OUVERTURE
Hena Maes-Jelinek
'One awakens at times to one's frailty in the cradle of the mind in particles that settle on one's brow or hand or skin, sailing particles from distant mountains and valleys that seek their mysterious parentage in all substance or in the alchemy of sound in a rainbow. Such . . . is the implicit orchestra of living landscapes when consciousness sings through variegated fabrics and alternations of mood, consonance as well as dissonance, unfathomable age and youth, unfathomable kinships'. (1)
This short passage is quoted from a partly autobiographical essay which is also a superb poetic hymn to the livingness of nature. In it coalesce several fundamental elements of Harris's writing discussed from various perspectives in this issue: the abstract and the sensuous or, more exactly, the abstract through the sensuous; consciousness, individual, communal and cosmic, as it "sings" through both intangible and concrete environmental forms; Harris's perception of living nature as essentially dynamic (2), expressing itself in a language of its own like the "whispering trees" that recur through the author's writing from his early poems on, the "singing rocks" in the essay quoted here or even in the human language partly acquired from "the sound of the rain falling, from the sigh of the leaves, from the music of the earth as we pressed on it"(3). The passage also suggests the musical design, at once silent and audible, that Harris hears at the heart of the universe (what Mallarmé called 'mobile musical architectures'), and to which he became attuned when voyaging in the Guyanese interior. It reminds us of the origins of his vision and of his exploration of an original language in which to express it, as he has explained in several essays and interviews. Admittedly, in its fusion and transmutation of apparently incompatible elements or sensory images ("the alchemy of sound in a rainbow"(4) ), the extract quoted is not at first easy to grasp. Its concise density, paradoxical juxtapositions and associations, typical of much of Harris's writing, may have been influenced by his scientific training and be partly ascribed to his conviction that, while the language of fiction and the language of science are both partial, they should complement each other:
"Even as the language of science differs from documentary frames or linearities, so we must seek in the language of profoundest fiction startling differences from documentary codes" (5).
This preamble is just one door through which one can enter Wilson Harris's writing, impelled by his own assertion that his vision and the art he developed were inspired by the 'living landscape' of the Guyanese interior (6). But there are many doors, disclosed in this issue, opening onto his houses of fiction. I don't intend to comment much on them, leaving the reader to make his own discoveries, though I wish to point out that "reading Wilson Harris", and therefore to some extent criticism on his work, is an important topic discussed by several contributors. The art of reading, including Harris's, is the special topic of Brigitta Olubas' essay which describes a kind of "performative" reading, the adjective Mary Lou Emery applies to Harris's language, while Louis Simon links the art of reading with the growth and altering of the subjective consciousness. As I hope will be clear, the substance of this introduction is the fruit of a reflection initiated by my reading of the essays I was editing. If I may borrow a Harrisian statement, "I had a dialogue with them", while some overlapping between the essays may suggest an emerging dialogue between them, which, of course, doesn't mean that they present similar views of a given subject or novel. On the contrary, part of their stimulating interest lies in diverging, original interpretations of novels or aspects of Harris's fiction previously the object of criticism. It is also rewarding that some essays deal with the crucial period of his early writing, too often neglected, when he was struggling to find his own voice and style and belonged to a group of Guyanese artists who, in Louis James's words, "were exploring ways by which to dismantle the colonial structures implicit in the western concept of 'realism'." His comparison between Harris and Denis Williams, and Gemma Robinson's between Harris and Martin Carter, illustrate the intellectual and creative ferment of those years in Guyana and show that Harris's preoccupations throughout his fiction were already present in his formative period. Similarly, Robert Bennett's essay on the intertextuality between Harris's Guyana Quartet and T.S.Eliot reminds us, as Harris's early poetry also shows, that Eliot was an ambivalent model whom he admired but distanced himself from and, as Bennett argues, "re-wrote" in his own way, as we also see in Black Marsden.
Puzzled by a fiction which in no way met their expectations of what a novel, especially the West Indian novel, should be, some early critics impatiently dismissed what they saw as extravagant incoherence (7). Reviewing The Uncompromising Imagination, Michael Dash deplored that there were only four West Indian contributors to the volume and that "[f]or many of the region's critics, Harris has made a career out of being esoteric" (8). In an otherwise favourable review of Carnival, highly appreciative of Harris's poetic language, Stewart Brown nevertheless wrote that "[s]een in the context of a South American magical-realist tradition Harris's work is much easier to comprehend, to read. He no longer seems a freak, an incoherent visionary, but emerges, rather, as a truly revolutionary writer, an outrider of the Adamic spirit" (9).
Even Derek Walcott who, in the sixties, was very impressed by the "power" and "vigour" of Harris's imagination, curiously failed to understand what one might call the intuitive, visionary rationale informing his early novels. In his reviews of Harris's fiction and of his first important essay, he clearly resists the novelist's conception of his art and wrote of The Eye of the Scarecrow that it was an "unreadable prose-poem. . . . It is one thing to respect the power and energy of Harris's imagination ; it is something else to groan under the burden of incomprehension." Reviewing C.L.R. James's Wilson Harris : A Philosophical Approach, Walcott stated that "[Harris] is probably the most audacious explorer of our psychic condition so far, but the truth is that he is becoming unreadable. There is a decadence of syntax that results from a poet's fascination with his own brilliance, and this seems to be the cul-de-sac that Harris has reached," (10) a statement eloquently belied by his later work and the illuminating comments collected here.
Writers who, like Harris, are in advance of their time naturally run the risk of not being understood, and it may be unfair to quote Walcott from journalistic comments which he might now wish to retract. My purpose in doing so is to emphasize how much Harrisian criticism has progressed since the sixties. At least three contributions in this issue (more if one takes into account the essays of young critics) clearly show that Harris's fiction can no longer be considered, as it sometimes was in the past, as the limited preserve of a handful of academics. I chose Karen Cornelis' essay from a batch of good papers written by undergraduates who were reading The Carnival Trilogy and Jonestown in class with my colleague, Professor Duytschaever, at the University of Antwerp. Francine Juhasz Houtman is a professional analyst who explains how her discovery of Harris's fiction opened her eyes to new ways of helping her patients in everyday life. Joris Duytschaever explains the "Wilson Harris Opera Project", i.e. the adaptation of Jonestown into an opera by the Flemish playwright, actor and director Tone Brulin, first performed in Antwerp on 10 June 1999 before a responsive audience. Thus Harris's writing inspires other forms of art : the poems offered here as a tribute to him by Fred D'Aguiar and Nathaniel Mackey and the multi-media "opera", an orchestration of text, music, dance and visual effects.
With the passing of time, Harris's writing is clearly reaching a wider, more diversified readership and is at last being recognized as relevant to different forms of the humanities and of art. Nevertheless, as Stuart Murray argues, the difficulties of teaching Harris and of making his work accessible to young audiences must not be underrated in the context of more conventional approaches to literature. Moreover, as he points out, Harris's writing is frequently absent from key theory and subject readers used in teaching. Regrettably also, when an extract from his writing is included, it is almost inevitably from Palace of the Peacock and Tradition, the Writer and Society, and this has a limiting effect (11).
However essential these texts are as the revolutionary, seminal conception of Harris's opus still eliciting new interpretations, their repetitive reprint has sometimes suggested that he is a one-novel writer, whereas the development and myriad facets of his fiction from Palace to Jonestown, its recurring yet always modified imageries are fundamental aspects of the multiple dimensions of his art, of its language and modes of expression, of its metaphysical, religious, psychological, social and political meanings. Each novel represents a major phase or link in Harris's unfinished creation, a different possibility of reality that Harris explores through ever deepening variations, so that, taken as a whole, the successive novels illustrate his conception of life as a process of infinite possibilities (12). Unfortunately, except in the essays by Dominique Dubois and Francine Juhasz, both in this issue and generally, there have been few comments in recent years on the novels of what might be called Harris's middle period, one major reason being that, though significant landmarks in his work's evolution, these novels are all out of print and can only be borrowed from well-stocked libraries (13).
Though it was not his intended meaning, Walcott's early view of Harris's writing as powerful yet hardly accessible raises the question of the possibly misunderstood genius whose dazzling, bold language offers some vague uplifting pleasure while its inherent meaning remains mysterious. It should first be pointed out that the mystery in Harris's writing is not in his own supposedly inaccessible language but is part of the existential process and of the complex reality he presents, its inexpressible archetypal and spiritual features. The inexpressible in its appropriate form, briefly analysed by Dominique Dubois, is discussed in Mary Lou Emery's essay on Harris's performative language, in particular his use of apophasis, "a dynamic for expressing inexpressibility", while she also probes "the dynamic of sensory metamorphosis [or sensory transference] in his writing", an analysis corroborated by the writer's own comments on Aubrey Williams included in this issue (14). She suggests that "Harris . . . makes a mystical state of being coextensive with the practice of creative expression". To this can be added, I think, the secular dimension of creativity in his fiction. For the secular and the religious are inseparable, as Paget Henry's philosophical essay implicitly makes clear by bringing to light the relationship between self-formation, the world of Spirit and contemporary social life, and by emphasizing the relevance of the Spirit to every-day politics, as expressed in Carnival. The political dimension associated with the cultural is also a major strand in Robert Bennett's article.
The religious (especially Gnosticism expounded by Michael Mitchell and Mary Lou Emery), the secular, the animal or creature in nature (15), the vestiges of human experience, their innumerable interrelated facets in the many-layered texture of both life and fiction are aspects of what Harris calls "the genius of creation"(16). On the question of genius, his only affinity with the Romantics lies in his adherence to Keats's notion of "negative capability >>which overlaps with his conception of the universal unconscious and is concretized in the nameless narrator of Palace of the Peacock as well as "Idiot Nameless" in The Eye of the Scarecrow and Companions of the Day and Night (17) . It could be argued that Harris's frequent references to the unfathomable and the unattainable are Romantic in nature. But unlike some Romantics, Harris does not idealize the unattainable, does not turn it into an absolute but sees it as the source of asymmetric, variable forces. Similarly, genius is neither individual nor absolute. This emerges from Michael Mitchell's exploration of the many dangers and temptations represented by modern versions of Faust in The Infinite Rehearsal as the novelist re-visions the role of Marlowe's and Goethe's hero and presents him as an ambivalent figure. For Harris genius is "community-in-creator" (18), an expression which combines the archetypal multitudinous sources of creativity, the endlessly renewed faces or shapes of all living creatures and nature erupting in the creator/artist. It is also illustrated by shifts in narrative voices and by the mutuality between writer and his living subject :
"Hope had commenced his book when he met queen Butterfly, the priest had inserted his hand in Hope's when he met the goddess June. And this was a signal of the phenomenon of creativity, linkages between characters and authors, linkages between a painted world that paints the painter even as the painter paints, a sculpted world that sculpts the sculptor as the sculptor sculpts, a written world that writes the writer as the writer writes . . . ." (19)
