Roberts sets multiple goals for this study. She wants to provide a new reading of seven perceptions of alterity, or myths, as she calls them. This new reading, she asserts, will help us to rethink our attitudes toward the Other. She also wants to give a chronology of alterity myths, showing how Western concepts of the Other developed over time.
The book begins with a discussion of alterity and of narrative theory. The author quite rightly points out the importance of narrative and stories about the Other in constructing identity. The discussion is informed by a knowledge of folklore and of orality, though all the texts subsequently treated come from written sources.
The first myth discussed is the story of Medea. In Euripides’ play, the author argues, Medea is presented as a mother who kills her sons to protect them. She is not motivated by sexual jealousy even though Jason, her husband, did abandon her for a new wife who would advance his fortunes. Rather, as a foreigner on Greek territory, Medea without Jason becomes a woman in a most precarious state--and so do her children. To save them from a fate worse than death, then, she dispatches them to a better place. Modern analogues, the author continues, may be found in African American slave women who killed their children rather than subject them to slavery. Much of the evidence suggesting infanticide is circumstantial, but there is at least one court case of an escaped slave who killed her daughter rather than let her be captured.
The next chapter discusses the famous line from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female.” This, the author says, is not so much a statement of equality under Christianity as it is an assertion that old laws no longer apply. Roberts examines St. Paul’s biography paying special attention to his vision of Christ on the road to Damascus which led him to convert to Christianity, changing his name from Saul to Paul in the process. St. Paul did not preach universalism, she claims, though subsequent generations have projected a universalist view onto all humanity, presuming that the Christian and predominantly European model of the world applies to all peoples.
The chapter on the Tower of Babel argues that this story is not really about arrogance and trying to build a tower tall enough to reach the heavens. Rather, it is about isolationism and attempts to remain within a city, refusing to go out across the world. Furthermore, Nimrod is a later addition, possibly mixed with the arrogance interpretation. As for babbling, the confusion of languages that was inflicted on the builders as punishment, it had more to do with a loss of the ability to communicate with the divine. With their focus on the material, the builders of Babel “plant(ed) the seed of humanism over and against God,” the author says. This is the part that is applicable to modern times for, just as English seems to be spreading as a universal language, so too is the desire to possess objects; materialism is replacing spiritualism.
Shakespeare’s Othello, the subject of the next chapter, is Other not so much because of the color of his skin as because he is a foreigner, a convert to Christianity who succeeds as a military man by fighting successfully against the “turbaned Turks.” Othello has problems in his marriage with Desdemona not because she is white and he is black, but because he fails to realize that the rules and behaviors which allow him to function successfully within the Italian army do not apply to civil society. Similarly, during World War II, combat allowed Native Americans to serve as successful soldiers, accepted by their white comrades. Upon return to civil society, however, this acceptance vanished and they found themselves to be part neither of mainstream America nor of their own culture.
Diderot’s Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville, Roberts tells us, used the subtle technique of fictitious dialogue to retell Bougainville’s more ethnographically nuanced narrative and to give us the image of the noble savage. The natural law attributed to the savage, Roberts argues, was actually Diderot’s way of advocating his own political agenda. Furthermore, while Diderot’s “natural law” seemingly allows a great deal of sexual freedom, it is freedom for men only; the society is patriarchal. The contemporary application of Supplement is that it reveals a truth about all Western constructs of the Other, which is that they are really about the West.
The Other can be distant from us in space, like the noble savage, but he can also be far away in time. This is the point of the next chapter, which discusses Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Hank Morgan, the hero of this novel, is disgusted by what he finds when he travels back in time. His destination is England, the country of his own ethnicity, but it is Other nonetheless. The hero quickly begins to set things right--with disastrous results. Culture proves to have its own powerful entropy that technology alone cannot overcome. This leads Roberts to examine The Sparrow, published by Mary Doria Russell in 1992. In this work, travelers to another planet misread the culture and cause terrible harm to precisely the group that they wish to help. Roberts concludes the chapter by questioning the cultural sensitivity of all of us and the myth of agency that we ascribe to ourselves as workers in the field, whether as anthropologists, linguists, or folklorists.
The final chapter deals with the Trickster, the emblem of post-modern man. While it begins with a story from the Plains Cree, most of the chapter is about Brer Rabbit and the story of the Tar Baby where the hero escapes punishment by begging his captors not to do precisely what he wants. The folk Tar Baby leads into Toni Morrison’s 1982 novel of the same name where a young man insinuates himself into a family and lives by his wits, like Brer Rabbit, assuming for each family member the guise that the person in question wishes to see. The lesson of the Trickster, according to Roberts, is recognition of possibilities and an imagination that allows a better understanding of the alterity of the Other.
Is it possible to create a chronology of alterity myths? And, when it comes to myth, does it matter what the author of the original story really meant to say? Does not a myth, if it is to remain a living part of tradition, need to change to remain applicable to the new circumstances in which it is told? I will assume a post-modern Trickster stance and say that all things are possible. Alterity and Narrative is a good read. The author writes well and the stories that she examines are, of course, classics; it is always fun to look at them again and in a new way.
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[Review length: 1163 words • Review posted on May 20, 2008]