"Hieroglyphics of Space": Wilson Harris in The Waiting Room

Abstract

When providing an introduction for Guyanese readers of Wilson Harris's privately printed volume of poetry in 1954, A.J. Seymour noted an element of Harris's approach to writing which was only to become more pronounced in years that followed publication of Eternity to Season. To an unusual degree, it seemed to Seymour and to many readers who followed afterwards, the poetry of Wilson Harris is intermingled with philosophy. As writes his verse is also creating a flux of thought in which is probing ultimate matters and asking questions of life (53). Foremost among those questions has been relationship between enunciation and subjectivity, dramatized in Harris's novels as relationship between inscription and character. Though heavily invested in aesthetics of symbolic, writings of Harris early on took a turn away from commitment to an ideal of a unified speaking subject which marks and much of symbolist enterprise. While Harris has not joined postmodernist writers such as Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Amiri Baraka and Julio Cortazar in a rejection of symbolist modes of encoding narrative, his works have always participated in questioning of givens of character and subjectivity which marks so much of more interesting new writing in latter half of century. Explaining genesis of his Guyana Quartet, Harris recalls that Some years ago [he] attempted to outline possibility of validating or proving truths that may occupy certain twentieth century works of fiction that diverge, in particular degrees, from canons of realism (Guyana 7). Clearly one canon of from which Harris diverges is adherence to production of an illusion of unified characters, an illusion orchestrated in cohesive mind of an author whose own consciousness is limiting horizon of fictive possibilities. The fictions of Wilson Harris do not simply replace illusions of a realist unitary self with its expansive double, that familiar, Jungian unconscious by which individual masks itself as universal. Harris's novels explode boundaries of self and agency within a nebulous territory traversed by shifting flows of writing. In his first novel, Palace of Peacock, Harris had begun work of overwriting limit lines of realistically delineated character. The narrator of Palace of Peacock, contemplating character Donne as unnatural soul of heaven's dream, looses grammatical fixity of realism's use of pronoun and shifter when observes, he was myself standing outside of me while I stood inside of him (Guyana 26). Such an unsettling of natural physics of alters not only reader's view of protagonist, but also, as Guyanese characters might put it, reader self. While all