Philosophy of the imagination: time, immanence and the events that wound us in Wilson Harris’sJonestown

Reading Wilson Harris with Gilles Deleuze: Carnival, or the novel as theatrical space

“…In this article I want to consider the significance of theatricality in the workings of Wilson Harris’s fiction, using the example of the novel Carnival and grounding my analysis in a Deleuzian perspective on the theatrical sign. While Lorna Burns has discussed the relevance of the Deleuzian concept of “immanence” for reading and understanding Harris’s work — according to Burns, Deleuze’s “philosophy of becoming and change” (2013: 6) illustrates remarkably well the crucial interplay between immanence and transcendence in Harris’s work — I, for my part, seek to examine how the theatre medium, so important to Deleuze’s theory of the sign, becomes crucial in the construction of Harris’s art of fiction. I show that it is the field through which Harris articulates the displacement of mimesis and its subject–object binarism and challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between the reader and the object of fiction.…”