A Critical Exploration of Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock - A Descriptive Essay
Introduction
Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (1960) is the first novel of the celebrated Guyana Quartet and represents a radical departure from conventional fiction. The novel describes the experience of a crew of non-natives along a river into the innermost settlements of Guyana. The expedition comprises Donne, his brother who is also the narrator, and others who come from all the different ethnic groups of Guyana.
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They set off on a boat to look for a group of Amerindians whom Donne, the plantation owner, needs for his farm. Donne takes with them an old Amerindian woman, Mariella, to be their guide and translator. She is a representative of the archetypal Guyanese woman who is usually abused and exploited. However, Mariella disappears, and the men are left without a translator. In addition to the disappearance of the muse, as they continue their mission, they face severe hardships, danger, and death. Donne, the cruel plantation owner, reminds the reader of the protagonist Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
The journey actually translates into a journey of self-discovery for the narrator, a dreamer, and Donne. Harris seeks to expose the illusion of opposites that create enmities between people. The captain Donne’s exploitation of the natives is representative of the large discriminations of racism and the binaries between the coloniser and the colonised world.
About the Author:
Theodore Wilson Harris was born on March 24, 1921, in New Amsterdam, British Guiana (now Guyana) and is now a resident of England. However, he is included in the canon of Caribbean literature as Harris graduated from Queen’s College in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. He has been greatly influenced by his life and experiences in Guyana. He studied land surveying and geomorphology in Guyana and for some time worked as a government surveyor. He also led expeditions into the Amazonian forests in the interior of Guyana.
In addition to providing him with the geographical and cultural knowledge of Guyana, his experience as a surveyor also formed the basis of the content and themes of many of his novels. Harris married Cecily Carew in 1945 but later divorced her. After moving to London in 1959, he married the Scottish writer Margaret Burns. He was awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liège (2001). He won the Guyana Prize for Literature twice, and in 2010 he was honoured as a knight by Queen Elizabeth II.
Though Harris published three volumes of poetry—Fetish (1951), The Well and the Land (1952), and Eternity to Season (1954)—he is recognised for his fiction that he began to publish after coming to England. The Guyana Quartet comprises his first four novels:
- Palace of the Peacock (1960),
- The Far Journey of Oudin (1961),
- The Whole Armour (1962), and
- The Secret Ladder (1963)
Harris’s novels are difficult to read, and they challenge the reader for the nature of his unconventional plot structure and narrative strategies. He is known for experimenting with plot and narrative structures. Often there is a blurring of the different states of consciousness—dreams versus reality; the external reality gets blurred with the internal state of mind. In many of his works, the story line emerges out of the memories and dream-like states of the characters.
His narratives acquire a complexity as he experiments and employs unconventional narrators and strategies. Though his career as a fiction writer began after coming to England, the landscape, history, and culture of Guyana form the basis of his imagination in many of his early novels. A number of works are set in the cities, villages, or jungles of Guyana or along the Amazonian river. Since Wilson Harris is of Amerindian, African, and English descent, the characters in his novels are equally diverse—from the descendants of the aboriginal Amerindians, the slaves brought from Africa and India, to the European colonizers.
Often, he tries to explore the themes of conquest and colonization and the struggles of colonized peoples. While his symbolism reveals his knowledge of the rich cultural history of Amerindian folklore, his allusions show his awareness of English literature, classical mythology, and Christian iconography and allegory. His employment of several states is based upon Jungian psychoanalytic theory and English literature.
For Harris, myth plays a major role as a mediating instrument between the binary cultures that exclude one another to forge divisions. In his fiction he has re-written both European and Caribbean myths to show the possibility of attaining wholeness. He believes that the vastly different and seemingly contradictory differences of humanity—based on race, civilisation, religion, language, country, and culture—may be reconciled through the myths.
Characters of the Novel
There are eleven characters that the readers need to know. Apart from the native woman Mariella, the crew on this mission consists of Donne, the non-native plantation slave owner, and his brother who narrates the story. The other crew members are the old Schomburgh, the bowman and his assistant Wishrop; Vigilance, an Indian, and his Negro cousin Carroll; Cameron and Jennings, a mechanic; and two twins from Portugal.
The Narrator is also the dreaming “I” and the younger brother of Donne. He has accompanied Donne on his journey in search of the natives who ran away. But he is the lone survivor to tell the strange story. His experience is mystical as it appears to unite the dead men and the living ones—for all times and all places. Donne is the brown-skinned man and the owner of the estate in interior Guyana. He appears to be a tough man and harsh in his dealings with the men and women alike. We find him almost brutal in his dealings with his mistress Mariella.
Cameron is a member of the crew. His Scottish and African heritage is indicated by his red face and kinky hair. He is frustrated as he failed to accumulate enough money to own some land. However, we come across him as a quiet and long-suffering person.
Schomburg is another crew member of German and Amerindian descent. He appears to be a good bowman despite the fact that he is in his fifties. His son Carroll is also on the crew.
Carroll is an endearing young boy of seventeen, also strong and sturdy built. He is gifted with a beautiful voice to sing but unfortunately is the first one to drown.
Vigilance is a black-haired Indian and a stepbrother to Carroll; he helps the crew to look out for the rest of the crew.
Jennings, the member of the crew who is also responsible for the boat’s engine, appears to be a serious man. But he is rebellious and quarrelsome and dies in a fall.
The da Silva Twins are two Portuguese twins on the crew. One of them kills Cameron in a fight.
Mariella is the only woman in the novel, the old Arawak woman. She is the mistress of Donne. However much Donne ill-treats her, she exhibits a spirit of forbearance. She stands for all that the exploiters are in search of. Though she disappears, as the dream at the beginning reveals, the narrator has a premonition that she will eventually destroy Donne.
Wishrop is a man in his forties, also the assistant bowman on the crew. An apparently violent man, he killed his wife, her lover, and the priest who married them. When he is on the run from the authorities in Venezuela, he is helped by an Arawak woman whom he kills later. Eventually he drowns to his death on this mission.
Summary of the Novel (Four Books)
The novel consists of four books, each beginning with a short quotation from a poet. The brief novel of twelve chapters is subdivided into four books. The division of the books shadows the various stages of their symbolic journey that takes place through reflections and introspection to a new understanding of many things in life.
Book I: “Horseman, Pass By” accosts the readers with a quotation from Yeats: “Cast a cold eye / On Life, on death. / Horseman, pass by.” The first book introduces the readers to the basic plot—a boat is journeying up the river through the Guyanese rain forest. The book begins with a dream by the narrator, in which a horseman who is riding at a great speed is shot to death. The dream is actually prophetic of the events to unfold on their journey. It indicates that Donne is likely to meet a fatal death at the hands of either the woman or the natives.
As the narrator is woken from his dream and sleep by an insistent rapping on his door by Donne, the narrator recollects Donne’s wild exploits at school for which he was eventually expelled, and the memory of Donne possessed “a cruel glory” for him. The readers are introduced to the complicating world of dreams and reality. As the narrator wakes up intermittently from his dreaming state to a state of consciousness, we gather details of the story. We learn of Donne’s cruel treatment of his mistress when she comes to the narrator and shows the marks of whipping on her legs. Donne on his part acknowledges that his life was tough.
As a last landlord, he has to “fight everything in nature, nature, flood, drought, chicken, hawk, rat, beast and woman…” Donne reminisces about their childhood—their parents’ “economic nightmare,” their early death, and his forced parental responsibility for the narrator. Through intermittent states of dream and consciousness, the first book ushers in the story element: Donne the violent taskmaster’s attempts to exploit the natives for his avarice to build a palace and make a name for himself.
Book II: “The Mission of Mariella” reveals that as soon as the crew reached the village, a colony of Amerindians, the news of the arrival of Donne spread around the colony. However, before they could tie the boat securely to the bank, all the people including the “young children who had been playing and scrambling near the coercite houses” abandoned the village.
After spending a night in a deserted village in their hammocks, the narrator vividly recalls that every grey hammock was an “empty cocoon as hollow and as a deserted shell.” In his hallucinations and dreams, the narrator had encounters with strange beasts. In the uncertain grey light, he thought it was a dog or horse but it was half-wolf, half-donkey neighing and barking. As he attempts to mount it, it shrinks into a half-woman and half-log, and the narrator raises his hand to cajole its ageing, soulful face.
Later we learn that Donne and a da Silva twin are successful in finding someone to guide them to the interior of the jungle where the natives fled. Donne almost brings an old Arawak woman by force. As his brother looks at Donne, he wonders at the picture that Donne presented of himself. Donne looked like an apparition with his “eyes sunken and impatient in rage, burning with the intensity of horror and ambition”.
As Donne addresses the crew, the narrator experiences the spell of the jungle over himself. The woman tells them that if they take a seven-day journey up the river, they will find the natives. But Schomburgh is the first to understand the risk and the imminent danger involved in the search. Jennings also warns them that they were fortunate in reaching the village and it was a bad time of the year to go up on the river. Amidst mixed reactions from his crew, Donne forces them to start on their mission in search of the natives. The second book gives us insights into the life of Wishrop and other crew members.
Book III: “The Second Death” is introduced with lines from John Donne: “I tune the instrument here at the door, / and what I must do then, think here before.” This book, the longest of the novel, reveals their struggles up the stream and the death of a number of them. Through the “straits of memory,” this book gives details about Carroll and his family.
The readers are introduced to the new member of the crew who sat “crumpled-looking like a curious ball, old and wrinkled… as a bowing statue, the stillness and surrender of the American Indian of Guiana… She belonged to a race that neither forgave nor forgot”. After the first day of their journey, the dreaming narrator and the crew are caught in the “straits of memory.”
As the novel continues in the voice of an omniscient narrator, we find the crew is caught in the “sudden dreaming fury of the stream,” and the agitated river appears to be a combination of an earthquake and volcanic water that fills them with terror. As they enter the War Office rapids, each begins to wonder who the Jonah was, and indubitably Donne is blamed for capturing this witch of a woman.
The first tragedy strikes when Carroll, the youngest, gets up to help steer the boat but slips and falls into the water. Mysteriously, his father Schomburgh also dies in his sleep. With the loss of the interpreter Schomburgh, the crew feel lost as they cannot communicate with the Arawak for further directions.
However, as Donne puts forward his plan, amidst hesitation from Jennings, the crew resume their journey. But the raging torrents of the river are like the “boiling stream and furnace of an endless life without beginning and end”. As “inspired madmen,” they make all efforts only to realise that their boat struck a rock and the “boat is now the vessel of their second death”.
While Jennings dies in a fall, Cameron is stabbed to death by a da Silva twin, and Wishrop, straining at the engine, also meets his watery grave in the maelstrom. Finally, on the seventh day, when the boat is totally wrecked, and with the death of all the crew members except Vigilance who disappears mysteriously with Mariella, the dreaming narrator gains a new perspective and offers the substance of the mission in the last book.
Book IV: “Paling of Ancestors” leads us into a confused state as the journey and the dream advance to a conclusion. Amidst visions, Donne, when he enters the “palace”—his monument—realises that nothing had any significance and his dream, his conquest, was as threadbare as the clothes of the woman in the vision.
He realised that “all his life he loved no one but himself”. But he realised it was just a fantasy, “but it was his blindness that made him see his own nothingness and imagination constructed beyond his reach”. Harris uses the medium of music as a harmony to bring in an epiphany. The surviving crew realise the inconsequential nature of their conquest and material wealth. The novel ends with Harris’s vision of the possible harmony of several binaries. The distinction between peacock and palace, dream and consciousness, illusion and reality, soul and flesh, material and spiritual, time and eternity, savannah and forest are all presented as one entity. The novel ends on the hope of the possibility of Harris’s vision—the formation of a true community that is inclusive of all the various elements of Guiana.
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