Palace of the Peacock (11 page)

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 are 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”.