1‘I have been haunted since childhood in British Guiana, South America... by vanished cultures and places and kingdoms, ’ the Caribbean author Wilson Harris writes in the ‘New Preface to Palace of the Peacock, ’ published in 1998, nearly forty years after the first edition of the groundbreaking novel.1 The word ‘haunted’ could hardly have been better chosen, for Harris’s novels are often preoccupied with traces, ruins, or ‘ghosts’ of one sort or another; in the magic-realist tradition his fiction thrusts the reader into the paradox of the interrelationship between the living and the dead and the nature of time. For Harris, all entities and identities are translational in the sense that they undergo constant transformation, and for human beings this necessarily involves processes of interpretation and re-expression. The translational nature of existence and human identity takes artistic form in narratives, or story; folklore and myth, which bear witness to the past yet, at the same time, treat universal, timeless themes and evoke the perennial presences of the natural world, can function as translational vehicles that facilitate a movement across the gulf separating the living from the dead, and the past from the present and the future. In Harris’s fiction they become bridges across time as well as spatial bridges between the Americas and Europe. By way of the ‘cross-cultural imagination, ’ one of Harris’s seminal concepts, an individual can bridge ‘chasms of time’ to become ‘a vessel of composite epic, imbued with many voices.’ This imaginative capacity remains paradoxical and fragile, though, because the ‘multitude is housed... in the diminutive surviving entity of community and self that one is, ’ and can only be reached by a ‘plunge’ from the familiar self to the stranger within.2

2The words ‘translate, ’ ‘transform, ’ and their variants occur with frequency in Harris’s novels, and folklore and myth manifest his comprehensive interest in processes of nature, human history, and individual development. Individuals, communities, and the world are always in the making, and this is an awareness that folklore and myth, with their principal themes of creation and metamorphosis, consistently reveal. In the novel The Tree of the Sun (1978) one of Harris’s characters asks and then answers the most fundamental existentialist question: ‘Why move at all, why begin to die...? To fulfil perhaps a theatre of nature that appears to be finished yet remains unfinished’ (90). For Harris, myth is a vehicle for bringing about a transformation of consciousness through this awareness of life’s ceaseless changes, its theatricality and its masquerade, so to speak, as well as a vehicle for reinterpreting and re-imagining human history, not just the history of the Caribbean, which itself is so marked by patterns of conqueror and conquered, enslavement, and the destruction of peoples and nature.

3Within these two broad functions of myth in Harris’s novels (i.e., transformation of consciousness, re-visioning of history), myth is a translational vehicle in the following specific senses: 1. it is a bridge, or passage, across time (between past, present, and future and between the living and the dead); 2. it is a bridge across space (between cultures and continents, especially between New World and Old World); 3. it is a bridge between the isolated or alienated individual and the larger social and natural order (that is, myth shows us the universal in the particular); 4. it is a bridge between fact and possibility. In her study of myth and history in three Caribbean writers, Alejo Carpentier, Édouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris, Barbara J. Webb states that it is the aim of these writers to ‘transform the void of historical rupture and fragmentation into an open-ended vision of possibility.’3 This is especially the case for the visionary, mythopoeic writer Harris. Myth has a utopian quality in his novels; it bears the imprint of history, yet it foreshadows possibilities that elude any plain statement of facts and events. Conquest and destruction haunt humankind; to pass beyond them will require not only new political orientations and agendas but also— and this is Harris’s emphasis—a new awareness of existential interrelatedness and a transformation of the world.4 He turns to folklore and myth to dramatize this vision.

4To say that myth is translational in Harris’s novels highlights certain aspects of this process of coming-to-awareness and re-visioning of history.5 1) The process involves interpretation (comprehension) and performance (action). 2) It faces resistance and barriers; in Webb’s description of Caribbean writers’ mission, the words ‘void, ’ ‘rupture, ’ and ‘fragmentation’ point to these difficulties. 3) The residue of what fails to be translated serves to fuel the continuation of the process. 4) The process is recursive, without an end. For Harris, coming-to-awareness and re-visioning history do not posit a static paradise as their destination, but rather engage an individual in a dialogue of challenge and response; myth is utopian in this latter sense of negotiation and open-ended possibility.

5One metaphor of this process of translation/transformation in Harris’s novels is limbo dancing. The word ‘limbo’ derives from the Latin limbus, which means ‘edge’ or ‘boundary’; limbo dancing is sometimes said to have its origins in the cramped conditions of the slave ships that carried Africans to the Americas in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries—and this, at least, is what Harris implies. He defines ‘limbo’ as a sudden shift from one level of awareness or consciousness that enables a person to translate another person’s identity through his/her own; this passage from one place and identity to another encounters obstacles and therefore requires a means to traverse them, a metaphor for which is the ‘plunge’ or the movement underneath the limbo stick. In The Tree of the Sun the painter and main character Da Silva da Silva explains the dynamics of transformation to Leonard, a black Englishman of Caribbean heritage:

There’s a sudden, perfectly normal, plunge—accentuated by shock— one takes from the ladder of fate into limbo. A state of abstraction, a state of immersion, in page or text, that takes one into another’s bones.
Like the sudden, perfectly normal, plunge—coincidental to shock— one takes in absentmindedly turning a key in a door until one forgets one’s skeleton hand and finds one’s been locked into an antagonist’s flesh.
A sudden, perfectly normal, sensation of sinking by degrees into a table or a wall as into the slow enveloping folds of a lake, the whiteness of the surface perhaps, the glint of rose colour from a shaded lamp or the smoothness of a wall, that blots out, for an instant, all other immediate anchorages—lowered threshold of awareness, extensive horizons—heightened threshold of awareness, intensive depths, unfathomable memories. (45-46)

6As da Silva and Leonard walk in Avondale Park, they encounter a limbo dancer from the West Indies, whose movements are described:

First the dancer merely lowered his head and shoulders as he passed under the bar but gradually as the pole was taken inch by inch, closer to the ground, he began to bend his trunk and limbs backwards; his legs and feet acquired astonishing agility and protean spirit. (48)

7This description of the limbo dancer continues for several paragraphs, with his movements imaginatively transferred to the London surroundings, such as high-rise apartment buildings that limbo dance beneath the sky and millions of city dwellers, all of whom participate in the ongoing historical process that might be likened to a limbo dance, to a ‘Middle passage ritual... a series of dancing shapes in pursuit of a universal architectonic or self’ (48). The Middle Passage refers, of course, to the bringing of slaves from Africa to the Americas, a fundamental event in Caribbean and European imperial history; the phrase ‘universal architectonic or self’ shows Harris’s often acknowledged debt to Jungian psychology and interpretation of myth. As the passage continues Harris develops further the analogy between limbo dancing, the Middle Passage, and re-visioning of history:

On every urban ship the gods are there in each new building programme like implicit dancers, horizons as well, under which history moves by global degrees. Cramped economic degrees, dwarfed economic degrees, embedded nevertheless in the womb of space as in a canvas of deeds that lag behind a universal conception of the body of truth. In a limbo dancer or building or monument one glimpses chains and broken chains, divided spaces, wounded angles in resurrections, movement and distortion towards the inimitable (never-to-be-wholly achieved) re-assembly of limbs into high rise Osiris, god-beetle, anancy spider, mast of new Christian ship, unfinished land, unfinished pier in the sea and the sky on the precipitate ladder of fate. (48)

8In this spectacular passage, folklore and myth—references to Osiris (the Egyptian god of life, death, and fertility), anancy spider (Anansi/ Anancy is an important god of West African lore), and Christ—carry forward the idea of difficult transformation, metamorphosis, death and resurrection, and thus reinforce the folk metaphor of limbo dancing as a translation of identities and a passage across resistances.

9Three aspects distinguish Harris’s treatment of folklore and myth: 1) He combines Old World and New World myth, drawing out their specificity as well as transcultural qualities. 2) He re-situates and re-expresses myth in ways that transgress realist conventions; thus time can flow backward as well as forward, and bridges between distant places such as Europe and the Americas materialize. 3) He interprets his own expressions of folklore and myth, and thus pushes the story’s overall translation of character and place into a new, continuing revolution; for that reason, many of his novels have a labyrinthine quality, for we are always within a translation cycle of comprehension and re-expression, without a final point of rest. Harris emphasizes that each trace of the past, and folklore and myth are themselves traces, can occasion a translation across time into the contemporary moment. In this sense, the present is haunted by the past; the past is revisited by the present, which tries to extract from it a seed of the future. The past is also haunted by the future, because, for Harris, all life is an unfinished drama moving toward some unknown realization. Through recursive cycles of interpretation and re-expression of folklore and myth, he seeks to demonstrate that time is not linear, but recursive and all encompassing (i.e., the past and future are always present).

10The novel The Tree of the Sun illustrates well these aspects of Harris’s innovative treatment of folklore and myth. Its title and epigraphs, which express the core ideas, are drawn from several sources: Amerindian myth, classical Greek mythology, and Western literature (e.g., T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare). In these epigraphs, the ephemeral and the enduring are juxtaposed, and the earth and the sky are brought into relation. The idea of journeys is introduced, as well as transformations. Here is the fragment of Amerindian myth from which the novel’s title is taken:

During a long series of feuds and battles with the Caribs the Arawaks used to climb into the sky by means of a foodbearing tree. One day their enemies set fire to the tree. It blazed across the ocean and as it fell there was an explosion like thunder. The Indians who remained in the sky turned into stars and formed the constellation of the Pleiades. (ii)

11The word Pleiades (the seven daughters of Atlas metamorphosed into stars) derives from the Greek word ‘to sail’; in the context of the novel, this relates to the various journeys and transformations that the characters undergo, especially Francis and Julia Cortez who, by the way, are dead but are resurrected by da Silva’s reading of their letters and journal. References to the Pleiades and the tree of the sun recur in the various artistic creations that the novel’s characters produce, such as paintings, a book, and a play.

12The epigraph from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets—

We are born with the dead;
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree
Are of equal duration.

13— as well as the epigraph from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: ‘I must hear from thee every day i’ the hour./For in a minute there are many hours’—highlights the mystery of time and the relationship between the living and the dead. The myths and themes introduced in the epigraphs will be mapped onto ‘correspondence[s] of events’ within individual characters’ lives; this mapping will result in a re-interpretation of the myths and themes and a new re-expression of them. In brief, they will undergo various narrato-logical and metaphoric expansions and transformations, and these give the novel its unity as well as its labyrinthine structure.

14The novel’s initial chapter puts into relief Harris’s cross-cultural imagination, with its bridging of widely separated cultural traditions and its movement backwards and forwards in time. It also establishes the basic equation in the novel between human creativity and nature’s creation, or between art and nature. The chapter begins with a scene from Mexican history and myth: the death of Montezuma, the Aztec Sun King, shortly after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the sixteenth century. In fact, though, this scene is being painted on a large mural by the main character, Da Silva da Silva, and the description of the mural encapsulates the novel’s theme of metamorphosis within which all beings participate:

He painted the sun-king retiring from his palace; painted the blow he received from the hand of the conquistadores, from the hand of his own people as well.

... His was a death-mask of the elements’ interchangeable ruses of tyranny and love, seasonal birth and seasonal resurrection, each day’s carpet of earth, each day’s tree of the sun, each day’s journey backwards or forwards in time, each day’s everlasting feud....
(1)

15In this process of translation, opposites such as birth and death are brought into relationship; divisions between elements and identities are at once established then broken down, and time loses its one-directional rigidity. The mural that da Silva is painting in an apartment in 1970s London is entitled ‘The Tree of the Sun, ’ which interprets and re-expresses the Amerindian creation myth of the novel’s epigraph in a particular historical moment viewed retrospectively from a contemporary context. Da Silva da Silva, who has a name worthy of ‘all circumnavigational seasons he paints, ’ is a composite of cultures and races, New and Old World.6 His wife, Jen, is Peruvian, and he begins painting the mural—he later calculates—on the day they conceive a child: thus, art and nature are brought together. Next to da Silva’s painter’s palette is an illustrated-histories magazine, with one illustration depicting Atahualpa, the last Inca sun-king, and his princess, from whom da Silva imagines that his wife Jen is descended. Finally, on the floor below the mural is an Amerindian carpet with tree designs on it, and as da Silva paints his imagination moves back and forth from carpet to magazine, to his and his wife’s personal histories, to the mural:

There was a tree design that da Silva would walk upon until he came to the branches from which to paint a Mexican sky under his English roof—or as he revolved upon a branch, flew upon a carpet— an English sky under an alien roof; an inner flight through an outer branched ceiling into a stranger element. (9)

16In this passage Harris moves from image to image, metaphor to metaphor, conveying the idea of imaginative, cross-cultural movement or travel.

17Death-and-resurrection, a basic theme of world myth and religion, is given various expressions in the Amerindian myth of the tree of the sun, the Greek myth of the Pleiades, and da Silva’s mural of Montezuma; we also find this theme in the epigraph taken from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Harris recurrently returns to this theme in a highly imaginative fashion. For example, da Silva, in the course of renovating the London flat where he and Jen live, finds hidden within a safe in the wall, a book, letters, and photographs of the former, now-deceased residents of the house, Francis and Julia Cortez. The safe protects the documents from destruction during a fire that occurs in the house fifteen years before da Silva and Jen become its owners, and the documents (figuratively speaking) rise like Phoenix from the flames upon da Silva’s discovery of them. Francis Cortez was half Spanish, half black-African; Julia was half English and half West Indian Creole. So it is not difficult for da Silva and his wife, with their ethnically mixed blood, to enter the lives of the former residents as they regard the photos and read Francis’s book and Julia’s letters; da Silva begins to bring the couple back to life in the mural he is painting: he ‘slipped like a figure of paint himself, painter in sky... through the door of the tree of the sun into the previous, long vanished, now suddenly recalled, tenants of the house’ (10). The translation that takes place is two directional: da Silva and Jen return to the past, imaginatively entering the lives of the former tenants, and the former tenants themselves return to life in the present by way of da Silva and Jen. Da Silva is ‘taken over by them page by page’ as he reads their documents and paints them on the mural (11); ‘a spark’ runs across ‘the divide between the living and the dead, a spark that touch[es] Julia and Francis in their graves within the flesh of a page’ (13). These exchanges, by way of the photographs, book, letters, and the mural, constitute a ‘miracle of transubstantial community’ (13). In sum, the discovery of the documents of the former flat’s owners, and da Silva’s and Jen’s vicarious entering into their lives, constitute a variation on the theme of death-and-resurrection that occurs throughout the novel.

18One function of art is to transcend time and exist in an ever-changing present. Through the magic of story, whether folklore, myth, or fiction, the reader can vicariously live other lives and inhabit other times; in this sense, the reader brings the dead back to life. Francis Cortez makes a similar discovery, and in his journal entitled ‘The Tree of the Sun, ’ which Da Silva da Silva is in the process of reading/ editing, he explains this transcendence of time thanks to the text and its reader:

Here I am. I died twenty-five years ago. But here I am. I shall die twenty-five years from now perhaps and here I am, large as eternal life, on this side of the grave. It’s such a fraction of time, a pinprick of time, in the age of the universe—twenty-five years—that wherever one stands and lives (on this side or the other of the grave) one is resurrected. Wherever time flies—on this bank or the other of the trench of the sky—the centuries are pinpricks of implicit wholeness or incalculable extension in and beyond each prison of existence. That is freedom, that is the royalty of freedom, all men are kings, women queens. (18-19)

19In this passage Francis, by way of da Silva the reader, crosses the barrier between the dead and the living and argues that the individual is not bound by his existence to a single identity. Francis continues his explanation with a shopkeeper he encounters on a stroll in the park: ‘what I sought to do in my book was to relate myself through you—through others who may come to read it—to the prick of a pin upon which populations move against the inscrutable canvas of the stars. Perhaps a minute, in this context, bridges centuries, on either side of which we stand, as an index of how buried we are in time’ (23). In these passages the dead Francis comes back to life by way of the journal/book that he has written and that da Silva is reading, and that we are also reading; through the experience of plunging into the printed page and story, we are involved in an imaginative translation into other identities and places.

20Non-narrative elements of folklore and myth such as metaphors and symbols can also function as translators; here the tree of the sun constitutes the principal metaphor, which recurs with variation in the titles of da Silva’s mural, Francis’s book, and the play performed within the novel itself. The core idea of this metaphor is creation; the sun is a creator—a common theme in Amerindian religion and myth—and the fertile earth, fecundated by the sun, is an abundant provider. Harris translates these ideas into correspondences of contemporary events in individual lives, making comparisons between nature’s creation and art’s creation. As da Silva paints a city scene and continues to think about Francis’s and Julia’s story, he looks down to the street below, ‘crowded with a carnival of spectators who slipped in and out of currencies of deaths and lives, of masks and appearances, in and out of the foodbearing tree of the sun’ (54- 55). The world about da Silva manifests the ‘miraculous translations of a motivated creator’ (54).

21Because the metaphors and symbols of folklore and myth are not bound by historical specificity, they can serve as translational vehicles between past, present, and future, and reveal the potential timelessness of any moment. Thus, the character of Julia Cortez, situated in the twentieth century, is portrayed in terms of Arawak creation mythology, the classical Greek myth of the Pleiades, and the enigma of timelessness expressed in the epigraph from Romeo and Juliet. The images shift back and forth between earth and sky and between the human, the inanimate, and the divine:

No wonder she found herself immersed in minutes that were hundreds of years, in which she felt herself both enlarged and diminished as she waited for Francis to return.

No wonder she smoothed her rock skirt and flesh into enterprises of invented car and re-invented ship on which to sail backwards to revived garden parties of her youth, savage symbols, carnival dances, that were in themselves a form of waiting, a form of anticipation, a form of hoping for a secret lover of infinity buried in ancestral bone and blood, a secret white, a secret black, a secret Carib, a secret Arawak. (70)

22Myth ‘lurks in every man’s heart, ’ and this gives an ‘unfathomable dimension’ and dignity to human experience (82). For Harris, myth is necessary in a postmodern world that has lost a sense of the timeless and the universal, and it is the challenge of art to translate the individual and the particular into other dimensions of time and possibility. Myth, and all art, has a transcendental quality, yet at the same time it engages in the common, everyday activity of interpreting and re-expressing human experience. Thus, da Silva the painter engages in ‘the translation of other lives and letters and books’ and becomes ‘the “soul” of the past and present times in everliving presence or renascence of the arts’ (83). In similar terms a character in Harris’s novel Black Marsden (1972) speculates: ‘ [E]very correspondence of events within an individual life [i]s an implicit and secret dramatization of buried universal themes.... ’7 Because myth is the storehouse of ‘universal themes’ in the form of symbols and narratives, a writer can draw from this resource to bring about a rapprochement of the contemporary individual and the transcultural and timeless. It is the task of art to portray a ‘correspondence of events’ that will lend itself to such a translation, but in principle the translation is always a possibility if there is an appropriate comprehension and re-expression. A cross-cultural imagination facilitates the task, making connections between disparate epochs, peoples, and events and drawing out the universal in the particular.

23The novel’s conclusion, with its labyrinthine narrative layering and crisscrossing, illustrates this well, bringing together the human, nature, and processes of transformation just as they are brought together in the epigraphs’ theme of metamorphosis and its metaphor of the tree of the sun, yet here the layering of the ideas has become even more complex. On level one, the painter Da Silva da Silva is reading/ editing the letters and book of Julia and Francis Cortez, the deceased, former tenants of his London apartment; on level two, Julia and Francis’s story unfolds, one of whose settings is the Caribbean island Zemi; on level three, a play entitled The Tree of the Sun is being performed on a West End stage called The Pleiades and the time is ‘the first decade of the twenty-first century’ (91). The characters performing the play include da Silva, who acts the part of Francis. In the novel’s conclusion, then, past, present, and future are brought together, and the living and the dead trade places. On level two, Julia and Francis prepare to depart, to sail away from, a Caribbean island, and this departure is a metaphor for their deaths and their metamorphosis, as in the creation myths of the novel’s epigraphs. We recall here again that the word ‘Pleiades’ is derived from the Greek word meaning ‘to sail’; ‘I have no memory of dying, ’ Julia says, ‘except in an endless procession of turbulences. One disembarks. One embarks again upon another ship. One’s here. One’s not here.... A procession of turbulences’ (89). The entire island seems ‘to sail into an extension of a vast continent of space’ (89). In passages such as this Harris draws out the mythic and mystic dimension of common experience and engages the reader in existentialist ponderings (90).

24He sketches the metamorphosis of human identity into natural elements through symbolic names, metaphors, and other translations of the core idea of the myths of the novel’s epigraph. For example, Julia and Francis are accompanied in their departure by Julia’s great-aunt, Sky, who walks with the aid of a cane, ‘rain’s multiple stick, ’ and who has ‘territorial and oceanic children’ (87, 91). In her final words, Julia says to Sky: ‘I shall be like you, great-aunt.... And when my children ring from a static sea or a static mountain I shall tell them to come home, I shall tell them that home is always another journey.... ’ (91). In the final pages of the novel Julia is translated into the myths of earth, sky, and ocean. Francis, who is described as ‘descended from the stars’ (93), holds Julia in his arms, and the ship sails away:

the prow of the great ship began to move forward, the water surged and swelled and a chorus of voices, the chorus of incarnation or human orchestra, filled the air with presences.
‘Away, ’ cried the voices, ‘away, away, away.’ The ship moved on and outward into the sun. (94)

25On level three, the chorus of voices transform into the acclamation and applause of the audience who has watched the play, The Tree of the Sun, in twenty-first century London.

26The conclusion of the novel bears some resemblances with that of Palace of the Peacock, in which the crew of a ship experience a mystical celebration of life; in The Tree of the Sun the emphasis moves away from the human and toward an interrelatedness of being. In its labyrinthine manner, the novel translates the core idea of the epigraph’s Amerindian and Greek myths into correlations with events in the lives of the novel’s characters, who are at once dead and resurrected by the power of the word and the cross-cultural imagination. For Harris, the world is unfinished, always in transformation; a mythopoeic vision of its transformations allows us to plunge, like limbo dancers, across the boundaries that fix us in narrow identities enclosed by time and place.