Wilson Harris

History, Fable and Myth in The Caribbean and Guianas

It occurred to me as I contemplated this series of talks entitled History, Fable And Myth that it may prove illuminating to look first of all at J. J. Thomass rebuttal of the 19th century historian Froude in his book Froudadty. Froudacitywas first published in 1889 and has been re-printed by New Beacon Books in 1969. It is not my intention to review Froudacity at this time but rather to highlight the crux of the dispute between Froude and Thomas as I believe that will help to make clear the kind of historical stasis which has afflicted the Caribbean I would suggest for many generations.

The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination

It is an honour to give the Arthur Ravenscroft Memorial Lecture this year. Arthur Ravenscroft was a dear friend of mine, and of my wife Margaret. We loved his spontaneity, his humour and his serious commitment to grave causes of freedom. We admired the scrupulous care with which he wrote his critical pieces. Indeed he was a scholar and a critic of integrity. We also admired his superb editorship of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, a legacy to the humanities in the English-speaking world. Braced by his memory I would now like to proceed with the sort of intuitive journey

Judgement and Dream

A judgement began to secrete itself in the work I was writing because of the ways in which I revised the work as I was writing it. I revised it by carefully scanning the drafts that I wrote and as I was doing so, I would discover there images that seemed to have been planted by another hand, and I would revise the drafts through those images. My own belief is that such images come out of the unconscious, out of the world’s unconscious. But there are two specific matters that one has to look at, because one cannot generalize about the unconscious. First of all, such images must relate to one’s background and to all sorts of apparently vague premises which exist in one’s background. On the other hand, because they come out of the unconscious it means that they have a universality. In other words, what is native, what is profoundly native, relates to what is profoundly universal.

Closing Statement: Apprenticeship to the Furies

The Furies! What are the Furies? Are they nourished by our animosities, prejudices, biases? Are we intricately and complexly and dramatically part and parcel of the womb-body of the Furies? Are they in us yet far from us? Are they ghosts tapping at our window within abused elements, water, air, fire, earth? I have been intuitively involved in an imagination of the Furies — their protean shapes and configurations — for some considerable time. They are such a neglected medium in the humanities, yet deeply rooted simultaneously, that a late-twentieth-century interpretation is paradoxical and personal, and I have had to fall back on a gathering impetus within my own work, across the past four decades, to cope with and confront an insistent theme of the Furies.

Kith and Kin

Now that I am embarked on this letter I find myself involved in the most curious dif~iculties. Memories that I have carried around (and taken for granted) since childhood suddenly seem more reticent, more withdrawn, than ever. And yet in that reticence paradoxically more active, with a deep inwardness to resist or scrutinize from their side any kind of facile portrait or summary on my side. There is a kind of melancholy humour at the heart of this resistance of memory which sustains a desire to yield something new to me now (which I could discuss with you), and yet by continuing its resistance wishes to impress on me how easy it would be for me to falsify it or betray it in a letter which could blissfully or naturally conform to a tranquil characterization of the past. Perhaps this complicated response and caution stems from the diverse character of memory and the feeling I now have very strongly that a large body of that heterogeneous character which affected our lives has