Masters smiled as if I had caught him out, caught his immersion in brutal yet philosophic reverie. It gave him no pleasure to confess to his kinship to Johnny save that such confession reopened the wound of diseased Ambition in which age is cemented to cosmetic youth or grotesque muscle. The powers of the lame are added to the fleet of spirit, as a parable of the partial nature of all human achievement, and human institution, all bodies, all images. I sensed he was as embarrassed and chastened as I, and this made me listen to him all the more closely and sympathetically.
“In confessing to partial images,” he said so softly I had to ask him to speak up, “we come abreast of both bias (the bias of ageing institution) and potential (the capacity within all of us to be born anew) in all regimes and civilizations. All images are partial but may masquerade for an age as absolute or sovereign. Take the Market-place to which you have returned like a ghost from the future. As absolute or sovereign image,the Market beguiles us into overlooking the terrors associated with it over the centuries. We tend to see in it the ground of honest trade, honest money — in our time — honest competition between individuals who are innocent of all that has happened.
“As partial image, however, the Market suddenly assaults us. It is brightest when it is darkest fellowship of greed. It is a net in which peoples and species have been decimated. We grow fat with our greedy antecedents, thin with our decimated antecedents. They inflate us to spawn them and their miseries and their grandeurs all over again.
“I tell you, my friend, much subtlety and true honesty are needed in the ‘reading’ of partial images. For the partial image — in confessing to the ground of bias in sovereign institution — appears to terrorize us, or to confuse us, though it has begun, in some degree, to free us from the absolutes that clothe our memory and to reveal a potential that has always been there for mutual rebirth within conflicting, dying, hollow generations.
“The partial image is biased, yes, but it is also in conflict with inherent bias — it is a part of something incalculably whole and stark and true. Such wholeness cannot be confined or structured absolutely; its complex nakedness and community of spirit eludes us within every mask or costume or dress …”
“What then is wholeness?” I cried.
“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, not to overwhelm each other but to ‘redeem’ (if that is not in itself too biased a word) the fragmentation of cultures, and to do so without glosses of deception that underestimate the depth, the terror, the obscurity, of the enterprise.
“The price of wholeness is a fiction that so relives the fragmentation of cultures that it cannot be duped by ideal rhetoric or faiths or falsehoods. It gives creative tension to doubts and uncertainties that become the cousins of god in reflecting their curiosity about the wounds of heaven that revive a concept of innocence, the wounds of hell by which we glorify the individual in traditions of conquest.
“Wholeness releases partiality to confront itself in others as a necessary threshold into the rebirth and the unity of Mankind beyond the rhetoric of salvation, beyond the rhetoric of damnation. Wholeness is a third dimension in which every mask suffers the kinship of exchange, the kinship of glory, the kinship of humiliation. At least,” he smiled across at me half-commandingly, half-apologetically, “that is what I think.”
Czar Johnny (half-masked by the future in Carnival generation’s embalmed Lenin) shuffled along with the globe on his back, a globe or an immense crate of sugar. The particular aisle in the gutted (as it seemed to me) Market ship along which he moved was rather narrow and the shoppers or crew over which he ruled pulled aside, as they saw him coming, into areas between the stalls. Thus he made his way inch by inch, foot by foot, through the population of Carnival limbo.
One Lady Charlotte, however, stood her ground.
“Charlotte?” I turned to Masters. “Have I not heard that name before?”
“Flip back to the Alms House scene in Carnival,” said Masters. “There’s mention of Charlotte. Bartleby’s second wife.”
“Ah yes! I remember. She stripped him of his property in the heat of their romance.”
“A cunning bitch. She’s dressed in rich cloth today, unlike poor Alice. And her shoes glitter. Ready to dance you would think. But no! she stands abusing Johnny as if she’s chained or riveted to the ground. Her pride won’t let her stir.”
“It’s infra dig, isn’t it, for her to go aside into the crush and the throng of perspiring infernal bodies between the stalls?”
“Her sons were educated at the College next to the Alms House, then they studied law at Harvard and in London. She knows her rights, that’s clear,” Masters conceded.
“What is she saying to the czar?”
“She’s telling him the folk in the Market have every right to stand in the aisle and buy their fruit and fish. She’s telling him he should back off and use another path away from the people’s stalls. She says she’ll stand where she is until kingdom come or until she’s through with her purchases.”
Flatfoot glowered. He slowly lowered the globe on his back until he had deposited it like a great boulder in the middle of the narrow people’s aisle. “You cunning bitch,” he cried with venom, almost taking the words, I thought, out of Masters’ shadow of a mouth. “Don’t be hasty, don’t abuse the Lady Bartleby,HE SAYS.”
I was astonished at the sudden caution that had arrived upon Flatfoot’s tongue, as if he were repeating an aside or an injunction he had received from an unseen companion. I played the scene back in my mind and listened intently. “You cunning bitch! Don’t be hasty, don’t abuse the Lady Bartleby, Johnny,HE SAYS.”
Yes, there was no doubt about it. I had overlooked but caught Johnny in the replayed utterance of the unseen companion.
“Who is HE?” I wondered.
“Johnny’s an idiot giant, he hears voices,” Masters half-laughed but I was conscious again of their mysterious global kinship, as mysterious, in a sense, as the cousinship to Sir Thomas who, I suddenly saw, out of the corner of my eye, had his eye fixed upon the czar of New Forest.
I almost swore I saw Masters’ shadow-lips moving in that mirroring eye.
“Lady Bartleby I asking you polite to stir you ass and to move out of me way. Lady Bartleby I telling you …” He began to roar like thunder. Then he stopped. He was listening to someone invisible whose lightning caution he repeated: “Be careful, Johnny, be careful what you say, HE SAYS.”
Charlotte grew icy. She was angry. She ignored him. But despite her anger — as is the way of dreams — she smiled; her ageing body smiled with a faint shrug within the seamless garment of marriage he had conferred upon her. Though she had divorced Bartleby he had called her Lady Bartleby. She remained riveted to the floor of the Market and continued to order iced fish, rice, oranges, pear-shaped mangoes, and other miscellaneous items I could not read from where I stood upon the Carnival vessel of Night.
Masters shifted a little beside me as if he were still embarrassed by a play or a rehearsal of resemblances as he led me through the labyrinth of fire. It was a curious sensation, the sensation of shadow overlapping light, light shadow, day night, the sensation of gesture as speech, of words and images so curiously broken they gave scope to Carnival self-ridicule, Carnival self-love, Carnival self-loathing, within savage pride, savage labour, savage creation. They gave scope to scorn as well as vulgar relief within the play of folk-conscience that enveloped the chained Lady and the Carnival tyrant.