Wilson Harris, Among the Ancestors

Sir Wilson Harris, with his final novel,
The Ghost of Memory (2006)

Such is life, so death comes calling. Sir Wilson Harris (1921-2018), the great Guyanese-British author whose fiction, poetry and essays form a singular, ever experimental whole, left the earthly plane on March 8. I only learned about his passing recently, when Chris Stackhouse shared the news. Oddly enough, I had been thinking about Wilson Harris quite a bit of late, as returned to several longstanding fictional projects, and would wade back into various works of his for knowledge and fortification. He was and remains one of the most important literary artists in my personal firmament. His imagination, daring and craft really were peerless, as was his exacting inner aesthetic compass, which led him to write over two dozen books, at a steady clip, and it is fair to say that none of them are easy, but ever last one offers multiple rewards.

Over the years, I have invoked his name and work many times on this blog, particularly in conjunction with the annual folly known as the Nobel Prize in Literature, an award that almost completely debased itself when its jury gave the prize to Bob Dylan, arguably the most decision amidst a host of recent ones, while literary pathblazers like Harris, John Ashbery, E. L. Doctorow, and countless others died overlooked. One post from 2006 focusing on Harris bore the title "Four Books," and his was the second I discussed. I will repeat it verbatim here, because everything I said then I still believe, with even stronger conviction:

Speaking of passing through strange mirrors, I recently reread Wilson Harris's Carnival (Faber Faber, 1985, out of print) for the graduate course I'm teaching. I realized upon finishing it once again that it must be one of the most difficult novels written in English in the last 25 (50? 75? more?) years. Though it only runs to 168 or so pages, it serves up prose so densely lyrical, disorienting, distancing, and taxing that I have to admit my reading strategy involved pausing, then rereading, then rereading again certain passages, even though I'd already read the novel several times in the past. My conviction remains that this is a work of manifest artistry that manages tosimultaneously embody multiple genres and modes while also functioning diegetically as an allegorical narrative. I also think it stages, from the level of syntax all the way up to the level of the plot, a very complex textual embodiment and performance of epic and ritual, as a revisionary "Carnival" site in prose (Carnival and the carnivalesque, masking/masqueing, transformation and metamorphosis, performance and performativity, trauma and recovery). In this work, Harris employs a relentlessly dialectic, fractal, negative capability in writing the social, economic, political, and spiritual "history" of Guyana, the Western epic tradition, the Diaspora and diasporas, society and the self. I also suggested to the class that though he was (and is) interested at the time in quantum theory, which is most evident in The Four Banks of the River of Space (yet operative, in terms of ways of reading time and space in Carnival and the carnival), he seems also to have anticipated string theory in this book, at least as I understand it from many articles and Brian Greene's and Lisa Randall's books on the topic (which isn't very well). Harris brain nevertheless strikes me as having been on the branes before almost anyone else--in the literary world, that is.

I again looked at Carnival last fall, as I was mentoring one of my brilliant graduate students, Simeon M., and shared, by reading aloud, Harris's opening to that novel, a series of passages that seem to take metaphysical flight as the eyes and voice box move from word to word. It is a remarkable performance, refined in that novel to sublimity, and for it alone Harris should have received every award under the sun. As these things go, of course, it did not work out that way, but he kept writing, and published right into his 80s. I have his final novel, The Mask of the Beggar, and though a late(r)/last work, it glimmers with his distinctive genius. In his work, Guyana, the Caribbean, black diasporic and mixed people of the new and old worlds, the spiritual and scientific, the metaphysical, the cross-cultural imagination, as he once put it, all take flight.

I never had the opportunity to meet Wilson Harris, but I did work with him quite pleasurably for a brief period in the early 1990s, when I was the managing editor of a literary journal that was planning to dedicate an issue to him. This involved written correspondence, and I noted then his graciousness and warmth, but also his exactitude when it came to how his work should appear and what we would include. What provided me with a lesson I had never gotten before was to see his edited manuscripts, and to note how, perhaps more so than any other author I had ever read, he distilled everything on the page down to an intoxicating brew.  Covering the typewritten text like a spiderweb, his penned cross-outs and substitutions suggested a continuous search for concision not with the aim of efficiency but of discursive precision was incredibly instructive. To put it another way, Harris was not in search just of the right word, but the combination of words through which the force of his narration, his ideas, the presence of the story, would resonate most fully. To give an example, here are two paragraphs from my quotation, back in 2011, of his Four Banks of the River of Space:

"The flute sings of an ancient riverbead one hundred fathoms deep, far below the Potaro River that runs to the Waterfall. Two rivers then. The visible Potaro runs to the Waterfall. The invisible stream of the river of the dead runs far below, far under our knees. The flute tells of the passage of the drowned river of the dead and the river of the living are one quantum stream possessed of four banks. We shall see!

"So deep, so far below, is the river of the dead that the sound of its stream may never be heard or visualized except when we clothe ourselves with the mask, with the ears of the dancer in the hill. Then the murmur of the buried stream comes up to us as if its source lies in the stars and it may only be heard when we are abnormally attentive to the mystery of creation and the voice of the flute within the lips of three drowned children.

Out of that interaction came an intermittent dialogue, and I made sure to send him my work as it appeared. He also did one of the kindest things an established writer can do when back in 1994, I sent him a copy of the manuscript of my first book Annotations, and, busy though he was--and though we had never met in person and only communicated via letter or electronic means--he sent back a one-page assessment that both summed up the novel in impressive form, affirmed what I was striving for, and provided me with my first blurb. It was a generous gesture, which he did not take lightly, and I will be forever grateful to him for doing so.

Theodore Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam, British Guiana, now Guyana, in 1921. He studied at Queen's College in Georgetown, Guyana, then worked as a surveyor in the country's interior, an experience that informed his work for the rest of his life. One can see the landscapes of his native country in his first novel, The Palace of the Peacock (1960), which made his reputation, and in one his late-career masterpieces, the beguiling, trenchant Jonestown (1996), which explores the US preacher Jim Jones' religious cult and its subsequent mass suicide that took place outside Guyana's capital. Harris took up a career as a writer and editor in the late 1940s, publishing poems and essays in journals such Kyl-over-Al, and emigrated to the UK 1959, primarily to foster and further his literary career.

Wilson Harris in 2006 (The Guardian)

The Palace of the Peacock also demonstrated his interest in an approach to narrative that broke down the strictures of realism, which he had linked in his critical work to the rise of colonialism, empire and the global slave system, in favor of storytelling which was more fluid in temporality, metaphorical and metonymic, speculative, oneiric, and philosophical. In as much as Harris took Guyana's multilayered history as his template, he also drew upon numerous European canonical texts, re(-en)visioning them so that his work entailed less of a rewriting and more of a dialogue with the prior texts. In this debut novel, the quest story leads to a profound reckoning for its characters but for the Caribbean novel, and Anglophone fiction, going forward. This was a new kind of mythic fiction, and Harris would, in all his subsequent work, demonstrate its numerous possibilities.

The Palace of the Peacock initiated what came to be known as the Guyana Quartet of novels, which appeared in rapid succession: The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963). In each he explored aspects of Guyana's colonial history and present, while also delving into aspects of its indigenous past and the complex merger of cultures that opened up spaces within and beyond reality. The rainforest, the plantation, the bush, and the river become not just the sites where the novels unfolded, but chronotopes permitting an innovative mode of literary and critical exploration. Through the 1960s Harris would publish roughly a novel a year, the subsequent novels often centering on women protagonists grappling with various forms of loss, as the mythic component already present in the work moving ever more fully toward the forefront of the texts.

In the 1970s, his novels shifted to the UK and other points across the globe, including Mexico, but the revisionary conversation with Guyana's past and present, the Caribbean and Latin America, the African Diaspora and Amerindia's multiple currents, only deepened, as did his exploration of reality's multiplicities culminating in the remarkable Carnival trilogy of the 1980s, which includes the eponymous novel, as well as The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2010, and received a lifetime achievement award from the Anisfield-Wolf Foundation in 2014. His wife of many decades, Margaret, predeceased him in 2010. He leaves four children by his first wife, Cecily Carew, as well as his sister, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Who Will Receive the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature?

UPDATE: Svetlana Aleksijevitj/Alexievich, a Ukrainian native now long resident in Belarus, and author of several major works of nonfiction and fiction, including Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of History of a Nuclear Disaster, her masterpiece, was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.

You can read more about Alexievich's life and work here. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of History of a Nuclear Disaster was translated into English by Keith Gessen and has been republished by Macmillan Publishers (and Picador). A documentary based on this work is forthcoming next year.

The Swedish Academy's official announcement, with more information about Alexievich, is here.

***

This is Nobel Prize week, and as I have done nearly every year over the last decade, I cannot help but speculate on this blog, which began in 2005 with a focus on literature, about this year's winner in the literary category. The honoree will be announced tomorrow, I believe. (Here are my posts from 2005 (and after Harold Pinter won in 2005); 2006; 2007; 2008; 2009; 2010; 2011; 2012; 2013; and post-award to Patrick Modiano in 2014.)

My batting average has admittedly been poor, in part because I keep thinking that the Swedish Academy, which awards the prizes, will end its focus on Europe in favor of the broader literary world, and yet for the past decade, the annual prizes have been weighted towards European writers, or, in the case of Alice Munro--whose work I am a huge fan of--writers of European descent across the globe. The last 15 Nobelists include Patrick Modiano (2014); Alice Munro (2013); Mo Yan (2012); Tomas Tranströmer (2011); Mario Vargas Llosa (2010); Herta Müller (2009); Jean-Marie Gustave LeClézio (2008); Doris Lessing (2007); Orhan Pamuk (2006); Harold Pinter (2005); Elfriede Jelinek (2004); J. M. Coetzee (2003); Imre Kértesz (2002); V. S. Naipaul (2001); and Gao Xiangjin (2000).

Three of these writers, LeClézio, Lessing and Coetzee, come from Africa, but all are of European descent; one, Vargas Llosa, is Latin American, and again, primarily (wholly?) of European descent; and two come from the most populous country on earth, China, which before the selection of Gao, an exile living in France, had never had a Nobel Laureate in literature. Of this gathering, I wholeheartedly endorsed the selections of Munro, Tranströmer, Pinter, Coetzee, and Kértesz. I did not know of either Mo's or Gao's work before their selections. I have long been a fan of Modiano's, as my linked post above makes clear, but I think there are better Francophone fiction writers, with far greater range, such as Michel Tournier, or the much younger Alain Mabanckou (French-Congolese), and in any case, because of both Modiano's and LeClézio's awards, France's greatest living poet, Yves Bonnefoy, was overlooked yet again.

 Orhan Pamuk was clearly a political choice, and is a fine writer, but I slogged--as if wading through mucilage--through several of his books, including Snow and Black Book. Each had great moments and set pieces, but in general, I am not a fan. I may be alone in this judgment, though. I do think Müller is an exceptionally gifted writer and have written before on the blog about her prose, particularly in Nadirs, but there are other German-language writers of great talent who should have been higher in the queue, like Alexander Kluge, one of the true originals in any language. I also believe Vargas Llosa is prolific and not the worst choice, but with so many other talented Latin American fiction writers who have been overlooked, I thought his selection was a wasted choice. Lessing's selection made an important political point, though I do not like her work at all, and it was a very good choice to select writers from China, about whose literature I am completely ignorant (though I have since read one novel by Mo Yan in translation and am trying to catch up). Meanwhile, a path-blazing writer like Assia Djébar (of Algeria), for example, who in some key ways renovated the literature of her country while adding a vital voice to contemporary letters, not only was passed over, but passed away in the meantime.

Of course the Europeanist slant is the Swedish Academy's prerogative. They are Europeans, after all, and hold the literatures of that continent in the highest regard, which should hardly be a surprise. Yet the Nobel Prize has long been a global literature prize, sometimes given for a lifetime's achievement, and at other times for a work or series of works that seem to capture the spirit of the age. Many of its winners have been major innovators in their national and global literatures, and have had an outsized influence on writing that follows. Others have been eccentric choices that few people knew of and perhaps even fewer read today. And then there have been other choices like Jelinek that remain confounding. Her choice, in fact, led one member of the committee to resign in disgust. I am not sure if it merited that level of response, but apparently the rancor around her selection was significant.

So: given the tendencies of the Swedish Academy, who will they choose tomorrow? Critic and book lover Shigekuni makes some smart picks on his eponymous blog. High at the top of his list is someone I have repeated touted since 2005, and one of my favorite writers in the world, the highly original Guyanese-British writer--there really is no one who writes like him--Wilson Harris, who is now 94 years old, and who published his last novel several years ago. Harris would be an excellent and inspired choice, but for that reason I doubt it will happen. Another writer from the Anglophone world that Shigekuni points to is John Ashbery, now 88. Ashbery is one of the writers who survives from the remarkable generation of American poets born between 1925 and 1935, whose oeuvres still loom larger in our national literature, and he has been, like Harris, utterly original as he has also become, without question, one of the most influential poets not just in the English language, but globally. (To the dismay of some, I should add.) I am not sure, however, whether Ashbery's recent poetry, which sometimes reads like a parody of his best work, may have harmed his chances.

Shigekuni additionally mentions Nathaniel Mackey, another major American--and African American--poet (and fiction writer), who has finally begun to receive his due. Given two of Mackey's (and our) direct literary ancestors, the extraordinary poets Jay Wright and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, are still alive, I almost feel that either or both of them should receive the award first, but any of these authors, but especially Harris, Wright and Brathwaite, would be excellent. An African writer that Shigekuni cites, the Nigerian fiction writer Buchi Emecheta, strikes me as unlikely, though she certainly has a large and strong body of work. I have feeling that as with Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, one of my perpetual favorites, Nicaraguan fiction writer Claribel Alegría, and Brazilian poet Adélia Prado, all of these incredibly talented will continue to be overlooked by the Nobel committee, though the work of any of them should the award. Two other Latin American poets who probably will be passed over but who merit the award are Raúl Zurita, the singular, innovative Chilean poet so beautifully translated into English by poet Daniel Borzutzky, and his fellow Chilean Nicanor Parra, who is aging towards the clouds at 101--yes, he is 101 years old!--but whose poetry still cuts like a well-honed razor.

Other writers Shigekuni mentions who would be top choices, and one of whom may emerge as the Prize recipient, include Ngugi wa Thiong'o, whose prodigious writing not only sets a high standard but also helped to spark a crucial shift in African and decolonialist/post-colonial writing in general when he elected to write in Gikuyu, a language indigenous to Kenya, rather than in English. Ngugi also has been outspoken politically throughout his career, and as Shigekuni mentions, was jailed and went into exile as a result. Another is the lyrical master of Arabic poetry Adonis (Adunis, pen name of Ali Ahmad Said), a native of Syria, who has more than established himself as one of the leading figures in his language. Adonis's poetry is politically aware and clear-sighted, and has been widely and deeply praised. (I featured one of his poems back in 2005; in 2013 I had the almost inexpressible pleasure of meeting him in person, and shared a photograph of him on J's Theater.)

My thought is that given the turmoil in the Middle East, and the fact that the Swedish Academy has not honored a poet since Tranströmer and few others in the last 15 years, as well as no writer working in Arabic since Egyptian fiction writer Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, Adonis will be the pick, though it very well could be Ngugi, who more than deserves it. Ladbrokes, the betting site, has Ngugi third at 6/1, and Adonis twelfth at 20/1 but either really should be a top choice. Will the Swedish Academy do the right thing, or will it be one of the usual suspects high on Ladbroke's list? First there is the Ukrainian writer Svetlana Aleksijevitj, whose work I am not at all familiar with, though I know she is a journalist of some note.  Also high on their list are Japan's Haruki Murakami, a writer I do enjoy reading and have taught many times; Joyce Carol Oates (???); and Jon Fosse, whom I read as I was writing Counternarratives, and found compelling and somewhat like a more abstracted Pinter.

Also on the list are perennials Philip Roth; Peter Handke, who may be disqualified because of the controversy that still surrounds his pro-Serbian statements; John Banville, a writer's writer I think is very good but perhaps not Nobel-worthy; and Nawal El Sadawi, the Egyptian feminist I remember reading in my early 20s with enthusiasm. If it must go to a European writer, and it isn't one of the very senior figures like Bonnefoy, Lászlo Krazsnahórkai, who received last year's Man Booker International Prize, and whose most recently translated book into English, Seiobo There Below (New Directions, 2014), merits the epithet "sublime," ought to be the choice. That novel is peerless, and, like the late Roberto Bolaño's 2666, represents a possible, vital path for other writers to follow. (Krasznahórkai) currently is in New York City, so I am angling to find a way to meet him before he heads back to Hungary).

Lastly, there are the Swedish Academy's geographical gaps. Since Rabindranath Tagore received the Nobel Prize in 1913, no writer from that country has received the Nobel, yet India abounds in superb writers, as does much of South Asia in general. No Korean has won the award, though Ko Un is often cited as a likely choice. Indonesia's literature also has gone unrecognized. In the Americas, Brazil's rich literary tradition has never been honored with a Nobel; should it go to a Brazilian, I predict it will be either Lygia Fagundes Telles, now up in years, or the prodigious João Gilberto Noll, from the far south of the country, who published, as my colleague put it, several very "strange"--but to me striking--novels several decades ago, and who seems to be at the top of favorite lists among Brazilianists I know. (I had the pleasure of meeting Noll several years ago at a dinner in Evanston, and though he had lived and taught for a while in the United States, we rambled about haltingly, more because of my nerves than his, in Portuguese.)

Whomever they pick, the Swedish Academicians will certainly spur us to comment. If it's an obvious choice, we'll say, Of course we knew this was coming. If things go as they have of late, though, we might just be saying, well, of course I knew Mia Couto (Mozambique) or Patricia Grace (New Zealand) was going to receive the award! But really, we didn't! I will most certainly update this blog post either way.

Quote: Wilson Harris

"The flute sings of an ancient riverbead one hundred fathoms deep, far below the Potaro River that runs to the Waterfall. Two rivers then. The visible Potaro runs to the Waterfall. The invisible stream of the river of the dead runs far below, far under our knees. The flute tells of the passage of the drowned river of the dead and the river of the living are one quantum stream possessed of four bnks. We shall see!

"So deep, so far below, is the river of the dead that the sound of its stream may never be heard or visualized except when we clothe ourselves with the mask, with the ears of the dancer in the hill. Then the murmur of the buried stream comes up to us as if its source lies in the stars and it may only be heard when we are abnormally attentive to the mystery of creation and the voice of the flute within the lips of three drowned children.

"Listen to the voice of the flute. It sings and tells its tale in the English language yet solid (however whispering) music gives the Word that echoes in one's frame as one kneels uncanny twists, uncanny spirals, that relate to ancestral tongues, Macusi, Carib, Arawak, Wapishana pre-Columbian tongues that have been eclipsed.

"From such eclipse emerges the rich spoil and upheaval of the Word, upheaval into banks of the river of space. As though the flute is a paradox, it arrives at the solidity of music by processes of excavation within a living languag.

"Once cannot tame the voices of the flute, voices of such uncanny lightness yet miracle of being that they are able to tilt the two rivers, the visible and the invisible rivers, into diagrammatic discourse; and in so doing to create the four banks of the river of space into a ladder upon which the curved music of the flute ascends. Those banks are dislodged upwards into rungs in the ladder and into stepping stones into original space.

"The titled banks convert of the river of space into a sieve that spills its contents. That sieve is the antiphon of the Waterfal, it constitutes a discourse between the rocks in the Waterfall and the clouds in the sky. The spilt water evaporates into cloud, evaporates into the promise of new rain, into cloud-kinship to latencies of precipitation in and of the Waterfall through rock. And the voice of the spiralling flute mirrors within solid music the ascension of the spirits of the living and the dead through rock and cloud into space."

Copyright © from Wilson Harris, The Four Banks of the River of Space, London: Faber and Faber, 1990, pp. 43-45. All rights reserved.