SOURCE: Dieke, Ikenna. “Anagogic Symbolism in Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock.” CLA Journal 42, no. 3 (March 1999): 290–308.

In the following essay, Phillips demonstrates how Harris uses symbolism in Palace of the Peacock to express ideas of deep spiritual significance that can transform the human psyche.

Critics of Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris have often noted with acute interest the remarkable way in which his fiction is driven, quite literally, by a single dynamo—the symbol-forming imagination which constructs phenomenal space as a protean theater for dramatizing in stark relief and reflective processes its underlying metaphysical reality. Harris's fiction reads like an intricate network of symbolic vignettes pregnant with evocative power and propelled by incredible moral eloquence. If proverbs are for Chinua Achebe the palm oil with which words are eaten, symbols and symbolic inscriptions are for Wilson Harris the cerate by which logos, character, locus and circumstance are invested with...