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Walcott set out, again, to overcome or outdo a tradition that had been employed to denigrate the cultures of colonized peoples and to stifle their aspirations to nationhood. In doing this, he took up the epic genre, the genre of nationhood, and shifted the subject from the colonizing country to the colonized country, from the colonizing “race” to the colonized people. He followed through the epic tradition, using scenes, characters, events, and structures from each major epic writer and revising them for his own purposes. In Walcott, as in Joyce before him, this appears to have been a highly deliberate process. In other words, Walcott self-consciously sought to isolate and refashion selected parts of the epic tradition. In this sense, Walcott did not precisely write within the epic tradition. He sought to be read within that tradition . He sought to be understood as creating poetry of similar form and comparable quality to that of the paradigm epicists. His receipt of the Nobel Prize suggests that he succeeded. But his calculated attitude toward that tradition makes his writing, in a sense, “external” rather than “internal” to it. I do not mean this as a criticism. It is merely a descriptive statement, and may apply equally to the paradigm epicists. But not all uses of a genre are so self-conscious. What, then, makes writing more internal to a tradition? We can understand the issue in this way. 197 Chapter Six Indigenous Tradition and the Individual Talent Agha Shahid Ali, Laila/Majnoon, and the Ghazal Tradition involves a complex of motifs, ideas, images, forms, rhetorical strategies , and so on. These have become adequately familiar to some body of readers so as to guide their understanding of and response to works in that tradition . Among these readers are authors who have internalized the motifs, etc., in such a way as to enable their own unselfconscious composition of new works. We might consider language by way of comparison. Individual speech is particular, unique, different. As Chomsky has emphasized, virtually all ordinary language use is “creative”; “in normal speech one does not merely repeat what one has heard but produces new linguistic forms—often new in one’s experience or even in the history of the language—and there are no limits to such innovation” (Language 5). For example, the overwhelming majority of sentences in this book are not sentences that I have heard or read before. But, in order to write any of these sentences, I need to have a language—a set of abstract rules, lexical items, and the like, that provide a systematic link between ideas and utterances. Without a structured lexicon, I cannot use the word “dog” to refer to a dog. Without principles of morphology, I cannot use the sound [z] to mark plural, as in “dogs.” Without rules of syntax, I cannot distinguish between “Dogs frighten the Smith brothers” and “The Smith brothers frighten dogs.” Moreover, these rules interact in such complex ways that I cannot, for the most part, be manipulating them consciously. If I am fluent in a language, I do not think “Okay, now how do I mark a plural?” Rather, I have internalized the rule for marking plurals and do it automatically. Put more technically, one could say that I have a procedural schema for the formation of plurals—even though I may not have a representational schema for plural formation. (For a general discussion of the cognitive issues involved in what I am calling “procedural schemas,” see chapter 9 of Johnson-Laird on “production memory” and “production rules.”) The distinction between these types of schema is crucial for understanding literary identity and an author’s relation to tradition. It is nicely illustrated by the difference between Walcott’s relation to the epic and Ali’s relation to the ghazal. LANGUAGE AND TRADITION A representational schema is, again, a hierarchized structure of information regarding an object’s properties and relations. The representational schema of a bicycle includes such conceptual and perceptual features as having two wheels, pedals, a handle bar, and so on, all of which fit together in a certain way and function in a certain way. In contrast, procedural schemas are structures that guide our activity. My procedural schema for riding a bicycle is what allows me to ride a bicycle. For the most part, procedural schemas operate unconsciously. I do not think, “Now I press down on the pedal with one foot, 198 Empire and Poetic Voice [3.137.185.180...

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