A challenge also to the various kinds of death or finality we accept in the absence of such a treaty. A challenge to tribalism and to fundamentalist assumptions of pure racial ancestry. As previously mentioned, the book lists and names all the members of Donne’s crew who are heading towards the Mission at Mariella. They are distinct and vivid individuals. They represent the whole spectrum from Amerindian and White West Indian to Africans of various hues, Portuguese, and several mixtures — all the people who ever came to these islands. But it is not historical identity that Harris is primarily concerned to establish: “The whole crew was one spiritual family living and dying together in a common grave out of which they had sprung again from the same soul and womb as it were. They were all knotted and bound together in the enormous bruised head of Cameron’s ancestry and nature as in the white unshaven head of Schomburg’s age and presence.” Palace of the Peacock is the first clear expression of the existence and the desirability of our cross-culturalism.
The dreamer realises that he and Donne and Donne’s crew are all in the same boat, on the same quest, dying and being born over and over again on their journey to El Dorado, the peacock palace, the dream of heaven, the dream of love on this brittle earth: “I saw with a thumping impossible heart I was reliving Donne’s first innocent voyage and journey into the interior country … [Donne] was glad for a chance to return to that first muse and journey … And with his miraculous return to his heart’s image and lust again, I saw — rising out of the grave of my blindness — the nucleus of that bodily crew … They had all come to me at last in a flash to fulfil one self-same early desire and need in all of us.”
What is the good of all this? Harris’s novels are just the thing if you find yourself suspended in a tide of superficialities, materialism, economic determinism, repetition, division and strife. Just the thing if the world seems flat and stale and you are afraid of undiscovered countries. Just the thing if you are so caught up in the day to day that you feel you are in danger of distrusting what is nebulous in your life and your self just because it is nebulous and unbound. We are made to look with fear and trembling on the devil called Donne because in this one body Harris locates so much of the cynicism, the self-destructive violence, the drive for power and possession, as well as the unacknowledged guilt and unhappiness of many people lost in the world today.
But Donne is not alone. The dreamer notices a frightening resemblance between Donne and Donne’s understudy, the bowman Wishrop, especially when the two are standing side by side. Almost at the same time, however, the Dreamer’s heart comes into his mouth because he is certain Donne was “myself standing outside of me while I stood inside of him”. As the book unfolds and spirals all the characters seem to be facets or aspects of Donne; at the same time, every character seems to be a Donne in his own right. We know from the start that Donne and the dreamer are brothers or halves of the same person.
So if we concentrate on Donne and follow his story we can’t lose too much about the novel as a whole, and we stay constantly in tune with the ways in which the novel uses the convention of the individual character only to undermine it. More than any other Harris novel, this one uses all the conventions of the novel to undermine the conventions of the novel. A sense of place, a sense of history, recognisable characters, the language of ordinary people and linear structure are similarly treated. The ghosts of all of these devices serve necessary functions, but the book pretends not to need them. And ultimately doesn’t.
Harris’s work is one long endeavour to shake our complacent investment in our conditioned reality and especially the notion that the individual in “real life” is or can be self-sufficient. The human subject is not separate from other people, past, present and future. The human subject is haunted by ghosts resident in this place and in other places. He does not have an identity sealed off from other species or from the life of nature.
But listen to Donne’s thundering and you hear the gun-talk of a Caribbean familiar: “I tell you I fight everything in nature — flood, drought, chicken hawk, rat, beast and woman. I’m everything. Midwife, yes, doctor, yes, gaoler, judge, hangman, every blasted thing to the labouring people.” Donne utters this robber-talk when the Dreamer upbraids him for his exploitation of the folk and his abuse of the woman Mariella. Donne reminds his brother that life in an outpost of progress is tough. Once you have yielded to the heart of darkness that is imperial and colonial exploitation, you have to be a devil to survive.
Like many people who have had it hard, Donne has taken survival beyond the boundary and turned the quest for power and material security into a permanent cloak or bullet-proof vest. His immigrant parents were farmers and hand-to-mouth business folk. They had had a hard life in the colony. When they died young, the forced-ripe Donne was obliged to take care of his brother the Dreamer.
But there is a fire in Donne that the increasingly timid, repressed and decent Dreamer longed to accommodate even as a child. A native of the Dreamer’s person, in fact, that would not accept the sentence and censure of education into self-control. Until Donne got himself expelled from school and joined up with a team of ranchers in the border country. “I had a curious sense of hard-won freedom when you had gone,” the Dreamer tells Donne. But the obsession never leaves him, and that is why he has come to the house Donne has constructed in the savannahs, the house from which he burned to rule the world.
Harris’s scrupulous tracing of the stages by which Donne entangles himself in the kingdom of this world holds the novel together, gives it recognisable reality. It is not difficult to understand Donne’s project to gain the whole world. It is the obsession of immigrants, men who come with nothing and think they are nothing.
Today men are buying up the island of Tobago, buying up Blanchisseuse, buying up Matura and other profitable choice sites in all the islands. Taking over banks. Rearing tourism hotels. Accumulating property to rent to embassies and foreign investors. Building access roads to plunder the land. It is the con-man version, the service-industry version, the insider-trading version, decadent forms of creativity, sad substitutes for the pioneering energy of a Donne or for the entrepreneurial spirit that took risks and built America. Palace of the Peacock understands the perils facing exploiter and exploited in the past and now.
Donne is bold-faced and brazen with his materialism: “‘Now I’m a man. I’ve learnt‚’ he waved his hands at the savannahs, ‘to rule this. This is the ultimate. This is everlasting. One doesn’t have to see deeper than that, does one?’ He stared at me hard as death. ‘Rule the land‚’ he said, ‘while you still have a ghost of a chance. And you rule the world. Look at the sun.’ His dead eye blinded mine. ‘Look at the sun‚’ he cried in a stamping terrible voice.” Donne thinks he is fighting his way out of the economic nightmare that killed off his parents before they had a chance to live. He disputes that “these devils” (the Amerindians) have title to the savannahs and the region. “‘After all, I’ve earned a right here as well. I’m as native as they, ain’t I?’”
The Dreamer is repelled and fascinated by Donne’s fierce and uninhibited energy. The novel celebrates this energy and juxtaposes the amoral Donne with the Churchy, frustrated Dreamer. But it is not a case of Donne being evil and the Dreamer good. Better to be Donne or Sutpen or Faust than the Dreamer, actually. Donne, at least, is living!