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Abstract
In recent years the “spatial turn” with its revaluation of relationships between space and time has had repercussions in many disciplines, and offers a fruitful approach to Wilson Harris’s fiction. How space can be experienced to give access to the legendary and historical past is a major concern in his novel Companions of the Day and Night (1975). This essay combines a spatial approach with an investigation of the novel’s intertextual relations with Blake’s Gnostic and alchemical work “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, C.G. Jung’s proposal of a “new conceptual language” in his essay on synchronicity, and the legend behind the name of the Kaieteur Falls in Guyana. How Harris disturbs and subverts our processes of reading to allow the mythic, personal and political to be unveiled in outer and inner landscapes by the imag(in)ary is a revelation of the revolutionary and prophetic qualities of his art.
Notes
1. This is a concept often used by Harris himself, both in his fiction and in his critical work, as in his stress on the revisionary importance of linkages in the essay “The Fabric of the Imagination”, and is a theme noted by critics such as Hena Maes-Jelinek and Nathaniel Mackey.
2. Foucault writes: “Such is the power of language: that which is woven of space elicits space, gives itself space through an originary opening and removes space to take it back into language” (qtd in Crampton and Elden 166).
3. John Pohl points out that Quetzalcoatl was often depicted wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a seashell and staff, which made it easy for him later to be identified with St James (Pohl 23). Quetzalcoatl was also an ambivalent god who represented a union of opposing opposites, earth and sky, above and below.
4. According to conventional sources, rich Aztec merchants could achieve status through the use of enslaved artists, who were ritually sacrificed at the end of a nine-day festival, although Arnoldo Carlos Vento is in line with more recent writers in throwing doubt on the accounts of the Spanish conquistadors.
5. For a detailed discussion of Gnosticism, alchemy and their relationship with postcolonial literature, see Mitchell.
6. One might note in this context the Cathars, whose religious ideals included an extreme degree of austerity in rejection of the material world.
7. For example, in Czech: Bylo nebylo; see also Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses: “Once upon a time – it was and it was not so, as the old stories used to say, it happened and it never did” (35; original emphasis).
8. See Harris’s essay “Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror: Reflections on Originality and Tradition” (1994), in which he discusses the “brooding solitariness” of the Soul as a “gnostic concept” (Harris, Essays 185).
9. See Harris’s “Profiles of Myth and the New World” (Harris, Essays 201).