Uncovering the marvellous: Surrealism and the writings of Wilson Harris

Abstract

To date, critical analyses of the impact of surrealism on the development of Caribbean literature have tended to restrict their focus to the francophone Caribbean. This article outlines the wider dissemination of surrealism through a focus on the writings of Wilson Harris. Harris’s appropriation of a number of surrealist tropes is revealed through a comparative reading of his novels Palace of the Peacock and The Ghost of Memory with Pierre Mabille’s surrealist work Mirror of the Marvellous.

Keywords:

• Wilson Harris
• surrealism
• Pierre Mabille
• marvellous
• immanence

Notes

1. See Maes‐Jelinek; Webb; Mackey.

2. Tythacott notes that Leiris writes of the colonized’s capacity to “write back” (214), while also noting the surrealists’ anticipation of postcolonial hybridity in their practices of collage, juxtaposition and pastiche (13). For a detailed account of the role played by surrealism in developing both anti‐imperialist discourse and postcolonial studies see Brennan 185–203.

3. Rosemont and Kelley’s wide‐ranging anthology is a partial exception to this. While providing numerous examples of non‐francophone surrealists (including Harris), the anthology’s focus on writers of African descent gives an incomplete vision of Caribbean surrealism.

4. Clifford’s work on surrealism and ethnography laid the foundations for more recent scholarship (Brennan; Tythacott) which views surrealism as the forbearer of postcolonialism (see Clifford, “Ethnographic”).

5. See Glissant 190–93.

6. Harris’s dismissal of the Cartesian split – “plural masks are not the same as Cartesian dualism. Plural masks imply a living cosmos in all its grain and particularity [ … ]. Unity then is paradox” (Harris, in Fazzini x) – in favour of a “living cosmos” and essential “unity” again enforces the sense that at the heart of Harris’s poetics is Spinoza’s philosophy.

7. For further discussion of Hallward’s account of postcolonialism, Deleuze and immanence see Burns “Becoming‐Postcolonial”. See also Burns “Becoming‐Bertha” 18–20 for a critique of Hallward.

8. Harris’s application of alchemy as a metaphor for the imagination has been well observed (Gilkes 36). Although Gilkes acknowledges Jung’s influence, the importance of the surrealists’ revival of alchemical practices has been overlooked by Harrisian scholars: Linguanti credits Harris with the resurrection of a practice that “ceased to exist with the birth of scientific chemistry (after Bacon and Paracelsus)” (247).