Selected Essays of Wilson Harris (review)

Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. Andrew Bundy. London: Routledge, 1999.

It was Coleridge who said that a truly original writer creates the taste by which he is to be relished. His dictum issued from the upheaval in the principles of artistic creation and criticism retrospectively identified as Romanticism. He might have added that it is often the writers themselves who write the seminal essays defining the principles. The same happened again with Pound, Eliot, and Modernism: The Sacred Wood was quickly recognized in universities as a vade mecum for the new literature. The same has happened yet again with the new literatures in English, with the exception that this time people in universities, preoccupied with their own theories as they are, have not been so quick to perceive that in Soyinka, Murray, Walcott, and Harris they have been vouchsafed a new canon of critical writings of remarkable originality.

This relative neglect is especially to be regretted in the case of Harris, for he was examining some of the European philosophic sources of poststructuralist and deconstructive theory, such as Heidegger, back in the '40s and '50s, and one of the many values of his essays is that they firmly mark out the autonomy of the territory of art. Indeed, it is from his own practice as creative artist that his innovative critical ideas are derived. Writers have not been so slow on the uptake as academics: Pauline Melville, Fred D'Aguiar, and David Dabydeen comprise a school of Guyana all acknowledging Harris as their master. They thereby testify to a potent influence according to the usual understanding of literary influences, and that alone should draw attention to his essays; but Harris's importance extends well beyond that. He is the best intellectual and imaginative resource we have for understanding all those kinds of writing at present incoherently addressed by postcolonial theory. Consider the originality of his readings of the African presence in American literature from Poe and Whitman through Faulkner to Ellison, first published in Womb of Space and selectively reprinted in part 2 of this collection. In his introduction, Bundy does well to bring Lawrence 's Studies in Classic American Literature into comparison; one might also add Carlos Williams's In the American Grain. All three books show a writer's inwardness not only with the achievement of other writers but also with the further potential of their material, the alternative books within the books, and of the three it is Harris's liberation of what one might call the postcolonial potential within colonial texts that is the most dynamic for our times.

This is shown when Harris turns his approach on the times themselves in several addresses and essays scattered through the selection, notably "Merlin and Parsifal" at the end of part 1, "Literacy and the Imagination" introducing the mainly American section already mentioned, and "In the Name of Liberty" in part 4, which takes the collapse of Soviet Communism as its point of departure. In these he "reads" whole cultures, political traditions, and national histories à la Walter Benjamin, against their grain, so as to liberate them from what ,in "Merlin and Parsifal," he calls "the realism of war, trade, money and privilege" (50). He is able to do this by the same principle that he reads, say, Poe: that is, by releasing the alternatives that a single line of narrative has to suppress in order to constitute itself as dominant. More than this, his way of reading reveals not only the covert reciprocity between oppressor and oppressed within a culture but also explores "the hidden rapport which may exist between adversarial cultures" (58), for example the Spanish and the Caribs. His method also gives him a criterion by which he can assess the worth of other approaches. Jung, for example, "is not the first great European thinker to bring tradition upon a frontier that is never crossed" (61). Harris may have Conrad in mind here from an earlier essay...