Walcott, Woolf, and Joyce

Abstract

This chapter on Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) examines the Caribbean poet’s ambivalent relationship with Anglophone modernism. It cautions that Walcott’s epic ambition to found a new tradition of Caribbean writing makes him reluctant simply to affirm or imitate the European cultural heritage of modernism. Walcott’s fraught relationship with modernism underscores his objections to the imperial violence and oppressive colonial institutions with which he associates Anglophone modernism. Focusing on Walcott’s complex use of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses, the chapter examines how the poet manipulates the literary tropes, myths, literary figures, and above all the names (of characters and places) that he borrows from his Anglophone predecessors. The chapter concludes that Walcott’s inventive refashioning of his literary borrowings allows him to gesture “through and against European modernism.” Walcott thus creates a New World literary aesthetic by sublating Anglophone modernism, “absorbing, transforming and rejecting metropolitan aesthetic practices.”