Abstract
Sir Wilson Harris is unique among Caribbean writers, not only in his style of writing, but for his large body of philosophical thought that forms a dialogue with his creative practice. As a model of the creative writer−philosopher, Harris stands in the company of other great Caribbean writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Aimé Césaire, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Édouard Glissant. His essays represent the unveiling of an artist’s thought in process. They are landmarks in Caribbean philosophy, in that they concern not only his own writing, but also explore the deepest questions pertaining to Caribbean art, aesthetics, and thought (colonial trauma, conquest, the upheavals created by slavery, time, representation, and consciousness, among other matters — as well as their links to the aesthetic process). His work is underpinned by a humanism that places the human back into the vital impulse of nature.
His work can be read, broadly speaking, as an attempt to move postcolonial philosophical thought beyond the Cartesian mind−body dualism. Showing that mind is ubiquitous, his essays and fiction first propose a vision of consciousness that spans the totality of nature. Second, humankind in Harris’s work does not necessarily consist of a “higher consciousness” that can isolate and stabilize the variables of reality. Instead, consciousness is shown to be a part of the flow of movement, becoming, and change that constitutes the “pure reality” that Harris calls the “universal unconscious” — hence the way his novels grapple with any attempt at “representing” objects in fixed and stable terms. In its attempts at overcoming the problem of dualism, Harris’s work finds many correspondences among fellow Caribbean philosophers and thinkers (Aimé Césaire, Frankétienne, and M. NourbeSe Philip, among others), as well as with the work of such European thinkers as Henri Bergson, A. N. Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze. His philosophy of organicism was, however, deeply influenced by the Amerindian and Afro-Caribbean ontologies of his native Guyana and the Caribbean more broadly. In re-emphasizing the mutual immanence between humankind and the “vital impulse” of its phenomenal environment, Harris also sought to display the often negative effects on postcolonial societies of notions of time, consciousness, and the human imposed by colonialism. His philosophy thus opened up new lanes of thought for generations of readers, and challenged epistemologies rooted in post-Cartesian, Eurocentric modes of thought. His novels brim with a rich and profuse sense of noumenal reality that lies beneath the surface of everyday appearance, a reality not encaged by space, time, or other categories of mental projection. His characters reach out to touch that reality, as does Harris himself.
It was quite some time after I had drafted a funding proposal to the Leverhulme Trust for a project on “the epic in Caribbean writing and performance” that a former professor of mine directed me to Harris’s essays. I was stunned by them. I found that they cut to the heart of some of the most salient issues in Caribbean performance art (carnival, limbo poetics, spectrality, masking, among others) with unmatched trenchancy, clarity, and an intimate grasp of the phenomenological concerns in Caribbean poetics. They were certainly much less known and appreciated than the essays of Édouard Glissant, for instance. But I was discovering that a number of Glissant’s ideas had already been anticipated by Harris (immanence, organic realism, difference as foundational to Caribbean ontology, being as relation, and so on) — and this is to take nothing away from the Martinican philosopher.
I was so struck that I needed to meet Harris. With that in mind, I emailed former publisher, editor, and critic, Anne Walmsley, as I had been told by a colleague that Walmsley could potentially introduce me to Harris. I wrote that I was conducting an ongoing project on the epic in Caribbean writing and performance in French and English, and indicated how helpful his essays were proving to me. I added that I was attempting some close readings of Wilson’s Carnival (see Allen-Paisant, 2018) and then, hopefully, of the entire Carnival Trilogy (1993/1985).
Harris was 95 years old, almost 96, and I half expected my message to be met with unwillingness, world-weariness, or even silence, which would have been understandable. But far from being silent, Wilson responded in a letter dated 21 January 2017:
Dear Jason Allen, I appreciate greatly what you have said to Anne Walmsley about my essays, which you find to be “astonishingly deep and rewarding”. I gather you have not read my novels and I would suggest that you read Time, History and Philosophy in the Works of Wilson Harris by Gianluca Delfino […] If this corresponds with what you would like to discuss we could meet in March, when the light will be much better.
For me, Harris belonged, in a sense, to a mythical time. His first novel was published in 1960, way before I was born. His letter gave me the feeling of stepping into a stream of conversation which was at once very old and very new. I was coming into contact with him as if through a distention in time. All of a sudden, from a distant gazer, admiring of Harris’s a genius and innovative writing forms, I was now becoming part of a narrative that was still alive.
Of course, he was not altogether right in his letter: I had read Palace of the Peacock (2010/1960), as I would mention to him in my reply, and had been amazed by the richness of its forms. What struck me most in this letter, aside from the fact that I was receiving a personal letter from Wilson Harris, was his generosity. The letter was typed (with a word processor) for the most part — Wilson had dictated the letter to critic and friend Michael Mitchell, who visited him often — and included a handwritten note at the end in which Wilson carefully outlined what readings he thought “may prove pertinent to the interview [I had] in mind”.
At our first meeting on April 11, 2017, the sensation was further impressed on me of a man who, despite his genius and importance, was infinitely kind and giving. I discovered that at this particular stage of his life, one of his main pleasures was to meet and converse with scholars of his work.
In that first letter to me, he generously summed up his work as follows: “You will find that the basic premise of my writing is involved with the animate and apparently inanimate worlds”. And with that, he confirmed many of my own intuitions and allowed me an audacity in my critical writing that was not there before.
On this first meeting in April 2017, I recorded around two hours of conversation with him, which was followed by a more informal chat. Wilson told me about his visits to Jamaica, spoke about his children (including E. Nigel Harris, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies). We spoke about my upbringing in Jamaica and current life in the UK, and he talked about his late wife Margaret. My April visit was followed by an exchange of letters in which I asked him questions that arose from my readings of his work and around aspects of it which I thought had not, or barely, been discussed so far. Finally, my burning questions led me to ask Wilson for another meeting. This eventually took place at his home in Chelmsford on 16 February 2018 where we held a conversation that lasted over three hours, with Michael Mitchell present.
In October 2017, I had sent Wilson a copy of my essay on Carnival (Allen-Paisant, 2018) and he was very enthusiastic about it. Upon reading it, he had rung Michael to say how much he had appreciated it and “the way I had penetrated his novel”. During my second meeting with him, the essay became a springboard for our conversation about theatricality, spectres, the text as performance–event, the influence of animism on Wilson’s work, and other related matters.
On 8 March 2018, I received news of Wilson’s death from Anne Walmsley. She mentioned in her email that she had spoken to Wilson two weeks earlier, that he had told her about my recent visit with Lucile, my wife, and with Michael Mitchell, that he had enjoyed our conversation very much, and that he liked what I was writing on his work. I also learnt that the interview of 16 February was the last one that Wilson gave.
The news of his death produced in me a tangled web of emotions: shock, wonder, mystery. A sense of destiny. In the diary entry below, I have attempted to encapsulate those emotions:
Visit to Wilson Harris on 16 February 2018. Didn’t know it was to be such a significant visit or perhaps I knew but denied it. Significant in that it was to be my last visit to him and also the last interview he would give […]. Wilson was the ghost of himself on 16 February 2018. Must read The Ghost of Memory. Probably too much too soon […] I’m afraid of how far it will take me. Wilson kept asking — he asked this resonant, probing question: “Have you asked all the questions?” He was keen that all my questions be asked. I think it was a wish that he was asking of the future. The question haunts me now as perhaps the last one he asked me. Over three hours of recorded conversation — Lucile [my partner] was there […] and so was baby in the belly. In years to come I’ll tell her that she was in the presence of this great man before he died. Wilson died on Thursday 8 March 2018, a bit less than three weeks after I interviewed him in his home. He was so vital in voice, in thought, in spirit, that I forgot about that dreadful cough […] — I had heard it almost directly I entered his living room. His mind made me feel that he would not die, that it was impossible but he would go soon, before I had the chance to send him the transcript of our interview conducted over a period of almost one year…”
The energy of the conversation tricked me into thinking that Wilson would stay around a bit longer, but deep down I knew it was the last time I would see him. I will hold dear the enthusiasm with which he answered my questions and forever remember how keen he was to know whether I had asked all the questions.
Wilson Harris is not dead. The quantum leaps of his imagination will not be encaged by space or time. Nor will his words that pierce through the haze of the everyday with a sense of eternity, of an invisible world that seizes us, only occasionally.