The Politics of Make-Believe
Dissimulation and Reciprocity in David Treuer's The Translation of Dr. Apelles
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14793656 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Colleen G Eils (corresponding author), Colleen G Eils Colleen G Eils |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 39 |
| Publication date | 2014-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Studies in American Indian Literatures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0730-3238 • E-ISSN: 1548-9590 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5250/studamerindilite.26.4.0039 |
| OpenAlex | W827251047 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
The Politics of Make-BelieveDissimulation and Reciprocity in David Treuer’s The Translation of Dr. Apelles Colleen G. Eils (bio) He felt scanned, read, and consumed, and he had no control over how they read him or what they told themselves about him. They could be saying anything. They probably were saying anything. —Dr. Apelles In the translator’s note that precedes The Translation of Dr. Apelles, the translator makes a curious appeal to his reader. He implores: “I hope you accept this offering, this book, this gift of beauty, and that you read it to the end. And then, turn back here and read it again” (2). The request might be dismissed as self-indulgent on the part of the translator and could understandably be forgotten by the end of the book, given the metafictional gymnastics that drive the narrative. Reading the novel again, however, allows for an understanding of the text that focuses on the politics of reading Native literature. The novel insists on its own fictionality in the service of Native intellectualism and survivance rather than affirming the value of love and self-realization for a Native man torn between cultures and understood through stereotypes, as academic and popular treatments of Translation suggest. Read against a legacy of appropriation and exploitation of Native translators, the novel points to a tradition of dissimulation as resistance to show the political potential of literary aesthetics. David Treuer (Leech Lake Ojibwe) depicts Native storytellers as sophisticated intellectuals capable of displacing existing centers of knowledge rather than simply bearers of culture.1 In the final scenes of the book, Treuer has Apelles acknowledge his readers to implicate the audience in the novel’s theorization of reciprocal reading practices. Rereading the novel, therefore, entails participating in the novel’s [End Page 39] meditation on access, reciprocity, and the desires that shape what we know and believe. The novel’s translator describes finding a “very particular book in a vast and wonderful library,” from which loose sheets, “covered with text in a language [he] did not understand” fell (1). While the translator focuses his efforts on translating the story on those loose pages—to do so he must find someone who reads the language to dictate the story to him—the form of the novel suggests the composite text he first opens: two separate narratives alternate by chapter for the length of the novel, as if pages of one were inserted into a bound copy of the other. The first narrative—which begins with the last sentence of the translator’s note—is a retelling of the Greek pastoral Daphnis and Chloe, in which two naive orphans find love and sexual fulfillment in each other through a series of coincidences. In the novel’s retelling, however, the Greek youths are written as Native characters Bimaadiz and Eta, and the story unfolds on Ojibwe lands in the nineteenth century.2 The other narrative in the novel centers on Apelles, a forty-three-year-old Ojibwe man living in a major US city in the twenty-first century. Apelles works at recap, a library of retired books, and in his free time he translates obscure Native texts for publication in academic journals. In part because of his paralyzing fear of being reduced by stereotypes into a character in “a story like all the other stories about his people,” Apelles has lived a solitary, private life (203). Faced with increasing loneliness he likens to the feeling of a book without a reader, however, Apelles risks becoming a character and undertakes the project of translating himself “into a language that someone, somewhere, will want to read” by writing the story of his life and his love for his non-Native coworker, Campaspe (39). The two narratives exist next to each other but do not explicitly intersect until the final pages of the novel when Campaspe steals the translation Apelles is working on—a story about their love—and loses it while at work at recap. Jealous coworkers then hide the manuscript pages in a copy of Daphnis and Chloe, where it is presumably lost forever, stored away with other “unknown and unloved” books (304). Just as the
Aesthetics · Appeal · Appropriation · Art · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Law · Modern American Literature Studies · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Short Stories in Global Literature
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |