Creolizing Homer for the stage: Walcott's The Odyssey - Derek Walcott - The Odyssey: A Stage Version - Critical Essay

In scene 9, their difference in appearance suggests a comparison between monocular and binary vision. The scene is set in a modern Greece oppressed by monolithic autocracy Polyphemos's monocular vision--and his cannibalism--suggest the oppression of individual humanity. Odysseus speaks on behalf of any group so oppressed: prisoners, slaves, minorities, colonials. He contends that mortals need two eyes "For balance. Proportion. Contrast.... Left, right. Good, bad. Heaven, hell" (68). Binocular vision affords depth perception, multiple dimensions, and the ability to appreciate opposites simultaneously.

According to Lorna Hardwick, the polarities structuring this cyclops episode are crucial to defining Walcott's postmodern perspective. It can be argued that Homer's emphasis on the cyclopes' incivility and their primitive lack of farming and shipbuilding makes them convenient representatives of the Other for the Greeks. The Greek-versus-barbarian social code valuing house over cave, cooked rather than raw food, citizen over alien, establishes a hierarchy that privileges Odysseus's rational sophistication. It is Hardwick's contention that Walcott dramatically undermines this hierarchy:

Walcott's redrawing of the Otherness of the Cyclops in terms of political tyranny and lack of human feeling both dissolves the distance between Homer and the twentieth century and denies that it is "natural" to exploit ethnic difference as a criterion for otherness." His incorporation of diaspora voices in the play emphasises a poetics of cultural fluidities and interaction rather than difference.... Walcott's concern is not with pluralism but rather with the forging of commonalities. (6-7)

Hardwick argues further that Walcott's

notion of simultaneity and the associated dramatic techniques recognise "difference" in gender, ethnicity, class, language and moral feeling but include these in an exploration of inter-relationships, an exploration which crosses time, space and culture. (9)

The "associated dramatic techniques" that Hardwick has in mind are the casting of the same actor as Polyphemos and the petty tyrant Arnaeus and the ruthless violence that connects the giant's bloody hands with Odysseus's ruthless dispatch of his wife's suitors.

Polyphemos has no monopoly on despotism. In fact no people has a monopoly on vice or virtue. This is the point Walcott makes in a 1990 interview regarding an often disregarded aspect of slavery: "Black people capturing black people and selling them to the white man. That is the real beginning;... We have to face that reality.... That is the history of the world" (qtd. in Brown 212-13). Seller, sold, and buyer are inevitably linked in a complicated brotherhood. Therein lies Hardwick's "commonality."

C.B. Davis is also impressed by the fact that Walcott later transforms Polyphemos into Arnaeus, "a huge swineherd with an eye patch, in a filthy sheepskin" (Odyssey 126). Davis interprets the overt linkage to mean that this cantankerous, lower--class, native Greek citizen is equally susceptible to the same monocular vision as the cyclops (albeit on a limited scale because of his subordinate status). The point is well taken, and it may be that Odysseus the dispossessed Ithacan king is himself guilty to some extent of an imperialist mind-set: