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Selected Essays: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination
Wilson Harris is one of the outstanding literary innovators of the century. His novels date from The Palace of the Peacock to Jonestown. This long-awaited volume matches Harris's career with his critical writings, from 1961 to the present day. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris brings together twenty-one lectures, addresses and essays to make available Harris's full range of writings on subjects including:
• the literate imagination
• traditions of myth and fable in Central and South America
• the North American literary imagination, from Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville and Ralph Ellison, to William Faulkner and Jean Rhys
• inheritances and legacies of writers of the postcolonial diaspora
This comprehensive collection also comes complete with:
• an extensive editorial introduction, providing valuable historical and theoretical context for the essays
• a map of Guyana
• bibliographies of Harris's fiction and non-fiction
• appendices on the legends of El Dorado and the Holy Grail.
• the literate imagination
• traditions of myth and fable in Central and South America
• the North American literary imagination, from Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville and Ralph Ellison, to William Faulkner and Jean Rhys
• inheritances and legacies of writers of the postcolonial diaspora
This comprehensive collection also comes complete with:
• an extensive editorial introduction, providing valuable historical and theoretical context for the essays
• a map of Guyana
• bibliographies of Harris's fiction and non-fiction
• appendices on the legends of El Dorado and the Holy Grail.
- GenresEssays
308 pages, Paperback
First published January 14, 1999
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March 22, 2026
The Music of Living Landscapes
41 ‘One flanking ocean – with its subdued, perennial roar against sea-wall and sea-defences – is the Atlantic, the other is green and tall, unlit by the surf of electricity on rainforests wave upon wave of wind-blown savannahs running into Brazil and Venezuela.’
44 ‘When I come upon a felled tree in a park in England it sometimes shapes itself in my inner eye as the epitaph of a murdered forest in Brazil, or Guyana, or Venezuela.
I seek—as if imbued by Lazarus’s mind in my mind, Lazarus’s dream of cosmic love—to re-clothe that tree with the music of consciousness, with rustling, whispering branches in the foliage it has lost.
I picture the tools that felled the tree as newsprung branches themselves within a parable of creation which gives breath to iron or wood or rock. Adam was moulded, it is said, from clay. Thus the technology that killed the tree arrives or returns as living branches in the risen tree itself.
Each newsprung branch—whether wood, or iron or stone—sees itself now as susceptible to a more deadly invention or tool than it had been when it felled the kinship, resurrected tree, parent or child, to which it has returned. The risen tree, in my consciousness, veils flesh-and- blood into itself within a revisionary dynamic of creation and re-creation. Even as the technology of clay was moulded in genesis into Adam’s pulse, Adam’s breath.
Cities have come to nestle in branches of clay or stone in valleys or mountains. They too may be re-visited with an inner eye to see how vulnerable they are. Their hope is born of the life of imagination’s tree in which sculptor and painter and architect and carpenter and mystic sensitize and re-sensitize themselves to rhythms and pulses orchestrated through being and apparent non-being.
In such a re-visionary muse, or music of consciousness, the tree suspends itself, promotes itself by degrees, within theatres of crisis that might be seen or read or gleaned through a variety of perspectives...
The sleeping yet singing rocks of ancient Amerindian legend grow in that tree...
I hear them as I stand in the open parkland in Kensington Gardens half-a-mile or more from the orchestra of the traffic arriving at, or coming from, Marble Arch…’
Merlin and Parsifal
58 ‘Every alteration in the fabric of a living landscape is akin to a man-made garment society wears. Society clothes itself in man-made caves, towering fabricated hillsides or skyscrapers, underwater mechanical crocodiles, bird-rockets, agile, engineered dinosaurs and tanks.’
Literacy and the Imagination
85 ‘Now we see here another aspect of this rehearsal, this infinite rehearsal, because one is rehearsing the various ways in which the horseman may have died. We come to the wound, the central wound which has been administered.’
86 ‘I am convinced that there is a tradition in depth which returns, which nourishes us even though it appears to have vanished, and that it creates a fiction in the ways in which the creative imagination comes into dialogue with clues of revisionary moment. The spectral burden of vanishing and re-appearing is at the heart of the writer’s task.’
88 ‘So we see the glass sides of a ship (the womb of the ship) which reminds you of the glass woman – half glass, half flesh.’
The Schizophrenic Sea
101 ‘The play of arbitrating forces should be associated with an asymmetry within the infinity and genius of art. This does not in any way imply that symmetries are false but it demonstrates that orders of symmetry may appear universal—may seek to pre-empt infinity —though they may actually be no more than useful, sometimes brilliant, extensions and inversions of a binding prejudice and locality. The stranger beauty of asymmetry lies in its subtle transformations of phenomena bound or tamed within a mask of universality and within patterns of elegant tautology—sometimes within patterns of unconscious parody of the past—sometimes within patterns that seek to reify territorial legend into moral or conquistadorial imperative symmetrized by habit or education into our perception of humanity.’
101 ‘Asymmetric infinity, on the other hand, implies an enfolding and unfolding of cultures beyond tamed vision, or totalitarian caprice and loss of revolutionary soul, it implies unseen yet real natures whose life is indefatigable (and thus it may, indeed must, occasion a sense of exhaustion within ephemeral structuralism), and whose therapeutic horizons-in-depth lie beyond logical fate that frames canvases of existence.’
106 ‘The emergence of asymmetric future through fissured past and present symmetries or models leads to the notion of a bridge that inevitably breaks to convey the paradox of creation in both the heights (above the bridge) and the depths (beneath the bridge).’
History, Fable and Myth
157 ‘Limbo then reflects a certain kind of gateway to or threshold of a new world and the dislocation of a chain of miles. It is – in some ways – the archetypal sea-change stemming from Old Worlds and it is legitimate, I feel, to pun on limbo as a kind of shared phantom limb which has become a subconscious variable in West Indian theatre.
159 ‘First of all the limbo dance becomes the human gateway which dislocates (and therefore begins to free itself from) a uniform chain of miles across the Atlantic. This dislocation or interior space serves therefore as a corrective to a uniform cloak or documentary stasis of imperialism. The journey across the Atlantic for the forebears of West Indian man involved a new kind of space—inarticulate as this new ‘spatial’ character was at the time—and not simply an unbroken schedule of miles in a log book. Once we perceive this inner corrective to historical documentary and protest literature which sees the West Indies as utterly deprived, or gutted by exploitation, we begin to participate in the genuine possibilities of original change available to a people severely disadvantaged (it is true) at a certain point in time.’
The Amerindian Legacy
170 ‘All this is implicit, I believe, in our cannibal horizon out of which the wraith of time ascends like subsistence of memory. I have often wondered whether the ritual of Guyanese and Caribbean hospitality (with its religious concern for the stranger) is not related obscurely to the theme we have been unravelling—the native or host consciousness.’
In the Name of Liberty
213 ‘I started this Note by implying a necessity to probe intuitive resources through which to scan the nature of immediacy and to weigh dualities when the hero becomes a tyrant, the romance of Liberty a theatre of tragedy. If that were all, one would be involved in an inflexible alternation, an inflexible rhythm of opposites.’
213 ‘Scepticism becomes remorseless in its traffic with frames of dogma that sustain certain kinds of bias which cultures associate with heroes or gods or sacred personages. Such frames are projections of immediacy—one may argue on behalf of the sceptical artist—in which phenomena of existence are given instant glorification in the temples of civilization. And since such projection is suspect in the political arena, it is equally dubious—the argument may run—in the so-called sacred place or temple where a god or a prophet is identified with a phenomenon of nature.’
214 ‘We have seen that paradox at work in some communist societies where secular freedom contradicts itself in becoming an absolute condition of thought and existence; inimitable Being slowly becomes forfeit to an art or a politics that is bereft of depth.’ Critique of dogmatic societies.
214 ‘In pointing to an addiction to ‘immediacies’ and to the sway of dualities that foster nihilism I am not proposing the corollary that history repeats itself endlessly. Not at all.’
The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination
251 ‘I mention this because I shall soon speak of my own work. But the pressure to do so— strange as it may appear—is free of egocentricity. It is a pressure that arises from strangeness, from abysmal strangeness. Abysmal not in a despairing sense. Surely this is clear by now! Abysmal in the sense of the subtle abysses that lie between all partial models of tradition, subtle abysses that make strangeness into intimacy, intimacy into what is at first unrecognizable until one perceives there a medium of extraordinary re-visionary momentum and truth.’
41 ‘One flanking ocean – with its subdued, perennial roar against sea-wall and sea-defences – is the Atlantic, the other is green and tall, unlit by the surf of electricity on rainforests wave upon wave of wind-blown savannahs running into Brazil and Venezuela.’
44 ‘When I come upon a felled tree in a park in England it sometimes shapes itself in my inner eye as the epitaph of a murdered forest in Brazil, or Guyana, or Venezuela.
I seek—as if imbued by Lazarus’s mind in my mind, Lazarus’s dream of cosmic love—to re-clothe that tree with the music of consciousness, with rustling, whispering branches in the foliage it has lost.
I picture the tools that felled the tree as newsprung branches themselves within a parable of creation which gives breath to iron or wood or rock. Adam was moulded, it is said, from clay. Thus the technology that killed the tree arrives or returns as living branches in the risen tree itself.
Each newsprung branch—whether wood, or iron or stone—sees itself now as susceptible to a more deadly invention or tool than it had been when it felled the kinship, resurrected tree, parent or child, to which it has returned. The risen tree, in my consciousness, veils flesh-and- blood into itself within a revisionary dynamic of creation and re-creation. Even as the technology of clay was moulded in genesis into Adam’s pulse, Adam’s breath.
Cities have come to nestle in branches of clay or stone in valleys or mountains. They too may be re-visited with an inner eye to see how vulnerable they are. Their hope is born of the life of imagination’s tree in which sculptor and painter and architect and carpenter and mystic sensitize and re-sensitize themselves to rhythms and pulses orchestrated through being and apparent non-being.
In such a re-visionary muse, or music of consciousness, the tree suspends itself, promotes itself by degrees, within theatres of crisis that might be seen or read or gleaned through a variety of perspectives...
The sleeping yet singing rocks of ancient Amerindian legend grow in that tree...
I hear them as I stand in the open parkland in Kensington Gardens half-a-mile or more from the orchestra of the traffic arriving at, or coming from, Marble Arch…’
Merlin and Parsifal
58 ‘Every alteration in the fabric of a living landscape is akin to a man-made garment society wears. Society clothes itself in man-made caves, towering fabricated hillsides or skyscrapers, underwater mechanical crocodiles, bird-rockets, agile, engineered dinosaurs and tanks.’
Literacy and the Imagination
85 ‘Now we see here another aspect of this rehearsal, this infinite rehearsal, because one is rehearsing the various ways in which the horseman may have died. We come to the wound, the central wound which has been administered.’
86 ‘I am convinced that there is a tradition in depth which returns, which nourishes us even though it appears to have vanished, and that it creates a fiction in the ways in which the creative imagination comes into dialogue with clues of revisionary moment. The spectral burden of vanishing and re-appearing is at the heart of the writer’s task.’
88 ‘So we see the glass sides of a ship (the womb of the ship) which reminds you of the glass woman – half glass, half flesh.’
The Schizophrenic Sea
101 ‘The play of arbitrating forces should be associated with an asymmetry within the infinity and genius of art. This does not in any way imply that symmetries are false but it demonstrates that orders of symmetry may appear universal—may seek to pre-empt infinity —though they may actually be no more than useful, sometimes brilliant, extensions and inversions of a binding prejudice and locality. The stranger beauty of asymmetry lies in its subtle transformations of phenomena bound or tamed within a mask of universality and within patterns of elegant tautology—sometimes within patterns of unconscious parody of the past—sometimes within patterns that seek to reify territorial legend into moral or conquistadorial imperative symmetrized by habit or education into our perception of humanity.’
101 ‘Asymmetric infinity, on the other hand, implies an enfolding and unfolding of cultures beyond tamed vision, or totalitarian caprice and loss of revolutionary soul, it implies unseen yet real natures whose life is indefatigable (and thus it may, indeed must, occasion a sense of exhaustion within ephemeral structuralism), and whose therapeutic horizons-in-depth lie beyond logical fate that frames canvases of existence.’
106 ‘The emergence of asymmetric future through fissured past and present symmetries or models leads to the notion of a bridge that inevitably breaks to convey the paradox of creation in both the heights (above the bridge) and the depths (beneath the bridge).’
History, Fable and Myth
157 ‘Limbo then reflects a certain kind of gateway to or threshold of a new world and the dislocation of a chain of miles. It is – in some ways – the archetypal sea-change stemming from Old Worlds and it is legitimate, I feel, to pun on limbo as a kind of shared phantom limb which has become a subconscious variable in West Indian theatre.
159 ‘First of all the limbo dance becomes the human gateway which dislocates (and therefore begins to free itself from) a uniform chain of miles across the Atlantic. This dislocation or interior space serves therefore as a corrective to a uniform cloak or documentary stasis of imperialism. The journey across the Atlantic for the forebears of West Indian man involved a new kind of space—inarticulate as this new ‘spatial’ character was at the time—and not simply an unbroken schedule of miles in a log book. Once we perceive this inner corrective to historical documentary and protest literature which sees the West Indies as utterly deprived, or gutted by exploitation, we begin to participate in the genuine possibilities of original change available to a people severely disadvantaged (it is true) at a certain point in time.’
The Amerindian Legacy
170 ‘All this is implicit, I believe, in our cannibal horizon out of which the wraith of time ascends like subsistence of memory. I have often wondered whether the ritual of Guyanese and Caribbean hospitality (with its religious concern for the stranger) is not related obscurely to the theme we have been unravelling—the native or host consciousness.’
In the Name of Liberty
213 ‘I started this Note by implying a necessity to probe intuitive resources through which to scan the nature of immediacy and to weigh dualities when the hero becomes a tyrant, the romance of Liberty a theatre of tragedy. If that were all, one would be involved in an inflexible alternation, an inflexible rhythm of opposites.’
213 ‘Scepticism becomes remorseless in its traffic with frames of dogma that sustain certain kinds of bias which cultures associate with heroes or gods or sacred personages. Such frames are projections of immediacy—one may argue on behalf of the sceptical artist—in which phenomena of existence are given instant glorification in the temples of civilization. And since such projection is suspect in the political arena, it is equally dubious—the argument may run—in the so-called sacred place or temple where a god or a prophet is identified with a phenomenon of nature.’
214 ‘We have seen that paradox at work in some communist societies where secular freedom contradicts itself in becoming an absolute condition of thought and existence; inimitable Being slowly becomes forfeit to an art or a politics that is bereft of depth.’ Critique of dogmatic societies.
214 ‘In pointing to an addiction to ‘immediacies’ and to the sway of dualities that foster nihilism I am not proposing the corollary that history repeats itself endlessly. Not at all.’
The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination
251 ‘I mention this because I shall soon speak of my own work. But the pressure to do so— strange as it may appear—is free of egocentricity. It is a pressure that arises from strangeness, from abysmal strangeness. Abysmal not in a despairing sense. Surely this is clear by now! Abysmal in the sense of the subtle abysses that lie between all partial models of tradition, subtle abysses that make strangeness into intimacy, intimacy into what is at first unrecognizable until one perceives there a medium of extraordinary re-visionary momentum and truth.’
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