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  • Artists' Self-Portraiture and Self-Exploration in Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound
  • Peter Erickson (bio)

The symbolic plot of Tiepolo's Hound can be quickly summarized as working through the overarching opposition between two stark images: the white hound named in the title, which epitomizes the European artistic tradition, and the black mongrel, which represents the reality of Caribbean culture. The tension is increased by the graphic contrast between white and black. Despite Walcott's belated disclaimer that he "made too much of the whiteness of the hound" (4.19.4; p. 121),1 the racial implications of the two colors are obvious and unavoidable.

The poem begins with an insistence on the "epiphanic detail" (1.1.3; p. 8) of the white hound. But, over its long course, the poem enacts a counterepiphany by which the black mongrel gradually gains recognition and eventually supersedes the white hound as the primary focus of attention. As the concept of an aesthetic "epiphany" suggests, Walcott draws on Joyce's Portrait of the Artist. Adopting the figure of the artist as Daedalus, he depicts the confrontation with the Minotaur as an encounter with "my fear, my self, my craft" (4.20.4; p. 127). While echoing Joyce's commitment "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race," Walcott reformulates this quest as his own project "to elevate my race from its foul lair" (4.20.4; p. 128). Thus redirected, the word race is inflected with a specifically Caribbean resonance.

One of the poem's key challenges is to explain by what means—by what process of formal and psychological negotiation—Walcott makes the switch from the symbolism of the white hound to that of the black mongrel. How can what is presented as an absolute obsession to find the image of the white hound be, in the end, so easily abandoned? In retrospect, we can see the poem's strategy is not so much to reject the white hound outright as to render it irrelevant. Translating the literary form of Joyce's Portrait into the visual medium of self-portraiture, I shall argue that the consideration of artists' self-portraits is one of the principal means by which the imagery of the black mongrel becomes the higher priority that displaces the white hound. Visual logic is at the heart of the poem, and I begin with a more general overview of the way Walcott's own visual art serves as a vehicle for the poem's conclusion.

The Role of Visual Art in Poetic Discourse

Tiepolo's Hound represents an unprecedented elevation of the visual component of Walcott's work. Previously, Walcott used single paintings for jacket covers of individual [End Page 224] volumes; the literally exterior and detachable status of the painting kept it separate from the poetry and gave it an exclusively decorative function. In Tiepolo's Hound, twenty-six paintings are interspersed within the poetic text, thus making the visual element part of the main body of the work.

In his first book-length poem, Another Life (1973), published at age 43, Walcott portrays the two major decisions that would shape his career. First, despite his dedication to visual art, he chooses to pursue poetry rather than painting. Second, he emphasizes the need to leave his Caribbean home to make his way in the wider world and to come to terms with European cultural heritage. In both regards, Tiepolo's Hound, seventeen years later, presents a striking reversal. The readmission of painting brings visual art back into the center of his work.2 The one-way departure dramatized in Book One is Pissarro's, which heightens the decisive impact of Walcott's full-circle return to the Caribbean at the poem's end: "This is my peace, my salt, exulting acre: / there is no more Exodus, this is my Zion" (4.26.2; p. 162). This verbal declaration directly connects with its visual counterpart, the image of Becune Point, the last painting. The two media come together in Walcott's appeal in the final stanza: "Let this page catch the last light on Becune Point" (4.26.4; p. 163). Page refers...

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