SOURCE: Maes-Jelinek, Hena. “Charting the Uncapturable in Wilson Harris's Writing.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 2 (summer 1997): 90–97.

In the following essay, Maes-Jelinek examines Harris's geographical and metaphorical reconception of the Caribbean and the region's potential for artistic creativity, particularly as represented in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill.

He saw the complexities yet simplicities of a fiction one may involuntarily write which involves a broken family with an entire humanity though its seed lies in obscure provinces, obscure sorrow hills.

—Wilson Harris, Resurrection at Sorrow Hill

May it not be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it?

—J. M. Coetzee, Foe

In his recent writing, both self-reflexive analytical fiction and imaginative criticism, Wilson Harris has returned emphatically to the Amerindian presence in Central America, as part of “the womb of space,” at once actual territory pregnant with physical and psychical resources, “largely submerged territory...