Ulyssean Carnival: Epic Metamorphoses in Wilson Harris's Trilogy

Abstract

Had not Masters read to me ... the story of the Trojan horse that became the seed of an overturned age or frame?Carnival I had expected him to worm his way into the Rose garden and slay his enemies.But instead the imperial design of the home coming lord and master had been converted into a colonial fable that spun its web in reverse order in the branches of the lofty rose tree over my head.The queen lay hidden in its branches.The Four Banks of the River of Space There can be no Odyssey without its descent among the clairvoyant dead.George Steiner, Real Presences In his recently published autobiography2 Wilson Harris describes the strong emotional impact he experienced as a child of eight when news reached his mother that his step-father had disappeared in the rainforests of Guyana.On the same day his mother opened a large black trunk that had belonged to his real father, from which she extracted a copy of The Odyssey and a wooden horse "carven from a Greenheart tree" (Contemporary 122).Harris writes about the first event of that memorable day: My step-father's disappearance in that immense interior when I was a child was the beginning of an involvement with the enigma of quests and journeys through visible into invisible worlds that become themselves slowly visible to require further penetration into other invisible worlds without end or finality.(122) Later that year Harris came upon a beggar not far from his home in Georgetown3 at a time when, though a young child, he was already reading Homer with his mother's help and may have even then unconsciously connected the beggar with the disguised Ulysses, who for so long had also been an absent father and husband, his whereabouts unknown, but was at last coming home: Across half-a-century and more . . .[t]he fabric of his face [the beggar's] upon a floating tide of sorrow is stitched into Homer's beggar within a tapestry of gestating vision.... (123) Callaloo 18.1 (1995) 46-58 Hiilim ...

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