Palace of the Peacock

Wilson Harris, born in 1921 in what was then British Guiana and is now Guyana, is one of the most unflinchingly poetic British novelists of the twentieth century. Generally lumped in with such English writers from the Caribbean as Naipaul, these "West Indian Novelists" are in actuality quite diverse in style and artistry. Where Naipaul is world famous, Harris is now almost totally forgotten, and out of print. Harris, a decidely challenging read, thus today is now inaccessible for most readers in both fact and fiction! For all the variety of modern fiction, there remain certain pragmatic lines in the sand, lines no writer wishing to attain even a fleeting popularity dare cross. This explains the disappearance of so gifted a writer as Harris. Readers must it appears sooner or later need the security blankets of the concrete; what Harris spells out in an essay as "the selection of items, manners, uniform conversation, historical situations, etc., all lending themselves to build and present an individual span of life which yields self-conscious and fashionable judgements, self-conscious and fashionable moralities." Absent these literary crutches, readers shun his works, and move on to authors more forgiving, but less fundamentally exciting. Harris seeks and explores the twin themes of disorientation and human unity through language, highly personal language neither scientific nor founded, as so much of modern writing is, on the journalistic, but rather language teeming with brilliant metaphors and wide-arching similes tracking the most gyrating perspectives. Such writing deliberately confuses, and apparently is anathema for most readers; its lack of direction turns off even the young, bright demanding minds too filled these days with the narrow-mindedness of careerism. Even readers who might be willing to follow fantasy or 'soft' philosophy, such as they find in such writers as Hessse, reject a writer like Harris as confusing, pointless, obscure. The Palace of the Peacock, first published in 1960, was the author's first novel; he didn't finish it until he was nearly forty, a very late age for a novelist to take up his craft. It calls to mind a series of novels, now seen as radical or non-mainstream, written during the forties and fifties; most prominent among these works is the fiction of John Hawkes. Dense and dreamlike, the most extreme examples of this fiction seldom offer very much in the way of a traditional narrative. Describing an exploration upriver, Palace of the Peacock sometimes reminds of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Yet Harris works from such a decidely multiple vision as to refute much of the narrative point of view Conrad worked so assiduously to maintain in his story. The unfolding tragedy here takes on a marked difference, for Harris is a native writer, and he visualizes a complex and perplexing human unity where Europeans discover only otherness and disintegration. Harris continually denies any distinct one voice or certainty,

Wilson Harris' epic charts the history of the Caribbean through the metaphor of Donne's crew as they travel into a West Indian "heart of darkness."

Wilson Harris produces, in the most poetic prose, the images, traditions, and myths of the the Carribean. Although most readers will find his writing too strange to follow, those people willing to submit to his style will find themselves torn from the restrictive world of realism. Palace of the Peacock depicts the journey of Donne's crew as they pursue both indigenous laborers and the creation of the universe. The characters are simultaneously dead and alive, dreaming and awake, as they shed the burden of mere physical existence. Philosophically and stylistically, Harris is unique and intriguing. I recommend Palace highly; unfortunately, his other novels are out of print.