The Composition of Reality: A Talk with Wilson Harris

Abstract

The Composition of Reality: A Talk with Wilson Harris Vera M. Kutzinski (bio) VERA M. KUTZINSKI: You have given so many interviews over the years that it must be strange for you to do yet another one. WILSON HARRIS: The funny thing is that I don’t like to do them, but I tend to do them nevertheless, with some people. Because there are some people who have this interest, this deep interest, and one gets into dialogue. So I have a few interviews. There is one coming in a book from Liège next month, a long interview with Alan Riach, a Scottish poet. 1 I know your deep interest in these issues. KUTZINSKI: One of the things that has frustrated me is that for years I have wanted to write about your novels and I haven’t really been able to, not to my satisfaction anyway. I suspect it has to do with the elusiveness of the vision of wholeness or continuity in your fictions. It’s there, but it is unstructured, so you’re always dealing with partial images. It may sound a bit odd to put it like this, but I think that it’s easier to practice partiality when you’re a novelist or a poet than when you’re a critic. I’m not suggesting this in order to draw the line between literary and critical writing, but because I, for one, often feel handicapped by the temptation to totalize, to pull everything together into a neat theoretical package. HARRIS: I must admit that I have a great admiration for critics working seriously, and I know this is the case with yourself. I spoke of Alan Riach, who is deeply engaged with links between Scottish literature and South American and Caribbean literatures, and this may well be a good sign because it may mean that the critics are at the edge of a far-flung and diverse audience beyond a strict regional or academic model. Many in that audience are not really in a position to see these things, whereas the critic has the equipment to engage with these issues and maybe indicate some possibility, some change. KUTZINSKI: Or at least the need for change. HARRIS: Yes, so I think critics are extremely important. But to come back to your remarks about totalizing wholes, I think this comes from a conviction that people have that there are formidable models which are absolutes. They may not put it like that, but that is the kind of prejudice that obtains. [End Page 15] KUTZINSKI: That an absolute model is the only thing that is ultimately meaningful? HARRIS: Yes, so that, for instance, they would see tragedy as absolute. You know, there are many American playwrights who are deeply enmeshed in some engagement with classical tragedy as they try to sense within their own work how tragedy is playing itself through. I feel this is the case with Eugene O’Neill, and with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller as well. So, obviously, that is a sort of habit. Perhaps Wole Soyinka, in his play The Road, in bringing an African, Ogun partiality, or breach, into the numinous predicament of tragedy, points in another direction, into the “chrysalis of the Word.” But the habit is hard to break. It’s a habit not only in the mind of critics but in the mind of writers as well who very often restrict themselves out of some sense perhaps of misgiving about their place in the humanities, in the culture, that they don’t conform. I’m not saying that they think consciously like this. KUTZINSKI: So it’s not a pandering to an audience, it’s a more subtle process? HARRIS: I think there is a desire to please an audience, but that audience may have to do with the conviction in the writers’ minds, with a compulsive sense in their minds that the audience they’re addressing is an audience which is implicated in their own prejudices, in their own biases. KUTZINSKI: Given what many would call the difficulty of your own writing, both your novels and your criticism, one could accuse you of not aiming to please...