Selected Essays of Wilson Harris

A.J.M. Bundy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415195669
• eBook ISBN: 9781134645435
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Wilson Harris is one of the outstanding literary innovators of the century. His novels date from The Palace of the Peacock to Jonestown . This long-awaited volume matches Harris's career with his critical writings, from 1961 to the present day. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris brings together twenty-one lectures, addresses and essays to make available Harris's full range of writings on subjects including: * the literate imagination * traditions of myth and fable in Central and South America * the North American literary imagination, from Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville and Ralph Ellison, to William Faulkner and Jean Rhys * inheritances and legacies of writers of the postcolonial diaspora This comprehensive collection also comes complete with: * an extensive editorial introduction, providing valuable historical and theoretical context for the essays * a map of Guyana * bibliographies of Harris's fiction and non-fiction * appendices on the legends of El Dorado and the Holy Grail.

Part I

THE ARCHETYPAL FICTION

PREFACE: THE ARCHETYPAL FICTION¹

Harris's novels set out to establish a new dialogue with reality in all its guises (p. 43). It is a reality one could call archetype. And what is archetype? We spoke, in the Introduction, of circularities and revisitations in the territory of Harris's novels. Circularity and archetype and intimately related. The one corresponds the other.²

Harris has identified in the continent of South America a self-regulatory human laboratory in which startling divergences from traditionalist expectations have taken place. The history, languages and literature of that continent function as the proof of an unusual theorem which revises the pattern of received histories. The legacy of ancient Americas operates as if, ‘all the races of the earth should have travelled there in order to become models for their craftsmen and artists’ (‘Profiles of Myth and the New World’, p. 203).

In a first instance, a humane laboratory will revise patterns such as the model of history outlined in the Introduction. It revises them via displaced transparencies that seed in other cultures and come, as it were, to the Americas for clarification. When viewed through the spectroscope of the Americas such transparencies fall back into place and can be fruitfully read. This gives rise to what Harris terms the cross-cultural phenomenon: the self-recognition of one civilization in the culture-bed of the other (‘New Preface to Palace of the Peacock’). The cross-cultural is to be distinguished from the multi-cultural, the cosmopolitan, which is a forum created out of mutual commercial interests and in which different cultures can operate at the same point in time. circumambulation, within an indeterminate sphere of experience. Overlapping and interpenetration are an essential part of its nature, so that in ‘Letter from Francisco Bone to W.H.’ (see pp. 47–52 in this volume), archetype is realized as

overlapping layers and environments and theatres of legend and history [that one might associate with Jonestown]

A further ramification of archetype is that Harris's words often take their chief meaning from their strict etymology: Associate with Jonestown, for instance, not conveying the usual sense of ‘things which make one think of Jonestown’ but is the Latin ad+socius allied to; literally ‘things allied and alloyed with Jonestown’. In this sense, Jonestown stands for a new contract with Being, an independent entity in its own right as opposed to an arbitrary collection of alike-seeming thoughts and inspirations. It is a specificity that gives the archetype its particular resonance and implication to promote unique composition in the body of fiction.

Yet the hypotheses of the archetypal fiction are approximative concepts. Approximative because they issue from chronic states. States that come about from the fact of not knowing and a not recognising: Harris's overlapping layers and environments and theatres of legend and history. One associates such layers with discontinuities in our experience of Being; moments of terminus and the fall from the fixed stars (disaster); trauma and disappearance, but also redemptive movements from the future and reversal of the past. ‘Archetypal dreams employ symbols of brokenness to depict the shedding of habit.’ (‘The Music of Living Landscapes’). Breakage or fragmentation from previous habit enables the dream to rewrite itself into new structures and, as I noted in the Introduction, also to write a new structure into the author.Moments of terminus are also ruptures in the fabric of time. Ruptures in the fabric of time release or secrete the composite epic. The epic is composite because pieces of different time (the past, present, relived future) come together and make a bridge through the rupture in time. One can interpret composite epic as a Masquerade or Carnival or Jamboree or All Hallows Feast in which long-vanished texts re-emerge and re-present themselves in ‘The language of the heartland, relying as it did upon a curious jigsaw of intangible resources, set in variable perspective’ (Heartland, 1964, p. 88).

The Conquistadors come to the Caribbean and show their faces to the Carib. They show the faces of fear, hatred, greed and war. The Carib look at the Conquistadors and see, as if for the first time, the masque of conquest they themselves have been performing around the Caribbean for two thousand years. To Harris, it was bitter self-knowledge, as much as inferior military technology, which defeated then extinguished the Carib.

The second instance is the overlap of the literary medium with the nature of the enquiry. The central fact of the archetype is that, as cultural expression, the archetype is neither known nor recognized until it is in some sense fulfilled; we become aware of the archetype's fullness only in retrospect, in the waning of events. Thus the archetypal novel addresses facts which exist yet which resist direct apprehension. In this way the archetype is a species of inductive knowledge. An unobserved matter of fact not subject to causal reasoning but which, once discovered, is taken for self evident. As the prime imaginative source for literary fiction, the archetype puts a burden of conscience on the artist; it acts as if it is inviting the artist to address those diffuse areas of consciousness that seem to stand outside the world of sense-perception. The artist is obliged to create a ‘new conceptual language’ with which to transpose nonsensational realities (see ‘Merlin and Parsifal: Adversarial Twins’, p. 61). A literary medium that deals with these things proceeds, as it were, by posing new riddles.

Harris uses certain words in a specialized sense. In ‘The Music of Living Landscapes’, I would think of music as the medium of memory, the thing with which we are mused or made into by memory (Gr. mnasthai, ‘I am made to remember, mnemonic’); I would interpret Lazarus as figuration for the tree of life. By abjecting nature we disease the tree of life; the anatomy of Nemesis, the course or diagnosis of disease. Technology, as a lux moderna, a modern insight, a new epochal attitude to problem-solving, a technology that kills the tree of life will return as living branches in the newly risen tree. Each new-sprung branch lives by the indulgence of a newer and future technology. In this essay, past acts of violence cause the subsequent generation to live provisionally, fearfully, in a way that will encourage new atrocity. Thus the tecknology of resurrection is both the imaginative means at our disposal for overcoming bias and fear, as well as the means for making living contracts of Being with the past.

The thinking in the Psalms and of the prophets is ‘circular. Even the Apocalypse consists of spiral images. One of the main characteristics of Gnostic thinking is circularity.’. Dogma [doctrine or belief] is ‘circular’...round in the sense of a living reality. [Koepgen in Gnosis des Christentums] calls attention to the ‘fact of not knowing and not recognising which lies at the core of the dogma itself’ [p. 51]. This remark indicates the reason or one of the reasons for the ‘roundness’: dogmas are approximative concepts for a fact which exists yet cannot be described, and can only be approached by circumambulation. At the same time, these facts are ‘spheres’ of indeterminable extent, since they represent principles. Psychologically they correspond to archetypes. Overlapping and interpenetration are an essential part of their nature.

C.G.Jung, III. The Personification of the Opposites, para. 123, note 54, in CWXIV, Mysterium

Coniunctionis, trans. R.F.C.Hull, Routledge, 1963, pp. 102n–103n.

As the shape of the idea ‘archetype’, the ‘round’ has all parts of its surface equidistant from the centre. The rounded life is one in which all activities carry equal weight. The centre is the origin or principle (L. principalis, first, chief, original). In the archetypal fiction that principle or origin usually resists direct perception, so that the roundness or surface-experience exhibits qualities of indeterminacy. Indeterminate both in the sense of having an unlimited number of solutions (L. in+ determinabilis, not finite) and in the sense of uncertainty of size or duration. When the ‘round’ is an object it assumes the proportions of a sphere. As experience, that sphere has ‘indeterminate extent’, i.e. we do not know the exact radian or distance from origin or, alternatively, the time at which the sphere of experience will converge. When sung, as in a canon, the round is taken up sequentially by a different voice. Thus, in the archetypal fiction, the given round is subject in each new section to revisions; a new voice, a striking approach, a variant in circumstance. Roundness then is characteristic of the archetypal fiction. Circularity means that the fiction approaches its end by indirect means, by

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1 FHarris has defined the art of fiction as accepting ‘the enigma of self-proportion’ The Waiting Room, London, 1967, p. 9. For a definition of the archetype, see n. 2 below.

2 The physical shape of ideas (circularity, roundness) is not itself the archetype but rather a foundmeans that corresponds the archetype.

1
THE MUSIC OF LIVING LANDSCAPES

Unabridged version of typescript submitted to BBC Radio 4. An edited version was broadcast 12 November 1996. Sound effects, flute variations were by Keith Waithe.

Perhaps I should tell you that I studied land surveying and astronomy as a young man. That was really the launching pad for expeditions into the deep, forested rainforests of Guyana, so that I became intimately and profoundly involved with the landscapes, and riverscapes, of Guyana.

As a surveyor one is involved in mathematical disciplines, and astronomy, and one has, or I have, the sensation that the part of the cosmos in which we live, and the rainforests, are the lungs of the globe. The lungs of the globe breathe on the stars.

It seems to me that, for a long time, landscapes and riverscapes have been perceived as passive, as furniture, as areas to be manipulated; whereas, I sensed, over the years, as a surveyor, that the landscape possessed resonance. The landscape possessed a life, because, the landscape, for me, is like an open book, and the alphabet with which one worked was all around me. But it takes some time to really grasp what this alphabet is, and what the book of the living landscape is.

Let me begin my address by asking

Is there a language akin to music threaded into space and time which is prior to human discourse?

Such a question is implicitly imprinted in legends of Guyanese and South American landscapes, preternatural voices in rivers, rapids, giant waterfalls, rock, tree.

A fish leaps close to where I stand on a riverbank, in the great dark of the South American rainforest night, and look up at the stars.

Theatre of memory! I hear that leap or voice of rippling water all over again across the years as if it's happening now, this very moment, within the Thames of London beside which I have often strolled since arriving in England.

And one meditates here by the Thames—as one meditated there not far from the Amazon or the Orinoco—upon the fate of the earth and its species.

Outer space is steeped in dangers and in environments hostile to life. Yet, it is said, the human animal is a child of the stars.

That child must carry, surely, an instinct for creation. Not only an instinct for the fury of creation, the fiery birth of constellations, but an instinct for immensity and silence, the music of silence within contrasting tone and light and shadow as they combine to ignite in oneself a reverie of pulse and heart and mind.

Inner ear and inner eye are linked to eloquent silences in the leap or pulse of light in shadow, shadow light, as if the fish in remembered rivers fly through an ocean of space and witness by enchantment, it seems, to the miracle of living skyscapes, oceanscapes, riverscapes wherever these happen to be, on Earth, or at the edge of distant galaxies.

I was born in South America and I left British Guyana for the United Kingdom at the age of thirty-eight.

Guyana is a remarkable wilderness. It has known Spanish settlers, then French and Dutch rule but became a British colony in the early nineteenth century.

Its population is less than a million but encompasses peoples from every corner of the globe, Africa, India, China, Portugal.

In area it is virtually as large as the United Kingdom and one sees graphically, I think, on a map the two oceans, so to speak, that flank the narrow strip of coastland along which the greater body of the population live and sound their drums of India and Africa. One flanking ocean—with its subdued, perennial roar against sea-wall and sea-defences—is the Atlantic, the other is green and tall, unlit by the surf of electricity on rainforested wave upon wave of wind-blown savannahs running into Brazil and Venezuela.

There are Amerindian legends which tell of sleeping yet, on occasion, singing rocks that witness to the traffic of history, the traffic of expeditions in search of El Dorado that Sir Walter Raleigh would have contemplated when he voyaged up the Orinoco before he lost his head in the Tower of London. The rocks sing an unwritten opera of El Doradonne adventurers.

Amerindians such as the Macusis, the Wapishanas, the Arawaks—whom Raleigh would have encountered—are still to be found in Guyana and South America. They have suffered— since Columbus's and Raleigh's day—decimations and the continuous depletion of their numbers at the hand of Europe across the centuries.

They were close to extinction at the beginning of this century but have survived in small numbers against all the odds.

I came upon them frequently—indeed they were sometimes members of my crew—in landsurveying expeditions into the heartland of Guyana and was drawn to their still demeanour and mobile poise as huntsmen and fishermen.

Through them I learnt of the parable of the music of the fish in a rippling stream. They baited their fisherman's hook with a rainbow feather from a macaw or a parrot and with a twist of the wrist—as if they addressed an invisible orchestra—made it dart in the stream towards the leaping fish.

Feather from a wing and eager fish were united, it seemed, into an orchestra of species and a sacrament of subsistence they (these ancient peoples) had long cultivated since their ancestors emigrated twelve thousand years ago from Asia across the Bering Straits into the continent we now call America.

Emigration—in distant ages as in modern times—is the nerve of spiritual enterprise in all communities; it is driven by private necessity as well as economic and historical impulse, by hope, desire, promise and innermost vocation.

I emigrated to the United Kingdom in the late 1950s and lived with my wife Margaret in Addison Road, close to Holland Park, a stone's throw from Kensington Gardens.

It wasn't long before I resumed the orchestration of elements in fiction—which I had begun in the landscapes of South America—with the novel Palace of the Peacock. This was the first volume in a related series to be entitled The Guyana Quartet upon which I worked in the early 1960s.

I had few friends in England, none of influence, and at such times when the future is grave and uncertain and one is a stranger in a great city one is visited by archetypal and troubling dreams.

Archetypal dreams employ symbols of brokenness to depict the shedding of habit. A naked jar sings in a hollow body, sings to be restored, re-filled with the blood of the imagination. The jar sleeps yet sings.

The jar is adorned with many elusive faces. It is inscribed with the head and the body of a boatman in a South American river. The boatman contends with mysterious currents. The paddle with which he strokes the rapids is seized by a streaming hand arising from the bowels of the earth…

An orchestra reawakens in my mind instinctive with a surge of terrifying music in the voyaging boatmen in Palace of the Peacock and I turn a page in the book and write—

The boat shuddered in an anxious grip and in a living streaming hand that issued from the bowels of earth. We stood on the threshold of a precarious standstill. The outboard engine and the propeller still revolved and flashed with mental silent horror now that its roar had been drowned in other wilder unnatural voices whose violent din rose from beneath our feet in the waters.

(Palace of the Peacock, 1960, p. 21)

The silenced roar of the engine filled the boatman with dread. The engine was strangely alive in the void of his senses, void because in the heart of danger he could see its a...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• SELECTED ESSAYS OF WILSON HARRIS
• POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Map of Guyana
• Introduction
• PART I The Archetypal Fiction
• PART II Cross-cultural Community and the Womb of Space
• PART III The Root of Epic
• PART IV Unfinished Genesis
• Summing-up
• Appendix: El Dorado and the Grail Legend
• Bibliography
• Index