The Anti-Functional Creativity: Obsolete Objects in “The Castaway”

Abstract

In Derek Walcott’s “The Castaway,” the ambiguous images and isolated castaway evoke the sordid colonial memory and its aftermath of the Caribbean cultural predicament, while, in poetic creation, they also elicit a sense of creative vitality. The interreaction between the negative content and the positive effect is activated, intriguingly, right by those images—sandflies, feces, entrails, decaying objects, etc., whose meanings are often degraded since their disvalued representations in the tangible world. Francesco Orlando once discusses functionally repressed physical things, basically capitalistic-evaluate, as “obsolete objects”, and proposes that these objects can achieve an anti-functional return in literature. This suggests the disvalued images can be excited artistically by their ambivalences. Based on Orlando’s discussion, this paper focuses on the ambiguous images, proposing that these “obsolete objects” subvert the pervasive negation, through their multiple connotations and the intertextuality in Walcott’s works. Besides the postcolonial echo of self-help communicated by the poet’s appropriation of Robinson Crusoe, it is these images replace the predicament presented in the poem with the artistic newness of natural self-sufficiency. This also raises a reflection on utilitarian and anthropocentric ideas of the highly commodified and functional today.