An overview of Wilson Harris’s Guyana Quartet

Abstract

Wilson Harris is an extremely productive and a well-known Guyanese novelist, poet and critic. He is generally appreciated as a writer who desires to create new form in his narratives by bringing reconciliation among races and seek for the basic unity of man. Harris’s writings created a community where one can get a “vision of oneness”. Unlike other Caribbean writers who presented the state of fragmentations of the past in their narratives, Harris emerged as a writer who faced the bitter past and bring reconciliations among races. This amalgamation which is untied from all cultural or racial issues, manifest a new state of consciousness. The Guyana Quartetis consisted of four pieces of novels namely – Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder. These novels are multi-layered and densely metaphorical. The paper seeks to give an overview of the Guyana Quartet from different aspects and the attempt of Harris to create a new form of community through imagination.