SOURCE: Drake, Sandra E. “Tumatumari: The Great Game.” In Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition: A New Architecture of the World, pp. 91–107. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.

We play the game of history, my child

Henry Tenby, Tumatumari, p. 127

History never repeats itself but it never outlasts itself either.

Comrade Block at Port Mourant, Tumatumari, p. 74

The consequences of centuries of failure to resolve social oppression in Guiana are explored in Tumatumari. The oppressive relations obtain among races and between the sexes; the exploration is organized around shifting patterns of identification and differentiation within the collective psyche of a family. The principal locus of this reorganization of collective familial and societal experience is the mind of Prudence Tenby Solman. The almost simultaneous deaths of her newborn child and her husband precipitate her mental breakdown; the reorganization occurs in the brief period between these events and her suicide, which has a paradoxical quality of finally triumphant and redemptive sacrifice and rebirth.

The great game, the game of history to which Henry Tenby, Prudence's father, refers, is played out in several arenas. The individual psyche of Prudence is a distinguishable locus. But it is not conceivable apart from its place in the structure of the family pattern, and the family pattern is not comprehensible without reference to the social patterns of Guyanese society.

The narration takes the form of a complex set of flashbacks during Prudence's breakdown. The organization of the narration reveals Harris's idea of the way in which collective trauma, and the individual trauma to which it gives rise, may be translated into memory and into art.

The daughter of a respected, highly conventional historian, Henry Tenby, and his even more conventional wife, Diana, Prudence grew up in Georgetown as a member of the urban, coastal bourgeoisie. Her crisis occurs in the Guyanese interior at Tumatumari, where, about a year before the novel opens, she has come to join her half-Amerindian husband, Roi Solman. He is an engineer supervising a crew of local Amerindians; he sees himself as involved in an important historic task, “the electrification of the Amazon.”

The Tumatumari site, overshadowed by Konawaruk Mountain, is deep in the interior; the roaring waters of a rapids break on the “Sleeping Rocks”—Tumatumari, in the local Amerindian tongue—near the camp.¹ While exploring the area around the Tumatumari site, Prudence discovers an abandoned well. The remaining ledge of stone becomes her favorite spot to sit and reflect. Later, she learns that Roi fell down here and injured his head. In the course of the novel the place is called The Chair of the Well and The Chair of History (after the chair on which her father sat when he held her as a child); Prudence identifies it as the place where her psychological “conception” and “birth” occur.

But trouble comes. The Amerindian crew takes the appearance of a mysterious file of Indians as an ill omen. Both the crew and Prudence believe that Roi has impregnated Rakka, the Amerindian servant, although Roi denies this. The appearance of the Lost Tribe of the Sun confirms the Amerindians' feeling that the crossing of boundaries indicated by this miscegenation is evil. The crew deserts. In a desperate gamble to get them to return to work and save the engineering project from failure, Roi resolves to exorcise the evil by playing the sacrificial role of scapegoat in the Ceremony of the Rock, a role a half-caste must fill. Prudence warns him of the danger in treating the Amerindian beliefs in such an instrumental way.

Roi is away on an expedition when he hears of the birth and death of Prudence's child. He rushes to return. Camped on the far bank of the river from the house, unwilling to wait for morning, he tries the crossing alone in the night. His boat crashes in the rapids, and he is decapitated on the Sleeping Rocks of Tumatumari.

The two basic components of Prudence's psychological reevaluation during her breakdown are confrontation with Guyana's African and Amerindian heritages. Her parents' lives were dominated by a veneration of the values and symbols of Euro-America. Diana, her mother, who grew up in Canada and could pass for White, is an ardent enthusiast of the British royal family. Henry, her father, who is visibly of mixed racial ancestry, was educated in the United States and Europe at the cost of great sacrifice by his father, a struggling rice farmer. For them, the good, the beautiful, and the true are to be found in Euro-America. The rejection of the Caribbean self, the fear of Caliban, is carried to its most sinister extreme in Diana's rejection and mistreatment of the darkest child, their only son, Hugh. Henry acquiesces in this rejection of son and self.

Their behavior indicates that the location of personal value lies in rejecting the truth of the physical self, and the location of social value lies in rejecting the truth of the Guyanese historical and cultural self. Henry's public and professional life has been as hypocritical and destructive as his private life. He remains passive during periods of political repression by Britain and tailors his historical writings and policy recommendations to avoid disturbing the status quo.

Henry Tenby has been dead for thirteen years when the novel opens. He has bequeathed his papers to Prudence, his favorite child and spiritual heir. His true legacy, however, is a confrontation with the profound cleavage of psyche that her father's self-imposed hypocrisy and repression inflicted on him. This cleavage or wound drives such a division into his life that he experiences each of his five children as having had two separate conceptions. The first conception occurred in the Brothel of Masks, a secret domain and a region of psyche where he chose—like masks—the faces he presented to the conventional world and according to which he lived his life. Paradoxically, the true meaning of his relation to his children and to his society lies in understanding these profoundly false self-conceptions.

His childrens' second conception is the normal biological one. To borrow Laing's terminology, the second conception belongs to the biological family; the first, in the Brothel of Masks, belongs to the introjected family. The disastrous incongruity between the two kinds of family does not constitute only a private tragedy peculiar to the Tenbys but it also derives from and represents the cleavages and incongruities bequeathed by Guyana's painful collective history.

From her father's papers Prudence has learned that he attributed the distortion of his life and work to

fear of the deepest confrontation with the shackles of humanity, fear of the total transplantation of himself, voyage of himself, expenditure of himself, expenditure of all he possessed. He was Eurasian (Amerindian on the wrong side of the blanket) and though he never directly confessed it, afraid of his African cargo, African momentum, African legacy.

(p. 102)

Prudence does not truly grapple with her familial and cultural inheritance, revealed in her father's papers, until her own crisis at Tumatumari. To meet the African legacy, she must confront the family's treatment of Hugh. She must also confront her sister Pamela's decision to marry a White soldier from the United States, immigrate to New York, pass for White, and put her Black child up for adoption. To meet the Amerindian legacy, she must confront life at Tumatumari and her relationship with Roi and the equally disturbing and ambiguous relationship each has with Rakka.

Prudence's growth in the novel pivots on patterns of familial equations she makes during her breakdown. The central equation is the doubling of identity she senses between her husband and her father: “different as they were in poise or carriage they shared indeed one vehicle of the imagination. They both appeared to her … like outriders of remorse—closely guarded ‘secret’ …” (p. 46).

This doubling has two sources. One is the intersection of Nature and Culture in marriage, especially in the simultaneous joining and separating of Nature and Culture represented by the incest taboo. The other lies in the two men's meeting of the social tasks history bequeaths them—tasks each fails to resolve and that pass to Prudence. In Harris's words, the whole burden of conception falls on her. Prudence succeeds in meeting the challenge—paradoxically, in the course of suicide.

I discussed in chapters 3 and 4 Harris's unusual combination of traditional, almost mythic, presentations of women at the same time that he introduces powerful variations. In Palace of the Peacock, Mariella is a defeated, subjugated, oppressed woman; a muse; and the most powerful, vigorous, initiating creative principle in the universe. Donne the conquistador turns out to be an androgynous, nurturant figure, a “mother” as well as a conqueror and ruler.

In Tumatumari, Prudence appears first as daughter to a historian; then, as her father wished, as wife to a “cultural engineer.” The mythic elements are traditional. Roi is the huntsman, set the manly task of slaying game. In a role recalling traditions common in Africa, he, as Roi Solman—“King Sun-Man”—must play the sacrificial victim for the good of the “folk.”

Yet the “game” Roi pursues when he sets out to hunt as his “first task” is also the “game of history.” And Roi, like Donne, becomes an androgynous figure. At book's end, it is not father (Henry), son (Hugh), or son-in-law/husband (Roi) who fulfills this task, a task that in its mythic form is always a male one and in its current form—the life of scholarship, engineering, public policy—is conventionally a male one. Remarkably, Harris uses the metaphors of conception, pregnancy, and birth not to apply to male creation but to stand for his female protagonist's successful accomplishment of cultural tasks that in both mythic and modern terms are conventionally allotted to males and that the male characters in the novel undertake and fail. Her success is not by dint of roles as daughter, wife, or sister but by dint of her own courage. She succeeds in her own right—and the symbolism of her success is female.

The passage describing Roi's decision to attempt the river crossing conveys his enigmatic personality, which troubles Prudence from the beginning of their life together in the hinterland. As he stands ready to cross the river, a foremost concern is a flare-up in the border quarrel between Guyana and neighboring Venezuela. Venezuela claims the land on which the campsite at Tumatumari stands, and Roi reacts passionately:

Why the very ground beneath him and the very house on the hill where his wife lay across the river were involved; territory he had lit however flickeringly: his own matchless wilderness. And no one would take it from him he cried: deep exacerbation, physical exhaustion, the long journey he had made, half-dreaming, half-waking bridges of sleep. The engineer within him like a subterranean spirit of desire drew close to the surface of his mind and he sprang to his feet.

(p. 18)

It is the “engineer within him,” which he identifies later as his “devil,” that drove him to bring flickering light to the backlands. It is this devil that impels him to quit the borderland of sleep and try the night journey across the river, which ends in his death. There are echoes here of Palace of the Peacock and Donne's drive to acquire and possess. In a manner suited to his name, which means “king,” Roi speaks in the passage quoted above with insistent possessiveness of “his” wife, “his” wilderness. There are echoes too of the horseman's breakneck ride across the land, which kills Donne just as the Sleeping Rocks kill Roi. A passage in Tumatumari that refers to Roi as “severed head of ruler/ruled,” recalling “the oldest uncertainty and desire in the world … to rule or be ruled, forever” (Palace, p. 14), and a description of Roi as an “outrider” also link him with Donne the Horseman, who outrides neither life nor death. Indeed, Roi's death ultimately results from a failure to respect the land and the people and from his attempt to manipulate them for his own ends.

Yet Roi's relationship to the land, to the Amerindians, to women, to the interior, is more complex than Donne's. He is half-Amerindian himself and mentions this as significant to him. He sees his own intentions as being progressive and generally benevolent, and at the same time he becomes increasingly aware that they are inadequate, even wrong, in the context in which he works.

When Roi calls for his gun after the desertion of his huntsman, raving that he must once again play the role of half-caste and outcast in the Ceremony of the Rock, Prudence calls him mad. “‘Call it what you like,’ he was beside himself. ‘The death of the old king … the birth of a new creation. …’ He was looking at her from a great distance” (p. 52). Yet Roi is aware of the deficiencies in his relationship with the Amerindians. Thus, when Prudence demands to know who the “wretched Indians” are, he tells her “‘They're the conscience of our age … in this part of the world anyway’” (p. 35).

The Lost Tribe of the Sun, the mysterious strangers whose appearance precipitates the desertion of the crew, comes as a warning to Roi, too:

Who were the lost Indians of the sun anyway? No one knew. And yet clearly one had seen them and would continue to make news of them until one was brought to book for the use one had made of credulity/incredulity in the name of science, emancipation, industry all rolled into one (self-interest).

(p. 34)

The Amerindians reject the intrusion into their world that Roi's impregnation of Rakka represents; Roi implicitly rejects Amerindia in his intention of deliberately manipulating Amerindian belief in the Ceremony of the Rock. The Lost Tribe of the Sun will continue its periodic visitations until the cultural dilemmas are satisfactorily resolved.

Prudence's recollections during her breakdown are heavily concerned with her heated discussion with Roi at the time of the work crew's defection. It is then that Roi tells her of the serious head injury he sustained in the fall down the well five years earlier. The company funding that project had subsequently gone bankrupt, and the undertaking was abandoned. In words equally applicable to the injury he sustained, Roi calls the financial abandonment “the final blow” (p. 7). This failure is important in the context of his telling Prudence of the Amerindians' “kinship with the Rock of the Sun which they had once made in their own light” (p. 32) but that “with the extinction of an original myth of creation after Conquest had retired into what was virtually for them their ‘death’ or ‘sleep’ of fire. They saw the sun now as an archaeological ruin … at the end of an age within which they had lost a primal vision” (p. 32). But Roi's scientifically advanced, “civilized” company has gone bankrupt, too. It is not the Amerindian myth alone that is out of resources. The conquest signalled the ultimate defeat of both sides of the victor-victim stasis.

The Lost Tribe appears to Prudence, too. She and Roi encounter the mysterious folk separately. Prudence sees them from the Chair of the Well as they file silently through the forest and glide away down the river in a corial, an Amerindian canoe. The reader learns that Roi “runs into” them under the waterfall. The significant phrasing sends images through Prudence's mind of the “scene of arousal,” of sparks and metallic waterfall, of “headlong collision” (p. 34). Because of the nonlinear narration, these phrasings, which come to Prudence before Roi's death, become in the retrospective narration after it prefigurations of the fatal shattering collision with the Sleeping Rocks of Tumatumari. They also express the novel's metaphors of sexuality and reproduction. Chair of the Well (Western history-mythology) and Sleeping Rocks (Amerindian mythology-history) both represent an encounter with the past. A reconception and rebirth of both cultures is needed by both and requires the participation of both. Prudence's stillborn child, Rakka's ambiguous pregnancy, and especially Prudence's successful sacrificial suicide and rebirth must be understood in this context, which involves Guyanese ideas of the relationship of coast and interior.

Roi's affinity for the interior deeply disturbs Prudence. At times she can no longer recognize in him the man who courted her in the genteel Georgetown setting where she was raised: “His [Roi's] capacity for singlemindedness … seemed to her there within the artifice of society—an enormous hidden fire. But now in the heart of the interior it turned almost menacing” (pp. 21–22).

The crisis at the work site requires Roi to perform tasks that on the level of plot are mundane and yet are narrated to the reader and experienced by Prudence in mythic terms that emphasize his rapport with the landscape of the interior and his increasing immersion in archaic myth. Because his huntsmen have fled, he goes after game himself for Rakka's semimagical stew pot, which is never empty. Significantly, too, he calls not for Prudence but for Rakka to bring him his gun. When he goes after game it is described as “the first task he must perform in the absence of his huntsman” (p. 53). The description of his return suggests something close to a merging with the very geology of the landscape. He is half-naked in the heat, bent almost double, and appears to be crowned with the grinning tusked head of the slain boar he carries on his back:

The line of the mountains appeared now like a lofty crest of the water breaking its own wave ceaselessly … the vast waving outline of the mountains and the transparent ocean of the sky within and beneath which fell away other exposures, shorelines, crests and seas like interior jungles of oceanic worlds.

(p. 53)

By contrast, Prudence's sense of alienation at Tumatumari is strong. It is increased by her estrangement from the reaction Roi and Rakka share when Rakka's mother dies. The older woman had refused to join her daughter in settling at the Tumatumari site, continuing to wander with her husband and a remnant band of nomadic Amerindians. She comes to visit Rakka from the upper reaches of the Potaro River, above Tumatumari:

The day began when Rakka's mother fell on the hill and died almost instantly, vomiting blood. … Roi declared noncommittally that the symptoms she revealed were those of chronic malnutrition. … Prudence was horrified at his and Rakka's acceptance of the death.

(p. 21)

Prudence's reaction reveals her attempt to forge a bearable relation with the inorganic world and with organic processes:

Sometimes when she stared into his [Roi's] eyes and the memory returned of the ancient Amerindian woman lying dead on the hill covered in filth it was as if the horror of immunity dawned upon her—Archangel of Sewers—and she wanted in an instant of revulsion to slam fast the lid of the well. Who would in her right senses drink at such a poisoned spring? One drop on her lips was instant plague, death. Yet the old woman had drunk and survived all her life and subsisted upon the scum of the elements. Rakka had been conceived by her when she was fifteen. At forty-five when she died her body looked old as the hills, old as Konawaruk, her face made of wood, her eyes of stone—chronic assimilation of environment … subsistent upon poisons.

(pp. 81–82)

Prudence is horrified by “immunity” because she understands that it is a kind of contamination. Physiologically, immunization is a process whereby one organism learns to live with another life-form by incorporating it. Paradoxically, one becomes safe from danger by accepting it within oneself.

Immunity and many other biological processes are significant metaphors in Tumatumari. One of the most important is pregnancy, which like immunity is seen as a kind of contamination. The basic analogy, on the individual level, is to the ways in which people see themselves in other individuals. Thus at one point Roi sees Prudence for what he was “—a pregnant vessel bearing within the treacherous soil of another” (p. 37). On the societal level, the analogy is to both cultural and to physical cross-fertilization in a society like Guyana's, with many ethnic groups and a history of miscegenation. Thus as Prudence's understanding of Roi's and Rakka's ambiguous relationship matures she begins to see that the significance of a fruitful union between him and Rakka lies in Roi's attainment of a psychic integration of his Amerindian ancestry and a cultural integration of two sources of power, Western science (electrification of the Amazon) and the resources of the Sleeping Rocks (“frozen sun”). At one point, in a half-dreaming state, Prudence identifies Rakkas as “the cradle of the sun.” At the same time she intuits the future birth and death of her own child and thinks, “That Rakka could be Roi's mistress and play the part of newfound child (lost tribe of the sun) seemed, at this moment, to possess a primitive foundation of rightness” (p. 43). This idea differs from the patronizing attitude toward the “native” as “child.” Rather, the context here implies the Amerindian as “oldest ancestor” who must be born again—reincarnated—as flesh and as cultural continuity, before Guyanese society can have any true descendants. This is the significance of the word play on the “barren” Sleeping Rocks and Roi's insistence on a “barren Rakka,” unable to conceive because of a fall—as he fell, down the well.

Prudence's dawning comprehension of the relationship between herself and Rakka is as important as her growing understanding of how Roi relates to Rakka. In a fundamental sense, Prudence and Rakka “impregnate” each other as much as they are (or are not) impregnated by Roi. At one point when Rakka bends over her, she meets Prudence's mouth with her “dreaming lips.”

Adding to the complexity of relations with the Amerindians and the interior is a paradox: At the crucial point when the work crew deserts, Prudence, who feels estranged from the Amerindians, nevertheless understands better than Roi both the deficiencies and the dangers inherent in his treatment of the crew's beliefs. She warns him: “You still don't see the rapids—how deep and swift are the emotions on which you gamble for control” (p. 37).

This retort to her husband illustrates the double level—familial and societal, psychological and sociological—on which the novel functions, a complexity that Prudence comes to understand still more fully in the course of her breakdown:

What had started as an adventure into the hinterland of ancestors (an explorer's game, marriage to an explorer) suddenly turned into the night of the womb … to put one's “history” together again was to begin for the first time to face the dangerous game one had been playing all along (one's ancestors, one's family) with nature.

(p. 152)

Prudence's words of warning also become prophecy, for the power of the Tumatumari Falls will shortly kill Roi. In the equation between the rapids, the feelings of the Amerindians, and the feelings Prudence discovers when she becomes an explorer not only into the Guyanese interior, to Tumatumari, but also into the psychological interior of the Guyanese mind as represented by her family, Prudence is also prophesying her own death in those same rapids.

The warning, however, is not a warning to eschew the gamble. In fact, the whole book conveys the idea that the gamble is the only hope of awakening the “frozen sun” of Tumatumari, that guiding conception that died for the Amerindians with the European conquest. Electrification, associated with the person of Roi, represents science, the set of concepts most distinctively characteristic of modern Western culture. In the name of science, and by means of material results obtained from applying the concepts to the physical world, nuestra América's subjugation was accomplished.

The question of Rakka's pregnancy becomes a stimulus for the understanding of the relations obtaining at Tumatumari as a doubling of those obtaining years before in the Tenby family. Thus, Roi tells Prudence that the Amerindian work crew, who walked away because they thought the Lost Tribe of the Sun disapproved of miscegenation between Roi and Rakka, saw “the incestuous barricade of families in the name of virtue as FEAR … Fear of the stranger creeping in” (p. 71). They are like Prudence's family, he continues; they want Rakka to “pass” as “a barren woman,” to which Prudence rejoins, “‘This isn't true at all—about me—my family. You have no right to say such things …’” (p. 71).

Prudence's indignant rejection of Roi's remarks is belied by her own recollections of her family. “Hugh Skelton knew from the beginning he was born black,” the reader is told (p. 119); and Prudence remembers how, at their mother's insistence, he was

given the hardest chores … to perform. Sometimes when there were distinguished visitors from overseas … he was told to go to his room. Play skeleton in the cupboard. Cruel and absurd. Her father always protested but his wife and daughters knew how forbearing he was and ignored him with impunity.

(p. 45)

Prudence's father, Henry Tenby, has thought of his son Hugh as the “brick in his fist” (to which Prudence alludes in her musings). There is also an “element of fear” in his longing for a son: “The black warlord which might spring from his head, fully equipped. With a fist like a hammer” (p. 130). This son is born like Minerva and personified as Mars. To Henry, Hugh represents both the suppressed part of his personality, which is celebrated as being a gentle one, and the wisdom he has failed to show in many important ways. Hugh in fact dies as a “warrior.” He is killed in the course of his political activity, attempting to affect the country's direction during a crisis that had long been building and that Henry Tenby, succumbing to his paralyzing fear, had never sought to avert in its incipient stages.

Prudence's recollections of her family are related primarily in two episodes. The first is a conversation she overhears at age fifteen between her parents and her older sister Pamela, who has just informed them that she is pregnant by a White disc jockey from the United States who is now in military service. She intends to marry him, move to New York, and pass for White. She does not understand her father's violent reaction, given his own toleration of the mother's attitude toward Hugh. But at last Henry Tenby starts to speak out, telling Diana and Pamela that he was “done for” years ago, “echoing” Roi's words to Prudence much later at Tumatumari that what he is doing (being an engineer) is capable of “doing him” in the end. Henry Tenby says: “‘I must put up a front for you and for society. Propped myself up to serve your interests. … Wouldn't it have been healthier if I had struck?’” (p. 62). But Diana is having none of it, intent only on calming him down and calling for the doctor. She says “‘My dear. … How could you hit me? … You're not a violent man. … Lie back …’” (p. 63).

Henry calls for an article he once published, “‘In that bookcase over there. That's where I lie …’” (p. 64). His advice at the time of writing the article, he remembers bitterly, had been:

Stick to what you know. … Bow to institutions. … The conservancies had emerged at great cost—capital and labour. They represented a necessary non-reciprocal historical nucleus, sugar above all, which must remain dear to us. Their design went back two centuries if one contemplated the earliest of polders and dams to withstand the floodplain of coastal rivers. … Hold it at bay.

(p. 64)

Apparently Henry Tenby is talking about a joint project he engaged in with an engineer years before, a project whose title he now says ironically should have been “Sarcophagus of Industry.” He goes on, in the same scene, to admit that he was wrong—“Christ forgive me”—in trying to impose common sense on the findings he wrote up, when “comprehensive spirit-level investigation (uncommon sense) showed the lie of the land rising and falling significantly, however gradually, however secretly” (p. 64). Henry Tenby believes that the revolution for which he hopes, the attainment of the “psyche of the new world,” will not soon occur, for Prudence reads in his papers after his death:

Man lives in history and it will take centuries—whatever mask of emancipation he wears—it will take perhaps another thousand years of flight through space for him to emerge from the psychology of fear. … Decent people (so-called)—good people (so-called) are all trapped by Fear. Fear of race for one thing. Fear of sex for another.

(pp. 103–10)

Henry Tenby knows that to overcome these fears will be both difficult and painful. Where these two fears are deeply interwoven—as they are in the saga of Guyana that Harris relates in Tumatumari and as Frantz Fanon suggests they are throughout the European-colonized areas—the psychological knots are compounded. This difficulty is especially evident in Tumatumari in Henry Tenby's relations with women in his life: Prudence, his favorite child; Pamela, whose racial and cultural defection through marriage precipitates his first open acknowledgment that he believes he has betrayed himself, his children, and his society; Isabella, the woman he met in Europe who is presumably White, his first love; and Diana, his wife. Prudence conflates her father, husband, and child who died at birth; Henry's images of the important women in his life shiver, shatter, and reappear fragmented and differently reflected and associated from their first appearances. Both processes constitute a form of doubling. Thus, only near the end of his life does he admit that Pamela is “the spitting image” of Diana. The resemblance extends beyond physical appearance. He is speaking of Pamela's rejection of all things Guyanese, and especially of Black Guyana. By implication Tenby thereby acknowledges that his wife, Diana, has in fact rejected both herself and him. The price she has exacted for being a loyal, loving, and supportive wife throughout their marriage has been Henry's consent to her denials and his acceptance of the “colonial conventions” to which she is devoted. The relationship is founded on a complicity in lies, evasions, and rejections concerning both race and sex.

The distortion of relations between men and women with regard to sex and race is central to the pathology of Henry Tenby's own marriage. He married Diana thinking her to be a sexually experienced woman of the world, an illusion that she deliberately fostered. On their wedding night he acted on this misconception and in effect raped her. Their relations were from then on insincere; neither understood the other:

He felt that she hated him but in fact just as he had misconceived her game before, he misconceived her sorrow now. This was clear to him at long last within the royal seal of death, marriage-bed of history. She did not hate him at all—she hated herself, shattering of an illusion.

(p. 147)

Harris identifies the perversion of relations between men and women and the perversion of relations between races as being at the root of the psychological and social paralysis that he describes as arrested maturation. If the novel focuses most strongly on Prudence's consciousness and the equations she makes between her father and her husband, a strong secondary focus is one the relation between Henry and his daughters, Pamela and Prudence, and between Henry and his son, Hugh.

In Henry Tenby's uncommunicated grief over his son's death, conveyed only long after the tragedy, he makes an association between the lie of his life work (his historical writing), his relationship to his political community (shown in the phrase in the following quotation “to confirm his state or constitution, 1 + 1 = O”), and his relationship with Hugh. The last association is indicated when the title he suggests for an article, “Sarcophagus of Industry,” is echoed in this passage:

Sarcophagus of industry in which he beheld the sum of all his hopes. Frozen capital.

Sum and son 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 = O. … As if the score … had been fused long before Hugh was born in his own barren breath. … Message for Hugh Skelton. This bullet fired by your father's rich kith and kin all races of endeavour—white + brown + black.

(p. 120)

In a brief passage immediately following, a passage whose quality as an almost bitter aside is emphasized by its italicization, the reader learns that Pamela goes to New York and there gives up for adoption the Black child born to her: “Pamela continued to pass for white: economically rewarding. But something in her she confessed died for good turning her into an ornament, lovely skin, lovely like the label on a box of soap” (p. 66).

Prudence, who becomes responsible for the necessary cultural reconception after her brother's death and her sister's defection, first undertakes the encounter with rejected ancestors. She does this by confronting her own reaction to the body of Rakka's dead mother and her own jealousy of Rakka and then through facing the unpleasant fact of her father's refusal to accept the “African cargo” in his ancestry and his collaboration with Diana in rejecting Hugh.

When Pamela tells her parents of her intention to leave Guyana forever, Harris writes that Henry Tenby “would have given his right arm to establish himself 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 …” (p. 62). But it is Prudence who explores both slopes.

Henry and Roi are both described as owing a debt to their historical origins (p. 86). As the bourgeois economic system that arose in Europe amassed capital—congealed human energy—and turned it into potential economic power at devastating human cost, so did that social system exact a devastating psychological cost, both in Europe and in the colonies. This damage is revealed especially clearly in the personality of Henry Tenby. The enormous repression in the psyches of individuals in the society constitutes, however, an equally powerful latent energy for healing and growth as well as for destructiveness. In this respect it parallels the possibilities latent in the economic accumulation of the European society that colonized Guiana, becoming what Harris calls “spiritual capital.” I discuss his development of this idea of latent psychological and cultural resources in Chapter 7; he casts it in a specifically African idiom in Ascent to Omai.

In portraying the inner voyage that Henry began but would not finish, into what is called “an immensity of origins,” the novel invokes a litany of Guyanese place-names in a context of significant symbolism:

… lanterns which rose up here and there to greet one with a password—road to Mahaica, Mahaicony, Abary, Berbice, Canje, Crabwood Creek, Courantyne. Or a welcome signal of lamps which spelt a brilliant punctuation mark of industry upon the sugar estates domain. … These were, in short, the coastal defenses one expected to find which some three centuries (invasion and penetrative settlement) had erected against the inroads of Night—the womb of the Amazon.

(p. 37)

Henry's journey through the night leads inland toward the “womb of the Amazon”: “His destination was Tumatumari. But first he must turn into the ghetto of Canje—land of the runaway slave—in search of the footprints of Eve rechristened Pamela” (p. 37). Only thus can he come to terms with the “African cargo.” But it is Prudence, not Henry, who arrives at the destination and who also makes the necessary detour through Canje, which was in fact the “land of the runaway slave.” The journey must go through Canje on the way to the goal the conquistadors sought in El Dorado: Gold and precious stones, here the Rocks (stones) of Tumatumari, and “the buried lapis of unity” to which Henry Tenby refers in the scene dealing with Pamela's pregnancy and that is identified with the Sleeping Rocks of Tumatumari; lapis is Latin for stone, rock.

“Prudence” is the great bourgeois virtue and the central personality quality Henry Tenby has cultivated. “‘Prudence is the watchword,’” he thinks at one point. Yet it is his daughter Prudence, of whom he says at a period of crisis, “‘She'll find it [his article] … that girl has imagination’” (p. 63), who takes the enormous psychological risk that may awaken the Sleeping Rocks of Tumatumari for a new age. On one level, the generation to which Henry Tenby belongs and that of Prudence, Hugh, Pamela, Rakka, and Roi are “destroyed.” No progeny survive in this novel. On another level, the very repression and distortion provide the power for the psychological breakthrough at Tumatumari.

This breakthrough is accomplished in the concluding book of the novel, a brief six pages, when Prudence's “translation,” to use Harris's word, becomes as it were the true Ceremony of the Rock, as Roi is forced finally to recognize it, a game

which Roi had played with Rakka until it ceased to be a mere game and turned into a matter of life and death. His blood froze within the waterfall. … No longer a jealous idolatrous game, a business deal with the natives, a stilted house on a hill, a fertile or infertile illusion. But the trial and judgment of the soul of Prudence descending to meet him.

(p. 154)

Conformity to external social convention destroys Henry Tenby inwardly. Roi goes through the motions of the Ceremony of the Rock, “playing” himself as half-caste outsider. He does this, like Henry Tenby, “for the good of the tribe/family,” in the name of science, progress, the electrification of the Amazon. Roi's behavior is equivalent to that of Henry Tenby, who acts, he says, to “preserve the conservancies.” But the price Roi pays is to play the game in earnest—as Prudence, instead of Henry, must as well. They play “the game of history,” and it is a “dangerous game,” as Prudence retorts to Roi when she learns that he intends to participate in the Ceremony of the Rock. History, society, and psyche will not be mocked, and they cannot be escaped: In the words of another character named Comrade Block, spoken at Port Mourant, “History never repeats itself but it never outlasts itself either.”

Note

1. Hena Maes-Jelinek discusses other aspects of the important image of the Rock in Wilson Harris (New York: Twayne World Authors Series, 1982), p. 100; and Michael Gilkes considers the relation between the Rock and the Eye in Prudence's vision in Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel, esp. p. 125. Ivan van Sertima recognizes their import in titling his article “The Sleeping Rocks: Wilson Harris's Tumatumari” in Enigma of Values, edited by Kirsten H. Petersen and Anna Rutherford (Aarhus, Denmark: Dangaroo Press, 1975), p. 109. The Sleeping Rocks are explicitly associated with the figure of the Gorgon in classical mythology. Throughout Harris's writings—in his poetry and essays as well as his fiction—classical allusions occur. Poseidon in The Secret Ladder is a case in point, as are references in his volume of poems published in 1954, Eternity to Season. Harris recasts these themes and figures from classical mythology as he takes on the role of novelist instead of poet. They become important symbols and metaphors within an indigenous cultural tradition of América mestiza.