace [...] she had seen through his duplication of sentiment to the core of his necessity to mount a guard over himself” (85). In other words, she has seen through his unconscious motives, his pride8 and refusal to give up the “possession of love,” and has thus exposed the self-concern inherent in his act of goodness: Would one ever learn to submit gently to the invisible chain of being [Stevenson wonders] without attempting to break loose and run after something or someone one knew as inadequately and helplessly as one knew one’s own hand upon one’s own heart? (85)

Stevenson’s relapse (largely motivated by his need for security) and his question show his awareness that freedom from solipsism, and vision, can be neither complete nor final. Indeed, Stevenson’s terror and need for “spiritual cover” (56) suggest that man might not be able to face full revelation of the mystery at the heart of the universe. In the course of the novel, he has progressed through the contrasts of the phenomenal world and experienced the tension between, and release from, opposite states of being, which finally teaches him “to bridge [his] awareness of dual proportion” (89). Now, like the muse, he must be on the move again and follow “the living stream” informed by this duality. The stream is like a

8

“Who could say how dangerously arrogant one might become if one followed one’s purest instinct of absolute rage for good?” (84).

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“crack in the floor or prison of the landscape” (89)9 and will take him along the endlessly disintegrating and resurging road towards self-release. That he is also moving towards his own death is implied in the postscript.10 The novel as such ends with the uncertainty that has informed the whole narrative. This uncertainty is an admission of the mystery of life and death and their inseparable manifestations (whether light and darkness, love and hate, the gift of oneself and the negation of the other); it is also an incentive to explore their “alliance.” Man’s irresistible attraction and repulsion for each accounts for the zigzag pattern of Stevenson’s progress in the wake of those he has discovered in both outer and inner heartland and who, like him, have added to its substance: And so the longest crumbling black road Stevenson followed in the scorched or drowned footsteps of every witness, accuser and accused, judge and muse, in the fiery submersion and trial of dreams, was but an endless wary flood broken into retiring trenches or advancing columns, all moving still towards fashioning a genuine medium of conquest, capable of linking and penetrating the self-created prison-houses of subsistence, these being the confusing measure of vicarious hollow and original substance. Stevenson did not know where the road led. He only knew it was there. (90; emphases mine)

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Book I I I contains other images of release particularly related to the muse: “The fortress of the past was yielding to a timeless rent and sacrifice in the mother of the present” (73). 10 The postscript consists of half-obliterated poems which prefigure the broken narrative fabric of The Eye of the Scarecrow and the disjointed diary of The Waiting Room. The blanks seem to stand for the void that Harris will explore in the subsequent novels, an exploration that culminates in his conception of the tabula rasa. Stevenson’s poems are, in fact, extracts from Harris’s Eternity to Season, intro. A.J. Seymour (1954; London: New Beacon, 1978). This confirms Harris’s use of Stevenson as an “agent of personality.” See “Interview with Wilson Harris,” in Kas-Kas, 52.

8 I

The Eye of the Scarecrow

The Heart of Inarticulate Protest

I

The Eye of the Scarecrow and the three novels that follow it open a new phase in Harris’s fiction. Their subject-matter is, even more specifically than in Palace of the Peacock, the subjective imagination, its working on memory, and its transformation of the raw material of life. Experience in these novels is wholly internalized. The protagonist is not the author but he, too, is engaged in creating fiction, insofar as he is an ‘agent’ in whose consciousness the reconstruction of the past takes place. His quest is for a new way both of apprehending life and of rendering it. The main character’s disorientation in the earlier fiction culminates in Heartland in the equation of his consciousness with a “vicarious hollow.” This is now the protagonist’s initial state of emptiness or breakdown, a state that results from catastrophe but goes together with a freedom from the tyranny of conventional reality, the tyranny of facts as opposed to their inner truth. We recognize here the creative possibilities Harris discerns in catastrophe, which does not merely bring about a change of outlook in the protagonist. The “crash” that shatters his safe, known world reveals the livingness of the subterranean reality it (the crash) brings to the surface. One has the impression of a dialogue between the perceiving consciousness and the material it perceives, “the flood of animated wreckage”1 that runs to meet it and on which the protagonist refuses “to impose a false coherency.”2 All concessions to linear progression in the plot are now rejected. The characters’ 1 2

N BOTH FORM AND CONTENT,

Harris, The Eye of the Scarecrow, 15. Further page references are in the main text. Harris, Ascent to Omai (London: Faber & Faber, 1970): 123.

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failure to apprehend their past experience as a whole and the disruption of time as a rigid frame of existence make for a fragmented narrative structure. But this surface fragmentation is counterpointed by what the narrator in The Eye calls “phenomenal associations” (13), subtle links conveyed by a complex network of related images. The following comment by Harris seems to apply to this novel in particular: the peculiar reality of language provides a medium to see in consciousness the ‘free’ motion and to hear with consciousness the ‘silent’ flood of sound by a continuous inward revisionary and momentous logic of potent explosive images evoked in the mind.3

The “drama of consciousness” re-created by the nameless narrator (N. in my reading) in his diary covers a nine-month period (the time of gestation) beginning on Christmas Eve 1963 and ending on 25 September 1964. N.’s declaration of intent as he makes his first entry shows him to be a more advanced and more highly conscious character than either Fenwick or Stevenson, each of whom had to free themselves from rigid assumptions and constrictive habits of thought in their relations with others and their understanding of the past: I am hoping it may prove the first reasonable attempt (my Journals in the past were subject to the close tyranny and prejudice of circumstance) at an open dialogue within which a free construction of events will emerge in the medium of phenomenal associations all expanding into a mental distinction and life of their own. (13)

Indeed, namelessness implies a denial of personality on the part of the narrator, who, in the passage just quoted, refuses to impose his own partial views on events he experienced; This is similar to Roland Barthes’ ‘disappearance of the author’. N. is already sufficiently aware of the limitations of any given ‘realistic’ version of the past to refrain from imposing on events the one-sided logic of a chronological time-sequence and external perspective. By trusting past events to speak for themselves and associate according to an intrinsic, not an imposed, significance, he recognizes that the past may have a distinctive, dynamic quality, “the stranger animation one senses within the cycle of time” (14). This explains his willingness to surrender from the start to a “visionary organization of memory” (16) rather than “succumb to the dead tide of self-indulgent realism” (15). N. is 3

Tradition, the Writer and Society, 32 (Harris’s emphasis).

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confronted anew with undigested experience, and to modify his understanding of it is the purpose of his recollection. His consciousness is a vessel flooded by contrasting images of the past, whose juxtaposition and consecutive alterations as they arise from increasingly deeper levels of reminiscence and imaginative grasp give the novel its structure. The three books of the novel deal with the same material in a different form, incidents in which N. and his friend L. (location engineer) were involved in 1948 and, further back in time, between 1929 and 1932. Books I and I I , “The Visionary Company” and “Genesis,” evoke these two periods in reverse order, although the creative reconstruction also covers the years between 1932 and 1964 (“twice sixteen years of ‘ebb and flow’” 34), not a time-span of memorable events but years during which N. grew attached to the surface reality of life, an attitude he is now trying to break down. The pivot of N.’s reconstruction is the year 1948, when he went into the jungle with L. in search of gold deposits and was “invalided out” (100) after a crash that “created a void in conventional memory” (15). The state of inner disruption he experienced then corresponds to the shattered, stunned condition of the victims of historical catastrophe that the evocation of 1948 brings to mind, particularly the strike and riots in Guyana.4 As N. resumes this condition in imagination, he recalls seeing the “scarecrow” face of L., a sudden and transient shattering of his features, which gave N. such a shock that it provoked in him a “curious void of conventional everyday feeling” (15). Thus vacancy in conventional memory and feeling is the initial state of his recollection. In N.’s attempt to shake himself free of given versions of the past, images emerge into his consciousness in an apparently haphazard way. Time itself is dislocated, and some reminiscences that come under the heading 1948 actually refer back to 1929. The images are aroused through phenomenal associations of place, smell, or sound. Sometimes also, like the narrator’s memories in Palace, they seem to “spring from nowhere.” Each memory epitomizes the essential meaning of N.’s search for “the

4

The strike lasted four and a half months on eight sugar estates on the coast of Demerara, in reaction to a change in the system of work from “cut-and-drop to cutand-load.” On June 16, the police opened fire at a plantation, killing five workers and injuring twelve. On this subject, see Cheddi Jagan, The West On Trial: The Fight for Guyana’s Freedom (originally as The West On Trial: My Fight for Guyana’s Freedom, 1966; Berlin: Seven Seas, 1975): 90.

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visionary company,” the eclipsed lives that peopled his childhood and early manhood, and all are connected by subtle links that form intricate compositions of many-layered significance. In Book I alone, the scarecrow, a unifying metaphor, sends out numerous ramifications. As an image of disruption, it first appears in “the cracked surface of a depression after a naked spell of drought” (14) that N. glimpses on L.’s face; it becomes the “dislocated image” (16) of the Georgetown foreshore, then the gaunt figure of the dying governor of Guyana, “a shirt cast over branches of rib and bone” (29), himself a symbol of the moribund British Empire; and finally it assumes the shape of the crumbling tenements of Waterloo Street, an image of disintegration that contains, nevertheless, the seed of rebirth: “the golden centre of inspiration, the most subjective scarecrow earth of all” (32). L. is wholly unaware of his metamorphosis into a scarecrow, not realizing that his surface composure can be broken down and yield an unknown view of himself; through most of the “drama of consciousness” he plays the role of a passive and unconscious participant. This links him with all the figures of the past who seem to have been equally unconscious − the Guyana strikers, whose action “bore such a close, almost virtuous resemblance to the unprejudiced reality of freedom” (18, 19), the Water Street beggars crippled by “self-deception” (17), the “unfeeling and unseeing” hearse-riders, and Anthrop, anonymous man (Greek anthropos) suffering the Depression of 1929. The unconscious “scarecrow of shadow” (19) links together the funeral procession of the strikers with that of “the nameless paupers of charity,” who also perpetuate a “self-sufficient life of doom, the seal upon all eyes, on all the senses of the world” (20). Connected with the scarecrow figure is the image of the ghost of a runaway slave whom N., as a child, thought he saw hanging from a tree over the “sliced surface of the canal” (another image of disruption) on what used to be plantation ground. The runaway slave evoked a spirit of freedom which even as a child N. was hoping to attain (35). In his failure to achieve it, however, the ghost may equally represent the figures of the past enslaved by others or by their own failure to achieve consciousness, and it suggests as well the immobility in which the figures have remained confined, trapped for so long in N.’s consciousness. Other associations grow from the basic metaphors. The ghost of the dying governor, for instance, reminds N. of the dying soldiers in a painting of the battle of Waterloo, who, like

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the strikers, form a funeral procession − of figures of conquest this time − and, like them, were consumed by their “rage for an ideal” (21). These overlapping associations suggest that out of the initial image of the scarecrow and its many variations there grows an underlying network of relationships that illustrate the victor/victim syndrome and point to the helplessness of those who were twice lost: the beggars, strikers, nameless paupers, Anthrop, all leading a buried existence in a time of depression, then obscured again in the folds of memory. N.’s reconstruction is punctuated by intuitions of the void in which the figures of the past used to live, the invisible dimension to which the unprivileged were relegated. The unconscious protest of the derelict Water Street beggars is born “of a kind of hollow silence” (17); the strikers are blocked by “the devil’s abyss [...] nihilism of spirit” (18); the poor man’s hearse, unlike that of the rich dead, lacks sides of glass through which the coffin could be glimpsed and arouses in N. the suspicion that it might be empty, and when he visits his grandfather’s tenements, N. can perceive the “hollow darkness” (30) at the tenants’ back. (All emphases here are mine.) On reaching Anthrop’s hovel during that visit, N. is subject to a fit of sickness, during which the stable image he has beheld is suddenly reversed. He experiences a “sensation of upheaval, the stigmata of the void” (33): i.e., suffers briefly the sense of anguish, the impression of living in a bottomless world, which is the normal condition of the inarticulate poor. In the moment of sickness while his vision of Anthrop’s room is reversed, N. perceives in it “a halfnaked woman, his wife, with twins at her breast” (33), whom, in the light of what he knows of Anthrop’s existence, he associates not with the “newborn” but with the “new-dead” (33). To sum up the double significance of this incident: the “stigmata of the void” are scars of the living death or deadness expressed by the metaphors of the scarecrow, ghost, and funeral procession; and N.’s perception of this gives him, if not a clear understanding, at least an intuition of the “dual proportion” that now serves him as a starting-point in his quest, what he calls “the self-reversing game of reality of the banquet of life on death” (35). Each image of the past is an incentive to N.’s perception of this process of self-reversal and offers, however elusively, a clue to the discovery of an opposite reality. The very structure of Book I is based on a juxtaposition of images of life and death and the duality that each evokes. Thus the funeral processions that N. remembers as he begins his diary are counterpointed by images, of life − for example, of N. “riding out of the

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womb” (23; resurrecting from unconsciousness) after a serious operation. At that time, however, he awakens to a restrictive existence, for he becomes “a slave to the futility of hardness” (35): i.e. to a one-sided, apparently static reality. Indeed, there is no example, in Book I, of the deeper, third dimension of being which it is the purpose of N.’s quest to discover; there are only intuitions that the “hollowness of spirit” (27) he re-experiences with humility and compassion can be the source of a regenerated vision. He once dreams of finding himself in a large secret room where he visualizes his first source of inspiration: the sleep of an immaterial unsupported element: the armour of the poor, and I knew then how dread and necessary it was to dream to enter the striking innermost chemistry of love, transcending every proud chamber in the inexorable balloon of time. (23)

Just as he finds in that room the “revolutionary goal” (22) he pursues, so he glimpses in the Waterloo Street tenements “the subterranean anatomy of revolution” (31), an incentive to discard the “primitive manifesto” (32) by which men live and to reach “an immaterial element” (32) through his imaginative identification with the scarecrow. Precisely because it was disintegrating, the world of 1948 was laying bare its own fountainhead of change. But, as N.’s present inner reconstruction implies, mutation into “a new unspectacular conception of life” (99) must first be realized in the individual psyche. The very types of behaviour which in Book I elicit a sense of “misconceived beginning” (35), such as N.’s false start in life in 1932 and the strikers’ premature demonstration in 1948, are shown in Book I I , “Genesis,” to be prime movers in N.’s development of a new vision. The contrasts evoked in Book I are now being transmuted into personal confrontations both in the outer world and in N.’s consciousness. “Genesis” is presented as a dateless diary in which incidents of 1932 and 1948 echo each other and foreshadow a future (2048) still shaped by man’s “familiar obsession [the desire to possess]” (47). In Book I, the past was freed from a static historical perspective by the achronological reconstruction of events and the juxtaposition of remote time-sequences. In the dateless diary, the shifts from past to future intimate timelessness, stimulating the process of transformation that is beginning to take place in N.’s consciousness.

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The initial image in Book I I is of the mud figures N. and L. fashion shortly after N.’s return from hospital in 1932. N. is keenly disappointed because his friend appeared “wooden and unable to enter into the spirit of the game of beginning to make everything new” (39). But, looking at the figures again after L. has left, N. suddenly sees “all the sap of life rise anew” (40) in one of the figures on the ground. The metamorphosis of the lifeless lump into an animated figure occurs through N.’s insight into the concealed sorrow, the subjective element, that has gone into its making. This creative act is born out of the conjunction of contrasting elements, L.’s passive participation and N.’s realization that he has inflicted pain; it re-enacts the original genesis, whose description prefaces Book I I : There went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground [...].

The missing words are “and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). By breathing life into L.’s figure, N.’s vision provides the missing element, just as later in the “jungle of conception” (48) N. turns up, a “living soul” (77), to save L. from death. Further still in their exploration, he reaches the meeting point between “breathlessness” (deadness) and “breath – mist” (93), the mist that fertilized the earth. L.’s “translated figure” (40) contains “the heart of inarticulate protest” (41) and becomes a metaphor for the exploited muse and the people she represents. It is first associated with mother earth, then with N.’s own mother, who appears as both a “victim” of love and intent on “devouring” someone else in the name of love. This in turn calls up the naked woman inside Anthrop’s room, then L.’s dead mother, whom, as he dreams of her, N. thrusts into the role rumour had given her while she was alive, that of the mistress of Anthrop, rich civil engineer and twin brother of the poor hearse-rider, who was also N.’s stepfather. Even while he is pushing her, N. realizes that she “lives and moves” (45): i.e., that she is not a senseless being to be manipulated at will. Finally, the mud figure is associated with Hebra, the prostitute N. and L. send for in the jungle in 1948. She is also called Raven’s Head, like the lost town the men try to locate.5 N. is struck by the insensitiveness with which L. takes her. As a matter of fact, he, too, 5

Another example of the identification of woman and land, like Mariella in Palace of the Peacock.

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takes her with “blind lust” (52); although he at first shrinks from touching her, he awakes by her side having unconsciously possessed her after all. Hebra is a deceptively lifeless mud-figure again in Book I I I , in which Scarecrow succumbs to the “habit of trying to fashion her into his own image” (87). This development of the mud-figure image throws light on the characters’ instinctive and often unconscious attempts to exploit others. Even L. (himself repeatedly prompted by N.), who never suspects evil either in his own or in other people’s motives, does so. Yet because he does not challenge the existing order of things, he helps to perpetuate it by taking advantage either of Hebra or of the “creatures of little weight and substance” (59) who transport his gigantic dredge into the interior. N. realizes that even Hebra, their victim, is intent on possessing them. The two friends now appear as the twins Anthrop’s wife was feeding, though, by nursing them, Hebra is also determined to assert her own existence. N.’s perception of this makes him discover a force of obsession in things I had only dimly dreamt before [...]. Things and persons whose life of obsession lay less within themselves and more within myself, within my lack of a universal conception, of their conception (the unborn folk). (53; emphasis mine)

“My lack [...] of their conception,” N.’s acknowledgment that he has so far failed to conceive or see others into existence parallels his recognition of life in L.’s mud figures at the beginning of Book I I : “the thing I created with my own eyes out of one of the pieces he had made” (40). The two passages show that vision is what resurrects the “unborn folk,” the seemingly dead, buried in memory (“the nameless forgotten dead”), and THE UNINITIATE (103) (“the nameless sleeping living”): i.e. the apparently nonexistent multitudes excluded from the rituals of privileged societies. The metamorphoses of the mud-figure image give N. to understand that, even when consenting to their own plight, the victims have feelings and a life of their own which he must revive. The second discovery he makes is that the nameless dimension “animates” the retrenched territory they inhabit. When he travels to the jungle with L., he is in search of his father’s innocence, while L. is solely interested in what relates to the outer expedition. He is impressed by the technical merits of a bridge built by N.’s stepfather, while N. sees in that bridge “both a trapdoor [for those who stop at its outer reality] and a poem [giving insight, through its very

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materiality, into the unknown beyond]” (50). While both stand on the bridge, N. becomes aware of the “dazzling sleeper of spirit” (49), a sudden awakening and subsiding of an inner reality taking visible shape under his eyes. In this evanescent phenomenon he recognizes a manifestation of the nameless dimension: “it, the trespass of feeling rising anew out of the stumbling labour and melting pot of history” (49). While still on the bridge, he feels, rising within himself, a “daemon” or “muse of place” (51), Hebra, whose “black mask” (56) is associated with “it – the accumulative ironies of the past, the virtuous rubbish-heap and self-parody of ancestors in death” (56). N.’s intuitions of the meaning of it imply that the territory they are exploring (which is both outer and inner space) is a repository for the sufferings of the past, in which, as N. realized through his childhood dream, “every dumb fact” (47) became converted into apparent nothingness. Out of this converted experience, “it now ris[es] anew,” indicating that the mute sufferings of victimized people subsist as pent-up energy, “a ceaseless ferment of unwritten lives,” capable of exploding, as it now does in N.’s memory. The appearance and disappearance of it, whether as “dazzling sleeper of spirit” perceptible in nature or as an inner intuition, coincides with a similar dual movement characteristic of Raven’s Head, the mining “ghost town” the two men are trying to discover: For centuries [...] mysterious locations had been plumbed to disappear and return once more into the undisclosed astronomical wealth of the jungle. Raven’s Head [...] was one of these relative establishments whose life of eternity sprang from a pinpoint conception of poetic loyalty to the idea of everlasting justice: they (such relative establishments) belonged to those who voluntarily began to relinquish the right they deserved to a place in them − whose recovery of them lay therefore within the heart of an acceptance of great distance from them. But such a decision to relinquish what one desperately wanted to find tore at the roots of all possession and conventionality. (54–55)

N. had already been warned in a childhood dream of the need to be distant from (while recognizing the otherness of) what he is after, when he sensed the presence of creatures who, he hoped, would “consent to be shaped by [his] command and tongue” (43) but who vanished as soon as he struck them. They, too, follow in his consciousness the ebb and flow N. has discerned in the “dazzling sleeper of spirit” and in Raven’s Head, since they are “sometimes capable of recall, sometimes elusive and sealed and forgotten” (43). Moreover, they are linked with Raven’s Head or Hebra

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through what N. calls “the phenomenon of dust” (39), for in Hebra’s town he perceives “distantly [...] the almost breathless fall of the condemned blossom of earth − the freedom of promise in dust” (55). The image of the “dusty insects” (55) is a recurring one (see also 17 and 63) that expresses the insubstantiality of both the neglected creatures in everyday life and the spiritual region towards which N. moves, “one’s immortal undiscovered realm, a land of creatures living freely everywhere and nowhere” (35). Like the mud-figure, this image links together the two sections of Book I I and its major discoveries: one, that creation in this context means seeing “persons and things” that are usually invisible because taken for granted; two, that this perception of life in the Other runs parallel to his (or its) autonomous emergence into life. In Harris’s earlier fiction, recognition of the “folk” or “ghosts,” both living and dead, was largely a one-way movement dependent on the main character’s willingness to explore. In this novel, the encounter and incipient relationship between one and the Other is due to a double movement: eyes opening to the existence of that Other, who is also susceptible of travelling towards oneself across the frontier behind which he (she or it) normally lives retrenched. In Heartland, Stevenson had moved towards an “extreme frontier,” envisioning, but not experiencing, what lay on the other side. Now, for the first time since Palace of the Peacock, the main character is shown travelling beyond the frontier of the known world. As N.’s eyes open to the unborn folk’s “life of obsession” in the jungle, he understands that this life lies Less in the open question of [the unborn folk’s] apparently submissive being and more in my ultimatum of fixed instincts, beyond which [...] I hesitated to go (even dared not go) since it would mean crossing a “dead” masked frontier as if this were a living disguise and territory in fact.... (53)

Actually, the “fixed instincts” erect the “‘dead’ masked frontier.” When N. and L. progress towards Raven’s Head, the obstacles they meet are “a magnetic instinctual load of rock” (54; emphasis mine), stifling habits of “jealous proprietorship and conviction” and N.’s “rage for self-justification” (55). Despite his many insights, N. is not yet prepared to dismantle his self-erected defences, although he now knows that it depends on his self-surrender whether or not he will reach Raven’s Head. He still refuses to “confess [...] to [...] his unlicensed censor of space” (56; to the scarecrow within him) as he does in Book I I I when he loses his identity.

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Book I I I , “Raven’s Head,”6 describes, as it were, from the inside N. and L.’s approach to the lost town or territory, which is clearly a metaphor for the buried past, for the state of deadness to which the uninitiate are confined, and for that innermost region of the individual psyche that Harris sees as both the storehouse of undigested experience and the vessel of its transformation. N. has now disappeared as an identifiable narrator, having travelled beyond “a frontier of existence” (69) where personality gives way to the emerging Other (first L., then Hebra). The first two sections of the reconstruction of the journey (covering Chapter 6 and the beginning of Chapter 7) are still part of the dateless diary. They describe the various approaches to Raven’s Head and give the first dramatized version of the encounter between the exploring consciousness and the Other’, whom in “Genesis” N. had perceived only intuitively or in dreams. In this version of the reconnaissance journey, creatures whom in his childhood dream N. associated with age and youth emerge as an old man and his grandson. They are, in the first place, passengers of the vehicle that is trying to approach Raven’s Head (the vehicle is N.’s consciousness obstructed by fear and will), then shepherds of the “flock7 of ghosts” the explorers discover while they are approaching. From fellow-travellers and objects of discovery, the old man and his grandson become the “counsellors of past and present generations” to whose “dialogue” (69) it is now essential to listen (in his childhood dream, N. had forced them back into their “dialogue of genesis” 43). Finally, they become “the mild doctors of the masked ages” who “refashion” (79) the explorer(s) after the crash. As their successive roles show, these representatives of buried existences waiting to be retrieved are projected from the exploring consciousness and become its agents of reconstruction after the crash that shatters it. This is further illustrated by the circumstances of the crash in this version, for the obstacles met by the vehicle in its approach to Raven’s Head are once again the explorers’ own instinctive attitudes, now projected into visible 6 In alchemy, Raven’s Head is at once the initial stage of the process of exploration and the state of blackness that precedes the cauda pavonis or resurrection. For a parallel between alchemy and the process of individuation in Harris’s novels, see Michael Gilkes, Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel (London, Trinidad & Jamaica: Longman Caribbean, 1975). 7 The explorer is now discovering the “flock of reflections” (25) N. and L. were trying to detect in East Street canal as children. The shepherds themselves are part of the explorer’s “flock of himself” (70).

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forms, the “animal substitute[s]” behind the human mask. Thus the frightened horse which draws the vehicle is their own “Gateway of Fear” (64), and the cow the driver hits out of exaggerated self-confidence seems, like L., to be paralyzed by “fate and patience” (66). Yet it is not, as first appears, imprisoned in “a stationary past,” for it “never actually cease[s] to move” (66). When the driver runs her down, “the mortal blow she received was like a shattering of his own barrier of stupidity and indifference and predictable image” (68). The crash, which “crumbles” the driver’s will and immediately brings to his attention the dialogue between the old shepherd and his grandson, makes him see himself no longer as one person but as two. In the ensuing self-examination, the exploring consciousness shifts from “driver” to “dreamer,” in whom one is tempted at first to recognize L., the engineer, and N., the narrator. Although this is true up to a point, the opposition that used to isolate each of them is now disappearing. The driver is asking questions one has come to expect of N. rather than L., while the dreamer feels he must assume the kind of responsibility that used to be L’s. Each has lost his bearings, feels “drawn [...] up” and “pulled [...] down,” partaking of wider, simultaneous yet contradictory movements,8 and eventually “turning – or falling – into the pool or thoroughfare of someone both like and unlike himself” (70). A truly dynamic relationship now begins to take shape between the two explorers, one that involves a denial of the self and movement towards the other. The process by which the self is being voluntarily surrendered as it extends itself into the Other (later described as “self-mutilation and selfextension” 84) is equivalent to becoming a scarecrow. Only now does N.’s earlier deliberate entry into a state of nothingness take on its full significance. Becoming a scarecrow has involved building an imaginative bridge between oneself and the Other (“the meeting ground of two” 75). On this ground of reciprocal and continuous self-surrender, it, the nameless dimension, emerges again, no longer simply a manifestation of residual life as in Book I I , but the liberating medium N. has been searching for all along, a capacity of the imagination to apprehend at the same time one and the Other, life and death, or any of the multiple antinomies of existence. To perceive these together, not as mutually exclusive entities 8

See also: “the crash is [...] architecturally unclear and unsound to me − unpredictable vacancy of ascent or block of descent?” (77).

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but as contraries continuously moving towards, and retreating from, each other, has been the mainspring of growth in the scarecrow vision. It animates both the contraries and the vision, which confirms the correlation between the apprehending consciousness and the dynamic duality it discovers:9 it (key and medium) could still exist in the grasp of one frail body of instinct as it unlocked the instant dust of another; in continual process of establishing a door for the one to issue through the other [...]. (75) who it was no one could say: a crumbling scarecrow perhaps, the key to...? It possessed nevertheless a backbone and a single eye which turned and looked − without appearing to make any effort to see − both ways in the same blank crude instant. (75)

The description of it in the first paragraph of Chapter 7 at once sums up the major discovery in Chapter 6 (the genuine communication between moving opposites and the role of the nameless imagination as both activated and activating medium) and prefaces the other version of the crash recorded in the once-more-dated diary. The explorers are seen again as N. and L., though the overlapping of their personalities [disclosed in the earlier version] still prevails, making it impossible to discern which of the two saved the other from execution after their violent quarrel with each other and with Hebra. N. is now reconstructing his “Fall into Ancient Passage” (76) and writing from that dark room of memory. The images that return to him are both L.’s snapshots of Raven’s Head and his own memories of a dream in which now one, now the other (“I”/“he”) is seen “digesting” catastrophe (79–80). They have reached the innermost depths made accessible by the shattering of appearances recorded in the first version, a “stunned, breathless, post-mortem” (77) condition (that of the “visionary company” in Book I), and in the “visionary room” (82) into which they descend (the room N. had envisioned as a child, perhaps 22) they fulfil their need of each other. It is here that the “transubstantiation” of one into the Other takes place after the customer (N./L.) of the visionary room has recognized “his own blurred spirit of seasonal image” (82) 9

Although both forms refer to the nameless dimension, it seems that a distinction can be drawn between it (italicized) and IT , which refers more specifically to the relation between TWO (one and the other). See “IT was engaged – even as it supported and bore the company of TWO – in preparing a new map of the fluid role of instinct,” 76.

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in the Water Street beggar. However, no sooner has the transformation taken place than the new scarecrow issued from it is faced with his new role, that of “the innocent unborn ‘soul’ who was destined to be charged with an account for murder” (83). If my reading of the novel is correct, what is then realized might be described as follows: in “Genesis” the “unborn folk” are apparently nonexistent as a result of N.’s failure to see them into existence. What is now disclosed is the sacrifice the “unborn” are continuously called upon to make. Sacrifice seems to be of two different kinds. There is the uninitiate’s acceptance of their own death (through meaningless trials provoked by men or nature), which L. explains to his friend: “Someone had died for us [...] THE UNINITIATE. ACCEPTANCE OF BLIND MURDER ” (103). This is the kind of sacrifice L. (men in general) never stop(s) taking for granted, an attitude which, as already pointed out, links him with the unconscious victims. Equally devouring is the sacrifice made or imposed out of love. Hebra represents the “unborn folk,” but as soon as the scarecrow born of the conjunction of victor and victim comes into the “living death” that is her normal state, he runs the danger of being fascinated by her. At one stage in the exploration there seemed to be a correspondence between N.’s desire to discover the source of a spiritual tradition and Hebra’s wish to restore “her spiritual bridge and sacred mining town” (53), though even then he suspected that she wanted to possess him and L. Now that he has reached that source, he is becoming intoxicated with it and anxious to possess it, so that it is now “a priceless jewel whose rarity bred every astonished witness of jealousy of love” (88). The relationship that develops between Scarecrow and Hebra contains, I believe, a warning against a form of spiritual cannibalism and insatiate hunger for love. Scarecrow has towards Hebra the same attitude as formerly (in what one might call the outer world), since he is “trying to fashion her into his own image” (87) − denying her intrinsic being − only to discover that he is becoming enslaved by his desire to possess her and the increasingly higher price he must pay to “execute” her (deny her otherness). It is this urge to enslave that makes the genius or muse of a spiritual tradition into a whore. The “murder” described in Chapter 8 has both literal and figurative import, though I feel the figurative carries more weight, since at this stage, in spite of the physical movements of the characters, the inner dimension prevails. At first, Scarecrow denies Hebra’s existence and in doing so denies his own, projected into hers, much as, in the first version of the

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crash, hitting the cow had crumbled his own will. And just as in the earlier memory of his intercourse with Hebra he had discovered in her “a life of obsession,” so he now discovers “her living currency” (88). In the outerworld encounter recorded in Book I I , N. and L. could not accept the fact that “a price was about to be placed upon [their] heads” (53), that they could be the object of a transaction too. Now Scarecrow “[gives] himself up to be sold to the highest bidder” (89): i.e., agrees to change places with the whore, and this self-denial brings about the second “conversion.” Scarecrow’s acceptance of his own death makes possible the birth of Idiot Nameless.10 The nine months of conception have been months of successive conversions and self-surrenders, and the exploring consciousness is now seen to break through from within Scarecrow, riding out of the womb, not like young N. “safe and established in his own private being” (36), but after surrendering the last shred of identity and greedy will. For this to be possible, however, Hebra, too, confesses to solipsism. After Scarecrow has invested himself with her garment, her “transubstantiation” takes place, and the explorer feels at last that he is at the end of his quest, uniting in his resurrection “long lost father [whose trial in the jungle he has relived] and newfound son [the nameless spirit-child]” (91). N.’s understanding of “the art of murder” (90) is his ultimate discovery and is cognate with his perception of the “enigma of life” (90), the coexistence of opposites, “the twins of breath and breathlessness” (90). To break the balance between the two is to “murder” one for the sake of the other. They are not alternatives but together form “the apprehensive soul and image of an unknown capacity” (90). The paradox lies in the fact that either can “murder” or “be murdered” (“the surprising or surprised life-blood” 90) 10

Several passages in the novel have prepared the reader for this birth, the replacement of N. by Idiot Nameless when he reaches the state of self-exile. See, among others, “the ghostly idiot stranger [...] in one’s own breath” (20). The Idiot, Fool or Clown in Harris’s novels finds its origin in the West Indian spider–trickster who identifies with the victim (see The Far Journey of Oudin) and outwits the oppressive authority of the exploiter. He is nameless because associated with the nameless “uninitiated” and because he represents the deep inner reality shared by all men and discovered by breaking down the imprisoning self. Idiot Nameless plays much the same role as the Fool in traditional literature, who, as Enid Welsford explains, is a creator of spiritual freedom: “Clownage,” she writes, “may act as [...] a wholesome nourishment to the sense of spiritual independence of that which would otherwise be the intolerable tyranny of circumstance”; Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber & Faber, 1935): 317.

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and that even an apparently harmless desire for the Other can engulf him (her or it). Hence the mutual self-surrender of Scarecrow and Hebra, which at last makes possible the birth or resurrection of Idiot Nameless. The confession the narrator sends to L. sums up one transformation (of N. and L. into Scarecrow) and foreshadows the other (Scarecrow’s and Hebra’s self-denial). The confession itself is called “The Eye of the Scarecrow” (84), suggesting that to confess is to create the Scarecrow’s double vision. It starts with a reference to Scarecrow’s confession of “murder” but ends with Nameless’s own confession and is signed “I D I O T N A M E L E S S ” (86), as if the very act of confession or self-surrender were itself the doorway to namelessness. Nameless has developed from N.’s continuous shedding of the layers of personality paralleled by increasingly deeper insights into the Other, whose fascination he must also resist. When Nameless writes “It is the consciousness of the continuous erosion of self-made fortifications that is the material of my confession” (86), he is not merely summing up his achievement but describing a process that can have no end. The state of namelessness or “negative identity”11 (101) reached by N. is the ultimate development of that “identity of abandonment” Stevenson was hoping to achieve in Heartland. The void entered by N. as he began his diary, unquestionably accepted or else fought with the blindness of despair by the victims of history, has become a creative dimension. Nameless’s last perception before he reaches complete freedom is of the “CAPACITY and DENSITY ” (88) of the apparent void. The womb he has re-entered ceases to exist as void, and the “unimaginably frail and indistinct” (94) essence (soul, spirit, it) he has discovered through the density of the reconstructed past and the lives of the uninitiate convinces him of the reality of “inner space” (94), which is a vessel at once for past experiences and for future possibilities. Indeed, as an ever-to-be-re-created state, namelessness, a “transparent vehicle of age and youth” (88), implies a dynamic rapport between past and future. There are many expressions of it in the novel as of the “haphazard penetration and shifting movement” (77) across the barrier of opposites that N. feared in his youth 11

Nameless reaches that state when he becomes “hollow artist” (95). Harris’s notion of “negative identity” is related to Keats’s “negative capability,” with which he expresses an affinity in “The Phenomenal Legacy,” Literary Half-Yearly (July 1970): 2, repr. in Explorations, ed. Maes–Jelinek, 43.


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(45). N. had glimpsed this movement in the “dazzling sleeper of spirit” and in Raven’s Head. The latter remains the “ghost of [...] arousal” (83) of Nameless’s growing sensibility and consciousness. To resist the temptation of pinning her down is the very essence of his art: The continuous birth of poetry needs to be more [...] than an imitation of a preservative fluid: it is the life-blood of seeing and responding without succumbing − in the very transparent mobility of consciousness − to what is apparently seen and heard. (97; Harris’s emphasis)

The identification of Raven’s Head with the elusive and fluctuating ground of art is the climax of the transformation of N. from diarist into artist. In The Eye of the Scarecrow, Harris’s intense concern for a genuine, realized community of men coalesces with the elaboration of a new, ‘authentic’ art of fiction; or, more accurately, this concern appears as the source of his art in the structure and narrative texture of the novel. The evocation of concrete, outer-world incidents runs through an intermediate approach to them which combines external with inner perspectives and leads to a wholly inward, abstract, or structural reconstruction of experience. These changes in the mode of perception go together with an increasingly deeper commitment on N.’s part to the “person of obscurity” (101) whose trial he is re-living. His “double vision,” as we have seen, is there from the start, but as an intuition to be realized, and this realization and the interiorization of experience are accompanied by a gradual change in narrative method. N.’s rejection of “self-indulgent realism” (15) in Book I is immediately followed by a breaking-up of the narrative continuity, which expresses a crumbling of the surface reality of existence and offers a glimpse of the “fluid logic of image” (95) that underlies the apparent “confusion of [outer] forms” (57). This discontinuity goes together in Book I I with a juxtaposition of styles12 matching N.’s descriptive recreation of his relationship with L. and his intuitive or visionary percep12

A distinction has been drawn between Harris’s ‘narrative’ and ‘reconstructive’ styles. See Eva Searl’s review of Companions of the Day and Night, Commonwealth Newsletter 9 (January 1976): 52. In Palace of the Peacock, Harris had created a style that conveys together the surface reality of life and its underlying flow, and he used it episodically in the other three novels of the Guyana Quartet. In Heartland, he adumbrates an exclusively ‘reconstructive’ style: i.e. one that refines outer-world experiences into an inner-world, largely symbolic, action. He has perfected this style in The Eye of the Scarecrow.

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tions of the nameless dimension. There are frequent shifts from the comparatively straightforward re-creation of an outer reality to a reconstruction of symbolic actions or manifestations that refer back to that outer reality. This second manner is further developed in Book I I I . The characters have by then become symbolic figures in the explorer’s consciousness (the dreamer/the driver, “rich man or poor man, customer, artist or engineer” 83) or they are reduced to “I” and “he,” “one” and “the other,” the essential agents in any human relationship, and duality is then expressed through a shift in point of view. The action is wholly symbolic, too, “refined” into a mere outline of significant movements. At this stage N. has become the “medium of capacity” (14) he set out to discover, the vehicle of a mobile consciousness and imagination sharing (or aiming at) the unborn state of eclipsed existences. From the static void of the figures of his youth to the “living” void of namelessness, the narrator has been probing the very source of creativeness and the possibilities of language. The MANIFESTO OF THE UNBORN STATE OF EXILE that concludes his quest is an epitome of this exploration and recapitulates its main discoveries. It describes language as the other expression of the “medium of capacity,” the organ of the nameless imagination: language alone can express (in a way which goes beyond any physical or vocal attempt) the sheer – the ultimate “silent” and “immaterial” complexity of arousal. [...]. It is the sheer mystery − the impossibility of trapping its own grain − on which poetry lives and thrives. And this is the stuff of one’s essential understanding of the reality of the original Word, the Well of Silence. (95)13

In his description of the role of language, Nameless insists on its fluidity (“the impossibility of trapping its own grain”) and its transforming power. We have witnessed the gradual metamorphosis of the scarecrow from a “dead” into a “living” image expressing a dynamic relationship. Nameless also emphasizes the capacity of language to transform what is, ironically, unconscious and blind into an illuminating “scale.” At several points in the novel, either L. or Raven’s Head illumines N.’s consciousness in a flash, and the flash itself is “living distinctive otherness” (101). At the end

13

In the three parts of the novel, there are as many references to silence as to the void, and the two must be linked. Like the void, silence becomes creative.


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of the Manifesto, “the other” (again L. and Raven’s Head linked together) emerges once more and immediately subsides in Nameless’s consciousness. The groping for the Other starts all over again through The Black Rooms of VISIONARY COMPANY and GENESIS and ends with the POSTSCRIPT OF FAITH IN DARK ROOM OF IDENTITY , offered as an answer to the nihilism and despair that prevailed at the beginning of the quest. There is no end to that quest, however. Raven’s Head represents a condition “into which we are still to be born” (107), which perhaps, as N.’s terror of the conversion into namelessness shows, can never be fully or finally entered, though it can be glimpsed and responded to in a way that alters the fundamental polarizations of existence. What is open to a man is the midway course made accessible by his normally partial vision: The drama of consciousness in which we were involved, part-knowing, partunknowing, dim and voluntary, illuminating and involuntary, was infinite and concrete, simple and complex at the same time. (81)

II The “Unborn State of Exile”14

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of expatriation experienced by Caribbean man at different periods of his history Wilson Harris has developed his own original conception of exile, which is central to his thought and characteristically possesses a negative and a positive side. The Guyana Quartet already abounds in exiles who were the victims of conquest: the Amerindian folk fleeing their land in Palace of the Peacock, the Caribs in The Whole Armour, and Poseidon and the descendants of runaway slaves in The Secret Ladder – all are exiles living

14

UT OF THE MANY FORMS

This essay was read at a conference entitled “The Commonwealth Writer Overseas,” which took place at the University of Stirling between 2 and 5 April 1975. The theme of exile was particularly relevant to Caribbean literature, and, from its very beginning, has been one of its major concerns, whether writers deal with the consequences of eviction and deportation in the past or voluntary expatriation in the present.

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ignored and neglected beyond the pale of institutionalized society. Already in these novels, the protagonist’s fulfilment depends on his capacity to rediscover those who were forced away from home under the pressure of circumstance, and to create with them a dialogue that would serve as a starting-point for a new community. In The Eye of the Scarecrow, exile is more obviously an inner psychological state which also combines a philosophical dimension with a self-reflexive meditation on the art of fiction, which Harris sees as in great need of an approach specific to the Caribbean and not a mere imitation of the English tradition. I am hoping to show that a voluntary, imaginative going into exile is for Harris a redeeming spiritual pursuit that must contribute to a reunification of modem man’s divided inner being and to greater harmony in a broken world. I shall illustrate this proposition by discussing The Eye of the Scarecrow. That exile deliberately chosen need not dry up the creative imagination − and each man for Harris is a potential artist or artisan of his own consciousness − is obvious in his own achievement,15 particularly those novels which, like Black Marsden and Companions of the Day and Night, set respectively in Edinburgh and Mexico, show such sympathetic understanding of other peoples’ cultures. Significantly, in The Eye of the Scarecrow a remembered vision of Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth starts in the narrator a train of memories all linked up with his Guyanese past. The heights and depths of the Scottish landscape, “the reluctant smoke of sky and carriage of earth [...] drawn into singular consciousness of each other” (13), urge him to discover the beginning of a similarly open dialogue within himself between the fragments of his earlier life. In the first part of the novel, the first-person nameless narrator (N.) juxtaposes in his diary apparently unrelated memories of public and private events between 1929 and 1964. He re-creates this period without any regard for chronology. As a result, the familiar logic of events from which the meaning of life usually arises is shattered. But, on closer examination, the map of Georgetown on which the narrator’s memories are charted reveals subtle similarities between events and between attitudes or states within people who seem to have nothing in common. These latent connections are conveyed through a few basic metaphors. The scarecrow, for instance, suggests a crumbling of the individual personality (first 15

In this respect, he has much in common with James Joyce; for both, their native land is an endless source of creativity.

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glimpsed by N. in his friend L.); it evokes equally the disintegration of the colonial power in Guyana, as personified by the scarecrow figure of the very ill Governor of the colony. In addition, the scarecrow represents the void which is the inner reality of so many men’s lives. It can be a spiritual or psychological emptiness (the inner breakdown experienced by N. in 1948), but it is also the state of unawareness that characterizes educated men (such as L.) as much as those who live in a materially bare world like the Water Street beggars and the poor tenants of Waterloo Street (see “the hollow darkness of their room,” 30). Moreover, the dispossessed are themselves reduced to mere nothingness because practically non-existent, invisible to their more privileged fellowmen. Another image evoking the unreality of the poor is the closed-in hearse which in N.’s childhood used to bear away the “nameless paupers” of Georgetown and aroused in the sensitive child the suspicion that it was empty. Another funeral procession which returns to N.’s mind is that of the shot-at demonstrators of the Guyana strike of 1948 pressing along the foreshore on what used to be plantation ground (hence reminiscent of slavery). They have vanished from the human scene, their individual lives unacknowledged and unrecorded, consumed by an ideal “which bore such a close, almost virtuous, resemblance to the unprejudiced reality of freedom” (18–19). Freedom is symbolized by the ghost of a runaway slave, trapped in death while trying to escape, whom N. as a child imagined he saw hanging from a tree outside his grandfather’s house. It is the enslavement (masked by self-deception) rather than the potentialities of freedom that he now discerns in the lives of those who haunt his consciousness. He remembers in particular one occasion when he and L. were playfully looking at their “flock of reflections” in the canal at the very place where he used to see the hanged slave. N. suddenly pushes L. into the water to use him as a gauge. It never occurrs to his friend that he has been pushed, just as years later he is unaware of being driven into action by another and remains blind to his instrumentality. Three years after this incident, N. escapes death after a serious operation and feels so relieved that he, too, is trapped in illusory strength and freedom while actually becoming “a slave to the futility of hardness” (the hardness of all that is fixed and established). From the three related metaphors of the scarecrow, the funeral procession and the hanged slave, three related groups of opposites emerge: life and death (including the living death of the unaware and the unseen);

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freedom and slavery; truth and self-deception. N.’s declared purpose as he begins his diary is to discover what he calls a “freedom of being” and to create, as we have seen, “an open dialogue within which a free construction of events will emerge in the medium of phenomenal associations all expanding into a mental distinction and life of their own” (13; emphases mine). Rather than let the past fall into a predetermined mould, he will “travel with the flood of animated wreckage” (15), the relics of the past, which, as “flood” and “animated” suggest, are still alive: they are part and parcel of the fluctuating ground of existence and are indissociable from the consciousness they are helping to shape. If N.’s reminiscences bring to light a series of missed opportunities or “misconceived beginnings,” they also hint at the resilience of the past and at the chances it offers of re-interpretation from different angles. Since it is in the individual consciousness alone that the past can live on as fluid substance, only N. as an individual can experience the crumbling of self-created defences that will free him from earlier prejudices and make possible the birth of a new vision. A first clue to the way in which vision arises is given in the central part of the novel, called “Genesis,” which probes deeper into the meaning of re-created experience. Shortly after the recovery that has given him a new sense of security, young N. and his friend L. play at fashioning figures of mud. Disappointed at L.’s reluctance “to enter into the spirit of the game of beginning to make everything new” (39), N. sees his friend to the street: At last I turned and began to make my way back to the house; and stopped at the place where he and I had crouched, now scarcely able to believe the thing I created with my own eyes out of one of the pieces he had made and discarded on the ground. For an incredible instant all the sap of life rose anew. [...] here was the beginning I sought, the old in the new, whether [L.] was capable of seeing it or sensing it or not. [...] It was all there, the problematic creation and bewildering scale of our lives. (39–40; emphases mine)

Here in a nutshell is the arousal of vision explored in the novel. N. first sees the mud figures as lifeless because they are the product of L.’s apparent woodenness. Then the very joylessness with which they have been made strikes him “like a curious revelation of mystical sorrow” (41). That is to say, he discovers the subjective element written into their wooden appearance, the distress due to the imposition of his will on L. and to the latter’s submission. “I felt cold and strange,” he writes, “a religious

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stranger to all previous knowledge of emotion; and emotion – in such a void or context − became new, liberating’ (41, author’s emphases). In other words, his new sensitiveness to the immaterial element discovered within the concrete figures has liberated N. from his quick assumption of L’s indifference, and the void created has left room for a new emotion to arise that frees him from his earlier blindness. L.’s very unawareness of the “inarticulate protest” (41) in his figures, similar to the unconscious protesting eloquence of the beggars (17), makes it clear to N. that one can unwittingly inflict pain on someone who does not himself see in what way he is being exploited or frustrated. Once he understands that his new way of looking at the figures has transformed the apparently uninspired product of L’s hands, N. is able to relate himself to him in a new way and to see that together his friend’s achievement and his own vision of it offer the possibility of a new dialogue between them. There is in “Genesis” a juxtaposing of two periods in N.’s past (“twice sixteen years of ‘ebb and flow’” 34) which speak to him as two separate areas of experience; they also seem to address each other as they foreshadow or echo N. and L’s insights and self-deceptions over the recreated period. When the two friends find themselves as adults in the “jungle of conception” during their nine-month expedition into the interior, they are still what they were as children: N.’s obsessive self-questioning and enquiries into the mystery inherent in all facts contrasts with L’s acceptance of things as they are, an attitude that links L. with all the poor or ignorant characters in the novel. However, family and psychological ties between them are so inextricable that N. can only define himself in relation to his friend, who now serves him not as a physical but as a psychological gauge. In the jungle, N. makes another discovery which suggests that the mysterious sometimes breaks spontaneously to the surface of the visible world or of consciousness. As he stands with L. on a suspension bridge, he becomes aware of the alternate concretization and dissolution of forms discernible in all life: A ripple, a footprint almost, appeared in the middle of the water and vanished. I stood still and waited. [...] the body of the stream ceased to breathe, growing still as the mound of sleeping sand, the contours of which I saw, fiery and distinct, in the middle of the river; in fact the river over the sand bank was a glittering shell and enclosure, a coffin of transparency, skeleton-key deep, the colour of its shallow bed like the hot blast of snow. The dazzling sleeper of

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spirit, exposed within the close elements, the refraction and proximity of sun and water, awoke all too suddenly and slid, in a flash, like speechless gunfire, from crown to toe, along the slowly reddening whiteness of the sand, turning darker still like blood as it fell; and ultimately black as the river-bottom descended, vanishing into a ripple, a dying footfall again, darting across the deep roadway of water and rising once more, distinct web and trace of animation upon a flank of stone. (48–49)

The sudden awakening and subsiding of “the dazzling sleeper of spirit” in nature (the mysterious dimension at the heart of all life) corresponds to the ebbing and flowing of layers of past experience in N.’s consciousness, a movement also characteristic of Raven’s Head, the mining town L. has been commissioned to re-locate because it is said to contain rich gold deposits. Raven’s Head is one of those “mysterious locations [that] had been plumbed to disappear and return once more into the undisclosed astronomical wealth of the jungle” (54). It is also the name given to Hebra, the prostitute the two men send for, who identifies with all the victims of men’s will. Although at first N. and L. take her for granted, we see that she, too, wants to come to life in her own right. When he becomes aware of the blind lust he and L. “sought [...] to perpetrate upon her, all alone, without conceiving of the shameful (or shameless) existence of another” (52), N. begins to see her and those who like her are kept under as the “unborn folk” or, as L. says later, “THE UNINITIATE ” (103). This expression refers to all who are excluded from privileged society as well as to the victims of man-willed or natural catastrophes, people who are invisible to the rest of mankind, since so little account is taken of them. By assimilating Hebra to the elusive Raven’s Head, N. shows that she can move and emerge to the surface of real life. N. and L.’s efforts to reach Raven’s Head merge with her own ‘surfacing’ to form the double movement necessary for any genuine relationship: eyes opening to the mysterious reality of the other, which, concealed as it may be within the jungle of appearances, will sometimes pierce through and come into view. Hence the necessity for N. to be attentive to the emergence of that reality, or to try and meet it, breaking down appearances in order to discover it in others without whom he must remain incomplete. As he later writes, he wants to get rid of self-indulgence and acquire enough insight “to sympathize with the derangement of all creatures within history and circumstances who wander the face of the earth as if they were the ‘living’

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unfulfilled part of oneself and one were the ‘dead’ fulfilled expression of their self” (102). It seems to me that the capacity to perceive and to follow beyond the static world the original movement of life and death in the conjunction and parting of the visible and the invisible (or to perceive it within any form of opposites) is what Wilson Harris means by “freedom of being.” It is the freedom to move fluidly without imprisoning oneself or others within preconceived frames. Significantly, N.’s journey of reconnaissance into the “jungle of conception” serves to chart “a new map of the fluid role of instinct” (76). The third part of the novel, called “Raven’s Head,” re-creates the voyage to the mining town, which eventually enables N. to perceive “THE DAWN OF FREEDOM ” (95). Although Raven’s Head is never described or shown to have a material existence (except on the ancient photographs of ruins taken by L.), it clearly emerges as the meetingground between N. and others or ‘the Other’. If N. keeps reminding himself of the biblical phrase In my Father’s house are many mansions, it is because Raven’s Head can take all possible shapes. There are also many approaches to it, which roughly correspond to the travellers’ attitude in life. But the way to Raven’s Head is necessarily a regression into a formerly neglected territory, whether the inner subterranean black rooms of the unconscious or the dark recesses of a still wild and primitive outer world. N. and L. are hindered in their progress by obstacles that are obviously facets of their own character. Since the beginning of Book I I I , they have merged into one persona, the driver of the expedition. When a crash occurs, they are clearly colliding with a concrete embodiment of their own ineptitude. There are several accounts of the journey and of what happens once they reach the proximity of Raven’s Head, the country of exile and of the “unborn folk,” but these are not mutually exclusive. They weave together the processes of dislocation and awakening vision described in the first two parts, and they present in different lights discoveries made through various modes of perception; each account further develops or gives a new emphasis to insights already gained. In the dream version of the journey, the “CRASH ,” due to a collision between the driver’s car and a cow, kills the cow and shatters the driver’s “own barrier of stupidity and indifference” (68). In N.’s diary, however, it seems to have derived from a quarrel between himself and L. over Hebra, whom N. murders in order to

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possess her more completely. In the earlier version, his blindness is accidentally exploded and he does not feel responsible for the death of the animal. In the diary version, his responsibility for the death of Hebra cannot be evaded. What matters is that, through his imaginative experience of the deaths he has caused, he is made to share the condition of all who have been stunned either by the hazards of life (the cow) or by encounters of a personal or historical nature (Hebra); this opens N.’s eyes to the livingness of apparently lifeless people. The crash in this novel is an imaginative reconstruction of catastrophe, showing that collisions between persons and peoples need not be wholly destructive and can be turned into creative encounters. For N., it is the turning-point in his quest for freedom. He is now aware of a frontier of existence upon which a boy and his grandfather emerge who belong to the “flock of himself” and are opposite reflections of his being.16 Their “indistinct dialogue,” which he had previously ignored but to which he now feels compelled to listen, recalls the “dialogue of genesis” (43) between similar personae whom he had struck and banished from his consciousness as a boy. On the other side of the frontier of existence (the side usually called death), N. sees the accumulated heritage of the past: And it is from this stunned, breathless, post-mortem [...] vision of recollection that a conception − or misconception − of the reality of the thing emerges after centuries, ages of haphazard penetration and shifting movement it seems. (77)

To offer “misconception” as an alternative to “conception” may seem surprising, since one might expect N. to find Truth on the other side of life. But the Other whose condition he now shares also alternates between blindness and insight. N. himself says: “we (one obscure member of us, at any rate) may stumble [...] in the end [...] upon the flashing settlement and page of truth” (77). The truth he discovers, however, is that there is no fixed, no final, truth. This is an essential notion in Wilson Harris’s vision of life and death. “The centre shifts,” he wrote in an early poem.17 His characters do not make discoveries of an infallible or comfortable nature. Just as N. earlier saw the appearance and disappearance of “the dazzling sleeper of spirit,” so he now opens his eyes to an alternative process of birth and death, of appearance and disappearance of life. Death here is the 16 17

Cf. “Man and boy, age and youth speaking together” (Palace of the Peacock 28). “In Memoriam 1948,” Kyk-Over-Al 2.7 (December 1948): 6.

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state of those who are not seen, of involuntary and voluntary exile; it is the state of the unborn, who will sometimes come to life of their own accord or be brought to life by someone else’s vision. By relating the emergence of the Other upon the slate of consciousness or its eradication from it with the natural alternation of life and death, Harris points to the possibility of modifying the apparently relentless polarizations of ordinary life. He does not optimistically suggest that they can be done away with altogether, only that to do away with the main source of evil: i.e. conquest as an art of devouring or possessing others and imposing one’s will on them, to do away with this is to open up a breakthrough to a new community and develop a sense of unity. I have so far referred to N. as the one who after the crash moves further and further away from his familiar self. But by the time he reaches the void (or state of death) from which he is to emerge again as from a womb, he is no longer the narrator writing his diary but the “Idiot Nameless” interpreting their common experience for L. It seems that self-exile passes by the Other but aims through him at a state which is neither the self nor the Other yet is potentially both. When N. has been hollowed of all that he was, he at last becomes a medium through which open dialogue between opposites can emerge. As “Idiot Nameless” he is also the scarecrow, that seemingly unreal being willing to atone for the murder of Hebra and the guilt of the community, as the uninitiate so often do. He has reached, then, the “ground of loss” of all the scarecrows and depressed beggars of his youth. Although it frightens him, he agrees to this “self-mutilation and self-extension” (84) − mutilation of what one is and extension into what one is not. He agrees to this because he realizes that only self-surrender can free him from the deadly instinct of possessiveness. Throughout the “drama of consciousness,” N. has had glimpses of what he refers to as I T , the unnamed reality at the core of appearances. I T takes many forms in Harris’s fiction. Anyone familiar with Palace of the Peacock will remember the pale moon-patch on the water and the description of I T during Donne’s ascent of the waterfall as “the atom, the very nail of moment in the universe” (130). Possibly, I T is the moving centre. In The Eye of the Scarecrow, it appears to change with the altering vision of N. I T is at first the violated feelings of the exploited of the past written into their achievements and “rising anew out of the [...] melting pot of history” (49) as if crying for release; it is also described as “the accumulative ironies of the past, the virtuous rubbish-heap and self-parody of ancestors

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in death” (56) − ironies, because it is ironical that this very rubbish-heap should contain I T , the nameless dimension. It then becomes the scale N. felt he needed and has been looking for in order to construct a new age (75). It is also described as “a crumbling scarecrow [... possessing] nevertheless a backbone and a single eye” (75), the inner eye capable of dispossessing the outer, physical eye and of dispersing illusions. Finally I T confesses or attests to “a continuous and miraculous conception of ‘living’ and ‘dead’ nature, rehabilitation of the lost One, the unrealized One, the inarticulate One” (108). By implication, I T attests to the endurance of Raven’s Head (the vestiges of the past and the never-dying need to explore them). The novel ends with the MANIFESTO OF THE UNBORN STATE OF EXILE written from NIGHT’S BRIDGE (bridge of night) by Idiot Nameless. The “Manifesto” is a poetic statement which sums up the creative process of consciousness in which N. and L. have been involved. It still contains many questions, because the mystery of life or of “origins” cannot be elucidated, however far or deeply one travels towards it. Hence the importance of intuition in N.’s voyage of discovery. Despite its many questions, the manifesto offers an answer to the anguish and despair that guilt and fear of the void, fear of the future also, have aroused in N. at various stages. The answer demands that he (or man in general) should use his imagination to give movement to the static achievements and eclipsed figures of the past that it was tempting to preserve as they had always been, for the illusion of security they gave. It is this use of the imagination that Harris was describing in a talk he once gave in Liège, when he said that “vision is a curiously active potential, a moving threshold of consciousness through the doorway of reflected [i.e., passive] objects.”18 The manifesto of Idiot Nameless starts with a declaration of faith in language and the “the original Word, the Well of Silence” (95), about which he also writes that “silence” which language alone can evoke, [is] a depthlessness of sound heard and digested in the blood-stream of the mind which is the closest one can come to entering the reality of the living circulation of the “dead.” (97) 18

Emphasis mine. This sentence is quoted from notes I took when Harris was speaking. The substance of his talk was published in “Reflection and Union,” in Commonwealth Literature and the Modern World, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek (Brussels: Didier, 1974): 15–19.

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By saying “it is the closest one can come,” Nameless not only emphasizes the difficulty of reaching the Other and what lies beyond, he also suggests that one does not finally reach that beyond. Or, as he further explains, identifying oneself with “the person of obscurity” is the closest one can come to the “living distinctive otherness” (101) which may or may not respond to one’s quest. This brings us back to Raven’s Head and its duality: it was first described as “person of obscurity” and a real though elusive settlement; it now emerges as “the Raven’s Head in which we are still to be born like creatures who may learn to dwell in a state of penetrative relationship and self-exile” (107). This is the Raven’s Head N. never reaches consciously, although he hopes he has discovered a capacity “to resume [...] the potential ground of self-exile, the unborn state of the world” (100). I hope to have made it clear that exile in Wilson Harris’s fiction is an imaginative distancing from one’s known identity with the double purpose of understanding oneself and the Other, who may have been waiting at the door of life. It is not a fixed goal but a continuous progress through the moving contrasts of existence. This, for Harris, is clearly the way in which a genuinely revolutionary future can be built. The Eye of the Scarecrow reaches no definite conclusion. Nameless recalls at the end the black rooms he has visited, and the process of remembering seems to start all over again, for there is no end to the need for “assessment and reassessment” of what he calls “the burden of individual guilt and collective history” (108). Nameless concludes with his POSTSCRIPT OF FAITH IN DARK ROOM OF IDENTITY . The postscript is addressed to L., who, as the Other, is part of the “inviolable soul or presence” in which they have briefly met (a reminder of the climax in Palace of the Peacock). The title of the postscript suggests two explanations: one, that Nameless is in the dark room of identity when he writes it and therefore still engaged in his endless quest for an equally nameless other; the other, that he has faith in the dark room of identity, in his namelessness, as conducive to “‘new’ community” (101). Already in Palace of the Peacock, Harris had used the word “nameless” to link together the many shapes of otherness and to denote a “kinship and identity” beyond national and racial identities. In The Eye of the Scarecrow, this “kinship and [nameless] identity” are related to the attainment of freedom when the crumbling of the fixed and labelled personality opens the way to vision and creation:

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The education of freedom − (and you have been one of my unconscious tutors in whom and with whom I grew into the heart of “negative” identity [...]) − begins with a confession of the need to lose the base concretion men seek to impose when they talk of one’s “native” land (or another’s) as if it were fixed and anchored in place. In this age and time, one’s native land (and the other’s) is always crumbling: crumbling within a capacity of vision which rediscovers [...] the constructive secret of creation wherever one happens to be. (101–102)

This statement is clearly a warning against isolation and immobility within a homogeneous identity, whether national or private, to which Harris opposes the negative identity his character has arrived at. Again, “negative identity” is an open and dynamic condition which, as already suggested, leads away from the self towards the Other but implies resistance to the fascination exerted by the latter. In Black Marsden, which takes up and counterpoints the theme of The Eye of the Scarecrow, Goodrich, the main character, feels compelled to resist just this kind of fascination when Black Marsden, beggar in one world and would-be dictator in another, threatens to engulf him and to imprint his own (Marsden’s) face on him. There is as great a need as in the earlier novel to work out a genuine “philosophy of revolution” on the very scene into which the exploited have vanished. But discovery is taken a step further; it becomes a twoway process in which retreat from the Other is as necessary as advance, so that the awakening to the Other’s existence described in The Eye of the Scarecrow is set within a broader perspective, and is only one phase in the alternating movement of advance and retreat. Horizons are also widened within the character’s consciousness. Goodrich’s inner theatre corresponds to the global theatre of mankind. When he visits Namless country, he sees a landscape in which the contrasts of Scotland and South America have merged. He also observes signposts of tropical and Mediterranean civilization. The frequency with which sky and sea or sky and earth in the vicinity of Edinburgh evoke contrasts in other landscapes and cultures, or the contrasts within the world, points to the scope of Wilson Harris’s vision and the way in which imagination in his novel bridges apparently irreconcilable elements: “In the comedy of an interfused reading of the elements a capacity for genesis is born or reborn within us: a capacity [...] to re-sensitize our biased globe


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into moveable squares within and beyond every avalanche of greed or despair [...]....”19

Once again, this capacity to re-think the world is linked to the individual’s freedom of being, the sense of being ‘alone’ that Goodrich experiences after his vision. Then he is animated with the same spirit as the piper who warned him to retreat from Namless. It is the spirit of survival that Wilson Harris hears in the Scottish pipes as in the Carib flute of bone.

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19

Harris, Black Marsden (a tabula rasa comedy) (London: Faber & Faber, 1972): 66.


9

T

The Waiting Room A Primordial Species of Fiction

S U S A N F O R R E S T A L , which serves as a starting-point for the adventure in consciousness that plays itself out in The Waiting Room, is told by the author in an introductory note. Susan is a woman in her early forties who became totally blind after three eye-operations. Some twelve to twenty years before this (the timespan is left deliberately vague), she was the mistress of a man whom she deeply loved and who left her after a violent quarrel. He disappeared into the heartland and was never heard of again. Susan married another man when she was already blind but, in spite of his attentive care and oversolicitousness, she continued to be haunted by the memory of her lover. With both men she kept an antique shop, which was destroyed with most of their belongings by an explosion that killed Susan and her husband. Only their diary or logbook survives, though partly obliterated. The novel is a reconstruction of the substance of this diary. It is easy enough to piece together the known facts of Susan’s existence and to trace her growing awareness that through most of her adult life she has self-deceptively posed as a victim and ignored her own possessiveness. But to be content with this would be to reduce the novel to “the self-sufficient story line”1 of conventional fiction that Harris rejects. Joyce Adler, in her excellent pioneer review of The Waiting Room, and Michael Gilkes have both drawn attention to the community of thought between this novel and Harris’s critical essays on fiction in Tradition, the Writer and Society.2 I shall refer the reader mainly to the essay “The 1

HE STORY OF

Tradition, the Writer and Society, 55. Joyce Adler, “The Art of Wilson Harris,” first published by New Beacon Books (1968), then in Exploring the “Palace of the Peacock”: Essays on Wilson Harris, ed. 2

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Writer and Society,” drawing attention to two sentences in the first paragraph, which can be read as a summing-up of Harris’s purpose in The Waiting Room: I shall try to trace what I perceive to be the outlines of a drama of consciousness in which the writer is involved as both a passive and a creative agent. It is as if within his work he sets out again and again across a certain territory of primordial but broken recollection in search of a community or species of fiction whose existence he begins to discern.3

“Community or species of fiction” indicates that Harris abolishes all distinction between the reality he evokes (community) and the evocation itself (species of fiction). Fiction does not merely ‘represent’ reality; it is reality, conveyed by a self-effaced writer who, as the “Author’s Note” in The Waiting Room shows, sees himself as a mere agent through whom the characters’ experience re-enacts itself. Whereas in the passage just quoted Harris emphasizes the role of the novelist “in search of a [...] species of fiction,” in the “Author’s Note” he insists, rather, on the independent existence of that fiction. Just as the narrator in The Eye of the Scarecrow hopes that “a free construction of events will emerge” from his recollection, so “W.H.,” the author or ‘editor’ of the Forrestals’ diary, sees in the material it records “a natural medium of invocation in its own right.”4 There is thus a reciprocal movement of the writer and his material (whether characters or the content of their consciousness) towards each other, which corresponds to a similar movement between the characters and the ghosts who people their inner being. There is no identification between the author and the central consciousness in the novel. Rather, as all characters live through him, they become in turn “agents of [his] personality”5 and thereby help abolish its limitations. The serial enlargement of the author’s and his characters’ personality through the retrieval of buried existences is partly what Harris means when he equates the re-creation of community with fiction. Seen from another angle, this equation is linked with Harris’s attempt to avoid “consolidation”: i.e., sharply defined, self-sufficient characters, as well as the Irving Adler (Mona, Jamaica: U P of the West Indies, 2003): 12–21; Michael Gilkes, Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel (London: Longman Caribbean, 1975): 113–19. 3 Tradition, the Writer and Society, 48 (emphases mine). 4 Harris, The Waiting Room, 10. Further page references are in the main text. 5 “Interview with Wilson Harris,” in Kas-Kas, 53.

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formalization into one given view of reality of one possibility of narrative development to the exclusion of all others. One finds instead in Harris’s fiction, particularly in The Waiting Room, a fluid, protean reality and characters attempting to break down the contours of personality in order to realize (i.e., conceive and achieve) their participation in a common being and consciousness. In The Eye of the Scarecrow, the narrator sheds his identity in order to reach namelessness and he does this by reconstructing the same events at increasingly deeper levels of his psyche. He discovers a series of alter egos in the form of animal substitutes, an old man, and a young boy, and, finally, the archetypal dreamer and driver. At that stage he has become “primordial character [or] species of fiction.”6 In other words, he has reached, temporarily and with one part of himself only, a state in which, to the extent that he relinquishes his identity, he partakes of a pre-individualized, pre-historical consciousness common to all men. The Waiting Room begins and largely takes place where The Eye of the Scarecrow ends, on the threshold of “primordial fiction” – the threshold only, because, as the endings of Harris’s novels show, man cannot and should not surrender finally to namelessness, hence genuine community can never be completed. The novel concentrates on the borderline between basic opposites: life/death, identity/non identity, consciousness/ unconsciousness, as well as between the manifold expressions of male and female being. It is important to remember that the word primordial is used, both in Harris’s essays on fiction and in this novel, in the double sense of primeval and fundamental and that these inseparable connotations refer to the form and content of the narrative. With respect to both, the novel is stripped of all inessentials. It is pure, quintessential fiction in which, to use Wallace Stevens’s words, “reality changes from substance to subtlety.”7 Through the exploration of basic human relationships it lays bare the most fundamental instincts and feelings (such as possessiveness, love, and hate), tracing them to compulsions, now unconscious, among the residua or archaic existence in every man’s psyche. It is naked, elemental existence that Harris conveys here, though in the light of earlier novels it clearly corresponds to what has so far been presented as either alien, apparently nonexistent, or ‘dead’ within man and outside him.

6 7

Tradition, the Writer and Society, 48. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951): 174.

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This novel also fulfils Paul Valéry’s never-achieved aim of writing “un roman cérébral et sensuel.”8 There is not only fusion between thought and feeling but, as will be shown, the expression of thought (particularly the concept of community) through sensuous imagery. The characters assume various forms of being as they re-enact the crucial phases of their relationship. “W.H.” writes in the “Author’s Note”: By fiction I do not mean to deny certain literal foundations but rather to affirm these absolutely as a mutual bank or living construction of events. (9)

Susan Forrestal is physically present throughout, although her presence is rendered more concretely in the second part of the novel. As suggested, she is obsessed with the memory of her relationship with her lover. The sexual act and the gestures of love make up the best part of what Harris calls “literal foundations.” The manner of their rendering, however, changes with the symbolic metamorphoses of the characters in Susan’s consciousness. Susan and her lover are woman and man making love, but their embrace is rendered through a multitude of natural forms, as a few examples serve to show. He is day and she is night (25). In one passage she is at first the sea “foaming white far under him around each black penis of rock,” then “a flowering plant lying crushed beneath him,” and finally a “wave of land beneath him” (29–30). Later she is seen on a cosmic scale as a teardrop” (46), which is actually the earth, for Susan’s consciousness is also “skull of the world” or “universal waiting room” (22), and in the drama she enacts with her lover, they are the “dramatis personae of the universe” (50). Not only do these images reveal the nature of Susan’s relationship with her lover, they suggest as well that there is a sexuality of the elements in the cosmos9 and illustrate Harris’s view of a universe in which there is no sharp division between forms of life and their function. Another aspect of community, this time between animate and inanimate being, is conveyed by one of the basic images in the novel, that of Susan as sail and deck of her lover’s vessel (19). At the climax of their intercourse, each “embrace[s] and [is] held in turn by a ‘deaf’ mast”

8

“A cerebral and sensual novel,” quoted in Paul Valéry, La Jeune Parque (Paris: Gallimard, 1974): 142. Note also the parallel between Harris’s conception of the novelist as agent and Valéry’s remark: “Il se fait des contes en moi,” “Tales write themselves in me” (tr. mine). 9 This is also clear in Harris’s later novel Jonestown.

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(47). This is both Susan and her lover holding and held by her/his partner, who as “‘deaf’ mast” or flesh is an unconscious but saving Other. The Waiting Room has two parts, “The Void” and “The Vortex.” In a sense, the characters move in the void from beginning to end. Since Susan is blind, even the room in which she sits, the material locale of her life with her husband, must give her a sensation of void. Geographically, it is placeless, its location in memory street (seen in the reconstruction as “void of memory”) having a primarily symbolic significance. The void is also Susan’s condition of disorientation after her lover’s departure and after her eye-operations; and at a further remove it is the state from which the ‘dead’ characters are revived by the author. Finally, the void is to be linked with the “positive fiction of nothingness” (10) Susan sees in her lover. The paradoxical juxtaposition of “positive” with “nothingness” points to the transformation of a sterile condition into a “living one.” This takes place in the waiting room – Susan’s room on the literal level and a metaphor for her consciousness and imagination and even for the universe, the three (actual room, consciousness, universe) representing the three overlapping planes on which the “drama” occurs. This vessel of transformation is, throughout, itself a protean symbol, whose many metamorphoses must be traced in order to follow the movements of consciousness it harbours. At the beginning of the novel, for instance, Susan indicts her lover in the “convertible void of the waiting room” (20; her consciousness), while at the end the waiting room is a cavern and a womb (still Susan’s consciousness) in which her lover achieves vision. While tracing its metamorphoses, one soon realizes that the waiting room is both the seat of a specific function and the function itself, the two sometimes presented together as in “late room, early capacity” (25), “unpredictable room, unearthly function” (45), “curious vessel – mnemonic device” (52), or, conversely, “Dream and capacity. WAITING ROOM ” (76). This reminds us that the object of exploration in Harris’s fiction is always its own instrument. Moreover, the waiting room is the symbol in which time and space merge: “the ‘waiting room’ part-present, part-past, part-future was falling through the dust of space” (54). The association of Susan’s consciousness with the waiting room needs to be qualified. Susan is the muse who initiates the process of memory, but the characters she brings to life in her “drama of consciousness” have an existence of their own. Her first gesture is one of self-effacement:

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Susan Forrestal was blind. She drew the palm of her hand slowly across her face as if to darken her own image, and to discover therein another sun of personality. (15)

As soon as she has brought her nameless lover (the other “sun of personality”) into being, the consciousness becomes his, then shifts from one to the other, and in the second chapter lies with an impersonal “one,” which is neither Susan nor her lover, though it partakes of both. This shift in consciousness repeats itself throughout Book I (Susan’s husband does not appear in the narrative until Book I I ). The point I am driving at, one that is consistent with Harris’s view of his characters as “agents” of consciousness, is that the waiting room does not represent the consciousness of one character only; it is Susan’s but it is also her lover’s and, as Joyce Adler rightly points out, the novel progresses “to a climax of inner discoveries that enable each to enter the imagination and consciousness of the other.”10 Furthermore, the waiting room is the nameless condition out of which Susan’s memory retrieves her lover, “A room one shared with the thief of all ages” (21). As a disembodied memory or “sheer phenomenon of sensibility” (11), the lover is referred to as “he” throughout the novel. However, the evocation of his memory or of the essence of his personality inevitably revives the real man as well: “the growing shelter [...] he began to suffer turned [...] into a total presence he regained and knew. Like a garment – necessary and binding and absurd – ‘he’ had forgotten he still carried or wore” (16). As already mentioned, the novel takes place on the borderline between opposites, among which are the actual and the “quintessential” personalities of Susan and her lover. The waiting room is a twodimensional reality which contains these and all other opposites: The waiting room was saturated with warm blood and chill: the dim senses of birth, the remote senses of death, the cold and hungry senses of love. (21)

The substance of Book I is the gradual transformation of the liaison and its rupture from the source of frustration it was before and after the lover’s departure into a life-giving relationship. Book I I counterpoints Book I and shows that the lover was as ill-treated by Susan as she was by him. It also deals with the lovers’ conscious apprehension of the transformation that took place in Book I . Although the first four chapters of the novel recall their alienating quarrels, each contains a moment of illumination 10

Adler, “The Art of Wilson Harris,” 17.

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and gives evidence of the community of being which it is the purpose of the process of memory to realize. There are moments of repulsion and attraction, of antagonism and coming-together within the larger serial illumination and the ever-deepening spiral of Susan’s memory. In both its positive and negative aspects, the relationship is reciprocal: each is the other’s “shadow” (16, 19), but the lover still fears Susan’s possessiveness, while she feels he still arouses in her contradictory feelings of hate and love. They are locked in mutual accusation, although Susan is the more vindictive, working herself up to a climax of indignation and “Indict[ing] him out of her sightless eyes” (20). Yet at the height of her wrath her cry “Thief. Thief”11 summons a “third nameless person [the impersonal consciousness already mentioned] [...] whose abstract presence now encircled one in the ruin of all atmospheres” (21). This anonymous existence (collective unconscious or primordial being?) confronts Susan and her lover (the pronoun “one” applies to both) with their own senselessness – the lover is deaf, as Susan is blind. As a result, they are faced with the very means of their fulfilment, their catastrophic blindness and deafness, though they are still sceptical of the unity it will help them to achieve. As Joyce Adler rightly points out, “each lacks an essential sense which only a fulfilling relationship with the other can restore.”12 Chapter 3 shows Susan and her lover still trying to establish their respective responsibility for their present crippled condition. Nevertheless, in her state of extremity Susan finds herself on the threshold of vision (“ledge of night, edge of dawn” 23), and we see indeed that she wants “to conceive [...] an extreme but true vision of him”13 (24). Her former pregnancy is now symbolic of her new incipient conception of her lover. She realizes that he raped her out of an excessive love for her, “the apple of his eye.” He, on the other hand, becomes aware of his self-deception and sees that she was but a “daily ornament” or “morning woman”14 in “his” room, a view of herself she accepted “like a self-created fetish” (23). Through 11

The second “Thief” is no mere repetition. It counterpoints the first and evokes an invisible presence in the heart of the nameless dimension. See also “DaSilva. DaSilva [...] Stevenson. Stevenson” in Heartland (44) and compare the “nameless person” in The Waiting Room with the mysterious thief of daSilva’s rations in Heartland. 12 Adler, “The Art of Wilson Harris,” 18. 13 The now dark waiting room represents a state of weakness and negation of the self which leads on to a recognition of the Other. 14 The paradox is understandable. She gratifies his pride and therefore ‘serves’ him.

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their common partial discovery they are “translated, in an instant of arousal” (26), yet still fear the disorientation that must accompany the obliteration of their personality. Each is still a “reflection” rather than an object of true vision for the other. But through their coming together on the brink of vision “with his eyes of morning as well as hers of night” (25) and in a sexual climax (“orgasm” 26) the reflection is momentarily broken and the other will reach self-knowledge by being recognized both in his/ her nakedness (“stripped”) and as the idol (“fetish of the void” 26) each has been and must cease to be for the other. Chapter 4 further illustrates the lovers’ contradictory impulses of disinterested love and possessiveness. The contradiction is contained in the title “Silence Please,” Susan’s command expressing at once a desire to possess the other by silencing him and the unselfish longing to reach the silence and fulfilment allied to namelessness. The command soon turns into a reconstruction of her lover’s former assault on her. He is so furious that she is still imposing this role on him that he is determined to act it out in revenge. Each is again seen taking advantage of the other. He at first tries to ignore her, then is made to realize that he has indeed crushed her. On the other hand, when he tries to approach her in tenderness, she reacts like a “trigger of fury” (32), yielding to an “assumption of being” (33) – an assertion of selfhood – similar to his own. Each is now a naked elemental force incomprehensible and frightening to the other, and in this role each seems to be a manifestation of the “master thief of love.” Susan is by turns the exploited one and an “ancient and devouring” figure moved by “the daemon of all possession” (32, 33), while he bursts upon her with the forcefulness of an “ancient storm” (37). Nevertheless, this clash of contrary forces issues in a moment of creation. A first step is made towards it when Susan, aware of the eclipse she has imposed on her lover, attempts to retrieve “him” beyond the “mould of appearances” (34), but becomes so intoxicated with the gesture of self-surrender this involves on her part that “she overemphasize[s] the role of domination” (36) she has played in the past. The real moment of creation occurs when Susan relinquishes all one-sided attitudes and former self-deceptions and agrees to “the loss of individual elements and powers” (37). The dark glasses she then dons in order to cover her spiritual nakedness become, paradoxically, their joint instrument of vision. Both have by now reached the crucial stage of helplessness and weakness at which they can be translated into “species of fiction and freedom” (38), and are indeed shown sharing the

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free movements of the elements.15 All opposites are momentarily joined and apprehended together, and the silence they longed for can be “heard” at the heart of the storm. This instant of togetherness and creation, when “the lightning of breath” (39) is released, is followed by the need to understand the mystery of their mutual exploitation. Distrust has not wholly disappeared and each fears the effect on himself/herself of the other’s need for reassurance and power. As a result, each is caught in a cycle of conflicting reactions of self-contempt and hostility towards the other. The way out of this deadlock is, as already suggested, the dissolution of the rigid mould of personality (“mould of cruel refinement” 41) in order to discover that each biased assumption contains its saving opposite. Thus, her lover’s awareness of his former lack of control transforms his assault (storm) upon Susan into “THE VERY RECKLESS SPECIES OF GRACE ” (40), and he is astonished to see that the brutal energy unleashed upon her can reveal itself as “the beauty of freedom [...] at the very heart of the storm” (40). Although in essence this chapter presents the characters’ zigzag progress from tyrannical assumptions to a confession of them, it describes mainly the lover’s change of attitude, just as Chapter 5, which counterpoints it, describes Susan’s. The last section contains a series of images of disruption that must first be re-enacted and digested in order to be creative. Before this happens, however, Susan recalls the quarrel she had with her lover before he left her, and this shows them once more hardened and locked in struggle, he, “doctor and lover rolled into one” (43), appearing now as an essentially threatening figure. The moment of creation and liberation in Chapter 4 expands as the drama reaches its climax in the two central chapters (5 and 6). The operation that made Susan blind has turned her inwards and will now at last cure her inner blindness. The effect of the operation merges in her consciousness with that of the two events for which she indicted her lover, his “rape” of her and his departure. Hence her keen pain when “buried past and revival in the present” (44) are confronted. Hence also the paradoxical association of penetration with separation and excision, of “arousal” with 15

“The sea and the sky became his spectacles as well as hers within which a new intercourse of the gods began, involving and dismantling every blockade of vision” (38). Note that the natural elements are, like human beings, the material reality through which vision is achieved.

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“extinction,” and of convergence with flight, a paradox which expresses Harris’s concept of community through what he calls “convolutions of image.”16 These involve, in an extraordinary orchestration, the basic images (or variations of them) of the four previous and four subsequent chapters: the knife (axe, razor, sword); the sun alternately associated with the lover and Susan in their destructive roles; the cavern or womb; the natural elements; and, most important of all, the vessel with its animate and inanimate features: captain, member (both sexual organ and member of the crew), mast or pole, sail and deck. Immediately after the operation, Susan’s vision still appears to be blocked by irreconcilable extremes, “ancient of suns [...] winter landscape” (45), as her lover’s is by fire and ice in the previous chapter (78). She is “stricken blind” but soon awakes to a healing darkness, and what had been a source of frustration becomes a source of rebirth. The actual pain of the operation is followed by the realization that her sorrow (and the world’s), “tear [...] body of feeling” (47), so far eclipsed by resentment and reproach, has “survived like indestructible evanescence” (47), so that suffering, physical and moral, stimulates her awareness of her earlier selfdeception. Her “waking ‘dying’ pain” (45) − she awakes from unconsciousness and dies to her old self − has brought her to the threshold of the “cavern of reality” (45), her own formerly obscure self, in which at the end of the novel her lover achieves vision (77). There is indeed a sense in which each “dies” into the other’s darkness, for his/her deeper self overlaps with the other’s. Although it seemed to Susan, as he operated upon her, that her lover was “the stone of the sun” (44) assaulting her, after the operation she sees that The blazing abstract scar of instrumental day now slowly faded into darkness, thief of night or creation, whom she loved and hated in turn with all the violence of separate convictions [...]. (45)17

Her lover is now becoming a dark inner sun (the antithesis of the ancient seal” she had first summoned, 15) who shares with her the “abstract blaze of solid darkness” of the “cavern of reality.” “Blaze” and “darkness” ex16

Tradition, the Writer and Society, 55. This sentence brings together a series of images that have so far been associated with the lover: fire (blaze); instrument (he is the instrument of Susan’s blindness and of her insight); day. Even “abstract” evokes “he,” phenomenon of sensibility to which Susan is allied. 17

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press the reconciliation of opposites that is taking place. For Susan, the night is now becoming “light” through a “dying wound of illumination” (46). The origin of this mutation is to be found in the “frailty of convertible properties like a healing thread” (46) that has subsisted all those years in the apparent void of the waiting room: residues of feeling, as already suggested, and above all the lovers’ true motives, as Susan finally admits when she “unravel[s]” (71) the thread. She had told her lover to go when she wanted him to stay, and he had taken her at her word, dismissing her while he secretly wanted her to follow him (71–72). The “dying illumination” that eventually enables Susan to come to terms with her past and achieve symbolic union with her lover is one form among many of a paradoxical and dynamic duality, process rather than fact: i.e. passage from darkness into light rather than final attainment of light. In this mobility of consciousness, a series of poetic metamorphoses occur which transform the “healing thread” into “a scale of ‘dying’ colours,” “existential of the rainbow” (a symbol of heterogeneous wholeness), which becomes “teardrop [...] held upon the fixed coil and station of the whirlpool” (46), thus at once still and moving. Because in this conjunction the lovers no longer attempt to tyrannize each other, they are again as free as the natural elements. At this point, the tear (Susan’s consciousness, filled now with the lovers’ embrace) turns into a cosmic vessel, no longer the vessel in which they were joined in vindictiveness in Chapter 1 but a metaphor in which the sexual act coalesces with Harris’s original version of the “myth of the flight of Ulysses from Circe.”18 In his critical interpretation of the myth, Harris sees a saving union between contraries in the cooperation between Ulysses and his crew, who have tied him to the mast of his vessel, then sealed their ears. Ulysses is a conscious artist who can listen to the otherworldly song of the muse without succumbing to it, thanks to the crew who steer the dancing vessel with which he is in union, though they are as senseless as its inanimate mast. The crew become “a dramatic agent of subconsciousness,”19 ex18

Harris’s phrasing in Tradition, the Writer and Society, 52. In The Odyssey, Ulysses leaves Circe with her consent, and she warns him against the Sirens’ song, although at an earlier stage she herself turned his crew into swine. In Harris’s recreation of the myth, Circe and the Sirens become one, probably because both exert a fascination conducive to states associated in Harris’s fiction: animal-like unconsciousness and death. 19 Tradition, the Writer and Society, 51.

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teriorizing in space through the dance of the vessel a reality too obscure for them to articulate. An important aspect of Harris’s rendering of the myth in The Waiting Room is the total reciprocity of the lovers’ roles: One embraced and was held in turn by this “deaf” mast to which one was truly bound and secured within the elements of distraction, paradoxical structure of liberation, and within a certain undefinable radius of which – acute coherence and conversion of the soul – lay the choirs of vision – sheer tenacity (even profane curiosity) of the “awakened” eye within the latent crash and operation of darkness, sheer relative beam, heavy and light, gravity as well as ironic weightlessness.... (47; Harris’s emphases)

In their embrace, each lover is Ulysses “nailed” to the other as to “negative anthropomorphic crew (eclipse of sight – or was it sound?)” (48). The flight from Circe and the Sirens, inspiring though dangerously fascinating goddesses, is a flight from a tempting but terrifying absolute which drives men to destroy others and themselves in their attempt to reach it. That is why it is also a flight from what in oneself can succumb to temptation: the weakness that turns man into an animal and the “self-regard” (47) that makes him deny others and kill. Ulysses can listen to the voice of the goddesses – and to that extent participate in their infinity – because the crew agree to make themselves deaf to a temptation they could not resist, and sacrifice themselves to make Ulysses’ flight possible. They are thus paradoxically a source of weakness (temporarily neutralized) in oneself and a means of liberation. Each lover has been the victim of the other’s lust and of the self-regard that made him/her want to pursue and possess him/her as an absolute. Susan was raped (albeit symbolically), but, in Book I I , she pursued her lover like a hunted animal, pinned him to the wall, and “punctured” him as he had punctured her, giving him “holes for eyes” (57). Each is the other’s insensitive mast and sacrificial crew reduced to blindness and dumbness (because deaf) by the other’s senselessness or “brute soul of solipsis” (50). But their embrace becomes “lifegiving” when self-knowledge enables each to recognize that the other is not a mere “tool and plaything” (51) but a saving instrument. Susan becomes both Penelope (the patient, serving wife) and Circe, just as in Book I I her lover identifies with her husband, who has given her all that she lacked before, “security, marriage, a home” (69), even though he is unaware of the deeper needs the lover satisfies. In their dual role, each lover presents the two faces of the rationale of man’s existence: choice and fate. Although these may seem identical at the instant of reconciliation (49),

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the similarity is deceptive, for choice can only take place through fate: i.e. thanks to the sacrificial fate of the dumb within and without oneself: Cloud or seal, blocking of ears, blinding of sight which rendered one and all immune and faithful guides or servants of each other through the unenviable passage of the underworld. Vessel of reality. Bond of translation. (78)

This sums up the many instances in the novel when Susan and/or her lover are seen reaching understanding or vision through the other.20 The “conversion of the soul” (47) occurs through an awakening of the senses arising from full recognition of, and participation in, the other when each understands that what used to be a source of tyranny in their eyes is indeed a source of liberation, and their “very state of brutal relation” begins to usher “in the fantastic irony of a common flesh” (53). The rebirth achieved through this union is of two kinds, for the revival of the senses leads to a renewal of sensibility: i.e. an awareness of what cast the other into the void and of the livingness of what seemed dead. First, their “common flesh” is heard “singing in one’s ears,” then the “MOUTH OF THE VOID [seat of darkness but also of an “immaterial conviction” 47] SANG for the first pointed incredible time” (54). The contrast between “common flesh” and “void” is contained in the title of Chapter 6, “Thing,” which describes both the concrete reality of the lovers and the nameless energy at the heart of the void.21 This ambivalence involves Susan in constant shifts from consciousness to unconsciousness and from a perception of ‘abstract’ reality to its concretization. It determines the structure of Book I, which is not a one-way but a two-way spiral, until at the moment of climax Susan perceives the two movements together as “Thing [...]. It was the only thread of ascent and descent into the hold of creation” (52). Significantly, the moment of vision does not cancel out this ambivalence. It is a perception of community as illustrated by the myth of Ulysses, a moment of poise when contraries are perceived in their complementarity and the exploring consciousness is aware of both without identifying with either: 20

For example, “he was [...] in process of being informed by her about himself” (39). The reader will recall that in The Eye of the Scarecrow the nameless energy or “it” is called “dazzling sleeper of spirit.” In this novel it is “wildcat of earthen fury” (49) or “swift runner of life” (67) and recalls the tiger in The Whole Armour. In my view, the bushmaster snake that kills the husband of the Amerindian Susan (79) is a destructive form of “it.” 21

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he dared to lean as never before (without actually falling) upon the abyss of invention and confront the technical blast and hollow within which she stood. (52) She knew she stood on the threshold of resigning herself [...] to [...] a third seeing vessel and party [...] lying between “him” on one hand, and “herself” on the other. (60)

The implication is that one surrenders to one’s own and the other’s darkness and namelessness (the “third seeing vessel”) without staying there finally. The rebirth that occurs as the void turns into living vortex is complete only when Susan’s husband is part of it. At the end of Book I, Susan and her lover are “drawn by the skin of the vortex into the other’s rent and beauty of consciousness” (54), becoming reconciled to the ambivalence of the waiting room, its terrors (arising from the disorientation due to a broken state or loss of a stable self, and its visionary capacity). At the beginning of Book I I , “the vessel of the room was almost pitch black save for the spiralling light of the horns” (57): i.e. the light of understanding issuing from the darkness of the vortex. At first, it seems to Susan that her husband is an obstacle to her newly achieved fluidity and freedom of consciousness, for she does not realize that the “unpretentious obscurity” (61) into which he fades as a result of her preoccupation with her lover can be part of a healing darkness. Admittedly, her husband’s solicitous guard over her is not devoid of an unconscious wish to possess her by his generous attitude, and her accusing cry “WATCHMAN. WATCHMAN ” counterpoints her earlier “Thief. Thief.” The two, however, merge in Susan’s consciousness, for her husband’s sense of impotence when she tells him on the phone that she wants “nothing” renders him as helpless, and thus as spiritually naked, as she and her lover were when deprived of their senses. Her husband, too, is in the void, and she cannot visualize him (she met him when she was already blind) any more than she can now visualize “him,” the “abstract” lover: “Blank. Black” (62). The two words refer to both men, and in their context link her two pregnancies, the fruit of her union with what each man represents, phenomena of sensibility and material comfort. Husband and lover make one when the telephone conversation is cut off and “nothing,” the other’s (husband and lover) shadow, begins to move as if “‘nothing’ were ‘something’” (65). It is only now that Susan’s operation is truly successful (as opposed to “technically” suc-

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cessful in Book I) and she grasps the full significance of her lover’s departure in the “Theatre of darkness” (70), formerly “operating theatre” (43). The counterpart of this “theatre” for the lover is the nameless cavern he is exploring in search of a spiritual El Dorado in the heartland. There has been a shift of scene, and the last chapter re-creates the lover’s achievement of consciousness in terms that parallel Susan’s. It is entitled “Blast” (a variant of the operation) and evokes a series of explosions that may shatter a man’s world or his perception of it and nevertheless open the way to a new life. There is the explosion of the seal of the sun,22 of memory, and of the Forrestals’ house with the shattering of their logbook. In the wife of his Amerindian guide the lover sees Susan returned to him. When the guide is bitten by a bushmaster, he identifies with it, thus acting out Susan’s identification of lover with husband and suffering the impact of catastrophe experienced by another. The “holes in his skin” (76) become “puncture of memory” (77) through which “he” sees Susan in a new light. Vision is achieved in the darkness of the cavern, an image that prevails in the rest of the narrative. Apart from the literal cavern the lover explores, immersing himself in the river that runs through it, it is a cavern of death, an underworld in which the lover recovers his senses. It is also the “cavern of reality” and more specifically the “subterranean cave of Susan” (77) (linked with the sexual imagery in Book I), in which he sees that “the faint stunned eyes [Susan’s] [...] grew bright [...] stars of consciousness blown by the very fist of night” (77). In other words, the lover can see now, thanks to the regenerated eyes of the muse. Finally, the cavern is the underworld of the “middle passage” (78) and the lover is “medium of history” (59). Through the mutation of the lover’s relationship with Susan, Harris explores the possibilities of genuine community or participation in the Other. The wife–husband–lover triangle, which appears in one form or another in most of his novels, can symbolize, among other things, men’s rivalry for the possession of the earth. The Middle Passage, one of the most catastrophic historical facts resulting from this rivalry, gave birth to a so-called “New World.” The dramatization in this novel of the regeneration of the “raped” muse offers, through the metamorphosis of basic human relations, a view of possible change on

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“The seal of the sun [see “ancient seal” 15] was upheld and splintered again and again” (77). This corresponds to “in that instant of recall her eyes splintered” (70).

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a wider scale and of the possible creation of a really ‘new’ world. In the cavern the lover hears “a new distant faint blast”: He knew [...] that the blast he now heard had actually occurred ages ago: and that, at long last, it was able to reach him in an echo long muffled and nurtured and preserved (like the sound of the sea in a shell). (79; Harris’s emphasis)

This delayed blast is that of historical catastrophe, and “he” (phenomenon of a renewed sensibility) re-lives “with new awareness his descent through the door of the middle passage” (79). The change this implies is not in himself only but in the past he re-lives, and the lover could ask, with Susan, “Was it ten years or twenty or ages ago one relationship had died and another begun? In our end is our beginning” (70). In both form and content, The Waiting Room substantiates this answer. The discontinuity of the narrative, each chapter presenting a new layer of spiritual experience and the potential for renewal, corresponds to the disjointed diary or shattered logbook in which the three characters have participated, the substance of their broken lives. The “punctures” they suffered (“holes for eyes” for the blind Susan and her hunted lover, “holes in his skin” for her husband) turned into passages towards a new beginning, and it can be said that their outdated outlook crumbled with the explosion of their antiques shop. Through the mutation of their personality (the gist of their re-created lives), each was seen to be the other’s guide, unconsciously in Book I , consciously in Book I I . The union of these contrary capacities was rendered symbolically by Ulysses’ and his crew’s “participation” in one another. The crew can also be said to represent the deaf and dumb of the Middle Passage, who were unable to communicate owing to their lack of a common language. There is thus a suggestion that Ulysses, the imaginative artist, is sustained by the mute victims of history to whom he can give voice. Indeed, when the lover tells Susan “art is the phenomenon of freedom” (66), “the ‘deaf’ within her stirred and listened. The ‘dumb’ she cherished began to speak” (66). Clearly, Harris’s rendering of the myth harmonizes the divided personality of modern man and revises his “misconception of god [...] man [...] beast” (50) while intimating that he is a composite of all three.

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Tumatumari An Epic of Ancestors

“ T R E A T Y O F S E N S I B I L I T Y ” in which Susan Forrestal and her lover participate in The Waiting Room lies at the very centre of the characters’ preoccupations and is given greater significance in Tumatumari. Formerly a community of feeling between individuals, it now involves the recognition of a community of existence between peoples, man and nature as well as society and nature if Guyana (any country or civilization) is to survive. Tumatumari concentrates on the effects of the traumas of history on the soul of individuals and peoples. It covers not only the history of one family and of Guyana from the end of World War I to the late 1960s; symbolically, it also embraces the trials and growth of a people over centuries as well as its potential future. Like Harris’s earlier fiction, this novel establishes a correlation between the exploration of the past and an art that grows out of the individual’s modified perception of its generally accepted meaning. Here, too, form and the metamorphoses of psychic content are interdependent and linked to the capacity of a young woman called Prudence to contain and transfigure the experience of her family. Her imaginative reconstruction suggests that catastrophe need not be an imprisoning ordeal but that the very losses incurred in the past can give birth to a liberated consciousness. At the beginning of the novel, Prudence suffers a nervous breakdown after a stillbirth closely followed by the death of her husband, Roi, decapitated on a rock in the rapids of Tumatumari. Her father, the historian Henry Tenby, died several years before and it is his history, together with that of Roi, that is re-enacted through Prudence. However, Harris’s use of a central consciousness as a medium of reconstruction is more complex than in the earlier novels, for Prudence is a medium within a medium: her memory is both independent and fused with Roi’s consciousness as he HE

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descends into the waterfall and looks back on life “as in a dream unravelling itself”1 (in much the same way as Oudin in The Far Journey of Oudin looks back upon the “match-box world” when he dies). Prudence, then, participates in Roi’s descent and sees “her own guillotined sun of reflection” (17) in the water. Not only is the reconstruction seen from both Prudence’s and Roi’s point of view (as the rocks press against one another in the blinding water), but Roi is both dead and “dying” (see, for example, 84 and 102). He “dies” throughout the narrative, and the timeless moment of his death is counterpointed by Prudence’s at the end of the novel. Although a catastrophe, his fall releases images of the past, “inner spaces,” that restructure themselves in Prudence’s consciousness: FROM WITHIN THE ROCK OF HISTORY − dark room of TUMATUMARI

− Prudence now looked out with Roi’s drowned eyes as if the landscape of memory had been assembling itself unobtrusively over the years into a number of technological signposts. (72)

The instant of the fall and Roi’s beheading are thus the imaginative nucleus of the novel, from which the major and many-faceted theme grows and the images proliferate. The central metaphor of decapitation, reproduced in innumerable variants, is nevertheless the gateway to a perception of wholeness and “the deepest alien unity of mankind” (67). The very first image is that of a “head” Prudence discerns in the river below the waterfall, in one sense a mere “object” or “thing,” in another a symbol of her dead child or of her husband rising again from the bottom of the whirlpool. This duality, reminiscent of the double function of “IT ” in the earlier novels, prefigures the significance eventually glimpsed by Prudence in her husband’s decapitation. In Book I, the “head” is subject to several transfigurations pointing to a different reality. Prudence sees in it a “mask” and “a reflection of her own features” (14). There are forms of it in living nature, in the “revolving glance of the ‘black’ head of sun in the water” (15). The face of Rakka, Roi’s Amerindian mistress, is like “the mask of the sun” (16), while in the death of Rakka’s mother from malnutrition Prudence discerns the “death mask of the sun” (22). Rakka and her mother represent the “vanquished Indians of the sun” (33), the original inhabitants of Guyana who have lost their primal vision of a sun-god, “rock of the sun” (32), and, insofar as they have been deprived of this 1

Harris, Tumatumari, 19. Further page references are in the main text.

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natural sovereign, have been decapitated as a people. From the start, Prudence sees also in the “head” “the One” (a symbol of unity) and “a cradle” (15, 31), which she carries towards the well from whose depths she retrieves the history of her family. Prudence’s “act of memory”2 proceeds from the very nature of her personality. Like most women in Harris’s fiction, she is the muse who can both inspire and deceive, though she shares this role with Rakka and in this respect is a further development of the modern/Amerindian muse in Heartland and The Waiting Room. She is also the psyche of the modern Guyanese, who draws from within herself and the world of Tumatumari resources indispensable to change. Both Prudence and, symbolically, the rock in the waterfall are a womb in which the “drama of conception” (41) takes place. Her own resources are memory, the mainspring of her recreation of the past; imagination, which, as her father says, is the only hope for the future (63); and foresight, as she shows in her capacity to envisage the future while reconstructing the past, notably when she recalls her visit to the abandoned native village and pictures the “TUMA3 TUMARI OF TOMORROW ” (66). The interaction between past, present, and future is an essential feature of Prudence’s perception of events and, consequently, structures the narrative. As in The Eye of the Scarecrow, history (personal and national) is freed from chronology and gradually pieced together by Prudence’s associative memory. Thus remembering her recent past when she wondered whether her child would be black or white, she is naturally led to recall that her family (the Guyanese community and the family of man) is racially mixed: her mother and her sister Pamela passed for white, her father was dark with Indian features, and her brother, Hugh Skelton, black and forced by his mother to hide and play “skeleton in the cupboard” when distinguished visitors came. This was

2

Harris’s phrasing in “The Unresolved Constitution,” Caribbean Quarterly 14 (March–June 1968): 45. 3 Memory, imagination and foresight correspond to the attributes of the virtue of prudence as described by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory (1966; Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1969). In Tradition, the Writer and Society, Harris emphasizes the relevance of “the art of memory” as described by Yates to the “drama of consciousness” he creates in his fiction. It goes without saying, of course, that the trinity of past, present and future has been a stock feature of the iconography of Prudentia since the early Middle Ages.

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done with the tacit agreement of Henry Tenby, who was nevertheless torn by the contradictory pressures of prejudice and conscience. The remote past of Tumatumari is mainly that of the Amerindians, who have, ever since the Spanish conquista, repeatedly vanished into the forest to reappear from time to time to sell their labour, subsisting in this way “upon a dislocated scale of time” (80). When Prudence first lifts the lid off the well of history (3) − an abandoned stone well built by Roi five years before his death − she sees the symbolic lost tribe of the sun moving at the bottom of the falls. They are a constant reminder of her own, Guyana’s, and humanity’s origins. Yet throughout Tenby’s youth and maturity, which evoke the colonial past as well as the more recent period of crucial choices for Guyana’s future, the Indians have been remorselessly exploited as a people and as individuals. Rakka, who appears in Tenby’s life as “the waif-of-the street,” is the cheap muse (and whore) of successive generations. Even Roi, himself half-Amerindian, declares that the Indians “are the conscience of our age” (35), yet admits that he, too, exploits them. For Prudence, the retrieval of the Indians from the “bandage4 of history” (49) becomes more than a question of economic justice. Although unaware of it, they are the remaining link with a primordial outer and inner landscape (“They sprang out of the ragged atmosphere within one’s head” 31) peopled with ancient gods (despite their fall) and animals, which man too often refuses to recognize as a part of himself. To retrieve the Indians from their eclipsed condition is thus to move towards a fuller conception of man. In an extraordinary passage which re-creates the meeting between “huntsman and hunted” (37), Roi’s hunt of a wild boar is superimposed on his descent into the waterfall (53). The rock towards which he falls looks like a boar. After the hunt Roi and the boar “sw[i]m towards each other” (apparently enacting the meeting between hunter and hunted). Then, in Prudence’s “dream of a loved one, drowning, decapitated” (54), it is as if the animal’s head had merged with Roi’s: “the boar’s lips [...] mingled now with hers as well as Roi’s like the water of life” (55). Further, experiencing the “birth of conscience” (87) in both husband and father, Pru-

4 This refers to the blindness of history and to the Indians, who are “blindfolded creatures” (48). The mountains, too, are blindfolded “bandage of the elements” (48) and Prudence’s head is bandaged by Rakka (43, 154).

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dence sees that it involves the recognition of the animal in man and confesses: deity wore chains after all − the chains of man’s terrifying relationship to the mire of the depths as man wore chains − chains of primordial animal to which he was ironically indebted for his susceptibility to the ‘openness’ of nature. (87)

Harris’s rendering of the openness of nature and of the effect of man’s response to it is most impressive. Commenting on Tumatumari, he insisted on the “ever-changing mobility of the earth,” and on the fact that “the very fixed stages – upon which we build our cities – are sentient and alive.”5 The following brief excerpt will show that the growth of consciousness in Prudence goes together with her integration into nature and participation in its rhythms of life. In a moment of illumination, the shock of revelation is so great that she begins to tremble: At first she could not cease from trembling [...] but as she shook, vibrations were set up which rippled and fled across the basin of the world − Amazon to Orinoco − Atlantic to Pacific − a continent bedded in rivers and oceans. It was as if she gained some consolation from reciprocity, from reaction. (112)

The main theme of the novel is the conversion of Prudence, in conjunction with that of Roi and Tenby, as a result of the reconstruction of the collisions of history and its dismemberments of individuals and peoples, a conversion stimulated by a growing awareness that history and its dead actors are themselves subject to change. It develops through a remarkably coherent use of imagery. The “head” or first symbol in the narrative presents together the two entities Prudence must reconcile: nature, whether represented by the sun or the whole landscape (“a dense face reeking of vegetation” 67); and society, represented by the different masks which the head motif introduces. As already suggested, the head covers a whole spectrum of meanings, positive and negative, for it is not only the tragic emblem of all dismemberments − Roi’s in the rapids, those of the tribes, which Roi’s fall re-enacts, Prudence’s (psychologically “trunkless and leg-less” 14), and Tenby’s (92) − it is also the embryo of reconstruction. Ivan van Sertima rightly points out that “there are images of all parts of the human anatomy, which seems to be breaking up and reassembling 5 Harris, “Theatre of the Arts,” in Theatre of the Arts: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek & Bénédicte Ledent (Cross / Cultures 60; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2002): 3.

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itself in the restructuring of man.”6 He underlines the importance of the eye; indeed, its appearance on the rock-face (another “head’ or “mask”) of Tumatumari marks the beginning of Prudence’s conversion. The eye is equivalent to “IT ” (114) and, as in Harris’s earlier novels, stands at once for the concrete instrument of exploration and vision and the metaphysical reality it discovers, the alien dimension Prudence discerns in the Amerindian and African victims of history. From the beginning, then, the “head” stimulates the reconstruction of its own severance and rebirth: “the vision of the ‘head’ in the water [...] was instrumental in invoking both the processes as well as the premises of recreation” (17). The premises of re-creation are the falls of Tumatumari and the well Roi dug above them to measure their hydroelectric potential. The waterfall and the well are complementary and linked by a secret staircase, which to Prudence is “a passage to her own name” (31), which she has inscribed on the lid of the well: i.e., a passage to self-knowledge. In her eyes, the upper part of the well has the configuration of her father’s “chair of history,” and to plumb its depths is to reconstruct Roi’s fall in the rapids, which stands for all collisions connected with the violation of men or cultures. The well enables Prudence to understand Roi’s failure to harness the energy potential of the falls, a task he undertook in a technological attempt to conscript nature for the benefit of a firm on the coast. His first collision, when he fell into the well and knocked his head against its concrete framework, made him aware of nature’s power to strike back, of the falls’ “electric fiend” (also his own daemon behind his mask): “I was stricken [...] Electricity to last a lifetime. I saw everything lit up from within” (24–25). This incident is to be linked with the recollection of Tenby’s deathbed scene, when he struck Prudence a blow on the temple which “set everything ablaze and she saw his life illumined [...] the smallest cracks in an otherwise impeccable exterior became the gaping lighthouse of the past” (46). The boiling waters of the rapids striking the rocks with fiery energy seem to correspond to the passions of men and exemplify a perilous but fertile duality in nature and man. The very name of the falls, Tumatumari, means ‘sleeping rocks’, and these are susceptible to “awakening,” and

6

Ivan Van Sertima, “The Sleeping Rocks: Wilson Harris’s Tumatumari,” in Enigma of Values, ed. Petersen & Rutherford, 121.

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“convertible” (26), like Susan Forrestal’s waiting room. Commenting on this name, Harris wrote: In the novel I sought to bring the “sleep” of a traumatized people, traumatized by conquest, into league with sculptures that have sprung from the earth – sculptured crests, sculptured outlines, sculptured exposures – in order to engage in an awakening, within many-sided nature, from the brutalization of every-day place and person by conquistadorial legacies.7

All the characters possess the falls’ dual nature and can be “ignited by an element far older, though frailer, than uniformity or persuasion” (21; emphasis mine). Rakka’s face, at first a dark mask, seems to Prudence “to wave and burn” (16). When Rakka’s mother died, her “eyelids turned to stone: lapis of populations within which a sombre flame shone” (22). The eyes of Tenby’s Rakka (the woman he visits in the “brothel of masks”) are “made of stone” (94) but become “suddenly afire” (95). The Indians peer at Roi “like stones” (50) and appear to Prudence as “strange stony faces in the falls” (56), but they have merely retired after conquest into their “‘death’ or ‘sleep’ of fire” (32). Prudence’s wish to balance the two proportions of loss and gain inherent in the past − a leitmotif in the novel − rather than concentrate on its face of disaster alone shows her awareness of the possible discovery of “fire in stone” (17). In this, her attitude differs from Roi’s in his lifetime. His eyes, too, were “stone-dead” (23) and would suddenly be animated by a spark. But though aroused by the “sparks” (26) that flew through him when he was electrified in the well, he did not adopt the kind of behaviour that would benefit the region and its early inhabitants. Instead, he took advantage of his recovery to impose his sovereignty over the Indians by way of “the Ceremony of the Rock” (36), in one sense the assumption of a monolithic persona that enabled him to parade a “mask of enlightenment” (35) as if he were the Indians’ new god or Rock-Sun while actually subjecting them to his one aim of “upholding an economic establishment [...] by fair means or foul” (36), which he thought was the only means of survival. Book I I , entitled “The Ceremony of the Rock,” shows other characters involved in a similar process of hardening. There is Rakka, looking tragic, tender, and full of compassion but also “tempered as steel” (42). Like the rocks that her name evokes, she is both barren and fertile: barren owing to 7

“Theatre of the Arts,” 4.

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a fall for which Roi was partly responsible, yet pregnant “metaphysically speaking” (71) because involved in a relationship of reciprocity with him. This the Indians couldn’t stand, wishing to preserve the tribe as a monolith for “fear of the stranger creeping in” (71). A similar fear kept Tenby’s black and white children divided (45), as it was “the secret hardening of fear” (60) that made him agree to Pamela’s marriage, followed by the rejection of her black child and its adoption by strangers in America. In both the deathbed scene, when he cursed “god” and his progeny for their division, and in his paradoxical reproach to Pamela for acting according to “the pattern of conquest, of history as [he] had accepted it, lived it and written it” (60), Tenby revealed the stress and illness of which he seems to die, the result of his constant assumption of a “bogus historical mask” (62). Thus, in the last moments of his life, he seemed to Prudence “a creature cloven in two, one face on top mask-like as before, the other face emerging from the old” (45). In the last section of Book I I , Prudence recalls a speech she heard in her childhood by one comrade Block (another monolith) at Port Mourant. His condemnation of the social and economic situation in Guyana was largely consistent with Tenby’s awareness of its evils, though he would not acknowledge it when he heard the speech in 1952. But Block’s accusing words were intended as “persuasion” only, and offered no alternative for genuine change such as Roi intuits just before Block’s speech is reported. Block’s refusal to admit that the East Indian woman Tenby nearly ran over is alive − possibly a refusal to see the victim as other than a conventional flag to be branded for political purposes − throws an ironic light on Tenby’s own self-deceptions, for in this instance it was Tenby who became the victim of misconception. Both Roi and Tenby differ from the characters in Harris’s earlier fiction, who had to discover in what way they erred in the past. The two men knew that their country’s natural configuration and the social idiosyncrasies born of oppression demanded wholesale revision of former policies. Yet out of self-interest and fear both steeled themselves against their deeper insights. Prudence states that her husband and father “shared [...] one vehicle of the imagination” (46), and, as her creation of “the epic of ancestors” (133) indicates, that vehicle or carriage is clearly herself (note that the alternative to her name on the lid of the well of history is “C-A-R-R-I-A-G-E O-F T-H-E S-U-N ” 79). That she has imagination is emphasized by her father, who was hoping she would marry an engineer in order to achieve the union between science and art that he saw as a

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prerequisite to the “treaty of sensibility” (104, 109) he secretly longed for. But hers is an imagination in great need of recovery. The re-creation of the brief period of her marriage to Roi shows that Prudence was already breaking down before the death of her child and of her husband, that she was ridden by fear since her arrival in Tumatumari: “‘pregnant’ fear of darkness” (28), fear of the content of the well (29), fear of “the seed of the future [...] brink of self-knowledge” (33), and above all fear of Rakka’s power over her husband (68). These fears of what the interior represents are of the same kind as those that prompted her spiritual conception by her father. In Books I I I and I V (“The Chair of the Well” and “The Brothel of Masks”), we learn of Tenby’s symbolic conception of his children in reverse order of their actual birth after his return from Europe to Guyana in 1921. The symbolic conception of each child corresponds to a crisis in his life and a catastrophe in the country, their real birth to his writing an essay or a play, in which his genuinely creative views were expressed, but which remained secret until Prudence reconstructed his subterranean life from them. Although the youngest of his five children (the first two were, in his mind, conceived solely by his wife), Prudence, born in 1940, was the first to be conceived as an ideal in 1922. Tenby was then “shopping in the womb of place [the brothel of masks] for the mask of a lifetime” (93). Finding himself face to face with the eternal Rakka, he was so horrified by “the stranglehold he detected upon [her] flesh and blood” (96) that he decided never to lift a hand to his unborn children and acquired the mask of gentility he would wear for the rest of his life. He was wholly deceived, however, since, as he bitterly acknowledged later, by refusing to recognize the “callous of history” (96) he was sacrificing whole populations to his illusion of rectitude. That it was an illusion was confirmed by his decision to match his outer mask with “a conception of [...] inner space” (130): i.e. the symbolically named Pamela, “virtue allied to beauty” (130), although, as Roi explains to Prudence (71), virtue too can be the fruit of fear.8 And fear was also at the heart of the conception of Hugh (130) as well as behind the impulse to “shove him underground” (101) when he 8

In Tenby’s conception of Pamela, Harris criticizes mainly the “perfectionist assumptions” or ideal “models” (153) for the sake of which men are prepared to sacrifice their fellow-beings. That the perfection Pamela is supposed to represent does not exist (her name is, of course, ironical) is suggested by her hypocritical behaviour even as a child (135).

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was born black. Hugh was to be killed in the 1962 riots by a bullet fired by his “father’s rich kith and kin” (120). To come back to Prudence’s role in her father’s and husband’s existence: it should be clear that whenever they acted in her name, they were moved by fear, the reverse side of Prudence. Even Roi’s decision, prior to his death, to cross the river alone in the dark was motivated by a fear that his wife and his territory were in danger. The two men’s self-deceptive notion of prudence explains why the young woman’s reconstruction of the past is also a process of self-examination and renewed conception of herself.9 It explains her vision of Roi’s death in the falls “THROUGH HER ” (28) and “IN HER NAME ” (50), a death symbolizing, it must be recalled, the disasters incurred in the name of misconceived prudence. Her knowledge that Roi and Tenby exercised “an underground imagination [...] over a life-time of bitterness until from their own lips a heartrendering cry arose” (46), though at first a cause of resentment in Prudence, left with the “burden of conception,” is nevertheless a stimulus to their conversion and her own. Roi himself had told Prudence: “Must not my skeptical law as well as your sympathetic love [...] re-structure themselves through dislocation, poison, fissure, weakness [...] learn of themselves through alien proportions?” (35). His timeless fall is the loss that gives Prudence “a structure of metamorphosis [...] the medium out of which a new illumination of feeling would emerge” (17). Although he used to wear the brutal mask of reified technology, he was aware of “pockets of darkness, filth” (35), in the body of the community and knew that he was equally a “scapegoat” (36), who, like the “sick king”10 in all mythologies, was responsible for the regeneration of his people. Like Carroll’s death in Palace of the Peacock, Roi’s is accidental and not intended as a sacrifice. Indeed, death in this as in all of Harris’s novels is too tragic a loss ever to be considered as in any way desirable. But because it does occur, the possibility of compensating for the loss by unearthing its proportion of gain 9

Note that Prudence has to wrestle in and with her own name (41 & 61). Roi’s name is symbolic. The ‘sick king’ is not only a mythological figure; he had an important role to play in the alchemical process. A close reading of Tumatumari will show that, of all Harris’s novels, it provides the most explicit illustration of the “alchemical imagination.” There are obvious examples of alchemical symbolism, like the marriage of fire and water through Prudence and Rakka, and the role of the Petra Genetrix (stone “maturing” and giving birth) already mentioned in Heartland, in which the muse named Petra becomes a “numinous boulder” (71). 10

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must not be overlooked. With Roi, who also represents the “dying god,” die the ruling assumptions of an age, though the images of suffering and death evoked by his fall are the prelude to a creative rebirth. On the other hand, the abandoned Indian village of Tumatumari reminds Prudence of the sudden fall of ancient American civilizations, “the head of ruler or rule severed in a flash” 67), but she must resist the temptation to romanticize the past. Through the reconstruction of Roi’s death in the rapids, both she and Tenby, the “father of history” (124), can face and comprehend “the reality of sacrifice” (131). Significantly, the long section entitled “THE DEATH AND FUNERAL PROCESSION OF THE KING OF THE SUN ” (85) recalls Tenby’s youth and its major options: first, his encounter in 1919 in Marseilles with Isabella, the “muse of the century,” who reflected its contradictions of dazzling beauty and lust allied to inner misery and starvation. Each concealed from the other his/her material and spiritual poverty, so that from the first there was an element of deceit in his relationship with the muse, who in this period vanished from his life as suddenly as the Indians were to vanish from Roi’s. Back in Guyana, he bought his mask of prudence, then in 1924 met “the waif-of-the street.”11 He treated her as a whore from the start and in retaliation she silenced him for the rest of his life, with the effect that her prostitution meant the muzzling of his art. On each occasion of his encounter with the muse, Tenby failed to realize that his real source of inspiration lay in visualizing the funeral processions of the past, whether of “the slaves of the sun” (90) or of African slaves, in whom he feared to recognize his ancestry, conceiving therefore his son “in the HEARSE OF THE WATERFALL ” (97) (destined to be a victim); there was also the procession of the postwar starving millions, of those, in short, whose tragic fate Tenby did not have the courage to confront in his lifetime. That Rakka in her different guises represents them all appears clearly from Prudence’s illuminations at the beginning of Books I I I and I V . These moments of vision give Prudence an intuitive perception of what recollected events substantiate – that the arousal of imagination involves, to begin with, a reconciliation between the two faces of the muse, herself and Rakka, the one born of Tenby’s (mankind’s) attempt to reach an 11 Isabella is really the first version of the “waif-of-the street.” She, too, is first treated as a whore, and when Tenby first makes love to her “it was as if she lay naked at the heart of the street” (89).

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illusory perfection and draw “from the bottomless well of the sky,” the other moving endlessly at “the bottom of the pool [...] the depths of history” (83, 111). The reconciliation is conveyed by a symbolic vision of harmony between Prudence and Rakka (fire and water), who revolve and change places on the circumference of the whirlpool of death and rebirth. They draw towards them a “mountain of souls” − the “dead” of all funeral processions. The reciprocity between Prudence and Rakka, a prelude to other confrontation[s] of extremes” (135) and their symbolic harmonization into “a fantastic reprocity of elements” (114), foreshadows Tenby’s resumption of the conversation with the muse or waif-of-the-street, since his own conversion partly depends on Prudence’s and her capacity to contain imaginatively all latent, then gradually perceptible, relationships. He must “descend into himself as into all men” (104), “crawl back into the interior [...] into the womb” (134), but it is “through the eyes of Prudence” and “from within the seal of death” (144, 145) that he fully understands the role he played in life and its previously unsuspected effect.12 Prudence’s compassionate probing of her husband’s life and Tenby’s years of silence bring to light their hidden motives. She had been shocked by Roi’s indifference to the death of Rakka’s mother but realizes that his mask of harshness concealed a deep anguish; she also sees that he had no alternative but to act “in the name of rules he knew to be obsolete” (81). Similarly, she (and Tenby with her) sees that her father’s silence was self-betrayal, but that to be “non-party, non-vocal” was preferable to following the “new banners of serfdom” (132) under which he would have had to protest. Moreover, she feels that, imprisoned as he was in his own fear, he shared the fearful silence of those who remained conscripted in the well of history. just as Roi’s contradictions (see 81) stimulate Prudence to an understanding of the “Metaphysics of the Alien,”13 so her father’s dichotomy becomes for her the catalyst of the treaty of sensibility they are both trying 12

In a sense, Prudence becomes the mother of a new Tenby. As in Palace of the Peacock, the Amerindians represent the ‘alien’ enduring reality at the heart of the landscape and the elements. The brief section entitled “METAPHYSICS OF THE ALIEN ” describes Prudence’s recognition that, however repellent and upsetting their way of life, the Amerindians are an essential link in mankind’s chain of being. Her vision (“I T ”) arises from the confrontation between “the archangel of sewers,” the humble representative of Rakka’s world, and the compassionate “archangel of God” (83). 13

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to achieve. As the past reveals its hidden face, Tenby’s deathbed curse turns out to have been a blessing containing “the wisdom of conception” (131). Even Pamela and Diana, Tenby’s seemingly self-possessed but neurotic wife, appear as pathetic figures, victims of their own unconfessed confusion and guilt. It is thus through the characters’ very limitations and an understanding of them that the birth of consciousness occurs. The Ceremony of the Rock, now called “Ceremony of dreams,” also involves the reverse process of hardening: “who could tell when [...] ROCK WOMB would part, until there emerged [...] ONE who had spent but a Night beneath the unequal burden of time?” (100). What would have been “premature” (81, 141) in Roi’s and Tenby’s lifetime remains, nevertheless, the seed of the future. Time plays a major role in the mutation that occurs in nature and in Prudence’s inner world. The “womb of time” (67) secretes its own resistance to the conventions of each age, and history itself is like an egg whose frail shell (114) protects infinite resources. Not only does Prudence’s vision change (like that of Harris’s earlier characters), but the “pointed eye of time [comes] alive” (112). In other words, with the passing of time, the seemingly frozen past begins to move (“resumption of traffic into the psyche, into space, into the hinterland” 142) and to return with an altered complexion. Although Harris’s earlier fiction implied as much,14 it is only in Tumatumari that the resurrection of the past and the interrelatedness of past, present, and future in the characters’ consciousness is so explicitly realized. The unpublished work from which Prudence re-creates Tenby’s life shows that the social and political monoliths hewed by the history of Guyana are liable to the same displacements as its soil (see the fissures in the rock of Tumatumari, the landslides in the Canje region); it lays bare “the unborn future in the heart of the dead” (99) − hence the title of Tenby’s play “Funeral Cradle” (115). After immersing himself in his past with Prudence, he rises from “the bottom of the pool” with the muse (Prudence and the waif-of-the-street); because his former prejudices have melted, he himself turns into a “door of conceptions” (117). In this way he 14

The “free construction of events” in The Eye of the Scarecrow and the fact that the logbook in The Waiting Room is a “medium of invocation in its own right” imply the changeability of the past, not just a different interpretation of it. Note also Harris’s reference to the “sexuality of time” in Fossil and Psyche, 2 (in Explorations, 68).

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actualizes Prudence’s earlier intuition that by entering the apparently empty settlement of Tumatumari (the seat of history) she was pushing open the “DOOR OF THE FUTURE ” (69).15 Equally important is the fact that while representing the diminished state of man (“primitive child, scarecrow” 142) each character is also a child of the future. No progeny is born of Prudence’s generation, since her child, the offspring of her fear and Roi’s anguish, dies at birth, Rakka is barren, and Pamela gives her child away. Tenby’s imaginative return to the Canje (a region associated with the blackest features of Guyana’s history where, significantly, he eventually achieves consciousness) is punctuated by references to “children impaled upon the ramparts of inner space,” at once the symbol of a sacrificed future and the price paid for the lifting of spiritual drought. But the representation of Roi as “CHILD OF THE SUN ” (80) expresses both his doom and his rebirth through Prudence, and throughout the novel the symbol of the child and the cradle Prudence carries in her arms announce her own regeneration and the liberation of “the Child of Nature” (155) together with her participation in the “Game of the Conception” (156). Roi’s and Tenby’s change in conjunction with Prudence blends and brings to full maturity three unique aspects of Harris’s art: his conception of character; his view of a changing past; and the ambivalent function of imagination in his fiction. Increasingly since the Guyana Quartet, Harris has tended to stretch the limits of his characters’ personality and to present each central consciousness as a crucible in which all the elements of his/her country’s and humanity’s complex past merge and dissolve again to keep open man’s infinite possibilities of renewal and progress. Whether consciously or not, each character bears an unlimited variety of experience at all levels and all stages of existence. Fulfilment consists in acknowledging it, in refusing to consider time and space as implacable and self-sufficient frames of life, and in transforming the separate monoliths of material selves into doorways opening onto the fluid mixture of instincts, emotions, aspirations high and low, that all men share and therefore should be sensitive to in each other. Out of this grows Harris’s conception of character as a personality “cognizant of many existences through the fact that those existences are not sovereign devices.”16 Ivan 15

See Prudence’s awareness that the inhabitants of Tumatumari, who, like her brother, have been “swept underground,” are “LAMP-POSTS OF THE FUTURE ” (66). 16 “Interview with Wilson Harris,” in Kas-Kas, 53.

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van Sertima calls Harris’s characters “microcosms or foci of community.”17 Prudence is indeed made to realize that the blend of races within her family and herself corresponds to the spiritual inheritance of her mixed ancestry. That is why she is the dynamic receptacle of her husband’s and father’s experience and becomes the seat of interaction between the effect of time on the immaterial residue of men’s lives (Roi’s and Tenby’s concealed emotions) and her own converting power of memory. She discovers that the past crumbles in time to disclose the disregarded or unsuspected feelings of individuals and peoples, the meaning also of their sacrifice. Once the barriers of time and space crumble, the recognition and assimilation of a changing past by an individual mediating consciousness can be seen as the fruit of reciprocity (note Tenby’s realization that he must “transfer to Prudence the [...] equipment she needed to retrace his steps to [the] scene of liberation” 131; emphasis mine). As Prudence’s imagination reclaims and transmutes larger sections of her father’s past, it is being healed by its very perception and digestion of the extreme and contradictory features of Guyana’s history. This reciprocity between increasingly deeper (or further removed) elements in the landscape of history and in herself is most eloquently expressed in Prudence’s illuminations: she recognized that I T (the eye on the Face of the Wall) was itself but a ring or clasp in a chain of identity extrapolated into her fluid grasp and that in glancing at her, through her, with her (in binding her to itself in one light) it was being glanced at itself from another source through the window of its own disparity of perception and therefore unbinding her in another light. (114, 151)

It is only after Tenby’s complete release from the shackles of his life that Prudence’s final liberation takes place. This, it must be underlined, is as terrifying an experience as Roi’s fall. The “treaty of sensibility” towards which she has been moving with her father in humility and compassion has entailed the breakdown of all former assumptions, “Idols” or “models” (152), as Harris calls them, and the discovery of a tradition of sacrifice and endurance which she genuinely ‘suffers with’ by yielding to the depths of the waterfall. Prudence wondered at the beginning of the novel whether she stood on the brink of self-destruction or of self-creation (15). Through her actual and symbolic descent into the waterfall, she achieves 17

Van Sertima, “The Sleeping Rocks: Wilson Harris’s Tumatumari,” 123.

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self-creation through self-destruction and participates in the endless dissolving and repainting of the canvas of existence, a natural, never-to-befinished process that man (and society) must adhere to if he is to avoid petrification. Having formerly contributed to the arrest of that process (her jealousy of Rakka amounted in part to confining the Other, individual or group, to real or spiritual death) she experiences the remorse necessary to envisage a different future.18 Her own Ceremony of the Rock is the “Translation of a non-reciprocal establishment. Spatial womb [...]. Translation of the Gorgon of History” (154–55; author’s emphasis). Once again Harris finds in the individual consciousness alone and in its willingness to confront its own components, however terrifying, the term of a national consciousness (provided “national” is used in an unrestrictive sense). Indirectly, he has also exemplified in Prudence and, through her, in her father the role of the West Indian artist, who, as he has written elsewhere, must “descend into [and] suffer creatively” the disorder of his people’s alienation and so-called “historylessness.”19 In his re-creation of his characters’ descent, there is a striking correspondence between the presence of symbols (particularly the waterfall, the well or chair of history, and the splitting rock) and the mutations of inner landscape they convey. On the whole, this novel combines a greater variety of styles than its predecessors. Primarily ‘social’ characters like Diana and Pamela are portrayed in a few accurate strokes revelatory of their moral deficiency. The narrative alternates between the density of The Eye of the Scarecrow and the ‘refined’ or quintessential texture of The Waiting Room. Discursive passages complement and clarify Prudence’s moments of illumination, without, however, replacing them. Each of the five parts begins with Prudence’s visionary perception of truths she must realize painfully and digest, so that the series of illuminations (there are brief partial ones within each part) is balanced by Prudence’s conscious efforts to grasp the significance of the history she is piecing together. The juxtaposition of intuition with a more rational approach (“vision and idea,” as Harris writes in Palace of the Peacock) is naturally reflected in the style, the high metaphoric concision of the opening section in each book alternating with dialogue or with the more explicit but still symbolic narration. Occasional authorial comments about Prudence throw light on her difficult progress, 18 19

Prudence also sees Roi as an “Outrider of the future [...]. Outrider of remorse” (83). Harris, “The Unresolved Constitution,” 44.

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without, I think, intruding into or impairing the unity of the narrative, a unity of content and form epitomized by Roi’s fall and decapitation. At the end of the novel, Prudence’s liberating vision culminates in the “Conception of the Game,” the sum of the many partial conceptions she has formed during her exploration. What was merely a tentative game at the outset, possibly a reiteration of “the game of Tumatumari, sleeping rocks in her head” (23) that she used to play with her father as a child, has involved her in the great game of history or “terrifying Conception of the Game of the Rapids” (152). The pun on “game” suggests the hunted game, the boar or ‘human’ game at last ‘conceived’ and therefore susceptible to rebirth. It is also the game of death and life which, for Prudence, has been at once “the game of exploratory nature” and the “game of inner space” (152) that entailed the fall and splintering of all one-sided ideals as well as the opening of outer and inner rock-womb to give birth to the Eye of vision. By this time, the severed head or “mask of phenomenon” Prudence beheld in the opening section of the novel has begun to live and move: with each fluid bubble the Gorgon’s head smiled, wreathed by the elements, translation of suns, subterranean as well as extra-stellar, across space, towards a reciprocal vacancy. An unprejudiced flesh and blood. (155–56)

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11 I

Ascent to Omai

A “Novel-Vision of History”

A

O M A I is the climax of Harris’s second fictional cycle, his most daring experiment so far with the form of the novel, and it comes nearest to actualizing his concept of narrative as a dynamic structural design. It could be likened to an abstract painting whose components would have the capacity to move. This novel brings together the different perspectives from which Harris has approached his material since Heartland and initiates yet another line of development. The first part of the novel alone combines the inland expedition fundamental to Heartland and The Eye of the Scarecrow with the spiral-like progress of the lovers in The Waiting Room and the coincident movements of ascent and descent to be found in Tumatumari. The fragmentation that characterizes the earlier novels is still a necessary stage of discovery in Ascent to Omai, but it goes together with a constant awareness of wholeness. It seems even that, to understand it rightly, the reader should be able to grasp the novel as a whole while discerning at the same time its interwoven elements and the correspondences between its several layers of meaning. He must also keep in mind that this novel, more clearly than any of the others, is about writing a novel and that it offers the most eloquent example in this cycle of Harris’s conception of character as a vessel for other existences. As in the earlier novels, events and actions can either imprison the characters in a deadlock of frustration or make them discover the light of compassion that explodes all self-made fortresses. The first conscious SCENT TO

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memory of Victor, the main character, is of his father, Adam, giving him a clout and poking him in the ribs when he was three years old because he was crying on the floor of their one-room lodgings while his parent made love with a prostitute he had brought in from the street. At such moments of crisis a voluminous old petticoat of his mother would serve Victor as a refuge, a fortress of love. As an older child, he would wait for Adam, a welder by profession, to come out of the foundry. From the symbolic wound in his side inflicted by his father, he would flash the light of the sun reflected in a mirror on to Adam’s brow and blind him. Victor had reached the age of puberty when his father started a six-month strike which ended with his burning down the factory and his own bed and board. On that same day Victor, by then an exhibition scholar in the best school in the country, burnt a hole in his exercise book and was caned. Adam served a seven-year sentence, then staked a claim as a porkknocker on Omai, where he made and lost a fortune, while Victor was thought to have run away to sea after his father’s trial. What became of him subsequently is uncertain. The novel opens with Victor’s search for Adam forty years after his trial and takes place in the six hours that separate Victor from his own death on Omai, a cloudy mountain covered with jungle in the Guyanese interior. Although the main facts relate to Caribbean history, Adam and Victor are representative of humanity, and their life-span even evokes the geological history of the earth. In the story of Victor, the successive ages of mankind are eventually harmonized. Striking correspondences make clearer than ever Harris’s view of the individual soul as an epitome of the world. There is, for example, an implicit parallel between the Magdalenian1 period of the late Palaeolithic and a child’s prenatal “‘trial or experience’.”2 There are signs of the civilizations that left an imprint on Adam and of the imprisoning as well as liberating agency they may have offered. In the first few pages alone, Adam brings to mind the Christian church and its achievements (“Patron saint of the watershed [...] stained glass window” (151), then its dual role (“saint and executioner of the watershed” 161), as well as the Renaissance and the 1

“Magdalena” is a river and a province in Colombia, the possible seat of the legendary El Dorado, from where Adam came to Albuoystown (near Georgetown); it is also mother earth, idolized by Victor, and the “Magdalene of Compassion” who protects him. 2 Harris, Ascent to Omai, 123. Further page references are in the main text.

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Russian revolution (“Donne to Mayakovsky” 171). Later in the novel, Osiris and Christ, both of whom suffered a similar fate in separate eras, are shown as possible objects of idolatry or, conversely, as omens of grace. The power of the individual soul to fuse disparate areas of experience also applies to time apprehended subjectively and objectively. Forty years separate Adam’s trial from its reconstruction, which takes place in six hours. This specific time-frame is balanced by a timeless apprehension of events, appearing not as isolated occurrences but as foci of activity related to what has gone before and what will happen after. Similarly, the participants in events have a counterpart in “the disembodied ghost of time flying in anticipation and reality before and after, below and above the aircraft [the latest version of the courtroom of existence]” (56). Events in time are thus counterpointed or reversed in a timeless dimension in which chronology is meaningless. Harris even suggests that in the characters’ vision the two dimensions are interchangeable: “It was also possible to reverse the material/immaterial function of the court” (57). It explains, for example, why Adam can stumble “upon the wreckage of his own past” (52) or why he can tell Victor “one must view the conqueror from the rear” (18). This is at the beginning of the novel, when Adam is fleeing up the hill and dissolves into the elements until there only remains, in Mayakovsky’s words, “a cloud in trousers” (17).3 The image fits Adam admirably, for he is a nebulous figure, a blind (“holes for eyes”4), faceless man, the eternal victim reduced to nothingness or tabula rasa. Victor’s evanescent perception of his father is also in keeping with the “spectral” and “diffuse character of the environment” (15). The veil of cloud that separates him from Adam is a veil between life and death, and the territory he is treading, though unmistakably concrete, suggests both the mountainous jungle and a mysterious nowhere just above him, the unseen peopled land whose existence Stevenson had only suspected in Heartland. The narrative of The Waiting Room concentrated on a borderline between opposites that became reconciled through the metamorphosis of formerly static images. In this novel, opposites are apprehended together from the start. More than in any other of Harris’s novels, the language of Ascent weaves a dense though extremely concise narrative which can best be un3

Vladimir Mayakovsky’s long poem “Oblako v shtanakh” (1914–15), translated as “A Cloud in Trousers” (1945), about a poet-figure frustrated by an indifferent universe. 4 The phrase “holes for eyes,” first used in The Waiting Room, also suggests a mask.

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ravelled by tracing essential metaphors and their meanings. To the superimposed structural patterns in Book I , “Omai Chasm,” mentioned above correspond three complex metaphors. Victor’s perception of the “chasm” opens the globe of his life. The chasm in the landscape is “the abyss of history” (17), containing the “psyche of history, stigmata of the void” (23) that Victor must understand. Its equivalent in his own life is the wound in his side inflicted by Adam’s clout. His insatiable appetite as a boy made him want to fill his side with more than his father could give him. A pun on OMAI , “OH MY CHASM , expresses this solipsism. But facing Omai chasm now, he realizes that the symbolic spear that wounded him as a child could be a spear of renewal opening a “chasm of daring” (29). The second structural metaphor, linked to the chasm which opens the way to the inward journey, is the circle. When Victor follows the rim of the chasm he moves “within humid and arid cycles of memory. FORBIDDEN CYCLES OF THE HEARTLAND ” (23). This form, too, offers contrasting possibilities, since, from the beginning, Victor is aware that all imprisoning circles can open out and knows he is engaged in a “Reformation of the loop” (17ff.). Victor’s refuge in his mother’s round petticoat, and his habitual circular climb high above his father’s factory with all that this entails – dazzling his father with the sunlight from the mirror implanted in his ‘wounded’ side while he makes silent demands of him for material sustenance and riches of all kinds (35–36) – creates limiting horizons for the boy. But the liberating power of a moving circle is suggested in Victor’s realization that the spear in his side created “its own revolving wheel of compassion” (34), which implies that the wound may be the origin of “reformation.” The third basic metaphor is the stone which unites outer and inner heights and depths, and at the end of the novel sends out the ripples and concentric rings that free both Adam and Victor from the enclosing horizons of Victor’s childhood and adolescence. The stone, too, has a dual function from the start. The vanishing Adam dislodges a stone that strikes Victor on the brow and makes him temporarily unconscious but also helps him understand the “Dialectic of the boot” (17) and by association the “Metaphysics of the axe” (17),5 the two methods by which people were 5 In this passage, Harris suggests that Victor’s (modern man’s) conscience is “halfmetaphysical, half-dialectical” (17), influenced still by Renaissance (Donne) and modern revolutionary thought (Mayakovsky).

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ruled from the Renaissance to the Russian revolution. There is also the stone flung by the French founder of a plantation; it killed his young brother, as a result of which he went into self-imposed exile. Thanks to the money he left for orphans when he died, the stone of death initiated a “dance of the muse. Dance of evolution” (20) which clearly prefigures the “Dance of the Stone” at the end of the novel. And there is the stratified rock on Omai, seen as a “lantern of geological age” or as Adam’s “tombstone of light” (20–21). The rock on Omai is volcanic and can therefore rebound, as Victor’s past does in his consciousness. In this capacity to erupt and change the configuration of the landscape, Victor reads an Opus Contra Naturam: i.e. the possibility to escape conscription by nature, whether in the outer world or in oneself, to avoid being tricked by its images and the illusions it creates. The dual function of all natural elements has a counterpart in Victor’s experience. The juxtaposition OH MY/OMAI reminds us that, for Harris, it is the physical self (OH MY ) that opens the way to the corresponding unseen reality that is being explored (OMAI ). Omai is semantically related by Harris to “omen”; it is also associated with the lost or mythical worlds of Atlantis and Roraima and is clearly another version of El Dorado. Bringing together OH MY with OMAI amounts to balancing gains with losses. Adam is Victor’s doppelgänger, his “secret agent” (18), and in a sense his “loss,” although, from the beginning, he is also an agent of enlightenment. One of the difficulties in the novel is that in addition to the opposition between the living and the dead (Victor and Adam) each is presented with his own contradictions. In his ascent, Victor shifts between a half-visual/half-intuitive perception of Adam in the landscape, spells of complete blackout, rationalizations of his intuitions, and finally a dreamlike reconstruction of his childhood and adolescence when the chasm parts the curtain of a stage on which his play, “SOUL ,” is enacted. To sum up the four chapters in Book I : as Victor climbs towards Omai, a myriad of contradictory impressions, all related to his and Adam’s life, assail his senses and mind from the heights and depths of the landscape. Geology and history are united by the imagery. The stratified rock of Omai not only shows traces of the Magdalenian period but its tin, copper, and gold deposits are so many witnesses of Victor’s (man’s) experience. To give one example, tin as a raw material corresponds to one stage in Victor’s making (“Tin soldier of fortune” 32) and to what Adam can afford to give him then; in Book I I , Victor first flies to Omai as Pilot Tin.

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Michael Gilkes has rightly suggested that Adam’s welding factory is the “melting pot”6 of the Caribbean. It is also the welding shop of creation, at once a locus and a capacity given man to dissolve and weld again (as nature itself does) the multiform elements of his world. In this lies Adam’s revolutionary power, though he does not seem to have known it. Victor’s approach to the Omai watershed is sustained by his awareness of both the sacred and the profane (31) and of the convertibility of each into the other. This is confirmed by what he sees as milestones on his way to Omai: the bump on his forehead made by Adam’s stone and the scar on his neck where he (Caribbean man) was beheaded long before. There is also the “rain of many colours” (21), assailing his blinded (and therefore void) eyesight as a result of a meeting of opposites, enabling him afterwards to discern “a frail multiform conception of unity, terrestrial and transcendental” (22). The fourth milestone is the “spear of renewal” (29) which re-opens his side and makes possible the reconstruction of his past life and of Adam’s trial. This reconstruction, arising from the “chasm of memory” (24), is described in Book I I , an enlargement of Book I , the medley of impressions and intuitions first received being now sifted out and clarified as Victor’s understanding deepens. The exploration of Omai is a composite metaphor for Adam’s (man’s) trial, for Victor’s gradual apprehension of the “fundaments of existence” (123), and for his writing a “novel-history” (52). In the Guyana Quartet, Harris was preoccupied with a conception of genuine authority, and since the ending of The Secret Ladder he has built up his vision of the existential trial (both ordeal and judgment) through Heartland, The Eye of the Scarecrow, and Tumatumari, using it as a central metaphor in Ascent to Omai. Victor’s re-enactment questions more than the judgment of Adam; it is a trial of the trial itself, of the court and its values, and of the role of the judge (Victor himself) in the sentence passed on Adam; it is also a re-examination of the identity and the essential “function” of man. Adam’s trial, partly re-enacted in Chapter 6, comes as a revision of the sentence and its effects evoked in Chapter 5. Both Adam and Victor have been condemned for squandering taxpayer’s money, and the effect of the sentence is similar on both. In appearance at least, they become utterly insensitive, “robot prisoner[s]” moving in concert with “robot millions” (38). If I understand rightly, the sentence “passed in the 6

Michael Gilkes, Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel, 135.

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very entrenched nature of things” (51): i.e. within the “fortress of the law” (54) was a negation of life, “extinction of species” (42). The “crucifixion of the robot” (41) is the martyr of man ‘desensitized’ by an exploitation or a ‘sentence’ which he accepts because he cannot conceive of a reality other than the “gross material idolatry” (42) of his judges. The sentence is a way of being as much as a form of punishment. This is confirmed as the trial re-opens in a “courtroom of truth [...] as large and painful as the globe in Victor’s head and as subjective as the mirror in his side” (42). Unlike the one-sided court Adam rejects, this new courtroom is on the borderline territory Victor approaches. The essence of the revisionary trial is Victor’s conscious apprehension (as opposed to intuitions and flashes of revelation in Book I) of a “sacramental union or balance” as well as “alternatives within history” (76) owing to his simultaneous perception of two existential dimensions. The mirror in which Victor used to reflect the light of the sun in order to blind his father becomes the instrument of his own reformation and vision. In order to understand its dual role, however, it is first necessary to see the link between Victor’s “game” and Adam’s destructive action, since it was Victor who unconsciously pushed his father to set fire to the factory. As Adam realized after the death of his wife (whom he loved though he “never really felt for her” 94), his desire for a son actually killed her; she died in a Caesarian operation. Victor’s birth, then, was due to a lack of genuine feeling allied to a wish for self-perpetuation, and it can therefore be said that Adam, a victim, fathered a “victor.”7 When his wife died, both Adam and Victor were cut off from the mother, the original source of life. Adam sought comfort in materialism, while Victor idealized − idolized, even − his absent mother, turning her into a “madonna.” As Victor grew up, he both hated his father for his poverty and idolized him as the one on whom he depended entirely for subsistence. It was then, out of love and hatred of his father, that he started pouring on him the “light of attack” (46) from the “mirror of subsistence” (64) or “mirror of appetite” (126), planted in his side when he was born. Climbing ever higher in a spiral of greed, he extracted from Adam first the equivalent of tin, then copper, and was 7

This substantiates a statement made by Harris two years after the publication of the novel: “the victim is projecting out of himself that reinforcement which makes the Monster / victor possible [...]. The victor on the other hand projects his monstrous victim”; “Interview with Wilson Harris,” in Kas-Kas, 46.

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dreaming of gold when Adam set fire to the factory or “claustrophobic Eden” (42). The instrumental mirror could be Victor’s soul, his consciousness or his imagination, entirely dominated in boyhood by conflicting emotions and only capable of reflecting the blinding light of a conquering sun, idol or ideal. Forty years later on Omai, the sun reflected on the wing of an aeroplane blinds him but gives him the cue he needs, for he then experiences what his father had gone through and realizes that the mirror did not merely reflect the light but that somewhere there in space, over the years of subsistence, the energy he had stored as a child each time he flashed the light on his father’s brow on his way to or from school possessed both psychic and technological features that were bound to return from the depths and heights of proliferate nature. It was as though each time he flashed the mirror he was relaying a series of ghosts that were born of his own unconscious reserves (past and future) within which lived a series of mirrors at various removes in time and eternity. (46)

The mirror is thus also a revealing instrument through which Victor discovers a series of inner selves and which now ‘translates’ him, stimulates his perception of contraries, and in doing so liberates him from the limitations of space and time. Victor approaches Omai from below and, as we realize later, from above by plane. He sees that Adam first reached his claim after stumbling not only through the wreckage of his factory but also through the shattered aircraft in which he (Victor) would meet his death, a fact which he anticipates (“omen or warning [...] before and after the crash” 50) just as he can visualize Adam stumbling on the wreckage a year or two later. Victor feels under “hypnotic compulsion” (56) to travel to Omai although, in the words of the poet Donne which come to his mind, the “currants yeeld returne to none.” His capacity to look forward and backward as he nears the borderline between “West and East” unlocks the “tomb of space” which corresponds to the “fortress of limbo” in which he and his father have been living. He is now experiencing the ruined and vacant condition of the victims of catastrophe (his father’s and that of the pilot of the aircraft), and he becomes aware of a rapport between Adam, the pilot, and his crew. They are all conjured up by Victor as he is “touched by his own holy/unholy lightning reserves” (49) and they appear as both witnesses to the past and the “serial ghosts” relayed by Victor’s mirror. At first terrified by the “duality of function” (50) revealed to him on Omai, Victor becomes aware of its creative nature. It implies

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the “repudiation of the robot,” which reveals itself as the “ruined instrument of an unruined consciousness [...] lighthouse within and beyond [...] fortress or wall” (50). Yet it is the ruined state he shares with Adam and the pilot, his incapacity even as judge to define either Adam or himself (a typically West Indian predicament when the novel was written) that enables him to assume a multiplicity of roles and to proceed with the revision of the trial. Victor’s identification with the judge coincides with his attempt at selfdefinition, which demands that he define Adam first. The latter’s origins are uncertain. He claims to belong to El Dorado, though the judge suspects him of being a communist agent and “the sick man of the world” (60). Adam himself reverses the procedure of the court and forces it to reconsider its own object by challenging its authority, on the ground that it cannot feel his existence as a person. It is only when, prodded by Adam, Victor faces his responsibility as a judge that he admits the “lack of feeling, quasi-feeling” of the court and questions his own authority. Then, for the first time, he commits himself to a synthesis “beyond and beneath all crucifixions of the robot – into the lightning omen and revelation of true Christ as an organ of capacity for all men, dying Man” (62). This difficult sentence contrasts the callous condemnation of desensitized people (“crucifixion of the robot”) “beyond and beneath” which the judge must travel to discover the “true Christ.” In other words, the robot himself leads on to the true Christ, who is not necessarily the real Christ but any victim who, as a result of his undoing, becomes an “organ of vacancy” (63)8 through which the lost balance between contraries can be restored: Adam is such an “organ” or “ruined instrument,” who gives the court an unexpected version of his act of sabotage: “I sought to unmake myself to make something I had lost before I was born. The land that is nowhere. Manoa” (58). Looked at in this light, Adam’s sabotaging of the factory is both a destructive and a creative act. Defence counsel’s argumentation is concerned less with Adam’s guilt, which he does not question, than with the need to demonstrate Adam’s “evolution [...] from nothing into a source of revelation” (63). He first uses a passage from Darwin’s The Descent of Man to show that in their evolution living creatures acquire features that may serve as mere ornaments, irrelevant “excess baggage,” or, quite the con8

Later in the novel, this organ is called “vacancy or corridor of Christ” (104).

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trary, may be instruments of survival. Similarly, the poem called “Fetish” (69–71),9 which defence counsel submits as a genuine expression of Adam’s being, possesses an “ornamentation of features” distinct from “omen of grace.” Yet it is again through its apparently lifeless elements, through ornament or fetish (as above through robot or ruined instrument), that the court (humanity) is urged to discover the light of omen. “Fetish,” defence counsel argues, “is a poem about disintegration [...] but you are unable to see you are being assisted [...] to break the callous you deplore” (72). Fetish (the poem and the condition it expresses) may appear to be “unfeeling raw material.” It is, as everyone agrees, “the rubbish heap of civilizations” (72). But this untidiness and the process of disintegration it implies (as opposed to tidy “callouses of conceit we plaster upon everything”) precisely lay bare the “flesh and blood within the masks of history” (74), the real man rather than an abstraction, and so can become a source of compassion, the “new experimental source of wealth” that defence counsel advocates. In this first part of the reconstruction, Victor has successively discovered in Adam a desensitized robot, the ruined instrument of an unruined consciousness, and finally a possibly fertile fetish. There is in this no exaltation of “base idolatry” but an attempt to uncover a “sacramental vacancy” (73) or void suffered by the victims of history. Chapter 7 shows the judge (Victor) approaching Omai in an aeroplane and makes clear the role of one witness, Dr Wall, who, the judge now realizes, was often quoted at the trial though he never appeared. The revisionary process by which the narrator ceaselessly approaches and presents the same material in renewed guise illustrates, in the very form of the narrative, the nature of the trial as defined by the judge: “It’s a question of the uncomfortable region one must approach time after time, again and again, down the ages shrouded by death in order to learn to bear by degrees what would otherwise be quite clearly [...] unbearable.” (55)

The judge is now elaborating on sketches he made forty years before: it is a reconstruction within the reconstruction, which thus juxtaposes two time periods as well: the first (in Chapters 5 and 6) when Victor (the judge) is mainly shown ascending the hill of Omai and re-living the actual trial; the second (in Chapters 7 and 8) when the judge (Victor) approaches Omai 9

One of Harris’s own early poems, published under the pseudonym “Kona Waruk”: Fetish (Guyana: Miniature Poets Series, 1951).

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from a plane which he knows is going to crash and the forty years that have elapsed provide him with a new perspective. His instrument of revision, like the novelist’s, is “imagination” (78). He now discerns in his sketches of the original trial the invisible presence or essence of Wall, “whose voice sprang from nothingness like an archetype of silence [...] ruined personality within whose rubbish shone nevertheless an illumination of function” (80). This associates Wall with Adam and Fetish, though a new element is brought in with the description of time as “the spectre of humanity” responsible for the breach in the wall and consequently the appearance of “one frail thread [...] unity [or] love” (80). Harris is suggesting here that the invisible but very real wall built into most human attitudes crumbles in time, provided time itself is not an absolute or a material prison. To be aware of the possible dislocation and spectral function of time is to be able to see a non-temporal dimension through linear or cyclical time10 and so allow, as the judge does, “a qualitative illumination” to emerge. In fact, the judge has been engaged in transforming the rigid frames of existence into transparent vessels allowing the coincidence of contraries. He has liberated first space, then time, from their exclusively “material base” (84). The last stage of the trial is the realization of his intuition that “the ruined fortress of personality could subsist [...] as blank cheque of compassion [...]. As a consciousness without content which nonetheless permitted all alien contents to exist” (85). This is the object of his art. Enough has been said so far about Harris’s purpose as a novelist for us to comprehend the identification of the exploration of Omai and the reconstitution of Adam’s trial with fiction writing. In Chapter 7, the judge probes further into the possibilities of his art when he shuffles, like a pack of cards, the sketches he had made at the trial. These now elicit the other silent voices he felt beneath everyone and everything: mute sensations [...] that returned to address him as if he, himself, were on trial, and what had not been said then was endeavouring to be heard now. [...]

10

The judge contrasts his dual apprehension of time with the Mexicans’ obsession with cyclical time and their fear that their fifty-two-year cycle would not be renewed if they did not offer human sacrifices to the sun. In Harris’s Companions of the Day and Night, however, even the Mexican calendar offers an opening into timelessness.

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Those pencils [of the imagination] spoke by illumining the curious disintegration of the past and invoking through the granular sensation of images − the dust of memory, the rubbish heap of landscape − a sequence of words allied not simply to pictures but to the very brokenness of all fabric inherent in vision. Language for him, therefore, was a vision of consciousness as if what one dreams of in the past is there with a new reality never so expressive before because nothing stands now to block the essential intercourse of its parts, however mute, however irrelevant. (78; Harris’s emphases)

I have quoted this passage at some length because it sums up what Harris and, at a further remove, the judge are doing and because it adumbrates Harris’s conception of the “novel as painting.”11 “Painting” for Harris implies a vision of the reality within and beyond appearances. It is process rather than a finished picture, an exploratory metaphor expressing his attempt to render the ineffable through an accumulation and transformation of images which are necessarily partial expressions of a wholeness that can never be represented in its totality. In the “novel as painting,” the writer is engaged in constantly revising his limited and therefore prejudiced view of the past, as the judge does when he elaborates on his sketches in order to approach the unbearable. In this respect, there is no distinction between the judge and the novelist. Earlier in the trial, the judge thought it possible “to reverse the sentence of the court” (67) (change the insensitive spirit of the age). Discovering what had not been expressed forty years before and illumining “the dust of memory” with “pencils of the imagination” (thus meeting the unexpressed in its attempt to make itself heard), he is breaking down the earlier tyranny of the law and as a novelist breaking down a one-sided, conventional version of events, so that what the narrator calls “the very brokenness of all fabric inherent in vision” now makes possible the reversal of the sentence. The judge repeatedly approaches the same material from different spatial and temporal perspectives. While shuffling his cards (the partial images of the reality he judges), he is envisaging alternatives to the accepted interpretation of Victor’s and Adam’s history and the roles they may have played. In Chapter 8, the judge re-reads his early version of the catastrophe and the court’s sentence as he reaches and flies over the lost city of Manoa. Immediately, a reversal of this early version is set in motion as he sees Manoa “like a pool in the clouds into which a stone [...] had fallen, 11

Harris, Fossil and Psyche, 12 (in Explorations, 81).

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and concentric rings representing frontiers of memory spread across the sea of the atmosphere” (89). The stone which at the beginning of his quest made Victor unconscious, is now the alchemical “lapis of ambivalences,” the catalyst that enables him to see at once the density and transparency of the inner territory or past experience he is exploring. The material of that experience can be either “a fortress of illusion” or a source of revelation. As the stone falls into the pool of Manoa that contains the material of Victor’s past, this material becomes “the dark mirror of judgment seat” (89). And the mirror (Victor’s childhood reflector) is seen to contain “an inner lighthouse whose store of energy re-activated horizons of conquest as subsistence of grace or memory” (89). The horizons of conquest are drawn in a diagram representing the falling stone and the ripples it sends out. It is inspired by a game Victor used to play as a child. First he threw into a canal the stone on which he fell when nearly run over by a car at the age of three and a half, then he went on throwing other pebbles in order to feel, as the ripples expanded and each horizon died, the numbness and sense of being born into a new self he experienced when he fell under the car. Each ripple on the diagram is the reversal of an “epitaph” named after the successive shelters or masks that have protected and imprisoned Victor in his life. The legend of the diagram points at once to the double function of the stone and the horizons and sums up man’s history down the ages (FACTORY OF THE GILDED MAN ). In the subsequent revision, it is as if the stone had become the element through which Victor’s consciousness frees itself from the burden of the past, since it reverses the horizons of conquest of his youth (the landmarks of his solipsism) into living, expanding ripples and links together the self that began to live in his mother’s womb with the many selves into which he grew or may have grown. The new feature manifest in this last version of the reconstruction is feeling. The very stone on which Victor fell as a child had bled for him. As the incidents of his childhood are recalled, Adam’s deep concern for his son becomes obvious, as well as the terrible anguish that made Victor seek refuge in one overarching shelter after another. At this stage, the judge interrupts his narrative and uses a blank card to offer an alternative to conventional novel-writing, reminding his reader that genuine art, if it is to illumine man’s predicament, cannot shirk the difficult task of confronting the origin of man’s suffering, the mystery of “inequality, repression, oppression” (96), however obscure it may be. Similarly, when the

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moment of illumination becomes possible, its meaning asserts itself through Dr Wall (the personification of disintegrating material life) when he addresses posterity on a blank card as well. More precisely, it is the significance of Victor’s experience after the catastrophe that speaks through Dr Wall. Child Three represents the crucial age of puberty when Victor used to make concentric rings around his father’s foundry. In the light of the present revision, Victor appears to have been at once terrified of his father’s workplace (of the unendurable blaze of its furnaces) and relieved by his father’s reappearance at night and the shield he provided against fire. The paradoxical image “dawn of night” epitomizes Victor’s contradictory reactions of fear and relief arising from one identical source, the basic emotions men experience in the face of incomprehensible forces. His present insight into his own contradictoriness and into his father’s role in exposing him to, yet shielding him from, fire frees him from his earlier idolatrous fixations, his mother’s petticoat or womb to begin with. And the feeling by which he is moved as he looks on the ruined state of such fortresses (a mixture of despair and tenderness for man who needs to build them) prompts him again to the essential stage of the exploration, the negative state in which opposites coincide. He himself is by now a vessel or “vicar of lighthouse” in which fetish or ornament and omen or vision exist through one another. As “Sailor,” he reads out a letter from Rose, a prostitute and one of the horizons in his globe, which testifies to the fertilization of the living by the dead as if there was always an “absent” Christ-like or Osiris-like victim to make us feel “the weight of our nonfeeling” (106). As in the earlier novels and in spite of the three letters by the judge, Dr Wall, and Rose, this final section of the reconstruction is highly symbolic, not only of Victor’s state but also of the kind of fiction the judge is writing about him, the “equation in art or language to the fundaments of existence” he is groping for “through history or the void which was native to history” (123). There is, for example, Victor’s immersion in the “uncharted seas” (of his unconscious, of his past and the past of the limbo populations whose history went unrecorded) and the evocation of the different personalities he may have become (writer, judge, explorer, sailor). Although he reappeared forty years after the original trial, we never know with certainty what he really did: the judge’s novel about him remains unfinished, which may be a way of suggesting that he never reaches one condition finally. On the other hand, his alternative existences seem to

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imply that life, whether in reality or in fiction, need not be imprisoned within one possibility. The sailor at the bottom of the sea counterpoints Victor, who had “sketched in charcoal on the housecoat of stars” (109). Charcoal is only one of several correlatives for a dark and ruined state that is yet susceptible of light. All this time, as we are frequently reminded, the dualistic stone sinks into the pool or sea. The fixed horizons and shelters of Victor’s known life expand while Sailor and Rose begin to dance at the bottom of the sea and “restructure” the formerly frustrating scenes of Victor’s youth. The dance, Sailor says, “celebrates the alternatives that lie before you, within you” (111). The end of the reconstruction is a dramatized exchange between prosecuting and defence counsels, between Victor and Sailor, and between Sailor, Parrot, and Raven, all of which illustrates what the judge has defined as “the essential intercourse of [the] parts [of consciousness], however mute, however irrelevant” (78). In the last chapter, this free intercourse is represented by the “Dance of the Stone,” which reverses the stunning action of the stone at the beginning of Victor’s quest and initiates the true “reformation of the loop.” Throughout the novel, the dance metaphor has conveyed the possibility of movement (usually the sign in Harris’s fiction of progress in consciousess) and harmony. It was linked with imagination (“dance of the muse” 20) or feeling (“dance of mercy, dance of compassion” 31) and evoked limbo which “spatializes” the West Indian predicament as well as the capacity for rebirth it offers. The dance of the stone is a dynamic metaphor that harmonizes slices of Victor’s life as well as their “equation”: i.e. extracts of the narrative reproduced as movements of the dance; it finally frees him from the fixations of puberty when his father burnt the factory. The last two movements, in particular, release him from his most constricting fortresses: the baboon (possibly the consenting scapegoat) and its very opposite, the madonna; these movements issue in the moment of vision above Manoa or El Dorado, similar in essence to the vision in Palace of the Peacock yet more far-reaching and complex. The judge remains to the end the chief medium of narration. He is “a creative struggler” involved in the “task of being born through words” (123), who thus sees his art as an instrument of rebirth. His (Victor’s) vision coincides with the moment of death and metamorphosis. He is one and many, Sailor/Adam counterpointing Victor/Adam on the “ground of alternatives,” the negative ground on which all possibilities exist and all opposites meet, which can yet set up its own activity “beyond” (126; emphasis

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mine) these opposites. From this “beyond,” Victor feels pushed for the last time out of the madonna fortress and the different forms it has taken. He had run away after the original trial because the catastrophe and its consequences were unendurable to him. But at the climax of vision he stares at the fire (“the last flickering beams of El Dorado” 127) and sees that “his father had been engaged in fighting [...] the very blaze he had started. Originator of the fire” (127–28). This confirms the dual role of man and god as both creator and destroyer. We are back where we started, for Victor sees his father once more in rags. His own breath, like the wind, dissolves his main refuge, the petticoat of the idolized madonna: His faint breath lifted it, expunged it of fear, of loss, of degradation, of extinction of species, so that − in conformity with the very ruin of catastrophe − it retained a living spark, a frail star, star of the Madonna (128). In the light of the novel as a whole, this dissolution of material life into a living spark becomes the seed of the future. The madonna figure is also at the centre of Harris’s preoccupations in his next fictional cycle. The novel ends with an implicit affirmation of the resurgence of life in which catastrophe (burning factory or plane crash) can issue. The whole catastrophic spirit of an age has been reversed into a living spark of creation. Instead of leading to imprisonment, the reconstructed trial has broken the rigidity of the law and enabled the prisoner to reach “freedom through knowing unfreedom” (111). The multiplicity of forms that convey the attainment of a spiritual reality (Omai) through its opposite or its material counterpart (Oh My) is, to say the least, astounding. Sections of the trial read as a dramatization of ideas and these also assume various concrete forms12 in other parts of the novel. The trial as a whole combines different styles (narrative, metaphoric, and expository) and different literary forms (prose, poetry, drama). Such variety is clearly part of the novelist’s view of language as “a vision of consciousness,” which has required many ways of approaching the source of vision (the ruined Adam). It has been objected that the judge’s address to the reader to explain his conception of the novel smells of the lecture hall and that the page numbers that locate the extracts equated with movements of the dance are an 12

See Kenneth Ramchand’s comment, “Ascent to Omai is Harris’s most concentrated attempt so far to give sensuous reality to a number of ideas we can infer from the work”; Introduction to “Bibliography on the West Indies,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 6 (December 1971): 105.

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authorial intrusion. This second objection carries little weight, for Harris would have obtained the same effect if he had omitted the page numbers, as he does at the end of The Eye of the Scarecrow. It would be more relevant to wonder whether the juxtaposed extracts or slices of narrative are convincing components of the dynamic design the dance of the stone is intended to create. I can only respond tentatively by saying that, as far as I can see, Harris’s experiment makes sense when viewed in the light of his equation of language with vision or the “fundaments of existence” and if one keeps in mind the structural function of the extracts quoted. Nevertheless, it remains an experiment which does not seem to have led to new developments in his narrative technique, although it has contributed to the makeup of characters in such novels as Companions of the Day and Night and The Tree of the Sun. The first objection is a more serious one, for the judge’s letter does read like a declaration of his intention as a novelist, which is the more striking for contrasting with the metaphoric texture of, say, Book I. But can one confuse Harris with his character even if their approach to fiction is similar? The judge’s voice is only one among many in Harris’s ‘serial’ character, and he meditates on subject-matter that Victor, his alter ego, has approached through a series of illuminations. The judge’s letter on a blank card is both structurally fitting and in keeping with the role he is playing.13 It must also be pointed out that criticism of the novel in English has often looked askance at the non-dramatic presentation of ideas in fiction, whereas in France the novel within the novel, and the reflections it leads to in the hero, has been acclaimed in the case of André Gide’s The Counterfeiters and overexploited ever since. This is a far-reaching issue that should be discussed at greater length than is possible here. Ascent to Omai no doubt pursues the effort of earlier twentiethcentury writers to render the totality of experience. It is perhaps too early to say whether the result is flawless; we need to be quite certain we understand the real function of each part in this complex composition. I would not make this claim, but I do suspect that, like Dr Wall’s elaborate therapeutic theory, this novel may be “in advance of its time” (82). 13

Certainly, the judge’s comment on his own novel is substantiated by the reconstruction of Victor’s experience. In this respect, Ascent to Omai can be favourably compared with Aldous Huxley’s Point Counterpoint, in which the theories of the novelist are never actualized. Compare also the judge / narrator’s comment on the art of fiction with the narrator’s in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

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II Climbing Towards Consciousness Marque d’un signet rouge la première page du livre, car la blessure est invisible à son commencement.14

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at the thematic network of Ascent to Omai. First, though, a rehearsal of some of the central narrative details. Victor is three years old when his father, Adam, pokes him in the side to keep him quiet while he, Adam, is making love to a prostitute on the floor of their slummy room. Victor’s mother is dead; withdrawing into a fortress of love, the child takes refuge within her old petticoat hanging on the wall. But like a spear opening a wound in his side, the blow he receives from his father is to be the hidden source of a drama of which he is at once the creator and the protagonist. A few years later, Victor begins to tease his father: he waits for Adam, a welder by profession, as the latter comes out of the foundry. Holding a mirror at his side, Victor tries to blind him with the light of the sun reflected in it. Once Adam does not come out: he has been starting a strike, which ends six months later when he burns down the factory and his own bed and board. The wound, the mirror and the fire stand out through Victor’s life as catalysts of his ambivalent relationship with his father. Forty years after the latter’s trial, Victor goes in search of him on Omai, the hill of purgatory, on which, as in our life on earth, he progresses like a sleepwalker, determined nevertheless to explore the cyclical trail of memory. From one novel to another, Wilson Harris attempts to detect the beginning of the wound, the fissure which, like a crack in the earth or a chasm in the universe, may eventually produce a new world, a new man, a new consciousness. To grasp the nature of the dual role of man as inheritor and a maker of history is, to put it in Victor’s words, “a question of continuously revising one’s conception of function, of re-considering, so to speak, the origin of function within a variety of signals and complexes” (45). It is a formidable task, in which man can be tricked by mirages of ET ME TAKE ANOTHER RUN

14 “Mark in red the first page of the book, for the wound is invisible at its beginning”; Edmond Jabès, quoting Reb Alcé, in Le Livre des Questions (Paris: Gallimard, 1963): 11.

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the senses as by illusions of the mind, in which he can be hypnotized by nature and society and remain a mere puppet, unless he realizes that he is the instrument of a universal unruined consciousness which persists within him, as within all ruined personality, and is capable of revival. Once he understands that, as an agent, he is part of a transparent globe which can be filled with the density of his own consciousness, he can attempt to trace the beginning of his own function, his own history. In Ascent to Omai, Harris suggests that despite his technological inventiveness modern man goes through a period of spiritual decline and is enslaved by the very civilization he has built. But memory subsists, preserving among the ruins the charcoal residue of a heritage that awaits reinterpretation in order to help man to another leap forward. The ruined personality in this novel is Adam’s. Incidentally, his name seems to be used in its original Hebraic sense of man as a species. He is the victim reduced to a tabula rasa, a faceless man or, in Mayakovsky’s words, a mere “cloud in trousers.” Yet, as Victor begins his ascent of Omai in pursuit of Adam, his doppelgänger, he is made aware of the possibilities of misinterpreting the past and his father’s role, and realizes that in the rediscovery of human consciousness nothing can be left unquestioned. The very end of the quest is dubious: is OMAI the uncertain location of El Dorado, the ultimate purpose of all heartland quests in Harris’s novels, or OH MY , the concrete pyramid of his solipsism? The answer seems to be both or, rather, a rapport between the two, for the creation of such a relation, dialogue, or “treaty of sensibility” between all opposites is, as we shall see, central to the novel. The chasm in Victor’s side, the blinding mirror which sprang from it, and the fire lit by his father make up a chain reaction set off by the conflicting emotions of hatred and love by the despair of the dispossessed in a world of technological achievement and wealth. Yet the resentment that sought release in material destruction contains a seed of love and compassion. Even the raw energy of the sun accumulated by Victor at various removes is pregnant with ‘areas of feeling’ which, imperceptible as they are, will later flash back. Serial images are frequent in the novel: darkness upon-darkness, a sketch-within-a sketch, milestone-within-milestone, the judge-within-a-judge, etc. They remind one of those Dutch paintings in which a door opens on a series of rooms, each revealing the next one through an ever-smaller door. Sometimes in the foreground a woman looks at her double in the mirror, and the eyes of her own reflection reflect

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her in turn. In like manner, Harris conveys the successive horizons of the worlds he explores as well as the serial selves that grow out of one another within the human personality. As Victor explores the legacy of the past and crawls painfully through the undergrowth of his father’s claim, he feels like one of those limbo dancers he used to watch as a child, who perform near the ground under a horizontal pole but rise again as through a door of rebirth. In Harris’s view, the limbo dancer enacts the drama of Caribbean man, who was forced to the ground by conquest and slavery but is capable of rising from the abyss. More than this, the dance interprets a universal plight, for Adam is universal man condemned to extinction unless the whole world extends itself into a “courtroom of truth” prepared to revise its judgment and to re-appraise the significance of his sabotage of the human factory. The trial dramatizes the “gestation” of Victor’s soul through his recreation of the signal events in his and his father’s life. It takes place within himself as if he were the human community – judge and judged, victor and victim, witnesses. It consists of two opposite movements. Just as when, as a child, he used to climb higher as the year advanced to reflect the sunlight on his father’s brow, so now Victor climbs towards the sunset on OMAI . He thus approaches it from below, identifying himself with Adam, but also from above in the aeroplane or “courtroom” he inhabits as a collective passenger. The aeroplane reflects the sun and flashes its light in his own eye below. Forty years after the event, the light thus shines from him and upon him, and the volcanic material of the past, which he stored in the mirror as a child, now throws light on him or, more precisely, on the relationship into which he is entering with Adam. The aeroplane is the latest fortress man has built for himself, all “technological roar without, caged psyche within” (59). Yet it is from this fortress that, at the sunset of his life, Victor attempts to throw a bridge between himself and the ruins of the past. The object of the trial is indeed a meeting between the living and the dead, between a man of the space age and the primitive past of which he has not yet freed himself. It amounts to balancing all opposites of which life is made: the unfeeling raw material with the feeling unity one confronts in the legacies of the past, the technological (scientific, mechanical) with the psychic (sensitive, mysterious) features discernible in all human achievement – what defence counsel calls “primitive fetish” with “Christian omen.”

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The witnesses at the trial appear to be those solid and conventional possessions or spiritual fetishes with which we encumber the courtrooms of our lives. Yet as Victor gropes his way through past, present and future experience, seeking to define himself as well as Adam, he discovers in that rubbish “an illumination of function that could divest itself of the overburden of appetite by subsistence of memory.” What is meant by this is explained by defence counsel when he tries to make clear to the court the significance of “Fetish,” the poem written by Adam/Harris. “Fetish” is about disintegration, but “If viewed [...] as an omen of grace, it possesses, within every cloak of darkness, a frail light – (a sacramental feeling for reconciling the divided heritage of man) – which shines through every burden of acquisition as that burden inevitably disperses itself within an imperfect material constitution. It is this dispersal or disintegration through which the sacramental union or balance shines to transform the quality of our participation in the quantitative joys and woes of all mankind....” (76)

In other words, this “omen of grace” enduring beyond disintegration through man, nature, or society reveals the existence of alternatives, of “opposite existences,” which man can only attempt to balance in the face of the blessings and curses of arbitrary fortune. The whole trial aims at convincing Victor that his world is doomed unless he rediscovers those alternatives in individual life and history and sifts “the reality of feeling from unfeeling cloak of emancipation and industry” (51). As the trial goes on, it is not so much Adam who is being judged as the court itself and the dead values it stands for. Adam, “the sick man of the world,” set fire to the factory in an apparently revolutionary act against “ideological and technological fortresses.” Actually, he merely succumbed to another form of idolatry and tyranny. And yet, forty years later, Adam still appears as the “light of omen,” capable of evolving from nothing into a source of revelation, and is more eloquent than all the rational do-gooders who claim to speak in his name. Adam fears and challenges the authority of the court, that other ideological fortress. In the end, however, all fortresses crumble; there is always a breach in the wall, a chasm in the earth, and time is an invisible but omnipresent witness at the trial – not time as another prison-house or a material commodity, but time as a qualitative, illuminating gauge revealing to the judge (Victor) the resilience of Adam’s ghost and his capacity for rebirth.

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Time in this sense seems to be equated with consciousness. To put it another way: it only comes to life, is retrieved from the void, in moments of creation. “Dead time,” says defence counsel, “is stored energy which may have a catastrophic explosive significance; [...] living time is that power or medium of presence one can summon at any stage to commune with and compensate the past” (108). When the judge (Victor) comes in view of Manoa, the evocation of the tragic events of his life coincides with a revival of time. As a child, Victor used to throw pebbles into the canal and watch the ripples expand. As each horizon died in the water, giving way to another, he would also experience a sense of death and rebirth. Now, like a stone falling into the pool of his consciousness, the tragedy of his childhood generates “concentric rings representing frontiers of memory” (89); it becomes “an inner lighthouse whose store of energy re-activated horizons of conquest” (89). The pressure of that volcanic stone explodes one by one the fortresses of Victor’s youth. From one horizon, one wounding experience, to another, the judge (Victor) goes through the death of each successive self, whether real or imagined, since Victor disappeared immediately after the trial of his father, and it is not known with certainty what vocation or alternative he invested in as a substitute for genuine emancipation. So the judge witnesses each epitaph give birth to another of his existences by freeing him from his “self-sufficient illusion[s] of character.” Possibly, the various stages of his liberation also represent successive stages in the evolution of man. But, whether personal or historical, it is clearly by rekindling the “charcoal of memory,” and conquering the former deserts of his life that the judge (Victor) becomes aware of the “vicar of lighthouse” (98), the mysterious, regenerating power in each of them. Towards the end of the trial, as the stone keeps sinking and exploding the limits of ages, the “vicar of lighthouse” takes on different shapes within the judge’s (Victor’s) consciousness but is always a revelation of a possible balance between opposites, what Harris calls “The mystery of lifein-death, death-in-life.” The dead can fertilize the living; the enslaved and the dispossessed, because of their very dispossession, can penetrate the most secret prisons of mankind, can help man strive for freedom “through knowing unfreedom” (112). To acknowledge the existence of alternatives inherent in ruin or vacancy, as well as the possibility of their mutual fertilization, is the only way of availing oneself of the breach in the wall. All this is brought home to the judge (Victor) as he immerses himself in the

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depths of the “uncharted seas” in his imaginative quest for the sailor and limbo dancer of Albuoystown. Each horizon wreathed from the descending stone grows into the movement of a dance which, like limbo, leaves a passage for rebirth. For the first time, descent and ascent coincide in the vision of the judge approaching OMAI . When Victor eventually confronts his father after the crash and the explosion of his fortress, he realizes that the latter had all the time been fighting the very fire he had started. For the last time, Victor sees the remnants of the ancient petticoat. When it finally crumbles, “expunged [...] of fear, of loss, of degradation, of extinction of species [...] in conformity with the ruin of catastrophe − it retained a living spark, a frail star” (128). Like Harris’s other novels, Ascent to Omai is the painful limning of a consciousness on the blank canvas of existence. The true moment of consciousness is that in which opposites are joined in harmonious balance. Towards the creation of such a moment, Harris’s characters seek the reeeming thread of compensating love through the dark corridors of memory. This striving after contrasting perspectives conditions the very structure of the novel: the ascending centripetal movement of Victor’s search for his father is balanced by the centrifugal horizons generated by the descending volcanic stone,until these horizons of consciousness become integrated into a single vision. Language is the unifying factor – not the conventional expression of the familiar and the customary, but words that emerge from the primordial silence and shape the judge’s consciousness. As in most of his novels, Harris lets the past carry its own light, allows the world’s complexity to speak for itself to the reader’s mind and senses, refusing “to impose a false coherency upon material one had to digest – perhaps all one’s life” (123). The reader is invited to participate in this difficult process, to share in the genesis of consciousness through language. Victor, the judge, is also a writer, whose re-creation of Adam’s trial is a “novel-history,” an attempt “to find [...] a true groping equation in art or language to the fundaments of existence through history or the void which was native to history” (123). He is a “creative struggler” involved in the task of “being born through words” (123). “Tu es celui qui écrit et qui est écrit,”15 says the poet: this is the essence of Ascent to Omai.  15

“You are what you write and who is written”; Jabès, Le Livre des Questions, 9.


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From The Sleepers of Roraima to The Angel at the Gate The Novel as Painting

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A S C E N T T O O M A I and his next novel, Black Marsden, Harris wrote two volumes of short stories based on Amerindian myths and rituals and historical anecdotes. There are seven novellas1 in all, which, together, form a unique experiment in fiction, an essential link or, to use a Harrisian term, a gateway between the second and third cycles of novels. I hope to have shown clearly so far that the so-called ‘historylessness’ and cultural void of the Caribbean were for Harris an essential source of originality which, to him, does not reside in dominant cultural or behavioural models but in frail hidden resources. Such resources are to be found in remnants of African myths, in limbo and voodoo, and in Amerindian vestiges of myth and legend. Harris dealt with the first in his earlier fiction, while in his volumes of short stories native Amerindian myths and history are his only source of inspiration. This is important if one keeps in mind the fact that the novels Harris wrote subsequently all stage a confrontation between conquering and repressed civilizations, not only in the Caribbean but on a global scale. Before moving on to this wider subject, he explored the creative potentialities of what appears today as a neglected cultural inheritance. Yet, as Yurokon exclaims in the story that bears his name, “here am I [...] no one and nothing, yet here I stand. [...] Whose spirit is it that will not − cannot −

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ETWEEN

Harris, The Sleepers of Roraima: A Carib Trilogy (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), contains “Couvade,” “I, Quiyumucon,” and “Yurokon.” The Age of the Rainmakers (London: Faber & Faber 1971) contains “The Age of Kaie,” “The Mind of Awakaipu,” “The Laughter of the Wapishanas,” and “Arawak Horizon.” Page references to the novellas discussed here are included in the main text.

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die?” (69). We know that tradition as a living though often unacknowledged reality underlying conventional and unquestioned orders of existence is central to Harris’s work. Related to it is the distinction he illustrates in the novellas between history as given authoritarian consensus of opinion and fables or myths as carriers of a seed of renewal, the germ of a “native host consciousness.”2 In “The Mind of Awakaipu,” for example, Harris starts from an anecdote3 according to which Awakaipu, a nineteenth-century Arekuna Indian, behaved heroically but unfeelingly when bitten by a perai (piranha), and he indirectly suggests that this interpretation was probably plastered over the stoic behaviour of the Indian. Actually, the wound he received (not only from a perai but from the conqueror) had aroused a “seminal tear,” the expression of a deep anguish that remained hidden from his masters but is seen by the artist as a “phenomenon of sensibility” capable of dispelling the drought of history and of eliciting a new consciousness, “rain of nativity.”4 The theme of resurrection, so important in Harris’s third fictional cycle, is present in all the stories, not as an achievement but as an open possibility, through the retrieval of what Harris has called the “phenomenal legacy” or “alternative realities.”5 In this way, history is redeemed by myth, provided the mythic imagination is viewed both as individual (and therefore susceptible of breaking given historical moulds through feeling) and universal. Closely related to the theme of resurrection is the archetypal child, the central consciousness in each story of The Sleepers of Roraima, who learns to understand and transform the myth in which he himself is involved. All the myths and fables are presented from the inside through the consciousness of individuals, the sleepers and rainmakers of the titles, who are both Amerindian mythical or historical characters and present-day “artists.” Indeed, each becomes an artist through his own regenerated vision and the transformation of the myth that takes place through him. Harris makes the most of the poetic or metaphoric and transformational nature of myths as defined by Claude Lévi–Strauss, the 2

Harris, History, Fable and Myth, 26 (not in Explorations). Reported by Richard Schomburgk and recounted by Michael Swan in The Marches of El Dorado (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958): 343–45. 4 “The Mind of Awakaipu,” 57. 5 “The Phenomenal Legacy,” Literary Half-Yearly (July 1970): 2, repr. in Explorations, ed. Maes–Jelinek, 43. 3

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French anthropologist, specialist in Amerindian myth and one of the pioneers of structuralism.6 More important still, both for the form of the stories and for the developments it leads to in his third cycle of novels, is Harris’s equation of language with music and painting, using all three as living “texts.”7 In order to illustrate this, I shall briefly discuss “Yurokon,” often referred to by Harris himself as a good example of the kind of analogies he was exploring.8 The main theme in this story is cannibalism, surely the most misunderstood ritual of primitive peoples. It appears here, as in all Harris’s fiction, in the form of a metaphor for an unbounded lust for possession of material riches or of people, a way of gaining strength at the expense of another. “Conquest,” writes Harris, “is cannibal realism.”9 The Caribs, whose name was distorted into “cannibal,” were themselves fierce conquerors before being conquered by Spain. The basic data of the story are mythical elements and a few known facts about the Caribs. The myth of Yurokon, the Bush Baby spectre arising from their pots, appeared among them in pre-Columbian times just before their decline, which they seem to have sensed coming (partly because they saw their intermarriage with Arawak women as an encroachment on their hegemony and strength). The myth was linked with a strong sense of guilt among the Caribs, for it told how a woman threw the Baby Yurokon (who had appeared among them as mother and child) into her pot, as a result of which its mother brought pain, misery, and death into the world.10 It is interesting to note that cannibalism (throwing the baby into the cooking pot) is the source of guilt in this version of original sin. In the various spatial forms he took (not only 6

Although I would not call Harris’s fiction ‘structuralist’, I find a strong affinity between the Lévi–Strauss of Mythologiques (Paris: Plon, 1964–71) and Harris’s second cycle of novels and the stories. 7 On this subject, see the essay “Fiction and the Other Arts in Wilson Harris’s Writing,” in this volume. 8 At this stage, the best example of a structural analogy with the visual arts is probably to be found in “Arawak Horizon.” For a full-length discussion of this story, see Jean–Pierre Durix’s excellent article “Crossing the Arawak Horizon,” Literary Half-Yearly 20 (January 1979): 83–92. 9 Harris, “The Native Phenomenon,” in Common Wealth, ed. Anna Rutherford (Aarhus: Akademisk Boghandel, 1971): 148, repr. in Explorations, ed. Maes–Jelinek, 53. 10 See Walter Roth, An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-Lore of the Guiana Indians (Washington D C : Government Printing Office, 1915): 179.

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mother and child but also tree or dog), it can be said that Yurokon was similar in nature to the Arawak Zemi.11 The pot or vessel in which the spectre appeared is itself significant, for the Caribs were known for their beautiful pottery. Harris merges these elements with the fact that, after eating a ritual morsel of the flesh of their enemies, the Caribs used to fashion flutes out of their bones, thus transforming dead human bone into music, a process called in the story “transubstantiation of species” (67). From the beginning, Harris juxtaposes in “Yurokon” twentieth-century with mythic or ‘dream’ time, the imaginative dimension in all his works. Yurokon is at the outset a twentieth-century Amerindian boy who questions his uncle about the Caribs’ reputation as “huntsmen of bone” (66): i.e. cannibals; he identifies in dream with a sixteenth-century Yurokon and with his mythological namesake. The experience of conquest he relives explains why he is the last Carib and “the first native” (68), this expression suggesting the state of nothingness to which the Caribs were reduced together with the spiritual renascence and ‘original’ identity inherent in this state. Yurokon has been given a kite by Father Gabriel, a missionary, and has fallen asleep at the foot of the tree to which his kite is attached; his sleep is at once real and representative of the Caribs’ unconscious state immediately before and after conquest. While awake, he sails “through the book of space” with his kite, but in his dream he sails “in pages of psyche” (66). There is thus the usual equation between space and psyche, and the ensuing re-enactment of history takes place within Yurokon’s psychological landscape. The musical analogy has a deeper meaning than obvious formal elements would suggest. These, however, can also be taken into account. The story has four movements like a symphony. The tension between two different tones and the resolution of this tension at the end, typical of symphonic structure, find a correspondence in the confrontation between Caribs and Spaniards resolved in the denouement. And the orchestral component is there in the guise of ancestral participants, but above all in the interplay of natural elements, which, in Yurokon’s inner landscape, take part in an “unwritten symphony.” One essential feature of the story is the fact that the encounter between Caribs and Spaniards is rendered wholly through images, some of which evoke sounds, and one is reminded of Lévi–Strauss’s assertion that there 11

For a discussion by Harris of the Zemi, see History, Fable and Myth, 23 (in Explorations, 38–39).

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exists “a logic of sensory qualities.”12 Among the key images introduced in the initial movement or exposition is the cross, in the name of which the Spaniards fought but which they also had to bear when they fell into Carib hands. In this sense, the cross is interchangeable with the bird (an emblem on the Spanish flag), whose wings were transformed by the Caribs into a musical instrument. There is also the image of the octopus and of the sponge, suggesting alternately the voracity and spirit of absorption of Caribs and Spaniards, both of whom behaved as godlike conquerors. The central metaphor is the kite, which takes on innumerable forms such as sea-kite (Spanish) and land-kite (Carib) but also stands for “a timeless element in all places and things” (81). It is throughout Yurokon’s instrument of exploration and gradually becomes an instrument of vision, thus reconciling, as in all of Harris’s fiction, the means with the end of exploration. All through, there is a juxtaposition of contraries, but also two ways of looking at the same phenomenon. For example, when Yurokon first hears an unwritten symphony, he perceives “a strange huddle of ancestral faces attuned to quivering wings [of the Spanish bird] which they plucked with their fingers like teeth” (67), an image which combines the eating of a Spanish morsel with the transformation of the Spaniards into music. But he also hears for the first time the fear of the strings (the Spaniards’), and this helps him understand his ancestors’ own feelings, the fact that they resorted to cannibalism partly in self-defence, to convince the Spaniards that the Caribs, too, were conquerors, “Make them think they had been eaten” (67). In the second movement, Yurokon, a manifestation of the spirit, arises from his uncle’s pot as a spiralling twist of smoke, a breach in the proud homogeneous psychological landscape of the Caribs. The twine of his kite, at first a chain, is the instrument of rupture that entails the disintegration of the Caribs’ outer and inner landscape or psyche (“Break the land. Break the sea. Break the savannah” 69). This enables Yurokon to hear the “unwritten symphony of the wind” (69), which is both a “music of ignominy,” the “song of silence” that follows the Caribs’ defeat, and “the music of origin” (70). The encounter of the “wild warring elements” shows that these play a dual role. For example, fire (the sun, which stands for the former gods or Caribs) is, contrary to all expectations, cooked by 12

Claude Lévi–Strauss, Mythologiques, vol. 1: Le cru et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964):

9. My translation.

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water (the mist, but also the Spaniards who came from the sea), and this suggests a complete reversal of situation for the formerly godlike Caribs now conquered and “cooked” by the new gods of Spain. The Caribs’ arrogance and the guilt of their spirits (“Yurokon bowed his head to conceal the ash of many a war feast, sculpture of blood” 68) subside as they become victims, and their “victorious shroud” becomes the “cauldron of heaven” (71), a holocaust which is not devoid of re-creative possibilities, since the confining leash becomes “the easter twine of endless participation” (71). The possibility of resurrection (“birth-in-death” 72) is conveyed by an extraordinary complex of images and puns developing from one nucleus, a metaphorical piano with black keys and white bones to which the Caribs dance their retreat “within the music of the century” (72). The third and fourth movements re-create in different sets of images the encounters between Caribs and Spaniards and the final retreat of the Caribs into the continent, so that Yurokon’s kite becomes an underworld one, which flies “in the broken sky of conquest” (74) and represents the burning-out, smouldering imagination of the vanquished. This is no onesided reconstruction. Although in the Caribs’ eyes evil has “a stomach of mail which drank tin” (73) (an allusion to the Spaniards’ cannibalistic greed for miner riches), Yurokon nevertheless sees that the Spaniards must have been struck by the “savage character of the land” and that the music of the flute to which the Caribs dance is in fact “a music of silence” (74), a way for the Caribs to absorb their defeat and the invading element. The encounter had already given rise to the creation of a “native organ” in which “innocent evil” (the Caribs’) and “maleficent good” (the Spaniards’, destroying in the name of an ideal) met as “living morsels of divinity” (73) (a meeting between equally cannibalistic gods?). As a result of the Caribs’defeat, the daytime (Spanish) octopus is still “a morsel of divinity” but the nighttime (Carib) octopus has become “the very antithesis of the gods” (74). Yurokon is a link between the two, a “victor-invictim” (75), at first born of the Caribs’ premonition of their fall and fatalistic acceptance of it (see the uncle’s “we, too, will succumb” 69), then “the new organ of capacity,” the potential interpreter of the “native symphony” (76) or consciousness of which Father Gabriel dreams. Harris sees even the extinction of the Caribs in dual terms: They ceased to fret about names since namelessness was a sea of names. They ceased, too, to care about dwindling numbers since numberlessness was native to heaven, stars beyond reckoning. (75)


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The very loss of the natives is the source of their universality (“sea of names [...] stars beyond reckoning”), “numberlessness” clearly meaning both without numbers and innumerable. In the natives’ becoming stars, Harris also visualizes the denouement in metaphoric terms while possibly recalling the myth of the Amerindians transformed into the Pleiades after running away from their enemies into a tree which was set on fire.13 Of particular interest is the way in which the Caribs’ loss is being transmuted into the “annunciation of the native of the globe” (77), though Harris does not envisage an actual rebirth of the Caribs but the rebirth of a native consciousness. After a day of battle, the music of the flute was “a music of silence.” In the shell of the sea (another image for the conqueror’s hard carapace) Yurokon hears a music that is also rain (recalling the notes breaking into a fountain in Palace of the Peacock), a symbol of fertility. After Yurokon’s awakening, while his vision takes shape, that “music of silence” becomes a “music of colour” on Carib vases which embroiled the savannah in the sea, the mountain in the valley, forest in scrub: bowl of earth, pottery of earth, toast of the valley by the huntsmen of bone who had drunk before from the bowl of the sea. (80)

It is first necessary to recall that painting is the metaphoric device used to express the Caribs’ visualization of the underworld to which they withdraw after their defeat. We are familiar from earlier novels with the transformation of sound into sight. In the passage just quoted, Harris brings together music and painting to convey a reconciliation of elements in a landscape of consciousness, a reconciliation which makes sense only as the transformed vision of formerly polarized attitudes within each person. Moreover, in “music of colour” music is at a further remove than colour, since it suggests the subtle alterations of boundaries of perception in variations and harmonizations of sensation on Carib painted pottery that sings. When Father Gabriel says to himself, “Eastertide again [...] annunciation of music” (81), he is equating the means with the end, music with the “painted” consciousness it expresses, as language was equated with visions of consciousness in The Eye of the Scarecrow and Ascent to Omai.  13

This myth inspired the chief metaphor in The Tree of the Sun. For different versions of it, see Lévi–Strauss’s Mythologiques I, 246–52.

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In Wilson Harris’s third phase, the painting metaphor becomes so important that it is woven in the very structure of the narrative in order to convey the protagonist’s “double vision.” The cycle begins with Black Marsden, a novel which initiates a new manner, in that it creates an impression of realism while also foreshadowing a sensuousness more fully developed in the novels that come after. This realism, however, is largely illusory, since the sense of immediacy it conveys is counterpointed by what might be called an inverse realism, best illustrated by the characters, who have sprung into being as a result of the protagonist’s sensitiveness to a theatre of consciousness within himself. Clive Goodrich has won a fortune in the pools and has been around the world, but he now lives in Edinburgh, conscripted into a role as patron of the arts. One winter afternoon, he comes across the “half-frozen spectre”14 of Doctor Black Marsden in the ruined Dunfermline Abbey and invites him to stay in his house as long as he likes. It is not the least achievement of the novel that Marsden and his agents, the beautiful Jennifer Gorgon, Knife, and Harp, exist in their own right as well as being existences that are part of Goodrich’s personality, his community of being, or, to use the novel’s terminology, the tabula rasa theatre within himself. The link with the tabula rasa personality of Adam in Ascent to Omai is obvious. The doppelgänger of Harris’s earlier novels has developed into a whole cast, “naked apparitions in search of density and cover” (36), or, from another angle, personalizations of “the human or cosmic desert” (54). The structure of the novel and the narrative remain essentially dualistic, not in any clear-cut way, but as a precarious balance constantly endangered and restored between a self-sufficient reality and the “fabric of invisibles” (33) that Marsden brings to Goodrich’s awareness. Of Marsden himself, Goodrich says: It was this aspect of strange immunity to the elements and strange immersion in the elements − half-pathetic and sorrowful, half-ecstatic and joyful − that became now a kind of vivid black humour. (12)

Black here, as in “Black Marsden,” is used in the sense explained by Harris15 as suggesting an “undiscovered realm” or “eclipse” which, as we know, is a dynamic state that precedes rebirth. Marsden plays a dual role 14 15

Harris, Black Marsden, 11. Further page references are in the main text. History, Fable and Myth, 20 (“eclipse” only in Explorations, 21).

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as “clown or conjurer” and “Hypnotist Extraordinary” (12). As clown or conjurer, he makes Goodrich alive to the theatre of the “non-memory,” and, as Marsden puts it, is “our most fallible identity kit”; it corresponds to “areas of the human sphynx in which millions are eclipsed [...] at starvation point; or vanished [...] in Hiroshima, for example” (30). The distinction is an important one and is illustrated in various ways by Marsden and his agents, by Goodrich when twice he becomes invisible to Jennifer Gorgon, but most characteristically in Namless, Goodrich’s country of origin in South America, which he revisits in imagination. Marsden stimulates or “fire[s] in some degree” (52) everyone with whom he comes into contact. But as hypnotist he exerts a dangerous fascination, for he does not hesitate to snap his fingers at Goodrich. Although the latter is indebted to Marsden for his growing insight, he must resist the temptation to yield his face to Marsden or to acquire the coat of uniformity that Marsden’s impassive agents tend to wear. In this respect, Black Marsden is a signal advance on The Eye of the Scarecrow, which it complements (Goodrich is said to have a “scarecrow eye” in his moments of vision). We saw, indeed, that Hebra, one of the uninitiate, could become possessive in turn. A major theme in Black Marsden is the fact that the uninitiate can offer “a dangerous hypnotic legacy at times as well as a revitalized caveat of originality and community” (55). Ironically, although Marsden is an agent of fascination, he himself provides Goodrich with the instrument that will help him resist fascination. For example, Goodrich sees Marsden, dressed as a camera (twentieth-century man’s instrument for reproducing his own view of reality), acting out his role as a featureless beggar and using Jennifer as “currency of beauty” to fascinate Goodrich. “At the very edge of fascination” (21), Marsden’s cameracostume is slashed by Knife, his own agent, and Marsden is revealed in his vulnerability, nakedness, and self-parody. This leaves Goodrich uncomfortably aware of the necessity for faith in a living creation, of the need to see through the “featureless” mirroring of people in authoritarian mass media, a process that Harris equates with the death of the imagination. Marsden’s agents present a similar duality. The beautiful Jennifer Gorgon is like a fascinating fashion plate and represents the temptations or pressures for the sake of which twentieth-century man so often relinquishes his individuality: love, sex, freedom (she is “the resurgent Gorgon, our twentieth-century fascination with freedom” (44). With her beauty-pack, she even represents “the hideousness of all charm, the

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hideousness of all compulsion” (59). But there is a fissure or crack in that “bandaged head of stillness” (60), and from their first meeting Goodrich knows that if he unscrewed the head of the Gorgon he would “be seized by the open-ended mystery of beauty which revealed and concealed all its parts ad infinitum” (14). As to Knife, who serves Goodrich as a guide to Namless, he may wear the face of the collectivity, since he looks the same whether he is white, black, or brown, but his very existence (particularly as Black Jamaican Knife) makes Goodrich aware of the polarizations in the world, the gap which separates the saved from the damned, just as in Namless it is he who confronts Goodrich with the pitfalls of collectivity and uniformity. Involuntarily, it seems, he is the persona through which Goodrich “re-senses” the premises of an extreme or “deep-seated” but genuine community. Before commenting on the Namless section in which this takes place, it is first necessary to point out that all aspects of the novel are marked by a subtle interplay of contrasts according with a repeatedly re-created awareness of otherness in Goodrich. There are the contrasts in the landscape around Edinburgh and between the old and the modern city. These are beautifully rendered, and one feels Harris’s extreme sensitivity to the atmosphere of the place as well as to the contradictions in the Scottish personality which serve to introduce Goodrich’s interest in the submerged or buried side of Marsden. Goodrich discovers a contrast between cultures in Namless, too. An alternation between the third-person narrator and Goodrich as I-narrator provides the narrative with external and inside perspectives as well as rendering the interplay of existences within Goodrich. There is also an alternation between Goodrich’s moments of exaltation and his occasional sense of oppression when Marsden becomes too assertive, although the latter, too, oscillates between self-assertion and inertia, an indication of the dynamic character of his personality. Finally, the narrative progresses through alternative forms of expression, for this is partly a novel of ideas, but one in which ideas are also concretized as characters or incidents. The tabula rasa comedy stages Goodrich’s participation in the lives of normally eclipsed personae who have suddenly impressed themselves upon his consciousness and their participation in his life. It implies the kind of self-distancing that has been explained à propos The Eye of the Scarecrow. “What is freedom without the blackest self-mockery” (23), writes Goodrich. When he “dreams” or loses himself in the intuitive

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dimension that made him respond to Marsden in the first place, he puts down his thoughts and sketches in his diary or “book of infinity.” This does not necessarily involve writing or sketching except in a metaphorical sense for vision, as when, on Dean Bridge, Goodrich “re-sensitize[s] our biased globe into moveable squares within and beyond every avalanche of greed or despair” (66). The moveable squares or “chessboard of visibles and invisibles” (64) can be the conscious and unconscious elements or existences within oneself that tend to be frozen and therefore paralyzing. They correspond to those sheltering and imprisoning horizons or circles in Ascent to Omai from which Victor liberated himself through the dance of the stone. Goodrich recalls the “avalanche” of despair in his mother after the death of his father and the disappearance of his step-father into the Brazilian jungle when he was five. It is thus “square five” that he wants to sense again when, stimulated by his vision on Dean Bridge and after being “invisible” to (cut dead by) Jennifer for the second time, he takes his visionary trip to Namless as a way of re-assessing the “blocked perspectives” (54) in his existence. Apart from being his country of origin, Namless is also his inner landscape, the tabula rasa theatre, and the prevailing condition of the twentieth-century world. Namless offers contrasts of snowy mountains and tropical valleys, but it has been turned into a desert and the population is hidden or eclipsed. The people have sleepwalked themselves from one strike to another and have been unknowingly pushed further than they thought. When the authorities decide to agree to all their demands it is too late; the claim mechanism has been deified, and the revolution turns Namless into a desert. Things were no better under the “American dinosaur” (82) when rulers made friends of their former victims in order to preserve their economic bastions. The idea seems to be that, whether in totalitarian or in capitalist areas, uniformity prevails; it is represented by the robot Goodrich discerns on a rock. Significantly, Brown Knife, as Goodrich’s guide and as an agent of the Director General of Namless Theatre, merely repeats what he has heard or read in the newspaper, Dark Rumour. Yet apparently without realizing the implications of what he says, he also explains to Goodrich the “emergent philosophy of [genuine] revolution bound up with a re-sensing, re-sensitizing of dead monsters” (82). As Goodrich’s understanding deepens, the landscape awakens and “a curious subtle fleshing [appears] upon the rocks” (82). Thus Namless, which at the outset was both an “archeological phenomenon” and the

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“cradle of exiled men and gods” (73), becomes a place where “the very stillness still moved endlessly” (84),16 and therefore lived. From “resensing” these contrasts, Goodrich is deeply upset by the fate of the eclipsed (he cannot remain indifferent to the robot) but feels the need to move and retreat from Namless. It is this simultaneous sympathy and need for retreat (or refusal to be engulfed in namelessness) that Black Marsden illustrates more specifically than Harris’s earlier fiction. Knife illustrates in his person the transformation of a susceptibility to namelessness into a totalitarian extinction of individuals, the stage before what Goodrich calls “self-execution into infinity” (90). Knife’s guiding role comes to an end when his terror at another agent’s assassination makes him adopt an authoritarian attitude towards Goodrich, thus reinforcing the totalitarian trend in Namless. Goodrich resists this, and when he hears a piping music associated with a nameless figure who had played to warn his master of an ambush, he reads in the song a warning to himself despite Knife’s assertion that the song now means the contrary: i.e. encouragement to go forward. Goodrich’s rejection of Knife prefigures his resistance to Marsden and his other agents, who have taken increasing advantage of his hospitality. Jennifer has been made pregnant by one of her characterless lovers, whom she doesn’t want to marry because she is merely concerned with perpetuating herself while remaining faithful to Marsden. She asks Goodrich whether she may use his house as a refuge and he mistakenly believes that she wants to be free of Marsden, too. A few days later he buys a flamboyant shirt “made of fire” (106) (perhaps an echo of the “shirt of flame” in Eliot’s “Little Gidding”) to match the “intuitive fire music” (94) that had warned him out of death in Namless and to celebrate his relationship of trust with Jennifer. But she does not even notice the shirt and is only eager to tell him that she has confessed all to Marsden and that he has agreed to their plan. Goodrich, who has not yet given his consent, is furious at having been taken for granted and throws them both out, thus freeing himself of the role imposed on him, not merely as patron of the arts but as another face for Marsden to wear. To those who, like Goodrich, can read appearances, Black Marsden shows that there is a complex distinction between enslaved patronage and the promotion of innovation and hard-won freedom in the arts. Goodrich’s trip to Namless has meant a necessary wrestling with “other buried 16

This recalls the phrase “nothing moved” in The Waiting Room, 65.


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traumatic existences” (94); it ended with a newfound compassion for his mother, who had given in to despair when he was a child, but also with a necessary retreat from Namless: How close can one come to [oblivion], learn from it without succumbing to it, without being swallowed up in it? (96)

Goodrich has stopped short of succumbing, of having his personality swamped by Marsden’s hypnotic power. He remains “alone, utterly alone, as upon a post-hypnotic threshold” (111). This “aloneness” beyond all coercive roles is the condition of genuine freedom.  In Companions of the Day and Night, a sequel to Black Marsden, Goodrich travels further into namelessness together with Idiot Nameless, the main ‘character’, whose papers, paintings, and sculptures Marsden has asked him to edit. As I explained in the essay on The Eye of the Scarecrow, Idiot Nameless or “the Fool” personifies a free and fluid condition, a kind of intermediate state between what is solidly established and entrenched, on one hand, and the mystery of what is eclipsed but contains a seed of rebirth, on the other. He represents at once a state of “negative identity” and the mobile medium of consciousness through which it is possible to reach that state (“Descent by a spark [...]. Descent into a spark.”17 His character is thus in keeping with the role he plays, that of falling into and breaking down long-established orders one after another. The novel takes place in Mexico, whose abundant layers of vestiges of such orders testify to the dominating presence of Aztec gods, driven underground by the Spanish, but conquering Christ, himself ridden by the bullets of twentieth-century revolutionaries. The role of Goodrich is to translate into a “novel-gospel” Nameless’s discovery, in these vestiges, of “unsuspected proportions” (36), “unsuspected corridors, underseas, underskies, of creation” (32). The diary, paintings, and sculptures Goodrich edits “were doorways through which Nameless moved” (13), which suggests that the very people he came across and the vestiges he visited while in Mexico opened the 17

Harris, Companions of the Day and Night (London: Faber & Faber, 1975): 66. Further page references are in the main text.

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way to their own unacknowledged side. An example of this is when the “majestic self-portrait” (24) of the sovereign Mexican Christ sculpted by a fire-eater becomes the very torch that illumines (or a door that leads into) the “rejected abysses” (25) into which Nameless descends beneath a Christian church. This transformation of Christ from a dominating, and therefore oppressive, figure into an illuminating torch points to the fluid role of Christ in the novel: indeed, in Harris’s fiction as a whole. He presented an Arawak Christ in Palace of the Peacock, and in Companions of the Day and Night he creates a Mexican Christ in whom merge the layers of sacrifice imposed on the Mexican people in successive ages. So Christ becomes filled with what Harris has called elsewhere “complexities of nakedness,”18 which Nameless “falls” into and experiences, thus becoming in turn a Christ figure: The strange humour of Christ lay in this, in susceptible spaces, susceptible executions, susceptible carvings, susceptible resurrections and descent into apparent oblivion, apparent nakedness woven into the intuitive chasm of his world [...]. And it was this combination of levels [...] that gave him the magic of universality. (31)

The paintings and sculptures or the visions they represent merge with the time-structure of Nameless’s visit to Mexico to give the novel its form. Nameless is said to have come to Mexico just under a fortnight before Easter. But his days in Mexico are also counted according to the pattern of the Mexican calendar stone, made up of a nine-day cycle (companions of the night) and a thirteen-day cycle (companions of the day). Days eight and nine were called Dateless Days, as they are in the novel, in order to absorb the remaining four days into the nine-day cycle. Significantly, it is the nine-day cycle (companions of the night) that punctuates Nameless’s experience in Mexico and merges with the period just under a fortnight (thirteen days) of the Christian calendar. The dateless days which come at the end of the novel re-create the Fool’s visit to Sisters Rose and Maria in New York in Mrs Black Marsden’s house, an event that took place before his visit to Mexico. The structure of the novel is thus circular, since the end touches the beginning and juxtaposes, as in earlier novels (Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey, Tumatumari, and Ascent to Omai), con18 Harris, “The Making of Tradition,” in The Commonwealth Writer Overseas, ed. Alastair Niven (Brussels: Didier, 1976): 33–39; repr. in Explorations, ed. Maes–Jelinek, 88–96.

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ventional time-structures (here pre-Columbian and Christian) with timelessness. It is also specifically ‘vertical’ in its emphasis on gravity and its various renderings of a falling body unravelling “historical investitures” to provide a glimpse of indestructible and uncapturable inner reality. The temporal and timeless dimensions are both conveyed through Nameless’s “fall” into legendary characters and into the remains of eclipsed cultures. In his introduction, Goodrich compares the pre-Columbian fear that the sun might fall and never rise again (a fear that led to the institutionalization of human sacrifices to the sun) with modern man’s fear that his world might fall into a “black hole of gravity.”19 What Nameless re-lives intensely in his falling sickness and in his descent into the past is at once modern man’s angst about sudden total extinction and the anguish (as well as the blindness, deafness, dumbness) that the fallen victims of the past have experienced: those who were sacrificed to the sun, then the Aztecs who fell victim to the Spaniards, the Christian conquerors who later became themselves victims of the revolution, and even the post-revolutionary workers who are the unconscious victims of the uniformity, false unity, they seek to impose. In the face of this range of oppressors-turned-oppressed (and vice versa), the ambivalent figure of the fire-eater whom Nameless first meets is all-important, since he re-enacts the fall of the sun (fire) into his devouring mouth but brings it out again and thus points to the possibility of rebirth. He is an artist whose ambivalence is illustrated by the fact that he is the creator of both the statue of the majestic Christ and the unfinished statue of the Absent Virgin,20 a point I shall comment on presently. A close reading of the novel will show that he is related to all the other male figures: the old fire-god Huehueteotl, who appears at the centre of the calendar stone; Christ; and the guide Hosé. It is the fire-eater who stimulates Nameless’s many descents as a spark, first, into a canal under an avenue where Montezuma sails (which can be perceived as a “living” presence), then into the church of the Absent 19

The ‘black hole’ has been described as “formed by the collapse of a heavy star to such a condensed state that nothing, not even light, can escape from its surface”; John Taylor, Black Holes: The End of a Universe? (Glasgow: Collins / Fontana, 1976): 9. It is scientifically uncertain whether the matter inside the black hole is annihilated or transformed and, as it were, reborn. 20 Possibly inspired by the unfinished Virgin of the Rondanini Pietà in Milan.

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Virgin, where he meets the fire-eater’s model for his statue of the Virgin. After this first meeting, Nameless sleeps with the model, who, as a whore, is a concrete presence, a commodity of love. But she is also the madonna, the Absent Virgin whom Nameless once sees and follows from afar in the vicinity of the pyramid of the sun, though he never comes upon her again. It seems that in the fullness of her being, as both virgin and whore, she is unreachable. She is a “spark within ghost” (61) and also the lost and never-to-be-found mother of origins. “How close does one come to the madonna as rejected commission of an age?” (28), Nameless wonders. Her statue has indeed been commissioned by the Church, then rejected, probably because the whore served as a model for her. Similarly, when searching for her, Nameless visits a former convent turned into a church outside Mexico City; he discovers that a procession has been instituted in honour of her raped grandmother, Sister Beatrice, but that she, “the child of a child born from rape” (41), is rejected as a whore. Her role is a pendant to that of Christ and, if I understand rightly, the four nuns of the vanished religious order, Sister Beatrice, Sister Joanna, Sister Rose, and Sister Maria, whom Nameless seeks out but never actually meets, are different versions of the Madonna. Sister Beatrice was raped by revolutionaries while dressed up as a bullet-ridden Christ in a procession. After that, she used to seduce a Fool each year to play the part. But Hosé, the guide, and most people prefer to ignore the interchangeability of roles between the raped virgin and the Fool, although Nameless during his visit is the seduced Fool who re-lives the genuine role of the sacrificed Christ. They monumentalize Sister Beatrice as a martyr of the revolution. It is Sister Joanna who, from her convent in an old European city, explains to Nameless in a dream the real meaning of Beatrice’s martyrdom and association with a Christ-like figure – that what she really wanted was, like Nameless himself, an “equation between revolution and religion” (47). Until the revolution, it was Christ the conqueror who prevailed in Mexico. By suffering His martyrdom in her person or through the Fool (in modern times Christ is not crucified but shot), she gives Him back his original religious role as a redeemer. Hosé himself suggests this unconsciously when he tells Nameless that her portrait offers “the seed of a place” (43). Don Hosé is not the only one who monumentalizes people into a static role. Sister Maria, who appears to be Sister Beatrice’s counterpart (like her, she died “last autumn” 40, 70), monumentalizes herself as a “prince of the church” (77) and, though killed accidentally by gunfire from a pass-

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ing police car, she asserts her so-called heroic role through her sister Rose. Even Nameless must resist the temptation to monumentalize the Absent Virgin into a “sacrificed angel pinned to the sky” (35), as he realizes in his first dream: “the art of murder [...] is the art of love of heaven too through winged premises.”21 Most of the time, however, the Fool breaks down the shell into which mythical and historical figures are conscripted and uncovers the sacrifice they suffered in its nakedness (hence the expression “unfrocked spaces”). The accumulated layers of vestiges he explores are so many “wagons of subsistence” (67) into which one former victim after another fell and lay “at the bottom of the world” (68). That is why the “dreams of subsistence” arising from the “unwritten reserves planted in the death of obscure men and women” (67) are interchangeable, as are the “absence and presence” (26) of those whom Nameless encounters. Thus, contrasting states are here clearly presented as interchangeable. “Interchangeability” is also illustrated in another sense when a “transaction of vision” (59) takes place between “Idiot spark” or Nameless and the Emperor Stone Rain or pre-Columbian emperor. In his descent into “accumulated levels of sacrifice” (36), Nameless does not identify completely with victims but stands halfway between vision, when he glimpses the inner proportions of the figures he encounters, and reflection: i.e. a state of passivity.22 When he falls into Emperor Stone Rain, the precarious balance between vision and reflection occurs but also a “movement of being glimpsed by each other across ages” (60). This visionary exchange is linked to the process of mutation illustrated in several places in the novel when “the shape of each body, each vision is made already subtly different to what one thought it was” (23). Mutation goes together with rediscovery and is ironically brought to Nameless’s attention when he realizes that

21

As mentioned above, this is a further development of the “art of murder” illustrated in The Eye of the Scarecrow. Making people into “commodities of love” is a way of killing them. But one can also ‘kill’ (make static) by idealizing inordinately. For Harris’s view of the dangers inherent in the idealization of the Virgin, see Enigma of Values, ed. Petersen & Rutherford. 22 For the distinction between reflection and vision, see Companions of the Day and Night, 59, as well as Harris’s essay “Reflection and Vision” in Commonwealth Literature and the Modern World, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek (Brussels: Didier, 1975): 15–19; repr. in Explorations, ed. Maes–Jelinek, 83–87.


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There were post-revolution convents that seemed to sink when their end came into excavations that had recently commenced, after centuries of eclipse, into pre-Conquest Toltec shrines concealed in mounds and hills. (31)

The ambivalence between the concrete and the “apparitional,” the sensory and the abstract or “structural,” so distinctive a feature of Harris’s second phase and of the novellas, is perhaps even more beautifully rendered in this novel than in the earlier fiction. Each character is at once solidly there and evanescent. The whore/madonna, for example, is both a flesh-andblood woman and an elusive, never-to-be-wholly-possessed muse. That is why her statue by the fire-eater remains unfinished: she is not an absolute but seems to represent an ever-changing source of inspiration and is, like Christ, “susceptible to all rejected visions” (26). Nameless’s interview with Sister Joanna, part of the preparations for his visit to Mexico, takes place both in an actual convent in Europe and as a visionary re-creation in a mid-Atlantic cabin (a middle ground between European and American civilizations). During the interview, Sister Joanna’s voice comes and fades as if to suggest that the confrontation with the Other can only be discontinuous. This recalls the woman in Black Marsden who “comes and goes” in Namless, or the passage in which Goodrich sees that “something moved, reappeared, flashed again, darkened.”23 Similarly, when Nameless visits Mrs Black Marsden in New York he finds that hers is a “contagious theatre of absences and presences” (74). Sister Rose is one of Mrs Black Marsden’s roles and comes alive from a “heap of wigs and costumes” (76) in her room. Mrs Black Marsden explains that There is a technicality to Rose [...]. But also there is a ghost to Rose which may become visible within that technicality [...]. And [...] it is only when the ghost is partially visible through the dress of technicality that the past really connects with the present. (75)

Nameless’s perception of the ghost in the technicality or of the ghostlike residues of experience in Mexico corresponds to his partial visions of the living element in them. In this respect, his progress in consciousness takes the form of a discontinuous dialogue with the dead. There is an element of continuity, however, in his progression towards the pyramid of the sun which he ascends and from which he falls. As suggested above,

23

Black Marsden, 78, 64.


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and as Harris himself has pointed out,24 his fall from the pyramid is also timeless, and in that sense ceaseless. It is as if his many descents into others and into various Mexican loci were facets (partial re-creations) of his great and continuous fall. This fall is indirectly conveyed through a superpositioning of truncated pyramid images: one is formed by the landscape (“A truncated pyramid of landscape man Popocatapetl was. Deprived of a skull” 29), another is alive on the billowing curtain as Nameless keeps falling although he is also in Mrs Black Marsden’s room, and yet another is composed of “Rose’s face animated and alive [but severed?] at the base of the pyramid” and “Maria’s head elongated like bone, upright reflection” (77). At one stage, it seems to Nameless that “for centuries [...] he had been ascending, descending [...] falling into rain [...] into shelters of paint [...] sacrificed paint” (58). If I am not mistaken, the Fool’s ceaseless fall amounts to his dynamic (because never final) identification with the uninitiate. It is what Marsden, in his letter to Goodrich, calls an “advance of ‘dying structure’ into ‘living present’” (81) or what Harris was to call “immortal dying tradition” in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness. Admittedly, on the realistic level Nameless dies at the base of the pyramid. Also, Mrs Black Marsden, when he asks her if he can spend a day and a night with her, rejects him (though recognizing Christ in him), as it seems Christ in his sacrificial capacity is always rejected. But Nameless in Black Marsden “endure[s] a state of crisis beyond infection by despair,” and in the timeless dimension he dies into life and seems in fact to be reborn as the child Sister Joanna took in before she died: “It was the beginning of the child of humanity” (52). That his dying coincides with rebirth is the last thing the Fool understands: to be born was to be unmade in the legendary heart of Rose in compensation for Maria’s bone and death, to be born was to be broken in the dream-play of history in compensation for unfulfilled models of sovereign subsistence, to be born was to descend into a depth of frustrated appetite and need arching back across centuries. (78; emphases mine)

Does the “child of humanity” announce the rebirth of genuine community in conquest-ridden Mexico?  24

See the postcript to “The Making of Tradition,” in The Commonwealth Writer Overseas, ed. Niven, 38–39 (in Explorations, 95–96).

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If, as has been suggested, Harris’s oeuvre is a continuous canvas on which he and the exploring consciousness in his novels advance and retreat between the poles of life and light on one hand, death and nothingness on the other, then Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness is a leap forward towards what is called in the novel the “genie of space” or “forgotten genie in oneself.”25 Da Silva himself is ‘resurrected’ from Harris’s earlier fiction (Palace of the Peacock and Heartland) as a “deep-seated painter” (10), one who apprehends together the material and immaterial dimensions inherent in all beings, objects, and experience. Whereas Idiot Nameless in Companions of the Day and Night was part of the explored reality, his own experience becoming accessible through Goodrich only, da Silva and the characters he “paints” impose themselves with an immediacy and a sensuousness undiminished by the non-material element elicited from each. The protagonist’s very name, “Da Silva da Silva” (6), expresses his own duality as well as his “double vision.” This is also conveyed by the time-structure of the narrative, which once more juxtaposes a conventional time unit, one winter day, with the thirty-odd years of da Silva’s experience since, as a five-year-old orphan, he was adopted by the British ambassador in Brazil, Sir Giles Marsden–Prince.26 These reconstructed years blend into the one day with shifts backwards and forwards. Da Silva is a painter who spends the winter day getting his pictures ready for an exhibition. But the canvases he gathers together are, as much as real paintings, slices of life which present themselves differently to him from what they were originally and through which he hopes “to discover [...] the origins of change” (10). Painting is here equated with experience, hence with fiction and, more generally, with the creative release from, and attraction to, deeply concealed areas of the psyche. The first set of da Silva’s paintings is the “Madonna Pool” series, which accumulates pool images with their dual possibility of mirror-like immobility and moving densities. Actually, they are areas in both elegant and destitute London;27 the pool is the seat of experience and therefore 25

Harris, Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, 50, 26. Further page references are in the main text. 26 As his name suggests, Sir Giles Marsden–Prince represents the two faces of tradition, the serving (Marsden) and the ruling (Prince). 27 The novel contains a beautiful evocation of London with its variations of light at all times of the day. Not only are the contrasts of the city presented, but Harris manages to intimate an immaterial reality as a counterpoint to its solidity. With

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“sea of redress, undress, unravelling elements” (13). Da Silva is married to one of the madonnas or muses, Jenine Gold, who is of mixed Celtic and Peruvian descent, as he is of mixed Portuguese and Arawak ancestry, so that together they span civilizations. She is omnipresent in the novel, because she and da Silva live in and through each other (“you are in me I in you forever” 5) and because she is at once his main source of inspiration and the globe he tries to bring to life through his painting, “Jenine Gold where masked populations reside” (5). A major skeletal theme in the novel involves their union engendering a potential rebirth of humanity, of men’s sensibility and imagination. Because Jen means so much to him and is also his material support, da Silva instinctively resists her selfsufficiency, “the halo of a stern goddess” (8) she sometimes wears and to which he could become subservient. She is in any case only one version, if eventually the most fruitful one, of the madonna; her portrait is complemented by that of Manya, da Silva’s model, like him from Brazil, and Kate Robinson, a teacher who wants to take Manya’s son, Paul, from her because she thinks Manya doesn’t take proper care of him. Manya wears a black coat of uniformity and her house is littered with the paraphernalia of “economic deity, industry, fashion”; da Silva loathes “imprints of changelessness” (18) in her. But he is aware of her essential nakedness, of the suffering person beneath the changeless coat, which she leaves behind at their last meeting, later to be interpreted by da Silva as the “trailing coat of the madonna” (75) which eventually may be one of the sources of his “flying,” moving inspiration. Manya has come to seek his help to be able to keep her son, and her intense love for her child heals her back to life. Just as Manya’s unlighted coat is the seed of the madonna paintings, so da Silva’s unlighted TV set is the vacant frame in which the “paradise paintings” take shape. Each setting, incidentally, is a vacant frame for da Silva’s paintings, while at the beginning he is “void of identities” (13). He had once seen Kate Robinson, the third madonna figure, in a TV programme on abortion, during which she had been provoked into confessing that she had an abortion herself and thus killed the need for Adam in herself. But da Silva discovers that her self-sufficiency is scarred, and her self-inflicted wound is for him a source of compassion: “at the heart of remarkable, controlled use of imagery, he re-creates the world, and the growth and death of empires, in the limited space of Holland Park and the Commonwealth Institute (rather, what used to be the Commonwealth Institute).

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box [TV ] or body [Kate’s] unlit by the senses lay signal lit by the nonsenses as seed of paradise” (25). In other words, a negative condition lies once more at the very source of creation. Besides, Kate’s intense concern for Manya’s child is an indication that she, too, is susceptible of a “new arousal of blood” (38). Although the three madonna figures seem on the surface of it to have nothing in common, they are linked by their feeling or desire (in Jen’s case) for a child. Apart from the madonna figures, another link between the “madonna pool” and the “paradise” paintings is the sixteenth-century print that comes alive through da Silva’s identification of the presences that “swim” on it with his own antecedents. It represents a meeting between civilizations: Portuguese courtiers march towards Amerindian beauties up to the waist in a Brazilian pool. The callousness of its first legend, “Sex and the Portuguese in Brazil,” evokes the suppression of the weaker culture by the stronger. Its other legend, “Paradise,” is largely ironical – if it suggests the creation of a new world, it also represents an illusory perfection, as the individual lives of da Silva’s antecedents show. In his paintings, these assume the personality of Magellan, the limping Portuguese circumnavigator of the globe who has a modern namesake in the father of Manya’s child, and Legba Cuffey, a composite figure in whom merge the eighteenth-century rebel slave Cuffey, the African god Legba (also limping), and their modern namesake, a barman and model of da Silva’s. Magellan was glorified by history while his crew was ignored, but he got little reward for his daring feats. Legba Cuffey was a mere footnote in the history books, but he now tends to compensate for the losses of the past by denying the former exploiter the right to exist, whereas da Silva wants “to join the fact of broken power long long ago [...] into netted Legba, as threshold to the game of universal [...] cross-cultural divinity” (10). And, indeed, by “painting” the two limping men into himself, he elicits a “whispered dialogue” (11) between them. Da Silva also paints into himself the Earl of Holland, a member of the ruling class victimized by Cromwell. These men’s lives show the reversibility of situation that makes Harris find life in death or light in darkness. They also illustrate the polarizations that inevitably result from the attempt to create ever-new Edens at the expense of others; hence the illusoriness of perfection in the “paradise” they try to create. The “principle of healing” (32) (at work in the modern Magellan, unexpectedly healed of leukemia) is a frequent rationale behind such an attempt. It is the need “to prove survival” (37) − after expecting

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death − by accomplishing ever greater deeds. Whereas Manya was healed psychologically by her love for her son, Magellan’s physical healing contains a warning against the need to die heroically on the beaches of conquest and to incur or impose sacrifice again and again. The male figures in the novel represent the contrasting faces or complex levels of “immortal dying tradition” (61) into which da Silva travels (26). Indeed, the contradictions in the lives of Magellan and the Earl of Holland (domination followed by victimization) and the recurring victimization of Cuffey (despite expectations of sovereignty when a reversal of history occurs) show that beyond the oppressive and oppressed but equally mortal (dying) faces of tradition, another immaterial, undying tradition secretes itself out of the accumulated sufferings of men. It is in forms of this immaterial tradition that da Silva discovers the “varieties of transparent eclipse” mentioned above. In it, too, is to be found the light that has been “pushed under [...] suppressed, even violated” (38) and never to be wholly retrieved, just as the “unfathomable coherence” that runs through each “trackless wilderness” (38) can never be attained. However, da Silva realizes as he “re-lives” each canvas that mutations occur, bringing with them partial illuminations such as he discovers through the “spiritual corpses” (17) in Manya’s room or through the black coat she leaves behind when she runs away to save her child. The “prodigal” return of life or of light is illustrated in the novel in many concrete and symbolic ways. Da Silva was rescued from a flood in Brazil by Sir Giles, who saved a child in London at the cost of his own life. When Jen returns from Peru and they make love in the middle of the day, da Silva becomes aware of their “mutual prodigality or resurrected body” (47); da Silva’s many self-portraits through the resurrected lives of his models amount to their return to life. But, above all, there is the re-enactment of Cuffey’s death in the “wildernesse”28 area of Holland Park, followed by the regeneration of his vision (“the eyes in his head were aflame” 59). This re-enactment brings about the reconciliation between Cuffey, the victim of the Middle Pass-

28

Harris invents a use of this older spelling with -e to differentiate certain phenomena from more general senses of ‘wilderness’; these phenomena, which for Harris are positively archetypal and atavistic, include the fantastically arranged treescape or “theatre” within a large garden or park (as here), the whole aspect of Kensington’s Commonwealth Institute buildings (see below), and the creative renditions within da Silva’s paintings.

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age, and Magellan, the restless seeker after paradise, so that in the “prodigal” paintings the “wildernesse” becomes the “middle ground of paradise” (48). Whereas, before, each was conscripted into his role as victim and conqueror, they have become “conscripted into an elaborate plot to heal each other’s wounds in the conception of a child” (60). Before commenting on the child as product of a prodigal return to life, it is necessary to point out that the immaterial dimension in tradition also manifests itself in a “drama of savage art” (5). Da Silva cultivates (recreates or envisions) endless varieties of “wildernesse,” all man-made, some beautiful, some hideous. But beyond man’s obvious achievements there is a demonic force, a wildness (it flashes through in various images), which to da Silva is a “source of terror” (3) and of fascination and which, as much as beauty, is part of what is called the hidden “genie” of man. Multifarious illustrations of that “genie” appear in da Silva’s last visions, the “exhibition” series he paints on the “wildernesse” of London’s Commonwealth Institute and in which the experience of individuals he has so far visualized is transposed to a universal scale. Here a dying tradition (the Empire) has been replaced by the new Commonwealth, but for the optimistic motto that accompanies the exhibition of new technological achievement da Silva substitutes what underlies the birth of the Commonwealth: “Self-survival, self-interest, self-sacrifice” (67). In the very architecture of the Commonwealth Institute he reads a contrast between the uniform cloak that runs through the three exhibition decks and the line of “nontone” they contain. This refers to what he calls “zero conditions,” the extreme poles of experience of the “violated bodies of history” (Cuffey and Magellan), poles of “unbearable hell” and “unattainable beauty or heaven” which nevertheless bring forth the “middle-ground regenerated eyes of [...] compassion as original vision” (70). The question remains, however, whether “new superstition” or “new mutation” will prevail in the Commonwealth. “Compassion as original vision” is the equation between feeling and regenerated vision that is always the purpose of the quest in Harris’s novels. Here it is pursued through canvas after canvas as an ever-present but only partly discernible light. That light is the “genie” of man, the spark that lies in his greatest as in his poorest achievements. The following passage is a good example of the way in which the narrative blends throughout the reality of the physical world with the transparency of its “immaterial constitution”:

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Da Silva would paint his way past [a demolished area] on a summer evening long ago it seemed (though perhaps it was only yesterday) with his brush dipped into the sky. He felt a tightened grip in his flesh, a sense of deprivation in those rotting beams or walls that belonged to a past economic code or day, and yet he was utterly amazed as the paint seeped out of the sky − transparent densities of blues and greens, white fire, edges of orchestrated delicacy touched by unfathomable peace, consensus of open-hearted privacy in a dying sky − as if to alert him to the reality of the radiant city within every city, the reality of the genie’s gift, the genie’s potential reconstruction. (63)

The “genie’s potential reconstruction” epitomizes the process of survival, mutation, resurrection at work in the novel. The genie assumes many different shapes but is mostly associated with a child. For example, Manya’s son is a spark on Manya’s canvas. There is also the “abused child, eclipsed child” to which one comes near as to a “prodigal daemon of heaven” (41) when the genie of man awakens. This awakening is best rendered through the relationship between da Silva and Jen (the artist and the muse), a marriage of both senses and minds; they have “ceaselessly conceived [an immortal presence] through each other” (48). Jen’s homecoming at the end of the winter day and her announcement that she is pregnant bring together several strands in the novel. Her pregnancy fulfils a marriage that has so far remained barren, but it is also a token of da Silva’s “birth [...] as a painter” (65), for his own creativeness is revitalized, and together they are on the point of “resurrecting” the genie of man. This is the main significance of the “genie’s return” or “homecoming of spirit” which sets the light circulating again: He caught her to him [...]. He encircled the globe then, a global light whose circulation lay through and beyond fear into unfathomable security. (77)

 The ending of Da Silva da Silva adequately prefaces Genesis of the Clowns, published in the same volume with it and subtitled “A Comedy of Light.”29 Like the “drama of consciousness” and the “tabula rasa comedy” in which Harris’s earlier characters were involved, it stages eclipsed personae moving in the protagonist’s consciousness. Frank Wellington is 29 Harris, Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness & Genesis of the Clowns (London: Faber & Faber, 1977). Note, however, that Genesis was actually written before Da Silva da Silva.

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a white Creole who used to work for the colonial government in British Guiana. When the novel opens, he has been living in London for twenty years. He receives an anonymous letter announcing the death of Hope, foreman of a crew he led into the Guyanese interior in 1948, and this urges him into a one-day journey into the past. As each member of the crew is resurrected from the marginal sketches he used to make in his field book and again approaches his pay-table, he sees they were steeped in a “dying light” which nevertheless “store[d] itself as the germinating seed of the future” (110). The novel grows out of that seed as Wellington’s original suspicion of their emotions of fear and love turns into a deeper awareness of the real debt he owes them. We know from earlier novels that the Fool or Clown stands for naked, eclipsed man, whom Harris associates with the divine (his characters are also involved in a “comedy of divinity” 102). The clowns here are the exploited crew, men who have either lost all expectations or, conversely, turn their deprivations and frustrations (emotional, political, economic) into capital investments to be used later. They are plagued by the impress of various legacies of the past which they cannot free themselves from, even though conditions have changed. Hope, for example, a kind of Black Marsden who stimulates Wellington’s understanding of the crew, still acts as if women were “at a high and cruel premium” (137) as when there was one woman to fifty or a hundred men in Guyana. He eventually succumbs to a “tyranny of affections” (147) similar to the political tyranny of the men of deeds he admires; the letter Wellington receives explains that Hope has killed a rival lover (Wellington’s black namesake) and has committed suicide. The crew are also ridden with terrors for which the scant “currency” they receive while serving an alien power can in no way compensate them. The Amerindian Reddy, for whom water falling from the “pole of the sun” was a guarantee of light, sees with dread Atlantic tidal currents carrying logs upriver but conceals his disorientation and fears behind a mask of laughter. Wellington now sees his misinterpretation of Reddy’s behaviour and his former blindness to the Amerindian’s terror as typical of the misunderstanding that has endured for centuries between sovereign employer and exploited men, a “misconception” responsible for the “frozen genesis” (112) not only in the relation between the crew and their leader but “in the encounter between alien cultures” (122). The novel, however, is not a one-sided indictment of imperialist and capitalist powers, although Wellington represents both. Like the crew, he is beset

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by unconfessed lusts and fears. He too has “undressed” Ada, the “Fertility Goddess,” and desired Lucille, Chung’s wife and Hope’s mistress. He senses the crew’s malaise as menacing though unconscious energy, an anonymous gun pointed at himself and threatening to kill him as he is nearly killed by the released energy of the storm that brings down his tent. Yet even in 1948 the storm and the “spatial gun imprinted” (85) in it set in motion a mutation only fully realized in 1974 when he receives the anonymous letter, an unravelling of “frozen” premises “as though the wheel of Empire began to turn anew [...] began to return to me as a moving threshold of consciousness” (86). As in Companions of the Day and Night, Harris draws his chief metaphor from a cosmic phenomenon. While Frank Wellington re-creates the experiences of the crew, he is involved in a “Copernican revolution of sentiment” (92), a displacement in his consciousness, and a recognition of men (and the cultures they represent) he once took for granted. The crew who in colonial times revolved around the central authority or sun of Empire (Wellington) had begun in 1948 to secrete their own “buried suns,” towards which Wellington turns as to a “shadowplay of a genesis of suns − the shadowplay of interior suns around which I now turned whereas before they had turned around me in processional sentiment” (86). This revolution illustrates in the individual consciousness the theme of the mutation of buried cultures developed in Companions of the Day and Night and in da Silva’s Commonwealth paintings. It implies a relativization of cultures: “Not one earth turns but many imprints relate to the sun. Not one sun but many buried suns related to imprinted landscapes, peoples” (92). Significantly, there is no question of merely reversing the old dominant order, of replacing one centre (earth or sun) by another, but, rather, of taking into account “revolving and counter-revolving potentials to which we begin to relate” (108). Harris does not stop at a Copernican revolution, for this is accompanied by a counter-revolution: “revolving and counter-revolving imprints of earth turn around the eye of the sun” (92); it even finds a parallel in the contrary tidal flows that so frighten the Amerindian Reddy, “revolutions turning in opposite and contrary directions” (87). A diagram on page 91 shows revolving and counter-revolving currents drawing nearer to each other while turning around the “stilled eye of the sun.” It seems to epitomize the view of existence that Harris gradually builds up as his contrary figures (Wellington and the crew) learn to move

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towards each other while also moving “around a central darkness of buried sun” (92). If I understand this rightly, the “stilled eye of the sun” is an illusion. Wellington thinks at one stage that “implicit in the Copernican wilderness is an unfathomable (rather than static) centre around which cultures revolve. I glimpse this as the complex theme of objective and subjective freedom” (117). This unfathomable centre seems to be the fluid, nameless dimension which Harris’s earlier protagonists have approached and to which both the crew and Wellington relate, although only the latter is aware of it. It also implies what Harris calls the “mediation of uncapturable light” between partial frames or cultures, a mediating “force” that cannot be tamed and is therefore a source of infinite potentiality. It is a force that may inspire terror but also contains, as Harris suggests, a “therapeutic capacity.” Retrospectively, after he has faced the “terrifying otherness” (126) of his crew, as they once faced the terror of the strange world he was imposing on them, Wellington transforms his encounter with the crew into one of reciprocity, perceiving “a capacity still beneath the pole of the sun to give, to receive [...] as the pain of unfrozen genesis” (127). This reciprocity is further illustrated at the end of the novel when Wellington reads the letter that started the “comedy” in which he took part all day. He sees his “own clown’s shadow welling up on the page” (143) and realizes that as the crew have been moving to him, so he has been moving to the nameless stranger who was addressing him. The comedy has been a “shadowplay of genesis. Light-play of genesis” (143), opposites playing against each other through which Wellington receives “the gift of life without strings” (148). While re-living the past, he had several intuitions that the crew’s unconsciously ambivalent attitude might equally release gifts of death or life: “ammunition, animation” (140). On first receiving the letter, he felt that “perhaps fate and freedom are mixed [...] twins one meets afresh, sees afresh in the womb of self-knowledge of selves other than oneself” (81). The letter which tells of Hope’s crime and suicide is subtitled “Counter-Revolving Currencies Of Fate and Freedom On The Paytable Of The Sky” (142). It is as if the real wages Wellington had not paid Hope in the past were now returning (counter-revolving) because Hope could not resist the climax of “antecedent emotions” (147) that has built up in him. The suggestion is that because his (and the crew’s) emotions were at one time ignored, these are now striking back in a totalitarian spirit, “a jealous right to possess properties of flesh-and-blood” (148).

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Hope’s gesture, however, offers dual possibilities of blind submission to fate and of freedom: “I say ‘humour of fate’ [...]. But why not [...] ‘mystery of freedom’?” (146). Wellington understands that freedom can be reached through recognition of a previously unconscious subscription to fate as he re-reads the letter ironically signed “F.W. ” The anonymous stranger is himself or, rather, an inner self towards which he has turned, thus distancing himself from the sovereign sun of his personality. It is therefore Wellington who realizes that on the brink of death Hope may have seen “another head among the clowns [...] another shadow” (148). By killing the black Wellington, he sent him into the nameless dimension into which he himself dies, the source of compassion and freedom white Wellington glimpses: Perhaps as apparently hopeless as one’s time is, there is a new movement, a new genesis of the clowns, a new subsistence upon the biases of Hope [...] that runs [...] far deeper than deliberate consciousness towards compassion. (102)

 Aspects of Harris’s fiction developed in the second and third cycles of novels come to a head in The Tree of the Sun. The joint process of interiorization and expedition into ‘otherness’ that began with The Eye of the Scarecrow is still linked with a probing into the working of a creative mind as into the very nature and mystery of creativity. We saw in Companions of the Day and Night that “the paintings and sculptures to which the writings related were doorways through which Idiot Nameless moved” (13). In a similar way, in The Tree of the Sun da Silva moves “through the door of the tree of the sun,” “into the life of previous tenants of the house” (10). What seems important in this equation of painting with a doorway is the assumption that the imaginative work of art is a gateway into being or towards resurrection.30 This is indeed the meaning of painting in The Tree of the Sun, though not of painting alone, since it is presented together with poetry, sculpture, music and, at the end, drama as so many coincidental forms of art (63), forms through which one gropes towards a truth that can never be wholly

30 This notion is akin to that expressed by Shelley in “Ode to the West Wind”: “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / like withered leaves to quicken a new birth.”

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apprehended31 and which makes creation itself a “heterogeneous enterprise” (63). It is through painting, however, that da Silva regresses into the past, just as in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness he paints, or descends into, apparently antagonistic or “incompatible” figures, in order to discover what they share and to retrieve the light eclipsed when they were victimized. At the end of this novel, da Silva’s wife, Jen, announces that she is pregnant. In its sequel, The Tree of the Sun, Harris explores the implications of this annunciation, which is the starting-point of a new expedition into the past. When the novel opens, da Silva takes up again a mural, called “The Tree of the Sun,” that he started to paint when he and Jen conceived a child, which reminds us that for Harris artistic creation is equivalent to the creation of life: “Two months pregnant this painting is,” says da Silva (3). He paints into his mural Montezuma, the Mexican emperor killed by a stone. It is not known whether it was thrown by the conquerors or his own people, but the blow he received merely left an imperceptible bruise. Then, as “burnt to cinders in the tree of dawn” (7), he paints Atahualpa, the Inca sun-king, whose death was much more violent than Montezuma’s, since he was sentenced by Francisco Pizarro to death by fire (and then garrotted instead) when the latter conquered Peru.32 The fates of the two kings are not presented as irrevocable historical events. Both contain a seed that in time could transform the catastrophic effects of their death. The juxtaposition of those fates in the painting links them to each other and to Jen and da Silva, who both have South American antecedents. Out of this juxtaposition emerges what Jen sees as “the tidal spark [...] that related her and her husband’s peoples to other peoples” (5). Thus the opening of the novel already presents its essential outline: the unravelling of a catastrophic past in order to discover in it the spark of rebirth that has so far remained unseen. The two main figures in his mural, and on the canvas of his imagination, are Francis and Julia Cortez, the former tenants of his flat, who died twenty-five years before. While remodelling the flat, the da Silvas came across an unfinished book and letters that the Cortezes secretly wrote for each other, though neither actually read what the other had written. Da Silva’s editorship of Francis’s book and Julia’s letters are both the mate31 32

“truth exists but stands on unfathomable foundations,” 17. Atahualpa’s death is fictionalized in Harris’s later novel The Dark Jester.

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rial of the novel and the subject of his “painting.” Secondary characters emerge from the Cortezes’ life and writings and these, too, da Silva “paints” into himself in a serial way. Nowhere better than here is it possible to apply to Harris Yeats’s belief that “the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.”33 Da Silva’s inner self provides the framework for the narrative. The reader sometimes tends to forget this, however, so vivid is the intercourse between Francis and Julia, the ‘living’ dead whose relationship is posthumously modified by da Silva’s “painting,” and between da Silva and the Cortezes. Not only does da Silva bring the dead to life, they bring him to life in their writing and envisage the role he will play in their future ‘existence’. It seems that in this dialogue between the dead and the living and their awareness of each other across time and space lies the way to what Harris calls “the resurrection of the self” – the return to life of buried antecedents or the surfacing and assimilation of unconscious elements into consciousness. This brings us a stage further in Harris’s conception of characters as “agents of personality.” In their desire to survive, the re-created characters of the past (who are so many inner selves) can also imagine their creator. The characters in this novel partake of one another’s existences, enter one another’s skin (Jen conceives the child Julia always wanted but repeatedly miscarried). Her miscarriages, which also have demographicethnic and historical overtones, can be seen at the beginning as a symbol of the aborted union between conqueror and conquered. This is confirmed when Julia tells Francis that “da Silva’s interpretation of [their] lives [...] works to diminish a pattern of domination” (38). Also, different times and spaces merge, and each event is seen with its ramifications in the past and in the future from a specific point in a character’s consciousness. There is a new insistence on the need to move backwards and forwards, never to lose sight of past and future, and this has led to the coining of a new phrase illustrated in many ways in the novel, “backward resurrection” (22). Da Silva’s descents into Montezuma and Atahualpa, into the Cortezes and the characters of Francis’ book, are backward resurrections, and all these characters are what da Silva calls “approximations to resurrected selves, across centuries, across islands and continents, on this bank of

33

W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961): 28.

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heaven or that bank of earth” (29–30, 53).34 Thus Harris stretches further than ever the limits of the human personality as if the creative imagination could defy all categories of being, run through all levels of existence and non-existence. He is also clearly engaged in revising and extending his characters’ (and the reader’s) limits of perception, a process which started with Palace of the Peacock but has become increasingly more complex. I have had occasion before to draw attention to the complexity and unifying quality of his language, particularly his metaphors. In this novel, they once more convey several layers of meaning, like “the tree of the sun,”35 basically a metaphor for the process of creation, which combines several modes of achieving vision. The combination of levels in the narrative texture, its fusion of immediacy and ‘otherness’, is particularly striking in the following passage, in which the Cortezes’ lovemaking suggests at once their participation in a cosmic movement in which opposites meet and the coming to life of the inanimate world around them, while also evoking the process of resurrection in which they and other unseen beings are involved: Francis drew her into bed. The sound of a faint call in the distance, a telephone beak in the shell of the sea, a telegram, rather than a letter, drew them into each other’s arms. Perhaps they were attuned to living ink as the surf ascended once again, to charcoal voices of birds in foodbearing tree at the heart of fire, to midnight eyes in the middle of broad daylight. “I spent the morning writing letters,” she confessed inwardly. Their bodies clung together into the language of a living tool, cultivated living bed, carpentered living tables and chairs in the room around them like attendant yet invisible courtiers, flesh-and-blood wood, grassgrown parks and ponds, carven benches, milestones of penetrative flesh in the theatre of a bed that secreted the memories of lives lived or unlived a generation and more ago, a generation and more to come. (26)

As usual in Harris’s fiction, there is a symbiosis between “vision and idea,” between imagined worlds and people and the philosophical substance extracted from the vision. There is also a close correspondence between form and content. Da Silva attempts to grasp the “inimitable,” “the unfathomable centre” or wholeness that can never be totally apprehended but will assume various shapes in the “resurrection of the self.” Francis 34 35

This prefigures “The Four Banks of the River of Space.” The expression was first used in The Eye of the Scarecrow, 29.

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and Julia (and the characters they create) are so many agents arousing that resurrection, “approximations” to it, or, as da Silva thinks, “wedded apparitions [...] within a quest for the resurrection of the self” (27). Da Silva’s self-distancing and penetration of these partial selves thus entail a multiplicity of approaches to the unfathomable wholeness. So do the sculptures, paintings, and dramas he envisions, as if only a variety of coincidental forms of art could provide a suitable approximation to the elusive otherness. This otherness and the ways to it have assumed innumerable shapes in Harris’s fiction. What emerges in this novel is the correspondence between the search for otherness and for wholeness, the arousal of sensibility, the partial achievement of community, and the process of creation itself. I have shown before that catastrophe can issue into rebirth, and here the wound received by historical antecedents (Montezuma and Atahualpa) is seen as a “blow” of creation. Julia’s miscarriage becomes converted into “profound sensibility of apparitions of community” (50), and in re-creating the conversion Harris attempts to approach through imagery the mysterious essence of the creative process. This amounts to asking whether art (Francis’ fiction, da Silva’s painting) can transform catastrophe, whether it can at least be one of the means through which one can try to approach what is unbearable in catastrophe. As in earlier novels, the renascence of imagination and of the arts goes together with a retrieval of buried or “unborn” antecedents from the apparent void of Caribbean or New World history (the Cortezes are West Indian). But the retrieved one is not to be idealized. As already suggested about Da Silva da Silva, creation seems to arise unpredictably from a double movement between the born and the negative condition of the unborn: Each intimate womb painting, or experience of naked enterprise in a body of elements, possessed intertwining forces that had crossed from one bank of cosmos to another to confront each other in a sudden breath or seizure of flesh. (60; emphasis mine)

In this double movement, too, lies the achievement of community, the “treaty of sensibility between the born and the unborn” (50). Thus, community is creation, unfinished creation as “unfinished community” (86) since no state is ever reached finally, no absolute ever institutionalized. God or man, dead or living being must efface himself and move towards an otherness that can be glimpsed but finally eludes him. The Tree of the Sun also evokes “parallel expeditions” (64): i.e. separate areas of experi-

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ence which do not meet directly yet relate to each other through the spark that resides in each. To retrieve that spark is to open the way to dialogue. The reciprocal movement between the living and the dead, the conception of characters who are at once themselves and other than themselves in another dimension, the fluidity of the narrative form, and the rich complexity of a language which presents together and in their constant movement the antinomies of existence – these are the fundamental aspects of an oeuvre as much concerned with the spiritual salvation of man as with the renewal of the art of fiction. It is an open-ended oeuvre, since, like each novel, it finds no resolution but, rather, presents life in the making with its self-deceptions and revelations “a hand dissolving the elements constructing the elements” (72) in the hope of running into the moment of vision: “To accept incompatible visions, to accept what is like and unlike oneself, to accept the tricks of nature as a versatile warning that truth exists but stands on unfathomable foundations, and still to believe in the unity of the self, is to run fleetingly (but sometimes securely) in a presence of glory.[....” (17; Harris’s emphasis

At the end of the novel, Julia’s departure from the West Indies with Francis appears to coincide with her death or, more exactly, is transformed into her dying. The dying scene and the departure, the end and the beginning, make one: Why leave? [Julia asks] Why not live forever upon a static gate [...]? Why move at all, why begin to die, across the ages one has constructed from deathless lives? To fulfil perhaps a theatre of nature that appears to be finished yet remains unfinished. (90)

The “theatre of nature” or, if I understand it rightly, of the human community appears when da Silva’s studio turns into the world stage on which he and Jen say lines edited and translated from Francis’ book and Julia’s letters. The many transformations that have taken place in the course of da Silva’s editorship cohere into the last scene, making the departure possible, issuing into a new creation, a new “evolution”36 of which the ship is a symbol. At first overwhelmed by his grief for Julia’s dying, Francis does not see the ship or even the sea until he touches his tears into laughter and he begins to hear the murmur of the waves, which amplifies and fuses with the voices of the sea of human beings around them. Thus, at the very 36

See “evolution of serenity” (92) or “evolution of music” (93).


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end da Silva’s painting, which has made Julia’s dying a passage into a new world, coincides with music to express this new birth and newly created harmony: Francis lay in Julia’s arms which were outstretched from the strangest living nothingness into the strangest living otherness. And then the prow of the great ship began to move forward, the water surged and swelled and a chorus of voices, the chorus of incarnation or human orchestra, filled the air with presences. (94)

 Since Black Marsden, Harris had been drawing away temporarily from Guyana as a source of inspiration; the country has become but one component among many in his work, for his imagination was stimulated in his ‘middle’ period by landscapes visited or lived in: London, Edinburgh, Mexico and India. This variety of geographical settings also illustrates a new development in his fiction, a different emphasis on issues that have always preoccupied him: namely, a cross-cultural approach to experience and to art. The major theme in his novels has also widened in scope. The transformation into a dialogue between stronger and weaker individuals or groups did not disappear, but was superseded by his intense concern for imperilled humanity around the globe. It was expressed in the devastated Namless territory in Black Marsden or the allusion in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness to “millions on the brink of starvation or on the brink of the grave” (68). We saw that, in that novel, da Silva’s Commonwealth paintings dissolve the “uniform” of Empire and make possible the displacement and mutation of what Harris sees as the fixed boundaries of a central culture or tradition. To use Harris’s own words, “the whole landscape of the metropolitan world is revised.”37 It is in this light that I look at The Angel at the Gate and concentrate on two related aspects, the use of myth and the nature of personality. When referring to the use of myth in modern fiction, one naturally thinks of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. In his famous essay on Ulysses, T.S. Eliot wrote that the mythical method is “simply a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and

37

Harris, “Re-Creative Parallels,” talk given at the University of Bayreuth on 18 June 1983. No written or printed text is extant, and I quote from notes I took.

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a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”38 Significantly also, Eliot used as an epigraph to Notes towards the Definition of Culture an item from The Oxford English Dictionary: “Definition: 1. The setting of bounds; limitation (rare) 1483.” In spite of his affinity with much of Eliot’s poetry, Harris’s enterprise is a very different one. I have already suggested that, in his approach to culture, instead of setting up boundaries, he tries to alter them and to find parallels between cultures. As to myth, he has written considerably on the subject. I shall simply refer to his description of myth as a “medium of transformation,”39 or as “a capacity for the conversion of deprivations and humiliations that may plague a culture and lead to violence and despair.”40 Clearly, then, myth plays an essentially dynamic role. Important words in these quotations are “transformation” and “conversion.” Indeed, in Harris’s critical writings words like change, re-vision, mutation, alteration, redress, translation recur with increasing frequency to emphasize the need to alter the entrenched biases of any central cultural tradition. Any formerly eclipsed, resurgent culture that would try to assert itself as sovereign would need to be similarly altered. “Deprivations and humiliations that may lead to violence and despair” – this is largely what The Angel at the Gate is about. Harris describes in this novel a world in crisis and on the brink of catastrophe. Several characters are unemployed; Sebastian, a major character, is also a drug addict. Instances of violence abound, among them the Brixton riots of 1981. It is, as the protagonist Mary Stella Holiday thinks, “a time of fires [and] of famine,”41 and there is, of course, the constant threat of atomic warfare. These images of despair, violence and destruction cohere into the symbolic “funeral [procession] of an age” (38), a recurrent image in Harris’s fiction. But parallel to this, there is the “miracle child,” John, the threeyear-old son of Sebastian and Mary Stella. The child in Harris’s fiction was so far “psychic” or expected child, as much a product of renewed 38

T.S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” in Eliot, Selected Essays, ed. Frank Kermode (London: 1975): 177. 39 Harris, “Carnival of Psyche: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea” (1980) in Explorations, ed. Maes–Jelinek, 125. 40 Harris, “Character and Philosophic Myth,” in A Sense of Place: Essays in PostColonial Literatures, ed. Britta Olinder (Göteborg: Gothenburg University, 1984): 124. 41 Harris, The Angel at the Gate, 15. Further page references are in the main text.

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sensibility and imagination through dialogue as of physical intercourse.42 Even in earlier novels, the child is connected with what Harris calls an “annunciation of humanity” (31, 52), and in this novel John is a ‘third party’ between his quarrelling parents and evidence of a possible redemption. In spite of his miraculous role, this white child is not presented as an idealized “son of man” (102, 123). Indeed, this possibility of seeing in him an absolute saviour is altered by the appearance of a black “daughter of man” (90, 102, 123) who descends from the same grandfather and, in the mind of her father, Jamaican Jackson, has been conceived by himself rather than her mother. This is one of the many ways in which absolute situations and images are converted and altered in the narrative. It is here that myth plays an essential role. The particular myth treated in this novel is that of Mary and Joseph, the humanized parents of Christ.43 It is already present in Harris’s first novel, and ambivalent Joseph figures are found in most of the novels after Black Marsden.44 In The Angel at the Gate, this ambiguous historical figure, devoted guardian of mother and child yet rather laughable cuckold, offers a remedy to a diseased society represented by the “holy”45 family of Sebastian, Mary and John, which, as in ancient times, is utterly deprived. He supports them financially through Mary’s work at Angel Inn. More importantly, he is Mary’s spiritual “ancient” (31) lover and nurses her psychologically by compiling her automatic narratives46 and through discussions conducted under hypnosis. It is the material of these narratives and conversations that the narrator “translates into the novel. He is the “no man’s land writer” (23) or “translator of Mary’s [...] book of fictional lives” (100) as these emerge from her unconscious self. It has been rightly said that Mary is “the eternally abused woman and [...] creative muse [of 42 On this subject, see Gary Crew, “The Psychic Child in Patrick White’s Voss and Wilson Harris’s The Tree of the Sun” (doctoral dissertation, University of Queensland, 1980). 43 In “Character and Philosophic Myth,” Harris refers to “the humanisation of the terrible divine,” 129. 44 See Black Marsden, Father Marsden in Companions of the Day and Night, Marsden–Prince in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, and possibly the “daemon of conscience” in The Tree of the Sun. 45 There is a pun on Mary’s name: Holiday / Holy Day. 46 These are compared in the novel (82) to the automatic writing of Yeats’s wife, which gave rise to A Vision.

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Palace of the Peacock ...] become a modern visionary character.”47 But here the creative muse and potential mother of humanity is ill. A way of coping with this illness is through the splitting of her personality into Stella and Mary, respectively the wife and sister of Sebastian. In Mary’s book, Stella says “I am a mask Mary wears, a way of coping with truth” (44). Mary’s and Stella’s dual role as sister and wife seems to have developed out of a passage from a Father of the Church, Paulinus of Nola, quoted as an epigraph to Book I I I of The Eye of the Scarecrow. In the passage quoted, sister and wife are the attributes of the mother of God.48 In this context, however, the division into two selves becomes a way for Mary Stella of facing her despair, of breaking down what would otherwise remain a monolithic diseased personality. Stella enacts one possibility in Mary Stella Holiday. She has attempted suicide and dies a few days later, though, as she tells Mary, she will come and go.49 Actually, Stella helps Mary to another process of translation – miniaturization of the world and the formidable issues men have to cope with. Possibly, like Oudin in The Far Journey of Oudin, her post-mortem perspective enables her to view the globe as “a match-box world.”50 What happens is that, for Mary, who travels imaginatively to India with Marsden and who afterwards visualizes his various existential facets and roles in the mirror of Angel Inn, the world is reduced to apprehensible proportions when a bale that falls from a passing lorry and strikes Marsden is transformed into Planet Bale. On this miniature world, the terror of atomic fire becomes a new dimension, “the seed of conversion” (89) by which fire becomes creative energy.51 47

Jean–Pierre Durix, “Through Tension to Metamorphosis: The Angel at the Gate by Wilson Harris,” World Literature Written in English 24.1 (1984): 121. 48 Sister and wife at once; for without the use of the body Mentally she unites, for the Spouse of God, not a man. Out of this mother is born the Ancient as well as the infant [...]. The quotation appears in C.G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, tr. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1870): 281. 49 Similarly, Sister Joanna’s voice comes and goes for Idiot Nameless in Companions of the Day and Night (46–50). 50 Harris, The Far Journey of Oudin, 12. 51 Harris wrote: “The mutuality I imply between images and cultures and characterizations is a paradox. It breaks, at certain levels, the conscription of polarised worlds bent [...] on destroying each other. It implies a profound irony and comedy of existence built into paradox, into a creative perception of finitude through the poetry of miniaturisations of the cosmos”; “The Quest for Form,” 22–23.

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This illustrates the way in which what Harris sees as “variable forces” function in the novel. Since his first appearance in Harris’s fiction, Joseph Marsden has himself embodied such variables, at once subject to “daemonic possession” (30) or “prey of the furies” (96, 100, 104) and agent of liberation. Now, at the end of his life, “his body [...] whittled or sliced by fate” (29), he is essentially a spiritual guide and, as opposed to Sebastian, who is “hollow tree” (44), he is the stick on which God leans (30). His house, Angel Inn, is “a bridge into other worlds” (23). There is a bit of Joseph Marsden in all the other male characters, including Khublall the Indian and Jackson the Jamaican, who are so many “living masks” (23) for him. Mary’s spiritual marriage with Marsden bears fruit through her perception of the conversions that take place in their lives and of parallel situations in the cultures they represent. Marsden, the Joseph figure, is thus in a sense the father of humanity, not a single or absolute creator but one who has evolved out of many partial selves (“possession by inventive angels and inventive devils” 30). What strikes one in this novel is the way in which character and myth, and the metaphors through which they are presented, destabilize our accepted version of reality. The narrative develops out of a series of frustrating incidents and desperate situations whose “translation” reveals the seed of a creative alternative. When Mary takes little John to Paradise Park where a gang of youths have slaughtered beautiful birds, he waves scissors of blossom at a duck and creates a “garden of Eden” which counterbalances the “garden of tragedy” (69). In Mary’s visionary writing, he becomes associated with the twelve-year-old Indian child-bride in whom the knife of violence was changed into “phallus of the sun” (69). That girl is reminiscent of Mary’s ancestor, the young slave girl sold by Marsden’s ancestor in eighteenth-century Angel Inn, a terrible deed now redeemed by Marsden’s care for Mary. A cat-and-mouse metaphor runs through the major part of the novel, symbolizing among other things Mary’s struggle with her double, Stella (59). Towards the end of the novel, however, “the mouse arises and kills the mystic cat in [...] reversed epic” (117). Although it takes place in Mary’s visionary writing, this extraordinary feat is in the nature of myth and is set up as a parallel to Heracles strangling the serpents in his cradle. Finally, the angel figures (for there are more than one), though essentially unpromising characters, are also potential annunciators of change. The unemployed Sebastian is in the same position as the Indian Khublall

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and the Jamaican Jackson, and there is a suggestion that because it is itself imperilled, Europe is in a better position to understand the Commonwealth. There is also the incident of the man who knocks violently on the Holidays’ door and awakens Stella, lying naked on the bed. Shocked out of sleep, she runs naked to the window and the man exposes himself. Stella is horrified, but she realizes that his blows have actually saved little John from swallowing the valium tablets she had carelessly left on the table. The man is thus both beast and angel; his gesture of rape and violence is the same as the gesture of love. Harris seems to suggest that we cannot foresee the consequences of our actions and that to recognize the nature of violence in which all men are involved is to open the way to the possibility of transmuting it into saving energy, to convert, as he says, “the ‘strike’ of the blow into reciprocal forces”52 and to erect what he calls a “rainbow-bridge”53 between cultures.

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52

Harris, “Metaphor and Myth,” in Myth and Metaphor, ed. Robert Sellick (Essays and Monograph Series 1; Adelaide: C R N L E , 1982): 5. 53 “Metaphor and Myth,” 11.

13

Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness “Inimitable Painting”

It was the universe whose light turned in the room [...] painting the carpenter’s walls with shades from the sky – the most elaborate pictures and seasons he stored and framed and imagined. — Palace of the Peacock

I

N T H E C H U R C H of Santa Maria dei Frari in Venice there is a celebrated Assumption of the Virgin painted by Titian. In the middle ground of the painting, suspended, as it were, between heaven and earth, the Madonna stands in a round pool of light, presented on a vertical plane filling the background, shaped in its lower half by a cloud and the cherubs in her wake, while its upper fringe, coincident with the round upper edge of the picture, is filled with the transparent heads of angels. Her very human figure appears to be pulled upwards towards God, represented as a large moving shadow emerging through the surface of the pool from depths of golden light. But the unhaloed Virgin remains only just beyond the reach of men, and the arms of one Apostle are lifted up to her in an ambiguous gesture, for he appears to be at once pushing her towards God and welcoming her to his lower plane. Another source of ambiguity is the expression of fear and anguish on the face of one angel on the Madonna’s right. There is a strong contrast between the flesh-andblood solidity of some figures, including the Virgin’s, and the transparency of others, as well as between light and darkness at all three levels of the picture. Erratic patches of light on the lower and middle planes are hard to account for because the area of the pool that might produce them is concealed by the dark shape of God. Some of them seem to arise from

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the surrounding darkness. The only possible explanation, however, is that the light circulates while emerging from the pool, just as the whole pool is clearly animated by a circular movement. For some years, the painting was out of the frame in which it has been enclosed for several centuries and was hanging frameless from hardly visible threads in front of the altar, so that the canvas itself appeared to be moveable and on the point of taking flight.1 The relevance of this painting to Wilson Harris’s Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness will, I hope, become clear in the course of this chapter. The relation between fiction and painting has long preoccupied Harris himself, whose concept of the “novel as painting”2 has developed out of his own practice of the art of fiction. In Palace of the Peacock, Donne’s vision of several framed pictures in the waterfall brings about his conversion, the transformation of his consciousness into the palace that accommodates a heterogeneous community. The correlation between self and space in this first novel, the spatialization3 of psychic content, marks the beginning of an exploration in which the projection into images and the visualization of contrary states of consciousness serve as a catalyst to a renewal of sensibility. Increasingly since then, painting (not the finished picture but the picture in the making) has become in Harris’s fiction an exploratory metaphor for vision. Numerous examples are to be found in Tumatumari, in Ascent to Omai (see Victor’s sketches concurrent with his writing a novel), and even in Black Marsden, while, in Companions of the Day and Night, a new phase of development opens with Goodrich editing Nameless’s papers, sculptures and paintings. Goodrich’s editorship gives life to the Nameless collection, which would otherwise fall into oblivion; it also sets in motion a revision by which the “highest canvases”4 of men (their greatest but petrified achievements) can be reanimated and their original spark, “the element of conscience” fallen into them, can be retrieved as a new source of inspiration.

1

This was in the 1970s. The painting is now framed again. Harris, Fossil and Psyche, 12 (in Explorations, 81). 3 For a discussion of that process in Palace of the Peacock, see “The Naked Design” above, 48–89. 4 Harris, Companions of the Day and Night, 65. For a discussion of the novels just mentioned, see the previous chapter, “The Novel as Painting,” 229–68. 2

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Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness

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Painting, as Harris shows in Companions of the Day and Night, can be both a static shelter or mask, and an imaginative re-creation of experience, a gateway to renewed existence (“the paintings [...] were doorways through which Idiot Nameless moved”5). In this novel, it is synonymous with experience and thus with fiction, and as da Silva “paints” his way through existence, he re-envisions the past, his own and that of figures at once individual and representative of the dominating or the sacrificed element in society, or both. Although it is also true of earlier novels, Da Silva da Silva is more specifically about the nature of creativity (a major theme in Harris’s later fiction) and is connected with a double movement from and towards the suppressed and violated element in the individual and humanity: as he returned to each painting again and again as varieties of transparent eclipse, he began to observe an implicit bank there in that a deep-seated mutation of tone rose into each canvas and one saw a spirit there as one sees a 6 never-to-be-painted, never-to-be-trapped, light or element on earth.

The two faces of painting coexist in Da Silva da Silva, a revenant from Palace, in which he disappeared yet mysteriously survived to reappear and die in Heartland in the anonymity of the jungle. He is here resurrected as a professional painter, his twin name a token of his double vision and of the dual perspective, material and immaterial, explored by Harris through his fiction. On one winter day, in his wife’s absence, da Silva revisions the paintings he did six or seven years before while she was in Peru. Characteristically, his reconstructions of a world sensuously perceived and represented nevertheless lay bare “unpredictable densities” (10) which arouse in him, and therefore in his art, a dialogue conducive to change between given, apparently immovable forms and weak, barely perceptible ones. Like a migrating bird flying from one world to another, he moves freely from one level to another of the universe he re-creates, fixing himself in neither, distancing himself from one or the other, his imagination (like the nameless imagination in Companions) “void of identities” (13), a vacant frame capable of enclosing variable pictures.

5

Companions, 13. Harris, Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns, 38. This essay deals mainly with the first of these two novels. Further page references are in the main text. 6

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The first set of such paintings is “The Madonna Pool” series, which evokes the many metamorphoses of the pool image as a source of either reflection or vision. There is the lake into which da Silva crashes in his dawn dream, an imaginative shattering that brings about the revision of his canvases; there is the pool-like tennis court at the back of his house; the pool is an image for contrasting areas in London, one elegant near Holland Park, the other destitute; there is also the pool of water near a “wildernesse” theatre in Holland Park. In other words, the pool is the visible world (the cosmos even) changing under our eyes according to the setting of our experience and the intensity of our perception. The quality of the light varies in harmony with these metamorphoses, offering a superb evocation of the shades of light in the London sky at various times of the day while intimating “layers of potentially mingling afresh with illusion in the bodies one saw in the street” (13). The Madonna, a variant of the muse (present in Harris’s work from the first), does not become a character in her own right until Companions of the Day and Night. In the earlier novel, Idiot Nameless pursues her to no avail after a brief day and night spent with her; in the present novel, however, da Silva is married to her. She is Jenine Gold, of mixed Celtic and Peruvian ancestry, just as he, a Brazilian by birth, is of mixed Portuguese and Arawak descent. Their marriage so far has remained barren, possibly because his need of her has been so great that he sometimes tends to see her as a goddess and thus complete in herself, whereas in the dawn of his re-visionary day she is also the fruitful earth (Jenine Gold) in which “masked populations reside” (5). Of the two other painted versions of the Madonna, Manya, da Silva’s Brazilian model, lives in the destitute pool, a dark world filled with “spiritual corpses” of fashion, wearing a black coat of uniformity as repulsive to da Silva as Jen’s immaculate coat of practical and economic self-sufficiency can sometimes be. Though she is unaware of her own enduring subservience to the tyrants of the day (“economic deity, chaos, industry, fashion” 18), Manya’s naked, essential humanity becomes a source of light unravelling her dark garment in da Silva’s re-visionary canvas. Indeed, the painter recalls that in actual life her intense love for her fiveyear-old son, Paul, saved him from being taken into care. She fled with him, leaving her black coat behind with da Silva. The third Madonna is Kate Robinson, a schoolmistress and model of practicality, who seeks da Silva’s help to take Paul away from his mother because she neglects his

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education. Her beautiful marble flesh hides a scar, the result of an abortion, and da Silva must descend with her through thick layers of reflection in the pool, must in fact penetrate her self-creating existence (by aborting she has “killed” Adam in herself) and discover in her the “stigmata of heaven.”7 Yet by her genuine concern for the survival of Paul, she, too, becomes an agent in the discovery of light at the heart of the pool. Survival, with its contrasting implications of resilience (the victim’s) and apparent immutability (the conqueror’s), can be discerned in the shapes of Legba Cuffey and Magellan, at once historical and contemporary figures. Legba Cuffey combines in himself the features of an eighteenth-century black rebel (Cuffey) and Legba, the Afro-Caribbean god who, in Edward Brathwaite’s words, comes to church “like a lame old man on a crutch.”8 He comes limping to da Silva’s door with a West Indian cricketer’s bat for a crutch and through their confrontation conjures up in da Silva the figure of Magellan, the limping, conquering seaman who received credit for circumnavigating the globe (while his nameless crew fell into oblivion) but derived no benefit from his daring feat. Magellan subsisted on allowances from kings and queens just as da Silva now subsists on Jenine Gold’s earnings. Da Silva cannot ignore him any more than he can Cuffey, and identifies with him as “one paints into oneself the mystery of the world’s injustice” (12). When the two limping men confront each other, “a whispered dialogue” (11) arises, of which Paul is the indirect fruit. He is indeed the son of a contemporary seaman called Magellan, introduced to Manya by the bar-tender Cuffey. In spite of his mother’s affection and Kate’s well-meant but tyrannical attention, he is the neglected “child of humanity”9 (of the always resurgent conqueror and the exploited muse), embodying both its capacity for conversion in “hollow Damascus” (19) and its hope for rebirth. He is the “spark” (19) in Manya that makes her, in da Silva’s eyes, a proof of his “challenging conception” (16) of the Madonna Pool as “our twentieth-century sea, sea of redress, undress, unravelling elements” (13). 7

This expression (which counterpoints “Stigmata of the Void” used in The Eye of the Scarecrow) Harris defines as “the limits of paradise,” suggesting thereby that the perfection of paradise is an illusion, since it, too, shows the scars of suffering. 8 Edward Brathwaite, “Legba,” in Islands (London: Oxford U P , 1969): 15. 9 Companions, 52. For an illuminating account of the role of the Madonna and her child in Companions, see Ivan Van Sertima, “Into the Black Hole,” A C L A L S Bulletin, Fourth Series, 4 (1976): 65–77.

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Da Silva’s conviction that the mirror-like immobility of the pool can be shattered, its elements unravelled and that truth, “half-glimpsed, half-concealed,” can arise from its depths, is best illustrated by his interpretation of a sixteenth-century print representing Amerindian beauties standing up to the waist in water in a lake in Brazil while Portuguese courtiers march towards the lake “as if it were a mirror in the palace of the sun” (their civilization then at its zenith) (15). The print has two legends, one, “Sex and the Portuguese in Brazil,” callous in its implications of sexual exploitation, the other, “Paradise,” full of ironic overtones. This second heading also becomes the title of the paintings into which da Silva’s “Madonna Pool” series develops before its mutation into the “Prodigal” series. The print conveys the two meanings of Paradise, creation of a new world and innocence or perfection. Modern versions of illusory Edens appear on da Silva’s canvases, expressions of man’s repeated attempts to create an immovable state of perfection that subsists on the suppression of others. Yet at the heart of the pool of ambivalent paradises da Silva eventually discovers the seed or spark, the “child-genie” (28), evidence at once of man’s physical survival and of his imagination and sensibility. If Companions was a novel about man’s fall and fear of extinction, Da Silva da Silva’ Cultivated Wilderness is primarily about resurrection and survival. The complementarity of the two themes is not fortuitous; it is part of a continuous development in Harris’s fiction, one that illustrates his conception of existence as a cyclical manifestation of life appearing and disappearing, advancing and retreating, whether in nature, human civilizations or the individual human consciousness. To this view is linked his concept of a living, immaterial tradition which survives the dissolution of all material forms and man-made orders. In Da Silva, previous developments come to a head in Harris’s treatment of resurrection. There is the physical rescue from a flood of the five-year-old da Silva by Sir Giles Marsden–Prince, the British ambassador in Brazil, who later dies in London while attempting to save a child from being run over by a car. There is Paul’s father, Magellan, who was expected to die of leukemia and at first attempted to survive through the child but was healed and returned to life. Imaginative resurrection occurs through da Silva’s identification with his models, whom he sees as so many resurrected selves. By re-creating their trials he is able to sift out original motives and subsequent sufferings from given situations and so discover the human dimension that makes the “prodigal” return of life possible. Moreover, survival through another

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(da Silva’s birth on the day Sir Giles’s wife died) or through another’s predicament (Paul’s orphaned childhood, a reiteration of da Silva’s), irrespective of family ties, is a further development of Harris’s concept of community – his belief that life cannot be constrained within one narrow identity. It is nameless life that assumes a particular shape before subsiding again. Insensitiveness to this, however, leads to the resurgence of similar situations, to fixed patterns of behaviour and, indeed, to containment within one narrow identity: “‘Poor healed Magellan [...] never ceases to prove himself. Dies on every foreign beach [the beaches of conquest whether Cuba’s Bay of Pigs or the Philippines]. Poor shot Cuffey [...] He never ceases to live. Lives in every foreign bar’” (49). Resurrection in whatever form is a token of the continuity of tradition in its oppressive as in its oppressed manifestations. Legacies of conquest and victimization are embodied, as already suggested, in Magellan and Cuffey, while Henry Rich, Earl of Holland (many of the paintings are done in Holland Park where his house used to stand), is the representative of a strong historical tradition who, from being a member of the ruling class, himself became a victim in Cromwell’s time. The unravelling of the conqueror and victim fixations is the major theme of the “Paradise” and the “Prodigal” series of paintings respectively. Already in “The Madonna Pool” section, da Silva was aware that his models were not the stereotypes of history he had originally seen in them, and his perception of their scars and vulnerability had actually set him on his voyage of exploration through painting. During the “drama of maturity” that takes place in “wildernesse” theatre (there is actually a theatre not far from where the “wilderness” in Holland Park used to be), a mutation occurs in the paintings as a prelude to change in the polarizations of tradition and to the partial uncovering of the “immovable yet mutated light” (54). That light is the essence of “immortal dying tradition” (61), an ambivalent concept elicited from da Silva’s paintings of flesh-and-blood people. As already suggested, it implies that tradition, although mortal in its perceptible form, is an undying, immaterial, and therefore nameless reality nourished by the sacrifices and sufferings of all men. In it is to be found the light that has been “pushed under [...], suppressed, even violated” (38) and never to be wholly retrieved, just as the “unfathomable coherence” that runs through each “trackless wilderness” (38) can never be attained. However, da Silva realizes as he “re-lives” each canvas that mutations occur, bringing with them partial illuminations. Da Silva makes a first step towards retrieving

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the light when he paints Manya and sees Magellan through her. He begins to understand their motives and perceives at once her “inimitable pathos” (36) − has her love healed Magellan back to life though he only made use of her and left her afterwards? − and his “anguish of being healed” (37). This is the anxiety of one who, unexpectedly returning to life, needs to prove constantly that he does survive and is stimulated to ever-new feats of conquest, to the discovery of ever-new paradises, even on “the moon’s beach” (39). Yet love, such as the intense, free and truly reciprocal relation between Jen and da Silva, can release non-institutionalized values, the “light” eclipsed with the shot and bombed Cuffeys of this world. “Love,” says Sir Giles to da Silva, “is a deep seated gesture towards the living and the dead, despite incompatible appearances, an act of healing [...] prodigal return where one least expects it” (30). After Jen’s (prodigal) return from Peru the light returns, not directly but in Cuffey’s “regenerated eyes” as these come alive with “newfound compassion” (59) on the painting of “‘wildernesse’ theatre: middle ground of paradise” (53). As da Silva realizes again and again, light itself (arising from a deep invisible source akin to nothingness) cannot be immobilized into one shape or in one place, for this would amount to a new hardening of tradition in his work. Like the bird or spirit that flies “within a marvel of opposites” (3) in da Silva’s dream, the light moves between Magellan and Cuffey on his “Paradise” and “Prodigal” paintings until, on his “wildernesse” canvas, the two men seem to have been “conscripted into an elaborate plot to heal each other’s wounds in the conception of a child” (60). As usual in Harris’s fiction, there is no facile reconciliation, no evidence even that it may take place, only a suggestion that a mutation may be occurring by which the dissolution of one mould of tradition (such as Magellan’s), disclosing its hidden face (Cuffey’s) and allowing a glimpse of “never-to-be-painted, never-tobe-trapped light” (38), illuminates the “middle-ground” or “middle passage of paradise” (58). This is the ground of a possible “dialogue between incompatibles of conquest or glory (paradise) and victimization or eclipse (Middle Passage). The death of one kind of tradition and of its material achievements is thus the “apparent death of tradition” (25) only, since it resuscitates, temporarily brings to light, through an awareness of the sacrifice gone into every achievement, the immortal tradition common to all

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men. It is, paradoxically, a source of creation and maturity10 as it becomes part of the process of life and death, appearance and disappearance of material forms and immaterial perspectives, which together form the whole world re-created by da Silva. This brings us back to our starting-point, the two-faced world or “cultivated wilderness” da Silva paints in himself and on his canvases. The word “wilderness” is used with all its implications of wildness, barrenness, complexity and confusion with reference to nature as well as to man, his inner state, and the world he has built. The “wildernesse” theatre in Holland Park is the “‘wildernesse’ theatre of the globe” (37), and the earth is a “wilderness mother” (65). There is a “wilderness” of communication (exemplified in Kate’s and da Silva’s incapacity to understand each other). The “beautiful man-made wilderness” (57) built in Holland Park in imperial days contrasts with the ”urban ‘wilderness’” (61) da Silva discovers in a demolished area of London. But the oxymoron or antithetical image of a “cultivated wilderness” carries a hope of regeneration and reconstruction. As da Silva re-visions his “urban ‘wilderness’” mural, he becomes aware of “varieties of twilight” and “transparent densities” (63) of colours, reminiscent of the “varieties of transparent eclipse” (38) in the “Paradise” portraits of Manya. In those earlier paintings, the light was synonymous with “indestructible impersonality” and “independence within all masks” (38), synonymous with a spirit that discarded the coat of uniformity. On his city mural he discerns a light more real than wood or brick, “the inimitable substance of a new architecture” (63). I have already suggested that this inner light can never be fully apprehended. Nor can what is apprehended be fixed, for it would then become institutionalized and hide the very source from which it originally sprang. It is to restore the light to its mobility that da Silva “cultivates” the wilderness, sets in motion the densities of the pool (the pool and wilderness metaphors merge here as they do on the sixteenth-century print, though with new meaning). Cultivation means creation, da Silva’s capacity to visualize as an “inimitable painting” “the suffering infinity of man” (62). It is Jen’s 10

Sir Giles refers to maturity as “a capacity to start anywhere, to step back, to step forward, to be ceaselessly aware of immaterial truth in the most massive stereotypes” (28). The “drama of maturity” in which da Silva is involved grows out of, and gives a more specific meaning to, the “drama of consciousness” that has so far taken place in Harris’s characters.

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dowry and Sir Giles’s legacy that leave him free to do his painting, and he owes his inspiration to Jen’s love and Sir Giles’s guidance. As the latter’s name suggests (Marsden–Prince11) he both serves and rules. His library “span[s] civilizations” (7), as da Silva intends his Commonwealth Institute paintings to do. And as the “ambassador of god” Sir Giles represents the “insoluble cross-cultural deity” (69), again the immaterial face of tradition which offers the only hope of genuine change in the Commonwealth, precisely because it can only be perceived when men discard the “soluble uniform” (69) they wear. In da Silva’s Commonwealth paintings, brilliant and imaginative use is made of the actual architecture (the helmet-like dome and the threedecked structure) and the exhibitions at the Commonwealth Institute in London to give an idea of the new forces at work in the Commonwealth.12 The individual figures on da Silva’s earlier canvases are now given a universal dimension. The “soluble uniform” of Empire (a dead or dying tradition) has given way to formerly “suppressed tones of feeling” (10) in exploited populations (the “embryonic scarecrows” glimpsed in Jenine Globe in da Silva’s dream?). New tones merge into new national uniforms and new “purist masks of technology” (73), which may well hide the line or area of “non-tone,” the state of nothingness in which “the violated bodies of history” (69) subsist. This reversal of situation (in which former victims are now possibly turning into tyrants) presents and develops more clearly than before implications that have been present in Wilson Harris’s work from the beginning. Seen from the outside, the helmet of the Institute recalls Cromwell’s helmet and his Commonwealth, but looked at from the inside the dome is like a circular star cluster, “the constellation of Hercules” (67), which shelters the “genie of forces” (69). Will this genie be recognized as the fruit of “complexities of nakedness” (69), the fleshand-blood “wilderness” of the exploited? Will the resurrected people remember the price they paid in the past and sometimes still pay in terms of “millions on the brink of starvation or on the brink of the grave” (68)? Will their new forces be used by themselves or by others to serve violence 11

In Harris’s earlier novels (Black Marsden and Companions) Marsden reveals to Goodrich, the exploring consciousness, the existence of eclipsed individuals and populations and serves him as a guide to namelessness. 12 See, in particular, the “Painted African Sun-Poem” and the Caribbean “Museum of Genesis,” 70–72.

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or freedom? “How soluble,” wonders da Silva, “are the stables that groomed the horses the conquistadores rode?” (72). His revised canvases give no answer to the questions threaded into them, though their transparencies elicit “the glimmering light of a perception of value beyond the quantitative mirage of civilizations” (74; emphasis mine). The “glimmering light of perception” is not the light, glimpsed by man but forever out of his reach, whose elusive presence has illuminated da Silva’s canvases. It is only one of its manifestations becoming perceptible through da Silva’s regenerated vision, “the ‘middle-ground regenerated eyes’ of [...] compassion as original vision available to the human imagination in every age” (70). The genie of man, an expression of light, appears in many different guises in the paintings (in a sense, these are all variations on the theme of light). But the emphasis at this stage is clearly on a resurrected sensibility (“compassion as original vision”). Naturally, the renaissance of feeling and imagination − clearly the two are inseparable − that Harris envisages can take place only in the individual. At the end of the day, in the “Homecoming” section, the narrative shifts back from a world-wide to a personal perspective; more accurately, the two merge in Jen, who is met by da Silva on her way home and announces that she is pregnant. Jen is one of the most successful female portraits in Harris’s fiction. Neither Virgin nor whore (an inevitable polarization in the novels evoking a society in which there was sometimes one woman to fifty men), Jen is in every sense “an extraordinary affirmation of life” (55). Her relationship with da Silva is joyfully sensual as well as spiritually and imaginatively fertile. It is one of complete and happy reciprocity between muse and artist (“you are in me I in you forever,” says da Silva on the morning of their mutual “creation” 5, 4), and their child, the offspring of their physical love, is also “the immortal presence they ceaselessly conceived into existence through each other” (48). The painter’s new vision and the muse’s pregnancy (the awaited “homecoming of spirit” 30) are the more striking if one remembers the essential life-giving (not receiving) role of the muse at the end of Palace of the Peacock. In this novel, not only is creativeness revitalized but its very source is fertilized and on the point of giving a new lease of life to the “genie” of man. Embracing Jen on their way home, da Silva feels he encircles the globe and its once more “circulating,” hence released and creative, light.

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The annunciation with which the novel ends is an extraordinary affirmation of faith in the future of humanity, though it is not an unqualified one, since da Silva must suppress fears of the many dangers that threaten the coming child, of the anguish that each birth, like each death, involves. Hope itself carries its own biases and self deceptions, as Harris shows in Genesis of the Clowns, the counterpoint to Da Silva, offering an alternative version of the rebirth that may follow the total eclipse of a man or a people. Without analyzing it in detail, I should like to indicate briefly in what way the second novel in the volume complements the first and to show that, together, the two present contrasting and overlapping possibilities of man’s future. The basic proposition that informs the rich metaphoric texture of the narrative in Da Silva is, as we have seen, that the creative act can result only from a marriage between feeling and imagination, since feeling makes possible the retrieval into the creative consciousness of neglected inner selves (Others inhabiting our common being), whose resurgence partly illuminates areas of darkness in inner and outer worlds. If, then, creation by man is a “displacement of opposites”13 through the recognition of others originally created by God (as Eve was created by God as a part of Adam), it follows that man’s creativity is primarily a capacity to apprehend and bring to light an already existing but invisible reality. Da Silva says at one stage: “‘Whose is the hand I wonder that guides my hand sometimes to paint a self-portrait of prodigal life, coincident with birth, coincident with death?’” (32). And in Genesis of the Clowns Hope, a black Guyanese, sends to Frank Wellington, his (significantly named) former employer now living in London, a book called Timehri, which means both “Indian patterns” and “the hand of God” (144). This has a direct bearing on the “comedy of divinity” or “comedy of light” that is the subject of Genesis. Harris, as we know, identifies repressed humanity − here, as earlier, the natives of Guyana − with the original, invisible reality I have just referred to, since exploited men are reduced to a primordial state and deprived of identity. As indicated earlier, they are represented in most of Harris’s novels by the Nameless Fool or Clown, rejected slave or god, who nevertheless enjoys true spiritual freedom because he is not enrolled in any fixed order. Frank Wellington’s resurrection of the “clowns” buried in his past − the surveying crew he led thirty 13

Companions, 29.

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years before in the Guyanese interior − is, like da Silva’s re-visionary canvases, an attempt to bring to life the concealed, immaterial face of tradition. He, too, lives now in a London flat and is urged to his one-day journey into the past by an anonymous letter announcing the death of Hope, who had been his foreman. As Wellington re-envisions his men, one is reminded of the traffic-lights metaphor in Da Silva, stop–go signals or appearing and disappearing suns, punctuating the repetitive death and the repetitive genesis of man. Wellington sees again the members of the crew coming one by one to his pay-table, now merging with the sketches he used to make in the margins of his field book and taking part in “the shadowplay of a genesis of suns” (86), a dark comedy in which they were all the time involved (though they did not realize it) when he was their master and substitute father (the paternal conqueror?). In this novel as in Da Silva, it is the protagonist’s understanding of a man he once took for granted, used “to do [his] bidding, a piece of furniture” (82), that now kindles the “Copernican revolution of sentiment” (92) that eventually releases the “frozen genesis” (112) of relationship between the crew and their leader. But while in Da Silva the light, whether real or illusory, shines on all canvases,14 dark light fills the universe Wellington penetrates anew, and the suns around which he turns are black as if he had fallen with the Fool in Companions into a world of “black holes.” In this world, ridden by the catastrophe of conquest, men are either extinct as individuals, having lost all expectations, or their unavowed terrors cause a tense malaise to build up in them (its origin unrecognized) that discharges itself violently later on in vengeful possessiveness or destructiveness. The scant “currency” they receive for serving the Empire can in no way compensate them for their fear. Beyond recompense is the heroism shown by the Amerindian Reddy, who conceals his disorientation with laughter when the light of his gods collapses as he witnesses for the first time Atlantic tidal currents carrying logs upriver. Nor can anything make up for for Chung’s frightened and lonely watch in the jungle. Wellington senses the men’s unresolved strain as menacing though unconscious energy, an anonymous gun pointed at himself and threatening to kill him, as he is nearly killed by the released energy of the storm that brings down his tent. Retrospectively, he is confronted with the 14

This by no means implies that da Silva’s reconstruction is “optimistic” and leaves out the pain and anguish experienced by his models or by himself.

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”terrifying otherness” (126) of his men, as they must once have faced the terror aroused by the strange world he was imposing on them. As he now takes part in their ”terrifying genesis,” he himself becomes “a head among the Clowns” (110), for, despite the agonizing pain of the confrontation, genuine “unfrozen genesis” (127) does occur when Wellington transforms the encounter into one of reciprocity. He now pays Reddy in “currencies of light” (112), the only wages that can make up for loss of the light of his ancestors, and to this effect “assemble[s] [his] sentiments across the paytable of the years” (126). Even as he does this, he receives from Reddy’s sister “the gift of life” (127), the generous present of a cosmic gun that releases “animation” as well as “ammunition” (141), or “the fire of creation native to us whose steadfast lore it has taken us ages to begin to move” (108). This simplified account cannot convey the perfect correspondence between the apparent stillness and actual mobility of earth and sun and the many other metaphors in the novel expressing a similar duality of apparent stillness and movement in men and women (the “Fertility Goddess,” Ada, is a case in point). Indeed, all metaphors concur to suggest the dual possibilities open to man of spiritual freedom (movement) and acceptance of fate (immobility) as well as the inevitable fusion of both in any man’s life, the notion also that freedom is reached through recognition of a previously unconscious subscription to fate. No such recognition seemed to be taking place at the time of the events recalled by Wellington. Moseley, one of the crew, saw that the strikers of a sugar estate were simply yielding to another kind of tyrannical power but not that he himself was enthusiastically complying with the imprint of technology on himself. The Frederick brothers took their revenge on capitalist tyrants by becoming capitalists in turn. And even Hope (the “witness to the pay sheet,” indirectly related to each man), though equally susceptible to the “inimitable potential of the past and the future, the inimitable danger as well” (99), eventually succumbed to “a tyranny of affections” (147) not unlike the political tyranny of the men of deeds he so admired. The anonymous letter Frank Wellington receives on the morning of his journey in memory explains that Hope has killed a rival lover (the black namesake of his former white leader) and has committed suicide. There is a suggestion that on the very brink of death Hope may have seen “another head among the clowns” and turned towards “the gift of life without strings” (148), which is a token of true freedom. This can hardly be taken to signify approval of

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Hope’s suicide, of course. The point is, rather, that Hope’s aggression towards the other is now turned against himself, so that, as both assailant and victim, he has encountered as his own the fate he has imposed on the other and by doing so has obliterated the tyrant in himself. In dispossessing himself he returns to namelessness and thus becomes once more an object of compassion, the only real source of hope in Harris’s novels. Hope (the character) seems to have died into that unknown dimension which forever eludes man though it is nourished by the confrontation of his (and nature’s) contrary movements, a dimension which, for Harris, appears to be of the essence of divinity. Viewed together, the two novels certainly illustrate the potentialities and dangers of man’s “genie of hope” (61), of resurrection as genuine rebirth or as just another rush into what Wellington calls “the riveted whirlpool of life” (90). Together and separately, they present an essentially open and unfinished half-human, half-divine comedy, informed by the conviction, at once profoundly moral and in harmony with a scientific view of cosmic life, that man breaks at his peril the precarious balance between the moving contrasts of existence, in whatever form. The rewarding course open to him is on the “middle ground of paradise”: There was an air, a light of incredible beauty upon the tide. That light spoke of interwoven illusions, the spell cast high by a state of illusion, uncanny threshold into oneself, into blocked divinity, blocked humanity, one drew, filled in, sculpted into oneself as the genesis of light itself. (124)

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The Tree of the Sun and Resurrection Faces on the Canvas

I would give my right hand to paint such light, the essence of unselfconsciousness eclipsed by conquest.1

I

“A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” Harris relates an incident which was a catalyst for his conception of both content and form in his fiction. As a surveyor in Guyana, he twice led an expedition in the same area, travelling by boat with his crew on the same stretch of river at an interval of several years. On both occasions, the boat nearly overturned on the same spot. Harris and the crew were saved the first time by cutting the rope of the anchor that had lodged in the bed of the stream, the second time by giving a strong tug on the anchor and pulling the boat towards the bank. When they got there, they discovered that the anchor was hooked into the one lost years before, and now brought it to the surface. Harris explains that the image of the constellated anchors was the origin of a strong upsurge of consciousness and that his imagination was energized by these two ordinary objects: N HIS ESSAY

I felt as if a canvas around my head was crowded with phantoms and figures. I had forgotten some of my own antecedents – the Amerindian / Arawak ones – but now their faces were on the canvas.2

Expedition, whether actual or into the psyche, and the recovery of antecedents were to provide the basic pattern of most of Harris’s narratives. His experience is an example of what he calls in the same essay the re-

1 2

Harris, Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, 27. “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” 60.

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trieval of “eclipsed perspectives of place and community”:3 i.e. the recognition of areas and populations ignored or driven underground for centuries. We know that Harris’s awareness of the hardly visible presence of those victims of conquest has led to his conception of the heterogeneous novel, which combines opposite fates or conditions in an attempt to reconcile them. It has also influenced his conception of character and made him see the individual as both one and many, encompassing layers of personality that range from low animal selves to a consciousness capable of the highest development. In the long run, however, the sudden apparition of antecedents on the canvas of his imagination seems to have led him to his conception of “the novel as painting,” and this appears to be closely linked to the theme of resurrection he has explored with increasing insistence ever since Palace of the Peacock. “Painting” and resurrection are two essential aspects of his fiction which converge and culminate in The Tree of the Sun. The concept of the novel as painting was first formulated long after the publication of Palace of the Peacock: I am drawn to “painting” as a profound “metaphor” […] in a certain kind of novel. […] The fact is the inimitable painting that becomes the medium of a novel allows “incompatible” conventions or structures […] to come into play in such a way that a new approximation to a genius of resurrected sensibility arrives in the language of the novel: it is as if both “incompatibles” are seen as peculiar graves or peculiar kinds of death, and the resurrection of the self emerges as these “incompatibles” begin to be transformed into “I and Thou,” “me and the other,” so that a new compassion is born.4

The painting metaphor thus stands for a capacity to visualize in depth – that is, beyond what is immediately perceptible – contrary states, and to vizualize them together. It is a visionary process of transformation or, as the character da Silva says, “of translation of the elements.”5 This process is already present in Palace of the Peacock, in which the pictures framed by the carpenter in the waterfall are so many catalysts in Donne’s conversion, and the picture of the Arawak virgin and child is what brings about the resurrection of his sensibility, since it makes him aware that “all his

3 4 5

“The Subjective Imagination,” 58. Letter to Hena Maes–Jelinek, 3 August 1976. The Tree of the Sun, 42. Further page references are given in the text.

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life he had loved no one but himself.”6 Above all, this process is perceptible in the metamorphosis of the tree of flesh and blood with the sun “suspended from its head,” the two together being transformed into the peacock. My impression is that the metaphor of “the tree of sun” has grown out of this very passage in Palace of the Peacock and that, since then, it has come to stand for the process of transformation itself. Also in Palace of the Peacock, one of the DaSilva twins is presented as an otherworldly creature, a kind of skeleton covered not with flesh but with drab, wet newspaper, and is called “a reporter who had returned from the grave” (123). His otherwordliness or newspaper self is a kind of paint or incipient canvas which, as we see in later novels in which he appears, becomes filled with the eclipsed faces of the historical and individual characters he paints. In these novels, the twins have indeed grown into the painter Da Silva da Silva. His double name “repudiate[s],” as he says, “a tautology of identity in painter as well as in painted subject” (3). This may seem paradoxical, but, in fact, his name expresses the duality of both his vision and the reality he explores. It is as if the second part of his name conveyed the ‘otherness’ towards which he gropes in his paintings. I have traced elsewhere7 the elements that have developed in “the novel as painting” as exemplified in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness and The Tree of the Sun, notably in Ascent to Omai and more briefly in Companions of the Day and Night, where artworks related to writings are seen as “doorways.” In a similar way, in The Tree of the Sun da Silva moves “through the door of the tree of the sun,” “into the life of previous tenants of the house” (10), employing painting to resurrect Amerindian antecedents by exploring the historical catastrophe of the New-World Conquista. This re-creative expedition through art is linked up with the creation of life via the ‘annunciation’ by da Silva’s wife that she has conceived a child. “Absolute justice,” muses da Silva, referring to Pizarro’s sentence on Atahualpa, “is death’s republic. To step back, before it is too late […] and to begin, all over again, to enfold a resurrection-motif of individual tenderness […] individual art of saving powers […] is a conception of the frail kingdom of life” (8). This resurrection-motif is illustrated in the lives of Francis and Julia Cortez, former tenants of da Silva’s flat whom he next brings into his 6 7

Palace of the Peacock, 140. See “The Novel as Painting” above, 235–74.

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painting. Julia died of cancer twenty years before and Francis disappeared and was never heard of again. While remodelling the flat, the da Silvas came across an unfinished book by Francis and letters Julia had secretly written to her husband, though neither actually read what the other had written. The book and the letter provide the material for da Silva’s mural and form a kind of novel within the novel. Da Silva edits the book and letters in much the same way that the narrator edits the Forrestals’ logbook in The Waiting Room. There is an importance difference, however: as da Silva brings Francis and Julia to life, they are aware of him as their creator. Time is abolished, and in the dialogue between the present and the past, the living and the dead, each is aware of the other as his own creation: “[Da Silva] was himself being taken over by them page by page as he began to sketch or paint them” (11). Francis’ real name was Rigby and he changed it into Cortez, uniting in the same Francis Cortez the personalities of Francisco Pizarro and Hernando Cortez. Just after their marriage, the Cortezes went to a grand costume ball in which he dressed up as Francisco and she as a feminine Atahualpa. This mock marriage between the conqueror and his victim assumes a particular significance when we know that Julia intensely desired to have a child but was never able to do so. We are also told at the outset of the novel that “the child Jen conceived was the apparition of a child she Julia dreamed to conceive all her life in the letters she wrote” (11). This resurrection of the miscarried foetus – image of all the aborted unions of the mission civilisatrice – is the subject of the novel. Though their marriage was barren, Francis and Julia were deeply in love and the scenes of their lovemaking are among the most poetic and sensuous in the novel. In the following passage their coming together on da Silva’s canvas seems to be an act of liberation: They drew into a tree of passion through which a psychical forest of creation grew and reached up, in its turn, into other forests or unknown creations. Their bodies became a cradle of the suture running hand in hand or mouth to mouth with a vision of nothingness so strong and secure it seemed other than nothingness and to abandon all straitjacketed proportions. (14)

This passage sends out several tendrils of meaning in the novel. To begin with, Francis “misconceives” the tree of passion because he dreams of the “perfect tyranny of love” (14, 17): that is to say, of the same kind of commanding and possessive love that once conquered the world in the name

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of Christ and which, on the level of personal relations, makes him jealous of Julia’s imaginative intercourse with da Silva. Julia, on the contrary, refrains “from investing in absolutes” (17). Yet it is through Francis’ book: i.e. through his art and da Silva’s, that his wife’s miscarried foetus is eventually brought back to life and the repetition of catastrophe in the future is forestalled. In the book, also called “The Tree of the Sun,” Francis has created a variety of characters who come to life in da Silva’s painting. These are Eleanor Rigby (Francis’ actual mistress), her husband Harlequin, and a black milkman, called Leonard, whom Francis uses as a kind of alter ego to father with Eleanor the child he and Julia never had. Thus through Montezuma and Atahualpa, then Francis and Julia, then the characters in Francis’ book, one explores in increasing depth the potentialities of the past. Another important point in the above passage is the reference to “a vision of nothingness so strong and secure it seemed other than nothingness,” for here Harris reasserts more boldly than ever that this nullity, which resulted from catastrophe, is a source of rebirth, that it contains the seed of evolution through which we free ourselves from the constrictions of the past and move towards the future: “There’s a central, apparently invincible, nothingness to all material existence out of which time runs backwards and forwards” (22). It is by regressing into, and coming through, this nothingness that Francis relates to the characters in his book, that he creates himself, as it were, into those other selves and can then ask the metaphysical question “Am I my own father?” (22). There is a new insistence on the need to move backwards and forwards, never to lose sight of past and future, and this has led to the coining of a phrase illustrated in many ways in the novel, “backward resurrection” (22). The backward resurrection implies a synthesis between past, present and future. It implies a plunge into the past in order to bring out of it something new and original but at the same time a consciousness that the present begins to die so that one has the constant possibility of making the present and the future anew, of not becoming locked into them. Da Silva’s descent into Montezuma and Atahualpa, into the Cortezes and the characters of Francis’ book are backward resurrections, and all these characters are what da Silva calls “approximations of resurrected selves, across centuries, across islands and continents, on this bank of heaven or that bank of earth” (29–30, 53). One finds in those approximations an expression of Harris’s attempt to approach truth from a variety of positions,

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since no one man possesses the truth. When da Silva turns a page in Francis’ book to “unveil and construe some its limbo elements” (45), it is one approach, one form of backward resurrection, this time through a material object. For in their descent into limbo Francis and da Silva follow Leonard to the nineteenth-century bottle kiln where his black immigrant ancestors used to work in one of the poorest areas in London. The kiln carries the traces of “economic miscarriage or scar” (47), yet serves as a catalyst to a new sensibility and a higher degree of awareness, “heightened threshold of awareness” (46): The heat and burden of a past century had vanished and yet something pathetic, yet penetrative and illuminating, curiously naked and sad, seemed to relate the mystery of constellations to a re-dress of appearances in the comedy of the cosmos. (46)

So the dead kiln is seen to contain a spark of life after all. When they leave the kiln, da Silva and Francis follow Leonard to Eleanor’s flat. In his book, Francis re-creates his affair with Eleanor through Leonard and sees him threatened by a bullet which Harlequin (her husband) fires. Through his fictional re-enactment of violence Francis appears to transform its impact. Once again, it is a question of becoming aware of areas of insensibility in the past, of wounds inflicted and unheeded which could re-open in the future and strike back with overwhelming force. The bullet fired by the “young revengeful harlequin” is transmuted into the force of imagination, the force which, Julia thinks, “seems to strike even as it rescues” (17): So that as the bullet sped, its material consequences seemed less overwhelming, almost as if it were tipped by ineffectuality to vanish into an apparition of creative paradox. Could Julia’s miscarriage of flesh and blood be converted into profound sensibility of apparitions of community (in resurrections of the unborn) one lives ahead of one’s time in order to be whole and survive? (50)

The question whether Julia’s actual miscarriage can be converted into a “sensibility of apparitions of community” in the future, into a capacity to conceive the rebirth of humanity, is central to the novel. It amounts to asking whether art (Francis’ fiction, da Silva’s painting) can transform catastrophe, whether it can at least be one of the means through which one can try to approach what is unbearable in catastrophe. The question is answered in one way when Francis and da Silva next follow Leonard to a market where a few masterpieces, among them Michelangelo’s David and

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Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, are put up for sale at a mock auction. Da Silva, whose paintings “translate the elements,” becomes the auctioneer. The auction is a kind of “creative paradox.” The link between the auction block of slavery days when flesh-and-blood people were put up for sale like animals is soon obvious. Da Silva reads traces of this horrible past in Titian’s painting, for he sees the two women on the painting as lionesses with “a beautiful lion cub [playing] in the head and flesh” of the child between them (58). In other words, the human animal shows through the faces and postures of the beautiful women and child that are themselves put up for sale, yet in a sense live and survive; so that the masterpiece in which the artist has (whether consciously or not) brought together the lower animal with figures of the highest beauty is auctioned, in da Silva’s words, “for the conservation of all threatened species” (57). Here, too, the question is whether the individual imagination is capable of grasping the nature of catastrophe (in this case slavery) in such a way that it can envisage a reversal of its implications, draw from it the element that will save the future, or as Harris says in Black Marsden, the element that will make it a “seminal catastrophe.”8 What is humour of fate and freedom [da Silva asks] if it disguises from itself the animal generations that stand within our terrors and ambivalences? We need to see them if we are to see how we ourselves are furnaces and floods in which so many threatened species may burn, in which so many lost species may begin to revive. (57)

In the second part of the novel, it becomes clearer than ever that what is at stake is the future of humanity. Julia comes to the fore and da Silva’s editorship of her letters is seen as a “deep-seated love affair” (63). Indeed he fertilizes the material of her past, her childhood and youth in the West Indies “across oceans,” as he says, “back to where it all started” (87). This return to the past illustrates Julia’s idea that “Posterity lies in the past as much as in the future” (36). One incident in her youth seems to illustrate this. At the age of eighteen, on the West Indian island of Zemi she ascended a mountain into Zemi land, the territory of the mythic Arawak gods,9 8

Black Marsden, 84. The name Zemi comes from the Arawak Zemi(s). These, as Harris has explained, are Arawak icons expressive of inner spaces in the Arawak psyche. See History, Fable and Myth, 23 (in Explorations, 38–39). Julia returns to her past in Zemi “as to an extension of mythical presences” (63). 9

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and had the impression that she was raped by Zemi dancers or players. When they retreated, she was conscious only of “a lover of infinity” and of “her first […] gateway into the annunciation of the globe […] within which populations danced” (71). This annunciation suggests that a symbolic conception has taken place, that in her journey to a mythic past Julia has been fertilized by the gods (as the Madonna was by the Holy Spirit) and that this has made her into a potential mother of humanity. The other significant event before her departure from the West Indies was the death of her father. As his funeral procession advances it becomes clear that his death stands for the death of an era and that what is called “the mighty insensible coffin of an age” (79) represents its deadness and insensibility. We see indeed that the funeral procession seems to “charge into sculptured solutions” (81) as if the instinct of man in a dying age was to invest further in what is solid and static. But as a counterpoint to this, the re-creation of the funeral brings to light various frail elements which gradually modify “the bulk of insensibility” (78), so that even the most insensible material seems to possess “an incalculable spark of compassion” (79). Again a major idea in Harris’s fiction is expressed here: namely, that, as Julia puts it, “the secret of the most sensitive, origins of life” are to be found “in the apparent death of life” (79). Significantly, it is at her father’s funeral that Francis first appears to Julia as a nondescript reporter from the Zemi Chronicle, as someone with whom she will “embark into another beginning of the self” (73). Francis, who had not yet changed his name to Cortez, is then called Francis Leonard Harlequin Rigby. In other words, he is then potentially all the characters he is to create in his book, what da Silva calls “limbo selves” (87). As such he is a true harlequin figure. The harlequin appears in many guises in the novel and combines features of death and life. He is “Julia’s unborn child […] everyman’s everywoman’s unborn child” (44). In the guise of Leonard he is called “unpromising skeleton” (44) and “Caribbean miscarriage” (45). But he is also the child born of the fictionalized affair between Leonard and Eleanor, appearing when the rape of Julia becomes “a gateway into the annunciation of the globe” (71). He thus carries the possibility of healing and change and, to use Francis’s words, “he puts fleshand-blood on the most unpromising skeletons” (44). As a harlequin figure himself, Francis passes with Julia through the “astonishing gate” (87) of her father’s plantation into a new world. Because their marriage was barren, it might be called a failure. Their lives, in which they wrote for each

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other in secret and often quarrelled, were in a sense what Julia calls “parallel expeditions” (64, 88). These are separate areas of experience which do not meet directly yet relate to each other through the spark that resides in each. It is da Silva who retrieves that spark and turns their marriage into a fruitful dialogue or, to use Julia’s words, “a communication that’s subtle as truth” (92). At the end of the novel, Julia’s departure from the Caribbean with Francis is taken up by da Silva (his studio become “theatre of nature” for the human community), whose mural represents Julia’s seaward passage as a dying into a new world, amid an oceanic surge of human voices. The incarnation or human orchestra is the community born of the now fruitful marriage between Francis and Julia. The tree of the sun has become the tree of humanity conceived anew by Julia. It is also the tree of the world in the Arawak and Macusi legend quoted as an epigraph to the novel: During a long series of feuds and battles with the Caribs the Arawaks used to climb into the sky by means of a foodbearing tree. One day their enemies set fire to the tree. It blazed across the oceans and as it fell there was an explosion like thunder. The Indians who remained in the sky turned into stars and formed the constellation of the Pleiades.

Harris has reworked into Julia’s story this “creation myth rooted in catastrophe.”10 Like Titian’s painting of Sacred and Profane Love, da Silva’s mural reconciles the two sides of life, the physical and the spiritual: it brings together Jen’s actual child and what he calls Julia’s “spiritual brat” (74). One might apply to it the words of André Malraux: For Titian as for Phidias, as for the Sumerian sculptors, whether they knew it or not, the object of artistic creation is to express through appearances what does not belong to appearances (and above all not to the time of men) – what can only exist through creation itself.11

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Harris, “Carnival of Psyche: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,” Kunapipi 2.2 (1980): 143 (in Explorations, 126). 11 Malraux, La Métamorphose des Dieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1974): 11 (my tr.).


15

Carnival and Creativity

The story goes that, before or after he died, [Shakespeare] found himself before God and he said: “I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.” The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: “‘Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons – and none.”1 Vision and idea mingled into a sensitive carnival — Harris, Palace of the Peacock

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in Wilson Harris’s first novel occurs at a crucial moment when the crew travelling on the river in pursuit of the Amerindian folk are completely disorientated and face the terror of the unknown as they experience their second death. The whole passage shows that already then Harris was using the word carnival as a metaphor for creativity and was also expressing its dual nature: HE REFERENCE TO CARNIVAL

Vision and idea mingled into a sensitive carnival that turned the crew into the fearful herd where he [Vigilance] clung with his eye of compassion to his precarious and dizzy vertical hold and perched on the stream of the cliff. The light of space changed, impinging upon his eyeball and lid numerous grains of 1 Jorge Luis Borges, “Everything and Nothing,” tr. Mildred Boyer & Harold Morland, in Borges, Dreamtigers, intro. Miguel Enguídanos (“Todo y nada,” in El hacedor, 1960, and Antología personal, 1961; Texas Pan-American Series; Austin: U of Texas P, 1964): 47. Less satisfactory translations by Anthony Kerrigan in Borges, A Personal Anthology (New York: Grove, 1967): 116–17, and by James E. Irby in Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (1964; Harmondsworth: Penguin Modern Classics, 1970): 285.

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sound and motion that were the suns and moons of all space and time. The fowls of the air danced and wheeled on invisible lines that stretched taut between the ages of light and snapped every now and then into lightning executions of dreaming men when each instant ghost repaired the wires again in the form of an inquisitive hanging eye and bird. (108)2

This extraordinary vision suggests that the very experience which turns the crew into a fearful herd stimulates in Vigilance a perception of creation on a cosmic scale. He has travelled with them so far but he is ascending towards light while the crew are caught in the “stream of death.” My point here is that a similar experience gives rise to opposite reactions, that the catastrophic event which the crew are re-living imprisons them in a deadlock of terror and even stimulates violence among them, yet is also the source of a rebirth of imagination. Palace of the Peacock is essentially about the saving role of imagination, while the nature of creativity and its possible regenerative influence on man’s moral behaviour is a major theme in all Harris’s fictions. As one character says in Carnival, “a living language [...] is a medium of creativity in morality” (74). I intend to concentrate on this novel but first wish to show that it brings to a head, and is a synthesis of, several aspects of Harris’s fiction which have matured into a many-layered whole. Harris has emphasized different aspects of the creative implications of carnival in several of his novels, giving perhaps the impression at an early stage that he was probing in various directions. But it seems that, like Stevenson at the end of Heartland, he keeps going backwards and forwards, and this is apparently a feature of the exploration in which he himself is engaged. We have just seen that carnival in Palace of the Peacock is a metaphor for creation, while “vision and idea” suggest both a visionary or imaginative perception of the world and abstract thought. Another aspect of the multiplicity of meanings inherent in Harris’s use of carnival is illustrated more concretely towards the end of The Whole Armour, which links carnival with history. Cristo returns to his village after spending some time in the jungle, where he was thought to have died. He explains to Sharon, the woman he loves, that he met there a party of Arawaks who could have belonged to two or three centuries earlier. Sharon laughs at him and explains that the Catholic mission has been 2

Interestingly, the image of the “hanging eye” recurs in Carnival (18, 25) and suggests the eye of God.

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staging a carnival, so that the Indians were actually costumed players reenacting the last battle between Arawaks and Caribs. But Cristo rejects this realistic version. The Indians and the runaway slaves he has met were real to him, whether they actually existed or were envisioned by him. He feels they put him together again after he had been dismembered like them, running in the jungle, a dismemberment that re-enacts the historical past of Caribbean man and prefigures Cristo’s execution for a crime he has not committed. This juxtaposition of two versions of history, one that is merely mimetic carnival, the other resting on a deep and intuitive insight into the psychological effects of events, points to later fusions of the two. The next allusion to carnival occurs in Heartland, in which it is practically used as a synonym for ‘creative’ in the phrase “carnival clue to the past.”3 In The Eye of the Scarecrow, the narrator comments on the 1948 strike in Guyana and feels the need to peer “into the heart of the universal carnival for the grimmest redeeming clue of an open memory.”4 Here the “universal carnival” not only means the “carnival of history,” but already evokes a universal “comedy of existence” such as Harris was to create in Carnival. As in Heartland, “carnival” is associated with “clue,” which refers to one of those smaller incidents or psychological effects buried in the unconscious and overlooked by official history, clues or “messages” which can be picked up again and open the way to a revision of past conflicts. What compels the narrator to look more closely at the past for a redeeming clue is the fact that the rebelliousness of the Guyana strikers in The Eye of the Scarecrow expresses a “nihilism of spirit,”5 which, ironically, closely resembles “the unprejudiced reality of freedom”6 which the narrator seeks to achieve. So, whereas a similar experience produced two very different reactions in the crew in Palace of the Peacock, here the strikers and the narrator are moved by a conception of freedom which looks the same, yet is very different. What matters in both cases is the irony inherent in each incident, each human reaction, since it is both itself and also susceptible of turning into its opposite. Such irony is also, as we shall see, a significant feature of the author’s view of creativity. Obvious3 4 5 6

Heartland, 68. The Eye of the Scarecrow, 19. The Eye of the Scarecrow, 18. The Eye of the Scarecrow, 19.

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ly, it invites a probing into deeper layers of experience and the innermost recesses of the self to approach the unconscious motives and attitudes that inform human behaviour. Although it may not have been immediately obvious, already in his early novels Wilson Harris was using carnival, a major cultural event in the Caribbean, as a counter, in much the same way as he had frequently used the word ‘through’ (and ‘beyond’) in its obvious significance yet for a deeper meaning.7 He was also moving towards the kind of self-reflexive fiction of which Carnival is such a striking example. However, unlike much contemporary self-reflexive writing, Harris’s narratives do not question the ‘reality’ of their own material, do not deny Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief” but are, rather, a meditation on the process of creation. On re-reading Palace of the Peacock, I realized that this self-reflexivity was already present, albeit in a less conspicuous form than in later novels. Most critics so far, including myself, have presented Donne as the main character even while drawing attention to his dual personality and to the Inarrator as his nameless other self. In the light of later novels, the transformation of Donne’s vision remains as essential as ever and is part of the narrator’s quest, but the latter’s role is just as important, since from beginning to end it is he, the nameless narrator, who identifies successively with the other characters and draws conclusions about their experience. In the part dealing with their “second death,” Vigilance, as a kind of alter ego of the narrator, takes up his visionary role and penetrates “every material mask and label”: “Vigilance had seen clear in the bowels of the nameless kinship and identity [...] and in one stroke it had liberated him from death and adversity.”8 The penetration of masks as an essential aspect of fiction-writing or exploration on the part of the major character is more fully developed in Tumatumari. Through the main character’s reconstruction of her family’s and Guyana’s history, the mask acquires a double function. It bears, in fact, a variety of implications, including metaphysical significance. But it is enough for my present purpose to understand that all the masks worn by Prudence’s family, as well as the masks of nature (“mask of phenome7 Cf. his statement, “Each fact is a door to be prised open in order to breach implacable identity or idolatry”; “Some Aspects of Myth and the Intuitive Imagination,” in Explorations, ed. Maes–Jelinek, 102. 8 Palace of the Peacock, 85.

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non,” “mask of the sun”9) are reversible. Or, to put it differently, that they contain and offer the key to their own partial dissolution or removal. The blinding mask of the sun is “translated” at the end and becomes a smiling Gorgon’s head. The mask which hides what is beneath yet can lose its rigid immobility and become, in Harrisian terms, a moving flowering head announces the narrator’s definition in Carnival: “Carnival hides us from ourselves yet reveals us to ourselves” (86). This, however, calls for an important qualification: the penetration of a mask does not mean that one discovers Truth behind it; there will be another partial truth or mask, and so ad infinitum. Other elements in Tumatumari foreshadow Carnival, such as the presentation of Roi, Prudence’s husband, as both king (as his name makes clear) and clown. For the first time also, Harris makes a complex use of the notion of game, which, in its major significance, is not just the great game of history but the game of creation, as the closing words of the novel indicate: “Game of the Conception. The Great Game.”10 Towards the end of the novel, when the conventional vision of the historian Tenby is transformed through the reconstruction of his role by his daughter Prudence, we are told that “from within the ultimate seal of death [Tenby’s is a post-mortem vision] he saw his historical function now in a new comical light like a soiled garment on his back.” Further on, a “comical evolution” takes place.11 I used to wonder: Why “comical”? and couldn’t see at first why Tenby’s new awareness was “comic.” Since then, Harris has repeatedly used the word “comedy” with reference to the “drama of consciousness” which takes place in his novels. Black Marsden is a “tabula rasa comedy.” Genesis of the Clowns is subtitled “A Comedy of Light,” and the narrator refers several times to the “comedy of divinity” through which the “genesis of the clowns” occurs.12 Indeed, “comedy” and “genesis” are used as synonyms in this novel.13 The Tree of the Sun is also a “twentieth-century comedy of divinity,” which on one level dramatizes “an unresolved ancient carnival feud of the parentage of the cosmos”14 and presents a character named Harlequin. Ever since the 9

Tumatumari, 14, 16. Tumatumari, 156. 11 Tumatumari, 141. 12 Genesis of the Clowns, 102, 128, 134. 13 Genesis of the Clowns, 120. 14 The Tree of the Sun, 40, 47. 10

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nameless narrator of Palace of the Peacock, Harris has had major characters or a narrator called “Idiot nameless” or “the Fool” (The Eye of the Scarecrow and Companions of the Day and Night). The clown in The Angel at the Gate is Anancy, the trickster-figure already present in Palace in the Peacock. In The Angel at the Gate, too, the extreme positions of “emperor” and “clown” are brought together in one character.15 Clearly, then, the carnivalesque elements I have referred to are present in Harris’s fiction from the very beginning. Although they appear with increasing frequency in later novels and are often given a different emphasis, they were, from the first, part of his conception of creativity and fiction. The penetration of masks to expose deeply buried and unconscious residues of individual and historical experience; the need to trace and elucidate real motivations behind paradoxical or deceptive appearances; the presentation of characters associated with carnival but also representative of the sharp contrasts to be found in poor and/or colonial societies – the King, the Clown, the nameless Fool who identifies with the exploited or eclipsed majority, the Harlequin; the increasing self-reflexivity that intensifies Harris’s fusion of “vision and idea,” the metaphoric and the abstract; all come together and illustrate his notion of comedy as represented in Carnival. Volumes have been written on the ambiguities of comedy and its metaphysical implications. Wilson Harris’s own conception is actualized in his fiction but can also be inferred from his essays, particularly The Womb of Space and the later essay “Comedy and Modern Allegory.”16 That he had The Divine Comedy in mind fairly early is obvious from his use of its opening lines as an epigraph to Heartland, published in 1965. What was not so clear at that time was his revision of Dante’s concept of comedy; and the link between the epigraph and the inconclusive ending of the novel seemed somewhat obscure. The title of Dante’s poem has, of course, been interpreted in many different ways. It is enough to recall that, quite apart from his dramatization of a theological system or divine plan as conceived in his time, Dante’s beatific vision is a ‘happy ending’ of 15

The Angel at the Gate, 99. “Comedy and Modern Allegory: A Personal View of the Revival of Dantesque Scenes in Modern Fiction,” paper read at the University of Turin on 29 October 1985. It was published as “Comedy and Modern Allegory: A Personal View,” in A Shaping of Connections, 127–40. 16

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deep spiritual significance. Like Dante, Harris advocates a spiritual rebirth of humanity, and in many of his novels the characters are in search of paradise. Whatever they mean by it, it is often perceived at the beginning of their quest as some kind of absolute similar to the traditional view (see Donne in Palace of the Peacock or Magellan in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness). But Harris presents this thirst for an absolute as a destructive, incorrigible human tendency. The reference to Dante in Carnival is clear, since, apart from the three epigraphs from his poem, the novel is explicitly called a “divine comedy of existence” (43) and a “spiritual biography” (23). It also deals in a very different way from Palace of the Peacock with the search for El Dorado, which in Harris’s fiction often represents the quest for paradise. The main character is called Everyman Masters, a name that allegorizes the kind of paradox informing Harris’s concept of creation and the novel as a whole. It does not merely juxtapose opposite perceptions of man, the singled-out ruler and the average man, but is a way of suggesting that one contains the other. In his first life, Masters is a plantation overseer in the colonial inferno of New Forest (probably Guyana). In what may be called his second life, he becomes an exploited Everyman working with other West Indians in a London factory. Like Palace of the Peacock, the novel opens with an act of revenge, Masters’ “second death” in London in 1982, when he is stabbed by a mysterious stranger after spending part of the night with one Jane Fisher. She is the white double of a black Jane Fisher who, twenty-five years earlier in New Forest, had attracted him to her house, where, mistaken for another overseer, he was killed by her jealous husband. Masters’ first death puts an end to his role as king of a colonial age, though not to the kind of exploitation for which he is partly responsible, since he himself experiences it in the London factory. Its main effect on him is to stimulate judgement of himself and his age: It set in train the most thoroughgoing analysis of hallucinated layers of being in himself, the most profound inquiry of which he was inwardly capable into everything he had seemed to be, everything he had aped, had done, his apprenticeship, the College he had attended, his parentage, cosmic and otherwise [...] the antics of Carnival, the heart of El Dorado, the cross-personal / cross-cultural relationships that he had tended to brush aside as adventitious or hollow myth. (87)

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This passage sums up the subject of the novel and can also be read as the effect of Masters’ second death, which stimulates the I-narrator to reconstruct Masters’ life. The “second death,” already envisioned in large part in Palace of the Peacock, may have been inspired by the Apocalypse (20:4). But whereas in both the Apocalypse and The Divine Comedy it refers to a period of damnation, expiation is here altered into an opportunity to revise past errors. As a matter of fact, Masters experiences several deaths and resurrections, each of which makes possible his and the narrator’s understanding of yet another slice of experience and casts a different light on, or even undermines, the previous one. The first-person narrator is called Jonathan Weyl. Masters can be his Virgil and guide through “the Inferno and Purgatory of the twentieth-century world” (15) only because he himself has been both “plantation overseer and hunted beast” (16). As he tells Jonathan, “I could not be your guide if I had not known the hell of the senses” (86). Although it is mainly Masters’ lives that are re-created, Jonathan’s role is just as important because the novel grows out of their dialogue and joint interpretation of the past, so that the narrative mode is not simply, in Coleridge’s words, an “appropriate form” but the very source of the novel’s significance, as it is also of the significance of carnival and comedy. Already in the opening chapters we realize that Jane Fisher is performing a play and that the comedy is a “revision” or “rehearsal.” The reconstruction is a dream, which, as in earlier novels, underlies its subjectivity. Moreover, Jonathan does not dream alone but through part of the narrative at least in conjunction, as it were, with his wife Amaryllis. Since theirs is a “marriage of cultures” (she is European, he of mixed ancestry), his creation is clearly cross-cultural and in a sense androgynous.17 As Jonathan descends into the Inferno with Masters, he meets several character-masks in whose lives he discerns significant clues of interpretation, the “carnival clues” perceived in earlier novels. What he makes of these under Masters’ guidance shapes the narrative. Already in The Tree of the Sun, some of the characters were aware of their creator. This is now further developed into a mutual creation: Jonathan is both Masters’ “creation” and his “fatherspirit” (31) – his “spirit-clerk” and his “parent-spark” (54). The “mutuality” or dialogue between the narrator and his guide appears in the very first re-created episode. Masters, aged nine, is seen playing on 17

See “the androgynous miracle of Carnival revolution,” 65.

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the beach with his older cousin Thomas. He cuts his hand on a bone and bandages the wound with a rag that Thomas tears away, perhaps involuntarily. But, like his namesake in the gospel, Thomas seems in need to prove the wound, which is only the first in a series inflicted on humanity. The bone or knife brings to the narrator’s mind the true shaman’s axe, and there follows a brief poetic reminder of the catastrophe evoked in Palace of the Peacock which nevertheless ends with the resurrection of the folk into the tree of flesh and blood. The implication here is that the slice or cut “dismembers” (23) yet also gives occasion to “re-member” in two senses: the “dismemberment” and “rememberment” of the human community (138) and the remembering of its wounds. Memory now appears personified by a false shaman from whom the child Masters ran away, apparently because he had heard rumours of a rapist in the neighbourhood. Although, as a personification of memory, the false shaman is a stimulus to creation, he is “Memory true and false” (26) and therefore a warning to Masters, then to Jonathan, of the dangerous deceptions which memory can exert.18 On reaching home after running away from him, Masters catches sight of his weeping mother through an open door. It reminds him of her suffering when she was expecting him, made pregnant by a man who didn’t marry her, so that she had contemplated an abortion. Masters’ legal father had then agreed to wear the “mask of the cuckold” (28) to save the child’s existence. Now Masters reenters his mother’s womb, as it were, and fully senses the implications of his own salvation. He sees the resemblance between the humiliations he would have suffered, had he been raped by the false shaman, the kind of humiliation that engenders violence, and the humiliation his mother suffered, which was instead converted into “the genius of love” (30), into “a vision through the abortion of an age” (29). This episode therefore suggests a distinction between two kinds of humiliation, both of which can be ascribed to a “psychology of rape” (29). They look alike, as the nihilism of the strikers and genuine freedom look alike in The Eye of the Scarecrow, yet they differ, and this is one of the many paradoxes and ironies on which the novel is built. On the other hand, the transformation of humiliation thanks to the “spirit of care” (29) of Masters’ stepfather reminds Jonathan of the “transfigurative wound” 18

This is clearly a further development of the role of memory when compared to its wholly positive function in earlier fiction, particularly Tumatumari.

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(30). The specific role of fiction, as he says, of his fiction in particular, is to translate the wounds of humanity (31).19 And this expresses another paradox, since the wound becomes creative. That such translation is the most difficult thing to achieve is shown in the next chapter, in which Jonathan tries to understand through Thomas, now another indispensable guide, “the blind collision between worlds trying to prove each other” (33). So the first episode already brings to light two essential aspects of Harris’s comedy. One is the dramatization of attitudes or forms of behaviour which are superficially similar yet basically different. The second is the possible visionary transformation of one kind of behaviour into its opposite. We shall see how this is illustrated in the rest of the novel. After Masters’ disappearance from the beach, Thomas anxiously runs back into town after him and in his haste collides with a black woman carrying a basket of eggs. She takes Thomas with her to show him where she lives so that he can later refund her loss. Walking towards her tenement, Thomas (and Jonathan with him) discovers the colonial inferno of the depressive 1920s. They reach the market place just after a schooner moored to the market wharf has caught fire and been reduced to burnt sails and hull. The burnt schooner and the market place evoke the original “collision of cultures” between Amerindians and European conquerors, but Jonathan now sees that, although the conquerors plundered and raped, there was yet “a glimmering fiction of mutual desire for protective law, protective spirit” (46), which prompts him to attempt to trace “an initial unity of Mankind”: It was this nebulosity of initial grace that deepened the fire in my eyes. I needed to descend with the vessel of Night into accompanying initials of the mastery of the globe, master-builder, master-philosopher, master-salesman, master of arts. I needed to descend with the schooner of Night into equally related initials of the servant of the globe, servant-builder, servant-philosopher, servant of arts. How creatively interchangeable were they – mastery and service – upon the unborn/born person in the Carnival body of space? I needed to descend into eclipsed initials of the rebirth of spirit within Masters and Thomas and Alice and the marble woman and numerous others. We were partial figures on the deck of Night. Such partial figuration of soul was a signal 19

This has been the purpose of Harris’s fiction from the beginning. On this subject, see Hena Maes–Jelinek, “Altering Boundaries: The Art of Translation in The Angel at the Gate and The Twyborn Affair,” World Literature Written in English 23.1 (Winter 1984): 165–74.


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of terrifying wholeness. Terrifying in an age that had settled for fragmentation, for polarization, as the basis of security. (46)

This passage sums up Jonathan’s creative process, his attempt to probe first one kind of partiality, that of the masters of the globe, then another, that of the “Servants,” in order to uncover a “mutuality” which can lead to “the rebirth of the Spirit,” in order also to approach a wholeness of which all the “partial figures” partake, yet cannot finally reach. Towards the end of the novel, he sees himself on the burning schooner and discovers within it an “untainted” or “unblemished” core, an “intact flower on a blasted tree” (165), which express the paradox of survival (164), of the mysterious intact reality which has outlived the calamities of conquest and the Middle Passage or, put differently, the nothingness that is “somethingness.” Meanwhile, on the market place, Thomas and the black woman witness another collision between Johnny the Czar (the woman’s common-law husband) and one Charlotte Bartleby. Johnny is the “carnival king” whose mask resembles Masters’; he is a shadowy counterpart of the rich ElDoradan plantation king. Despite the hidden voice of conscience prompting him to be cautious, he and Charlotte face each other like two devouring crabs. Violence is avoided then, but when he gets home drunk he vents his anger on his wife, using the incident of the broken eggs as an excuse. When he threatens to strike her, Thomas, who has followed her, jumps through the cart-wheel in front of their cave and stabs him. Johnny, who is first shown carrying a heavy burden (or the globe) on his shoulders, naturally belongs with the exploited, and we just saw that he is not insensitive to the voice of conscience. But as carnival Czar, he is a minor dictator in the plantation tenements, where, as Jonathan says, “revolution was taboo” (65). He could represent the fool or harlequin of Caribbean carnival and, as we know, carnival in the Caribbean has long been associated with rebellion against an authoritarian colonial power.20 However, Johnny (who can be seen as a blind double of the perceptive Jonathan) has 20

In another essay on this novel, I refer to Bakhtin’s analysis of the liberating power of carnival – see “Ambivalent Clio,” below. I still believe that Bakhtin’s writings are relevant to Harris’s fiction. Yet, though Bakhtin does stress the ambivalence and the relativizing power of carnival, he tends to see it as exclusively liberating and revolutionary while underestimating its possible hardening into an uncompromising absolute such as Johnny represents. For a Bakhtinian interpretation of Carnival, see Russell McDougall, “Wilson Harris and the Art of Carnival Revolution,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 10.1 (Autumn 1987): 77–90.

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become a hardened revolutionary and has half turned into an “embalmedLenin” (50). So that he dies perpetuating the deadlock, the spirit of impotence and the victim-syndrome he has cultivated. He reminds one of the warning in Black Marsden that love of freedom can also become a dangerous absolute. As Marsden says, “Freedom is a baptism in rivers of blood.”21 Ironically, Thomas’s involuntary crime bears some resemblance to Johnny’s indignant resort to violence. As Jonathan explains, “the transfigurative wound came within an ace of realization” when the wheel of revolution began to turn. But Thomas is moved by the unconscious residues of emotions he has experienced during the day (envy and jealousy), by his one-sided adherence to the woman’s cause and his need “to right old-age wrongs everywhere” (63), so that his gesture is an immature bid for freedom. An obsessive theme at the centre of Harris’s fiction is the nexus of fate and freedom and the difficulty of distinguishing between them because in so many circumstances they look alike and in any case cannot be dissociated.22 The need to recognize genuine freedom, in the creation of art as much as in life, is also central to Carnival. The axe of the true shaman Jonathan perceived at the beginning of the novel moved freely in a “subtle liquid blow” (22) and made everything alive, while the false shaman was aping his stroke of creation. I referred above to forces of humiliation that looked alike, yet were different. Such ironies are woven into the metaphoric texture of the narrative, particularly through the many images of fire which clearly consumes yet also leaves an intact core (see the schooner and the staircase in Nightbridge club, 160) and “fertilizes the life of the imagination” (44). A close reading of the novel and its imagery shows that the impulse towards creation and renewal in Harris’s comedy does not rest on a simple duality, a mere juxtaposition of opposites, but on a constant interplay of the two, and on the narrator’s growing awareness that each force contains its opposite and can be reversed into it. The two must be kept in sight, the masks must be moveable, as indeed Masters’ and Delph’s are, for genuine creation to take place. That is why the images of slicing that run through the novel are so important. It is as if the 21

Black Marsden, 41. The opening sentence of Genesis of the Clowns refers to “an exchange of fates and freedoms” (81). 22

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canvas of existence were cut down again and again with a knife that sometimes kills but also initiates the process of self-discovery. The true shaman’s axe sets Jonathan travelling through the “light years” of past, present and future (132), which recalls Malraux’s observation that “the time of art does not coincide with the time of the living”; it enables Jonathan to pull apart time and space, not as a mere reproduction of the fragmentations of life, societies or cultures but in an attempt to discover some inner reality and to dislodge events/attitudes or images from their fixed and therefore one-sided stance, to make them move in much the same way as several women in the novel (the two Alices and Aimée) move in a dance of creation. Dance plays a major role in this narrative, as it does in Ascent to Omai, in which the dynamic metaphor of the Dance of the Stone orchestrates the slices of the protagonist’s life. How this liberating movement occurs is another important aspect of comedy. Both the narrator and his characters are repeatedly faced with the necessity to choose and to exercise freedom, even though complete freedom is impossible. To take one example, when Jonathan recalls his own birth and the fact that his parents had been forced to marry by a conventional society because his mother was pregnant (though they would have done so anyway), he realizes that he was born both from the freedom of his parents’ love and the fate imposed on his father. Martin Weyl, the father, wonders whether his child will be a mere pawn or a “child of questioning conscience” (80). Towards the end of his reconstruction, when Jonathan sees clearly that the puppet is equally “half-living human, bread” (164), he suggests that only a personal experience of what reduced humanity suffers (he has by then distanced himself from the supreme “I” and become “shrunken me” 161) can reveal a distinction between “apehood or puppetry of soul and true self-reflective [...] spark of fiction” (165). This again recalls a passage in Ascent to Omai when a masked character, through his very dispossession, “enter[s] the innermost secret locks and prisons and chains of [...] mankind” and celebrates “freedom through knowing unfreedom.”23 As I have said, the word ‘through’ is the pivot of Harris’s comedies and the crucial link between the “carnival dualities” (162) he creates. It is the means by which the tragedy of fate, in whatever form, becomes a comedy of freedom, although, as Carnival shows, the conversion can only be par23

Ascent to Omai, 110–11.

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tial and repeated again and again. It is through his first violent death that Masters begins to reverse the circumstances of his first life. Martin Weyl is a lawyer and has been chosen to don the mask of Thomas at the reconstruction of his trial for the murder of Johnny. And it is because he was “a pawn of circumstances” (80) when he was forced to marry that he experiences a “translation of conscience” and wears the “embalmed” masks of both Thomas and Johnny to feel their contradictory yet reversible emotions of love and vengeful conflict. Thanks to Masters’ guidance, Jonathan realizes that Thomas’s “dual hands” (his mixture, as I understand it, of doubt and genuine revolutionary hope) can purge the world of violence through violence (90). And shortly afterwards we are shown in the suffering of Jonathan’s mother that “the roots of hope lie through hopelessness that is sliced, transfigured, sliced and sliced again and again and again” (96). As Jonathan meditates on this, he concludes that it is through what may seem final and uniformly fateful, particularly in the process of creation, that one can discover a “sleeping originality” or “undreamt-of resources of spirit” (110). A variation on this theme was offered earlier when Jonathan recalled his crossing of the Atlantic to Europe with Masters in 1957, possibly a reversal of the Middle Passage. A storm break out, during which Jonathan sees through the sides of their ship and has a vision of Christ walking on the waters. The full significance of this passage must be appreciated in its context. What matters for our purpose is that during the episode Masters is blind to what is going on, whereas Jonathan first sees “through his [Masters’] eyes into a mystery in which hills tumbled and plates of the sea-bed arose” (91; emphasis mine). Immediately afterwards, he sees the sea and the storm miniaturized in Masters’ eyes and “converted into the terror of beauty” (91). So a transformation of blindness into vision takes place, not in one character but in two, as if Jonathan saw ‘through’ Masters, or could see thanks to the latter’s blindness (seeing through blindness may be another example of irony). I think we have here, among other implications, a complex re-working of the myth of Ulysses and the Sirens, which Harris had already used in the storm episode in Palace of the Peacock and in The Waiting Room. Indeed, shortly afterwards, Jonathan refers to Masters’ deaf ears and blind eyes as “proportions of divine irony” (95). The outcome in this instance is not just the conversion of blindness into vision (after this Jonathan keeps referring to Masters’ blind/seeing eyes) but the creation of a mutuality of vision.

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The reversibility of fate is exemplified in the novel by Jonathan’s perception of alternative interpretations of events, in his conception of fiction and the writing process,24 and in the use of images and metaphors, which I now wish to illustrate. We saw that when Thomas kills Johnny, he jumps through the wheel of a donkey-cart parked in front of his cave. The wheel radiates a series of possible interpretations in most of Harris’s novels. Its basic contradictory yet related meanings are as treadmill or crushingwheel on the one hand, wheel of revolution or imagination on the other. After failing to save an Amerindian prince who has been sentenced to death for matricide, and also failing to persuade the court that there are “savage unconscious realms” (141) still in our world, Martin Weyl comes out of court exhausted and full of grief. He is knocked down by a cyclist and crushed by the wheel of a passing dray-cart. At his funeral, the horse drawing the hearse takes fright and backs up in the garden, cropping the flowers and leaving it dry. Moreover, Jonathan, then a child of seven, imagines that his father may not be in the coffin and the hearse, but in the body of the horse (something similar occurs to the narrator in The Eye of the Scarecrow). To the adult narrator, the horse responsible for the drought-garden becomes a metaphor for the colonial society: i.e. a Trojan horse in whose belly (“Purgatory’s belly” 120) the people watching his father’s funeral are also caught. But Jonathan sees that the “rock-horse” of the colonial regime is a catalyst of creativity; this is, in a way, confirmed when he feels that neither his father’s death nor his own in the future make them non-existent in an absolute sense: “we resided in the womb of a phantom horse as a seed of archaic revolution” (121). This sentence points to several ramifications. “Archaic” leads back to the Amerindian prince and the so-called “savage” element with which every society must come to terms within itself, whereas the phantom horse becomes the womb of all creative possibilities, like the “glass body” (122) of Masters’ mother in which, as a child, he had discerned his own survival, or even the “glass-cathedral” to which Masters takes the children Jonathan and Amaryllis at Easter, when their meeting becomes the seed of the “marriage of cultures” that later unites them. In the last part of the 24

Compare with Harris’s statement: “I believe that the real test of an imaginative writer lies in how one discerns these combinations, catastrophe and regeneration going together because the whole history of civilization makes that inevitable.” Interview by Helen Tiffin, 7 September 1979, New Literatures Review 7 (September 1979): 29.

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novel, Jonathan and Amaryllis, still guided by Masters, have a glimpse of Martin at the top of the ladder of the sky, recognizable through the horse, wheel and cart associated with him. It then becomes clearer that in the case he lost he was advocating the recognition of the hideous imperatives that compelled the Amerindian prince to follow an ancient ritual, imperatives that keep reappearing in various guises, whether as “black-out Carnival and games of nuclear holocaust” or as “unconscious advocacy of the body as fodder for the state” (142), which is what the devil demanded of Masters when they met, thus pointing to yet another kind of Inferno. No wonder, Jonathan exclaims, that those who try to enlighten us fall under “Christ’s Trojan donkey!” (138, 142). This striking development of the wheel and donkey metaphors sums up Martin’s role, whose body has been rent like Christ’s (141), his heart offered to Masters (i.e. humanity) when his own was failing in order to enable him to survive. Yet even Masters finds it hard to acknowledge that Christ’s Trojan or pagan donkey corresponds to “the human beast of love” (143) which supports the universe (like Johnny carrying the globe on his back). In the expression “Christ’s Trojan donkey!” there merge a Christian and a pagan myth, which is the more significant if one keeps in mind not just its cross-cultural meaning but the fact that it epitomizes several major aspects of the novel and Jonathan’s exploration of “savage unconscious realms” (141). One is that someone always pays for the paradise of other people. Masters, as overseer in New Forest, used men and women as beasts of burden, while in one of his later lives, it is his descent into hell that runs parallel with Jonathan’s and Amaryllis’s marriage in paradise. This is a major way in which Harris transforms Dante’s allegory and, more importantly perhaps, the theological system Dante presents, since none of the episodes describe a self-sufficient or separate state (Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise) but, on the contrary, show that each is sustained by its opposite and that they are inseparable. In this, Harris’s “comedy” differs not just from Dante’s but from the contemporary versions which the great poet continues to inspire. It is animated by constant revision and progresses by dismantling, not building up, solid worlds, situations, creeds. It rests on paradox, on what is at once like and unlike.25 Comedy, 25

See, for example, Masters’ blind yet visionary eyes or the knife which is also a seed (86). See also, in Palace of the Peacock, the image of the hangman’s noose, which Harris comments on in “Comedy and Modern Allegory.” At the end of the

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to use Masters’ words, is “reversible fiction” (90). This revisionary process is also embodied in “Christ’s Trojan donkey!,” the association of catastrophe and possible resurrection it conveys, the fact that one contains the germ of the other and can be transformed into it. The last time Jonathan sees his guide, Masters has been resurrected as a Lazarus who unravels a series of existences on a chain of being (143). Yet he is still pursuing the mysterious overseer who had borrowed his face in New Forest and was responsible for his first death, the “character one seeks to confront beyond life and death with the injustices with which one has been saddled in life” (156). Masters never comes face to face with him, though he perceives his outline in the dark when the latter enables him to enter the carnival theatre, where he meets a series of understudies who bear the burden of true creation, its heights and depths. It is here that Masters’ anger at having once more missed the overseer, his enemy, becomes therapeutic. This conversion reproduces the overseer’s own dual function, since he both kills and saves Masters, as the muse in Palace of the Peacock is said to kill and save at the same time.26 At the end of the Paradiso songs in The Divine Comedy, Dante comes face to face with the light of God, dares to look at it, and exclaims: 0 plenteous grace, whence I presumed to bear

the stress of the Eternal Light, till thirst was consummated in the seeing there!27

So he faces at last the absolute he has longed for. If I understand rightly, God in Wilson Harris’s fiction seems to hover as a mysterious shadowy presence in the background, as in Heartland, and, it seems to me, both at the beginning and the end of Carnival in the guise of the faceless overseer who has the power to wear other men’s masks. That he should be at once mysterious assassin and saviour is probably the supreme irony and the core of Harris’s Divine Comedy. Certainly, He is an ambivalent creator and possibly an androgynous one involved in the process described in The Waiting Room: “Ancient metamorphosis, endless creation, gods, species

novel, the noose supports Donne rather than strangling him, prompting Harris to a witty paraphrase of Gertrude Stein: “a noose is a noose is not a noose.” 26 Palace of the Peacock, 47. 27 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto X X X I I I ; The Ultimate Vision, tr. Melville B. Anderson (London: Oxford U P , 1951): 586.

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of fiction within whose mask of death one endured the essential phenomenon of crisis and translation.”28 For Jonathan in Carnival, creation has meant throughout a partial unmasking of the contradictory faces of reality. We saw that part of his exploration at least is done in conjunction with Amaryllis, who is not an idealized Beatrice, and their union illustrates both the earthly side of paradise reality and the liberating movement which Wilson Harris equates with creation: We lived in yet out of our frames, we touched each other yet were free of possession, we embraced yet were beyond the net of greed, we were penetrated yet whole, closer together than we had ever been yet invisibly apart. We were ageless dream. (123)

All through the last chapter of the novel, Jonathan holds Amaryllis in his arms,29 and the ecstasies, both sensual and spiritual, they experience run in parallel with the torments Masters goes through in the London underworld. When Masters disappears for good, Amaryllis is left with a child in her arms, probably the fruit of Masters’ union with his former enemy, Jane Fisher, and, as in several of Harris’s later novels, the herald of resurrection. Jonathan is overjoyed at the thought that both pagan and Christian ancestry might merge in the child. But Amaryllis wisely reminds him: “Whether she is Masters’ child or not [...] she runs in parallel with all wasted lives to be redeemed in time. And in that spirit she is his child. She is our child. [...] The love that moves the sun and the other stars30 moves us now, my dearest husband, my dearest Jonathan, to respond with originality to each other’s Carnival seas of innocence and guilt, each other’s Carnival lands of subterfuge and truth, and each other’s Carnival skies of blindness and vision.” (172–72)

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The Waiting Room, 79. See 127, 128, 154, 159, 161, 167, 168. 30 Significantly, the words in italics are borrowed from Dante’s Divine Comedy and in the context of the quotation as a whole they offer yet another example of the way in which Harris transforms the poet’s vision. 29

16

Carnival and J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country Ambivalent Clio

‘History leaves behind it only a residue excessively confiscated, disinfected and finally edible, for the use of official school manuals and pedigreed families 1 ... But actually what do you know?’ History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, 2 as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

T

H E S E Q U O T A T I O N S clearly express the mystery of history and the scepticism of two major twentieth-century novelists towards the possibility of fully apprehending, let alone conveying, an objective account of it. The views of a Frenchman and a Czech are not irrelevant to the Commonwealth experience, since their countries, too, have been the theatre of historical disaster in the twentieth century. The close connection between the writing of history and of fiction hardly needs to be emphasized, since, broadly speaking, the raw material of the two kinds of narrative: i.e. human experience, is similar. Although one is supposed to deal with facts and the other with their imaginative interpretation, both are strongly influenced by prevailing social, political and philosophical attitudes. To the historian’s conviction in the nineteenth century that he presents historical events objectively corresponds the generally omniscient narrator of nineteenth-century fiction, who also believes that his uniform vision of reality is the true one. Then comes the

1 Claude Simon, The Flanders Road, tr. Richard Howard, intro. John Fletcher (La Route des Flandres, 1960; tr. 1961; London: John Calder, 1985): 140. 2 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, tr. Michael Henry Heim (London: Faber & Faber, 1984): 223.

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view, expressed by Croce and Collingwood among others, that the reconstruction of the past cannot be dissociated from the subjective view of the historian influenced by the problems of his own time. This acknowledges the fact that historiography involves evaluation and interpretation as much as the reconstruction of events. Another historian has gone so far as to say that “history is ‘made’ by nobody save the historian: to write history is the only way of making it.”3 There is only one step from this position to the structuralist assertion that history, too, is a text like all other forms of reality and that it is therefore a fiction in the same sense as a novel is. I don’t think that most writers (even experimental or postmodernist novelists) who make us intensely aware of the impact of history on individual lives follow philosophers or critical theorists in this direction. To be aware that men’s perception of history, whatever its influence, is necessarily subjective and partial is one thing; to consider it as “deconstructionable” discourse for which only the free play of other discourses, even nonauthoritarian ones, are to be substituted is another. As David Lodge put it, “History may be, in a philosophical sense, a fiction, but it does not feel like that when [...] somebody starts a war.”4 Since an intense concern for history and its catastrophic effects lies at the centre of most great twentieth-century novels, there is little doubt that Lodge’s view is shared by a majority of writers. But there have been very different ways of reacting to catastrophic events. When, in Milan Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, the major character asks “What if history plays jokes?” implying that man has no control over his destiny, he may not be far from sharing the view of American postmodernists, many of whom seem to think that history can only be treated in “comic or apocalyptic ways.” At another extreme, George Steiner’s assertion that language can no longer express the world of history is well known, although he has more recently suggested that tragic history continues to inspire the best fiction.5 If history is not a fiction, it has always stimulated the creation of new fictional forms reflecting writers’ perception of the way in which, to para3

Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (1933), quoted by E.H. Carr in What is History? (1961; Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1976): 22. 4 David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971): 33. 5 In a talk entitled “The Muse of Censorship,” delivered on 18 July 1984 at the English Studies Seminar organized by the British Council at the University of Cambridge.

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Carnival and J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country

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phrase Croce, history “vibrates” in present situations. My concern here is with novels which do not merely reconstruct events, however imaginatively, but re-create the enigma of their origin and of the motives that provoked them. Such fiction starts from the assumption that history and its causes are as complex and mysterious as individual human behaviour.6 In Claude Simon’s The Flanders Road, the leitmotif “How are we to know?” punctuates each episode and repeatedly questions the given version of apparently objective facts. In Kundera’s novel, mystery is suggested metaphorically by a woman painter who criticizes the realistic style she was taught in the Prague academy, explaining that she used to trick her teachers by enlarging a spot of colour into a fissure, like the torn canvas of a theatre scene, revealing something mysterious or abstract in the background: “‘On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth’.”7 Wilson Harris expresses a similar interest in the enigmatic dimension of history when he writes that “we live in a civilization that has created the masks, the furnishings, the apparatus of the past in its museums but has lost the qualitative mystery that lies, for example, within allegory and epic.”8 A vision of history inspired by a conviction that truth is complex and mysterious naturally leads to a questioning of, and inquiry into, the apparent reality and goes together with a transformation of the traditional forms of fictional exploration. The two novels I shall discuss, J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country and Wilson Harris’s Carnival, are of this kind. They are very different in form and content, yet both posit the idea that history, though it consists of a series of disasters, also offers possibilities of fulfilment to the imagination capable of perceiving them, although Coetzee suggests this implicitly and ad absurdum through the failure of his heroine to take advantage of such possibilities. Both writers, however, illustrate the need for dialogue and for the kind of fiction which the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, more than fifty years ago, called the

6

So is the writing of history, whose alleged objectivity is seriously questioned even in a formally traditional and realistic novel like Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956). 7 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, tr. Michael Henry Heim (London: Faber & Faber, 1984): 63. 8 Harris, Letter to Hena Maes–Jelinek, 7 November 1984.

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“polyphonic novel.”9 His notion of heteroglossia or dialogism – the movement, exchange and the always open, always unfinished dialogue between the consciousness of characters and between characters and authors – clearly prefigures Harris’s “multi-voiced imagination.” In order to express this plurivocality or, in Coetzee’s case, the need for it, the two writers revert to allegory, which may seem paradoxical, since in the past this form was often associated with a homogeneous or at least collectively accepted set of values10 and was fairly predictable in its development. But, as Harris’s remark quoted above indicates, there is on the second, or even deeper, level of meaning in allegory an enigma or mysterious element which, in the fiction we are considering, takes two different forms: that of the mystery inherent in history, and that of the mysterious or unknown Other(s) with whom dialogue must be created in order to generate plurivocality. Coetzee’s novel comes closer to the traditional form of allegory, although it lacks some its major symbols, such as the journey or quest as a process of learning. It might be argued that Magda’s soliloquy is precisely that. She does envisage such a quest, but the possibility of a quest is ruled out by her incapacity to achieve consciousness, to learn and change, or by her determination not to do so, or both. If, she says, “the road goes nowhere day after day [...] then I might give myself to it.”11 Magda, the protagonist, lives a completely isolated and boring existence with her authoritarian father on a South African farm “in the heart of the country.” Imprisoned in this uneventful life, locked into a love/hate relationship with her father, she twice pictures herself killing him out of jealousy, first for his fictitious sensual new bride, then for the coloured servant’s real young bride. What other events are narrated, such as her different versions of her rape by Hendrick, the servant, her affair with him, his running away for fear of being accused of her father’s murder, all seem fantasies of frustrated human relationships. At the end of the novel, 9

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Works, 1929, rev. 1963; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1984), passim. 10 On this subject, see Gay Clifford, The Transformations of Allegory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). However, as the title of the book indicates, the author states that allegory is not a static form and contains possibilities of transformation. 11 J.M. Coetzee, In the Heart of the Country (1977; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983): 63. Further page references are in the main text.

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Magda is still looking after her father, who has retreated even further into himself, and communication between them is more impossible than ever. Despite its vivid evocation of concrete life on the farm,12 the narrative is entirely self-reflexive. As the first-person narrator, Magda is “a poetess of interiority” (35) who creates herself through words: “I create myself in the words that create me” (8) or “I make it all up in order that it shall make me up” (73). It not only suggests that she is responsible for what she is but that to her, and possibly at a further remove Coetzee, language is life, reality. Magda is aware of the pitfalls of this equation and fears at times that the very ground beneath her feet might turn into a word (62), although words are clearly a refuge for her. Coetzee, himself a linguist, comes very close to poststructuralist theories of language. Even so, I would suggest that Magda’s use of language shows white South Africa getting drunk on words but incapable of any saving action. She is indeed torn between an impulse to act and her obsession with words. Her retreat into language is both a substitute for action and a unique but tragically aborted opportunity to transform her existence through a new vision. She says at the outset that we “dream allegories of baulked desire such as we are blessedly unfitted to interpret” (3). I have already suggested that the mysterious element of allegory is represented in both Coetzee’s and Harris’s novels by an Other outside the self with whom dialogue must be established in order to create a saving ‘plurivocality’. The trouble with Magda is that she both longs for that Other and rejects it. True, the other characters, too, refuse to communicate with her, but it is not just her father and the country he represents (71) that will not yield their secrets; reality itself remains enigmatic despite Magda’s many questions and suppositions. Coetzee dramatizes an existential dilemma through the South African predicament. Magda’s narrative shows that there is no such thing as objective reality, but her approach to the reality she re-creates also proves that she cannot begin to grasp enough of an existence outside herself to come to terms with it. Her attempts at self-knowledge by looking into the mirror end in self-absorption and the rejection of all explanations: “I am beyond the why and wherefore of myself” (23). When, after this failure, she tries looking at the past, the tunnel of her memory turns into the glassy walls of her skull, and she comments: 12

This is wonderfully rendered in the film adaptation (starring Jane Birkin, Trevor Howard and John Matshikiza) entitled Dust by the Belgian director Marion Hänsel.

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“I see only reflections of myself drab and surly staring back at myself” (38). She later admits “my art cannot be the art of memory” (43). This shrinking away from a real exploration of history is, I believe, the major reason for her failure to enter into dialogue with others,13 although she feels bitterness at being rejected and calls herself “a castaway of history” (135). She does feel nostalgia for a “Promised Land” from which she has been expelled, the golden age (7) of childhood when she listened with the servants’ children to the mythic stories of their old grandfather. But she neither wonders nor regrets that “klein Anna” is too frightened to talk to her and can only hear “waves of rage crashing in [Magda’s] voice” (101). Magda then thinks: This is not going to be a dialogue, thank God [...] I could have burned my way out of this prison, my tongue is forked with fire [...] but it has all been turned uselessly inward [...] I have never known words of true exchange. (101; my emphasis)

Magda’s confession explains why she is, as it were, suspended in her isolation in both space and time, an empty vessel for the words that blow through her like wind (64): these words of mine come from nowhere and go nowhere, they have no past or future, they whistle across the flats in a desolate eternal present, feeding no one. (115)

And further: “I am the reluctant polestar about which all this phenomenal universe spins [...]. At the heart I am still the fierce mantis virgin of yore” (116). It is not just self-centredness that cuts her off from the community of men and a progressive history. Her incestuous relationship with her father also makes it impossible to create a dialogue with people different from herself. Sexual relations symbolize her attempts to make contact with people. She twice describes herself labouring under her father’s weight (10, 116). But, as she acknowledges in Yeatsian accents, no awakening (128), no saviour will redeem their world: Out of his hole he [the son she might engender] pokes his snout, son of the father, Antichrist of the desert come to lead his dancing hordes to the promised land [...]. I struggle to give life to a world but seem to engender only death. (10) 13

Ironically, she calls “dialogue” a conversation in which her father peremptorily questions the black servant (20), who addresses him in the third person as “the baas.”

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At the end of the novel, Magda asks “Where, unless compassion intervenes, does the round of vindictiveness end?” (130). The compassion, however, is all Coetzee’s, for her mixture of understanding and selfdeception and for her deep attachment to “the beauty of this forsaken world” (138). After failing to introduce dialogue into it, she also fails to make contact with the outside world through the voices she hears from the sky, voices which moralize but are indifferent to her fate. So she still lives with her father, the authority and the law, now blind and deaf, an enduring silent monolith whom she carries and supports, yet would really have to kill in order to be reborn. If, as I suggested, she is the white muse of the land, she is, to use a Harrisian expression, a tragically “blocked muse”. She is still convinced that she lives in paradise, but one that has become, in her own words, a “petrified garden” (139), the concrete equivalent of the “stony monologue” (12) she has conducted throughout. By contrast, the child who appears in the arms of Amaryllis, the firstperson narrator’s wife, at the end of Carnival represents the transformation of vindictiveness into hope, Harris’s unquenchable faith in the capacity of the human imagination to retrieve the seeds of a fruitful union between the antagonists of historical confrontations. As the narrator, Jonathan Weyl, says, “Every puppet of disaster moves in parallel with a spark of redemption, the spark of succession.”14 This is not a blindly optimistic comment, for Harris does not shrink from the horrors of history; it is inspired by a philosophy and aesthetic vision once more couched dazzlingly in a narrative enacting a “twentieth-century divine comedy of existence” (43). “Divine Comedy” immediately brings to mind Dante’s allegory, which indeed served as a blueprint for the novel, though one that Harris transforms radically. A basic feature of his fiction has always been the transformation of conventionalized or static forms of being and of traditional narrative. He now shows what a malleable form allegory can be. He uses most of its usual constituents – king and queen, knights and ladies, confrontations with beasts and dragons, animal heraldry – but these are essentially living and protean metaphors. His major theme, the collision between metropolitan and colonial worlds, Christian and pagan, is explored in a quest-journey involving characters who represent ambivalent attitudes: Everyman Masters is a callous overseer in New Forest (obviously 14

Harris, Carnival, 171. Further page references are in the main text.

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Guyana), a Dantesque New World inferno, but also a consenting dweller and explorer of the London factory underworld, while his cousin Thomas represents both doubt and revolutionary spirit. Uncertainty and terror, insensitiveness and obliviousness are equally personified, while both Masters and his counterpart, the Carnival Czar Johnny, are at one stage moved by “Diseased Ambition” (29), a desire “to master a universe that has despoiled one” (26), which suggests that they are both victim and victimizer, at least potentially. Such ambivalence, contained in Everyman Masters’ very name, is but one example among many of the ways in which the novel modifies approaches to life and fiction, particularly allegory. There is a level on which the characters progress, like Dante, from Inferno through Purgatory to Paradise, but each phase or state is indissociable from its opposite. Thus, in New Forest, the plantation or colonial Inferno, the “Inferno of history” (21), Aunt Alice’s tears “water the rose garden of paradise” (44), while the state of paradise achieved by Jonathan and Amaryllis in the last chapter of the novel is dearly paid for by Masters’ descent into the underworld. On a deeper level, there is no regular progress from the depths to the heights but a penetration through the gateway into the underworld and the overworld. As Harris himself has suggested, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso are not absolute and separate categories. These are altered in the narrative “to overlap and penetrate one another in subtle degrees.”15 The narrative covers over fifty years from 1926 to 1982, crucial years in the twentieth century which, as Masters says, will be remembered as a “tormented colonial age” (36). All major episodes involve a murder, premeditated or involuntary, committed out of love or of jealousy, or as an unconscious exploitation and devouring of others. The novel opens with the “second death” of Everyman Masters in London in 1982, stabbed by an unknown visitor as he was stabbed in 1957 by a jealous though mistaken husband in New Forest. Each death is, in fact, an occasion for selfanalysis and revision of the past. Chronological time and events are evoked with precision, but only as frames through which Jonathan freely travels back and forth in his imagination, so that links and parallels emerge between events and characters which at first seem to have little in common. For example, both the false shaman whom Masters escapes from as a child on the New Forest beach and the mysterious assassin-cum15

Wilson Harris, interviewed by Jane Wilkinson, Kunapipi 8.2 (1986): 32.

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benefactor he pursues as an old man in London are linked with the mysterious shadow, ambivalent presence or hidden force that all of Harris’s protagonists have to contend with. Young Thomas’s murder of the Carnival king Johnny; the failure of Martin Weyl, Jonathan’s father and a lawyer, to save the matricidal Amerindian prince; Martin’s own accidental death, which cuts short his attempt to persuade others of the saving reality of the “savage heart” – all illustrate the “abortion of an age” (29). Yet the saving element in this failure comes to light as Masters recalls that when his mother was pregnant with him by a white man and contemplated an abortion, he was saved from it by his coloured legal father. By setting aside his pride and insisting that she keep the child, even though this meant for him putting on “the mask of the cuckold” (29), he expressed a “spirit of care” (29) which brought about the “conversion of humiliation into the genius of love” (30). Each element of life and, correspondingly, each metaphor in the narrative is thus seen to contain various, sometimes antithetical, possibilities: anger is destructive but can also be therapeutic, fire consumes yet also regenerates and fertilizes (44). The central feature of the novel is reversibility, a shift from the negative or destructive pole to the creative one, just as the knife, the instrument of so many murders, turns into “seed” (86, 87). Another striking transformation of the semantic content of a major metaphor occurs when the destructive “Trojan” horse responsible for Martin’s death and for the drought-garden (“Purgatory’s belly”) in which the colonial people are trapped later becomes “Christ’s Trojan donkey!,” a striking image merging catastrophic conquest with the possibility of resurrection. It also becomes the seat of the “complex marriage of cultures” (124) Jonathan and his wife achieve. So, while In the Heart of the Country is a confession of despair in which possibilities of change are defeated by the protagonist, Jonathan’s “reversible fiction” (90), and at a further remove Harris’s, envisions what he calls a “translation of the wounds of humanity” (31). This transfiguration, Harris has always insisted, is the specific role of fiction. Jonathan differs from Magda in another way. While she keeps saying “I am I” (5), she also complains that her “monologue of the self is a maze of words out of which [she will] not find a way until someone gives [her] a lead” (16). Jonathan, by contrast, contains many others, particularly the guides who lead him into the labyrinth of history. Everyman Masters is the major guide, but all the figures of the past are equally helpful, as their motives and the mystery of their behaviour are partly clarified through the

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dialogic reconstruction of Masters and Jonathan. The narrative really consists in attempting to draw increasingly closer to the mysterious origins of actions, and some destructive forms of behaviour (like Thomas’s unpremeditated murder of Johnny in an attempt to protect Johnny’s wife) turn out to have been provoked by the “profoundest desire to give, to save, and receive nothing in return” (85). The “genius of love,” as Masters calls it, is “a major self-reversible element in all revolutions” (85). In spite of the partial elucidation of their motives, the many guides Jonathan encounters in his exploration of the past also have about them an aura of mystery which he can only partly decode. Significantly, they all belong to the colonial world, some of them even to a savage or primitive world. They correspond to the “character-masks” who animate the “carnival of history” (13, 147, 164), which re-creates itself, “gestates” (26) through Jonathan. There is now a considerable literature on the liberating power of carnival. Mikhail Bakhtin was a precursor on this subject also, since he showed in a famous study of Rabelais that laughter and popular culture are the carnivalesque elements that free literature from a hierarchical and static vision, giving rise to the novel as a form which eternally seeks, analyses itself, and questions its acquired forms.16 Carnival, a major cultural phenomenon in the Caribbean, has now been transplanted to Britain by West Indian immigration. Harris uses it as a metaphor for his open vision of history and of existence in general as well as for his conception of fiction as a “double writing” process. As a mere instrument of protest against tyranny, carnival can harden into sterile opposition, as when Czar Johnny and Charlotte Bartleby, both “crabs” of a sort, are caught in “the mutual devouring principle within a chained civilization” (52). But carnival usually celebrates the end of the old world and the birth of a new one, symbolized by the death of an old king who must make way for the young. In this sense, Harris’s novel is an allegory of the death of Empire, which brings to light the uncertainty and terror that preside over the coming of a new age. This is clearly relevant to the South Africa Coetzee portrays. Masters is the dying god or king who must learn “the art of 16

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (F. Rable v istorii realizma, 1940, rev. 1965; Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1968), passim. Also partially present as early as “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1937–38), in Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin & London: U of Texas P , 1981): 167–205.

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dying” (11), and we may think he succeeds in doing so, since he is the putative father of the child conceived by the woman responsible for his death. The child represents the new spirit and the new kind of fiction that began to gestate with the reconstruction of history. As a metaphor for Harris’s ambivalent view of existence, carnival encompasses at once temporal, limited, partial realities and a wholeness or “intact reality” (162) sensed or perceived but forever out of reach. At one stage, Jonathan thinks: “Carnival time is partial, the past and the present and the future are parts of an unfathomable Carnival whole beyond total capture” (31), while Masters speaks of a “true life, a true spirit, beyond all frames” (108). The “carnival revolution” (63) Harris presents is therefore a process, a capacity to free oneself from rigid attitudes. It is also “a capacity for shared wounds, shared ecstasies” (11). If, inevitably, carnival involves the wearing of masks and thus “hides us from ourselves,” it also “reveals us to ourselves” (86) and entails penetration of “many series of inward masks” (43), “the veils within veils within us” (44), or put differently, of “the extended and multi-layered luminosities of the cosmos” (45). This “far-viewing” (163) also applies to Jonathan’s writing-process. Again unlike Magda, who creates herself in her monologue, he shows, both in the discursive and the metaphoric texture of the narrative, that he is as much created by the character-masks or guides in dialogue with him as they are by him: “[Masters] and other character-masks were the joint authors of carnival and I was their creation” (31). He is both Masters’ “creation and his father-spirit” (31). He repeatedly insists on this reciprocity and on his role as “fiction-parent of generations steeped in the collision of worlds” (34). A major achievement of the novel lies in its compelling fusion of vision and form, the re-visioning of history and the reflexiveness on the kind of plurivocal fiction that makes this re-visioning possible. On the face of it, the ‘deconstruction’ that is a prerequisite to re-visioning has a lot in common with the poststructuralist approach to history. But Harris’s belief in some mysterious force he has called “unnameable [moving] centre or [...] wholeness”17 is different from the denial by Derrida (and many poststructuralists) of any centre and his tendency to fall back on the 17 Interview by Helen Tiffin, New Literatures Review 7, 24. That Harris thinks the centre is not “still” or static is suggested in an early poem “In Memoriam 1948,” KykOver-Al 2.7 (December 1948): 6.

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text or on language as the only reality.18 Harris’s narratives express simultaneously a renewed faith in man and in the capacity of language to transform his consciousness. As Jonathan says, “The Word is the Wound one relives again and again within many partial existences of carnival” (13).

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18

Frank Lentricchia: “The major theme accompanying decentering is that there is nothing outside the text, ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’” – Derrida’s famous statement in Grammatology, although Lentricchia adds that “Derrida is no ontologist of le néant because he is no ontologist”; After the New Criticism (London: Methuen, 1983): 170–71.

17 I

The Infinite Rehearsal

“Immanent Substance”

Reflections on the Creative Process

That the life of the imagination has its roots in spaces and elements beyond historical bias or man-made formula or conventional memory is an illumination of a creative fusion of ‘absences’ and ‘presences’.1 aesthetic inventions are ‘archaic’. They carry in them the pulse of the distant source.2

F

Wilson Harris has been preoccupied with the nature of creation, the act of bringing into being, and the capacity to do so, though the two often blend in his comments, as suggested by his expression “acts of creation-in-creativity.”3 The title of his collection of poetry Eternity to Season already epitomizes his conception of the creative process: the passage from an endless source of being to seasonal, transitional forms. As we shall see, however, “Eternity” in no way suggests a static immortality, while the

1

ROM HIS EARLIEST WRITINGS,

Harris, unpublished afterword to The Four Banks of the River of Space. George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London: Faber & Faber, 1989): 4. 3 Harris, “Comedy and Modern Allegory: A Personal View,” in A Shaping of Connections, 133. 2

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subtitle of the 1954 edition,4 “poems of separation and reunion,” points to the movement which informs the creative process. Moreover, as the poem “The Well (prologues of creation)” shows, the source of creation is subterranean, not heavenly: Who brings the water From the deep interior of earth Is magical with the science Of vision Is the godlike being of the well.5

In his introduction to the 1954 edition of the poems, A.J. Seymour rightly calls Eternity to Season “The Book of Genesis according to Harris.” Indeed, while the collection as a whole evokes various facets of creation, including the very beginning of Guyanese history (“Behring Straits”) and the archetypal links between the New World and the Old through the reincarnation of Homeric characters, “The Fabulous Well” section deals more specifically with the creation of life and the “re-creation of the senses,” which, as we shall see, is also a major feature given further meaning in The Infinite Rehearsal. In his many comments on the nature and function of the imagination and on his writing method, Harris explains that the printed text of his fictions takes shape after his hard concentration on earlier versions, in which he discovers “clues” he was not aware of having planted there, signals of the text’s livingness and intentionality as these take precedence over his (the author’s) directing will. In a sense, he abandons himself to, goes to meet, these manifestations of the “fabulous well” as he re-works the imagery that first arose from it.6 Obviously, this suggests far more than a mere conscious development of imagery, since it implies that life and the

4

I am grateful to Gemma Robinson, who photocopied for me the early 1952 and

1954 editions of Wilson Harris’s poems at the University of Guyana. 5 Harris, Eternity to Season, 19.

6 On this subject, see in particular “Literacy and the Imagination,” in The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris, ed. Michael Gilkes (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1989): 13–30, and “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27.1 (1992): 13–25, and Temenos Academy Review 13 (1992): 69-85, repr. in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination: Selected Essays by Wilson Harris, ed. Andrew Bundy (London: Routledge, 1999): 248–60.

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‘texts’ enacting it evince a creative genius that exceeds the limitations of the individual. One should add that in his comments on the working of the imagination Harris seems less concerned with explaining his own work than with throwing light on what he considers as the deep-seated germ of creation as opposed to non-essentialist views of fiction writing. No theory or exegesis has ever been able to account rationally for the creative genius of man. Even in the age of reason, Pope could write that “Both [writers and critics] must alike from Heaven derive their light.”7 And, as suggested in the introductory chapter of a fairly recent history of genius, “no amount of analysis has yet been able to explain the capacities of those rare individuals who can produce creative work of lasting quality and value.”8 Hence the difficulty of tracing what might be a ‘logical’ explanation of the writer’s progression towards the printed (in Harris’s case, always ‘unfinished’) version. As one examines the successive drafts of his novels,9 one is struck by inexplicable gaps in the creative continuum, especially between the last typescript and the published novel. Harris himself has commented as follows on such gaps in relation to Carnival: the final draft took place in head and heart and mind and was transferred immediately onto the page. The evidence for such changes needs to be gauged within the rhythms of the inner life of the text. Nevertheless – whatever hiatuses [...] may exist – the roots of re-visionary procedure I describe in this Note are visible in the series of drafts.10

Another striking feature is the relative explicitness of the early drafts, both in plot and in the expression of Harris’s philosophy of life, which perhaps makes all the more mysterious the creative thrust inducing mutation into the appropriate, at once more elliptical and pregnant, form of his fiction. This mutation is a major aspect of the protagonist’s progress through and 7

Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” in Collected Poems (1711; London: J.M. Dent, 1951): 58–76; 59. 8 Genius: The History of an Idea, ed. Penelope Murray (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989): 1. 9 I am grateful to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin for a Mellon Fellowship which enabled me to examine some of Wilson Harris’s manuscripts kept at that institution. 10 Harris, “A Note on re-visionary cycles in the composition of Carnival” (dated April 1991). Wilson Harris papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas. I am grateful to Vera Kutzinski for sending me a copy of this unpublished note.

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beyond the actual circumstances of life in search of meaning and value.11 To give one example of meaningful reduction in Harris’s printed text: the holograph material of 261 pages of The Infinite Rehearsal, including six notebooks, was finally reduced to the 88-page novel. The introductory note to the novel (much longer in the typescript) appears only on page 106 of the second holograph notebook. This is followed by an explanatory note by W.H., which has disappeared from the published text, though W.H. remains a character in it. The effect of these reductions and cancellations is to enhance the significance of the Note by Robin Redbreast Glass, the protagonist and narrator – it brings out more forcefully the important fact that his “fictional autobiography”12 is that of a dead man, while it also presents in a nutshell the “immanent substance” of the novel. All of Harris’s fictions are, in a sense, a continuously renewed dialogue between the living and the dead or the eclipsed, whether people(s), cultures or civilizations. In order to understand this, one must keep in mind the fact that Harris perceives existence as an endless interweaving between life and death; that death never means to him total or final annihilation but a living absence, “a deposit of ghosts relating to the conquistadorial body” (1); that the realm of the dead is also that of the sacred and of the subterranean tradition which Harris and his characters ceaselessly probe in their quest for value or, as Glass puts it, “the original nature of value and spirit” (vii). That realm is also the unconscious and, approached in a different perspective, the void experienced by the pre-Columbian and, subsequently, the Amerindian and Afro-Caribbean people(s), an apparent void only, which is also the source of Harris’s fictional vision, its metaphysical and ontological tenor.13 This implies that no portion of human 11

Commenting on Carnival, Vera Kutzinski writes that “Harris’s revised text is considerably denser than the manuscript passages are, a density – and opacity – that results whenever he cancels vestiges of realism”; “Realism and Reversibility in Wilson Harris’s Carnival,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 2.1–3 (Spring 2000): 163. Her essay is the first to examine the manuscripts of Carnival, much as J.J. Healy had commented on the manuscripts of Ascent to Omai. 12 Harris, The Infinite Rehearsal (London: Faber & Faber, 1987): 1. Further page references are in the main text. 13 This metaphysical constituent is particularly prominent in the Carnival Trilogy. On this subject, see also Paget Henry’s illuminating article “Framing the Political: Self and Politics in Wilson Harris,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 2.1–3 (Spring 2000): 82–95.

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experience is ever lost, but is transmuted into the ghostly substance plumbed by Harris’s protagonists to recognize it as both part of their inner being and of the substratum out of which spirit takes shape, a substratum from which it cannot be severed without entailing illiteracies of the heart and mind (27, see also below).14 However, not Carnival alone but many a Harrisian narrative can be called “a divine comedy of existence.” Each is a Dantesque journey to the kingdom of the dead and the eclipsed, but with a major difference: the creative journey in Harris’s oeuvre is, as already suggested, a two-way process, an encounter between the questing protagonist and the fictional substance, which, as he has often explained in his essays,15 erupts of its own accord from the unconscious, an arousal alternately called “resurrection.” Such is the basic creative movement in The Infinite Rehearsal, as is immediately clear at the beginning of the novel, when Ghost (I T or “spectre of wholeness,” 2) arises from the sea as personification of the erupting immanent fictional substance to meet Robin Glass on a beach in Old New Forest (1).16 Or, expressed differently, Ghost is “the apparition of the numinous scarecrow, the numinous victim who (or is it which?) secretes himself, herself, itself in our dreams” (1). One should note that in the holograph draft W.H. expresses his intention of writing Robin’s autobiography, whereas in the revised version Robin is the major narrator, despite his assertion that W.H. has “stolen a march upon [him]” (“N OTE ,” vii). It is his authorship that illustrates the intentionality of the living text.17 Just as Harris disclaims full authorship of the novel, so Robin Redbreast Glass is not the single author of his fictional autobiography. If he were, there might be little difference between him and the self-sufficient author of realistic fiction. As Ghost tells him, “bits of the world’s turbulence, universal unconscious embed themselves in your book” (46), while 14 Ghost explains to Glass that in the City of Skull the “refugees of spirit [are] in flight from themselves” (51). 15 See, among others, “The Fabric of the Imagination,” Third World Quarterly 12.1 (1990): 175–86, repr. in From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. Anna Rutherford (Mundelstrup & Sydney: Dangaroo, 1992): 18–29. 16 Coming after the “New Forest” location in Carnival, the combination of “Old” with “New” indicates a further dialectical stage in the Dantesque journey. 17 See Harris, “The Absent Presence; The Caribbean, Central and South America,” 87. In the Note on the composition of Carnival Harris also speaks of “a re-visionary intentionality” (2).

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in the holograph draft Ghost says: “You live and write from the other side of W.H.’s mind. He is indeed a character in your book. It is you who break the authoritarian script to which he may otherwise be prone.”18 In this respect, Harris’s novels have successively moved towards the gradual effacement of the third-person author/narrator (already partly true in Palace of the Peacock), who, in the later novels, becomes the “editor” of other people’s Dreambooks, Anselm’s in The Four Banks of the River of Space, Hope’s in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill and Bone’s in Jonestown. In The Infinite Rehearsal, the “immanent substance” moulds itself, as it were, into several creative masks, Robin’s, Ghost’s and W.H.’s, as well as into the partial masks Faust wears. They form a creative pool or, to use Harris’s own words, create through “mutual agency.”19 The shaping of fiction into a diversity of creative masks informs the narrative movement, which reverses and complements that of Carnival, modulated by a penetration of masks. Nevertheless, in Carnival, too, “fiction gestates.”20 Mutual agency in no way means consensual co-writing. Robin warns in his Note that he and W.H. are adversaries, something that appears most clearly in Chapter 6 of the novel when Robin recalls (or thinks he remembers) that he was in bed with ’flu when his mother Alice, his aunt Miriam and a small party of children drowned after their boat, Tiger, capsized. Only his friends Peter and Emma were saved by Alice, who had returned to the sea to save other children but failed in the attempt. The first bone of contention is when W.H. challenges this version of events, asserting that he was lying feverish in bed when Robin drowned – after which W.H. occupies Aunt Miriam’s little theatre while Robin Glass sets out for the “sacred wood” (2) “in the multi-textual regions of space” (46). This is not the only source of uncertainty – like Donne in Palace of the Peacock, Robin dies several deaths, one by drowning, and a “second death” in his revised “dreaming” existence when he is beheaded by Ulysses Frog (11), the prelude to his new life of exploring consciousness and the potential rebirth of his age. The frequent uncertainty of facts in Harris’s fiction points to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of ever knowing the complete 18

Holograph draft, 40. “A Note on re-visionary cycles in the composition of Carnival,” 3. Vera Kutzinski describes Carnival as “fiction of joint multiple authorship,” in “Realism and Reversibility in Wilson Harris’s Carnival,” 155. 20 Harris, Carnival, 26. 19


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truth, especially historical truth. The other reason for Robin’s animosity towards W.H. is authorial rivalry, since at that stage he (Robin) claims the right to be the sole author of his autobiography (“It is my life – not W.H.’s” 47). Actually, he loathes both W.H. and Ghost, holding the latter responsible for the terror he experiences as he falls back into a discordant hollow age and resenting the “uncomfortable home truths” (49) spoken by Ghost, fearing also the dissolution of the ego obvious in Ghost’s aged appearance and death-like being. He nevertheless admits: Such is the illusion of power the resurrected body faces as it ascends from the grave. It is encrusted with illusions of power, illusions of freedom, that it needs to unravel as a prelude to a genuine revolution. (49)

Thus, the “adversarial spirit” in which, Ghost says, the truths of fiction are rooted (46) also prevails at the deeper level of gestating consciousness in Robin’s book, informing the dialectical process, the confrontation and tension between partial truths, that, Harris suggests, kindles creativity.21 This deeper level of creativity is one reason why Harris rejects realism. Moreover, the fluid interplay of authorial presences as various creative masks emerging then fading again in Robin’s book imparts its structural movement, a musical rhythm as it were, to the narrative as a whole. At the beginning he refers to “all masks and vessels in which a spark of ultimate recognition flashed ... faded ... flashed again” (2). This oscillation informs all aspects of Robin’s progression, the shifts between inner and outer being, between the two time-scales (see below), between remembering and forgetting. It is clearly a major feature of Harris’s philosophy of being, which destabilizes any temptation to immutability. As already obvious, Robin’s autobiography is of the creative spirit. In the complex density of the first chapter one can trace some of the basic features through which he engages simultaneously in an allegory of modern times and in the imaginative self-reflexive journey that might enable him to envision a reversal and transmutation of the destructive course of contemporary civilization. His surname, Glass, suggests reflection in a

21

See “Adversarial Contexts and Creativity,” passim. It must have been written at about the same time as The Infinite Rehearsal. The example Harris repeatedly gives of creation resulting from adversarial encounter is that of the bone-flute carved by the Caribs from the bones of their enemies and fashioned into a vessel of music.

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mirror and transparency (at one stage he is in a looking-glass world).22 He presents himself as a “grave-digger in a library of dreams and a porkknocker in the sacred wood” (2), a description that combines his exploration of a multiplicity of texts with his search for the treasures of the earth.23 As Robin Redbreast, he sees in Quetzalcoatl a “savage antecedent” (6), at once the animal and divine in man, extra-human dimensions at unconscious or archetypal level that we tend to ignore. The animal dimension is also manifest in Don Juan Ulysses Frog, the composite mythic immigration officer, a bureaucrat who attempts to catch Ghost, dumb at this stage like “the constellation of a deprived humanity” (3), foreshadowing all the refugees Robin Glass will come across in his pilgrimage. The rich intertextuality of Chapter 1 brings to light the subterranean cross-culturality that is an essential feature of Robin’s fiction-writing. The sacred wood, a source of terror and regeneration for both Dante and T.S. Eliot, and the latter’s metaphor for the realm of poetry and criticism, was, first of all, the grove where Aeneas plucked the Golden Bough before his journey to the world of the dead.24 Even before starting off, Robin hopes for a “chance to consume with Ghost a splinter of transubstantial creation in every chapel perilous of the heights and the depths” (4). Jessie Weston, who traced the ruins of an ancient ritual in the Grail romances,25 sees the Perilous Chapel in the middle of a forest as the seat of a terrifying trial before reaching the source of spiritual life. Other sub-texts imply that, like his Aunt Miriam in the plays she used to stage, “revising the histories of the world” (35), Robin is engaged in a re-visioning of history (7, 8) and 22

See Harris, “Reflection and Vision,” 15–19. As for the onomastic implications of “Robin Redbreast,” the name may have been inspired by Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” but “Robin” could also have been named after the ostler in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, who tries to imitate the magician, while “Redbreast,” whatever its connotations, is part of the rich bird-imagery in this novel, a creature of the air counterpointing and complementing water-creatures (cf. “Frog”). 23 Pork-knockers, reputedly poor, prospect the Guyanese interior for gold and diamonds. They were said to take with them a barrel of pork which they would overturn and knock on to get the last slivers of meat as their provisions dwindled. Harris gives that gesture a cosmic dimension of extraordinary poetic power (2, 3). In fact, the chapter would require a word-by-word analysis to unravel its concise poetic richness. 24 James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1948): 1–3. 25 Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1957): 187.

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becomes aware of the ambivalent consequences of historical events: the emancipation of slaves leaving them homeless; the First World War doing away with privileges but sending thousands to their death, as evoked in lines from Wilfred Owen’s darkly ironic poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”; Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” raising the axe that fell upon the globe in 1939. Slavery impinges on Robin’s consciousness through the calypso “Stone Cold Dead in the Market” (Harris calls it “Jumbi Jamboree”26) sung by Ulysses Frog’s mistress, herself called Calypso (10, 11). Yeats’s “Second Coming” underlies the “resurrection” from the waves (8) of Ghost, who seems at first to voice “waste land poetry” (3), and later Emma adapts a line from Four Quartets when she tells Robin that, returning to ourselves, we “know ourselves for the first bleak and terrible time” (58). These and other literary and mythical allusions27 are woven into the fabric of Robin’s autobiography, eliciting connections between central American and European myths (Quetzalcoatl and Faust) and yielding the historical background of an apparently doomed civilization. Night keeps falling through the first chapter, intimating the urgency of Ghost’s apparition and Robin’s “impossible [yet necessary] quest for wholeness” (1). Faust, the play revised by Robin’s pork-knocker grandfather during his last voyage in the heartland, is the major text subjacent to Robin’s quest, to which he had already responded as a foetus in his mother’s womb while she was typing it. Aware of his grandson’s coming birth and at first prepared to barter his own soul and his grandson’s head for “crass gold” (14), his grandfather had begun instead “to prize the ironies of strangest hidden conscience” (15), thus foreshadowing Robin’s commitment. In other words, the conversion of the grandfather’s quest from material to spiritual wealth28 originates in the intuitive “pre-natal” dialogue between

26

“The Fabric of the Imagination,” Third World Quarterly 12.1 (January 1990): 183, repr. in From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. Rutherford, 26. 27 Among other intertextual sub-texts, see also The Tempest, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne,” Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood (especially Captain Cat’s exchange with drowned sailors), Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Dante’s Purgatorio, v.133, and Hamlet’s father’s “Remember me.” 28 The same conversion already takes place in Palace of the Peacock. Note also in The Eye of the Scarecrow (25) the grandfather’s censure of the child’s “idolatrous realism” when he confesses to seeing the ghost of a hanged slave above the canal of a

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grandfather and grandson, a dialectical complicity between past and future which later also stimulates Robin “to plumb the rebirth of [his] age” (15). The grandfather was obsessed with both Goethe’s protagonist and Marlowe’s, and Faust and Dr Faustus appear alternately in Robin’s narrative. Like Ulysses Frog, “epic lover yet doomed jealous scavenger of humanity” (12), Faust is an ambivalent archetype: “Faust the Beast. Faust the half-circus man, the half-mechanical soul. Faust the womb and the grave. Faust the slave and Faust the self-mocking engineer of the gods [...] ” (11). As both tempter and guide, he provokes in Robin the awakening of his critical imagination and the capacity to discriminate between “LIKE AND UNLIKE FORCES ” (23), a recurring necessity as Harris’s protagonists face apparently similar comportments with totally different motivations and consequences,29 as they learn to see through and beyond deceptive appearances, and repeatedly make moral choices on which their progress depends. This is illustrated by Robin’s re-creation of his awakening senses, which shows a similar though far more complex conceptualization than in Eternity to Season. Robin was born in 1945 when the Bomb fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “an effulgence of birth threaded into death” (17). As he dreams his birth, he is struck by the silence ensuing on the fall of the Bomb yet also by his own instinct to seize all silent creatures, his temptation “to seize the species, seize the kingdoms of the earth” (20). He fails in his attempt to seize the world but the moment of temptation and his yielding to it enable him to hear the bustle of life as it slips from his grasp. He also detects the deception Faust is playing on him with his simulated kingdom bell and, overcoming his numbness, he manages to touch him instead of being touched, “caught” by him and made an instrument of material progress (22–23). This free and challenging gesture enables Robin to acquire his own voice and to scream, “giving voice to a spirit through and beyond [himself]” (24). Indeed, he realizes that the cry he “gave from the heart, [was] a cry so poignant, so real, it drew [him] into the web, into the flesh, the imperilled substance, of all ecstatic and sorrowing creatures” (24). Thus, Robin’s reactions to Faust’s temptations bring about the re-creation former plantation. The grandfather’s rebuke seems to be the seed of his writing as “infinite rehearsal.” 29 For instance, in Jonestown the sexual act is both a gesture of love and a rape, as it is in The Angel at the Gate.

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of his senses and sensibility as he counters passivity and indifference and breaks “the silence and deafness” which, Ghost had warned him, “would encompass [his] age if [he] failed to sound the origins of spirit” (19). Ironically, Robin’s participation in the “ceaseless rehearsal of the birth of spirit” (18) occurs through his confrontation with Faust, who calls himself “the comedian of the void in the machine” (25). It is an essential aspect of what Harris calls “paradoxes of creativity”30 that only penetration and reversal of the material world can reveal the hidden spirit accessible through it. This is called “ironies of Faust” in the typescript.31 Faust, the master of a technological world, nevertheless tells Robin “Your voice is revolutionary spirit” (25), thus showing his awareness of the “mystery of deprivation and its bearing on caught yet liberated senses of the imagination” (25). “THE MYSTERY OF DEPRIVATION ” (26) becomes a key phrase in Robin’s evocation of two childhood events which bring home to him the crucial significance of the “origins of sensation” (34). The first event is the Guyana strike of 1948, already visualized, though differently, in The Eye of the Scarecrow, where the narrator remembers “those who shot up, prematurely, with a conviction of self-righteous organization, and died before they knew it in the battle of the year, strike and lock-out.”32 In the earlier novel, the emphasis was on a misconception of freedom which, Harris seems to imply, was to influence Guyana’s political future. At a deeper level of consciousness, Robin’s memory of Tiger, a band leader and striker shot by the police, makes him relate the strikers’ “real” deprivation, as well as their sublimation of it into self-righteous protest and “purity” (30),33 to a deprivation of the senses, which Aunt Miriam calls “illiteracies of the heart and mind” (27). He writes:

30

Harris, “Literacy and the Imagination: A Talk,” 29. Typescript, 18. See also Faust’s “self-mocking humour” in the printed text (65). When later Robin meets Peter and Emma, he refers to their “capacity to mirror yet repudiate and breach Skull reflexes and automatic behaviours” (60), which is also irony. 32 The Eye of the Scarecrow, 17. 33 In the typescript, Tiger succumbs to “the Tempter [in both script and novel he is manipulated by Faust], to the lure and fallacy of black (white) purity” (27), while the fear reflected in his eyes is of “the atrophy of passion, the atrophy of love” (typescript, 25). 31

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Aunt Miriam was right in that we soon forget how strange and mysterious are our capacities, hearing extremity, listening extremity, speaking extremity, touching extremity, seeing extremity, knowing extremity; and that those capacities or extremities may never have come into being except through a dreamlife that is steeped in temptations – pre-natal temptations, as well as childtemptations – sexual temptations as well as lust-for-power temptations – to which we succumbed. Succumbed yes to the vitality of sensation but recoiled in converting the shadow of temptation into a source of original, self-confessing being in creation. (27)

While this passage sums up Robin’s earlier dreaming experience, it also foreshadows mute Ghost’s sudden capacity to speak. His cross-cultural utterance (extracts from de la Mare’s “The Listeners,” from the calypso heard by Robin’s grandfather, and from Eliot’s The Waste Land) seems to have been provoked by the death of Tiger, who represents deprived humanity. At a further remove from Robin’s, it is also a cry of resistance, resistance here to the “death-wish of an age” (32). Robin calls Ghost’s message “an edge,” which, like the extremities of sensation in the above quotation, is the precarious locus of conversion reached through “the immediate taste of temptation” (32; my emphasis). What Harris is suggesting in this, as in Robin’s second rehearsal of the same event through different imagery (33–35), is that all our sensuous qualities stimulate the imagination, what he calls “its spectrality and miraculous concreteness.”34 Robin’s different approaches to the event is a way of exploring alternative grounds of creation.35 On the other hand, his self-questioning about “the origins of perception” can also be seen as an interrogation on the origins of consciousness.36 The other event is Robin’s memory of the gift of a ring of “spiritual gold,” an “invisible ring” (36, 37) given to him by his mother on his fifth birthday. At this stage, the ring seals “a marriage [...] or rehearsal of the origins of tradition” that binds all generations, “the living, the dead, the unborn” (38). Indeed, touching his ring and aware of the presence of 34

“The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination” (1992), in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Bundy, 256. 35 In a manuscript of Ascent to Omai, Harris refers to alternative routes the novel could have taken which were abandoned, a way of saying that there can never be one absolute path to creation. 36 This question has so far remained unresolved scientifically. Adam Zeman, “The Problem of Consciousness,” Prospect 47 (December 1999): 50–54.

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Birthday Ghost, Robin tastes the wreck of past civilizations and the precise dates of their fall.37 At the same time, “the premises of laughter” impinge on his consciousness as he re-creates his birthday party “in the chapel perilous under the sea” (39). Whereas earlier on, as revised foetus in his grandfather’s revised version of Faust, he had been aware of the bite of life (albeit simulated by Faust, 21), he now feels united with his mother through the “tooth” or bite of death (40), the last sense-experience he recalls before that of drowning being now foreboded in the last line of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Till human voices wake us, and we drown” (40). The human voices waking Robin in the chapel perilous under the sea belong to his drowned relatives and friends but are also the crowd of voices speaking through W.H. (49), who has himself heard Robin’s drowning voice crying from the ocean “Remember me as I remember you” (48). Although implicit before, the juxtaposition of time with timelessness is now a major factor in Robin’s probing of the creative process. In his afterword to The Four Banks of the River of Space, Anselm writes: “What is the genesis of art? [...] Does it exist on a borderline between two time-scales? One time-scale is clothed by conventional memory. The other perceives that conventional memory is biased [...].”38 Robin, who so far has mentioned the dates of events with great precision, reaches the borderline between temporal dimensions when he comes to the edge of a swamp, “THE EDGE OF THE CHAPEL PERILOUS OF THE FLATLANDS ” (45) (each crucial stage in his journey is marked by such a chapel). The swamp is on the way to the City of Skull, the illusory technological paradise born of Faustian deceptions (54) but also full of the refugees of history, “refugees of spirit” (63). As Robin envisages the kind of future Skull may hold for the masses, he is reminded of the enigma of time (55), again through sensation, by touching the bone in the masks of Skull. Time’s dual dimension (its “page” and its “bone”)39 opens to him the “Dateless Day Infinity Route or Tunnel” (55) where he meets Peter and Emma in the year AD 2025. Again, he meets them at an edge, “at a 37 This fits in with Ghost’s personification of the subterranean tradition born of the accumulated experience of humanity’s past though linked, as just seen, to its future. 38 Unpublished Afterword to The Four Banks of the River of Space, 3. 39 Note also that when he last sees his mother, “She fell into the Glass of time. Timelessness” (42).

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junction in the tunnel where the resurrection of the dead seemed to blend with the survival of the endangered living” (57). Robin’s free movement in time, his simultaneous perception of time and timelessness, corresponds to the fluidity of the “immanent substance” taking shape through different creative masks.40 Thus in AD 1962 he “was aware of Ghost’s extension of himself into W.H.’s ageing mask” (57; see also 47), while in AD 2025 he realizes that “W.H. himself had vanished and that someone else – some other ageing mask – played the role of authorship/charactership in my book as if I were he, he me” (57). This fluidity of fictional arousal through successive masks in non-calendrical time induces “the secretion of ageless myth” which, for Harris, is also dynamic, at once archetypal legend and “a capacity for the conversion of deprivations.”41 Myth therefore acts as a subtle rebuttal of an authoritarian realism – however sophisticated – an authoritarian story line or sophisticated dumping ground in the theatre of Skull for [...] a doomed humanity held in thrall by the logic of violence, the logic of hell. (57)

Realism, here as in many of Harris’s critical formulations, is not just literary mimesis in a limited sense but alludes to a single-minded concentration on material and technological progress to the exclusion of deepseated psychical and spiritual resources. Robin sees in that rebuttal “the foundations of religious hope” (57) incarnated in Emma who, in AD 2025, has become a priest. The allegorical rehearsal that now plays itself out (it re-enacts Glass’s “miniaturizing the creation in [himself]” 66, when he was born) involves both the dead (Robin Glass, who has not aged since his death in 1961 and is still “immortal youth” 56) and the living Peter and Emma, who have survived and aged since the drowning accident. Glass and Peter, illusory immortal resurrection body and the death-wish of modern civilization Peter represents (58), must now together ascend the Mountain of Folly, 40 In a discussion of Companions of the Day and Night, Pierre François writes that time and space incur a radical “re-sensing”; “Synchronicity and the Unitarian Geopsyche in Wilson Harris’s Companions of the Day and Night,” in The Contact and the Culmination: Essays in Honour of Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège: L3–Liège Language Literature, 1996): 241–51; 243. This is also true of The Infinite Rehearsal. 41 Harris, “Character and Philosophic Myth,” 124. See also “myth breach[es] the mimicry of natural fact,” in “Some Aspects of Myth and the Intuitive Imagination” (1978), in Explorations, ed. Maes–Jelinek, 101.

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the accumulated follies of the age, through which they must seek to elude the fascination of Faust, who tempts them up to his technological heaven. In their ascent, they become each other’s alter ego, each other’s “stranger.” And it is their mutual agency (Faust mistakes Peter for Robin) that enables them first to repudiate the deadly rope to heaven held out by Faust and pursue instead “the seam in the wave of the rock” (67); then to resist the fascination of Billionaire Death, the wealth and power it has acquired from the billions “civilization devotes to weapons of destruction” (68). Despite Faust’s defeat, Glass is nevertheless being cautioned against the possible deceptions and hubris of spirituality itself,42 the danger of confusing the resurrection (a discontinuous, alternating phenomenon) with a fixed eternity, as indeed he was tempted to do when he told Ghost “I want to be eternally young, eternally strong” (43). Commenting on The Infinite Rehearsal, Harris wrote that “The rigidity of the perpetually young immortal Faust secures the tautology of tyranny, the worship of fascism, of evil.”43 As a spiritual adviser to Glass (62–63), Emma plays a major role in his reversal of direction or “reversed sail” (80) – more than this, too, as Peter’s alter ego Glass remembers lying with her on the beach after the accident “with his lips within the cover of her hair yet on her breasts” (61). “How remarkable [he thinks] that a childhood/adolescent love affair should blossom into a female priesthood and nourish the resurrection body” (63–64). There is a suggestion here that the spirit is no mere abstract disembodied entity and that there is mutual fertilization between the spiritual and the concrete in the endless process of creation. In the next stage of Glass’s journey towards Skull, his guide Tiresias tells him: Emma’s theology [...] is rooted in the necessity to bring a sacramental urgency to the ancient and perennially fertile body of sex. Not promiscuity, not cheap stimulation. But something we scarcely understand. The miracle of the senses, touch, taste, echoing waves and particles and penetration. (74–75)

Senses and sacrament are symbolized by the nail which pierced Emma on the beach, a source of both suffering and ecstasy “that shatters all prepossessions” (61) and, if I understand rightly, the organ of what Harris 42 Wilson Harris stresses the dangerous fascination of eternity as “an extinction of birth and death in human creative terms”; “The Quest for Form,” 22. 43 “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination” (1992), in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Bundy, 255.

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called “numinous sexuality,”44 and of the true passion that counterpoints love’s death-wish (67), the instrument also that breaks Faustian hubris. In the last section of his dream journey, Glass first witnesses with Peter the making of the “imaginary substance of greatness that lies in a fabric that we can never wholly grasp” (73). The emblems of powerful historical characters (agents of doom like Napoleon and Alexander45) but also Alice’s ring balanced by the stone that killed a Jamaican girl (a balance enacted before in fragile “infinity’s chain” 70, 71), all topple into a chaotic vortex “moving fast yet still” (73). It is at this stage that the seer Tiresias, who in Glass’s reconstruction of the 1948 strike was the leader of the Tiresias Tiger band, takes over as guide, leading Glass through the wasteland world of Skull with its refugees of soul and spirit. Here Glass sees for the first time the multi-faceted metaphorical figure of Beast that Frog was hoping to catch as if he were another face of Ghost (9). Frog wanted to question him about the map of heaven which Beast now holds in its/his claws and hands. From his earliest fiction, the Beast has been a recurring image in Harris’s narratives, now hunting and hunted boar (Tumatumari), now hieratic unicorn. It embodies all the paradoxical features and effects of the Faustian drive, for it can be a merciless predator when serving the Faustian ambition to reach heaven and eternity. Hence Glass’s grandfather’s allusion to Faust as “the Beast of immortality, the Beast of the circus and of the machine” (14). Hence, also, Frog’s wish to see the map of heaven in its hands. Yet Beast is also the hunted victim thoughtlessly exploited by man: “Beast-morsel, Beast-fish, Beast-grain, Beast-shrimp” (76), the Beast that feeds and clothes man. In this capacity Beast is transfigured into an instrument of vision and is involved “in weaving a portion of Emma’s seamless garment” (78). It/he thereby contributes to the religious hope: i.e. the future, that Emma represents in contrast to the divided doomsters and boomsters of Skull. Beast’s “unfinished thread” (80) 44

“The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination” (1992), in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Bundy, 252, 255. Compare with the cosmic intercourse between a log turned phallic tree and “a genesis-cloud [...] in the womb of space”; Jonestown, 133. Moreover, the nail gives an ambivalent and creative meaning to Christ’s stigmata. 45 The passage takes up and further develops the “band” imagery of the beginning of the novel. The drumming of the bands heralds either doom (“D O O M D O O M ”) or the boom of technological development (“B O O M B O O M ”). The bands are the instruments of the popular religion and fanaticism to which Peter was addicted.

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underpins the creative process, while Emma’s seamless garment (an image of undividedness and wholeness in the making) recalls the garment, “all threads of light and fabric,” of the Arawak virgin in Palace of the Peacock. And as the vision of the Virgin finally “converts” Donne, so Glass’s vision of Beast in its sustaining and creative role helps him to reverse sail towards true survival. At the end of his autobiography, Glass finds himself confronted by a blank page and wonders: “Whose hand would seek mine, whose mask become my age in the future?” (82). The shadow he then sees on the page is an extension of Ghost as both he and W.H. have been (47): i.e. the future vessel of the immanent substance. Significantly, the postscript to Glass’s narrative is written in AD 2025 by Ghost, who claims “to tap the innermost resources of eclipsed tradition in the refugee voices that W.H. heard in the sea,” (86), resources that he himself personifies, as he makes clear at the beginning of his postscript. They have accumulated in the moving yet still vortex of the sea (76, 86) that spins the fabric of the seamless robe. The unfinished thread in the robe is Harris’s variable metaphor for the basic theme of the novel: i.e., the nature of “true survival” as opposed to Faustian immortality. True survival excludes static eternity. Tiresias insists that he is moved by “a spiritual necessity to look into the heart of true survival, into a shadow linking those who were apparently saved and those who were apparently not” (80). In other words, true survival, for Harris, is an unfinished fabric of existence that interweaves life-in-death and death-in-life, the terms often used by him to sum up his philosophy of existence. Simultaneously, the unfinished thread weaves and is woven into what he calls the “fabric of the Imagination,” here the fictionalization or, I would say, relativization of life and death as well as of all the actors in the creative process, “when fiction [i.e. the momentum of emerging fiction] fictionalizes authors and characters alike” (48). In his article on “Self and Politics in Wilson Harris,” Paget Henry describes spirit in Harris’s fiction as a “universal living medium whose creativity and agency are necessary for all forms of existence.” Discussing Carnival, he stresses the importance of spirit in Harris’s approach to the politics of self-formation, hence to everyday politics.46 It should be obvious from my reading of The Infinite Rehearsal that the political is not altogether absent from this novel. Faustian will-to-power, the supremacy 46

Paget Henry, “Framing the Political: Self and Politics in Wilson Harris,” 89.

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of the machine, the emphasis on the bankruptcy of civilization, on “the illiteracy of the economic imagination” (27, 28) which entails the despair and violence of the deprived – all are part of a pessimistic political vision.47 Glass even thinks he is involved in a “political parable of mind and soul born of childhood remembered visions in an age of dangerous superpowers professing the good intention out of cunning self-interest, the good life out of expedient design” (66–67). My impression, however, is that, increasingly in his later novels and certainly in The Infinite Rehearsal, spirit as an alternative to, rather than a support of, any worldly agency is Harris’s way out of what he sees as the death of an age. The “polarizations of Faustian morality” (13) are countered by Emma’s “divine communism” (59, 64). As a priest, soon to become Archbishop of Canterbury and a major actor in Glass’s conversion, Emma is the first character in Harris’s fiction to embody so specifically the religious substance of spirit. Harris himself does not belong to any institutionalized church but claims to be a “Christian Gnostic,”48 and, as we know, Christ figures prominently in his fiction49 and is indirectly evoked in this novel in the “resurrection body.” The theme of the resurrection has been treated in many different ways in Harris’s earlier novels.50 In The Infinite Rehearsal, there is a conflation of the sacred and the profane as Glass sails towards Emma. The end of the novel also clearly reiterates the conception of fiction as a manifestation of spirit. In the typescript, Glass refers to “the birth of spirit, the birth of creativity.”51 In the printed version, as he yields his pen to an as yet faceless author, he declares: “Spirit is one’s ageless author, ageless character, in the ceaseless rehearsal, ceaseless performance, of the play of truth” (82). That Glass should then disappear and the postscript be written by Ghost is a further expression of both the origin and the nature of fic47 This is also Paget Henry’s view of Harris’s attitude towards politics, although our readings are complementary rather than analogous. 48 Harris, “Wilson Harris Interviewed by Alan Riach” (1990), in Harris, The Radical Imagination. Lectures and Talks, 57. On Gnosticism in The Infinite Rehearsal, see Michael Mitchell, “The Seigniory of Faust: Gnostic Scenery in The Infinite Rehearsal,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 2.1–3 (Spring 2000): 168–78. 49 See also his recent poems entitled “The Winter Christ,” Temenos Academy Review 2 (Spring 1999): 46–49. 50 On this subject, see “The Tree of the Sun and the Resurrection Theme: Faces on the Canvas,” above, 287–95. 51 Typescript of The Infinite Rehearsal, 78.

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tion, the immanent substance born of the essence (in Harris’s words, the “absence presence”) of all human experience and its transient return to oblivion in the depths of the sea. “Remember me,” the cry uttered by Glass to W.H. (48), by Emma to Glass (63), and by Ghost to the reader (87, 88), is an appeal from eclipsed humanity to initiate all over again its resurrection through fiction.

II “Re-Visionary Strategies” The Wisdom of Uncertainty

To take, with Cervantes, the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths (truths embodied in imaginary selves called characters), to have as one's only certainty the wisdom 52 of uncertainty, requires no less courage. The imaginative universe a writer creates may so turn upon him, address him, even strike him – as if it were alive in its own right – that the writer is drawn backwards and forwards to other imaginations he may have ignored or misunderstood in the past, other imaginations he may grasp more truly when he 53 comes upon them in the future.

M

ANY YEARS AGO,

after I had begun exploring the new literatures in English and written a few comparative articles, Albert Gérard told me that I was involved in comparative studies. I felt rather like Monsieur Jourdain, who was speaking prose without knowing it, for I was more familiar then with the concept of comparative literature which required that the comparison should apply to literatures in different languages than with the broader conception which allowed for comparison between literatures written in a similar language. But I was grateful to Albert Gérard for drawing my attention to a critical 52 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, tr. Linda Asher (Umění románu, 1960; L’Art du roman: Essai, 1986; New York: Grove, 1988): 6. 53 Harris, “Comedy and Modern Allegory: A Personal View,” in A Shaping of Connections, 127–28.

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framework that I had until then little taken into account in spite of the practice of comparison. I am now convinced that in terms of both difference and similarity, of historical, sociological and/or interpretative approaches, the new literatures in English offer one of the richest fields for comparative exploration, even if, as Helen Tiffin argues, the basis for comparison and the criteria of judgement specific to that field need to be clearly defined.54 It is not my purpose in this essay, however, to enter the arena of theoretical definitions. Rather, I shall try to show in what way Harris’s creative and critical writings contribute an extra philosophical and historical dimension to the very notion of comparison in its broadest sense and ramifications. Like Joyce, who only wrote about Dublin after leaving it, Harris has kept writing about Guyana (with two or three exceptions), even in those novels that are set mainly in London. He has also written two collections of novellas which re-create Amerindian myths. Yet to call him prolific would be to misunderstand the nature of his creative venture, since each fiction can be called an instalment and a “rehearsal,” with variations, of its predecessor (however different in its surface texture) within an oeuvre which, by its very nature, must remain incomplete or unfinished. As I have affirmed elsewhere in this volume, he was also a proponent of crossculturalism avant la lettre, his first novel, Palace of the Peacock, remaining, to my knowledge, the most genuine expression of that now fashionable concept. Cultural encounters were from the very beginning the staple of Wilson Harris’s imagination, not only the confrontation between ‘old’ and new’ worlds in the Renaissance, which, for all its hideous consequences, he does not see in exclusively negative terms,55 but also the clash and cross54 Helen Tiffin draws attention to the fact that until the fairly recent past more attention was given to practice than to theory in comparative studies of the postcolonial literatures in English. She has pleaded for a clear definition of criteria specific to such literatures. See, among others, “Commonwealth Literature: Comparison and Judgement,” in The History and Historiography of Commonwealth Literature, ed. Dieter Riemenschneider (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1983): 19–35. On the definition of postcolonial criteria, see the now classic study by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989). 55 The catastrophic eclipse of conquered people(s) is indeed a major theme in his work. However, unlike most interpreters of the conquest of America, Harris empha-

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fertilization between Caribbean and European cultures – as one realizes when, for example, one comes across Greek gods metamorphosed into Guyanese peasants in his early poetry. From his first novel onwards, Harris has ‘re-vised’ the generally accepted, realist versions of NewWorld history, Guyanese and Mexican, as well as the notions of community and individual personality prevailing in both Caribbean and European fiction. His rejection of realism or, as he put it many years ago, of the “novel of persuasion,”56 springs from a deeply moral vision which has stimulated him to a never-ending quest for the “lost body,” the eclipsed presence and soul of those defeated by European conquest. Realism, Harris suggests, presents as inevitable a “given” plane of social existence and is therefore authoritarian, whether consciously or not. He himself rejects all absolutes, since human vision is necessarily partial, so that uncertainty and incomplete knowledge of the mainsprings and far-reaching consequences of experience prevent man from achieving a wholeness forever desirable but forever out of reach. Hence his own multiple approaches to, or “rehearsals” of, a given experience, not, as might be supposed, as a postmodernist stance in which a destabilized reality can proceed from an absence of value but, on the contrary, in the repeated attempt to reach the enigmatic source of value, the connection he probes between “moral vision and creativity,”57 as I hope to show presently. From his earliest writings, Harris has asserted the partiality (in both senses) and the biases of all human perception; this has led him to re-live and reverse “the ‘given’ conditions of the past, freeing oneself from catastrophic idolatry and blindness to one’s own historical and philosophical conceptions and misconceptions, which may bind one within a statuesque present or a false future.”58 In his introduction to the one-volume edition of the Guyana Quartet, he calls this “re-vision” of the past and his own earlier perceptions of it “a fiction that seeks to consume its own biases through many resurrections of paradoxical imagination.”59 I have already sizes both the terror and the “mutuality” the clash gave rise to and sees this duality epitomized in the Carib bone-flute; on this topic, see esp. the chapters “Ut Musica Poesis” and “‘Numinous Proportions’,” below, and Harris’s essay “Adversarial Contexts and Creativity,” passim. 56 Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society, 29. 57 “Adversarial Contexts and Creativity,” 125. 58 Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society, 36. 59 Harris, The Guyana Quartet (1960–63; London: Faber & Faber, 1985): 9.

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alluded to the poetic density of his novels’ narrative texture, woven with “convertible images” that express the changes and partial transformations of the characters’ vision. Referring to his reconstruction of the past and the occasion which made him reject “idolatrous realism,” the first-person narrator of The Eye of the Scarecrow describes his creative process in the following terms: It was to prove the re-living of all my life again and again as if I were a ghost returning to the same place (which was always different) shoring up different ruins (which were always the same).60

This is the substance of Harris’s own writing, although it has changed considerably in form between the quintessential narrative line of Palace of the Peacock and the complex self-reflexiveness starting with The Eye of the Scarecrow and continuing on to the ‘re-writing’ of the Faustian myth in The Infinite Rehearsal. “Re-visionary strategies” are both exploration in depth and intuitive arousal of layers of experience (“living fossil-strata”61) that have been lying dormant in the unconscious, in order to re-vise both one’s own and the Other’s ingrained roles or functions. This process, through which the author engages in dialogue with his own earlier fictions as well as with existing myths and/or major texts from various cultures, affects all aspects of his writing, whether content, narrative texture, symbolism or even genre, as we see in his use of allegory. Most importantly, it stimulates the redemptive, unifying role of the imagination, a theme that has run through his work since Palace of the Peacock. In retrospect, one can read an “infinite rehearsal” in Bone’s several ways of dying in Jonestown, or in Masters’ serial deaths in Carnival, though, as a concept, it is clearly a late outgrowth of the “drama of consciousness” or “play of the soul” in which Harris’s protagonists have always been involved. The Infinite Rehearsal picks up what he calls “intuitive clues”62 from The Eye of the Scarecrow, which in many ways he ‘re-writes’. “Ghost,” for example, has developed from “the ghostly idiot stranger […] in one’s own breast” who first ap-

60

Harris, The Eye of the Scarecrow, 25. Harris, “Validation of Fiction: A Personal View of Imaginative Truth,” 44, 51. 62 “‘Intuitive clues’ […] appear to have been planted by another hand. It is as if a daemon navigates within the imageries in the text”; “Validation of Fiction,” 45. See also the chapter “‘Numinous Proportions’,” below. 61


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pears in The Eye of the Scarecrow,63 and in the two novels both nature and man’s deepest self (“inner space, inner time”64) are the seat of that third, nameless dimension or “I T ”65 which Ghost also represents allegorically. Since Black Marsden, Harris has created his own form of allegory in close connection with his “re-visionary strategies”: I do not believe an imaginative writer may re-visit – if I may so put it – the field of allegory and discover new emphases such as complex comedy, complex modernity, save through the uncanny depths of creative experience within his own work and the sensation he or she may have of living interior guides arising from the collective unconscious encompassing the living and the 66 dead.

In the same essay, Harris writes: If we are to re-discover an originality to cope with the terrors of our age, an evolution in form needs to occur […] the triggers of conflicting tradition […] 67 need to be re-activated through the cross-cultural psyche of humanity.

The “cross-cultural psyche of humanity” informs what he calls the “literate imagination”: i.e. “the true arousal of a native universal imagination – the true arousal of a diversity of cultures in counterpoint with one another within a tapestry of mutual self-knowledge.”68 Literacy, for Harris, is thus the reverse of the “mental incest” or one-track thinking that asserts the purity of identity or the supremacy of one culture in opposition to others.

63

See the chapter on The Eye of the Scarecrow above. “Comedy and Modern Allegory: A Personal View,” in A Shaping of Connections, 127. 65 In The Eye of the Scarecrow, the emphasis is on the metaphysical notion of self-exile which underlies that of “infinite rehearsal.” In Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), a comparative study of a myth nearly as haunting as that of Faust, George Steiner traces the concept of self-exile to Hegel, and writes: “It is to ourselves that we are strangers” (16). So does Julia Kristeva in her book Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Fayard, 1988): 249. 66 “Comedy and Modern Allegory: A Personal View,” 127 (my emphasis). 67 “Comedy and Modern Allegory: A Personal View,” 137. 68 “Oedipus and the Middle Passage,” in Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English, ed. Geoffrey V. Davis & Hena Maes–Jelinek (Cross/Cultures 1; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1989): 11. 64

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 Although Carnival seemed like a climax in his oeuvre, The Infinite Rehearsal probes even deeper into the labyrinths of self and nature to present as facets of the same allegorical quest the survival of modern civilization and the creative process of fiction-writing. Significantly, it is a ‘re-writing’ of the ever-modern myth of Faust, who longed to reach heights accessible to God alone and thereby to pierce the mysteries of creation, but, paradoxically, attempted to do so through a pact with the Devil. There can be no such pact in Harris’s novel, because good and evil are not separate moral categories. Like Harris’s earlier fictions, this novel reads as a dialogue between the living and the dead, close and distant voices, or sovereign and lost traditions. The first-person narrator Robin Redbreast Glass is dead but speaks through W.H., his “adversary.” Since his “da Silva” novels, Harris has entered his own fiction as a character “in search of a species of fiction”69 as if the fiction pre-existed, a “living text” brought to the fore through a polyphonic narrative in which both he and the existences or “agents of personality” he creates are vessels rather than the omnipotent author and sovereign characters of realist fiction. Tenuous, even uncertain facts underlie Glass’s narrative, as can be seen in the contradictions arising out of the drowning incident. Actually, the boat-wreck in which Miriam, the female creator, and her young actors drowned can be read as the shipwreck of civilization. Both Third- and First-World catastrophes are evoked, such as the Guyana strike and riots in 1948 (also the hub of the historical reconstruction in The Eye of the Scarecrow), the destruction of earlier Western civilizations, the two World Wars, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the civil war in Lebanon, and the Chernobyl disaster. In the striking opening of the novel, Ghost, the “numinous scarecrow” (1), appears, rising out of the sea and the wreck of a great ship on the beach of the universe. While, in Carnival, New Forest represented the Adamic Caribbean, Old New Forest stands here for the “global theatre of mankind” encompassing old worlds and new. Ghost, the “spectre of wholeness” (2) who embodies the residue of opposite fates (conquistadorial and victimized), comes to Glass as night is falling on twentieth-century civilization. He comes as his conscience, mute at first yet eloquent with disasters resulting from originally hopeful policies: the axe falling on El Dorado plantation but leaving the slaves homeless; falling on dynasties 69


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and privileges in 1914–18 but sending to their death the unemployed and, in Wilfred Owen’s words, “children ardent for some desperate glory”; falling on those betrayed in 1939 by Chamberlain’s “peace in our time.” “‘Why’,” asks Glass, “‘must we axe evil and hurt ourselves?’” (9). Nevertheless, he agrees to hide Ghost from Ulysses Frog, a protean and ambivalent Faustian figure whose very idealism and longing to entrap “the glorious Beast […] from time immemorial” compelled him to patrol “the beach of the sacred wood” and “the world in every national costume” (6). When Glass resists Frog and is axed by him (another version of his death), his head “topple[s] into the globe” (11), a dismemberment that sets him on his quest for resurrection. As indicated earlier, Glass’s name conveys both reflection and transparency – reflection and thus a sharing of the biases that prevail in the world (notably Frog’s), and the transparency concomitant with creation, whose very origins he attempts to grasp, particularly in the first half of the novel, which reconstructs his birth and childhood. Glass can be seen as the fictional offspring of the “glass woman” in Carnival in whom Masters saw himself as a foetus. A similar pre-natal adventure occurs here when Glass, as a foetus in his mother’s womb, responds to his grandfather’s version of Goethe's Faust as his mother is typing it; Glass was born the year his grandfather died, 1945: “[My mother’s] contractions began. The Bomb fell upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki” (17). The simultaneity of the two events, “birth threaded into death” (17), illustrates a basic conviction that each catastrophe carries its own seed of rebirth. The child in Harris’s fiction is always a symbol of resurrection; here it is probed more deeply, since Glass is “revised foetus” (“foetal terror revised, foetal hope revised” 13), whose imaginative quest after death makes him re-live the turbulence and chaos into which he was born. Dazzling nature imagery weaves together the cosmic setting of ocean (crest of the waves and bottom of the sea), flatlands and sky in which Ghost’s apparition and Glass’s rebirth as redbreast (also “lost golden species” and “lantern-butterfly”) take place, a “sacred wood” of iridescent beauty, nevertheless menaced by “Capital block prosperity” and “Marxist block necessity” (12, 13), “block” suggesting monolithic ideologies, the auction-block of slavery, and the block on which heads roll. Glass is tempted from infancy to seize “the kingdoms of space” (20, 66) and the bait of simulated life offered to him by Faust but he resists, and acquires his own organs of perception, ear, eye, and above all his own voice when he screams and

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rejects Faust’s “kingdom bell” (23). While the Easter bells in Goethe’s Faust Part I prevent the hero from committing suicide, they are here the instrument of temptation. Indeed, despite, or precisely because of, the prevailing Faustian morality, Faust the tempter is also a major guide in Glass’s quest for a “waste land through which to plumb the rebirth of [his] age” (15). He appears again when Glass reaches the city of Skull and must ascend the Mountain of Folly. Skull, the nihilistic city of the swamps, is the “archetypal colony” (54) where a hollow and doomed humanity live in uncertainty and terror “held in thrall by the logic of violence, the logic of hell” (57). It is also the seat of progress which Faustian technology has transformed into a simulated “electric paradise. Cheap energy is the opium of the masses, the new lotus” (54). While Goethe’s Faust I I presents humanity’s aspiration towards progress and the rational ideal of freedom and perfectibility (Streben), Harris’s shows that the ideal has been perverted. Temptations may be material or ideological, as when Third-World populations yield not only to Faustian ambition but also to the lotus flower exuding not death but The drug of deprivation that looks like the seed of black (or white) purity, the black (or white) seed of God, when the drummer of the senses protests in a fever against the ills of the world that are as much in him as in those he assaults. The lotus flower of addictive bias that hardens into terror!” (30)

In a world which puts its faith in material progress, Faust, “the comedian of the machine,” is a “prodigious immortal” (22). Others give in to fake spiritual temptations, “convinced [they] possessed a duty to maim or kill in upholding the laws of God” (49), not to mention the political lures of “dangerous superpowers professing the good intention out of cunning self-interest, the good life out of expedient design” (67). Skull is full of refugees who have succumbed to various visions of new El Doradoes, and when, on the Mountain of Folly beyond Skull, Glass comes upon the window of Billionaire Death, who explains that from the World Wars alone he pocketed “billions of royalty,” Glass looks at “the terrible opera of an age” (68) and the masks of the victims through the eyes of Death. Yet this very identification with the vision of fictionalized Death leads him on to the “hospital of infinity,” the vortex below the Mountain of Folly, first under the guidance of Peter, his childhood friend, then of Tiresias, the “seer of the underworld” (80; also the leader of a steelband, who died protesting in the Guyana strike).

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As in Harris’s earlier “comedies,”70 the pilgrim’s progress and ‘translation’ occurs through the recognition of a central spiritual irony at the heart of all life, a capacity to discriminate between “LIKE YET UNLIKE FORCES ” (23) which assume different shapes in his narratives. As already shown, the Easter bells, a symbol of resurrection, are used by Faust to tempt Glass into an act of possession, while on the Mountain of Folly he tempts him and Peter to seize a “glorious rope” to climb to heaven, which they reject to follow the “true seam” that will take them through the Mountain (72). The central irony here is the distinction between illusions or simulations of immortality and, as we shall see, true survival in “Infinity’s chain” (71). As “Fallen angel from the workshop of the gods, ambivalent sceptic of the purposes of evil, reluctant doctor of the soul,” Faust incarnates this irony. When Glass begins to re-live, as it were, his grandfather’s revisionary Faust (19), Faust appears, as we saw, as both tempter and guide, inducing in Glass, through his very temptations (to which Glass sometimes succumbs) and the horrors he makes him witness, “the ironies of strangest hidden conscience” (15) that his grandfather had also experienced in the “sacred wood,” so that Glass acquires the ironical capacity “to mirror yet repudiate and breach Skull reflexes and automatic behaviours” (60). Paradoxically, the “bridge of wisdom” is also the “Faustian bridge” (52, 53) arching through opposite worlds, like the suspension bridge in The Eye of the Scarecrow. Faust explains that he must be read properly with a literate imagination (24), and Glass wonders later: “Were not mockery and self-mockery a measure in themselves of the changing shroud, the changing investitures, of bias?” (77). When he borrows Faust’s “Quetzalcoatl eyes in which were entwined the marriage of heaven and earth,”71 he perceives the movement and parallels at the heart of the universe:

70 Harris uses “comedy” in his own idiosyncratic way. It implies an ironic transformation or conversion by re-living the very evil one seeks to eradicate, moving through and beyond it. Since Black Marsden, his fictions have been called “comedies” (Carnival is re-vised “Divine Comedy”). The Infinite Rehearsal is “Dateless Day Infinite Comedy,” “dateless day” evoking the Mexican calendar and the timeless passageway of memory in which Glass meets Peter and Emma. 71 The duality of Faust’s “ancient eyes” (64) is related to Quetzalcoatl, in whose dual nature the fish and bird imagery in the narrative is rooted.

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The backward shift, the forward shift, the folly, the creativity, the parallel laughters of the universe, the laughter of grace and mystery for which one pays dear, the laughter of the electric machine, of mechanical simulation, one buys cheap. (64).

I have already indicated that in this “fictional autobiography” (1) Glass’s quest “for the nature and the meaning of value” (9) is also a quest into the nature of creation and fiction. All Harris’s fictions illustrate, through antithetical imagery, what he has called “Adversarial Contexts and Creativity,” which means more than a Blakean progression through contraries. It implies a descent into humanity’s buried, ‘savage’ past and a probing into, as well as a partial identification with, the alien “adversary within and without.” Creativity is rooted in a profound grasp of those elements both foreign and native to ourselves (“the everlasting stranger within oneself”). Fiction grows, as it were, from the accumulated intangible remains of human experience in the “womb of space.”72 Hence the author’s constant re-visions of “living texts,” his own and those of other writers. In the wake of Eliot’s The Waste Land, Harris frequently intersperses his narratives with images or phrases borrowed from other writers, but in a way that modifies their original meaning and liberates them from a given or fixed cultural frame. For example, the frequently mentioned “chapel perilous” in this novel alters the meaning both of Jessie Weston’s commentary in From Ritual to Romance and of Eliot’s symbolism. This process is here expanded, so much so that echoes or transformed tags of multifarious origins offer a kaleidoscopic view into the “universal imagination” (82) which sustains the novel. Faust (Marlowe’s and Goethe’s) relates to a pre-Columbian myth. The Tempest, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Treasure Island, Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne,” Under Milk Wood, Waiting for Godot, Four Quartets, and possibly Hardy’s “Moments of Vision” (among others) voice cultural contrasts and parallels. There is a juxtaposition by Ghost of “familiar texts” by de la Mare and Eliot with Calypso’s folksong: “Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door.

72

This phrase, the title of a book of essays by Harris, refers to the inner territory that must be penetrated and revived to give birth to the “Resurrection child.”


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Belly to belly Back to back Ah don’t give a damn Ah done dead a’ready And I Tiresias have foresuffered all I who sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead. (32)

Although the three extracts refer to the dead and suggest an “absence” which is also a “presence,” there is at first sight little connection between them. Yet, as Glass realizes, in spite of the cultural gulf which separates them, they counterpoint each other and “become strangely cross-cultural” (32), expressions of an “enduring tradition” (48) which, as suggested, grows from the residues of human experience. This “enduring tradition” is the reverse side of Leavis’s “Great Tradition,” which, as Michael Gilkes rightly points out, was supported by “the Imperial Adventure.”73 Unlike Goethe’s protagonist, who finally climbs into heaven, Glass’s quest is one of both ascent and descent, and at the end of it he is back in Skull, though preparing to sail into the future to meet Emma – certainly a subversive counterpart to Jane Austen’s heroine, since she is a priestess who, in AD 2025, is to become Archbishop of Canterbury, a foil to the woman-hating that has been a “long-standing taint in the body of our civilization” (74). Like the Arawak virgin in Palace of the Peacock, she wears the seamless garment of the saving muse and does indeed offer the “religious hope” (44) Glass has been looking for, stimulating a balance between “terror” and “sacrament” (87). We recall that both she and Peter had survived the shipwreck, and Glass’s last conversation with Tiresias is on the true nature of survival; he presents it as a seed “between survivor and non-survivor,” a seed or frail bond between light and shadow, a frail window of strangest flesh-and-blood between the visible and the invisible. That seed is the primitive impulse of the resurrection of the body […]. To measure or weigh ourselves against the light-in-the-shadow, the shadow-in-the-light of others is to deepen a reality that breaches the ailing premises of time. (81)

73

Michael Gilkes, review of The Infinite Rehearsal in Artrage: Intercultural Arts Magazine 8 (Autumn 1987): 15.

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Glass’s fictional autobiography is thus a spiritual quest, not towards a final goal, but towards the apprehension of the nexus and frail equilibrium between the antinomies of existence, which is what makes for survival. “Fiction,” said W.H. to Glass, “explores the partiality of the conditioned mind and the chained body, chained to lust, chained to waste” (49). Just before vanishing himself, Glass looks at a blank page in his autobiography and wonders: “Whose hand would seek mine, whose mask become my age in the future?” (82). In the Postscript, written by Ghost in AD 2025 as he is on the point of being engulfed by a wave, he converses “with the mind and the hand of the new mid-twenty-first-century drowned voyager who is to be reflected in Redbreast Glass” (85). In the course of his quest, Glass had envisioned the year 2025 when W.H. himself would have vanished and “someone else – some other ageing mask – played the role of authorship/charactership in my book as if I were he, he me” (57). Thus new faces and masks take on the role of author and character, and there is no end to the “revivification of the spaces of meaning that tie one voyaging generation to another” (87). The last words of the novel, “Remember me, remember Ghost” (88), which may paraphrase Dante (Purgatorio, V.133) or perhaps Christina Rossetti’s “Remember,” sum up the “infinite rehearsal” in which Ghost within Robin Redbreast Glass within W.H. have been involved. From The Eye of the Scarecrow onwards, Harris’s fiction shows that we live in a hollow dying age, though he sees that very hollowness as “the ground of creative conscience and value” (51). Like many contemporary writers, he equates life with a text (“language is world”74) but not with discourse, and his work does not emphasize the fictionality of fiction. On the contrary, as W.H. insists at one point (48), fiction reveals truths and the reality of the world, while fictionalized author and characters are, as indicated above, mere mediators or “vessels” through which fiction takes shape. It could be argued that to reveal truth or, rather, truths (since Harris insists on the heterogeneity of truth and the “uncertainty,” “the ambiguity of the Word” 50) has always been the function of art, but Harris’s view reverses the traditional perspective, since fiction, for him, is reality in the deepest sense, whereas “authors become unreal” (48). In The Infinite Rehearsal, Harris gives the impression of attempting to approach the mystery of creation from both sides, as if his protagonist were mid-way 74

“Validation of Fiction,” 51.


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between the living and the dead. Glass explores the “origins” of sensation and of perception (35), the origins of sexuality (74), the origins also of spirit (19) and of value (51). On the other hand, through Tiresias’ eyes he sees “the negative film of Thebes […] the negative film of ancient walls under the sea […] Napoleon’s negative crown and Alexander’s sceptre” (72). In a world falling apart, Harris, significantly, uses this very disintegration (which found its theoretical equivalent in deconstructionism) to urge a reconstruction with the “building blocks of humanity” (18) or, as he put it in an earlier allegory, “to re-sensitize our biased globe into moveable squares within and beyond every avalanche of greed and despair.”75 The final word in this novel is that of Ghost, who sees the resurrection he has enacted as A complex revival of buried resources arching through many cultures and civilizations towards a true voice, a true ear, a true dialogue that the resurrection body nourishes as its ultimate originality. (85)

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Black Marsden, 66.


18

The Four Banks of the River of Space Unfinished Genesis

Mutual. It is all mutual.1 Modern physics […] penetrates in our time into other parts of the world where the cultural tradition has been entirely different from the European civilization […]. [Its] openness may help to some extent to reconcile the older traditions with the new trends of thought.2 What unheard-of marvels does cosmic gestation prepare in each of us? ... It is now possible to reconstruct the odyssey of the universe, which gives birth to consciousness.3 ‘I am a king of oceans and skies,’ said Proteus to Rose. ‘I swam, flew the Atlantic through Middle Passage Africa, India, Greece, Rome, multiple Christian/pagan motherhood of carnival. I reached the margins of the world, I came to El Dorado, all in jest. What a golden jest colonialism and post-colonialism are. What untold riches! He knows as he dreams in his cradle. What a gift for a newborn child. Let us give him the riches of the Imagination for we have nothing. We are poor. Give him a chance, Rose. Let him live to create his Imaginary City of God.4

I

for the survival of the eight-year-old Anselm, Proteus, a Ulyssean figure, reiterates Harris’s representation of the child as the carrier of hope for a regenerated imagination. He also clearly presents the deprived postcolonial world as a major locale and 1

N THIS PLEA

Patrick White, Voss (1957; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970): 188. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959): 173. 3 Hubert Reeves, Patience dans l’azur: Évolution cosmique (1981; Paris: Seuil, 1988): 20. 4 Harris, The Four Banks of the River of Space, 103. 2

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source of creativity to counter the crisis of civilization which ruling powers have been unable to solve through “the long Day of the twentieth century,” the time-span through which Anselm, the “living dreamer” (xii) in The Four Banks of the River of Space, retraces his steps in order to conceive a better future. Although, from his very first novel, Harris has emphasized the need for the ‘civilized’ world to plumb and attempt to understand, rather than merely exploit, the resources of the ‘primitive’, his protagonist travels further than ever before into unexplored geographical and psychological landscapes in search of his family’s past and of the roots of civilization. The result is an astonishingly orchestrated narrative eliciting unexpected correspondences between pagan myths (Guyanese and Greek) and Christian history and belief, between nature and psyche, a perception, both scientific and imaginative, of the cosmos and the human consciousness, in a language at once abstract and metaphoric, and of an extraordinary poetic density. The Four Banks of the River of Space is the third part of the trilogy which opens with Carnival and progresses through The Infinite Rehearsal, though, in keeping with Harris’s rejection of sovereign personality, the characters wear different masks as agents of the protagonist who, himself in different guises (Jonathan Weyl, Robin Redbreast Glass, and now Anselm) but with similar preoccupations, unites the three narratives. Each novel of the trilogy ‘revises’ a masterpiece of Western literature, freeing it from the historical/social/psychological frame and ideology of a given period. The Four Banks of the River of Space is a cross-cultural re-writing of The Odyssey which breaks and reverses the finality of Ulysses’ deeds, particularly his homecoming at the end. The novel is also full of echoes and self-revising “rehearsals” from earlier fictions, in particular Palace of the Peacock, Heartland, The Waiting Room, Tumatumari and Ascent to Omai. Like the universe itself, the exploring consciousness in Harris’s fiction never stops expanding, as appears from the distance covered by Anselm in comparison with, say, Stevenson in Heartland. While the latter penetrates the interior towards a frontier between life and death, he does not actually cross it except when he disappears at the end of the novel through “an open winding traverse,” along the river “like an unfinished script which [...] had been half-washed away into a message of timeless incompletion [...].”5 Although Stevenson keeps wondering “who” and 5

Harris, Heartland, 89 (emphasis mine).

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“what” there is to discover in the heartland depot, he is beset by existential fears that the “visionary resources” he hopes for are non-existent. Anselm, who also disappears into the rainforest,6 comes close to these enigmatic resources and is seen entering the kingdom of the dead as he crosses the threshold of the door into the unconscious, while the river of space along which he travels runs from the living to the dead. To paraphrase Malcolm Bradbury on modernist fiction, the most obvious subject of this novel “is the making of that particular work of art itself,”7 for the comments on creativity inform, and make one with, its own exegesis as the narrative unravels and the characters come to life. The self-reflexiveness in Harris’s work, at first unobtrusively woven into the texture of first-person sections, as in Palace of the Peacock and The Eye of the Scarecrow, is an obvious feature of his latest novels, most emphatically so in the trilogy. Anselm, like Glass, is “a grave-digger in a library of dreams” writing his “fictional autobiography.”8 The Four Banks of the River of Space, however, even more explicitly construes its own substance into varying structures as Anselm travels from one bank of the river of space to another and complexities come to light in the plot, giving rise to new interpretations of known facts. The significance of Harris’s narratives largely emerges from the protagonist’s (and the reader’s) capacity to discriminate among basic motivations beneath apparently similar events or conduct. Anselm, a Guyanese “engineer, sculptor, painter, architect, composer” (one of Harris’s scientist–artist alter egos and the “living dreamer” within him), is visited one evening in Essex in his “theatre of dream” by Lucius Canaima, a murderer in their earlier life in Guyana whom Anselm had allowed to escape. Paradoxically, his presence now arouses in him a moral compulsion to retrace his steps into the past, a compulsion that initiates Anselm’s homeward odyssey and a series of encounters in the Guyanese interior with half-real, half-mythical characters: Inspector Robot, a pro6

This is a recurring event in Harris’s fiction, perhaps inspired by the disappearance of his own stepfather in the jungle. As well as being a metaphor for lost lives and civilizations, it symbolizes an enigmatic passage from life into death as another form of being rather than as the sharp break between life and non-existence that a witnessed physical death conveys. 7 Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern World: Ten Great Writers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989): 24. 8 Harris, The Infinite Rehearsal, vii, 2.

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moter of artificial intelligence and a manipulator of souls, still in search of Canaima after all these years; Anselm’s uncles Proteus and Harold; his aunt Alicia (another mask for Carnival’s Alice Bartleby), and an English missionary couple, Penelope and Ross, and between them the shadow of Penelope’s first husband, Simon, a British officer who was to die at El Alamein. Together, those three represent the colonizing powers, the army, and the Christian church. A major strand in Harris’s work foregrounded in this novel is the probing into the nature of evil and violence, together with the imaginative capacity to “redress” and “convert [the] deprivations”9 from which they arose, in his eyes the major moral function of fiction and myth. Harris’s was never an idealized world-picture. Rape and murder, greed, thirst for power and possession, a one-sided “block” mentality – all feature prominently in his novels, must be confronted, their motives and the depths of emotion of those involved understood. The breaking and reversal of mechanisms of frustration is central to many of his plots and part of the ambivalent process by which a “radical change of heart”10 stimulated by the imagination can occur. The Four Banks of the River of Space concentrates more specifically on the role of “daemons” and “furies” in man and nature as inescapable dramatis personae in the creative, hence regenerative process. When Canaima, whose “victims reflected the moral dilemmas of an age” (4) and who nurses in them “a conflict of values” (11), first appears to Anselm, he finds it impossible to escape. In Amerindian mythology, Canaima (with a K) is an evil spirit and the god of retaliation,11 and therefore a still highly relevant mythic archetype in a twentieth century convulsed by catastrophic conflicts and expeditions of vengeance, “a violent and terrorist age” (87). Harris’s insistence on the vicious circle of violence and war as “the long Day of the twentieth century” draws to a close seems to have been prophetic. Yet (or precisely because of what he is) Canaima is now a catalyst and temporary mentor, albeit a tormenting one, in Anselm’s homeward journey, having himself retraced his steps 9

Harris, “Character and Philosophic Myth,” 124. Harris, The Four Banks of the River of Space, 31. Further page references are in the main text. 11 See Harris’s early story “Kanaima,” in Commonwealth Short Stories, ed. Anna Rutherford & Donald Hannah (1971; Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1979): 106–15. See also Michael Swan, The Marches of El Dorado (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958): 50–54. 10

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towards self-knowledge and understood that “if a crime is forever a crime, if tautology rules in our dogmas and poetries and statecraft” (10), the very instruments of human law and freedom imprison both murderer and victim in their fate. The breaking-up of such tautology in order to initiate a process of reformation is a major theme in this novel. Nevertheless, Canaima remains an ambivalent guide as he dances his way into 1948 with the freedom of movement of his victim (the Macusi bird-dancer Anselm had seen him kill, who now becomes a messenger of possible change) and pokes his metaphoric knife in Anselm’s ribs. He gives him the “transfigurative wound”12 which opens for him the “door of the dream-unconscious” (11) and enables him to meet the ghosts who arise from the past, making him sensitive also to “the abuse of others, to the perils that encompass the globe” (16). As Anselm now makes his way, momentarily invisible like an epic hero, along the first bank of the river of space, he first comes across a Macusi axeman felling a tree which turns out to be “HUMAN TIMBER ” (15), out of whose roots (also the roots of the Cross) arises the king of thieves, the well-nicknamed “Black Pizarro,” a pork-knocker in whom merge the obsessions with poverty and wealth that have plagued humanity from time immemorial. The sculptor in Anselm chisels him (echoes of Palace of the Peacock) “as a thief who sought to steal in every century on earth the heaven he had lost on Calvary’s hill” (17), thus giving form to the mixture of spiritual longing and greed that, throughout Harris’s fiction, motivates the search for El Dorado. In this novel, it is within the fabulous ruins of El Dorado that Anselm (namesake of a Canterbury archbishop and saint) creates his Imaginary City of God (13). The king of thieves (also a major but more enigmatic persona in Heartland and The Waiting Room) is another archetype that cannot be eluded, for he, too, personifies a recurring human attitude. A sinner to the end, he is closer to ordinary human beings than the repentant thief on the cross, and his role here is shared by many other thieves, notably Penelope’s suitors. Through a variety of circumstances and characters who have apparently little in common but among whom what would otherwise be an absolute or implacable kind of behaviour is here fragmented, repetitive patterns of behaviour and history elucidate the functioning of the human mind and psyche overshadowed or stimulated by similar drives and desires in widely distant 12

Harris, Carnival, 25.

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times and spaces. Correspondingly, “Home” is simultaneously the longedfor El Dorado, the Imaginary City of God Anselm attempts to conceive, and, as we shall see, ancient Ithaca. On a more realistic plane, it is the home that was to be built for refugees of the Second World War when Anselm was sent on an actual expedition to the Potaro river in 1948 to investigate the possibility of creating a settlement there. Although he was unconscious of it then, his meeting with Canaima’s primitive victims and “spiritual refugees” was the seed of metamorphosis in him. Here again merge in the refugees’ lot a quasi-universal modern condition, material and spiritual, while “Home” is a physical, mythic and spiritual reality.13 It was in the course of his expedition to the Potaro that Anselm met Ross and Penelope, both obsessed still by her dead husband, who had once come home to find them together in bed, as one version suggests, but actually in the garden, according to another (26). Since the marriage between Simon and Penelope had ended long before, Ross need not have felt either guilt or responsibility for Simon’s death. Yet he kept haunting them after their departure for Guyana as if both Penelope and the land (it had been his ambition to become governor) were his lawful possessions. Anselm’s understanding of the role of the avenging hero in their lives is complemented by his perception of another facet of the Ulyssean figure in his uncle Harold, his “proprietorship of Imaginary estates and slavewomen within the Rose garden” (64), since Simon and Harold are partial embodiments of the mythical Ulysses. The revelation Anselm is compelled to listen to through Harold’s confessional need, on the second bank of the river of space, is that his uncle, a womanizer married to Alicia, had abused the Rose twins on the estate. Overjoyed when he heard that the second Rose, pregnant by him, would give him his first heir, she had told him that his first son was Anselm, the child of the first Rose twin he had “bought” seven or eight years before. On the third bank of the river of space, Anselm must digest the fact that his brother is Canaima. The kind of associations which allow Anselm to draw a parallel between Simon and Harold as partial Ulyssean figures, while Uncle Proteus plays the role of the homecoming Ulysses in Aunt Alicia’s fossil/garden theatre, is one example among many of the “imponderable” transitions 13 Unintentionally, Harris provides an answer to Camus’ question in The Rebel (quoted by Bradbury as an epigraph to The Modern World: Ten Great Writers), “Where can I feel at home?”

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(see the William James epigraph14) through which Anselm progresses in his pilgrimage of the mind. A more concrete though still metaphoric thread of associations (yet related to the former, as everything is in the dense fabric of Harris’s narrative) grows out of the metamorphoses of nature, a multiple shape-changing reality which substantiates Hubert Reeves’s statement that “nature is the family of man,”15 and acts out its endless capacity for renewal or rebirth. One example of this is the “HUMAN TIMBER ” felled by the Macusi axeman, since the rainforest is the lung of the globe and, as we saw, the king of thieves arises from the tree’s roots. While still on the first bank, Anselm comes to the god-rock of the waterfall, where he meets Inspector Robot and they ascend the rock together. Robot tempts him to look down at the world through his (Robot’s) glasses as into a purely technological laboratory of graves from which no one can escape death. But the very glasses through which Robot fixes the dead in their fate enable Anselm, the sculptor suspicious of all absoluteness and finality, to carve the rocks into a moving procession of “living […] existential sculptures” led by the king of thieves, who from “sculpted wood […] became […] rock visionary flesh and blood,” (39) and they all ascend the hill, where they bury Canaima’s victim, the Macusi dancer.16 Thus the same glasses which for Robot are a tool of power allow Anselm to sculpt “live absence” into “Presence,” to alter the effects of evil through evil and a felt (re-sensitized) experience of its effects:

14

“The manner in which trains of imagery and consideration follow each other [...] the flight of one idea before the next, the transitions our minds make between things wide as the poles asunder, transitions which at first startle us by their abruptness, but which, scrutinized closely, often reveal intermediate links of perfect naturalness and propriety – all this magical imponderable dreaming has from time immemorial excited the admiration of all whose attention happened to be caught by its omnipresent mystery”; William James, Association of Ideas. 15 Patience dans l’azur, 22, tr. mine. 16 This scene further develops Prudence’s vision in Tumatumari (48–49). Anselm, however, is more keenly aware of the possible deceptions of science. Another example of the deadening or creative use to which science and technology can be put is when Anselm realizes the danger of filming the Macusi woodman merely to feed millions of T V viewers with images of the near-extinction of a tribe, like exotic animals or flowers, “to satisfy a mind infused with metaphors of the hunt and the kill, the seizure of others within every museum or cinema” (14).

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I became genuinely involved […] in uplifted veil upon veil of darkness until I possessed a glimmering apprehension of the magic of creative nature, the life of sculpture, the genesis of art, the being of music. (39)

Such metamorphoses are the expression not merely of Harris’s poetic imagination but also of his visionary insight into complex overlapping levels of natural and existential being and into the evolutionary processes that underlie the greatly endangered survival of both nature and humanity in the twentieth century. Rose, for example, is at once Anselm’s abused (though also abusing) mother and mother nature. Anselm’s scientific explanation of the reversal and conservation of the river’s resources not only throws light on the natural phenomena by which rivers, the “veins and arteries” of the earth (34), survive to irrigate it, but his scientific measurement of the river’s increasing energy potential gives him a glimpse of the creative resources embedded in the area fertilized by the river: namely, the Word and the “voices of the flute” (44) which arise from the river, tilting17 and translating its banks into a ladder of space while creating a (geological) “curvature of music” which of necessity deepens his perception of the inexhaustible resourcefulness and mutations in nature and their parallels in a psychological landscape: That glimpse [he concludes] empowered my pilgrimage upwards in space yet backwards in time […]. [It] became a key into cross-cultural capacity to bear the dual, triple (sometimes self-reversible) content of some of the greatest myths of survival in the body of humanity. (47)

In other words, just as earlier in this passage Anselm had described the interaction between stars and river and sensed the correlation between a natural phenomenon and the spirit of the place as it found expression in word and music (on which more below), so now he becomes aware of a parallel between a phenomenon he observes in nature (the varying levels and the contents of the river) and the imaginative phenomenon by which men have given form in myths to their many-layered experience of development and survival. Harris’s approach to nature has always fused scientifically known facts with an imaginative approach, and in his criticism he has often stressed the need to match the scientific revolution by which the 17 On the disorientation caused by the “tilting of the field,” the perception of nature’s own instability and endless capacity for metamorphosis prior to a necessary psychological rupture and change, see the protagonist’s similar experience in Black Marsden.


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relativity and quantum theories radically altered our perception of the universe at the beginning of this century with a similar revolution in the humanities that would pull down barriers and palliate the limitations of our one-track minds. Already in his earlier fiction, he attempted to bridge the post-Renaissance division between science and art and achieve what scientists have called “the new alliance” between science and human creativity.18 More recently, he gave the lie to George Steiner’s assertion that it is arrogant […] to invoke such basic notions in our present model of the universe as quanta, the indeterminacy principle, the relativity constant […] if one cannot do so in the language appropriate to them − that is to say, in mathematical terms.19

One must add, in all fairness, that Steiner has since qualified his statement. True, scientists themselves have pointed to the difficulty of developing a satisfactory language to describe the insights of quantum mechanics for non-specialists. Hubert Reeves explains that man’s inability to retrace his steps to the origins of the universe is not due exclusively to his limited understanding but to the limitations of language, which are also the limitations of logic and the scientific method.20 Yet he, too, trusts to consciousness to explore a reality which is ‘something’ rather than ‘nothing’.21 Harris, however, largely trusts to intuition to compensate for the shortcomings of man’s one-track mind (see the Nick Herbert epigraph to the novel). Probably the most revolutionary implications of the discovery of modern physics, in modern man’s understanding of the universe and his philosophical approach to it, was the replacement of monism by the pluralism 18

Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle Alliance: Métamorphose de la science (Paris: Gallimard, 1979). 19 George Steiner, “The Retreat from the Word,” originally published in Language and Silence, repr. in George Steiner: A Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984): 286. 20 Commenting on this problem and the split which occurred between science and the humanities, including religion, after the trial of Galileo, Werner Heisenberg, the famous physicist, concludes: “whatever the explanation of [...] other forms of understanding may be the language of images, metaphors and similes is probably the only way to approach the ‘one’ from wider regions. If harmony in a society depends on the common interpretation of [...] the unity behind a multitude of phenomena, the language of the poets may be more important than that of the scientists”; Natural Law and the Structure of Matter (London: Rebel Press, 1970): 45. 21 Reeves, Patience dans l’azur, 67–68.

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inherent in quantum mechanics, a pluralism which even Einstein could not subscribe to despite his contribution to quantum theory. I am not suggesting that the relativity and quantum theories had an immediate influence on non-scientists. A similar perception of plurality was intuited by modernist writers in their exploration of an enlarged subjective consciousness and the shift their work exemplified from a largely external “objective reality” to inner plural subjective worlds. But whereas the breakdown of a unitary world-view, of traditional structures and forms in all fields of experience, was a source of deep pessimism and anguish at the beginning of this century, further aggravated into sheer despair or a philosophy of meaninglessness as the horrors and after-effects of two world wars piled up, Harris sees in the very dissolution of monolithic world structures (including, of course, the dissolution of empire) an opportunity for the renascence of a more ‘balanced’ civilization. It does not in any way imply that he condones the violent destruction of a supposedly decadent civilization. Rather, as with all manifestations of an external reality which can never be ignored, it is through that very reality, when its fragmentation or dissolution occurs (whether man-willed or not), that a perception of the deeper motivations and emotions that underlie it becomes possible and that, as in the particular case of destructive violence, “an essential rapport between ruin and origin”22 can emerge. Harris’s probing into the process by which ruin (an illusory tabula rasa) can actually offer a seed of creation, like his conviction that a truly creative response to crisis “may well come from the other side of a centralized or dominant civilization,”23 is concomitant with his ‘quantum’ perception of world and experience. “The theory proposes that all the possible alternative quantum worlds are equally real, and exist in parallel with one another.”24 An awareness of parallel and alternative worlds and of their “coexistent potentialities”25 informs the narrative of The Four Banks of the River of Space in its major aspects and themes: the evocation of cosmic reality and of perceptible nature; the treatment of myth; Harris’s 22 Harris, “The Native Phenomenon,” in Common Wealth, ed. Rutherford, 150 (in Explorations, 55). 23 Harris, “Literacy and the Imagination,” 20. 24 Paul Davis, God and the New Physics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984): 116 (my emphasis). 25 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 159.

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own well-known rejection of realism and the arousal of overlapping layers of the unconscious into consciousness – all converge and unfold in Anselm’s role as ‘medium’ (medium of discourse, medium of dance) as he gathers within himself “plural forms of profound identity.”26 Finally, Harris’s “quantum Imagination” can be said to underpin both his fictional rendering in this novel and his definition of literacy as a perception of a multiplicity of texts, “different texts playing against each other,”27 as opposed to illiteracy, which he sees as a psychological and metaphysical phenomenon excluding the presence of the Other. The “ruined corridor of space” (75), a passage into the future, the “uplifted Jacob’s ladder in its primitive lightning arc, one curved wing of the law upon the earth, the other breaking into the ceiling of the sky” (121) and the changing “light of the constellations” (157) evoke the cosmic setting through which the river of space runs, at once a geographical reality (the Potaro river) and a metaphysical one: “the river of the dead and the river of the living are one quantum stream possessed of four banks” (44). This major expression of a plural reality (the world of the living in parallel with the invisible stream of the dead far below), which sustains Anselm’s journey into the past as he glimpses its possible conversion into the seed of a regenerated future, also conveys the creative paradox at the heart of Harris’s writing, the perception of what is both similar yet different (“and” and “yet” are the most frequent conjunctions in his writing). His revision of Gertrude Stein’s “a rose is a rose is a rose” into “a rose [...] is a particle is a wave”28 epitomizes his simultaneously poetic and quantum approach to creativity as “meaningful paradox.”29 One of its most significant representations in this novel is Aunt Alicia’s “museum of fossils” (13) − fossils imprisoned in their static historical condition − which is nevertheless a 26

Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society, 40. See also: “In my approach to the quantum imagination [...] I visualise the dismemberment of ourselves in others.” “Oedipus and the Middle Passage,” in Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English, ed. Geoffrey Davis & Hena Maes–Jelinek (Cross / Cultures 1; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1990): 15. 27 “Literacy and the Imagination,” 27. 28 Harris, “Comedy and Modern Allegory: A Personal View,” in A Shaping of Connections, 129. Any book on modern physics comments on the scientific paradox of the particle being also a wave. 29 Harris, “Validation of Fiction: A Personal View of Imaginative Truth,” in Tibisiri: Caribbean Writers and Critics, ed. Maggie Butcher (Aarhus: Dangaroo, 1989): 51.

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“garden” “live fossil” and “re-visionary” theatre (15, 18, 26). This is a paradox which may call to mind the fossil radiation in space. It recalls Aunt Alice’s “realm of oblivion or absolute limbo” which is nevertheless a “realm of Carnival evolution into a family of spirit” in Carnival.30 Alicia’s main concern is with the “poor in spirit” whom Anselm is to retrieve from the abyss. The abyss (cosmic void, geological gorge, but also ideological gulf and black holes of forgetfulness) separates parallel and alternative worlds, yet is also “creative hollow” (67), as Anselm realizes when he grasps the distinction between a fast that is “the seed of art” and “the pit or hole of bottomless greed” (67). From his own resistance to the temptation of excessive food and Proteus’s “creative fast” (112), Anselm knows he must also resist identifying absolutely with the starved, for this would mean imprisoning oneself into “one or other false eternity” (50) a static condition akin to death, whereas his task as “the architect of the City of God is to [animate] a gulf, an abyss, yet a crossing” (50, 52) between parallel lives and experiences without yielding to either, in order to approach the mystery of a possible conversion of deprivation (“abyss of an incalculable, inner reformation” 40). It is now a commonplace to say that Harris’s art is paradoxically rooted in the so-called historical and cultural void of the Caribbean, summed up here as the “creative riddle of the abyss” (60). Interestingly, the state of the void remains an unexplained mystery in quantum mechanics and it, too, “is one of the states of the physical system which includes all the possible states of the world. That state of void is thus not separated from the many other states which can be realized [… and] are virtually present….”31 The potentialities of the abyss are revealed through the intangible and ambivalent presence of both daemons and furies and the arousal of music and language. Harris never concealed the tormenting element in the creative process, and, as already suggested, it is indeed Canaima, the daemon and murderer, in whom Anselm nevertheless perceives “parallel lives, alternative existences” (5), who prods him to creativeness and points to 30

Carnival, 41. J.M. Jauch, L’abstrait et le réel dans la physique contemporaine (Université de Genève, 1968): 17–18, tr. mine. As a physicist, Jauch also sees a threat to humanity in the failure of ethics and religions to revise their perception of man’s destiny after the scientific revolution. 31

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the role of furies in the “mystery of creativity” (5). Da Silva da Silva had been similarly instructed by the devil and became-himself a “daemon artist” for Julia in The Tree of the Sun.32 Here Anselm kills a flying creature (36) with the knife Canaima had planted in his own ribs and later raises his hand to kill Harold, his father, though the gesture turns into a blessing (80), possibly also a translation of the Oedipus myth. Anselm is thus contaminated by the very evil he condemns. It is, significantly, in the self-confessional part of the novel on the third bank, when he engages in dialogue with the judge in self-judgement (also a recurrent feature of Harris’s fiction) within his “gestating unconscious” (115), that he becomes aware of the “terrifying energies that imply risk” in creation (112), the daemons and furies that nevertheless “provide a balance within [those] risks” (113). One should note that it is from the concrete facts in his family’s history, “man-made events” (85) and those of nature, that Anselm grasps the full measure of the torments of creation: his mother, the first Rose, prepared to sacrifice her son, who is saved by Proteus; Aunt Alicia’s real motive in adopting Anselm, complicity with Rose in seeking revenge on Harold; Proteus’s fast on his drinking bouts, which proves creative, just as Harold’s obsession with women reveals to Anselm “passion’s peace [the intensity of peace] at the heart of the storm” (112). The trial − also a gestation of innermost form” (117), creation in becoming − ends with the reversal of “diseased genius” when the furies ignorantly conscripted by diseased antecedents (in their destruction of nature as much as in their conflicting personal relations) are “balanced [...] within [...] the gestating male/female body of spirit one nurtures, the body one slays [...]” (118). By then he has given new life or “parented” his antecedents, thus taking a step further the role of the resurrection child in Harris’s fiction, since he is now the “parent of civilization”; another proof of the mutuality of creation. The above quotation also shows the androgeneity of the creative spirit. Indeed, just as in Carnival the translation of vision or “far viewing” occurs while Jonathan holds Amaryllis in his arms, so here the canvas of Anselm’s narrative blends with the tapestry or “coat of tradition” (54, 55) Penelope weaves and unravels. The mutuality of creativeness, together with its dependence on both male and female energy, is asserted when Anselm feels he becomes a “medium of exchange with ‘live absences’” 32

Harris, The Tree of the Sun, 40, 67.

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(19) and the substance with which he sculpts Penelope and Ross into life is “shared thought, a mutual exchange of secrets, a mixture of philosophy and reverie” (20). He draws Penelope “from the margins of nothingness” (56, 57) but she, too, draws him into the tapestry of her mind. In keeping with the creative role of women in Harris’s novels, Anselm emphasizes her participation as feminine creator and man’s dependence on her when he tells her that she is “central to every canvas.” “You were Wisdom, feminine Wisdom [...]. You are [...] an emancipated centre” (56, 57). And even though he repeats half-humorously one of Alicia’s “absurdities” he refers to “God the Mother of all men and women” (65). Penelope’s weaving is obviously a metaphor for Harris’s conception of reality, for what he called elsewhere “the fabric of the imagination” and for this narrative in particular, for creation as constant metamorphosis: i.e. the translation of ruin (Anselm travels through ruined premises) and the abyss. In terms of the postcolonial fiction he is writing, the coat is also a metaphor for the arousal of a conquered and lost reality as a new source of art. Harris’s originality as a postcolonial writer lies in his identification of the saving potential of apparently irrelevant resources (the eclipsed “invisible” conquered) and their creative “absence” with the very source of language, which is thus also associated with the many forms the “unfathomable” yet living reality takes in his fiction, whether “the nameless forgotten dead,” “live fossil,” “ground of loss” or the sacred and the divine, as I have attempted to show elsewhere.33 It is this elusive reality beyond language that Anselm approaches while attempting to move, in Merleau–Ponty’s words, “beyond the classical dichotomy between subject and object.”34 Harris’s approach in fiction to the origins of language has always been close, it seems to me, to that of phenomenologists like Merleau–Ponty and, more recently, Emmanuel Lévinas. For the former, la parole, provided it is authentic: i.e. the first and original expression of a thought as distinct from ordinary and empirical language, is that thought itself and transforms silence: Our view of man [he writes] will remain superficial as long as we don’t go back to the origin [of this transformation], as long as we don’t retrieve the primordial silence under the sound of words, as long as we don’t describe the

33 34

Hena Maes–Jelinek, Wilson Harris (T W A S ; Boston M A : Twayne, 1982): 8. Maurice Merleau–Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 203.

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gesture which breaks that silence. The word is a gesture and its significance a world.35

For Harris, too, “the Word is a gesture of psyche,”36 equivalent to the arousal of consciousness. It also seems from what precedes that, just as creation is mutuality, so the Word is a dialogue between the beyond and the here. And the reality it conveys, its essential livingness and the many forms it takes, also partakes of the here and the beyond, as we realize through the metamorphoses “within the tapestry of the Word” (133) in The Four Banks of the River of Space, particularly in the last part of the novel, for they are ways of fissuring the visible and reaching the beyond, however evanescent the dialogue may be. In this process, Harris comes close to Lévinas, who writes: the very essence of language consists in undoing its phrase at every moment through [...] exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to say again without ceremony what has already been misheard in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said complacently entrenches itself.37

The last part of the novel is indeed an inconclusive unravelling/ravelling fabric of word and music as Anselm, Penelope and Ross, led by a “savage” guide, travel on the fourth bank towards the ruined mission house (El Dorado and City of God), each carrying one of the three Macusi children who used to sing in Penelope’s choir and were drowned in the river, touched by a “dancing” electric eel. The last episode takes up again and develops the beginning of Part I I , where both language and music arise from the abyss, the bottom of the river, or innermost reality: So deep, so far below, is the river of the dead that the sound of its stream may never be heard or visualized except when we clothe ourselves with the mask, with the ears of the dancer in the hill. Then the murmur of the buried stream comes up to us as if its source lies in the stars and it may only be heard when we are abnormally attentive to the mystery of creation and the voice of the flute within the lips of three drowned children. (44)

35 Phénoménologie de la perception, 214. This formulation of the arousal of language from silence is very close to Harris’s in The Eye of the Scarecrow (see 95). 36 See Enigma of Values, ed. Petersen & Rutherford, 37. 37 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et Infini (1971; Paris: Librairie Générale française, 1990): 16, tr. mine.


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The child, as ever a potential agent of transformation, is here the Word made flesh and, reciprocally, flesh into Word, for the “bruised Word or child” is a “window through bandaged eyes into space” (126) and so helps Anselm to vision. The children have been pulled up from the river of space and are, for all their frailty, the personal burden that each character must come to terms with: Anselm’s twinship with the daemon-killer Canaima (brother yet stranger within oneself), and Simon’s obsession with vengeance, which drove him to become the hero Penelope married, hiding within and from herself a “spectre” of conquest from which she is now freed (160). She, too, had a share of responsibility in obsessions with vengeance and conquest, and it is mainly through her emancipation that we perceive the link between the “conversion” of Ulysses and the retrieval of the children from the depths of space and the unconscious. From his early poetry onwards, Harris’s work has evinced his deep interest in Ulysses, and the implicit parallel he draws between Troy and vanished pre-Columbian civilizations. Ulysses’ fragmented identity in The Four Banks of the River of Space breaks the absoluteness of the Homeric archetype, transforms the classical epic, and even elicits a parallel between a humbled Ulyssean hero and Christ’s sacrifice, a further development of the association between Christian and pagan myth in the metaphor of “Christ’s Trojan donkey!” in Carnival. In Anselm’s Imaginary Theatre, “the imperial design of the homecoming lord and master [is] converted into a post-colonial fable” (63) and Ulysses/Proteus in rags dies, killed by the thorn Rose has sent to his brow, joining in death the “poor in spirit” and gaining the strength to descend into the world’s abyss (66), which has only been possible through an acceptance of fragmentation: We may only heal the wounded archetype when we live the divide at the heart of language and place its enormity on many shoulders when several players [...] take a share in performances and portrayals of [...] inner immensity of craft, inner power. (30)

Living the divide at the heart of the language (“an abyss, yet a crossing” 50) is what Anselm has done in his pilgrimage, realizing as Julia does in The Tree of the Sun that “in that hiatus was grace to make the unbearable bearable.”38 The hiatus is also the seat of “the medium of discourse” Anselm enters reluctantly at first. In Harris’s very idiosyncratic 38

The Tree of the Sun, 85.

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use of “discourse,” there merge different forms of natural and artistic expression. While the concept of contemporary poststructuralist discourse is generally cut off from essence, a self-sufficient human construct and/or an instrument of power, discourse here is not only dialogue with the dead, the lost and the sacred (see above) a paradoxical conjunction of “absence” and “presence,” it is dance, music, and the voice of nature that speaks through bird, leaf or waterfall. In The Far Journey of Oudin, “A tree was a word, a river was a word, a man was a word: yet they were − all three − as imperishable and wordless as all substance.”39 In The Tree of the Sun, Julia reflects that “the sense of wood possessed its grain of incalculable irony or humour, incalculable spark of compassion.”40 This prefigures the “HUMAN TIMBER ” out of which the king of thieves materializes. The diversity of discursive forms is rooted in what Harris calls an inner objectivity, in essence and perhaps in what he terms “the universal unconscious,” but also corresponds to a religious source of life, increasingly presented as such in his fiction. That source lies in the eclipsed ancestral tongues from which both Word and music arise as Anselm comes upon the second bank. More than words, however, the “living language” is “miracle of being” captured in the light voices of the flute or the “revisionary step” (10) of the dance. Because they are essentially fluid, kinetic and “uncapturable,” music and dance are the most congenial expressions of Harris’s transformative view of existence. At once a gateway or “melodic door” (8) into unexplored being and a conversion into life of the spark of creation, they partake of its two-way process. Music animates all forms (“rhythmic stones” 125) and is, with dance, “the thread linking all creatures, all spheres, all places”; it is, as Anselm puts it, “antiphonal discourse” (27–28).41 When he retraces his steps, entering more deeply into the origins of discourse (“We have a long way to go backwards into all these names [...] with which we have tagged genesis” 133), he perceives the “musicality or linkage” (122) between the daemon and fury of creation. This recalls Hubert Reeves’s description of the “sounds” of music as, first, the links responsible for the harmonized organization of 39

The Far Journey of Oudin, 74. The Tree of the Sun, 79. 41 See Russell McDougall, “‘Corporeal Music’: The Scale of Myth and Adjectival Insistence in Palace of the Peacock,” in Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek (Aarhus: Dangaroo, 1991): 98–105. 40

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cells into molecules and of particles into atoms, then as the structures of the universe. As he attempts to define the “music of nature,” Reeves wonders whether the development of the universe in space and time was already inscribed in the interactions between particles: Were the flight of the nightingale in front of my window or the last sonatas of Beethoven already inscribed in the partition which quarks, electrons and photons were preparing to read fifteen billion years ago?42

In the crucial passage in which Anselm describes the birth of music out of the sieved, fossilized vestiges of the (Potaro) river of space, he finds “proof of the reality of the curvature of the music that rose upon the ladder of space” (45) in his surveying work in the region in the 1940s. “The curvature of the music” is energized into a spatial curve (see Harris’s diagram, 46), the path Anselm follows to retrieve a similar energizing content from “the greatest myths of survival in the body of humanity” (47). “The curvature of space,” writes Lévinas, “expresses the relationship between human beings [... it] is perhaps the very presence of God.”43 This might serve as a summing-up of the reality Anselm reaches with Penelope and Ross after their “capture” by the primitive tribe, when at last they hear the “drums of Home” (161) and are caught up in the music’s embrace. Ross’s conversion has taken place just before this and may be the most significant of all, because he deeply distrusted the Macusi Indians he had come to teach and was suspicious of their “savage idealism” and wish to conquer (138). In his conversion, however, several kinds of discourse coalesce. Early in the pilgrimage, he and Penelope were “seized” by the supremacy of their language (English) and so unaware of the native rhythms and antiphonal quality it had acquired in Guyana that they were prepared to accept the divide at the heart of the language, the divide between “object” and “subject” (29), as Ross carries “the suffering Word and primitive child” in his arms, “the Word changed. Its inherited glory dimmed” (127). The second change occurs when he comes upon the “Dido Orchid” he longed to find, a rare specimen named by a German botanist, now both flower and “woman’s shape” (135), whose deprivation and self-immolation by fire as queen of Carthage abandoned by Aeneas has transformed it 42 43

Patience dans l’azur, 202–203, tr.mine. Totalité et Infini, 324.

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into “blackened fossil flesh” (140). As with the Rosegarden, the Dido Orchid expresses a remarkable poetic identification between woman and nature and another translation of myth. At this stage, however, only Anselm perceives in the orchid the fossil’s possible resurrection into life, and it is only at the very end, when he realizes that the child he has been carrying is a girl, one of the finest voices at the mission and a dancer, that Ross is on the verge of surrendering to “the miracle of hope [...] [that] might still breach an epic formula” (161). His conversion is not final, but the change in the Word and the reality it represents, the possible breach in epic formula and its tragic consequences, initiate a new cycle of life. Like the ending of Palace of the Peacock and, it seems to me, for the first time since that novel, the ending of The Four Banks of the River of Space presents the Amerindian captors (now possibly guardians) and their captives together in “a theatre of interchangeable masks and fates and elements upon savages and civilizations” (161). Anselm’s rehearsal is temporarily over; “the burden and mystery of the rising sun” seems to be suspended on the “unfinished genesis” (9)44 of his/Harris’s art. 

44

This view of creation recurs in both fiction and criticism and naturally follows from Harris’s concept of “infinite rehearsal.”


19

Carnival, The Infinite Rehearsal, and The Four Banks of the River of Space Ulyssean Carnival of Epic Metamorphoses

Had not Masters read to me [...] the story of the Trojan horse that became the seed of an overturned age or frame? — Harris, Carnival I had expected him to worm his way into the Rose garden and slay his enemies. But instead the imperial design of the home coming lord and master had been converted into a colonial fable that spun its web in reverse order in the branches of the lofty rose tree over my head. The queen lay hidden in its branches. Harris, The Four Banks of the River of Space 1

There can be no Odyssey without its descent among the clairvoyant dead.

I

N AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY,

Wilson Harris describes the strong emotional impact he experienced as a child of eight when news reached his mother that his step-father had disappeared in the rainforests of Guyana. On the same day, his mother opened a large black trunk that had belonged to his real father, who had also disappeared in the Guyanese interior, from which she extracted a copy of The Odyssey and a wooden horse “carven from a Greenheart tree.”2 Harris writes about the first event of that memorable day: My step-father’s disappearance in that immense interior when I was a child was the beginning of an involvement with the enigma of quests and journeys

1

George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London: Faber & Faber, 1989) 2 Harris, “Wilson Harris,” 122.

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through visible into invisible worlds that become themselves slowly visible to require further penetration into other invisible worlds without end or finality.3

Later that year, Harris came upon a beggar not far from his home in Georgetown,4 at a time when, though a young child, he was already reading Homer with his mother’s help and may even then have unconsciously connected the beggar with the disguised Ulysses, who for so long had also been an absent father and husband, his whereabouts unknown, but was at last coming home: Across half-a-century and more [...] [t]he fabric of his face [the beggar’s] upon a floating tide of sorrow is stitched into Homer’s beggar within a tapestry of gestating vision [...].5

The never-resolved mystery of his step-father’s disappearance into the jungle, his father’s wooden horse, his reading The Odyssey as a sensitive, impressionable and imaginative child, the encounter with the Georgetown beggar – all seem to have provided Harris with a “series of subtle and nebulous links”6 of the kind he sees as the latent ground of the West Indian personality, while, for the writer he was to become, they turned into the seed of his growing, never-to-be-finished, fictional tapestry. Metamorphosed Homeric figures have peopled Harris’s writing from his earliest works and are the major personae of his poetic sequence Eternity to Season (1954), in which ordinary peasants and fishermen haunt the jungle and coastlands of Guyana, masked as ancient mythical Greek figures from both The Iliad and The Odyssey.7 But it is mainly The Odyssey that underpins his fiction as an endless source of revisionary myths and metaphors and modulates his aesthetic and philosophic vision. Already in Palace of the Peacock, Donne’s boat expedition towards El Dorado parallels Ulysses’ journey home, but, in contrast to the Greek 3

“Wilson Harris,” 122. The vision of the beggar is a recurring theme in Wilson Harris’s fiction. See Marsden in several novels, including The Mask of the Beggar. 5 “Wilson Harris,” 123. 6 Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society, 28. 7 Interestingly, thirty-six years later Derek Walcott repeated Wilson Harris’s experiment, transforming poor West Indian fishermen into Homeric personae, giving them, like Harris, a mythological dimension (Omeros, 1990). Walcott has also written a play called The Odyssey. For fairly obvious historical and geographical reasons, Homer’s epic has been a major source of inspiration to the Caribbean imagination. 4

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hero’s vengeful return, ends with Donne’s homecoming to a pagan/ Christian family and a vision of reconciliation, reversing the urge to violence and punishment that animated the crew through much of their quest. Harris himself draws an implicit parallel between Donne and Ulysses when he writes that his father’s “carven horse” was “threaded into Homer’s giant horse” and later resurrected as the horse ridden by the conquistadorial Donne in Palace of the Peacock.8 Although the jungle and rivers of Guyana can hardly conjure up devastated Troy, there is an implicit comparison between the destruction of ancient civilizations and the disappearance of entire populations in Asia Minor and pre-Columbian America. The enduring spirit and invisible presence of the vanished folk already convey his perception of conquered and decimated peoples as natural and spiritual ancestors of mankind “within a descent of the imagination.”9 The presence among the crew of the old Arawak woman, ancient archetypal Egeria of the folk briefly transfigured into the youthful tempting beauty all long to possess, weaves the narrative thread of pursuit and conquest (of woman and territory) with a revised version of the Sirens episode in The Odyssey. The seductive chant Donne and the crew have to resist in the warring elements is not that of an external deceptive power but of their own uncontrolled passions, of which they are freed only by the death of the youngest among them. Significantly also, they are successively then simultaneously deprived of both hearing and sight, rendered senseless by the “murderous rape and fury”10 with which they pursue and fight over the unattainable object of their desire. This episode is again transformed and given new meaning and complexity in the relationship between Susan Forrestal and her lover in The Waiting Room.11 Other Homeric exploits are metamorphosed, their significance revised, in subsequent novels by Harris, but the Carnival Trilogy12 alone refers with obvious directness to The Odyssey in conjunction with two major literary landmarks of the Western tradition, The Divine Comedy and 8

“Wilson Harris,” 125. “Wilson Harris,” 125. 10 Harris, Palace of the Peacock, 74. 11 On this subject, see “The Waiting Room: A Primordial Species of Fiction,” above. 12 Harris, The Carnival Trilogy (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), includes Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). 9

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Goethe’s Faust as well as pre- and post-Columbian Amerindian myths and customs, thus offering an impressive quintessence of the Old World– New World symbiosis that informs Harris’s cross-culturalism. My purpose is to concentrate on the Ulyssean palimpsest13 in the trilogy and bring to light Harris’s fertile integration into his narrative of successive Western world-views (antique, pre-Columbian, late-medieval and modern), a kind of epic of humanity, as he revises these views and gives shape to his developing vision. He never questions the sublimity or significance of Homer’s, Dante’s or Goethe’s work, all precursors and creators of vision in their own time. But he has repeatedly insisted on the need to renew the form and content of epic, allegory and myth, to revision as well as reverse the stereotypes they have given rise to and to see them as a community of texts and forms unhampered by the limitations of space and time. The dynamic of his revisions lies in his conviction that no character (whether god, mythic hero or ordinary man), no belief or type of behaviour, can represent an absolute ideal. Their partiality must be acknowledged and they must be dislodged from recurring absolute frames of thought and demeanour. Indeed, history and human experience tend to repeat themselves in reality and fiction, and Harris, who still adheres to the humanist view that literature can modify consciousness, suggests that the horrors of history and the suffering they generate might be avoided if men could envisage alternative consequences and imaginatively translate the predicament to which they see themselves confined by fate. Guides as well “daemons and furies,”14 the manifold essence of creativity, play a major role in Harris’s referential epic, allegory and drama. Although unreservedly accepted in the masterpieces of the past, their appearance, albeit in a modified role, in Harris’s trilogy has puzzled some readers, who find it hard to account for them in a modern context. In The Odyssey, gods and goddesses (mainly Athena) guide Ulysses through his journey and ordeals, though he also makes enemies among them (Poseidon, for example, who inspired an antithetical vision of the ancient god in The Secret Ladder). Virgil, Dante’s guide to the Inferno and the mountain 13

Jean–Pierre Durix discusses the Ulyssean palimpsest in The Infinite Rehearsal and the novel’s many intertextual features in “The Palimpsest of Fiction: The Infinite Rehearsal,” in Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination, ed. Hena Maes– Jelinek (Aarhus: Dangaroo, 1991): 210–20. 14 Four Banks, 3.

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of Purgatory, links ancient epic and medieval allegory through his hero Aeneas, who, like Ulysses, descends into Hades. Although he is human, his prestige as a writer and creator of myth still makes him a superior guide descended from the pantheon of trustworthy mentors. In contrast to this, the guides in Harris’s trilogy, Masters in Carnival, Ghost and Faust/ Dr Faustus in The Infinite Rehearsal, Canaima, Alicia, Proteus and Harold in The Four Banks of the River of Space, are mostly dead acquaintances of the protagonists, arising from “the collective unconscious” into their consciousness or haunting their dreams, though some may be seen as half mythical (Everyman Masters, Faustus and Canaima) while also referring back to earlier allegory and drama. The major difference from their earlier models is their humanity and ambivalence, their being, to use Harris’s term again, mere “understudies”:15 i.e. limited, partial substitutes of an unattainable whole, of “the mystery of intact reality,” the “genius of creation” (Carnival, 162), or of a “universal fathomless actor” (163). Even the gods in Harris’s fiction have come down from their pedestal; they are often associated with the lost victims of history and partake of their humanity. So, while being part of an unfathomable entity or wholeness, the guides in his fiction are nevertheless also ordinary human beings who at different stages of their life may have been, like Masters, both tyrant and victim but whose experience, post-mortem view and self-confessional need give them the requisite understanding and compassion to urge a reversal of patterns of violence and exploitation. They can still be deceptive, like Faustus in The Infinite Rehearsal, but also confront the traveller with ordeals through which he learns to make the right choice, as when Robin Redbreast Glass discards a glorious but misleading rope in favour of a “true seam” (the thread of dynamic wholeness as opposed to absolute totality) when ascending the Mountain of Folly. In this capacity to distinguish between “LIKE YET UNLIKE FORCES ” (23) lies the pivot of Harris’s “convertible images,”16 which, he suggests, are intrinsic to modern epic and allegory. Guides, then, are clearly not self-sufficient archetypes, any more than their living interlocutors are traditional heroes moving towards a single 15 Harris, “Comedy and Modern Allegory: A Personal View,” in A Shaping of Connections, 127–40. See also Stephen Slemon, “Revising Allegory: Wilson Harris’s Carnival,” Kunapipi 8.2 (1986): 45–55. 16 “Comedy and Modern Allegory,” 134.

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fixed object. Since much of the trilogy’s self-reflexiveness consists in discussing how events should be interpreted, analysing the characters’ motivations as much as their behaviour, Harris’s characters define themselves through function and thoughtful reaction to events and situations rather than enduring or typifying qualities or shortcomings. They are multidimensional, particularly the guiding figures who manifest themselves at different levels of the protagonist’s consciousness, revealing different facets and layers of their own personality and transformative potential. Hence their own developing and shifting roles. In Carnival, Masters first guides Weyl to the colonial underworld of his childhood, where he was to become a tyrannical overseer, then, after his assassination as an exploiter, to the London underworld, where he worked in a factory like any other poor West Indian migrant, while in the rest of the trilogy Ulyssean figures reveal by turns their cold-hearted, generous, vengeful and forgiving attitudes and potentialities. This undermining of persisting mythical archetypes and their fragmentation into a multiplicity of dissimilar characters in adversarial functions is in keeping with Harris’s philosophy of existence and his apprehension of the evolutionary nature of the phenomenal world. Like The Odyssey, the trilogy begins at home in New Forest, America (clearly Guyana) and first concentrates on the son-figure, Telemachus, here Jonathan Weyl, guided by Masters, who dons successive, different and partial masks (Masters the First, Masters the Second, etc.) in their reconstruction of the private and historical experiences that punctuate Jonathan’s own Odyssey as a fiction writer who interprets the missed opportunities of the cultural clash between Europe and the Americas. Unlike The Odyssey, however, the scene of revenge takes place at the beginning and, as in Palace of the Peacock, yields to reconciliation at the end of the novel. Carnival as a specifically Caribbean cultural event used to be a temporary explosion of liberation only possible because inseparable from the oppressive order and codes against which it reacted. In Harris’s fiction it is the comedy of existence that allows for the constant interplay of adversarial forces, and, as an all-encompassing metaphor, it engenders the multiple transformations inherent in his concept of creation and fictionwriting.17 It is both fact and process, exploration and self-discovery; it is concrete reality in whatever mask (including “masks of absolute regimes” 17

On this subject, see “Carnival and Creativity” above, 297–314.


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131) but also its life-giving convertibility and therefore creativity. In his re-creation of Masters’ and his father’s experience in New Forest, Jonathan is helped not only by “Masters the Fourth” (116) in an evolutionary chain of existence but also by the news published in their youth in the paper Argosy, a name apparently derived from Argo, the ship in which Jason managed to secure the golden fleece after sailing between the Wandering Rocks, or even Argos, Ulysses’ old dog. It will be recalled that the child Jonathan, to whom Masters had read the story of the Trojan horse, was obsessed at his father’s funeral by the idea that the body was not in the hearse but in the horse that pulled it and which, frightened for no apparent reason, had backed into the garden and reduced it to a “drought-stage” (120). As he recalls the scene of the funeral procession and the slow-moving horse advancing through poverty-stricken New Forest, Jonathan no longer sees the “rock-horse” as mere destroyer of his garden but realizes that therein lay the catalyst of modern allegory, modern fiction or biography of terrifying spirit to judge the age in which I lived [...]. The fact was that we [Jonathan and his father] resided in the womb of a phantom horse as a seed of archaic revolution more enduring than novel or fashionable non-existence that perpetuates a lie. (120–21)

Clearly, then, the devastating Trojan horse of colonialism becomes a pregnant “womb of space,” in Harris’s terminology both individual psyche and cosmic theatre, at once the seat of, and the capacity for, metamorphosis. Martin is therefore a kind of revolutionary Ulysses, and the original hero’s destructive invention is seen to contain a seed of change and “therapeutic genesis,”18 while in the process of the conversion of colonial deprivation the destructive image generates a “modern allegory”: i.e. a revised regenerative “species of fiction”19 freed from static fictional codes. Before commenting further on the Trojan horse as convertible image, it is worth drawing attention to parallel images of pregnancy and possible conversion in Carnival. One is of Masters’ mother’s “GLASS BODY ” (122), in which he envisions his own pre-natal existence and survival

18

Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1983): 117. 19 Tradition, the Writer and Society, 48.

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when his mother was threatened with abortion then saved from it by the child’s legal though not real father (another pre-natal experience occurs in The Infinite Rehearsal). The mother’s humiliation and the menace of deprivation she had experienced are transformed into the “genius of love” (30). Another image of fertility is that of the “glass cathedral” (122), in which Jonathan and Amaryllis are taken as children by Masters on Easter Sunday, and Jonathan, struck by the gloom and radiance in the edifice (reminiscent of similar contrasts in the forest), has a vision of himself ascending and descending “into a mysterious constellation of evolutionary spaces” (122). Thus the narrative weaves together a number of spaces of gestation such as “the cathedral-horse” (123) in which Jonathan and Amaryllis later come together in a creative sexual encounter shortly before their marriage. Their love-making in what becomes the belly of a cosmic horse of space (a wedding horse parallelling the father’s funeral horse 126) is an extraordinary metamorphosis of Ulysses’ cunning invention, initiating an equally creative “complex marriage of cultures” (124), not in forgetfulness or sexual escapism but with a deep awareness of past sorrows and deprivations. Another fertile space is the interior of the ship on which Jonathan sails to Europe with the guiding Masters in 1957. As they converse about their respective roles on their journey from the colonial inferno, the body of the ship becomes a “womb of glass” (89) struck by a storm, a variation of the storm through which the old Arawak woman guides the crew in Palace of the Peacock. The terror of beauty, of pity (of gentleness even) that the storm evinces purges Jonathan, as it were, of the sense of peril and evil he experiences in the chaos of the storm. For the first time also, he has a vision of Christ, dreaming of seeing Him, through the glass side of the ship, walking on the waters. When he later reconstructs his father’s death and meditates on its possible meaning, the Christ-persona reappears in association with “the half-prancing donkey or mule or horse” (111) that engulfed his father, a lawyer, as he was crushed coming out of court by the wheel of a dray-cart drawn by the donkey. He was then exhausted and broken by his failure to save from a death sentence an Amerindian prince who had killed his dying mother in accordance with the law of his people. Martin Weyl’s plea for the recognition of the charisma of ancient pagan law had been disregarded, though, as Jonathan now sees, there was a similarity between the hideous imperatives of pagan rituals and the modern “games of nuclear holocaust” or the “advocacy of the body as fodder

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for the state,” which are tantamount to “articulating an ancient ritual dressed up in the vestments of purist obsession” (142). In the re-visioning of Martin’s death, the donkey becomes “resurrection mule,” while the “savage heart” he had so passionately defended is taken from his rent side (an analogy with Christ’s?) and handed to Masters to pass on to Jonathan (143). The donkey that causes Martin’s death is thus as ambivalent as Ulysses’ transfigured Trojan horse, and the cross-cultural fusion of the two images into “Christ’s Trojan donkey!,” the novel’s central metaphor, epitomizes the transformation of an implacable ruse into a potential “new beast, a new heart, a new love upon which to ride” (142). In its reversal of a stratagem of conquest and destructiveness, it is one of the best examples of Harris’s “convertible images.” It suggests that the relentless order of things and patterns of behaviour represented in ancient epic could have been broken and reshaped with the advent of a Christian civilization, whose original revolutionary purpose obviously miscarried. But the “carnival transubstantiation”20 generated by the trilogy’s dynamic Ulyssean iconography still offers a vision of genuine transformation. Martin’s and Masters’ efforts to save the “pagan body” and “savage heart” (139, 47) of the Amerindian prince introduce another major thread into the trilogy’s narrative texture, one that exemplifies the development of humanity along an “evolutionary/revolutionary” (119) chain of being and implies that past, present and future states coalesce in man’s condition. This concept derives from and accounts for the protagonists’ repeated return to the past, immediate or remote or, very significantly, primeval. While granting them glimpses of the future, which allows Ghost in The Infinite Rehearsal to say “I am the memory of the future” (43), this free voyaging in time contributes to the multi-dimensionality of the characters but does not entirely explain it, since this is also the outgrowth of psychological and emotional agencies. Although perceptible in the whole trilogy, the evolutionary thread is more prominent in the second novel and adds to the representativeness of Ulysses as a comprehensive figure of human limitations and possibilities, one in whom man’s most primitive features and his endless capacity to progress persist indissociably through time and timelessness. These two dimensions co-exist in this novel more than ever before, since the narrator, Robin Redbreast Glass, is dead but resurrected as “immortal youth,” writing his autobiography “‘from the 20

The Womb of Space, 35.

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other side of W.H.’s blind/seeing mind’” (47). Although the two writers are “adversaries,” they both approach “the ruling concepts of civilization [...] from the ruled or apparently eclipsed side in humanity” (“N OTE ,” vii). Robin is mostly guided by Ghost (a layer of being further removed from Robin), who has arisen from the sea and converses with him as he writes his autobiography. Ghost is several times described as a “hollow voyager,” a shadow that can be filled by conquistadorial and victimized body (1), the recipient of the meaning sifted from men’s actions, good or bad, none of which is ever completely lost. He or “IT ” cannot be associated with any particular being but could be seen as an embodiment of the collective unconscious which, as suggested above, emerges into consciousness in the writing-process. Ghost has developed from the Idiot Nameless of Harris’s earlier fiction, hunted down by the immigration officer Ulysses Frog soon after appearing to Robin. The officer is accompanied by his mistress, Calypso (Homeric nymph and West Indian musician), who sings a well-known Caribbean song which, like the lotus flower that Robin’s alter ego (Peter) feeds on, voices the lament of the slaves on the Middle Passage and expresses the “drug of deprivation” (30), the death-wish of the masses (58). Yet her singing and dancing are also an expression of survival. The paradoxical association of the epic hero with “Frog” and his ruthless control of the world’s beaches to keep out its swarming refugees (in a sense represented by Ghost) brings to light yet another layer of his personality. His name, like “Redbreast,” draws attention to the animal component in each character (the crab and crocodile in Carnival are other examples), traces of an animal primitiveness which seems to have vanished but are in fact ambivalent “fossil strata,” “angelic, terrifying, daemonic”21 and susceptible of erupting unpredictably in both man and nature. One is reminded here of Ovid’s awareness of a similar animal self as he enters his final metamorphosis “back” into his forthcoming death in David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life: I try to imagine the sky with all its constellations, the Dog, the Bear, the dragon and so on, as an extension of myself, as part of my further being [...]. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, [the creatures] will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after

21

Harris, Enigma of Values, ed. Petersen & Rutherford, 19.


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them, the plants, also themselves [...]. Then little by little the firmament. The spirit of things will migrate back into us.22

In Robin’s narrative, the facet of Ulysses constituted by Frog points to the cold determination with which, obsessed as the latter is by conquest, he wears the uniform of “magistrate, admiral and immigration officer” who has from time immemorial wished to entrap the “Beast of paradise” (10). Paradise is the idealistic absolute that conquerors have always wanted to reach, while the Beast, if I understand it rightly, may be the victims the conquerors hunt down and exploit in their search for “the map of heaven” (9), which is why Beast appears to be an ambivalent version or reverse side of Ghost. The wish to conquer and the concomitant hunger for power and immortality materialize chiefly in Faust, whose myth in his grandfather’s revised version greatly influences Robin. Interestingly, Faust sometimes looks at him with the ancient eyes of Quetzalcoatl (64), for the Mexican god was likewise obsessed with youth and immortality and was fed with the heart of human victims to ensure the renewal of time. As a conjunction of antithetical yet complementary animality, bird and snake (like Frog and Redbreast, “lost golden species”), Quetzalcoatl is one of Robin’s “savage antecedents” who can help him approach “the spirit of value” as he dreams “[his] way backwards in time into the ancient workshop of the gods” (6). All voyages of exploration in Harris’s fiction involve a movement backwards and forwards, not just in an attempt to gain freedom from the constraints of time but because, in the backward movement to retrieve what Harris has called the “fossil of psyche” and forward towards “a vanishing future,”23 there lies the prelude to metamorphosis. Robin’s alternative movements from past to future involve a vertiginous approach to the very origin of creation, whereas, when transported into the future, he glimpses a “religious hope” (44) in Emma, the beloved adopted sister who, in the year AD 2025, becomes Archbishop of Canterbury. He meets her in a kind of light-year tunnel which is just one of many possible seats of transmutation:

22 23

David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (1978; Sydney: Picador, 1980): 96. Harris, Fossil and Psyche, 11 (in Explorations, 79, 80).

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Each relic of time, each built passageway, each sculpted tunnel or bowl or room [...] glimmered with the cruelties of the past yet with a theatre of newborn spirit to breach or transform a moment of terror. (56)

Actually, much of the setting is cosmic, ranging from the bottom of the sea to the visible and invisible firmament. The following passage, for example, evokes an interpenetration of spaces: I saw the new moon like a curved fingernail in the late, afternoon Old New Forest sky. I stared at it with intensity. As if my hollow voyager lost and lost and found again and again had pared it from ancient Homer’s webbed hand with immeasurable Joycean delicacy and drawn it on the sunset sky. Webbed Homeric hand. Impossible human bird. Impossible male, female animal. NIGHT WAS FALLING . My own fingernails were black with earthen light. (3)

The allusion to Joyce, whose re-writing of The Odyssey Harris greatly admires, is only one among numerous examples in the novel of multitextuality, a more appropriate term, I feel, than intertextuality, which posits a self-referentiality of literature incompatible with his conviction that fiction is still a vehicle of meaning and value. Multi-textuality for Harris is more than a game and offers parallel expressions of his own vision or the germs of re-vision. To return to the impression of unlimited space and timelessness in The Infinite Rehearsal: their effect is not to reduce man’s stature or minimize the significance of his experiences, whether joy or suffering and terror. It is, rather, to entice him from fixed and limited horizons (hence, perhaps, Harris’s obsession with Ulysses, the eternal voyager) towards an awareness of humanity at large, of a continuous existence (human, animal, natural, cosmic) in which the individual is a link in a frail yet enduring chain joining the survivors and the dead. When, at the end of the novel, Robin Redbreast disappears as narrator, the postscript is written by Ghost, who returns to the sea from where he arose at the beginning of the narrative: I am the ghostly voyager in time, in space, in memory, but always I return to the vast ocean, the rolling seas and the great deeps. (85)

His postscript confirms the reader’s suspicion that, even though he may never have written a line before (86), he is nevertheless the true source of authorship only temporarily assumed by Robin and his adversarial interlocutor, W.H., for, as Ghost claims, it is he who “[taps] the innermost resources of eclipsed traditions in the refugee voices that W.H. heard in

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the sea” (86). It also makes clear that if Ulysses first appeared in the narrative in a negative role, “epic lover yet doomed, jealous scavenger of humanity” (12), he also partakes of Ghost, whose hollowness, hence openness and transmutability, is nevertheless “the ground of creative conscience and value” (51). This becomes particularly clear in The Four Banks of the River of Space, whose second epigraph, from Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” is an apt transition between the two novels: I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move.

Space is lacking to develop here the effect and role of all Homeric strands and figures in the trilogy. Tiresias, another obsessive figure in Harris’s work, in The Infinite Rehearsal a band leader, strike leader and androgynous blind/seeing seer, guides Robin down the Mountain of Folly to the City of Skull and explains the role of the Beast, whom Robin then glimpses. Another metaphor expanded from Harris’s earlier fiction and diversified is the rock coming alive, possibly inspired by the Wandering Rocks passage in The Odyssey. Whereas in Joyce’s Ulysses the rocks are a major obstacle to change, either as the indomitable pillars of Church and imperialist state between which Bloom’s “throaway” finds its way down the Liffey, or as passive Dubliners,24 in the trilogy, whether in “waterfall oracle” (Carnival) or close to the god-rock near the Macusi waterfall (The Four Banks of the River of Space), the rocks are humanized into “dancing boulders” (Carnival, 110) or “processional rock[s],” or “rock visionary flesh and blood” (Four Banks, 39) in which Anselm sees “‘live absence’ [turning] into ‘presence’” (39). Of course, the chief, manifold metaphor in the trilogy is the ship, but to comment on this would require another essay, and Harris himself has interpreted its meanderings and metamorphoses throughout the three novels.25 24

Harris indirectly pays homage to Joyce by transforming his “Bloomsday” into “Boomsday” (45) in connection with the dead noise Tiger’s band makes in the City of Skull. 25 Harris, “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27.1 (1992): 13–25, and Temenos Academy Review 13 (1992): 69–85, repr. in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination: Selected Essays by Wilson Harris, ed. Andrew Bundy (London: Routledge, 1999): 248–60.

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The Four Banks of the River of Space is largely “the divine comedy of the master’s homecoming” (63), in which the moral design of “epic/ allegoric theatre” (64) transforms the Ulyssean syndrome more radically than ever before.26 In the ancient epic, Ulysses is an absolute sovereign – actually, a hero/monster – who, on his return, carries out merciless vengeance on the suitors who covet his wife and his kingdom. However admirable he may be in some respects, the destructive idealism, jealousy and implacable vengefulness he acts out have now become a major threat to civilization and the very existence of humanity.27 So is his absolute sovereignty when imitated in modern, highly technological societies. In Anselm’s book of dreams, his personality is fragmented into a number of actors who share “the burden of Ulyssean Carnival kingship” (59), becoming partial selves subject to conversion (hence “Carnival”). Anselm, the Guyanese scientist–artist who has taken this name out of admiration for the one-time Bishop of Canterbury, returns home in search of El Dorado/Ithaca/the City of God, a conjunction which suggests that the quest for a lost home, lost civilization and people is a religious as well as a cross-cultural and even psychological experience, since this means coming to the doors of the unconscious. His return is stimulated by Canaima, a Guyanese counterpart of Ulysses, for he is a humanized personification of Kanaima, the Amerindian god of vengeance. Although a former murderer, he is nevertheless Anselm’s first guide and, as the quester is shocked into realizing later, his own half-brother. It is a partly amended Canaima who initiates him into the role of the daemonic and of furies in both life and creation and warns him against the tautology of vengeance in belief, statecraft and poetry, which Anselm gradually recognizes as a formerly unacknowledged motive in his own family. Three Ulysses share the burden of the mythic hero: Anselm’s uncle Proteus, pork-knocker and beggar; Harold, his brother, the lover who abused the Rose Twins, mothers of Anselm and Canaima; and Simon, the

26

For a general and detailed analysis of the novel, see the chapter “The Four Banks of the River of Space: Unfinished Genesis” above, 359–77. 27 Obviously, Harris has little sympathy for heroic excesses and what George Steiner calls the “sanctified bestialities” of The Divine Comedy in “Dante Now: The Gossip of Eternity” (1976), in Steiner, On Difficulty and Other Essays (London: Oxford U P , 1978): 181.


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conqueror, a British officer and would-be governor of Guyana. As Harris explains, Odysseus has been drowning in the Caribbean sea and in the oceans for centuries, drowning yet resuscitating in rehearsals of Troy to fight wars of colonial expansion and conquest. It is no longer possible for him to arrive in New World El Dorados that are in equation with ancient Ithacas as a single man. He has become plural and is borne upon the shoulders – re-born within the flesh of many cultures.28

Similarly, there are several thieves and suitors, just as there are several queens, the Rose twins and Penelope, who is married first to Simon, then to Ross, before they emigrate as missionaries to Guyana, where Anselm meets them in 1948. As partial actors and embodiments of Odyssean archetypes, all of these characters are involved in several ‘rehearsals’ of the basic Homeric drama, acting out in Anselm’s dream and “live-fossil theatre” (18) their many-sided and overlapping roles. The “King of thieves,” for example, first identifies with the thief on Calvary’s Hill who rejected the paradise offered by Christ and has tried ever since to conquer or steal it on every continent. A cross-cultural figure, pre-Columbian and ancient Greek as much as Christian, he is “Black Pizarro” (17), a Guyanese pork-knocker, symbolic seeker of all the El Dorados of this world and an equation to all the thieves or suitors who sought to (dis)possess Penelope (56). She presents him, however, as a “reformed character in the City of God” (55), and he is another ghostly scarecrow whose voice instructs Anselm in the roles Proteus and Harold are to play in his re-creation of personal and universal epic. Proteus figures in the first alternative version of the Homecoming when, as a Ulyssean beggar coming to the gates of Home, he is killed by the thorn one Rose-Queen sends to his brow (62). But his voluntary discarding of the robe of lord and master gives his part the seed of a “reversal of the [...] premises of myth” (65) and of a conversion of dispossession in the half-ruined colony. When Anselm comes upon Harold wearing the rags he (Anselm) has stolen from Proteus, Harold confesses that, though married to Alicia, he had slept successively with the Rose Twins but had never been told by Alicia (kind and generous to Anselm but a vengeful Clytemnestra towards Harold) that he made the first Rose pregnant until 28

Harris, “The Absent Presence: The Caribbean, Central and South America,” 91–92.

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the second Rose, pregnant in turn, told him he already had an heir in Anselm. The hatreds of the past are transmuted into forgiveness when Anselm, first raising his hand to kill Harold and avenge both mother and “mother-nature,” renounces vengeance and blesses the father returned to him from the kingdom of the Dead. The last performance of the Homecoming is shared by Anselm, Penelope and Ross. In all “rehearsals,” Penelope rather than Ulysses plays the central role, for the coat of tradition she keeps weaving and unravelling, also a coat of wisdom like the Arawak woman’s kerchief in Palace of the Peacock, represents the basic pattern of creation and metamorphosis in this as in all Harrisian fiction, the “infinite rehearsal” of missed opportunities, in order to retrieve the victims of colonialism from the abyss. It is a role she is particularly fit to play, since, as she points out, “women − even queens − have long been the property of the realm” (159). Perhaps because she is so central, like all women in Harris’s fiction, it is not the Ulyssean Simon who changes but Penelope’s perception of him. He had come home to find her with Ross and although they were not deceiving him and in any case his real union with Penelope had ended, she and Ross always felt guilty after he died at El Alamein. At the end of the novel, Anselm, Penelope and Ross progress towards the ruined mission house/El Dorado/Ithaca/City of God, each carrying a Macusi child retrieved from the river where they drowned. In a significant reversal of conquest, they have been captured by the “savage” Macusi, to whom they surrender when they recognize in the primitive child they carry their own suppressed refusal, from childhood onwards, to come to terms with some painful truth about themselves (which therefore drowned in their unconscious): Anselm that he was the brother of the daemon Canaima; Penelope that Simon (whom she now sees in the child she carries) became obsessed with vengeance as a boy, which drove him, like Ulysses, to become the hero she married, hiding within herself yet from herself a “spectre” of conquest; while Ross finally sees in the beautiful young singer and dancer he carries the creativity of the Macusi, of whom he was suspicious, the power of their native rhythm and speech to transform the imperial language, and the possibility for the native child to take up Penelope’s role: “the miracle of hope in a child-queen who might still breach an epic formula” (161). In the trilogy as a whole, the fabulous metamorphoses of ancient Homeric myth provide a remarkable summing-up of Harris’s philosophy

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and world-view: first, Ulysses’ cunning invention and instrument of conquest is shown to contain a seed of rebirth and reconciliation; then, the “rehearsal” (potentially “infinite”) of past conflicts and tragedies from different angles and states of being encompassing the multi-layered (un)consciousness of those who were involved in them gave them a glimpse of possible salvation; finally, the third novel evokes the incipient reversal of the consequences of the Homecoming to historical, natural, primeval origins. Of all the homecomings in Harris’s fiction,29 this, it seems to me, most eloquently and subtly hints at further developments engendered in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill. Through his metamorphoses and “rehearsals” Harris’s Ulysses has been steering from one bank of the river of space to another without finally casting anchor. Moving between two worlds, it is as if he had made his the Homeric hero’s answer to the Cyclops when he said he was called “No-man,” as if, indeed, a nameless scarecrow without a fixed identity in the kingdom of the living and the dead, he kept freeing himself from persistent urges towards greatness and destructiveness, opening himself up to different kinds of being to reverse the hero’s single-minded drive to conquest. In this process, he is both fictional and psychic medium, through which at the end Anselm (who has been successively Telemachus, a suitor, and Ulysses), Penelope (the Queen) and Ross (the major suitor) forgive and become reconciled with their own past and “savage” origins. Yet theirs is no final Homecoming, either, for when they surrender to their primitive captors, it is as if they have boarded Ulysses’ship for yet another journey on the travelling earth. As Julia says in The Tree of the Sun, “home is always another journey.”30

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29 Apart from Palace of the Peacock, see Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness and The Tree of the Sun as well as the early poem “Agamemnon” in Eternity to Season. 30 Harris, The Tree of the Sun, 91.


20

Resurrection at Sorrow Hill Charting the Uncapturable

He saw the complexities yet simplicities of a fiction one may involuntarily write which involves a broken family with an entire humanity though its seed lies in obscure provinces, obscure sorrow hills. — Harris, Resurrection at Sorrow Hill ‘May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is 1 in it?’

A

F T E R T H E E M E R G E N C E of the Americas on the world map, more than 400 years elapsed before Caribbean artists broke the silence into which their ancestors had been precipitated by the European conquest. When an indigenous literature in English finally emerged, few writers sought to interpret the fate of the Amerindians. The Guyanese poet A.J. Seymour was the first to do so; and apart from a few allusions in his prose writings, there is the odd poem by Derek Walcott, H.G. de Lisser’s ambiguous novel The Arawak Girl, and Mittelholzer’s rather sensational Kaywana Trilogy. Perhaps understandably, most novelists were concerned with the character and immediate effects of colonialism, slavery and indentured labour. Wilson Harris’s Guyana Quartet alone showed equal interest in these and in the essential significance of the vanished Amerindians for the articulation of a modern Caribbean consciousness. In his recent writing, both self-reflexive analytical fiction and imaginative criticism, Harris has returned emphatically to the Amerindian presence in Central America, as part of “the womb of space,” at once actual territory pregnant with physical and psychical resources, “largely sub-

1

J.M. Coetzee, Foe (1986; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987): 143.

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merged territory of the imagination,”2 and primordial seat of life and of a creativity that can never be fully apprehended nor given final expression: “No art of total capture or subordination of originality within formula exists despite appearances,”3 originality evoking here both origins and significant innovation. Harris pretends neither to a complete recovery of Caribbean origins nor to absolute originality but concentrates, rather, on the way creativeness can operate, particularly in a postcolonial context. In this respect, his exploratory narratives form a unique matrix of new cartography, both geographical and metaphorical, which reconceptualizes the Caribbean and its creative potentiality. One would assume that a highly sophisticated technology and the discoveries of space travel now make possible perfectly accurate topographical surveys. But this is to reckon without nationalistic greed and pride. In 1974 a German historian, Arno Peters, brought out a new geopolitical, anti-Mercatorian projection intended to restore the true proportions to the continents, in particular the real dimensions of the Third World. But this projection displaces the centre of our planet from Rome to a small town in the Congo and is often considered unscientific. Significantly, although a sphere has no centre except its nucleus, Europeans have traditionally been eurocentric; Americans see the USA as the centre of the planet, while the Chinese have created their own “Middle Empire.” Cartography is still influenced by self-centred and hegemonic nationalism, and despite pretensions to the contrary, such stubborn subjectivity and domineering self-assertion find their equivalent in all disciplines of the humanities, whether or not directly influenced by geopolitical perceptions of the world. The process by which Europeans appropriated not only the geographical but also the mental and psychological territory of the conquered peoples has by now been elucidated. But whether the victims of conquest recovered their original imaginative space along with political independence, whether they even can or should do so, remains a muchdebated question, particularly in postcolonial poststructuralist criticism, although, inevitably, the debate is conducted in, and is therefore limited to, the intellectual epistemological terminology of the colonizing West. Moreover, although much postcolonial criticism challenges the claim to accuracy of the mimetic representation of actual territories with its poli2 3

Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination, xix. The Womb of Space, xvii.

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tical and cultural consequences, comparatively little attention is given to the similar conception of the mapping of the human experience and psyche in literary texts. For example, Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism argues that the rise of the English novel is inextricably linked with the growth of imperialism which underpins and supports the image of society presented in English fiction.4 Yet while questioning the “consolidated vision” of the “central authorizing subject,” he doesn’t say a word on the subject’s chosen mode of representation, which certainly contributed to the consolidation of the imperialistic vision, but merely states that “the ‘what’ and ‘how’ in the representation of ‘things’ [...] are circumscribed and socially regulated,” while “allowing for considerable individual freedom.”5 Wilson Harris, who nearly forty years ago emphasized the link between imperialism and the rise of the novel, claimed, by contrast, that “this freedom [...] however liberal [it] may appear is an illusion,”6 and he has since repeatedly shown that realism, both as a way of perceiving and acting upon the world and as a mode of writing, is arbitrary in its failure to acknowledge areas of experience, while the concomitant growing influence of rationalism reduced the earth itself to a “passive creature” cut off from its roots. The difference between Said’s and Harris’s analysis resides in the fact that, for Harris, undermining a consolidated vision is not exclusively or mainly a matter of political change, though ultimately it includes that, too, but first requires a renewed grasp of the human psyche and of a profound reality at once phenomenal and cultural. In a well-documented article,7 Tim Cribb demonstrates, in the light of geographical surveys he consulted in Georgetown, that Harris’s response to the Guyanese landscape in his world-view and writing, together with 4

“The novel as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society and imperialism are unthinkable without each other”; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993; London: Vintage, 1994): 84. 5 Culture and Imperialism, 95. 6 Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society, 29. In this essay, Harris had also anticipated the connection between empire and the rise of the novel suggested later by Said: “The rise of the novel in its conventional and historical mould coincides in Europe with states of society which were involved in consolidating their class and other vested interests” (29). 7 Tim Cribb, “T.W. Harris – Sworn Surveyor,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 28.1 (1993): 33–46.

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the epistemological mutation it entailed, had a solid basis in his experience as a professional surveyor. His analysis of Harris’s surveys throws light on what was indeed a neglected source of exegesis of his conception of art, though I would say that Cribb’s emphasis on its pragmatic origins complements rather than corrects other interpretations that privilege a conceptual genesis of Harris’s fiction. Cribb’s own article testifies to the correlation between the two approaches. I would even take one step further his assertion of the scientific verifiability and correspondence of Harris’s vision and suggest that both the practice and the concept of “infinite rehearsal” Harris has evolved through his fictional oeuvre run parallel to a similar process in science. In its attempt to understand the universe, science continually challenges its own discoveries and is involved in an “infinite rehearsal” of its own, an endless revisioning and revising of earlier, sometimes partial misconceptions, or, in Harris’s words, “consuming [its] own biases,” also called “sin eating” in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill.8 And if man has made tremendous progress in knowledge and understanding, he doesn’t seem any closer to answering ultimate questions about the mystery of creation, the origins of life, and what is, apparently at least, the finality of death, whether of individuals or of whole societies. Resurrection at Sorrow Hill does not claim to give conclusive answers to these questions; this would run counter to Harris’s rejection of finality, whether in ontological or in epistemological concepts. But the territory it charts opens onto dimensions in which it might be possible to trace spiritual vestiges of vanished civilizations in the Americas as a possible source of renewed approaches to art, while it also fictionalizes the process of deepening consciousness inherent in the attempt. Harris’s spatial narratives were always conceived in terms of mapping, itself a preliminary to a renewed apprehension, and therefore rebirth, of neglected areas, people(s), and their psychological motivations. The dreaming narrator’s vision in Palace of the Peacock already fashioned the geopsychical setting, the equation between self and space, to be found in all of Harris’s fictions, and visualized Brazil and Guiana as “an actual stage, a symbolic map,” a kingdom “turned into a battleground of spirit.”9 The majority of the crew were then also from Sorrow Hill, an actual small settlement in Guyana, a country mostly ignored in our highly mediatized, 8 9

Harris, Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, 130. Further page references are in the main text. Harris, Palace of the Peacock, 20.

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globalized world. Putting it on the map, however, involves far more than filling the blanks of colonial cartography or exposing its distortions. Sorrow Hill in the later novel is both “native and universal [...] born of a precipitation from voyages and movements of peoples descending from ancient America, from Renaissance Europe, from the Siberian straits, from Africa, from India, from Asia [...] equally it sprang from the soil of written and unwritten histories at a confluence of three rivers and three civilizations, pre-Columbian civilization, post-Columbian civilization, and a civilization that dwells in spaces still unplumbed” (4). By locating his narrative in an obscure heartland territory, Harris reiterates his belief that a solution to the present crisis of civilization could emerge from the margins. “The future of Guyana lies here” (24), says Hope, the gauge-reader protagonist who writes the novel as “a book of space” (17). When he and his mistress Butterfly, the beautiful and vulnerable queen of ruined El Dorado, are killed by her husband, the ambivalent Christopher D’eath, Hope nevertheless survives to re-create the history of the inmates of the Sorrow Hill Asylum for the Greats, a former prison under colonial rule. Like other Harris characters who partake of several dimensions of being, the inmates are both dead and alive, ordinary men yet dual personalities, who in their schizophrenic dividedness impersonate famous historical figures like Montezuma, Leonardo, or Socrates. They harbour the tension between destruction and survival, annihilation and the pull towards resurrection, between despair and faith, the crucial choice men face in the “Age of Sorrows,” miniaturized in their asylum. Hope, too, the “visionary madman” (240), suffers from an acute breakdown and is split between fear of extinction and a saving love, while Dr Daemon, ambivalent genius and doctor of souls, goes through bouts of despair after his bride’s death. Resurrection at Sorrow Hill is an all-embracing epic in Harris’s revised sense of the word, in a setting that bears marks of modern invasions, but, as suggested, it is pregnant with the neglected resources of a still primordial world. As a “confluence of spaces” (6), Sorrow Hill is at once a theatre of collapsed cultures and a “theatre of psyche,” whose complexities Hope charts on a scale that registers the eruption from the unconscious of extra-human faculties personified in animal creatures but also gods or semi-gods, like Quetzalcoatl or the androgynous Tiresian seer, now maimed judge, now Daemon’s grandmother, who recalls the old Arawak woman of ancestral wisdom who keeps surfacing in Harris’s fiction. Ancient myth co-exists with the invasion of science and technology.

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Hope’s gauging is computerized, while Dr Daemon’s sophisticated telescope enables him to scan the primitive landscape under his eyes, mythical and actual constellations, and the wider cosmos with its intimations of other parallel worlds. The fall of Montezuma’s empire and his personal tragedy are echoed by the fall of the Ptolemaic universe and Giordano Bruno’s burning at the stake, though it is Montezuma who bears the burden of these falls. And the historical disasters of the Renaissance reverberate in present-day conflicts. But above all, the intense individual emotions that fire such conflicts prove major sources of violence, and the inmates’ split personality and impersonations of famous past figures are symptoms of frustration generated by these undigested overwhelming emotions. Monty, for example, imprisoned for a crime he has not committed, is obsessed with the same desire for revenge as Montezuma, the fallen emperor. The mute cry of a child for whose murder the Brazilian Leonard feels responsible pursues him in Sorrow Hill. Len takes himself for Leonardo da Vinci and sees the murdered child on da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks. A striking metaphorical web unfolds from the painting, first misused by a fascist league in Brazil as emblem of the ethnically pure virgin state they want to establish, then revealing the possible transubstantiation of the murdered child into the Eucharist. This is just one example of the inmates’ capacity to transfigure their catastrophic experiences into a creative potential, a major theme in Harris’s art, as Hope gauges and records their “rising and falling levels of consciousness” (27). In their present condition, the inmates share the silence and voicelessness into which the ghosts of the past they impersonate have fallen as well as the eclipsed state of the Amerindians who haunt the narrative and take part with them in the carnival procession of funeral masks awaiting resurrection (228). Their role offers another instance of the correlation between historic trauma and possible rebirth, between what Hope calls “the substance of the voice of the dumb” (75) and “a multi-dimensional creator or god” (29). One is reminded of The Secret Ladder when Poseidon, the god-like leader of the runaway slaves, soundlessly addresses the surveyor Fenwick in “the silent accents of an ageless dumb spirit.” In Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, this has developed into a “ventriloquism of spirit” (78), which animates the “originality in the ramifications of apparently passive psyche in nature to break the hubris of one-sided human discourse” (78–79). This “ventriloquism of spirit,” also “speech prior to speech” (75), informs various expressions of creativity


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(language, music, sculpture, creative fire) that Hope can only partly apprehend. Indeed, if resurrection is creation and vice versa, “there is no second coming which is absolute and singular” (193). Rather, Hope’s non-linear charting narrative progresses through myriad images of breaking and partial re-memberment, through an alternation of sensuously evoked landscapes, sexual desire and ecstasy, and a perception of the more abstract “compositional reality” (112) of existence, a mosaic of its oppositional elements across ages and cultures. Analytical dialogues are succeeded by the resurgence of Amerindian gods in nature out of their post-conquest silence. The Timehri hand of god, for instance, is everywhere perceptible on the canvas of nature, and the mask of the Aztec monkey-god advises Montezuma to acknowledge he was partly responsible for his fall. The major metaphor running through the novel is the ceaselessly arriving “splintering ship of space” (31, 36) re-enacting different catastrophes in conjunction, however, with the reconstitution of “the composition of the vessel” (68). The multiple variations on the structural metaphors of breaking and reconstitution are so many manifestations of the resurrection as process of transformation or conversion, translation from one mode of being into another, on which Harris has commented thus: Christian ideology invests [...] in the resurrection as the conquest of Death. And I would suggest that to do so is to forfeit a revisionary momentum within resources of language. The resurrection may imply not conquest at all but a transition from one dimension or universe of sensibility to another.10

In keeping with the complete absence of monistic absolutes in Harris’s narratives, the resurrectionary process combines with alternations both in Hope’s perceptions and the configuration of the territories he charts. Subject to spells of insight and deception, Hope advances through unplumbed and resurrected spaces, through opacities or densities which alternate or run parallel with transparencies (174), sometimes gripped by “congealed yet eruptive energies of flight” (64) until, unpredictably, in a split second of illumination, he hits upon the possibility of creation: He was involved from the beginning of time and space in the composition of the vessel [...]. Above all [...] he was involved in the possibility of originating 10

“An Interview with Wilson Harris,” by Charles H. Rowell, Callaloo 18.1 (Winter

1995): 194.

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dimension that gave a new intensity to every splinter [...] in the bristling orchestra of BIG BANG . Big Bang drum of the rapids. Was such inchoate origin or unfinished capacity an inimitable progression in its own right in parallel with the crumbling progression of the end-game world, the end-game vessel of the globe within the rapids? (68)

As “space attendant” (26) and “resurrection guide” (28), Hope is in search of “a truth that lies behind the ruins of adventure, colonization, that infest the face of the globe” (55), but he discovers that he can gain only intermittent access to windows into a reality out of reach in its totality yet partly perceptible through a growing “phenomenal literacy” (10, 12, 18, 28), another meaningful Harris coinage, conveying a capacity to read terrifying yet exalting depths and heights of landscape and history and to translate them into art. And just as his mapping thrusts him nearer the unseizable “composition of wholeness” (110), so his fictional charting allows him to apprehend a voiceless spirit that had surrendered its voicelessness “to sounding rocks and waters and fires and soil” (35). The mute and victimized intermittently reappear in Harris’s fiction in a character called Nameless. Significantly an archangel in this novel, he throws further light both on Hope’s writing-process and on the nature of the resurrection. He questions Hope’s claims to single authorship and says that he writes himself into the pages of Hope’s book (171). Indeed, the narrative, initiated by Daemon’s grandmother, not only unfolds through Hope’s dialogues with the “mad” but is also frequently taken over by those who guide, inspire or point to the self-deceptions of his charting. He is in no way a self-sufficient author; rather, the narrative shapes itself through him, although, as Harris was careful to point out some years ago, this kind of effacement does not mean “the death of the author” in Barthes’s sense or in postmodernist practice, which, in his view, can lead to language games in the absence of referential meaning. The relativization of authorship in his fiction is inherent in creativity as a process of reciprocity: linkages between characters and authors, linkages between a painted world that paints the painter even as the painter paints [...] a written world that writes the writer as the writer writes [...]. (147) In such mutuality of living text, living fiction, it was possible to bear the shock of becoming a tool of an elemental God [...]. (155)

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The resurrection, too, evolves from such reciprocity between, on the one hand, altering, extended, or keener perceptions and, on the other, active presences and phenomena erupting from Hope’s unconscious. So, like fiction writing, the resurrection is endless process or, to use another Harris expression, “unfinished genesis.” It is above all latent survival and the possible resurgence of an essential component in the make-up of men and cultures. When Nameless explains to Hope the way he may envisage it, he concludes: “We are relics of fire” (242); in that fire and the rhythmical harmony perceived on and off in the narrative lies the secret of the resurrection, a multifaceted phenomenon, revival of unmapped dimensions, of the spirit in man and nature, of consciousness and conscience, of love and of meaning. It issues from a fracture in what Nameless sees as “the paralysis of materialism” (241). Daemon had earlier encouraged Hope to a “spiritual subversion [...] instinct with creative insight” (84). This can be read as a summing-up of a religious strand in Harris’s writing, which also involves breaking prior to transfiguration. We saw that the mad, broken by life, were associated with the dumb victims of conquest, themselves ghosts partaking of an elusive creator. The mad ones, too, one character says, “know that a vulnerable humanity may strike a concert with Shadows of divine element that are alive” (156). Although never idealized, madness can nevertheless be “involuntary genius” (53), a spur to its own transfiguration into “creative schizophrenia,” as Michael Gilkes calls what he also sees as a major source of creativeness in the Caribbean. In Harris’s fiction, the Caribbean predicament extends its creative potential to the resolution of similar world-wide crises: Hope’s peculiar neurosis drives him to create fictions in which transfigured oppositions are necessary if the incorporation of one culture by another is to become an evolving source of re-visionary healing within diverse bodies and cultures that do relate to each other yet are at war with each other everywhere [...]. (162–63).

At the end of the novel, Hope hears a kind of music synonymous with creation and finds in all ruptures the origin of an art opening onto what can only be a ceaseless renewed charting: A trinity of pens [Hope’s, Daemon’s, Archangel’s] lay now within the breach of catastrophe, eloquent, cool flame, charcoal bum and splinter, and archangelic hand of the Clock.

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Hope seized them all with ecstatic gratitude as if he stood upon the very threshold of his book and a chorus of griefs arose within which an unseen orchestra moved and reassembled singing, dancing pillars where flame had stood around the ageless Mask of the seer. (244)

“And the response in the book?” the reader could then ask with one of the characters. There is no dogmatic response [says Dr Daemon] [...]. The ship of the church, the ship of the state, the ship of a civilization, are weathered, weathering masks of a broken family (and its outcasts, as well as its survivors) through which the resurrection breaks open all incorporations [...] and thereby gives profoundest numinosity to an Imagination that recovers, in a variety of guises, those we appear to have lost. (166)

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Obscure Sorrow Hill Seminal Ground of Endless Creation

Sorrow Hill was both a legendary harbour and a human settlement, it was an epitaph and a cradle. It was native and universal [...]. It was born of a precipitation of voyages and movements of peoples descending from Ancient America, from Renaissance Europe, from the Siberian straits, from Africa, from India, from Asia. Sorrow Hill was no artefact of social engineering. It could not be framed within a formula. It was born from a precipitation of craft imbued with legendary voyages, yes, but it equally sprang from the soil of written and unwritten histories at a confluence of three rivers and three civilizations, pre-Columbian civilization, post-Columbian civilization, and a civilization that dwells in spaces still unplumbed which embrace North, South, East, West, and one sometimes felt other Nameless horizons. — Harris, Resurrection at Sorrow Hill

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of an actual settlement near Bartica in Guyana, at the confluence of the Cuyuni, Mazaruni and Essequibo rivers, Wilson Harris presents in a nutshell the multi-layered significance of what is surely one of the most obscure places in the world as the potential source of a new vision of humanity and of a future civilization “that dwells in places still unplumbed.” To understand the full import of this location in Harris’s work as a metaphor of rebirth and creativity in the wake of the colonial encounter, one should remember that Sorrow Hill was a burial ground for both local people and river captains who had led expeditions into Guyana in search of its legendary riches. In the vicinity of Bartica also stands an old fort built by the Dutch in the eighteenth century, “Kijk-Over-Al” (look over/survey all), a name which clearly expresses the determination of the imperial gaze to exert full control over the conquered territory. N THIS DESCRIPTION

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The passage quoted above inextricably blends geography with history and even myth, but my purpose is to show the primacy of geography, of the meaning of place and landscape in Harris’s reinterpretation of history. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said writes that “none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography,” a struggle not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings. He defines his purpose as “a kind of geographical inquiry into historical experience.”1 Conversely, Harris’s work is an imaginative, historical, social and metaphysical inquiry into an original geographical experience. In an often quoted essay on “The Subjective Imagination,” he recalls that on two successive expeditions he was leading on the Potaro river, a tributary of the Essequibo, the anchor of his boat gripped the bed of the stream. The second time it happened he and the crew would have been pulled into the Tumatumari falls and decapitated on the rocks (an experience imagined in Tumatumari), had he not managed to pull up the anchor. When he got to the river-bank, he realized that it was hooked in the lost anchor he had cut off on the previous surveying journey. Harris’s account of the experience and its effect on his consciousness, an “illumination,” as he calls it, also throw light on the source of his art, on “catalysts of experience within the density of place [...] that become the inner ground of a narrative fiction of juxtapositions.”2 It appears from subsequent essays and the many protagonists in his fiction who are either surveyors or engineers travelling on rivers in the Guyanese interior, like the peoples and conqueror who over the centuries penetrated the land, that he came to see his work as a professional surveyor, before becoming a full-time writer, as an opportunity to gauge the impact of colonialism, first on his country, then on a global scale.3 At the time of the experience described above, the two anchors brought to the surface of his memory his own Amerindian ancestry and surviving preColumbian peoples but also the crews of many expeditions lost in the Guyanese rivers, while their constellation clearly symbolized a latent relationship between the two peoples (Amerindians and conquering crews) which Harris was to investigate again and again. 1

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994): 6. “The Subjective Imagination,” 61. 3 On this subject, see Tim Cribb, “T.W. Harris – Sworn Surveyor,” where it is argued that Harris’s work as a surveyor was for him the source of a new epistemology. 2

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In subsequent essays and interviews Harris has often insisted that landscape is never passive4 and has evoked his struggle to conceive the kind of language and narrative that would adequately express his perception of it as a “living text,” its voices and speech in the Guyanese interior, which he interprets as so many expressions of animal and human life embedded in nature. This accounts for his stylistic fusion of all categories of being, not just geological, vegetable, animal, human features but the protean fluidity that informs their interweaving. At this stage I will only mention a few that shape his narratives as they originate from an orchestration of human with non-human elements. Examples abound as his protagonists “[navigate] the veins and arteries of the heartland.”5 Suffice it to recall the beginning of the expedition in Palace of the Peacock when the boat is in the grip of “a living streaming hand that issued from the bowels of the earth,”6 “the silent faces and lips raised out of the heart of the stream” (33), the skeleton footfall on the river-bank, which frightens the narrator or, to take a more recent example, the “Who You” bird talking to Hope, the protagonist of Resurrection at Sorrow Hill (49–63). One must also keep in mind that each of Harris’s narratives as well as his work as a whole progresses through movements inspired by the animated configuration of the landscape, nature itself, an alternation of eruption from, and dying again into, apparent nothingness discernible in the interweaving of life and death in the existential process; of blindness and insight in man’s consciousness; the movement of advance and retreat in Stevenson’s penetration of the jungle in Heartland, the ebb and flow of his emotions and, as we shall see, the mixed twins of fate and freedom in Genesis of the Clowns. These are manifestations of the endless vital process Harris discerns at the heart of all existence and experience. Similarly, in the wideopen canvas of his fiction characters disappear, only to reappear in later novels, as we saw in Heartland and Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness. The same is true of some mythical locations like Raven’s Head in The Eye of the Scarecrow, while the actual Sorrow Hill reappears 4

On this subject, see “The Landscape of Dreams,” a conversation between Wilson Harris and Michael Gilkes, in Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek (Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1991): 31–38. See also “Wilson Harris Interviewed by Alan Riach,” 33–65. 5 Harris, Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, 56. Further page references are in the main text. 6 Harris, Palace of the Peacock, 21. Further page references are in the main text.

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at intervals with accretions of meaning inversely proportionate to its apparent irrelevance on Guyana’s map, and certainly the world’s. In Palace of the Peacock, several members of the crew are from Sorrow Hill,7 already presented as a locus of death and resurrection. Since Harris’s first novel is the object of inexhaustible commentary, I am content to simply refer to it here as the seed of an ever deeper, more complex exploration of the imaginative resources and spirit of place in his art of fiction. In Book Two of The Eye of the Scarecrow, significantly subtitled “Genesis,” the narrator travels from “Waterloo,” a street in Georgetown, where he had glimpsed “the hollow darkness of their room” at the back of destitute tenants,8 to Sorrow Hill, “the lost womb of a mining town” (48). Then, standing on a bridge with Sorrow Hill at his back, he watches A ripple, a footprint almost, [appear] in the middle of the water and [vanish] [...]. The river over the sandbank was a glittering [...] enclosure, a coffin of transparency [...]. The dazzling sleeper of spirit, exposed within the closed elements [...] awoke all too suddenly and slid in a flash [...] turning darker still as it fell [...] vanishing into a ripple, a dying footfall again [...] and rising once more [...] distinct trace of animation upon a flank of stone. (48–49)

The “dazzling sleeper of spirit” is a manifestation of the nameless dimension, later called “IT ,” the apparent void in which all victimized, exploited, destitute people(s) move. Hence the juxtaposition in the narrative of the crumbling tenements of Waterloo Street with Sorrow Hill. “IT ” is also “the trespass of feeling rising anew out of the stumbling labour and melting pot of history” (49). In other words, a purely geographical phenomenon is equated with the arousal in the narrator’s consciousness of the violated feelings of the victims of history and with history itself textualized into the landscape. This is just one passage among many in the novel, in which the configuration of place and its attendant natural phenomena are clearly the very source of vision (the opening eye of the scarecrow– narrator) as well as the “Well of Silence” (95) out of which Harris’s proliferating, protean imagery evolves. In kaleidoscopic fashion, the “Well of 7

See Desmond Hamlet, “Renewal in a Far More Resonant Key: Reflections on the Mad Sin-Eating Relics of Fire in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 17 (Summer 1997): 84–89. Hamlet mainly discusses the meaning of the resurrection in Palace of the Peacock and Resurrection at Sorrow Hill. He also notes the allusion to Sorrow Hill in The Eye of the Scarecrow. 8 Harris, The Eye of the Scarecrow, 30. Further page references are in the main text.

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Silence,” “reality of the original Word” (95), is at different times the void, the unconscious and, increasingly in Harris’s later fiction, the sacred, the unfathomable centre and multi-dimensional androgynous God. As we shall see in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, the protagonist’s consciousness is awakened by sound as much as sight and the “dazzling sleeper of spirit” becomes a “ventriloquism of spirit [...] the activation of inherent originality in the ramifications of apparently passive psyche in nature to break the hubris of one-sided human discourse” (Resurrection 78–79). This is no pantheistic idealization of nature but the livingness of the world manifesting itself in voices other than human: Is there a language akin to music threaded into space and time which is prior to human discourse? [...] prenatural voices in rivers, rapids, giant waterfalls, rock, tree.9

Except for Palace of the Peacock and to a lesser extent The Secret Ladder, Genesis of the Clowns is probably the novel which most explicitly allegorizes the psychological pressures on the crew who are both accomplices in and victims of the geographical penetration of the land. All of Harris’s novels stage a journey, sometimes limited in space and time, and not always into the heartland or even involving Guyana. But it is always also one of psychic revelation, though sometimes in retrospect, as in Genesis of the Clowns. Moreover, the movement of advance and retreat already mentioned, the approach to the object of exploration from several directions, as in The Eye of the Scarecrow, breaks up the linear charting which Harris views as the imposition of a deceptive structure on both physical territory and narrative. On the oscillating course of his fiction, Genesis looks back to the elemental clues associated with Sorrow Hill in Palace of the Peacock and The Eye of the Scarecrow and forward to Resurrection at Sorrow Hill. The first-person narrator in Genesis, symbolically called Frank Wellington, is of white Creole English and Brazilian stock. His parents, who died on a journey down the Essequibo when their boat capsized, were buried at Sorrow Hill. He worked as a government surveyor until he emigrated to England; twenty years later, on a midsummer day in 1974, he receives a letter announcing the death of Hope, his foreman. This entails the evocation of expeditions he led twenty-five to thirty years before in Guyana, of the personality of Hope 9

“The Music of Living Landscapes,” 40.

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and of the crew whom he now sees as characters in a “shadowplay of genesis of suns” (86). “The shadowplay of a genesis of suns” develops out of the major dynamic metaphor in the novel, cosmic rather than geographical, the Copernican revolution by which the sun of Empire is being decentred, just as, in his re-visioning of the past, he becomes aware of the power of changing feeling to set in motion a globe immobilized in the days of Empire: a Copernican revolution of sentiment that displaces rivers, lands into a wheel of dreams imprinted around each sun in the very ground under one’s body and feet. (92)

The “processional sentiments” telescoping people and feeling into one expression in the first quotation stems from another, this time economic, metaphor: the pay-table to which Wellington’s crew came one after another to collect their scant wages, though he did not realize at the time the price they paid in suppressed feeling for serving the Empire.10 While talking to each of them, Wellington used to sketch them as doodles in the margins of his field book, symbolically the margins of the colonial territory. He now sees these doodles as “breathless bodies” on the “stilled page of the globe” (87), mere instruments doing his bidding, returning twenty-five years later to seek their “real wages” (92), his contrite acknowledgement of his former callousness and of their contribution in hard labour and disorientation to the “capital genesis” (accretion of profit) on the pay-table of Empire. The figure most relevant to my argument is Reddy, an Amerindian whom Wellington hired in the 1940s at Sorrow Hill to carry his theodolite, which Reddy called “the pole of the sun” (121), thus transforming the telescope’s scientific source of vision into a mythic one (one of the many examples of the blending of science and myth in Harris’s fiction). Wellington now sees their original meeting as an instance of “the frozen genesis of [a colonial] encounter” (112), also that, although Reddy saw in him a substitute father-figure, he (Wellington) ignored the nature of his fear in a universe from which he was being alienated. In Reddy’s and his people’s mythic perception of sky and earth, the gods, givers of light, inhabited the descending waters falling from the pole of the sun (113). But as he travels 10

Note the novel’s epigraph: “In the psychology of the sentiments another Copernican revolution is needed”; Stuart Hampshire, A Kind of Materialism.

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with Wellington from Sorrow Hill to the Abary, a coastal area, he sees with terror objects, logs and trees, moving of their accord against the stream, and even that the “very water itself [...] moved contrary to the shadow of the gods” (113). At the time, he hid his fear in sudden flares of laughter. Now Wellington sees that the demise of his gods and the reduction of his culture to a mere satellite were for him a Copernican reversal. In the general economy of the novel, the geographical phenomenon frequently observed by Harris – powerful Atlantic tides pushing upstream and running counter to the normal flow of the river – produce circular movements and set in motion an “unfrozen genesis” (127) or “revolving and counter-revolving” (92) physical and psychical forces. Thus nature itself offers a relativization of cultures, one invading the land from the Atlantic, the other rising up from the Equator, revolving in opposite directions, not around the static dominating sun of Empire but around the “unfathomable centre” (117), the undiscoverable source of being that informs all material masks and shapes Harris’s fiction. Another agent of unfrozen genesis is Reddy’s sister, whom Wellington also meets at Sorrow Hill. In Harris’s earlier fiction, Guyanese women were frequently shown to be mere objects of gratification and exploitation by domineering men, though they could be also a major catalyst of vision and potential saviour, as in Palace of the Peacock. In The Waiting Room and Tumatumari, the protagonist and centre of consciousness is a woman engaged in a complex process of self-realization and imaginative revisioning of history. In his latest novels, the “madonna/whore” complex has evolved into a “Fury/virgin” ambivalence.11 Moreover, landscape and cosmos are often sexualized in Harris’s fiction – for example, in The Waiting Room and, strikingly, in Jonestown, in which sexual intercourse between elements in the cosmos becomes an act of creation and leads to a vision of the lost city of Atlantis as “a counterpoint between rape and devastation [...] to balance extinction with a renascence […] of lost cul11

On the “mjadonna / whore” see Michael Gilkes, “The Madonna Pool: Woman as Muse of Identity,” Journal of West Indian Literature 1 (June 1987): 1–18. See also Mark McWatt, “The Madonna / Whore: Womb of Possibilities,” in The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris, ed. Michael Gilkes (London: Macmillan, 1989): 31–44. On the “Fury / Virgin,” see Harris, “Apprenticeship to the Furies,” River City 16 (Summer 1996): 104–15, repr. in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination: Selected Essays by Wilson Harris, ed. Andrew Bundy (London: Routledge, 1999): 226–36.

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tures.”12 There is a long literary tradition of identification of land with woman, especially in colonial and postcolonial travel narratives, as well as an abundance of recent critical commentary on the “double colonization” of each. For Harris, too, space is feminine, as his well-known phrase “womb of space,” first used in Genesis of the Clowns (120), shows. Not only do the women in the novel make one with the land and the “female earth” (114), Wellington has desired them all and “undressed” them all, if only in his mind. But it is with Reddy’s sister that he experiences “a climax in [his] bones [...] consistent with a bond that lay between [him] and a file of breathless bodies” (122), as if the intercourse with her, whether real or imagined, were also one with her people. It is this conjunction of woman, people, land that arouses in him a vision of glimmering figures “in the bed of the river [...] in a mysterious landscape,” figures he now sees as actors in “a comedy of divinity whose roots lay on the mountains [...] as they lay in Sorrow Hill, as they lay in blackened rooms of cheap graves and lodgings” (124). As mentioned above, it was the letter announcing Hope’s death that triggered off the “comedy” in which Wellington’s crew began to move again in his consciousness, “clowns” or ambivalent trickster figures coming to life and stimulating his alternative vision of the traumas of colonization on individual soul and society. The Marti brothers, for example, perpetuated the economic deprivation of their East Indian forebears in a “fast” that allowed them to build up capital and later invest in various economic ventures in imitation of foreign neocapitalism. On the other hand, the African Hope, who bears the scars of his own and his people’s sufferings around his mouth (82, 88), sought an outlet for his frustrated desires and ambitions in womanizing, in velleities of power (he was a great admirer of dictators), and in revenge. Wellington’s first memory of him is of a slightly threatening figure when Hope emerges from the dark in a receding storm that broke the ridge-pole of the tent the foreman had put up for him, as if a shot had been fired and just missed him.13 It gives Wellington the impression of being confronted with the repressed violence of the crew, though it is only when re-living the event that he understands its implications, acknowledges “a central darkness of buried sun” 12

Harris, Jonestown, 136. There are frequent storms, both natural and psychological, in Harris’s fiction. They arouse a sense of threat but can also lead to vision and liberation. 13

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(92), and sees himself riveted to the wheel of Empire as to a “moving threshold of consciousness” (86). Although it is never explicitly stated, one feels that his (the colonizer’s) assumed superiority and indifference generate a violence which finally explodes when Hope kills his ward, Lucille, apparently to assert “a jealous right to possess properties of fleshand-blood” (148), then turns the weapon against himself. Nevertheless, the narrative is inconclusive, and apart from the genesis of the clowns who enlighten Wellington on his earlier lack of insight, the main function of his shadowplay is to unblock the stasis of their former relations and to generate “revolving and counter-revolving potentials to which we begin to relate” (108). So that when he pulls the trigger, Hope may have seen Wellington as “a head among the clowns” (148) just as the surveyor sees “[his] own clown’s head welling up on the page” (143). However, his perception of his true relation with the crew, his response to it, and the nature of his new vision are essentially moral, though they also generate a new conception of being. True, the economic, social and political iniquities of the colonial system are represented through the various tensions in the crew’s everyday life. But I cannot agree with Sandra Drake, who, in her generally perceptive analysis of the novel, asserts that Harris, like other Caribbean intellectuals, addresses the question “of how to synthesize Black consciousness and solidarity with some aspects of Marxist–Leninist theory and practice with other more traditional values.”14 In both The Eye of the Scarecrow and Genesis of the Clowns, Harris’s characters criticize the Marxist-inspired strike in Guyana in 1948, and in other novels Harris criticizes Marxism–Leninism as much as capitalism, especially in their dogmatic form. In Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, Hope resists the temptation to dive into the midst of the turbulent populations beneath Sorrow Hill “to unravel inner hopelessness with their demagogic addiction to convention, to the surfaces of revolution, to authoritarianism” (69). My impression is that the anonymous letter sent to Wellington in Genesis of the Clowns but actually signed F.W. (a suggestion that the nameless writer is one of his own selves) points to various directions open to postcolonial Guyana, obviously a concern of the symbolically named Hope. The letter’s subtitle, “Counter-Revolving Currencies of Fate and Freedom on the Paytable of the Sky” (142), echoes the first sentence of the novel and is a 14

Sandra Drake, Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition: A New Architecture of the World (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1986): 161–62.

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counterpoint to the many failures deriving from colonial stasis in the past. But it translates what sounds at first like economic return (currencies) onto an existential plane where fate and freedom, confinement to what seems an inevitable destiny and the capacity to liberate oneself from it, are inextricably bound and the shadowplay goes on in a cosmic/spiritual sphere, the “paytable of the sky.” That Hope himself/itself remains an actor in this unending play is a possibility tendered by the letter writer: “Perhaps you were there in the shadows of that last paytable midnight and he did not fire. Then history may possess an unwritten anecdote, an eclipsed but naked spiritual fact” (146). This spiritual fact is unearthed and more deeply scrutinized in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, in which Hope, still a gauge reader but now protagonist and part-narrator, has taken over the authorship of the text from his former skipper and writes a “dream-book” which is also a “book of space” (17), though, in keeping with a process recurrent in his later fiction, it is edited by Wilson Harris. Hope is also a part-time inmate in the Sorrow Hill asylum, formerly a prison where the ambivalent Christopher D’eath at one time occupied each of the seven cells. Here is another feature of the aftermath of colonialism: repression has given way to psychological depression, already fictionalized in Tumatumari and The Angel at the Gate. Harris adheres to Michael Gilkes’s concept of “creative schizophrenia,”15 postulating that, like any other rupture, self-dividedness can be an opportunity to break up a static condition (here, blocked psyche) before therapeutic reconstitution. When, for example, Hope’s mind “split” following a fearful experience in the jungle, “[it] was the beginning of acute self-knowledge” (20). The other inmates or “clowns of Sorrow Hill” who seem to “traverse a border-line between madness and genius” (3) also suffer from this schizophrenic dividedness and illustrate the doubling in characterization frequent in Harris’s writing as they impersonate famous historical figures like Montezuma, Leonardo, Socrates and even an archangel, indirectly showing the need to reconcile within themselves and within a place dense with the psychological vestiges of conquest the variegated parts of their cultural inheritance.

15 Michael Gilkes, Creative Schizophrenia: The Caribbean Cultural Challenge (The Third Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture; Coventry: University of Warwick, Centre for Caribbean Studies, 1986).

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Harris explains in an introductory note (unpaginated) that the inmates who don the masks of former “greats,” “characters of the past-in-thepresent,” partake of a pre-Columbian tradition perceptible in its arts. So does “the human/animal fluid and variable identity” Hope discovers outside and within himself as he travels from Sorrow Hill to Lower and Upper Camaria and on to Serpent Creek. One example of this tradition and fluid identity can be found when Hope is urged by Daemon, the asylum doctor, to wear a holy monkey mask to talk to Monty/Montezuma and attempt to penetrate in dialogue the nature of a “terrifying revenge that Conquest had engineered, [...] the inner desperation of victim cultures which cemented their deprivation into a royalty of hate” (92–93): “[The mask] has authentic roots in the rainforest and some say it possesses navigational skills, superior to those of Columbus himself, as a mimic deity or pilot of the buried living....” (90)

This is just one of several examples of the ‘resurrection’ of a pre-Columbian phenomenal world-view; it attempts here to approach Montezuma’s fall and his people’s desire for revenge in terms of their own culture. It is also an example of genuine cross-culturalism and of the variable ontological map that Hope both charts and embodies as he is being challenged “to break the contours of fate” (88). Already in “Genesis,” Wellington could hear “a jumble of voices” arising out of Sorrow Hill (120), “the vaguest murmur of a shadowy crowd far in the distance” that merges with “the distant growl of the rapids” (125). In Resurrection, Hope’s gauge-reading of the level of rising and falling river at the Sorrow Hill “resurrection stage” is also one of “rising and falling levels of consciousness in rivers of space” (27). But as he travels from Sorrow Hill to Serpent Creek, he is made aware by his guide (archetypal judge) of the need “upon the precipice of civilization to explore the descent of populations all around the globe in the maelstrom” (59). It is, of course, part of Hope’s function to reintegrate them into the resurrectionary, evolutionary process, just as, later in the novel, the revisioning of the other inmates’ experience in his book of dreams enhances his insight into the way that process operates: “the atmosphere of the asylum was now charged with the unfinished genesis of a vessel that had arisen in counterpoint to the funeral barge of an age” (200). The spatialization of experience in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill is allpervasive, informing the narrative throughout in both content and form,

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while Hope’s capacity to read space increases with his “phenomenal literacy” (10, 28). Within the limits of this chapter, I can only briefly discuss the ship-metaphor as the major carrier of meaning. Readers of Palace of the Peacock will remember that Donne’s indispensable means of conquest, his boat, is equated with his mind (“the crew every man mans and lives in his inmost ship [...] and mind” 46) and that Donne abandons it as his own hulk to rot and crumble when he is at last prepared to accept the crumbling of his domineering personality. In Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, the ship represents space itself or, I should say, all spaces geographical as well as all other spheres: social, political, cultural, religious. It is also the means of charting those spaces, an instrument not ready-made or taken for granted, since Hope fashions it as he goes along and is involved “from the beginning of time and space in the composition of the vessel” (68). This sentence recalls the role of hope as a necessary ingredient in man’s progression in life “in parallel with the crumbling progression of the endgame world, the end-game vessel of the globe within the rapids” (68). Also in Hope’s perception of the parallel between faith and end-game despair lies one expression of the “composition of reality” (112) in which he both takes part and charts, while knowing he can never apprehend “reality” completely, only follow its partial breaking and re-memberments. As both symbol and instrument of the “voyaging imagination,”16 the “foundering, self-reconstituting vessel” (217) keeps splintering through the novel, as it does in all the shapes it assumes in various fields of human activity and institutions: The ship of the church, the ship of the state, the ship of a civilization, are weathered, weathering masks of a broken family (and its outcasts as well as its survivors) through which the resurrection breaks open all incorporations [...]; and thereby gives profoundest numinosity to an Imagination that recovers, in a variety of guises, those we appear to have lost. (166)

Hope himself and, at a further remove, Harris, his editor, are the imaginative vessels through which the interrelated histories of ancient America and Renaissance Europe have been resurrected, textualized and set in motion, converting the terrors and traumas of past and present into a scene of love and compassion (244). But the “vessel of the resurrection” (233), 16

Part of this essay was published as “Intuition, Myth, Imagination, Memory,” in How Novelists Work, ed. Maura Dooley (Bridgend: Poetry Wales, 2000): 45–55.

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which started from Sorrow Hill and retrieved the actors of private and historical tragedies on the way, keeps moving, not towards a resolution of humanities’ crises but only maintaining its course as the vehicle of endless creation, in nature and fiction, a creation that has been metaphorized throughout Hope’s journey and is epitomized in an abstract meditation in his book: And the muses of fiction − that had long been marginalized in asylums − were being summoned once again, in the history of civilization, to begin to plumb a paradox. There was a paradoxical equation between an extraordinary theme of unity in all species, phenomena, things, galaxies, and the fragmentation of the modern world. Such fragmentation was not realistically absolute (though it threatened to overwhelm us as such) but a medium that could make strangely clear to the Imagination the price humanity was beginning to pay in gaining a composition of visionary and re-visionary interconnectedness of species and substances and galaxies within every splinter that is buoyed up by a brokenness that runs hand in hand with an Immaculate Idea of Being. (228)

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I

“Tricksters of Heaven” Visions of Holocaust in Jonestown and Fred D’Aguiar’s Bill of Rights

N O V E M B E R 1 9 7 8 , there took place in Guyana what must have been the first and most horrific mass suicide/murder of cult members in contemporary society. Nearly one thousand people died (among them two hundred and seventy-six children), who were forced to drink a sweetened cyanide soup or were shot on the spot. The alleged purpose of the Reverend Jim Jones, an American like his victims, in founding the “People’s Temple” sect and a settlement in Guyana was to create a model community and cooperative farm, a centre of light which, as in Conrad’s prophetic Heart of Darkness, only brought death and destruction. There was even a macabre repetition of Marlow’s expedition to the Central Station when, a few days before the massacre, an American Congressman, Leo Ryan, who came to investigate what was going on in Jonestown, was shot dead and some of his companions wounded by Jones’s acolytes as they were getting off the plane on the nearby airstrip. In Black and White, the late Shiva Naipaul wrote an account of the tragedy, in which he emphasized the support Jones received from American and Guyanese institutions and from eminent personalities in both California and Guyana. He brings to light the general lack of moral discrimination and insight into such ventures, the mistaken tolerance which, as Paula Burnett points out in her excellent review of Wilson Harris’s Jonestown, makes us all accomplices in the event.1 Naipaul’s inquiries into the “drama of ideas” which preceded Jones’s emigration to Guyana with his followers in 1977 and into various groups of Californian society provide yet another version of the American dream gone wrong and make 1

N

Paula Burnett, “Apocalypse Now and Then,” New Statesman (12 July 1996): 48.

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clear two disturbing aspects of a now more familiar phenomenon: a total rejection of personal responsibility by anyone involved and the moral confusion of a society seeking refuge in a variety of phony spiritual or communal ventures. But his argument that the establishment of Jonestown in Guyana squared with the prevailing corruption in the country appears, to say the least, questionable: I was not particularly surprised when, one morning, I heard on a BBC Radio news programme that an American Congressman, who had gone to Guyana to investigate an agricultural commune inhabited by hundreds of fellow Americans and run by a socialist preacher from California, had been shot and killed in an ambush at a remote jungle airstrip. Such an event, I felt, was entirely in keeping with the atmosphere of the Cooperative Socialist Republic.2

How would Naipaul have interpreted similar events that have since taken place in the U S A ,3 Switzerland, Canada, France and Japan (where the destruction intended for the non-initiates of the Aum sect was to reach inconceivable proportions)? The group killings and suicides in France took place in Christmas 1995, when seventeen survivors of the “Temple Solaire” sect, of whom fifty-three members had died the year before in Switzerland, were killed and burned on an altar in Vercors. In between the two events, neither the Swiss nor the French police, informed of the sect’s activities, tried to prevent a repetition of the killings, nor was anyone brought to trial. Are they to be accused, like the Guyanese authorities, of showing a predilection for welcoming, assisting and sheltering strange people, a weakness springing from a peculiar sort of gangsterism that can contain within itself both corrupt cynicism of the highest order and ideological motivation?4

Or is the rational, credulous, naive incapacity to understand the charismatic and manipulative power of sect leaders a more complex issue than Naipaul realized?

2

Shiva Naipaul, Black and White (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980): 9. In 50 Great Conspiracies of All Time: History’s Biggest Mysteries, Coverups, and Cabals (Secaucus N J : Citadel Press, 1995), the authors Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen argue that Jones was linked to the C I A and make the horrible suggestion that Jonestown was a C I A experiment in a “mind-control program” that ran amok. 4 Naipaul, Black and White, 36. 3

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Wilson Harris and Fred D’Aguiar, both of Guyanese origin,5 have explored what one of Naipaul’s informants called “the mystery of that place and those people.”6 Both offer an inside, fictional interpretation of the Jonestown tragedy, which nevertheless throws light on a major twentiethcentury phenomenon. I intend to concentrate on Harris’s novel Jonestown. However, Fred D’Aguiar’s remarkable poetic sequence Bill of Rights, published after Harris’s novel, imagines the experience of a member of the People’s Temple and significantly complements Harris’s (and his protagonist’s) largely metaphysical dialogue with the dead. D’Aguiar’s poem is in one way such a dialogue, too, since the narrative voice is mainly that of an anonymous speaker whose letters sent from Jonestown to a Rasta friend in Brixton remain unanswered and he learns only after his return that his friend has died of cancer. The thirty-three-year-old protagonist seems to have been one of the underprivileged to whom Jones claimed to be offering a purposeful life and redemption. An ordinary man, “A mercen- / ary maybe, archvillain / certainly not,”7 observant and given to introspection, he left his Brixton council flat to join the cult leader in the U S A , ending up in Guyana, a triangular journey evoking not actual slavery despite its colonial resonance and ghetto experiences in Brixton, Chattanooga and Kalamazoo, but a persistent mind-enslavement, the “mind-forged manacles” that Blake already perceived in a crowded, morally blind metropolis. With comparable poetic concision, the narrator conveys the swift transition from the neophytes’ enthusiasm and unconditional dedication to Jones (God the Father, as he actually called himself) to despair as their utopian project rapidly crumbled in their inexperienced struggle with a pitiless nature and they survived only thanks to the generosity and practical advice of the local Amerindians and the help of the Guyanese government. Very soon, too, Jones’s perversity and tyrannical methods came to the fore, reinforcing the protagonist’s sense of being trapped and cut off from the rest of the world, as in any dictatorship. Although the 5

Both D’Aguiar and Harris think Jonestown was the most horrific catastrophe that could have happened in Guyana. Another British Guyanese writer, David Dabydeen, wrote a documentary on the massacre for B B C Radio 3 and 4. 6 Black and White, 69. 7 Fred D’Aguiar, Bill of Rights (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998): 2. Further page references are in the main text.

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memory of it later interrupts his evocation of life on the farm, the massacre itself and its immediate aftermath are briefly but poignantly recorded early in the narrative: Men, women and children queue before a pot More like a vat and drink or else are shot, Their cries that could raise the dead, raise hair And a thousand flutes in a death air, A thousand flutes piled on top Each other, like so many grains of rice [...] A thousand flutes for bullets A thousand souls for flutes A thousand bullets for souls [...] Silence except for the baying of the blood Silence above the wind in the trees Silence as the river breaches its banks Silence of us like fish in a tank Silence in the lengthening plait of vines Silence [...] (15–16)

The bone-flute, also a recurring metaphor in Wilson Harris’s writing, was an instrument made by the Caribs out of the hollowed bones of their dead enemies, particularly evocative of their encounters with the Spanish invaders before they were completely exterminated by them. In Harris’s fiction, it is a vessel of “mutual spaces” between enemies and a “bridge upon which the ghost of music runs [...] between the living and the dead.”8 D’Aguiar’s metaphorization of Jones’s victims into flutes also connects the Jonestown killings with the Renaissance conquest and its victims. The anaphora in the last strophe quoted above, a typical feature of Caribbean poetry, particularly in the oral tradition, punctuates the rhythm of the sequence and, on a larger scale, its structure. The alternation of conversational and higher diction, the many-levelled tones, voices, linguistic registers and rhythmic patterns, another idiosyncrasy of Caribbean verse, are impressively varied. So is the intertextual fabric of the narrative, which orchestrates brief citations from Shakespeare, de la Mare, Auden, Keats (ironically suggesting the gap between the romantic idealization and 8

Harris, “On the Beach,” Landfall 39.3 (1985): 339.

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the reality of the South American heartland) with West Indian folk- and slave-songs, calypso, reggae poetry and brief echoes of Brathwaite, Walcott, Matthews, Marley and Linton Kwesi Johnson. Poetry, then, is here the polyphonic instrument through which D’Aguiar’s own Bill of Rights takes shape while mapping the extraordinary cultural diversity and resources of the English language in Britain and, in the process, asserting the people’s human rights. A “Bill of Rights” was also the ideal the protagonist shared with his Brixton friend (73–76) and which drove him to Jonestown. Having survived the tragedy, he retires to New England, numb and apparently still morally confused, oscillating between remorse and the rejection of responsibility (“Nor have I hollowed an enemy’s bone / into a flute” 126). He lives utterly cut off from all human contact, except for the regular visits of a whore. Nevertheless, neither he nor the reader can help being haunted by the ghosts of Jonestown: When I walk, it’s over a thousand Dead; so I stand on the spot Staring at one place Whose pattern, I pray, will not Scramble into a town full of dead. (124)

Harris’s novel opens where the poem ends and concentrates on the spiritual numbness of those involved in the venture and of a humanity contaminated by the sickness of a dying age. It indirectly forestalls the anticlimactic last line of D’Aguiar’s sequence, “the authorities are none the wiser” (129), by asserting the need “to go beyond politics and history”9 in order to explain such horrors and grasp one’s full responsibility for one’s own fate and that of others. Naipaul made the Californian and Guyanese authorities largely responsible. For D’Aguiar’s protagonist, Jones is the culprit. He (the protagonist) is deeply affected by the tragedy yet stops short of a deeper (self-)judgement, though this is implicit in the poetic voice and its metaphoric association of Jonestown with earlier historical events of a similar nature. In Harris’s novel, what happens in Guyana on the “Day of the Dead” is not seen as an isolated event, either, but as part of large-scale historical and moral context, one among similarly inspired disasters in different social and natural environments. It 9

Harris, Jonestown, 160. Further page references are in the main text.

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explores all the interstices of “the holocaust that afflicts us all in a variety of overt and masked forms everywhere” (126) and, as a manifestation of an irrational and incomprehensible will to destroy, it epitomizes other twentieth-century ‘ideological’ genocides. If the Jonestown tragedy cannot be compared literally to the massacres and holocausts that have taken place in the world since the conquest of the Americas, the motivations of its more obscure actors, as scrutinized by Harris, throw considerable light on similarly motivated if far more extensive events. Francisco Bone, the first-person narrator, also narrowly escaped death in Jonestown and wandered for seven years after the tragedy, suffering from partial amnesia before he dared attempt to elucidate the meaning of survival and “the enigma [...] of shared Passion between spoilers and despoiled” (19). The opening letter he writes to W.H. on a “Dateless Day” (outside a conventional time-scale), asking him to edit the “dream-book” of which he (Bone) is the real author, is a major feature which, as we shall see, takes various forms in the narrative – the emergence into the consciousness of both writer and narrator of presences buried in an apparent void, the “extinct” of the Jonestown experiment. They remind Bone of the large-scale enigmatic disappearance or breakdown of peoples in Central and South America. But, as Mr Mageye, his former teacher, now his guide in his imaginary Odyssey, tells him, it is his personal gradual awakening from numbness and amnesia, both typical of twentieth-century man, the resurgence of “passion and emotion” (56) in himself and in apparently dead history (50), that “brought [him] face to face with the accumulated spectres of years, the dread spectre of the twentieth century” (56). Bone’s consciousness then becomes a “Memory Theatre,” a receptacle of ghostly vanished multitudes as of individual concrete actors in the tragedy, and he sees himself as a “diminutive entity of community and self” (5). Most of Harris’s novels are re-visionary epics or allegories divested of repetitive patterns inspired by models that may be great or sublime but whose outdated perspectives or world-view often remain unquestioned. His “re-visions” of canonical epics and allegories such as The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy elicit transformative and regenerating potentialities of interpretation of the kind of human experience that frees their heroes and monsters from the stereotypical behaviour in which they have

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been enshrined.10 Convinced of the necessarily partial nature of all thought and human experience, all representations and imagery, Harris rejects all frames and closure at any level of existence or being and presents life as a continuous process of dismemberment and re-memberment, a perpetual interweaving of plural dimensions. This is also true of man, a creature with both divine and animal capacities rooted in living landscapes (as in early epics), in the “womb of space” “in which our gestation as a species began.”11 Understandably, then, his protagonist’s experience and vision “transcend the limits of individual existence.”12 Bone’s intention is to open up a “human-centred cosmos” (6), and the reconstruction of events that plays itself out in his consciousness and the figures involved in them are at once concrete (re-enacting the actual past) and apparitional: i.e. belong to a mythopoeic and archetypal dimension. So the narrative blends the human with the extra-human and repeatedly shifts from familiar but limited perspectives to the protagonist’s awareness of the potential or actual dismantling of their frames, enabling him to perceive, however intermittently and indistinctly, an underlying multi-dimensional, universal reality alternately seen as God,13 a subterranean tradition in the making, the unconscious, or archetypes. It is this process or fluid interweaving of different layers of being that informs the poetic fabric of Harris’s writing, the composite metaphors that free language and spirit from conventional formulae. Language itself arises from that elusive, enigmatic reality: “Language,” says Bone, “is deeper than frames” (6). Through a startling orchestration of images, Harris presents a symbiotic Old World–New World epic, in a setting that extends from the Guyanese heartland to the cosmos, blends past, present and future and traces the movements from unconscious and subconscious to consciousness in Bone’s psyche, who, as medium of the reconstruction, grows into “a 10 See Wilson Harris’s Carnival and his essay “Comedy and Modern Allegory,” in A Shaping of Connections, 127–40. See also “Ulyssean Carnival, Epic Metamorphoses” above. 11 “Apprenticeship to the Furies” (1996), in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Bundy, 228. 12 This sentence is borrowed from Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Imagination (Berkeley: U of California P , 1967): 197. 13 See Resurrection at Sorrow Hill: “I knew that the election of one sun as an absolute deity was an addiction to bias. God is multi-dimensional. Not uni-dimensional” (29).

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vessel of composite epic” (5). As such, he is also the “diminutive” creator of the “Virgin ship” or vessel of memory and of the voyaging imagination, in which he undertakes his self-confessional journey into the past to “face his trial at the bar of time” (77). The metaphorical “Virgin ship” combines the Virgin archetype already present in Palace of the Peacock with the mythic ship which is also a goddess.14 “Virgin Ship” is the title of the first part of the novel, which opens right after the massacre, when Jim (here Jonah) Jones, still alive, is seen approaching a young mother (the first of three virgins) with her child (later “the Child of humanity”) to make sure she is dead before he commits suicide. He is on the point of doing so when he is shot by Deacon, who was his right-hand “angel” as Bone was his left-hand man. The two men, both born in 1930, are complementary “oppositional twins,”15 at once friends and enemies divided by racial antagonism (48). If Deacon, an orphan adopted by East Indian peasants, is presented as an angel fallen from the stars, Bone, the son of a single mother like so many children in the West Indies, sees himself as the descendant of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat who emigrated to Guyana after accidentally killing his brother and named his plantations Le Repentir and La Pénitence. As usual with plantation owners, he chose mistresses from among his slaves, one of whom was Bone’s ancestress. By claiming this ascendancy, Bone presents himself as the offspring of both sides of the colonial system and introduces the theme of guilt and remorse as of possible redemption, for his mother is the second Virgin, who wears one of the masks of “the mother of humanity,” a compassionate woman who was murdered in 1939, on the eve of World War I I , and whose death saved Bone’s life. The third Virgin in the narrative is 14 Harris came across the myth of the ship-goddess in Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966) and felt it validated his own use of this metaphor in his fiction. After completing Carnival, he took as the novel’s epigraph the relevant passage from Brown, which begins as follows: “The wanderings of the soul after death are prenatal adventures; a journey by water, in a ship which is itself a goddess, to the gates of rebirth.” The myth obviously also validates the saving role of the female in Jonestown, as in all his novels. For Harris’s explanation, see “Validation of Fiction: A Personal View of Imaginative Truth,” 44–46. 15 In “Adversarial Contexts and Creativity,” Harris suggests that the moral vision which inspires innovative art grows out of the conversion of adversarial positions. In spite of their enmity and Bone’s jealousy of Deacon, the latter is a continuous presence in Bone’s quest and stimulates it.

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another Marie, a young East Indian girl betrothed, then married to Deacon, with whom Bone is also in love. Like the other “broken” archetypes in the novel, whether predatory or saving figures, the Virgins are both concrete women and different partial faces of an original archetypal “image” which cannot be totally grasped, whose wholeness “baffles us” (166) and remains “unfathomable.” Although she is represented in several of her contradictory aspects, Virgin or enslaving Animal Goddess, enchantress or guiding oracle, compassionate mother but also “dread and fourth virgin” (230), it is her conversion into a “Blessed Fury” and the Virgin Siren’s warning music that help Bone discover “varieties of counterpoint” (19) between charismatic leader and sacrificial victim. In other words, the Furies, traditionally revenge-goddesses, are divested of violence and transfigured into agents of regeneration. Like all enigmatic substance in Harris’s fiction, whether “hidden texts of reality,” the seemingly dormant past, or the apparently dead or extinct but living “fossil strata” (all forms of the universal reality discussed above), archetypes break into consciousness through plural masks and give both life and fiction their revisionary impulse. The concrete data of the characters’ personal life are woven into a narrative texture that alternates between philosophical dialogues and a visionary metaphoric re-creation of experience divested of boundaries in space and time, in which large-scale, natural/cosmic phenomena parallel their reduced, partial expression in human beings and their immediate environment. As a young man, Bone went with Deacon to San Francisco State College, thanks to a scholarship funded by his colonial ancestor’s legacy. They met Jones, were fascinated by him, and returned with him to Guyana to found, like the Maya, a city in the heart of the jungle, the “Conquest Mission,” whose adherents would die “within the insatiable stomach of eternity” (14).16 Jones is one of several embodiments of an archetypal Predator. He is first seen standing “in the whale of the sun” or “throne of conquest [...] in which he sought to secrete his followers” (14). The image of imprisonment (the whale) and absolute power (which the full sun has 16

In “The Quest for Form,” Harris describes eternity as an absolute source of terror and beauty which does away with life and death in creative human terms. Idealism is often inspired by a longing for eternity or infinity, which results in a tyranny that despoils and consumes. To consume, for Harris, suggests both destructive greed and the need to consume (get rid of) one’s prejudices. “The Quest for Form,” 21–27.

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represented in Harris’s fiction since Palace of the Peacock) is later converted into the mask of the tall cat or tiger worn on Carnival day by the murderer of Bone’s mother.17 Equally pregnant and protean imagery in the following passage shows an ordinary concrete object (an old cracked blackboard) opening onto a cosmic “dream” vision of a wave that threatens to engulf the Virgin Ship during Bone’s crossing from the disasterridden Jonestown of 1978 back to 1939 Albuoystown: [Mr Mageye] dodged behind blackboard and wave. As the ship was about to fall through the roof of the world he occupied a crevice in the blackboard and peered through it as if it were a telescope. At that instant I heard the bells of the Sirens ringing. The Ship righted itself. I heard the voice of the Sirens through the magical bells declaring that Mr Mageye was a rare phenomenon, a genuine and sacred jester. He stood there in the telescopic wave with the look of a gentle Sphinx. The expression passed from his features, he moved back to the front of the blackboard, and he resumed his history lesson. (33)

Mr Mageye is here both living teacher and one of the three Magi who guide Bone in the netherworld. The Sirens, propitious rather than dreadful, deceiving goddesses are related to the Virgin figures. The passage blends several temporal perspectives (1978 and 1939 but also 1985, when Bone begins his “dream-book,” and 1994, the year it is edited), which brings to light parallel situations and motivations and intimates that the past itself changes, is active in the present, and offers meanings to which one may have been blind: “the spatialities inserted into time [...] are different” (105). Bone’s quest through this multi-dimensional past and the many questions he asks himself and Mr Mageye in his backward and forward journey help him progress through the antinomies of being and motivation between which man must constantly discriminate freely to avoid submitting blindly to fate and/or ideology. The interrelatedness between moral choice or moral being and creativity gives substance to Bone’s narrative from the moment he breaks his pact with Jones, aware that the “dread closure” of such a pact underlies “the death of the arts” (17). He borrows from Beckett the title of his “dream-book”: Imagination Dead Imagine, 17

In Amerindian mythology, the Sun-god was an absolute, fed with the heart and blood of sacrificial victims. It stands at the centre of the Aztec and Maya calendars, while the cat (ocelot / tiger) is one of the day signs. So are the vulture and eagle, who represent Deacon, the scavenger and avenger of the Jonestown massacre.

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which Jones, too, had made his motto in the Conquest Mission (15, 90), though the perverse effect of his longing for infinity was to be a deathwish. Whereas, when Bone begins to ponder on the meaning of “Imagine,” it becomes an exhortation to creativeness18 and recognition of seminal life in death: “One must re-imagine death as a live fossil apparition. Imagination Dead Imagine” (232). The second (unnumbered) chapter, “Giants of Chaos,” starts with Bone coming out of the “Cave of the Moon” (45) where he had taken refuge after the tragedy, a Lazarus surfacing three days after his psychological death. The shift in this chapter from the evocation of Bone’s and Deacon’s initial motivation for joining Jones to the myth-making dramatization of the betrothal between the ten-year-old Deacon and Marie, the Wilderness Virgin, soon yields to a breathtaking vision of “archetypal oceans and skies” (51), a spatial arena proportionate to Deacon’s “celestial ambition” to emulate the great conquerors of the past and “duel with eternity [...] the Titans, the tricksters of heaven” (52). This juxtaposition of Deacon’s aspirations with his forthcoming marriage adumbrates the correlation between will-to-power and a sexuality steeped in violence, the main symptom of a diseased society. The conversion of violence into a creative and redeeming sexuality in both man and nature is, as we shall see presently, a major strand in the narrative. “Tricksters of heaven” relates to Caribbean mythology, also represented by the Goddess Kali, venerated by East Indians, who make up about forty percent of the Guyanese population. As I indicated earlier, the Trickster, on the other hand, was originally the African spider god Anansi, who became identified with the beaten-down slave who rebels against his master and escapes oppression by virtue of his cleverness. The divine, the human and the animal thus merge in his figure. However, if in Bone’s vision of Deacon’s wild ambitions as a boy, the tricksters are heroes and “giants” he hopes to conquer and surpass as a compensation for the trauma of deprivation he experienced as a child (63), for Mr Mageye and Bone himself, they are also poor labouring folk, “antlike and enigmatic” (66), while later Bone sees in the Giants people in all 18

See Harris’s essay “Imagination Dead Imagine: Bridging a Chasm,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7.1 (1994): 185–95. Note also the ambivalence of Harris’s interpretation, similar to the distinction he makes between actions that look alike yet are different in intention and effect like the sexuality of the rapist, as opposed to sex shorn of violence, or the ambivalent nature of fire.

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stations of life, “all parties across the generations of colonial and postcolonial histories” (156). The tricksters, later identified as “tricksters of Spirit” (151), are ambiguous and ambivalent figures, whose mutability is here seen as a capacity to cross the borders between different dimensions, as well as “to relinquish cleverness [...] in favour of sifting every obstacle to truth in the fabric of the Self” (151) and later partake of the metamorphosis of the cosmic Spider into Saviour-Child (205). The trickster’s role and Mr Mageye’s persona as “Magus-Jester of history” illustrate Harris’s conception of comedy as a process of conversion initiated by an awareness that any existential predicament potentially contains its reverse, that any kind of fact or behaviour are the very doorways through which one can tend towards deeper, antinomal proportions. “Comedy,” a major character suggests in Carnival, “is reversible fiction” (90). “Giants of Chaos” also evokes the other, deeper space envisioned through conversion. As events are seen to ripple into far-off consequences, so the storm in which Bone is caught (it recurs in different spaces in the narrative) is an expansion of the miniature storm or “chaos” (22) he had caused by shaking amid leaves and bushes out of fear of Jones when hiding from him just after the massacre. It is comparable to the ‘Butterfly Effect’ in chaos theory: i.e. “a sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” “the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.”19 Peering into the depths of space through Mr Mageye’s camera, Bone comments: At first I saw nothing but Chaos. I saw floating planks from the forests of King Midas, I saw floating cargoes of South American rubber bound for the Golden Man in the kingdom of El Dorado, I saw the mastheads under broken slave-ships, I saw frail residue like the beard of Titans, I saw celestial mathematics written into rockets and sails upon space stations. An air of wreckage hung over them in the degree that civilizations had foundered but the fleet was now half-afloat upon ocean and sky. (51)

The storm is a recurring phenomenon in Harris’s fiction, both real and metaphorical, which exteriorizes the inner turmoil experienced by the quester as he approaches the limits of the known and is on the edge of lost worlds, of vestiges formerly buried in the unconscious, the universal dimension towards which Bone travels in his “Dream.” The passage just 19

James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (1987; London: Abacus, 1993): 8.

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quoted is reminiscent of a similar vision in Carnival: “The storm clung to pupils of devastation everywhere and nowhere. I looked into the ghost of chaos as into a raging, human cosmos,”20 which suggests a parallel world animated by equal forces to that of the living. The debris of former times Bone sees through Mr Mageye’s camera are also “relics of Spirit” (151), whose revival prod him further in his journey. In the universal dimension Harris calls “the womb of space,” Bone meets several archetypal figures, the Predator lurking “beneath every fallen and falling creature” (73), man and beast of terrifying beauty, but also the “divine huntsman who hangs on the Cross in [...] our ragged flesh, to hold the Predator at bay when humanity is in the greatest danger” (51), a figure first envisioned in Palace of the Peacock like the archetypal Virgin (and who, unlike Lord Death, encouraged Bone to kill the Predator and to “walk with a Bomb of environment disasters [...] to blow up the globe” 75), advises him against revenge. Another archetype or “sphere within ourselves” (55) Bone meets in the netherworld is the Old God/ King/Prisoner “chained to eternity” (115) who personifies authority and potential freedom and whose sacrificial dismemberment partakes of a dissolution of the frame that opens the way to a free re-memberment of humanity. The nature of freedom, its burden and responsibilities as opposed to hedonistic permissiveness, is one of Bone’s major preoccupations. So is the mystery of injustice, a recurring theme in Harris’s fiction. It was Deacon’s and Bone’s anger at injustice that drove them to forge a pact with Jones. The purpose of Bone’s dreaming return to the hell of Jonestown is to transform their former anger and “authoritarian fixture of wrath” (121) and to assess his responsibility as survivor, to share the huntsman/Christ’s instinct “to put numinous flesh [...] upon the Bone of wasted lives that survivors of holocaust harbour in themselves” (106) – in other words, to revive within himself the “growing, maturing dead,” invisible part of a chain of being Harris described elsewhere as “the subtle linkages of a parent-Imagination, in, through and beyond all creatures, all elements.”21 It is impossible within the limits of this chapter to do justice to the rich, tight density of the many-layered imagery in the narrative, its deepening and protean significance, as it generates the conversion of the protago20 21

Carnival, 91. The Four Banks of the River of Space, 125.

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nist’s vision and the concurrent transfiguration of tragedy. In the third part or chapter of the novel, the “Foundations of Cities” Bone is in search of are equally the enigmatic ground or roots of lost cities and imploded cultures and the original premises or “hidden texts” (99)22 sustaining his creative process as writer and builder of “new architectures out of the rubble of tradition” (84). Indeed, the rationale behind his journey forwards and backwards in time is “to salvage a broken world and reclaim its bearing on a living future” (112). In his exploration of individual and historical past, his recovering memory stimulates his growing consciousness. But the frontiers between layers of being are themselves mobile and recede, and no Harrisian protagonist ever finally reaches its extreme limit or enigmatic source of creation, since this would mean facing an absolute or a Creator who, like the archetypes discussed above, can only be glimpsed through its/His partial manifestations or plural masks. The same applies to the relics of experience, whose deadness is only apparent. There are, Bone discovers, “breathlines infused into architectures of space in science and fiction and poetry and art” (143). The arousal to perceptible livingness of fragments of a deeper reality (relics of the past and source of creativeness) is the fruit of a meeting between its own resurrectionary eruption and the quester’s vision. This is the fundamental dynamic or “re-visionary momentum” (111) of both Harris’s writing and his character’s Dreambook. “The reverend has a propensity for virgins [...] / After dey is pregnant for him we get them as wives / All our first born are the children of God.” So runs D’Aguiar’s irony in Bill of Rights (19). In Jonestown, too, the leader’s promiscuity in real life is at the core of his imperial mission, “the sanctification of the beastly brothel is [... the] art of colonialism” (123). On his return to Jonestown, Bone realizes that when founding a utopian new Rome in the rainforest, he, Deacon and Jones brought with them all their prejudices about women and nature. In the course of his quest he begins to see the animal goddess as his foster-mother, whose “numinous paganism” (128) can purge sex of violence: 22

A major aspect of Bone’s quest, especially in “Foundations of Cities,” is its selfreflexiveness. Bone is both writing and “written” (4). Harris’s fictions are “texts of reality,” not in the sense of a Leavisite “unmediated reality” but because he believes that the life of the imagination is “more real than the real world” and can transform both the arts and man’s behaviour.

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The act of penetration of space, of Virgin space, penetration of other worlds, was not in its mysterious origination an act of violence. It was an act of creation, the creation of living diversities, the living orchestration of differing spaces, ages, realities. (128)

Bone envisions this act of creation in one of the most striking episodes in the novel, an intercourse (“incalculable spatial phenomenon” 133) between a log turned phallic tree and a “genesis-cloud [...] in the womb of space” (132). To grasp its full implications, one must recall Bone’s earlier perception that the Amerindian women Jones “swallowed” and their silent men-folk were “ghosts of Atlantis” whose sacred places had been pillaged and were lost like Atlantis. As he discerns the redeeming potential of the past, it is a broken (dismembered though mending) phallus which, as opposed to Jonah’s “climb into [...] eternity’s closure of time” (133), penetrates the genesis-cloud. Bone himself, he realizes, contains his extinct antecedents and is partly the embodiment of “lost tribes [...] Atlantean peoples” (131), while Jonestown lies “nameless under the sea.” He visualizes an ancient, extinct but now reviving storm ravaging Plato’s lost city and the parallel engulfment yet perceptible outline of Jonestown and of “the drowned, pre-Columbian New World, since the European conquest, in every mutilated landscape” (135–36). But a break in the chain of elements enables Bone to see that the fate of Atlantis was laid bare as a counterpoint between rape or devastation and implicit freedom still to balance extinction with a renascence (or renaissance) of lost cultures whose vestiges and imprints could be orchestrated into the seed of the future. (136)

Bone’s vision of a fruitful marriage between heaven and earth is paralleled in the last part of the novel, “Roraima’s Scorpions,” by his own reenactment of Deacon’s wedding and honeymoon night with Marie, the wilderness Virgin. Deacon, who fell into a ravine and died after killing Jones and saving Bone, is absent from the reconstruction, but his ghostly living mask on Bone’s shoulders enables the latter to understand Deacon’s motivations and makes it clear that any severance of their joint involvement with Jones would be self-deceptive. Bone’s intercourse with the Virgin is the more important, as the two men represent different dimensions of being (possibly the two faces of the trickster): Bone, together with his inner skeleton self, is the human creature with “abnormal lucidity” (5) and in search of a soul, as the prefatory ballad suggests. Deacon, fallen from

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the skies, keeps falling through the chapter. He falls through the void of the colony, of disfigured landscapes and of a declining civilization; above all, he falls through the void of memory and psyche which Bone scans, and his fall links the heights and the depths of which humanity partakes. The saviour child, who is desired by the folk and who shares with Bone the role of Lazarus, was born of Deacon’s marriage with the Virgin. But its resurrection at the end of the novel seems to me to be the fruit of the two men’s re-enacted intercourse with her, of Deacon’s torment and remorse (the Dream-book is also “an epic of repentance” 181) and of Bone’s recovering memory, imagination and expanding consciousness. Before this last vision, however, Bone returns to the wedding’s banqueting hall, where he is made aware of an argument between Jones and Deacon, who had angrily warned the leader against the coming “end of the world” (200) but accepted his lies out of political necessity or fear. In the hall, too, a mythopoeic scene reveals the ineradicable moral ambivalence at the heart of all being. The multiple arms of the East Indian goddess Kali whirl strangled female children exploited out of economic necessity. Anancy, once the saviour of transported slaves, has acquired an appetite to rule in the banqueting hall of history, like that other trickster, Prometheus, who lied to cover his rebellion because he saw his chance to “rule with the gift of fire [therapeutic and injurious ammunition] [...] from whose ash would spring [...] the magnetic beauty and charm of the Predator” (207). Hence Bone’s intuition that already in 1954 “Jonestown lay submerged in the collective unconscious” (197) as if part of a latent willto-power. When the roof of the hall collapses,23 Bone feels that Jones lives and “will re-emerge from the salvaged banqueting hall in space in another charismatic crusade” (220–21). But Bone himself is at last prepared to assume responsibility for “a lie which taints creation” (207), and he sails towards Roraima, a peak in the rainforest on the border of Guyana, Brazil and Venezuela, sacred to the Amerindians and reputed to be the seat of El Dorado, rich in diamonds and gold.24 Ever since Palace 23 This is an adaptation of the crash from which the poet Simonides alone was saved by Castor and Pollux. Simonides remembered where the other guests had been sitting in the banqueting hall and was able to tell who the dead were. This is recorded by Frances Yates, in The Art of Memory, as the origin of “the art of Memory.” 24 The British explorer Michael Swan cites Sir Walter Raleigh on this subject. Swan himself had since boyhood dreamt of climbing the mountain, stimulated by Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. He describes his actual climb of the mountain in 1955 and

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of the Peacock, El Dorado (city of Gold, city of God) in Harris’s fiction has been the ambivalent object of man’s greed and of his never fully achieved spiritual redemption.  For Bone, sailing to Roraima means journeying towards a lost primitive world which may hold a seed of regeneration, as well as towards his innermost self, where, still wearing Deacon’s mask, he faces at last his inner deep-seated primitive judges. Only then does he fully recover his memory, remembering that after his honeymoon night Deacon had gone to Roraima, “the soul of living landscapes” (232), an exquisite garden yet one infested with scorpions. His purpose was to get a fortune for his newborn child, through whom he was hoping to rule the world. In his pursuit of material rather than spiritual riches, he was inoculated with the scorpion’s venom and made immune to pain, on condition that he avoid intercourse with Marie and not touch his child in the cradle. When he did so on his return, the child turned into a leaf of stone. Through the successive stages of his quest, Bone has been besieged by fear, terror and dread and has repeatedly shrunk from leaping into what seemed a terrifying void in landscape and psyche despite the huntsman’s encouragement (cf. 75). Now that, still under Deacon’s mask and accused of Deacon’s deception, he opens his memory and his conscience to the murder, however unintentional, of the saviour child, he sees Roraima, the “dread and fourth Virgin,” as healing “dread mother of Compassion” (231). Only now does he agree to identify fully with Deacon and to bear responsibility for a “fallen, perpetually falling humanity” (203). When he consents to be put on trial and is driven by his judges over the edge of the cliff, he is finally leaping into the void, the first of Harris’s protagonists to do so of his own accord. He is re-enacting the fall of man, experiencing what Harris calls “the gravity of freedom,” at once its serious, sometimes terrifying responsibilities and a fall into the “womb of space” and “the unfinished genesis of the imagination” (75). But, like Donne caught by a noose when he falls down the cliff in Palace of the Peacock, Bone is arrested in his leap into the void and falls “into the net of music, the net of the huntsman compares it to his visit to the ruins of Maya cities in the forests of Southern Mexico; Swan, The Marches of El Dorado (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958): 190.

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Christ” (233), suspended in that area of the imagination where life and death overlap and confronted with both the Predator and the resurrected Child, free to keep moving towards the source of creation but never reaching it. Jonestown is a novel of extraordinary scope, bringing together and further developing the major themes of Harris’s considerable oeuvre in a narrative as open-ended as his earlier fictions. Itself an “unfinished genesis,” it evokes in bold, untrammelled metaphoric language the endless interplay between the material and the immaterial, the concrete and the “apparitional” perspectives informing the “texts of reality” that gestate in Bone’s consciousness. As in The Four Banks of the River of Space, the narrative combines with equal plausibility a pre-Columbian perception of the universe (in particular the Maya conception of time) with an awareness of alternative or parallel realities postulated by quantum physics, as in Bone’s recognition of similar structures in different spheres (“celestial mathematics” / “Mathematics of Chaos”).25 Although located in a littleknown, seldom publicized country, the novel portrays with unusual power the illnesses of contemporary society anywhere: unbridled ambition, the false spirituality of charismatic leaders, the perversion of initially idealistic ends. Above all, it implicitly warns against the behavioural mechanisms through which societies keep operating, the revenge-syndrome (personified in the Furies), equally devastating in the West and in the Third World. The reversal of these mechanisms, however, is envisaged by the individual consciousness alone. In his self-analytical journey, Bone gradually recognizes the deepest roots of his (and man’s) behaviour and the energizing impetus of archetypal forces, the inescapable ambivalence of human nature, though never in a simple, dualistic way. Rather, contradictory impulses overlap and each emotion, feeling, motive contains the seed of its opposite, which makes conversion possible. Dread, the prevailing emotion throughout Bone’s quest, can give rise to violence but is also interwoven with repentance (221), “the farthermost evolution Mind –

25

Harris’s art of fiction can be compared to a conception of science described by the Belgian Nobel Prize scientist Ilya Prigogine: “We witness the emergence of a science no longer limited to simplified idealized situations but which confronts us to the complexity of the real world, a science which makes possible for human creativity to be ‘lived’ as the singular expression of a fundamental feature common to all levels of nature”; La fin des certitudes (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996): 16 (tr. and emphasis mine).

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despite its addiction to cruelty – may begin to contemplate” (231). In his innermost self, Dread finally emerges in conjunction with Compassion and cosmic Love. Like humanity as a whole, Bone survives partial extinctions within himself, spurred on by a conviction that, contrary to what Jones asserts, “the heart of the wild is susceptible to change” (215). But, as in Harris’s earlier fiction, the future depends on a renascence of the imagination, of consciousness, and, increasingly, on a spiritual regeneration which, for Bone, takes the form of a “re-conceptualization of the Child” (208). Jonestown is animated by what I have called elsewhere “a mysticism in reverse, a descent towards inner transcendence,” as the very ending of the novel makes clear: We stood face to face, Dread and I, Predator and I. Old age and youth parted and I was naked in the lighted Darkness of the Self. The Child rode on the Predator’s groaning back. Lightness becomes a new burden upon the extremities of galaxies in which humanity sees itself attuned to the sources and origins of every memorial star that takes it closer and closer – however far removed – to the unfathomable body of the Creator. (234)

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The Dark Jester “Unimaginable Imaginer”

Do I imagine reality Or does the real imagine me? Unimaginable imaginer What part does the imagined play?1

W

H A R R I S quotes the last two lines of this poem by Kathleen Raine as an epigraph to Resurrection at Sorrow Hill (1993). The poem as a whole, however, expresses as pointedly a major aspect of the narrative process in The Dark Jester. The protagonist, who, in diverse roles, assumes the multi-layered “personality of Dream,”2 is hard to perceive as a fully substantial being. But as a creative agent himself obsessed by the “mystery of art” (23) and its origins, he can be seen as a human version of the “unimaginable imaginer” who attempts to engage in dialogue with the historical, ‘imagined’ characters who emerge from his unconscious, “Non-Self seeking its Opposite called Self” (7). Many of Harris’s novels are prefaced with a note by the narrator, whether Clive Goodrich in Companions of the Day and Night (1975) or W.H. in The Waiting Room (1967) and most of the later novels. He presents himself as the editor3 of the manuscript, a mediator who “translates” 1

ILSON

Kathleen Raine, untitled poem, in Living with Mystery: Poems 1987–91 (Ipswich: Golgonooza, 1992): 90. 2 Harris, The Dark Jester (London: Faber & Faber, 2001): 1. Further page references are in the main text. 3 Paula Burnett comments on this in “Memory Theatre and the Maya: Othering Eschatology in Wilson Harris’s Jonestown,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 2.1–3 (Spring 2000): 221.

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and gives form to a fictional substance recorded by the novels’ protagonists in a log-book (The Waiting Room), papers and diaries (Companions), records of automatic writing (The Angel at the Gate), or the protagonist’s dream-book in the later fiction. The assumption is therefore that the writer is not the exclusive creator of a narrative that breaks down the barriers of individual authorship and that he captures the compulsions of multiple creativity. The writer and, at a further remove, his protagonist are involved in a creative “mutual agency,”4 the two-way process in the course of which they move towards the fictionalized substance that erupts of its own intentionality into their individual consciousness. In most of the novels, this substance arises from the ‘void’ of Caribbean history, whether individual, social or political, a void which, to Harris, has always been apparent only. As suggested in The Waiting Room, it implies that “a fiction which appears to grasp nothingness runs close to a freedom of reality which is somethingness.”5 For Harris, all experience, however deeply buried in the chasms of historical or individual memory, forms an inexhaustible pool, part of a wholeness never entirely grasped but surfacing in variable forms or masks, yet another feature of its multiple creative potential. This composite reality, nourished by a “deposit of ghosts,”6 partakes of the unconscious and of what Harris calls in different contexts “the womb of space” or “Spirit.” It is, in short, linked to other major energizing agents of the creative process in his fiction: the sacred, the mythic and the archetypal. In their twin journey into outer landscape and inner psyche, Harris’s protagonists are faced with the question, first clearly formulated in Heartland, of “whom and what”7 lies in the mysterious nameless dimension they are penetrating with reluctance, misgivings, and incipient terror. One would have thought that the emergence of Ghost in The Infinite Rehearsal was an ultimate expression of the “who” or “what” in the explored subterranean dimension. The Dark Jester, however, takes us even further into that territory or, as in The Four Banks of the River of Space, into the “parent Imagination.”8 4

Harris, “A Note on re-visionary cycles in the composition of Carnival” (April

1991). 5 6 7 8

Harris, The Waiting Room, 10. Harris, The Infinite Rehearsal, 1. Harris, Heartland, 40. Harris, The Four Banks of the River of Space, 125.

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The unsigned preface entitled “Fragment of a Dream” confronts the reader, this time without a mediator, with the anonymous voice of a Dreamer, which makes us wonder “who” or “what” is dreaming,9 for the fragment seems to be both part of the dream that initiates the narrative and the partial mysterious Dreamer himself. Yet his is not a disembodied voice but that of a material/immaterial being (14) who appears to move on an intermediate plane between concrete living nature and a shadow world of forms or, in his own words, of “live fossil organs” (vii), “dusty [...] buried [...] but still alive” (50) and re-activated “in dream-design” (86). As Bone says in Jonestown, “I dreamt I was translating from a fragmented text […] that already existed.”10 Dreaming in Harris’s fiction is an intuitive epistemological opening into the unconscious, the secret motivations as well as undigested woes it harbours, and, above all, the mainspring of creativity. The Dreamer in The Dark Jester could be “an extension from Ghost,” who, when returning to the great deeps in The Infinite Rehearsal, echoes Hamlet’s father’s appeal “Remember me”11 and calls for another hand to take up the narrative of human history. The other hand here re-creates the encounter between the conquistador Pizarro and the last pre-conquest Inca, Atahualpa. Nevertheless, as in earlier novels in which Harris frees history from a delimited temporal frame, this historical event is embedded in a quintessential vision of mankind’s existence “across ages” (vii) and opens onto a meditation on man’s relations with other living species and on his place in nature and the cosmos “across times” (x). It even tries to capture the beauty and terror that emanated from them “before the times of man” (13). As Harris often says, it is a fiction that transcends a merely human discourse.12 This meditation and the imaginative quest it initiates are also a process of self-judgement, a recurrent feature of the progress towards selfknowledge on the part of Harris’s protagonists. 9

David Punter asks a fairly similar question about Palace of the Peacock in his Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000): 44. 10 Harris, Jonestown, 7. See also “The dream was jesting with the dreamers. The dream spoke”; Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, 154. 11 The Infinite Rehearsal, 82, 88. 12 See, among others, “Profiles of Myth and the New World,” in Nationalism vs Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. Wolfgang Zach & Ken L. Goodwin (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996): 77–86.

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Retrieved from the womb of time and from the prison-house of colonial history, the Inca strikes the Dreamer’s imagination as a spark ignited “on the edge of death or of life” (2) and apparently emerging from a “divide between Self and Non-Self” (7), a “frail opposite to [him]self” (3): i.e. the Dreamer. The spark or distant “seed” generates the reconstitution of the past and induces the same kind of reversing visionary process13 the Dreamer admires in masterpieces of painting and sculpture: a Byzantine icon in which the Christ child gives birth to Its mother’s soul and Michelangelo’s “Rondanini” Pietà with Christ supporting the unfinished form of His mother. To give some idea of the concise density of the text, the parenting child is also a quantum particle spreading out and generating “waves of space” (4). This isn’t just a counterpoint to history as “approved by a dominant culture” (1). Implicitly, it conveys the necessity for man to take into account inescapable natural forces rather than envisaging life in merely social and political terms. Like Bone in Jonestown, the Dreamer (or should I say W.H.?) is obsessed “by cities and settlements in the Central and South Americas” that are still an enigma today, and he, too, dreams “of their abandonment, their bird-masks, their animal-masks.”14 Such enigmas, the incomprehensible surrender of the powerful Inca to Pizarro and his handful of men but also the abandoned sanctuaries of Vilcabamba in Peru and Palenque in Mexico, have been absorbed into a shadow world-theatre through which the Dreamer attempts to approach, if only in some degree, the riddles of history and the ungraspable origins of creation. In his backward and forward reconstruction of historical events, he enters into dialogue with the Dark Jester, a persona who was already present in Harris’s early work as an artist prepared to risk identifying himself “with the submerged authority of dispossessed peoples.”15 He is not an idealized character but, as Margaret Harris’s epigraphic poem suggests, one who moves between the

13

Vera Kutzinski, “Realism and Reversibility in Wilson Harris’s Carnival,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 2.1–3 (Spring 2000): 147–67. 14 Jonestown, 4. 15 See Harris, The Eye of the Scarecrow (1965) and Companions of the Day and Night (1975). See also History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas, 17 (in Explorations, 35). On this subject, see Helen Tiffin, “The Metaphor of Anancy in Caribbean Literature,” in Myth and Metaphor, ed. Robert Sellick (Essays and Monograph Series 1; Adelaide: C R N L E , 1982): 15–52.

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living and the dead, an ambivalent participant in the joys and sorrows of mankind. He is here a further development of Mr Mageye, Bone’s “MagusJester” in Jonestown. Half-man, half-god, through whom the laughter of the gods resonates, the Jester is also a major performer, a creator of “diverse arts” (16) in the play of world-theatre and, as such, incorporates in himself at some stage both Pizarro and the bishop who converted Atahualpa. But despite the layers of experience he encompasses, he is not an omniscient elucidator of the dark areas of history. Rather, these layers are so many windows opening through him to a reality that is still beyond him (46). Conversely, the archetypal translator the Dreamer sees in Palenque interprets aspects of that immanent reality.16 The Jester, the translator and the Dreamer himself are thus related nameless allegorical figures of the “underworld imagination”17 at work in the dreaming process. Hence the “dark” identity-less persona of the Jester, whose voice sometimes fades “in the darkness of the void” (52). As a matter of fact, all of the characters arise, as it were, from various layers of the Dreamer’s unconscious and consciousness, and from the “recesses of humanity” (2) he explores while attempting to bridge the chasms of history or between different kinds of being and behaviour. They are actors in both the world-theatre the Dreamer visualizes and in the personal drama of self-judgement to which he submits as a way of modifying his previously one-sided world-view: I am judged for acts I performed without understanding the shapes of lust I mistook for a whole being. An acute judgement painful and desolating, and yet it brings a spark or particle of relief from a tight-fitting nature. Other facets, other faces, other sides to nature begin an immense liberation in breaking absolutes into partial organs. (vii)

“Breaking absolutes into partial organs” allows the Dreamer to delve into unacknowledged factors while attempting to respond to the existential multi-faceted inquiry echoing through the narrative in apparently different but related questions: “What is jest?” “What is history?” “What is art?” 16

The translator is at first Pizarro’s actual translator, later transfigured into the watchman / translator in Palenque. On the significance of translation in Wilson Harris’s work, see Stephanos Stephanides, “Goddesses, Ghosts and Translatability in Wilson Harris’s Jonestown,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 2.1–3 (Spring 2000): 233–41. 17 History, Fable and Myth, 17 (in Explorations, 35).

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“What is prophecy?” Although also scattered through the narrative, the answers to these questions are all linked; they are not final pronouncements, but probings into contrasting, not mutually exclusive, interpretations, each pregnant with the very elements that give access to their reverse. For example, it is by first re-living the accepted version of Atahualpa’s capture by Pizarro that the Dreamer breaks through it towards a possibly redemptive significance in his trial. The Jester guides the Dreamer in his uncertain progression between the divisions, paradoxes, opposites and adversarial forces within himself, in the historical characters he evokes, and in the reality he plumbs. As in earlier novels, the Jester’s art lies in an irony that dislodges or melts frozen, one-sided assumptions and in a dialectical humour he now shares with the archetypal translator. One major paradox blends the urgency of the quest with the impossibility of its full realization. Hence the Dreamer’s answer to his own question: “Jest is an attempt to bridge the apparently unbridgeable” (vii). What seems unbridgeable is the chasm which separates Atahualpa from Pizarro, pre-conquest from post-conquest times, but also the many closures we erect in all spheres in an ordering of life the Dreamer calls “Cartesian form” (16). Harris has often drawn attention to the limitations of Cartesian logic and its anthropomorphic interpretation of the world, contrasting it with a phenomenal legacy and a tradition, perceptible still in pre-Columbian art, that implies, as he says, a “treaty of sensibility between human presence on this planet and the animal kingdom.”18 It finds expression in the novel in a swaying bridge between “animal passion” and “human spirit” (4) or, conversely, between “human passion” and “animal spirit” (8, 10, 23), a reversal which illustrates the “treaty of sensibility” between the two species. This is manifest in Inca iconography, the blending of human, animal and cosmic features in myth that inspire in the dreaming narrator a poetic “Atahualpan” as opposed to “Cartesian” form. Atahualpan form eludes the common sense and rigid differentiations between sensory perceptions and their usual representation in Western art. One penetrates a dimension in which all boundaries between categories of being and between the senses dissolve. Although the Dreamer calls himself a twentieth-century man (5), in his search for the lost resources of 18

Harris, “Imagination Dead Imagine: Bridging a Chasm,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7.1 (1994): 185.

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humanity he participates in a ballet of creation in which emotions take on tangible shapes. For example, conflicting moods, such as anger and laughter, materialize in an incandescent Bird (3–4) which may be part of the Dreamer’s fossil antecedents, for its song, also a “theme of opposites” (22), stimulates his understanding of an ancestral parentage between all creatures (5), while his sense organs’ perceptions overlap: My unnerved […] eyes heard the cry of the Bird. I had seen the incandescent creature with the nerves of art. I dreamt I had stumbled on the Atahualpan parentage of the Universe by the Sun and by other Suns. I listened with new ears, new eyes, in my Dream. And I heard and saw the strange muted and muffled cry of the Bird in tones, however, that made me gasp. It was singing a mysterious mutual cry of several voices in one. (20–21)

And also: “to see and to read a mute, indescribable signal, is the art of Jest” (18). A famous violinist said that music is what comes between the notes.19 The silent music “threaded between space and time”20 gives the narrative its formal imaginary structure in an attempt to give access to the non-verbal reality that underlies it. It is the living essence that informs the creatures on the Moon, the animals, the rhythms and tones of the orchestrated ballet or, to use one of the Dreamer’s expressions, it is “the blood of infinity” (3). In a remarkable passage, the Bird’s music turns into an “elusive chord of snake-like sun,” then into “Feathered Serpent” (22), a South American version of Mexican Quetzalcoatl, now a metaphor for the unseizable transcendental. Atahualpan form also conveys the Inca’s predicament in mythopoetic serpent imagery. The Dreamer evokes Atahualpa’s appearance unarmed with his retainers, soon to be massacred on the big square in Cajamarca. His robe is covered with golden serpents, “beads of waving sun” (25) intimating the mythological affiliation of the Inca with the Sun, his father. But the serpent also embodies Pizarro’s reptilian, cold-blooded intensity (8). On the other hand, when the Dreamer attempts to warn Atahualpa against his incautious welcome of Pizarro, he is first threatened by the mythological serpents but then spared, unlike Laocoön, who had warned

19 Isaac Stern, “La musique, c’est ce qu’il y a entre les notes,” Le Vif / L’Express (22 December 2000): 40. 20 Harris, The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination: Selected Essays by Wilson Harris, ed. Andrew Bundy (London: Routledge, 1999): 40.

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the Trojans against the Greeks’ wooden horse and was smothered by snakes along with his sons. Major implications emerge from this fusion of the pre-Columbian and the Greek mythological serpents. First, a distinction between the “absolute prediction” (38) of the Greek version, which bespeaks a deterministic view of life and a submission to fate when Laocoön’s prediction is indeed fulfilled, and the Dreamer’s “prophetic art” (43, 83). This was adumbrated in Jonestown where Bone explains that “to sail back in the past is to come upon ‘pasts’ that are ‘futures’ to previous ‘pasts’ and so ad infinitum […] within the […] womb of time.”21 The Dreamer’s voyage into timelessness is both another partial freer movement towards the source of creativeness and an opportunity to revise the doom of history. The other original re-visioning of Homeric myth is the importation of the Greek ruse, Ulysses’ wooden horse.22 Pizarro enters the square in Cajamarca with two other horsemen, his wooden heart blind and indifferent, like the Greeks in Troy, to the immaterial processions welcoming him and the hospitality he receives. It brings to mind colonial encounters all over the world when many native populations unsuspectingly welcomed their conquerors. Yet the wooden horse does not introduce an alien enemy only but, as the Jester insists, “brings an enemy within of our own making” (14). Although “no absolute disclosure exists to unravel motivation,”23 and “truth itself is not fixed” (17), the Dreamer’s intuition is that Atahualpa’s self-division, his awareness of the “corruption of empires” (28), made him lower his defences and prompted him to reverse “millennia of conquest” (31) by welcoming Pizarro. Nevertheless, the narrative in no way claims to be an accurate account of the conquest of Peru. On the contrary, uncertainty is conspicuous in the Dreamer’s questioning journey, tentative intuitions and intimations of the infinite. As suggested above, it appears from the Dreamer’s journey (as in earlier novels) that historical or individual experience never dies completely but rests in a fossilized state or near-extinction to be retrieved by memory, which is why, in his “self-judgement,” the Dreamer “revive[s] an unfinished tone and rhythm within an Imagination that exists in chasms 21

Jonestown, 5. For a comment on Harris’s diverse re-creations of this myth, see “Ulyssean Carnival, Epic Metamorphoses” above. 23 “Imagination Dead Imagine,” 190. 22

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between human spirit and animal nature” (vii), and also perceives Atahualpa’s “non-termination” and “arrival in the late twentieth century” (3). Although Harris’s fiction has always drawn on unacknowledged features in human experience, in this philosophical and psychological narrative he shows more clearly than ever that the hidden side of history in both the communal and the individual psyche is the territory of art. In this respect at least, fiction is no invented story but reality itself or, as Harris says, “texts of being,”24 while art is both the purpose of the Dreamer’s quest and its animating force or prime mover: “Art transcends the material of which it is made. […] it lies […] in a consciousness of timelessness we cannot seize” (11–12). At some stage in his reconstruction, the Dreamer wonders: “is it the unbearable wings of impossible/possible re-generation blown by art across ages, across centuries?” (60). Obviously, then, the narrator’s concern is less with the accuracy of facts than with the capacity of mind and soul to apprehend the essentiality of being within the manifest texture of events, behaviour and even dogmatic dispositions, as when the Dreamer perceives the inner face of the rigidly orthodox Spanish bishop. No creature or form of life is immune from vulnerability. It is not only Atahualpa who evinces a wound, which, in his reconstruction, the Dreamer shares with him; even Pizarro and Cortez cannot entirely conceal the vulnerability they have in common with their victims. Moreover, the wounds and chasms generated by history are paralleled by “the wounds in the earth […] before time began” (57). The major images in the novel are all of divisions, abysses, chasms, both in men and nature, expressing a kinship between humanity and what Harris calls “the life of the earth.”25 Such ontological vulnerability opens the way to the sources of creativity: “each wound was a window into a tree of life” (13). Further: “I sensed [Cortez’] infirmity as a complex window through which I looked into possibilities […] of a constant soul” (91). Similarly, the darkness of the void subsequent to Atahualpa’s fall, a void dense with his unseen sorrowing people and their silent voices, the precipice in Palenque where the Dreamer penetrates the darkness of oblivion, all are the variable seats of the Dreamer’s discovery of the frontiers of regeneration (51) and the possible transmutation of ruin into origin (41), just as the darkest corners of 24

Harris, “The Fabric of the Imagination,” Third World Quarterly 12.1 (January 1990): 180, repr. in From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. Rutherford, 23. 25 See Harris, “Theatre of the Arts,” 1–10.

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his dream are a threshold into truth (76). This remains the fundamental dynamic of Harris’s fiction, which brings together history, the potential reversal of its consequences through the converting irony of jest, and art. It emphasizes the necessity to revive a pre-Columbian world-view both as a way of bringing back to life cultures enshrouded by conquest and of counteracting the Faustian technological civilization it initiated, even if one can never wholly escape the temptations of one’s age. All through the narrative, apparently hard, inanimate matter is alive, informed by the immanent Spirit at the core of all life.26 Stone and rocks have never been inanimate in Harris’s fiction. Here again they are humanized, and the ruined stone walls of Tiahuanaco “echo […] with the shadow of flesh and blood” (59). Gold arouses only greed and ferocity in Pizarro, who melts the treasures of the Inca’s ransom – in his eyes, mere pagan idols. But for Atahualpa, gold is “a map of the stars […] of the Sun” (12) and “possesses a sensation of innermost sparkling fire” (73). It lives in the cross Atahualpa had rejected when the bishop tried to force it on him and blends with the rope around his neck after his execution, the embodiment of his victimization. Above all, it lives in El Dorado, the man of gold, whose glittering body can be bought or sold. In the underworld of the Americas, the Dreamer discovers, beneath that glitter, flesh on a plank in the belly of a slave-ship sailing the Middle Passage. Art is rooted in that suffering flesh: Then it was that I saw the first work of art (was it the first, had I forgotten the others?) in the inner Underworld of the Kings of America. Half-flesh, halfwork-of-art. A stretched figure, cruelly placed on a plank, in the belly of a slave-ship. A man of gold. I jumped as I flew and watched myself from above. El Dorado, the King of Africa and America, in a slave-ship. (98–99).

Apart from the opposite meanings of gold, the convertible power of language, which, to Harris, signifies the potential conversion of reality, of the meaning of one thing into its opposite, is perhaps best illustrated by the rendering of the metaphysical notion of suspension. In the novel’s version of his execution, Atahualpa hangs suspended from a rope. But in the subsequent transfigurations of his doom, fate is suspended as Atahualpa loses his kingly garment (46) and, “within freedom’s paradoxical originality” 26 On the subject of “Spirit,” see Paget Henry, “Wilson Harris and Caribbean Poeticism,” in Henry, Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (New York & London: Routledge, 2000): 90–114.

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(42), liberated in space and time, is suspended “in the past and the present and the future” (82). He attains a precarious, uncertain, always to be restored balance in the existential process, while the Dreamer sums up his own progress: I had travelled fictionally, it seemed, across centuries to approach a form I called Atahualpan, to know him and it, to know a living/dead form and substance that differed in its dying, in its living, from anything by which I had been conditioned in a dominant history, a dominant cultural history. (102)

In keeping with Harris’s own fictional journey, there is no conclusion to the novel. As in Jonestown when Bone agrees to be judged instead of Deacon, killed by Jones, whose head he wears, the Dreamer at the climax of his “self-judgement” identifies completely with Tupac Amaru, the last legitimate Inca, executed like his uncle Atahualpa. While Bone was pushed and fell from a cliff “into a net of music,”27 the Dreamer stands on the scaffold like the historical victim he has become and hears a music that sings of a “hidden Ship in a Hidden City no one has yet found though it still endures with the promise of creation on Land and on the Sea” (109). Both dreamers fade into the unfinished imaginary realm which their narrative has momentarily brought to light.

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Jonestown, 233.


24

The Mask of the Beggar Transfigurative Art

Only he was created who gave issue to creation [...] Perception lived on [...] and it sought the counter-perception [...] in the invisible depths of the other [...] Visible yet invisible was this occurrence of the skies, visible yet not recognizable –, he, however, he the beholder, caught in this universal growth, he the plant-involved, the beast-involved, he also stretched himself from firmament to firmament [...] through the starry tides of the universe, and standing in the earthly real with his animal-roots, his animal-stems, his animal-leaves, he stood at the same time in the furthermore sphere of the stars, so that at his feet lay the sign of the serpent which, root-entangled and seven-starred, had sunk deep into the west while, transferred to his heart, sparkling in a twofold triad, shone the sign of the lyre [...]1

E

by Wilson Harris arouses expectations among readers who have followed the development of his fiction since the initial groundbreaking novel Palace of the Peacock. Although his original theme, his vision of the world and of the human person have remained basically the same, his in-depth explorations of them have brought to light so many existential dimensions, have generated so many variations and multiple levels of meaning, that one always wonders what new fictional creation he will come up with next. Given his conception of fiction, The Mask of the Beggar appears as an open-ended climax to a necessarily unfinished oeuvre. Like The Dark Jester, it can be 1

ACH NEW NOVEL

Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil, tr. Jean Starr Untermeyer, intro. Bernard Levin (1945; Oxford: Oxford U P , 1983): 146, 344, 408–409. The novel is an imaginary re-creation of Virgil’s last eighteen hours. The last section, “Homecoming,” is a stream-of-consciousness prose-poem evoking Virgil’s visions as he approaches death.

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seen as “A Fragment of a Dream,”2 albeit another step further in its selfreflexive pursuit of a multi-dimensional art. It is also a philosophical journey down towards the roots of consciousness. The nature of art and of the creative process, Harris’s in particular, and the need to understand their origins and function are the central themes of the novel. They constantly break through a factual, one-sided perception of the world and its alleged universality; hence the historical and political dimensions of the narrative, in which the ruling world-order and presentday civilization are repeatedly challenged by hidden imaginative resources. In a prefatory note, Harris himself outlines the essential features of this process and intimates the spiritual dimension that he sees as a necessary counterpoint to materialism. Earlier novels by Harris, notably The Infinite Rehearsal and The Dark Jester, present characters who, as we have seen, emerge from the other side of life, from the unconscious or, put differently, from the subterranean dimension and storehouse of the past Harris has explored through his fiction, in keeping with his concept of existence as a life-and-death process. In The Mask of the Beggar, the first four chapters are recounted by the mother of the protagonist, an artist, sculptor, painter, writer, like Anselm in The Four Banks of the River of Space. The narrative progresses intuitively, a fact that the mother keeps emphasizing: “Art was the living, psychical transfer of emotions that [...] moved their emotional bones – intuitively it seems – into wood and glass and stone and maps and fictions”;3 “I had been intuitively aware of displacements before he had spoken a word [...]. I had read his ambivalent thoughts [...] intuitively” (63). To this intuitiveness corresponds the artist’s unconscious: “Was this capacity for a creation [...] the subconscious spring that disturbed my son so deeply he could hardly speak?” (57). In these first four chapters, the nameless mother recalls an experience of her equally nameless son at the age of eight, when the boy came home at lunch-time so upset by the face of a beggar he had seen at the corner of West street that he refused to eat.4 The encounter with the beggar occurred 2

The Dark Jester (London: Faber & Faber, 2001): vii. Harris, The Mask of the Beggar (London: Faber & Faber, 2003): 58. Further page references are in the main text. 4 West Street is a location already mentioned in The Eye of the Scarecrow. The beggar is a major figure in Black Marsden and, in one guise at least, already seems to 3

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in 1933, but the mother, who died in 1952, returns from the dead and in the year 2000 brings up the event again in a conversation with her son.5 From the beginning, then, there are backward and forward shifts in time, juxtaposed, even making one with, timelessness, notably in the “Mother of Space.” This rejection of linearity is a major feature of Harris’s crosscultural fiction generally, for by bringing together different cultures from different periods, non-linearity contributes to the revelation of elements rooted in one composite source. The characters, too, are multi-dimensional, at once real human beings, sculptures and paintings created, and, as we gradually realize, figures moving in the artist’s consciousness. The mother, in particular, is a “speaking sculpture” who engages in dialogue with her son in the artist’s studio. She is also the “Mother of Space” on the map of art, for, as she says, “I had created him to be my creator” (42). “Mother of Space” is clearly a further development of the “womb of space” which, in earlier novels, is the seat of all human experience and existence transfigured into “their own shadowy essence,”6 and the source of Harris’s art. The mother is thus without and within the artist and counterbalances his own reflections and questionings. These are also, though not always, “adversarial” (56). But “I knew,” she says, such adversarial happenings [...] represented [...] a step forward in the ambivalent relationships of creator and created” (57). This is reminiscent of Harris’s emphasis on “adversarial contexts.”7 and, in his earlier writings, on the reconciliation of opposites, here a “blend of opposites” (94) “that brings us closer to the inexpressible truth” (105). In The Four Banks of the River of Space, Anselm reflects that, more than being a reconciliation, there is “a gathering up of all that had been experienced in every condition of existence [...].”8 I think that this gatherappear from nowhere as an otherworldly character. 5 In the return of the mother, Harris sees a parallel with a Byzantine painting (11) in which Christ gives rebirth to his dead mother. He has also mentioned elsewhere Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà, a sculpture of Christ carrying his mother “who hovers between life and death.” See Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Imagination (Berkeley: U of California P , 1967): unpaginated illustrations between 146 and 147. 6 Heartland, 43. 7 See Harris, “Adversarial Contexts and Creativity,” passim. In Jonestown, Bone and Deacon are “adversarial twins.” 8 The Four Banks of the River of Space, 51.

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ing-up in the womb of space of all that has been experienced is what Harris means by “counter-intuitive resources” (ix) in an art that is “intuitive and counter-intuitive” (78) or, put differently, an art that arises from a dialogue with the unconscious. An important discovery made by the artist is that he cannot “direct” the dialogue which he records in his voluminous notebooks, cannot impose his own will on those with whom he enters into dialogue, as when, later in the narrative, he wants to make his mother/ sculpture speak and she remains stubbornly silent: “Wordlessness struck my passive lips” (64). He then realizes that “it had always been a spontaneous eruption within me and within her when I addressed her” (89). This illustrates a major aspect of Harris’s conception of the “intuitiveness and counter-intuitiveness” of fiction as well as his repeated emphasis, in his self-reflexive comments, on the independence of characters in spite of a “community” and a sharing of imagination (82). The figure of the beggar is inspired by Ulysses’ disguise as he returns home from the Trojan war in Homer’s Odyssey. The artist hopes for the homecoming of his father, who disappeared in the “ocean of forest” (2)9 at the back of Harbourtown, an imaginary location on the South American coast in what is obviously Guyana. Like the mother, the father is also, on one level, a mythical and archetypal being, the unknowable Father of humanity (42). The beggar, too, seems to have returned from the dead, with his “loathsome face [...] as though arisen from the womb of a grave” (20).10 But, unlike Ulysses, he is not animated by a spirit of vengeance.11 Instead, he is the medium through which the past victims of history are resurrected in the artist’s consciousness. His is not a hard, impenetrable or insensitive mask. A composite of all races, his skin is “split into tiny holes” and “crevices” (2, 4) through which, as through the Mother’s “holed eyes” (14), the victims of history come back to life. It seems that the shock the boy received when he beheld the beggar was the “first visionary experience” (2) leading to the kind of artist he was to become. 9

This is a recurring event in Harris’s fiction, inspired by the disappearance of his own father and step-father in the Guyanese interior. On this subject, see Harris’s autobiographical essay “Wilson Harris,” in Contemporary Authors: Autobiographies Series 16 (Detroit M I : Gale Research, 1992). 10 Harris, who at the age of eight was already reading The Odyssey, had also met a beggar in the street. See his autobiographical essay. 11 On Harris’s transformative re-writings of Homeric episodes, see “Ulyssean Carnival, Epic Metamorphoses,” above.

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He had pushed away his plate, but “each grain darkened itself into the shadowy brush of a painter [...]. The Beggar’s skin was split into [...] sliced rice” (2). In other words, the grains of rice become grains in the canvas of art. Later, he thinks that “slicing was a form of art” (122). As in most of Harris’s fiction, especially the later novels, fissures, splits, holes and gaps are recurring images parallel to chasms in the landscape or the abysses of history. They are one kind of “quantum variations” (see below) of the necessary disruptions of surface reality on the path to creation.12 Drowned immigrants “reside [...] in the Beggar’s spiritual disguise and mask” and so alight in the artist’s paintings and sculptures, while the Mother, herself risen from a chasm, speaks of the need to cross chasms “to find the origins of life” (11). The Mother and the beggar are complementary. As a “figure of Space,” she provides “a vacancy behind or within the Beggar’s Mask” (20), and the artist calls her “the bride and mother of the Beggar” (18, 22). The immigrants, forgotten, invisible victims of the past, who in all of Harris’s novels are resurrected from the womb of space, are here mainly Chinese workers brought to Guyana in the middle of the nineteenth century to replace the emancipated slaves who would no longer work on the plantations. One of the ships bringing them took fire; the drowned immigrants arise from the sea through the Beggar’s Mask, as Ghost arises from the sea in The Infinite Rehearsal. The fearful voices of the Chinese, who, in official history, are merely “a frail tissue of statistics” (12), are heard in the artist’s studio and make the Mother wonder whether this is her own voice in the street – one of many suggestions that the womb of space is the subterranean territory of the eclipsed or dead Other(s). The Mother sees herself as “a woman of speaking glass or eloquent paper or wood in the artist’s imagination [...] eloquent wood resembling flesh” (2, 5). Similarly, the immigrants’ voices, “the voice of fleshly wood” (12), seem to come alive in the street. This recalls the “HUMAN TIMBER ” felled by the Macusi axeman in The Four Banks of the River of Space.13 If I understand rightly, “fleshly wood” is an oxymoron epitomizing Harris’s conception of art, its materials (wood, glass or paper) as real in the artist’s imagination (see also 107) as flesh-and-blood creatures, since fiction itself 12

Harris speaks of “creative forces that penetrate or make fissures in eternity”; “The Quest for Form,” 22. 13 The Four Banks of the River of Space, 15.

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is “a text of being.”14 It also expresses the underlying diversified unity of all existence, a “cross-culturality between living nature and humanity,” which the Mother presents as “the timeless instrument of art” (50). Flesh and wood are even presented as interchangeable, “Ancient wood sensitised into the flesh of art” (22).15 As indirectly suggested above, the novel takes place entirely within the artist’s consciousness or, more exactly, at the edge of the unconscious which the artist probes and from which the figures he sculpts and paints arise in a reciprocal movement. But this is only one kind of “mutuality” (vii); the deeper kind of function, so to speak, at the more profound level of the unconscious where historical and mythic figures as well as cultural entities, metaphorically represented, move in “quantum variations” (Harris’s term, as already used in his earlier work). To put it simply, one might first quote part of the epigraph to The Four Banks of the River of Space: “Quantum reality consists of simultaneous possibilities, a ‘polyhistoric’ kind of being [...] incompatible with our [...] one-track minds.”16 Or, put differently, “physical reality divides into a multiplicity of separate universes [...]. Reality is a multiverse rather than a simple universe.”17 As is well known, Wilson Harris has always tried to reconcile science and art. I am hoping to show that “quantum variations” inform the basic structure of the novel as well as all its aspects and the “partial” realities the artist envisions, which are all part of an “unfathomable wholeness”18 or, as he says in this novel in a multiplicity of expressions, “unknowable God” (26), “unfathomable Creator” (34, 119) or “Spirit” (142, 148). Indeed, a remarkable feature of the narrative is the blending of Harris’s philosophical belief in “a true Creator whose unknowable limits are our creaturely 14

Harris, “The Fabric of the Imagination,” Third World Quarterly 12.1 (January 1990): 180, repr. in From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. Rutherford, 23.

15 Already in Tradition, the Writer and Society, Harris suggests that when Ulysses is tied to the mast of his ship to listen to the Sirens, the mast “becomes an extension of his body” and he talks of “a community of animate and inanimate features” (52–53). This is a recurrent feature in his fiction. 16 Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics (London: Hutchinson, 1985). 17 John Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2002): 52. 18 “Wilson Harris, An Interview” by Helen Tiffin, New Literatures Review 7 (September 1979): 24.

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infinity”19 with the scientific perception of multifarious and protean manifestations of life and art. This blending of art and science takes place through the work of the artist, the medium who resurrects the drowned of history from the vacancy behind the “Beggar’s Mask.” When the beggar was a boy, the mother described his father as perfect, and he became the ancestor humanity lost for ever “except within an organ of true creation that ceaselessly returns” (18). The lost Father thus comes home in different guises in the artist’s work. He is, in one sense, the unknowable God for whom the artist in his creative capacity is a substitute (34). He also materializes in several partial father figures, one of them Trotsky, the father of revolution, who believed “in a permanent unceasing revolution” (43) but was assassinated like “pre-Columbian figures symbolically assassinated by history in conquistadorial regimes” (44) several hundred years before. The parallel between Trotsky’s assassination and the suppression by conquest of pre-Columbian cultures is first perceived when the mask of the beggar crumbles into ancient fragments, one of which represents “a SEATED PRE-COLUMBIAN SAGE WITH A CUP ” and “wings in his emaciated chest” (40, 41) who looks like an Oriental sage and might be instrumental in the creation of a new world-view that would revive shadowy populations.20 Lazarus, a recurrent figure in Harris’s fiction, was a contemporary of the pre-Columbian artist who fashioned the Oriental sage (83). He is another father personification who is resurrected as a work of art. In the narrative told by the artist at Carnival time, he is the dancer “Lazarus Quetzalcoatl” (84). Quetzalcoatl is an ambivalent god who plays a major role in the artist’s search for new beginnings. A “miraculous synthesis of serpent and bird,”21 he is both creator of the world and, in the pre-Columbian post-classic period, usually appears in human form. He is also god of the wind (Spirit) and of the dawn. With his adversary Tezcatlipoca (“Smoking Mirror”)22 they are said to represent matter and spirit. In 19

The Four Banks of the River of Space, 32. This is a simplified formulation of ramifications expressed through varied imagery. 21 Mary Miller & Karl Taube, An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993): 141. 22 An Illustrated History of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, 164. 20

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his meditation, the artist remembers that “he [Quetzalcoatl] looked into the Smoking Mirror and saw he had a human face” (118).23 He took on himself the sins of man, “the sins of a failed, universal imagination” (120). But “he clung [...] to an unfathomable Creator in whom a Spiritual art, beyond fixtures, mirrors the promise of Man however desolate that promise may seem” (119). We shall see that later in the artist’s dreaming journey Quetzalcoatl’s rebirth is an augury of new beginnings. The point here is the relationship or cross-cultural community of being between figures and works of art retrieved from the straitjacket of time. Another major instance of quantum variations are the many approaches to, and definitions of, art, though all accord with Harris’s fundamental conception of art as emerging from the void glimpsed through abysses and wounds in human beings and in the earth itself, which is why art is never free of terror and violence. We see this on the face of a child represented on a pre-Columbian pre-classic bowl, a face “filled with terror,” which makes the Mother realize that the Void, at which the child’s face expresses terror, “live[s],” while the artist had already reflected on her relation to the Void: Is the Mother of Space the mother of a Void that reaches into alternative universes of creation and ‘de-creation’, of Something that dwindles into Nothing we cannot yet explain save that this is the spirit of dialogue in art? Easy to ask such questions. They touch us too deeply. They bear on the secure and insecure fates of humanity reflected in the passivity of the arts that speak with hushed voices we suppress in ourselves. (42) At first sight, it might be argued that art is approached and defined as a remedy for the world’s evils and illnesses to counter a repetition of closures in language and in ideas adopted by politics, economics, and science, exercised therefore by a dominant civilization which sees itself as absolute in its values of communication. Such absolution breeds Death [...]. (64)

But art as such is no redeemer. It is only instrumental in breaking through “all closures and tyrannies of convention” (64) and so opening the way to the awakening of consciousness. All through the narrative, the artist is engaged in fashioning his self-portrait, attempting all the while to liberate himself from all prejudices, repeatedly faced with opposite or alternative choices in his self-questioning journey. For instance, 23

See also Harris, “Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on Originality and Tradition,” Wasafiri 20 (Autumn 1994): 38–43.


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Was art one-sided, dominant, singular, on the Bridge of Creation? Or was it plural, plural artist and creations overshadowed by an unfathomable God that gave all gods and substitutes chances for a complex, open-ended medium of universality [...]. (54)

In Harris’s fiction and essays, one manifestation of art and its substance has always been an irruption of the unconscious into the conscious or, as he once said, “the capacity of the abyss [eclipsed reality] to secrete revisionary potential within texts and imageries.”24 The unconscious is thus roots of consciousness. In this novel, what one might call full consciousness is a translation of wholeness and therefore “a mystery” (117) coexistent with the unconscious (“unconscious/conscious” 166). As the Mother of Space reflects, “Consciousness – however diverse in its formal applications – was a universal, spatial entity, a small-seeming entity perhaps yet boundless, unbound” (35). In his own journey towards this boundless entity, while the artist fashions himself, his purpose is to release “the prisoners of closures of tradition and fate” (64). This takes place gradually, though not completely, in the second part of the novel narrated by the artist, which is the counter-intuitive part of the novel and a voyage towards consciousness. It is carnival time25 and he leaves his studio to go to Water Street, looking for the woman of whom his “Mother of Space” is an exact reproduction, which may be why he cannot find her.26 He also looks for Lazarus, in whom he finds an original resemblance with the Oriental sage and the pre-classic child on the preColumbian bowl as these arise in his consciousness. He himself dances carnival as a “Stone,” which turns “into a flowing life-giving stream” (85) and later crashes into his studio (152). Nevertheless, at this stage the artist realizes that he is halted in his journey and cannot force open the door to a deeper consciousness; he must therefore take another route. Meanwhile, in his dream, bits of his studio walls – the seat of creation – turn into keys, one of which gives him a clue that will open the way to24

“The Fabric of the Imagination,” Third World Quarterly 12.1 (January 1990): 181, repr. in From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial, ed. Rutherford, 24. 25 Carnival in Harris’s fiction is a metaphor for creation. On this subject, see “Carnival and Creativity in Wilson Harris’s Fiction,” above. 26 Exact reproductions are a realistic rendering of a surface reality. Hence the inexactitude of the characters he discovers in the abyss of Time and history. See the “inexact” small man, 153, 154.

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wards self-understanding. He finds an old letter which reminds him that he had sold his childhood house to a woman he now visualizes simultaneously as real flesh-and-blood in his studio, a figure in his painting, and a variation on the Mother of Space (97). She, too, has returned out of the past into the present “to stab at all complacency” (95). She makes him aware of the likeness between his sculpture of the Mother of Space, the figure of a “reclining woman, 600 B C , Ancient Mexico” (95), and a woman who, she says, is in prison. After her visit, the artist becomes aware of all the prisoners he should rescue from gaol: the reclining woman, Lazarus, the Oriental sage, a child-like man, and the beggar, all figures and elements of the past he had seen before without fully exploring the cross-cultural possibilities they harbour that might sustain him on the path to consciousness. The beggar persuades him to visit his former home, which, the artist says, “was to prove my first self-portrait” (101), at first an “unwelcome” one. Indeed, when he arrives at his former home, which he hasn’t seen since he sold it, paying no attention to what he then deemed unimportant details, he is shocked to see that it has been replaced by a prison, into which he is introduced by a modern Cyclopean gaoler (108). His subsequent encounters with the prisoners are clearly allegorical landmarks in the creation of his self-portrait – of a new, regenerated self, and of art. “Was my self-portrait the prison, the mental prison in which she [the reclining woman] was confined?” (104). Significantly, the figures of the past are also contemporary, suggesting that they remain imprisoned by “static traditions [...] in dominant cultures” (106) of which the Cyclopean gaoler, blind to deeper realities, is a guardian. The reclining woman is thus also a present-day drug addict in an advanced stage of pregnancy. But her eyes are “at the edge of the inexpressible” (105). And, to the artist’s assertion that he has come to rescue her, she retorts that she will rescue him, thus emphasizing the role of the Other in spiritual salvation, necessarily a reciprocal process. The artist’s ensuing progress is conveyed largely in poetic terms that weave the existential and spiritual interconnectedness between all beings and natural elements. An association of images – the balloon-like pregnancy of the pre-Columbian reclining woman, the Oriental sage with a cup and the child on a bowl “[speaking] to one another” and themselves belonging to the “womb figured in the stars” (109) – enable him to move as a seed from one world to another and to join their constellation (110).

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Back in prison as a Nobody in the eyes of the Cyclopean guard,27 the artist comes upon Lazarus, now “Faceless,” who tells him he will arise with the second coming of Quetzalcoatl: “I arise time and time again, to make the different universes on Earth live afresh” (112). Of course, he clearly stands for the many resurrections of the past frequent in Harris’s fiction. The artist’s vision here blends Homeric, Christian and pre-Columbian elements. Lazarus manages to escape from prison, but in a way resurrects in the child Quetzalcoatl to whom the drugged woman gives birth before dying. With her death, something in the artist dies, “giving birth to Imaginations more varied than [he] dreamt [he] was capable of” (121), which may have been what she meant when she said she would rescue him. In his continued meditation in the prison cell, also the prison of a civilization (118), the artist recalls a painting by Gauguin of a woman lying passive and watched by the spirit of the dead. He also recalls the picture in Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray which bears the marks of the protagonist’s debauchery, and he sees in the painting “the intuitive life of art” (117). He then contrasts the Spirit of Life and the Spirit of the dead with the “cell of language” in which “we imprison ourselves without understanding how or why we are imprisoned” (117). Language is indeed a, if not the, major factor in the construction of reality. The Mother of Space complains at one stage that The comedy of the Inferno [...] had imposed itself upon outsiders [...] wittingly, at times, unwittingly, at other times, by closures, a repetition of closures in language and in ideas adopted by politics, economics, and science, exercised therefore by a dominant civilization which sees itself as an absolute in its values of communication. (64)

But there are also ‘lapses’ in the language through which man can become conscious of forgotten relationships between visibility and invisibility (53). And the artist later realizes that “nothing was settled without a visionary language to re-interpret the ruined fixities of recorded history that baffled gaolers and prisoners alike and kept them divided and in place” (85).

27 See The Odyssey, Song ix. Harris frequently adapts Odyssean episodes in his fiction. The artist says here that “Cyclopean blindness rules the world as it did in Homer’s age” (110).

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This visionary language comes to him when he perceives the deeper significance of Quetzalcoatl in his work: The terrain of Imagination into which I had now distinctly entered in meaningful, far-reaching deceptions of place that lifted me into walled otherness and into peculiar, changing sameness as though I were both in my studio and in a prison that had been my home, as though I were living consciousness and yet even more alive, it seemed, in a depth of original unconsciousness flowing into fragmentary, modern consciousness in sculptures and paintings [...] I had woven which were returning [...] the terrain of lost or stolen voices [...] all these and more came to my mind with overwhelming but subtle power. (124)

From now on, figures buried in the unconscious help him prepare for the “Journey of Dream on which a civilization must embark to save itself” (130): the reclining woman; Quetzalcoatl as her child, who “knows without knowing” the “Itness of the Mind”28 but also the ambivalent fire “burning and not burning” (128)29 which falls like a veil around him in his Dream and equips him for the journey “within [him] and beyond [him]” (128). In the Journey of Dream on which he now embarks, the artist meets several historical figures who, in one way or another, have contributed to the nature of civilization. Cortez, for instance, in his conquest of Mexico set a pattern of violent behaviour replicated in Stalin, “set[ting] in train a series of trails that led to the murder of Trotsky” (140) in Mexico. It is obviously Harris’s conviction that the failure to create a “New, CrossCultural World in the sixteenth century” (143) encouraged similar failures due to one-sided “ritual and dogma” (136) in the colonial encounters of subsequent centuries. In his dream30 the artist has now reached a level of depth in which the “stilled” portraits of the figures he meets are aroused, and he “participate[s] in them as they in [him]” (131),31 which, apart from 28 In The Eye of the Scarecrow and in some later novels “It” represents the Spirit or the essence of the spiritual. 29 Non-burning fire occurs frequently in Harris’s fiction and recalls the “fiery furnace” episode in the Bible (Daniel 3) when the three men (Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego) thrown into it, as ordered by Nebuchadnezzar, walked out of it unhurt. 30 One must keep in mind that in Harris’s fiction dream opens the way to the unconscious towards which the protagonist is travelling. 31 See a similar community of being in The Four Banks of the River of Space: “[Penelope] shared the material substance of my thoughts even as I penetrated hers” (23).


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the cross-culturality it illustrates, implies that the artist’s delineation of his self-portrait is simultaneously the potential creation of a new society and civilization. It is also on this level that the artist discerns the possibility of remorse in Cortez. Already in earlier novels, the dreaming protagonist becomes aware of a vulnerability in the most ruthless conquerors or tyrants, whether Cortez, Pizarro or Jim Jones.32 This is an ontological feature manifest in all forms of being, whether human or natural, a variation on the holes, gaps and chasms already mentioned and a chink in anyone’s armour which could open the way to change. Hence the expression “transfigurative wound”33 and in this novel “a human transfigurative art” (140). This is a variation on the regenerative dimension of catastrophe in Harris’s art. The artist, however, cannot free Cortez within himself “from his prejudices and from [his own]”: I could not wholly cast off the ancient, unconscious/subconscious desire to master the globe that persisted as the real savagery in all times from Alexander the great through Napoleon to Hitler and Mussolini. (146)

As in his meditation as a whole, the artist envisages alternative possibilities and choices and at this crucial moment of his self-questioning does not dissociate himself from “the savagery one carries in oneself alongside sensations of confusing possibilities of revelation” (148). He nevertheless feels prompted to express his “confession” (148–50), an artist’s manifesto, obviously Harris’s as much as his protagonist’s. Indeed, the confession is a summing-up of the conception of art which, from his first novel on, structures Harris’s fictional sequence: the paramount role of intuition in the creation of a “community of being” as reciprocal process and the capacity for change it can entail if applied in society. This conviction that art can generate social change is partly sustained by an originality (novel, after all, means ‘new’) which Harris sees as parallel to discoveries in science, not just the quantum variations linked metaphorically in the narrative but the arousal and movements of “an ancient and flexible substance” buried in the psyche and comparable to “the moving plates under the surface of the Earth” (150). The notion of “moving plates” derives from a theory already formulated in the 1920s but only fully accepted by scientists at the end of the 1960s. It assumes that 32 33

See Jonestown and The Dark Jester. Carnival (London: Faber & Faber, 1985): 25.

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the continents used to form one single great entity which broke up, the resulting territories drifting apart. An oceanic rift or mountain belt at the bottom of the ocean is subject to constant submarine volcanic eruptions, which entails the formation of new oceanic crust and the continuous displacement of the continents. Because the oceanic and continental crusts, now called ‘plates’, are constantly moving, they are called ‘moving plates’.34 Significantly, Harris, who had already drawn a parallel between psychological and geological depths in Ascent to Omai, suggests again that the past apparently imprisoned in the unconscious is not static but continuously susceptible to motion and eruption like the ‘moving plates’. The other major element in the artist’s confession is the emphasis on “the life of Spirit” (148), already present in Palace of the Peacock and a prominent tendency in the later fiction. Its further development in The Mask of the Beggar is the parallel drawn between Christ and Quetzalcoatl, who, it was believed in ancient Mexico, would return in the future (like Christ). Just as Christ represents suffering mankind, so Quetzalcoatl returns “in hidden intuitive form [...] on the Ships that brought Immigrants [exploited victims] from China into Harbourtown and South and Central America” (149). This is yet another instance of cross-culturality, a way of bridging the gaps between men and cultures and of bringing “hidden twinships” (148) to light. The last section of the narrative develops, as in earlier stages, along dualistic lines. In the artist’s studio, there is a “CRASH ” (151), the latter, as in all of Harris’s novels, metaphorizing the shattering of the world of appearances, thus enabling a deeper reality to come to light.35 The crash occurs when a small man throws into the studio a large rock, “a radioactive Stone” with a map of the world on it (as on the floor of the studio), provoking what the artist calls a “numinous explosion,” a “blow from the Sky” (152), while the diminutive man who throws the stone may himself have descended from the sky or ascended from the street (153). Dressed in a beautiful suit made in one of the world’s major capi34

I am grateful for this explanation to Jean–Clair Duchesne, a professor of geology at the University of Liège. The catastrophic tsunami in South Asia was due to such a phenomenon. 35 The crash is often a re-enactment of the catastrophes responsible for so many dismemberments in men and societies but which, for Harris, could have led, or can lead, to regeneration.

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tals and apparently representing their materialism, he, too, exists in several dimensions. He is a real man created by the artist in his studio, sentenced for stealing a boat (156), then arrested by the police after escaping from prison (169). He is also “buried history” and a quantum variation of all the figures the artist has met in his explorations. He (the artist) has now reached the roots of consciousness, the purpose of his counter-intuitive narrative, to which such variations are native (159), while the child-like man also appears as “the living embodiment of burning, non-burning fires that had lit [the] studio from the beginning” (153): “Fire burns yet possesses a secret window [another variation on ‘hole’], in the furnace of violence it creates, through which we contemplate an immense task in varieties of healing” (157). This last creation, however, can also be threatening and a source of terror for the artist, an indication that the Other whom the artist thinks he has made is not a passive substance to be moulded to his liking but, like the Mother of Space, an independent character. At the deepest level of his dream, the artist sees him as “sliced,” broken and dismembered but in this state pervaded with tenderness and compassion. Thus joint terror and compassion are the pivot of the new beginnings the artist has been trying to discover and whose significance he now ponders: Was all this – in the form of the man in my studio – a symptom of Faustian immortal Time that steals and brings back what it steals in unpredictable ways? It was and it was not. It was a radical penetration of Faustian Time away from a singular, absolute Face into mutualities between the negligible and the apparently fixed and formal, between upwards and downwards, between glimpses of the Sky that stretches into infinity and glimpses of the Earth that baffles life and finity, between loathing and love, between what one creates that re-creates the depths one has missed. (167)

This achievement of “mutualities” and balance is clearly not final or ultimate, for immediately afterwards the artist unthinkingly hits the child-like man with the stone and the man fires and strikes the artist’s self-portrait with its many faces on the wall. The police then arrive and arrest him. In other words, the material world of appearances always reasserts itself. The dream and the artist’s last work of art make it clear that there can be no final solution to the world’s conflicts.

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The artist’s last thoughts are a further meditation on the role of art following his relationship with the child-man, who had told him “Art springs from life. Or is it life that springs from art?” (164).36 The two possibilities are confirmed by the artist, who first thinks “I had propelled [the childman] onto an Ocean of Space like one coming from neglected areas of the Imagination upon a watershed of Times” (170), then “I had made a real man, if nothing else, from a dot in my notebooks” (171). It suggests that the material and the imaginary worlds are equally real. Harris, however, does not idealize art, which, being man-made, can never be wholly consummate. Van Gogh (whom he greatly admires) had been so affected by such limitations that he committed suicide, and Wilde could not pursue his “attempt to bridge subjective place with the mysterious life of the arts” after he came out of prison (169). Harris’s purpose since Palace of the Peacock has been to approach, however glimmeringly and in flashes of intuition, what he once called “the inimitable ground of being.”37 The Mask of the Beggar criticizes more explicitly than ever both a purely materialistic and technological civilization and the kind of fiction that fails to probe the deeper motivations and emotions that threaten men when they run berserk. This criticism is counterpointed by his perception of both outer and inner spiritual life, of human existence interwoven with all the elements of nature and the universe, of a bridge between cultures inherent in what he calls “crosscultural psyche.” This perception informs the manifold imagery that orchestrates a multi-levelled, dynamic reality which, ideally, one should grasp in its totality. But, as Harris insists throughout his fiction and essays, human perceptions are necessarily partial; thus wholeness is unattainable in both life and fiction, which is why his own work, like the existential process he has so eloquently interpreted, can only be an “unfinished genesis.” At the end of his fictional autobiography in The Infinite Rehearsal, the narrator wonders “Whose hand would seek mine, whose mask become my age in the future?”38 After his encounter with the child-man in The Mask of the Beggar, the artist also anticipates that his art will be carried on by other creators:

36

See Oscar Wilde, “life is the reflection of literature.” The Four Banks of the River of Space, 51. 38 The Infinite Rehearsal, 82. 37

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I could not believe it but the listening feeling persisted in a non-burning quality that would require future Imaginations beyond me, future Imaginations that would link many-framed forms of music into the rhythms of language. (171–72)

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The Ghost of Memory A Meditation on the Nature of Art

Mine eye has play’d the painter

T

H E G H O S T O F M E M O R Y , the latest and, possibly, the last expression of Harris’s inexhaustible creativity, appears as a philosophical synthesis of his considerable fictional output. It is mainly a meditation on the origins of creation and on the nature of art, though its abstract features are counterpointed by sense-rooted metaphors. Basically, however, it is a kind of gathering-up of questions that have preoccupied Harris throughout his novels, especially the later ones. In this respect, it could be called a Gesamtkunstwerk1 – a comprehensive work of art, a blending of various artistic means of expression fused imaginatively, so that, ideally, one should be able to capture the novel as a whole. The questions the narrator/protagonist keeps asking are “What is truth?” “What is love?” “What is spirit?” “What is art?” – fundamental questions which call not for one but for a multiplicity of answers. The narrator, taken for a terrorist, has been shot in the back, though he claims he is no terrorist. Like some of Harris’s earlier characters, he has a multiple personality – son of the mother of space, artist, beggar, trickster; but, above all, he is the Ghost of memory, another of Harris’s “dreamcharacters” who hover between unconsciousness and consciousness. He seeks to bring to light “unconscious perceptions” (another striking oxy-

1

An expression used by the composer Richard Wagner for his operas, though not as Heidegger understood it – as “an art which must become again an absoluteness.” Quoted by Jacques Taminiaux in Art et évenement: Spéculation et jugement des Grecs à Heidegger (Paris: Éditions Belin, 2005): 200.

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moron2) that bear on the nature of civilization past and present. We saw that in The Infinite Rehearsal Ghost was a major character who emerged into consciousness. Here his position at the edge of consciousness and unconsciousness indicates his capacity to apprehend together life and death or, more exactly, what Harris calls the “close, almost indefinable cross-culturalities between moments of life and death,”3 which is another way of expressing his well-known concept of existence as death-in-life and life-in-death. When the Narrator was shot, he fell into a painting, an art-form which, as we saw in the earlier chapter “The Novel as Painting,” is a metaphor for life itself, never to be captured in its wholeness. His moving in and out of it therefore suggests that he moves between life and death, and conveys both a subjective and an objective perception of reality, since he sees the world from inside and outside. At the same time, though, like Idiot Nameless in Companions of the Day and Night, he falls and keeps falling through the narrative, wondering whether he embodies falling multitudes (3), he ascends the ladder between earth and heaven, enacting, in Pierre François’ felicitous expression, a “lapsarian ascent.”4 Up and down also conveys his movements between death and life, the unconscious and consciousness. According to Harris, “the unconscious possesses a function that brings down the conscious complacencies that appear to rule the world in the surfaces of existence. This signifies the bringing together of conventional moments – that are normally alien to each other – into astonishing intimacy, moments of safety that rule and moments of desolation or wretchedness.”5 As in Harris’s earlier fiction, there is a mythic and allegorical dimension in the narrative. The bullet or blow the protagonist received was dealt by a “Titan or Master of violence” (6), and the Narrator thinks he was 2 This phrase is borrowed from Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination (1967; Berkeley & Los Angeles, U of California P , 1971): 17. 3 The Ghost of Memory, like all other novels by Wilson Harris, will be published in London by Faber & Faber. My references to page numbers are from the manuscript he generously sent me. The quotation above is from the Author’s Note, ii. 4 Pierre François, “The Lapsarian Ascent,” in François, Inlets of the Soul: Contemporary Fiction in English and the Myth of the Fall (Cross/Cultures 35; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1999): 255. 5 Letter to Hena Maes–Jelinek, 30 December 2005.

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pushed by the father of the gods when he fell. The Titan is a figure already present in Jonestown as “Trickster of Heaven,” whom Deacon wanted to fight and conquer in his ambition to equal the gods. Titans were intermediate creatures between dinosaurs and men, and therefore embody one stage in the evolutionary process. They represent untameable forces of primeval nature. Their violence is a feature perceptible in Nature as well as in man, yet, in Harris’s view, it can be reversed like any other form that seems fixed or implacably superior: “stroked lines,” in the Artist’s painting, “bring new possibilities within the Titan’s eyes, for revolutionary spaces unforeseen by conventional logic” (11). Thus, again as in earlier novels, there is qualified optimism in the possible conversion of violence – qualified, because there is both hope and despair in the protagonist’s progress and because most revolutions, whether French, Russian or Chinese, degenerate into “narrow conservatism, complacency, democracy under the banner of crude capitalism” (12). Obviously, then, the novel presents a very contemporary predicament, even history in the making. Yet, however representative of present-day plights, such crises have marred human existence throughout history. It is the function of Art to perpetuate “a continuity no one understands between ancient and modern traditions of blood-consuming politics and religions” (14). The Narrator who was shot because deemed a terrorist wonders whether he is a “ghostly sacrifice on a pinnacle of hope” (13), comparable to the preColumbian victims whose heart, extracted with a knife, was offered to the Sun to ensure its return and keep Darkness at bay: An invisible ghostly knife runs across centuries into a soldier’s bullet or bomb that devastates scores or thousands, into the Market-place as well, in its stalls and pedestals, where the humblest creatures may be seen. (13)

This allusion to the innocent victims of fanaticism exemplifies Harris’s condemnation of all absolutes in the name of which man commits the worst atrocities. “Absolutes,” the protagonist says, “reinforce partialities until they conceal them from view. This has helped to promote genocides, holocausts” (55), which brings to mind the best-known genocides committed in the name of Western civilization, those in pre-Columbian America and in twentieth-century Rwanda as well as the genocide of the Jews, which Harris presents (rightly in my view) as the product of centuries of antisemitism:

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Take the Jews [...]. They were blamed and persecuted across hundreds of years for the crucifixion of Christ. No one else confessed to instinctive guilt for the barbarous deed that had been performed by the Roman military. […] If they had […] the Holocaust might never have happened. (102)6

As we saw, notably in Jonestown, even God is not an absolute. “Is there a strange Darkness in the Mind of God,” one character asks. And further: “Is it not true […] that without the gods, in the absence of gods that are partial, God would become so dominant, so central, he would turn absolutely human and limited?” (82). This rejection of absoluteness is counterpointed by the many forms of partiality the narrator discerns as he moves in the “womb of art” (12), an art he repeatedly calls “Art of Limbo” – inevitably so, since he is a ghostly figure as well as a “broken” one, thus reflecting in himself the fractured state of all who fell in history. Theirs was a fall into the Void and into Darkness, always the fate, in Harris’s fiction, of decimated peoples in the past but also in modern cultures and the human environment generally. For instance, “global warming springs into a Void. Rising seas and changing climates […] are hidden realities pointing to disaster” (14). As a matter of fact, Nature, like the Artist, “cries out in a cry that is eloquent with many voices within bird, and beasts and forests” (15). This reminds us that throughout his fiction Harris humanizes nature, which indeed partakes of the same essence as man. In both Titan and Mother of space, the artist sees “different yet related aspects of equation between Nature and Man” (17). But there is also a parallel between Man and the cosmos, as there is between the creation of Art and the creation of the universe: “I was drawn into the Womb of Art by a vision of constellations. […] Who could say where lay the origins of Art joined to the constellations?” (24). The Void and Darkness, however, also offer a possibility of rebirth. The Artist is indeed “in search of new beginnings” (29) and feels that his fall provides “an immense opportunity to conceive a dying into creativity” (13). This posits Harris’s conviction that art is not the mere rendering of a surface or even a psychological reality but involves a plunge into the deepest recesses of the human soul. In the painting, which, we must keep in mind, encompasses reality, the Narrator/Artist has been sitting on the bank of a river, metaphorically 6

On this subject, see Sven Lindquist, Exterminate All the Brutes, tr. Joan Tate (London: Granta, 1996).

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entering the rapids of history (21). There he sees a group of naked people whom a spectator on the scene calls Arawaks. They are reminiscent of the tribe Patience sees in Tumatumari, “groping figures uncertain of themselves” who “had come in South or Central America” (25). The spectator calls himself Christopher Columbus and says he comes regularly to the gallery to see the painting. In his ensuing dialogue with the Narrator, Columbus expresses his contempt for the Arawaks and their culture, thereby echoing the triumphant materialism and “values of the Titan” (28, 30), whereupon the Artist explains his own conception of Art: “What I am getting at is the genius of Art through and beyond all fixtures with which we would stop universal life in its tracks and claim we have an absolute solution to the ills of humankind” (29). As a matter of fact, the dialogue opposes two world-views that have prevailed through the centuries, at the very least since the Renaissance. Columbus asserts that his spiritual parents are Ferdinand and Isabella and claims he belongs to a Church that never changes; he is proud of its static frame or mould. One can call it creationist, since, as he says, “Man is created in the image of God” (35).7 Creationism is a form of fundamentalism, a rigid religious approach specific not just to Catholicism as represented by Ferdinand and Isabella but to all the kinds of fundamentalism that have become so spectacularly resurgent in the modern world. When two new characters, George and Andy, enter the gallery, and he tells them that the Artist/Trickster/Beggar wants “to look into Darkness,” he is accused by Andy of being dogmatic and authoritarian: He [Columbus] was obsessed. There was no doubt about it. His obsession led him to strive to make his Church an all-important feature in the New World. So all-important it ignored or suppressed all other faiths that sprang from primitivity, so-called primitive fire, primitive tree, primitive water, primitive sky, primitive soil, primitive rock.” (34)

The Narrator’s view, by contrast, is Darwinian, the expression of a belief in evolution and therefore, though this is not specifically stated, scientific. Interestingly, however, not only does this view admit of inexplicable elements or events in history, which men translate into myth (34), it also parallels to some extent the primitive view of nature:

7

Unless otherwise indicated, italics in quotations represents Harris’s emphases.

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The primitive believe in a god of fire, a god of water, a god of the soil, a god of rivers.… In this way they see – whether they perceive it logically or not – that the psyche is dismembered and may only be somewhat united again, in its parts, with and through Nature, through diversity. (34)

The dismembered psyche is “the psyche of Earth” (36), which implies that the physical world is animated by a vital principle. The Narrator explains that a cataclysmic shock occurred in a prehistoric age when ancestors of present-day species (dinosaurs) disappeared from the surface of the earth. But primitive people are aware that some of their features have survived inexplicably and mysteriously into later periods. They know of this inheritance shared with men and of the interlacing between all forms of life: “we are related to every creature in the tree of life and death,” and further: “Primitive faith […] transfers human pain into trees, it shares human pain with the Earth. […] Does the living Earth groan in its arteries and veins?” (36). This pervasive, immanent vital principle is what in the novel is called Mind as opposed to the merely physical Brain. In his progress along River and through Forest, the ghostly Beggar discerns a frail thread that might shed some light on the “mystifying emergence of Man on earth.” He also hopes to discover in the canvas “portions of the hidden Mind of the Universe” (41). The two (hidden Mind and Man’s emergence) are obviously linked and might clarify one another. Searching for Night-eyes similar to his own, the Beggar/Artist perceives Tiresias, “blind yet mysteriously seeing” (43) – in Harris’s writing a recurrent figure that has been both man and woman and has thus experienced a kind of wholeness inaccessible to ordinary human beings. The eyes of the “Prophet and Beggar” Tiresias, though blind, are “open to consciousness and unconsciousness.” As he predicts, they come to a city buried in the soil, Olmec, where they see Arawaks, “shadows of presence on the stage of death and life” (43). Olmec city is “in a void of time” but is also in the Beggar/Narrator’s unconscious (44), an indication that he carries within himself the burden of history, even though he complains that the unconscious remains “untapped, unspoken for” (45). In Olmec city, the Narrator falls into a lighted room where he sees a large bowl of Olmec design which opens to reveal a sleeping infant child whom the artist sees as “an Infant of hope […] in its ancestral cradle” (46). In Harris’s earlier novels, the child has always represented the potential for future developments. Its presence in a pre-Columbian work of art can only mean that the future depends on an immersion in, and under-

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standing of, the past. But it does not denote a naive faith in the child, for “Until he can make another leap from Childhood into virtually impossible maturity he will continue to clothe his vulnerability with Childhood fantasies of parochial rightness, parochial narrowness” (47). At this stage in his progress, the protagonist still thinks he is “ignorant of the complex universe of Art.” But he realizes that Nature is the Painter (the creator?), whose vision is instrumentalized through himself and Tiresias in a play which reveals that “Spirit is the business of Art” (49), an invisible Spirit that Tiresias alone sees in the “Ghosts of Memory,” the spiritual nakedness of the Arawaks returning to “the theatre of the City” (49). When a lightning storm breaks, it reveals phallic lines in the Olmec head, fires that “burn their way to the lower organs” (50), while the lightning also reveals an Arawak woman returning from the flood that washed away her civilization. In the renewed dialogue between the Trickster/ Beggar and Columbus, the latter reasserts the absoluteness of his Church; conversely, the Beggar says he himself “seek[s] new shapes […]. The approach of an open Mind which evolves […] through fragments, through shifts, in the stream of time” (54). The chapter that follows is both a sequel to the Beggar’s meditation and a dialogue between George and Andy, who are looking at the painting. The Beggar has left the room for a flicker of time unseen by Tiresias. The seer’s blindness brings to his mind the conviction of a universal blindness: “History is blind though we lean upon it as though it knows everything” (56). He also reasserts the kinship between Man and the Cosmos when he sees “rags of cloud” as “Man’s awakening” (57) and then wonders “Who am I? What am I? What is Man?” (57). Tiresias, who denies being omniscient, does not answer these questions, drawing instead a parallel between the violin-shaped Arawak woman and a headless, limbless Greek goddess. But “Such a breakage means the possibility of a new start, a new knowledge inscribed with sculptures, paintings, writings” (59). It is in keeping with Harris’s philosophy that these artistic forms should be incomplete and that their fragmentary being should express either “material cruelty” or “immaterial love,” a love presented as an essential agent in the creation of art, seeking “to open our minds within and beyond illusions of constant form in a universe of which we know very little” (59). As Tiresias explains, he feels he is in the Void, the Void of past and present histories but “moving into undreamt futures.” These, the Beggar realizes, may come into being if the various forms of art he has

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discussed – Greek statue, the Arawak woman looking like a Giacometti – enter into a profound dialogue through a new creativity (60). Tiresias then sends him to another room in the ancient city, where he will come upon Wanderers and Lovers. But, getting out of the painting, he comes upon George and Andy again, though he is invisible to them. Their conversation turns on George’s perception of the noise made by huge crowds of people in a stadium, which he thinks of as “the pathos of humanity,” a “desolate humanity,” actually involved in what is for these people like a religious ritual – Harris’s way of suggesting that this is the kind of value modern crowds go for to fill their empty lives. The noise reminds George of the roar of the rapids he heard in South America, “a music like rain and fire in the rapids” (65). The rapids are “in the painting,” hence relevant to all cultures - which leads to his reflection that “Art and Nature [combine] mysteriously into a perception within us” (64). In the picture gallery, the Narrator carries on with his meditation, which now centres again on his own identity: “Who was I? How could I account for myself?” (70). In his progress towards self-knowledge, he makes several observations: He is “Nothing,” though he knows he is “Something,” which suggests a need to empty oneself of what one is before the reconstruction of a new self becomes possible. He is both visible (to Columbus who takes things literally) and invisible – to George and Andy, who possibly hear his voice within themselves “like […] the subconscious/unconscious mind of theatre” (70). He is also “Real and unreal” (75). But mostly he lacks wholeness: “The Trickster is incomplete. Tiresias is incomplete. The Beggar is incomplete” (70). The notion of incompleteness prevails through the chapter: “I am the Ghost of memory […] Memory is the trail of incompletion” (71), and I see this as an aspect of Harris’s denial of totality and completeness. As Ghost of memory, the Narrator perceives a million faces in the street, among them a black boxer who has died. He then sees a skeleton ship which is several ships, including one from ancient Greece and one associated with America. Jason has all these ships in his blood. As in Harris’s earlier fiction, the ship is “a slave-ship in which slaves travel across the seas in a death that proves to be a terrifying bondage called life” (72). “It is ruined by wars, by slaveries […] by misadventures sprung from human blindness,” but “it carries open doors [to the mystery of truth] into unknown spaces, into unknown places” (76). In this context, George is drawn to Jason, who was married to the Arawak woman whom Andy presents as a

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witch and who had predicted that Jason would become a champion (77), though he later betrayed her. Jason may be pathetic, but he is representative of ordinary people, embodying both their unenviable condition and their potential creativity. Thereby he may contribute to the “Profoundest creativity [that] is needed” (73). George sees that their creation, an effigy or sculpture on the ship and the ship itself, is curiously inseparable from the great painting on the walls of the gallery (75), another way of expressing the creativeness inspired by the slaves. He evokes Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà8 as an expression of the brokenness in the living and the dying, a brokenness which apparently means that there is no complete, cohesive state of existence in life or in death. He also says that the Beggar in the painting “cannot be captured or seized […]. His essence is beyond us (75). Similarly, “our essence [i.e., of ordinary people] cannot be stolen or captured” (79), which is a renewed assertion of Harris’s essentialism. After Tiresias’ assertion that they would meet the Wanderer, George became “a wanderer, an incomplete version of the Wanderer” (76). The Wanderer opens the room in Olmec City into which he had previously sent the Arawaks they had seen. In the middle of the room is Elena/Medea (in whom a Venezuelan and a Greek myth are fused). She also brings to mind a brokenness which, again, offers “a miracle of possibilities” (84), and afterwards appears to the Beggar as “a Goddess of incredible beauty and grace” (87). If she had been seen earlier as a prostitute or a witch, the Wanderer explains that this is because she was not understood in the vagaries of immortal myth: “Is not life itself a dream we do not understand? Are there not mysteries in Nature? How can I explain to you what your inner pulse has known, what your inner eyes have seen?” (88). Who was the Wanderer? The Beggar asks: Is he the Artist? Was he the Artist? Did his ghost dwell in the painting? Did he embody the mystery of a creator and his creation in which consciousness and unconsciousness were not contrivances but essential, uncapturable forces […]? (89)

This leads on to another major question about the Nature of truth, which “required a ceaseless probe into consciousness and unconsciousness beyond and within ourselves” (89). Then the Wanderer makes the Beggar aware of “undreamt-of and immensely important perspectives” (89), but 8

Harris had heard of the Pietà before he read Anton Ehrenzweig’s The Hidden Order of Art. He was deeply impressed by it when he saw it in Milan.

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the latter is aware that there are limits to what an artist or a creator can do. Nevertheless he becomes independent and formulates his own vision of Art, “as if I myself were involved in the arts of creation: involved in an involuntary force of the unconscious beyond myself and within myself.” Is he the unconscious eruption into Christopher’s conscious? I could speak to Christopher Columbus like an eruption of the unconscious in him pleading with him and against which he fought. Would he change at the last moment, would we change, and release a true phantom of saving Art, a true phantom of forces beyond capture in a world we shared? (90)

Like the Beggar himself, the already-mentioned forces beyond capture reiterate Harris’s conviction of the unfathomable in the existential process. What follows is an analysis of the nature of love by the Wanderer, starting with his reaction to Medea’s murder of her children after she was betrayed by Jason. He speaks of her as one that “broke in herself a fixed trail of habits in which we frame an infant before it is born” (92). This is clearly a questioning of the sentimental, conventional way in which children are “imprisoned.” Although Medea’s act is cruel, she was able to “revise the Arts of the world by bringing into play doors that open which seem forever shut” (92). In other words, she broke a usually rigid code of behaviour to reveal a dual “impossibility/possibility” of change, “impossibility” denying purely optimistic prospects. For, in his repeated question “What is love?,” the Wanderer points to its many deceptions: women bearing children year after year for uncaring husbands, children bundled into factories or conscripted into armies, or men and women wanting children to prove they are not infertile. All these cases reveal an “inner truth stranger than reason” (91) while also exposing the exploitation of children that is hidden by complacent, separatist regimes. To Christopher Columbus, all this is heresy. The Beggar steps out of the canvas and is temporarily one with the Wanderer: “‘we’ and ‘one’ were linked in all men and women though few were aware of this subtle linkage” (93). When he is separated from the Wanderer, he is sad to be left in a state of incompletion, though this makes him open to new possibilities (94). In the ensuing dialogue between Columbus and the Beggar, the latter again stresses man’s attachment to the material, implicitly opposing Brain (the material) to Mind and emphasizing man’s incapacity to understand the universe. Referring again to the Goddess Elena/Medea, he says: “She

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is married to a truth we cannot confine in a single apartment or compartment” (96). Further, he asserts that “we need a woman – who has become lights […] and light in uncertain light – to tell us what love is in the infinite wastes of the universe” (97). When Christopher asks a basic question relating to the meaning of Heaven and therefore to men’s beliefs, he answers: heaven is in Nature, a Nature of complex and difficult balances between all things, all peoples, all creatures, land and waters, balances through which we may learn – with an open mind – to break through in small degrees – however minuscule – the involuntary prisons in which we imprison ourselves. (97–98)

Again the question is asked, “What is Art?” “There are energies,” says the Beggar, “which come from anywhere and fall into paintings, sculptures, writings, and make them live afresh. All art is in a state of ruin awaiting the moment when energy comes in afresh.” (99)

And further: “What is the creative imagination?” There is no straightforward answer to these questions. Instead, the Beggar tells Christopher that the Wanderer is a ghost-figure in his (Christopher’s) unconscious. Yet Columbus recalls, in self-justification, that he brings the rule of conquest into play by bringing the religion of Christ to a barbarous people. To the Beggar, what Christopher calls barbarism was a way of creating a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious: “evil and good […] innocence and guilt are […] mysteriously related” (102). Such a relationship prevails even in the divine, as William Blake implied in his writing, and the beggar asserts that “Satanic forces energised eternity and helped the divine into eternity” (103). Christopher’s anger at this statement prompts the Beggar to evoke a slave ship – actually, the ship full of Black Friars (slaves) in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. Elena/Medea sees it as a ghost-ship, which leads on to the question “What is freedom?” (105). Although this remains illusory in a system that enslaves itself through its love of material riches, a change may occur “through and beyond the forms of the mimicry of absolutes which tie us down forever” (105). Still stung by the Beggar’s words, Christopher turns to the canvas on the wall and begins to slice and cut into it so that the pieces fall to the ground like rags. This is conquest and destruction all over again: “He sliced the River into broken pavements, he sliced the Forest into broken Arawaks, he sliced the Rooms into lost Cities” (105). When the Beggar utters a scream, George and Andy

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rush into the Room, but the Beggar is invisible. In the end, only George is left with the pieces of painting. But he knows that an effort would be made to put it together again – that is, to reconstruct the life-process. Opening the window, George sees a constellation of lights, of stars which, he knows, appeared a million years before in the universe: “they were ruins in which one placed the origins of Art” (107); this again parallels the birth of Art with the birth of life, and would help George to put the fallen figure back into the painting. The last sentence of the novel is an act of faith in a possible resurrection from catastrophe. Our beliefs are largely illusory, but they should be brought together with the possibility of truth. In a meditation on the nature of the novel in a book called Le rideau (the curtain), the Czech novelist Milan Kundera emphasizes the major distinction between criticism and the art of the novel. Like Wilson Harris, he refers to what he calls “the futility of literary theory”9 and considers fiction writers as “poets of the novel.” He quotes Flaubert, who tried to “enter the soul of things,”10 which Robert Musil also tried to do through a “thinking metaphor.”11 Kundera, too, sees the novel as capable of stimulating a change in the individual and therefore, at a further remove, in society. The writer is the founder of a culture, of a nation.12 Also like Harris, he thinks that the transformation of forms is inseparable from existential discoveries.13 “A novel,” he writes, “is the fruit of an alchemy which transforms a woman into a man, a man into a woman, mud into gold, an anecdote into drama! It is this divine alchemy that is the strength of any novelist, the secret, the splendour of his art!”14 Referring to his homeland, he quotes a statement by Neville Chamberlain after signing the Munich agreement in 1938: “a far away country of which we know little,”15 which might apply to most postcolonial countries, certainly to early-modern America, and the way they were treated by European powers. He also quotes a statement by Goethe, which makes him a forerunner of crossculturalism: “national literature,” says Goethe,” no longer represents 9

Milan Kundera, Le rideau: Essai en sept parties (Paris: Gallimard, 2005): 173. Le rideau, 66, 76. 11 Le rideau, 87–88. 12 Le rideau, 185. 13 Le rideau, 25. 14 Le rideau, 113, tr. mine. 15 Le rideau, 47, tr. mine. 10

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much today, we are entering the sphere of world literature [die Weltliteratur] and it is up to us to accelerate this evolution.”16 Kundera’s argument amounts, in an apparently haphazard yet subtle way, to a history of the novel, indirectly suggesting where our research priorities should lie in order to originate a new humanism. I hope to have shown that The Ghost of Memory is both a summing-up of Harris’s major philosophical conceptions and an evocation of highly contemporary issues through which he nevertheless conveys his obsession with the mysterious origins of life and of art. The novel is inconclusive, as is his fiction taken as a whole. Finality means death and runs counter to his aesthetic and metaphysical credo. In this respect, he has made a most original and significant contribution to contemporary art. Although all of Harris’s fictions show a deep concern for the state of the world, the anxiety and the sufferings of the victims of conquest and the underprivileged, The Ghost of Memory is his most radical denunciation of the instincts that drive men to conquer and impose their alleged superiority on weaker human beings. But none of his novels is a realistic pamphlet, and in this latest one he reasserts the role of imagination, art and love as potential factors of evolution towards a better world.

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Le rideau, 50.


26

F

“Latent Cross-Culturalities” in Harris and Soyinka Their Creative Alternative to Theory1

cross-culturalism has been a major theme in postcolonial criticism, although, as with many concepts, it elicits a variety of interpretations. To writers like Wilson Harris and Wole Soyinka, it clearly implies more than a recognition of different kinds of otherness, cultural exchange, or even cultural hybridity. Their early attraction to ancient Greek culture, clearly a stimulus to their creativity, and their revival of some of its myths, archetypes or masterpieces in terms of their own local cultural inheritance2 already point to a kind of ontological cross-culturalism which subverts and dismantles Western assumptions of a superior cultural heritage while helping shape their own work and radically transforming some its most significant creations. In his version of The Bacchae, Soyinka sought, he said, to bring to light man’s need to relate to Nature and the gods in striving for psychic liberation; also that a genuinely eclectic approach to creativity, an “awareness of a universal catalogue of metaphors of art,” is “the only reliable antidote to the ever-changing establishment monomania of the artistic world.”3 In his

1

OR SOME TIME NOW,

“Latent Cross-Culturalities” is borrowed from Wilson Harris’s essay “Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror,” 40. 2 See Wilson Harris’s personification of Guyanese peasants as Greek heroes in his poetry collection Eternity to Season and Soyinka’s identification of Yoruba gods with Greek deities. 3 Wole Soyinka, “Between Self and System: The Artist in Search of Liberation,” in Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (Ibadan: New Horn, 1988): 71, 77, 65.

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Carnival Trilogy4 Harris breaks down monumental figures like the hero/monster Ulysses into multiple, multi-dimensional character/masks in a process of re-vision and cross-culturalization of all fictional elements. Moreover, both writers have explicitly drawn attention in their criticism to rationally inexplicable cultural correspondences, commenting on strange examples of cross-culturality. In his essay “Climates of Art,” Soyinka explains that when first confronted with one of Francis Bacon’s self-portraits, he was struck by its resemblance to an egungun mask. He emphasizes “the similarity in the use of distortion” between the Yoruba mask in motion and the faces in Bacon’s painting, which, he says, “appeared to be [...] almost an attempt to capture an essence of that mask in motion − but without the numinous dimension.”5 His most striking experience, however, was when he entered the studio of the Australian artist Colin Garland and, on seeing one of his paintings, exclaimed “Abiku!”6 When a Yoruba mother loses a young child several times, it is believed that the same child dies and comes back to life again in a different form, tormenting his mother by threatening to go back to the other world. This is the abiku, and Soyinka, seeing “an extension of Abiku’s mythic metaphor in the painting,” felt that the painter “had unwittingly been made an instrument of the wilful child.”7 In two recent essays, Wilson Harris gives a few examples of the crossculturality he had become aware of in North America: – a small Mexican clay figure, called “warrior,” with a caricaturized royal tiger showing a striking resemblance to Henry VIII ; – from the same period, between the 6th and 10th century, a ruling personage known as the Juarez sculpture because of its resemblance to President Juarez; – an ancient Mexican figure with a Chinese physiognomy; – a hieratic ape from Guatemala, dated AD 100, which might have come from a medieval European cathedral; – and a massive Olmec head from LaVenta which seems Negroid or African. 4

The Carnival Trilogy (London: Faber & Faber, 1985) includes Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). 5 “Climates of Art,” in Art, Dialogue and Outrage, 256. 6 “Climates of Art,” 257. 7 “Climates of Art,” 258.

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“It is,” Harris comments, “as if all ethnicities, all the races of the earth travelled to ancient America to become models for their craftsmen and artists.”8 But the most wide-ranging instances of artistic cross-culturality he explores are between Titian’s painting of the “Allegory of Prudence” which represents three men’s heads at different ages ‘doubled’, in a sense, by three animal heads – wolf, lion, and dog; the god-man Quetzalcoatl; a Macusi bone-flute; and finally, an Australian aboriginal painting in which human presences seem to be rooted in animal creatures.9 The transcultural similarities Harris and Soyinka detect in areas of creativity so widely separated in both time and space illustrate a perception of the function of art in society which differs from concepts that underpin much postcolonial theory, although these writers’ essays, particularly Harris’s, are repeatedly used by theorists to support or vindicate their position. Soyinka stated that “man’s recognition of certain areas of depth-experience [...] are not satisfactorily explained by general aesthetic theories”10 and rejected both theory as a discipline and the ideology that informs it in his well-known essay on Roland Barthes. Harris, too, has repeatedly expressed his reservations about theory. When questioned on postcolonialism in an interview, he declared: Fashionable theories [are] not altering anything [...]. Theorists read each other, but I don’t know whether they look at novels and [...] what is changing in the language of fiction. They claim to be liberators, but they are conquistadors in another sense [...]. They believe it’s all locked up. There’s a formula, whether they call it magic realism or they call it deconstruction or whatever.11

The indicting words here are “they believe it’s all locked up” and “formula,” which point to habits or systems of thought developed in a European intellectual tradition. When, therefore, Harris and Soyinka advocate, not the rejection of European culture, but the recognition of their own native traditions and above all of their metaphysics, they do so on different grounds from postcolonial theory’s exception to eurocentrism. That post8

Harris, “Imagination Dead Imagine: Bridging a Chasm,” Yale Journal of Criticism

7 1 (1994): 186. 9

Harris, “The Fabric of the Imagination,” in Harris, The Radical Imagination, 76–78. Wole Soyinka, “The Fourth Stage,” in Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1976): 140. 11 “Wilson Harris, interviewed by Kerry Johnson (Cedar Falls, Iowa: 5 June 1994),” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 1.1 (1997): 94. 10

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colonialism, despite its repeated protests against Europe, has not managed to free itself of basically European intellectual premisses is obvious in the paradoxical attitude which consists in claiming the right to appropriate Euro-American poststructuralist theories and intellectual approaches while simultaneously claiming a circumscribed cultural group identity (in Soyinka’s words, “self-apprehension”), whose basic values are antithetical to Western culture. It sometimes leads to amusingly embarrassed or apologetic comments on the writers discussed when these diverge from the theoretical orthodoxies into which their work is fitted. Harris opened a recent address by saying that his “criticism is a long extended footnote to [his] fiction,”12 thus pointing to the common inspiration of the two. One major strand running through his criticism in The Radical Imagination and as yet uncollected essays is his exploration of the nature of the pre-Columbian cultural tradition, which he sees as now inseparable from the European culture that drove it underground. This is not, strictly speaking, new; in his first major critical essay, Harris had already insisted on the need to retrieve an eclipsed native tradition in the Caribbean. The new element in his recent discussions of cross-culturalism is the emphasis on the existence of parallel universes or realities, original and different cultures constellated at an invisible and mostly unconscious level, actualizing what he calls “true-diversity-within-intimate-yet-ungraspable universality.”13 The similarities which Harris sees as expressions of a “fluid variable identity”14 related at an unconscious level are comparable to the “‘essentialist’ correspondence”15 Soyinka perceives between Picasso’s Guernica, a Rodin sculpture, African traditional masks, and other artistic forms. For both artists, this correspondence illustrates a universality utterly free of the hegemony of any specific culture. Elsewhere, Harris also reflects on the “pitiless slogan ‘ethnic cleansing’ which has echoed around the globe within a chorus of grief, raped women, bombed villages and cities.”16 He then suggests, paradoxically at first glance, that an understanding of the pre-Columbian tradition may 12

Harris, “Faulkner’s Orphans” (unpublished talk given at the South Bank Centre in London on 7 April 1994). 13 Harris, “Judgement and Dream” (1989), in Harris, The Radical Imagination, 31. 14 “Imagination Dead Imagine,” 187. 15 Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage, 174 (emphasis in the original). 16 “Imagination Dead Imagine,” 185.

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help us see the fallacy in such concepts and “prevent the death of the imagination within frames of dogmatic identity and [...] homogeneity.”17 The two attributes of the imagination Harris has always insisted on – its intuitive nature and its capacity to conceive of humanity in heterogeneous terms, not just in a racial sense but also, as we shall see, with reference to all living species – sustain the pertinence of pre-Columbian perceptions of the universe and man’s relation to it to counter notions of racial purity and their present-day catastrophic effects. When he underlines that relevance, Harris simultaneously draws attention to the limitations of the European tradition, particularly from the Renaissance onwards. It isn’t only that Europe and the West generally have thrived on conquest since that time and still exert economic and cultural control in many areas of the world. The break which occurred between science and art (science and an imaginative psychological, even ‘magical’ apprehension of the universe) entailed a cultural fragmentation that impoverished the European tradition and was to culminate in the Enlightenment and a constricted rationalism. Taking Harris’s argument one step further, one can say that the ultimate outcome of this intellectual approach in the twentieth century was the conceptualization, through theoretical discourse, of the collapse or denial of its own tradition’s referents and values, though not necessarily of what Harris would call its limiting frames of thought. Without being anti-social, the kind of cross-culturalism that Harris and, in a different way, Soyinka propound is, as already suggested, extra-social and extra-national. It is psychological, metaphysical and/or religious and even extra-human or, as Harris puts it, “beyond human logic.”18 In other words, it is essentialist in the original sense of the word, which posits the existence of intuitively accessible metaphysical essences, though these differ from the unified entities underlying Western systems of thought. Their cross-culturalism is also non-idealistic, though it is referential and arises from what Harris calls the “World’s unconscious” or the “universal unconscious.”19 Interestingly, both writers use the word “numinous”20 to

17

“Imagination Dead Imagine,” 185. “Profile of Wilson Harris” (unpublished talk with Fred D’Aguiar and Pauline Melville; B B C Radio 4 Kaleidoscope feature, broadcast on 27 November 1993): 9. 19 Harris, “Judgement and Dream” (1989), in Harris, The Radical Imagination, 25. 18

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describe the dimensions or proportions inherent in their art and their approach to culture, while their conviction that art is and should be linked with the sacred and with myth is well-known. Soyinka wrote that Yoruba traditional art is [...] ‘essential’ [and expresses] a quintessence of inner being, a symbolic interaction of the many aspects of revelations (within a universal context) with their moral apprehension.21

And Harris says: “An elusive deity alerts us to the fallibility of a purely human discourse,”22 though again his God is not some fixed, all-powerful divinity but, as one of his characters says, “a true creator whose unknowable limits are our creaturely infinity,”23 thus focusing on creation as a dialectical process. For all their influence on postcolonial theory, then, particularly in their analysis of imperialism and of a postcolonial/neocolonial world in crisis, Harris’s and Soyinka’s divergence from theory lies in their approach to that crisis. This divergence is ontological and epistemological, and springs from both writers’ conviction that a deeper apprehension of the nature of being, of the neglected non-rational elements in both individual and culture, might offer a salutary basis for change. Their opposition is also to an exacerbated intellectualism which takes little account of the deeper emotions and beliefs that inform human behaviour or transforms them into abstract oppositional stances. To take one example, in his essay on “The Commitment to Theory,” the oft-quoted postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha emphasizes the relation between politics and theory, which he presents as an instrument of progressive social transformation and innovation.24 His postulate of a “translation of value” and his notion of a “Third Space of enunciation” as the transitional meeting-ground between moving subjects seem to have been inspired by Harris, from whose essay “The Writer and Society” Bhabha quotes in support of his point. A basic distinction remains, however, between Bhabha’s “emphasis on the representation of the 20

Wole Soyinka in Art, Dialogue and Outrage, 256, and Harris, “The Fabric of the Imagination,” in The Radical Imagination, 76–77, and “The Absent Presence: The Caribbean, Central and South America,” 83. 21 Myth, Literature and the African World, 141. 22 “Imagination Dead Imagine,” 189. 23 The Four Banks of the River of Space, 32 (my emphasis). 24 Homi K. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 21–23.


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political, on the construction of discourse,” his denial of an “essentialist logic”25 and Harris’s adumbration, in the very essay Bhabha quotes from, of his all-encompassing metaphysics of being. As must be obvious from his fiction and criticism, Harris has never denied the importance of the political; “political change is not just a technicality. It’s a very profound cultural, phenomenal, primordial, sensational reality.”26 Still, there is a glaring contrast between Bhabha’s reliance on an abstract, ‘constructed’ system of thought to bring about change, even if indirectly, and Harris’s insistence on the need to descend into the void (which Bhabha equates with his Third Space of enunciation or, if I understand it rightly, discourse), a void in which Harris discovers “a new and profound fiction of obscure [...] humanity.”27 The void for Harris is not an empty space but an unrecognized one, and what he sees as a third, nameless dimension is capable of infinite expansion: It is [necessary] to begin to conceive a third factor or entity beyond conventional fixture or polarisation, a fourth world, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, etc., whereby the task of tradition essentially alters as it acquires complex interrelated perspectives beyond sovereign fear into passion or marvel or intricate beauty.28

Harris often recalls that his experience in the South American rainforest, and his intuitive perception of “densities” and non-human dimensions while he was actually reading European novels on his expeditions, made him aware of the inadequacy of the realistic tradition of the European novel and its language, however useful it may have been as a mirror held up to homogeneous European societies. On the other hand, he finds in the pre-Columbian world-view a validation of his fictional rendering of the multi-dimensionality of being, though he is also careful to acknowledge the fact that, before the invasion of their world, the Aztecs, too, had allowed the triumph of restrictive convention to hasten their fall into rituals of heart-wrenching sacrifice.29 In fact, he compares the Aztec fall into absolutism with the inquisitorial intolerance, in roughly the same period, that sent Giordano Bruno to the stake for his adherence to, among 25

Location of Culture, 27. “Interview with Kerry Johnson,” 91. 27 Harris, “The Writer and Society,” in Tradition, the Writer and Society, 62. 28 Harris, “The Complexity of Freedom,” in Explorations, ed. Maes–Jelinek, 124. 29 “Imagination Dead Imagine,” 187. 26

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other heretical views, the Copernican revolution. But whereas the collapse of the Ptolemaic universe was seen in Europe increasingly in purely scientific terms, the crumbling of the pre-Columbian world and cultures and the advent of a different universe were heralded by portents in the sky and “in some terrifying kind of theatre.”30 This is where Harris discerns in his own writing, and evokes in his criticism, a link between his vision and an earlier pre-Columbian mythical world, in which gods and men, sky and earth, the divine and the animal: i.e. plural and different layers of being, are orchestrated into a communal whole, as exemplified by Quetzalcoatl but also, very differently, in the multi-dimensional genius perceptible in Titian’s “Allegory of Prudence.” In an altogether different register, Harris also finds a confirmation of his early intuitive denial of the passivity of “landscapes/riverscapes/skyscapes”31 and of his conviction that “parts of ourselves are embedded everywhere − in the rock, in the tree, in the star, in the light, in the wood.”32 He finds a confirmation of this in “quantum immediacy”33 – in the axiom in quantum physics that posits the existence of multiple, parallel and multi-dimensional universes and associations between different forms of being. The bold analogy Harris draws between native, pre-Columbian and quantum perceptions of the world or worlds, between the “phenomenal literacy”34 of ancient peoples and a modern Western, largely rationalist, scientific literacy is surely a major example of the cross-culturalism which, in his view, could counter the manipulation and abuses of supposedly passive landscapes, which threaten to destroy the world. It is also an appeal, as the narrator in Carnival puts it, to acknowledge “the pagan womb from which civilization comes [...] from which we all derive.”35 This wide-ranging cross-culturalism spanning spaces, ages and civilizations is, of course, replicated in the multiracial configuration of the peoples of the Americas: Therefore [says Harris] you need an orchestration of imageries and resources and histories ancient and past, modern and ancient, that may not be contained 30

“Interview with Kerry Johnson,” 90. Harris, “The Fabric of the Imagination,” in The Radical Imagination, 72. 32 Harris, “The Absent Presence: The Caribbean, Central and South America,” 81, 94. 33 “The Absent Presence,” in Harris, The Radical Imagination, 81. 34 Harris, Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, 10. 35 Carnival, 103–104. 31


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in the novel form that one associates with Europe. Thus one had to find traditions older than the novel form, as well as to find within oneself the originality to cope with the stresses that one faced. Because it is so easy to succumb to the temptations of writing the kind of novel [...] which will appeal to the colonial masters, the institutions that still govern culture.36

Referring to this persisting colonial mentality, the protagonist in Carnival argues that [an] exacerbation was occurring at many levels of our colonial civilization and would result [...] in a nightmare feud of one sort or another, meaningless violence, inexplicable assaults, accidents, horrors, all sprung from addiction to frames that hypnotized peoples into believing themselves not only helpless or insecure or threatened but [...] overseers of human destiny by divine territorial right....37

In the blend (not just reconciliation) of victor and victim38 Harris finds another seed of creative cross-culturalism as opposed to what he calls a perverse cross-culturalism which claims an impossible independence from formerly dominating cultures. “Cross-culturalism can no longer be evaded,” he says, “because the whole world has been built on it for centuries.”39 His way into it as a means of liberating man from static frames of thought has been through repeated fragmentation of all the entities that make up the realistic narrative (characterization, space, time, narrative structure and imagery) while simultaneously, at a deeper level, bridging chasms between closed worlds, closed fields or traditions – above all, between the oppositional yet related compartments of his characters’ psychic space or the psycho-cosmic theatre of their experience. This inter-relatedness is also one reason why Harris’s postcolonialism differs from postmodernism. Fragmentation may elicit vulnerability but is also a creative process, a “creative schizophrenia,”40 as Michael Gilkes called it, generat36

“Profile of Wilson Harris,” 5. Carnival, 114. 38 “Our antecedents were the victims of conquest, our antecedents were paradoxically also victors who gobbled up land and gold”; “Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror,” 40. 39 The Radical Imagination, 141. 40 Michael Gilkes, Creative Schizophrenia: The Caribbean Cultural Challenge (The Third Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture, December 1986; Coventry: Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick). 37

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ing multiplicity and multi-dimensionality. We are by now familiar with Harris’s view of the human personality as a cluster of partial selves, “strangers in the self” involved in a never-ending quest whose aim is not a unity that is absolute or even desirable, but is unachievable, though they may get glimpses of it. In Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, even God is presented as “multi-dimensional. Not uni-dimensional.”41 The purpose of the quest is the protagonist’s awareness of this inner and outer multi-dimensionality and of his participation through it in an “unfinished genesis.” In this sense, each protagonist is a moving cross-cultural world. Sorrow Hill in the novel just mentioned harbours a former prison turned into an asylum for the “greats.” Hope, the protagonist, is both dead and alive and re-enacts on this existential frontier, in his inner theatre or “dream-book” but also in the multi-dimensional Guyanese heartland, his confrontation with the ambivalently named Christopher D’eath as well as the other inmates’ real and imagined trials. Each feels himself to be both himself, a contemporary South American, and a “great” representative of past civilizations, whether Montezuma, Leonardo da Vinci, Judas, Socrates, or the Buddha. Hope’s simultaneous present experience and descent into vanished cultures through his co-inmates’ collaboration is also a voyage into various dimensions of being, which Harris calls “a unique comedy of animal and human interchangeable masks”42 as well as “revisioned” or “original” epic. The following brief passage shows D’eath’s wife, Butterfly, who has just made love with Hope, escaping into the bush after D’eath kills a deer: Butterfly followed. She made her way into the clearing. She was still naked. But D’eath was gloating on the creature he had slain. He scarcely saw her. She could have been one of a multitude of phantoms plastered on a wall of Bush at that moment [...]. The animal he had killed was a marvellous creation, an El Doradonne deer. Its horns were as luminous as the new moon’s upon a head of darkness. Was it a head, was it the stillness of a dance? D’eath was blind to Butterfly’s presence as she placed herself between the horns. They seemed to tilt, then to straighten into the constellation of a body. Male uplifted constellation horns. Female constellation thighs. Counterpoint of El Doradonne male / female beauty within the miracle of species. Butterfly’s slenderness − sculpted as it were from the deer’s horns − acquired the intricate,

41 42

Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, 29. Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, Author’s Note (unpaginated).


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beautiful flesh Hope alone had perceived when he held her. It was as if her dancing feet had grown into impossible / possible marvel, the marvel of limbs sprung from the horns of the golden deer.43

Such a passage clearly breaks the unity of the self through a language that fleshes out Harris’s concept of a “fluid, variable identity” and evokes humanity’s roots in nature and its links with animality. The recovery of these roots, also Soyinka’s declared purpose in The Bacchae, is one of meanings of the resurrection in the novel. Another is the resurrection of meaning itself and the coming to life, as in earlier fictions, of “live absences” and/or “absent presences.”44 The pursuit − never straightforward but discontinuous, in a forward and backward, multi-angled movement − of “an infinite goal,” whether elusive god, unfathomable centre, enigma of values or ungraspable wholeness, has led one protagonist after another to penetrate a profusion of (sometimes deceptive) appearances as so many windows into reality. Hence the inexhaustible number of “convertible imageries,” as Harris calls them, or of “transitive chords”45 within the aroused densities of nature. For a major feature of his metaphysical yet, as suggested, non-idealistic cross-culturalism is the perception of linkages between apparently alien images apprehended as rhythms animating different ways of being, different spaces and worlds as well as overlapping partial visions. Soyinka sees a similar symbiosis between language and music when he writes that The nature of Yoruba music is intensively the nature of its language and poetry [...]. Language in Yoruba tragic music undergoes transformation through myth into a secret (masonic) correspondence with the symbolism of tragedy, a symbolic medium of spiritual emotions within the heart of the choric union.46

For Harris, the uniting rhythms of the text are its silent music, linkages also between different forms of art, not just language and music but also painting and sculpture. Language is, for Harris, the agent of arousal of deep, latent, polysemic cross-culturalities. In his own phrasing, “it raises the whole question of the Word made Flesh.”47 This is, of course, at the opposite pole of what 43

Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, 40–41. Harris, “The Absent Presence: The Caribbean, Central and South America,” 81. 45 “Interview with Kerry Johnson,” 84. 46 “The Fourth Stage,” 147. 47 “Wilson Harris Interviewed by Alan Riach,” 53. 44

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Soyinka also sees as typical of Euro-American society, “a society where art has lost its moorings to a humanistic shore and creates for itself an autonomous existence.”48 For Harris, by contrast, language and reality are one. Language is what “we are and which we acquired, not only from our mother’s lips but also from the sound of the rain falling, from the sigh of the leaves, from the music of the earth as we pressed on it, what crackled under our feet.”49 It is the medium through which the world with its terrors and its ecstasies comes into being in a multi-textured fabric, “texts playing against each other as [...] if [...] a profound creative democracy begins to break the apparition of tyranny, the habit of conquest.”50 This conviction of the referential cross-culturality of language made Harris reject both fictionality, “the fictionalizing of fiction” (and in criticism the “constructedness” of discourse) which, he says, is “the game that the post-modernists play,”51 and a “progressive” or linear realism which he has always seen as the privileged tool of an exclusively European culture and its vested interests. Here is one expression of his vision of the genesis of Word and World: Silence in the depth of [the] myth of the absolute Word ripples into layers of sound within all gestures, all species, within the shape of rocks whose hieroglyphic utterance in crevice and markings, markings of age akin sometimes to a cradle or an epitaph descended from the stars, is espoused and matched by the applause of the elements in a clap of water within a waterfall.52

This is reminiscent of the emergence from the cracking “chrysalis of the Word” that Professor alludes to in Soyinka’s The Road.53 The allusion of both writers to a mute but real essence differs from Bhabha’s “Third Space of enunciation.” The Third Space for Harris is actually “the womb of space,” whose variable dimensions can expand and multiply indefinitely.  48

Art, Dialogue and Outrage, 63. Harris, “The Fabric of the Imagination,” in The Radical Imagination, 78. 50 Harris, “Literacy and the Imagination,” 27. 51 “Wilson Harris Interviewed by Alan Riach,” 40. 52 “Imagination Dead Imagine,” 191. 53 Wole Soyinka, The Road (London: Oxford U P , 1965): 45. 49

27

Ut Musica Poesis

For Wolfgang, a lover of music Is there a language akin to music threaded into space and time which is prior to human discourse? — Harris, “The Music of Living Landscapes”

T

H E O R I G I N A L I T Y of Wilson Harris’s novels lies predominantly in his use of language. Other writers may share his approach to life and his perception of man’s place in the universe, but his work is unique in its perfect coalescence of content and form. Harris believes in the interrelatedness of all elements in life. Nature, humanity, fauna and flora partake of the same essence, are partial materializations of an “unfathomable” wholeness, unfathomable God or Spirit towards which his characters progress but never reach. This interrelatedness makes for a fusion in his writing of all categories of being and also accounts for its dynamism and fluidity. It informs the constitution, the ontology, of both nature and men. Nature, in Harris’s words, is never passive; it is “sentient and alive,”1 humanized even as when he talks of the “veins and arteries of the South American landscape.”2 Moreover, the landscape has its own psychology − Harris speaks of the “psyche of space”3 − and in a sense evinces a moral being. It is a source of beauty but also of terror; it creates and annihilates.4 Similarly, the human psyche is a “womb of space.” It has

1

Harris, “Imagination Dead Imagine: Bridging a Chasm,” Yale Journal of Criticism

7.1 (1994): 187. 2

Harris, “Author’s Note,” Palace of the Peacock, 3. Harris, “Author’s Note,” Palace of the Peacock, 11. 4 Harris speaks of the “untamable cosmos”; The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1983): 39. After the recent destructive 3

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its own geological ages, earthquakes, landslides and volcanoes. This is particularly obvious in Ascent to Omai, in which the characters’ life-span evoke the geological history of the earth. A simple example from Harris’s first novel, Palace of the Peacock, can illustrate this correspondence between landscape and man. The narrator relates his dreaming account of the voyage of a skipper and his crew on a nameless river in the Guyanese interior towards El Dorado: The map of the savannahs was a dream. The names Brazil and Guiana were colonial conventions I had known from childhood. I clung to them as to a curious necessary stone and footing, [...] the ground I knew I must not relinquish [...]. They were as close to me as my ribs, the rivers and the flatland, [...]. I could not help cherishing my symbolic map, and my bodily prejudice like a well-known room and house of superstition within which I dwelt. (20)

Such humanization of nature explains why the landscape has a language and music of its own. Examples abound in Harris’s writing, from the “whispering leaves” and “sighing forest” in Palace of the Peacock to the “singing rocks” in Tumatumari. In The Dark Jester when the last Inca Atahualpa dies, nature shares with his people the grief caused by his execution: “The music of nature, padded with loud tears of sorrow, comes across space and time. An orchestra peals in silence and then settles into tumbling rocks” (66–67). In “The Music of Living Landscapes,” Harris explains that on his land-surveying expeditions in Guyana he learned from the Amerindians “of the parable of the music of the fish in a rippling stream. They baited their fisherman’s hook [...] as if they addressed an invisible orchestra” (41). On the other hand, in The Radical Imagination he writes: When the human animal understands his genius, he roots it in the creature, in the forest, in the trees, in other words in the language which we are and which we acquired, not only from our mother’s lips but also from the sound of the rain falling, from the sigh of the leaves, from the music of the earth as we pressed on it, what crackled under our feet. (78)

Harris also refers to “a profound treaty of sensibility between the human presence on this planet and the animal kingdom,” of which he finds tsunami in South Asia and Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, one cannot help seeing the truth of Harris’s statement “Nature erupts in orchestras of Nemesis”; Harris, “The Music of Living Landscapes,” 43.

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striking examples in pre-Columbian art, an art which expresses a “variable and fluid identity.”5 Just as there is interrelatedness between all aspects of creation, so there is a basic connection between the different arts. In The Womb of Space, Harris refers to “a coincidence of arts [...] so that a poem or fiction may absorb metaphors that relate to painting or sculpture or organic images of music” (91). In Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, he mentions an ars combinatoria (44), and in several novels, notably The Four Banks of the River of Space and The Mask of the Beggar, the artist/protagonist practises several arts, for he is sculptor, painter, architect, composer. In his later novels, the major characters travel both physically and in imagination towards what I referred to above as “unfathomable wholeness,” which in different contexts is also presented, as suggested, as “Spirit” or the “Sacred” or the unconscious, and is also the source of the arts, their never-to-be trapped origins. Already in The Eye of the Scarecrow, the major character had self-reflexively commented on the joint arousal of language and consciousness: Language is one’s medium of the vision of consciousness. There are other ways [...] of arousing this vision. But language alone can express (in a way which goes beyond any physical or vocal attempt) [...] the ultimate “silent” and “immaterial” complexity of arousal [...]. It is the sheer mystery − the impossibility of trapping its own grain − on which poetry lives and thrives. And this is the stuff of one’s essential understanding of the reality of the original Word, the Well of silence. (95)

The “original Word” and “the Well of Silence” evoke the unfathomable origins of the arts. “We need today,” Harris writes, “an openness to the language of the imagination simultaneous with a grasp of the Sacred,”6 a statement which applies to music as it is first heard in Palace of the Peacock. Carroll, the youngest member of the crew, is “a boy gifted with his paddle as if it were a violin and a sword in paradise” (22). He is the first to die as he falls into the rapids and his companions hear “an indestructible harmony [...] the sadness of the baptismal lamentation on his lips [...] in the heart of the berserk waters” (75–76). Towards the end of the novel, just after the emergence of the palace of the peacock (a metaphor for the

5 6

“Imagination Dead Imagine,” 188. “Imagination Dead Imagine,” 191

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“unfinished genesis of the imagination”7) shaped by music out of natural elements, Carroll’s music is heard again issuing from an inner invisible source: Carroll was whistling. A solemn and beautiful cry [...]. It was an organ cry almost [...]. It seemed to break and mend itself always [...], the echo of sound so pure and outlined in space it broke again into a mass of music. [...] I had never witnessed and heard such sad and such glorious music. [...] The dark notes rose everywhere, so dark, so sombre, they broke into a fountain [...] sparkling and immaterial as invisible sources and echoes. (147–48)

Music as an expression of the sacred is also heard at the end of Jonestown when the protagonist is pushed into the void (the locus of victimized people[s]) by his native judges: “Black-out music. Black soul music. I fell into a net of music, the net of the huntsman Christ” (233). In the passages quoted, music is not just an expression of harmony; it is the very source of creation, God’s instrument in the evolution of the visible world as well as an agent of conversion of static conditions and states of mind: “When music and unspoken prayer animate language, all proportionalities of being and non-being, genesis and history, are subject to a re-visionary focus.”8 Harris’s concept of cross-culturality between different historical periods, different peoples, between ‘one’ and ‘the Other’, finds its most original interpretation in his discussion of the Carib bone-flute. The Caribs used to eat a morsel of flesh of their enemies in order to gain some insight into their plans of attack, which is why they were labelled ‘cannibals’ by the Spaniards. From beneath that morsel they extracted a bone which they fashioned into a flute. In this way they created a “mutuality” between alien cultures and, paradoxically, it was destruction (cannibalism) that stimulated creativity, for they saw in the bone-flute the very origins of music. In the novella “Yurokon,” the young boy of the title is the last Carib, and he tries to understand why his people are represented as cannibals. He perceives a cleavage in both landscape and the Carib psyche. This psychological chasm is expressed by the bone-flute which becomes 7

In a dialogue with Edward Said, the famous conductor Daniel Barenboim expresses a similar notion when he says that “music is not about being but about becoming”; Daniel Barenboim & Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, ed. Ara Guzelimian (London: Bloomsbury, 2004): 21. 8 Harris, Jonestown, 97.

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an instrument of release, giving voice to a harmony of contrasts among men. For Harris, the Mexican figure of Quetzalcoatl is related to the South American figure of Huracan, itself a variant of Yurokon. The bone-flute metaphorically represents “a numinous bridge that arches invisibly from ancient Mexico into the ancient Guyanas and South America”9 and therefore voices the correspondence between music and architecture.10 Yurokon, sitting at a Carib camp-fire, is “steeped in fire” as in other elements such as the wind, which, like the bone-flute made of an enemy, is both destructive and creative; so that Harris sees yet another association between fire and music. We see this at the end of Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, in which the character named Hope has consigned in a “dream-book” the trials of his companions in the asylum below Sorrow Hill. Father Robson’s church has been set on fire by an inmate who saw him making love with his sister. But the fire is then converted or transfigured into a creative one: The curtain of the theatre of fire fell upon the sin-eaters from the asylum for the greats and enclosed them. [...] A trinity of pens lay now within the breach of catastrophe, eloquent, cool flame, charcoal burn and splinter [...]. Hope seized them all with ecstatic gratitude as if he stood all over again upon the very threshold of his book and a chorus of griefs arose within which an unseen orchestra moved and reassembled singing, dancing pillars where flame had stood around the ageless Mask of the seer. (244)

As Harris wrote about this novel, “Music in the text is simultaneous with the incandescent imagination.”11 Again, this is fictionalized in The Dark Jester, in which the incandescent imagination is metaphorized in a bird: A Bird with incandescent wings nested in the tree. They seemed monstrous in one flame, monstrously beautiful, immaculate but evasive, in another veined root or leaf that blazed. The lighted fanfare arose in a tree that blossomed. (13)

9

Harris, “The Absent Presence; The Caribbean, Central and South America,” 83. Plato drew a similar parallel between music and architecture, an idea taken up by the Renaissance theorist L.B. Alberti, who, in his treatise De re aedificatoria (1485), expressed “the principle according to which architecture, like music, is the art which penetrates the mind most profoundly and completely matches its exigencies”; André Chastel, Art et humanisme à Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique: Études sur la Renaissance et l’humanisme platonicien (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961): 133 (my tr.). 11 Harris, “Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror,” 39. 10

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And, further along, when the Dreamer/protagonist’s vision extends to cosmic dimensions: Now – it dawned on me − that the pyramid of the Moon and the pyramid of the Sun were placed in a musical fugue, or adventurous passage, that spoke of Earth and Moon together in faintly remembered, half-forgotten dimensions. [...] The unnerving [...] Music that arose from the nebulous Bird lay in its wings, so stretched, so quivering in savagery and in tenderness it became a theme of opposites, white and black flame. (21–22)

Music as “a theme of opposites” implies that even when it expresses harmony, it cannot be idealized, since, whether in actual life or beyond it, it potentially contains its reverse. As the protagonist of Jonestown reflects, “it was clear to me that dissonances in music lie in depth within all harmonies to acquaint us with unwritten relationships that disturb our Sleep. Or else harmony would consolidate itself into an illusion...” (21). Harris also makes this clear in the preface he wrote for The Four Banks of the River of Space, in which he supposedly edits the “dream-book” of a character named Anselm, “engineer, sculptor, painter, architect, composer,” who disappeared in the jungle. Anselm had told him that he traced the linkages between alien and separate appearances in his book “by emphasizing musical or antiphonal discourses mirrored unfathomably as the genesis of sound, painted or sculpted unfathomably” (xiii–xiv). The Four Banks of the River of Space is probably the novel in which Harris’s perception of the different roles of music is most salient. The antiphonal discourses evoke “alternative existences” (5), suffused with “alternative rhythms” (xii). Rhythm is a major feature of Harris’s narrative, informing its stylistic variations and general structure, replacing the linearity that he criticizes in the realistic English novel. Since he considers the text as the equivalent of reality (note his many references to the Word made flesh), music is the connecting thread between the different parts of the novel, between all elements in nature and in the cosmos as well as between the visible and the invisible world, the living and the dead. Music is also an element of unity between diverse people(s), and, as Béla Bartók suggested, it expresses the victory of the spirit. At one stage, Anselm has a “glimmering apprehension” of “the innermost genius of the planet [...] the genesis of art, the being of music” (39). Music is heard in “the rhythm of the pooled stars” (43) but also in the abyss (9) and is a door opening into the unconscious (8).

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One passage in particular illustrates the transcendental role of music.12 Anselm mourns the death of three Macusi children who sang in the choir of Penelope, a missionary, and who drowned on a boating expedition. Remembering their voices, he sculpts them into a flute and hears in its music a dialogue between the living and the dead: [...] I said to Penelope, ‘a living language is a precious ladder, it’s the antiphon of the flute in which the dead and the living discourse in the heights and the depths. Listen to the voices of the drowned children. They live again within solid music and within the elusive story they tell’. (43)

The flute then makes him aware of the “invisible stream of the river of the dead far below the visible Potaro river”: The flute tells that the river of the dead and the river of the living are one quantum stream possessed of four banks [...]. [...] The murmur of the buried stream comes up to us as if its source lies in the stars and it may only be heard when we are abnormally attentive to the mystery of creation and the voice of the flute within the lips of three drowned children. (44)

The flute also relates to “ancestral tongues, Macusi, Carib, Arawak, Wapishana pre-Columbian tongues that have been eclipsed.”13 “From such eclipse emerges the rich spoil and upheaval of the Word” (44). Finally, “the voice of the spiralling flute mirrors within solid music the ascension of the spirits of the living and the dead through rock and cloud into space” (44–45). Harris’s conception of the existential process as life-in-death and deathin-life is one of the ways in which he counters a one-sided perception of life.14 Again music is a liberation from such single-mindedness, as we see in The Mask of the Beggar:

12 On this transcendence, see also the Dreamer’s allusion to “the essence of music emerging as an immortal summons to me” (The Dark Jester, 68). 13 For Harris, the pre-Columbian peoples that have been exterminated and eclipsed are part of the “unfathomable wholeness.” 14 His reference in one of the above quotations to a “quantum stream” is inspired by the multiplicity implicit in quantum theory. One of the epigraphs to Four Banks runs: “Quantum reality consists of simultaneous possibilities, a ‘polyhistoric’ kind of being [...] incompatible with our [...] one-track minds”; Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics.

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A wordless music arose all of a sudden around me in the Storm of creation. It hit me as it hit the god in the room who seemed unable to say a word [...]. Not unlike Death he seemed in the shapes around him, bodily shapes that seemed alive. They move or seem to move with lifelikeness. They are unconscious of the rhythms of music that touch other and deeper lives in the prisons of materialism [...]. With wordless music and the rhythms it brought into being I could rescue those in prison [...]. I had seen the emergence of the drowned Ship with its Immigrants into Harbourtown but had not understood the rhythms of the images that sprang from a music in Space that spoke of life within and beyond lifelikeness. (64–65)

“Within” and “beyond” remind us both that it is through the material world that one reaches its inner spirit and that Harris visualizes the universe in all its dimensions in space and time. At one stage in The Dark Jester, the Dreamer is impressed by the “shadowy brilliance of vision, distant yet close,” he has just had and wonders: “Who had created such visionary and terrifying art (such terror and beauty and wisdom) before the times of Man in a Sky of dream?” (13). “Beyond” also suggests the otherworldly origin of language and of all the arts, including music. Still in The Dark Jester, the Dreamer refers to a diversity of interpretations of Byzantine civilization, which remains “open [...] beyond the finality of human discourse” (ix). In one of his essays, Harris insists on the “fallibility of a purely human discourse” and comments on the speech of a creator and his/her agents in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill: “Such speech exists, as it were, in some priority that comes before human utterance. In that priority lies the mystery of the exact Word of creation.”15 He goes on to say: “There is a Silence that is interior within, anterior to, the human myth of the Word. Silence in the depth of that myth of the absolute Word ripples into layers of sound within all gestures, all species, within the shape of rocks” (82). This naturally recalls the eruption of language and music from the “Well of Silence” which stimulates consciousness and imagination for it “ignite[s] in oneself a reverie of pulse and heart and mind.”16 In The Four Banks of the River of Space, this inner silent music is repeatedly felt by Anselm to open his eyes to his own limitations – “Those true voices in the live fossil blood of music could turn nevertheless and tear one’s convictions into shreds” (137) – and he also talks of 15 16

Harris, “Profiles of Myth and the New World,” 82. “The Music of Living Landscapes,” 40–41.

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“the instructive bite of music” (140). Interestingly, Daniel Barenboim, in his dialogue with Edward Said, states that “every great work of art has two faces: one toward its own time and one toward eternity,” also that there is something “timeless”17 about Mozart’s music, while Said says: “I find music fascinating in part because it encompasses silence.”18 Barenboim also refers to “the color of sound,”19 a synaesthetic association of arts that Harris has often discussed and fashioned in his fiction. To hear colour and to see sound engenders a correspondence between painting and music20 expressed at the end of the nineteenth century by artists like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Gauguin and Debussy, and discussed by Kandinsky at the beginning of the twentieth century to explain the development of abstract painting. Harris comments on this subject in relation to the art of the Guyanese painter Aubrey Williams: I came upon Aubrey Williams’s work for the first time in Jamaica in 1970 [...]. I wrote then of the music of colour orchestrated in his canvases. I suggested that this lament was symbolic of the vanished Arawaks. But there are peculiar aspects to such orchestrated tone, or music, I would like to bring into play now. The ‘eye’ may be deeply affected by combinations of colour. So much so that the ‘ear’ picks up those combinations and hears what painted space is saying. Painted space “speaks” to the “ear.”21

Harris also wrote: When I look at a Cézanne, for instance, I sense quite often the mood of sculpture. When I look at an Aubrey Williams something quite different may happen that I can only describe as an equation with fantastic rhythmic being in startling as well as subtle (indeed muted) tones and values in the life and movement in the canvas. It is in this sense that I speak of ‘sensation akin to music’.22 17

Parallels and Paradoxes, 52. Parallels and Paradoxes, 23, 19 Parallels and Paradoxes, 81. 20 On this subject, see Peter Egri, “Text in Context – English Literature, Painting and Music: A Comparative Approach,” in Literature(s) in English: New Perspectives, ed. Wolfgang Zach (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990): 69–78. See also “Writing and the Other Arts,” below. 21 Harris, “On Aubrey Williams,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 2.1–3 (Spring 2000): 26. See also “ear sees, eye listens, within a medium of visionary music”; Harris, “Author’s Note,” Palace of the Peacock, 12. 22 Harris, “Foreword” to Guyana Dreaming: The Art of Aubrey Williams, comp. 18

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In The Dark Jester, the Dreamer says: My unnerved [...] eyes heard the cry of the Bird. I had seen the incandescent creature with the nerves of art. [...] I listened with new ears, new eyes, in my Dream. And I heard and saw the strange muted and muffled cry of the Bird in tones, however, that made me gasp. (20–21)

Also, “The fire was so unnerving, so matchless, it created a sound that was red, a scarlet sound” (21). And when the Dreamer imagines Atahualpa in Hatun Vilcabamba, No one and nothing had greeted the Spanish Conquistadores when they arrived. Yet Atahualpa was there, I dreamt, [...]. He was there and not there. An emotional body was visible to certain eyes. His facelessness was shot through by the colour of music in a Bird’s cry. (77)

Clearly, then, music is a major element in Harris’s fiction and the crossculturalism he detects in both life and art. It informs his conception of nature, of the human existential process, of the universe, and of the relation between all three. He has explained the effect his first encounter with the Guyanese interior had on him: The shock of contrasts in river, forest, waterfall had registered very deeply in my psyche. So deeply that to find oneself “without a tongue” was to learn of a “music” that was “wordless,” to descend into varying structures upon parallel branches of reality, branches that were rooted in a stem of meaning for which no absolute existed.23 A great magical web born of the music of the elements is how one may respond perhaps to a detailed map of Guyana seen rotating in space with its numerous etched rivers, numerous lines and tributaries, interior rivers, coastal rivers, the arteries of God’s spider.24

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Anne Walmsley (Mundelstrup & Sydney: Dangaroo, 1990): 9. There is a painting by Williams called “Shostakovich Quartet No. 7, Opus 108” (Guyana Dreaming, 55). 23 “‘When one dreams one dreams alone’: Wilson Harris interviewed by Fred D’Aguiar,” Bomb 82 (Winter 2002–2003): 76. 24 Harris, “A Note on the Genesis of The Guyana Quartet,” in Harris, The Guyana Quartet, 7.

28

Writing and the Other Arts

[It is necessary] to visualize in new ways [...] subtle links and bridges between the arts and the sciences, between poem and painting, between music and figurations of memory associated with architecture.1

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is to attempt to convey what the global evokes in Wilson Harris’s writing, the multifarious forms it encompasses as it inspires and nourishes different artistic modes. As with any concrete or immaterial reality he approaches through a variety of concepts, the global appears in multiple forms of being. It is both macrocosm and microcosm, nature and psyche and their measureless depths. It is our world in all its appearances and masks underpinned by a cross-cultural network, and, for the narrator in The Eye of the Scarecrow, “the abstract globe in one’s head.”2 It is also the “unfathomable wholeness” at the heart of “the living globe-in-depth”3 or, put differently, it is the infinite “womb of space” that Harris’s characters ceaselessly explore, the very opposite of any notion of totality with its emphasis on absoluteness. Finally, as is suggested in “Imagination Dead Imagine,” it is the imagination itself, though never in a homogeneous capacity but stimulated by variable forces. Harris’s first self-reflexive journey towards wholeness as the enigmatic source of creation is to be found in the MANIFESTO OF THE UNBORN STATE OF EXILE in The Eye of the Scarecrow, in which the character

1

Y PURPOSE IN THIS CHAPTER

Harris, “The Life of Myth and its Possible Bearing on Erna Brodber’s fictions Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home and Myal,” Kunapipi 12.3 (1990): 87. 2 Harris, The Eye of the Scarecrow, 75. Further page references are in the main text. 3 Harris, “Some Aspects of Myth and the Intuitive Imagination,” 99.

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Idiot Nameless privileges language as “the medium of the vision of consciousness”: There are other ways [...] of arousing this vision. But language alone can express [...] the sheer – the ultimate ‘silent’ and ‘immaterial’ complexity of arousal.

And further: It is the sheer mystery – the impossibility of trapping its own grain – on which poetry lives and thrives. And this is the stuff of one’s essential understanding of the reality of the original Word, the Well of Silence. (95)

Briefly, the state of namelessness or “negative identity” (101) the protagonist has by then reached amounts to an abandonment of the self, of the ego in particular, which enables him to lose himself, as it were, in the condition of the numberless destitute whom he calls the “uninitiate” (103) and in a neglected apparently extinct historical past of victimization. The Well of Silence is the mysterious source that transmutes this condition into art. At this stage, Nameless stops in the “Dark Room of Identity” (107), also, of course, a room of genesis illustrating Harris’s conviction that death can offer a transition to rebirth. As Francisco Bone exclaims in Jonestown, “One must re-imagine death as a live fossil apparition. Imagination Dead Imagine” (232). Gradually, in Harris’s later novels the relation between self and non-self as the mainspring of different kinds of art becomes more prominent. Music and painting were, of course, already incipient compositional elements in Palace of the Peacock. If in The Eye of the Scarecrow he initiated his metafictional and metaphysical reflection on the nature of art, by the time he wrote Companions of the Day and Night he had begun to explore in greater depth varieties of artistic modes. In the novels from The Waiting Room to Companions, it is also becoming clear that man is not the sole creator of art which – this is now a self-evident truth – Harris does not see as a mere imitation of nature, aesthetic recreation of experience or even sole visionary exploration of man’s consciousness. Daemonic and divine, elusive and inexplicable, the creative impulse in his fiction is manifest in the all-pervasive livingness of the gods, nature and men. In Real Presences, George Steiner argues that any aesthetic act, however original, is always an imitatio, a replication of the inaccessible first

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fiat, “a creative motion always after the first.” “Whatever [their] seeming novelty, [...] [works of art] are ultimately mimetic.”4 Harris believes in a far more collaborative creativeness between the divine and the human. He does not claim to capture the very origins of creation. But where Steiner asserts that “even the most innovative, revolutionary text, canvas, tonal composition, arises from something: from the limits of physiology, from the potential of the linguistic or material means, from social-historical ambience,”5 Harris sees the act of creation as being capable of reaching through these towards a sheer nothingness that can mutate into somethingness. This mutation is originality. Keeping Steiner’s comment in mind, it doesn’t mean that the artist considers himself as a god. Rather, in the words of Anton Ehrenzweig, whose study The Hidden Order of Art Harris often mentions, “The story of divine creation turns into the story of human creativity.”6 In Tumatumari, called Prudence, the main character of the novel, At first [...] could not cease from trembling [...] but as she shook, vibrations were set up which rippled and fled across the basin of the world – Amazon to Orinoco – Atlantic to Pacific-a continent bedded in rivers and oceans. It was as if she gained some consolation from reciprocity, from reaction.7

The shock she has just received occurred when she saw an eye appear on the rock-face of the Well. This “Eye” or “IT ” (83, 111) evokes in several of Harris’s novels the nameless reality or dimension, a “spectre of wholeness”8 within all concrete, psychological or behavioural phenomena. Prudence’s ‘in-sight’ into the Eye or crack of stone leads to “a resumption of the conversation with the muse” (114): in other words, to inspirational sources equally shared by man and nature and, in the context of this novel, buried in history. Harris makes this clear in “The Music of Living Landscape,” where he refers to Tumatumari as “sleeping yet singing rocks.”9 In another essay, after asking “What is art?,” he goes on: 4 George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London: Faber & Faber, 1989): 201–204. 5 Real Presences, 201–202. 6 Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Imagination (1967; Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P, 1971): 210. 7 Harris, Tumatumari, 112. Further page references are in the main text. 8 Harris, The Infinite Rehearsal, 2. 9 Harris, “The Music of Living Landscapes,” 45.

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Sculpture appears to have existed long before man existed in his present evolutionary shape. [...] Out of the turbulence of the Earth, the rocks appeared, looking like sculpted bees, sculpted insects, sculpted animals and sculpted man himself. Man and woman [become a] living work of art in a long terrain of intuitive shapes. They [...] resemble the rock-hewn [...] faces of creation, which they share with every creature.10

My point is that Harris’s fiction conceives a world in which all forms of existence and experience, all modalities of being or “sentient living entities,” as he says, whether nature, animals or men, open onto an inner complex reality, the “immanent substance” or “archetypal essences”11 emerging in The Infinite Rehearsal. This infinite variety in both concrete world and the subterranean reality that informs it, as well as the fluid metaphoric shifts from one to the other, account for Harris’s “new conceptual language”12 and for the associative method by which apparent incompatibles of all kinds, and not merely the “contrasting spaces” as in the early work, coalesce into a chain of being. If, as Harris has often explained, creation is a two-way process, an encounter between his questing protagonists and the fictional substance emerging from the unconscious, then imagination itself partakes of both worlds. In its “unfinished genesis,” it is both creative capacity and the wholeness that capacity approaches and glimpses, if only evanescently. It creates itself while apprehending the other, revealing the all-pervasiveness that holds the world together. In a flash of revelation in The Four Banks of the River of Space, Anselm, the protagonist, exclaims: “I had missed the subtle linkages of a parent-Imagination in, through and beyond all creatures, [...], all elements, a Parent beyond fixed comprehension.”13 And Harris himself, about the “fabric of the imagination”: Such a notion arguably implies that there has been a genesis of the imagination within the interstices of unrecorded time, that the unique – indeed inimitable –

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Harris, “The Power of the Word in Space and Place,” not yet published. On this subject, see Noel Cobb, Archetypal Imagination: Glimpses of the Gods in Life and Art (New York: Lindisfarne, 1992). 12 C.G. Jung refers to “a unity of being which would have to be expressed in terms of a new conceptual language,” in Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, tr. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955): 133. 13 Harris, The Four Banks of the River of Space, 125. Further page references are in the main text. 11


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force of such a genesis imbues the human psyche with flexible and far-flung roots in all creatures, all elements, all worlds and constellations, all sciences, all spaces susceptible to visualisation.14

To trace this inimitable force is a challenging paradox throughout Harris’s fiction, in that the protagonist’s approach to the inexpressible is both a “terrifying well-nigh unendurable perspective”15 and a possible source of ecstasy. There is no ending, in conventional terms, in his novels, but an achievement of vision: in death, which, for Harris, is also life-in-death; through disappearance, real or metaphorical, into the third nameless dimension, or through a fall into a state of suspension between extinction and a possible reversal of that fall, such as is experienced by Bone in Jonestown and the Dreamer in The Dark Jester. Increasingly, after exploring the resources of language16 to reach that vision, Harris simultaneously investigates the imaginative, self-reflexive power of the other arts as a means of “re-sensitizing” the world. In this respect, Companions of the Day and Night could be considered as one of the most global yet densely concise instalments in his fictional oeuvre, especially in its striking fusion of science and the arts. We saw that, by the end of The Eye of the Scarecrow, the narrator’s spiritual selfexile had transformed him into Idiot Nameless, now the main character in Companions of the Day and Night. In his hollow appearance, “eloquent mosaic character composed of inner stains and dyes,”17 he clearly prefigures Ghost in The Infinite Rehearsal and the many-faceted quester in The Dark Jester. He seems nevertheless more physically human in his travels and relations with other characters such as the virgin/whore and, above all, in a sharpening of the senses, giving access to what Mrs Black Marsden calls the ghost within the technicality (75) of different arts. In Black Marsden, Goodrich realizes that it is possible “to re-sensitize our biased globe into moveable squares.”18 In its sequence, Companions of the 14

Harris, “The Fabric of the Imagination,” in The Radical Imagination, 69. The Eye of the Scarecrow, 96. In The Four Banks of the River of Space, Harris speaks of “the unbearable divine” (9). 16 See Susan’s log-book in The Waiting Room, Victor’s poems in Ascent to Omai, or Goodrich’s “Book of Infinity” in Black Marsden. 17 Harris, Companions of the Day and Night, 81. Further page references are in the main text. 18 Harris, Black Marsden, 66. 15

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Day and Night, his edition of the “Idiot Nameless collection,” sets in motion a world immobilized in static perceptions of history and of the layers of successful regimes and cultures in Mexico. One bridge between science and art grows out of Goodrich’s awareness that modern man’s fear of extinction if the earth were to fall into a black hole of gravity (14) is similar to “pre-Columbian investitures of fear” which made them resort to human sacrifice on the pyramid of the sun to ensure solar rebirth after night. On the second day of his wanderings through Mexico, Idiot Nameless finds himself at the end of a road branching in two directions, “science and art”: One branch led into a hole in the ground, into untapped resources of energy or untapped resources of extinguished time, the other into a cloak or body sacrificed to the sun, into the end of time itself or the genesis all over again of light.... (23)

Both then lead into a subterranean pool of neglected personal, cultural, even cosmic resources and, together, as the Fool reflects, Were two sides of nameless potentialities [...] that made the shape of each body, each room [...] subtly different to what one thought it was. (23)

These passages imply that the many art-forms the Fool reacts to – the preColumbian vestiges, the dream-play (a version of Harris’s familiar drama of consciouness), the unfinished statue of the Absent Virgin, the fireeater’s many canvases, the monumental statue of the Emperor with which the Fool identifies, becoming a fluid Emperor Rain and leaving behind a passive reflection “devoid of [...] authentic transaction of vision” (60) – all these are so many gateways to different cultural periods and catastrophic historical pasts, “the moving squares of the globe” I mentioned earlier entering into dialogue. Hence Goodrich’s comment that “the paintings and sculptures to which the writings related were doorways through which Idiot Nameless moved” (13). It is in this sense that music, though seldom mentioned in this novel, is nevertheless the expressive medium of the Fool’s joint consciousness of catastrophe and its suspension (71). There is also musicality in the variations on a given motif such as the Fool’s many descents and ascents, and it modulates the different fragments / days19 of the narrative, the specific rhythm underlying the Fool’s 19 On this subject, see Pierre François, “The Lapsarian Ascent,” in his excellent study Inlets of the Soul: Contemporary Fiction in English and the Myth of the Fall

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various perceptions of the globe: the cosmos which he envisions when he flies in mid-Atlantic, the “seas, skies, places” (68) of the world, as he journeys through space and within his own mental globe or sphere.  Relating different modes of artistic expression is, of course, nothing new. Aristotle’s Poetics with its emphasis on mimesis is still influential today.20 Horace’s ut pictura poesis, “as in painting so in poetry,” and its possible extension to ut musica poesis have a long history both in creative attempts to approximate painting or music in poetry and in aesthetic theory.21 In The Womb of Space, Harris himself quotes Théophile Gautier, who wrote that Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal “[take] color from all palettes and notes from all keyboards.”22 From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards and certainly in the modernist period, many writers attempted to give literature a musical structure or the texture of the visual arts. Here again, Harris’s originality lies in a ceaselessly evolving translation of cross-culturality into the various forms of art woven into the narrative, a process one might call cross- or trans-modality.23 In The Womb of Space, he talks of a “coincidence of the arts” whereby “a poem or fiction may absorb metaphors that relate to painting or sculpture or organic images of music” (91). In Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, the artist’s daemon reads in da Silva’s canvases an “Ars combinatoria.”24 The painter is another incarnation of the da Silva who in Palace of the Peacock appears to Vigilance as “the frailest shadow of his former self. His bones were splinters and points Vigilance saw and his flesh was newspaper, drab, wet until the lines and markings had run fan(Cross / Cultures 35; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1999): 255–89. 20 See Pierre Somville, Essai sur la poétique d’Aristote et sur quelques aspects de sa postérité (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1975). 21 Henryk Markiewicz, “Ut Pictura Poesis: A History of the Topos and the Problem,” New Literary History 18.3 (Spring 1987): 535–58. 22 Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination, 90. 23 See Harris’s essay “Aubrey Williams,” in which he speaks of “the music of colour orchestrated in [Williams’s] canvases [...] Painted space ‘speaks’ to the ‘ear’”; Journal of Caribbean Literatures 2.1–3 (Spring 2000): 26. 24 Harris, Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, 44. Further page references are in the main text.

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tastically together.”25 Harris later described this apparition of a man who seems to return from the grave as “inchoate canvas or painting.”26 In Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, he creates himself as an artist as he re-creates individual lives and historical episodes occurring since Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe. He prepares for an exhibition pictures that he painted seven years earlier and descends into these paintings as Goodrich descended into the Idiot Nameless collection. In both essays and fiction, Harris applies similar “re-visionary strategies” in the quest for wholeness and metamorphosis of a static world. He has explained that, when going back to earlier texts, he becomes aware of clues he may have planted in them intuitively, clues that erupt and suggest an “ongoing, infinite potential as that text appears to move [...] to convert itself into something other than it first seems to be.”27 In The Eye of the Scarecrow, he fictionalizes this method and adumbrates his concept of “infinite rehearsal” when the narrator refers to a childhood incident whose significance he did not immediately grasp: [...] little though I knew it this was to prove a lifetime’s poetry of science and a stubborn terrifying task. It was to prove the re-living of all my life again and again as if I were a ghost returning to the same place (which was always different), shoring up different ruins (which were always the same). (25)

In Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness: as he returned to each painting again and again as varieties of transparent eclipse, he began to observe an implicit bank there in that a deep-seated mutation of tone rose into each canvas and one saw a spirit there as one sees a never-to-be-painted, never-to-be-trapped, light or element on earth. It was this contrast between uniform cloak and mutation of tone born of suppressed resources that filled him now [...] with a sense of original independence through himself, through each failed canvas across the years. (38)

One also finds in the “Manifesto” of The Eye of the Scarecrow and at the core of da Silva’s re-vision of his paintings a common primordial fountainhead of creation, at once source of inspiration and object of re-envisioning, which in his series of paintings da Silva sees as “an unfathomable coherence through each trackless universe, trackless wilderness” (38). 25

Harris, Palace of the Peacock, 95–96. Unpublished interview with Hena Maes–Jelinek, August 1981. 27 Harris, “Comedy and Modern Allegory: A Personal View,” 135. 26


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The global in this narrative is being shaped into its multi-layered texture. As da Silva “unravels self-portraits of fate” (50) in canvases painted seven years before, “Truth flashes through the Magellan mask, the Cuffey mask, that I wear; a naked spark of truth that lingers, a glimpsed compassion, an original unity that runs with conformable institutions but is other than uniform style, uniform paint, uniform conviction.” (50, my emphasis)

The compassion, rebirth of emotion and sensibility da Silva detects in his paintings emerges from a dialogue, among others, between Magellan, who opened the way to the European conquest of the world, and Cuffey, a revolutionary victim of that conquest. The coming together of the world’s disparities culminates in da Silva’s highly original use of the architecture of the Commonwealth Institute in London as a metaphorical globe. He sketches a line of tone representing institutional uniformity and a line of universal non-tone or never-to-be-painted beauty and compassion (69), the two meeting at the apex of the Commonwealth tent. In his painted voyage through the tent, he moves through a “wildernesse” globe, which nevertheless elicits “the glimmering light of a perception of value beyond the quantitative mirage of civilisations” (74). This vision of hope is matched by his relation to his wife, whom he calls “Jenine Gold, Jenine Globe, where masked populations reside” (5). When he meets her on her way home and she announces that she is pregnant, “he encircle[s] her fleecy coat” and, in doing so, “encircle[s] the globe then, a global light whose circulation lay through and beyond fear into unfathomable security” (77). Jen’s news of the coming child is, as Harris has said elsewhere, an “annunciation of humanity”28 in a dying age and a crisis of civilization which calls for a rebirth of moral conscience and a move towards an allencompassing vision of the resources available to man that could blend in a dynamic liberation of static mental structures. The muse’s pregnancy is also an annunciation of the “renascence of the arts.”29 It occurs in the last chapter of The Tree of the Sun, a sequence to Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, in which the painter’s art is an even more far-reaching 28

Harris, “The Quest for Form,” 22, 27. Harris, The Tree of the Sun, 24, 69, 83, 87. Further page references are in the main text. 29

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medium of fertile re-creation of the past and a self-reflexive scrutiny of the artist’s role. The ending is a strikingly dense, metaphoric composition interweaving inner and outer world: earth, sea, sky reaching out into the cosmos; living and dead characters and their spiritual relation; man’s long evolutionary history imprinted with traces of its animal past. In other words, all spheres of being cohere in the ship of the globe with which a newly created community or “human orchestra” (94) begins to move. A brief passage will give an idea of how this interweaving affects the language of the novel. Da Silva expresses his attachment to Jen and their coming offspring but is reticent about the burden of his spiritual relation with the woman whose life he is re-creating: Their climax made him suddenly confused [...] at the dividing line between spirit and creation. His tools sang nevertheless, painter’s brush and sculptor’s hammer, singing flesh of a bird, the spirit of a bird. There was the rhythmic stab of a sculptured song, there was a sound of soundless crying, as the songbird lit in her body and inserted its beak into her flesh, into his flesh, into a piercing thrilling musical wire. (74)

Harris’s vision in this novel identifies the creation of community with “the very art of creation” as a “heterogeneous enterprise” (63), in which poetry, painting, sculpture coincide, though music comes increasingly to the fore as a unifying essence and agent of “the [...] ‘silent’ and ‘immaterial’ complexity of arousal,”30 especially in the Carnival Trilogy and The Dark Jester. I must restrict my comments on music to some brief concluding remarks which, I trust, are congruous with its renewed significance in Harris’s latest novels. Already in Palace of the Peacock, Carroll’s music or “organ cry” in “break[ing] and mend[ing] itself always”31 epitomizes the pivotal movement in all of Harris’s narratives: ruin/origin; dismemberment/re-memberment; death/resurrection. Music is fluid, intangible, uncapturable and capable of merging dissonant components, all features Harris sees in the “inimitable ground of being” – or wholeness – which in The Four Banks of the River of Space “gather[s] up [...] all that ha[s] been experienced in every condition of existence” (51). Whereas painting and sculpture capture the outer world and grant access to its inner complex 30 31

The Eye of the Scarecrow, 95. Palace of the Peacock, 113.


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reality, the role of music, apart from the stylistic variations I briefly referred to in connection with Companions of the Day and Night, is at least twofold, especially in The Four Banks of the River of Space and The Dark Jester. In The Four Banks of the River of Space, particularly, it is a link or connecting thread between outer and inner spheres, between successive layers of reality – for example, in the joint performance of flute and scale or ladder when the (diagrammatic) voice of the flute ascends from the abyss through “the flesh of the elements,” “the Fossil ancestors” (46–47), giving voice to “the spirits of the living and the dead” (45). It is thus a relating agent within the globe as well as a link between different forms of art in the narrative. One can apply to music Emmanuel Lévinas’s observation that “the essence of language is its relation to the Other.”32 Indeed, language and music are “antiphonal discourses” (xii) in Anselm’s dreambook. On one level, the Other here is the Amerindian, in particular three drowned Macusi children. More generally, it is the wholeness or “immanent substance” which Harris has translated into a great variety of terms in his fiction and criticism. Music animates the components of this wholeness. As “music of genesis,” it captures the very movement of creation, pervading the globe with “spatial rhythms [...] one seldom listens to” (8). At one stage, Anselm and his companions listen to “fire-music” in a waterfall in the forest: We had entered it seemed [...] an innermost chamber of the magical Waterfall beneath god-rock. It encompassed the globe, the ancient world, the modern world. As if the Waterfall had been uplifted from the river and transferred within us in the music of space, around us in Shadow-organ imperceptible [...] dance of genesis. (133)

The dance of genesis that informs Harris’s global imagination.

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32

Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (Paris: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971): 227 (my tr.).


29

Wilson Harris’s Multi-Faceted and Dynamic Perception of the Imaginary

The birth of the imagination is infinite — “Wilson Harris Interviewed by Alan Riach” What are the tasks of imaginative genius to begin the transformation of [...] barriers in the light of [...] unsuspected resources available to the Imagination within the abyss of our late twentieth-century age? — “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination”

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W I L S O N H A R R I S ’ S F I C T I O N and essays concentrates on the role of the imagination in the existential process he re-creates or comments on. As he wrote in an unpublished essay, “The Key word for me as a writer is imagination.” One may therefore ask what he means by the word, apart from its obvious definition as a creative faculty. Another question is: in what sense can he be called a “warrior” of the imaginary? As their titles indicate, the subject of many of his essays is imagination: “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination”; “Some Aspects of Myth and the Intuitive Imagination”; “Literacy and the Imagination”; “Validation of Fiction: A Personal View of Imaginative Truth”; “The Fabric of the Imagination”; “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination”; The Radical Imagination; “Imagination Dead Imagine: Bridging a Chasm”; “Creolization and the Creative Imagination”; “The Imagination on Trial”; “The Age of the Imagination”; “The Voyaging Imagination”; “Canaima: an Overturning of Habits of Mind in Profoundest Trials of the Imagination”; The Womb of Space: The Cross/Cultural Imagination. This obsessive concern testifies to the centrality of this concept in his work, while the variety of titles makes it clear that his definition is neither final nor absolute. It suggests, rather, the partiality of different approaches, in keeping with the author’s conviction that all statements are OST OF

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partial, and it also implies that his quest for meaning parallels the evolutionary character of imagination itself. Already in his first novel, Palace of the Peacock, the first part of the Guyana Quartet, there is a distinct link between injustice and the lack of imagination it denotes. Donne, the conquistador and plantation owner who pursues Amerindians he wants to use as cheap labour, admits: “I grant I have been cruel and harsh [...]. I have treated the folk badly [...]. I am beginning to lose all my imagination.”1 Nevertheless, exploitation and injustice do not lead to insubordination, for the Amerindians, who are never actually reached, become for Donne spiritual agents of self-confession and repentance. In The Whole Armour, the third part of the Quartet, Cristo is unjustly accused of a crime he has not committed, but eventually he gives himself up to the police and agrees to die, moved by a “force of spiritual resolution,”2 sacrificing himself for the community and achieving a freedom beyond life and death. In The Eye of the Scarecrow, re-creating the Guyana Strike of 1948 when some of the strikers were shot dead by the police, the narrator deplores the killing but regrets their “aimless and subversive” action in the name of a dangerous “progressive realism.”3 Harris has always objected to a stance of insubordination and resistance or the “politics of protest,”4 which he calls “self-righteous deprivation”: One’s pride becomes caught up in one’s humiliations, one’s deprivations [...]. One is proud to maintain a limited, narrow position, and forever complain to the world of the ways in which one has been oppressed or whatever. The imagination [...] has to go much deeper and find links between what I call the occult and the triumphs of love.5

In view of such a position, Harris can hardly be called a “warrior,” except that his plea for an imaginative renewal is carried out through his writing

1

Harris, Palace of the Peacock, 56. Harris, The Whole Armour (London: Faber & Faber, 1962): 111. 3 Harris, The Eye of the Scarecrow, 18. 4 Harris, “The Fabric of the Imagination,” Third World Quarterly 12.1 (January 1990): 176, repr. in From Commonwealth to Postcolonial, ed. Rutherford, 19. 5 Harris, “Unfinished Genesis: A Personal View of Cross-Cultural Tradition” (1990), in Harris, The Radical Imagination, 99. See also “the inner desperation of victim cultures which cemented their deprivation into a royalty of hate”; Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, 92–93. 2

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with the convincing intensity of a passionate advocate of a conception of the imagination. What does Harris mean by “the occult”? He is referring both to those disregarded by society and by conventional history6 and to the unconscious forces within the psyche and the deeper motivations that are often ignored despite their influence on human behaviour. He believes that the solution to the world’s problems is neither economic nor political,7 while in fiction he criticizes the realistic novel or “novel of persuasion,” as he calls it, which rests “on grounds of apparent common sense” and takes place “on an accepted plane of society we are persuaded has an inevitable existence.”8 This does not mean that in his own fiction Harris ignores actual reality. His novels are as full of violence and terror as many other Caribbean novels.9 Caribbean history lies at the root of all his creations and is the substance of a never-ending quest “through” (a favourite word in his essays) appearances as of a search for “windows into reality.”10 He has also referred to “the intuitive life of the imagination, its spectrality and miraculous concreteness.”11 This is illustrated in The Dark Jester when the narrator sees “the first work of art [...] in the inner underworld of the kings of America. Half-flesh, half-work-of-art. A stretched figure cruelly placed on a plank, in the belly of a slave-ship.”12 The history of the Caribbean is one of dismemberment, slavery, exploitation. Harris calls the victims of history the “eclipsed,” the “unborn” or the “uninitiated,”13 and it is the role of the imagination to retrieve them from oblivion (which is actually the subject of his novels). In The Eye of the Scarecrow, which marks a turning-point in his fiction by virtue of its more philosophical inclination, he refers to the depository of past experi6

See Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society, 36. See “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination” (1992), in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Bundy, 251–52. 8 Tradition, the Writer and Society, 29. 9 See his treatment of slavery in The Far Journey of Oudin and The Secret Ladder as well his re-creation of the Jonestown massacre in Jonestown. 10 “Profiles of Myth and the New World,” 81. 11 “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination” (1992), in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Bundy, 256. 12 Harris, The Dark Jester (London: Faber & Faber, 2001): 98–99. 13 The Eye of the Scarecrow, 83, 103. See also, in the same novel, “The Manifesto of the Unborn State of Exile,” 95ff. 7

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ence in the unconscious as “it – the accumulative ironies of the past, the virtuous rubbish-heap and self-parody of ancestors in death.”14 It was to take many different forms in subsequent novels and, as we shall see, is called by different, original yet related terms. Unlike other Caribbean writers who asserted in the past that the Caribbean is “historyless” and uncreative,15 Harris is convinced that “the void” or sense of void into which the “eclipsed” fell – whether African slaves cut off from their country of origin or Amerindians present though forgotten in his own ancestry – is actually as dense as the landscape he discovered when he led expeditions in the Guyanese jungle. As suggested above, this density is made of the accumulated sufferings of the oppressed, either invisible (like the Amerindians in Palace of the Peacock) or lost in an abyss of unconsciousness. Harris calls this forgotten substance “Absent Presence”16 or “live fossils,” an oxymoron which suggests that what is fossilized is dormant and can be revived, as he revives in his fiction an unacknowledged underground tradition, “a living open tradition which realizes itself in an enduring capacity associated with the obscure human person.”17 Harris calls the receptacle of these “live fossils” “the womb of space,” an expression inspired by the dense landscape of the jungle, which conveys its livingness and capacity for renewal. It is both the concrete refuge of hunted Amerindians and Maroons and a metaphor for the repository of neglected history, nevertheless susceptible of rebirth, as “womb” makes clear. Again in keeping with the variety of approaches to this fictional substance, the “womb of space” is designated by such different terms as “otherness,” “spirit,” a “deposit of ghosts,”18 the unconscious, “living text,”19 “the sacred,” the mythic, the archetypal. Although related, they are not synonymous but different aspects of a wholeness and deep-seated cultural reality towards which Harris’s characters move. He also calls it “the submerged territory of the imagination.”20 14

The Eye of the Scarecrow, 56. Among them V.S. Naipaul. For Harris’s comments on Caribbean forms of creative expression, see History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas. 16 Harris, “The Absent Presence: The Caribbean, Central and South America,” 81. 17 Tradition, the Writer and Society, 36. 18 The Infinite Rehearsal, 1. 19 “The Landscape of Dreams,” 33. 20 Harris, The Womb of Space, xix. 15


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The way into that submerged territory is through the imagination itself, which is therefore both creative agent and the multi-faceted substance it apprehends. But if that substance makes up a “wholeness,” it can never be perceived in its entirety, especially since it keeps evolving, just as the creative agent is always in the making, never complete. Hence Harris’s concept of “the unfinished genesis of the imagination,” which is also essentially a dynamic process in harmony with the existential flow of “life-in-death and death-in-life”21 in nature: I see the environment as a measure of reflection in the person, a measure of the cosmos in the person [...]. We need [...] to scan with subjective eyes landscapes/oceanscapes/riverscapes and the elements within these for complex reflections or absent/present creatures and beings.22

We find in this interconnection of landscape and man the rejection of an exclusive anthropocentrism common in Western philosophy, an interconnection which also includes the animal world. Harris repeatedly alludes to Titian’s painting of the “Allegory of Prudence” which so eloquently illustrates that connection, also obvious, as he explains, in pre-Columbian art. This kinship between worlds – natural, human, animal – came to him as a revelation on his first expedition in the Guyanese interior23 and radically changed not just his perception of nature but also of the role of the imagination and, as Fred D’Aguiar puts it, “how he imagined”: This was the beginning of a task I could not evade [...] that lay in the incorporation of shells, of the branches of trees, of wood in oneself like a skeleton – interiorly and imaginatively in oneself – as much as exteriorly in diverse and complex nature.24

Similarly, in practically all of his novels nature is a catalyst of consciousness. To take but one example, in Ascent to Omai Victor, the protagonist, ascends Omai in the south of Guyana: Beneath him lay the chasm of the river, volcanic and subdued. Above him stood the mountains of lava, worshipful and brooding, a subsidiary ridge of 21

Palace of the Peacock, 25. “The Age of the Imagination,” 22. 23 “‘When one dreams one dreams alone’: Wilson Harris interviewed by Fred D’Aguiar,” Bomb 82 (Winter 2002–2003): 75, 76. See also pages xiv, 379–80, 408 and 506 above. 24 “When one dreams one dreams alone,” 76. 22

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temperament, thrusting [...] towards loops of sky and bush. Topography of the heartland. Within one such loop [...] the sun appeared to vegetate, hanging in the sky. Suddenly [...] Victor felt himself addressed by a line from a Russian poet – art of revolution – a cloud in trousers [...]. Encircling vestments of poetry – Donne to Mayakovsky. Victor stopped to examine his own conscience in this respect – half-metaphysical, half-dialectical.25

As a stimulus to consciousness, imagination is essentially an agent of conversion, what Harris called the “‘convertible’ property of imagination.”26 In Jonestown, the narrator, Bone, who had collaborated with the sectleader, Jones, to set up an experimental community in the Guyanese interior, awakens to his own responsibility towards the “extinct” of the experiment when nearly a thousand people died after being forced to drink a soup laced with cyanide. As indicated earlier,27 the motto of his narrative or “dream book,” Imagination Dead Imagine, captures the process in which he is involved: the gradual transformation of his consciousness into a “Memory Theatre” in which past victims come to life, not just individuals he knew but vanished multitudes including pre-Columbian peoples, who disappeared in apparently dead history. Imagination becomes then the instrument of his moral and emotional awakening: “One must reimagine death as a live fossil apparition. Imagination Dead Imagine.”28 Harris’s emphasis on convertibility in all aspects of life finds expression in his original language, in particular in his “convertible imageries.”29 These are a source of difficulty for some readers, but it must be kept in mind that they originate in Harris’s erasure of the fixed boundaries between categories of being and of the conventional static frames into which we tend to imprison different forms of life. These convertible “imageries” abound in the narratives, generating their rhythm and animating a movement in keeping with the flow of life. The most obvious example is to be found in Palace of the Peacock, when the sun, initially a symbol of Donne’s implacable rule, breaks into stars prefiguring the breakdown of his power and his own transformation. In Companions of the Day and Night, the narrator translates into a novel the papers, diaries, 25

Harris, Ascent to Omai, 16–17. Tradition, the Writer and Society, 52. 27 Pages 430–31 above. 28 Harris, Jonestown, 232. 29 See the “Author’s Note” in the 1988 Faber edition of Palace of the Peacock (10). 26

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paintings and sculptures of his protagonist, “Idiot Nameless,”30 and thinks that “the paintings and sculptures to which the writings related were doorways through which Idiot Nameless moved.”31 But this is not just a movement through apparently static works of art and towards the origins of creation; these works of art themselves change like the stone statue of an emperor in Mexico turning into “Emperor Rain” and becoming “Emperor Stone Rain.”32 Another example is the “transubstantiation of bone into rain”33 (the solid becoming fluid) that Sister Rose envisions. Related to such conversion is the mutability of the senses, as in The Dark Jester when the Dreamer’s “unnerved [...] eyes heard the cry of the Bird”: I listened with new ears, new eyes in my Dream. And I heard and saw the strange muted and muffled cry of the Bird in tones [...] that made me gasp.34

A remarkable feature of Harris’s fiction is the coherence between content and form and their philosophical implications. As we have seen, his approaches to imagination as both instrument and object of quest are partial, as are the multitudinous ways in which his characters move towards the “womb of space” or “wholeness.” And, as he has pointed out (and exemplifies in his narratives), “All the imageries are partial though attuned to a wholeness one can never seize or structure absolutely.”35 I have already alluded to the wholeness which Harris deems “unfathomable,”36 different from totality, which suggests a static absolute, whereas wholeness made of all human experience, all partial elements, all cultures, evolves constantly. Though unattainable as such, it has a life of its own, as the expression “living text,” mentioned above, suggests: “It is as if the text is alive 30 This expression is first used in The Eye of the Scarecrow and expresses the state of “negative identity” reached by the character who descends into the void of historical victims and into the deepest spaces of his own psyche. 31 Harris, Companions of the Day and Night, 13. 32 Companions of the Day and Night, 59, 60. Pierre François suggests that the Fool himself is transmuted into Rain Emperor (Inlets of the Soul, 266). 33 Companions of the Day and Night, 77. 34 The Dark Jester, 20–21. 35 “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination” (1992), in The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Bundy, 252. 36 “All the structures are partial [...]. What relates these structures is an unnameable centre or unfathomable wholeness”; “Wilson Harris: An Interview” by Helen Tiffin, New Literature Review 7 (1979): 24.

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in its own right, and the text has this capacity to revise itself. The text has an intention of its own.”37 It manifests itself to the writer, who glimpses it intuitively and intermittently.38 Creation is therefore a two-directional process, a move towards and away from the unconscious, while in their livingness the many parts of wholeness are susceptible to connections and links between each other: We have a world that is tormented and torn and divided into all sorts of compartments, and the bridges between these cultures are very difficult to sustain. But they do exist. They can be found.

And further: The dead change within our unconscious. The dead return as an aspect of the unfinished genesis. The dead return, therefore, in fiction, to carry a burden which apparently we cannot carry and at the same time we become aware of our deepest roots in nature. We become aware of those roots which are so deep that they hold out some kind of hope, as if what lies in the past can address us through the unfinished genesis of a certain kind of rhythm that animates spaces, architectures, and worlds.39

These deep-seated linkages are the foundation of Harris’s cross-culturalism – a term which, I believe, he was the first to use – and of his art. It should be noted, however, that despite his emphasis on the role of imagination and his explorations of the nature of art, particularly in his two latest novels, his world-view is at the opposite pole from the concept of art for art’s sake. Art is life and creates a dialogue between the visible and the invisible, our material existence and the infinite, which is why, ultimately, “Art transcends the material of which it is made [...]. [It] lies [...] in a consciousness of timelessness we cannot seize.”40 Yet the timeless at the root of art, which is also the unconscious, the abyss in which silent crowds move in Harris’s fiction, has the capacity to secrete what Harris calls the “re-visionary potential within texts and imageries of reality.”41 In most of 37

Harris, “Originality and Tradition” (1991), in The Radical Imagination, 117. On this subject, see “Wilson Harris Interviewed by Alan Riach,” 33ff. 39 Harris, “Creative and Re-Creative Balance Between Cultures” (1991), in Harris, The Radical Imagination, 114–15. 40 The Dark Jester, 11–12. 41 “The Fabric of the Imagination,” Third World Quarterly 12.1 (January 1990): 178, repr. in From Commonwealth to Postcolonial, ed. Rutherford, 21. 38


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his essays, Harris compares the power of imagination and art (but also of love and compassion) to stimulate social change to discoveries in science and their effect on communal and individual life. In The Mask of the Beggar, one of the characters meditates on the “Comedy of the Inferno” (the state of the world) in the following terms: How had the Comedy of the Inferno come into being? [...] It had imposed itself upon us – those of us, let me say, who are deemed outsiders, racially inferior or disobedient in charting another faith, heretical or breakers of the law – wittingly, at times, unwittingly, at other times, by closures, a repetition of closures in language and in ideas adopted by politics, economics, and science, exercised therefore by a dominant civilization which sees itself as absolute in its values of communication. Such absolution breeds Death as the final machine or conquistador or creator of things to come. A restlessness commences amongst gods and artists who seek an openness to all fixtures of language that run contrary to innermost thought, to all closures and tyrannies of convention.42

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42

Harris, The Mask of the Beggar (London: Faber & Faber, 2003): 64.


30

“Numinous Proportions” Wilson Harris’s Alternative to All ‘Posts’

A truly creative alchemical response to crisis and conflict and deprivation − a response that engages with formidable myth − may well come from the other side of a centralised or dominant civilisation, from extremities, from apparently irrelevant imaginations and resources. The complacencies of centralised, ruling powers […] begin to wear thin at the deep margins of being within a multi-levelled quest for the nature of value and spirit. — Harris, “Literacy and the Imagination”

A

S T H E N E W M I L L E N N I U M sets in, the major crisis that beset Western civilization with world-wide repercussions before World War I has not abated, and we seem to approach a new era dangerously poised between a sense of exhaustion and disintegration and the resurgence of a narrow fundamentalism. With the possible exception of the Renaissance, no other period seems to have combined more inextricably man’s propensity to tyrannize and destroy with his extraordinary capacity for progress, though on the moral side any gains made are largely cancelled out by losses. Wilson Harris belongs among those writers who still believe in the moral function of art, a belief actualized, as the quotation above indicates, in a quest for value rather than resting in categorical assertion. His many essays on the imagination as provider of a genuinely creative response to crisis are proof enough that, in his eyes, art is still the major potential carrier of meaning. In the context of the ‘modernism versus postmodernism’ debate, this makes him close to modernism, as I think he is, but could disqualify him as a postcolonial writer because modernism has grown out of the liberal-humanist tradition, whose strategies fed on colonialism and

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the unacknowledged appropriation by metropolitan centres of cultural features from their heterogeneous colonies.1 I am making this point only to show the kind of contradiction one comes up against as soon as one tries to classify in a field averse per se to categorization. Nor am I denying the impact of so-called ‘primitive’ or ‘exotic’ cultures on modernist art, but I do suggest that the influence worked both ways, if at different moments, and that not a few postcolonial writers are direct heirs of what was a modernist breakthrough, despite its political conservatism and sometimes, though not always, unconscious ideological biases. Before comparing Wilson Harris’s work with literary postmodernism, a few preliminary comments are necessary, if only to make it clear which specific features call for comparison. No discussion of postmodernism can avoid remarking on the welter of contradictions it elicits among supporters and detractors or even within each group. Such a lack of consensus reflects on the nature of postmodernism itself; the loss of value and significance it posits has entailed a similar disagreement about what language means, as evidenced, for example, by the proliferation of ‘posts’ and their personal, contradictory meanings. Some could argue, for instance, that Simon During uses “post-cultural” in a progressive sense and George Steiner in a conservative one. Still, what appeared originally as the expression of a liberating pluralism is sometimes turning into an obstacle rather than helping us under literature. This may sound like the querelle des anciens et des modernes all over again, and a comparison with the French “Battle of the Books” is not so preposterous if one remembers that a major issue in seventeenth-century France was the opposition between Cartesianism and non-rationalism (whether in religion or in poetry), and between the claim to universality represented by the classics and national subjects or myths. Also, then as now, both sides resorted to Cartesian logic in their argumentation but created confusion by using the same terms with different meanings. My own purpose is not to enter the postmodernist controversy but to substantiate briefly Wilson Harris’s view 1 This is the view argued by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989): 156–57. Since I have mentioned Harris’s affinity with modernism, I should say here that Harris’s own view of tradition is different from Eliot’s and the reverse of authoritarian though there is a similarity between the two in their viewing it as a living phenomenon, and, as is obvious from his references to Eliot’s criticism, Harris admires it.

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that the prevailing alternative to postmodernism is a fall-back onto a onesided tradition which he sees as a given ‘formula’ rather than a genuinely renewed and renewable concept. To give a few examples: Gerald Graff’s analysis of the “post-modernist breakthrough” has the merit of clarifying the issue, though perhaps too systematically. He argues that postmodernism is the “logical culmination” of romanticism and modernism and continues these movements, rather than constituting a sharp break with them. Terry Eagleton offers a parallel argument when he writes that it was “modernism which brought structuralist and poststructuralist to birth in the first place,”2 and Frank Lentricchia makes a fairly similar point.3 But there is a certain irony in Graff’s presentation of postmodernism as a “reactionary tendency,”4 for he criticizes it throughout his essay in the name of rationalism and coherence, basically the values already put forward in the late-1920s by Wyndham Lewis against romanticism, against the intuitive in Bergson’s philosophy, and against Joyce and Lawrence, all destroyers of the classical ideal, endangering Western civilization by a return to primitivism. It is worth mentioning that for Graff, as indeed for most commentators on postmodernism, the role of the imagination is to shape and order rather than discover.5 In a commonsensical article on the arbitrariness and motives of the ‘modernism versus postmodernism’ debate, Susan Suleiman argues that it is one of naming rather than content, relevant only in the Anglo-Saxon context.6 In the same volume, Hans Bertens offers a well-informed and helpful survey of the characteristics and historical development of postmodernism as term and concept. But despite his insistence on the pluralism of the postmodem Weltanschauung and of his own approach to it, and apart from a brief allusion to Latin American magical realism, he makes no reference whatsoever to phenomena outside Europe and the USA . He shares with Graff and Suleiman, as indeed with most Western commenta2

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983): 139. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (London: Methuen, 1980): xiii. 4 Gerald Graff, “The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough,” in The Novel Today, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (Glasgow: Collins/Fontana, 1977): 219. 5 “The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough,” 237. 6 Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Naming and Difference: Reflections on ‘Modernism versus Postmodernism in Literature’,” in Approaching Postmodernism, ed. Douwe Fokkema & Hans Bertens (Amsterdam & Philadelphia P A : John Benjamins, 1986): 255–70. 3

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tors for or against postmodernism, a total lack of awareness of the basic factors which brought about the much emphasized disintegration, decentering (though not loss of power) and disenchantment or bitterness of the West. That this was formerly experienced by colonized peoples is wholly ignored, as is the interaction of cultures in a ‘global’ world and the surfacing even in the West of visions and modes of thought alien to its tradition and capable of modifying or renewing it. The most telling example of this limited outlook in the Fokkema and Bertens volume is an essay by Richard Todd, generally a perceptive critic on British fiction by conventional standards. Todd is intent on proving that there is such a thing as “Postmodernist British Fiction” and he considers it to be of prime importance that the writers he has in mind should have become part of the canon. Some of the novels he mentions are indeed by major British writers (John Fowles, Iris Murdoch, William Golding in The Paper Men), but the aspects of their fiction he discusses, such as playfulness, pastiche and parody, are not the only or even the major criteria one would judge by if prone to canonization, despite Linda Hutcheon’s insistence on their creative potential.7 Moreover, what Todd sees as the aspiration of British postmodernist fiction to a pluralistic discourse seems to be of a very limited kind. This also applies to other Western commentators, for whom pluralism generally means separate commitments to the “ex-centric” in “class, race, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity” as opposed to the “homogeneous monolith […] middle-class, male, heterosexual, white, western.”8 Todd refers to the “colonial or imperial past” but, significantly, cites Sir Walter Scott and J.G. Farrell and seems unaware of any experimental postcolonial writing along these lines in Britain other than Rushdie’s, generally one of the few postcolonial writers worthy of “appropriation” by British critics.9

7 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (New York & London: Methuen, 1980), and A Theory of Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth-Century Art Form (New York & London: Methuen, 1985). 8 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York & London: Methuen, 1988): 12. 9 Richard Todd, “The Presence of Postmodernism in British Fiction: Aspects of Style and Selfhood,” in Approaching Postmodernism, ed. Douwe Fokkema & Hans Bertens (Amsterdam & Philadelphia P A : John Benjamins, 1986): 99–117. My remark applies to the time when this essay was written (in the late 1980s).

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Linda Hutcheon, by contrast, offers an amazingly inclusive analysis of the many forms of postmodernism and exposes its paradoxes and contradictions, seeing in them a source of power and creative tension as well as the reason for the diverging interpretations it gives rise to.10 Above all, she suggests that postmodernism remains partly trapped by that which it challenges and rejects.. Truth and reference, she says, have not ceased to exist but have been problematized11 and the postmodern foregrounds process as opposed to the discovery of total vision, even when it does find such a vision.12 One of her recurring arguments against negative comments on postmodernism is that its representatives are aware that their creations are only human constructs, which naturally follows from the negation of a referent. But the impression one often gets is that, within the persisting confines of their tradition, the writers she deals with dismantle and ‘play’ with its building-blocks and move them around, but seldom cross its borders except on the surface level. Certainly, the self-reflexiveness of much postmodernist fiction has not necessarily entailed a drastic revision of narrative strategies and change in outlook. I would take Fowles’s fiction as one example among many. Like Todd, who considers The French Lieutenant’s Woman as “perhaps Britain’s closest approach to the ‘canonic’ Postmodernist novel,”13 Hutcheon clearly sees it and Fowles’s A Maggot as significant examples of postmodernist fiction. Her analysis of Sarah’s role as fiction-maker in the first of these novels is illuminating. But her conclusion is that the creative aspects of parody, allegory and mise en abyme that characterize metafiction in this novel are saving techniques for the mimetic genre.14 If saving the mimetic genre is what matters – and it clearly is, since she approves of the novel as “realism redefined”15 – it is difficult to accept that postmodernism has been the genuinely revisionary mode she sees it as. It contradicts what I see as a major feature (and shortcoming) of Fowles’s fiction. He is a good storyteller, and the role played by women in his novels as stimulators of male consciousness can be seen as an advance on his predecessors in the realist 10

Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 47, 222ff. A Poetics of Postmodernism, 223. 12 A Poetics of Postmodernism, 48. 13 “The Presence of Postmodernism in British Fiction,” 112. 14 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 70. 15 Narcissistic Narrative, 58. 11

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tradition. He may even have suggested through Alison, the Australian girl in The Magus, that English society needs to be regenerated from the outside. But despite the mysterious aura of Sarah in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, he has repeatedly tried and failed to convey through his narratives a deeper, mysterious dimension. The trials Nicholas is subjected to in The Magus, the different versions of the allegorical episode of the cavern in A Maggot16 – these are incentives to awareness through fairly conventional albeit baroque symbolism and through mechanical devices such as His Lordship’s unexplained disappearance (despite its metaphysical connotations) or, for that matter, the celebrated endings of The French Lieutenant’s Woman. They may “challenge certainty”17 and, like the four postscripts in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, they question the main text18 and convey a sense of relativity – but not the genuine ontological doubt supposed to be a major feature of postmodernist fiction. These few and admittedly arbitrarily chosen examples suggest that postmodernism still functions within a tradition in which it is difficult to envisage genuinely new and different modes of perception.19 The continuing impact of tradition as expression of established culture and outlook, and a return to it, were already evidenced in some of the negative responses to an inquiry by the P E N Review (1985) on the “New Orthodoxy” in critical theory. It is also interesting to note that a return to realistic narrative is being hailed from ideologically opposite quarters.20 Wilson Harris’s conception of tradition was the subject of his first major essay and, just as Palace of the Peacock contains embryonically all 16

Which partly mars the tour de force achieved by Fowles in his trial narrative, a challenge indeed to historiography; see Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 106. 17 A Poetics of Postmodernism, 48. 18 Richard Todd, “The Presence of Postmodernism in British Fiction,” 114. 19 I am aware that my brief discussion of postmodernist features may give an impression of unqualified generalization. I would argue that Graham Swift’s Waterland and even D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel are better examples of what postmodernism is usually said to be than Fowles’s novels. Some of the more original aspects of postmodernism are discussed in Postmodern Fiction in Europe and the Americas, ed. Theo D’haen & Hans Bertens (Amsterdam: Rodopi & Antwerpen: Restant, 1988). 20 See, for example, Alan Wilde, “Postmodernism from A to Z,” Contemporary Literature 30.1 (1989): 133–41. Wilde concludes his review of Postmodern Fiction: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Larry McCaffery with the exclamation: “Welcome back, World!”

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further fictional developments in his work, so Tradition, the Writer and Society contains the quintessence of all further developments and conceptualizations of his thought. I do not, incidentally, think that Harris puts forward ‘theories’, though some of his views have been theorized and used in criticism. His own critical essays are usually written after or, judging from their dating, in parallel with some of his fiction, and the premisses in both are largely non-rational, as a close scrutiny of his writing shows.21 Even though the general trend of his essays develops as a ‘logical’ argument, there are, as it were, ‘gaps’ in the logic, filled by what are for Harris wholly intuitive insights. As often with original writers, his fiction and critical writings are most profitably read in the light of each other for a better understanding of his vision and thought as of their unique symbiosis. Harris’s conception of tradition, inspired, as is wellknown, by the West Indian experience of void and so-called ‘historylessness’, is a good example of the resistance of his views to theorization. Its non-rational tenor has not been sufficiently emphasized, though, as he said in an interview in which he connected postcolonial allegory and tradition, “the absent body is rooted in an understanding of presence which lies beyond logical presence.”22 To rationally minded critics (myself included), the full implications of the italicized words are not easy to grasp, yet they are the very essence (if one still dares use that word) of Harris’s art. They account for his mode of writing as a visionary, predominantly ‘dream-like’ yet transformative re-enactment of the past, for the ‘deconstruction’ of the surface reality and the decentering of narrative perspective in his fiction, not in playfulness or, at the other extreme, out of despair in a world become meaningless but, on the contrary, to make possible the quest for value and meaning which, as we saw, he clearly advocates. Although it does have ideological and political implications (if only in its rejection of any kind of imperialism and authoritarianism), decentering for Harris, while denying hierarchy, does not express a suspicion of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ and implies more than Derrida’s awareness that contamination by the metaphysical is impossible to escape.23 But he, too, rejects the notion of all absolutes and the notion of a “transcendental 21

See, for instance, The Womb of Space. “Interview by Stephen Slemon,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 19.3 (July 1988): 47-56; 49. 23 Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, 174. 22

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signifier” through which “truth or reality […] will act [and should act] as the foundation of all our thought, language and experience.”24 The foundation of truth is, for Harris, “unpinnable” and absolute truth can never be reached, not even through a “reconciliation of opposites,” which, as the Protagonist of The Four Banks of the River of Space realizes, is “too uncreative or mechanical” a formula.25 I am in fact arguing that Harris’s thought, like the linguistic fabric of his prose, defies categorization. His works of art are not looking for rules and categories, and both his fiction and his criticism seek “to translate/redress all codes into fractions and factors of truth.”26 The truth his characters are in quest of, “the inimitable ground of Being,”27 is never reached and its existence is only perceived intuitively through “a glimmering apprehension of the magic of creative nature, the life of sculpture, the genesis of art, the being of music.”28 The God Harris seems to believe in is not, if I understand rightly, a reality exclusively beyond man but essentially a creator, “a true Creator, whose unknowable limits are our creaturely infinity.”29 I hope this will become clearer as we go along. The point I am making here is that Harris’s God exists through men as much as they through Him, just as in his novels the creative process develops through an interaction between the author/sometimes “editor”/sometimes protagonist and his characters (see below). At one stage in his imaginative quest, the protagonist of The Four Banks of the River of Space thinks: I had missed the subtle linkages of a parent-Imagination in, through and beyond all creatures, [...], all elements, a Parent beyond fixed comprehension until I began to retrace my steps.30

Retracing one’s steps is the process in which Harris’s protagonists have been involved from the Guyana Quartet onwards. Through their experiences and encounters with a vanished past, lost cultures or deprived individuals and groups (apparently non-existent yet agents of the sacred in his fiction), his protagonists confront “areas of tradition that have sunken 24

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, 131. Harris, The Four Banks of the River of Space, 51. 26 The Womb of Space, 86 (emphasis mine). 27 The Four Banks of the River of Space, 51. 28 The Four Banks of the River of Space, 39. 29 The Four Banks of the River of Space, 32 (emphasis mine). 30 The Four Banks of the River of Space, 125 (emphasis mine). 25


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away and apparently disappeared and vanished and yet that are still active at some level.”31 Harris goes on to say that “one has to make a distinction between activity as a kind of mechanical process and as something which is rooted in […] a combination of faculties in the imagination,” thus clearly linking the creative process to the kind of tradition (“absent body” beyond logical presence) he has in mind. From whatever angle one approaches his fiction or essays, one comes up against this enigmatic “presence,” which he himself says he apprehends through “intuitive clues” (see above) and which takes on innumerable shapes in his novels. The dreaming re-creation of New-World conquest in Palace of the Peacock is a surfacing of that lost tradition into consciousness, as are, in The Secret Ladder, the runaway slaves Fenwick encounters and the mysterious presence that hovers over Catalena when Poseidon’s followers threaten to execute her. The Indians in Tumatumari, the pre-Columbian vestiges into which Idiot Nameless falls in Companions of the Day and Night, the Namless country in Black Marsden, the canvas da Silva “revises” in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness – all are so many faces (sometimes paradoxically faceless) or manifestations of tradition, which sometimes erupts with unpredictable force and can arouse terror as much as ecstasy. I am convinced that there is a tradition in depth which returns, which nourishes us even though it appears to have vanished, and that it creates a fiction in the ways in which the creative imagination comes into dialogue with clues of revisionary moment. The spectral burden of vanishing and re-appearing is at the heart of the writer’s task.32

It is this subterranean living tradition (“living fossil texts” is, as we shall see, another expression for it) that informs the notions of “reversal,” “re-vision” and “infinite rehearsal,” a-posteriori conceptualizations of Harris’s fictional practice, now frequently applied in postcolonial criticism, though not always in the sense meant by Harris, because the critic, perhaps inevitably, ignores the complex overlapping of layers of reality and the intuitive thrust in exploring them, the faith in the power of intuition by which Harris has radicalized fiction. In addition, his conception of a lost tradition and of texts coming alive, as it were, of their own volition, texts which he scans for frail clues he (or any other author) may not have 31 32

“Interview by Stephen Slemon,” 48. Harris, “Literacy and the Imagination,” 27.

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been aware of planting there himself,33 suggests that the text not only has a life of its own but an intention of its own. Harris convincingly substantiates this view in The Womb of Space by his wholly personal and original reading of novels which had previously received considerable attention of a more conventional kind.34 It should already be clear that the uncertain enigmatic reality which, for Harris, is the substance of tradition differs from what is usually called postmodernist indeterminacy. That reality is rooted not only in a lost past but also in the physical world and in man’s psyche (“the womb of space”): “It is not a question of rootlessness but of the miracle of roots, the miracle of a dialogue with eclipsed selves.”35 It naturally influences his conception and rendering of character. The “dissolution of ego boundaries,” the fragmentation of the self, characteristic of much postmodernist fiction, entail in his novels neither mere uncertainty of identity nor, at the opposite pole, the assertion of one that is merely ‘Other’, as in some AfricanAmerican writing and criticism or, for that matter, much postcolonial writing. Neither the author nor the characters are “sovereign,” in his view, by which he means that they do not embody one given personality but, rather, a series of personalities born out of “one complex womb”36: “personality is cognizant of many existences [who] become agents of personality.”37 Already in Palace of the Peacock Harris had presented the men who accompany Donne on his quest as “the eccentric emotional lives of the crew every man mans and lives in his inmost ship and theatre and mind.”38 In this first novel also, Harris anticipated what poststructuralist critics call “the disappearance of the author,” though with a different effect and 33 Harris, “Comedy and Modern Allegory: A Personal View,” in A Shaping of Connections, 131. 34 Umberto Eco has expressed a similar view when he wrote that “between the intention of the author […] and the intention of the interpreter […] there is an intention of the text.” Another parallel with Harris’s thought lies in his assertion that “modern quantitative science is born, inter alia, in a dialogue with the qualitative knowledge of Hermeticism”; “After Secret Knowledge,” Times Literary Supplement (22–28 June 1990): 666, 678. 35 Harris, “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” 65–66. 36 Harris, Palace of the Peacock, 41. 37 “Interview with Wilson Harris,” in Kas-Kas, 53. 38 Harris, Palace of the Peacock, 48.

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meaning. Barthes proclaimed the death of the author as the exclusive and original source of meaning concomitant with his authority as the unique producer of that meaning (see, among other writings, “The Death of the Author”39). The act of creation becomes, in Linda Hutcheon’s words, “performative inscription” produced here and now, whose significance largely depends on the role of the receiver,40 as we know from Iser’s theories. Or, according to Hutcheon, the author can be, as in Coetzee’s Foe, an “agent provocateur/manipulateur.”41 The disappearance of the author in Harris’s fiction implies more than a provocative stance, a challenging of received truths (though it does this as well) or an escape into parody. Harris becomes a vessel through whom other voices speak. As he or the narrator disappears, like the first-person narrator of Palace or the third-person narrator of The Tree of the Sun, the serial personalities that speak through him become capable of provoking change (like Donne in his trial when the “I”-narrator temporarily vanishes). The characters thus become ‘agents’ creating fiction themselves and even fictionalizing their creator. This dialogical process is increasingly foregrounded in such novels as The Tree of the Sun and The Infinite Rehearsal.42 It recalls my interpretation above of God as both Creator and Created. It also explains why the author is “an agent of real change”43 who can still influence humanity and civilization through the transformation of both art and life. There is doubtless an element of Shelleyan Romanticism in this belief, though, to Harris, the “literacy of the imagination” is first and foremost a deep perception of the fallacies and false clarities which imprison man in a one-directional role. It is not the appendage of an elite, intellectual or otherwise, as he shows in his discussion of Beti, a character in The Far Journey of Oudin.44 Although illiterate, she reads Oudin, and because she

39

Barthes, “La Mort de l’Auteur,” in Critique et vérité (1966); as “The Death of the Author” in Image–Music–Text, ed. & tr. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977): 142–48. 40 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 76-77. 41 A Poetics of Postmodernism, 78. 42 There is some affinity between this dialogical process and Bakhtin’s conception of dialogue as explained by Julia Kristeva in “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” though there are also differences. 43 Unpublished interview by Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin (24 April 1986): 2. 44 See “Literacy and the Imagination.”

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is intuitively capable of grasping his need in his extremity, she creates him anew. Harris’s repeated emphasis on conversion, transformation and translation is also rooted in his vision of an apparently lost tradition which he sees as “the true source of the text” when the latter “comes profoundly alive.”45 If one keeps in mind that the “soil of tradition” is also “the soil of the world’s unconscious,”46 the text coming alive clearly shows that the author is a mediator, as indeed Harris suggests when he writes that “[the author] is susceptible to an unpredictable movement of consciousness-inunconsciousness.”47 Although critics have repeatedly emphasized the importance of transformation in Harris’s fiction, little attention has been paid so far to his vision of creation as a transfer or “translation” of the substance of fiction from unconsciousness into consciousness. Yet in one of his much-quoted essays, “Comedy and Modern Allegory,” Harris refers five times this notion: to “a bridge between the collective unconscious of the human race and the miracle of consciousness,” a bridge “from the limbo of the lost to the limbo of the saved,” not a static or finished bridge but one that grows out of a response to “intuitive clues.”48 The ceaseless elaboration and “unfinished genesis” of that bridge is what Harris means by cross-culturalism as distinct from multi-culturalism, which designates the coexistence and recognition of different cultures but not necessarily their interaction; distinct also from the postmodernist pluralism discussed above. His most frequent example of cross-culturalism in his essays (but also fictionalized in The Sleepers of Roraima49) is that of the Carib bone-flute, which points to a nascent posthumous dialogue between two cultures, one conquering, the other defeated and lost but revived imaginatively. He has explained that the Caribs used to carve a flute out of the bones of their cannibalized Spanish enemies and eat a morsel of their flesh in order to enter their mind, sense their adversarial hate, and intuit the kind of attack they might wage against themselves. It would seem that the Caribs also saw in the bone-flute the very origins of music. The flute was therefore “the seed of an intimate revelation […] of 45

“Literacy and the Imagination,” 22. “Literacy and the Imagination,” 22–23. 47 “Literacy and the Imagination,” 23. 48 “Comedy and Modern Allegory,” 135, 132. 49 Harris, The Sleepers of Roraima: A Carib Trilogy. 46

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mutual spaces they shared with the enemy […] within which to vizualize the rhythm of strategy, the rhythm of attack or defence the enemy would dream to employ against them.”50 I wish to emphasize here Harris’s description of the flute as a “bridge of soul,” “a fine, a spider’s web, revolving bridge, upon which the ghost of music runs, moves between the living and the dead, the living and the living, the living and the unborn.”51 The revulsive impact of cannibalism has long hidden this “mutuality” but it (cannibalism) now “begins to give ground to a deeply hidden moral compulsion” to conquer the “inner rage, inner fire associated with cruel prejudice.” Harris insists on the need to probe “the links between moral being [the consumption of hideous bias] and profoundest creativity,” as he also metaphorizes in the bone-flute his conviction that “adversarial contexts” such as the encounter between inimical cultures can generate creativity since both destruction (cannibalism) and creation (music) coalesce in the instrument, and that catastrophe can so destroy the monolithic outlook of a people as to offer an opportunity for spiritual recovery and new growth. Understandably, then, Harris’s dynamic conception of creativeness as a bridge between the invisible and the visible, unconsciousness and consciousness, a “mutuality between perishing and surviving,”52 is wholly incompatible with realism, even revised, and its postmodernist forms, which he most objects to on the ground that “the post-modernists have discarded depth, they have discarded the unconscious”53 and fail to probe the deeper psychological strata in individual psyche and culture. His own insistence on the surfacing and translation into consciousness of experience buried in the unconscious also accounts for his transformation of genres. When Linda Hutcheon writes of postmodernism as an art which interrogates and pushes limits and explains that literary genres have become fluid,54 she exemplifies this mainly by pointing to a blurring or mixing of categories – for example, between various forms of elitist and popular art. Harris’s questioning and re-definition of traditional forms of narrative entails, in practice, a complete reversal of conventional genre 50

Harris, “On the Beach,” Landfall 39.3 (1985): 339. “On the Beach,” 339. 52 “Comedy and Modern Allegory,” 132. 53 “Literacy and the Imagination,” 27. 54 A Poetics of Postmodernism, 8, 9. 51

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expectations. The “drama of consciousness” in which his characters have been involved from his first novel, enacting an “infinite rehearsal” yet never total mutation of established patterns of existence in the past, his “re-visions” of allegory and epic into ‘modern’ fictional modes – these are also informed by the convertibility of experience, at once personal and historical, that I have discussed above and elsewhere. However sublime, Homer’s great epics and Dante’s Divine Comedy express a vision of life and death in keeping with their time and inspired by man’s longing for the infinite in a form which, if imitated, can be immobilized in its very sublimity. Harris replaces the “allegorical stasis of divine comedy” by an “evolving metaphysic” of the imagination55 which he deems necessary to save humanity from the catastrophic death-wish it has submitted to in its very desire for the infinite. In many of his novels, “convertible imageries” alter the formerly separate and distinct Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso into fluid, overlapping states. Commenting on Donne’s perception of the hell he is responsible for, when, in Palace of the Peacock, he hangs from a cliff in an invisible noose, prior to his conversion and evanescent vision of what may be called “Paradise,” Harris modifies Gertrude Stein’s expression of continuity (“a rose is a rose is a rose”) into “a noose is a noose is not a noose” and even “a rose is a noose is a particle is a wave”56: An alteration, however intuitive, in allegorical stasis of divine comedy of existence must affect Faustian hubris. The very cornerstones of European literature may alter and acquire different creative emphases within a world that has so long been endangered and abused in the name of the virtues of the superman, virtues that are synonymous with a lust for infinity.57

It is within this perspective that Harris has revised and altered the leading thread and issue of The Divine Comedy,58 Goethe’s Faust, and major aspects of Ulysses’ quest in his trilogy, Carnival, The Infinite Rehearsal 55

Harris, “The Quest for Form,” 27, 26. “Comedy and Modern Allegory,” 129. 57 “The Quest for Form,” 27. 58 It is interesting to compare Harris’s interpretation and “transformation” of the structure of The Divine Comedy with Edward Said’s in Orientalism. Said sees it as typical of “the Orientalist attitude in general which shares with magic […] and with mythology the self-containing, self-reinforcing character of a closed system.” Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). Said’s criticism stops at Dante’s rejection of Islam. 56


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and The Four Banks of the River of Space. In this latter novel, Harris transforms the character and fate of his Penelope and Ulysses as radically as he had “revised” his Guyanese divine comedy in Carnival, a re-visioning of epic that is also “cross-cultural dialogue between imaginations.”59 A major feature of Harris’s re-visioning of allegory, which follows from the upsurge of reality from the unconscious, is the apparition of “guides” in the narrative who belong to the buried past (as Virgil guided Dante through his quest) and are “substantial to the fiction” the novelist creates, helpers in the creative process.60 One thinks, for example, of the Caribs Cristo envisions in the forest in The Whole Armour, of the formerly vanished yet reappearing da Silva in Heartland, of Hosé (also a literal guide through Mexico) in Companions of the Day and Night, as well as of characters acting more obviously as spiritual guides through the labyrinth of memory, like Masters in Carnival, Faust in The Infinite Rehearsal, and the characters, “live absences,” who help Anselm translate “epic fate into inimitable freedom” in The Four Banks of the River of Space.61 I am, of course, oversimplifying what is actually a complex process in Harris’s novels. If I am not mistaken, the guides who, as he has explained, “arise from the collective unconscious encompassing the living and the dead” are linked with, and partly personify, an “inner objectivity”62 underlying the manifold manifestations of the phenomenological world. They usually belong in his novels with the living and the dead (see Masters in Carnival or Ghost in The Infinite Rehearsal) and partake of both the human and the divine. I think that Harris sees in this “inner objectivity” a kind of unifying function (though it is obviously more than that) embracing both reason and imagination, the undivided faculties of man which in alchemy still operated in unison. In both fiction and essays, he has shown a preoccupation with the need to reconcile art and science, tragically separated as a result of the excessive rationalism of the Enlightenment63: The Enlightenment […] began to turn its back on the life of the intuitive imagination. It negated the necessity to visualize in new ways, to […] re-inter59

“Comedy and Modern Allegory,” 128. Harris, “Validation of Fiction: A Personal View of Imaginative Truth,” 47–48. 61 Four Banks, xiii, 9. 62 “Comedy and Modern Allegory,” 127. 63 When alluding to this division, Harris often refers to Frances Yates’s analysis in The Art of Memory. 60

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pret in far-reaching ways, subtle links and bridges between the arts and the sciences, between poem and painting, between music and figurations of memory associated with architecture.64

Finally, I would suggest that the substance of fiction which comes to life through the complex arousal of imprisoned or eclipsed faculties and their genuine − in contradistinction to sublimated − contribution to a creative humanity”65 is what Harris has called “living fossil strata” or “live fossil myth.”66 Space is lacking to comment on the major role and transformative potential of myth in Harris’s fiction. Suffice it to say that “myth becomes a basic corrective to tyrannous or despotic immediacy.”67 Harris’s emphasis on the livingness of a fossil reality can be associated with the “revisionary potential within imageries in texts of reality.”68 That “texts of reality” or “texts of being”69 should be capable of “revising themselves” because they are alive (yet another formulation of the living tradition) brings to light an identification between art and life which at first glance may resemble the disappearance of “the familiar humanist separation of art and life” that Linda Hutcheon presents as characteristic of postmodernism.70 Again, her example shows that the fusion takes place on a realistic fictional level, even one of “journalistic facticity,”71 whereas Harris’s characters re-live the torments of calamitous events as if experiencing them or their consequences. So that while postmodernist metafiction usually stresses the fictionality of narrative as a subjective human construct no better or worse than another (if, by poststructuralist standards, judgements of value are to be excluded), Harris boldly connects the transformation of images of a terrifying past through an act of imagination with a possible rebirth from catastrophe. And just as he thinks there is no short-cut to solving the calamities of the world, so “there is no short cut 64

Harris, “The Life of Myth and its Possible Bearing on Erna Brodber’s Fictions,” 87. Harris, “Oedipus and the Middle Passage,” in Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English, ed. Geoffrey V. Davis & Hena Maes–Jelinek (Cross/Cultures 1; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1990): 15. 66 “Validation of Fiction,” 11, 5. 67 “In the Name of Liberty,” Third Text 11 (Summer 1990): 7–15; 10. 68 Harris, “The Fabric of the Imagination,” Third World Quarterly 12.1 (January 1990): 176, repr. in From Commonwealth to Postcolonial, ed. Rutherford, 19. 69 “The Fabric of the Imagination,” 180 / 23. 70 Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism, 7. 71 The Poetics of Postmodernism, 10. 65


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into the evolution of new or original novel-form susceptible to, immersed in, the heterogeneity of the modern world.”72 As he further explains, “without a profound alteration of fictional imagery in narrative bodies […] catastrophe appears to endure and to eclipse the annunciation [change, rebirth] of humanity.”73 Nor is this correspondence between life and art a rendering of the Leavisite “unmediated reality” Homi Bhabha criticizes,74 since Harris’s not only breaks the mould of realism specific to the “Great Tradition” but the artist himself is, as I have argued, a mediator. Another consequence of this is that Harris’s conception of language differs from the poststructuralist views of postmodernism which declare all attempts to turn any language into an instrument of positive knowledge “utterly futile.”75 Language is not “self-referential,” though Harris would probably not deny Eagleton’s description of it as a “web-like complexity of signs […] the back and forth, present and absent, forward and sideways [Harris would say backward] movement of language in its actual processes.”76 Harris’s conception of language is naturally in keeping with his belief in the correspondence between art and life. Commenting on the narrator’s “living, closed eye” in Palace of the Peacock, he writes: The living, closed eye therefore is a verbal construct, but it is something sculpted as well. In the beginning was the Word, in the beginning was the language of sculpture, in the beginning was the intuitive/inner voice of the mask, in the beginning was the painted cosmos and its orchestra of light and darkness.77

“Language is world,” Harris also wrote,78 stressing a correspondence which he developed in a discussion of justice in The Whole Armour: 72

“Carnival of Psyche: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,” Kunapipi 2.2 (1980): 145 (in Explorations, 128). 73 “The Quest for Form,” 26–27. 74 Homi K. Bhabha, “Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critique of Some Forms of Mimeticism,” in The Theory of Reading, ed. Frank Gloversmith (Brighton: Harvester, 1983): 94. 75 Hans Bertens, “The Postmodern Weltanschauung and its Relation with Modernism: An Introductory Survey,” in Approaching Postmodernism, ed. Bertens and Fokkema, 22. 76 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, 8, 132. 77 “Literacy and the Imagination,” 26. 78 “Validation of Fiction,” 51.

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For what is at stake […] is the flexible placement of associations within a pregnant form, a living language, a pregnant Word. Such pregnant form gives life to the hollow appearance of justice. That is my intuition of fiction and […] its bearing on the scope and capacity of the Word to come into equation with inimitable truth.79

“To come into equation with inimitable truth” will probably mark him out as an “essentialist,” as he is when he writes “That goal [of his protagonist] or infinite domain is never reached or taken but it remains an essence that underpins, translates, transfigures the ground of all experience.”80 One must emphasize that what Harris has in mind in terms of “essence” or “centre” remains, like wholeness as opposed to totality, forever “unnameable” or “unfathomable” and cannot be encompassed in any “frame of dogma,”81 can never be the privileged source of authority of any given culture or civilization. I return to this aspect of his work because this cohering, mediating but ungraspable force is also the “untrappable source of language,” which, because it cannot be trapped,82 is the instrument “which continuously transforms inner and outer formal categories of experience.”83 This is the transformation illustrated through his work by “convertible imageries.” It is also this mysterious reality which makes of Harris a postcolonial writer and, perhaps paradoxically, has inspired some postcolonial criticism in recent years. To place my major argument in the postcolonial context: the victims of imperialism (vanished peoples and cultures), its psychological legacies, eclipsed “areas of sensibility,” and their impact on landscape(s), the present-day deprived whom the powerful choose not to see – all are part of what Harris has called “an apparent non-existent ground of being” (expressed differently above) which nevertheless possesses a “regenerative force.”84 For it is on that apparently non-existent ground that the frail transformative clues appear on the canvas of existence and art. This ground of loss (both inner and outer space) is also the 79

“In the Name of Liberty,” 12. Four Banks, xiii. 81 “In the Name of Liberty,” 8. 82 Harris, The Eye of the Scarecrow, 96. 83 Tradition, the Writer and Society, 32. 84 “Wilson Harris: An Interview,” by Helen Tiffin, New Literatures Review 7 (1979): 19, 25. 80

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driving moral force of his conception of fiction as “conversion of deprivations,”85 as constant re-vision, a fiction which, in the now much-quoted phrase, “seeks to consume its own biases.”86 I think this expression means more than a negation of the authority of the text and an acknowledgement of the author’s inevitable subjectivity. I would suggest that it applies mainly to Harris’s working method, when he revises his drafts and concentrates on them with extreme attention, “scanning them for clues”87 and revising “imageries” which he will not accept as final, as their development throughout his fiction shows. The point I have been driving at is that the immaterial/material perspectives and the unconsciousness/consciousness nexus which make Harris reject postmodernism as nihilistic are the very premisses of his postcolonial outlook. Harris has expressed agreement with the postcolonial position, provided one is aware of a hypnotic transference of influence from colonialism to postcolonialism and the fact that the latter is still partly bound up with the former.88 His objection to much postcolonial writing is that it has adopted the realism of imperial cultures in both form and content, as some former colonies have in political practice: “punitive logic [like that of the slave owners] continues as the philosophy of postcolonial regimes.”89 He has also commented in several essays on Caribbean philistinism and its “refusal to perceive its own dismembered psychical world”90 as well as on the one-sided militantism of the literature and criticism of the formerly oppressed, particularly when they present themselves as “the antithesis of the thesis of white supremacy.”91 I have argued that his own cross-culturalism is deeply rooted in a perception in depth of lost, ‘alien’ experience, of vanished, supposedly ‘savage’ cultures (e.g., the pre-Columbian) with which the ‘civilized’ must enter into dialogue as they retrieve them from the abyss of oblivion. It is precisely the “abysmal otherness,” the never wholly perceptible third nameless dimen85

The Womb of Space,” 63, 137. Harris, “A Note on the Genesis of The Guyana Quartet,” The Guyana Quartet (London: Faber & Faber, 1985): 9. 87 “Literacy and the Imagination,” 19. 88 “Unpublished Interview, 7. 89 “Oedipus and the Middle Passage,” 18. 90 The Womb of Space, 122. 91 Bill Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, 21. 86

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sion which underlies all Harris’s narratives and may “bring resources to alter […] the fabric of imagination in the direction of a therapeutic ceaselessly unfinished genesis,”92 that is the mainspring of Harris’s postcolonialism. As he has pointed out, Extremity or marginality […] lifts the medium of diverse experience to a new angle of possibility. Marginality is not so much a geographical situation […] it is rather an angle of creative capacity as the turbulent twentieth century draws to a close.93

This may appear as yet another formulation of the creative potential of the subterranean tradition. But it calls for an important reservation concerning the applicability of Harris’s thinking to postcolonial criticism. One of the tenets of that criticism, as indeed of poststructuralism, has been the rejection of the notion of universality as an expression of cultural imperialism. Harris’s view of that imperialism and his response to ‘universal’ Western masterpieces are much more nuanced, and, to that extent, his adherence to the postcolonial approach in criticism is a qualified one. It is not just a question of the meaning one attributes to words (though it is partly that) but also of his vision of universality, which, as much as postcolonial criticism, precludes any easy assimilation of the universal to the Western. But in this as in other aspects of his thought and writing, he has conceived his own third way. He has expressed his deep attachment to the English language in several essays, and when he describes it as “a changing, subtle medium” which has acquired “some of the rhythms and incantatory spirit of the alien tongues of [his] mixed ancestry.”94 This is not, I think, just a passing reference to the hybridization of English but a ‘validation’ of his dynamic view of cross-culturalism and its transformative potential. He has also asserted that Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe are as much the heritage of black men and women as of white men and women because the triggers of conflicting tradition […] lie in, and need to be re-activated through, the cross-cultural psyche

92 “The Fabric of the Imagination,” 182 / 25. A striking image of this “unfinished genesis” is the “ravelling/unravelling” of “the coat of tradition that never quite seems to fit the globe” Penelope weaves in Four Banks (54–55, 58–59, 121). 93 “In the Name of Liberty,” 15. 94 “In the Name of Liberty,” 14.


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of humanity, a cross-cultural psyche that bristles with the tone and fabric of encounters between so-called savage cultures and so-called civilised cultures.95

These words, together with Harris’s insistence on “diversity-within-universality,”96 point once more to the bridge between a tradition rooted in a “universal unconscious” and the creative imagination: The universal imagination − if it has any value or meaning − has its roots in subconscious and unconscious strata that disclose themselves profoundly within re-visionary strategies through intuitive clues that appear in a text one creates. That text moves or works in concert with other texts to create a multitextual dialogue.97

I am aware that, while insisting on the importance of Harris’s intuitive method and the bridge between the unconscious and consciousness in his creative process, I have been ‘hypnotized’ to a large extent by my Cartesian training and have presented a rational argument that considerably reduces and tames the creative energy, complex vision, significance and stunning beauty of metaphoric language that inform his fiction. I do not mean by this that Harris’s writing resists critical analysis, only that it is in his novels that the reader will discover the “visionary counterpoint of resources”98 he brings to light; “the hidden numinous proportions within the mechanisms of colonialism and postcolonialism.”99

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95

“Comedy and Modern Allegory,” 137. “The Life of Myth and its Possible Bearing on Erna Brodber’s Fictions,” 1. 97 “Validation of Fiction,” 44. 98 “Oedipus and the Middle Passage,” 18. 99 “The Fabric of the Imagination,” 176 / 19. 96


Conclusion Straight Lines and Arabesques

H

has developed considerably since the publication of Palace of the Peacock, exploring ever further the complexities of life and art. Nevertheless, he has remained faithful to his original vision, never seeking the easy success which his extraordinary, exceptional command and creative use of the English language might have brought him. As mentioned in the Introduction, it was his immersion in the Guyanese landscape that first induced him to discard realism as a possible mode of writing and to find a language that would embrace the sinuosities and unstable configuration of the land, so that his writing offers a unique symbiosis between a South American perspective and a British cultural background. Quite strikingly, the landscape also inspired his perception of the motion and ceaseless fluctuations of the cosmos, mirrored in societies and in human relationships, movements that inform his concept of “unfinished genesis.” History, especially the history of the New World, is equally central to his fiction. Harris was particularly affected by the extermination of the Amerindians by the European conquerors in the Guianas and the Caribbean islands, a catastrophe that led to his conception of the void at the heart of both society and the human psyche, a void alluding to “eclipsed perspectives of place and community,”1 to the “silent voices” that haunt his narratives. In his later fiction he extended his representation of Renaissance genocide to include twentieth-century holocausts. However, although the Amerindians are confined to an abyss of apparent non-existence, Harris’s concept of the existential process as “life-in-

1

ARRIS’S FICTION

“A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” 39.

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death” and “death-in-life” implies the continuous “absent”2 presence of an aboriginal reality, persisting still in the Guyanese environment. He also sees the aboriginal and other exterminated peoples as a lingering element within the Guyanese and, more generally, the human personality. As one of his characters says, “One is a multitude.”3 Understandably, then, his notion of identity runs counter to that of most postcolonial writers and critics, who insist on the need for a homogeneous self, whereas Harris upholds a human rather than a national identity. The political is not thereby excluded from his writing, but he insists that emotions strongly influence politics and, contrary to many, he asserts that these are as important as rationality and logic, if not more so. This fits in with his intuitive approach to fiction. All of Harris’s protagonists are immersed at one stage in what he calls the “terrifying legacies of the past,” an immersion at once concrete (the Guyanese interior), psychological and moral (the inner self), and creative (“Interior of the Novel”). The “womb of space” is Harris’s metaphor for the psyche as inner spatial ground of exploration, in which the dialectical relationship between ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ is a way of restoring a psychological balance lost with the conquest. He may have been the first writer to put forward the concept of cross-culturality, which he sees as a mutuality not only between different peoples and cultures but also between self-assertive people(s) and those he calls the “uninitiated” within the social establishment. It explains why his novels all capture the arousal of unconscious unacknowledged elements and their move towards consciousness. This is the essential meaning of resurrection as Harris explores its possibilities in novel after novel. The vehicle through which resurrection takes place is the imagination – a process rather than merely a creative faculty, since it is always in the making as the moral instrument of progress and unity between human beings. What he calls “the unfinished genesis of the imagination” is a conceptualization of creativity which he approaches from different angles, as he does in his many reflections on the nature of art. As his novels become increasingly self-reflexive, their protagonists ever more urgently ask “what is art?” Like most of Harris’s concepts, art is basically dualistic, involving both beauty and terror; as already implied, it concentrates on the 2 3

“The Absent Presence: The Caribbean, Central and South America,” 81–92. Jonestown, 5.

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retrieval from oblivion of the “lost,” whether individuals, communities or civilizations. This bringing to life implies that fiction is reality itself; for Harris, “language is world,”4 while he also repeatedly alludes to the Word made flesh. In his attempts to capture the extreme diversity of real life, Harris has resorted to different forms of art, which is why the protagonist in his later novels, such as Anselm in The Four Banks of the River of Space, is often engineer, sculptor, painter, architect and composer, an advocate of a “coincidence of arts.”5 Painting and music are particularly apt forms of art for giving expression to invisible and voiceless sufferers and conveying the fluidity of all life that Harris infuses into his writing – in other words, expressing not being but becoming. Moreover, he sees, even between different forms of art, a cross-culturality similar to that which informs all his novels. Interestingly, in an essay on the Guyanese painter Aubrey Williams, he writes that “the ‘eye’ colours a voice that addresses the ‘ear’”; “The ‘ear’ hears ‘painted space,’ hears the uncanny voice of ‘painted space’ as the ‘eye’ and ‘ear’ are mysteriously linked.”6 I have already discussed the role of music,7 and shall merely add here that music voices the emotions of those who are reduced to silence. As Antonín Dvořák said, “music is a language beyond language,” while Daniel Barenboim says that “music encompasses silence.”8 More generally, Harris writes that “art transcends the material of which it is made.”9 It is also in the orchestration of what seems incompatible and inexpressible that intuition and dream play such a major role in his writing. At the outset of Jonestown, the narrator, Francisco Bone, comments on the kind of novel he wishes to write, which, of course, coincides with Harris’s conception of fiction. In the later novel The Mask of the Beggar, both the Mother and her son, the artist, also reflect on the nature of art. I will therefore grant them the last word, for Harris has expressed better than any critic what he thinks the novel should or should not be:

4 5 6 7 8 9

“Validation of Fiction,” 5. The Womb of Space, 91. “Aubrey Williams,” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 2.1–3 (Spring 2000): 28, 27. See “Ut Musica Poesis” above, 497–506. Parallels and Paradoxes, 23. The Dark Jester, 11.

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I was obsessed […] by cities and settlements in the Central and South Americas that are an enigma to many scholars. I dream of their abandonment, their bird-masks, their animal-masks.… Did their inhabitants rebel against the priests, did obscure holocausts occur, civil strife, famine, plague? […] The unsolved disappearance of the Caribs in British Guiana is another riddle of precipitate breakdown.10 What is art? What knowledge do we truly have of implements that tell us of the riddles of the past? […] Is inner peace the material benign raised into complacent hardness […] or is it a voyage into spiritual deprivations we have amassed that bring us back to contemplate a corridor in the Beggar's mask that remains a subtle opening into the origins of meaning within the tone and temper of the furies?11 If art is simply what the artist wishes to say […] then we are lost. There is such a thing as freedom of character in a novel or a poem or a painting. It has virtually disappeared, I know, and that makes for easy reading, easy seeing. You must know of elements of subjective, surprising independence in art. Such elements bear on the reality of consciousness. Who knows truly what consciousness is?12 Art was a substitute through which one was involved […] to respond to multiple cries in the Silences of a numb humanity of wood or glass or flesh. Whatever divisions one made, whatever philosophical calculations, none were to be taken literally.13 What is art? Does art provide secretly, with originality, the regeneration of a grasping, self-killing humanity? One kills others in oneself with a bullet that one fires through one's head. One confesses to collective guilt that could be traced around the world since wounded Time began, since the furies began. And yet in that Wound a corridor remains in which one sees oneself, or others see one, precariously, immaterially whole….14

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10

Jonestown, 4. The Mask of the Beggar, 13. 12 The Mask of the Beggar, 23. 13 The Mask of the Beggar, 26. 14 The Mask of the Beggar, 33. 11


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——. “The Palimpsest of Fiction: The Infinite Rehearsal,” in Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination, ed. Hena Maes–Jelinek (Aarhus: Dangaroo, 1991): 210– 20. ——. “Through Tension to Metamorphosis: The Angel at the Gate by Wilson Harris,” World Literature Written in English 24.1 (1984): 120–27. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). Eco, Umberto. “After Secret Knowledge,” Times Literary Supplement (22–28 June 1990): 666, 678. Egri, Peter. “Text in Context – English Literature, Painting and Music: A Comparative Approach,” in Literature(s) in English: New Perspectives, ed. Wolfgang Zach (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990): 69–78. Ehrenzweig, Anton. The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Imagination (Berkeley: U of California P , 1967). Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975). François, Pierre. “The Lapsarian Ascent,” in François, Inlets of the Soul: Contemporary Fiction in English and the Myth of the Fall (Cross/Cultures 35; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1999): 255–89. ——. “Synchronicity and the Unitarian Geopsyche in Wilson Harris’s Companions of the Day and Night,” in The Contact and the Culmination. Essays in Honour of Hena Maes–Jelinek, ed. Marc Delrez & Bénédicte Ledent (Liège: L3–Liège Language Literature, 1996): 241–51. Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1948). Gilkes, Michael. Creative Schizophrenia: The Caribbean Cultural Challenge (The Third Walter Rodney Memorial Lecture; Coventry: Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick, December 1986). ——. “The Madonna Pool: Woman as Muse of Identity,” Journal of West Indian Literature 1 (June 1987): 1–18. ——. Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel (London, Trinidad & Jamaica: Longman Caribbean, 1975). Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science (1987; London: Abacus, 1993). Graff, Gerald. “The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough,” in The Novel Today, ed. Malcolm Bradbury (Glasgow: Collins/Fontana, 1977): 217–49. Hamlet, Desmond. “Renewal in a Far More Resonant Key: Reflections on the Mad Sin-Eating Relics of Fire in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 17 (Summer 1997): 84–89. Harris, Wilson. “The Absent Presence: the Caribbean, Central and South America” (University of Cambridge, 1990), in Harris, The Radical Imagination, 81–92. Also published in Hambone 10 (Spring 1992): 212–23.

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