SOURCE: López, Alfred. “Meaningful Paradox: The ‘Strange Genius’ of Wilson Harris.” Conradiana 28, no. 3 (autumn 1996): 190–205.

In the following essay, López discusses the influence of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness on post-colonial fiction, particularly its representation of otherness, and argues that Harris surpasses Conrad in his writing.

What a golden jest colonialism and postcolonialism are. What untold riches! He knows as he dreams in his cradle. What a gift for a newborn child.

—Wilson Harris, The Four Banks of the River of Space

It is thus not a matter of opposing another discourse on the same “things” to the enormous multiplicity of traditional discourses on man, animal, plant, or stone, but of ceaselessly analyzing the whole conceptual machinery, and its interestedness.

—Jacques Derrida

As might be guessed from the title, this is not entirely an essay about Wilson Harris; that is, my intent here is not necessarily to...