"When he left the beach the sea was still going on": Walcott (re)verses Joyce

Chapter Four

“When he left the beach the seawas still going on”: Walcott(re)verses Joyce

Joyce was afraid of thunder, But lions roared at his

funeral From the Zurich zoo. Was it Zurich or Trieste? No matter. There are legends,

as much as the death of Joyce

is legend, [...] One could abandon writing

for the slow-burningsignals

of the great, to be,instead,

their ideal reader,ruminative,

voracious, making thelove of masterpieces

superior to attempting to repeat or outdo them,

and be thegreatest reader in the world.

DerekWalcott, “Volcano”.

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In this chapter I concentrate on theimpact of Ulysses on what is generallyconsidered one of Derek Walcott’s greatestliterary achievement, the epic narrativepoem Omeros (1990), a work that contributedto earn him the Nobel Prize for Literaturein 1992.Educated in the Irish Catholic college of

Saint Mary1 in Castries, the capital of theCaribbean island of Saint Lucia, Walcott’searly years were shaped by the compellingmulticultural environment of the island, inwhich the strong Irish mark of his educationplayed a crucial role. Indeed throughout hisworks, the poet shows a non-casual closenessand affinity with Irish culture and withsome of the questions associated with Irishnationalism. These are the years in whichWalcott reads Joyce, Beckett, Yeats andSynge, and begins to reflect on culturalidentity, a major feature in both his poeticand dramatic production. In a 1977 interviewconducted by Edward Hirsch, Walcottacknowledges the attraction exerted by Irishliterature on his writing as well as thetragedy of sharing a similar colonialdestiny:

The whole Irish influence was for me a very intimateone. [...]I had been reading a lot of Irishliterature: I read Joyce, naturally I knew Yeats, andso on. I've always felt some kind of intimacy withthe Irish poets because one realized that they werealso colonials with the same kind of problems thatexisted in the Caribbean. They were the niggers ofBritain.2

1 Walcott is a Methodist, but because Methodism was aminority religion in St. Lucia he attended a Catholicschool.

“When he left the beach the sea was still going on”: Walcott (re)verses Joyce

Walcott’s Irishness, then, is a category inwhich literary and (post) colonialaffinities are inextricably interwoven,indeed they concur to create a peculiarcultural dimension from which he drawsinspiration.In this regard, it is remarkable that Ulyssesrepresents one of Omeros most importantsubtexts. As a matter of fact, the verynotion of Irishness is constantly challengedand questioned in the novel through variouscharacters and in particular through Stephenand Bloom. Stephen represents the artist tobe, “doomed” to express his own creativitythrough the coloniser’s language while Bloomrepresents the (Hungarian) immigrant’s son,who tries to find his own (existential andcultural) space in a country, which at thesame time is and is not his nation. InOmeros, Walcott explores even further someof the issues Joyce brought to the fore inUlysses. He does so in dialogical terms, à laBakhtin. Hence throughout the poem both thenarrator and the blind poet Omeros3 seem toestablish a kind of deferred dialogue withJoyce made of a web of intertextualreferences.

It is precisely through such a “literarydialogue” that Joyce’s influence isrevealed. In the pages that follow I willdiscuss the nature of this influence byexploring three key issues that stronglymark both Joyce’s and Walcott’s writing: therole and function of epic, history andimperialism and the father-son relationship.As I will not be able to trace here all the

2Edward Hirsch, “An Interview with Derek Walcott”,Contemporary Literature, vol.20, No.3, Summer 1979, pp. 279-292, p. 288.3 As I will show later, these two figures

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possible connections between Walcott andJoyce –Joyce being a powerful referent pointthroughout Walcott’s complex and multi-layered poem– I intend to give an insightinto the most interesting and engagingaspects of Joyce’s influence on theCaribbean poet. Accordingly I will begin bydiscussing the titles of the two texts andtheir evocative potential. I will thenconcentrate on chapter 39 of Book five,where in opposition to the rest of the poem,Joyce and his characters are not justalluded to, but they are directly calledinto question, standing out from narration.

4.1.Inscribing tradition: Ulysses andOmeros as titles

Etymologically the term “epic” comesfrom Greek epikos, which in its turn comesfrom epos that means "word, story, poem".Attempting to delineate the maincharacteristics of epic, Ivan Herbisonhas defined it as follows

a narrative poem which recounts in detail theexploits of a heroic character, relating the heroto a specific cultural, historical, andgeographical background, so that the poem itselfcomes to embody a significant statement about theethos of both the society which it portrays andthe society which produced it4.

In Herbison’s definition, the herobelongs to a specific historical and

4 “The idea of the ‘Christian epic’: towards ahistory of an Old English poetic genre”, in Studiesin English Language and Literature: Doubt Wisely. Papers inhonour of E. G: Stanley, M.J. Toswell, E. M. Tyler,eds., New York: Routledge, 1996, 342-361, 343.


geographical background and the narrationof his deeds becomes exemplar to describethe character and the ethos of a societyor, more comprehensively, of a nation. Both Joyce and Walcott have rejected an

all-encompassing generic association ofUlysses and Omeros to epic as a Westernmaster narrative, mainly because thecomplexity of their works cannot beencapsulated in a unique generic frame.That said, Homer is undoubtedly aninescapable reference point in both Joyceand Walcott’s works. There is adifference though: Walcott’s Homer mustnecessarily pass through Joyce. As GeertLernout has observed, “it is simplyimpossible to write a modern-day Homericepic without reference to Ulysses”5. Indeedin Omeros Joyce becomes a voice thatmerges from the many literary echoesWalcott has to confront with.Undoubtedly, Joyce’s is a very powerfuland piercing voice that complicatesWalcott’s relation to epic from both astylistic and narrative point of view.

In order to understand the wayJoyce and Walcott employ the epic form,and how Joyce, in particular,influences Walcott, one should examinethe titles of their works, which areparticularly evocative.

The name Ulysses is the Latin andmost familiar version of the originalGreek Odysseus. Probably Joyce’sknowledge of the Odyssey passes throughits Latin and English translations andfrom his boyhood’s readings of CharlesLamb’s Adventures of Ulysses (1808). Although

5 “Derek Walcott’s Omeros: The Isle is full ofVoices”, Kunapipi 14.2, 1992: 90-104, 97.

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Joyce did study Greek and could have readthe Odyssey in the original “hisexpertise was so minimal that he cannotjustly to be said to have known Homer inthe original”6. The fact that Joyce doesnot use/refer to the original name/poem,but its Latin translation has of coursesome implications on the novel itself.More precisely, it suggests that one ofthe novel’s major hypotexts, i.e. theOdyssey, has already entered the textualnetwork of Ulysses in a culturally mediatedform.

As far as a translation is “thecommunication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalenttarget-language text” (OED), the Latin aswell as the English translations ofUlysses, then, have already passed throughtwo different languages and thereforethrough two different cultures. Ulysses, asthe title of the novel metonymicallysuggests, refers to the poem as a whole;in this regard, among other things, thenovel, represents another translation,which at the same time is and is not anIrish one. Certainly Joyce’s“hellenization” of Ireland7, passesthrough a non-literal translationcontinuously deviates from its sourcetext. He reinterprets it in its form andcontents, since the kind of epic heintends to produce is the “epic of the6 See Keri Elizabeth Ames, “Joyce’s Aesthetic of theDouble Negative and His Encounter with Homer’sOdyssey”, Colleen Jaurrechte, ed., Beckett, Joyce and the Artof the Negative. European Joyce Studies 16, Amsterdam: Rodopi,2005, 15-48, 17.7 This is an expression that Vincent J. Cheng has usedin his Joyce, Race and Empire (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995) to talk about hybridity andstereotyping.


human body” as well as “the epic of tworaces (Israel-Ireland)”8. It is withinthis framework that one should considerJoyce’s refusal to acknowledge thecorrespondences he suggested between hisnovel and the Odyssey as the ultimateinterpretative paradigm9.

Walcott’s use of the word Omeros forhis title is even more engaging because,as Joseph Farrell has observed, he doesnot designate the master poet of theWestern tradition by “the spuriouslyuniversal Latinate ‘Homer’ (Latin‘Homerus’), but by the Greek ‘Omeros’”10.Not the ancient Greek, then, but themodern one, “transcribed without regardfor the conventions of the written Greeklanguage” (285). Analogously to the nameUlysses, the name Omeros, so spelled,symbolically anticipates thatreinterpretation of traditional epicvalues that will be enacted throughoutthe text.

Further the figure of Homer as a manfascinates Walcott. He is one of thefathers of Western culture and yet hisown identity has been seriouslyquestioned by a significant number ofscholars11. Undoubtedly for a post-

8 See Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1972, 186.9 Here I am obviously referring to the well knownLinati and Gorman schemes.10 “Walcott’s Omeros: The Classical Epic in aPostmodern World”, Margaret Bessinger, Jane Tylus andSusanne Wofford, eds. Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World:The Poetics of Community, Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1999,«http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft40000565/», accessed12.10.12, 271-296, 285.11 John Miles Foley re-traces the major phases of theso called “Homeric Question”, in his Homer’s Traditional Art,

http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft40000565/

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colonial writer like Walcott the questionabout Homer’s identity is particularlyfascinating. In Omeros in fact rather thanbeing treated as a “real person”, he ispresented as mythic figure, a hybrid madeof different cultures and languages. Heis the “post-colonial muse”, whoseinspiration is at the basis of the poemitself:

[...] I said, “Omeros,”

and O was the conch-shell’s invocation, mer wasboth mother and sea in our Antillean patois,os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashesand spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore12.

Walcott himself tries to detect thepoet’s identity, or at least to offer hisown interpretation. But first, inWalcott’s perspective, Homer has tobecome “Omeros”. This change in the name,at the same time signals a condition ofcloseness to and distance from Westernculture, that is a recurring biographicaltheme in Walcott’s production. In thepoem, it is the character of Omeros who,more than others, embodies such anambiguity between the necessity of beingpart of a shared cultural horizon andthat of establishing a differenttradition. The use of modern Greek, infact, marks a distance, a fissure betweenpast and present, the wound of a post-colonial space, in which the present can

University Park: The Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 1999.12 Derek Walcott, Omeros, New York: Farrar, Strauss andGiroux, 1990, 14. All citations from the text refer tothis edition and are marked by page numbers inparentheses.


exist only as an on going process ofnegotiation with the past.

Therefore Homer as Omeros symbolicallyembodies the contradictions and paradoxesof the post-colonial world. In the poem,Omeros is first and foremost a name forthe ancient poet and for the poem as awhole. Indeed, it is precisely throughthe deconstruction of this name that thehybrid nature of the character and of thework comes forth.

The narrator dissociates the nounOmeros into three primary structuralunits, “O”, “mer” and “os”, as if he weredissociating its molecular bonds to reachan impossible ultimate meaning. Each ofthese units reveals the inextricableconnections of both the poet and the poemto the geo-physical reality of the placein which the story is set. Accordingly,the initial O reproduces the sound of aconch-shell, a symbolic and magicalobject in many ancient eastern epics.13

The conch shell was a horn traditionallyused to gather warriors before a battle,and also a sacred instrument, whose soundserved as an invocation to the spirits.It is with this last meaning that theconch shell is here evoked. Remarkably,at the very beginning of the poem, likein traditional epic, Walcott presents hisown invocation to the Muse who herecorresponds to Homer himself. A few linesearlier, however, the conch shell’s soundwas described as the “moan” that usher is

13 For example, in Indian epic each hero of mythicalwarfare carried a conch shell, which often bore apersonal name, as a symbol of his power and courage.For further details see Daģyab Rinpoche, Buddhist Symbolsin Tibetan Culture. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995, 54-55.

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a new day: “O open this day with theconch’s moan, Omeros,” (page). Noticethat here the invocative tone is directlyaddressed to Omeros.

“Mer” indicates both “mother” and“sea” in the Antillean patois. The hybridlanguage characterised by a non-standardFrench speech enables the narrator toconflate in a single word the masculineand in some respects deadly image of thesea as the violent manifestation ofnature with the feminine and lively imageof the mother, as a symbol of fertilityand care. Moreover, the reference to thesea directly connects Omeros to the oldfisherman Seven Seas.14 Finally “os”indicates at the same time a “grey bone”,as it were part of a composite structureand the waves of the sea as they breakupon a shore or a reef.

In its composite structure, the nounOmeros epitomises the very essence of thepoem. Like the narration in Omeros, thenoun Omeros has a beginning, a middle andan end. Through the vocative “o” the day,which symbolises the poem, begins, thencomes the real object of narration thesea (“mer”) and eventually its end(“os”), when the waves are sucked intothe sea again. The poem closes with theimage of the sea which, inexhaustible,keeps on his course, apparentlyindifferent to outer events.

14 Throughout the poem it is very difficult todistinguish between the narrator, the fisherman, SevenSeas and Omeros himself. Even though a distance remainsbetween the narrator and the other characters,especially in terms of narrative voice, one has thefeeling that they are projections, aspects of the samepersonalities.


In both Ulysses and Omeros, epic is notmerely treated as a genre to reinterpretor parody, it is also referred to in itsmost traditional meaning, i.e. as anelevated form of long narrative thatcelebrates the story of a nation throughthe deeds of a legendary hero.

For example, in the episode ofScylla and Charybdis, during theconversation at the library, Stephenreflects on his country in terms ofnational epic and, in a kind of reverie,he repeats to himself words that probablyhe has heard from Dublin literaryintelligentsia: “Our national epic hasyet to be written, Dr Sigerson says.Moore is the man for it”.15 Remarkably, here Stephen does not thinkof himself as the possible author ofIreland’s national epic. That kind ofepic does not interest him. Stephen doesnot want to praise a country he despises,a country whose limitations andrestrictions he has been fighting all hislife. He leaves that kind of epic towriters like Moore, writers who aredeeply ties to Ireland and his story. Infact, the writers Stephen mentions belongto the so called Celtic Revival. Acultural movement through which theyintended to promote traditional Irishliterature as the starting point for anew form of nationalism16. Stephen’snationalism is based on differentpresuppositions. 15 Ulysses [1922], London, Penguin, 2000, 246. Allcitations from the text refer to this edition and areindicated by page numbers in parentheses.16 For further studies see Gregory Castle. Modernism andthe Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press,2001.

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He thinks of himself, of his future fameas an artist, as the only possiblecatalyst for a genuine national feeling.The Irish nation will eventually berecomposed through the portrait of theartist as an “adult man”. It is with sucha conviction that Stephen can boldlyclaim: “I suspect [...] that Ireland mustbe important because it belongs to me.”(748), appointing himself as the hero ofhis own epic.

Discussing Adorno’s theory ofsubjectivity in the novel, Andras Ungarintroduces the notion of “negative epic”,whereby the subject/hero “liquidateshimself” and becomes an anti-hero, whosepersonal story collides with the story ofhis own country17. Such a change producesa fissure between the hero’s deeds andhis national feeling, so that the firstare no longer a component of the second.Consequently, Stephen’s epic can only bethat of the artist in exile, his deedsthose of a man whose identity and culturetranscend the limiting borders ofIreland.

However, as the possible author of anegative epic Stephen is destined tofail, because Joyce “abandons” him forBloom18, hence metafictionally Stephen can

17 See Andras Ungar in Joyce’s Ulysses as National Epic: EpicMimesis and the Political History of the Nation State. Gainsville:University of Florida Press, 2002, has argued that inrelation to his notion of history and of nationalismthe epic genre is felt as a foreign and as an“antagonist to modern age”. 18 In a letter to Frank Budgen Joyce famously declares:“Stephen no longer interests me” (Frank Budgen, JamesJoyce and the Making of Ulysses [1934], Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1960, 105).


only be an incomplete character inJoyce’s own epic, i.e. Ulysses19.

In Walcott the first reference to epicis associated to Seven Seas and to theanonymous figure of a black fisherman,who becomes the representative of the“Caribbean nation”20:

as a dry sea-urchin’s, hoisted his flour-sacksail on its bamboo spar, and scanned the opening

lineof our epic horizon; now I can look back

to rocks that see their own feet when light netsthe waves,as the dugouts set out with ebony captains,since it was your light that startled our sunlit

wharves

where schooners swayed idly, moored to their coldcapstans.A wind turn the harbour’s pages back to the voiceThat hummed in the vase of a girl’s throat:“Omeros.” (13)

19 Precisely because Joyce had lost his interest inStephen, I do not think, as many scholars do, that froma metafictional point of view he wanted to assign him thepaternity of Ulysses as, for instance, Margaret MacBridehas argued: “By the day’s end, Buck and Stephen haveseparated. Stephen will not return to the MartelloTower [...]. Nor will he return to the job at Deasy’sschool [...]. Stephen, like Ovid, will write in exile.And within ten years just as he predicted, he beginsUlysses. It is Stephen, not Moore, who pens Ireland’snational epic.” (“Ulysses” and the Metamorphoses of StephenDedalus. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001,53).20 In many interviews Walcott has stated that heconsiders the Caribbean a nation from an “emotionalpoint of view”. See for example the interview conductedby Dino Messina, “I Caraibi come l’arcipelago greco. Lanostra storia scritta sul mare”, Corriere della Sera,11.12.2008,«http://lanostrastoria.corriere.it/2008/12/derek-walcott-i-caraibi-coml.html», accessed 19.10.2012.

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By hoisting “his flour-sack/sail onits bamboo spar” the black fishermanscans “the opening line” of the Caribbean“epic horizon”. From the very beginningof the poem it is clear that the kind ofepic that is here evoked is one with thelandscape, with nature. Certainly it isalso the epic of the peoples, who inhabitthe place; their lives, however, are notin opposition with the landscape, ratherthey are “scanned” by the natural rhythmsof the place. Thus the fisherman with hisconstant contact with the sea embodiesthe perfect harmony between men andnatural environment. Remarkably it isthrough the sea that such an harmony isassured and confirmed. Everything beginsand ends with the sea, because, asWalcott has elsewhere stated, the “sea ishistory”21. It is from the fisherman andhis travelling by sea, from the dugoutsand their “ebony captains” that theCaribbean epic begins. Hence in a kind ofmetafictional myse-en-abyme, the harbourbecomes a book whose pages are turned bythe wind. The same wind that swells theflour-sack sail and makes the dugoutmove; the same wind that hums the word“Omeros” in a Greek girl’s throat,significantly called Antigone. Thus, thewind is literally the inspirer, theelement that sets things in motion. It isworth reminding here that etymologically21 “The Sea is History” is the title of a poem from thecollection The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), in which the seais presented as a “grey vault” where all the secrets,battles, monuments and martyrs of the Caribbean arelocked up. Notably the poem ends with the followinglines: “and in the salt chuckle of rocks/with their seapools, there was the sound/like a rumour without anyecho/of History, really beginning.” Collected Poems 1948-1984, New York: Farral, Straus & Giroux, 1992, 367.


inspire means precisely “blow into” (fromLatin inspirare).

At the same time “Omeros” is the firstword of this Caribbean epic and the titleof an epic that, in fact, has beenalready written, which is represented bythe poem itself. The reflection on therole and function of epic in a modern(Ulysses) or in a postmodern context(Omeros) inevitably implies ametafictional double bind. As one startsto explore how epic is evoked andchallenged in these works, it immediatelyemerges a metafictional component thatobliges the reader to consider the epicreferences of the narrative in the lightof the work itself. It seems that epicopens a further (non)fictional space, inwhich the roles of author and charactersuperimpose and overlap.

4.2 (His)stories

In chapter XXXIX (Book 5) the speakingI22 continues his journey to Ireland, thenative country of Maud Plunkett. Maud isthe wife of the expatriate Major DennisPlunkett, with whom she settled in St.Lucia shortly after the World War II. AsIrene Maryniuk has argued, this characteris shaped both as an echo of Homer’sPenelope and Joyce’s Molly Bloom23. Maudis a hybrid character, not only because

22 Walcott’s highly ambiguous use of deixisdramatically complicates the identification of thespeaking subject. He embodies an indefinite figure whopartly refers to Walcott himself and partly to theextradiegetic narrator of the poem.23 Irene Martyniuk, “The Irish and the Caribbean: DerekWalcott’s Examination of the Irish in Omeros”, The SouthCarolina Review 31.1. 1999: 142-148.

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she is a “mixture” of two importantliterary antecedents, but also becauseshe is Irish. She is, moreover, the Irishwife of an English man, she is “silencedby gender, yet aware of her own personand values”24. She lives as a Westernwoman in the colonized Caribbean. She ishomesick and longs for her country,hoping that sooner or later her husbandwill keep his promise to visit Irelandagain.

Hence the speaking I’s journey throughIreland becomes a sentimental as well asa poetic journey in search of his own(literary) origins and of an intellectualand emotional emancipation. He wandersthrough Dublin, Glen-da-lough (where inthe 6th century Saint Kevin founded animportant monastic settlement), and on alakeshore in the ruins of an abbey, wherehe notices a “square Celtic Cross”, andwalks through a “dry road”/ to hear abrook talk the old language of Ireland”.Indeed Ireland becomes an inescapabledestination for Walcott and his speakingI, for their necessarily endlesswanderings. For Walcott Ireland like St.Lucia (his home country) is a colonisedland, like St. Lucia it has been forcedto accept a foreign culture and a foreignlanguage.

In the Joycean chapter of Book 5,Walcott reflects on history, a recurrentmotif in his poetry. However, it is notIrish history as a whole he is concernedwith, rather it is Irish history as auniversal symbol of cultural and materialsubjugation, as Joyce has recounted it.Indeed it is by echoing the Nestor24 Matyniuk, 142.


episode of Ulysses that History emergesfrom the multi-layered textual amalgam:

the child-voiced brook repeatedHistory’s lesson

as an elder clapped its leaves inapprobation

until others swayed to the old self-possession

for which faith is known; but whichfaith, in a nation

split by a glottal scream. (338, 32-36)

The first lines of the above excerpt arereminiscent of Stephen’s last day as ateacher at Mr. Deasy’s school. InWalcott’s metamorphosed reality “thechild-voiced brook”, which repeats thehistory lesson, evokes both the youngstudent questioned by Stephen aboutPyrrhus and the unceasing flux of historythat proliferates in many incontrollablerivulets each of them turning into “atale bringer”, thus echoing the role ofAnna Livia in Finnegans Wake. Stephenhimself turns into an “elder” who clapsits leaves at the child/rook’sperformance, but who also recognisesIreland’s dramatic paradox: “a nationsplit by a glottal scream”. As JahanRamazami has remarked, “puzzling out whatit means to love the English language andyet hate English imperialism, Omeros askshow the postcolonial poet both grievesthe agonizing harm of British colonialismand celebrate the empire literarybequest”.25 However the luck of faith(that is not necessarily only of faith to

25 Jahan Ramazani. “The Wound of History: Walcott’sOmeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction.”PMLA, vol. 112, no.3 (May, 1997): 405-417, 176 (fromHarold Bloom, ed. Derek Walcott, check)

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God) in a nation split by a glottalscream refers also to a specific momentof Nestor, when, on hearing the studentscry out after someone scores a goal infield hockey, Stephen makes his well-known remark to Mr. Deasy (2):

-History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from whichI am trying to awake.From the playfield the boys raised a shout. Awhirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmaregave you a back kick?-The ways of the Creator are not our ways, MrDeasy said. All history moves towards one greatgoal, the manifestation of God.Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window,saying:-That is God.Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee! -What? Mr Deasy asked.-A shout in the street, Stephen answered,shrugging his shoulders. ()

To the imperialist vision of theschoolmaster, whose understanding andfurther explanation of history issupported by a strong Catholicperspective, Stephen opposes chance andcoincidence. In this regard the “glottalscream” is the denial and displacement ofGod the Logos in the realm of the voidand incertitude. Interestingly Stephen’sblasphemous association of God to a shoutin the street can be compared in Omeroswith the misspelled inscription onAchille’s canoe, which says “In God wetroust” instead of “trust”, as a kind ofimpossibility to entrust oneself to God,whose language, whose verbum, belongs toa foreign and obscure idiom. Ironically,in the last chapter of the poem echoingEliot, Walcott reminds us of Achille’s


death that “when it comes, will be adeath by water”.

Walcott’s concept of “glottalscream” especially in the sense oflinguistic wound seems to find anotherimportant source in the Portrait, withStephen Dedalus’s perceptivedifferentiation of his Hibernian-Englishfrom the Standard English spoken by theDean of studies:

—The language in which we are speaking is hisbefore it is mine. How different are the wordshome, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and onmine! I cannot speak or write these words withoutunrest of spirit. His language, so familiar andso foreign, will always be for me an acquiredspeech. I have not made or accepted its words. Myvoice holds them at bay. My soul frets in theshadow of his language. (P, 205)

As Said has argued, Joyce’s work is arecapitulation of those political andracial separations, exclusions,prohibitions instituted ethnocentricallyby the ascendant European culturethroughout the nineteenth century26. Inorder to overcome his and Stephen’sdilemma, then, Joyce twists the coloniallanguage to make it suit thepeculiarities and circumstances of hishybrid and urban Irishness. SimilarlyWalcott employs the English language toexpress the racial, cultural, andlinguistic concerns of the island ofSaint Lucia. He turns the coloniser’slanguage into a hybridised, Antilleanpatois that effectively captures the

26

? Cf. Edward Said. The World, the Text and the Critic,

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regional accents and idiosyncrasies ofthe Saint Lucian people27 (4):

I was raised in the obscure Caribbeanport,

where my bastard father christened mefor his shire:

Warwick. The Bard’s county. But neverfelt part

of the foreign machinery known asLiterature.

I preferred verse to fame, but I wrotewith the heart

of an amateur. It’s that Will youinherit. (120, 32-37)

It is precisely through this “linguistictransplantation,” which implies a sort ofcraftsmanship and amateurishness in itsmaking, that Walcott can transform the“foreign machinery known as Literature”into something more familiar andrecognisable, this is the only chance hehas as a poet to belong to the WesternCanon and to inherit Shakespeare’s legacy(“It’s that Will you inherit”).

A few lines further the incurablewound that marks the fracture betweencoloniser and colonised is effectivelyexemplified by the violent partition ofthe land, the violent subjugation ofIreland: “still splitting heirs, dividinga Shem from a Shaun/an Ireland not wiseras it got older” (338, 43-47). Thebrother struggle, one of the major nodalpoints of the Wake, becomes the symbol ofan impossible reconciliation, of afratricide war. Interestingly not only

27 Cf. Patricia Novillo-Corvalán. “Literary Migrations:Homer’s Journey through Joyce’s Ireland and Walcott’sSaint Lucia”


does Walcott refer to two characters ofthe Wake, but he also employs Joyce’sstyle by introducing Shem and Shaun witha pun “heirs” (meaning “those whoinherit”) instead of “hair” in theidiomatic expression “split hair”.

In the third section of chapter39, the poet continues his exploration ofIreland. By now it should be quite clearfor the reader that such an explorationcorresponds to a kind of ghost haunting,Walcott wants to meet Joyce, as Hamletwanted to meet the ghost of his father.In Walcott’s personification of nature,every element, every spot is reminiscentof the Irish writer and of hischaracters. Joyce is the maestro, who canguide him through his own Odyssey:

I leant on the mossed embankment just asif he

bloomed there every dusk with eye-patchand tilted hat,

rakish cane on one shoulder. Along theLiffey,

the mansards dimmed to one indigosilhouette;

then a stroke of light brushed thehoney-haired river,

and there, in black cloche hat and coat,she scurried faster

to the changing rose of a light. AnnaLivia!

Muse of our age’s Omeros, undimmedMaster

and true tenor of the place! So wherewas my gaunt,

cane -twirling flaneur? I blest myselfin his voice,

and climbed up the wooden stairs to therestaurant

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with its brass spigots, its glints, its beer-brightened noise. (339-340, 57-68)

From line to line the poet approachesJoyce in a sort of slow, althoughinexorable, movement. Walcott is goingbackwards (reverse) to the origin of hispoetry, to the main source of his owninspiration. Leaning on the “mossedembankment” the poet wanders if “he”(Joyce) “bloomed there”, if he thoughtfor the first time of Leopold Bloomwandering along the Liffey; if that wasthe place in which he could bring theobject of his artistic inspiration beforehis mind. In an instant the Liffeybecomes Anna Livia, the poet recognisesher, she is the “Muse of our age’sOmeros, undimmed Master and tenor of theplace”. Remarkably as Walcott remembersJoyce’s characters, they come to life,not in Joyce’s pages, though, but in hislines: Walcott’s incorporates Joyce (andHomer) into the hybrid Caribbeantradition, Joyce’s voice becomes his (“Iblessed myself in his voice”).

Throughout his narration Walcottrefers to a significant number ofauthors, whom he has to confront, butnone of them is recognised as Omeros.Only Joyce is. In the beginning of thepoem, the narrator explains the meaningof the name Omeros:

I said, “Omeros”,And O was the conch-shell’s invocation,

mer wasboth mother and sea in our Antillean

patois, os, a grey bone, and he white surf as it

crashes


and spreads its sibilant collar on alace shore.

Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, andthe washes

that echoed from a cave-mouth when thetide has

ebbed. (28, 24-30)

As Novillo-Corvalán has argued,

Homer becomes Omeros, a cultural legacy strippedof a capital “H” and turned from the singularmonologic “Homer” to the plural dialogic Omeros,suitably representing the cultural diversity ofcolonised peoples whose hybridity ischaracteristic of an in-between identity thatresults from the mergining of multiple words,multiple languages and multiple races. Thereforethe canonical figure of Homer acquires a newliterary and cultural meaning within theCaribbean heteroglossic locale (159)

In this regard Walcott’s recognition ofJoyce as “our age’s Omeros” implies alsoa recognition of the disruptive role thathe played in the Western literary canon.Joyce is Omeros because his writing isalways already deterritorialised (he“sings” Ireland, but he has lived all hislife away from Ireland), Joyce is Omerosbecause his writing is always alreadyhybridised, the idiolect he invents forFinnegans Wake is a stratification, in somecases even a convergence, of multiplelanguages and idioms.

In the last part of the chapter, onecan see even more clearly the nature ofthe relation that links Walcott to Joyce,a relation of both resistance and praise,of fatherhood to be overcome, not muchdissimilar to that between StephenDedalus and Shakespeare, described in the“Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses.

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Here Stephen intensely questions thecultural authority of Shakespeare and hisworks, even though his own words andmetaphors derive precisely fromShakespeare, because “there can be noreconciliation [...] if there has notbeen a sundering” (249).

Walcott describes the poet’s reunionwith his dead father Warwick Walcott (whodied when Dereck was only one), in theirold house, which after his death had beensignificantly converted into a printshop. Here, as Pollard has argued,following the classical epic convention,Walcott describes a father who has cometo instruct the son about his futurevocation.28

«In his pale blue notebook29 where youfound my verses»-

my father smiled- «I appeared to makeyour life’s choice,

and the calling that you practice bothreverses

and honours mine from the moment itblent with yours.

Now that you are twice my age, which isthe boy’s,

which the father’s?».

«Sir» -I swallowed- «they are onevoice». (118, 22-28)

In this passage Walcott operates anextremely complex set of connectionsbetween himself and his father, betweenhimself as a poet and Shakespeare as hisliterary father, all filtered through28 Charles W. Pollard. “Traveling with Joyce: DerekWalcott’s Discrepant Cosmopolitan Modernism”. TwentiethCentury Literature (Summer 2001), 47, 2: 197-212, 204.29 The blue notebook of Ulysses is now part of theRosenbach Foundation’s material.


Joyce’s sensibility. As a matter of fact,Walcott faces his own tradition (imposedor self-imposed) through Stephen’s eyes:he overtly quotes him when he says “theyare one voice”, In fact, in ProteusStephen defines his father as “the manwith my voice and my eyes”. MoreoverWalcott’s lines evoke Stephen’s theory onHamlet, according to which Stephen“proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandsonis Shakespeare’s grandfather and that hehimself is the ghost of his own father”.Stephen develops his theory to suggestthat the artist must be both father andmother to the work of art. His vision ofthe artist is a self-authorizing figurewho trascends the need for origins, thetracing of genealogies, or the imitationof literary predecessors.

In the very last section of thechapter, Walcott eventually meets Joyce(8):

[...] And then I saw him.

The Dead were singing in fringed shawls, thewick-low shade

leapt high and rouged their cold cheekswith vermillion

round the pub piano, the air MaudPlunkett played,

rowing her with felt hammer-strokes frommy island

to one with bright doors and cobbles,and then Mr. Joyce

led us all, as gently as Howth when itdrizzles,

his voice like sun-drizzled Howth, itsviolet leesof moss at low tide, where a dog barks:<<Howth!Howth!>> at

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the shawled waves, and the stone Irubbed in my pocket

from the Martello brought one-eyedUlysses

to the copper-bright strand, watchingthe mail-packet

butting past the Head, its wakeglittering like keys. (340, 74-87)

In a scene that is reminiscent of theDead (after all which story would be moreappropriate than this?), Maud Plunkettplays the piano instead of Mary Jane, as“Mr. Joyce”, “the tenor of the place,”leads the singers. Joyce’s presence isunderlined by the repetition of the term“Howth” first used as a toponym, as weall know, at Howth’s head Bloom proposesto Molly, and “Howth Castle and Environs”signals both the place in which thewakean “commodius vicus of recirculation”begins and the character of HCE, and then“Howth” becomes the barking of a dog thatechoes that of the dog in Proteus.

Consequently, in Walcott’s poetictopography “Howth” becomes a portmanteauword, the key to creative imagination. Itallows the poet to go backwards throughJoyce’s ouvre (notice that first comes FWand then Ulysses) to physically andmentally explore the source of hisinspiration. The last lines are addressedto Ulysses. By rubbing a stone/talisman fromthe Martello Tower the poet is able topowerfully evoke the homeric hero, evento the point of “redirecting” his routefrom Ithaca/Dublin to Castries/SaintLucia. However what arrives at SaintLucia is not Odysseus, but one-eyedUlysses, that is Joyce, and a mail-packet, maybe containing Ulysses, whose


journey to Saint Lucia is marked by itswake (in the sense of the track left by avessel, of the state of forbearing sleepand of Joyce’s last novel) that glitterslike the keys that Bloom chooses for hisadvertisement or that Stephen and ALPhave given away.

I would like to conclude my paper witha quotation from the French writer andpoet Eduard Glissant, who has deeplyreflected on the concept of errancy inour (post) colonial era. He says

the wanderer [l'erratit) [...] is no longerthe traveler, nor the discoverer, nor theconqueror; he seeks to acquaint himself withthe totality of the world and already knowsthat he will never accomplish this-and that,in this [lack of 'accomplishment'] resides theendangered beauty of the world30

Joyce’s legacy to Walcott should besearched in his wandering, in his senseof precariousness, and in hisimpossibility of creating a totalizingorder of things, of arresting the flux oflife. Panta Rhei. “Woman. As easy stopthe sea. Yes: all is lost”, thinks Bloomtransforming the Heraclitean saying intothe concrete experience of theelusiveness of a woman; “when he left thebeach the sea was still going on”, saysthe narrator of Omeros referring to hishero, Achilles, who is leaving the beachand the poem. It is precisely in thisbreach between the awareness of existenceoutside the text and the necessity thateach story inevitably must come to an end

30 Poetics of Relations, trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbour: TheUniversity of Michigan Press, 1997, 33.

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that Joyce the flaneur meets Walcott theamateur.

"When he left the beach the sea was still going on": Walcott (re)verses Joyce

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