SOURCE: Russell, D. W. “The Dislocating Act of Memory: An Analysis of Wilson Harris' Tumatumari.” World Literature Written in English 13, no. 2 (November 1974): 237–49.

In the following essay, Russell examines the major thematic developments in Tumatumari as a complex expression of “the art of memory.”

In describing a new radical art which will go beyond the dead-end realism of the novel, Wilson Harris states “that, in fact, an art of memory which dislocates, in some measure, an idolatrous plane of realism by immersing us in a peculiar kind of ruined fabric, may help to free us from a consensus of bestiality, monolithic helplessness, monolithic violence.”¹ Just such an art of memory is used by Harris in Tumatumari in his presentation of the drama of consciousness of Prudence, and the novel becomes a complex act of memory. Although the poetic density of the language and structure of the novel continually shows...