Omeros: An Overview Like Homer’s epics, Omeros begins in media res, but whereas Homer’s narrative stabilizes fairly quickly, Omeros shifts and dissolves between time frames and narrative situations with an initially bewildering abruptness. The epic consists of seven books, comprising 64 chapters, each chapter divided into three lyric sections. The lyrics which are the compositional units of the poem are dense and resonant, requiring close, careful unpacking of a different sort than we will have practiced with Homer. Omeros initially provokes so many expressions of bewilderment that we will begin by addressing questions raised by the initial reading of the poem, and try to take those questions back into the text by close reading of crucial initial passages. We won’t work from a predetermined lesson plan so much as from an alerted responsiveness to what challenges emerge from participant readings. Much of the first week of treatment of Omeros, then, will involve grounding ourselves in the multiple worlds of the poem, familiarizing ourselves with the characters, and recognizing the narrative strategies and thematic concerns that announce themselves in the initial sections. Many of the questions guiding our work will be informational and interpretative questions raised by the participants. The following sequence offers a more detailed narrative account of the poem, rather than a set of questions. The observations which follow are directed at some of the target passages which the seminar will focus on. A number of imagistic motifs--smoke, leaves, ants and lizards, reflections, the sea, the world as text--will be noted in our early discussions, so we can chart their development as symbols through the poem. Book 1 opens with Philoctete describing for tourists the cutting the trees for canoes, establishing the primary themes of history, memory, nature and culture The tree-cutting establishes the Homeric connection through sustained metaphors of military assault and transgression against nature. The poet enters his own narrative suddenly by invoking Homer, linking him to the blind character Seven Seas, and calling on him as source and inspiration. We will consider what, in the narrator’s childhood and in his experience, has made him a poet, and how his poetry is connected to nature and to history, to the characters he invents in this poem. The book also introduces Dennis Plunkett, weary veteran of England’s World War II Africa campaign. Through Plunkett Walcott begins to sound the themes of historical conflict (World War II a recurrence of the campaign at Troy) and the waning of the age of the European empires. The poet discloses his investment in the fictive life of his characters--and the dissolving of his own history into the narrative of his poem: “This wound I have stitched into Plunkett’s character. / He has to be wounded, affliction is one theme / of this work, this fiction, since every ‘I’ is a fiction finally. / Phantom narrator, resume.” The stitching will link the poet to Maud Plunkett, who is making a quilt of the birds of the island (like the death-shroud Penelope weaves in the Odyssey), and to the sea-swift which will guide Achille on his visionary journey in Book 3. Figuring the poet’s own theme of self-exile, to be developed especially in Books 4-7, the Plunketts drive inland, offering a tracking shot through time as well as rainforest, which reveals the possibility of a love for place and people stronger than history or cultural conditioning, for they find themselves “rooted in the island for the rest of their lives.” Plunkett, an amateur military historian himself, associating the island with the beauty of Helen, their former island housekeeper, vows to write her history. In a parallel to the fatal dispute which opens the Iliad, Achille and Hector argue over Helen at their boats. The object of their murderous longing, Helen is first seen strolling on the beach amid evocations of epic games; as she sings The Beatles’ “Yesterday,” she passes through smoke at the beach end, out of time into a mythic and eternal figuration of ideal beauty. This moment exemplifies Walcott’s freeze-frame technique which represents the moment when fading beauty or power leaves the signature of eternity. At the end of Book 1, the poet has a visionary encounter with his father, who gives him his own historic commission, analogous to Plunkett’s: to compose a poem that revivifies and honors in its cadences the nameless black women who have carried coals up to the white luxury liners in Castries’ harbor: “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.” We will consider the resemblances and the differences between the poet’s memorial project and Plunkett’s. In Book 2, a new historical sequence opens--the “Battle of the Saints” between England and France at the close of the 18th Century which established England’s control of St. Lucie and of the seas at large. This conflict restages Homer’s epic battle, for St. Lucie is nicknamed “Helen,” the beauty over whom nations fought and men died. Plunkett’s research into the heroic battle leads to the discovery of a midshipman Plunkett who died in the fighting, who becomes for him “a namesake and a son”--evoking the Homeric motif of the patriarch grieving for the lost youth. Walcott ironically counterpoints Major Plunkett’s historical nostalgia for heroic conflict; he contemporizes the themes of history and struggle in a sequence which parodies local politics, the reggae campaign by Maljo and his “Professor Statics’s United Force.” Contemporary island politics and tourist incursion in the wake of empire thus contrast with Plunkett’s evocation of the heroic origins of the colonial presence. Helen moves in with Hector, who gives up his life on the sea to buy the Comet, a Space Age van with leopard skin seats, a vehicle of modernism with a kitsch evocation of barbaric primitivism. In his turn, Achille’s recognition that Helen will not return creates a crisis in self-knowledge and sets him on a journey that is the opposite of Hector’s. Achille’s fishing expedition, ever more remote from land, becomes a vision-quest will carry him back through time, to the land of his ancestor; the sea swift, Athena-like figure of inspiration, draws him beyond himself, like the poet for whom “Time is the metre, memory the only plot.” Books 3-5 encompass two journeys outward and returns: Achille’s psychic journey to Africa to meet his ancestors, and to relive the ordeal of enslavement and the middle passage; and the poet’s journey from St. Lucie to the centers and outer reaches of empire in North America and Europe. This voyage section of the poem develops parallels with the Odyssey and with Virgil’s Aeneid, especially with the underworld descents of the heroes of those poems. Readers are invariably puzzled by what to make of Achille’s adventure: does he “really” jouney back to Africa, or does he suffer sunstroke and a consequent extended hallucination? These questions open up to the consideration of the mystery of fiction’s capacity to intimate truths deeper, more condensed, and more comprehensive than “literal” history can account for. Achille’s journey is a version of epic anabasis, an underworld journey. Forced by Helen’s abandonment of him to ask, for the first time, who he is, the question propels him to the past, to his ancestors, to the knowledge of his own name, for an answer. In discovering the collective suffering of his people, he learns how personal identity can only be grasped through the participation in the history of community. The motif of naming figures importantly in Achille’s access to knowledge. The way ahead lies through the past: to dwell in the past, in nostalgia, is to become a shade, yet to embrace the past in its irrevocability is to free himself for a future he doesn’t know yet, and also to enlarge the self through widening the circle of compassion. In his absence, Helen becomes a Penelope figure, mourning and longing and waiting. Upon his return, raking leaves to throw in the fire for his blind friend Seven Seas, Achille discovers a relic, a small and terrifying carving of the Aruac Indians, long extinct from the islands, and this completes this stage in his discovery of history: once the circuit of his private history is swept up in the larger circuit of his people’s losses, he learns that the truth of history involves the knowing of other peoples’ unsettlement. This is a Homeric lesson in tragic compassion and imagination of otherness. Raking leaves, Achille learns, like Homer’s characters have, that “Like the generations of leaves, [are] the lives of mortal men. / Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, / now the living timber bursts with the new buds / and spring comes round again. And so with men: / as one generation comes to life, another dies away” (Iliad 6. 171-75) At the end of Book 3, and in Books 4 and 5, the poet overlaps his own odyssey with that of his hero. Visionary encounters with his mother and his father, and a failed marriage, send him outward in search of self-knowledge and in the longing to lose his afflictions in the deeper afflictions of history. His journey is fictional as well as geographical. He imagines another displaced person, a nineteenth-century pioneer woman, Catherine Weldon, who stays on in the great plains of North America after the death of her husband and son, out of her love for the land and for the Plains Indians. Her anguished testimony to the final conflicts and the brutal suppression of the last Indian resistance brings Achille’s mute grief for the Aruacs into high elegaic expression. Walcott weaves Catherine Weldon’s witness of the devastations of history into his own imaginative survey, poised between irony and awe, of the twilight of the European empires. The great cities of Europe are like funerary monuments overweighted with images of their own self-glorification, “repeating that power / and art were the same, from some Caesar’s eaten nose / to spires at sunset in the swift’s half-hour.” In response to the art which serves and glorifies power, the poet sharpens his vocation, to honor those who have vanished in history’s smoke, to invoke the undefeatable life springing up in the cracks where empire’s grip has weakened, and to “cherish our island for its green simplicities,” as his father’s ghost counsels him. Outward quests circle into abundant returns in the concluding books of Omeros. Book 6 is weighty with tragic inevitabilities, yet healing in the cathartic way of tragedy. Hector’s Comet makes its last arc. Driven by his own captivity to the money economy and remorseful over his abandonment of his mother the sea (the central syllable of O-mer-os is “mere”/ “mer”) and of his brother Achille, Hector plunges over a sea-cliff into the immortality of local legend and Walcott’s song. If this is a sacrificial death, an atonement for the island’s self-defeating bargains with the future, it is a prologue to Philoctete’s healing. Ma Kilman, local proprietress of the No Pain Café, sibyl and obeah-woman, undertakes her own mythic journey, into the forest to search for the ancient herb that will close Philoctete’s wound, led by ants and ancestral voices to find the stinking corolla of a white flower whose seed, “the cure that precedes every wound,” had been transported from Africa centuries before by a sea swift. In the baptismal bath which she prepares in a rusting cauldron, the poet shares in Philoctete’s sense of “the shame, the self-hate / draining from all our bodies.” This moment is a peripeteia, a moment of healing not just of Philoctete’s body wound, but of the open wound left by slavery, and all the afflictions and failures of love registered by the poet and his characters. Achille and Helen are reunited. The poet observes them at the funeral of Maud Plunkett, the account of whose death is as sublime in its poignancy as the tense exchange between Achilles and Priam in Homer’s epic. The poet finds himself stunned by two wonders in this scene. One is the “charity of soul” that brings the awkward, illiterate fishermen who have worked for Major Plunkett to share his grief. The other is the poet’s own presence in the scene: “Join, interchangeable phantoms, expected pain / moves me towards ghosts, through this page’s scrim, / and the ghosts I will make of you with my scratching pen, / like a needle piercing the ring’s embroidery / with a swift’s beak, or where, like a nib from the rim / of an inkwell, a martin flickers a wing dry.” Here the poet’s art, like Maud’s quilting, is a piercing, wounding thing, yet the wound is found to be its own cure, and weaving of quilt or poem creates a momentary wholeness of the tattered fabrics of discarded moments and lives. Book 7 offers a final purgatorial experience. With Omeros/Seven Seas as his guide, a Virgil to his Dante, the poet treks up into the lush mountains, past the boiling sulphur pits of Soufriére, to confront not the past, but the possible nightmare of the future. He beholds “souls who had sold out their race,” land speculators and politicians who make quick money off the tourist boom. He also has to interrogate his own motives for writing the island into his verse: “Hadn’t I made their poverty my paradise?” As he sees the island turning into “a souvenir of itself,” he recognizes that his protest against tourism may share a common sin with the tourists, a romanticization of poverty. This self-confrontation and confession yields to a sense of blessing, as the poet discovers that the “charity of soul” he has imagined among his characters includes him, and assures his own healing. The poem ends luminously, in a relaxed, exalted mood, although the encroachments of the new threat of history, `global tourism, shadow the landscape. Plunkett adjusts to Maud’s loss, and finds himself bound more deeply than ever to the people of the island. Helen prepares to give birth, and Achille returns to his work, making the best of what he can in the overharvested waters, his work a “prayer of anger” against the humiliations of the tourists. “When he left the beach the sea was still going on.” The poem finishes finely, its various themes drawn into a poised and resonant closure. The poet, like his characters, accepts the change and loss that history brings, but keeps the narrative open toward a new generation which will find its own way to endure, to address--and humanize--the changed conditions of the island. The poet, like Achille, returns to the sea--the “mer” in O-mer-os--as a source of life and as the inexhaustible unconscious of language itself, the mindless source of metaphor and thought that give the world meaning and make it last in art. He discovers that a wound, whether of love, time, or history, can be a blessing, carrying its own cure: “we shall all heal,” Ma Kilman says. The precarious, impoverished, dignified lives of the island are lit and lifted by the final green flash of the poet’s song in the very moment of their fading, and in that moment’s pause Walcott makes time stop and hearts stop in wonder at their mortal beauty. He reassures us, like Homer, that the very conditions of our mortality--our errors, our passions, our losses--are the grounds of a mythmaking imagination, portioned to character, writer, and reader, that will not quite let us die. Omeros: Bringing It All Back Home (Concluding Fragmentary Observations on VI and VII) * When a poem solves its own problems with decorum and grace, commentary seems superfluous sometimes, for tears speak better than words. Nevertheless, since we are language animals, living and breathing and having our being in the stuff, here are a few parting shots, observations generated by reading the last two books. * Sunrise light, unexpected, unearned, unasked for, opens both books. “The full moon shone like slice of a raw onion” at the poem’s conclusion. Nature (as in high romanticism) proves to be a dangerous but healing, inexhaustible source of renewal, exceeding human design or invention, yet inevitably domesticated, acculturated, politicized as soon as we begin to talk of it (not a Dutch florin moon, or the scimitar of Istanbul, but a “slice of raw onion”). * Ocean--”mer/mere,” mother--through the tracks of association, is inexhaustible, mindless source of metaphor and myth; the unconscious of language and of history. See especially 294-96: “It was an epic where every line was erased / yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf . . . “ So myths, the narratives by which we make history mean something, and outlast our participation in it, or the seeds of myth which are metaphors and similes, are endlessly projected, endlessly dispersed by a power that is both annihilating and endlessly creative. The poet’s trust is that this power is ultimately providential: “it drenched every survivor / with blessing” (296). “Though the seas threaten, they are merciful,” as in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. * There is a possible Tempest allusion in the coral metaphor for Achille and his “quiet culture” (296-98): Ariel’s song to Ferdinand, “Full fathom five thy father lies / Of his bones is coral made / Those are pearls that were his eyes / Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” Note that sea-change comes about through suffering. * Note the critical self-reflection of 270-71. The poet begins to distinguish himself from Plunkett in terms of their projects and “strategems,” yet the differences, as we have seen before, seem to collapse into each other. “All that Greek manure under the green bananas” seems to be a jocular dismissal, but manure is of course a fertilizer. Is there any hope in the wish to “enter the light beyond metaphor”? What would that mean? To live without poetry? * Am I misreading to observe that after this point, the Greek analogizing subsides (not disappears), so that Helen can become the name for “a local wonder,” and Achille can go about the business of his fishing trade? My hunch is that the poet’s journey to the heart of empire (notes from underground by an Invisible Man) demystifies European / Mediterranean culture as fountain of meaning and value, freeing the poet up for a more “native,” naturalistic vision of St. Lucie. * Philoctete’s cure from the baptism in African roots, seems relevant to the poet’s transformation. Hector and Maud’s deaths in VI probably figure in this as well. Hector’s suicide seems fatally driven: “A man who had cursed the sea had cursed his own mother” (231). So he is like Orestes: “He drove / as if driven by furies, but furies paid the rent.” Hector’s burial is moving in part because of the multiple latent associations Walcott sets into play: Patroclos and Hector, surely, but perhaps Virgil’s Palinurus as well (the sacrificial death required by the god of the sea), and even the mysterious prophecy of Odysseus’s death, with the strong emphasis to the oar carried inland. Note that “this was the prayer that Achille could not utter” (233), and that the placement of the oar prepares Hector for a journey Achille had made earlier in the poem, “the day the African swift and its shadow raced.” * “There was Plunkett in my father, much as there was / my mother in Maud” (263). How much is that? How do we understand the algebra that relates the fictional to the historical characters in this poem? The death of Maud, whose “image was my mother’s,” seems to be motivated in part by the poet’s “expected pain” of his own mother’s coming death (266). Since he shares with Maud the craft of “gardening” (265-66), she seems perhaps to represent the completion and refiguring of the work of the artist. Maud seems closer than the poet to his nostalgic ideal of an artist whose representations have the purity and the security of a nearly perfect correspondence between the representation and the thing represented: “the clear concentric / rings from a pebble, from the right noun on a page” (266). * It seems in part to be necessary as well to complete Plunkett’s rooting of himself in the “New World” of the island. Maud, we have noticed, maintains her connection to the idealized beauty of her island history and culture of Ireland (303), whereas Dennis has been so disillusioned by war and postwar commercialization of England that he has little desire to return--like the islands, his last visit to England shows him that his former home has is “cashing in on decayed gentility” (251), and thus, like the islands, is becoming a “souvenir of itself” (310). Maud seems to stand for that tenebrous ideal of the sentimentalized, lovely past, lost in fact. When Ma Kilman assures him, in the seance, that Maud is in heaven “if heaven is a green place,” “That moment bound him for good to another race” (307). This is a deep moment of reconciliation between historical oppositions: heaven is reconfigured from the icy remoteness of Olympos and the cloudy purities of Christian heaven to the life-color of the islands; the Odyssean soldier who had risked his life and saw his friends die for imperial pieties finds his home in an unexpected place, at the margin of a frayed empire, where a transplanted sybil / obeah woman puts him in touch with his lost wife, a Penelope who had woven her own bird-clustered shroud (birds are migrating souls), and now his Eurydice, forever. * The poet’s final infernal / purgatorial ordeal: what makes it necessary? Perhaps in part a sense of permanent alienation from the people who bore him and nourished him. Maybe a bit of expatriate guilt in Walcott, the poet who once proudly claimed he would never leave the islands. The journey outward has left him a stranger and an observor in what used to be his home, and he can never expect that wound to be healed. This seems evident in 226-29, where the transport driver treats him as a customer-tourist, and he resists engagement, interrogating his own work: “Art is History’s nostalgia”; “Hadn’t I made their poverty my paradise?” (228) * The key questions put to the poet in his underworld journey have to do with his “pride in my craft” and with “whether a love of poverty helped you / to use other eyes, like those of that sightless stone?” (293-94) What does this question mean? How far can the poet go in identifying and reintegrating himself with his people? Note the turn that comes after this crisis: “My light was clear” (294). Note also that the composite black / white Omeros / St. Omer ( Seven Seas) asks him, as Virgil and Beatrice ask Dante, the most soul-harrowing questions, and also provide the necessary strength to resist the potential despair occasioned by the question: “Omeros gripped / my hand in enclosing marble and his strength moved / me away from that crowd” (293). * Is Achille’s vision of the whale (302-03) a transformed figure of Moby Dick, and of the Leviathan of the Book of Job? Why do he and Philoctete turn back after this, “their wet, salted faces shining with God”? * The “green flash” of twilight that recurs in the closing books: can we think of it as that momentary yet enduring flash of imagination so awakened by love of this world as to illumine it in all its ordinariness at the moment of its vanishing? * “Like Philoctete’s wound, this language carries its cure, / its radiant affliction” (323). The blessure / blessing motif rounded to a close here. Language is the wound of wounds, in some sense: it sets us in a divided world, it divides the knowing and the speaking subject from the wholeness we all long to return to. But language also enters into the gap created by our self-consciousness and seeks to cure it. It never can, because the original affliction is already repeated in every word we speak. Yet words, because they bind us to each other, if not to the lost worlds that have gone up in the smoke of history, can console, because we don’t have to suffer alone. And that is why the poet can ask of Achille, in what is to me the emotional climax of the poem, at Maud’s funeral, “Where was it from, / this charity of soul, more piercing than Helen’s beauty?” (265) * Perhaps relevant to the “interchangeable phantoms” of Walcott’s poem: Stephen Dedalus, in Ulysses, speaking of Shakespeare: “He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is ended. . . . He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.” * “We shall all heal.” We shall all heal. In God we troust. SOME ESSAY QUESTIONS FOR STUDENTS * “A few make History. The rest are witnesses” (104). Omeros is a wide poetic meditation on history, and contains within it also Plunkett’s history project. What attitudes toward history does the poem explore, and what attitudes toward history does it develop? * Choose a Homeric character, situation, motif, or strategy, and explore the connection to Homer as well as Walcott’s use of it in Omeros. * Choose a single image pattern (e.g., smoke, the swift, leaves, ants, butterflies, the sea), and explore its ramifications and symbolic associations, showing its relation to the narrative and thematic structures of the poem. * Choose a single section of Omeros, and undertake a close reading of its themes, images, tone, and characterization, exploring its connection to the larger narrative and thematic structures of the poem. * Fathers and mothers and sons in Omeros. * Omeros is also an extended meditation on art and its relation to nature and history. Explore Walcott’s development of this theme, especially in regard to his reference to painting and sculpture.