ABSTRACT
Wilson Harris’s fictional debut in 1960 with Palace of the Peacock has proved increasingly significant within the development of Caribbean literature. Harris himself has written some twenty-one novels, besides a major body of essays, lectures and critical works, by the end of 1997.2 These have uncompromisingly developed his premise that West Indian literature should transform reality, rather than being ‘a vested interest in a fixed assumption and classification of things’.3 His fiction to date falls broadly into five interlinked cycles, with transitional works: the geo graphically based ‘Guyanese Quartet’ (1960-93); the ‘dramas of con sciousness’ written between 1965 and 1970; outward-looking explorations of global identity (1972-82); and the ‘Carnival Quartet’ produced from 1985 to 1990. Two recent novels show Harris turning back to Guyana in a world perspective, and appear to indicate a new phase.4
