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  • Weaving the Tapestry of MemoryWilson Harris’s The Four Banks of the River of Space
  • Jean-Pierre Durix (bio)

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A novel about the complexities of memory, Wilson Harris’s The Four Banks of the River of Space is a return to the writer’s childhood haunts. Shunning what he calls sterile realism, Harris digs under the reality of perception and language to find the hidden music or pattern which gives significance to apparently desperate situations. Memory thus becomes a form of creation which follows the Odyssean metaphor of the quest naturalized here in the author’s original Guyana heartland. This journey into the past does not limit itself to the reassertion of the protagonist’s multiculturalism. It states that poetic language can only progress through erasure leading to the opening out of new doors or windows into essential reality, where polarities melt away.

After Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, The Tree of the Sun and The Angel at the Gate, novels set mostly in London, Wilson Harris embarked on what has become, in his own words, a trilogy, with Carnival, The Infinite Rehearsal and The Four Banks of the River of Space. 1 These three works have in common the fact that a great number of scenes belong to the author’s native Guyana and to his early experiences there as a boy and, later, as a surveyor in the forest. This return to childhood haunts was already heralded in Genesis of the Clowns, a sadly neglected novel which was published in the same volume as Da Silva and which was a development of the themes and characters found in The Secret Ladder.

In The Four Banks the reader is back to the world of Amazonian rivers and “porkknockers” familiar in Palace of the Peacock and Heartland. The characters live on the edge of the rainforest, a place where people lose their tracks or are defeated by the elements while searching for mineral riches in the form of gold and diamonds. The Eldorado metaphor is once again a figuration of human beings’ desire to possess the world and appropriate its riches, even sometimes at the cost of reducing other people (and themselves too in the process) to the status of mere puppets or instruments. There are passages, particularly in the first and fourth chapter, in which the characters progress towards a mysterious goal amidst dense bush. And yet this is not a mere repetition of the same themes or elements. In the early novels of the Guyana Quartet (I have argued for the extension of this into a quintet in order to include Heartland, a work based on similar aesthetic conceptions), linear “realistic” plot occupied more space than the metaphoric developments and variations characteristic of later pieces [End Page 60] from The Eye of the Scarecrow on. With The Four Banks of the River of Space, the South American setting is refined into more abstract elements which could potentially belong to any other place. The artist is more than ever aware that he is working through the limits and particular resources of language and imagination. Therefore the situations represented contain within their artistic expression the almost infinite potentialities of creation. Yet there always remains this element of distance, the resemblance and yet impassable gap between the signifier and the signified. But unlike some deconstructionists who conclude that this gap only leaves one with the possibility of playing infinitely with different associations of signifiers, Wilson Harris boldly assumes that there must be a center of meaning, an essence which, although unreachable, gives significance to human endeavours.

In The Infinite Rehearsal, the narration is twice removed in the sense that a preface signed “Wilson Harris” warns the reader that the story is a book of dreams entrusted by Anselm (an explicitly fictitious name) to the author’s editorship. The name Anselm is linked to Canterbury cathedral, its beauty, its past and its nave echoing with the voices of choirboys. It is also that of one of the earliest saints and intellectuals to have attempted to link religious faith and reason, philosophical speculation and pragmatic concerns with everyday existence.

At this point in the writer’s career, unlike the...

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