MAPPING THE GUYANESE DREAM‐SPACE

Abstract

The intention of this paper is to explore Wilson Harris’s representation of landscape in The Guyana Quartet, focusing particularly on the affiliations between the liminal topography and the author’s aesthetic of becoming that attempts to reconcile the artistic and the material. Though Harris’s work threatens simply to replace ethnocentric modes of perception with his own cryptic myth‐making, temporal and spatial dislocation substituted for the fetishization of the historical void as regenerative gateway, his vision of an embryonic cross‐cultural community traced through the quartet suggests a subtler and more nuanced appreciation of the challenges of post/colonial modernity.

Keywords:

• cartography
• myth
• history
• exploration
• space
• hybridity

Notes

1 In fact, Hearne goes on to assert that, like sleep, the land also inspires dreams, and in the rest of his essay discusses dream and myth as the other side of Harris’s “material structural witnesses” of history.

2 Harris’s notion of “scale” combines the notion of music, the harmony between Heaven and Earth and acts as an organizational equivalent to the Amerindian rainbow‐bridge archetype which is a figure of cross‐cultural community. See Russell McDougall (92–105).

3 Boundaries are, of course, symbolic representations legitimized by their inscription in the immense bureaucratic archives which made possible the long‐distance exertion of power, rather than existing in a material sense. It is important to point out, however, that the maps and other linked texts which made distant land possessable came into being as a consequence of the repeated material passages of explorers and surveyors across an unfamiliar landscape. The techniques of traverse surveying employed in British Guiana in fact entailed an expansive and nomadic boundary‐transgressing style which demarcated a highly ambiguous territory, and this, in part, contributed to the various border disputes that have chequered Guyana’s history, many of which remain unresolved. See D. Graham Burnett (199–253) for a fuller discussion of the tension between the local encounters of individual surveyors with Guyana’s landscape, and the colonial demand for the production of documents that would legitimize territorial claims and portray a rational, if synthetic, organization of space.

4 Harris provides the useful comparison between daylight and night‐sky to indicate how the material world and immaterial realities are both part of the same totality of being, and how an alteration of imaginative vision is required to distinguish these multiple realities. See The Womb of Space (9).

5 Indeed, less than a quarter of the current boundary of Guyana can be called entirely undisputed. See Graham Burnett (200).

6 However, Harris’s landscape contains not merely the living traces of the past but also future possibilities, since during his journey Cristo also appears to see a huge glass‐making factory in the depths of the forest that indicates the potential of Guyana’s future industrial development (358).

7 The Canje is a significant landmark in Harris’s re‐visioned topography, the microcosmic setting for his early play, “Canje (The River of Ocean)”, and the point of departure for a non‐fiction piece, “Journey into the Canje” in Lindfors and Schild, Neo‐African Literature and Culture (346–52).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Green

James Green teaches at the University of Gloucestershire and is currently completing a doctoral thesis examining British writing since 1990 in the context of globalization. His research interests are mainly in contemporary fiction and cultural theory.