“Resisting Fearful Symmetry: Wilson Harris’s Bridges of Language"

This essay started out as a laudatio for the Honoris Causa Degree in Modern Letters conferred to Wilson Harris by the University of Macerata but later drew also from direct exchanges with the author. In the essay I argue that Harris is a writer belonging to a truly visionary lineage of world-creators. Dreams are his gateways to vision and to cosmic energy or spirit present in yet unexplored spaces and times. Openings into new conceptions, dreams in his novels prepare for change by revisioning previous dreams materialized into history. The dreamworld Harris creates in his novels resists the concepts of identity and alterity produced by the Cartesian and metaphysical Ego, to counteract the destructive effects of the conquistadorial paradigm. For Harris, neither victimizer nor victim can ever hope to regain purity or recover long-lost origins: in a globalized world, salvation is the Virgin/Whore’s child, the outcome of violence and innocence, of purity and devastation, the place of paradox. In such a world, language becomes the bridge joining opposites.