The Four Banks of the River of Space

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A novel about the complexities of memory, Wilson Harris's The Four Banks of the River of Space is a return to the writer's childhood haunts. Shunning what he calls sterile realism, Harris digs under the reality of perception and language to find the hidden music or pattern which gives significance to apparently desperate situations. Memory thus becomes a form of creation which follows the Odyssean metaphor of the quest naturalized here in the author's original Guyana heartland. This journey into the past does not limit itself to the reassertion of the protagonist's multiculturalism. It states that poetic language can only progress through erasure leading to the opening out of new doors or windows into essential reality, where polarities melt away.The Four Banks of the River of Space fragments the epic figure of Ulysses into several personalities who conduct self-analyses to redefine the nature and function of myth.