ABSTRACT
When Descartes reappears in 1640 ‘out of the blue’, the parrot gives a ‘dismal squawk’, yet nobody heeds its warning: from then ‘mind and matter started to divide, body and soul to separate and science and magic to march in opposite directions’ (p. 111). In the end, Descartes arrives in the guise of the Jesuits in the Americas and the parrot is back in the Orinoco basin: ‘Time passed. It was clear to the bird that ideas from Europe were gaining ground in his own territory’ (p. 114). Finally, a group of players arrive and stage The Tempest. While Prospero abjures his magic once and for all in his famous epilogue, the parrot, reified and commodified, is taken to North America. Sardonic humour hardly contains sardonic anger. Melville’s writing, I would argue, transcends the playfulness of postmodern historiography.
