The Infinite Rehearsal

The Carnival Trilogy #2

by Wilson Harris

The novel by that title is a rewriting of Goethe’s Faust and to a lesser extent of Marlowe’s Dr.Faustus, which brings to mind their present-day emulators. The protagonist’s guide here is a character named Ghost (a ‘spectre of wholeness’) who helps him revise the past ‘from the ruled or apparently eclipsed side of humanity’ and does so ‘in an infinite rehearsal of a play of the birth of history’.
The Infinite Rehearsal is an autobiography of a fictional character, Robin Redbreast Glass. The novel interweaves passages from Harris's earlier novels with allusions from such writers as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and William Shakespeare.

96 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1987

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wilson Harris continues his allegoric journey through human existence and he manages to discover his own unique library which is absolutely different from The Library of Babel found by Jorge Luis Borges.

The graves I dug were libraries of myths of gold, silver, bone within a community of convertible soils and dreams that appeared in my Sleep, the living and the dead, texts of space travel, texts of sea travel, texts of the sacred wood, texts also of descent into the foetus, into the new-born and the unborn, descent into famine, texts that broke a uniform narrative domination by the conquistadores of history in inserting themselves into my book despite the apparent eclipse they endured, despite voicelessness or oblivion.

In The Infinite Rehearsal he brings William Shakespeare’s sentence: “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players” right up to its logical limit: “All the world's a story, and all the men and women merely personages”.

It was also a mystic dream and the beginning of faith. Yes, faith! But faith in what? Was it faith in one’s powers to measure prosperity or to be measured by prosperity, to save or to be saved, to know or to be known? Was it faith in heaven or in hell?

In the world created by Wilson Harris the imagined are equal to the real and the dead are equal to the living.

[Kela Francis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won't tell you i really know what it's about. The language is beautiful, sweeping, immersing you in the chaos of (re)creation.

[Omar Abu Samra · Rating 5 out of 5]

“life is cheap, so spend, spend spend”