Context

"Yes, I have completed The Mask of the Beggar,” Wilson Harris wrote in a letter late in 2002, and added, “I feel reasonably happy with it. I look back and wonder how I wrote it—it brings the long work I have been doing more or less to an ‘end.’” Begun in 1960 (the year Faber and Faber published Palace of the Peacock, taking a substantial publishing risk with a difficult work of the imagination in that miserable climate of postwar England when the appearance of something as drab as Lucky Jim was considered a sunny day) and concluded forty-three years later with The Mask of the Beggar, Harris’s twenty-fourth novel, the “long work” will probably be regarded as a masterpiece of contemporary fiction. The final novel can be seen as a summation of what Harris has been voicing (in that peculiarly personal rhythm of his prose) in all of his work since Palace, immersing the reader in dimensions of time and space that are dreamlike, unsettling, and yet profoundly real.

A surprising freshness in the singular music of the prose of Palace of the Peacock was what first introduced readers to images and ideas that in Harris’s later novels become constantly orbiting constellations around his central theme. This theme is expressed at the end of Palace: “A longing . . . to see the indestructible nucleus and redemption of creation,” to which the author’s voice adds, “he [the main character] longed to see, he longed to see the atom, the very nail of moment in the universe.” The quest for the visionary moment involves abandoning the “crust and shell” of the body which must cross “an enormous spiritual distance.”

There is a “story” in Palace—the adventures of a boat’s crew in the Guyanese interior—although conventional reality soon evaporates into illusion. Still, the work is essentially epic; there are deliberate echoes of Homer and Dante as the crew penetrates the Guyanese interior and comes to the mysterious palace. The narrator is “transported beyond the memory of words,” for he has reached “the palace of the universe and the windows of the soul looked out and in,” and inside the palace, where the peacock’s cry is heard by the soul as sad and glorious music, one is “free from the chains of illusion” arriving at “the inseparable moment within ourselves of all fulfillment and understanding.” It is a moment of spiritual exhilaration, a deeply religious experience, almost Buddhist in the self’s realization of interior illumination, obtained via poetical perception.

Milton writes in Paradise Lost, “We know no time when we were not as now,” which Eliot answers in Four Quartets, “And all is always now,” keenly though we seek “The point of intersection of the timeless / With time . . .” Such lines anticipate and resonate in Palace of the Peacock, which (along with all of Harris’s later works) is to be read like poetry, to be seized by the imagination in a series of intuitions, not subjected to a rational accounting that would convert moments of revelatory insight to some commonplace of mysticism.

Without consciously following Eliot’s example, Harris combined his next three novels, more than twenty years after their first publication, with Palace of the Peacock and published them as The Guyana Quartet (1985). Eight years later, he combined three succeeding novels as The Carnival Trilogy. Throughout these volumes, the epic theme predominates. Characters first encountered in Homer are reincarnated in the timeless rainforest existing in the now of the imagination; one of them (in The Four Banks of the River of Space [1990]) says, “Homer is the greatest of all epic imaginations. I knew him once long, long ago. I ate every blind crumb, every blind tear, that fell from his eyes.” The Homeric connection with Joyce is not overlooked, and in making it (in The Infinite Rehearsal [1987]) Harris creates one of his most beautiful moments:

I saw the new moon like a curved fingernail in the late, afternoon Old New Forest sky. I stared at it with intensity. As if my hollow voyager lost and lost and found again and again had pared it from ancient Homer’s webbed hand with immeasurable Joycean delicacy and drawn it on the sunset sky.

Some of the other novels are set in England and Scotland, adding a superficial variety to landscapes where the action is consistently of a transcendental nature, but even there the rainforest’s dream-world remains a throbbing presence in the background. While academic critics, most notably Hena Maes-Jelinek, have produced an impressive body of explicatory analysis of Harris’s work, his is the kind of art that resists exegesis. Eliot said of Dante that we can only point to him and remain silent. I believe this also true of Harris. Once the reader hears the music (which in fiction is always occasioned by imagistic language) in the Quartet and the Trilogy, explanation becomes superfluous—and, confessing to a critic’s impotence, I must add that the novel that has to me the most music, The Four Banks of the River of Space, which I hear even as I silently speak its title, is the one about which I have not a word to speak but only a finger to point to in silence.

But now, after twenty-three novels and over forty years, we arrive at The Mask of the Beggar. The text of the book is preceded by a note in which Harris presents an uncharacteristically direct statement about his ideas and how they are to be understood in his work. The note, as well as the novel that follows, comprise a summation: in Harris’s end is his beginning, and it encompasses the entire range of his quantum Imagination, to borrow two of his favorite words. Here are passages that contain Harris’s enduring fascination with Amerindian myths, his belief in “visionary Time”—time that is fugitive and trapped, fluid and stagnant—in which Cortez and Quetzalcoatl reappear, and passages in which he defines the peculiar aesthetics of his art, with its cross-cultural references rooted in the dark depths of human consciousness, distinguishing this art from the journalistic representation of a superficial reality commonly practiced by his contemporaries.

The note opens with a declaration of the author’s intent:

In The Mask of the Beggar a nameless artist seeks mutualities between cultures. He seeks cross-cultural realities that would reverse a dominant code exercised now, or to be exercised in the future, by an individual state whose values are apparently universal. He senses great dangers for humanity in this determined and one-sided notion of universality.

This might appear somewhat vague and cryptic to some readers; on the contrary, coming from Harris, this is blunt speech spoken in a combative tone: it is a direct criticism of dominant western—particularly American—culture whose universal proliferation is observed to be a form of global pollution. The nameless artist, he continues, “senses unconscious pressures within neglected areas of Imagination that may erupt into violence,” meaning that racial archetypes and the mythologies buried in the collective memory of people whose culture has been overwhelmed by Western models will not tolerate an indefinite suppression; an art that does not draw its appeal from the larger universal imagination will be repetitive and therefore sterile; the artist must plunge into the “roots of consciousness” and from there extract “a quantum cross-cultural art that brings challenges and unexpected, far-reaching, subtly fruitful consequences.”

The artist remains nameless, but in these opening observations in the note his unspoken name could well be Wilson Harris: the “quantum cross-cultural art” he’s talking about is his own work and describes his authorial intention and method of writing not only in his present novel but indeed in all of his work. In his own imagination, the apocalyptic event was “the Conquest of the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas in the sixteenth century” when the West acquired “implicit governance of the world in politics, economics, social and cultural values.” And so Harris begins his novel with a western symbol. “The Mask of the Beggar is based,” he states in the note, “on the disguise Odysseus adopts on returning to his kingdom in Ithaca.” But there are holes or fissures in that face through which emerge people of other races in an imaginary place called Harbourtown, which could be Georgetown in Harris’s native Guyana, that curious crossroad where three cultures meet. What Harris means by those holes in the mask can only be comprehended intuitively, and while to read the meaning of this symbol as “other identities . . . visible in the face of the Western epic hero” might convey the essence of the idea, it also weakens the force of the original metaphor. The mask has become a Cubist face, simultaneously exhibiting many dimensions, or it is a face you might see in the subway in Manhattan or the metro in Mexico City, a face glimpsed in flashes of light through a prevailing darkness and confusing the viewer as to its possible origin. To tell the story of these people, suggests Harris, “well-nigh forgotten, ancient pre-Columbian imageries are explored”—a declaration of his method in all of his work and an important key to understanding any of it. And because the perspectives offered by pre-Columbian imageries—imageries which constituted that defeated culture’s envisioning of reality—are different, even alien, from the dominant European models, therefore traditional western forms of art “must suffer a measure of transfiguration” if they are to accommodate the work of this different quantum Imagination. Which is to say, a radical aesthetic shift becomes a necessity when one’s subject matter is driven by a worldview that derives its symbols partially from Arawak and Carib myths and other non-western sources. Harris’s great achievement has been that he created, and then sustained in his entire “long work,” a singular form, a prose with unfamiliar stresses and curious juxtapositions of ancient and modern images, making the reader hear the heartbeat of the Guyanese interior, which is his image for the eternal soul of the universe.

Harris’s insistence on “the necessity of cross-culturality” is best explained by him in an interview he gave to the magazine Bomb (Winter 2002-03):

Cross-culturality differs radically from multiculturality. There is no creative and re-creative sharing of dimensions in multiculturality. The strongest culture in multiculturality holds an umbrella over the rest, which have no alternative but to abide by the values that the strongest believe to be universal. Cross-culturality is an opening to a true and variant universality of a blend of parts we can never wholly encompass, though when we become aware of them we may ceaselessly strive for an open unity that they offer. In this quantum way we may forestall the tyranny of one-sided being.

We cannot, his argument implies, experience art as an exclusively privileged perception; you may be in London, but unless you can hear the drumming and the bone-flute’s exquisite music from the depths of the rainforest while you listen to a composition, say, by Steve Reich, you really don’t inhabit the planet earth. And what this implies is that you can’t read a novel by Wilson Harris as though you were reading Robinson Crusoe—even though Defoe set his novel almost in the very region where, as a young man, Harris worked as a land surveyor and penetrated the forested interior that provided him with images and visions as if he had been taken there to witness the primal creation of reality. All of Harris’s “long work” can be said to have been an attempt to make a comprehensive record of those images and visions that, it is not too fanciful to say, are native to his soul—Time Regained, in a sense; though where Proust confines his search to a recent historical past, Harris explores multiplicities of time and space (hence his interest in quantum physics and chaos theory). His method is to peel away layers of collective racial memory, to seek the vibrant timeless moment at the heart of Time: to witness all events in the now of the imagination.

The world witnessed by Harris has many dimensions. A seemingly serene landscape is alive with past presences, long-forgotten mythic symbols are bursting out of the land that seems suddenly fissured by the internal pressure of its own particular history—or, as Harris states in his note to The Guyana Quartet, “the soil of place in which ancient masquerades exist.” It is a world in which even the fossils are murmuring a Jungian message: reality can be represented by the imagination only in an art that diverges, Harris insists, “from canons of realism,” and it is in the novelist’s “intuitive rapport with densities of conspiratorial time” that his fictions originate. The writer’s artifice, he declares in the note to the 1998 reissue of Palace of the Peacock, “brings a pregnant apparition into the silences of space that have neither a beginning nor an ending.”

There are no named characters, except what Harris calls “solid ghosts,” in The Mask of the Beggar (cf. Eliot’s “familiar compound ghost” in “Little Gidding”). The narrator in the first four chapters is the statue of a sculptor’s mother, and in the remaining three the sculptor himself; the “solid ghosts” include Odysseus, Lazarus, Montezuma, Cortez, and the symbolically important mythological figure of Quetzalcoatl. As with most of Harris’s fiction, there is no plot or action, only intellectual design that advances the ideas; where the earlier novels painted vivid landscapes of the Americas, The Mask of the Beggar barely contains a sketch. The dialogue between the sculpted mother and the sculptor son occasions opportunities for generalizations related to the imaginative content of all of Harris’s work; an episode no sooner begins than it, too, becomes an occasion for broadcasting ideas that function as retrospective elucidation; the writer is continually drawn from the particular immediate content to making a larger connection, eagerly seizing the cross-cultural potential of an idea. From the very first sentence of the prefatory note—“In The Mask of the Beggar a nameless artist seeks mutualities between cultures”—to long statements in the final chapter, Harris expresses his ideas directly rather than, as in much of his previous work, engaging the reader in literary archeology.

As a kind of aesthetic summation of Harris’s career, it is perhaps not surprising that The Mask of the Beggar is also his most personal novel. Some twenty pages from the end, the man who calls himself a sculptor suddenly makes a confession, declaring, “I am largely an intuitive writer,” and proceeds for two and half pages of italicized prose to produce a sort of credo. “We have been intuitively seeking in this fiction hidden twinships and physicalities that are wholly neglected in creative complexity,” the writer informs the reader, explaining some lines later that some events “lie beyond conventional language,” for “bland convention . . . misses mutualities, dualities, ecstasies that grope into a marriage with infinity,” meaning that the conventional novel cannot capture the simultaneous presence of the past and the future in any given present, nor arrive at “the intricate far-reaching truths that art seeks.”

His own art and his ideas about cross-culturality and ecology comprise the principal substance of The Mask of the Beggar, with many general assertions—e.g., criticizing conventional fiction, “Without visionary Time fiction is useless, it is but a report on what we already know;” or, claiming a privileged hierarchical rank for himself, “My feeling for art is so different from popular conceptions that I keep what I do a secret;” or, attacking philistines, “people who can read and write, but who are illiterates of the Imagination . . . [and who] stick fast to their cultural models.” When overindulged, such generalizations are in danger of becoming meaningless, or at least redundant, as in: “We fumble for words when it comes to creating a universal and diverse myth. We stick to bits and pieces that are useless in terms of deep feeling, deep changing.” Such abstract generalization is not a precise expression of a fresh idea, and the author’s resorting to italics and a liberal use of initial capital letters for words he believes to be significant is no guarantee of deep Meaning. Ideological rhetoric is a poor substitute for that purity of thought suggested by objective imagistic language. If these excessive generalizations are excusable, it is because The Mask of the Beggar is a sort of footnote that Harris has appended to his work and is necessarily explanatory. There might be nothing new in his sociopolitical remarks about Native Americans who suffered atrocities “perhaps worse than the Holocaust,” and nor do conventional novelists need to be scolded once again that they “write still in fixed nineteenth/eighteenth-century forms,” yet on the larger canvas of the “long work” these little bits of pointillism are relevant and important; they oblige the viewer to draw back and look again at the whole canvas and observe revealed there an entirely new perspective that startles the imagination with the discovery that what had seemed a radical distortion that deliberately sabotaged a received idea is in fact a new, and a more comprehensive, aesthetic.

Selected Works by Wilson Harris

The Age of the Rainmakers. Out of Print.
The Angel at the Gate. Out of Print.
Ascent to Omai. Out of Print.
Black Marsden: A Tabula Rasa Comedy. Out of Print.
The Carnival Trilogy. Out of Print.
Carnival. Out of Print.
Companions of the Day and Night. Out of Print.
Dark Jester. London: Faber and Faber, £9.99.
Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns. Out of Print.
Eternity to Season. London: New Beacon Books, £11.95.
Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles, 1966-1981. Out of Print.
The Eye of the Scarecrow. Out of Print.
The Far Journey of Oudin. Out of Print.
Fossil and Psyche. Out of Print.
The Four Banks of the River of Space. Out of Print.
The Guyana Quartet. London: Faber and Faber, £9.99.
Heartland. Out of Print.
History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas. Out of Print.
The Infinite Rehearsal. Out of Print.
Jonestown. Out of Print.
The Mask of the Beggar. London: Faber and Faber, £16.99.
Palace of the Peacock. London: Faber and Faber, £7.99.
Resurrection at Sorrow Hill. London: Faber and Faber, £14.99.
Selected Essays of Wilson Harris. Routledge, $30.95.
The Sleepers of Roraima: A Carib Trilogy. Out of Print.
Tradition, the Writer and Society. Out of Print.
The Tree of the Sun. Out of Print.
Tumatumari. Out of Print.
The Waiting Room. Out of Print.
The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder. Out of Print.
The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination. Out of Print.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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