Harris's work, because of its syncretic approach to language and to the symbolic meaning of experience, is notoriously "difficult." Concerned more with the symbolic and contradictory—rather than the literal—meaning of language, he has produced a highly innovative novel-form…. [His] approach to the novel-as-painting, where words are used to suggest—like the brush strokes of the artist—areas of color, light, and shade, and where the writer's purpose is "to break down things in order to sense a vision through things" boldly challenges the conventional narrative form of the novel. Like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, Harris, in attempting to explore the deeper resources of language and experience, is in fact extending the boundaries of what we call fiction. One frequently gets the impression of an apparent "breakdown" of language in Harris's fiction…. [His writing] creates an impression similar to that of certain "surrealistic" paintings, and, to some extent, Harris intends to shock the reader. But the "controlled chaos" of the writing is really part of a desire (like that of the early French surrealist painters Andre Breton, Magritte, Chagall, and others) to dislocate the fixed, conventional habit of perception: it is a desire related to what Mircea Eliade calls "the destruction of the language of art" which, as he sees it, is a systematic and radical transformation. (pp. 147-48)

[Harris's] novels, from Palace of the Peacock onward, illustrate the development of a continually expanding sensibility which questions, fragments, and reassembles "reality" in its search for a genuinely new, all-embracing Art…. (p. 148)