Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (24 March 1921 – 8 March 2018) was a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but subsequently became a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging. Harris is considered one of the most original and innovative voices in postwar literature in English.[1]
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Biography[edit]
Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam in what was then called British Guiana. After studying at Queen's College in the capital of Guyana, Georgetown, he became a government surveyor, before taking up a career as lecturer and writer. The knowledge of the savannas and rain forests he gained during his time as a surveyor formed the setting for many of his books, with the Guyanese landscape dominating his fiction.
Between 1945 and 1961, Harris was a regular contributor of stories, poems and essays to Kyk-over-Al literary magazine and was part of a group of Guyanese intellectuals that included Martin Carter and Ivan Van Sertima.
Harris came to England in 1959 and published his first novel Palace of the Peacock in 1960. This became the first of a quartet of novels, The Guyana Quartet, which includes The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963). He subsequently wrote the Carnival trilogy: Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990).
His most recent novels include Jonestown (1996), which tells of the mass-suicide of followers of cult leader Jim Jones, The Dark Jester (2001), his latest semi-autobiographical novel, The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and The Ghost of Memory (2006).
Harris also writes non-fiction and critical essays and has been awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liège (2001). He has twice won the Guyana Prize for Literature.
Harris was knighted in June 2010 during the Queen Elizabeth II Birthday Honours.[2][3] In 2014, Sir Wilson Harris won a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.[4]
Criticism[edit]
Literary critics have stated that although reading Harris's work is challenging, it is rewarding in many ways. Harris has been admired for his exploration of the themes of conquest and colonization as well as the struggles of colonized peoples. Readers have commented that his novels are an attempt to express truths about the way people experience reality through the lens of the imagination. Harris has been faulted for his novels that have often nonlinear plot lines, and for his preference of internal perceptions over external realities.
Critics have described Harris's abstract, experimental narratives as difficult to read, dense, complex, or opaque.[5] Many readers have commented that Harris's essays push the boundaries of traditional literary criticism, and that his fiction pushes the limits of the novel genre itself. Harris's writing has been associated with many different literary genres by critics, including: surrealism, magic realism, mysticism and modernism. Over the years, Harris has used many different concepts to define his literary approach, including: cross-culturalism, modern allegory,[6] epic, and Quantum Fiction. One critic described Harris's fictions as informed by "quantum penetration where Existence and non-existence are both real. You can contemplate them as if both are true."
His writing has been called ambitiously experimental and his narrative structure is described as "multiple and flexible."[7]
Wilson Harris categorized his innovations and literary techniques as quantum fiction.[8][9][10] He uses the definition in The Carnival Trilogy and in the final novel, The Four Banks of the River of Space.
Harris noted in an interview that "in describing the world you see, the language evolves and begins to encompass realities that are not visible".[11] Harris attributed his innovative literary techniques as a development that was the result of being witness to the physical world behaving as quantum theory. To accommodate his new perceptions, Harris said he realized he was writing "quantum fiction".[12]
Literary technique[edit]
The technique of Wilson Harris has been called experimental and innovative. Harris describes that conventional writing is different from his style of writing in that "conventional writing is straightforward writing" and "My writing is quantum writing. Do you know of the quantum bullet? The quantum bullet, when it's fired, leaves not one hole but two."[13]
The use of nonlinear events and metaphor is a substantive component of his prose. Another technique employed by Harris is the combination of words and concepts in unexpected, jarring ways. Through this technique of combination, Harris displays the underlying, linking root that prevents two categories from ever really existing in opposition. The technique exposes and alters the power of language to lock in fixed beliefs and attitudes, "freeing" words and concepts to associate in new ways.
Harris sees language as the key to social and human transformations. His approach begins with a regard of language as a power to both enslave and free. This quest and understanding underlies his narrative fiction themes about human slavery. Harris cites language as both, a crucial element in the subjugation of slaves and indentures, and the means by which the destructive processes of history could be reversed.[14]
In Palace of the Peacock, Harris seeks to expose the illusion of opposites that create enmities between people. A crew on a river expedition experiences a series of tragedies that ultimately bring about each member's death. Along the way, Harris highlights as prime factor in their demise their inability to reconcile binarisms in the world around them and between each other. With his technique of binary breakdowns, and echoing the African tradition of death not bringing the end to a soul, Harris demonstrates that they find reconciliation only in physical death, pointing out the superficiality of illusions of opposites that separated them.[15]
Death[edit]
Harris died on 8 March 2018, at his home in Chelmsford, England, of natural causes.[16]
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Guyanese Literary Giant Sir Wilson Harris Leaves Behind a ‘Literacy of the Imagination’
The Trinidad and Tobago literary arts booth at Carifesta XI, held in Suriname, which has proudly co-opted Guyanese-born Wilson Harris. His “Carnival Trilogy” is second from the right. Photo by Georgia Popplewell, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Sir Wilson Harris, the innovative Guyanese writer who categorised his work as “quantum fiction”, died on March 8, 2018 at his home in England, at the age of 96.
Widely considered to be a pioneering voice in English literature, with a beguiling intellect and masterful grasp of language, Harris began his career in Guyana as a land surveyor. The job took him on jaunts to the country's fascinating interior, where he grew close the indigenous people who lived there. The knowledge they shared with him and the majestic backdrop of the Amazon rainforest would go on to feature in many of his novels. He explained, “I look to create a kind of community that has a literacy of the imagination in it, that can unlock polarisations and fanaticisms that bedevil us.”
Beginning in the mid 1940s, Harris’ poetry was published — alongside that of other important poets like Martin Carter — in Kyk-Over-Al, one of the region's definitive publications of the post-World War II era. Harris soon transitioned his metaphorical skill to other literary genres, expanding his writing to include essays and novels.
Perhaps Harris’ best known titles include his “Guyana Quartet” — “Palace of the Peacock” (1960), “The Far Journey of Oudin” (1961), “The Whole Armour” (1962) and “The Secret Ladder” (1963) — landmark post-colonial work that experiments with mythology, time and space.
He also penned the “Carnival Trilogy” — “Carnival” (1985), “The Infinite Rehearsal” (1987), and “The Four Banks of the River of Space” (1990) — Carnival-themed re-imaginings of Dante’s “Paradiso”, Goethe’s “Faust”, and Homer’s “Odyssey”, quite fitting given the festival's rebellious beginnings which mimicked colonial traditions and gave them its own spin.
In 1993, Harris authored “Resurrection at Sorrow Hill”, which talks about the surveillance carried out by mental asylums on their charges, and which he cleverly juxtaposes against the insanity of real life. On the heels of this novel came “Jonestown” (1996), which delves into the mass-suicide and murder of the followers of cult leader Jim Jones. Such themes could be interpreted as ripple effects of colonialism — Harris never stopped investigating the modern-day structures that continued to enforce similar types of control. Harris’ last novel was “The Ghost of Memory”, which was published in 2006.
As news of his death broke, tributes poured in on social media, with bibliophiles thanking Harris for taking them on journeys of imagination:
The Caribbean lost an icon today... #WilsonHarris #Guyana #GuyaneseLiterature #WestIndianLiterature #Caribbean #Literaturedemerarawaves.com/2018/03/08/guy…
Rest in Peace, Sir Wilson Harris (March 24, 1921-March 8, 2018). An incredible loss. If you haven’t read his work, please, do yourself a favor check it out. His essays are a special delight. Start there, and then explore his novels. #WilsonHarris#RIPen.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Ha…
My favourite book Palace of the Peacocks I still have my copy used for A Level 1982 RIP Sir #WilsonHarris twitter.com/JLowrieChin/st…
Many noted that despite the fact that his books could be “difficult” reads, they were well worth it:
“Difficult” often denotes a radical break with the syntax and grammar of market-driven, neo-colonial narrative. #WilsonHarris
Sir #WilsonHarris - a challenging writer - but once you got him, Eureka - genius! #RIP twitter.com/Petchary/statu…
On Facebook, Annan Boodram called Harris a “giant”, saying:
[…] As a teenager I struggled to understand his writings because they were so nuanced, so layered, so connotative, so associative and so symbolic.
One Facebook user called Harris “an extraordinary, inimitable visionary”, Barbadian Annalee Davis noted that “the Caribbean and the UK have lost one of their finest writers”, and while young Guyanese writer Ruel Johnson “never bought into the legend of Harris’ work”, he “begrudgingly concede[d] that the legend was not unwarranted”.
Meanwhile, Gerardo Manuel Polanco shared:
I will forever be indebted to Wilson Harris. I owe my academic career to him. He was the cornerstone, the foundation of my Graduate thesis. I used his ideas, essays, and novels in every other paragraph I wrote. The indigenous people of the Caribbean, the landscape, alternative modes of worship like Voodoo, and native myth were revived and given new meaning because of him. He changed the way Caribbean literature is written and read. Rest in power, Sir Harris, an entire region will forever mourn and celebrate you.
Yet, some contended that Harris was not given his due within the Caribbean. In 2014, there was a Twitter debate over who that year's Nobel Laureate in Literature should be, and one fan suggested it should to go a “visionary” like Harris, especially because he was “up there in yrs & you cannot win a posthumous @Nobelprize_org Prize.” But while Harris was honoured during his lifetime — including winning the Guyana Prize for Literature on two separate occasions and being knighted in 2010 — the Nobel was not to be.
On a public Facebook thread, Trinidad-based writer and librarian Debbie Jacob mused:
He never received the recognition he deserved. I loved his work and his theory of fossil memories.
Michelene Adams added:
Way ahead of his time. He made my students quake but I insisted on including palace in my Caribbean Prose course
Facebook user Frank Anthony was grateful for Harris’ “tremendous contribution to Guyanese literature” and from the United States, Louis Chude-Sokei wrote:
Very few thinkers have had an influence on me as great as his. He is one of the most innovative and radical writers and thinkers (in his style and in his approach to politics) of the last two centuries. The very idea that in all oppositions and differences we can find a ‘half blind groping’ towards new modes of community or being or art that can devour and reinvent those oppositions and differences…that's where everything I do started to make sense.RIP, Sir Wilson. Thanks for the incredible and exhausting novels (though clearly all of them were mere iterations of one long densely poetic vision). […]
Harris, who once said that “only a dialogue with the past can produce originality”, has left behind a body of work that will no doubt bequeath that legacy onto younger writers, some of whom weighed in on his passing.
In the words of Facebook user Subraj Akash Singh:
Saddened to hear of the passing of one of the greatest Caribbean writers who ever lived… ‘Palace of the Peacock’ changed my life because it changed my mind about what a novel could be. Harris has died, but his oeuvre will certainly live on forever.
Written byJanine Mendes-Franco
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