SECTION FIVE—
EPIC AND PEDAGOGY
13—
Epics and the Politics of the Origin Tale:
Virgil, Ovid, Spenser, and Native American Aetiology
Susanne L. Wofford
This essay resituates study of the epic by comparing the use of origin myths in epic to the origin tale as a distinct genre, including examples from Ovid, from Joel Chandler Harris's retelling of African and Indian stories of origin, and from two Labrador Indian aetiologies. Susanne Wofford argues that epic stands against aetiology and origin tale as genres that contrast in form and purpose. Although stories of origin often naturalize violent change at the foundation of a society or nation, they also expose that violence, representing the beginnings of custom, ritual, or elements of landscape in forced impositions on a different original form. Epic, in contrast, although it appears to search for causes, in practice usually occludes them and evades especially the kinds of revelations the aetiology or origin story presents. Wofford's essay suggests that study of the traditional Western epic can be expanded and illuminated by contextualizing epic with the lived oral traditions represented in indigenous origin tales and heroic narratives and poems, and argues for teaching the European epic in a broad American context.
The question of whether and how to teach the classic epic poetry of the West has become an urgent one in universities in the United States, especially as debates about the value of the literary canon have moved to center stage in recent years. Decades ago, though, in the postwar period, when Great Books programs were established at schools like the University of Chicago (under the leadership of Mortimer Adler) and Columbia University (where a two-year general humanities requirement still is a major feature of every student's undergraduate education), the question had already been posed as a challenge to the emergence of the modern, department-based U.S. college or university. In arguing about whether to include more literature from other cultures or more works written by women or more examples of works representing the minority literatures of the United States in college requirements, most universities seem to have posed the debate as a choice: either we teach the traditional canon or we shrink the number of classic works and "open up" the canon to include other material. In this essay, I hope to suggest, briefly and in a summary way, a different, perhaps more American or
more New World context for teaching the ancient and Renaissance epic: the oral literature and traditions of Native Americans. In addition, I look at origin tales written down by Joel Chandler Harris, which may have roots in American Indian as well as African storytelling traditions, and more briefly at an origin tale by Kipling. These texts, I will argue, provide a very different context within which to view the epic stories, and help to remind the student of those aspects of early epic, often submerged in the literature class, that connect it to contemporary performances of oral heroic narrative and storytelling in the late twentieth century. The reader will find in the appendix to this essay two Native American origin tales to which I will refer, and in my brief bibliography, notes on where to find more examples of similar tales. This essay is less explicitly about pedagogical method—what exactly to do and say when teaching epic this way—than it is about the value of this very different context for teaching and interpreting epic.
A cautionary note must be briefly appended about the use of Native American materials. Scholars, critics, and students must use Indian stories and legends carefully, with an awareness of the extent to which whatever is written and published may be distant from the oral original. Many Indian stories are not available in printed form, because they can be told only at a certain time or only by a certain person or because to print them would be to lend special authority to one or another version of the tales or because they are used in sacred ritual or because the teller is not literate. That said, the many strong Indian traditions in this country of heroic song, heroic legend, and origin tale remain largely unknown to most non-Indian college students. To study ancient epic and ancient aetiologies in conjunction with twentieth-century oral traditions of heroic and mythic narrative can make the Western epic central to a new and broader understanding of the American literary heritage.[1]
The Rabbit and the Muse
Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso
quidve dolens regina deum tot volvere casus
insignem pietate virum, tot aide labores
impulerit. tantaene animis caelestibus irae?
(Aeneid 1.8-11)
Tell me the causes now, O Muse, how galled
In her divine pride, and how sore at heart
From her old wound, the queen of gods compelled him-
A man apart, devoted to his mission-
To undergo so many perilous days
And enter on so many trials. Can anger
Black as this prey on the minds of heaven?
(1.13-19)
The Aeneid begins with the question of cause, and later epic poets have followed in Virgil's footsteps, claiming that the poetic form they have chosen will provide reasons and explanations for suffering, action, and motive, not to mention the presence of death or evil.[2] The cause or origin the poet needs help to know in Virgil's case is a transcendental one, and one that sums up a range of related questions: Can such anger fill the gods? If so, why? Do the gods exist as anthropomorphized beings that can feel anger? What is the relation of the divine and human spheres, and is the relation between them one of cause? These are questions that, as the story goes on, Virgil's narrator seems less and less certain his poem can answer.
The opening of the Aeneid gives three stories to account for Juno's anger. This displacement to another narrative level—here, a displacement to myth—suggests that the origin itself is narrative or mythic, or at least, that that is what we can know about it ("Who has known his own engendering?" asks Telemachos in the opening of the Odyssey [1.216],[3] before he goes to hear story after story about his father). Moreover, neither the poet nor the readers are likely to feel that the question of cause has been answered by these three mythic narratives. In posing the question of cause at the beginning, Virgil may be calling forth again the Lucretian echoes of Georgic 2: "felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas" ("Happy is the one who could know the causes of things," Georgics 2.490). Lucretius's assertion that to know "the first beginnings of things" (De Rerum Natura 1.55) is to overcome fear of death through philosophical understanding of the nature of the universe is clearly the subtext of this passage in the Georgics. But in the Aeneid, this knowledge of causes proves elusive, shadowy. The epic poet asks for inspiration to find the cause—to know the origin and provide the story that arises from it—but he can never fully achieve this task. I have argued elsewhere that this cause cannot be known partly because of the circularity of figure and narrative in the poem—do Juno and Allecto cause Amata's fury or represent it?[4] If they cause it, do they merely move the question of cause to another level, in a regress of narratives present on other occasions when epic poets seek causes?[5] When the poet does attempt to represent cause, the included aetiology usually disrupts, complicates, or exposes the costs of the narrative construction of value that makes the epic a national poem.
Epics, then, seek to represent cause and to tell a story of origins, and an important subset of epic also seeks to make that story into a national history, providing a surrogate memory for the nation. But when we look closely at the effort to represent origin in epic, we encounter either out-and-out evasion or the sort of narrative regression mentioned above—both moments in which the epic displays anxiety about the very project it has undertaken. The structure of epic, especially in regard to its efforts to narrate origin, contrasts with and cannot easily be made to incorporate the origin tale or aetiology. Dividing the two, as I will do provisionally in this essay, is a heuristic
device, since the epic clearly includes versions of origin tales from the start, and part of the interest of the form comes from the moments of intersection—places where the origin tale is embedded in epic, often places of special figurative and allegorical density that expose the risks of representing that which itself may need to be hidden. These risks include the danger of demystifying a sacred origin by making it publicly available, and the threat that revealing violence, crime, or sexual transgression at the origin will deprive the society of its founding authority.
There is a long tradition, represented most recently in the work of David Quint and Elizabeth Bellamy, that sees epic as linear and teleological, a narration that encodes the ontological opposite of the wanderings of romance.[6] Looking at some of the roles of aetiologies within epic will show, however, that epic may not be able to trace the narrative line from origin to goal and may be much less linear and much more circling than critics have allowed.[7] Just as many epics seem not to reach their desired endings (the Iliad, the Aeneid, The Faerie Queene ) so many also betray uneasiness about incorporated stories of origin, the grounds on which the epic is itself established. If the epic as a genre is linear, then, it often tells a linear story without real beginning or ending—beginning in medias res and ending also ex mediis rebus.
Aetiologies can be told for the origins of certain customs or rituals—as in some of Callimachus's Aitia. The epic games in book 5 of the Aeneid, for instance, function as fictional aetiologies both for the Roman families whose names are mentioned and for the display of horsemanship at the end for the lusus Troiae, a pageant or ceremony revised by Julius Caesar and established under Augustus as a regular institution.[8] They also can be told to explain the presence of a certain name or of the elements of the landscape—a tree, a particular flower. Examples of aetiologies in the Aeneid include the naming of several important landmarks, such as the Punta di Palinuro in southern Italy, the Punta di Miseno in the Cumae area, and (not to leave out Aeneas's nursemaid) Caieta, as well as aetiologies for Augustan custom. Examples in Ovid include the stories of the naming and creation of the laurel tree (Daphne: Metamorphoses, book 1) and of other trees—the weeping willow (Cyparissus: book 10), the weeping myrrh (Myrrha: book 10)—, of the origins of various flowers (Narcissus: book 3; Hyacinth: book 10), birds (Procne and Philomela: nightingale and swallow, book 6), and springs (Byblis: book 9; the poisoned pool in the story of Salmacis and Hermaphrodite: book 4).[9] All of these tales involve the description of how the poem's landscape came into being, and they pose the question of how that landscape should be interpreted.[10]
One encounters very similar story types in indigenous tales from many cultures around the world. I have chosen two Labrador Indian tales that show interesting similarities to aetiologies in the Western classical tradition: "The First Loon" and "The Origin of Robins" (retold by Lawrence Millman) (see appendix). I cannot do justice here to the complex local, political, or ideological roles that these tales may play in their individual cultures, but in teach-
ing these works it would be important to develop a fuller understanding of their cultural context and the conditions in which they are performed or related. Here I propose a formal analysis that will allow, I hope, some legitimate comparison.
Tales of origin, in contrast to epic, have a different but recognizable narrative form and set of consequences. A brief look at several tales with which many readers will be familiar—Joel Chandler Harris's rendition of the story of how Brer Rabbit lost his fine bushy tail, and Kipling's "How the Elephant Got His Trunk"—will help to identify characteristic traits of the origin tale. In the case of Brer Rabbit, the tale that results is like the rabbit's tail itself short, indeed short enough to be included here in full:
"One day Brer Rabbit wuz gwine down de road shakin' his long bushy tail, w'en who should he strike up wid but ole Brer Fox gwine amblin' long wid a big string er fish! W'en dey pass de time er day wid wunner nudder, Brer Rabbit, he open up de confab, he did, an he ax Brer Fox whar he git dat nice string er fish, en Brer Fox, he up'n 'spon' dat he katch um, en Brer Rabbit, he say whar'bouts, en Brer Fox, he say down at de babtizin' creek, en Brer Rabbit he ax how, kaze in dem days dey wuz monstus fon' er minners, en Brer Fox, he sot down on a log, he did, en he up'n tell Brer Rabbit dat all he gotter do fer ter git er big mess er minners is ter go ter de creek atter sundown, en drap his tail in de water en set dar twel day-light, en den draw up a whole armful er fishes, en dem w'at he don't want, he kin fling back. Right dar's whar Brer Rabbit drap his watermillion, kaze he tuck'n sot out dat night en went a fishin'. De wedder wuz sorter cole, en Brer Rabbit, he got 'im a bottle er dram en put out fer de creek, en w'en he git dar he pick out a good place, en he sorter squot down, he did, en let his tail hang in de water. He sot dar, en he sot dar, en he drunk his dram, en he think he gwineter freeze, but bimeby day come, en dar he wuz. He make a pull, en he feel like he comin' in two, en he fetch nudder jerk, en lo en beholes, whar wuz his tail?"
There was a long pause.
"Did it come off, Uncle Remus?" asked the little boy, presently.
"She did dat!" replied the old man with unction. "She did dat, and dat w'at make all deze yer bob-tail rabbits w'at you see hoppin' en skaddlin' thoo de woods."
"Are they all that way just because the old Rabbit lost his tail in the creek?" asked the little boy.
"Dat's it, honey," replied the old man. "Dat's w'at dey tells me. Look like dey er bleedzd ter take atter der pa."
(pp. 125-126)
One of the features of this tale, besides the disjunction between the voices of the white child and the African slave, is that it tells of a transformation that cannot be reversed. While some of the stories Harris records in Uncle Remus seem to encode an allegory of how a clever individual can outwit an oppressor whose claim to control is based simply on superior power ("Born and bred in de briar patch, Brer Fox, born and bred"), this one suggests that
Brer Fox's trick has permanently altered the shape of things—"Are they all that way just because the old Rabbit lost his tail in the creek?"—and, moreover, that that permanent change is connected to a kind of patriarchal descent—"Look like dey er bleedzd ter take atter der pa"—a statement qualified only by "Dat's w'at dey tells me," which leaves the source of the oral tradition unidentified—who are "they"? In most such tales of origin, we are asked to consider what kinds of truth claims are being made: here the "truth" is a fictional one—neither Uncle Remus nor Joel Chandler Harris nor the reader thinks that there ever really was a rabbit who said these things, and yet the tale tells something that is felt to be "true" metaphorically or fictionally. Uncle Remus obscures this problem by his allusion to his authority in telling the tale—"Dat's w'at dey tells me."[11] He is an oral narrator whose claim to knowledge is a chain of storytellers that fictionally reaches back to the beginning—he, too, we might say, takes after his pa. This question of the fictive truth claims made by origin tales will return shortly, as we look at fictions that claim a religious or pseudoreligious authority. For now, it suffices to highlight the unidirectional metamorphosis: the change cannot be undone.
Most of these tales—including the Ovidian ones—represent an excessive violence, often exemplified in or combined with an account of forbidden sexuality or desire—brother-sister incest, father-daughter incest, rape, self-love to the point of self-destruction—followed by a catastrophic and irreversible metamorphosis that produces the element of landscape or being in question.[12] The metamorphosis marks the ending of the tale, a clear closure that defines also the cause or reason for the change. Indeed, the metamorphosis itself could be said to be a figure of closure, an event that resolves seemingly irresolvable tensions or oppositions in the narrative. The metamorphoses sometimes involve a death (as in "The First Loon"), which, by the symbolic economy of the genre, seems to be the cost of an all-powerful intervention, sometimes by the gods, sometimes by an otherwise unidentified source of narrative power. Sometimes, also, these stories share the odd feature that their endings seem relatively unimportant compared to the route taken to arrive at the point of conclusion.
One way to read these stories of origin, then, is to consider to what extent they are narratives about the naturalization of force or violence—to what extent they are stories in which a sudden, revolutionary, and instantaneous act of force is made to seem a natural event. The fact that the endings are irreversible emphasizes how the tales make such catastrophic acts of force seem to produce the natural world as we know it, everything appearing 'just the way things are," incapable of further change. Kipling's 'The Elephant's Child" and the aetiology of Brer Rabbit's tail discussed above are both stories set in the frame of a colonial project, a colonial occupation or enslaving that marks one culture's violent acquisition of another. In this setting, the view that these catastrophic metamorphoses have simply produced "nature"—indeed an
improved nature, since in the case of the Kipling tale the elephant can use its long trunk to spank its irritating relatives—might seem to symbolize or reduplicate the colonial project itself, in which a violent acquisition and ostensible transformation of the colonized can be made to seem both irreversible (just the way things are) and morally superior. Obviously these tales are not all identical, and Brer Rabbit is not clearly improved by the shortening of his tail—in fact, the transformation of the big bushy tale is told as a tale of loss. Also, in neither of these two cases does a divine power intervene to authorize the metamorphosis: wit itself, enforcing its stratagems aggressively, determines the definitive shape of the rabbit's tail. But the fantasy of irreversibility serves the cultural and ideological function of establishing and legitimizing "the way things are" in a society (slavery, colonization) or in a story, and of making the desire to change such things correspondingly fantastical and unnatural.[13]
Ovid
Ovid's account of Apollo's desire for Daphne, the first of the amatory tales in the Metamorphoses, carries a similar resonance."[14] The natural world here seems at first glance a world of tranquillity, a place of escape from the violence of history enacted in the plot of desire. The source of the power to become a tree is associated with Daphne's connection through her father to the waters and the local setting itself: "Help, father help!" she cries, as Apollo's breath touches her shoulders and her trembling hair. "If mystic power/Dwells in your waters, change me and destroy/My baleful beauty that has pleased too well" (Metamorphoses 1.545-547; p. 17). Peneus, her father, is, like most of the local deities in Ovid, both the river in Thessaly of this name and its god. His "mystic power," then, is fictionally that of a god, but figuratively that of the river and locality itself. This interpretation perhaps illuminates the poetic logic in the transformation of his daughter into an element of this setting, as well as establishes the limits of her escape. The locality here resists the force of Apollo and transforms Daphne, though it does not answer her prayer and destroy her beauty. Daphne loses her speed in her metamorphosis but gains a luster, a glamorous beauty (nitor ):
Scarce had she made her prayer when through her limbs
A dragging languor spread, her tender bosom
Was wrapped in thin smooth bark, her slender arms
Were changed to branches and her hair to leaves;
Her feet but now so swift were anchored fast
In numb stiff roots, her face and head became
The crown of a green tree; all that remained
Of Daphne was her shining loveliness [remanet nitor unus in illa].
(Metamorphoses 1.548-552; p. 17)
The loss here—of her nymph form, of her speed, of her sinuous movement is matched and compensated for aesthetically by the evocation of the beautiful tree and tranquil landscape.[15] As a nymph, Daphne might be said to represent literally what should be her figurative relation to the local setting: she should serve as the spirit of the waters and the trees, and before her transformation she had loved to roam the woods. Now, however, she has become literally anchored in the setting. As with most characters whose wishes are fulfilled, too, her wish to remain a virgin is granted in a more literal way than she could have expected, yet even so Apollo embraces her and appropriates her symbolic power for himself. If Apollo is read in part as a figure for Augustan imperial power, this tale depicts, as does that of Juturna at the end of the Aeneid, the local landscape resisting the national drive of epic.[16]
At first, then, the metamorphosis seems to represent a real escape from the violence of political or historical struggle, even if at the cost of the loss of subjectivity. But Apollo is not deterred: he seizes the laurel and succeeds in a near rape; the tree recoils from his kisses but cannot get away, because it is rooted. After embracing and kissing the bark, Apollo takes the leaves of the laurel as his symbol—"My lyre, my locks, my quiver you shall wreathe"—and promises to set the laurel tree on either side of Augustus's palace gates. He concludes:
"My brow is ever young, my locks unshorn;
So keep your leaves' proud glory ever green."
Thus spoke the god; the laurel in assent
Inclined her new made branches and bent down,
Or seemed to bend, her head, her leafy crown.
(Metamorphoses 1.564-567; p. 18)
The aetion ends with her apparent acquiescence to his appropriation of her form and its meaning. We must stress the appearance of agreement here, though, because Ovid does: we are not to know Daphne's true thoughts here, but at least her recoil and horror have disappeared. The world of imperial triumph, like that of erotic desire (or hatred of love), is a world of turmoil and movement, but Daphne has joined the landscape—the nodding head of the leafy crown of the tree momentarily evokes the image of the beautiful grove in which the action takes place—and taken on a different kind of figurative life. On the other hand, Ovid leaves open the possibility that Apollo simply does not recognize her resistance to his use of her, since now she is a tree.[17]
This story might at first be read as a tale of the origin of poetry, hinted at with the mention of Apollo's lyre. As a god skilled in prophecy and music, Apollo is closely associated with poetry, a quality that explains how the laurel wreath comes to be the poet's symbol. Certainly this second-level aetiology of the story of Daphne as an account of the origin of poetry has deter-
mined much of the symbolics of later European poetry, exemplified best, perhaps, in Petrarch's appropriation of the "laurel" as the figure simultaneously for his poetry and his beloved. If so, it suggests that poetic power and control come at great cost—that the natural materials of the poet resist his desire and cannot be made to fit his needs without "a dragging languor" (torpor gravis, Metamorphoses 1.548—"a down-dragging numbness" in the Loeb) that roots them and makes them tractable. To support this reading, Ovid's method of detailing the stages of metamorphosis might be read as a literalizing of the method of metaphor: a natural simile would work by claiming that a character is like a tree, while a metaphor says that a given character is a tree. The loss of the distance maintained in the simile is rewritten here as a violent imposition of will. The implicit set of analogies that are submerged in the metaphor but that nonetheless give it its efficacy are recounted in eery detail (arms are like branches, and so on). The fact that the laurel will be ever green—the final stage of the aetiology—is itself determined by Apollo through analogy to himself: the leaves of the laurel are always green so that the analogy between God and tree can be maintained, so that the leaves will retain the mark of the divine, so that we remember that they have been appropriated as Apollo's symbol.
The exposure of the poet's figurative method as itself depending on a kind of force, and on the subjection and near rape of a female figure, fits also with a more explicitly political reading of the aetiology.[18] Ovid's story concludes with what seems to be flattery of Augustus. E. J. Kenney notes that "the laurel was prominent in the cult of Apollo, and here is the god himself giving pride of place to its associations with Augustus."[19] The story itself becomes momentarily transformed into the aetiology of Augustus's association with the laurel. The account of resistance and violent transformation is wrenched briefly but conclusively into a tribute to imperial power, where the transformation of resistance into natural landscape does seem to naturalize that power—to suggest that this is, irreversibly, how the world is. Even nature, in this understanding of the story, exists to celebrate Augustus, and the landscape that had served as protection against the violences of the political world itself becomes an ideological symbol, where its tranquility and beauty serve to hide, not deflect, the violence in the narrative.
That this is also one aetiology for poetry only seems to identify poetic metamorphic power with the political power of Augustus. One must qualify this last claim, however, both because Ovid has extensively detailed that violence and because he reminds us of the tale of resistance and escape in the moment of doubt he recaptures in the ending of the tale: "factis modo laurea ramis,/adnuit utque caput visa est agitasse cacumen," "The laurel in assent/ Inclines her new-made branches and bent down,/ Or seemed to bend, her head, her leafy crown" (1.566-567; p. 18). Ovid's wit also hints
here that there is no reason to interpret the bending of the crown of a tree as a suppressed language. He acknowledges implicitly here that the narrator has lost his capacity to guess at her motives and opinions. Perhaps she has escaped more completely from being a known object of poetic narration than we or Apollo could have guessed.
The moments of narrative excess in the story—the chase, Apollo's desire, his caressing of the bark of the tree as it recoils, for instance—are in fact some of the most memorable. Such excess—what one might call the Ovidian grotesque—is so frequent in Ovid's aetiologies that one must include them within any theory of how to read these tales. His account of the rape and mutilation of Philomela can serve as an example in which the violence and grotesquerie prevent, or at least complicate enormously, the kind of political reading proposed above. Here is Ovid's account of Philomela's tongue flapping on the ground:
radix micat ultima linguae,
Ipsa iacet terraeque tremens inmurmurat atrae,
Utque salire solet mutilatae cauda colubrae,
Palpitat et moriens dominae vestigia quaerit.
(Metamorphoses 6.557-560)
The tongue lay on the dark soil muttering
And wriggling, as the tail cut off by a snake
Wriggles, and, as it died, it tried to reach
Its mistress' feet.
(p. 138)
The terrible humor of this account along with the recurring violent acts in the rest of the story (including the murder and dismemberment of Procne's child) make it difficult to read the tale primarily through an ideological lens, since they vividly present and dwell upon images quite extraneous to the ideological purpose or historical plot. At about the halfway point in the story, we seem again to be immersed in an account of how art emerges from violence—this time visual art, since once her tongue is cut off, Philomela weaves a tapestry to depict the rape. But the revenge of Philomela and Procne complicates the picture: more clearly than in the case of Daphne, if for a very different reason, the female victim resists becoming part of this aetiology. Once the murder of the child and the banquet have occurred, the reader's sense of horror is complete. The transformations that end the story, then, provide an escape for the reader as well as for the characters from the violences that have erupted everywhere—violence perpetrated on them, but also discovered within them. The swallow and the nightingale Ovid wittily avoids saying who was who, since the scholarly tradition had been mixed—sail off to forest and to roof, while Tereus too becomes a bird (volucrem ) with
a long fantastic bill—a hoopoe. Nature in the form of these three birds becomes an escape for all three from the narrative of desire, rape, and revenge, yet it is a nature marked forever by this narrative. This is not a setting infused with tranquillity and beauty: the transformation produces a mourning landscape that continually points to the crime and grief that it hides.[20]
The transformation also calls attention to the role of art in the tale, in that it literalizes one of Ovid's metaphors:.
He wept and wailed and called himself his son's
Disastrous tomb, then with his naked sword
Pursued Pandion's daughters. As they flee,
You'd think they float on wings. Yes, sure enough,
They float on wings! One daughter seeks the woods;
One rises to the roof, and even now
The marks of murder rise upon a breast
And feathers carry still the stamp of blood.
And he, grief-spurred, swift-swooping for revenge,
Is changed into a bird that bears a crest,
With, for a sword, a long fantastic bill-
A hoopoe, every inch a fighter still.
(Metamorphoses 6.665-674; p. 142)
The play on words whereby the metaphor becomes literal is explicit in the Latin: "Corpora Cecropidum pennis pendere putares:/ Pendebant pennis" (6.667-668). The chiastic order emphasizes the wit but also the closure of the story: as so often in Ovid, what might have been a metaphor or an expressive gesture becomes physical. As William Anderson points out in his commentary, the two sisters have not escaped their crime against Itys, nor has Tereus escaped his grief or his desire for revenge. As birds, "the sisters continue to recall the crimes they have committed and suffered. . . . They are eternally marked with the blood of their crime. . . . The cruel vengeance which dominated and warped the minds of Procne and her sister has now become the one passion of [Tereus]."[21] The human characteristics of the hoopoe (the crest looks like a crest on a helmet, the beak replaces the spear—pro cuspide ) reinforces the sense that Tereus cannot escape his warrior identity and the violence it led him to. By stressing his own artistic power to effect this metamorphosis, Ovid calls attention to the power of art to rework violence into something that at least accuses the evildoer if it cannot transform or deflect that violence utterly. And he differentiates his art from Philomela's more retributive craft, whose rough tapestry with words worked in was used to spur Procne to revenge. Ovid's metaphorical transformation— they are like birds, they are birds—creates not revenge but three creatures that symbolize and mark a nature inescapably symbolizing crime and passion, what later poets in a different tradition might recognize as fallen na-
ture. Ovid also seems to be differentiating his tale from earlier versions of the story, since he so explicitly avoids suggesting any divine intervention in the moment of the transformation.
In this case, then, the origin story can serve to resist the tendency to represent its founding act of violence as natural and can expose, rather than hide, the violence at the origin of the creature or setting. Such a landscape, polluted, poisoned or disfigured by desire or power, is surprisingly common in Ovid. Examples of the landscapes, landmarks, trees, and other creatures that retain always the marks of crime, grief, or excessive passion include Niobe weeping forever as a rock face; Byblis, whose unsatisfied lust for her twin brother makes her first a writer, then a wanderer, searching for her brother, until, as she lies weeping on the ground, the nymphs turn her into a spring, which still weeps and keeps her name; and Myrrha, whose consummation of an incestuous love for her father sends her into exile where she becomes a tree. Myrrha, as penitent, asked to be transformed: though the tree seems to weep, she eagerly seeks the transformation. She "buried her face and forehead even in the bark" while the tree oozed myrrh, her tears, and groans in labor as her child burst the bark in childbirth. Ovid tells us that she has forgotten her former feeling, but the weeping continues still, transposed into the landscape:
Quae quamquam amisit veteres cum corpore sensus,
Flet tamen, et tepidae manant ex arbore guttae.
(Metamorphoses 10.499-500)
Though with her body she had forfeited
Her former feelings, still she weeps and down
The tree the warm drops ooze.
(p. 241)
Indeed, trees often seem to become or provide an ominous setting. Tereus rejoiced on the boat as he brought Philomela to his home, and Ovid tells us that "the brute could hardly wait to seize his joys" (Metamorphoses 6.514515; p. 137). But he does wait, until he can drag her off to a cabin in the woods, "silvis obscura vetustis," "hidden away among dark ancient trees" (6. 520-522). We already know what deeds are appropriate for these ancient woods, the woods where one of the sisters will remain once she takes her bird form.
In Myrrha's case, finally, the tree stands as memorial both to the taboo-breaking heroine and her desires, and to the force used in the policing of that taboo. Rather than hiding or aestheticizing that violence—or justifying it through a sacrificial economy—these tales tell the story of a different origin. If read as marking an origin in crime, illegitimate passion, or horror, Ovid's Metamorphoses can simultaneously illustrate the dangers for the epic of exposing these origins.
Two Labrador Origin Tales
"The First Loon," a Labrador Indian origin tale, can be usefully compared to many of Ovid's aetiologies, especially the tales of Philomela and of Myrrha.[22] Like them, it is a tale that involves the breaking of a sexual taboo (this time against incest) and a transformation that both provides the characters with an escape and presents a lamenting bird whose song reminds listeners of the story. The tale seems told to answer the question, "Why do loons sing in such a mournful way?" and like the Ovidian aetiologies, it suggests that behind every natural form or shape or element there is a narrative. Reading the landscape, then, is reading these suppressed stories of metamorphosis. The violence in "The First Loon" occurs not in the transgression itself, which is much enjoyed by both parties, but in the policing efforts of the brothers, who stand in for the larger social group (following the orders of the mistapeo ) in insisting on "healthiness." The moment of transformation, not detailed as in Ovid,[23] seems to hide or disguise the murder of the brother, which was the original plan: "The best way to get rid of this shame, they figured, was to get rid of the boy himself." The murder is displaced by the brother's escape into song, which is literalized as his transformation into a bird: if he can sing a hole into the ice, then he must become a singer. Singing had already been his way of identifying himself to his lover-sister: "But wherever he hid, near or far, he'd only need to sing and his sister would hear him." Now he has literally become the distant singer heard over the ice and in the north woods, the loon. Moreover, like Daphne and especially like Myrrha, the incestuous brother here seems to wish upon himself a form of self-destruction: to leap into a hole in the ice is to risk death, so that the bird form that emerges seems to contain both these suppressed deaths—the murder planned by the brothers, and the near suicide of the baby's father.
The violent policing of social norms marks the limit where transformation is necessary in order for the tale not simply to end in murder. But one is struck by the extent to which the story sides not with the efforts to prohibit incest but with the creative happiness of the lovers—not with "health" as a social category but with "health" as a physical reality ("To her, the baby looked as healthy as any she'd ever seen"). The tale also emphasizes aesthetic value in the girl's praise of the baby's "loveliness": loveliness is marred by the murder of the child, aesthetics by violence, but the tale's own status as an aesthetic form that contains both transgression and violence points to another "loveliness" that persists, like and in the cry of the loon, as the story ends. This loveliness persists, then, in the tale's odd allegiance to the two lovers and their baby, and its creative force lives on in the loon, a creature that is both produced by and serves as a figure for the father's grief. And like the figure of the loon, the story itself is marked by suppressed grief, as it registers the irreversible change in its ending—"his sweetheart would never
come to him again." Within that grief there hides a less openly admitted sense of sorrow: that this original epoch when incest could occur with pleasure and without awareness of transgression is also irreversibly closed off, its distance from the present marked by the presence of the loon.[24]
"The First Loon," then, seems initially to provide authority for the establishment of an incest taboo, for in the story the very forms of nature (or at least one of them) are shown to arise in the moment that the human sphere is marked off by this distinction. At the same time, however, it both reveals the violence needed to enforce the taboo and develops a subterranean fantasy of a world without such prohibition, a world shown as both creative, "lovely," and associated with the story itself. Here too the origin tale can be read doubly: it naturalizes the human taboo—suggesting that it marks "things as they are" in nature (loons do exist) and culture (the society continues to prohibit incest and to claim the right to decide what is "healthy")—but it also marks the origin of this social structure in transgression and violence, admitting in a more underhanded way the artificial and potentially destructive result of the taboo.
A similar doubleness exists in another Labrador tale, "The Origin of Robins."[25] Here again the threat of incest provokes a violent response, violence that mysteriously transforms its victim into a figure with metamorphic powers. The parricide, which is felt to be a justified response to the father's repeated abusive acts—the abandonment of the child, the burning of the wife—apparently does not save the mother, although, as in "The First Loon," death becomes metamorphosis here when the son "[takes] pity on her, saying that she didn't have to be a human being any more." As Daphne turns to her father to escape an overly aggressive suitor, so this woman turns to her son to escape the aggression of her husband. In each case, the metamorphosis is presented as a form of escape at first, and here there is no qualification of that escape at the end of the tale. The woman chooses to become a bird; the analogy of her burned, reddened breast produces the robin: "And all at once the old woman was flying up into the sky, with red feathers on her breast where she's been burned. That's how robins came into the world." Like "The First Loon," this tale exposes the violence of the enforcement of the incest taboo, though it does so under the rubric of jealousy and the danger of the fantasy of incest. The coloring of the robin reveals the human capacity to act on violent fantasy, and more indirectly the costs of imposing the incest taboo (since we never know for certain whether incest has occurred or not—and the tale seems to present fatherly jealousy of the mother-son tie as a fantasy of incest).
The two ways I have suggested of reading origin tales point, then, to two possible and opposed results of such narratives. First, to identify an origin would seem to be to claim an authority, especially cultural authority. Origin explains, gives cause for, customs, rituals, and exclusions and claims a rela-
tion to specific settings; it even identifies birds and animals as belonging to that nation's self-understanding. As the later English student of rhetoric George Puttenham put it in 1586, "etiology" is the figure of "tell cause," which one does to gain credit—to make oneself more believable and authoritative.[26] Presumably, the convention of narrating a national history in epic arises in part from an analogous desire to claim authority for the writer and for the respective literature. Most epics tell the origin of a nation or narrate a crucial early event that defines a given culture. But—and this is the second point—once that origin is narrated, and the aetiology is no longer mystified into a form of secret knowledge held by an elite, then the violence that often precedes and causes the metamorphosis is also exposed. The possibility that the origin will be demystified once it is represented, and the consequent likelihood that a counternarrative will be generated that tells a very different version of national or cultural origin, both suggest how risky extensive use of such aetiologies can be.
Origin in Epic
One measure of the risk of incorporating aetiology in epic is the extent to which it disrupts the otherwise rather carefully maintained double narration, according to which the actions of the gods are given as explanations for events but kept separate from them. One early example occurs in the Odyssey, where the bard sings of Odysseus's homecoming and then tells his listeners about the cost to the Phaeacians of having aided him. Poseidon wishes not only to impale the ship that the Phaeacians use to transport Odysseus home and to end its voyage but to end all ocean—crossing with passengers—essentially cutting the Phaeacians off from all Mediterranean trade. Zeus restricts Poseidon, however, and permits him only to hurt the ship:
"Let her be turned to stone—
an island like a ship, just off the bay.
Mortals may gape at that for generations!
But throw no mountain round the sea port city."
When he heard this, Poseidon, god of earthquake,
departed for Skheria, where the Phaiakians
are born and dwell. Their ocean-going ship
he saw already near, heading for harbor;
so up behind her he swam, the island-shaker,
and struck her into stone, rooted in stone, at one
blow of his palm, then took to the open sea.
(Odyssey 13.156-164; Fitzgerald, p. 234)
The Phaeacians are punished for conveying the sleeping Odysseus home. They pay the price that he perhaps ought, symbolically, to pay: the epic re-
quires harsh labor and valiant effort for success, not tranquil sleep that takes place during a magical voyage. After this event, the Phaeacians decide to cease offering free passage to those wayfarers stranded on their beaches. If Skheria is a place somewhere in between ordinary mortality (Ithaca) and immortality (Elysium), the poem tells us that passage from that world to the ordinary world symbolized by rocky Ithaca stopped after Odysseus's homecoming: he will be the last voyager to carry mythic wealth home, to transport (as in a metaphor) the riches of this idyllic setting into the rough and far-from-ideal setting of his homeland. The tale is an aetiology, then, for something the epic is not very interested in—the island off the bay of Phaeacia, a place the poem never visits again. But the poem is interested in the break between the mythic adventures of Odysseus in books 9-12 and the largely realistic books of his return. While certain immortal powers are lent him at times by Athena (as when he is beautified and rejuvenated—which occurs once in Phaeacia and again at the end of the story in Ithaca, in a rare repeated simile),[27] Odysseus returns to an island where all seasons do not occur simultaneously, where the land is poor not abundant, the gardens cultivated with hard labor and poverty. The "hard pastoral" (as Franz Boas and Arthur O. Lovejoy would put it) of his visit with Eumaeus only serves to mark out all the more emphatically how far this is from Phaeacia, a place that seems all too much like the Ogygia he spent seven years leaving. The aetiology then is in a way an aetiology for epic itself: it is the origin tale that identifies the conditions that define the rest of the poem, the conditions that define the constraints on human will and achievement that make heroism possible, the conditions that Odysseus has sought for ten years in order to reestablish his heroic selfhood.
The fact that this is an origin tale tends to get lost in the reading of the Odyssey because the "tale" is seven books long—the adventures on Skheria beginning as Odysseus crawls up on the beach at the end of book 5. The aetiology of the boat-island also describes a change that is irreversible, a change that confirms the power of the gods, both because it is the physical marker of the negotiation between Zeus and Poseidon and because it marks in its larger consequences the extent of Poseidon's power. The sea will not be tamed; the anger will not abate until long after the poem's end (as Zeus prophesies in book 1); and the cost of a smooth homeward journey is the conclusion of an heroic epoch. The episode also exposes some of the narrative strain that occurs when an outrightly magical power is needed to make the epic reach its desired end. The story of Odysseus's homecoming can be read as a metaphorical account of his excellence—his arete-—the extraordinary heroism that allowed him to brave the sea and bring back its riches, but it also hints that without this mythical or semimythical aid, Odysseus might never have made it home and might, in fact, have become far more like the wandering adventurer he pretends to be than like the heroic figure he pre-
sents on Phaeacia. The poem wants him to be both, and it is in the moment of his passage to Ithaca that one image is to be laid over the second: his extended conversation with Athena—rare in epic—and his careful packing away of the Phaeacian gold in the Ithacan caves mark the complex doubleness that this poem demands of its hero-beggar.
A comparable example from the Aeneid, the death of Palinurus and the naming of the Point of Palinurus after him, similarly reveals this discomfort of epic at a moment of magical intervention. Like Odysseus, Aeneas is propelled toward his destination by a magical power that makes the fleet run smoothly. This power is divine indirectly—Neptune has promised Venus that he will allow the fleet to arrive, but the cost he exacts is "one life given for many" ("unum pro multis dabitur caput," Aeneid 5.815; Fitzgerald, p. 154). Aeneas is required to take the helm eventually—after we have been told that "the fleet ran safely on its course"; he is not allowed simply to sleep the whole way, as Odysseus was. But he mistakenly thinks that Palinurus had failed to be sufficiently on guard, while the poem tells us that Palinurus has been selected as the sacrificial victim, the one who pays the price for the taming of the sea, and indirectly for the epic need to use supernatural means to bring its hero home. The Homeric detail of the ship being turned into stone is matched here in the moment when Palinurus nearly saves himself: as Palinurus reaches Italy and pulls himself onto the beach, "savages/Attacked me as I clutched at a clifftop, /Weighted down by my wet clothes. Poor fools,/ They took me for a prize and ran me through" (Aeneid 6.358-361; Fitzgerald, p. 172). His grasp on the cliff edge gives that spot its name: he is not turned to stone, but as he touches the cliff he marks the landscape. Here too the epic dodges the full implications of the aetiology: a sacrifice of a human being is necessary for Aeneas to reach Italy's shores, a sacrifice that is domesticated by being transformed into an aetiology for a local custom and place-name. The Sibyl assuages Palinurus's pain, saying:
Neighboring folk
In cities up and down the coast will be
Induced by portents to appease your bones,
Building a tomb and making offerings there
On a cape forever named for Palinurus.
(Aeneid 6.377-381; Fitzgerald, p. 173)
This irreversible narrative marking of the Italian landscape threatens to expose a political structure underlying Aeneas's conquest of Italy: deaths will be required for his victory, but they will be made to seem less devastating by being incorporated into the Roman future as the name of a locality.
An even greater threat to the piety supposedly celebrated in the poem comes during one of the few efforts Virgil makes to represent origin directly: Aeneas's account of the fall of Troy in book 2. Simply narrating the city's
fall—identifying the original traumatic event—does not really identify the cause, since cause can always be pushed back one step farther: the episode implicitly asks the question, What caused the fall of Troy? When during Aeneas's speech the poem does momentarily reveal a kind of immediate cause, the effect seems to be devastating. This occurs when Venus, trying to convince Aeneas to save himself, draws aside the cloud that had veiled Aeneas's sight and invites him to see the gods directly as they tear Troy down:
Look: where you see high masonry thrown down
Stone torn from stone, with billowing smoke and dust,
Neptune is shaking from their beds the walls
That his great trident pried up, undermining,
Toppling the whole city down. . . ..
Dread shapes come to view—mighty powers
Divine, warring against Troy
[apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae
numina magna deum].
(Aeneid 2.608-624)
Here a violent act of force brings about irreversible destruction. Although Aeneas's words don't confirm that he sees exactly what Venus says he should see,[28] he does have a vision here that dire divine forces are the cause of Troy's destruction. The difficulty with this revelation of origin is precisely its horror: even Neptune is working to tear down his own city (hence the irony of his epithet).
The horror of this scene deeply influences Aeneas: "Then truly it seemed to me that all Troy fell in flames" (Aeneid 2.624-625). Venus has told him that it is not Paris or the hated face of Helen that is to blame, but the gods, the relentless gods: "divum inclementia, divum" (Aeneid 2.602). But to claim that it is the gods at fault is to present the opening for a critique of the poem's ideology—and from Aeneas's point of view to recognize the faulty logic of the civilization he has tried to defend.[29] Perhaps this provides a different perspective from which we can view Aeneas's determination to bring his household gods with him, as he must feel abandoned by much of the Olympic pantheon. Moreover, the notion that the gods can be blamed for human suffering and loss has been criticized by Zeus himself from early in the epic tradition (in the beginning of the Odyssey, for example). In any case, examples like this of revealed origin are rare in the epic, perhaps because such moments are sources of enormous trauma for the hero and of ideological disruption for the poem.
In Epic and Empire David Quint has written of two kinds of returning to origins, one of which he, following Freud, sees as an unhealthy repetition of origins—the repetition compulsion exemplified in the simulacra of Troy in book 3. The other kind he sees as a more successful "working through" of
the past, one that truly allows a making new to follow.[30] Quint sees this more successful return to the past as occurring in the second six books of the Aeneid, during the war in Italy—a successful, but nonetheless very violent form of "working through." If the interpretation presented here is correct, however, then the "repetition compulsion" represented in the little Troy of book 3 and in other efforts to return to Troy should be read as an effort not to return to the past but to avoid the story of origins—to blind us, or the narrator, to the real origin, to the lessons that the revelation of the cause of Troy's fall had forced on Aeneas. These repeated returns to the past in simulacrum represent a rejection of the origin tale and a desire to forget what the origin tale knows. The anxiety about what narratives of origin may reveal is written into the poem by the desire the Trojans and the poem have to recreate Troy. As Bellamy has suggested, the poem is haunted by and yet evades Troy and the Trojan past, as perhaps it is also by the Roman Republic and the Republican past.
Epic, then, might be said to be a genre that mystifies rather than reveals origins, and that demonstrates the reasons not to expose the cause. This resistance to the origin tale in the epic helps to show why Virgil distinguishes the writer of epic from the happy man of Georgics 2 who knows causes. Although the Aeneid includes many Lucretian allusions and analyses, and although aspects of the poem allow for a fuller Lucretian reading (as Philip Hardie has argued), the poem more often resists knowledge of causes than seeks it, and in doing so, it is more easily aligned with national and imperial ideology. Those moments in the epic when origins are narrated can, in contrast, sometimes be moments when a submerged counternarrative is allowed to surface.
Spenser and Source
As epic narratives often remind us, their origin is in other texts or other poems, the pun on "source" (fountain, spring, the original) serving to link the moment of inspiration with the turn back to literary tradition. Spenser uses this pun directly in Book 4 of The Faerie Queene when he refers to Chaucer (whose unfinished tale he is now completing) as the "well of English undefiled" (4.2.32).[31] In Spenser's poem, many of the sources—many of the fountains and springs—are defiled, and the cause for this is twofold: first, according to the fiction, they are polluted or given special "vertue"—Spenser provides a fictional aetiology for a given spring that explains, just as any narrative of origins will, how the spring came to be as it is; but secondly, he implies that they are polluted because Ovid polluted them. Ovid's aetiologies are the source of the spring Redcrosse and Duessa dally by in 1.7.7; and an imitative Ovidian narrative explaining the nymph's failure to pursue the "chace" is itself embedded in the text to point to this origin. The cause is
thus doubly displaced, for it is fictionally the nymph's laziness, but it is also the fact of narrative itself—in this case, the preceding narrative of Ovid. The spring of special "vertue" in the beginning of book 2 even more explicitly echoes Ovid, especially his accounts of the pursuit of Daphne and the transformation of Niobe. The reader is made to wonder, then, whether the original stain is really that of fallen human nature or simply the corrupting and transgressive literary tradition represented by Ovid that has passed on to our new author springs and sources that were already defiled.[32]
Of course, in any oral tradition, the source of a tale is the tradition itself—but in Virgil, and more insistently in Spenser, the emphasis on repetition of a source text is so self-conscious that it limits the degree of explanation of cause or origin that any such aetiology can have. Spenser theorizes this pattern of repetition when he names an Ovidian narrative as the cause of a given emblem, personification, or element of landscape. He thus allegorizes the effacing of origin in epic. Similarly, while Virgil's narrative is still ostensibly claiming to represent national origins (as well as to appropriate the localized origins of individual places and geographic names), Spenser is clearer about the need to evade direct representation of origin. Consider the lack of representation of the origin or conclusion of the knight's quests (no imagined originary scene in the Faery Queen's court; no return to court); Arthur's lack of knowledge of his origins (knowledge that he never gains in the poem); and the related topic of the importance attached to foundlings in the poem (babies with no explained origin or family). Along with these thematic examples, one might point to the nearly obsessive allegorization in The Faerie Queene of the inversion of cause and effect in narrative.[33] The poem is passionately divided about whether origin or cause can ever be represented as something stable, an inevitable problem in a poem where every external event can be a figure for an internal event. In any case, The Faerie Queene seems surprisingly clear about the impossibility of representing cause or origin, except as another story or another figure or emblem.
To take one example, in the story of the baby with the bloody hands in the opening of book 2, Spenser tells us the unwashable blood is a "sacred Symbole" (2.2.10) this blood is the mark of his origin on the baby and is usually read as an allegory for original sin, the Christian version of the polluted origin that defiles all. To contrast this image of origin as and in sin—something marked, fated, and irreversible—however, Spenser offers us the baby held by the bear in book 6, which Calepine gives to Sir Bruin and Matilde (6.6.29). This baby also is wrenched from violence, but given no history, no marking, no shaping. This treatment of origin as absolute and inexplicable rupture ironically leads to a more hopeful future, where, among other things, this child won't have to be a "sacred [yet polluted] Symbole." The bear baby also disappears at this moment from the poem as if no narrative is now possible about him.
Spenser differs strikingly from both Virgil and Ovid in that in their poems' metamorphosis is always irreversible, while in The Faerie Queene, metamorphosis is sometimes irreversible (for example, the nymph turned to fountain in Book 2, or the fate of Malbecco) and sometimes reversible (Fra Dubio, Grill, though he chooses otherwise).[34]
Fra Dubio, in contrast to Myrrha and Daphne, who sought to be transformed to trees as acts of penance or escape, does not want to be a tree: "once a man, Fradubio, now a tree" (1.2.33). He has learned that he must wait until the ordained amount of time has passed in order to be released from his wooden prison. To find the human body bound in nature is for Spenser something deeply disturbing—a distortion of human form, a deformation that shows physically that human form has been abandoned internally—but the deformation of Fra Dubio also emphasizes that the reformation must take place. Nature is no saving arena of refuge here, and the narrative promises a temporal return to Fra Dubio (a promise not fulfilled in the poem) rather than heading irreversibly in one direction. Spenser learned something about reversible and irreversible metamorphosis from Dante, for the Christian epic is designed to reveal precisely God's power to change "things as they are"—that is, to redeem fallen nature. The fact that this redemption—the promised "time and suffised fates" (1.2.43) for Fra Dubio—does not take place within the poem indicates an uncertainty in The Faerie Queene between the dominance of its political purpose and the allegiance to its Christian conclusions and consequences. "Things as they are" include both the fallen world so central to Protestant understandings of human morality and also the limitations of court society, where Spenser's poem was not as fully appreciated as he had hoped. It is helpful, then, to conclude by considering what function the fantasy of reversibility might have served in Elizabethan society, a fantasy suggesting that the origin in crime, transgression, or (for the Tudors) civil war can be altered, and a new beginning made. The presentation of reversible origin in Spenser clearly has its roots in his religious conviction (and in the precedent of earlier Christian epic), but perhaps it also serves this broader cultural purpose. Spenser's mythological origin tale about the fall, told in the Arlo Hill digression in "The Mutabilitie Cantos," takes place in Ireland. Here in the colonial setting, the change narrated in the tale is represented as irreversible, suggesting that Irish barbarism should be understood as "nature," as "things as they are":
Nath'lesse, Diana, full of indignation,
Thence-forth abandond her delicious brooke;
In whose sweet streame, before that bad occasion,
So much delight to bathe her limbes she tooke:
Ne onely her, but also quite forsooke
All those faire forrests about Arlo hid,
And all that Mountaine, which doth over-looke
The richest champian that may else be rid,
And the faire Shure, in which are thousand Salmons bred.
Them all, and all that she so deare did way,
Thence-forth she left; and parting from the place,
There-on an heauy haplesse curse did lay,
To weet, that Wolues, where she was wont to space,
Should harbour'd be, and all those Woods deface,
And Thieues should rob and spoile that Coast around.
Since which, those Woods, and all that goodly Chase,
Doth to this day with Wolues and Thieues abound:
Which too-too true that lands in-dwellers since haue found.
(Faerie Queene 7.6.54-55)
Spenser's divided feelings about Ireland are figured here in a temporal displacement: the beauty of the landscape, which the Arlo Hill digression and the entire Mutability Cantos suggest he felt quite keenly, is largely placed into the past once Diana utters her curse, while the present inhabitants are compared to wolves in the wildness. The curse is irreversible; the departure of Diana from Arlo Hill is absolute; and the English colonization of Ireland all the more necessary and itself made to seem irreversible. But the private story of the origins of sin or doubt in the individual—Fra Dubio, for instance—must never become an irreversible one, even if the return to original form can only be hoped for, predicted, but never made complete.
Appendix to Chapter 13
The First Loon
Long ago there were two lovers, a brother and sister. All night long they would fondle and embrace on their sleeping skins. This did not please their parents, who said: You can love each other and be first cousins, but not, certainly not, brother and sister.
"But why can't I love my brother?" the sister asked.
"And why can't I love my sister?" asked the brother.
"Because it's unhealthy, that's why," their parents said.
Hearing this, they loved each other even more.
At last the mistapeo* spoke out against them: "A brother and sister who are lovers, that will bring a bad winter and plenty of starving."
The boy was forced to go into hiding. But wherever he hid, near or far, he'd only need to sing and his sister would hear him. And then she would come running.
Several months passed and the girl gave birth to a baby boy. She was carrying it in her moss-bag when one of her older brothers said: "I hope a lynx bites out its heart!"
"How can you say such a nasty thing?" the girl asked.
"Because your baby is unhealthy, that's why."
The girl did not understand this at all. To her, the baby looked as healthy as any she'd ever seen.
Now the girl's brothers decided to do something about the father of this baby. Although he was their younger brother, he was bringing home shame on the family. The best way to get rid of this shame, they figured, was to get rid of the boy himself.
A while later the boy was singing for his sister. The girl put on her snowshoes and followed his song. The brothers tracked their sister all the way to the shore of Michikimau. And there, in the middle of the frozen lake, the boy was waiting.
"Look at the lovely baby I've brought you!" the girl exclaimed.
Just then one of the brothers shot an arrow directly into the baby's heart. "It's not lovely anymore," he said.
The boy knew they would try to shoot his heart, too. So he quickly sang a hole in the ice. He took off all his clothes and jumped into this hole. The next instant he was a loon, flying up out of the cold water. And as he flew, he cried mournfully, for his sweetheart would never come to him again.
"The First Loon" and "The Origin of Robins" from Wolverine Creates the World: Labrador Indian Tales, collected and retold by Lawrence Millman (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Capra Press, 1993). Reprinted courtesy of Lawrence Millman.
* Mistapeo means shaman.
The Origin of Robins
A man, Aiasheu, had a wife and son. One day he noticed some scratches on his wife's breast. "Who made those scratches, woman?" he demanded.
Replied his wife: "I snared a partridge. While I was getting it out of the snare, it scratched me."
"Those look like love scratches to me. Are you sure you haven't been sleeping with our son?"
"Certainly not!"
Yet the more Aiasheu thought about this, the more he believed it. Why were his wife and son always picking berries together? What did they do when he went out hunting? Hadn't he once seen the boy fingering his mother's thigh at a mukoshan?
Now he was convinced that his wife and son were sleeping together. He decided to take the boy on a little trip . . . a little trip from which he would not return.
Father and son paddled their canoe to an island. "There are some duck eggs on those rocks, boy," Aiasheu said. "Why don't you gather a few?"
After the boy had jumped out of the canoe and waded ashore, Aiasheu began paddling away. "I'm leaving you here," he yelled back to his son, "because you're been sleeping with your mother."
"That's not true!" the boy protested.
"Tell it to the wolves who'll be picking over your bones . . ."
Back in camp Aiasheu told his wife that the boy had drowned when their canoe had flipped over. It was fortunate that he, her husband, knew how to swim or he would have drowned, too.
Now the man started treating his wife very badly. He'd throw her out of the tent, with no clothes on, in the middle of winter. Or he'd feed her lemmings, saying that if foxes could eat lemmings, so could she. Or he'd simply beat her until she felt her body would break.
Several years passed. The woman had a dream about her son. He was alive, the dream said, and soon would appear at her tent with a tabaskan* piled high with meat. She told her husband this dream, but his only response was to beat her. "Our son is dead," he said. "His bones have turned yellow by now."
"No," the woman replied. "He is alive. I have dreamed it so. And he will bring us meat."
Now Aiasheu was so angry with his wife that he pushed her into the fire. "Taste your own meat, woman, if you're so hungry," he told her.
Just then a young man emerged from the bush with a tabaskan. He dropped the lead and reached into the fire, pulling out the woman. After he'd done this, he pushed in Aiasheu.
* Tabaskan means sled.
"You are my son," Aiasheu screamed. "Please don't let me burn up!"
"I don't have a father anymore," the young man said, throwing a birch log onto the fire to make it burn faster.
The woman had some very bad burns on her chest and seemed to be in pain. The young man took pity on her, saying that she didn't have to be a human being anymore. He asked what creature she would like to be. "I would like to be a bird, my son," she said.
And all at once the old woman was flying up into the sky, with red feathers on her breast where she'd been burned.
That's how robins came into the world.
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"Towards an Account of the Ancient World's Concepts of Fictive Belief." In Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World, edited by Christopher Gill and T. P. Wiseman, 230-244. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
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The Gods in Epic: Poets and Critics of the Classical Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Forbes Irving, P. M. C.
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Metamorphosis in Greek Myths. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Guillory, John.
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Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History. New York: Columbia University Press.
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The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings. Rev. ed. by A. B. Frost. New York: [ 1880]. Grosset and Dunlap.
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The Metamorphoses of Persephone: Ovid and the Self-Conscious Muse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Last Places: A Journey in the North. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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The Arte of English Poesie. [1586]. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University [1906]. Press.
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Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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"The Hermaphrodite and the Metamorphosis of Spenserian Allegory." English Literary Renaissance 17: 207-223.
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"'Si credere dignum est': Some Expressions of Disbelief in Euripides and Others." Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society n.s. 22: 60-89.
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Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America. New York: Random House, Vintage Books.
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14—
Walcott's Omeros :
The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World
Joseph Farrell
With his plays drawn from Greek mythology and his evocative epic hymn to the Caribbean, Omeros, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott has forced many to rethink the relationships between archaic Greek society and the contemporary world. Joseph Farrell, known especially for his work on classical epic, takes up a debate as to whether Omeros can be considered an epic at all, and suggests that in forcing us even to ask this question, Walcott demands that we reassess the position and assumed supremacy of Western literary epic. In demonstrating the complex relationship of Omeros to the tradition of classical epic, Farrell reveals the contingencies of that tradition and the richness of Walcott's poem as a work that straddles both epic and novel, classical and modern, scribal and oral.
Let me begin with an anecdote.
I have a daughter who is a student in the Philadelphia public school system. Like any other big-city school system, ours has its problems, but so far they have seemed manageable. If nothing else, trying to negotiate the school-district bureaucracy provides parents with a rich store of strange experiences that we enjoy sharing with one another. This particular story concerns race. Again like most cities, Philadelphia has had to cope with the problem of segregation by race and has chosen to address the problem in schools not by busing, but by establishing a voluntary desegregation program. Schools in the "deseg" program receive extra funding from the central district and consequently have more instructional and support staff, enrichment programs, and so forth. Parents choose whether to participate in the program and designate in order of preference the schools they would like their child to attend. The children are selected by lottery and are assigned to a school on the basis of their number and their race: almost everything depends on whether the school you want needs more white, black, Asian, or Hispanic children in that particular year. The year we applied marked the first time that the aspirations of anyone in our family had so explicitly been tied to his or her race.
My daughter's name is Flannery—not the most common name, and when a child who bears it encounters another, their common name creates a spe-
cial bond. One of the Flannerys we know is further distinguished by the fact that she is also a twin and that she and her brother Schuyler have one white and one black parent. It is their experience with the deseg system, a parental war story, that I want to recount. Because race is the only criterion for admitting a child to a deseg school, the district requires interested parents to specify their child's race, and to do so in terms that are, literally, black and white: they recognize nothing in between. Flannery and Schuyler's parents balked at this. To identify their children as either black or white would go against everything that they stand for, both in their marriage and in the absolutely interracial identity that they cherish in their children. But a choice had to be made. When they simply refused, the bureaucrat in charge of the interview, who had no doubt been through this before, sighed wearily and said: "Well, I guess we're just going to have to subject them to the eyeball test." The parents were too astonished to protest before the children were sized up by the bureaucrat, whose job at that moment was simply to determine the race of the children by his own judgment about the color of their skin. And in a decision that could have been scripted by Solomon, but more likely by Kafka, he found that one of the twins was black and the other was white.
Derek Walcott has been subjected repeatedly to the literary-critical equivalent of this test and indeed invites such scrutiny by the way in which he thematizes his own racially mixed ancestry.[1] As he wrote over thirty years ago in the often-quoted poem "A Far Cry from Africa,"
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?[2]
Years later in "The Hotel Normandie Pool," the theme returns:
And I, whose ancestors were slave and Roman,
have seen both sides of the imperial foam,
heard palm and pine tree alternate applause
as the white breakers rose in galleries
to settle, whispering at the tilted palm
of the boy-god Augustus. My own face
held negro Neros, chalk Caligulas;
my own reflection slid along the glass
of faces foaming past triumphal cars.[3]
The motif of racial indeterminacy presents itself throughout Walcott's poetry in other registers as well: the linguistic register, in which English threat-
ens to occlude the Creole dialects of St. Lucia; the literary-historical register, in which Walcott speculates on his storyteller's craft in its relation to that of the Caribbean "man of words" and to that of Shakespeare, to name but two of his many models; the religious register, in which St. Lucia's Catholic culture contrasts with Walcott's own Methodist upbringing, while both Christian traditions exist in dialogue with the folk religion of the common people and with the animism of the islands' ancient inhabitants; and in many other registers. One of these others is the one on which I will focus, the generic register; for the debate (if I may call it that) over the genre of Omeros shares with these other questions the twin motifs of dichotomy and indeterminacy in ways that cast a strong and useful light on the poem and on the concept of genre itself.
To begin, even characterizing discussion of the poem's genre as a debate is an overstatement. Diverging opinions there have been, but little dialogue. Classicists like Mary Lefkowitz, Oliver Taplin, and Bernard Knox and Eurocentric comparatists like George Steiner have expressed little doubt about the poem's epic character.[4] But Sidney Burris, while hailing Omeros as a "sprawling new poem" of "herculean ambition," pointedly avoids using the word "epic," calling Omeros a Caribbean "national narrative."[5] Similarly, longtime students of Walcott and of West Indian literature generally have been chary of the epic label. It is true that Robert Hamner, one of the world's foremost experts on Walcott, has not shied away from it.[6] But John Figueroa, perhaps the dean of West Indian literary studies and a former teacher of Walcott's, in what was probably the first scholarly commentary on the poem, stated flatly and preemptively: "Omeros is not an epic."[7] Similarly Patricia Ismond, another distinguished West Indianist and Walcott specialist, finds Omeros informed by a lyric rather than an epic sensibility.[8] Finally, I should mention that this is the tack taken by Walcott himself, who has said: "I do not think of it as an epic. Certainly not in the sense of epic design. Where are the battles? There are a few, I suppose. But 'epic' makes people think of great wars and great warriors. That isn't the Homer I was thinking of; I was thinking of Homer the poet of the seven seas."[9]
This last remark points to the different ways in which critics have viewed the poem's relationship to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Eurocentric critics have been quick to identify the poem's "debt" to Homer as its essential distinguishing characteristic; Taplin perhaps goes farthest in this regard.[10] Burris, in contrast, predicts that "commentators on Omeros . . . will understandably busy themselves in tracking down the Homeric parallels in Walcott's poem," but argues that this will be "a particularly ill-fated approach because part of the poem's task, its attempt to recreate the original authenticity of Walcott's Caribbean culture, lies in its deliberate deflation of analogy."[11] The most important antecedents of Omeros, Burris suggests, are to be found in Walcott's own dramatic works and in another quasi-Homeric work of great generic in-
determinacy, Joyce's Ulysses.[12] Figueroa goes even farther, stating that "Walcott's poem is not an imitation of either the Iliad or the Odyssey. . . . The point of the use of Homer lies elsewhere," that is, in his metaphorical or allegorical significance "as the great creator," especially of poetic language, and "as the Blind Seer," himself a wanderer held in no great honor whose suffering has gained him an acute understanding of the nature of things, even as a kind of poetic savior who rescues Walcott's Narrator from the sins that have beset other poets.[13] But this Homer is, finally, a symbol of "the foreign in West Indian culture, especially . . . the non-African foreign," an element that is itself in need of redemption: for Figueroa, the value of a poem like Omeros "is a question not so much of what influences are at play"—of whether the poem merits a place in the apostolic succession of Homeric imitators—but of "the quality of what is made" out of these influences, whether they bear the authentic stamp of Homeric originality.[14]
There has thus been considerable anxiety among critics and on the part of the poet himself about the generic affinities of Omeros. One may conjecture that many of those who hail the poem as an epic do so without much interest in genre theory, but rather out of a desire to honor Walcott for what is indeed a remarkable achievement. In general most critics appear to regard the entire issue of genre as unfortunate, any choice among the available categories being difficult if not impossible for most readers to make. Despite the difficulty, however, critics raise the issue as one that is somehow necessary to confront, even if some can manage only an equivocal solution, like that of the reviewer who described the poem as, "if anything," a novel in verse.[15] Any uncertainty raised by the epic pretensions of Omeros stems from the obvious fact that the poem does not conform rigidly to the generic expectations that most readers bring to classical European epic poetry. In a way, this attitude is preferable to its opposite, which regards Omeros as unproblematically an epic in the Homeric tradition. The poem is, without question, about problems of belonging, concerning itself with the dubious prospect that any of us might find real comfort in a sense of belonging to some putatively homogeneous group. The problem of literary categorization is thus merely a special case of one of the poem's central themes; but it gains point from the fact that epic has been perceived—particularly European epic in the classical tradition—as, to use Bakhtin's term, the "monologic" genre par excellence and as the antithesis of the most thoroughly open and dialogic genre, which Bakhtin terms the novel.[16]
With respect to the assessment of postcolonial literature, the critical discourse of epic poetry acquires a racist tinge. Ultimately, I believe, it is the notion that the European epic speaks with the voice of the accumulated authority of generations of white imperialist culture that leads many readers to deny Omeros any meaningful association with the epic genre, while in the open polyphony of novelistic genres they find a quality better suited to the Cre-
olization of language, the racial and literary miscegenation, that characterize the poem. The debate clearly goes far beyond mere taxonomy and becomes a political battle for Walcott's racial identity and ethnic soul: is the author of Omeros "really" the white Walcott descended in blood from men of Warwickshire and in ink from the bard of Avon, or is he the black descendant of slaves whose history and language have all but disappeared from the official record, a man whose story can be told only in novelistic opposition to the epic culture that seeks to co-opt him as its own spokesman? In this light, it becomes clear that the epic element in Omeros threatens to reopen an old debate over Walcott's relationship to the European and African elements in his personal heritage and in the culture of the West Indies as a whole.[17]
In this essay I would like to make two responses to those critics who feel compelled to deny that Omeros is an epic poem. First, to base such a denial on a desire to claim Omeros as an Afro-Caribbean poem ignores those contemporary studies in world epic that go well beyond the literary tradition defined by European poets such as Homer and Milton. Second, to distinguish the poem from its predecessors in the canonical epic tradition on the basis of its capacity to celebrate alterity is to ignore the European epic's capacity for self-questioning and for radical reinterpretation of its own generic roots.
Let me expand upon both points.
Africa and the Epic
Those critics who are embarrassed by the possibility that Omeros might be taken for an epic, and hence as a white man's poem, are, no doubt unknowingly, endorsing an untenable and extremely reactionary view of what epic poetry is in its racial and world-cultural dimensions. Such a view, to be sure, has been maintained by a number of "authoritative" discussions of epic as a world genre; but these discussions can easily be shown to be deeply, if unwittingly, implicated in a racist discourse of shocking naiveté.
The idea that the African nations were actually incapable of producing an epic literature was articulated, not perhaps for the first time, but with embarrassing clarity, by Maurice Bowra in his 1952 study Heroic Poetry.[ 18] In surveying the heroic poetry of a wide variety of world literatures, Bowra noted the close relationships between poetry of praise or of lamentation and the heroic poetry with which he was concerned, but observed that the two former categories "exist in some societies where heroic poetry is lacking." He ascribes this lack to an "inability to rise beyond a single occasion to the conception of a detached art." The examples he cites are from Africa—specifically, from Uganda and Ethiopia—and he concludes his discussion with these words: "Though these poems, and many others like them, show a real admiration for active and generous manhood, they come from peoples who have no heroic poetry and have never advanced beyond panegyric and
lament. The intellectual effort required for such an advance seems to have been beyond their powers."[19] It is extremely depressing to observe how often these and similarly demeaning cultural stereotypes leap to Bowra's mind as he discusses the literary achievements of African peoples. Characteristic is the presumption that heroic verse represents a later and more developed stage of the panegyric and lament that Bowra finds in Africa, the idea that a literary culture must progress from these early stages toward a true heroic literature, and that heroic poetry calls for a degree of intellectual abstraction of which Africans are not, in his view, capable; rather, the poetry that they do produce is notable for its "simple and primitive" qualities, its "expression of an immediate and violent excitement." Bowra's views, which strike us today as ignorant and insulting, are fully representative of literary scholarship in his day, and he was far from alone in believing that epic was simply not an African genre. A similar opinion was voiced in 1970, this time on purely formal grounds rather than as a judgment on the intellectual capacities of the African artist, by the influential folklorist Ruth Finnegan.[20] But by that time the tide had begun to turn, and since then considerable work has been done both to make known the existence of an epic literature among a number of African peoples and to study its particular qualities.
The procedure followed by many studies of the African epic is double. Scholars like Isidore Okpewho and John William Johnson aim to show, on the one hand, that the African epic is recognizable as epic on the same terms as canonical European specimens, and, on the other hand, that it displays certain distinctive characteristics as a primarily oral and performative rather than literary genre.[21] For this reason Africanists have an important role to play, first and self-evidently, in the comparative study of oral epic as a phenomenon of world literature, but also, to the extent that research into oral poetry has revolutionized the study of the Homeric poems, in the effort to reinterpret the canonical tradition of European epic that boasts of its Homeric ancestry. One consequence of this activity is that the African epic has been subjected to some of the same questions that had begun to be asked both of the archaic Greek epic and of its putative modern European analogues, principally, poetry of the South Slavic epic tradition recorded and studied by Milman Parry and Albert Lord.[22] It can now be seen that the African material stands in more or less the same relationship to texts like the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey as does the Slavic material, even if one reaches the conclusion that the Homeric poems are by comparison only vestigially oral performances that have traveled some considerable way down the road from performance to literary fixedness. For instance, when Okpewho, in order to illustrate oral poetry's tendency to strive for immediate effect by means of humor, compares the grim humor shown by the narrator of the Kambili epic ("The old sandle man's head was cut off at his neck. / Big trouble has begun in Jimini! / The little man fell flopping about like a tramp in the cold")[23] to Patro-
clus's ill-timed and entirely out-of-character jeering at the Trojan Cebriones, whom he has just killed, it is clear that what Okpewho regards as a typical and even normative procedure for the Mandingo poet is present, but nevertheless comparatively rare in Homer.[24] If we are unconvinced by this particular analogy, however, other examples come to mind: the Homeric narrator's ironic aside concerning the bargain struck by Glaucus, who exchanges his golden armor for Diomedes' bronze (Iliad 6.234-236) ,[25] or perhaps Odysseus's observation to his host and principal listener, Alcinous, that his story is getting rather long, and it might be time simply to stop and go to bed (Odyssey 11.328-384). This exchange occurs about halfway through the hero's narrative of his adventures since the Trojan War and, not incidentally, about halfway through the poem as a whole. When Alcinous refuses to hear of any delay in the completion of the tale, we may take his reaction as the oral poet's script for his ideal audience, who should be as eager for the rest of his story as Alcinous is for that of Odysseus.[26]
Passages like these are admittedly not very common in our Iliad and Odyssey—or perhaps they tend to be overlooked by readers unaccustomed to finding such elements in epics of the European canon. But despite Homer's distance from actual oral performance, comparative study establishes without question the ultimately oral and performative character of Homeric epic and in this way aligns the Iliad and the Odyssey with modern world epic as against the remainder of the ancient, medieval, and early modern tradition of "classicizing" European epic in the Homeric tradition—such as the Aeneid, LaDivina Commedia, Os Lusíadas, Paradise Lost, and so forth. This is a crucial point, I suggest, because the scholarly discovery of an African epic linked to Homer by virtue of its being the product of an oral-epic performance culture actually parallels one of the dominant conceits of literary apologia in Omeros— namely Walcott's construction of Homer not as a participant in an exclusively European scribal culture, but as a singer of folktales whom one might find just as readily in an African or Afro-Caribbean context as in that of archaic Greece.
For Walcott, the Creole culture of the Caribbean is preeminently an oral culture. In the poem "Cul de Sac Valley" he contrasts this culture with the scribal culture in which he works, calling Creole "a tongue they speak in, but cannot write."[27] He imagines himself as a poet-carpenter, creating a work that images perfectly his Caribbean homeland:
as consonants scroll
off my shaving plane
in the fragrant Creole
of their native grain;
from a trestle bench
they'd curl at my foot,
C's, R's, with a French
or West African root
from a dialect throng-
ing, its leaves unread
yet light on the tongue
of their native road.
("Cul de Sac Valley" 1.13-24)
But as he catches the fresh scent from a stand of trees in the landscape he wishes to represent—trees designated in French Creole as bois canot, bois campêche—his dream of honestly representing that landscape is shattered as he imagines the trees "hissing" at him with reproach:
What you wish
from us will never be,
your words is English,
is a different tree.
(1.33-36)
Here the poet's language and his status as a member of the scribal culture distance him from the oral culture of his Creole home.
The motif of Caribbean culture as grounded in orality is basic to Walcott's thinking on language. His play O Babylon! concerns the cultural and political ideals of a Rastafarian community in Kingston, Jamaica. In a note on the play, Walcott writes of the Jamaican spoken dialect in its pure form as unintelligible except to Jamaicans, and thus in need of translation to any outsider; and "within that language itself," he writes, "the Rastafari have created still another for their own nation. . . .[They] have invented a grammar and a syntax which immures them from the seduction of Babylon, an oral poetry which requires translation into the language of the oppressor," and goes on to observe: "To translate is to betray."[28]
This confession pertains in the first instance to the author's project of representing an oral culture in a scripted play; but it sheds a painful light on his effort to write a West Indian poetry at all, and particularly to write it in English. Such an effort must be fatally flawed from the start because any English poem, any written work, stands at an extra degree of separation from its subject as compared with Creole utterance. It possesses the quality not so much of an original composition as of a translation—and, thus, as a betrayal.
What is crucial, however, is one's response to the recognition of this betrayal. If there is a division between English and Creole, between scribal and oral cultures, between Europe and Africa, there is also a relationship to be negotiated. It is this insight that makes place for the craft of translation, a space that is inevitably, necessarily there.
Translation is, however, an transitive process: if Creole must be translated into English, the converse is also true. If European colonialists bring foreign categories of intellection to the interpretation of Caribbean realities, it is equally possible to translate European culture into West Indian terms; and this latter type of translation, while it is, given the asymmetrical power relationship between the European colonialists and the islanders, less common than the first, shares with all forms of translation the impossibility of leaving the "original" unchanged. The decision to translate Homeric epic into West Indian terms cannot but change one's perception of Homer. Thus Walcott's characterization of Caribbean dialects as "oral poetry" finds its parallel in Walcott's refusal to cede Homer to the scribal culture of European colonialists.
This is no casual theme in Omeros (or, indeed, in Walcott's work as a whole), but a central problem to which the poem constantly and broodingly recurs. The theme is sounded first in the image of Seven Seas, a blind old man identified by the poem's Narrator with Omeros (1.2.2-3). Seven Seas spends some of his days sitting in the No Pain Cafe, observed by its proprietor, Ma Kilman: "Sometimes he would sing. . . But his words were not clear/They were Greek to her. Or old African babble" (1.3.2).[29] It is Seven Seas who, like a prophet, discloses to Philoctete the meaning of Achille's unusual, overnight absence from port: he has journeyed to Africa in search of "his name and his soul" (2.29.2).
This equivalency between Greek and "old African babble" involves an approximation of Homer's oral poetry to elements in West Indian speech that must remain, even to many West Indian listeners, inarticulate and at best partially understood. This motif finds its parallel in other contexts. When, for example, in the Narrator's interview with Homer himself the ancient poet declares that "a drifter/is the hero of my book," the Narrator surprises him by rejoining: "I never read it," which he then qualifies: "not all the way through."[30] For the reader alive to the poem's engagement with literary antecedents, it is a puzzling moment.[31] I take this reply as rejecting what is implied when Homer refers to his Odyssey as a "book." The passage thus indicates that Homer is not to be understood exclusively as the representative, nor Omeros as the product, of European scribal culture; for, after denying that he has ever "read" Homer "all the way through," the Narrator declares his debt to the oral tradition, going on to insist:
"I have always heard
your voice in that sea, master, it was the same song
of the desert shaman, and when I was a boy
your name was as wide as a bay, and I walked along
the curled brow of the surf; the word 'Homer' meant joy,
joy in battle, in work, in death, then the numbered peace
of the surfs benedictions, it rose in the cedars,
in the laurier-cannelles, pages of rustling trees.
Master, I was the freshest of your readers."[32]
This emphasis on Homer as an oral poet of the sea and of nature, one whose poetry finds its analogue not in literature but in the unwritten landscape and seascape of St. Lucia, in the quotidian experience of a growing boy, constructs a Homer very different from his Virgilian and Miltonic progeny, one who resembles much more the Slavic and African epicists recovered by folklorists. If this Homer can be encountered at all through reading, it can only be a partial encounter—"not all the way through"—involving not just the leaves of a book but also "the pages of the trees."[33]
In this respect research into the existence and oral performative character of the African epic and the establishment of a link between these traditions and those that produced the songs of Homer in a sense substantiates Walcott's imaginative characterization of Homer, in one of many avatars within Omeros, as Seven Seas, the wizened old storyteller of St. Lucia who embodies the lore and wisdom of the island people and whose ultimate roots are in Africa.
Epic as a Dialogical Genre
My second main point concerns the way in which most students of literature have been taught to conceive of the European epic. It is clear that the study of world epic in the twentieth century represents a major challenge to traditional definitions of the genre based on the European canon. In addition, it can easily be shown that these traditional definitions are wholly inadequate to describe even poems like the Aeneid and Paradise Lost. A good deal of the modern theoretical discourse that concerns itself with epic—and I am thinking here primarily of the classic formulations, descended from Schiller, of Hegel, Lukács, Auerbach, and Bakhtin—shows a pronounced tendency to employ a discursive caricature of the genre as a foil for making clearer the less strictly defined, formally and culturally heterogeneous, and in short "open" characteristics of other genres, especially the novel.[34]
This discursive strategy has resulted in a number of pernicious literary-historical misconceptions, not least of which is the absurdly one-dimensional idea of the epic genre that many students of literature regard as axiomatic. Thus while the epic, when viewed from a multicultural perspective, may prove to be many things, in the classical tradition of European literature it has been accorded a privileged place among the most elevated genres. Among its attributes, along with a tone conforming to its elevated matter, are authority, or the idea that the stories told by the epic narrator are objectively true; transcendence, or the idea that the authority and truth of the epic narrative are
wholly independent of any historical or cultural contingency; and originality, the idea that epic is in some sense a source of subsequent culture, particularly as the literary embodiment of a nation's character.
If we define the European epic as necessarily possessing characteristics such as these, it is easy to see why some readers would hesitate to regard Omeros as representing the genre. Its tone is seldom elevated, nor is much of its matter especially dignified. The narrative voice, though sure in a technical sense, is personal (in many passages explicitly autobiographical), uncertain (readier to ask questions than to provide answers), idiosyncratic (prone to seemingly uncontrolled punning), uncomfortable with the mantle of authority. The narrative itself is often untrue in any conventional sense: the Narrator does not really speak with his dead father or with Homer himself; Achille does not really sail to his ancestral Africa; Denis Plunkett is in fact neither the father nor the descendant of the obscure midshipman who bore the same surname and who died in the Battle of Les Saintes. It is also clear that the nationalism of this epic is far from embracing the imperialist ideology of previous epics. Walcott's St. Lucia is consistently represented as a remnant and a victim of empire, while as one among many Caribbean islands, the formerly contested possession of rival empires now, left to fend for itself, seems both an unlikely subject for a triumphalist national epic and an unlikely heir to the epic tradition handed down from Greece, Rome, and Christendom in general.
If there were any doubt that Omeros is a deliberate nonepic, it would seem to be dispelled by a pair of passages that occur near the end of the poem. In the first, Walcott imagines what a conventional epic description of St. Lucia might have looked like:
"In the mist of the sea there is a horned island
with deep green harbours where the Greek ships anchor
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It was a place of light with luminous valleys
under thunderous clouds. A Genoan wanderer
saying the beads of the Antilles named the place
for a blinded saint. Later, others would name her
for a wild wife. Her mountains tinkle with springs
among moss-bearded forests, and the screeching of birds
stitches its tapestry. The white egret makes rings
stalking its pools. African fishermen make boards
from trees as tall as their gods with their echoing
axes and a volcano stinking with sulphur
has made it a healing place."
(Omeros 7. 57.1 )
The style of this passage, its beauty notwithstanding, might strike the reader as absurd and hence sheerly parodic in the usually unpretentious linguistic context of Omeros, with its stretches of plain dialogue, its Creole, its occasional obscenities. But there is no mockery here. The passage is uttered first by Omeros himself, who observes the Narrator weeping like a boy:
and he saw how deeply I had loved this island.
Perhaps the oarsman knew this, but I didn't know.
Then I saw the ebony of his lifted hand
And Omeros nodded: "We will both praise it now."
But I could not before him. My tongue was a stone
at the bottom of the sea, my mouth a parted conch
from which nothing sounded, and then I heard his own
Greek calypso coming from the marble trunk,
widening the sea with a blind man's anger.
Omeros then sings the first two lines of the song quoted above. The Narrator continues:
and the waves were swaying to the stroke of his hand,
as I heard my own voice riding on his praise
the way a swift follows a crest, leaving its shore.
They sing the remaining stanzas together, until the Narrator informs us:
My voice was going
under the strength of his voice, which carried so far
that a black frigate heard it, steadying its wing.
The concentration of literary motifs in this passage—its elevated tone; the appearance, in the fact that both Omeros and the Narrator are on a boat, of the classical conceit by which composing poetry is figured as sailing (to say nothing of allusions to specific literary voyages, like that of Dante and Virgil across the Styx); Omeros's vatic knowledge of the Narrator's love, unsuspected by himself, for his native land; the response of the waves and of the frigate bird to the Orphic power of Omeros's song; the blending of the poets' voices; and the younger poet's inability to sing before hearing the voice of the elder all represent a departure from the "normal" (if one can speak of a norm) narrative style of the poem up to this point. Through this departure and in the distance it takes us from the poem's usual stylistic procedures we can measure the gap between Omeros and other epics of the Homeric stripe.
A second passage not long after this one accomplishes something similar, but in a less striking way. The poem's final chapter begins as follows:
I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe's son,
who never ascended an elevator,
who had no passport, since the horizon needs none,
never begged nor borrowed, was nobody's waiter,
whose end, when it comes, will be a death by water
(which is not for this book, which will remain unknown
and unread by him). I sang the only slaughter
that brought him delight, and that from necessity-
the slaughter of fish, sang the channels of his back in the sun.
I sang our wide country, the Caribbean Sea.
Who hated shoes, whose soles were as cracked as a stone,
who was gentle with ropes, who had one suit alone,
whom no man dared insult and who insulted no one,
whose grin was a white breaker cresting, but whose frown
was a growing thunderhead, whose fist of iron
would do me a greater honor if it held on
to my casket's oarlocks than mine lifting his own
when both anchors are lowered in the one island.
(Omeros 7.64.1 )
Such a passage is literally perverse, turned backwards, alluding in the poem's final chapter to the conventional opening of a canonical epic. Indeed, one can easily read the first line of the chapter as an allusion to the opening lines of the Iliad, but an allusion that systematically inverts virtually everything in its source:
(Iliad 1.1-2)
"Sing, goddess, the baleful anger of Peleus' son, Achilles." Every departure from the Homeric model speaks eloquently of the vast difference in perspective between the two poems. In naming his hero, Walcott rejects the universal form Achilles in favor of the dialectal variant Achille, local Creole by way of colonial French. By including the patronymic he underlines the theme of cultural rift; for while Achilles and Peleus share membership in a single Hellenic culture, the very names of Achille and Afolabe represent the victimization of Africans in the Americas at the hands of the European slave trade. The epithet "quiet" is of course unimaginable for any Homeric hero. Finally, in "I sang" two crucial reversals occur. First, in the change of tense and mood from Homer's forward-looking "sing"
of the epic genre. "Omeros is not an epic," writes Figueroa, "and it hardly touches on the gods."[35] And indeed, it is in passages like this that we squarely confront Burris's "deliberate deflation of analogy."
If the European epic is what the theorists tell us it should be, then clearly Omeros is no epic. But those theorists are wrong. Certainly the idea that epic is a closed, authoritative genre, objective in its regard of the heroic past, and so on is a significant discursive construct that evidently answers some deep-seated cultural longing on the part of readers brought up on European literature. But a discursive construct it is, and its usefulness in describing or understanding an actual epic poem is limited at best. The discourse on the epic is, to be sure, one of the longest-lived and most powerful elements of literary investigation in the West. The fact is, however, that there has always been a counter tradition of reading epic as more open to pluralities of interpretation than the conventional view of the genre would seem to allow, and such interpretations have recently become a dominant feature of the critical discussion. From ancient allegoresis of the Homeric epics, which refuses to take the poems at face value, to romantic readings of Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost, to New Critical readings of the Aeneid as a deeply divided, grimly brooding meditation on the costs of empire, practical critics have always shown great acuity and resourcefulness at reading behind the objectivity and transcendence that we have all been taught to find in epic to the cultural anxieties and historical contingencies reflected and refracted within what poses as the inevitability of epic narrative.[36] It is in general I think fair to say that the rigid conception of epic that I have been outlining is by and large the province of theorists, who find such a construct useful for their own discursive purposes, and of nonspecialists, who are by definition not very interested in the epic; while the excellent work that any number of connoisseurs have done illustrates that an acceptance of alterity is a basic constitutive feature of the European epic from its inception. To deny that Omeros is an epic on the grounds that it is something "other" than the Iliad or Paradise Lost is to misunderstand the development of European epic as badly as Bowra misunderstood the existence of African epic.
But if Omeros does not conform to the expectations of theorists and nonspecialists, it does not fail to satisfy them. Walcott's ironic handling of the generic conventions of classical epic poetry is in my view more convincingly read as a logical extension of the epic genre's capacity to reinvent itself through inversion, opposition to epic predecessors, and ironic self-reflexion. To return briefly to the end of the poem: by announcing his subject here rather than at the beginning of the poem, the Narrator inverts normal epic procedure. While this particular stratagem is, I believe, an innovation, it is of a piece with the kind of striving for novelty that one finds throughout post-Homeric epic. That is to say, it is precisely the kind of innovation, commonly identified with Greek poetry of the Hellenistic period, but found
everywhere in Virgil, Camões, and Milton as well, whereby either adherence to epic convention or imitation of a particular epic model is pointedly varied in such a way as to force rethinking about fundamental aspects of the genre.[37] This capacity has come to be seen as a central characteristic both of individual poems (e.g., Virgil's internal dialogue between the voices of celebration and lament, and his reduction of the hero and his enemy to a single pattern) and of the tradition as a whole (e.g., Milton's recasting of the classical pagan hero as a demon to be surpassed and defeated by a new, Christian hero possessed of qualities diametrically opposed to those of his prototype and foe).[38] Indeed, two recent studies of the European epic argue convincingly that the genre can be understood only in dialectical terms. For David Quint, the dialectic takes shape over time, with each instantiation of epic narrative finding its place on a continuum that lies between a wholehearted commitment to the celebration of triumph and a dissenting point of view that consistently takes the side of a defeated resistance. For Susanne Wofford, the epic poem is dialectical in its very structure: in the simile, the epic figure par excellence, the genre attempts to correlate its heroic ideology with the (largely antithetical) values of the external world.[39] Over time, Wofford argues, the genre develops various strategies for negotiating this disjunctive relationship, which nevertheless remains apparent to the reader and plays an essential role in constituting the epic. Both Quint and Wofford thus present views of the epic that are profoundly at odds with received opinion concerning the closed, monologic nature of the genre; and, what is more, their ideas, while developed and expressed with great energy and uncommon insight, are by no means eccentric when considered in relation to the bulk of contemporary critical work on the European epic. Indeed, one might say that their work marks an important stage in theoretical work on the epic and a signal that in this field theory has finally begun to catch up with practice.
Thus the polyglossia of Omeros does not just flout epic convention or render allusion to the classical epics merely parodic or unimportant, but actually continues the epic tradition of questioning and self-questioning engagement on the part of the poet with his predecessors. Placing at the end of the poem a passage that the "rules" of the genre tell us should come at the beginning is a formal instance of the capacity for inversion and reinvention that is itself a property of the epic genre. We may also take it as a signal that more substantive forms of inversion and reinvention are under way as well.
Once we realize this, it becomes clear that my earlier summary of a hypothetical argument in which I adduced this passage to prove that Omeros is no epic is itself open to drastic revision. To begin with, I called "Achille" a "dialectal variant" of "Achilles," the "universal" name for the greatest of heroes. This position is correct within the confines of a discourse that regards epic as the literary embodiment of a unitary, undifferentiated "European" culture; but a modest amount of philological inquiry reveals what is wrong
with this perspective. "Achilles" happens to be the form that the name takes in English as well is in Latin, and it is through Latin that the form acquires its apparent universality. In fact, though, this form is, like "Ulysses" for "Odysseus" and "Hercules" for "Herakles," a Roman corruption of the Greek "Akhilleus." In other words, it is itself a dialectal variant. It is clear that the poem invites precisely this kind of scrutiny; consider its title, which designates the master poet of the tradition it engages not as the spuriously universal Latinate "Homer" (< Latin "Homerus"), but by the Greek "Omeros." Indeed, even here we cannot claim that the Greek form represents a fixity or an authenticity that can pass for universality; for it is not the form that an ancient Greek would have used,
I said "Omeros,"
and O was the conch-shell's invocation, mer was
both mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes
and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore.
Omeros was the crunch of dry leaves, and the washes
that echoed from a cave-mouth when the tide has ebbed.
The name stayed in my mouth.
(Omeros 1.2.3 )
The Greek word is "derived" from elements of the French Creole dialect spoken, not written, on the islands and from the natural sounds of the Caribbean environment.[41] We may find in the apparent chronological inversion that derives Greek from French a parallel to the formal device of ending an epic with a formula normally used for beginnings, though in the sounds of the natural environment the Narrator finds a linguistic source that is indeed older than language itself. What is more important is to recognize in the "demotion" of Greek to a derivative status relative to the primacy of "our Antillean patois"—itself a tellingly ironic formulation in a poem written chiefly in English—a motif repeated in at least two other central conceits of the poem with much broader thematic significance.
The first of these conceits, which descends from the idea of translatio imperii, involves the unending succession whereby formerly enslaved and colonized peoples become oppressors in their own right. The motif first appears in the early poem "Ruins of a Great House," of which Rei Terada writes: "Walcott places the British conquest of St. Lucia at the end of an originless chain of conquests including the Roman colonization of Britain."[42]Omeros neatly
extends this motif, beginning with the ancient Athenian democracy—"its demos demonic and its ocracy crass"[43] —that enslaved its fellow Greeks who inhabited the islands of the Aegean in what began as a defensive league against Persian invasion but ended as the Athenian Empire. Then Roman enslaved Greek and appropriated Greek culture as a symbol of empire, passing this iconography of power on to other enslaved peoples destined to gain empires of their own. The British Empire in turn established colonies throughout the New World and, with its fellow European powers, enslaved and exterminated the inhabitants of that world—virtually, in the case of the North American Iroquois and Sioux, completely in the case of the Antillean Aruacs and Caribs—and thereby created a fresh need for slaves, supplied by Africa, whose descendants remain oppressed by a pervasive racism particularly in the contemporary United States.[44] But even the enslaved and the oppressed are not free from complicity. A shocked Achille witnesses a slaving raid on his ancestral village carried out by another African tribe.[45] The warlike Caribs had been responsible for wiping out the peaceful Aruacs, while a regiment of freed North American slaves—the Buffalo Soldiers of the United States Ninth Cavalry—advanced the cause of white imperialism by carrying out the final defeat of the Sioux.[46] "All colonies inherit their empire's sin."[47]
For our purposes a second motif is perhaps even more important. I refer to the figure of lineage or paternity in Omeros and in epic narrative generally.
In Omeros paternity is a far from simple matter. Denis Plunkett grieves because he will die without an heir, and in an act that is half pedantry and half unrestrained imagination he makes himself the "father" of a young midshipman also named Plunkett, who, he discovers, died serving under Admiral Rodney in the Battle of Les Saintes 200 years before the story of Omeros takes place. Imagining this young man as his son does not prevent Plunkett from claiming him as an ancestor as well, by a crazy logic based on the fact that, as Plunkett will do, the young midshipman also died without leaving an heir. The Narrator of the poem stands in a similarly ambiguous relationship to his father, who died at an age younger than that of the Narrator, who thus figures himself as "older" than his father as he tells the story of Omeros.[48] Achille experiences a hallucination that takes him to Africa, where he converses with people whom he imagines as his ancestors; and as the poem ends he prepares to raise Helen's child, who may be his own son or else that of his departed friend and rival, Hector. In all these instances the relationship of fathers to sons is deeply problematized, the basis of the relationship questioned: is it primarily a biological matter, or one dependent on empathy, imaginative sympathy, mutual interest, and acceptance, or even an act of will asserting itself over reason? Is the vector of the relationship always one that follows the arrow of time from father to son, or does the son engender the father from whom he wishes to inherit?
This is, I submit, one of the central problems of the European epic from
its inception. The heroes of the Iliad are obsessed with their own ancestry and are bent on proving that they measure up to the standards set by their forebears. Telemachus's coming of age involves meeting his long-lost father for the first time in his life. Aeneas must transform himself from the dutiful son of a doomed race to the progenitor of the greatest empire in world history. Satan rebels against the appointed succession of the Father by the Son, so that Adam, fatherless himself, becomes the begetter of humankind in general. It is difficult not to see in the career of the European epic an ideal instantiation of the Oedipal warfare that for Harold Bloom constitutes the driving force behind all literature.[49] But the epigonal work can never overcome its own belatedness and derivative status. For epics such as these, genealogy—not just that of the hero, but that of the poem itself—becomes all important: by virtue of claiming legitimate descent from Homer, these epics attempt to take the place of Homer as originary texts in their own right. But on grounds of originality it is clear that the principal European epics are compromised by their membership in a clearly defined literary tradition stretching back to Homer: by virtue of this fact, they can never be original as Homer is.
By renewing this aspect of the epic tradition Omeros makes of itself a paradigm for the contemporary individual's relationship to the various cultural legacies that he or she inherits or wishes to claim. In a limited way, the poem can thus be read as an allegory of our own relationship to classical culture, or to the immigrant culture of our personal ancestors, or even of groups to which we feel or imagine a sympathetic connection rather than an ethnic or biological one. The central reflection of this arrangement is the relative lack of authority and control that Walcott's Narrator exerts over his story, in sharp contrast to the objectivity and truth that are conventionally ascribed to the epic poet. Walcott's Narrator is thus not so far removed from his reader, in that both are in the position of needing to piece together fragments of a broken past in order to make sense of their existence and experiences.
Thus Omeros presents the reader with a litmus test, or rather, with the illusion of such a test; for, like the bureaucrat of the story with which I began, any reader who seeks to apply such a test to this poem can only fail. There is in Omeros no black or white, but only black and white. Its roots are not in Europe or Africa, but necessarily in both Europe and Africa. Consequently, it is not epic or novel, but only epic and novel. This, however, it can only be if its relationship to classical epic, however we may choose to problematize this relationship, as well as to the epics of groups traditionally ignored by the canonical European epic tradition, is fully acknowledged and integrated into our reading. This is only one of the reasons that we should celebrate this remarkable poem, which is after all still new to us, still in many ways uncanny and unfamiliar—for its ability to make us see our own past anew, to force us to reflect upon our own ancestry, and to understand our own heritage—racial, intellectual, and cultural—both as it is and as we would have it be.
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