Wilson Harris
Editorial
Stabroek News
January 4, 2003
"idiosyncratic genius without precedent or peer"
In 2001, the internationally-honoured and respected Guyanese-born novelist, Wilson Harris, turned 80. His extraordinarily innovative work is unusual often to the point of bewilderment in its apparent jettisoning of traditional conventions of prose writing. However, for the reader "who requires more of fiction than mere skilful figure-skating over the surface of life" (Robert Nye), Harris' fiction offers real rewards. These include an unfashionably positive and life-enhancing view of human potential in a world dangerously polarised along implacable racial, political and cultural fault-lines, as well as a philosophical and cultural challenge of global significance. He has been honoured for the humane, visionary nature of his writing by a variety of international literary, humanitarian and educational institutions and has twice been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize.
His work has gained the admiration and respect of even his harshest critics for the depth and consistency of his attempt to extend the boundaries of the novel forging a new, often startling fictional language and style. Entering a Harris novel is always a challenge, never an 'easy read'. Harris often takes the conventional, deliberately tilting it, virtually capsizing explicit meaning into apparent non-sense so as to allow implicit, new meaning to emerge. An extremely simple illustration of this might be seen, for example, in an explicit statement like 'the man drinks rum', which can be turned around in apparent defiance of meaning to become 'rum drinks the man" ; a much more significant comment on rum-drinking.
From his first novel, Palace of the Peacock (1960) to his most recent; The Dark Jester (2001), his 23rd novel, the Guyanese/South American rainforest appears as a major influence in his work, which might be described as a painting in progress, a vast canvas that, like the work of Abdias do Nascimento of Brazil, or Leroi Clarke of Trinidad or Aubrey Williams of Guyana, is constructed through a series of incremental, contradictory and often confusing images and ideas which resolve themselves into a pattern of astonishing relevance and clarity when taken as a whole, experienced by the reader without any attempt at coercion of the text. A good novel, after all, like a good painting, isn't merely something we read passively. It reads us.
Like the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier or Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Harris had found a 'magical reality' reflected in the Caribbean/South American landscape of rivers and rainforests. It was his experience of the Guyana rainforest (where he spent several years as a hydrographic surveyor) which alerted him to the need to 'read' the landscape differently. The landscape of the rainforest, he realised, could not be explicitly described : one couldn't, for example, simply call the trees 'green', nor the rivers 'black', because there are continually changing shapes, shades and colours in that landscape which require a less rigid, more open-ended method of description. The landscape itself was often unpredictable and challenging: the mirror-like surface of a river or creek might contain rocks or 'tacoubas' waiting just below the surface to capsize the confident steersman. It was this sense, by extension, of the fluid, unstable nature of life itself, of the need to develop an 'interior' validity, that led him to repudiate the essentially colonial 'novel of persuasion' in which the writer consolidates his characters - persuades us to believe in their life-like portrayal - and set him off on a difficult but more rewarding journey.
Harris also saw (like Denis Williams) that in Guyana and the Caribbean, there was no static, fixed or immediately recognisable identity, especially in Guyana, owing to the country's racial and cultural mix and to what Denis Williams had called 'the lack of assurance of an indwelling ancestor'. The human person, for Harris, therefore, was a welter of possibilities, wearing many faces like the landscape itself, offering a theme of a 'living drama of conception' rather than the explicit Naipaulian portraiture of the broken Caribbean person. Racial admixture, the horror of slavery, the detritus of Empire, could then become (as it did for Derek Walcott, who has also fashioned a major reconstructive art out of the shards of Caribbean racial and cultural history), a source of infinite possibilities, and a new art of fiction would be needed to reflect this new approach to the human condition. One of the inevitable drawbacks of this kind of writing is that it " ....operates at such an unrelieved pitch of intensity, that the results can be bearable only in small doses: like listening to late Coltrane or early Sonic Youth. Nobody could claim that Harris is easy to read, but almost everyone who has made the effort becomes an admirer and an addict....The Dark Jester maintains his stature as an idiosyncratic genius without precedent or peer." (Stephen Howe in The Independent, 24th March 2001)
Harris' writing represents a radical, subversive attempt to question the assumptions of a colonial-engendered fiction based on the 'comedy of manners': to take on the challenge of 'authenticity' in authoring a reconstructive art of fiction, along with the attendant dangers of obscurity and difficulty.
"Harris seems unique in the history of literature in his sustained, brilliant and cunning assault on the object [ human determinism, history as incontrovertible 'fact' ] Retracing in his fiction the paths of rampant tribes : Carib, Aztec, Inca, conquistador, privateer and trader, slavemaster and planter, colonialist and governor, Harris engages on a reconquista of the mind. "
(Gregory Shaw : "What do we do with Harris? "in The Literate Imagination, Macmillan 1989)
His is a remarkable, cross-cultural imagination that discovers the seeds of regeneration within the rubble of colonial conquest and 'lost' El Dorados, excavating through dream, myth and allegory the enduring potential of the human spirit. It is easy to complain of the 'difficulty' of reading Wilson Harris's work, but unwise to ignore its importance.
"...by regarding the hysteric or the artistic innovator as abnormal, we accorded ourselves the luxury of believing that they did not concern us, and that they did not put in question, by the mere fact of their existence, an accepted social, moral or intellectual order".
(Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism [Beacon press, Boston 1963])
