Publication details
Originality : New Names? Names Anew?
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The conference paper presents a reading of Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound which was published in 2000. Tiepolo’s Hound is a book-length poem; some prefer to call it a verse-novel. Thematically, the poem is about painting. It offers a historical account of Impressionism. Moreover, it is published with a twenty-six full-colour reproductions of Derek Walcott’s paintings (watercolour and oil paintings). Structurally, the poem fuses two painters’ stories in a corresponding parallel, not synchronous simultaneity, though, as the two painters are separated by a century: Camille Pissarro, born in 1830; Derek Walcott, in 1930. The poem retraces the artistic career of St. Thomas-born painter Camille Pissarro and concomitantly recounts that of St. Lucia-born poet and unfulfilled painter Derek Walcott disguised as the poem’s narrator persona. Hence, Tiepolo’s Hound is both a biography and an autobiography. The formal combination of verse and paintings reflects a desire, on the side of Walcott, to portray the seen world more than verbally. In addition, this combination asserts the difference between Pissarro’s embrace, perusal, realization, and expression of his artistic longings in the ‘sublime’ landscape of metropolitan France, symbolic of Empire, and Walcott’s which have recourse to the fertile and virgin (indeed, fertile because virgin) scenery of ‘ordinary’ St. Lucia. In other words, it is the difference between Walcott who pays tribute to the native land of his childhood and Pissarro’s reverence of Empire. The presentation offers yet another reading of this combination: The artistic career, both in written literature and visual culture, is subject to the same politics of centre/periphery and dominating/dominated. More specifically, this issue is to be addressed in relation to Walcott’s aesthetics the core concept of which is Adamic “naming” as the first step towards establishing a native art free of the assumptions of the hegemonic metropolitan canons and their compulsions |
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