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| Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock Critical Analysis |
A Critical Exploration of Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock -
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.
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.
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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.
Analysis and Critical Appreciation
Theme: The novel makes one realise that through introspection and a confrontation with our past we can have a purgatory effect that leads one to a re-orientation in thinking—a possibility of rebirth and new beginnings. As the narrator goes through different states of reality, hallucinations, and dreams, and confronts his illusions and fears, he finally understands that his experience is not restricted to Donne and the crew’s experience but it has a greater significance as it relates to the experience of mankind at large.
Symbolism: A cursory reading leaves the readers clueless about the symbolism in the title Palace of the Peacock. Peacock as a symbol is as rich and multifarious in its meanings as the hues of the peacock. Though different cultures and religions vary in the meanings associated with it, in general it stands for beauty, glory, royalty, and immortality. Here Harris uses it as a symbol to talk about his vision of a unified society—that can be achieved when we attempt to better ourselves and realise the need to integrate all the sections and races of the world in general and Guiana in particular.
On another level, the “Palace of the Peacock” that they reach at the end of the journey is only a phantasm that leaves them with the destruction of their own selves. While Donne stands for exploiting European civilisation, the crew represent the major racial groups of post-colonial Guiana. The journey is symbolic of the exploration of their identity and their true selves. The seven-day journey, resonating with the seven-day period of creation and rest in Genesis, is destructive and therefore anti-Genesis. However, the symbolic journey becomes the bildungsroman for the narrator.
Plot and Narrative Techniques: In 1964, Wilson Harris in his lecture “Tradition and the West Indian Novel” considered that the traditional mainstream English novel of the 19th century as a “novel of persuasion” which is generally a chronicle of “an individual span of life” presented on a linear line of time and plot. Harris rejects this conventional style of fiction with a recognisable linear plot and characters.
This compulsion forces him to adopt many novel techniques and ideas. The breakdown of binary divisions is evident from the epitaph in Book I. It presents a paradox of life in death, death in life phenomenon. The dreaming narrator speaks of his “one dead seeing eye” and “one living closed eye.” Since Harris rejects the conventions of a traditional novel, he makes use of several super-realistic devices.
In the first book, we find the narrator waking up from his sleep or dream to meet his brother Donne. Throughout the novel, the ambiguity is maintained as the readers are baffled with the different states of consciousness—dreams, visions, hallucinations, and the very fantasy of the “Palace of the Peacock.” The novelist does not limit himself to a single point of view. The shifting of narrative voice from the first person “I” to third person and at times several points of view enables him to take the readers into the minds of the characters and their feelings, which makes it confusing for the reader.
Language: The English spoken by the multiracial characters differs from each other. While Donne the coloniser’s language is flawless when he says, “Life here is tough. One has to be a devil to survive. I am the last landlord…,” the pidgin variety is evident in the dialogue between Cameron and da Silva: “I is a fool yes. A foolish dead man…but I seeing me parrot. Is no vulture bird…” to which Cameron replies, “What in heaven name really preying on your sight and mind, Boy … I only seeing vulture bird. Where the parrot what eating you?”
Mythmaking and Twinning of Elements: In order to develop a new consciousness of the composite nature of Guiana as a nation, Harris believes in the creation of new myths that embrace the diversity of Guyana. In his novel, in addition to the haziness of the dichotomies of life, Harris resorts to the principle of twinning of characters that enables him to create new myths.
There are numerous instances: Mariella is both the native woman as well as the village. The narrator and Donne get intertwined: “he was myself standing outside of me while I stood inside of him”. The narrator awakes to find himself in what appears to be an operating theatre, or a maternity ward, or a prison cell.
Later in chapter five we read of a creature that is “half-wolf, half-donkey” and “half-woman, half-log.” It is interesting to note that Harris’s mythmaking is based on the twinning of myth that results out of an echo of a familiar myth, legend, or religious character or story that is presented with a difference.
For example, when Donne the leader utters a loud cry and brings back the dead crew to life, it echoes the two myths of the shout of life as associated with the Bible and the ancient Greek myth. In the book of Ezekiel from the Bible, God takes the prophet Ezekiel in a vision to a valley full of dry bones and asks Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones.
As Ezekiel prophesied, the bones all joined together, and as he prophesied further, the breath of life from four winds entered them. This breath of life entering into the lifeless creatures is reminiscent of the Biblical account of the creation of man—when God breathed His life into Adam’s nostrils and Adam became a living soul. Ezekiel’s account of the valley of bones also leads us to the bone-flute of Caribbean mythology and other cultures.
It is believed that ancient Caribs possessed a bone flute that was made from the body of the enemy. This has subsequently been linked to the notion of the seed of music—the reed pipe and the flute. The critic Arturo Cattaneo writes: “The value of Harris’s exploration of the genesis of the Carib bone, or bone flute, is that not only does it make us aware of new readings and possibilities of the past but it also helps us to an unbiased reading of the modern world.
For Harris, the bone flute is not only the seed of music but, as primitive technology, it is susceptible to high-technology metamorphoses through time of which modern man is hardly conscious” . Thus, one sees a new orientation that helps in accommodating the seemingly irreconcilable contradictions of Christian and pagan worlds, white and black, and other binaries of life.
The “Paling of Ancestors” is one more example of this reconciliation of the dialectics of life. Harris creates a new myth in the tableau of a carpenter (Joseph), woman (Mary, Madonna), and child (Christ) with a difference. When Donne sees a woman wearing a “long sweeping garment” and the whole room reflects the “threadbare glistening garment,” this is a new vision and a re-telling of the old myth (Madonna) that enumerates Harris’s new vision of mythmaking.
Landscape: The characters and the landscape often reflect each other. The landscape plays an important role in the shaping of the characters. The symbolism of the landscape cannot be ignored as the crew fight their way up the raging river. Schomburgh and the da Silva twins come from “Sorrow Hill.”
It is good to observe the description of the Arawak woman as they are fighting on a torrential river: “Tiny embroideries resembling the handwork on the Arawak woman’s kerchief and the wrinkles on her brow turned to incredible and fast soundless breakers of foam. Her crumpled bosom and river grew agitated with desire … The ruffles in the water were her dress rolling …” . The novel abounds in a rich description of the land, river, and people that is richly symbolic.
Conclusion
Citing Harris’s attempt to show the diversity of the Guyanese that shows the complexity of the Caribbean psyche, Harris makes use of characters who have a mix of race and culture. These characters, who serve as “real and psychic doubles of each other,” enable him to present his concept of integration—an “integrated psyche.”
This psyche is evident at the end of the novel when the seven explorers are all spirits in the “palace of the peacock” (the literal metaphor for this psychic integration) in a shared, post-death, psychic state represented by the music they all “hear” and their recognition of each other as part of “one undying soul”.
Harris rejects the notion of the “novel of persuasion” since it was unsuitable for a Caribbean writer. Defining the notion of nationhood has always been a challenge for Guyana. The diversity of its racial, ethnic, and religious groups and its colonisation by the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch poses a difficulty in developing its national consciousness.
One of the foremost concerns of Harris is to find or suggest the creation of a unique Guyanese consciousness. As Kenneth Ramchand in his introduction to Palace of the Peacock writes, “Harris’s disregard for the usual conventions of (time, character, social realism) in the novel arises from an almost literal-minded obsession with expressing intuitions about the person and about the structure of societies that men have built for themselves through ages … The West Indian novelist should set out to visualize a fulfilment, a reconciliation in the person and throughout society, of the parts of a heritage of broken cultures.”
Harris is thus successful in showing to his readers the superficial nature of all divisions based on race, colour, ethnicity, religion, and culture that can undergo a metamorphosis like his protagonist who realises that whatever he was chasing as the ideal is in the end insignificant. Since his works address universal issues and “convey a positive, life affirming outlook,” Harris is acclaimed as a postcolonial writer as well as an important literary and cultural critic who would like to invent the forging of a new Guyanese consciousness by re-writing the novel and myths.
As Victoria Toliver opines, Harris’s greatness lies in promoting a “radical imagination”—an imagination that is able to read and think across cultures. As the penultimate chapter leads the reader into the “palace of the peacock”: “The stars became peacocks’ eyes, and the great tree of flesh and blood swirled into another stream that sparkled with divine feathers where the neck and the hands and the feet had been nailed.
This was the palace of the universe and the windows of the soul looked out and in. The living eyes in the crested head were free to observe the twinkling stars and eyes and windows on the rest of the body and the wings”. The final chapter, despite its brevity, is a witness to Harris’s vision, and as realisation dawns upon the narrator in the palace, there was “inner music” and the “dance of all fulfilment.”
Modal Essay-Type Answers
Model Answer 1: Myth and Symbolism
Question: How does Wilson Harris use myth and symbolism in Palace of the Peacock to address the divisions in Guyanese society?
In Palace of the Peacock, Wilson Harris uses myth and symbolism 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.
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 myths.
The title Palace of the Peacock carries rich symbolism. The peacock stands for beauty, glory, royalty, and immortality. Harris uses it as a symbol to talk about his vision of a unified society—that can be achieved when we attempt to better ourselves and realise the need to integrate all the sections and races of the world in general and Guiana in particular.
On another level, the “Palace of the Peacock” that they reach at the end of the journey is only a phantasm that leaves them with the destruction of their own selves. While Donne stands for exploiting European civilisation, the crew represent the major racial groups of post-colonial Guiana. The seven-day journey, resonating with the seven-day period of creation and rest in Genesis, is destructive and therefore anti-Genesis.
Harris also resorts to the principle of twinning of characters to create new myths. Mariella is both the native woman as well as the village. The narrator and Donne get intertwined: “he was myself standing outside of me while I stood inside of him.” The creature that is “half-wolf, half-donkey” and “half-woman, half-log” further dissolves binary categories.
Harris’s mythmaking is based on the twinning of myth that results out of an echo of a familiar myth presented with a difference. When Donne utters a loud cry and brings back the dead crew to life, it echoes both the Biblical story of Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones and the ancient Carib bone-flute myth.
The bone flute is the seed of music, and as Arturo Cattaneo notes, it is susceptible to high-technology metamorphoses through time. Thus, Harris creates a new orientation that helps in accommodating the seemingly irreconcilable contradictions of Christian and pagan worlds, white and black, and other binaries of life. The “Paling of Ancestors” is another example of this reconciliation, where Harris re-tells the old Madonna myth with a difference, presenting a woman in a “threadbare glistening garment.” Through such mythmaking, Harris shows the possibility of attaining wholeness and a true community inclusive of all the various elements of Guiana.
Model Answer 2: Narrative Technique
Question: Discuss the unconventional narrative techniques used by Wilson Harris in Palace of the Peacock and their effectiveness.
Wilson Harris’s novels are difficult to read because 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 Palace of the Peacock, the story line emerges out of the memories and dream-like states of the characters. In 1964, Harris considered the traditional mainstream English novel of the 19th century as a “novel of persuasion” which is generally a chronicle of “an individual span of life” presented on a linear line of time and plot. Harris rejects this conventional style of fiction with a recognisable linear plot and characters.
The breakdown of binary divisions is evident from the epitaph in Book I: “Cast a cold eye / On Life, on death. / Horseman, pass by.” This presents a paradox of life in death and death in life. The dreaming narrator speaks of his “one dead seeing eye” and “one living closed eye.” In the first book, we find the narrator waking up from his sleep or dream to meet his brother Donne.
Throughout the novel, the ambiguity is maintained as the readers are baffled with the different states of consciousness—dreams, visions, hallucinations, and the very fantasy of the “Palace of the Peacock.” The novelist does not limit himself to a single point of view. The shifting of narrative voice from the first person “I” to third person and at times several points of view enables him to take the readers into the minds of the characters and their feelings, which makes it confusing for the reader.
This technique is effective because it mirrors the novel’s theme of reconciliation. As Kenneth Ramchand writes, “Harris’s disregard for the usual conventions of (time, character, social realism) in the novel arises from an almost literal-minded obsession with expressing intuitions about the person and about the structure of societies that men have built for themselves through ages.”
The West Indian novelist, according to Harris, should set out to visualize a fulfilment, a reconciliation in the person and throughout society, of the parts of a heritage of broken cultures. By using dream-states, shifting perspectives, and anti-linear plotting, Harris immerses the reader in the same purgatorial journey as the narrator. At the end, when the narrator enters the “palace of the peacock,” the reader too experiences the “inner music” and the “dance of all fulfilment.” Thus, the unconventional narrative technique is not a barrier but the very means by which Harris conveys his vision of an integrated psyche.
Model Answer 3: Landscape and Character
Question: Examine the relationship between the Guyanese landscape and the multi-racial crew in Palace of the Peacock.
In Palace of the Peacock, the landscape, history, and culture of Guyana form the basis of Harris’s imagination. The characters and the landscape often reflect each other. The landscape plays an important role in the shaping of the characters, and the symbolism of the landscape cannot be ignored as the crew fight their way up the raging river. Schomburgh and the da Silva twins come from “Sorrow Hill,” and their fates are tied to this geographical origin.
The river journey is central. As the crew enter the War Office rapids, the agitated river appears to be a combination of an earthquake and volcanic water that fills them with terror. The raging torrents are like the “boiling stream and furnace of an endless life without beginning and end.”
The description of the Arawak woman as they fight on the torrential river beautifully merges human and landscape: “Tiny embroideries resembling the handwork on the Arawak woman’s kerchief and the wrinkles on her brow turned to incredible and fast soundless breakers of foam. Her crumpled bosom and river grew agitated with desire … The ruffles in the water were her dress rolling …” .
This merging shows that for Harris, the boundary between the human and the environment is porous. Mariella, the old Arawak woman, stands for all that the exploiters are in search of, and her disappearance mirrors the elusiveness of the landscape itself.
The seven-day journey up the river is both realistic and symbolic. The crew, representing all the different ethnic groups of Guyana, face severe hardships, danger, and death. The landscape becomes a crucible. Carroll, the youngest and most endearing, drowns; Schomburgh dies in his sleep; Jennings dies in a fall; Cameron is stabbed; Wishrop meets his watery grave. By the seventh day, the boat is totally wrecked.
This destruction is necessary for the new vision that emerges in Book IV. The final distinction between peacock and palace, dream and consciousness, savannah and forest are all presented as one entity. The novel ends on the hope of the formation of a true community that is inclusive of all the various elements of Guiana.
Thus, the Guyanese landscape is not a passive backdrop but an active agent that strips away false identities and prepares the crew for spiritual reconciliation. As Victoria Toliver opines, Harris’s greatness lies in promoting a “radical imagination” that can read and think across cultures, and this imagination is deeply rooted in the animate landscape of Guyana.
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