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Alter/natives: myth, translation and the native informant in Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 19; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360500196375

1470-1308

April Shemak,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements My thanks to Sangeeta Ray, Tanya Shields and Liz DeLoughrey who provided information and assistance. Notes 1. Retamar asserts, ‘Caliban is Shakespeare's anagram for “cannibal,” an expression that he had already used to mean “anthropophagus,” in the third part of Henry IV and in Othello and that comes in turn from the word carib.’ See Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Caliban: notes toward a discussion of culture in our America', In Edward Baker (trans.) Caliban and Other Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 6. 2. See Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (eds), Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 1999). 3. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives; Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (eds), Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Postmodernism (Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1990); Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993); and Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 4. Pauline Melville, The Ventriloquist's Tale (New York: Bloomsbury, 1997); hereafter cited by page number in the body of the text. 5. I am using the spelling of ‘Macunaima’ that appears in The Ventriloquist's Tale, except when I am referring to Andrade's text which incorporates an accent over the ‘i’ – ‘Macunaíma’. 6. See Paula Burnett, ‘“Where else to row, but backward?” Addressing Caribbean futures through re-visions of the past’, Ariel, 30 (January 1999). For an enlightening discussion of the novel's evocation of quantum theory, nineteenth-century sciences and the implications for postcolonial ecocriticism, see Elizabeth DeLoughrey's ‘Quantum landscapes: a “ventriloquism of spirit”’, forthcoming, Interventions, special issue on postcolonial ecocriticism, ed. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin. 7. Edwin Gentzler and Maria Tymoczko (eds), Translation and Power (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), p. xvi. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the body of the text. 8. Michael Cronin, ‘The Empire talks back’, in Gentzler and Tymoczko (eds), Translation and Power, p. 54. 9. Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: A History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. ix; hereafter cited parenthetically in the body of the text. 10. Chow, Writing Diaspora, p. 38; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 11. Doris Sommer, Proceed With Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 8; hereafter cited parenthetically in the body of the text. 12. Waugh's construction of native Amerindians in British Guiana and Brazil appears in A Handful of Dust (New York: Little Brown, 1934), and Ninety-Two Days (London: Methuen, 1991). For an analysis of Melville's response to Waugh, see Sarah Lawson Welsh, ‘Imposing narratives: European incursions and intertexts in Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale (1997)’, in Gerhard Stilz (ed.), Missions of Interdependence: Literary Directory (New York: Editions Rodopi, 2002), pp. 107–20. 13. Mário de Andrade, Macunaíma, trans. E.A. Goodland (New York: Random House, 1984); hereafter cited parenthetically in the body of the text. 14. Sérgio Luiz Prado Bellei, ‘Brazilian anthropophagy revisited’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (eds), Cannibalism and the Colonial World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 88; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. The essay elaborates on what is an extensive theoretical discourse around the idea of anthropophagy in Brazilian culture. See also Luís Madureira, ‘Lapses in taste: “Cannibal-tropicalist” cinema and the Brazilian aesthetic of underdevelopment’, in Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (eds), Cannibalism and the Colonial World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 110–125. 15. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, ‘Macunaíma: to be and not to be, that is the question’, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 4 (1999), p. 66; hereafter cited parenthetically in the body of the text. 16. For a discussion of racial discourses in Andrade's Macunaíma see Zita Nunes, ‘Anthropology and race in Brazilian modernism’, in Francis Barker et al. (eds), Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 115–25. 17. In Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), Roberto González Echevarría points out the centrality of anthropological discourses to Latin American narrative and their alignment of indigeneity with the nation. 18. In the 1926 Preface to Macunaíma, Andrade writes, ‘What undoubtedly interested me in Macunaíma was my ongoing preoccupation with working through and discovering all I can about the national identity of Brazilians. … The Brazilian has no character because he has neither a civilization of his own [civilização própria] nor a traditional consciousness’ (quoted in Luís Madureira, p. 113). 19. Brazilian anthropologist Gustavo Lins Ribeiro explains that Andrade based his rendering of Macunaima on a blending of myths from various Amerindian tribes and also relied heavily upon the writings of German geographer and ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg. He points out that ‘“Makunaima” could well have been collected as a myth in what was then a part of the British Empire’ (p. 69). See his ‘Macunaíma: to be and not to be, that is the question’, pp. 60–77. 20. See Peter Hulme, ‘Survival and invention: indigeneity in the Caribbean’, in Laura Garcia-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer (eds), Text and Nation: Cross-disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996), pp. 50–1. 21. Chow provides a reading of Walter Benjamin's ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ and expands Benjamin's theory to include not just art objects but human beings, which is particularly notable for analysing the native informant. See her Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 43–8. 22. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 9. 23. In ‘Quantum Landscapes: A Ventriloquism of Spirit’ (Forthcoming) Elizabeth DeLoughrey reads the 1919 solar eclipse as ‘a suspended moment of space-time that allows an examination of eclipses and incest, nature and science’. 24. Ribeiro notes an interesting point that comes out of Koch-Grünberg's research: ‘English missionaries translated the word for the Christian God as “Makunaima”’. See his ‘Macunaíma: To Be and Not to Be, That is the Question’, fn 9. 25. Previously Napier succumbs to the Macunaima myth when he hears his Amerindian guides tell their different tribal versions of the eclipse-incest myth which cause him to become sexually excited (pp. 193–5). 26. For the Amerindian communities of Guyana, the situation has grown more urgent as the Guyanese government, under the direction of the IMF and World Bank, has given mining and lumber companies virtually free reign to the interior. See Marcus Colchester, Guyana: Fragile Frontier (London: Latin America Bureau, 1996), p. 86. For further discussion of the problems in defining indigenous identity in the era of globalization, see Colin Perrin, ‘Approaching anxiety: the insistence of the postcolonial in the declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples’, in Eve Darian-Smith and Peter Fitzpatrick (eds), Laws of the Postcolonial (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 19–38. See also Jace Weaver, ‘Indigenousness and indigeneity’, in Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwartz (eds), Postcolonial Studies Reader (London: Blackwell, 2000). 27. Melville deals with this topic in an earlier short story, ‘The Parrot and Descartes’. See The Migration of Ghosts (London: Bloomsbury, 1998).