Walcott's Intertextual Method: Non-Greek Naming In Omeros

"Signs were interchanged . . . "

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (153)

"Memory is not the province of logic."

Derek Walcott, Epitaph for the Young (15)

All that Greek manure under the green bananas . . .
glazed by the transparent page of what I had read.
What I had read and rewritten till literature
was guilty as History. When would the sails drop
from my eyes . . .
When would my head shake off its echoes like a horse
shaking off a wreath of flies? . . .
But it was mine to make what I wanted of it, or
What I thought was wanted.

Derek Walcott, Omeros (LIV.iii, pp. 271–72)

In Omeros, as elsewhere, Walcott acknowledges the charge of imitation, what some see as the anxiety of influence, but it is clear that the acknowledgement is something of a ritual gesture. The impetus of the passage is toward what follows. After the image of the horse shaking off flies (a futile attempt) comes the assertion of ownership—all this literature was "mine"—and of freedom: he can make of it what he will. Then comes a very Walcottian qualifier, almost a disclaimer: or what he thinks others want. It is the middle assertion that is the key, the freedom to use literature in his work, to make it signify, in whatever way he pleases. It is, after all, part of the world and part of experience. For although all signifying practices are necessarily intertextual, those of a writer "more deeply moved by the sight of works of art than by that of the things which they portray,"¹ whose creativity is informed with multiple traditions, are inescapably more so. It should be said at the outset that intertextuality—Jean-Pierre Durix speaks of "the shimmering brocades of intertextuality . . . the dizzying spiral of echoing signifiers" (7)—in Walcott is always complex and open-ended. As John Thieme points out, his work "incorporates and synthesizes disparate cultural intertexts . . . recognizing that the formative influences outlined are themselves hybridized, shifting and unstable" and "already exist in a discursive continuum which is particularly fluid because of the cross-cultural nature of the post-colonial situation" (4). However, the discursive continuum on which Omeros "signifies" (in the Henry Louis Gates sense) may be wider than has hitherto been suggested. By its use of Homeric names the poem openly invites an intertextual reading—although the apparent Greek parallels are never straightforward, and in the last analysis function always as secondary to the world of the poem's immediacy, its dimension as Caribbean mimesis and mythopoeia—but less conspicuously some of the other, non-Greek names Walcott uses also carry a symbolic literary resonance. They are part of the double project which Robert Hamner defines: he "appropriates the life witnessed by various cultural texts" at the same time as he "textualises the life out of which he has grown" (231). The allusiveness implicit in the Plunketts' part of the story, and that of Ma Kilman, can modify the reader's perception, as certain literary echoes cause meanings to sprout in new directions. When explored, such echoes emerge as central to the poem's figuring of cultural pluralism and spirituality, and its engagement with identity politics, and provide new insight as to the aesthetic decisions which seem to have gone into its making.

It is not hard to see that Ireland is important to Omeros. The figure of Joyce is staged unmistakably at significant moments, the Irish landscape is powerfully evoked—particularly literary Dublin with Joyce's Howth and the Martello Tower, and Glen-da-Lough, the ancient spiritual center—and Maud Plunkett is given an Irish identity. But the poem's relationship to Irishness does not end there. Its aged couple, the Plunketts, illustrate the pluralism within whiteness, Maud being the Irish wife of an English husband, Dennis, but the intertextual resonances of their portrayal complicate this simple national binarism, bringing in oblique Irish echoes in relation to Dennis as well as Maud, and inverting the...