The Classical and the Modern Epic: Homer’s Iliad and Walcott’s Omeros

Director: William Shullenberger
Professor of Literature
Sarah Lawrence College
Bronxville, NY 10708

June 28-July 30, 1999



Intellectual Rationale

        This seminar will offer a careful reading of two important works of literature, one classical and one contemporary: Homer’s Iliad and Derek Walcott’s Omeros. The epic is a monumental literary form which is an index to the depth and richness of a culture and the ultimate test of a writer’s creative power. Homer’s great poem stands at the beginning of the epic tradition in western culture, and Walcott’s is that tradition’s most recent expression. Although we tend to assign the epic to the literary past as a bygone genre, Omeros, published in 1990, triumphantly asserts the ongoing power of the epic to claim our attention and shape our self-understanding. It also returns us to the literary past, to read Homer (as well as Dante, Virgil, Melville, and Joyce) in a new light.
        This seminar will organize that attention and understanding around three major purposes. First, we will study the major structural, stylistic, and thematic features of the epic as formalized by Homer, and their transmission and transformation in Walcott’s modern poem. Second, we will consider the cultural significance of the epic. In particular, we will observe the epic’s service as the collective or heroic memory of a people, and consider whether it offers faith in poetic memory as a way to transcend the afflictions and losses of history. In light of recent critical reflection on postcolonial literature and theory, we will observe the ways in which the epic reflects on culture, cultural conflict and cultural difference: how Homer, for instance, marks the differences and continuities between Greeks and Trojans, and how Walcott represents the lives of Caribbean people in the waning of the colonial period, and their--and his--relation to metropolitan centers of power. Third, we will closely examine the textual connections between the poems as a case study of literary influence, and measure the degree to which influence becomes a resource for literary and cultural power.
There is a special appeal to a close reading of Omeros in relation to the epic tradition at this time. The critical response to the poem, climaxing in the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, testifies to Walcott’s accomplishment. Although serious new assessments of Walcott are appearing steadily, critical interpretation of his major poem is still in preliminary stages, and so the lines of debate and “meanings” of the poem have not yet become standardized. This NEH seminar offers its participants the exciting opportunity to engage in original and exploratory critical work on a difficult text which I believe will stand as one of the great achievements of modern poetry. Wrestling with the difficulties of both the archaic oral text of the Iliad, with its own startling architecture and resonances, and the complex modernist text of Omeros, lead seminar participants, especially those coming into the program from disciplines other than literature, into a renewed appreciation of the reflective power of poetry, and a renewed sense of confidence and pleasure in their capacity to make sense of it.
        The grace, beauty, and imaginative strength of Omeros depends in good part on the power and insight of Walcott’s reading and rewriting of Homer. Walcott offers a powerful example of the way in which a contemporary writer can make a place for himself in literary tradition and harvest its power for the assertion of his own creative authority and cultural centrality, as well as reimagine history from the point of view of a people who have been dispossessed of it and by it. But literary influence is not a one-way street. T.S. Eliot put the relation between originality and the tradition behind it this way: “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.”
       So Walcott in his “really new work” in effect revises our relation to Homer. Walcott’s ambitious rewriting of Homer’s epics leads contemporary readers back to discover in the ancient texts persisting human themes and insights, as well as complex literary strategies. Walcott’s strategic confrontations with and transformations of Homer’s poetry can thus sharpen our attention to structures of imaginative, moral and social power articulated in the Iliad, so that we renew our awareness of its pertinence to our times and our struggles, and renew our sympathy for those remote and godlike yet deeply vulnerable characters who enact and suffer our ultimate concerns.

        The seminar will allot two weeks to the examination of the Iliad, and three weeks to the examination of Omeros. There are three reasons for this distribution: Omeros is more likely to be an unfamiliar text to participants; its modernist narrative fragmentation and organization, its cast of characters and shifts in time and setting, offer significant interpretative difficulties; and the comparative relation to the Iliad will require us at certain points to be reading both texts together. The following description provides a map of the thematic grounds to be covered in our close readings, and the critical concerns which will motivate and organize them.
      Rising from the particulars of a moment in time and place, the epic gives the vital mythology of that time and place its fullest and most impersonal literary shape. Encyclopedic in its inclusiveness, epic reflects a culture’s origins and projects its destiny, problematically asserting and questioning that culture’s formative values. Whoever he may have been, whether a single integrative genius or a convenient fiction to pin together the redaction of the accumulated work of generations of anonymous bards, “Homer” inaugurates and sets the standards and conventions of epic in western culture. Ideally, in an extended course on epic tradition, we could read both Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as major “pretexts” for Walcott’s invention, as they have been for other poets such as Virgil and Milton. Because the length of the seminar allows for close attention to only one of these works, we study the Iliad because it sets the high tragic tone which resonates through Omeros, and it provides the central characters and conflicts which Walcott refigures in his story.
        In the Iliad, the conflicts and characters of the ten years’ gruelling war at Troy are condensed into a period of several weeks, during which the savagery escalates at the time of Achilles’s sullen withdrawal from the fighting, and climaxes in his explosive, terrible return. In Achilles’s absence, the battle tide shifts back and forth, affected in unpredictable ways by divine interventions and sudden outbursts of more than human courage and war skill by various heroes on both sides. Achilles reluctantly permits his beloved comrade Patroclus to enter the fighting as a surrogate, rousing the Achaians by wearing Achilles’s armor. Patroclus’s pathetic death at the hands of Hector dismays and outrages Achilles, who blazes back into the action with a bloodthirsty fury great enough to terrify even the gods. Achilles’s commitment to battle is a tragic choice because he knows by prophecy that in choosing to fight he is committing himself to his own death. Achilles’s killing of Hector and brutal desecration of his corpse fail to mitigate his rage and despair until, in an extraordinary midnight encounter, the Trojan king Priam pleads for his son’s corpse. Priam’s courage and humility break the spell of Achilles’s wrath, and Hector is borne home to the dignity of funeral rites which mark a brief calm and strangely prefigure the desolation of Troy itself. Such rituals, like gift-exchanges and heroic declamations, are provisional and fragile, culturally sponsored assertions which provide momentary but precious stays against the confusion of time and war’s onslaught.We will keep before us, in our study of the Iliad, what has made it such an enduring, culturally formative text. We can find the answer, in part, in a rigorous, even austere imaginative honesty--what the critics have described as Homer’s “objectivity”--which tests the human capacity for greatness as well as evil, and measures the lonely tragic grandeur, and the longing for a community not founded on strife, that seem inherent in the human condition.
        Several major themes will activate and organize our reading of the Iliad. The poem abounds in ironies by which culture is shown to be founded and defended by the very virtues which threaten to destabilize and destroy it. Homer displays heroic self-assertion as a double-edged virtue. It is a courageous gesture of individual defiance of mortality and all human contingency. But because one person’s aristeia is another’s undoing, heroism ultimately serves the impersonal and destructive force it defies, the force which, Simone Weil says, turns all human beings subject to it into things. Gift-giving and hospitality are binding counterforces against the destabilizing energies of individual heroism, for the friendship ties forged by gifts and guest-friendship have a stronger claim upon the hero than even kinship or tribal loyalties. This is what made Paris’s abduction of Helen from Menelaus’s household a blasphemy great enough in the Greek estimation to warrant the ten years of slaughter.
        Homer also foregrounds the problematic, arbitrary actions of the gods. Because the acts of the gods have no lasting consequences for them, their immortal beauty and power appear vain and, at times, farcical. In contrast, the timebound, irrevocable choices that human beings must make continually expose their vulnerability, yet their very commitment to choice, whatever the consequences, heightens their tragic dignity. The gods, then, can be taken either as evidences of the arbitrary malevolence of supernatural will, or as personified figures for chance and luck, “the way things are,” in the bleak, unintelligible form which war presents to us; and that is perhaps an even more anxious ground for human knowledge and choice than the prospect of divine wrath.
       We will observe how women occupy particularly perilous and vulnerable positions in the traumatized universe of the Iliad. Homer marks this tragic position in the precipitating episode in the poem, in which Agamemnon and Achilles spar over the possession of the mute captive Briseis: an ironic recapitulation of the fight over Helen which is the manifest cause of the war. As trophies, objects of exchange and contention, women represent an extreme form of the objectification and dehumanization to which all are subject. As mothers and wives, the Trojan women’s elegaic witness registers with great pathos not just the collapse of a great civilization but the helplessness of the civilizing impulses in the face of the relentless imperatives of war.

       In Omeros, Walcott performs a stunning transformation of Homer’s foundation texts. Walcott has frequently developed analogies between the seascapes and cultures of Homer’s Mediterraean and his own Caribbean; Omeros relocates Homer’s epic scene from ancient Troy to the backwater Antillean island of St. Lucie, and discovers the tragic grandeur and mythic power of Homer’s heroes in the fishermen and villagers who harvest the all-nurturing sea and the fertile but fickle earth for their lives’ subsistence. The central Homeric characters of Omeros are Helen, Achille and Hector, brothers of the fishing trade whose rivalry for Helen’s extraordinary and unpossessable beauty turns their friendship to murderous anger. Achille’s desolation upon Helen’s abandonment of him takes him further and further out to sea--the “mer” in O-mer-os--until the search for a ground for self compels him on a visionary odyssey through time and space to the inland village of upriver Benin where he relives the slave raid that dispossessed his ancestors of home, name, and past. He returns to St. Lucie a changed, self-possessed man, ready to live with his losses. Hector’s anxiety about Helen’s love and his compulsion to keep her in modern style drives him to give up the sea, to sell his canoe and to buy a souped-up transport van, with space age customized painting and leopard skin seats, to taxi people about the island. The pressure for money, the longing for the sea, and remorse over his fight with Achille ultimately propel Hector over a sea-cliff to his death. Helen and Achille are reconciled, and the poem ends with Helen preparing to give birth and Achille returning to harvest the thrashing silver of the inexhaustible sea.
       Walcott crosscuts several other significant stories into the primary tale, among them the lame Philoctete’s waiting for a cure to the rancid festering sore on his foot, emblematic of the psychological wound of slavery; the deep roots of love for the island cultivated by the expatriates Dennis and Maud Plunkett; and the displaced poet’s own odyssey in search of a place in the world which would welcome him as a wanderer home. The poet’s journey, like Achille’s, is temporal as well as geographical: he goes back in time to encounter his mother and father, and out into the world to confront the imposing cultural mystique and trace the waning boundaries of European empire. Homer appears as a character in various guises in Omeros: as the blind grizzled fisherman Seven Seas, as a crazy vagrant kicked about Trafalgar Square, as the great American painter Winslow Homer, as the Liffey-haunting dandified ghost of James Joyce, as the griot of a West African village, as a Sioux prophet at the time of the Ghost Dance. But Homer surfaces most powerfully in the high sublime hexameters of Walcott’s verse, making the poet himself the most inclusive and self-conscious of the Homer figures he stitches into the poem.
        Walcott’s achievement is remarkable in several respects, and the seminar will study the thematic and stylistic accomplishments of his poem in detail. Walcott employs what T.S. Eliot called the “mythic method,” a systematic evocation of the unifying narrative spell of myth to organize and to dignify the potential chaos and insignificance of modern secular life. But he does so in the ironic, self-questioning way of a modernist aware of the potential falisifications and betrayals and nostalgias of mythmaking. He thus creates a poem on the heroic scale, with the scope of vision and encyclopedic inclusiveness of the Homeric epics, but also with the self-conscious interventions and the narrative fragmentation characteristic of modernism. He sustains the tone of grandeur which Aristotle, observing Homer, declared appropriate to the epic, weaving together a fabric of diverse, seemingly incompatible styles: the high sublime of Homeric declamation and of English visionary poetry with the nimble, syncopated Creole patois, chants, and challenges of St. Lucie’s streets and bars and seafronts. Homer’s rolling hexameter beat and the sturdy variability of a terza rima modeled on Dante’s Divine Comedy provide the metrical and stanzaic stability necessary to sustain Walcott’s panoramic vision and linguistic experimentation.
        He achieves that blend of objectivity and of implicit compassion which gives Homer’s poems such tragic dignity, and, like Homer, he imagines the poem itself, at least tentatively, as a heroic act, a sustained meditation on history capacious enough to register its deepest losses and powerful enough to claim that art can transcend them. In Omeros, as in the Iliad, we see history transfigured into myth, even at the moment of its fading, and Helen’s bitter lament in the Iliad for herself and Paris could stand as an epigraph for the central figures of both poems: “ Zeus planted a killing doom within us both, / so even for generations still unborn / we will live in song.”
       This seminar will study these two major texts not only for their individual value but also as an instance of the way influence works in the western literary tradition, which proves to be a territory with very open borders, liberating, dynamic, and pluralistic. Epics have always had complicated relations to the dynastic and imperial histories which sponsor them, but Walcott’s is the first postcolonial epic. In studying how Walcott appropriates the powerful text of Homer in order to tell the stories of people on the margins and in the shadow of the worlds of power, we discover how the great works of literary tradition form a cultural commonwealth, not the private property or domain of any class or ethnic group. In a culture of social fluidity, relatively high literacy rates, and the mass production and dissemination of texts, the creative and cultural fire of traditional texts is accessible to anyone who would read and write. Writers like Walcott who aspire to greatness lay hands on that fire, invoking and entering tradition in order to make it their own, and to make themselves a part of it. How to claim the fire, like Prometheus: this seminar will enable its participants to pass this public secret on to our students with greater clarity and passion.

      Although this seminar will emphasize careful reading, practical criticism, and its cultural consequences, it is not without theoretical premises. Although theory tends to remain in the background in an intense course of close reading like this, participants will become acquainted with some theoretical paradigms that they may find useful in their study and teaching of connections between texts, and the ramification of those connections into the cultural complex we call a literary tradition. Theories of intertextuality, postcolonial dialectics, and affective stylistics will be particularly useful to us. Harold Bloom’s studies of literary influence, especially in The Anxiety of Influence, as well as Henry Louis Gates’s adaptation of those studies in The Signifying Monkey, provide a theoretical rationale for a major thematic aspect of this seminar. Adapting an insight of Longinus to the conditions of modern writing, Bloom demonstrates how “belated” writers gain their power through active confrontation with and absorption of the voices of their forebears. This demonstration will prove valuable to us not only in making sense of Walcott’s response to Homer, but in Homer’s own masterful integration and transformation of the bardic traditions which provided his own material.
        In The Signifying Monkey, Gates in turn brings Bloom’s arguments to bear on the special constraints and challenges facing black writers. Gates shows how black writers have had to write themselves and their cultures into existence. In demonstrating their humanity through the exercise of verbal mastery, writers from slave narrators to contemporaries have fused the rhetorical versatility of African-American oral tradition and game-playing with the unifying power and claims to authority of European scribal traditions. We will see how Walcott cultivates the trickster’s art of the Signifying Monkey, elaborating texts which are multivocal and multicultural. In so doing, he creates a text of Homeric scope and diversity, at once sublimely playful and subversive of the orthodoxies of culture and tradition. Gates’s close textual studies in turn provide a theoretical opening for the more politically and culturally inflected work of postcolonial critics, whose studies of the negotiations and reversals of power among colonizing and marginalized cultures, with the crucial theme of the control of language and other modes of cultural representation, can sharpen our consideration both of the cultural contest between Achaians and Trojans in Homer’s epic, and of Walcott as an instance of one through whom “the Empire writes back.”
Affective stylistics, as practiced by figures like Stanley Fish and Norman Holland, reminds us that literature is in the reader as much as it is on the page, and that reading, by changing what we think we know about ourselves and others, changes who we are. Reading and writing are themselves boundary-breaking actions which require the imagination of otherness. A literary tradition builds itself up out of exchanges between writers and other writers, as well as between writers and readers. Writers and readers are themselves, in turn, built up out of such textual encounters. Through reading and writing, we not only extend our sympathies toward those whom we might not otherwise encounter in our socially bounded lives, we also discover a deftness and flexibility to our identities which defy the rigidifying and segregating practices and pressures of so much else in our social lives.
       Critic Gerald Early describes literary activity as a special case of “cultural impersonation,” which erodes the attitudes of essentialism and exclusivity upon which dogmatic identity politics of different sorts are invariably founded. Homer’s vivid and even-handed “impersonations” of characters on both sides of the conflict between Greece and Troy heighten the tragedy of the poem by reminding us of the common interests, of family, friendship, land, and memory, which war impersonally destroys. Achilles’s great moment of release from the inhuman rage which drives him through the poem comes when fellow-feeling is awakened by seeing in Priam’s mourning for Hector a premonition of his own father’s grief at his inevitable death. Walcott’s capacity to “impersonate” sympathetically even unlikely or easily satirized characters like the ex-colonial soldier and pig farmer Dennis Plunkett and his wife Maud, or the imagined pioneer woman of the North American plains, Catherine Weldon, contributes to what is called a “charity of soul” more piercing than the beauty of Walcott’s Helen. Walcott’s empathic practice is a modern self-conscious version of the literary magic first sublimely enacted for us by Homer: “When one grief afflicts us we choose a sharper grief / in hope that enormity will ease affliction, / so Catherine Weldon rose in high relief / through the thin page of a cloud, making a fiction / of my own loss.” Personal grief loses itself in the greater losses of a history which is made common through the binding work of poetry. The first person plural, “we,” “us,” is crucial here: the practice of the poets becomes a model which readers must emulate if they are to imagine the way into the works at all. To the degree to which poets like Homer and Walcott make us more aware of our own cultural impersonations, we become that much more adept at preparing our students, in turn, to enter into and extend the dialogue across time and culture which is literary tradition.