Triangulation and the Aesthetics of Temporality in Tiepolo's Hound

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Camille Pissarro was peacefully situated in the city of Louveciennes, some eleven miles from Paris. Otto Von Bismarck laid siege to Paris in an attempt to consolidate Prussian power within the newly united German confederation, and the winds of war eventually chased Pissarro, Claude Monet, and many other refugees across the channel to England. It was there at the various museums of London where Pissarro and Monet engaged in a fruitful visual dialogue with the great landscape artists of England, most notably John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. Although they admired Gainsborough, Lawrence, and Reynolds, among others, Pissarro commented to a friend that "we were struck chiefly by the landscape-painters, who shared more in our aim with regard to 'plein air', light, and fugitive effects" (qtd. in Adler, 45). Pissarro took special note of Turner's capacity to depict the effects of light on snow and ice "by using a number of brushstrokes of different colours placed next to each other, rather than white alone" (Adler 46). The image of these two great impressionists before the work of their English compatriots of art has fascinated art historians because of the influence it suggests that Turner and Constable may have had on the impressionist movement, but the fascination of this encounter for Derek Walcott is more personal. Turner's 1838 painting, The Fighting Téméraire, which hung in the National Gallery before the eyes of Monet and Pissarro, also appeared in Thomas Craven's book, Masterpieces of Art, a copy of which Walcott inherited from his deceased father. Warwick Walcott died when his son was only a year old, but he left behind his own amateur copies of Turner and other painters to stimulate his son's painterly imagination.

The work depicts the famous retirement of the ship that had helped England to victory in the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar during the Napoleonic Wars against Spanish and French warships. It exhibits the most outstanding visual trait of Turner's work: the sunset reflected on the water, shining the declining light, halved by the horizon of the sea, directly into the eyes of the viewer. The moon also appears in the image, further suggesting the dividing line between what was and what will be. Turner enables his viewers to contemplate time as the protagonist of so many of his works, infiltrating and affecting every aspect of the historical drama that he depicts, subordinating the event's significance to the sun's movement. Turner's aesthetics of temporality has interested Walcott since he was a boy, as evidenced by his references to Turner's work in Another Life, his 1974 autobiographical poem, and of course, most recently in Tiepolo's Hound.¹ Seeing historical events through the lens of time's protagonism, in its small but relentless shifts and changes, has allowed Walcott to explore the various dualities that constitute his world—dualities of racial difference, Caribbean and European cultures, human and natural histories, poetry and painting—without falling into the logic of hierarchies or false dichotomies. Even despite his own intensely historical interest in Camille Pissarro in Tiepolo's Hound, ultimately Walcott is uninterested in chronology and its implications of patrimonial inheritance or hierarchical alignments of cultures and geographies. Walcott prefers to imagine Pissarro's encounter with Turner as an anachronistic triangulated meeting of disparate places (France, England, the Caribbean) and times (early 1800s, late 1800s, early twentieth century). He writes:

Triangulation: in his drawing room my father copies The Fighting Téméraire. He and Monet admire the radiant doom of the original; all three men revere the crusted barge, its funnel bannering fire, its torch guiding the great three-master on to sink in the infernal asphalt of an empire turning more spectral, like the mastodon.

(Tiepolo's Hound 76)

Triangulation is a spatial order used in surveying to be able to delimit a location by means of measuring its distance from two distinct spots. Triangulation not only confirms the distance by means of two witnesses, but it also spatially places the...