Garth St. Omer, and Andrew Salkey. With the exception of Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Sylvia Wynter, and the 'repatriated' Jean Rhys, this was a distinctly male enterprise. Even in the works of major novelists such as Lamming, Harris, Selvon, and Naipaul the position of women as subjects of history is marginal to national and racial identification. Their novels reflect a preoccupation with the structure and values of colonial societies, with social and political change and its attendant crises, with race, class, and ethnic conflicts, with identity and the alienation from native space wrought by colonialism, with recovering the obscured cultural roots of the African majority, and with the role of the writer in charting national consciousness. The overlap of thematic concerns did not mean ideological or stylistic uniformity, however. Each of the major writers has a distinctive stylistic approach to the novel, drawing freely both from the literate traditions of Europe and America and from the linguistic and social modes of indigenous oral traditions peculiar to the region.
The novelist who dominates the literary scene at first is George Lamming from Barbados. Between 1953 and 1972, he published six novels: In the Castle of My Skin (1953), The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958), Season of Adventure (1970), Water with Berries (1971), and Natives of My Person (1972). Lamming writes out of a deep moral and intellectual commitment to the collective Caribbean community, to 'the shaping of national consciousness,' and to 'giving alternate directions to society.' Each of his novels deals with some aspect of the colonial experience, which provides the framework for a fully articulated vision of the Caribbean emerging in national-historical time. Chief among his themes are alienation and exile as facets of the colonial experience and the restructuring of Caribbean societies around the needs of its peasant and working-class majority. Major tropes of the Caribbean novel are drawn here in full self-consciousness of the dynamics of decolonization and the specific cultural constitutions of Caribbean personhood, among them: the -594- dissolution of colonialism, expatriation, repatriation, and national reconstruction.
The most widely read of Lamming's novels are In the Castle of My Skin and Season of Adventure. In the Castle is a foundational autobiographical novel about childhood in a colonial society. Its seminal value is easily seen when read in conjunction with fictional novels about childhood such as Michael Anthony's The Year in San Fernando (1965), Ian McDonald's The Hummingbird Tree (1969), Merle Hodge's Crick Crack Monkey (1970), Erna Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980), and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John (1985). Season of Adventure is a much-celebrated novel of emergence interwoven with the breakdown of postcolonial society and the process of psychic and social reconstruction. Lamming's central character is a strong heroine in the tradition of McKay's Bita Plant, but Lamming's highly refined sense of historical process is quite distinct from McKay's cyclicity. Lamming's heroine is actively engaged in the political process of national reconstruction.
The Emigrants and Water with Berries are novels of emigration and exile. In The Emigrants Lamming delineates the cultural dynamics of the massive West Indian immigration to Great Britain after World War II. In Water with Berries he examines the immigration of three West Indian artists to London and the effect this has on their development as men and as artists. Lamming's novels of expatriation stand in sharp contrast to the elegiac tones of V. S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and the satiric humor of Naipaul's The Mimic Men (1967). Lamming views immigration to the 'mother country' as fundamentally destructive to the Caribbean psyche, and Water with Berries has a distinctly apocalyptic tone. Lamming's last novels are allegorical in design. Natives of My Person is a historical novel that characterizes the genesis of colonialism in the New World in an allegorical reconstruction of a sixteenth-century voyage that ends in mutiny. Lamming describes it as 'the whole etiology of In the Castle of My Skin, The Emigrants, and Season of Adventure.'
Lamming's collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile (1960), is one of the first attempts to chart the intellectual and cultural history of the new West Indian literature. He delineates the outlines of national consciousness in contexts as varied as The Tempest and Othello, C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins, his own experience of -595- Haitian religious rituals, and his extended visit to Africa. He provides a theoretical framework for reading the syncretic character of the West Indian novel. 'The education of all these writers is more or less middle- class Western culture. But the substance of their books, the general motives and directions, are peasant.' Lamming now speaks and writes out of a more inclusive collective identity, about the Caribbean novel rather than the West Indian novel, but his observations about the contours of colonial and postcolonial consciousness in Pleasures remain an authoritative, insightful approach to the literature and culture of the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean.
Austin Clarke, also from Barbados, creates a different discursive space in his novels of expatriation. In his Toronto trilogy, The Meeting Point (1967), A Storm of Fortune (1973), The Bigger Light (1975), he explores with humor and insight cultural and racial conflict and the psychological stress of life in Toronto among workingclass immigrants from the Caribbean. Expatriation has a different level of intensity in Clarke's novels. This is also true of Sam Selvon's novels of expatriation: The Lonely Londoners (1956), Moses Ascending (1975), and Moses Migrating (1983). Selvon's comic vision changes perceptibly from sympathy to vicious satire as his West Indian subject reconstructs a parasitic identity that is superficially Black British.
Wilson Harris brings an entirely new dimension to the novel with his extravagant use of the vast Guyanese landscape as a metaphor for the obscured roots of community in the New World, his fluid characters, his fantastic reality, and his mythological approach to time. His themes are not so different — identity, memory, history, ancestry, community, cultural conflict, violence, greed, and exploitation — but his approach to the novel is far removed from the social realism of Mendes and James, from McKay's agricultural idyll, and from Lamming's increasingly allegorical conception of the past as prehistory. In Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays (1967), Harris rejected outright 'the conventional mould' of the West Indian novel of persuasion 'in which the author persuades you to ally yourself with situation and character.' He invented a form that would project the fluidity of the West Indian personality and situation as a potential for growth and change. Harris was concerned from the outset with the -596- role of the creative imagination in engendering a new civilization and a new literary tradition in the Caribbean.
Harris has published sixteen novels to date, and all but five of them use a Guyanese setting. His first four novels, Palace of the Peacock (1960), Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), and The Secret Ladder (1963), are known as the Guiana Quartet. Harris's obsession with the drama of consciousness as 'an infinite movement' and 'a ceaseless task of the psyche' is fully articulated in these early novels about the people, the landscape, the history, and the legends of Guyana. In the five novels that follow, Heartland (1964), Eye of the Scarecrow (1965), The Waiting Room (1967), Tumatumari (1968), and Ascent to Omai (1970), the impact of the Guyanese heartland on the subjective imagination deepens into elaborate explorations of memory and identity. The novels that follow are set in Edinburgh, London, India, and Mexico. Black Marsden (1972), Companions of the Day and Night (1975), Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns (1977), The Tree of the Sun (1978), and The Angel at the Gate (1982) share common images and characters, all variations of Harris's exploration of the human capacity for growth and development in different cultural contexts. Carnival (1985) and The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) are 'spiritual biography' and 'fictional autobiography' respectively. Set in Guyana and in the United Kingdom, they are an elaborate deconstruction of the ambiguities and deceptions that attend any attempt to apportion fixed value to human consciousness.
Harris's four books of criticism are helpful in sorting out the stylistic and linguistic theories that shape his fiction in such a distinctive way. The first of these, Tradition, the Writer and Society, provides an invaluable theoretical frame of reference for Caribbean literature as a whole. Fossil and Psyche (1974) and Explorations (1981) are collections of his essays and lectures. In The Womb of Space: The CrossCultural Imagination (1983), Harris examines
