Derek Walcott " the Muse of History " (1974)

Here, Walcott argues that the “common experience of the New World . . . is colonialism” (1). This is true even for those whose “veneration of the Old is read as the idolatry of the mestizo” (1). Such writers remind us, Walcott argues, though they too are “victims of tradition” (1), “of our great debt to the great dead” (1) and that “those who break a tradition first hold it in awe” (1). Arguing that “they have gone past the confrontation of history” (2), Walcott suggests that we owe such thinkers more than “those who wrestle with that past” (1): for they know that by openly fighting tradition we perpetuate it, that revolutionary literature is a filial impulse, and that maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor. (1) When they call themselves “classicists” (1) and “pretend an indifference to change” (1), it is with an “irony as true of the colonial anguish as the fury of the radical” (2). Arguing that these classicists’ “sense of the past is of a timeless, yet habitable moment” (1), Walcott contends that these writers reject the idea of history as time for its original concept as myth, the partial recall of the race. For them history is fiction, subject to a fitful muse, memory. Their philosophy, based on contempt for historic time, is revolutionary, for what they repeat to the New World is its simultaneity with the Old. (2) Their “vision of man” (2) is “elementary, a being inhabited by presences, not a creature chained to his past. Walcott offers a philosophy of history: the method by which we are taught the past, the progress from motive to event, is the same by which we read narrative fiction. In time every event becomes an exertion of memory and is thus subject to invention. The further the facts, the more history petrifies into myth. Thus, as we grow older as a race, we grow aware that history is written, that it is a kind of literature without morality, . . . and that everything depends on whether we write this fiction through the memory of hero or of victim. (2) Hence, the famous claim that servitude to the muse of history has produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters. Because this literature serves historical truth, it yellows into polemic or evaporates in pathos. (2) This is the “revolutionary spirit at its deepest” (3). Rejecting that “shame and awe of history” (2) on the part of poets who “think of language as enslavement and who, in a rage for identity, respect only incoherence or nostalgia” (2), Walcott asserts that the “truly tough aesthetic of the new world” (2), by contrast, “neither explains nor forgives history” (2) and “refuses to recognise it as a creative or culpable force” (2).