INTRODUCTION

In May 1964, five years after immigrating to Britain, Wilson Harris addressed the London West Indian Students' Union on the subject of “Tradition and the West Indian Novel.” Over the course of his remarks, Harris observed the persisting relevance of Eliot's modernism. “The fact is,” he said:

The dense intertextual and historical relations between Harris and Eliot are hard to miss. In 1960, the unsolicited manuscript for Harris's Palace of the Peacock was published in London by Faber, the firm that would subsequently publish all of Harris's novels, including a four-part series entitled The Guyana Quartet. More than two decades ago, Bruce King remarked, “If Wilson Harris has any direct forebear it is T. S. Eliot with his meditations on time and tradition, and his fragmentation of narrative into a mosaic of dissociated images and symbols expressive of the chaos of modern culture and of the individual mind attempting to piece together an encompassing vision out of personal disorder.”