Carnival

The Carnival Trilogy #1

by Wilson Harris

Carnival sets out to provide an historically positioned and ideologically motivated “reading” and rewriting of Dante's Divine
Comedy, its mode of narration reflecting Dante's allegorical language, its imagery continually evoking the Dantean “pretext”, and the structure of its action repeating in the decentred world of twentieth-century colonial displacement Dante's journey through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso under the guidance of Virgil and, later, Beatrice.

172 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1985

About the author

Born in Guyana in 1921 and based in England since 1959, Wilson Harris is one of the most original novelists and critics of the twentieth century. His writings, which include poems, numerous essays and twenty-four novels, provide a passionate and unique defense of the notion of cross-culturalism as well as a visionary exploration of the interdependence between history, landscape and humanity. In 2010 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco]

Carnival is a biography. Carnival is a fertility rite. Carnival is Dante Alighieri translated into magical realism.

They were real yet unreal presences to each other as all human shocking intercourse is. One lives in and out of Carnival time since each element that masks us sustains time as its original medium of sacrifice within creation.

Wilson Harris talks in paradoxes and riddles:

Wholeness is the unique mediation of fiction of spirit between partial images. Wholeness is, shall I say, a real fiction in arousing, penetrating, transforming the parent-in-the-child, the object in the newborn or unborn subject. Wholeness opens the prospect of climates of passion and emotion that reflect each other.

And he creates a virtual poetic universe populated with fictional beings living outside time by their own magical laws of postmodern imagery.

I thought of autumn and its fossil burning nest in which the phoenix of the year lays its eggs. I thought of spring and the nest of snow from which the sun arises.

The world is a theatre of masks… Just choose a mask you will wear.

[Thomas]

this book is extremely dense and there are about three or four different things being done at once. there is a narrative about the life of Everyman Masters as told to the narrator after Masters' death at the beginning of the novel. this narrative seems to be somewhat structurally based on the divine comedy, and it moves freely backwards and forwards in time. characters often shift and merge into one another based on their identification with carnival masks. in addition to the narrative Harris seems to be simultaneously commenting upon or analysing the symbolism and metaphors of his own book, in language and terminology that seems to take a lot from psychoanalysis and myth. sometimes dialogue spoken by the characters is used to do this, in a way that feels quite odd and out of place. this all sounds pretty cool in theory but i found many of the sentences to be stilted or clunky, and the metaphorical analysis veers into apparent word salad quite often. whether this is just an impression caused by my own ignorance of psychoanalysis i can't really say.

[Hannah]

Global Read Challenge 92: Guyana

I am not rating this book, because while I didn't like it, I'm quite sure that is my flaw and not the book's. I haven't read Divine Comedy so maybe I'm at a disadvantage. I almost never knew what was happening or what I was reading about. The language was extremely dense and flowery and for me it was a slog to get through. I'm sure I'm missing out.

[Omar Abu Samra]

Extreme abstraction, Minimal narrative anchors, a masterpiece