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Article Excerpt
Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale is a postcolonial novel that talks back to a variety of earlier works, notably Mario de Andrade's Macunaima. This essay argues that a crucial difference between the two texts is their rather dissimilar attitudes toward the cultural and racial multiplicity embodied by the Amazonian trickster Macunaima.
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Pauline Melville's The Ventriloquist's Tale is a self-consciously postcolonial text. As one reads the 1997 novel, one cannot help but notice how the author is writing back to a variety of metropolitan pundits, from Darwin and Freud to Levi-Strauss and, most explicitly, Evelyn Waugh. However, there is one intertextual relationship that is more complicated, and usually ignored by critics--that with Mario de Andrade's Macunaima. The link between the two works is the Amazonian trickster who is the eponymous protagonist of Andrade's 1928 "rhapsody" and the narrator of (at least part of) Melville's novel. Yet, what an examination of the two texts also underscores is Melville's apparent ambivalence toward her mischievous narrator. Andrade's Macunaima is often seen as the symbol of the cultural and racial hybridity that ostensibly characterizes life in Brazil and South America in general. Or, less positively, he is the tragic reminder of the region's failure to accept its "harlequinate and multiple" identity (Haberly 144). Melville's novel, in contrast, suggests that the only way the Amerindian inhabitants of the Guyanese savannah will be able to survive as a distinct group is by isolating themselves from the outside world, including their black and East-Indian co-citizens from the coast. Indeed, as I will attempt to demonstrate in my comparative analysis of the two novels, the reason Melville's portrayal of Macunaima differs so markedly from Andrade's is that, ultimately, she does not seem to believe in the cultural and racial multiplicity embodied by her trickster.
The concept of race has become extremely volatile in the last few decades. Some scholars even deny that there is such a phenomenon as race, given that the "human genetic variability between the populations of Africa or Europe or Asia is not much greater than that within those populations" (Appiah, Father's 35). Contemporary thinkers like Kwame Anthony Appiah and Rainier Spencer see race as "our historical curse, our great confusion" (Spencer 126). While they accept that there are discernible differences among human groups that are genetically inherited, they are adamant that those traits do not reveal anything fundamental about an individual. As Appiah writes, "the truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us" (Father's 45). Since race has a social dimension, of course it may not be critical whether it is perceived as a biological entity or a cultural one. Nevertheless, one of the negative implications of the wide embrace of the "basic unreality" of race (Appiah, "Race" 277) is that it makes it extremely difficult to ponder the possibility of a mixed-race subjectivity, and thus to trace the unique challenges faced by people of mixed ancestry.
Jacques Audinet, for instance, has noted the paradox that, even though humans know they are "the fruit of multiple intermixings," they have a tendency "to deny their mixed origins" (54). Audinet also makes the acute observation that there are striking parallels between contemporary ideas on race and those promulgated by eighteenth-century intellectuals like Arthur de Gobineau and Cornelius de Pauw. As he quotes Michel Lalonde, "the two systems drive at the same conclusion, the non-existence of a durable filiation rooted in Mestizaje, through a genetic annulment kept alive two centuries later by linguistic silence" (80). Still, even among those scholars who insist that race has no reality beyond discourse, few deny that people from "separate geographic zones" have come in contact with each other and produced hybrid offspring (Audinet 9), who do not always identify with--or are not fully accepted by--either parent group. As Jonathan Brennan writes in his collection Mixed Race Literature, despite "the fragility, hostility, or vulnerability of racial terminology, the metaphor of race and mixed race is invoked and engaged by many mixed race writers" (6). Moreover, while there is a general acceptance of "hypodescent, a policy that assigns mixed race individuals to the race that has been saddled with the lowest social status" (2), the idea of race is often invoked against people of mixed ancestry. Feeling collectively threatened by a mixed-race subjectivity, members of non-dominant groups tend to categorize hybrids either as collaborators, "converts to the hostile and intruding culture," (Cook-Lynn 35) or as "confused, fractured, and therefore sick" (Spencer 132). This anxiety about racial mixing is evident in The Ventriloquist's Tale. Throughout her novel, Melville distances herself from one of her characters, a European anthropologist who believes in the purity of races and cultures. Yet, by the end, she creates the ineluctable impression that cultural and biological mingling poses a major danger to the people of the savannah.
The political impetus behind The Ventriloquist's Tale becomes apparent early in the text. One of the novel's central personages is an English literary scholar named Rosa Mendelson, who travels to Guyana to do research for a monograph she later tentatively entitles: "'Evelyn Waugh--a Post-colonial Perspective'" (351). Through Mendelson, Melville is able to reverse the power dynamics in one of Waugh's most celebrated narratives about Guyana, presented both in the short story "The Man who Liked Dickens" and in the novel A Handful of Dust (207-21). Inspired by a tour Waugh took in the 1930s of Brazil and what was then British Guiana (Ninety-Two Days), the episode concerns an Englishman who gets lost in the Amazon and is rescued by a mixed-race recluse. The recluse then holds the traveller hostage, forces him to read Dickens aloud, and prevents him from "getting back to civilization" ("Man" 129; Handful 216). In The Ventriloquist's Tale, Melville instead has Mendelson ascertain that it is Waugh who compels a local boy "to sit and listen to him reading out loud for hours" (49). Terrified at the thought of "having to stay in such a place for ever," Waugh concocts a fiction about the "'plight of a civilised man trapped amongst savages'" (289). Yet, even in such a revisionist fashion, the author's engagement with Waugh is limited. The London-based Melville, who is the daughter of a white English mother and a mixed-race Guyanese father (Melville, "Beyond" 739), seems less interested in undermining the stories Waugh tells about the South American country than in exploring the ones he ignores. She is especially drawn to incidents involving one of the Guyanese savannah's most prominent clans, the McKinnons, who bear more than a few resemblances to her own family (Waugh, "Eldorado" 596, Ninety-Two Days 59).
In her novel, Melville describes the McKinnons as "a big Amerindian family" but, as we learn, they are actually of mixed Amerindian and European heritage (47). They are all descended from a Scot named Alexander McKinnon and...
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