Wilson Harris's Metamorphoses: Animal and Vegetable Masks in Palace of the Peacock

The nature of tradition and the meaning of tradition to Caribbean and New World man, Caribbean and New World artist, are concerns which echo repeatedly through Wilson Harris’s essays. Like the Guyanese painter and novelist, Denis Williams, Harris has defined Old World tradition in terms of the integrity of the tribal persona which has formed a nexus with history, a nexus between history and art, where art validates history in the sense of reinforcing its biases, assumptions and preconceptions, whether seen from the point-of-view of the conqueror or victim. Reacting to the dominant narrative form which he argues had been adopted wholesale by most West Indian writers, Harris seeks to convince us that there is an art and a tradition, a form of narrative which intersect with, or provide a vertical dimension or scale to, an “accepted plane of society we are persuaded has an inevitable existence.” ¹

For novels that consolidate our view of the human person, in which category he would include novels of protest “based on national, political and social simplifications of experience” ² and characterized by mere surface tension and realism, Harris would substitute a narrative art based on explosive images and strange juxtapositions. Thus in his seminal essay, “Tradition and the West Indian Novel,” he speaks of “the epic and revolutionary novel of associations” in which characters “are related within a personal capacity which works in a poetic and serial way so that a strange jigsaw is set in motion like a mysterious unity of animal and other substitutes within the person.” ³ It is clear from even a cursory reading of the Guyana Quartet that the conventional character or persona of the novel is subjected to both a radical dislocation or shattering and a simultaneous inflation which subsumes all sorts of non-human resources and permits the overlapping of myth and fable from a multitude of sources.

I have used the term “inflation” advisedly; for as I have argued elsewhere, ⁴ Harris has been writing dialectical novels whose logic, derived from a source other than Anglo-Saxon empiricism, is in fact to be found in the idealist/romanticist notions of nineteenth-century German philosophy whose fundamental tenet is that of an absolute mind or consciousness embracing a totality of experience. And I think we must go back to a novelist such as Herman Hesse, for example, to seek approximations to Harris’s conception of fictional character and narrative persona. If I may be permitted to quote briefly from the “Treatise on the Steppenwolf”: “The heroes of the epics of India are not individuals, but whole reels of individualities in a series of incarnations. And in modern times there are poetic creations, in which, behind the veil of concern with individuality and character . . . the motive is to present a manifold activity of soul. Whoever wishes to recognise this must resolve . . . not to regard the characters of such a creation as separate beings, but as the various facets and aspects of a higher unity . . . of the poet’s soul.” ⁵

Behind Hesse’s insistence on the idea of self as cosmos, on personality as occupying the “perilous bridge” between nature and spirit, as an entity in flux or a state of “becoming,” we can, of course, discern the powerful influence of Hegel. Harris incorporates this logic into a conception of culture, personality and consciousness in flux, made up of many buried and half-buried elements, covered by the historical overlay of dominant economic models, and hidden by the cultural myopia and amnesia of our age. His fictional quest for a new totality, a new unity and authentic community, involves therefore a retrieval of an array of fabulous beasts and “monsters” from the past, from the pre-Columbian hinterland of the Americas, from the classical myths of the Old World as well as primitive myths and rituals of all continents. He cites specifically the need to revitalize the “fauna and flora of legend” ⁶ ; and it is to that fauna and flora of legend, elaborated into complex bestiary and vegetation imagery, I propose to turn...