This essay sketches an approach to the nature of narrative in Wilson Harris's writing. I have chosen a passage ending book 2 of Palace of the Peacock, running between pages 26 and 31 of the one-volume edition of The Guyana Quartet (1985). The text is identical with that on pages 24 to 31 of the single volume paperback edition first published in 1968. My choice is guided by the fact that in this passage the ordinary narrative of events is readily ascertainable; yet even so, a reader is likely to feel a degree of uncertainty. In Harris's later works that degree is much increased. By attending to the sources of the uncertainty here, one can obtain some guidelines for reading the later writing.

But first for the relative certainties. Tutored by four centuries of narrative tradition from Sir Walter Raleigh to Sir William Golding, a Western reader immediately recognizes the situation as a typical moment in a narrative of exploration: the portage of an expedition's boat and equipment around rapids on a venture to the interior. This recognition is itself instructive for reading later Harris, since typical situations derived from traditions, whether of exploration or domesticity, still function beneath the surface. The reader is thus well advised to read quickly, without preconceptions, trusting the text to trigger recognitions which, once realized, lend orientation for a much slower rereading. Anyone who has had the experience of reading Finnegans Wake or parts of Ulysses will know how to do this.

Orientation, however, is precisely not what the writing seeks to impart. Compare the passage chosen with three other moments of fear within the tradition of novels of exploration: Robinson Crusoe's discovery of the foot-print on his island, Conrad's Marlow, perturbed by an eerie cry coming out of the mist in Heart of Darkness, or Forster's Mrs. Moore in the Marabar Caves in A Passage to India. After his initial panic, Crusoe analyzes the event in the light of reason, recovers self-control, and sets about extending that control over the new situation. Marlow, situated within Conrad's play of irony as he is, nonetheless preserves his stoic calm, which is instrumental to the operational success of his mission, however hollow the success. Forster's Mrs. Moore, after peering into her own heart of darkness, emerges to find that the experience of the echo gathers force within her, draining life of meaning, leaving her in an irritably posthumous state, playing patience, waiting for actual death. These three moments mark the stages of a traditional movement from confidence through crisis to exhaustion. The moment of fear is like a test, which all in varying ways survive. Were they to have failed the test, the story line would not have been able to continue and that is what makes them the heroes of their stories.

Harris's narrator is both the heir of this heroic tradition and a departure from it, and as such is closest to Mrs. Moore. One index of this is gender, normatively masculine in the tradition of exploration. Here, at the beginning of the passage, the male crew toil to thrust the prow of their boat deeper into the interior; by the end, the narrator has succumbed to his irrational panic and is explicitly unmanned.

Of itself this might make him no more than an anti-hero, coming late in the tradition, as in Graham Greene. But Harris's writing goes beyond this. With Defoe, Conrad, and Forster, the moment of fear is something that is overcome or, at the least, known and hence completed; the narrative can proceed through it and out the other side. The temporal horizon of the narration is concealed from the reader so that the events have the immediacy of experience, but this is really only a rhetorical device to achieve a reality effect, and the narrative is driving toward its horizon all the time. That is what keeps us reading.

Harris takes up the capacity of the first-person narration to immerse the reader in the immediacy of experience, but instead of leading the reader out the other side, leaving a completed incident behind, he lets it hang in the air in a curious state of undetermined suspense. True, in this instance the narrator appears to faint and appears to come round from his (or her) faint in the arms of old Schomburgh and young Carroll. But what actually happened? Old Schomburgh asks three times, but each time Carroll interposes an answer, and this can have only the status of a hypothesis, a possible interpretation. Carroll believes that the narrator saw something. A reader seeking to answer the question might observe that it seems more as if the narrator heard something. And, at the end of the section, when the narrator appears to be about to deny that he saw something, he represses the impulse to deny and instead leads us back over the narrative ground from which the incident sprang, multiplying its traces to the point where the exploring reader finds it impossible to determine whether the narrator dreamed the incident or the incident dreamed him.

The reader thus has to read like a common reader, with a naive openness to experience as it occurs, especially when Harris employs first-person narration, yet then question and revise the experience just had, not according to the lights of reason and doubt, but within the manifold of infinity. This process of revision is built into the writing. In a sense the act of interpretation, of speculative revision, has already been incorporated into it. In Harris's later writing that process is taken much further and consumes more of the ordinary narrative. The reader has accordingly more work to do in recognizing its vestiges and allowing their implications to expand in the mind.

What keeps us reading in Harris, then, is the experience of rereading, a constant recirculation of narrative event and sensory description. This is the pleasure of it. The originating experience is not annulled but liberated; the moment of fear becomes a moment of freedom, entered into, accepted. The driving quest of the original narrative is freed from necessity. The result is a rare and strange kind of comedy.

Take the case of this passage. The primary source of the narrator's experience is probably a complex of Amerindian beliefs. Harris would have encountered these during the fifteen years he worked as surveyor in the rain forest and had them confirmed later in his reading of local ethnographers, such as Walter Roth, or travel writers like Michael Swann. According to Roth, writing in the Thirtieth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1908–9, a number of different tribes in the Guyanas believe an individual to be partly composed of spirits, belonging to different attributes or aspects of the individual, such as the head, heart, or even footprint, and after death, these migrate to various parts of the forest. Still proceeding synthetically, Roth observes common factors in Amerindian mythology grouped around the figure of Yurokon, Yolok, Iya-imi, etc., which resemble those of the Aztec Huracan. He speculates that these figures may be identical with the Arawak idea of the Shadow-spirit of the bush, met with suddenly after an often unrecognized premonitory sigh. Any Indian so visited in the bush returns home to die.

The ubiquitous sigh, the footprint, the moment of fear, the sense that experience comes from both inside and outside the narrator—the analogues in the passage from Harris are obvious enough. That this ethnography is probably the primary material is important, because it positions the writing on the colonized side of the historical line dividing the colonizer from the native Other. That is the source of its moral responsibility. But Harris is the last person to be caught up in the sterile and typically Western dichotomies of self and Other. The act of narrating a story of exploration superimposes on the primary material a number of narrative layers—Robinson Crusoe's footprint, Marlow's eerie cry, and Mrs. Moore's disconcerting echo—all part of a Western tradition. But Harris's writing is determined neither by the native nor the Western. As he writes in his meditations on Amerindian beliefs in The Age of the Rainmakers: “The story or stories circulated about Awakaipu … are largely bound up I feel … with projections of a formal pattern—an unfeeling heroic consensus, closed plot, consolidated function or character—upon the inner breakdown of tribal peoples long subject to conquest and catastrophe.” These same terms could be turned equally on the Western tradition, save that it is one of subjecting rather than being subjected. Harris's writing frees itself from both alike. Here, for instance, his narrator does not return home to die, for he is not a character in the traditional Western sense: he has no home, and he is already, from the beginning of the story, dead. One sees the strangeness of the comedy.

Thus in Harris the nature of the narrative incident and hence of overall narrative is radically redefined. He leaves the company of Defoe and Conrad and Forster and Greene and aligns himself with the modernism of Joyce. But in Ulysses the realism of Dublin's streets and of Stephen, Bloom, and Molly's thoughts has a nineteenth-century fullness of detail, and the modernism consists partly in the imposition on that realism of a series of linguistic filters through which we discern it as best we can; in Finnegans Wake such distinctions become impossible to maintain and all that can be known is in and through the play of language.

Neither in Palace of the Peacock nor in later Harris does language become preeminent in that way. True, he shares with Joyce a sense of the relativity of our means of knowledge of the world, and that relativity inevitably includes language, but supervening on this is a more ontological concern with the world and its salvation. Harris describes The Age of the Rainmakers as a personal exploration of vestiges of legend, then adds: “In defining this exploration as an arch or horizon I have sought not to ring those vestiges round but to release them as part and parcel of the mind of history—the fertilization of compassion—the fertilization of imagination—whose original unity can only be paradoxically fulfilled now.”

Harris is both a modernist and a visionary and in this last respect jumps the smooth tracks we lay down for the development of the novel and joins company not with any other novelist but with a poet, Blake. As with Blake, the best gift one can bring to a reading of Harris is a capacity for wonder.