Forgettable Vacations and Metaphor in Ruins

Walcott's Omeros

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3600979
AutoresNatalie Melas (autor de correspondencia)
Año2005
Volumen28
Número1
Páginas147-168
Fecha de publicación2005-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCallaloo (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0161-2492 • E-ISSN: 1080-6512
EditorialProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/cal.2005.0028
OpenAlexW2046025664
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas9

Forgettable Vacations and Metaphor in Ruins:Walcott's Omeros Natalie Melas (bio) But in our tourist brochures the Caribbean is a blue pool into which the republic dangles the extended foot of Florida as inflated rubber islands bob and drinks with umbrellas float towards her on a raft. This is how the islands from the shame of necessity sell themselves; this is the seasonal erosion of their identity, that high-pitched repetition of the same images of service that cannot distinguish one island from the other, with a future of polluted marinas, land deals negotiated by the ministers, and all of this conducted to the music of Happy Hour and the rictus of a smile. (The Antilles) He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is the convulsive possession. (Caillois 30) It is difficult to take up Derek Walcott's book-length poem Omeros without saying of it, as critics regularly do, that it is a monumental achievement. One can propose a catalogue of features that earn it this distinction: its virtuosic versification combining a kind of hexameter with a Dantesque terza rima; its complex narrative; its subtle and polyvalent reflexiveness; the sheer variety of its registers of diction and plot; the wealth and resonance of its imagery. But the phrase "monumental achievement," particular when it applies to the intrinsically historical genre of epic resonates oddly with the antihistoricist postcolonial aesthetic Walcott develops in his earlier essays whose discourse on amnesia would seem to resist, if not actively oppose, conventional notions of monumentality, posed as these are in a redemptive relation to history. "History is irrelevant in the Caribbean," he writes point blank in "The Caribbean: Culture of Mimicry" (5). In the "The Muse of History," the essay in which he elaborates this argument most fully, he explains himself in words that are no less provocative: "the truly tough aesthetic of the New World neither explains nor forgives history. It refuses to recognize it as a creative or culpable force" (2). Another Life (1965-73), a long autobiographical poem that records the early phase of Walcott's warns against the epic genre ("Provincialism loves the pseudo-epic" [183]), presumably because, given the banality of history for the colonial, the disproportion between [End Page 147] the bombast of the genre and the insignificance of provincial life is a recipe for mock epic. A witty catalogue of vignettes of local characters presented under the names of heroes from Greek mythology demonstrates the proposition. Epic monumentality is clearly not here a viable possibility. How is it then that Walcott attempts just such an epic twenty years later and avoids parody? One way to approach the question is to look in the text for the techniques Walcott develops to carve out a space for "an epic of the dispossessed," in the words of Robert Hamner's apt title. Omeros is, for instance, highly reflexive for it stages the conditions of its own writing in two authorial figures and prominently features a metadiscourse on its own operations. If self-consciousness creates a distance from parody, other rhetorical strategies preempt it, such as the elaborate "rhetoric of disavowal" Gregson Davis outlines in which Walcott secures legitimation for the work's epic scope in the very gesture of disavowing any epic intention or pretension. Another approach to Omeros' evasion of parody is to look at the text's context, its broader conditions of possibility. St. Lucia itself is no longer provincial in the sense that it was in the twilight of empire for it has gone, along with so much of the region, from a backwater of colonial history to a tourist Mecca. The island is no longer a forgettable speck on the fringe of empire but an objectless destination, and it is this commodification of the place itself, I argue, that creates the backdrop against which the affliction of postcolonial history expunged from the essays becomes at once irrelevant and necessary. Tourism can resembles imperialism in many respects, particularly in the Caribbean where it wears uncannily similar faces, with relatively wealthy white visitors (although there is also an increase in black middle class heritage tourism) served by

Allusion · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Travel Writing and Literature