Donne has several moments where he expresses misgivings about having become “the most violent taskmaster” and of being involved in “the most frightful material slavery”. He confesses that he drives himself “with no hope of redemption whatsoever” and would not be surprised if the Indians do him in. For a moment at any rate, he longs for release.
Harris uses the figure of Donne to present man in the rich welter of his material obsessions and spiritual drives, and to bring the reader closer to harmonising these. It is not necessary to worry about whether Donne is alive or saved at the end. And it is not fair to ask Harris to write a novel in which the characters live as ordinary people who have internalised the novels’ “vision of consciousness”. What happens to the figures in the novels happens for the reader’s benefit. It is the reader who becomes the characters. The characters can go hang when they are done. Donne is shot or hanged by Mariella.
Towards the end of Palace of the Peacock, Harris tries to write about how beautiful heaven can be. Donne and his crew come to the highest waterfall they have ever seen. Astonished at “the immaculate bridal veil falling motionlessly from the river’s tall brink”, they abandon their boat and engine and begin ascending the cliff, mounting the steps and balconies that have been nailed with abandon from bottom to top. Donne comes to a window in the cliff and his eyes take in a vision of eternity in the glistening shimmering form of ancient everlasting mother and child. This is Harris describing the eternal with tranquillity and passion together. This is Harris trying to write about what happens in heaven. But you can’t look upon the glory of the Lord and escape unscathed. See what happens to the fierce conquistador: “Donne knew he was truly blind now at last. He saw nothing. The burning pain he felt suddenly in his eye extended down his face and along the column of his neck until it branched into nerves and limbs. His teeth loosened in their sockets and he moved his tongue gingerly along them. He trembled as he saw himself inwardly melting into nothingness and into the body of his death. He kept sliding on the slippery moss of the cliff and along columns and grease and mud. A singular thought always secured him to the scaffolding. It was the unflinching clarity with which he looked into himself and saw that all his life he had loved no one but himself.”
This is a dangerous passage because it could be used to reduce the book to a vulgar morality tale. The dissolution of the material Donne is not the climax but a preliminary stage. Harris is the first deconstructionist. But Caribbean deconstruction was never negative or cynical. All colonials have to deconstruct. All those people telling you who you are. People trying to Other you. The Secret Ladder describes in the clearest of terms the beginning of the post-colonial process of casting off what has been imposed. Russell Fenwick realises he is not really going mad in the bush: “Seven days it had taken to finish the original veil of creation that shaped and ordered all things to be solid in the beginning. So the oldest fable ran. Perhaps seven too were needed to strip and subtilize everything … The seven beads of the original creation had been material days of efflorescence and bloom to distinguish their truly material character. But now the opposite realities of freedom were being chosen (not phenomena of efflorescence but shells and skeletons) to distinguish an immaterial constitution (which after all was the essential legitimacy of all creation).” That is what happens to Donne and the crew. The seven days up to Mariella are for deconstruction. The seven days after are days of re-construction.
In the final paragraph of Palace the reader realises that he is the Dreamer, and the novel he has just read is an exploration of his own journey towards resurrection. Self-knowledge and acceptance. Donne is part of the Dreamer, part of us. The whole crew including Donne are the humanity of the Dreamer come from the past to free him up into complexity. “I felt the faces before me begin to fade and part company from me and from themselves as if the need of one another was now fulfilled, and our distance from each other was the distance of a sacrament, the sacrament and embrace we knew in one muse and one undying soul. Each of us now held at last in his arms what he had been for ever seeking and what he had eternally possessed.”
You may or may not be convinced by the novel’s attempt to take us back to the original moment of creation, to sustainment by the undivided soul and anima in the universe. But its psychological truth is inescapable: the Palace of the Peacock, El Dorado, call it what you will, is inside us.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wilson Harris was born in 1921 in the former colony of British Guiana. He was a land surveyor before leaving for England in 1959 to become a full-time writer. His exploration of the dense forests, rivers and vast savannahs of the Guyanese hinterland features prominently in the settings of his fiction. Harris’s novels are complex, alluding to diverse mythologies from different cultures, and eschew conventional narration in favour of shifting interwoven voices. His first novel Palace of the Peacock (1960) became the first of The Guyana Quartet, which includes The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962) and The Secret Ladder (1963). He later wrote The Carnival Trilogy (Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990)). His most recent novels are Jonestown (1996), which tells of the mass-suicide of a thousand followers of cult leader Jim Jones; The Dark Jester (2001), his latest semi-autobiographical novel, The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and one of his most accessible novels in decades, The Ghost of Memory (2006). Wilson Harris also writes non-fiction and critical essays and has been awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liège (2001). He has twice been winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature.