The Infinite Rehearsal and Pastoral Revision

The dramatization of selfhood, particularly in the postcolonial era as a continual negotiation among identities and pasts, is the fictional and theoretical preoccupation of much of Wilson Harris’s writing. In response to a sense of historical and cultural deprivation and to a crisis of representation in the Caribbean, other postcolonial places, and beyond to wherever personal and communal identities are closely linked, Harris offers a highly imaginative means to recuperate value.

Harris’s style—the writing of style, as well as style of writing—implies a great deal. In an important talk published in 1973—important as an elucidation of the tradition and direction of West Indian writing and as an analysis of his own creative and critical corpus—Harris describes the conventional European novel as the “novel of persuasion” in which the primary concern of the author is the “consolidation of character,” so that character “rests more or less on the self-sufficient individual—on elements of ‘persuasion’ . . . rather than ‘dialogue’ . . .” A novel of such conventional mold “may be properly assessed . . . in terms of surface tension and realism . . . in the way the author persuades you to ally yourself with situation and character.” ¹

Whereas in the conventional literary model, creative as well as social value originates in the duality of “surface tension and realism,” the “self-sufficient individual,” and persuasive writing as such, Harris claims to play upon and revise the received tradition, thereby resurrecting the novel, raising it from a stagnation to a dynamic body in which conscience and creativity are revived. With regard to this enterprise, Harris asserts the need for and lays claim to an “imaginative daring to probe the nature of roots beyond fixed or static boundaries” and “to probe the function of roots as a criterion of creativity and capacity to digest and liberate contrasting spaces.” ² For him the “fulfillment” of the West Indian novel and thus also the writing of the West Indian self originates in the ability of the imagination to continually juxtapose contrasts in cultures, places, times, and characters, in contradistinction to the “homogeneous imperatives” (37) which have governed the West Indian sense of history and self through the figures of colonial rule and legacy.

As in Harris’s other novels and as explicated in his theoretical writings and in The Infinite Rehearsal (the second volume in Carnival, his recent trilogy of novels), the endeavor to envision and articulate Caribbean postcolonial identity is narrated as a journey. Written earlier, the first volume in The Guyana Quartet, Palace of the Peacock, is a “version of the search for El Dorado, perhaps the quintessential myth of the post-Columbian Caribbean,” ³ and The Guyana Quartet itself is a re-enactment of earlier “attempts at penetrating to the central core, the meaning of the New World.” ⁴ The encounter between old and new worlds, between the conquistadorial and the Caribbean, is the main paradigm of the greater quest for selfhood and, concomitantly, social and creative values. However, unlike the earlier dramatizations of the discovery and settlement of the New World, The Infinite Rehearsal is more overtly a commitment to cross-cultural intuitive activity, “to probe the function of roots as a criterion of creativity and capacity to digest and liberate contrasting spaces.” And the novel develops into almost a desperate harangue against forces of “consolidation” and “homogeneous imperatives,” utilizing direct, philosophical advice, tricky narrative maneuvers, and recurring, often redundant thematic threads. Recuperative means are found in ceaseless revisionary strategies, constituted by dialogues among several pasts and cultural spaces as well as between intuitive innovations and molded, hardened conventions. For Harris, the ruling concepts of persuasion and consolidation have been made possible through an extraordinary investment in the alienating capabilities of individuality; he perceives fulfillment originating instead in a “native tradition of depth” ⁵ : “The point I want to make in regard to the West Indies is that the pursuit of a strange and subtle goal, melting pot, call it what you like, is the mainstream (though unacknowledged) tradition in the Americas” (32). Regeneration and freedom ultimately lie in the consciousness of the communal.

Whereas The Infinite Rehearsal is the...