Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

Where then, I pressed him, lay the link between “plucked brand” and “false shaman”? It lay, he said, in forces of humiliation that resembled each other but differed in ultimate wisdom from each other. To spy upon her or through her, as if he had returned into her body as foetal Carnival child, and to see the fire that threatened to consume him with her tears, was to endure the psychology of rape within her body long before the false shaman appeared and threatened to seize him on the foreshore. How extraordinary, yet inevitable, it was that the “mask of the cuckold” that his legal father wore came into luminous perspective when he ran back into his mother’s womb. In that mask of Carnival humiliation, Carnival cuckold, was raised the enigmatic spirit of Sex through and beyond nature’s intercourse, a spirit that could sustain both mother and child within a cruel and desperate world so easily exploited by the false shaman.

Instead of the “plucked brand” or the Abortion his mother, the glass woman, had begun to plan, the foetus would mature and the child would be born with a capacity for judgement and self-judgement beyond his years, a capacity that was strangely fractured, strangely unfulfilled, a capacity to employ such partial fracture as an integral element in unravelling/overcoming the lure of diseased Ambition or conquest.

In other words the humiliation of the plucked brand he had seen as himself, the potential Abortion written into foetal self, ran in parallel with the psychology of rape he had endured at the age of nine on the foreshore, but the mask of the cuckold upon his legal father (and the humiliation that also implied for his family) was radically different in its internal essence from plucked brand or false shaman. It originated a vision through the Abortion of an age, through the fallacious proprieties of an age, it originated a capacity to set material pride aside in favour of the spirit of care, the innermost spirit of Sex, the spirit of brooding creativity that takes over where nature leaves off … I was, to say the least, intrigued at the origins of such conversion of humiliation into the genius of love that differed from the natural impact of humiliation upon the material body. I was at a loss to understand it all, though I had glimpsed again the transfigurative wound of which Masters spoke on so many occasions. He desisted from saying anything more at this stage though I knew now that his guidance into realms that seemed to exist before birth and after death bestowed upon me in this life (this lived life) a privilege that would deepen and expand the biography of spirit on which I was engaged. It would deepen it, expand it, in peculiar and mutual engagement between author and character at the heart of Carnival.

Soon I was to perceive in the complex loves and sorrows of Masters’ life that I was as much a character (or character-mask) in Carnival as he was. Indeed in a real and unreal sense he and other character-masks were the joint authors of Carnival and I was their creation. They drew me to surrender myself to them.

My hand was suffused as I wrote by their parallel hands, my eyes as I looked around by their parallel eyes … And suddenly, paradoxically, it seemed to me that Masters’ coiled posture in the glass woman, his mother, turned upon me and conferred upon me a blessing or privilege, the fictional law that husbands the mother of a Carnival god when it (that law) — that character of law — dons the mask of the cuckold within Carnival.

“That mask,” Masters said, “possesses its origins in the family humiliations I have disclosed that evolve nevertheless into spirit-parent, into fiction-maker, that I confer now upon you.” He cried to me from the womb as much as from the grave that such a peculiar translation of the wounds of humanity was indeed the law of fiction and to wear it made me not only his creation but his father-spirit, to wear it made me not only their creation but the parent-spark of the other characters in Carnival.

Such is the paradox, the comedy, of half-divine, half-Carnival, character-masks in the medium of time. For Carnival time is partial, the past and the present and the future are parts of an unfathomable Carnival whole beyond total capture. Thus the past, as much as the future, bears upon the present, they are the children of the present but they also parent the present. The hidden past affects the present even as it emerges through present discoveries as a new, unsuspected force. If the present parents the future how can it also be the child of the future?

“The contradiction is resolved,” Masters said, “when one sees that the parts of time within which we live, die, are born, imply that there is no absolute parent or model of time that we can seize.

“To see into the future — as into the hidden past — is a revelation of the partial ground on which we stand and the partial ground to which we move backwards or forwards.

“To see into the past as into the future is not to possess absolute knowledge of the past or the future but to be moved nevertheless by the mystery of originality that gives birth to the future as the future and the past give birth to ourselves.

“That originality, that mystery, may perceive a real, however elusive or incomplete, outline of coming events — or hidden past events — even as it confesses to deeper and farther hidden pasts and coming futures that are already transforming the basis of what one sees and feels in this moment. Freedom therefore is grounded in perceptions of originality that see through absolute fate.”

I was seized by a responsibility that may have intuitively existed in everything I had already written but which suddenly acquired a new, subtly terrifying, dimension.

Take, for example, young Masters’ cousin Thomas, the twelve-year-old boy who had vanished in a clump on the foreshore pursuing an animal fragment of original cosmic crab. Was he twelve years old or twelve hundred years old? Whose child was he? In consulting my notes of conversations with Masters in the 1960s and 1970s I find no reference to Thomas’s parent-masks.

Masters nudged me suddenly in the labyrinth of past/present/future through which we moved into accepting his cousin as my spirit-flesh, my fiction-blood. I hesitated even as I accepted. I felt an inner turbulence. Was I giving Thomas the Doubter a new, unsuspected, disturbing Carnival adolescence in a twentieth-century plantation Inferno or Purgatory? Such responsibility in fiction comes as a shock, a blow. For if Doubt (rather than Faith) and its astronomic, biologic, economic antecedents were to be sanctioned and protected by its spirit-parent, and to become my progeny, then the law of fiction I represented needed to visualize diverse proportions of the body of tormented love it had vicariously married to become Thomas’s Carnival parent. One’s obsession with the tormented body of love — who was parent, who not, who would inherit the earth, who not, whose populations were exploding, whose not, who possessed the future, who did not — needed to secure guides (concrete in instinctual imagination) if one were to visualize foetal significance, emergence, adolescence, in alien — or apparently alien — generations one accepted and adopted.

One needed guides in those who — driven by regimes of fear or uncertainty — had regressed backwards in space or had “re-entered the body of the mother” they idolized or worshipped.

I grant that Masters was a principal guide in this context of regression that counterpoints progression and it was he who bestowed upon me the privileged mask of fiction-parent; but in becoming my concrete guide into an area or areas I had but vicariously married he opened the body of time to young Thomas as well and to uncertainties I needed to fathom as acutely more relevant to me, and my age, than Faith. All this in spite of my earlier revelation of the hand of cousinly Thomas that exacerbated the wound it sought to prove. In such exacerbation lay a blindness, or cloud over the world’s eyes I had not realized or experienced before. And in this new exacerbated guidance, or journey into blind collision between worlds seeking to prove each other, young Thomas was virtually indispensable …