The Metaphor of the Theater in The Four Banks of the River of Space

One: Odyssey

Wilson Harris wrote a short play, “Canje (The River of Ocean),” along with a collection of poems, in Eternity to Season (1954), ¹ in which he embarked on an unfinished odyssey through time and the history of human existence, in an attempt to unravel the tangled web of civilization and arrive at a safe haven for a troubled and tragic world. It is this odyssey that he revisits in The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990), ² his last novel in the trilogy that includes Carnival (1985) ³ and The Infinite Rehearsal (1987). ⁴ This early and little-known work contains two factors of importance to the trilogy: explorations of Homeric archetypes and theater.

Both the drama and the poems contain germs of concepts later developed in The Four Banks. The play is set in a fishing village at the mouth of the Canje River on Guyana’s East Coast and its subtitle, “the river of ocean,” suggests a microcosmic use of the Guyana setting, just as the Potaro River works for Harris’s timeless, cosmic preoccupations in the fiction. The play is prefaced by a geographical note: “There is a legend that a great lake of fresh water feeds the Canje River and is yet to dry up. The known facts are that the Canje River is part of a natural flood basin influenced by the ocean tides.”

The resulting salination in the water has a deterministic effect on the livelihood of the villagers. Here the author focuses his concern for the economic pressures on the people’s lives which he then interweaves into myth. Relatedly, in Four Banks, the Potaro flows through legendary/mythical Amerindian rainforests and can be metaphorically employed in a journey into ancient civilization while the fate of the rainforest is linked to the livelihood of the people there. Since both play and novel are preoccupied with the survival of mankind, the Canje River serves as a stage for the villagers’ daily struggle for livelihood against the sea and assumes the vast endlessness of an ocean. The bank of the Potaro becomes the scene of acts affecting the tribe’s survival and is the river of space in the vastness of geological time.

Of relevance to these themes of human survival is the neatness of setting which involves the Guyana rainforests. This neatness of setting recalls the current issues of global warming and fears for the destruction of Amazonian forests (with eventual threats to human and animal life), urgent global environmental issues, and Harris’s preoccupation with the survival or extinction of Amerindian civilizations and cultures. In one sequence in The Four Banks, Anselm meets Lucius Canaima, who, many years before, murdered a Macusi ritual dancer on the bank of the Potaro. Anselm is (metaphorically) stabbed in the ribs by Canaima’s finger (knife), and, in a ghost-like form, journeys back in time and sees a Macusi axeman cutting down trees in the rainforest. His routine warning cry of “timber” when the tree is falling becomes “HUMAN TIMBER” (15). Among the likely meanings of this is a concern for the issues just outlined above (global warming, fears for the destruction of Amazonian forests, etc.). Ironically, the murder of the Macusi by Canaima is an act threatening the survival of the whole tribe, which is in danger of becoming extinct like the trees cut down by the same axeman . The lives of the people are closely knit with the life of the forest both in terms of environmental science and ancient mythical connections, causing the fall of the tree to become “HUMAN TIMBER.” Both are transient, vulnerable, exploited and threatened. This is the state of the world’s people who are forced paradoxically to endanger their existence for sources of economic survival. The situation is made quite explicit in the text:

The rainforests were the lungs of the globe. Trees needed to be felled, yes, but the breath of the rivers and the forests was a vital ingredient in space. It was an issue of living contrasts interwoven by the soul...