Fossil and Psyche by Wilson Harris
"Fossil and Psyche" by Wilson Harris explores the intricate relationship between imagination, history, and identity through the metaphor of archery, where "psychic arrows" aim at "fossil targets" representing mythic and eternal truths. Harris emphasizes the transformative potential of literature to transcend conventional boundaries separating the material from the spiritual. He critiques the "idolatry of absolutes," which restricts understanding and appreciation of literature to temporal and cultural confines. By advocating for a culturally heterogeneous world community, Harris highlights the importance of accessing the imaginative possibilities that can redefine power structures and identities. He identifies literature as a means to engage with timeless connections, suggesting that novels can serve as dream-like expeditions that challenge traditional interpretations and reveal the deeper, collective energies of human experience. Harris’ work encourages a revisionist approach to literature, urging readers to see the interplay of past, present, and future across diverse cultural narratives. Ultimately, "Fossil and Psyche" positions imaginative literature as a vital tool for fostering community and enriching the understanding of identity through a dynamic engagement with history.
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Subject Terms
Fossil and Psyche by Wilson Harris
First published: 1974
The Work
Fossil and Psyche articulates Wilson Harris’ belief that “the potentiality for dialogue, for change, for the miracle of roots, for new community is real.” Using the metaphor of archery (psychic arrows and fossil targets), he situates his novels and the work of other writers within a realm of attempts to reach architectonic (mythic) realities. He argues against the opposition of the material to the spiritual and critiques the borders by means of which the real is held separate from the imaginary. Harris asserts the potential of the imaginary to illuminate the transcendent possibilities of history and identity. Such possibilities, if realized, would result in a culturally heterogeneous world community and in an alteration of world power hierarchies.
The “idolatry of absolutes” holds readers and writers hostage to the temporal, spatial, and cultural limitations of literature when in fact those limitations are illusory. Arrows of language and imagination can reach the fossil targets of architectonic, mythic, eternal, atemporal, renewing experience. Novels by authors such as Patrick White and Malcolm Lowry, Harris claims, are dream-expeditions signaling humanity toward “a third perhaps nameless revolutionary dimension of sensibility” that evades commonly held notions of material and spiritual reality. Such an evasion is the key to enriching and understanding the value of the multiplicity of identities. Accessing these wells of timeless connection will “deepen and heighten the role of imaginative literature to wrestle with categories and to visualize the birth of community as other than the animism of fate.”
Traditional oppositions lead to inadequate readings of imaginative literature and to misreadings of the processes that underlie imaginative composition. Literature, like every aspect of human experience, is lodged within a matrix of time and space. The literature Harris addresses in Fossil and Psyche attempts to transcend this matrix, to confound time and space, to mine the architectonic fossils of human community with present psychic projections of imagination.
Novels of expedition, then, revise history and reveal the hopeful, transformative energies of life locked away in even the most deadly and deadening acts of history. Writers who embrace such a process of revision renew the creative, psychic act of imagination. Such psychic projections of imagination join past to present and future and European to African and Native American.
Bibliography
Drake, Sandra E. Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition: A New Architecture of the World. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986.
Gilkes, Michael. Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel. London: Longman, 1975.
Harris, Wilson. Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays. London: New Beacon, 1967.
Maes-Jelinek, Hena, ed. Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination. Aarhus, Denmark: Dangaroo, 1991.
Moore, Gerald. The Chosen Tongue. New York: Longman, 1969.