Homer and Virgil

Walcott was defensive about the classical borrowings inOmerosas soon as it was

published. ‘I know what’s going to happen with this book. People are going to say, “Oh, Walcott, now he is going for the big bucks. There’s theIliad, there’s the

Odyssey, there’sUlyssesand now he figures, well, I’m ready now – here’s my big

one.”…So what’s going to happen? The parenthesis, the large parenthesis will begin.

4 _{Derek Walcott, interviewed by Anthony Milne 1982, reprinted in Conversations with Derek Walcott,}

p. 76.

5 _{Derek Walcott, ‘Reflections onOmeros’, reprinted inThe Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertxtual}

Perspectives, p 240.

Everyone will put in a bracket – now he is trying to doUlysses.’7He went on to say it

was humorous for him to try to recapture, or make a parallel of the Caribbean prior to Greece. He stressed the differences (‘An almond leaf is not an olive leaf’) and said that art, literature were what made a leaf important.

The borrowings from Homer, and the odd bit of Virgil, are mostly character traits, or distant allusions to events. They are so generic, given the way the classics have become incorporated in Western thought, that they are not borrowings so much as the use of a common and long-established language that happens to have nouns that include a beauty called Helen, a sulky hero called Achilles, a wounded Philoctetes. Walcott denied reading Homer in his entirety – ‘“I never read it,”/I said. “Not all the way through.”’ (LVI/iii/4) and ‘I don’t know theIliadand I don’t know theOdyssey.

I’ve never read them.’8 He does not attempt inOmerosan updating or a significant

retelling in the Caribbean context, but his playThe Odyssey, worked on during the

same period and completed soon afterwards, is much more faithful to the Homeric storyline. His claim not to have read Homer should not be taken entirely at face value.

7.3 Dante

Though there are more identifiable parallels between Dante andOmeros, Walcott was

again at pains to deny too deliberate a borrowing. He pointed out, maybe with his tongue in his cheek, that a volcano (‘a standard plot in any epic’) was a natural

7 _{Derek Walcott, interviewed by Robert Brown and Cheryl Johnson 1990, reprinted inConversations}

with Derek Walcott, pp.182-3.

8

Derek Walcott, interviewed by J. P. White 1990, reprinted inConversations with Derek Walcott, p. 173.

metaphor for the dead emerging from the mists, but that as soon as he wrote that people were going to think of Dante. Only folk who did not know Dante would see the image as he, Walcott, thought of it.9 Fumagalli’s painstaking analysis and her discussion with Walcott draw out a far more complete truth.

Fumagalli points out that the structure ofOmerosis ‘thoroughly Dantesque. The book

is a re-enactment of the same spiritual journey by different characters

(Walcott/Narrator, Achille, Philoctete, Major Plunkett) led by alternating guides.’ She goes on to state that the ‘cinematic’ aspect ofOmerosowes much to Dante. In

interview with her, Walcott says, ‘the antecedent of cinema is Dante; no other poet has his cinematic transparency.’ He also praises Dante’s use of parenthesis as a means of concentrating experience into something like an epiphany.10He uses the technique himself, for example at LVI/i/7, where Walcott interrupts his morning view from the hotel for the journey with Omeros through Malebolge, ending at LIX/i.

Fumagalli compares the meetings between Walcott and his father’s ghost inEpitaph

for the YoungandOmerosand says that putting the works side by side offers ‘a

unique insight into both Walcott’s development as a poet and his assimilation of Dante.’ She sees a significant development in the adoption ofterza rimain the later

work, relating this to Warwick’s injunctions to Walcott inOmerosto ‘give those feet

a voice’ (XIII/iii/12). She interprets that as ‘implicitly urging him to reconsider precisely the Dantesque aspects that were neglected in theEpitaph –“local intensity,”

the use of the vernacular, and perhaps, as a “voice” for those “feet”,terza rima.’ and

suggests that he had by this time (the writing ofOmeros) ‘assimilated Dante almost to

9 _{Derek Walcott, interviewed by Robert Brown and Cheryl Johnson 1990, reprinted inConversations}

with Derek Walcott, p. 185.

the point of second nature.’11 We shall see in the section on Prosody below that in respect ofterza rima, the assimilation was less than complete.

There is a more direct borrowing in XLIX/i/8, where Ma Kilman’s scrubbing of Philoctete’s face parallels Dante’sPurgatorio, Canto I, where Virgil wets his hands

with dew from the grass and wipes Dante’s tearful face, cleansing him of Hell’s foulness. Philoctete has a Dantesque aspect, too, in that he represents the loss of language after the Middle Passage and generations of slavery. With this in mind, Fumagalli points out the similarity of Dante’sPurgatorio I‘Ma qui la morta poesì

resurga’ (‘but let dead poetry rise again’) to Philoctete’s resurrection, ‘Philoctete shook himself up from the bed of his grave’ (XLVIII/ii/15).12

BothAnother LifeandOmerosassociate Soufrière with Dante’s Malebolge. It is at

Soufrière that Walcott’s Narrator is led through the Eighth Circle of Hell encountering the damned. One of the spectres of the Malebolge the Narrator meets is Hector’s, shouldering an oar in Dantesquecontrapasso, retribution befitting his crime of

abandoning the sea (Epitaph for the Younghad also includedcontrapasso). He also

meets Charon, who is grizzled with white stubble on his chin, like Dante’s Charon ‘bianco per antico pelo’. Fumagalli analyses the Narrator’s journey through the Malebolge in detail, finding parallels throughout.13

Though the detailed comparisons are there and many in Fumagalli, it is clear from Walcott’s comments and her own analysis that he turned to Dante in the first place for reasons of language rather than story or character. He praises Dante’s ‘permanent

11 _{Maria Cristina Fumagalli,The Flight of the Vernacular, pp. 193-4.} 12

Maria Cristina Fumagalli,The Flight of the Vernacular, pp. 200-201.

immediacy, the permanent freshness of his work’, precisely the quality he was

seeking in his quest for a light beyond metaphor, and goes on to draw a relationship of simplicity and narrative power between Dante and one of his other models for the writing inOmeros, Hemingway. He emphasises Dante’s visual, almost pictorial,

imagery […] ‘far stronger than it is in Hemingway’, something that appealed to both the artist and writer in Walcott. He then says that ‘what is really startling in Dante is a thing that no other writer has – that is parenthesis, a parenthesis that contains

sometimes more drama than the action.’14

For Walcott, Dante’s dialogues ‘are amazing.’ He praises them for the same reasons: immediacy, simplicity and furthermore their rhythm and vernacular power. ‘The really, really astonishing thing in Dante, in fact, is to have a tone that is not

rhetorical.’ It is those that he will have had in mind, when constructing his exchanges in patois and English Creole. ‘[Y]ou always have to decide, in the greatest poetry, if somebody is capable of such speech.’15

It is notable that when his Narrator is led through the Malebolge, he is most in danger when he meets the self-satisfied poets, condemned to the pit for seeing only the surface of things, who ‘smiled at their similes’. Walcott is fleeing pride in his craft and is only saved from slipping back by Omeros, whom he begs for another chance at language (LVIII/iii/4-9).

He places himself thus in the company of two of the acknowledged classical masters of Old World literature. Though he alludes to them strongly in both the framework of

14

Maria Cristina Fumagalli,The Flight of the Vernacular, pp. 276-277.

his story and, at first, his metaphors, his wish to emulate their approach to language (simple, vernacular, direct) requires him ultimately to move to new, local metaphors and a story that is firmly of St Lucia today. By adopting his masters and then moving on, he places himself and St Lucia as both bearers and renewers of tradition, at neither the centre nor the periphery of the Old Culture but at the forefront of something new.