Sir Wilson Harris and the revival of literary culture

THEODORE Wilson Harris, the greatest Guyanese novelist, died just about two weeks ago on March 8, 2018. The media dutifully carried reports of his death, but very little about his writings or the evaluation of his place in Guyanese and world literature.
Wilson Harris was born on 24th March, 1921 in New Amsterdam, Berbice. Berbice, despite its disadvantages as against Georgetown, has produced the best Guyanese writers. Georgetown, however, offered the best education opportunities and so young Wilson was sent to Queen’s College, which in those times was a boys’ school and in effect, an English Public School. In whatever field they entered, Queen’s boys, as a group, invariably distinguished themselves.

At Queen’s itself, and after he came down, he was involved in several literary groups which, at that time, were active in Georgetown. These groups discussed literature and experimented with writing. When Harris was posted to the interior, he accordingly had a fair grounding in English Literature and in writing techniques. Harris was trained as a land surveyor, joined the Civil Service on certification, practised on the coast for a short time, after which he was posted to the interior where he spent many years before emigrating to Britain in 1959.

The Interior of Guyana, at the time Harris was posted there, was a world completely different from the coastland and there was very little physical and social communication between them. The interior was a land of deep, primaeval forests, vast open savannahs, mountains and hills and rivers and magnificent waterfalls. The flora and fauna were strange and the sparse population which inhabited this vast interior world were a few scattered Amerindian tribes, who still retained much of their pre-Columbian way of life. The most striking feature of this interior world was the deep silence which enveloped it and which invoked his dreams and streams of consciousness and created the mind and psyche which was the basis of Harris’s novels. The Hindu-Buddhist philosophy analyses the creativity and activity of such silence. It was this silence as much as the physical world which Harris encountered which was the basis of his novels.

He wrote 26 novels, all with the Guyana interior as background inspiration, and though he lived in England for most of his life, the fact of Guyana being so much part of his psyche and imagination implied that he always remained a Guyanese in exile. Harris is considered one of the most respected and influential Caribbean writers and one of the innovative and original voices in post-war literature in English. Many may find Harris difficult to read, since he moves away from the normal literary conventions such as plot, story line, logical sequence and even rationality. He sometimes expresses himself in non-rational terms.
It seems to us that Harris was struggling to express in language the infinite and this leads to the moving away from literary conventions, which are protective of, and indeed, products of the finite. The finite is expressed in positive terms; the infinite is expressed in non-positive terms. The very ancient philosophers were faced with this problem of knowing the infinite and expressing it. Over the centuries, they discovered and evolved techniques of grasping the infinite and have made available those techniques to those who desire to know them. The Hindu-Buddhist and Taoist traditions offer those techniques to all; and the realisation of the infinite is encapsulated in such terms as Moksha, Nirvana and Tao. Assimilating the teachings and techniques of these ancient philosophers would allow us to read Harris with enlightenment and joy. This is a very exciting field of literary criticism waiting to be explored.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, in Georgetown, there were regular meetings and contacts between the young intellectuals and writers and they met mostly at each other’s homes. Such persons would include Martin Carter, Eusi Kwayana, David DeCaires, Paul Persaud, Sidney Singh, the Jagans, the Westmaases, Arthur Seymour, Jodha Samaroo and Wilson Harris. This “Salon Culture” was very fruitful in throwing up new ideas and inspiring and perfecting writing. In the political embroglio of the 1960s and 1970s, this culture was destroyed. It was expected that as the University of Guyana grew and became more active, such a culture would be resuscitated but this never happened, neither on the part of the student population, nor among the academics. An essential vehicle for the academics to meet and develop such a culture is an active Senior Common Room, but this never took off at UG.

Another essential for the development of a literary culture and the production of writers are literary magazines, where writings of young writers could be published. Kyk-over-Al was such a journal and Wilson Harris wrote for it between 1945 and 1961. Arthur Seymour produced and published it for many years and on his death, Ian McDonald tried to continue it, but it unfortunately faded away.

Ameena Gafoor founded the Arts Journal, which has been published for several years now and to some extent has filled the gap left by Kyk-over-Al. It is a very high-quality magazine and though subsidised by the Gafoor Foundation, it is still expensive. The Guyana Chronicle for decades had published the Christmas Annual, which featured the works of young poets, prose writers, painters and photographers. Edgar Mittelholzer, for example, was first published in the Annual. Then the Annual faded away in the 1980s. Serious attempts have been made over the last several years to revive it. The death of Wilson Harris has brought to the fore the need for the revival of a literary culture in Georgetown, the university and at centres elsewhere in the country.

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