Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

It took me months of close conversation with Masters in London to piece together Thomas’s reaction to the flight of the boy-king in his charge from the false shaman. Thomas reappeared from the clump in which he had pursued a fragment of constellation crab. The child-mask El Dorado was nowhere in sight. Thomas shouted, he looked everywhere, then flew into New Forest. The town became a cloud that darkened his eyes as though the bandage upon gold, upon currency, assumed gigantic proportions. He needed proof of the king’s whereabouts. He needed to seize him, scold him for playing tricks. He needed to weigh him in the balance. His uncertainty ran so deep, his fear that his charge may have been molested (he had read the New Forest Argosy ), it was as if he himself had never been born and the gigantic bandage diminished into a shell. Masters had feared the Abortion of an age written into universal flesh-and-blood in glimpsing the glass woman. He, on the other hand, glimpsed the concave egg like a mask or blind over his eyes in alignment with “plucked brand” or gold. The uncertain penetration of those veils, egg and gold and fire, was his gestation in the womb of space and it drew him into regions I could not dream to enter on my own as fiction-parent of generations steeped in the collision of worlds.

Thomas flew or ran along East Street, came to a corner, failed to see a market woman approaching him from North Road. They collided. She was massive, he was small. Disaster followed less from her than through him. She was carrying a basket on her head. She staggered, tried to clutch it, but it fell with a lush explosion.

The shell over Thomas’s eyes split for an instant into the splendid yolk and contour of the sun. He was dumbfounded, even paralysed, by the white and orange glare of a miniature pool that reflected the cosmos. He saw everything within a lightning mask but a blind fell over him again. A gross of eggs that the black woman had been taking to New Forest Market lay now smashed and oozing on the ground.

Two elements or forces in nature had conspired to prove or disprove each other. One element was the economic loss that the market woman had suffered. The broken eggs on the road deprived her of a round sum that would have paid her rent for a month at least in the tenement, plantation range in which she lived.

It was a minor catastrophe. It was a major catastrophe. It may have seemed minor in cold shillings and pence but it possessed the heat of emotional configuration in the New Forest economy.

The other element was the sensation of exaggerated disaster Thomas had had in colliding with her, and this seemed to confirm the major content of economic emotion or depression in the 1920s. He could not shake off the feeling that he had exposed, rather than inflicted, an injury. How to probe it, analyse it (text books of Purgatory in the wake of the collision would ask, how to set up schools, universities, political sciences of the Inferno to assess economic emotion in a South American colony)! And blind as he became again after the shell grew once more over his eyes he could still perceive her sagging mouth and the sweat on her brow like tears.

“Oh god,” the market woman cried, “who is going to pay for this? Gold ain’t enough.” The humour of her remark that “gold” wasn’t enough registered faintly on Thomas.

“I shall pay. I shall find the money,” he promised.

“You believe gold is cheap, Boy?” The market woman was laughing but behind her laughter lay not only sweat but the mirror in which El Dorado had seen fire threatening to consume him.

The market woman seemed closer to black marble than to El Dorado’s memory of a cavity of flesh behind him, glass in front of him, as he lay coiled in his mother. Nevertheless Thomas had seen the fire in black marble as he had seen the pool of the sun before through a shell. Despite his promise to pay he was terrified and desired to run, as Masters had run, but the marble woman held him firmly with a hand that seemed both rough and smooth as if it echoed the mystery of the human egg at which the economic spirits of creation in capital cosmos had laboured in the sun and the moon and the stars from the beginning of time.

It was noon in New Forest, the orange yolk on the ground shone, and the labour of capital cosmos, fathered by fiction, impressed itself anew upon Thomas. He knew he could not run. The injury, the hand-to-mouth existence he had exposed loomed larger now than ever in the marble woman. But they had come to some sort of understanding, for she had relinquished her grip on his shoulder.

Thomas had, in the interval, abandoned all responsibility for his royal charge. Indeed he felt that the boy-king had implicated him in another devilish game. And he felt irrational anger, a blaze of irrational fury, but pulled himself up in time, rebuked himself in time. Yet something lingered, something vague, as though in the realm of irrational anger at someone for whom we are held responsible — or were held responsible — we may track down jealousy in its obscure beginnings that increase and multiply to divide those who possess the stigma of the Abortion of an age and those who fear their smooth masks are an inadequate defensive cosmetic.

I discussed this complicated theatre with Masters in London and he expressed the view that the parallel existences or incarnations of Uncertainty owe the character of jealousy that possesses them to a collision of worlds implicit in “primordial colonial egg” that Carnival dramatizes as the birth of a diversity of fictions and masks.

Thus “jealousy” is another humiliation that fiction may employ to fathom the human/animal soul, the glass soul, the marble soul, the iron soul, the steel soul, the weight or weightlessness of deprivations of love that masquerade as prudence.

“The relevance of all this to the fictionalization of a constellation that speaks for the twentieth century is clear,” Masters said to me. “It is as a tormented colonial age that the twentieth century will be remembered and your book should point, I am sure, within its multiple perspectives to an overlapping context of spirit and nature that reveals without dogma the essence of love and love’s imperial malaise, love’s imperial tribulations within the plantation, institution, metropolis, factory, everywhere.”

His voice faded and I continued to piece together Thomas’s “adventures” in 1926.

Thomas and the black marble woman made their way along East Street. She was taking him across the Town to the tenement, plantation range in which she lived, so that he would know where to come when he had accumulated twelve shillings (a prodigious sum in 1926) to pay for the basket of eggs he had been instrumental in capsizing when he ran into her.

The dream-clock in the sky let the sun fall a notch or two deeper than I had previously calculated. Was it noon or afternoon? The mask of the sun shone with brilliance and fury. They turned into Brickdam, an impressive, black-pitched bandage of a road that ran through the middle of the Town. It was distinguished by some of the finest residences in New Forest. East Street had had its fine wooden houses as well, all on stilts in the low-lying township protected by a wall from the sea, but Brickdam with its three-storeyed residences masked the nature of the subsistence (and less than subsistence) economy that controlled a plantation cosmos. Not only overseers resided along the bricked and tarred road (that tended to grow faintly moist in places, to stick to one’s feet) but civil servants of various pigmentation; the dust of gestating ages stuck to their faces in tune with Carnival cosmetic of the unborn.

Incongruously perhaps (or was it congruously?) two mansions, one a famous College for New Forest youth, the other a great Alms House, rubbed sides or fences in the elegant, wooden parade along Brickdam.