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

Crusoe's survival is not purely physical, not a question of the desolation of his environment, but a triumph of will. He is for us, today, the twentieth century symbol of artistic isolation and breakdown, of withdrawal, of the hermetic exercise that poetry has become, even in the New World, he is the embodiment of the schizophrenic Muse whose children are of all races. (40)

Walcott's comments on this prototype also illuminate his creolization of Odysseus. From his native St. Lucia, Walcott recalls "the cunning of certain types, representative of the slave outwitting his master, like Br'er Rabbit or Tar Baby, done in West Indian dialect' Yet, one figure was missing:

My Makak comes from my own childhood. But there was no king, no tribal chief, no warrior for a model in those stories. So the person I saw was this degraded, humble, lonely, isolated figure of the wood-cutter. I can see him for what he is now, a brawling, ruddy drunk who would come down the street on a Saturday when he got paid and let out an immense roar that would terrify all the children. ... He is still alive, and there is no terror anymore--except in the back of my mind. This was a degraded man, but he had some elemental force in him that is still terrifying; in another society he would have been a warrior. ("Meanings" 50)

Walcott's Odyssean protagonist is the shipwrecked, vagabond Crusoe/Makak, who shares with Homer's displaced royalty, Odysseus and Eumaeus, remarkable survival instincts, not just associations with distant thrones. Were it not for the assistance of Athena, Odysseus might well have suffered the fate of the faithful Eumaeus. Although Eumaeus is the son of a king and quite capable as a warrior, he now functions as a swineherd, a station from which he manifests no desire to rise. It is only by the materialistic suitors' estimation that his status might seem inferior. Before the returned Odysseus reveals his identity to him, Eumaeus remembers fondly his days of hunting wild boar and boasts of his herd and the revenge that he and his master will exact on the men besieging Penelope (112-14).

Walcott also introduces a slight modification in Odysseus's offenses against the gods. The Greek version has Tiresias specify two primary offenses. First, Odysseus blinds Polyphemos, and his father, Poseidon, vows unrelenting vengeance, even though Odysseus acted in defense of his men and himself. Second, Odysseus's starving men kill and eat cattle sacred to Helios on the island of Thrinacia, so they must die and he is condemned to reach Ithaca late, as a lone passenger in an alien vessel. Walcott keeps these original offenses, but from them he derives a third. Athena appears in a dream shortly after Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca: "You mocked the immortal ones" and were "The first to discount each omen!" (119). Through having Athena see human acts of self-preservation as offensive to the gods, Walcott creates an opening in the narrative to interrogate the supernatural machinery.