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The work of
James Joyce looms large in the prolific production of the
St Lucian poet, playwright, essayist, and 1992 Nobel
Laureate, Derek Walcott. This is revealed in his
autobiographical essay ‘Leaving School’ (1965), in which
he reported his youthful identification with ‘[his]
current hero, the blasphemous, arrogant Stephen Dedalus’
(Walcott 1993a: 31); in his epic poem Epitaph for the
Young (1949), where he continued and developed
his relationship with Joyce’s work; in his seminal essay,
‘The Muse of History’ (1974), the epigraph to which
boasted Stephen Dedalus’s forceful declaration in
Ulysses: ‘History is the nightmare from which I am
trying to awake’ (Walcott 1998: 36);
[1] and in his
celebrated epic poem Omeros (1990), in which he
emulated Joyce’s Hibernian rewriting of the Odyssey
as he shifted Homer to the historical, cultural and
linguistic circumstances of his twentieth-century
Caribbean island of Saint Lucia.
Beneath the
enduring fascination that Walcott has repeatedly professed
of Joyce and Irish literature, however, it is possible to
identify a larger historical reciprocity that proved
fundamental in this timely literary meeting. At the core
of Walcott’s affiliation with the Irish literary
tradition, thus, is embedded a deeply-rooted colonial
history that forged a series of parallels between the
Irish and Saint Lucian islands.
According
to Charles W. Pollard, these analogies are based on
historical, religious, and political factors, particularly
since ‘[both writers were] born on an island controlled by
the Roman Catholic Church and the British Empire’, and
were ‘educated by Irish priests […] but rebelled against
[their] suffocating orthodoxy’ (Pollard 2001: 197).
Similarly, he claims that both writers were ‘educated in
the colonial system, [and] grew to resent English rule yet
cherished the English language and literary tradition’
(Pollard 2001: 197). Finally, Pollard asserts that their
literary vocations ‘compelled [them] to flee the
provincialism of [their] island home although [they]
continued to focus on writing about that island’ (Pollard
2001: 197). In effect, Walcott himself identified these
striking parallels in a crucial interview with Edward
Hirsh:
The
whole Irish influence was for me a very intimate one. When
the Irish brothers came to teach at the college in Saint
Lucia, I had been reading a lot of Irish literature: I
read Joyce, naturally I knew Yeats, and so on. I’ve always
felt some kind of intimacy with the Irish poets because
one realized that they were also colonials with the same
kind of problems that existed in the Caribbean. They were
the niggers of Britain (Baer 1996: 59).
In
Walcott’s creative development as a writer, Stephen
Dedalus’s perceptive differentiation of his
Hibernian-English dialect from the Standard English spoken
by the Dean of Studies: ‘— The language in which we are
speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the
words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on
mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest
of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will
always be for me an acquired speech (Joyce 2000: 159)’,
would have increased his awareness that as an
English-speaking Caribbean writer he had to face a similar
linguistic dilemma.
Therefore,
just as Joyce masterfully twisted the colonial language to
make it suit the particular requirements of his
twentieth-century Irish circumstances, so Walcott
similarly employed the English language to express the
racial, cultural, and linguistic concerns of the island of
Saint Lucia. Walcott turned the English language into a
hybridised, Antillean patois that successfully captured
the regional accents and idiosyncrasies of the Saint
Lucian people. Moreover, in ‘The Muse of History’
Walcott advocated an Adamic redemption, a linguistic
rebirth that would allow New World writers to become a
second Adam and to rename, and hence transform, the
oppressive colonial legacy which they had inherited.
In
particular, he placed emphasis on the Chilean poet Pablo
Neruda, whom he considers one of the greatest New World
poets, arguing that Neruda had similarly undertaken the
historical task to rename and poetise his own culture
(Walcott 1998: 39-40). This call for action is powerfully
allied with the belief that the ex-colonial subject has
the right to use ‘the white man’s words […] his
dress, his machinery, his food. And, of course, his
literature’ (Walcott 1993b: 20). In this light, Walcott is
asserting that language and literature provide marginal
writers a dual means of self-representation which enable
them to use the Western tradition to their own advantage,
as well as stretching the linguistic possibilities of the
colonial speech through the use of devices such as
code-switching (moving between two languages or dialects
within the same discourse) and vernacular transcription
(writing in colloquial language).
Yet at the
same time, in the mirror of Joyce’s art wherein Walcott
recognised the image of his own face, are also reflected a
series of complex, distorted figures with which the
Caribbean poet identified. The looking glass of Irish art
simultaneously revealed to him the literary figures of
Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, albeit compounded and
enriched by the signification they had assimilated in
Joyce’s work. If Joyce charted the complex migration of
Homer’s Odyssey into the scenery of his native city
of Dublin, then Walcott similarly extended the journey of
Homer to the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia.
But Joyce’s
mapping of the Odyssey also involved a complex
voyage through history and literature that created a
version of the Greek hero Ulysses refracted through the
prisms of Dante’s Commedia, Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, as well as through several centuries of
critical interpretations that he had inherited as a
twentieth-century Irish writer. Thus in his epic poem
Omeros, Walcott also incorporated a Homeric heritage
refracted by Dante’s medieval understanding of Homer (he
employed a lyric form that resembles Dante’s tersa rima)
and by Joyce’s contemporary readings of Homer and Dante,
which Walcott, in turn, blended with the rich, exuberant,
and yet oppressive history of Saint Lucia.
Not for nothing has the island been named
the ‘Helen of the Caribbean’, in a metaphorical
designation that proposes an analogy between the mythical
quarrel between Greeks and Trojans over Argive Helen, and
the historical disputes between British and French powers
over the sovereignty of the island. Saint Lucia, as
Walcott pointed out in ‘Leaving School’, had been named
‘by Columbus […] after the blind saint’ (Walcott 1993a:
24). According to Christian hagiography, Saint Lucy
plucked out her beautiful eyes because they proved
attractive to a male admirer. This vow of chastity also
enabled the martyr to renounce all earthy possessions in
her total devotion to God. The motif of metaphorical and
physical blindness, as we shall see, is also central to
Walcott’s relationship with Homer and Joyce. |
