creole in literature- beyond versimilitude- texture and varieties- derek waclott.- john j. figueroa

8/13/2019 Creole in Literature- Beyond Versimilitude- Texture and Varieties- Derek Waclott.- John J. Figueroa

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Creole in Literature: Beyond Verisimilitude: Texture and Varieties: Derek WalcottAuthor(s): John J. FigueroaSource: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 25, Non-Standard Englishes and the New MediaSpecial Number (1995), pp. 156-162Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3508824.

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Creole in Literature: Beyond Verisimilitude:Texture and Varieties: Derek WalcottJOHN J. FIGUEROA

MiltonKeynes

The crucial question for the politicians of Creole and West African Pidgin,and for all nationalist monolinguists, is whether it is really worth giving upvariety (and what ordinary people, let alone a genius, can do with it) for acertain kind of political and cultural uniformity, sometimes called purity. Isthis search for uniformity more relevant to closed, intimate forest societies,than to, say, present day Africa, and the multi-ethnic West Indies? And doesthis insistence on one variety of a community's speech show an ignorance oflanguage and its uses, especially of its non-semantic aspects?Living and working in Africa strengthened my long standing intuitivedoubt about the doctrine of one language, one culture, one political unit; andof course one language per person, a la English xenophobia. Wole Soyinka'sAke seems to me strong evidence against monolingualism and againstmonoculturalism. As Carlos Fuentes put it in his BBC broadcasts, 'Mono-lingualism is a curable disease'. And so would be monodialectism. Moreimportantly it would remove the rich possibilities for texture and fore-grounding in literature, or even in general conversation and story telling.Further evidence, to put it negatively, of the lack of need for monolingua-lism in the makers of fiction might come from such people as Ford MadoxFord, Nabakov, Manzoini, Beckett - not to mention old stalwarts such asChaucer, Dante, and Erasmus. And in the African context, what ofAquiano,Achebe, and Emecheta, to mention but a few?In a brief note, in my CaribbeanVoices,Volume II,1I point out how DerekWalcott, in his sonnet sequence Tales of the Islands, uses our West Indianexperience of a variety of language registers to symbolize one importantaspect of our living - especially our sense of living on the periphery of thegreat world, far from metropolitan centres. The sonnet which begins 'Poopa,da' was a fete It had free rum free whiskey' contains the now well-knownlines:

While he drunkquoting Shelley with 'EachGeneration has its angst but we has none'And wouldn't let a comma in edgewise.(Blackwriterchap one of them Oxbridge guys)2

1 Caribbean oices,d. byJohnJ. Figueroa,2 vols (London:Evans, I966-72), n, 225.2 Derek Walcott, Collected oems London: Faber, 1986), p. 22.


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JOHN J. FIGUEROANow dialect, creole, is often used in literature simply to give verisimilitude.When used for this purpose alone it can be, and often is, banal.Verisimilitude exercises a writer because of the problem of probabilityand plausibility for one thing, but it goes well beyond that. Literature and artalways pattern verisimilitude so as to 'say something'. But in this saying itmakes an object of contemplation, rather than a tool of action. And althoughmuch that is used to pattern that which 'says' something is collected fromreal life, it is removed from its own life situation and is no longer a slice of itsoriginal life. The making of images, condemned by many religions, isdangerous not on the Platonic non-truth grounds, but because it is so easy toforget that it is an image, and as an image it is made by some one or somepower.

The use of non-standard varieties as a part of texture, and structuring,rather than simply as a slice of life, can be significant and uniquelycommunicating. But to use them so as to make the social point that they canhave status has its limitations, and often defeats the status objective as incases when a peasant (or a black person) is made to speak in his/her naturalregister and produces only laughter, often because what is said has nomeaning deeper than a slice-of-life meaning, or than showing that the properregister is known by the author and is being displayed.Of course that use of language will always have connections with so-calledroots, ancient or modern. But the very term roots is an image oftenmasquerading as a realistic term, deeply connected with real life: in facthumans, and other animals, especially mammals, get their sustenancethrough their mouths, and are not rooted in the way in which trees have to berooted in order to exist.

Jan Mukarovsky raised some of these questions, in connection with use ofnon-standard varieties, some time ago in his StandardLanguage and PoeticLanguage.3There the main questions tend to be about foregrounding by theuse of dialect, and the possible loss of significant meaning in fiction when alanguage so develops that what was meant precisely as a variation, toindicate a feeling, or make a point, has since become standard, or haschanged in some way. The formulary 'In choirs and places where they sing'sounds ironical in modern English, but repetition of the same meaningthrough different semantic formulations used to be the standard form ofemphasis in early English. Hence your passport is likely to have a requestthat you should be allowed to pass 'without let or hindrance'.

Foregrounding is part of creating texture in poetry; creating texture is partof creating meaning within the limited space allowed to a poet in, say asonnet of a quatrain. Limitation of space is often a forceful advantagebecause it makes concentration and concision of language necessary, in3 Trans. by Paul L. Garvin in A PragueSchoolReader Prague, I932; repr. Georgetown: GeorgetownUniversity Press, I964).

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Creolen Literatureliterature texture is part of meaning, or is meaning itself, due to whatemanates from juxtaposition. Consider these lines from Derek Walcott's TheSaddhuof Couva, n which the old wise man, originally an indentured labourerfrom India, is contemplating the difference in mores between the old timesand the new, between Trinidad his new country, in which he has become avillage Counsellor, and India to which he is too old to return; he thinks tohimself:

Playing the Elder. There are no more Elders.Is only old people.4'There are no more Elders' is as standard as can be. 'Is only old people' ispure Trinidadian. Put them together, in the same mouth, and a meaning ismade palpable - a meaning difficult to get in any other way than bycreating that certain kind of texture, by using together the standard andcreole varieties of a particular language, with all the implications of thetensions between the intimate and the formal, the old and the new, thesynchronic and the diachronic.Before proceeding further, two important memoranda: literature is con-cerned with contemplation; it is not mainly instrumental. Secondly, litera-ture is an imitation of life, not a slice of it. It is something made andfashioned, and it is enjoyed, appreciated, and communicated with, as animitation, as fiction, not as life itself. This does not mean that fiction is notintimately connected with, and involved in, the community from which itcomes, but it is an image of the community, not as some say, as seen in amirror, but an unautomatic image made, fashioned by some person orpersons in a partly conscious process of work, of making. (Jt6rlois the Greekword, from which our word poetryoriginates, indicates first of all the act ofmaking.)The difference between a slice-of-life approach and the reflection of, andon, life approach, is well illustrated by the Paolo and Francesca episode inDante's Commedia.If modern television were dealing with the matter wewould simply have to see the couple rolling around in the bed, or on thechaise longue (Mrs Campbell, please note), if not actually coupling. That ispartly because television is afraid of having anything to communicate aboutthe consequences of, say, sexuality and adultery. It is more concerned withviewing statistics, and therefore with titivating us by showing graphicallywhat can go on in bed. Very often the very graphic nature of the portraitureblinds us to any patterning of meaning in the episode.Dante's way was so different. He shows the two young people, Paolo andFrancesca da Rimini, reading about Guinevere together, makes it clear that'their eyes have met', and simply has Francesca say:

4 Collectedoems,p. 372.

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JOHN J. FIGUEROAhe who will never be separatedfromme,kissed me, on my lips, all trembling, [...]that day we read no farther.

But there was more to it than that, for we meet them not on their couch ofpleasure, but in one of the rings of Hell - 'he [...] will never be separatedfromme'. For 'one thing with Hell, at least it organise', as Derek Walcott hasSpoiler the Calypsonian say.5 And, of course, Walcott is the master of the useof varieties, both of discourse and dialects to make meanings for pleasurableand insightful contemplation:One thing with hell, at least it organisein soaring circles, when any man dies

he must pass through them first, that is the style,Jesus was down here fora little while. (p. 438)For me one of the marks of genius in Walcott was his very early willingnessto draw on all aspects of his cultural heritage. This has caused some, whomRex Nettleford designates as 'blackists', to dismiss him as being Eurocentric.But he was the first among us West Indian writers born in the early twentieth

century who was not afraid of mixed categories. He was the first significantAnglophone poet to be willing to mix meaningfully greatly differing varietiesand registers of language.Claude McKay - under the influence of a 'dreadful European' - firstmade his mark in ConstabBallads (19 I 2), written entirely in Jamaica creole.His next collection, published in the USA, was in as standard an English asone could find. He did not again write poetry in the common tongue of

Jamaica, although he used it in his novels. And he certainly did not ever mixthe varieties in his mature poetry.Evan Jones, in the late I940S, partly on a wager and a challenge fromNeville Dawes, did mix the varieties, but mostly from the point of view ofachieving verisimilitude - of letting the Banana Man speak in an authenticvoice. He probably came nearest to achieving more than verisimilitude inTheLamentof theBanana Man, but the varieties are fairly close together:

My yoke is easy, my burden is light,I know a place I can go to any night.Dis place Englan' I'm not complainin',If it col', it col', if it rainin', it rainin'.6But he hardly ever made a special meaning by doing so, or set a tone asWalcott has done with the weaving together of: 'Playing the Elder. There areno more Elders. I Is only old people.' Edward Kamau Brathwaite was laterto expand the range of Caribbean language as it is used in poetry; but his

5 'The Spoiler's Return', Collectedoems,p. 432.6 Caribbean oices, , p. 80.

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Creolen Literaturecontribution in this respect would need a separate long article, and camesome time after McKay.Let me open up further this exploration by returning to Spoiler theCalypsonian. I purposely put it this way to show how easy it is to forget therole of the author in fiction, and oddly enough, the role of language. Weforget at our peril that what we read or hear in fiction has been made by someone, and expresses his/her patterning of experience. (Further, this is all donein language, a fact which many experts in both Linguistics and Literaturehave tried to dodge for years. Fortunately things are now changing.)In the passage quoted above 'One thing with Hell, at least it organise',Walcott puts words into the mouth of Spoiler, the Calypsonian, and placeshim in a certain fictional context. Spoiler has returned from Hell to have alook at Trinidad - Trinidad as Walcott, not without reason, sees it:Trinidad in which the biggest smuggler of them all is made chairman of theCommittee of Enquiry to investigate smuggling, as the poet puts it in themouth of the character Shabine: 'with himself as chairman investigatinghimself'. Spoiler is impressed with how little things have changed, except forthe worse, since he departed the scene:The shark, racingthe shadowv f the sharkacross clear coralrocks,does make them darkthat is my premonitionof the sceneof what passing over the Caribbean. (p. 433)But the nationalists, the excusers, the ones who are likely to want one varietyof language only in their polity - they must have a voice:all you go bawl out, 'Spoils, things ain't so bad'.This ain't the DarkAge, isjust Trinidad,is human nature, Spoiler,afterall,it ain't big genocide, isjust bohbohl. (p. 434)It is at the end of all this that Spoiler is made to say, in the face of theunbelievable confusion and layering that is Trinidad - a state of affairs thathas to be communicated, and appreciated, authentically, through varietiesof language as much as through individual images: 'One thing with Hell, atleast it organise'. And the stroke of genius in using organiseinstead of isorganised,is not only the obtaining of verisimilitude in Spoiler's voice, butrather in the expression and communication of, among other things, the realdisorganization of a place in which the colloquial organise s the best way toexpress the 'soaring circles, when any man dies | he must pass through themfirst, that is the style'. Notice the meaning that comes out of the contrast indiction and tone between the line starting 'One thing with Hell' and the oneending 'that is the style'. The deep meaning of fiction comes though textureand structure.Texture is achieved mainly by antithesis, like the woven patterns in acarpet. Antithesis can be achieved as in placing 'soaring circles' along with'at least it organise'. The texture can be indicated in the very kind of word

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JOHN J. FIGUEROAused, and the variety of registerfromwhich it comes. Let me cite an examplefrom the opening of Book ii of the Aeneid f Virgil - of that same Virgil whowas Dante's guide through the underworld as clearly as Dante is Walcott's.And I take this example not without malice aforethought, for it seemsnecessary in post-colonial and neo-colonial situations to remindthe brethrenconstantly that the world did not really begin in I963, nor 1838, nor 1775,nor in I668, nor even in Io66.'Conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant' - is the opening line of Book in.'Pius Aeneas' is about to tell Dido of the fall ofTroy- 'et pars magna fui'. Buthe is telling her at a state banquet, not on the initimate couch to whicheventually Dido's infatuation was to lead, as also to her desertion by him, andto her subsequent suicide. 'All in silence intently wait to hear' what thiswanderer has to tell them. And so Virgil starts with the word conticuere hich indaily speech would have been conticuerunt.n this way, in the very first word ofthis book he signals complicatedly about the whole formality and fatality ofthe situation. He has textured his verse in a certain way, and not only because,as those who do not write verse are likely to think, conticueremight be moreeasily fitted into the prosody of the poem. What we have here is the use of the'upper' register to give a meaning, just as in Walcott we have seen, onoccasion, the introduction of the 'lower' variety to say something not easilysaid in any other way. And as for texturing and patterning, note that two bookslater when Aeneas has finished the tale of the sacking ofTroy, Virgil's final linebegins: 'Conticuit'. They had all been silent when he started, he now fallssilent, after his gruelling tale. ('Et pars magna fui'). Conticuere,which couldhave been the more colloquial conticuerunt,as become conticuit.And so in thestructure of his tale he clearly marks the beginning and the end of a mostimportant episode by variations on a word, and one of those variations alsosets the tone of something that is starting on the level of the State, and of Troyto Carthage - with the founding of Rome always in the background. It startsthat way but it is to end in personal tragedy. Conticuereor conticuerunt hichbecomes conticuit 'he holds his peace') foreshadows the fact that he is going toremain silent when she expects him to speak of his love, and to act upon it.Not only Aeneas travelled far from home, from Troy to Carthage; so alsodid the 'guy', from St Lucia to Oxbridge. So that in his mouth the expected'we have none' - with respect to angst - became 'we has none'. The tinyodyssey of'the Oxbridge guy' has been no less disturbing to him than thedynastic happenings, of which Aeneas was a great part, were to him. And allthis is done in language, but not only with the ostensive, semantic aspects oflanguage. And it is done through a certain kind of texturing which can, in thehands of a real artist, include the juxtaposition of various registers of alanguage, and various varieties within that language, and the variations onthe suprasegmental aspects of language.Note in the following extract from Walcott's Omeros,not only the vulgar'Who the hell is that?' taken in contrast to homage, and not only zero copula

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Creole n Literaturein 'She? She too proud ', but also the special West Indian intonation withwhich this dismissive remark by a 'carry down artist' must be said:I felt like standing in homage to a beautythat left like a ship, widening eyes in its wake'Who the hell is that?' a tourist near my tableasked a waitress.The waitress said, 'She? She too proud '7

Just as some paintings open for us a window on to the world, take usoutside as it were (they were never wrong about suffering, the Old Masters),and some bring the world into us; so a writer of a sonnet with but fourteenlines can open the window and take us outside, or bring the wide world, orthe patterned garden, into our small room- even if, as a result, we find thefragrance hurts. The poet has only language to do all this, and if he is wise henurtures the varieties he knows, and he fears not to use the whole of hisrepertoire. And he will resist very strongly those who tell him that in theinterest of national solidarity or, God help us, his roots, he must restricthimself to one variety alone- preferably that which has not been defiled byformal education.Conticui.It is now time for me to hold my peace.

7 Derek Walcott, OmerosLondon: Faber, I990), p. 24.

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creole in literature- beyond versimilitude- texture and varieties- derek waclott.- john j. figueroa

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