SOURCE: Durix, Jean-Pierre. “The Visionary Art of Wilson Harris.” World Literature Today 58, no. 1 (winter 1984): 19–23.

In the following essay, Durix provides an overview of major themes in Harris's novels, concluding that his art is “a deep exploration of the paradoxes of vision, for which a new approach must constantly be invented.”

When Wilson Harris published Palace of the Peacock, his first and best-known novel, in 1960,¹ the Times Literary Supplement immediately perceived the originality and imaginative power of this Drunken Boat in prose.² The creative evolution of the author since that date has led many critics to consider him a major contemporary writer worthy of the Nobel Prize.³

Wilson Harris was born in 1921 in New Amsterdam, in what was then British Guiana. Educated in Georgetown, he took part in the artistic movements which accompanied the postwar awakening in many colonial territories. His first poems and stories were published in Kyk-over-al...