Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

“The partial image is biased, yes, but it is also in conflict with inherent bias — it is a part of something incalculably whole and stark and true. Such wholeness cannot be confined or structured absolutely; its complex nakedness and community of spirit eludes us within every mask or costume or dress …”

“What then is wholeness?” I cried.

“Wholeness is the unique mediation of fiction of spirit between partial images. Wholeness is, shall I say, a real fiction in arousing, penetrating, transforming the parent-in-the-child, the object in the newborn or unborn subject. Wholeness opens the prospect of climates of passion and emotion that reflect each other, not to overwhelm each other but to ‘redeem’ (if that is not in itself too biased a word) the fragmentation of cultures, and to do so without glosses of deception that underestimate the depth, the terror, the obscurity, of the enterprise.

“The price of wholeness is a fiction that so relives the fragmentation of cultures that it cannot be duped by ideal rhetoric or faiths or falsehoods. It gives creative tension to doubts and uncertainties that become the cousins of god in reflecting their curiosity about the wounds of heaven that revive a concept of innocence, the wounds of hell by which we glorify the individual in traditions of conquest.

“Wholeness releases partiality to confront itself in others as a necessary threshold into the rebirth and the unity of Mankind beyond the rhetoric of salvation, beyond the rhetoric of damnation. Wholeness is a third dimension in which every mask suffers the kinship of exchange, the kinship of glory, the kinship of humiliation. At least,” he smiled across at me half-commandingly, half-apologetically, “that is what I think.”

Czar Johnny (half-masked by the future in Carnival generation’s embalmed Lenin) shuffled along with the globe on his back, a globe or an immense crate of sugar. The particular aisle in the gutted (as it seemed to me) Market ship along which he moved was rather narrow and the shoppers or crew over which he ruled pulled aside, as they saw him coming, into areas between the stalls. Thus he made his way inch by inch, foot by foot, through the population of Carnival limbo.

One Lady Charlotte, however, stood her ground.

“Charlotte?” I turned to Masters. “Have I not heard that name before?”

“Flip back to the Alms House scene in Carnival,” said Masters. “There’s mention of Charlotte. Bartleby’s second wife.”

“Ah yes! I remember. She stripped him of his property in the heat of their romance.”

“A cunning bitch. She’s dressed in rich cloth today, unlike poor Alice. And her shoes glitter. Ready to dance you would think. But no! she stands abusing Johnny as if she’s chained or riveted to the ground. Her pride won’t let her stir.”

“It’s infra dig, isn’t it, for her to go aside into the crush and the throng of perspiring infernal bodies between the stalls?”

“Her sons were educated at the College next to the Alms House, then they studied law at Harvard and in London. She knows her rights, that’s clear,” Masters conceded.

“What is she saying to the czar?”

“She’s telling him the folk in the Market have every right to stand in the aisle and buy their fruit and fish. She’s telling him he should back off and use another path away from the people’s stalls. She says she’ll stand where she is until kingdom come or until she’s through with her purchases.”

Flatfoot glowered. He slowly lowered the globe on his back until he had deposited it like a great boulder in the middle of the narrow people’s aisle. “You cunning bitch,” he cried with venom, almost taking the words, I thought, out of Masters’ shadow of a mouth. “Don’t be hasty, don’t abuse the Lady Bartleby ,HE SAYS.”

I was astonished at the sudden caution that had arrived upon Flatfoot’s tongue, as if he were repeating an aside or an injunction he had received from an unseen companion. I played the scene back in my mind and listened intently. “You cunning bitch! Don’t be hasty, don’t abuse the Lady Bartleby, Johnny ,HE SAYS.”

Yes, there was no doubt about it. I had overlooked but caught Johnny in the replayed utterance of the unseen companion.

“Who is HE?” I wondered.

“Johnny’s an idiot giant, he hears voices,” Masters half-laughed but I was conscious again of their mysterious global kinship, as mysterious, in a sense, as the cousinship to Sir Thomas who, I suddenly saw, out of the corner of my eye, had his eye fixed upon the czar of New Forest.

I almost swore I saw Masters’ shadow-lips moving in that mirroring eye.

“Lady Bartleby I asking you polite to stir you ass and to move out of me way. Lady Bartleby I telling you …” He began to roar like thunder. Then he stopped. He was listening to someone invisible whose lightning caution he repeated: “Be careful, Johnny, be careful what you say, HE SAYS.”

Charlotte grew icy. She was angry. She ignored him. But despite her anger — as is the way of dreams — she smiled; her ageing body smiled with a faint shrug within the seamless garment of marriage he had conferred upon her. Though she had divorced Bartleby he had called her Lady Bartleby. She remained riveted to the floor of the Market and continued to order iced fish, rice, oranges, pear-shaped mangoes, and other miscellaneous items I could not read from where I stood upon the Carnival vessel of Night.

Masters shifted a little beside me as if he were still embarrassed by a play or a rehearsal of resemblances as he led me through the labyrinth of fire. It was a curious sensation, the sensation of shadow overlapping light, light shadow, day night, the sensation of gesture as speech, of words and images so curiously broken they gave scope to Carnival self-ridicule, Carnival self-love, Carnival self-loathing, within savage pride, savage labour, savage creation. They gave scope to scorn as well as vulgar relief within the play of folk-conscience that enveloped the chained Lady and the Carnival tyrant.

“Lady you know how damn hard I work? You think you know? I move galaxies of sugar. You no have a clue. You too proud to step out of me way. ME. Czar Johnny! You want to gaol me, yes, chain me to you but Lady I could burn you …” He mumbled something that was followed by HE SAYS to imply another caution from his lightning companion, but the voice was so faint this time that Johnny felt he could safely ignore it. He reached out to seize Charlotte but the echo of faintness intensified into another lightning call, female rather than male, arising from the stalls. It pulled him back into himself. He looked around and saw the marble woman, his common-law wife. She had left Sir Thomas to consult a colleague and report on the distressing event of the day — the loss of the eggs. She returned in time and perceived the violent climax that the czar of New Forest was about to inflict on Lady Bartleby.

“Johnny, Johnny, I know you strong. But strong can mean weak, SHE SAYS. Johnny, Johnny, I know you’s a brute, I know you’s a crab. But the lady in chains is a crab too , SHE SAYS, and crab can eat crab.” The marble woman’s dark humour took the Market Carnival by surprise. The riddle of the Carnival crab was known to all, crab-Johnny, crab-Charlotte, as the mutual devouring principle within a chained civilization, North, South, East, West. It was an omen of coming death for one or the other, for Johnny or Charlotte, but at the moment a comedy of design was paramount. The insertion of SHE SAYS into counterpoint with the faint injunction HE SAYS that Johnny had ignored registered upon “male crab” and “female crab” to break a climax of violence though they remained fixed in the Market aisle with the crate of sugar between them. There was resounding applause.