Wilson Harris facts for kids

Sir Theodore Wilson Harris (March 24, 1921 – March 8, 2018) was a famous writer from Guyana. He started by writing poetry, then became known for his novels and essays. People often describe his writing as deep and full of metaphors, covering many different topics. Harris is seen as one of the most creative writers in English after World War II.

Wilson Harris's Early Life and Career

Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam, Guyana, which was then called British Guiana. His father worked for an insurance company. After studying at Queen's College, Guyana in Georgetown, Guyana, the capital of Guyana, he became a government surveyor. Later, he chose a career as a lecturer and writer.

For twenty years, Harris worked as a land surveyor. This job took him through the savannas and rainforests of Guyana. The amazing landscapes he saw became the setting for many of his books. His experiences in the Guyanese interior also shaped how he wrote his stories. He once said that exploring these vast, wild places helped him create the language for his fiction.

Literary Beginnings and Family Life

Between 1945 and 1961, Harris regularly wrote stories, poems, and essays for the Kyk-over-Al literary magazine. He was part of a group of smart Guyanese writers, including Martin Carter and Jan Carew. Harris later published his poems from the magazine in a collection called Eternity to Season (1954).

In 1945, Harris married his first wife, Cecily Carew. She was the sister of the famous Guyanese novelist Jan Carew. They had four children together. Their marriage ended around 1957.

In 1959, Harris moved to England. That same year, he met and married his second wife, Margaret Whitaker. She was a poet and playwright from Scotland. They were married for fifty years until she passed away in 2010. They did not have any children.

Major Works and Achievements

Harris published his first novel, Palace of the Peacock, in 1960. It was published by Faber and Faber, and the famous poet T. S. Eliot approved it. This book was the first of a four-part series called The Guyana Quartet. The other books in this series are The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963).

Later, he wrote another series called the Carnival trilogy. This included Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). His more recent novels include The Dark Jester (2001), The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and The Ghost of Memory (2006).

Harris also wrote non-fiction books and critical essays. He received special honorary degrees from the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liège (2001). He won the Guyana Prize for Literature twice. In June 2010, he was made a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II. This means he was given the title "Sir." In 2014, he received a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.

Understanding Wilson Harris's Writing Style

Many people find Wilson Harris's writing to be complex and deep. Some critics say his stories are hard to understand because they don't always follow a straight timeline. He often focuses on inner thoughts and feelings rather than simple, real-world events. For example, in Palace of the Peacock (1960), a character who seems to die might appear alive again later. This shows how his novels explore reality in a unique way.

Exploring Complex Themes

Harris is admired for how he explores themes like conquest and colonization. He also writes about the struggles of people who have been colonized. Readers have noted that his novels try to show truths about how people experience reality through their imagination.

Critics have described his writing as experimental and abstract. They say his essays push the limits of traditional literary criticism. His fiction also pushes the boundaries of what a novel can be. Harris's writing has been linked to many different styles, such as surrealism, magic realism, mysticism, and modernism. He himself used terms like cross-culturalism, modern allegory, and quantum fiction to describe his work. One critic said his stories are like "quantum penetration," where both existence and non-existence feel real.

Character Development in Harris's Novels

Early on, some critics felt that Harris's women characters were mostly limited to roles like muses or mothers. However, later novels showed stronger female characters. For example, Mary in The Angel at the Gate (1982) is a main female character. Carnival (1985) also features important women like Aunt Bartelby and Amaryllis. These books show a more balanced view of consciousness.

The writer Angela Carter pointed out that all of Harris's characters are like archetypes, which are universal symbols. This means that if his female characters seem "flat," his male characters might also seem that way.

Influences and Philosophical Ideas

Early critics like C. L. R. James saw a connection between Harris's work and philosophers like Hegel. However, later critics argued that Harris was inspired by African and Indigenous belief systems. Harris himself wrote that his work explores the hidden strengths within the mix of cultures in the Caribbean and Guyanas. He believed that a philosophy of history could be found within Caribbean arts.

Wilson Harris's Unique Literary Techniques

Harris's writing style is known for being experimental and new. He explained that regular writing is "straightforward," but his writing is "quantum writing." He compared it to a "quantum bullet" that leaves not one hole, but two.

He often uses events that are not in order and many metaphors. Another technique he uses is combining words and ideas in surprising ways, often by putting opposites together. By doing this, Harris shows that seemingly opposite things are actually connected. This technique helps to "free" words and ideas, allowing them to connect in new ways.

Harris believed that language was key to changing society and people. He saw language as something that could both enslave and free. This idea is central to his stories about human slavery. He felt that language was a big part of how slaves were controlled, but also how the harmful parts of history could be changed.

In Palace of the Peacock, Harris tries to show that the idea of opposites creating enemies between people is an illusion. A group of people on a river trip face many sad events that lead to their deaths. Harris shows that their inability to accept differences between themselves and the world around them causes their downfall. Through his technique of breaking down opposites, and following the African idea that death doesn't end a soul, Harris shows that they only find peace in death. This highlights how shallow the idea of opposites that separated them was.

Harris once said that when you describe the visible world, language starts to include "realities that are not visible." He felt his unique writing style came from seeing the physical world act like quantum mechanics (a theory in physics). To fit his new ideas, Harris realized he was writing "quantum fiction." The "quantum" part of his work was his way of trying to match the demands of reality itself. This was deeply influenced by his twenty years as a land surveyor in Guyana.

He wrote about the connection between nature and his writing style: "The table comes from a tree in the forest, the forest is the lungs of the globe, and the lungs of the globe breathe on the stars. There are all sorts of connections and those are quantum connections." He explained that he intuitively rejected the idea that nature was just there to serve humans. Instead, he wanted to dive into the "living, disturbing, but immensely rich text of landscapes/riverscapes/skyscapes." This led language to break free from old rules and explore new ways of seeing.

His writing has been called very experimental, and his story structures are described as "multiple and flexible." He often uses dreams within dreams in his novels, like in The Guyana Quartet (1985) and The Dark Jester (2001). He also uses ideas from epic poetry and old documents. Sometimes, the same characters appear in different novels, like the da Silva twins from Palace, who show up in other works like Da Silva Da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness (1977).

Harris called his new ideas and writing methods quantum fiction. In a 2010 interview, he said: "I came to the idea of a quantum reality through the kind of landscape I was dealing with. You had trees, rivers, cliffs, human beings, waterfalls and you had various opposites in them. There were opposites in the land, in the rivers, in the waterfalls, and in order to write about this I had to find a method which I later discovered was a quantum reality." He used this idea in The Carnival Trilogy and its final novel, The Four Banks of the River of Space.

Wilson Harris's Passing and Legacy

Wilson Harris passed away on March 8, 2018, at his home in Chelmsford, England. He died of natural causes. The 100th anniversary of his birth was celebrated by the Bocas Lit Fest, a literary festival.

Works

Novels

(All published by Faber and Faber)

• 1960: Palace of the Peacock
• 1961: The Far Journey of Oudin
• 1962: The Whole Armour
• 1963: The Secret Ladder
• 1964: Heartland
• 1965: The Eye of the Scarecrow
• 1966: The Waiting Room
• 1967: Tumatumari
• 1968: Ascent to Omai
• 1969: The Sleepers of Roraima
• 1971: The Age of the Rainmakers
• 1972: Black Marsden: A Tabula Rasa Comedy
• 1975: Companions of the Day and Night
• 1977: Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness/Genesis of the Clowns
• 1978: The Tree of the Sun
• 1982: The Angel at the Gate
• 1985: Carnival
• 1985: The Guyana Quartet (Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin,The Whole Armour, The Secret Ladder)
• 1987: The Infinite Rehearsal
• 1990: The Four Banks of the River of Space
• 1993: Resurrection at Sorrow Hill
• 1993: The Carnival Trilogy (Carnival, The Infinite Rehearsal, The Four Banks of the River of Space)
• 1996: Jonestown
• 2001: The Dark Jester
• 2003: The Mask of the Beggar
• 2006: The Ghost of Memory

Short stories

• Kanaima, 1964
• The Sleepers of Roraima, 1970
• The Age of the Rainmakers, 1971

Poetry

• Fetish, 1951
• The Well and the Land, 1952
• Eternity to Season, 1954

Nonfiction

• 1967: Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays. London: New Beacon Books.
• 1970: History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas. Georgetown: National History and Arts Council.
• 1974: Fossil and Psyche. Austin: University of Texas.
• 1981: Explorations: A Series of Talks and Articles 1966– 1981. Aarhus: Dangaroo Press.
• 1983: The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination. Westport: Greenwood Press.
• 1992: The Radical Imagination: Lectures and Talks. Liège: L3.
• 1999: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination: Selected Essays of Wilson Harris. London: Routledge.

Prizes and Awards

• 1987: Guyana Prize for Literature
• 1992: Premio Mondello dei Cinque Continenti
• 2002: Guyana Prize for Literature (Special Award)
• 2008: The Nicolas Guillen Philosophical Literature Prize, Caribbean Philosophical Association
• 2014: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award