beginning midsummer

INTRODUCTION

How many different ways are there for a book to begin?

What does it actually begin with, and when had it really been started? Where does it start? You may suggest that it starts on the first page, but this is usually just a bare sheet... or does a book commence at the first page with roman numbering? Maybe the numbering should rather be arabic, to make a proper start, since what was numbered with roman numbers was only the preface and the acknowledgements and the table of contents. It could be the epigraph, serving as a catapult for the story to begin in the reader's consciousness, or possibly, the dedication does so by initiating a solemn consecration of four hundred pages. Is it the first sentence or the first paragraph or the first chapter which is taking the first step in a chain of writing or reading activities? Does the book begin when it is started to be read? This might mean that it begins with the extracts from reviews on its back, or with a brief description of the author's career, or, in short, with this conceptual anachronism which suggests that a thing first and primarily exists when it is being perceived, and its coming into existence is an entirely different question. The starting point of a book is perhaps the same as the atmosphere which the first few descriptive words or sentences imprint onto the reader's mind. Or is the first mark in the life of a book its being printed? Is it the manuscript, or is it what the author conceives and invents in his or her mind before sitting down and writing the very text?

Matters are different if the beginning we are talking about focusses on the text, the book, the act of composition and the ideas involved which may lead to its creation, or the act of writing.

This paper is concerned with the writer's  point of view and his or her vision of the unfolding text. It considers the effort it takes until the author is capable of actually writing down a text. It centres on midsummer, a cycle of poems written by Derek Walcott, published in 1984.

midsummer is the poet's continual observation of how the linguistic-poetical conception of things is related to the way in which the art of painting has a hold on them. It verbalizes the brooding of a midsummer heat in the tropics and disentangles the spell of an enchanting tropical vegetation and animal wildlife into words. It throws reflective shadows onto the shape of the beloved or the friend on memories and visions of the Caribbean sea, of Caribbean life.

The theme of the text of midsummer, however, is the theme of a beginning. It may be too obvious to observe that beginning with a text means using language just as using language means to start upon a text. Language, in this context, is the link between thought and action, between thinking about how and when to begin with the text and actually set about writing it. Beginning with the composition of a text enhances the significance of language in a particular way.

The text of midsummer inspires the critic to consider more than one type of beginning. The one-dimensional type with its axis of succession, temporal as well as spatial, suggests that the sequence of the 54 poems has to start with a chosen one and it actually starts with poem I as the first small entity of writing to be seen when the reader opens the booklet and turns the leaves until the first piece of writing appears. The textual commencement is two-dimensional since the booklet in its wholesomeness is a whole from which fragments - the poems - can be singled out: midsummer's pages with a poem on each page, scattered on the floor, resemble the archipelago of islands over which the person of the author arrives in an aircraft (poem I). This mirrors the poet's getting into and over his own writing, his appearance upon his own text. Chapter 2 is a meditation on these given constellations, and chapter 3 inquires deeper into the third type of beginning: the one which re-defines something that has been there before but that no observer has ever articulated before. This kind of initiation through language implies the redefining force that gives a word to the Word; it is the most unspectacular function of language to be

spluttering out

that what it discovers was always there to be known.

(poem XII)

Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Towards the end of his Nobel Lecture The Antilles he points to the simplicity of "[a] basic stone church in a thick valley outside Soufrière, the hills almost shoving the houses around into a brown river, a sunlight that looks oily on the leaves, a backward place, unimportant, and one now being corrupted into significance by this prose." The intention of this paper is not to provide space for a discussion of the question of whether it is only prose that is corrupting things into significance, or whether poetry alone is capable of respecting the silent dignity of things described with words, just because "stanzas that might contain the light of the hill on an island blest by obscurity, [are] cherishing ... insignificance". Walcott, with much delicate insight, calls this corruption through language an epiphany. Chapter 2 is concerned, on the one hand, with this basic kind of beginning, which means the poet's struggle to create his own language as initiating a mode of personal speech within the larger frame of an already existing language. On the other, it enquires into the psychological dimensions of authority. - Chapter 1 owes much to Edward W. Said's brilliant study Beginnings, Intention and Method. It outlines a rather theoretical reflection on the nature of first steps and illustrates the mechanisms within a perceiving mind leading to an output of literary realness.

Speaking of beginnings, the question might arise in which way beginnings and origins can be viewed as having divergent features. The distinction between an origin and a beginning emerges poignantly in directing one's vision, both historically and spatially. Essential manifestations, be it human beings, pieces of writing or pears hanging on a tree, looking out for their origin, are actually looking back. There is the question of which place I come from, the question of an emerging cultural, critical and vegetative backdrop, the question of what it is the ground which I stand on and the bough which I hang on consist of. There is another feature to the notion of origin, one that is, according to Edward Said, divine, mythical and privileged (1). It is divine in the sense that human creativity, skills and craft can not interfere with it. An origin is mythical, because there is no precise data as to its temporal orientation nor any reliable information about its historical context and truth value. And then it is privileged in the sense that it is not accessible to rational control.

Contemplating its beginning, a being stands still; self-conscious though it may be, its gaze sinks into nowhere. Meditating on a creative beginning, however, it lifts its eyes to what lies ahead, focussing it with intent. The former type of beginning Said terms "intransitive": the beginning has no other sense than that of being the first event in an incontingent succession of events: "In attempting to push further and further back to what is only a beginning, a point that is stripped of every use but its categorization in the mind as beginning, one is caught in a tautological circuit of beginnings about to begin"(2). The third chapter of this essay, however, suggests that this intransitive kind of beginning can have most creative features, and that it may be linked to its transitive counterpart rather than be separated from it. – The latter type, then, Said calls "transitive". It occurs when experience and definition depart from a consciously chosen point to set out into "a field of rational activity" which is an area "disposed, or laid out, not by calendars but according to structures ordered internally by rules, sets, impersonal groupings"(3). A brief discussion of these internal structures will also take place in the first chapter.

 Beginnings are instances of human activity. Beginning midsummer occurred when flying and writing happened to be congruent activities.

The question of beginning raises the question of how a task as a whole can be started with. Arriving upon the archipelago of the Antilles, the poet of midsummer really first sees just a single island. It is one of those islands Walcott calls "Fragments of Epic Memory", which is the subtitle of his Nobel Lecture. If the text of the booklet midsummer is considered as a whole - which it is if we accept that we hold a whole book in our hands, slim as it may be - the individual poem must be seen as an island: and the poet is looking down on it. "Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main"(4), the main land being the bright motley pool of languages which are spoken and written in the Antilles. In this context the poetry of midsummer can be looked upon as a fragment through which there is an entry to the text as a whole.