The Angel at the Gate by Wilson Harris starts with a liminary note signed “W. H.” explaining that the plot of the novel is a transcription of Mary Stella Holiday's automatic writing, which took place while she was undergoing treatment and receiving guidance from Father Joseph Marsden, a priest-cum-hypnotist living at Angel Inn, an old house in London. The narrative arises out of Mary's malaise and her desire to situate herself in relation to others. This specific form, a narrative within a work of fiction, is not new in Harris' corpus: he has used this model in The Eye of the Scarecrow, The Waiting Room and Companions of the Day and Night. However, here the multi-layered construction reaches a new stage with the use of automatic writing and the role such a technique can have in the development of imaginative powers.

The reader is led along two strands of narrative. On the first level, Mary Stella is merely the author of the notes which form the framework of the book. On a second plane, that of the automatic writing, she is split into two personae: Mary, Marsden's secretary and patient, lives with her brother Sebastian, an unemployed drug addict. Stella, his wife, has to be taken into the emergency ward after swallowing a massive quantity of Valium. They have a small son, John, who plays a very important part in the other characters' evolution. As the narrative at times hovers on the threshold between the first and the second levels, relationships between characters become less clear. At the end of chapter five, Father Marsden is nearly crushed by a bale falling from a lorry in the street. His accident and “little death” is a focal point where Khublall, a Hindu, and his friend Jackson, a Jamaican, actively join the plot. Through Mack, Stella's father, they are linked with the main family. This deepening of personal links parallels other discoveries made concerning the past history of the Angel Inn, where Marsden's eighteenth-century ancestor sold Mary's black ancestor, a slave, in his auction room. The novel weaves many networks of association around Marsden which lead to the final acknowledgement that one must endure “the traffic of many souls.”

The name “Marsden” was used for a major character in Black Marsden, a novel situated in Scotland. There the character appears as a “clown or conjurer or hypnotist” (p. 12). His action brings positive as well as negative results to Goodrich, the narrator-protagonist. Where Black Marsden tends to sponge, Father Marsden helps to liberate people from “possession.” The setting is obviously the Kensington-Shepherd's Bush area of London, which can be identified with many actual place names. Yet Harris combines familiarity and disorientation through his introduction of such imaginary locales as Paradise Park and Planet Bale, a strange celestial body which materializes from the nearly fatal bale. Paradise Park evokes Holland Park in Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness. Yet it arises more from artistic work than from reality. The park becomes charged with historical and archetypal connotations. It is the place where metamorphosis reaches a climax.

The names of the other characters also play on multiple layers of evocation. The Joseph and Mary couple have been present in Harris' novels since Palace of the Peacock. The eternally abused woman and miraculously creative muse of the first volume of the Guiana Quartet has now become a modern visionary character. Joseph Marsden contributes only indirectly to the well-being of the “miraculous child” raised by Mary, a child conceived in circumstances almost as miraculous as those surrounding the conception of the son of God. John is a kind of cuckoo who grows up in a stranger's nest.

Harris strategy of referential anchoring and disorientation seems to provide all the keys for “understanding” the novel in his liminary note. If we follow the arguments developed by “W. H.,” the narration concerns a person whose name has been modified “to avoid embarrassment” (p. 7). Yet much of the plot forces readers to question all presuppositions which might chain them to verisimilitude. Harris' fiction weaves unobtrusively in and out of the basic plot, which becomes inextricably linked with the world of dreams. In the author's opinion, one cannot be content with the material surface of things. It is necessary to integrate many other layers of perception and memory without which one's idea of reality remains static and sterile.

Harris' writing sets out to explore meaning, not so much as a clearly definable object but as a basic skeleton structure which accounts for the profound unity of the world. Only the imagination is free enough to operate the radical stripping off of appearances which forms a necessary prelude to the enterprise. In his radical conception of fiction, Harris cannot be content with traditional characters whose features remain constant throughout the plot. In works such as The Eye of the Scarecrow, his characters mirror one another and form complementary halves. Yet, in The Angel at the Gate, Mary Stella appears whole in the first level of narration and separated into Mary on one hand and Stella on the other when we reach the story proper. In key transitional passages, characteristics belonging to the two worlds overlap, causing uncertainty for the reader. Far from being a weakness in the novel, this feature strips down the surface of commonly accepted references in order to pave the way for the imagination.

The novel seeks a similar process of reassurance and disorientation in the chronological references. The narrator provides accurate dates relating the plot to contemporary events: he indicates that the episodes described take place between November 1980 and June 1981. This period approximately covers the actual writing work for The Angel at the Gate, which reinforces the value of this book as metafiction. The narrator mentions President Reagan, fires in a dance hall in Dublin, in a London house where several young West Indians die and in a hotel in Las Vegas. We also find a reference to the famine in Ethiopia and the threat of a Russian invasion of Poland. Yet together with these events, which clearly belong to the contemporary period, the novel mentions the Proudhon utopia in the Jura mountains, which Mary contemplates joining. This jump in time, if we judge by ordinary criteria, causes a destructuring effect. Similarly, when Marsden's auctioneer ancestor appears in the narration, the reader is not surprised to see an eighteenth-century account book written in the style and spelling of the period. Yet when the list starts again a few pages later with “For getting poore Van Gogh's yellow chaire out of ye Market 25p” (p. 22), the conventions of verisimilitude are infringed upon once again. The half-comic, half-anguishing technique is familiar, but Harris has rarely used it so effectively. Beyond the first moment of surprise, we realize that he is emphasizing a new conception of time which privileges echoes and synchronicity rather than a mechanical sequence of separate events. The different episodes linked throughout the centuries all have to do with catastrophes and traumas which must be envisaged in their positive aspects for, in Harris' world, destruction usually heralds a new and deeper possibility of construction. Nature dies in order to be reborn in the following spring—hence the period between November and June, almost the time of gestation. The conventions of the novel are destroyed so that new and more authentic conventions may emerge. Such a process of renewal is only seen in its starting stages, for every conceptual edifice threatens to become static and needs to be stripped of its sterilizing aspects. So the narration must remain a work in progress; it never reaches a definite conclusion.

The experience of death precedes a new birth. Marsden dies at the precise moment when life can reappear on a more authentic basis. The old man is the origin of the material used by “W. H.” in his fiction. When he dies, the novel can come to life in an autonomous form. It can use the notes taken by Marsden and by Mary but need not follow them slavishly. This freedom of creation arises out of the destruction of the materialistic constraints which might have been imposed by the actual protagonists of the events incorporated into the plot. The imagination, for Harris, is a capacity for reaching beyond the idolatry of reality. It is a synthesizing and paradoxical force which exists in a frontier area. In The Eye of the Scarecrow, the narrator talks of the “borderline … between an Imagination capable of reconciling unequal forms present and past and an Imagination empty of self-determined forms to come …” (p. 98). It attempts to join antagonistic elements while at the same time endeavouring to be free of any preconceptions.

The imagination is more a power of exploration than of possession. It helps the reader to free himself from any desire to freeze reality. Some characters tend to use others as commodities: in a dream, Sebastian sees Mary and Stella in the shape of a butterfly which brushes past his lips, offering its beauty to be enjoyed and gulped down like food. The novel reacts against this cat-and-mouse game in which one character simply chases and devours another—there is a scene where a cat literally hunts down a mouse in Jackson's garden. For Harris, language cannot set out to master reality. It can only link different elements which would otherwise remain separate or antagonistic.

Instead of aiming at possession of some form of static meaning, Harris' writing brings together incompatible terms and causes unexpected collisions. The result is often flashes of temporary illumination which open new vistas in an apparently blocked situation. One of the author's favourite devices in The Angel at the Gate is to create characters out of a song which Stella has favoured since her childhood. Mack the Knife, Sukey Tawdrey, Jenny Diver and Lucy Brown are not only names in a famous melody sung by Louis Armstrong and inspired by John Gay's Beggar's Opera and Bertolt Brech's Dreigroschenoper. A whole personal history is created from a projection of the characters' predicaments on the themes of “Mack the Knife.” From the meeting of these two fields of evocations arises a new plot which at times seems part of the two sources and yet appears radically different. Mack is an expert in murder, swindles and is a lady-killer (in more than one sense). He also uses other people instead of attempting more fruitful relationships with them. His attitude compares with the conquistadores or colonial owners described in the Guiana Quartet.

In Harris' fiction, words often create reality: Planet Bale arises out of the bale which falls from a lorry and nearly crushes Marsden. The accident introduces the old priest—and those who happen to witness the event—to a novel universe, to a different body of perception. With Harris, genuine creation is triggered by a shock which forces the characters to revise their preconceptions. The event inaugurates a series of echoing images, the meteoric strike, the expedition to another world and the crushing of the body of an old man, who is reduced to an empty vessel out of which can emerge other creations of the mind. The distance between Planet Bale and the pavement on which Marsden is lying unconscious makes a sense of perspective and enables the viewer to re-examine his priorities in order to privilege “qualitative mystery” rather than “quantity-for-the-sake-of-quantity” (p. 88). It is the distance brought about by the creative imagination.

The plot includes other traumatic events which seem shocking and undesirable yet which cause beneficial effects: when a man exposes himself in front of Stella after waking her up with his repeated knocks on the door, the woman suddenly discovers her son John about to swallow a quantity of Valium which she has left lying on the table. Thus, horror and bestiality eventually open on the saving of the child's life. The sex maniac belongs to the series of Anancy-like figures which abound in Harris' fiction. This trickster indirectly turns a dangerous situation into a happy event. In Harris' fiction, trickster figures usually contribute to the unblocking of representations. Such images as turning wheels or material being woven relate to the positive activity of such characters. Mother Diver has a shawl which evokes the threading or the unravelling of truth. Wheels appear as parts of chariots or of motor cars. Anancy, the young boy who surprises Mary when he appears unexpectedly in the Angel Inn to read Sir Thomas More's Utopia, moves as quick as lightning despite his bandaged foot. The narration draws a parallel yet emphasizes the difference between him and Marsden:

Anancy returned as sculptured chariot of god (with one wheel that ran round and round as if it were whole, yet served in envisioning a broken revolution to signify the moral fate of all human design).

(p. 29)

This creature is composed of a mixture of apparent skill and wholeness on the one hand and of imperfection on the other. His creative possibilities lie in the interaction between his surface completeness and the deep flaw in his possibilities. The first element enables him to work wonders while the second prevents him from exerting tyrannical powers. Marsden causes surprising effects but not so much with his actual physical abilities. On the contrary, he acts more as a catalyst. He has learned to free himself from “the perversities of affection” (p. 30). He thus represents life reduced to its minimal stage, a body “whittled or sliced by fate … into a knobbed stick” (pp. 29–30). The miraculous Joseph, who appears with his car to help reunite Mary and Stella when Stella comes out of hospital, strangely echoes Joseph Marsden while being an Anancy-like figure, too. Many characters in this novel seem to have “angelic” powers. By this Harris seems to indicate people who can reach or help other people to a higher degree of relationship with others: Marsden, Anancy, Khublall, Jackson and Wheeler all help, in different ways, the realization of this necessary revision of premises. They are creatures of the “threshold” of the “gate” between the material world which many take for granted and another world which only the creative imagination can explore.

The novel is written on the threshold of a radically new form of perception. The language is fertilized in this intermediary zone where familiar landmarks become blurred and melt into others. Here, Harris' fiction progresses from one partial representation to another using the creative drive of rich images. The narrative can be compared to the automatic writing practised by W. B. Yeats's wife and described in A Vision, a volume which Mary finds on Marsden's desk. The web of the novel is made up of “an elaborate system of actively related opposites” (p. 107). Harris' imagination has provided him with “metaphors for poetry” (p. 107) out of which the different strands of the story emerge by processes of classical progression as well as by association or plays on the meaning of words. Harris never takes up an image in isolation to signify one single layer of meaning; rather, images are confronted or they echo one another in series which drift out of the main thread, usually to return modified and enriched by the collisions of sounds and evocations. The tension arising from the confrontation of two terms causes the emergence of a third, possibly less static one which revitalizes the process of discovery. For Harris, words are less important in their meaning than in their potential for creative metamorphosis. The enterprise is fraught with the danger the author associates with love. The narrator of The Angel at the Gate speaks of creating “through the mystery of temptation.” Temptation in itself is a danger because it can lead to the exploitation of the object of one's love. Yet “in the greatest flowering danger lies the greatest prize of artistic wisdom” (p. 124)

In this work of passion, Harris' characters are attracted by utopias which set out to bring ready-made solutions to problems. In this novel, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi and Pierre Proudhon are illustrations of ideological systems which some people consider providential. For Harris, any theory which becomes a self-sufficient system increases polarizations and paves the way for cruelty and tyranny. He criticizes the so-called revolutionaries who disguise old-fashioned methods of reasoning into apparently new solutions. In The Angel at the Gate, the narrator provides the example of Leo Tolstoy who abandons his family in order to found an “ideal” community and whose mysticism soon turns into authoritarianism. Sebastian's artificial drug paradise leads only to irresponsibility and violence. Human paradises are threatened, as we see with Paradise Park, where little John, in a dreamlike version of the Leda myth flashes his scissors out of his pram and cuts in all directions, causing metamorphoses in Sukey Tawdrey:

The flamingo's bitten neck darted across the woman's body into the brain of the serpent. Sliced evolutionary wings grew afresh on the other side of the woman's thighs into the apparition of a swan. Then wings enveloped the scene to disclose a rim of black under a scarlet ribbon of feathers.

(p. 70)

But these dangers must be faced and turned into moments of revelation. Such scenes in Harris' novels usually show the wholeness of characters and objects broken down. Each becomes fragmented yet enriched with elements belonging to others. Thus, a mutual dialogue is initiated thanks to the power of the imagination. This activity involves a reassessment of one's relation to history. Art becomes an act of memory. The characters' isolation is broken by their discovery of a subtle evolutionary web which they have ignored hitherto. The narrator expresses this using a series of metaphors:

Father Marsden had said that if one could ascend a rainbow of tears one would converse with the souls of the living and the dead. It was on that rainbow-bridge that a butterfly of existence flew. On each wing were intricate and multiple records of the deeds of many lives shimmering and shifting to reflect anew each individual history or individual body.

(p. 17)

The perception of the artist is similar to these shimmering and never stable images which form on the wings of a butterfly. All are separate yet related through the overall pattern. Each is fragile and can be possessed by a passing predator. Yet once the wings are shattered, nothing of the original richness endures. The revelation lies in the moment of metamorphosis. Objects and people can discover profound relationships with each other if only they refrain from becoming “furies.”

The process of narration bears witness to the same paradoxes: the voice which interprets the plot and comments on the events seeks to find abstract formulations. It, too, is tempted by the “enchantment with the womb” (p. 124), by a desire to reach truth and immobilize it. Through this measure of stability meaning can arise and the ideas can be communicated on a basis which the narrator and the readers have in common. Yet this tendency cannot be separated from a realization that the true imagination always starts to break limits and destroy walls. The reader must enter the complex conceptual world of the author and thus accept the limitation of his freedom of interpretation. But this constraining aspect cannot be separated from the author's genuine concern for open structures. The text of the novel imposes a pattern to pave the way for a radical questioning of all superficial patterns. Such tension between form and formlessness would not be bearable without Harris' profound belief in the inexhaustible powers of language to break any constraint. Stella tries to put words into Sebastian's mouth. Old Lucy in the last chapter wants Jackson to “talk” to his daughter, and by this she implies “to force an idea into the young girl's mind.” These remain perverse uses of language. The writing of this novel proves that one cannot possess someone's speech in the same way as one cannot take absolute possession of language. Language remains a riddle, a frustrating yet unique access to a deeper form of vision.

In the framework of Harris' fiction, The Angel at the Gate concentrates on the creative potential of catastrophes and people's apparent weaknesses. Instead of placing the emphasis on heroes of the traditional type, this novel examines the “angel” figures as catalysts of discovery. This novel is a dream journey, but not in the mode of an escapist enterprise since paradises always prove fraught with ambiguities. Compared with Harris' other works, it seems simpler in its use of language. Yet the writer steers a delicate course between the familiar and the disorientating. Memory plays a vital part in the origin of the characters, who are developed from semi-conscious fragments of history and from musical themes which enter into a dialogue with the written text. The Angel at the Gate is an important step in Harris' metafictional enterprise: in his use of automatic writing he explores a particularly fruitful field concerning the position of the novelist in relation to his material. The different voices that meet echo the paradox of revelation and radical otherness which remains at the core of the genuine imagination.

Note

1. The Angel at the Gate (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 126. Further references are incorporated in the text.