In describing a new radical art which will go beyond the dead-end realism of the novel, Wilson Harris states “that, in fact, an art of memory which dislocates, in some measure, an idolatrous plane of realism by immersing us in a peculiar kind of ruined fabric, may help to free us from a consensus of bestiality, monolithic helplessness, monolithic violence.”¹ Just such an art of memory is used by Harris in Tumatumari in his presentation of the drama of consciousness of Prudence, and the novel becomes a complex act of memory. Although the poetic density of the language and structure of the novel continually shows the inadequacy of any purely intellectual analysis of the work, a discussion of the major thematic developments is useful in permitting the reader to share to some extent in the “dimension of translation as well as digestion”² of this dislocating art and act of memory achieved by Prudence and her author.

The landscape in which this act of memory takes place is permeated by a sense of void, introduced in the first scene of the novel. For Prudence at the pool before dawn the sky is a void since “the stars had faded but the sun not yet risen,” and the “sky appeared to her at the moment stricken of its true digestion of fire—of both native stars and sun”; she is surrounded by the “opaque light void of the sky.”³ The theme of the void is expanded throughout the novel by the presentation of Prudence living at Tumatumari, on the edge of the advance of the technological age and the withdrawal of primitive society. She is the product of history, and has left the civilization of Georgetown to move to the frontier, into the void between the two cultures, between the dying present and the unborn future. She exists also in an emotional void because of the nearly simultaneous death of her husband in the falls and of her child at birth.

The first reaction of Prudence to this sense of loss is nervous breakdown, her present state. There are, however, “two proportions of ‘post-natal’ breakdown” that she is experiencing, stated at the beginning of chapter two:

On one hand she found herself searching for a concentration or location of loss to serve as the medium out of which a new illumination of feeling could emerge—a structure of metamorphosis completely natural and original despite its axes of dislocation. … Prudence felt she could fall no lower and would learn to build all the higher. Arrow of ascension. Block of construction. Fire in stone.

On the other hand she found herself divided upon a hairline of clarity so extreme it made her despair of the very foundations she wanted to find. And this despair—the paradoxical landslide at times of every grain of support—was both pinprick and horror—balloon of construction: at such moments the target of memory shone without relief as if to confirm an absolute disorientation and realm. There had been the death of her newborn child. Then there had been the death of her husband Roi. …

(17)

This passage gives us two important directions of the novel: the concern for establishing opposite possibilities for one event, the appointing of gains within losses, losses within gains, and the fact that this process is the “target of memory.” In fact, as has been stated earlier, the novel becomes a complex act of memory by which Prudence reconstructs her immediate and remote past, not only from her own consciousness, but through that of Roi and her father as well, both before and after their deaths. The function of memory in this reconstruction of the past is thus somewhat complicated. As the novel progresses there is a kind of “serial illumination” operative, to borrow a term from Harris' essay on “Interior of the Novel.”⁴ This can be seen in the connections between the five sections of the novel: each one is an expansion of a new conception of the past discovered in the previous section. In this way Prudence's memory achieves a transformation of the past which in effect is a destruction of “the incestuous image,” a rebirth of the “lost and alien.”⁵

I have pointed out that the theme of the void is established in the first scene of the novel. This first incident also gives us an image of the unity of opposites which at the same time triggers the mechanism of memory. The “object” Prudence finds in the water is both the face of her child and the back of her drowned husband's head, combined in one. In a sense it is a mask of both and it introduces the image of the mask, a major one in the novel. The first section of Tumatumari, “The Mask of the Sun,” deals with Roi Solman and his connection with the disintegrating Indian society; both have at one point assumed the mask of the sun. Prudence discovered this while discussing the mysterious Indians with her engineer husband, Roi, himself half Indian. The silent band of Indians upsets both the emancipated natives and Roi and Prudence, since they are a vanquished and vanishing remainder of the primitive culture's original myth of kinship with the sun, their primal vision. Since the arrival of the technological age the lost tribe of the sun has “retired into what was virtually for them their ‘death’ or ‘sleep’ of fire.” (32) Yet they are periodically and unexpectedly seen. Roi admits that he has been exploiting this myth to the advantage of his scientific work. He has been able to do this because of the coincidence of the lost tribe's last appearance five years ago at the time of his near-fatal accident at the bottom of the well. The nature of his injury (“When they pulled me up I felt like glass. Shining and white. Electricity to last a lifetime. I saw everything lit up from within”[25].) and his recovery (“by way of the filthy ceremony—the Ceremony of the Rock as the people around the hill call it. We rubbed our noses upon it—metaphorically speaking of course. I was seen as their lighthouse—scapegoat. …” [36] are used by Roi to establish his super-natural powers in the eyes of the natives. When Prudence objects that it is beastly, Roi replies: “It is. Self-preservative. Ghetto. After all the object is one of upholding an economic establishment—emancipation, enlightenment—by fair means or foul. …” (36) Roi feels this pretense, this wearing of the mask of the sun, is the only possibility for them. “It is a long sad incestuous tale no doubt through which may I remind you we preserve our crops.” (36) Prudence's reply is prophetic: “That's the rub. You still don't see the rapids—how deep and swift are the emotions on which you gamble for control. …” (37) Roi does in fact founder in the rapids and lose his life.

This “Ceremony of the Rock,” the act by which the mask is assumed, becomes the title of the next section of the book which is an exploration of this quality of pretense in Roi and in Prudence's father. Prudence had seen her father's mask of forbearance broken at the moment of his death when his pain at the division between his children caused by racial prejudice brings him to curse God for this deception which he has perpetuated all his life. He dies saying “anything I would give to erase my own name—break in order to build. A true covenant. …” (45) Earlier in his life he had made an admission of the mask to Pamela, over-heard by Prudence. Pamela has asked permission to marry a New Yorker. Henry sees this as an attempt to pass for white, to hide her mixed blood, an attempt which he permits but condemns since it is part of the front which he has helped maintain: “Don't say you've lived with a bogus historical mask all this time and not known. I thought you knew of my spiritual demise. It started the day I kept telling myself my family—kith and kin—came first. I needed money, respect. Cornered. I must put up a front for you and for society. Propped myself up to serve your interest. A dead man. Immortal soul. Wouldn't it have been healthier if I had struck—lived for a while—abandoned you all … ?” (63) In this sense Roi and Henry Tenby are similar: they are both aware that they support a pretense. To Prudence they appear “like outriders of remorse—closely-guarded ‘secret.’ Art of control. For the good of the tribe/family. Economics of survival. Pass law. Virtue. Reins upon an underground imagination which they exercised over a lifetime of bitterness until from their own lips a heartrending cry arose.” (46) Her father had betrayed her by showing her his life was an enormous failure, rather than a success; Roi has also betrayed her by his death which has been a result of his impatience to establish the technological age at any cost. It has been a loss of belief and life for the ‘gain’ of civilization. Prudence finds the double betrayal almost too cruel to bear, but at the same time “she knew there was no escape until she had learnt to strike back in the name of love. The height of absurdity really. The depth of love. Tenderness. Cruelty. Responsibility. Hell. Compassion. All combined … rolled into One. …” (48)

Moved by this need to strike back in the name of love Prudence creates a scene in her mind that closely connects the tribe of the sun with Roi. She sees the Indians as calling to her “to be born again—expelled from the bondage of history towards a spiral of ‘vision’ …” (49) as they ascend to the summit of illusion. They refuse to remain “garbage to be disposed of upon the frontiers of a technological universe.” (48) She along with them should not be blinded by the confining, false pretense of history. She sees the Indians as moving to a new vision of the absolute, which is either life or death, as they climb the mountain toward the sun:

And as the cloud-backed Indians stopped at last and plunged to read the summons of life or death—to break the arbitrary divide in a flash—she strained her eyes for Roi. It was as if the night had descended when she would give birth to their child. And as her husband plunged across the river of the jungle to reach her he appeared to descend deeper than he intended or knew—pushed and pulled by her. God—by her. IN HER NAME. A collision grew imminent. She felt she had been hit by stars: self-knowledge, the constellation of the father in the son, infliction of injury seen at the last moment for what it was—stunned silence (science)—the secret door to the future. …

(50)

This is a key point in the novel. As a result of the collision of cultures Prudence for the first time has the intuition of a gain within the loss of her husband: the injury of his death is the secret door to the rediscovery of the future, it brings the recognition of the necessity of a creative rediscovery.

Henry Tenby, Prudence now sees, had wanted the same when he condemned Pamela's and his own blind masquerade: “he would have given his right arm to establish upon a watershed of time—one slope leading back into the abyss of slavery—the other moving forward towards a contour which invoked the past again but not upon a level of “connivance,” rejection, “conspiracy,” consent: secret redress instead (genuine spiral of re-discovery, creativity). …” (62) Yet the closest Henry Tenby had come to this in life was a condemnation of his historical perspective which had excluded totality in favour of imposing formulae from above, formulae derived from a narrow exclusive view of the past and present. This is made clear to him when he reflects on his dispute in forty-seven with the lunatic expert who had wanted to reform the water conservancies. Tenby had won, but the course of events proved him wrong. His view had ignored the true lie of the land, had been a misconception of topography. Looking back on his mistakes, he has nothing but contempt for his ideas: they were uncreative, “restrictive,” subservient to the existing economic institutions, “increasingly arbitrary (self-sufficient),” and ignored any “complex evolutionary functions.” (64–65)

Prudence herself is tempted to see only what she wants to see, she realizes, when she recalls her visit to the deserted village, confirmed in the belief that Rakka too is pregnant, although she is not. Her erection of this “model of self-deception” had been an attempt to harden herself “against the womb of time, against the decapitation of the ghetto, anguish of reflection, pain.” (67) She is willing to do anything to save her man. She is also tempted to see the future the same way Roi has, as the violation of cultures “which one sought to fashion under the name of economic self-righteousness and self-sufficiency,” (69) but which in fact would be “Economic sting. Consume or Perish.” (68) However, when she recognizes Roi in the hut after momentarily thinking she was seeing his dead body, she recognizes also that the ‘dead’ future which she had imagined was really the ‘living’ past. She knows that the ‘living’ future can only be built by accepting the violation of cultures for what it is, by accepting both gain and loss:

As if the light that suffuses the sky (which one takes for granted as indigenous to the canvas of space) were dimmed and one knew that the quality of one's vision rested much more on an alien fracture or sun than on a uniform pattern of illumination: that one's vision sprang out of a collision of faculties—apprehensive reflex, nerve, retina—from which one groped to populate the face of the universe with “living” as well as “dead” features (technological signposts) in order to recapture a profound intuition of both loss and gain, reconstructive order. One's blindness to uniformity, in fact, was the beginning of one's vision of a particular creative/uncreative humanity immersed in the origin of the sun. …

(69–70)

Roi also comes to this realization when the Indians withdraw their support from his economic system based on a one-sided deception. Ironically, he loses the Indians due to the myth he has exploited. They believe he has impregnated Rakka, thereby making an only too-human bond with their race, and since Roi is half-caste this means the end of the race for the Indians. They withdraw their support from the technology of the future, which they now see was gained by deception. Roi feels that although the belief in Rakka's pregnancy is wrong physically, it may be right metaphysically: “They know she is (pregnant)—metaphysically speaking. Perhaps they are right. They're withdrawing their labour—end of an age—decapitation of the ghetto. I have come to symbolise this which is the last thing I dreamt my blundering tools, abortive technology would engender. It may be the slow painful beginning of far-flung contours of re-construction along lines truly consistent with an alien miracle—creative/un-creative humanity, law of opposites, genuine freedom/genuine control—in lieu of self-deception in the name of. …” (72)

This section of the novel ends with the speech of Comrade Block, a final indictment of the economic establishment by both Roi and Henry Tenby. The speech is introduced by the above speech by Roi, and Prudence recalls the incident from the past “with Roi's drowned eyes.” (72) Delivered by Comrade Block, an anonymous character “who could be me,” says Henry, the speech seems to be personally directed to Henry's faults and the mistakes of Guiana and all modern civilization. The speech ends: “And lastly I am speaking to YOU out there, purveyor of news, engineer of loves, historian of deceptions—all in the name of the gods. You won't get away with it anymore. There's a price-tag on your head—hit-and-run driver. …” (76)

By the end of the first two books, Prudence's memory has endowed both Roi and her father with an awareness of the self-deception and the artificiality of the society they have sustained. In “The Chair of the Well” Prudence's memory and imagination are used even more freely than they were in the closing speech of the preceding book, to reshape the facts of their lives according to her “intuition of total relationships born of rising equally setting sun.” (81) Her memory begins to transform the losses, to digest the trauma of history. The section is built around the complex of images connected with the title. The “chair” is the chair of history, literally the chair-like top of the well made by Roi in the escarpment, so that the walls of the well are similar to the rock face of the falls. To look into the well is to look into the past through a hole in the rock of history, into the pools of memory.

Looking into the well, Prudence's vision of the death of Roi is transformed into the complicated image of the spinning wheel, with Roi pinned at the centre. As he is drowning, the river is seen as “flowing towards him like lava of consciousness down the Kaieteuran escarpment.” (84) Roi has been given an intuition of total relationship; he connects two opposite poles: “These were Prudence on stilts of fire above him in her balloon of labour, childbirth, and Rakka beneath him like a sack of refuse. He stood halfway between them suspended in the volume of the waterfall—riven by an arrow of pain—divided by a hairline of sensibility. The circumference of fire and water revolved around him. …” (84) This image is expanded until all of history is drawn to the spinning wheel's circumference, whose centre is the centre of “a dying world.” (84)

The appearance of Prudence's father on the wheel, as a centaur, embodying the political conscience of the race which roped souls “all in the name of progress,” (86) forms the major part of this section. Prudence rearranges the facts that she knows about her father to bring about the birth of his conscience, “to life the veil from a dogma of purity, self-righteous deception.” (87) She sees the “dog of conscience” snapping at the “strange pitiless hėap of currency at his elbow—hideous bones of gold, litter of remorse.” (88) Henry's affair with Isabella is the first example of his enslavement to money. He had wanted to buy her to possess her, rather than simply love her; similarly, she had allowed herself to be possessed because she thought he was rich. When she abandons him he sees the truth about himself.

Prudence next sees her father “shopping in the womb of place for the mask of a lifetime—the mask of virtue.” (93) It is in 1922 in Georgetown, in the middle of an economic recession. He has already begun to acquire his reputation for life but is not certain that it suits him. He visits a brothel called FACE LIFT where he discovers that a life spent in the “service for money” (94) is really a life in a whorehouse, and it doesn't matter what mask you wear, since they are all masks, “a rose is a rose is a. …” (95) The madam is transformed into a Chinese woman, then into Rakka, and is seen as the “whore of the centuries” used by every “chronic lover,” including Roi. (96) Henry Tenby's decision to hide his conception of this truth, principally embodied in the prostitution of populations (implosion) for the sake of economics, from his children, is seen by Prudence as her spiritual conception, although she was born in 1940.

The spiritual conception in 1922 of prudence (Prudence) is followed in 1924 by the spiritual conception of Hugh Skelton Tenby, the only black member of the family. Prudence discovered an essay by her father on the effect of immigration of cheap male labour only, with no regard for the sexual balance, and on the cruel methods of transport. The essay had been conceived in 1924 when Henry decided not to disclose the scandal of the death of Jack History due to an unrelieved erection, reported to him by the “waif of the docks and streets,” (105) although he knew that this was just an expression of the humiliating excess of males caused by the inhumane immigration policies. Tenby wants to sidestep the question of race and sex because he needs money and is afraid of being accused of being “anti-white, anti-black. Anti-god, anti-devil. Christ knows what. No what I need in 1924 if I am to enter into business—the business of writing books—is a mask of refinement, a skeleton in the cupboard.” (106) He decides not to ignore, but to attenuate the report of the death by erection by saying that the waif saw Jack History, “but that you're just a little bitch—a victim—a victim of hallucination—collective breakdown—nightmare wish-fulfilment—desire for a leader. …” (107)

Prudence is now able to see this attempt to postpone confrontation between “individual conscience and collective mirage” as a “fatal miscalculation.” (107) His tongue is seized by the waif of the streets. His essay written finally in 1938 on this question remains hidden away unpublished, just as his son Hugh, born in 1938, is hidden when guests arrive.

The actions of Henry as he is dying, however, are seen by Prudence as a resumption of his conversation with the muse, with the waif of the streets. The fourth book, “The Brothel of the Masks,” presents us with a new view of life seen after death, by means of the “Eye” in the rock face of Tumatumari, the living dead eye: It is Prudence who creates this “Eye” and she uses it to create “intimate volumes, unpublished acts, unpublished dreams, autobiographical plays of equivalences of destiny (all seized and torn in a moment of self-betrayal)—which her father had hidden nevertheless in his trunk or coffin of life—beneath the mountain of souls—or was it in his dark primeval sky above—” (112–13). It is her attempt to achieve a reciprocity in the apparent tragedy of her father's life, an attempt to reach an “ultimate treaty of sensibility … between man and man, man and nature.” (109) Through the intermediary of Prudence, Henry is allowed the confrontation which he had a voided in his life. He is able to see the “Brothel of Masks” as a place of filthy lucre, built on the foundation of the taxpayer's money. After his death, since he is now free from the self-deceptions of his life, he confronts the reality of his blame for Hugh's death in the budget riots of 1962: “Sum and sun of all his hopes—Hugh Skelton lying upon his bier. Shot in the streets of Georgetown. Budget Riots 1962. The shock of confrontation, of standing upon a frontier of frozen resources—frozen profits—broke him into two to confirm his state or constitution I + I = 0”; and “Message for Hugh Skelton. This bullet fired by your father's rich kith and kin—all races of endeavour—white + brown + black.” (120) In this section Prudence is using the conscience of Henry as a “door of conceptions,” “capable of supporting a disparity of relationships—weak and strong—” (117). Besides the transformation of her father's deathbed curse into the blessing of the resumption of the conversation with the muse which allows both Prudence and her father new conceptions of the past, Prudence now sees this renewed conversation as being anticipated by her father during his lifetime of silence. Ironically, his self-betrayal and silence during his life were also a blessing since he was forced into an awareness of “the shackles of his time.” (131)

His third child, Pamela, represents his decision to accept the disparity between academic freedom and freedom restricted by convention, the lack of any real possibility for change in the present, although he still believed it could be achieved in the future—it was just “economically unpropitious, politically and culturally unwise” (129). Pamela's spiritual conception is his decision to represent the vested interests of society, while secretly hoping for real change in the future.

The episode of the drought on the Canje sums up much of Henry's life and death. The drought is equally the excess of sun and the excess of the distortions of reality imposed by the economics of the society. All his life Henry has supported this constitutional and economic rape, while secretly hoping for a reversal. The sudden torrential rains do reverse the situation, by imposing the other extreme, and causing the death of children by contaminated water. Similarly, Henry must sacrifice his children to relieve the drought of the status quo of his society.

After death, Henry is struck by the collision of the opposites, sun and flood, and he gains a new conception of their unity in Canje. If they had been aware of the true unity of the landscape—“the endless precipitation of fire and the endless uprising of waterfall” (137)—they could have avoided the extremes of drought and flood (ghetto of economic self-interest, self-destruction).

Prudence now sees her father's life as “a necessary sickness as well as a growing health” (138) since it is from his suffering that he has arrived at this new conception. His death has brought about a transformation in his life: “a closed lifetime it had seemed to her (Prudence)—her father's lifetime: an open pit or lid it now was (new conception—drama of conception—drama of consciousness)” (141). Prudence now sees his self-sacrifice as a necessary “container of elements the digestion of which was incompatible with the times—the explosion of which would have been catastrophic and premature” (141). But now, in the void which surrounds Prudence at Tumatumari, and “from within the ultimate seal of death” (141), he is beginning the confrontation:

with elements that had been restricted before within a cruel bottle-neck or focus of obsession but now had been partially liberated and digested by an ironical weight (or weightlessness) of imagination. Death-in-life. Life-in-death. Self-surrender in self-betrayal. Self-betrayal in self-surrender. The unwritten constitution of a treaty with the muse which was to endure because of its capacity for standing on its own head the void of his century—birth of a new technology—epitaph of the old in the cradle of the new. Wheel within wheel—resumption of traffic into the psyche, into space, into the hinterland, into the bottomless pool of origins.

(142)

The book ends with Henry himself now seeing what Prudence discovered at various points earlier in the novel. He orders the spiritual conception of his children as the reverse of their physical conception. He further notes for the first time that Pamela and Diana were similar: both seemed to be what they were not; and opposite: Diana, a neurotic virgin; Pamela, promiscuous. He had been fooled by both, and realizes that Diana did not hate him for his rape of her, but rather herself for not being able to keep up her illusions. This last new conception by Henry of his past seems to open the way for an endless stream of new conceptions which he will make, but which are not included in the novel. By the end of “The Brother of Masks” Prudence has endowed her father's death with the capability of establishing his desired “treaty of sensibility.” She has produced, as it were, his unpublished play “Funeral Cradle,” a “life in death.”

In the last book of the novel, “Conception of the Game,” Prudence turns the “Eye of the Well” on her own activities in the course of the novel. The creation of the “Eye on the Rock Face of Eternity” is at once an illumination, a new conception of the past, present and future, a conception of the game which she played in the past, and a conception of a new game in the future. Throughout the novel, Prudence had been attempting to reconstruct her family's “history,” which had seemed a harmless sort of game to her. In fact, it had been a dangerous game since she was forced to see the game of self-deception her ancestors had been playing with nature, the game of masks, of hypocrisies. This realization seemed to destroy her world, since it caused the destruction of assumptions on which the world of her ancestors was based: “rainfall of idolatries, splintering of perfectionist assumptions I had never dreamt to question.” (153) The birth of the “Eye,” however, is also the realization that this seeming end is not the end but the beginning, a dying to be reborn: “And as these models crumbled it began to dawn upon me that a new spatial womb existed whose reciprocal functions one had long denied—new engines or structures of the psyche—” (153). As well, the birth of the “Eye” is just part of a series of beginnings: “The Eye on the Face … (she then wrote) was itself but a ring or clasp in a chain of identity extrapolated into her fluid grasp and … glancing at her, through her, with her (in binding her to itself in one light) was being glanced at itself from another source through the window of its disparity of perception and therefore unbinding her in another light. A fantastic reciprocity of elements which in encircling her had no alternative but to release her since it subsisted on a hairline or crack within the Obsessional Mask of an Age.” (151–52)

Although Prudence has achieved release through this chain of transformations, it is also destruction. Reciprocity of elements. Funeral Cradle. The novel ends with her destruction/birth in the waterfall—from “the nervous precipice of breakdown into the bottomless pool of memory.” (153) As the old Prudence (prudence) is destroyed, she is flooded with new translations of Roi's death, her mother's rape, and the remote history of the human race: “And yet with each fluid bubble the Gorgon's head smiled, wreathed by the elements, translation of suns, subterranean as well as extra-stellar, across space, towards a reciprocal vacancy. An unprejudiced flesh and blood. Majesty of the game. Game of the Conception. The Great Game.” (155–56) The novel ends, but the process of creative reconstruction can't: it opens eternally on another beginning through the dislocating act of memory.

Notes

1. Wilson Harris, “Interior of the Novel: Amerindian/European/African Relations,” in National Identity: Papers Delivered at the Commonwealth Literature Conference, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 9th–15th August, 1968, ed. K. L. Goodwin (London and Melbourne: Heinemann, 1970), p. 142. Elsewhere in this ten-page article Harris cites the works of Camus and his imitators, and of Robbe-Grillet as examples of the dead-end in which the contemporary realistic novel finds itself; the former works present a consolidation of the absurd, the latter a consolidation of meaninglessness. In rejecting these contemporary French writers and their followers, and calling for a radical renewal of art, Wilson Harris shows striking parallels with a third French writer, Arthur Rimbaud, whose work preceded Harris' by almost a century. I am currently doing further study on this topic.

2. “Interior of the Novel,” p. 138.

3. Wilson Harris, Tumatumari (London: Faber, 1968), p. 13. All further citations from the novel will be identified by the page number in parentheses following the quotation from this text.

4. “Interior of the Novel,” p. 146.

5. See the second epigram to Tumatumari, p. 8.