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

This article is an attempt at reading Wilson Harris with Gilles Deleuze, considering how the latter’s writings on the image might produce a fresh understanding of Harris’s art of fiction. To do this, I highlight the interest that both Harris and Deleuze have in the theatre as a medium for illustrating their conception of the image in language and thought. Discussing mainly the novel Carnival, I show how Harris assimilates narrative to the theatrical medium itself as both a concrete and abstract space of spontaneous multiplicity, and relate this to Deleuze’s understanding of the image and of the text as objects of movement and of becoming. I also relate Harris’s art of fiction to Deleuze’s critique of conventional mimesis and its subject/object binarism, showing how codes and conventions of theatrical communication (and a readerly self-conscious perception of this) are injected into Harris’s narrative protocols, creating an aesthetic that communicates to or, more specifically, performs with, the reader in ways that challenge the conception of narrative as self-contained representation. In sum, this paper demonstrates the way in which Harris’s narrative evokes, and is evoked by, the play of theatre — in other words its quintessentially differential nature, through images that resist the very concept of representation.