[A study of Wilson Harris's early poems in Eternity to Season] reveals that his preoccupation throughout his career as a writer has been to reveal man's dual role as a finite being inhabiting a defined "season" of time, and as an infinite extension of certain human attributes (modified by landscape, climate and historical experience) which exist in eternity. Now Mr. Harris has published an essay, "Tradition and the West Indian Novel" [in his Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays], which unveils the theory on which all his fiction has been based.

In essence, his argument is that the traditional Western novel has based its treatment of character upon the assumption that man plays only the first of these two roles. It has largely ignored the second. This has led to the elaboration of a technique which Mr. Harris calls "the consolidation of character"; the building up of...