[A study of Wilson Harris's early poems in Eternity to Season] reveals that his preoccupation throughout his career as a writer has been to reveal man's dual role as a finite being inhabiting a defined "season" of time, and as an infinite extension of certain human attributes (modified by landscape, climate and historical experience) which exist in eternity. Now Mr. Harris has published an essay, "Tradition and the West Indian Novel" [in his Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays], which unveils the theory on which all his fiction has been based.

In essence, his argument is that the traditional Western novel has based its treatment of character upon the assumption that man plays only the first of these two roles. It has largely ignored the second. This has led to the elaboration of a technique which Mr. Harris calls "the consolidation of character"; the building up of finite individual character through the enumeration of attributes….

Mr. Harris's experience of the West Indies, which have been subjected to waves of wildly differing conquest, to a succession of polyglot invaders, enslavers, colonizers, and liberators, has convinced him that character needs to be defined by other methods. Character needs to be set free in time and in space…. This method he calls the fulfilment of character, as opposed to its consolidation…. Looking again at the treatment of character in Mr. Harris's novels we can see how his people are mysteriously and incestuously linked with one another; linked not only with their many-hued ancestors but also with their collaterals and their unborn descendants. We can see why the linked characters in Palace of the Peacock … or The Whole Armour … continually reflect, inhabit and even become one another according to the dictates of their state of being. For such interfusions of character take place within the plane of time but along the plane of eternity. Caribbean man must be conceived of in both planes if the nature of his existence in a particular place and time is to be understood.

Yet the theory does not illuminate Mr. Harris's novels alone. Other modern novelists since Joyce (whose use of the Odyssey enabled him to establish the deepest possible temporal and mythic perspective) have often been concerned with freeing their characters in space and time in very much the way envisaged by Harris, though few have been as radical as he in the means they employ. Few, for instance, have exhibited a free interflow not only between character and character but between man and landscape, as Vigilance and the Arawak Woman in Palace of the Peacock become one with the rockface and the boiling stream.

West Indian literature itself, however, offers the example of George Lamming, whose Of Age and Innocence seems to be moving towards a theory of character akin to Mr. Harris's….

Mr. Harris's essay, then, has the dual importance of illuminating his own practice and casting a searching light upon the evolution of the contemporary novel in general. It is improbable that anyone will be content much longer with sequential order and finite character or event, which the film alone has done so much to question…. In another essay Wilson Harris compares the evocation of primordial character to the consciousness of a vodun dancer, who starts out with a complete body imprisoned in temporality but dances until "one leg is drawn up into the womb of space". In this state conventional memory is erased, but it is replaced by a kind of primordial memory, born of overlapping spheres of reflection, "like a one-legged bird which joins itself to its sleeping reflection in a pool". As Yeats was concerned with the moment when dancer and dance become one, so Wilson Harris sees the trance as a state experienced subjectively by the dancer, but also exteriorized as "an intense drama of images in space". This perfect equipoise of the inner and the outer life is that which the novelist should now seek to evoke.