It is from Yeats's great phrase about "the unity from a mythology that marries us to rock and hill" that we may, justifably, begin an examination of Wilson Harris's singular exploration of his corner of the West Indian experience. To Harris, this sacramental union of man and landscape remains the lost, or never established, factor in our lives. We enjoy, we exploit, we are coarsely nourished by our respective Caribbean territories—but illegitimately. We have yet to put our signatures to that great contract of the imagination by which a people and a place enter into a domestic relationship rather than drift into the uncertainties of liaison. No other British Caribbean novelist has made quite such an explicit and conscious effort as Harris to reduce the material reckonings of everyday life to the significance of myth. It is useful to consider first the geographical matrix in which his imagination was fashioned. (p. 177)

[The Guyanese landscape is] one of the great primary landscapes of the world, and it can crush the mind like sleep. Like sleep, it inspires the dreams by which we record the progress of our waking life.

It is important to remember this element of the dream, and of the dream's sister, death, if we are to come to any understanding of these four Wilson Harris novels—[Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour, and The Secret Ladder]…. For the quartet opens with one dream of death, and closes with another dream of creation. Between these two dreams lies an evocation of being not accessible to any reviewer's summary. If we are to share the writer's experience, we must accept possession of the living by the dead; we must accept the resurrected man and the fact that "the end precedes the beginning" and that "the end and beginning were always there." Harris's world is not only one of prosaic action, but one of rite and mythical formation. "The first condition for understanding the Greek myth," said Gide, "is to believe in it." And it is not improper that Harris makes belief the condition for entry into his Guyanese world.

In Palace of the Peacock, the first of the quartet and Harris's first novel, we are immediately presented with this pattern of interwoven dream and waking. It opens with a horseman shot from his saddle as he gallops, the discovery of the corpse by the elusive figure who is to become the narrator, and the narrator's dreaming conviction after the discovery that, somehow, he the living has lost his sight and can see only with a dead man's "open and obstinate" eye. This symbol of the eye recurs frequently in the four stories of the quartet. It is, I think, the clearest hint that Harris gives us of the structure and methods we must expect to find throughout his work. The human eye, living and dead, serves something of the same purpose as the mirror on the wall in a Dutch interior painting. Both reflector and captor, it enhances the material vividness of the foreground figures, yet its troubling duplication reminds us of the other life it holds captive in an infinite and shrinking series. Nor are the diminished figures in the glass—or in the eye—any less real for being reduced. What disturbs us is their jewel brightness, their sense of independent life, their possession of a separate but complementary world. (pp. 178-79)

If I have given priority to this analysis of Harris's reflecting and imprisoning "eye," it is because his use of it does serve to introduce us to the fictive world his persons inhabit. The passages in which he assembles, in our nerves, the power and meaning of the eye are intricate and compelling; we are sensuously convinced before we cerebrally grasp. And if, as I have suggested, he sees his mandate as one of creating a mythical framework, then his use of the "eye" is legitimate. For the imperceptible shuttle system from dream to waking and death to life, the dogmatic possibility of causal relationships between these states, give the essences of much of myth. Harris does not, like the naturalistic novelist, offer us the demonstrable proofs of observation; he simply throws himself on our willing agreement. And this, for Harris, is the only way for the artist in the modern world where he is deprived of his traditional assurances. "The creative human consolation," he wrote in Tradition and the West Indian Novel …, "—if one dwells upon it meaningfully today—lies in the search for a kind of inward dialogue and space when one is deprived of a ready conversational tongue and hackneyed comfortable approach." [My italics.]

This is one of the most fruitful obsessions any novelist can carry into his study of the human heart today; it is also an extremely dangerous one. For in so doing, he offers his artistic throat to the knives of ridicule, inattention and misunderstanding. Obversely, his mendicant's role imposes a certain limitation on his own freedom of aesthetic venture. He must work, in short, within an extremely limited frame and convince us by his intensity rather than by his generous scope. C.L.R. James and other critics have made much of Wilson Harris's relation to the existentialists, but his technique seems to me to lie in the symbolist tradition. (pp. 179-80)

On the surface, the plot of Palace of the Peacock seems simple enough. It describes the struggles of a boat's crew as they forge a passage up a nameless Guyanese river, through rapids, between walls of forests and under towering battlements of cliff face, to the great falls at the head of the stream…. They hope to make contact with a fugitive and sensibly suspicious "folk," who, while accompanying their passage along the banks of the river, never appear, but send them only the shy and enigmatic missives of the forest; a wounded tapir or a parrot with a silver ring around its leg. At the end all are dead. The last is transfixed, or translated, at the moment of his death by a knowledge of a loving communion between the living and the dead that completely obliterates the hope of the treasure he had come to seize for the purchase of vulgar consolations he can now barely remember.

On this level it is a mere morality and, to borrow Harris's adjective, a rather "hackneyed" one at that. But we are early relieved of this possible banality by the realization that the crew's names match, man for man, those of another legendary crew who had all perished many years before in the rapids near the beginning of a similar venture into the interior. At this point, it becomes the reader's pleasure, as it must have become the writer's excitement, to determine the extent to which each crew possesses the other; to decide at what moment the anguish of one group is simply that of commonplace muscle and endurance pitted against the immediate pressures of a river's current, or is the accumulated reflections of the greed and love, cruelty and faithfulness which another body of men had once imposed on those among whom they had lived, on the land they had once tried to dominate. (p. 180)

Harris is not an "easy" writer…. The contending experiences he is attempting to resolve in a finished, persuasive work of art do not really yield to the methods and syntax of, say, Naipaul. But it is worth joining battle with him, even when he fails to carry off his attack. His effects are cumulative. Images, metaphors, incidents and assertions which, at the beginning of any of his stories, may at first seem examples only of a wilful and unrelated vividness will suddenly, by a process of duplication in a new setting, become clear and powerful factors in an orderly poetic statement. He is very seldom self-indulgent.

So, the nameless boat, with its twice-named crew, continues to beat up the nameless river towards the Palace of the Peacock. With a quite astonishing coolness of nerve, almost, one might say, with arrogance, Harris continues to shift his characters from phase to phase of reality and of Time. His transitions are often so abrupt, so arbitrary, that we are, momentarily, confused, until we learn to accept the use to which our sensations are being put. This is a world of hallucination, or rather, a world in which hallucinatory apprehensions of Time's circular and organic wholeness is a commonplace of existence. Quarrels between the crew occur, and they die by accident, exhaustion or murder. Sometimes the dead ones are replaced, for a second or for a day, by counterparts from the other crew who were swallowed by the river at the beginning of their venture. But even those who die in the present follow the progress of the boat along the enormous heights of cliff face above the river, for they too are forever reflected in the undying eye; they too survive on what Harris terms "the elastic frontier" which stretches to and fro to enclose whole provinces of the territory of death and the territory of life. The "folk," the indigenes, remain unapproachable. They live, unconsciously, in harmonious relationship with the organic body of a land through which Time moves like blood, carrying action, dream and death on an unending circulatory voyage of nourishment, salvage and renewal. (pp. 181-82)

The expedition which had begun as a pedestrian, rather sordid, gold rush has ended as an argosy, because of the suffering, and because of the surrender of the primal solitude of the landscape and to the implacable occupation of their dreams. They are dead men, to be sure, but by their deaths they have won admittance to the antique, beautiful and imperishable palace that, in each year of our obsessive enslavement of the earth, is moved beyond yet another horizon. The Golden Palace that they can bring back to us in our dreams is the knowledge that all the territories "overwhelmed and abandoned [have] always been ours to rule and take."

Inevitably, such a brief critical reduction of so dense, intricate and active a work as Palace of the Peacock must do the book a disservice. Harris's vision is too subtle, and his technique too sculptural, for us to do other than to enter his work and try to join the highly idiosyncratic celebration he is conducting. Once we accept the ritual stages, without necessarily committing ourselves, we begin to understand what he is trying to communicate. This is straightforward enough. It is the conviction that, in his time, in his corner of the world, a people must learn not only the gross and monotonous facts of their immediate history but must assemble, from the exchanges of their daily lives, the assurances and inspiring reverberations of myth. It is a uniquely difficult commission to execute. For they must do this in a self-conscious age of technology in which there are fewer and fewer effective symbols—a multiple furrow tractor, for instance, can never become the key to that door of perception which we can make out of a horse, a plough, and a man behind the plough. They must do it at a time when they are living at the beginning of a history. Palace of the Peacock is one of the few pieces of evidence we have that success in this task is possible.

If I have given to Palace of the Peacock a great deal of the space allowed me in this essay, it is because this first book in the quartet seems to state most of the themes which are later developed in the others. Like many other novelists who rely heavily on the use of symbol to give resonance to their work, Harris tends to find a symphonic design best suited to his purpose. The images employed in the several stories depend for their final "proof" on the manner in which they are later reworked and given new moulded structures by the author.

It is therefore a pity that limitation of space prevents a detailed study of The Far Journey of Oudin. In this story, we are returned to the crafty, suspicious and greedy peasant world of the coastal savannahs. The basic theme is one of Harris's constant preoccupations, that of dominion, of tyrannical and thus sterile authority which is hardly distinguishable from rape. (pp. 182-83)

This book, the most complex of the quartet, is also the least satisfactory. The main fault lies in failure of nerve on the author's part. Faced with the drab and mercenary domestic exchanges of a khulak community, the author panics, becomes rhetorical, pretentious and sometimes nearly bombastic. He robes his innocent and uncaring people in philosophical vestments which they wear about as comfortably as would a navvy dressed in a duke's full coronation regalia. Unlike any other stories in the quartet, this one also seems to preach a message, and the message is in the end platitudinous: "all that glitters is not gold," "you can't take it with you," and so on.

With The Whole Armour, we see Harris restored to the heights of his impressive powers. It is perhaps the most accomplished work of the series. Plot, image, character, architecture and language all fuse into a whole that is as compact, shapely and penetrative as a bullet. In it, he returns to that ideal frontier which is as much a spiritual as a geographical boundary—the line between the challenging wilderness and the cultivated sensibility—and which is the setting in which he always moves most confidently. Once more the plot is austere; an undecorated stage on which the principals are the foci of our total attention. In this story, too, Harris undertakes the portrayal of a relationship which seems to be beyond the powers or outside the interest of most West Indian novelists; the complexities of love between a man and a woman who is a person in whom the subtleties of erotic response can be kindled or who is approached, as a new-found land, with awe, delight and a careful sounding of the shoals. Sharon, the young girl in The Whole Armour, is such a one, and the relationship between her and Cristo, the fugitive accused of murder, gives a lyric immediacy and profane disturbance that is very rare indeed in West Indian fiction. (p. 184)

[Here], for the first time in British West Indian fiction, we are faced with a serenely confident charter of liberation from the immediate past. Cristo not only thinks what he says but lives it. He is freed from the squalid commercial transaction between white and black, aborigines and conquistadors, which is most of West Indian history…. His proximate responsibility for the death of his putative father Abram, his assumption of the skin of "Christ, the tiger," his return to the coastlands, his fathering of a child, his legacy to that child of a more audacious understanding and use of the land, are all part of a carefully fashioned, artistic criticism of a system that for too long nourished itself on the cycle of parturition, forced labour and the flesh's surrender, but which never acknowledged the reality of holy dying.

The Secret Ladder confirms the sense one had in reading The Whole Armour that Harris was developing a new assurance in handling the techniques of fiction. The story is perhaps the most interesting of any in the quartet. (pp. 185-86)

Simply on the level of a drama played out between the invading, often impatient forces of material progress and the dispossession of a timid, uncomprehending folk, this would be a fine story. The characters of the crew are distinct; the tension of wills (between Fenwick and his men) in the heavy atmosphere of a jungle just before the rains, the lack of communication between the tough, Faustian surveyors and the frightened, dream-burdened people of the river are both sustained with great skill. So is Fenwick's mingled guilt and exasperation over his failure to convince Poseidon of their good intentions; his recognition that the magnificent and inconsolable old man has a part of the truth that the planners must recognize if their future of material plenty is to give them nourishment.

But there is another exploration of meaning carried in the current of the social conflict for, in The Secret Ladder, Harris returns to many of the themes and symbols of the first book. The action takes place over seven days. Fenwick's boat is named Palace of the Peacock. To him, the rivers of Guyana are "the curious rungs in a ladder on which one sets one's musing foot again and again, to climb into both the past and the future of the continent of mystery." The crew, although more substantial and prosaic than the first crew, are yet seen, through Fenwick's eyes, as actors in an inward drama of his dreams. And these dreams are inspired by—or, if you prefer, are the other side of—what Harris once called "the material structural witnesses" of history. For Fenwick, as for Wilson Harris, the experiences of the day must be revised in the language of dreams, of free association, so that in the end, by the potent magic of image, all the fragments of our strange, broken heritage may begin to act one upon the other, become whole within our instinctive grasp. It is only when this has been achieved that we will enter into an active, conscious possession and use of the West Indian inheritance. (pp. 186-87)