SOURCE: James, Louis. “The Leech-Gatherer and the Arawak Woman.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 2 (summer 1997): 67–71.

In the following essay, James compares the transformative effects of Harris's imagination in Palace of the Peacock to similar ones in the poetry of William Wordsworth.

One of Wilson Harris's most extraordinary passages of writing comes not in his fiction, but in an essay published in 1973. Harris tells of two moments of danger surveying the Potaro river above the Tumatumari rapids at a time of high water. An anchor snagged and had to be cut loose. Three years later on the same river, the anchor again caught under the water, and, with the boat filling with water, the boatman was unable to cut it free. Just before disaster struck, the anchor came free and was brought up, interlinked with the anchor that had been lost three years before.

For Harris, the moment brought...