The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh 9781138063631, 9781351201599

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Series editors’ preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: from classical to postcolonial epic
1 Rallying the tropes: the language of violence and the violence of language
2 ‘History in the future tense’: genealogy as prophecy
3 ‘The artifice of eternity’: ekphrasis as ‘an-other’ epic
4 Conclusion: resistant nostalgia
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE POSTCOLONIAL EPIC

This book demonstrates the epic genre’s enduring relevance to the Global South. It identifies a contemporary avatar of classical epic, the ‘postcolonial epic’, ushered in by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a foundational text of North America, and exemplified by Derek Walcott’s Caribbean masterpiece Omeros and Amitav Ghosh’s South Asian saga, the Ibis trilogy. The work focuses on the epic genre’s rich potential to articulate postimperial concerns with nation and migration across the Global North/South divide. It foregrounds postcolonial developments in the genre including a shift from politics to political economy, subaltern reconfigurations of capitalist and imperial temporalities, and the poststructuralist preoccupation with language and representation. In addition to bringing to light hitherto unexamined North/South affiliations between Melville, Walcott and Ghosh, the book proposes a fresh approach to epic through the comparative concept of ‘political epic’, where an avowed national politics promoting a culture’s ‘pure’ origins coexists uneasily with a disavowed poetics of intertextual borrowing from ‘other’ cultures. An important intervention in literary studies, this volume will interest scholars and researchers of postcolonial studies, especially South Asian and Caribbean literature, Global South studies, transnational studies and cultural studies. Sneharika Roy is Assistant Professor of Comparative and English Literature at the American University of Paris, France. Her research focuses on comparative approaches to epic that bridge classical and postcolonial theory and literatures. She is a contributor to the MLA volume Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh and to the French encyclopaedic project Dictionnaire des littératures indiennes (Dictionary of Indian Literatures).

‘A brilliant cross-cultural reading of epic, which wrests the genre from its classical origins to demonstrate how its contemporary postcolonial incarnations unsettle the essentialist notions of nation inherent in earlier conceptions of the form. Roy’s study is also a major contribution to scholarship on Melville, Walcott and Ghosh.’ John Thieme, Professor, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, UK

‘The Postcolonial Epic makes an essential contribution to the study of world literature but more than that: its careful and in-depth presentation of the sea-borne epic, ancient and modern, American, Caribbean, and Indian, imperial, national, and postcolonial, in theory and in practice, increases our understanding of literature itself, how it works and what it can do.’ Neil Ten Kortenaar, Professor and Director, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Canada

LITERARY CULTURES OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Series Editors: Russ West-Pavlov, University of Tübingen, Germany and Makarand R. Paranjape, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

Recent years have seen challenging new formulations of the flows of influence in transnational cultural configurations and developments. In the wake of the end of the Cold War, the notion of the ‘Global South’ has arguably succeeded the demise of the tripartite conceptual division of the First, Second and Third Worlds. This notion is a flexible one referring to the developing nations of the once-colonised sections of the globe. The concept does not merely indicate shifts in geopolitics and in the respective affiliations of nations, and the economic transformations that have occurred, but also registers an emergent perception of a new set of relationships between nations of the Global South as their respective connections to nations of the north (either USA/USSR or the old colonial powers) diminish in significance. New social and cultural connections have become evident. This book series explores the literary manifestations (in their often intermedial, networked forms) of those south–south cultural connections together with academic leaders from those societies and cultures concerned. EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Bruce Robbins, Columbia University Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford Laura I. P. Izarra, University of Sao Paulo

Pal Ahluwalia, University of Portsmouth Robert J. C. Young, New York University Simon During, University of Queensland Véronique Tadjo, University of Witwatersrand

BOOKS IN THIS SERIES THE POSTCOLONIAL EPIC Sneharika Roy For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/ Literary-Cultures-of-the-Global-South/book-series/LCGS

THE POSTCOLONIAL EPIC From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh

Sneharika Roy

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Sneharika Roy The right of Sneharika Roy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-06363-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-20159-9 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Apex CoVantage, LLC

TO MY MOTHER

CONTENTS

Series editors’ prefacex Acknowledgementsxii

Introduction: from classical to postcolonial epic

1

1 Rallying the tropes: the language of violence and the violence of language

31

2 ‘History in the future tense’: genealogy as prophecy

84

3 ‘The artifice of eternity’: ekphrasis as ‘an-other’ epic

137

4 Conclusion: resistant nostalgia

181

Bibliography188 Index203

ix

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

The ‘Global South’ is a descriptive and analytical term that has recently come to the fore across a broad range of social sciences disciplines. It takes on different inflections in varying disciplinary contexts – as a mere geographical descriptor, denoting a network of geopolitical regions, primarily in the southern hemisphere, with a common history of colonisation; driven by processes of transformation (the Global South has and continues to be the site of an ongoing neocolonial economic legacy as also of a number of emergent global economies such as India, China, Brazil and South Africa); as an index of a condition of economic and social precarity which, though primarily manifest in the ‘global south’, is also increasingly visible in the North (thus producing a ‘global south’); and, finally, as a utopian marker, signifying a fabric of economic exchanges that are beginning to bypass the Northern economies, and, gradually, a framework for political cooperations, especially from ‘below’, which may offer alternatives to the hegemony of the Euro-American ‘North’. Literary cultures are a particularly pregnant site of south–south cultural analysis as they represent the intersection of traditional and modern cultural forms, of south–south (and north–south) cultural exchange, particularly via modes of translation and interlingual hybridisation, and refract various discourses of knowledge in a highly self-reflexive and critical fashion, thereby demanding and enabling an interdisciplinary dialogue with literary studies at its core. Hallowed connections between literary production and the postcolonial nation notwithstanding, transnational south–south literary connections have usually marked the (anti-)colonial, postcolonial and indeed contemporary digital epochs. Thus, literary cultures form one of the central historical and contemporary networked sites of intercultural self-articulation in the Global South. This series intervenes in the process and pre-empts the sort of bland institutionalisation which has forestalled much of the intellectual force of postcolonial studies or the more recent world literature studies. It proposes x

S eries editors ’ preface

wide-ranging interventions into the study of the literary cultures of the Global South that will establish an innovative paradigm for literary studies on the disciplinary terrain up until now occupied by the increasingly problematised areas of postcolonial studies or non-European national literary studies. The series contributes to the rewriting of cultural and literary history in the specific domain of the literary cultures of the Global South. It attempts to fill in the many gaps left by Euro-American-dominated but ultimately ‘provincial’ Northern cultural histories. The study of the literary cultures of the Global South ‘swivels’ the axis of literary interrelations from the coloniser–colonised interface which, for instance, has preoccupied postcolonial literary studies since its inception (and which inevitably informed the ‘national’ compartmentalisation of postcolonial literary study even when it averted its gaze from the colonizer). Instead, the series explores a set of ‘lateral’ relationships which have always existed but until now largely ignored – and which, in an age of digital communication and online cultural production have begun to emerge, once again, into their properly prominent position. Russell West-Pavlov Makarand R. Paranjape

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘To produce a mighty book’, says Ishmael, ‘you must choose a mighty theme.’ I would like to thank all the individuals who gave me the academic courage and emotional sustenance to attack as mighty a theme as the epic. This book emerged under the careful guidance of my doctoral supervisors, Marta Dvořák (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, France) and Neil ten Kortenaar (University of Toronto, Canada). I am deeply grateful to Marta for her unwavering faith in the epic breadth of this project and her razor-sharp advice, always laced with a sense of humour. I am also indebted to Neil who, despite being on another continent, consistently nurtured my ‘Melvillean’ predilection for a broad corpus and expansive comparative investigations. Their mentorship, support and advice, which continue well after the completion of my thesis, are invaluable. The insights of the distinguished members of my doctoral jury – Professors Claire Lanone (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, France), Claire Omhovère (Université-Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France), Alexis Tadié (Université Paris-Sorbonne/Institut de France, France) and John Thieme (University of East Anglia, UK) – were also crucial in remoulding contours of my revised manuscript. Revisiting my work three years after my defence gave me the critical distance necessary to restructure it as a book project, as did teaching at the American University of Paris and discussing epic texts with colleagues. Of immense intellectual value were my illuminating conversations with Jula Wilderberger on Greco-Roman literature and on postcolonialism with Geoff Gilbert. I am also deeply grateful to Cary Holinshead-Strick, Elizabeth Kinne, Linda Martz, Hannah Westley and Russell Williams, all of whom generously devoted time and attention to this book in its final stages. Inside the classroom, my ideas were constantly being revitalised by the energy and enlivening insights of my students, especially during intense class discussions around classical epic, postcolonial literature and literary theory. Unbeknownst to them, my students have been among my finest xii

A cknowledgements

teachers. In addition, I would like to thank the co-editors of the Routledge ‘Literary Cultures of the Global South’ series, Makarand Paranjape and Russell West-Pavlov, as well as the anonymous reader for the productive changes they suggested. I address a very special thanks to the two ‘Epicures’ of my life – my father, and my partner, Christophe. And finally, I would like to invoke the shade of Angela Roy, my mother, my Virgilian Master, who was, to quote Dante, ‘the one from whom I took/the beautiful style’. To her I dedicate this book.

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Come, Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia . . . – Walt Whitman, ‘Song of the Exposition’

INTRODUCTION From classical to postcolonial epic

Then he made me learn Virgil’s Aeneid off by heart for my Roman History class. It’s all about the founding of Rome. And it’s, oh, only twelve books long. [. . .] I could give him backchat, and anyway I’d never write good poetry because what did I know about war, death, the gods and the founding of countries? – Bernardine Evaristo, The Emperor’s Babe

The absence of a sustained investigation of the genre of epic in postcolonial theory, with the exception of Édouard Glissant’s work in French, can be explained by a paradoxical phenomenon. On the one hand, the epic is perhaps too compatible with postcolonial literature: the genre’s specific preoccupations with history, territory and identity are themes that are so ubiquitous in postcolonial studies as to make epic form almost redundant. From this angle, the dynamics of Fredric Jameson’s (1986) concept of a ‘national allegory’ or Homi Bhabha’s theory of ‘nation as narration’ ([1990] 2008: 209) would seem to characterise the entire body of postcolonial literature and not a specific literary genre. On the other hand, as the genre of imperial authority par excellence, epic is viewed as inherently incompatible with the postcolonial agenda of critically reappraising colonialism and its aftermath. As Zuleika, the diasporic Nubian slave living in 3rd-century Roman-­occupied ‘Londinium’ ironically notes, how can a genre celebrating imperial ideals of ‘war, death, the gods/and the founding of countries’ (Evaristo 2002: 85) be favourably received by the victims of colonialism, particularly ‘subalterns’ such as Zuleika herself, who have been marginalised or silenced in such founding narratives? This perceived opposition between the epic and the postcolonial condition is understandable. If the

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epic celebrates the presence of territory, ancestral history and a collectively shared culture, what relevance does the genre have in societies shaped by the violent loss of territory, history and culture? In other words, what is the status of the epic, traditionally the narrative of empire, in a post-imperial age across the literary cultures of the Global North and South? The answer to the question of epic’s place in the postcolonial world, I posit, begins with Moby Dick ([1851] 2011). Both a founding and foundling narrative,1 it is arguably the first text to use the nation-centred epic form to represent a decentred, transnational community. Unlike the national crews depicted in Virgil’s Aeneid (29–19 bce) or Camões’s Lusíads (1572), more than half of the whalers aboard the Pequod are not ‘Americans born’ but hail from ‘the rest of the world’ and each is an existential island unto himself (Moby Dick 2011: 161–62).2 Narrated by an orphan bereft of bearings and foundations, Moby Dick makes the epic, a genre of the ‘founding of countries’, a stranger unto itself. The text is also both a witness and a stranger to its times, enigmatically evoking, rather than directly referencing, 19th-century America’s central preoccupations – national patriotism regarding westward expansion, the questions of slavery’s extension to territories gained after the Mexican-American War and of the return of fugitive slaves, continuing incursions and settlement in Native American territory, the polemics surrounding union and disunion portending the Civil War, and the nascent economic hegemony of America on the world stage. Its use of literary devices of metonymic displacement, archetypical motifs, narrative digression, poetic opacity – and a self-conscious claim to epic status – allows it to simultaneously engage with, and distance itself from, these controversies. It thus acquires a certain universal applicability as a text that ‘speaks’ to our postcolonial world. The African American writer Toni Morrison (1989: 140–46), for instance, famously associates the whiteness of the eponymous whale with a denunciation of white supremacist discourse, while the Palestinian-born American critic Edward Said (2001a: 358) celebrates it as a touchstone for multiculturalism in a global era. Moby Dick has also had a deep impact – hitherto overlooked – on two contemporary authors: Derek Walcott, the Saint Lucian poet and dramatist, and Amitav Ghosh, the Indian novelist and essayist. In Omeros ([1990] 1992), Walcott castigates Melville for his depiction of the ‘imperial colour’ of the white race in Moby Dick that gives ‘the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe [italics in original]’ (184). Though Walcott sees in Melville’s representation of the whiteness of the whale a defence of white supremacy (and not a critique, as Morrison does), the fact that Moby Dick is the only text to be quoted verbatim in the highly intertextual Omeros reveals its significance, however ambivalent, for the Saint Lucian writer. In contrast, Ghosh (Lydon interview 2008) openly acknowledges and celebrates Melville’s formative 2

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influence on his Ibis trilogy (2008–2015), particularly the first volume, Sea of Poppies (2008c). In his essay ‘Of Fanas and Forecastles’ (2008b: 57), he asserts that no author was ‘more keenly aware’ of ethnic diversity aboard merchant ships, or ‘represented it to better effect, than Herman Melville’. Instead of seeing the Pequod as a nationalistic metonym of the American ship of state, Ghosh celebrates ‘this small Nantucket whaling ship’ as a multinational ‘floating Babel, with sailors from Holland, France, Malta, Long Island, the Azores, Tahiti, Sicily, the Isle of Man and China’. Ghosh’s observation points to Melville’s revolutionary reconfiguration of the two constants of the genre, nation and migration, one that would have profound implications for the ‘postcolonial epics’ of a generation of writers including Walcott and Ghosh, but also Pablo Neruda (Canto General [1950]), Édouard Glissant (Les Indes [1956]) and Kamau Brathwaite (The Arrivants [1973]), all of whom seek to give epic expression to their own nations’ experiments with decolonisation, nationalism and globalisation. In line with Édouard Glissant’s contentious hailing of the ‘white, racist, sudiste’ William Faulkner as ‘the genitor of a multilingual ­pan-Caribbean poetics’ (Weidorn 2012: 192, 184), this book identifies Melville’s notoriously polysemic Moby Dick as a foundational text for postcolonial epic. Placing Moby Dick alongside its intertextual and generic legatees – ­Walcott’s Omeros and Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy – allows for the constitution of a transcultural and transhistorical corpus that demonstrates the epic genre’s rich potential to articulate and interrogate postcolonial concerns of cultural hybridity, historical revisionism and post-independence nation-­ building across the Global North/South divide. I will frame this argument in terms of ‘migrating epic practice’, ‘political epic’ and ‘postcolonial epic’. All three can only be explained once this book’s use of the word epic has been clarified.

Whose epic? Any comparative investigation of epic should begin with two questions: Which kind of epic? Whose epic? The first question allows me to draw the boundaries of my field of investigation. This book limits its focus to only one of the many manifestations of epic across cultures: written ‘political epic’. Let us recall that the Western tradition of epic, with which Melville and Walcott engage explicitly and Ghosh dialogues more discreetly, encompasses practically any text in dactylic hexameters dealing with ‘weighty’ themes (Quintilian 10.46–58, 62). Epic thus includes not only narratives of actions of heroes who are superior to ordinary men (Aristotle I.1447b–II.1448a) such as the works of Homer and Virgil, but also historical accounts (Ennius’s Annales), philosophical and scientific treatises 3

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(Lucretius’s De rerum natura, Hesiod’s agricultural Works and Days), highly self-conscious Alexandrian epic (Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica), and even comic and ironic epic (Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lucan’s Civil War) (Toohey 1992: 1–5). Traditional conceptions of epic were therefore far more flexible than most contemporary formulations would allow. A similar taxonomical multiplicity characterises the poetics of Indian antiquity, which presents a kaleidoscopic vision of epic through the overlapping criteria of history, didacticism and versification. Sanskrit aesthetics offer no exact equivalent to the word ‘epic’, thereby calling attention to the second question, Whose epic? Or, epic as defined in which tradition? Sanskrit aesthetic theory provides categories of itihaas (narrating history or ‘what truly happened’), dharma-shastra (a treatise on dharma or righteousness) and kavya (the courtly or literary style) – to which ‘epics’ such as Valmiki’s Ramayana and Vyasa’s Mahabharata (whose written forms date between 400 bce and 400 ce) conform in varying degrees (Dandin 2011: 26–27; Pollock 2003: 60). The Bhojpuri-speaking indentured labourers depicted in Ghosh’s trilogy, however, are drawn not to Valmiki’s erudite Sanskrit epic, but to Tulsidas’s 16th-century vernacular rewriting of the Ramayana, the Ramcharitmanas. This demotic version achieved mass popularity through the constant oral performance of its narrative in the form of folk songs, dramatic re-enactments and recitations during festivals (Tiwari 2010: 80). A similarly heterogeneous lexicon can be found in the African oral tradition – referenced explicitly by Walcott through the figure of a village bard or griot in Omeros. In the West African context, the Wolof terms cosaan or woy jallore encompass genealogy, heroic exploits and the praise song, while the Mande word tariko, or spoken narrative, derives from ‘ta ¯rı¯kh’, the Arabic term for history. In the Central African region, the Duala people of littoral Cameroon refer to the epic as munia (Johnson, Hale and Belcher 1997: ix). This extremely selective cross section not only highlights the variegated conceptions of epic across and within cultures, but also demonstrates the importance of clarifying the meaning attributed to the term ‘epic’ in any comparative analysis.

Epic in traditional and postcolonial criticism I therefore deliberately limit my use of the term epic to those manifestations with an explicitly political scope dealing with a historical, mythical or, most often, euhemeristic past (myth cast as history). This stress on the past can be found in traditional epic aesthetics around the world. In his Poetics, Aristotle famously distinguishes between epic action that ‘may happen’ and a historical event that actually ‘has happened’ (IX.1451b). The Sanskrit emphasis on itihaas and the Gambian focus on tariko attest to a similar preoccupation with a communal history. These conceptions of epic and 4

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history are intertwined with a specific vision of collective identity – that of empire. To use Benedict Anderson’s ([1983] 1991: 7−36) terms, the empire is ‘imagined’ as a divinely sanctioned, dynastic realm that is predestined for a future of planetary expansion. The rise of European Romantic nationalism in the 18th century would result in a radically different representation of the community, that of the secular, egalitarian, territorially delimited nation-state. A sense of national identity is thus a relatively recent phenomenon, born out of the ‘modernity’ of Enlightenment ideals. It heralds a new, fundamentally ambivalent, collective relationship to history. The nation-state is caught between its ‘objective modernity to the historians’ eye’ and its ‘subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists’ (Anderson 1991: 5), who seek a legitimising narrative of origins. In other words, the national narrative ‘carries a contradiction between the agedness of supposed national origins and the novelty of the nation-state that is meant to rest on them’ (Hill 2008: 155). It is within the context of this shift from empire to nation-state and the historical ambivalence generated by it that modern criticism on the epic must be understood. From the 18th century onwards, the dialectic between imperial antiquity and the emerging nation-state’s ‘modernity’ becomes a constitutive principle of aesthetic judgements. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller ([1827] 2001), for example, talk of the epic as a representation of an event that is ‘completely past’, as compared to dramatic action that is ‘completely present’. In G.W.F. Hegel’s ([1835] 1975: 1044) lectures, epic appears as a genre that depicts a ‘rich’ historical event ‘in the whole breadth of its circumstances and relations’, giving the reader access to a totality, ‘the total world of a nation and epoch’. This ‘naïve’ form, Hegel contends, is ultimately at odds with modernity, whose structural features of fragmentation and alienation allow it to ‘resis[t] being grasped as a totality’ (Cunningham 2011: 50). As an Idealist preoccupied with the development of human consciousness, Hegel thus associates the epic with a ‘primitive’ expression of the universal spirit. Speaking of the literature of his own time, he claims epic poetry has ‘fled from great national events into the restrictedness of private domestic situations’, which are rendered in the prose of the novel, the new bourgeois form of the epic (1975: 1109). In his Theory of the Novel ([1916] 1988: 71, 122), the Hungarian critic Georg Lukács rearticulates Hegel’s evolutive scheme. He compares the ‘normative childlikeness’ of epic, which situates the action ‘completely in the past’ (a refrain from Goethe and Schiller), with the adult melancholy of its successor, the novel. As ‘the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given’, the novel expresses the modern individual’s ‘estrangement from the outside world’, his ‘transcendental homelessness’ in an age ‘abandoned by god’ (56, 66, 41, 89). Writing in the shadow of 5

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the First World War, Lukács speaks nostalgically of the epic as both product and reflection of a now-lost organic society where the self was unsevered from society and ‘indissoluble threads’ connected the individual to ‘a great organic life-complex – a nation or a family’ (67). Where Lukács sees alienation in the novel, his Russian contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin ([1934−1935, 1941] 2006) sees liberation from authority and ‘dialogism’. In his essays ‘Discourse in the Novel’ and ‘Epic and Novel’, both written in the first half of the 20th century, the epic is once again pressed into service as a negative foil to the novel whose place in history Bakhtin seeks to legitimise. His ‘apotheosis of the novel’ is therefore a ‘complex rhetorical strategy that is designed to counter a centuries-old critical tendency to consider the novel as an inferior or even subliterary genre’ (Booker 1995: 125). Bakhtin thus boldly celebrates the novel as a subversive, manyvoiced ‘dialogic’ form of the ever-becoming present in negative opposition to the ‘monologic’ epic, whose conservative vocation is to reinforce political authority. This opposition is best understood in the broader context of his materialist and, in a certain sense, Marxist approach to language. Bakhtin sees the history of language as a dialectic ‘struggle among socio-linguistic points of view’ (2006: 273). Language becomes an arena for the confrontational intersection between centrifugal forces of centralisation (e.g., political unification expressed through an officially recognised, ‘unitary’ national or literary language) and centripetal forces of decentralisation (e.g., ‘heteroglossia’, ‘dialogism’ as well as the decentring of political and linguistic norms in the ‘upside-down’ world of carnival and popular culture). Heteroglossia can be seen as the ‘internal stratification of any national language’ into ‘social dialects governed by the age, social group, profession etc. of the speaker’ (262–63). ‘Dialogism’ can be considered Bakhtin’s major contribution to understanding a word, a literary work or a language-system not as a stable, self-contained entity that is born ex nihilo and in isolation, but as always emerging as ‘a rejoinder in a given dialogue, whose style is determined by its interrelationship with other rejoinders in the same dialogue’ (274). Perhaps in covert reaction against Stalinist totalitarianism, Bakhtin critiques the epic style as ‘monologic’, centralising and intolerant of contestation, operating as it does from ‘from the heights of its own uncontestably authoritative unitary language’ (368). In contrast, he sees the novel as an intrinsically dialogic and subversive form. As opposed to the novel’s multi-voiced dialogism, the monologic epic exhibits the following characteristics: it is set in an inaccessible ‘absolute past’ (like Lukács, he echoes Goethe and Schiller), unlike the contemporary setting of the novel; this temporal past is axiologically valorised, giving the epic an ‘absolute conclusiveness and closedness’ in stark opposition to the novel’s ‘semantic openendedness’ and its ‘living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality’ (16, 11, 7); it deals with 6

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national experience in contrast to the novel’s focus on the personal; and it demands a ‘pious attitude’ to its ‘sacred and sacrosanct’ (16) narrative, in contradistinction to the novel, a form he claims to be inherently critical of other genres as well as self-critical and parodic. The features of epic that Bakhtin identifies are not in themselves misleading. A national past of founding fathers that eclipses the personal, an ‘absolute’ axiological disjunction between the heroic past and the present of the audience, a tendency to exclude elements such as ‘unpoetic’ linguistic registers, humour and self-critical open-endedness – these are indeed the broad characteristics of traditional epics. However, it is the spirit in which they are read that needs to be questioned. Once we grant Bakhtin his need to simplify for analytical purposes and his intention to elevate the ‘subliterary’ novel to a legitimate ‘literary genre’, we can see these epic characteristics as issues of degree rather than difference. No one will contest the premise that national epic is more public, more commemorative and rhetorically ‘grander’ than the novel. However, to say that Western epic is only public (what about Virgil’s ‘private voice’ of imperial regret, to use Adam Parry’s [1963] term?), only takes place in an inaccessible past (what about Virgil’s constant parallels between Aeneas and Augustus?), only serious (what about the comic episode with Thersites in the Iliad or Ulysses’s pun on ‘Nobody’ in the Odyssey?), only premised on rigid imitation and inimical to change (what about the major innovations introduced by Virgil, Tasso, Camões or Milton?) or only written in dactylic hexameters, terza rima or blank verse (why should prose be excluded from epic?) is reductive. Bakhtin does disservice to the epic by suggesting that there is only one of reading epic, that is, as a literary fossil incapable of evolving, a ‘completely finished, congealed and half-moribund genre’ (14). He thus forecloses the possibility that the genre’s rich traditions of intertextual, and at times discordant, dialogues between authors may be illustrative of the very dialogism he denies it. The most powerful refutations of the Bakhtin’s model of epic are those that expose the disjunction between theory (necessarily based on abstraction, but deceptive when entirely unilluminated by textual evidence) and practice (as reflected in the epic texts themselves). John McWilliams Jr. (1989: 6) argues that Bakhtin’s version of epic ‘does not allow for the rebellion and transformations that have occurred within the epic tradition itself’ through Virgil, Dante, Milton, Melville and Whitman. In fact, McWilliams convincingly demonstrates that American epic poets such as Joel Barlow, who actually did privilege static imitation (the Bakhtinian formula) over daring innovation, failed to write authentic epics: American heroic literature succeeded only after many attempts to write either serious imitative epics or burlesque mock-epics had 7

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severally failed. [. . .] In Moby Dick and the first edition of Leaves of Grass, truly New World models of heroic behavior and of the epic genre finally emerged because their authors were able to laugh at the portentous gravity of their creations. (1989: 6–7) My stance in this book is aligned with that of McWilliams. His focus on the inclusion of the comic and the ironic in early New World epics also helps explain why Moby Dick offers an attractive alternative epic vision for Omeros and the Ibis trilogy, whose postcolonial agenda of revising history is well served by comedy’s potential to function as political critique. In his exploration of Omeros as an epic, Joseph Farrell (1997: 258) flatly declares that the European epic tradition does not correspond to Bakhtin’s ‘absurdly one-dimensional idea of the epic genre’. European epic, Farrell asserts, is dialogical and constantly stages the ‘questioning and self-questioning engagement on the part of the poet with his predecessors’ (263). This selfcritical, multi-voiced dimension of epic is foregrounded by scholars such as Adam Parry (1963: 79) who, analysing Virgil’s epic in the aftermath of the Second World War, famously observed there are ‘two distinct voices in the Aeneid, a public voice of triumph, and a private voice of regret’. Similarly, David Quint (1993: 99) identifies the prophetic curses of Polyphemus in the Odyssey, Dido in the Aeneid and Adamastor in the Lusíads as powerful illustrations of ‘voices of resistance’ that contend with the epic’s ‘official version of history: they are the bad conscience of the poem that simultaneously writes them in and out of its fiction.’ Though Quint’s examples bear out Farrell’s (1997: 258) argument, Farrell is nonetheless forced to take a somewhat militant position in order to resist the overwhelming influence of Bakhtinian theory ‘that many students of literature regard as axiomatic’. It can legitimately be pointed out that the ‘self-questioning engagement’ of epic that Farrell foregrounds appears as an occasional, disquieting undertone rather than as an overt proclamation of the ‘radical reinterpretation of its own generic roots’ (252). Thus, the Aeneid’s private voice only presents ‘something subtly at variance with the stated theme of the poem’ (Parry 1963: 75) and the vanquished curses, however threatening, are never allowed to displace the linear narrative of the victorious that in the long run ‘will be shaken, not overturned’ (Quint 1993: 113). Classical epic is not as monological or closed to subversion as Bakhtin claims; but neither is it as dialogical as Farrell would like it to be. Variations of the Bakhtinian conception of epic as a discourse of authority can be found in poststructuralist and postcolonial criticism. In Of Grammatology, first published in 1967 and translated into English by Gayatri Spivak in 1976, Jacques Derrida (1976: 87) equates epic with linear 8

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discourses of progression, that is, teleological discourses as opposed to a deconstructive alternative of ‘pluri-dimensionality’ and a ‘delinearized temporality’. The ‘end of linear writing’, he contends, has created ‘uneasiness’ in academic disciplines: For over a century, this uneasiness has been evident in philosophy, in science, and in literature. All the revolutions in these fields can be interpreted as shocks that are gradually destroying the linear model. Which is to say the epic model. (1976: 87) Rather than a genre based on a tradition of texts, the epic is dematerialised into a ‘model’ of discourse. This interpretative move is at the head of a theoretical line of descent running through the work of Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Édouard Glissant. Their engagement with epic is informed by Derridean deconstruction as well as Bakhtinian dialogism, prompting them to cast the epic as the epitome of the monologic authority of European colonialism. In his essay ‘On Violence’ that appears in The Wretched of the Earth, published a year before Algeria’s independence in 1962, Martinique-born Frantz Fanon (2004: 14) associates colonisation with the epic (read ‘epic model’) because the coloniser proclaims his arrival to be the absolute beginning of history. Fanon also echoes Bakhtin’s idea of the absolute past of founding fathers since the colonist inaugurates a golden age of progress: The colonist makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is invested with the very beginning: ‘We made this land.’ He is the guarantor for its existence: ‘If we leave all will be lost, and this land will return to the Dark Ages.’ (14−15) Commenting on this passage and Fanon’s depiction of colonial history as discourse thirty years later in Culture and Imperialism, the PalestinianAmerican thinker Edward Said (1994: 268) foregrounds its Foucauldian, discursive implications: ‘Fanon penetratingly links the settler’s conquest of history with imperialism’s regime of truth, over which the great myths of Western culture preside’. But this epic self-representation carries the seeds of its own destruction. Premised on Western Reason and the humanist faith in man’s perfectibility, the high idealism of the colonial odyssey ‘cannot survive juxtaposition with its quotidian debasement by European settlers’ (268). Homi Bhabha’s brief remarks on epic bring more powerfully to the fore Said’s intuitive sense of a split between the discursive representation 9

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of colonial reality as epic (high mimetism) and its ‘quotidian debasement’ (low mimetism). In ‘Of mimicry and man’, Bhabha ([1987] 2008) explores this split in terms of ambivalence rather than antithesis, returning to Fanon’s emphasis on the psychopathological implications of colonialism, particularly the Freudian deconstruction of the unitary human subject as fragmented between the conscious and the unconscious. For him, the settler narrative of the colonial odyssey is not just patently at odds with reality but latently with itself. Its conscious high mimetism already bears unconscious traces of low-mimetic farce and parody: The discourse of post-Enlightenment English colonialism often speaks in a tongue that is forked, not false. If colonialism takes power in the name of history, it repeatedly exercises its authority through the figures of farce. For the epic intention of the civilizing mission, ‘human and not wholly human’ in the famous words of Lord Rosebery, ‘writ by the finger of the Divine’ often produces a text rich in the traditions of trompe-l’oeil, irony, mimicry and repetition. In this comic turn from the high ideals of the colonial imagination to its low mimetic literary effects, mimicry emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge. (2008: 122) Here, the epic appears as a discourse of colonial ‘intention’ (another ‘epic model’). Nonetheless, Bhabha powerfully demonstrates that even the most monologic of cultural statements – in this case, that of post-Enlightenment colonial discourse – are enmeshed in the complicated materiality of administrative control and the dialogic mixedness of registers of the contact zone that is the colony. The enunciative conditions of colonial practice, that is, the repetition of post-Enlightenment claims in the context of colonial hierarchy, exposes the disjunction between Britain’s ‘benign’ intentions and its repressive policies.3 While colonial discourse unwittingly reveals its own epistemological contradictions and the enunciative hybridity engendered through the repetition of European cultural statements in non-European contexts, the postcolonial novel consciously deploys this latent enunciative ambivalence as a deliberate strategy of resistance and dissidence. As Bhabha argues later on, ‘What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it imitable’ (125). Bhabha’s sensitivity to the unconscious, subversive potential of any text aligned with political authority can be seen as both echoing the Bakhtinian (2006: 276) monologic model and critically nuancing 10

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it through the precisely Bakhtinian insistence on words and discourse as not being the isolated ‘private property’ of one speaker, but already plunged into ‘a dialogically-agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value-judgements, and accents’. From this standpoint, Fanon’s colonial odyssey is a ‘living utterance’, despite its claims to being a timeless truth. Having taken ‘meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment’ (i.e., in the colony), epico-­colonial discourse is already ‘an active participant in [a] social dialogue’ set up between the coloniser and the colonised, even if, as Bhabha observes, it disavows its participation in (and inevitable contamination by) such dialogue. Bhabha’s most valuable contribution to understanding classical and postcolonial epic, however, is his contention that culture is ultimately ‘located’ not in the spatiality of the nation-state but in the temporality of enunciation. The temporality involved in representing the nation’s people, Bhabha (2008: 208–9) explains, is itself split into a ‘double-time’. Thus, ‘in the production of nation as narration’, there is ‘split’ between the ‘pedagogical’ and ‘performative’ temporalities of the national narrative. Like monologic discourse, pedagogical temporality reduces people to objects and signs of the past in an authoritative national discourse of stable historical origins, complete in itself. Akin to dialogic utterances, performative temporality empowers people as subjects and signs of the present, whose self-signification emerges through their interaction with the contemporary moment as an ongoing process. The ‘people’, then, are located in the interstices between these two temporalities as ‘they represent the cutting-edge between the totalizing powers of the “social” as homogeneous, consensual community’ (similar to Bakhtin’s centrifugal forces) and decentralising tendencies of ‘contentious, unequal interests and identities within the population’ (analogous to Bakhtin’s centripetal forces). Bhabha’s attention to the split within genres of authority in the very act of discursively representing the nation is highly pertinent to postcolonial epic. His focus on temporal models and the novel, however, leads him away from considerations of the epic as a genre. Though one may infer that for Bhabha epic is merely a conceptual shorthand for colonial self-representations predicated on authority doomed to farcical failure, his problematisation of the nation as a discursive construct (a more productive reformulation of Derrida’s ‘epic model’ for literary scholars) opens new avenues in contemporary epic theory and informs this book’s conception of political epic, as will be demonstrated in the next section. If the colonial odyssey is, in a certain sense, comic or parodic in its failure to live up to its ideals for the Anglophone Bhabha, the phenomenon of slavery and its after-effects make the colonial epic a narrative of devastating tragedy for the Francophone Martinican Édouard Glissant. His 11

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vision is informed by his first-hand experience of Martinique’s economic and cultural depletion, the roots of which lie in the colonial history of the slave trade. French ‘départementalisation’ (the process conferring the rights and status of a metropolitan French ‘département’ to former colonies overseas) and American-led globalisation has only further aggravated the island’s fragile situation of dependency on foreign aid. In reaction to this context of dispossession, Glissant (1999) sees in the epic a form of individual affirmation and collective reinscription in a chaotic, violent – but also ­exciting – global narrative. In Faulkner, Mississippi (published in French in 1996 and translated into English in 1999), he rehabilitates the epic tradition by insisting on both the urgency of epic production in contemporary society and its enduring relevance through a revitalisation of what he perceives to be its obsolete poetics and politics. In a postcolonial world where traditional communities are ‘physically threatened in their very existence’, it is the epic that allows for the acknowledgement of historical trauma and gives most powerful expression to ‘the human and very tacit right to be recognized as self’ (1999: 221). Yet such expression can only take place once we accept that ‘the epic has dried up, it is from this very drought’ that a ‘new epic’ has been born (49). Glissant’s argument concerning the necessary ‘creative destruction’ (Weidorn 2012: 192) of epic is his seminal contribution to contemporary epic theory, along with his use of heuristic concepts from postcolonial and global studies. These ideas are part of his lifelong philosophical and poetic mission to rejuvenate the epic ambition of giving voice to a people (specifically those of his own Caribbean archipelago) in a global world. For a ‘chaos-monde’ buffeted by the opposing forces of neocapitalist homogenisation and creolising heterogeneity, Glissant proposes in his 1993 treatise Tout-Monde a ‘poetics of relation [italics in original]’ in order to conceptualise this potential of the imagination that leads us to consider the ungraspable globality of this kind of chaos-monde at the same time that it helps us to pick out details, and in particular to sing of our place. (quoted in Prieto 2010: 117) In Faulkner, Mississippi, Glissant offers nothing less than a theoretical manifesto of postcolonial epic as a means ‘to sing of our place’ within the worldtotality. Like the German Romantics, Lukács and Bakhtin, Glissant defines the epic comparatively. Unlike them, he defines the epic not through external negative comparison with another genre, but through an internally differentiated comparison within the genre through two forms of epic: the ‘excluding epic’ and the ‘concluding and participatory epic’. To return to the 12

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problematic of the local ‘detail’ and the world-totality, one may say that in the world of traditional epic (less chaotic and globalised than our ‘chaos-monde’), the individual specificities and ‘details’ of a national culture are imagined as universals for the world-totality. Thus, in Glissant’s (1999: 221−22) ‘excluding epics’ (a comparative concept that includes Homeric and African epic, Indian legends, Berber songs, Egyptian myth, and bardic poetry ‘across the world’), ‘human communities conceived of themselves in ethnic and almost generic terms, as much as [through] the “universality” of their individual cultures.’ By ‘defining each community through exclusivity’ and perceived ethnic singularities, such ‘grandiose epic [. . .] excludes the other’. In the Caribbean, however, the singular does not need to be extended outwards to the totality, since the multifarious world-totality is already fractally contained within ‘our place’. The Caribbean’s histories of displacement resulted in cultural mixing and a new conception of identity as Relation, not root. Creolisation and the process of Relation not only produced ‘a meeting, a shock, a cultural métissage’, but ‘a heretofore unseen dimension that allows one to be here and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free upon the sea, in harmony and exiled’ (quoted in Cailler 2011: 144). In the ‘concluding and participatory epic’ of ‘the worldcommunity’, ‘the “universal” would be the finite and infinite quantity for all cultures and all humanities’ (Glissant 1999: 222). The Caribbean is thus the paradigmatic instance of the ‘world community’ and of the Relation, prefiguring the ongoing creolisation of both postcolonial societies and former colonial powers. Instead of the intolerant totality of the traditional epic’s ‘root identity’, the concluding and participatory epic articulates the decentred, rhizomatic ‘relation identity’. As an expression of the Relation, ‘an open totality’ and ‘multiplicity in totality’ (quoted in Britton 1999: 12), such an epic is part of Glissant’s broader philosophical project of performing ‘an eminently Hegelian critique of Hegel’ (Hallward 2001: 72). We are also faced with the inescapable dialectic of excluding versus participatory epic, even if the latter is characterised by its Hegelian transcendence of the ethnocentric terms of the former. Indeed, in Glissant’s theoretical scheme, excluding and participatory epics sound more like discourses of imperial monologism (the Derridean ‘epic model’) and postcolonial dialogism respectively than bodies of intertextually linked but individually distinctive texts. In this respect, he seems to be continuing the postcolonial impulse to dematerialise epic as discourse and offer in its stead a combative and utopic counter-discourse: ‘Daring to offer as a hymn, repetitive and pulsating but revitalized, to the notion as well as to the word: “community”! [italics in original]’ And, later, ‘Let us strike up this epic song, and take care not to sacrifice ourselves to it uniquely, because it takes care not to be univocal’ (1999: 221, 222). 13

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Political epic and migrating epic practices Much of the criticism explored so far rests on a largely stable conception of the epic as the expression of ‘a nation and an epoch’ (Hegel), a ‘monologic’ form (Bakhtin) and the ‘grandiose epic that excludes the other’ (Glissant). In this book, I argue for a re-evaluation of this Hegelian legacy by reconceiving the form as a more unstable, unsettled entity characterised by the enunciative ambivalence that emerges when narrating the nation (Bhabha). To do so, I begin by reading against most Romantic and post-Romantic scholarship that takes Homeric epic as the implicit or explicit generic gold standard. Instead, I emphasise Virgil’s role as a founding figure of the epic of the imagined national community. If Homer is the father of Western epic, Virgil is the initiator of a paradigm change in Homeric epic that would come to be known as ‘national epic’, to use Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra’s term. Rejecting the Homeric ‘scheme of life by which the hero lives and dies for his own glory’, Virgilian national epic ‘replaces a personal by a social ideal’.4 Thus, Virgil revealed a new field for glory and for sacrifice. The cause which deserves the one and inspires the other was not for him an ideal of individual prowess but of service to Rome. [. . .] Virgil revealed an entirely new use for epic in an age for which the old heroic outlook was too anarchic and anti-social. With him, the epic becomes national, and though later it was to extend its scope beyond the boundaries of nations and of continents, his was the first step in a new direction. (1945: 13) Before proceeding further, one must note that this political dimension is also a question of reception: medieval Christian readers such as Dante were far more interested in the Aeneid’s allegorical aspects, and Humanists from Petrarch onwards concentrated on its style and epic poetics. A concertedly ‘political’ approach to the text appears to be rather recent and can be traced back to Abbé Vatry’s 18th-century commentary (Norden [1901] 1999: 114). Still, Bowra’s attention to Virgil allows us to counterbalance the overwhelming and somewhat deceptive focus on Homer in much of the Romantic scholarship on the epic. As Bowra (1945: 11) reminds us, ‘the whole theory of epic’ in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance ‘was built upon Virgil’s practice’. Though not original in its argumentative lineaments, his book From Virgil to Milton (1945) is exemplary in the clarity of its formulation of national epic. Virgil’s meditations on the costs of war that must be borne with Stoicism were perhaps of immediate relevance to 14

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Bowra, who published the book a month before the end of the Second World War, but its nuanced emphasis on the imperial politics of epic as expressed through a Virgilian paradigm is highly pertinent for postcolonial scholars. A fundamental aspect of Virgil’s practice is intertextuality. His political epic is founded on its incorporation of Homeric traditions that are made to migrate to the Roman context. One cannot overstate Virgil’s debt to Homer (for the subject matter of Troy and stylistic conventions) and to Ennius (the first Roman poet to adapt Homer’s Greek hexameters to Latin and depict Roman ‘history’ from Aeneas’s arrival in Italy to Ennius’s own time). The first six books of the Aeneid recount Aeneas’s Odyssean wanderings across the Mediterranean after the Fall of Troy and the second set of six deals with the Iliadic theme of war between Aeneas and the native Latins of Italy where the hero must found Rome. Yet, the Aeneid is also a profound departure from Homeric epic. As Bowra (1945: 15) observes, it deals with ‘something much larger than the destinies of individual heroes’. Characters and events in the story are vested with a political significance ‘outside themselves’ and the immediate context of the poem. Virgil, by ‘linking his fabulous hero Aeneas to his living patron Augustus’, also creates a new kind of epic time, radically different from the Homeric ‘absolute past’ inaccessible to the listeners of the epic song. Rather than the Romantic and Bakhtinian conception of an ‘absolute past’, Virgil evokes a kind of ‘present perfect’ (in the grammatic sense of an action that began in the past but whose effects continue into the present) that is in direct contact with the contemporary world of his readers. This ‘bracket[ting of] past and present in a single whole’ creates a self-fulfilling teleology peculiar to political epic, in which Virgil is able to display ‘the abilities which made it [Rome] great in his own day’, all the while suggesting that they ‘existed in it from the very beginning’ [emphasis mine] (1945: 15). As a form of national temporality, Virgilian epic illustrates Bhabha’s (2008: 212, 208) notion of a ‘nationalist pedagogy’ legitimised by a ‘pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past [italics in original]’, giving rise to the static and monolithic representation of a ‘pre-figurative self-generating nation, extrinsic to other nations’. Bowra’s theory of national epic, particularly its focus on epic’s subordination of the individual to national concerns and its teleological temporality extending into the present, inflects this book’s conception of political epic. However, I do not entirely subscribe to Bowra’s understanding of national epic as an intertextually harmonious, undisturbed whole. Even Bowra fleetingly recognises the tensions between the migrating Homeric intertexts (necessary for the cultural legitimacy they lend to Rome) and the Roman root identity: ‘the leading hero and his followers are not Romans 15

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nor even Italians but Trojans whose ancestral connection with Italy is dim and remote’ (1945: 34). Building on Bowra’s intuitive impression, this book uses the term ‘political epic’ to designate that kind of epic typified by enunciative tensions between its political genealogy, one that represents a ‘self-generating nation, extrinsic to other nations’ (Bhabha 2008: 208), and its poetics of emulative intertextuality, one that is intrinsically embedded in the cultures of other nations. Despite Bowra’s conception of national epic as a specifically written form firmly rooted in a Eurocentric tradition bookended by Virgil and Milton, his formulation possesses remarkable comparative scope. In fact, it is well suited to the African and Indian contexts of oral epic traditions. In contradiction to the spirit of Bowra’s (1952: 11) dismissal of the Zulus as incapable of ‘heroic poetry’ and as having ‘never advanced beyond panegyric and lament’, the politicisation of a mythical narrative typical of national epic is a salient feature of African oral epics. Though set in the historico-mythical past, the stories of African griots constitute a ‘major vehicle’ through which contemporary socio-political issues of the Mande peoples are ‘constantly debated’ (Johnson 1999: 21–22). Like Virgil who links Aeneas to Augustus (albeit in the text itself), griots may extend the genealogies of heroes to include the names of patron-listeners reputed to be descendants of these heroes. Thus, in his recitation of Sunjata, the bard Dembo Kanute not only mentions the name of Seni Darbo, a government official hosting Kanute’s performance, but also contrives to make one of Darbo’s ancestors ‘the star’ of a chase scene involving the Sunjata and Sunmanguru, eclipsing the eponymous hero himself (Okpewho 1979: 69–70). Similarly, V.S. Pathak speaks of the ‘Ramayanization or the divinization of history’ (quoted in Sreedharan 2004: 329) in Indian courtly production. Sheldon Pollock cites the example of the courtly poem Prthvirajvijay, dated to the 12th century and produced in the Ajmer court, which is built on the political parallels between Prithviraj and Vishnu/Ram (1993: 275). Pollock has also shown how medieval Indian kings from the 12th century onwards encouraged a ‘mythopolitical equivalence’ between themselves and Rama, the earthly manifestation of Vishnu and hero of the Ramayana. Traces of this tradition of ‘inventing the king as Rama’ (263) are visible today in temple ruins and inscriptions as well as extant historical narratives and courtly poems. The troping of the past as an allegory of the present – a structural principle of political epic – would continue into the modern era in the Indian context. In the 19th century, Indian indentured labourers (girmitiyas) would cast their situation of separation from the motherland in the narrative terms of the past: they saw in the Ramayana’s ‘key structure of banishment’ an allegory of their own leave-taking of India and associated ‘the presence of demonic

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ra ¯ksasas’ in the epic with the natives of destinations such as Fiji (Mishra ˙ 2007: 29). However, it was not Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana that enjoyed ‘textual supremacy’ among the Indian diaspora, but Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, a fact Amitav Ghosh underscores in Sea of Poppies (314). This medieval, regional version of the Ramayana, rendered in demotic Hindi, was imbued with the egalitarian vision of Bhakti and resonated deeply with the vernacular folk culture of the villagers who became migrants. Rather than the royal propaganda of ‘inventing the king as Rama’, their tactic of preserving cultural traditions and articulating the foreign in terms of the familiar can be described as ‘inventing the girmitiya as Rama or Sita’. The Ramayana is a migratory text par excellence. As A.K. Ramanujan (1999: 134) puts it, it has been ‘translated, transplanted, transposed’ through ‘hundreds of tellings’. Not only did the Sanskrit text by Valmiki migrate across India’s vernacular cultures to produce Tamil, Telegu, Awadhi, Gujarati and Bengali rewritings (among a vertiginous host of others), its Tamil ‘version’ circulated and served as a model for Southeast Asian variants, notably the Thai Ramakien and the Malaysian Hikayet Seri Rama, while Tulsidas’s Awadhi Ramcharitmananas travelled to diasporic Indian communities abroad. This brings us to the capital role played by migration in the conditions of political epic’s (re)production and reception. In the Western context, Virgil’s politicisation of the epic tradition reflected in the Aeneid would become the pan-European standard of imitation for Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) and Torquato Tasso’s Liberation of Jerusalem (1581) in Italy, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) in England as well as Camões’s Lusíads (1572) in Portugal. The potential split between a narrative of the nation produced through interpretative and writerly practices of migration is more pronounced in the Western tradition, which is characterised not by the circulation of regional rewritings of epic master-texts typical of India and Southeast Asia, but by the ‘creation’ of ‘new epics’ (though intertextually indebted to Virgil) with the explicit intention of expressing the national temperaments of Italy, Britain, Portugal etc. This creates a problematic peculiar to the genre that I will foreground by briefly counterpointing Hegel’s and Whitman’s models of epic. Hegel’s conception of epic is premised on the ‘modern’ understanding of the genre that emerges from the 18th century’s preoccupations with nationalism and industrialisation. For Romantics and post-Romantics, the epic, specifically Homeric epic, is problematic precisely because of its apparently unproblematic representation of collective identity as ‘primitive’ and ‘naïve’ (the German Romantics), ‘organic’ (Lukács), ‘unitary’ and centralising (Bakhtin) and universalising (Glissant) – rendering it out of joint with

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individual experiences of alienation from the modern state and the subaltern’s marginalisation in official versions of history. These appraisals seem to suggest an almost natural homology between centripetal forces of national identity and the centralising literary form of epic devised to represent it. As Hegel (1975: 1108) puts it, ‘For an epic proper, as is the case with Homer, is a work which finds language for all that a nation is in its deeds, and expresses it with direct simplicity once and for all’. Hegel’s Romantic conception of a transparent, spontaneous relationship of ‘direct simplicity’ between Homer’s epic language and a ‘primitive’ people compels him to disqualify Virgilian epic and its successors as ‘artificial, deliberately manufactured’ and ‘self-conscious’, when it should be ‘unintentional and artless’ (1975: 1010). This leads to the virtual dismissal of practically any kind of emulative intertextuality, evidenced in his disparaging remarks about Camões’s Lusíads: ‘we cannot but feel the cleavage between the national subject-matter and the artistic formation derived partly from antiquity and partly from the Italians, and this destroys the impression of the primitive originality of epic’ (1975: 1108). Here the ‘impurity’ of the Portuguese epic’s Greco-Roman and Italian roots seems to undermine the Romantic conception of individual genius and a ‘pure’ nationalism organically deriving from a common genetic well-spring. For all his malaise, Hegel uncovers – only to then deprecate and disavow – a paradigmatic paradox at work in European epic: the importance of mobile, migrating traditions to the rooted, nation-centred epic genre. It would take an American writing on the other side of the Atlantic to acknowledge and audaciously celebrate what Hegel calls the ‘cleavage’ between national politics and extranational poetics as the operative principle of epic. In ‘Song of Exposition’ (1871), Walt Whitman offers a kind of literary declaration of independence for American epic: Come, Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia; Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts, That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings; Placard ‘Removed’ and ‘To Let’ on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus: Repeat at Jerusalem – place the notice high on Jaffa’s gate and on Mount Moriah; The same on the walls of your Gothic European Cathedrals, and German, French and Spanish castles, and Italian collections; For know a better, fresher, busier sphere – wide, untried domain awaits, demands you. (2002: 165) 18

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Whitman cleverly recasts European epic in America’s image as a migrant, an ‘illustrious émigré’ (2002: 167), and provides a visual correlative to the invisible literary processes of migrating traditions. By avowing, rather than denying, the fact that the evolution of European root-centred epic has always been one of routes and circulation, he is able to legitimise the epic muse’s acclimatisation in the New World as the ‘natural’ culmination of a series of dislocations. Whitman’s vision is not new and can be seen as the New World’s rearticulation of Old World notions of translatio imperii and translatio studii, the transfer of power that necessitates the transfer of a preexisting body of cultural discourse to legitimate this power. Nonetheless, what is ‘artificial’ and aesthetically marring for Hegel becomes normative and revitalising for Whitman. Put another way, the American poet asserts the necessity of a centrifugal poetics of migration for the centripetal politics of the nation. This ‘migrating epic practice’ highlights the inherently dialogic nature of any intertextual engagement as ‘a rejoinder in a given dialogue’ even as these migrating traditions are appropriated and redeployed as ‘concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization’ (Bakhtin 2006: 274, 271) in the form of political epic. This fundamental divide between message and medium threatens to undermine the very legitimacy of epic as the genre whose vocation is to ‘fin[d] a language for all that a nation is’, to borrow Hegel’s formulation. This book therefore approaches political epic not as an internally consistent, cohering monolith but as a genre of enunciative ambivalence wherein an avowed national politics coexists uneasily with a disavowed migratory poetics. Political epic is a product that turns its back on its process. It is a fiction of political fusion that veils its poetic frictions, a narrative of national integration at odds with the proliferation of cultural sources that is the pre-condition of its production. Seeing political epic as split between centripetal politics and centrifugal poetics clears a space for a reassessment of the genre’s role in postcolonial literature and theory. Rather than framing analyses of classical and postcolonial epics in dialectic terms of monologism and dialogism (Bakhtin), excluding and participatory epics (Glissant) or epics of winners and losers (Quint), this book follows the criss-crossing filigree-work of ‘political epic’ and its ‘migratory’ intertextuality that overlays both classical and postcolonial texts. These terms allow me to articulate the book’s central, chiasmatic argument: while traditional epics employ a hybrid poetics of migration to express a monocultural politics of nation (a contradiction it must disavow), postcolonial epic strategically foregrounds this rift as paradigmatic of epic itself (the Whitmanian move). It thus allows the genre to come full circle by employing a poetics of migration to articulate a politics of migrating identities irreducible to a single national norm (a complementary homology it openly advertises). Furthermore, by compounding the tensions and 19

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disjunctions already present in political epic, it makes the tradition more amenable to contemporary explorations of the profoundly disruptive nature of colonialism as experienced at all levels – individual and existential, familial and genealogical, national and cultural. This argument has important ideological implications. In the construction of political epic, elaborate intertextuality, a constitutive feature of the genre itself, is depicted and ‘contained’ as an expression of textuality, dissociated from political ideology. In its denial of the political implications of the enunciative hybridity (i.e., intertextuality of cultural dialogue) in which it is engendered, political epic is an emblematic illustration of the ‘radical rhetoric of separation of totalized cultures that live unsullied by the intertextuality of their historical locations, safe in the Utopianism of a mythic memory of a unique cultural identity’ (Bhabha 2008: 50). As a result of the double movement of translatio studii and translatio imperii, the ‘alien’ is appropriated, the ‘foreign’ domesticated, in a narrative whose politics are premised on a monocultural identity. Still, traces of unassimilated alterity remain: the fact that Aeneas, a Trojan, initially does not speak the Roman language betrays his Homeric, non-Roman origins as does the controversial presence of the pagan gods of Greco-Roman antiquity in the Christian epic narrative of Camões. While political epic advertises its prestigious, hybrid cultural origins through its literary intertexts, it denies the ‘intertextual temporality of cultural difference’ that ‘ensure[s] that the meaning and symbols of a culture have no primordial unity or fixity, that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew’ (Bhabha 2008: 55). In contrast, postcolonial epic explicitly recognises the intertextual temporality of cultural difference, but comes up against a different set of representational dilemmas. Despite its double embrace of migrating poetics and a politics of mobile identities, it still seeks ‘to sing of our place’ (Glissant quoted in Prieto 2010: 117). But if this ‘place’ is not that of the nation-state (suspect because of its ethnocentric tendencies and structural inadequacy in a transnational world), from which ‘place’ can the postcolonial epic song spring? Scholars such as Stuart Hall ([1989] 1990) and Bhabha answer that it is not in the spatiality of the nation, but in the temporality of enunciation that identity and culture emerge. However, postcolonial epic reveals a more complicated scenario. While the erudite postcolonial writers and their narrating alter-egos remain committed to validating ‘the intertextual temporality of cultural difference’, they must also contend with the equally valid yearnings of their unmoored subaltern characters. Thrust into the bewildering ‘chaos-monde’ (Glissant in Prieto 2010: 117), such characters actively desire the reassuring stability of political epic’s conception of the ‘primordial unity or fixity’ of culture. Thus, ambivalence and enunciative splits, however different, characterise 20

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both political and postcolonial epic. Such observations caution us against an ‘evolutive’ understanding of epic which would cast postcolonial epic as more ‘sophisticated’ than its ‘naïve’ and ‘pre-modern’ classical counterpart (this reading would constitute another DerridEan ‘epic model’ of telos), pointing instead towards a more dialogic interaction between classical and postcolonial epic.

From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh The tendency to consider the epic as a theoretical abstraction – one that runs through the work of the German Romantics, Lukács, Bakhtin and Bhabha – also informs much of recent scholarship on Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis trilogy as epics. Christopher Sten (1996), for instance, offers the compelling, richly suggestive argument that Moby Dick is a ‘hybrid epic’, blending the ‘ancient’ martial epic traditions (the Iliad, Beowulf) and the ‘modern’ epics of spiritual quest (the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost), but does not cite these primary sources. When scholars such as Julia Hoydis (2011) or Jacob Crane (2011) see Sea of Poppies as ‘a grand historical epic of trade and travel’ (331) or an ‘epic of the Indian Ocean diaspora’ (2) respectively, the term ‘epic’ is used less to refer to a tradition than to indicate a narrative on an ‘impossibly large scale’ (Irvine quoted in Hoydis 2011: 328). In a similar vein, Lance Callahan (2003) points out that studies on Omeros ‘bandy about the names of many canonical writers’ but privilege ‘generalization’ over ‘detailed’ close readings. As a result, ‘Most readers seem to sense correlations between Omeros and the epic tradition, but are often unable to validate these correlations by reference to specific passages or techniques’ (60–61).5 Heeding Callahan’s call to return to the epic texts themselves, I re-embed Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis saga within the continuum of a self-consciously intertextual Western tradition spanning the Iliad, the Aeneid, Orlando Furioso, the Lusíads and Paradise Lost. In Ghosh’s case, the Indian epic traditions of Valmiki’s Ramayana and Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas also constitute the intertextual canvas against which the genre’s development will be foregrounded. This comparative approach grounded in close readings will be conjoined with a specifically postcolonial perspective on contemporary epic indebted to Bhabha, but also to Glissant’s (1999) study of the epic dimensions of William Faulkner’s work. For Glissant, Faulkner is the forerunner of postcolonial epic. More precisely, his work is a bridge between ‘excluding epics’ and ‘concluding and participatory epics’, and, as such, prefigures ‘this other epic’ of ‘the difficult Relation’. The ‘difficult Relation’, I venture, is a more penetrating and productive formulation of postcolonial epic than ‘concluding and participatory epic’, not only because Glissant provides concrete 21

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examples of its functioning through his close readings of Faulkner, but also because it compels us to attend to ‘opacity’. The Glissantian Relation is founded not only on Caribbean creolisation, but also on opacity or ‘the irreducible density of the other’ (quoted in Dash 1995: 144). Opacity is thus the pre-condition of the Relation: ‘The ingredient of opacité creates the cultural diversity without which the ideal of relation (cultural interrelating) is not possible’ (Dash 1995: 143). In the epic of the ‘difficult Relation’, opacity appears as an epistemological and ontological condition as well as a set of textual representations responsive to ambivalence, contradiction and silence. Glissant sees Faulkner’s work as obsessively and opaquely circling the historically-repressed truths of expropriation and slavery in the American Deep South without explicitly articulating them, thereby constantly deferring their full disclosure. Faulkner’s work is therefore ‘a monument around a secret to be known, pointing it out and hiding it all at the same time’ (1999: 5).6 Glissant considers himself and other postcolonial writers (such as Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier) as extending Faulkner’s elliptical practice in their own, often opaque, explorations of the historical trauma of slavery and the Middle Passage that Faulkner leaves unsaid in his work. Glissant also acknowledges the fact that Faulkner’s writing, with its exclusive focus on Yoknapatawpha (a fictional equivalent of Lafette County, Mississippi), ‘did not cover the world, as Hemingway had’ (53)–or even as Melville had, half a century earlier. In stark contrast to the rooted life and work of Faulkner, the widely travelled Melville, notorious in his time as ‘the man who lived among cannibals’ (Rollyson, Paddock and Gentry 2007: v), shares obvious affinities to the global lives led by contemporary postcolonial writers and their transnational narratives. Melville’s, Walcott’s and Ghosh’s sustained engagement with travel as a thematic preoccupation and way of life is striking. New York-born Melville’s four years at sea would provide him with material for much of his prose production including exotic travel narratives (Typee and Omoo) and philosophical allegories based on sea stories (Mardi and Moby Dick). His trip to the Near East in 1856–1857 would furnish subject matter for his spiritual epic Clarel. Walcott’s literary production largely parallels his geographical movements. His early years spanning 1931–1950 spent in Saint Lucia are marked by modernist poems reflecting a local focus on the island (Epitaph for the Young), a preoccupation that would continue to mark much of his oeuvre (Another Life, Sea Grapes, The Star-Apple Kingdom). His stays in various Caribbean islands from the 1950s to the 1970s nourish the pan-West Indian sweep of the plays he wrote during this period (Henri Christophe, Drums and Colors, Ti-Jean). Once he started obtaining teaching assignments at prestigious American universities, an increasingly cosmopolitan emphasis on America 22

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and Europe is discernible, though often balanced by the nostalgic longing for Saint Lucia (The Fortunate Traveller, The Arkansas Testament, Omeros, The Prodigal). Ghosh, the son of a Bengali diplomat of Bangladeshi origin, has always led a nomadic life. His shuttling in and out of India is a condition shared by his diasporic characters. The cosmopolitan breadth of his novels coexists, however, with a strong interest in local culture, notably that of: Egypt and the Middle East (The Circle of Reason, In an Antique Land); the South Asian region including Burma, Malaysia and China (The Glass Palace, the Ibis trilogy); as well as his native Bengali culture (The Calcutta Chromosome, The Shadow Lines, The Hungry Tide). Both Walcott (Sharp interview 2011) and Ghosh (Silva and Tickell interview 1999) have strongly resisted attempts to place their works in broader comparative paradigms such as postcolonialism, insisting on the local specificities of their native Saint Lucian Creole and Bengali cultures respectively. Both deliberately place themselves in indigenous literary genealogies. Walcott ([1974] 1999) has situated his work within his self-baptised tradition of ‘Adamic’ New World writers comprising Walt Whitman, Saint-John Perse and Pablo Neruda. In the Caribbean historical context of erasure and loss (the genocide of the local Arawak tribes and the dislocation of African slaves and Asian immigrants), Adamism refers both to the absence of history (the self-willed amnesia of the slave-descendant) and a ‘belief in a second Adam, the recreation of an entire order’ (Walcott [1974] 1998: 40). Ghosh (2003: 6), for his part, prefers to see himself as the modest inheritor of an immense regional revival that profoundly marked his native Bengali culture: the Bengal Renaissance of the 19th century. Spearheaded by Bengali intellectuals who appropriated European ideas of ‘modernity’, it marked an era of cultural effervescence and laid the foundations of Indian nationalism. Both Walcott and Ghosh thus embody the classic diasporic ambivalence between localism (not nationalism) and cosmopolitanism, aggravated by their paradoxical displaced positions as expatriates writing outside the nations they celebrate. The dynamics of place and displacement, nation and migration, roots and routes are therefore central to understanding the works of Melville, Walcott and Ghosh, in terms of their individual practices as writers, as well as the affinities between them. In its analysis of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick as anticipation of postcolonial epic, this book also shifts the emphasis from Faulknerian deferral studied by Glissant to Melvillean displacement. In my attention to the writers’ representation of incongruously displaced histories and geographies, I follow recent criticism concerning Melville’s engagement with slavery (Karcher 1980; Rogin 1985; Freeburg 2012), the Black Atlantic (Mackenthun 2004), the Indian Ocean (Ghosh 2008b; Dimock 2017) and the Pacific (Wilson 2000). Faulkner represents Yoknapatawpha 23

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territory, a transparent allegorical equivalent to Lafayette County, Mississippi, as a microcosm of America (region-as-nation); Melville portrays the circumnavigating Pequod as an allegorical ship of state (extranational ship-as-nation) whose multinational crew already embodies the world (not just the American ship-as-world but world-as-transnational ship steered by America). Equally apparent is Melville’s open celebration of the disjunction between his migrating subjects (subaltern sailors) and the migrating traditions of epic evoked through a rampantly intertextual network of references to: Egyptian, Indian and Greek mythology; Native American myths; the Bible; Scandinavian sagas; Dante Alighieri, the knight-errantry of epic romance; and John Milton. Moby Dick’s claim as a predecessor of postcolonial epic also relies on more subterranean displacements and elusive allegories of lost origins, beginning with the ship’s name: ‘Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now as extinct as the ancient Medes’ (105).7 The Puritan massacre and near-total extermination of the Pequot tribe in 1637 is not explicitly articulated, but enigmatically displaced through the ship’s name, undergoing multiple dislocations as it travels across the extraterritorial maritime areas of the North and South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea and finally the Central Pacific, where it is destroyed by Moby Dick. Yet, the seas contain their own displacements of historical sins, as Melville knows well. Anticipating Paul Gilroy’s paradigm of the Black Atlantic (1993), Melville describes the Cape of Good Hope as a ‘black sea’, ‘a great, mundane soul’. Its tides conjure a historical (white) ‘conscience’ that is ‘in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it bred’ (288). The Pacific as an arena of American expansionism and its overreach is also freighted with historical ambivalence. Thus, Ishmael celebrates the American presence in the Pacific, boasting that pioneering whalers paved the way for merchants and missionaries in Polynesia (151). However, as the site of the Pequod’s apocalyptic sea-burial, the Pacific is also the stage for expansionist outreach that becomes overreach in a ‘self-dispossessing’ encounter (Wilson 2000: 84) with the White Whale. The presence of the Native American Tashtego, the African American slave figures of Pip and Fleece the Cook as well as the South Sea native Queequeg aboard the Pequod, without forgetting the incidental Indian lascar, the European sailors as well as the Nantucket ‘Isolatoes’ (162) – all displaced from their native environments – makes the drifting and existentially adrift Pequod a ‘fit roosting place’ for ‘homeless selves’, not least of which is Ishmael (288). Derek Walcott and Amitav Ghosh, both attentive readers of Melville, also craft epics in which displacement functions at multiple levels. Both follow in Melville’s footsteps by using the epic, a genre of place and nation, to 24

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articulate historical experiences of displacement and migration. Walcott’s Omeros commemorates the Middle Passage endured by the Africans who were forcibly made to cross the Atlantic and work as slaves in the Caribbean, including in Walcott’s native island of Saint Lucia. Though written in 1990 at a time when the slave trade of the colonial era had given way to the Caribbean’s neocolonial dependency on the American economy, Omeros seems predominantly preoccupied with the past of the Black Atlantic. The Ibis trilogy also looks back to the past at a time when India’s sights were trained on its present and future. It was published in the years spanning 2008–2015 at a time when a neoliberal India preferred turning its back on memories of colonial oppression and socialist nationalism to face a present and future of increasing self-assertion on the world stage as a member of the emerging BRICS economies. However, in Sea of Poppies (2008c), Ghosh looks back to the 19th century, chronicling the maritime experiences of South Asian ‘lascar’ sailors on board European merchant vessels and Indian indentured labourers who signed contracts to work on far-flung colonial plantations. As successors in the global labour market to the African slaves depicted by Walcott, the girmitiyas’ historical experience is also an oceanic one. The trauma of deracination is compounded by their existential fear of losing caste by crossing the ocean, which was therefore considered to be ‘Black Water’ or Kala Pani. Like Melville’s ship-as-world, the Ibis contains a multiplicity of nationalities and religions so that the world itself seems condensed into the ship. In the next two books, Ghosh turns to the South China Seas, depicting Indian and Western opium merchants in the cosmopolitan opium-hub of Canton in River of Smoke (2011) and exploring the experiences of Indian soldiers in the British army who participate in the First Opium War in Flood of Fire (2015). While I refer to all three books in this study, much of my attention will be devoted to Sea of Poppies,8 which shares particularly strong affinities with Moby Dick and Omeros. Its depiction of the transnational, maritime movement of indentured labourers and lascar sailors echoes that of subaltern whalers in Moby Dick and of African slaves commemorated in Omeros. This thematic convergence as well as the texts’ generic engagements with epic undergird the rationale of the corpus. In addition to the representation of the Middle Passage in Omeros and the Crossing of the Black Water in Sea of Poppies, less overt forms of displacement are at work. Walcott shows how all the characters living in Saint Lucia are geographically and historically displaced, including the white, Western characters. Due to his mixed origins, colonial education and cosmopolitanism, Walcott’s poet-persona is afflicted by the displacement experienced by both the Caribbean people (who, like him, have descended from African slaves) and by the Western expatriates, whose privileged lifestyle allows them to love the island at one comfortable remove from its poverty. 25

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Walcott and his poet-narrator, like Melville and Ishmael, must also negotiate the centripetal politics of place and the centrifugal poetics of intertextual epic through a combination of resistance and appropriation, resulting in a ‘spurning embrace’ of classicism (Taplin 1991: 223). Most disruptive of all – and most Melvillean – is the disconcerting way in which the poetpersona ‘carries’ both West Indian geography and the history of the slave trade with him: he sees a Homeric figure in a local Saint Lucian storyteller; he projects his imaginative reconstructions of the Middle Passage onto European capitals and even onto the interiors of the American apartment of his Greek lover. Though less metapoetic and pyrotechnical, undercurrents of deeper displacements are also at work in the Ibis trilogy, notably a reinscription of the Black Atlantic into the Indian Ocean space through the Ibis’s history as a slaver (Crane 2011; Roy 2017). The Indian ‘factory’ in the opium capital of Canton is a miniaturised, but also metonymically displaced, version of the Indian subcontinent. In a manner analogous to Walcott’s poet-persona who ‘carries’ historical trauma during his wanderings, Deeti ‘transports’ her memory and culture through mobile ‘memory temples’. Both Deeti and the Caribbean poet-narrator share affinities with Virgil’s refugee-prince Aeneas, the bearer of Trojan traditions, symbolised by the statues of his household gods who ‘travel’ with him throughout his wanderings. The exiled Aeneas with his Trojan gods, the seafaring Ishmael who circumnavigates not only the world but its literature, the globe-trotting Saint Lucian poet-narrator haunted by history and the diasporic Deeti with her multiple shrines of memory – all unhoused selves in search of a home – reflect the travelling traditions of epic. These epic characters embody the tensions between the centripetal politics of rootedness of epic and the centrifugal forces of uprooted, migratory traditions that produce it. However, the sites where the intersections between the politics of the nation and the intertextual traditions of migration are most clearly visible are those recurrent narrative devices that link past to present, individual action to a civilisational backcloth, specifically the conventions of the epic simile, ­genealogy-paraded-as-prophecy and ekphrasis. As pivots between the narrative and ideology, these mechanisms aestheticise and mythicise epic action by setting it against the natural world (through epic similes), against history and imperial destiny (through genealogy and prophecy), and against the epic work itself (through ekphrasis). This book therefore explores three aspects of epic: language as reflected in the use of epic tropes, politics as manifested in the conjoining of genealogy and prophecy to articulate a teleology of history and aesthetics as expressed in ekphrastic comments on the status and role of the epic text itself.

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Outline The first chapter, ‘Rallying the tropes: the language of violence and the violence of language’, focuses on the representation of violence in classical and postcolonial epic. It retraces a shift in preoccupation from physical violence in classical epic to linguistic and representational violence in postimperial epic. This generic development can be largely explained by the influence of poststructuralism on postcolonial epic. The methodological framework brings together the classicist model of Achilles’s choice formulated by Susanne Wofford, Indian classical and neo-Romantic aesthetics of the symbol as well as postcolonial poetics of allegory theorised by Frederic Jameson and Jahan Ramazani. The chapter takes as its starting point Susanne Wofford’s argument that classical epic figuration is characterised by a disjunction between the disruptive finality of death on the one hand, and the tropes of continuity drawn from the natural world of seasonal renewal on the other. I argue that such disjunctions and linguistic violence, while implicit in classical epic, are explicitly brought to the fore in postcolonial epic, which juxtaposes incommensurable orders of reality through multidirectional ‘heterotropes’ as well as self-knotting negative and hypothetical similes. Wofford’s attention to Don Quixote’s confusion between trope and reality offers a particularly relevant paradigm for postcolonial epic’s revision of one-dimensional, hegemonic systems of representation (that disavow the unstable interpretations capable of emerging from them) through disruptive, ‘mad’ counter-interpretations. Here, the Quixotic use of the comic and commercial registers as well as metalinguistic tropes problematise the differential ‘realities’ of colonialism experienced across divides of power, culture, space and time. In ‘ “History in the future tense”: genealogy as prophecy’, I turn my attention from poetics to politics. As the title implies, anachronism is central to political epic which casts the historical past (genealogy) as a predetermined, projective futurity of imperial predestination (prophecy). I explore how postcolonial epic critically engages with the entanglement of tenses in political epic through counter-prophecies proclaiming either the end of empire (curses) or forging alternative diasporic destinies (neoVirgilian visions). While I recognise the significance of ships as sites of alternative ‘oceanic’ genealogies of the Black Atlantic and the Indian Ocean World, I argue that their poetic and political potential lies less in their purely spatial dimension as transnational counter-sites to the nation-state, than in their capacity to spatialise and thus resist the linear sequentiality of imperial time and capitalist time (both ‘destroy’ the social worlds that exist before them by relegating them to obsolescence as ‘prehistory’ or

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‘pre-modernity’). However, postcolonial epic is not a straightforward castigation of capitalism. The strong correlation between maritime and social mobility promoted in postcolonial epic reflects a recentring of global history on the subaltern worker and entrepreneur as well as a re-engagement of the forms traditionally used to represent capitalism and globalisation, notably the ‘romance of navigation’, to use Jonathan Lamb’s (2001) term. Rather than demolishing the Virgilian teleology of imperial anachronism, postcolonial epic can be seen as exploiting it for its own purposes. If a text can be so contrived as to make tenses interchangeable for an imperial project, then it can also be reconfigured for post-imperial programmes of political and cultural change. Political epic’s conceit of temporal reversal (i.e., genealogy-as-prophecy) thus paves the way for postcolonial epics, in which reversible tenses and genealogies disrupt political and epistemological hierarchies. This emphasis on self-reflexivity lays the ground for the final chapter, ‘ “The artifice of eternity”: ekphrasis as “an-other” epic’. Scholars of epic ekphrasis have traditionally cast the ekphrastic description of a visual object as the ‘generic Other’ of the epic’s verbal narrative. Postcolonialism criticism reformulates this otherness in terms of race by seeing the ekphrastic conflict between image and word as reflective of the political and discursive struggle between coloniser and colonised. Resisting this binary, I offer a reading based on ‘anotherness’ that highlights the deep complicities between postcolonial authors and European art, which is cast as much as a target as a weapon of postcolonial critique. Using Michael Riffaterre’s (1981: 114) argument that description always shifts the focus to ‘another object’, I demonstrate how art in political and postcolonial epic is a sign that displaces the diegetic narrative towards another narrative, offering an allegory of culture, history and of the epic text itself. As sign of culture, postcolonial epic ekphrasis critiques European art as a marker of hegemony, even as it uses the same European art to lead an attack on two fronts: one that undermines nativist conceptions of a national art ‘emancipated’ from Europe’s yoke, and one that critiques the cultural amnesia of the post-literate world of multinational capitalism. In addition, the complex Virgilian formulation of ekphrasis as an allegory of history for the winners (Aeneas’s shield), but also the vanquished (the Carthaginian walls as a memorial), prefigures postcolonial preoccupations. It is Virgil’s c­ounter-emphasis on an elegiac memorial that postcolonial epic brings more powerfully to the fore through Melville’s depiction of Ahab’s doubloon (a miniature shield) that will sink with the Pequod, Walcott’s reinterpretation of Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream as an allegory of the Middle Passage and Ghosh’s Mauritian smriti-mandir or ‘memory temple’ that commemorates the ancestral crossing of the Black Water. Aeneas’s inability to understand 28

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the future events depicted on his shield also anticipates the interpretative dilemmas highlighted by postcolonial epic. Postcolonial epic thus marks a change in ekphrastic preoccupation from the representation of reality (mimesis) to the grounds of representation itself (mimicry as defined by Rei Terada). Unlike political epic that monumentalises the origins of a culture, of a nation and of the text, postcolonial epic through its use of ekphrastic mimicry problematises, rather than promotes, such ‘myths of origin’ by revealing the origin to be a myth in itself. The three generic conventions of epic imagery, genealogy and ekphrasis offer different entry-points to investigate how postcolonial writers attempt to give aesthetic form to the violence of colonial and postcolonial history, as well as reconcile the trauma of the past with the agency of the postcolonial subject. Yet, any deviation or departure can only be understood in the context of a tradition of stylistic emulation. Focusing on epic conventions confronts readers with the paradox that it is at the most conventional moments of textual imitation that epic authors can give expression to the most radical forms of innovation and experimentation. In a curious twist, in order to appreciate the unconventionality of epic authors, classical and postcolonial, we must turn to the conventions of epic.

Notes 1 In ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’ (1850 [1984]: 1154) Melville asserts that ‘all excellent books were foundlings without father or mother’. He thus anticipates the New World trope of Adamism (Lewis 1955) and the postcolonial predilection for what Valérie Loichot (2007) calls the ‘orphan narratives’ of Saint-John Perse, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Édouard Glissant. 2 However, the fact that non-Americans outnumber Americans on board the Pequod should not be considered a celebration of transnationalism. On the contrary, this is a deeply nationalist statement justifying America’s stewardship of the world. The Pequod is troped as a metonym for America’s whale fishery, army, navy, and merchant navy (161). In all four cases, ‘the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world [. . .] generously supplying the muscles’ (161). 3 Bhabha’s argument here draws from Michel Foucault’s concept of repeatable materiality. In ‘The commitment to theory’ ([1989] 2008: 33), he summarises Foucault’s concept thus: ‘the process by which statements from one institution can be transcribed in the discourse of another.’ Thus, ‘any change in the statement’s condition of use’ and ‘any alteration in its field of experience or verification’ can ‘lead to the emergence of a new statement: the difference of the same.’ 4 Bowra’s emphasis on Virgil’s politicisation of the epic tradition, however, should not draw attention away from a different kind of political dimension present in Homeric epic, highlighted by Gregory Nagy in The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero and Hero Worship in Archaic Greek Poetry (1999). Nagy sees the Iliad and the Odyssey as marking a radical break from

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the Cyclic poems (the Cypria, Aithiopis, Little Iliad, Ilou, Persis, Nostoi and Telegonia). He argues that the 8th century bce (i.e., the period during which the Homeric epics acquired their stable form) was a ‘watershed in the evolution of Hellenic civilization’, marked simultaneously by the ‘strong, localized traditions (cult, law etc.)’ of decentralised city-states and a ‘commensurately strong’ translocal ‘trend of intercommunication among the elite of the city-states – the trend of Panhellenism’ (1999: 7). If Homeric epic seems to create a politically unifying cultural ‘geography’ of pan-Hellenism, Virgil’s significance for postcolonial epic lies in the innovative ways in which he foregrounds history, particularly his politicised reworkings of the Homeric conventions of genealogy, prophecy and ekphrasis. 5 Valuable exceptions include: John McWilliams Jr.’s exploration of Moby Dick in the chapter ‘Till a Better Epic Comes Along’ in The American Epic (1989), pp. 187–216; Lance Callahan’s study of Omeros, especially the chapter ‘The Color of Shadows’ in In the Shadows of Divine Perfection (2003), pp. 57–108; and Patrick Colm Hogan’s chapter ‘Outdoing the Colonizer: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Walcott’ in Empire and Poetic Voice (2004), pp. 157–96. 6 In his sensitivity to the concept of saying the unspeakable (without saying it), Glissant seems to be influenced by Toni Morrison’s (1989: 11–14) revaluation of foundational American literature as expressing ‘the unspeakable spoken’ through ‘absences [that] are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves’. 7 However, the Pequots were not as extinct as the ancient Medes of Persia (100 bce–550 ce) in Melville’s time. Survivors of the massacre ‘lived in Stonington, Connecticut, a few miles east of New Bedford [where Ishmael embarks on the Pequod]’. The remaining Pequot tribe ‘produced a score of seamen and whalemen’ (Barsh 2002: 80), though by 1850, they ‘were considerably mixed with white and negro blood’ (DeForest quoted in Barsh 2002: 87). 8 All references related to the Ibis trilogy therefore refer to Sea of Poppies (2008c), unless indicated otherwise.

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1 RALLYING THE TROPES The language of violence and the violence of language

From the Iliad on, the disjunction between the represented action of characters in epic (in war, in love, and in moral struggle) and the figurative claims made about that action by the poet becomes a defining feature of epic poetry. – Susanne Wofford, The Choice of Achilles

Epic similes and other forms of elaborate figuration are a strikingly consistent stylistic feature of epic poetry across literary cultures of the Global North and South. Critics have tended to focus on the aesthetic significance of the genre’s stylistic devices. James Whaler (1931: 1035−37), for example, identifies the following functions of epic similes: they explain, emotionalise, ennoble or anticipate the action, or provide relief from it. In his notes on the translation of the first volume of Valmiki’s Ramayana, Robert P. Goldman (1990: 100) underscores a similar purpose of epic similes that divert the reader’s attention from the story to the objects of comparison. Imagery, particularly metaphor, is also ‘a salient literary poetic feature’ of African heroic poetry (briefly evoked by Walcott in Omeros through the bardic figure of the griot), including the epic traditions of the Tanzanian Bahaya people, the southern African Basotho tribes and the West African Mande groups (Mulokozi 2002: 193, see also n1). However, recent criticism has foregrounded the ideological power of epic language. Far from being exquisite but superfluous ornaments, the figurative devices of epic are seen as instruments of the aestheticisation of violence that reflect the author’s stated and unstated ideological concerns. Poetic choices in classical epic, as Susanne Wofford (1992) has persuasively argued, are thus profoundly political. Yet, the use of language to depict violence also entails a certain violence done to language in both political and postcolonial epic, making epic tropes a valuable site to investigate the tensions and contradictions embedded in the political projects of both forms. While political epic 31

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seeks to naturalise and legitimise the violence of war even as it downplays the linguistic violence necessary for such ideological justifications, postcolonial epic shifts our attention from physical violence to a double-edged rhetorical violence that serves to both elevate its subaltern characters to the proportions of epic and expose the fault lines of the postcolonial project of nationalist identity-construction. A pertinent example of the aestheticisation and legitimisation of military violence appears in Book Two of the Iliad. When Agamemnon must motivate his troops, battle-worn after nine years, and persuade them that war is more thrilling ‘than sailing hollow ships to their dear native land’ (1991: 2.537−38), the narrator must lead a parallel verbal assault. Six successive epic similes (2.539−64) fan out to figuratively amplify the rising swell of enthusiasm among the soldiers’ ranks. The shining armour of the soldiers is compared to a blazing forest fire; their debouching on the plain to the migration of birds, to leaves and to flies around milk pails; the noise of their horses’ hooves to thunder; and the leadership of their officers to that of herdsmen guiding their flock. As the soldiers amass ‘tribe on tribe’ on the Scamander plain like the waves of ‘winging birds’ landing together on tidal flats, the action is gilded with a certain epic splendour: Armies gathering now as the huge flocks on flocks of winging birds, geese or cranes or swans with their long lancing necks—circling Asian marshes round the Cayster outflow, wheeling in all directions, glorying in their wings—keep on landing, advancing, wave on shrieking wave and the tidal flats resound. So tribe on tribe, pouring out of the ships and shelters, marched across the Scamander plain. (2.544−50) Even if Homer’s poetic representation does not express the kind of teleological temporality and imperial ideology that would appear in Virgilian epic, it lays the groundwork for the depiction of violence in Western political epic. Homeric epic tropes have become a definitive convention of Western epic poetry: the similes of bees, flowers and leaves in the citation above have been reincorporated by Virgil, Dante, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Luís de Camões and John Milton in their respective national epics. Homer’s comparison between a falling hero and a poppy in the Iliad (e.g., Gorgythion’s death, 8.349−53) is reworked by Virgil to describe Euryalus’s death in the Aeneid (2010: 9.497−502), by Ariosto to depict Dardinello’s defeat in Orlando Furioso ([1532] 1975: 18.153.1–8), by Camões to evoke Inês de Castro’s dying moments in the Lusíads ([1572] 32

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2008: 3.134.1−8) and by Tasso to portray the fall of Lesbin, Solyman’s page, in the Liberation of Jerusalem ([1581] 2009: 9.85.6−86.8). Homer’s celebrated Iliadic simile comparing men to leaves (6.171−75) reappears in Virgil’s description of the dead souls in the underworld (6.352−55), in Tasso’s depiction of Latinus’s death at the hands of Solyman (9.39.1−8) and in Milton’s evocation of Satan’s host in Paradise Lost ([1667] 2005: 1.301−4). Epic tropes thus illustrate the paradox of political epic that lays claim to a mythic past of originary purity, uncontaminated by foreign influences, even as its enunciation is enacted through hybrid intertextuality. Travelling epic tropes derived from multiple cultural texts are enlisted to serve a politics of a rooted, monocultural collective identity. Similar intricate figuration characterises Valmiki’s Ramayana (2009: 18.6), evidenced by the description of Ram’s monkey-warriors being ‘like great black clouds, dark as collyrium’. When they are struck down, ‘they resembled mountains falling as their summits were shattered by thunderbolts’ (57.71). Valmiki’s use of monsoon imagery with elephants in rut, rain-clouds and storms would migrate across later Sanskrit texts to become a stock device of the courtly kavya tradition (Lienhard 1984: 23; Peterson 2003: 101−4). As Sheldon Pollock (2006: 14) argues, Sanskrit kavya’s efficacity in articulating ‘a form of political consciousness and culture’ facilitated its spectacular migration across the Indian subcontinent and beyond, as far as Vietnam and Java in the transregional space of the ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’. Even in the medieval period, ‘when, with new forms of vernacular literary culture everywhere making their appearance’, the ‘Sanskrit literary culture [. . .] reign[ed] supreme’ (Pollock 2006: 95). Firmly associated with political authority, its migrating kavya conventions would promote the imperial aspirations of regional empires. Classical analogies across epic literatures serve to legitimise political power through the cultural authority of their intertexts, but they can also have subversive undertones. Agamemnon’s need to convince his troops to fight already attests to the tension in epic between the pacifist stance of returning home (nostos) and the martial ideal of glory (kleos). This ambivalence is also present in Valmiki’s Ramayana. In an extremely atypical passage in the sixth Book of War, the author ironically counterpoints the pastoral bliss of a river with fish and swans against a muddy, weed- and vulture-infested river bank. In a complex system of parallel figurations, the battleground is initially compared to a river and ‘its great trees’, but the pastoral moves inexorably towards a paroxysm of the grotesque and the morbid: Indeed, the battleground resembled a river. Masses of slain heroes formed its banks, and shattered weapons, its great trees. Torrents of blood made up its broad waters, and the ocean to which it 33

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flowed was Yama. Livers and spleens made up its deep mud, scattered entrails its waterweeds. Severed heads and trunks made up its fish, pieces of limbs, its grass. It was crowded with vultures in place of flocks of hamsas, and it was swarming with adjutant storks ˙ instead of sa ¯rasa cranes. It was covered with fat in place of foam, and the cries of the wounded took the place of its gurgling. Truly, it resembled a river at the end of the rains, swarming with hamsas ˙ and sa ¯rasa cranes. (2009: 46.25−8) Valmiki’s use of irony and repulsive imagery can be seen as a powerful castigation of war, even if his final flourish of figuration (which returns to the positively connoted swans and cranes, rather than vultures and storks) reinforces an aestheticised vision of violence. This celebration of violence is the stylistic norm of the work. Susanne Wofford opens a productive avenue to investigate such figurations of violence in The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (1992). While traditional criticism of classical literature focuses on the aesthetic harmony underlying the apparent contrast between figure and action, Wofford sees such dissonances as symptomatic of the epic’s deepseated ideological contradictions. She posits that it is the disjunction and contradiction between figure and action that represent a ‘defining feature in epic poetry’ (1992: 7). In order to ‘guarantee their cultural authority and power’, epic poems not only ‘accommodate and allegorise the specific ideological requirements of their societies, but make that accommodation visible’ in ‘the moment of separation’ between action and figure that enacts ‘a series of displacements of their own poetic claims’ (3, 2). To illustrate, Wofford cites the example of the epic simile of the falling poppy flower used to evoke the death of Gorgythion, a son of Priam. By creating analogies between the hero’s irreversible death and the repeating natural cycle of seasons, this simile glosses over the finality of the hero’s death and legitimises it as heroism. Such figurations suggest that, like the trees and flowers which will bloom again in spring, the hero will live on in song (a symbolic mitigation of his death only appreciated by the readers, not the hero). Thus, natural imagery, she explains, serves to disguise the human cost of epic ambition by transforming the linear temporality of mortal existence into the iterative temporality of the seasons. Often, nature imagery also involves references to the world of everyday work (shepherding, carpentry, fishing etc.) serving as a reminder of the civilisational ideals for which the Homeric heroes are fighting. The disjunction between linear action and the iterative figure is thus changed into deeper continuity or likeness, suggesting that there is a profound harmony between the natural and human worlds. As Wofford puts it, 34

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Taken together, the figures in the story suggest that heroic action gains its significance through a connection to the larger civilisation and its ongoing life, a connection defined as political and moral, and shaped by ideological imperatives. These figures represent the peaceful world left behind – the alternative Achilles does not choose. They claim, in an attempt to join two alternatives that the poem has put asunder, a continuity and moral correspondence between heroic and nonheroic life. (5) It is this disjunction between the figure, suggesting continuity, and the act of dying, linked to the absolute disruption of the life cycle, that Wofford sees as characterising epic poetry. The fact that epic violence constantly requires an accompanying figurative justification betrays an awareness that heroic action is not inherently justifiable and in itself does not contain the meaning attributed to it externally by tropes. The yoking together of martial action and natural imagery stages a confrontation between two choices, war and peace, one which Achilles will resolve in his unequivocal decision to live a short, glorious life rather than a long, anonymous and peaceful one. For Wofford, Achilles’s decision dramatises the epic’s generic vocation of immortalising the hero’s deeds and death in battle. His choice is thus paradigmatic of epic style: it is the choice the epic poet himself must make. Wofford’s argument draws from contemporary Marxist theory, specifically Louis Althusser’s conception of ideology and Fredric Jameson’s attention to the resolution of ideological contradictions in texts. She connects the ‘stress in Althusserian Marxism on the unacknowledged structuring of one’s world’ through ideology to the Jamesonian emphasis on ‘the unacknowledged structuring of a poem’. Extending their ideas, she argues that the ‘political unconscious’ of epic poetry works to suppress its contradictions (the human cost of a war it must glorify) through an imaginary resolution (the hero’s immortality through song). Its figurative economy thus ‘conceals assumptions, represses or submerges the costs of the claimed resolutions and thereby makes their solutions seem natural’ (19). The disjunctions are latent – it is for readers like Wofford to bring their ideological contradictions to the surface. However, her focus on disjunction is extremely fruitful in an area she leaves unexplored – postcolonial epic tropes. In this chapter, I apply Wofford’s analysis of classical tropes to postcolonial texts. In contrast to the ‘unacknowledged’, concealed contradictions of classical epic, the tensions and potential malfunctioning of the figurative machinery in Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis trilogy are manifestly advertised by the authors, both as political and aesthetic statements. While political epic seeks to veil and naturalise the deep-seated disjunctions 35

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between action and figure, postcolonial epic self-consciously aggravates and problematises them by subjecting the epic language of violence to varying degrees of linguistic violence. If implicit disjunction is the ‘defining feature’ of political epic, explicit disjunction, then, is the salient trait of postcolonial epic.

Felled trees and fallen heroes Ever since Aristotle, Western rhetoric has been marked by a power struggle between simile and metaphor, largely to the benefit of the latter. While both rely on the interplay of like and unlike, the comparison made by the simile is explicitly assumed in connectors including ‘like’, ‘even so’ or ‘as’ – and not suppressed, as is the case of implicit comparisons or metaphors. Metaphors are therefore considered more sophisticated and intellectually demanding (Wheelwright 1959: 103). Jakobson and Hale (1956: 76–82) implicitly rearticulates the Aristotelian privileging of metaphor by linking metonymy to prose and realism (based on the referent) and metaphor to poetry and romanticism (more attentive to the sign). However, the Russian linguist also implies that similes are more difficult to analyse than metaphors. The simile performs a double duty of comparison and contiguity: while exhibiting the property of similarity associated with metaphor, it also operates on the metonymic principle of horizontal contiguity and the syntagmatic arrangement of successive items. In the context of epic, each epic simile is both a comparison and a self-contained part of the whole, a miniature world within the simile-studded constellation that is the epic poem. By ostensibly inviting readers to look for resemblances, the epic simile ultimately asks readers to reassemble the parts and reassess their views of the whole, thereby partaking of both the metaphoric and metonymic functions. It is against this backcloth of specific epic similes and broader ‘wholes’ of political agendas that I will analyse the use of vegetal imagery, a stock epic comparison, by Melville, Walcott and Ghosh. Tree imagery not only serves to foreground their aesthetic and ethical positions, but can also help identify the primary epic model for each author. For Melville, it is the Miltonic tradition of the ironic simile that is ideally suited to his ambivalent exploration of questions of subjugation and supremacy in the polemical period preceding the Civil War. For Walcott, it is Virgil’s poetics of metaphoric fusion and metamorphosis that allows him to reject the binarisms of both colonialist and nationalist discourses in favour of a deliberately unsettling stance of historical revisionism and moral relativism. For Ghosh, it is Rabindranath Tagore’s synthesis of classical Indian aesthetics and European Romanticism that allows for the articulation of Indian experiences of colonial realities within an indigenous philosophical tradition that questions the 36

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nature of reality itself. All three authors create highly unstable, heterotopic figurative economies whose seamed disjunctions are profoundly at odds with the seamless conjunctions to which classical epic aspires. These intertextual ties between classical and postcolonial poetics merit detailed analysis in a comparative framework. Melville is drawn to the epic simile because it guides readers towards a metonymic conception of his epic where intertextual references serve as parts to be constantly reassembled in our understanding of the whole. When Melville compares Ahab to a tall tree, he is imitating Homer’s systematic comparisons in the Iliad between falling trees and dying heroes including Simoisius (compared to a poplar, 4.553−64), Imbrius (compared to an ash, 13.212−16), Asius (compared to an oak and poplar, 13.452−58), Hector (compared to an oak, 14.489−96), Sarpedon (compared to an oak and poplar, 16.570−74), and Euphorbus (compared to an olive tree, 17.59−68).1 Though Melville uses this classic epic simile of conjunction, he selects its most disruptive and violent form: the tree struck down by lightning (as compared to trees reintegrated back into the living world through their wood used for chariots or ships, as is the case for the similes used for Simoisius, Asius and Sarpedon). Ahab’s body-length scar running from head to foot is associated with the seam running down a tree ‘branded’ by lightning and marks ‘a crucifixion in his face’ (2011: 164, 165); he is ‘the most ­thunder-cloven old oak’ (166), an elm that risks being struck by lightning (583) and ‘a blighted fruit tree’ that casts its ‘last, cindered apple to the soil’ (621). When Ahab refuses to renounce his obsession with Moby Dick, he is described in the following manner: As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab’s many of the mariners did run from him in a terror of dismay. (583) Melville’s epic similes of trees struck by lightning are in fact strongly reminiscent of Homer’s evocation of Hector’s death, the only episode to occasion the additional detail of Zeus’s lightning bolt: As a huge oak tree goes down at a stroke from Father Zeus, ripped up by the roots and a grim reek of sulphur bursts forth from the trunk and a passerby too close, looking on, loses courage— the bolt of mighty Zeus is hell on earth—so in a flash 37

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for all his fighting power, Hector plunged in the dust, his spear dropped from his fist. (14.489−95) Hector’s heroic apotheosis occurs in his moment of death. Zeus’s divine intervention also suggests a sense of purpose as the hero’s death would seem to have its place in the broader cosmic scheme of things. In contrast, disharmonious disjunction characterises Ahab’s figuration. The utter destruction suggested by the lightning bolt already lessens, if not eliminates, the sense of cyclical renewal that Wofford speaks of. Rather than being symbolically reintegrated into civilisation, his existential isolation (‘lone, gigantic elm’) and role as an aberration of nature (‘branded’) is constantly foregrounded. Melville further denaturalises the conjunctive aestheticisation between death and glory through proleptic irony, a typically Miltonic device. It is Milton who definitively establishes the potential of the simile to act as a trope of irony, with its double-edge of ostensible glorification and underlying degradation. When Milton describes Satan’s spear as dwarfing the tallest Norway pine that will be hewn for ‘the mast/Of some great admiral’ in Paradise Lost (1.294), one may assume that this is a heroic, aestheticised representation of the biblical arch-villain. His status as the military commander of the fallen angels only makes the secondary analogy with the admiral’s ship more appropriate. However, the fact that Satan, who has just been cast out of heaven into hell, requires this spear as a prop to ‘support uneasy steps’ (1.295) highlights his physical weakness, but also his lack of moral solidity. The epic scholar would also discern ironic echoes of epic antagonists such as the giant Polyphemus, associated with a mast in the Odyssey (9.323), and Tancred as well as Argante, whose lances are described as ‘knot-hard masts high in the air’ in the Liberation of Jerusalem (6.40.2). This nautical image of the ship’s mast serves Melville’s purposes well. During Ahab’s first encounter with Moby Dick, the captain is ‘dismasted’ by Moby Dick, but ‘like his dismasted craft’ which he replaces with a new ship, his ivory leg is simply substituted by another one. Though this prosthetic leg is made of ivory, the wood imagery continues to carry connotations of spiritual sterility and death: ‘this dead stump I stand on now’ (207). Like Milton’s simile which proleptically announces Satan’s failure to corrupt mankind and spite God, Melville’s tree and lightning imagery already foretell the tragic end to Ahab’s nihilism. Melville’s strategy is therefore anti-Homeric, foregrounding disjunction where Homer creates naturalising conjunctions. The choice of Achilles – and the choice of epic – to go to war is systematically troped as destructive and disjunctive, while the pacifism of nostos is constantly associated with regenerative imagery which Ahab rejects. Thus, before chasing the whale, Ahab 38

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is like the ‘thunder-cloven oak’ which will still offer ‘a few green sprouts’ to welcome ‘the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May’ (166). By the third and last day of the fatal chase, he, a living man, is incapable of ‘green weather’, whereas even the non-living ship has ‘tiny mosses in these warped cracks’: ‘this dead wood has the better of my live flesh’ (641). Melville denaturalises Ahab’s extreme brand of heroism by revealing it to be a kind of egotistic imperialism and unbending terrorism. But he also does more. He unsettles the very grounds on which the epic simile is constructed, that is, the linguistic assumption of a stable, one-to-one correspondence between the action and the trope. Melville thus undermines and does violence to the very language of his epic novel. Through the dense accumulation of Greco-Roman and biblical intertexts, the wood imagery takes the reader into multiple, discrepant symbolic realms that do not cohere: Ahab is an anti-Hector, a branded Cain, a Miltonic Satan, but he is also a Christ-like martyr ‘with a crucifixion in his face’. This ambiguity in the wood imagery is aggravated through a polysemic proliferation of other analogies, often incongruous and syncopated. On the one hand, Ahab is systematically compared to royal, dictatorial figures (a Khan, a czar, a sultan, a sea-loving Danish King, a Lord of Leviathans, Tarquin). Starbuck, the chief mate, sees Ahab’s dictatorial behaviour as decidedly undemocratic: ‘he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below!’ (214). On the other hand, it is the non-white characters (Fedallah, Pip) who act as counterweights to Ahab’s authoritarianism. When Ahab appears alongside Fedallah, he is both the tyrant and the tyrannised: And yet, somehow, did Ahab – in his own proper self, as daily, hourly, and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates, – Ahab seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them. (613) A similar reversal occurs when Ahab takes the hand of Pip, the black cabin boy: ‘I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!’ (597). Indeed, practically every crew member is either a literal slave in the ship’s hierarchy (subalterns including sailors such as Ishmael, the Cook and Pip) or compared symbolically to a slave. The third mate Flask is unflatteringly contrasted with his subordinate, the African harpooner Daggoo, and the roles of lord and servant are reversed: ‘this imperial negro, Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask’ (161). Ishmael’s choice of biblical name is that of the son of Hagar, an Egyptian slave. When Ishmael sees passengers stare at him and Queequeg, he 39

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ironically wonders whether a white man is more dignified than a ‘whitewashed Negro’ (94), thus drawing attention to their racial differences, but also subtly hinting at a common state of servitude. Most striking of all is Melville’s simultaneous association of Ahab with imperialism, slavery and the Native American experience. The captain of a ship named after a virtually exterminated American Indian tribe, Ahab is nonetheless described figuratively as a wolf caught ‘in the hidden snare of the Indian’ (209). The figurative economy becomes even more troubled when Ahab uses the Atlantic triangular slave trade as a trope of his solitude: the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without – oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! (619) Condemned to the sterility symbolised by his ‘dead stump’, Ahab can never access the regenerative qualities of human solidarity symbolised by nature, the ‘sympathy from the green country without’. Ahab’s self-identification with the transatlantic figure of a slave is nonetheless extraordinary in its ghostly reinscription of the Black Atlantic onto the Pacific Ocean. In addition, Pip’s experiences of falling overboard and being abandoned by the crew recall those of slaves on slave ships who jumped into the ocean or were tossed into it by their overseers (see Mackenthun 2004: 168−69). Elsewhere, slavery serves as an analogy of the human condition: ‘Who ain’t a slave?’ asks Ishmael pointedly (33). Carolyn Karcher (1980: 2) persuasively demonstrates that Melville addresses the politically charged question of slavery not ‘by making American Negro characters his primary vehicles’ for challenging slavery, but by focusing ‘on the expression and exploitation he had known as a sailor and generaliz[ing] about slavery by analogy’. He thus creates ‘fictional counterparts’ for African American slaves, which include not only ‘South Sea cannibals, American Indians, native Africans’ and others but also, more subversively, ‘white Americans’. Extending her thesis, I would argue that Melville’s oblique ‘commentary by analogy’ method orchestrates displacements that are highly unstable and multidirectional. The operative principle of his polysemic tropes – heterotropes, if you will – is that of the heterotopia, the juxtaposition of heterogeneous ‘fragments’ of ‘possible orders’ each from such a radically different site that ‘it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all’ other than the ‘non-place of language’ (Foucault 1994: xvii−xviii). Only in Melville’s heterotropic figurative economy can Ahab and Pip both find residence simultaneously in orders of incommensurable 40

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historical experiences, in stereoscopic tropes of imperial authority and servile subjection. Melville thus contests the ‘syntax’ of segregation, the ‘very possibility of grammar at its source’ by revealing heterotropic continuities at the heart of a national narrative constructed as a series of discrete, exclusionary white experiences. The grounds of the comparison that separate reality from the symbol are revealed to be unstable: Is Ahab ‘really’ a slave who indulges in figurative fantasies of total mastery? Or is he ‘really’ a master whose authority is symbolically undermined by slave analogies? By constantly displacing loci of power and subjugation, Melville makes of Ahab a more nuanced, problematic and anguished representation of American imperialism. A manipulative monomaniac who brilliantly enlists popular support to extend his personal imperialism, Ahab nonetheless also fits the paradigmatic sailor-slave figure in Melville’s fiction. Ahab and Ishmael are similar to Redburn and White-Jacket, characters through whom Melville ‘showed whites developing the same traits under these conditions [of exploitation] as the Negro was thought to exhibit by nature’ (Karcher 1980: 37). By subjecting white characters to perceived and real slave-like conditions against which resistance is essential ‘if the victim of oppression is to preserve his manhood’, Melville undermines ‘the very concept of race that lay at the basis of racial prejudice’. However, while Karcher sees white subaltern characters such as Redburn and White-Jacket as victims of such persecution (a list to which one may add the underpaid Ishmael who self-identifies as a slave [33]), in Moby Dick it is the captain, the highest-ranking officer and personification of authority itself, who is enslaved by his hubris and is leading his own kind of slave revolt against Moby Dick. As Toni Morrison (1989: 141) observes, the ‘trauma of racism is, for the racist [emphasis mine] and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self and has always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis’. The demagogic despot is thus also the pommelled underdog who will not concede defeat: ‘I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies—Take some one of your own size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again’ (213). It is this spirit of tragic heroism, amplified through rich intertextual resonances with Prometheus, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Dr Faustus that gives Ahab a heroic stature that transcends his despotism and demagogy. As his amputated leg and scar running down his ‘branded’ tree-like body from head to toe suggest, Ahab is a man as divided as his country, a contradictory, cataclysmic embodiment of 19th-century America’s multiple and most violent subjectivities – that of an expansionist imperialism abroad and resistance against discriminatory hierarchies at home. Melville is therefore drawn to the epic simile because of its double legacy of Homeric grandeur and Miltonic irony, but adds a heterotropic dimension 41

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that undermines the syntax of figurative separation and historical marginalisation. His heterotopic heroic figurations prefigure those of Walcott who goes even further, deliberately fusing and confusing differential experiences through metaphors of metamorphosis. This impulse towards fusion operates even when Walcott uses short or extended similes and can be linked to his epic agenda of revising colonial binaries of victors and victims. The figuration of violence through nature imagery is central to Omeros as it is to the Latin American epic Canto General by Pablo Neruda ([1950] 1993), an author Walcott has recognised as an epic model (1999: 38−41). Latin America and the Caribbean share a bloody history of colonial encounters with autochthonous tribes dating back to the 15th century. Neruda offers a chronological history of the natural and human realms in the New World, beginning with a primeval world of vegetation and minerals, growing through precolonial tribes and vestiges of their empire (Machu Picchu) and desecrated by the arrival of the Conquistadors. Their exploitation of the Latin American people prefigures that of American corporations and the neocolonial Latin American political elite. Neruda’s (1993: 15−16) conception of a fecund ‘arboreal America’ of ‘green treasure, your dense undergrowth’, of a ‘Green uterus, seminal/American savannah’ anticipates Walcott’s use of vegetal imagery for Saint Lucia. Europeans such as Valdivia ‘exterminated the pastoral dawn’ and ‘chopped off the chieftain’s hands/returned the prisoners/with their noses and ears cut off ’. With ‘his bloody glove’ he ‘soiled the country’s stones,/leaving it full of corpses,/and solitude and scars’ (63). However, unlike Neruda who separates precolonial and colonial past as well as the spheres of man and nature, Walcott fuses Arawak and European history, geography and human demography. The poem opens with the Caribbean fishermen building their canoes. The diegetic events correspond to the three stages of shipbuilding identified by Naomi Rood (2008) that characterise Homer’s tree similes: the felling of trees, the hauling of the freshly-cut logs and the working of the wood to build the ship. Running parallel to the diegesis is a realm of figuration evoked through tree imagery. Walcott uses vegetal symbolism to return to an originary historical moment, the ethnic genocide endured by the Arawaks (spelt in Omeros as ‘Aruacs’) at the hands of the Europeans. The apocalyptic atmosphere is heightened by the imagery of mutilation, bloodshed, mass-killing, and an all-destroying conflagration. In this scheme, the neocolonial present (Caribbean fishermen cutting down cedars for their canoes and posing for tourists) represents the ‘real’ action while similes and metaphors serve to associate the felled cedars with the Arawak tribe, their language and culture. This figurative bridge between the human and vegetal world is built in the beginning of Omeros through the trees 42

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they worship as gods (‘The first god was a gommier’, 5). However, rather than retaining the referential primacy of the ‘real’ fisherman Achille, the reimagined death of the Arawaks takes on increasingly literal dimensions. Wielding an electric saw, Achille hacked the limbs from the dead god, knot after knot, wrenching the severed veins from the trunk as he prayed: ‘Tree! You can be a canoe! Or else you cannot!’ The bearded elders endured the decimation of their tribe without uttering a syllable of that language they had uttered as one nation, (6) Homer uses similes to compare heroes to shoots (Euphorbus) and trees (Hector, Sarpedon), but Walcott uses metaphor’s potential to literalise the simile, thereby suggesting that the Arawaks are the trees: the red-skinned logwood endured the thorns in its flesh, while the Aruacs’ patois crackled in the smell of a resinous bonfire that turned the leaves brown with curling tongues, then ash, and their language was lost. (6) Walcott also exploits the polysemy of veins (of leaves and human bodies) and curling tongues (of fire, but also the tongues of the Arawak elders and the saplings/children) as well as the biblical image of a thorn in the flesh. Rather than the Woffordian temporal disjunction between the irreversible death of the hero and the cyclical renewal of seasons, there seems to be a profound conjunction between the equally inexorable annihilation of the trees and the Arawaks. This conjunction between action and figure is of course intended to produce profoundly disjunctive and discordant effects of unease and shock for the reader. Such associations between dead trees and the ghosts of warriors, far from being new in postcolonial epic, are also a stock device in classical epic. Achille’s ‘defaming [of] the forest’ (7) echoes not only Neruda’s depiction of the ‘exterminated’ ‘pastoral dawn’, but also Virgil’s portrayal of Aeneas’s desecration of Polydorus’s buried body. Similar motifs of blood, wrenching and severance appear when the unsuspecting Aeneas tries to tear a branch from a bush to provide shade for his altar: Soon as I tear the first stalk from its roots and rip it up from the earth . . . 43

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dark blood oozes out and fouls the soil with filth. Icy shudders rack my limbs – my blood chills with fear. (3.34−37) A voice then issues forth from the plant, begging Aeneas to not ‘mangle this wretched flesh’ and not ‘stain’ his ‘pure hands’: I am no stranger to you. I was born in Troy, and the blood you see is oozing from no tree. Oh escape from this savage land, I beg you, flee these grasping shores! I am Polydorus. Here they have impaled me, an iron planting of lances covered my body – now they sprout in stabbing spears! (3.50−54) Troy had handed over Polydorus (Aeneas’s kin) and a ransom to King Polymestor of Thrace in the hope of winning an ally during the Trojan war. However, Thrace opportunistically disposed of Polydorus without a proper ritual burial and seized the treasure (hence Polydorus’s bitter transferred epithet of Thrace’s ‘grasping shores’). His metamorphosis literalises the Homeric simile: he is not like a tree falling down, he has become part of the vegetal world, and his blood seeps out of severed shoots. The Polydorus passage is an example of a critique of war within a political epic that elsewhere glorifies martial conflict or at least sombrely justifies its necessity. Here, Polydorus functions as a metaphor of the ghosts of the past who must be put to rest through a proper burial before Aeneas may turn to his Roman future. A similar sense of moral violation pervades the scenes of bleeding trees in the Inferno and in the Liberation of Jerusalem. In the Inferno ([1312–21] 1995: 13.31−45), Dante the Pilgrim attempts to wrench a branch from a tree in the Wood of Suicides, only to realise that blood flows in it instead of sap. In Canto 13 of Liberation of Jerusalem, Tasso presents Tancred hewing down a cypress tree: At last he draws his sword, and with great force hacks the high plant. Oh wonder! At each bound, great gouts of blood out of the cut bark course and stain the earth vermillion around. He is filled with horror. (13.41.1−4) Tasso adds the element of romance by having the voice of Tancred’s dead beloved, the Saracen Clorinda, ring out from the tree. The overall impression of tragic waste is heightened by the fact that Tancred unwittingly killed 44

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Clorinda in combat since he was not able to see her face behind the visor. Nonetheless, like Virgil, the Italian writer underscores the moral violation involved, even when vanquishing a pagan. Clorinda explains to Tancred that it is not only her spirit but ‘all, Frankish or pagan knights, the great war’s toll’ that are held captive in the trees. Therefore ‘[t]hese branches and these trees can feel. If you/hew down their wood, you murder what you hew’ (13.43.1−3, 7−8). However, Walcott’s privileging of Virgilian metaphor is still far more disjunctive than the practices of his classical predecessors in its epistemological and ontological implications. Not only does Walcott make use of the corrective function of the metamorphosed tree as an acknowledgement of the irreparable human cost of war in political epic, he complicates the representation of the victims. While Neruda systematically grants heroic stature to ‘the people’ of a transhistorical Marxist brotherhood extending from the precolonial ‘labourer, weaver, silent herdsman’, guanaco-tamer, mason, jeweller, tiller and potter (41) to the postcolonial farmer, miner, brakeman, fisherman and mechanic (393), Walcott aggravates his own romanticisation of the ‘people’, both the Arawaks of the past and the Caribbean fishermen of the present. If Polydorus and Clorinda gain the sympathy of the epic heroes and the readers, the Caribbean fishermen felling cedars seem to be literally hacking the Arawaks, creating a much deeper sense of malaise for the reader. The fusion and confusion between action (Achille and the others cutting down the cedars) and figuration (the cedars as metaphorical Arawaks) seem to occur in a temporally but also morally disjunctive moment in which Arawak past and Caribbean present have coalesced. This heterotopic space of dislocated, differential histories shares strong affinities with Melville’s reversible heterotropes which bring incommensurable temporalities and subjectivities into violent association. This blurring of action and figure operates not only through Walcott’s metaphors, but also his similes. Like Milton’s ironic similes, the three successive similes describing the fishermen as they dismember the gigantic trees appear to undermine the fishermen’s potentially heroic status: Like barbarians striding columns they have brought down, the fishermen shouted. The gods were down at last. Like pygmies they hacked the trunks of wrinkled giants for paddles and oars. They were working with the same concentration as an army of fire-ants. (6−7) While the felled Arawak ‘trunks’ seem locked in a binary against the trunkhacking fishermen, a later comic pun on Achille’s ‘trunk’ would seem to 45

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undo this dialectic of the vanquished and the victims. If the Arawaks appear tragically defeated as trees, they are reinvested with the capacity to resist through a later implicit association with the mosquitoes ‘needling Achille’s trunk’ (7), attacking his eyes and making him weep. However, the insects are ultimately overpowered: Then the host retreated to high bamboo like the archers of Aruacs running from the muskets of cracking logs, routed by the fire’s banner and the remorseless axe. (7) A troublingly stereoscopic space of disjunctive superimpositions emerges in which it becomes impossible to attribute stable moral positions. The Caribbean fishermen, the heroes of the epic, are cast as predatorial and destructive, disturbingly repeating on a figurative level the decimation of the Arawak culture by the European colonisers as well as, in an entirely discrepant image, the overthrowing of Rome, an imperial power, by Vandals. They are unflatteringly associated with pygmies and fire ants, even if their actions (giving prayer, wielding ‘arms’, ‘doing battle’ with the trees) give them a heroic status. Similarly, instead of being figuratively separated from the Arawaks, symbolised by ‘red-skinned logwood’, the Europeans are conjoined with them through the vegetal image of their ‘muskets of cracking logs’. The ‘fire’s banner’ linked to the fishermen using fire to hollow out the trees nonetheless recalls the war banners of the conquering Europeans. In this extraordinarily syncopated, ontologically unstable and ethically disturbing heterotropic space, Walcott creates incongruent continuities out of historical experiences that are traditionally placed in discrete seriality. Such instability is characteristic of ‘the allegorical spirit’ of postcolonial literature identified by Fredric Jameson (1986). His comparison between John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the short stories of the Chinese author Lu Xun is particularly pertinent to understanding Walcott’s oneiric polysemy: Our traditional conception of allegory – based, for instance, on stereotypes of Bunyan – is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences: this is, so to speak, a one-dimensional view of this signifying process, which might only be set in motion and complexified were we willing to entertain the more alarming notion that such equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text. (Jameson 1986: 73) 46

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This is the function of Walcott’s stereoscopic heterotropes that reintroduce historical depth and density by resisting ‘one-to-one equivalences’ such as Saint Lucia being the Helen of the West Indies, itself part of the ‘onedimensional’ process of colonial signification and representation. Instead, the metamorphoses of metaphoric blurring elicit the properly defamiliarising and ‘alarming notion’ of the contingency of any comparison, which is ‘in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text’. Thus, Walcott’s description of the colonial conquest of Saint Lucia repeats the invasion of Rome (an imperial glorification of conquest), but also inverts it by suggesting the inevitability of the fall of imperial powers (an anti-colonial stance). The rhetorical conjunctions between Arawaks and Europeans (both associated with logs) and between the fishermen and the Europeans (both capable of destructive violence) also undo nationalist narratives that vilify the coloniser and idealise the indigenous people as heroes or martyrs. Joseph Farrell (1997: 265) underscores the fact that the ‘oppressed’ natives were also capable of slaughter (the Caribs exterminated the Arawaks) and oppressed, subaltern subjects also participated in the colonial project, as evidenced by the defeat of the Sioux by the Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth Cavalry, themselves freed African slaves. In a later passage, once again rendered in tree imagery, Achille even imagines himself to be a Buffalo Soldier killing an American Indian. Unaware of Arawak history, his ignorance makes him ironically oblivious to the parallels between the genocide of indigenous tribes in the United States and the Caribbean (162). This historical ignorance is remedied by Seven Seas on a Saturday ‘that contained centuries’ as Achille rediscovers ‘the strata of history layered underheel’, a fitting description of the heterotropic opening sequence of the felling of trees that foregrounds not merely the forgotten layers of history ‘underheel’, but the ironies embedded between and across these layers. Moreover, Walcott’s epic is ‘one elegy from Aruac to Sioux’ (164) that forges a continuum of native resistance movements across cultures through wood imagery. Like the Arawaks associated with cedar trees, the Sioux, Crows and Dakotas are ‘pines [that] have lifted their spears’ (214). The bard or griot of a Congolese village that will be raided for slaves is described as ‘the seed-eyed, tree-wrinkled,/the crooked tree who carried the genealogical leaves/of the tribe in his cave-throated moaning’. While the ‘treehole, raw in the uprooted ground’ (140) foreshadows the deracination of the tribe, Walcott powerfully reimagines a sense of agency through the vatic capacity of self-representation articulated by a coalition of bardic figures – the Saint Lucian Seven Seas whose tapping fingers recount the past of the Middle Passage (12), a ‘blind shaman’ who ‘tears to bits’ a colonial treaty (214) and the African griot. Deprived of eyesight but visionary, they appear as manifestations of Omeros, both the mentor of the poet-persona 47

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(diegetic level) and a specifically Caribbean heterotrope who reconciles apparent opposites of cultural singularity and transcultural solidarity. Derived from the Greek Omeros (for Homer) and the French (O-mer-os or O-sea-bones), he signifies a specifically Caribbean poetic creativity allied to the sea and to the ancestral experience of the Middle Passage as well as a transhistorical, transnational politics of resistance through self-articulation. The incongruence between disparate historical events as well as between past and contemporary experiences is further aggravated by Walcott’s satiric use of the Homeric comparisons between leaves and fallen heroes to evoke his own divorce. The narrator ironises his own ‘dead-end of love’ (172) by comparing it to the aisles of Vallombrosa, a topos that figures in an already parodic simile linking Satan’s host to the leafy Italian valley of the same name in Paradise Lost (1.302−3). For all the accusations of Walcott egotistically blending the historical experience of slavery and genocide with moments of personal crisis such as a divorce (Hamner 1997: 90), one must recall that these disjunctions are part of a broader heterotopic poetics of syncopated superimpositions of the past and its reactualisation in the present. If the figure becomes a site of interpretative disjunctions, a final ritual of conjunction is performed at the end of the sequence when the Arawak trees strategically ‘forget their lives as trees’ (8) by ‘feeling not death inside them, but use’ (7) and accept Achille’s prayer: ‘Tree! You can be a canoe! Or else you cannot!’ (6) The presence of the swift from Africa flying above the canoe lends a Christian aura of resurrection to this episode: its outstretched wings recreate the figure of the cross. However, the transformation of death into life is also an enduring epic concern dating back to Homer. (Similarly, in Moby Dick, a coffin, a symbol of death itself made of dead wood, becomes a vehicle of deliverance and survival for the individual who will narratively ‘resurrect’ himself as ‘Ishmael’.) When Homer describes the death of Sarpedon with wood imagery, he also signals that the wood will be transformed: Sarpedon fell as an oak or white poplar falls or towering pine that shipwrights up on a mountain hew down with whetted axes chop for sturdy ship timber— so he stretched in front of his team and chariot, sprawled and roaring, clawing the bloody dust. (16.570−74) As Naomi Rood (2008: 22) argues, both the epic poet and the shipbuilder ‘transform things of nature into culture: the shipbuilder turns a tree into a ship; the epic poet turns a mortal man into an immortal hero.’ From a Woffordian standpoint, once again nature imagery seems to reconcile the 48

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irreconcilable: death in mortal terms is rendered as the rebirth of a cultural artefact through poetic devices, but this transfiguration does not mitigate the mortal cost for the hero. A similar dialectics of death and rebirth appear in Omeros: the ‘reborn’ canoe acts as an allegory for the rebuilding of postcolonial society. However, Wofford’s approach prompts us to be suspicious of such facile conjunctions, wherein a poetics of resurrection would seem to articulate a politics of reconstruction. From this angle, the deployment of an iterative temporality of rebirth can be seen as obfuscating the irreversible loss of life and culture for the Arawaks and the transplanted Africans as well as masking the very discordant realities of the neocolonial present. Thus, the ‘happy ending’ of the reborn canoe deflects attention away from the fact that the local fishing economy is now undergoing its own death as a result of the multinational hotel and tourism industry catering to the same tourists the fishermen are posing for. Walcott cannot entirely escape the pitfalls of idealism that such conjunctive transfiguration entails, but I would still argue that the poem’s fundamentally unstable figurative economy ultimately privileges disjunctive irony over epic glorification. By harnessing the Virgilian metaphor of the metamorphosed bleeding tree to the Homeric simile of the rebuilt ship, Walcott disjunctively links historical violence and fragile political reconstruction into a constantly changing narrative of collective survival. Rather than one foundational moment of the fall, the volatile figurations would suggest that a colonially-troped tropical ‘paradise’ such as Saint Lucia is in an unending signifying process of being lost and regained. The ‘reality’ that emerges is thus inescapably mediated: it is mediated through colonial history and ­re-mediated through the eyes of axe-wielding fishermen (contemporary natives) as well as the eye of a tourist’s camera (neocolonial successors of the colonists). Walcott’s disruptive opening sequence of syncopated heterotopes is thus one of the most powerful illustrations of Homi Bhabha’s ([1989] 2008) theory of the Third Space which disjunctively and deliberately shifts attention from essentialist origins to hybrid emergence, from epistemology to enunciation, from reality to representation. Saint Lucian history emerges neither in the linear, exclusionary time of colonial historiography nor the nationalist, equally linear, temporality of nativist longings, but as a constantly metamorphosing entity ‘caught in the discontinuous time of translation and negotiation’ and exposing its ‘discursive embeddedness, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specific place’ (Bhabha 2008: 55).

Hypothetical similes Less overtly disjunctive is Ghosh’s poetic engagement with tropes of death and rebirth through the nautical image of the wooden schooner, the 49

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eponymous Ibis in Sea of Poppies. While the migrants’ leave-taking of India is rendered through tropes of death, the Ibis is systematically depicted as an agent of rebirth, a symbolic wooden ‘ancestor’ (9) to the indentured labourers (girmitiyas), whose new diasporic identities it helps engender. In keeping with the widely held view of the time that crossing the ocean or ‘dark water’ would result in a loss of caste and Hinduness, the migrants instinctively describe departure from India in terms of death: ‘it seemed as if [emphasis mine] the journey down the Ganga had given the migrants their last taste of life before the onset of a slow and painful death’ (228). The introduction of the hypothetical ‘if’ is noteworthy. It creates two levels of narratives by modifying the epic simile’s ‘as’ into ‘as if’. The transition from a conjunctive ‘as’ to a discreetly disjunctive ‘as if’ results in what may be called a hypothetical epic simile that seems to hesitate between two readings of reality. Ghosh’s hypothetical simile juxtaposes, but does not confuse, external reality (the departure) and personal subjectivity (death). A breach appears in the ‘empirical reality’ of the realist narrative, that of an alternative experience of subaltern subjectivity, vested with its own ontological and epistemological validity. In keeping with the migrants’ cultural repertoire, this double-reading of reality is troped through Indian images of illusion and reality. However, Ghosh’s use of these metaphors also resonates with enduring preoccupations of Indian philosophy and poetics. Indian poetics has traditionally focused on the power of poetic tropes as vehicles of a higher, spiritual truth. Anandavardhana (9th century CE), in his authoritative stylistic compendium Dhvanyaloka (often translated as Theory of Suggestion in Poetry), explores the role of figures in creating ‘suggestive poetry’ or dhvani. For Anandavardhana (2011: 32), tropes trigger hidden truths: when ‘perceptive critics [. . .] turn away from the literal meaning’, the ‘suggested meaning flashes suddenly across the[ir] truth-perceiving minds’. Equally suggestive are the ‘moods’ or ‘flavours’ of a work theorised by Bharatamuni (circa 3rd century CE) in his magisterial treatise Natyashastra. Expanding on Bharatamuni’s typology, Abhinavagupta (10th−11th centuries ce) in his Shantarasa underscores the role of the rasa of peace (shantarasa) in aesthetic experience. Shantarasa is seen as a means for achieving the transcendental knowledge associated with liberation (moksha) from the karmic cycle of rebirths (2011: 66−67). Illustrative examples are provided by the medieval bhakti poet Tulsidas in his 16th-century rewriting of the Ramayana entitled Ramcharitmanas (1994), a foundational text for the girmitiyas. Tulsidas uses implicit and explicit similes to explain the difference between the world of the senses (an illusion or maya) and the spiritual truth that can liberate the true devotee (bhakt) of Ram. Ram has a dual role as both the source of lila (the play of illusion) and its dispeller: ‘The world of matter is the object of illumination, and Rama is its illuminator; 50

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he is the lord of illusion and the home of wisdom and truth.’ The world of matter is then compared to two objects of delusion: ‘Though a (polished) oyster-shell is mistaken for silver and a mirage for water, these appearances are false [. . .] in the same way, this world of matter is dependent on Hari [i.e., Vishnu, of whom Ram is an avatar].’ Yet, the power of delusion is not to be underestimated, as the simile of decapitation makes clear: ‘Though unreal, it [delusion] gives us pain nonetheless, as when a man’s head is cut off in a dream, he is not rid of pain till he awakes’ (1994: 72). The preoccupation with physical appearances and a metaphysical reality would find new formulations during the Bengal Renaissance, a cultural movement born out of the Bengali intelligentsia’s selective appropriation of Western ideas of ‘modernity’. In the early 20th century, Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), an iconic figure of the Bengal Renaissance (of which Ghosh sees himself as a modest inheritor), would begin writing Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol (1950). In this spiritual epic, he transforms the Indian myth of Savitri, a woman embodying conjugal fidelity in the scriptures, into an overarching spiritual allegory of humanity’s evolution towards transcendence. His contemporary, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), would draw from both the Indian rasa theory and European Romanticism to launch a robust critique of scientific rationalism. In ‘What is Art?’ ([1917] 2011) Tagore distinguishes between scientific fact (‘what I know about a rose’) and the senses (‘what I feel about a rose’) that can only be aroused by suggestive poetry. Hence the importance of ‘what the Sanskrit rhetoricians say [about rasa and the flavour of a text], in poetry we have to use words which have got their proper taste, – which do not merely talk but conjure pictures and sing.’ Demolishing the empirical world of fact, he celebrates human sentiments that ‘defy analysis’. Poetry takes on the hermeneutic vocation of allowing the poet to ‘transform the world of appearances into the more intimate world of sentiments’ (2011: 142−43). Significantly, the experience of the divine introduces a new standard of reality and challenges the ‘lightless world of facts’: ‘in art, things are challenged from the standpoint of the immortal Person, those which are important in our customary life of facts become unreal when placed on the pedestal of art’ (152, 151). We may therefore acquire a finer appreciation of Ghosh’s use of the hypothetical simile in the light of Tagore’s hybrid assimilation of Romantic poetics and classical Indian aesthetics. The ‘if’ opens an ambivalent space of interplay between the literal and the symbolic, between the ‘lightless world of facts’ and ‘the standpoint of the immortal Person’, between worldly illusion and spiritual reality. Thus, after being saved from her pyre by Kalua, Deeti feels that it was as if [emphasis mine] she really had died and been delivered betimes in rebirth, to her next life: she had shed the body of the 51

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old Deeti, with the burden of its karma; she had paid the price her stars had demanded of her, and was now free to create a new destiny as she willed, with whom she chose. (163−64) This passage reflects the Hindu belief that the morality or immorality of one’s actions predetermines one’s caste in the next life. In this scheme of karmic reward and retribution, one is endlessly reincarnated until one attains the spiritual perfection necessary for liberation (moksha) from this cycle. In the simile above, Ghosh demolishes the determinism of karmic predestination by turning its own logic of rebirth against it. He articulates a fundamentally existentialist message that existence, driven by choice, precedes an inherited caste essence. He also writes back to the unproven ‘explanation’ provided by colonial authorities for the significant number of women who left India as indentured labourers. As Brij Lal (1983: 46) explains, ‘There is no explanation of the reason for female migration in the literature [of indenture], except for the assertion that most of the women were desperate, indigent destitutes of “loose” character, or widows.’ Rejecting these speculations as ‘unsatisfying’, Lal focuses on more probable reasons expressed by the migrants in their folk-songs: ‘Ill-treatment of young brides, domestic disputes, simple drudgery, and frustration [. . .] poignantly raised in numerous songs, appear to have been among the factors which encouraged women to migrate’ (46–47). Deeti’s story – her exploitation by her in-laws, her toil as an opium-grower, her flight, and her categorisation by Bhyro Singh as a ‘loose’ woman who deserves to be raped – corresponds to several points raised by Lal. The layered figurative depiction of her rebirth in the novel also works against the onedimensional, Eurocentric representations of female indentured labourers as figures of abjection in colonial records. Sea of Poppies can therefore be seen as the literary counterpart to Lal’s sociological conclusions. Deeti’s existentialist insight is also aligned with the realm of spiritual truth delivered through the ‘suggestive poetry’ (dhvani) of the hypothetical simile. Deeti’s symbolic reincarnation is further underscored when she adopts her new name, Aditi, to avoid discovery by her in-laws who want her to perform the ritual of sati (a widow’s self-immolation on her husband’s pyre). Again, Ghosh deliberately plays with the contrast between appearances and reality. Her new name is a mask to avoid discovery (i.e., an illusion, an appearance), but, paradoxically, this new invented name becomes ‘real’, all the more so since it was her original name before she gave birth to her daughter: ‘No sooner had she said it than it became real: this was who she was [emphasis mine]—Aditi, a woman who had been granted, by a whim of the gods, the boon of living her life again’ (216). This is an extraordinary 52

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transition from the separation of similes (as if Deeti is reborn) to the metaphoric fusion of figure and action, so stunningly self-evident in its truth that it borders on the tautological (‘this was who she was’). Deeti’s symbolic rebirth anticipates, and is paradigmatic of, the liberating diasporic destiny of all the girmitiyas on board the Ibis: ‘wasn’t it she herself who had said, at the start, that they were all kin now; that their rebirth in the ship’s womb had made them into a single family?’ (397). Like Deeti who ‘shed[s] the body of the old Deeti’, these girmitiyas with their diverse clans, castes and religions will be ‘free to create a new destiny as [they] wil[l]’ (164). Figurative rebirths are compounded literally by new life as Deeti’s pregnant belly echoes the ship’s belly. The ship’s wood and Deeti’s womb seem to combine, resulting in an exhilarating, transformative reversal of roles: ‘How strange it was to feel the presence of a body inside her, lurching in time to her own movements: it was as if her belly were the sea, and the child a vessel, sailing towards its own destiny’ (424). There is a beautiful interplay of macrocosm and microcosm as the Ibis carries Deeti in its hold and Deeti carries her baby in her womb. Deeti attains almost cosmic proportions as the reversal of roles makes her womb appear like the sea on which the Ibis is sailing. The text thus actively invites readers to associate insights into the girmitiyas’ liberation with spiritual truth. When the migrants take leave of their make-shift camp to board on the Ibis, their departure is associated with ‘awe’ and ‘a divine revelation’: ‘it perforates the veil of everyday expectation in such a way as to reveal the prodigious darkness of the unknown’ (325). Later, Nob Kissin Pander’s flash of mystical ‘illumination’ concerning the Ibis’s role does indeed perforate the veil of illusion that is maya: ‘the Ibis was not a ship like any other; in her inward reality she was a vehicle of transformation, travelling through the mists of illusion towards the elusive, ever-receding landfall that was Truth’ (388). Ghosh’s hypothetical similes thus reflect his deep debt to Tagore, himself an inheritor of a hybrid legacy of Romanticism, medieval Bhakti traditions of transcendence and classical Sanskrit aesthetics of transfigurative poetry. Ghosh harnesses Indian metaphysical poetics to postcolonial politics in his representation of the girmitiyas’ subaltern status and race in general. As the Bengali-speaking Paulette eloquently puts it when speaking of Zachary’s race: ‘Are not all appearances deceptive, in the end? Whatever there is within us – whether good, or bad, or neither – its existence will continue uninterrupted, will it not, no matter what the drape of our clothes or the colour of our skin?’ (459). The choice of Paulette, a white, French girl raised by a Bengali ayah (maid) as the speaker of this utterance anchored in Hindu philosophy also points to a deliberate disturbing of racial binaries in colonialist and nationalist discourse: this ‘Westerner’ is also part of the Ibis girmitiya ‘family’. On a stylistic level, 53

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Ghosh’s neo-Romantic inward eye turns empirical ‘truth’ on its head so as to affirm the higher truth of inner vision, so ineffable that it must necessarily be rendered through tropes and symbols. Pander can be seen as exemplifying ‘the truth-perceiving’ readers described by Anandavardhana (2011: 32) in his theory of the evocative image only available when one ‘turn[s] away from the literal meaning’. During the storm that closes Sea of Poppies, Pander attains the blissful state of shantarasa as he believes his ‘transfiguration’ is completely realised. His release from physical illusions prompts him to literally release Neel from his imprisonment by giving him the keys of his ‘choley’ (prison cell) aboard the Ibis. Physical deliverance becomes a sign of the spiritual liberation to come. Addressing Neel, he says, ‘may you find your release, your mukti’ (460). The idea of freedom denoted by mukti acquires more explicit metaphysical significance when he sees himself as bestowing moksha or deliverance from the karmic cycle to another prisoner, Kalua: ‘you too will find your freedom, moksha is at hand for you too’ (460). Pander’s state of ‘transcendent, blissful joy of pure ananda’ (461) is clearly troped as an act of deciphering the true meaning of the signs around him and freeing the other characters from their interpretative ‘cages’ of illusion: Now that Taramony’s presence was fully manifest in him, it was as if he had become the key that could unlock the cages that imprisoned everyone, all these beings who were ensnared by the illusionary differences of this world. (461) Pander and Deeti, the latter a synecdochic figure for the migrants, are the only characters who have privileged access to the liberating, transcendental knowledge Anandavardhana speaks of. They are able to move beyond the ‘veil of everyday expectation’ (325) by realising that leave-taking and loss of caste are not forms of death but of literal social liberation and personal rebirth. Their intimations of the divine are remarkably consonant with Tagore’s substitution of scientific epistemology by a sacred ontology: empirical evidence ‘is challenged from the standpoint of the immortal Person’ so that facts become unreal and intangible intuitions of the divine acquire the status of truth. It is significant that Deeti is often not believed (e.g., the incredulity of the Colvers regarding Deeti’s vision in River of Smoke’s incipit) and Baboo Nob Kissin Pander is consistently associated with comic deflation (an issue explored later in this chapter as typifying the Quixotic disfigurement of the figure). Their systematic association with the supernatural prompts parallels with the marvellous real of Alejo Carpentier and the magical realism of Salman Rushdie, in which the boundary 54

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between ‘magical’ and ‘real’ collapses as the supernatural is depicted in matter-of-fact terms.2 However, unlike magical realism’s blurring of fact and myth, Ghosh’s depiction does maintain this epistemological frontier – but only stylistically, not experientially, as it were. The universe of the novel’s action is governed by empirical laws, not supernatural ones. Though neglecting the form of magical realism, Ghosh retains its core function, that is, to juxtapose the incommensurable ‘realities’ of the colonisers and the colonised so that the (Eurocentric) terms on which reality is defined is called into question. Moreover, Ghosh is well aware of the excessively euphoric vision evoked by conjunctive associations between figurative and personal rebirth. He therefore anticipates criticism by granting this positive vision to characters most in tune with the ‘spiritual’ world and subject to disbelief. This is the disjunctive resistance of the hypothetical simile that does not dictate, but hesitates. Readers therefore have the choice to dismiss Deeti’s and Pander’s visions as ‘mystical’ fancy or embrace them as higher truths, the clear authorial allegiance to these characters notwithstanding. The hypothetical simile is thus disjunctive in its double resistance to two facile temptations: the first, to see the girmitiyas as anonymous and helpless victims, deprived of any kind of subjectivity or agency (an interpretative pitfall of colonial representations); and the second, to uncritically celebrate diasporic crossing as a purely euphoric prefiguration of contemporary transnational travel (the hermeneutic trap created by indiscriminate glorifications of globalisation of which Ghosh has been accused, see Ahuja 2012).

Negative similes Ghosh’s hypothetical similes create a hermeneutic ambivalence similar to that of Melville’s and Walcott’s negative similes where heroic allusions are evoked only to be rejected in favour of the writer’s own political and poetic agenda. Both Melville and Walcott tactically use negative similes to elaborately stage ostensible rejections of the genre of Western epic. Take Melville’s use of a negative simile to depict the whaler’s experience of ‘wonder and awe’: Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever and heat of his first battle; nor the dead man’s ghost encountering his first phantom in the otherworld; – neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned cycle of the hunted sperm whale. (277) 55

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This simile is a microcosm of traditional epic, arraying together the epic conventions of the young hero, the idealised wife, the ringing battlefield, and the hero’s descent to the underworld, with its aura of the supernatural. Yet this epic machinery is no longer part of the action, but is displaced to the figurative level – military soldiers, war and the ghost are the objects of the simile and do not belong to the realm of the action. Melville suggests that the sublimity of whaling is superior to Iliadic battle and to Odyssean katabasis or the descent to the underworld. The element of the supernatural implicit in katabasis is ‘contained’ in the figurative realm, but productively collaborates with the action to add to the sublime sense of awe. The careful alliterative balance of sibilance (‘stranger and stronger’) and consonance (‘charmed, churned’) adds to the incantatory grandeur of the passage. Melville’s reliance on the negative simile highlights a broader linguistic dilemma: he must describe an unconventional subject (whaling) in the conventional style of epic. As the chapter title ‘The Advocate’ suggests, the text’s figurative energies are massively directed towards making a case for the whale to be accepted as an epic subject. Melville thus already signals the shift in epic agon from action to language, from narrative to trope. This rejection is typically Miltonic: several similes in Paradise Lost use classical comparisons only to reject them in favour of the superiority of the biblical subject. For example, Eve with her homely gardening equipment is more beautiful than the goddess of hunting, Diana (Delia): ‘but Delia’s self/In gait surpassed and goddess-like deport,/Though not as she with bow and quiver armed,/But with such gardening tools as art yet rude,/ Guiltless of fire had formed, or angels brought’ (9.388−92). In an analogous manner, the negative simile allows Melville to demonstrate that the whaler is, in fact, not like a raw recruit or a soul entering the underworld, as his experience transcends the thrill of battle and the awe of death. Lawrence Buell (1994: 62) briefly alludes to Melville’s attraction to ‘the grand Miltonic tradition of the negative classical simile’ wherein ‘[n]egation in each case is a way of reaping the benefits of metaphorical analogizing while establishing that the subject at hand has an autonomous glory not preempted by any analogy in terms of which it might be seen.’ The paradox of a pre-emptive claim to originality through intertextual imitation is exploited more explicitly by Walcott in Omeros. Walcott deploys negative metaphors to suggest that his epic of fishermen is in some sense more ‘genuine’, and hence superior to the tradition of martial epic. Negative stances in Omeros effect a corresponding negation of Achilles’s choice of war over a quiet, peaceful life. The narrator asserts that his epic poem is written ‘not for kings floundering in lances of rain’. Instead it celebrates ‘the prose/of abrupt fishermen cursing over canoes’ (15). One must parenthetically note that Omeros is in verse, not in ‘prose’: 56

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its selective incorporation of elements from Dante’s tercet-structured terza rima is written for a literary audience. However, let us turn our attention back to the dynamics of metaphorical negation: This was the shout on which each odyssey pivots, that silent cry for a reef, or familiar bird, not the outcry of battle, not the tangled plots of a fishnet, but when a wave rhymes with one’s grave, a canoe with a coffin, once that parallel is crossed, and cancels the line of master and slave. (159) Despite the repetitive negations, epic is not negated as much as it is reformulated in pastoral, pacifist terms. The dismissal of martial combat, evident in the assertion ‘not the outcry of battle’, as well as an overturning of the hierarchical code of master and slave typify Walcott’s use of recusatio, as Gregson Davis (1997: 321−33) has demonstrated. Recusatio refers to the rejection of epic by Hellenistic poets such as Callimachus (Aetia) and Apollonius of Rhodes (the Argonautica) in favour of lyrical, small-scale, light compositions, a pattern followed by Augustan poets such as Ovid (Amores), Virgil (the Eclogues) and Propertius (poems to Cynthia), and reworked by modernists such as Ezra Pound (‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’) and Apollinaire (‘Zone’). Davis explains that Apollinaire’s modernist poem ‘Zone’ (1913) stages a disavowal of the pastoralism of antiquity only to reincorporate it into the urban landscape: ‘After all you are weary of this oldtime world/Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower your flock of bridges is bleating this morning/You have had enough of this living in a Greek and Roman antiquity’ (2000: 229).3 Interestingly, Apollinaire’s invocation transposes classical pastoralism on an urban landscape while Walcott’s entire poem is driven by the postcolonial desire to eject the topoi of European classicism from the tropical island. In both cases, rejection becomes a form of tactical reassimilation. Persona and performance intersect as the poem orchestrates Walcott’s ‘spurning embrace’ of Homer, to use Oliver Taplin’s felicitous phrase (1991: 223). As Davis argues, performing a disavowal of influence becomes a way to better define the ‘artistic persona constructed through the performance of writing/reading’ (324). Buell’s (1994: 62) observations on the paradox of epic intertextuality that expresses ‘an autonomous glory not pre-empted by any analogy in terms of which it might be seen’ is particularly relevant in the case of Omeros. The poet-persona wants to liberate himself from colonially mediated Homeric analogies when describing Saint Lucia’s landscape, yearning to ‘enter that light beyond metaphor’ (271), a space of ‘autonomous glory 57

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not pre-empted’ by the analogies he disavows. In this sense, the real aresteia in Omeros is not the love triangle between Achille, Hector and Helen, nor Plunkett’s tussle with history, nor even the narrator’s odyssey, but the poet’s desire for a relationship with his native island that is unmediated by Homeric tropes. Rather than rallying the tropes, Walcott performs a general rout of the tropes, only to reappropriate them. This spectacle of disavowal and reappropriation which serves to better define his own epic voice is ultimately located in the realm of language, not diegesis. The significance of the wood imagery, the hypothetical similes, and the negative similes and metaphors investigated so far can be thrown into clearer relief through a linguistic experiment of excision. Let us imagine the Iliad, the Aeneid, Moby Dick, Omeros, and Sea of Poppies without their epic tropes. The Iliad would offer no pastoral respite from the relentless narrative of war, no discursive digressions into the cycle of seasons, the animal world, shepherding, farming, fishing, shipbuilding and so on. In addition to idyllic detours in an otherwise stern narrative of imperial foundation, the Aeneid would also lose one of its most powerful moments of self-interrogation on the costs of war expressed through the bleeding tree that is Polydorus, a metamorphosis-metaphor so evocative it would recur throughout Western epic literature. In contrast, the postcolonial texts would read as rather prosaic, realist and frankly depressing stories. Moby Dick would be stripped of Ishmael’s rhetorical extravagance and would focus exclusively on the calamitous encounter between subaltern whalers and a whale at sea. Omeros would be bereft of the intertextual anchor of its title and uncomplicated by the tensions between a learnt European tradition and a lived creole culture. It would merely recount a local, somewhat petty, love triangle as perceived by a British expatriate and by the Anglicised poet-persona on his return to his native land. Rather than a subversive rewriting of the colonial history of opium and indenture focusing on empowered subalterns transforming their own destinies, Sea of Poppies, by ceaselessly depicting the suffering and oppression of the girmitiyas, would in fact reinforce the Eurocentric construction of the subaltern as a ‘passive’ victim of the ‘dynamic’ processes of colonial capitalism. Moreover, in the last three scenarios outlined thus far, there is little or no room for heroic elevation, martial exploits, the supernatural, or descents to the underworld – key structural features of epic. As Franco Moretti (1996: 11) has observed, Byron’s epic declaration ‘I want a hero’ (1.1) in Don Juan (1819) reminds us that contemporary epics ‘want’ things the modern world, with its pacifist, secular and democratic values, ‘lacks’ or refuses to entertain. This results in tropes often playing a role exactly opposite to the one they played in traditional epics: whereas traditional epic similes brought glimpses of the ‘other’ world of epic (the idyllic world of nature, humdrum, workaday activities of agriculture and 58

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shipbuilding or even a counter-discourse exposing the costs of war) into the narrative, postcolonial epics rely on tropes as backdoors to strategically reintegrate the epic machinery of the supernatural, the aristocratic and the martial (otherwise ‘incompatible’ with contemporary epistemologies and values) into their narratives. Not only would Moby Dick, Omeros and Sea of Poppies be aesthetically flat and dispiriting without their figurative worlds, they would also be deprived of a primordial site of discursive hybridity. Tropes are privileged locations for the articulation of revisionist paradigms of a Eurocentric history of colonialism and speculative capitalism as well as for the critique of nationalist ideologies of monocultural, territorially sovereign nation-states premised on nostalgic nativism. Jahan Ramazani (1997) notes the complementarity between the trope’s movement of meaning and postcolonial literature’s promotion of transnational travel and labile identities. The ‘movement of metaphor across ethnic, regional, and gender boundaries’, he argues, is in fact ‘well suited to the hybrid and inter-cultural character of postcolonial literature’ (414). Moby Dick, Omeros and Sea of Poppies orchestrate similar twin movements, mobilising meaning to upset the fixity of colonialist and nationalist identities by spinning figurative webs of unlikely symbolic connections and creating ‘metaphoric compan[ies]’ (Ramazani 1997: 414) of heterogeneous characters. The Pequod becomes a floating fraternity of literal and symbolic slaves. Ahab shares complex affinities of enslavement with the subalterns he lords over, particularly Pip and Ishmael. Walcott establishes a bardic continuum signified by ‘Omeros’, spanning the shaman, the griot, Seven Seas, and the poet-persona. Ghosh portrays the multi-faith, multi-regional migrant brotherhood of the Ibis – of which the ‘Western’ characters Paulette and Zachary are also a part. The Pequod, Achille’s historically freighted canoe and the Ibis thus represent what Ramazani calls ‘transnational allegories’, as opposed to a Jamesonian national allegory.4 To use Glissantian terms, rather than ‘root’ identities predicated on a mythical ‘creation of the world’ and the exclusion of the other, figurative connections become expressions of the ‘relation-­identity’ conceived in ‘the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures’ (1997: 144). Ramazani’s and Glissant’s focus on cultural hybridity needs to be taken further into the realm of enunciative hybridity through Bhabha’s notion of the Third Space.5 Far more than a thematic programme of intercultural hybridity, postcolonial epic tropes open a space of linguistic hybridity. While eminently amenable to expressions of the content of cultural hybridity in postcolonial epic, the trope is above all a site of enuciative alterity and dialogism – and herein lies its ideological power for classical and postcolonial epic. Wofford’s study comprehensively demonstrates the 59

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opportunities afforded by epic similes for authorial incursions into the classical narrative. The dialogic presence of the author’s voice overcoats the action, aestheticising and legitimising epic violence through figuration. As sites of the writer’s ‘discursive embeddedness’ and ideological ‘positionality’ (Bhabha [1989] 1994: 53), classical tropes exemplify the linguistic hybridity of Bakhtinian dialogism. They already create an opening for postcolonial tropes to seize on the possibility of deploying ‘the enunciative present as a liberatory discursive strategy’ (Bhabha [1992] 1994: 265). The trope marks the dialogic presence of the author who extends the action into a realm outside the diegesis, but at the same time coterminous with it. Its figurations can only exist in a heterotopic universe running parallel to the action, the ‘non-place of language’ (Foucault 1994: xvii). The figure’s domain is properly that of what Homi Bhabha (1994: 260) calls the ‘the space of the non-­sentence’: ‘not before the sentence but something that could have acceded to the sentence and yet was outside it [italics in original]’. It is the heterotopic presence of ‘could have’ that is akin to magical realism in its capacity to open ‘up possibilities for “other” times of cultural meaning (prefigurative, retroactive) and other narrative spaces (fantasmic, metaphorical)’ (Bhabha 255). It is within this hybrid ‘space of the nonsentence’ that I would like to briefly explore the apparent contradictions between figure and trope in postcolonial texts. Moby Dick presents a fundamental contradiction between the centripetal, narrative linearity of destruction and the centrifugal, figurative circularity of conjunctive analogies that embrace the characters. Yet, despite the transcultural and transnational allegories of enslavement linking the Pequod’s crew, Ahab is an all-powerful captain whose egotistic quest leads to their irreversible deaths. Ishmael is unable to avert the catastrophe, a fact reinforced by his progressive marginalisation as a character (though not as a narrator) in the course of the novel. Ishmael’s retrospective narrative may bring the Pequod’s crew back to life for the reader but even Ishmael’s rhetorical potency, including the redemptive poetics of the coffin that saves him, cannot compensate for his own impotence when it comes to putting a stop to Ahab’s quest. The implacable fact of trauma reveals that the novel is as much as a cautionary tale against Ahab’s self-destroying egotism and contradictions as it is an indictment of Ishmael and the crew’s willing participation in a collective catastrophe. Yet, in the space of the ‘non-sentence’ opened by tropes, Ishmael’s figurative aspirations of solidarity are neither in contradiction with the diegesis nor are they flimsy fantasies to be dismissed. Rather, they express the optative mood of American literature, the ‘could have’ so precariously close to the ‘did happen’ that its very enunciation retroactively modifies our perceptions of what happened in the past. 60

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Similarly, the ending of Omeros can also be interpreted as tragic, particularly for the local fishermen. They are synecdochically represented by Hector, who tries to adapt to a mechanised world. When he gives up fishing to become a taxi driver, he is unceremoniously bumped off (he dies in a car crash) and relegated to a Dantean inferno. The narrator clearly sides with the clinging to the traditional way of life symbolised by Achille, even if he becomes ‘the only fisherman left in the world’ (301). Though Achille wonders whether he has to leave his village with its adjoining ‘hotels and marinas’ and its ‘ice-packed shrimps of pink tourists’, he finds ‘no cove he liked as much as his own’ (301). This begs the question: what will Achille do in a village where his means of livelihood is becoming economically irrelevant? The swift may have figuratively ‘sewed the Atlantic rift’ (319) as far as the history-obsessed, cosmopolitan poet is concerned, but the fishing sector will not bridge the ‘real’ socio-economic rifts and disparities described in the poem. Furthermore, sewing the Atlantic rift implies a transformation brought about through linguistic figuration rather than the narrative which, for its part, acknowledges the slow death of the island’s ‘old ways’ (301). The poem seems to recognise that Achille’s way of life does not represent a feasible solution, contrary to the poetic claims of the nostalgic narrator for whom fishing represents a convenient contemporary image of Odyssean wandering for his postcolonial epic. Yet, like Deeti’s infant in the womb, Helen’s unborn baby is a symbol of a new, transformed life ahead. Associated with the ‘sail of her bellying stomach’ (275), the baby is meant to symbolise the hope of the future, but what future awaits fishermen who can no longer live by their sails? When Melville has Ahab and his crew die, he suggests that Ahab’s epic code is incompatible with a commercially driven world. Walcott, by having Hector die, upholds a nostalgic vision of his island at odds with its neocolonial ground-realities. The poet-persona himself lucidly acknowledges the disjunctive contradictions embedded in his nostalgically-transfixed poem when he says: ‘Didn’t I want the poor/ to stay in the same light so that I could transfix/them?’ (227). However, such a reading rests on an interpretative approach that presents the narrative and figurative levels as competing, mutually commensurable, capable of comparison and substitution (i.e., one is right, substituting that which is wrong: either the tourism industry will infringe on and ultimately destroy Achille’s way of life, as implied by the narrative, or the ‘sail of [Helen’s] belly’s stomach’ prefigures a perpetuation of fishing traditions, as suggested by the figuration). Instead, such contradictions need to be understood as contiguities, coterminous existence of ‘ “other” times of cultural meaning’ (Bhabha 1994: 255). The alienating hybridity of the third space allows us to apprehend Walcott’s figurative alternative as a realm of ontological alterity, a non-sentence coterminious with – but outside – the poem’s 61

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‘sentence’. As such, it demands that we take it on its own radical terms, not on those of the diegetic universe. Sea of Poppies is also marked by tensions between transfigurations of rebirth and the relentless narrative emphasis on death. Deeti’s swelling belly and the ship’s belly are poignant metaphors for the rebirth of the girmitiyas and their new caste-free avatars. In fact, without the tropes of transfiguration, Ghosh’s narrative of the migrants would be unabatingly depressing and pessimistic, akin to the natural realism of 19th-century novels of social critique. The villagers live in grinding poverty; they wrench themselves from everything that is familiar, comforting and gives their lives structure and meaning (caste, clan, family) by signing themselves on as indentured labourers for plantations randomly assigned to them; once on the ship, they are exploited as a temporary work-force and are at the mercy of a foreign captain and heartless high-caste subedars not averse to sexually exploiting the ‘human cargo’. Indeed, the Ibis prefigures the oppressive hierarchies of the plantations to which the migrants are bound (Singh 2012: 53), but also retroactively points back to the diasporic origins of the Indian independence movement (Gandhi’s experience in Natal) that required an egalitarianism transcending caste and religion practised by the migrants avant la lettre (Roy 2017: 60). Ghosh’s hypothetical ‘if’ is less an acknowledgement of the limits of figurative transformation than a doublevision that insists that the reader entertain the coexistence of the affirmative mood and its state of alterity, the optative mood. The non-sentence (the possibility of socio-economic mobility, solidarity and rebirth) exists simultaneously alongside and ‘outside’ the sentence (the narrative of deracination, suffering and death). This irreducible ambiguity of postcolonial figuration reflects the ambivalence of the epic project in the postcolonial world, torn between utopic aspirations of communion and ground-realities of discrimination and oppression. However, the massive investment of postcolonial ideals of transcultural contact and a humanist sense of communion in epic tropes can lead to a structural overload as figurative meanings intersect with, encroach on and even overwhelm the action. Generic and ideological tensions, already visible in hypothetical similes, recusatio and negative similes, erupt more forcefully to the surface through more explicitly disjunctive strategies such as the use of comic and the transformation of the characters into Quixotic misreaders (a paradigm I again borrow from Susanne Wofford), both of which occasion metatextual reflections on the role of language itself in postcolonial epic. Put in more schematic terms, I now turn from violence in epic language to violence inflicted upon language through exaggerated, ironic and metalinguistic disfigurements of the figure. 62

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Thersites’s complaint and the ticklish question of epic comedy In ‘Epic and Novel’, Mikhail Bakhtin ([1941] 2006: 23) claims that laughter ‘destroys the epic’ because it demolishes the ‘fear and piety before an object’ required in heroic narratives. Yet, in the Iliad, the comic is usually associated with the figures of greatest authority – the gods – in the scenes at Olympus. Often, the squabbles and intrigues in heaven (the end of Book One and Book Twenty-One) are mock-heroic echoes of the tragedy of ‘man-killing war’ (11.387) on earth. Though Homer seems to suggest that the insouciance that breeds laughter is a luxury reserved for the gods, comic representation is also occasionally applied to mortals. In Book One, Thersites, the ugliest man in Ilium, is clearly a comic type and perhaps the first anti-hero in occidental literature.6 With his crooked legs, clubfoot, humped shoulders, and ‘his skull warped to a point,/sprouting clumps of scraggly, woolly hair’, he is ‘the ugliest man who ever came to Troy’ (2.250–55). Yet, the comic also allows for critique. The subaltern Thersites is ‘insubordinate, baiting kings’, even if this insubordination is censured in the text as being ‘for no good reason’ (2.248). He rightly points out that foot soldiers such as himself sacrifice their lives to procure the ‘lion’s share of bronze’ and ‘women’ for Agamemnon, who wants them to continue fighting: ‘How shameful for you, the high and mighty commander,/to lead the sons of Achaea into bloody slaughter!’ (2.263–64, 2.272–73). The comic thus serves as a weapon to ironically expose the glorified figurations of power. Thersites foregrounds the vulgar grossness (women and ransom) of the stakes involved in a war legitimised by the high idealism of Achilles’s choice of the abstractions of martial glory or kleos. The comic therefore has the subversive potential to undo the ideological conjunctions established between action and trope. Despite Bakhtin’s fundamental tenet that the epic and the comic are incompatible, his observations on the comic are in fact of great relevance to the study of postcolonial epic. Let us begin with his initial premise. Bakhtin bases his analysis of epic on the German Romantics’ notion of an absolute past, which is both a temporal and axiological category, invested with a superlative dimension (the firsts and bests, the peak times of a civilisation). ‘All external expressions of the dominant force and truth’, he explains, ‘were formulated in the valorized-hierarchical category of the past in a distanced and distancing image’. The ‘dead are loved’ from an epic distance (20). While epic distance lends enchantment to the heroic view, laughter introduces proximity by undermining ‘any hierarchical (distancing and valorized) distance’ (23) through ‘the comic familiarization of the image of man’. Such comic familiarisation of man ‘expose[s] the disparity 63

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between his surface and his center, between his potential and his reality’. It thus introduces a ‘dynamics of inconsistency and tension between the various factors of this image [of man]’ (35). It is precisely because laughter foregrounds ‘inconsistency and tension’ in the representation of man that it is crucial to postcolonial epic and serves its ambivalent purposes so well. The explicit disjunction between action and trope is a defining feature of contemporary epic because such narratives are attentive to the disparity between potential and reality which characterise the image of modern man – and the image of the modern postcolonial nation. Postcolonial epics are torn between the authors’ desire to commemorate the communal past and their critical awareness of the inability of the nation to entirely live up to its people’s aspirations in the present. Melville’s whale partakes of both heroic grandeur and mock-heroic deflation. Moby Dick is a primeval, almost mythic creature of the deep but his species is un-epically mass-consumed by man as food (as explained in the chapter ‘The Whale as a Dish’, 358–60), fuel and cosmetic products. Ishmael’s systematic preoccupation with bringing the whale up close, turning it around and inside out (chapters devoted to the whale’s skin, head, tail, measurement of its skeleton, its viability as a dish to be eaten) would also correspond to Bakhtin’s observations on the function of laughter of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a crude zone of contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, [. . .] lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. (23) While the whale, by virtue of its voluminous polysemy (‘Leviathan is the text’ [527]), weathers such competing modes of representation, the human characters fare less well. Ahab’s grandeur appears heightened through mythical and regal analogies (Prometheus, Satan, Tarquin, Nicholas the Czar), but this self-aggrandising also works against him when he is reduced to a ‘Khan of the plank’ (170). The inelegant guttural plosives underscore the metonymic mismatch of part and whole (Ahab comically presiding over a single plank or the plank as a part of the ship over which Ahab presides). Elsewhere, the officers’ meal is compared to the stifling ‘Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors’ (192–93). The ‘nameless invisible domineerings of the captain’s table’ are ironically contrasted with ‘the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows the harpooners’ in the hold (194). In Moby Dick feasting, a staple of epic (Sherratt 2004), thus becomes a site of parody of Ahab’s ‘social czarship’ (192). 64

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A similar satirical attack is directed at the local politicians of Saint Lucia in Omeros. The political candidate dubbed Statics for his mix of Yankee and Caribbean patois (who forgets to switch on his megaphone) pitches himself as a man of the people. Using the limping, wounded Philoctete (‘my footman’) and Helen as symbols of the Middle Passage’s trauma and postcolonial Saint Lucia respectively, he declaims: Like that man hopping there, St. Lucia look healthy with bananas and tourists, but her soul crying, ’tends ça moin dire z’autres, tell me if I lying. I was a fisherman and it lancing my heart at neglection-election to see my footman wounded by factions that tearing him apart. The United Force will not be a third party between two parties, one Greek and the other Trojan, both fighting for Helen [italics in original], (107) Denouncing the false promises and ‘chicanery’ of his rival candidates, he opportunistically links historical exploitation to his own agenda: every miscast vote, he claims, is ‘a cruise back to slavery/in liners like hotels you cannot sit inside/except as waiters, maids [italics in original]’ (107). Here, Walcott uses satire to register the failure of the postcolonial project. Unable to articulate its objectives honestly or transparently, it is doomed to ‘static’ interference, more incoherent noise. Static’s campaign fails and he ‘left as a migrant-worker for Florida’ (109), another kind of ‘cruise back to slavery’. Yet, the poet-narrator has also left his island to teach in America, as the Greeks did for their Roman masters: ‘Service. Under my new empire’ (206). He is merely a more cosmopolitan, privileged and self-aware version of Static. This may help explain why most of the explicitly mock-epic tropes are directed at himself. Like Ovid and Alexander Pope, Walcott deploys martial images in the mock-epic context of the ‘war of love’ (171). However, he updates them to the military engagements of the 20th century. Alone in a restaurant, the poet-persona ‘lived like a Japanese soldier in World War/II, on white rice and spare ribs’; he is ‘like a Jap soldier on his Pacific island/who prefers solitude to the hope of rescue’ (170–71). While Melville talks of an officers’ meal as a Coronation banquet and Walcott self-deprecatingly compares his diet to the Asian rice consumed by a Japanese soldier, Ghosh uses a scene of feasting for both comic effect and colonial critique in Sea of Poppies. When Neel decides to host an impromptu 65

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dinner in the sheeshmahal (hall of mirrors) of his yacht-like budgerow, the preparations take on the exaggerated proportions of a military engagement, complete with ‘a platoon of stick-wielding paiks’ (97), ‘an army of piyadas, paiks and boatmen’ (102) and even ‘an outbreak of internecine fighting’ among the paiks (98). The misunderstanding concerning a chamber-pot used as a vase in full sight of his foreign guests crowns the delightfully burlesque episode. Scatological references to intestines and worms result in a comic deflation of imperial discourse as Burnham lectures Neel on the white man’s burden. While Burnham invokes God to speak of the principles of Free Trade which are as ‘immutable’ (108) as the Ten Commandments, Neel is beset by hunger pangs and horror as he recollects the purpose of the vase (originally ordered for a magistrate who had worms in his intestines). His repugnance at the chamber-pot presiding over the dinner-table is telescoped with his rejection of Burnham’s blatant economic militarism: ‘he uttered a cry in which a lingering trace of revulsion could still be heard. “But Mr Burnham! Are you saying the British Empire will go to war to force opium on China?” ’ (105–6). Later on, the courtesan Elokeshi comments on Doughty’s sexual misadventures, comparing his ‘licking’ of her genitals to ‘tasting a chutney’ (110). From a Bakhtinian perspective, eating, excretion and cunnilingus draw attention to bodily orifices and the corporeal cycle of ingestion and renewal. They represent the dynamic and changing nature of things, the ‘gay truth’ (Bakhtin [1965] 1984: 283) that challenge the immutability of the economic and political hegemony that Ghosh’s 19th-century British opium traders believe they enjoy. Beyond its comic effects, the mock-heroic performs the function of political critique in postcolonial epic. Like the wood imagery and negative similes explored earlier in the chapter, it marks a crucial site where ideology is articulated. Melville’s mock-banquet is a denunciation of despotism, Walcott’s Homeric election a castigation of local, self-interested politicking and Ghosh’s use of the scatological ironically exposes the material motives underlying the moral pretexts of colonialism and the opium trade. In all three examples, the role of money and economic power is implicitly or explicitly recognised. Money, in fact, has always been problematic in political Virgilian epic, but not in Homeric epic. Homer has no qualms in placing issues of ransom, gifts and sexual hostages at the heart of the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles (being denied Briseis will be the cause of Achille’s wrath). In stark contrast, Virgil is at pains to sublimate the material truths of territorial usurpation and conflict that marked Roman history through the ideological machinery of gods and fate (Wofford 1992: 106). The focus on commerce in Camões’s Lusíads (the spice trade) and in postcolonial epic (whaling in Moby Dick, the history of slavery and the present state of Saint Lucia’s tourist-dependent economy in Omeros, the opium 66

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trade in the Ibis trilogy) also demonstrates the extent to which European colonialism orchestrates a paradigmatic shift in the epic genre from political epic to economic epic. Money is particularly disjunctive in political epic because it foregrounds the material motives that underlie an imperial narrative of conquest. This disjunction between high ideals and material exigencies is perhaps best illustrated in the novel Don Quixote (1605) whose eponymous protagonist follows the heroic code to the letter: The innkeeper asked if he had any money. Don Quixote said he didn’t have a blanca [a coin of small denomination], because he never read in the histories of knights-errant that any one of them had taken money with him. (2011: 34) The innkeeper concedes that ‘although the histories didn’t specify something as obvious and necessary as money and clean shirts, there was no reason to believe that they didn’t have them.’ He assures Don Quixote that knights ‘carried well-stocked purses for any contingency’ (34). As Susanne Wofford argues, Quixote’s ‘madness’, born out of an interpretative dilemma that takes text for reality, stages a disjunction between the world of heroic ideals and material motives that spur them. This Quixotic reading of the world, I argue, has become a recurrent feature of postcolonial epic’s engagement with the migrating traditions of political epic.

Disfigurement of the figure: the ‘furious trope’ of madness The heroic code relies on a knowing confusion of trope and action. We as readers know that Gorgythion and other warriors in the Iliad really die, but we may choose to privilege the figurative message that heroes will be immortalised in song. As Wofford points out, Don Quixote represents the other extreme of reading epic by dispensing entirely with this knowing complicity between reader and epic. For Quixote, the action is not akin to the trope; the action is the trope. This hermeneutic confusion is exemplified in the windmill scene. Don Quixote, on coming upon a host of windmills on the plain, sees the appearance of ‘monsters’ as part of a larger scheme governed by ‘Fortune’: ‘Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have hoped. Look over there, Sancho Panza, my friend, where there are thirty or more monstrous giants with whom I plan to do battle and take all their lives and with their spoils we’ll start to get rich. This is 67

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righteous warfare, and it’s a great service to God to rid the earth of such a wicked seed.’ ‘What giants?’ said Sancho Panza. (64) In this grand narrative of ‘righteous warfare’ and ‘service to God’, Don Quixote is the epic ‘hero’ seconded by his trusty squire and pitted against the ‘wicked seed’. Ulysses combats a giant Cyclops, but Don Quixote attacks a windmill that he thinks (or wants to think) is a giant. The split between action and trope becomes the gap between two competing narratives or interpretations. Two rival levels of action appear as the ‘mad’ or ‘obsessed’ character literalises the trope and forcibly incorporates it into the diegesis. In fact, by denying the fundamental discrepancy between trope and action, Don Quixote provides the most powerful dramatisation of the disjunctions and potential malfunctions of the two levels. The rich hermeneutic potential of such Quixotry is eminently amenable to the ideological ambivalence and revisionist thrust of postcolonial epic. Don Quixote is emblematic of the Bakhtinian conception of novel as a form that critically revises dominant genres and is self-critical in its embrace of parody (2006: 6, 384–86). Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis trilogy therefore owe their generic allegiance to both political epic and Cervantes’s novel. The presence of ‘readers’ in Moby Dick (Ahab as a ‘reader’ of the whale), Omeros (Plunkett and the poet-narrator as ‘readers’ of Saint Lucia’s history and her landscape), and in the Ibis trilogy (Pander as a ‘reader’ of Zachary and the ship Ibis) can, in certain respects, be considered Virgilian, as we will see presently. However, these characters’ tendency to give narrative priority to the trope is fundamentally Quixotic in that they succumb to the temptation of privileging the literalisation of the trope over the physical world that surrounds them. The transition from oral to written epic finds expression in the importance given to acts of reading and reception in the Aeneid. Aeneas is the first epic hero who is constantly called upon to ‘read’ the world around him. Aeneas must interpret the bas-reliefs on the Carthaginian temple walls (1.538–97), the figures on the walls of Daedalus’s temple (6.16–41) and the engravings on his shield (8.727–59). The entire conquest of Italy is literally justified by Zeus’s reading of a text, the scroll of the Fates (1.312–13). Aeneas can legitimately rule over Italy because of his role as a second Achilles (the ‘genuine’ second Achilles as compared to the ‘false’ second Achilles Turnus claims to be, see Quint 2011), predestined to establish a ‘second Troy’. Virgil’s second Troys (3.104, 3.414, 3.840) and second Achilleses (6.106, 9.838) powerfully enact the double movement of political empire (translatio imperii) through the ideological mobilisation of Homeric texts 68

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and tropes (translatio studii). This casting of history as a Homeric conceit is specifically the target of Walcott’s epic, even if Melville and Ghosh also give readers a central role in the narrative. Don Quixote, for its part, helps us to understand why the disfigurement of the figure is inevitably associated with some form of obsession or madness. To confuse trope and reality is an epistemological aberration that is so absurd, one would have to be mad to do so. As Sancho remarks, ‘only a person who had windmills in his head’ (65) is capable of such a reading. Don Quixote’s mad reading takes the epic simile to its logical extreme: his figuration of action becomes an alternative narrative that is more desirable, and hence more ‘true’ than the diegetic ‘reality’. The separation of similes gives way to the dangerous (con)fusion of metaphor: ‘they are giants’ (64), insists Quixote. The narrative strategy of the text is aimed at having the reader perceive the divide between diegesis and figure while Don Quixote, oblivious to this difference, devotes his energies to overcoming this perceptual gap (Wofford 1992: 392). The strategic excuse of madness also allows the narrator to ironically distance himself from the protagonist’s literalising of the figure or his disfigurement of the trope. In this context, Ahab can be seen as a tragic Quixote. Like Don Quixote, who does not see the windmill as ‘just a windmill’ (65), Ahab views Moby Dick not just as a whale but as a trope of evil: ‘all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick’ (232). The whale becomes an epic nemesis, an agent of evil against which he pits himself, ‘deliriously transferring its [evil’s] idea to the abhorred white whale’. After being ‘dismasted’ by Moby Dick of his leg, Ahab ‘at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations’ (231). The violence of meaning uprooted from one context to another is evident in the verbs of figuration and transference: ‘personified’, ‘deliriously transferring to’, and ‘identify with’. His distorted reading climaxes apocalyptically in the following lines: He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it. (232) In his description of Ahab’s obsession as a form of madness, Ishmael is careful not to compromise the captain’s intelligence. This makes Ahab’s madness fundamentally different from that of Quixote. Quixote’s literalisation of the trope makes him comically ineffective. Ahab, however, becomes more powerful and tragically effective in the execution of his obsession, as 69

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Ishmael is at pains to make clear with the ‘furious’ epic simile of the Hudson river: Ahab’s full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab’s broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. (233) Ahab’s madness is Quixotic in that it blinds him to the fact that the whale is a mass of blubber and blood, not ‘a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory’ (256–57). In his compulsive impulse to allegorise the whale by constantly extending ceteological information into reflections on the human condition, Ishmael too is a Quixotic reader. However, by recognising that ‘Leviathan is the text’ (527), he draws attention to the status of the whale as a ‘text’ mediated through discursive representation and subjective reception rather than an immediate reality. Like Don Quixote, Plunkett and the narrator in Omeros literalise the trope based on epic texts they have read at the expense of reality. Quixote’s ‘textual attitude’ (Said 2001c: 92) is evident when he admonishes Sancho for not being sufficiently ‘well versed in adventures’ to see that the windmills are giants. In Omeros, the disfigurement of reality is evident in the fact that Plunkett willingly pursues his ‘historic hallucination’, his ‘mythical hallucination’ (31). Rather than seeing a ‘housemaid swinging a plastic sandal’, Plunkett, inspired by the V-shaped backline of the yellow dress his wife has given Helen, views Helen as a transfigured yellow-winged butterfly and further tropes her as a Homeric Helen. Sitting in a restaurant frequented by tourists, he contemplates The name, with its historic hallucination, brightened the beach; the butterfly, to Plunkett’s joy, twinkling from myrmidon to myrmidon, from one sprawled tourist to another. Her village was Troy, its smoke obscuring soldiers fallen in battle. Then her unclouding face, her breasts were its Pitons, (31) The line break, which is also a stanza-break, typographically repeats the imaginative jump between the classical trope and the neocolonial reality 70

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of the tourist industry. Saint Lucia, with its explicitly eroticised landscape, acquires historical significance as a classical figure of speech (‘the island was once named Helen’) applied to a colonial prize: ‘for her Gaul and Briton/ had mounted fort and redoubt’ (31). Here, Plunkett refers to the Battle of the Saintes fought between Britain and France in 1782 that restored Britain’s naval supremacy over most of the islands in the West Indies. Like Virgil, who consistently tropes Rome as a second Troy in the Aeneid, Plunkett deliberately sees the island of Saint Lucia as a second Troy. Plunkett also perpetuates the Homeric conceit of colonial historian J.A. Froude (1888), who saw in the restitution of Britain’s authority over its West Indian possessions a heroic echo of the restoration of Ulysses’s authority in Ithaca (34). In this epic scheme, Plunkett, by fighting for Britain in World War Two, becomes a descendant of what Wole Soyinka has called ‘Ulysses Britannicus’ (1999: 367), the colonial adventurer-chronicler embodied by David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley and Leo Frobenius. Like his classical counterpart, Ulysses Britannicus is a ‘soldier of fortune’ who is ‘given to the arts of narrative embellishment’ and is ‘an accomplished salesman in the pursuit of a nationalist ideal’ (367). He is ‘supremely selfregarding’, not above adding a ‘little embellishment’ of romanticisation and expanding ‘his mission to a national agenda’ (370, 371). Plunkett, the practitioner of Homeric parallels, is an armchair Ulysses Britannicus. In his pursuit of a self-serving, ‘embellished’ chronicle of personal and national glory, he even adopts Froude’s (1888: 15) personification of Britain as ‘Penelope Britannia’ for his wife Maud. If the maid Helen is Saint Lucia, Maud undergoes a similar figurative idealisation, with ‘her fine profile set in an oval/ivory cloud, like a Victorian locket’ (30). Maud’s figurative associations give greater meaning and an epic purpose to Plunkett’s part in Britain’s wars: ‘You are my tea-rose, my crown, my cause, my honour,/ my desert’s white lily, the queen for whom I fought’ (28). The justification of imperialism orchestrated by such Homeric figuration explains why Plunkett feels such horror towards the iguana: it represents a rival precolonial presence, a competing name embodied by the island’s original animal inhabitant: ‘the hunched island/was called “Iounalao,” “Where the iguana is found” ’ (4). The lizard represents the windmill, the fact that the trope does not justify the action because it is just a trope. Thinking of the Battle of the Saintes, he asks whether ‘the greatest battle/in naval history’ was fought for a creature with a disposable tail and elbows like a goalie? For this a redoubt was built? And his countrymen died? For a lizard with an Aruac name? (92) 71

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In the light of such interpretative vacillations, elaborate and self-serving figurations fall away as examples of bad faith. It is not for ‘Helen’, a sublimated epic ideal that ‘Gaul and Briton/had mounted fort and redoubt’, but for land already occupied by indigenous tribes and ‘a lizard with and Aruac name’. Moreover, Plunkett still mourns the loss of his comradesin-arms (27–28). Like the private voice of sorrow in Virgil’s Aeneid (see Parry 1963: 79), the militaristic bluster in the Plunkett sections of Omeros is haunted by the threnody of loss. Reflecting on his role in World War II, he asks himself, ‘What was it all for?’ (26). Plunkett’s self-willed hallucination makes him see the waiter as a Lawrence of Saint Lucia, tourists as myrmidons and the island as a second Troy. This is more than fanciful Quixotry: it gives meaning to his own life as a soldier. His vision of the Battle of the Saintes as a second Battle of Troy (31) is mirrored in the following chapter by the poet-narrator’s subjective contemplation of the stallion on the beach where ‘the horse hardened to wood, Troy burned, and a soundless/wrestling of smoke-plumed warriors was spun’ (35). The expatriate Saint Lucian poet is therefore not exempt from a similar impulse to mythologise, one which can be traced back to his early poetry. In Another Life ([1973] 1992: 183), the speaker wryly remarks that ‘[p]rovincialism loves the pseudo-epic’ and ‘these heroes [Saint Lucians] have been given a stature/disproportionate to their cramped lives.’ By Omeros, the ‘pseudo-epic’ has given way to ‘the opening line/of our epic horizon’ (13), but the critical awareness of the pseudo-ness of lending Homeric dimensions to humble fishermen who have not read Homer remains. The similarities between Plunkett and the poet-narrator also refute the binaries of coloniser and colonised: both characters are prey to a preconfigured vision of the space they inhabit, one which merges with their inner subjectivity and egotistic motives. The poet-narrator’s bad faith is foregrounded when he actually comes face to face with Helen the person, not the trope. This encounter results in a Medusa-like stare that ‘paralyzed me past any figure of speech’ (36). Hence, the use of the predatorial simile of a pantheress (36–37) – also the longest in simile in Omeros – to describe Helen. Her presence, ultimately irreducible to a trope, threateningly encircles the entire figurative apparatus of his poem. Similarly, Plunkett knows from the very beginning that action should be separated from trope because wars were ‘thin like sea-smoke, but their dead were real [emphasis mine]’ (31). The poet-narrator’s famous insight regarding the need to privilege reality over the trope, to discard ‘Homeric shadow’ in favour of ‘that light beyond metaphor’ (271) is not part of a progressive movement culminating in a moment of epiphany. On the contrary, the reality of the iguana, the unpoetic plastic sandal and the headstrong maidservant is posited against ‘Homeric repetition’ (96) from the very beginning of the epic. Gregson 72

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Davis (1997: 331) has aptly described this shuttling between the desire for metaphor and its disavowal as ‘the quixotic quest for the full signifier’. The explicit thematisation of the act of comparing resurfaces in images of parallel oars, parallel battle lines and parallel meridians throughout the poem. While Ghosh’s characters in the Ibis trilogy are rarely Quixotic, one notable exception stands out: the Bengali agent for Benjamin Burnham, Nob Kissin Pander. This is not surprising. Of all the characters, he is the most spiritually attuned to a metaphysical, inner world and prone to see the material world as maya, an illusion veiling hidden truths. Pander’s revelations, in fact, are both comic and mystical. He is Quixotic in his comic desperation to see events and people around him as confirmations of Taramony’s prophecy. Before dying, she predicts that certain signs will foretell her return to the world of the living including her soul’s migration into Pander’s body. Like Plunkett, who obsessively looks for forced Homeric coincidences, Pander in Sea of Poppies searches for portents which ‘were sure to be manifested in the unlikeliest places and in the most improbable forms’ (133). Thus, he seizes on the freak coincidence that the sea-shanty ‘Heave Away Cheerily’ that Zachary plays on his whistle shares the same rhythms as Gurjari, a raga associated with Lord Krishna. Since Krishna is an avatar of Vishnu, the prophetic significance of Gurjari for a Vaishnavite (worshipper of Vishnu) like Pander leads him to establish a hilarious set of parallels, much to the anxiety of Zachary. As a mulatto pretending to be a white man, Zachary fears the discovery of his true identity. Pander, however, subscribes to a different hermeneutic frame, that of the Krishna myths: Krishna’s ‘very name meant “black” ’ and his ‘darkness had been celebrated in thousands of songs’ (133–34). Pander observes that Zachary’s face, though disappointingly white with no trace of the ‘monsoonal tint of Ghanshyam, the CloudDark Lord’, was ‘comely, not unbecoming of an emissary of the Slayer of Milkmaids’ Hearts [i.e., Krishna]’ (134). Zachary even comes to see Pander as Quixotic: ‘Not for the first time Zachary wondered whether the gomusta was not merely eccentric but actually mad’ (335). Pander’s madness has profound epistemological and ontological implications linked to the reconception of identity on grounds of diasporic plurality rather than race or nationality. As Jacob Crane (2011: 10–11) persuasively argues, Pander’s ‘misreading’ of Zachary’s blackness unwittingly creates an ‘alternative space’ that transgresses ‘the absolute archives of race and nation’. Pander’s hermeneutics divests Zachary’s black origins of their Black Atlantic associations with shame and persecution and reinvests them with the positive, divine connotations of the Hindu-inflected Indian Ocean World: When at last he saw the notation beside Zachary’s name – ‘Black’ – he uttered no wild cry of joy – it was rather with a sigh of 73

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silent jubilation that he rested his eyes on the scribbled word that revealed the hand of the Dark Lord. (152–53) Pander’s Quixotry transcends both the racism Zachary experienced in America and the Hindu caste-barriers that would have made the American foreigner a source of ‘contamination’ for a caste-conscious Brahmin such as Pander. Pander also undergoes a transformation that is a literalised realisation of the dying Taramony’s prophecy: ‘your body will be the vessel for my return [. . .] the two of us, united by Krishna’s love, will achieve the most perfect union – you will become Taramony’ (152). Ghosh is playing with the Bhakti tradition’s most famous trope of seeing God as a lover – a relationship explored in the poems of medieval poets such as Kabir and Tukaram. Thus Taramony, a devotee of Krishna, tells Pander, ‘Krishna was her only man [. . .] the only lover she would ever have.’ Pander responds by insisting that he will worship her as she worships Krishna: ‘You will be my Krishna and I will be your Radha’ (149). Here, the Bhakti impulse to collapse spiritual and sensual union through the transferal of the lover trope to God is doubly transferred: Taramony sees herself as the Radha of Lord Krishna and Pander, in turn, aspires to be the Radha of Taramony. This chiasmatic reversal is both one of roles (devotee-lover/lord-elusive beloved) and of gender. In the course of the novel, Pander’s heightened mystical senses grow in proportion to his maternal impulses as he becomes increasingly feminised. Like Zachary, Neel too becomes the object of his mystical readings. Pander, who sees Zachary as a second Krishna and Neel as a second son, appears as both a character blessed with divine insight into ‘concealed inner truths’ (357) and a comic misinterpreter, an Indian Don Quixote who sees Krishna in an American first mate and a son in the man whose downfall he orchestrated. This metaphysical literalisation of tropes, however, is ironically undercut by more pressing bodily functions. ‘Moving’ inner truths give way to the motions of the gomusta’s corporeal ‘interior’ as he rushes to the lavatory: The sight of the encounter between these two beings [Zachary and Neel], both of whom concealed inner truths known only to him, was so moving as to actually set in motion the long-­threatened earthquake: the gurgling in the gomusta’s interior was now like that of molten lava. (357) In Sea of Poppies, Ghosh’s engagement with the trope of madness in Pander’s case is marked by a gentle indulgence entirely at odds with Melville’s 74

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tragic elevation of Ahab’s apocalyptic obsession or the ironic sting directed at Plunkett and the narrator. In contrast, by Flood of Fire (2015), Pander’s troping takes on a far more serious ideological function as a critique of Free Trade and capitalist greed. In Flood of Fire, he no longer associates Zachary with the playful avatar of Vishnu (Krishna), but with his destructive avatar of Kalki. Kalki is the destroyer who arrives during the age of evil (Kaliyuga) to bring about the apocalypse, after which a new cycle of time, beginning with Satya yuga, the age of truth, is set into motion. Pander’s preoccupation with Kaliyuga echoes that of Tulsidas in Ramcharitmanas. References to the Kaliyuga are frequent in Tulsidas’s text: ‘the story of Rama is an axe to hew down the Kaliyuga’ (1994: 70). Often, the poet associates his own sins with those of the age: ‘Of those born in this dreadful Kaliyuga [. . .] who abandon the Vedic path and walk in evil ways [. . .] who are impostors claiming to be Rama’s devotees, though slaves of gold and wrath and lust, chief in the world am I’ (10). Banarasi Prasad Saksena even observes that Tulsidas ‘appears to be obsessed with the evils of the Kaliyuga’ (quoted in Tulsidas 1994: 721). Thus, in Flood of Fire, when Zachary decides that he ‘want[s] to own ships, not work on them’, his ‘incantatory repetition of the word “want” ’ sends ‘a shaft of illumination’ through Pander. He recalls that ‘Ma Taramony had always said that the present era – Kaliyuga, the age of apocalypse – was a time of wanting, an epoch of unbound craving in which humankind would be ruled by the demons of greed and desire.’ Confusing mystical trope and material reality, Pander sees Zachary as the ‘incarnate realization of Taramony’s prediction’ that ‘a great host of beings would appear on earth, to quicken the march of greed and desire’ and ‘hasten the coming of Kalki’ (258). Beneath the madness of misreading is the lucidity of truth. To help Zachary ‘in his mission of unshackling human greed’, Pander directs Zachary to opium, perhaps the most powerful agent of transformation, ‘a substance that had a magical power to turn human frailty into gold’ (258). Pander, in his small but significant way, lays the foundation for the paroxysm of colonial greed, the First Opium War. As Pander explains to the bewildered Indian soldier Kesri Singh in Flood of Fire, it ‘is the destiny of the English to bring about the world’s end; they are but instruments of the will of the gods.’ He explains that ‘the English have come to China and Hindustan’ because ‘these two lands are so populous that if their greed is aroused, they can consume the whole world.’ Kesri Singh and himself are therefore ‘here to help the English fulfil their destiny. We maybe little people but we are fortunate in that we know why we are here and they do not. [. . .] For only when this world ends will a better one be born’ (509–10). In a manner similar to the rewriting of the history of malaria from the perspective of the ‘little people’ who appear to be manipulating Western 75

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scientists in The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), the British victory in the First Opium War seems to be engineered by the Indians and the Chinese. Ghosh playfully transforms an act of European aggression into one of Asian orchestration. The harbingers of Commerce, Christianity and Civilisation are ironically exposed in their true role as ‘demons of greed and desire’ (2015: 258) and agents of apocalyptic destruction. In fact, Burnham and the morally-corrupted Zachary of Flood of Fire resemble the sinners critiqued by Tulsidas: ‘impostors claiming to be Rama’s devotees, though slaves of gold and wrath and lust’ (1994: 10). Moreover, Ghosh seems to suggest that Zachary and Burnham, not Pander, are the real ‘misreaders’.7 As opium merchants, they distort the Christian injunction to love fellow beings as well as the precepts formulated by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Wealth of Nations (1776) in their own interests. Indeed, the latter work is cited constantly by the opium merchants to legitimise the sale of opium in China and constitutes the major ideological centre of gravity of the trilogy. The opium merchants ignore the principle of moral sympathy, mutual cooperation and common good established in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1790: I.I.1, II.II.8) and systematically violate the code of justice, the rule of law and fair play that undergird Smith’s conception of Free Trade in Wealth of Nations (1904: IV.9.51; see also Werhane 2006: 206). The ultimate irony lies in the fact that they mobilise the ideas of Smith, who firmly opposed colonialism as an unproductive, unfair monopoly phenomenon that benefited an economic elite (1904: IV.7), in order to further their private ends of capital accumulation. In the postcolonial epics of Melville, Walcott and Ghosh, it is the act of reading that becomes the ideologically fraught arena in which heroes ‘prove’ themselves. The traditional heroes of epic who are supposed to be in physical and/or political control of their worlds – Ahab, Plunkett and the poet-narrator at his more self-deceiving moments, and the opium merchants synecdochically represented by Benjamin Burnham – are ironically exposed as ‘outdated’ heroes, hermeneutic failures who are the victims of their own distorted misreadings of reality. In contrast, ‘subalterns’ such as the underpaid Ishmael, the underprivileged Saint Lucian working class, the exploited girmitiyas and eccentric Pander may be deprived of the physical and political power of the West, but are interpretatively empowered in their capacity as bearers of privileged insights into the nature of reality or as ‘mad’ readers self-consciously aware of their Quixotry. Heroes have undergone constant evolution in the Western tradition – from Virgil’s martial hero to the Christian hero of Dante to the romantic heroes of the Italian Renaissance to Camões’s economic merchant-hero. The hero’s most contemporary manifestation would appear to be the hermeneutic hero whose lack of historical agency is strategically compensated by 76

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a ‘superior’, but nonetheless ambivalent, exegetic agency associated with madness. Madness has traditionally marked a site of psychological excess that must be curbed in epic – be it the wrath of Achilles, the hysteria of Dido abandoned by Aeneas or the jealous torments resulting in Orlando’s insanity when Angelica, the pagan princess he loves, elopes with the soldier Medora. Orlando is a particularly relevant case since he is explicitly cast as a misreader in the celebrated scene where he reads the romantic verses written by Angelica and Medora testifying to their love. Though ‘[t]hree times, four times, six times he read the script’, the jealous Orlando refuses to accept their ‘true meaning’ and vainly strives to ‘change the sense of what was plain and clear’ (1975: 23.3.1–4). Orlando’s interpretative denial in the face of ‘what was plain and clear’ already anticipates the eccentric misreadings of Don Quixote. However, the specificity of postcolonial epic’s Quixotic hermeneutics resides in its Saidian preoccupation with discourse and primarily Eurocentric representations against which ‘madness’ offers sites for the articulation of transgressive ‘truths’. Like heterotropes, the subversive potential of mad misreadings lies less in the fact that they are counter-readings per se than in their epistemological instability as representations of reality (rather than reality itself) subject to endless further mediation and tampering. Madness opens a playful space of dubiousness and duplicity in which narrators can both distance themselves from the hermeneutic excesses of their ‘mad’ characters, all the while recognising the devastating effects self-interested misreadings unleash in the ‘real’ world. Pander’s madness allows us to see the civilising mission and Free Trade for what they really are: an apocalyptic onslaught of rapacity on a civilisational scale. Madness performs similar functions in Moby Dick and Omeros by undermining the discursive sublimation of epic enterprises (the pursuit of the whale, the colonial conquest of Saint Lucia) and exposing them as acts of egotism, cupidity and, ultimately, destruction for all. Madness is thus a metonym for the workings of postcolonial epic. The postcolonial epic text is generically conditioned to magnify ‘reality’ into epic representations, but it must also engage with the legacy of poststructuralism by displaying a scepticism towards its own discursive acts. This poststructuralist inheritance can be foregrounded through Stuart Hall’s ([1989] 1990) observations on culture and history as ever-changing discursive constructs rather than essences in ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’. From this perspective, madness is less an adversarial counter-­narrative than a self-reflexive ‘positioning [italics in original]’, as Hall would put it, that ‘challenges the fixed binaries which stabilise meaning and representation’ (1990: 229). For Hall, identity is defined not in relation to ‘a simple “factual past” ’. Instead, identity marks ‘unstable points of identification 77

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or suture [. . .] within the discourses of history and culture’. It therefore has ‘no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental “law of origin” ’ (226). From this perspective, the interpretative madness of characters in postcolonial epic allows their authors to highlight the unstable movements of discursive self-inscription within, or self-suture from, master narratives of history. The Quixotic reader’s derangement exemplifies the Derridean dance of interpretative play opened between ‘differ’ and ‘defer’. Words acquire meaning through their differences vis-à-vis other words just as madness becomes ideologically potent through the ways in which it ‘differs’ from hegemonic discourses. Moreover, a word’s full meaning is always ‘deferred’ and contingent on supplementary meanings contained by other words: ‘meaning is never finished or completed, but keeps on moving to encompass other, additional or supplementary meanings, which as [Christopher] Norris puts it elsewhere disturb the classical economy of language and representation’ (Hall 1990: 229). Mad interpretations undermine history’s status as a totality by transforming it into a heuristic hypothesis. The ‘mad’ readings of Ahab, Plunkett and the poet-narrator and Pander reveal that the meanings extracted from history and reality are contingent and not conclusive; they are ‘positionings’ of ‘identification and suture’, not essences and universal truths. The emphasis placed on mad readers by Melville, Walcott and Ghosh thus points to postcolonial epic’s poststructuralist concerns with language, discourse and hermeneutics. While physical violence is omnipresent in their epics – combats with whales, armed resistance by Arawaks and Native Americans, corporal punishment of prisoners and coolies – the disfigurement of the figure also suggests a more concerted engagement with our linguistic apprehensions of reality.

Speaking of one’s ‘own people’ in the ‘language of another’ Mikhail Bakhtin’s ([1934–1935] 2006) attention to the political role of language in ‘Discourse in the Novel’ is of particular relevance to understanding the specificities of classical and postcolonial epic. For Bakhtin (2006), the official language of the state is an agent of national unification. It reinforces a unified ‘verbal-ideological world’ (270) that does not recognise ‘alien’ cultural influences. He points out that in high poetic genres, language ‘appears, in essence, as a thing, it does not lie on the same [italics in original] plane with the real language of the work.’ He continues: Elements of heteroglossia enter here not in the capacity of another language carrying its own particular points of view, about which one can say things not expressible in one’s own language, but 78

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rather in the capacity of a depicted thing. Even when speaking of alien things, the poet speaks in his own language. [. . .] Whereas the writer of prose [. . .] attempts to talk about even his own world in an alien language (for example, in the non-literary language of the teller of tales, or the representative of a specific socio-­ ideological group). (287) Bakhtin’s point – that the traditional poet speaks of an alien culture in his own language (one thinks of Ulysses’s exchange with the Phoenicians or Aeneas’s dialogue with the Carthaginian Dido) while the novelist will speak even of his own culture in an ‘alien’ language soaked in non-literary registers – foregrounds a major specificity of contemporary epic. Postcolonial epic, with its multilingual cast of characters, explicitly exhibits both the Bakhtinian brand of linguistic hybridity typical of heteroglossia and the cultural hybridity of contact zones (Pratt 1991). In the polyglossic Moby Dick, the Quakers’ archaic idiolect provides a convenient conceit to justify Ahab’s use of the elevated style of Shakespearean tragic heroes. Elsewhere, Ishmael uses pidgin English to communicate with Queequeg, while the cook speaks in the vernacular idiom of 19thcentury Black Americans. The power of an idiolect to ‘carr[y] its own particular points of view’ is foregrounded in old Fleece’s sermon to the sharks in Chapter 64, an echo of the sermon in the ‘negro church’ (38) and a parodic counterpoint to Father Mapple’s sermon to the Nantucketers in Chapter Nine. Though Stubb makes fun of old Fleece by demanding that he ‘preach’ in a ‘gentlemanly’ manner without swearing at the sharks, the black cook subtly undermines Stubb’s authority by implying that the sharks can be ‘angels’ while his master Stubb is the ‘real’ shark. Addressing the sharks as ‘Belubed fellow-critters’, old Fleece concedes, ‘You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel.’ Smarting from Stubb’s humiliation, old Fleece nonetheless has the last, ominously prophetic, word: ‘Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ‘stead of him eat whale’ (357). Walcott deliberately opens Omeros in creolised English as an open challenge to the Standard English used by most professors of literature.8 When Ma Kilman asks Philoctete about his wound, he answers, ‘“Moins blessé.”/I am blest/wif this wound, Ma Kilman’ (18). Here, creole patois, acting as an interface between the English ‘to bless’ and the French ‘blesser’ (to injure), appears both as a wound (‘Moins blessé’) and an unsuspected benedictional cure (‘I am blest’). The wound, a symbol of physical disempowerment, is transformed into a sign of enunciative hybridity so that the ‘mystery of the holiness of suffering is [. . .] revealed in language, a syncretist re-creation, unique to St Lucia’ (Burnett 2001: 136–37).9 Ghosh, for his part, revels 79

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in the recreation of the Laskari language in Sea of Poppies and the Chinese pidgin used by the transnational business community of Fanqui-town in River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. In Sea of Poppies, he devotes an elaborate epic simile to Laskari as an expression of transnational mobility and intercultural understanding: Laskari – that motley tongue, spoken nowhere but on the water, whose words were as varied as the port’s traffic, an anarchic medley of Portuguese calaluzes and Kerala pattimars, Arab booms and Bengal paunchways, Malay proas and Tamil catamarans, Hindusthani pulwars and English snows – yet beneath the surface of this farrago of sound, meaning flowed as freely as the currents beneath the crowded press of boats. (96) A language of the contact zone, Laskari is as ‘alien’ to the American Zachary as it is to the Bengali-speaking lascar Jodu. Zachary has to ‘wrap his tongue around words like “dal”, “masala”, “achar” ’ and ‘memorize a new shipboard vocabulary that sounded a bit like English and yet not: the rigging becomes the “ringeen,” “avast!” was “bas” ’ (15). Jodu, repeating Laskari orders such as, ‘Starboard watch ahoy! Jamna pori upar ao!’ to himself, ‘understand[s] perfectly well the whole while yet being unable to account for the meaning of the several parts’ (96). Ghosh’s pervasive polyglossia thus gives his trilogy a wordy ‘taste’ so that, ‘[e]ach word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life’ (Bakhtin 2006: 293). It is at this point that the paradox of political epic is productive. Its centripetal politics of monocultural nationhood cannot acknowledge its reliance on centrifugal migrating poetics drawn from ‘foreign’ languages and cultures traditions. Through the exclusive use of the native language to speak of ‘alien’ things (speaking of the Phonecian and Carthaginian worlds in Greek and Latin, for example), the foreign culture’s alterity is assimilated and ‘contained’ ‘as a thing’ that is not on the same level as ‘real language’. In contrast, the presence not only of foreign languages and dialects, but also of multiple literary styles, professional jargon and sociocultural registers in Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis trilogy demonstrates their profoundly Bakhtinian commitment language not ‘as a thing’ but as a political actor ‘carrying its own particular points of view’.10 As postcolonial epics, they do not merely highlight the migrating languages and traditions at work in the constitution of nomadic or diasporic identity, but present enunciative hybridity as the pre-condition for the articulation of identity per se. 80

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As this chapter has demonstrated, epic tropes – classical and postcolonial – are sites of double-voicedness and hybridity that introduce a new utterance, an alternative perspective, a fresh frame of reference into the narrative. In this sense, the figuration of classical and postcolonial epic is characterised by allegorical dynamics. Classical epic tropes perform the allegorical function of a ‘narrative supplement’ that ‘is understood to extend and explain a primary narrative that is itself, then, fundamentally altered by this supplementary reading’ (Wofford 1992: 13). However, the allegorical supplement of the classical epic simile remains a supplement. Its subordination to the ‘real’ world of action reinforces a stable system of representation and a unified worldview. The hero may live on in song, but the ‘reality’ of his death is never undermined. In contrast, postcolonial tropes such as multidirectional heterotropes, knotted negative similes, unstable hypothetical similes, and comic and hermeneutic disfigurements of the figure destabilise hegemonic systems of signification and problematise the differential, fragmented ‘realities’ of historical experience across divides of power, culture, space and time. While the allegorical thrust of classical tropes allows them to ‘supplement’ the narrative, postcolonial tropes periodically supplant the diegetic reality of the text, calling into question the Eurocentric or nationalist criteria according to which a normative version of ‘reality’ was established in the first place. As inheritors of poststructuralism, postcolonial epic figures tell a story that both differs from the narrative and defers its full interpretation. In this sense, they are consonant with the new kind of allegory Fredric Jameson associates with postcolonial literature, one in which a ‘massive and monumental’ representation of reality is revealed to be ‘profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream’ (1986: 73). Equally important is Jameson’s observation that such polysemia is also the result of the ‘aesthetic dilemma’ that arises when the colonial ‘adversary’ who ‘spoke another language and wore the visible trappings of colonisation’ is replaced ‘by your own people’ (81). The ultimate enemy of the Pequod’s crew is not Moby Dick, but the American dictator Ahab; Hector’s and Helen’s embrace of modernisation and the poet-narrator’s complicity with a Western world of privilege represent threats that are as great, if not greater, to the local way of life and to the epic poem itself than Plunkett’s nostalgic excursions into colonial history; and Neel and Pander, for all their critical awareness, are active collaborators in the colonial enterprise of political domination and economic exploitation. While the source of conflict in classical epic is located at the level of action, the ultimate agon in postcolonial epic is displaced to the Foucauldian ‘non-place’ of language. If the Quixotic disfigurement of the figure that does violence to language and upsets regimes of truth would seem paradigmatic of postcolonial epic, one must remember that the germ of this 81

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subversive potential is already present in the disjunction between diegetic violence and aesthetic figuration in classical epic. In this sense, Don Quixote makes visible the ideological contradictions that are naturalised and rendered invisible through classical epic’s conjunctive analogies. Postcolonial epic depicts ‘mad’ reader-characters who brutally bring these repressed tensions and truths to the surface. Its transgressive tropes evoke a Quixotic world in which ‘absolutes become fragmented, nonvision becomes vision, and the false clarities of tradition become the uncertain round’ upon which new knowledges can be built (Slemon 1988: 164). While stylistic figures in postcolonial epic etch alternative histories and epistemologies in miniaturised form, two macro-narrative structures execute revisionist paradigms of history on the broader scale of a fresco. These structural devices are the interlinked conventions of genealogy and prophecy, to which we will turn in the next chapter.

Notes   1 For an analysis of the use of felled trees to depict fallen heroes in the Iliad, see Naomi Rood’s ‘Craft Similes and the Construction of Heroes in the Iliad’ (2008), particularly pp. 24–33.   2 For a critical overview of the definitions of magical realism, see Christopher Warnes’s (2009: 1−17) introduction to his book Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence. Warnes defines magical realism as ‘a mode of narration that naturalises the supernatural’ resulting in ‘coherent codes of the natural and the supernatural [being] arranged in a state of equivalence with one another’ (100). It has profound epistemological implications: ‘the signifiers, natural and supernatural, real and fantastic, depend for their meanings on a stable point of comparison – a shared notion of reality – that is undermined by the relativising effect of magical realism’ (7).   3 Translated by Dudley Fitts, in Angel Flores (ed.), The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry: From Nerval to Valery in English Translation, pp. 229−34.  4 Jameson argues that ‘Third-World texts’ ‘necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society [italics in original]’ (1986: 69).   5 Bhabha explains that an ‘act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement’ requires that ‘these two places be mobilized in the passage in a Third Space’. The term refers to both the ‘general conditions of language’ and the specific context of the utterance’s ‘production of meaning’ and interpretation (2008: 53).  6 While the figure of Thersites has traditionally been described as ‘comic’ and anti-heroic, his role in the epic has elicited divergent interpretations. For a negative reading of Thersites as ‘a physically abject and therefore risible figure whose role always seemed épater la bourgeoisie through his quarrelsomeness’, see Ralph Rosen, ‘The Death of Thersites’ (2003: 131).

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For a more positive view of Thersites as a man of the people (‘demos’) who anticipates ideas of democratic equality, see Siep Stuurman, ‘The Voice of Thersites: Reflections on the Origin of the Idea of Equality’ (2004).  7 For a detailed analysis of ‘misreaders’ of Adam Smith’s work in the Ibis trilogy, see Sneharika Roy, ‘The Adam Smith Problem in the Ibis Trilogy: Self-Interest, Empathy, and Hermeneutic Irony’ (forthcoming).   8 On the BBC radio programme World Book Club, hosted by Harriet Gilbert (2008), Walcott said he wanted to ‘pitch’ the opening of his ‘patois, creole poem’ at the ‘conversational’ but also ‘reverential level’ of the speech of the Saint Lucian fishermen so that it would ‘demand an effort’ from readers particularly ‘some English professor somewhere [who] would have to speak this very bad English’.   9 For a discussion of Philoctete’s wound, see Jahan Ramazani’s authoritative essay ‘The Wound of History: Walcott’s Omeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction’ (1997). 10 The question of language in the works of Melville, Walcott and Ghosh has been the subject of extensive critical investigations, of which only a necessarily selective list can be given here. For Melville’s polyphony, see Paul Lyons’s ‘Melville and his Precursors: Style as Metastyle and Allusion’ (1990), pp. 452−63. Also of interest is McWilliams’s deliberate retranscription of a passage from Moby Dick in blank verse in The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860 (1989: 200–1). For Walcott’s hybrid poetics, see John J. Figueroa’s ‘Creole in Literature: Beyond Verisimilitude: Texture and Varieties: Derek Walcott’ (1995) and Paula’s Burnett’s chapter ‘The Smell of Our Own Speech: The Tool of Language’, specifically pp. 135−50, in Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (2001). For Ghosh’s ‘deterritorialisation’ of English, see Lise Guilhamon’s ‘Global Languages in the Time of the Opium Wars: The Lost Idioms of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies’ (2011).

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2 ‘HISTORY IN THE FUTURE TENSE’ Genealogy as prophecy

No, Virgil, no: Not even the first of the Romans can learn His Roman history in the future tense, Not even to serve your political turn; Hindsight as foresight makes no sense. – W.H. Auden, ‘Secondary Epic’

Genealogy figures prominently in the works of Herman Melville, Derek Walcott and Amitav Ghosh. In Melville’s Redburn (1849), the eponymous well-born protagonist re-enacts his dead father’s transatlantic journey to Liverpool while upper-class gentility, illegitimacy and orphanhood are at the heart of Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852). Walcott, the most explicitly autobiographical of the three writers, dramatises his own origins and, by extension, the historical origins of his island in his poetry and drama. A representative example is the character of Shabine, the sailor-poet of ‘Schooner Flight’, whose ‘English, Dutch and nigger blood’ makes him declare that he is either a miscegenated ‘nobody’ or a multicultural ‘nation’ (1992: 346). Family ties have also been an enduring theme for Ghosh, who approaches them both as an anthropological phenomenon in his 1984 essay ‘The Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village’ (2002: 109–33) and as a subject of fiction in his multifamily, multi-generation sagas such as The Shadow Lines (1998) and The Glass Palace (2000). However, despite the three authors’ recurrent preoccupation with lineages, their representation of individual and collective origins in Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis trilogy reflects a more concerted generic attention to genealogy as an epic convention. As this chapter will demonstrate, genealogy in political epic is far more than a leitmotiv. Genealogical digression is a fundamental structural component of political epic’s narrative temporality and ideological teleology. While it is tempting to see the postcolonial epics of Melville, Walcott and Ghosh as 84

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repudiating imperial genealogies of racial purity, these authors do not reject genealogy per se (it is, in fact, a fundamental concern in their works and in postcolonial literature as a whole), but resist the teleological formulation of genealogy specific to political epic. Though they rehaul the imperialist cast of genealogy in revisionist terms of subaltern and diasporic histories, their postcolonial epics still shuttle between the primal need to construct counter-stories of lineage and a postmodern awareness of the constructed nature of narrative. For postcolonial epic, the past tense of history is mediated by the continuous present of the epic utterance. Traditionally, genealogical digressions in classical literary cultures of the Global North and South are framed in the past tense. The past tense is used for the elaborate genealogies in the Iliad, in the Ramayana and in the Mali epic of Sunjata. In Valmiki’s Ramayana, for example, Vashishtha retraces Ram’s genealogy from Brahma the Creator through Manu and Ikshvaku, the first king of Ayodhya, to then list all Ikshvaku’s descendants down to Dashratha, Ram’s father (Book II, Canto 102 [1986]). The Mali epic Sunjata opens with a genealogical catalogue that begins with Adam and Eve, extends through Prophet Muhammad’s Ethiopian companion Bilal-bi-Rabah (thus conferring Islamic legitimacy to the eponymous hero-descendant) and the founding clan families, ending with the hero’s father, Fata Magan the Handsome (1.46−2.339 [1986]). Such genealogical digressions are characterised by formulaic expression: ‘King Juluku, the Holy begat King Belo Komaan./Belo Komaan begat Juruni Komaan./Juruni Komaan begat Fata Magan, the Handsome’ (2.254−56). In today’s postcolonial context, Sunjata plays ‘a definitive role in building a sense of national identity’ and ‘unity’ – typical of political epic – by emphasising a common genealogical source for the scattered Mandekanspeaking clans across political frontiers established by European colonial authorities (Johnson 1986: 50). Moreover, despite the deceptive use of the past tense, political epic is also characterised by a genealogical temporality stretching into the present, particularly in the case of performative traditions. Genealogy in political epic deliberately conscripts epic heroes to the national archive with the aim of exalting current political leaders. In African epic, this political dimension, though absent in the ‘text’, can be actualised during the griot’s performance of the oral narrative. (Walcott gestures towards these performative traditions in Omeros [139–40].) Citing the example of the late Bantu griot Habibu Selemai, Mugyabuso M. Mulokozi (2002: 59) observes that a bard can appeal to the generosity of his audience by extending his epic genealogies to the present and including the names of his patron-listeners who consider themselves descendants of the hero. The anachronistic presence of Dauda Jawara, first prime minister of Gambia, in a recitation of the Sunjata epic, though not part of the 85

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‘original’ genealogical catalogue, also reflects the imbrication of legendary epic and present-day political authority (Okpewho 1979: 73). Similarly, from the middle ages onwards, Indian monarchs legitimised their positions of power by having themselves compared to mythical heroes such as Ram in a propagandist move that has been called ‘inventing the king as Rama’ (Pollock 1993: 263). These ennobling links between past and present were concretised outside the ‘text proper’ through architectural edifices, inscriptions and commissioned courtly poetry. Contemporary Indian politics overtly turn to the epics for ideological arsenal by continuing the medieval tradition of ‘inventing’ Ram. In 1990, L.K. Advani, the leader of the right-wing BJP political party, organised a Ram Rath Yatra (‘Ram’s Chariot Procession’) with an air-conditioned Toyota van redesigned with a platform to resemble a chariot, deliberately echoing Ram’s chariot, and followers dressed as epic characters. His purpose was to campaign for the construction of a temple to Ram on a site reputed to be Ram’s birthplace but occupied at the time by the Babri mosque. The message conveyed by this volatile iconography – that of re-establishing Ram’s ideal kingdom (Ramrajya) through the reconstruction of the temple – fuelled intense communal violence, culminating in the demolition of the mosque two years later by Hindutva activists (Davis 1996). The Indian diaspora has also seen the emergence of ‘Ramayana politics’ (Singh 2012: 35–36), wherein Ram’s ideal kingdom is seen as a prefiguration of an improved state of local politics. However, the Ramayana, particularly its medieval demotic version, the Ramcharitmanas, has also traditionally provided a positive source of cultural sustenance to Indian migrant communities abroad who needed ‘faith in a God whose experiences bore resemblance to their own’ and identified with ‘Ram as a fellow sufferer in exile’ (Rambachan and Shukla 2016: 117). Transpositions of the mythological past onto the political present in the Western tradition have tended to be more textual than performative. In his Anglocentric account of Caribbean history, the historian J.A. Froude (1888: 15) musters Homeric credentials to glorify colonising Britain as ‘Penelope Britannia’. Thus, Britain’s naval victory over the French in the Battle of the Saintes (1782) is troped as an event that allows Britain to assume her ‘natural’ mastery over the Caribbean in much the same way Ulysses reclaims his kingdom on stringing the bow: ‘England kept her West Indies [. . .] The bow of Ulysses was strung in those days’ (34). Walcott’s Omeros powerfully foregrounds this strategic deployment of the cultural prestige of Homeric epic and Hellenism in general to justify colonialism. The entire epic challenges the colonial archaeology of knowledge underlying the discursive representation of Saint Lucia as a colonial prize, a ‘Helen of the West Indies’. This harnessing of Homeric epic to political propaganda can be traced back 86

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to a specific model: Virgilian political epic and its telescoping of epic genealogy and prophecy into a teleology of national destiny. The divergent conceptions of genealogy in Homer’s and Virgil’s epics throw into sharp relief the specificity of the latter’s political formulation of genealogy. In Book Six of the Iliad, for example, Diomedes asks Glaucus, ‘Young gallant stranger, who are you?’ Glaucus answers by first emphasising the vanity of human history in the face of mortality, comparing men to falling leaves – one of the most celebrated epic similes of the Iliad (1991: 6.170–75). The use of pastoral similes, as demonstrated in the first chapter, can serve to put the epic action into perspective: leaves reappear every spring but death for man is irreversible. Genealogy becomes a way of reestablishing a sense of continuity in the face of the violent discontinuity brought on by death. Glaucus names his dead ancestors, starting at the beginning with Aeolus, all the way down to his father Hippolochus. Glaucus ends his genealogical digression with his father’s words: ‘And I hear his urgings ringing in my ears:/“Always be the best, my boy, the bravest,/ [. . .] Never disgrace the generation of your fathers” ’ (6.246–49). Glaucus’s genealogical digression reveals the importance of kinship ties and clan which override that of his political allegiance to Troy. The warriors decide not to fight each other since their families are ancestrally bound by hospitality – an act unthinkable in political epic where public duty precedes individual concerns. (In the Aeneid, Dido welcomes Aeneas and shares her kingdom with him, but the Roman hero must place his political mission to found Rome above claims of hospitality and private affection.) Glaucus also retraces his genealogy in the past tense, beginning with ‘Sisyphus, Aeolus’s son, who had a son called Glaucus’ and ending with his father, ‘Hippolochus fathered me’ (6.181, 6.244).

Hindsight as foresight: getting the tenses right In contrast, Virgil, writing an epic in honour of his patron Augustus, deliberately confuses his tenses. He capitalises on prevailing political myths linking Augustus to Aeneas, a Trojan prince in the Iliad. Aeneas, the founding father of the Roman empire, naturally predates Augustus as well as the principal occurrences in Roman history. In order to include historical time in Aeneas’s mythical time, Virgil uses the Homeric device of prophecies. Aeneas, who cannot possibly know about the great events of Roman history to come (e.g., the emergence of Roman jurisprudence, the triumphs of imperial Rome, and the end of the Roman civil wars), learns of them through prophecies made by gods (Jupiter, Vulcan) and figures gifted with prophetic insight (Helenus, the ghost of his father Anchises). Aeneas thus becomes aware of his glorious ‘descendants’, notably Julius Caesar 87

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and Augustus Caesar. Aeneas’s ‘future’ is therefore Virgil’s past. As Karl Galinsky (1998: 20) puts it, Virgil writes ‘an epic about the beginnings of Rome and the journey ahead rather than looking back [emphasis mine] at the formation of the Roman people from the pinnacle of his own time. In short, he wrote an Aeneid rather than an Augusteid.’ By presenting the historical past as Aeneas’s ‘future’, Virgil creates a curious sense of temporal reversal: the ‘first Roman’ (Aeneas) learns ‘history in the future tense’, as W.H. Auden (1969: 296) wryly observes. The Virgilian innovation of presenting genealogical past as prophetic future represents an explicit politicisation of Homeric narrative. This characteristically Roman telos is well articulated by Polybius, a Roman historian who lived roughly 200 years before Virgil: ‘Fortune has caused the whole world and its history to tend towards one purpose – the empire of Rome’ (quoted in Bowra 1945: 75). It is this teleological drive that sets Virgilian epic apart from its Homeric predecessor. As early as Book One, Jupiter lays out the imperial project of the epic in no uncertain terms, presenting Aeneas’s future descendants as the inheritors of an empire. Having consulted ‘the scroll of the Fate’ (1.313), he predicts that Aeneas’s son, Ascanius, will move the capital from Lavinium to Alba Longa and that, three hundred years later, Ilia and Mars will give birth to twins, Remus and Romulus, who will found Rome. In fact, this prophecy suspiciously resembles a gallery of forebears or a history textbook: Aeneas will wage a long, costly war in Italy [. . .] But his son, Ascanius, now that he gains the name of Iulus – Ilus he was, while Ilium ruled on high – will fill out with his reign thirty sovereign years [. . .] a royal priestess great with the brood of Mars will bear the god twin sons. Then one, Romulus [. . .] will inherit the line and build the walls of Mars and after his own name, call his people Romans. On them, I set no limits, space or time: I have granted them power, empire without end. [. . .] From that noble blood will arise a Trojan Caesar, his empire bound by the ocean, his glory by the stars: Julius, a name passed down from Iulus, his great forebear. (1.304–44) The relentless march of verbs in the future tense forges the Homeric past with the Roman present, culminating in the ‘Trojan Caesar’, variously interpreted as Julius or Augustus Caesar, both from the Julian line (Dobbin 88

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1995). This temporal sleight of the epic hand legitimises empire through a teleology, or rather a tautology, of the present as a fait accompli of a past in which it is already prefigured: Aeneas’s conquest of Italy has been foretold (in the scroll of Fate); this conquest itself foretells the Roman victories of his descendants Julius Caesar and Augustus. This teleological temporality cloaks the historical violence of conquest. As Édouard Glissant (2010: 143) points out in Poetics of Relation (1990, trans. 1997), a founding event of violence is masked and legitimised by a myth of filiation, one that celebrates the racial purity of an ethnocentric ‘root identity’ as a justification of empire. (Glissant’s analysis of genealogy as an ideological discourse thus bears similarities to Wofford’s examination of epic similes as sites of discursive legitimisation explored in the previous chapter.) Glissant would later link this root identity to ‘excluding epics’ in Faulkner, Mississippi (1996, trans. 1999). The root identity, Glissant (1999: 303–4) explains, is anchored in a ‘founding episode’ of the ‘distant past’ (in the Aeneid’s case, Aeneas’s founding of Rome). From this founding episode emerges a ‘filiation’ (the Julian claim to descent from Venus, mother of Aeneas) based on ‘violence’ (Aeneas’s mythical conquest of the native inhabitants of Italy as well as the historical wars waged to create and expand the Roman empire, notably the Punic Wars with the prosperous Carthage). This physical violence is symptomatic of a deeper, ontological violence: Myth, therefore, contains a hidden violence that catches in the links of filiation and absolutely challenges the existence of the other as an element of relation. The same is true of the Epic, which singles out a community in relation to the Other, and senses Being only as in-itself, because it never conceives of it as relation. (2010: 50) Thus, in imperial epic, violence is ‘sanctified’ and ‘ratified’ by ‘a claim to legitimacy that allows a community to proclaim its entitlement to the possession of a land [la terre in French], which thus becomes a territory [un territoire]’. Finally, the political claims of filiation are ‘preserved by being projected onto other territories, making their conquest legitimate – and through a project of a discursive knowledge’ (2010: 143–44). Glissant’s insights foreground the specificity of Virgilian genealogy-asprophecy, its ‘fixed linearity of time, always toward a projection, a project’ (2010: 47) that goes hand in hand with an epistemological discourse predicated on the Other and excluding an ontology of Relation. In fact, the Relation is antithetical to traditional epic since it is produced ‘not in the hidden violence of filiation’ but in ‘the conscious and contradictory experience of contact among cultures’. It ‘does not devise any legitimacy 89

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as guarantee of entitlement but circulates, newly extended’ (2010: 144). In contrast, by conjoining ancestral filiation to territorial claims through prophecy or predestination, Virgilian temporality creates a deterministic cause-effect relationship between time (genealogical history) and space (geographical limits of conquest) by transforming land (‘la terre’) into territory to be rightfully claimed (‘un territoire’). Virgil’s politicisation of genealogy as a projection of imperial rule would come to represent a definitive convention of Western epic literature. While Virgil selects Aeneas, a Homeric intertext, as the ‘ancestor’ of Augustus, Torquato Tasso casts ‘Rinaldo’, a character concocted from Homeric myth (Achilles) and Christian history (the 12th-century Rinaldo), as the ancestor of his patron Alfonso II d’Este to burnish the Este lineage in the Liberation of Jerusalem (10.74−77). Alfonso II d’Este is ‘destined’ to become one of the ‘sons of sons’ of Rinaldo, ‘well worth him’ who ‘will [emphasis mine] in time be born’ to perpetuate his glorious defence of Christendom (10.75.8–76.1). In Book Three of Ludovico Ariosto’s (1975: 3.16–62) Orlando Furioso, the seeress Melissa convenes a pageant of as-yet-unborn spirits before Bradamant who gazes on her future descendants: ‘Among your progeny/Dukes, marquises and emperors I see’ (1975: 3.17.7−8). This prophetic parade culminates in what will proleptically become the Este family of Ferrara, Ariosto’s patrons. It also echoes the spectacle of souls awaiting birth that Aeneas beholds in the underworld. Ariosto’s contemporary, Edmund Spenser, would similarly enlist Homeric genealogy for a prophetic projection of the Tudor dynasty in Book Three of Faerie Queene. In Camões’s Lusíads (literally meaning the sons of Lusus, the companion or son of Bacchus from whom the Portuguese trace their origins), the nymph foretells the ‘glorious history’ (2008: 10.7.8) of the Portuguese Empire across the world after da Gama’s death (10.7–73). Her enumeration of events includes the exploits of Pacheco, who defended the Portugueseheld Indian city of Cochin (1503), Tristão da Cunha’s conquests in East Africa (1506) as well as Alfonso de Albuquerque’s conquests of Ormuz (1507), Goa (1510) and Malacca (1511). A migrating tradition of imperial destiny thus becomes clearly discernible in Virgil’s prophecy of Augustus’s unending Pax Romana, Tasso’s and Ariosto’s projection of heroes leading up to the Este family, Spenser’s Renaissance version of Pax Britannica and Camões’s depictions of Portugal’s colonial victories. In each case, historical pageants masquerade as prophecy in a sequential, linear narrative culminating in a glorified imperial personage who embodies the ongoing and endless rule of empire. These epics draw on existing associations between mythic characters and European dynasties that were encouraged by the monarchs themselves to reinforce political power (translatio imperii) with cultural legitimacy (translatio studi). Epic poets have thus systematically 90

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appropriated foreign traditions to nationalist ends, pressing the intertextual hybridity that generated their texts in the first place into the service of monocultural political statements of the Root identity. Postcolonial epic comes full circle, advertising its transnational political vision through hybrid intertextual genealogies that draw on indigenous and European cultural traditions. Moreover, the contradictions embedded in the temporal conceit linking genealogy to prophecy in political epic are often difficult to sustain. The contrived nature of this temporal logic is particularly evident in Ariosto’s multiple versions of Orlando Furioso (three variants appearing in 1516, 1521, 1532), in which imperial prophecy had to keep up with the everchanging political contexts. Eric MacPhail points out that the 1532 version included a new prophecy by the seeress Andronica celebrating Charles V, a fact Ariosto could not have known when writing the first version in 1516, three years before Charles V was crowned. As MacPhail observes, [Andronica] insists that Charles’ mission is prescribed by heavenly mandate, ‘gli ordini in cielo eternamente scritti’ (15.27.2), but we may well ask why it wasn’t written in the first two editions of the poem [. . .] The very facility with which Ariosto’s poetry accommodates the present betrays the fallacy of prophecy, which can never keep pace with contemporary events. (2001: 35–36) Such sleights of hand, like all propagandist strategies, seek to gloss over historical rigging through associations with divine providence and manifest destiny. While political epic dissimulates such sleights of hand, postcolonial epic forces the genre to reveal its hand. Rather than the artifice of historicopolitical conjunctions of political epic, postcolonial epic foregrounds the disjunctive nature of the subaltern’s historical experience as well as the contrived nature of history-making.

From an ‘empire without end’ to the ‘end of empire’ If prophecy heralds endless empire in political epic, Melville’s Moby Dick and Walcott’s Omeros explicitly use prophecy to signal the end of empire. Jupiter’s prophecy of a teleological ‘empire without end’ (1.341) finds American echoes in Ahab’s ‘plot of universal empire’ (Mackenthun 2004: 174) in Moby Dick. Ahab is obsessed with extending his personal domain over the crew members (he brilliantly convinces them to pursue Moby Dick rather than hunt for lucrative whale oil) and over the White Whale (he 91

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cannot accept that an entity more powerful than him exists: ‘I’d strike the sun if it insulted me’, 208). The ‘imperious linearity of Ahab’s hunt’, with its emphasis on expansionism and extermination, makes it a metonym of the ‘founding imperatives of American civilization’ and ‘the teleological vision of Manifest Destiny’ (Castronovo 1995: 67, 75, 69). His ‘iron way’ to power marks a temporality, a teleology as implacable as the iron tracks ‘whereon my soul is grooved to run’. Like a hurtling train, Ahab’s soul rushes ‘unerringly’ over ‘unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds [. . .] naught’s an angle to the iron way!’ (213) Ahab’s iron-willed personal imperialism is, however, violently undercut through spectral intertexts from American history and the Bible. Instead of a Virgilian ‘empire without end’, the very name of the Pequod, a ghostly recollection of the 1637 Pequot Massacre, bears a self-fulfilling prediction of disaster. Ahab’s biblical name also prefigures his painful, humiliating death. In the Bible (1 Kings 17:30 NRSV), King Ahab is a blasphemous worshipper of Baal who ‘did evil in the sight of the Lord more than all before him’. Melville reminds readers that the biblical Ahab was ‘a very vile’ and ‘wicked’ king whose blood was licked by dogs (117). Similarly, the predictions of Elijah, Old Manx, Gabriel and Fedallah foretell the tragic end of Ahab’s despotism aboard the Pequod. Such self-fulfilling prophecies are more akin to curses and represent a radical perversion of the complementary functions of genealogy and prophecy in political epic. In Moby Dick, prophecy is not harnessed to a sense of genealogical continuity and imperial providence, but to abrupt extinction brought on by futile egotism. The mysterious Elijah (an intertextual echo of the biblical prophet who also predicts disaster to the biblical King Ahab) proffers an enigmatic warning to Ishmael: what’s to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won’t be, after all. Anyhow, it’s all fixed and arranged a’ready; and some sailors or other must go with him, I suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity ’em! (132) The playfulness of Melville’s teasing parody of imperial prophecy, heightened by Elijah’s Hamlet-like aphoristic vacillation, should in no way take away from the profound ominousness of the apocalyptic end awaiting the Pequod. The warning of Gabriel, so named because he sees himself as the archangel, cannot be more explicit. Capitalising on the sudden fall of a whaler into the ocean, Gabriel points his finger downwards to its depths and says to Ahab (who is systematically associated with blasphemy): ‘Think, think of the blasphemer – dead, and down there! – beware of the 92

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blasphemer’s end!’ (378). Fedallah, the Oriental oracle, predicts à la Macbeth that Ahab will die after having seen two hearses, one not made by mortal hands (the White Whale bearing Fedallah’s corpse) and the other made of American wood (the Pequod). Elijah’s, Gabriel’s and Fedallah’s forebodings can be seen as equivalents of the prophetic curses of epic ‘villains’ such as Dido and Adamastor that David Quint (1993: 106–25) examines in Epic and Empire. In retaliation against Aeneas’s betrayal and abandonment of her, Virgil’s Dido invokes the aid of the ‘avenging Furies’: ‘may he [Aeneas] never enjoy his realm [. . .] let him die/before his day, unburied’ (4.771–73). She also foretells the Punic Wars and the rise of Hannibal, referred to as the ‘avenger’ of her downfall brought about by Aeneas. Her ‘rival prophecy’ is a grim inversion of Jupiter’s prediction of imperial glory: ‘No love between our peoples, ever, no pacts of peace!/Come rising up from my bones, you avenger still unknown [. . .] this is my curse – war between all/our peoples, all their children, endless war!’ (4.778–84). As Quint (1993: 111) notes, Dido’s prediction reminds us that ‘Rome’s unbroken rule will be periodically challenged’ by the Africans who will ‘refuse to stay conquered’ and will engage in the three ‘future’ Punic Wars (264−136 bce). Similarly, Camões’s Adamastor curses the Portuguese with shipwreck and misfortune in their mercantile enterprise (4.41–60). It is against this backcloth of the curse of the vanquished that comes to haunt the victors that one can better appreciate the contemporary critical impulse to read Moby Dick as a prophetic prefiguration of the hubris of American imperialism (Said 2001b; Spanos 1995). Indeed, it is all the more striking that the dire predictions or ‘curses’ in the novel are not merely held in suspended animation (as is the case with the Aeneid and the Lusíads, which do not depict the dire events as part of the story but only as distant forebodings), but are actually fulfilled in the narrative. Ahab’s death, foretold by multiple prophetic figures, does come to pass in the novel, just as Elijah’s prophecy of King Ahab’s death is concretised as a narrative event in the Bible. Prophecy is in fact central to the Bible, whose mythic and encyclopaedic dimensions have been associated with epic (Frye 1973: 53–56). However, instead of the biblical genealogies extending from Adam and Eve to Noah’s descendants (Genesis) and from King David to Jeconiah (Book of Kings), Melville provides a series of apocalyptic prophecies, more akin to the Book of Revelation than the Genesis. Even the analogy of the Book of Revelation cannot be pressed too far: Christ’s prefigured Second Coming finds only a pale, even parodic, shadow in Ishmael’s unexplained survival that resists the purposive teleology of both imperial destiny and Christian messianism. On a thematic level, Melville offers no legitimising myth of racial filiation justifying territorial claims. Instead, Ahab’s personal imperialism is 93

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ironically exposed to be egotistically perverted and self-destructive, like that of Milton’s Satan. From a stylistic standpoint, it is relevant to ask whether the tragic predictions to which Ishmael is witness undo Virgil’s tenses. On the one hand, the premonitions are formulated in the appropriate future tense or imperative mood. On the other hand, unlike Virgil’s unbroken line of genealogical continuity between past and present, Melville’s is a disruptive temporality wherein human and historical tragedy is enunciated by a narrator dislocated between traumatic memory and the cathartic telling of the trauma. The retrospective narration underscores the disjunctive irony of the enunciative situation: not only is Ahab predestined to die, but the narrative presence of the sole survivor narrating Ahab’s story only amplifies the tragedy of the traumatic event. If Moby Dick signals the end of Ahab’s private dominion and more allegorically prefigures the hubris of American imperialism, Omeros focuses on the historical demise of Britain’s colonial empire. The British empire that Major Plunkett served no longer governs Saint Lucia, but he persists in seeing a sort of invisible hand of history that is apparently still at work in the shaping of the postcolonial present. Plunkett re-enacts the Virgilian quest for a self-fulfilling prophecy where the past already prefigures, and therefore determines, the future. If Augustus is affiliated with Aeneas, a textual ancestor in the Aeneid, Saint Lucia is linked to Helen, a textual forebear with Homeric credentials in Plunkett’s mind. In his personal teleology, the Battle of the Saintes was already prefigured by the Trojan War, a connection supported by ‘Homeric coincidence[s]’ (100) such as the Homeric name of the island of Saint Lucia (The Helen of the West Indies), Comte de Grasse’s flagship (Ville de Paris, an echo of the name of Helen’s abductor) and the name of the local maidservant (Helen, a legacy of classical names attributed to slaves). Unlike the Homeric heroes and British admirals, however, Plunkett is merely an ‘armchair admiral in old age’ (90) who rigs his readings of history. His imperial vision of glorious conquest puts the British victory in the Battle of Saintes (and, by extension, himself) at the centre of Saint Lucia’s history, ignoring its precolonial past. As Glissant would observe, Plunkett seeks to mask an act of violence (the Battle of the Saintes for Saint Lucia) with a genealogy of intertextual Homeric filiation. His Homeric flights of fancy also sidestep the uncomfortable truth of a waning British empire that is ‘go[ing] to the dusk’ (99). It is not the ageless Homeric heroine Helen but the ageing Plunkett who is the most appropriate symbol of Britain’s fading legacy in Saint Lucia. If Plunkett’s Homeric coincidences regarding Saint Lucia represent a form of historical rigging, Plunkett’s own family tree reflects a more personal kind of genealogical manipulation. Plunkett comes from a military family with a father involved in World War I and a grand-uncle who 94

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participated in the Second Boer War. Both are included in his family tree, one that is artistically embellished with ‘flowers for battles, buds for a campaign’: ‘One pod was the Somme’s./It burst with his father’s lungs. Then a pale yellow/asterisk for a great-uncle marked Bloemfontein’ (87). Like the epic tropes explored in the previous chapter, pastoral symbols of regeneration such as buds and flowers aestheticise the destructive violence of war. The ironic contrast between the bucolic and the bloody in the image of Plunkett’s father’s lungs exploding at the Somme forcefully highlights the vanity and futility of such martial engagements. Moreover, Plunkett is even willing to pay a higher fee to the man drawing up his family tree for the inclusion of more blue-blooded ancestors. He does not object to the man ‘pluck[ing]’ titles ‘from Agincourt to Zouave, returning to where/ he found blue blood in the Plunketts’. As this tampering continues, the man expects him to ‘pay more,/naturally, and he did’ (87). Ironically, the entire genealogical project is self-defeating since instead of prophecies of eternal dynastic succession through progeny, the grand scheme ends anticlimactically with ‘No heir: the end of the line./No more Plunketts’ (88). The literal sterility plaguing the Plunkett couple signals the symbolic end of Empire, satirically foregrounded by Walcott’s sustained use of the imagery of fertility such as the ‘genealogical willow’, ‘blossoms’, ‘pods’, ‘buds’ and ‘flowers’. In contrast to the themes of annihilation and sterility in Moby Dick and Omeros respectively, Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies presents strikingly optimistic prophecies of diasporic dynasties. He redeploys Virgil’s interlocking ­genealogy-as-prophecy paradigm to assert the marginalised migrants’ claim to history. Virgil’s temporal scheme allows Ghosh to playfully turn the determinism of karmic predestination, racial discrimination and colonial oppression into epiphanies of the diasporic destinies awaiting the characters in Sea of Poppies. Thus, Deeti’s vision of the Ibis as she stands immersed in the waters of the Ganga in March 1838 (narrative present) is briefly counterpointed with a proleptic authorial comment (flash-forward) on her descendants, described as ‘the legions’ who ‘in time’ would ‘come to regard the Ibis as their ancestor’ (9). Deeti’s liberating future of maritime and social mobility (she will become the matriarch of the thriving Colver clan in Mauritius) is therefore already hinted at, even as she is depicted in the diegetic present as a victim of patriarchy and colonialism. A quiet humour is also introduced through the mock-epic description of the large family as being composed of ‘legions’. Nonetheless, a rather Virgilian sense of divine providence pervades the trilogy. In Sea of Poppies, the Ibis is perceived by Deeti to be ‘a sign of destiny’ (3). In River of Smoke, Kalua’s escape from the Ibis (depicted on the walls of the Colver clan’s family temple in Mauritius) is a preordained moment of deliverance: an ‘instance when Fate had 95

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conspired with Nature to give them [the Colver descendants] a sign that theirs was no ordinary destiny’ (13). Kalua’s flight from the Ibis prefigures the ‘miracle’ of his second escape from Hong Kong, fittingly facilitated by the Ibis, in Flood of Fire (606–7). The privileged loci of genealogy-as-prophecy in the trilogy are Deeti’s family shrines. There are three of them – her family shrine in India, her drawings on the beams of the Ibis as it crosses the Black Water and the family temple in the adopted homeland of Mauritius. The first two are depicted in Sea of Poppies while the third is described in elaborate detail in River of Smoke’s incipit and proleptically referenced in all three novels. The introduction of every important character includes a proleptic parenthesis that highlights the role he or she will play in Deeti’s and Kalua’s lives. The involvement of these characters earns them a commemorative image in the Colver family temple in Mauritius. The family shrine, itself a monument to the Colver clan’s biological filiation, is also a symbol of fresh elective and affective affiliations for the characters who move from inherited caste- and/or race-based identities to new beginnings built on individual choices and actions. The hazel-flecked, dark eyes of Zachary, the mixed-race son of a Maryland freedwoman and a plantation owner, are described in the following manner in a proleptic parenthesis: ‘(later, when it came for him to be included in Deeti’s shrine, much would be made of the brilliance of his gaze)’ (10). Zachary will in fact transcend the racially circumscribed profession of carpenter and rise through the ranks to take over the role of the captain during his first voyage aboard the Ibis in Sea of Poppies. Similar proleptic digressions are used for Neel (38), Jodu (56), Paulette (116) and Nob Kissin Pander (123) in Sea of Poppies as well as for Penrose Fitcher (34–35) in River of Smoke in order to describe their images in Deeti’s shrine. In these digressions, the temporality is clearly that of the future, signalled by deictic markers such as ‘years later’ or ‘many years and thousands of miles later’ (123). Prophecy thus becomes a narrative device that privileges filiation (the genealogical continuity of the Colver clan) as well as individual, often subaltern, agency and self-determination over hereditary determinisms. Despite the conspicuous absence of intertextual references to Virgil (save one in River of Smoke, 13), Ghosh is paradoxically the most Virgilian of the three authors (Melville and Walcott cite the Aeneid copiously) in his authorial comments on the shrine as a diasporic space of prefiguration and predestination. Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis trilogy thus resist or rechannel the triumphalism of Virgilian prophecy in distinctive ways. As it has migrated across texts and contexts, the prophecy of endless empire has been transformed into a prediction of annihilation (doomsday premonitions in Moby Dick), exposed as fallacious (Plunkett’s Homeric coincidence in Omeros) 96

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or redirected towards the postcolonial subject to suggest new beginnings (Ibis trilogy). Yet, the omniscient narrator’s forward-looking, victorious Virgilian vision in Sea of Poppies is constantly counterpointed with the girmitiyas’ backward glances towards the homeland from which they are being torn away. Despite their new-found solidarity and siblinghood, the migrants compulsively look back as they move forward. They repetitively recount their personal stories to one another; preserve their traditions by reciting prayers and stories of the epics and other scriptures (the Quran, Ramcharitmanas and the Alha-Khand,1 314); and sing Bhojpuri songs of the birahá or separation from one’s lover, which allegorise their own separation from the Indian motherland (365–66). It is therefore tempting to argue that political epic looks forward to an eternal Pax Romana or Pax Britannica while postcolonial epics of migration appear locked in a more ambivalent ‘twin-headed January’ turned towards both ‘a past [. . .] born in degradation’ and a present ‘that lifted us up [. . .] with such an elation/ that it contradicts what is past!’ (Walcott 1992: 223–24). Such comparative observations, however, must be nuanced. Despite its triumphalism, political epic also exhibits a controlled ambivalence towards the losses incurred on the path to imperialism. Though Virgil entangles his tenses to establish a retrospective, legitimising ‘myth of filiation’ in the Glissantian sense of the term, he also inserts authorial comments on the painful cost of founding Rome. This equivocity is already announced in Book One. While Jupiter’s prophecy foretells the triumphs of Aeneas (Virgil’s ‘public voice’, as Adam Parry puts it), the poet insists on his ‘many losses’ and ‘many blows’ (an expression of the ‘private voice’ of lament, Parry 1963: 79) in the invocation (1.1–13). Even if these expressions of suffering are informed by a fundamentally root-oriented conception of identity – and not the Relation of postcolonial epic – we will see that in either case a future of elation cannot wholly wash away a painful past, especially one marked by the traumatic conditions of orphanhood, dislocation, disinheritance and death.

Reversible genealogies and ‘adoptive ancestors’ The Aeneid is replete with prophecies of Rome’s imperial destiny, one of which is delivered by the ghost of Aeneas’s father, Anchises. Yet, Aeneas, the father of Ascanius and the founding father of Rome, is also orphaned during the narrative. The death of Anchises in Book Three symbolises the death of Aeneas’s Trojan identity that will be increasingly eclipsed by a sense of Roman-ness, signalled by the growing importance of his son Ascanius, who successfully leads his first battle by Book Nine. Old Trojan origins and a new Roman destiny are seemingly harmoniously reconciled in Book Six, where Anchises’s ghost delivers a prophecy of Rome’s (not Troy’s) glory 97

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and lists the future, unborn descendants of Aeneas. His prophecy to Aeneas begins with a telescoping of their Trojan roots and their inter-marriages with Italians: ‘the glory that will follow the sons of Troy through time,/ your children born of Italian stock who wait for life [. . .]/I will reveal them all’ (6.876–79). Virgilian epic thus irons out the wrinkles of trauma Aeneas would have experienced in the loss of his Trojan roots. He will not even be able to retain his Trojan language as a result of a divine deal brokered by his arch-enemy Juno, who will insist he be forced to adopt the language of the Latin people. In contrast, postcolonial epic tends to place the individual’s need for genealogical and cultural continuity against a historical background of disruption, dislocation and even erasure. Valérie Loichot (2007: 1) speaks of the works of William Faulkner, Édouard Glissant, Toni Morrison and Saint-John Perse as postplantation ‘orphan narratives’ that ‘escape the agency of a central authority, whether a father or the author of a text’. As she argues, ‘The dialectical dance between author, parent, and time teaches us that their respective offspring—the text, the child, and history—are orphaned.’ This section takes its cue from Loichot and will demonstrate how orphanhood becomes an Adamic strategy to escape ‘a central authority’, even if such liberation comes at the cost of cathartically confronting, instead of evading, a past experience of trauma. Melville seems to subject genealogy to apocalyptic forms of treatment in Moby Dick. As opposed to the rich ancestral tapestries formed by fecund prophecies of progeny in the Aeneid, Orlando Furioso or the Lusíads, the crew of the Pequod moves in a sort of genealogical vacuum. The whalers are men who have left their parents, wives and children (whom they will tragically never see again) and appear genealogically unmoored. The two protagonists of the epic – Ishmael and Ahab – are symbolic, if not real, orphans. By telling us next to nothing about his family background, Ishmael appears bereft of parentage in the beginning and is figuratively orphaned (again) when the Pequod sinks at the end of the novel. We learn from Peleg that Ahab’s mother was already a ‘crazy’ widow when he was born and died when he was a year old (117). Ahab has thus never known his ‘sweet mother’ and makes no mention of his biological father (582). The sense of abandonment is perhaps most acute for Pip, the black cabin boy, who appears to re-enact the African experiences aboard slave ships through his own experience of being cast overboard and his hallucinations of death by drowning. The disturbing genealogical blanks in Moby Dick have gained increasing critical attention in the 20th and 21st centuries. On the one hand, R.W.B. Lewis, writing in 1955, saw Melville’s oeuvre as the ‘apotheosis’ of the ‘Adamic’ American tendency to reject the ancestral Old World past (‘the camp of Memory’) in favour of the New World present (‘the 98

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camp of Hope’) through ambivalence (‘the camp of Irony’). On the other hand, Eyal Peretz in his 2003 work on Moby Dick is more sensitive to the darker implications of the traumatic effects of disaster on self-identity. Both deserve attention. R.W.B. Lewis foregrounds the significance of the Adamic stance to the epic project of nation-building through a national literature. Quoting from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, ‘The American Scholar’ (1837), Lewis (1955: 78) reminds readers of the New World’s ‘declaration of literary independence’ from ‘the courtly muses of Europe’. Lewis also argues that the American Adam is the New World equivalent of classical epic subjects such as ‘the matter of Troy’. As such, he is a modern king or prince alienated from space (on the margins) and time (no longer ‘the legatee of its [the world’s] history’) (128). The idea of the self-made man, ‘an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race’ (5) becomes an epic ideal of the self-making man, ‘the type of creator’, ‘the first, the archetypal, man’ before the Fall, whose ‘moral position was prior to experience’. In the context of Moby Dick, going to sea becomes the pre-condition for the Adamic state where characters are, to repeat Lewis’s phrase, ‘bereft of ancestry’. This is most explicitly demonstrated in the case of Queequeg, interestingly the only character who merits a chapter entitled ‘Biographical’. For all its oriental trappings, Queequeg’s background is noteworthy as the sole genealogy that appears in the epic and is by no means ‘blank’: ‘His father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors’ (90). Such exotica, however, is tempered by a good dose of reverse orientalism as Queequeg realises that ‘even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father’s heathens’ (90). Yet, this royal heir’s wanderlust and curiosity drive him to the sea, even if his travels involve sharing the lot of common Christian sailors. Contact with Christianity has irremediably ‘unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan Kings before him’ (90). Queequeg, appearing as he does at the beginning of the epic, prefigures the Adamic trajectory of Ishmael and, as we will later learn, echoes that of Ahab. All the non-Western crew members are Americanised Adams, having left their Asian and African homelands and cast their lot with American whalers. For the South Seas native Queequeg, exchanging the tribal sceptre for a harpoon entails the loss of one set of genealogical origins and the acquisition of a new community of belonging: the chapter on his biography closes with his decision to accompany Ishmael. However, the limited access to Queequeg’s subjectivity makes the South Pacific harpooner’s personal trajectory look largely unproblematic, even happy, suggesting a kind of ‘fortunate fall’ (even if he does finally die in the final encounter with Moby 99

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Dick). Casting off genealogical bearings will appear far more painful in the case of Ahab and Ishmael. We get a brief glimpse of Ahab’s genealogy in the chapter ‘The Candles’. Changes in the atmospheric electric field generate an unearthly glow, referred to as ‘St Elmo’s fire’ on the top of the Pequod’s three masts that blaze ‘like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar’. The Portuguese sailors also encounter St. Elmo’s fire in Canto Five of the Lusíads (5.18) but the emphasis is on the external phenomenon, not on internal psychological states. Ahab, who is systematically linked to fire through the fire-­ worshipping Persian Fedallah, places his foot on the latter’s kneeling body. He addresses the ‘tri-pointed trinity of flames’, a blasphemous parody of the altar, thus: Light, thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! [. . .] O thou, magnanimous! Now do I glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father, my sweet mother I know not. [. . .] Thou knowst not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten [. . .] Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again, with haughty agony, I read my sire [. . .] defyingly I worship thee! (582) Here the figures of founder and foundling coalesce. In an ultimate act of moral inversion, Ahab appropriates the primordial function of God – ­creation – for himself, welding his own genealogy around a ‘fiery father’. He creates his own creation myth, though only through a reversible play on a wily chiasmus: ‘Light, thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!’ A self-proclaimed ‘child of fire’ (582), Ahab reverses the genealogical given of inheriting an ancestral legacy by adopting an ancestor in his own image: the ‘foundling fire’ is itself an orphaned progenitor. Yet, there is a profound sense of ambivalence between his defiant, self-fathering Adamic pride and the tragic loss of his biological parent, ‘my sweet mother [whom] I know not’. Ahab’s identification with the white fire is based on his experience of isolation, irrecoverable loss (‘thy unparticipated grief’) and the impossibility of knowing one’s origins (‘thy incommunicable riddle’). Moreover, Ahab’s double status as master and slave, explored in the previous chapter, reappears in this dramatic speech. Ahab rejects the fire’s ‘unconditional, unintegral mastery in me’, asserting instead his ‘queenly personality’ and ‘royal rights’ (581). In an ultimate reversal of power relations, Ahab, speaking to the fire, argues, ‘Thou knowest not how came 100

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ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten [. . .] I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent’ (582). Here, Ahab exposes the epistemological and ontological errors inherent in any myth of origins that underwrites genealogical formulation. There are no fixed origins, only ‘an incommunicable riddle’ at the heart of every originary myth. Ahab also uncovers the performative dimensions of self-representation: he ‘read[s]’ his ‘sire’ into a discursive existence consonant with his own obsessions. Elsewhere, Ahab reflects on the fact that misery perpetuates itself among mortals and gods: ‘To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods’ who ‘themselves are not forever glad’ (537). The toned-down trauma of Virgil’s imperial orphan Aeneas gives way to Ahab’s ‘eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave’ (537). Self-fathering is also at the heart of Ishmael’s genealogical project which opens with the famous act of Adamic self-baptism: ‘Call me Ishmael’ (29).2 As in the case of Ahab, self-begetting for Ishmael is both an affirmation of agency and an acknowledgement of orphanhood. The choice of the biblical name Ishmael sheds light on an ambivalent state of legitimacy (the biblical Ishmael was Abraham’s first-born son, cherished by his father, blessed by God) and illegitimacy (Ishmael was conceived not by his first wife, but by his Egyptian slave, Hagar). Melville’s Ishmael also identifies himself as a figure disowned (the biblical Ishmael had no share in the inheritance) and exiled (Hagar and Ishmael were sent away after the birth of Isaac, conceived by the first wife, Sarah). Yet, it is also God’s will that Ishmael become the founder of the Arab people: ‘he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation’ (Genesis 17.20). Melville’s Ishmael is thus a similarly ambivalent figure, associated with both abandonment and new foundations. Excentric Adamism, however, is not without its own sense of trauma. As Peretz movingly puts it: The opening thus says: either my name is Ishmael and you should call me by my name; or this is not my given name, but one called for by the conventions of fiction; or it is my name, carefully chosen, and in order to explain why I chose it I have to tell you my life’s story; or, since I am an abandoned human, and feel like a disowned son, I call upon you, the readers, to adopt me and call me by this name so that I won’t be alone any more. (2003: 39) Peretz’s hypotheses point to a question to which Thomas L. Dumm devotes an entire essay entitled ‘Who Is Ishmael?’. Dumm (2005: 401) is particularly sensitive to the fact that the incipit reveals an Ishmael smarting from 101

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the ‘rough transition’ from schoolteacher lording over the tallest boys to being lorded over as a ‘simple sailor, right before the mast’.3 For Ishmael, sliding down the social ladder is difficult to stomach: ‘It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes’ (32). Dumm explains: While the Van Rensselaers were a distinguished family, and Hardicanute a Swedish king, of particular interest is the reference to the Randolphs, who are one of the oldest and most distinguished Virginia names, the family of Thomas Jefferson. It built its fortune from the labor of slaves. To imagine oneself a Randolph suggests that one is a slaveholder. So Ishmael comes from a distinguished family. But the slippery language suggests that he may not. Moreover, in the very next paragraph he also asks, ‘Who ain’t a slave?’ (401) Dumm pays close attention to the similarities between Ishmael and Pip: both are assigned financial estimations of their worth (Ishmael as the three hundredth lay, Pip as one-thirtieth the value of a whale); both experience the trauma of being cast away and recovered (Pip by the Pequod, Ishmael by the Rachel); both are marginal figures oscillating between madness and wisdom, gaiety and grim foreboding. This leads Dumm to the provocative conclusion that Ishmael is Pip who has survived to tell the tale: ‘The shattered identity of the narrator who demands or suggests or pleads that we call him Ishmael is that which is inhabited by the least significant member of the crew of the Pequod, Pip’ (409). More precisely, Dumm posits that Ishmael-Pip is a ‘black child of Randolph family miscegenation’ (410). While Dumm seems to over-interpret the novel’s associations between Ishmael and Pip as an actual equivalence, the text’s figurative economy is clearly founded on what have been called ‘heterotropes’ in the previous chapter – the heterotopic juxtaposition of incommensurable levels of disparate experiences. In a novel where the trope of slavery is constantly being displaced across heterogeneous consciousnesses – Ahab’s white Quaker consciousness, Pip’s Black Atlantic consciousness, Ishmael’s formerly privileged, now-subaltern sailor consciousness – the analogous experience of abandonment shared by Ishmael and Pip is unquestionable. The epic is clearly anchored in the perspective of an increasingly peripheral figure enslaved metaphysically, if not physically, by Ahab’s Panopticon-like ‘central authority’, to use Loichot’s expression. Ishmael, by suppressing his genealogy, acquires the power to reverse it, to name himself and to exercise authority over the narrative of the experiences of his former self before the sinking of the Pequod. 102

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While the sense of a genealogical vacuum remains largely enigmatic in Moby Dick (we will never really know who Ishmael is), the blanks in the history of Saint Lucia and the genealogy of Walcott’s characters have a clear source: the extermination of the native Arawaks and the deracination of the Africans brought on by colonisation. As descendants of African slaves, Philoctete, Achille and the mixed-race poet-narrator feel estranged from their African origins. As British expatriates in Saint Lucia, the Plunketts have also symbolically disinherited their European past. Furthermore, unlike Moby Dick, Omeros recounts the lives of not only men but women such as Maud, the wife of Major Plunkett, and the Saint Lucian maid, Helen. Helen’s pregnancy, as opposed to the sterility of the Plunkett couple, is clearly suggestive of new beginnings for Saint Lucia. As self-fathering figures, the male figures such as Plunkett, Achille and the poet-narrator are also associated with (re)birth, but the outcomes in each case are radically different. Not all forms of Adamism can successfully bring forth new life. The symmetrical pairing of Achille and the poet-narrator is an emphatic illustration. Both Achille and the poet-narrator undertake a descent to the underworld, a typical epic convention. Both experience Virgilian encounters with the ghost of a father with diametrically opposite outcomes. Achille, already culturally alienated from Africa, undergoes a second experience of dispossession when he is disinherited by his father. In contrast, the poet-narrator attains a sense of his literary vocation and cultural inheritance from the ghost of his father Warwick. Till his encounter with his dead father, Achille, like his counterpart in the Gulf Stream painting, seems to obsessively turn ‘his head towards Africa [. . .] forever, between our island/ and the coast of Guinea, fixed in the tribal dream’ (184). However, Walcott resists the temptation to give easy nativist answers to the question of diasporic identity. He presents Achille as being ignorant of what his name means. While the American Adam chooses to be ‘happily bereft’ (Lewis 5) of his European ancestry, the Caribbean Adam’s lack of ancestral continuity is the result of an involuntary, traumatic historical fact. He must therefore arrive at a strategic compromise, as Achille does through voluntary amnesia: he accepts his new creole name Achille as ‘the gift/of this sound whose meaning I still do not care to know [emphasis mine]’ (138). In an epic where ‘memory [is] the only plot’ (129), amnesia can be historically imposed (as a result of the Middle Passage), but it can also be strategically redeployed as a form of agency. As Walcott has written in ‘The Muse of History’ ([1974] 1998: 40), Adamism is both about the absence of history (or the self-willed amnesia of the slave-descendant) and a ‘belief in a second Adam, the recreation of an entire order’. Achille’s agency in Omeros is foregrounded through an anachronistic mechanism similar to the Aeneid, but markedly different in intention. In his 103

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hallucinatory descent to the underworld to meet his dead father Afolabe, it is Achille who is aware of the future of slavery awaiting his African ancestors, as opposed to Aeneas who is unaware of the imperial future foreseen by the ghost of his father. As Robert Hamner (1997: 76) judiciously remarks, ‘just as Aeneas’s destiny is Virgil’s Roman legacy in the Aeneid, Afolabe’s future happens to be Achille’s fragmented history.’ The crucial difference, however, is that while Virgil uses a temporal sleight of hand (genealogyas-prophecy, history-as-future), Walcott deliberately draws attention to the discrepancies or disjunctions involved in contriving to make the past look like the future. Hence the persistence of anachronisms through phrases such as ‘a future Achille already knew’ or ‘the future reversed itself in him’ (139) and elsewhere, ‘he was his own memory’ (141). The fact that Afolabe is a figment of Achille’s hallucinatory imagination also implies a reversal of roles as the son creates the father, akin to Ahab’s creation of his ‘fiery sire’. This reversal resurfaces constantly. Achille’s features are ‘mirrored’ in those of his ‘life-giver’ (136), in the image of the tribe standing on a pier and ‘reversed/by reflection’ in the water (136). As critics like Paul Breslin (2005) and Rei Terada (1992) have demonstrated, the poem is in fact structured on reversals. Terada (1992: 204−5) points out that genealogy is ‘reversed’ in the double meaning of continuity through reformulation in verse (to verse again) and of discontinuity through revoking or rebellion (to undo, revoke, reverse an order). She shows how the encounter between Warwick’s ghost and his filial poet-narrator is an explicit dramatisation of a ‘reversed’ temporality and teleology. Walcott’s father Warwick died when Walcott was a year old, but Walcott is sixty years old at the time of the composition of Omeros. In the imagined dialogue between the sexagenarian poet-persona and his tricenarian father, the former is old enough to be the ‘father’ of his deceased father. The poet’s advantage is not only one of retrospection, but literary fame: his father’s blue notebook of verses pales in comparison to the poetic skill developed by his son, soon to be a Nobel laureate. A reversed teleology is also at work, one which upsets the linearity of epistemological frameworks of history (with its sequential dates and timelines) and geography (with its meridians that also become ‘reversible’ in the poem). The agency offered by such discursive reversals may be partially empowering, but it is not necessarily exhilarating. Achille ‘fathers’ his own father through memory, but he also ‘disinherit[s]/himself’ by ‘forgetting his parents, his tribe, his own spirit/for an albino god’ (139−40). Orphanhood and self-fathering become two facets of the Adamic imagination, linked respectively with forgetting (orphaning oneself from one’s history) and remembering (reassembling a fragmented history in the recreated features of an ancestor).

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However, not all Adamic endeavours bear fruit. Major Plunkett compensates for the absence of a son by seizing on a (non-Homeric) coincidence: the fact that a nineteen-year old Midshipman who died in the Battle of the Saintes was also named Plunkett. On the one hand, Major Plunkett finds solace in the fact that he has recovered ‘a namesake and a son’ (94). On the other hand, since the young midshipman lived during the 18th century, he is more akin to a father than a son to Plunkett. Plunkett thus has his temporalities hopelessly confused. As Terada (1992: 203−4) observes, he ‘assuages his hunger for a son by looking for fathers; this Bloomian figure becomes a Telemachos of the library, researching his ancestry’. Plunkett’s fallacious Adamism is comic and lacks the self-critical awareness Achille demonstrates in his ultimate recognition of the fact that genealogy, however reversible through individual agency, can never fully compensate for the pain of historical deracination and cultural uprootment. The most unequivocal affirmation of Adamic possibilities, however, is associated with the main female protagonist, Helen. In fact, all the female characters in the poem are linked to fertility motifs. As opposed to Plunkett’s penchant for life-destroying canons, marked by ‘Type, Trunions, Bore, Condition, Size, Weight’ (88), Maud, despite not being able to give Plunkett a son, is associated with organic images of gardening, a passion shared by the poet-narrator,4 while Ma Kilman concocts a regenerative cure from African fauna for Philoctete’s wound. Terada’s (1992: 190) passing observation that Helen is a Mother Mary figure whose ‘child is all her own, since it’s impossible to identify the father’ merits elaboration and can be productively linked with the overwhelmingly masculine concept of Adamism. Helen resists not only the colonialist and nationalist paradigms Plunkett and the narrator seek to impose on her, but also escapes gender constructs. Like Madame Foquarde, the ‘Martiniquan Penelope’ and wife to Captain Foquarde in Another Life (1992: 181), Helen also inverts Mary’s chastity: she is serenely promiscuous and her baby’s paternity is uncertain. Helen is thus a subversive Mary whose Christmas pregnancy reinforces the association with the Immaculate Conception. Even the name of her baby is fraught with the historical and cultural tensions that run throughout the epic. Achille wants an African name, an idea Helen resists because she wants ‘no African child’. The decision is postponed till the christening because Achille believes Helen must ‘learn/where she came from’ (318). Helen’s baby will have to look both backwards to where it ‘came from’ and forward to what Paul Breslin (2005: 19) calls the ‘Adamic possibilities of the present’. The fact that Walcott abstains from closure on this question suggests that the pain of the past has still not entirely been purged from the present.

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Equally noteworthy is Ghosh’s choice of a female migrant, pregnant with the child of an untouchable, as the narrative centre of gravity of his trilogy. Not only does Deeti found the Colver clan in Mauritius, she also engenders a proleptic parallel narrative through her drawings in the family shrines. If the contemporary Helen has a mythic Hellenic counterpart in Omeros, Deeti is briefly associated with the heroines of the Indian epics. Ghosh’s descriptions of Deeti include an explicit analogy with Draupadi of the Mahabharata (36) and an implicit association with Sita of the Ramayana (67). While intertextuality in epic traditionally reinforces epic stature, these comparisons are far more ambivalent, emphasising sexual exploitation and patriarchal hypocrisy (e.g., Draupadi’s ‘virtuous’ status as wife to the five Pandava brothers is used to justify Deeti’s rape by her brother-in-law) and involuntary abduction (implicit parallels with Sita through references to Ravana). The systematic allusions to the ‘demons’ lying in wait for the migrants in Mauritius are also drawn from the Ramayana tradition. These intertexts are in keeping with the ‘textual supremacy’ of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas among Indians in the diaspora: they identify with its sympathetic depiction of Ram’s and Sita’s sufferings in exile and appreciate its ‘upholding [of] his dignity and endurance as an ideal worthy of emulation in their own situation’ (Singh 2012: 26). However, given the epic’s all-encompassing role as ‘a religious, social, cultural, and emotional anchor for the early indentured labour in an alien and often hostile environment’ (Singh 2012: 25), it is surprising that Ghosh does not establish a more elaborate system of analogies between Ram and Sita’s departure from Ayodhya and the migrants’ leave-taking of India. Perhaps it is the Ramcharitmanas’s biases of gender and race that make it unamenable to Ghosh’s egalitarian project. The epic has traditionally depicted Sita as the ideal, self-sacrificing wife (pativrata). As Sherry-Ann Singh (2012: 26) notes, its demonisation of Ravana as ‘evil’ offered a dangerous allegorical equivalent for non-Indians (e.g., white colonial authorities, other diasporas such as the Africans in Trinidad) in the eyes of diasporic Indians. The Ramayana thus has the potential to provide cultural fodder for justifying ethnocentric conclaves even as it promotes empowering models ‘for the reconstruction of both family and community networks’. Ghosh’s restrained use of the Ramcharitmanas can therefore be seen as an attempt to counterbalance what Sudesh Mishra calls the ‘almost monotheistic concern with a single sacred text’ (2006: 104) with a multiplicity of promiscuous textual origins. These include the Chinese narrative Journey to the West through Ah Fatt’s fascination with this text (387), the literature of the French Enlightenment and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul and Virginie through Paulette’s preferred books (120) and Frederic Douglass’s autobiography through Zachary’s experience in Baltimore (Crane 2011) in 106

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Sea of Poppies. We also find a quiet allusion to Roman mythology (12) in opening ekphrastic sequence of River of Smoke. As opposed to the genealogical blanks in Moby Dick and Omeros, Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke are practically bursting at the seams with the ancestral origins of the characters. This is linked to Ghosh’s choice of time frame: he does not recount the experience of resettlement of the first and second generations of the girmitiyas in Mauritius, but the first generation’s leave-taking from the homeland. Genealogical roots are obviously central to the narrative in order to foreground the trauma of subsequent uprootment, the most poignant symbol of which is Deeti’s first daughter Kabutri who is tragically ‘orphaned’ as a result of her mother’s departure. Nonetheless, the trilogy is also emphatically Adamic in its insistence on liberation from, and transcendence of, hereditary determinisms. Most of the characters who experience positive transformations undergo Adamic acts of renaming and self-baptism: Kalua goes by the name of Madhu (transcribed as Maddow), Paulette of Putleshwari, Jodu of Azad Lascar, Neel of Anil Kumar Munshi, Ah Fatt of Freddy and Bahram Modi of Barry. The loss and gain of names points to a broader pattern of conjoined orphanhood and rebirth or readoption that recurs throughout the trilogy. In Sea of Poppies, Neel loses his title and his heir but gains a brother in the form of Ah Fatt, the illegitimate son of Bahram Modi. The celibate Nob Kissin Pander will terminate his unbroken genealogical chain stretching across ‘eleven generations’ (138) of Brahmins, but gains two symbolic ‘sons’ in the form of Neel and Zachary. Zachary, the illegitimate son of a plantation owner and a freedwoman, must leave Baltimore (on the advice of the legendary Frederick Douglass, a textual ancestor) in order to begin an unexpected transformation into a gentleman. The presence of three illegitimate sons (Zachary, Ah Fatt, Robin Chinnery) also underscores Ghosh’s use of orphanhood as a trope of Adamic refashioning. In Flood of Fire, the Indian peasant-turned-mercenary Kesri Singh is symbolically orphaned when he leaves his family and the village to join the British army: ‘with neither kin nor family to come to his aid, he had become a kind of pariah’ (112). When he is rejected by Indian soldiers who have heard of the ‘dishonourable’ elopement of his sister Deeti, he decides to volunteer for overseas service in China with his English superior, Captain Mee. He then realises that his belief that ‘his paltan [platoon] had been his home and his family for nineteen years’ (178) was ill-founded. Orphaned twice from his native village and his platoon, he finds true kinship with Captain Mee: ‘the only man who had put a friendly hand on his shoulder was not someone of his own caste and colour but rather an Angreez [Englishman] on whom he had no claim whatsoever’ (179). Most characters in the trilogy thus come to the Adamic realisation that their true families are not from their own ethnic groups (which in 107

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fact persecute or ostracise them when they fail to conform), but counterintuitively (as far as the characters are concerned) outside these hereditary groups. The privileged locus of this displacement of the American narrative of Adamism to the Indian Ocean World is the ocean-crossing, continentstraddling Ibis. This eponymous ship becomes the vehicle of transformation for most of the characters, taking on the role of ‘an adoptive ancestor and parents of dynasties yet to come’ (328). The clause ‘adoptive ancestor’ neatly crystallises Ghosh’s discreet alliterative reversal of tenses. Genealogical determinism is critically revised to allow for the democratic possibility of electing or adopting one’s ancestors and by extension, one’s way of life. R.W.B. Lewis’s description of the Adamic adventure could apply to a certain extent to Ghosh’s diasporic ideal. Ghosh’s epic girmitiya hero is ‘an individual emancipated from history’, admittedly not ‘bereft of ancestry’, but capable of transcending ‘the usual inheritances of family and race, an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources’ (Lewis 1955: 5). The clearest statement of Ghosh’s Adamic agenda is made, fittingly enough, by the American Zachary when he declares in Sea of Poppies, ‘what I do counts for more than where I was born’ (409). The only character to meet a tragic end – Bahram Modi, who is financially ruined by the Chinese efforts to eliminate the opium trade – is a victim of historical determinisms (the arrival of Commissioner Lin, the imminent Opium Wars) beyond his control. Equally significant are the specificities of Ghosh’s brand of Adamism which explicitly rejects the alienation of the American Adam (exemplified by Ahab and Ishmael) in favour of a collective identity based on solidarity and community. Deeti, the diasporic prefiguration of the Indian political activist fighting for freedom from colonial rule, rises above caste and religious differences, putting her life in peril in order to assert the basic human rights of the girmitiyas aboard the Ibis. Designated as the ‘matron of the dabusa by common consent’ (395), Deeti becomes their spokeswoman, articulating and defending their fundamental liberties. For example, she protects the Hindu Munia after her love affair with the Muslim Jodu is discovered (433). When a young Muslim julaha (weavers associated with untouchability) dies on the ship, she prevents his corpse from being peremptorily thrown overboard and insists on proper death rites (381). The fact that the Hindu, Rajput-born Deeti is willing to risk confrontation with the supervisors for the sake of an untouchable Muslim family should not be overlooked. As Tayyub Mahmud reminds us, the common condition of exploitation under indenture unified labourers and engendered a new ‘collective identity’ born in ‘resistance’. It allowed them to suppress their differences of language, region, caste and religion so as to reconstitute their 108

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internal ‘heterogeneity as a singularity’. Deeti’s ability to transcend such differences resonates with the ‘anti-colonial cosmopolitanism, transgression of boundaries and deterritorial anti-colonial networks that marked the Indian nationalist movement since its inception’ (Mahmud 2013: 239; see also Roy 2017: 60). This revolutionary sense of community and solidarity aboard the Ibis sets the trilogy apart from Moby Dick and Omeros. Ishmael, despite his humanist calls to ‘the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world’ (125) remains an outsider, at best a spectator, aboard the Pequod. His only meaningful relationship is with Queequeg, another outsider. The narrator of Omeros is painfully aware of his alienated position as a literary poet amidst a community of fishermen whose work is manual. Ghosh’s characters, in contrast, are not solitary, alienated Adams but community-centric Adams, ‘self-reliant and self-­propelling’, who value a sense of community and communion.

‘Federated along one keel’: the ship as a paradigm of kinship and history Melville, Walcott and Ghosh experiment with what may be called ‘oceanic genealogies’ shaped by circumnavigation, the Middle Passage and the Crossing of the Black Water. Their works are consonant with contemporary theories emphasising ‘displacement’ rather than ‘dwelling’ as constitutive of identity (Clifford 1997: 3), exemplified by diasporic paradigms of the Black Atlantic and the Indian Ocean World. In his book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy ([1993] 2002: 15) famously argues that instead of focusing on the originary African homeland, historians should ‘take the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis’ to reconstitute the cultural meaning of the Black diasporic identity. Isabel Hofmeyr coins the term Indian Ocean World to refer to ‘a cultural and economic system of considerable antiquity’, a ‘set of articulating trade systems’ that ‘interlinked Malays, Chinese, Indians, Arabs and Africans’ and, from the late 15th century onwards, Western colonial powers (2007: 6, 8). Of crucial significance in both paradigms is the role of ships. Gilroy (2002: 17) demonstrates that ships need to be considered as ‘political and cultural units’ rather than ‘abstract embodiments of the triangular trade’ in the context of the Black Atlantic. Similarly, Vijay Mishra (2007: 12) locates ‘the loss, the moment of trauma’ of the Indian plantation-diaspora not ‘in the abstract loss of the homeland’ but ‘in the space of the ships, the passage’ across the ocean, the dehumanising conditions of which were reproduced in the ‘barracks’ or the lodgings on the plantation. From a discursive standpoint, Michel Foucault (1986: 27) emphasises the representational power of the ship as ‘the heterotopia par excellence’. Shuttling ‘from port to port, 109

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from tack to tack’, it is ‘a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea’. Though Melville, Walcott and Ghosh celebrate transnational oceanic identities straddling national frontiers, I will argue that the poetic and political potential of the ship in these epic texts lies less in its purely spatial dimension as a transnational counter-site to nation-state. Rather, it is the ship’s palimpsestic capacity to act as a spatialisation or a stacking up of dislocated histories and genealogies that enables it to discursively resist the linear sequentiality of imperial time and capitalist time. In this regard, Gilroy’s attention to the temporality of capitalism in his study of ships is of vital importance. By referring us back to the ‘slave trade and its relationship to both industrialisation and modernisation’, ships provide a means to ‘reconceptualise’ the ‘orthodox relationship’ between Western ‘modernity’ and the non-Western practices that are displaced to capitalist modernity’s ‘prehistory’. Within a global genealogy of modes of production, ships offer ‘a different sense of where modernity might itself be thought to begin’ in the relationship with the Other that constitutes ‘a selfconscious sense of Western civilisation’ (Gilroy 2002: 17). The ‘orthodox’ conception of civilisation as a linear teleology of progression has structured Western self-representations from Polybius’s centring of ‘world history’ around the ‘one purpose’ of Roman imperialism (quoted in Bowra 1945: 75) to the Idealism of Hegel, Marx’s contemporary, for whom world history is charted through the progression of the spirit towards a consciousness of its own freedom. In his Grundisse (1858) and preface to Capital (1859), Marx provides an economic formulation of this progressive vision of world history in his four phases of ancient, feudal, agricultural and industrial modes of production. Thus, ‘capitalism is a “higher” mode than feudalism and so on’ (Evans 1975: 72). In this sequential scheme of creative destruction, in which each stage negates and transcends the previous one, the non-Western ‘Asiatic’ mode of production represents Europe’s prehistory: ‘the Asian or Indian forms of property constitute the initial ones everywhere in Europe’ (1964: 139). The notorious category of the Asiatic mode of production has been subject to intense epistemological critique by postcolonial scholars such as Gayatri Spivak (2000: 6), who challenges the Eurocentric bias that ‘bestows normativity upon the narrative of the modes of production’. However, it is the Virgilian sense of the imperial present (industrial present for Marx) retrospectively cast as predestined (pre-­ determined by the logic of capitalism for Marx) that is most relevant to this analysis. As Marx (1867) puts it in the preface to Capital I: ‘the country that is developed more industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future’. As Dipesh Chakrabarty ([2000] 2008: 63) notes, ‘this reading of history is only retrospective’, emerging within a conceptual 110

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framework in which ‘the intellectual comprehension of the structure of capital is the pre-condition for historical knowledge’: ‘the logical presuppositions of capital can only be worked out by someone with a grasp of the logic of capital.’ This capitalist logic works in tandem with what Benedict Anderson ([1983] 1991: 24), reformulating Walter Benjamin’s ideas, calls the ‘homogeneous’ time of ‘modernity’ that is ‘empty’ of ‘prehistorical’ religious symbolism. As spaces where ‘peoples are hurtled into this vortex of modernity’ (Hofmeyr 2007: 5), ships function as both instruments of capitalist telos and points of (re)emergence of non-normative temporalities that question ‘where modernity might itself be thought to begin’ (Gilroy 2002: 17). The heterotopic space-time poetics of the ship thus allows for the cross-sectional articulation of a politics of the dense, heterogeneous ancestral palimpsest that holds out against the secular, clock- and calendarcalibrated ‘homogeneous time’ of capitalist time as well as against certain forms of nationalist and diasporic modernity. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s analysis of Marx’s history of dialectical materialism helps us identify the non-normative temporalities that counteract capitalist homogenous time. Chakrabarty uses the term History 1 to designate Marx’s teleological history of capitalism, one based on the ‘self-reproduction of capital’. According to Chakrabarty (2008: 64), Marx recognises that History 1 is punctuated by other, anterior histories, or History 2, in which relations between money and capital did ‘not contribute to the reproduction of the logic of capital’. History 1 does not encounter the pasts of History 2 ‘as antecedents established by itself ’, that is, as stages of capitalist prehistory destined to be dialectically transformed into the industrial ‘image of [their] own future’. Nor does it encounter History 2 ‘as forms of its own life-processes’. History 2 therefore represents forms outside this neo-Virgilian teleological scheme of futurity. In his insightful application of Chakrabarty’s ideas to Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, Greg Forter (2016: 1337) persuasively argues that the Ibis, like the poppy flower, is ‘a figure for capital’s turning history into an antecedent to its own “life-process” (History 1)’ and, at the same time, ‘a figure for History 2, for a life-world that capital fails to integrate and sublate’. Chakrabarty’s and Forter’s arguments concerning capitalist modernity gain in heuristic power when contrasted with the Virgilian vision of imperial telos. This section sets up a dialogue between Virgilian teleology and postcolonial theories of capitalist temporality through the theoretical prism of Gilroy’s ship-centred critique of modernity. The three ships depicted in the texts – a whaler in Moby Dick, a slave ship in Omeros and a former slaver retrofitted as a carrier of opium and indentured labourers in the Ibis trilogy – conceived to pursue profit in transnational industrial systems, can be seen as embodiments of ‘History 1’ and the Virgilian teleology of imperial temporality. At the same time, they 111

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also contain ‘History 2’ of counter-modernity and, in a classic postcolonial move, shift the terms of debate from the origin as a ‘given’ to its emergence through enunciation. As Chakrabarty (2008: 67) notes, it is the enunciation of stories relating the ‘distant and immediate pasts of the worker’ that can work against the logic of capitalist temporality. Though capitalism seeks to separate the abstract capacity for work from the worker’s ‘personality (that is, the personal and collective histories you embody)’, the worker’s ‘memory and straying imagination’ (Horkheimer quoted in Chakrabarty 67) make him or her ‘the figure posited by capital as its own condition and contradiction’. ‘This worker’, Chakrabarty (66) insists, ‘does not therefore represent any denial of the universal history of capital [italics in original]’. However, by ‘enacting other ways of being in the world—other than, that is, being the bearer of the labour process’, this worker demonstrates History 2’s function as an interruption of, not an alternative to, the ‘totalizing thrusts’ of History 1. Transposing Chakrabarty’s (66) arguments to the context of ships, we will see that the nautical vessels depicted in postcolonial epic do not represent ‘a dialectical Other of the necessary logic of History 1’ culminating in its sublation by History 2. Instead, ships syncopate the historical phases of modes of production wherein the pasts of History 2 ‘inhere in capital and yet interrupt and punctuate’ History 1 (64). Like the levels of a many-storied building but also like the narrative events that adorn storied tapestries, the layers of other pasts (non-capitalist, but also non-nationalist) that emerge within the capitalist space of the ship, give it its peculiarly powerful ‘storied’ dimension. The ship’s spatial, palimpsestic capacity makes visible the transversal, interlayered stacking of competing and incommensurable temporalities. The ship’s spatialisation of time appears most explicitly in Walcott’s Omeros through the representation of the canoe. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the mobility of metaphor through wood imagery allows for a heterotopic association of Arawak past, the colonialism of Christian Europe, the Middle Passage re-enacted by the swift from Africa flying overhead, and the neocolonial present experienced by the descendants of African slaves being photographed by the tourists. Later, this canoe coalesces with a Homeric trireme temporally displaced to the Black Atlantic where it becomes a slave ship commanded by Ulysses and propelled by African slaves. As a heterotopic space merging incommensurable orders of historical experience in the non-place of language (History 2), it allows Walcott to mutinously and retroactively upset the inexorable march of colonial capitalism (History 1). The heterotopic trireme-slaver brings Ulysses’s island-kingdom of Ithaca and the Caribbean archipelago into disjunctive associations of exile for both master and slave. As the rebellious crew says to 112

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the captain, ‘you dream of Ithaca,/you pray to your gods. May they be as far apart/from your wandering as ours in Africa’ (203). Moreover, this episode is inspired by the sirens sequence in James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses (1922), recalled by the Caribbean poet-narrator during his literary pilgrimage to Ireland. Intertextual and historical connections thus emerge across multiple islands: Ireland, Ithaca, Andros, the Saint Lucian port of Castries and the islands of Margarita and Curaçao off South America (204). One also notes the representation of the crew of African slaves as having already assimilated the Calypsonian Afro-Caribbean dance culture developed by their descendants in the Caribbean and, even more incongruously, the peacenik rhetoric of the Vietnam war (‘fuck you and your war’, 203), as Timothy Hofmeister (1999: 60) has pointed out. The anachronistic resistance against the linear homogeneous time of colonial capitalism (through the displacement of the slave trade in a Homeric text mediated through modernism) and against the territorial spatiality of nationalist histories (through the transnational archipelagic analogies) finds its most powerful expression in the slave crew’s reversal of the trireme’s course which is now being steered the ‘wrong way’ (203) away from Ithaca, even if its new destination remains uncertain, formulated in the subjunctive mood (Hofmeister 1999: 60). Like the canoe and the trireme in Omeros, the Pequod of Moby Dick and the titular Ibis are sites of densely packed, synchronic and syncretic histories. The Pequod, for instance, is an agent of transnational capitalism, but also a site of emergence of culturally hybrid and elective genealogies. The chapter ‘Forecastle – Midnight’ in Moby Dick presents a multinational tableau with American, French, Dutch, Irish, Portuguese, Icelandic, Maltese, Sicilian, Azore, Chinese and lascar sailors (without forgetting the Amerindian Tashtego and the African Daggoo) all singing in chorus to Pip’s tambourine. This cultural production aboard the Pequod likens it to the ‘micro-systems of political and linguistic hybridity’ typical of slave ships traversing the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 2002: 12). Moreover, it establishes a transnational genealogy wherein filiation is replaced by affiliative choices linked to the profession of whaling. Building on the familial metaphor of marriage used to evoke the sense of interracial communion between Ishmael and Queequeg on land (85), Melville uses the nautical image of the monkey-rope connecting Ishmael and Queequeg to describe the ‘Siamese ligature’ that unites them: ‘Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother’ (381). Like the multi-ethnic crew of the Pequod ‘federated along one keel’ (162), the lascars hailing from diverse colonised locations on the Ibis ‘had nothing in common, except the Indian Ocean’ (13). The Ibis’s crew includes the Malay lascar leader Serang Ali, Simba Cader from Zanzibar, 113

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the two tindals (Babloo-Tindal, a South Indian ‘Cooringhee Hindu’, and Mamdoo-Tindal, a cross-dressing ‘Shia Muslim from Lucknow’), the highcaste Sunker and an assortment of other well-travelled subalterns. One notes the mixing of religions and even gender, but also in Sunker’s case, a loosening of caste strictures. Ghosh’s 21st-century depiction of the 19thcentury lascar community can therefore also be considered a utopic microcosm of the multicultural diversity of the Indian subcontinent, unfettered by boundaries of caste, religion or the nation-state. Like the Pequod’s crew and the lascars, the migrants also become a floating brotherhood. The metaphor of their ship-siblinghood is not Ghosh’s poetic invention but the terms historically used by Indian indentured labourers bound for Mauritius, Fiji or British Guiana. Parbattie Ramsarran (2008) explains how the ship served as a ‘protective family unit governed by the statutes of the indenture contract’: Jahaji (literally meaning ship), a kinship type of family institution is one of the first social institutions constructed on voyages by indentured labourers. Men, women and children, so as to collectively overcome and survive many of the oppressive circumstances that they encountered on the voyage all became members of a jahaji family. Members of that family structure were referred to as jahajis—ship brothers, and jahajins—ship sisters. (179) Moreover, Ramasarran continues, ‘intermarriage among Jahaji families were forbidden’ and once they arrived at their destination (her case-study is British Guiana), ‘Jahaji engaged in the functions of consanguineous families’ (179). Paulette, recycling Nob Kissin Pander’s Vaishnavite, Bhakti ideas, explains in a tone of ‘unalloyed certainty’ that crossing the Black Water is ‘like taking a boat to the temple of Jagannath, in Puri. From now on, and forever afterwards, we will all be ship-siblings – jaházbhais and jaházbehns – to each other. There’ll be no differences between us’ (328). The Jagannath temple Paulette refers to is a major site of pilgrimage for worshippers of Jagannath (i.e., Vishnu). Even the prisoners Neel and Ah Fatt forge a self-sufficient ‘protective family unit’, corroborating the jail governor’s observations to Neel: ‘When you step on that ship, to go across the Black Water, you and your fellow transportees will become a brotherhood of your own: you will be your own village, your own family, your own caste’ (290). Such humanist expressions of Adamic solidarity are nonetheless constantly contrasted with the repressive hierarchy structuring the ship’s micro-society. As the migrants, lascars and prisoners learn, the Ibis has two avatars – that of the benign ‘wooden maí-báp [mother-father]’, but 114

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also that of the menacing supervisor, symbolised by the chain of surveillance culminating with Bhyro Singh, the ‘maí-báp’ of the migrants, and Captain Chillingworth, the maí-báp of Bhyro Singh (371). The repetition of the native Bhojpuri locution, maí-báp, creates similarity at the heart of difference: as alternative genealogies, they are mutually opposed (the Ibis confers agency while the overseers confiscate it), but also interlinked. The Ibis may represent an ‘adoptive ancestor’ (328) for a democratic diasporic dynasty, but she also forcibly thrusts a new network of oppressive socioeconomic relations onto the girmitiyas. Furthermore, a metahistorical reading of the Pequod and Ibis emerges when one heeds Gilroy’s (2002: 4) injunction to consider maritime vessels not as political spaces presented in their immediate materiality and unfiltered through language, but as discursive representations or textual mediations of time and space, that is, Bakhtinian ‘chronotopes’. As a unit of analysis in which neither time or space is privileged in isolation but are ‘utterly interdependent’ (Glossary in Bakhtin 2006: 425), the chronotope points to the status of the ship in the text as a rebellious repository, a heterotopic archive whose constitutive principle is one of anachronism in the etymological sense of going backwards or against (ana in Greek) the time (chronos) of linear sequentiality dictated by historicist discourses of colonialism and capitalism. If displacement rather than place constitutes identity, it is not only in the geographical sense of displacement, but also in the profound temporal dislocations orchestrated through the overlapping of often antagonistic archives. Gesa Mackenthun (2004) insightfully uncovers the archival layers of the palimpsestic Pequod, which spatialises historical experience through the contiguities between heterogenous collective memories. On the one hand, as a national narrative overwritten by Ahab, the Pequod is the ‘allegorical ship of state, representing the e pluribus unum of American democracy’, thus embodying the official archive of imperial time. On the other hand, the presence of Pip, the African American cabin boy, also makes the Pequod a symbolically freighted ‘ghost ship and a slaver’, linked to personal memories and counter-temporalities of imperialism (Mackenthun 2004: 162). Of particular relevance is Mackenthun’s reading of the temporal, ‘heterotopic’ implications of the Pequod which ‘condenses’ multiple geographical and historical moments. First, its name bears a self-fulfilling curse linking the 17th-century Pequot Massacre to the 19th-century extermination of the Pequod’s crew. Second, the presence of Pip on board also ‘geographically displaces the memory of the “Black Atlantic” to the Pacific, thus suggesting a thematic link between America’s past (and present) involvement in the transatlantic slave-based economy and its Western future’ (171). This leads Mackenthun to the following conclusion: ‘In aesthetically subverting the determinist teleology of Manifest 115

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Destiny (Ahab) with a “modernist”, complex temporality (Pip), Melville counters the logic of imperial history with the subaltern and heterotopic fragments of memory’ (172). There is, however, a third temporality, that of the narrating Ishmael, displaced by both Ahab and Pip in his own narrative. Ishmael literally goes against the time of the Pequod’s annihilation by rewinding back to the journey that preceded its destruction. While the inclusion of African Americans and the Native American Tashtego on board the ship reflects the reinscription within the American national narrative of the histories it has marginalised, it is Ishmael’s narrative that opens a performative ‘Third Space’ of enunciation where historically displaced presences enter into heterotopic shocks with the national narrative. Thus, Ishmael’s description of the waters of the Cape of Good Hope as a ‘black conscience’ (288) not only throws America’s Puritan myth of origins ‘out of harmony’ (another etymological meaning of anachronism) through the fragment of a Black Atlantic memory, it in turn also displaces the national narrative that can no longer trace its origin back to a single Puritan source. The impersonality of the ship’s homogeneous clock-time marked by the division of labour through rotational watches (such as that of Ishmael described in Chapter 96) is thus undermined by the uncanny, iterative eruptions of repressed spectral others, making the Pequod a stranger unto its American self. The ghost ship, in effect, briefly metamorphoses into a ghost-town as sea-ravens ‘deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation’ (288). Equally uncanny is the ghostly presence of the American Indian, the ‘original’ Nantucketer: Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket, – the poor little Indian’s skeleton. What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a livelihood! (97−98) The ‘legend’ of the Native American child is thus the starting point for a history of American whaling, itself an allegory of American imperialism. The Nantucketers ‘conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans’ (98), like the European powers before them divided their colonial possessions 116

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among themselves. While James Cox (2006: 228) sees in this passage an ‘uninterrupted whaling inheritance’ that romanticises colonisation by glossing over its violence, it is difficult to see this legend, despite its touches of the exotic and ‘wondrous’, as part of a history that is ‘uninterrupted’ or shorn of violence. In Ishmael’s telling, the romance of imperialism is tarnished by the realities of whaling, a profession notorious for separating fathers from their children who risk becoming orphans at any moment. American whaling history (History 1) becomes freighted with an originary moment of loss and trauma (History 2). Furthermore, the abduction by the eagle, a symbol of America, also points to the persecution of the aboriginals by Puritan America. While the novel’s symbols are notoriously unstable, the penultimate scene of the novel, depicting Tashtego hammering a sea-hawk’s wing to the Pequod’s mast as she sinks, can nonetheless be interpreted as act of retribution against imperial America as emblematic as it is futile, a final reinscription of the repressed Indian presence in the ‘American wood’ of the ship as it is being annihilated. Ishmael’s genealogy of whaling extending from Native Americans to Alexander-like Nantucketers ends with a startling reinscription of industrial land-based slavery in the maritime space of the ship: The Nantucketer’s ‘home’ and ‘business’ (99) is his ship that he ‘plough[s]’ as ‘his own special plantation’ (99). The Virgilian source of this metaphor deserves mention. Addressing the Trojan prince Helenus, who has successfully established a Trojan settlement, a tearful Aeneas says, ‘your destiny’s been won!/But ours calls us from one ordeal to the next./You’ve earned your rest at last. No seas to plow,/no questing after Italian fields forever/receding on the horizon’ (3.579−84). The implication here is tragic: by describing his ship as ploughing the seas, Aeneas expresses his longing to resettle on land (though it is his subjects who will plough it). In Moby Dick, the metaphor is double-edged. On the one hand, the subaltern sailor is given a sense of agency over ‘his own special plantation’. Yet, the use of the possessive case is misleading, as the sailors engaged in manual labour are more akin to the cotton-picking slaves than the plantation owner. Indeed, Ahab’s megalomania stems from the fact that he sees the Pequod as his ‘own special plantation’ and not the property of the Nantucket investors. Rather than a progressive sequentiality of creative destruction where each historical phase destroys and replaces the one that preceded it, ‘other’ histories of Native American persecution and genocide, of industrial slavery and the plantation system eerily resurface through figures of speech in the palimpsestic, heterotopic space-time of the Pequod. The double dynamics of displacement and reinscription also characterise the distinctive transoceanic Adamic genealogies that emerge on the Ibis. As a former slaver and opium-carrying vessel, the Ibis is a dialectical ‘emblem’ 117

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of the temporality of ‘colonial capitalism’ that as well as that of ‘subaltern microhistories’ that imperial modernity seeks to ‘absorb, cancel, or snuff out’ (Forter 2016: 1335, 1336). Though the crew follows the clock-time of rotational watches, the migrant-labourers and prisoners destined for hard labour in the Mauritian penal colony are bearers of displaced stories, relegated to the margins of history. Their recounting of their pasts and of mythical stories typifies the worker’s ‘memory and straying imagination’ (Horkheimer quoted in Chakrabarty 67) that derail the purposefulness of profit-driven logic of capital’s self-reproduction. Sea of Poppies acknowledges the monolithic temporality of capitalist modernity premised on the sequential progression from agricultural to industrial production under the aegis of the secular ‘god’ of profit (for Jesus Christ, as Burnham notes, is Free Trade, 106). At the same time, within this totalising teleology, it posits the multiple, incommensurable space-times of the mythic (Neel’s recounting of the legend of King Bhagiratha, an ancestor of Ram, who figures in a genealogical digression of the Ramayana) and the magical (the migrants’ supernatural dread of the Black Water as a space of death and Nob Kissin’s Bhakti vision of the Ibis as an egalitarian agent of rebirth). As Greg Forter (2016: 1339–40) notes, this eruption of the communal and the magical in colonial modernity marks ‘a disturbance in secular historicist time’ revealing a past that is both ‘undigested by colonial capital’ and capable of articulating a utopic future of subaltern solidarity that ‘violates capitalism’s own life process’. Expanding Forter’s argument, I would like to shift attention from the utopic possibility held in the transformation of the subaltern’s material conditions to the Third Space of enunciative hybridity. Neel’s recounting of the story of Bhagiratha (367), a king who redeems the ashes of his ancestors, introduces the messianic time of the simultaneous into the homogeneous temporality of the ship’s log and its capitalist drive to transport commodities and human beings to Mauritius. The Persianand Bengali-speaking Neel, recalling the Bhojpuri in which his valet used to speak to him as a child, relates this myth in the vernacular. He recounts how Bhagiratha persuades the river-goddess Ganga to pour herself down to earth to purify the unconsecrated ashes of his ancestors, who had been reduced to ashes for having disturbed the sage Kapila, an avatar of Vishnu. Here, the conditions of enunciation are as important as the object of enunciation (the story). In keeping with Michel Foucault’s principle of repeatable materiality (any repetition of a cultural statement changes its meaning by virtue of the change, whether slight or significant, in the context of its production and reception, see Bhabha 2008: 33), the fact that Bhagiratha’s story is enunciated on the Ibis transforms its significance from a myth that celebrates the sacred permanence of place (it is on Ganga-Sagar island that Bhagiratha’s ancestors were redeemed) to one that asserts the performance 118

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of a new identity born in displacement. The migrants who believe they will ‘die’ on the Black Water can in fact ‘rescue’ and ‘redeem’ their former selves by becoming the members of a new, democratic ship-family: they can become their own Bhagirathas. The Ibis thus transports not only commodities and labourers, but also the personal stories of Zachary (his mixed racial origins), the migrants (their ‘past’ lives in India), the lascars (their cosmopolitan experiences ranging from fighting in the Battle of Trafalgar to appreciating the seamanship of the Finnish), Ah Fatt’s childhood in multicultural Canton, and Captain Chillingworth’s tale of the ‘white Ladrone’ in the South China Sea. Like its passengers, the Ibis carries the memory of its past life as a slaver: its beams are tattooed with ‘the peepholes and air ducts, bored by generations of captive Africans’ (11−12); its hold still has iron chains and reeks of ‘a human odor, compounded of sweat, urine, excrement and vomit’ that ‘had leached so deep into the timbers as to have become ineradicable’ (131). If the Pequod is a figurative ‘ghost ship and a slaver’ (Mackenthun 2004: 162), the Ibis is literally so. The first voyage of the Ibis from Baltimore, home to Frederick Douglass, to Calcutta thematises the extension of the Black Atlantic to the Indian Ocean world of the Kala Pani. According to Jacob Crane (2011: 10–11), the Ibis becomes the space of ‘performance of diasporic identity that crosses and recrosses the discursive borders between Frederick Douglass and Hindu scripture – bridging the black Atlantic and the Kala-Pani’. As Greg Forter observes, this resistance to ‘mono-oceanic paradigms’ makes Sea of Poppies a text that heeds Isabel Hofmeyr’s injunction to see ‘the Atlantic Ocean as linked to the Indian’ (emphasis in original, Hofmeyr quoted in Forter 2016: 1330). This ‘linked relationship’ is not only one of mere extension of one model to the realm of another, but also one of what may be called a positional revisionism. Here, the structural flaws of one socio-economic system can be temporarily transcended through the performance of a new identity in the (strangely liberating) social and genealogical vacuum offered by another model, removed from the familial moorings, social biases and cultural constraints of the character’s native environment. Such is the case for the Bombay-based Parsi Bahram Modi who metamorphoses into Barry Modi in Canton, where he is unconstrained by the familial pressures and social constrictions of the elite, parochial Parsi milieu. A similar freedom is experienced by Zachary, whose liberation from the racialised oppression of the Black Atlantic is facilitated by the Indian Ocean worldview of Nob Kissin Pander (who sees his Blackness as a sign of the divine, not of biological inferiority, 152−53, see Crane 2011: 10−11), but also by the Pacific cultural prism of Serang Ali and his lascars. Zachary’s character constitutes a pattern of prefiguration moving in two divergent directions, from the Black 119

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Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, as critics have recognised, but also from the South China Sea to the Black Atlantic. Zachary’s liberation from the hereditary determinism of his mixed racial origins and his masquerade as a white officer anticipates the empowering subterfuges of Indian migrants such as Deeti, who embarks on a process of self-fashioning that will lead to her founding her own clan in Mauritius. Zachary’s transformative trajectory begins with his exposure to lascars in Cape Town, itself a liminal boundary between the Atlantic and Indian oceans, as Crane has noted (8−9). Serang Ali and his lascar crew sense in Zachary a man who is not unlike ‘one of themselves’, but is ‘endowed with the power to undertake an impersonation that was unthinkable for any of them’ (46−47). They thus ‘adopt’ Zachary, taking charge of his sartorial accoutrements and transforming him into a gentleman and officer capable of protecting their interests. Yet, we learn later that this transformation that takes place ‘beyond the Cape’ (Crane 2011), has in turn already been prefigured in the Pacific Ocean in the personage of Adam Danby, the White Ladrone. Zachary is not the first of Serang Ali’s Western apprentices. Zachary and the reader learn through Captain Chillingworth that twenty-five years before Zachary’s metamorphosis, a white cabin boy named Adam Danby fell in with the members of a dismantled Chinese pirate empire, including Serang Ali. Danby is an uncanny prefiguration of Zachary: he is a subaltern figure of European capitalist modernity (though he is white); he is ‘a fine old glib-gabbet’ and impersonator once he gets ‘togged out in his best go-ashores’ (379). Though his impersonation is practised in the context of piracy, not commercial trade (as is the case with Zachary), he is a ‘[w]hite man playing catskin for a kippage of Long-Tails’ (379). Zachary even cherishes the watch used by Danby and inscribed with his name. As he synchronises his watch to the ship’s chronometer, he reflects on ‘the movement of the minute hand [which] was evidence, too, that despite the unchaging horizon ahead, the schooner was steadily altering her place in the universe of time and space’ (375). Ironically, the small clock, a keeper of homogeneous time, once displaced to the Indian Ocean and handed to Zachary, becomes the heterotopic site of the heterogeneous histories of the Black Atlantic slave trade as well as two major economies of the South China Sea, the opium trade and piracy (the latter a product and parasite of wealth accumulation). Against the macro-processes of capitalist expansion (History 1) emerges a micro-perspective of a savvy subaltern such as Serang Ali who lives off the system, but nonetheless adheres to a compelling comparatist ethics (History 2). When Zachary insists on the moral differences between Danby’s illegal piracy and his own legitimate position as an officer of the opium-­ trading Ibis, Serang Ali retorts, ‘Smuggling opium not blongi crime? 120

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Running slave-ship blongi better’n pi-ra-cy?’ (409). Nobody is better placed than Zachary, the son of a Maryland freedwoman and well acquainted with slavery, to appreciate the truth of these transnational parallelisms. Ironically, however, he does not heed Serang Ali’s counter-discourse of global modernity. Uncomfortable with the air of illegality and mystery surrounding Serang Ali, Zachary symbolically returns the watch to him (409) in a moment of disinheritance. Indeed, Serang Ali sees Zachary as a second Adam Danby and a second son: ‘When I look-see Malum Zikri, my eyes hab done see Malum Adam. Both two same-same for me. Zikri Malum like son also’ (408−9). However, Zachary has an additional double, the dissolute Indian landowner Neel whose feudal way of life is gradually disappearing: both men are seen as adoptive sons by Pander. In Flood of Fire, Zachary will become the apprentice of a third father figure: Benjamin Burnham. (Both Burnham and Danby are white subalterns-turned-commercial barons who start out as cabin boys.) Zachary’s biological father (the Maryland plantation owner) and adoptive father figures (Serang Ali, Pander, Burnham) make him the metonymic representation of the intersections of Atlantic, Indian and Pacific worlds; of the dense capitalist networks of the slave trade, indenture, the lascars and the opium trade. It is aboard the Ibis that these economic systems overlap, but they are also dislocated from their discursive apparatus of legitimisation and become subject to more critical hermeneutics of counter-modernity (through the powerful critiques of the opium trade as well as physical and mental slavery articulated by Serang Ali and Pander). While Zachary’s trajectory would seem to represent the homogeneous, empty time of the progressive expansion of the logic of capitalism from the West to the Orient, in Ghosh’s subversive narrative economy it is the Orient that is revealed to have ‘orchestrated’ his rise (through Serang Ali) and moral fall (through Pander, as demonstrated in the previous chapter) – and by extension, that of colonial capitalism itself. In the postcolonial epics of Melville, Walcott and Ghosh, ships function as transhemispheric space-times where the genealogy of capitalism is revealed to be less progressive than palimpsestic, less linear than layered, less univocally hegemonic than uncannily spectral and haunted by its own exploitative violence and excess. The maritime mobility offered by the sea allows not only for the ever-increasing circulation of commodities and capitalistic penetration into new markets, but also for social mobility and for the rewriting of one’s origins. Peculiar tensions are therefore embedded in the epic narratives of Melville, Walcott and Ghosh who depict the sea and ships as stages of the oppression unleashed by global capitalism as well as the transnational micro-politics of resistance and revolutionary cultures within these exploitative systems. Indeed, all three texts figure central episodes of 121

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revolt and mutiny as ‘means to conduct political dissent’ (Gilroy 2002: 17): Steelkilt’s rebellion in ‘The Town-Ho Story’, the black crew’s civil disobedience towards the Ulyssean slave ship captain and the defiance of Bhyro Singh’s authority by Kalua. In addition, Melville and Ghosh in particular, while acknowledging the destructive teleology of capitalism, also powerfully underscore the subaltern experiences of economic empowerment and cosmopolitanism that emerge through complex dynamics of collaboration with, and critical revision of, hegemonic forces. The strong correlation between maritime and social mobility, however, reflects not only a thematic recentring of global history on the subaltern worker and entrepreneur, but also a re-engagement with the narrative forms traditionally used to represent capitalism and globalisation, notably romance.

Romances of capitalism and social mobility Postcolonial epic presents an ambivalent representation of the sea as a space of capitalistic exploitation, but also subaltern economic ingenuity. This seemingly antithetical coexistence of oppression and Adamic liberation makes sense when re-placed in the imperial literary tradition that Jonathan Lamb calls the ‘romance of navigation’ (2001), one that harnesses romance elements to the epic imperative of national interest. Melville (see Tally 2014) and Ghosh (see Ahuja 2012) in particular do romanticise the subaltern experience of globalisation, but this is only one part of a more complex and subversive agenda: they also critically engage with the European romance of transnational capitalism and appropriate it for their own postcolonial purposes. The eponymous Don Quixote claims that there are two kinds of people: ‘those that trace [their lineages] to princes and monarchs and, little by little, taper off with time and wind up like a pyramid turned upside down; and others that start out low-class, and rise a bit at a time, until they get to be great lords’ (2011: 178). The latter scenario represents a deep-seated romance of maritime mobility that runs through world literature from the stories of Sindbad (circa 900−1100 ce) to Robinson Crusoe (1719). These eponymous characters, however, rise through work and trade, unlike Don Quixote, who envisages mobility either through retroactive nobility (‘after investigation [my origin] will prove to have been great and renowned’) or love and marriage (‘the princess will be so much in love me that [. . .] she will receive me as her lord and husband’, 178). In Moby Dick, whaling represents a maritime opportunity for social mobility, an ideal embodied in the figure of Captain Bildad. Bildad, a part-owner of the Pequod, is the epitome of the self-made man who starts out doing manual labour and ends his ‘adventurous career’ as a capitalist. He rises through the ranks of 122

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cabin boy, harpooner, boat header, chief mate, captain and finally becomes a ship owner (111). Like the Sindbad story-cycle and Robinson Crusoe, the increased mobility of capital facilitated by sea trade appears to be directly correlated to the social mobility afforded by the profits from such maritime trade. Romance also takes on the nationalist agenda of epic through the ‘romance of navigation’, to use Jonathan Lamb’s (2001) term. This cultural narrative conjoins commercial expansion and national glory in the enterprising figure of the navigator whose resourcefulness and heroic mastery of the sea ‘are both singularly his own and typical of national temperament’ (Lamb 2001: 53). Thus, Ishmael perceives Bildad to be ‘a man of greatly superior natural force’ whose professional life was one of ‘audacious, daring, and boundless adventure’. The solitary life at sea in the midst of the elements has made him think ‘untraditionally and independently’ (the Transcendentalist ethic put to capitalist ends). His ‘thousand bold dashes of character’ prompt analogies with a ‘Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman’. He is ‘one in a whole nation’s census’, but his presence in this census can only burnish the nation’s credentials. The association with conquest (Vikings, Romans) also bestows the prestige of martial heroism to economic individualism. Melville appropriates the ‘heroic merchantcolonizer’ of Elizabethan writing, notably Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (Vitkus 2001: 38), transposing it to the context of American nationalism. He forges the figure of what may be called the ‘heroic whalerdiscoverers’ who roamed the South Seas before James Cook and the Russian circumnavigator A.J. von Krusenstern: They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. (150) As Margaret Cohen (2010: 152) explains, such declarations of ‘maritime nationalism’ were consonant with the ‘contemporary view of the sea as American destiny’ at home and abroad. She cites the French statesman Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote in 1835 that ‘Americans are driven to take over the seas as the Romans were to conquer the world.’ Yet, Melville also insists on the specifically American dimension of such a conquest of the world which will uphold New World ideals of liberty and republicanism. Extending his rhetorical invention of ‘heroic whaler-discoverers’, Melville again appropriates colonial romance to create what can be called ‘heroicwhaler-liberators’ who reflect American republicanism and the Monroe 123

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doctrine advocating the non-intervention of European monarchies in the republics of the Americas: It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts. (150) While the rhetorical excesses may point to a certain reflexive irony, it is necessary to emphasise the extent to which Ishmael’s grandiose declarations should in fact be given serious consideration. Ishmael’s observations are typical of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (Hackluyt is the first author to be referenced in the section ‘Etymology’ which opens the book), but also of the Lusíads, the Portuguese epic with a discoverer for a national hero. This passage is emblematic of the nationalist and transnationalist tendencies of American maritime nationalism which ‘unif[ies] the nation as an imagined community [. . .] with an eye on the horizon of the globe’ (Cohen 2010: 11). Paradoxically, the transnational control of overseas territories serves to foster nationalism at home. Unlike Melville, whose society is both postcolonial and neo-imperial, Ghosh is unequivocally critical of the political and economic control of countries overseas. Like Melville’s heroic whalers, his narratives of subaltern cosmopolitanism and economic self-betterment can be seen as postcolonial appropriations of the colonial romance of navigation, itself an appropriation of epic. As Lamb (2001: 54) explains, individual enterprise is valued in romance: ‘Anthony Cascardi says that “romance is motivated by the hero’s unsatisfied need for personal love and individual fulfilment,” a goal consistent with an enterprise culture and the fashioning of the modern subject.’ The potential contradiction between individual interest and national interest, according to Lamb, is resolved by linking maritime romance to the genre of chivalric romance, exemplified by the Italian epic-romances of Tasso and Ariosto in which adventure, fantasy, love, and the supernatural are important components. The romance of navigation thus has roots in epic since English chroniclers found ‘in chivalric romance a convenient genre for combining the double attributes of enterprise and patriotism’ (58). In the Ibis saga, Ghosh writes back to the colonial romance of entrepreneurship through the figure of the British opium-trader Benjamin Burnham whose ruthless entrepreneurial drive makes him a parody of the ‘heroic merchant-colonizer’ of Elizabethan travel romance. 124

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A British prototype of the American Adam, Burnham rises from the lowly status of cabin boy to the enviable position of partner in ‘a leading trading house’. This social ascension is facilitated by his experiences of maritime mobility (a life spent on ships carrying slaves, opium and convicts) that also bring him into contact with missionaries with ‘close connections to opium traders’ (70). As Anupama Arora (2011: 30) observes, ‘Burnham’s life functions as a microcosm of the webbed network [. . .] of the AngloAmerican Empire’ and ‘reiterates one version of the history of Empire’. This version of history is that of the colonial romance of navigation and national entrepreneurship. It is no coincidence that Ghosh uses the vocabulary of romance, ‘the jadoo [magic] of the colonies’ to describe the social mobility afforded by Britain’s maritime empire: ‘a boy’s who’s crawled up the hawse-holes can become as grand a sahib as any twice-born Company man’ (71). Burnham’s heroic stature is reinforced by his physical presence: he is a ‘man of imposing height and stately girth, with a full curly beard that covered the upper half of his chest like a plate of glossy chainmail’ (68). The armorial simile, a vestige of martial epic, signals Burnham’s role as his country’s economic hero. His part in his country’s romance of navigation is evident in Flood of Fire when he traces his economic genealogy back to ‘heroic merchant-colonizers’ in a bid to enlist Zachary in an epic musterroll including Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés and Robert Clive. This catalogue reflects a Eurocentric, capitalist interpretation of world history. It condemns to prehistory the feudal and agricultural economies that structure the social worlds of Indian farmers and landowners and writes off the contribution of non-Western seamen: Blessed indeed are those, Reid, whom God chooses to be present at such moments in history! Think of Columbus, Cortez and Clive! Is there any greater or more satisfying endeavour for a young man than to expand his own fortunes while extending God’s dominion? [. . .] But not to everyone did it fall, said Mr. Burnham, to recognize these emerging avenues of opportunity. Many timid and cautious men were sure to be scared by the uncertainties of war – these creatures of habit were predestined to fall by the wayside while the bold and the chosen claimed the prize. [. . .] he did not doubt for a moment that a new empire of commerce was opening up. (283–84) The harnessing of the digressive, centrifugal forces of romance – ‘the bold and the chosen’ hero, the wandering quest for the ‘prize’ – to the progressive, centripetal teleology of national epic – of being ‘predestined’ for economic 125

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glory – exemplifies the contradictory generic and ideological energies of the romance of navigation. The implicit irony of such self-­serving hypocrisies is explicitly revealed elsewhere in Flood of Fire by the Chinese translator Compton when he sees that the British merchant Launcelot Dent is able to interrupt a naval battle through bribes in order to ensure the safe passage of his opium cargo: ‘This is what happens when merchants and traders begin to run wars – hundreds of lives depend on bribes’ (479). While Ghosh ironically exposes the colonial romance of navigation for what it is – an epic of destruction driven by self-interest and a tragedy in world history, he also reinscribes subaltern entrepreneurs within a revised romance of navigation both for the indigenous labour forces such as the girmitiyas and the lascars as well as for native capitalists such as Bahram Modi. In Sea of Poppies, the lascar sailors exhibit a transnational exposure rivalling that of Burnham. The steward Cornelius Pinto, a Goan Catholic, claims to ‘have been around the world twice, sailing in every kind of ship, with every kind of sailor, including the Finns, who were known to be the warlocks and wizards of the sea, capable of conjuring up winds with a whistle’ (174). A closer indigenous equivalent to Burnham is Bahram Modi, the central Indian character in River of Smoke. The phonetic and graphic similarities between Burnham and Bahram are telling in this regard. Bahram’s father-in-law, Seth Rustamjee, owns Mistrie Brothers, a shipbuilding firm that is ‘one of Bombay’s most prominent establishments’ (45). Personal and national enterprise coalesce in the Mistries, ‘a lineage of builders and master-craftsmen’ who, with Rustamjee as their current ‘patriarch’, succeed in proving that ‘Indian-made vessels’ can ‘perform as well, if not better than, any in the world’ – at cheaper rates (49). Their entrepreneurial heroism makes them ‘a formidable force in a fiercely competitive industry’. Significantly, Bahram, like any true hero of romance, is ‘too individualistic to stay in step with a team of fellow workers’ (50). Like Burnham, he has ‘a sharp eye for sizing up risks and opportunities’ of the opium trade. He rises to become ‘almost without peer in his experience of the China trade’. In the process, he has accomplished the heroic exploit of ‘build[ing], almost single-handedly, one of the largest and most consistently profitable trading operations in Bombay’ (45). While critics have seen in Ghosh’s counter-narrative of modernity elements of ‘aestheticisation’ that deflect attention away from structural economic disparities and ‘unresolved social conflict’ (Ahuja 2012: 83), such embellishments need to be considered from the point of view of genre rather than that of classical economy. Ghosh’s touches of romance not only reflect the idealistic impulse that drives the romance of navigation, but also represent a rechannelling of the form towards indigenous subalterns. Not only does Ghosh’s subaltern romance of navigation highlight subaltern agency, it 126

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demonstrates that capitalist enterprise is not the exclusive attribute of a ‘dynamic’ West, inaccessible to a ‘decadent’ East. Ghosh’s critical revision of the Eurocentric romance of entrepreneurial travel shows that transnational capitalism and colonial modernity emerged in a complex process of coercion and complicity between actors from both East and West, despite the asymmetries of power involved. Ghosh’s selective appropriation of the colonial romance also involves a repudiation of the genre’s jingoistic ethnocentrism in favour of a humanistic vision of diasporic multiculturalism free of the territorial violence of the postcolonial nation-state. In River of Smoke, Bahram’s overseas lodgings in Canton in the Indian enclave become an idealised microcosm of the multicultural Indian subcontinent. The cultural differences between Indians hailing from places as diverse and far-flung as Sindh, Goa, Calcutta, Madras, Karachi and Chittagong ‘mean nothing’ to the Cantonese who indiscriminately call them ‘Achhas’. Ghosh underlines the fact that irrespective of ‘whether a man is from Karachi [modern day Pakistan] or Chittagong [modern day Bangladesh]’, he will be considered an ‘Achha’ since the Acchas are ‘all from one country [emphasis mine]’ (2011: 185). This is a discreet but powerful moment of political critique of the nation-state’s arbitrary boundaries that have divided the Bengali culture into Bangladesh and West Bengal, and the Urdu-Punjabi culture into Pakistan and the north Indian states. While here too Ghosh may be accused of idealising the diaspora, this passage can also be read as cautioning against nativist forms of diasporic ethnocentrism that reproduces political frontiers and ethnic enclaves abroad. From this angle, Ghosh’s critique appears to be directed as much against the romance of European capitalism as it is against the destructive brand of diasporic nostalgia which favours the reproduction of the ethnic absolutism of the nation-state overseas. A critique of the postcolonial nation-state can also be found in Moby Dick. From a postcolonial prism, the apocalyptic end reserved for the Pequod appears as a denunciation of American maritime nationalism and extraterritorial expansionism (Castronovo 1995; Mackenthun 2004; Said 2001b). As for Ishmael, he is a problematic, if not parodic, incarnation of the economic nationalistic hero. Though Ishmael may be ‘broad-shouldered’ (113), it is not he but Queequeg and Bildad who are clearly the epitomes of the physically superior whaler-hero. Unlike Bildad, who worked his way from cabin boy to ship owner, Ishmael has little or no economic drive but lives at subsistence level: ‘I am one of those that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the world is ready to board and lodge me’ (113). He is anything but the incarnation of the national hero whose entrepreneurial zeal will extend America’s extraterritorial commercial empire. Speaking of captains (the traditional role attributed to merchant-heroes 127

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such as Vasco da Gama), Ishmael declares, ‘I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever’ (32). If anything, Ishmael’s narrative (somewhat like Melville’s) is one of social deterioration, not improvement. He hails from ‘an old established family’ and ‘keen[ly]’ feels his transition from schoolmaster to sailor (32). Hence, though he may celebrate the manual labour of whalers, he is actually most comfortable when performing the intellectual labour of glorifying or philosophising whaling. As Paul Royster (1989: 314) puts it, ‘Ishmael is never so happy as when he is finding in some dull, arduous, or onerous task an allegory of universal truth.’ Thus, work is celebrated ‘when Ishmael can interpret it symbolically, when it assumes the pattern of some larger structure or condition of human life’. Though the celebration of literary ‘craft’ as opposed to the repetitive seafaring labour required by the nautical ‘craft’ is a structural feature of sea romance (Cohen 2010: 12), Ishmael’s dilemma also anticipates that of the third-world intellectual alienated from the indigenous proletariat he must represent. As Frantz Fanon ([1961] 2004: 163) argues in ‘On National Culture’, the ‘first duty’ of the native poet desirous of representing ‘the people’ as ‘the subject of his creation’ is to realise the extent of his ‘alienation’ from them. This explains the peculiar paradox of Moby Dick being an ‘exuberant paean’ to physical ‘labor’ and to the ‘industry of nineteenth-century America’ (Royster 1989: 313) articulated by a singularly lackadaisical narrator distinguished not by his manual industry but his literary production. Moby Dick thus marks a transition from the already ambivalent romance of navigation to the explicitly problematic postcolonial romance of the subaltern. It retains the residual generic and geopolitical impulses of the former and anticipating the latter’s problematic tendency to cast the intellectual as a revolutionary spokesperson of the people. Ishmael’s voluble universalisations and corresponding silence on the labourer’s alienation from the product and the economic system prevent his literary labour from being in ‘any sense, an indictment of the system of economic relations’ (Royster 1989: 322). In contrast, Walcott’s narrator insistently calls into question the analogising impulses of his literary work and obsessively foregrounds both the alienation experienced by Saint Lucians in the multinational capitalist system as well as his own alienation from the ‘people’. Omeros is, however, unlike Moby Dick and the Ibis trilogy in one important respect – the time frame of its setting. Despite their ironic critique of the nation-state, Moby Dick and the Ibis trilogy ultimately redirect the European colonial romance towards the indigenous postcolonial subject in narratives that romantically celebrate subaltern mobility and native economic heroism. They are aided in their paeans of subaltern resourcefulness 128

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by the peculiar historical location of their narratives that mark the transition between the age of sail and the more mechanised age of steam. Whaling and the wooden world of sail in general require both the primitive sense of exploration and physical prowess as well as industrial institutions of production and consumption (of the whale, of opium). This peculiar transitionary era in economic history explains their double glorification of manual labour (the whaler in Moby Dick, the opium cultivator, the indentured labourer and the lascar in Sea of Poppies, the foot soldier in Flood of Fire) and the capitalist entrepreneur (Bildad as a synecdoche of American capitalism, Burnham and Zachery of Anglo-American capitalism, and Bahram of Indian proto-capitalism). Walcott, who situates his epic at the tail-end of the 20th century, must incorporate the ugly contemporary realities of multinational capitalism in the third world. For the poor of Saint Lucia, there is little or no social mobility. While characters change jobs in Omeros, they do not change social stations. Helen works as a maidservant for the Plunketts and as a barmaid but quits her job because ‘some of them tourist – the men/only out to touch local girls’ (33). Nonetheless, Helen accepts, even embraces, her island’s modernisation. On Friday nights, she frequents No Pain Café – ‘Is the music,/the people I like’ – in defiance of Achille’s stern disapproval: ‘She was selling herself, like the island, without/any pain, and the village did not seem to care/that it was dying in its change, the way it whored/away a simple life that would soon disappear’ (111). Like Plunkett, nostalgically stuck in a colonial past, Achille prefers the old ways and bitterly observes that ‘the young took no interest in canoes’ (112). In contrast to both men, Helen is explicitly linked to fickle modernity: ‘She was as a beautiful as a liner, but like it, she/changed her course’ (124−25). Like Helen, Hector changes jobs but also gives up fishing, his ancestral livelihood, to become a taxi driver. However, according to the value-system governing the poem, as I have demonstrated in the previous chapter, Hector’s desire to adapt is an act of betrayal. Like Achille, the poet-narrator believes that the ‘worst crime’ is ‘to leave a man’s hand’s empty./Men are born makers’ (150). The poet-narrator thus makes Hector ‘pa[y] the penalty of giving up the sea’ by having him die in a car accident (224−26). Echoing Achille’s disapprobation of Helen’s ‘whoring’, the poet-narrator comments, ‘Castries was corrupting him [Hector] with its roaring life,/its littered market, with too many transport vans/competing’ (231). Like Achille, Plunkett too resists change and is trapped in his own nostalgic colonial romance. He is, after all, an army man, not an entrepreneur. He may wonder at the ‘wild enterprise’ of Bennett and Ward’s sulphur mine foreclosed in 1836 (60), but he subscribes to the older romance of war and its ‘numerological poetry’ (91). As a British expatriate in Saint Lucia, he resorts to the romance of ‘Homeric association’ (31) in order to 129

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avoid coming to terms with the fact that the Saint Lucians’ ‘past was as flat as a postcard, and their future,/a brighter, flatter postcard’ doomed to be packaged as ‘schemes of charters with their poverty-guaranteed tours’ for neo-imperial consumption by American tourists (57). Like Plunkett, the poet-narrator recognises the self-serving nature of his nostalgia as inspiration for his epic project: ‘Didn’t I want the poor/to stay in the same light so that I could transfix/them in amber, the afterglow of empire[?]’. Contemporary Saint Lucia, in fact, resists the ‘the thickening syntax’ of the ‘colonial travellers’ on whose romances the poet-narrator has been brought up (227). Like Ishmael, the poet-narrator can only participate in the community of workers by linking manual labour (fishing and canoebuilding) to intellectual labour (thematising the paradox of a postcolonial epic being written by a writer whose art, like the fishing sector, is threatened by commercialism): ‘My craft required the same/crouching care, the same crabbed, natural devotion/of the hand that [. . .] planed an elegant canoe’ (227). If we look beyond the romantic metatextual analogies and the idealisation of the manual labour involved in planing the canoe, we perceive that the literary craft, in fact, does not require ‘the same’ skill-set as the seafaring craft, as the well-read narrator contemplating the ‘illiterate rocks’ (295) – a transferred epithet that deflects attention away from the inhabitants’ ­illiteracy – knows only too well. Walcott would thus seem to correspond to Gayatri Spivak’s (1999: 256) vision of the third-world intellectual ‘anxious to prove that intellectual labour is just like manual labour’ through a ‘verbalism’ that ‘helps only [italics in original]’ him and in no way contributes to the material improvement of the subaltern’s living conditions. Nonetheless, at the end of his epic, the poet-narrator acknowledges the gap between himself and his fisherman-double, Achille, for whom ‘this book [. . .] will remain unknown and unread’ (320). Here, Walcott resolutely resists the temptation to resort to what Spivak (1999: 265) calls ‘the transparency of the intellectual’ wherein the third-world intellectual, by speaking on behalf of the subaltern without acknowledging the gap of privilege between them, actually silences the subaltern through his erudition, which only reproduces his symbolic capital and iniquitous divisions of international labour. Instead, Walcott produces metatextual statements that at certain moments of the poem connect him to Achille, only to disavow such analogies elsewhere. By doing so, he systematically recognises that the subaltern cannot be unproblematically retrieved ‘from the archive of colonial or elite nationalist histories’, but can only be ‘gradually re-inscribed through a critique of dominant historical representation’ including the elitist discursive construct that is Omeros (Morton 2004: 51). Ghosh avoids foregrounding this enunciative disjunction, not out of literary dishonesty, but from the desire to privilege the subaltern’s voice over 130

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stylistic and generic sophistication. He therefore opts for an unobtrusive omniscient narrator. He rejects both the voluble, unstable narrative voice (Ishmael) and the confessional mode of the alienated third-world poetintellectual (Walcott’s persona) in order to ‘get out of the way’ as a writer and give centre-stage to the subaltern’s story (interview with Aldama 2002: 90). Thus, in a sophisticated balancing act, the cosmopolitan narrator highlights Deeti’s lack of literacy, but also underscores her agency through an alternative mode of representation – art – as she draws images of her ancestors in her household shrines in India and Mauritius. Ghosh’s reliance on ekphrasis, the verbal description of a visual object, disentangles him from the contradictions between physical and intellectual labour that the narrators encounter in Moby Dick and Omeros, but does not entirely erase the problematic nature of his epic project. The very deployment of ekphrasis – an emblematic convention of classical epic – reveals the gap of privilege between the erudite narrator’s symbolic capital and Deeti’s artistic labour in a narrative designed for an unavoidably literate audience. Analysing the relationship between genealogy and social mobility underscores the three texts’ shared epic impulse to trace a collective genealogy centred on the indigenous labourer. Though this subaltern genealogy is not without elements of romanticisation and nostalgia, we have seen how these idealising tendencies are the generic residues of the romance of navigation that they seek to appropriate. As for the native capitalist, both Melville and Ghosh, by reworking the colonial romance of navigation, offer laudatory, but nonetheless qualified, affirmations of the indigenous capitalist spirit in the turbulent and often destructive context of transnational capitalism. Even Bahram Modi dies as result of circumstances that favour colonial merchants over native merchants. Ghosh strongly suggests that his death is a form of expiation for his involvement in the devastating opium trade. However, the multiple economic roles of the colonised or postcolonial subject – ­enterprising labourers, shrewd capitalists and intellectuals – make it difficult to celebrate a single national narrative of economic success. These tensions are most explicit in Omeros which reflects the continued financial dependence of the Caribbean on the United States in a context of blatant neocolonialism. Equally problematic is the relationship between physical and intellectual labour in an economic epic. In Moby Dick and the Ibis trilogy, transnational capitalism seems to be a means to glorify national enterprise, even if both epics also mark their critical distance from the romance of capitalism. In contrast, there is virtually no social mobility in Omeros which presents a withering picture of multinational industrial capitalism. Ultimately, all three epic texts offer ambivalent explorations of the forces of global capitalism which transform individual lineages through possibilities of social mobility (both upward and downward) and redefine national history in relation to 131

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transnational forms of economic cooperation or coercion. In their sustained attention to dialectics between capital and labour, Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis trilogy foreground a new development in the genre, that of the paradigmatic shift from political epic to commercial epic.

Etymologies and the genealogies of words Ultimately, however, Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis trilogy imperil the genealogical project underpinning both the writing of the epic and the building of the nation by advertising the derivative nature of both endeavours. Russ Castronovo (1995: 68) describes Moby Dick as ‘an American Odyssey in pursuit of an ending’ as well as a beginning. It ‘tackles the sources, origins and genealogy of narrative precisely because it does not have a beginning but multiple beginnings’ (1995: 70). Ishmael’s digressive style constantly derails the diegesis, and the much-awaited sea adventure only begins after the first third of the novel. Yet, since the eponymous whale’s origins hark back to the ‘antediluvian’ period, Ishmael must work his way all the backwards to ‘that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun’ (529). The epic itself begins by splitting the eponymous sign into signified and signifier, drawing attention to the multiple sources of the latter across European, Nordic and the probably invented ‘Fegee’ language families in the section ‘Etymology’ that opens the book. This multiplicity is further aggravated by the source of these etymologies – a late assistant schoolteacher afflicted with tuberculosis who is no longer present to confirm his findings. Melville then moors the sign of the whale in a vertiginous genealogical pool of textual sources including the Bible, Milton, expeditionary literature and whale songs. Once again, the authority of these sources is destabilised by an authorial comment warning the reader not to take these extracts, ‘however authentic’ for ‘gospel ceteology’ (15). Moreover, the designation of the source of these quotations, a ‘sub-sub librarian’, playfully twice removed from the position of librarian, already dramatises an endlessly deferred quest for origins. The material reality of the whale is in fact conclusively foreclosed by an unequivocal affirmation, ‘Leviathan is the text’ (527), that appears to anticipate Derrida’s famous aphorism, ‘There is no outside-text.’ ‘Linguistically unable to moor itself in any sovereign meaning’ and ‘[l]acking in any textual foundation’, the epic turns to Ishmael whose self-baptising declaration, ‘Call me Ishmael’ can inscribe ‘his own being only as a moment of doubt and suspicion’ (Castronovo 1995: 72). Omeros’s opening begins simultaneously in three temporal locations, two historical (colonial contact with the Arawaks and the neocolonial ground-realities of Saint Lucia) and one enunciative (the poet-persona’s 132

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baptismal invocation of ‘Omeros’). Like the ‘whale’, the Homeric bardic figure ‘Omeros’ possesses an unstable etymology (Greek? Creole?) that embraces multiple language families and eschews claims to authenticity that drove colonial and nativist discourse. By simultaneously evoking the ancient Greek origins of the Homeric name and ascribing a new Caribbean ‘etymology’ to it (O-mer-os becomes the invocatory O-sea-bone in French Creole), Walcott problematises questions of sovereign meaning, textual foundations and the quest for origins: It is as if tradition has undergone a process of migration, taken ship across the wide Sargasso sea of the Atlantic, found itself beached, Odysseus-like, in the Caribbean and then, even as it begins to exert influence in the opposite direction, come to doubt whether it had a point of origin in the first place. (Thieme 1999: 16−17) As a sign that reflects the text’s ‘doubts’ about its own origins, Omeros becomes – like the ‘whale’ – a metonym of the text’s ambiguous genealogy that disturbs purist versions of literary and national history. Unlike the intertextual exuberance of Melville and Walcott, Ghosh opts for a more dissimulated variety. The fecund intertextuality of Ghosh’s writing project, in fact, only comes into clear view when we turn to the paratextual apparatus. Ghosh’s paratexts reflect an encyclopaedic range and quantity of sources strongly reminiscent of Melville’s ‘Etymology’ and ‘Extracts’ preceding the narrative. Indeed, Ghosh’s alter-ego, Neel, appears to be an Indian avatar of Melville’s ‘sub-sub librarian’ in the epilogues to River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. As narrative thresholds, the epilogues playfully keep up the referential illusion: ‘This book follows Neel’s khabardari in attending closely to the Chinese Repository [. . .] Neel was a keen collector of documents relating to his experiences in China’ (2011: 555). Like Melville’s ‘late consumptive usher to a Grammar school’, Neel, as we learn in River of Smoke, is fascinated with etymology: ‘Neel was of the view that words, no less than people are endowed with lives and destinies of their own’ (2008: 473). In addition to 19th-century and contemporary historians, his sources include British colonial reports on immigration and opium, articles published in the Canton register, parliamentary papers, botanical and military treatises as well as linguistic studies of Bhojpuri and collections of Bhojpuri folk songs. Ghosh also draws his reader’s attention to the origins of words, relying on dictionaries of Laskari nautical terms, Elijah Bridgman’s A Chinese Chrestomathy in the Canton Dialect (1841) and the famous Hobson-Jobson (1886), a dictionary of Anglicised versions of Indian words that peppered the spoken English of British colonisers in India. Like 133

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Melville and Walcott, Ghosh uses etymology to dramatise the hybrid origins of language itself, particularly pidgin languages born in contact zones.

The preten(c)e of history: staging the past This chapter’s focus on the representation of characters’ lineages, of genealogies of imperialism and capitalism, and of the etymology of words charged with history throws into sharp relief the constant reconfiguration of time and space in postcolonial epic. Linear history, as we have seen, becomes as fluid and viscous as a clock in a surrealist painting. Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis trilogy are simultaneously backward- and forward-looking epics that recognise the need for ancestors, even a sense of dynastic pride, as well as the value of a democratic society where individual choices are privileged over the authority of the ancestor. In this sense, these epics appear to dramatise what Homi Bhabha ([1991] 2008) calls ‘the problematic historical transition between dynastic, lineage societies and horizontal, homogeneous secular communities’. The co-presence of ancestors and agency in these texts can be seen as symptomatic of the aporetic coexistence, within the cultural history of the modern imagined community, of both the dynastic, hierarchical, prefigurative ‘medieval’ traditions (the past), and the secular, homogeneous, synchronous cross-time of modernity (the present). (2008: 358−59) Postcolonial epic temporality can therefore be seen as an expression of ‘the ambivalent historical temporality of modern national cultures’ (359). The disjunctive nature of this postcolonial temporality is best understood in Bhabha’s terms of pedagogical and performative temporality. Pedagogical temporality involves constructing ‘the people’ as ‘historical objects of a nationalist pedagogy’, legitimised by a ‘pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past [italics in original]’ (208). It is ‘the polarity of a pre-figurative self-generating nation, extrinsic to other nations’ (212). In contrast, performative temporality involves ‘the people as “subjects” of a process of signification’ based on contemporary modernity and not an ‘originary presence’ (208). While the postcolonial stance privileges the dynamic enunciation of the nation by calling attention to the ongoing signifying process (the ‘splitting’ of national time into pedagogical that is being actualised by the performative), the classical worldview presents the nation as a finished product of signification. Classical epic asserts the permanence of the pedagogical statement and its unproblematic, reiterative ‘suturing’ (naturalised by being rendered ‘seamless’ through sleights of hand such 134

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as genealogy-as-prophecy) into the present. Virgil’s history-as-prophecy denies the performativity of history, relying on sleights of hand between the present model (Augustus) and the mythic past (Aeneas). Postcolonial epic stages these sleights of hand through deliberately anachronistic strategies of self-fathering and self-mothering descendants as well as epistemological revisions of capitalist and imperial time through the heterotopic spacetimes of ships and metatextual deconstructions of the origins of the very words being used to discursively create genealogies. This brings us back to the initial premise that postcolonial epic would appear as a response to Auden’s implicit injunction to Virgil to get his tenses right. One may say that rather than a revision of Virgil’s tangled tenses, it is the constructed nature of time itself that comes under scrutiny. The linearity of a predestined imperial history would appear to give way to the free-flowing reversibility of memory that slips through the chinks of the sequential teleology of empire and capitalism. Yet, it is Virgil who in a sense opens up the possibility for ‘reversed’ genealogy in the Teradian sense of the term (Terada 1992: 205), demonstrating that that time does not exist outside representation and must inevitably be mediated through tense. Postcolonial epic genealogies uncover the fundamental truth exploited but disavowed by Virgil: that time in text is tense; to deny this mediation is literally a preten(c)e. If a text can be so contrived as to make tenses interchangeable for an imperial project, then it can also be reconfigured for post-imperial programmes of political and cultural change. Virgil thus already gestures towards the discursive volatility (and hence malleability) offered by representation since history and time must necessarily pass through the Third Space of enunciation before they become discursively stabilised as tenses on the page. Virgil’s conceit of temporal reversal thus paves the way for postcolonial epics where reversible tenses and genealogies stage disruptions of political and epistemological hierarchies. Political epic harnesses ‘hindsight as foresight’ as a sleight of hand to promote an imperial agenda while postcolonial epic asks readers to recognise that hindsight informs, indeed actually forms, the foresight underlying conceptions of our collective destiny. Like Salman Rushdie’s diasporic heroes who look back ‘even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt’ (Rushdie 1992: 10), the hero of postcolonial epic is a conquistador of time, not space or territory, whose heroism lies in the self-conscious, ongoing reconciliation between a certain sense of alienation from ancestors and the adoption of recreated ones. The specificity of postcolonial genealogy would therefore lie in its resistance against forms of imperial or social determinisms in favour of an explicit staging of the intersections between the ‘pedagogical’ legacy of ancestors and the ‘performative’, self-critical agency of present individuals who appropriate a god-like power to shape their ancestors in their own image. 135

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Notes 1 The Alha-khand refers to a collection of epic ballads recounting the exploits of two Rajput warriors, Alha and Udal, sung by oral bards in North India. Krishnadutt Pariwal differentiates between oral Hindi epic traditions represented by the Alha-Khand and written epic traditions, exemplified by the Ramcharitmanas. See Pariwal’s (2005: 1178–80) entry on ‘Epic (Hindi)’ in Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature. 2 Robert Wallace (2013) explains that in their recent opera on Moby Dick (which premiered in 2010), Jack Heggie and Gene Scheer were forced to ‘invent’ a name for Ishmael prior to his self-baptism. They chose that of Greenhorn. In fact, the line ‘Call me Ishmael’ does not open, but closes the opera, thus adhering to the cyclical, retrospective nature of the narration. In contrast, the 1956 film version directed by John Huston has Ishmael ask us to call him by that name before the fateful whaling voyage. It thus insufficiently evokes the trauma and loss that motivates the choice of name in the first place. 3 ‘Before the mast’ refers to the forecastle, forward of the mainmast where the sailors’ quarters were situated. The phrase also echoes the title of Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s bestselling travelogue, Two Years Before the Mast (1840), a source of inspiration for Melville. Both authors shared a love of the sea and a sympathetic vision of the underprivileged subaltern class of sailors. 4 The narrator remarks, ‘What we shared, we shared as gardeners’ (265). See also the references to allamandas in 122−25.

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3 ‘THE ARTIFICE OF ETERNITY’ Ekphrasis as ‘an-other’ epic

Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. – W.B. Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’

Like the epic simile and the genealogical catalogue, the ekphrastic sequence is a narrative digression or detour, opening up a parallel world in the diegesis of the text. In the midst of the hurly-burly of epic action, the narrator pauses to contemplate an aesthetically pleasing artefact – a shield like that of Achilles in the Iliad, a palatial edifice like that of Indraprastha in the Mahabharata or even flags like the illustrated pennants rippling atop the masts of Vasco da Gama’s fleet. As a description of a visual or architectural masterpiece, ekphrasis glorifies the artistic skill and historical achievements of a people. It is therefore eminently suitable to the epic’s political purposes of promoting and perpetuating national memory. It is also a metatextual occasion. Artistic creation can become a metaphor for the production of the epic text itself, allowing the author to make oblique or direct statements about the poetic and political intentions underlying his project. Thus, like the genealogical convention which traces the history of a people and predicts their eternal glory, ekphrasis implicitly or explicitly showcases the origins of the epic text and anticipates its ongoing reception for successive generations of readers. These functions of epic ekphrasis – the cultural glorification of a people, the political affirmation of a nation’s permanence and the metatextual exaltation of the text itself – link political and postcolonial epic. At the same time, they throw into relief the latter’s revisionist stance that recasts these three ekphrastic principles of cultural, national and metatextual monumentalisation as, respectively, the subversive celebration of the miscegenated origins of any culture, the performativity underlying 137

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any national narrative and the ideologically fraught reception of any epic. Ultimately, at the heart of political and postcolonial epic ekphrasis lies a dialectic between the messy ephemerality of human experience – ‘the fury and the mire of human veins’ – and the pristine perpetuity promised by art – ‘changeless metal’, as W.B. Yeats says in ‘Byzantium’ (1990: 298). Both political and postcolonial epic seek to transfigure what Yeats in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ calls the ‘dying generations’ into an ‘artifice of eternity’ (1990: 239−40). Like the term epic (from the Greek epos, meaning word), ekphrasis is rooted in Greek lexicon, combining the prefix ex (out) and phrazein (describe, speak out). Despite ekphrasis’s roots in Western aesthetics, elaborate representations of visual or plastic works of art can also be found in the epics of other cultures. In Book Two of the Mahabharata, King Yudhishthira’s assembly hall, constructed by the divine architect Maya, has ‘solid golden pillars’, is ‘garlanded with gem-encrusted walls’ and shines ‘divinely forth, as though on fire’. This royal hall surpasses the hall of the Gods of the four directions and that of Brahma himself (1975: 37). The ornate ekphrastic description is therefore an assertion of Yudhishthira’s suzerainty, implying that ‘he must be as much master of his world as the others [the gods] are of theirs’ (van Buiten 1975: 11). In the Western tradition, the description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad is recognised as the first extant example of ekphrasis. Homer presents two unnamed cities on Achilles’s shield. One of the cities is under attack, thus becoming a mise en abyme of the Iliad that recounts the siege of Troy. The other city, with its wedding festivities, marketplace and fields, is at peace and thus represents the generic ‘Other’ of the martial action of epic (see W.J.T. Mitchell 1994: 180; Taplin 1980: 14–18). In this sense, Homeric ekphrasis recalls the functioning of epic similes, linking epic action to the ‘other world’ of pastoral and workaday imagery. Homeric epic ekphrasis also serves a political function: by leaving the cities unnamed, Homer constructs a translocal ‘pan-Hellenic model’, a synthesis of the distinct local traditions of the principal Greek city-states ‘that suited most city-states but corresponds exactly to none’ (Nagy 1999: 7). The shield thus acts as a totalising ‘emblem’, to use Murray Krieger’s term (1992: xv), of the panHellenic culture that it both constructs and claims to reflect as an entity pre-existing the text. However, Homer’s ekphrastic spatialisation of identity (the spaces of two cities) gives way to a markedly different temporal organisation (one Roman space depicted at different historical moments) in the Aeneid. By replacing Pan-Hellenic geography with Roman history, Virgil inaugurates an ekphrastic tradition specific to political epic. Migrating Homeric poetics are harnessed to national politics even as this intertextual hybridity 138

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undermines the cultural purity of the imperial project. Appropriating the Iliadic shield, Virgil presents a sequential arrangement of Rome’s mythic and historical founding figures from Aeneas through Romulus to Julius Caesar on Aeneas’s shield (2010: 8.724–59). It is this Virgilian reformulation of the Homeric model that would shape the epic convention of ekphrasis and migrate across Europe: the Italians Ariosto (1975: 33.1–58) and Tasso (2009: 16.2–7, 17.66–94) as well as the Portuguese Camões (2008: 8.1–43) also use ekphrastic descriptions as prophetic projections of the history of their respective nations. Thus, as we have seen for epic tropes and genealogy, the politics of a fixed, self-contained nation are articulated through a poetics of migration. Though fully appropriated and ‘contained’ as ‘literary’ intertextuality unimplicated in political identity-construction, the migrating tradition has profound miscegenational implications which undermine the foundational paradigm of a closed political and cultural entity.

Ekphrastic anotherness The ekphrastic sequences of Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis saga exhibit traits of both Homeric and Virgilian ekphrasis, drawing from classical legacies to articulate forms of distinctively ‘postcolonial ekphrasis’. In classical terms, ekphrasis has been seen as a ‘parergone’ or a superfluous visual Other in a verbal narrative that is therefore ‘foreign’ to epic. Hegel counters criticism that the description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad is merely a supernumerary set-piece, an external parergone, by arguing that in the war-dominated Iliad, the shield affords an opportunity to evoke ‘the whole sphere of the earth and human life’ – weddings, farming, harvesting, shepherding and so on (1975: 1055). In this sense, ekphrasis recalls the epic simile, another figurative device accused of being an ornament, capable of being removed from the epic poem without inflicting damage to the whole. This supernumerary dimension, however, is offset by the ekphrastic fragment’s capacity to contain crucial fractal perspectives that exceed the whole. In postcolonial criticism, ekphrasis’s association with visual alterity within a narrative makes it well suited to articulating racial or cultural Otherness. Aesthetic parergon thus gives way to ideological paragon, particularly in terms of gender and race. James A.W. Heffernan (1993: 7) sees ekphrasis as staging ‘the commonly gendered antagonism’ between picture and narration so that the silent ‘womanly’ images are ‘envoiced’, ‘talking back to and looking back at the male viewer’. W.J.T. Mitchell (1994: 157) has argued that the ‘ “otherness” of visual representation’ can dramatise ‘a relation of political, disciplinary, or cultural domination in which the “self” is understood to be an active, speaking, seeing subject, while the “other” is 139

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projected as a passive, seen, and (usually) silent object.’ Echoing Karl Marx, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak,1 he notes, ‘Like the masses, the colonized, the powerless and voiceless everywhere, visual representation cannot represent itself. It must be represented through discourse.’ Post-Mitchellian criticism has largely reproduced this view. For Tobias Döring, postcolonial ‘revisionary ekphrasis’ can ‘presum[e] power to represent, reframe and counter the aesthetic manifestation of the colonial gaze’ (2002: 159). Mirroring Döring’s emphasis on the silence imposed by the colonial gaze on the subaltern, Renae L. Mitchell sees Walcott as responding to colonial monuments with Saint Lucian ‘counter-monuments on behalf of a people whose history and memory he believes have been arrogated’ (2015: 153). By demonstrating how postcolonial ekphrasis counters the ‘contemporary legacies of the colonial gaze’ (Döring 2002: 159) and ‘challenge[s] the canonicity of the Western tradition’ (R. Mitchell 2015: 151), these readings cast postcolonial ekphrasis in fundamentally antagonistic terms of Otherness. They thus risk diminishing the profound sense of collaboration and complicity with Western art that is the pre-condition for postcolonial ekphrastic engagement, even in its most confrontational manifestations. Readings centred on Otherness tend to reduce the target of ekphrastic critique to the former coloniser whereas the postcolonial writer is engaged in a complex balancing act that uses postcolonial historical revisionism to counter the colonial gaze of European art and at the same time uses the same European art to resist nativist demands for a national art ‘emancipated’ from Europe’s yoke. Douglas Robillard (1991: 41) shows that in Melville’s case, his growth as ‘a sophisticated art-lover in the raw America of the nineteenth century’ reflects the postcolonial predicament of any young country, with ‘its debts to the old world and its stubborn, patriotic dream of fashioning its own characteristic arts’. Melville resisted the kind of ‘cultural nationalism [that] demanded a distinctively American form for the arts, free from European influences’. Like ‘[m]any of the best American artists [he] made the pilgrimage to Europe to study the old masters or to study with the best contemporary artists of the old world’. Such pilgrimages were also textual. Melville borrowed European art treatises such as John Burnet’s A Treatise on Painting (1834–1837) and John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1846) from the Boston Athenaeum which later grew into the Museum of Fine Arts (Sten 1991: 7). Walcott also came to European art through reproductions in books such as A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: From the Renaissance to the Present Day (1939) by the American critic Thomas Craven. For Walcott, Craven’s ‘large black book’ from which his father and he copied the works of artists such as J.M.W. Turner and Francisco Goya became an ‘imaginary museum’ where he ‘learnt all I knew about the old masters and the great painters’ (quoted in Baugh 1980: 84). Walcott’s emphasis on Craven’s 140

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book and art in a Benjaminian age of mechanical reproduction also implicitly gestures towards other ways of replicating art, notably the postmodern ‘packaging’ and marketing of culture through touristic souvenirs and postcards – a significant preoccupation in Omeros. The sophistication of Walcott’s postcolonial ekphrasis lies in its resistance as much against the former coloniser as against the international tourism industry and the commodification of geography as a tropical paradise in the Caribbean. The theme of artistic apprenticeship in Ghosh’s River of Smoke makes it the most ekphrastic of the three novels in the trilogy and hence the one to which this chapter devotes most of its attention.2 Robin Chinnery, one of its central characters, is a fictionalised representation of the illegitimate son born from the relationship between a Bengali woman and the English painter George Chinnery (1774–1782). Robin is an imitator of European art (he examines and copies paintings like any apprentice), notably that of his father. So familiar is he with his father’s style that he produces ‘Chinnery’ paintings on which he makes a considerable profit before his ‘fraud’ is discovered (142). The paradox of ‘forging’ one’s ‘own identity as an artist’ (140) through the forgery of art and duplicitous ‘fraud’ extends beyond Chinnery to the Cantonese artists who imitate European art on a mass scale. Like Walcott, Ghosh writes in a postmodern age but implicitly traces the contemporary multinational commodification of culture to the remarkably executed imitations of European art by 19th-century Cantonese painters. These painters create such a perfect illusion of authenticity that they risk replacing their European originals: ‘a day will come when many a canvas thought to have been painted in Venice or Rome will be found to have been made in China!’ (247). If Chinnery undermines the originary status of his father’s paintings by forging them, the Cantonese painters do the same for all European art. Chinnery also defies nationalist paradigms by imagining an ‘epic painting’ to represent the opium barons of the cosmopolitan Canton (214) rendered in a dizzying multiplicity of styles comprising that of Pieter Brueghel (probably the Elder) of the Dutch Renaissance, Van Dyck of the Flemish baroque period, the Italian mannerist Archimboldo, Velásquez of the Spanish Baroque school and the early practitioner of French Romantic art Theodore Gericault, as well the aesthetics of Mughal miniatures. The ekphrastic projects of Melville, Walcott and Ghosh therefore resist both European and nativist forms of monumentalisation, often using one against the other. These complicities imbricated within ekphrastic postcolonial ‘counter-monuments’ (R. Mitchell 2015) prompt us to look beyond the paragone of a metaphoric power struggle between verbal and visual, colonial self and native Other to the parergone operating through metonymic displacement (the part as representing, even transcending, the 141

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whole). A more slippery reading then emerges wherein ekphrasis, an apparent displacement of the verbal by the visual, is only the starting point for a proliferating series of displacements. Rather than staging Otherness, ekphrasis unfolds through ‘anotherness’ by shifting the meaning of the narrative to another level of signification, analogous but not equivalent to the original sense implied by the mimetic action. Michael Riffaterre (1981: 25) reminds us that description, rather than making the reader ‘see something’ or ‘present an external reality’, is ‘a verbal detour so contrived that the reader understands something else than the object ostensibly represented’. Instead of reinforcing the mimetic and offering a representation, description operates a ‘displacement’ towards the non-mimetic, ‘dictat[ing]’ an ‘interpretation’. The ‘displacement of the focus’ from ‘the object itself’ to ‘its use as a sign, a symbol for another object’ (114), allows Riffaterre to move from mimesis to semiosis: I suggest that in fact the image should be seen not as referring to an object but as a different discourse, as a second set of signs, referring to the literal description, to the literal set of signs. The image will thus not be corroborating a sensory representation or refining upon it: it will be interpreting it, thereby shifting the description from mimesis to semiosis. (108) Thus, when Homer or Virgil speaks of shields, Melville of whale paintings, Walcott of Winslow Homer’s painting The Gulf Stream (1899) or Ghosh of a domestic shrine, they are deploying mimetic description for non-mimetic ends, using the shield, the whale, the boat in the painting or the drawings in the temple as signs for ‘another object’ or ‘focus’. These signs serve as discourses on culture, history and the epic project itself. In the following pages, I explore the three facets (cultural, political and metatextual) of anotherness corresponding to the three functions of epic ekphrasis enumerated at the beginning of the chapter: the glorification of a culture, the affirmation of a nation’s permanence and the metatextual monumentalisation of the text. In line with Riffaterre’s thesis, I posit that through the ekphrastic interplay of mimetic and non-mimetic, of descriptive sameness and symbolic otherness is born another epic – one which is both the same (an emblem, a miniaturised epic within the entire epic) and displaced (not quite the same as the entire epic). Riffaterre’s dynamics of similarity and displacement are also consonant with Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial concept of mimicry as an ambivalent discursive process based on repetition where a change in the context in which the repetition occurs creates something that is ‘almost the same, but not quite [emphasis in original]’ (2008: 123). 142

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While post-Mitchellian criticism takes ‘otherness’ as a starting point for a revisionist history, the collaborative anotherness of epic ekphrasis calls attention to ‘another object’ on the readerly horizon. If followed to its logical end, anotherness will inevitably lead us to questions of origins and originality. Ekphrastic anotherness enigmatically opens vanishing points wherein the parallel lines of mimetic and non-mimetic, while seeming to converge, ultimately recede into an invisible origin of mimicry. Melville, Walcott and Ghosh share a certain scepticism towards the masternarrative of originality. Melville once wrote: The world is forever babbling of originality; but there was never yet an original man, in the sense intended by the world; the first man himself – who according to the first Rabbins was also the first author – not being an original; the only original author being God. (1971: 259) Walcott also uses the image of the imitation of Christ in his riposte to V.S. Naipaul’s disparaging view of the Caribbean as lacking history: The moment then, that a writer in the Caribbean, an American man, puts down a word – not only the first writer whoever he was, in Naipaul’s view, but every writer since – at that moment he is a mimic, a mirror man, he is the ape beholding himself. [. . .] The imitation of Christ, the mimicry of God as a man. In that sense the first Christian is also not only the first man but the first ape, since before that everything was hearsay. (1974: 8) By shifting the grounds of the debate from the first man (‘reality’) to ‘put[ting] down a word’ (representation of reality), Walcott urges us to look beyond mimesis towards semiosis or mimicry. As Rei Terada explains, if mimesis is ‘the representation of reality’, then mimicry is ‘the representation of a representation, a repetition of something itself repetitious’. Like Riffaterre who replaces mimesis with semiosis, Terada argues that ‘for Walcott, mimicry replaces mimesis as the ground of representation and culture’ (1992: 1–2). Terada’s notion of a repetitious origin is inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s reflections on the simulacrum (the copy that has no original), but also resonates with Jacques Derrida’s ([1967] 1976) concept of the ever-deferring trace. Derrida goes to the origin of representation itself (i.e., speech and writing) by moving beyond the traditional notion of language as derivative of speech. Instead, he argues, both language and speech originate from a 143

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pre-condition, an ‘arche-writing’ (archi-écriture) or the principle of differance governing the emergence of meaning through differences between oral or textual signifiers (sounds, words): ‘The (pure) trace is differance [emphasis in original]’. The differance or ‘the pure movement which produces difference’ across sounds or words is based on contingency and deferral as meaning is revealed to be unstable, ever-moving and contingent on a semantic unit’s relation to an infinity of other units (62). The trace is not an immediate source of signification but the process itself that we ‘must then, situate, as a simple moment of the discourse [emphasis in original]’ (61). The trace is not a unit of signification but a meta-unit or the operative principle that governs signification. It ‘does not depend on any sensible plenitude’ and ‘is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude’ that is ‘by rights anterior to all that one calls sign’ (62). The trace, as a principle of signification, draws attention to the conditions in which the origin is constituted: the origin is ‘never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin’ (61). Therefore, ‘there is above all no originary trace’ due to the constant deferral of meaning during the process of ‘the articulation of signs among themselves’ (62–63). In other words, the source is a sign. A source or origin can only be grasped as a sign at one remove from reality (e.g., the words ‘source’ or ‘origin’). As such, it is irrecoverable as an unmediated presence. As Stuart Hall (1990: 222) puts it, meaning ‘is always constituted within, not outside, representation’. Put schematically, the trace privileges the process over the product, emergence over origins, mediation through discourse over immediate presence, enunciation over experience or reality. Derrida’s concept of the trace is extremely valuable for postcolonial explorations of national history and identity because it allows us to move from ‘the myths of origin’ to the ‘myth of the origin’ itself (92). It asks us to ‘think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences’ (Bhabha 2008: 2). Furthermore, the trace as ‘nonorigin’ undermines the genealogical conception of literary history as ‘the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer [emphasis mine]’ (1963: 141) articulated by T.S. Eliot. Rather than a stable origin, ‘Homer’, from a poststructuralist perspective, becomes a sign rather than a source. In this sense, Terada’s formulation of Walcott’s postcolonial mimicry represents a kind of meta-genealogy that prompts us to seek not genealogical origins from a mimetic perspective, but intertextual traces in a series of signs where the originary ‘reality’ is endlessly deferred. Like the trace, which is ‘an origin of an origin’, mimicry is the ‘representation of a representation’ and thus exhibits the ‘double self-consciousness’ 144

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of postmodern literature (Charles Russell quoted in Hutcheon 2005: 11). Walcott’s ‘New World mimicry’, an aesthetics developed as a response to a putative ‘Old World originality’, can be highly productive in foregrounding the postmodern dimensions of postcolonial epic ekphrasis. Classical ekphrasis is a celebration of origins (the production of the visual object as an allegory of the creation of the text) while ekphrastic mimicry, premised on anotherness, draws our attention to the fact that any origin is a representation, a repetition of another endlessly repeating representation. Ekphrastic mimicry, then, is a form of critical engagement with the origins and originality of the Old World, as exemplified by its art, premised not on a belief in ‘the myths of origin’ but on the ‘myth of the origin’ itself (Derrida 1976: 92). The deployment of such mimicry in the epic text is particularly transgressive. By suggesting that ‘there are no first times’ (Terada 1992: 2), the postcolonial authors playfully upset the Bakhtinian (2006: 15) thesis that epic represents the ‘world of fathers, beginnings and peak times’.

A ‘bastard art’: miscegenated genealogies of the epic Postcolonial ekphrastic mimicry undermines any originary claim, whether laid by Europe or the postcolonial nation. By casting both entities as signs, not sources, it shifts attention from mimesis to semiosis, from the ekphrastic object to ‘its use as a sign, a symbol for another object’ (Riffaterre 1981: 114). In Moby Dick, European art’s origins are called into question as its monolithic identity is displaced by another narrative – that of cultural mixing and miscegenation. When Ishmael devotes three chapters (55–57) to reflections on the artistic representations of whales, he posits that ‘the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures’ are in fact the ‘primal source’ of well-known Western works of art depicting sea monsters such as Guido Reni’s ‘Perseus and Andromeda’ (circa 1635) and William Hogarth’s ‘Perseus Descending’ (1808). Even this hierarchy is demolished since all these visual representations, Western and non-Western, are deemed ‘pictorial delusions’ that inaccurately represent the whale. Elsewhere, high culture gives way to a kind of subaltern whale-art as Ishmael reflects on tribal Hawaiians and subaltern white sailors aboard American whalers who create engraved artefacts using shark teeth: An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark’s tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady application. 145

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As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer. (329) One is struck by the instability of the ekphrastic object which constantly shifts to ‘another object’. The initial hesitation between a traditional object of martial epic (a war-club) and a more unconventional one directly linked to Melville’s whaling epic (an oar representing an item of maritime livelihood) gives way to the Western bone sculpture and, in an abrupt change in size from the ‘bit’ of bone, moves to Achilles’s shield and Dürer’s prints. However, Homer is somewhat out of place because he is a writer, not a painter, and because of Greece’s paradoxical status as an ex-centred archipelago, whose culture has been expropriated to serve as the origin of continental European culture (see Leontis 1995). Though Melville does, in a sense, perpetuate this expropriation of Homer for America, Homer finds new meaning in his displacement to the realm of whaling and his consequent association with another ex-centrically placed archipelago, Hawaii. The stark and categorical one-to-one equivalence between the Hawaiian savage and the American sailor-savage orchestrated by the simile also creates a sort of mongrel solidarity that upsets the kind of American nativism that demands a racially and culturally circumscribed identity. However, there is yet ‘another object’ (Riffaterre 1981: 114) in this allegory that threatens to betray its egalitarian and transcultural messages, one linked indirectly to Homer’s legacy: the Latin lexicon whose emphasis on vocabulary draws further attention to its textuality. While Melville again uses a simile to assert parity between word (literacy) and image (literacy not a prerequirement), the incongruity of a textual object in a sequence emphasising visual representations reflects the prodigious verbal labour required on the part of the epic author to elevate the physical labour (‘human perseverance’, ‘steady application’, ‘marvellous creations’) of his subaltern characters to ‘troph[ies]’ that nonetheless remain ‘not-quite-as-workmanlike’ as ‘Achilles’ shield’. Yet, this cultural chip on the shoulder is Melville’s lot too as an American writer appropriating Greco-Roman epic. Furthermore, while the subalterns are the objects of his aestheticised verbal representation (i.e., the epic text Moby Dick), Melville deliberately bestows ekphrastic agency to the Hawaiian savage and the American subaltern whaler by presenting them as creators of representations of their cultures and lived experience. 146

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A powerful illustration of the miscegenated origins of American narrative and nation can be found in the engravings wrought by Queequeg on the sea-chest (initially meant to be his coffin when he seems on the verge of death due to illness). Ishmael informs us that Queequeg’s tattoos were ‘written’ on his body by a tribal seer in hieroglyphics that reflect ‘a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth’ (555). While Melville cannot resist recasting Queequeg’s totalising tattoos in the image of his own encyclopaedic epic, he preserves the original function of tribal Maori tattoos as genealogical markers and repositories of local epistemologies. Juniper Ellis (2008: 52–53) explains that ‘moko patterns proclaim the identity of an individual’ by ‘identify[ing] the bearer as connected to genealogies that link the individual to the extended family and the tribe and to the land and the divine’. Tattoos were often so unique that their designs could be copied on paper to serve as individual signatures on official documents. Thus, Queequeg’s carving of ‘grotesque figures and drawings’ on the chest is not merely the ‘wild whimsiness’ of artistic inspiration, but one of cultural reinscription, a reaffirmation of genealogical ties, albeit a qualified one. Its meaning is understood neither by Queequeg for whom it was originally intended, nor by Ishmael who uses the coffin as lifebuoy to save himself from drowning when the Pequod sinks. Moreover, as Russ Castronovo (1995: 101) points out, Ishmael fails to mention his friend Queequeg when he is saved by the South Sea cannibal’s coffin, which bears the same designs as those on Queequeg’s body. In this sense, the coffin is Queequeg’s ‘alienated and figurative corpse’ that resurfaces in the narrative. This suggests that ‘the essence of intercultural understanding and interracial fraternity contained in Queequeg’s body has been hollowed out’. The coffin’s ‘écriture sauvage, which nobody, not even Queequeg himself, is able to read’ can therefore be interpreted as providing ‘a powerful image of how a narrative of a dominant culture is established on the ruins’ of ‘cultures which it displaces’ (Mackenthun 2004: 166). However, a poststructuralist reading would call our attention to the ‘myths of origin’ that constitute cultures – hegemonic or marginal – as predetermined essences in the first place. As a cipher no one understands, the inscribed coffin is not just a site of ‘écriture sauvage’ but an ‘archi-écriture’, appropriately afloat, an ambivalent site of enunciation that problematically erases, even as it bears ghostly traces of these erasures. As a discursive movement caught between articulation and effacement, erasure paradoxically requires the articulation of the presence being erased. The coffin is also the ‘figurative corpse’ of Ishmael or more precisely, the person he was before he named himself Ishmael. The coffin thus cautions us against seeing it as a new origin or counter-origin, emphasising instead the provisionality 147

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of its own emergence, the instability and elusiveness of its position as a ‘nonorigin’. Postcolonial theory allows us to see the failure to interpret the coffin’s inscriptions not as an acknowledgement of defeat or the hegemonic reappropriation of a dominant culture, but as a double-edged enunciation crossed with the unstable and elusive dynamic of ‘differance’ where meaning becomes contingent on context. Significantly, Queequeg’s tattoos – and by extension their replication on the coffin – are associated with signs of hermeneutic ‘opacity’, in the Glissantian sense of the term, that is, ‘a sort of protective mechanism insulating the radical difference of the other from the self’s at times depredatory search for knowledge’ (Weidorn 2012: 184). His tattoos form an ‘interminable Cretan labyrinth’ (56); they are ‘mysteries’ (555) and ‘hieroglyphic marks’ (556), making his body ‘a wondrous’ but subversive ‘work in one volume’ that resists interpretative (dis)closure. Melville goes even further by having Queequeg become a quintessentially diasporic individual, alienated from his own culture’s signs (he does not understand the hieroglyphics) and undermining the cultural stability of any myth of origins: his tattoos will be ‘unsolved to the last’, even to himself (555). It is only fitting that the tattoo, a ‘savage’ mark inscribed on human skin, the ultimate ‘contact zone’ of penetration and assimilation of ink, be the symbol for the interface between the sign and a constantly deferred, impenetrable origin. As Juniper Ellis (2008: 60) puts it, the tattoo is ‘a sign of a sign’ in ‘a novel that dramatizes searching for sources’. Queequeg’s tattoo is what Murray Krieger (1992: xv) would call a metatextual ‘emblem’ of the miscegenated origins of Melville’s epic. The search for sources of history, culture and self-identity through art is also at the heart of Omeros. The poet-narrator’s dilemma is that if ‘history is the presence/of ruins’, the tiny island of Saint Lucia would have no history as there is only ‘a green nothing’ (192). Moreover, as the European neoclassical fountains’ ‘cold noise’ tells us, ‘power/and art were the same’ (205). For a diasporic slave-descendent, Western architecture, exemplified by the host of edifices in London’s cityscape (St Martin-in-the-Fields, Big Ben, the Tower of London etc.), is a sublimation of the colonial violence of a city that ‘can buy and sell us/the packets of tea stirred with our crystals of sweat’ (197). The deliberately ambiguous line break that plays with the possibility of ‘us’ being a direct object (to buy us or sell us) or indirect object (to sell tea to us) is a more explicit reference to London’s involvement in slavery through the transatlantic slave trade. Walcott’s ekphrastic references to Europe’s historical architecture thus serve to commemorate ‘the exploited and marginalized subjects that monuments exclude’ (R. Mitchell 2015: 161). But they also showcase the hubris of the colonial enterprise whose Yeatsian, monumental ‘artifice[s] of eternity’ are belied 148

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by the ephemerality of power since Europe has been eclipsed by the ‘new empire’ of America (206). Walcott’s relationship with European architecture and art would therefore appear to be openly adversarial. In contrast to the monumental ‘weight of [European] cities I found so hard to bear’ (204), the two major busts in the poem – Homer’s and Julius Caesar’s – reveal a metonymic understanding of ‘Europe’ through fragments that constitute a more segmented, variegated conception of European culture. While the bust of the titular Omeros has received sustained critical attention, that of Julius Caesar in the key ekphrastic sequence of the poem also merits study. Caesar appears in the poem as synonymous with imperialism, which is troped as his ‘first wisdom’ (208). The busts of Homer and Caesar thus represent founding figures of European culture and empire respectively. However, in this poem of constant mirroring and reversals, Caesar, the seemingly territorialising, destructive antithesis to the maritime, pacific and creative Homer, is in fact an inverted reflection, sharing more in common with his eponymous sculptural counterpart than first meets the eye. As I will demonstrate, beneath the antagonisms of Walcott’s carefully crafted ekphrastic engagement with Caesar’s bust in the American museum lies a sense of cultural affinity and complicity unavailable to the other visitors. The bust ultimately includes the poet-narrator in a special relationship of privilege and historical awareness (from which other tourists are excluded), despite alienating him through its associations with imperialism. The Metropolitan Museum sequence (182–84) opens with an obvious dialectic between sterility (culture, represented by the museum) and vitality (nature, symbolised by the ‘leaf-light’ and birds in the museum garden). As he walks through the museum, the poet-narrator instantly associates this ‘museum-mausoleum’ with the suspended animation of formaldehyde: ‘Art has surrendered/to History with its whiff of formaldehyde’ (182). The narrator’s ‘irises’ travel ‘from glaring insomniac Caesar, for whom death/ by marble resolved the conspirator’s crisis,/past immortal statues inviting me to die’ (183). Here, under the persona’s subversive gaze, Caesar himself seems entrapped by art, condemned by the fixity of stone to a state of limbo-like, wide-eyed insomnia. The discursive temporality of ekphrasis also toys with the chronology of history, cheekily sparing Caesar’s assassins the hassle of his murder through an artistic assassination, a ‘death/by marble’ (183). The poet is able to look the Caesarean glare in the eye – and sardonically mock Art and himself, even allowing himself to be momentarily framed by the perspective of ‘the immortal statues inviting me to die’. The rhetorical sophistication and pose of world-weariness in this episode reveal that under the general tone of subversion is a sense of cultural complicity between imperial art and the erudite, cosmopolitan postcolonial poet. 149

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In fact, rather than ekphrastically ‘speaking back’ to the figure cast in the poem as the father of colonialism by, say, exposing the colonial brutality sublimated by the bust (as he does elsewhere, see 208), Walcott draws attention to his own familiarity with European history and his verbal dexterity as a poet subjecting Caesar to an eternity of deaths by jocular reviewing. ‘Death/by marble’ does reflect a certain verbal agency of the postcolonial poet who, in a kind of revenge against Caesar for having ‘change[d] the ground under the bare soles of a race’ (208), can now sentence him in turn to a discursive death. Yet, Caesar has already been symbolically ‘defeated’ by the postmodern age. Like all the other artwork in the museum, his bust is reduced to an object of scholarly obfuscation (‘a scholarly beard renders/a clouding judgement’), or worse, to the dumb blankness of zombie-like tourists: ‘Art is immortal and weighs heavily on us,/and museums leave us at a loss for words’ (183). We should not be fooled by the inclusive ‘us’. Walcott’s elegantly compressed and playful commentary on art and history reveals that his poet-narrator is clearly not at a ‘loss for words’. The real sense of agon derives less from the conflict between Caesarian imperialism (image) and the narrator’s postcolonial critique (voice of beholder) than from the emphatic distinction between two kinds of beholders: the ‘tourists’ and Walcott’s persona. The former group, cast as ‘reverential mourners’ whispering ‘like people in banks or terminal wards’ (183), is associated with silence, death, financial capitalism and terminal illness. The allusion to banks is particularly revealing in its deliberately dissonant position alongside morbid images of funerals and hospitals more readily associated with death. Caesar’s bust becomes as much a metonym for colonialism as for a certain resistance against the commodification of European culture presumably found in the souvenir-shop of the museum: ‘every view is a postcard signed by great names: that sky Canaletto’s, that empty bench Van Gogh’s’ (183). One senses an ambivalent nostalgia for the cultural and historical plenitude embodied by European art, now eclipsed by the late capitalism of American postmodernity. The bust is thus ambiguously placed as both a historical adversary and a cultural ally ‘inviting’ the narrator back into a ‘thick description’ of history whose solidity is diametrically opposed to the culturally flattening postcard. If the monument-less ‘green nothing’ (192) of Saint Lucia obliges Walcott to pay homage to the strategic historical ‘amnesia’ of the Caribbean history of erasure and deracination, the portable postcards bought by the transient visitors represent a different kind of amnesia – the instant gratification of consumption severed from a collective sense of culture or historical past. Such is the triumphant ubiquity of the postmodern packaging of culture that the only resistance the poet can offer is discursive (through his poem) and positional (distancing himself 150

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from the indiscriminating tourists, even if he too is a tourist). Indeed, a similar abhorrence of the historical and cultural flattening unleashed by tourism is expressed by Plunkett, a colonial double of the poet-narrator, who sadly compares Saint Lucians’ past to a flat postcard and their future to ‘a brighter and flatter postcard’ (57). The museum tourists are not unlike the tourists in Saint Lucia who ‘manifest the occupational amnesia proper to leisure, for vacations are, as Walcott phrases it in The Antilles, eminently “forgettable” ’ (Melas 2005: 149). In what he perceives to be an age of post-history, it is Walcott’s persona, not the other tourists, who can reconstitute the historical meaning of the museum’s expropriated artefacts. For all his apparent alienation from Western museums with their ‘dead air’, the narrator with his practised eye appreciates Western art inside the museum as effortlessly as he ‘read[s] the calligraphy/of swallows’ outside it. Walcott’s discursive resistance to the commodification and indiscriminate consumption of the postmodern age takes the form of mimicry, a more historically and aesthetically critical reception of culture as a process rather than a finished product. Rather than imitating the ‘authentic’ through mechanical reproduction, mimicry problematises authenticity itself, exposing it as artifice. The bust of Julius Caesar with its ‘eaten nose’ is an echo of the ‘small bust’ of Homer with a comic ‘broken boxer’s nose’ in Book One (14). Despite the obvious oppositions between an imperial Caesar and postcolonial avatars of Homer in the poem, it is what links the busts that is truly significant: the fact that they are both busts, or plastic representations, twice-removed imitations of reality, as Plato would say. Like Caesar, the poem’s founding figure of colonialism who appears in the form of marble copies, Homer, the ‘great originator’ of epic, is cast ‘in the shape of models, marble copies of his head and figure’ (Döring 2002: 199). Nonetheless, as constructed origins of European history and culture, the ekphrastic busts of Caesar and Homer are made to ‘voice’ different ideologies. Caesar’s silent bust, as a metonym of Roman imperialism, interlocks with other Roman fragments associated with empty mouths. The ‘stuttering pennons appear/from the mouths of arches, and the past dryly grieves/ from the O’s a Roman aqueduct’ (192). Similar yet different, Homer’s bust, despite its seemingly marmoreal fixity, is linked to objects of resonance – a conch shell (14), a cave mouth (14), a vase (15) – from which voices emanate: ‘a vase/with a girl’s hoarse whisper echoing “Omeros,” as in a conch-shell’ (230). As an echo uttered by a girl, Omeros (230), the ‘original’ Caribbean Homer, can never be an origin but a reciprocally constituted ‘nonorigin’, a trace, like Queequeg’s tattoos. The emphasis on echoes, moans and the voice also draws attention to the bardic, oral traditions represented by the griot and the shaman that precede written epic. Martin McKinsey (2010: 159–60) underscores this point well. He asserts 151

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that the absence of ‘an established written standard’ in ‘the preliterate art of orature’ meant that it was impossible ‘to speak of “variations” or indeed of originals’. McKinsey thus sees ‘the improvisational fluidity of ancient oral composition’ as Walcott’s ‘aesthetic signature’ – but even a signature is a sign of textuality, not orality. More than a model or character, Omeros – and for that matter, Caesar – are emblematic ‘signatures’ overwritten by the poet in a work that self-consciously dramatises the dialectic between originals and variants in the context of identity, culture and epic traditions. Art also functions as an allegory of miscegenated origins in River of Smoke. Half-British, half-Bengali, Robin Chinnery embarks on an artistic reinterpretation of a foundational Western narrative of origins, the Genesis, by displacing it to the Indian context (140–42). Here, the Orient literally becomes the originary model of Occidental representations. The characters posing as models for Adam and Eve, the First Man and Woman of Christendom, are not ‘pure’ Westerners, but the langot-wearing Muslim Jodu and the sari-clad, Bengali-speaking, Enlightenment-inspired French Paulette who prefers Nature to the Bible. The interference of Shaivite imagery in the representation of Jodu as Adam (the ‘inky’ skin and cobra around his head recall Shiva) and of Indian flora (Paulette holds a mango, the Tree of Knowledge is a tropical Banyan tree) further aggravates the originary claims of the biblical narrative. The deep sense of taboo involved in violating the discourse of purity underlying any founding narrative is highlighted through a sexual transgression, compounded by a religious one: Robin’s homosexual fixation on Jodu leads him to depict the Muslim boy’s nudity in such explicit detail that it appears the boy has not been circumcised. The incommensurability of multiple cultural codes for nudity – the ‘innocence and simplicity’ of nude biblical figures in the Western canon, the Indian shame towards nudity as a practice associated only with ascetics such as ‘Naga sadhus’ and the Islamic injunction of circumcision (141) – leads to one of the rare representations in Ghosh’s work of cultural misunderstanding as being not comic, but tragic. Tears running down his cheeks, Robin watches helplessly as his canvas is ripped to shreds by the outraged Jodu and Paulette. Misunderstood by both his Indian compatriots and abandoned by his British father, Chinnery can immediately identify with the Canton painters whose replications of European art earn them the scorn of both Chinese and Western painters: I understood at once why Mr. Chinnery [Robin’s father, the famous British painter] held these artists in such low regard: it is because Canton’s studios produce a bastard art – a thing no more

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likely to be loved by its sire than is its human avatar (and who could know this better than I?). (248) As demonstrated in the chapter on genealogy, disinheritance by one father (Mr. Chinnery) can mean Adamic adoption by new communities (‘kinship’ with the Cantonese painters, in particular Jacqua). ‘Bastard art’ is an ekphrastic metonym not only for Ghosh’s trilogy, but for postcolonial epic, which advertises its miscegenated circumstances of production. Melville’s provocative notion of Homer’s and Dürer’s artistic ‘savagery’, Walcott’s appropriation of Caesar’s death and Ghosh’s transcultural bastard apprentices rely on reframing, reversal and mimicry to critique colonialist and nationalist constructions of ethnocentric identity. As mimetic objects, the tattoos, the bust and the Canton paintings draw our attention to ‘another’ vision of culture, deconstructing Otherness in favour of a more playful ‘anotherness’ which undermines the exclusionist terms on which Otherness is construed.

Monuments of empire or elegiac memorials of mourning? Let us recall Riffaterre’s (1981: 114) insight that the descriptive imagery is always doubled: it is the item being described but also another object, displaced, lying elsewhere. Homeric ekphrasis, for example, draws our attention to another focus, that of the creation of art. Hephaestus’s divine genius allows us to see, almost feel, a ‘broad rich plowland/tilled for the third time’ and ‘the earth churned black’ (18.629–30) before the epic poet reminds us, ‘solid gold as it was – that was the wonder of Hephaestus’ work’ (18.637–38). In contrast to Homer’s description of the engravings on Achilles’s shield as Hephaestus forges them, Virgil’s shield presents its creation as a fait accompli that Aeneas admiringly beholds. Aeneas’s shield is also exemplary in its ‘displacement of focus’ from the mimetic to the symbolic. The shield is significant not as an object but as a sign for Roman history. By having the shield represent imperial history, Virgil inaugurates a politicised mode of epic ekphrasis. The opening lines of Virgil’s shield ekphrasis already announce the epic’s political agenda as Aeneas admires ‘the story of Italy/Rome in all her triumphs’ (2010: 8.738–9). As a god who possesses the gift of prophecy, Vulcan is ‘well aware of the seers and schooled in times to come’ (8.740). Like the Virgilian reworking of Homeric genealogy (the hero’s past) into imperial prophecy (the genealogical digressions in the Aeneid deal with Aeneas’s future descendants, not his ancestors), Virgilian ekphrasis is proleptic,

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predicting events that will occur after Aeneas’s death. Vulcan’s engraves the ‘story’ of ‘Rome in all her triumphs’ including its founding events: the birth of Remus and Romulus, the negotiations with the Sabine women, King Tallus’s defeat of Alba Longa and his punishment of the traitor King Mettus, as well as the timely interventions of Horatio and Manlius respectively in the armed struggles against the Etruscans (led by king Porsenna) and the Gauls. These exploits prefigure Octavius Caesar’s defeat of Antony and Cleopatra in the Battle of Actium: And here in the heart of the shield: the bronze ships, the battle of Actium, you could see it all, the world drawn up for war, Leucata Headland seething, the breakers molten gold. On one flank, Caesar Augustus leading Italy into battle, the Senate and People too, the gods of hearth and home and the great gods themselves. High astern he stands, the twin flames shoot forth from his lustrous brows and rising from the peak of his head, his father’s star. [. . .] And opposing them comes Antony leading on the riches of the Orient, troops of every stripe – victor over the nations of the Dawn and blood-red shores and in his retinue, Egypt, all the might of the East and Bactra, the end of the earth, and trailing in his wake, that outrage, that Egyptian wife! (8.790–808) The Battle of Actium’s privileged spatial position ‘in the heart/of the shield’ reinforces its centrality in the temporality of Roman history. By spatialising moments of political victory, the before’s and after’s of the historical chronicle appear frozen on the shield. Here, ekphrasis creates the illusion of temporal sequentiality having been transformed into eternal recurrence (each glorious event is a prefiguration of the next one), of linear genealogy having metamorphosed into a circular form of imperial predestination. In the final image, Octavius Caesar is portrayed as the model of Roman pietas, thanking the gods and laying before them tribute exacted from the vanquished barbarians: But Caesar in triple triumph, borne home through the walls of Rome, was paying eternal vows of thanks to the gods of Italy: three hundred imposing shrines throughout the city. 154

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The roads resounded with joy, revelry, clapping hands, with bands of matrons in every temple, altars in each and the ground before them strewn with slaughtered steers. Caesar himself, throned at brilliant Apollo’s snow-white gates, reviews the gifts brought on by the nations of the earth and he mounts them high on the lofty temple doors as the vanquished people move in a long slow file, their dress, their arms as motley as their tongues. (8.837–47) The ekphrasis of Aeneas’s shield thus presents us with a ‘museum of words’, to borrow James Heffernan’s (1993) phrase, reminiscent of the processions depicted in panels of the triumphal arches of Titus and Constantine in Rome. The shield’s emphasis on the vanquished Cleopatra as well as subjugated ‘barbarians’, including the Numidians, the Leleges and Carians from Asia Minor, the Gelonian Scythians from Central Eurasia and the Gallic Morini would appear to reinforce W.J.T. Mitchell’s (1994) conception of the ekphrastic correlation between visual and cultural otherness. David Quint (1993: 30), for instance, argues that the shield’s depiction of the historical victory of Augustus over Cleopatra at Actium represents a symbolic ‘victory of a principle of history – a principle lodged in the West, where identity and power are transmitted across time in patrilineal ­succession – over the lack or negation of historical identity that characterizes the ever-changing, feminized nature of the East’. The shield would thus appear to dramatise ‘the process of history-making’ and ‘the axiom that history belongs to the winners’. Foregrounding Virgil’s break with Homeric epic, Bernard Knox observes, Aeneas’ shield is decorated with the deeds and names of those who through the ages have brought Rome to its position of world mastery, but the shield made for Achilles has no names but those drawn from myth, no history; it is a picture of the world and human life. (2010: 33) Human existence is particularised and limited to Roman history so that Roman identity may then be universalised. The history of the world becomes the history of Rome. In this sense, the Aeneid exemplifies what Édouard Glissant (1999: 221–22) calls the ‘excluding epic’ where genetic filiation is extended to the collective sense of the universalisation of a single culture. Renaissance epic poets would firmly consolidate the Virgilian deployment of ekphrastic images as an aestheticised and glorified narrative of 155

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history. Ariosto, for example, retraces the French invasions of Italy in the wall paintings conjured by Merlin in canto 33 of Orlando Furioso. The interlinking of ekphrasis with Virgilian prophecy is explicit: while painters of yore ‘depicted with their brushes what has been’, Merlin’s pictures portray ‘things/To come [emphasis in original]’ (1975: 33.3.3, 33.3.7). In Tasso’s The Liberation of Jerusalem, the seer-hermit Peter gives Rinaldo a shield on which is emblazoned the history of the Este family (2009: 17.64– 94). A mixture of genealogical record and epic fancy, this ekphrastic genealogy begins with the founding figure of Actius, a captain in the Roman army at the time of the Visigoth attacks on Rome, and stops at Rinaldo’s father, Bertold. Unlike Aeneas, who gazes at his future inscribed on the shield, Tasso’s shield is properly historical, not prophetic, depicting Rinaldo’s heroic ancestors, ‘your first unknown fathers’ (17.87.2), as enumerated by Peter the Hermit. Traces of Virgil’s prophetic ekphrasis are nonetheless evident in Peter’s prophecy, following immediately after his description of the shield. The old man conjures a prophetic vision of Rinaldo’s descendants ‘whose names shall equal whatsoever name/Rome, Sparta, Carthage boasted most in fame’ (17.89.7–8). This ekphrastic one-upmanship with antiquity culminates with the Renaissance figure of Alfonso II, the Duke of Ferrara who shall be born in times when, old and ill, the world grows poor in fame by slow degrees. But he’ll be such, none shall with greater skill wield sword or sceptre, or with greater ease sustain the weight of armour or the crown your [Rinaldo’s] blood’s chief boast, your jewel of renown. (17.90.3–8) The implicit parallel between the appearance of Alfonso II and the new Golden Age, echoing Virgil’s enigmatic fourth eclogue,3 reinforces the sense of divine providence shaping the course of history. A similar politicisation of ekphrasis as an allegory of national history characterises the Lusíads. Camões (2008: 7.74–77, 8.1–43) spends two cantos retracing Portuguese military history through images painted on the silk banners of Vasco da Gama’s ships. He draws our attention to the historical allegory underwriting the national gallery of heroes: ‘Deeds, which, in that eloquent gallery,/Were depicted in such silent poetry’ (7.76.7–8). Many of the mythical and historical figures on the flags (Lusus, Ulysses, Henry of Burgundy who liberated the Portuguese from the Spanish in 1128, Alphonso I who began the Reconquista against the Moors) already figure in the retrospective prophecy in Book Three. Like Virgil, who enumerates 156

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traitors to Rome (Mettus of Alba, Tarquin, Castiline) only to show their chastisement, Camões references disloyal Portuguese figures like Pedro Fernández de Castro (whose deflection to the Moors shocked Christian Europe) and Paoi Rodrigues Marinho, slayed by Gil Fernandes. However, the imperial anxieties that discreetly surface in the Aeneid through episodes of foreign or internal threats to Rome find more explicit expression in da Gama’s bitter comments on the fact that though a few descendants remain worthy of the ‘name they have inherited’, the ‘painter finds too few of them today!’ (8.42.4, 8.42.8). In all the above cases, ekphrastic objects operate a displacement from the narrative to the symbolic and allegorical, metonymically linking a hero’s individual exploits in a historical continuum of the imperial adventure of foundation and consolidation. Certain authors, particularly Tasso, overlook or downplay the disturbing nuances and interrogations Virgil brings to his ekphrasis. Others, like Camões, foreground these anxieties more explicitly. In the case of the Aeneid, beneath the triumphalist sheen of Aeneas’s shield lurk darker undertones of imperial unease. Like the stoic, pious Aeneas who barely escapes the carnage of the Trojan war and must constantly overcome hardship and peril, Roman history often appears tenuous, capable of being destroyed but for providence’s protection. Far from an unproblematic celebration of the events portrayed on the shield, the foundational events of Roman history are mostly linked to situations of foreign attack (by the Sabines, the Etruscans, the Gauls) and internal power-struggles (the failed Etruscan-backed attempt to restore the king Tarquin to the Roman throne, the Catiline conspiracy to overthrow the Republic) (Bowra 1945: 77). The context of the Aeneid’s production – a period of relative stability after volatile civil wars – would not be far from the minds of Virgil’s readers who would have added the latest rounds of internal strife (between Octavius and Antony) to the historical list of Rome’s deliverances from political ruin. A sign of patriotism, the shield is therefore at the same time another sign, a cautionary parable reflecting the fear that an empire can flounder at any moment due to threats from within or without. The metonymic potential of ekphrastic anotherness also prompts us to look elsewhere in the Aeneid for alternative ekphrastic messages. If Aeneas’s shield in Book Eight represents an allegory of the vigilant protection of empire validated by providential victories, the ekphrastic sequence depicting the Sack of Troy on the temple walls at Carthage in Book One represents its symmetrical opposite, the ill-fated Trojan War culminating in defeat. This passage, with its elegiac tone that mitigates epic triumphalism, has not migrated as fluidly as the shield ekphrasis across other European imperial cultures. This can be explained by its interrogative mode that is ill-suited to the nationalism of political epic. In Book One of the 157

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Aeneid, Aeneas feeds ‘his spirit on empty, lifeless pictures’ on the walls of the Carthaginian temple presenting a depressing succession of defeats and deaths: the unjust ambush of Rhesus and the abduction of his horses, Achille’s slaying of the young Troilus and his desecration of Hector’s body. Though these scenes of loss are relieved by moments of humanity depicted on the temple’s bas-reliefs (Achilles’s return of Hector’s body to Priam) and valour (the exploits of the Trojan allies such as Memnon and Penthesilia as well as of Aeneas himself), the overall impression is one of pathos, not the glory of kleos. Moved by these images, Aeneas observes, in one of the epic’s canonised lines, that ‘the world is a world of tears/and the burdens of mortality touch the heart’ (1.558–59). As Michael Putnam puts it, ‘Aeneas at Carthage watches a monument to his vanquished countrymen, an elegiac memorial that induces mourning’ (1998: 262). It is this Virgilian counter-emphasis on an elegiac memorial that postcolonial epic brings more powerfully to the fore through Melville’s depiction of the doubloon (a miniature shield) that will sink with the Pequod, Walcott’s reinterpretation of Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream as an allegory of the Middle Passage and Ghosh’s Mauritian smriti-mandir or ‘memory temple’ that commemorates the ancestral crossing of the Black Water. Moreover, as Alessandro Barchiesi ([1994] 1999: 334) notes, unlike the sequential arrangement of events in the shield’s ekphrastic sequence (‘in ordine bella’) that is typical of the historical annalistic epos, the ordering of events on Carthage’s temple walls is ‘not ex ordine’. Its resolutely unchronological order (with post-Iliadic episodes figuring before Iliadic events) reflects a displacement of focus from the ‘mere exposition of historical detail’ to something ‘more’ (Putnam 1998: 248). Far from the apparent bombast of imperial domination that rings out from Aeneas’s shield, what we hear behind Virgil’s ‘verse so masterfully made’ in the Carthaginian mural sequence is ‘the weeping of a Muse betrayed’ (Auden 1969: 297). The muse, however, is not the only one to be betrayed. For all his epic stature as the founder of the Roman empire, Aeneas’s hermeneutic capacities appear limited throughout the epic. His pathos-based reading of the bas-reliefs made by the residents of Carthage may be erroneous. What he perceives to be the Carthaginians’ sympathy and admiration towards the Trojans may, in fact, be a triumphalist celebration of the downfall of the Trojans, the sworn enemies of Juno, Carthage’s patron goddess. Contemporary Roman readers would not share Aeneas’s sense of ekphrastic identification with Carthage, ‘a city whose future includes an intense struggle with Troy become Rome for control of the Mediterranean basin’ reflected in the three Punic Wars (Putnam 1998: 245). Indeed, a more imperial reading of the murals foregrounds the ironic prefiguring of the death of Dido (who appears immediately after the ekphrastic reference to the doomed 158

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Penthesilia, the only woman of power in the sequence) and the glory awaiting Aeneas, similar to that of Achilles (depicted as triumphing over Troilus and Hector in the mural). Since contemporary readers saw Carthaginians as ‘cruel and grasping’, one may wonder, as N.M. Horsfall ([1973–74] 1990: 137) does, whether they ‘are really the people to express lasting sympathy for the exiled and vanquished’. He also notes the ‘irony of Aeneas’s warm reactions, when Carthage is to bring him and his people nothing but suffering’. Aeneas’s ‘touching mistake’ repeated by ‘the romanticism of his readers’ is therefore ‘a typical case of dramatic irony’ (Barchiesi 1999: 336). That such a ‘great temple’, an emblem of ‘the city’s splendor’, has been built by ‘rival workers’ hands’ only adds insult to injury by depicting the Carthaginians as dangerously similar to the Romans, as capable of ‘labors’ on a ‘vast scale’ and civilisational perfection (1.547, 1.549–50) as the Romans. Aeneas’s ‘misreading’, or at best limited understanding, of the Carthaginian bas-reliefs anticipates his equally incorrect assumptions regarding the site for his second Troy. He first believes it is Thrace, then Crete (based on his father’s erroneous interpretation of the Delian oracle), before realising it is Italy (thanks to the household gods who appear in Aeneas’s dream to ‘correct’ the Trojans’ misreadings). Let us also recall that Aeneas’s historical handicap as he gazes at his shield. Unlike the divine seer-forger Vulcan, Aeneas does not understand the significance of the proleptic images on his shield since they refer to events that will occur after his death: ‘He fills with wonder –/he knows nothing of these events but takes delight/in their likeness, lifting on to his shoulders now/ the fame and fates of all his children’s children’ (8.856–59). A single, discreet detail of Aeneas’s ignorance can slyly problematise the issues of knowledge and misunderstanding that inform the interpretation of the ekphrastic object. As we will see, the disquieting dissonances created by details such as Aeneas’s interpretative limitations in political epic are more strongly foregrounded in the ekphrastic readings that emerge through Ishmael, Walcott’s persona, and the beholders of the paintings in the Mauritian family temple.

‘Memory temples’: postcolonial genealogies If Virgil’s shield is an ekphrastic monument to commemorate Roman genealogy, Melville proposes two ‘anti-shields’ – the ‘antichronical’ whale predating human history itself and the dubious doubloon, parading as a miniaturised shield, but in fact a proleptic ‘elegiac memorial’ (Putnam 1998: 262) akin to the Carthaginian murals. Both resist the totalising grasp of a teleological history and the containment of classical ekphrasis. Though 159

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not strictly speaking an ekphrastic sequence, Ishmael’s researched list of fossils of sea monsters in the chapter ‘The Fossil Whale’ transforms these cetacean ‘relics’ (529) into virtual museum exhibits, objects of ekphrastic contemplation. These fossils provide Melville with an opportunity to build a more self-reflexive ekphrastic ‘museum of words’ that problematises the constructed nature of history. The ‘pre-adamite’ and ‘antemosaic’ (528, 529) whale fossils predate humanity’s founders (Adam, Moses). While Virgil seeks to put the Roman present in the broader perspective of its national past, Melville humbles human history by putting it in the wider perspective of prehistory. The whale, as the narrator points out, not only predates man but time as conceived by man since ‘time began with man’. The whale is thus metonymic of a pre-terrestrial, ‘unsourced existence’ that transcends any human attempt at temporality: When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. [. . .] I am horrorstruck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over. (529) The whale-sign resists the sign of History à la Virgil and Hegel, substituting their teleology of imperial and human perfectibility with an apocalyptic vision of the End of History’s petty tyranny: ‘the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.’ Moreover, the fossils are themselves suspect: they ‘do not answer to any known species of the present time’ but, being ‘sufficiently akin’ to whales ‘in general respects’, are enlisted as ‘Cetacean fossils’ (528). This emphasis on the contrived nature of history as an eclectic, highly selective sum of discrete, if not disparate, parts is reinforced in the ekphrastic whale-art sequence where Ishmael conscripts candidates of varying credibility into his imaginary ceteological museum. The deliberately chronological ordering of these ekphrastic instances from the ancient to the contemporary could have suggested a genealogical, historical approach similar to that of Virgil’s ekphrasis until the reader realises that, rather than the Aeneid’s ‘Roman victories’ (8.811), Melville is compiling the ‘monstrous pictures’, ‘pictorial delusions’ (318), ‘manifold mistakes’ (322), and 160

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‘prodigious blunder[s]’ (320) littered throughout the human representation of whales, including Hindu art, Hogarth’s engraving of ‘Perseus Rescuing Andromeda’ and the ‘sober, scientific’ representations of whales in colonial travel literature and natural history. Melville’s mock-genealogy of ekphrastic whale representations thus exposes the fallaciousness of a linear, progressive Enlightenment conception of human intelligence and perfectibility, which is literally reduced, in this case, to a comedy of ‘monstrous’ errors. However, for all his parodic intentions, Melville does not disparage the whale itself. Uncharitable comments such as that likening one of the represented whales to an ‘amputated sow’ (321) serve to reveal the ‘manifold mistakes’ that result from man’s limitations when confronted with nature at its most massive and sublime: ‘Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters’ (322). Let us recall that the whale does not merely overwhelm man physically; its antediluvian existence supersedes human temporality (i.e., history). The ekphrastic ideal of the total representation of the whale – or of the history of the world – is ‘a thing eternally impossible for mortal man’ (322). Harassed, hunted and harpooned, the whale is granted a discursive victory. Its opacity, like that of Queequeg’s tattoos, consistently resists representation by remaining ‘unpainted to the last’ (323). Ekphrasis allows Melville to acknowledge the limits of historical and literary representation, but also the hazards of the act of reception which involves interpreting representations (already an interpretation). The doubloon, a sign that constantly displaces its meaning, is the clearest metonym of ekphrastic anotherness in the novel. Though nailed into the mast, its meaning is anything but stable as the interpretation by each character who attempts to decipher the coin – Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, Old Manxman, Queequeg, Fedallah and Pip – is succeeded by ‘another rendering’ (504). Literally dislocated from its original context – the colonial goldmines of Ecuador –, it is vested with originary significance as the ‘ship’s navel’, but in fact only offers reflections of each characters’ obsessions and subjectivities. As a sign of ekphrastic mimicry, the doubloon’s significance lies in ‘its doubleness, or reflective function’ as it ‘multiplies the fetish quality of money by making many different systems of value reside in a single material object’ (Royster 1989: 317). As a medium of exchange, its ultimate value is displaced elsewhere: for the crew, it is worth sixteen dollars; for Stubb, nine hundred and sixty cigars; for Ahab, it is not ‘money’ that is ‘the measurer’ (207), but biblical payment through mutual injury and retaliation (eye for an eye). As Paul Royster (1989: 318) argues, the 161

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coin is analogous to language: it is not a source of meaning but a mediator between men. (Typically, it is finally Ahab who claims the coin as his, despite Tashtego having sighted the whale first [623].) The coin offers an epistemological allegory wherein its apparent interpretative liberty allows the characters to imprison themselves in their own hermeneutic error (a trap already anticipated by Virgil). Both homogeneous (all gold coins must have the same value) and homogenising (subjecting diverse items to a single standard of monetary value), the coin demonstrates the extent to which each crew member has become a mimic-Ahab, quick to impose his private interpretative imperialism on the coin. A simulation rather than a source of meaning, the coin participates in a symbolic massproduction of meanings that the crew members (other than Pip), alienated from their ‘individualities’ and deprived of personal autonomy, can no longer lucidly interpret. In fact, the characters recognise the coin’s status as a sign, a deferral of meaning. For Ahab the coin is ‘a magician’s glass’ which ‘mirrors back’ to each man ‘his own mysterious self’; for Starbuck even the engraved sun is not a stable source of meaning since the rising and setting sun ‘is no fixture’; for Flask, it is but a medium of exchange (502); for Stubb, Old Manxman, Queequeg and Fedallah (the latter two’s interpretations further mediated through Old Manxman’s description of them), its value is displaced as each character compares it to ‘another’ dictionary-like text – the almanack (503), tarot signs taught by a ‘witch in Copenhagen’ (504), the encyclopaedic knowledge of Queequeg’s tribe reproduced in his tattoos (504–5), and the ‘sign’ of the sun in Zoroastrian scripture (505). Even Pip’s ramblings can only be coherently decoded according to Old Manxman through Murray’s grammar manual. Thus, it is not only Pip but most of the crew members who locate the value of the coin in its doubly reflective function as reflections of themselves and as a reflector of reality, a sign. Pip’s reading of the coin stands apart from those of the other characters. He resists Ahab’s imperialism (of all the crew members, he comes closest to swerving Ahab’s iron will) as well as the dictatorial regime of one-toone equivalence materially imposed by money and symbolically established through Ahab’s hermeneutic monopoly over the signification of the whale (a source of evil to be destroyed). As a product of enforced displacement, Pip is better placed than most to appreciate the violence of symbolic dislocation. His preoccupations with slavery, oppression and perhaps slave-deaths (allusions to his father, a ‘darkey’s wedding ring’, the Grim Reaper going ‘blackberrying’/blackburying) are ‘another rendering’, but also metonymically move from one fragment (the coin) to ‘another’ (the coin lodged in the larger entity that is the mast made of pine, itself a metonym of the ship). Just as his father cut down a pine tree and found a slave’s wedding ring in 162

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its trunk, so the Whale (our Father?) will fell the Pequod’s mast in which is lodged the doubloon that will only be retrieved on Judgement Day (506). If the other crew members appear as interpretatively-limited Aeneases, Pip is associated with the prophetic insight of the gods. While the other crew members indiscriminately embark on symbolic exchanges, substituting the coin’s materiality for personal projections, Pip ultimately breaks out of this interpretative smoke screen to see what the others do not see: the liberating materiality of the coin (‘Oh the gold, the precious, precious gold!’ that is ironically ‘hoarded’ by the sea) that resists symbolic displacement. Ishmael’s rendering of the coin’s multiple interpretations (since he is the narrator) carries an acknowledgement of the hermeneutic temptation of seeing the coin as a decipherable ‘sign’. However, Ishmael gives the last word to Pip who reduces the sign to the ‘empty cipher’ (500) Ahab vaguely intuits it to be. Once it has sunk to the depths of the ocean, it is stripped of both material and symbolic value and incapable of reflection since the subjects whose obsessions it reflects will have long since been dead. Ultimately, the coin will bear not a message, but a question to the angels of the resurrection who will ask how the coin got lodged in the mast (506). Like the whale who is ‘unpainted to the last’ (323), the coin will not merely remain uninterpreted to the last, but will be divested of the very capacity of equivalence (presumably coins have no value, monetary or interpretative, after the resurrection) that enabled its symbolic production of simulated reality. If the coin is indeed ‘Ishmael’s shield’ (Garrison 1971: 183), it is one that, like the Pequod, sinks and thus betokens a cyclical, apocalyptic vision in which the Pequot genocide anticipates the crew’s decimation. It thus takes the elegiac impulse of the Carthaginian bas-reliefs to its logical extreme by emphasising annihilation and cathartic mourning on the part of a survivor. In contrast to Melville’s emphasis on nihilist destruction, Walcott and Ghosh stress not only the pain of trauma, but also the regeneration and eventual re-establishment of displaced diasporic communities. In this sense, both postcolonial writers, while distancing themselves from the exclusive ethnocentrism of political epic, share deep affinities with Virgil’s programme of depicting a ‘second Troy’. Both negotiate cultural otherness through the interplay of parts and wholes, placement and displacement offered by ekphrastic mimicry. Sources and simulations, fragments and ensembles are at the heart of Walcott’s Boston museum4 sequence in Chapter 36 of Omeros. Walcott’s complex ekphrastic episode spans Roman antiquity (Caesar’s bust), the triangular trade from the 16th to 19th centuries (The Gulf Stream as a historical allegory), 19th-century racism (free association with The Gulf Stream leads the poet to Melville’s representation of whiteness), the Civil War (Saint Gaudens’s frieze of black soldiers who fought in the Civil War outside the 163

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Boston Museum) and contemporary American neo-imperial ‘soft power’ (the postcards replicating paintings, the ‘Greek columns’ of the museum, the Boston State House), tainted by more discreet racial discrimination (the taxi that ignores the black poet-narrator). Each artwork is metonym of its time-period, but the multiplication of meaning through ekphrastic mimicry offers polyphonic allegories of history and representation. After having contemplated the bust of Caesar, the poet-persona meditates on Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream, clearly the centre-piece of this ekphrastic episode. Walcott, himself a painter, is attracted to the 19th-­ century American landscape painter for several reasons. Among Winslow Homer’s enduring subjects are the tropical sea and sunlight (exemplified by A Wall, Nassau [1898] and Sloop, Bermuda [1899]), black experiences (well illustrated by The Carnival [1877]) and simple fisherfolk (epitomised by Inside the Bar, Tynemouth [1883]) – themes close to Walcott’s Caribbean aesthetics. Walcott’s painting that figures on the cover of Omeros – ­depicting Caribbean fishermen in a slender canoe-like boat with a green island silhouetted against clouds in the background – is similar to Homer’s tropical, marine paintings. Homer’s signature style – classical frieze-like compositions, centrally placed sculptural figures, and a strong narrative character – also suggests formalist parallels for Walcott’s New World epic that seeks to impart a monumental dimension to humble Saint Lucian fishermen. The Gulf Stream encapsulates these elements by setting up the enigmatic pictorial ‘story’ of a black figure reclining in a dangerously tilting boat as sharks (one open-mouthed) swirl in the foreground and a waterspout portends disaster in the background. The sharks and spout are at curious odds with the serene beauty of the turquoise-tinted sea, typical of the tropical Caribbean, and the reclining nonchalance of the black figure. The triangular configuration of a black body, sharks and a ship in The Gulf Stream is similar to that of J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840), a painting with which Homer could not have been unfamiliar (Spassky 1982: 39). Indeed, Homer’s distant ship on the horizon and ominous sharks recall the hazy slave ship and predatorial sharks feasting on dismembered remains of slaves thrown overboard in Turner’s work. The Gulf Stream’s apparently decontextualised depiction of a black man at sea therefore already contains ‘another’ painting, that of a black victim of the slave trade. Attracted to what Bryson Burroughs calls the painting’s potential as a ‘great allegory’ (quoted in Spassky 1982: 41), Walcott’s poet-persona sees The Gulf Stream as a historical allegory of the triangular trade. He thus orchestrates a symbolic displacement, ‘lifting the canvas’ (184) from its context of uncritical touristic consumption within the museum and placing it adrift in the historically-freighted waters of the Black Atlantic. The displacement of a North American frame of reference (the Florida Keys) by a wider Black 164

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Atlantic hermeneutics hinges on the boat’s in-between location between the Caribbean and Africa. Thus ‘the light on green water’ in the Florida Keys depicted in the painting is stretched through simile to that of Saint Lucia (‘as salt and clear/as the island’s’). The black figure’s prominent neck muscles are metaphorical ‘ropes’ turning ‘his head towards Africa’ (183). Exploiting the ekphrastic potential to halt time in a freeze-frame, Walcott presents the painting as holding the black figure in suspended animation on the Black Atlantic: ‘The Gulf Stream/which luffed him there, forever, between our island/and the coast of Guinea’ (183–84). Moreover, Winslow Homer’s New World representation of the black man as pitted against nature, a force of sublime beauty and terror (the choppy ocean, the shark, the waterspout) complements Walcott’s vision of the elemental, Adamic freshness of the Caribbean that the ‘mausoleum museums’ of Europe appear to lack. Like Virgil’s shield that glorifies Roman history, The Gulf Stream appears to play a commemorative role as a historical allegory of the Middle Passage. Walcott’s ekphrasis nonetheless marks its distance from political ekphrasis. Instead of the public portrait gallery of Virgilian ekphrasis presenting ‘all in order, the generations born of Ascanius’s stock/and all the wars they waged’ (8.741–42), Walcott’s historical allegory is intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, and deliberately defies spatial ordering through the re-enactment of a reverse west-east Middle Passage with a black figure off the coast of the New World looking towards Africa. Walcott uses the stoic grandeur of Winslow Homer’s unnamed figure to show that his African ancestors were epic survivors: ‘they crossed, they survived. There is the epical splendour’ (149). This emphasis on survival and trauma is not without affinities to Virgil’s ekphrastic sequence of the Sack of Troy, one that is also not chronological. Moreover, Virgil’s emphasis on the numerous perils facing the developing Roman empire – foreign attacks by Etruscans or Gauls, internal conflict such as the Catiline conspiracy – lends a heroic, miraculous grandeur to Rome in much the same way the black figure in the painting retains a stoic valour in the face of sharks, storms and the historical shadow of the slave ship. Yet, uncritical commemoration is held in check by an emphatic critique of an unproblematic return to African origins. The origin of the very figure that seems to long for his African homeland is problematised as historical memory gives way to self-critical mimicry. The poet-persona insists that the figure is none other than the protagonist of his epic poem: ‘Achille! My main man, my nigger!’ (183). The west-east reversal of the Middle Passage is compounded by an ontological reversal of origins as a major character of Walcott’s 20th-century poem is cast as the model or origin for the figure in Homer’s 19th-century painting. The ‘anotherness’ of ekphrastic mimicry extends to the representation of the writer as well. Capitalising on 165

Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11122 (accessed on 15 May 2017).

Figure 1 Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream. 1899, oil on canvas, 71.4 × 124.8 cm. Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1906. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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the fortuitous coincidence of the 19th-century artist’s Hellenic surname, the poet metonymically refers to him through his hand – ‘another Homer’s hand’ (184). In a poem replete with doubles, the pictorial black figure doubles as Achille; Winslow Homer doubles as an artistic Homer; and the poet himself is the double of the Caribbean Omeros, making it impossible to locate a stable originary source. Rather than a paragone against colonial constructs of otherness, it is the collaborative energies of anotherness that conjoin the Greek Homer, the North American Winslow Homer and the Caribbean Walcott. Such collaborative anotherness is, however, singularly lacking in Walcott’s violent denunciation of Melville’s Moby Dick. The text appears in this ekphrastic sequence through a curious detour. In a poem that, as Renae R. Mitchell (2015: 155) notes, systematically links columns to imperialism’s sublimations of slavery, the compressed association of architectural columns, sharks and the paleness of leprosy with Melville is stinging. In a moment of free association, the poet-narrator observes that the shark’s ‘leprous columns’ circle not only Achille’s nautical craft in The Gulf Stream but his own literary craft that needs no redemptive white sail from a sea whose rhythm swells like Herman Melville. Heah’s Cap’n Melville on de whiteness ob de whale – ‘Having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue . . . giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.’ Lawd, Lawd, Massa Melville, what could a nigger do but go down dem steps in de dusk you done describe? [italics in original] (184) Here, Walcott seems to reverse the power relations, empowering the black voice and reducing the white voice to a silent image. The exaggerated slave voice adopted by the narrating voice (and not used anywhere else in the poem) only further reinforces Walcott ’s parodic attack on Melville. He exploits the paragonal potential of ekphrasis to stage a confrontation between the silent image (whiteness of sharks, the White Whale and the white race) and the invocatory voice (the poet’s counter-commentary in the black vernacular). Yet, Walcott’s understanding of Melville as a white supremacist reflects a monolithic reading that reduces the meaning of his polyphonic epic to one displaced citation. By selectively citing Melville, Walcott actually silences the pervasive dialogic pluralism of Moby Dick, freezing and reducing it to a silent visual sign in order to literally have the 167

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last word on the text’s meaning. When we re-place the quote back in the context of the novel, we see that it needs to be considered in tandem with Ishmael’s claim at the very beginning of the chapter that it is ‘the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me’ (236). The polyphony and ambiguity of the passage quoted by Walcott has led Toni Morrison (1989) to a startlingly different conclusion. Like Walcott, she sees the whale as an embodiment of white supremacist discourse: ‘Melville’s truth was his recognition of the moment in America when whiteness became ideology’. Unlike him, however, she argues that the whale shows us that ‘it is white racial ideology that is savage’ and in this scheme, Ahab embodies a ‘white, nineteenth-century American male [who] took on, not abolition, not the amelioration of racist institutions or their laws, but the very concept of whiteness as an inhuman idea’ (142). Furthermore, the inherent ambivalence of ekphrasis also works against Walcott’s tirade since the visual quality of whiteness can only be conjured through words, in this case, a direct quotation from Moby Dick that becomes as much an act of harangue as one of homage. It is not Homer’s Iliad, nor Dante’s Divine Comedy, nor even Joyce’s Ulysses, but Melville’s Moby Dick that is quoted ad verbatim in the explicitly intertextual Omeros – a point that has so far not been sufficiently underscored. For all his ‘Look Back in Anger’ posturing, Walcott cannot resist Melville’s distinctive whale humour, and almost in spite of himself, lets Melville have the last word in describing his (Walcott’s) predicament as empty cabs deliberately ignore his hails: I looked for a cab, But cabs, like the fall, were a matter of colour, and several passed, empty. In the back of one, Ahab sat, trying to catch his whaler. I looped a shout like a harpoon, like Queequeg, but the only spout was a sculptured fountain’s. (184) Walcott reproduces Melville’s analogising impulse by troping his shout as Queequeg’s harpoon in order to satirise the very racism he associates with Melville. It would seem that his rejection of Melville’s apparently white supremacist politics is articulated through the same author’s poetics (but for the allusion to Melville, the imagery of whaling is entirely gratuitous in this taxi sequence). Ultimately, it is not the poet-persona who ventriloquises Melville, but Melville who, instead of being silenced, ‘speaks’ through Walcott’s harpoon imagery. No doubt Walcott’s ekphrasis is intended to reflect his selective appropriation of what he perceives to be the Adamic elements of 168

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American empire (represented by Walt Whitman in literature and Winslow Homer in art) and his rejection of what he considers to be its oppressive, racist aspects (symbolised by Melville and the taxi). Through the passage from ‘sic transit gloria [mundi]’ to ‘sic transit taxi, sport’ (182, 184), the sequence attempts to retrace ‘the iconographic translatio imperii of visual powers from the Old World to the New, from the British to the American empire’ (Döring 2002: 158). Nonetheless, as Walcott shows only too well in his complex reception of European and American art, the migration of cultural artefacts and meaning cuts both ways. The ekphrastic tryptic (Caesar’s bust, Winslow Homer’s canvas, Melville’s whale) that emerges is anything but single-voiced, despite Walcott’s best efforts to establish the imperial otherness of Caesar’s bust and Melville’s text. If Caesarean imperialism and Melville’s racism seem to be counterpointed as negative foils to Winslow Homer’s New World revisionism and the commemorative significance of the memorial to Black soldiers in the Civil War, the collaborative complicities with Homer seem to spill over to Caesar and Melville as well. This proximity is achieved primarily through the poet’s sophisticated sense of self-deprecating humour that breaks down barriers rather than erecting them, bringing him closer to his ekphrastically-rendered nemeses than he would care to admit. In a final move of displacement, Winslow Homer’s black figure substituted by Walcott’s Achille reveals itself to be an allegory of the embattled postcolonial author caught between the chimera of a nativist ‘tribal dream’ and the tokenistic commemorations of black experience offered by his chosen country of expatriation, and left only with ‘a shout/like a harpoon, like Queequeg’ (184). If art allows him to replace a metonymic figuration of himself (the character Achille is a double of the poet-narrator) at the centre of history, the world ‘outside’ the canvas reminds him of his marginal position in a society where taxis and ‘real time’ pursue their course oblivious to his epic cri de cœur. The final line of the intricate Museum passage ends on an anti-climactic note: the museum lights are switched off. Ordinary nocturnal life resumes its course as the streetlights are switched on. The high culture of Art (symbolised by the museum lights) and Literature – forms that operate a displacement from the ‘real’ to the symbolic – are in turn discursively displaced by the material world (represented by streetlights). This might suggest that Walcott finally privileges life and the unrepeatable Bergsonian flow of experience over the totalising ambitions of History, Art and the Epic. This ekphrastic tussle between eternity and ephemerality runs throughout Omeros. The sea is an illustrative example. With its unending flux, the sea resists static representation and is metaphorically associated with waves wiping the slate of history clean. If Melville’s whale, like his text, remains ‘unpainted to the last’ (323), Walcott’s epic seeks to remain unwritten to the last, to write only to efface 169

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and write again. Like the sea, it seems to joyously sweep away ekphrastic standards of Hegelian totality, teleological structure and the immortal fixity of the written word. Instead, the poem seeks to approximate nature in all its unseizable ephemerality and indifference to purpose. Neither the sea nor ‘the illiterate rocks’ (295), Walcott writes, had any memory of the wanderings of Gilgamesh, or whose sword severed whose head in the Iliad. It was an epic where every line was erased yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf in that blind violence with which one crest replaced another with a trench (296) Here, the persona confronts his principal preoccupations: his situation of cultural privilege compared to the ‘illiterate’ rocks and fishermen, his familiarity with ‘high’ literature and the historical legacy of slavery and colonisation that has marked his island. The sea is at once over-mediated through the Iliad, the Gilgamesh and collective historical memory, and gloriously unmediated in its sublime violence. His negation of epic through the amnesiac Atlantic unmarked by the Iliad is counterbalanced by his recusatio (Davis 1997) or the reincorporation of epic through the metaphoric potential of the waves as agents of violence and through the intertextual residue of epic titles. Walcott’s radicalism lies in his Romantic conservatism. Like Keats’s predilection for odes or Byron’s use of the ottava rima, Walcott’s loose terza rima and oceanic poetics are marked by his enduring fascination with neoclassical order and form. However opposed Walcott may be to a Hegelian conception of History, his poem is perhaps the most Hegelian of the three works under consideration in its loving obsession with totalising, circular forms (vases, throats, cave mouths, conch shells) to enclose words, language and the poem itself. As Murray Krieger (1992: 203, 268) argues, the spatial ekphrastic object in poetry becomes a metaphor for the self-enclosed poem itself, a classical tendency illustrated by Keats’s Grecian urn. One gets a similar sense of Kriegerian ‘roundness’ in Omeros. Take for instance, the following lines: ‘A wind turns the harbour’s pages back to the voice/ that hummed in the vase of a girl’s throat: “Omeros” ’ (13). Or, ‘Rhyme remains the parenthesis of palms [. . .] it is the language’s/desire to enclose the loved world in its arms’ (75). Or yet again, ‘I felt [. . .] the beach close like a book/behind me’ (295). The poet’s mission, as articulated by Omeros, is ‘to circle yourself and this island with your art’ (291).

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Walcott’s aphorism on epic – ‘they crossed, they survived. There is the epical splendour’ (149) – applies with equal force to Ghosh’s girmitiyas crossing the Indian Ocean. Ghosh must also deal with the fragmented nature of Indian diasporic identity as the migrants are separated by differences in caste, religion, region and socio-economic status. Ghosh thus needs an ekphrastic emblem drawn from the well-spring of the migrants’ culture that unifies their extraordinarily diverse group without reducing Indian-ness to a totalising essence. His choice of Deeti’s memory temple is a master stroke of ekphrastic anotherness and is the site of the trilogy’s most sophisticated figurative mechanisms. An integral part of the migrants’ daily lives, the temple is also a figure of displacement par excellence. It is inscribed within India’s ‘sacred geography’ that has traditionally been created ‘not by homing in on the singular importance of one place, but the linking, duplication, and multiplication of places’ (Eck 2012: 5). For example, the holy city of Kashi (Benares), its temple and its associated five-fold pilgrimage structure are systematically duplicated across India by ‘Kashis of the North’ and ‘Kashis of the South’ (3). As Amitav Ghosh observes in ‘The Diaspora and Indian Culture’ ([1990] 2006: 248), ‘the symbolic spatial structure of India [that] is infinitely reproducible’ creates a uniquely reverential form of metaphysical mimicry. Thus, ‘the trouble with an infinitely reproducible space [is that] since it does not refer to actual places, it cannot be left behind.’ Moreover, this imagined, reproducible geography emerged from popular pilgrimage movements, not from the religious brahmin elite (Eck 2012: 5). It thus resonates deeply with Ghosh’s epic mission to affirm the subaltern’s historical agency. Sea of Poppies opens with an ekphrastic description of Deeti’s household shrine in the village on the outskirts of Ghazipur. A typical Indian puja room (prayer room), it contains visual duplications of the divine (statues and prints of gods and goddesses) as well as of pictures created by Deeti herself of living and deceased members of her family. Through the rearrangement of parts, represented by both physical objects (the belongings of her dead parents elevated to ‘relics’) and visual representations (prints and charcoal-drawn pictures), Deeti positions herself within a broader whole represented by a continuum that is both genealogical and cultural. Yet, these symbolic displacements only serve to reinforce the stability, rootedness and unchangeability of everyday life. This Hindu ‘essence’, as it were, is stunningly disrupted by Deeti’s impulsive decision to include a form neither human nor explicitly god-like, a symbol of migration rather than nation, the two-masted schooner the Ibis in her ‘personal pantheon’ (8). Itself displaced from the Black Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, the slaver-turned-opium carrier will be a vehicle of

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displacement for the migrants. It also displaces time by granting visions of the future to Deeti: though an instrument of secular industrial capitalism, it is vested with ‘supernatural’ power as a source of prophecy (Forter 2016: 1337–38). The Ibis’s apparently incongruous inclusion in Deeti’s homely shrine (remarked on by her daughter Kabutri) sets into motion not only Deeti’s displacement, but that of the shrine itself. Like Aeneas who physically carries his father and household gods out of Troy across the Mediterranean, Deeti imaginatively carries her culture and ancestry with her through her multiple shrines: the ensemble of images she draws on the Ibis’s palimpsestic wooden beams (already tattooed with holes bored by the African slaves it formerly transported) and the more elaborate ‘memoryshrine’ she founds in Mauritius, housed in the equally palimpsestic cavern walls (which bear stick-drawings by African runaway slaves or maroons predating the Colvers’ arrival on the island). The shrine in her Indian home, the shrine aboard the Ibis and the Mauritius memory temple represent the progressive displacement of Deeti’s focus on Hinduness (represented by statues of Hindu gods of Ganesh, Durga, Krishna and Shiva) as well as her caste- and clan-based affiliations (reflected by the presence of relics of ‘family and forbears’) by more nonessentialising considerations. The Ibis already prompts this move from ethnic exclusiveness to inclusiveness. In the opening pages of Sea of Poppies, we learn that Deeti ‘just know[s]’ that many of the Ibis’s passengers must be painted ‘on the walls of our puja room’ (2008: 11). The shift from inherited identities to shared experience as the basis for collective identity is evident. Yet, Ghosh must tread a fine line since temples have also been sites of virulent ethnocentrism in India (the Ayodhya temple controversy described in the previous chapter) and abroad (temples as enclaves of nativism). The political significance and subversiveness of Deeti’s Mauritius shrine is brought more powerfully to the fore when we refer to Vijay Mishra’s (2007) reading of the function of temples and other religious buildings in the diaspora. The physical loss of the homeland, Mishra contends, is compounded by the lack of a substitution (such as a new nationstate for the diaspora, which is marginalised in the adopted homeland). This double loss leads to retreat into essentialist diasporic instrumentalities such as places of worship (church, temple, mosque) or into social collectivities from which both the nation-state’s dominant racial group as well as other diasporas are excluded. It leads to purist readings of homelands and the search for absolute ethnic states: Khalistan, Tamil Eelam, Kashmir and so on. (2007: 10) 172

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Ghosh presents the Colvers’ memory temple as an emphatic counter-site to those places of worship that are instrumentalised to project an essentialist and exclusivist diasporic identity. Such nativist impulses are at the root of demands for ‘absolute ethnic nation-states’. Deeti’s Mauritius shrine commemorates the experiences of the Colver founding figures, but also includes Indians who are not related to them (Neel, Pander, Jodu) and ‘foreigners’ (Serang Ali, Paulette, Zachary, Fitcher). Furthermore, since Deeti believes it is ‘bad luck to attempt overly realistic portraits of those who had yet to leave this earth’ (2008: 8), each of these individuals is depicted metonymically. Jodu is identifiable by his scarred forehead, Paulette by her long arms, Pander by his bald potato-head, and so on. Deeti’s ‘diagrammatic images’ (2008: 8) give the characters an iconic quality, akin to the easily identifiable ‘types’ of epic. The expressive physical detail associated with each character is the visual counterpart to the mnemonic epithets accorded to epic figures. This epic stature, however, is counterbalanced by bold anti-representational dynamics ranging from elegant stylisation (notably for the Ibis) to affectionate caricature and ‘cartoonish drawings’ (2011: 34) often reserved for the eccentric, comic characters (Pander, Penrose). Such self-referentiality checks the diasporic trap of nostalgic nativism underlined by Mishra. The anti-representational minimalist aesthetics used in the character-portraits on the cave walls thus draw attention to the images’ status as reproductions housed within the larger reproduction that is the Mauritian temple. To use Homi Bhabha’s (2008: 123) terms, this temple is ‘the same’ as Deeti’s household shrine in India but also ‘not quite [italics in original]’ the same in its inscription of diasporic experience that transcends the boundaries of the Indian nationstate Deeti has left behind. The reference to Kalua’s name engraved in an ‘ornamental cartouche’ on the wall of the Mauritian temple also prompts us to stand back at a critical distance and recall the comic conditions in which this name was produced. Kalua, fleeing with Deeti, adopts his father’s name ‘Madhu’ to avoid recognition and uses his first name as his surname; the name and surname are imperfectly reproduced orally by the Bengali translator Nob Kissin Pander to an inebriated Captain Doughty; Doughty, in turn, Anglicises the invented name ‘Madhu Kalua’ to ‘Maddow Colver’ as he puts it in writing in his register. Ghosh thus privileges the double consciousness of mimicry rather than mimetic practices, by representing the act of representation: the actual recording of the name. This allows him to balance the idealisation of Kalua by his descendants with the more down-to-earth material and enunciative conditions of Kalua’s recruitment. Even before Kalua’s actual migration, the name he will bestow on his descendants has already migrated across Pander’s Bengali accent and Doughty’s pidgin Hindi as well as 173

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his written English. The fact that the origin of the Colver family name can be traced back to a comic moment of subterfuge (Kalua hiding, not proclaiming his real identity), of mispronunciation, of faulty hearing, and inebriation further undermines the dynastic pretensions of political epic. The apparently simple act of transcription, of making a graphic copy of a string of phonetic sounds, becomes an epic exercise in translinguistic and transcultural negotiation. It is now a faulty copy that becomes the original. The fact that such sophisticated mimicry emerges unselfconsciously from the ekphrastic description of images drawn by an unlettered migrant is a powerful comment on Ghosh’s epic monumentalisation of subalterns. Here, ekphrasis, with its emphasis on the iconographic, rather than silencing and othering the colonised figure through visual otherness (as J.W.T. Mitchell argues), actually offers an ingenious way out of the representational dilemma articulated by Gayatri Spivak in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ ([1985] 1999). If, to extend Spivak’s arguments, an uneducated subaltern such as Deeti is condemned to be silenced first by colonial historiography (as demonstrated by Brij Lal [1983]), then by elite, nationalist political discourse, and finally by third-world intellectuals and authors whose writings only serve to consolidate their own cultural capital, the visual domain offers a partial solution by ostensibly side-stepping the representational crisis posed by discourse in the first place. As Ghosh reminds us in River of Smoke: this small prayer niche [in the village outside Ghazipur] became the repository of her dreams and visions. During the nine long years of that marriage, drawing was not just a consolation, but also her principal means of remembrance: being unlettered, it was the only way she could keep track of her memories. (10) Deeti’s artistic capacity to represent her dreams, visions and memories in India will also become the ‘principal means of remembrance’ for her and her well-established clan in Mauritius. If the subaltern must be spoken for since she cannot speak, it must be borne in mind that discourse does not offer the sole means of self-representation. Visual self-representation both in individual and collective terms can represent the cathartic ‘therapy of self-representation’ that has been traditionally ‘denied to diasporic peoples’ (Mishra 2007: 9). The agency conferred through the power of self-representation is emphasised in Sea of Poppies’s opening chapter when Deeti is described in Homeric terms as ‘at once blind and all-seeing’ (5). This vatic attribute is extensively developed and elaborated on in the incipit of River of Smoke, 174

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where we find Deeti’s sole self-portrait in the family temple. The historical allegory of the Colvers’ Crossing is in fact a quiet metatextual allegory of the act of subaltern epic creation. Pregnant with child, Deeti will also engender art. In the panel of ‘The Parting’, Deeti depicts the moment of separation from her husband as she stayed on aboard the Ibis while he fled on a lifeboat. Deeti paints herself as lifted up by the winds of the storm. She therefore has a god-like omniscient view of the fugitives’ escape from the Ibis as the event unfolds beneath her on the Ibis’s deck: It was as if the tufaan [storm] had chosen her to be its confidante, freezing the passage of time, and lending her the vision of its own eye; for the duration of that moment, she had been able to see everything that fell within that whirling circle of wind: she had seen the Ibis, directly below, and the four figures that were huddled under the shelter of the quarter-deck’s companion-way, herself being one of them. (16) Ghosh’s use of the supernatural is revealing. Clearly, it serves to lend epic dignity to the humble girmitiyas. As a muted variant of magical realism, it also emphasises the epistemological and ontological validity of Deeti’s unique perspective of her own history as both a participant and a reinscriber of her own participation. On the one hand, her supernatural visions are subject to the sceptical incredulity of none other than her Colver descendants. Yet, the visual precision of her image of the Ibis and the scientific validity of her insight into the storm’s ‘eye’ demonstrate that what can be dismissed as superstition is paradoxically validated by empiricism. Neel confirms that the pictorial eye depicted by Deeti is borne out by the scientific discovery of the eye of a storm. The eye of the storm, a ‘gigantic oculus’ of a spinning ‘telescope’, also serves as a metatextual allegory of Ghosh’s epic with its motley cast of characters brought together by the Ibis who grants them the boon of starting new lives abroad: the authorial eye/I ‘examin[es] everything it passed over, [. . .] creating fresh beginnings, rewriting destinies and throwing people together who would never have met’ (20). The supernatural in the ekphrastic sequence is also the site of a major intertextual displacement – that of Virgil’s Aeneid. The Roman epic of settlement led by a refugee-prince who triumphs in the face of tremendous odds is transposed to the Indian ocean context of the girmitiya diaspora. Ghosh signals the complementarity between Virgilian epic and the Colvers’ saga by having the tale of Kalua’s daring escape from the Ibis represent to his descendants ‘what the story of the watchful geese was to Ancient Rome – an instance when Fate had conspired with Nature to give them 175

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a sign that theirs was no ordinary destiny’ (13). This episode of the Capitoline geese is one of the many providential deliverances of the Roman empire that figure on Aeneas’s shield. C.M. Bowra explains that the escapes depicted on his shield vary in character, but in all of them, Rome, when she seems to be all but lost, is saved either by some person or by what looks like luck but is really divine protection, like the geese on the Capitol who give the warning of the Gauls’ approach. (1945: 77) Just as Rome was delivered from a surprise attack by the warning of the cackling geese, Kalua is saved from certain execution by the confusion created on board the Ibis by the storm. In fact, the Colvers lay claim to a distinctly Virgilian narrative of divine signs and self-fulfilling prophecies as Ghosh makes clear in the opening line of his trilogy: ‘The vision of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean, came to Deeti on an otherwise ordinary day, but she knew instantly that the apparition was a sign of destiny’ (2008: 3). In River of Smoke, the narrator asserts, ‘Fate had conspired with Nature to give them a sign that theirs was no ordinary destiny’ (2011: 13). This legitimising legacy of exceptionalism, however, is tempered by comic deflation, metatextuality and the mimicry of the nonorigin. Apart from ekphrastic mimicry, Ghosh, like Melville and Walcott, signals the limits of representation through the apparent triumph of the material (the ‘real’ world) over the symbolic (‘art’). While the Colvers remain prey to teleological, totalising tendencies, reflected in the highly ritualised viewing and circumambulation of the smriti-mandir, their preoccupation with the feast following the pilgrimage to the shrine clearly demonstrates that the present, in all its material evanescence, takes precedence over the abstractions of the mythic past. Ghosh emphasises not only the satisfaction, but the satiation of the Colvers: They were the simplest of feasts, but afterwards when all the food was gone, everyone would lean helplessly against the stony walls and complain how they banbosé too much and how their innards were growling and how bad it was to eat so much, manzé zisk’arazé. (2011: 8) The Colvers embody satisfaction and prosperity (the dahi and ghee are made from the milk of the Colver cows). The tension between food, on the one hand, and ancestral worship (conducted by forming a line and 176

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whispering hushed prayers), on the other, can be read as a dramatisation of the tussle between festivity and authority, between perishable food and imperishable art. Such celebrations of food correspond to the Bakhtinian ([1965] 1984: 278) notion of ‘positive hyperbolism’. Here, a sense of community is created not through looking back at an idealised past but forged in the materiality of the present. Mikhail Bakhtin’s remarks on Rabelais’s banquet imagery apply equally well to Ghosh’s food scenes, which also present ‘popular images of food and drink [that] are active and triumphant [. . .] They express the people as a whole because they are based on the inexhaustible, ever-growing abundance of the material principle’ (302). This spirit of change and renewal characterises the shrine itself which is later destroyed by the indifferent, all-powerful forces of Nature. Appropriately, it is a cyclone, like the one that delivered Kalua, that sweeps away the shrine. Yet, its disappearance is experienced less as an irrevocable loss than as a part of the course of nature and life: the food is ‘what the children who had been on those pilgrimages would remember best’ (2011: 8).

Resistant nostalgia In a certain sense, Melville, Walcott and Ghosh seem to present ekphrastic sequences that are ultimately self-defeating. Apparently, the whale will remain ‘unpainted to the last’, the sea epic of Walcott erased and unwritten to the last and Ghosh’s shrine obliterated. The postcolonial ekphrasis of Melville, Walcott and Ghosh thus resists representation, all the while inscribing this resistance within a discursive practice that highlights the ekphrastic object’s status as a ‘re-presence or re-presentation’ rather than the unmediated, supposedly objective ‘delivered presence’ of historical truth (Said 2001c: 21). Postcolonial ekphrasis thus intersects with a similar trend of postmodern ekphrasis articulated by Heffernan (1993: 4) when he observes, ‘[w]hile classic ekphrasis, they say, salutes the skill of the artist and the miraculous verisimilitude of the forms he creates, postmodern ekphrasis undermines the concept of verisimilitude itself.’ For all their critical self-reflexivity, there is, however, a deep, persistent sense of the elegiac that hovers over postcolonial ekphrasis. Though the destruction of the shrine is mitigated by its infinitely reproducible capacity as a metonymic part of a decentred sacred geography, other losses are not as reversible. In River of Smoke, Neel, for instance, laments the passing of Canton as he knew it in 1839. He finds that the bustling ‘floating city’ that used to be ‘so small yet so varied, where people from the far corners of the earth must live, elbow to elbow [. . .] the last and greatest of all the world’s caravanserais’ has disappeared (185). Instead, it has become a ‘typical “White Town” of the kind the British made everywhere they went’ (552). 177

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The colonial architecture that Walcott ironically mocks in Omeros is bitterly described by Neel thus: ‘the new enclave was like a monument built by the forces of evil to celebrate their triumphal march through history’ (553).5 As opposed to this colonial monument, the painting of the Maidan and the Thirteen Factories that Neel discovers in River of Smoke becomes a testament to the history of the Chinese, Asians, Europeans and Americans who had lived ‘elbow to elbow’ in Fanqui-town: ‘The picture cost more than I could afford, he said, but I bought it anyway. I realized that if it were not for such those paintings no one would believe that such a place had ever existed’ (553). This sense of loss and annihilation is echoed in Moby Dick and Omeros. Queequeg’s tattoos disappear with the drowning of their bearer and the destruction of the ship. Even their replication on the coffin that saves Ishmael is ambivalent, if not deeply disturbing. As a symbol of the ‘hollowing out’ (Castronovo 1995: 101) of Queequeg’s tribal identity to make place for Ishmael’s deliverance, the coffin would appear to reenact the expropriation of the American Indians’ land and culture to clear a ‘New World’ space for the European settlers, a historical fact foregrounded by the name of the Pequod itself. Even the ekphrastic mimicry of the lost origin (Queequeg himself cannot decipher his tattoos) cannot entirely allay a pervasive sense of loss. Ishmael’s name, a nominative tattoo of sorts, is a form of testimony, a self-chosen reminder of his lost origin (the destroyed Pequod) and permanent orphanhood. The impression of a vacuum is even more complex and anguished in the Caribbean context of Omeros, where the history of the West Indies is one of multiple lost origins – of the Caribs and Arawaks, of the African slaves and even of the expatriate British residents. Indeed, the latter group’s triple alienation from the metropolitan centre, the indigenous population and the transient tourists (presumably mostly Americans) who are oblivious to the island’s colonial past is far closer to the native poet’s estrangement from Europe, the Saint Lucian labourers and the unconcerned tourists perpetuating colonial hierarchies through their blithe participation in neocolonial structures of oppression. Yet, there is a strong utopic impulse that underlies these narratives of loss. If there is always ‘another’ object behind epic ekphrasis, it is ultimately the contemporary preoccupations of the writer’s own world. Writing in the intensely polemical and volatile context of the 1850 Compromise (debates concerning the extension of slavery to the Western territories, acts of Native American extermination), Melville seems to displace his utopic yearnings for a transnational, subaltern cosmopolitanism to the sea through the ekphrastic emblem of whale-art practised by a continuum of ‘savages’ – the Hawaiian savage and the white sailor-savage on par with the Greek savage Homer, the Dutch savage Durer – that crosses national, cultural and racial divides. Similarly, Ghosh’s ekphrastic sequences can be read in the 178

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light of his castigation of fundamentalists in India and abroad. In one of his lectures, Ghosh cites attacks on artists and writers by Indian Hindu fanatics and Egyptian Muslim extremists, arguing that their bigotry undermines both cultural pluralism and the freedoms of the artists and writers who promote it (2012). From this angle, the Cantonese imitations of European art and the diasporic, multiracial Colver shrine appear as metonyms of multicultural creativity and utopic counter-narratives to forms of contemporary extremism ‘profoundly hostile to any notion of dialogue between cultures, faiths and civilizations’. Ghosh’s portrayal of the painting representing the lost hybridity of a pre-Opium War Canton also reflects his desire to recover a forgotten subaltern history of non-Western globalism in an age increasingly oblivious to the historical past in its consumerist obsession with instant gratification in the present. Like Ghosh, Walcott too mourns the loss of historicity and cultural memory in a post-literate age of multinational capitalism. His heterotopic reinterpretation of The Gulf Stream is an act of historical recuperation as he reinjects the Middle Passage into the historically sanitised, hospital- and bank-like space of the American museum. As a counter-site to the cultural and historical ‘flattening’ (Jameson [1984] 1991: 8) exemplified by the flatness of travel brochures, postcards and credit cards, his palimpsestic reading of the painting creates a sense of historical depth. Superimposing Achille on Winslow Homer’s Black figure allows him to pay tribute to the artistic creativity of an American Homer, commemorate the ‘epical splendour’ of the Middle Passage and nostalgically reconjure a subaltern, pre-industrial way of life linked to seafaring and fishing in Saint Lucia through the reference to Achille. His ekphrastic sequence thus represents a powerful recovery of historical consciousness and a reaffirmation of culture in the aesthetically arid wasteland to which both the touristic Saint Lucia and the post-cultural West have been reduced in the eyes of the poet-narrator. Moby Dick, Omeros and the Ibis trilogy are thus narratives of irrecoverable loss (disappearance of subaltern, transcultural histories) and attempts at recovery (nostalgically recovering pasts to envision alternative, historicallyinformed conceptions of culture and identity). Such ambivalence that shuttles between loss and utopic aspiration suggests that postcolonial ekphrasis is utopia disguised as elegy. If Virgilian ekphrasis parades the past as the future, postcolonial ekphrasis can be said to do the opposite: it masquerades a vanishing, if not already vanished, past as still containing recoverable fragments of a desirable and realisable future. In this sense, postcolonial ekphrasis may be seen as articulating a form of resistant nostalgia in an age of increasing ‘historical deafness’, to use Fredric Jameson’s (1991: xi) term. Self-conscious reimaginings of history not only allow for the identification of the origins of contemporary dilemmas in the past, but also the 179

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necessarily partial and mediated excavation of moments of subaltern cosmopolitanism and agency as tentative templates for future programmes of action. The metapoetic potential inherent in any ekphrastic sequence thus allows postcolonial ekphrasis to provide the clearest formulation of the role of epic today, an issue I will briefly consider in the conclusion.

Notes 1 Both Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak refer directly to Karl Marx’s statement in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Ventriloquising the elite’s perception of the small proprietors of the French peasantry, Marx ironically declares that the latter ‘cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’ (quoted in Spivak 2000: 259). Said (2001c: 21), who also quotes the same line in Orientalism, applies Marx’s ironic assertion to the Western construction of the Orient: ‘if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient.’ Spivak (256) uses Marx’s phrase to distinguish between ‘representation as “speaking for”, as in politics, and representation as “re-presentation”, as in art or philosophy’. 2 All parenthetical references without the year of publication therefore refer to River of Smoke in this chapter. 3 The eclogue heralds a new Golden Age through references to a miraculous child and a virgin. It has therefore prompted hypothetical parallels with the birth of Christ. Such parallels, however, have been dismissed by most critics (see Davis 2010: x). 4 While allusions to Boston landmarks such as the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial and the State House suggest that the museum of this sequence is the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (which houses some of Winslow Homer’s paintings and J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship), Homer’s The Gulf Stream is in fact exhibited in the Museum of Art, New York City, which purchased the painting in 1906. 5 Here, Neel echoes Pander’s conception of British colonial capitalists as a ‘a great host of beings would appear on earth, to quicken the march of greed and desire’ in Flood of Fire (258).

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4 CONCLUSION Resistant nostalgia

Art is History’s nostalgia.

– Derek Walcott, Omeros

The choice of the epic, a form whose defining structural feature is its obsession with history, would seem extraordinarily conservative in a postmodern age that ‘has forgotten how to think historically in the first place’, to borrow Fredric Jameson’s (1991: ix) formulation. Against this ‘dehistoricized and dehistoricizing’ culture, Jameson – in a particularly telling classical metaphor – casts ‘Postmodernism theory’ as a disoriented Theseus, doggedly holding ‘its Ariadne’s thread on its way through what may not turn out to be a labyrinth at all, but a gulag or perhaps a shopping mall’ (xvi, xi). For Jameson, postmodernism marks a shift from the labyrinthine depth of a historical consciousness to the flatness or depthlessness of commodified culture, epitomised by the mall and glossy surfaces of advertisements. Jameson delivered this diagnosis at the close of the 20th century, which had seen the ‘political failure’ of the Radical Left of the 1960s, the entrenchment of a consumer culture in an age of multinational capitalism, decolonisation and ‘a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world’ (5, xvi). In his 2012 book Post-­postmodernism, Jeffrey Nealon deliberately doubles the prefix ‘post’ to emphasise the contemporary ‘intensification and mutation’ of postmodernism as understood by Jameson to signify not just ‘a style of artistic practice’ but ‘a historical period of capitalist development’ (ix−x). In this context, I would like to briefly address the implications of postcolonial epic not as an atemporal abstraction of stylistic rules, but as an entanglement with the historical specificity of our time. In doing so, I attempt to trace the beginning of a response to the towering question: What is the epic’s vocation in our postmodern and postcolonial world?

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Jameson contends that in an age of mechanical, and now digital, reproduction, ‘we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach’ (25). ‘ “Real history” ’, the ‘traditional object’ of ‘the historical novel’, thus gives way to ‘the disappearance of the historical referent’ (21, 25). Postcolonial epic, in its resolute resistance to the postmodernist dissolution of History as formulated by Jameson and in its articulation of counter-histories, would seem to exhibit an embarrassingly ‘conservative’, even naïve, conception of the historical referent as very ‘real’. (This Jamesonian vision of postmodern culture as de-historicised and de-politicised has been contested, notably by Linda Hutcheon, who highlights the rethinking of the past orchestrated through postmodernist strategies of self-reflexivity in the ‘historiographic metafiction’ of postcolonial writers [2005: 5–6]). Yet, Jameson’s conception of postmodernism is not so monolithic as to exclude the ‘oppositional culture’ of radically distinct ‘residual or emergent cultural languages’, nor is postcolonial epic’s relationship with History so unproblematic as to ignore the poststructuralist legacy of discursive mediation ‘leaving us with nothing but texts’ (159, 18). For all its explicit or implicit engagements with postmodernism, postcolonial epic – like political epic from which it emerged – ultimately asserts the primacy of the historical referent, but does so through a form of resistant nostalgia, one that registers its resistance through a self-critical and provisional recuperation of something less block-like than History – call it a missing past. Walcott and Ghosh have expressed such resistant nostalgia in particularly forceful ways, though Melville also casts his entire epic as a recovery of a past. In Omeros, Walcott ironically counterpoints the palimpsestic weight of history palpable in the ‘parchment of the sea’ (282) with the Jamesonian flatness of a paralysing postcard, a credit card and the ‘gold sea’ of a beach ‘that looked just like everywhere’ (227, 229). On the one hand, he recognises the narcissism of a nostalgia that merely provides fodder for his own sepia-tinted epic project to transfix the Saint Lucians: ‘Art is History’s nostalgia’ (228). On the other hand, such nostalgia is, above all, a refusal to forget. Walcott’s nostalgia for a pre-industrial past marks his discursive resistance against ‘the blank page of white concrete’ (227) and the encroaching cinder-blocks of hotel development (though as an expatriate, he too stays in such hotels). Like Walcott, Ghosh (2012) attends to the continuities between colonial and neocolonial capitalism which, moreover, draw attention away from another facet of history – ‘the cross-cultural conversations’ among ‘people from Africa, Asia and elsewhere’ that ‘were interrupted by imperialism’ and are being forgotten. His epic project in the Ibis trilogy is thus a form of resistant nostalgia against neoimperialism abroad and fundamentalism at home. Neocolonialism and extremism both 182

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deny that ‘West’ and ‘East’ alike have been ‘irreversibly changed’ by each other; both are united in their aim ‘to remake the world – or at least their corners of it – in their own images’. Neither offers ‘a true mirror of the world we live in’. In this context, postcolonial epic expresses utopia through elegy, nostalgically reconstituting transnational microhistories of subaltern solidarity and resistance (white and non-white sailors whaling together in Moby Dick; indigenous Arawaks and First Nations putting up armed struggle as well as the transethnic bardic coalition in Omeros; the siblinghood of lascars and indentured labourers in the Ibis trilogy) within global systems of speculative capitalism. Raymond Williams’s (1977: 122) terms help underscore the critical edge of such nostalgia. These reconstructed pasts are not of the ‘archaic’ variety (an element wholly of the past) but of the ‘residual’ kind (an element formed in the past but ‘still active in the cultural process’ and capable of being in an oppositional relationship with the dominant culture). In postcolonial epic, the constructed nature of the act of retrieving such ‘residual cultures’ of history is constantly emphasised through the strategies of suture highlighted in the previous chapters – heterotropic imagery and quixotic tropes, anachronistic and self-begetting genealogies, and ekphrastic anotherness and mimicry. Ghosh’s (2012) remarks on nostalgia and resistance are pertinent here. Though he concedes that ‘it is tempting [for the so-called Third World] to look back on the days of nonalignment with some nostalgia’, such uncritical nostalgia repeats the error of fundamentalists today who ‘turn back the clock’ and ‘pretend that solutions could be found by looking backwards in time’. A more self-critical nostalgia can only emerge when one demonstrates one’s awareness that the intertwined Western and non-Western heritages are ‘fragmented, fissured and incomplete’. From this angle, the paradox of postcolonial epic lies in its use of classical devices of completeness and continuity to articulate ‘the yearning that comes from this incompleteness’. While epic tropes, genealogy and ekphrasis emphasise seamless continuums with the natural world, history and literary tradition in traditional epic, they underscore the seamed identities and heterogeneous cultures born out of colonialism’s contact zones in postcolonial epic. In this context of resistant nostalgia, Melville’s role as a precursor of postcolonial epic also needs to be revisited. Walcott’s and Ghosh’s impulse to recuperate the historical referent (even as they recognise its mediated and constructed nature) sets them somewhat apart from Melville and his narrative of extermination, which is unrelieved by any explicit sense of healing or recovery. As Eyal Peretz (2003) has demonstrated, Moby Dick’s emphasis on annihilation, a survivor’s trauma and the performative nature of testimony makes it a tragically prescient forerunner of literary representations 183

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of the Holocaust (155–57n28). For Peretz, the novel ‘can be said to testify to twentieth-century events, that is, to speak for them and to communicate the horrible excess beyond linear time which was revealed through their occurrence’ (19). The previous chapters have demonstrated how Melville’s merging of incommensurable histories of imperial domination and geographies of global capitalism anticipate the postcolonial strategies of Omeros and the Ibis trilogy. Both Walcott and Ghosh upset the telos of imperial and capitalist time through the heterotopic memories of the dislocated subaltern. However, in the rhetorical and epistemological violence Moby Dick does to these totalising imperial histories and geographies, it achieves an effect of ontological nihilism that makes it practically post-figurative of postcolonial epic. Postcolonial epic in fact has to backtrack away from Moby Dick’s nihilistic end and the horrific diegetic black hole it bores. Melville leaves us with a gaping void, only partially refilled by Ishmael’s retrospective commentary that is rhetorically carnivalesque, but without a comforting sense of catharsis within the diegesis. Postcolonial epic must move backwards from Melville’s text to some sense of a restored whole as much as it moves forward from it through poststructuralist and postmodernist tactics of generic and ideological deconstruction. More generally, postcolonial epic does not reject the Virgilian history-as-spectacle as a colonial impulse, because it recognises the human need for self-remaking through performance and meaningful events. The overall intention is therefore one of cathartic conjunction between a fissured self and a fragmented past – for all its disjunctive poetics. In this sense, postcolonial epic’s rhizomatic and heterotopic formulations of the individual’s relationship to the imagined community remain embedded in, and still require, political epic’s strategies of rootedness and conjunction – epic tropes, genealogies, prophecies and ekphrasis. However, unlike political epic, postcolonial epic periodically draws our attention away from the stage to the staging, even staginess, of the past. It is this apprehension of the past in its ‘incompleteness’, as Ghosh (2012) puts it, that helps us understand postcolonial epic’s reluctance to offer programmatic counter-models to the nation-state or structures of political organisation for the future. Instead, these texts manifest a sense of utopian opacity. In fact, to look for a stable prototype of a postnational society in texts that emphasise the essential instability of their transcultural communities is to risk reading against these works. Ishmael’s narrative self-healing (enigmatically evoked through the opening plea, ‘Call me Ishmael’, and never explicitly described) is still in progress; we leave the new synecdochic family unit of Achille, Helen and the baby of unknown paternity at a fragile moment of happiness that, given their divergent attitudes towards change and modernisation, may not last long; Ghosh, 184

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rather than describing the actual process of resettlement of the Colvers in Mauritius, privileges atypical, ephemeral groups of cultural heterogeneity such as the Ibis ship-siblings or the multicultural economic eco-system of Canton destroyed by the Opium Wars. The ephemerality of community in the three texts points to an equally unstable temporality of the utopic in-between: barely has one glimpsed the nascent parallel between a specific character or group and a potential political model when the identity of the self changes or the group dissolves. This in-between space is not of the order of the nation or even the global trans-nation (énoncé or object being described). Instead, it is of the order of enunciation and translation (énonciation emerging through the narrating process which invests words and traditions that are ‘half someone else’s [Bakhtin 2006: 293] with new intentions). This constant deferral of an unproblematic post-foundation continuum extending into the ‘present’ – making it ‘not quite experience, not quite concept’ (Bhabha 2006: 260) – is revolutionary for the genre of epic. Édouard Glissant ([1996] 1999), speculating on the new function of postcolonial epic, asks us to Imagine a kind of epic literature for which no ‘resolution’ could be conceived. [. . .] It would be an unsuspected and unpredictable opening, not at all systematic; it would be fragile, ambiguous, and ephemeral, but would shine with all the paradoxical splendor of the world. It must be that way; otherwise, the drying up of traditional epic would have caused a death much colder and harder than even death itself. (99–100) Postcolonial epic thus introduces a temporality, indeed an ontology, of irresolution that is fundamentally at odds with political epic’s vocation to construct for the community an imagined but stable and immutable continuity with a mythic origin within a historical telos extending into the present. In a sense, it ‘kills’ political epic, a form that, for all its aesthetic innovation, has expressed deeply conservative messages linked to the stability and durability of a civilisational model. But in doing so, it actually ‘saves’ political epic from obsolescence. In a final flourish of recusatio, postcolonial epic rejects the imperial and capitalist determinisms of political epic, only to strategically redefine the genre in more enunciatively unstable terms of ‘paradoxical splendor’. It is precisely the enunciative elusiveness of a central political paradigm in Moby Dick that allows critics to see in it allegories as diverse as the triumph of American democracy (Matthiessen [1941] 1968), a cautionary tale against totalitarianism in the context of the Cold War and Vietnam (Spanos 185

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1995), a prophetic warning against America’s expansionist intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq (Said 2001b) and a prefigurative tale of transnational globalisation (Tally 2014). While allegorical readings of Melville are projected forward into a future Melville could not see, the Ibis trilogy, set in the 19th century, allegorically functions both backwards into the past and forward into the reader’s present. The contemporary epic appeal of the saga resides in part in the nostalgic dynamics of globalised, multicultural communities surprisingly analogous to those of the present era of interconnectivity. Moreover, the trilogy is gilded with the charm of the trappings of the age of sail, preceding the more mechanised age of steam. In addition, Ghosh himself has corroborated the intuition of readers like Christopher Lydon who see in his saga of the British-led Opium Wars a ‘coded commentary’ on contemporary wars in the Gulf motivated by America’s ‘addiction’ to ‘the other big “O” commodity – oil’ (Ghosh 2008a). Interestingly, the connections between oil and the ‘blubber capitalism’ (Saunders quoted in Leroux 2009: 437) of whaling have also led readers to see in Moby Dick parallels with America’s wars for oil. Omeros deploys multiple, often conflicting, allegories of the past as present: the past of colonialism reconfigured in present neocolonial disparities; the past as a source of both trauma and poetic inspiration for therapeutic self-representation; Odyssean exilic wandering as synchronous with the existential dislocation of the expatriate poet. By ‘celebrating his own geographical in-placedness’ as well as ‘its antithesis, the migrant’s displacement’, Walcott addresses ‘the ambivalence about place shared with Caribbeans worldwide and with other emigrés’ (Burnett 2001: 15). The shared concerns of Melville, Walcott and Ghosh with ‘geographical in-placedness’ and ‘the migrant’s displacement’ – typical of contemporary theoretical models of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ (Bhabha [1994] 2008) and ‘cosmopolitan patriotism’ (Appiah 1997) – also reflect their amenability to contemporary cultural and socio-political discourses on hybridity. Moby Dick’s case is exemplary in this regard. Relegated to oblivion at the time of its publication, the text would be celebrated in the 1940s as a national text of the American Renaissance (Matthiessen 1941) and, with the transnational turn from the 1960s onwards, as one representing ‘the ordinary people of the whole world’ (C.L.R. James [1953] 2001: 19), discursively constituting a ‘world system’ (Moretti 1994) and exemplifying ‘postnational narration’ (Pease 1997). As for Walcott and Ghosh, the production of literary culture of (and not in) the Global South remains deeply enmeshed with that of the Global North ‘acting as a global arbiter of quality and manipulator of power’ (Burnett quoted in Breslin 2001: 287). Walcott has been the recipient of American and British prizes, culminating in the Nobel Prize in 1992. The admiration expressed for his 186

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work in the obituaries after his death on 17th March, 2017, thus marks the extension of a process of consecration that was well under way during his lifetime. Ghosh has won national as well as international awards (including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, which he declined) and has been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker. The enviable positions of Melville, Walcott and Ghosh in national and international canons have therefore been highly conducive to the ongoing consolidation of their works as epics, and to arguments, including the premises of this book, concerning their vivification of the epic tradition. A final point is the role of America in these postcolonial epics. The hegemon of the Global North is either explicitly designated but displaced (the circumnavigating ship of state) or an eerie absent-presence (faceless tourists in Saint Lucia or oil coded uncannily as opium in the Ibis trilogy). An enigmatic target of critique, America’s very presence in these texts nonetheless attests to its preponderant, ubiquitous status in a world of ‘justin-time (which is to say all the time)’ ‘post-postmodern capitalism’ (Nealon 2012: xi). From our ‘post-postmodern’ vantage-point, the three postcolonial epics would appear as Foucauldian archaeologies of knowledge, excavating the nexus between the speculative capitalism of colonial ventures (whaling, slavery, indentured labour, the opium trade) and contemporary American hegemony. In doing so, they also signal a paradigmatic shift in preoccupation from politics to political economy in the epic genre. Like the interpretative polysemy of Ahab’s doubloon, the allegorical elasticity of these postcolonial epics allows them to act as imaginative surfaces upon which we project our contemporary fantasies of hybridity and fears of hegemony. Even at their most critically reflexive moments, the nostalgic reconstructions of these postcolonial epics provide desirable ancestorfigures whose unexpected transcultural and hybrid similarities with us, the contemporary readers, validate our sense of our place in history. Epics of resistant nostalgia they may be, but we would do well to recall, as Pip does, that there is not a little narcissism in the reception of an epic: ‘I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look’ (505). A text is not just written as an epic, but rather, becomes an epic through cultural consensus among generations of readers within, and beyond, the boundaries of a nation.

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Melville, Herman. (1850) 1984. ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’, in Harrison Hayford (ed.), Pierre or, the Ambiguities; Israel Potter, His Fifty years of Exile; The Piazza Tales; The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade; Uncollected Prose; Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative, pp. 1154−71. New York: Modern Library of America. ———. (1849) 1970. Mardi: And a Voyage Thither. Vol. 3 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press/Chicago, IL: Newberry Library. ———. (1847) 1968. Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Sea. Vol. 2 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press/Chicago, IL: Newberry Library. ———. (1852) 1971. Pierre; or, the Ambiguities. Vol. 7 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press/Chicago, IL: Newberry Library. ———. (1849) 1969. Redburn: His First Voyage. Vol. 4 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press/Chicago, IL: Newberry Library. ———. (1846) 1989. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. Vol. 1 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press/Chicago, IL: Newberry Library. ———. (1850) 1970. White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War. Vol. 5 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press/Chicago, IL: Newberry Library. ———. 1989–2009. The Writings of Herman Melville. Edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press/Chicago, IL: Newberry Library. Ovid. 1982. The Erotic Poems. Translated and edited by Peter Green. London: Penguin Books. Pound, Ezra. 1990. Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions. Propertius. 1994. Propertius: The Poems. Translated by Guy Lee. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Virgil. 2010. Virgil’s Eclogues. Translated by Len Krisak. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Walcott, Derek. 1987. The Arkansas Testament. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ———. 1974. ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’ Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 16(1): 3–13. ———. 1992. Collected Poems 1948–1984. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2008. ‘Derek Walcott’, interview with Harriet Gilbert. World Book Club. BBC. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02r7n8v (accessed on 5 February 2011). ———. ‘Derek Walcott: Of Poetry, Prizes and Post-Colonialism’, interview with Rob Sharp. Independent, 21 June 2011. www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/books/features/derek-walcott-of-poetry-prizes-and-postcolonialism-2300641.html (accessed on 13 April 2017).

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Galinsky, Karl. 1998. Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Garrison, Daniel. 1971. ‘Melville’s Doubloon and the Shield of Achilles’, ­Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 26(2): 171–84. Glissant, Édouard. (1996) 1999. Faulkner, Mississippi. Translated by Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Originally published as Faulkner, Mississippi (Paris: Stock). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, and Friedrich Schiller. (1827) 2001. ‘On Epic and Dramatic Poetry’. Translated by Evelyn Lantz. The Schiller Institute. www.schillerinstitute.org/transl/schil_epic_dram.html (accessed on 7 April 2017). Goldman, Robert. (1984) 1990. Translation and Annotation of Vol. 1 of The Ra ¯ma ¯yana of Va ¯lmı¯ki, pp. 96–117. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University ˙ Press. Hamner, Robert D. 1997. Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s Omeros. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Hardie, Philip, ed. 1999. Vol. 3 of Virgil: Critical Assessments of Classical Authors – The Aeneid. London: Routledge. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1835) 1975. ‘Epic Poetry’, in Vol. 2 of Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, pp. 1040–110. Translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horsfall, N.M. (1973−4) 1990. ‘Dido in the Light of History’, in S.J. Harrison (ed.), Oxford Readings in Virgil’s Aeneid, pp. 127−44. Reprint. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, John William. 1999. ‘The Dichotomy of Power and Authority’, in Ralph A. Austen (ed.), In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Oral Epic as History, Literature and Performance, pp. 9–23. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1985. Introduction to The Epic of Son-Jara: A West African Tradition, in Sisòkò 1986, pp. 3−57. ———, Thomas A. Hale and Stephen Belcher (eds.). 1997. Oral Epics from Africa: Vibrant Voices from a Vast Continent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Knox, Bernard. 2010. Introduction to The Aeneid, in Virgil 2010, pp. 1–41. Kunene, Daniel. 1971. Heroic Poetry of the Basotho. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lukács, Georg. (1916) 1988. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Whitstable: Whitstable Litho Printers. MacPhail, Eric. 2001. ‘Ariosto and the Prophetic Moment’, Italian Issue, MLN, 116(1): 30–53. McWilliams Jr., John. 1989. The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770– 1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mulokozi, Mugyabuso M. 2002. The African Epic Controversy: Historical, Philosophical and Aesthetic Perspectives on Epic Poetry and Performance. Dar es Salam: Nkuki na Nyota. Nagy, Gregory. 1999. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero and Hero Worship in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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202

INDEX

Abhinavagupta 50 Adam, Smith 76 Adamism 23, 29n1, 98 – 109; in Flood of Fire 107; in Moby Dick 98 – 102, 109; in Omeros 103 – 5, 109, 165; in River of Smoke 107, 153; in Sea of Poppies 107 – 9 Aeneid, The 2, 8, 14 – 15, 17, 26, 28, 77, 79, 117; Dido’s voice of resistance 8, 93; ekphrasis in 138 – 9, 153 – 9, 163, 175 – 6; epic similes in 32; genealogy as prophecy in 87 – 90, 103 – 4; metaphor and metamorphosis in 43 – 4; prophecy in 97 – 8; role of readers in 68; see also Virgilian epic as paradigm under epic allegory: allegorical impulse of tropes 34, 81; allegorical spirit of postcolonial literature 46, 81; and ekphrasis 28, 145, 146, 152, 156 – 8, 162 – 5, 169, 175; in Moby Dick 24, 70, 94, 115 – 16, 128, 146, 162, 185 – 6; national allegory theorised by Jameson 1, 59, 82n4; in Omeros 28, 49, 158, 163 – 5, 169, 186; in River of Smoke 152 – 3, 175; in Sea of Poppies 186; transnational allegory theorised by Ramazani 59 American Civil War 2, 36, 163 – 4,  169 Anandavardhana 50 Anderson, Benedict 5, 111 Apollinaire, Guillaume 57

Apollonius of Rhodes 4, 57 Arawaks 23, 42 – 3, 45 – 8, 49, 71, 103, 132, 178, 183 Ariosto, Ludovico see Orlando Furioso Aristotle 36; on epic 3, 4 Arrivants, The 3 Auden, W.H. 88, 158 Augustus 7, 15, 16, 87, 88, 89, 90, 94, 135, 154 – 5, 157 Aurobindo, Sri 51 Bakhtin, Mikhail: chronotope 115; on comedy 63 – 4, 66; dialogism 6 – 7, 8, 11, 13, 19, 59 – 60, 167, 185; on epic 6 – 8, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 145; heteroglossia 6, 78 – 9; on political role of language 6, 19, 78 – 80; positive hyperbolism 177 Bengal Renaissance 23, 51 Bhabha, Homi: influence of Bakhtin on 10 – 11; mimicry 9 – 11, 142, 185; nation as narration 1, 11, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 29n3, 134, 144; Third Space 49, 59, 61, 82n5, 116, 118 Bhakti movement 17, 50, 53, 74, 114, 118 Bharatamuni 50 Bible, The 24, 38, 39, 92, 93, 101, 132, 152 Black Atlantic 27, 109 – 10; in Moby Dick 23, 24, 40, 102, 113, 115 – 16; in Omeros 25, 26, 112 – 13, 164 – 5; in Sea of Poppies 26, 119 – 21, 171 – 2; see also slavery

203

INDEX

Bowra, C.M.: ‘national epic’ 14 – 15, 16, 29n4 Brathwaite, Kamau see The Arrivants Byron, George Gordon see Don Juan Camões, Luís Vaz de see The Lusíads Canto General 3, 23, 45; imagery in 42, 43 capitalism 27 – 8, 58, 59, 76, 110 – 32, 135, 150 – 1, 172, 182; romance of capitalism 122 – 32; see also capitalist time; neoimperialism; romance of navigation capitalist time 27 – 8, 184; Chakrabarty on Marx 110 – 12; in Moby Dick 113, 115 – 17; in Omeros 112 – 13; in Sea of Poppies 117 – 21 Cervantes, Miguel de see Don Quixote colonialism see empire comedy 4, 7, 8, 10, 27, 63 – 7, 73 – 4, 105; comic tropes in Moby Dick 64; comic tropes in Omeros 65; comic tropes in Sea of Poppies 65 – 6; and ekphrasis 160 – 1, 176; theorised by Bakhtin 63 – 4 Dante: as Christian reader of epic 14; as innovator 7; see also Divine Comedy, The Derrida, Jacques 8 – 9, 11, 13, 21, 78, 132, 143 – 4 dialogism see Bakhtin, Mikhail difference: cultural difference 20, 144; enunciative difference 29n3, 118; see also Other Divine Comedy, The 21, 61, 76, 168; metaphor and metamorphosis in 44 Don Juan 58, 170 Don Quixote 27, 70, 74, 77; mad reader paradigm theorised by Wofford 67 – 8, 69; money in 67 ekphrasis: in The Aeneid 138 – 9, 153 – 9, 175 – 6; definition and theory of 137 – 43, 145; ekphrastic anotherness 28, 140 – 5, 153; ekphrastic mimicry 29, 142 – 5, 153, 161, 163 – 6, 173 – 4, 178;

ekphrastic Other 138 – 40, 141, 153, 155, 167; in The Iliad 137, 138, 139, 153; in The Liberation of Jerusalem 139, 156, 157; in the Lusíads 137, 139, 156 – 7; in The Mahabharata 137, 138; in Moby Dick 145 – 8, 159 – 63; in Omeros 148 – 52, 163 – 70; in Orlando Furioso 139, 156; in political epic 137 – 8, 153 – 9, 163, 183, 184; in postcolonial epic 137 – 45, 158, 177 – 80; in River of Smoke 131, 141, 152 – 3, 174 – 7, 177 – 8; in Sea of Poppies 131, 171 – 4 Eliot, T.S. 144 empire 1 – 2, 5, 185; in The Aeneid 87 – 90, 97 – 8, 138 – 9, 153 – 9; and art 138 – 9, 148 – 50, 153 – 9; and epic 15, 27; legitimised by genealogy as prophecy 87 – 91; in Moby Dick 41, 91 – 4; in Omeros 47, 94 – 5, 148 – 50; resistance against 8, 92, 93, 97, 157 – 9; split in discourse of 9 – 11, 19; translatio studii and translatio imperii 20, 68 – 9, 90; Virgil’s private voice of regret 7, 8, 72, 97 Ennius 3, 15 enunciation 11, 20, 185; and ekphrasis 144, 147 – 8; and epic tropes 33, 49, 60; and genealogy 112, 116, 118, 134 – 5 enunciative hybridity 9 – 11, 15 – 20; of epic tropes 49, 59 – 60, 78 – 81; see also enunciative split; Third Space under Bhabha, Homi enunciative split 5, 10 – 11, 14, 16 – 21, 29n3; disjunction between privileged writer and subaltern subject 20, 24, 61, 128, 130 – 1, 146, 170, 174, 182; in ekphrastic convention 138 – 9; in epic tropes 33; in genealogical convention 91 epic: Alexandrian epic 4, 57; Homeric epic as paradigm 3, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 29n4, 32, 138, 155; oral traditions of 4, 16; perceived opposition with postcolonial condition 1 – 2; terms for, in African context 4; terms

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for, in Indian context 4; theory of 3 – 21; Virgilian epic as paradigm 7, 14 – 16, 17, 18, 87 – 91, 153 – 9; see also political epic; postcolonial epic epic simile 26; in The Aeneid 32; contradiction between figure and action theorised by Wofford 34 – 6; functions of 31 – 2; in The Iliad 32, 34 – 5, 37 – 8, 42, 48 – 9; in Liberation of Jerusalem 33, 38; in Lusíads 32; in Moby Dick 36, 37 – 42; in Omeros 72; in Orlando Furioso 32; in Paradise Lost 33, 38, 41, 45, 48; in Ramayana 33 – 4; in Ramcharitmanas 50 – 1; in Sea of Poppies 80 Eurocentrism 16, 52, 55, 59, 77, 127 Evaristo, Bernardine 1 Faerie Queene, The 17; genealogy as prophecy in 90 Fanon, Frantz 9, 10, 11, 128 Faulkner, William 98; as forerunner of Caribbean literature 3; and Melville 23 – 4; as precursor of postcolonial epic 21 – 2 Flood of Fire 25, 96, 121, 129, 133; Adamism in 107; mad readers in 75 – 6; romance of navigation in 125 – 6 Foucault, Michel 187; and heterotopia 40 – 1, 60, 81, 109 – 10, 111, 115; and repeatable materiality 29n3, 118 genealogy: in African oral traditions 4, 16; as epic convention 26, 27 – 8; in Indian courtly tradition 16, 17, 86; of nation 15 – 16, 20; see also Adamism; genealogy as prophecy genealogy as prophecy 27; in The Faerie Queene 90; in The Liberation of Jerusalem; in The Lusíads 90; in Orlando Furioso 90, 91; in political epic 87 – 91; in postcolonial epic 86 – 7; in Sea of Poppies 95 – 7

Ghosh, Amitav: and Bengal Renaissance 23; The Calcutta Chromosome 75 – 6; ‘The Diaspora and Indian culture’ 171; as expatriate writer 23; ‘Of Fanas and Forecastles’ 2; The Glass Palace 23, 84; life and works 23; on Melville 2 – 3; on postcolonialism 23; ‘The Relations of Envy in an Egyptian Village’ 84; The Shadow Lines 23, 84; see also Flood of Fire; River of Smoke; Sea of Poppies girmitiya see indentured labour Glissant, Édouard 1, 9, 20, 89, 98; creolisation 13, 22; excluding epics and participatory and concluding epics 12 – 13, 14, 17, 19, 89, 155, 185; on Faulkner 21 – 2; as Francophone Martinican 11 – 12; Les Indes 3; opacity 22, 148; poetics of Relation 12, 13, 21 – 2, 59, 89 – 90 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 5, 6, 41 griot 4, 16, 85; in Omeros 4, 31, 47 Gulf Stream, The 28, 103, 142, 163 – 7, 179, 180n4 Hall, Stuart 20, 77 – 8, 144 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 160, 170; on ekphrasis 139; on epic 5, 14, 17 – 19; and Gissant 13 hermeneutics see reception heterotopia see Foucault, Michel heterotrope 27, 81; in Moby Dick 40 – 2, 102; in Omeros 46 – 8 Homer, Winslow see The Gulf Stream hybridity: creolisation 13, 22, 58, 79, 83n8, 83n10, 103, 133; cultural hybridity 3, 59, 79, 186; hybrid epic 21; see also enunciative hybridity; poetics of Relation Ibis trilogy see Flood of Fire; River of Smoke; Sea of Poppies Iliad, The 7, 15, 21, 29n4, 77, 168; comedy in 63; ekphrasis in 137, 138, 139, 153; epic similes in 32, 34 – 5, 37 – 8, 42, 48 – 9; genealogy

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in 85, 87; see also Homeric epic as paradigm under epic imperialism see empire indentured labour 16 – 17, 95 – 7, 106 – 9, 171 – 7, 183; and the Black Water 25, 28; jahaji or ship family structure 114 – 15; troping of 50 – 5, 86,  106 Indian Ocean World 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 73, 109, 113 – 15, 119 – 21; see also indentured labour Jakobson, Roman 36 Jameson, Fredric: allegorical spirit of postcolonial literature 46, 81; historical deafness 179; national allegory 1, 59, 82n4; political unconscious 35; see also postmodernism Joyce, James see Ulysses Liberation of Jerusalem, The 7, 17, 124; ekphrasis in 139, 156, 157; epic similes in 33, 38; genealogy as prophecy in 90 Lukács, Georg 5 – 6, 12, 17, 21 Lusíads, The 2, 7, 8, 17, 18, 20, 21, 66, 76; Adamastor’s curse 8, 93; ekphrasis in 137, 139, 156 – 7; epic similes in 32; genealogy as prophecy in 90; St Elmo’s fire 100 madness 27, 77 – 8, 81 – 2; mad readers in Ibis trilogy 73 – 6; mad readers in Moby Dick 69 – 70; mad readers in Omeros 70 – 3; Quixote as mad reader 67 – 8, 69; see also magical realism magical realism 54 – 5, 60, 82n2,  175 Mahabharata, The 4, 106, 137, 138 marvellous real 54 Marx, Karl see Marxism Marxism: Althusserian Marxism 35; in Canto General 45; Chakrabarty on Marx 110 – 12; and language 6; Marx on self-representation 140, 180n1; political unconscious formulated by Jameson 35 McWilliams, John Jr. 7 – 8, 30n5

Melville, Herman: and art 140; life and works 22; on originality 143; Pierre, or the Ambiguities 84; Redburn 84; see also Moby Dick metaphor: in epic 31; and metamorphosis in Omeros 42 – 9; and metamorphosis in The Aeneid 43 – 4; and metamorphosis in The Divine Comedy 44; and metamorphosis in The Liberation of Jerusalem 44 – 5; negative metaphors in Omeros 56 – 7; theory of 36 Middle Passage see Black Atlantic; slavery migration: of ekphrastic convention 138 – 9, 155 – 6; of epic tropes 33; of genealogical convention 90; of people 3, 17, 23, 25; of traditions or ‘migrating epic practice’ 15, 17 – 19, 133; see also indentured labour Milton, John see Paradise Lost mimicry: as defined by Bhabha 10, 142; as defined by Terada 29, 143; ekphrastic mimicry 29, 142 – 5, 153, 161, 163 – 6, 173 – 4,  178 Moby Dick 22; Adamism in 98 – 102, 109; Ahab as mad reader 69; capitalist time in 113, 115 – 17; comic tropes in 64; ekphrasis in 145 – 8, 159 – 63; epic similes in 36, 37 – 42; heterotropes in 40 – 2; negative similes in 55 – 6; polyglossia in 79; as precursor of postcolonial epic 2 – 3, 8, 23 – 4, 183 – 4; prophecy in 91 – 4, 96; studies on 21, 185 – 6 modernity 5 – 6, 18, 23 Morrison, Toni 2, 22, 29n1, 30n6, 41, 98, 168 nation-state 5, 11, 20, 27, 78, 99, 184 – 5, 187; and ekphrasis 137 – 9, 140, 141, 144 – 5, 153, 172 – 3, 178 – 9; and epic 2, 3, 6, 13, 7, 32; and genealogy 84 – 6, 105, 110, 114, 127, 134; nation as narration 1, 5, 10 – 11, 14 – 16, 26, 115 – 16, 134, 186 (see also romance of

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navigation); and postcolonial tropes 32, 41, 47, 49, 53, 59, 64, 73, 80 – 1; split in discourse of 11, 14, 17 – 21,  134 Native Americans 2, 178; in Moby Dick 24, 29n2, 40, 116 – 17; in Omeros 47, 183; Pequot massacre 24, 30n7, 92, 115 neocapitalism see neoimperialism neocolonialism see neoimperialism neoimperialism 181 – 3, 186 – 7; in the Caribbean 12, 25, 131; in Latin America 42; in Omeros 42, 49, 61, 70 – 1, 129 – 32, 150 – 1, 163 – 4, 178, 182 Neruda, Pablo see Canto General novel: postcolonial novel 10, 11; theory of 5 – 7 Odyssey, The 7, 8, 18, 29n4, 38, 79; descent to the underworld 56; Polyphemus’s curse 8 Omeros 25; Adamism in 103 – 5, 109; capitalist time in 112 – 13; comic tropes in 65; ekphrasis in 148 – 52, 163 – 70; heterotropes in 46 – 8; mad readers in 70 – 3; metaphor and metamorphosis in 42 – 9; negative metaphors in 56 – 7; polyglossia in 79, 80; prophecy in 94 – 5, 96; similes in 45 – 6, 72; studies on 21, 30n5, 186 Orlando Furioso 17, 21, 124; ekphrasis in 139, 156; epic similes in 32; genealogy as prophecy in 90, 91; madness in 77 Other 89; anotherness 28, 140 – 5, 153, 167; ekphrastic Other 138 – 40, 141, 153, 155; and modernity 110 Ovid 4, 57, 65 Paradise Lost 7, 14, 16, 17, 21, 24, 94; epic similes in 33, 38, 41, 45, 48; negative similes in 56 Pequot tribe see Native Americans poetry: and epic 5, 13, 16; Indian aesthetics 50 – 1, 53; metres 3, 7, 15; western aesthetics 36; see also metaphor; simile

political epic: critique of war in 8, 43 – 5, 97; definition and theory of 3 – 5, 11, 14 – 21, 27, 28, 29, 132, 184, 185; ekphrasis in 137 – 8, 153 – 9, 163; genealogy as prophecy in 87 – 91, 134 – 5; tropes in 31 – 4, 58, 80 – 2 Pollock, Sheldon: ‘inventing the king as Rama’ 16, 17, 86; Sanskrit cosmopolis 33 postcolonial epic: comedy in 63 – 4, 66, 68; definition and theory of 3, 11 – 12, 19 – 21, 27, 28, 29, 183 – 5; ekphrasis in 137 – 8, 145, 158, 177 – 80; genealogy in 85, 91, 97, 134 – 5; tropes in 32, 35 – 6, 59 – 62, 80 – 2 postmodernism 181 – 2, 184, 187; and ekphrasis 141, 145, 150 – 1, 177; and genealogy 85; Jameson’s views on 180, 181, 182; post-postmodernism 181, 187 poststructuralism 77 – 8, 81, 143 – 4, 147 – 8; and epic genre 8 – 9, 27 prophecy: in The Aeneid 97 – 8; and ekphrasis 139, 153 – 7, 163, 176; in Moby Dick 91 – 4, 96; in Omeros 94 – 5, 96; prophetic curses 8, 92, 93, 97; see also genealogy as prophecy Ramayana, The: Hikayet Seri Rama 17; ‘inventing the king as Rama’ 16, 17, 86; Ramakien 17; Ramayana politics 86; Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas 4, 17, 21, 50 – 1, 75, 86, 106; Valmiki’s Ramayana 4, 16 – 17, 21, 33 – 4, 85; vernacular versions 17 reception: contemporary reception of Mande epic 16; Dante as reader of epic 14; ekphrasis as allegory of 137 – 8, 158 – 9, 161 – 9; of Ghosh 187; girmitiyas’ reading of Ramayana 16 – 17; importance of, in epic 17, 187; mad readers 67 – 78; medieval reception of the Ramayana in the courtly context 16; of Melville 186; Melville’s reading of epic traditions

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24; of Walcott 186 – 7; see also enunciative split recusatio 57, 62, 170, 185 Riffaterre, Michael 142, 145, 153 River of Smoke 25, 107, 126 – 7, 129, 133; Adamism in 107, 153; ekphrasis in 141, 152 – 3, 173 – 7, 177 – 8; genealogy as prophecy in 95 – 6 Robinson Crusoe 123 romance of navigation 28, 122 – 32 Rushdie, Salman 54, 135 Said, Edward 70, 177; on Fanon 9; on Moby Dick 2, 93; on self-representation 140, 180n1 Schiller, Friedrich 5, 6 Sea of Poppies 25; capitalist time in 117 – 21; comic tropes in 65 – 6; ekphrasis in 131, 171 – 4; epic simile in 80; genealogy as prophecy in 95 – 7; hypothetical similes in 49 – 55; mad readers in 73 – 4; polyglossia in 80; and Ramayana 106 – 7; studies on 21, 186 Shakespeare 41 simile: hypothetical similes in Sea of Poppies 49 – 55; negative similes in Moby Dick 55 – 6; negative similes in Paradise Lost 56; in Omeros 45 – 6; theory of 36; see also epic simile; metaphor slavery: in Faulkner’s work 22; and Glissant 11; in Moby Dick 2, 23, 39 – 41, 100, 102, 162 – 3; in Omeros 25, 47 – 8, 148, 163 – 7; see also Black Atlantic South Pacific 23, 24; and Queequeg 24, 39 – 40, 99, 147 – 8 Soyinka, Wole 71 Spenser, Edmund see Faerie Queene, The 17

Spivak, Gayatri 110; on subaltern self-representation 140, 180n1, 174 subaltern 18, 28, 183; in Canto General 45; disjunction between privileged writer and subaltern subject 20, 24, 61, 128, 130 – 1, 146, 170, 174, 182; and ekphrasis 174 – 5, 178 – 80; in Emperor’s Babe 1; and genealogy 85; in Moby Dick 24, 25, 28, 41, 116 – 17, 122 – 3, 127 – 8, 145 – 6; in Omeros 25, 128 – 9; and postcolonial tropes 32, 39, 41 – 50, 53, 58, 59, 63 – 4, 76; in Sea of Poppies 25, 58, 114, 118 – 22, 124 – 7; see also indentured labour Sunjata 16, 85 – 6 Tagore, Rabindranath 36, 51 Tasso, Torquato see Liberation of Jerusalem Ulysses 113, 168 Virgil: The Eclogues 57, 156, 180n3; see also The Aeneid Walcott, Derek: and art 140 – 1; as expatriate writer 23, 72; life and works 22 – 3; on Melville 2, 167 – 70; on originality 143; on postcolonialism 23; ‘Schooner Flight’ 84; see also Omeros Whitman, Walt: as Adamic 23; and epic 7, 18 – 19; Leaves of Grass 8; ‘Song of Exposition’ 18 – 19 Williams, Raymond 183 Wofford, Susanne 31, 34 – 6, 38, 48 – 9, 59, 62, 67 – 9,  81 Yeats, W.B. 138

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