Founding a Language: Derek Walcott and Omeros
p. 159-170
Texte intégral
By so many systems
As we are involved in, by just so many
Are we set free on an ocean of language...
John Ashbery, “A Wave”1
12015 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Derek Walcott’s narrative poem, Omeros, which resituates Homeric epic in the contemporary Caribbean, following the trials of its hero, Achille (who is as much an Odysseus as he is an Achilles), his lover, Helen, and his rival, Hector, along with the travails of a score of other characters. Perhaps most pertinently, the poem transposes Homeric epic from an imperial Mediterranean to a postcolonial Caribbean, a transposition that necessitates a relentless questioning of the former by the latter. This dichotomy, however, is by no means presented simplistically, as a stark case of the dispossessed against the possessors. Instead, the dichotomy, even as it is applied and affirmed, is shown throughout the poem to be misleading in two ways: first, in the fact that there are always more than two sides pitted against one another in such multinational affairs; and, second, in the fact that there are also always less than two: both Homeric epic and Walcott’s own long poem, that is, are simply about people who live in or near an archipelago in a sea: they’re similar in as many ways as they are different.
2 Of the numerous strands of criticism that Walcott’s poem (by now clearly considered his masterpiece) has already inspired, the three that I would like to attempt to braid herein, in an attempt to understand the poem’s complex relationship to its inherited language, are those that concern themselves with postcolonial theory, genre studies, and questions of individual influence. More specifically, I would like to take up the threads of Martin McKinsey, who investigates the practices of naming, unnaming, and renaming in colonial and postcolonial societies as they are explored within the poem; of Timothy Hofmeister, Isabella Maria Zoppi, and others, who consider the ways in which Omeros both adheres to and departs from traditional conceptions of the epic; and of Thomas Austenfeld and Charles Pollard, who are particularly concerned with the influence of Dante and Joyce, respectively, on Walcott’s poem, where the poem’s subject cannot help but bring to mind Joyce’s Ulysses, while its consisting almost entirely of tercets in a loose approximation of terza rima of course evokes Dante.2
3In one of its own most stark formulations, Omeros, in contradistinction to classical epic, is a poem about a people “who set out to found no cities; they were the found, / who were bound for no victories; they were the bound, / who leveled nothing before them; they were the ground”, a triple assertion that positions the islanders of Walcott’s St. Lucia as victims of history while at the same time recommending and praising their endurance, where the fact that “they crossed, they survived,” constitutes their “epical splendor”, such splendor having formerly been reserved only for the founders and conquerors.3 The Iliad, that is, is about the epical splendor of the warrior Achilles. It is several hundred years before Virgil comes along to locate the seed of this same splendor in the city that Achilles helped raze, only Aeneas then simply becomes a kind of next Achilles: not a victim but himself a conqueror. What Walcott does, however, is to locate the epical splendor in the fallen city itself, conflating those who remained in it and those who were shipped to Greece as slaves with Agamemnon, Menelaus, et. al. The heroes of his poem are the vanquished: a fisherman, a waitress, and a taxi driver (Achille, Helen, Hector) whose names come from both sides of the original, archetypal conflict and are now more caught up in the web of history than in the web of mythology, though the two are, of course, tightly interwoven.
4As a child of history himself (as opposed to one of its near-mythic originators), Walcott, not unlike the characters in his poem, didn’t actively find or found any language, epic or otherwise; he, too, was the found. Both English and, more broadly, the literary tradition of the West found, founded, and funded him, and in so doing bound him, both in the sense of being “bound by chains” and in the sense of being “bound for all ports”, thus somehow paradoxically setting him free on the surfaces of systems in which he was not only involved but also threateningly enmeshed. Not surprisingly, we see this fate mirrored in the characters of the poem: they are seeking freedom of movement within the limitations that their historical circumstances have thrust upon them. They drive too fast out of anger, they dive to the sea’s floor in search of treasure, they walk along the beach barefoot, swinging sandals in their hands and humming the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”
5 Omeros is a poem in seven books (its own seven seas, perhaps). It consists, in total, of 64 chapters spread across the books and indicated tellingly by roman numerals (I-LXIV), with each chapter being made up of three sections, these sections, too, indicated by roman numerals (i-iii). The classical tradition is thus present in the very structure of the poem, in addition to its content. As to form, the poem is composed almost exclusively in tercets and is thus heavily indebted to Dante, composer of the great epic that bridges the classical and the modern, where if Walcott’s poem, like all other poetry since Dante, is a footnote to Dante, it is a footnote that by sheer virtue of its size and inertia threatens to engulf its original text. The themes of Omeros, too, are in large part the themes of the Divine Comedy: corruption in contemporary politics, the difficulty of establishing just rule among men, the coming-to-wisdom through trials of experience, and so on. There are even two prominent sections of the poem that could be filed under the heading of katabasis, or the descent to the underworld: Achille’s vision quest that takes him back into his African heritage and the poet’s own descent into the volcanic inferno of St. Lucia’s Soufrière.
6Given the importance of Dante’s influence on Omeros, one could anticipate that section iii, chapter XXXIII, of Walcott’s poem, which lies towards the beginning of its fourth and therefore central book, would be of some kind of central import simply for numerological reasons. The fact that here only, though, the poem breaks from its loose terza rima in favor of particularly tight tetrameter couplets unmistakably locates this section as a kind of center of gravity of the poem, a heart of the poem that departs from Dante’s tercets just when, numerologically (three being an obviously important number to Dante), the poem should perhaps be most enthralled by them. But in the 33rd canto of the third canticle of his own poem, that is, at the poem’s conclusion, Dante beholds the arena and rose of God, his soon-to-be everlasting home, and the Commedia comes to a happy close that it might then be written. By way of contrast, in the third section of chapter XXXIII of Omeros, Walcott contemplates the process by way of which a drab and dreary New England house might potentially be turned into a home, though this vision remains unrealized and distant, posited only as a possibility in a remote future, and so the poet’s journey must continue, his writing of the poem simultaneous with it. Everything that is absolute in Dante is contingent in Walcott. The departure from form is thus warranted even as it remains beguiling; at the point where Walcott might have most strikingly connected his poem to Dante he does so precisely by abandoning him. Dante’s own poem never breaks from its tercets save for in the closing, single line of every one of its cantos, the line that is needed to complete the last rhyme. While Dante’s poem is in large part about completion, though, and the ultimate closure that goes with it, Walcott’s own epic is a postmodern one that resists this finality found in Dante even as it is in large part founded on it. One simple departure from form that lasts for a mere seventeen couplets suffices to indicate this, as does Walcott’s refusal to follow the strict, interlocking rhyme scheme of terza rima. And Walcott’s poem, too, concludes with a grand vision, but it is an ending that is a non-ending: the sight of the sea “still going on”.4
7In a recent London Review of Books essay titled “On Not Going Home”, James Wood distinguishes between Lukács’ idea of “transcendental homelessness” and what Wood himself calls “secular homelessness”, between the homelessness of the poet lost in the wood but whose return home – in Dante’s case, to God – is secure and the homelessness of the poet for whom such a full and permanent return is not possible, a poet who, even should his wanderings cease and he find himself back on native soil, would nevertheless continue to feel restless and adrift even there: not Homer’s Odysseus, then, but Tennyson’s Ulysses, himself modeled on and reclaimed from Dante’s own damned voyager, whose arrogant wanderlust serves as a pagan/secular foil to the pilgrim’s pious submission.5 The irony here, of course, is that Walcott has always been able to return to St. Lucia (whose namesake is one of the three blessed ladies who intercedes on Dante’s behalf and thus helps to secure his spot in heaven), while Dante was never able to return to his own home city, Florence. We might say that Dante established a transcendental notion of home as a result of his permanent political exile, whereas Walcott’s own poet-figure, despite the geographical accessibility of home, finds it difficult to reside in St. Lucia in any kind of replete and transcendental sense. There are too many shards and drapes of history that continually pierce and occlude his vision there, even if they also provide him with insight.
8 Still, Walcott knew just as surely as Dante, knew largely in part from Dante just as Dante knew from Brunetto Latini, that “the way man makes himself eternal”6 and thus establishes a permanent dwelling is through the finding and shaping of a language and the construction and cultivation of a space in which that language can unfold, reside, and, most importantly, last (Joyce knew this, too, also from Dante). Through the written word the impermanent houses of our identities can be transformed into lasting homes, made to endure. But in the Inferno, in a much-debated passage, Brunetto Latini is damned precisely for the purveying of such unnatural teachings; the only natural way to immortality is through grace. Still, in the Purgatorio Dante posits supreme poetic skill as a considerable rival to grace itself, as the episode of Casella in canto II makes clear. This is where Dante the devout Catholic comes into conflict with Dante the proto-secular humanist, who at the very least has a great deal of respect for the “unnatural” act of attempting to make oneself immortal not through grace, but through art. Dante thus seems to continue to adhere, at least in part, to his former mentor’s instruction simply by virtue of writing his own poem, which is, importantly, a poem that he knows from its fourth canto will join the immortal ranks of the works of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Lucan, and Ovid, all five of whom include him in their group in Limbo. But even as Dante thus ventures to make himself eternal through art, he still nevertheless condemns that very venture itself by placing its mouthpiece in hell, thereby undermining to a serious extent his own poetic enterprise. Walcott’s own epic undermines itself in similar ways, with Dante himself, among others, now playing the role of Brunetto Latini: voicing some of the poet’s own methods and creeds in the shadow of the poet’s disapproval (a service that Francesca and Ulysses, in addition to Brunetto Latini, perform for Dante).
9Walcott doesn’t shift the language of epic as Dante did, from a high Latin to a low Italian, but he does shift its focus from a centralized Europe to a marginal Caribbean. Thus, like Dante before him, he challenges the very conventions of epic, displaces the latter, and in so doing redefines and breathes new life into it even as he would seem to be trying in large part to vanquish it. One might even say, echoing Derrida, that “whether he wants to or not – and this does not depend on a decision on his part – the epic poet [and especially the poet writing a postcolonial epic] accepts into his discourse certain premises [...] at the very moment when he is employed in denouncing them”.7 The price Walcott pays for his polemic against Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment rationalism, implicated, as they are, and to a not insignificant extent, in the slave-holding history of the West, is the relentless interrogation of his own poem even as it unfurls, so that like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Omeros has thus undone itself by the time it is finished, “an epic where every line was erased / yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf” (296) only to then be erased again, a method that erodes the presumptions of certainty inherent in such edifices as epic before they can begin to gain traction.8
10Walcott is thus not without his own kind of humility, though it is not Dante’s. Omeros, as I’ve noted above, ends with the sea “still going on”, a force that dwarfs the poem and that will eventually convert its lines and stanzas into coral and pearls. Yet Walcott’s poem is also itself that very sea that engulfs and transforms, that continually collapses upon and enfolds, that commits itself to wreaking sea changes upon various imperialist structures. It is the “sunlight redefining Roseau’s / old sugar-factory roof” on a former plantation, where the name “Roseau,” in addition to indicating the sugar cane itself, might also be seen as a worn down version of “Rousseau”. It is the “wreaths of funereal moss drap [ing]” the rust-eroded remnants of an old sulphur mine in a recess of the island. Even Shakespeare’s own song of transformation, “Full Fathom Five”, is subjected to the tempest of another island’s forces and transmuted into a lament for a disappearing people (and a people disappearing in part at the hands of Shakespeare’s countrymen): “Flare fast and fall, Indian flags of October”, where perished Indians are likened to the flame-colored leaves that fall from trees in autumn, the same epic simile Dante employs to describe the souls of the damned gathering on the shores of Acheron.9
11Walcott’s polemic against, and eroding of, epic history, though, is countermanded by his own epic gestures: “the wisdom”, he notes, is “enraging”.10 Even as Walcott, like his own hero, Achille, searches to “find someplace, / some cove he could settle like another Aeneas, / founding not Rome but home”, the act of searching out not a foundation for a new empire but merely a settlement where one can be at peace still recalls Virgilian epic and thus makes one complicit in the act one would denounce.11 Walcott is thus often caught having to admire what he condemns, and to condemn what he admires.
12The gesture is a familiar one and draws us back to Dante, and back to canto XV of the Inferno, where the pilgrim, walking along a causeway with Virgil, meets and converses with the shade of a former mentor, Brunetto Latini, who moves along the burning sand of the field a couple of feet below the elevated travelers. Dante thus puts himself in a position higher than that of Ser Brunetto, both literally, by way of the raised walkway, and figuratively, by way of his own status as saved in contradistinction to Latini’s damnation. At the same time, however, that Brunetto walks both beneath and slightly behind Dante as they converse, Dante bends his head, “as in reverence”, and addresses Brunetto as a “dear, fatherly, benevolent” figure in the course of their dialogue.12 So Walcott positions himself in regard to Dante, Homer, and Virgil, and even to the western literary tradition in general: he emulates, joins, and bows before it even as he condemns it to damnation for its complicity in the sins of empire he would denounce.
13The episode in Dante is full of pathos and pity; Brunetto Latini, it seems, has done very little to deserve eternal damnation, yet the mechanics of Dante’s poem require Brunetto’s presence at just this point in the poem, just as Walcott’s own poem’s mechanics require that his own conception of hell, depicted in Book Seven of Omeros, consist of only two pits: one for “traitors / who, in elected office, saw the land as views / for hotels” and the other for poets who “smiled at their similes, / condemned in their pit to weep at their own pages”.13 This is a fate that any poet might suffer, Walcott included, unless those pages have already disintegrated in a figurative, essential manner, even as they remain. No wonder, then, that Walcott’s poem undoes itself even as it stitches itself together. Only poets whose poetry thus effaces itself could hope to avoid this kind of artistic damnation, only poets whose craft allows, through a generous navigation of ideas, for the finding and shaping of a language that will not reify, out of pride, into self-serving laws, rigid ideologies, and self-pleasing similes. Dante, I think, though perhaps not at first glance, and no doubt rather paradoxically, was himself such a poet whose humble righteousness and dismantling of established political orders thus provided a model attitude for Walcott to take up, but in response to, among other things, Dante himself – the other Dante, one might say.
14As Dante joins the ranks of Homer, Virgil, Ovid and others as a great poet while at the same time separating himself from them (they’re all in Limbo; Dante will be in Paradise), so Walcott joins the ranks of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Dante while at the same time separating himself from them. It is a similar relationship to the one that obtains between Joyce and Shakespeare. The influence of Ulysses on Omeros is obvious, Walcott himself acknowledging it when he visits Dublin within the poem, but A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was important to Walcott, too, from a very early age, as a work of postcolonial literature written in a still-colonial era.14 Joyce’s bildungsroman contains in its pages a scene reminiscent of Dante’s conversation with Brunetto; only in Joyce it is a scene in which the pity felt by the speaker for the one with whom he converses (despite Dante’s ultimate condemnation of Brunetto) is replaced by a remorseless exposure of a pathetic figure: the Dean of Studies at University College, Dublin.
15 The young Stephen Dedalus comes upon the dean trying to light a fire in a hearth, crouching before the fireplace, so that Stephen stands above him for the duration of their conversation but, unlike Dante, does not bow, though he does offer, but only halfheartedly, some assistance. In the ensuing conversation on what the dean calls “the esthetic question,” the roles of believer and nonbeliever from Dante now reversed, Stephen brashly affirms that he needs Aristotle and Aquinas “only for my own use and guidance until I have done something for myself by their light”.15 He continues: “If the lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it. If it does not give light enough I shall sell it and buy another”.16 It is not difficult to imagine Walcott affirming that he needs Homer and Dante only for his own use; nor is it not without a certain grim pleasure that one might imagine Walcott “selling” Homer or Dante should either fail to meet his needs. In Portrait, the balance of power that exists between Stephen and, say, Aristotle, is not entirely different from the balance of power that exists between Stephen and the dean. Only where Aristotle provides Stephen with considerable light and thus makes it difficult for Stephen to discard him, the dean provides no light whatsoever. Soon enough, the conversation between the two figures becomes more evocative of the Inferno’s tenth canto than of its fifteenth, the former consisting of a relentless sequence of misunderstandings. In Joyce’s novel, the dean seems to think that when Stephen is talking about the “lamps” of Aristotle and Aquinas, he is talking about actual lamps, so Stephen has to explain to him his more figurative meaning, which the dean then fumblingly claims to have gotten all along. Stephen, however, persists, explaining the difference between figurative and literal usage, literary language and the language of the marketplace, for an illustration of which he settles on the word “detain,” giving as an example of its non-literary usage, “I hope I am not detaining you”, to which the dean then responds, “Not in the least”, only to utter quickly then, having again seen his blunder and attempting to minimize it, “Yes, yes: I see… I quite catch the point”.17 But in a scene in which the lighting of a fire is carried out literally and fumblingly and the light of various kinds of lamps discussed, it is quite clear that the dean, who is twice described as grey and whose soul Stephen considers pathetically unfired, does not “see” adequately to suit Stephen: his vision is too dim, his own lamp too smoky, a point brought home by the final and famous turn their conversation then takes.
16The dean, still going on about actual lamps, says that “you must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold”, to which Stephen responds, “What funnel?” and, upon the dean’s clarification of the object in question, “That?... Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?”.18 Here the conversation becomes comically absurd: the dean asks, “What is a tundish?” to which Stephen responds, “That – the funnel.” But the impasse is also fraught with dire political implications, as the English dean assumes that “tundish” must be some kind of Irish word, so that the young Irishman has to inform him of its perfectly English origin. The dean is thus ridiculed and condemned to a kind of darkness by Joyce, and we see the young colonial, Stephen, beginning to grasp what it means to have a greater mastery of the colonizer’s language than the colonizer himself.
17When it comes to such thickets of language, where the very core of a word is potentially atomic in its power and energy, Walcott, in an earlier poem, “The Schooner Flight,” in which Omeros itself seems atomically prefigured, proclaims: “you would have / to be colonial to know the difference, / to know the pain of history words contain”.19 Certainly Joyce knew it, and Portrait is largely a recording of Stephen’s coming to learn it. And it is a theme for Walcott over and over again in his poetry: coming across, or finding, the crippling pain of history inherent in language and trying to convert it into freedom of movement.
18“To understand a sentence”, writes Wittgenstein, “means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique”.20 To know the pain of history words contain also means to understand a language, but in addition to this it means to understand a sentence, the pronouncement of a punishment or execution of a judgment by which one can potentially be mastered. Walcott’s poetry exhibits a mastery of technique of the highest order, but this does not imply that language therefore has no mastery over him; he understands his sentence. The more one masters the language one finds at one’s disposal, the greater the power of that language becomes, simultaneously empowering but also dwarfing its user. The pain of history words contain is indicative of a profound wound, the wound that so many of Walcott’s characters, from Achille to the poet himself, are afflicted by and for which the transmuted language of poetry might be the best cure, if only it is a poetry that constantly undoes its own bindings, lest they themselves chafe and restrict.
19What needs to be allowed for is circulation, air, and even error. When Seven Seas says of Achille’s vision quest to Africa, “His name / is what he out looking for, his name and his soul”, which name does he have in mind: “Achille” itself or the name of the ancestor whom Achille meets on the banks of the Congo, “Afolabe”?21 Is one of these names necessarily more authentic, less derivative, than the other? The Yoruba “Afolabe” means “one born of high status,” while “Achille” is nothing if not indicative of one born of particularly high status indeed: the godlike Achilles. Both names, though, are bitterly ironic considered in light of Afolabe’s subsequent capture and subjection to the indignity of slavery and thus of Achille’s own slavery-plagued ancestry. Afolabe himself is renamed “Achilles” by a British admiral after performing a feat of great strength, and he lets himself be called by this new name “to keep things simple”, which in one sense he no doubt does by thus avoiding any kind of confrontation with his captor, though in another sense, far from keeping things simple, this process of renaming, of accepting a new name begrudgingly, and of making that name one’s own and passing it along to others – all this fairly complicates things.22 The simple idea of “imperial naming [followed by] post-imperial renaming” is far too reductive, says one critic of Omeros: “the terms of empire [...] are not fixed” and are therefore subject to all kinds of erosions and reshapings at the hands of exploding surf.23
20If we consider the imperative that we call a thing by its right name, we’ll see that Omeros puts a curious twist on it, as a great many of its names are on a surface level wrong for an English-language poem: “Achille” instead of “Achilles”; “Philoctete” instead of “Philoctetes”; In God We Troust instead of In God We Trust (Achille’s canoe). The tourists on St. Lucia delight in the misspellings that abound on the island: “BLUE GENES, ARTLANTIC CITY, NO GABBAGE DUMPED HERE”.24 And they would likely delight, too, in “Omeros” instead of “Homer.” It doesn’t take long though, especially in this last instance, to see that what would appear to English speakers as the “wrong” names are right in any number of ways, from the puns and portmanteaus of the misspellings to the simple fact that “Achille” is French for Achilles, and “Omeros”, of course, Greek for Homer. It’s the supposedly “right” names that are actually wrong. The poet realizes all this slipperiness inherent in names, language, and tradition early in the poem when his Greek lover informs him, “O-meros... That’s what we call him in Greek”, to which he responds, “Homer and Virg are New England farmers... you’re right”.25 And when a priest smiles somewhat condescendingly at the misspelling on Achille’s canoe, Achille exclaims, “Leave it! Is God’ spelling and mine”.26 We may indeed be here simply to say, “house, bridge, well, gate, jug, fruit tree, window– / at most, column, tower”, as Rilke suggests, but in a great many instances finding this elemental language proves to be exceedingly difficult, buried as it is beneath all the strata of the midden of history, or perhaps somehow consisting of it, and only waiting to be poured through the poet’s – funnel?27
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
Format
- APA
- Chicago
- MLA
Bibliography
Alighieri, Dante (1994), The Inferno of Dante, trans. Robert Pinsky. New York: FSG.
Ashbery, John (1985), A Wave. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Austenfeld, Thomas (2006), “How to Begin a New World: Dante in Walcott’s Omeros”, in South Atlantic Review 71.3, p. 15-28.
Derrida, Jacques (1978), “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. London and New York: Routledge, p. 351-370.
10.1007/BF02677889 :Hofmeister, Timothy P. (1996), “The Wolf and the Hare: Epic Expansion and Contextualization in Derek Walcott’s Omeros”, in International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2.4, p. 536-554.
10.4324/9780203054277 :Joyce, James (1964), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin.
10.1353/cal.0.0175 :McKinsey, Martin (2008), “Missing Sounds and Mutable Meanings: Names in Derek Walcott’s Omeros”, in Callaloo 31.3, p. 891-902.
10.2307/827849 :Pollard, Charles W. (2001), “Traveling with Joyce: Derek Walcott’s Discrepant Cosmopolitan Modernism”, in Twentieth Century Literature 47.2, p. 197-216.
10.2307/j.ctv2xqnf15 :Rilke, Rainer Maria (1961), Duino Elegies. Trans. C. F. MacIntyre. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Walcott, Derek (1990), Omeros. New York: FSG.
— —, (1979), The Star-Apple Kingdom. New York: FSG.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958), Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwood.
Wood, James (2014), “On Not Going Home,” in The London Review of Books, 36.4, p. 3-8.
10.1353/cal.1999.0111 :Zoppi, Isabella Maria (1999), “Omeros, Derek Walcott and the Contemporary Epic Poem”, in Callaloo 22.2, p. 509-528.
Notes de bas de page
1 John Ashbery, “A Wave”, A Wave (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 68.
2 See Martin McKinsey, “Missing Sounds and Mutable Meanings: Names in Derek Walcott’s Omeros” in Callaloo 31.3 (2008, p. 891-902); Timothy P. Hofmeister, “The Wolf and the Hare: Epic Expansion and Contextualization in Derek Walcott’s Omeros” in International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2.4 (1996, p. 536-554); Isabella Maria Zoppi, “Omeros, Derek Walcott and the Contemporary Epic Poem” in Callaloo 22.2 (1999, p. 509-528); Thomas Austenfeld, “How to Begin a New World: Dante in Walcott’s Omeros” in South Atlantic Review 71.3 (2006, p. 15-28); and Charles W. Pollard, “Traveling with Joyce: Derek Walcott’s Discrepant Cosmopolitan Modernism” in Twentieth Century Literature 47.2, 2001 (p. 197-216).
3 Derek Walcott, Omeros (New York: FSG, 1990), p. 22, p. 149.
4 Ibid., p. 325.
5 James Wood, “On Not Going Home” in The London Review of Books 36.4 (2014, p. 3-8).
6 Dante Aligheri, Inferno, trans. Robert Pinsky (New York: FSG, 1994), p. 155.
7 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London and New York: Routledge, 1978), p. 358. I have substituted “epic poet” for Derrida’s “ethnographer”.
8 Derek Walcott, Omeros, op. cit., p. 296.
9 Ibid., p. 58, p. 60, p. 209.
10 Ibid., p. 300.
11 Ibid., p. 301.
12 Dante, p. 153, p. 155.
13 Derek Walcott, Omeros, op. cit., p. 289, p. 293.
14 See Charles W. Pollard, “Traveling with Joyce: Derek Walcott’s Discrepant Cosmopolitan Modernism” in Twentieth Century Literature 47.2, 2001 (p. 197-216).
15 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin, 1964; first edition, 1914), p. 202.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., p. 203.
18 Ibid., p. 203-204.
19 Derek Walcott, The Star-Apple Kingdom (New York: FSG, 1979), p. 12.
20 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1958), p. 81.
21 Derek Walcott, Omeros, op. cit., p. 154.
22 Ibid., 83.
23 Martin McKinsey, art. cit., p. 892, p. 900.
24 Derek Walcott, Omeros, op. cit., p. 311.
25 Ibid., p. 14.
26 Ibid., p. 8.
27 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. C. F. MacIntyre (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961), p. 69.
Auteur
Montana State University
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Poison et antidote dans l’Europe des XVIe et XVIIe siècles
Sarah Voinier et Guillaume Winter (dir.)
2011
Les Protestants et la création artistique et littéraire
(Des Réformateurs aux Romantiques)
Alain Joblin et Jacques Sys (dir.)
2008
Écritures franco-allemandes de la Grande Guerre
Jean-Jacques Pollet et Anne-Marie Saint-Gille (dir.)
1996
Rémy Colombat. Les Avatars d’Orphée
Poésie allemande de la modernité
Jean-Marie Valentin et Frédérique Colombat
2017