Walter Benjamin and a poetics of the post-colonial Iyric
[Paper presented at the First Walter Benjamin Association World Conference, 24-26 July 1997, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands ]
In this paper I propose a relation of affinity between
post-colonial poetry and ideas developed by Benjamin in his early work. In its
most abstract sense, the post-colonial is a name for certain forms of historical
displacement through which a subjected self struggles to relocate itself in
space, time, body and language and of similar displacements Benjamin had ample
and painful personal experience. In the present context, the argument confines
itself to poetry which works out a dialectical tension between the forms of
allegory and myth, and my examples are drawn from the poetry of islands, where
an island is treated as an abyss into which time falls as history, which it is
the poet's task to bridge, as exemplified in the work of Derek Walcott.
For Europe after the Renaissance, the dream of
colonization was a myth of progress based on dominative exploitation dissembled
as the civilizing mission of Enlightenment. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Horkheimer and Adorno wrote of
the `indefatigable self-destructiveness of enlightenment' as related to the
destructive aspect of progress' (Dialectic
xi).1 Throughout the era of modern colonialism, progress was
experienced, by the complicitous among the colonized, as access to the
colonizer's language and culture, although this dispossessed them progressively
of whatever had been their original language and culture, thus creating—in the
words of Derek Walcott—'one literature in several imperial languages' (An
15-6).2 The subjugation of linguistic and cultural heterogeneity into
a unity under the constellation of colonialism provides an ironic parallel in
reverse to the process described by Benjamin as the movement of the plurality of
languages, through translation, to a pure language' which would be the `the
messianic end of their history' (SW
257).3 Insofar as the post-colonial becomes self-aware of his
double legacy of loss-in-gain, he is like Benjamin's angel of history, propelled
by the storm of progress `into the future to which his back is turned, while the
pile of debris before him grows skywards' (Reflections
258).4 For the post-colonial, the debris is less the ruin of a
totality from the past than the recession of unified being into the future, a
fiction of unity never to be recuperated except in terms of a fragmented
plurality. `I see Africa multiple and whole' ( `Je
vois l'Afrique multiple et une'), wrote Aimé
Césaire, who grew up speaking Creole as his first
language, but wrote creatively in French (Césaire
353).5 In Benjaminian terms, the post-colonial mourns. What he
mourns, in this version of the Fall, is the loss of correspondence between
himself as the created product of history and the original linguistic culture
from which his history has separated him. In Benjamin, man is the namer who
gives linguistic expression to the dumb things of nature. In the colonial
condition, man splits into the named (who is rendered mute like a thing of
nature) and the namer (who, in `overnaming' his Other, displaces the Other's
languages by his own). The life of the named, like that of the things of nature,
is condemned to mourning because they are mute; they are mute because they
mourn: mourning and muteness circle round the sense of abject degradation and
guilt brought on by being more an object to be read rather than a subject who
can read and name. The post-colonial condition adds a new twist to this
dialectic. The mourning ceases to be mute, because it learns to allegorize in
the given language, and what it thus demystifies is the myth of origin,
including the fable of the fall in which its choice of language traps it.
Thus the melancholic of Benjamin's allegory can be
said to correspond to the condition of the post-colonial in a number of
relations: 1) the loss of a pure language; 2) the split into plurality,
fragmentation, and linguistic secondariness; 3) guilt and muteness; 4) the
compulsion to read allegorically what cannot be named unconcealedly. Each
correspondence can be illustrated with reference to a poet like Derek Walcott,
who reiterates the idea that the things of the world exist in nature more truly
when their linguistic being is spoken. One of his poems treats the Caribbean as
inconceivable because `no one had yet written of this landscape / that it was
possible' (CP 195).6 In
another poem, his boyhood is spoken of as a time `when I was a noun / gently
exhaled from the palate of the sunrise' (Om
12).7 The poet is an Adam whose task is `giving things their names'(CP
294), although the poet can also envisage a condition prior to that of being
named:
My race began as the sea began,
with no
nouns ... (CP 305)
This state of pre-history is imaged as `the
bridesleep that soothed Adam in paradise, / before it gaped into a wound' (Om
42). History begins, for the Caribbean, with the shadow cast by an act of
overnaming—colonialism. Benjamin claimed that `Fate is the entelechy of events
within the field of guilt' (Tr 129).8
Likewise, the entelechy of names in a field of guilt is what the postcolonial
learns to recognize as history. In this condition of fealty, to write is to take
the task of naming a self into one's own hands. For the post-colonial poet the
task is to find new names for the self. He finds, however, that he can only do
this by dis-membering and re-membering the old ones.
The post-colonial in Walcott asks himself a
question: `Who will teach us a history of which we too are capable?' (Om
197). The first and enforced—part of the answer is colonialism. What survives
as the aftermath of that epoch is the debris of memory, `History's nostalgia' (Om
228). The second—and paradoxical part of the answer is the difficult task of
melting down history, so that life after history can begin, as if before
history, in willed acts of memorable forgetting. When Walcott's Odysseus says to
Nausicaa, `The future is where we begin', she asks 'Is this just a dream?', and
he replies `No. A place where dreams are killed' (Ody 59).9 Once the dreams that are the nightmare of
history have died, the life of wakefulness begins, in which the poet resumes his
Adamic task.
Like Benjamin's baroque, in which `chronological
movement is grasped and analysed in a spatial image' (Tr 92), the islands of his native Caribbean provide Derek Walcott,
in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, with an allegorical image for history in
the form of amnesia, which is the ruin of memory: `All of the Antilles, every
island, is an effort of memory; every mind, every racial biography culminating
in amnesia and fog' (An 30). Benjamin
identified the semblance of history for the baroque as the transience of nature
in the form of decay (Tr
177‑78). Walcott uses identical terms for the history of `the writer's
habit' in the Caribbean: a `sense of elegy, of loss, even of degenerative
mimicry' (An 5), and `melancholy as
contagious as the fever of a sunset' (An
22). Europe had taught Caribbeans to see themselves as `No people. Fragments and
echoes of real people, unoriginal and broken' (An 6). In these Tristes
Tropiques, `The sigh of History rises over ruins' (An 7). But Walcott refuses `to see such emptiness as desolation' (An
16). In his oppositional dialectic, the figure of ruins is opposed by an
antithetical `delight of conviction, not loss' (An
5): `For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten,
insomniac night ... the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in
spite of history' (An 27-8). This idea
has its analogue in the notion of `Messianic nature' developed by Benjamin in
relation to the paradox `of this eternally transient worldly existence': `the
rhythm of Messianic nature is happiness. For nature is Messianic by reason of
its eternal and total passing away' (Reflections
313). In Walcott's version of Messianic amnesia, the ocean `was an epic where
every line was erased / yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf' (Om
295-96).
The idea of time as the degenerative history of
nature is thus resisted by the happiness of the timeless `reality of light, of
work, of survival' in the landscape (An
19): `It is not that History is obliterated by this sunrise. It is there in
Antillean geography' (An 29). What the
islands of the Caribbean offer is `Not nostalgic sites but occluded sanctities
as common and simple as their sunlight'. The poet declares `I am not re-creating
Eden' (An 19); nevertheless, he is now
again a namer, end `this process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the
same process that the poet faces every morning of his working day, making his
own tools like Crusoe, assembling nouns from necessity' (An
11). The necessity of literalness in translation was explained by Benjamin in
terms of the `Fragments of a vessel that are to be glued together ....
recognizable as fragments of a greater language...' (SW
260). The image is echoed by Walcott:
Break
a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love
which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.... Antillean art is this
restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our
archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original
continent. (An 8‑9)
The task of the poet is defined by Benjamin, in the
early essay on `Two Poems by Holderlin' (SW
18‑36), as having to `transform the figures borrowed from a neutral
"life" into members of a mythic order' (SW 28), not to myth but rather ... to mythic connections, which in
the work of art are shaped into unique, unmythological, and unmythic forms' (SW
35). This is to be accomplished by the mediation of what is called the poetized
(or the poematized): das Gedichtete.
David Wellerby comments that `das
Gedichtete comes about as an overcoming of the mythic, a negation of the
mythic conflict in a structure that brings that conflict ... to rest' (Wellerby
50).'10 The mythic figure of Odysseus might be said to offer the
post‑colonial poet just such a form for allegory to negate: the
subservience of the borrowing is sublated in what is done with the borrowing.
The mythic is taken as if with an aura already worn; which is then reworked into
a new recuperative allegory. The depletion of mere borrowing is acknowledged
laconically by Walcott (CP 297). The material content recovered from the figure of Odysseus
is his growth through history into `this man to whom everything has happened' (Ody
80). In Walcott's stage adaptation of The
Odyssey (1993) the hero is a figure of longing. Through his allegorization,
dispossession is retrieved as belonging: `Our ribbed bodies long for their
original shore' (Ody 5). His epic
involvement in war is dismissed as `A tower cracking, Troy, Troy! What was it
all worth?' He would readily `give up all this heaving for one yard of earth' (Ody 39). The allegorical significance of the passages of Odysseus is
explained to him by Athena as an equation between home and peace, `The harbour
of home is what your wanderings mean.... The peace which, in shafts of light,
the gods allow men?' (Ody 159). While
Walcott's Odyssey tends toward the
literal in metaphorical translation, his quasi-epic Omeros
(1990) is more fully transpositional. In Omeros
the mythic is treated anti-mythically, almost as an antidote to the disease of
memory, and also as a magical `exorcism' of Homer (Om
294). The persons of the poem are extrapolations:
... I said "Omeros,"
and O was
the conch-shell's invocaton, mer was
both
mother and sea in our Antillean patois,
os,
a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes
and spreads its sibilant collar on a lace shore. (Om
14)
What the poet looks for in the structure of events
in time is a place of possibility, as something potential which must be
realized:
not on this grass cliff but
somewhere on the other
side of
the world, somewhere, with its sunlit islands,
where
what they called history could not happen. Where?
Where
could this world renew the Mediterranean's innocence? (Om
28)
Odysseus, for the post-colonial poet, is the heroic
and tragic figure for the possibility and deferral of fulfilment in whom man
will recover nature erased of history, return through narrative to a place where
time tells nothing, and the recurrence of the mythic can be disbanded. In Dialectic
of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno described the nucleus of `all
civilizing rationality' as a form of 'mythic irrationality':
In class
history, the enmity of the self to sacrifice implied a sacrifice of the self,
inasmuch as it was paid for by a denial of nature in man for the sake of
domination over non‑human nature and over other men. This very denial, the
nucleus of all civilizing rationality, is the germ cell of a proliferating
mythic irrationality: with the denial of nature in man not merely the telos
of the outward control of nature but the telos
of man's own life is distorted and befogged (Dialectic
54).
What the poets of the post-colonial condition try
to create, as in Walcott, is a renewed dialectical tension between man and
nature, and nature and history, which may be described as the denial of a
denial, poetry's attempt to reverse `mythic irrationality' through the antidote
of renewed allegory.11
Notes
1 Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, tr. John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, 1972.
2 Derek Walcott, The
Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux,
1992 (n.p.).
3 Walter Benjamin:
Selected Wntings, volume 1 1913-1926, edited by Marcus
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996.
4 Walter Benjamin, Reflections:
Aphorisms, Essays and Autobiographical Wntings, ed. Peter Demetz, tr. Edmund
Jephcott. New York & London: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovitch, 1978.
5 Aimé Césaire, The Collected
Poetry, tr. Clayton Eshelman & Annette Smith. Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press, 1983.
6 Derek Walcott, Collected
Poems 1948-1984. New York: The Noonday Press/Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1986.
7 Derek Walcott, Omeros.
London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1990.
8 Walter Benjamin, The Ongins of
German Tragic Drama, tr. John Osborne, with an introduction by George
Steiner. London: Verso, 1977, 1985.
9 Derek Walcott, The Odyssey: A
Stage Version. London & Boston: Faber & Faber, 1993.
10 David E. Wellerby,
`Benjamin's Theory of the Lyric', in Benjamin's
Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1988, pp. 39‑59.
11 `The antidote to myth is
to be demonstrated in allegory', Benjamin (Gesammelte
Schriften 1: 677), quoted in Winfred Menninghaus, `Walter Benjamin's Theory
of Myth', On Walter Benjamin: Criticals
Essays and Recollections, edited by Gary Smith. Cambridge, Massachusetts
& London: The MIT Press, 1988, p. 314.
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