The Carnival Trilogy by Wilson Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

had endured at the age of nine on the foreshore, but the mask of the cuckold upon his legal father (and the humiliation that also implied for his family) was radically different in its internal essence from plucked brand or false shaman. It originated a vision through the Abortion of an age, through the fallacious proprieties of an age, it originated a capacity toset material pride aside in favour of the spirit of care, the innermost spirit of Sex, the spirit of brooding creativity that takes over where nature leaves off … I was, to say the least, intrigued at the origins of such conversion of humiliation into the genius of love that differed from the natural impact of humiliation upon the material body. I was at a loss to understand it all, though I had glimpsed again the transfigurative wound of which Masters spoke on so many occasions. He desisted from saying anything more at this stage though I knew now that his guidance into realms that seemed to exist before birth and after death bestowed upon me in this life (this lived life) a privilege that would deepen and expand the biography of spirit on which I was engaged. It would deepen it, expand it, in peculiar and mutual engagement between author and character at the heart of Carnival.

FOUR
    Soon I was to perceive in the complex loves and sorrows of Masters’ life that I was as much a character (or character-mask ) in Carnival as he was. Indeed in a real and unreal sense he and other character-masks were the joint authors of Carnival and I was their creation. They drew me to surrender myself to them.
    My hand was suffused as I wrote by their parallel hands, my eyes as I looked around by their parallel eyes … And suddenly, paradoxically, it seemed to me that Masters’ coiled posture in the glass woman, his mother, turned upon me and conferred upon me a blessing or privilege, the fictional law that husbands the mother of a Carnival god when it (that law) – that character of law – dons the mask of the cuckold within Carnival.
    “That mask,” Masters said, “possesses its origins in the family humiliations I have disclosed that evolve nevertheless into spirit-parent, into fiction-maker, that I confer now upon you.” He cried to me from the womb as much as from the grave that such a peculiar translation of the wounds of humanity was indeed the law of fiction and to wear it made me not only his creation but his father-spirit, to wear it made me not only their creation but the parent-spark of the other characters in Carnival.
    Such is the paradox, the comedy, of half-divine, half- Carnival , character-masks in the medium of time. For Carnival time is partial, the past and the present and the future are parts of an unfathomable Carnival whole beyond total capture. Thus the past, as much as the future, bears upon the present, they are the children of the present but they also parent the present. The hidden past affects the present even as it emerges through present discoveries as a new, unsuspected force. Ifthe present parents the future how can it also be the child of the future?
    “The contradiction is resolved,” Masters said, “when one sees that the parts of time within which we live, die, are born, imply that there is no absolute parent or model of time that we can seize.
    “To see into the future – as into the hidden past – is a revelation of the partial ground on which we stand and the partial ground to which we move backwards or forwards.
    “To see into the past as into the future is not to possess absolute knowledge of the past or the future but to be moved nevertheless by the mystery of originality that gives birth to the future as the future and the past give birth to ourselves.
    “That originality, that mystery, may perceive a real, however elusive or incomplete, outline of coming events – or hidden past events – even as it confesses to deeper and farther hidden pasts and coming futures that are already transforming the basis of what one sees