Intertextualizing Polyphemus: Politics and Ideology in Walcott's Odyssey

COMPARATIVE 0T9ÎÏÏ9 Volume 40 · No. 1 · Spring 2006 Intertextualizing Polyphemus: Politics and Ideology in Walcott's Odyssey ZlNA GlANNOPOULOU "The whole course of imitations and adaptations is simply a method of apprenticeship." —Derek Walcott, interview given in 1977 "The idea ofart has no tense apart from the present. Dante, for a poet, is. That is related to the same idea that God is. God doesn't have a past or future tense. And art does not have a past or future tense." —Derek Walcott, remarks before the reading of his poem "The Sea Is History" Three years after the publication of Omeros and with his repeated denials that he was rewriting Homer still echoing, Derek Walcott returned to Homer, this time adapting the Odysseyinto a drama which, byretainingthe title ofits epic antecedent, dispelled anylingering doubts as to its classical source.1 Butwhile Omeroshas already attracted a great deal ofscholarly attention, Odysseyhas lagged behind, despite that over a decade has elapsed since its publication.2 Existing studies of the play 2 Comparative Drama provide a rapid overview ofits scenes, drawing along the way some good but undeveloped connections with the Homeric precedent and commenting inpassing on its medium,language,and cultural context.3 Suchhaste is perhaps inevitable, given not only the thematic richness of Walcott's work and its multUayered allusions to Homer,but also the relativelysmall size of the studies themselves. In this paper, I shaU attempt to remedy this haste byexamining only one episode, Odysseus's adventure with the Cyclops, from the point ofview ofits use oftime, space, and characters. The restricted scope ofmy interpretation will permit a detailed analysis ofone fully realized and thematically independent dramatic incident as it reveals some ofWalcott's core ideological stances, which may then be fruitfullyexplored in the rest ofthe play.While the focus ofmy attention will be onWalcott's rendering ofthe adventure,I shall draw comparisons throughout between the play's depiction of the episode and that of its epic antecedent. The essentially performative nature of both the Walcottian and the Homeric media invests the parameters of my study with special significance, as time, space, and characters constitute the necessary ingredients of performance. Of course, both works have by nowbecome texts: Homer's Odysseyhas ceased being an oral poem since it was written down, andWalcott's play, although still performable, must lamentably be for most a reading pleasure.4 And yet for all their "textuality," their status as species ofperformative poetry remains: both were created in order to be enacted before an audience, recording events firmly situated in time and place and populated by characters. It might then be useful to linger briefly on the nature and extent of the kinship between Homeric performance and Caribbean theater, as well as to offer a brief overview ofWalcott's Odyssey, before I clarify further my objectives. WhUe modern epic poems are received on the printed page or perhaps through public readings, the Homeric epics were performed. Both the rhapsôidoi, who recited the creations ofthe aoidoi (the"singers"), and the deliverers ofspeeches within the epics are social actors, addressing an audience,thejudgesoftheirperformance.5Thelongoraltradition,ofwhich Homer is part, supplies the epic poems with mostly formulaic material which, however, is not merely repeated, as oralists tend to argue, but is re-created and transformed during verbal transmission over time.6 Zina Giannopoulou3 Although the exact parameters of the Homeric oral culture are forever lost to us, the presence and importance of the audience, a key component of the essentially performative nature of the epic, can be glimpsed from within the texts themselves: both the Iliad and the Odyssey include many instances of speakers engaged in public speech acts, and the putative effects of those acts on the audience inform the content of the speeches and the discursive modes deployed in them. Similarly,West Indian theater has been deeply influenced not only by the rich oral tradition of the area but also by the imaginative worlds of legends, myths, and folktales it has inherited.7 DerekWalcott, the major dramatist ofthe Caribbean, exploited the narrative and formal possibUities ofthat tradition in such plays of the fifties and sixties as Ti-Jean and His Brothers and Dream on...