Anancy as trickster: Magical space in the fiction of Wilson Harris1

Abstract

In a career spanning over forty years, Wilson Harris stands paradoxically both inside and outside “postcolonial fiction”. His almost‐surrealist style holds many similarities to postcolonial mediations on the often‐fragmented nature of postcolonial identity. Yet Harris's pursuit of slivers of spiritual truth, in an age when universals are no longer popular, places him strangely outside its discourses. Such diverse strands are explored through magical re‐appraisals of space, re‐visionings that encompass post‐modern thought, chaos theory, Western literary history and the cultures of the Caribbean and Latin America. Key to such representation is the figure of Anancy as trickster. Referring to Anancy in Jonestown (1996), Harris evokes a complex web of images ‐ carnival, mask, limbo and phantom‐limb ‐ which illustrates a development from Palace of the Peacock (1960). Harris transforms the figure of hoaxer, so that it is not a faking of the past that is envisaged, but rather a re‐making of the past.