The Seasons of Wilson Harris

Abstract

First paragraph: It took Wilson Harris two poetry pamphlets, a self-published poetry collection, numerous essays, an unperformed play, and at least three discarded novels before he felt he had found his creative voice. Working as a surveyor in Guyana (then British Guiana) in the 1940s and 1950s, his route to becoming a writer was not obvious. When he died four years ago at the age of 96, his name had become synonymous with a visionary artistry that is dazzlingly, even bewilderingly, crosscultural. His twenty-four novels (all published by Faber from 1960 to 2006) pose an extended challenge to the limits of narrative realism and, as he would put it in the essay ‘The Writer and Society’, are an attempt to write fiction as a ‘drama of consciousness shared by animate/inanimate features’. Starting with Palace of the Peacock, Harris, whose centenary was observed last year, honed a genre-defying language that experiments with myths and histories to reveal how ‘apparently eclipsed voices and cultures’ can re-emerge with renewed relevance for the past, present and future.