16 Wilson Harris: Palace of the Peacock

Dr. Melissa Helen

I INTRODUCTION

I.   1 About the Author- Personal details

Theodore Wilson Harris was born on March 24, 1921 in New Amsterdam, British Guiana (now Guyana) and is now a resident of England. However, he is included in the canon of Caribbean literature as Harris graduated from Queen’s College in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. He has been greatly influenced by his life and experiences in Guyana. He studied land surveying and geomorphology in Guyana and for some time worked as a government surveyor. He also led expeditions into the Amazonian forests in the interior of Guyana.

In addition to providing him with the geographical and cultural knowledge of the Guyana, his experience as a surveyor also formed the basis of the content and themes of many of his novels. Harris married Cecily Carew in 1945 but later divorced her. After moving to London in 1959, he married the Scottish writer Margaret Burns.

In addition to poetry, Harris also writes fiction, non-fiction and critical essays has taught at several places in the world, including the Mysore University. He was awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liège (2001). He won the Guyana Prize for Literature twice and in 2010 he was honoured as a knight by Queen Elizabeth II.

I.2 His Works:

Though Harris’s published  three  volumes  of  poetry  Fetish (1951), The  Well  and  the  Land (1952), and Eternity to Season (1954) he is recognised for his fiction that he began to publish after coming to England. The Guyana Quartet comprises his first four novels: Palace of the Peacock (1960) The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963).

The Far Journey of Oudin, set in Guyana deals with the history of the family of Oudin, a servant who flees with Beti to save her from the unwanted advances of another man. The Whole Armour is centred on Magda, a prostitute in a brothel. Her son Cristo who is accused of murder escapes for his life is joined by Sharon who conceives his child. Cristo is eventually captured and sentenced to death

The Carnival Trilogy includes three novels: Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990).Some of his recent novels include Jonestown (1996), The Dark Jester (2001), The Mask of the Beggar (2003) a partially autobiographical and The Ghost of Memory (2006).

I. 3 Distinctive features of his works:I. 3 i) Narrative Technique:

Harris’ novels are difficult to read and they challenge the reader for the nature of his unconventional plot structure and narrative strategies. He is known for experimenting with plot and narrative structures. Often there is a blurring of the different states of consciousness –

– dreams versus reality; the external reality gets blurred with the internal state of mind. In many of his works, the story line emerges out of the memories and dream like states of the characters. The Waiting Room (1967) is the story of Susan a blind girl, her husband and her recollections of her former lover who disappeared into the jungle. Her diary found in the debris of an explosion that killed her and her husband gives the novel a sense of abstraction and narrative fragmentation.

His narratives acquire a complexity as he experiments and employs unconventional narrators and strategies. The Eye of the Scarecrow (1965) is regarded as the most unconventional narrative. The narrator “It,” transcends all story-telling conventions.

I. 3 ii) Setting:

Though his career as a fiction writer began after coming to England, the landscape, history, and culture of Guyana form the basis of his imagination in many of his early novels. A number of works are set in the cities, villages or jungles of the Guyana or along the Amazonian river.

I. 3 iii) Characters:

Since Wilson Harris’ is of Amerindian, African, and English descent, the characters in his novels are equally diverse – – from the descendants of the aboriginal Amerindians, the slaves brought from Africa and India, to the European colonizers. Often, he tries to explore the themes of conquest and colonization and the struggles of colonized peoples.

I. 3 iv) Symbolism and Myth:

While his symbolism reveals his knowledge of the rich cultural history of Amerindian folk- lore, his allusions show his awareness of English literature, classical mythology and Christian iconography and allegory. His employment of several states is based upon the Jungian psychoanalytic theory, and English literature.

For Harris’ myth plays a major role as a mediating instrument between the binary cultures that exclude one another to forge divisions. In his fiction he has re-written both European and Caribbean myths to show the possibility of attaining wholeness. He believes that the vastly different and seemingly contradictory differences of humanity — based on race, civilisation, religion, language, country and culture, may be reconciled through the myths.

I. 3 v) Themes:

Often, he tries to explore the themes of conquest and colonization and the struggles of colonized peoples and the clash of cultures. His themes also include: the role of the imagination, the ambiguity of language, and the forging of identity between native and foreign culture, and, the redemption of mankind.

2   The Novel

Summary: Palace of the Peacock is the first one of the Guyana Quartet and was his first novel to be published in 1960 after he came to England. It basically describes the experience of a crew of non-natives along the river into the innermost settlements of Guyana.

The expedition comprises of Donne, and his brother who is also the narrator, and others who are from all the different ethnic groups of Guyana. They set off on a boat to look for a group of Amerindians whom the Donne, the plantation owner needs for his farm. Donne takes with them an old Amerindian woman, Mariella, to be their guide and translator. She is a representative of the archetypal Guyanese woman who are usually abused and exploited. However, Mariella disappears and the men are left with-out a translator.

In addition to the disappearance of the muse, as they continue their Mission of Mariella, they face severe hardships, danger and death. Donne the cruel plantation owner reminds the reader of the protagonist Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The journey actually translates into a journey of self-discovery for the narrator, a dreamer and Donne.

Harris seeks to expose the illusion of opposites that create enmities between people. The captain Donne’s exploitation of the natives is representative of the large discriminations of racism and the binaries between the coloniser and the colonised world.

Characters:

There are eleven characters that the readers need to know. Apart from the native woman Mariella, the crew on this mission to Mariella consists of Donne, the non-native plantation slave owner and his brother who narrates the story. The other crew members are the old Schomburgh, the bowman and his assistant Wishrop; Vigilance an Indian and his Negro cousin Carroll; Cameron and Jennings a mechanic and two twins from Portugal.

2.2. i The Narrator: The narrator is also the dreaming I and the younger brother of Donne. He has accompanied Donne on his journey in search of the natives who ran away. But he is the lone survivor to tell us the strange story. His experience is mystical as it appears to unite the dead men and the living ones – for all times and all places.

2.2. ii Donne: He is the brown skinned man and the owner of the estate in interior Guyana. He appears to be a tough man and harsh in his dealings with the men and women alike. We find him almost brutal in his dealings with his mistress Mariella.

2.2. iii Cameron: Cameron is a member of the crew. His Scottish and African heritage is indicated by his red face and kinky hair. He is frustrated as he failed to accumulate enough money to own some land. However we come across him as a quiet and long suffering person.

2.2. iv Schomburg: Another crew member who is of German and Amerindian descent. He appears to be a good bowman despite his the fact that he is in his fifties. His son Carroll is also on the crew.

2.2. v Carroll: An endearing young boy of seventeen, is also strong and sturdy built. He is gifted with a beautiful voice to sing but unfortunately is the first one to drown.

2.2. vi Vigilance: A black haired Indian, and a step brother to Carroll helps the crew to lookout for the rest of the crew.

2.2. vii Jennings: The member of the crew who is also responsible for the boat’s engine appears to be a serious man. But he is rebellious and quarrelsome and dies in a fall.

2.2. viii Da Silva Twins: Two Portuguese twins on the crew. One of them kills Cameron in a fight.

2.2. ix Mariella: The only woman in the novel is the old Arawak woman. She is the mistress of Donne.

However much Donne ill-treats her, she exhibits a spirit of forbearance. She stands for all that the exploiters are in search of. Though she disappears, however, as the dream at the beginning reveals, the narrator has a premonition that she will eventually destroy Donne.

2.2. x Wishrop: A man in his forties in also the assistant bowman on the crew. An apparently violent man he killed his wife, her lover and the priest who married them. When he is on the run from the authorities in Venezuela is helped by an Arawak woman whom he kills later. Eventually drowns to his death on this mission.

3.   Summary of the Novel:

The novel consists of four books each book begins with a short quotation from a poet. The brief novel of twelve chapters is subdivided into four books. The division of the books is done in a manner that shadows the various stages of their symbolic journey that takes place through reflections and introspection to a new understanding of many things in life.

Book 1: The first book titled “Horseman, Pass By” accosts the readers with a quotation from Yeats: Cast a cold eye/On Life, on death. /Horseman, pass by. The first book introduces the readers to the basic plot – a boat is journeying up the river through the Guyanese rain forest.

The book begins with a dream by the narrator, in which a horseman who is riding at a great speed is shot to death. It is interesting to note that from the beginning of the novel, the reader is introduced to the obfuscation of the binaries of life.

The dream is actually prophetic of the events to unfold on their journey. It indicates that Donne is likely to meet a fatal death at the hands of either the woman or the natives. As the narrator is woken up from his dream and sleep by an insistent rapping on his door by Donne. The narrator recollects Donne’s wild exploits at school for which he was eventually expelled and the memory of Donne possessed ‘a cruel glory’ for him.

In this book, the readers are introduced to the complicating world of dreams and reality. As the narrator wakes up intermittently from his dreaming state to a state of consciousness, we gather details of the story. We learn of the Donne’s cruel treatment of his mistress when she comes to the narrator and shows the marks of whipping on her legs. The narrator shares his dream to Donne. Donne on his part acknowledges that his life was tough. As a last landlord, he has to “fight everything in nature, nature, flood, drought, chicken, hawk, rat, beast and woman…” Donne reminisces their childhood – their parents ‘economic nightmare’ their early death and his forced parental responsibility of the narrator. He tells his brother of his progress as a man when he has learnt to rule the savannahs.

Through intermittent states of dream and consciousness, the first book ushers in the story element- Donne the violent taskmaster’s attempts to exploit the natives for his avarice to build a palace and make a name for himself.

3. 2 Book II: The second book “The Mission of Mariella” we read that as soon as the crew reached the village, a colony of Amerindians, the news of the arrival of Donne spread like around the colony. However, before they could tie the boat securely to the bank, all the people including the ‘young children who had been playing and scrambling near the coercite houses’ abandoned the village. After spending a night in a deserted village, in their hammocks, the narrator vividly recalls that it every grey hammock was an ‘empty cocoon as hollow and as a deserted shell’.

In his hallucinations and dreams the narrator had encounter with strange beasts. In the uncertain grey light, he thought it was a dog or horse but it was half-wolf, half-donkey neighing and barking. As he attempts to mount on it, it shrinks into a half-woman and half- log and the narrator raises his hand to cajole its ageing, soulful face.

Later we learn that Donne and a daSilva twin are successful in finding someone to guide them to the interior of the jungle where the natives fled. Donne almost brings an old Arawak woman by force.

As his brother looks at Donne, he wonders at the picture that Donne presented of himself. Donne looked like an apparition with his ‘eyes sunken and impatient in rage, burning with the intensity of horror and ambition’ (55). As Donne addresses the crew, the narrator experiences the spell of the jungle over himself.

The woman tells them that if they take a seven day journey up the river, they will find the natives. But Schomburgh is the first one to understand the risk and the imminent danger involved in the search. Jennings also warns them that they were fortunate in reaching the village and it was a bad time of the year to go up on the river. Amidst mixed reactions from his crew, Donne forces to start on their mission in search of the natives.

The second book gives us insights into the life of Wishrop and other crew members.

3. 3 Book III: The third book is aptly titled as “The Second Death”. The crew that was earlier fortunate in escaping the first death on their journey to Mariella is now embarking on the most challenging mission. The book is introduced with lines from John Donne “I tune the instrument here at the door, /and what I must do then, think here before.” The third book, the longest one of the novel reveals their struggles up the stream and the death of a number of them. Through the ‘straits of memory’ this book gives details about Carroll and his family.

The readers are introduced to the new member of the crew who sat “crumpled-looking like a curious ball, old and wrinkled…as a bowing statue, the stillness and surrender of the American Indian of Guiana… She belonged to a race that neither forgave nor forgot” (71). After the first day of their journey, the dreaming narrator and the crew are caught in the ‘straits of memory’. As the novel continues in the voice of an omniscient narrator, we find the crew is caught in the ‘sudden dreaming fury of the stream’ and the agitated river appears to be a combination of an earthquake and volcanic water fills them with terror.

As they enter the War Office rapids, each begins to wonder who the Jonah was and indubitably Donne is blamed for capturing this witch of a woman. The first tragedy strikes when Carroll the youngest gets up to help steer the boat but slips and falls into the water. Mysteriously, his father Schomburgh also died in his sleep.

With the loss of the interpreter Schomburgh the crew feel lost as they cannot communicate with the Arawak for further directions. However, as Donne puts forward his plan, amidst hesitation from Jennings, the crew resume their journey. But raging torrents of the river are like the ‘boiling stream and furnace of an endless life without beginning and end’ (99). As ‘inspired madmen’ they make all efforts only to realise that their boat struck a rock and the ‘boat is now the vessel of their second death’ (100). The descriptions of the turbulent river and the landscape have a symbolic as well as a realistic meaning.

While Jennings dies in a fall, Cameron is stabbed to death by a daSilva twin and Wishrop straining at the engine also meets his watery grave in the maelstrom. Finally on the seventh day, when the boat was totally wrecked, and with the death of all the crew members except Vigilance who disappears mysteriously with Mariella, the dreaming narrator gains a new perspective and offers the substance of the mission in the last book.

3.  4 Book IV: The final book “Paling of Ancestors” leads us into a confused state as the journey and the dream advance to a conclusion. Amidst visions, Donne when he enters the ‘palace’ his monument he realises that nothing had any significance and his dream, his conquest was as threadbare as the clothes of the woman in the vision. He realised that ‘all his life he loved no one but himself’ (140). But he realised it was just a fantasy ‘but it was his blindness that made him see his own nothingness and imagination constructed beyond his reach’.

Harris uses the medium of music as a harmony to bring in an epiphany. The surviving crew realise that the inconsequential nature of their conquest and material wealth. The novel ends with Harris’ vision of the possible harmony of several binaries. The distinction between peacock and palace, dream and consciousness, illusion and reality, soul and flesh, material and spiritual, time and eternity, savannah and forest are all presented as one entity. The novel ends on the hope of the possibility of Harris’ vision– the formation of a true community that in inclusive of all the various elements of Guiana.

4 The Novel – Analysis and Critical Appreciation

4.  1 Theme: The novel makes one realise that through introspection and a confrontation with our past we can have a purgatory effect that leads one to a re-orientation in thinking- a possibility of rebirth and new beginnings. As the narrator goes through different states of reality, hallucinations and dreams, confronts his illusions and fears, he finally understands that his experience is not restricted to Donne and the crew’s experience but it has a greater significance as it relates to the experience of the mankind at large.

Symbolism: A cursory reading leaves the readers clueless about the symbolism in the title Palace of the Peacock. Peacock as a symbol is as rich and multifarious in its meanings as hues of the peacock. Though different cultures and religions vary in the meanings associated with it, in general it stands for beauty, glory, royalty, and immortality. Here Harris uses it as a symbol to talk about his vision of a unified society- that can be achieved when we attempt to better ourselves and realise the need to integrate all the sections/ races of the world in general and Guiana in particular.

On another level, the ‘Palace of the Peacock’ that they reach at the end of the journey is only a phantasm that leaves them with destruction of their own selves.

While Donne stands for exploiting European civilisation, the crew represent the major racial groups of post-colonial Guiana.

The journey is symbolic of the exploration of their identity of the true selves. The seven day journey resonating the seven day period of creation and rest in Genesis is destructive and therefore anti-Genesis. However the symbolic journey becomes the bildungsroman for the narrator.

Plot: In 1964, Wilson Harris in his lecture ‘Tradition and the West Indian Novel’ considered that the traditional mainstream English novel of the 19th century as a ‘ novel of persuasion’ which is generally a chronicle of ‘an individual span of life’ presented on a linear line of time and plot. Harris rejects this conventional style of fiction with a recognisable linear plot and characters.

This compulsion forces him to adopt many novel techniques and ideas. The breakdown of binary divisions is evident from the epitaph in Book 1. It presents a paradox of life in death, death in life phenomenon. The dreaming narrator speaks of his ‘one dead seeing eye’ and ‘one living closed eye’.

4. 4 Narrative techniques: Since Harris rejects the conventions of a traditional novel, he makes use of several super-realistic devices. In the first book, we find the narrator waking up from his sleep/dream to meet his brother Donne. Throughout the novel, the ambiguity is maintained as the readers are baffled with the different states of consciousness – dreams, visions, hallucinations and the very fantasy of the ‘Palace of the Peacock’. All these add to the complexity of understanding the novel.

The novelist does not limit himself to a single point of view. The shifting of narrative voice from the first person I, third person and at times several points of view enables him to take the readers into the minds of the characters and their feelings which makes it confusing for the reader.

4.  5 Language: The English spoken by the multiracial characters differs from the each other. While Donne the coloniser’s language is flawless when he says, “Life here is tough. One has to be a devil to survive. I am the last landlord…” the pidgin variety is evident in the dialogue between Cameron and daSilva “I is a fool yes. A foolish dead man…but I seeing me parrot.  Is no vulture bird…” to which Cameron replies “What in heaven name really preying on your sight and mind, Boy … I only seeing vulture bird. Where the parrot what eating you?

  Mythmaking and twinning of elements: In order to develop a new consciousness of the composite nature of Guiana as nation, Harris believes in the creation of new myths that embrace the diversity of Guyana. In his novel, in addition to haziness of the dichotomies of life, Harris resorts to the principle of twinning of characters that enables him to create new myths. There are numerous instances of this: Mariella is both the native woman as well the village. The narrator and Donne get intertwined “he was myself standing outside of me while I stood inside of him”.

The narrator awakes to find himself in what appears to be the operating theatre, or a maternity ward or a prison cell. Later in chapter five known we read of a creature that is ‘half-wolf, half-donkey’ and ‘half-woman, half- log’.

It is interesting to note that Harris mythmaking is based on the twinning of myth that results out of an echo of a familiar myth/legend or religious character / story that is presented with a difference. For example: When Donne the leader utters a loud cry and brings back the dead crew to life, it echoes the two myths of the shout of life as is associated with the Bible, and, the ancient Greece myth.

In the book of Ezekiel from the Bible, God takes the prophet Ezekiel in a vision to a valley full of dry bones and asked Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones. As Ezekiel prophesied, the bones all joined together and as he prophesied further, breath of life from four winds entered them. This breath of life entering into the lifeless creatures is reminiscent of the Biblical account of the creation of man — when God breathed His life into Adam’s nostrils and Adam became a living soul.

Ezekiel’s account of the valley of bones also leads us to the bone-flute of Caribbean mythology and other cultures. It is believed that ancient Caribs possessed a bone flute that was made from the body of the enemy. This has subsequently been linked to the notion of the seed of music- the reed pipe and the flute. The critic Arturo Cattaneo, in his article “Harris the Myth Maker” writes:

The value of Harris’s exploration of the genesis of the Carib bone, or bone flute, is that not only does it make us aware of new readings and possibilities of the past but it also helps us to an unbiased reading of the modern world. For Harris, the bone flute is not only the seed of music but, as primitive technology, it is susceptible to high-technology metamorphoses through time of which modern man is hardly conscious.

Thus, one sees a new orientation that helps in the accommodating the seemingly irreconcilable contradictions of Christian and pagan world, white and black and other binaries of life. The ‘Paling of Ancestors’ is one more example of this reconciliation of the dialectics of life. Harris creates a new myth in the tableau of a carpenter (Joseph) woman (Mary, Madonna) and child (Christ) with a difference. When Donne sees a woman wearing a ‘long sweeping garment’ and the whole room reflects the ‘threadbare glistening garment’ is new vision and is a re-telling of the old myth (Madonna) that enumerates Harris’ new vision – of myth making.

Landscape: The characters and the landscape often reflect each other. The landscape plays an important role in the shaping of the characters. The symbolism of the landscape cannot be ignored as the crew fight their way up the raging river. Schomburgh and da Silva twins come from ‘Sorrow Hill’.

It is good to observe the description of the Arawak women as they are fighting on a torrential river. “Tiny embroideries resembling the handwork on the Arawak woman’s kerchief and the wrinkles on her brow turned to incredible and fast soundless breakers of foam. Her crumpled bosom and river grew agitated with desire … The ruffles in the water were her dress rolling …” (73). The novel abounds in a rich description of the land, river and people that is richly symbolic.

5.  Conclusion

Citing Harris’ In his attempt to show the diversity of the Guyanese that shows complexity of the Carribean psyche, Harris’ makes use of characters who have a mix of race and culture. These characters who serve as ‘”real and psychic doubles of each other,’ enable him to present his concept of integration- an “integrated psyche”. This psyche is evident at the end of the novel when the seven explorers are all spirits in the “palace of the peacock” (the literal metaphor for this psychic integration) in a shared, post-death, psychic state represented by the music they all “hear” and their recognition of each other as part of “one undying soul”.

Harris rejects the notion of the ‘novel of persuasion’ since it was unsuitable for a Caribbean writer. Defining the notion of nationhood has always been a challenge for Guyana. The diversity of its racial, ethnic and religious groups and, its colonisation by the British, French, Spanish and Dutch poses a difficulty in developing its national consciousness. One of the foremost concerns of Harris’ is to find and or suggest the creation of a unique Guyanese consciousness.

As Kenneth Ramchand in his introduction to Palace of the Peacock writes, “Harris disregard for the usual conventions of (time, character, social realism) in the novel arises from an almost literal-minded obsession with expressing intuitions about the person and about the structure of societies that men have built for themselves through ages … The West Indian novelist should set out to visualize a fulfilment, a reconciliation in the person and throughout society, of the parts of a heritage of broken cultures”.

Harris is thus successful in showing to his readers that superficial nature of all divisions based on race, color, ethnicity, religion and culture can undergo a metamorphosis like his protagonist who realises that whatever he was chasing as the ideal is in the end insignificant.

Since his works address universal issues and ‘convey a positive, life affirming outlook’ Harris is acclaimed as a postcolonial writer as well as an important literary and cultural critic who would like to invent the forging of a new Guyanese consciousness by re- writing the novel and myths.

As Victoria Toliver opines, Harris’s greatness lies in promoting a ‘radical imagination’ an imagination that is able to read and think across cultures. As the penultimate chapter leads the reader into the ‘palace of the peacock’:

The stars became peacocks’ eyes, and the great tree of flesh and blood swirled into another stream that sparkled with divine feathers where the neck and the hands and the feet had been nailed.

This was the palace of the universe and the windows of the soul looked out and in. The living eyes in the crested head were free to observe the twinkling stars and eyes and windows on the rest of the body and the wings.

The final chapter, despite its brevity is a witness to Harris’ vision and as realisation dawns upon the narrator in the palace, there was ‘inner music’ and the ‘dance of all fulfilment’.

6.  Glossary

Arawak= a member of an Indian people in South America Amerindian= American-Indian

7.    References:

• Cattaneo, Arturo. “Harris The Myth-Maker” Journal of Caribbean Literatures 2.1/2/3 (Spring
• 2000): 96-108. Web.
• Harris, Wilson. Palace of the Peacock. London: Faber and Faber, 1983. Print.
• Jackson, Shona N. “The Recalcitrant Muse: Race, Sex and Historical Tension in the Search for the West Indian”. Caribbean Quarterly 50.3 (September 2004): 47-62. Web.
• Toliver, Victoria. “Vodun Iconography in Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock” Callaloo 18 1. (Winter, 1995): 173-190. Web.