reserving our literary heritage
(Excerpt of an interview with Lori Shelbourne, Georgetown, Guyana, May 20, 2009. Shelbourne is doing her PhD dissertation on Wilson Harris at the University of Leeds; this research project would constitute a vital contribution to the postcolonial field. Her MA thesis was on the historical novels of Harris.)

PP: IS THERE a leaning, a preference in his [Wilson Harris’] work to any one school of thought (in cross-culturalism)?

LS: No, I don’t think he takes sides. The whole drive of Harris’ work is perpetually to open up points of connection, or crossing if you like, between different cultures, and to engage with different cultural traditions or schools of thought in ways that not only brings them into dialogue with others, but begins to reveal strange or eclipsed facets of those traditions, so that they can no longer be seen as straightforwardly singular, monolithic entities.

And thus the idea of taking sides — which relies on the notion of two (or more) groups that remain utterly distinct and divided from each other — becomes increasingly impossible.

The Carib bone-flute that we’ve been discussing is a good example of this; for Harris’ revisitation of this tradition does not work to valorise or de-valorise one or the other tradition entirely. Instead, by considering both traditions in-depth and moving beyond surface caricatures and oppositions, Harris brings out a relation between the two. It creates, in a sense, an imaginative bridge that enables his reader to occupy and cross between both cultural perspectives: Re-reading Eucharistic ritual through the Carib bone-flute and vice versa, in ways that could endlessly throw up new comparisons and interpretative possibilities.

Indeed, Harris has quite often, in his recent work, talked about ‘strangers in the self’, whether that is the characters in the novel discovering these strangers, or we might say, moments of estrangement from their usual cultural position and perspective, or the author himself. The idea of ‘strangers in the self’ has important implications for cross-culturalism, for, of course, any notion of cultural identity will usually depend on the construction of the outsider, stranger or foreigner.

This concept runs through Harris’ fictions in interesting ways. So often, for example, a character will be revisiting — or re-visioning, to use a Harrisian word — a scene or historical moment, or an object that is completely familiar to them. And then, something happens — whether it is in the moment that they are looking at the thing, or in their repetition of it in memory. The object of their contemplation will reveal some new aspect they hadn’t recognised before. And as that happens; as something moves or changes within this apparently familiar object that one is used to occupying a particular relation to, the contemplator will also find themselves dislodged, or estranged, from their usual perspective, which is, of course, shaped by cultural traditions and legacies.

I think this kind of movement is fundamental to Harris’ art and it informs, I think, the substitutions and conjunctions that are recurrent in his work, and can be confusing to a new reader.

As when he would say, ‘the tree and rock and waterfall,’ ostensibly referring to the same thing. So, to answer your question, I would say that the whole force of Harris’ work is not to reinforce oppositional cultural identities, but rather to work at ways of undermining such biases and the constructs that they rest on.

PP: I am warming to this now; it means we ought to look at his complete oeuvre to get the fullness of his meaning, because of the number of parallels in his work. Also, we find characters disappear in one text and reappear in another, perhaps to enforce a point, or bring elucidation…

LS: …perpetual rehearsal…

PP: …infinite rehearsal. Go on…

LS: Yes. So, like you say, Harris’fiction is impelled by a kind of energy of repetition or revision. One story will often return to another story, or a particular aspect of, or character from, whether that is a story by another author, such as, for example, ‘Heart of Darkness’, or ‘The Divine Comedy’ in ‘Ascent to Omai’ and ‘Carnival’, or one of his own stories. As, for example, with the characters from ‘Palace’, which variously return in ‘The Far Journey of Oudin’, ‘Heartland’, and ‘Resurrection at Sorrow Hill’. And then there are also certain themes, like the theme of the second or third death, which again develops the idea that all apparently finished fictions and lives are open to revision and repetition.

This emphasis on revision in Harris’ work is fundamentally concerned with the capacity to generate or rediscover a plurality of perspectives, or perspectival positions, within an apparently singular event or experience, or even an object. And as such, it is crucial to his cross-cultural practise. It works through the idea that any apparently fixed legacy or history or way of looking at the world, which might seem to be based on a total eclipse of particular non-dominant imaginative traditions or histories, can still, through repetition and revision, re-disclose those traditions that it represses.

PP: There is no end to his imagination.

LS: Yes. He talks about the unfinished genesis of the imagination. The opening moments of ‘Palace of the Peacock’ provide the best example of this. It starts, as many will know, with the death of the horseman, Donne, which is dreamt and re-dreamt three times by the narrator of the novel. By his name — which is a pun on ‘done’, as in the past tense of ‘to do’ — and his repeated dying, this character is symbolically associated to the idea of the finished, or given, past event, which is an idea that history relies on.

His death is charged in the novel with the sense of an ending of the history of colonisation in Guyana, since his boat journey is suggested to be the culmination of so many other boat journeys through which the country was colonised. So, if we read Donne’s death in this way, then we can see that the narrative starts by taking up and challenging the idea that death — the death of particular historical agents — signifies the ultimate closure of a particular story, leaving that story as a fixed and immutable legacy for future generations to deal with.

Because, as we watch the moment when Donne dies, there is this strange uncertainty that is produced. We see him “stiffen,” and “bow like a hanging man to his executioner,” and then fall from his horse. And we hear the sound of a shot. It is almost like watching a scene in slow motion; as if we were going back over an important event in slow motion to try and establish exactly what happened.

And what we cannot establish — as we read the narrative — is the actual moment, and therefore, the certainty of the event of Donne’s death. We don’t actually see him die; we see a series of occurrences that, taken together at speed and with a certain set of assumptions, might lead us to believe we are certain of what happened. But taken slowly, and in detail, they just generate a whole series of alternate possibilities. So it seems that he is possibly hung, or possibly shot, or possibly once again, later in the novel, drowned. And of course, as this happens, a whole variety of alternative possible stories start to spring up. The event is therefore open to retelling and re-reading. So, at the more symbolic level, I think what this opening does is to take in general the historical idea of the closed and ‘perfect’ event — in the sense of finished, past tense — and suggest that it is a kind of illusion. So from this, we might say that what Harris is working towards is suggesting that the assumptions that shape our most immediate perception of things rely on a number of prejudices, shortcuts, assumption, and represessions; so, in this sense, repetition can be both transformative and revelatory.

And of course, from this, the moment the narrative then begins to open up a particular story that the narrator ‘re-lives’, actually or in his dreams, it is left unclear throughout the novel in ways that begin to redisclose unconscious or silenced elements of the story as it was initially experienced and perceived. So, it is this repetition that enables the building of the “windows of the world” with which the novel ends (it had started with a singular window of the world — ruled by Donne’s vision through which the narrator looks — which might in one sense be read as a kind of cross-cultural imaginative architecture.

Interestingly, Roland Barthes has said somewhere that in our consumerist culture, the practice of re-reading is not really common, except amongst the young and perhaps the elderly — there is this emphasis on consuming the next book, the next new story, which, of course suits the bookmakers and sellers.

But he says that in a first reading, one always reads oneself, by which I take him to mean, what you see is a confirmation of your own assumptions about stories, morals and values and so on; they’re not really challenged in a first reading; it is in the second, third readings that the ‘otherness’, the difference of the book, begins to effect and change its reader. So he says, counter-intuitively, that when we think we are continually reading new stories, different stories, we are actually reading the same thing; it is in the re-reading of the same that difference really starts to emerge. And I think this is a key insight into the motivation underscoring the ‘infinite rehearsal’ in Harris’s imagination.

PP: Writing from a distance in reference to the work of Wilson Harris…

LS: Well, there are a couple of points to be made here. The first is that I don’t think Harris’ work has ever really been concerned with mimetic representation; with representing Guyanese culture, let’s say, exactly as it is or was; or with that kind of notion of ‘authenticity’ in fiction, where the aspiration is to produce a representation from a perspective that is completely immersed in what it represents, and would therefore ‘ring true’ to its Guyanese readers.

I think, for Harris, that very idea is itself problematic, and this is related to the ideas we have been discussing already. For Harris has repeatedly suggested that the most ‘immediate’ perception of things; the most recognisable and therefore apparently accurate, is itself, of course, a construct that has been forged through years of history and ideology and so on. And those kinds of immediate perceptions can themselves be imprisoning.

That said, his work definitely engages in very profound ways with local knowledge, histories, and concerns. In fact, I think the level of this engagement is often missed because of all the emphasis on the universal and related ideas in his work and its criticism. ‘The Secret Ladder’, for example, involves some very careful readings of the Berbice Slave Rebellion, for example, a key event in Guyanese history, and the history of maroon communities in Guyana; the history of the political constitution in Guyana, as well as the histories of land management and development, and changes in understanding of the land.

He, in fact, has drawn a distinction in one of his essays (called ‘Continuity and Discontinuity’) between a ‘native’ tradition and what he calls ‘local prejudice’. So, by the latter, I think he means a kind of literary parochialism; a kind of ‘accurate’, in a realistic sense, depiction of local life or elements of it in a way that is concerned primarily with striking local readers as a familiar representation of their life, and thus encouraging a kind of local pride or something of the sort.

By contrast, his idea of a ‘native tradition’ is that the author plumbs so deep into local experiences and histories, that he extends there significance into or towards the universal — into a native imaginative tradition that is, as he puts it, capable of universal application. So, in these senses then, I don’t think distance is really something that becomes problematic in his work, at least in the terms that he proposes for literary value and evaluation, as his work is, in short, less concerned with the accuracy of immediacy, and more with an in-depth digestion of experience, such that distance in time or space is not a negative factor.

The other point, of course, is that, as I’m arguing in my thesis, Harris is fundamentally a cross-cultural writer. And part of the influence of his geographical movement on his work has been the ways in which it has brought us to read elements of say Mexican culture (as in ‘Companions of the Day and Night’) or Scottish culture (as in ‘Black Marsden’) in ways that connect to aspects of Guyanese or Caribbean culture, and that disclose the latent cross-culturality in these other areas of the world as well.

Responses to this author telephone (592) 226-0065 or email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com

What’s Happening:
The Guyana Annual magazine is inviting entries to its eight literary competitions, and to its art and photography competitions.

Be a part of the centenary celebrations of the National Library; see press for details.

Poetry workshop during July for emerging writers. For further information, contact me at above telephone number/email address.

reserving our literary heritage
Wilson Harris: Cross-culturalism at Work (Part II)
(Excerpt of an interview with Lori Shelbourne, Georgetown, Guyana, May 20, 2009. Shelbourne is doing her PhD dissertation on Wilson Harris at the University of Leeds; this research project would constitute a vital contribution to the postcolonial field. Her MA thesis was on the historical novels of Harris.)

PP: IS THERE a leaning, a preference in his [Wilson Harris’] work to any one school of thought (in cross-culturalism)?

LS: No, I don’t think he takes sides. The whole drive of Harris’ work is perpetually to open up points of connection, or crossing if you like, between different cultures, and to engage with different cultural traditions or schools of thought in ways that not only brings them into dialogue with others, but begins to reveal strange or eclipsed facets of those traditions, so that they can no longer be seen as straightforwardly singular, monolithic entities.

And thus the idea of taking sides — which relies on the notion of two (or more) groups that remain utterly distinct and divided from each other — becomes increasingly impossible.

The Carib bone-flute that we’ve been discussing is a good example of this; for Harris’ revisitation of this tradition does not work to valorise or de-valorise one or the other tradition entirely. Instead, by considering both traditions in-depth and moving beyond surface caricatures and oppositions, Harris brings out a relation between the two. It creates, in a sense, an imaginative bridge that enables his reader to occupy and cross between both cultural perspectives: Re-reading Eucharistic ritual through the Carib bone-flute and vice versa, in ways that could endlessly throw up new comparisons and interpretative possibilities.

Indeed, Harris has quite often, in his recent work, talked about ‘strangers in the self’, whether that is the characters in the novel discovering these strangers, or we might say, moments of estrangement from their usual cultural position and perspective, or the author himself. The idea of ‘strangers in the self’ has important implications for cross-culturalism, for, of course, any notion of cultural identity will usually depend on the construction of the outsider, stranger or foreigner.

This concept runs through Harris’ fictions in interesting ways. So often, for example, a character will be revisiting — or re-visioning, to use a Harrisian word — a scene or historical moment, or an object that is completely familiar to them. And then, something happens — whether it is in the moment that they are looking at the thing, or in their repetition of it in memory. The object of their contemplation will reveal some new aspect they hadn’t recognised before. And as that happens; as something moves or changes within this apparently familiar object that one is used to occupying a particular relation to, the contemplator will also find themselves dislodged, or estranged, from their usual perspective, which is, of course, shaped by cultural traditions and legacies.

I think this kind of movement is fundamental to Harris’ art and it informs, I think, the substitutions and conjunctions that are recurrent in his work, and can be confusing to a new reader.

As when he would say, ‘the tree and rock and waterfall,’ ostensibly referring to the same thing. So, to answer your question, I would say that the whole force of Harris’ work is not to reinforce oppositional cultural identities, but rather to work at ways of undermining such biases and the constructs that they rest on.

PP: I am warming to this now; it means we ought to look at his complete oeuvre to get the fullness of his meaning, because of the number of parallels in his work. Also, we find characters disappear in one text and reappear in another, perhaps to enforce a point, or bring elucidation…

LS: …perpetual rehearsal…

PP: …infinite rehearsal. Go on…

LS: Yes. So, like you say, Harris’fiction is impelled by a kind of energy of repetition or revision. One story will often return to another story, or a particular aspect of, or character from, whether that is a story by another author, such as, for example, ‘Heart of Darkness’, or ‘The Divine Comedy’ in ‘Ascent to Omai’ and ‘Carnival’, or one of his own stories. As, for example, with the characters from ‘Palace’, which variously return in ‘The Far Journey of Oudin’, ‘Heartland’, and ‘Resurrection at Sorrow Hill’. And then there are also certain themes, like the theme of the second or third death, which again develops the idea that all apparently finished fictions and lives are open to revision and repetition.

This emphasis on revision in Harris’ work is fundamentally concerned with the capacity to generate or rediscover a plurality of perspectives, or perspectival positions, within an apparently singular event or experience, or even an object. And as such, it is crucial to his cross-cultural practise. It works through the idea that any apparently fixed legacy or history or way of looking at the world, which might seem to be based on a total eclipse of particular non-dominant imaginative traditions or histories, can still, through repetition and revision, re-disclose those traditions that it represses.

PP: There is no end to his imagination.

LS: Yes. He talks about the unfinished genesis of the imagination. The opening moments of ‘Palace of the Peacock’ provide the best example of this. It starts, as many will know, with the death of the horseman, Donne, which is dreamt and re-dreamt three times by the narrator of the novel. By his name — which is a pun on ‘done’, as in the past tense of ‘to do’ — and his repeated dying, this character is symbolically associated to the idea of the finished, or given, past event, which is an idea that history relies on.

His death is charged in the novel with the sense of an ending of the history of colonisation in Guyana, since his boat journey is suggested to be the culmination of so many other boat journeys through which the country was colonised. So, if we read Donne’s death in this way, then we can see that the narrative starts by taking up and challenging the idea that death — the death of particular historical agents — signifies the ultimate closure of a particular story, leaving that story as a fixed and immutable legacy for future generations to deal with.

Because, as we watch the moment when Donne dies, there is this strange uncertainty that is produced. We see him “stiffen,” and “bow like a hanging man to his executioner,” and then fall from his horse. And we hear the sound of a shot. It is almost like watching a scene in slow motion; as if we were going back over an important event in slow motion to try and establish exactly what happened.

And what we cannot establish — as we read the narrative — is the actual moment, and therefore, the certainty of the event of Donne’s death. We don’t actually see him die; we see a series of occurrences that, taken together at speed and with a certain set of assumptions, might lead us to believe we are certain of what happened. But taken slowly, and in detail, they just generate a whole series of alternate possibilities. So it seems that he is possibly hung, or possibly shot, or possibly once again, later in the novel, drowned. And of course, as this happens, a whole variety of alternative possible stories start to spring up. The event is therefore open to retelling and re-reading. So, at the more symbolic level, I think what this opening does is to take in general the historical idea of the closed and ‘perfect’ event — in the sense of finished, past tense — and suggest that it is a kind of illusion. So from this, we might say that what Harris is working towards is suggesting that the assumptions that shape our most immediate perception of things rely on a number of prejudices, shortcuts, assumption, and represessions; so, in this sense, repetition can be both transformative and revelatory.

And of course, from this, the moment the narrative then begins to open up a particular story that the narrator ‘re-lives’, actually or in his dreams, it is left unclear throughout the novel in ways that begin to redisclose unconscious or silenced elements of the story as it was initially experienced and perceived. So, it is this repetition that enables the building of the “windows of the world” with which the novel ends (it had started with a singular window of the world — ruled by Donne’s vision through which the narrator looks — which might in one sense be read as a kind of cross-cultural imaginative architecture.

Interestingly, Roland Barthes has said somewhere that in our consumerist culture, the practice of re-reading is not really common, except amongst the young and perhaps the elderly — there is this emphasis on consuming the next book, the next new story, which, of course suits the bookmakers and sellers.

But he says that in a first reading, one always reads oneself, by which I take him to mean, what you see is a confirmation of your own assumptions about stories, morals and values and so on; they’re not really challenged in a first reading; it is in the second, third readings that the ‘otherness’, the difference of the book, begins to effect and change its reader. So he says, counter-intuitively, that when we think we are continually reading new stories, different stories, we are actually reading the same thing; it is in the re-reading of the same that difference really starts to emerge. And I think this is a key insight into the motivation underscoring the ‘infinite rehearsal’ in Harris’s imagination.

PP: Writing from a distance in reference to the work of Wilson Harris…

LS: Well, there are a couple of points to be made here. The first is that I don’t think Harris’ work has ever really been concerned with mimetic representation; with representing Guyanese culture, let’s say, exactly as it is or was; or with that kind of notion of ‘authenticity’ in fiction, where the aspiration is to produce a representation from a perspective that is completely immersed in what it represents, and would therefore ‘ring true’ to its Guyanese readers.

I think, for Harris, that very idea is itself problematic, and this is related to the ideas we have been discussing already. For Harris has repeatedly suggested that the most ‘immediate’ perception of things; the most recognisable and therefore apparently accurate, is itself, of course, a construct that has been forged through years of history and ideology and so on. And those kinds of immediate perceptions can themselves be imprisoning.

That said, his work definitely engages in very profound ways with local knowledge, histories, and concerns. In fact, I think the level of this engagement is often missed because of all the emphasis on the universal and related ideas in his work and its criticism. ‘The Secret Ladder’, for example, involves some very careful readings of the Berbice Slave Rebellion, for example, a key event in Guyanese history, and the history of maroon communities in Guyana; the history of the political constitution in Guyana, as well as the histories of land management and development, and changes in understanding of the land.

He, in fact, has drawn a distinction in one of his essays (called ‘Continuity and Discontinuity’) between a ‘native’ tradition and what he calls ‘local prejudice’. So, by the latter, I think he means a kind of literary parochialism; a kind of ‘accurate’, in a realistic sense, depiction of local life or elements of it in a way that is concerned primarily with striking local readers as a familiar representation of their life, and thus encouraging a kind of local pride or something of the sort.

By contrast, his idea of a ‘native tradition’ is that the author plumbs so deep into local experiences and histories, that he extends there significance into or towards the universal — into a native imaginative tradition that is, as he puts it, capable of universal application. So, in these senses then, I don’t think distance is really something that becomes problematic in his work, at least in the terms that he proposes for literary value and evaluation, as his work is, in short, less concerned with the accuracy of immediacy, and more with an in-depth digestion of experience, such that distance in time or space is not a negative factor.

The other point, of course, is that, as I’m arguing in my thesis, Harris is fundamentally a cross-cultural writer. And part of the influence of his geographical movement on his work has been the ways in which it has brought us to read elements of say Mexican culture (as in ‘Companions of the Day and Night’) or Scottish culture (as in ‘Black Marsden’) in ways that connect to aspects of Guyanese or Caribbean culture, and that disclose the latent cross-culturality in these other areas of the world as well.

Responses to this author telephone (592) 226-0065 or email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com

What’s Happening:
The Guyana Annual magazine is inviting entries to its eight literary competitions, and to its art and photography competitions.

Be a part of the centenary celebrations of the National Library; see press for details.

Poetry workshop during July for emerging writers. For further information, contact me at above telephone number/email address.