Wilson Harris - Palace of the Peacock

Wishrop’s face dawned on my mind like the soul of all. He was obviously torn and captivated by Carroll’s playing that lifted him out of his mystical conceit. I felt the new profound tone of irony and understanding he possessed, the spirit that allowed him to see himself as he once lived and pretended he was, and at the same time to grasp himself as he now was and had always been — truly nothing in himself.

The wall that had divided him from his true otherness and possession was a web of dreams. His feet climbed a little and they danced again, and the music of the peacock turned him into a subtle step and waltz like the grace and outspread fan of desire that had once been turned by the captain of the crew into a compulsive design and a blind engine of war. His feet marched again as a spider’s towards eternity, and the music he followed welled and circumnavigated the globe. The sadness of the song grew heart-rending when he fell and collapsed though his eye still sparkled as a wishing glass in the sun — his flashing teeth and smile — a whistling devil-may-care wind and cry, a ribald outburst that wooed the mysterious cross and substance of the muse Carroll fed to him like the diet of nerve and battle to induce him to find his changeless fortress and life. It was a prodigal web and ladder he held out to him that he climbed again and again in the world’s longing voice and soul with his muted steps and stops.

The windows of the palace were crowded with faces. I had plainly seen Carroll and Wishrop; and now as plainly I saw Cameron, the adversary of Jennings. I saw as well the newspaper face and twin of the daSilvas who had vanished before the fifth day from Mariella after making an ominous report and appearance. The music Carroll sang and played and whistled suddenly filled the corridors and the chosen ornaments of the palace; I knew it came from a far source within — deeper than every singer knew. And Carroll himself was but a small mouthpiece and echo standing at the window and reflecting upon the world.

In the rooms of the palace where we firmly stood — free from the chains of illusion we had made without — the sound that filled us was unlike the link of memory itself. It was the inseparable moment within ourselves of all fulfilment and understanding. Idle now to dwell upon and recall anything one had ever responded to with the sense and sensibility that were our outward manner and vanity and conceit. One was what I am in the music — buoyed and supported above dreams by the undivided soul and anima in the universe from whom the word of dance and creation first came, the command to the starred peacock who was instantly transported to know and to hug to himself his true invisible otherness and opposition, his true alien spiritual love without cruelty and confusion in the blindness and frustration of desire. It was the dance of all fulfilment I now held and knew deeply, cancelling my forgotten fear of strangeness and catastrophe in a destitute world.

This was the inner music and voice of the peacock I suddenly encountered and echoed and sang as I had never heard myself sing before. I felt the faces before me begin to fade and part company from me and from themselves as if our need of one another was now fulfilled, and our distance from each other was the distance of a sacrament, the sacrament and embrace we knew in one muse and one undying soul. Each of us now held at last in his arms what he had been for ever seeking and what he had eternally possessed.

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.