SOURCE: “Carnival Strategies in Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin,” in Callaloo, Vol. 11, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 346-60.

[In the following essay, Jonas examines the essence of the “Trickster” and shows the instances of this imaginary creature presiding over Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin.]

West Indian novelist George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin takes its title from a couplet in Derek Walcott's juvenilia:

You in the castle of your skin
I the swineherd.

Walcott here invokes a conventional romance situation—unattainable mistress and infatuated, self-denigrating admirer—with the added pungency of racial overtones suggested by “skin.” Lamming, however, changes the possessive pronoun, thus reversing the entire situation and seizing the castle for himself. By this sleight of hand, the naked (black) skin, with its connotations of exposure, shame, and deprivation, is transformed into an image of impregnability, strength, and self-sufficiency. By changing the joke, Lamming slips the yoke.

Indeed, the technique of turning deprivation into plenitude is the strategy of the entire novel. Lamming's fiction stands on the threshold between two worlds facing both ways at once. For while one view of Castle shows a tragic mask of deprivation, failure, and exile, the other reveals a triumphant comic grin. Tragedy requires a scape-goat, but comedy, though it may permit the victim to be bound to the very horns of the altar, always allows him to evade the sacrificial role and escape to the sound of echoing laughter. It is on this very margin between tragic sacrifice and comic reversal that Lamming's first novel is situated.

Universally, cultures have recognized the power and danger of the margin or threshold by identifying a trickster-deity¹ who shall preside over the rites of passage. In the West Indies, as in Afro-America, folk-tales are told of the Trickster Anancy—half spider, half man—who, though perennially in tight situations, is singularly adept at turning the tables on his oppressor and emerging more or less unscathed. His ability to extricate himself lies in his gift for “spinning yarns.” In African mythology, Anancy is a god, responsible for creation itself, though his kindness to humans has brought about his fall from the favor of Nyame, the supreme Sky God. Rejected from the heavens, he finds himself positioned between earth and sky. Trader par excellence, Anancy enters the world to make things happen, to recreate boundaries, to break and reestablish relationships, to reawaken consciousness of the presence and the creative power of both the sacred Center and the formless Outside. Then he returns to that hidden threshold which he embodies and makes available as a passage to ‘save the people from ruin.’”²

Not surprisingly, given his capacity to hide in rafters and weave his web in any nook or cranny, Anancy survived the Middle Passage, and still spins his yarns throughout the Caribbean. His survival in folk imagination surely has to do with his capacity to transform disruption, discontinuity, brokenness, and defeat into triumphant new configurations of possibility. His perennial rebellion, and his use of comic trickery and deceit to expose the inadequacies of authority figures must surely have endeared him to the imagination of an oppressed folk. For it is the triumph of the Trickster to so deconstruct and invert the given “text” of authority that the destined scapegoat of tragedy turns the tables and emerges laughing in a comedy of ironic reversal—the castle of MY skin!

As symbol for the “limbo dance” of the West Indian novelist, Anancy is without peer. Poetry may well find its inspiration in jazz, blues, and calypso, but West Indian narrative, I contend, owes its beings to another Muse—Anancy. For, as Wilson Harris has argued, the West Indian artist is working in a limbo—a void between two worlds.³ Surrounded by and exiled from the structures of an alien world view, he must create his own world in this absence, or else be forever a negative, an exiled scapegoat. The very form of his art must be redefined. It is precisely here, in the interstices of structure, that the Anancy artist creates a world that describes its own center, thus marginalizing the oppressive structures of the Great House. Anancy re-creates the world—weaving a universe of relationships from the very substance of his being as he narrates his story in his way. For it is by way of his verbal ingenuity, his “yarn,” that he can escape nonentity and strategically relocate the center of the cosmos.

Lamming, as an Anancy artist, confronts the world view of “Mr Hate-To-Be-Contradicted,” exposing the arbitrary nature of its premises and denying it the fixity and permanence it wishes to claim. He draws our eyes away from the structures of European domination to the folk themselves, to the spider weaving in the unswept corners of the house as it were. His strategy posits the possibility of a multiplicity of centers, and insists on relationships, connectedness, and pluralism as a necessary corrective to the inside/outside, above/below polarized hierarchies implicit in the Eurocentric expression of Great House/exploited tenantry.

Boundaries, thresholds, crossroads, and the marketplace of symbolic commercial intercourse are omnipresent in the rigidly structured Eurocentric landscape of Castle. They express a tragic world view in which hierarchies are inevitable, and principles of inclusion and exclusion are final and ultimate. High on the hill are the landlord's house and garden surrounded by a brick wall topped with broken glass, while below in the valley is the “tenantry”—the folk defined in terms of their relationship to the landlord:

To the east where the land rose gently to a hill there was a large brick building surrounded by a wood and a high stone wall that bore bits of bottle along the top.⁴

(252)

At night the light poured down through the wood, and the house looking down from the hill seemed to hold a quality of benevolent protection. It was a castle around which the land like a shabby back garden stretched.

(29)

Yet another wall encloses the school yard:

In one corner a palm-tree, and in the others three shrines of enlightenment that looked over the wall and across a benighted wooden tenantry.

(35)

The three “shrines” are the church with “dark stained hooded windows that never opened” (35) and an interior that is “dark and heavy and strange”; the head-teacher's house; and the school itself “with windows all around that opened like a yawning mouth” (35). It is not without significance that a language of sacredness is used for this structured landscape in which the folk stand pro fana, feeding their children as human sacrifices to the yawning mouth of the system.

The landscaped village with its lighted Great House on the hill overseeing the tenantry in the valley, and the sacred middle ground between them of religion and education, is a microcosm of the novel's broader landscape in which Big England and Little England co-exist in the parent-child relationship typical of colonialism. “Land-lords” of authority—England, the Great House, the School, the Church—all “look down” disdainfully across their boundary walls at the folk of the tenantry.

The Great protect their interests by means of a system of overseers, supervisors, and inspectors, but the folk, by contrast, are without protection; they experience invasion of their fragile defining boundaries at every point. The frail walls of the village suggest a corresponding frailty of the walls of personhood for those who live there:

The village was a marvel of small, heaped houses raised jauntily on groundsels of limestone, and arranged in rows on either side of the multiplying marl roads. Sometimes the roads disintegrated, the limestone slid back and the houses advanced across their boundaries in an embrace of board and shingle and cactus fence.

(10)

The villagers lack a clearly marked “road” of purpose. Defined by others, they are yet to define themselves. Their lack of identity, their constant experience of being “overseen,” is symbolized in the incident of G's bathtime. As the neighbor's son Bob balances on the paling to watch, his weight causes a fence to crash: “the two yards merged. The barricade which had once protected our private secrecies had surrendered” (18). A crowd is attracted to the scene:

On all sides the fences had been weighed down with people, boys and girls and grown-ups. The girls were laughing and looking across to where I stood on the pool of pebbles, naked, waiting. They looked at Bob's mother and the broken fence and me. The sun had dried me thoroughly, and now it seemed that I had not been bathed, but brought out in open condemnation and placed in the middle of the yard waiting like one crucified to be jeered at.

(19)

The scene recurs in different forms throughout the novel: shame and degradation consequent on the breaking down of defining boundaries, ritual beatings, ritual purifications. Mocking eyes rejoice over the trembling naked figure of another's embarrassment, glad to find a scapegoat for the shame they fear to confront within themselves. G's naked skin is his sole protection—his frail counterpart to the landlord's “castle” on the hill.

Boundary walls define the Great, then, but merely marginalize the folk, categorizing them as expiatory scapegoats for the Great. G and his friends transgress sacred boundaries when they secretly enter the grounds of the landlord's house to see what goes on at a party, and they witness the seduction of the landlord's daughter by a British sailor. Later, the story given out by the landlord is that his daughter was raped by the village boys. Here the “penetration” of sacred domains—the rape of class interests by the military—is projected onto the folk. Similarly, moral corruption within the ranks of those bonded together by a common “skin” is denied. Moral and economic problems are univocally displaced into simple racial hatred. Villagers conversing in the shoemaker's shop sum up the landlord's relationship with the folk with more acuity than they realize when one of them says: “He couldn't feel as happy anywhere else in this God's world than he feel on that said same hill lookin' down at us” (97).

Ritual projection of guilt and shame onto an innocent victim is the recurring motif of the novel. Wilson Harris has already pointed to the number of ritual beatings and washing ceremonies in Castle.⁵ Repeatedly a scapegoat is singled out to bear the burden of another's disgrace. At the school's celebrations marking the Queen's birthday, the Headmaster, anxious to impress the inspector, is enraged when the ceremony is interrupted by a loud giggle. His response is dramatic. On the departure of the inspector he addresses the school in a voice “choked with a kind of terror” (42). Punishment falls on the first available victim in ritualistic sadism: the innocent lad becomes a “human symbol of the blackest sin,” is bound hand and foot, and a leather strap brought down repeatedly on his buttocks until his clothing is ripped and the “filth slithered down his legs.” Like a sacrificial victim, the boy makes “a brief howl like an animal that had had its throat cut” (43). Asked why he didn't run, the boy replies, “He had to beat somebody, and he made sure with me” (43). Like the men in Foster's shop, the boy understands the human need for a sacrificial scapegoat. As his school-friends bathe away the filth and blood, the victim relates information about the Head teacher that fully explains the man's insecurities and his need to protect his image at all cost.

The pattern is repeated at a wayside revival service. Once again an authority figure humiliates and denigrates a victim while worshippers and onlookers alike exult in projecting their own shame onto the chosen scapegoat. Watching the preacher's tactics with a reluctant convert, G comments, “I was sure they were going to sacrifice him, and I wanted to see how it was done” (166). The words “born again” disturb him: “There was something very frightening about them, and particularly the context in which they were placed. The hymn had been started in order to control the tittering of the spectators. … The preacher was a kind of spiritual bailiff who offered salvation as a generous exchange for the other's suffering” (167). Experience eventually teaches the lad that the circle of worshippers with the preacher at its center is a structured world akin to that of the landlord's walled houses on the hill; to enter it is to accept castration and assume the eternal role of child before the controlling authority of the Great.

When her pumpkin vine is trampled, G's mother has a sense of loss and futility that is wider-reaching than the immediate waste of the plant. Her voice “spoke as if from an inner void beyond which deeper within herself were incalculable layers of feeling” (17). Her deprivation vents itself on G. The boy, completely innocent, stands naked in the center of a circle of spectators who rock with laughter as his mother engages in a ritualistic beating. A scapegoat is needed, and the naked boy serves the role. The innocent boy in the school, G in his mother's yard, the youth at the wayside service—all naked, all innocent, all chosen victims. The vulnerability of the naked self is evident.

Lamming's key metaphor for the invasion of boundaries and absence of defining walls of selfhood is the flood with which the novel opens. Water seeps through ceiling and floor into the house where G lives with his mother. Outside, a lily is uprooted from the soil by the force of the rain. Invading floodwaters anticipate the later “flood” of worker riots that will invade the boundaries of privilege but leave in their wake a muddy residue of bourgeois profiteering personified in Mr Slime, founder of the Penny Bank—an organization that, despite its promise, yields no benefits to the village. At an existential level the floodwaters provide an image for the novel's exploration of ways to build defining walls around the self. For repeatedly the self experiences invasion by the Other: “Deep down he felt uneasy. He had been seen by another. He had become part of the other's world, and therefore no longer in complete control of his own. The eye of another was a kind of cage” (73).

Release and freedom are found only in the darkness—in the darkened cinema, in the school lavatory. To embrace the light is to lose one's freedom. Light from the landlord's house dictates the lifestyle of the villagers; light at the wayside revival service calls the people to forsake their manhood and be “born again” into submissiveness; and Ma calls Pa away from his dreams of silver, pork, and weddings, away from his ruminations on existence, away from his gaze through the open doorway into the freeing darkness and back to the circle of light thrown by the lamp in their home—a lamp that obediently takes its cue in unquestioning piety from the light on the hill. Lamming consistently inverts the Judeo-Christian metaphors of European tradition and associates light with exploitative control, darkness with freedom. The lad at the open-air meeting confesses his fear of the candles his aunt burns to “keep away the spirits” (162)! In Lamming's revision of the European text, it is only when one has the courage to step out of the light—beyond the narrow circle of the known into the unknown, undreamed-of realm of darkness that a new order of things is made possible. The alternative is to be “a prisoner in the light, condemned to be saved” (163).

Subtly Lamming inverts the conventional hierarchy of images. To be born again now appears as acquiescent auto-castration, and what Eurocentric authority calls enlightenment is discovered to be confinement within the denigrating oversight of an alien world view. By the end of his novel, Lamming brings us to the final inversion when the black skin itself, far from being a mark of shame and frailty, is revealed as a strong-hold—a mask behind which the self is safe from invasion; “The likenesses will meet and make merry, but they won't know you, the you that's hidden somewhere in the castle of your skin” (261), G exults. To be held in “le regard” of the other is to be mis-defined. One moves into Being when the defining process is from within. G's drama is an existential taking-possession of the boundaries of the self; he converts the cage of the already-defined into the fortress of the ever-signifying.

Sacrifice of this essential being is a kind of castration and, indeed, the image of a broken phallus haunts this novel. Discovery of their sexual potential by the boys in the public bath is checked and punished by the supervisor. Insistence on monogamy creates havoc for Jon and Bambi, producing a dilemma in which any attempt at choice (one means of self-definition) would result in auto-castration. G and his friends discover manhood stirring in them as they stumble upon a sailor making love to the landlord's daughter—“As there was a God in heaven I was going to do something with a girl” (173)—but when they return to the wayside revival meeting, they are urged to be “born again.” Ma invites Pa to leave his dreams of wealth and freedom and to repeat a child's prayer (90). But while the imposed culture, through its religion, requires childlike submission, those who fail to assume the responsibilities of manhood end up being defined by others, as Trumper realizes when he describes a man who refuses to be involved in the process of political decision-making as being like “a monk with a rotten cock who ain't know how he come by the said same infirmity” (293). Obedience to the rules of the game as dictated by the colonizer's cultural forms is like taking a vow of celibacy, but the colonized finds that his submission itself leads to impotence and worse. “One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene,”⁶ is James Baldwin's stark rendering of the dilemma.

The broken phallus motif is supported by the story line. G begins from a point of deprivation, “an almost total absence of family relations” (12), and a past that has sunk “with its cargo of episodes like a crew preferring scuttle to the consequences of survival” (11). Like his past and present, the boy's future, too, with his fears and ideals, seems destined to go down the drain in the same way as the flood waters that have washed out his ninth birthday (10). Like the uprooted lily in the flood, G will be removed from the village to attend high school, and the novel will end on the point of his departure for Trinidad at the age of nineteen. Uprooting, deprivation, discontinuity, absence of relationships, painful loss—these characterize his (and his people's) forward movement in time.

Behind him the villagers' experience echoes his own. Any hope for improvement of their lot through assumption of political or economic power seems destined to fail. Slime's Penny Bank scheme and the workers' riots alike seem to leave the folk rather worse off than they were under the landlord's feudal overlordship. Exploitation and dispossession are the story of the folk—under slavery, under the colonial landlord, and now under the emergent national bourgeoisie.

Just as the story is of brokenness and fragmentation, so is the plot. If it is seen as depending entirely on chronology for its unity, the plot discovers little meaning or purpose in either G's story or that of the community. For mimesis—though interesting—fails to provide the connections, fails to reveal signifying relationships. Even Trumper realizes that historical narrative fails. He says: “Don't ask Hist'ry why you is what you then see yourself to be, 'cause Hist'ry ain't got no answers. You ain't a thing till you know it” (297).

Yet though the forward linear movement of the novel is pessimistic, though imitation leads to ignominious failure and mimesis fails to uncover meaning—though, in a word, read as a conventional bildungsroman, Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin seems almost without hope, there is an alternative way of interpreting the text that emphasizes not hopeless sequence, but connection—and the key to such an alternative reading lies in the oral tradition of Anancy stories. For Lamming's “grotesque” scrap bag of incidents, anecdotes, folk tale, and memory is, in fact, a trickster-like assembling of the dismembered. Like a novitiate contemplating the sacra of the tribe, the reader must consider the connections between parts, the relationships that provide ironic meaning. In such a strategic re-reading, the village landscape signifies an alternative ideology. Its disintegrating road, the “embrace of board and shingle and cactus fence,” and houses advancing “across their boundaries to meet those on the opposite side” (10), speak eloquently of a universe of relationships, of connections, of wholeness set over against the divisive structures that dominate. This is a place where community is a reality.

Context, then, is all-important in Lamming's work, and the reader who ignores the ironies of juxtaposition is betrayed into over-simplifications. James Ngugi, for instance, suggests that Lamming's solution to the problem—“the united struggle of the dispossessed”—is communicated by Trumper. But the inadequacy of the racial ideology that Trumper declaims is exposed by its ironical context, for even as Trumper enthuses over his newly-found sense of racial identity, black bourgeois politics is moving in to dispossess Foster and send Pa to the Alms House.

Ironic play on the boundaries between juxtaposed episodes in the novel is common. The castrating role of the church (represented by the wayside meeting) is made evident because, sandwiched between two visits to this meeting, is the episode in which the boys “trespass” on the landlord's garden. The episode is vibrantly sexual, and, of course, evokes earlier discussion of the Fall, the Garden, and the Empire. Skillfully, Lamming draws together concepts of rebellion against political and religious control within a Freudian framework of patricide and rape of the sacred. Clearly just as Ma, with her puritanical views, discourages Pa from thinking of wealth and pleasure and freedom (instead he must pray like a child at her knee), so the Mother country, through its cultural superstructure, seeks to persuade the colonized that appropriation of wealth, freedom, and responsibilities is tantamount to a “rape” of the privilege that belongs to the Great alone. That G has learnt something from his experience in the Landlord's garden is evident, for on his first visit to the meeting, he is nervous and awed. When he returns, though, it is to play the trickster: he responds to the invitation to be “born again” merely in order to escape punishment by the overseer. Never again will he be imprisoned in the colonizer's “light.”

Though threatened with castration, Trickster has the capacity to reassemble his broken phallus. Despite the pervasive castration motif, there is an ebullient phallicism in this novel. The small boys who play with pins on the railway tracks look forward to the time when their “small blades” will be exchanged for the real weapons that the bigger boys brandish. Crabs, dogs, frogs, humans—all copulate in the region beyond the boundaries of the village—beyond, for it is in the margins of social premises that power resides: it is the “dung” that social perspectives reject that Trickster converts into “medicine” for the healing of the Tribe.

Frequent references to food in the novel also tie in with the concept of the Trickster. There are mouthwatering descriptions of Savory's (apt name!!) cakes and pastries, and of the elaborate preparation by G's mother of the meal of cuckoo, flying fish, and ice cream on the eve of his departure for Trinidad. Food preferences parallel the sexual imagery to suggest Trickster's vast appetite—itself a mythic projection of the longing for a share in life's pie.

Certainly the folk figure begins outside the castle of privilege, in its “shabby back garden.” But at the novel's conclusion, he is inside the castle of the self. For Lamming does not give us G's history, nor his diary, but a novel—a re-writing of the past in which context provides significant and illuminating connections. For Castle's form is not linear; it is an Anancy web of signification in which one divines meaning from relationships between fragments that, standing alone, seem meaningless. The G who writes the narrative is other than the G who is contained in the text. G as textual character has limited perceptions, but when he steps outside his history, his vision is enlarged. The trickster artist is able to use his perspective of distance and exile (temporally and spatially removed as he is from events) to weave threads into new configurations. Situated, godlike, at the interstices where juxtaposed fragments reflect upon each other, he divines significance; for the spider's web is, ultimately, a “system of signs.”

The process of stepping outside a containing metaphor of life into a position from which one can survey oneself in ironic appraisal is latent in the maturation process as described by French psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget identifies four stages⁷ in the development of the child that shed light on our discussion of the adult G's exile. The stages are as follows:

Birth to 18 months	sensori-motor (pre-speech)
18 months to 7–8 years	representation (post speech, but preoperatory)
7–12 years	concrete operations
12 years onwards	propositional/formal operations

Until 18 months, Piaget argues, the child lives in an “egocentric space,” and the objective world exists for him only as his senses record it. Later he moves to “general space,” and is aware of all objects, including his own body, as existing in that general space. This “total decentration in relation to the original egocentric space” Piaget describes as a “Copernican revolution.”⁸ The point here is that the infant is contained in reality, yet is unaware of being so contained. The advent of speech accompanies his movement outside himself, providing, as it were, the ability to represent himself to himself. From 7–12 years of age, he apprehends reality through concrete metaphor, and not until he approaches 12 years is he able to reason in the abstract, weighing one proposition against another—standing outside his metaphors in ironic contemplation.

Piaget implies that speech is the first stage in self-discovery (an issue discussed at length by the boys in Lamming's novel). For the psychologist, speech involves stepping outside “reality” into a space in the mind where reality (including the reality of the self) can be contemplated. At a later stage of growth, where formal operations replace the concrete, the child achieves a capacity for ambiguity—for irony.

The difference between the G within the historical text and the G who narrates that history from a point outside is akin to the difference between the pre-speech and the representational stages of childhood, or the difference between concrete and formal operation. In the first case, the child can move outside reality and represent it by words; in the later experience, development is marked by a release from concrete structure into the space of the mind where ambiguity is possible. Juxtaposing the paradoxical and the contradictory in a kind of limbo, the mind proceeds from the known (concrete) to the unknown (imagined) and this, in essence, conditions creative potential. In each case the movement out of reality into a reflective mode permits new dimensions of maturity. In the later stage, paradox becomes the ground for invention.

Unless he represents himself to himself, unless, in addition, he can stand outside structure and embrace paradox and ambiguity, the child fails to develop. Returning to Castle, we could draw the parallel that merely to exist in time is not enough, nor is a mere mimetic representation of events sufficient. For mature understanding to occur, there must be a movement outside of structures so that the reality lying somewhere between the always-partial structured perceptions can be investigated.

Restated in terms of our Anancy model, the argument is that there is need for a web of fiction to juxtapose fragments of experienced event in ways that reveal significance hidden in the interstices. Time moves in one direction through the novel, but counter to that flow is the reflective movement of memory, of the mature G narrating the fragments of his life, revising, reversing, juxtaposing to provide the relationships that reveal meaning. In this reflective movement, contradictions and paradox are held in skillful balance.

The twin movements—forward in time, and backward in revisionist reflection—are captured in the early pages of the novel in a passage that will serve here as an introduction to our discussion of the function of written narrative as self-creation:

The clock shelved in one corner kept up its ticking. My mother retreated to another part of the house where the silk and taffeta designs of her needling were being revised and reversed. I soon followed. …

(12)

As if in defiance of the oppressive linearity of history, the mother engages in a creative drawing together of fragments into something of use and beauty.

At many points in G's narrative, as here, the “clock” of historical sequence is abandoned, and a timeless moment of harmony and pattern shapes itself as the people group together at the telling and hearing of tales. One such moment occurs when G's mother, Miss Foster, and Bob's mother gather. Harmony, meaning, and fecundity take the place of deprivation and loss as the women re-create their world within a landscape where divisive boundaries are lost, and a spreading cherry tree suggests vibrant shared life:

They sat in the shade under the cherry tree that spread out over the fences in all directions. The roots were in one yard, but its body bulged forth into another, and its branches struck out over three or four more. … They sat in a circle composed and relaxed, rehearsing, each in turn the tale of dereliction told a thousand times during the past week. … It seemed they were three pieces in a pattern which remained constant. … In the corner where one fence merged into another, and the sunlight filtering through the leaves made a limitless suffusion over the land, the pattern had arranged itself with absolute unawareness. … The three were shuffling episodes and exchanging the confidences which informed their life with meaning.

(24–25)

The full meaning, however, is not clear to the women. As the narrator explains: “Their consciousness had never been quickened by the fact of life to which these confidences might have been a sure testimony” (25). For greater self-awareness there must be a further distancing. It is only when Trumper leaves the island that he is able to see with any degree of clarity what it means to be a Negro and to “proclaim himself the blackest evidence of the white man's denial of conscience” (299). Similarly, G perceives that, painful as it is, withdrawal into a no-man's land of exile—outside history, outside the defining relationships of society—this alone makes gnosis possible. In fact, Lamming transforms the negativity of dispossession—which finds its ultimate expression in exile—into a positive ground of self-knowledge. The mature narrator, from his perspective of exile from the folk he reflects on, infuses into the fragmented life of the village the existential overtones, the ironic juxtapositions, and the key words evoking rich associative links to produce a web of meaning where linear narrative yields only purposelessness and despair.

Speaking from his vantage point within history, G is limited by the puritan frame of perception that determines and prefigures all he sees. Both his own tone and that of others of the folk is often condemnatory: the boys are “vagabonds,” “disrespectful varmints,” “hooligans,” and “grinning jackasses.” The natural world beyond the boundaries of social structure teems with life, but it is described in morally derogatory terms. There is a puritanical, awed revulsion before forces that are seemingly both powerful and dangerous. In the woods, an old woman stumbles on copulating dogs “shaggy and obscene in their excitement,” and human couples “gross and warm in frenzied intercourse” (33). The boys observe the couplings of crabs on the beach and are “fascinated and terrified” in the woods by the ferocity of mating cats and the “hideous posture” (171) assumed by a pair of frogs. Their revulsion at this country on the margins, a landscape which defies and threatens their sense of order and structure (they are, we recall, adolescents) is concretized in the viscous “ooze-like jelly” from the mating frogs into which Trumper inadvertently puts his hand. Conditioned by a puritanical society, they consider the natural, the sexual, the procreative a nasty and distasteful business.

But this is the attitude of youthful immaturity. Despite the mental castration suggested in their reactions, a current of laughter surges through the novel, celebrating sexuality, denying responsibility, and revealing the locus of corruption, not in the marginalized folk and their nature, but in the very heart of authority's sacred constructs. This laughter is the sure manifestation of the trickster. It is fully and pervasively evident in the tales and anecdotes related by the folk in Castle. For every repressive statement made by authority, there is a counterstatement made by the folk, inverting, parodying, punning, and generally laying bare the hollow sham at the core of all authoritarian assumption. Far from being digressions, the “interpolated” tales are crucial to an Anancy-reading of this novel.

A fine example is the story of Jon. Western authoritarian standards enter Jon's life when he runs into the “free-for-all Brethren.” Deliciously misinterpreting this nomenclature, he freely takes Brother Bannister's daughter for himself and impregnates the girl. Required by the good church man (at gun point) to marry the young lady, lest shame come on both church and Brother Bannister himself, Jon is faced with the problem of Susie, the mother of his children. Jon's solution is to agree to marry both girls, but on the appointed day he sits in a tree in the church yard, choosing neither, while the two congregations wait in vain.

A sympathetic reading might at best see here a disruption of rural mores by an intrusive moral code, while a harsher view might find in Jon's sexual behavior an irresponsibility matched only by his helpless vacillation before the need for mature decision-making. There is, however, a key to an alternative “reading”—the three times repeated “like a feather in the wind” which links with the “cock-of-the-yard” motif running through the novel. Jon finds himself outside of structure, threatened on one hand by Brother Bannister with his gun representing European values, and on the other by Susie with her bottle of arsenic representing the folk institution. “Poor Jon was betwix' the devil an' the deep blue sea,” Trumper comments. But Jon evades castration. Refusing to shift from his ambiguous position, he assumes the role of trickster, facing both ways at once and making ambiguity his strength. Symbolically positioning himself up a tree in the cemetery—suspended between heaven and earth, life and death—he waits, Anancy-like, for the hater of contradictions to contradict himself: “He stay there quiet as a mouse an' he see all the commotion, an' he hear all what they sayin' 'bout where he wus, an' he just look an' listen” (125). And his wait is rewarded as the priest and Brother Bannister reveal, in their angry interchange, a great deal that they would have preferred to have kept hidden. Trumper captures the glee of the trickster in his words: “I never know there wus so much to tell 'bout the clergy, an' only 'God in heaven knows if it's all true, but we here in this earth can only hope it ain't true, the things I hear about the clergy” (125). From his liminal position, Jon—trickster-god of the market place—provokes an “exchange” that frees him from the power of assumed authority, exposing the sacred premises of a dominant, repressive culture to re-examination, if not ridicule, while skillfully evading all responsibility himself (a denial of responsibility duplicated in the narrative strategy of using the child-mask of Trumper to recount the tale). The triumph of the trickster's phallus is exuberantly celebrated by Trumper: “Some say this, an' some say that, but no matter what some say or not say, everybody started to refer to Jon as the cock in the yard. An' some say cocks wus gettin' scarce. What a scandal it wus, an' I hear things about cocks I never hear in all my born days. 'Twus a hell of a mix-up, an' I hope never to hear of such a thing again” (124).

Another tale about “cocks” is related by Miss Foster; it is the incident of Gordon's “mannishness” in attempting to enter the white man's world of economics by selling a fowl cock (and ah how intentional is the pun!) to a white man standing at the bus stop. Trickster, of course, is god of exchange, and we can expect to find his antics here. As Gordon turns the fowl around for inspection, the expected happens: the bird messes in the man's face. Gleefully the boys relate to an investigating police officer how the man fled because he had “messed his pants,” while children around immortalize the incident with a song, “look what fowlcock do to you.” Folk tale joins here with calypso tradition to expose and humiliate the oppressor.

Responsibility for the incident lies, of course, with the fowl-cock, not with Gordon.⁹ Wearing a mask of childlike innocence, he initiates an “exchange” that will expose the “shame” of the authority figure—the white man, who throws coins for the boys to dive for, hands out pennies on public occasions, but denies economic independence to the folk he exploits. Any liaison with the landlord's daughter would, after all, constitute a “rape” of the privileged class.

And so, despite repression and attempted castration, the phallus of the Trickster is omnipresent. Outside the margins of history, Trickster reassembles his fragmented phallus; he draws together meaningless threads of experience, and so creates himself anew—weaving not only a web of meaning, but a mesh in which he ensnares his prey. Trumper describes his own experience of such a creative moment:

I wus sittin' under the cellar at home, I don't remember why I went under the cellar, p'raps I wus searching for eggs. But anyway, I wus there, under the cellar, an' it seem I wus all by myself there, under the cellar, jus' looking at the dust and dirt an' rubbish under the cellar.

(122)

The whole world, so an African creation myth tells us, was born from an egg. It is under the cellar, amidst the rubbish and dirt swept outside the house of structured premises, that Trumper begins the process of creating his world anew.

In the same way as Trumper, G salvages his life from the “rubbish” that is excluded from Eurocentric perceptual framing. Looking at his diaries, he realizes that, like the “cargo of episodes” on the scuttled ship of his family past, the records of his own past are destined to be “put away on the shelf and … never heard of again except someone rescues them from the garbage” (258). That is, unless they are “re-read” and “revised” as they are in the novel itself. The written word, as Derrida points out, is infinitely iterable, renewing its life constantly through repeated recontextualizations that are independent of the author, indeed that are premised on his absence. For the author is indeed “absent.” He is neither the G within the text, nor the G who narrates, but someone else, somewhere else. Thus the notion of exile creates ever-widening ripples of signification. The Anancy-artist, then, escapes oblivion by means of his thread—the narrative thread spun from his own historical being. He draws that single spun thread, though, into a multiplicity of relationships and configurations to reveal his divining powers—his ability to search between events for the meaning that lies in the interstices. The novel's discussion of “getting into history” is, thus, resolved in the act of artistic creation.

All attempts at climbing into history ultimately fail. Man does not define himself by epic heroism, for the big fisherman on the beach is a man only when he ceases to be godlike. Nor is a man made by his actions, since “stoning” either headmaster or landlord results only in the replacement of one authority by another. Assuming the responsibility of choice, too, is meaningless in a society that does not offer valid choices. Self-definition, as Lamming describes it, is not measured by material gain, and, indeed, it is not achieved in time. It consists, instead, in reflection, in stepping outside time into inner spaces of the imagination where fragmentary threads are woven into a relational web.

One aspect of the trickster remains to be discussed—his handling of “dung” which he converts into “medicine” for the tribe. On the way home from a farewell party held in honor of his departure for Trinidad, G is intercepted by a prostitute. At the party he had been “cock of the yard”; now he has the opportunity to “prove” his manhood in the time-honored way. But he chooses instead to tell the girl a story. The tale in full reads as follows:

When I was a little boy I knew another little boy who was in the habit of accumulating birds' shit. When he got the right quantity he cut a stick and painted it with the birds' shit. He hid the stick till it was dark, and when he went out, unseen and hardly seeing, he would make conversation with another boy. Then he would ask the boy to hold the stick, and when the boy held he pulled the stick through the clenched fingers, and the paint came off in a solid little pile on the other's hand.

(261)

The boy in the story epitomizes the impulse to project one's darkness onto another, to use another's humiliation and shame to prove one's own manhood. Unwittingly the prostitute is acquiescing in this process, allowing her body to become a “hide of darkness” (to use Brathwaite's phrase) for another's guilt. G refuses to win “manhood” so cheaply.

Like the boy, the trickster-artist takes the accumulated “shit”—the shame of the folk—and (like G who appropriates his childhood acquaintance's scatology for his own storied didacticism) converts it, through the ritual of his text, into “medicine.” Healing is made possible through his exposure of the process by which human beings, black and white alike, project their own shame onto others and refuse to confront their inner darkness. The discovery that the shameful, defiling “shit” is, in reality, the “blackest evidence” of another's denial of conscience, gives wisdom and power, as Trumper has realized.

Manhood—maturity—is attained, not through sexual conquest, but through mastery of the word as a vehicle for both critical self-discovery and the existential projection of that self onto the landscape. By means of the narrative act, G and his creator escape the colonization of being held in the perceptual landscape of an exploitative Other, and break into the freedom of writing themselves into the landscape.

Writing, Jean-Paul Sartre has suggested, is a dialectic, “a pact of generosity between author and reader,”¹⁰ in which the writer and reader collaborate for their mutual freedom. The creative writer presents his reader with a landscaped perceptual world within which the reader freely roams, reconstructing that landscape according to his personal vision. When Lamming permits G to substitute story-telling for sexual exploitation, he sets up a paradigmatic alternative to all forms of exploitation. For the freedom of essential being enjoyed by both reader and writer in the unimpassioned narrative act is the complete antithesis of acts of exploitation and colonization—whether literal or metaphorical.

For Lamming has entered the carnivalesque world of Anancy—the Trickster of the margins. His task as creative West Indian writer is to mount a perpetual assault on the word of assumed Eurocentric authority, to resist any and every world view that colonizes him and to assert, in place of the sacred “shrines” of Western cultural imperialism, an ongoing narrative activity that invites us to step outside the “given” into a limbo where imaginative new connections can be made, and where acts of reconstituting reality hold infinite possibility. The rhythm of this novel—its dialectical movement between chronological event and moments of laughter-filled story-telling—implies the need that society has for carnival. Not, perhaps, the costume-band variety, but all those carnivalesque moments when the group steps outside the metaphors in which it is contained and not only discovers new ways of seeing itself, but grasps the pen and inscribes that new self-image on the landscape. So that the self in the castle of my skin can at last be defined from within—not confined and colonized within the perceptual landscape of the Other.

Notes

1. Literature on the Trickster includes: Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, “‘A Tolerated Margin of Mess’: The Trickster and his Tales Reconsidered,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 11 (1975); Norman O. Brown, Hermes the Thief: the Evolution of a Myth (New York: Random House, 1969); Laura Makarius, “Ritual Clowns and Symbolic Behavior,” Diogenes 69 (1970): 44–73; Robert D. Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa: A Study of Mythic Irony and Sacred Delight (Berkeley: U of California P, 1980); Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1956); Barre Toelken, “The ‘Pretty Language’ of Yellowman: Genre Mode and Texture in Navaho Coyote Narratives,” Genre 2.3 (1969); Victor W. Turner, “Myth and Symbol,” in International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968); and Joan Wescott, “The Sculpture and Myths of Eshu Elegba, the Yoruba Trickster,” Africa 32 (1962).

2. Pelton 60.

3. See, for instance, his “History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and the Guianas,” in Anagogic Qualities of Literature, ed. Joseph Strelka (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1971).

4. George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (London: Longman Caribbean Ltd., 1970). All subsequent references are to this edition.

5. Ian Munro and Reinhard Sander, eds., Kas-Kas: Interviews with Three Caribbean Writers in Texas (Austin: U of Texas, 1972), 45.

6. James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” Notes of a Native Son (London: Corgi, 1965), 94.

7. Jean Piaget, The Child and Reality (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973), 10.

8. Ibid. 16.

9. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” Daedelus 15 (1972): 1–38. In examining the elaborate system of conventions observed in cockfights among the Balinese people Clifford Geertz comes to the conclusion that the cockfight provides metasocial commentary, and that its function is interpretative: “it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience, a story they tell themselves about themselves.” It is interesting to note, too, in connection with Gordon's story, that Trickster's genitals may act independently. In Radin's account, mischief is done by Wakdjunkaga's ambulatory genitals, while the Trickster himself remains at home. Narrators of Anancy stories customarily conclude with a disclaimer, exonerating themselves from any blame that might attach to their social commentary.

10. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Why Write?,” in What is Literature?, translated by Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).