Essay: On Looking Back To Envision the Future

by Bernard M.W. Knox

Modern readers confronted with a book title that reads Backing into the Future may well come to the conclusion that it is a reference to the amusing film produced in 1985 called Back to the Future. But in fact the source of the title is much older. The phrase is based on a number of expressions found in ancient Greek literary texts: the chorus's description of its bewilderment in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, for example -- "not seeing what is here nor what is behind" -- or the characterization of an older man in Homer's Odyssey as "the only one who sees what is in front and what is behind." The natural reaction of the modern reader is to understand the first of these expressions as "not seeing the present nor the past," and the second as "who sees the future and the past." But the Greek word opiso, which means literally "behind" or "back," refers not to the past but to the future. The early Greek imagination envisaged the past and the present as in front of us -- we can see them. The future, invisible, is behind us. Only a few very wise men can see what is behind them; some of these men, like the blind prophet Tiresias, have been given this privilege by the gods. The rest of us, though we have our eyes, are walking blind, backward into the future.

Paradoxical though it may sound to the modern ear, this image of our journey through time may be truer to reality than the medieval and modern feeling that we face the future as we make our way forward into it. The Christian Church from its beginnings and all through the Middle Ages waited with unshaken faith for the Second Coming of Christ; as the year 999 drew to its close, Western Europeans, some in panic fear and others in joyful anticipation, looked forward to the beginning of the thousandth year since the birth of Christ, the year that would see the end of this world and the establishment of the kingdom of God. In later centuries, ushered in by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the idea of human progress generated a host of new visions of the future. The human race would still look forward, but its eyes would be set not on the Last Judgment but on utopian dreams of a perfect society on this earth -- the stateless, creative liberty of the Anarchists, the universal prosperity that would be created by the uninhibited free play of the market, the classless society that would succeed the dictatorship of the proletariat as the state withered away, and many another dream that turned out to be a delusion and in some cases a disaster.

These modern futuramas have their irreconcilable differences, but they have one thing in common: They all resolutely reject the past. "History," said one of the great builders of modern industrial progress, "is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition." Today our literary curriculum is under attack by educational reformers who, though expressing themselves in language more arcane than the plain speech of Henry Ford, are planning to abolish the cultural tradition on which the West's sense of its unity and identity is founded. They propose, in the name of multiculturalism, feminism and political correctness, to replace such patriarchal and racist texts as Homer, the Bible, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe and Flaubert with works that will presumably direct the eyes of the young forward to the new world of universal sister- and brotherhood.

Such a total and sudden abolition of cultural traditions that link the present to the past is not without historical precedent. Violent cultural and social change, inspired by new ideologies, has more than once been imposed on a people by revolutionary government. The results have not been impressive. Most of the cultural innovations are eventually, sometimes quickly, discarded, and sometimes the experiment ends in a collapse into chaos. The visionaries of the French Revolution, for example, abolished the Catholic religion, replacing it with the worship of the Supreme Being. They changed the names of the months; in I793 the winter season consisted of Nivose, Pluviose, and Ventose -- Snowy, Rainy, and Windy. They abolished all aristocratic titles -- Duc, Comte, Vicomte, Marquis -- and even changed the form of salutation between equals -- Monsieur and Madame were replaced by Citoyen and Citoyenne. And they replaced ancestral weights and measures with the metric system. Of all these radical innovations, the metric system was the only one that lasted more than a few years. For it, and for whatever benefits the Revolution may have brought the French people, they had to pay a disproportionately high price in the blood of their sons as a Corsican military dictator plunged Europe into more than a decade of war.

Many years later, the Russian Bolsheviks, at enormous cost in human life and suffering, imposed on the inhabitants of one sixth of the earth's surface a system designed to substitute for what Marx called "the cash nexus between man and man," the bond of comradeship in the struggle to create the classless society. Their Brave New World has collapsed in what threatens to become chaos as the state system of production and distribution withers away, as the Orthodox Church begins to reclaim its hold on the Russian soul, St. Petersburg reassumes its traditional name and the separate nations the czars had welded into an empire reclaim their independence.

The ambitions of our academic radicals are of course not comparable in scale with those of the revolutionaries who created modern France and have come close to destroying modern Russia. They envisage not a social revolution (though their phraseology abounds with nostalgic echoes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) but a cultural revolution -- or rather, since from their academic positions of vantage they aim to impose change from above, a cultural coup d'etat. But if they should succeed, they may do just as much damage in the cultural sphere as the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks did in the political.

A society that turns its back on its past, abolishes its traditions and tries to replace them overnight with newfangled substitutes geared to a new ideology, is headed, history seems to suggest, for catastrophe. On the other hand, societies and cultures so bound by tradition that they resist gradual adjustment to new circumstances and ideas, that look resolutely backward to the past as an inviolable, even sacred, pattern, are bound for either stagnation or revolution, or both in turn. A cultural tradition must not be allowed to ossify, to become an oppressive orthodoxy. It must be continually renewed and expanded to include new masterpieces, embrace new aspirations, new visions of the human condition. But renewal, in the words of one of the great innovators of modern music, Igor Stravinsky, "is only fruitful when it goes hand in hand with tradition."

For an example of such a renewal of tradition, one has only to look at Derek Walcott's magnificent poem Omeros. In this masterpiece, the only epic poem in English that will stand comparison with Milton's Paradise Lost, Walcott has done for the inhabitants of his birthplace, the small island of St. Lucia in the Antilles, what Joyce did for his fellow Dubliners in Ulysses. Walcott's characters, black fishermen in the village of Gros Islet, reenact the duel of Hector and Achilles, while his black Helen casts her spell not only on these two but also on the British ex-officer Major Plunkett, whose namesake, Midshipman Plunkett, was killed in 1782 in the naval battle off St. Lucia that assured England's possession of the island for the next 150 years. Achille (the native language is a French patois) is blown in a dream Odyssey clear across the Atlantic to meet his ancestor in West Africa. Walcott himself, who first heard the modern Greek name of Homer -- Omeros -- from "a voice/ that hummed in the vase of a girl's throat," appears in the poem and eventually meets Homer, a blind man from the village known as Seven Seas.

Walcott, a native of the island, lives abroad in Boston, has traveled widely in Europe and returns to the island to visit his mother, a widow living in a home for the aged. He too is fascinated by Helen, of whom he says: "Sometimes the gods will hallow / all of a race's beauty in a single face." His first sight of her is of

a woman with a madras head-tie,
but the head proud, although it was looking for work.
I felt like standing in homage to a beauty 

that left, like a ship, widening eyes in its wake.
"Who the hell is that?" a tourist near my table 
asked a waitress. The waitress said, "She?  She too proud!" 

As the carved lids of the unimaginable ebony mask
unwrapped from its cotton-wool cloud,
the waitress sneered, "Helen." And all the rest followed.

All these characters come fully and movingly to life in Walcott's hands; black and white are treated with equal understanding and sympathy as they go their complicated ways. This does not, however, look at first glance like material that calls for Walcott's evocation of his great predecessor, or the epic scale of the poem between eight and nine thousand lines. Yet in his fluent tercets, linked by a dazzling play of rhyme, half rhyme and assonance, the scene expands, as in the Odyssey, to the farthest reaches of the known world, and Homer's Odyssey is omnipresent, most memorably in the narrator's final interview with Omeros, in which he confesses that he has never read the Odyssey, "Not all the way through."

Then there was the silence any injured author 
knows, broken by the outcry of a frigate-bird, 
as we both stared at the blue dividing water, 

and in that gulf, I muttered, "I have always heard 
your voice in that sea, master, it was the same song 
of the desert shaman, and when I was a boy 

your name was as wide as a bay, as I walked along 
the curled brow of the surf; the word Homer" meant joy, 
joy in battle, in work, in death, then the numbered peace 

of the surf's benedictions, it rose in the cedars, 
in the lauriers-cannelles, pages of rustling trees. 
Master, I was the freshest of your readers." 

And so he is. He has appropriated the Homeric tradition to assert the dignity of his black villagers and to give depth and resonance to his modern themes -- the "afterglow of empire," the replacement of colonial exploitation by a native version ("Ireland shall have her freedom," Yeats wrote, "and you still break stone"), the displacement of peoples -- the Aruac Indians dispossessed by French colonists and their African slaves, his own displacement as a black poet living in Boston. Like Joyce (who also appears in the poem), Walcott has expanded and renewed the tradition; he looks back at the past to illuminate the present and give form to his brooding on the future.

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