THE UNFINISHED BODY

Abstract

This article examines Wilson Harris's The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) in light of its engagement with the transformations that occurred in the world economic system post‐1945, and the difficulties faced by Third World nations as they struggled to maintain their freedom in this context. Harris articulates a global, cross‐cultural historiography in which absolutist notions of tradition and identity are unstitched and refashioned upon a new scale. The contrapuntal perspective he subsequently trains on the world exposes the violence that underpins the formation of modern sovereign subjectivity, as well as the socio‐economic polarization wrought by capitalism's drive to integrate all into a global system in which relations of domination are structurally occulted. Harris spotlights the “production” of a particular type of individual body—regulated, enclosed, sovereign—as integral to this system. In turn, I argue, he posits the need for both institutional change and a radical re‐imagining of reality in order to enable the emergence of a new “carnival” world body, a heterogeneous, ceaselessly mutating universal that allows for the assertion of specificity while contesting the global commodification of difference.

Keywords:

• Wilson Harris
• the body
• global capitalism
• sovereignty
• nation‐state
• carnival

Notes

1 Édouard Glissant in Tout‐monde (1993) employs this characterization of the peoples of the Third World as a “hidden face” that erupts into visibility and consciousness (69).

2 In addition to the reference to the “waste land”, many of the images recall those from “The Dry Salvages” in Four Quartets: “To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage, / The bone's prayer to Death its God” (195).

3 Significantly, in her analysis of the Grail legend, Jessie Weston traces its provenance to the nature rite of Adonis and other such cults—further indication of The Infinite Rehearsal's orchestration of overlain traditions.

4 The regulation of the European body, and the production of the “rational” subject predicated on the primacy of the mind, can be traced to the “Great Confinement” of the 17th century, the history of which Michel Foucault outlines in texts such as Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. See also Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body.

5 On the impact produced by the “setting free” of the working population, see Marx (Capital I: 781–94).

6 The notion of the body as defined by a “smooth” sovereignty derives from Bakhtin's characterization of the modern, Lenten body as one in which all “signs of its unfinished character, of its growth and proliferation were eliminated [ … ] its apertures closed” (Bakhtin 29).

7 The “carnival” body is Bakhtin's term for the type of (material and social) body repressed during the Renaissance. In contrast to the modern, atomized, disciplined Lenten body that superseded it, the grotesque, carnival body, writes Bakhtin, is “unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits”; it is “not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects” (27).

8 Jameson contends that “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping” will be “an integral part of any socialist political project” in its contribution to the exposure of structurally occulted global power relations (416).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Niblett

Michael Niblett recently submitted his PhD in Caribbean literature at the University of Warwick. His thesis explores approaches to ritual, memory, and the body in the work of Wilson Harris, Earl Lovelace, and Patrick Chamoiseau. He teaches part‐time at Warwick and is currently co‐editing a collection of essays entitled “Perspectives on ‘the Other America’: Comparative Approaches to Caribbean and Latin American Culture”.