Limbo Rock : Wilson Harris and the Arts of Memory

Spain possessed arts of memory that were still precariously active in Renaissance Europe when the conquistadores set sail: arts of memory signifying innermost objectivity, inner-most variation and evolution in a medium of contrasting motifs of creativity. The pre-Columbian age possessed the legacies of Quetzalcoatl—however, distant or seemingly lost—signifying the evolutionary wedding of earth and sky and linkages of outer space and inner space.

—Wilson Harris

limbo . . . emerges as a novel re-assembly out of the stigmata of the Middle Passage . . .

—Wilson Harris

limbolimbo like me

knees spread wide and the dark ground is under me

—Kamau Brathwaite

I will enter into you I will enter into you woman

through the Indian forest of your hair I will enter . . . But wait

—Grace Nichols

Hey, let’s do the limbo rock!

—Chubby Checker

With (Hegel, the dialectic) is standing on its head.

—Karl Marx

In a pattern familiar to readers of Wilson Harris’s novels, Tumatumari (1968) opens with a scene which the narrator implies is a dream, but which the dreamer insists— with “a certainty which resided at the very base of memory . . . curved and reflected in the heavens as well” (16)—is not a dream. In Tumatumari, the residence of the dreamer’s certainty “at the very base of memory” becomes the setting of the novel, and on this site, the novel’s opening dream comes true, no longer the “game of inner space” but a “matter of life and death.” The blurring of inner dream space and outer material realities characterizes much of Harris’s fiction, but in Tumatumari the blurs transmute into images of a landscape, simultaneously a theater, in which cross-cultural arts of memory are recalled and performed to revise the logic of historical narrative which has underwritten the realist novel. Furthermore, through Harris’s revisionary fiction in Tumatumari, a fundamental division structuring the discourse of conquest and its later legacies in realist narratives—that of sex/gender opposition—is turned on its head and displaced.

The location of Tumatumari’s narrative at the base of memory cues readers to read differently, in a “time lag,” as Homi K. Bhabha has described the effects of both Harris’s and Toni Morrison’s challenges to western chronologies (59–60). Lagging behind and in between units of language and chronological time, we read about things previously lost to and in memory; but more importantly, our attention shifts to what Bhabha, leaning heavily on Harris’s writings, terms an “iterative, interrogative space . . . not so much a closure as a liminal interrogation ‘without’ words of the culturally given, traditional boundaries of knowledge” (59). In this interrogative space “‘without’ words” (with and outside of words?), Harris’s writing recalls Renaissance, pre-Columbian, and New World African arts of memory and their languages of place evoked in what he has called his “iconic landscape” (“Interior of the Novel” 16).

The term “iconic” immediately spatializes what we expect to be narrativized temporally and lends a ritual connotation to the space set into view, the landscape as sacred memorial image and as setting for acts of memory. Using the term “landscape” to describe his texts, Harris extended in the late 1960s and early 1970s points put forward only recently by critics such as Linda Hutcheon and Donna Harraway in their claims for and against postmodernism. Hutcheon has explained postmodernism as a discourse which textualizes and therefore denaturalizes nature as an effect of representation so that, in postmodernism, “even nature . . . doesn’t grow on trees” (2). Harraway criticizes what she sees in postmodernism as a “violent and reductive artifactualism,” stating that “. . . nature is made, but not entirely by humans; it is a co-construction among humans and non-humans” (297). Harris’s metaphors of landscape as a living text and of his own fiction as an iconic landscape address not only nature as co-productive with human culture, but cultural texts themselves as produced and read through a view of “nature” which opens onto a profound cross-cultural and cross-specieal imagination. Recently, he has described this imaginative capacity as partaking of “extra-human...