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6  giotto’s invisible sheep Lacanian Mirroring and Modeling in Walcott’s Another Life 121 Emerging as a poet whose West Indian cultural identity is frozen within the ontological riddle of the landscape, Walcott acknowledges in an autobiographical preface, “What the Twilight Says,” that the New World poet must start from scratch: In that simple schizophrenic boyhood one could lead two lives: the interior life of poetry, the outward life of action and dialect. Yet the writers of my generation were natural assimilators. We knew the literature of Empires, Greek, Roman, British, through their essential classics; and both the patois of the street and the language of the classroom hid the elation of discovery. If there was nothing, there was everything to be made. With this prodigious ambition one began.1 This ambition is problematic, given the indirection of a language that can only come into being through the presence of an other—through an other. As the Lacanian model suggests, subjectivity arises with the child’s entry into the symbolic order when he acquires language, a name, and social prohibitions. Subject formation is therefore based on assimilating a variety of elements within one’s social context including the crucial element of difference. During Walcott’s earliest apprentice years, he speculated about the confrontation of two contrasting worlds, Europe and its former colonies, and how to integrate the Western literary tradition into his provincialism, without destroying his childlike sense of awe:2 Provincialism loves the pseudo-epic so if these heroes have been given a stature disproportionate to their cramped lives remember that I beheld them at knee-height and that their thunderous exchanges rumbled like gods about another life.3 From a psychoanalytic perspective, subject formation is a universal condition of mitigating the profound and frustrating processes involved in forming an identity. For Walcott, the notion of self-alienation is compounded by 122 an adopted culture’s language that subjects him as it constructs him. In phenomenological terms, the locus of identity revolves around the Other, that central presence, real or conceived, through which we become self-aware by regarding ourselves as another would. For Lacan, the subject is constantly having to remake itself in encounters with the speech that presupposes an addressee. Lacan’s Other is closely associated with language itself, or at least with the place of otherness to which language is directed. Walcott opens “The Divided Child,” part I of Another Life, with an epigraph from Malraux’s Psychology of Art in which Vasari’s account of the lives of Cimabue and Giotto is rendered. The epigraph’s obvious message is that the true artist, accepting his master’s tutelage, learns to love works of art over the things they portray. Less obvious is the way in which the apprentice renders the landscape through the master’s mediation, hoping to capture an art language that can mediate the world of objects. A Lacanian scheme is especially appropriate as a mode for understanding the process of artistic apprenticeship because it suggests that all language presupposes the absence of the object it signifies; hence a painting or poem refers not to the object from which it was derived (as a series of marks or articulations) but to a prior learned and assimilated object of art. This bears crucially on Walcott’s view of every language as owing something to others, with obvious implications for art. As Walcott argues, “There is no distinction between the derivative, which has ‘originat[ed]’ from ‘something ,’ and the ‘original,’ from which subsequent forms derive.”4 Even the inimitable is an attempted copy that will itself be copied. Rei Terada has demonstrated in Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry that Walcott’s view of mimicry is an inescapable condition of all art, but one that the artist must use to his or her advantage. In the Cimabue and Giotto paradigm, the master is “struck” by the way in which his pupil has appropriated his own representation of the landscape. Unlike “mimesis ,” a representation of reality, mimicry is a “representation of a representation ,” something that the gifted student instinctively knows.5 Walcott’s use of the story of Cimabue and Giotto, then, suggests a paradigm (for “The Divided Child,” at least) of a hidden reciprocal relationship between master and apprentice, who mirror one another and influence each other’s art. But it also suggests a parallel binary opposition in which the master/apprentice relationship is subverted to disrupt the hegemonic fixity of the colonizer/colonized...

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