The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  Fear had become a republic or plantation or colony against which he recoiled and beat his fists, not with his naked small hands that would have been broken in the rapist’s grasp but with his running feet that clawed and sprinted on the earth. Was it a battle then in which he was joined against fear when he ran from fear? Such is the language of the unconscious. It speaks on many levels of dream, half-puppet language, half-spiritual language, half-true language, half-false utterance, the labyrinth of innocence and guilt.

  The man who approached him was curiously appealing, oddly familiar, and yet sinister. He seemed to exist and yet not to be altogether real, a presentiment, a fate, something to be metaphysically penetrated, avoided, seen through. He was a menace, a danger; he would appear, again and again betwixt heaven and hell, Masters felt. Perhaps this was not the first time (and there had been previous visits) but whether first or not it would constitute the first critical encounter with Memory he would remember. An instinct for imagination perhaps saved the boy-king. It was a game of soul, a game a child plays with the shadow of Memory false and true, the shadow of Ambition, false and true. For Memory’s male persona aped the shaman of old. With a wave of his arm against the shadowy axe of the sea, far out in the sun, the intimate stranger called to the boy as to someone he knew, someone he saw with a backward glance from the future, or the past, into the present.

  Young Masters was fascinated. Such skill he had never witnessed before. The stranger waved his hand and appeared to disembowel space, yet to stitch it around the child in a wonderful garment with a button for an eye. The young boy recalled the eye of the fish on the fisherman’s gallows he had seen that afternoon in the game he played of wheeling light years.

  He was tempted now by a most dangerous extension of that game, a dangerous resemblance between the original eye of creation and his, a dangerous resemblance between the original eye mysteriously fired and sculpted, mysteriously dismembered into revisionary pupil and socket until it became a revolution of mind, a window of soul – and his.

  He ran, without knowing why, from such a temptation to accept his as the absolute original. It was a temptation he could not rationalize. It was as if the stranger were offering him the gifts, the talents, of a cosmic Pygmalion, a cosmic sculptor and seducer of space, offering him the precision of a godlike puppet to place his finger on the button of collective, explosive rape (to submit himself, in advance of that event, to a private version of collective, explosive rape) so close to, yet so remote from, the garment of love that is threaded into that transfigurative wound by the luminous hand of the sun and the moon and the stars.

  Had he stayed, had he been raped by that intimate stranger, the facts of this biography of spirit would have accumulated into a miscarriage of soul (whatever ambitions Everyman Masters may have realized, whatever powers he may have come to possess in imbibing the solicitation of the false shaman) for he would have appeared narcissistically whole in his own eyes and would have forfeited the mystery of partial guilt and therefore the mystery of ultimate surrender to otherness, ultimate innocence. As it was the danger remained – though few were aware of it as Masters climbed the ladder of success into traditional plantation overseer; the danger remained like a constant threat over a king’s or a god’s estate, and the consequences were never wholly to be forgotten. Memory, true and false, had arrived in the gateway of creation.

  Young Masters gained the sea-wall and continued running into New Forest. He arrived at the gate to his house, ran along the flagged pathway through sunflowers and sweetpea up the stairs through the front door. Then stopped. The house seemed unnaturally silent except for his own breath which came with the trapped force of a live creature from his heart and blood. The shadow of the false shaman still lay over him though he had run fast and left him behind on the foreshore. It lay over him and imbued his escape with uncanny excitement, akin to a fever, a drive, an energy, the shadow of Memory false and true. Did something reside in him now of the psychology of rape, the psychology of conquest? Was this the seed of Ambition to rule, to master a universe that had despoiled one, to march at the head of great armies into monsters one projected everywhere? (It was a question Masters was to frame long afterwards when we sat in Holland Park and discussed the psychology of power and the nature of Ambition at the heart of diseased politics around the globe.) Had he run forwards from the false shaman that New Forest day into the lust of light years, or backwards into the eye of a star cautionary and wise that forms in the spaces of the womb where fiction gestates? The fiction of Carnival began indeed to gestate from that moment.

  His trapped sobbing breath had ceased and he moved gingerly (as he had crawled gingerly like a king crab on the foreshore) toward his parents’ room. The door was very slightly ajar. He was about to rap or push when he glimpsed something through the slit of space. It was his mother’s tears that he saw, tears that masked her and suddenly made her into the mother of a god in the play of Carnival. She was sitting at a mirror and her tears were reflected in the glass. He was so riveted by them, by seeing them fall, by the charisma of grief they spelt to a profoundly disturbed, profoundly impressionable, child that he seemed to see through her side and back into the glass or mirror that ran down her front. Her tears seemed as a consequence to be woven from glass. They were fluid and divine cherries all white and edged with marbled fire. They were small yet unnaturally large as they fell upon her breasts that were open and bare in the shadowed glass front of flesh, and Masters was smitten by the sensation that she knew all that had happened to him that afternoon and was weeping for him, weeping for the lust, the Ambition, in Memory false and true.

  Of course she could not have known, the young Carnival god knew. She was weeping for something else of which he was never to learn exactly. Indeed, even if she had turned around then and told him what it was, he would have forgotten and remembered only the tears that were shed for him now, as in the past, and the present, and the future.

  She did not turn. He did not disclose he was there. He felt nevertheless that she knew; he felt as she touched her glass breasts in the mirror that she knew he was inside her, halfway between a wall of glass and a cavity of flesh, that she knew he was looking through her into a kind of fire that mingled with her tears.

  There was furniture in the room and that too stood within the glass and the cavity of flesh. There was a lampshade that sprang out of the cavity into the glass. There were china ornaments that framed themselves in the glass to greet the flesh. There was a bed in the room that seemed to slide from the glass into the flesh. Slices of all these shone in the fire, shone in the mirror, shone in each minuscule balloon or teardrop sculpted from his mother’s sockets and eyes. One slice seemed to rub against another until as they shone they silently sounded a note of music.

  “Here is the evolution of Sorrow,” the foetal Carnival child thought without articulate thought, the kind of thought that lies at the heart of a coiled dancer against a door, peering through his mask, a coiled dream in the womb of space when the eye of a star peers through the crevices of Memory, Memory that is female now rather than male, Memory that brings the danger of cosmic fire, of burning exposure in the body of the mother of god, sudden exposure to the substance and the shadow of spiritual Sex.

  Was she weeping at the thought of losing him, of plucking him from her like a brand on fire? Was this inconsistent with what he had felt before, that she was weeping for him and for the encounter he had had with the false shaman that afternoon?

  Did the link between “plucked brand” and “false shaman” subsist in one of the profoundest secrets of Carnival, the mask of the cuckold?

  I remember discussing this question with Everyman Masters in London in the 1960s and 1970s when he addressed the philosophic myth of a colonial age that draped its mantle everywhere around the globe on superpowers, as on empires past and present, to set in train parallel existences, executions, resurrections of a plantation king or emperor or president or god.

  Masters expl
ained the seeds of trauma that had led him, within the ground of bizarre irony, to erect the obscure colonial status of sugar or rice estate overseer into Carnival prince of the world. He explained that the shock of encounter as a child with the “intimate stranger” on the foreshore of New Forest had so curiously broken him, yet imbued him with the spectre of terrible Ambition, that he had run back metaphorically into the womb; and in spying upon his mother had been so overwhelmed that a closely guarded family secret sprang into his mind. Closely guarded yet not so closely guarded for he recalled the whispers of servants in his parents’ home. His father was not his father. And it had seemed that she (the glass woman in whom he lay coiled all over again) had contemplated an Abortion when she carried, or was pregnant with, him. I asked him, as he seemed reluctant to continue, what had saved the day. His father, he said, his legal father, had stood by the glass woman, protected her, and insisted upon her keeping the child as if it were his. (It was important to remember, he said, that his legal father was coloured, the glass woman, his mother, was coloured, his biological father, whom he had never met, was white. And all expectations were that the newborn baby would be white.)

  Where then, I pressed him, lay the link between “plucked brand” and “false shaman”? It lay, he said, in forces of humiliation that resembled each other but differed in ultimate wisdom from each other. To spy upon her or through her, as if he had returned into her body as foetal Carnival child, and to see the fire that threatened to consume him with her tears, was to endure the psychology of rape within her body long before the false shaman appeared and threatened to seize him on the foreshore. How extraordinary, yet inevitable, it was that the “mask of the cuckold” that his legal father wore came into luminous perspective when he ran back into his mother’s womb. In that mask of Carnival humiliation, Carnival cuckold, was raised the enigmatic spirit of Sex through and beyond nature’s intercourse, a spirit that could sustain both mother and child within a cruel and desperate world so easily exploited by the false shaman.

  Instead of the “plucked brand” or the Abortion his mother, the glass woman, had begun to plan, the foetus would mature and the child would be born with a capacity for judgement and self-judgement beyond his years, a capacity that was strangely fractured, strangely unfulfilled, a capacity to employ such partial fracture as an integral element in unravelling/overcoming the lure of diseased Ambition or conquest.

  In other words the humiliation of the plucked brand he had seen as himself, the potential Abortion written into foetal self, ran in parallel with the psychology of rape he had endured at the age of nine on the foreshore, but the mask of the cuckold upon his legal father (and the humiliation that also implied for his family) was radically different in its internal essence from plucked brand or false shaman. It originated a vision through the Abortion of an age, through the fallacious proprieties of an age, it originated a capacity to set material pride aside in favour of the spirit of care, the innermost spirit of Sex, the spirit of brooding creativity that takes over where nature leaves off … I was, to say the least, intrigued at the origins of such conversion of humiliation into the genius of love that differed from the natural impact of humiliation upon the material body. I was at a loss to understand it all, though I had glimpsed again the transfigurative wound of which Masters spoke on so many occasions. He desisted from saying anything more at this stage though I knew now that his guidance into realms that seemed to exist before birth and after death bestowed upon me in this life (this lived life) a privilege that would deepen and expand the biography of spirit on which I was engaged. It would deepen it, expand it, in peculiar and mutual engagement between author and character at the heart of Carnival.

  FOUR

  Soon I was to perceive in the complex loves and sorrows of Masters’ life that I was as much a character (or character-mask) in Carnival as he was. Indeed in a real and unreal sense he and other character-masks were the joint authors of Carnival and I was their creation. They drew me to surrender myself to them.

  My hand was suffused as I wrote by their parallel hands, my eyes as I looked around by their parallel eyes … And suddenly, paradoxically, it seemed to me that Masters’ coiled posture in the glass woman, his mother, turned upon me and conferred upon me a blessing or privilege, the fictional law that husbands the mother of a Carnival god when it (that law) – that character of law – dons the mask of the cuckold within Carnival.

  “That mask,” Masters said, “possesses its origins in the family humiliations I have disclosed that evolve nevertheless into spirit-parent, into fiction-maker, that I confer now upon you.” He cried to me from the womb as much as from the grave that such a peculiar translation of the wounds of humanity was indeed the law of fiction and to wear it made me not only his creation but his father-spirit, to wear it made me not only their creation but the parent-spark of the other characters in Carnival.

  Such is the paradox, the comedy, of half-divine, half-Carnival, character-masks in the medium of time. For Carnival time is partial, the past and the present and the future are parts of an unfathomable Carnival whole beyond total capture. Thus the past, as much as the future, bears upon the present, they are the children of the present but they also parent the present. The hidden past affects the present even as it emerges through present discoveries as a new, unsuspected force. If the present parents the future how can it also be the child of the future?

  “The contradiction is resolved,” Masters said, “when one sees that the parts of time within which we live, die, are born, imply that there is no absolute parent or model of time that we can seize.

  “To see into the future – as into the hidden past – is a revelation of the partial ground on which we stand and the partial ground to which we move backwards or forwards.

  “To see into the past as into the future is not to possess absolute knowledge of the past or the future but to be moved nevertheless by the mystery of originality that gives birth to the future as the future and the past give birth to ourselves.

  “That originality, that mystery, may perceive a real, however elusive or incomplete, outline of coming events – or hidden past events – even as it confesses to deeper and farther hidden pasts and coming futures that are already transforming the basis of what one sees and feels in this moment. Freedom therefore is grounded in perceptions of originality that see through absolute fate.”

  I was seized by a responsibility that may have intuitively existed in everything I had already written but which suddenly acquired a new, subtly terrifying, dimension.

  Take, for example, young Masters’ cousin Thomas, the twelve-year-old boy who had vanished in a clump on the foreshore pursuing an animal fragment of original cosmic crab. Was he twelve years old or twelve hundred years old? Whose child was he? In consulting my notes of conversations with Masters in the 1960s and 1970s I find no reference to Thomas’s parent-masks.

  Masters nudged me suddenly in the labyrinth of past/present/future through which we moved into accepting his cousin as my spirit-flesh, my fiction-blood. I hesitated even as I accepted. I felt an inner turbulence. Was I giving Thomas the Doubter a new, unsuspected, disturbing Carnival adolescence in a twentieth-century plantation Inferno or Purgatory? Such responsibility in fiction comes as a shock, a blow. For if Doubt (rather than Faith) and its astronomic, biologic, economic antecedents were to be sanctioned and protected by its spirit-parent, and to become my progeny, then the law of fiction I represented needed to visualize diverse proportions of the body of tormented love it had vicariously married to become Thomas’s Carnival parent. One’s obsession with the tormented body of love – who was parent, who not, who would inherit the earth, who not, whose populations were exploding, whose not, who possessed the future, who did not – needed to secure guides (concrete in instinctual imagination) if one were to visualize foetal significance, emergence, adolescence, in alien – or apparently alien – generations one accepted and adopted.

  One needed guides in those who – driven by
regimes of fear or uncertainty – had regressed backwards in space or had “re-entered the body of the mother” they idolized or worshipped.

  I grant that Masters was a principal guide in this context of regression that counterpoints progression and it was he who bestowed upon me the privileged mask of fiction-parent; but in becoming my concrete guide into an area or areas I had but vicariously married he opened the body of time to young Thomas as well and to uncertainties I needed to fathom as acutely more relevant to me, and my age, than Faith. All this in spite of my earlier revelation of the hand of cousinly Thomas that exacerbated the wound it sought to prove. In such exacerbation lay a blindness, or cloud over the world’s eyes I had not realized or experienced before. And in this new exacerbated guidance, or journey into blind collision between worlds seeking to prove each other, young Thomas was virtually indispensable …

  It took me months of close conversation with Masters in London to piece together Thomas’s reaction to the flight of the boy-king in his charge from the false shaman. Thomas reappeared from the clump in which he had pursued a fragment of constellation crab. The child-mask El Dorado was nowhere in sight. Thomas shouted, he looked everywhere, then flew into New Forest. The town became a cloud that darkened his eyes as though the bandage upon gold, upon currency, assumed gigantic proportions. He needed proof of the king’s whereabouts. He needed to seize him, scold him for playing tricks. He needed to weigh him in the balance. His uncertainty ran so deep, his fear that his charge may have been molested (he had read the New Forest Argosy), it was as if he himself had never been born and the gigantic bandage diminished into a shell. Masters had feared the Abortion of an age written into universal flesh-and-blood in glimpsing the glass woman. He, on the other hand, glimpsed the concave egg like a mask or blind over his eyes in alignment with “plucked brand” or gold. The uncertain penetration of those veils, egg and gold and fire, was his gestation in the womb of space and it drew him into regions I could not dream to enter on my own as fiction-parent of generations steeped in the collision of worlds.