SOURCE: Drake, Sandra. “Revolutionary Hope as Immanent Moment: The Writing of Wilson Harris.” In Process of Unity in Caribbean Society: Ideologies and Literature, edited by Ileana Rodríguez and Marc Zimmerman, pp. 168–75. Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literatures, 1983.

In the following essay, Drake explores Harris's writing style in terms of the relationship between literature and society.

This paper is a brief and somewhat preliminary outline of a project on which I am now working, an analysis of the work of the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris. I am especially interested in how his difficult, peculiar and relatively inaccessible writing is to be regarded by people concerned with the relation between literature and society.

Harris' work also presents interesting questions of genre. I suggest that he is a writer of revolutionary insights, not alone in the text of his work but also in its texture—that is...