Summary

(MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE, CRITICAL EDITION)

Palace of the Peacock contains most of the elements that Harris elaborates upon in his later
works, and it establishes his rejection of the conventional European style of fiction writing,
which follows a linear pattern of narration and in which all aspects of the story are finally
brought together to a logical conclusion. The storyline in this novel is as follows: Donne, a
white colonizer, is leading a multiracial crew into the forest in hopes of enlisting cheap
labor for his ranch plantation. As they penetrate deeper into the interior, the members of
the crew, and finally the captain himself, die off one after the other.

The novel is very rich in symbolism. Donne, the ruthless white master, stands for the
exploitative European presence in the Caribbean, concerned with individual gain, and
having no appreciation of the natives except in terms of the physical labor that can be
extracted from them. The crew of the ship represent the major racial groups of
postcolonial Guiana: indigenous, African, and Asian. The length of the journey, seven days,
hints at an anti-Genesis, a destruction rather than creation of the New World. The journey
itself is representative of a quest, an exploration of identity as well as territory.

The novel begins as a dream of Captain Donne’s twin brother, the narrator. In the dream,
Donne has been murdered by Mariella, a Native American woman he had seduced,
exploited, and abused. The murder is a symbolic reference to the spirit of defiance and
bitterness of the natives against the colonialists. Significantly, Mariella is also the name of
the territory of the mission the crew stop at during their expedition.

Mariella, who also appears as an old woman, is similar in her variety of states of being to
the crew members who are already dead and are reliving their adventures through the
narrator’s vision. Finally, the murdered captain, Donne, whose story is told by his twin
brother, eventually merges with this narrator, completely eroding of the traditional
definition of a protagonist as a separate literary character with a specific function in the
story.

Although aspects of Palace of the Peacock are explained toward the end of the novel, no
final resolution takes place. Instead, the narrative implies that all stories and histories are
merely interpretations of a vision, a perception construed in a state of altered
consciousness.

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Bibliography
(MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE, CRITICAL EDITION)

Adler, Joyce. Exploring the Palace of the Peacock: Essays on Wilson Harris. Edited by Irving
Adler. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2003.

Fazzini, Marco, ed. Resisting Alterities: Wilson Harris and Other Avatars of Otherness.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004.

Gilkes, Michael. Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel. St. Augustine, Trinidad: Longman
Caribbean, 1975.

James, C. L. R. Wilson Harris: A Philosophical Approach. St. Augustine, Trinidad: University

of the West Indies, 1965.

Maes-Jelink, Hena. The Labyrinth of Universality: Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of Fiction.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.

Maes-Jelink, Hena. Wilson Harris. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Maes-Jelink, Hena, and Benedicte Ledent, eds. Theatre of the Arts: Wilson Harris and the
Caribbean. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.

Munro, Ian, and Reinhard Sander, eds. Kas-Kas: Interviews with Three Caribbean Writers in
Texas. Austin: University of Texas at Austin, 1972.

Van Sertima, Ivan. Caribbean Writers: Critical Essays. London: New Beacon Books, 1968.

Webb, Barbara J. Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction. Amherst: University of

Massachusetts Press, 1992.