GEORGE LAMMING'S JOURNEY BETWEEN 'CASTLE' AND 'CAVE'
RICKEY SINGH COLUMN
By Rickey Singh
Guyana Chronicle
February 8, 2004
IT IS NOT often that members of the public, together with students and academics of a university, get the opportunity of a renowned novelist summarising, in a single presentation of less than two hours, his body of complex literary work spanning a period of some 42 years.
But this was the rich experience of an unusually packed Lecture Theatre of the Teaching Complex at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies two Monday nights ago (Jan.26) when one of the foremost literary icons of the English-speaking Caribbean, George Lamming, delivered his lecture on `The Castle and the Cave’.
The intriguing title, chosen by the Barbados-born Lamming - author of his first and best known novel, the autobiographical `In the Castle of My Skin’ - may undoubtedly have contributed to the significant size and composition of the audience, not to mention the novelist's reputation for controversial statements on social and political issues of national and regional importance.
Lamming's lecture was the second such event sponsored as part of the UWI's Faculty of Humanities and Education Cultural Studies Initiative Distinguished Lecture Series.
And it was the final public lecture in an intra-CARICOM series of four by Lamming, introduced with much warmth and admiration to the audience as Caribbean intellectual, literary artist, teacher, poet, novelist, broadcaster and critic.
Before his rare appearance that night at Cave Hill, his public discourses in the series at the St. Augustine and Mona Campuses of the UWI and the Antigua State College had covered, respectively:
`Language and Politics of Ethnicity: A Novelist's Perspective’; The Political Foundations of a Caribbean Aesthetic - Reflections on Claude McKay and C.L.R. James’; and `Remembering Tim Hector’.
He reserved for his final presentation the lecture that focuses on his first novel half a century ago, and the 'cave' on the hill that is the UWI campus in Barbados.
To the evident amusement of his audience, Lamming remarked that "home ground is not always the most cordial turf to walk", as he set about explaining the title of his lecture which he supported by readings - some a bit too much - from texts of his body of work embracing seven novels.
“'Castle', he explained "in its French version, as a large building fortified for defence against any enemy". And he defined `Castle’ in the title of his first novel, perhaps "better known than read", as "a metaphor for a fortress...
Which book?
"Structured,” as he said, "to endure all kinds of weather; and though highly visible on the outside, does not allow easy access to those who are curious about its interior design..."
When people charmingly tell the author, "I read your book" - invariably referring to `In the Castle of My Skin' - his own good judgement to avoid any embarrassment, leads Lamming to resist asking "which one".
There are, after all, six other books, in addition to published essays and interviews - The Emigrants; Of Age and Innocence; Season of Adventure; Pleasures of Exile, Water with Berries and Natives of My Person..
But, in discussing the symmetry of his published work over more than four decades, they may well be regarded as "one book".
Or, as he put it that night of his lecture at Cave Hill, "the missing chapters" of his published work that "the Cave (likened to an intellectual prison) did not tell you about" - those who innocently admit to having "read your book".
In defining "the cave" in the context of his discourse, Lamming referred to the parable in Plato's `Republic’ to relate how education may best affect our nature.
In this parable, as he related, the 'cave' is presented as an "intellectual prison from which escape is difficult and painful, but not impossible; and it is expected that those who escape may, at great risk, return to liberate the prisoners who remain...."
His elaboration of this concept of the "cave" led him to the suggestion - one that provoked laughter from the audience - that it would be a "remarkable triumph" if the Principal of the UWI Cave Hill campus, Professor Hilary Beckles, could persuade the local business community, in all sectors, to "mandate that all senior staff be given time off to attend courses in Caribbean sociology and Caribbean thought".
He feels that such an "experiment" could make for an "intellectual improvement" in the concept and style of management in the Barbadian society.
Primary focus
Turning his attention to the primary focus of his lecture, the novel `In the Castle of My Skin’, Lamming explained that it is the evocation of a world "seen and experienced through the eyes of boys in a world of childhood and adolescence, the mapping of their growing-up..."
There followed an intense period of quotations from his various books - or the "missions chapters" to his autobiographical novel - with `Castle’ ending on a point of departure when the narrator moves from Barbados to Trinidad; and the next book, `The Emigrant’, carries forward this departure - the migration of West Indian "men", the "boys" in his first novel, to England, a largely male adventure of the 1950s.
And, in carrying his audience through the journey of his novels, as "one book", Lamming was to explain how the message of "migration" to England was to become central to the psychology of more than one generation of West Indian people.
For, while the "boys" of his childhood `Castle’ were rooted to one particular territory (Barbados), the "men" on the ship in `The Emigrants’, were drawn from all the territories of the English-speaking region, determined to see their fulfilment elsewhere, outside of their own society - as he was to later describe in `Pleasures of Exile’.
The novelist does not return again to his native Barbados as a "concrete and recognisable location" for any of his narratives that subsequently followed.
His third book (or 'chapter') of the unfolding drama outlined in `Of Age and Innocence’, is based on his invention of a composite island that embraces the entire Caribbean region as Europe's "first experiment in capitalism overseas..."
With that novel, `Castle of My Skin’ is expanded to the whole Caribbean and perceived to be battling through the last stages of what Franz Fanon would later describe as a "dying colonialism" - with the fabled island of `San Cristobal’ placed as "the physical and historical architecture of the whole (Caribbean) archipelago...
When the first "independent republic" in: Lamming's `Of Age and Innocence’ finally collapsed, there was no further journey to make by the narrator who was addressing the audience that night on the `cave’ on a Barbadian hill.
So the next stage of the journey, as told by the author, was the `Native of My Person’. It traces the psychic disorder of this collapse, giving rise, in the process, to what he interpreted as "a wave of Pentecostal fundamentalism which seems irreversible..."
And it was in this "psychic condition", he said, that one might find "the primordial forces that give shape and meaning to all that is contained, in essence, in the preceding books from 'Castle of My Skin to Season of Adventure’”...
Yes, said this literary giant, this icon of the Caribbean" to his audience: "I have read your book. It is not altogether correct; but it is an innocent admission that the 'Cave' (the university on the hill?) did not tell you about the missing chapters....", since the history-making novel, `In the Castle of My Skin’.