Wilson Harris
Wilson Harris was a notable Guyanese author born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1921. He experienced a diverse life, beginning his career as a land and hydrographic surveyor, which profoundly influenced his literary work. Harris moved to England in 1959 and married Scottish writer Margaret Burns, with whom he shared a long-lasting partnership until her death in 2010. His literary contributions are characterized by an eclectic style that transcends conventional genres, exploring complex themes of identity, history, and the human experience. His debut novel, "Palace of the Peacock" (1960), reflects his fascination with the interplay between reality and illusion, and examines the cultural identities of its characters during an expedition in Guyana's interior. Throughout his career, Harris sought to challenge traditional narratives and promote a deeper understanding of self and community through his philosophical inquiries. Over his lifetime, he published 25 novels and received numerous accolades, including the Guyana Prize for Literature and a knighthood for his contributions to literature. Harris passed away in 2018 at the age of 96, leaving behind a rich legacy of literary exploration and cultural reflection.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Wilson Harris
Author
- Born: March 24, 1921
- Birthplace: New Amsterdam, British Guiana (now Guyana)
- Died: March 8, 2018
- Place of death: Chelmsford, England
Author Profile
Theodore Wilson Harris was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1921, the oldest of two siblings. He attended Queen's College in Georgetown, Guyana, an academically selective grammar school, from 1934 to 1939. After graduating, he worked as a land and hydrographic surveyor from 1942 to 1958; during this time, he accompanied mapping and surveying expeditions into Guyana's heavily forested interior, an experience that would later profoundly influence his sense of place in his writing. Following his divorce from his first wife, Harris moved to England in 1959 to marry Scottish writer Margaret Burns, whom he had met on a visit five years earlier. The two remained married until Burns's death in 2010.
Wilson Harris was an extremely eclectic and expansive writer; in The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (1983), he writes that “literature is still constrained by regional and other conventional but suffocating categories.” Influenced by such diverse figures and subjects as Carl Jung, Martin Buber, William Blake, Elizabethan poetry, indigenous folklore, and nineteenth-century expedition literature, Harris investigated the ambiguities of life and death, of history and innovation, of self and other, and of reality and illusion. He spent his career attempting to transcend notions of genre, tradition, and discipline, constructing texts founded on philosophical speculation and questioning received concepts of origin, history, and reality. In his writing, he attempted to promote new models for civilization and for creative art. It was Harris’s hope that such inquisitions of the self may prove crucial in the development of a radical revision of history, origin, and identity.
Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (1960) opens with a series of nightmare vignettes that awaken into each other; the narrator declares, “I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye.” The novel hovers between reality and illusion, death and life, insight and blindness. It chronicles an expeditionary party’s journey into the interior of Guyana, drawing heavily on Harris’s previous experience as a surveyor. In this expedition into the territory of the self, each member of the party embodies a part of Guyanese identity. A European, an African, and an indigenous Guyanese set out together in a quest to retrieve renegade farmworkers but find along the way that they are, perhaps, the ghostly repetitions of a party that perished on the same river in the early days of European conquest. The allegorical and existential significances of the quest give Harris the opportunity to delve into the nature of narration, time, space, and being. He asserts that humanity can alter fate by recognizing connections and by articulating and celebrating commonly held identities.
The themes raised in Palace of the Peacock are also found in the novels that succeed it. In subsequent novels, Harris returns to elaborate and examine the psychological and existential structures by way of which identity ossifies and resists participation in change. By carefully constructing contradictory narrative puzzles, Harris leads his readers into ambiguous regions of understanding where opposites (life and death, reality and illusion, self and other) meet. It was his hope that such expeditions of the imagination would result in greater understanding of identity and community.
In 2006, Harris published his twenty-fifth novel, The Ghost of Memory, which would also be his last. He received several awards and honors for his work, including the inaugural Guyana Prize for Literature in 1987, the 1992 Premio Mondello Cinque Continenti, the 2002 Guyana Prize for Literature Special Award for lifetime achievement, and the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement. In 2010, he was made a knight bachelor of the Order of the British Empire.
Harris died in Chelmsford, England, on March 8, 2018, at the age of ninety-six.
Bibliography
Adler, Joyce Sparer, and David W. Madden, editors. Wilson Harris / Alan Burns. Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 17, no. 2, 1997, pp. 1–316.
Cribb, Tim J. “T. W. Harris—Sworn Surveyor.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 28, no.1, 1993, pp. 33–46.
Drake, Sandra E. Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition: A New Architecture of the World. Greenwood, 1986.
Genzlinger, Neil. "Wilson Harris, Guyanese Writer of Intricate Novels, Dies at 96." The New York Times, 16 Mar. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/obituaries/wilson-harris-guyanese-writer-of-intricate-novels-dies-at-96.html. Accessed 3 Apr. 2018.
Gilkes, Michael, editor. The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris. Macmillan, 1989.
Harris, Wilson. Interview by Fred D'Aguiar. BOMB: The Author Interviews. Edited by Betsy Sussler, Soho, 2014, pp. 235–48.
Harris, Wilson. Interview by Stephen Slemon. ARIEL, vol. 19, no. 3, 1988, pp. 47–56.
Howard, W. J. “Wilson Harris’s ‘Guyana Quartet’: From Personal Myth to National Identity.” ARIEL, vol. 1, no. 1, 1970, pp. 46–60.
Jaggi, Maya. “Redemption Song.” The Guardian, 16 Dec. 2006, www.theguardian.com/books/2006/dec/16/featuresreviews.guardianreview15. Accessed 21 Apr. 2016.
Maes-Jelinek, Hena. Wilson Harris. Twayne, 1982.
Msiska, Mpalive-Hangson. “Harris, Wilson.” The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, edited by F. Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo, vol. 1, Oxford UP, 2010, pp. 434–36.
Sharrad, Paul. “The Art of Memory and the Liberation of History: Wilson Harris’s Witnessing of Time.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 27, no. 1, 1992, pp. 110–27.
“Sir Wilson Harris.” British Council Literature. British Council, 2016, literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/wilson-harris. Accessed 21 Apr. 2016.
Slemon, Stephen. “Carnival and the Canon.” ARIEL, vol. 19, no. 3, 1988, pp. 59–75.
Williams, Mark, and Alan Riach. “Reading Wilson Harris.” Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination, edited by Hena Maes-Jelinek, Dangaroo, 1991, pp. 51–60.