A Parrot without Feathers?: Ventriloquy, Orality, and Nostalgia in Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller and Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale

This article seeks to shed new light onto the inscription of indigenous mythical tales in the contemporary postcolonial novel by way of a comparative and contrastive analysis of Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller (1987) and Pauline Melville’s first novel The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997). It examines the narrators’ oral tales that use ventriloquy to recuperate the voice of the other who emerges as both absent and present in the diverted language of the ventriloquist. The attempt to avert the loss of access to indigenous culture and its cosmogonies is considered here as a nostalgic gesture. Boym’s distinction between restorative and transformative nostalgia allows one to underline how Vargas Llosa’s and Melville’s works further explore the paradox inherent in the act of inscribing non-Western oral myths within the novel, a genre associated with a written tradition.