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

Derek Walcott’s (1990) Omeros concludes with a description of the St Lucian fisherman Achille hauling in his canoe – teeming with caught mackerel among other fish – and taking pleasure in the “odours / of the sea in him”, in his armpits, and the “dry scales” he has to scrape from his hands (325). A diversity of activity, immediately and intensely experienced, from the “palm-ribbed mongrels” competing with “sawing flies” for the entrails Achille had “hurled” onto the sand moments earlier, to the lighting of lamps in the nearby village, is contrasted in the poem’s final stanzas with the “immense lilac emptiness” of the settled sea (325). In this article I argue that this contrast constitutes an important aspect of the poem’s thematic, formal, and stylistic relationship with the experience of space: what is felt (and described) affectively, immediately, and locally is placed in opposition – even as Achille turns his back on its “emptiness” – to the sheer immensity of the space that intervenes between, and connects, St Lucia and Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, a space in which affective description (“lilac”) regularly competes with an inconceivable “emptiness”.

Yet far from simply affirming this spatial hierarchy – in which the poetry faces the local, while the “global” serves as a background, a presence felt only as a kind of absence – Walcott’s poem introduces a significant tension into its representation of spatial experience, which this article aims to analyse. The penultimate chapter of Omeros, for instance, encourages a perspective which accentuates, in contrast to the poem’s aforementioned concluding stanzas, its mapping of “global” geographies, its criss-crossing of the sea’s emptiness with lines and relations connecting localities into constellations too large to be felt affectively and immediately:

I followed a sea-swift to both sides of this text;

her hyphen stitched its seam, like the interlocking

basins of a globe in which one half fits the next

into an equator, both shores neatly clicking

into a globe; except that its meridian

was not North and South but East and West. One, the New

World, made exactly like the Old, halves of one brain,

or the beat of both hands rowing that bear the two

vessels of the heart with balance, weight, and design.

Her wing-beat carries these Islands to Africa,

she sewed the Atlantic rift with a needle’s line,

the rift in the soul.

(Walcott 1990, 319)

The poem’s stitching of locations across the “globe” – from the Islands of the Caribbean Sea to Boston and Madeira, London and Glendalough, to Greece and the coast of West Africa – encourages a change of perspective by which the “immense lilac emptiness” of the sea becomes “a horizon that linked me to others” (Walcott 1990, 191). Rhyme, across these stanzas, performs this linking: the “interlocking / basins” of the globe “neatly clicking” into place even as the repetition of gerunds at the ends of lines binds stanzas together.

“Africa”, however, slips past the rhyme scheme – and despite the poetic voice’s confidence in the spatial shifting of gears, and despite this change of emphasis from local description to “global” connections, description of these macro-scales places different pressures on the poem’s style and form. To describe connections on the level of the “globe”, Walcott has recourse to some of the poem’s dominant metaphors: the swift’s migratory lines of flight, embroidery and stitching, the rhythm of rowing. Traversing the “emptiness” of the intervening space between the poem’s locations involves a repurposing of descriptions that elsewhere in Omeros stress the immediacy of the Island’s “local”: Maud’s embroidered quilt, the working life of the fishermen, the swift’s activity. Metaphoric investment in the “interlocking” of locations across the “globe” repeats aspects of the poem’s mimetic descriptions of St Lucia on a different scale. The “local” is transplanted into “global” descriptions, at once suggesting a congruence between St Lucia and the world as a whole (the Island as a microcosm), and, significantly, a difficulty in transcending what is felt locally in descriptions of geographies that exceed an individual’s experiential capacity (the “global” as properly unrepresentable).

Across the poem, a significant tension emerges between what is felt locally and imagined transnationally, between geographies that exert different kinds of pressure on mimetic description. This significant tension is also, therefore, a tension of significance. Just as a reef reveals to a bird’s-eye viewer a “submerged geography”, Walcott’s poem frequently foregrounds the interaction between different scales and layers of the experience of space (1990, 168). But it is the relation between this interaction and the poem’s investment of significance in particular spatial constellations that come to characterize its stylistic negotiation of multi-scalar geographies. As such, the poem, at least in part, attempts to discern and relate the different “significant geographies” that characterize postcolonial, and specifically Caribbean experience. This article does similar work, tracing the pressure exerted by the social across the range of its scales on the poem’s form and style, and focusing attention on the ways in which space and the spatial (often competing) forms of cartography and transnational relational networks exist in dynamic relation with the poem’s expressive content and its narrative.

The term “significant geographies”, as Karima Laachir, Sara Marzagora, and Francesca Orsini (2018) note, draws attention to “the conceptual, imaginative, and real geographies that texts, authors, and language communities inhabit, produce, and reach”, and that rarely coincide with the “globe” conceived as a whole (294; emphasis in original). This focus entails, in Francesca Orsini (2015) words, a view of “space as relational, as a plurality of stories, and as a vantage point to explore the dynamic relationship between local and cosmopolitan tastes, authors, genres, and practices in vernacular and cosmopolitan languages” (352). It involves rethinking geographies from a subjective (or inter-subjective), rather than an objective point of view: what matters are the ways in which geographies are significant for people – whether individuals, communities, or in broader social arrangements. In Omeros, these “conceptual, imaginative, and real geographies” regularly involve a shifting of scales across a variety of different interpersonal and intercultural relations. From lyric descriptions of connections binding together experiences of diverse locations, to accounts of specific exchanges among St Lucia’s native and non-native inhabitants, the poem foregrounds precisely the “dynamic relationship between [the] local and cosmopolitan” described by Laachir, Marzagora, and Orsini. This article’s principal purpose is to analyse the ways in which Omeros foregrounds this relationship, but also to show how the poem recasts some of the theoretical conversations about place and space, prompting a reconsideration of the patterns of shifts and emphases that characterize postcolonial engagement with geography.

Because of the frequency with which these shifts occur, it is useful, in Walcott’s case, to follow the Japanese literary critic and philosopher Kōjin Karatani (1995) in making a clear distinction between “community” and “society”. Following Marx, Karatani conceives of society as “less a community or system than as communication between a multitude of communities and systems” (141). Community, according to this reading, is a system characterized by the presence of both filial bonds – real or imaginary consanguinity, fraternity, kinship – and a shared set of rules. Society, in contrast, is the result of exchange between communities, of extra-filial relationships between two or more systems which between them do not share a common set of rules or a sense of kinship.

Mapping the “social”, in Karatani’s sense of the term, is at the heart of Omeros. The poem invests a great deal of energy in tracing exchanges, interrelations, and contact between unlike systems. Described by Edward Baugh (2006) as “not a novel, but a narrative poem with novelistic features” (185), Omeros follows loosely the quotidian and imaginative lives of a range of characters living or temporarily residing on the Island of St Lucia. The poem predominantly features three-line stanzas with an interlocking, though not strict, rhyme scheme. Divided into seven “books”, each comprized of a number of “chapters”, the poem’s narrative is divided between three “stories”, featuring overlapping groups of characters: first, Achille and Hector’s rivalry over Helen; second, Plunkett and Maud’s life on St Lucia, including Plunkett’s search for a way of relating to his and the Island’s military history; third, the travels of the first-person narrator – a figure loosely identifiable with Walcott himself – between St Lucia, the USA, and Europe. Other significant episodes include the changing relationship Philoctete has to his wound, Achille’s journey to West Africa, events around Ma Kilman’s shop, and the Island’s relationship to tourism. The poem’s events tend to involve “social” interactions: encounters between those considered foreign to a milieu and those considered, for a variety of reasons, to “belong” to it; narratives of travel; historical relationships between different cultures often characterized by a starkly uneven distribution of power; linguistic relationships across and between different language communities. These encounters produce for Baugh the poem’s “continual variety”, its

shift and dialogue of voices, explicit and implied, and the concomitant friction of class interests which this dialogue represents; the realization of landscape and social lifestyle, and the exploration of character within those contexts; the gusto in the description of physical action, and this contrasted with lyrical evocations of place and person; the technical tour de force of prosody, the counterpointing and orchestrating of different stories. (2006, 187)

Characterized by mixture, friction, and contrast across more than 300 pages, Omeros draws attention less to points of view than to movement between points of view: a movement which foregrounds parallax, or the ways in which one’s experience of space changes as one shifts between different scales, situated perspectives, and ways of seeing.

This mixture and movement characterize the poem’s treatment of space. For Baugh, the “geographical sweep of the poem, cutting across large expanses of historical time”, combines with “the visual excitement of physical action, landscape and vivid, sensuous detail” to suggest a “cinematic élan” (2006, 187). Yet Baugh underplays the relationship between these scales. The tension, friction, even interrelation between these “large expanses” and “vivid, sensuous detail” – two scales of attention that demand different poetic languages, different means of implying significance – is a central, if under-appreciated, aspect of Walcott’s poem. Indeed, it is important to note that a text’s “significant geographies” do not exclude the possibility of its imaginative, conceptual, and critical interest in the “global” pictured, however imprecisely or impossibly, as a totality. One of the term’s (perhaps neglected) critical possibilities is its making available readings that focus upon the ways in which a text’s significant geographies might remain in tension with geographies that elude significance (or, indeed, accurate signification). This kind of reading exploits the heterogeneity of Karatani’s “social”, which can at once involve clearly delineated significant geographies – such as, in Walcott’s poem, Plunkett’s mapping, the encounters between tourists and fishermen, and various kinds of localized exchange across class boundaries – and exchanges that take place on practically unimaginable macro-scales, large enough to disrupt, or at least change the nature of the imposition of “significance”.

In part prompted by this awareness of a profoundly multi-scalar “social”, Fredric Jameson(2019) draws attention to “a dialectic of space” in which

entities (seemingly of an institutional kind) which are somehow “larger than life” and thus unrepresentable in the form of individual existence move further and further away from a micro-level of human experience, in which everything seems to have been reduced to a present of time without a temporal contexts. (11)

Consequently, “the ‘global’ becomes unimaginable, while the ‘local’ becomes unthinkable and accessible only to bodily sensation and experience” (11). Part of this article’s argument involves the recognition that this spatial interplay between immediate experience and an inaccessible “global” relates in critically important ways to the interplay between a text’s own micro- and macro-levels: in other words, style and narrative. Jameson (2009) elsewhere argues that “the incommensurability of plot and style in the novel” produces a “static or arrested dialectic [ ... ] in which no third term seems to propose itself beyond the unity of the negative opposites”, and therefore “in which neither the macro-level of the narrative nor the micro-level of the language can be reduced to the other” (22). Similarly, shifting between the “macro-level of the narrative” and “the micro-level of the language” of Omeros – which, while not being a novel, hinges upon a complex interplay between the expressive levels of narrative and style – generates difficulties for any reading keen to posit a homology between these levels.

This is especially the case when a text like Omeros hinges upon both this friction and tension between scales and, on the linguistic level, what the poet and essayist M. NourbeSe Philip (2014) calls “the confrontation between the formal and the demotic within the text itself” (84). Where I depart from Jameson, however, is in his insistence on the (“static or arrested”) dialectic between style and plot. Instead, I argue that, throughout Walcott’s poem, the relationship between narrative and style produces a parallax gap: to view Omeros in terms of its style, its significant geographies, its evocation and depiction of affect, is not the same as viewing it in terms of its “epic” plot, and gesturing towards the unrepresentable network of global histories and geographies. The gap between these perspectives acts across these levels of Omeros and represents one of its underappreciated aesthetic achievements.

At its most basic level, then, parallax – the displacement of an object when viewed from alternative positions – serves to provide the reader of Walcott’s poem with a sense of the complexity of multi-scalar geographies. The poem’s accentuation of specific and concrete spatial relations is haunted by the pressure of other relations, often imaginative, connecting the material lives of the poem’s characters into strange, metaphorical, even mythical configurations with other places separated by vast expanses of space and time. It is in this sense that the poem draws attention to different means of investing significance into geographical relationships: a friction exists between the poem’s material geographies, its connecting together various “locals”, and its imaginative ranging across “global” expanses. This friction, as I will show, is congruent with a formal and stylistic friction between the poem’s different scales or types of expression. A division of labour between “poetic” local and prosaic “global” depiction comes to characterize Omeros, and the gap between these types of expression cannot be easily resolved.

As such, I acknowledge the importance of Slavoj Žižek’s (2009) reminder that,

when confronted with such a parallax gap, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other (or, even more, to enact a kind of “dialectical synthesis” of the opposites); the task is, on the contrary, to conceive all possible positions as responses to a certain underlying deadlock or antagonism, as so many attempts to resolve this deadlock. (n.p.)

I argue here that Omeros is characterized by a poetics of parallax in which a perspectival shifting across multiple levels – the “local” and “global”, significant geographies and those that elude significance (and, indeed, signification), the demotic and formal within language, “poetic” style and “prosaic” plot – constitutes a complex mapping of the multi-scalar relations between language and geography. This mapping permits a perspective from which the “deadlock or antagonism” that Žižek mentions appears as both an insurmountable reality of the contemporary experience of space and, ultimately, creatively enabling as the basis of a poetics simultaneously informed by the particularities of Caribbean experience and capable of ranging beyond it.

By means of this emphasis on parallax, this article differentiates itself from Paula Burnett’s (2000) focus on Walcott’s “creative” and “ludic” uses of ambiguity, his “delight in the paradox of the sharedness of difference” which, in Burnett’s reading, stresses “multiple meanings” rather than “conflicted meanings” (138). Instead, I seek to trace the activity of gaps, equivocations, conflicts, and frictions between meanings, languages, cartographies, and geographies within the poem. Walcott himself seems to have been aware of the activity of these gaps. For instance, the poet, in an interview with Luigi Sampietro, reflects, while considering his choice of metre, on the existence of two different kinds of experience, two different spaces of expression, within Omeros:

So, I preferred to use a longer line – a hexametrical line. Because I felt that the prose – the narrative experience in the poem – would’ve had less of a sort of an epic echo if it were in hexameter as opposed to if it were in pentameter – in which it would already begin to certainly have echoes of Milton, or Tennyson – something Victorian – in terms of the measure of it. And I don’t think that the pentameter would’ve allowed me the kind of prosaic space that I wanted for the action of the narration – the prose element in it. I think that in the pentametrical measure ordinary things tend to get over-emphasized by the beat – I think. Whereas here there is more flexibility, more caesuras. You can relax, you can pick up – accelerate as you wish. (Walcott 2014, n.p.)

This “prosaic space”, which carries “the narrative experience in the poem”, is here opposed to poetry’s more insistent line-unit, characterized by a “beat” that overemphasizes a particular “epic” feeling which Walcott associates with “Victorian” poetics. Instead, Walcott seeks a relationship between narrative and poetic style less inclined to resolve one way or the other – less characterized by either the overemphasis of heroism (still present here in the use of Homer’s “hexametrical line”), or the overemphasis of prosaic, ordinary existence. This complex division of labour within the poem reflects the poet’s desire “to celebrate the diurnal, day-to-day heroism of people who go out and face the arrogance” (Walcott 2014, n.p.): a “heroism” that is counterbalanced by an attention to the “diurnal”.

In delineating these two “spaces” within the poem (spaces which nonetheless, in practice, frequently overlap), Walcott appears to introduce, implicitly, a logic of significance. Poetic style’s tendency to underscore and amplify an “epic echo” within ordinary experience is opposed to a more flexible “prosaic” depiction. Significance appears to be associated with the former’s insistent beat, its “heroic” style, rather than with a “prosaic space” perhaps better suited to the depiction of the “diurnal” and the “day-to-day”. Yet it is important to note that Walcott’s poem resists this overly simplistic reading. The association between prose and “narrative experience” – in a poem whose narrative hinges upon historical and geographical connections and journeys that are rarely content to remain among the material realities of everyday life – upsets any easy identification between prose and the mundane, poetry and the “epic”. Indeed, this logic of significance frequently inverts on broader scales: “prosaic space” is associated with macro-scales of attention, geographical and historical connections that resist clear representation, while poetic intensity is frequently associated with locally felt experiences, clearly delineated significant geographies, physically felt proximities between humans and their environments.

The dynamics of this division of labour appears to have interested Walcott across his career. Earlier poems – “Crusoe’s Journal”, “Codicil”, and “Homage to Edward Thomas” are clear examples – often foreground negotiations between kinds of expression proper to both prose and verse. The poem “Islands”, for instance, published in In a Green Night in 1962, considers prosaic and poetic ways of relating to the Islands of the Caribbean. “Merely to name them”, the poetic voice suggests, “is the prose / Of diarists” (Walcott 1992, 52):

But Islands can only exist

If we have loved in them. I seek,

As climate seeks its style, to write

Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight,

Cold as the curled wave, ordinary

As a tumbler of Island water (52)

The verse, here, is quick to find “its style”: the poem’s first couplet (“write”/“sunlight”) combines with a clear patterning of alliteration (the “c”-sounds and “s”-sounds of “Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight”, for instance) to underline a mimetic immediacy which is frequently associated with poetry within Walcott’s writing.

Poetry’s mimetic immediacy is regularly opposed to more expansive spatialities. Later, for instance, in “Forest of Europe” from The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), Walcott describes a poetry invested in what is locally felt, haunted by broader and larger geographical scales that elude the grasp of conscious experience:

He saw the poetry in forlorn stations

under clouds vast as Asia, through districts

that could gulp Oklahoma like a grape,

not these tree-shaded prairie halts but space

so desolate it mocked destinations.

(Walcott 1992, 376)

The “poetry” of the “forlorn stations” and the “tree-shaded prairie halts” is here dependent on its contrast with a “space” – the “vast” clouded sky, an image repeatedly used in Omeros – which is, like the “immense lilac emptiness” of the sea, unimaginably “desolate”. If, for Baugh, the “geographical sweep” of Omeros involves “cutting across large expanses of historical time” as well as “the visual excitement of physical action, landscape and vivid, sensuous detail” (2006, 187), Walcott’s earlier poetry suggests that such a “cutting across” often means an oscillation between different perspectives: whether those of a “poetry” of “sensuous detail” and a prose of “desolate” space, or simply between micro- and macro-scales of spatial relations – an oscillation itself present in his description of an immense emptiness that is still somehow expressive of a “lilac” presence.

Omeros too is characterized by a “style” which, in the poem “The Flock” (from the 1965 collection The Castaways and Other Poems), Walcott describes as a “tension of motion and the dark, / inflexible direction of the world / as it revolves upon its centuries” (1992, 78): a tension of local “physical action” and a much broader “geographical sweep” underemphasized in Baugh’s argument. Even Walcott’s painting, used on the front cover of Omeros’s first edition, stresses a variety of this tension. The four figures in the painting’s centre, underlined by the strong yellow of their boat (a yellow that blends with the colour of one fisherman’s raincoat) are contrasted with a restless olive-green sea and a dense and moody cloudy sky that refuse to be consigned to the mere background. Instead, the vast expanses of sea and sky contest the painting’s human figures in the foreground, drawing the viewer’s attention away from what initially appears to be the painting’s “action”. As such, the painting’s media, its use of colour and texture, dramatizes a struggle central to the poem’s treatment of space. The poem, too, explicitly foregrounds this tension’s relationship with different levels of expression: “Time is the metre”, the narrative voice suggests, and “memory the only plot” (Walcott 1990, 129): the metre’s keeping of time, locally felt, is in tension with the plot’s more expansive relationship to time. For Baugh, “the long line carries the narrative forward in an easy, brisk flow, threaded and propelled by the self-renewing, endlessly varied and largely unobtrusive, irregular rhyme” (2006, 188). Yet what appears to be accentuated across the poem is a sense of the parallax resulting from any shifting of attention from the “line” and its context within the rhyme scheme and the “narrative” as a whole.

The reader is, therefore, in a position similar to that of a passenger in Hector’s “sixteen-seater passenger-van”, “sliding into two worlds”: one, the “atavistic” world of the van’s interior – complete with an “African emblem” and “leopardskin” decor – and the other the world of “Space Age” velocity that propels the passenger towards “an Icarian future they could not control” (Walcott 1990, 117). Despite, however, the narrator’s insistence that this “sliding” occurs “without [a] shifting [of] gears”, the poem often accentuates moments in which a clear “shifting” is present (117). While Walcott’s narrator speaks of perspectives being “narrowed from epic to epigram” (175), the reverse process, by which narrow, local description is suddenly widened, often brings with it significant stylistic variety. Take, for instance, Maud’s sudden perception of “subtlety” after heavy rain in a climate that otherwise seems monotonous when compared to the “light northern rain” and the “seasons” of Ireland (48):

Then, soaked like paper, the hills were a Chinese scroll

and she saw a subtlety where none was before.

Bamboo strokes. Wet cloud. Peasant with straw hat and pole.

Fern spray. White mist. Heron crossing fresh waterfall.

The map of heaven was breaking up in nations,

and a soggy nimbus haloed the loaded moon

when Achille saw the mare’s tale, prognostications

of a grumbling sky that underlined each omen –

from the widowed veils of the indigo rainspouts

to candles of egrets screwed on a swaying branch,

then the match of lightning; in irascible knots

freckling the hot glass of the Coleman lanterns

termites singed their glazed wings and fell away as ants.

(49)

If rhyme is considered by the poem’s narrative voice as “language’s / desire to enclose the loved world in its arms” (75), then the irregularity of rhyme here might suggest the “world” slipping through language’s fingers. Strong rhymes – “scroll”/“pole”, “nations”/“prognostications”, and even the internal rhyme against the presiding scheme of “ants” and “lanterns” – are, across five stanzas, relatively infrequent. At the same time, Maud’s comparison between the climates of Ireland and St Lucia quickly gives way to an evocation of Chinese landscapes, the syntax adapting, momentarily diverging from the more common use of lines without caesuras, to evoke conventional translations of the titles of Chinese paintings. An initial “significant geography” (Maud’s linking together of Glendalough and St Lucia) gives way to a metaphoric insistence on environmental comparisons across imaginative, rather than experienced, distances. The clouds, “breaking up into nations”, reflect this movement outwards: what begins as a description of Maud’s affective responses to two specific environments (one remembered, one immediately present) is soon intersected by a different kind of cognitive mapping, concerned less with a comparison between “locals” than with expansive, “global” imaginative resonances.

The poem regularly encourages, both thematically and stylistically, a rapid alternation between these scales, and the resulting parallax comes to characterize its representation of the experience of space. From descriptions of both the traveller’s “widening mind” (Walcott 1990, 207) and the “abstract universals” associated in the poem with European imperialism (180), to the specific sights, sounds, and smells of individual localities, Omeros regularly encourages a reading sensitive to the gains and losses of different cartographies. The poem often draws attention to maps and cartography, particularly in relation to different ways of representing St Lucia. As the narrative voice suggests, “whimsical cartographers aligned the Islands / as differently as dead leaves in a subtle wind” (90), and descriptions ranging from Plunkett’s “small map” (98) to the “parchment charts at whose corners four winged heads spout / jets of curled, favouring gusts” (159) serve to underline the relativism of figurations of space.

This relativism has its linguistic correlative in Walcott’s use of internal translation, such as when Achille and Hector quarrel at the beginning of the poem:

“Touchez-i encore: N’ai fendre choux-ous-ou, salope!”

“Touch it again, and I’ll split your arse, you bitch!”

“Moi j’a dire – ’ous pas prêter un rien. ’Ous ni shallope,

’ous ni seine, ’ous croire ’ous ni choeur campêche?”

“I told you, borrow nothing of mine. You have a canoe,

and a net. Who you think you are? Logwood Heart?

“’Ous croire ’ous c’est roi Gros Îlet? Voleur bomme!”

“You think you’re king of Gros Îlet, you tin-stealer?”

Then in English: “I go show you who is king! Come!”

(1990, 16)

Matthew Reynolds (2003), in a different context, discusses translation’s tendency to produce an “oscillation between [the] recognition and abolition of foreignness” (99–100), and here, for Walcott, a similar oscillation serves to encourage sensitivity to different levels of textual representation. The translation’s paraphrasing of colloquial terms – “salope” becoming “bitch”, for instance – emphasizes at once cultural and linguistic proximity, and the gaps between both languages. On the one hand, the rhyme between “bomme” and “Come” stresses sounds that are shared between both languages, while the typographical and orthographical accentuation of linguistic difference, on the other hand, widens the gap between them, reminding the reader of an aspect of “local” life which the poem, predominantly, translates.

Parallax, then, characterizes both the poem’s stylistic and formal aspects – its alternation between “prosaic” and “poetic” experience, for instance – and its thematic investment in “significant geographies” and different ways of relating to space. Its foregrounding of differences between a number of perspectives, of gaps between different ways of viewing landscapes and environments, often serves to accentuate aspects of the poem’s critique of tourism. For example, the narrator’s ruminations, late in the poem, about the tourist’s view of St Lucia, involve a deliberate equivocation and confusion of perspectives:

Who needed art in this place

where even the old women strode with stiff-backed spines,

and the fishermen had such adept thumbs, such grace

these people had, but what they envied most in them

was the calypso part, the Caribbean lilt

still in the shells of their ears, like the surf’s rhythm,

until too much happiness was shadowed with guilt

like any Eden, and they sighed at the sign:

HEWANNORRA (Iounalao), the gold sea

flat as a credit-card, extending its line

to a beach that now looked just like everywhere else,

Greece or Hawaii.

(Walcott 1990, 229)

The tourist’s intrusion into the Island is here rendered by means of an oscillation between perspectives. Two kinds of description are interwoven: one, a neutral description of the Island’s “people”, its “old women” and “fishermen”, and its “rhythm”, sensitive to cultural and geographical specificity; the other, the commercial perspective of mass tourism, which translates these markers of cultural specificity – “calypso”, “the Caribbean lilt” – into a version of the Island that exists for foreign consumption. The stanza break between noun and adjectival phrase, between “the gold sea” and “flat as a credit-card”, provokes a momentary confusion between these two kinds of description. The “gold sea” is at once a description of a natural beauty particular to the Caribbean and a metaphor for its commercialization. The equivocal adjective “gold” therefore carries a troubling double meaning: it refers to the specific “significant geographies” of the Caribbean, and simultaneously signifies a more “global” perspective from which the Island’s beaches “now looked just like everywhere else”.

This equivocation accords with other aspects of the poem, such as Paul Breslin’s (2001) description of Walcott’s use of birds as emblems which are at once “of the place” and also “connect it across the space between Islands, or even in the case of the sea-swift, with lost origins across the sundering Atlantic” (258). However, another significant consequence of a critical sensitivity to Walcott’s uses of parallax is a fresh understanding of what is often considered one of Omeros’s failures. The poem’s restless variations with respect to space produce what, for Breslin, are some of “the frustrations” involved in reading Omeros, particularly with reference to its relation to a Homeric past:

Why does it lavish so much tortured ingenuity, so much grandiose rhetoric, on analogies it ultimately condemns as pointless or even pernicious? Why does the poet so obsessively devoted to forging parallels with the Homeric epics end up confessing, to the spirit of Homer himself, that he has never read them “all the way through”? (2001, 244)

Perhaps one answer to these questions is that Walcott’s poem is invested in registering what happens when a shift in perspective – from “grandiose rhetoric” to quotidian description, “Homeric epic” to local arguments, “significant geographies” to an unrepresentable “global” – occurs. Indeed, it is by means of parallax that Walcott’s poem reflects upon the “two journeys” present within “every odyssey”: “one on worried water, / the other crouched and motionless, without noise” (1990, 291). For both journeys, “the ‘I’ is a mast; a desk is a raft / for one”, and “an actual craft / carries the other to cities where people speak / a different language” (291). This doubleness, at once moored to a specific space and capable of “global” roamings, is left unresolved throughout Omeros. As Breslin elsewhere notes, a “self-undoing impulse” within the narrative is regularly “countered by an equally strong impulse to bind together and unify all the parts” (2001, 244–245). Reynolds’s “oscillation between [the] recognition and abolition of foreignness” is here absorbed within a much broader emphasis on movement between geographical scales, between the centrifugal and centripetal forces Breslin draws attention to.

This movement can be seen whenever the poem reflects upon its own use of spatial analogies, such as when the narrative voice, late in the poem, considers its own narrative in tension with its “global” ramifications:

My light was clear. It defined the fallen schism

of a starfish, its asterisk printed on sand,

its homage to Omeros my exorcism.

I was an ant on the forehead of an atlas,

the stroke of one spidery palm on a cloud’s page,

an asterisk only. Achille with his cutlass

rattling into the hold shared the same privilege

of an archipelago’s dawn, a fresh language

salty and shared by the bittern’s caw, by a frieze

of low pelicans. The sea was my privilege.

And a fresh people. The roar of famous cities

entered the sea-almond’s branches then tightened

into silence, and my crab’s hand came out to write –

and down the January beach as it brightened

came bent sibyls sweeping the sand, then a hermit

waist-high in the empty bay, still splashing his face

in that immeasurable emptiness whose war

was between the clouds only.

(Walcott 1990, 294–295)

As the “roar of famous cities”, of “global” networks of travel and exploitation, “tightened / into silence”, the narrative voice stresses an oppositional “local”; the “immeasurable emptiness” of the ocean and the reflected sky is juxtaposed with a perspective from which the writer is merely an “ant on the forehead of an atlas”, an “asterisk only”. Yet even this opposition is marked by the equivocal and oscillating rhythm that characterizes the poem’s treatment of space. Words like “sibyls” and “frieze” – evocative of Greek culture – produce a spatial palimpsest in which the Island’s “significant geographies”, its affectively felt quotidian life and its various networks of relation, are overlaid with analogies that suggest a different variety of significance, one dependent on European precedence.

It is this contestation over “significance” that the poem appears to be interested in thinking through in all its ramifications, as the narrative voice asks, with respect to the poem’s tendency to double its St Lucian characters with their Homeric antecedents:

Who gives her the palm? Did sulking Achille grapple

with Hector to repeat themselves? Exchange a spear

for a cutlass; and when Paris tosses the apple

from his palm to Venus, make it a pomme-Cythère,

make all those parallels pointless. Names are not oars

that have to be laid side by side, nor are legends;

slowly the foaming clouds have forgotten ours.

You were never in Troy, and, between two Helens,

yours is here and alive; their classic features

were turned into silhouettes from the lightning bolt

of a glance. These Helens are different creatures,

one marble, one ebony.

(Walcott 1990, 313)

The difference between these “Helens” is, the poem appears to argue, ascertainable only by virtue of the parallax between them, the regular oscillation between perspectives: “epic” and quotidian, Caribbean and European, “local” and “global”. Walcott’s poem therefore resembles what Roberto Schwarz (2001) describes, in a different context, as a text “written against its pseudo author” in the form of “an ‘involuntary’ self-exposure” which is grounded in “the calculated inadequacy of the narrator’s attitudes toward the material he himself presents” (54). If there is a “calculated inadequacy” of certain “epic” pretensions in Omeros, it is calculated to draw attention to the parallax resulting from movement across and between spatial scales, thematically, stylistically, and formally. In this sense, the poem seeks to understand the ways in which narrative troubles, and is troubled by, its simultaneous interest in “significant” geographies and geographies that elude significance. Omeros’s poetics of parallax, therefore, signals a deep and complex thinking about space, both in its specifically Caribbean, and its broader relational configurations.

In conclusion, returning to Žižek’s suggestion that parallax often draws attention to a central “deadlock or antagonism”, that its alternation between various perspectives constitutes an attempt “to resolve this deadlock”, it becomes clear that Omeros’s almost palimpsestic layering of alternative responses to the experience of space, its regular shifting between and juxtaposition of different scales of attention and description, serve as a means of interrogating the spatial forces that characterize postcolonial experience in an increasingly globalized world. There is a clear relationship here between my argument and a distinction Ben Thomas Jefferson (2013) borrows from John Agnew. For both Jefferson and Agnew, there is a significant difference between “space” and “place”, the former conceived of as “top down”, the latter as “bottom-up”: space, in this reading, is “inscribed over place” (Jefferson 2013, 288). Omeros, in my reading, invests much of its energy and descriptive power in tracing the inevitable interrelationship between these two different ways of approaching geographical configurations. The poem’s tendency to foreground moments when a stylistic intensity rooted in affective description is rapidly overwritten by what Jefferson, following Agnew, would term “spatial” perspectives, and also moments when these broad “spatial” perspectives are suddenly underwritten by more “bottom-up”, “local” scales of attention, reveals the extent of this investment.

For Jefferson, however, Walcott’s poetry is less concerned with the parallax between “place” and “space” than it is with an accentuation of the former, and a critique of perspectives limited to the latter. “Typically in Walcott’s writings”, Jefferson argues, “he describes places with which he is familiar, and through his local knowledge, challenges ideas that view these places as either unknown or owned spaces” (2013, 302). In Omeros, this sense of the separateness of the “local” and “familiar” from the vastness of “unknown or owned spaces” is rarely so clearly established. Visiting his mother in a care home in Castries, after a lengthy period living in the USA, the “poet” of Omeros – whose first-person description makes up much of the central part of the poem – describes his walk back to his hotel room with a strong emphasis on the ways in which “place” and “space” are intertwined:

I felt transported,

past shops smelling of cod to a place I had lost

in the open book of the street, and could not find.

It was another country, whose excitable

gestures I knew but could not connect with my mind,

like my mother’s amnesia; untranslatable

answers accompanied these actual spirits

who had forgotten me as much as I, too, had

forgotten a continent in the narrow streets.

Now, in night’s unsettling noises, what I heard

enclosed my skin with an older darkness. I stood

in a village whose fires flickered in my head

with tongues of a speech I no longer understood,

but where my flesh did not need to be translated;

then I heard patois again, as my ears unclogged.

(Walcott 1990, 167)

The connection between a specific “place” and the poetic voice’s memories is here fraught with difficulties. The confidence in a “local knowledge” of “places with which [Walcott] is familiar” that Jefferson describes is unsettled: instead, place emerges from this description as an interface between what is translatable and untranslatable, between a translation that itself foregrounds an “oscillation between [the] recognition and abolition of foreignness” and a local specificity which permits no understanding, only “amnesia”. As is so often the case with Walcott’s poetry, this interface finds its counterpart in a number of stylistic decisions. Affective description which encourages a sense of proximity to an environment – “shops smelling of cod” – is immediately juxtaposed with metaphors – “the open book of the street” – that have a distancing effect. Diction, similarly, draws attention to two opposing forces here: the equivocal word “country”, for instance, tugs the reader in two directions, one towards “countryside” and specificity, the other towards “nation” and geographical macro-scales. The “continent” which the poetic voice has forgotten “in the narrow streets” replicates this tension between “place” and “space”. Also present is the now familiar division of labour between “poetic” and “prosaic” experience: these stanzas display a poetic style that remains uncertain in the regularity of its rhyme and metre, its syntax alternating between enjambment and an affirmation of the line-unit.

What results is a clear sense of the ways in which Omeros foregrounds movement between a range of different micro- and macro-scales: the “local” and the “global”, the concrete and mythical, “significant geographies” and imaginative, vague networks of affiliation. As such, Walcott’s poem, rather than simply opposing the “local” to the “global”, suggests that St Lucia, and its characters’ experience of it, emerges in the parallax between these micro- and macro-scales. Its mapping of a variety of different social relations, linguistically as well as spatially, depends upon a series of equivocations and frictions between different perspectives, and different modes of expression. It is, therefore, the relation between these equivocations and frictions and the poem’s investment of significance in particular spatial constellations that characterizes its style’s negotiation of multi-scalar geographies.

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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.