“Join, Interchangeable Phantoms”: From Metaphor to Metonymy in Walcott's Omeros

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, like the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. This gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than the original sculpture, those shattered icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.¹

The lines above, the most famous of Derek Walcott's 1992 Nobel Prize lecture, are so oft-quoted that to cite them yet again is to set in motion a cycling between self-validation and self-parody—perhaps exactly as Walcott himself often does. More than ten years on, after much intense and loving use, these lines seem less a locus for piecing together Walcott's definitive statement on the nature and mission of his art than a kind of Rorschach test of his readers—what meanings they want to see here, what meanings it seems possible to see here. In this sense, Paula Burnett is particularly acute in closing the circle Homi Bhabha's discussion of Walcott leaves open, reminding us that Walcott's vessel trope draws on Walter Benjamin's earlier conception of the dynamics of translation:²

Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.³

Perhaps Walcott's vessel image is so open to critical translation because it consists of a translation of another's translation of translation; in a sense we find ourselves invited to extend the transformational genealogy so central to Walcott's own intertextual methods.

But to complete my own translation of Walcott's lines, to finish off the Rorschach test I mentioned earlier, I would like to focus on a single key shift in emphasis between these two figurations—the shift from Benjamin's "resembling" to Walcott's "reassembling." Benjamin's passage (admittedly quoted out of context, and of course itself in translation) suggests something about the nature of resemblance—the ways in which and through which texts in translation need be made "like." His fragments retain a primary identity as fragments, as "part[s]" which only "are to be" joined together at some indefinite future point. But Walcott's version pushes beyond likenesses to issues of "whole[ness]" and "restoration"; his vessel presents itself primarily as a whole, already well on its way to full reassembly. The material problematics of the physical and spatial metaphor thus seem much more urgent—the glue, the seaming and scars, the anxiety over whether things will "fit." Thus contiguity emerges more clearly as the specific form of likeness Walcott's vessel figure must contend with. Walcott's figure contemplates not the relation of parts to other parts (as for Benjamin), but the relation of parts to a projected, necessary whole.⁴

The concerns evident in Walcott's vessel quote—concerns with contiguity as a specific mode of likeness; with hermeneutics, the relations between parts and wholes—are also present, I'd like to suggest, in the foundational poetics of Omeros, the book-length poem published shortly before the Nobel Prize award, and arguably Walcott's most impressive literary achievement.⁵ While metaphor is most...