[In the following essay, James compares the transformative effects of Harris's imagination in Palace of the Peacock to similar ones in the poetry of William Wordsworth.]

One of Wilson Harris's most extraordinary passages of writing comes not in his fiction, but in an essay published in 1973. Harris tells of two moments of danger surveying the Potaro river above the Tumatumari rapids at a time of high water. An anchor snagged and had to be cut loose. Three years later on the same river, the anchor again caught under the water, and, with the boat filling with water, the boatman was unable to cut it free. Just before disaster struck, the anchor came free and was brought up, interlinked with the anchor that had been lost three years before.

For Harris, the moment brought a moment of vision:

It is almost impossible to describe the kind of energy that rushed out of that constellation of images. I felt as if a canvas around my head was crowded with phantoms and figures. I had forgotten some of my own antecedents—the Amerindian/Arawak ones—but now their faces were on the canvas. One could see them in the long march into the twentieth century out of the pre-Columbian mists of time. One could also sense the lost expedition, the people who had gone down in these South American rivers. One could sense a whole range of things, all sorts of faces—angelic, terrifying, daemonic—all sorts of contrasting faces, all sorts of contrasting faces, all sorts of figures. There was a sudden eruption of consciousness, and what is fantastic is that it all came out of a constellation of two ordinary objects, two anchors.¹

Harris emphasizes the ordinariness of the anchors to stress the extraordinary power of the imagination they evoked. But looking at Harris's account of the scene, one can see the context that contributed to the moment of vision. Waterfalls and rapids are dramatic features of the Guyanese interior, marking violent fissures in the vistas of intermeshed forest and dark, sluggish rivers. They are transformations in the landscape and terrifying tests of the human spirit. With a surveyor's eye, Harris notes, “at the foot of the Tumatumari rapids or falls the sand is like gold. Above, an abrupt change of textures occurs—it is white as snow. These startling juxtapositions seemed to me immensely significant in some curious and intuitive way that bore upon an expressionistic void of place and time.”²

Significant, too, is the moment at which the vision came. In both scenes there was a flurry of activity, indeed of extreme danger (“I am sure I could not have swum to the river bank if the boat had gone down”), followed by a moment of release. The experience of the moment of vision is, of course, one familiar to other creative writers. Harris invokes Coleridge, Melville, and Conrad. But a closer parallel may be the romantic poet, William Wordsworth. Wordsworth also had visionary moments when seeing the most common objects, characteristically at a moment of suddenly changed attention. When seeing a beggar in a London street, “Caught with the spectacle my mind turned round / As with the might of waters. …” Other visions have more dramatic settings. Standing by a waterfall in the Alps, he experienced a moment when

the light of sense
goes out, but with a flash has revealed
The invisible world …

As in Harris's vision, the revelation goes beyond time and place, giving a sense of all things coexistent in a transcendent reality.

Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms on one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last and midst, and without end.(3)

Although the root experience may be similar, this only increases our sense of the difference and unique quality of Harris's writing. The experience by Tumatumari rapids was for him the beginning of a life-long process to transform it into words: as he declares, “it was a number of years before I found I could really work into narrative that kind of vision, if one may so describe it.” And he continues by quoting and analyzing moments in Palace of the Peacock and Tumatumari where an experience in space and time is again implicated in the interaction between phases of history and culture, as intimated in his earlier vision by the rapids.

Harris's imagination emerges as extraordinarily literal. His fiction is continually rooted in factual places, dates, historical and geographic data. Wordsworth also wanted to bring imaginative and scientific reality together in his writing. In his well-known words, “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is the countenance of all science.”⁴ But his ambitious attempt to put this into practice did not get beyond writing The Prelude and The Excursion.

The extent to which Harris succeeds where Wordsworth fails rests in part on Harris's attitude toward language. Wordsworth sought to escape from false jargon to recover the plain “language of men.” Harris goes beyond this to unlock the potential trapped by convention within the simplest words. This is partly stated in the passage Harris gives to the schoolmaster, Mr. Becks, in Carnival:

Language is, or should be, as much an art as a tool or a medium of tools. We need to question, to say the least, the innermost resources of language through the creative imagination, in the creative conscience. Such questions sometimes evolve into profoundest answers to the plague of robot intelligence. A living language is a medium of imaginative death as well as imaginative rebirth and life. It is a medium of creativity in morality. Fiction as much as language dies otherwise.⁵

Harris fences this round with comic irony. Becks is a schoolmaster in “Brickdam” (Harris's schoolmaster, in New Amsterdam, Guyana, where he grew up?). And the colonial schools did not teach “creative” language. Becks is careful himself to “read nothing but mediocre novels and poetry. It is better to be on the safe side, to assume there is no hope.”

The way the two approaches to language, by Wordsworth and Harris, change the experience they inscribe, may be seen by briefly comparing two well-known passages by each author. Wordsworth first. “Resolution and Independence” has as its inspiration a transformative vision that could well have been seen by Harris. It is framed in a morning of movement and activity: this is suddenly arrested by the sight of an old, gray-headed leech-gatherer standing “motionless as a cloud” before a pool of water. As he talks, the poet experiences a disturbing vision in which the still man paces “about the weary moors continually, / Wandering about alone and silently.”⁶ The moment passes, and the appended moral—that he should learn from the old man's fortitude—is curiously irrelevant to the communicated power of the vision. For a moment Wordsworth had penetrated to, in Harris's words “the substance of life,” sensing his own place in a profound history of human endurance. But beyond describing the moment itself, he had no terms in which to understand or communicate this.

In a central passage of Palace of the Peacock the expedition crew also become aware of the “substance” of the Arawak woman they have taken on to be their guide. The passage is too well-known to require detailed analysis. But it is worth asserting first what is, at one level, its realism: “Her long black hair—with the faintest glimmer of silvery grey—hung in two plaints down to her waist. She sat still as a bowing statue, the stillness and surrender of the American Indian of Guyana in reflective pose. Her small eyes winked and blinked a little. It was an emotionless face.”⁷ The description will be immediately recognized as startlingly apt by those who have seen aged women in the Indian villages of the Guyanese interior. The vision is both subjective and an outpouring of self. At the midpoint of the novel, the narrator senses, as Wordsworth did in contemplating the old man, a still center of reality. Here “life had possessed and abandoned at the same time the apprehension of a facile beginning and ending. An unearthly pointlessness was her true manner, an all-inclusive manner …” (72). Yet we are also back with Harris's vision by Tumatumari rapids. He wrote there, “all this has a bearing on the nature of community.” The anchor with the past has become contact with the roots of the Guyanese peoples. What for Wordsworth ends as alienation—he dismisses the man with a self-defensive laugh—for Donne's crew becomes something that profoundly disturbs their consciousness.

But Harris does not say “the crew was disturbed.” He literally transforms the woman into a life-threatening rapid. The concept becomes an image. The words themselves become the alchemy, the magic. “Tiny embroideries resembling the handwork on the Arawak woman's kerchief and the wrinkles on her brow turned to incredible and fast soundless breakers of foam. Her crumpled bosom and river grew agitated with desire, bottling and shaking every fear and inhibition and outcry. The ruffles in the water were her dress rolling and rising to embrace the crew” (73). The interaction transforms both viewers and seen, the crew and the woman. The Arawak woman's soul and body engulf them like a wave, sexual and regenerating, “flowing back on them with silent streaming majesty and abnormal youth and in a wave of freedom and strength” (75). Then the vision is gone, leaving them with the consequences of what they have seen, swept dangerously through forbidden rapids, “keeping our bow silent and straight in the heart of an unforgiving and unforgiveable incestuous love” (74).

Harris's achievement has profound relevance to debates about literature in the modern world. In spite of his dalliance with the French Revolution, Wordsworth wrote within a rigid social framework. He remains trapped within a social consciousness that undermines the validity of his psychic sympathy with the old man and the humanity he represents. Harris, contemplating the Arawak woman, directly confronts such restrictions. Thus far, he deconstructs the colonial perspective. But, as Homi Bhabha has pointed out, postcolonialism in itself can imprison what it seeks to release. “What is profoundly unresolved, even erased, in the discourses of poststructuralism is that perspective of depth through which the authenticity of identity comes to be reflected in the glassy metaphorics of the mirror and its mimetic or realistic narratives.”⁸

The passage could well have been written by Harris himself, and thirty years earlier. For it is not only in the recognition of the Other but the understanding that this act of recognition profoundly changes both perceiver and perceived, that Harris moves beyond postcolonialism and points to the future. This future is being always re-created. The final act of transformation is on his readers. Indeed, it is on you.

Notes

1. “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” New Letters 40 (1973): 41.

2. “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” 39–40.

3. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, book 7, 11. 643–4; book 6, 11. 601–03; book 7, 635–40.

4. William Wordsworth, Preface to “The Lyrical Ballads” (1802).

5. Carnival (London: Faber and Faber. 1985), 74.

6. “Resolution and Independence,” 11. 131–32.

7. Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 71; hereafter cited parenthetically.

8. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 48.