(Hi)stories

It was important to raise the issue of history and historiography in last week's class, as this reminds us yet again of questions that have been consistently present for us this semester, and that suggest very promising possibilities for papers and further inquiry. I think of Declan Kiberd's avowal (which was on the board) that “there can be no single History, only a plurality of self-interested histories, each composed at the mercy of its own moment of creation and at the mercy also of the literary form in which it is encased.” When, near the very end of Star of the Sea, we learn that Seamus Meadowes has reinvented himself many times over after reaching America, and even written an autobiography in which he casts himself as a justice-seeking advocate for the working man, we realize quite palpably how this novel shows us how stories, testimonies, and myths proliferate and then are dispersed; meanwhile, the truth gets harder to locate, and the dead become ever more lost and anonymous in the mists of time (remember Walcott, in "The Muse of History," proposing that "in time every event becomes an exertion of memory and is thus subject to invention. The further the facts, the more history petrifies into myth"). As the narrating Dixon finally explains, "As for the rest -- the details, the emphases, certain devices of narration and structure, whole events which may never have occurred, or may have happened quite differently to how they are described -- those belong to the imagination" (394). It all sounds very poststructural, right: the actual past has gone, and it's only manifested in the historicized traces now, traces that signify an absent presence.

Our most direct encounter with historiography has been Walcott's essay, of course, but if you want to pursue this line of inquiry you'd do well to seek out Hayden White's work -- in particular the essay to which I referred in class some weeks ago, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" (1980). In the three decades since White's work appeared, we've come to realize that the relations between literature and history must be rethought and that, indeed, there are two meanings of the word "history": (1) the events of the past, and (2) telling a story about the events of the past. White is interested in the constructedness of historical narrative, in the principles of selection, and in the desires that inhere in our need to have real events presented in such a way that they "display the formal coherency of a story," for "the notion that sequences of real events possess the formal attributes of the stories we tell about imaginary events could only have its origins in wishes, daydreams, reveries." In what ways do our texts this semester (Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage," for example, or Crossing the River, Omeros, Star of the Sea, etc.) formalize and thematize an opposition to "old historicism," which, according to White, has always wanted us to find in historical narratives "a structure that was in the events all along," and which, consequently, suggests "why the plot of a historical narrative is always an embarrassment and has to be presented as 'found' in the events rather than put there by narrative techniques"? When you realize how history was traditionally a matter of coherence, of structures, of order, of knowability, it begins to bring a whole new resonance to the fractured, gapped, multigenred, stitched-together texts we've encountered this semester ...

Sea Worthiness

We're at the point in the semester, of course, when connections and threads should be richly accumulating across our disparate texts (as I tried to indicate via our little exercise involving "names" on the whiteboard last night); I look forward to the final papers in this regard, as I'm sure some of you will be doing this kind of associational and comparative tracking. As another kind of exercise, and wondering about the connective tissue made available to us through the Irish Famine and emigration experience (after last night's productive discussion), I thought I'd try to identify at least one link between O'Connor's Star of the Sea and our various course texts this semester: (1) w/ Hayden's "Middle Passage": the two texts mostly clearly and directly involved with the onboard ship experience; the comparisons between the role of the captains in the two texts; the fragmented nature of the narratives and the multiple sources in play in each; (2) The Tempest: we might think about the connections between Caliban, Cliff's Christopher, and Pius Mulvey around the idea of "othering" and notions of the monster and the abject; there's also the possible comparison between Prospero and David Merridith in that each was in a sense exiled in their own land before experiencing the sea crossing and more overt exile; (3) Wide Sargasso Sea: there's a kind of echo between the post-emancipation changes to the social order in Rhys's Jamaica and the Famine-related upheavals that changed the fates and hierarchies (to some extent) of the landlords and tenant farmers in Ireland; the idealized expectations of Antoinette regarding England and of the emigrating Irish regarding the America that awaits them; (4) Crossing the River: there are probably too many to mention here, but there's the ship's log/diary comparisons between the two texts (and the two captains), "that terrifying ledger of human suffering" (O'Connor 186); there's the spectral, dispossessed western migrations of Phillips's Martha and O'Connor's Mary Duane (who is finally just "a shade moving slowly through a forest of black umbrellas" (389)); there are the similarities in the multi-voiced, fragmented form of the novels; (5) No Telephone to Heaven: the discourse of racism that appears in both texts; the sense of comparative traumas and experiences of racism that are opened up in both texts (e.g., Clare's experience juxtaposed with Bobby's African American experience in the former novel, and the Irish dispossession and sea passage juxtaposed with the Middle Passage in the latter); (6) Black Shack Alley: Merridith's alienated position relative to his father reminds us, perhaps, of that the treatment of fathers, sons, and inheritances -- and the way such relationships are affected by colonial dynamics -- are featured in each text; (7) Omeros: Maud's Irishness and the Poet-figure's journey to Ireland in Book 5 open up interesting points of convergence with O'Connor's novel: as Michael Malouf proposes, "Structurally, Ireland and Joyce move the poem away from its previous concerns with the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle Passage and lead to the more universalist, cosmopolitan themes of the later chapters in Book 5"; maybe we could even think of the Adamic sensibility and poetics being a relevant comparison (the emigrant Irish expect a kind of Adamic renewal in America, perhaps, and also experience the kind of ineffable void in their sense of history (because of the trauma of the Famine) that Walcott describes in "The Muse of History"); (8) The Lonely Londoners: the good, resourceful, creative side of Pius may remind us a little of "Selvon's boys" in London, but, more than that, the novels also focus searingly on material dispossession -- this fear of Pius Mulvey may remind us of the milk bottles passage in Selvon's novel: "More than poverty and hunger it began to claw at him: the picture of himself and his heartbreakingly courageous brother growing old and then dying in that mountainside cabin. Nobody to mourn them or even to notice they were gone" (87); there's also the juxtaposition between the great hopes of the emigrants upon leaving their native lands in each text and the harsh realities of what they encounter -- as we learn late in Star of the Sea, "anti-immigrant feeling was strong" (376) in New York when the Star's passengers are finally allowed to disembark.

Well, it's an interesting exercise, in any event! Before we move on, a couple more observations about Star of the Sea. First, there's the sheer poignance of the Captain's observations of the leavetaking (which, in a way, take us back to those memorable scenes in Book 3 of Omeros when the slaves are taken from their homes, their families, their occupations, or that moment in Crossing the River when, the ship heading to sea, Captain Hamilton observes that "they huddle together, and sing their melancholy lamentations" (124)): "What anguish, then, must be endured by those on board who will never again in this life see their loved ones who must remain behind? The man who will never more go walking in the evening in his home town with his brother, quietly reflecting together on the matters of the day. Or the girl who must bid farewell to respected parents whom she knows to be too poorly to countenance such an arduous voyage. The happy young couple who must part from one another and the father parted from his wife and children, to travel into America by himself where the means only exist to pay for one passage. To wander alone among strangers, they risk all" (275).

Consider this, too, as an overflow vestibule to last night's discussion. I know there are a good many observations still to be made about O'Connor's novel, the two poems, the Clifford essay, etc.

Of Shining Salted Faces

Well, I'm thinking we can & should still be in the business of isolating some stray striking passages in this space, and the grim encounter between the whale and the Star of the Sea in O'Connor's novel reminded me of that wonderful moment, late in Omeros, when Philoctete and Achille encounter (with a mixture of awe and terror) the sudden emergence of a whale right next to their fishing boat:



Exultant with terror, Philo kept ravelling


the line around his fist, and then both gasped as one whale --


"Baleine," said Achille -- lifted its tapering wedge



as a bouquet of spume hissed from its splitting pod,


as it slowly heightened the island of itself,


then sounded, the tail sliding, till it disappeared



into a white hole whose trough, as it came, lifted


In God We Troust with its two men high off the shelf


of the open sea, then set it back down under



a swell that swamped them, while the indifferent shoal


foamed northward. He has seen the shut face of thunder,


he has known the frightening trough dividing the soul

from this life and the other, he has seen the pod


burst into spray. The bilge was bailed out, the sail


turned home, their wet, salted faces shining with God.



This passage, with the radiant appearance of that whale at the end of a day's fishing, reveals that, among other things, Walcott is a great nature writer, too. One remembers Shakespeare's sense of the "solemn sympathy" of nature, perhaps, or, as I do, thinks of David Abram's discussion of animism in his great book, The Spell of the Sensuous. Abram hopes that the interpenetration of the human and animal/natural worlds is such that "the other forms of experience that we encounter -- whether ants, or willow trees, or clouds -- are never absolutely alien to ourselves" (16). This is increasingly rare, though, and Abram later laments, "How is it that these phenomena no longer address us, no longer compel our involvement or reciprocate our attention? .... To freeze the ongoing animation, to block the wild exchange between the senses and the things that engage them, would be tantamount to freezing the body itself, stopping it short in its tracks .... If we no longer experience the enveloping earth as expressive and alive, this can only mean that the animating interplay of the senses has been transferred to another medium, another locus of participation" (130-1). We should admire Philo and Achille here, their "salted faces shining with God," and this natural manifestation of their rediscovered wholeness. Someone (Briana, maybe?) had wondered about the significance of the ants in Omeros (and I think ants end up having an ambiguously important role in Solibo Magnificent, too, which is next up for us), so maybe this incident, along with the Abram quotes, help us a bit in that regard?

Cliff Notes

I guess the subject line could also read "Tempis Fugit," right? Egads, it's tough to do justice to everything within our allotted boundaries. Thank you to James and Sean for giving us some leads for getting started on the No Telephone to Heaven discussion, but, of course, much remains. I take some solace in Walcott's understanding of time: "The strength of the sea gives you an idea of time that makes history absurd.... History is a very, very minor statement; it's not even an intrusion, it's an insignificant speck on the rim of that horizon. And by history I mean a direction that is progressive and linear. With the sea, you can travel the horizon in any direction, you can go from left to right, or from right to left. It doesn't proceed from A to B to C to D and so on. It's not a rational line. It's a circle, and that's what you feel." With your permission, I'd like to inhabit that understanding of time (and not the linear one) as we approach our readings henceforth -- let's be islanders in that regard.

Now, as for Cliff's novel, maybe I can consolidate a few things and invite you all to toss around a passage or two in these parts so we can advance the conversation even as we look ahead to this week's film and then, more distantly (i.e., in the following week), to our next novel, The Star of the Sea. I know we started to address this, but I've been intrigued by some of the meaningful overlap with Wide Sargasso Sea (between the authors, between the protagonists, between the richly ambivalent endings (with the seeming awakening of each protagonist), between the healing figures of Harry/Harriet and Christophine, between the abject orphaned figures of Christopher and Daniel Cosway, etc.). When Rhys's novel opens with "They say when trouble comes close ranks" we are right away alerted to the fact that the social dynamic, in the post-emancipation period, is changing in a major way, and that race is going to be pressured by other categories (like class and gender). No Telephone to Heaven starts in much the same way, with that clear dialectic being established between sameness and difference. Thus, you have the guerrillas trying to forge an alliance based on their similarities -- "this alikeness was something they needed" (4), but the difficulty of smoothing over their differences is symbolically indicated by those "khaki pants and shirts" (5) they all wear. The first description of Clare, too, indicates the wide range of racial categories in play in the Caribbean (familiar to us from the problems Antoinette's family encounters in Rhys's novel): "A light-skinned woman, daughter of landowners, native-born, slaves, emigres, Carib, Ashanti, English, has taken her place on this truck, alongside people who easily could have hated her" (5). Imagine Tia having to forge an alliance with Antoinette to fight oppression: it's completely logical in one sense, and deeply problematic in another. When we were discussing the irony of the freedom fighters wearing U.S. army jackets, by the way, which seems to symbolize the difficulty the postcolonial subject faces in undertaking resistance (not being able to escape the hegemonic Western circumscriptions), I had meant to try to connect that early moment to Kitty trying to resist very those subversive little notes of Mrs. Black, and then both to the attack on the film production at the end of the novel. The end result of those laundry notes was to have her two African-American co-workers fired, and thus to further the interest of her boss's/society's racist predilections. What does that say about the efficacy of resistance? Does it lend credence to Fanon's belief that anti-colonial violence is somehow necessary as a "cleansing force"? Does this inform the horrific violence committed by Christopher?

One other interesting detail that we noted in the opening pages of each text is the metaphor of the garden that has been overrun and turned into "ruinate." In Rhys's novel, the garden that used to be "large and beautiful" has now "gone wild," with "a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell." The suggestions are perhaps ambivalent here, as in one sense they point to the loss of innocence and the downfall of the Cosway family (with which we sympathize), but in another sense to the demise of the colonial ideal (and certainly the lushness of the island environs and vegetation in Part II becomes an antagonist to the controlling desires (both literal and narrative) of Rochester). The implications are similarly ambivalent in No Telephone to Heaven, perhaps? That is, there's something restorative about an undisturbed nature returning to an original state of wildness, but it also seems to represent a loss of connection (to the matrilineal heritage, among other things).

It may be worth calling attention to the similarities between Section V of Cliff's novel and Book Five of Omeros (Edward Said's "voyage in," in which the figure from the colony must travel to the heart of empire as part of his/her educational process, and hope to find a balm for a psychic wound), and it seems necessary as well to note the wounds of various sorts in this novel (in this sense, again, there's very rich overlap between NTTH and Omeros, which would contain possibilities for another fine paper topic): there are the very prominent physical wounds (Paul and his family and especially Mavis, Bobby, Clare's womb, etc.), but also a variety of psychic and figurative wounds (Christopher, Clare, Harry/Harriet, etc.).

There are obviously a myriad of other scenes and moments in Cliff's novel that we'd still do well to address. I think, for example, of (1) Clare's & Boy's experience at the New York high school ("no place for in-betweens" (99), (2) the system of racial classification (see that paragraph on New World racial categories on p.56) that dates back to the late 16th century and continues to have damaging effects on the characters of this novel, (3) the paragraphs involving Clare's identification with Bertha ("Caliban. Carib. Cannibal. Cimarron. All Bertha. All Clare" (116)) in Jane Eyre, (4) the insights Clare gleans from encountering the bronze state of Pocahontas (another woman who was renamed) (pp.136-7), (5) the scene with Clare and Harry/Harriet in the nightclub designed "to suggest a galleon on the Spanish Main" (121), and a good many others ... We eventually realize that this text is something of a bildungsroman, with Clare slowly coming into a more enlightened awareness of history and of her own identity (it's a very expanded version of what happens to Antoinette in those final paragraphs of Wide Sargasso Sea, when she resolves to put the torch to Thornfield Hall and everything it represents). Cliff's novel is circular in this regard: everything that happens helps us to understand how she ends up being in the rebels' van at the beginning of the novel.

Anyway, it would be great to gather together some more comments on No Telephone to Heaven. Have at it, if you're so inclined!

Compassing Omeros

I'm late in helping you outfit your pirogues with these navigational aids, but you might find this guide to Omeros (more extensive and analytical than the student-created ones I've been distributing) quite useful, as well as this running index/glossary. You might also find worthwhile Hilton Als's 2004 profile of Walcott for the New Yorker, as well as this more recent piece by Adam Kirsch, also for the New Yorker. This interview (audio) of Walcott also has some good material, and if you advance to around the 27th minute you'll hear him discussing Omeros for a little bit.

I still find myself mulling over some of the questions that arose regarding Kincaid and A Small Place: e.g., the vague discomfort regarding Kincaid's positionality, the question about what it means to live in a "small place," etc. Regarding the former, maybe this issue would largely go away if it weren't for those couple of moments when her critique of everyday Antiguans becomes especially unvarnished. Still, Franz Fanon and others assert that the first step in the reclamation process for the abject and the colonized is anger, so maybe her call to arms, even in its more strident guises, has a kind of necessary and honest forcefulness to it. And what would we find, I wonder, if we rooted around the website for the Antigua and Barbuda Department of Tourism? I'm suddenly curious to read A Small Place again now, too, to see if there's more self-reflexivity than is immediately apparent, to see where Kincaid might subtly be negotiating her dual position as insider and outsider (I'm also inclined to wonder if there might somehow be some overlap between Kincaid's text and Ortiz's Cuban Counterpoint around the issue of invoking and then reversing polarizing binarisms).

Maybe, too, we can redirect some of these issues to Omeros, especially in those moments when the poet/narrator is in the position (nearly) of tourist (e.g., in the opening of Book Six when he rides in a taxi back to his St. Lucian Hotel after his sojourn in Europe and North America in the previous book). Walcott said once in an interview, in fact, that "I come down here so often that perhaps literally I'm a tourist myself coming from America." Anyway, there are plenty of other moments in Omeros when the discourses and lenses of tourism are present. There's probably a paper idea in there somewhere ...

Kneel to Your Load

Greetings, everyone, from the anchorage of a sunny Thursday. I hope Omeros will start to yield more and more delights as you get more accustomed to the demands of reading a "poem" like this, and as the layered stories/strands start to come into clearer focus. I'm never quite sure how to approach this work properly, at least in the early going: do we work forward in a sequential and linear fashion, or do we jump around based on thematic pursuits? I guess it must be a bit of both, but hopefully we can strike the right balance next week.

Anyway, you've got those three major levels to track: (1) the self-reflective and questing nature of the poet figure (who we can rather safely see as Walcott himself in this case (in Book IV you'll encounter many sections where he seems to struggle with his life in Boston; in Book V he feels uneasiness as a U.S. university professor ("Service. Under my new empire" (206)); and there's that interesting section (pp. 173-4: significantly, it's the only one written in couplets) in which he seems to describe the breakdown of his marriage). Try to track the questions and uncertainties he struggles with as you get deeper into the text; (2) the Achille/Hector/Helen plotline, which finds Walcott locating his epic material in the quarrels of two subsistence fishermen; and (3) the historiographic pursuits of Plunkett, who "decided that what the place needed / was its true place in history" (64) and who finally finds the "Homeric coincidence" (i.e., a ship named the Ville de Paris surrendering in a war "fought for an island called Helen" (100) (so named because of the way the French and British fought so fiercely over it). Some moments I think we should be sure to touch down on as we get going next Wednesday, and before we move on to the later books with Sarah's assistance, would be Book I, Chapter 5 (pp.24-32); Book 1, Chap. 12 & 13 (pp.67-76), Book 2, Chap. 14 (esp. pp.81-83), Book 3, Chap. 25 (pp.133-139), and Book 3, Chap. 32 (pp.165-68) (although, really, pretty much all of Book 3 is crucial).

St. Lucia, by the way, was first settled by Arawak Indians around 200 A.D., although by 800 their culture had been superseded by that of the Caribs; these early Amerindian cultures called the island “Iouanalao” (Island of the Iguanas). It was long believed Columbus discovered the island in 1502, but recent evidence suggests he merely sailed close by; in any event, there was no European presence until its settlement in the 1550s. Sometime around 1600 the Dutch arrived, which was followed by the first attempt at colonization in 1605. By mid-century the French arrived, which began that period of the island changing hands fourteen times. The British persevered, and by 1814, after that prolonged series of enormously destructive battles, the island was finally theirs (to this day, though, the French legacy is still evident in the Creole dialect). St. Lucia became independent within the British Commonwealth in 1979.

Personally, and do take issue if you think I'm overstating things, when I read Omeros I find myself feeling I'm immersed in the greatest poetic achievement that I've ever encountered. His extraordinary attention to the felicities and complexities of language, his deft managing of the technical demands of what he's attempting here, not to mention the intellect and wisdom that stand behind the content, seem to me to be above anything I've ever read before. I wonder if some of you wouldn't mind simply sharing here a passage or line or two that has stood out for you in terms of such accomplishments. I love (and could repeat over and over again) the assonance and consonance (and general euphony) of that "to please implacable Caesars" phrase (37), but there are no shortage of others: e.g., there's that gorgeous scene-painting that concludes Chapter VII (p. 42), when the speaker describes waking up "from that shallow sleep"; or when he refers to lightning as the Cyclone's "stilt-walking messenger" (52); or when he describes the "sucked-out sun, like a lozenge / on a blue Delft plate" (79); or when he describes the slaves watching "the Redcoats running between the trees, / dispersing like blossoms when the poinciana rattles its hanging bandoliers in the breeze" (81); or that extraordinary (and extraordinarily sad) scene in Book V when he describes the Sioux being ambushed at Wounded Knee, when the U.S. soldiers are figured as pines on the hill: "The pines have lifted their spears. / Except that the thick, serrated line on the slope was rapidly growing more pine-trees" (214).

Well, kneel to your load, indeed. But I hope it's proving to be a stimulating load. See you next Wednesday.

Unhomed

Homi Bhabha proposes that the state of being "unhomed" is the paradigmatic post-colonial experience, an idea that we can certainly start to see being played out in our texts so far this semester. I guess it all started with that Grace Nichols poem on the first night (I don't really know where I belaang / Yes, divided to de ocean / Divided to de bone / Wherever I hang me knickers -- that's my home), which cautioned us to be ready to spot a poetics of home that features irreconcilable fragments of memory and desire. Antoinette is denied a home in Jamaica by unyielding racial categories, and then, after crossing the Atlantic, she ruefully notes that "this cardboard house where I walk at night is not England" -- the cardboard might be the walls that can't protect her (and that will soon burn), but this is also a touching moment in that she's still trying to believe in some "real" England that she was always taught to believe existed. And then, wow, I can't get that devastating story of Martha out of my mind from the second section of Crossing the River. In a way, because she is finally so utterly dispossessed and seems only able to find some measure of solace in a dream, Martha reminds me of Antoinette and her obeah-induced sleep in Wide Sargasso Sea.

When contemplating the state of being unhomed, I think of all those Syrian refugees on the move for western Europe, and of that striking image (above) of untold numbers amassing in a battered Damascus and seeking food from the United Nations; once a mass of people are uprooted and moved, they all too often become spectral figures, and are removed from the field of vision of literature, culture, and public consciousness (in some distant way, Antoinette's situation in that attic becomes a kind of metaphor for this spectrality). Whether we get to talk about it this week or next, this condition brings the importance of James Clifford's essay into our purview. The questions Clifford raises are vitally important (especially for our pursuits in this class), and they're immediate and direct: "What is at stake, politically and intellectually, in contemporary invocations of diaspora" (302)? This is especially pertinent given that diasporic consciousness and positions so often get articulated (in largely salutary ways, as a kind of homogenized cosmopolitanism, for example) by academics, theorists, writers, artists, etc. What happens when we nearly start to celebrate the condition of exile? What responsibility do we have as participants in literary studies, in a class like this one, etc., to keep this discourse rooted in historical and cultural specificity? "What is the range of experiences," asks Clifford, "covered by the term [diaspora]? Where does it begin to lose definition?" (306).

Our readings this semester are already making it clear that not all experiences of displacement and estrangement are experienced evenly. Caren Kaplan, in her book Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, cautions us against seeing exile as "a condition of the soul," something that ends up being unrelated to the facts of material life: the exile subsequently gets constructed as a "romantic figure" while the refugee (of which there may be some 25 million in the world today) becomes a "faceless political construct outside the sphere of literature and aesthetics." Anyway, our novels (and poems) are already helping us think about "the distinctions between exile, expatriation, diaspora, and immigration," and how they can be teased out and "made meaningful in historically and culturally specific ways" (Kaplan).