SOURCE: Cribb, Timothy J. “Toward the Reading of Wilson Harris.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 2 (summer 1997): 59–62.

In the following essay, Cribb suggests an approach to analyzing the elements of narrative in the fiction of Harris, concluding that Harris is “both a modernist and a visionary.”

This essay sketches an approach to the nature of narrative in Wilson Harris's writing. I have chosen a passage ending book 2 of Palace of the Peacock, running between pages 26 and 31 of the one-volume edition of The Guyana Quartet (1985). The text is identical with that on pages 24 to 31 of the single volume paperback edition first published in 1968. My choice is guided by the fact that in this passage the ordinary narrative of events is readily ascertainable; yet even so, a reader is likely to feel a degree of uncertainty. In Harris's later works that degree is much increased. By attending to the sources of...