Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

As for immortal Alice, she remained blissfully unconscious of the eyes of her uncle and of the budding prince of the estate upon her. The judge, her uncle, was in love with her but she did not know it; and the young prince, the judge’s pupil, possessed a rumbling intimation — as he watched her dance — of generations that haunt us, as we haunt them, from the past and the future, and of the older man’s controlled ecstasy and passion, a rumbling intimation as well of fiery seed, fiery self-knowledge, arching through jealousies, feuds, complicated loves, in Thomas’s Carnival attachment to the marble woman when he seized the knife with his own hand — as with the hand of others — to prove blood and kill the czar of New Forest.

Judge Quabbas was no czar. He was a master of high Antipodean conscience, and the bar that Alice jumped with ravishing simplicity could easily have been a sword that divided them in bed. She was untouchable, chaste. She was a constellation, the blessed Alice. He was childless. He had never married. He clothed her in the music of the stars, remote stars matched sometimes nevertheless by the wit of hell in the lighted coal of crocodile ages under the Crocodile Bridge. Inevitably the blaze of such light-year distances turned glacial and cold; it began to stab him in the legs, in the chest, in the arms — even as Alice sprang to heaven, a naked spirit on the lawn in his darkening gaze. That his attachment to her, the attachment of a middle-aged dying man, diabetic and prone to illness, was in reversible likeness to the crusading love of young Thomas for a woman of forty with whom he collided through fate or folly, remained hidden from him in the depths of the mutual seed of the Carnival mask.

Hidden from him, but it constituted perhaps a major self-reversible element in all revolutions. How to link chaste love for the young by the passionate, eager, middle-aged or old to proof that heaven exists, that wrongs may be righted, in the savage heart of the young who may, more legitimately perhaps, defend all ages and make love, profane or sacred, to all ages. Had Thomas — within a year or two of puberty — defended the marble woman and slept with her to guard her from dragons, the affair might have become the premise of Carnival legend or romance. Had Quabbas slept with young Alice, it would have outraged all propriety. And yet in the revolutions of heaven, in the slow transvaluation of hunter and hunted, masked hunter, masked huntress; masked hunted, a link existed — the seed of a new twentieth-century constellation — that bound middle-aged Quabbas to the young, angry, jealous crusader Thomas. It was profoundest desire for chastity despite malformed “savage heart” and emotional constriction of jealous desire, jealous love, profoundest desire to love rather than to be adored by the beloved, profoundest desire to give, to save, and receive nothing in return.

I was startled, nonplussed, and I cried to Masters, “What is chastity? I have never seen chastity in such a light.”

“Chastity gives rather than receives. It is, contrary to expectation, not a matter of purity, pure spirit, pure nature, but of impure spirit so overwhelmingly lovely that it marries nature or guides nature, a mixture of spirit and nature in other words, a descent of spirit into nature. And thus it is less likely to loom in all its essential mystery between the young and the young, who may mindlessly consume each other, or the old and the old, who may mindlessly loathe each other, but between the young and the old, the old and the young, who come to care profoundly for each other, and in crossing the barriers of mindless consumption and mindless loathing — in shedding mindless consumption and mindless loathing — to gain access to some measure of heavenly love.

“I know it’s difficult to understand. I could not be your guide if I had not descended into the hell of the senses. And the danger remains, of course, that the old may relapse into seducing the young, the young may turn and abuse the old. I know it all. I tell you I have suffered it all. There are risks everywhere. Even heaven is a stage of risk.”

I glanced at Quabbas. The glacial stab cut into him again but he had heard, he understood. He had heard his pupil’s voice transfigured, translated, in his own body. Alice leapt from one realm into another. The knife of her being flared within the seed of the air, the seed in his body. It was a knife, it was a dance. It reopened parallel lives, dressed or masked in music, in liturgy, in the Market-place, Carnival dance and song.

It was the knife of profoundest ecstasy, startling self-knowledge. It was the seed of Carnival that hides us from ourselves, yet reveals us to ourselves. It was a knife that lay between him and Alice, between him and Thomas, between him and Masters.

He sought to hold himself up, to resist the pain. He felt himself melting into the ground, dissolving backwards. But he fell forwards instead on to the lawn. He lay curled like a ball that had been sliced but would bounce high when no one saw it.

*

The death of Judge Quabbas was a climactic moment or guideline into space. I was reminded of it by Masters in the year 1957 when we sailed to Europe. It was autumn. He had been hospitalized for several weeks before he was fit to travel. The shock of his “first death” had been, needless to say, a blow but it revived his memories of Quabbas and of diverse proportions of Carnival that enlisted him now in complicated Carnival of time, past, present and future. Indeed that journey in 1957 was both real and unreal, unreal fact, inimitable fiction. I returned to it — to the ship on which we sailed — in my discourse with the dead king in 1982/83 when he stood at my elbow as I wrote of him, and guided me into seemingly impossible realms.

He resigned from the plantation kingdom of New Forest and abandoned his rights to a static saddle in a corrupt colony. The “death” he had received evolved into “seed” and the judgement that had been exercised upon him by Jane Fisher the First, who mistook him for another overseer and invited him to sleep with her in order to join hands with her husband and kill him, set in train a body of reversible legend, reversible shadow and mutual configuration of the judgement of the age to which we belonged. It set in train the most thoroughgoing analysis of hallucinated layers of being in himself, the most profound inquiry of which he was inwardly capable into everything he had seemed to be, everything he had aped, had done, his apprenticeship, the College he had attended, his parentage cosmic and otherwise, the childhood games he had played with unfamiliar and familiar cousins in a hardhearted yet promiscuous society, the antics of Carnival, the heart of El Dorado, the cross-personal/cross-cultural relationships that he had tended to brush aside as adventitious or hollow myth.

For example, he confessed to me that he had been secretly watching Alice practising the high jump on the tennis court when her uncle (also a secret watcher) collapsed with a heart attack, but it had signified nothing to him in depth, in complex depth, when it happened; it was to take his own “first death” to bring the event back into uncanny focus; it had been a shock, yes, the moment it happened, a realistic shock, but it went no deeper, it did not immediately descend beneath the surfaces of realism into complex reality. Alice had screamed. He had burst forth like a sprinter on to the lawn. The watchman in the lodge at the main gate to the College had been summoned. Mr Quabbas was dead. That was not the end. Within a day or two or three of the funeral, unpleasant rumours about Quabbas and his niece began to circulate, unpleasant rumours also about some of the daring young men that Quabbas cultivated in the guild.

Those rumours were not easily quashed. Everyone knew they were false, and yet everyone persisted in broadcasting a series of lies and diseased fable. The truth was that when a society senses a shape to events that destabilize “example”, it sniggers behind its mask, it becomes uncomfortable, it shrinks from reality. It even encourages fashionable cults of political violence that become the stuff of new heroic example, especially when such cults may be embalmed to resemble innocence or gentleness or courage. Young Alice (the spirit of gentleness) and young Thomas (the spirit of daring) were not immune from conscription into a conspiracy to befoul poor Quabbas’s name. Masters recalled someone sniggering behind his Carnival mask and saying that the Guild Cave theatre was a cover-up for Quabbas’s so-called “latent homosexuality” or “latent bisexuality” in his attachment not only to gentle Alice but to Masters’ sacred cousin or to someone who resembled “sacred rebels” or their cousins. It was all symptomatic, alas, of diseased mask, diseased gossip, that function to preserve the status quo and to suppress the challenge of disturbing inner truth that transcends circumstantial appearance.