The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  The Carnival Trilogy

  WILSON HARRIS

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Carnival

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  The Infinite Rehearsal

  Dedication

  Note

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Postscript by Ghost

  The Four Banks of the River of Space

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The First Bank

  (The King of Thieves)

  The Second Bank

  (Carnival Heir of Civilizations)

  The Third Bank

  (The Trial)

  The Fourth Bank

  (Home)

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  [This introduction is an extract from an address I gave to the Temenos Academy in London on 18 March 1991. The full text was published in the following year in the journal Temenos 13.]

  As an imaginative writer I find myself reading in continuously changing ways. I reread works by writers I may have misjudged and which I return to and perceive differently. I reread my own fictions after a long while and see connections there I planted and yet which seem utterly new. Let me attempt to illumine what I mean as concretely as I may. Let me commence with Carnival, the first novel in this trilogy.

  A word about the characters in Carnival. Jonathan Weyl is – let us say – a twentieth-century Dante figure. He is secreted in the carnival of the twentieth century. The particularities of his existence make him intimate with some of the proportions of a thirteenth-century Dante even as they move him light years away, so that the origination of a Dantesque formula, a Dantesque investiture, a Dantesque mask, is called into question. There are stars in Dante’s thirteenth-century cosmos he would never have perceived as we perceive them. They were fixed. Whereas for us the light that comes across space from a star is but the shadow of an object that may have vanished. News of its disappearance has not yet been transmitted to us. To put it differently: within the abyss of tradition – within the spatiality, the spectrality of tradition – the original nucleus that motivates us is so peculiar, so unidentifiable, that singularity needs plurality. Dante, in other words, needs a twentieth-century carnival of masks even as those masks look backwards to him and through him into the mysterious origins of Imagination in science and art.

  There is also Amaryllis, who is a Beatrice figure. She has acquired particularities of numinous sexuality in the twentieth-century carnival. I shall touch upon these in due course for they help in the transformation of the barrier between the Virgilian pagan and the paradiso.

  There is Everyman Masters, the twentieth-century Virgilian guide. As ‘Everyman’ he cannot escape his pagan body. Indeed he visualizes Christ as riding into Jerusalem on a pagan donkey, a donkey that is another kind of Trojan horse. In it lies an invisible text, an invisible army, that will overturn Jerusalem itself as well as the Roman age.

  All these complications imply various fractures and subtle abysses in story lines we take for granted. The reader has to read differently, to read backwards and forwards, even more importantly forwards and backwards. All the imageries are partial, though attuned to a wholeness one can never seize or structure absolutely. Wholeness becomes a thread or a continuity running from the inferno into the paradiso. I said earlier that ‘wholeness’ cannot be seized or structured. Wholeness is a rich and insoluble paradox. Wholeness has to do with an origination of the Imagination whose solidity is interwoven with a paradoxical tapestry of spectrality, of the light year. Thus it is that Everyman Masters is both dead and alive when he dies and returns into Jonathan Weyl’s dreams, into Amaryllis’s dreams, as their Virgilian guide. The rich but insoluble paradox that clothes him brings an impulse into the text of Carnival to transform an authoritarian paradiso.

  The ecstasies and torments that run parallel through the twentieth-century age made it inevitable that the dead king should descend into the living Inferno the moment Amaryllis and I glimpsed heaven and consummated our secret marriage vows. The Inferno lives when the dead retrace their steps around the globe. Our marriage was unique heart and mind but for that reason – unique tranquillity and ecstasy, unique revolution and peace – it was inevitable that a master spirit would return to counsel us and to bear the penalty of the Inferno that runs in parallel with heaven. Masters accepted the penalty. He became my guide and opposite (our guide and opposite) in arriving from the kingdom of the dead to counsel us in the land of the living and to guide my pen across the pages of this biography of spirit.

  The use of the word ‘inevitable’ in the passage above is intended to pre-empt fate and in so doing to steep us in a continuity that is other than fate, the continuity of insoluble wholeness. As a consequence the dead/living king (that Everyman Masters is) bears the penalty of the Inferno in order to make of every erasure of pagan labour’s claim to the paradiso a fracture or subtle abyss in the story-line of the paradiso. That fracture, that subtlety of penetration, is lifted into the bliss of the conjunctio between Amaryllis and Jonathan Weyl as a portent of a healed humanity across all terrifying barriers.

  What is divine comedy? In the light of the abyss of space and time of which a thirteenth-century poet was unaware, may not divine comedy transform itself into light-year comedy, may not a numinous equation exist between spectrality and blissful sexuality as the seed of the Incarnation?

  Light-year comedy within the context of numinous sexuality brings the rhythms of obsolescence into youth and vice versa. In such rhythms landscapes/riverscapes/skyscapes are miniaturized into bodily/bodiless continuities we do not immediately recognize as pertinent to the sacrament of sex:

  Our naked flesh was inhabited by mutual generations clad in nothing but obsolescent organs, obsolescent youth. What obsolescence! What intimate renewal of being beyond age and youth! We were intimate, ageless being, we were four years short of thirty, we were young, we were old as the coition of the hills and waves miniaturized in our bodies. We were a dying fall into deeper orchestration of mutual spaces.

  When I wrote that passage – and though it came out of intense care and concentration – I did not realize (it might well have been written by a stranger) the continuity it sustained with future work, the corridor that ran through it into the characters that would appear in the second novel of this trilogy, namely The Infinite Rehearsal. Many imaginative writers know of the legacies one work offers another that is still to be written. What I am referring to, however, is deeper than this. It is as if those legacies are overturned by the hand of a stranger to imply a continuity the legacies themselves may have eclipsed. It would never have crossed my mind – when I wrote The Infinite Rehearsal – to associate Jonathan Weyl, Amaryllis and Everyman Masters in Carnival with Robin Redbreast Glass, Emma and Peter in The Infinite Rehearsal. Even now I advance the association with some trepidation. Yet it is blindingly clear that it exists. Robin Redbreast Glass is immortal Faustian youth. He sustains a link with Jonathan Weyl (the twentieth-century Dante figure in Carnival) because of the mediumistic bliss that erupts into his relationship with Emma. Emma – the female priest in The Infinite Rehearsal – an ageing woman (presumably therefore obsolescent in sexual terms) validates Amaryllis, the Beatrice figure, in Carnival. Numinous intercourse occurs between her – the ostensibly aged woman – and the immortal Faustian youth Robin Redbreast Glass.
Peter – as Robin’s alter ego – is a mediumistic Everyman Masters and a shadowy Virgilian guide in The Infinite Rehearsal.

  Robin Redbreast Glass arises from the grave of the sea to become immortal Faustian youth. There had been a boating accident in which Robin, his mother, his aunt, and others were drowned. Peter and Emma were in the capsized boat but they escaped and lay on the beach exhausted. Peter lay with his head under Emma’s hair and upon her breasts. When Emma and Peter are old they meet the resurrected Faustian youth (who therefore has not aged) in the tunnel of the light years. Robin sees himself within alter ego Peter as if the years fall away and he (Robin instead of Peter) lies with Emma on the beach. He lies with his head beneath her hair and upon her breasts. And yet he recognizes her as an aged woman simultaneously. He sees her as a female priest. It is this saving paradox within age and youth, within the translation of obsolescence and fertility, that gives to the spectrality of encounter a wholly different apprehension of the living in the dead, the dead in the living, absence in presence, presence in absence. I am not sure that the terms ‘dead’ and ‘living’ apply in this context for one is dealing with a continuity of encounter that nourishes itself by overturning legacies of expectation. That is how it seems to me. I have no dogma or absolute theories about the unfinished genesis of the Imagination.

  Robin is amazed to discover that Emma is a priest. So was I, the writer. Prior to writing this novel I believed women should not be priests. I changed my mind in the light of the subtle abysses that appeared in The Carnival Trilogy. Robin records his astonishment in a series of passages (the allusion to ‘Skull’ is to a city of prosperity littered with desolations). Robin exclaims inwardly:

  I saw in a flash that she was a priest, a female priest, she was hope in the city of Skull, revolutionary hope, unconventional hope.

  Let me confess that the issue of the female priest is one that startles me. It overturns a certain legacy of expectation that I have entertained from childhood. The priest is male is male is priest is male for ever and ever. Aboriginal or ontic tautology enshrined in so many storylines. But a question arises: are the stigmata upon the body of Christ a storyline? Do they not imply an abyss at the heart of history? Is the crucifixion of the Son of God – no less a person, mark you! – the very Son of God – is this not an abyss at the heart of human history? If so, then the stigmata may imply a range of association we do not recognize and have scarcely begun to gauge. That is how I felt when I came to Emma, the young/old, obsolescent/fertile priest. Through her my grasp of Faust underwent a profound change. Let me come first to the stigmata. Robin addresses Emma inwardly again:

  All this made me scan Emma’s features closely. She was veiled by dateless day infinity comedy. I saw her innate sorrow. I suddenly saw how worn she was. It was as if a nail had woven its innermost weblike constancy into her flesh, an ecstatic nail, a sorrowing nail. Ecstatic and sorrowing!

  When Robin alludes there to ‘dateless day infinity comedy’ as a veil upon Emma’s features he draws upon an ancient pre-Columbian, calendrical perspective. This matches, I think, the notion of light-year vistas. But I wish at this juncture to remind you of the ‘nail’, its ‘innermost weblike constancy … ecstatic nail, sorrowing nail …’

  It is as if one glimpses numinous sexuality within Robin’s blissful relationship to Emma on the beach beside the sea, a numinous sexuality that becomes a spectral nail that pierces through the inferno into the paradiso.

  In such a nail that shatters one’s pre-possessions I knew the construction of a sound that echoed in the air and in the sea. It was the music of the priest, of the God of nature. ‘One comes,’ said Emma, ‘to a beloved creation, to the divine, in every moment that one survives in the inimitable textures of nature, truly lives and survives.

  All this I feel brings a wholly unexpected variation into the stigmata we tend to identify tautologously with the body of Christ. Through Emma the female priest – Emma the body of the womb – a multiple counterpoint – weblike yet constant – is woven that involves Faustian, immortal youth, the resurrection body, ecstatic numinous, paradisean nail, and sorrowing nail that pierces the tyranny of the inferno.

  As I lay on the beach I was pierced by the cry of the gulls, the laughing sea gulls. Were they gulls or were they cranes? I could not tell. It was a cry from heaven and yet it was a subtle, piercing, shaking laughter. A shaking note like strings of music in the sea. The motif of an incomparable composition …

  It may interest you to note that the cry of the gull echoes a pre-Columbian motif which relates to Quetzalcoatl. Quetzal the bird. Coatl the snake, the abysmal yet fertile earth which is ‘beloved nature’.

  Now, may I return to Faust and the way in which the multiple counterpoint affected my vision of Faust. There is an aspect to Faust, immortal youth, when he seems to achieve a divorce from the resurrection body in The Infinite Rehearsal and looms as absolutely dominant. He buries the ecstatic, sorrowing nail within a hubris of immortality. He seeks implicitly to abort the mysterious buoyancy that is open to him as he lies beside Emma. Weblike constancy becomes a sterile rigidity. And then he gains a position by which to manipulate a series of ageing masks. One such mask bears the initials W.H. (my own initials). A joke, a serious joke. Except that Faust sees the ageing masks he wears as expendable. And in that sense the joke may hurt. Despite one’s labours for Faust – despite the labour of one’s antecedents across generations – one and they are expendable and doomed.

  The rigidity of the perpetually young immortal Faust secures the tautology of tyranny, the worship of fascism, of evil. Faust’s ageing masks include the ageing institutions of democracy, of the Church, of the humanities, the universities. We have seen how such ageing institutions may be worn to the detriment of peoples in Hitlerite Europe, in Field-Marshal Amin’s Africa, and most recently in Saddam’s Iraq.

  I do not have to remind you that tyrannies have been nourished by the ageing Church which turned a blind eye to injustice, by ageing democracies which have been the suppliers of machinery of war or have stimulated in the commercial field gross, materialistic ambitions.

  I cannot easily explain it but the curious fractured storylines within The Infinite Rehearsal drew me intuitively to sense that the numinous body of the womb in the female priest implied unsuspected fabric that breaks and alters the rigidity of Faustian hubris. The substance of the nail, the substance of instrumentalities linking cultures, turns institutions around to examine and re-examine themselves in creative and re-creative lights. Robin Redbreast Glass yields to the priest Emma:

  I felt her lips upon mine. The kiss of all loves and all true lovers,

  The numinous instrumentality of the nail becomes the seed of invisible texts in which ageing, expendable masks become the secretion of strangers who are intimate to ourselves and who will sustain continuity into the future.

  One needs to be cautious for the issues we are exploring do not turn on dogma or intellectual formula. Yet one may have, I think, a certain true confidence in the intuitive life of the Imagination, its spectrality and miraculous concreteness beyond implacable identity of formula.

  It is the nail, the paradox of associative instrumentalities, which brings me now to the last volume in this trilogy, namely The Four Banks of the River of Space.

  Let me commence by presenting a cross-cultural parallel between an aspect of Homer’s Odyssey and South American/Guyanese legend relating to the figure of Canaima. Telemachus is approached in Ithaca by a friend who tells him that his father Ulysses is alive and will return home to redeem the kingdom and to destroy Penelope’s suitors who are wasting the substance of the state. The next day when Telemachus runs into his friend and reminds him of their conversation the friend is astonished. He has no recollection of it. He was somewhere else, Homer covers the discrepancy by saying that a god or a goddess had appeared in the shape of Telemachus’s friend. A similar yet enigmatic confusion of identity occurs in South America and it relates to the revenge apparition or fury
or god called Canaima. Ulysses does return as prophesied and is not immediately recognized. He comes in the rags of a beggar.

  An aspect of Ulysses’ fury when he returns which I find horrific is his slaying of many or some of Penelope’s serving women who had slept with some of the suitors in the palace in Ithaca. One accepts the necessity of slaying the suitors but the hanging of the serving women filled me with dread as a child when I read Homer. Upon reflection across the years I find it endorses another parallel with Canaima. The aspect of terrifying revenge! True, Ulysses was a great hero, a returning hero, but the redemption of his kingdom is tainted by the horror of revenge.

  I recall coming upon a group of Macusi Indians in the Potaro river in British Guiana in the mid-1940s. They told me Canaima was active amongst them and in pursuit of some obscure wrong he had judged their people had done – some crime they had committed in the past – and as a consequence he was spiriting away their young men and maidens. It is hard to describe their state of misery in the face of Canaima who is indeed a formidable legend associated with the enactment of revenge upon wrongdoers. The pathology of revenge in him becomes a form of evil.

  It is important to note in charting the parallel with Homeric epic that Canaima may appear in an encampment – intent on sowing fire like a terrorist or causing some bitter distress – and be recognized as a neighbour, as one’s cousin, or someone’s brother or father. Yet the following day when the recognized person is cornered he makes a good case for being somewhere else, hunting, fishing. An uncanny confusion overwhelms the tribe. Not only are they confused about the crime they or their antecedents have committed and which brought Canaima into their midst but they are confronted by an abyss within which lurks the identity of terror. If only they could seize the instrument Canaima uses!

  The instrument becomes both spectral and concrete. And this explains in some degree the ascendancy of the camera amongst deprived peoples. If they are to deal with such spectrality, such concreteness, a shift has to occur in the premises of their reading of reality in the sky, in the land, in the river, everywhere. That shift seems almost impossible in a mass-media world and yet a moment may have arrived when the apparatus, the instrumentalities we take for granted, are susceptible to cross-cultural and re-visionary momentum. Take the camera. Disadvantaged peoples become pawns of the camera. Their ills are made visible to millions of viewers and then they fade from the news. The camera becomes a weapon with which we shoot an animal or a savage and bring him home as a trophy in the television box. There are passages in The Four Banks of the River of Space which extend the complications I have raised but I wish to restrict my emphasis to the matter of weaponry and instrument.