The Genesis of the Clowns is a memory piece. In Holland Park, London, in 1974, the narrator, who appears to be a stand-in for the author—a former government surveyor in what had until 1966 been British Guiana—receives a letter informing him of the death of a man, Hope, who, years before, had been his assistant. Only gradually do we learn that the novel’s onetime surveyor is named, not Wilson Harris, but rather, Frank Wellington. He recalls the episode in 1948 when he had gathered a crew for an exploratory expedition upriver—among them Hope. Wellington had meant to deal with Hope, as with the rest, as a mere instrumentality, “to see in him nothing but technical responses I bargained for, coded gestures I paid for,” but soon finds this impossible. Likewise the river itself, the terrain, the encompassing light exceed his determination to create linear measurement. In “the fatalistic light of calm” upon the river, Wellington says,
I felt I was looking deep into a massive and formidable hesitation of forces in myself and in my age, and that there glimmered far down, far beneath the bed of the river figures in a mysterious landscape, figures that embraced each other save that the very function of their embrace possessed a value other than itself which had so turned in on itself it may have involuntarily safe-guarded itself or, on the other hand, eclipsed itself altogether
—typical of how the involutions of thought, as Harris follows its trails, lead to its own impasse. The setting feels like something I’ve seen in a painting of Chris Ofili’s, or even a Blakean “forest of the night,” though the narrative remains always at the edge of that forest rather than plunging into it as in other works of Harris’s. In reading Harris, in any case, I think of Blake more than of any other predecessor: both men were radicals whose political passion was married to a visionary sensibility. What if C.L.R. James (one of the dedicatees of Genesis of the Clowns) had been influenced by Jung as deeply as he had been by Marx? He would have been more in tune with the polymorphous thinking embodied in Harris’s fiction. Such overt action as we find narrated in Genesis of the Clowns is, on the face of it, little more than the sequence of banal encounters involved in a payday at the surveyor’s waystation: a table set up by a tent, where one by one each member of the multi-ethnic crew approaches to sign a pay sheet and receive his two weeks’ wages: fourteen days at three dollars a day. But meeting the men one by one, we catch intimations of their elusive pasts and riddling futures, all tied together through what Wellington recognizes as “imperial/colonial legacies around the globe” but also the “incredible penetrations of space in a cell, in a room, in a sun.” Harris pursued what he called a “quantum concept” of multiple interleaved realities to match the multiple interpenetrating or perhaps simply colliding life worlds within the web of imperial remnants in which incommensurable belief systems cohabit uneasily. His determination to register the full complexity and unfathomable contradictions of modern being outstrips all literary realism, to a degree that I suspect would terrify any subsequent writer who thought to attempt it. I’m not aware of any subsequent writer committed to quite so radical a conception of what the novel could be. If the results induce dizziness in the reader, that’s probably because in the seventy-odd pages of each of these novellas, in “the telling silences secreted in the family of the Word,” in the ramifying interstices of his fable, he layers more matter than any other writer could gather in hundreds of pages.
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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.
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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.