OUVERTURE
(Continued)
In some novels, particularly Carnival, Harris repeatedly alludes to the "genius of love" (a potential source of terror as much as of ecstasy), but it is in Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness that the eruption of "the genie" ("the spark" in The Tree of the Sun) as expression of variable, formerly unconscious forces, is most eloquently represented in Da Silva's re-visions of his paintings. In that novel he also clearly conveys the political implications of the artist's creativeness in Da Silva's sketch of the Commonwealth Institute's "INSOLUBLE CROSS-CULTURAL DEITY/SOLUBLE UNIFORM" with its dual, interacting composition of institutional tone/universal non-tone (20), the latter one possible representation of collective or, as Harris calls it, the universal unconscious. The phrase epitomizes what he sees as the roots of creativity : adversarial contexts and the collective unconscious, also the sources of consciousness and moral being (21). "Universal non-tone", the "zero conditions" out of which the narrator in Da Silva da Silva hopes that "original vision" (Da S, 70) will emanate, reminds us that the very origin of the creative momentum, "the indestructible nucleus . . . of creation. . . . the very nail of moment in the universe" (22) remains inaccessible.
This question has obviously obsessed Harris from the very beginning (23). In her discussion of the inexpressible in Harris's work, Mary Lou Emery rightly points out that he qualifies the impossibility of presenting an "almost" unimaginable creator when he said in an interview "and yet one can still present it"(24). It seems, however, that it is the unknown (and largely unknowable) itself which is the seed of creation, what he has variously called a creative "enigma of values"(25), "the riddle of the creator", "riddles of spirit"(26), or "the mystery of intact reality" (27). Vera Kutzinski talks of "unfathomable hands beneath or within the psyche and nature of the language of the imagination". The last words of Jonestown are, we remember, "the unfathomable body of the creator" (28). It offers one explanation among several of Harris's strong objections to realism, as Paget Henry argues, while simultaneously signifying that originality is less the creation of something utterly new than the recovery of eclipsed traces of reality (a question I shall come back to). On the other hand, what abounds in Harris's fiction from Palace to Jonestown are images and metaphors that embody the creative process itself, as Russell McDougall shows. Dominique Dubois explains the various meanings of the "tree of the sun", a metaphor that expresses an in-depth community of being between man, nature and the cosmos, a community of origins too if one approaches these origins through the heights and depths of the universe. So does the metaphor "Phallus of the sun" (AG, 69) which prefigures the creative cosmic intercourse between phallus/log and the "genesis-cloud" in Jonestown (J, 133ff). One striking feature of these as of so many of Harris's metaphors is their compact expression of "compositional life" (RSH, 87) , similar in a sense to the scientific expression « mathematics of chaos" (29), discussed by Carmen Concilio, and used by Harris in his later novels, especially Jonestown. Such a feature shows Harris's equally revolutionary capacity to capture in one metaphor both an abstract/reduced formulation, and the multifariousness, of reality, « a hidden mathematics within the body of language" (J, 6).
Harris himself has often explained the creative process as an encounter, an imaginative, endlessly gestating bridge between the unconscious and consciousness in both writer and concentrated reader (30). Several essays published here deal with this issue and explore its manifold expression and interpretative potential. Francine Juhasz, in particular, approaches the relational components of the psyche from a psycho-analytical perspective and interweaves the representation of her quest with the Harrisian texts that helped her find a model to stimulate her patients to "waking" and "healing" dream. Andrew Bundy, among others, uses Harris's expression "dream-book" to describe his fiction as a whole. Which brings us to dream as creativity or at least as an essential condition in the creative process, a point made by Louis Simon. In his introductions to The Four Banks of the River of Space and Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, W.H. (See Paula Burnett's comment on this use of initials) explains that he has edited the protagonists' "Dream-book" at their request, while Jonestown opens with Francisco Bone's request itself. Anselm, Hope and Bone emerging from W.H.'s unconscious to offer him the material of his fiction (31) are individualized faces of the "multitude" which, as Bone says, inhabits one (J, 5). At the same time, it is as if, like the moving beam of a lighthouse, the writer's consciousness brought successive figures out of the shadows. At the beginning and the end of Jonestown, Bone seems at once closer to, yet still distant from, the many-layered reality he is exploring in his Dream-book than the other two protagonists. One must remember that even the deepest layer of reality, the eruptive life towards which the author and , at another remove, his protagonists progress is not a homogeneous whole but is itself subject to "breaches that invite a strange intercourse of parts that surrender themselves to new associations or the birth of ideas, the re-visionary birth of creativity"(32). In other words, this is the moving, composite centre at the heart of reality and fiction, another difference from T.S.Eliot's "still centre". At the other pole of the encounter, the protagonist follows the dictates of the "living dreamer" within himself (33). Harris describes this movement towards each other of the erupting ("compositional") reality and the "living dreamer" in the following terms :
"The 'living dreamer' in Anselm meets them again [the dead characters whose life he recreates] as 'live absences' or metaphorically sculpted or painted presences. Each metaphoric sculpture or painting subsists on a sensation that flesh-and-blood in the re-creative imagination embodies a correspondence with - and a pregnant distance from - the materials a sculptor sculpts, the fabric upon which and with which a painter paints, and that such numinous correspondence and distance provide the narrative substance of Dream with imageries that become 'live fossil stepping-stones' into an original space or dimension that is the genesis (curiously unfinished genesis) or infinite birth of the imagination" (FB, p.xi).
"Correspondence with" and "distance from" suggest a precarious balance like that achieved by Bone at the end of Jonestown, a balance at once part of the substance and the object of the dream, or the "state of suspension" (34) towards which Harris's protagonists ceaselessly move. And as Harris himself explained, their "floating" between two poles "breach[es] linear bias or storyline function" (35). Moreover, the end of the above quotation implies that imagination is both the instrument and a never achieved goal in the making. This explains the variety of titles, conveying different approaches, Harris gives to his many essays on the nature of the imagination. The title in this issue does not just mean, as one might think, the age or period in which imagination prevails but its antiquity and agelessness, its ceaseless genesis through an endless "past that leaves its ruined clues" and "each ruin participates in the origins of consciousness".
The characters' retracing of their steps towards the ruined past, recovering emotions now understood or perceived in a new light (36), also opens onto Harris's conception of time, a complex issue which deserves more than the brief commentary possible here. He has himself sufficiently insisted on his rejection of linearity, a point inevitably raised in many contributions. Time cannot be dissociated from other major aspects of his work, notably his treatment of history dealt with by Karen Cornelis, Dominique Dubois, Robert Bennett and Paula Burnett. Harris does not ignore calendrical time, stating that even in quantum physics changes occur in "historical time" (37), and conventional time can usually be clearly reconstructed in his fiction as, for instance, in The Eye of the Scarecrow, Companions of the Day and Night or Jonestown. Nor is it simply discarded in favour of timelessness but is rather the dimension we live in and through which, when breached, timelessness can be apprehended. Timelessness is not the mere absence of conventional time either ; it is an extra-human dimension with some attributes similar to space with which, as Paula Burnett points out, it interpenetrates. Though Harris says that "[t]here is no absolute beginning" (J, 5) "no determined beginning, no determined ending" (38), he does not refer to a static eternity (39). As there is a "womb of space", so there is a "virgin womb of time" (J, 5), an "apparent sexuality" to time which plays a "pregnant role" (40), as Denis Williams, quoted by Louis James, pointed out : "for Harris the union of object and subject is temporal in its power ceaselessly to modify the present in free association with the past." Harris also alludes to an extra-human dimension called living time which he sees "partially" captured in "draperies upon living time" in Aubrey Williams's paintings among others (41). After the crew have passed "the door of inner perception" in Palace of the Peacock, they enter this living dimension which in another context Harris calls time as "native ancestral aboriginal capacity" (42) : "[t]hey saw and heard only the boiling stream and furnace of an endless life without beginning and end" (PP, 94 and 99).
The ruptures in conventional time, the shifts between, and blending of, past, present and future (see Paula Burnett's comparison with the Maya) coincide with the spatial movements of advance and retreat in many novels, for instance at the end of Heartland and The Tree of the Sun. It is this movement, excluding any one-directional vision, which informs the characters' "dreaming" experience (43) and makes possible what Harris called "backward resurrection" (TS, 34). And, as with space, Harris's characters sometimes achieve or experience a "state of suspension" between time and timelessness (44), an ephemeral balance of a psychological, spiritual and aesthetic rather than scientific nature. Indeed, in spite of his many references to modern physics (mainly the quantum view of parallel universes) Harris's original conception of space and time is not limited to the space-time concept, and Louis James rightly alludes to his "guarded reference to 'Einsteinian mathematics'. Also, in spite of his affinity with some of Prigogine's views, mentioned above, he would clearly reject the latter's conviction that the "arrow of time" makes it irreversible (45). Hence, Harris's view of humanity's condition has not evolved, like Prigogine's, from one of being to becoming ; it posits both being and becoming.
Such rejection of "an absolute identity to time", admitting of a "double movement between two time-scales" (46), as in Eternity to Season, underlies reversibility, clearly the crux of Harris's narrative oscillations through multi-layered space and time. It is central to Vera Kutzinski's essay which also develops a new kind of scholarship (47) by tracing Harris's compositional method through the successive drafts of Carnival, bringing out the many potentialities of the writing process, which Harris further explores or retreats from, like the advance/retreat progression of some of his characters. Reversibility is a key to a cross-culturality rooted, as Harris insists, in the universal unconscious partially represented in forms of art apparently unrelated in space or time (see his frequent parallel between a Titian painting and Mexican Quetzalcoatl) but also evident in what Louis James calls the "cross-disciplinary vision" of Anselm in The Four Banks of the River of Space. Harris himself has often commented on reversibility of which he finds a striking example in Michelangelo's Rondanini Pietà with the Son giving rebirth to his dead Mother.
The duality coterminous with reversibility is, of course, a theme running through most essays since both as existential reality and the fluctuating conciliation of its adversarial parts, it informs all aspects of Harris's writing. Andrew Bundy brings to light what Harris calls "the hidden rapport . . . between adversarial cultures" (48) in his comparison between the Grail and El Dorado legends, arguing that the latter reverses the former and is now a potential field of exploration for analysts of the "hidden psyche". His essay also brings to mind Harris's repeated allusions to "[t]he debt that civilisation owes to savage and indigenous cultures" (49). Arturo Cattaneo's erudite essay delves deep into Harris's myth-making to interpret "archetypal situations . . . cutting across space and time", disclosing parallels between Greek myths and Harris's rendering of Amerindian myths as so many examples of cross-culturality, and demonstrating that Harris's original oxymorons are essentially dynamic figures of duality and paradox. This is complemented by Russell McDougall's essay on Harris's myth-criticism, which also "dialogues" with Brigitta Olubas'. McDougall defines metaphor as generating reversibility and concentrates on the bone-flute and the rainbow/phallic bridge, major examples of the metaphor's converting power, as central related figures in Harris's reading of pre-Columbian myths.
Yet one must refrain from idealizing Harris's synthetic metaphors or resolutions of duality, because they are not final and, as he never allows us to forget, they contain an element of terror. Applying the bone-flute metaphor to his relationship with Jones (one of mutuality and treason), Bone suddenly recalls his "conversion of a primitive morsel into a feast of terrifying conscience within the furies of history" (J, 18). Furies and daemons are inescapable archetypal dual figures in Harris's creative process. Furies have a "potency for terror [especially as agents of revenge] and simultaneously, paradoxically, for the regeneration of cosmic love," (50) while the daemon is the Greek genius but also has a capacity for evil, as we see in Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness. The artist, Harris says, "experiences a tension between daemon and divine" (51). Daemons and Furies and their transformed counterparts (see the Blessed Furies) appear in various guises in Jonestown, a favourite with critics, which has inspired different approaches. As already suggested, Louis Simon concentrates on the "consciousness-altering capacities of writing and reading" stimulated by the novel's self-reflexive narrative. Paula Burnett's exhaustive essay privileges the multiple resonance of the Maya in the text ; Stephanos Stephanides deals with translatability as creativeness, a little discussed aspect of Harris's work, (52) : "The translation", he writes, "claims the text of the past for future generations and thus becomes an allegory of its resurrection". Finally, Carmen Concilio illustrates the complementarity between science and art mentioned above.
It will be clear, I hope, that the aspects of Harris's work evoked in this Ouverture are interdependent. Most are evoked in Hope's deeply significant "manifesto of the ship of the globe" in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, characteristically as much question as answer :
"'when one descends into breakdown - part-physical, part-mental - and is drawn up into space, what equation exists between the multi-dimensionality of the mind and the multi-dimensionality of the ship of the globe written in one's senses and non-senses ? How shall I begin to put it ? How shall I translate the untranslatable truth ? For me - half-drowned, half-spatial creature (and more, much more I am, less, much less am I) - the equation that exists between metaphors of madness and metaphors of genius is the fluid nucleus of the mystery of truth (neither purely mental - of the body of the mind - nor purely physical - of the spring of the body).'
Hope's manifesto was the language of such nuclearity. He felt an eruption in himself so acute, so dismantling, so reconstructive, it dawned on him that such a mysterious nucleus was the substance of the voice of the dumb that had uttered his name. Mixed metaphoric senses in voice-ness, voicelessness, speech prior to speech, dumbness prior to eloquence" (53).
This passage is a crucial expression of both Harris's philosophy of existence and vision of culture, counterpointing "the substance of the voice of the dumb" to the dominant voices. In Hope's intuitive progression towards the source of creation, all contraries begin to interact, all partial elements in the existential process: part-physical, part-mental, ascent and descent, one's senses and non-senses, Hope as half-drowned, half-spatial creature, voiceness and voicelessness. As Merleau-Ponty writes,
"Our view of man will remain superficial as long as we don't go back to the origin [of expression], as long as we don't recover the primordial silence under the noise of words, as long as we don't describe the gesture which breaks that silence" (54).
The parallel Hope draws between the multi-dimensionality of the mind and the multi-dimensionality of the ship of the globe evokes corresponding partialities within the human person and on the world map. In their representation of such composite reality in inner and outer worlds Harris's narratives move towards a harmonization of elements both within the human person and between cultures, a very different proposition from a surface hybridity. It is through this in-depth cross-culturality, cross-fertilization of old worlds and new worlds, that he has imaginatively opened the way to a new authentic Caribbean fiction.
