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Main Narrative Mutations: Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature (Literary Criticism and Cultural..
Narrative Mutations: Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)Rudyard J. Alcocer
In this book, Rudyard Alcocer offers a theory of Caribbean narrative, accounting for the complex interactions between scientific and literary discourses while expanding the horizons of narrative studies in general.
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LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY Edited by William E.Cain Wellesley CollegeA ROUTLEDGE SERIES LITERARY CRITICISM AND CULTURAL THEORY WILLIAM E.CAIN, General Editor REVISED LIVES Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship William Pannapacker THE REAL NEGRO The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth-Century African American Literature Shelly Eversley LABOR PAINS Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott on Work and the Woman Question Carolyn R.Maibor NARRATIVE IN THE PROFESSIONAL AGE Transatlantic Readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Jennifer Cognard-Black FICTIONAL FEMINISM How American Bestsellers Affect the Movement for Women's Equality Kim Loudermilk THE COLONIZER ABROAD Island Representations in American Prose from Melville to London Christopher McBride THE METANARRATIVE OF SUSPICION IN LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA Sandra Baringer PROTEST AND THE BODY IN MELVILLE, Dos PASSOS, AND HURSTON Tom McGlamery THE ARCHITECTURE OF ADDRESS The Monument and Public Speech In American Poetry Jake Adam York THE SLAVE IN THE SWAMP Disrupting the Plantation Narrative William Tynes Cowan READING THE TEXT THAT ISN'T THERE Paranoia in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel Mike Davis RACIAL BLASPHEMIES Religious Irreverence and Race in American Literature iii Michael L.Cobb ETHICAL DIVERSIONS The Post-Holocaust Narratives of Pynchon, Abish, DeLillo, and Spiegelman Katalin Orbán POSTMODERN COUNTERNARRATIVES Irony and Audience in the Novels of Paul Auster, Don Delillo, Charles Johnson, and Tim O'Brien Christopher Donovan THE END OF THE MIND The Edge of the Intelligible in Hardy, Stevens, Larkin, Plath, and Glück DeSales Harrison AUTHORING THE SELF Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth Scott Hess NARRATIVE MUTATIONS Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature Rudyard J.Alcocer NARRATIVE MUTATIONS Discourses of Heredity and Caribbean Literature Rudyard J.Alcocer Routledge New York & London Published in 2005 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, a Division of T&F Informa. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. "To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk." All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alcocer, Rudyard J. Narrative mutations: discourses of heredity and Caribbean literature/Rudyard J. Alcocer. p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-97115-2 (alk. paper) 1. Caribbean fiction (Spanish)—History and criticism. 2. Caribbean fiction—History and criticism. 3. Heredity in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PQ7361.A43 2005 863.009′9729–dc22 2005019685 ISBN 0-203-50352-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-58089-3 (Adobe eReader Format) A la memoria de mi padre Rolando Alcocer Cetina, M.D. 1925–2002 Contents Acknowledgments Introduction viii 1 Chapter One Heredity and Discursivity: From Pre-History to the Plantation 16 Chapter Two Misce-gene-nation: Heredity and the Rise of Pluralism in Caribbean Narrative 40 Talking Flowers and Flowering People: Narrative, Plant Genetics, and Caribbean Identity 70 Chapter Four Bound Bodies: The Struggle in Caribbean Narrative Against Biological Determinism 98 Chapter Five Hybridity and Its Mysteries: Heredity, Intertextuality, and Cultural Identity in the Caribbean 132 Heredity, Narrative, and the Caribbean Diaspora 164 Notes 168 Bibliography 192 Index 201 Chapter Three Afterword Acknowledgments I could not have brought Narrative Mutations to this point without the untiring and invaluable aid of the following people, each of whom deserves here at least several paragraphs of commentary: Adriana Méndez Rodenas, Daniel Balderston, Susan Lawrence, Mary Lou Emery, Timothy J.Reiss, Scott Westrem, Sean Meehan, Prasenjit Gupta, Kelly Alcocer, and Jeanine Alcocer. Thank you all for your keen intellectual insights and editorial suggestions! The University of Iowa, particularly its Graduate College and its Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature, has been a generous source of support, as has Luther College, particularly its Department of Modern Languages & Literatures and its interdisciplinary program in the Humanities: Paideia. My hope is that I have been at least half as beneficial to my colleagues and students at these institutions as they have been to me. In the last few years, I have done my best to maintain a life outside of my teaching and scholarship. Several individuals have played important roles in this "life," and have given Jeanine and me their love and friendship, including Randal Affolder, Sean and Mary Meehan, Karen and Thomas Rietz, Joyce Berg. Lastly, in this study I have written—at times obliquely—about the family. I will write a bit more: I can't say enough about how supportive Jeanine's side of the family has been; fortunately we have been able to spend enough time in New York, Virginia, and Florida during the last few years for family to still feel like family. Needless to say, I send muchos besitos to my side of the family, especially Mami, Loli, Rudolph, Rolando, Isabel, and Kelly: the covers of this book could not contain the joy they bring. Last, though certainly not least (except perhaps in size), I would like to thank my baby daughter Carmen, whose first 3 months have been the most exciting in my life. Introduction In "Otra maldad de Pateco,"1 a remarkable short story by the Puerto Rican writer Ana Lydia Vega, the protagonist, José Clemente, is born with a black head and a white body. His body is divided, quite literally, into two clearly different pigmentations, which represent in their turn—in highly dichotomous fashion— the two major social poles on this island and—as it happens—in the remainder of the Caribbean: Blacks, who purportedly identify with an African ancestry and cultural traditions, and Whites, who identify with people and things European. Much has been written about Vega's story, but little about the strange transformation that lies at its heart. A figure with a black head on a white body? The image might strike some readers of the story as the stuff of fantasy, not unlike the satyrs and minotaurs of Greek mythology whose bodies were also divided in some unusual, even supernatural way. As was the case with his half-human, halfanimal predecessors, José Clemente and the story of how he eventually arrived at a single color ("which color will it be and how is this significant?," one might ask) are in many ways perplexing: certainly babies do not ever really appear thus complexioned, right? Furthermore, Puerto Rican (and Caribbean) society is not really so easily divided in half along color lines: its population is predominantly a product of generations of intermixing between people of European (mostly Spanish), African, and—to a lesser degree—indigenous descent, a process that was already well underway even during the colonial era during which "Otra maldad de Pateco" is set. What I find most compelling about this story and many others like it from the Caribbean is not necessarily whether they are "right" or "wrong," scientifically or historically accurate or not, in terms of the curious mutations or other physical attributes their characters may display upon birth, but rather that these stories are interested in or somehow informed by processes and ideas of heredity in the first place. Given the welcomed shift throughout the academy away from essentialist and biologically fixed understandings of "race," it is indeed a curiosity worth exploring that so many sophisticated (and even politically radical) narratives remain thus informed and interested. My aim in the pages that follow is to trace heredity as a guiding trope throughout much of Caribbean literature—particularly its fictional narratives—and to some extent throughout much of the Caribbean cultural arena. Although my focus is in 2 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS the Hispanic Caribbean (especially in Cuba and Puerto Rico), I also consider important fictional narratives from elsewhere in the Caribbean, particularly Dominica and Guadéloupe. Why establish a link between heredity2 and Caribbean narrative? In an entirely different (and distant) context, George Mallory famously justified his desire to climb Mt. Everest with the dictum, "Because it's there." As tempting as this path may be (his expeditions tragic failure notwithstanding), one cannot use Mallory's words as justification for the enterprise of this study. Is this so-called "link" between heredity and Caribbean narrative even "there" in the first place? If so, to what degree? Even if heredity does somehow seem to pervade this body of literature, even if the link can be made with some success, to what end do we make it? Broadly stated, exploring this relationship sheds light on many of the most pressing issues pertinent to Caribbean and literary studies. In terms of postcolonial theory (inasmuch as the Caribbean is sometimes described as a post- or neo-colonial region), for example, one might ask if the relationship between the once-colonized and the colonizer is similar to that between a child and a parent. Is the first ever free of the second or are the two inexorably linked? What does it take to render them asunder? In terms of narrative studies, the question becomes "How do narratives register and/or negotiate these tensions?" More broadly, what forces determine the paths narratives may take and how are these forces linked to other discourses in a given society? This study offers at least partial answers to these questions by way of arguing for the importance of discourses of heredity in Caribbean narrative. My basic contention is that Caribbean narratives are bound by many of the same processes that characterize these discourses, which are sometimes quite "fictional" themselves. Similarly, much of Caribbean narrative reveals a struggle on the part of writers to resist or overcome these binds. A fundamental concern of this study is to place Caribbean narratives within their cultural and historical contexts. This, however, should entail more than establishing a chronology but also analyzing these contexts in terms of the discourses and ideas that play dominant roles. Discourses related to heredity, including those on race but also, in some respects, those on agriculture, have received substantial attention in studies on the Caribbean,3 yet discourses of heredity (or hereditarian discourses)4 have received inadequate attention. This is particularly striking in that this narrative tradition is replete with both direct and indirect references to such discourses—references that are closely tied to the way Caribbean narratives negotiate and shape meaning. In fact, by focusing on discourses of heredity in Caribbean narrative, we gain additional insight not only into the roles of agriculture (especially the sugar plantation) and race throughout Caribbean narrative, but also into other issues that are central to the region and of no small importance elsewhere. While I argue for the importance of discourses of heredity in the Caribbean, my intention is not to suggest that these discourses exist only in Caribbean culture and that they are a final determinant of meaning here; rather, they are a set of discourses that Caribbean writers have used, and they are INTRODUCTION 3 ones with which or through which other discourses, including fictional narrative, can be read. What do we make, for instance, of the frequency with which Caribbean narratives bestow human characteristics on plants, plant characteristics on humans, not to mention narratives in which both plants and humans seem entangled in a process that foregrounds intergenerational dynamics?5 By intergenerational dynamics I mean occurrences predicated on the relations between parents/ancestors and offspring/descendants, whether these terms function literally or figuratively in the narratives. Furthermore, I argue that, within a hereditarian paradigm, the above intergenerational processes in narratives include relationships involving (in varying combinations) plants, human bodies, human communities, narratives, even cultural theories—all of which involve the cultural elements most crucial to studies of the Caribbean. These elements include the plantation,6 race, history, and—given the transmissions on which hereditarian processes are premised—gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Lastly, I would like to make it explicit now that while I focus on discourses of heredity in Caribbean narrative, I do not mean to suggest that such discourses (particularly as manifested in the dubious uses to which genetic science has sometimes been put) may provide a desirable praxis or paradigm to impose on cultures and writings or through which to interpret and order every culture and writing, especially those from as unique a region as the Caribbean. I wish instead to show how, in a society influenced by the plantation, hereditarian thinking or ideology has infiltrated the most unlikely of arenas. In revealing writers' (at times, perhaps, unintentional) recourse to such thinking (or, as I will often phrase it: a "hereditarian" imagination), I work under the assumption that to move beyond this kind of potentially hierarchical and deterministic mentality we have to be aware of its often subtle existence. A general aim in this study is to carry out this exposition of hereditarian discourses in Caribbean narrative and in doing so to explore the complicated, dynamic region where art (i.e., Caribbean narrative) meets its raw materials (which include hereditarian discourses). OVERVIEW Although throughout this study I intend to construct a multi-faceted account of or definition for hereditarian discourses, we can begin with the following provisional statement: discourses of heredity encompass ways in which writers in the Caribbean use language or organize knowledge or experience in such a way as to indicate or suggest a perception of determinism, as well as a search for kinship, biological origins and/or racial purity. Conversely, these writers some-times also employ hereditarian discourses in the opposite direction to follow the results of different kinship, biological and/or ethnic crosses. In addition, I employ the term more broadly in order to encompass what I consider a hereditarian imagination on the part of Caribbean writers; with such an imagination or sensibility in mind, 4 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS we can see that relationships of heredity and dependence pervade areas not commonly associated with these relationships. A challenge to this study lies in that it is not always apparent where to locate something as potentially nebulous as hereditarian discourses. In some respects it is easier to locate them implicitly through their "footprints," although often—as I hope to demonstrate—there can be little doubt as to their "presence" (always a complex one) in the Caribbean discursive field. Although I will seldom find it apt to make a point-by-point, strict (or mechanical) approximation between scientifically-based hereditarian language and narratives by Caribbean writers (e.g., "this particular character's personality could be an example of the author's attempt to illustrate a recessive inheritance" etc.), I do intend to make less rigid approximations. If nothing else, in making such approximations I hope to demonstrate the prevalence and problematics of hereditarian discourses in Caribbean writings. The ideological range within which we can locate the works of various writers is a wide one: with respect to the associations between heredity and the political implications involving constructions of race, we shall see that some writings opposed racism during the era of slavery, some continued to do so well after the abolition of slavery, while others are more oblique and seem more preoccupied with issues that seem to have little bearing on race. Meanwhile, references to agriculture or even race in Caribbean narrative do not necessarily mean that an important hereditarian element is also at play As such, when I refer to agriculture or race in Caribbean narrative, I do so mainly with an eye to how these discourses can be read in terms of the shape of narratives and also in terms of how they define narrative possibilities and limitations. How is it, exactly, that literary narrative, a discourse or set of discourses so often associated with freedom, resistance, and sometimes even with the "highest" of human faculties, could also be intimately tied with discourses as potentially deterministic as those involving heredity? Sciences interested in heredity (especially genetics), for example, can be used to combat illnesses and to improve agricultural yields, but they have also been associated (most notoriously in Nazi Germany) with nefarious concepts and practices like racism and eugenics.7 In fact, my contention is that hereditarian discourses encompass several themes prevalent in Caribbean narrative that might otherwise seem unrelated. In so doing, new possibilities arise with regard to ways of reading Caribbean narratives and comprehending several complex issues surrounding the region. Stated differently, when many narratives (particularly those I analyze in this project) explore what it means to be Caribbean, they are often also coming to terms with (or debunking) the concept and the weight of heredity—at times indirectly but occasionally in quite evident ways—and the entire legacy of colonialism that this term evokes. Interestingly, even as some narratives or cultural theories try to distance themselves from a constricting hereditarian language, in doing so they may invoke this language. Ultimately, hereditarian discourses serve as a guiding trope in much of Caribbean narrative, perhaps due to the region's complex history of ethnic mixing. Implicitly at stake, INTRODUCTION 5 perhaps, with the question of heredity is the very status of the Caribbean as a sovereign region, not only politically and economically but also with respect to cultural unity or identity. By way of providing a historical "answer" to the question of heredity in the Caribbean, this study traces a shift that took hold during the twentieth century in Caribbean attitudes toward both hereditarian discourses and the region's former colonizers: rather than protesting the prevalence of inherited, ethnic "contamination" within the Caribbean, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, progressively-minded writers in this region began publishing narratives that turned the tables on the onus of heredity by emphasizing ethnic heterogeneity as a distinguishing feature of the Caribbean and as a crucial element in visions of the regions future. We shall see, however, that this shift away from biological determinism and toward ethnic heterogeneity has not been historically uniform. In any case, I agree with writers (for instance Cirilo Villaverde and José Martí in a Cuban context) exemplifying the later trend in their desire for a Caribbean free of racial distinctions and/or hierarchies, both of which deploy a certain model of heredity. This wrestling by Caribbean writers with discourses associated with heredity is the focus of this study and in my opinion adds a layer of complexity and richness to a fascinating literary tradition, one, no less, that has turned a critical eye on race relations and constructions of race for over a century and a half. NARRATIVE THEORIES AND THE CARIBBEAN Although in essence it offers a theory of Caribbean narrative and of its singularity, this study might also engage anyone interested in narrative studies in general, in how literary and scientific discourses interact in a culture, and especially those interested in issues of representation. In many respects I intend to combine analyses of representation in Caribbean literature (of which important contributions have already been made) with a new analysis of narration and narrative techniques in this literature. Needless to say, these "dualities" (representation and narration) are in fact two faces of the same coin and Narrative Mutations is based on this premise. Too often, however, we overlook the fact that narratives are narrated and do not "represent" automatically. Accordingly, I hope to show that in the Caribbean, hereditarian discourses (which comprise an overlooked representational force) are intertwined with narrational concerns, i.e., concerns regarding the construction of stories. With regard to narrative theories, few of the more prominent "general" theories in the context of the North American academy make any mention of Caribbean narratives; the presumption in this silence is that Caribbean narratives are the same as those from other regions and that what is applicable else-where is also applicable in the Caribbean. Part of my ambition for this project is to add to the growing corpus of Caribbean narrative theory8 by taking into consideration important scientific trends (and their cultural implications) both within and without the Caribbean. 6 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS In some regards, a study on hereditarian discourses in the Caribbean is particularly useful in elucidating complex race relations and constructions of race. Many important studies have analyzed race and literature in the Caribbean (e.g., Coulthard 1962, Luis 1990, C.Williams 2000); further-more, agriculture and the plantation in the Caribbean have been fruitfully correlated with cultural production (Mintz 1966, Benítez Rojo 1988 and 1992). In my view, however, heredity as a concept serves as a crucial link among numerous discourses with in the Caribbean and it is also one from which they seem to draw their strength: heredity is a temporal, process-driven concept, and this may account in part for the discursive power it wields in the personal and group identities narrative fictions construct. By linking hereditarian discourses and narrative in the Caribbean, I draw on the work of cultural critics like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Mary Louise Pratt, and Sander Gilman, each of whom has productively analyzed how racial discourses operate within cultures and writings. Lastly, the term heredity is linked not only with genetics, but also with a concept controversial in contemporary cultural theory, hybridity: a concept that studies on the Caribbean have not treated extensively, perhaps because of their emphases on the more prevalent and influential concept of transculturation, as formulated by Ortiz in his Contrapunteo cubano. Although hybridity has received some indirect treatment in the Caribbean, part of my ambition in this project—particularly here in the introduction—is to examine some of the reasons for this lacuna. AIR AND BLOOD: CULTURAL THEORY, HEREDITY, AND THE CARIBBEAN How does heredity (a concept that is at once nebulous as well as associated with visceral, sanguine processes) relate to Caribbean and non-Caribbean cultural theories (which can themselves be quite "airy" while potentially having very real consequences)? Before outlining the various chapters of this project and the texts that I will analyze, a few observations are in order regarding the nexus between cultural theory and concepts associated with heredity. Any attempt to speak of the Caribbean in theoretically abstract or holistic terms is potentially a risky project because each of the islands in the region has—among a plethora of possible distinguishing characteristics—a distinct history, ethnic make-up and economy; although several islands share the same language, Caribbeans speak numerous languages and dialects.9 Nonetheless, scholars of varying political persuasions have found in the Caribbean several unifying factors, including a common history dominated by mercantilist colonization and a common social structure dominated by the plantation. According to Michael Dash, technological advances during the twentieth century facilitated communication among Caribbean islands; this process, in turn, has been instrumental in the Caribbean conceptualizing itself as a region, rather than as an assortment of small nations. He adds that "the very heterogeneity of the region, which, as…has [been] suggested, is an obstacle to theorizing about it as a whole, has become the INTRODUCTION 7 methodological ground that facilitates recent attempts to establish theoretical models of the Caribbean."10 The challenge, in my view, lies in identifying unifying factors and building theoretical models without simultaneously invoking divisive hereditarian language. Paul Gilroy, for example, locates the Caribbean in a space he labels the "Black Atlantic," and offers the ship as a metaphor to characterize the region (Gilroy 1993). The motions of this ship symbolically connect Africa, England, and North America, with the Caribbean serving as a focal point. In his postmodern reading of the region and its literature, Benítez Rojo has argued that, despite apparent chaotic discontinuities, a deep structure—based on the historical influence of the plantation throughout the Caribbean—links its various islands (The Repeating Island 1992). Other theories about the Caribbean, however, have more complex relationships with hereditarian discourses. Dash provides an intellectual and historical context to Pan-Caribbean theories in currency during the late nineteenth century. These theories, he argues, also asserted a hemispheric, Pan-Americanism: In an attempt to define a new space outside of the colonial system of relations, whether aesthetic or political, [Hispanic] Caribbean intellectuals began to theorize new interdiscursive notions such as criollismo, antillanismo, or a new American identity. Hemispheric mappings at this time were based on the belief in the uniquely mestizo nature of Caribbean society. (59–60) Eventually, however, due to the "inequality of economic development and the expansion of North American capitalism," this Pan-Caribbean impulse yielded to pessimism and more sectarian visions of the region (60). Caribbean theorists of the 1920's developed another sense of spatial representation—one that was not intertextual and open-ended but that theorized a Caribbean 'heterocosm.' An original presence outside the reach of both encroaching imperialism or any dialogic relationship…. This Rousseauesque idealism would be at the heart of much of the nationalist, indigenist, Marxist, and noiriste politics of the next few decades. (60) Of the noiriste political movements Dash mentions, the most prominent in the Caribbean—especially a mid-century Francophone Caribbean—was négritude, a term coined by Aimé Céaire in his poem "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" (1939). According to Nick Nesbitt, négritude refers to a collective identity of the African diaspora born of a common historico-cultural experience of subjugation…. Both the term and the subsequent literary and cultural movement that developed equally 8 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS emphasized the possible negation of that subjugation via concerted actions of racial affirmation, of which the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) is the prototype. In succeeding decades the term became a focus for ideological disputes among the black intelligentsia of a Francophone world in the process of decolonization.11 Léopold Sédar Senghor, one of the leading voices in the négritude movement, offered in 1970 the following as a definition of the term: Negritude [sic] is nothing more or less than what some English-speaking Africans have called the African personality…it is…the sum of the cultural values of the black world; that is, a certain active presence in the world, or better, in the universe.12 Could négritude, however, carry theoretical and cultural weight in the Caribbean without falling into the trap of a biological essentialism rooted in hereditarian discourses? Nesbitt does not think so: Unlike Césaire's earlier historicizing use of the term 'Négritude,' [his] articles such as 'What Does Africa Mean to Us?' argued for a biologicallybased notion of black identity inherited from Frobenius [German 1873– 1938], in which a black 'biological reality' is invoked to account for black identity…both Césaire's and Senghor's uncritical reliance upon a sanguinary ideology of African 'blood' resonates disturbingly with fascist doctrine of the era. (1406) A more recent theory of Caribbean culture is creolization, popularized by the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant. "The idea of creolization," he explains, demonstrates that henceforth it is no longer valid to glorify 'unique' origins that the race safeguards and prolongs. In Western tradition, genealogical descent guarantees racial exclusivity, just as Genesis legitimizes genealogy. To assert peoples are creolized, that creolization has value, is to deconstruct in this way the category of 'creolized' that is considered as halfway between the two 'pure' extremes.13 Glissant's mission with the concept of creolization is an admirable one in that he seeks to disrupt the unfortunately associated binaries of good/bad and pure/mixed. In deconstructing notions of racial purity and valorizing creolization, however, he and other proponents of the concept nonetheless operate within the basic discursive framework of the human body and its reproduction. This is the case not so much with respect to how the term is generally used (creolization designates a cultural process rather than a specific racial type; in fact it rejects and mocks genealogy), but rather with its etymology: according to the OED, the French créole INTRODUCTION 9 stems from the Spanish criollo (a child, particularly of Europeans, who is born in the New World), a word that is a derivative of criar (to raise, to grow, or to breed), which in turn is derived from the Latin creare (to create). In a sense, a concept that rejects the notion of genesis is rooted etymologically in that very concept. On the one hand, the strength of creolization as a concept may lie in the process of rhetorical inversion the term itself suggests. On the other hand, however, Glissant acknowledges the tensions in the term. For example, a Caribbean poet he does not identify once challenged Glissant with regard to the term creolization: "I understand the reality," he told Glissant, "I just do not like the word" (Glissant 141). Furthermore, Glissant warns that creolization, rather than deconstructing fixed genealogical categories, can fall prey to reification14 and begin designating a fixed intermediary position between two supposedly "pure" extremes. The question remains: Is it possible to carry forth Glissant's social vision without invoking or simply inverting undesirable concepts rooted in a hereditarian imagination? "Los factores humanos de la cubanidad" (1940), an influential essay by the Cuban Fernando Ortiz, illustrates this very tension, albeit in very subtle ways. It is in "Los factores" that, while trying to arrive at the basic qualities of cubanidad, he likens Cuban culture to an ajiaco, the pre-Columbian name for a popular stew made from "varias especies de legumbres…y de trozos de carnes diversas; todo lo cual se cocina con agua en hervor hasta producirse un caldo muy grueso y suculento y se sazona con el cubanísimo ají que le da el nombre"15 ("various kinds of vegetables…and chunks of various kinds of meats; all of which is cooked with boiling water until a very thick and succulent broth is produced, which is in turn seasoned with the very Cuban ají whence the name ajiaco"). The ajiaco stands as a metaphor for the "mestizaje de cocinas, mestizaje de razas, mestizaje de culturas. Caldo denso de civilización que borbollea en el fogón del Caribe" (169) ("mestizaje of cuisines, the mestizaje of races, mestizaje of cultures. Dense broth of civilization that bubbles in the kettle of the Caribbean"). The process of mestizaje, however, is not as simple or as linear as one might suspect, despite the optimistic tones of his last observation. Elsewhere, for example, he advises against thinking "que la cubanidad haya que buscarla en esa salsa de nueva y sintéica suculencia formada por la fusión de los linajes humanos desleídos en Cuba" (169, my italics) ("that la cubanidad should be sought in that salsa of new and synthetic succulence formed by the fusion of the human lineages seen in Cuba"). According to Ortiz, being Cuban is not simply contingent upon heredity but hinges on other factors that underscore the importance of cultural— as opposed to biological—processes. In other words, Cuba is in a continuous process of formation that is not dependent on heredity. Avoiding mention of this hereditary dependence is not always easy, however. Early in the essay, for example, he argues that "la cubanidad para el individuo no está en la sangre, ni en el papel ni en la habitación" (165) ("la cubanidad in terms of the individual is not in the blood, nor in one's role nor in where one lives"). Being Cuban is more than just these accidental things. In fact, Ortiz asserts that 10 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS there are people who live in Cuba who are not really Cuban while there are true Cubans who do not reside on the island. Of particular importance is his claim that la cubanidad is not in the blood, but is rather a "condición del alma" (165) ("a condition of the soul"). What interests me, however, is how this claim compares with the language he uses in other parts of the essay: Pero pocos países habrá como el cubano donde…se hayan cruzado razas más dispares y donde sus abrazos amorosos hayan sido más frecuentes, más complejos, más tolerados y más augurales de una paz universal de las sangres; no de una llamada 'raza cósmica,'16 que es pura paradoja, sino de una posible, deseable y futura desracialización de la humanidad. (170) But there must be few other nations like Cuba where…there has been so much intermixture between such dissimilar races and where their amorous embraces have been so frequent, so complicated, so tolerant, and so indicative of a universal peace between the different blood types; not between a so-called 'cosmic race,' [see n. 16] which is pure paradox, but between a possible, desirable, and future de-racialization of humanity. Race, then, has played a role in the formation of Cuban society and will continue doing so; until, that is, humanity achieves its "future de-racialization." It is unclear, however, whether this de-racialization means that over time the races will have become so genetically intermingled that there will in effect only be one race (or no race) or that there will be a change in attitude toward actually existing "races." Despite his earlier claim regarding the relationship between blood and la cubanidad, Ortiz's vision of the latter relies heavily on discourse that invokes genetics. Blood ties and the existence of different races is a particularly problematic subject for Ortiz, given that he argues both that Cuban culture does (in terms of its unique past) and does not (in terms of its future) depend on heredity. Later in the essay, for instance, he makes the following point with regard to Cuba's unique racial history: Parece fácil clasificar los elementos humanos cruzados en Cuba por sus razas: cobrizos indios, blancos europeos, negros africanos y amarillos asiáticos. Las cuatro grandes razas vulgares se han abrazado, cruzado y recruzado en nuestra tierra en cría de generaciones. Cuba es uno de los pueblos más mezclados, mestizos de todas las progenituras. (171) It seems easy to classify the human elements combined in Cuba by their races: coppery Indians, white Europeans, black Africans and yellow Asians. The four great races have embraced, mixed and mixed again on our land across generations. Cuba is one of the most mixed, mestizo nations in existence. One of the central paradoxes that Ortiz's comments suggest is that it seems quite a challenge closing the Pandora's box of hereditarian discourse once it has been INTRODUCTION 11 opened. There is little doubt in my mind, for example, that Ortiz envisioned a more egalitarian Cuban society that had moved beyond "race"; how easily could it do so, however, when with his next breath he praised Cuba on account of the unique contributions the "four great races" had made there? This is what I meant when I stated earlier that several Caribbean writers have "struggled" (sometimes implicitly and at other times explicitly) with hereditarian concepts. Ortiz gave the specific type of heterogeneity he found in Cuba the name "transculturation," a term that expresses los variadísimos fenómenos que se originan en Cuba por las complejísimas transmutaciones de culturas que aquí se verifican, sin conocer las cuales es imposible entender la evolución del pueblo cubano, así en lo económico como en lo institucional, jurídico, ético, religioso, artístico, lingüístico, psicológico, sexual y en los demás aspectos de su vida.17 the highly varied phenomena that have come about in Cuba as a result of the extremely complex transmutations of culture that have taken place here, and without a knowledge of which it is impossible to understand the evolution of the Cuban folk, either in the economic or in the institutional, legal, ethical, religious, artistic, linguistic, psychological, sexual, and other aspects of its life.18 Transculturation was meant to stand in contrast to two other terms that carried a significant amount of currency within an anthropological project articulated most convincingly at the time by the work of Bronislaw Malinowski: these terms are acculturation and deculturation. Unlike these two, transculturation signaled a balance between the "original" culture and the resulting one: Africans in Cuba did not lose their African heritage while assimilating a Spanish heritage that was thrust on them. Rather, they gained a new, transculturated Cuban identity. Although the term transculturation avoids potentially negative hereditarian connotations more successfully than other theories (in that it makes no direct reference to body types or miscegenation), Ortiz's concept registers heredity in other ways. In Chapter 3 I analyze the unique comparison-and-contrast counterpoint Ortiz uses to illustrate his views on transculturation: a counterpoint fascinating in the way it uses two agricultural products (ones often directly involved in genetic manipulation) to account for broader human processes. Now we come to hybridity, a term (used to describe the results of interactions between presumably non-hybrid or pre-hybrid human populations) that is clearly part of the lexicon of scientific and agricultural investigations on heredity, and one that has been as absent in conceptualizations of Caribbean identity as it has been present in other postcolonial arenas.19 Stated more precisely, the term actually predates the science of genetics: The genealogy of the term is…more accurately associated with the development of the natural sciences and in particular botany and zoology, 12 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS where it referred to the outcome of a cross between two separate species of plant or animal. In the eighteenth century, when classification of the natural world and its material products became a veritable obsession, the concept of the hybrid was expanded to incorporate humans.20 In the Caribbean, hybridity may lack viability as a cultural model for the postcolonial relation insofar as it re gisters numerous racial discourses. With respect to a possible hereditarian framework, part of the problem lies in a split between the hereditarian associations of the term hybridity and the implied ideology of theories of hybridity, an ideology that disavows purities and fixed essences. According to Homi Bhabha, hybridity is the sign of the productivity of colonial power, its shifting forces and fixities; it is the name for the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal (that is, the production of discriminatory identities that secure the 'pure' and original identity of authority). Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects.21 Bhabha seeks to show how, within the context of the British colonial presence in India during the nineteenth century, dominant discourses (i.e., those of the British) bolstered their authority through a process that always invoked the agency of the dominated. Consequently, even the discourses of those in power are not purely or absolutely dominant: they are hybrid discourses. On the one hand, the term hybrid as it is employed here is functional and heuristic in that it succeeds in indicating those dominant discourses' lack of fixity and absoluteness. Coombes and Brah, for instance, argue that, beyond its uses in the natural sciences, at a certain level "'hybridity' signals the threat of 'contamination' to those who espouse an essentialist notion of pure and authentic origins. This lends the term a potentially transgressive power which might seem to endorse the celebration of its traces as transgressive per se" (1). On the other hand, however (and as Coombes and Brah's compilation also shows), hybridity as a term is problematic in that (in the best of scenarios) it suggests that the cultures and societies in which post-colonial studies are most interested are fundamentally derivative and thereby lesser. Furthermore, we shall see that hybridity can also evoke eugenicist and racist dogmas. In any case, hybridity is—as Robert Young indicates within the context of British colonial expansion in Asia—a concept that registers (even if inaccurately) a variety of discourses, including sexual ones (whether homosexual or heterosexual): On the face of it, therefore, hybridity must always be a resolutely heterosexual category. In fact, in historical terms, concern about racial amalgamation tended if anything to encourage same-sex sex (playing the imperial game was, after all, already an implicitly homo-erotic practice).22 INTRODUCTION 13 Although hereditarian discourses have—as we shall see—at a certain level undoubtedly informed theoretical polemics about the Caribbean, hybridity is hardly a term commonly used to describe the Caribbean, its cultures, and its narratives. Why this lacuna? The Caribbean, first of all, is by virtually any definition of the term a "hybrid" region: it is the offspring (by most historical accounts) of unlike parents.23 It has, in particular, come to be identified as an area of mixture and cross-cultural contact. Nonetheless, theorists of the region have resisted the derivative undertones of hybridity in describing the Caribbean. In a region that has experienced centuries of miscegenation, the current abstract understanding of hybridity post-colonial studies offers may never have had a chance given the racial associations that may surround the term in the Caribbean. TEXTS AND CONTEXTS In arguing that hereditarian discourses pervade Caribbean writings—and, consequently, that attention to these discourses may amount to a productive reading strategy for these writings—my basic premise is that any literature is a register of multifarious and sometimes conflicting discourses in a culture. As such, texts and contexts are inextricably linked and any knowledge about the one could also shed light on the other. As concerns hereditarian discourses, it is difficult to separate these from other discourses in the Caribbean. For instance, when fictional narratives in the Caribbean refer to agriculture, racial discourse, and colonialism, they also invoke a set of hereditarian concepts whose logos or logical mechanisms resemble those of the first three terms. Given my earlier contention that Caribbean writers have struggled with notions of heredity as they seek to achieve an egalitarian, heterogeneous society, I use a historical narrative to structure this study. Although this narrative may at times move backward as well as forward, and reveal gaps and tensions, I will often return to it in order to clarify the stakes and circumstances surrounding any given invocation of heredity in Caribbean narrative. Furthermore, since I see hereditarian discourses collectively as a prominent theme in Caribbean narrative, this study contains a substructure, with each chapter casting a slightly different conceptual light on the relationship between hereditarian discourses and Caribbean narrative. In chapter one my main goal is to establish and historicize the presence of a hereditarian imagination and to outline the ways it exerts a discursive or metaphorical force in the Caribbean, particularly insofar as it is inextricably linked in this region to a social and economic system based on agriculture: a set of practices most forcefully exemplified in the Caribbean by the sugar plantation. In advancing my argument, a basic objective of mine is to provide some cultural and scientific background to heredity as a concept, both before and after Gregor Mendel's work on genetics was re-discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century. I am particularly interested in prior scholarship that argues for the discursivity of heredity24 and concepts linked to it, as well as for the existence of a hereditarian imagination well before Mendel conducted his landmark 14 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS experiments. Of specific importance also is the position of discourses of heredity with respect to taxonomy, as well as the currency each of these has beyond "purely" scientific arenas, e.g., their agency in demarcating not only the foreign and autochthonous, but also class distinctions (which, as we shall see in Zeno Gandía's La charca—a prominent novel published in Puerto Rico in the 1890's— can be determined by assumptions regarding hereditable racial distinctions), as well as the role discourses of heredity play in the production of gender continuums. The fact that science is not gender neutral is especially significant insofar as heredity itself—not unlike hybridity—is premised on the distinction between the male and the female, as well as on the function each of these has in reproduction. chapter one culminates with a survey of discourses on the plantation because, unlike any other entity in the Caribbean, the plantation encompasses the problematic of scientific discourses on heredity and it also is a force in cultural production, including fictional narrative. In subsequent chapters I treat narratives that register different moments in a historical continuum that moves roughly from a greater to a lesser sense of hereditarian determinism, and that also correspond to different modes of hereditarian discourse. chapter two addresses the subject of Caribbean communities and the way hereditarian discourses inform issues that are central to the ways communities in fictional narratives are formed and defined, including miscegenation, incest, parenthood, and—on the whole—the colonial social system prevalent within a plantation economy, especially during the mid-nineteenth century: a period characterized by abolitionist fervor and disagreements regarding the desired fate of the Caribbean. In setting forth my argument I use two early abolitionist Cuban novels: Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Arteaga's Sab (1841) and Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés (1882, but begun over forty years earlier), both of which critics consider foundational Cuban "romances," set the basic parameters for this chapter insofar as they illustrate the oftentimes strained relationships between members of different cultural and economic groups. Furthermore, both Sab and Cecilia Valdés are guided by a fatalism or determinism (involving racial constructions and other issues of heredity, particularly the inheritance of property) to which their characters eventually succumb. In the wake of the previous chapters' discussions of the plantation and discourses of heredity, chapter three examines later narratives centered upon plant imagery and the reproduction of plants (as we shall see, the distinction between plants and non-plants is not always a clear one). I start my analysis with prominent mid-twentieth-century fictional and anthropological texts written by Cubans, including Ortiz's Cuban Counterpoint (1939) and Dulce María Loynaz's Jardín (1951). I will focus, however, on Alejo Carpentier's short story, "Viaje a la semilla" (1958), and especially his novel El recurso del método (1974). Each of these narratives, oftentimes in very subtle, ironic ways, uses botanical images and processes related to heredity in advancing broader arguments regarding Caribbean society. El recurso del método, in particular, provides a sophisticated interpretation of modern Caribbean/Latin American political and social history. INTRODUCTION 15 Significantly, this interpretation often hinges on a conflation between plants and people—the kind of conflation possible when plants and people are treated similarly within the hereditarian paradigm offered by the plantation. In chapter four my attention shifts to the trope of the body, including the human body, in Caribbean narrative. Although my analysis begins with an introductory overview of polemics regarding the body (especially discourses on race during the 1920's and 1930's), central to this chapter are an in-depth commentary on "Otra maldad de Pateco" and the Cuban25 Mayra Montero's novel Tú, la oscuridad (1995). In these texts, animal and human bodies, body parts, the reproduction (and its sometimes unexpected results) of bodies, and their racial categorization play a principal thematic and structural role. My basic contention in this chapter is that the body registers many of the fundamental tensions surrounding the Caribbean and its cultural identity. The most poignant tension may be the one involving the precarious dichotomy "modernity/tradition": this "dichotomy" rises to the surface in narratives like Vega's and Montero's, in which supernatural forces associated with animism from the African diaspora trump the deterministic "laws" of heredity. The first four chapters make repeated reference to colonialism and its legacy in the Caribbean. Both Sab and Cecilia Valdés register, for instance, the British influence within the world of the Spanish Caribbean plantation. Meanwhile, El recurso del método makes numerous references to the Spanish legacy in the New World, just as Tú, la oscuridad rehearses the exploratory zeal of the first scientists sent to the Americas by colonial empires. The legacy of colonialism is related in a very curious way to an important issue in the narrative from many islands in the region: an issue that strikes me as interwoven with the discourse on heredity, namely, the way later Caribbean narratives incorporate elements of other narrative traditions. Do these traditions coexist among other discourses in the Caribbean and serve as a clay through which Caribbean narrators express their vision of the region? In short, can narratives be bound by other narratives, and if so, how might these relationships register hereditarian paradigms? These are the questions chapter five confronts, with particular emphasis on Caribbean narratives that revisit novels by the Brontë sisters; these narratives include Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by the Dominican Jean Rhys, Vega's "El baúl de Miss Florence" (1991), and Windward Heights (1998) by Guadéloupe's Maryse Condé. Significantly, themes associated with heredity figure prominently in each of these novels, including cases of congenital illness and malice, children of unexpected pigmentation, and behavior patterns based on antiquated racial classifications. A central point of my argument in this chapter is that foreign influences (by the British in the case of the Brontë texts) manifest themselves in unusual ways in Caribbean narratives: ways that register the weight of hereditarian discourses in the region. Another argument I advance is that hereditarian relations (i.e., these cases of congenital illness and malice, unexpected pigmentation, etc.) are crucial in questions of verisimilitude and the way a (theoretical) readers expectations for the narrative are fulfilled or frustrated. Chapter One Heredity and Discursivity: From Pre-History to the Plantation On the ideal Caribbean City: above all, it would be so racially various that the cultures of the world—the Asiatic, the Mediterranean, the European, the African—would be represented in it, its humane variety more exciting than Joyce's Dublin. Its citizens would intermarry as they chose, from instinct, not tradition, until their children find it increasingly futile to trace that genealogy. —Derek Walcott, 1992 Nobel Lecture Caribbean writings often confront the idea of heredity, and when they do, it can be in unexpected ways. The pervasiveness of heredity as a theme in Caribbean letters is such that, like the air we breathe, it can be indistinguishable from its immediate context. Although eventually the Caribbean peoples may realize Walcott's hopes for the region, i.e., a region that has transcended an interest in heredity or genealogy (or that at least finds such an interest futile), discourses of heredity remain instrumental in how writers from the region articulate their views. In this chapter, I attempt to bring these discourses into relief in terms of both Caribbean narrative and a broader historical overview on hereditarian discourses themselves. Rather than offering the discursivity of heredity as a given, my general intention here is to show the ways in which this concept has functioned as a cultural discourse, both in and out of the Caribbean. This initial step provides a necessary theoretical backdrop as I, in subsequent chapters, sketch this discursivity in a variety of narrative writings from the region. Of particular importance in making this sketch will be the Caribbean's relations with both foreign and autochthonous scientific discourses. The underlying target that orients the various steps my argument will take in this chapter is the sugar plantation: an entity that commodified both plants and people. We know, based on the work of Antonio Benítez Rojo (1988 and 1992), that the plantation is a discursive force in Caribbean culture and writing (just as, according to Roberto González Echevarría, Golden Age Spanish court documents exert a discursive force over the Latin American novel1). Indeed, it is impossible to overemphasize the importance of the plantation to the history and culture of the Caribbean. By HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 17 linking the plantation to hereditarian processes and ideas, I hope to round out my assertion that heredity, too, exerts a type of discursivity in the Caribbean. Hereditarian discourses appear in other narrative traditions, particularly those related to plantation societies. Narrative from the Southern United States comes to mind on account of the dual legacy of sugar/cotton manufacture and slavery. Undoubtedly, however, there exist important differences with respect to the South's history of colonialism, not to mention any differences in the historical and societal place of narrative there. One possible (and very important) difference is popular attitudes toward "racial mixing" in the South and in the Caribbean: it would be necessary to carry out detailed readings of Southern writers and to embark on a much longer discussion to argue the following point, but in contrast, for example, to common assessments of Faulkner's South, racial mixing and interethnic romance in Caribbean narrative, as we shall see, is often (not always) a strong impulse/desire among characters; it is a combination of state, colonial and plantation authorities that frustrates this desire. It is also possible to trace hereditarian discourse elsewhere in Latin American arts and letters. For example, in Gioconda Belli's novel La mujer habitada (1990), a tree with a memory serves as the common denominator in the lives of two women from different historical periods. The paintings of Frida Kahlo also occasionally blend, in a decidedly graphic way, humans with trees or plants. Kahlo and other Mexican artists were familiar with Jay Hambidge's (U.S., 1867–1924) writings during the 1920's regarding the structural similarities between plants and great works of art and architecture (Rodríguez 249; Hambidge's principal texts are Dynamic Symmetry in Composition as Used by the Artists, 1923, and Practical Applications of Dynamic Symmetry, 1932). Recently, Magali Carrera has productively explored lineage in paintings from Mexico's colonial era (Imagining Identity in New Spain, 2003). Notwithstanding the debatable power discourses of heredity (including genetics and the Human Genome Project2) hold over our lives, I do not believe that heredity is a sort of mysterious code underpinning all fictional narrative, Caribbean or not.3 Instead, I hope merely to show in this chapter that it is possible that hereditarian principles can be a discursive force, that they have informed numerous dimensions of Caribbean narrative, and that these principles may compose an identifiable theme in this corpus of writing. We shall begin with general considerations of scientific, and philosophical discourses of heredity (including genetics and genealogy) in the cultural arena. HEREDITY, SCIENCE, AND THE CULTURAL ARENA The branch of science most interested in—and most commonly associated with— heredity is genetics. The Oxford English Dictionary lists numerous definitions of this term, but all of them pertain to the notion of establishing an origin (as in the Greek-based term Genesis, which means origin or creation). Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, perhaps the world's leading authority on the subject, explains that "genetics [is] 18 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS the study of heritable differences" as well as, consequently, heritable sameness.4 Meanwhile, the term can be associated with the process of establishing kinship or other relations of proximity—a process that is potentially useful in attempts to prove or disprove claims to purity. Before delving into Caribbean narratives to see how they interact with genetics and other hereditarian discourses, it should be noted that there have been earlier (even if scientifically ill-conceived) commentaries on the status of genetics as a cultural force beyond (but also in some ways predating) its scientific currency starting in the early twentieth century. Although it is impossible to ascertain when and where people developed an interest in the basic principles of heredity that eventually resulted in the science of genetics (a desire for such knowledge is, perhaps, an impulse as old as human society),5 it was not until the first few years of the twentieth century that the term genetics assumed one of its current meanings: the institutionalized, scientific practice of mapping heredity, which in turn is a process involving the transmission of genes (or hereditary information) through chromosomes. This transition came as a direct result of the reactivation of Gregor Mendel's writings, which formulated the operative principles underlying genetics.6 This does not mean, however, that genetic principles (even when based in pseudo-science) did not exert power in the social imagination (both inside and outside of the Caribbean) prior to this. In his engaging but by today's standards scientifically problematic (Cf. n. 5) study, History of Genetics: From Prehistoric Times to the Rediscovery of Mendel's Laws (1965; English translation 1972), Hans Stubbe speculates on the development of a "genetic" sensibility (although "hereditary" sensibility would be, in scientific terms, a more accurate description): "The cultivation of the date palm [as early as the 9th century B.C.E.) therefore gave the first indication of the fact that plants, like animals, have two different sexes and that one could cultivate them by bringing together plants of different sexes in a special way" (6–7). Even though Stubbe does not prove that this presumed early interest in heredity was in any way also interested in (or at all aware of) the processes that took place at the molecular level, or for that matter, that agriculturalists even fathomed the variable sexuality of plants three thousand years ago, he leaves little doubt that they were indeed interested in hereditarian processes, however differently they may have been viewed with respect to genetic science. These agriculturalists (and, indeed, many others) would also probably have been keenly interested in another facet of heredity pertinent to an agricultural society: the inheritance of land and other property. Moving forward along the Mediterranean historical record, Emanuel Rádl, a scientist writing soon after Mendel's theories were rediscovered argues that the notion of original sin in Christian philosophy, the chastisements with which the Jewish God pursued his people into the third and fourth generation, the fate which led Aeschylus's heroes to their ruin, St. Augustine's doctrine of the predestination of man for a happy or eternally unhappy life—these are, for Rádl, "the first theories of heredity…. The belief in the transmigration of souls, the caste system, and hereditary privileges were other expressions of the same conviction."7 With regard HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 19 to hereditary caste systems, Stubbe posits that these "are based on the idea that favorable characteristics are inherited in subsequent generations. It is for this reason that the priesthood was hereditary among the Jews of the tribe of Levi, as was the gift of prophecy in Homer's time. The practice of medicine was a hereditary privilege in the family of Asclepiades" (10). Even as ancient Greek philosophy, particularly its Platonic varieties, asserted the primacy of a timeless world of ideas, it was nonetheless informed by a hereditary imagination or sensibility. Stubbe singles out a passage in The Republic in which, drawing upon a Phoenician myth, Plato makes the following observation in a casual but speciously deterministic tone (whose dangerous hierarchical implications Stubbe does not pursue): But the god who fashioned you added gold in the composition of those of you who are to become rulers (which is why their prestige is greatest); he put silver in the auxiliaries, and iron and bronze in the farmers and other artisans. As you are all of the same stock, children will mostly resemble their parents. Occasionally, however, a silver child may be born of golden parents, or a bronze child of silver parents, and so forth.8 Others have also seen the correlation between philosophy and hereditarian processes. In her Hacia una crítica de la razón patriarcal, Celia Amorós argues that Plato's pupil, Aristotle, may have been the first to employ a "genealogical" philosophical method in that he sought to legitimate his own views in the philosophies that preceded his own.9 Meanwhile, much more recently, Friedrich Nietzsche's genealogical method aims "to show how the particular interpretations of life that created the moral values of Christianity came about…. Such 'facts' are the products of earlier, accepted, and therefore unacknowledged interpretations."10 With respect to a discussion on Linnean taxonomy coming later in this chapter, Nietzsche was remarkably prescient. Sarah Kofman explains, for instance, that "for Nietzsche the essence of things is enigmatic, so genera and species are themselves but human, all-too-human metaphors."11 Foucault's critical approach shares Nietzsche's emphasis on the genealogical reversal of accepted facts or "truths." According to Mark Poster, genealogy is for Foucault a diachronic method, one that attempts to reconstruct the origins and development of discourses by showing their rootedness in a field of forces. Genealogy is a Nietzschean effort to develop a critical method that undermines all absolute grounds, that demonstrates the origins of things only in relation to and in contest with other things. Genealogy disallows pure beginnings, those historical formations that deny their historicity by naturalizing themselves, absolutizing themselves, grounding themselves in some transcendent principle.12 In his essay, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault himself argues that a genealogy 20 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS will never confuse itself with a quest for their "origins," will never neglect as inaccessible the vicissitudes of history. On the contrary, it will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice; it will await their emergence, once unmasked, as the face of the other…. The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin, somewhat in the manner of the pious philosopher who needs a doctor to exorcise the shadow of his soul. He must be able to recognize the events of history, its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats—the basis of all beginnings, atavisms, and heredities. 13 If genealogy—an endeavor informed by hereditarian principles—can be used as a liberating mechanism, i.e., as one that challenges and undermines claims to purity and superiority, there is another side to this coin: writers of a different ideological bent can use genealogy to reify such claims. This tension or ambiguity is best captured in the irony of Foucault's and Nietzsche's genealogical project: one that invokes the language and mechanisms of genetic studies in order to show that a given, transmitted truth (including any assertion regarding racial superiority) lacks a pure or sublime "origin." Important questions concerning historiography inform Nietzsche's and Foucault's genealogical methods: since the narratives history can provide may not necessarily be accurate and value-free, not only is it fair to ask, "What is history?" and "What happened in the past?," but one should also ask, "Where is history and how does historical knowledge get disseminated?" The latter questions concern Laura Otis in her study, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth Centuries, in which she traces the development of a notion (since discredited by the scientific community) of "organic memory," whereby individuals physically inherit the memories of their ancestors. Although our studies differ given my interest in the Caribbean and in how heredity informs narration,14 her survey of (mostly nineteenthcentury) theorists of organic memory is of relevance to my discussion of discourses of heredity. Among the most prominent of these theorists were Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), each of whom advanced what were, in effect, theories of evolution. The former believed "that an organism evolved by responding to its environment; the body changed as use of its parts increased or decreased."15 As such, an organism could "acquire a new trait within one generation and pass this trait on to its offspring" (Otis 6). Meanwhile, in his biogenetic law, Haeckel states that the series of forms through which the Individual Organism passes during its progress from the egg cell to its fully developed state, is a brief, compressed reproduction of the long series of forms through which the animal ancestors of that organism (or the ancestral forms of its species) have HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 21 passed from the earliest periods of so-called organic creation down to the present time.16 Implicit in this "law" is the idea that "the present organism contained its past within it, and that one could thus read phylogeny, or ancestral development, by observing ontogeny, or individual development, if one could only read the individual in the right way (Otis 7–8). Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection initially coexisted with theories like Lamarck's and Haeckel's, and only much later gained greater acceptance in the scientific community.17 Despite their eventual decline, Otis shows that these theories nonetheless inspired numerous literary fictions premised on the "wish to read history from the body" (8). Such a wish, however, is but one of the permutations that discourses of heredity may take. In his Drawing Blood, Keith Wailoo examines the often slippery line between eugenics18 and the misapplication of genetic science: he traces, specifically, the medical and social history of sickle cell anemia, a disease commonly associated in the United States with African Americans. During the 1920's, about a decade after the disease was first diagnosed, a researcher argued "that the disease passed from one generation to the next according to the Mendelian laws regulating a dominant trait."19 Until scientists developed newer technologies during the middle of the twentieth century,20 this view had become prevalent in the North American medical community. According to Wailoo, For those concerned with racial relations in the United States during the 1920's, the Mendelian dominant thesis meant that interracial marriages would probably spread the blood disease outward from the Negro population into negligent whites…. The concept of blood was a convenient catchall, collapsing within it ideas about heredity, kin, clan, and community in the same way that the term genes does today. (134–35) The result in the United States between the 1910's and 1940's was the development of a scientific pretext for racial segregation, including (particularly in the South) the occasional prohibition of interracial marriage (137). As Wailoo's discussion makes clear, the direct and indirect societal force of hereditarian discourses (regardless of their scientific accuracy) cannot be underestimated: in effect, it is difficult to know exactly where the body ends and where scientific (albeit not necessarily neutral or accurate) knowledge about the body begins. In this regard, Deborah Steinberg has recently shown how a popular 1991 BBC lecture series on genetics registers the complexities and dangers of what might otherwise be considered a neutral, objective discourse. Rather than serving to deconstruct facile understandings of race and nation by constructing "value-free" genetic maps, geneticists have instead reified such understandings. To make her point, she quotes excerpts from Steve Jones's "expert lecture," of which the following statements are examples: "We, the British, contain more hunting genes than do, say, the Greeks, who had rolled over the earlier economy and absorbed 22 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS its genes long before." And "throughout modern Europe, we can see patches of genes which reflect the successes and failures of nations and economies long gone…today's southern Italians and Sicilians are still genetically distinct from their compatriots in the North."21 Furthermore, rather than being a liberating discourse, genetics, according to Steinberg, also upholds a disparity between the literate and the illiterate, given that only geneticists can "read" the stories our genes supposedly contain: "When Jones tells us what he reads of genes…he does not confer upon us the ability to read them ourselves" (143). At issue amid the polemics we see in Steinberg's account of the BBC lectures is, on the one hand, a pressing, indeed disturbing, question: nature or nurture? On the other hand, the social function of (often scientific) discourses of heredity is also contested. It is within such polemics that we can locate much of Caribbean narrative. We can proceed now in a direction based on the second term in this dyad: narrative. HEREDITY, "LITERATURE," AND LITERARY STUDIES Narrative and, more broadly, literature, are of pertinence within this discussion of heredity and culture. For much of the twentieth century it was common to apply hereditary or genetic principles to the study of literature in order to distinguish between various genres and how these evolved, the most notable example of this perhaps being Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957). A similar practice included establishing various types of lineage between otherwise different writings, regardless of the difference: authors or texts with certain similarities, despite differences of historical period or geographical area, as well as subtle similarities despite apparent sharp contrasts between two works by the same author, etc. Beginning in the 1920's, for instance, critics began using a so-called "genetic approach": this approach attempted "to analyze the [historical? political? literary precedence? It is unclear] processes by which a work comes into existence or is 'engendered.' Such an endeavour…was indeed rejected by the Russian Formalist Tynianov, on the grounds that the notion of 'genesis' belongs to a system of references outside the text."22 Eventually, however, critics like Lucien Goldmann and Tzvetan Todorov briefly revitalized genetic criticism in France.23 Not surprisingly, genetics (as understood in a pseudoscientific sense of the term), or—more precisely—eugenics, has been a popular theme in science fiction. Leonard Isaacs states, for example, that H.G.Wells advocated "the policy of preventative eugenics in his prescription for A Modern Utopia" and adds that in "Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon gave considerable thought to eugenic practices."24 Also with respect to science fiction, Helen Parker observes that "many science-fiction writers eagerly explore the possibilities for species growth offered by laws of genetics and the principles of selective breeding and natural selection."25 According to her, genetic science fiction, "as a thematic emphasis, examines serious deviations from the natural or expected evolutionary pattern and the effect of those deviations on man and his society."26 It has been only in recent HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 23 years that literary studies have turned their focus on genetics itself as a scientific discourse of relevance to the cultural sphere beyond science, an example being Jon Turney's Frankenstein's Footsteps: Science, Genetics, and Popular Culture,27 a study that uses the Frankenstein myth as a barometer of popular attitudes toward the biological sciences. Turney, however, does not link hereditarian discourses with writers' narrational and rhetorical concerns, perhaps because the focus of his study is popular perceptions of science. One essay on literary matters is extraordinary in the way it uses a discourse of heredity—more specifically, genealogy—in discussing one writer's narrational and rhetorical concerns: David Chioni Moore's "Alex Haley's Roots and the Rhetoric of Genealogy."28 This essay, published nearly two decades after Roots first appeared in 1976, seeks to reposition the novel within the most important current debates in cultural theory. Here is a powerful segment from Moore's essay —a segment in which he attempts to provide a theoretical or conceptual context to Haley's identity-founding mission in writing Roots. Few are the people in the world who have no interest in who they are, and for most of them that means where they are from, or, more specifically, where their 'people' or ancestors were from. And most people—at least most of the diverse people I've ever met—believe further that in knowing their roots, in tracing back to their most-distant source, they will therefore also find out who their current extended community of cousins and more extended relatives today are. They will, in recovering the root, symbolically join with it. Such rooted thinking is not limited to individuals, either, for few indeed are also the societies that do not themselves have some founding myth, an originary narrative that traces an entire people back to a single and absolute source. The model of rooted identity is perhaps most familiar to us from introductory textbooks or popular representations of evolutionary biology…. The image at hand is drawn from biology, but in our minds' eyes one may readily substitute many other things—for example, either languages or civilizations—in these root-and-branch models. IndoEuropean languages, to choose one example, are commonly held to have begun with but a single tongue in the ancient trans-Caucasus region, and branched into Germanic, Latinate, Celtic, Balto-Slavic, Iranian, and Sanskritic subfamilies, which themselves branched again. Or, on the philosophical front, an originary Greek thought has been held to have produced derivatives first in Rome, and then in Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Berlin. (11) Moore then sounds a caurionary note regarding Haley's project: "There are of course risks, in this analysis and elsewhere, in placing too much emphasis on biology, because the notions and metaphors for identity that are drawn from biology interact in complex ways with other dimensions of identity, the historical, religious, political, and so forth" (14). In other words, Moore is questioning the 24 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS very process by which Haley seeks first to establish the identity of his last Africanborn ancestor and second to draw a genealogical progression that will connect him to this ancestor. According to Moore, such an endeavor, when carried out in the human as opposed, for example, to the more abstract or detached realm of biological science, is necessarily a social construct motivated by subjective concerns: a construct that could just as easily have traced a genealogy in a different direction: As is evident, of the numerous paths Alex Haley could have traced on this chart, he chose—or, more accurately, he was forced by a combination of coincidence, iron social regulation, and, most importantly, historical crime —to focus on but one As a matter of pure theory or strict blood-line genealogy, Alex Haley could have identified any of these non-African ancestors as his root, but as a matter of practice and American social mandate, that is hard to imagine…. As a matter of day-to-day reality in the United States, the general dynamic of ethnic choice is divided strictly by color. Though many 'mixed' whites…can choose to identify either as, say, Belgian or Italian or Lithuanian or Scots-Irish, for the most part the so-called 'onedrop' rule identifies all Americans of any visible Africanness as Black…. This weighted' and oddly binary system was long-codified in many states' laws and is now reinforced by broad social practice. (15) As compelling as I find Moore's argument, I take some issue with it: while I agree with the distinction he draws between (for lack of better terms) imagined and scientific genealogies, I believe he simplifies the thrust of Haley's project and misses its point, perhaps in what is to my mind a hurried attempt to reach a point in society when we no longer need to look for "roots": The recovery of a root…serves an especially important function when a major chunk of the tangle of one's identity has been either erased or systematically denigrated, or, in the case of Haley and his primary intended readers, both. Yet once that origin is recovered, that nobility restored, the next important, and, I would argue, moral task is to recognize that purities can only ever be tentative. (21) He concludes his essay by asserting that the "metaphor for human culture should be more the mangrove than the tree" (21). In principle this assertion has appeal, but as any reader of Roots will know—or anyone slightly familiar with this saga's cultural and historical context—a genealogical endeavor like Haley's holds crucial implications in terms of its personal and social objectives, many of which have probably not been met completely (otherwise Moore probably would not have bothered writing his essay). Moore's basic contention is a strong one: a search for roots is a social construct that sets unnecessary boundaries between groups of people. Simply HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 25 stated, however (and as Moore is well aware), family lineages and, consequently, the paths for genealogies (not to mention the groups to which we belong) are sometimes imposed from without. Ultimately, perhaps Walcott's vision of a society that can afford to lose interest in genealogy is more desirable (and more likely) than one that is asked to stop this interest on theoretical grounds. The intricacies of the Roots debate notwithstanding, hereditarian discourses, including genealogy, are—in some form or fashion—recurring themes in Caribbean writings. This is particularly the case due to the Caribbean's unique and varied racial dynamics; in Cuba, for instance, given centuries of racial mixing and the strength of nationalist discourses, it is futile to demarcate ethnic minority groups with any precision. Despite his insistence—one based on moral precepts with which I concur—that genealogy is in most respects a chapter in human history that we should close, Moore's initial interest in genealogy is indeed worth pursuing; it is, in a sense, a book worth examining—particularly insofar as genealogy and hereditarian discourses pervade writings on Caribbean identity in a number of important ways he does not consider in his essay. More germane to the field of Caribbean letters is Juan Gelpí's Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico, which seeks to historicize Puerto Rican literature within the framework of markedly hereditarian relationships of paternalism. According to him, a "brotherhood" of male Puerto Rican writers began during the late nineteenth century (especially as a response to the growing North American threat and, later, to North American domination)—and well into the first few decades of the twentieth centuries—to erect a literary canon that comprised the works of Manuel Zeno Gandía as well as "Generación del 30" writers Antonio S.Pedreira and René Marqués. This brotherhood has had a paternalist relationship with later, especially women, Puerto Rican writers, given the following definition of paternalist: Es paternalista quien se ve como padre y coloca a otros miembros de la sociedad en una posición inferior de niños figurados. La retórica del paternalismo a menudo remite a las relaciones familiares, y su metáfora fundamental consiste en equiparar a la nación con una gran familia.29 He is paternalist who sees himself as a father and places other members of the society in the inferior position of figurative children. The rhetoric of paternalism often invokes familial relationships, and its fundamental metaphor consists in likening the nation to a large family. Gelpí is right to signal the metaphorical importance of heredity (in the case of Puerto Rican writing it involves a generational gap or struggle over the literary canon that has taken place during the last sixty years, approximately), although we shall see throughout this project that heredity has been a multidimensional trope throughout Caribbean writing in ways Literatura y paternalismo does not pursue. 26 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS Before I provide a more thoroughly historicized account of hereditarian discourses in the Caribbean within their scientific contexts, it is worth acknowledging an affinity between Gelpí's text and an earlier work of literary theory that addresses similar issues of paternalism and the struggles between different generations of writers: I am thinking specifically of Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence,30 in which the great poets of one generation must—in finding their voice—of necessity incorporate and then subvert the writings of the great poets of previous generations. While Bloom's study and my own share an interest in intergenerational relationships, there are—needless to say—several issues of high pertinence to the Caribbean that fall outside his particular focus and that I wish to explore: issues like racial discourses, the historical legacy of slavery in the Caribbean, the plantation, and—with specific respect to the pages immediately to follow—how these Issues are imbricated in a very influential scientific tradition both within and with regard to the Caribbean. SCIENTIFIC ANTECEDENTS TO DISCOURSES OF HEREDITY IN THE CARIBBEAN Luis Palés Matos, Puerto Rico's best known poet, made a controversial observation in 1927 that registers many of the issues surrounding the remainder of this chapter, several of which had arisen in the Caribbean intellectual arena more than a century earlier: The aesthetic sense of the white race has reached a stage of dangerous cerebralisation…. I do not believe in a monumental art of purely cerebral representation: I only believe in an art which identifies itself with the thing and fuses with the essence of the thing. An art which is as little art as possible, that is, where the aptitude for creation is subjected to the urge of the blood and instinct, which is always the right urge, because it carries with it the thousands of years of experience of the species.31 On the one hand, Palés seeks an art that is free from the constraints of European philosophical, systematic thought—the kind of thought often associated with science. On the other hand, Palé's alternative to these constraints—a retreat to "the urge of the blood and instinct" rooted in heredity—is no more free from associations with European scientific and philosophical paradigms, particularly Haeckel's biogenetic law. It is worth mentioning here that I do not believe Palés is calling for a retreat to racial purity; rather, he is stressing the need not to overlook the Caribbean people's physical history. Europeans, seemingly, had become detached from more authentic cultural practices—an accusation that Martin Heidegger was also making about his fellow Europeans. On the philosophical front, the primary influence underlying Palés's commentary is the German Oswald Spengler,32 whose The Decline of the West33 offered a vision of history radically different than Hegel's totalizing, Euro-centric HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 27 model. In some respects (and this was perhaps the element in his writing that appealed most to thinkers outside of Europe), his philosophy was an antiphilosophy, disavowing positivism and challenging any assertions of Europe's superiority based on its propensity toward philosophical abstraction. This kind of thought, according to Spengler, was indicative of a people (which he calls a "race") in a period of decline (a "civilization), as opposed to a less self-reflective, more "rooted" or authentic people (a "culture"). Spengler's use of the term race merits some commentary: he was not a racist, i.e., he did not assert the inherent superiority of certain ethnic groups over others. Instead, he believed that landscape played a more central role in determining the "soul" of a people than did the possible hereditary transmission of physical and character traits. The cyclical tendency Spengler identified in his interpretation of history must have contributed to his works appeal in Latin America and the Caribbean. What I find most interesting about The Decline of the West, however, is the way Spengler describes heredity in metaphorical terms. Spengler's views on the organic, cyclical nature of history and the role of human actors in shaping that history are greatly saturated with a language informed by hereditarian imagery. Early in the second volume of The Decline of the West he he draws an initial distinction between plants and animals—a distinction, no less, that recalls Haeckel's biogenetic law as it anticipates Jean-Paul Sartre's phenomenology of consciousness: "only the plant is wholly and entirely what it is; in the being of the animal there is something dual. A vegetable is only a vegetable; an animal is a vegetable and something more besides" (3). Immediately, however, he provides descriptive analogies in claiming that the line between the two realms is not rigid: "A herd that huddles together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a way into his God—all these are seeking to return out of the life of freedom into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated into individuality and loneliness" (3). In his overly sweeping (but at the time influential) remarks about the predictable trajectory of Europe and North America, he relies further on hereditary images. This is particularly so in that for him the fruit never falls far from the tree, and much depends on where the tree is located to begin with: A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant takes root, there it dies also. There is certainly a sense in which we can, without absurdity, work backwards from a race to its 'home,' but it is much more important to realize that the race adheres permanently to this home with some of its most essential characters of body and soul. If in that home the race cannot now be found, this means that the race has ceased to exist. A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in everchanging landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plant-nature in them, and eventually the race-expression is completely transformed by the extinction of the old and the appearance of 28 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS a new one. Englishmen and Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as Americans. It has long been obvious that the soil of the Indians has made its mark upon them—generation by generation they become more and more like the people they eradicated. (119) Aníbal González, in his insightful study on Spengler's influence on Palés, argues that, for the former, culture is "el producto de una conversión radical que ejerce el paisaje sobre la conciencia del hombre" ("a product of a radical conversion that the landscape exerts over the consciousness of men").34 With respect to the Caribbean, Palés (and the Cuban José Antonio Saco in the previous century) thought that populations of African descent were better suited to the region because it resembled Africa's landscape more closely than it resembled Europe's.35 It is within this intellectual exchange between Europe and the Caribbean that we must —to a significant degree—place Palé's poetry, in which Africa and its linguistic rhythms figure prominently. According to González, Palés's interest in Spengler amounts to an irrationalism36; more important to my argument, however, is the intimacy Palés found between people and their landscape or environment. Now that we have seen some of the philosophical context of Palés's observation, we can turn to its (perhaps more complex) scientific context, although, needless to say, these contexts are interrelated and at times indistinguishable. In fact, scientific discourses (including genetics, the branch of science dedicated to studying how the blood transmits, in Palés's words, "thousands of years of experience" or physical traits) have played, taken collectively, an important role in the Caribbean, well before Palés. These discourses have been, and continue to be, a controversial agent in the Caribbean. In a book published in 1988, for example, Judith Reay and John Steward argue that one general weakness of science teaching in the Caribbean, as elsewhere, has been the divorce of science from technology or, to put it in another way, the separation of the philosophy and methodology of science from its application. Science thus comes to be viewed as a set of arid concepts and classroom activities which seem to have little bearing on everyday occurrences or experiences, and no obvious relation to the technical achievements and developments which influence the lives of individuals and affect the progress of nations.37 They add optimistically that "the potential of science and technology is such that many of the problems confronting Caribbean societies could be solved if science and technology were systematically applied to them" (vii). With respect to the scientific and social currency of genetics in Cuba, José López Sánchez argues (albeit, granted, within the framework of a self-promoting dictatorial regime) that it has been only recently that Mendel's vision has been widely disseminated: "Conocido en nuestro país desde hace muchas décadas por lo que se ha dado en HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 29 llamar las leyes de Mendel, no es, sin embargo hasta ahora, que se aplica y enriquece su concepción con la investigación y el trabajo práctico aplicado que se llevan a cabo en las instituciones especializadas de nuestro país."38 Scientific discourses are additionally "controversia" in the related sense that historically it has been unclear if these discourses have been primarily imposed from without or if they are able to carry the stamp of autochthony. Their controversial elements may be related to uncertainties regarding the political and cultural status of the Caribbean region itself. Sidney Mintz, for instance, an anthropologist who conducted an influential study of the Caribbean, explored what he recognized as a tenuous distinction between Western and non-Western in attempting to define the region. Despite strong African and pre-Columbian elements, Caribbean societies are, he argued, "among the most Westernized of the modern world."39 Although it is unclear what he means by "westernized" (more than likely European and industrialized), his basic contention is a strong one: the Caribbean is both European and not European, industrialized and agrarian, scientific in the modern sense and traditional. Narrative and science are not unrelated in the Caribbean. In Myth and Archive, González Echevarría argues that, almost as a rule, novels interact with whichever discourses wield the most authority in a specific society—this is how they gain their mimetic force. He argues that during the nineteenth century, a discourse hegemonic like no other (e.g., abolitionist, religious, mercantilist discourses) was science, particularly as manifested by European naturalists—including Alexander von Humboldt, Darwin, Charles-Marie de la Condamine, and Captain Richard Burton—who traveled to the New World. "If the first discoverers and settlers appropriated Latin America40 by means of legal discourse," González Echevarría states, "these new conquistadors did so with the aid of scientific discourse, which allowed them to name again (as if for the first time) the flora and fauna of the New World" (96). He adds, in turn, that during the twentieth century, an anthropological discourse informed by the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss (13), Bronislaw Malinowski (151) and Clifford Geertz (151) prevailed as the means through which Latin American narratives staked a foothold in "reality." Although I believe it is possible to group these two hegemonic discourses (naturalism and anthropology) under a similar, broad category of "science" (particularly in that twentieth century anthropology often aspired to the "objectivity" of science), this does not detract from the suggestive power of González Echevarría's contention. Following his commentaries, however, I propose that hereditarian principles encompass both discourses he identifies as hegemonic in Latin America, in that discourses of heredity are related to much of what was considered scientific discourse in nineteenth-century Latin America. González Echevarría contends that when a (usually male) traveler visited Latin America during the nineteenth century, if he wished to write for a European public, scientific or otherwise, [he] had to remain European, had to persevere in his identity in spite of the lures of the wild. 30 NARRATIVE MUTATIONS His discourse demanded it. The rhetorical strategy that kept this distance was the constant expression of wonder, of surprise, achieved through repeated comparisons between the European and the colonial world. But distance was created mostly by the practice of classification and taxonomy (for which Linnaeus had provided a whole new language). The other world, or the world of the Other, is classifiable, apt to become the object of a taxonomy. (108) González Echevarría's reference to the Swede Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) is an interesting one (and one that—as we shall see—holds many implications for the role of science in the Caribbean) in that the latter developed his method of differentiating, classifying, and naming living beings in an era when botany was still a branch of medicine.41 According to Londa Schiebinger, it has been said "that God created nature and Linnaeus gave it order."42 Although his system of genera, orders, classes, etc., was inspired by a devout religiosity and a literal interpretation of the Bible, Linnaeus "argued that at least some present-day plant species were the result of earlier hybridizations…. In later life, he wavered on this question of botanic hybrids, at times even positing them as the key principle of natural diversity". 43 In many respects, the gray areas between "species" challenge Linnaeus's categorizations and suggest that his system has a dubious relationship with the world of nature. He knew that his system was an artificial, pragmatic one, and that it did not mirror any "language" of nature. With regard to the genera of his sexual system for plants, for example, Lisbet Koerner argues that he knew that [these genera] were not always natural kinds (although he wavered on the question of what natural kinds might be). Despite its moments of contradiction and inexactitude, however, his sexual system made the ordering of floral collections less daunting both to the learned and to amateurs. (15) Nonetheless, this system has survived the Darwinian revolution and was "hailed in the twentieth century as the starting point of modern zoological nomenclature."44 Schiebinger aptly observes that Linnaeus's system of classification is further complicated in that its nomenclature was not immune to highly politicized cultural values and stereotypes—it was not and could not be "pure" science. She focuses on the zoological class of which humans are a species, namely, Mammalia. Linnaeus could have chosen from a number of other indicators 45 in naming this class, but instead emphasized "the presence of milkproducing mammae…but one characteristic of mammals…'functional' in only half of this group of animals" (137). One of Schiebinger's conclusions is that Linnaeus's term Mammalia links us to the "lower" species in the class via a female function, whereas reason, traditionally a distinguishing male function, identifies our species, Homo sapiens (137). For the purposes of the present study, HEREDITY AND DISCURSIVITY 31 Schiebinger's essay is especially useful insofar as it reveals how cultural values are never absent from scientific discourse. This point is worth remembering even more when scientists turn their gaze upon members of their own species. According to Robert Young, the same kinds of debates that plagued Linnaeus concerning the mutability or rigidity of species concerned those who focused primarily on the human arena.46 Typically, these scientists made claims regarding the unity (one species) or diversity (several species) of humanity. Although he could have chosen from a number of nineteenthcentury exponents of racialist thought, including Francis Galton, Gustave Le Bon and Arthur de Gobineau, Young focuses on the English Robert Knox, who claims, notoriously, that "the products of inter-racial unions are either infertile, or if fertile, after a few generations will revert 'to one or other of the species from which they sprang.'"47 Before analyzing discourses on race and hybridity, I would like to underline that during the nineteenth-century, in European (and Caribbean) scientific circles, "race" was understood in a language similar to the kind used in botany. González Echevarría provides an apt—albeit general—observation that suggests how a number of often sharply different fields of inquiry provided a homogenized body of "information": "Modern imperial powers, through institutions charged with acquiring and organizing knowledge (scientific institutes, jardins des plantes, museums of natural history, Tiergarten), commission individuals possessing the scientific competence to travel to their colonies or potential colonies to gather information…. [I]n short, everything that could be known by nineteenth-century science" (Myth and Archive 101–02). The most prominent of these scientists was Alexander von Humboldt, a botanist and minerologist steeped in Linnean taxonomy who—along with Aimé Bonpland, a fellow botanist—visited Cuba in the late 1700's and published The Island of Cuba in 1826. While his training was in botany and mineralogy, his description of Cuba extends to matters far beyond these realms, including also Cuba's geography, climate, government, and social mores. In several instances, Humboldt concerns himself with topics that might be considered essentially "scientific" (and for this reason he may be the protypical "Scientist of the Americas"): "The hills of Regla and Guanabacoa," he argues, "present to the botanist, at the end of royal palms, Xatrofa panduraefolia; X. integerrima Jacq; X. fragrans; Petiveria alliacia; Pisonia loranthoides; Lantana involucrata" and seventeen other plant species that were new to Humboldt.48 He focuses elsewhere, however, on societal matters indicative of Havana's racial climate: "At the present time, the whites receive but little increase through immigration from Europe, the Canary Islands, the Antilles, or the Continent; this class multiplies within itself, for patents of white blood are seldom granted by the tribunals to persons of light yellow color"49 (203). Significantly, in both of the preceding quotations, Humboldt reveals an interest in issues of classificatio