SOURCE: Thorpe, Michael. “Wilson Harris: Writing against the Grain.¹” Ariel 25, no. 3 (July 1994): 113–20.

In the following essay, Thorpe argues that The Radical Imagination represents “the distillation of Harris's thought and art,” noting that Harris is at least as influential and important a literary and cultural critic as he is a novelist.

Two recent compilations supply what may be regarded, respectively, as the distillation of Wilson Harris's thought and art and of the critical responses of an élite corps of Harrisians, devotees, and unravellers of his works during the years 1969–90. The Radical Imagination gathers his lectures and talks in the years 1989–91, including his Smuts Memorial Fund Commonwealth lectures at the University of Cambridge in 1990, “Cross-Cultural Crisis: Imagery, Language and the Intuitive Imagination.” Wilson Harris: The Uncompromising Imagination, whose purpose is to laud him on his 70th birthday in 1991, is both fittingly celebrating and, in parts, bracingly critical. Together, these volumes...