Da Silva da Silva is a painter, and his pain and pleasure, blindness and insight, comedy and calamity lie in the fact that everything he sees, he sees as if painted; everything he does, he does as if painting it rather than doing it. He meets the world as a representation, and in acting within it, he merely represents it anew. But is he the painter of what he sees? “Perhaps he had been painted there himself by another hand a breath’s passage away from earth.” Such metaphysical uncertainties—a constant flux in which apparent polarities mirror each other and interfuse—are the very ground on which Wilson Harris built his ever-ungrounding fictions, starting with Palace of the Peacock in 1960 and on through his last work, The Ghost of Memory in 2006. Dwelling on such self-undoing reflections becomes second nature to Wilson’s readers, but how many are they? He’s been called “the great unread novelist of the Caribbean.” It was reading Ralph Ellison’s posthumous Juneteenth a couple of months ago, parts of which conjured unexpected affinities with Harris’s “dazzling yet enigmatic” (or, as a perhaps franker commentator put it, “fascinating, challenging, and yet at times completely alienating”) prose; Harris, who was mightily productive—he published some thirty works of fiction, as well as essays and, early on, poetry—could not always maintain his grip on such all-permeating multiplicities: the whorls and eddies of his writing sometimes careen out of control or lead nowhere. But his oeuvre also includes some masterpieces; the first to come to mind, for me, being Jonestown (1996). Among his books on my shelves I found one I’d never gotten around to reading, this pairing of novellas that handily illustrates two sides of Harris’s emotional landscape, each as strange and mutable as the other: in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivate Wilderness, the London cityscape (the “cultivated wilderness” is at one level Holland Park, near which the writer himself, like his Brazilian-born protagonist, lived) and, in Genesis of the Clowns, the back country of his homeland of Guyana. Harris’s most persistent trope is an incantatory oxymoronic repetition whereby the same word becomes attached to contrary modifiers that somehow escape their mutual limitations, for instance beauty seen as “a multiple currency of light that marks both earth and sky with a predilection of wasted time, conserved, to outlast ‘time’ itself” or, still more wildly, an objective
that drew one forwards and backwards compulsively into all that was half-human, half-god, in oneself within a long and unpredictably painful transition towards becoming more wholly god or more wholly human; more capable of visionary activity within lost natures and times one endured as the accumulative transubstantiation of instinct that ran with a mystery of justice and injustice, authority and freedom, in insoluble deity.
Despite Da Silva’s anchorage in the observable topography of the West London of its day, its roads and landmarks—Abbotsbury Road, Addison Road, Mortimer Square; “a complex of buildings with Dickensian names, Dorrit House, Carton House, Nickleby House”; the Commonwealth Institute, Lord’s Cricket Ground, the ruins of Holland House—as well as more occult yet quite real existences such as “the buried rivers that flowed beneath the London streets,” all ties to the empirical can be dispersed from one sentence to the next. I assume the Guyanese geography of Genesis of the Clowns is just as accurate in detail. For every leap Harris makes into the quantum fluctuation of “interwoven illusions” there’s an accurate perception of a specific time and place that gives this prose an unshakeable grip. In Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness the most salient threads in the dense weave of time and space are art and love—da Silva’s relationship with his wife Jen; in Genesis of the Clowns, which I’ll write about separately, money and labor come to the fore.
❂
Wilson Harris, Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns, was published by Faber and Faber, London, 1977, and is out of print.
❂
BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.