Palace of the Peacock

by Wilson Harris

  But we are now many years away from Palace of the Peacock and the Guyana novels. Since 1960, there have been another twenty books, with interesting titles like Da Silva Da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, The Infinite Rehearsal, Resurrection at Sorrow Hill and The Four Banks of the River of Space. In addition there is a lot of writing about his work, including his own essays and lectures. I have picked out these titles to point to an important connection.

  Palace of the Peacock is about resurrection or overcoming death. From the first novel to the last, this is the author’s rich, liberating and infinite theme. On arrival at Mariella, the ardent dreamer suggests to the troubled Donne that someone must broach the subject of death’s supposed finality and terror. This novel shows Donne and the crew dying and coming back several times. The title of the twentieth novel, set on the same river where Donne’s crew is supposed to have drowned, is Resurrection at Sorrow Hill. What is this all about? In an earlier book, the character Robin Redbreast Glass, whose autobiography is the matter of The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), articulates a confession that pushes the reader to see the cycle of death and resurrection as a kind of play of shadow and light. Harris had obviously begun to feel a need to articulate and conceptualise the revelance of what is referred to in Palace as “acknowledging the true substance of life”, and demonstrating “the unity of being”.

  According to Glass, “the hope for a universally just society, for the attainment of the mind and heart of love, the genius of care – are an impossible dream …” He insists, nevertheless, that these values associated with the dream of unity and wholeness are true. The reader realises that there are implications in this for how we create art, and for how we live our lives: the impossibility of final achievement actually “nurses, prompts, gives reality to the creative imagination and instils one with profoundest paradox, with insight into the numinous character of all things, all features, all aspects of being.”

  In this light, each life is or is like a work of art, part of an infinite set of rehearsals approaching again and again “a sensation of ultimate meaning residing within a deposit of ghosts”. Glass’s ghosts relate to conqueror and conquered without exacerbating adversarial proportions, and they relate harmonisingly to “new worlds and old worlds, new forests and old forests, new stars and old constellations within the workshop of the gods”.

  Many critics compare Harris and Conrad, so it is perhaps in order to add: Harris’s work, like that of Conrad before him, “gives reality to the creative imagination and” (the words come from Robin Redbreast Glass) “instils one” (the reader and the intuitive author) “with profoundest paradox, with insight into the numinous character of all things, all features, all aspects of being.” In the work of both authors there are repeated illustrations of the coexistence and interdependence of opposites. And in both there is no ambiguity about the human imperative arising from that: “A man that is born falls into a dream, like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns – nicht war? … No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.” The quotation is from Lord Jim. But this is exactly the kind of courageous immersion that Harris’s work encourages.

  It would be foolish not to take account of the critics or of Harris’s commentary on what he later discovers in his own work. But an innocent voyage can be exciting. The ambushed horseman is called Donne. The person who has shot him off his galloping steed is Mariella, an Amerindian woman he had seduced above the waterfall. This we gather from our initial guide, the narrating person, the one who is telling the story. In the second paragraph of the novel, the narrating person walks towards the dead man. He is aware that someone is watching him and the dead man, watching them from the ominous trees and bushes out of which the bullet had swirled.

  In this novel, Harris uses a technical device known as a first-person narrating character or I-narrator. We know that when this device is used, the I-narrator is usually one of the main characters or the main character, and the book is likely to be about some process or peculiarity in this person. But in his 1964 lecture “Tradition and the West Indian Novel”, published in Tradition, the Writer and Society (1967), Harris criticises what he calls “the novel of persuasion”, the mimetic novel that makes a selection of items (manners, conversation, historical situation, etc.) in order “to build and present an individual span of life which yields self-conscious and fashionable judgments, self-conscious and fashionable moralities.” All of this, he suggests, takes place “on an accepted plane of society we are persuaded has an inevitable existence.” It therefore consolidates a materialist reading of the world.

  It can come as no surprise that Harris is using the ghost of the first-person narrating convention rather than the convention itself. The self-sufficient character may break down in a Harris novel but no amount of I-narration can put him together again. The I-narrator of Palace disappears from time to time, and instead we have the native point of view of the Amerindian Vigilance, or the authoritarian and cracking voice of Donne, or an authorial voice which is unable to contain itself and has to enter into the I-narrator: “‘Yes, fear I tell you, the fear that breeds bitterness in our mouth, the haunting sense of fear that poisons us and hangs us and murders us. And somebody,’ I declared, ‘must demonstrate the unity of being and show …’ I had grown violent and emphatic … ‘that fear is nothing but a dream and an appearance … even death …’ I stopped abruptly.”

  By the time we come to Harris’s most recent novel, Jonestown (1996), there is fulfilment of what is implicit in the way Palace is told. Jonestown carries to the furthest extreme a standard authorial device in the later works of pretending to be editing somebody else’s manuscript. This is a formal registering of the author’s discovered sense that he is putting together, sometimes intuitively, fragments and relics coming unpredictably from he knows not where. Francisco Bone, a survivor of the Jonestown killings, sends his fiction manuscript to WH; and to compound the fiction, Bone makes WH a character in his book, referring to him and discussing his outlook at several points in the text.

  For the record then, the I-narrator of Palace goes, and so do the increasingly ineffective attempts to maintain the difference between the author and the fictional character that we see in the first five novels. Gone too are the use of diary and diarist as in The Eye of the Scarecrow (1965), and the use of journal and remembering character as in the novels from Scarecrow to Ascent to Omai (1970).

  In the later novels it is impossible to miss the foregrounding of three features: an interest in and interrogation of the author’s presence or participation in a fiction; a conviction of the overlapping ground between fiction and “reality” in a text; and musings on how texts and authors come into being at all. These features existed in Palace long before anyone was theorising about them, and they allow us to make of Harris a major theorist of fiction. But to read his works as they unfold is to understand that for Harris these “meta” questions are not empty play or modern theory.

  The imagery and symbolism in the opening paragraphs of Palace call for a responsiveness that may seem to bear a resemblance to ingenuity. A good illustration is the noose. The arresting shot pulls the narrator up like a hangman’s rope or cowboy’s lasso. As Harris himself has pointed out, the noose turns up again on p. 21, twice on p. 49, and crucially on p. 101, when Donne dangles from the cliff-face. In the narrating character’s own words, the shot or noose stifles his own heart in heaven. The noose we find is being elaborated and re-elaborated in the book to serve as a binding image relating to a key concept – death and rebirth.

  For implied in this second paragraph is the not unfamiliar paradox that you have to be blind or dead to the things of this world if you are to experience the reality or behold the power and the glory. This comes out in the description of the narrator’s approach to the dead man. The dead man’s eyes ar
e open. They are staring boldly up at the sun. The living man is blinded by the sun, while the dead man looks the sun boldly and unflinchingly in the eye. “The sun blinded and ruled my living sight but the dead man’s eye remained open and obstinate and clear.” You can’t go far in a Harris novel without meeting up with ambivalent symbol and spiritual paradox, the bitter knowledge of death in life, and the liberating sense of life in death and life after death.

  But for the moment the reader is concerned about how the I-narrator is tied up with the shocking event and the star-crossed persons. How come the blind man sees and the living man doesn’t? We have questions about the murdered horseman and about the person who was laying wait to “blow him away”.

  *

  Without belabouring the point we can notice that in both theme and style much of what happens later in the Harris oeuvre is present in Palace, but there are significant differences as the unfolding proceeds. The first five or Guyana novels manage to convey a solid sense of history and place, of social classes and individual types, even while attempting to free us from the tyrannies and complacencies of believing in these as absolutes. We recognise social and political issues even while we notice that the effect of the works is to add other levels of reading to them. From the point of view of language we can observe that the use of dialect in the episode leading to the stabbing of one of the daSilva twins (pp. 86–91) in Palace of the Peacock gives off a sense of familiar reality while a strange and difficult experience is being described.

  The part played by such localisation in giving the reader a “necessary stone and footing” in the early novels has not perhaps been sufficiently noticed, and critical discussion has not been clear enough about what might have taken its place in the later works. Jonestown does not try to convey the particular geographical and historical sense of Guyana. Nor does it dwell, like Shiva Naipaul’s Journey to Nowhere (1981), on the mass suicide in 1978 of over 900 followers of the messianic cult leader Jim Jones. The novel does not reflect directly on the dependent condition of countries like Guyana, or question how Jim Jones was allowed to establish a base in Burnham’s Guyana.

  In many of the later novels, the immediate social and political themes merely float. The landscape is much more interiorised, and much more diffused than it used to be. This may be a loss to the reader but there is an explanation. Francisco Bone has heard of WH’s “sympathies for voyagers of the imagination”. In his letter he explains to WH that his manuscript is an attempt to explore not just this place now but “overlapping layers and environments and theatres of legend and history that one may associate with Jonestown”.

  Harris’s novel wants, systematically, to make imaginative or poetic links between different times and places; the drastic fate of invisible Mayan cities, the unsolved disappearance of Caribs in British Guiana, and the crumbling walls and roads of coastal villages and townships of New Amsterdam that are silent witness and memorial to Spanish, French, Dutch and British colonisation over the centuries. In the twentieth century there are the mass migrations out of Guyana and the Jonestown catastrophe. Since, for Harris, history is a series of parallel texts, one might even call these links intertextual links.

  The clash of communities and the breakdown of community are central to Palace of the Peacock. But by the time Harris comes to write Jonestown the breakdown of particular communities and the fundamentalist conflicts between communities in the world loom for him as signs and symptoms of a world-wide phenomenon: the fall from a universal and pre-historic or “original” sense of community and place. So Francisco Bone laments that “the fabric of the modern world has worsened”, that billionaire death has multiplied his purse strings, and that “the torments of materialism have increased”.

  In Jonestown, Harris’s concern about the worsening of the modern world leads him to project what happened in Guyana as an instance of “the erosion of community and place which haunts the Central and South Americas”. And so the book turns out to be less about the particular Guyanese catastrophe of 1978 than about the need to create an in-pulling “memory theatre” or an “imagination theatre”. To change the terms, the interest is in “a mathematics of chaos” which might allow one to figure out or act out in the imagination the hidden meanings of all such episodes in pre-and post-Columban times.

  The Jonestown catastrophe is absorbed into, made part of, a possibly liberating project described by Bone in a letter to someone called WH (Wilson Harris?). One of Bone’s vatic and seemingly unclear statements makes sense in relation to this novel, and is a kind of guideline to many of the late novels: “Keys to the Void of civilisation are realised not by escapism from dire inheritances, not by political glosses upon endemic tragedy, but by immersion in the terrifying legacies of the past and the wholly unexpected insights into shared fates and freedoms such legacies may offer.”

  Those who read Harris regularly look up to him as a mystic and guru, an inspiring presence exuding a force more powerful than the literal meanings of his words. Those who write about him are drawn to include in their accounts, as I have done above, an unusually high proportion of explication. Most Harris critics feel that what he is saying is important and that it is one of their functions to explain it to the reader. For such critics, the labour and difficulty of form and language reflect the uniqueness and the arousing quality of the author’s vision. They recognise also a radical intention. Since the “medium” has been conditioned by previous use and framed by ruling ideologies, there has to be an assault upon the medium including not only the form of the novel but also the premisses about language that are inscribed in the novel.

  In what follows, however, I want to suggest that while Harris’s novels are unusual he is not hard to read. If we think of Palace of the Peacock as a book about who is Donne and what happens to him, nearly every other level of significance will float into our consciousness. When Donne first came to the interior, Mariella existed “like a shaft of fantastical shapely dust in the sun, a fleshly shadow in his consciousness”. This excitement and mystery couldn’t last. Donne lost it. He disintegrated. He became consumed with conquering and crushing the region and enslaving the native Indians.

  In a weak (or is it strong?) moment later in the novel, Donne tells the narrating person: “I am beginning to lose all my imagination save that sometimes I feel I’m involved in the most frightful material slavery. I hate myself sometimes, hate myself for being the most violent taskmaster – I drive myself with no hope of redemption whatsoever and I lash the folk. If they do murder me I’ve earned it I suppose …”

  The abused and reduced woman we first see emerging barefoot from a shack to feed Donne’s chickens is a relic of the conquistador’s first dream. He looks at her now “as at a larger and equally senseless creature whom he governed and ruled as a fowl”. The first thing we recognise is this. He was her man, and he did her wrong. She became his executioner or hangman.

  Whatever device Harris is using, he is using it in his own way. For much of the book, it is Donne who is the centre of interest, not the I-narrator. Possible themes relating to Donne suggest themselves at an intimidating rate. Donne as conqueror. Effect of conquest on conqueror. Effect of conquest on conquered. Sex, power and imperialism. Woman turned into object. Abuse of the female. Love, and degradation of love. Imagination as creative release. The themes jostle one another. But after all this, the scene dissolves as in a movie. The I-narrator has been dreaming after all. Donne enters his room. We are in the third paragraph. It is becoming clear. Harris is a writer of the multi-media age, and a writer linking neglected resources from traditional societies with newer ones. Writing and the cinema. Writing and painting. Writing and music. Writing and sculpture and dance. Carnival, limbo, Amerindian bone flute.

  The book does not allow us to take the dreamer simply as a narrating device. The I-narrator is fascinated by Donne, who we learn is his brother: “His name was Donne, and it had always possessed a cruel glory for me. His wild exploits had governed my imagination from
childhood. In the end he had been expelled from school. He left me a year later to join a team of ranchers near the Brazil frontier and border country. I learnt then to fend for myself and he soon turned into a ghost, a million dreaming miles away from the sea-coast where we had lived.”

  The I-narrator also lusts after Mariella. The scene dissolves again. Donne’s entry was part of the dream. The I-narrator wakes up. Mariella is beating her hand on his door. He had noticed earlier “the back of her knees and the fine beautiful grain of her flesh”. He is drawn to this attractive and dishevelled phantom: “She lifted her dress to show me her legs. I stroked the firm beauty of her flesh and touched the ugly marks where she had been whipped. ‘Look’, she said, and lifted her dress still higher. Her convulsive sobbing stopped when I touched her again.”

  The I-narrator … No. Dreamer. Better call him dreamer from now on, because we find out as the work goes on that the whole thing is a dream. The dreamer turns away from Mariella’s black hypnotic eyes as if he is blinded by the sun. But the fury of her voice is in the wind, like the bullet that killed Donne. And in the haze of his blind eye she is “a watching muse and phantom whose breath was on my lips”.

  At this point we don’t know what is dream and what is waking. But everything feels real, and that is what matters. Harris’s novels are a challenge to our notion of what is real, a challenge to our notion of Time and to our earthly Geography, a challenge to our values, a challenge to our static view of language, a challenge to our reductive view of persons, animals, objects, place. A challenge to sign “a profound treaty of sensibility” between ourselves and all of them. A challenge to snatch an insight into “the numinous character of all things, all features, all aspects of being”.