Ulyssean Carnival: Epic Metamorphoses in Wilson Harris's Trilogy

Had not Masters read to me . . . the story of the Trojan horse that became the seed of an overturned age or frame?

— Carnival

I had expected him to worm his way into the Rose garden and slay his enemies. But instead the imperial design of the home coming lord and master had been converted into a colonial fable that spun its web in reverse order in the branches of the lofty rose tree over my head. The queen lay hidden in its branches.

—The Four Banks of the River of Space

There can be no Odyssey without its descent among the clairvoyant dead.

—George Steiner, Real Presences

In his recently published autobiography ² Wilson Harris describes the strong emotional impact he experienced as a child of eight when news reached his mother that his step-father had disappeared in the rainforests of Guyana. On the same day his mother opened a large black trunk that had belonged to his real father, from which she extracted a copy of The Odyssey and a wooden horse “carven from a Greenheart tree” (Contemporary 122). Harris writes about the first event of that memorable day:

My step-father’s disappearance in that immense interior when I was a child was the beginning of an involvement with the enigma of quests and journeys through visible into invisible worlds that become themselves slowly visible to require further penetration into other invisible worlds without end or finality.

(122)

Later that year Harris came upon a beggar not far from his home in Georgetown ³ at a time when, though a young child, he was already reading Homer with his mother’s help and may have even then unconsciously connected the beggar with the disguised Ulysses, who for so long had also been an absent father and husband, his whereabouts unknown, but was at last coming home:

Across half-a-century and more . . . [t]he fabric of his face [the beggar’s] upon a floating tide of sorrow is stitched into Homer’s beggar within a tapestry of gestating vision. . . .

(123)

The never resolved mystery of his step-father’s disappearance into the jungle, his father’s wooden horse, his reading The Odyssey as a sensitive, impressionable and imaginative child, the encounter with the Georgetown beggar, all seem to have provided Harris with a “series of subtle and nebulous links” (Tradition 28) of the kind he sees as the latent ground of the West Indian personality, while for the writer he was to become they turned into the seed of his growing, never-to-be-finished fictional tapestry.

Metamorphosed Homeric figures have peopled Harris’s writing from his earliest works and are the major personae of his poetic sequence, Eternity to Season (1954), in which ordinary peasants and fishermen haunt the jungle and coastlands of Guyana, masked as ancient mythical Greek figures from both The Iliad and The Odyssey. ⁴ But it is mainly The Odyssey which underpins his fiction as an endless source of revisionary myths and metaphors and modulates his aesthetic and philosophic vision. Already in Palace of the Peacock Donne’s boat expedition towards El Dorado parallels Ulysses’ journey home but, in contrast with the Greek hero’s vengeful return, ends with Donne’s homecoming to a Pagan/Christian family and a vision of reconciliation, reversing the urge to violence and punishment that animated the crew through much of their quest. Harris himself draws an implicit parallel between Donne and Ulysses when he writes that his father’s carven horse was “threaded into Homer’s giant horse” and later resurrected as the horse ridden by conquistadorial Donne in Palace (Contemporary 125). Although the jungle and rivers of Guyana can hardly conjure up devastated Troy, there is an implicit comparison between the destruction of ancient civilizations and the disappearance of entire populations in Asia Minor and pre-Columbian America. The enduring spirit and invisible presence of the vanished folk already convey his perception of conquered and decimated peoples as natural and spiritual ancestors of mankind “within a descent of the imagination” (125). The presence among the crew of the...