Encomium of Helen: Derek Walcott's ethical twist in Omeros

      Names are not oars that have to be laid side by side, nor are
    legends; slowly the foaming clouds have forgotten ours. You were
    never in Troy, and, between two Helens, yours is here and alive;
    their classic features were turned into silhouettes from the
    lighting bolt of a glance. These Helens are different creatures, one
    marble, one ebony. One unknots a belt of yellow cotton slowly from
    her shelving waist, one a cord of purple wool, the other one takes
    a bracelet of white cowries from a narrow wrist; one lies in a room
    with olive-eyed mosaics, another in a beach shack with its straw
    mattress, but each draws an elbow slowly over her face and offers
    the gift of her sculptured nakedness, parting her mouth. (312-13)

I can hardly read this passage as anything other than a slip back into the very rhetoric that the poem has arduously tried to leave behind. Although he begins by emphasizing once again that the two Helens cannot and should not be conflated, the poet seems unable to resist the temptation of elaborating once again on the attractions of each woman, until finally they are fused again into a single object of desire--an object, for that matter, that offers itself as a "gift" to the poet. Again, the poet's desire transforms Helen into a metaphor that defines her, not us, as responsible for her own objectification. It appears that at the very end, the aesthetic and erotic pleasures of his craft, in spite of the epistemic violence they exert on Helen (as revealed by the narrator himself), overcome the scruples of respect for opacity, and the poet does not pass by the opportunity to submit the other to his desire. This failure is especially revealing in light of the fact that it is the poem itself that has questioned the legitimacy of that erotic/aesthetic subjugation of Helen in particular and otherness in general.

The sophist philosopher Gorgias, best known from Plato's homonymous dialogue, left for posterity a fascinating text that remains one of the few extant examples of ancient Greek rhetoric: the Encomium of Helen. Gorgias's argument is that Helen could only have gone to Troy under the influence of one of four causes: the will of the gods, the power of Paris's speech, love, or force. In any of those cases, Gorgias argues, Helen should be exonerated from guilt, for she was under the influence of powers too mighty for any human will to resist.

Gorgias ends the Encomium by declaring that the text is a game composed for his own amusement. Some scholars have taken this statement literally, arguing that praise for someone as obviously immoral as Helen cannot be taken seriously. In this view, the text is an exercise designed to show the persuasive power of speech regardless of its veracity (a performance of what today we have come to associate with the term sophist). Other scholars see the Encomium as making a serious argument.15 Regardless of which side one takes, however, Helen's position remains quite precarious. Either she is guilty from the start, in which case any defense could only be a joke, or the defense is serious and she acted under the compulsion of external forces, in which case she lacks agency--she is not really acting but is acted upon. In fact, the possibility that Helen acted by her own will is equated with a moral lack, so she can only be innocent but powerless or willful but evil. In the tight logic of this narrative, Helen is a silenced subaltern. She is silenced both by her accusers and her defenders.