Palace of the Peacock (10 page)

Palace
of
the
Peacock
is set in the sixteenth century and goes back to earlier times. One of the main characters is Donne. Donne can be thought of as a sixteenth-century character – Elizabethan adventurer or Spanish conquistador. The book deals with breakdowns of community that are historical and disturbingly modern. It is about imperialism and
fragmentation
, about desire and death, about the abuse of native peoples and the endless search for wholeness. It is a book about now.

I still have the copy I read in 1963. I hadn’t read anything else by Wilson Harris. I hadn’t read any reviews. I was drawn into the work. Even now, after another twenty books or so and after a lot of writing about his work, Harris is still inviting. I don’t see how anybody can say he is hard to read. Not when he is at his best, as he is most of the time in
Palace
of
the
Peacock.
Not if you realise that you are dealing with a writer who uses his material like a film-maker, painter and musician. Not if you have a sense of rhythm and can feel the beat that does so much of the work in the later writings.

The descriptions of landscape and nature were striking, sometimes overwhelming: “The trees rose around me into upward flying limbs when I screwed my eyes to stare from underneath above. 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.”

More than that even, one was hooked at once by
character
and event. The book begins with a startling act of violence: “A horseman appeared on the road coming at a breakneck stride. A shot rang out suddenly, near and yet far as if the wind had been stretched and torn and had started coiling and running in an instant. The horseman stiffened with a devil’s smile, and the horse reared, grinning fiendishly and snapping at the reins. The horseman gave a bow to heaven like a hanging man to his executioner, and rolled from his saddle on to the ground.”

The language drew attention to itself. It was literal and sensuous, and eye-openingly figurative at the same time. Once or twice in the opening pages it seemed to be at war with itself, drawing the reader at least two ways at once. Seeming opposites or unrelated things (operating theatre, maternity ward, murderer’s cell) are yoked together in spite of the superficial tension that accompanies such yoking. One sense is described as if it were another. So the sound of the shot in the wind had turned into a rope; the straight line of the bullet was now a screaming menacing spiral; the teeth of the devilish horseman and the teeth of the fiendish horse grinned in concert; the horseman became a man with a noose around his neck biting at the rope, like the horse
snapping
at the reins.

I read the opening paragraph with a sense of recognition. I had seen the episode in many a black-and-white movie. Mouthed the drumming of the hooves, nasalised the sound of the bullet ricocheting. The horseman stiffened as if he had been lassoed, the horse rearing and whinnying, the
theatrical
and slow-motion fall from the saddle. I had acted all of them out in childhood games. But this was no imitation Western. What was one to make of the horseman bowing to heaven as if to his executioner? I came to Harris in enough innocence to suspend my biases about what a novel should
be, and what it ought to be about. I was greedy for story. I read it very fast. Then I started over.

Ignoring the historical calendar and the tensions arising directly out of the forced and voluntary movements over five centuries, a crew consisting of all the peoples who came to the Caribbean at different times are journeying together by boat into the heart of Guyana. The da Silva twins of Sorrow Hill; old Schomburgh the bowman, living in a
condition
of “silent stoical fear that passed for rare courage”; the young African boy Carroll, “gifted with his paddle as if it were a violin and a sword together in Paradise”, and his cousin the black-haired Amerindian Vigilance, “reading the river’s mysterious book”, the red-skinned man Cameron, “faster than a snake in the forest with his hands”; the mechanic and wooden-faced Jennings, “cursing and
reproving
his whirling engine in the unearthly terrifying grip of water”; and finally, Wishrop, assistant bowman and captain’s understudy.

When it is too late to make a difference to our
involvement
, the novel speaks to us about its assumption that
waking
and dreaming, the living and the dead, can exist side by side: “The odd fact existed of course that their living names matched the names of a famous dead crew that had sunk in the rapids and been drowned to a man, leaving their names inscribed on Sorrow Hill which stood at the foot of the falls. But this in no way interfered with their life-like appearance and spirit and energy.”

Although this vivid and matter-of-fact crew are driven by their own separate lusts, they are united in pursuit of gold and the Indians (“the folk”) who can serve as guides and slaves. They are heading towards a mission or inland station called Mariella. In the journey beyond Mariella, which takes seven days, they press-gang an old Amerindian woman as their guide. Their captain is the rapacious Donne. The boat eventually crashes and is abandoned at the foot of a
breathtaking
waterfall, and the crew ascend the steep sides of the
cliff to look out and in from the windows of the palace of the universe.

The ascent to the palace comes after the death of Carroll, who slips and falls into the water. This death comes over as a sacrifice, and it is associated with the emergence of an ancient music. The novel tells us that the eyes and ears of the crew are suddenly opened to the possibilities of wholeness: “In an instant it were as if we saw with our own eyes as well as heard with our own ears an indestructible harmony within the tragedy and sorrow of age and the malice and the nature of youth. It was Carroll’s voice that turned to stone and song, and the sadness of the baptismal lamentation on his lips which we heard in the heart of the berserk waters was our own almost senseless rendering and apprehension of the truth of our art and our perfection in the muse.” It is interesting that in a note to the 1988 re-issue of
Palace
of
the
Peacock,
Harris plays on Carroll’s music, linking its function to that of the Carib bone flute which he read about years after writing the Guyana novels. This tells us something about the intuitive process involved in creation and about the hidden order in art, both of which give Harris’s writings their unpredictable imagery and insights.

From the start this kind of difference between Harris’s work and the productions of his contemporaries drew
attention
to itself. The difference in artistic disposition is
connected
with differences in attitudes to history. Summing up in 1970 the Harris oeuvre up to
The
Waiting
Room
(1967), I wrote that “the ground of loss or deprivation with which most West Indian writers and historians engage is not for Harris simply a ground for protest, recrimination and satire; it is visualised through the agents in his works as an ambivalent condition of helplessness and self-discovery, the starting-point for new social structures … Susan Forrestal, blind, helpless and deprived, involved in
The
Waiting
Room
in the development of new resources and capacities for
relationships
with people and things, becomes the exciting
ambivalent emblem of a so-called ‘hopeless’, ‘historyless’ West Indian condition.” Harris was concerned with West Indian history but was trying to move away from the usual attitudes. The link between Susan’s blindness and the
blindness
theme in
Palace
is another illustration of the continuity between the first novel and the later ones.

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.