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

In the passage that finally deposits the sleeping Odysseus on his native shore, the exhausted adventurer experiences a surreal flashback that includes mermaids, phantoms of his drowned companions, and a childhood dream. The episode gives Odysseus reason to distrust the boundaries between imagination and reality. While he suspects he is suffering from hallucinations about the Sirens and Scylla and Charybdis, his spectral crewmen insist that his exploits "aren't just sailors' stories that swirl round shipwrecks" (105). Their insistence on the tale's foundation in truth, however, is complicated immediately with the appearance of his old nurse Eurycleia alternating with Billy Blue in a nursery lullaby:

EURYCLEIA (Sings)
   So, cradled in him comfort, a child see what grows
   From his shadow to shapes on a nursery wall.
(ODYSSEUS cowers, whining.)
BILLY BLUE (Sings)
   Doubt foams into dark forms feeding on phosphorus,
   The waves sound like jaws chewing the night.

   Sometimes friendly faces turn to fiendish horrors.
   Scylla soared on one side, Charybdis on his right....
EURYCLEIA (Sings)
   Are all of these monsters a child's imagination? ...
BILLY BLUE (Sings)
   Or the madness of a mariner too long alone? (106)

These kinds of reservations, spurred by unsettling dreams, underlie Athena's later charge that Odysseus is guilty of mockery in questioning the gods and their omens (119).

Walcott's creolized protagonist doubts authority whether it be theological, governmental, or literary In keeping with this iconoclastic tendency, his narrative continually reflects on itself. Devices such as shadow play (22), mime (28, 36), and characters taking dual roles function as Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt does to highlight the intertextuality of theatrical art. Rather than have Odysseus outline once again some of his key adventures for Penelope and Laertes as Homer does, Walcott relies on a comic sequence of doubled characters: mermaids who teased Odysseus on his raft before he washed ashore in Phaeacia become flirtatious kitchen servants in Ithaca; Nausicaa reappears as Penelope's insolent maid Melantho; Polyphemos turns up again as the troublesome swineherd Arnaeus, to whom Odysseus gives the one-fingered "Cyclops salute" (124-27).

In Walcott's hands, Penelope's independence is also enhanced. She still craftily unravels her tapestry night after night to forestall obstreperous suitors, but she also holds her own against threats brought by the suitor Antinuous, asserting her power of independent choice: "My patience wasn't slavery, it was pure trust" (20). In other words, her protracted refusal of other lovers comes from her heart, unfettered by domestic obligation, convention, or tradition. She has waited faithfully the full 20 years for her husband's return; nevertheless, in addition to the bed test by which she forces Odysseus to prove his identity, she is not afraid to assert her disapproval when his bloody vengeance turns her house into a slaughterhouse. She demands an accounting: "IT'S FOR THIS I KEPT MY THIGHS CROSSED FOR TWENTYYEARS?...To make this a second Troy! When will men learn?" (153, 154). In a departure from Homer, her intervention also saves the life of Melantho. Then, only after she rejects several proffered tokens of Od ysseus's identity, does she give him the chance to prove that he knows the secret of their immovable bed.