In the Shadows of Divine Perfection: Derek Walcott's Omeros

IN THE SHADOWS OF DIVINE PERFECTION

MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS VOLUME 30

STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS VOLUME 30

Edited by William Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A ROUTLEDGE SERIES

STUDIES IN MAJOR LITERARY AUTHORS WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor DELICATE PURSUIT HENRY JAMES AS A Discretion in Henry James and Edith BIOGRAPHER Wharton A Self among Others Jessica Levine Cathy Moses JOYCEAN FRAMES Film and the Fiction of James Joyce Thomas Burkdall JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE ART OF SACRIFICE The Evolution of the Scapegoat Theme in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction Andrew Mozina TECHNIQUE AND SENSIBILITY IN THE FICTION AND POETRY OF RAYMOND CARVER Arthur F.Bethea SHELLEY’S TEXTUAL SEDUCTIONS Plotting Utopia in the Erotic and Political Works Samuel Lyndon Gladden

GERTRUDE STEIN AND WALLACE STEVENS The Performance of Modern Consciousness Sara J.Ford LOST CITY Fitzgerald’s New York Lauraleigh O’Meara SOCIAL DREAMING Dickens and the Fairy Tale Elaine Ostry PATRIARCHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS Sexual Politics in Selected Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy Joanna Devereux

“ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE” Dramatic Sensibility in Mary Shelley’s Novels Charlene E.Bunnell

A NEW MATRIX FOR MODERNISM A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham Nelljean McConeghey Rice

“THOUGHTS PAINFULLY INTENSE” Hawthorne and the Invalid Author James N.Mancall

WHO READS Ulysses? The Rhetoric of the Joyce Wars and the Common Reader Julie Sloan Brannon

SEX THEORIES AND THE SHAPING OF Two MODERNS Hemingway and H.D. Deirdre Anne (McVicker) Pettipiece

NAKED LIBERTY AND THE WORLD OF DESIRE Elements of Anarchism in the Work of D.H.Lawrence Simon Casey

WORD SIGHTINGS Visual Apparatus and Verbal Reality in Stevens, Bishop and O’Hara Sarah Riggs Gordon Tapper

THE MACHINE THAT SINGS Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body

iv

T.S.ELIOT’S CIVILIZED SAVAGE Religious Eroticism and Poetics Laurie J.MacDiarmid THE CARVER CHRONOTOPE Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver’s Fiction G.P.Lainsbury THIS COMPOSITE VOICE The Role of W.B.Yeats in James Merrill’s Poetry Mark Bauer

IN THE SHADOWS OF DIVINE PERFECTION Derek Walcott’s Omeros

Lance Callahan

Routledge New York & London

Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street NewYork, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photo-copying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Callahan, Lance. In the shadows of divine perfection: Derek Walcott’s Omeros/by Lance Callahan. p. cm. —(Studies in major literary authors; v. 30) Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 0-415-96804-6 (alk. paper) 1. Walcott, Derek. Omeros. 2. West Indian poetry, English—Greek influences. 3. Epic poetry, English—History and criticism. 4. West Indies—In literature. 5. Saint Lucia—In literature. 6. Castaways in literature. 7. Exiles in literature. 8. Homer—Influence. I. Title II. Series. PR9272.9.W3)443 2003 811’.54–dc21 2003009172 ISBN 0-203-00987-8 Master e-book ISBN

For Joanne

Avete in voi li fiori e la verdura E ciò che luce ed è bello a verdere

—Cavalcanti

Contents

I. II. III.

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Greek Calypso

1

The Color of Shadows

58

Strange Attractors

112

Notes

129

Works Cited

133

Index

140

Preface

THIS BOOK CHASES A SINGLE SLIPPERY IDEA BACK AND FORTH ACROSS THE various levels of discourse at which a long twentieth-century poem operates, attempting to show that Derek Walcott’s Omeros is configured in such a way as to install the elusive concept of interjacence as the central functional tenet of West Indian society, and to show that the Caribbean’s response to the apparent cultural absences implied by the islands’ historical and artistic status as “between” is both culturally constituting and individuating. Insofar as Walcott is successful in his attempt to circumscribe “the vacuum at the core of West Indian sensibility” (“Tribal Flutes” 44) he is successful in creating a Caribbean master narrative, the basis of an aesthetic pact whose very conditions of existence underwrite the cultural products and practices of the West Indies, by constructing absence as an uninscribed but writeable space in which selfdelineation may occur. Of course, Walcott is not the first to produce a long poem which examines and, in the act of examination, validates the perceived core principles of West Indian socio-artistic operation, nor, in fact, is Omeros Walcott’s first attempt at producing a socially documenting/constituting poetic text. Brathwaite’s The Arrivants also concerns itself with social specificity, and artistic lineage, of the Caribbean. Brathwaite, however, sees no absences, per se, but rather entities and acts whose function and meaning have been willfully obscured by imperial practice, but which are easily recovered; the roving authorial “I” of “Rights of Passage” has little trouble accessing ancestral, or present-day, African codes since, despite the best efforts of empire, “all Africa / is one, is whole” (90). In marked contrast, Achille’s African explorations reveal the fact that the act of the attempt is all-important since easy, direct access to the codes of the past, or the response to natural codes they dictated, if it were ever possible, has now been shattered by a brutal colonial history. The familial ease with which the African diaspora commingle in The Arrivants has been replaced in Omeros by the chronic unease of a culture unsure of its center. Walcott’s earlier attempts to produce a socially validating text turned inward, filling the communal discontinuities which seemed to hinder social delineation with the certainties of self. But this strategy, particularly as it plays out in Another Life, tends to devalue the operation of community even as it interrogates that operation.

x

Omeros draws the self/other dialectic, and ultimately a number of the other binary oppositions traditionally used to engage postcolonial art, into the defining béance of the Antilles, and in so doing destabilizes the epistemological boundaries which stand as the a priori condition of the existence of binaries. Walcott deploys a number of interlocking strategies of misdirection to wedge the poem into the space created by the force of the mutual exclusion of binary pairings, showing the nature of the Caribbean attempt to access this space to be unique. To effect such a destabilization of these presumably unshakable grounds of inquiry, Walcott enacts the same programmatic decisions at every level of Omeros, from meter and verse, to figuration and allusional matrix, to the ideological/sociopolitical positioning. At every level, the poem generates assumptions which prove misleading, proceeding by poetic subterfuge to disorient the reader and undermine the validity of orthodox critical formulations concerning the work or the culture from which it issues. Though these strategies of misdirection are thoroughly interlaced, each element conspiring with the next to resolve the poem into exquisitely rendered uncertainty, this study examines the principle of interjacence upon which the effectiveness of Omeros rests in a systematic manner which nevertheless attempts to preserve a sense of the seamless poetic whole Walcott has woven. Essentially, the same conceptual undercarriage is approached from three different angles, and this necessitates three distinct methodologies. The first chapter deals primarily with the metrical mis/directions of the poem, the second chapter primarily with the figurative and structural incertitude Walcott has crafted, and the final chapter considers the theoretical ambiguity which permeates the text. Ultimately in Omeros, the nature of West Indian hesitance, and the response to the Nature/Culture dialectic it engenders, is seen not just as culturally constituting, and definitive, but as closely binding Caribbean culture to certain supposedly Eurocentric root texts and cultures, finally positing Caribbean artists to be the spiritual successors not just of ancient Africa but of ancient Greece as well.

Acknowledgments

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK ROBERT HAMNER, ROSS LECKIE, MICHAEL MILLS, AND Will Vanden Hoonaard, all of whom gave generously of their time and talents in reviewing the manuscript of this book. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to John Ball, Anthony Boxill, and Demetres Tryphonopoulos, without whose thoughtful and meticulous reading of the manuscript, and apparently inexhaustible patience, this book would never have been possible. The editor and publishers would like to thank Farrar, Straus & Giroux for permission to quote Derek Walcott’s work, the University of California Press for permission to quote from Allan Mandelbaum’s translation of Dante’s Inferno, Random House for permission to quote from Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of The Aeneid of Virgil, and HarperCollins for permission to quote from Richmond Lattimore’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey.

I Greek Calypso

I ENUNCIATION OF THE SPIRIT OF A PEOPLE, GIVING VOICE TO THE ASPIRATIONS and values of an entire culture, is a project few poets have dared to undertake. Fewer still have actually succeeded in poetically articulating the salient features of this collective identity and the spirit of the age in which it came to flourish. The attempt to produce a document which reveals the essence of a people is always an onerous task, but when that document must give voice to the previously voiceless, to a people who have been systematically silenced for centuries, the magnitude of the task becomes herculean. Such is the project which Derek Walcott sets for himself in Omeros. Emerging from over three hundred years of brutal oppression, the Caribbean people find themselves custodians of a culture inextricably tied to an imperial history which they themselves have had no part in writing, inheritors of a civilization created as a result of a plan they themselves had no part in formulating, and chroniclers of that world in a language coded by slave traders and overseers. Still, despite this combination, or perhaps because of it, a uniquely West Indian consciousness has emerged. Estranged from ancient tradition and alienated from colonial cultural practice, modern West Indians found themselves and their culture in the curious position of being defined in solely negative terms. Neither African, European, nor North American, but with clear ties to all three, the Caribbean seemed to exist in a kind of cultural limbo which could not be delineated in a specifically Caribbean manner. Nevertheless, the fact remained that a West Indian identity had been forged in the midst of the unprecedented physical and social destruction which the islands had witnessed, and that original art forms and cultural practices had emerged from the apocalypse of colonial rule. Although many West Indian writers had of course produced work which explored various aspects of their heritage, history and mindset, sometimes with great success, what remained to be written was a text which developed a comprehensive account of West Indian experience in characteristically West Indian terms, setting that experience in a global context developed through terminology unique to the Caribbean psyche. In other words,

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there was no Caribbean master narrative, no work which encapsulated the values of the society in a manner unique to that society. There existed no text which could operate as the artistic covenant of a newly emerged and unique culture. What remained to be written was a Caribbean epic. The form that such a document should take has come to be a highly contentious issue in Caribbean literary theory. Any text which follows too closely the master works which defined the heroic age of any other culture would be seen as derivative and as having no special connection to the burgeoning consciousness of twentieth-century Caribbean society; worse still, it could be considered an extension of the loathed imperial, Eurocentric tradition. Any work which attacks imperialist dogma is still framing itself with reference to that same Eurocentric tradition. Nor could a Caribbean writer simply ignore the European literary heritage. That unique West Indian consciousness which the writer was attempting to delineate would never have developed without imperialist policy, and for better or worse, most West Indians were, and to a large extent continue to be, thoroughly schooled in the European cultural tradition. Similar problems occur for the writer who chooses African models. Caribbean culture clearly owes some of itself to seminal African influence, but ultimately the Caribbean can no more be accurately depicted in African terms than it can in European ones. Some critics have argued that the situation is all but hopeless: “Cultural history is lost to West Indians…because language, the fundamental carrier of culture and tradition is lost” (Khan 156). More recently, others have argued that there is an implicit “tension between written literature and… Afro-Caribbean consciousness at the heart of the Caribbean reality” (Ng g , “Decolonization” 10). Of course, language per se has not been lost to West Indians, and there is no reason to suppose that English, as a linguistic system, is less capable of conveying the cultural history of the West Indies than any other. Indeed, it could be argued that the cultural inscription of English, particularly the Caribbean idiom, as the language of empire and slavery—two formative historical elements of West Indian culture—represents the ultimate signifying system of the British Caribbean tradition. Clearly, the form of any successful poetic account of the fundamental principles of West Indian experience will have to be flexible enough to support exploration of a vast array of rather contentious issues, and to permit sympathetic articulation of wildly diverse and often conflicting points of view. It will have to accommodate itself to investigations of a violent imperial history, and to mythical recovery of a broken African heritage. It will have to carry an appraisal of the Caribbean’s relationship to the Eurocentric literary tradition, and of the island’s indigenous folk art forms. It must be capable of producing a text which can serve the same socially documenting function as ancient epic, but of enacting this function in an entirely new manner, all the while taking into account the highly capricious postmodern global context into which this society has emerged. It will have to serve as the transparent vehicle of the elusive, and to some extent fragmentary voice of the Caribbean. It will have to serve as the basis

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of a new tradition which incorporates into itself several millennia of cultural heritage. The genre of Caribbean epic will have to be simultaneously familiar and foreign, heritage bound and unprecedented. The verse form of Omeros is carefully constructed to enable Walcott to accommodate these multifarious considerations. Upon first examination of Omeros, many readers are astounded by the fact that Walcott has chosen to craft this ostensibly Caribbean poem in hexametric terza rima, one of the most cherished forms of the European literary tradition, and arguably the very foundation upon which the culture of Christian empire was built. This hardly seems a practical mode in which to explore the nuances of West Indian culture. Indeed, English language terza rima has rarely been able to explore any sort of nuance whatsoever, the burden of finding so many rhymes usually rendering the form useful only to parodists and other comic-minded poets. Walcott’s choice of terza rima sends the reader’s mind spinning off into a vast and tangled intertextual web of expectations and concerns. However, any expectation that Walcott will strictly adhere to the precepts of classical hexameter poetry, or even to the iambic pentameter line with an extra stressed foot normally employed to translate this poetry into English, are quickly dashed by closer inspection of Omeros. Despite the fact that most lines are composed of twelve syllables, so wildly varied is the metrical construction of the poem that at times it gives the appearance of being free verse. Incorporating four-, five-, and six-beat lines in both stress verse and syllable stress verse, along with passages which strain the rhythm past any semblance to meter, Omeros is ultimately a work whose prosody is most unlike anything else ever attempted in English. Insofar as Omeros is able to enact successfully its foundational role as epic, it must be written in a unique verse form. Renato Poggioli makes clear the fact that “The apparition of a new literary genre is always accompanied by the invention or exclusive adoption by that genre of a definitive verse form” (347). The almost constant modulations of the rhythm of Omeros are designed to do more than ensure that the sound and sense of the poem remain synchronized, although such is certainly the case. Taken as a whole, the intricate metrical patterns of the poem serve a programmatic function. A uniquely Caribbean voice must be articulated in a uniquely Caribbean music. Walcott is attempting to establish a set of formal metrical conventions which are applicable, in toto, only to Omeros, a procedure which Poggioli notes is always adhered to in such cases, since the link between a new genre and its meter is initially considered in terms of “unwritten poetics” which only become codified in retrospect (347). To use the terminology of John Hollander, Walcott is attempting to strike a metrical contract with his readership, and with the society he seeks to represent. This contract describes the prosodic aspect of the poem which does more than develop links between “patterned sound and semantic sense” (Hollander 188): This dimension I should call purely conventional, or formal, rather than expressive, and its function is rather like a definitive or axiomatic one for

4 IN THE SHADOWS OF DIVINE PERFECTION

the whole literary work. It involves the elements of convention which link a metrical style or type to the whole poetic genre and, hence, a poet’s choice of meter to a larger intention. (Hollander 189) The larger intention of Omeros, to stand as a Caribbean master narrative, necessitates the poems prosodic complexity. More than simply a showcase for Walcott’s virtuosity, the poem, like the society it seeks to define, must incorporate into itself several massive literary traditions while in the final analysis remaining something essentially new. It cannot simply abandon meter or it would be no more Caribbean than Leaves of Grass, just as an Omeros written in blank verse would be no more Caribbean than Paradise Lost. In order to form an artistic covenant with the West Indies, an entirely new verse form must be forged which is simultaneously circumscribed by Eurocentric poetic strategies and distinctly outside them. Considered in this manner, it becomes obvious that if Omeros is to succeed, nothing short of a metrical tour de force on Walcott’s part will suffice. Several reviewers have attempted metrical analysis of Omeros, with limited success. Confounded by the elaborate prosodic formulations, one reviewer decided that the poem is “rhyme-driven” (Leithauser 94) while another offered such conclusions as “the rhythm wavers every which way—mimicking drunkenness” (Benfey 38). Although neither of these reviewers provided any scansion of the poem, it is clear that Omeros strains the limits of traditional methods of metrical analysis. The poem’s principally decasyllabic lines would seem ideally suited to foot scansion, but so freely varied are the stress patterns that it becomes difficult to know how many feet a given line should be divided into. Further, foot scansion has always tended to place undue emphasis on pyrrhic and spondaic feet, a problem which would be viciously compounded in Omeros. Ultimately, Walcott has created a poem whose prosody is best examined in terms that its own metrical contract provides. This chapter examines the poem primarily using the method of single-line scansion developed by Derek Attridge, which abandons the use of metrical feet, and concentrates instead on the so-called rhythmic figures of the work. This method, which is capable of providing insight into both the strictest syllable stress verse and true vers libre, is ideally suited to metrical investigation of Omeros, and allows examination of the exact manner in which Walcott poises the work between the metrical formulations of classical epic and free verse epic, “the central poetic genre of this century” (Adams 55). Before such an examination can begin, it is necessary to decide upon how to approach certain uniquely Caribbean problems with which Omeros confronts the prosodist. The most contentious of these issues is the use of dialect. Most of Walcott’s poetry is written in standard English (a term which is itself often considered somewhat inflammatory in postcolonial circles), often using elevated diction and Latinate grammatical constructions. However, some of Walcott’s

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most memorable and widely admired work of the past twenty years, including “Sainte Lucie” (1976) and “The Schooner Flight” (1979), has relied heavily on the use of dialect and St. Lucian patois. In fact, Chamberlin considers the use of St. Lucian sociolect in “Sainte Lucie” so important that he sees the poem as a turning point in Walcott’s career (99). In this respect, Omeros replicates the pattern of Walcott’s career as a whole. The bulk of the poem is written in standard English, but it is peppered with instances of dialect and local St. Lucian idiom. The importance of these dialect sections is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that God, in his only appearance in the poem, speaks in dialect: Look, I giving you permission to come home. Is I send the sea-swift as a pilot, the swift whose wings is the sign of my crucifixion. And thou shalt have no God should in case you forgot my commandments. (XXV, i) The rhythm of these dialect passages must be examined with an awareness of the lightly stressed speech cadences of native St. Lucians. However, with but a single exception, all the dialect passages occur within quotation marks, so it seems reasonable to assume that the corpus of the poem can be interpreted as employing the syllabic and phrasal stresses of standard English, and that special acknowledgment of St. Lucian speech cadences need only be made in direct speeches attributed to St. Lucian characters. The first black inhabitants of St. Lucia obviously learned English as a third language, and as Robert Lado’s pioneering work on the subject makes clear, “the learner tends to transfer his pronunciation system, including stress and rhythm patterns to the foreign language” (28). Thus, the speech rhythms of present day St. Lucians are in part at least remnants of African and of French speech patterns. Consideration of Caribbean speech rhythms and idiom is often highly charged. In part, this is the legacy of the critical value judgments of another age, which pronounced local dialects and “pidgins” to be inferior to standard English. But it is also tied to the use by postcolonial writers of standard English, which Ng g calls “the most racist of all human languages” (“Literature and Society” 14). Writers in former British West Indian colonies for the most part have access to no other language, traditional languages having long since disappeared. The argument is that the unique pronunciations and local idiom of Caribbean islands is in fact a new language—in St. Lucia’s case, creole—which is thus partially free from the etymological ties that bind the Caribbean psyche to the ideology of empire. The use of dialect may thus be considered subversive. So important is the role of rhythm in this that one recent study of Jamaican Dub poetry considers the concept of riddim not just in terms of stress patterns but as a formative social concept which “reminds us constantly of the cultural heritage of the poem” (Habekost 91), and which provides access to the immaterial “archive of African

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culture” (Habekost 70). Thus, it could be argued that the entire text of Omeros should be analyzed with an awareness of the cadences of St. Lucian speech. Such criticism may be partly defrayed by the fact that Walcott’s work is usually described as “classically minded,” and by internal evidence supplied by the poem itself. For instance, Walcott provides a detailed guide to the pronunciation of the title: and O was the conch shell’s invocation, mer was both mother and sea in our Antillean patois, OS, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes (II, iii) Though this constitutes an admittedly impressionistic phonology, it seems clear that Omeros is to be pronounced its usual pronunciation. The plethora of rhymes demanded by terza rima also proves useful in indicating that most of the words are meant to receive standard pronunciation. Those that are not are fairly clearly indicated, both by the rhyme scheme and by non-standard spellings. “Achille” repeatedly rhymes with “wheel,” thus indicating that the hero of the work is meant to have his name pronounced in the French St. Lucian manner The “s” is not left off this name by chance, for when the Trojan hero does appear in the work, his name is given its standard spelling. A similar case is found in the character Philoctete, whose name rhymes with “wet.” This, along with the missing “s,” indicates that this name is not meant to be given its standard pronunciation. However, unlike Achille, Philoctete is not a name found in St. Lucia, so although it is clearly meant to have just three syllabies, and is meant to rhyme with “wet,” the exact pronunciation of this name is somewhat speculative. Still, the assumption seems safe that most instances in the poem which call for a special pronunciation will be signaled by nonstandard spelling. Such instances are rare, even in the direct speeches of St. Lucian characters. It is worth noting, for instance, that God’s speech does not employ a single nonstandard spelling or expression. That this is a dialect speech is signaled only by the syntax, principally missing auxiliary verbs and third-person pronouns, and not by the lexicon. A further prosodic complication is introduced by the fact that Omeros is macaronic, certain sections being written in St. Lucian creole, a recognizably distinct variation of French. Less than thirty lines of creole are used however, so this will not be a major concern; but as this dialect of French is only used in St. Lucia, Dominica, Grenada, Trinidad and the French islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Haiti, the rhythm of these passages will be marked to indicate their pronunciation by a native St. Lucian. Ultimately, as Adams has noted in his discussion of Pound’s The Cantos, satisfactory analysis of a metrically complex work can only be accomplished if the study does not “lose touch with the established conventions of English poetry or the possibilities and limitations of English language,” while somehow managing to avoid being pulled down into “the quagmire of unformed theory,

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the mass of quarreling prosodists, linguists, and other hair-splitting dogmatists” (Adams 57). Thus, while special consideration must be given to certain culturally specific aspects of the prosody of Omeros, and the entire study must be undertaken with an awareness of certain uniquely Caribbean political considerations, metrical analysis of the poem will ultimately only prove valuable if it employs the standard techniques and inferences used to examine the prosody of any English language poem. II Many of the prosodic concerns raised by the introduction are apparent in the poem’s opening line, a mildly alliterated decasyllabic line of direct speech by a St. Lucian character:

Much of one’s response to the rhythm of a poem is generated by the expectation of meter, or lack thereof, which the poem raises. It is difficult to know just what expectations the first line of Omeros raises. The twelve-syllable line divided by a central comma bears some resemblance to English translations of classical hexameter. The first six syllables are further divided into two threesyllable halves. The grouping of stresses seems almost random, with the first strongly stressed syllable occurring almost halfway through the line, so one might be led to conclude that this is pure syllabic verse. But the line does seem to possess a curiously regular rhythm when read aloud. Overall, the line somehow seems both highly stylized and colloquial, even though the substitution of “them” for “those” is the sole indication of dialect. It would be virtually impossible for an English speaker to read through the first four syllables without giving emphatic stress to at least one of them, though which one is somewhat speculative. Philoctete’s speech runs through the first five tercets with a similar effect, showing stress patterns which are clearly neither regular, nor random: The beat of these tercets seems at first largely irregular. The number of unstressed syllables is allowed to vary widely, and there are several terms which it is difficult to know how to stress, not the least of which is the speakers name. As noted earlier, this is not a common St. Lucian name, and since it is clearly meant to have three syllables, we cannot use the Homeric character as a guide. Still, certain patterns begin to emerge. Many of the lines are five beat. Five beats spread out through twelve syllables splits the difference between hexameter and tetrameter, and imparts an uneven tempo to the lines, which Walcott emphasizes by bunching the stresses together. While there seem to be no clear cut metrical patterns in this speech, examination of these lines at the level of clause and phrase shows that there are recurring rhythmic figures. Choriambs are prevalent,

8 IN THE SHADOWS OF DIVINE PERFECTION

usually preceded or followed by an unstressed syllable. “Smile for the tourists,” “jam in our jacket,” and “give us the spirit” all mirror the Sapphic line referred to as Adonaic (the fourth line of the Sapphic stanza), and enforce the uneven motion of Philoctete’s speech. More common, however, is the choriambic figure commencing with an unstressed syllable: “the minute the axe”; “They sound like the sea”; “the trees have to die”; “I lift up the axe”; “for strength in my hands”; and “was filling my eyes.” These occur not as random portions of the line, but as discrete syntactic units which unify the rhythm of the speech, and which will recur frequently throughout Omeros.

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Further, certain of the lines are in fact quite regular. The twelfth line of the speech is composed in perfect dactylic tetrameter:

A number of other apparently irregular lines may also be divided into a form of the tetrameter:

Evidence of the amphibrachic pattern indicated in line 3 is also seen throughout the rest of the speech, and raises the interesting possibility that Walcott is attempting to use the exceedingly rare amphibrachic meter. A number of the lines begin with what could be considered two amphibrachic feet, and the rhythmic figures already identified are often seen as segments of amphibrachic feet: “I lift up the axe and,” “the trees have to die. So,” “the minute the axe of.” It is also worth noting that the first eight syllables of the eleventh line form a perfect anacreontic strophe—“like the mist we pass the rum. When.” Many of these same elements are taken up by the narrator in the remainder of the opening section: This section is peppered with the same rhythmic figures seen in Philoctete’s speech, often used to conclude lines. One-fifth of the lines end with choriambs, while fully one-third of the lines end with the same foot used to conclude certain catalectic lines1 of Greek verse No fewer than five of the first twenty-one lines of this section commence with the anacreontic pattern. Amphibrachic feet are employed much more liberally. Interspersed are lines which display little metricality and, interestingly, lines which seem to be equally divided between ternary and binary rhythms. There are also lines which can be divided into quite regular tetrameter, but whose substitutions are so peculiar that it is difficult to think that a reader would consider them metrical at all:

10 IN THE SHADOWS OF DIVINE PERFECTION

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12 IN THE SHADOWS OF DIVINE PERFECTION

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This section is peppered with the same rhythmic figures seen in Philoctete’s speech, often used to conclude lines. One-fifth of the lines end with choriambs, while fully one-third of the lines end with the same foot used to conclude certain No fewer than five of the first twenty-one catalectic lines1 of Greek verse lines of this section commence with the anacreontic pattern. Amphibrachic feet are employed much more liberally. Interspersed are lines which display little metricality and, interestingly, lines which seem to be equally divided between ternary and binary rhythms. There are also lines which can be divided into quite regular tetrameter, but whose substitutions are so peculiar that it is difficult to think that a reader would consider them metrical at all:

Two amphibrachs sandwiched between two anapests may be a “meter” so complex, and odd, that it may not even strike the ear as especially rhythmic, much less metrical. Indeed, the effect of this line is more akin to prose than to poetry. This mélange places Omeros right at the edge of metricality and forces consideration of some of the most fundamental principles of prosody itself. Every line but one in the opening section contains twelve syllables, but the number of beats per line is allowed to vary, so the conclusion might be reached that this is actually syllabic verse, a meter so esoteric that many metrists refuse to recognize it as a meter at all (The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 1249). However, although the number of beats varies, no line has fewer than four, nor more than six. Roughly one-sixth of the lines are four-beat, twosixths are six-beat, and three-sixths are five-beat, a ratio which is approximately equal to that of the poem as a whole. This would indicate that the verse is syllabatonic (that is, both syllable and stress count controlled), but the stresses do not fall at consistent intervals through extended passages. The prosody of the opening section seems designed to position the work in the space between the categories traditionally employed to analyze poetry. Ultimately it is even difficult to decide if this opening section is or is not metrical.

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One could say that the prosody of chapter I section i points to the difficulty of formalizing the distinction between rhythmic and metrical verse. Attridge’s definition of meter is an excellent one: Meter is an organizing principle which turns the general tendency toward regularity in rhythm into a strictly-patterned regularity that can be counted and named. (Poetic Rhythm 8) However, the question of how strict this regularity must be before the verse is perceived as metrical remains. Most metrists agree that once the ear detects a pattern of alternating stresses in a work, it will continue this pattern through deviations in the line. For instance, trochaic substitutions have never been considered violations of iambic meter but simply complications of it. The rule often used to distinguish metrical complications from unmetrical verse was expounded over a century ago by W.H.Brown: “any variation is allowable that does not obscure or equivocate the genus; but any that suggests another genus is not allowable” (Princeton Encyclopedia 771). This merely rephrases the question, since one is still left to wonder how far a given line must deviate from the pattern before the genus is obscured. Consider this renowned line from Paradise Lost: “Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death” (2, 621). Although eight of the ten syllables are stressed, this is considered a complication of the iambic line. Although in this instance readers have, of course, been prepared to expect an iambic line, strict iambic through long passages is rare in Milton. There is almost always tension between what the reader expects to hear and actually does hear. Psychoanalytic theory suggests that experienced readers may come to a text from a certain tradition predisposed to expect certain patterns, in which case a reader confronted with decasyllabic tercets will certainly expect hexameter, and will demote and promote stresses as necessary:

There is absolutely no way to force the third line into hexameter, but line four might be seen to re-establish the pattern:

However, any expectation of regular hexameter in Omeros is quickly eroded as it becomes clear that the syllabic rhythm of the lines seems much better able to

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support a ternary meter. The question then becomes how many lines one must read before expectation of meter overrides syllabic rhythm. This process may be accelerated when the meter combines dactyls, amphibrachs, and anapests, since these are so difficult to differentiate from each other, and may quickly establish the required preconditions for promotion and demotion, as shown in the scansion, and would cause certain passages from the first section to read quite regularly. Despite these regular passages, however, the rhythm of this opening section is far too varied to be considered metrical in any traditional sense. Obviously, expectations of meter are not raised to the extent that allows Shakespearean prosodists to consider apparently irregular lines as metrical, such as, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” (“Sonnet 116”). Still, the dividing line between metrical and unmetrical verse is a blurred one, and Omeros seems designed to occupy this intermediary position, since while it is clearly not metrical, it is not completely unmetrical either. Even in purely accentual verse, the repetition of rhythmic figures will harden them into metrical formulae which readers will respond to, and the opening of Omeros clearly predisposes readers to hear certain figures, primarily and Such is the prevalence of these figures that the distinction between meter and rhythm becomes almost meaningless. The expectation the opening section raises may be of what Brogan calls the “phrasal prosody” of “word group cadences…rather like that in Fr. [ench] prosody, in which syntactic junctures alone are allowed to separate words into groupings often unpredictable in size and stress pattern” (Princeton Encyclopedia 773). It is worth remembering that the history of St Lucia is a blend of French and English. The patois of the main characters in the poem is a dialect of French, and the English which St. Lucians use sometimes imitates the rhythm, syntax, and vocabulary of French. Thus Walcott’s decision to employ these long rhythmic figures may be seen as a programmatic decision meant to unite the meter and setting of the poem. The opening section of the poem makes clear, however, that Walcott will never allow any programmatic function of the rhythm to override its emotive value. The sound and sense of the poem remain beautifully interwoven. As Philoctete pauses, tears in his eyes, attempting to raise the courage to begin desecrating the forest, Walcott bunches the stresses and uses repeated “r” sounds to grind the tempo of the line to a halt—”I fire one more white rum.” The same technique is used to convey the solemnity with which the ferns concede that the destruction of the trees must take place—”the ferns nodded ‘yes.’” This entire passage is highly sibilant, conveying the rather sinister aspect of Philoctete’s tale, punctuated by cacophonous moments such as “cut down them canoes,” and “tourists who try taking,” hinting at the mayhem the fishermen are about to introduce into the forest. Perhaps the best example of this interplay between sound and sense is found in the line “the sharks teeth gnaw evenly,” the tempo of which mimics the even pace of the task being described. After bounding through a series of dactyls, the reader is brought to a crashing halt, and forced to consider the brutality of the act of felling the ancient gods. Overall, Philoctete’s speech has

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a slow graceful movement, unlike the effect dactyls normally generate in English, but mirroring their effect in classical Greek. The tumbling amphibrachic flow of stanzas eight and nine mimics the cascading streams, which plunge down the mountain before turning “into idle pools” in a slow, six-beat line. Methodical egrets move through two metrically identical anacreontic lines, the rhythm of which reflects the solemn repetition of the creature’s activities. The pell-mell fourbeat lines of stanzas nineteen and twenty are brought to a crashing conclusion, prepared for by the poems first thirteen-syllable line, in a spondaic, six-beat line which leaves readers aghast at the “blood-splashed” cedars. Walcott will never allow programmatic concerns of the meter of Omeros to lessen the emotional impact which the rhythm of a given passage must generate. Perhaps the most tantalizing possibility raised by the prosody of the opening section lies in the realization that several apparently irregular lines may be divided into a regular trimeter using Aeolic four-syllable feet:

Although this line could be explained as a series of alternating trochees and iambs, or what Attridge would term three mixed inversions, the preponderance of choriambic line endings throughout this section makes the assumption that this is a line of choriambic trimeter more plausible. Evidence of trimeter is also seen in the last two lines of the opening section which begin and end with ionics:

Although any four-syllable foot may be subdivided into a pair of two-syllable feet, the conclusion that Walcott is here employing an English-language imitation of quantitative verse is not unwarranted,2 especially in light of the other classical figures noted throughout the opening section. Many of these same elements are continued into the following section, as Achille is introduced. With but a single exception, every line ends with either a choriamb or the truncated Catalectic foot, and the section is littered with the now familiar rhythmic figures: The first two lines are quite irregular, although both feature the signature rhythmic devices. The third line, however, offers interesting possibilities for promotion and demotion. The line becomes perfect anapestic tetrameter if “he” is promoted and the commonplace verb “saw” is demoted. The emphasis is not on the fact that the swift was seen, but rather that it was seen only by Achille, a point which becomes increasingly important as the poem progresses. It is also interesting to note the use of iambics from line five through seven. Line six

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represents the first time that strict iambic hexameter is employed in the poem, and its use coincides with the first specific classical allusion in Omeros, as Achille’s heel is ensnared by the vine. This turns out to be nothing more than a minor inconvenience, and Walcott quickly returns to ternary meter. As seen in the first section, these rhythmic changes closely follow the syntax and punctuation of the stanzas, as the iambic section is bracketed by full stops. The same rhythmic signatures noted in chapter I, section I, are employed throughout chapter I, section ii: “wrenching the severed,” “ploughed into breakers,” “like pygmies they hacked,” “for addles and oars,” “their language was lost,” and “They went for his eyes.” As the section progresses the ternary meters become increasingly prominent:

Ternary meters are introduced, but never so strictly adhered to that their singsong cadences are allowed to override the movement of the verse. There is a constant tension generated as Walcott gently tugs the reader into bounding

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ternary patterns which are established only to be broken. As in chapter I, section i, there are also lines equally divided between ternary and binary meters: The main metrical complication introduced in chapter I, section ii, occurs in the syllabic count. The section opens with forty-eight consecutive twelvesyllable lines, but just three of the concluding twelve lines are decasyllabic. These concluding lines offer virtually no opportunity for elision:

Ten of the last twelve lines feature the same catalectic and choriambic line endings employed to this point, and the hint of ternary meters, particularly amphibrachic remains, as do the rhythmic signatures. The number of beats per

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line remains consis tent, but it is clear that some of these lines are much closer to free verse than anything encountered to this point, particularly the nine syllable line, “like hounds with sprigs in their teeth. The priest.” This passage retains enough of the distinguishing rhythmic elements to remain consistent with the prosody encountered to this point, but the varying line lengths indicate that a fundamental change has occurred. As soon as the reader is lulled into a comforting sense of regularity, expecting all the lines to be decasyllabic, Walcott shatters the pattern, perhaps alerting the reader that complacency of any kind is a dangerous reading strategy in the case of Omeros. The curiously indeterminate nature of these concluding stanzas, so rhythmically similar to those that preceded them, but incorporating startling line length variation and occasional prose-like lines, may also reflect permutations at the semantic level. The trees are passing through an intermediary stage between their former lives as gods and their new lives as canoes. They begin to yearn “to touch the sea,” then suddenly their transformation is complete and they are no longer trees but “pirogues crouched on the sand.” The semantic indeterminacy of the section is magnified by the priest who blesses the former gods with a bell and “the swift’s sign.” The canoes then accept their new role in the metrically familiar line, “agreed with the waves to forget their lives as trees.” The divided nature of this line is perfectly suited to the indeterminate nature of the activity being described, as is the final line which returns to tetrameter. The scansion of this line shows a stress on the first syllable of “Hector,” which diverts from its St. Lucian pronunciation, but which seems justified given the fact that Achilles, not Achille is referred to in the same line. Chapter II, section ii, is the first section to leave the localized St. Lucian setting as the invocation of the muse is presented:

The concluding line of chapter II, section ii, introduces the event that led to the poem’s title:

Although the first two chapters of the poem employ a wide range of rhythmic devices, and a number of lines which it is difficult to know how to interpret, three of the most important lines in the opening books have been written in strict ternary meters. The secret cure of Philoctete’s wound, a secret upon which the

20 IN THE SHADOWS OF DIVINE PERFECTION

symbolic operation of the poem will turn, and the introduction of the word “Omeros” to the poet/narrator have both been composed in amphibrachic tetrameter. In fact, the line which takes Philoctete’s secret to its final resting place, where it will remain until discovered by Ma Kilman in the climactic final book, is metrically identical to the introduction of the title:

Walcott seems to be restricting use of the strictest meters to the development of the most crucial lines. This is a complete reversal of traditional metrical practice, in which key lines are highlighted by a departure from regular meter. The reader’s attention is focused on these lines by the metrical tension thus generated. Conversely, Walcott highlights key lines by composing them in strict meter, which contrasts them against the quasi-metrical nature of the passages in which they occur and of the poem as a whole. From the moment the tree-gods’ fate is sealed (“give us the spirit to turn into murderers”), to the moment when European colonization/ devastation of the island begins (“that rose with the Aruac’s smoke till a new race/ unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees”), to the moment Achille sees the swift (“of a cloud like a breaker. Then he saw the swift”), pivotal lines are emphasized by a regularity which, in the context of the prosody of Omeros, makes them as striking as the aforementioned “rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death” in the context of Miltonic pentameter. In fact, the invocation of the muse suggests that Walcott will use meter to indicate a relative importance of lines which is not signaled at the semantic level. The invocation begins with a line which seems at first to be amphibrachic, but whose pattern is largely obfuscated by a thirteenth syllable, before moving to a line of perfect anapestic tetrameter. Semantically, the first line would seem to be the most important, and the second merely a modifying afterthought. However, it is the second, anapestic line (“as you did in my boyhood, when I was a noun”) which is actually key, since it is in exploring his formative memories with his dead father in Book Six that the poet/narrator actually comes to understand and accept his poetic charge. The extensive repetition of the signature rhythmic figures of Omeros, both in and out of the metrical passages, lends the work prosodic unity. These figures are used so frequently that they quickly harden into recognizable and anticipated units, and in so doing become formulaic. Walcott often uses these formulae to inform key passages, a fact which becomes abundantly clear in chapter II, section iii, as the narrator recounts his encounter with the Greek lover who told him of the word “Omeros”:

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Stanzas three and four are particularly interesting, not just because they depict the narrator’s initial response to the term “Omeros,” but because they also illustrate the way Walcott moves through unmetrical, quasi-metrical and metrical verse in the space of just six lines, pinning the whole section together with repeated Adonaic figures: This passage represents something of a microcosm of the operation of the poem as a whole. Each tercet contains one four-beat line, one five-beat line and one six-beat line. The first two lines contain thirteen syllables while the following four are decasyllabic. The first line, which features three stressed syllables, followed by four unstressed syllables offers clear opportunity for promotion and demotion, which pushes the line into an iambic rhythm. Still, the bunched stresses and thirteen syllables cause this line to read in a quite irregular manner. The following line moves to the more common ternary cadence, but again the extra syllable, this time stressed, causes the line to read in an uneven fashion. The third line is highly regular, as the poet/narrator speaks the word “Omeros” aloud for the first time. The next line can be divided into two amphibrachs followed by three trochees, what I have termed a divided line, while the fifth line, which deals with “mother and sea,” key concerns of the poem, is composed in amphibrachic tetrameter. The last line is completely irregular. But the Adonaics “cold as its marble,” “studio attic,” “O was the conch-shell’s,” “surf as it crashes,” and “Antillean patois,” give the passage an unmistakable rhythmic unity. This is especially important in such a metrically complex passage as this which generates a rather disorienting effect in the reader. We are constantly being pulled into ternary meters which are no sooner introduced than they disappear. Expectations of meter, it seems, are raised only to be foiled. Throughout chapter II, section iii the Adonaics are also used to help organize the semantic operation of the poem. In the eighth tercet we are presented with the following line:

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Seven lines later a subtle parallel is drawn:

The rhythmic similarity of the two phrases draws attention to their semantic similarity and magnifies the horrifying effect of the comparison. As was the case in previous sections, chapter II, section iii is made rhythmically coherent not just by the signature rhythmic figures, but also by consistent line endings. Fourteen of the forty-two lines in this section, exactly one third, have catalectic endings, while nine of the remaining twenty-eight lines end with choriambs. There are also three anacre-ontic lines in this section, and three apparently irregular lines which may be divided into trimeter.3 In the midst of a somewhat chaotic prosodic scheme, unifying features abound. The repeated use of Aeolic and Sapphic figures in this pivotal section lends credence to the assertion that the best way to analyze the prosody of Omeros is with an awareness of so-called “phrasal prosody.” It is clear that at the level of clause and phrase the poem displays remarkable rhythmic regularity, while at the level of metrical feet, arbitrary and rather esoteric units, the poem is for the most part highly irregular. Since Omeros seems designed, in part at least, to erode the distinction between rhythm and meter, the syntax of the poem provides perhaps the best guide to understanding the work’s prosody. This is a technique with which French metrists are intimately aware, since it forms the basis of French language scansion. It is worth noting that the first exchange between the “heroes” of Omeros occurs in the creole dialect which is the mother tongue of many St. Lucians: Hector’s first line of speech employs both of the most common rhythmic figures of Omeros, and follows a generally amphibrachic pattern. Hector’s speech exhibits the unmistakable metrical signatures which characterize both the narrated sections of Omeros and the direct speeches in English. It should be noted that this line represents a questionable transcription of patois, particularly the phrase “choux-ous-ou, salope.” The word “ou” is the second person pronoun referring to the general derogatory term “salope,” which Walcott translates as “bitch.” The separation of these two terms by a comma is puzzling, and appending “ou” to “choux-ous” even more so. In any case, this does not affect the metrical construction of the line to any great extent, and it could thus be argued that the cadences of St. Lucian dialect form the source of the rhythmic patterns Walcott employs in the poem. The next line of patois, heavily elided, is composed in perfect trochaic hexameter, while the line of translation which separates the first two lines of patois is comprised of two dactyls followed by three trochees. The line of translation seems to be a blend of the two lines of

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creole it separates. The third line of patois contains just ten syllables, and although it is divisible into two rhythmically identical halves, and could thus be considered hemistichic, it is ultimately metrically formless. Patois is used sparingly in the poem, but it is as if the first three lines which the reader confronts function as a distillation of the metrical constructions of the poem as a whole. This could be meant to indicate that the dominant rhythms of Omeros are drawn from St. Lucian patois more so than from any classical model, or perhaps more accurately that classical metrical formulations show peculiar similarities to the speech cadences of patois speakers. As if to show that St. Lucian speech rhythms may be transplanted into English with little modification, the line in which Hector accuses Achille of being a “tin-stealer,” and the line of translation Walcott provides, are rhythmically almost identical, the main difference being that the English line ends with an extra unstressed syllable. At the narratological level, the most important feature of chapter II, section iii is the introduction of Helen, in the final line:

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After several largely irregular lines, Walcott drops into a rigid amphibrachic tetrameter to introduce both the lynchpin of the plot, and the poem’s central symbol, the shadow. Again we see the reversal of traditional metrical practice as Walcott emphasizes key lines not by pulling away from an established meter, but by establishing meter. Further, this line is metrically identical to the lines discussed earlier dealing with Philoctete’s secret cure, and to those which describe the poet/narrator’s introduction to the word “Omeros,” illustrating the astounding prosodic consistency which Walcott has embedded in the poem. The sections of Omeros dealing with Maud and Dennis Plunkett employ essentially the same rhythmic practices used to develop the sections pertaining to the activities of the black St. Lucian characters, as a passage from chapter V, section i illustrates: The same rhythmic figures, line endings and ternary meters are present. There is, however, a slightly more pronounced use of trochaic hexameter in this passage, and throughout the sections dealing with the Plunketts, perhaps indicating that despite having spent most of their adult lives on the island, they are still not completely assimilated into its rhythms. The use of binary meter, “the rhythm of marching feet” (Benítez-Rojo 26), may also pertain to the

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Major’s martial background and temperament. There is also a somewhat greater opportunity for promotion and demotion in these sections than is seen in much of the poem, but for the most part, the same metrical formulations are used to depict both white and black St. Lucians. Although the metrical formulations of Omeros are constantly being subtly adjusted to suit the context and content of each section, the first sustained deviation from the basic rhythmic structure of the poem does not occur until Book Three, chapter XXV, section i, as Achille begins his spiritual journey to ancient Africa:

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Clearly, the verse has undergone a considerable alteration. Most obviously, the line length has begun to fluctuate wildly, so much so that there is no longer a preponderance of twelve syllable lines. Just eleven of the thirty-nine lines in chapter XXV, section i—less than one-third—are decasyllabic. The imagery of this passage has become decidedly more ethereal, and sinister, and the lines are more heavily alliterated than anything encountered to this point in the poem. The familiar rhythmic figures and line endings persist throughout this opening section, and several of the lines show the anacreontic pattern. There is also a line of apparent trimeter. However, the majority of these familiar features are found in the twelve-syllable lines, which are widely scattered among long, highly irregular lines. Ternary meters are hinted at but never clearly introduced. The stresses tend to be bunched together, often separated by four or more unstressed syllables, and although this study has not employed a generative approach to metrics, it should be noted that these stresses are extremely strong. Overall, the prosody retains enough of the rhythmic signatures developed in the first two books to remain vaguely familiar, but introduces enough complications to leave no doubt that a profound change of both prosody and atmosphere has occurred. The prosody is at once both foreign and familiar, which is, of course, exactly the psychological condition which characterizes Achille at this point in the narrative. The grinding spondees and foreboding imagery combine to create a singularly unnerving effect as both the reader and Achille are confronted by an exotic and vaguely ominous landscape. The cumulative effect of these changes in setting, atmosphere and prosody is highly disorienting, and against this nonplussing background, God’s sudden interjection is all the more startling:

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These lines are all four-, five-, or six-beat, and several allude to the familiar rhythmic patterns. But these patterns are, for the most part, disrupted by extra syllables. Just two of these lines are metrical. The significance of the entire journey to Africa revolves around the recovery of lost names, so as the final line of this passage illustrates, despite the rhythmic discontinuities introduced, Walcott continues to identify key lines by forcing them into more regular ternary meters, although it should be noted that this line offers the possibility of an alternate scansion: The line of levity which breaks the auricular solemnity of the passage is also interesting in that the repeated use of ternary meter has conditioned the reader to respond to God’s admonition in an atypical way. Some readers may be tempted to respond to this line with deference to the iambs of the King James translation of the bible:

It is important to remember, however, that God is not speaking the Queens English, but rather West Indian dialect, and that the syllabic stress would thus fall on “shalt.” Read in this way, the line forms perfect anapestic tetrameter, a favored meter in comic dialogue in classical Greek comedy. Ultimately, the meter of these lines must be considered deliberately ambiguous, which seems to be a defining feature of the metrical contract of Omeros. Walcott employs a number of techniques to produce this ambiguity. Throughout the first two books of the poem, we have seen a number of divided decasyllabic lines, composed of two ternary and three binary feet, and these reappear in Book Three. But Walcott also reverses the practice in this book, constructing some of the lines from three ternary and two binary feet:

This hybrid meter perfectly matches the hybrid symbolism of the line. The swift is seen as both the messenger of the animist, traditional African gods, and of the Christian God. Again we are presented with a line, unlike anything encountered to this point, which seems strangely familiar. The poem remains metrically consistent, but full of unexpected developments. As Achille encounters the first evidence of civilization in the midst of the jungle, a new rhythmic figure is introduced:

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This is the base form of a figure used almost exclusively in classical Greek tragedy, known as dochmiac. It is almost always deployed at moments of most intense agitation, agony or grief. The fact that Walcott has saved its widespread use for the African chapters is telling. It is used repeatedly throughout the opening sections of Book Three, including the instant Achille’s canoe first touches the mysterious community (“the prow found its stake”), and in the concluding tercets of XXV, ii as an expectant hush falls over the village upon Achille’s arrival:

Although the lines contain the expected number of beats, it is clear in this section that the rhythm of Omeros has been extensively modified. The line endings are unpredictable, and consecutive stressed syllables are common. With the exception of “he knew by that walk,” the rhythmic signatures of the first two books have disappeared. One thing which does not seem to have changed is Walcott’s propensity to set the most important lines in the strictest meters, although these meters now tend to be some-what obfuscated by the presence of extraneous syllables. The first line of chapter XXV, section iii, which opens the climactic sequence of the poem, shows that whether set in Africa or the Caribbean, decisive moments will be crafted in ternary, often amphi-brachic meter: The first and most important line of this passage is clearly amphibrachic. Of note is that the first twelve syllables of the third line form the divided line seen so often previously. The pattern is partially obscured by the terminal trochee, and a line is thus created which is at once both axiomatic and unprecedented. Also of note is that the recognition of the boundary standing between father and son, an agonizing moment, is crafted using a dochmiac figure. These transitional sections, with their transient metrical constructions, leave the reader in a state of bewilderment as the pivotal exchange between Achille and his progenitor begins:

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ACHILLE

AFOLABE

The fact that this passage is of momentous importance to the poem as a whole is avouched by its appearance on the page. This is the only passage in the work in which Walcott uses isomorphism to identify speakers. The two tercets in which Achille and Afolabe first communicate form one of only a few passages in which lines are broken into segments. These divisions all follow the grammar of the lines, and are perhaps meant to indicate the halting, uncertain nature of this first contact, and the time lag between statements as “Time translates.” As the speakers become more familiar to each other, the broken lines disappear, perhaps indicating that they no longer need a translator. Oddly, a number of the broken lines may be divided into trimeter. To find a preponderance of these classical feet in the African chapters, particularly in this climactic section, is surprising, but may partially account for their use in the St. Lucian books. That is, they may be meant to represent, in some way, vestigial African influence in the modern West Indies. The dochmiac figure is used several times, including twice in the agonistic line in which Achille reveals that the African names have been lost. It

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seems that Achille has begun to recover the African rhythms of his ancestral past, as represented by this figure. The practice of enforcing key lines by setting them in regular ternary meter remains. Achille reveals the point of the pilgrimage in a series of amphibrachs—“we yearn for a sound that is missing.” And even though the lines in which Afolabe explicates the gravity of such a lacking are not decasyllabic, their ternary meter is strongly felt:

These lines offer a tantalizing possibility. An uncharacteristic number of lines in the exchange between Afolabe and Achille are end-stopped. These two lines are enjambed. Taken as a whole, these two lines comprise ten amphibrachs. If the word “you” was moved up a line, we would be left with two lines of perfect amphibrachic pentameter. This regularity is quite apparent when reading the lines, but obfuscated by the scansion. The Caribbean rhythms Omeros has developed lie just below the surface of the African rhythms, incomplete, or partially obscured by extraneous syllables, but present and potentially recoverable nonetheless. The differences between the speech cadences of Achille and Afolabe are to some extent illusory. The “sound that is missing” is hidden rather than lost. This missing sound may perhaps be symbolized by the extra syllables used in the African chapters. Clearly, what is not missing are the rhythmic signatures of Omeros: “place you have come from,” “what do they call you,” “you would be nothing.” Afolabe’s language, on the surface so rhythmically distinct from the language employed in the St. Lucian books, is in fact quite closely related to it. This is made abundantly clear by the grief stricken conclusion of Afolabe’s speech, the final words he utters in Omeros, and the climax of the poem:

The familiar line endings, rhythmic figures and ternary meters are all present in this passage, even though no two lines are of the same length. At Afolabe’s moment of greatest anguish, his concession that his son has been subjected to the greatest of indignities, the stripping of name, the dochmiac figure is employed,

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just as it is employed in classical tragedy at junctures of greatest grief. In fact, throughout the African chapters the figure is used repeatedly at moments of cardinal dolor, perhaps with most striking effect in chapter XXVII, section iii, as Achille, in a moment of almost ecstatic pother, bludgeons one of the slave raiders:

The dochmiac figure is also stunningly employed at the end of this section as, in a moment recalling chapter I, section ii, Achille is symbolically manacled:

The fitful, stammering movement of this figure, combined with cacophonous expulsives, masterfully captures the violence with which Achille lashes out at his would-be captor. As in the rest of Omeros, programmatic and emotive aspects of the rhythm are seamlessly integrated. These same rhythmic patterns are maintained throughout the African chapters, but as soon as the scene shifts back to St. Lucia in chapter XXIX, section i, the twelve-syllable lines return. In fact, the syllable count in this section is as strictly enforced as it is anywhere in the poem—just two of the thirty-three lines in this section are not decasyllabic. Rather than prosodically easing readers out of the African chapters, Walcott brings them back with a jolt, much as the mate breaks Achille’s reverie in the opening line of chapter XXX, section i:

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This chapter returns to the rhythmic patterns developed in the earlier St. Lucian books, including implementing strict ternary meters in key lines, this time free from extraneous syllables:

However, Achille’s speeches in this section reveal a subtle but fundamental change:

Achille ‘s speech retains the signature rhythmic figures it employed before his visionary return to Africa, but now the dochmiac figure also appears:

Achille has returned from Africa with a new awareness of the conditions of his existence, and this awareness is mirrored at the poems metrical level. Achille is able to set his present situation in the context of ancestral cadences, as it were. These new cadences have been fluently incorporated into Achille’s St. Lucian speech rhythms, just as his new understanding of his heritage has been smoothly absorbed into his Caribbean-centred Weltanschauung. It would seem that rather than plunging him into a malaise of self-absorbed recrimination and despair, Achille’s African experience has had the opposite effect of providing him with some measure of clarity and spiritual peace. The African vision has not introduced a discontinuity into the narrative, or Achille’s psyche, but has supplied a sine qua non for both. The corollary metrical alterations which the poem enacts are best characterized by Achille’s own words, as he informs Afolabe that he and his society “yearn for a sound that is missing.” To some extent, that missing sound has been recaptured—a sound which will ultimately

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lead to Philoctete’s cure. Though modified, the prosody of the poem remains astoundingly consistent, as the opening lines of chapter XXX, secton iii make clear:

The translation of this benediction, a central moment in the psychological development of Achille, is not just metrical, but is the exact metrical formulation with which Walcott delivers a number of the most important lines of the poem —“to pass on its note to the blue tacit mountains,” and “that hummed in the vase of a girl ‘s throat ‘Omeros.’” Such astonishing attention to detail ensures the prosodic unity of the work, despite the permutations which the African chapters enact. The only section of Omeros whose prosody is truly incongruous with that of the rest of the poem is chapter XXXIII, section iii. In a stunning departure, this section is comprised of seventeen couplets, apparently crafted in trochaic tetrameter: Commenting on this passage, Benfey claims he “would have welcomed more of the sort of formal variation which Walcott allows himself only rarely in Omeros” (38); he adds that “in such passages one detects the lineaments of a different poem” (39). Indeed, to say that one “detects” features of a “different poem” in this section is to understate the astonishment generated by Walcott’s decision, after 172 pages of tercets, to switch into “bruising trochaic tetrameters” (Benfey 38) with perfect end rhyme, and presented on the page as couplets. Benfey implies that there are other such anomalous passages in Omeros, which he does not identify, but the thirty-four lines of chapter XXXIII, section iii represent the only substantial infringement of the metrical contract of the poem. The prosody of this section is like that of the rest of the poem in that it reveals itself under close scrutiny to bear little resemblance to the form which initially presents itself to the reader. The section is not, for the most part, written in trochaic tetrameter, bruising or otherwise. The opening three lines of the section are indeed trochaic, but contain just seven syllables. The fourth line is tetrameter, but is composed in iambs. Lines five through eight repeat this pattern. Further, lines one, two, and four, and lines five, six, and eight all end with a virtual offbeat, while lines three and seven, which lead into the iambic lines, do not. Despite the fact that the section appears on the page as couplets, the opening eight lines actually comprise two quatrains with an aabb rhyme scheme. Attridge

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notes that the four beat, four-line stanza is by far “the most common of all rhythmical patterns if every kind of verse is taken into account. It is the basis of most modern popular music including rock and rap, of most folk, broadside, and industrial ballads from the middle ages to the twentieth century, of most hymns, of most nursery rhymes, and of a great deal of printed poetry” (Poetic Rhythm 53). Thus, Walcott has without warning switched from one of the more recherché forms to the most ubiquitous. The effect of this flexion could not be more astonishing. The sudden strength and regularity of the stresses sets up a pounding, almost violent cadence. Walcott’s use of strict meter and epanaphora combine to produce an unnerving, hypnotic effect which serves as the perfect

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vehicle for the litany of chilling images which make up this section. The poet’s suffering as he contemplates the house in which his marriage decayed and dissolved is almost palpable. The unrelenting insistence of the verse is particularly striking in contrast to the carefully calculated uncertainty which the previous ninety-eight sections had meticulously cultivated. Further, the overwhelming fear and sorrow with which the speaker confronts the house, and the feelings of insecurity and rancid sterility it engenders in him, are marvelously captured by a verse form which seems ill-equipped to accommodate such a burden. Heptasyllabic lines of the sort with which the section opens have traditionally been employed to generate a sing-song, childlike beat. Attridge notes that this meter is “highly appropriate for the comforting tones of a lullaby” (Poetic Rhythm 101). That Walcott has chosen to compose the most disturbing, angst-ridden section of Omeros in a verse form usually associated with lullabies is one of the more peculiar reversals of Eurocentric poetic practice contemporary literature has produced. Without a single inversion, substitution or other metrical complication in the first eighteen lines, the verse nevertheless takes on an ominous, chant-like quality quite unlike the soothing predictability of a nursery rhyme. Closer scrutiny, however, shows that the verse is somewhat more metrically complex than it first appears. Although the first sixteen lines are primarily heptasyllabic, the verse actually alternates between heptasyllabics and iambic tetrameter, a variation of the four-by-four formation known as eights and sevens. The first three lines all begin with the word “house,” while the fourth does not. Lines five through seven also begin with “house” while the eighth does not. The lack of virtual off-beats in lines three and six sets up the concluding line of each stanza. Although Milton uses eights and sevens to great effect in “L’Allegro,” the particular variation of the verse form being employed by Walcott is actually much closer to that employed in ditties. In fact, the meter of the first eight lines of chapter XXXIII, section iii is identical to that of “Lizzy Borden”: Clearly, Walcott has created a section which flies in the face of conventional metrical practice, as his torment and frustration spills onto the page in a form normally reserved for the lightest of verse. Despite the prosodic contrariety of this section, it does share clear ties to the metrical strategies employed in the rest of Omeros. Throughout the poem, Walcott generates expectations of regularity only to subvert them and in this, chapter XXXIII, section iii is no different. Patterns established in the first eight lines

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begin to subtly but distinctly mutate in the following ten. Lines nine through twelve all feature virtual off-beats, and the heptasyllabic and iambic lines alternate. This, combined with the paucity of punctuation, makes it impossible to say with certainty whether these four lines constitute a quatrain of eights and sevens, or two couplets. Lines thirteen to sixteen seem to re-establish the pattern of the first eight lines, though every line ends with an elided syllable. The only line which must show elision in order to keep the syllable count either seven or eight is line sixteen, which would show nine syllables without elision. Presumably, if “derision” is elided then “CableVision” should be as well, but lines thirteen and fourteen, in theory at least, could be shown as having eight syllables. If this were the case, then lines thirteen through sixteen would constitute a quatrain of the Miltonic version of eights and sevens used in “L’Allegro”—two lines of trochaic tetrameter followed by a heptasyllabic, and concluding with a line of iambic tetrameter. It is impossible to decide with certainty which scansion is most appropriate to these lines, and thus impossible to decide if Walcott is deviating from the pattern established by the first eight lines or remaining faithful to it. In a sense, the metrical construction of this section is as carefully calculated to generate uncertainty and to foil absolutist claims on the nature of the prosody as any other section of Omeros, albeit within the confines of a more rigid verse form. This section is not so far removed from the prosody of the rest of the poem as it first appears to be. Although employing binary meters, it does employ a great deal of tetrameter, the prescriptive line of the poem as a whole. The familiar catalectic line ending is employed in virtually every line, while two lines use terminal choriambs. Consider also lines seventeen through twenty: If line nineteen is seen as trochaic, then lines seventeen through twenty form some-thing of an inversion of the quatrains with which the section opens. Rather than three trochaic and one iambic lines per quatrain, we would be left with three iambic and one trochaic. However, attempting to force line nineteen into a primarily trochaic, or for that matter iambic, pattern through promotion and demotion, would distort the line beyond any semblance of fidelity to its syllabic rhythm. The line could be described as two mixed inversions—that is, as showing either iambic substitutions in the second and fourth feet or trochaic

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substitutions in the first and third. However, given the preponderance of Aeolic feet throughout Omeros, it is not implausible to consider this a line of choriambic dimeter. In any case, lines nineteen and twenty constitute something of a turning point in the section. From this point on, the lines are all octosyllabic, but considerably more irregular: This apparently straightforward verse confounds attempts to categorize it in a generalizing manner, and challenges traditional notions of the ability of a given verse form to support highly charged topics. Ultimately, it is difficult to decide with certainty whether this passage is composed in couplets or quatrains, or even whether it is primarily iambic or trochaic. Such cleverly engineered uncertainty is, as we have seen, a defining feature of the metrical contract of Omeros, as is the process of raising expectations only to dash them. Once Walcott has lulled the reader into the comforting cadence of strictly metered verse, this structure begins to evaporate, as a host of inver sions is introduced. After twenty consecutive four-beat lines, five-beat lines begin to appear. Whereas the first fourteen lines of the section had been predictably punctuated, punctuation all but disappears in the second half of the section. As soon as the expectation of eights and sevens is raised, the lines become consistently octosyllabic. The initial word of the first twelve couplets had been capitalized, a practice employed just once in the concluding five couplets. The programmatic decisions which inform the metrical contract of Omeros are being enforced in this section, even though the verse form has changed. As to the metrical incongruity of this section in the context of the poem as a whole, Walcott’s decision to move so far afield from the prosodic norms of Omeros is more than a gambit to startle the reader. Chapter XXXIII, section iii exists outside the narrative stream of the poem. It is the only section in the work which does not operate as either a satellite or kernel event in the narrative strategy. As such, it is the only section of the poem which could be interrogated as a stand alone lyric, even though it clearly elucidates the reader on certain aspects of the poem, since it seems to shed some light on the mind-set of either the so-called “phantom narrator,” the intrusive narrator, or the poet himself. Still, despite the fact that this section adds a certain impact to the poem as a whole, its removal would not introduce a narrative discontinuity, nor would our

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understanding of any aspect of the story line be compromised. Perhaps Walcott has decided that a narratologically heterodox passage should be composed in a singular verse form. Once more, Walcott has shown the ability to design passages whose meter simultaneously addresses programmatic and line-by-line concerns. Chapter XXXIII is clearly a transitional moment in Omeros. Chapter XXXII, section iii ends with a tercet depicting the authorial “I” leaving Achille and his island behind:

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Chapter XXXIV, section i begins with the appearance of the aircraft over the American Rockies:

Chapter XXXIII seems to have been the epic equivalent of an in-flight movie, comprised mostly of sundry reminiscences of the languid jail which is the poetic speaker’s New England existence. The aircraft is clearly functioning as a suturing device, tying the first three books of the poem to the final four, and binding Achille and his companions to the Crow and the other dispossessed characters who are to appear in Books Four and Five. The logic of Omeros demands that Chapter XXXIII, which shifts the focus of the poem to a global perspective, be a prosodic non sequitur. That is, the massive displacement of narrative outlook has been signaled by a singularity within the metrical contract, which in turn makes the metrical similarity between the St. Lucian and global books all the more striking. Readers feel a certain reassuring familiarity in chapter XXXIV, section i as the poem returns to the cadences established by the St. Lucian books, even though the authorial gaze has moved far afield. Walcott wastes no time in solidifying the metrical links between chapters XXXII and XXXIV, as the lines quoted above indicate. Chapter XXXIV, section i is peppered with the familiar rhythmic figures: “large as our cities,” “mistook them for lakes,” “were torn like the clouds,” “the Sioux in the snow.” Interestingly, the dochmiac figure is also repeatedly used: “Like white comets left,” “the white waggons move.” The following section makes clear that the practice of setting key lines in the strictest meter, usually amphibrachic tetrameter, will also be employed in the global books:

This last line, which sets up the thematic and ethical concerns of the entire Sioux section, is metrically identical to several of the poem’s most important

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lines already examined, including “to pass on its note to the blue tacit mountains” and “that hummed in the vase of a girls throat ‘Omeros.’” In fact, there is a singular consistency to the verse throughout books four and five as the scope of Omeros widens to include vast sweeps of America and Europe. Although the meter is constantly being adjusted to suit the line-by-line concerns of the partic-ular topic being scrutinized in any given passage, these alterations are subtle, and take place within the defined parameters of the metrical contract forged in the first three books. In books four and five the line lengths are less consistent than they have been, and lines featuring in excess of six beats are a little more common, but the meter remains unmistakably “omeric,” as the opening of Book Five shows:

The opening tercets of this section are rather close to free verse, but a free verse of a type employed on several occasions in earlier passages, particularly in

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the African sections, perhaps indicating a measure of disorientation on the speaker’s part. The line lengths too are quite irregular, ranging from twelve to eighteen syllables. However, given the fact that the narrative has been brought to one of the epicenters of the slave trade, not to mention a port which, by virtue of its having been founded by Ulysses, is one of the seminal locations of the cultural strain which gave rise to the creation of Omeros, the meter is remarkably familiar. Perhaps most interesting is the seventh line of the passage, which is composed in amphibrachic hexameter, the only instance of ternary hexameter in the entire work. As chapter XXXVII, section i proceeds, however, the narrator seems to have less difficulty investigating his surroundings within the framework of the metrical practices established earlier. It is as if the narrator has seen the familiar in the foreign. That is, although the line lengths are unusual, the cadence these lines employ is, by this point in the poem, well known. The five lines following the line of amphibrachic hexameter are all decasyllabic and feature the now ubiquitous ternary meters. The poem seems to be struggling to come to terms with this new and kinless subject matter. Gradually though, the narrative subsumes this exotic location and its attendant topics, and is able to articulate conclusions in its own characteristic mode of expression. That this process, as illustrated by the prosody, is more laborious than was the case in the sections dealing with the Sioux is not surprising. It is easier to account for the conditions of Sioux existence in the context of a Caribbean perspective. The Caribs and Aruacs suffered a similar, if more cataclysmic fate. The Sioux are a more comfortable fit in a Caribbean poem than are the Portuguese, and this truth is reflected in the prosody of Omeros. But Lisbon is ultimately accounted for within the poem’s Caribbean frame of reference. Indeed, it could not be otherwise; the metrical contract developed in the St. Lucian books is not and, it could be argued, could not be broken by the global books. To do so would be to devalue the Caribbean perspective, to concede that the poetic method which had so deftly handled St. Lucian subject matter is incapable of supporting interrogation of more far flung and, perhaps, mooted topics. The Caribbean has endured centuries of Eurocentric definition. It has repeatedly been judged in European terms and, as often as not, found lacking. Walcott is eager to show that an antithetical procedure is possible. Whereas the Caribbean has traditionally been represented through European eyes, the reverse is now being attempted. The prosody and, of course, narrative of Book Five shows that West Indian codification of Europe is not just possible but fruitful. In a sense, by maintaining metrical consistency Walcott validates a “Caribcentric” perspective. Of course, to say that the poetic method of Omeros is capable of delineating the life of Lisbon is not to say that the narrator is altogether comfortable with what he finds there, and this discomfort is reflected in a certain fitfulness which the verse retains throughout the section: In this passage, and throughout chapters XXXVII and XXXVIII, which deal with Lisbon and London respectively, the familiar line endings are used

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sparingly and a greater percentage of the lines end with spondees than in any other portion of the work. The line lengths never do become entirely consistent, tending to be slightly longer than those of the St. Lucian books. The ternary meters and divided lines are employed, but the patterns are often partially obscured by extraneous syllables. Coupled with the liberal use of awkward, multisyllable modifiers such as “winebarreled” and “gold-manacled,” and groups of three or more consecutive stressed syllables, these sections manage to impart both the narrator’s understanding of his new environment, and the discomposure it instills in him. In essence, chapters XXXVII and XXXVIII employ a metrical strategy similar to but much less radical than that employed in the African chapters. The European sections use the rhythmic signatures much more frequently, and the ternary meters are far easier to distinguish than was the case in the African sections. In toto, the metrical formulations used to probe European existence do not greatly differ from those used to explore St. Lucian life. Apparently, the narrator finds Achille’s ancestral homeland a far more foreign location than modern-day Lisbon, perhaps reflecting the homogenized character of twentieth-century culture, but perhaps a testament to the efficiency with which slave traders smashed indigenous cultural forms, and a somber appraisal of the totality of Caribbean inculcation into a Eurocentric Weltanschauung. Throughout the concluding books of Omeros, the metrical formulations employed are in a state of almost constant modulation as Walcott subjects the metrical contract to minor emendations to ensure that sound and sense remain interwoven. But these alterations are always enacted within the precepts of the metrical contract which the opening books painstakingly developed. None of the final twenty-four chapters strays as far from the established metrical norms as chapters XXXVII or XXXVIII, and to the end, key passages continue to be composed with absolute fidelity to this contract. When Omeros finally speaks in chapter LVI, section iii, the cadence of his first words is unmistakably familiar:

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Notice that the last two lines are metrically identical. Both show the anacreontic pattern, but in the final line, the figure is completed by the poet/ narrator, who seems to have picked up the rhythm of his spiritual mentor’s speech very easily. The well known line endings, rhythmic signatures and mix of ternary, binary, and divided lines are all present, but the prosody has been adjusted to allow greater opportunity for promotion, resulting in a greater preponderance of binary meters than had heretofore been encountered:

Although the prosody employed here fits comfortably into the overall rhythmic scheme of Omeros, a slight modification of the rhythm, generated mainly by repeatedly grouping three or more unstressed syllables together to create

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unstressed beats, has lent the verse a formal, traditional quality, which is just what one might expect in Omeros’s first speaking appearance in the poem. The poet/narrator picks up this hexametric formality, blending it with distinctive omeric cadences:

The formal diction and the graceful pace of the verse are offset by a certain hesitancy. Despite the fact that the poet/narrator has adopted the rhythms of the ancient poet, the encounter between them is not going at all smoothly. Tonguetied in front of the master, the poet/narrator commits one faux pas after another. He finds himself “babbling” and muttering. Thus, when we come to the line in which Omeros’s name is praised, an all important concept in the thematic structure of the poem, the poet/narrator cannot quite find his natural cadence, and the amphibrachic tetrameter is marred by an extra stressed syllable. This stuttering does not, however, destroy the dignity of the young poet’s response, and the added formality which his speech has taken on is undeniable. This formality is counterpointed by the extreme informality which appears in the verse as the exchange progresses:

The colloquial diction and bouncing amphibrachs combine to break the solemnity with which the exchange began, and establishes the rhythmic pattern which will dominate the next two sections, as the verse alternates between traditional formality and conversational nonchalance, with Omeros picking up some of the poet/narrator’s cadences as well. This modulation may mirror Walcott’s views on the nature of literary heritage, which he views as an exchange across the centuries. History is considered a “timeless but habitable moment,” while time is considered mythical, or “the partial recall of the race” (“Muse” 22). In any case, we are once again presented with evidence of the fact

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that Walcott has designed a metrical scheme flexible enough to include endless variation within the auspices of a metrically coherent project. That there is consistency in the midst of the constant prosodic mutations through which the poem moves is strikingly reinforced by chapter LXIV, section iii, the final section of the poem. This thirty-three line section employs virtually every rhythmic formula the poem has developed as it moves fluidly between ternary, binary, divided, and nonmetrical lines. In fact, this concluding section could be considered something of a metrical mise en abyme, mirroring the prosodic concerns of the poem as a whole:

The poem ends much as it began, in a shroud of cleverly conceived ambiguity. The opening tercet is composed of one four-stress/four-beat line, one five-stress/ six-beat line, and one six-stress/five-beat line. The section opens with a line of tetrameter, followed by a line of hexameter and an irregular, thirteen-syllable line, which spreads three stresses through the first nine syllables before stressing three of the last four syllables. The decelerating pace which this structure imparts the tercet may mimic the life force ebbing from the snappers, as the day and the poem wind down. In any case, three metrically dissimilar lines open the section, which are tied together by the repeated use of Adonaics. Lines four and five are composed of back-to-back Adonaics with a concluding iamb. In fact, the entire section is peppered with this figure: “hands at the slaughter,” “angling their muzzles,” “thumping with fishes,” “aching Achilles,” “sagging on bamboo,” “coins in a basin,” “fanning its coalpot.” The anacreontic pattern opens the seventh, ninth, nineteenth, twenty-second, thirty-first and thirty-third lines. The dochmiac figure is employed, just as it has been throughout the second half of the poem, to relay the most ghastly images (“his hands gloved in blood”), but it is also used to close the poem (“was still going on”). There are also several lines, in which Achille and Achilles are explicitly compared, whose prosody seems best explained as trimeter. Chapter LXIV, section iii is something of a distillation of the prosodic practice of the poem as a whole, but perhaps more impressive is its

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internal coherence. Despite the exotic metrical melange upon which the passage rests, it reads with a remarkably unforced quality, not striking the ear as some sort of versification workshop, but rather possessed of an elegant fluidity as it decelerates through phrases like “immense lilac emptiness” and “No Pain lit its doors,” before closing with the exquisite, sibilant alliteration of the final two lines. Omeros opens with a description of the fishermen’s activities “one sunrise”; it closes as the moon rises over the beach and a grueling work-day comes to an end. III It is, of course, all but impossible to comment on every rhythmic nuance of such an involved and lengthy text as Omeros, particularly within the confines of a single chapter. The poetic strategy Walcott adopts lends itself to infinite variation as the meter is constantly adjusted to enable the most efficient enunciation of the topic under consideration in any given passage. For this reason, it is quite difficult to summarize, or categorize, the metrical program which Omeros enacts. In fact, it could be argued that this resistance to categorization, the poem’s evasion of totalizing judgments, is itself a key feature of the metrical contract, and that insofar as this claim is true, the metrical contract has fulfilled Walcott’s goals and justified his prosodic decisions. Although the metrical

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contract establishes parameters within which the poem’s myriad rhythmic fluctuations occur, we have repeatedly witnessed a nebulous quality which seems embedded in the most fundamental layers of the verse. The verse seems balanced at the edge of meter, never becoming strictly metrical, save in chapter XXXIII, section iii, but never quite lapsing into true free verse either. Line lengths tend to show great consistency, but are by no means strictly enforced. The most common line in the poem is perhaps the divided line, composed of two ternary and three binary feet. The uncertainty the poem generates is consistent through all seven books. The significance of this at a programmatic level becomes a central concern. The question of what function this meticulous and rigorous development of prosodic irresolution serves, or could be expected to serve, is troubling, particularly in light of the fact that in essays and interviews Walcott says little about meter or rhythm. This perhaps says less about Walcott’s interest in prosody than about the interests of his readership or interviewers. Most of his essays deal with expressly political concerns, as do most of the questions he fields from interviewers. The popularity of free verse in this century, coupled with something of a general critical suspicion of poetry which seems especially “crafted,” tends to have extinguished discussions of meter. This is not to say that Walcott himself is uninterested in the topic, as the 1987 poem “A Latin Primer” points out. Scansion and metrical analysis forms the controlling metaphor of the elegy, as Walcott makes various pronouncements on the subject, not the least of which is the following: “I hated scansion.”2 The best place to look for clues as to the programmatic function of the rhythmic form of Omeros is to the poem itself. There are a number of references to meter and rhythm in the poem, several occurring at key sections, and all of them rather telling of the importance which Walcott ascribes to beat. Perhaps the most important of these occurs in Chapter XIII, sections ii and iii, as the poet/narrator meets with the ghost of his dead father Warwick. In these sections, the two explore some of the poet/narrators earliest memories, and it is from this explo ration that the poet/narrator receives his poetic charge. The social responsibility he bears is directly tied to his poetic method, as this method is articulated by Warwick. The crux of the passage concerns the female laborers whom the poet/narrator, as a child, would watch loading coal in the harbor, “with a strength that never altered its rhythm” (XIII, ii). These groaning women are the sum and substance of his ancestry, and the truth of Warwick’s St. Lucia. The poet’s obligation to them is twofold; his responsibility is to articulate their mute existence, but he must view the accomplishment of this task as repayment of a debt incurred as a child: Although the poets duties and obligations are made explicit, the exact nature and form his restitution should take remains unspoken. But the importance of rhythm to the project is made absolutely perspicuous. Perhaps most interestingly, this extended metaphor repeatedly draws attention to the links which bind poetic rhythm to the rhythms of the objective world. This does not seem to be a commentary on the mimetic potential of prosody so much as an expression of the

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belief that the rhythm the poet chooses with which to articulate the experience of his island will not be arbitrary, but will in fact bear some organic correlation to the perceived beat of that experience. Presumably, the metrical contract of Omeros cannot be constructed based simply on random technical decisions, but must in some way encapsulate “that slow ancestral beat.” Warwick, who identifies himself as a failed poet and who is frequently associated with a Eurocentric text called The World’s Great Classics, expresses this point in primarily binary meter. This may possibly be in sympathy to the monotonous rhythm of the women’s feet, “the endless repetition as they climbed,” but more likely reflects the fact that his generation of St. Lucians had been so thoroughly indoctrinated into European cultural practice that they were unable to break free of that iamb strewn tradition, even, it would seem, in death. In any case, the notion that a rhythmic tie binds phenomenal and aesthetic spaces is reinforced at several key junctures of Omeros. In Chapter XXIV, section ii, as the reader is prepared for Achille’s African dream-quest, Walcott pronounces, “Time is the meter.” In Chapter LIX, section i, as Wacott reflects on the poem, and on the nature of epic, he points to the formative influence of the sea, claiming, “It never altered its meter/to suit the age.” Such is the prevalence in Omeros of the metaphor of meter that it is not unreasonable to assume that the prosody of the poem is itself operating as a metaphor. Such an assumption is particularly useful in investigating the transient, protean nature of the metrical contract developed in Omeros. Walcott’s method of moving perpetually between various meters and unmetrical lines may be considered a political decision, and a poetic practice which reflects some of the most deep-seated elements of the West Indian psyche. The formal aspect of a postcolonial text is a politically charged and highly contentious issue. Walcott, in attempting to produce a document which could serve as the artistic covenant of Caribbean culture, could not follow too closely the templates provided by the imperial tradition, nor could he ignore

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that tradition since it had played a formative role in the development of what has come to be considered a distinctly West Indian consciousness. The prosodic form of Omeros, neither strictly metered nor free verse, neither appended to nor divorced from European literary heritage, seeks to fulfill this mandate. More than this however, the metrical contract of Omeros may be meant to represent the sense of cultural insecurity which seems to permeate West Indian society. The idea that Caribbean culture may only be described in terms of negation, that is, as neither African, European, nor North American, though bound to all three, has proven difficult for Caribbean writers. The prosodic uncertainty which Omeros generates in its constantly shifting metrical constructions, and its resistance to categorization at almost any level, reflects the fact that the Caribbean often seems unsure of its cultural centre. The difficulty of making totalizing statements in regard to the prosodic form of the poem mirrors the difficulty of making totalizing statements about Caribbean culture itself. The poem is a unique intersection of free and metrical verse, just as St. Lucian culture is neither African nor European, but a unique intersection of the two. It is important to note just how deeply embedded in the structure of the verse this principle of uncertainty is. For instance, it is usually quite easy to decide whether or not a given poem rhymes, and most readers, if asked, would immediately respond that Omeros is a rhymed poem. Leithauser catalogues so many cross-rhymes (feminine, masculine, visual, pararhyme, rim rhyme, anagrammatic, apocopated, macoronic, rime riche, and dozens of off-rhymes) that he eventually comes to describe the poem as a “rhyme casebook” (93). A great many of the rhymes are perhaps best characterized as near-rhymes, and some of the lines have no matching rhymes at all. Chapter I, section i sets the pattern which the rest of the poem, except chapter XXXIII, section iii, employs. It begins with perfect end rhyme in an aba bcb pattern. However, the rhymes of the fifth and seventh lines, “cedars” and “Feed us,” quickly break the comforting monotony of perfect end rhyme, while the sixth and eighth lines employ the clever sight rhyme “eyes” and “Yes.” The fourteenth and forty-second lines also end with “eyes,” an apparent continuation of the rhyme since they rhyme with no other line in the section. The rhymes in lines ten and twelve, “feathers” and “murderers,” show just how far from perfect rhyme Walcott is willing to stray. The fact that lines twenty-six and thirty-two rhyme (“sea” and “memory”) shows just how far from the rhyme schemes of traditional terza rima the poet will wander, as does the fact that lines forty-seven, forty-eight and fifty all rhyme (“before,” “generator,” and “water”). Stretching the term rhyme to include “pastures” and “cedars” still leaves lines twenty-five and sixty-two without matching rhymes. The end result of this melange is that when read aloud, much of the section does not seem to rhyme at all. The poem employs many rhymes which are so strained (“smudges” and “villages” for instance), that without the expectation of rhyme which the sight of terza rima raises, few would interpret these as rhymes at all. Clearly, Omeros is a rhymed poem, but the rhyme scheme is as opaque as it is possible for a rhyme scheme to be. Given the preponderance

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of near rhyme it employs, along with the occasional unrhymed lines, one could claim that taken as a whole the poem is neither rhymed nor unrhymed. Much of the poems incertitude is generated by the way the verse form has been designed to raise expectations which are quickly dashed. Omeros reveals itself under close scrutiny to be a far different poem from that which first presents itself to the reader. It opens in a rigidly decasyllabic terza rima, but no sooner is this pattern established than it is broken. Readers are repeatedly lulled into the sing-song cadences which ternary meters so quickly establish, only to have these cadences disappear. We are presented with deeply disturbing subject matter articulated in prosodic forms more usually associated with nursery rhymes. As we come to expect reasonably consistent line lengths, the line lengths begin to fluctuate wildly. These techniques lend the poem an oracular, disorienting quality which is both aesthetically effective and politically inscribed. But at a different level of discourse, this technique may be considered part and parcel of Walcott’s program of constructing a text which neither attacks nor extends the Eurocentric poetic tradition, since Omeros is, at its most obvious level, a work which employs variations of classical prosodic techniques, while in the final analysis remaining a work which has twisted these techniques into virtually unrecognizable forms. The imperial gaze has been reversed, as it were, and the western literary heritage is now being appraised and interrogated within the auspices of a Caribbean sensibility. In a sense, this discussion swirls around the highly contentious issue of mimicry, a term traditionally employed to denigrate the artistic efforts of colonial societies, particularly those of Africa and the Caribbean. In the centuries leading up to emancipation, and for the most part in the century that followed, the black citizen was considered to be the white citizens “shadow,” mindlessly aping the actions of the builders of empire and culture, capable of only the most derivative creative acts (c.f. Froude 88). The legacy of this heinous mind-set has given rise to a strong desire to abandon the cultural models supplied by imperialism, and by extension would tend to culture deep suspicion of a work such as Omeros. Recently the term mimicry has been employed to describe a subversive strategy subaltern cultures employ to resist being constructed as imperial other. That is, the colonial subject became recognizably similar to the colonizer, but in a modified form that Bhabha has termed “not quite / not white” (“Of Mimicry” 132). The contention is that this process constructs a colonial self that defies imperial representation, which in turn undermines imperial identity and authority: “the observer becomes the observed and the ‘partial’ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence” (“Of Mimicry” 129). This topic will be taken up in greater detail in later chapters. For now it is enough to realize that the very prosody of Omeros raises these concerns, in addition to providing an aesthetically viable vehicle with which to investigate them at the semantic and narratological levels. The poem is like, but not quite, terza rima— just as it is like, but not quite, hexameter. The metrical contract of Omeros may thus be considered subversive:

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an act of artistic sedition is embedded in the very most fundamental layers of the verse. While this conclusion may be theoretically justifiable, it is, I feel, somewhat misleading to label Omeros a subversive text since the term subversion implies a heedful effort to undermine authority, in this case that of the poetic techniques of the Western literary tradition. Insofar as a text undertakes subversion, it is still framing itself with explicit reference to an anterior discourse—it reads against that discourse. This is clearly not Walcott’s goal in creating the metrical contract of Omeros. His project is not to create an expressly anti-imperial text, but rather to design a Caribbean perspective which will incorporate into itself the sum and substance of the historical conditions that led to the development of Caribbean culture. Further, any claim that Omeros is operating in a “like but not quite” manner (as defined by Bhabha’s discussion of colonial/postcolonial subjectivity) with the express intent of undermining Eurocentric formulations of the poetic, comes dangerously close to reading the poem as parody, and such is certainly not the case. The poem is not responding to an ante-rior discourse, any more so than any utterance does this, but attempting to subsume that discourse into a new and uniquely West Indian mode of expression. It is realization of this process which most adequately accounts for the particular metrical constructions and rhythmic figures employed in Omeros. While it is a rather speculative enterprise to question why a poet would choose one meter over another, the fact that Omeros is not just responding to tradition but forcing tradition to respond to it as well, helps us understand the programmatic implications of the prosodic decisions Walcott enacts in the poem. Perhaps the most fascinating metrical nuance of the work is its reliance on Aeolic and Sapphic figures. Walcott implements these figures at considerable risk, since their use opens the poet up to many of the criticisms already addressed: namely, how a Caribbean voice may be found in seminal elements of Western culture. But Walcott’s rationale may lie in the very fact that these figures are formative. Aeolic and Sapphic figures are ancient, perhaps as much as 2,700 years old. By using them, Walcott may be attempting to find a cadence which strips away nearly three millennia of cultural inscription. Much as Ezra Pound had done in using ancient and obscure rhythms, Walcott is attempting to send the reader back to root texts, to a time before European empire. Although these rhythms would eventually be appropriated by Western Europe as a cultural birthright, they are, in and of themselves, virtually uninscribed. In Pounds case, the decision to implement these rhythms was largely aesthetic, undertaken to fulfill the maxim, “make it new.” The new, it turns out, is to be found in the distant past. Root texts are possessed of a vitality that their derivative progeny have lost. In Walcott’s case, the technique has political as well as aesthetic implications. In returning to root texts, Walcott can associate himself with a much earlier attempt to delineate a new culture, and simultaneously circumvent, in part at least, the connotations which imperialists and slave traders had

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imparted to the only poetry with which most West Indians are well acquainted, that of Europe. To enact this same escape from the cultural bonds of colonization, many Caribbean writers, Brathwaite prominent among them, have looked for alternative cultural models in the oral traditions of Africa and the West Indies, a technique which Walcott has tended not to employ, perhaps because it partially ignores European influence in the creation of West Indian consciousness. But the rhythmic signatures of Omeros allow Walcott to avoid having to choose between one tradition and another, and to once again position the work between acquiescence to or denial of Eurocentricism. These rhythmic devices point to a profound and startling correspondence between the emergence of Greek culture in the seventh century B.C. and the emergence of his own twenty-seven centuries later. We have come to consider classical Greek poems as the most literate of texts, but this judgment is based more on our indoctrination as readers than on anything found in the texts themselves, and nowhere is this more apparent than in considerations of meter. Greek meters are highly oral-formulaic, having been incorporated into written texts as handed down by storytellers, or rhapsodes, before the creation of standard Homeric texts in the sixth century B.C. The rhythmic figures seen in these texts may thus be interpreted as mnemonic aids allowing the rhapsodes to “stitch together” their culturally documenting stories with greater fluency, just as similar figures allowed the citharodes and aulodes to more memorably perform lyric “texts.” By implementing these ancient meters, Walcott is colluding with an oral tradition as much as a literate one, and once again positioning Omeros in the space between two apparently Manichean options. In a sense, the Homeric texts are little different from the songs of African griots, or for that matter, the anonymous, pre-emancipation oral lyrics common throughout the West Indies. Further, Walcott’s use of these long rhythmic figures forces analysis of the poem at the level of phrasal prosody, which some theorists consider no prosody at all, but which is the norm in French. Thus, these Aeolic and Sapphic figures impel the reader to respond to the cadences of the poem in a manner similar to one’s response to French language verse. The metrical contract of Omeros has deftly subsumed the rhythms of St. Lucia’s French heritage, through the use of Greek metrical formulations, a contention supported by the fact that these formulations appear in the poem’s Patois speeches. Aside from the use of Aeolic and Sapphic figures, perhaps the most striking feature of the omeric metrical contract is its dependence on ternary meters. These meters are a key component of Walcott’s strategy of broken expectation. Readers of Omeros are confronted with solemn dactyls and stately anapests, a technique virtually unprece dented in English though the norm in quantitative verse. The fact that ternary meters have been used so sparingly in English no doubt added to their appeal for Walcott, but they may also have been appealing as a more authentic Caribbean cadence. The oral tradition of the pre-emancipation West Indies has survived to this day in various permutations, the best-known and important of which is kaiso. The main Caribbean genre of social commentary

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and political critique throughout most of this century, kaiso employs rhythms thought to have been derived from traditional African forms (Hill 286). Although it reached its greatest popularity, and notoriety, in Trinidad, kaiso was employed throughout much of the Caribbean before 1890 (Quevedo 14), and is now widely considered a definitive West Indian form. While it has not been the strategy of this chapter to employ musical models of rhythm, one cannot help but notice certain pronounced similarities between the metrical constructions of Omeros and the basic rhythmic structure of kaiso. This is particularly apparent in Walcott’s liberal use of amphibrachs. Since English is a stress timed language, the use of amphi-brachs produces a cadence which mimics syncopation in music, that is, in its base form, “short-long-short.” Kaiso, both single-tone and double-tone, employs highly syncopated rhythms, without exception. Quevedo refers to the genre’s “addiction to what is traditionally known as the ‘half tone,’ that is to say the shortening of one antecedent note and prolongation of the subsequent” (Quevedo 3). This technique, somewhat similar to tempo rubato, except on a vastly compressed scale as the beat of kaiso is incrementally adjusted on a continual basis, has rendered it next to impossible for traditional musicologists to accurately score the work. This continual emendation of the beat is quite like the prosodic technique at work in Omeros. Perhaps more to the point of this chapter, printed kaiso lyrics bear unmistakable similarities to Walcott’s poem. The most cherished ability of the kaisonian is the development of spontaneous rhetorical recitatives in response to some feature of the immediate surroundings. These recitatives are composed in what is referred to as “extempore kaiso rhythm.” Examination of one of the most famous examples of this form reveals that this rhythm employs metrical formulations quite similar to those deployed in Omeros. The kaisonian Executer, in response to the question “What is a circle?” put to him by an audience member, during his legendary first trip to New York, offered the following reply:

(Quevedo 21)

Although the subject matter of this kaiso would seem out of place in Omeros, its rhythm would not. In fact, given the extemporaneous nature of the piece it shows remarkable complexity, moving from dactylic trimeter, through an iambic line, before concluding with an anapestic/amphibrachic mix. That both the

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question and answer form signature rhythmic figures of Omeros cannot help but strengthen the claim that some of Walcott’s prosodic decisions are meant to subsume indigenous cultural forms of the Caribbean. That Walcott uses metrical figures common to both Sappho and Executer only deepens the indeterminacy which any analysis of the metrical contract of Omeros must acknowledge. The prosodic form of the poem sends the reader spinning off into a tangled intertextual web whose threads seem anchored to both ancient Greek tradition and contemporary West Indian popular culture. Walcott’ ‘s depiction of Omeros’s accent as “Greek calypso” (LVII, i) may be more literally accurate than one might initially suppose. Of course, one cannot lose sight of the fact that the unusual metrical practices of Omeros possess a certain novelty and freshness which would, in and of itself, account for their use. In his essays, Walcott has devoted considerable effort to developing his own politically charged version of the Poundian maxim, “Make it new.” Walcott’s New World aesthetic “refuses to recognize history as a creative or culpable force” (“Muse” 25), and as such is essentially Adamic, holding that cultures are originated “By the force of natural surroundings” (“Culture or Mimicry” 8), and that “West Indians, despite the contaminations around us, are in the position of Crusoe, the namer” (“Crusoe” 36): “It is this awe of the numinous, this elemental privilege of naming the New World which annihilates history in our great poets” (“Muse” 26). Thus, while the verse form of Omeros possesses a compelling matinal quality which must be considered an aesthetic end in itself, this prosodic originality must also be considered the fundamental building block of a mode of expression which recodes history. That is, it is the voice with which Walcott will name the New World. A new articulation of the world must be supported by a new beat. Of course, in prosody nothing is truly new, since there are no new meters left to be “discovered.” Still, this is not an either/or proposition. There are gradations of newness, and more and less ubiquitous meters. Walcott’s practice of setting the most important lines in the strictest meters is a complete reversal of traditional metrical practice. His use of terza rima, while not entirely unprecedented in English, is most unusual. From the melancholic dactyls to the chilling eights and sevens, every reversal the poem enacts is, at one level, an element of the quest to construct a fresh voice with which to enunciate a new and uniquely Caribbean perspective, to create an Adamic cadence. This may help account for Walcott’s astonishing claim that the rhythm of Omeros is not poetic at all: I did not notice how much great prose I had absorbed into my nervous verse system. When I began to write in hexameter lines and in stanzas, well the structure is there in the architecture of the best turn of the century prose, in Conrad and Kipling. And you find in them the wit of the paragraph; mentally it keeps the rhythm up. So the solidity I felt behind me

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was the solidity of prose. I wanted the feel of great prose rather than of a strong verse line. (Bruckner 17) Omeros occasionally moves into free verse, it rarely employs end-stopped lines and it is, in places, quite conversational. Still, it is difficult to see how it could in any sense be considered prose-like. It is also difficult to know how “the wit of the paragraph” influences rhythm, or for that matter, how the backbone of Omeros could be considered anything but the “strong verse line.” It is wise to maintain a healthy skepticism when approaching Walcott’s claims on the nature of Omeros, or at least to look for ulterior motives behind such pronouncements as: “I don’t know The Aeneid and I don’t know The Odyssey. I never read them” (Fuller 517). This is a highly unlikely claim, but it emphasizes the fact that Walcott does not want the poem too closely associated with classical Western literature. He certainly does not want it thought a rewrite of The Iliad or The Odyssey. Walcott’s claim that the rhythmic roots of Omeros are to be found in turn of the century prose may be an attempt to draw attention away from the cultural inscription which the verse form of the poem bears. It may also be meant to add to the ambiguity which the metrical contract of the poem generates. After all, nothing could be more confusing than prose-like terza rima. Ultimately this claim may simply be something of a word to the wise: in Omeros nothing is quite as it first appears to be.

II The Color of Shadows

I The invention of epic poetry corresponds with a definite and, in the history of the world, often recurring state of society. That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been. Most nations have passed through the same sort of chemistry. Before their hot racial elements have been thoroughly compounded, and thence have cooled into the stable convenience of routine which is the material shape of civilization— before this has firmly occurred, there has usually been what is called an “Heroic Age.” (Abercrombie 7) SO RAN THE PREVAILING WISDOM OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY. STANDING between savagery and civilization, between the tribe and the truth as it were, was a golden moment of insight in which the passion of primitive existence blended with the cool remove of analysis and self-reflection to produce a given culture’s axiomatic moment—a moment when the central beliefs upon which the tribe had unwittingly operated came to be identified, codified, and lauded. While we may perhaps be inclined to look askance at such a pronouncement, dismissing it as the florid byproduct of Georgian sentimentality, and pointing out that the origins of texts, let alone entire cultures, are so highly overdetermined as to make such claims of beginnings pointless, there is nevertheless a kernel of significance at the center of Abercrombie’s argument, the logic of which is as compelling today as it was in 1914. At some point, cultures, like individuals, pass through a “mirror stage” in which self and other become clearly distinguished. The task of searching for the particular qualities which distinguish one’s culture from all others, and thus of creating a belief in the ties that bind the disparate elements of that culture together, is incorporated into the fundamental layers of the master narratives of almost every society. At

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some point, belief was forged in an essential connection between the men of Phocis, Argos, Pylos, Arcadia, and the rest, and the notion of “Greek” sprang into existence, a notion under written by The Iliad. At some point, the title New England came to be regarded as a misnomer, and the notion of “America” came to be, a notion validated by Leaves of Grass. “Us and them” plays out in the communal sense much as “you and I” do in the personal; enunciating difference as the basic condition of existence, and propelling the makers of culture toward expression of the uniqueness of their “hot racial elements.” So it is that Walcott, metrical contract in hand, sets about the task of delineating the societal specificity of the West Indies, teasing out the uniquely Caribbean strains from a culturally heterodox, geographically diverse, and historically amorphous existence. Perhaps the most vexing impediment to the successful completion of this task comes into focus as one considers Arbercrombie’s claim that epic is achieved before a society’s distinguishing “racial elements have been thoroughly compounded.” Walcott must undertake his project with the realization that his society is already thoroughly compounded. Indeed, Caribbean society ‘s polyglot nature is the very element that cannot be omitted from the narrative of West Indian reality. Cultural hybridity, spreading itself across a landscape which is for all practical purposes Adamic, comprises the process of St. Lucian societal development, and in a very real sense Omeros can only be considered successful insofar as it bears witness to the multivocal foundation upon which the culture uneasily rests. In much the same way that the metrical contract had to acknowledge, and reenact, the conflicting tugs of a number of wildly diverse artistic influences, a tension which pulled a uniquely West Indian art into existence, the philosophy and figuration of Omeros must somehow account for the fact that the essence of Caribbean society is polyvalence itself. Once more, Walcott must develop and implement a strategy that neither attacks nor mimics literary formulations of the Heroic Age of any society with lineal ties to the Caribbean. The poem must illustrate the fact that the intaglio of cultural inscription etched into the material of Caribbean life by a meticulous process of imperial representation and othering carried on for centuries eventually came to be co-opted as an element of a singular West Indian culture. Confused and conflicting aesthetic traditions, globally diverse histories and heritages, and wide ranging ethnicity have come together in a Gordian Knot of culture, whose very impenetrability serves as its principle definiens. Thus, the project of delineating the core values of West Indian society, of identifying and poetically articulating those features of the culture which if removed would topple its individuality, must never stray towards pronouncements of overarching, monolithic communal unities. Further, if Omeros is to form an accurate record of Walcott’s own beliefs on the subject, then it must somehow corroborate the Caribbean peoples trepidation and mistrust of the very idea of a cultural center, an uncertainty so pronounced, in Walcott’ ‘s opinion, that it may itself be thought of as constituting a central tenet of West Indian community:

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It is very difficult for foreign readers to understand the vacuum at the core of West Indian sensibility, a kind of deadness that no exhortations about community and achievement can stir, one that is suspicious and uncertain. (“Tribal Flutes” 44) No nationalistic cheerleading, no impassioned unity sermons nor tub-thumping proclamations of communal belief can find their way into Omeros. As it acknowledges diverse cultural influences and a nebulous, tear-stained history, a multivalent sociological makeup and disposition and a constituting uncertainty, the poem must somehow circumscribe a cultural center which Walcott himself seems to conceive of as an absence. As was the case in the development of the omeric metrical contract, Walcott undertakes this apparently Sisyphean task by adopting a strategy of broken expectations and misdirection. Much as we may initially be astounded by a poem that attempts to develop uniquely Caribbean rhythms in hexametric terza rima, we may also be querulous as to how a purportedly Caribbean ideology may be staked out through the actions of characters named Hector and Helen moving through a plot which appears to be a postmodern amalgam of The Iliad and The Odyssey, complete with epic devices and classical figuration. But just as the meter shows itself under close scrutiny to be anything but derivative, so does the figuration and structure of Omeros operate to raise expectations of indebtedness which, in the final analysis, are obliterated. Indeed, the figurative discourse of the work becomes so richly textured, so heavily inlaid with multiple levels of clashing significance, that the poem eventually seems to bear little similarity to classical epic at all. Epic convention is employed with such nonchalance, and in so modified a form, that it eventually becomes all but impossible to decide with certainty whether or not Omeros even employs epic devices, at least in any meaningful sense of the term. This formal incertitude, together with the poem’s metrical entropy, allows Walcott to begin to enclose the axiom of West Indian culture—an epicentric lacking from which a new and underived art has spread. This communal béance, so to speak, must somehow be enunciated in a manner faithful to the realities of the present day Caribbean which acknowledges, but is not controlled by, the realities of a shattered history. Such a work would no doubt fulfill Abercrombie’s expectations since, as Walcott points out, what we have witnessed in the West Indies throughout the second half of this century is “the early morning of a culture which is defining itself” (The Antilles 26), a metaphor curiously similar to that employed by Abercrombie: …before the state called civilization can arrive, there has commonly been a long passage of dark obscurity, which throws up into exaggerated brightness the radiance of the Heroic Age. (Abercrombie 12)

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The value-laden terminology of this citation notwithstanding, it suits the Caribbean situation rather well, in that most would agree that the period of European expansion into the archipelago was a dark one indeed, against which the sudden proliferation of cultural artifacts in this century seems all the more dazzling. More importantly, locating these self-defining moments at cultural dawn stresses their inherently indeterminate nature and alerts us to the transience which must, by definition, accompany the genesis of new cultural strains— periods which might be termed moments of overdetermination, when many ideological strains and artistic influences, none of which are themselves underived, are twisted into an essentially new mode of cultural practice. It is no surprise then that the characters of Omeros should display the same protean quality which characterizes the poem’s metrical contract, seeming both analogous to their classical counterparts and, simultaneously, utterly divorced from them. Epic convention in Omeros operates in a similarly nebulous fashion. The poem neither attacks nor extends the Eurocentric epic tradition. Thus, examination of epic machinery is not an end in itself but a means of accessing the strategy of indetermination which forms the substrata of the text. Embarking on a point by point analysis of how Walcott’s use of the invocation of the muse is similar to that of Homer, and how the two differ, is only useful insofar as it allows us to consider the process by which Walcott attempts to delineate “the vacuum” which exists at the core of West Indian consciousness. Attempting to provide a “proof” as to whether Omeros is or is not an epic is futile, since such a proof is largely a matter of definition; the conclusion one arrives at in this regard will follow syllogistically from the definition of epic one chooses to begin with. Ultimately, Omeros can be neither epic nor anti-epic, neither analog nor reversal of tradition, but must attempt to exploit the semantic void that separates these and other binary pairings. In a sense then, Omeros is not a rewriting of The Iliad or The Aeneid, but rather an attempt to refigure the very idea of these texts by fundamentally modifying the representational method of classical epic. In other words, the profound difference between conceptions of self and community into which classical and West Indian Heroic Ages emerged necessitates a revolutionary poetic method which may be epic in scope and function, but not in mind set or process. This process of rewriting not the particularities of epic, the devices and so forth, but rather of attempting to rewrite the root assumptions of classical epic accounts for the fact that critics have been unable to discern just what text, or texts, Omeros is patterned on. Hamner’s careful examination of the poem, for instance, notes a number of features which seem to match elements of what might be termed a generalized epic pattern, but does not identify a single close correspondence between Omeros and any other text, despite his observation that “most critics who review Omeros cite the company of Longfellow, Whitman, Joyce, Crane, Eliot, Pound” (“Walcott’s Epical Omeros” 1). Virtually every essay that concerns itself with Omeros does bandy about the names of many canonical writers who have tried their hand at epic of one sort or another, but

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none come to compare particular texts to Omeros in a detailed manner, choosing instead to remain at the level of generalization: Omeros is a long narrative poem, containing history, the comic, the tragic, the universally human. Its scale is epic, moving from the… Antilles, to West Africa, to Lisbon, London, Boston, Dublin, Toronto, and Wounded Knee… the ordinary people inhabiting Walcott’s poem exhibit elements of heroism. (Livingston 132) The success of the omeric re/figurative strategy is evidenced in these claims. Most readers seem to sense correlations between Omeros and the epic tradition, but are often unable to validate these correlations by reference to specific passages or techniques. The poem seems to float between tradition and revision, occupied by the ghosts of epic heritage, a vague sense of indebtedness which defies accurate depiction in formal epic terminology. Incertitude is inscribed as a fundamental component of the thematic and structural operation of the work, just as it was at the metrical level. In order to understand how Walcott accomplishes this, it is necessary to examine not just the elements of epic which Omeros refigures but also to consider those it omits entirely; the ideological success of Omeros depends as much on textual absences as presences. Given the nature of Caribbean culture and history, it could not be otherwise. As noted in the previous chapter, the West Indies have traditionally been depicted consistently in terms of negation, and this process of imperial representation has itself been subsumed into the Caribbean identity. This otherness precludes the sort of confident assertions of sovereign, irrefutable identity which informs epic, from classical to post-modern. Walcott is not, after all, attempting to install Omeros as some sort of Weltgedicht, showing Caribbean culture to be the rightful inheritor of earthly empire. Homer and Virgil, Vida and Milton, Wordsworth and Whitman all asserted the essential and undeniable rightness of their respective ideologies, that their beliefs were those favored by the gods. Even the epics of the twentieth century, though elusive and incomplete, rarely question the centrality of European ideology, clearly projecting the belief that as goes the First World, so goes the world. Such pronouncements would be utterly alien to the nature of Walcott’s project, and this is no doubt one reason for his consistent and vehement resistance to calling Omeros an epic (Bruckner 13). There are also specific cultural absences in the West Indies, particularly in its root narratives, which preclude a traditionally epic approach to artistic selfdefinition. The most important of these is perhaps found in the disposition of the hero: In the West Indies, from a slave tradition adapted to the environment, the slaves kept the strength of the stories about devils and gods and the cunning of certain figures, but what was missing in the folklore was a single heroic warrior figure. We had the cunning of certain types,

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representative of the slave outwitting his master, like Br’er Rabbit or Tar Baby, done in West Indian dialect…. But there was no king, no tribal chief, no warrior for a model in those stories. (“Meanings” 49) “Best,” in The Iliad, means best in battle. The aristeiai depict superiority in armed combat. Remove the battles from The Iliad and the remaining work could scarcely be thought of as comprising an epic. As Walcott himself asks of Omeros, “Where are the battles?” (Bruckner 17). Since the warlike hero is absent from West Indian folklore, and all but absent from West Indian history, he certainly cannot appear in a text which documents West Indian cultural sensibility. Although Walcott did, early in his career, explore the personality of the most notable Caribbean warrior, in Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes, and may even be seen as bemoaning the lack of a political hero in the 1949 apprentice poem, “Cry for a Leader,” the body of Walcott’s mature work clearly embraces the realization that a figure more akin to Anancy than Agamemnon exists at the heart of Caribbean consciousness, a realization fully developed in the allegories Ti Jean and His Brothers and Dream on Monkey Mountain. Thus, a title like Omeros and an ostensibly epic structure seem outrageously out of place in the project of composing a Caribbean master narrative, and application of the term epic may, as Walcott insists, be misguided. But the difference between Caribbean and classical master narratives is one of form, not function. Just as The Iliad and The Odyssey are “the central cultural and educational documents of Hellenism” (Hardie 1), so too does Omeros seek to unfold itself as an inclusive document of Caribbeanism. Just as The Aeneid presses the Greek cultural tradition “into the service of a new age in Rome” (Hardie 2), so does Omeros use classical Greek culture to help define the “new age” in Castries. The difference is that while neither Homer nor Virgil would ever have thought to question the fundamental soundness of their ideology, Walcott can do nothing save question. Whereas Milton “never stumbled about in a cosmological emptiness stretching between truth and meaning” (Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths 91), Walcott attempts to position his work precisely in this emptiness. Devoid of the fortifying influence of warrior kings and their patron divinities, or the comforting organizational certainty of musica mundana, the world of Omeros is one of existential contingency in which meaning must be created not found, significance derived not divined, and the essential formlessness of human activity acknowledged at every step of the process. Perhaps most importantly, the comforting certainty of “home” which informs virtually every epic poem in the Eurocentric tradition has been replaced by the chronic unease of a culture unsure of its center, of a people perpetually transient: The sprout casually stuck in the soil. The depth of being rooted is related to the shallowness of racial despair. The migratory West Indian feels rootless on his own earth, chafing at its beaches. (“What the Twilight Says” 21)

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Omeros poetically deconstructs the notion of “home” and refigures it in a form that incorporates a sense of permanent exile. The particular modifications to which Walcott subjects traditional epic devices and figures are shadows of processes operating at more fundamental levels of discourse—programmatic decisions meant to mutate the root assumptions of epic, and their attendant ideologies. Walcott’s project of enunciation must account for the Caribbean’s suspicion of its own cultural heritage, “the shrug which embodies our African and Asian diasporas” (The Antilles 3), its deflating appraisal of its own history, “that long groan that underlies the past” (The Antilles 7), and its endemic sense of rootlessness. In fact, it must not just account for these elements in its poetic strategy, but enshrine them as first principles of that strategy, and in so doing show them to be originary influences in the evolution of West Indian sensibility and society. As epic, Omeros will programmatically move to subvert the most cherished principles underlying Eurocentric epic practice. It might also be added that the poem, insofar as it is in any sense to be considered epic, runs against the grain of current poetic practice. Much as meticulous prosodic craftsmanship is held in low esteem by contemporary critics, who seem to consider attention to the details of versification as little more than poetic chicanery, affected diversion drawing attention away from the intellectually barren, so too does contemporary criticism eschew epic: “The epic as a genre has had a generally bad press in the twentieth century. If epic was once the king of the genres, it has been dethroned as thoroughly as many other kings” (Dasenbrock 248). So we are left with a poem whose astounding versification, described by the poet as prose-like, supports a sweeping storyline featuring characters named Hector and Achille, which the poet refers to as “certainly not…of epic design” (Bruckner 396). Every aspect of Omeros seems designed to occupy some sort of theoretical middle ground; even, it would seem, between the tastes and distastes of our age. Clearly, analysis of the structural and figurative techniques with which Walcott attempts to enact his poetic disquisition of the Caribbean must be approached with the same caution employed in analysis of its prosody, never losing sight of the fact that defiance of categorization is a key ideological component of the work. II “This is how, one sun-rise, we cut down them canoes.” Much of the complexity issuing from Walcott’s strategy of positioning the ideological concerns of Omeros in the semantic void separating the binary pairings often used to analyze postcolonial literature (including, as we shall see, the binary comprised by those exploding watchwords of postcolonialism,

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betweenness and hybridity) is generated by the poem’s first line. Given the fact that Walcott devoutly configures the poem to neither adopt nor abandon Eurocentric poetic practice, and the fact that the poem concerns itself with a cultural dawn, it is perhaps not surprising that Omeros should open at sunrise, though even this fact is less than certain, since we are to learn that Philoctete narrates this line in retrospect. Still, it is fitting that a poem which consistently conspires to undermine either/or propositions should begin at neither night nor day, in neither light nor darkness. As the meridian between day and night, sunrise, like many boundaries, is transculturally inscribed in folk mythology as a locus of magic, a singularity in which certainties become less certain, and the normal, expected relationships which govern existence tend to become confused. Philoctete’s tale, as a whole, does possess an ethereal, unearthly quality, as the fishermen, set against the threshold of dawn, descend into the forest to begin their ghoulish task. Given the matter of fact nature of the activities being described, Philoctete’s narrative is not just chilling but rather phantasmic, predicated on a certain confusion of form, an erosion of the clearly defined boundaries that separate independent objects of the natural world and, ultimately, of those which separate perceiver from perception. The ferns “sound like the sea.” The fishermen’s exhalations produce “feathers like the mist.” The first blow the trees suffer comes from “the axe of sunlight,” as the fishermen look on with axes in their eyes, and presumably their hands. Philoctete’s eyes eventually fill with “dew,” not tears, as he contemplates the task before him. So disorienting is this strange blurring of edges that it becomes rather difficult to separate the men from their surroundings as they prepare to harvest not trees but canoes. They are all of one body, so to speak, which validates Philoctete’s trepidation and makes clear that his appraisal of himself as a murderer is no display of Punic faith but rather a pious belief that in defiling the forest he and his party also desecrate themselves. As Philoctete’s tale ends, the phantom narrator picks up on this figurative pattern, consistently describing the men in naturalistic terms, and personifying the forest. Philoctete rolls his “trouser leg up with the rising moan of a conch,” but leaves it “to a garrulous waterfall/to pour out his secret.” This strategy underwrites the entire first chapter, melding human and natural form, thwarting a simple deductive approach to distinguishing human from natural activity, and thus confounding our usual understanding of volition. This opening shows that the neat categories of interpretation with which we normally approach a text will prove an ill fit to Omeros, and this in turn complicates the matter of comparing the poem to classical epic. However, in opening in this dizzying forest netherworld, the abode of the gods, the poem does in a sense mirror both The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy. In fact, the similarity in setting between the first section of Omeros and Canto I of Inferno is striking: When I had journeyed half our life’s way,

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I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray. (I, 1–3) Dante begins his circuitous journey through the spheres in a densely forested valley at sunrise, disoriented and filled with dread. Though Walcott thoroughly revises this allegorical dreamscape, substituting La Sorciere for the Mountain of Rectitude, an iguana for the leopard, lion and wolf and so forth, the resemblance between the world Dante surveys as sunrise descends the mountain, and that which Philoctete occupies as “sunrise trickled down its valleys” is unmistakable. However, Walcott establishes this correlation only to undermine it. Dante’s way is blocked by three beasts, whereas Philoctete introduces the beast, “a shark with side-wise jaw,” into the forest; whereas Dante fears the forest, the forest has every reason to fear Philoctete. Most importantly, Dante uses the figure of the rising sun to reveal Beatrice, and the path to spiritual enlightenment; the sunlight reveals nothing to Philoctete save the butchery that he and his cohorts have inflicted on the gods. The importance of this last reversal can scarcely be overstated, since the image of the sun, and of sunrise, is absolutely central to Dantean symbolic strategy: That it is the figure of the rising sun by which Beatrice comes at last to stand upon the triumphal chariot is the most revealing image which the poet might have found to affirm the analogy of her advent to Christ’s in the present tense, but to stress, in so doing, the very basis upon which that analogy rests: the advent of light. (Singleton 51) In reversing the revelatory significance of sunrise, Walcott has weakened most of the potential symbolic interaction between his work and Dante’s. The sun illuminates Dante’s path to his god while it lights the way for Philoctete to murder his. At one level mimicking The Inferno and at another undermining its figurative authority, the opening of Omeros positions the poem somewhere between reiteration and rewrite, neither following the Dantean tradition nor being divorced from it. Perhaps the more interesting comparison is that between the openings of Omeros and The Odyssey. It is in this comparison that the peculiar relationship Omeros develops with its epic forbears becomes most apparent. Once more, the sun quickly becomes important, as the first specific incident mentioned in The Odyssey is the destruction of Odysseus’s men by Helios. This in itself may be considered both analogue and reversal, since the sun god destroys Odysseus’s band but seems something of a willing accomplice to Philoctete’s. Sunrise as meridian also plays a key role in The Odyssey since, as the poem opens, Odysseus’s nemesis, Poseidon, is visiting the Aithiopians, “who live divided/some at the

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setting of Hyperion, some at his rising” (1. 23–24).1 But here the similarities end. Book I of The Odyssey renders an account of Athena petitioning Zeus to allow Odysseus’s homecoming. The Odyssey thus opens with a depiction of the gods deciding a man’s fate—Omeros opens with a depiction of men sealing the gods’ fates. This partially destabilizes further correspondences between the two poems since the gods openly manipulate virtually every action recounted in The Odyssey, but are maimed in the first section of Omeros. The subsequent attempt to reestablish contact with the naturalistic forces of St. Lucia, I will argue, controls the structural development of Walcott’s poem. The most obvious question to be asked of the opening of Omeros is also structural, and concerns the most famous of epic devices. Several critics have argued that the poem begins in medias res: The story begins in medias res since Philoctete has already suffered his meta-physical wound, Helen has already been fired, the major is already casting about for linkage with the island and the author pointedly draws attention to the fictional nature of the “I” he has injected into the unfolding narrative. (Hamner, “Walcott’s Epical Omeros” 5) These observations are certainly accurate, though the narrative “I” does not appear until the sixth section, perhaps a little too far into the poem to be considered part of the opening. Still, the fact that certain events chronologically precede the commence ment of the narrative does not necessarily mean that the narrative commences in medias res. With the exception of Genesis, and certain other creation myths, few narratives actually heed the Mad Hatter’s advice to “begin with the beginning.” In medias res, at least as it is employed in the Homeric and Virgilian texts, does not indicate that certain events predate the opening. The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Aeneid all begin in the tenth year of the adventures at a point just before the climax referred to as hamothen. Literally “from somewhere,” as Frye points out, this “somewhere” is far from arbitrary: All three epics begin at a kind of nadir of the total cyclical action: The Iliad at a moment of despair in the Greek camp; The Odyssey, with Odysseus and Penelope furthest from one another, both wooed by importunate suitors; The Aeneid, with its hero shipwrecked on the shores of Carthage, citadel of Juno and enemy of Rome. (318) Though important, the vignette with which Omeros opens cannot easily be considered as fitting this pattern. Nor does it allow for the germane elements of the plot to be narrated in retrospect by the hero, in the case of Odysseus, to the Phaeacians of Scheria, the last people he visits on his wanderings. Although the complex chronological structure of Omeros makes it difficult to locate

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temporally certain events, it is clear that a great many of the most important events of the poem have yet to occur as the poem begins. Achille’s return to Africa, the deaths of Hector and Maude, and the poet/narrator’s encounters with Omeros and the ghost of his father all seem to take place after Philoctete tells his story— though since the poem is composed almost entirely in past tense, it is difficult to be certain. In fact, the complete absence of hypotactic cues means there is no way to locate Philoctete’s recitation in the time stream of the poem. He may be leading his guided tour after the entire storyline has been completed. Though we cannot be certain of when Philoctete relates the events, we can be reasonably certain that the events themselves must predate every episode of the St. Lucian plot, with the obvious exception of those pertaining to Midshipman Plunkett. It could not be otherwise. Since the main plot revolves around fishermen, then the first element of the story would be the creation of fishing vessels. There is thus a sense in which, far from beginning in medias res, Omeros actually begins at the very beginning. Further, since Philoctete is clearly relating this story of beginnings in retrospect, it could be argued that rather than following epic convention, Walcott is completely reversing it. That is, in the first section of Omeros, Philoctete reclines among an audience of eager listeners and relates the originary element of the poem’s storyline, just as Odysseus does in book IX of The Odyssey. Such a strategy is perfectly in keeping with the ideological requirements of “the early morning of a culture which is defining itself.” Omeros is a document that registers the ongoing process of becoming in which Caribbean culture is involved, and is not a retrospective account of assured fame. As The Odyssey opens, Odysseus’s feats have already been accomplished and the merit of these feats judged and found to be of the highest order. This is reflective of the fact that by the time the text was composed, Greek culture had already acquired some measure of “the material shape of civilization.” The Odyssey artistically enacts the principles of a society already confident of its uniqueness and importance. But the attempt to gain this confidence, what might be termed the struggle of becoming, is a central feature of Caribbean identity. It is the process, the active and ongoing agency of definition which Omeros engages, and not the supposed teleological endpoint of this process. Arduous, and by definition incomplete, the struggle to develop a coherent sense of the uniqueness and validity of West Indian culture is an intrinsic ingredient of that culture which can only be accounted for within a poetic strategy designed to eschew the documentary sensibility of classical epic in favor of a kinetic mode of enquiry. Clearly, beginning in mediis res is a technique ill suited to such an endeavor, but since the cultural activity the project demands must be balanced against deference to western literary heritage, also demanded of a poem like Omeros, an inventive and to some extent unprecedented mutation of poetic practice must be enacted. So it is that Omeros commences with an episode that resists placement in the poem’s timeline, that describes the originary events of the poem’s storyline, but that nevertheless operates in such a manner as to initially resemble Homeric

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methodology. The very fact that the poem can generate uncertainty as to whether or not it begins in medias res, a question which should be utterly straightforward, bespeaks Walcott’s effectiveness in developing a poetic strategy capable of delineating a society unsure of its cultural center, a society essentially founded on uncertainty, and provides a sobering example of the sophistication of the techniques used to position the poem between reiteration and avoidance of the Eurocentric literary tradition. It is this same insistence on the centrality of the act of cultural self-discovery which in large measure accounts for the nature of the modifications to which Walcott subjects another key component of classical epic opening, namely the statement of argument: I sing of arms and of a man: his fate had made him fugitive; he was the first to journey from the coasts of Troy as far as Italy and the Lavinian shores. Across the lands and the waters he was battered beneath the violence of the High Ones, for the savage Juno’s unforgetting anger; and many sufferings were his in war— until he brought a city into being and carried in his gods to Latium; from this have come the Latin race, the lords of Alba, and the ramparts of high Rome. (The Aeneid 1.1–2) This introduction, perhaps the most famous opening in the western canon, is the quintessential statement of argument, in twelve lines encapsulating the theme and storyline of what is to be a sprawling, twelve-book poem. Virgil quickly establishes the sacrosanct cultural lineage of Rome and the unimpeachable accomplishments of its first, and as yet nameless, hero. But this opening also affords us a practical opportunity to consider the paradoxical relationship binding the epic tradition to its Caribbean successors, and the dual revulsion and reverence it inspires in contemporary black West Indian poets. Though depicting the foundation of the prototypical European empire, this passage rings with an extraordinary Caribbean resonance. In a curious and startling manner, Virgil’s statement of purpose seems to mirror the historical West Indian experience, even as it lays the cultural foundation of imperial society. Aeneas is, after all, fleeing a homeland laid low by invaders and embarking on a perilous sea voyage, before arriving as a stranger in a strange land. Though “battered beneath the violence of the High Ones,” the intrepid Aeneas perseveres through his “many suffer-ings” to found what is to become a unique, though in many ways derivative culture. The chronicle of a people violently displaced and subjected to all manner of brutality who nevertheless establish a coherent culture can easily be seen as

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having a certain appeal to the Caribbean writer. Of course, no one would confuse Ma Kilman and Philoctete with the lords of Alba, nor the markets of Castries with the ramparts of high Rome, though perhaps no one would have confused the village Aeneas founded with imperial Lavinium either. In any case, to find such a remarkable echo of West Indian experience in The Aeneid, a work whose very name is for some synonymous with European subjugation of non-European society, is rather astounding. To claim that Omeros, at a fundamental, almost spiritual level, shares an easy peace with the Virgilian and Homeric texts, that an ingrained empathy may be claimed to exist between Caribbean society and the ancients, is quite at odds with most criticism. Benfey asserts that Walcott “must have recognized from the outset that the parallels between Homer’s Greeks and Walcott’s Antilleans would, in the long haul, grow artificial and contrived” (92). If this is true, then one must conclude that the poem as a whole is artificial and contrived; after all, Omeros forces the reader to consider its problematic relationship to classical epic through to the end. No one would suggest that the discovery and articulation of certain similarities between the inhabitants of modern Castries and the inhabitants of ancient Mycenae or Rome is not surprising, nor that the principles underpinning ancient empire share a great deal with those governing life in the contemporary West Indies. The mindset upon which The Aeneid rests ultimately reduces the world outside the soon-to-be Holy Roman Empire to the level of creaturehood, and the work itself has been used throughout imperial history to justify the cultural decapitation to which colonizing powers subjected their colonial underlings. But the repulsion the work generates in this respect exists ceteris paribus with the attraction it generates as a successful and enduring document of social delineation that validates the cultural products and practices of a people who had been reduced to rootless exile by an act of extreme violence, and as such serves as a palmary example of the dichotomous push/pull influence of classical epic on a work like Omeros. Walcott engages classical epics not just because they belong to a tradition in which he is well versed, and which played a key role in the development of a Caribbean aesthetic, but also because in Homer, Virgil and Dante he finds a kinship of purpose and, perhaps, the emotional sincerity he himself must find if the omeric project is to be credible. What Walcott cannot share with Homer, Virgil, or Dante is the sense of manifest destiny informing their work—not just the unshakable, unquestioning faith in the sanctity of their subject matter, but also the fact that the cogency and definability of their culture was considered a fait accompli. Since Omeros attempts to render knowable the ongoing formation of Caribbean identity, an identity tied to its active, in embryo nature, to the fact that it is ongoing, the poem cannot offer a statement of argument in any meaningful sense of the term. Hamner, though, argues otherwise: “An announcement of the theme may be detected in the scene where the ghost of the poet’s father (Anchises admonishing Aeneas on Romans’ duty) charges his son to give expression to unsung ancestors”

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(“Walcott’s Epical Omeros” 6). This passage, found in the final two sections of book one, certainly deals with one of the principal concerns of the poems, but it is rather difficult to conceive of it as statement of argument, or theme, in any conventional sense. Anchises’s admonishment of Aeneas is not generally considered Virgil’s statement of argument, and even if the act of giving expression to unsung ancestors is to be considered the theme of Omeros, the fact that it is not announced until chapter XIII precludes it from operating as anything even remotely akin to classical statement of argument, in either a structural or ideological sense. Omeros is a poem of discovery more so than documentation, and its ideological center, the fulcrum upon which its thematic operation pivots, is to be conceived of as a vacuum. In a sense, the theme of Omeros is the search for theme. Thus, the choruslike summaries and explanations with which The Odyssey and The Aeneid begin, and the sociological confidence they represent, are utterly unthinkable in the context of Walcott’s enterprise. The absence of a statement of argument in the poem represents a fundamental departure from the thematic methodology of the ancients: Walcott chooses not to modify traditional epic technique but to adopt a poetic philosophy diametrically opposed to it. Omeros commits to a strategy that acknowledges the abiding self-doubt of the Caribbean and engages the existential contingency with which any potential outcome of this strategy must be tempered. The poem does not attempt to develop the fable of a preordained but submerged societal center through which cultural confidence may be gained and West Indian fame assured. This precludes any intimation of a teleological structure in the opening. This conclusion is not meant to suggest that The Iliad, The Odyssey, or The Aeneid present entirely unambiguous endings, nor that they move inexorably through the steps of a predictable development of theme. Rather, the claim is that these texts are informed by a sense of stability and certainty which only the clear and present centrality of their respective societies can provide, so that despite the oscillations through which Homer and Virgil move, or the structural circularity of their texts, there exists what Frye has called “a constant balance and order running through the whole” (319). Such consistency cannot exist in the context of a contemporary Caribbean text. The case is somewhat different as we come to consider the final two elements of the traditional epic opening, the interlocking techniques of invocation of the muse and epic question. Since the outcome of ancient epic was textually a priori, the epic question was rather straightforward. Readers knew that Troy had fallen, Rome had risen, the devil’s revolt had failed, and so on. What remained to be asked was what god had caused these things to happen and why: What god drove them to fight with such a fury? (The Iliad 1.9) Tell me the reason, Muse: what was the wound

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to her divinity, so hurting her that she, the queen of gods, compelled a man remarkable for goodness to endure so many crises, meet so many trials? Can such resentment hold the minds of gods? (The Aeneid 1. 13–17) Unlike the deeds of Achilles or Aeneas, to which mortals might bear witness, the motives of the gods could only be gleaned with the help of a supernatural entity like a muse. But for Walcott, the point of the enterprise is not so much to answer questions as to discover what the questions might be, or perhaps more accurately stated, to investigate the procedure by which the questions may be developed. This in turn casts a rather demanding role for the muse, and makes the invocation problematic to say the least: O open this day with the conch’s moan, Omeros as you did in my boyhood when I was a noun gently exhaled from the palate of the sunrise. (II, ii) This is an unusual, not to mention cryptic, rendition of the invocation, and its structural and figurative importance to the poem as a whole is highly speculative. Whether or not Omeros even employs an epic question is also conjectural. Though no commentators have identified an epic question in the poem, I would argue that it appears, exactly as it does in classical epic, immediately following the invocation: A lizard on a sea-wall darted its question at the waking sea. Having a lizard ask the epic question is so peculiar a modification of the technique that without the cue provided by placement, readers would probably not recognize these lines as the epic question at all. But it could be argued that without the exclamative “O” with which the previous tercet opens, readers would not identify these lines as the invocation—and most of the poem’s commentators do. Nevertheless, there are compelling ideological considerations to support the claim that tercets fourteen and fifteen of this section comprise the invocation and epic question respectively. In examining these techniques, the complexity of Walcott’s task becomes apparent, as does the sophistication of the figurative strategy he must enact to compass successfully this task. The ancients could assume a certain implicit comprehensibility of the muse which Walcott cannot. The muse, and all the insight and tools of disclosure at her disposal, was complicit with the ancient epicist and merely needed to be

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petitioned to be of use. This presupposes the intelligibility of the muse, that she would frame her response in terminology easily transcribed by the poet. And such an exchange, apparently, is exactly what would transpire. The language used by the poets and the gods seems to have been interchangeable, if not identical, and neither had any difficulty contextualizing the subject matter, weighty though it was. The willingness of the muse to assist in the epic endeavor need not be questioned, and was not. Indeed, rendering the acts and motives of the gods knowable was their single raison d’être, and they could be relied upon to give the correct answer, “because they are muses” (Plato, Republic VIII, 547a). Thus, confident of the validity of his language and certain of the muse’s support, the narrator of The Aeneid need only say “Tell me.” And this may be thought an ornate and fanciful appeal to the muse: the narrator of The Iliad says simply “Sing.” Walcott is afforded no such luxurious confidence. No unshakable certainty in the validity of his language or method of inquiry underwrites his project. In fact, the search for a poetic idiom capable of accounting for the artistic life of the West Indies is an integral component of that project. So too is the process of ferreting out the proper questions which the poet must ask of the culture. Thus, the opening of Omeros must engage a vexing level of discourse unknown to the ancients. Walcott must coax the muse into providing the poem with a language and methodology capable of discovering and empathetically articulating the definitive elements of Caribbean society, should such elements be found to exist, while reconciling these elements with the realization that the assumption that axiomatic historical moments or societal first principles may be thought to exist is itself somewhat at odds with the imbroglio nature of a culture spun around uncertainty and hesitance. Thus, the act of searching for such a center must itself assume a position of primacy in any account of Caribbean culture. The problem for Walcott is that in order to create a uniquely Caribbean narrative, a uniquely Caribbean discourse must first be created, or revealed. Omeros cannot proceed on the basis of an unquestionably Caribbean nomenclature, since none exists. It is for this that the narrator turns to Omeros—not to tell a story, but to provide a conduit through which such a story might be told. Though such a strategy undermines certain key assumptions of classical epic, assumptions which neither Homer nor Virgil would have thought to question, Walcott’s invocation remains spiritually linked to classical invocations of the muse; he merely calls out for a different form of inspiration. Nevertheless, petitioning the muse to provide a language is a tactic so different from any previous invocation that the pres ence of the traditional expostulation “O” becomes all the more important to its recognition. That Walcott should introduce an apparently superfluous thirteenth syllable into so important a line in the form of the very most hackneyed of poetic artifices seems at first a bizarre act of poetic self-mutilation. But this single syllable shows up the brilliance of the semiotic matrix of Omeros, the manner in which it manipulates its relationship with its subject, with the literary canon and with the language it employs.

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Readers are to become aware in the ensuing section that “O was the conch shell’s invocation.” The pun is clear enough, but the line also reveals how basal an interrogation of West Indian culture Omeros is to be. “O” has been transformed from the most exhausted aphorism in the poetic lexicon into an onomatopoeic signifier pointing to the fundamental nature of Walcott’s poetic task. The blast of a conch sounds the introduction of the invocation, an invocation of “the conch’s moan,” which asserts the primacy of a naturalistic, immediate, and to some extent Adamic language in the omeric project. This harkens back to a moment of childhood immediacy when the poet/narrator “was a noun,” and in turn clarifies the operation of a poem seeking questions, not answers. The lizard apparently knows these questions, but expresses them in a language that, at this point in the poem, no one understands. It seems as if only by the discovery of a more intuitive mode of interaction with the West Indian landscape can the narrator effect any sort of reconciliation between the islands and their perpetually exiled inhabitants. The invocation of the muse represents something of a semantic implosion into which Walcott has crushed some of the most problematic aspects of his poetic method, and he thus feels compelled to provide, probably wisely, an extended explication of the concerns raised by the invocation throughout the six tercets which follow, as he details the service Omeros provides by sounding the conch: Only in you, across centuries of the sea’s parchment atlas, can I catch the noise of the surf lines wandering like the shambling fleece of the lighthouse’s flock, that Cyclops whose blind eye shut from the sunlight. Then the canoes were galleys over which a frigate sawed its scythed wings slowly. In you the seeds of grey almonds guessed a tree’s shape, and the grape leaves rusted like serrated islands[.] (II, ii) This explanation can hardly be said to render the implications of Walcott’s recondite figurative method transparent. Indeed, it is scarcely less abstruse than the invocation itself. Still, it is clear that an unknown, perhaps unknowable elemental dialogue is operating in St. Lucia, and that the narrator may only participate in this dialogue with the help of the elemental force that is Omeros. The apparently articulate exchange of nature is readable only through the intermediary, interpretative presence of the first epic poet. That Walcott chooses to delineate the translational function of Omeros with reference to the sound of the surf is particularly telling since, as Pound has noted, onomatopoeic renditions of the noise of the sea form a central component of Homeric poetry (250). Since Homer had developed a lexical framework capable of engaging, of reading as it were, “the sea’s parchment atlas,” through him the poet/narrator might find intercession between himself and the naturalistic “text” he must engage. The

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constituting nomenclature of classical epic, its self-assured reliance on the validity of its own language, must be braided into the languages of imperialism and the animist discourse of nature to produce a poetic idiom free from the deflating gyves of colonial history: And O was the conch-shell’s invocation, Mer was both mother and sea in our Antillean patois, OS, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes[.] The term Omeros is established as a polyvalent presence in the poem, the very sound of which pulls the reader off into a baffling array of considerations. “O” ties poetic artifice to the Adamic language of the islands. “Mer,” denotatively dual in the language of St. Lucia’s original European colonizers, and in the hybrid St. Lucian version of that language, invokes both the most important natural force of the Caribbean, “the sea which feed us,” and the basic element of human history, which has also fed us. “[O]s” draws in the specters of classical European heritage as Latin for “bone” and the onomatopoeic sound of the sea in Greek. Ultimately, Walcott attempts to wind these strands so tightly together that each becomes indistinguishable within the totality of a uniquely Caribbean discourse. That is, Walcott’s poetic method must so thoroughly inculcate such a plethora of influences that any attempt to disentangle them, to consider a given aspect of the poem’s operation to be the function of a single cultural process or precursor, is seen as counterproductive, if not ludicrous. This artistic overdetermination, and the central role which the language of West Indian nature plays in it, is extended right down to the poem’s title. For the poet/narrator at least, “Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves” as much as the overlord of imperial literary heritage. The question of what is in a name becomes fabulously complicated. Omeros does not so much attempt to locate the multivariate psychology of the Caribbean within certain clearly distinguishable cultural strains, as to enshrine multivariance as the pivotal feature of Caribbean psychology. In so doing, it adopts a uniquely West Indian sensibility and depicts the atypical nature of the Caribbean people’s perspective on, and engagement of, their geographical and historical environment. This conclusion is completely at odds with Benfey’s assessment of the poem’s guiding principles: But make no mistake: he is singing a song of praise to the mettle and resilience of a tongue that has wandered so far from those shores where the King’s English is spoken. (92) I would argue that the poem is not a song of praise to the “mettle and resilience” of English, the King’s or otherwise, but to the mettle and resilience of those for whom that language came as part and parcel of the genocidal culture of slavery.

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Walcott is impressed not with the fact that English could be modulated to partially articulate a reality far different from that of England ‘s pleasant pastures, but with a people capable of enacting such a modulation. Further, this modulation was undertaken by subsuming and modifying a host of cultural, linguistic and naturalistic components, and, by the sheer force of communal will, of forcing various European languages (French, Spanish and Dutch as well as English) to accommodate a new semantic context which inculcated African and, to a much lesser extent, Amerindian sensibilities. In fact, it is the failure of English, its inability to engage fundamentally the West Indies, and the psychocognitive and cultural dysfunctions this failure has engendered, which in many ways controls the operation of the poem. Obviously, Omeros itself, a compelling work of art, testifies to the poetic utility of Walcott’s particular brand of the English language; but within the figurative logic of the poem, English seems no more important than any other cultural influence. The philosophical, figurative and thematic chassis of the poem has now been shaped. In the first two chapters of Omeros the reader has been led by three different narrators through four different time periods. The narrative commences with Philoctete’s tale, an episode which readers are unable to locate within the diegetic timeline. The phantom narrator then controls the next four sections, the first of which is set immediately after the action Philoctete describes, the following three seemingly occurring in the same period as the bulk of the St. Lucian plot, or what may be called the diegetic present. The poet/narrator appears in the fourteenth tercet of the fifth section to invoke the muse, an event which may or may not take place in the diegetic present, before flashing back an unknown length of time to recount the moment he first heard the name Omeros. This constant modulation of narrative voice, and the Byzantine timeline it governs, has the same disorienting effect on the reader as do the poem’s constant metrical oscillations. Answers to even the most basic questions to be asked of a text—who tells the story and in what order do the events unfold—become so hopelessly convoluted as to render such analysis virtually pointless, except insofar as it gives an indication of the principle of uncertainty which controls every aspect of the poem’s operation. This strategy of misdirection transforms the bathetic contrivance “O”into a dynamic symbol of Antillean reality, and a tangible link to the intuitive discourse Walcott hopes to access. Walcott’s treatment of the title shows that even at the earliest stages of the poem, this process is producing increasingly elaborate thematic coils. The Janus-like pun linking the invocation of the muse to the phonology of “Omeros” makes the sound of the conch operate as both the first syllable of the Greek proper name and as the actual mechanism of the-invocation. The importance of this phonology is anticipated by the fact that Walcott comes to the term Omeros not by a formal, literary path but by a casual, oral one—“That hummed in the vase of a girls throat: ‘Omeros.’” Thus, a title which may be thought to inextricably bind the poem to the European canon operates in the poem itself as an aural perception:

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Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, and the washes that echoed from a cave-mouth when the tide has ebbed. The name stayed in my mouth (II, iii) The textual element to which Omeros refers is also rather uncertain, since at various points in the poem Philoctete, the enigmatic Seven Seas, the literary presence of Homer, and the ghost of the poet himself all seem to play the role of Omeros. The operation of the term Omeros is dependent upon an unshakable ambiguity in every sense. To claim that Omeros is simply the figure of an ancient poet would be an over-simplification almost as damaging as to claim that Omeros itself is an homage to the Kings English. The multiple frames of reference Omeros forces the reader to engage cause certainties to dissolve by wreaking havoc on the categories of interpretation and strategies of comprehension readers normally employ. This undermining of univocal approaches to the poem is not achieved simply by alternating between two poles of reference, such as embracing orthodox Eurocentric conceptions of history in one passage and rejecting them in the next, or extending the Homeric tradition in one tercet but confounding it in the next. Rather, every aspect of the figurative, ideological, and structural methodology of the poem is constructed to corrode such soothing orthodoxy. In developing a Caribbean discourse capable of deciphering the lizard’s question, Walcott forces each element of the work to function simultaneously as analog and reversal. The opening of Omeros is neither epic nor anti-epic, but both. Walcott’s invocation of the muse is neither Homeric nor Virgilian, nor completely divorced from Greek and Roman epic. Omeros simultaneously resembles and remakes classical epic technique, and uses these techniques to push the reader into a dizzying relationship with the text. Terada points out that “characters and events in Omeros both parallel and contradict their Homeric counterparts” (187) but draws this conclusion based on the understanding that “Walcott counters Homeric expectations by fluctuating between reversal and continuity” (186). It is certainly true that some passages seem to bear a closer resemblance to passages of The Iliad or The Odyssey than others. But ultimately, as we have seen in the case of certain key epic conventions, the omeric poetic strategy contains within itself both reversal and continuity: Omeros does not alternate between parallel and contradic-tion, but parallels and contradicts pari passu. This is as much as to say that the poem creates its own aesthetic space in which it exists as neither mimicry nor mockery. In this sense, Omeros stands as something of an operational model of what Edouard Glissant has called Walcott’s resistance to the “affirmation of the urgency of a revaluation of the conventions of analytical thought” (65). If Omeros may be thought to be even minutely successful in this respect, then the theoretical and political implications are profound. The poem clearly focuses attention on the categories of analytical thought, but if it has in any way managed to destabilize the

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supposedly steadfast categories according to which a good deal of postcolonial criticism operates, then any method of enquiry which is not based on practices developed in the text itself must be considered suspect. Doctrinaire approaches to the nature of language and communication, or the form of history, teeter precariously on the brink of meaninglessness since the theoretical substrata on which they rest has been partially eroded, and the conclusions which follow from such analysis thrown into doubt. This becomes particularly important in terms of the expectations the opening of the poem generates, or perhaps more accurately stated, in terms of whether Walcott has set himself a task which can in any way be successful. It becomes increasingly clear as Omeros progresses that insofar as there is a coherent command and control structure in the work, a set of authorial instructions which guide the far flung inquiries of the poem, then that set of instructions pertains to the attempt to access a discourse from which most of the St. Lucian characters and the poet/narrator have been barred, though they nonetheless sense its presence. This is made clear by three facts: that the epic question, the answer to which should commence the narrative proper, is asked by a lizard; that the secret of Philoctete’s cure is articulated by a “garrulous waterfall”; and that Ma Kilman unearths this secret by interpreting the dialogue of ants. In fact, much of the exchange value of the narrative is based on a depiction of a series of naturalistic codes, the metaphoric idiom these codes generate, and their effect on those who perceive the discourse but are unable to participate in it. This discourse, in the context of Omeros, seems a peculiarly West Indian phenomenon: England seemed to him merely the place of his birth. How odd to prefer, over its pastoral sites— reasonable leaves shading reasonable earth— these loud-mouthed forests on their illiterate heights, these springs speaking a dialect that cooled his mind more than pastures with castles! (X, iii) The naturalistic dialogue of the old world has long since fallen silent; unlike the loquacious St. Lucian countryside, the English landscape has nothing left to say. The problem for Walcott is that although he may be aware of this discourse, he has no way of decoding it—no way, presumably, of comprehending the lizard’s question, and thus no way of developing the questions the Caribbean master narrative must develop. Obviously, Omeros can never escape its own textuality to provide direct access to the objects of perception. The text can presumably do no more than signify, but this has never stopped Walcott from driving toward a signifying system more applicable to the Caribbean, one that can render the natural context of the islands readable. Much of the Sea Grapes collection presupposes such a

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shared code, and the last lines in the volume, the conclusion of “To Return to the Trees,” form one of Walcott’s most concise expressions of this approach: I can read only in fragments of broken bark, his heroes tempered by whirlwinds, who see with the word senex, with its two eyes, through the boles of this tree, beyond joy, beyond lyrical utterance, this obdurate almond going under the sand with this language, slowly, by sand grains, by centuries. These lines undeniably illustrate the importance for Walcott of the attempt to create a shared code rendering natural phenomena articulate, and a concomitant aesthetic space in which poetic expression and its referent may to some extent intermingle. This approach seems theoretically indefensible, but to adopt a rigid critical stance in response to such a practice is to miss the point of its operation: Walcott can never utterly put to rest his desire to write like the sun, or like the ocean, which “h[as] no memory of the wanderings of Gilgamesh/or whose sword severed whose head in The Iliad” (296). Sometimes, as in much of Sea Grapes, he even claims momentarily to achieve such transparency. More often, and more reasonably, he conveys its impossibility. (Terada 241–42 n.7) It seems that the poet is only to be judged reasonable insofar as he agrees with the theoretical disposition of the critic. It is perhaps worth wondering when society came to demand its poets be reasonable. More to the point, Terada’s commentary emphasizes the conundrum with which Walcott’s work confronts critics, and the tactics critics have had to employ to avoid this problem. The inference is that Walcott must constantly battle his misguided instinct to attempt to generate an intuitive poetic discourse capable of interrogating objective phenomena on their own terms, a poetic method capable of “reading” nature and of comprehensively articulating the knowledge so gained. Apparently, Walcott never completely masters these impulses. The ensuing lapses of judgment produce moments of intellectual naivety and ill-considered poetry which must simply be forgiven. But if this is the case then a great deal of Walcott’s poetry must be forgiven. In his earliest work, Walcott shows a propensity to attempt to detextualize his response to nature, and to adopt a poetic method whose effectiveness is tied to its

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insistence on the intermingling of human/subjective and natural/phenomenal discourse: you kneel before The sessile innovation of the thrush, the sibilant yew trees, By broken and flaked languages, near a drying river, You practice the pieties of your conquerors *** O for a voice, not A brood of tin throats on a wire branch, cavalier attitudes, Don Juan, Dung Guano, O for The swallow’s arrowing to honest expulsion (“Canto IV”) Though clearly apprentice pieces, “Canto IV” and the rest of Epitaph for the Young nevertheless hold the seeds of what would become a major thrust of the mature poet ‘s work. The notion that colonialism had provided a language ill equipped to engage the West Indian context, that the conquerors had alienated themselves and their underlings from the indigenous discourse, and that the legacy of this dislocation continues to haunt those who would attempt to depict accurately West Indian reality is central to the collection, as is the attempt, difficult though it is, to reestablish a connection with this context, to find a voice. The pursuit of a mode of expression capable of rendering the “invocation of the thrush” knowable is not just desirable, but essential if the Caribbean is ever to be unbowed “before a bitter god.” This ideology becomes ever more sophisticated in Walcott’s work as he evolves an idiom capable of more fully supporting it. In a great deal of Walcott’s later work, perception of the interchange of nature becomes the central preoccupation of the poetry: Squat on a damp rock round which white lilies stiffen, pricking their ears; count as the syllables drop like dew from primeval ferns; note how the earth drinks language as precious, depending upon the race. Then, on dank ground, using a twig for a pen, write Genesis and watch the Word begin. Elephants will mill at their water hole to trumpet a new style. Mongoose, arrested in rut, and saucer-eyed mandrills, drinking from the leaves, will nod as a dew-lapped lizard discourses on “Lives of the Black Poets,” gripping a branch for a lectern for better delivery. Already, up in that simian Academe,

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a chimp in bifocals, his lower lip a jut, tears misting the lenses, is turning your Oeuvres Complètes. (Midsummer LI) Once more, the establishment of an aesthetic space in which phenomenal and literary utterance commingle is seen to be a central aspect of Walcott’s poetic mandate and an indispensable act in the cultural homologation of the West Indies. Bitterly ironic and self-effacing, this passage is still completely dependent on the postulated intelligibility of “dew-lapped lizard discourses,” even as it alludes to the Gospel of St. John and follows a thematic template very similar to Blake’s “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence. This concept receives perhaps its most satisfying treatment in “Cul de Sac Valley,” as the difficulties of finding a language capable of fully engaging the Caribbean land-scape are explored through an extended carpentry metaphor. If the poet’s “craft is blest,” we are told, he might enact “the fragrant creole”2 of his community’s “native grain.” No easy feat under any circumstances, the task is impossible using the King’s English: like muttering shale, exhaling trees refresh memory with their smell: bois canot, bois campêche, hissing: What you wish from us will never be, your words is English, is a different tree. English, as passed down by Milton and Froude, is clearly not up to the task, but this is not to say that a workable idiom could not, in theory, be developed. The bois campêche are not, at the very least, denying the importance of the attempt to develop such an idiom. In fact, the poet’s shortcomings are hardly universal in the society. As the poem goes on to point out, some seem to have mastered the requisite language, though they are unable to transcribe it. Perhaps they are simply unconcerned with such arcane matters: In the rivulet’s gravel light gutturals begin, in the valley, a mongrel, a black vowel barking, sends up fading ovals; by a red bridge, menders with shovels scrape bubbling pitch,

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every grating squeak reaching this height a tongue they speak in, but cannot write. So even if this discourse cannot be reasoned into existence, and though the poet may never have more than partial access to it, evidence of its existence seems a common thing in St. Lucia, at least as St. Lucia exists in Walcott’s poetry. The importance of the knowledge to which the discourse might make the poet privy can scarcely be overstated. Walcott concludes “The Sea Is History,” in The Star Apple Kingdom, with an epic parade of August creatures, and with the following insight: and then in the dark ears of ferns and in the salt chuckle of rocks with their sea pools, there was the sound like a rumor without any echo of History, really beginning. The notion that poetic engagement of the animist discourse spells the destruction of Eurocentric conceptions of history, and thus constitutes a moment of genesis, of Adamic possibility, is a common theme in Walcott’s mature work, as succinctly stated in Another Life. “And now we were the first guests of the earth / and everything stood still for us to name” (IV). The difficulty of setting this process in motion is always stressed, as, I would argue, is the importance of attempting to conceive of the form such a process might take. Often, the speaker in these poems claims, perhaps unreasonably, to have succeeded in this; so, it may be concluded that Walcott creates characters who, in the context of their existence as literary constructs, are able to do what the poet himself cannot: experience moments of what might be termed diegetic transcendence. And as often as not, the characters are led to this transcendence by a certain vague ahimsa, and by sound. In Omeros, the consummate expression of these strategies of naming/languagebuilding, it is not the articulation of some particular truth which is required of the poet, but rather the identification of a question, or the ability to discern a semantic void in which an animist discourse seems able to operate. In figurative terms, it is enough, at first, to recognize that the lizard is asking a question; one need not necessarily understand it, nor be able to provide an answer. Apparently unstructured perceptions, the sounds of nature, are recognized as articulate, though indecipherable, and this in itself is an epiphany. Such a sensibility may be interpreted as an extension, albeit rather surrealistic, of the fundamental principles of nation language, at least as that term has been applied in the postcolonial West Indies:

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The poetry, the culture itself, exists not in a dictionary but in the tradition of the spoken word. It is based as much on sound as it is on song. That is to say, the noise that it makes is part of the meaning, and if you ignore the noise (or what you would think of as noise, shall I say) then you lose part of the meaning. (Brathwaite, History of the Voice 17) In its inferential treatment of nation language, Omeros tends not to frame the subject in terms of the standard oral culture/written culture debate, but sees both these as components of an inclusive Caribbean discourse. Brathwaite’s claim that sound and sense commingle in West Indian culture may be considered as supporting this approach, and brings us full circle back to the importance of the metrical construc-tion of Omeros. Brathwaite wonders: “How do you get a rhythm which approximates the natural experience, the environmental experience?” (History of the Voice 10). Walcott is not necessarily attempting to emulate natural experience, though in portions of Omeros he does just this, but is struggling to develop and implement a verse form capable of accurately and empathetically engaging the natural surroundings, and to thus bring his poetic voice into alignment with the voice of St. Lucia, a voice which Walcott conceives of as a blend of human and natural agency. Caribbean society is defined in part by the way its development has been guided by the animist discourse, which the Caribbean peoples have intuitively known to exist but into which they never could gain complete entry. Ultimately, of course, any articulation of this inter-play must be textualized. Walcott cannot devise a poetic method which literally transcribes natural agency, which provides a line by line translation of the animist discourse or which operates as a completely transparent window on the St. Lucian landscape: the West Indian poet is faced with a language he hears but cannot write because there are no symbols for such a language and because the closer he brings hand and word to the precise inflections of the inner language and to the subtlest accu-racies of his ear the more chaotic his symbols will appear on the page. (“Muse” 13) But he can attempt to employ a strategy which is well suited to examination of the role this animist code has played, and continues to play in the development of West Indian consciousness and culture, and the manner in which it destabilizes theoretical boundaries between perception and cognition by introducing an intuitive component. Omeros partially deconstructs itself by this insistence on process as opposed to progress. Since Walcott finds no unshakable defining principles to underwrite West Indian culture, the act of considering the lack of definiens is itself culturally constituting.

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Beyond this, however, Walcott is aided in his attempt to enshrine the notion of lacking as a fundamental tenet of Antillean social development, and to develop an idiom capable of articulating this lacking, by the fact that the Caribbean landscape has been, and to some extent continues to be, uninscribed. Though the almost lost Amerindian languages may have been more easily able to accommodate the Caribbean geographical context, European, or for that matter African languages were not. In the centuries following colonization, little changed. Brathwaite notes that the English educational models employed in the English speaking West Indies, though supposedly modified to suit the surroundings, were utterly ineffectual, leaving West Indians “without the syllabic intelligence to describe a hurricane” (History of the Voice 8), but nonetheless convinced that “the hurricane does not roar in pentameters” (History of the Voice 10). There exists a fundamental discontinuity between perception and the language used to interpolate that perception, and it is in this space that Walcott attempts to write Omeros, roaring hurricanes and all: In the grey vertical forest of the hurricane season, when the dirty sea returns the wreaths of the dead, all the village could do was listen to the gods in session, playing any instrument that came into their craniums, the harp-sighing ripple of a hither-and-zithering sea, the knucklebone pebbles, the abrupt Shango drums made Neptune rock in the caves. Fête start! Erzulie rattling her ra-ra; Ogun, the blacksmith, feeling No Pain; Damballa winding like a zandoli lizard (IX, iii) In this passage, the conclusion of Walcott’s treatment of the hurricane, the storm is focalized through a variously African, Greek and Latin mythological iconography, depicting the visible effects of the hurricane as repercussions of godly revelry. Once again the people of Castries are affected by, and aware of, a dialogue in which they apparently cannot take part. The passage cited follows several sections in which the sound of the rainy season is interpreted by the characters as largely erratic and unfathomable. Achille, for instance, hears “the crash/of thousands of iron nails poured in a basin/of rain on his tin roof” (IX, i). However, these sections also hint at an opportunity to gain access into the elemental discourse, and even the ability to intuit its significance. Maud’s complaint that she misses the seasons provokes an immediate response: “Some breeze reported the insult, since the monsoons/anger coarsened the rain” (IX, i). This response guides her to a new understanding of her surroundings: “the hills were like a Chinese scroll/and she saw subtlety where none was before.” Maud has been led to this insight, the requisite first step towards decoding her environment, by the environment itself. The St. Lucian landscape has been

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textualized, albeit in a Chinese script which she is unable to read, but which, given the proper training, she is able to discern as readable. St. Lucia, for Maude, is no longer impenetrable monotony. Achille, who has had more experience deciphering the script, is, in a practical and perhaps life saving manner, able to render the naturalistic discourse at least partially transparent: The map of heaven was breaking up in nations, and a soggy nimbus haloed the loaded moon when Achille saw the mare’s tails, prognostications of a grumbling sky that underlined each omen— from the widowed veils of the indigo rainspouts to candles of egrets screwed on a swaying branch, then the match of lightning; in irascible knots freckling the hot glass of Coleman lanterns termites singed their glazed wings and fell away as ants. Then, next day, the stillness. And in it, the bitterns and the gulls circling inland. Then, in the distance, the strange yellow light. He went to buy kerosene from Ma Kilman’s crowded shop. (IX, i) “The monsoons” (IX, i) skies are as readable as a map, and even though Achille’s knowledge of this map is fragmentary, he is able to discern impending danger and modify his activities accordingly. Achille is not able to translate the “grumbling sky,” but he is aware of what these “omens” portend, as is much of the rest of the population, evidenced by the fact that Ma Kilman’s shop is crowded. Such elemental literacy, combined with the help Omeros could provide through his ability to read the “the sea’s parchment atlas,” could go a long way toward deciphering the lizard’s question. This treatment of the hurricane also shows how far Walcott wanders from classical sensibility. Consider the storm which Juno compels Aeolus to unleash on Aeneas: The hurricane is howling from the north; it hammers full against his sails. The seas are heaved to heaven. The oars are cracked; the prow sheers off; the waves attack broadside; against his hull the swell now shatters in a heap, mountainous, steep. (The Aeneid 1.144–149) Whereas Achille and his companions must attempt to intuit the code of nature, Aeneas, under attack, is under no such constraints. While the storm represents a potentially lethal threat to Achille only in passing, Aeneas knows he is the focus

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of the storm. Although there way be little comfort in the certainty that the forces of nature are ranged against him, it is a certainty nonetheless. Such certainty is unknown to Achille, whose ability to interrogate the agency of nature seems to exist part way between understanding and ignorance, reason and intuition, code and inference. For Virgil, thanks to the muse, the gods are a known quantity, with recognized personalities and agendas, who control the weather using a knowable language: So Neptune speaks and, quicker than his tongue, brings quiet to the swollen waters, sets the gathered clouds to flight, calls back the sun[.] (The Aeneid 1.200–202) Neptune is far more agreeable in Walcott’s version, as the drum beat of an African god makes him “rock in the caves.” Indeed, this intercultural party, in addition to mimicking the polyvalent nature of Caribbean culture, and of Omeros, signifies the difference between gods and humans: For the gods aren’t men, they get on well together, holding a hurricane-party in their cloud-house and what brings the gods close is the thunderous weather, where Ogun can fire one with his partner Zeus. (IX, iii) Just why they are celebrating, or what exactly Ogun and Zeus are toasting, remains a mystery. Moreover, the gods are operating in the poem as little more than iconographic shells, all but void of significance. The fact that Ogun, in Yoruba mythology, is the creator/destroyer, god of the forge, dogs and roads, among other things, seems completely irrelevant. He, like Zeus and Neptune, exist merely as emblems of lost beliefs, and certainties, which continue to have an impact on the life of St. Lucia. It could be claimed that at this point in the poem they exist as empty names, signifiers without significance, just as Brathwaite conceives the uniquely Caribbean storm to be significance without a signifier. Walcott opens this section by calling the storm a cyclone, a term usually associated with the pacific, perhaps enforcing the notion that English is a forced fit with the Caribbean. More interesting is Mandelbaum’s use of the word hurricane in his translation of The Aeneid. The Caribbean, it would seem, has rewritten the ancient text, or at least the contemporary conception of it, just as this ancient text is being used to reconfigure our understanding of the Caribbean. Literary heritage truly is, as Walcott insists, a dialogue. Walcott’s examination of the discontinuity between perception and language in the West Indies, his belief that an intuitive discourse operates in this space, and his attempt to develop a poetic idiom which renders this discourse at least partially transparent, conspire to expose the theoretical frailty of conventional

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concepts of history and originality. The curious position which Omeros occupies with reference to its epic primogenitors, particularly in its insistence on process rather than telos, embodies Walcott’s belief that the poetry of the Caribbean which has issued from an attempt to produce a uniquely Caribbean idiom subsumes both nature and history in an inferential manner: Poetry, which is perfections sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statues brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal; it conjugates both tenses simultaneously: the past and the present, if the past is the sculpture and the present the beads of rain or dew on the forehead. There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias…. The dialects of my archipelago seem as fresh to me as those raindrops on the statues forehead, not the sweat made from the classic exertion of frowning marble, but the condensations of a refreshing element, rain and salt. (The Antilles 9–10) This archaeological aspect of poetry, which uncovers the language’s “natural and marmoreal” axes as it commingles past and present, produces “its own vocabulary” which renders “the diction of institutions” (10) irrelevant, particularly in a Caribbean that constantly points up the gaping absences in institutional diction and draws attention to the importance of the elemental dialect of the islands. “[T]he awe of the numinous” with which the Caribbean confronts its beholders is that of phenomena without associated signifiers. The notion that these absences provide tremendous opportunities, and concomitant difficulties, is of paramount importance to Walcott’s treatment of the nekuia, or descent passages, though any commentary on the re/figurative strategy applied to this epic technique must be tempered by the realization that several distinct episodes of Omeros could be viewed as visits to the underworld: In lieu of the obligatory visit to the underworld, Walcott has sunstruck Achille journey back in time to tribal Africa; and in his role as narrator he follows the living statue of Homer down Dantean Malebolge into St. Lucia’s Mt. Soufriere to envision the damned speculators, politicians, entrepreneurs, back-biting poets and traitors who betrayed their islands and their race. (Hamner, “Walcott’s Epical Omeros” 6) Note that Hamner considers the descent-like passages in the poem as replacing, rather than refiguring, the classical nekuia. Livingstone refers to the African chapters as “a long visionary section which is at the heart of the poem” (134),

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thus framing the passage in terms of a dream-quest, while Terada sees the sections as “rewriting the back to Africa theme” (27). Only Hamner explicitly positions the descent-like passages of the poem with reference to classical epic, which in itself gives some indication of the subtlety of the re/figurative strategy they employ. It is no surprise that Walcott implements this technique with some deal of artistic subterfuge since his implementation of epic machinery has, to this point in the poem, been equally esoteric. Still, it seems clear that in returning Achille to tribal Africa, and having him interview his ancestor, figured as his father, the poem does, at a fundamental level, allude to the method of classical decent. And since Achille undertakes his journey without a guide, while the narrative “I” is led into Malebolge by the vivified statue of an ancient poet, it seems reasonable to conclude that the African sections of Omeros most closely relate to the Homeric/Virgilian nekuia, while the Malebolge sections reference Inferno. The African passage diverges considerably from its classical precursors, sharing none of the ornamentation and ceremony which characterized the Homeric and Virgilian nekuia. But the pattern of divergence is telling of just how comprehensively Omeros recodes its own literary heritage. Homer provides all manner of textual preparation for Odysseus’s search for Tiresias, from 10.490 when Circe introduces the subject, to 11.35 when Odysseus completes the sacrificial pit. Achille simply falls asleep. Odysseus knows whom to look for in the land of the dead, and even what this person might be expected to reveal, though Tiresias obviously proves less than forth-coming. Achille finds himself in a realm for which he is completely unprepared, having been told next to nothing. God’s rather tongue in cheek interjection lets Achille know that he is “home,” and that he has been led there by a divine messenger in the form of the swift, but Achille must depend on his own intuition and powers of perception to make sense of the situation—which he quickly does, identifying Afolabe as his father “by that walk.” It is an intuitive acceptance of a shared animist discourse which allows them to communicate: Time stood between them. The only interpreter of their lips joined babble, the river with the foam, and the chuckles of water under the sticks of the pier. (XXV, iii) The notion of babble is used repeatedly throughout Omeros to describe indecipherable sound recognized as a language, as for instance when Ma Kilman describes Seven Seas’s speech as “old African babble” (III, ii). In the passage cited above, the nature of the pun is made clear, since the river is doing more than creating unstructured sounds, or babbling, but has in fact locked Achille’s language to Afolabe’s, allowing the two to communicate in “joined babble,” despite the fact that Achille was initially rendered inarticulate by his perceptions of the African landscape:

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His heart and his bare head were bursting as he tried to remember the name of the river-god and the tree-god in which he steered, whose hollow body carried him to the settlement ahead. (XXV, ii) Achille, back in his ancestral homeland, is placed in the same position his ancestors had been in the New World—without the signifiers needed to compass their environment. But a common subtext exists between father and son. Achille does recognize the canoe as a gods body, even as he is unable to remember the god’s name.3 Thus, Achille exists in a world stripped of signifiers, but whose significance he is able to partially intuit. Terada disagrees: When Achille meets Afolabe, “Time st[ands] between them. The only interpreter” (136). On the one hand, this deus ex machina of time allows Achille to understand Afolabe directly. Walcott stresses the immediacy of their exchange by rendering it in dramatic form. Yet “Time st[ands] between them” in another sense as well, obstructing the communication it enables. What they understand most clearly is that they cannot understand each other, because Achille’s language shows no connection to its referents. (28) It is certainly true that Achille’s language is incapable of accurately engaging his African surroundings, and that Afolabe quickly becomes aware of this. But it is also true that Achille clearly communicates this to be the enduring legacy of the cultural Babbitry expected of the slave, or what he “had to believe,” that Afolabe recognizes this as a profound indignity, and that in the end both recognize it as a debilitating lacking. They seem to understand each other quite well, and not necessarily because “time st[ands] between them.” Walcott’s punctuation of these lines is quite unusual, making it rather difficult to say just what is facilitating this immediate exchange. In considering time to be “the only translator,” as Terada does, one must read right through the full stop, and consider the following three dependent clauses to be three paralleled objects of the previous sentence. But one could just as easily acknowledge the full stop, and consider “the river with the foam” to be an apostative modifying “the only interpreter.” This would mean that the river itself is the facilitator of the exchange. The matter is only clarified a little by the claim, later in this same section, that “time translates.” If however, one reads with Terada, then it must be noted that time does more than translate the words of Afolabe, but also renders the river and the “chuckles of water under the sticks of the pier” comprehensible. In this case, the acquisition of appropriate nomenclature should pose even less of

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a problem for Achille, and his exchange with Afolabe can only be considered as total as any conceivable communication could be: His father said: “Afo-la-be,” touching his own heart. “In the place you come from what do they call you?” Time translates. Tapping his chest, the son answers: “Achille.” The tribe rustles, “Achille.” Then, like the cedars at sunrise, the mutterings settle. AFOLABE Achille. What does the name mean? I have forgotten the one that I gave you. But it was, it seems, many years ago. What does it mean? ACHILLE Well, I too have forgotten Everything was forgotten. You also. I do not know. The deaf sea has changed around every name that you gave us; trees, men, we yearn for a sound that is missing. AFOLABE A name means something. The qualities desired in a son, and even a girl-child; so even the shadows who called you expected one virtue, since every name is a blessing. Terada sees this as a debate over the arbitrary nature of language, claiming that Afolabe “does not distinguish names from their referents” (30) while Achille “accepts the modern assumption that we should not look for reason in the particular forms of language” (29); “The reader…wants to know who is right” (30). The question should perhaps be whether or not Achille himself considers his own understanding of language to be “right,” should we accept Terada’s interpretation of what this under-standing is. There is no doubt that Achille recognizes the gap between his perceptions of the landscape and his ability to articulate them. There is also no doubt that Achille recognizes this discontinuity, or lacking, to be a liability, or he would not “yearn for a sound that is missing.” This missing but not lost sound would render the naturalistic discourse knowable, and Afolabe is

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apparently in a position to restore it, and in so doing to provide some measure of access to the dialogue of nature. Once more we are confronted with Walcott’s insistence on process rather than telos. Achille’s descent has not led to answers but to the identification of questions. He has not recovered the sound that is missing, but has articulated the fact that something is in fact missing. Figuratively, this functions in exactly the same manner as the realization that the sounds of nature are coherent though indecipherable. Unlike Odysseus, who set off to ask a specific question of Tiresias, Achille has received specific questions from Afolabe: Unless the sound means nothing. Then you would be nothing. Did they think you were nothing in that other kingdom? ACHILLE I do not know what the name means. It means something, maybe. What’s the difference? In the world I come from we accept the sounds we were given. Men, trees, water. AFOLABE And therefore, Achille, if I pointed and I said, There is the name of that man, that tree, and this father, would every sound be a shadow that crossed your ear, without the shape of a man or a tree? What would it be? (And just as branches sway at dusk from their fear of amnesia, of oblivion, the tribe began to grieve.) In something of a reversal of classical epic practice, the ghost awaiting the intrepid Achille offers no answers, instead peppering him with questions, and in so doing forcing him to enunciate the depth of his learning and to frame the nature of the lacking he perceives not just in his own life but in his culture. Terada’s suggestion that the debate over Achille’s name “dramatizes the arbitrariness of language,” and, following Kimberly Bentson, that “descendants of slaves may want to un[name] the immediate past” and to “stage the newly liberated self by their own acts of naming” (29), only acknowledges one side of the passage. Achille’s language may be arbitrary, but we are led to believe, not just in this section but throughout the entire poem, that this is a crushing problem. Achille’s name “originates from a different cultural tradition than his body” (Terada 29) to be sure. But more importantly, his name bears no apparent connection to that body, just as all the other signs he employs bear no connection to his natural or societal surroundings. Walcott indicts the name Achille, doubly removed as a patois rendition of Greek, and not names in general. When Achille asks, “What’s the difference?,” readers see that he is being led towards a new

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sensibility which accosts a colonial heritage that forces him “to accept” the notion of assigned, arbitrary sounds, and which replaces it with the active, ongoing examination and reappraisal of his context. Walcott suggests that the difference between European signifiers and the Antillean context means nothing. Signs of how vapid is the operation of Eurocentric discourse in St Lucia are omnipresent: “In God We Troust,” “BLUE GENES, ARTLANTIC CITY, NO GABBAGE DUMPED HERE.” Attempting to engage the animist discourse, on the other hand, is not so pointless. The act of postulating such a discourse, and of attempting to render it knowable, even if this project is never to be more that minutely successful, offers the possibility of a more intrinsic connection between sound and significance. In a sense, then, this too may be seen as an attempt on Walcott’s part to reinforce the strategy of indetermination/misdirection upon which the effectiveness of the poem rests. An intermediary position is staked out between the apparently Manichean entities of arbitrary and semantically fixed language in the form of a discourse which may be recognized as a discourse but which remains largely opaque. This also frees Walcott from the potentially crippling constraints raised by Terada, and many other postcolonial theorists, in the claim that the formerly colonized generate new nomenclature simply to sidestep having previously been named by the colonizer. This implies that the new nomenclature, and the discourse arising from it, will be framed with reference to an anterior, imperial discourse, and would thus still be controlled by the Empire. By depicting Achille’s language as flawed not simply because it is a remnant of imperialism but because it is ineffectual in engaging West Indian reality, Walcott to some extent evades the grasp of history, allowing Omeros to operate somewhere between rejection and acceptance of imperial nomenclature. The strategy of indetermination Omeros employs is dependent upon Walcott’s ability to generate correlations between the poem and its Eurocentric precedents that ultimately turn out to be misleading. But in his treatment of the nekuia, Walcott has reversed the reversal, so to speak. As noted, only Hamner explicitly considers the African chapters in terms of classical descent. Terada, in fact, conceives of the episode as a form of homecoming (27), though no evidence is introduced to support this claim. It is clear that Achille’s sunstruck journey to Africa bears little obvious similarity to the Homeric nekuia. But careful examination reveals that Omeros actually follows the pattern of classical descent quite closely in several crucial respects. In the African chapters, Walcott reverses the prescriptive strategy of Omeros by producing a passage which more closely follows classical poetic practice than it first appears, and he has done so in relation to the most problematic and mystifying episode of The Odyssey. Omeros bears its closest one to one correspondence to The Odyssey as it parallels a Homeric passage that many critics consider clear interpolation, and have for more than a century advocated removing (Williamowitz 144). The problem is that there seems no purpose in Odysseus’s descent. Simply stated, Circe instructs Odysseus to visit Tiresias (10.539–40), who will inform him of the measurable steps of his journey home and of the nature of his homecoming. Tiresias,

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however, says nothing at all about these steps, and next to nothing about the nostos, choosing instead to concentrate on Odysseus’s subsequent placation of Poseidon. It is left to Circe to inform Odysseus of the Wandering Rocks, Scylla and Charybdis, and the Cattle of the Sun (12.37ff), leaving off where Tiresias had begun. Achille experiences a similar lack of answers in his descent, learning little from Afolabe that he presumably could not have learned from Seven Seas, whose “words was Greek, or Old African babble.” Of course actual contact with the ghosts of history has a profound impact on Achille, as it does on Odysseus, and the nekuia passage is artistically effective in both texts, but it is the actual configuration of the exchange between Achille and Afolabe which points up the most significant connection between the omeric nekuia and that of The Odyssey. When not asking questions, Afolabe makes extensive use of the conditional: “Unless the sound means nothing. Then you would be nothing,” “if I pointed and I said,” “if you’re content with not knowing.” Tiresias’s speech is entirely conditional: But even so and still you might come back, after much suffering, if you can contain your own desire, and contain your companions’, at that time when you first put in your well-made vessel at the island of Thrinakia, escaping the sea’s blue water, and there discover pasturing the cattle and fat sheep of Helios, who sees all things, and listens to all things. Then, if you keep your mind on homecoming, and leave these [unharmed, you might all make your way to Ithaka, after much suffering; but if you do harm them, then I testify to the destruction of your ship and your companions, but if you yourself get clear, you will come home in bad case [.] (11.104–14) Despite the fact that Afolabe speaks at the beginning of Achille’s underworld visit, while Tiresias speaks at the end of Odysseus’s, the tenor of both exchanges is markedly similar. It should also be noted that the omeric nekuia also ends with a prophecy of a sort: “Now he heard the griot muttering his prophetic song/of sorrow that would be the past” (XXVIII, i). But the fact that Achille’s descent follows its classical prototype more closely than it first appears does not mean that the inferences to be drawn from the relationship of Omeros to The Odyssey in this regard are not perplexing. Since in traveling to the underworld Achille has traveled back in time, any soothsaying the villagers attempt will concern “a future Achille already knew” (XXVI, i). More importantly however, the whole notion of prophecy seems utterly at odds with a text that embraces hesitance and uncertainty as societal first principles, and that stresses the importance of action rather than of end results. But Tiresias’s prophecy is renowned for its “peculiar

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uncertainty” (Page 49 n.10), even in a culture in which “conditional prediction is typical” (Ehnmark 75). Far from illustrating a sensibility diametrically opposed to that on which Omeros is based, Tiresias’s prophecy is characterized by a brand of the same “peculiar uncertainty” Walcott sees at the heart of St. Lucian culture. John Peradotto’s commentary on Tiresias is especially useful: the seer is less inclined to present a simple and absolute vision of future events than to illuminate what philosophers would later call certain necessary or probable causal relationships. He is less likely to say simply that B will occur, than to say “if A, then B.” What the prophet is represented as knowing is not so much the future as the fact that there is a measure of order and regularity in events… He does not see future events; he reads their seeds or signs. (67) This conception of Greek prophecy is astoundingly similar to the process of inference with which the St. Lucian characters of Omeros engage the naturalistic code of the islands, seeing in the landscape “signs” of probable outcomes. Indeed, insofar as the function of the ancient oracle is “to predict the consequences as a certain course of action” (Ehnmark 75), it can scarcely be thought of as prophecy at all in the conventional, modern sense of the word, operating more as insight than second sight. So too do Afolabe’s if/then propositions infer a certain set of outcomes dependent upon Achille’s ability to grasp the principles according to which tribal Africa explicitly inter-faces with its environment, the seeds of which are seen in St. Lucian society, and on his ability to conceptualize the importance of the intuitive interpretation of the animist dialogue, limited though this interpretation may finally prove to be. So although the griot’s song is less than prophetic from Achille’s point of view, Afolabe’s speech does indeed refer to possible events in Achille’s future. If Achille remains “content with not knowing,” then his life will continue to be governed by a less than adequate imperial discourse. But, we may infer, if Achille comes to consider Afolabe’s “names” worth knowing, which we have seen to be the case, then he might potentially free himself from the handicaps of a disconnected language. The griot’s song with which the prophetic sections of Omeros end operates in a manner more akin to biblical prophecy, unconditionally “forecasting” what is to become of Achille’s ancestors, proceeding much as Circe does at the end of The Odyssey’s prophetic sections. The dual prophecies of Afolabe and the griot, neither of which give but the scantiest, most cryptic indication of what is to become of Achille, function well in the overall figurative strategy of Omeros not simply because readers are left unsure of how the effort to generate a new discourse will unfold, but also because Homeric prophecy, though initially appearing incongruous with the project of Caribbean self-discovery, is shown to be an ideal vehicle to articulate

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Walcott’ ‘s quixotic understanding of the substance of history, which finds expression in Omeros in the phrase “prediction and memory.” The intertextual web Omeros weaves with reference to classical epic is intertwined with the intratextual links the poem develops between tribal Africa and contemporary St. Lucia to produce a notion of prophecy which seems to consider past and future as interchangeable. Achille informs Afolabe that it was “prediction and memory, /to bear myself back.” Perhaps this is meant as a forecast of what knowledge the West Indies might find to be lacking in itself, and a recollection of where such knowledge might be, or have been found. It might also be an indication of the ease with which the animist discourse facilitates communication across the centuries: He could hear the same echoes made by their stone axes in the heights over the tied sticks of the settlement, and the echoes were prediction and memory, the crossing X’s of the sidewise strokes[.] (XXVII, i) Once more, auditory imagery lies at the heart of Walcott’s explication of interrelatedness, though in this instance sound facilitates an exchange not with the landscape but with the past. The poetic idiom which Omeros attempts to develop would, it seems, render history as transparent as nature, and confound the distinction between past and present. The nature of Tiresias’s prophecy helps Walcott reinforce this confabulation. Tiresias, in what must be considered the most mystifying act of The Odyssey, forecasts an event which does not come to pass, at least not in the text—Odysseus’s inland voyage to a people ignorant of the sea. Peradotto notes that Tiresia’s prophecy “is both review and preview from the still, timeless perspective of death” (Peradotto 68), the Homeric equivalent of “prediction and memory.” But in the most Byzantine connection between Omeros and The Odyssey, Achille’s descent actually seems to fulfill Tiresias’s prophecy, since in visiting tribal Africa he is encountering people “who know nothing / of the sea, and who eat food that is not mixed with salt” (The Odyssey 11.122–23). Recalling Achille’s complaint regarding the “tasteless to him river-fish,” we seem left with a bizarre enactment of prediction and memory. The African chapters do not, in this respect, parallel the Homeric nekuia but complete the key prediction made therein. The West Indian sensibility upon which Omeros rests apparently allows Walcott to fluidly commingle European literary history and African oral history, which in turn allows him to fully exploit the uncertainty inherent in the Homeric nekuia. This uncertainty is in itself useful to the omeric project, but the ultimate appeal of the nekuia for Walcott may lie in the fact that its querulous nature, its operation as an instance of narrative aporia, can be interpreted as resulting from “a breakdown in an attempt to bridge the discomfiting discontinuity between nature (exemplified by the demands of Poseidon on Zeus) and culture

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(exemplified by the demands of Athena on Zeus)” (Peradotto 63). The nekuia thus highlights The Odyssey’s preoccupation with the most central concern of Omeros—the development of a poetic strategy capable of accurately articulating nature and culture, and in so doing of mediating these dichotomous entities. The dissolution of such intellectual divisions, and the certainties they represent, is also a primary function of the poet/narrator’s descent into Malebolge, as even the identity of the guide is uncertain: So one changed from marble with a dripping chiton in the early morning on that harp-wired sand to a foam-headed fisherman, in his white, torn undershirt, but both of them had the look of men whose skins are preserved in salt, whose accents were born from the guttural shoal [.] (LVI, i) Omeros and Seven Seas have become indistinguishable. Ancient poet and contemporary fisherman are braided into one another to produce the enigmatic, hybrid figure who is to lead the poet/narrator’s descent into the volcano. Crucially, both Omeros and Seven Seas speak a dialect “born from the guttural shoal,” a language generated by the animist discourse which sees past and present, society and physical surroundings, as inextricable, if not identical, as Seven Seas makes clear: “This is like Troy all over. The forest gathering for a face! Only the years have changed since the weed-bearded Kings. (LVII, iii) In essence, the discursive level at which Seven Seas/Omeros operates confounds strict notions of linear time, the structured numerical gradation of “the years” which is the Eurocentric understanding of history, and thus destabilizes one of the key critical strictures according to which Omeros, and so much Caribbean art, is investigated— its relationship to its European precursors. The language issuing from the mediation of landscape and society makes the very concept of such divisions uncertain, and when the poet/narrator claims “I have always heard/your voice in that sea master” (LVI, iii), he acknowledges the primary importance of the drive toward this discourse capable of circumscribing the void at the center of Caribbean consciousness on its own terms, of producing “a wide page without metaphors” (LIX, i). The poet/narrators descent into Malebolge suggests the difficulties which accrue to such a momentous under-taking, as well as the possible existence of such an idiom. Seven Seas points out that the poet/narrator already has some idea of what is at stake: “you hear the salt speech/that your father once heard; one island and one

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truth” (LVIII, ii). The poet/narrator has intuitively perceived the discourse which renders the Greek Islands and the Antilles coalescent, but he is nevertheless in danger of falling into that special pouch of hell reserved for poets: In one pit were the poets. Selfish phantoms with eyes who wrote with them only, saw only surfaces in nature and men, and smiled at their similes, condemned in their pit to weep at their own pages. And that was where I had come from. Pride in my craft. Elevating myself. I slid, and kept falling towards the shit they stewed in; all the poets laughed, jeering with dripping fingers; then Omeros gripped my hand in enclosing marble and his strength moved me away from that crowd, or else I might have slipped to that backbiting circle, mockers and self-loved. The blind feet guided me higher as the crust sloped. As I, contemptuously, turned my head away, a fist of ice gripped it from the soul-shaping forge, and it wrenched my own head bubbling its half-lies, crying out its name, but each noun stuck in its gorge as it begged for pardon, willing to surrender if another chance were given it at language. (LVIII, iii) Omeros itself may be thought of as Walcott’s chance at language, as an attempt to develop an idiom capable of penetrating the veneer of perception and rendering West Indian existence in its own self-revelatory nomenclature. The damned poets’ sin is not found in their failure to develop such a poetic method but in their smug pleasure at having abandoned the attempt, their self-satisfaction with their cleverness at disguising the obviously lackluster capacity of metaphor, so it is no surprise to find “some estimable men / among the souls suspended in that limbo” (Inferno IV 44–45). Only Omeros’s intervention saves the poet/ narrator from damnation, a fate from which Omero, the “poeta sovrano,” could not save himself in Dante (Inferno IV 88). To readers of Omeros, the depiction of the Hell in which Omero and Virgil find themselves sounds hauntingly familiar: “we have no hope and yet we live in longing” (Inferno IV 42). Dante has condemned Homer and Virgil to the very situation to which the poet/narrator must aspire, seizing on the longing itself as psychologically and culturally constituting. In essence, the poet/narrator is rescued to Omeros’s circle of Hell, a place well removed from Malebolge. Readers are left to wonder whose is the anonymous voice from the pit which causes the poet/narrator to focus on the narrowness of his escape by forcing him to reflect on his own poetic oeuvre:

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ask yourself this question, whether a love of poverty helped you to use other eyes, like those of that sightless stone?” (LVIII, iii) The answer, apparently, is no, but the realization of this clearly spurs a new awareness in the poet/narrator since he emerges from his Dantesque vision with the words, “My light was clear” (LIX, i). Walcott makes clear that this dialect, and the revelations it is capable of generating, is not racially selective since Major Plunkett is also shown to have some knowledge of its existence and importance. In a passage foreshadowing the poet/narrator’s descent, Plunkett also makes a pilgrimage to Malebolge: This was the gate of sulphur through which he must pass, singeing his memory, though he pinched his nostrils until the stench faded into verdurous peace, like registering skulls in the lime-pits of Auschwitz. (X, ii) The hellish imagery leaves no doubt that this too is a descent, one seasoned with racial guilt and driven forward by hopes of redemption. As noted earlier, this singeing of memory is enacted by the language of an island FLOATing in the “amnesiac Atlantic”: with a bow, and a patois blessing with old African signs, as soundless as the light on the road they watched him go[.] (X, iii) The dialect capable of undermining history offers its benediction to all who make the effort to hear it, regardless of their personal or racial history. It is interesting to note that Plunkett’s quest is sanctified by “a resinous woodsman,” presented as a living embodiment of the forest “with soles quiet as moss,” in an act blending patois and African. The dialect of the forest renders the distinction between pre- and post-colonial existence meaningless. Of course, the Plunketts hope for a different gift from this dialect than does the poet/narrator. Whereas Seven Seas had considered the view that presented itself from Soufrière to be “like Troy/all over,” Maud sees an earlier state; “It’s like Adam and Eve all over” (X, iii). Whereas the poet/narrator hopes for and requires greater access to the history of conflict, its horrors and implications, the Plunketts hope for and require a retreat into a prehistory, before these things existed, and the absolution this might bring. Though such plenary access to so glyptic a discourse is rather unlikely, the potential rewards are enough to propel Achille, the poet/narrator

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and the Plunketts headlong into a ceaseless struggle to understand. In the act of the attempt lies the sum and substance of Caribbean consciousness. And Walcott leaves no doubt that, despite their enormous differences, Achille, the poet/narrator and the Plunketts are all indisputably Caribbean. They are inextricably bound to each other by the very thing which conspires to exclude them from the animist discourse and which most perspicuously distinguishes them from Achilles, Odysseus and Aeneas—their status as amaranthine exiles. Each of the poem ‘s “protagonists is a castaway in one sense or another” (Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed 3). Walcott’ ‘s insistence that an endemic rootlessness exists at the undermost layer of the West Indian psyche ensures that the informative sensibility of Omeros will represent a sweeping divergence from that of classical epic, whose entire corpus unfolds as an explication of the importance of nostos, or home coming. The far-flung exploits of Achilles, Agamemnon, and Odysseus are underwritten by the assurance that an Achaean homeland awaits their return; exile on the coast of Troy is but a temporary displacement made bearable by the comforting certainty of the existence of “home,” though they may never set foot there again. Aeneas ‘s is a journey from Troy to New Troy, so to speak, a fleeting homelessness as decreed by the prophets. But Achille and Hector never leave the island which has become their permanent ectopia. “The sprout casually stuck in the soil” has no home to leave nor return to. They are no more than sitting tenants in the land of their birth. And as Omeros’s interrogation of the poet/narrator makes clear, conceptions of home and identity are tight-knit: From what city? Do you know?” “No. I forget.” “Thebes? Athens?” “Yeah. Could be Athens,” I said, stumbling. “What difference does it make now?” That stopped the old goat in his tracks. He turned: “What difference? None, maybe, to you[.] (LVI, iii) Terada sees in Omeros’s questions little more than a preoccupation with detail, based on “faithfulness to the object world”: The Iliad and The Odyssey brim with community news about who is whose grandson and who shares the same hometown, and apparently assume that these details radiate significance. (242 n.19) Such details do radiate significance, and Omeros’s astonishment that this significance is lost on the poet/narrator and Afolabe’s incredulity that the

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significance of name is lost on Achille both point to the same inceptive premise; the construction of identity, personal or communal, erupts from a fully developed conception of home. There is no cultural identification without a cultural center, which, as Omeros and Afolabe’s captious commentaries point out, is most fully expressed in the establishment of a space, geographical or psychological, uniquely possessed by a particular people. So even those who have historically been rendered homeless maintain cultural coherence through their sustained belief in the existence of such a space—the “promised land.” But for Achille and Hector, cut off from ancestral Africa and spiritually disconnected from the Caribbean, no such space exists. Walcott’s belief that a “gap” exists at the center of Caribbean culture and consciousness is most clearly evidenced in the squatter mentality of the native St. Lucian characters of the poem. The project of articulation undertaken in Omeros is, in this sense, a project of home-building. And since there is no geographic “other,” no promised land towards which the St. Lucian characters may move, the importance of Walcott’s insistence on the primacy of “act” becomes magnified. The act of developing a Caribbean idiom, of attempting to access the animist discourse of the islands, is the act of creating a cultural center, and it is ultimately this process in and of itself which serves as the definiens of “West Indian,” at the communal level, and of “I” at the personal. The true source of the poet/narrator’s anguish at returning to his empty New England home now becomes clear: I do not live in you, I bear my house inside me, everywhere [.] (XXXIII, iii) This is far from analogous to Aeneas carrying “home” with him in the form of the household gods of Troy. It is the plaintive of an individual for whom the act of making his physical surroundings conform to the notion of home, the process “of wood and brick becoming home,” has been interrupted. The significance of the continual process of becoming is evidenced by the disastrous emotional effects of the interruption of the process. No Penelope awaits the poet/narrator’s return to New England. The section does not depict a homecoming, but simply the return to mute wood and brick. It depicts the return to absence. However, simply to omit any reference to the epic nostos would not have the desired effect in Omeros, since such a strategy would not necessarily illustrate the fact that Walcott’s conception of Caribbean culture precludes such an event. Omeros must provide some textual indication that “home” must be developed, not reached. Walcott enacts such circumscription of textual absence through an ingenious eversion of the epic device of periplous, or perilous sea voyage. Though the nostos provides the overarching thematic unity of The Odyssey and The Aeneid, it is the dangerous navigation of the sea, undertaken almost entirely within sight of land, that sutures the various elements of their essential episodic

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plots. In chapter LX, Walcott sends Achille and Philoctete on a similar, though less than perilous voyage along the coast of St. Lucia: So he sailed down to Soufrière along and close to the coast. He might have to leave the village for good, its hotels and marinas, the ice-packed shrimps of pink tourists, and find someplace, some cove he could settle like another Aeneas, founding not Rome but home, to survive in its peace, far from the discos, the transports, the greed, the noise. So he sailed down the coastline, Anse La Raye, Canaries (LX, i) By this point in the poem, some six hundred lines from the end, Achille, having been tutored by the confrontation with Afolabe, by the death of Hector and by the cure of Philoctete, has begun to understand the quixotic nature of his relationship to his surroundings, and the nature of the “sound that is missing.” That he should leave the village of his birth in search of home is absolutely necessary. It is to be the final awareness building act Achille must undergo. He must find “no cove he liked as much as his own” (LX, i) in order to understand that home is to be found in a ceaseless succession of constituting acts. Like meaning, home is to be created through the act of striving towards it. His efforts to understand the natural/cultural idiom of the island have already borne fruit, since it is Achille’s recognition of a disruption in this discourse which spurs the periplous: bursting seas convinced him that “somewhere people interfering with the course of nature”; the feathery mare’s tails were more threateningly frequent, and its sunsets the roaring ovens of the hurricane season, while the frigates hung closer inland and the nets starved on their bamboo poles. The rain lost its reason and behaved with no sense at all. What had angered the rain and made the sea foam? (LX, i) The fact that Achille is able to recognize that the behavior of the elements is aberrant, that they are angered, indicates that he is now capable of deriving sophisticated inferences from the naturalistic code, and insofar as he has succeeded in this, he has succeeded in making the island home. All that remains is for him to become aware of this. So it is that the periplous of Achille and Philoctete is less than an odyssey:

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They spent the whole night on the beach in Soufrière, talking to other fishermen under the horned, holy peaks, where Achille built up a bonfire (LX, ii) Their sea voyage turns out to be something of a melancholic camping trip with spiritual overtones. But it is disclosing nonetheless, since Achille’s conversations with the fishermen of Soufrière lead him to feel “like the phantom of a vanishing race/of heroes”: like Afolabe; like Achilles; connected to their environment and confident of the validity of their discourse. The chapter closes with the sailors’ enigmatic encounter with a Baleine whale, “their wet, salted faces shining with God” (LX, iii). III The cabalistic epiphany with which chapter LX ends is in many ways emblematic of the overall figurative strategy of Omeros, in that readers are left certain that Achille and Philoctete have received some sort of benediction, but unsure as to exactly what has transpired. Their sea voyage is an almost comic condensation of classical epic technique which has, in the end, produced a spiritual awakening more profound than anything seen in Homer or Virgil. This is a strategy of uncertainty we have seen played out at every level of Omeros, from the minutia of hemistitch and metron to the broad strokes of narratological strategy and relationship to the western canon. Time and again, the form of the poem conspires to mis/direct the reader, providing partial rever sals of tradition by breaking the expectations it raises and reaching conclusions which can only be described as controvertible. No matter what level of discourse one considers, nor what critical terminology one employs, the poem works to issue a démenti of pontifical judgments, even as it fulminates the importance of the issues it raises. The process of rejecting supposedly fixed categories of interpretation, the episte-mologically infallible, is a feature of much of Walcott’s work which has been extensively studied, but almost always against a series of assumptions that consider Walcott’s self-appointed project to be one of balancing the twin traditions of the European and the African. Walcott himself provides the terminology for this approach: I am a kind of split writer; I have one tradition inside me going one way, and another going another. The mimetic, the narrative, and dance element is strong on one side, and the literary, the classical tradition is strong on the other. (“Meanings” 45)

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This “self-avowed split between two traditions and the tension generated by this dichotomy” (D’Aguiar 157) is considered the centerpiece of Walcott’s poetic oeuvre, as the drive towards reconciliation of these traditions is considered the primary impetus of his poetry. Most of the sociological concerns raised by Walcott’s work are interpreted with respect to this dialectic. Insofar as the poet is attempting to enunciate communal concerns, for instance, he is following the African/mimetic/oral tradition, while attempts to delineate subjective concerns are governed by the European/literary tradition. Any ambivalence seen to exist in the work is thought to issue from Walcott’s uncertainty as to which tradition should be allowed to predominate, and the uncertainty is thus seen as fluctuation between two clearly defined poles and not as an aesthetic space in and of itself. Walcott himself also sets the parameters of the racial component of these twin traditions in the 1962 poem, “A Far Cry from Africa”: I who am poisoned by the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Walcott’s own racially mixed ancestry is, in a sense, used as a metaphor of his poetic method. He is alternately repulsed and attracted by the European canon, unable to choose between the branches of his family tree. The sociolinguistic concerns raised by his work are also interpreted according to this dialectic; insofar as Walcott employs indigenous speech patterns and dialect he valorizes his African ancestry, while those passages which employ more formal speech patterns and allusions concede to his European genealogy. But Omeros makes clear that the process is hardly this simple, even at the most practical levels, since St. Lucian expression is in many ways more French than English, and, as “Hewanorra Airport” points out, retains something of the Amerindian as well. Clearly, during the three decades separating “A Far Cry from Africa” and Omeros, Walcott’s ideology continued to evolve. “Fully conscious of the factional pressures of Euro-American traditionalists on one hand and AfroCaribbean purists on the other,” (Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed 24) Omeros figures the choice between dialect and standard English and between African and European iconography as no more than offshoots of a more fundamental tenet of Caribbean reality—West Indian cultural production/awareness revolves around an epicentric lacking. This conception reduces attempts to evaluate the cultural artifacts of the West Indies according to any univocal dialectic pointless. Gikandi claims that much of Walcott’s poetry is generated by the tension resulting from the conflicting pulls of two sets of influence (Gikandi 9); but Omeros is crafted in such a way that these two influences are seen to counterbalance, so to speak, and in so doing provide an intermediary point of absence in which Walcott attempts to write. Many of Walcott’s pronouncements on the nature

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of Caribbean poetry take on an added profundity when considered in this light. Almost invariably, critics consider the “inner language” referred to in “The Muse of History” to be dialect, and in the context of the essay this obviously makes perfect sense. The discrepancy between standard English and dialect forces Walcott to blend “English forms—the alphabet or symbols—with the fluidities of dialect—its tone, pace and inflection” (D’Aguiar 163). But in Omeros this discussion is resolved in terms of the “sound that is missing”—sociolect is preferable to standard English only insofar as it seems more easily able to gain access into the animist discourse of the island. A language heard, and recognized as a language, but which defies transcription exists at the heart of the figurative strategy of Omeros, and this construction subsumes the standard English/dialect binary, and destabilizes criticism based on this dialectic. The sociolinguistic mélange often noted in Walcott’s work is not significant simply because it produces satisfying poetry, though such is certainly the case, but because the very act of blending, the process of forming such an idiom, is itself culturally constituting in the West Indian context: What would deliver him from servitude was the forging of a language that went beyond mimicry, a dialect which had the force of revelation as it invented names for things, one which finally settled on its own mode of inflection, and which began to create an oral culture of chants, jokes, folksongs and fables[.] (“What the Twilight Says” 17) The emphasis here is clearly on process. The dialect has “the force of revelation” only as it invents, and the West Indian is delivered by the act of “forging a language.” Though the primacy of the kinetic is incompletely expressed in “Twilight,” the provenance of the omeric strategy is clearly seen: It did not matter how rhetorical, how dramatically heightened the language was if its tone were true, whether its subject was the rise and fall of a Haitian king or a small island fisherman, and the only way to recreate this language was to share in the torture of its articulation. (“What the Twilight Says” 17) In Omeros, the attempt to embrace the “torture of articulation,” the active circumscription of absence that subverts either/or suppositions of cultural development almost in passing, finds its most thorough expression in the figure of the shadow. In fact, it is the shadow image that ultimately renders the poem’s sprawling pattern of allusions coherent and that impresses order on its radiating, omnigenous figuration. Virtually every trenchant episode of the poem is marked by the appearance of the shadow, from Helen’s introduction (“The duel of these fishermen/was over a shadow and its name was Helen”) to the first line of the griot’s song (“We were the color of shadows when we came down”) to the

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moment the poet/narrator realizes he is capable of communicating with Omeros (“I saw no shadow underline my being”). In total, there are more than one hundred shadow references in the poem, as Walcott presses the shadow into service as everything from a metaphor of slaves on the middle passage, “the shadows in its hold,” to a simple but captivating visual image of Achille’s surroundings: “The moth’s swift shadow rippled on an emerald/lagoon.” It is thus as difficult to generalize about the operation of the shadow in Omeros as it is to over-state its importance. But it is surely no coincidence that Walcott resolves the figuration of Omeros, a poem which so obviously engages the cultural legacy of imperial Europe, in terms of the central image of imperial cultural supremacy. Traditionally, the shadow has served as the primary expression of the derision with which the empire considered the cultural products of the colonies, especially of the Caribbean. The black artist was considered the white artists “shadow,” mindlessly aping the artistic mannerisms of empire, incapable of all but the most derivative creative acts. The European cannon was art’s perfection, colonial culture a flimsy pastiche. The lurid legacy of this mind set continues to haunt the Caribbean, as finding the emetic capable of purging West Indian art of the catcalls of the old masters has proven difficult. It is, of course, this cold claw of ancien régime which Omeros so brazenly confronts, so it is not surprising that Walcott should choose to place the shadow image at the center of the omeric figurative strategy, though Omeros is certainly not the first of Walcott’s works to employ it. In fact, Walcott has used it on several occasions in its imperialistically derogatory sense, most notably in The Joker of Seville, as Tisbea asks Juan of his Moorish companion: “Who? Oh, him! Think of him as my shadow.” (40) Walcott has also repeatedly used the shadow image to express the political progeny of empire as it exists in neocolonial West Indian life, as in Deacon Doxy’s song to Sufferer in O Babylon: We little nations, we live in the shadow of the towers of Babylon, we have no power, we’re a flower in the shadow of a mighty banyan tree. (222) But as early as 1965, the polyglot medley which is the omeric shadow was beginning to take shape in Walcott’s poetry, as The Castaway and Other Poems collection illustrates. Of particular interest to present purposes is “Crusoe’s Island,” one of Walcott’s most sophisticated early attempts to employ a poetic strategy designed to operate in the middle ground between mimicry and mockery by illustrating that a solipsistic poetry that tries to use the poet’s subjectivity to remove the poem/poet from context is self-nullifying, and to some extent

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illusory, while a strategy that accepts the West Indian historical context as simply a source of rage finds itself artistically manacled. Though the retreat into selfhood, a space seemingly beyond the grasp of history, has a certain appeal, the castaway’s shadow jolts him into the realization that the Caribbean artist is never truly alone and that the attempt to escape from community, and thus heritage, is delusional: As startling as his shadow grows to the castaway[.] (28–29) Selfhood, to some extent, is always a matter of context, a fact which quickly becomes apparent to the self-imposed exile: his own brain rotting from the guilt Of heaven without his kind, Crazed by such paradisal calm The spinal shadow of a palm Built keel and gunwale in his mind. (38–42) The shadow, having been acknowledged, provides the mechanism the “bearded hermit” needs for self-actualization by providing the entire vessel, from keel to gunwale, which will carry him away from his isolation. The shadow is also used to indicate the spiritual value of community: All heaven in his head, He watched his shadow pray Not for God’s love but human love instead. (49–51) At this stage of his career, Walcott is already exploring the notion that accepting the Caribbean community’s history and heritage allows West Indian writers to use all the tools at their disposal to express their uniquely West Indian consciousness. They cannot be precluded from employing the Eurocentric literary heritage of the Caribbean as an implement of expression. Thus, “Crusoe’s Island” converts the shadow image from an emblem of artistic worthlessness to an acknowledgment of the artistic tradition of which Caribbean writers are, for better or worse, in large measure a product. More importantly, the poem alludes to the kinetic, ongoing nature of the contemporary Caribbean’s interrogation of this heritage: I stand at my life’s noon

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On parched delirious sand My shadow lengthens[.] (90–93) Shadows are in a continual process of transformation throughout the day. They materialize at dawn as huge, indistinct entities. They gradually shrink and sharpen as the sun rises, before all but disappearing at noon. They lengthen again throughout the afternoon before dissolving at dusk. The shadow is continuously modified by the changing position of the sun, just as a colonial heritage is continually modified by the changing perspectives of those who interpret it. Long before the appearance of Omeros, Walcott realized that tradition, far from being a distant, intractable entity, can be transfigured. It is, in fact, locked in a perpetual process of mutation, and in “Crusoe’s Island” Walcott uses the shadow image to effect such a transfiguration of an imperial metatext, in this case the very text featuring that beau idéal of colonial mimicry, the erstwhile man Friday. Though obviously a more cursory treatment of the issue than that presented by Omeros, the conclusion of “Crusoe’s Island” makes clear that the two poems are of the same ideological lineage. “Friday ‘s progeny” return from church at dusk: And nothing I can learn From art or loneliness Can bless them as the bell’s Transfiguring tongue can bless. Neither the poet, his craft, nor the body of work it gives him access to can effect this sanctification. As it so often is in Omeros, benediction is proffered by sound, in this case that of a bell speaking an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but nevertheless effective “tongue,” which ultimately calls into question the validity of “art and loneliness.” Between 1965 and 1990, Walcott’s construction of the shadow image continued to gain complexity, largely because his conception of the fundamental nature of Caribbean culture continued to change. No longer conceived of as a composite of two distinct cultural strains, West Indian society is seen in Omeros and the later essays as existing in the void between these two strains. The idea that Walcott’s cultural birthright is not so much hybrid as interjacent was beginning to take shape by 1969 when The Gulf and Other Poems was published. Working against the epigram of Froude’s opprobrious claim that “there are no people” in the West Indies, “Air” explores the notion that this absence may be socially defining, closing with the line, “There is too much nothing here.” As Chamberlin notes, “This ‘too much nothing,’ as Walcott has said elsewhere, is ‘like nothing one has ever seen before.’ Which is to say, some thing different” (166). In the context of Omeros, we might say that a unique culture has issued from this absence, and not that the absence itself is

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necessarily unique. In any case, the conception of an artistic tradition anchored in the space between European and African traditions, between heritage/history and selfhood and ultimately between subject and object, expressed in a poem which is neither analogue nor reversal of poetic tradition, is ideally figured by the shadow. It is the perfect tool with which to undermine the hybrid conception of cultural production. It must be conceded that it is difficult to conceive of the intersection of two artistic traditions as anything but composite, and perhaps even more perplexing to imagine a figurative strategy capable of articulating absence. But Walcott has seen in the shadow an image ideally suited to the expression of his difficult conception of Caribbean cultural development. A shadow is the result of the interaction between a light source and an opaque object. It is not a blend of the two, sharing nothing with the light source or the opaque object, but dependent upon both for its existence. When imperial hubris labeled colonial society a shadow, it was to become a more accurate description than Froude could ever have supposed. Any number of the binaries used to interpolate West Indian art are subsumed by this metaphor. For instance, whether one decides, as Chamberlin does, that Walcott considers the creation of absence to be a result of the clash of imperial sensibility and “the awesome power of the natural world” (165), or whether one adopts the explicitly racial binary of African versus European, the result is the same; both sides of the binary exist in a state of excited repulsion, never imploding into a combinative form, and in so doing create a semantic void between them into which appears a third element, the force of their mutual exclusion. It is irrelevant whether imperial influence or “the natural world” is to be considered the light source. West Indian culture depends on these elements only to the extent that their interaction, or lack thereof, provides the existential space for its development. It is also crucial to note that at a literal level a shadow exists as both presence and absence. Despite the fact that it is an object of perception, it is utterly incorporeal. Insofar as one perceives a shadow, one perceives nothingness. A shadow exists as the shape of a lacking, known only by what it is not, namely light.4 To this may be added the fact that even though a shadow is an objective entity, a perception like any other, it is not entirely divorced from the self which casts it, and is often thought of as part of the self. Figuratively, the shadow occupies a sort of nether world between subject and object, closely connected to the self but technically an other. Thus, the apparently Manichean entities of colonizer and colonized, mimicry and mockery, and even self and other come to be curiously indistinct when examined on the basis of the shadow metaphor of Caribbean cultural development. The development of a poetic method capable of articulating such indeterminacy is, as I have argued, the very project of Omeros, and Walcott’s ranging implementation of the shadow goes some distance towards accomplishing this task. It could be argued that the omeric shadow’s complexity is itself a fitting metaphor of Caribbean culture, polyglot and diverse.

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This extreme multivalence comes into sharp focus in the exchange between Achille and Afolabe: In the world I come from we accept the sounds we were given. Men, trees, water. AFOLABE And therefore, Achille, if I pointed and I said, There is the name of that man, that tree, and this father, would every sound be a shadow that crossed your ear, without the shape of a man or a tree? What would it be? (And just as branches sway in the dusk from their fear of amnesia, of oblivion, the tribe began to grieve.) ACHILLE What would it be? I can only tell you what I believe, or had to believe. It was prediction and memory, to bear myself back, to be carried here by a swift, or the shadow of a swift making its cross on water, with the same sign I was blessed with, with the gift of this sound whose meaning I still do not care to know. AFOLABE No man loses his shadow except it is in the night, and even then his shadow is hidden, not lost. At the glow of sunrise, he stands on his own name in that light. When he walks down to the river with the other fishermen his shadow stretches in the morning, and yawns, but you, if you’re content with not knowing what our names mean, then I am not Afolabe, your father, and you look through my body as the light looks through a leaf. I am not here or a shadow. (XXV, iii) Here, the conception and strategies of naming, the importance of sound to the project of authentic self-actualization, and the existence of an inscribable void between self and other, and between analogue and reversal, are exquisitely enmeshed and wound tightly into the shadow. Used six times in this pivotal passage, each appearance of the shadow operates at a slightly different level of discourse and refers to a slightly different ideological concern, but all are united in that they exist as antihybrid or interjacent. Notice that the sound that is

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missing is not simply a shadow, but a shadow “without the shape of a man or a tree.” Once the animist dialogue has been forgotten, so too is the ability to see the connections between the objects of perception, in essence ending the ability to give shape to lacking. The shadow comes to represent the importance of name as the intermediary of self and other. Afolabe points out that we stand on our own shadows, each “on his own name,” to illustrate the fact that there are elements of the phenomenal world to which we can lay claim of ownership, that we do interact with nature. Since sound and shadow are here commingled we must, knowingly or not, be participants in the animist discourse. As Achille denies this operation, denies his shadow so to speak, he calls into question the validity of his own existence and becomes the “ghost of a name.” Perhaps the most engaging visual image in the entire poem, and perhaps the most elusive figure Walcott has ever created, occurs at the end of the passage as Afolabe becomes exasperated that Achille seems intent on making no effort to even attempt to understand his would-be mentor, and will apparently remain “content with not knowing”: “you look through/my body as the light looks through a leaf. I am not here /or a shadow.” A leaf is semi-opaque, filtering the light it feeds on, but allowing much to pass through. It casts a partial shadow, leaving the ground below neither lit nor shaded. Walcott’s elenctic treatment of binaries in this passage is almost unfathomable—in dismissing the pith of name, Achille reduces Afolabe not to a shadow, which in Afolabe’s conception of reality would not be such an ignoble fate, but to the shadow of a shadow. Even the shadow, the paradigm of interjacence and ambiguity, is itself liable to shades of grey. In this, as in all else in Omeros, nothing is irreducible. Walcott draws so many of the concerns of the poem into this passage and forces these few lines to bear such semantic weight that the thematic crust of the poem is fractured, sending fault lines radiating back to the very first section, and forward to the very last. An interpretive sinkhole is opened in the poem into which fall Achille and his shadow, forcing them to metonymically represent St. Lucia, and forcing us to read the metonym against the thematic operation of the poem as a whole. We recall from the first section that the hunched island also pines “Over its lost name,” though it still harbors eels who “sign their names along the clear bottom sand,” as we are propelled forward to the penultimate section and the poet/narrator’s claim that another of the islands lost names had guided his “chirping nib”: “the name Helen had gripped my wrist.” Afolabe leaves Achille with a question which spreads itself from cover to cover: “Are you the smoke from a fire that never burned?” Our understanding of this question, to which “there [is] no answer,” must be tempered by the phantom narrator’s claim in the first section that “smoke forgets the fire from which it ascends,” and by the poet/narrator’s equation of Plains Indians’ fire with Achille’s African experience: “The wandering smoke below me was like Achille’s/hallucination” (XXXIV, ii). This in turn sends us back to the Amerindian patronyms of the first section “that rose with the Aruac’s smoke,” and forward through the text, though back in time, to “a smokey Troy” (LIX, ii). Lost empires and tribes, lost

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languages and sounds, and a lost, solitary fisherman swirl round a single line of the text, forming an intellectual vortex the very impenetrability of which serves as a metaphor of the Caribbean’s ponderous heritage. At the eye of this semantic maelstrom are shadows leading Achille through “prediction and memory,” reprinting themselves “on the white sand of antipodal coasts” (XXVIII, i), and “signing their black language” (XXXII, ii). Its poetic utility notwithstanding, it is the shadows inviolate mutability, a peculiarity given its incorporeal nature, which ultimately stamps it as the central element of the omeric figurative strategy. In opening at sunrise, Omeros does more than mirror classical epic practice, or prefigure the indeterminacy the poem will generate. It also sets the overall structure of the poem in a diurnal cycle. The poem begins when the shadows are beginning to take shape, distinctly emerging from the background twilight. The poem ends at moonrise, as the shadows are beginning to dissolve back into darkness. Achille and Afolabe meet at omeric high noon as “The sun stands/with expectant silence” (XXV, ii), momentarily freezing the shadows crisply in place as the exchange occurs. In this trice, this expectant pause in which sun, river and reader all await the poem’s climax, the indeterminate, ever changing shadows become fixed and determinate. In this moment alone is the primacy of the kinetic suspended, and immediate insight made possible. The rest of Omeros revolves around the ceaseless act of struggling toward such insight, a notion ratified by the poem’s final lines. At night, Afolabe had pointed out, shadows are “hidden not lost.” But some nights hide their shadows better than others: A full moon shone like a slice of raw onion. When he left the beach the sea was still going on. (LXIV, iii) The poem begins and ends in a form of twilight. As Achille leaves the beach, his shadow must be cast in this fulgent moonlight, a shadow inexorably transformed by the moon’s passage through its arc. As the poem closes, the motion of the shadows, like the sea, is still going on.

III Strange Attractors

I Whenever we are dealing with imitation, we should be very careful not to think too quickly of the other who is being imitated. To imitate is no doubt to reproduce an image. But at bottom, it is, for the subject, to be inserted in a function whose exercise grasps it. (Lacan 100) Africa and Aphrodite have more in common than the Greek root which unites their names;1 there is a flow of marine foam that connects two civilizations “in another way,” from within the turbulence of chaos, two civilizations doubly separated by geography and history…. The peoples of the sea, or better, The Peoples of the Sea proliferate incessantly while differentiating themselves from one another, traveling towards the infinite. Certain dynamics of their culture also repeat and sail through the seas of time without reaching anywhere. (Benítez-Rojo 16) [T]hey were taken aback when the bells tolled five. More than a sound, it was a vibration that made the afternoon light tremble and filled the sky with startled pigeons. “It is horrible” said the bishop. “Each hour resonates deep inside me like an earthquake.” The phrase surprised the Marquis, for he had responded with the same thought at four o’clock. It seemed a natural coincidence to the Bishop. “Ideas do

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not belong to anyone,” he said. With his index finger he sketched a series of continuous circles in the air and concluded: “They fly around up there like angels.” (García Márquez 54) THE RELATIVE SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF OMEROS IS, AS WE HAVE SEEN, LARGELY dependent upon Walcott’s ability to undermine the validity of its own textuality, to flaunt the poems inability to signify the West Indies, which in turn enforces the value of the animist code and erodes the authority of the literary tradition with which the poem appears to be enmeshed. Walcott sets the poem in constant motion, tracing an epicycloid curve around the aesthetic/ existential space in which he feels Caribbean self-definition is occurring, sometimes staying quite close to the islands, sometimes straying quite far afield. This ceaseless fluctuation of gaze, and the dizzying technical maneuvers which enable it, place the poem in a sort of ideological limbo which conspires to preemptively devalue orthodox critical formulations concerning the nature of West Indian cultural products and practices. The sophistication of the omeric strategy notwithstanding, a postcolonial poem which relies so heavily on pretextual expectations of the reader and thus, by extension, on the European canon, cannot help but lay itself open to charges of artistic collaboration. Though clearly no sedulous transcription of a classic imperial metatext, Omeros is, by virtue of its very name if nothing else, a work which seems idiosyncratically Caribbean at best. Having examined the poetic machinery Walcott employs to place the poem in the epistemological limbo between empire and colony, center and periphery, readers are left to consider the philosophical ramifications of this approach, and the question of whether or not there is any possible theoretical stance that may be seen to validate the Adamic sensibility on which the poem’s verse, figuration and ideology rest. In stressing the active, ongoing nature of West Indian identity, and in positing the existence of an animist discourse that underwrites this activity, Walcott constructs the poem in such a way as to take advantage of a certain empathetic ease which is seen to tie the West Indies with the root texts of western society, and the sensibility and rhythms these texts inculcate. But this empathy could easily be thought no more than a clever illusion orchestrated by a bucolic, “weeping Derek Walcott” (Saakana 106), intent on writing himself into the “mighty line of Marlowe and Milton” (“What the Twilight Says” 31) and thereby easing the pangs of a deepseated colonial inferiority with “the imperial cry of personal and private hurt” (Saakana 15): “Thus, locked into his color, he refuses to confront history and apportion blame” (Saakana 15). But the relationship between one text and another, and certainly between one culture and another, is rarely as simple as hurling accusations or accolades; nor is the process of extricating Caribbean art from the webs of Empire as simple as composing works which “litigate against the dead, sue History and demand compensation” (“The Road Taken” 112–13).

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We have considered how the construction of Omeros confounds the validity of either/ or propositions at every level of its operation, anticipating Bhabha’s claim that we cannot “describe the world with a set of binary oppositions: things out there and theory in here, or institutions here and actions there” (“Postcolonial Authority” 66), and suggesting an alternative in the form of the interjacent. This final point, the suggestion not just that binaries are inadequate, but that the force of their mutual exclusion provides an active, uninscribed space in which certain forms of utterance can operate, proves problematic, particularly in relation to the interlaced notions of history and originality. Walcott’s work has always acknowledged the realization that “you cannot step outside that which you contest, that you are implicated in the value you choose to challenge” (Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism 223). Omeros avoids this conundrum in that it never explicitly contests the value of Eurocentric literary formulations, nor directly challenges the authority of Homer or Virgil. Quite the opposite, Walcott invokes the omnipresence of Homer as poetic counsel and, at times, self-evident justification of the omeric method. For some, this would mark Omeros as a classic neocolonial text, the work of an artistic quisling which cleverly obscures the fact that “rejection of colonization must include a rejection of all myths, even a rejection of literary standards of the colonial period” (Clarke 178). In attempting to produce a work that neither adopts nor abandons the myths of the West, which operates in the sociological gap between Hutcheon and Clarke as it were, Walcott turns the work toward the Antillean islands themselves, seeing in them a space possessed of an Adamic discourse, a series of uninscribed utterances to which the poem can refer, and in the act of referencing, metaphorically access. The conclusion that this partially frees the poem from the onerous aesthetic and political constraints of an imperial literary heritage may be dismissed as the product of absolute naivety, “a childlike optimism… that the artist under these circumstances is completely unfettered by tradition, and is about to begin in an experiment as new and novel as artistic creation must have been at the dawn of creation” (Khan 157). Taken together, these critical considerations place the postcolonial artist in an apparently untenable position. Unable to confront, continue or ignore “the residue and meaning of conquest,” the Caribbean poet would seem to have no option but impotent silence. Because of this, many theorists, if not writers, have begun to stress the importance of parody and ironic forms to the decolonizing project, since these forms are able to take advantage of the “double-voiced” nature of utterance,2 producing works which mimic imperialist discourse in a disorienting manner. These ambivalent imitations call into question the authority of the texts they remake, and thus simultaneously resemble and dissemble. So it is that Bhabha seizes on this duality as denying “imperialist culture not only of the authority that it has for so long imposed …but even of its own claims to authenticity” (“The Postcolonial Critic” 57), while Kobena Mercer speaks of the “‘syncretic’ dynamic which critically appropriates elements from the mastercodes of the dominant culture and ‘creolizes’ them,” thus moving to

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“decenter, destabilize, and carnivalize the linguistic domination of ‘English’” (57). In general, then, the inherent “undecidability” of language means that no one user, nor group of users, authoritatively inscribes a lexicon or grammar, and this semantic fluidity provides a space in which the formerly colonized (and doubly and trebly colonized) may attempt to produce counter knowledges/ discourses which ultimately allow the subaltern to re/articulate the conditions of his or her existence and retrieve preimperial codes—despite being “cut off from mobility within both foreign and domestic dominant structures” (Spivak, Thinking 1). This uncertainty, which spins away from the word into all aspects of colonial/ post-colonial discourse, particularly as it is expressed by Bhabha, who couples the semantic uncertainty identified by Bakhtin and Derrida with the psychoanalytic conception of ambivalence (the simultaneous desire for a thing/ person/action and its opposite), bears a certain resemblance to the incertitude so central to the operation of Omeros. Despite the initial resemblance, however, several factors mitigate against this correspondence. The metrical, figurative and thematic fibrillations of Omeros are carefully crafted to be culturally specific, that is, to operate as functions of a Caribbean context, whereas the Bakhtinian double-voice is a function of all discourse. The fact is that implementation of a purely discursive conception of ambivalence in the analysis of postcolonialism is dangerously totalizing—it suggests that colonialism operated identically everywhere at all times, when, as Fanon demonstrates, a great deal of the empire’s energy was expended to foster divisive regionalism (The Wretched of the Earth 74–75). As Robert Young notes, the increasing prominence of discourse analysis in postcolonial studies “has meant that there has been a noticeable geographical and historical homogenization of the history of colonialism” (Colonial Desire 164). Clearly, the appropriation of Eurocentric literary forms by a writer of the Indian diaspora, whose historical awareness of colonialism will note a certain British deference to precolonial social institutions,3 will be undertaken with a far different sensibility, and with different sociopolitical ramifications, than that of Afolabe’s descendants, who were presented the more brutal hand of empire. And although French egalitarian philosophy would perhaps have had some bearing on the initial importation of slaves into St. Lucia, and on their subsequent treatment, there can be little doubt that Achille, Hector, and company continue to carry thinly scabbed wounds of the Edward Long mentality that considered their forebears subhuman degenerates. An attempt to amend Homer to the needs of Caribbean culture must surely reflect this. Discourse analysis, however, tends to obscure such nuance,4 to the extent that the highly rarified notions of ambivalence and uncertainty from which such work issues seem, in the final analysis, to be but little connected to the incertitude Omeros so assiduously develops. Perhaps most troubling is the fact that if one considers the exploitation of Bakhtinian dialogism as providing the space in which imperial assumptions are to be rewritten, as the only way the Caribbean can “establish its identity within

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the parameters defined by the European language and culture it strives to disperse” (Gikandi 19), then one has moved the project completely into the realm of discursivity, and this is something many would wish to avoid since “the dissolution of all perceived realities into sheer discursivity would leave us with no reason or motivation whatsoever to raise objections to suffering and oppression” (Chase 61): Land claims, racial survival, cultural revival: all of these demand an understanding of and response to the very concepts and structures which poststructuralist academicians refute in language games, few of which recognize the political struggles of real people outside such discursive frontiers. (Tapping qtd. in Slemon 6) Heteroglossia and polyvocality offer an escape, through parody, from the cultural/aesthetic chains of empire, by suggesting that language, the basis of culture, is incapable of semantic certainty. This may be an escape into totalizing irrelevance, but according to the strictures of current critical orthodoxy there may be no alternative; despite Walcott’s claims to the contrary, there are no uninscribed spaces—aesthetic, quotidian, or existential. Since “nature” and “Caribbean” are entities constituted for us in language, Walcott’s attempt to develop a prosodic/figurative idiom capable of Adamically unreading such terms “must inevitably be thwarted by the fact that [he is] always already in a world whose contours have been supplied prior to [his] entry” (Freeman 80). All that Walcott can conceivably do is “seize upon what is and, precisely through attempting to rework the old, established idiom, succeed in creating something— or someone—new and original” (Freeman 80). This is a singularly anti-Adamic vision of originality which means that every text, to use Hutcheon’s terminology, is “implicated,” no matter what sort of relationship it attempts to cultivate with its cultural precedents. Walcott can disclose nothing of the animist discourse, and must remain content with re/examining the form such discourse has been given in the textuality of empire, since no text can ever be more than a “multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (Barthes, Image Music Text 146). Stymied by lexis, icon and index, the Caribbean artist drifts in the impossibility of linguistic presence, hopelessly attempting to point to the operation of nature in the islands, not “writing” the West Indies but “rewriting” Froude and Trollope’s inherently ambivalent representation of it.5 This means that Omeros, insofar as it attempts to delineate the cultural existence of the West Indies by using The Odyssey or The Iliad, is not in the least unusual at the level of enactment. That is, since all texts are dialogic blends of previous texts, Omeros simply acknowledges the process in a more open fashion. The logical conclusion is that Walcott remodels these texts to take advantage of the creative potential of parody, and its subversive qualities. Of course, Omeros

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is not parodic.6 And although the poem’s insistence on act rather than end could be interpreted as a postmodern reliance on the “partial” as a mode of resistance, partiality is contextualized in Omeros as a totality, or a complete, self-contained, self-sustaining event. In general, it is difficult to think of Omeros as in any way subversive, at least in any traditional sense, or to see it as deliberately undermining the cultural authority of Homer or Virgil. Although Omeros employs certain equivocating strategies that bear an initial resemblance to key principles of poststructural/postcolonial thought, closer examination of the poem shows this correspondence itself to be misleading— particularly when one considers Walcott’s earnest and oft-repeated desire to create a “style past metaphor” (“Nearing Forty”). The misdirection Omeros works to establish at the prosodic, figurative and allusional levels ultimately destabilizes the poems discursive orientation, to the extent that some of the parameters within which discursivity is established are themselves reconfigured. Insofar as the strategy of interjacence converts either/or propositions to nand/nor propositions, to adopt the Boolean terminology, it subsumes a host of poststructural concerns regarding the nature of originality and, in a sense, produces a level of discourse which can best be described as chaotic: its operation cannot be accounted for through any series of binaries; it unfolds in a deterministi cally unpredictable manner (showing close correspondences to certain precursive texts while simultaneously disconnecting itself from them); it diverges rapidly from the conditions it initially establishes (as a result of its misdirecting equivocation). The entropic operation of Omeros eventually displaces its own apparently univocal relationship to Eurocentric metatexts by introducing a shared, transhistorical, nonlinguistic code, Benítez-Rojo’s “marine foam,” which implicitly validates the poem’s pattern of allusions. Just as the poem’s prosody must be considered neither metrical nor free verse—but by dismissing the expectations it raises ultimately develops its own metrical frame of reference which inculcates both meter and vers libre—so too does Omeros develop a theoretical structure which accounts for the importance of individuating context in its attempt to define “West Indian,” while at the same time centering the discursive operation of the poem around the notion of a decontextualizing Nature. This practice, insofar as it is successful, allows Walcott to posit the existence of what might be termed a universalist hermeneutic, which he then bends to specifically Caribbean ends by showing that “Uniqueness can be the product of processes which are themselves general to all living matter” (Barrow 48). Thus, it could be argued, Omeros does not so much rework, rewrite or parody The Iliad or The Odyssey, but instead uses them to help gain access to these fundamental processes, since as Benítez-Rojo implies, the Homeric texts responded to societal requirements and naturalistic codes very similar to those of the contemporary Caribbean. Extraordinary as this claim may be, Omeros provides ample internal evidence that Walcott believes it to be true; the most valuable lesson to be learned from Omeros is how he casts his “voice in that sea,” and in so doing is able “to reread (rewrite) the march of

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Nature in terms of rhythms ‘of a certain kind’” (Benítez-Rojo 17). The natural world is saturated in more than just language, and the centrality of the act of discovering what this “more” is, what exactly lies between language and the languaged world, entitles West Indian culture and spiritually links it to that of Ionic Greece. II “This is how, one sun-rise, we cut down them canoes.” The first line of Omeros sets in motion a series of entropic strategies which function to undermine the authority of imperial inscription of particular verse forms and root texts, a process culminating in the notion of interjacence, most fully figured by the shadow image. But the poetic complexities generated by this line, and by the techniques it sets in motion, also conspire to disturb the discursive orientation of the work as a whole. Even as it sets the narrative structure of the poem in a transformative diurnal cycle and introduces a perpetually fluid prosody which quickly diverges from the conditions of its initial appearance, the line focalizes itself in activity. Taken together, these techniques may be considered related to the Barthesian insistence on affectivity as a means of moving “outside the sentence” and wayfaring the “exorbitant dignity” attached to predictive syntax (The Pleasures of the Text 56), which Bhabha conceives of as a “language of performativity” derived “to contest the pedagogical” (“Postcolonial Authority” 56). However, for Barthes, as for a great many modernist and postmodernist theorists, this movement is thought to be enacted through fragmentation and displacement, strategies antithetical to the smoothly cyclic movement of Omeros which, contrary to Barthe’s pronouncements, demands a respect for the whole (c.f. The Pleasure of the Text 18). In fact, rather than declaiming the effectiveness of the disjunctive as a means of social delineation, or of identifying the diasporic as the element allowing the formerly colonized “to conceive of a political strategy of empowerment and articulation” (“Postcolonial Authority” 56), the first line of Omeros does quite the opposite, introducing the unified, unifying existence of the most fundamental component of the animist discourse—the cycle of alternating light and darkness which has guided the development of all human culture. Thus, this opening remakes The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy only incidentally, since all three poems are seen to be responding to the same cosmological substructure and accounting for it within the sensibility of their respective cultures. Rather than beginning with a uniquely Caribbean event, Omeros begins with the most ubiquitous moment to which humans are witness before spiraling off into a quintessentially West Indian scene as the event is contextualized within a West Indian perspective. It takes no great insight to identify differences between one culture and another, least of all between Black Figure Greece and the twentieth-century West Indies.

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Most current literary and cultural theory seizes on this diversity as the key point of entry into a given artistic product or practice, which has the curious effect of highlighting commonalities: “when the kaleidoscope of world cultures becomes normal, the fixed points, the universals, stand out” (D.Brown 88). It is the unforced ease with which Omeros gains access to these fixed points that so captivates the poet/narrator, just as it is Homer’s languid “voice in that sea” which so compels Walcott. The divergence from traditional postcolonial theory which this mindset represents is enormous, and its consequences reprint themselves on every layer of Omeros’s every line. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this cosmogenic universalism is that rather than simply conceiving of ourselves as languaging the world, we are forced to consider how we have been languaged by the world, that is, how we “reflect the celestial patterns that have stimulated and constrained the evolution of our environment” (Barrow 115), an environment with which all “human social life and human societies…are in continuous interaction” (Baker 9): Days and nights, seasons and tides, cycles of fertility, rest and activity: all are reflections of the rhythms imposed on us by celestial motions… [T]he inexorable motions of the heavens and the earth have cast their shadows upon our bodies, our actions, and our superstitions about the meaning of the world. (Barrow 115) The manner in which Nature has written us is as least as important as the manner in which we have written Nature. The composition of this unremitting dialectic must somehow be accounted for in the omeric methodology, even though intuitive, deconceptualized awareness of “the rhythms imposed on us” may be difficult, if not impossible to acquire. So, the first line of Omeros sets in motion a process of metrical entropy and a destablization of the allusional matrix it propounds, but it also initiates the theoretical processes which are to support Walcott’s interrogation of the Caribbean people’s interspersion with the animist discourse. These processes are themselves interjacent, since they are conceived to exist as the force of the mutual exclusion of Nature and Culture, a force which serves as the power source of the dialectic, and of West Indian cultural practice as it is constructed in Omeros. The products of this dialectic exist neither “within a limited region of possible utterance and modes of representation constituted by the social world” (Freeman 198), nor within the even more Draconian parameters implied in the claim that “it is the nature of the human brain to react in specific ways” (D.Brown 115) to specific stimuli.7 In the entropic ideology of Omeros it is clear that Nature is not positioned as a human construct, nor is Culture positioned as a phenomenon of Nature. Nevertheless, the specific features of the dialectic are, to some extent, culturally specific; the way in which social groups intersperse themselves with Nature, or deny the interspersion, varies considerably over time and space.

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Achille’s claim that “somewhere people interfering/with the course of nature” (LX, i) carries with it the message that “somewhere” is not “here.” The Caribbean has engaged, rather than silenced, the animist discourse. This is a divergence from Euro-centric sensibility that circumvents the imperial inscription separating Walcott from Homer and validates the empathetic ease with which Walcott identifies Achilles and Achille. Caribbean culture has evolved partly as an attempt to delimit the violence of its interaction with the naturalistic dialogue: Nature is the flux of an unknowable feedback machine that society interrupts constantly with the most varied and noisy rhythms. Each rhythm is itself a flux cut through by other rhythms, and we can pursue fluxes upon rhythms endlessly. Well then, the culture of the Peoples of the Sea is a flux interrupted by rhythms which attempt to silence the noises with which their own social formation interrupts the discourse of Nature…the cultural discourse of the Peoples of the Sea attempts, through real or symbolic sacrifice, to neutralize violence and to refer society to the transhistorical codes of Nature. Of course, as the codes of Nature are neither limited nor fixed, nor even intelligible, the culture of the Peoples of the Sea expresses the desire to sublimate social violence through referring itself to a space that can only be intuited through the poetic, since it always puts forth an area of chaos. (Benítez-Rojo 16–17) When positioned in “this paradoxical space” (Benítez-Rojo 17), the metrical correlations between Sappho and Executor, and the philosophical correspondences between Walcott and Homer, take on startling significance. Each of these poets, in his or her own way, is attempting to produce aesthetic intercession on behalf of community, for the benefit of Nature, and vice versa. Since the code(s) of Nature remains largely opaque, it is the manner of the act of attempting intercession, “real or symbolic sacrifice,” which becomes culturally definitive. It is, after all, rather difficult to know how acts of social formation have interrupted the animist discourse. Given that “the flux” to which Sappho, Homer, Executor, and Walcott respond is similar, as are “the polyrhythms” or cultural practices employed by each to mitigate the “rhythms” interpenetration of “the flux,”8 it is not completely surprising that certain general similarities among them should exist. That Walcott should have found such specifically similar elements, the spiritual contiguity which allowed him so easily to incorporate the textuality/orality of ancient Greece into a modern Caribbean text, is somewhat more astounding. The ubiquity of the Adonaic figure in Omeros, and throughout West Indian culture, is a particularly striking illustration of this. One could suppose that Walcott read Sappho in Greek, and adopted the prosody, and though this seems somewhat unlikely, it is surely ill considered to believe that the kaisonians arrived at this metrical construction via a formal literary path. The

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appearance of this rhythmic figure in the Caribbean cannot easily be accounted for in a traditional societal/contextual model of artistic production. It would be far more bizarre to propose that the structure of a poet ‘s brain leads to the use of this figure. But the indeterminate, entropic strategy of misdirection Omeros employs is, as noted, essentially chaotic, and as such could be thought to acknowledge, and itself to be guided by “self-organizing criticality” (Bak 46) by which pattern emerges from chaos. Scale-free (random) processes will, within certain parameters, yield highly repeatable results.9 Rather than reading backwards from Executor to Sappho in an attempt to find some textual lineage which unites them, the similarities of their work can themselves be considered validation of the claim that functional/deterministic correspondences exist between the parameters within which Sapphic and kaisonian method emerged. Though their contexts differ greatly, both poets use similar strategies to sublimate the disruptive influence of their own formation. The series of assumptions upon which the overall poetic operation and effectiveness of Omeros rests have been shown to be politically and artistically perilous, opening Walcott to charges of intellectual naivety and imperial collusion. The notion that the agency of a coherent though all but indecipherable animist discourse partially accounts for the form of Caribbean culture could be dismissed as the romantic musings of an organicist two hundred years out of date. The claim that the very attempt to engage this discourse, far from being futile, is itself culturally constituting, and that the particular features of the attempt are socially definitive, may seem to be whimsical chicanery, diverting attention from Walcott’s inability to escape/confront/confound the idiom of empire. Indeed, his invocation of Omeros as poetic godfather and conduit to cultural articulation, other than showing considerable pluck, may be thought to illustrate the depth and breadth of Walcott’s estrangement from rank-and-file St. Lucia, and to fulfill Helen Vendler’s prophecy that “his learnedness might be the death of him” (Vendler 23). He is not, however, the first to suggest that “Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe are as much the heritage of black men and women as of white men and women” (Harris, “Comedy and Modern Allegory” 137). Walcott, it could be argued, tends to deracinate this heritage, “tired of their fucking guilt, /and our fucking envy” (LIV, i). But the patterned entropy Omeros’s philosophy of interjacence generates at every functional level invites a deterministic nonlinear systems approach to the poems ideology, and this approach contextualizes certain basal correlations between Greece, Africa, and the Caribbean, and in so doing critically validates an ahistorical fluency which many readers have noted in Walcott’s work, but have been unable to theoretically position: For Walcott a vision of history rooted in elation encompasses not the ethnic order and movement of a particular time and place but the recreated vision of an Adamic man, beginning afresh to name his landscape and his

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world, not with the naive innocence of a noble savage but with the memory and experience of an Adam with a past. (Wilson-Tagoe 52) This assessment rings very true, but the phrase “Adam with a past,” much like the phrase “prediction and memory,” is so thoroughly equivocal, embodying so fundamental a paradox, as to seem all but unaccountable for within a rigorous theoretical framework. Nevertheless, “Adam with a past” seems the perfect characterization of Achille in Africa, and, perhaps, of the poet/narrator in Ulissibona as “Sunday hears his own footsteps/making centuries recede” (XXXVII, i). A matching paradox is found at the center of many chaotic systems, of which the development of human society is surely the most chaotic; the instabilities and cascades of bifurcations which such dynamics exhibit ensure nonrepeatability,10 but in the midst of these bifurcations and their ever increasing disorder, there are moments of what might be termed entropic repetition. As a chaotic dynamic progresses, certain patterns recur.11 Clearly, some deep structure controls the evolution of such systems, which are therefore chaotic but not random. Such systems are pulled by some “unseen force,” referred to as a strange attractor, into an unpredictable but repeating orbit. This description bears an obvious similarity to the omeric method, which figures Omeros and the phantom narrator, Hellenic Greece and the twentieth-century West Indies, as re/iterations of the same act, each an utterly unique repetition of the same response to an unknown, perhaps unknowable subcode which subsumes all other operations: the codebook to the cultural machine of the Peoples of the Sea is made up of a network of subcodes holding together cosmogonies, mythic bestiaries, remote pharmacopoeias, oracles, profound ceremonies, and the mysteries and alchemies of antiquity… The keys to this vast hermetic labyrinth refer us to ‘another’ wisdom that lies forgotten in the foundation of the postindustrial world. (Benítez-Rojo 17) In Omeros, “‘another’ wisdom” is figured as the “sound that is missing,” a sound which is “hidden, not lost.” The process of the poem is not so much to uncover this sound as to show that it was never completely obscured in the first place, that evidence of its existence abounds in Caribbean society and art, as it had done in Homer’s Greece. Omeros seems never to have had any doubts about this, and his fluent manipulation of the “keys” to this code, the clues to its existence, led by the same cosmogonies and mysteries as the poet/narrator, make him invaluable to the omeric project of enunciation. The strange attractors model can account for Walcott’s individuality, and that of the “rhythm ‘of a certain kind’” he hopes to poetically embrace, while depicting Walcott and Homer, Castries and Athens as theoretically

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indistinguishable. More accurately stated, Walcott is enmeshed with Homer in that both orbit the topic at hand according to the same seminal approach to certain cosmological substructures. Having examined many instances of both particular and general similarities between these disparate cultures which can only be described as amazing, and having noted the curious attraction that pulls Omeros toward The Iliad and The Odyssey and the ease with which these texts intermingle, the term strange attractor seems all too appropriate. Both strains of chaos theory, self-organizing criticality and strange attractors, account for the deep-seated empathy Walcott finds to exist between the Caribbean’s engagement of the animist discourse as cosmological subtext and that of ancient Greece, showing each culture to be neither derivative nor original. Walcott’ ‘s conception of “memory” is perhaps more closely aligned with order out of chaos, that is, with the understanding that the present shape of Caribbean society allows us to extrapolate back into the past to see linkages with African and Aegean root cultures, while “prediction” is enabled by order within chaos, that is, the action of the strange attractors will cause the society to repeat itself in the future. In essence, both strains of chaos theory show Omeros to effect its sociological aspect by poising itself between order, “a perceived pattern in otherwise random events” (Stenger 14), and disorder, “a lack of information” (Stenger 22). This final formulation is chilling for theorists who equate fragmentation with aesthetic and political effectiveness, but it opens a captivating possibility to Walcott. The notion that order and disorder are indistinguishable12 renders concepts like fragmentation and unity, imitation and originality, and center and periphery, meaningless, and, contrary to Lyotard’s misunderstanding that chaos theory embraces the disjunctive and can spring critical inquiry from totalizing narratives (The Postmodern Condition), suggests an encompassing totality of human and natural affairs. Thus, “chaos has its frightening…aspects. Fragmentation and unpredictability are not always cause for celebration” (Hayles, Chaos Bound 17). For an artist intent not on rewriting a society but on writing it for the first time, an artist attempting to find the definiens which unite an emerging cultural identity, and in so doing help develop that identity, Hayles’s conclusion is hardly profound. The disjunctive poses certain problems for a poet intent on cultural definition, just as the totalizations of humanism conspire to deprive the poet of claims to cultural uniqueness. In the active, uninscribed and inherently entropic space between the Manichean options offered by postmodernism and humanism, Omeros embraces the twin paradoxes of order within chaos and order from chaos to show West Indian culture to be absolutely unique but endlessly reiterated: “the Caribbean can be read…as a stream of texts in flight, in intense differentiation among themselves and within whose complex coexistence there are vague regularities, usually paradoxical” (Benítez-Rojo 27). These regularities, some of which we have seen to be anything but vague, pin the cultures of the Peoples of the Sea to a common, though perhaps unknowable denominator, expressed through their nonviolational interpenetration of the

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animist discourse. This allows the “dialect of self and other in the context of a sense of place” (Baugh 126), so central to Walcott’s poetic oeuvre, to play out in Omeros as an operation which constitutes West Indian society even as it acknowledges the fact that “the powerful and often problematic relationship between human beings and their sense of place is remarkably universal” in the New World epic (Fitz 170). The relationship is examined in most New World poetic projects of social delineation, but the nature of the examination enacted in Omeros is a uniquely Caribbean entropic repetition of examinations carried out in certain root texts of the Old World. Such examinations, bound up with “the scope and capacity of the Word to come into equation with inimitable truth” (Harris, “In the Name of Liberty” 9), may be stripped of conclusions by the opacity of the animist discourse, which may remain beyond the scope of the Word as wielded by Walcott or Homer, but the nature of the examination reflects the operation of a strange attractor, which serves as “an essence that underpins, translates, transfigures the ground of all experience” (Harris, Four Banks xiii). In a sense then, not only is Homer “as much the heritage of black men and women as of white men and women,” but he is, in fact, much more closely aligned with the cultural products and practices of Afro-Caribbeans than of imperial Europeans. We have seen that the Homeric texts depict Africa as exotic, but not fundamentally distinct from the rest of the world, and that the Aithiopians were as worthy of Poseidon’s attentions as were the Athenians.13 Homer’s principal concerns, to enforce the importance of the notion of “home,” to depict the seminal, unifying features of a coherent Greek identity, and to document the emergence of Hellenic culture, are concerns very like those which focalize Omeros. The vitality generated by the methodology and mindset of The Iliad and The Odyssey is one Omeros hopes to capture. Walcott considers the Caribbean to be very much entitled to the guidance of Homer, and the Homeric texts seem to validate this sense of entitlement. Benítez-Rojo points out that “the correspondences between the Greek and Yoruba pantheons have been noted, but they have not been explained” (15). While chaos theory does not offer an explanation, per se, it can account for these correlations within the auspices of a coherent critical system which normalizes the relationships such correspondences imply, even as it sees each pantheon as utterly unique. It is as foolish to wonder who derived the pantheon from whom as it is to wonder whether the Maya learned to build pyramids from the Egyptians, or vice versa. To simply dismiss such correspondences as coincidence would, of course, be equally absurd. But to see such correspondences as re/iterations in the midst of ceaseless systematic bifurcations which comprise the development of a certain cultural strain is a paradoxical but nonetheless effective “solution” that provides an unyielding critical foundation for the omeric method, as well as a means of articulating a theoretically cogent appraisal of the more puzzling aspects of the strategy of interjacence. From this emerges the rather startling conclusion that Homer is the spiritual inheritance of the Caribbean writer, as cultural ethnarch of the Peoples of the Sea,

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while the Eurocentric writer has only the most tenuous affiliation with the Homeric legacy, a conclusion which manifests itself most fully in consideration of the self/other cultural dialectic. Young notes that “Englishness…has never been successfully characterized by an essential core identity from which the other is excluded,” pointing out that Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy is predicated on the fact that “English culture is lacking, lacks something and acts out an inner dissonance that constitutes its secret, riven self” (Colonial Desire 3). The project of keeping this riven self hidden was, it could be argued, the central thrust of imperial cultural enunciation. The use of race as a tool in this project seems to have been a matter of expedience; but in any case, this is a response to the central dialectic of social delineation which could scarcely be more different from that of the Athenians, for example, for whom race and class seem to have been unrelated—“Athenian” seems to have been a political rather than an racial term.14 And despite Pliny’s catalogue of various permutations of humanity (c.f. Pliny 47–51), a tome which essentially comprises a fanciful compendium of human oddities, the notion that the mark of a person is found in their skin is a peculiarly Medieval conceit, important to Chanson de Roland and its dauntless Ethiopians, “a cursed people, blacker than ink” (11.164), but one which would have seemed a bizarre confabulation in the ancient Greek conception of identity. Of course, in the project of hiding the riven self of empire, it was of paramount importance, if one were to use a racially specified other, to show that differences of complexion were indicative of moral differences. So, “the black Ethiopian was associated with sin and with the diabolical by homiletic writers such as Paulinus of Nola, who explained that they were burned black not by the sun but by vices and sin” (Friedman 65). The Ethiopian, closest to the sun god in Homer, has been placed farthest from the Son of God in Chanson de Roland. It was a small step from here to argue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that “the lower races…are destined to serve the nobility of mankind, and may be tamed, trained, and used like domestic animals, or may, according to circumstances, be fattened or used for physiological or other experiments without compunction” (Waitz 13). To contextualize this matter in terms of strange attractors is to realize that the racial theory of imperial Europe was not designed to allow Europeans to treat Africans as beasts; rather, to treat Africans like beasts was to validate the cultural methodology the empire deployed to constitute itself. In other words, the claim “blacks are other so we can treat them with violence” is converted into “We treat blacks with violence, therefore they are other.” In denying its polyglot nature, imperialist cultural practice clearly orbits a different strange attractor from ancient Greece or the Caribbean. Propelled by violence, imperialist social discourse is the absolute antithesis of the discourse of the Peoples of the Sea, which is powered by a sublimation of violence, even the violence of its own operation. Given these differing orbits, the belief of empire that it had somehow managed to imprint its values upon The Iliad or The Odyssey, that it had irrevocably inscribed any of the root texts of the west, is no more than fantasy. In orbit

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around a different attractor, empire was incapable of any direct intercourse with these texts whatsoever, having no point of access into the “rhythm ‘of a certain kind’” according to which Hellenic cultural methodology proceeded. In adopting Homeric figuration or Sapphic meter Walcott is, in effect, distancing Omeros from “the mighty line of Marlowe and Milton,” while simultaneously inculcating the formative sensibilities of the Aithiopeans. In this is seen Walcott’s subtlest sleight of poetic hand, his most devious act of misdirection. III In the beginning was the Word, in the beginning was the language of sculpture, in the beginning was the intuitive/inner voice of the mask, in the beginning was the painted cosmos and its orchestra of light and darkness. (Harris, “Literacy and the Imagination” 26) Wilson Harris offers this pronouncement as a commentary on the narrative voice of Palace of the Peacock, “The living closed eye” which “is a verbal construct, but it is something sculpted as well” (26). The passage could just as easily refer to the operation of the interlacing technical machinations which the omeric strategy of interjacence executes as it attempts to draw Word and world, cosmological substructure, animist discourse, and cultural/contextual codes into the aesthetic space it creates for itself. The constant, misdirecting bifurcations Omeros generates across the entire spectrum of its poetic operation allow Walcott to weave some of the planet’s most ancient texts into the cultural fabric spun by an “entirely new historical and social category…[the] West Indian black who was a slave” (James 4). This points to the unique discursive agency of landscape in the Caribbean, while avoiding the headpatting platitude that West Indians “have preserved a sense of the life of the earth” (Coulthard 49). Omeros makes a handle of the inherently fluid nature of discourse, even as it heeds the warning that it is “just as transcendentally unhistorical to assert that all discourse is undecidable as it is to claim that all language is luminously clear” (Eagleton 103). Shadows draw the poet/narrator into the past which would be his future, speaking the unknowable code, all too well known: the shadows crossed me, signing their black language. I felt transported, past shops smelling of cod to a place I had lost in the open book of the street, and could not find. It was another country, whose excitable gestures I knew but could not connect with my mind,

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like my mother ‘s amnesia; untranslatable answers accompanied these actual spirits who had forgotten me as much as I, too, had forgotten a continent in narrow streets. Now, in night’s unsettling noises, what I heard enclosed my skin with an older darkness. I stood in a village whose fires flickered in my head with tongues of speech I no longer understood, but where my flesh did not need to be translated; (XXII, ii) The shadow’s language is a tablature of chaos, erupting from deterministic undecidability and, as such, providing answers in untranslatable form even as it translates the gestures of another country by circumventing the operation of intellect. As the transfiguring “night’s unsettling noises” become the basis of a Gnostic Pentecost in which flesh simply understands the “older darkness” in which it is wrapped, translation becomes irrelevant; as the distinction between memory and prediction collapses, the distinction between being and becoming is lost. Walcott’ ‘s various techniques of misdirection unite to suspend the poem between order and disorder, the known and the perhaps unknowable, the action of its own bifurcations not simply mirroring the importance of the kinetic to the West Indian psyche, but re/enacting this process from moment to moment, line to line. Omeros parenthetically acknowledges the fact that “only the patronizing artist can fix a people in their folk culture, which then becomes static and a parody of creation, an object of tourist consumption” (Durix 26), while nucleating the belief that “if tradition were dogma it would be entirely dormant and passive, but since it is inherently active at all times, whether secretly or openly, it participates in the ground of living necessity by questioning all assumptions of character, and conceptions of place and identity” (Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society 46). The omeric interrogation of place and identity mis/directs the reader to Roger Bacon’s axiom, following Porphyry, that “place is the beginning of all existence, even as a father” (I.159), but packages this notion in a manner which forces the reader “to appreciate the full force of commonality and pattern as a unifying factor in the interpretation of human creativity” (Barrow 245). In the end, Walcott’s use of pseudo-Dantean verse and Sapphic prosody, Homeric sensibility and Virgilian method is clearly no puerile attempt to flutter the Dovecotes, a shocking divergence from the postcolonial activity of “sloughing off Eurocentricism for indigeneity” (Ramazani 405). Quite the contrary, it is a means of uncovering the vital, seething absence at the center of West Indian life, and its perpetual, self-constituting motion. One leaves Omeros having drawn Achille and Achilles closer together than could possibly have been imagined upon first encountering the text: Achilles’s rage and Achille’s serenity

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no more than nuances of response to the same elementary complexities of existence. The poet/narrator and Omeros, indeed, Walcott and Homer themselves, are all locked into the same orbit around the same impenetrable questions, each a unique iteration of the same refracting answers. As The Iliad and The Odyssey are cyclic, so too is Omeros, but each is no more than a single revolution in a larger project of enunciation extending back into prehistory and forward to the ends of time as the Peoples of the Sea continue to constitute themselves, each enunciating act the same, each text unique to the marrow. Guided by the animist discourse, a discourse dominated in the Antilles by the mercurial voice of the sea, Hector and Helen, Plunkett and Achille, all play their parts in a drama of articulation which spills over the text and into a dialogue blending two cultures twenty-six centuries removed in an act whose end is unthinkable. As we leave the poem the sea is still going on.

Notes

I: Greek Calypso 1. Catalexis is a relative term which refers to the suppression of a syllable in the concluding metron of a line. Different catalectic lines will thus end differently. I use the term to refer exclusively to lines ending 2. I am not here suggesting that Walcott is attempting to employ principles of quantity, or duration, in the prosody, but simply that he is using stress, the usual marker of English language meter, to imitate the metrical patterns of Classical verse. Thus, a stressed syllable is to be equated with a long vowel, and an unstressed syllable with a short vowel. 3. Although it is not the aim of this chapter to engage in a numerological analysis, one cannot help but notice the preponderance of the number three in Omeros. The poem is written in tercets, with predominantly ternary meters. The sole exception is chapter XXXIII, section iii. Each chapter is divided into three sections. The longest sections contain thirty-three tercets. There are three such sections. The shortest section contains three tercets. Chapter III, section iii has thirty-three lines, as does the thirty-third section, and chapter XXXIII, section i, the midpoint of the poem. The poem as a whole can be divided into three metrically distinct parts. There are three interwoven plots, one centering on Achille, one on Plunket, and one on the poet/narrator. There are three women involved in the St. Lucian storyline. The deaths of three characters are depicted, as are three ancient battles. Three dead characters give speeches, as do three poets (including the narrator). St. Lucia is called by three different names, and the action takes place on three different continents. 4. This line is taken from the original galley proof of the poem. In the final, published version the line was to become “I hated signs of scansion.”

II: The Color of Shadows 1. That Homer should, at the very beginning of The Odyssey, and thus at the very inception of the European canon, have installed Africa as the symbol of the exotic would no doubt not have been lost on Walcott. Nor would the fact that one of the

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most powerful of the Olympians deigned Africans worthy of spending time with. In fact, a visit to this most remote of people is Homer’s regular way of motivating the absence of any god from Olympus. The intricate relationship and correspondences between the root cultures of Europe and the ancestral homeland of black Caribbeans is explored in depth in the final chapter of this study, as is the notion that the barbarous mentality of the European slaving era is but little connected to the formative elements of European art. 2. This metaphor is also employed, to the same end, in the pivotal twelfth chapter of Another Life. 3. Walcott hints at the validity of approaching African and St. Lucian landscape with a common sensibility, since he depicts the crocodiles as “slitting the pods of their eyes” (XXV, i) just as the St Lucian iguana had witnessed Achille’s actions through “the slit pods of its eyes” (I, i). 4. This understanding has a peculiar impact on the manner in which the colonial experience is interpreted. Insofar as the empire forced the colonies to operate as shadow, or other, in order to confirm their own existence, then imperial identity is sustained by nothingness. Therefore, the colonizer’s practice of forcing the colonized to mimic is a practice which ultimately undermines imperial identity.

III: Strange Attractors 1. Africa and Aphrodite actually have nothing in common as far as Greek roots go. 2. This double-voice finds expression in the Bakhtinian conception of language as “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance” (The Dialogic Imagination 358) existing together as “a single syntactic whole” (304). This instability is also inherent in the Derridian notion that each word contains within itself concerns of absence and presence, similarity and difference, producing an oscillation between two meanings which leaves us unable to determine which is primary, and ultimately forces us to consider not just the impossibility of linguistic presence but also “the transgressive relationship which links the world of meaning with the world of non-meaning” (Writing and Difference 275). 3. Spivak, for instance, refers to British attempts to end the observance of Sati, whereby a widow would immolate herself on her husbands funeral pyre (“Can the Subaltern Speak?” 296–297). But the very fact that British administrators picked and chose which local customs to involve themselves in, that is, which to outlaw and which to condone, shows how different was the colonial situation of the Raj from the utter disregard for indigenous custom, not to mention the ghoulish violence, with which the European industrial machine extracted raw materials from Africa. 4. The operation of poststructural methodology in the study of post-colonialism has, it must be concluded, borne the same results it has in its application to other literary and historical periods—to remind us that language is not the ahistorical, amoral vehicle of signification it was once thought to be. In the African and Caribbean contexts this insight seems largely tautological; one suspects that Afro-Caribbeans hardly needed Bakhtin or Derrida to point out that “the language used to enact, enforce describe or analyze colonialism is not transparent, innocent,” nor that the

NOTES

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6.

7.

8.

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empire did not just flood a region with military might, but also “permeated forms of knowledge” (Young, Colonial Desire 163). So too, it should be added, must any commentary on the prosodic or figurative features of a Caribbean text, or on its pattern of allusions, conclude simply “This is a text.” The postmodern conception of parody, as perhaps most fully developed in Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody, is, of course, ultimately ubiquitous. Using a definition which sees parody “as signaling difference at the heart of similarity and as an authorized transgression of convention” (Hutcheon, Poetics x) it is difficult to conceive of a text which is not parodic. In claiming that Omeros is not parodic, I use the term in its more usual sense, with the implication that if the poem were a parody, readers would be able to perceive which ante-rior text is being parodied. The notion that we have been genetically preprogrammed by evolution to behave in certain largely predictable manners, and thus to produce certain specific and largely predictable forms of utterance, is applied to aesthetics most forcefully by Dissanayake, who argues that the characteristics of “human nature” responsible for ritual intersect in some way to produce art (126–27). These traits—sociality, ordering and tool making among them—are apparently so globally common that differences between the art forms of various cultures are to be seen as erratic nuances, minor deviations from bio-evolutionary drives which cannot be overwritten. This socio-biological understanding of art leads to some rather astonishing conclusions, especially when applied to poetry. Perhaps most interesting to present purposes is the claim that metered poetry is universal, and features lines which are read aloud in approximately three seconds (Turner and Pöppel 281–300); one wonders how the twenty-four-syllable Homeric lines would sound if rendered in three seconds. Benítez-Rojo’s use of the terms flux and rhythm, and certainly the cryptotranslation “of a certain kind,” are rather abstruse, but this is largely owing to the multifaceted complexity of the topic under investigation. In general, chaos theory examines the relationship between “language” (natural, genetic, machine, etc.) and “thinking” (generically referred to as information processing) by dividing the operation into three hierarchical levels, one level being considered “higher” than the next if its assumptions are the results of processes of the “lower” level: syntactic (“alphabet”), which carries no meaning; semantic, which concerns the interaction between symbols and stimuli; and pragmatic, which concerns the relationship between symbols and patterns. It is the semantic level, the traditional area of cognitive psychology, with which Benítez-Rojo and readers of Omeros are primarily concerned, though this “‘bootstrap’ hierarchy…means that all levels are dynamically intercoupled via feedback-feedforward loops” (Nicolis 4). But the socially constituting practices of the Peoples of the Sea are multivariate, obliterating their own correspondences between symbol and stimulus “in a soup of signs” (Benítez-Rojo 2), and are thus best considered in terms of the rhythm such interaction produces. It is the semantic level at which pattern recognition and category formation (“coexisting attractors”) take place, and which thus allows us to equate the deterministic nonlinear function of ancient Greek society to that of the contemporary West Indies. This is also the “multifractal” level. It should be noted that the precise manner in which these three levels interact is unknown (c.f. Nicolis 2–10).

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9. The process by which this phenomenon is best illustrated is that of an hourglass. As each grain of sand falls from the top half of the timer to the bottom, its path and final placement are erratic, and the pile of sand which forms at the bottom is subject to scale free avalanches. Nevertheless, once each grain of sand has fallen to an unpredictable place in the bottom, a predictable, conical pile of sand has formed. A number of small-scale chaotic events can lead to large-scale pattern. This is a process, one supposes, not unlike that by which “time sifts/like grain from a jute sack” in Ulissibona, perhaps “repeating the X of an hourglass” (XXXVII, i). 10. That is, the same process (mathematical equations, fluid dynamics experiments, etc.) set in motion twice, each time with the most minuscule difference in initial parameters will yield wildly different results. 11. In nonhomogenous probability density functions, or fractals, one would expect a continuous, uninterrupted development of ever increasing entropy. But as Mandlebrot’s set, the most famous fractal illustrates, this movement toward entropy is punctuated by the emergence of the same “picture” over and over. 12. The contention is that distinctions between order and disorder are based on ignorance— no phenomenon is disorderly, just poorly understood. Once enough is known about the operation of a given phenomenon, its operation will be seen to be ordered. This conception may have its roots in Einstein’s appraisal of the peculiar randomness quantum mechanics generates: “I am, in fact, fairly convinced that the essentially statistical char-acter of contemporary quantum theory is solely ascribed to the fact that this operates with an incomplete description of physical systems” (Einstein 667). This division is closely related to the division between determinism, “how nature behaves, and predictability… what we humans are able to observe, analyze, and compute” (Bricmont 133). 13. Though the etymology is somewhat uncertain, the term Aithiopean seems to have been derived from the Greek aith, meaning “blaze,” and ope, meaning “face” (c.f. Friedman 8). The suggestion was that the African’s pigmentation resulted from living in close proximity to Hyperion, an uncomfortable but not ignoble condition in Greek cosmology. 14. The term “Greek” was used to refer to those who spoke Greek as their mother tongue.

Works Cited

PRIMARY SOURCES Poetry 25 Poems. Port of Spain: Guardian Commercial Printery, 1948. Epitaph for the Young: A Poem in XII Cantos. Bridgetown: Advocate, 1949. “Cry for a Leader.” Unpublished, c.1949. In a Green Night: Poems, 1948–1960. London: Jonathon Cape, 1962. Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964. The Castaway and Other Poems. London: Jonathon Cape, 1965. The Gulf and Other Poems, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974. Sea Grapes. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976. The Star-Apple Kingdom. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. The Fortunate Traveller. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981. Midsummer. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984. Collected Poems: 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. The Arkansas Testament. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. The Bounty. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997.

Essays “Society and the Artist.” Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Ed. Robert Hamner. Washington: Three Continents, 1993. 15–17. “History and Picong…in the Middle Passage.” Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Ed. Robert Hamner. Washington: Three Continents, 1993. 18–19. “Necessity of Negritude.” Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Ed. Robert Hamner. Washington: Three Continents, 1993. 20–24. “Leaving School.” Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Ed. Robert Hamner. Washington: Three Continents, 1993. 24–32. “The Figure of Crusoe.” Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Ed. Robert Hamner. Washington: Three Continents, 1993. 33–40. “Tribal Flutes.” Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Ed. Robert Hamner. Washington: Three Continents, 1993. 41–44. “Meanings.” Savacou 2(1970):45–51. “What the Twilight Says: An Overture.” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. 3–40.

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“The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16.1(February 1974):3–13. “The Muse of History.” Is Massa Day Done? Black Moods in the Caribbean. Ed. Orde Coombs. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1974. 1–27. “Caligula’s Horse.” After Europe. Eds. Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin. Coventry: Dangaroo, 1989. 138–42. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992. “The Road Taken.” Homage to Robert Frost. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. 93–117.

Plays Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes. Bridgetown: Advocate, 1950. Ione: A Play with Music. Mona: University of the West Indies Extra-Mural Department, 1957. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. The Joker of Seville and O Babylon! New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978. Remembrance and Pantomime. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980.

SECONDARY SOURCES Anon. “Work-songs, I and II.” The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. Ed. Paula Burnett. London: Penguin, 1986. 3. Anon. La Chanson de Roland. Trans. Howard Robertson. London: Dent, 1972. Abercrombie, Lascelles. The Epic. 1914. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969. Adams, Stephen. “The Metrical Contract of The Cantos.” Journal of Modern Literature XV:1(Summer 1988):55–72. Alghieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Allan Mandelbaum. 3 vols. Berkeley: U of Cali-fornia P, 1980. Attridge, Derek. The Rhythms of English Poetry. NewYork: Longman, 1982. ——. Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Bacon, Roger. Opus Majus. Trans. Robert Belle Burke. 2 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962. Bailyn, Bernard and Phillip D. Morgan, eds. Strangers within the Realm. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Bak, P. “Self-Organizing Criticality.” Scientific American (January 1991): 46–53. Baker, Patrick. Centering the Periphery: Chaos, Order, and the Ethnohistory of Dominica. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 1994. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Carl Emmerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Barrow, John. The Artful Universe. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. ——. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Baugh, Edward. Memory as Vision: Another Life. Norfolk: Longman, 1978. Benfey, Christopher. “Coming Home.” The New Republic (October 29,1990):36–39.

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Index

aristeiai 63 Alighieri, Dante 65, 66, 81, 87, 97 Inferno 65, 66, 88, 97, 105, 113 Arnold, Matthew 124 aulodes 53

periplous 59, 101 Pliny 124 Porphyry 126 Pound, Ezra 6, 52, 55, 61, 74 rhapsode 53

Bacon, Roger 126 Blake, William 72 Brathwaite, E.K. viii, 53, 82, 83, 86

Sappho 55, 119, 120 self-organizing criticality 120, 122 Shakespeare, William 15, 120 strange attractors 122, 124, 131

Chanson de Roland 124 García-Márquez, Gabriel 111 griot 54, 93, 94, 104

Virgil 62, 63, 67, 69, 70, 72, 76, 85, 88, 97, 101, 114, 116, 127 The Aeneid 56, 61, 63, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 85, 86, 100

Harris, Wilson 121, 123, 125, 126 Homer 61, 62, 63, 69, 70, 72, 74, 76, 87, 88, 97, 101, 114, 115, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128 The Odyssey 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 76, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99, 100, 101, 116, 117, 118, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128 The Iliad 56, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 67, 70, 71, 72, 76, 79, 99, 118, 122, 123, 125, 127

Walcott, Derek A Far Cry From Africa 102, 103 Air 102, 106 A Latin Primer 68 Another Life x, 82, 130 Crusoe’s Island 96 105, 106 Cry for a Leader 63 Cul de Sac Valley 81, 82 Epitaph for the Young 80 Henri Christophe 62 Joker of Seville (The) 104 Midsummer 80 Nearing Forty 116 O Babylon 104 Sea Is History (The) 82 Ti Jean and His Brothers 63 To Return to the Trees 78, 79

kaiso 54, 55, 120 Marlowe, Christopher 113, 125 Milton, John 14, 20, 36, 37, 63, 81, 113, 125 nekuia 87, 88, 92, 93, 95 nostos 92, 98, 100 140