The knowledge of the savannas and rain forests he gained during his twenty years as a land surveyor formed the setting for many of his books, with the Guyanese landscape dominating his fiction.
Between 1945 and 1961, Harris was a regular contributor of stories, poems and essays to Kyk-over-Al literary magazine[3] and was part of a group of Guyanese intellectuals that included Martin Carter, Sidney Singh, Milton Williams, Jan Carew, and Ivan Van Sertima.
[7] Louis Chude-Sokei argues that the readerly "consensus is that Harris's irrecuperability and his minor or cult status is largely due to his prose... its complexity and density, whether fiction or non-fiction, regularly ban him from course syllabi and the rituals of literary culture, even in the Caribbean.
"[8] At the same time, perhaps partly because of the challenge of Harris' work, "his legacy can and should make a difference" to Caribbean art and thought (ibid).
Harris's writing has been associated with many different literary genres by critics, including: surrealism, magic realism, mysticism and modernism.
Over the years, Harris has used many different concepts to define his literary approach, including: cross-culturalism, modern allegory,[10] epic, and quantum fiction.
Joyce Sparer Adler agrees, but notes that certain novels had stronger characters with more narrative agency, such as Beti in The Far Journey of Oudin (1961) and Magda in The Whole Armour (1962).
However, it is not until Susan Forrestal in The Waiting Room (1967) that Harris writes a woman protagonist, and not until Mary in The Angel at the Gate (1982) can we see a fully-fleshed out character with emotional depth.
[11] For Adler, Harris used the cipher of fictional character in the same way ritual uses masks; they are portals between worlds, and assemblages of mythological history, not really depictions of people.
However, later critical work such as by Hena Maes-Jelinek, Paget Henry and Andrew Bundy argued that Harris was instead drawing on aesthetic resources of syncretism of African and Amerindigenous systems of belief and practice.
Harris himself wrote in History, Fable & Myth in the Caribbean & Guianas (1970) that his work "reads back through the shock of place and time for omens of capacity that were latent, unrealized, within the clash of cultures and movements of peoples into the South Americas and West Indies”.
Harris does not necessarily need to rely on a Hegelian historical theory, since he feels that a philosophy of history in fact lies within Caribbean arts (ibid).
Paget Henry places Wilson Harris in the "mythopoetic tradition" of Caribbean thought in his foundational Caliban's reason (2000).
The technique exposes and alters the power of language to lock in fixed beliefs and attitudes, "freeing" words and concepts to associate in new ways and revealing the alchemic aspects of consciousness.
For Harris, the task is to experiment with the capacities of language so that it can measure it to the complexity of reality, hence his general distrust of and disappointment with literary realism.
This quest and understanding underlies his narrative fiction themes about human slavery, colonization, power, freedom, and mystical or ecstatic experiences.
Harris cites language as both a crucial element in the subjugation of enslaved and indentured people, and the means by which the destructive processes of history could be reversed.
[17] Harris attributed his innovative literary techniques as a development that was the result of being witness to the physical world behaving as quantum theory.
[18] The "quantum" component of his work is his attempt to measure up to the demand of reality itself, deeply influenced by his two decades as a land surveyor of the Guyanese interior.
[19] Common metafiction framing techniques in his novels include dreams and dreams within dreams (as in the Guyana Quartet (1985) and The Dark Jester (2001)), tropes from epic poetry, found or received archival material (such as the asylum journals analysed by the narrator in The Waiting Room (1966) or The Angel at the Gate(1982), or the papers of Idiot Nameless in Companions of the Day and Night (1975)), and the repeated use of the same characters across different novel-universes (such as the da Silva twins from Palace, who reappear throughout the oeuvre, for example in Da Silva Da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness (1977)).