Abstract
The chapter reads Merwin’s achievement in The Folding Cliffs against the etiolated literary epic tradition of the late twentieth century, on the one hand, and the critical framing of epic as the genre of imperialistic triumph of the victors in war in such influential accounts as David Quint’s Epic and Empire, on the other. Restoring the complexities of oral tradition with the full theoretical sophistication of complex documentary techniques reminiscent of W.G. Sebald’s fiction, Merwin draws elegiac attention to the dignity and heroism of indigenous Hawaiian culture even as he elegizes the ecosystems in which it thrived. Merwin’s poem therefore extends Pound’s maxim that epic in the modern era must be “a poem including history” into a poem including ecohistory as a part of his larger protest against the exploitation and expropriation of Hawaiian resources through American imperialism and evangelistic exceptionalism. Merwin’s epic of dispossession reinvents the epic tradition and thereby challenges literary-historical assumptions about the nature of American culture, its local habitation and name, and the grand narratives it employs to justify its destructive attitudes toward aboriginal cultures, the biosphere, and even the literary forebears it misappropriates from Homer onward.
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Notes
- 1.
James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover (New York: Knopf, 1992). Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (New York: Vintage, 1998).
- 2.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 13.377–80 (1805 version).
- 3.
M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans., Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 35.
- 4.
Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quentin Hoare (London: Verso, 1996), 5.
- 5.
Paul Innes, Epic (London: Routledge, 2013), 156.
- 6.
C.S. Lewis, A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 38.
- 7.
David Quint, Epic and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 40–41.
- 8.
Quint, Epic and Empire, 368.
- 9.
Moretti, Modern Epic, 48.
- 10.
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 111.
- 11.
Another more commonly analyzed point of resistance to colonial imperatives from within the genre of contemporary epic is Derek Walcott’s Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990). In his complex and now classic interpretation of the hybridity of Walcott’s epic, Jahan Ramazani, “The Wound of Postcolonial History: Derek Walcott’s Omeros,” The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 49–71, has persuasively interpreted the “polysemous and mutiparented trope” at the heart of Walcott’s “poetics of affliction.” Arguably, in Walcott’s diagnosis of the transhistorical wound of empire, and in its allegorical projection of the eighteenth-century territorial war in the Battle of the Saints for the island onto the sexualized and objectified body of the Plunketts’ former servant Helen, the poem reinscribes a patriarchal, colonizing gaze in its problematic gender politics. The dual narrative argument of identification with Homer’s poetry and then disavowal of the connection as a dynamic of reception works to represent postcolonial life in St. Lucia against the recolonizing potential of complicit reception, argues Helen Kaufmann, “Decolonizing the Postcolonial Colonizers: Helen in Derek Walcott’s Omeros,” in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 192–203.
- 12.
H.L. Hix, “Prolegomena to Any Future Reading of The Folding Cliffs,” in Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W.S. Merwin, ed. Jonathan Weinert and Kevin Prufer (Seattle: WordFarm, 2012), 101–12 (quotation at 112).
- 13.
Françoise Palleau-Papin, “W.S. Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs: Epic Poetry as Postcolonial Revision,” Revue Française d’ Études Américanes 147.2 (2016): 41 and 42.
- 14.
David Mason, “W.S. Merwin, American Proteus,” Hudson Review 66.3 (2013): 592.
- 15.
Michael Thurston, “The Substance of the Island: W.S. Merwin’s Lyrical Epic,” The Kenyon Review, new series, 22.3/4 (2000): 181 and 184.
- 16.
Ezra Pound, “Date Line,” in Literary Essays, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 86.
- 17.
All quotations of Merwin’s poetry, unless otherwise noted, are taken from W.S. Merwin, Collected Poems, ed. J.D. McClatchy, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 2013), and cited in text by volume and page number. For examples of the traditional technique of epic synecdoche, compare Homer, Iliad, 22.410ff; Virgil, Aeneid, 4.667-71; Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, 12.100. For an earlier formulation of this idea, see my “Merwin’s Ecopoetic Conservancy,” reprinted in this volume.
- 18.
Homer, Iliad, trans. Peter Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 6.403, 22.410–11.
- 19.
On the Battle of Thermopylae, see Herodotus, Histories, 7.207–239.
- 20.
Why? Merwin may well have Dante’s Inferno in mind here. With its perfectly infernal imperfection of 34 Cantos—since hell cannot reflect the numerical perfection of the other Canticles of 33 Cantos—Dante includes the introduction to the Commedia to represent the distorting influence of hell on the poem’s trinitarian design as a whole.
- 21.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet V, trans. and ed. Benjamin R. Foster, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), 47. For more context, see further the section on Gilgamesh in K. Jan Oosthoek, “The Role of Wood in World History,” Environmental History Resources: https://www.eh-resources.org/the-role-of-wood-in-world-history/
- 22.
For the genesis and structure of the idea of totality and its importance in Adorno’s thought more broadly, see Dimitri Vouros, “Hegel, ‘Totality,’ and ‘Abstract Universality’ in the Philosophy of Theodor Adorno,” Parrhesia 21 (2014): 174–86.
- 23.
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 146.
- 24.
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 143.
- 25.
C.D. Wright, “Reading ‘The Folding Cliffs,” Many Mountains Moving 11 (2001): 169–74 (at 170).
- 26.
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; reprint: Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 326, 503, 507. Ironically, Hawaii was not a state when Burke used the relief map of the United States as his example.
- 27.
Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 123.
- 28.
In John Burt’s apt description, “Merwin wishes to root his story not merely in historical time but in geological time….[G]eological time and mythic time run together.” Burt, “W.S. Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs,” Raritan 19.3 (Winter 2000): 115-34 (at 128–29).
- 29.
The interview is available at:
https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/post/ws-merwin-home-garden-unknown#stream/0
- 30.
Mieke Bal, Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 8.
- 31.
Roy Osamu Kamada, Postcolonial Romanticisms: Landscape and the Possibilities of Inheritance (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 3. Unfortunately, Kamada does not discuss Merwin’s work in his otherwise admirable and important study.
- 32.
W.S. Merwin, “Forward,” Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. W.S. Merwin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), xix.
- 33.
W.S. Merwin, “Preface” (1993) to The Second Four Books of Poems, in Collected Poems, ed. McClatchy, 1:194.
- 34.
See W.S. Merwin, Summer Doorways: A Memoir (Emmeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005), 208–9, for the autobiographical anecdote about the blind bard in Portugal.
- 35.
Laurence Lieberman, “W.S. Merwin: Apotheosis of the Lepers,” American Poetry Review 41.2 (2012): 41.
- 36.
Burt, “W.S. Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs,” 123.
- 37.
Lieberman, “Apotheosis of the Lepers,” 44.
- 38.
See Helene P. Foley, “‘Reverse Similes’ and Sex Roles in the Odyssey,” Arethusa 11 (1978): 7–26.
- 39.
“Pele Raped,” in Mary Kawena Pukui and Alfons L. Korn, eds. and trans., The Echo of Our Song: Chants and Poems of the Hawaiians (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1973), 182. Quoted by Zhou Xiaojing, “‘Come Ye Not Without Song, Offering, Prayer’: Ecological Ethics in Hawi’ian Songs,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.1 (2009): 13.
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Festa, T. (2022). Merwin’s Epic of Dispossession. In: Langdell, C.C. (eds) Reading W.S. Merwin in a New Century. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13157-8_14
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