- 1 Pauline Melville was born in 1948 in British Guyana, the daughter of an Englishwoman and of a Guyan (...)
1With The Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997) Pauline Melville1 has penned a novel that churns issues of belonging and betraying, and a text that scrutinizes the possibilities of an identity for the Guyanese Indians. It opens with Chofy McKinnon, a Wapisiana Indian who owes his surname to a free-thinking Scottish grandfather gone native in the Amazon, via Jamaica, leaving his wife and son to work in Georgetown. He travels with his aunt Wifreda who needs to have her eyes operated in the capital. There he meets Rosa, a British scholar who researches Evelyn Waugh’s trip to the Guyanas in 1933, and who becomes his lover. It so happens that the famous author had then stayed with the McKinnons and that Wifreda remembers him, although for some strange reason she proves outstandingly reluctant to discuss the matter (“She would say as little about Mr Evelyn Waugh as possible.” Melville 73). As the second and biggest part of the novel opens, we learn that she is afraid lest her memories should unleash the dark and secret truth upon which their lives have been built: her sister Beatrice and her brother Danny once had an affair and a son into the bargain, one whom Waugh met. For the Amerindians, as Claude Lévi-Straus knew and wrote about, incest provokes eclipses and precisely, one took place in 1919 even as the two lovers had fled deep into the savannahs and far into Brazil.
- 2 The novel is actually very much about language and silence, with one chapter specifically entitled (...)
- 3 Guyana stands apart in the Caribbean Basin. Unlike the islands, it is starkly divided between “coas (...)
2In the prologue to the novel, a dazzling preliminary text, the frame-narrator to the story warns that “All stories are told for revenge or tribute” ( 9). He might allude to our postmodern situation and remind us there that “we come after,” as George Steiner states in his preface to Language and Silence.2 He may also hint at the glancing and writing back that all postcolonial literatures represent. Wifreda knows all too well that once you start telling the Amerindian version of stories, there is no stopping the flood of tales. Such return of the native repressed is congenial to postcolonial works, and The Ventriloquist’s Tale is prominently about the resurgence of Indian myths, beliefs and languages beyond the superimposition of modernity, science, Christianity and, generally speaking, colonialism. It is also a response to Evelyn Waugh’s vision of the Indian society. Irresistibly in The Ventriloquist’s Tale voices spring forth, giving vent to legends that have always been there, however dormant, testifying to the resistance of the oppressed. At all times in the novel, and as the title may well let its reader surmise, several voices are to be heard. Even as the Wapisiana can ventriloquize the cries of the animals in the Guyanese savannah in order to lure and kill them, the narrator mimics the stories and voices of the Indians living in the hinterland.3 Such polyphony is apparently in keeping with the choice of the novel, a genre studied by Mikhail Bakhtin in the light of the carnival, one which allows for chaotic narration and the plurality of viewpoints. However, it soon appears that the origin of these voices is never united in one source (or one belly, as it were and to keep the image introduced by the title); here we can hear the strains of poetical scraps that, unlike lyricism, seem to be attributable to no character in the novel, and there we witness the diffraction of enunciators that is a characteristic of the theatre. As will be shown in the second part of this paper, other generic influences threaten the novelistic ideal, one which is, after all, strongly linked with a European historical context, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which is also that of colonialism. Lastly, it seems that these confused and ventriloquized voices may all emanate from a unique point of view after all, and that the conductor of the novel need be read as a trickster, a deeply unreliable narrator. Indeed, the text foregrounds a chaos which, after one has taken a closer look, seems to stem from a metatextuality which pertains to the tradition of the novel as it was established by Cervantes, Sterne but also by Borges and Rushdie.
- 4 “There is a myth which is known throughout the whole of the Americas from southern Brazil to the Be (...)
3The Ventriloquist’s Tale pays homage to the grand tradition of novelistic storytelling. It is rife with realistic characters, anecdotes, plots and subplots, tales, stories; it unfolds as lushly as the Guyanese landscape does. It is also rife with myths. We learn why shooting a tapir provokes rain (123-124), and how moaning winds are the sound of Tamukang, the Master of Fish (a star constellation known in the Western world as the Pleiades, the Hyades and part of Orion), whenever he sets out blowing his flute (175). We are told why the sun is paler in May (184), why it preferred to have an Indian wife rather than a White or a Black one, and above all, why solar eclipses occur. There is a myth recorded by Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose prose appears as an epigraph4 to the novel in a first instance of polyphony, according to which a sister and a brother had an incestuous affair, became the moon and the sun, with the sun chasing the moon until sometimes it catches up with it, provoking the well-known natural phenomenon. Such myths are fiercely fought by the Jesuit priest Father Napier, who rechristens the Amerindian settlement “Saint Ignatius” and relentlessly crisscrosses the savannah in order to eradicate what he calls superstitions. In carnivalesque fashion, European views and Indian beliefs collide, with the latter ones surging back from a subterranean past (the narrator purports, in his prologue, to “dig time’s grave,” [2]) to emerge into the present. Such resurgence of the native culture is a singularity of the Guyanas, where an important Indian population has survived the chaos of colonialism which has all but wiped out all traces of a native culture in the rest of the Caribbean. These myths rule time and space in the savannah, whereas news from the coast, religious, scientific or otherwise, reach the savannah months later (“Every six months or so, the out-of-date newspapers arrived from Georgetown, sometimes in unreadable condition.” [177]).
- 5 “Anyway, according to my grandmother, Charles Darwin without so much as a by-your-leave parked his (...)
4European newspapers, however, are never quite dismissed. In The Ventriloquist’s Tale, science is thus given pride of place: Darwin is said by the narrator’s grandmother to have first conceived his theories while surveying the Guyanas.5 The narrator mimics radio broadcasters discussing the Big Bang and one of the characters, McKinnon Senior, attempts to photograph the 1919 eclipse in order to confirm Einstein’s theory of relativity. The entire novel opposes the equation and the story.
Once, I remember, she particularly wanted to hear a programme about the cosmic noise picked up by radio telescopes—the faint echo of the Big Bang that has spread through the universe over the aeons. We have always been crazy about astronomy. When she returned from fishing, she came to where I lay in my hammock and I repeated the whole programme about Einstein and Hawking, in the voice of Alvar Liddell, a famed BBC announcer.
“Which came first,” I wondered out loud, “the equation or the story?”
“The story, of course,” she snapped, as she listened carefully to my perfect mimicking of those faint hissing sounds of the universe from the beginning of time, recorded by radio telescopes.
“What people are hearing,” she said, “is the final wheeze of an enormous laugh.” The programme continued to explain how the universe expands outwards over millions of years towards infinity and then contracts back over millions of years into a singularity. (8)
5The victory of the story over the equation is repeated on page 182 exactly in the same terms. Elsewhere, it is once more the eclipse which coalesces opposites as the Indian myth is rivalled by Einstein’s theory of relativity: the eclipse of 1917 was, indeed, used by physicists to show that, as Einstein was then contending, such masses as the sun could modify the trajectory of light. During an eclipse, the glitter of one star which was situated exactly behind the sun could in fact be contemplated, its light bent by the strength of the sun’s gravitational field (McKinnon reads about it in a yellowing copy of The Times two years later, right before a second eclipse), and this experiment was conducted in South America, where the light of stars is brighter than in other parts of the globe but also where there was, that very year, a conjunction of a total solar eclipse with the presence of a bright star right behind the sun. Alongside Einstein, scientists of all kinds crowd the novel. One of them, a Czech scholar and anthropologist, Wormoal, even attempts to fashion a scientific approach to mythology, trusting the resurgence of old patterns to be read anew (on his plane back to Europe, he gloats and boasts: “‘I think I know as much as it’s possible to know about the eclipse mythology in these parts.’ He patted his briefcase triumphantly and returned to reading some papers.” 351) Resurgence is then to be understood as the resistance and endurance of an Indian point of view alongside a European one. Superstitions do hold their ground, drawing the story in the direction of a tragic necessity which vanquishes rationality. Thus, when Beatrice and Danny, the incestuous sister and brother, are discovered by their sister Wifreda, Beatrice threatens her with becoming blind as a termite. At the end of the novel, Wifreda has indeed become fully and irretrievably blind (“All her adult life, she had feared that she would go blind simply because of her kinship with her brother Danny and sister Beatrice. Kinship with them was itself enough to warrant some sort of supernatural reprisal.” [72]). The (East) Indian domestics also know better than their masters (“Indira served coffee wearing an expression like Cassandra’s after another of her forecasts had been disbelieved.” [328]) when a dinner party at the Canadian High Commission is marred by one male guest fondling another male guest under the table, sending the avocado salad onto the dress of the American Ambassador’s wife. In any case, two perspectives collide and heteroglossia proliferates. The scientific model is all the more interesting here since Bakhtin, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, describes the reality of the novel as “the complex unity of an Einsteinian universe” (Bakhtin 16): the problem of dialogism is not so much that there are several voices competing for authority, but also that they are enunciating from various times and spaces, thus distorting further any type of linearity.
6Placing her text under the sign of Evelyn Waugh, a character in the novel and an author who is renowned for such a technique, Melville confronts viewpoints that do not cancel one another out. Ambiguity thrives as characters strive to position themselves, and it sometimes veers towards the absurd. Thus, it is in the dark room of McKinnon, the freethinking photographer, that mass is celebrated by Father Napier, hinting at the collusion, or communion, of both science and religion with the obscure beliefs of the savannahs. Thus also, Chofy, the alienated modern Indian who works at the library and does not understand such silly partition between work and life, is, on his first day, sent by the librarian to talk to Rosa with whom he falls in love and has a passionate affair. At last, when Father Napier becomes mad, towards the end of the inserted story in the novel (part two), his spirit seems possessed by old Amerindian folklore: “Imitating the sun’s journey to Iken, he walked around the cage all night.” (263) The conflict between equation and story might be one opposing, on the one hand, similitude, correspondence, and congruence (as is the etymological, original sense of the word “equation”) and difference, on the other. In The Ventriloquist’s Tale, the “equivalence” identified by Lévi-Strauss becomes a story. Indeed, stories often branch out into plurality and Sister Fidelia, who was found drunk one time too many and was sent packing to Mexico, records that “Historians have raked up the story of the last solar eclipse in this region on July 16th, AD 789 when Quetzalcoatl, one of their pagan gods, headed east on a raft of serpents and had to leave Mexico because he made love to his sister” (147). It is the same story and yet another one, a variation on the theme, an echo returning with a difference—and with a vengeance. As the narrator’s grandmother says, “Truth changes. Variety remains constant.” (3) Characters in the novel are united by the bewilderment they experience in the face of the impossibility of making any sense, of following one train of thought, of choosing one theory, one story rather than any other one. Melville writes under the clear influence of baroque, or neo-baroque, authors such as Wilson Harris, a novelist she has obviously thoroughly read. We find in Melville’s novel the same webs of versions, the same repetitions with a variation, the same carnivalesque whirlwinds of voices.
7One of the many myths recounted in the course of the novel is that before man killed his first deer, provoking yet another eclipse, “we could all speak the language of plants and animals” (122). An underlying dream in The Ventriloquist’s Tale is that we retrieve such a unique language and go “back to some period before speech, as old as silence” (317). Pertaining to such a pre-saussurian and pre-babelian state, Indian languages are often the medium through which an almost forgotten idiom springs forth again, signalling a circular resurgence: “A Wapisiana chant went round and round in her head. She used to hear it as a child when somebody died, before Father Napier’s zealous frenzy had converted so many villages to Catholicism.” (236) Native languages belong to the world of “before,” but also to the rituals of poetry (“when somebody died”); chants, songs, proverbs and scraps of tales in Indian languages are confined to the realm of children and women (314, 316) and to rites of passage. These tongues represent a refusal of European idioms, of the rationality and order that supposedly go along with them, but also possibly of the genre of the novel. Often the place for rituals to intervene, Indian languages are associated in the novel to the practice of petroglyphs, one which is both graphic and linguistic, and one which draws the word towards the realm of the image.
“The Taruma call this the River of the Dead,” said Danny.
The Taruma had so named the Kassikaitiu because in times of severe drought, when the waters were low, there were ancient petroglyph writings on the rocks at the base of the river. These writings were rarely visible. They were reckoned to be older than the great flood which once submerged the region. The Taruma said that it was by means of those marks, halfway between writing and drawing, that the dead were still able to speak to the living (195, my emphasis).
8At one with the landscape in which it originated, the language of the Taruma appears as a poetic one, if we were to define the latter as an incantation, a link between the quick and the dead. The idea that “the dead are still able to speak to the living” notably recalls T.S. Eliot’s theory not only on tradition (Eliot, The Sacred Wood), but also on the way in which all poetry is in some way a ritualistic “Burial of the Dead.” Not incidentally, the author of The Waste Land is mentioned a few times (“On Saturdays, when I was a youngster, I had to brush the priest’s books. There were books on the shelf by Evelyn Waugh and T.S. Eliot, I remember.” [41]). Another poem, “Ash Wednesday,” also appears in the form of the date at which Evelyn Waugh reached the McKinnon settlement (“I remember he arrived on an Ash Wednesday.” [48]); this modernist poem can be read like a prayer or an incantation of a set of dry bones to be resurrected or not. Under such a patronage and in a modernist manner, words take on a ritualistic life in Melville’s novel; they launch into a prose whose volubility tends towards verse, and through which an apparently dead world springs forth once more to the sound of a “rattling dance of bones,” echoing their Eliotian “chirping” (Eliot, Collected Poems 95) counterparts:
Then I saw that on the word were carved other words, hieroglyphics, tiny rows of them, and they were in a language I could not understand. But I became aware of the noisy and voluble existence of words, an incessant chattering from the past, and as the babble grew louder, as the throng of words grew and approached along the forest trails, the savannah tracks, the lanes and by-ways and gullies, the words, some declaiming, some whispering, were joined, first by laughter and ribald whistles, then by rude farting sounds and finally by an unmistakable clattering that could only be the rattling dance of bones. (5)
9Here an introduction to poetry, the “danse macabre” is also restored to its first, medieval form, that of a theatrical performance (Corvisier). Indeed, voices sometimes lose track of signifieds in order to become a mere performance, regardless of meaning. Such is the case when Bla-Bla prays for the tempest to stabilize:
Frightened by the violence of the storm, [Bla-Bla] put his hands together and decided to pray. All he could remember was something he had learned the previous term at school that felt like a prayer. As the air grew darker and took on a bruised, greenish hue, he rattled off what he had learned out loud:
“Always speak quietly and courteously,
A quiet voice is a mark of refinement,
If you have to interrupt anyone speaking
Always say excuse me, please.
Cover your mouth with your hand when you yawn.
Cover your mouth with your hand
And turn your head aside when you cough.”
“Amen,” he added. (315)
10His prayer is a speech-act. It outgrows the abilities of the novel to explore theatrical practices. The novel is also placed under the sign of a contemporary loss of identity, one which is often embodied in the theatre. Thus, names do not always refer to whom they should and in the prologue, the narrator asks the reader to call him Chico, which is his brother’s name (“but so what,” 1). As for the son of Beatrice and Danny, he remains “Sonny,” as anonymous as some Beckettian characters. It seems that the loss of a unique language went hand in hand with an ontological inbetweenness. Be it poetical or dramatical, there is in The Ventriloquist’s Tale a (once more) Eliotian distrust of the self and embrace of “impersonality,” an attempt at retrieving the primeval function of language, that of nursery rhyme and prayer of the dead altogether.
11Remarkably, Indian languages are never quite heard, they are rather merely mentioned. There is the Wapisiana that is spoken by the McKinnons, and especially by the three girls, Beatrice, Wifreda and Alice, during their years of education at a convent in Georgetown; the Macusi that is spoken by Chofy; the Waiwai that is spoken deeper in the jungle; and the Tamura. There is also that special brand of English, Creole, spoken in the West Indies and caught by the Irish nurse: “She suffered from melancholia and was frowned on by the other nuns who deplored her tendency to lapse into Creolese.” (143) Again, these languages are never heard, they represent a black hole in the narration. The Indians speak English now, and it is the language of the novel. It is also the reason for Bla-Bla, Chofy’s son, dying in a mine explosion provoked by Americans looking for gold.
- 6 To understand this passage, the reader must remember another one where the meaning of “Chofoye” is (...)
You know what they are saying? One of the Americans saw a little boy in the area and he pointed to the danger spot and shouted: “Chofoye. Chofoye.” He said he was trying to warn him. He thought it was an Amerindian word for explosion. Bla-Bla must have misunderstood and run towards the spot because he thought his father had come home. The stupid Americans didn’t even realise he spoke English—let alone that we all have different languages anyway. (343-344)6
12The ghostly presence of the Indian tongues is a source of deathly misunderstanding and Chofy’s son dies in this explosion. They are linked to mysteries not to be delved into too far.
13If voices may be seen both as the expression of a Bakhtinian dialogism and the quest for poetry and drama, the resurgence of voices is ultimately presented as a construction due to the tricks of the narrator. His grandmother, for one, does not forgive him for delivering all these myths to a Western audience, so that she needs to be knocked unconscious in order for the novel to go on:
But out of the blue, things turned bad between Koko and myself. She flew into a rage when she heard I was going to write the stories down. She is a stickler for tradition. All novelty or innovation is a sign of death to her and history only to be trusted when it coincides with myth. She believes we Indians should keep ourselves to ourselves, retreating from the modern world like the contracting stars. We fought. She rubbed pepper in my eyes. I knocked her out—temporarily— with a war club. (8-9)
14Such permanence of voices, which all seem to surge back from an ancient past, has to do with the talent of one single person, that is to say the boasting narrator who states as early as the prologue:
To cut an endless story short, I have a genius for ventriloquism. Any diva in the Scala Opera House, Milan would kill for my vocal range. I can do any voice: jaguar, London hoodlum, bell-bird, nineteenth-century novelist, ant-eater, epic poet, a chorus of howler monkeys, urban brutalist, a tapir. The list is infinite. (8)
- 7 “Perhaps the most common method of inscribing alterity by the process of appropriation is the techn (...)
15Indeed, the framing of the story by a prologue and an epilogue is a sure sign that he or she is “cutting an endless story short,” putting an end to collective effusion as well as to immemorial remembrance. A letter by Sister Fidelia from Mexico (146-147), a scientific article concerning “The Structural Elements of Myth” (81-83), another one about the solar eclipse of 1917 (178-181), a dialogue here and there: few are the passages that are not relayed through the invasive and tyrannical voice of the frame-narrator: “But first, I lay claim to the position of narrator in this novel. Yes, me. Rumbustious, irrepressible, adorable me.” (1) Strange repetitions occur, with one anecdote spoken freely, and then mediated by the narrator: one woman telling another one in direct speech while bathing in the river that since a couple had made love in the church built and consecrated by Father Napier, the latter had decided to build it all over again (114), a story later recorded by the narrative voice colluding and including two viewpoints at once, that of Father Napier and of the Macusi Indians: “The Macusi people found him intolerable, but puzzling, especially on the occasion when he insisted on reconsecrating the church after a young couple had spent the night there.” (151) There are two different instances here of indirect speech (“found him intolerable” and “insisted on reconsecrating”). The entire novel may be read as one massive appropriation of other voices, as it soon becomes clear as one goes that both indirect and free indirect speech prevail largely in the diegesis. The text cannot be read and heard as anything else than muffled, its voices deadened by the mediation of an all-encompassing, histrionic narrator. One effect thereof is the almost total absence of any vernacular speech, which is one of the hallmarks of Caribbean literature and is analysed as such by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back.7 In The Ventriloquist’s Tale, sentences circumvent the outcries of the language of slaves (as “vernacular” etymologically means): “Cries of ‘I goin’ break she blasted leg’ resounded through the forest.” (356) Other than that, the novel is couched in a constantly standard English. The narrative process might be an attempt at blurring the objectivity which lies at the basis of the scientific discourse. Of course, the narrator knows that, in Franz Fanon’s words, “For the native, objectivity is always directed against him” (Fanon 77). Accordingly, he knows how to give originality a wide berth. Instead, the narrator decides what, and what not, bedside tale to tell, closing the text with a selfish procrastination: “I will tell you the story of the parrot. Another time.” (Melville 357)
16Still, the fears of Koko, the vigilant grandmother, might not be grounded after all since the narrator presents his version of facts as flawed, tampered with, devious and inaccurate: “In this jolly company, I always relate stories of a certain rapscallion, a character born from silence, who is driven mainly by trickery and the desire to eat meat, a character whose antics would be enough to make a corpse laugh.” (355) He accuses his origins when admitting that he is nothing else than a very unreliable narrator: “We, in this part of the world, have a special veneration for the lie and all its consequences and ramifications.” (3) Father Napier is repeatedly tricked by such tampering with the truth and seems never to get used to it (“The old man had been indulging in the customary Indian habit of trying to please him by telling him what he would like to hear. [Father Napier] had been taken in by it over and over again in his years as a missionary.” [216]). The grandmother is not so much betrayed as honoured by the narrator’s unreliability, one which is based on deceit and artifice:
Not only do we Indians know how to make ourselves attractive. We are also brilliant at divining what you would like to hear and saying it, so you can never be really sure what we think. […] Ventriloquism at its zenith. My grandmother taught me to rely daily on the pleasures of artifice and, more importantly, the tactics of warfare—surprise, deception and disguise, that art of mixing the visible with the invisible. (354)
- 8 There is, in The Ventriloquist’s Tale, just one more story inserted in the main fold of events, whi (...)
17Free indirect speech singularly applies to intertextuality, and former texts are inserted within a narrative frame which distorts their original meaning. Hallowed authors become in the novel simple carpenters, as is the case with Aristotle Crane, a character who is “contemplating the world from a stack of lumber” (51). Evelyn Waugh, a man “with pushed-up face and little pebble eyes,” trapped in his upper-class colonial prejudices, is himself a character in The Ventriloquist’s Tale. His inclusion is based on historical fact. In his travel book, Ninety-Two Days, he records spending one night in the ranch of a Mr. Christie, a religious fanatic. It inspired a cruel short story entitled “The Man Who Liked Dickens” which tells of a certain Paul Henty arriving in the Guyanas after having been cuckolded by his extravagant wife. Henty takes part in a scientific expedition, along with an anthropologist, a biologist, a surveyor, and a professor. The expedition is a disaster. All participants give up but Professor Anderson, who promptly dies of malaria, and Henty finds himself starved and all but naked, lost in the savannah. He is hosted by a Mr Mcmaster who has been living with the Shiriana Indians for sixty years. He is made to read the complete works of Charles Dickens by McMaster, who is illiterate. When a party of Englishmen reaches the small settlement, looking for Henty, McMaster has arranged for the latter to be lying, drunk, in a hammock at the other end of the village. He tells them that Henty has died, condemning his ‘guest’ to stay there forever.8 Evelyn Waugh wrote of his text:
I had just written a short story about a man trapped in the jungle, ending his days reading Dickens aloud. The idea came quite naturally from the experience of visiting a lonely settler of that kind and reflecting how easily he could hold me prisoner. [...] [E]ventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savages at home and the civilized man’s helpless plight among them. (Gallagher 303)
18In the short story, Evelyn Waugh’s intense dislike of the Guyanese wilderness is obvious, and this is manifested in his novel A Handful of Dust (where Paul Henty becomes Tom Last). The Ventriloquist’s Tale writes back, presenting Evelyn Waugh under an unsympathetic light and turning him into a snobbish Englishman.
19As it turns out, only one photograph is ever developed after McKinnon’s dark room is wrecked. It is given to Father Napier who, in his madness and despair, takes it back to his cloister in Edinburgh. “He had one photograph which always aroused interest, showing about thirty alligators resting on the rocks alongside the Ireng River. Mists hung about them and they all had their mouths open as though in ecstasy.” (Melville 265) Such motionless ecstasy meets Rosa’s experience of the Guyanese territory:
Her failure seemed somehow typical of what happened in this country—a demonstration of the second law of thermodynamics. Everything tending towards inertia. She tried to remember the relevant laws. Something to do with entropy and disorder increasing with time. (330)
20This statement cannot but echo the theories of Benitez-Rojo, who views the entire literature of the Caribbean as obeying such a law, with the world and the word growing towards chaos. Resurgence, in this novel, tends towards loss rather than retrieval: when Bla-Bla dies after an unavailing operation, Chofy understands that he has lost not only a son, but an entire continent, to the greed of the North Americans, to the curiosity of the surveyors, to the will to power of the colonisers, old and new, political and scholarly. The voices of an Indian culture do not so much surge back as reach us through the mediation of a narrator who is little more than an academic, but less than a native who sticks to tradition and allows the Indians to keep to themselves. He or she can do little else than transcribe these scraps, these fragments shored against ruin, to use yet another Eliotian image, before the end of a culture that is lamented but certainly not postponed.
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