The Guyana Quartet by Wilson Harris

First published: 1985: Palace of the Peacock, 1960; The Far Journey of Oudin, 1961; The Whole Armour, 1962; The Secret Ladder, 1963

Type of work: Four novels

Type of plot: Allegory

Time of work: Twentieth century

Locale: Guyana

Principal Characters:

Palace of the Peacock

• Donne, an ambitious colonizer who is trying to develop an estate in the Guyanan interior

The Far Journey of Oudin

• Oudin, a mysterious drifter of uncertain racial lineage
• Mohammed, a wealthy landowner who is gradually losing his property and his moral fiber
• Beti, Mohammed’s niece
• Ram, a crafty, materialistic entrepreneur

The Whole Armour

• Magda, a lusty, strong-minded prostitute of mixed African and Chinese parentage
• Cristo, Magda’s son, who has returned to Guyana after completing his education and finds himself a stranger in his native land
• Sharon, a beautiful young woman who appears to be pure white but has black ancestors

The Secret Ladder

• Russell Fenwick, a government official in charge of measuring water levels
• Poseidon, a black squatter so old that he has become a mythical figure

The Novels

The Guyana Quartet is an omnibus volume made up of four novels originally published separately. The first of these is Palace of the Peacock, a strange story about a crew of men fighting their way into the Guyanan jungle on a small riverboat powered with an outboard motor. The mechanical power is supplemented by oarsmen at the many passages where roaring rapids threaten to capsize the fragile craft. Harris’s densely metaphorical style of writing is strongly reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s rich, impressionistic prose. Like Conrad, Harris is keenly interested in revealing the influence of environment on human character.

One by one, the crew members are killed, most of them swept away by the river, one or two murdered in irrational quarrels. The driving purpose of Donne, the colonizer leading the crew, is to recapture a group of runaway workers and force them to return to toil on his estate. He ends up achieving only his own destruction. The Palace of the Peacock, which he reaches at the end of his journey, is a fantastic dreamlike structure housing nothing but dead men.

Harris has an impressive knowledge of the world’s literature, and the influences of many different authors can be detected in his novels. These include the poets William Butler Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and William Blake. Palace of the Peacock, in addition to being reminiscent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), calls to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s greatest poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), in which the crew of a ship met with disaster. It is, of course, also reminiscent of Herman Melville’s greatest novel, Moby Dick: Or, The Whale (1851), in which a whole shipload of men meet with disaster on a futile quest motivated by one man’s arrogant pride.

Palace of the Peacock is a novel about the virtually unexplored interior of Guyana, a country about the size of Great Britain but populated by fewer than three-quarters of a million inhabitants. The next novel, The Far Journey of Oudin, is about the ricelands of Guyana and the East Indian farmers who work them. The dominant racial group of Guyana is made up of the descendants of Hindus and Muslims who emigrated from India. The next largest racial group is of African descent. There are also significant populations of Portuguese, Chinese, and native South American Indians. There has been some intermixture of racial strains, but by and large the ethnic groups remain distinct, separate, and mutually suspicious. Harris’s principal concern as an author is to find, or perhaps to create, a uniquely Guyanese consciousness they all share. This consciousness would be comparable to that which makes all citizens of the United States perceive themselves as Americans regardless of race, creed, color, or even native language.

The Far Journey of Oudin explores the deterioration of a prominent family of East Indian landowners and the rise of a greedy moneylender, who represents a new wave of exploiters of the beautiful land. Oudin, an outsider and stranger, represents a new breed of Guyanan who refuses to be motivated by avarice and exploitation. His influence destroys the existing balance of power and begins to create a new status quo based on justice and tolerance. The Far Journey of Oudin is strongly reminiscent of novels by William Faulkner, especially the so-called “Snopes trilogy” consisting of The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959).

The Whole Armour deals with the seacoast of Guyana and the Pomeroon River, which empties into the Caribbean. Magda, a prostitute, attempts to save her son Cristo from being hanged for murder by persuading a friend to hide him. When the friend is killed by a jaguar, Magda has her son change clothes with the dead man so the authorities will think her son is dead and will give up hunting for him. Cristo falls in love with a beautiful girl named Sharon and becomes careless about concealing his identity. He is eventually captured by the police. In the meantime, Sharon has become pregnant and bears a son whom she names Cristo, symbolizing the indestructibility of the common people.

The last novel in The Guyana Quartet, titled The Secret Ladder, deals with the perpetual struggle between land and water. Russell Fenwick is more aware of this situation than any other person because of his job as surveyor. His explorations of the maze of Guyanese rivers arouses suspicion and hostility among black squatters, who first try sabotaging his equipment but eventually attempt murder. Fenwick is a civilized man who ultimately finds it impossible to deal in a civilized manner with the primitive settlers and his own unruly crew. Like Palace of the Peacock, The Secret Ladder focuses on descriptions of the jungle and waterways of Guyana. The novel’s lush prose is intended to mirror the lush vegetation and beautiful but treacherous rivers that can rise as much as ten feet in a matter of days. Both Palace of the Peacock and The Secret Ladder strongly resemble Joseph Conrad’s famous story Heart of Darkness.

The Characters

Although Harris’s characters stand out as individuals, he wanted to represent all the different types of people to be found in multiracial, multicultural Guyana. His characters therefore are also chosen to represent the population spectrum. The crew members fighting their way upriver in Palace of the Peacock represent most of the ethnic types to be found in Guyana, including a mysterious old Arawak Indian woman who symbolizes the original inhabitants of the land before the time of Columbus. Again Harris can be compared to William Faulkner, who sought to represent the entire South of the past and present in the panorama of characters he presented.

Harris does not limit himself to a single point of view or even to several points of view in his novels. He feels free to take readers inside any character’s mind to reveal what that character is thinking and feeling. This is sometimes confusing and occasionally threatens to destroy the illusion of reality.

Harris has often stated that he is not interested in portraying characters in the traditional manner most commonly associated with nineteenth century fiction. He does not confine himself to a particular time frame but feels free to go backward and forward in time, with sometimes confusing results. In The Far Journey of Oudin, both Oudin and Beti seem to be simultaneously taking two separate journeys at different stages of their lives. Harris enters his characters’ memories to reveal past events and even describes his characters’ dreams as if they were real events, sometimes making it difficult for readers to differentiate between fantasy and reality.

The effect of Harris’s experimentalism is to make readers conscious of the presence and purpose of the author as a sort of puppeteer manipulating his characters and even throwing them away if he gets bored with them. Harris seems to wish to keep reminding readers that his characters are not real people but instead are symbols of the heterogeneous people of Guyana, their hopes, their fears, their struggles to survive in a harsh land, and their efforts to understand themselves as individuals and as a people.

Harris uses the traditional artistic device of contrast to differentiate his characters. As one example, he pairs the ignorant, superstitious, gullible Mohammed against the hardheaded, self-educated Ram in The Far Journey of Oudin. Harris has plenty of colors to work with on his palette because of the unique history of Guyana, which has brought together people from Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe.

Harris handles dialogue quite effectively as a tool for delineating human character. He understands the heterogeneous peoples of Guyana better than they understand one another. Often his characters speak a pidgin English peculiar to Guyana. A short example from chapter 2 of Palace of the Peacock indicates the flavor of this exotic speech:

How come you answer so quick-quick for another man? You think you know what mek a man tick? You can’t even know you own self, Boy. You really think you can know he or me?

Critical Context

Critics are almost universally agreed that Wilson Harris is a very difficult writer to understand. The difficulty is created by Harris’s poetic use of language in his prose fiction. He is certainly not as difficult as the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake (1939) but is at least as difficult as the James Joyce of Ulysses (1922). Hostile critics say that Harris is unnecessarily opaque, while sympathetic critics assert that he is worth the effort it takes to understand him. An example of his densely metaphorical prose from chapter 2 of Palace of the Peacock illustrates the characteristic that is the main bone of critical contention:

The rocks in the tide flashed their presentiment in the sun, everlasting courage and the other obscure spirits of creation. . . . A white fury and foam churned and raced on the black tide that grew golden every now and then like the crystal memory of sugar. From every quarter a mindless stream came through the ominous rocks whose presence served to pit the mad foaming face.

A phrase such as “the crystal memory of sugar” is perplexing and threatens to break the fragile illusion of reality while readers pause to decipher its meaning. Although each of the novels in The Guyana Quartet is short, each requires a long time to read because of the complexity of the prose. Mirroring the feelings of the boatmen on the furious, foaming river in Palace of the Peacock, readers begin to feel wary of Harris’s beautiful but impetuous prose. Harris is a novelist who must be read slowly and attentively.

Critics, whether antipathetic or sympathetic, are almost universally agreed that Wilson Harris is one of the most important West Indian writers because of his ambition to create a new consciousness for the people of Guyana. In doing this, he has set an example for authors of other former European colonies around the world, especially those of the Caribbean region and Africa. Some critics consider him to be one of the most important writers of the twentieth century because of his leading role in the emerging cultural, intellectual, and political influence of the Third World.

Bibliography

Cartey, Wilfred. Whispers from the Caribbean: I Going Away, I Going Home. Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1991. A detailed discussion of English-language Caribbean novels. Contains lengthy discussions of Wilson Harris, including analyses of all four novels in The Guyana Quartet.

Drake, Sandra E. Wilson Harris and the Modern Tradition: A New Architecture of the World. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. A scholarly examination of four works by Harris, with a focus on his bold use of language, his literary precursors, his interest in the connections between different cultures, his belief in the possibility of an apprehension of truth and of knowledge, and his emphasis on the need to review the way the modern world views its own history.

Gilkes, Michael, ed. The Literate Imagination: Essays on the Novels of Wilson Harris. London: Macmillan, 1989. A collection of essays on various aspects of Harris’ work by leading authorities on the subject of Caribbean literature. Contains many references to The Guyana Quartet, a useful bibliography, and an essay by Harris himself.

Maes-Jelinek, Hena. Wilson Harris. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Maes-Jelinek, an authority on the literature of the Caribbean, considers Harris to be one of the most important writers of the twentieth century while admitting that he is also one of the most difficult to understand. This book attempts to explicate Harris’ writings and devotes separate chapters to each of the four novels in The Guyana Quartet.

Moore, Gerald. The Chosen Tongue: English Writing in the Tropical World. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. An excellent overview of literature written in English by nonwhite authors in Africa and the Caribbean region. Contains many references to Harris and his works. Useful for appreciating the ongoing interrelationship between Africa and the New World.