Post-colonial Epic and the Double-Narrative Strategy
后殖民史诗与双重化叙事策略

The epic as an imperial genre or the genre of the powerful has a long tradition in the Western literature since Homer.To Western literary critics the epic always means reminiscence of the great past and praises of the tribal/national heroes.With the arrival of post-imperial age,however,some post-colonial writers of multi-cultural,unconfirmed identities,who have long lived in a rootless situation,try to use the old narrative form of epic to represent their indigenous history and to identify themselves.Thus,Derek Walcott uses successfully a double-narrative strategy to create Omeros,his post-colonial epic,rich in connotation and multicultural color of the Anglophone-Caribbean area.The St.Lucia poet,on the one hand,digs into his childhood memory for initial scenes,upgrades his individual experiences and memories to a collective memory and transforms little stories into a grand narrative;on the other hand he exploits cultural sources from the Mediterranean Sea along with the Caribbean,borrowing images, plots and archetypes from the Western canon,such as the Homeric epics,the Bible and La Divina Comedia.These heterogeneous fragments are then knitted and woven together so elaborately that they form an intertextuality full of correlations,derivations,reflections and allusions.Under Walcott's pen commonplace local happenings go through a poetic transformation by means of such cultural codes as war,trauma,recollection and root-seeking,and are referred to analogous elements in the Western canon,thereby they are generalized,given historical significance and freed from parochial localism.Making use of the dominating power of speech and communication of the Western canon,Walcott utters a long depressed voice and makes it heard to the whole world,and rewriting and subverting the Western canon at the same time.The double-narrative strategy and the deconstruction of the Western canon also mean an active step toward dialogs between the ex-colonizer and the colonized,ex-oppressor and oppressed in the post-colonial age,which require equality,tolerance and mutual incorporation.It is by means of the double-narrative strategy that the poet-islander succeeds in building up a hybrid cultural identity with a broad outlook and in revealing the value of dialogic co-existence and cultural pluralism in the age of globalization.