BOOK REVIEW

Jul 25, 2010 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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After an illuminating Interview of Sir Wilson Harris by Professor Michael Gilkes brought to you by THE ARTS FORUM in two parts, we now offer a critical review of Harris’s final novel. We hope that this rich insight will, in some modest measure, serve to dispel prevailing perceptions that Harris’s writings are “difficult” and draw readers closer to his works: his fiction, poetry and critical writings. Patient reading will be well rewarded.

By MICHAEL GILKES

Wilson Harris, The Ghost of Memory, Faber and Faber, 2006.
Wilson Harris’s first novel, Palace of the Peacock (1960), begins with a horseman galloping along the road in a savannah bordering the South American rainforest. He is shot and falls to the ground dead but remains spiritually alive as the alter ego of the novel’s ‘I’ narrator, his dreaming twin brother.
The Ghost of Memory (2006) which Harris has said is his final novel, begins with a man who is mistaken for a terrorist and shot in the back. He falls through time and space into a dreamlike state between life and death, ending up inside the world of a painting in a city art gallery. It is a painting of the South American rainforest.
The similarities in these beginnings, though superficial, are noticeable enough to suggest that Harris has now completed the circle of his extraordinary fictional Träumebuch of twenty-five novels.
The first and last novels might almost be taken as a measure of the distance his writing has travelled in the wake of his uniquely cross-cultural, visionary gift.
Palace of the Peacock is written in an arguably ‘realistic’ (but by no means conventional) style, accessible as an adventure story with submerged meanings that, as in Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, surface as the journey proceeds:
“The crew began, all together, tugging and hauling the boat, and their sing-song-cry rattled in my throat. They were as clear and matter-of-fact as the stone we had reached… The sun was high in the heavens. The river burned and flamed.
The particular section, where we were, demanded hauling our vessel out of the water and along the bank until we had cleared an impassible fury and obstruction. The bright mist lifted a little from my mind’s eye, and I saw with a thumping impossible heart I was reliving Donne’s first innocent voyage and excursion into the interior country” (Palace, pp. 26, 27).
The hidden implications of the journey gradually appear as the crew venture deeper into the interior of the rainforest and [simultaneously] into their innermost thoughts and feelings. The unsuspecting reader is carried along until dangerous rapids (literal and figurative) appear and threaten to capsize the boat as it drifts into the presence of a towering waterfall.
The Ghost of Memory, on the other hand, immediately plunges the reader into a quantum world of imaginary and real events among dead and living ‘presences’ within a constantly changing environment of narrative voices and cultural landscapes.
The shooting of the man mistaken for a terrorist recalls the shooting of the Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, in the Stockwell London Underground on the 22nd July 2005.
He quickly ‘morphs’ into a modern equivalent of an Aztec human sacrifice to the sun god, our present fear of ‘terrorism’ placed alongside the Aztec fear that the sun may never rise again (remarkably, Harris had already written the opening chapters of his novel before the DeMenezes shooting occurred).
The shot, fallen man is cast as both victim and ‘privileged sacrifice’, a ‘saviour’ for the good of Mankind, becoming the questioning, spectral voice and presence within the Artist’s canvas.
There is a dialogue between the ‘dream man’ and Christopher Columbus (a visitor to the gallery who has adopted the name of his hero) who finds the painting fascinating and extremely disturbing at the same time. He finds himself obliged to listen to the other side of the ‘conquistadorial narrative’ from the ghost of the conquered. Other visitors enter the conversation and are similarly exposed to the ‘dream narrative’.
The conflicts and paradoxes in the novel arise from ‘a commotion between the conscious and unconscious’ (p.18) precipitated by the nature of Art itself, imaged in the painting which ‘speaks’ to the gallery’s visitors.
The voice of the ghost in the painting, by engaging the viewer in an open-ended dialogue on questions like ‘what is the New World?’ and ‘what is Art?’ acts as a stimulus to the unconscious mind, allowing suppressed thoughts and ideas (which therefore become threatening) to surface.
In his ‘Author’s Note’ Harris refers to C.G. Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious and Anton Ehrenzweig’s The Hidden Order of Art, works that share the view that the creative Arts can provide strategies which prompt the ego to allow the emergence of unconscious perceptions.
This is a familiar approach used in theatre arts and, of course, psychotherapy. But Harris’s novel isn’t a Rorschach: it deals with real emotions, ideas and events, but looked at from ‘the other side’, as it were, from the margins of perception.
Ingrained, conventional ideas and values are attacked below the level of normal awareness.
This is the rationale behind his use of fabulous and dream imagery, unfamiliar, shifting landscapes and a fictional language that appears to do violence to conventional meaning. It is ‘a narrative that has no absolutes’ (author’s note, p. viii) intended not to confirm us in any view, but to create a quantum situation in which opposite views co-exist, often shading into each other.
There are many examples of this quantum condition of ‘mutiple states of being’ in science, but also in both Nature and human nature.
At a distance a waterfall appears still yet perpetually moving. The astronaut stepping out of his spacecraft on a ‘space walk’ appears motionless yet is travelling at phenomenal speed. The ‘terrorist’, seen from another angle becomes a ‘saviour’ and great leader, the slave auction block becomes a pedestal for a hero.
The creative artist is familiar with this phenomenon of ‘multiplicity of Being’. As Anton Ehrenzweig observes:
“All artistic structure is essentially polyphonic: it evolves not in a single line of thought, but in several superimposed strands at once. Hence creativity requires a diffuse, scattered kind of attention that contradicts our normal, logical habits of thinking” (The Hidden Order of Art, Paladin, 1970, p. 14).
The Ghost of Memory is one of Harris’s most ‘disjointed’, imaginative and multi-layered novels, resembling a painting by visionary artists like Brazil’s Abdias do

Nascimiento or Trinidad’s Leroy Clarke.
The apparent ‘dislocation’ of the writing, on closer reading, reveals a ‘hidden order’ within the text.
The writer attempts to explore the undifferentiated and obscure margins of thought and existence, to write, as it were, from the edges and margins of consciousness, drawing upon the imaginary world of dreams, allegory and cross-cultural images and ideas. One might say that the novel reads us.
Harris throws together an apparently random collection of figures whose conversations and interactions embody the novel’s exploration of the theme of cross-culturality as a means towards understanding and resolving conflicts on a global scale. Real and spectral visitors to the art gallery include Christopher Columbus (admirer of the great explorer), the blind Greek seer, Tiresias and two art lovers, George and Andy.
There are glimpses of an Arawak female figure resembling Giacometti’s ‘Standing Woman’, an Olmec city, a group of players, a beggar, the city landscape, the South American pampas and a skeleton ship recalling Melville’s story, ‘Benito Cereno’.
The painting itself is a landscape in which figures move and converse or leave to rejoin other figures in the gallery. The reader’s engagement is held on an intellectually challenging level where nothing is absolute and ‘reality’ itself is left open to question.
What may appear to be disjointed or chaotic in the writing is consistent with the author’s open-ended approach to questions about the meaning of life, Art and nature and human relationships.
Harris’s innovative approach is ultimately a way of avoiding the trap of “the complacencies of centralized, ruling powers where language becomes ‘a tool for hypocrisies and false clarities’ (p. 1). It is a fictional style aimed at allowing a conversation between ego and unconscious as a means of understanding the roots of apparently intractable oppositions of power and powerlessness, victor and victim, technological wealth and world poverty from a new standpoint: from the periphery rather than the centre.
It is a dilemma that has already begun to take on far-reaching global, political, social and economic significance. Harris’s work has been a continuous attempt to promote the concept of ‘interior bridges between a moment of safety and another of desolation’ (p. viii). The importance of such ‘bridges’ is only now beginning to be understood and appreciated.
One of the most striking features of Harris’s fictions is that ‘they take place in dislodged spaces’ (p. 2). It is a fiction akin to dream, and as Carl Jung once pointed out, ‘Our dreams are most peculiarly independent of our consciousness and exceedingly valuable because they cannot cheat.’ (p. 3).
The Ghost of Memory touches on many of the themes in the previous novels. It is the author’s final attempt to (re)connect the twin worlds of ego and unconscious, victor and victim, free and enslaved, rich and poor, material and immaterial in an effort to alert us to the real storms that lie on the horizon.
It is a last attempt, perhaps, to ‘punch a hole in the clouds’ of absolutism and complacent egoism as a way of escaping the coming storm. Harris’s protagonists may suffer the consequences of the author’s vision of a fallen world, but they also assist the reader to reclaim hope out of the wreckage.
The Ghost of Memory develops the theme of self-abnegation or self-sacrifice, of ‘fore-suffering all’, Tiresias-like, as an antidote to the violence and imbalance in the modern world. Here the writer-as-ghost identifies with the victim of the bullet meant for a terrorist.
The risk is also envisaged as ‘digesting’ a morsel of the dead (as in the religious ceremony of ‘transubstantiation’) as a means of participating physically in the tragedy of loss, is a deeply religious note of expiation that is hinted at time and time again in Harris’s novels. Here it is a main theme.
The novel ends with a dialogue between Christopher and the ghost in the painting, who now appears in visible form as one of the players preparing to perform in the street. He mentions the ship that will be used in the play, recalling the slave ship in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. In Melville’s story the ship, seen at a distance, carries a crowd of dark, cowled figures on deck who appear to be monks.
They are in fact slaves who have mutinied. The ghost comments on this ominous reversal of roles and the contradictoriness of the concept of ‘freedom’ in a slave society or indeed even within the democratic systems of the modern world:
What is freedom? One is left to calculate how the slaves or mimics of a system everyone is told to admire because it is the best in the world, can find freedom when the system enslaves itself by freight by a lust for money, which banishes originality. A mutiny has occurred on board the ship (p. 98).
Christopher, incensed by such ‘dangerous folly’ then draws a knife and appears to threaten the speaker. Instead he cuts the painting to shreds. The ghost, unable to use his ‘phantom arms’, screams. The scream is heard as a mysterious, disembodied sound that seems to shake the building.
He becomes invisible again as George and Andy rush into the room. They find only a distraught, frantic Christopher shouting ‘this play must stop…!’. People rush into the room, including the police.
The savaging of the painting re-enacts, in a different context, the killing of the suspected terrorist. It also images the attack the ego makes upon unconscious elements that threaten it. The police take away the now deranged Christopher in chains (like the other Columbus, his hero, sent back to Spain in chains after the fiasco of his third voyage to the Caribbean). George steps out onto the balcony and looks up at the bright constellation of stars:
George was suddenly empowered by the distant spectrum in the sky … Was this the immense journey of life? … Whatever it was it would help him to bring the tattered and bereft figures lying on the floor back into a painting.
He had been empowered to do so by the celestial unconscious. It is real and unreal, and it inspires us to make of illusion a shape which represents an eternity of riddles, a shape brooding upon ruin and unknown fulfillment and origin. (p. 100)
Those are the final lines of the writer after nearly 50 years spent producing a remarkable and unique body of work: the language sounds very much like Harris’s farewell to his faithful Muse, the inspiration behind his writing life. It also carries an echo of the Magus, Prospero, breaking his staff and drowning his book, the task over but the magic of the work remaining.
Notes:
1 ‘Literacy and the Imagination’ in The Literate Imagination, ed., Michael Gilkes, MacMillan, 1989, p. 30.
2 In Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed., Andrew Bundy, Routledge, 1999, p. 89.
3 From a lecture on dream analysis 7 November 1928. Quoted in Bundy, p. 13.

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