SOURCE: Sander, Reinhard W. “The Quest for Form: Wilson Harris' Contributions to Kyk-over-al.” World Literature Written in English 22, no. 1 (spring 1983): 17–27.

Form and content are then inseparable.
In fact everything is Form—the mystery is Form.

—Wilson Harris, 1955¹

The literary magazine Kyk-over-al was edited and published by A. J. Seymour from 1945 to 1961. It appeared half-yearly and contained short fiction, plays, poetry, critical articles, and reviews that originated in Guyana and the West Indies. Its emphasis, however, was clearly on poetry and the theoretical debate about the quality and direction of a distinctive West Indian literature.² Wilson Harris contributed numerous poems and articles to the pages of Kyk-over-al, as well as several pieces of short fiction. His contributions appeared fairly regularly in the magazine, from the very first issue of Kyk in 1945 to the very last issue in 1961.³ The magazine therefore contains a substantial body of writing by this author which yields some insights into his development preceding the publication of his first novel, Palace of the Peacock, in 1960.

It seems to me that there are three major phases of development in Harris' contributions to Kyk-over-al. A first, very short phase (1945–1948) contains Harris' earliest attempts at both fiction and poetry. In phase two (1948–1954) he embarked on a theoretical debate on the question of literary form. At the same time he continued his personal quest for a suitable form through writing poetry, and during this period he seemed to have abandoned the writing of fiction. Two collections of poetry, Fetish (1951) and Eternity to Season (1954), are the fruit of this second phase, and many of the poems from these collections were published during this period in Kyk. The third phase (1954–1960) reveals that Harris had privately continued to experiment with fiction: during this period he published an excerpt from a novel in progress which can be identified as a possible early version of The Secret Ladder.⁴ Further significant theoretical statements also appeared, but the publication of poetry dropped and finally came to an end. Harris' last contribution to Kyk-over-al was a piece of short fiction that marks the threshold to the post-1960 period, with its similarity to Palace of the Peacock in structure and style.⁵ Since Rolstan Adams has recently published a very informative article on Harris' early poetry,⁶ my discussion of these three phases in Harris' early development will concentrate on the fiction and theoretical articles which appeared in Kyk-over-al.

The two pieces of short fiction published during the first phase are entitled “Tomorrow” and “Fences Upon the Earth.” In “Tomorrow” (1945)⁷ the first-person narrator encounters an old artist who for years has been working on a statue but is unable to complete its face:

It was the beginning of a face, with blind eyes, tormented, struggling to be born, struggling for vision. There was a promise in the face but that was all. There was a promise of a noble head, but that promise had to develop from a sinister, unshapen mass. There were cruel lines about this head, too, and about this face, that were fighting to emerge, to become dominant and enduring features.

In his despair over the unfinished work the artist explains to the narrator:

Maybe I do not understand. Maybe the new people to be born are beyond my genius. I shall not be the one that shall understand. But someone will come out of the byways of the world and he will understand this new people, because maybe he will be one of the new people. His will be a new story, the beginning of a new heritage, the end of today, the beginning of the dream that will help to shape tomorrow.

The meeting between the narrator and the artist is suddenly interrupted by the entry of the artist's young housekeeper, who explains that she has just murdered her lover and is being sought by the police. While recounting the disillusionment and frustration which led to this desperate act, her gestures (especially her uplifted arms) are compared by the narrator to the posture of the statue. When she decides to give herself up to the law, explaining,

I've been running away from myself too long all these years. Sometimes it's hard for people like me to know what are the things we really want in this world. Maybe every time we run away from ourselves, we make it harder and harder to find out. Maybe if we go on running we'll never find out. Maybe it's time we start meeting ourselves, knowing ourselves. I believe that's what we're going to do from now on

the narrator has a brief vision of her face:

Her clouded, obscure expression had lifted, like a veil moved aside to reveal a flash of splendid beauty: a beacon light flashing out quickly across wastes of darkness. Then her face grew clouded again, bitter and obscure.

Although the implied connection between this moment of illumination and the face which the artist is seeking is obvious, the question still remains, for the woman, the artist, and the observing narrator:

Who would hear or understand the dark meaning of her life? Couple the light and the shadow, the good and the bad into a true pattern? And what was that pattern?

One detects in this short story themes, figures and images in embryo that were to be developed in greater depth in Harris' novels. The idea of the need for self-knowledge at the individual and community level and the attempt to reconcile opposing aspects of the psyche and the community emerge clearly. In the later novels female figures like the woman in this story would become catalysts in the process of psychic reintegration for the male protagonists. In “Tomorrow,” however, the first-person narrator remains the observer and the female figure herself undergoes the change. The rudiments of the symbols and images which Harris uses in his novels to convey his sense of the complexity and duality of human life and nature can also be identified. The unfinished head of the statue, for example, with its potential to be invested with good or evil or both, is a familiar device, as well as the image of an eye as a symbol of interior vision. This is how the narrator gives us his first impression of the old artist, for instance:

Suddenly I felt the door behind me moving. It had opened slightly. Looking back, I saw an eye appear at the crevice. … The door opened wider still. The eye grew to a face, the face a form: the form of an old man standing in the doorway … I was held by a peculiar expression of his eyes: a sort of intensity, fire, a sort of hunger. These qualities contrasted strangely with a very old face, a face, lined, thin, fragile and kindly. …

However, because these images and symbols belong to no larger organic pattern of association they strike the reader as strained and artificial within the narrative framework of the short story. Furthermore, the obtrusive narrator repeatedly spells out the meaning of these images, allowing the reader no opportunity to make the necessary connections in his imagination. Perhaps the least successful of these symbolic signposts is the author's introduction of the Kaieteur Fall as a painting in the old artist's living room. In this setting and form the vitality of what in other contexts has become one of Harris' most complex and liberating symbols is unable to produce associations of its own, and its meaning has to be explained by the old artist:

It has power. Beauty. Mystery. It is a symbol for the land. The symbol of power waiting to be harnessed. Of beauty that goes hand in hand with terror and majesty. Of the mystery that lies in men's hearts, waiting to be explored, given form and direction and purpose.

Harris himself seems to have been aware of the limitations of such explanations. In his second short story, “Fences Upon the Earth” (1947),⁸ the first-person narrator, like the narrator in “Tomorrow,” is forced to admit at the end of his tale: “Yes. I know what you will say. The words I have used are inadequate. Forgive me. I know it was inevitable that it should be so. The whole thing had been secret and wordless.” The “secret and wordless” thing is an encounter with the Amerindian presence in the Guyanese interior, an encounter that provides some insight into the profound and disturbing impression that the Guyanese landscape and its ancestral inhabitants were to leave on the mind of the future novelist. On a stroll away from his workmates in the interior, the narrator is overwhelmed by the vastness of the forest he has entered, whose “mighty trees closed in over [his] head”:

I thought that surely I would hear the trees grow in this forest. They were so solid, so timeless. One seemed each moment to hear them quietly settling deeper and deeper; their mighty roots thrusting farther and farther into the ancient earth. It was all very strange and fantastic and beautiful.

In this frame of mind the narrator encounters an Amerindian fisherman, who seems to be an organic part of the environment and a symbol of dignity and wholeness:

I knew in those moments the greatest happiness of my life. For the first time that I could remember I looked upon a human being standing upon the earth, not falsely, by force or subterfuge, or bravado, or by any sort of empty pretension, but very simply, as though to own the earth were to carry the most natural and easeful burden in the world … His limbs were powerful. They had the perfection of the young trees that stand rooted in the forests, breathing forth an ageless symmetry in their being.

The narrator's ruminations are interrupted by the appearance of his employer, the representative of a large mining concern, who accuses the Amerindian of trespassing on company land. To the narrator this intruder appears “a very alien and ridiculous figure in this part of the world … a strong man and a ruthless one.” For a moment violence seems inevitable, but then the narrator observes what he calls a miracle: the Amerindian's “transition from fury to calmness,” which allows him to dismiss the presence of the intruder and walk calmly away. The intruder interprets this as a sign that his words have succeeded in cowing the Amerindian, but the narrator himself explains, rather heavy-handedly, what he sees as the real significance of the Amerindian's reaction:

But in a flash [the Amerindian] had spoken to me in his wordless language. What he said was this:—Let the stranger build his fences. Something divine in me prevents me from killing him. I could kill him easily. I could crush his flabbiness to pulp. But to what end? What is the use of violence? There has been enough violence on the earth. Nothing can be built or be preserved by violence. I have no fences to build. I shall trust to my destiny. I shall trust to the forces that brought me on this spot I call my home. I shall trust to the deep things that tie me to the earth to give me my rightful place in the sun. These things shall never fail me. I know. I believe. I keep faith with the earth. I trust God. That is enough. There is no other way. I shall be patient.

In his attempt to explain the significance of the Amerindian the author becomes lost in ever narrowing circles of rationalization, which, rather than communicating the unique qualities of stillness and strength suggested by his mysterious figure, connect the encounter with facile pacifism and Christian submission. It is worth noting that in the poetry Harris was also writing at this time he is able to communicate this particular experience much more successfully through a few striking images. The fourth stanza of a poem called “Village in America,” which appeared in the same issue of Kyk-over-al that carried the short story “Fences Upon the Earth,” contains this description of Amerindians:

They have a slowness and a sleepiness upon them.
They stand mute and execrated
like statues of priceless ebony
curbing a monstrous strength
curbing the violence of their limbs:
until the deep smile comes in patient grandeur
upon the darkness of their features.
This is the culmination of their strange beauty.(9)

Harris' apparent failure at this stage to mould prose fiction into a vessel for the communication of intuitive insights and vision and his relative success in doing so in poetry may account for his concentration on poetry between 1948 and 1954. During this second phase some of his most important theoretical articles were also published, in which he explained for himself and to the readers of Kyk-over-al the necessity of his relentless quest for a new poetic form. In his reviews of several of the small volumes of West Indian poetry that now began to appear he deplored the writers' imitation of traditional poetic concepts which he felt were alien to the West Indian environment. He singled out in particular the tendency towards a “consolidation” of the romantic spirit that in its own time and place had been a liberating impulse. Instead of becoming involved in a “realisation of original form,” Harris felt the West Indian poet had been trapped by a “static approach” and by “formula,” and he urged a “liberation from formula” as a necessary first step to end the creative impasse in which poetry had become “ineffectual ornament” and “imposing facade.”

The poet of the moment has to accomplish a leap. He can no longer secure himself in a collective fashion but must surrender himself in actual symbols—as distinct from recollected symbols—even though the shock of his surrender presents great difficulty to an audience “whose encased lives before the Infinite” have found their measure in collective dreams and whose formula for existence has always evaded the actual world.¹⁰

Harris made it quite clear in his articles that his quest for form was not to be mistaken for a concern with mere aestheticism. At the centre of his thought was (and remains) his commitment to social engagement. What he wanted was a return to the idea of “man as the creator of values, rather than values as the creator of man.” In 1953 he wrote, “The profound task of transforming society must sooner or later become the crucial concern of all men of sensibility.” The writer had a responsibility to deal with “the actual state of the world: its processes, its changes, its needs.”¹¹

Harris' social vision has always been an optimistic one. As a Caribbean writer he had been early convinced of the potential of the Americas. If New World man could be made to understand that he had his origins in what Harris termed the great movement “of fleeing institutions of bondage in Europe and Asia,” he would not, Harris argued, continue with the self-destructive “transplantation of static disciplines into a new soil and new world.”¹² He would accept his “bare world” of mountains, jungles and rivers as a positive beginning and learn to explore imaginatively the buried values and caveats of the Amerindian civilizations, which had grown in an authentic and organic way out of the same environment. For Harris this was not a nostalgic or atavistic return to the past. On the one hand he wrote:

The great civilisation of the American Indian, which was based on an agricultural norm, is a vivid example of an architecture of values made manifest from original conditions devoid of illusory masses or materials. Matter truly bore the imprint of genius, not the dead stamp of industralisation or the taboo of spirituality removed from sensuous direction. This was an assertion of human greatness truly epic in dimension. To realise it, is to be aware of the diminutive man of the cities of the world today …

On the other hand, Harris reminds his reader:

Of course we all know that the Aztec civilisation failed. Its failure was accelerated by contact with the individualism of an alien power … The priests of the Aztecs sacrificed living hearts torn out of the breasts of human beings. This horrible contradiction was the result of man becoming the toy of his religion. A contradiction developed between man who built a world, and the world he built which made him helpless.¹³

Harris' theories about poetic form, the potential of New World man, and the legacy of the ancient Amerindian civilizations began to be fused into practice in the poetry he wrote during this second phase. To a large extent the poems that appeared in Kyk-over-al between 1948 and 1954 as well as those published in the two collections, Fetish and Eternity to Season, succeed in breaking with the earlier poetic conventions, and the poet is able to create patterns of authentic symbols drawn from the Guyanese landscape, Greek mythology, and the Amerindian past to communicate his social vision.

Both Michael Gilkes and Rolstan Adams have suggested that after Eternity to Season Harris had “exhausted the vessel of poetry … [and] turned to prose fiction as his vehicle.”¹⁴ This estimate seems to be confirmed by developments within the third phase of Harris' contributions to Kyk-over-al, which are characterized by an eclipse of the power of images and symbols in his poetry. The Sun: Fourteen Poems in a Cycle appeared in 1955. Here the poet attempts to communicate his ideas by using the shapes of the poems themselves as a vehicle for meaning. The attempt to confine meaning within lines whose length was dictated by the rigid outlines of trees and crosses seems to have been self-defeating, and after this Harris ceased to experiment with poetic forms in the pages of Kyk. At this point he once more demonstrated that he had continued to experiment with fiction privately in the years since the publication of his two early short stories. Perhaps he had felt all along that the epic dimensions of his vision of man and society could not be contained within the dense economy of poetic form. Furthermore, his characteristic urge to communicate to as wide an audience as possible must have challenged him to conquer and transform the most popular form of prose narrative, the novel. The publication in 1954 of “Banim Creek,” which is described as an extract from an unpublished novel, suggests that Harris has been attempting longer pieces of prose fiction before he stopped publishing poetry.¹⁵ “Banim Creek,” however, is by any standards, even in comparison with his earlier short stories, an unsatisfactory piece. Rather than a single confrontation between two representative characters observed and interpreted by a first-person narrator, Harris attempts a larger canvas involving the development of a number of personal conflicts, each of which the first-person narrator must attempt to explain. Trapped within this apparatus of realistic fiction, especially by the demands of creating realistic characters, the extract can offer no full development of ideas or symbol. The function of the philosophizing narrator becomes particularly obtrusive as his comments are placed at the beginning and end of the action and introduce details of plot important to the rest of the novel that are even more distracting. It is possible that “Banim Creek” was part of a first draft of The Secret Ladder, but there is little resemblance beyond a similarity in superficial details of plot. At the opening of the extract the first-person narrator acquaints us with his three workmates, who are part of a group of tide readers in the Guyana interior. Their characters are summarized to prepare us for the conflicts which come to a head when all three become involved in the sexual pursuit of a Portuguese woman who sells vegetables to the men at the camp. Themes that become important in The Secret Ladder, such as responsibility for one's actions and the need for self-knowledge, are touched upon, and the Portuguese woman shares certain characteristics and functions with the later character, Catalena Perez. But the complex weave of character and motivation, symbol and reality of the later work is missing.

Wilson Harris published no more fiction until 1960 when he surprised his readers with the extraordinary achievement of Palace of the Peacock. Here the restraints of the conventional realistic novel are suddenly broken through and replaced by a fluid text which frees characters, plot and time to interact within a pattern of contrasting and interlocking symbols. Without access to possible earlier drafts one can only speculate about the creative process which altered Harris' fiction between 1954 and 1960. Was it a slow and tortuous process of revision or a sudden leap that occurred between “Banim Creek” and the novels of the Guyana cycle? A clue to the answer may perhaps be found in a critical article on Denis Williams' painting that Harris published in 1955 under the title “Two Periods in the Work of a West Indian Artist.”¹⁶ In this article Harris assesses the change in artistic vision and direction that he had observed in Williams' recent work. Of Williams' work before 1954 he writes:

He put everything he saw on canvas: fearful faces, desperate faces, demons, lust, the faces of newspaper vendors uttering mechanically the destinies of the world, faces coming out of subways, on buses, on the pavement, the faces of pregnant women—all against the actual harsh world of time and circumstance.

According to Harris, Williams was always desperately in need of ever larger canvases to paint what he saw, until he suddenly realized the artistic impasse to which his work was leading. There seems to have been no phase of transition. Williams destroyed a number of his works and proceeded to what Harris describes as “the renunciation of one period or style and the adoption of a new technical and spiritual revolution.” Williams' example may have been the catalyst for Harris to perform a similar revolutionary leap. Harris' description of Williams' new work also indicates the kind of result he himself would strive towards in his renunciation of earlier styles and techniques.

Most great paintings exercise power and they dominate the onlooker. They hold the onlooker captive. The onlooker is taken into the canvas. Denis Williams sought for ways and means to renounce painting in that traditional sense, and to free the onlooker, to extend him gloriously out beyond the confines of the canvas. He wished to set aside the painting that captures, and to discover a movement outward, a liberation of the person.

The implications that Harris drew from this process for the literary artist are clear: he himself would have to abandon what he later called “the novel of persuasion,” the canvas of realism, for a novel and canvas that would involve the reader in a process of associative reading; that would liberate him from the assumptions and values of conventional perception. And Harris underlines once more in his article on Williams his conviction that such a break with tradition was not the same as experiment for experiment's sake:

What [Williams] sought steadfastly to guard against, however, in his new experiments was the arbitrariness or mood that is characteristic of a new school of abstract painters at the present time in England and Europe. He did not wish to gamble with colour or intuition. He sought a work of art true in itself, true to a law and discipline of relationships.

In 1961 a short piece of prose fiction in Harris' new style was published in Kyk-over-al, as if to ensure that the magazine that had played such an important role in his development and in the development of West Indian literature in general should contain one example of the new form and content for which he had argued and worked in his earlier Kyk contributions. By a quirk of coincidence this was also the last issue of Kyk-over-al to appear, and to my mind it marks the end of an epoch in West Indian writing, which had been dominated by the debate about the form and direction that the literature of the emergent West Indian nations should take. Theory now gave way to practice. In Harris' last prose contribution, “Spirit of the Sea Wall,”¹⁷ although the first-person narrator of the earlier stories is once more present, his dominating role as interpreter and philosopher has disappeared and character and plot have become secondary features. The narrator who stands on the sea wall between the rising sea and the vulnerable town is no longer an observer. Instead he becomes an active participant in the symbolic drama between the eternal sea, bringer of life and death, and the land on which man has erected his frail civilization, his Godstown. Looking at the sea, the narrator feels like, or rather becomes, “a ghost” with “empty trouser-legs” and “scarecrow feet,” the city behind the sea wall, which lies below sea level, appears to be a “buried city,” a “toy city.” The pattern of images and symbols which connect the man and the city lead the reader into wider and wider circles of association that include the destruction and ruins of the city of Troy as well as the other buried civilizations that may once have stood on the site of Godstown. A similar pattern of contrasting images is used for the description of the sea's symbolic dual nature. The “maternal forgotten sea” of the beginning of the story appears to the “scarecrow” narrator as an old woman:

She was one of that curious sea of beggar women, patrolling Godstown like conscience and muse, who floated and devoured pennies and scraps. She knew how to hug the debris of the world to her bosom. She mumbled and sagged and groaned to my cocked scarecrow hat—“I know you wouldah fall down. Neither man nor god can fight the sea forever and for good. You don't know that? Sooner or later the old lady got to get you …” She was mumbling all the time a little crazily.

Her hands “smell and taste like if they dead and they living still.” The old lady appropriates the narrator's cocked hat or head and invests it with the life of her dead lover, a transposition that changes the threat of the sea to a promise of life. Harris achieves his most terrifying and successful image of the dual nature of the sea at the end of the story by allowing the old lady to be drowned by the incoming tide in the presence of the narrator whom she has transfixed. As she is drowning, the narrator perceives her in this way:

A magical bewitching change had occurred. She straightened her back. The wind and water blew and filled her limbs and bosom generously. Every wrinkle puffed and vanished and her eyes widened and sparkled. I saw her full breasts rising and swelling beneath my starred and cocked hat. The smell in her sea-self no longer revolted but turned keen as a knife slicing the air.

The reader who all along has been participating in this transformation without consciously registering that a drowning is being described on the realistic level is suddenly pulled back into the real world by becoming aware, with the narrator, of a curious crowd of onlookers who are vainly trying to reach the drowning woman and pull her back to the safety of the wall. Their earth-bound perspective is emphasized when, having failed in their rescue attempt, one of them cries: “‘She's dead …’ unable to encompass any other living thought.” Here at last, in “Spirit of the Sea Wall” we have Harris, the mature artist of Palace of the Peacock and the subsequent novels.

Notes

1. In a review of Poems, by Leo I. Austin, Kyk-over-al, No. 20 (1955), p. 205.

2. See Reinhard W. Sander, “An Index to Kyk-over-al: 1945–1961,” World Literature Written in English, 16, No. 2 (1977), 421–61.

3. See note 2 and the bibliography of Harris' early writing in Wilson Harris, Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles, 1966–1981, ed. Hena Maes-Jelinek (Aarhus, Denmark: Dangaroo Press, 1981). In the July 1981 special issue of Kyk-over-al, A. J. Seymour has reprinted the four pieces of fiction that Harris contributed to Kyk between 1945 and 1961.

4. In a personal communication Harris recalled that he wrote four novels during this period: Of Courage and Compassion, Heartland, Horseman, Pass By, and Almanac of a Jumbi. The manuscripts of these novels were later destroyed by the author himself. The excerpt referred to here is “Banim Creek,” a section of Of Courage and Compassion.

5. This piece is “Spirit of the Sea Wall,” published in Kyk, No. 28 (1961), pp. 181–83. According to Harris it was an excerpt from Almanac of a Jumbi (1958) (see note 4).

6. Rolstan Adams, “Wilson Harris: The Pre-Novel Poet,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 13, No. 3 (1979), 71–85.

7. Kyk, No. 1 (1945), pp. 30–34.

8. Kyk, No. 4 (1947), pp. 20–21.

9. Kyk, No. 4 (1947), p. 7.

10. Rev. of The Guiana Book, by A. J. Seymour, Kyk, No. 7 (1948), pp. 37–40.

11. “Art and Criticism,” Kyk, No. 13 (1951), pp. 202–05, and rev. of Bim, No. 17, Kyk, No. 16 (1953), pp. 195–98.

12. “The Reality of Trespass,” Kyk, No. 9 (1949), pp. 21–22.

13. “The Question of Form and Realism in the West Indian Artist,” Kyk, No. 15 (1952), pp. 23–27.

14. Michael Gilkes, Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel (London: Longmans, 1975), p. 15. See also Adams, “Wilson Harris: The Pre-Novel Poet.”

15. “Banim Creek,” Kyk, No. 18 (1954), pp. 36–42 (see note 4).

16. “Two Periods in the Work of a West Indian Artist,” Kyk, No. 20 (1955), pp. 183–87.

17. See note 5.