Wilson Harris, many times nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a British writer of Guyanese origin, one of the most original novelists and critics of the twentieth century, and probably the first to use and interpret the aesthetically fruitful notion of cross-culturalism. Harris's insights into the profound symbiosis between history, culture and artistic expression were initially inspired by his encounters with Amerindians in the Guyanese rainforest interior, where he led many surveying expeditions. These encounters aroused his interest in pre-Columbian peoples, who figure prominently in many of his novels and stories. His perception of the Guyanese landscape is the source of his unique narrative rhetoric, richly metaphoric language, and philosophy of existence: i.e. the epistemological and phenomenological interrelatedness between man, animal life, and nature. The present study offers magisterial, in-depth interpretations of Harris's exhilaratingly complex and shape-shifting fictional worlds.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 The Myth of El Dorado in the Caribbean Novel

2 The Writer as Alchemist: The Unifying Role of the Imagination

3 Palace of the Peacock

4 The Far Journey of Oudin: A Naked Particle of Freedom

5 The Whole Armour: A Compassionate Alliance

6 The Secret Ladder: The Immaterial Constitution

7 Heartland: Between Two Worlds

8 The Eye of the Scarecrow

9 The Waiting Room: A Primordial Species of Fiction

10 Tumatumari: An Epic of Ancestors

11 Ascent to Omai

12 From The Sleepers of Roraima to The Angel at the Gate: The Novel as Painting

13 Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness: “Inimitable Painting”

14 The Tree of the Sun and Resurrection: Faces on the Canvas

15 Carnival and Creativity

16 Carnival and J.M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country: Ambivalent Clio

17 The Infinite Rehearsal

18 The Four Banks of the River of Space: Unfinished Genesis

19 Carnival, The Infinite Rehearsal, and The Four Banks of the River of Space: Ulyssean Carnival of Epic Metamorphoses

20 Resurrection at Sorrow Hill: Charting the Uncapturable

21 Obscure Sorrow Hill: Seminal Ground of Endless Creation

22 “Tricksters of Heaven”: Visions of Holocaust in Jonestown and Fred D’Aguiar’s Bill of Rights

23 The Dark Jester: “Unimaginable Imaginer”

24 The Mask of the Beggar: Transfigurative Art

25 The Ghost of Memory: A Meditation on the Nature of Art

26 “Latent Cross-Culturalities” in Harris and Soyinka: Their Creative Alternative to Theory

27 Ut Musica Poesis

28 Writing and the Other Arts

29 Wilson Harris’s Multi-Faceted and Dynamic Perception of the Imaginary

30 “Numinous Proportions”: Wilson Harris’s Alternative to All ‘Posts’ Conclusion: Straight Lines and Arabesques

Bibliography of Works Cited