When Wilson Harris' Palace of the Peacock was published in 1960, a new kind of novel was added to the repertoire of West Indian fiction—the poetical novel. This does not mean that poetry has been lacking in the West Indian novel. There are passages of lyrical beauty in so many of the novels that it would be tedious to list them. George Lamming is often referred to as primarily a poet who has turned to prose. Indeed, there is much evidence of this in his novels, but although poetic passages abound in Lamming not one of his novels leaves the reader with overall impression that he has just read a poem. In fact, Lamming's occasional long-windedness is the opposite of what one expects of poetic compactness and compression.

Edgar Mittelholzer, in his two novels, Latticed Echoes (1960) and Thunder Returning (1961), did make an attempt to create poetical novels, but the motifs which are intended to give a poetical effect are so arbitrary and become so involved when put together that the general effect of the works is one of confusion rather than of clarity which one expects of poetry.

Vic Reid's The Leopard (1958) came closest to being a poetical novel before the appearance of Palace of the Peacock. It had compactness and clarity. Besides, the use of imagery and symbolism, and rhythm of the prose was lyrical in its effect. This novel was frequently referred to by the reviewers as a tour de force. However, in his effort to maintain a style of prose-poetry and to create original images, Reid sometimes forgets his subject matter. Kingsley Amis's criticism of the novel is very valid: “Only in the closing pages, when the wound becomes the centre of the victim's world, does style show off subject-matter to advantage …”¹ This inability to fuse form and content detracts from the poetic effect of the novel.

In West Indian literature, if one wants to find a novel which is similar in effect to Virginia Woolf's The Waves, one must turn to the novels of Wilson Harris, the first of which is Palace of the Peacock.

Most readers of the West Indian novel are likely to agree that the novels of Wilson Harris are more difficult to understand than those of any other novelist. Various reviewers have made various attempts to interpret the novels, but none has been very clear in his explanations. There may be two reasons for this: either Harris is profound and complex in his thought and therefore difficult to understand, or his writing is vague and obscure and therefore does not communicate his ideas. Some critics do feel that he does not make enough effort to communicate: “The Guianese novelist Wilson Harris, for instance, draws heavily upon Guianese scenery and Guianese lore. And these are wrapped in so personal a symbolism that communication is only partial.”² This may be true, but there is a suggestiveness about Harris' writing which implies more than obscurity.

Harris' first novel, Palace of the Peacock, has the rich suggestiveness of a poem. The imagery and symbolism is vivid but completely original. The language has a lyrical quality which frequently suggests to the reader that it is more than mere prose. This facet of Harris' writing can best be illustrated by quoting two examples of his descriptive passages about Guiana jungles and rivers. He is without compare in his ability to suggest the mystery and the ageless splendour of the jungle. He does this, furthermore, without long-winded descriptive passages to hold up his narrative or the expression of his ideas. Harris is the most economical of West Indian writers; none of his books is much more than one hundred and fifty pages long. Note how in the following passages he is quick to relate his observations to the impressions of his characters:

The trees on the bank were clothed in an eternity of autumnal colour—equally removed from the green of youth as from the iron-clad winter of age—a new and enduring spiritual summer of russet and tropical gold whose tints had been tenderly planted in the bed of the stream. The sun veined these mythical shadows and leaves in our eye.³

In this brief description he also manages to refer to and illustrate one of his most important themes, that of time and eternity. A beautiful description of a waterfall is also related to Harris' theme of eternity:

The river was calm as the day before, innocent and golden as a dream. The boat ran smoothly until the stream seemed to froth and bubble a little against it. A change was at hand in the sky of water everyone sensed and knew. The vessel seemed to hasten and the river grew black, painted with streaks of a foaming white. The noise of a thunderous waterfall began to dawn on their ear above the voice of their engine. They saw in the distance at last a thread of silver lightening that expanded and grew into a veil of smoke. They drew as near as they could and stopped under the cloud. Right and left grew the universal wall of cliff they knew, and before them the highest waterfall they had ever seen moved and still stood upon the escarpment. They were plainly astonished at the immaculate bridal veil falling motionlessly from the river's tall brink. The cliffs appeared to box and imprison the waterfall. A light curious fern grew out of the stone, and pearls were burning and smoking from the greenest brightest dwarfs and trees they remembered.

Steps and balconies had been nailed with abandon from bottom to top making hazardous ladders against the universal walls. These were wreathed in misty arms blowing from the waterfall.⁴

The reader is quick to attribute special symbolic significance to this waterfall, for as the characters in the novel begin to ascend the face of the cliff next to the waterfall they see visions which are definitely religious and Christian in their evocation. Donne, the central character, sees visions of a carpenter, of a woman and a child, and of a wounded stag. These pictures leave one with the impression that it is through Christ that one must approach the Palace of the Peacock, for it is towards the Palace of the Peacock that Donne is climbing, even if he does not realize it consciously. When he reaches the top of the waterfall he becomes physically blind, but this permits him to see clearly through the spiritual eye of his soul:

I saw the tree in the distance wave its arms and walk when I looked at it through the spiritual eye of the soul. First it shed its leaves sudden and swift as if the gust of the wind that blew had ripped it almost bare. The bark and wood turned to lightening flesh and the sun which had been suspended from its head rippled and broke into stars that stood where the shattered leaves had been in the living wake of the storm. The enormous starry dress it now wore spread itself all around into a full majestic gown from which emerged the intimate column of a musing neck, face, and hands, and twinkling feet. The stars became peacock's eyes, and the great tree of flesh and blood swirled into another stream that sparkled with divine features where the neck and the hands and the feet had been nailed.

This was the palace of the universe and the windows of the soul looked out and in.⁵

It would seem therefore that the Peacock is a symbol of Christ, and that the Palace of the Peacock is meant by Harris to represent the Kingdom of Heaven. It is not surprising that Harris should choose a bird to represent Christ, for many poets have found that the ability which birds have to fly through the air is suggestive of the spiritual. Yeats' “The Wild Swans at Coole” comes immediately to mind. Besides, Hopkins in “The Windhover” had used a hawk as a symbol of Christ. Harris is familiar with the work of both these poets, for he takes quotations from their poetry as epigraphs for his novels.

By surmounting the waterfall, Donne achieves the Kingdom of Heaven: he enters upon eternity. In his fifth novel, Heartland, Harris gives his clearest statement on what the waterfall symbolizes:

Petra was fast approaching the brink of the fall, when the sleeping river loses its poise and drops like a smoking breath down the face of the Kaieteuran escarpment; here nature had long established—and history had now slowly begun to read and confirm—both the desolate link and the message of a divided reality, the displacement of man like river-bed from river, watershed and island from the heart of a continent.⁶

As Harris sees it, man has been separated from his natural habitat and transposed into a place foreign to him. This place is the world of time and space. Man's physical attributes, for example his vision, far from being an asset to him, merely serve to hinder his more perfect spiritual eye. For this reason, death is a release, as Wilson Harris sees it. Time also places a restriction on the nature of man, who was meant to live in eternity. Consequently, Wilson Harris attempts to ignore time and to press everything into an eternal present: “Time had no meaning. The room was as old as a cave and as new as a study.”⁷ For this reason the Guyana jungle, which seems never to change, is a perfect symbol of timelessness for Harris.

Palace of the Peacock is an account of a trip upriver towards the waterfall of a crew of dead men. Since time does not pass in Harris' novels, death has very little significance. People die and continue to exist. In this novel, it suits Harris to use dead men as his central characters, for in this way they can stand aside and see the briefness and insignificance of their lives in time as compared with their lives in eternity:

Had we made a new problematical start—a pure and imaginary game, I told myself in despair—only to strip ourselves of all logical sequence and development and time? and to fasten vividly on our material life as if it were a passing fragment and fantasy while the curious nebulosity of ourselves stood stubborn and permanent? and as if every solid force and reason and distraction were the cruel stream that mirrored our everlastingness?⁸

The crew is made up of a number of men of different racial origins—Negro, European, Indian, American Indian—who possibly are meant to represent the various races in the population of Guyana. Sometimes the author distinguishes them clearly by their qualities, and at other times he seems to fuse them and they become merely mankind. Donne, the most definitely characterised, seems to represent the European whose philosophy of life is to rule the world. Harris manages to imply that this is a misdirection of human energies, for the world is not man's natural home. The trip upriver towards the Palace of the Peacock proves this, for the crew, without realising it, is drawn by its nature towards an eternal life.

Wilson Harris is the most philosophical of West Indian novelists, and it is good that in this period, while the other writers are concerned with purely social and practical problems, such as racial prejudice and colonialism, at least one writer should take the time to think about the deeper meaning of human existence, to think about such things as the nature of man, eternity and time, and religion. Wilson Harris' insight gives additional depth to West Indian fiction.

It is remarkable that in assessing English fiction two distinguished novelists should make very similar observations. John Updike, the American novelist, makes the following comment:

Adversely, let me say that no literature is as non-existential as the English. That is, the Englishman does not really seem to be aware of any intrinsic problem in human existence. It can be all patched up and muddled through. Hence the survival of satire—an instrument for piecemeal correction. Hence the extraordinary fluency with which novels of social circumstances are still produced—as if society were the universe. Hence the virtual absence of radically formal experimentation. … Hence, finally, the uniquely sweet and seductive voice, which would call us back from the edge of the abyss in whose depths answers might lie. …⁹

Nadine Gordimer has the same criticism to make:

The real gap that I am conscious of in my expropriated literature is the lack of novelist-philosophers. … But where is the British equivalent of a Camus—not just the individual genius, but the writer with the sense of the past (unwistfully) and the future (unprophetically) present in himself, and a cool purpose, born of real passion for life, to explore its possibilities at this stage of half understood, totally threatened human existence. … Among my contemporaries in British writing there is a lot of lively blind dissatisfaction—hitting out for the hell of it at telly civilisation or shying (again) at that apparently Welfare State-proof old coconut, the H Barrier. From outside, however admirably well done, and sometimes witty, it all seems rather parochial.¹⁰

It is in this respect that West Indian writing has both gained and suffered from its association with English Literature. The West Indian writer has learned to criticise his society by ridiculing and attacking its weakness. This is good. But the West Indian writer has seldom delved into themes which are not social and pragmatic. This does not mean that all West Indian writing has been parochial, even though much of it is specifically about West Indian territories. Surely, themes such as slavery, colonialism, and racial prejudice are variations of universal themes, such as man's inhumanity to man, the exploitation of the weak by the strong, and the corroding effect of materialism.

Nevertheless, it is because of the strong limiting influence of English Literature upon West Indian literature that a writer such as Wilson Harris, who is willing to undertake radical “formal experimentation,” is so welcome in West Indian writing. Here, at last, is a philosopher-poet who is not content merely to criticise social imperfections but who explores more fundamental problems of human nature.

Notes

1. Kingsley Amis, “Fresh Winds from the West,” Spectator (May 2, 1958), 565.

2. W. I. Carr, “Reflections on the Novel in the British Caribbean,” Queen's Quarterly, LXX (Winter, 1964), 588.

3. Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (London, 1960), p. 76.

4. Ibid., pp. 128–129.

5. Ibid., p. 146.

6. Wilson Harris, Heartland (London, 1964), p. 70.

7. Palace of the Peacock, p. 133.

8. Ibid., p. 54.

9. John Updike, “A Comment,” TLS (June 4, 1964), 473.

10. Nadine Gordimer, “Notes of an Expropriator,” TLS (June 4, 1964), 482.