A poetics of parallax: The significant geographies of Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990)

ABSTRACT

Tracing the interplay between different scales of language, narrative, and geography in Omeros (1990), this article analyses the activity of parallax within Derek Walcott’s aesthetic, and its broader significance for the relationship between postcolonial literature and space. It argues Omeros evidences Walcott’s development of a poetics of parallax, and analyses this poetics in a way that builds on recent critical developments such as the focus on “significant geographies”, as well as on established critical distinctions, primarily that between style and plot. By analysing the negotiation of different scales of attention across the poem – from local depiction characterized by heightened style to the insistence on spatial and historical relationships that elude style’s descriptive powers – this article connects formal and stylistic readings with the text’s geopolitical imagination. The result provides a new angle on the poem’s negotiation of Homeric sources, and its delineation of the tensions and pressures that criss-cross postcolonial spatiality.

KEYWORDS:

• Derek Walcott
• Caribbean
• significant geographies
• mapping
• parallax
• Omeros

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Joseph Hankinson

Joseph Hankinson is a stipendiary lecturer in English at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford, and is the acting co-ordinator of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre, based at St Anne’s College. His research focuses on the pressures of the transnational and the translational upon literary styles across 19th- and 20th-century fiction and poetry, as well as upon experimental approaches to comparison.