SOURCE: Johnson, Kerry L. “Translations of Gender, Pain, and Space: Wilson Harris's The Carnival Trilogy.” Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 1 (spring 1998): 123–43.

In the following essay, Johnson focuses on Harris's concern with the body as a metaphorical locus of gendered identity and cross-cultural community in The Carnival Trilogy.

Vaguely alarming yet unreal, laden with consequence yet evaporating before the mind because not available to sensory confirmation, unseeable classes of objects such as subterranean plates, Seyfert galaxies, and the pains occurring in other people's bodies flicker before the mind, then disappear.

—Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

In his recent work, Wilson Harris has been moving toward representing a multiplicity of bodies in relation to each other and to space. These bodies extend out toward and embody the sky, the earth, and the entire cosmos, as Harris sees the body's extension out to “the complex landscapes of the earth [as] a...