The New Man in the Jungle: Chaos, Community and the Margins of the Nation- State

Abstract

The New Man in the JungleChaos, Community, and the Margins of the Nation-State Robert Carr (bio) The map of the savannahs was a dream. The names Brazil and Guyana were colonial conventions I had known from childhood. I clung to them now as to a curious necessary stone and footing, even in my dream, the ground I knew I must not relinquish. They were an actual stage, a presence, however mythical they seemed to the universal and the spiritual eye. They were as close to me as my ribs, the rivers and the flatland, the mountains and heartland I intimately saw. I could not help cherishing my symbolic map, and my bodily prejudice like a well-known room and house of superstition within which I dwelt. I saw this kingdom of man turned into a colony and battleground of spirit, a priceless tempting jewel I dreamed I possessed. I pored over the map of the sun my brother had given me. —Palace of the Peacock “You can’t be sure of anything in the bush, Mr. Fenwick. The truth is you poring over them chart and tide-map too hard.” —The Secret Ladder —Wilson Harris, The Guyana Quartet 1 Flying over Guyana’s national territory, the eye traverses hundreds of miles of dense jungle. On morning flights, the landscape is remiss, stoic, secretive to the urban industrial perspective. Soaring at such imperial heights, borne by technologies imported from the industrialized countries, one sees the impenetrable green broken only by the occasional savannah or the vast brown reach of the mighty rivers. At night, the blackness is absolute and overwhelming. Wilson Harris’s Guyana Quartet (1961–64) documents and redocuments this confrontation, to question the concepts of the nation and the state, and the lay of the terrain (national, psychological, global), as much to inaugurate as to impeach. In opening and closing his recapitulation of the history of Guyana’s national projects from the interior, Harris reconsiders the European encounter with the New World, refracted now through the prisms of New World multiculturalist nationalisms Boissière had hinted at, with the reflection of the self that hounds a spectrum of trained, industrialized workers in the jungle. From Donne/Carroll, the brutal/contemplative brothers seeking gold in Palace of the Peacock (1961), the novel that opens The Guyana Quartet, to Fenwick, the government surveyor at the head of The Secret Ladder (1964) that closes it, men find their structures of self, knowledge and power crumbling under [End Page 133] the terrible weight of the jungle. In the Quartet’s intervening novels, Oudin of The Far Journey of Oudin (1962) and Abram/Cristo/Peet of The Whole Armour (1963), emblematic of those disenfranchised in the national project, find themselves the pawns of private economic strategies, the objects of law and order, demarcated zones cast as the territory for the extraction of surplus and the enactment of power, pre-1838 (estate = state) and after (coast = nation). Confronting the history of the pursuit and promise of development as the national patrimony, Harris’s Guyana Quartet seeks to decipher the history of social relations, of national and nationalist identities, of labor relations, and the constitution of men and national administration from the locus of the micrological spheres of the jungle zone into which the universe has collapsed. Guyana’s rainforests were propelled into metropolitan media networks when, in the 1970s, the bodies of Reverend Jim Jones and his followers were found in the interior. Confronting, like the earliest pioneers, crises in the collective psyche, these strangers plunged into the wilderness, pilgrims from the center of regional imperialism and staged their own massacre. The jungle returned to itself, its own ancient cycles of life and fertile rot, to those who live there, eking out a subsistence on the primeval landscape. These broad stretches of undeveloped territory have persistently proven stronger than the men from metropolitan countries, the earliest being Sir Walter Raleigh (1595) and Abraham van Pere (1627), British and Dutch men captured by the secrets of the interior and the prospect of marshalling capital-intensive technology for long-term profits. Then the South American territory was administered as a “patroon,” the property of the...