SOURCE: Emery, Mary Lou. “‘Space Sounds’ in Wilson Harris's Recent Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 2 (summer 1997): 98–103.

In the following essay, Emery discusses how Harris utilizes the imagery of Guyanese visual art as a metaphor for the problem of identity in The Four Banks of the River of Space and Resurrection at Sorrow Hill.

We may carve or sculpt or paint with a hand that falters even as it seeks the true, exact hand it can never capture, Timehri, hand of God. …

I have dreamt, Judge, of writing a manifesto of the ship of the globe. …

—spoken by Hope in Resurrection at Sorrow Hill

As readers of Wilson Harris's writing, we are drawn into the fictions, drawn almost literally, as his characters “carve, sculpt, or paint” themselves onto the pages that become simultaneously canvases, galleries, and theaters of a reimagined globe. The dynamics of visual creativity figured in...