I've toyed with a Jamesian intonation in this review:
Mr.Walcott is essentially a poet of nature, magnificent in
description. He has here, with, I believe, substantial success, attempted to
write an epic of the Caribbean. As the title indicates, Homer forms a major
source of inspiration for the author. The grand Greek epics echo in the
background, linking Old World to New, Ancient to Modern, Pagan to Christian.
But the narrator of Omeros is explicitly a part of the story he tells. Though
his life intersects with those of his characters only tangentially in the
narrative, his story as he tells it contrasts in the way of an autobiographic
realism with the semi-mythic stature of many of the fictional characters he
creates (who are, however primitive, nevertheless representationally convincing).
The flashing
brilliant originality and fresh beauty of his metaphors of the sensuous world
constitute our author’s undeniable power. He gives us inimitable pictures of
Caribbean life, invents and conveys unseen, unthought-of relations, paints his
pictures with a luxuriant imagination, enlarges our perception of the world,
offers up such insights, so many new connections, such profuse, ingenious
metaphors as seem quite palpably to be actual additions to life. Thus, Mr.
Walcott succeeds in what may be deemed the most vital function of a poet: his
originality lights new vistas and suggests “another way to see.”
Nor does this
faculty, this extraordinary gift, the ability to create and recreate the external
world fail to manifest a nearly proportionate strength in imagining the internal
world, the soul of man. His fountain of metaphors flows unimpeded when he
handles this other, more profound world—little of his magic is lost in
the transition. I do not wish by any means to suggest that he is the greatest
of moralists or psychologists, for he is neither; he does not reach the depth
or scope of Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Yet his characters live, as do those of any
good novelist. Whether we consider the simple, overtly fictional natives of St.
Lucia who are depicted as living through the transition from the
pre-industrial, pre-tourist, colonial world before the world war to the loud,
mechanized, polluted, tourist-dependent modern world, or whether we turn our bemused
attention to the pseudo-fictional mixed soul and complex consciousness, the sensitive
social conscience and aesthetic appreciations of the narrator, life inheres in
the human world found in his pages. I should suggest the former characters act
in Mr. Walcott’s Iliad, set on the island, while the narrator figures in his
own Odyssey, one which transports him through the European colonial powers, the United
States, St. Lucia, and their intertwining histories. And there is more than
this, including characters encountered during the narrator’s odyssey and an
especially deep portrait of an elderly English couple resident in St. Lucia
through their declining years. In passing, I may mention that this ambitious,
encompassing historico-geographical epic contains such a range of historic
allusions as will not be available in the memory of the educated reader. But
this individual ought still to catch and comprehend most, at least, and
sufficiency, of the intended meaning without reference.
Much of the poem
traces, through the consciousness of the narrator and two of his characters, an
English immigrant to St. Lucia and a native black St. Lucian, the history of
St. Lucia, with an hallucinatory view of the original slaves’ experience, and an
history of the Western world since Homer. These journeys into history lend
perspective to the elegiac tone which pervades the poem. Much has been lost by
the African slaves and their descendants, and by the hemisphere’s indigenous
peoples—their lives, their freedom, their culture. The characters represented
as contemporary natives of St. Lucia also bear something of the burden of these
past losses, while facing future threats to their culture and their environment
from the tourist trade. Mr. Walcott’s poetic sensibility registers all these
changes as losses, though the narrator, in a moment of introspection,
recognizes his fellow islanders may see the alterations wrought by time less sentimentally,
less nostalgically—being too poor to afford the spiritual luxury of a backward
glance, and being, as well, quite unconscious of the scope of the changes. Each
of these historical odysseys form a series of glimpses of imperialism’s ravages
in the New World and Africa, and, indeed, in the nations and cultures which
unleashed this exercise of power which, it is suggested, continues even today
in a less barbaric, more clandestine and corrupting form under the guise of
global, free-trade capitalism.
There is in 'Omeros'
a measure of moralizing (if rarely overt and unqualified) not found in Homer
himself, though often enough found in the greatest writers, as, for example,
Dante, Milton, Vergil. At all events, this mode of writing is perhaps never
actually an inspiration to great poetry, but at best provides moral cover and
the appearance of social benevolence. Mr. Walcott largely leaves the reader to
draw his own moral lessons from the stories and histories presented. He knows
no remedy for the sufferings of the past, though reverberations persist. Only
these shadows sometimes beg new reckonings, salutary exfoliations of certain
social and psychological layers. His suggestions in this path derive not from
abstract principles, a priori
presumptions, or categorical imperatives, but from that peculiarly human form
of imagination, empathy. Empathy, enriched by our poet’s powerful imagination,
sets upon past and present without malice or resentment, trusting the reader to
see the moral landscape for himself, and then to feel it. Passing through all
heavy challenges, the swift narrative current does not flag and does not
concede its right to brilliance and beauty.
To sustain a high level of poetic creation through the length of an epic and to
overcome so many self-set difficulties--these mark Omeros as one of the
preeminent literary achievements of our time. Of course, to invite comparison
with Homer always makes for a reckless risk, one perhaps only Dante and Milton
survived fully intact. Yet, Mr. Walcott possesses considerable strengths and
wisely veers far away from Homer in his intricate narrative interweavings, his autobiographical version of an Odyssey mixed with an antiheroic Iliad, and his pursuit of such psychological
interiorities as were still unthought of in Homer's time. One of these
considerable strengths, and not the least impressive mark of greatness, is not
only to accomplish the rare feat, but to do so with ease and panache,
cheerfully to meet any figure or circumstance that may appear on the horizon,
evading no aspect or element of the task--and thereby to manifest a complete
soul, a spirit capable of matching the age and transmuting it into the finer
material of art.
