Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Robin is amazed to discover that Emma is a priest. So was I, the writer. Prior to writing this novel I believed women should not be priests. I changed my mind in the light of the subtle abysses that appeared in The Carnival Trilogy. Robin records his astonishment in a series of passages (the allusion to ‘Skull’ is to a city of prosperity littered with desolations). Robin exclaims inwardly:

I saw in a flash that she was a priest, a female priest, she was hope in the city of Skull, revolutionary hope, unconventional hope.

Let me confess that the issue of the female priest is one that startles me. It overturns a certain legacy of expectation that I have entertained from childhood. The priest is male is male is priest is male for ever and ever. Aboriginal or ontic tautology enshrined in so many storylines. But a question arises: are the stigmata upon the body of Christ a storyline? Do they not imply an abyss at the heart of history? Is the crucifixion of the Son of God — no less a person, mark you! — the very Son of God — is this not an abyss at the heart of human history? If so, then the stigmata may imply a range of association we do not recognize and have scarcely begun to gauge. That is how I felt when I came to Emma, the young/old, obsolescent/fertile priest. Through her my grasp of Faust underwent a profound change. Let me come first to the stigmata. Robin addresses Emma inwardly again:

All this made me scan Emma’s features closely. She was veiled by dateless day infinity comedy. I saw her innate sorrow. I suddenly saw how worn she was. It was as if a nail had woven its innermost weblike constancy into her flesh, an ecstatic nail, a sorrowing nail. Ecstatic and sorrowing!

When Robin alludes there to ‘dateless day infinity comedy’ as a veil upon Emma’s features he draws upon an ancient pre-Columbian, calendrical perspective. This matches, I think, the notion of light-year vistas. But I wish at this juncture to remind you of the ‘nail’, its ‘innermost weblike constancy … ecstatic nail, sorrowing nail …’

It is as if one glimpses numinous sexuality within Robin’s blissful relationship to Emma on the beach beside the sea, a numinous sexuality that becomes a spectral nail that pierces through the inferno into the paradiso.

In such a nail that shatters one’s pre-possessions I knew the construction of a sound that echoed in the air and in the sea. It was the music of the priest, of the God of nature. ‘One comes,’ said Emma, ‘to a beloved creation, to the divine, in every moment that one survives in the inimitable textures of nature, truly lives and survives.

All this I feel brings a wholly unexpected variation into the stigmata we tend to identify tautologously with the body of Christ. Through Emma the female priest — Emma the body of the womb — a multiple counterpoint — weblike yet constant — is woven that involves Faustian, immortal youth, the resurrection body, ecstatic numinous, paradisean nail, and sorrowing nail that pierces the tyranny of the inferno.

As I lay on the beach I was pierced by the cry of the gulls, the laughing sea gulls. Were they gulls or were they cranes? I could not tell. It was a cry from heaven and yet it was a subtle, piercing, shaking laughter. A shaking note like strings of music in the sea. The motif of an incomparable composition …

It may interest you to note that the cry of the gull echoes a pre-Columbian motif which relates to Quetzalcoatl. Quetzal the bird. Coatl the snake, the abysmal yet fertile earth which is ‘beloved nature’.

Now, may I return to Faust and the way in which the multiple counterpoint affected my vision of Faust. There is an aspect to Faust, immortal youth, when he seems to achieve a divorce from the resurrection body in The Infinite Rehearsal and looms as absolutely dominant. He buries the ecstatic, sorrowing nail within a hubris of immortality. He seeks implicitly to abort the mysterious buoyancy that is open to him as he lies beside Emma. Weblike constancy becomes a sterile rigidity. And then he gains a position by which to manipulate a series of ageing masks. One such mask bears the initials W.H. (my own initials). A joke, a serious joke. Except that Faust sees the ageing masks he wears as expendable. And in that sense the joke may hurt. Despite one’s labours for Faust — despite the labour of one’s antecedents across generations — one and they are expendable and doomed.

The rigidity of the perpetually young immortal Faust secures the tautology of tyranny , the worship of fascism, of evil. Faust’s ageing masks include the ageing institutions of democracy, of the Church, of the humanities, the universities. We have seen how such ageing institutions may be worn to the detriment of peoples in Hitlerite Europe, in Field-Marshal Amin’s Africa, and most recently in Saddam’s Iraq.

I do not have to remind you that tyrannies have been nourished by the ageing Church which turned a blind eye to injustice, by ageing democracies which have been the suppliers of machinery of war or have stimulated in the commercial field gross, materialistic ambitions.

I cannot easily explain it but the curious fractured storylines within The Infinite Rehearsal drew me intuitively to sense that the numinous body of the womb in the female priest implied unsuspected fabric that breaks and alters the rigidity of Faustian hubris. The substance of the nail, the substance of instrumentalities linking cultures, turns institutions around to examine and re-examine themselves in creative and re-creative lights. Robin Redbreast Glass yields to the priest Emma:

I felt her lips upon mine. The kiss of all loves and all true lovers,

The numinous instrumentality of the nail becomes the seed of invisible texts in which ageing, expendable masks become the secretion of strangers who are intimate to ourselves and who will sustain continuity into the future.

One needs to be cautious for the issues we are exploring do not turn on dogma or intellectual formula. Yet one may have, I think, a certain true confidence in the intuitive life of the Imagination, its spectrality and miraculous concreteness beyond implacable identity of formula.

It is the nail, the paradox of associative instrumentalities, which brings me now to the last volume in this trilogy, namely The Four Banks of the River of Space.

Let me commence by presenting a cross-cultural parallel between an aspect of Homer’s Odyssey and South American/Guyanese legend relating to the figure of Canaima. Telemachus is approached in Ithaca by a friend who tells him that his father Ulysses is alive and will return home to redeem the kingdom and to destroy Penelope’s suitors who are wasting the substance of the state. The next day when Telemachus runs into his friend and reminds him of their conversation the friend is astonished. He has no recollection of it. He was somewhere else, Homer covers the discrepancy by saying that a god or a goddess had appeared in the shape of Telemachus’s friend. A similar yet enigmatic confusion of identity occurs in South America and it relates to the revenge apparition or fury or god called Canaima. Ulysses does return as prophesied and is not immediately recognized. He comes in the rags of a beggar.

An aspect of Ulysses’ fury when he returns which I find horrific is his slaying of many or some of Penelope’s serving women who had slept with some of the suitors in the palace in Ithaca. One accepts the necessity of slaying the suitors but the hanging of the serving women filled me with dread as a child when I read Homer. Upon reflection across the years I find it endorses another parallel with Canaima. The aspect of terrifying revenge! True, Ulysses was a great hero, a returning hero, but the redemption of his kingdom is tainted by the horror of revenge.