Derek Walcott’s Another Life, or Writing the Self into a Distance
Derek Walcott’s foray into autobiography soon proves to call the very genre into question, presenting, as it does, a multitude of characters and voices rather than a self- centered, self-enclosed narrative. In so doing, the poem dovetails with a recurrent postcolonial feeling according to which the...
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| הוצא לאור ב: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
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| מחבר ראשי: | |
| פורמט: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| שפה: | Anglais |
| יצא לאור: |
Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2022
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| גישה מקוונת: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| סיכום: | Derek Walcott’s foray into autobiography soon proves to call the very genre into question, presenting, as it does, a multitude of characters and voices rather than a self- centered, self-enclosed narrative. In so doing, the poem dovetails with a recurrent postcolonial feeling according to which the master-slave relationship has not been the Hegelian place for revelation and truth, but rather for disguise, masking and dissembling. However, diffractions of the self also echo in a more linguistic and strictly literary mode, with the splitting of the self appearing as a consequence of the loss of the original language, of the subsequent plurilinguism and of the colonial imposition of foreign artistic models. Lastly, the present paper will investigate the way in which the text of Another Life is composed not so much as an œuvre as a ceaseless movement towards the unknown. The self then becomes a shifting point which, over and again, loses itself on the horizon of the verse. |
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