Sounding the Break: African American and Caribbean Routes of World Literature

4: Dialectics of World Literature

4 Dialectics of World Literature Derek Walcott between Intimacy and Iconicity Readers frequently betray exhaustion with the critical debates that frame the work of Derek Walcott. Venerable Walcott critic Edward Baugh, recently reviewing four book-length author studies by four other venerable Walcott critics, writes: “None of the studies under review is unreasonable or startling, and, as the general rule, arguments are based on sound, indeed impeccable scholarship. Each has [its] distinctiveness in terms of changes rung on inevitable topics for Walcott criticism.”1 Despite the “sound, indeed impeccable scholarship” of the works under consideration, Baugh shows a bit of fatigue with the “inevitable topics for Walcott criticism,” a series of critical oppositions he dutifully enumerates: Europe and Africa; oral traditions and literary canons; provincialism and cosmopolitanism; poetic myth and positivist history. This exhaustion partly flows from what David Damrosch calls “the hegemony of the hypercanon” in world literature, an increasingly consolidated short list of “celebrity authors” garnering major prizes, multinational publishers, reviews, author studies, and syllabus appearances .2 From Walcott’s earliest poetry and drama, his writing has selfreflexively read, fed, and contested this institutionalization of his oeuvre and its “authorized” meanings. His iconic status as a “prodigy of the wrong age and colour,” a postcolonial hybrid of the creole Caribbean, highlights the danger—registered in both Walcott’s work and the conversations circulating around it—of literary exemplarity taking on the “interchangeability” that Natalie Melas identifies with “the commodity form in its circuit of exchange.”3 Produced as an examplar of the West Indian or postcolonial or Afrodiasporan poet/playwright, Walcott makes legible the material and intertextual processes by which his representations become representative, his example emblematic. This chapter tracks how he lays bare, as well as fashions his participation 83 Dialectics of World Literature in, a commodified field of world literature that constantly threatens to reduce his work to its most exchangeable, emblematic aspects. Nonetheless , Walcott recuperates a recalcitrant intimacy in the longue durée of world literature, embodied in practices of recitation recursively shuttling , “from hand to mouth,” between elite and vernacular idioms and contexts. This “hand to mouth” intimacy inscribes his oeuvre into a transhistorical, transcontinental chain of poetic transmission that stages a suspension of the hypercanonical dialectics that position Walcott as a diasporic icon, or resolution, of contradictions. A thoroughly drawn interpretive landscape mapping out Walcott’s literary production perennially confronts readers. This is a textual effect of the work itself, part of a design that intervenes in its institutionalization in an emergent canon of twentieth-century literature. Walcott’s writing seemingly apprehends one of Pierre Bourdieu’s arguments in The Rules of Art: “The discourse on the work is not a simple side-effect, designed to encourage its apprehension and appreciation, but a moment which is part of the production of the work, of its meaning and its value.”4 Through quite legible cues, Walcott’s poetry and drama frame “the discourse on the work . . . its meaning and its value” in ways that produce both pleasure and ennui. Thus Omeros, “as much a poem about writing about the Caribbean as it is a poem about the Caribbean,” according to Paul Jay, uses the metafictional device of embedded author figures, Dennis Plunkett and Walcott, to animate an explicit exegetical debate about positivist history and poetic mythmaking, imitation and invention, vernacular styles and classical forms.5 Within five years of the book’s publication, Joseph Farrell could survey an extensive body of criticism already rigidly sorted into a set of positions with respect to the question of Omeros’s “generic register,” an interpretive landscape that returned a weary critical community to an all-too-familiar precipice: “The epic element in Omeros threatens to reopen an old debate over Walcott’s relationship to the European and African elements in his personal heritage and in the culture of the West Indies as a whole.”6 However, Farrell notes that Walcott “invites such scrutiny” through his consistent use of the “twin motifs of dichotomy and indeterminacy.”7 Critics thus find themselves ensnared hermeneutically, maneuvered into iterations of the choices imposed upon the poet, staged as early as “A Far Cry from Africa”: “Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? / I who have cursed / The drunken officer of British rule, how choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?”8 The poetry transfers an authorial exhaustion with the “dichotomies and indeterminacies,” the 84 Dialectics...