Hena Maes-Jelinek

The Myth of El Dorado in the Caribbean Novel

The possible existence of a golden city in the South American heartland, has haunted men’s imagination since the days when the conquistadores were hoping to make it the centre of the third and richest province of the Spanish Empire. The legend told of a king who every year covered his body with gold dust and dived into a lake. Quesada, the conqueror of Colombia, who was hoping to reach Manoa, succeeded in having himself appointed by the King of Spain as Governor and Captain-General of El Dorado, Guiana, the Great Manoa and the Island of Trinidad. Before dying of leprosy, he bequeathed the title to his nephew, Antonio de Berrio, and enjoined him to pursue the quest. Berrio, then a sixty-year old soldier, came to the New World to claim his inheritance, made Trinidad the base for his search and launched three unsuccessful expeditions before he was made a prisoner by Raleigh and left to die on an island on the Orinoco river. The

Reviews : Natural and Psychological Landscapes Wilson Harris, The Sleepers of Roraima: A Carib Trilogy, Faber, I970, £I.25; and The Age of the Rainmakers, Faber, I97I, £I.25

The function of myth is to account for a creation, for the origin of the elements or the beginnings of a civilization, with another creation born of a growing consciousness and imagination. In his collections of ’fables’ Wilson Harris traces the genesis of natural and psychological elements, and of an apprehension of the world which, like myth itself, might yet evolve from an individual conception to a more generalized view of the mainspring of creation. One’s first impression of the stories, particularly of The Age of the Rainmakers is of a dazzling puzzle which one tackles nevertheless with a growing sense of excitement, tempered with an awareness that one must resist the sheer melody and visual suggestiveness of words to make sure of their meaning. Yet the stories

Europe and post-colonial creativity: a metaphysical cross-culturalism

In Shakespeares The Tempest , the meeting between Prospero and Caliban is an allegory of a Renaissance colonial encounter. Although Prospero emphasizes his gift of language to Caliban, he deems him incapable of ‘nurture’ (cultural progress). After the Second World War, the Barbadian novelist Georges Lamming saw in that gift the possibility of a ‘new departure’, which in the following decades was to modify not only Calibans prospects but most emphatically the European, and specifically, the British cultural scene. I intend to illustrate this transformation through the contribution of postcolonial writers to the metamorphosis of the ‘Great Tradition’ of the English novel. The changes are formal, linguistic but also evince a metaphysical cross-culturalism best exemplified, among others, in the fiction of the Guyanese-born, British novelist Wilson Harris.