Wilson Harris’s Multi-Faceted and Dynamic Perception of the Imaginary

Abstract

M OST OF W I LSON H ARR IS'S F ICTION and essays concentrate on the role of the imagination in the existential process he re-creates or comments on. As he wrote in an unpublished essay, "The Key word for me as a writer is imagination.'ri One may therefore ask what he means by the word apart from its obvious definition as a creative faculty. Another question is: in what sense can he be called a "warrior" of the imaginary? As their titles indicate, the subject of many of his essays is imagination: "A Talk on the Subjective Imagination"; "Some Aspects of Myth and the Intuitive Imagination"; "Literacy and the Imagination"; "Validation of Fiction: A Personal View oflmaginative truth"; "The Fabric of the Imagination"; 'The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination"; The Radical Imagination; "Imagination Dead Imagine: Bridging a Chasm";