Intertextualizing polyphemus: politics and ideology in Walcott's Odyssey.

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-MAR-06

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"The whole course of imitations and adaptations is simply a method of apprenticeship."

--Derek Walcott, interview given in 1977

"The idea of art has no tense apart from the present. Dante, for a poet, is. That is related to the same idea that God is. God doesn't have a past or future tense. And art does not have a past or future tense."

--Derek Walcott, remarks before the reading of his poem "The Sea Is History"

Three years after the publication of Omeros and with his repeated denials that he was rewriting Homer still echoing, Derek Walcott returned to Homer, this time adapting the Odyssey into a drama which, by retaining the title of its epic antecedent, dispelled any lingering doubts as to its classical source. (1) But while Omeros has already attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, Odyssey has lagged behind, despite that over a decade has elapsed since its publication. (2) Existing studies of the play provide a rapid overview of its scenes, drawing along the way some good but undeveloped connections with the Homeric precedent and commenting in passing on its medium, language, and cultural context. (3) Such haste is perhaps inevitable, given not only the thematic richness of Walcott's work and its multilayered allusions to Homer, but also the relatively small size of the studies themselves. In this paper, I shall attempt to remedy this haste by examining only one episode, Odysseus's adventure with the Cyclops, from the point of view of its use of time, space, and characters. The restricted scope of my interpretation will permit a detailed analysis of one fully realized and thematically independent dramatic incident as it reveals some of Walcott's core ideological stances, which may then be fruitfully explored in the rest of the play. While the focus of my attention will be on Walcott's rendering of the adventure, I shall draw comparisons throughout between the play's depiction of the episode and that of its epic antecedent. The essentially performative nature of both the Walcottian and the Homeric media invests the parameters of my study with special significance, as time, space, and characters constitute the necessary ingredients of performance. Of course, both works have by now become texts: Homer's Odyssey has ceased being an oral poem since it was written down, and Walcott's play, although still performable, must lamentably be for most a reading pleasure. (4) And yet for all their "textuality," their status as species of performative poetry remains: both were created in order to be enacted before an audience, recording events firmly situated in time and place and populated by characters. It might then be useful to linger briefly on the nature and extent of the kinship between Homeric performance and Caribbean theater, as well as to offer a brief overview of Walcott's Odyssey, before I clarify further my objectives.

While modern epic poems are received on the printed page or perhaps through public readings, the Homeric epics were performed. Both the rhapsoidoi, who recited the creations of the aoidoi (the "singers"), and the deliverers of speeches within the epics are social actors, addressing an audience, the judges of their performance. (5) The long oral tradition, of which Homer is part, supplies the epic poems with mostly formulaic material which, however, is not merely repeated, as oralists tend to argue, but is re-created and transformed during verbal transmission over time. (6) Although the exact parameters of the Homeric oral culture are forever lost to us, the presence and importance of the audience, a key component of the essentially performative nature of the epic, can be glimpsed from within the texts themselves: both the Iliad and the Odyssey include many instances of speakers engaged in public speech acts, and the putative effects of those acts on the audience inform the content of the speeches and the discursive modes deployed in them. Similarly, West Indian theater has been deeply influenced not only by the rich oral tradition of the area but also by the imaginative worlds of legends, myths, and folktales it has inherited. (7) Derek Walcott, the major dramatist of the Caribbean, exploited the narrative and formal possibilities of that tradition in such plays of the fifties and sixties as Ti-Jean and His Brothers and Dream on Monkey Mountain. (8) However, the link to Homer is not established merely by the influence of tradition on Walcott's oeuvre, but also by the performative nature of the oral culture in which his poetry is rooted. (9) In an interview given in 1977, Walcott said vis-a-vis the performativity of his poetic tradition: "I was lucky to be born as a poet in a tradition that uses poetry as demonstration, as theater.... The storyteller tradition is still very prevalent in the Caribbean. The chant, the response, and the dance are immediate things to me; they are not anachronistic or literary." He echoes the same sentiment about his own work: "In the West Indies the immediacy of the poet's address to an audience ... makes him a performer.... In a sense, my plays are large poems that are performed before an audience" an utterance that finds ready application in the verse-form of The Odyssey. (10) In light of this emphasis on performance, Homer appears more like a singer of tales whom one might find just as readily in an African or Afro-Caribbean context as in an exclusively European literary culture.

In transplanting Homer's Odyssey to the dramatic medium, Walcott has retained the plot of the epic but has considerably compressed it, in order to make it suitable for a three-hour performance. The play consists of two acts of uneven sizes: act 1 comprises fifteen scenes and enacts a brief appearance of Odysseus among his fellow warriors, a mini-Telemachy, Phaeacia, the Cyclops, and Hades; act 2 contains six scenes and depicts the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus's meeting with Athena on Ithaca, his encounter with Eumaeus and reunions with Eurykleia and Telemachus inverted, a brief bow-contest, the slaughter of the suitors, and finally, his reunion with Penelope. Thematically, there is much emphasis on Penelope's loyalty and struggles as well as on Odysseus's longing for home and his wanderings.

The Cyclops episode, situated almost halfway through the first act, evolves in two scenes. Odysseus and his men arrive on the Cyclops's island where they meet the Philosopher, a thought-oriented islander, who familiarizes them with the existing political situation of mindless despotism. The Cyclops, an Orwellian dictator who kills and eats those who oppose him, is eventually blinded by Odysseus, whose cunning and quick action put an end to his tyrannical authority. By contrasting the nature and extent of the episode's use of time, space, and characters with its epic precedent's deployment of the same performative elements, I shall delineate Walcott's notion of ideological and political oppression, its manifestations and contributive agents. Within this broad framework, I shall make two main contentions: first, whereas Odysseus's narrative of his encounter with Polyphemus in Odyssey 9 places the adventure in the distant past of a remote and semifictional dystopia, its dramatic enactment situates it in the here and now, thereby confronting the audience with the ubiquitous and ever-present possibility of dictatorship. Walcott's spatial and temporal reconfiguration of the story robs it of its dreamlike quality and sharpens its political realism. Second, while the victory of the Homeric Odysseus is the product of the practical intelligence and cunning of an outsider who succeeds in crushing the savagery of the ignorant and crude insider, Walcott's Odysseus emerges as the distillation of characteristics already present in the society awaiting freedom. Consequently, the outwitting of the master by the "slave," a quintessentially folkloric theme, is envisioned not as the dubious gift of an enlightened "other," but as the result of the combination of forces latent in the psyche of the socially and politically oppressed. Walcott's dramatic use of time, space, and characters in the Cyclops episode helps to articulate his particular vision of postcolonial emancipation, while at the same time creating a universal parable of humankind's resistance to totalitarianism. (11)

I. The Cyclops's Island: Time and Space

In the Homeric epic, Odysseus narrates his encounter with Polyphemus to the gathered Phaeacians as a past event and, arguably, the grandest of his exploits. While references to time, place, and circumstance are properly set in the past tense, as pertaining to recollected factual details, the rapid exchanges between Odysseus and his men--or between Odysseus and Polyphemus--are cast in the present tense. The faithful re-creation in the narrative present of the tone and verbal content of past dialogic interactions turns the addressees of Odysseus's oral performance into spectators of his past. The resulting vividness is the closest epic analogue to the liveliness of a staged act, since in both cases the audience is allowed to "eavesdrop," to witness reality firsthand, albeit a fictional one. (12) However, the frequent intermixture of present-tense dialogue with past-tense narrative ultimately shatters this dramatic illusion, because it serves as a constant reminder that what the audience hears is an indirect retelling of an event completed in the past, not a speech act that takes place in the here and now. (13) The past-associations of the episode are heightened by the vague temporal demarcation of the adventure from within Odysseus's overarching narrative: the Cyclops episode appears as the third, after the Cicones and the Lotus-Eaters, of a series of mishaps that afflicted the Greek hero and his crewmen on their way home from Troy. No one knows, and Odysseus never intimates, exactly when each of his adventures occurred; the only thing that matters is that they haunted his past, a long and arduous past from which his presence among the Phaeacians has sealed him. (14) By situating his encounter with Polyphemus in an unspecified and, due to the extraordinary content of the story, unrepeatable past, Odysseus's account conveys the finality and monstrous uniqueness of the adventure. (15) Because of this narrative device, his audience can conceive of itself as placed safely outside the terrible event and, though it may marvel at it, feel essentially alienated from its gruesomeness. (16)

In rewriting this episode, Walcott maintains the temporal indefiniteness of the epic tale. Once again, Odysseus relays his adventures to his lighthearted hosts and places his nightmarish meeting with Polyphemus immediately after the description of his seven-year idyllic sojourn on Calypso's island. (17) Despite that the encounter with the goddess occurs at the beginning of the narrative, this placement nowhere suggests an actual chronological order. Therefore, the Polyphemus incident, which comes after the adventure with Calypso and is packed with horrors that create a marked contrast with the "enchantment" hidden in the goddess and her island (56.7-8), shares the previous episode's temporal vagueness. Walcott explains his indifference to the chronological ordering of events as follows: "Once you have a strong or accepted narrator, and once the audience gets into the rhythm of a piece, time ceases to be a problem. If the rhythm is strong, there is no need to show an interval as progressing chronologically." (18) In Odyssey, the presence of Odysseus as the events' narrator is enough to create a self-sustained story that stands in need of no clear temporal markers.

This loose attitude to time serves not only as a compositional device governing the sequence of adventures, but also as a thematic motif that occurs both in the dramatic exchange prefacing the Cyclops episode and in the episode itself. Odysseus's narrative deals with events of an unspecified past, and yet the brief dialogue (59.5-60.9) that paves the way to the episode proper foregrounds the notion of future. In choosing a time frame for the adventure with the...

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