Werbanowska 1

Marta Werbanowska
Dr. Jarrett Brown
ENGG 232
6 March 2017
Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1960) – a bibliography

Literary criticism of the novel:

1. Gana, Nouri. “Donne Undone: The Journey of Psychic Re-integration in Wilson Harris's

Palace of the Peacock.” Ariel, vol. 32, no 1, January 2001, pp. 153-70. Ariel: A Review of

International English Literature.

https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/ariel/article/view/34400/28436

2. Islam, Syed Manzu. “Postcolonial Shamanism: Wilson Harris's Quantum Poetics and

Ethics.” Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 16, no. 1, November 2007, pp. 59-82.

JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23019723

3. Jackson, Shona M. “The Recalcitrant Muse: Race, Sex and Historical Tension in the

Search for the West Indian (Trans) subject.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3,

September 2004, pp. 47-62. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654464

4. McCarthy, Cameron. "The Palace of the Peacock: Wilson Harris and the Curriculum in

Troubled Times". Counterpoints, vol. 70, 1999, pp. 364-78. JSTOR.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/42975682

5. Shaw, Gregory. “Wilson Harris's Metamorphoses: Animal and Vegetable Masks in

"Palace of the Peacock".” Callaloo, vol. 18, no. 1, Winter 1995, pp. 157-70. JSTOR.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299235

6. Toliver, Victoria. “Vodun Iconography in Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock.”

Callaloo, vol. 18, no. 1, Winter 1995, pp. 173-90. JSTOR.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299238
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Other scholarship on Wilson Harris:

7. Adler, Joyce Sparer. Exploring the Palace of the Peacock: Essays on Wilson Harris.

Edited by Irving Adler. U of the West Indies P, 2003.

8. Maes-Jelinek, Hena. The Labyrinth of Universality: Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of

Fiction. Editions Rodopi, 2006.

9. ---. The Wilson Harris Bibliography. http://www.cerep.ulg.ac.be/harris/index.html

Accessed 2 March 2018.

10. McWatt, Mark. “Wilson Harris: Understanding the Language of the Imagination.” The

Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, Routledge, 2011, pp. 34-42.

Theory and Critical/Historical Background:

11. Burnett, D. Graham. Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a

British El Dorado. U of Chicago P, 2001.

12. Harris, Wilson. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the

Imagination. Edited by Andrew Bundy, Routledge, 1999.

13. Lane, Richard. The Postcolonial Novel. Polity, 2006.

14. Tiffin, Helen. “The Metaphor of Anancy in Caribbean Literature.” Myth and Metaphor,

edited by Rob Sellick. Adelaide Centre for Research in the New Literature in English,

1982, pp. 15-52.

15. Wilentz, Gay. “English Is a Foreign Anguish: Caribbean Writers and the Disruption of

the Colonial Canon.” Decolonizing Tradition: New Views of Twentieth-Century "British"

Literary Canons, edited by Karen Lawrence. U of Illinois P, 1991.

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Glissant, “Closed Space Open World” and Palace of the Peacock

 Post-plantation literature of memory (274) – symbolism over realism, “creative

marronage,” landscape as implicated in the story (Mariella – both woman and place),
nonlinear time (circular or rhizomatic)
 Plantation as the matrix for Caribbean culture: internal contradictions (the characters are
both alive and dead), creolization (everyone comes from different ethnic background),
miscegenation (here in the form of sexual violence, Donne and Mariella)
Wilson Harris and course objectives/overview:

 Cbean lit as response to colonization: “Tradition” - myth of El Dorado and colonial greed
as prism through which Cbean is seen; the European tradition of novel of
character/consolidation vs the novel of imagination/fulfillment/ drama of consciousness
that is more suitable for WI, more inspired by “native” understanding of reality
 politics of the collective: Harris’s discussion of other WI writers in “Tradition” as effort
in establishing a diverse Cbean literary community, to forge native criticism; in
“Landscapes”, community also includes nonhuman nature.
 Language and representation: beyond traditional understanding of these terms; silent
music of landscape as a language/means of communication, the need for attunement and
responsiveness to landscape; nonhuman nature as part of the nation, too (alternative to
Western epistemology of anthropocentrism); McWatt: language of the imagination as a
mode of conversing with the world from the margins, Harris’s fiction as native “re-
vision” of Western framework for seeing reality
 Carnival – McWatt (40), mode of representation/understanding reality
 relationality – Living landscapes, human and environment; “Tradition” – writers to one
another and to the European tradition
 marronage – nature as ally (Landscapes), escaping European influence (Tradition). Also
mythopoetics, marvelous realism
 history and geography as factors: understanding of history as circular, mythical,
rhizomatic (McWatt 38); the impact of Amerindian cultures and then colonization on
various visions of reality (landscape as active vs passive); author’s situatedness (Guyana
vs London) as a narrative strategy for the essay (Landscapes – bridging the breaks by
narrative switches between locations and modes, from autobio to philosophy)
 Werbanowska 4

Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1960) – a bibliography

1. McWatt, Mark. “Wilson Harris: Understanding the Language of the Imagination.” The
Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 2011.
 Harris’s ‘language of the imagination’ . . . is a language which is really the embodiment
of a philosophical position – as his own theoretical writings make clear – that has to do
with a deep conviction about the need for, and the possibilities of, genuine freedom that
spring from the act of reading and writing the world. (34)

2. Gana, Nouri. “Donne Undone: The Journey of Psychic Re-integration in Wilson Harris's
"Palace of the Peacock." Ariel, Vol 32, No 1 (2001).
 On the historical level, Palace belongs to the very early days of the Dutch settlement
(1616) and is, as well, pertinent to the later uninterrupted British colonization (1831-
1966) of what used to be called British Guiana. From this perspective, the book reenacts
one of those ritualistic journeys administered by either Dutch or British ranchers who, in
search of fugitive slaves for their plantations, relied on the help of the aboriginal
Amerindian inhabitants who are represented in the novel by the figure of the Arawak
woman. On the mythical level, Palace apes one of those numerous voyages in search of a
quasi-chimerical city of gold —an El Dorado — whose lure and elusiveness cost Sir
Walter Raleigh his head in the early seventeenth century.
 Published in 1960, Palace is haunted by the dream of an intercommunal modus vivendi—
a dream all the more urgent in the context of instensifying ethnic antagonism . . . For a
Jungian intellectual like Harris, the way out of these politically perpetuated ethnic
enclaves lies in the archetype, in alchemy: his countrymen are in a dire need of an
alchemical psychic re-integration, an archetypal re-possession of their interior.

3. McCarthy, Cameron. "The Palace of the Peacock: Wilson Harris and the Curriculum in
Troubled Times". Counterpoints Vol. 70, 1999.
 Donne is colonizer and agent of dominating instrumental reason, but it is his materialism
that blocks his wholeness of being. His abuse of Mariella - Arawak, Shaman-woman,
and colony – leads to one of his many deaths in the novel.
 The seven day journey in The Palace of the Peacock may thus be compared to the seven
stages of the alchemical process during which the massa confusa (the nigredo or chaos) is
immersed ( ablutio , a stage similar to Christian baptism or "death by water") and
exposed to a series of chemical and physical changes - through to a stage of purification
( albedo ) to the final aurum non vulgi or Cauda Pavonis (the peacock colors) , which
represents a unity in diversity.
 In The Palace of the Peacock this subaltern or revolutionary power derives from an
unflinching self-critique and openness to contradiction, discontinuity, and difference.
 Werbanowska 5

4. Toliver, Victoria. “Vodun Iconography in Wilson Harris's "Palace of the Peacock".”

Callaloo, Vol. 18, No. 1, Wilson Harris: A Special Issue (Winter, 1995)
 Considered within the architecture of possession, metamorphosis, limbo, and harmony,
these four visually commanding scenes-(1) the opening scene of Book One in which
Donne's Mait'tete (or met tet, meaning master of the head) is shot down by a phantom
presence, (2) the scene midway into Book Two in which the narrator attempts to mount
the aberrant beast of his nightmare, (3) the scene centrally located in Book Three in
which the old Arawak woman forms a nucleus of pierced flesh on two planes of
experience, and (4) the final scene of Book Four in which the narrator gains his third eye
in the palace of the peacock-all come together to convey to readers in a metaphorical
manner, rather than in a didactic way, one of the themes of this novel: that society,
represented by the adversarial I-Donne twinship with its dying crew, is in need of the
mediating powers of a capable mambo.

5. Shaw, Gregory. “Wilson Harris's Metamorphoses: Animal and Vegetable Masks in

"Palace of the Peacock".” Callaloo, Vol. 18, No. 1, Wilson Harris: A Special Issue
(Winter, 1995), pp. 157-170
 The reader of Palace of the Peacock participates in the shock and disorientation
experienced by the crew precisely because of these constantly shifting frames of
reference, complexity of resonance, carnival promiscuity of forms, miscegenation of
images.

6. Islam, Syed Manzu. “Postcolonial Shamanism: Wilson Harris's Quantum Poetics and
Ethics.” Journal of West Indian Literature, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Nov 2007), pp. 59-82
 The transformation of limbo from its catastrophic origin to the celebratory exuberance of
carnival is mediated through Anancy - the spidery trickster figure of West African origin.
For Harris this 'limbo gateway', apart from signalling the metamorphic linkage between
Africa, the Americas and the West Indies, creates the in-between limbo space from
which the hybrid subjectivity of Caribbean people has emerged.
 In Palace of the Peacock, the vertical journey upwards along the cliff-face not only
brings death to the rigid self of colonial/postcolonial subjects, but enables their upright
journey. It will lead not only to the healing of their souls, but also provide them with a
model for forming a postcolonial ethical community.