SOURCE: Raine, Kathleen. “Discovering Wilson Harris.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 2 (summer 1997): 42–45.

In the following essay, Raine discusses the role cultural preconceptions play in Harris's works, noting his reliance on imagination and beauty.

It is the mark of the new that we never know what it will be until it arrives. Of one thing only we can be sure, that it is unpredictable and is never the outcome of existing “trends.” The wind that bloweth where it listeth is unconstrained, blows round corners. Current ideologies determined by mechanistic and “evolutionary” premises are likely to see the future as the product of the past, whereas perhaps that past is the product of the future in a living—and therefore purposeful—universe. Teleology, rejected by Darwinian evolutionism, returns. In Wilson Harris's world it is premises which are in question, the unknowable determinants. Thus the figure of Virgil and the meaning...