Its constantly evolving character notwithstanding, a remarkable unity of thought informs [Wilson Harris's] considerable opus. Two major elements seem to have shaped Harris's approach to art and his philosophy of existence: the impressive contrasts of the Guyanese landscapes, with which his survey expeditions made him familiar, and the successive waves of conquest which gave Guyana its heterogeneous population polarised for centuries into oppressors and their victims. The two, landscape and history, merge in his work into single metaphors symbolising man's inner space saturated with the effects of historical—that is, temporal—experiences. The jungle, for example, is for Harris both outer and inner unreclaimed territory, the actual 'landscape of history' for those who only survived by disappearing into it and a metaphor for that inner psychological recess to which his characters relegate both their forgotten ancestors and the living whom they dominate. It contrasts with the savannahs and is itself full of contrasts. Though teeming with life, much of it is invisible to the ordinary 'material' eye, just as those who, willingly or not, lead an underground existence remain unseen save to the 'spiritual' (imaginative) eye. The jungle's extra-human dimensions suggest timelessness and offer a glimpse of eternity, while the constant renewal of the vegetation confirms its existence within a cyclical time pattern. In Harris's words the jungle 'travels eternity to season'; and the Amerindians, who move to and fro between that secret primeval world and the modern areas where they can find work, subsist, as he writes in Tumatumari …, 'on a dislocated scale of time'. They are an essential link between the modern Guyanese and the lost world of their undigested past, and must be retrieved from their buried existence in both real and symbolical terra incognita if Guyana (and the individual soul) is to absorb all its components into a harmonious community.

Already in his poetry Harris had dealt jointly with the contrasts and polarisations in nature and history, and presented spiritual freedom as a capacity to move between opposites…. The very form of his verse reflects the reconciliation of opposites by freely mixing concrete with symbolical or outer with inner planes of existence…. [His] substantial volume of poetry, Eternity to Season …—significantly subtitled 'Poems of separation and reunion'—is an epic in which the characters, called after Greek mythological heroes, turn out to be humble Guyanese labourers. Their mythological stature indicates perhaps where the Guyanese should look for their archetypes. Harris gives his own idiosyncratic interpretation of Homeric adventures just as he was later to fill Christian and Amerindian myths with new content. His free borrowing from various cultures is one of many ways in which he attempts to break down barriers between men and between civilisations. He does not deny the specific character and experience of each people, and his poems are meant to awaken the sensibility and imagination of the Guyanese to the real nature of their environment. But he rejects all static ways of being. Man cannot help being imprisoned within time and history; he can, however, achieve partial liberation and distance from even necessary orders by tending towards an 'other', provided this 'other' is not allowed to become another absolute. This dualistic and dynamic view of existence accounts for Harris's many-layered and paradoxical language, particularly his juxtaposition of contradictory terms which challenge our modes of perception and thought (as in 'blossoming coals of immortal imperfection'). Many of the basic metaphors Harris was to use in his fiction are already found with a potentially double meaning in his poetry. But while the vision is as boldly original in the one as in the other, it has achieved a greater impact by being embodied in the more concrete setting and highly individualised characters of his fiction. Harris is primarily a novelist even though his fictional language has the concentrated richness of poetry and, as has often been pointed out, demands the same minute reading and explication. True, the poet has always had greater licence than the novelist to deal with the transcendental, but Harris's way of dealing with it has introduced a new dimension into the novel.

Harris's fiction began to appear at a crucial time for both the nascent West Indian fiction and the novel in English since, in the fifties and early sixties, the trends in English and American fiction indicated that many inheritors of established traditions had ceased to believe in them. The dissolution of values and forms due to the combined action of history and science had left artists in a void similar in kind to that experienced with more tragic intensity by West Indians throughout their history. With a few notable exceptions, English and American novelists reacted to this loss of certainty by either seeking refuge and renewing their faith in realism, or turning experimental fiction into an art of the absurd, technically brilliant and innovatory but often undermining the very purpose of art. Wilson Harris is among the few West Indian writers who pointed out the irrelevance of both trends to a 'native' art of fiction. While insisting that the disorientation of the 'diminished man' in formerly strong societies had been experienced for centuries by the conquered populations in the Caribbean and the Americas, he warned particularly against the influence on West Indian writers of the post-war European art of despair. His own 'art of compassion' does not involve, as has sometimes been suggested, a withdrawal from history in order to transcend it. It is, on the contrary, intensely concerned with the impact of history on the ordinary 'obscure human person' and expresses a passionate denial of what has been termed the 'historylessness' of the Caribbean: it shows that people exist by virtue of their silent suffering as much as by celebrated deeds or a materially recognisable civilisation, of which incidentally obscure men are the unacknowledged executors. My main purpose is to show how Harris's view of Caribbean history has shaped his art of the novel.

The major historical facts endured by the Caribbean peoples were dismemberment, exile, eclipse and, for many, slavery, with the result that for several centuries they lived destitute and inarticulate in a political, social and cultural void. In much of Harris's fiction these catastrophic experiences are recreated both as facts and as inner states to be digested by the individual consciousness. Most of his novels present an outer-world and an inner confrontation between a conqueror or oppressor and his victim, as well as the traumas that result from the violation of a people or of an individual soul. They all explore possibilities of rebirth and of genuine community between polarised people(s) and between antithetical ways of being. This basic and recurrent theme determines Harris's conception of character, the structure of his novels and their narrative texture as well as his style. Harris equates dominant and fixed forms in art with dominant and static social structures, local, national or international. Hence his attempt to find a fluid mode of expression to render the duality of life, the necessary movement between its opposite poles, and above all the mobility of consciousness.

Harris's fictional work to date can be divided into three major phases. In the first of these the Guiana Quartet creates a composite picture of the many facets of Guyanese life: the paradoxes and unpredictable manifestations of a nature that is not easily mastered, the historical vestiges, visible and invisible, that give each area a specific 'spirit of the place', and the activities of a multiracial population often self-divided and alienated from its 'lost' or unintegrated groups such as the Amerindians or the descendants of runaway slaves. There is a sense in which the first novel, Palace of the Peacock, contains in embryo all further developments. It recreates the main fact of Caribbean history, the endlessly renewed exploitation of land and people, from time immemorial through the Renaissance to the present day, by waves of invaders intent on winning the country's riches for themselves. 'Rule the land … and you rule the world,' says the skipper Donne, who pursues an invisible Amerindian tribe on a nameless river through the jungle, and shows the mixture of idealism and brutality that has characterised many an ambitious enterprise in modern times. (pp. 179-83)

The opening of the novel on the frontier between life and death establishes at the outset Harris's dual view of existence and his conception of death as eclipse rather than annihilation. The dead in his fiction are an essential part of a community of being and must be retrieved from oblivion by imagination. In Palace the narrator's reconstruction of the past is both an 'act of memory' and a 'dream', Harris's word to describe an intuitive, imaginative apprehension of reality, one that frees man from the limitations of exclusively rational and/or sensory perceptions and makes possible the reconciliation of apparently incompatible opposites. The double perspective due to the juxtaposition of material perception and spiritual vision in Donne and the Narrator is paralleled by a similar duality in the phenomenal world itself, which offers an insight into its immaterial counterpart. There is the 'skeleton footfall' on the river bank disclosing an invisible presence, or the tree that suddenly sheds all its leaves, revealing the simple inner structure that underlies its external profusion.

Donne and the crew must recognise their exploitation of both land and people (united by a similar 'namelessness'). As they travel upriver and re-enact their possessive or murderous deeds, the dangers they meet gradually decimate their ranks and turn them into pursued men longing for redemption through the muse they have all abused in one way or another…. The main effect of the trials they have gone through has been to shake them out of their fixed sense of identity, and although they are not aware of it until they come together in the manifold symbol of the peacock's tail at the very end, their dying to themselves (their 'Second Death') is a momentary surrender to 'otherness', the lifeblood of community. The final conversion, however, occurs in Donne and offers the first example in Harris's fiction of the necessary interdependence between the imaginative artist (for Donne is also that) and the ordinary folk.

A further illustration of duality is to be found in the shift from the concrete to the purely symbolical as the narrative draws to an end, suggesting that spiritual rebirth is a feat of the imagination, which is itself regenerated…. Donne's fall into the void is a symbolical re-enactment of the fate of the victims of conquest. Whether in Palace, Tumatumari (in which the severing of Roi's head in a collision with a rock in the waterfall symbolises the dismemberment of the Amerindians and the loss of their leadership) or in Companions of the Day and Night …, the fall down a natural escarpment in Guyana or from a Mexican pyramid stands for the collapse of a people and recreates the terrifying sense of void they experienced.

The fall in Palace of the Peacock is followed by a rebirth from what Harris sees as both the 'grave' and the 'womb' of history. It is Donne's spiritual self that is resurrected to apprehend the evanescent moment in which the members of his heterogeneous crew or community come together as stars and eyes in the peacock's tail, fragments of the splintered sun, which in the first part of the novel was a symbol of Donne's implacable tyranny. The metamorphosis of images corresponds to a similar transformation and displacement of formerly fixed attitudes within the characters. That is why the vision of the crew's reunion at the end is so brief. It actualises the Narrator's moments of intuitive perception of wholeness which have alternated with the crew's actions and physical progress throughout the narrative. Owing to this alternation the structure of the novel is informed by the ebb and flow movement that Harris sees in all forms of outer life and deems essential within man's consciousness.

The other novels of the Quartet also illustrate the frightening but necessary disorientation this regained fluidity of being entails in men confronted by violence and murder, the residues of slavery and the desire of former victims to become exploiters in their turn, 'as though the oppressed convention nurses identical expectations of achieving power', and the continuing exploitation of minority or eclipsed groups. The Far Journey of Oudin focuses on the master-servant relationship on the East Indian rice plantations between the savannahs and the coast. The Whole Armour takes place on the Pomeroon river and the precarious strip of land between bush and sea. Cristo, a young man wrongly accused of murder, agrees to sacrifice himself to redeem the community. In The Secret Ladder the land surveyor Fenwick and his crew stationed in the jungle gauge the river Canje prior to the building of a dam that would flood the territory from which the descendants of slaves refuse to move. None of these novels has the linear simplicity of Palace of the Peacock; the more commonplace experiences of the earthbound characters and the more complex plots give them a density and an immediacy further enhanced by a more extensive use of dialect. But the issues raised do not find a worldly resolution. The emphasis is on spiritual freedom, responsibility and a genuine authority which, like the sense of unity in Palace, are envisaged through the recognition of the alien and weak element in the community as its true roots and therefore springhead of change. The crux of each novel lies in the possibility of unlocking a fixed order of things and eroding the certainties and imperatives that imprison the protagonists within a one-sided and rigid sense of self. Hence the crumbling rather than 'consolidation' of personality, the disturbing resemblances between dead and living characters, or sometimes even the reappearance of the dead among the living, and the frequency of 'doubles' or twins to 'break through from patterns of implacable identities'. In keeping with Harris's concentration on process rather than achievement, the end of the Quartet is inconclusive. A central motif running through its four movements is the need for the Guyanese (as for Donne) 'to understand and transform [their] beginnings'. That is why each novel raises the question of who the characters' rue parents are. What Harris calls 'the mystery of origins' can only be penetrated, though never completely, by 'dismantling a prison of appearance'. This course of action, initiated by Fenwick in The Secret Ladder, is the major theme and shaping factor of his next cycle of novels.

Harris's fifth novel, Heartland …, is an essential link between the Guiana Quartet and his next works…. At the end of the novel [the protagonist] Stevenson … disappears into the heartland, leaving in his half-burnt resthouse fragments of letters and poems. The uncertainty of his fate in the intermediate life-and-death world of the jungle suggests that, like characters in the following novels, he has lost himself in the third nameless dimension Harris has now started to explore. This is the void once inherent in the Caribbean psyche, seen as a possible vessel of rebirth for all men and as a state to be experienced by the artist who shuns the tyranny of one dominant world-view and allows contradictory voices to speak through him. The novel tends towards the interiorisation of action that is wholly characteristic of Harris's second phase. At the same time the pattern of pursuit and flight specific to the Quartet gives way momentarily, through Stevenson's relationship with the Amerindian woman, Petra, to reciprocity between the exploring consciousness and the eclipsed 'other'…. 'Crumbling', 'retiring' and 'advancing' outline the course henceforth taken by Harris's characters, first an erosion of biased assumptions followed by a double movement of advance and retreat (for the self as for the other) which precludes total identification with another and therefore total loss or gain for one or the other. The 'vicarious hollow and original substance' towards which Stevenson moves, but is not known to have reached, sums up the simultaneous condition of nothingness and starting point of creation that Harris sees as the essence of Caribbean experience and art.

Without unduly schematising, one can discern in Harris's next four novels some common features which throw light on his purpose as a novelist. They all recreate the past of an individual Guyanese family, whose trials and present circumstances reflect the 'burden of history' that still weighs on the society they live in. The condition explored in each novel is one of void or loss. (pp. 184-88)

There is a double preoccupation in these novels, with the state of loss incurred in the past and the kind of fiction that the artist, his narrator or protagonist attempts to conceive. The two are closely linked together and it will be seen that these works are as much about the art of fiction as about the revival or 'art' of community. The Narrator in The Eye who re-lives his past again and again, Susan and her lover re-living their affair through the author's editorship, Prudence re-creating twentieth-century Guyanese history from her own memories and her father's papers, and Victor writing a novel about his father's trial, all are creators or characters in search of a 'primordial species of fiction'. The phrase implies that the stuff of fiction is to be found in what is both fundamental and primeval (in themselves and in the outer world) which the protagonists have long neglected, ignored or misrepresented to themselves. The primordial is shown to be a dynamic relationship between all forms of life but first and foremost between human beings…. As each explorer of the past discovers, however, the nothingness, deadness, stagnation or even inflexibility of those whom the Narrator in The Eye seeks beyond 'a dead masked frontier' is only an illusion. Their essential livingness and even capacity to reverse given situations and become tyrannical in turn is one of the protagonists' main discoveries. The basic rapport the protagonist achieves with the object of his exploration is one in which each moves towards the other without ever finally succumbing or identifying with that other. This is the bare outline of a process that must be traced through the complex structure and the rich metaphorical texture of the narrative; these vary greatly from one novel to another as Harris extends the limits of the reality he explores and approaches his material from different angles.

Nature and society (even when the latter is refined and abstracted, as in The Waiting Room) are the starting point of the characters' exploration, for in Harris's fiction it is always a keen sensitivity to the material world which leads to the perception of an immaterial perspective (or of those that are judged immaterial: 'the nameless sleeping living and the nameless forgotten dead'). The emphasis is no longer as in the early novels on the breakdown of the protagonists' personality: this is now their condition when the novels open. Their breakdown, however, turns out to be an asset: in their initial state of weakness or emptiness they no longer try to imprison within a given or final view the experience they re-live or the people they knew. Each becomes a medium ('vicarious hollow') in which the past re-enacts itself. In both The Eye and The Waiting Room the narrator's declared purpose is to allow a free and living 'construction of events' to emerge from the evocation of the past. What happens is that the 'broken' memory or the unsettled state of the characters yields a fragmented version of events; these gradually reveal possibilities of interpretation different from their original one. In other words, the past, which is now the main substance of the novel, is subject to the same process of crumbling and reshaping as the character who re-lives it. Time and space (inner and outer) are not seen as rigid and divisive frames of existence; these barriers come apart too, disclosing, for example, the disregarded or unsuspected feelings of individuals and peoples whose behaviour had been represented in one light only. There is thus a dislocation of surface reality in all its forms—and therefore a fragmentation of the narrative structure—which makes the protagonists aware of 'the stranger animation one sees within the cycle of time'—in nature, that is; in the seemingly frozen past; in the retrenched and silent existence of the uninitiate and in the protagonists' own unconscious. This fragmentation alone opens the way into what is apparently dead within and beyond the perceptible world but is in fact alien, mysterious, 'opposite' life, sometimes fierce destructive force, sometimes frail, indistinct spirit. The protagonist himself is healed, his own memory and imagination regenerated, to the extent that he can feel that life by incurring its 'burden of authenticity, obscurity or difficulty'. It is what Harris means by 'revising contrasting spaces' in order to allow a 'new dimension of feeling' to emerge. It is brilliantly illustrated in Tumatumari in the symbolic vision of harmony between Prudence and her husband's despised Amerindian mistress, Rakka, revolving together and changing places in a whirlpool of death and rebirth.

The characters' transformation ('gestation of the soul') is rendered symbolically through serial metamorphoses of metaphors, which is wholly consistent with Harris's belief that the individual consciousness is saturated with 'given' images of the past, and with the fact that metaphors alone can convey the unity underlying the apparently disparate shapes of life. A good example of this is the scarecrow in the first novel of this cycle, a metaphor for the diminished state of man, for the disruptions that can be observed in nature, for disintegrating tenements in Georgetown and for the dying British Empire. This accumulation of various scarecrow images (like the many versions of the severed head perceived by Prudence in Tumatumari) renders the underlying unity or 'unfathomable wholeness' that belies the void or tabula rasa. Wholeness is also expressed in single metaphors as, for example, in the symbolic union of Prudence and Rakka mentioned above or (in The Waiting Room) in an image inspired by the myth of Ulysses; his dependence on an insensitive mast and deaf crew is used to convey the union between the lovers, each being for the other the deaf mast or crew which allows his or her companion to hear the otherworldly muse. Some single key metaphors, like the sun and the whirlpool, develop fresh contrasting meanings from one novel to another. Single words also frequently express one thing and its opposite. So the word 'silence' in the same novel is both Susan's injunction to her lover, which denies him, and the expression of her longing for the silence and potential fulfilment allied to the nameless dimension.

Although I have already suggested as much, it is necessary to insist that while wholeness is tentatively reconstructed or approached in the narrative through an accumulation of images, and perceived by the protagonist in visionary moments, it is never actually attained. The narratives trace the characters' oscillations between the finite world and their vision of the 'infinite' as they grope towards a metaphysical reality which both fascinates and terrifies them. They make some progress towards it as they move towards the nameless in probing into human history, into the mystery of eclipsed lives and of injustice. When they have shed their own identity, have become in imagination and temporarily 'Idiot Nameless' (the trickster without identity of Caribbean history), the metamorphosis of their vision, and therefore of themselves, takes place. Self-negation achieved, their consciousness becomes a vehicle for the transmutation of static images and is itself transformed metaphorically: the scarecrow, an image of unconsciousness when the novel opens, is released, like the Narrator, from the blindness of self-sufficiency and becomes the medium of an interplay of opposites, the foundation of true vision; the waiting room, at first a place where Susan broods over the past and suffers, becomes a 'womb' of rebirth (reconciliation and vision); the severed head in Tumatumari turns into a smiling and flowering Gorgon's head; in Ascent to Omai the stone in the pool, which sends out concentric rings or horizons of memory delimiting frustrating periods of Victor's life, initiates a dance (a series of harmonious movements) between these formerly blocked slices of life.

Namelessness, moreover, is not wholeness (the coincidence of opposites) but only the contrary and negative pole of a clearly defined identity. In Black Marsden …, which initiates the third cycle of his fiction, Harris warns against the danger of erecting former victims into the powerful instrument of a new tyranny in the name of a misconceived revolution. During his trip to Namless [sic]—at once his country of origin and an imaginary wasteland, modern man's ruined consciousness—Goodrich, the main character, realises that formerly exploited workers have been trapped into a spiral of self-destructive strikes by their employers and by obscure forces. The tabula rasa state of Victor's father in Ascent to Omai has developed into the tabula rasa theatre directed by Black Marsden, who stimulates Goodrich's generosity and spiritual liberation but threatens to engulf and 'deplete' him like all Marsden's other agents when they yield to him. Through Goodrich's association with Marsden it becomes clear that the material generosity of individuals (or nations) will not redeem them from their sense of guilt towards the poor. Goodrich possesses 'the eye of the scarecrow' which eventually helps him resist the hypnotic spell Marsden had cast over him. At the end of the novel he stands 'utterly alone', free from imposed thought yet still moved by 'the strange inner fire' that had first sent him on an expedition into 'infinity'.

This state of aloneness and the passion for infinity that Goodrich cannot wholly assuage if he wants to stay alive are further explored in Companions of the Day and Night, a sequel to Black Marsden, in which he becomes more deeply involved in the smouldering existence of the dead by editing Idiot Nameless's paintings and sculptures, the 'equation' of his exploration of Mexico. Through Nameless's 'descent' into Mexican historical vestiges, Harris brings together the theme of the enforced eclipse of civilisations and his belief in a possible 'treaty of sensibility between alien cultures'. Essentially, the novel is about the fall of man and his terror of extinction; it gives the experience of the void a universal and even a cosmic scale. Goodrich compares the pre-Columbians' dread that their world might come to an end unless they offered the sun human sacrifices with modern man's fear that his world might fall into a 'black hole of gravity'. The pre-Columbians fell under Cortez and the conquering, not humble and life-giving, Christ that followed in his wake; the Christian Church, however, was itself driven underground by a revolution early in the twentieth century that led to further repression. Nameless too suffers from a 'falling sickness' (a psychological equivalent to the possibility of cosmic fall) which nevertheless enables him to confront and unravel the self-destructive models of pre-Columbian and Christian institutions, to retrieve also the original 'spark' or element of conscience, inherent in each civilisation, which was buried with these institutions when each in turn was sacrificed. Nameless lives at once through the days of the Mexican calendar and the pre-Easter period as the predicaments of the interchangeable conquerors and victims merge in his consciousness. It is indeed the contradictory aspects of his own condition as both victor and victim that Nameless explores and reconciles in himself. At the same time his transformation into a spark after his fall from the pyramid of the sun together with the impression he gives at the end that he is a frail Christ who is once more denied physical life suggest the possible emergence of a new centre of illumination from within the very deadlock of history.

A fundamental aspect of Companions is the way in which old forms (such as institutions or myths) prove susceptible of new content through the mediation of the individual consciousness. Together with Nameless's 'painting' this leads to yet another development in Harris's presentation of characters. The aspect of namelessness explored in Black Marsden is still there, symbolised by the coat of uniformity worn by post-revolutionary workers and by the destitute madonna in the next novel, Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness…. But more importance is given to Nameless's own freedom from codified ways of thinking and the capacity it gives him to play many roles in life and suffer the predicament of different people. Already in Ascent to Omai the judge, not knowing what became of Victor, shuffles blank cards while recreating the trial, thus envisaging for him alternative existences, for this blankness is like 'a consciousness without content which nevertheless permitted all alien contents to exist' While in The Eye Harris presented language as an equation of the arousal of vision from that blankness, in his latest novels he has added a term to the equation: painting as an art of grasping the 'inimitable'. The main character is now a painter whose works are so many partial versions of, yet also 'doorways' into, an inner reality or light that can be neither wholly unearthed nor trapped. The narrative itself is like a large canvas which corresponds to the painter's field of vision. The existences on this canvas reveal unpredictable resources that modify the relation between the two faces of tradition, the conqueror's and the victim's or, in a different form, the 'dying' tradition of perceptible achievements and its immortal counterpart growing out of unacknowledged sacrifice. The need for an imaginative, necessarily precarious balance between the two underlies the painter's ceaseless effort to create a 'middle ground' between the contrasting figures he 'paints' into existence, people whom he sees as resurrected selves moving in and out of his consciousness.

Since Black Marsden these 'painted' resurrected lives (resurrection leading to community is the major theme of the third cycle of novels) are evoked with increased sensuousness. Because the main concern in Harris's novels lies in the impact of the outside world (the apparently trivial as much as the more dramatic incidents of everyday life) on the individual's inner self, the recreated 'drama of consciousness' involves flesh-and-blood people. In the novels of Harris's second phase the possibility of reconciliation between the protagonist and those he revives is largely expressed metaphorically. Although the metaphors are borrowed from living nature, the reconstructed experience has a more abstract or structural character than in the earlier or later fiction. In the third phase, however, the revived figures are always solidly there; in the Da Silva novels they are significantly conceived, brought to life, through the tender physical relations between the creative artist and his earthly muse or madonna. (pp. 188-95)