The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder

by Wilson Harris

259 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 1973

About the author

Born in Guyana in 1921 and based in England since 1959, Wilson Harris is one of the most original novelists and critics of the twentieth century. His writings, which include poems, numerous essays and twenty-four novels, provide a passionate and unique defense of the notion of cross-culturalism as well as a visionary exploration of the interdependence between history, landscape and humanity. In 2010 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Third book of the Guyana Quartet; again heavy going and intense but a rewarding read. Set on the banks of the Pomeroon river the symbolism of the jaguar is central. The story revolves around mother and son, Magda and Cristo (the levels of meaning in this extend to the names as well) and their umbelical connection. Cristo may or may not be a jealous lover who has murdered a rival. Magda persuades Abram (someone to whom she has previously sold her body), to hide him. Abram dies and Magda forces Cristo to exchange clothes so it appears he has died and there is a wake for him (at which he briefly appears). Cristo is reunited with his lover Sharon, but there is another death at the wake.
There is jealousy, passion, guilt, trials to be endured and some of it almost feels like the "stations of the cross". Not to mention a dead man returning to assert his innocence. Harris has argued that there is the perceptual intuition of early childhood at play in the imagery.
Underlying it all is a tremendous sense of the fragility (economic and social) of the society.
I will have to reread this at some point because of its depth and intensity, and I suspect that when I do I will find even more in it than this time.

[Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

First review, 9/28/13:

Dense with symbolic language, Wilson Harris's The Whole Armour is a Jungian journey into myth and the subconscious. Probing into this text with a psychoanalytic mind is wise, to be sure, as The Whole Armour includes investigations into colonial and postcolonial neurosis. Questions about parenthood, identity, perception, and political power are all raised by this novel. The Whole Armour is a quick read, but is also a book that the reader owes multiple perusals. It is by no means simple or easy. This is a difficult and abstruse book, but these facts enhance the books underlying principles rather than undermine them.

Second review, 3/20/17:

Revisiting this novel after four years, I'm surprised how prescient my Master's-degree-seeking self was in regard to how I would interpret this novel now. For me today, psychoanalysis is always the watchword, although it is Lacan rather than Jung. But Jung, along with Fanon, seems like as good of a point to begin interrogation of this novel as any. The dancing of the characters across the page, Abram, Magda, Cristo, Sharon, Mattias, Peet, and the tiger, there are obvious biblical parallels that are lost on me but beyond, or perhaps because of, that this story seems to infinitely retell itself. Moments take place across "hallucinated months" (128) as we, like Sharon, are "willing to be hypnotized by the suspension of every conventional basis of belief" (120). The 'magical realism' of this novel goes beyond formal conventions and works on the level of an interrogation of the novel-form itself. The novel is the Carnivalesque (literally) text, it the mock-battle of "Indians" hosted by the Catholic Mission that Sharon uses to explain away the Arawak Indians that Cristo claims to have met.

The alibi of the text, its status as a homonym of the mock-battle, disavows the uncomfortable claims Harris reasserts again and again across his oeuvre: claims about the illusory and circular nature of time, the material qualities of myth, and the lack of distinction between individuals. This is a story about roots, about "human fantasy and unhuman reality" becoming "the intertwined roots of history" (90) and the pulling up of those roots to reveal that they might "look like nothing" (116).

The tiger becomes an experience of the collective unconscious, as myths take on lives of their own. The Whole Armour, more than Palace of the Peacock, grants particular insights into character's points of view and articulates their subjective reality as paradoxically coincident with other subjective realities that might exist in contradiction. Harris's constant reference to "fantasy" makes the world signify differently. There is no distinction between fantasy and what humans perceive as reality. Did Cristo murder the unnamed lover or jealous suitor of Sharon who serves as the initiator of the plot? Was Cristo truly replaced by Abram? Was Cristo the tiger all along? Was Cristo's son born in those hallucinated twelve months? These questions, at the level of plot, are not significant ones. Understanding their relation to myth, collective unconscious, and fantasy is far more important. The crucial point here is why these questions are even posed, and what their various answers would mean in conjunction with each other.

However, plot is crucial to the novel. Harris is not haphazard in crafting a certain sequence of events. Abram's positioning as the possible main character, followed immediately by his death and disappearance from the novel, pulls the rug out from under the reader in a profoundly unsettling way, setting the stage for the chaos that is to come. Mattias's death, too, seems to propel the novel forward. His story is self-contained in the description of Cristo's wake, and yet his inner monologue takes us far afield from the novel itself. Mattias, then, is a narrative digression that both must be excised from the novel for his irrelevance but also must exist as a forward-pushing plot point. His plot is the most easily discernable. Mattias carries the stain of Cambridge, the stain of a normative, understandable, sequential plot and character arc.

For Harris, almost nothing is as it seems. What is represented here is a profoundly thought-provoking vision of life and culture. Harris demonstrates how individuated subjects are still fundamentally connected and have subjective experiences that can exert force on those of others.