ABSTRACT
This chapter puts forward a reading of Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound. It aims to expand on the repertoire of topics already addressed in this study by looking at Walcott's engagement with a number of themes and issues not previously considered, at least not at length. In doing so, the chapter aims to deepen, expand upon, and further enrich our sense of the implications of nonlinear temporality in James Joyce and Walcott's writings. Walcott is, of course, well aware of the historical conditions under which the documents of the civilisation of the Old World were transmitted to the New. Walcott pictures himself accused of obscuring a brutal reality with a beautiful, deceptive surface. Walcott next singles out survival, in particular, as the primary reality attested to in Antillean culture. The world, Walcott readily acknowledges, ought to make the writing of poems "futile"; as in Omeros, the historical sense risks overwhelming the capacity for creativity.
