Listening to Sycorax in Marina Warner’s Indigo*
Congreso internacional de AEDEAN, (2003)Аннотация
Marina Warner’s novel Indigo is one of the most interesting revisions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the context of the postmodernist tendency to rewrite canonical works. In its exploration of the multiple gaps and silences of Shakespeare’s play, Indigo pays attention to one of the most disturbing absences in The Tempest: that of Sycorax. Her voice, one of the “unheard noises” of the island of Shakespeare’s play, is listened to in Warner’s novel by means of a dual strategy that underlies the whole work: the amplification of Shakespeare’s personae by dividing their traits among different characters, and the presentation of the action from several centres of consciousness. Bearing in mind this two-fold strategy, the aim of the present paper is to explore the relevance of Sycorax in Indigo by analysing both her amplified presence in Warner’s work, and her focalisation of the middle section of the novel, which significantly corresponds to the time of Shakespeare’s play.