Nigel Rigby (University of Kent at Canterbury), Wasafiri 17 (Spring 1993). Also in New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids Vol. 68 n°3&4 (1994), pp. 319-321.

The Radical Imagination brings together a talk by Wilson Harris at the University of Cambridge in 1989, an interview by the Scottish poet Alan Riach in 1990, the four 1990 Smuts Memorial Fund Commonwealth Lectures at the University of Cambridge, and finally, a lecture given by Harris at the University of Liège in 1991. Harris illustrates his lectures and talks with a range of his novels, and the book traces his artistic imagination through the often complex web of themes and symbols that have shaped his fiction. The Radical Imagination begins with an analysis of the opening image in his first novel, The Palace of the Peacock (1960), and Harris's discussion of Donne's death is clear and illuminating, unravelling the densely packed layers of the image. More importantly, Harris's concentration on Donne's dead seeing eye and living closed eye establishes the centrality of an intuitive vision to an understanding of Harris's art.
      Harris describes the writing of his novel as a "re-visionary" process. By this he means that during the readings of his first drafts he finds images that appear "to have been planted by another hand" (p. 17); Harris sees these images coming from an "intuitive imagination," from an unconscious self which bridges the past, present, and future. It is a measure of his confidence as a writer that he redrafts to develop the connections which these images suggest, trusting his intuition and "re-visioning" the work accordingly. In a sense, Harris appears to edit the complexity into his enigmatic novels, although he describes the process as the novels editing themselves. The editors of this volume, Alan Riach and Mark Williams, have similarly revised the lectures with the intention of producing "a text which reflected the intricate spiralling of Harris's thought and the interconnecting nature of his logic, which continually reiterates and revises itself" (p. 15). The ongoing reiteration and revision does give the reader an occasional feeling of déjà vu, and I am not sure if I would always agree with their claim that Harris approaches the same areas from different angles, but the restatements do clarify his ideas, and show where one idea connects with another.
      Harris is particularly concerned to attack the nihilistic preoccupations of the modern world, and the main theme of his work, as the editors point out, is the need to regenerate the creative imagination through a universal vision that finds a depth through the past and present of all cultures. He builds bridges to the past and between cultures and myths, giving his world an integrity and depth of reality that he sees as missing in the post-modern perception of a shallow, fragmented social reality.
      What I find particularly suggestive, among many provocative images in the book, is the ancient alchemists' theory, to which Harris refers in the third Smuts Lecture, of an intercourse between an inner and outer body, between a male and female self; this relationship was liberating, he argues, being about "a touching, but not a seizing" (p. 95). Harris sees the marriage of inner and outer body standing for the regenerative possibilities of good and evil, intellect and intuition, and black and white, which have been lost in the modern world's drive to create absolutes. Imperialism pushed the "negative" qualities into the margins and onto the colonized. In a sense, then, the sheer power of imperialism sowed the seeds of its own decay by transferring the self-regenerative parts of itself onto the Other. In Harris's argument, the suppression of the intuitive side of human nature has created a world which has deliberately burned its bridges to the past. The power to regenerate now comes from the hybridized margins, from "racial" and cultural mixture, from the "intuitive imagination" of the artist able to look aslant at the self- isolated modern world.
      Although Harris does not wish to be categorized only as a post-colonial, writer, his work is, and has always been, intimately concerned with challenging the absolutes of imperial power. It is interesting that in his notion of regeneration coming through hybridization, post-colonial theory has eventually lined up behind his thinking - Homi K. Bhabha, for instance, sees hybridization as both regeneration and resistance - and Harris was expressing a form of "magic realism" long before the genre became popular. Twenty or thirty years ago, post-colonial writing was beginning to be structured around a conflict between oppressors and oppressed, reversing the European perception of good at the center, and evil on the margins: but still keeping the two worlds separated by the historical evil of imperialism, Harris never did subscribe to that view, always seeing a complex interdependence of cultures in the past, present, and future where others saw conflict. His lectures reveal a remarkably stable vision in his thirty years of writing. The book is recommended as a fine complement to his fiction, and as an eloquent expression of a highly individual imagination.

Wilson Harris has always been something of an eminence grise in discussions of Commonwealth or post-colonial literatures. Everyone admits that he is an important figure, but few do more than confess (albeit in tones of admiration) to the difficulty they have with his highly wrought fictional prose and what the editors of his talks call "the intricate spiralling" of his intellect. Nonetheless, he has generated small groups of dedicated followers. Apart from Michael Gilkes (Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel, Longman, 1975) and some others in the Caribbean, these have centred on the university at Austin Texas (Harris taught there as a visting fellow, lodged some of his papers in the library and had an interview and several talks published), then at Aarhus University (Anna Rutherford and Kirsten Holst Petersen edited an early talk and collection of papers, Enigma of Values an Introduction, Dangaroo Press, 1975) and the University of Liège (Hena Maes-Jelinek produced a pioneering study of Palace of the Peacock, The Naked Design, Dangaroo, 1976, and has gone on to become a leading Harris scholar who has put together a representative sampling of Harris commentary here under review). Harris's vision of dynamic cross-cultural dialogue functioning amid global power systems takes his influence beyond the northern hemisphere, however, so that he appears as a touchstone of post-colonial literary theory in a book by three Australians (Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, Routledge, 1989) and inspires two New Zealand academics to edit an interview and the writer's more recent public lectures at the universities of Cambridge and Liège.

The Radical Imagination
Harris's response to questions always makes me think of Gayatri Spivak; there's a constant shifting of ground so that one feels everything ultimately is answered but nothing is directly addressed at any one moment. The reader is obliged to tread water amid the waves of intellect in the faith that constant motion is part of a gestalt of the ocean of experience - fixity, even for a moment, entails being swamped by history, dragged down by weights of bias and power. Reference to Spivak is germane in that while Harris has frequently sounded like an anticipator of post-modernism (intertextuality, slippage of signs, difference and radical questioning of cultural formations and power/knowledge systems are basic to his style and project), these essays reveal his essential disagreement with people like Lyotard and Derrida. Harris certainly resists and 'problematises' the many binaries of oppositional Western thought and imperialist or 'third world' politics, but a relativising scepticism and the retreat into ideas of civilisation as a bricolage of surface simulacra are anathema. The conceptual difference is important because so often it seems not to be there in the practice and occasionally leads to misguided interpretations of Harris's work. (The distinction is made even clearer in the interviews in Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination.) While I can think of several articles touching on the subject (and nearly all of Harris's epigraphs emphasize it), Riach and Williams are probably right in claiming that insufficient attention has been paid to the religious nature of Harris's vision (Introduction, p.11). Certainly his ever-recurrent discussion of the Carib bone flute (which picks up tangentially Peter Hulme's examination of post-Columbus constructions of cannibalism, Conrad's insight into the fearful connection between civilised 'us' and savage 'them', Carpentier's fictional foray into the origins of music) makes clear his sacamental view of history ... .

      The only reservations I have about this ... book (which is a good idea, a useful scholarly tool and a well produced product) lie with the editorial framing. Firstly the select bibliography mentions only Harris's fiction. It would be both appropriate and helpful to readers wanting to explore the 'infinite rehearsal' of Harris's ideas to include a list of previous talks and essays, especially those collected in Tradition, the Writer and Society (London: New Beacon, 1967) and The Womd of Space (Westport/London: Greenwood Press, 1983). Secondly, the editors' use of Harris as a stick to beat "the traditional practitioners of 'English Literature' [and] those championing the emergent literatures themselves" along with "most post-colonial novelists" (pp.13,135) for their clinging to Manichean oppositions and narrow "territorial interests" suggests some narrow interest of their own since it does not take into account the many novelists, commentators and theorists who have moved beyond restrictive categories to explore in both art and institution "the reality of modern writing in English globally", often moving beyond English in the context of postcoloniality to a vision of complex hybrid interaction that approximates to Harris's own ideas. Indeed, though I concur with their incorporation of Spenser to discussion of the postcolonial process, the editors' claim that "Harris ... stands at the end of a process of which Spenser marks the beginning" (p.14) suggests a simple fixity of the binary and the linear that is at odds with the holistic mutability of Harris's content and style.

      The material itself focusses mostly Carnival and The Four Banks of the River of Space, though, as with all of Harris's talks, it is the process of writing, the redemptive capacity of the creative imagination and the relation of his images to civilization generally that become the subject matter. "Judgement and Dream" offers us a brief but crucial insight into the writer's practice of revising drafts and the importance of Jungian imagery in a "ceaseless rehearsal" of accessing and revising the buried past and "endorsing differences yet creatively undermining biases" (p.2O). 'Authoritarian realism is rejected in favour of 'the native', the mythic and the allegorical, and his novels become a "net ting of intuitive images" that are frail, fleeting and multi-faceted (interview, pp33-4). Harris attacks popular political movements and the Humanities alike for installing "self-righteous deprivations" that perpetuate oppositional power relationships and foreclose on imaginative (re)vision in which Old and New World elements are intertwined. Black Marsden enacts a "tilting of the field" in an effort to (re) discover hidden connections and other possibilities in a post- Renaissance rationalist econometric world that in later texts increasingly moves through modern technology and Greek tragedy into playing with ideas from quantum physics and Dante, all in a quest after "therapeutic value". The talks all embroider around these ideas, interspersing biographical snippets and a global range of reference from Macusi and Aztec culture to Giordano Bruno, Aborigines to Titian, Ulysses to the Atom Bomb. Harris's non-fiction is of a piece with his fiction and both are like the circulation of Venetian glass beads through the trade routes of Africa: the pattern of circulation is always there though the individual beads may differ; on the micro-level, though the colour threads may change from bead to bead, the cross sectional designs are always similar and always consistent at any one point in each bead. The fascination is in imagining the processes of circulation and creation, the beauty and terror behind the artifacts ... .

      These books [i.e. The Radical Imagination and The Uncompromising Imagination, the other book under review] are in the 'must get' category for anyone interested in the work of Wilson Harris and are object lessons in the movement and theory of post-colonial writing generally.