The Carnival Trilogy

by Wilson Harris

  “Turn my bruise around and around,” he said to Judge Quabbas. “Turn my insides out. Yes, do. Such is the spirit of the cave. I stand between the murdered czar of Carnival and Thomas. I wear both embalmed masks. I slip from one to the other. The wound I bear is self-inflicted. I cannot be sure where I truly belong – with the vested interests that put bread in my mouth and force my hand or with the misery of freedom, the desire for freedom I suffer acutely. Thus is my child born, the czar’s child as well, Thomas’s child as well. Hideous pawn to suffer the self-inflicted wounds we suffer or conscience, conscience, the innermost creativity of conscience, within the labyrinth of the future.”

  The trial of Thomas was to overshadow my father’s life and the remaining days of Judge Quabbas’s life. It was to give a luminous quality to the “savage heart” as the ingrained faculty within the cave of character-masks, the apparently embalmed “savage heart” yet alive and a peculiarly self-reversible organ of love, organ of feud, heart into heart, love into feud, feud into love.

  My father was to suffer the stroke of the wheel through which Thomas had leapt at the Carnival czar. It would happen in seven years, Masters said to me, when he defended a prince of El Dorado and confronted that “savage heart” as feud, divine feud, to be tested and borne and analysed by an endangered civilization if that civilization were not to succumb to violence but to fertilize the new womb of an age through paradox, through transfigured wounds.

  Mr Quabbas was to suffer the knife of love as a most tender, a most appropriate judgement by that “savage heart” in its unravelling of the limbs of love, unattainable love to be spied upon, enjoyed, even at the end of life, in one’s last moments on earth.

  Death by the “savage heart” came to my father as a young man (I was seven years old at the time), but it fell almost immediately upon Judge Quabbas as he emerged from the twilight of the cave on to the night of the tennis court where I was led by Masters. A week had passed since the inception of the trial of the character-mask of Thomas. Masters had spent some time in the library, everyone else had gone home, and he decided to leave the College by a short cut through the tennis court. It was around seven-thirty. The watchman was having his evening supper in the lodge at the main entrance. Masters made his way from the library down to a covered pathway linking the main hall to the gymnasium and then he turned into a path leading to the tennis court.

  I followed him through the dark. The lights of the building shone at our back. Suddenly a glare through the trees from the court addressed us and we knew a game was in progress. The grass lawn came into view. The lights at the edge of the court played not upon tennis performers but upon Alice, Mr Quabbas’s niece, who was practising the high jump. She thought she was alone. She had switched on the lights and set up the frame and bar. She jumped, ran around in a circle, paused, ran forward and jumped effortlessly again. She rested for a few seconds and raised the bar once more.

  I was enchanted by the quality of action. She leapt into the air with the magic of dream. A curious psychical music animated her limbs, her arms, her entire body. It was the dance of sublimity. She knew, or felt she was alone, and this knowledge – the secure knowledge of playing to no audience at all – did not incapacitate her. Rather it gave her the rhythm of inner and outer, unforced spaces, a supernaturally visible heart and invisible psyche and lung, mysterious concretion of blood.

  She was veiled, her blood was veiled and unseen, yet innocently nude flash of grace, sacramental body of grace, with each sublime gesture of flying, leaping spirit. It was as if Masters beheld the entire memorial of embalmed god or goddess utterly reversed. It was as if I beheld a miracle. Excavated, flying body was alive in the girl. The knife of music penetrated to heart, lung, and to every entity and cell within her; it drew every luminous organ from within her and cast an unselfconscious, vital garment over the spirit of a body to imbue it with a fullness of joy we had never seen before. Was this a vision of paradise?

  We were confused but liberated. The knife! We pondered the sharpness of unsleeping music in space that one hears with an ear and a sense other than given ear or sense. Was it (that sharp music cutting into, yet knitting, a veil) the first Thomasian stroke of a death sentence upon Judge Quabbas enunciated through the “savage heart” of love in half-sleeping, half-leaping Alice?

  Masters lodged himself deeply, flattened himself unobtrusively, into the tree against which he stood in order not only to view the high jump goddess but also to avoid being seen by another presence with eyes glued upon Alice. That other presence was Judge Quabbas himself. He had secured himself in a bush. The leaves and the play of light hid him from her as within a mask but we could see him dream-distinctly, however darkly. The judge was so transported, so intent on the knife that cut into her, as well as into him, that he was unaware of the other standing but a few feet from him lodged in a tree, or uncut wood, resembling the tree or the uncut wood of unwritten epitaph, unopened grave that was already yawning at his feet.

  Young, dancing, leaping, immortal Alice! Had the ancient Magna Carta crone, Aunt Alice Bartleby of the Alms House, once looked like this? Had she danced like this long, long ago before she tripped for her daylight supper?

  Masters realized that the tree against his back was seventy-five or eighty years old. Perhaps more. It was silk cotton. It would have been a mere seed in the ground when Aunt Alice was born.

  Judge Quabbas’s mask of bush grew from a cherry tree scarcely forty years old. That would have been a mere seed in the ground when the marble/market woman of Cannon Row Estate was born. How old would Jane Fisher of New Forest have been then? She was the marble woman’s East Indian daughter who married a jealous fisherman. He played Carnival in the mask of Thomas, the revolutionary saint. He did so in order to kill the Carnival czar or the czar’s elusive, superior Everyman Masters in whose character-mask an overseer damned his wife and left her with child. As for Jane Fisher the Second of London – she had not yet been born and lay in the seed-mask of the future.

  As for immortal Alice, she remained blissfully unconscious of the eyes of her uncle and of the budding prince of the estate upon her. The judge, her uncle, was in love with her but she did not know it; and the young prince, the judge’s pupil, possessed a rumbling intimation – as he watched her dance – of generations that haunt us, as we haunt them, from the past and the future, and of the older man’s controlled ecstasy and passion, a rumbling intimation as well of fiery seed, fiery self-knowledge, arching through jealousies, feuds, complicated loves, in Thomas’s Carnival attachment to the marble woman when he seized the knife with his own hand – as with the hand of others – to prove blood and kill the czar of New Forest.

  Judge Quabbas was no czar. He was a master of high Antipodean conscience, and the bar that Alice jumped with ravishing simplicity could easily have been a sword that divided them in bed. She was untouchable, chaste. She was a constellation, the blessed Alice. He was childless. He had never married. He clothed her in the music of the stars, remote stars matched sometimes nevertheless by the wit of hell in the lighted coal of crocodile ages under the Crocodile Bridge. Inevitably the blaze of such light-year distances turned glacial and cold; it began to stab him in the legs, in the chest, in the arms – even as Alice sprang to heaven, a naked spirit on the lawn in his darkening gaze. That his attachment to her, the attachment of a middle-aged dying man, diabetic and prone to illness, was in reversible likeness to the crusading love of young Thomas for a woman of forty with whom he collided through fate or folly, remained hidden from him in the depths of the mutual seed of the Carnival mask.

  Hidden from him, but it constituted perhaps a major self-reversible element in all revolutions. How to link chaste love for the young by the passionate, eager, middle-aged or old to proof that heaven exists, that wrongs may be righted, in the savage heart of the young who may, more legitimately perhaps, defend all ages and make love, profane or sacred, to all ages. Had Thomas – within a year or two of puberty – defended the marble wo
man and slept with her to guard her from dragons, the affair might have become the premise of Carnival legend or romance. Had Quabbas slept with young Alice, it would have outraged all propriety. And yet in the revolutions of heaven, in the slow transvaluation of hunter and hunted, masked hunter, masked huntress; masked hunted, a link existed – the seed of a new twentieth-century constellation – that bound middle-aged Quabbas to the young, angry, jealous crusader Thomas. It was profoundest desire for chastity despite malformed “savage heart” and emotional constriction of jealous desire, jealous love, profoundest desire to love rather than to be adored by the beloved, profoundest desire to give, to save, and receive nothing in return.

  I was startled, nonplussed, and I cried to Masters, “What is chastity? I have never seen chastity in such a light.”

  “Chastity gives rather than receives. It is, contrary to expectation, not a matter of purity, pure spirit, pure nature, but of impure spirit so overwhelmingly lovely that it marries nature or guides nature, a mixture of spirit and nature in other words, a descent of spirit into nature. And thus it is less likely to loom in all its essential mystery between the young and the young, who may mindlessly consume each other, or the old and the old, who may mindlessly loathe each other, but between the young and the old, the old and the young, who come to care profoundly for each other, and in crossing the barriers of mindless consumption and mindless loathing – in shedding mindless consumption and mindless loathing – to gain access to some measure of heavenly love.

  “I know it’s difficult to understand. I could not be your guide if I had not descended into the hell of the senses. And the danger remains, of course, that the old may relapse into seducing the young, the young may turn and abuse the old. I know it all. I tell you I have suffered it all. There are risks everywhere. Even heaven is a stage of risk.”

  I glanced at Quabbas. The glacial stab cut into him again but he had heard, he understood. He had heard his pupil’s voice transfigured, translated, in his own body. Alice leapt from one realm into another. The knife of her being flared within the seed of the air, the seed in his body. It was a knife, it was a dance. It reopened parallel lives, dressed or masked in music, in liturgy, in the Market-place, Carnival dance and song.

  It was the knife of profoundest ecstasy, startling self-knowledge. It was the seed of Carnival that hides us from ourselves, yet reveals us to ourselves. It was a knife that lay between him and Alice, between him and Thomas, between him and Masters.

  He sought to hold himself up, to resist the pain. He felt himself melting into the ground, dissolving backwards. But he fell forwards instead on to the lawn. He lay curled like a ball that had been sliced but would bounce high when no one saw it.

  *

  The death of Judge Quabbas was a climactic moment or guideline into space. I was reminded of it by Masters in the year 1957 when we sailed to Europe. It was autumn. He had been hospitalized for several weeks before he was fit to travel. The shock of his “first death” had been, needless to say, a blow but it revived his memories of Quabbas and of diverse proportions of Carnival that enlisted him now in complicated Carnival of time, past, present and future. Indeed that journey in 1957 was both real and unreal, unreal fact, inimitable fiction. I returned to it – to the ship on which we sailed – in my discourse with the dead king in 1982/83 when he stood at my elbow as I wrote of him, and guided me into seemingly impossible realms.

  He resigned from the plantation kingdom of New Forest and abandoned his rights to a static saddle in a corrupt colony. The “death” he had received evolved into “seed” and the judgement that had been exercised upon him by Jane Fisher the First, who mistook him for another overseer and invited him to sleep with her in order to join hands with her husband and kill him, set in train a body of reversible legend, reversible shadow and mutual configuration of the judgement of the age to which we belonged. 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 childhood games he had played with unfamiliar and familiar cousins in a hardhearted yet promiscuous society, 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.

  For example, he confessed to me that he had been secretly watching Alice practising the high jump on the tennis court when her uncle (also a secret watcher) collapsed with a heart attack, but it had signified nothing to him in depth, in complex depth, when it happened; it was to take his own “first death” to bring the event back into uncanny focus; it had been a shock, yes, the moment it happened, a realistic shock, but it went no deeper, it did not immediately descend beneath the surfaces of realism into complex reality. Alice had screamed. He had burst forth like a sprinter on to the lawn. The watchman in the lodge at the main gate to the College had been summoned. Mr Quabbas was dead. That was not the end. Within a day or two or three of the funeral, unpleasant rumours about Quabbas and his niece began to circulate, unpleasant rumours also about some of the daring young men that Quabbas cultivated in the guild.

  Those rumours were not easily quashed. Everyone knew they were false, and yet everyone persisted in broadcasting a series of lies and diseased fable. The truth was that when a society senses a shape to events that destabilize “example”, it sniggers behind its mask, it becomes uncomfortable, it shrinks from reality. It even encourages fashionable cults of political violence that become the stuff of new heroic example, especially when such cults may be embalmed to resemble innocence or gentleness or courage. Young Alice (the spirit of gentleness) and young Thomas (the spirit of daring) were not immune from conscription into a conspiracy to befoul poor Quabbas’s name. Masters recalled someone sniggering behind his Carnival mask and saying that the Guild Cave theatre was a cover-up for Quabbas’s so-called “latent homosexuality” or “latent bisexuality” in his attachment not only to gentle Alice but to Masters’ sacred cousin or to someone who resembled “sacred rebels” or their cousins. It was all symptomatic, alas, of diseased mask, diseased gossip, that function to preserve the status quo and to suppress the challenge of disturbing inner truth that transcends circumstantial appearance.

  “Judge Quabbas’s death and its aftermath,” my guide said to me in the labyrinth of dream that redresses the past in the present in the future, “illumine the genesis of social cults of violence that feed on sex as diseased territory within which the exploitation of sweetness and light, innocence and daring, become commonplace. Yes, commonplace. For within such commonplace all are in chains, all are in gaol. Nothing can change. We must – I beg of you Weyl– put such commonplace into profound reverse if we are to run through the erection of hollow ideal, hollow example, that imprisons us.”

  He waved his hand as if to greet the ocean on which we sailed in 1957. Three or four days off Limbo (or was it Lisbon on the map of dream?) a storm began to brew. Masters said to me as the lightning flashed, “You know, Weyl, Quabbas’s death should be a leap in your book from the Inferno into Purgatory and into, may I say it, paradise.” Was he joking, was he mocking me? I was astonished at such optimism in the light of the sorry and unhealthy state of mind that he himself had deplored in his reminiscences of Quabbas’s befouled name. We descended the stairway into a saloon. Masters ordered a drink. The severity of the wound he had received had in no way diminished his cast-iron stomach and its immunity to fiery drink.

  “It’s time, Masters‚” I said, “it’s time I confess something to you.” His face darkened as if he anticipated the coming storm.

  “Go on, Weyl, go on.”

  “Perhaps it’s nothing but …” I stopped. He ordered another drink and waved at me impatiently. The saloon seemed curiously dark, curiously veiled, but imbued with the oddest luminosity as if a bell at the heart of the storm rang with muffled light r
ather than sound. Masters waved his hand and for a moment the body of the ship turned to glass, womb of glass, flesh of glass, and I dreamt I saw Christ walking on the sea through the side of the ship. I plucked up the courage to speak.

  “You speak of hollow example,” I said, “and of exploiting sweetness and light …”

  “Yes,” he said, “go on, my dear Weyl.”

  “Well then,” I said, “let me confess. I am troubled by guilt that I may unwittingly exploit sacred figures and turn them into romantic concretions of violence. I know there is a distinction between hollow ideal and disturbing truth, and you speak of the necessity for reversibles or reverses within the hollow ideal. I am not sure I understand fully. Take Thomas. He is a sacred figure, a disciple of Christ.” I was staring through the body of the ship into the coming storm. “His hand is upon Christ’s wounds. His hand is also that of the revolutionary who stabs the Carnival czar, the Carnival representative of Christ. An inferior Christ, no doubt – there am I speaking of doubt … It was involuntary. Perhaps such a vision of Thomas, Doubting Thomas, with dual hands, is pertinent to a colonial age lacking in genuine revolutionary hope and deceived by all sorts of fallacies and ideologies. And yet I wonder whether Thomas the disciple can carry the burden of such extreme paraphrase?”

  I felt as uneasy and perturbed and crest-fallen as Masters sometimes was. The ship flashed again and I saw through its glass sides, through glass flesh-and-blood, through marble flesh-and-blood, into the rising waves upon which Christ walked as if he understood my guilt, my awkward confession, as if he knew me, as if he forgave me. Masters seemed blind to all this yet he was my guide into space. He looked at me with his sunken blind eyes, pregnant with the mystery of the womb and the grave. “It’s the price you must pay, my dear Weyl,” he said at last, “to reverse non-vision into vision, the blind ornament into the seeing vision.”