I Carnival Time! Wilson Harris and the Carnivalesque A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English Literature in the University of Canterbury by Paul Mountfort University of Canterbury 1993 II Here we find .... chimeras (fantastic forms combining human, animal, and vegetable elements), comic devils, jugglers performing acrobatic tricks, masquerade figures and parodical scenes - that is, purely grotesque carnival themes. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World One lives in and out of Carnival time since each element that masks us sustains time as its original medium of sacrifice within creation. Not only that. Original medium of theatre. One is the other's veil of timely or untimely dust. Wilson Harris,Carnival Ill Contents: Abstract IV Introduction 1 I - Carnival's Passages 11 II - 'The Scene of the Infinite Rehearsal' 43 III - 'A Limbo Stage' 70 IV - 'The Harlequin's Cloak' 99 V - 'The Climax of Carnival' 124 Appendix One: A chronology of Wilson Harris's Novels 144 Bibliography 145 IV Abstract The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the growing appreciation of the importance of carnivalesque elements in the novels of Wilson Harris. Since all reading and criticism is partial, the introduction gives a brief summary of critical approaches to this aspect of the Harris's work. Building on the insights of these critics this study presents a short festive, folkloric and literary history of carnival from its origins, thus providing background to the celebration of the festival in the present-day Caribbean. Classic carnivalesque features are listed which, though suggestive rather than exhaustive, provide guiding criteria for the readings that follow. While not attempting a thorough-going exegesis of Harris's critical and philosophic writing - which reveal much about his understanding and usage of carnival - I finish my history of carnival with a brief exploration of his non­ fictional contributions to the subject. The following chapters divide Harris's work into four broad phases and undertake readings of a selection of his novels up to what can be regarded as their culmination or climax in the novel Carnival. Although the readings are essentially thematic, concerned above all with the writer's carnivalesque vision as conveyed in the novels, there are frequent references to his narrative techniques and this builds towards some tentative conclusions about Harris's innovations of form and the implications of this for the art of the novel. Paul Mountfort 1 Introduction The Anancy artist is the masquerading carnival figure par excellence. Joyce Jonas Caribbean carnival today (including the metropolitan celebrations spawned in such cities as New York, Toronto and London) is a multicultural ensemble, a mosaic of historic and innovative festival forms. Carnival's history resembles the course of a great river with many tributaries which has spilled into a 'callaloo of global dimensions' in the late- twentieth century, or a huge tree whose roots lie in pre-hist01y and whose branches are the myriad post-colonial variants of the festival. In its present day forms Caribbean carnival, with its hybridization of diverse elements, reflects the wider island and mainland national life of the region in which there is a mixing of belief and religious custom as varied as races - typically one finds devotees of Voodoo, Rastafarianism, Santeria, Obeah and Shango alongside those of Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam and Hinduism. The syncretism represented by the festival, then, however fraught its origins and convulsive its history exemplifies principals of cross-cultural fertilization in the development of the Caribbean. As a contributor to Caribbean Festival Arts comments: African slaves, repatriated slaves, and Chinese and East Indian indentured labourers brought to the island [Trinidad] cultural traditions that the European considered exotic, pagan and sub-human. Today these disparate traditions blend into Carnival, giving unity and identity to a country characterised in the past by racial tension, cultural bias and religious bigotry.1 In cultural and artistic terms, the so called 'creole aesthetic' of an assembly of diverse, Calypsonian elements present in carnival has a broad application and makes itself 2 felt in many spheres in contemporary Caribbean life. This is certainly true of creative fiction. Writers such as George Lamming, Earl Lovelace, Willi Chen, Rawli Gibbons, Paule Marshall, Derek Walcott and others have engaged carnival in their works as a symbol of the region's cultural constitution (with varying degrees of ambivalence), but the central figure both in terms of carnival as subject and the evolution of a new, camivalesquefonnfor the novel must be Wilson Harris.2 It is he who embraces carnival as a cross-cultural medium in its fullest potential. Michael Gilkes, in the first full length study of Harri.s's works, wrote that [a] new state of consciousness, a new and original growth in sensibility produced, as it were, by a genuine cross-fertilization of cultures and races, is the main theme of Wilson Harris's work. His novels illustrate what must be considered as perhaps the most remarkable and odginal aspect of West Indian writing: one in which the condition of cultural and racial admixture itself becomes the 'complex womb' of a new wholeness of vision. 3 A realization is now emerging amongst critics that carnival and the carnivalesque are central to this cross-ferilization and have evolved into a fundamental dimension of Rani.s's fiction over the course of his writing career. As a symbol of cross-cultural fertilization in the Caribbean, carnival is vital to both the material and the techniques Harris has developed in the workings of what he calls 'the cross-cultural imagination.' Carnival is both an explicit and implicit concern in many of his novels and of his writings as a whole. But before the question of what the distinguishing features of this aspect of Harris's work are is addressed, it is necessary to ask what is meant by carnival and the carnivalesque in the context of his fictions, and how does one set about reading them? Gilkes, in a recent critical work, quotes the Guyanese artist and writer Denis Williams as having written of Harris's writing in 1969: 'We shall need to forge an entirely new critical apparatus for assessing these works. So that right now it would be a bold man indeed who would attempt a comprehensive exegesis.' He notes that since then several 3 full length studies have appeared, but what is needed remains 'nothing less than a revolution in sensibility; a 'literacy of the imagination' to allow in reader and critic for an openness to language as vision rather than exclusive intellectual meaning. •4 I would like to address this in the present study by avoiding, as much as possible, the reductionist criteria which sometimes guide analysis and definition in criticism - to forego any attempt to trap the meaning of such terms as comedy, tragedy, sacrifice, representation, form, mask, masquerade, the grotesque, creativity, and carnival - and endeavour instead to build up a body of fundamental associations between carnival itself and elements which run throughout or evolve over the course of Harris's work . What I propose is to undertake a reading (or series of readings) of carnival and carnivalesque elements in some ten of Harris's novels, chronicling their development through four broad phases of his work.5 These readings seek not so much to present a linear argument leading up to an overwhelming conclusion - a technique of criticism Harris's fiction resists - but to discern salient features of carnival and follow certain threads in the tapestry of Harris's fictions in the process of evolution to their culmination in the most recent phase of his fictional writing, with the publication of the Carnival Trilogy. This study, therefore, should provide a frame-work for establishing what carnival is and what constitutes the carnivalesque and- allowing for the creative role of the reader in the capacity of a text to mean and the freedom of both (reader and text) - let the novels 'speak for themselves' as much as possible. The aim is to provide a catalogue or index of carnival elements in Harris's opus which, in many ways, epitomise the colourful content and innovative style and of his fiction. A brief look at the critical contributions to the subject to date will help to establish the nature of the field and show how these elements of Harris' s fiction have been read formerly. Rena Maes-Jelinek first recognised the importance of carnival in the development of Harris's work in an essay, "Carnival' and Creativity in Wilson HalTis's fiction' (1986). She identifies carnivalesque elements appearing with increasing frequency and deepening significance from Harris's earliest novel, Palace of the Peacock. 4 The penetration of masks to unravel deeply buried and unconscious residues of individual and historical experience; the need to trace and elucidate real motivations behind paradoxical or deceptive appearances; the presentation of characters associated with camival but also representative of the sharp contrasts to be found in poor and/or colonial societies: the King, the Clown, the nameless fool who identifies with the exploited or eclipsed majority, the Harlequin; the increasing self-relexivity which intensifies Harris's fusion of 'vision and idea', the metaphorical and the abstract; all come together and illustrate his notion of comedy represented in Camival. 6 Maes-Jelinek devotes most of her attention to Harris's 1985 novel Camival, though in acknowledging and briefly discussing the development of such features throughout Harris's works to their 'climax', as it were, she points to the scope which exists for a sustained reading of carnivalesque features across a series of his novels such as is undertaken in the present study.