he reality with which the efforts character and scheme of action must cope before achieving narrative/lyrical standing. Second, Deleuze and Guattari say, "everything takes on a collective value" (17).
That is, the minor literature, which may be the product of a writer alien to both his marginalized population and the mainstream, will be (or can be) both representative and formative of its cultural type on one hand and on the other an idiosyncratic expression:
It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forget he means for another consciousness and another sensibility (Deleuze and Guattari 17).
Deleuze and Guattari formulate this situation in a way that emphasizes the writer's freedom of scope, but the collectivity of "enunciation" is inescapable. Thus, the practitioner of a minor literature, and the product itself, may function as synecdoche, or a personified figure of speech in which a part (in context, a poem, a novel written by someone from a marginalized population) is made to stand for the whole of the writer's nationalist/parochialist/indigenous consciousness.
These various dynamics are in the background of Derek Walcott's body of work in general and in Omeros in particular. Walcott was born in St. Lucia, formerly one of the colonial islands of the British West Indies until its independence in 1979, and the American Navy leased a base there beginning in 1940. In the 1950s, Walcott studied in the United States on a Rockefeller grant but moved out of the academic environment and into the world of nonmainstream New York theater in the 1960s, returning to St. Lucia to form a theater company and produce his own and other plays with a view toward broadening the arts base in the West Indies (Walcott 50...