The dark jester

by Wilson Harris

Recounts Pizarro's conquest of Peru as a fictional meditation on the encounter between Spanish colonialism and Inca civilisation, and the spiritual and cultural consequences that emerge from this meeting.

Genres: Fiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Born in Guyana in 1921 and based in England since 1959, Wilson Harris is one of the most original novelists and critics of the twentieth century. His writings, which include poems, numerous essays and twenty-four novels, provide a passionate and unique defense of the notion of cross-culturalism as well as a visionary exploration of the interdependence between history, landscape and humanity. In 2010 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
Another tour de force by one of my favourite novelists, Wilson Harris. I still don’t understand why he isn’t better known. He is difficult and magic realism isn’t to everyone’s taste, but for me he is one of the great South American/Caribbean novelists.
This novel reflects on a small but significant episode in South American history. The meeting between Pizarro the Spanish conquistador and the king of the Incas Atahualpa. The king is to be burnt at the stake (spreading the Christian Gospel was a robust affair), but avoids death by converting to Christianity and promising a room of gold to Pizarro for his freedom. Atahualpa is betrayed and killed.
Harris draws on myth and wisdom from a variety of sources; primarily South American, but also Buddhist and classical Greek; Plato’s cave even makes an appearance. The narrator is dreaming the events and is known as the Dreamer. The Dreamer periodically transforms as he is occupied by different players in the drama and sees different perspectives. But we are looking at the Incan civilisation meeting European materialism.
The Dreamer is accompanied throughout by the Jester of the title. Harris’s way of writing is intense and it has a certain sensuality; for example, the Jester’s soundless laughing is described as “like a gathering storm on a Butterfly’s wing”. Harris recreates myth with the fusion of the various myths he brings to the novel; a reimagining of the horrific effect of meeting of two entirely different cultures. The Jester figure appears in other work by Harris and represents “the submerged authority of dispossessed peoples”. History and Cartesian logic have their limitations as the entry of the Greeks into Troy is contrasted with the fall of the Incas.
Dreaming has significance in Harris’s fiction being often an epistemological way into secrets and the unconscious and to the centre of creativity. The questions “What is History/Art/Prophecy/Truth?” are asked. It is a rich and multi-layered exploration of the destruction of a civilisation. If you like magic realism and complex structured novels this may be for you.

[Miguel Lupián · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lectura propuesta por el Dr. Zac Zimmer para comentar en su ponencia "La cartografía especulativa y el tejido del cosmos", presentada hace unos días en el Seminario de Literatura Fantástica Hispanoamericana. Aunque no sabía nada de este autor guyanés, me encantó su prosa densa, onírica y poética, que te seducía para leerla en voz alta. Utilizando la estructura del quipu (instrumento de almacenamiento de información a través de cuerdas y nudos, empleado en las civilizaciones andinas pre-colombinas), donde el tiempo no es lineal, Harris nos cuenta otra versión (o paralela) de la conquista del Perú (con vasos comunicantes con otros sucesos históricos en otras épocas y civilizaciones): un "encuentro fantasmagórico entre Pizarro y Atahualpa". Aunque los críticos lo clasifican como realismo mágico, Harris siempre rechazó el realismo, porque representa "una serie de explicaciones que falsifican la realidad latinoamericana". Lectura densa, compleja y laberíntica, pero muy gozosa.

[Manuel Abreu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is where my Harris journey started, over a decade ago, and it's still my north star. It also happens to hold up quite well. To quote the text as a way to describe the vast, warping spatiotemporal landscape it plots, it has a "pre-Columbian baby astronaut" (page 7 iirc) approach to narrative, and is a great example of Harris' late work, where cross-culturality is the engine of ideas and encounters, while being more accessible than the recondite masterwork that is Jonestown (1996).