 | | | term-navigates the Caribbean with judgments and intentions which are like those of Columbus; that is, it lands scientists, investors and technologists (the new discoverers), who come to apply the dogmas and methods that have served them well where they came from, and who can't see that these refer only to realities back home. ("The Repeating Island," NewEnglandReviewandBreadLoafQuarterly 7, no. 4 [1985]) |
| The sting grew more painful as we sought to assemble contributions in our usual manner, for our categories of genre, of mode, and even of value increasingly showed their poverty. "Category" itself seemed an irrelevant term in light of the workFrancophone, Anglophone, Hispanophonethat kept arriving. The experience, however, was educational if alarming (or educational because alarming), I hope not only for us but also for the outsized majority of North Americans who share in our innocence. May SeaofLentils continue that instructive process. |
| Consider, for instance, the notion of "narrative." It is at best a volatile thing in Sr. Bentez's extraordinary work, and this is not simply a matter of the novel's multiple points of view. Yes, there are five discrete perspectives in SeaofLentils, but even so simple an assertion is misleading, since in each tale the very presumption of discreteness is a sham, since any narrow perspective seems to "kill" its progenitor, just as Antn Babtista's natural son, Miguel, at length murders his father. It is less accurate to say that singular point of view is shattered than that it is washed away. More even than the blood that flows on so many of its pages, SeaofLentils is liquid. |
| Thus, for further example, those of us trained in European modes of judgment and observation may be prepared to call SeaofLentils a historical novel. But how can we accurately understand "history" here by means of our traditional premises? Bentez's fiction does consider, say, the struggle between an essentially medieval Spanish feudalism and an emergent mercantile caste; all its main figures are European; and yet the novel is written in that fluid manner I just suggested. It is a Third World work, the emblem of an Antillean author, and thus it persistently erodes the linear narrative of our historiography, which |
|
