Derek Walcott

Start Free Trial

Derek Walcott's Omeros: Echoes from a White-Throated Vase

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

In the following essay, Lock discusses the problematic aesthetic representation of the female subject in Western literary tradition and in Walcott's evocation of Helen in Omeros.
SOURCE: Lock, Charles. “Derek Walcott's Omeros: Echoes from a White-Throated Vase.” Massachusetts Review 41, no. 1 (spring 2000): 9–31.

In reading Omeros we are struck, as we are in the Iliad, by the silence of Helen. What is this silence, and how in a poem is silence to be figured? To depict the woman, without representing her voice, is for the poet to exercise his (specifically his) descriptive powers, and to render the woman an object, whose silence is matched by its/her passivity. What remains is of course beautiful, but it is a beauty achieved at the expense of the person. The familiar narrative is announced in terms of her (or its) shadow, appearance rather than substance, object rather than subject:

                                        The duel of these fishermen
was over a shadow and its name was Helen.(1)

The entire poem is written in hexameters, and Helen's (or “its”) second utterance is made of a hexameter famously not her own:

“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away,”
she croons, her clear plastic sandals swung by one hand.(2)

The woman's voice is traditionally and, to us, offensively subordinated to her beauty, and it is a mere truism to say that, in Western art and literature, men act and speak, women are, and are looked at. The one who represents has been normatively male; the one represented, whether as nude or Virgin, heroine or slut, has been female, not so much, we might argue, for thematic reasons than as a function of the division between the one who represents and the one who is represented.

That division would lead us to understand that the Madonna became the dominant theme of medieval painting not as a result of an otherwise inexplicable cult of the Virgin, but as the cause of that cult: male artisans and craftsmen, charged with the task of representation, define themselves and their craft by opposition. What is represented is not craft but grace.

This constitutive division of gender between the male who represents and the female who is represented takes on a thematic rendering from the very beginning. Just as the Madonna is surrounded by male saints whose adoring gaze replicates within the pictorial space the gaze and the veneration of the (male) viewer, so Homer presents Helen not directly to the reader but as she is presented to the old men of Troy, and indirectly through their reactions:

And catching sight of Helen moving among the ramparts,
they murmured one to another, gentle, winged words:
“Who on earth could blame them? Ah, no wonder
the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered
years of agony all for her, for such a woman.
Beauty, terrible beauty!
A deathless goddess—so she strikes our eyes!”(3)

Thus, within a work of art or literature, the figure of a woman becomes a second-order work of art, admired within the work we are reading or viewing, by a male figure himself represented therein. Rather than lamenting this fact, which we may do, from a historical and political perspective, we should acknowledge that, aesthetically, the internal, represented spectator, and the internal, doubly-represented aesthetic object (the woman), make for the most intricate aesthetic and cognitive challenges. Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is exemplary of the playful, self-reflexive and, at the same time, intensely ethical exercise in the aesthetic sacrifice of the person to the object, of the (representing) voice to the (represented) silence.

“Sacrifice” is of course a charged term, for it implies that necessity or beneficial consequence is involved. In political terms we had better say subordination, or repression, or worse. But in aesthetic terms we are right to speak of sacrifice, for it is the work of art which we honour and value even as we deplore the object-hood to which the person has been reduced or “sacrificed.” (To the extent, of course, that “the person” has any “ethical being”: here the hold of mimesis continues to cloud our thinking.)

The voice of the one who represents is strongly contrasted with the silence of the one represented: the mysterious and enigmatic silence of the Mona Lisa is emblematic of the very deed of representation. Yet there is, we should note, a difference between the figuring of silence in fiction and in poetry, especially in epic. Novelistic prose is possessed of the remarkable linguistic feature known as erlebte Rede or style indirect libre, or free indirect discourse, whereby the voice of another may be incorporated into the narrator's speech, two voices fused indistinguishably. Not only other persons, but even inanimate objects may be said to have thoughts. That is after all the point and theme of Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel in front of the fire, meditating, and apprehending all, without voicing a single word.

Free indirect discourse is not an effect to be striven for, but rather something that occurs almost inevitably with fiction. It may explain why ekphrasis, such a prestigious topos of poetry, is so seldom found in fiction. An object of description refuses in fiction to remain an object, to stay passive, but somehow answers back, becomes animated, acquires, as we say, a life and a voice of its own, interfering verbally with the narrator's voice. We see this occurring with the buildings in Dickens's London, the wind and the moorland in Wuthering Heights, Hardy's Egdon Heath, or any number of fictional landscapes. This is, one could argue, not a calculated thematic effect on the part of the novelist, so much as the result of the conjunction of “descriptive prose” and “novelistic discourse.” What is described takes on a voice—which might explain why people in “real life” are no less interesting than their fictional equivalents, while actual landscapes, cityscapes, furniture, things, are always, after and outside a novel, somewhat disappointing.

Poetry, we might say, has as its task to keep subject and object distinct because it is the literary form of Greek philosophy: Aristotle's Poetics are in some sense the guarantor of Aristotle's Metaphysics. The novel, by contrast, confuses them and us, and is the literary form of modernity, of both imperialism and democracy.

Bakhtin argues that the novel arises from the breakdown of the “classical public wholeness of the individual … A differentiation between biographical and autobiographical forms had begun.”4 In Homer, Bakhtin continues, “There was as yet no internal man, no ‘man for himself’ (I for myself), nor any individualized approach to one's own self. An individual's unity and his self-consciousness were exclusively public. … The individual was completely on the surface, in the most literal sense of the word.” In short, there is in Homer no thinking without speaking, and no speaking without addressing. There is therefore no possibility for representing silence.5 Isabel by the fire is an impossible scene in epic; it (or she) is the very consummation of the possibilities of the novel.

And what is forever refreshing in Homer is the sense of narrative without internal motivation, a narrative determined purely by external factors, the visible and the vocal. As Schiller discerned, in the discontent of his awed fascination with Homer:

even in reading, our hearts pause, and gladly detach themselves from the object in order to look within. But of all this, not a trace in Homer. … As though he possessed no heart in his bosom, he continues in his dry truthfulness.6

Our pleasure in reading novels is in part to be derived from the illusion, or the assurance, that we might have access to another person's mind and heart. The fictional representation becomes itself the best evidence (as in Schiller) for the presumption of a heart in the characters, as in the writer: a “look within.”

Such access to another's mind in fiction, rather than in epic, tends to open up also an access to the mind of things, or of the landscape: that such things or views should have a heart is no more absurd than that people should—and in fiction no more infrequent.

The novel, it is often remarked, is the most successful form of cultural export: post-colonial politics is seldom embarrassed by the novel as genre, not even by the novel as vehicle of grievance. Newly-independent nations have founded their traditions on works of fiction as Greece and Rome grounded themselves on epic. Poetry, by contrast, seems always archaic (its perpetual, designated weakness vis-a-vis the novel). Modern poetry (Eliot, Pound, David Jones) insists on its modernity by keeping up with the novel, in a process which Bakhtin labelled “novelization,” while at the same time unbarring its archaic traces. Yet, even in modernist verse, the dialogism so distinctive of the novel, and so central to the loose unstructured texture that typifies the genre, is not often to be noticed.

In Omeros we find harmony, closure, structure, thematic unity, everything that we hope to find in poetry and in epic, with none of the ironic disclaimers and compositional disruptions to which modern poetry has accustomed us. Its play with voices appears to be conventional, its distinction between diegesis and dialogue would seem recognizable to Aristotle.

“This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes.”
Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking
his soul with their cameras. “Once wind bring the news
to the laurier-canelles, their leaves start shaking
the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars,
because they could see the axes in our own eyes.
Wind lift the ferns. They sound like the sea that feed us
fishermen all our life, and the ferns nodded ‘Yes,
the trees have to die.’ So, fists jam in our jacket,
cause the heights was cold and our breath making feathers
like the mist, we pass the rum. When it came back, it
give us the spirit to turn into murderers. …”(7)

Already we find in this introductory passage a sort of phonetic or accentual disruption. The effect is dramatic, in the sense that one cannot read aloud Philoctete's speech without assuming an accent: “Wind lift the fern” is not speakable in Received Pronunciation.8 This passage is ascribed to Philoctete: by contrast, the narrator's own language, the diegesis, is always “correct.” Yet it is through the narrator's voice that we learn of “the tourists, who try taking his soul with their cameras.” The syntax is correct, but the sentiment, whether ascribed or shared, is “primitive,” as is the idea that the ferns might nod their assent. (It would be a mistake to treat this as an instance of Ruskin's “pathetic fallacy.”) On first reading, one might decode the phrase to separate our narrator from Philoctete, and to restrict to Philoctete the savage belief, of “the primitive mind,” that a photograph can steal the soul. Yet in the very next section we have the narrator's description of the chopping down of trees—playing with Horace, Satires, Book I, 8: “Olim truncus eram”—and the building of canoes, a narration uninterrupted by dialogue:

                                                                      The logs gathered that thirst
for the sea which their own vined bodies were born with.
Now the trunks in eagerness to become canoes
ploughed into breakers of bushes, making raw holes
of boulders, feeling not death inside them, but use—(9)

Here the trees are animated even in their death, animated by a desire to be of use, and through that desire, presumably, they become canoes. We must now reconsider the poem's opening verse, because if our narrator believes this about trees, he may as well believe that the camera steals the soul.

We have already said, after Bakhtin, that the Homeric world knows no interior life or inner world, that the unity of the individual is complete on the surface. Here in Omeros we have a world full of Homeric echoes, yet one with a rich and mystifying inwardness: epic and novel combined without the obvious signs of “novelization.” And we must make explicit our view that the novel is, at the linguistic level, considerably more animistic and primitive than the Homeric epic: access to another's mind—the staple of fiction—is the very condition of animism.

Where there is inwardness, there will be echo. Where there is echo there must be an inner space, the recess of its latency.

The figure of echo is complicated. It is both outward: there is no real voice there, no presence of a person; and it is inward, in that what produces an echo must contain it.10 The figure of synecdoche is in this way a type of echo, and we see how echo poems (George Herbert's “Heaven” is a well-known example) are constructed by removing one word from within an outer enclosing word: delight/light, enjoy/joy, pleasure/leisure, persever/ever.11 Echo is thus a literal or phonetic synecdoche, a word contained within a word, part of one word that can be taken for the whole of another.

Helen's very first words in Omeros are subject to this sort of echoic repetition:

                                                                      Helen said: “Girl, I pregnant,
but I don't know for who.” “For who,” she heard an echoing call, as
with oo's for rings a dove moaned in the manchineel.(12)

And the poem's title is unfolded in the same fashion:

A wind turns the harbour's pages back to the voice
that hummed in the vase of a girl's throat: “Omeros.”
“O-meros,” she laughed. “That's what we call him in Greek,”
stroking the small bust with its boxer's broken nose. …
                                                                                … I said, “Omeros,”
and O was the conch-shell's invocation, mer was
both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes
and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore.
Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, and the washes
that echoed from a cave-mouth when the tide has ebbed.
The name stayed in my mouth.(13)

We find in this remarkable passage the word “Omeros” being emptied of its component sounds, and the word that contains—as envelope/synecdoche—is figured in “the vase of a girl's throat,” a conch-shell, a cave-mouth, and “my mouth.” Catachresis (known misleadingly as incorrect usage, or as dead metaphor) is never deliberate, and needs no motive: it is always the child of necessity.14 Yet its use here is insistent: what else can we call the entrance to a cave but its “mouth”? And what else to call “my mouth”? Other things in this poem have mouths, though they speak not: the cannon, itself an “iron log,” “mounting, mounting, until its mouth touched the very first branch” (83), and the conventional catachresis of the “cannon's mouth” (102). At first the canoes do not speak, though “their nodding prows / agreed with the waves to forget their lives as trees” (8); but when Achille is in his entranced Africa, or Lethe, “For hours the river gave the same show / for nothing, the canoe's mouth muttered its lie” (134). We attend to “the mouth of the cauldron” (246) and the mouth of sundry other vessels, one of which vessels is this craft, of poetry. The poem's dedication alerts us to this recurrent pun: “For my shipmates in this craft. …”15

The mouth is not only that through which we speak; it is the opening in any vessel, necessary if an echo is to be produced. The mouth is for both speech and echo, the sign of either a presence or an absence within the vessel. It is only by convention that words denoting parts of the human body are considered not to be catachresis, to be as it were the literal terms from which metaphor spreads, or takes off. Only by convention, by our blindness to catachresis, does a human mouth signify a presence within. Yet the mouth of a beautiful woman, aesthetically objectified, begins to resume its status as catachresis for, say, the opening of a vase.16

The same Greek girl from whom the narrator first heard the name of Homer is recalled at the end of Book 5 (out of 7), in Boston:

                                                                      I climbed steps, I read buzzers,
searched from the pavement again for that attic where
a curved statue had rolled black stocking down its knees,
unclipped and then shaken the black rain of its hair,
and “Omeros” echoed from a white-throated vase.(17)

Just a few pages later, the poet/narrator is proposing a cinematic version of this poem's story:

                                                                      Cut to a woman's hands
Clenched towards her mouth with no sound. Cut to the wheel
of a chariot's spiked hubcap. Cut to the face
of his muscling jaw, then flashback to Achille
hurling a red tin and a cutlass. Next, a vase
with a girl's hoarse whisper echoing “Omeros,”
as in a conch-shell.(18)

We began with “the vase of a girl's throat” and we have arrived at “a vase with a girl's hoarse whisper”; the only mouth in this section of cuts is that to which the woman clenches her hands “with no sound.”

These transformations, in what the poet calls “my reversible world,”19 have been achieved by catachresis and synecdoche. It is worth noting that synecdoche is the very trope of reversibility, by which container may stand for contained, and vice versa. We should insist that catechresis is not “dead metaphor”—as a kind of lazy deviation from the “literal”—but rather involuntary or unmotivated metaphor; it is equally important to insist that synecdoche is a type of metonymy. We thus find, in the play of catachresis and synecdoche on the figure of the vase, an elaborated model of Roman Jakobson's theory of poetic language as the transposition of—or the interference between—the metaphoric and metonymic poles.20

Presented with the figure of a vase, we are no longer surprised at the silence of Helen—a silence which does not exclude a capacity for echo. Yet the girl-vase-vessel who speaks the name “Omeros” is an unnamed Greek girl, with Asiatic features, not the Helen of St. Lucia (that island's name, Walcott's own birth-place, is a gift to one who would claim kinship with Homer and Milton). The named, dark Helen is introduced thus, at a café:

I felt like standing in homage to a beauty
that left, like a ship [vessel], widening eyes in its wake.
“Who the hell is that?” a tourist near my table
asked a waitress. The waitress said, “She? She too proud!”
As the carved lids of the unimaginable
ebony mask unwrapped from its cotton-wool cloud,
the waitress sneered, “Helen.” And all the rest followed.

(24)

Among its many senses, that last sentence almost caps, by its own subtle echo, Yeats's astonishing half-line:

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower,
And Agamemnon dead.

The indirect presentation of Helen by way of the tourists and the waitress accords with Lessing's observation that Helen's beauty is not described directly but must be inferred from the responses of those around her.21

Walcott's presentation of his Helen is not only indirect, but it makes explicit its means of indirection, its masks, shadows, and echoes:

I saw her once after that moment on the beach
when her face shook my heart, and that incredible
stare paralysed me past any figure of speech,
when, because they thought her moods uncontrollable,
her tongue too tart for a waitress to take orders,
she set up shop: beads, hair-pick, and trestle-table …
Her carved face flickering with light-wave patterns cast
among the coconut masks, the coral earrings
reflected the sea's patience. Once, when I passed
her shadow mixed with those shadows, I saw the rage
of her measuring eyes, and felt again the chill
of a panther hidden in the dark of its cage
that drew me towards its shape as it did Achille.
I stopped, but it took me all the strength in the world
to approach her stall, as it takes for a hunter
to approach a branch were a pantheress lies curled
with leaf-light on its black silk. To stand in front of her
and pretend I was interested in the sale
of a mask or a T-shirt? Her gaze looked too bored,
and just as a pantheress stops swinging its tail
to lightly leap into grass, she yawned and entered
a thicket of palm-printed cloth, while I stood there
stunned by that feline swiftness, by the speed
of her vanishing, and behind her, trembling air
divided by her echo that shook like a reed.(22)

The insistence on echo and shadow is, however, not just a tribute to Homeric indirection. It also gives us a clue to a further complexity, for Omeros seems to rank itself among those recensions of the Homeric story that suppose Helen to have been a figment: “Helen the Eidolon or ‘Phantom,’ whose story is that there was no such story.”23 There are two Helens in Omeros, the named black girl, and the unnamed Greek one. The poem thus exploits the non-Homeric story, first told by Stesichorus, mentioned by Herodotus and Euripides, treated by Sophocles in Philoctetes,24 and twice cited by Plato in the Phaedrus, that is was only a phantom, a mask, a shadow that caused the trouble between Menelaus and Paris, and that the real, substantial Helen stayed all the while in Egypt. This tradition was given renewed life by Flaubert in The Temptation of St. Antony, where her presence is conjured into being by Simon Magus. That, incidentally, should give a clue to Helen's presence in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: as a vision, a shadow, a phantom, she is there less for her beauty than for her “conjurability.” Ernst Bloch suggests that the motivation of the myth may be ascribed to the absolute or utopian hope which can be vested only outside of objective reality.25 The one serious attempt in modern English literature to address this theme is H. D.'s much-neglected Helen in Egypt published in 1961, whose prefatory note is worth citing at length:

We all know the story of Helen of Troy but few of us have followed her to Egypt. How did she get there? Stesichorus of Sicily in his Pallinode, was the first to tell us. Some centuries later, Euripides repeats the story. Stesichorus was said to have been struck blind because of his invective against Helen, but later was restored to sight, when he reinstated her in his Pallinode. … According to the Pallinode, Helen was never in Troy. She had been transposed or translated from Greece into Egypt. Helen of Troy was a phantom, substituted for the real Helen, by jealous deities. The Greeks and the Trojans alike fought for an illusion.26

And H. D.'s poem takes up the theme of the phantom, shadow, reflection:

Alas, my brothers,
Helen did not walk
upon the ramparts,
she whom you cursed
was but the phantom and the shadow thrown
of a reflection(27)

The two Helens in Omeros, Asiatic and African, Greek and Egyptian, seem to be shades, if one can put it so, of the dark and fair Iseults of the Tristan legend:

You were never in Troy, and, between two Helens,
yours is here and alive; their classic features
were turned into silhouettes from the lightning bolt
of a glance. These Helens are different creatures,
one marble, one ebony. …
but each draws an elbow slowly over her face
and offers the gift of her sculptured nakedness,
parting her mouth.(28)

And where there are two, there is not one original and one copy; or if there are, we cannot tell the copy from the original, the shadow from the form that casts it. It is the predicament of Narcissus:

He [Achille] brooded on the river. The canoe at its pole,
doubled by its stillness, looked no different
from its reflection, nor the pier stakes, nor the thick
trees inverted at the riverline, but the shadow-face
swayed by the ochre ripples seemed homesick
for the history ahead, as if its proper place
lay in unsettlement. So, to Achille, it appeared
they were not one reflection but separate men—(29)

Nor can we tell from the shadow whether it is cast by flesh or marble:

                                        any statue is a greater actor
than its original by its longer shadow(30)

and “Only silhouettes last.”31 We might speculate that the confusion occasioned by reflection is not unlike, and may itself reflect, the impossibility of ascribing identity to voices in the free indirect discourse of dialogism.32

Helen is employed as a maid by the Plunketts, an expatriate couple, he a retired Major who fought with Montgomery in North Africa, she (Maud) of Irish origin: Plunkett serves the function of the internalized male gaze, the represented gaze of admiration and desire which makes of Helen a representation within a representation. Helen, as seen by the Major, is described in terms of her shadow, and in terms of the confusion, or identity, between her shadow and herself:

he could see her shadow through the sheets of laundry
and since she and her shadow were the same, the sun
behind her often made her blent silhouette seem
naked. …(33)

The next time we see Helen, through the eyes of the fisherman, Achille, the presentation is slightly different, for it is the shadow rather than the body that is possessed of agency:

It was still moonlight, and the moonlight filled the sheen
of the nightgown she entered like water as her pride
shook free of the neck. He saw the lifted wick shine
on the ebony face, and the shadow she made
on the wall. Now the shadow unpinned one earring,
its head tilted, and smiled. It was in a good mood.
It checked its teeth in a mirror, he watched it bring
the mirror close to its eyes.

(114)

What is a shadow but an entirely exteriorized body, a body without inwardness, without a mind? “A shadow of himself,” we say of someone numbed to silence. Yet this shadow is substantial, a body. As we have watched the transformation of an echo into the vase from which it issued, so we witness here a shadow becoming its own substance. Insubstantiality has been transformed into statuesque solidity, by the reversibility of synecdoche, and by the doubling of metonymy.

Shadows, like reflections, should be given privileged linguistic status, for they involve both likeness and proximity, both metaphor and metonymy. That is to say, there are two necessary conditions for shadows and reflections: that the shadow or reflection resemble what causes it, and that the shadow or reflection exist only in proximity to or in contiguity with that which is its cause. Nothing else visually, apart from shadows and reflections, so insists on the holding together of the metaphoric and the metonymic.34

Yet if we leave the spatial, visual field, and enter into the acoustic and temporal realm (the world of those under the patronage of St. Lucia), we must admit, to a most exclusive linguistic club, the echo. The condition of membership is that the phonetic effect depends on both resemblance and contiguity. The echo must acoustically resemble the word which is its cause, and it must fade, pine away into non-being, when not in proximity to its cause. As the twoness of the original and the copy (in the visual-spatial world) leads, duplicitously, to a confusion between them, or (same thing) to an identity of one with the other, so (in the aural-temporal world) an echo after a voice makes it hard to tell voice and echo apart.

Again we listen in to the acoustic chain of echoes, and understand why the echo issues from a container, and why that container has a throat. And we can attempt an answer to the sharp question posed by Maud Plunkett:

What was it in men that made such beauty evil?

(124)

Beauty (the feminine, the represented) is objectified, silenced, permitted only to echo the male voice. Yet this is no simple tale of the oppressors and the oppressed. As we are also told: no colony can be free of the Empire's guilt. If every poem is an echo, then all our cultural and aesthetic training teaches us to look for echoes, whether we are post-colonial poets or expatriate retired officers:

He [Plunkett] found his Homeric coincidence.
                                                                                “Look, love, for instance,
near sunset, on April 12, hear this, the Ville de Paris
struck her colours to Rodney. Surrendered. Is this chance
or an echo? Paris gives the golden apple, a war is
fought for an island called Helen?”(35)

Plunkett, the British expatriate, decides that their maid, Helen, is part of the pattern of echoes:

                                                                                                                                                                If she
hid in their net of myths, knotted entanglements
of figures and dates, she was not a fantasy
but a webbed connection. …(36)

He undertakes his historical research on the War of the Antilles precisely out of his fascination not with Helen “herself” (he would not admit to that sort of improper personal interest) but with Helen as figure and echo:

So Plunkett decided that what the place needed
was its true place in history, that he'd spend hours
for Helen's sake on research.(37)

Our narrator, a native of the islands, in contrast to Plunkett, is complicit with Plunkett in the silencing of Helen, even in “Not his, but her story. Not theirs, but Helen's war.”38 For even the concession of “Not his, but her story” will only place her in the focus of his gaze, so that Plunkett will enact yet again the representation of Helen as the type of beauty. It is men who make the beauty evil by representing it, though they have little choice when representation is figured as a masculine craft, and when our entire civilisation endorses the echoing of aesthetic values.

Meditating on the vase as the figure for Helen in Omeros one is tempted to outline a topos with a tradition: the vase as the figure of the silenced woman. Keats's urn is the epitome of the silent: “Thou still unravished bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time.” Its compound synecdoche (unseen emptiness of town, unseen emptiness of unseen urn) makes silence both reflective and contained, as if we might one morning hear an echo of silence:

What little town, by river or sea shore,
                    or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
                                        Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

And its punning catachresis: “O Attic shape! Fair attitude!” guides us echoically to hear an apostrophe to Helen in:

Thou, silent form, dost tease us. … out of thought
                    As doth Eternity …

Browning's “The Statue and the Bust” (one of the few English poems in consistent terza rima, to which Walcott's poem alludes and from which it strikes echoes) knows almost too well what is involved in the animation of art:

The true has no value beyond the sham:
As well the counter as coin. …

(II, 235–36)

Browning's example would be indispensable for Henry James's portraits and representations. We should also invoke Stevens's “Anecdote of the Jar” in this line of figuration whose argument is that the vase, shapely, beautiful woman, is the woman portrayed, and thereby silenced. A singularly clear instance, transparent in its own almost embarrassing directness, is William Cowper's ode “On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture Out of Norfolk” which opens precisely with a lament at the silence of the woman portrayed:

Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard the last.
Those lips are thine—thy own sweet smiles I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
“Grieve not, my child. …”

The unspeaking lips of a portrait are not far from the unspeaking lips, and the throat, of a vase. Most dramatically, there is in The Winter's Tale the transubstantiation of Hermoine—not a transformation, for her shape, her outline, her silhouette, that which would cast a shadow, remains unchanged. The negation of the difference between that which lives and that which is its copy, between object and subject, between voice and echo, is most poignantly posed in Leontes's question:

                                        What fine chisel
Could ever yet cut breath?(39)

(A question which we may have heard echoed in “the trembling air / divided by her echo.”) The cutting of breath—the manifestation and utterance of animation—is forever beyond the artist's power, an enduring taunt of artistic futility.

But it is equally impossible to pursue the opposite line, to see the world artlessly, without figures, beyond figuration. Just as the narrator of Omeros is unable to forget Homer:

                                                                                When would it stop,
the echo in the throat, insisting, “Omeros”;
when would I enter that light beyond metaphor?(40)
                                                                                For three years,
phantom hearer, I kept wandering to a voice
hoarse as winter's echo in the throat of a vase!(41)

so the narrator is unable to see the Plunketts's black maid as merely a woman, whose name is merely her name, without echo or resonance.

The narrator again acknowledges the similarities between Plunkett and himself—what all men share—similarities that extend to the research of the one and the epic of the other:

                                                                      Plunkett, in his innocence,
had tried to change History to a metaphor,
in the name of a housemaid; I, in self-defence,
altered her opposite. Yet it was all for her.
Except we had used two opposing stratagems
in praise of her and the island; cannonballs rolled
in the fort grass were not from Olympian games,
nor the wine-bottle, crusted with its fool's gold,
from the sunken Ville de Paris, legendary
emblems; nor all their names the forced coincidence
we had made them. There, in her head of ebony,
there was no real need for the historian's
remorse, nor for literature's. Why not see Helen
as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow,
swinging her plastic sandals on that beach alone,
as fresh as the sea-wind?(42)

The sun, light, St. Lucia, is matched by the sea, mer, for these are the inhuman elements of light and life, innocent of human tradition, culture, memory, aesthetics, poetics:

                                                                                The ocean had
no memory of the wanderings of Gilgamesh,
or whose sword severed whose head in the Iliad.
It was an epic where every line was erased
yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf. …
                                                  It never altered its metre
to suit the age, a wide page without metaphors.(43)

A world without metaphors, humanity as free of figures as the sea and the sun would be, were they “truly” represented: the desire for this is the theme rehearsed with elegant obsessiveness by Wallace Stevens. The peculiar fun of Stevens's poetry lies in its cheerful confidence in its own failure to reach “that light beyond metaphor,” that one can practise for ever and without risk a poetic quest whose goal is securely unattainable:

The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation.(44)

Yet, in Stevens, one cannot desist, and one must look down on those who abandon the quest. Likewise in Walcott, the recognition that one's subject has been objectified is of no help at all in restoring the subject, in seeing the person (in Arnoldian phrase) as in herself she really is. Tropes objectify, but they alone make representation and knowledge possible; at their most subtle, intricate, devious, the trope of echo transforms a woman into a vase, herself/itself both sculpture and echo. The poet's question:

                                                                                          Why not see Helen
as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow,
swinging her plastic sandals on that beach alone … ?

may then serve as a most luminous gloss on Stevens's disdain for Mrs. Pappadopoulos, “So-and-So Reclining on her Couch,” who is heard to say:

                                                            One walks easily
The unpainted shore, accepts the world
As anything but sculpture. Good-bye,
Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.

One cannot walk the unpainted shore, any more than one can see what the sun sees, or follow the rhythm of the ocean. Nor can one figure a beautiful woman as anything but a reflection of Helen and an echo of Homer—a vase, with a throat, an echo-chamber, or an echo-chamber-maid. More disturbing is the converse: one can hardly figure anything except as a woman. We might say, recalling Bakhtin, that the condition of primal epic is precisely to be free from echo, and that “novelization” takes over as soon as echo is heard. With echo all language becomes potentially parodic. Echo is the first parody, and the novel begins in parody. Epic is the vase, whose echo is the novel. That is the irreversible synecdoche, that Walcott must follow Homer, must be contained within Homer, to be detached and individualized only as an echo. They meet, climatically, and Omeros, or rather his marble bust, speaks:

“Love is good, but the love of your own people is
greater.”
                    “Yes,” I said. “That's why I walk behind you.
Your name in her throat's white vase sent me to find you.”(45)

And as Walcott comes after Homer, he becomes himself as the woman or the child to the originary voice of the man:

And my cheeks were salt with tears, but those of a boy,
and he saw how deeply I had loved the island.
And Omeros nodded: “We will both praise it now.”
But I could not before him. My tongue was a stone
at the bottom of the sea, my mouth a parted conch
from which nothing sounded. …(46)

As for those plastic sandals, even such a banal detail holds echoes that reverberate through the poem. The plasticity belongs of course with the metamorphic, Ovidian theme. And one may venture that Helen carries or wears sandals for the same reason that monastics wear them. The silence that Helen shares with monastics may be, in an unfigured sense, mere coincidence, but there is a deep logic in catachresis: a sandal, unlike a shoe, has no tongue.

By contrast, the women carrying coal are not objects of aesthetic representation, though, in an echo of Helen on the ramparts, it is an old man, the poet's father, who “spoke for those Helens of an earlier time”:

The carriers were women, not the fair, gentler sex.
Instead, they were darker and stronger, and their gait
was made beautiful by balance. …(47)

In a remarkable elaboration of the metaphorics of poetic metre, the poet's father assigns the task:

Kneel to your load, then balance your staggering feet
and walk up that coal ladder as they do in time,
one bare foot after the next in ancestral rhyme. …
                              Look, they climb, and no one knows them;
they take their copper pittances, and your duty
from the time you watched them from your grandmother's house
as a child wounded by their power and beauty
is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice.

Even to those women, slaves, victims, the exploited and, for all their treading, the down-trodden, can a voice be given. But to Helen, to fair Helen, the beautiful, the aesthetic, the very type and first occasion of representation, no voice can be given: throughout western history, from Homer to Omeros, the representation of beauty depends on a central cavernous silence. In tongueless plastic sandals lurks an echo of many scandals.

Notes

  1. Derek Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber, 1990), Book One, Chapter III, Part I, p. 17.

  2. Omeros, Book One, Chapter VI, Part II, p. 34.

  3. Homer, The Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 133–34 (Book III, lines 185–190).

  4. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, edited by Michael Holquist (Austin, TX and London: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 133.

  5. See G. E. Lessing's discussion of inarticulate noise (rather than of silence) in the “piteous outcries” and “whimperings” in the Philoctetes of Sophocles: “whole long lines full of papa, papa … which must have been declaimed with quite other hesitations and drawings-out of utterance than are needful in a connected speech.” Laocoön, translated by W. A. Steel in Laocoön, Nathan the Wise, Minne von Barnhelm (London: Dent, 1930), ch. 1, p. 7. Sophocles's Philoctetes treats of the “shadow-Helen”; see nn. 23–6. For a useful account of the role of Philoctete in Omeros, see Carol Dougherty, “Homer after Omeros: Reading a H/Omeric Text,” in Gregson Davis, ed., The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives, special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 96, no. 2 (Spring 1997), pp. 339–47.

  6. Friedrich Schiller, “Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” in Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays, translated by Julias A. Elias (New York: Ungar, 1966), p. 109.

  7. Omeros, Book One, Chapter I, Part I, p. 3.

  8. As Walcott himself has noted of the poem's opening line: “There are people at Oxford, or Harvard maybe, who are going to have to read this thing [line repeated in broad Creole accent]. And then I said, yes, that's how it has to be—but the Empire doesn't give in that easily.” “Reflections on Omeros” (edited transcript of lecture given at Duke University on 19 April 1995), in Gregson Davis, ed., The Poetics of Derek Walcott, p. 246.

  9. Omeros, Book One, Chapter I, Part II, p. 7.

  10. See, more than once, John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981).

  11. One of the most memorable, if not the most delicate of these envelope-words, a visual rather than acoustic echo-pair, is Humbert Humbert's: “The rapist was Charlie Holmes; I am the therapist.” Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955), Part 2, chapter 1, p. 147; see also Part 1, chapter 27, p. 112.

  12. Omeros, Book One, Chapter VI, Part I, p. 34.

  13. Omeros, Book One, Chapter II, Part III, p. 14.

  14. For an excellent discussion of catachresis, see Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 55–60.

  15. See also Omeros, Book Six, Chapter XLV, Part II, p. 227: “My craft required the same / crouching care …” and Book Seven, Chapter LVIII, Part II, p. 291: “a desk is a raft / for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak // of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft / carries the other. …” Note how “craft” generates from within, by an echo-rhyme, its own metaphorical “vehicle,” “raft”; and see, on “c/raft,” Carol Dougherty, “Homer after Omeros,” p. 353.

  16. See the outstanding essay by Owen Barfield, “The Meaning of Literal” in The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), pp. 32–43. What Barfield calls the achieved literal—“literalness is a quality which some words have achieved. … it is not a quality with which the first words were born” (p. 41)—we will call catachresis.

  17. Omeros, Book Five, Chapter XLIII, Part III, p. 219.

  18. Omeros, Book Six, Chapter XLV, Part III, p. 230.

  19. The “reversible world” translates “le monde renversé,” a term often associated with the Baroque, ultimately to be derived from Baltasar Gracian. See Barbara Babcock, ed., The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978).

  20. On Jakobson, metaphor and metonymy, see Charles Lock, “Debts and Displacements: on Metaphor and Metonymy,” Acta Linguistica Hafniensia (C. A. Reitzel, Copenhagen: special issue on Roman Jakobson), Vol. 29 (1997), pp. 321–37.

  21. G. E. Lessing, Laocoön, ch. 21, p. 79, and n. 5 above. See also Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, p. 351.

  22. Omeros, Book One, Chapter VI, Part III, pp. 36–7. This passage exemplifies Lessing's account of Homer's technique: “Homer, I find, paints nothing but continuous actions, and all bodies, all single things, he paints only by their share in those actions, and in general only by one feature,” Laocoön, ch. 16, p. 56.

  23. In the phrase of Gregory Nagy, “Foreword” to Norman Austin, Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. xi. Austin's work provides the most thorough scholarly treatment of the topic.

  24. Walcott discloses: “… to have Philoctete as a character, although Philoctetes is not, as far as I remember, a major character in the Odyssey, is to have a play by Sophocles jamming with a poem by Homer.” “Reflections on Omeros,” p. 242.

  25. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), Volume One, pp. 184–86.

  26. H. D., Helen in Egypt (New York: Grove Press, 1961; New York: New Directions, 1974), p. 1. H. D. died on 27 September 1961, just after the poem's publication: see The Letters of John Cowper Powys to Frances Gregg, edited by Oliver M. Wilkinson (London: Cecil Woolf, 1994), Volume One, p. 237. A popular treatment of this theme was a romantic novel, The World's Desire (1890), written by Andrew Lang and H. Rider Haggard. The collaboration was initiated when Lang had written to Haggard: “I can't feel quite certain that Helen ever went to Troy. In Herodotus and Euripides only her shadow goes.” See Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang: A Critical Biography (Leicester, UK: Edmund Ward, 1946), pp. 124–37. It is reported by the Egyptian poet M. M. Badawi that the English poet and scholar John Heath-Stubbs, while working in Alexandria from 1955 to 1958, wrote a verse-drama, “Helen in Egypt,” “of which a dramatic reading was given before its publication in the house of a friend”; I have not been able to locate a copy of this work. See Aquarius, no. 10 (“in honour of John Heath-Stubbs,” 1978), pp. 25–7.

  27. H. D., Helen in Egypt, p. 5. The link between Omeros and H. D.'s Helen in Egypt has been made by Charlotte S. McClure in “Helen of the ‘West Indies’: History or Poetry of a Caribbean Realm,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. XXVI, no. 2 (Fall 1993), pp. 15–6.

  28. Omeros, Book Seven, Chapter LXII, Part II, p. 313.

  29. Omeros, Book Three, Chapter XXVI, Part II, p. 141.

  30. Omeros, Book Five, Chapter XLI, Part III, p. 210.

  31. Omeros, Book One, Chapter VI, Part I, p. 33.

  32. That Bakhtin's “dialogism” corresponds in large part to free indirect discourse may be deduced from V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); see Charles Lock, “Double Voicing, Sharing Words: Bakhtin's Dialogism and the History of the Theory of Free Indirect Discourse” in the journal Dialogics (Sheffield, UK), forthcoming.

  33. Omeros, Book Two, Chapter XVIII, Part II, p. 97.

  34. Further on shadows, see Charles Lock, “A Returning of Shadows,” Literary Research/Recherche Littéraire (No. 29: Spring-Summer 1998), pp. 15–26.

  35. Omeros, Book Two, Chapter XIX, Part I, p. 100; see also Book One, Chapter V, Part III, p. 31: “the island was once / named Helen; its Homeric association // rose like smoke from a siege.”

  36. Omeros, Book Two, Chapter XVIII, Part I, p. 95; “webbed” plays and plies between text as texture and Zeus as swan, whose copulation with Leda engendered Helen of Troy.

  37. Omeros, Book One, Chapter XI, Part I, p. 64.

  38. Omeros, Book One, Chapter V, Part III, p. 30.

  39. Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, Act V, scene iii, line 78.

  40. Omeros, Book Six, Chapter LXIV, Part III, p. 271.

  41. Omeros, Book Seven, Chapter LXIV, Part II, p. 323.

  42. Omeros, Book Six, Chapter LIV, Part II, p. 271.

  43. Omeros, Book Seven, Chapter LIX, Part I, pp. 295–96.

  44. Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” ix.

  45. Omeros, Book Seven, Chapter LVI, Part III, p. 284.

  46. Omeros, Book Seven, Chapter LVII, Part I, p. 286.

  47. Omeros, Book One, Chapter XIII, Part II, p. 74.

I am grateful to Line Henriksen for bibliographical assistance in the preparation of this essay.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

In Pursuit of Elegance

Next

Visions of Light

Loading...