Fables of Development: Literary Form and the Dialectics of Dependency

This chapter explores the critical possibilities offered by the use of dependency theoryDependency theory as a theory of literature and culture in the manner pioneered by Roberto Schwarz. It is especially concerned with Schwarz’s dialectical critique of the relationship between the national and the international. Drawing on the work of Ruy Mauro MariniMarini, Ruy Mauro, whose analysis of dependency shares much with Schwarz's emphasis on thinking the part through the whole, the chapter asks what an analysis of literature might tell us about the dialectics of dependent capitalismCapitalism. My focus is on a little-known novella, The Adding Machine (1954), by the Guyanese author Edgar MittelholzerMittelholzer, Edgar. Subtitled “A Fable for Capitalists and Commercialists”, Mittelholzer’sMittelholzer, Edgar narrativeNarrative is an early piece of Caribbean speculative fictionSpeculative fiction that, in one sense, functions as a fairly straightforward indictment of individual greed. But at the levels of imagery, styleStyle, and form, it also captures the contradictory logics of dependencyDependency, super-exploitation, and underdevelopmentUnderdevelopment as these evolved following the colonial conquest of the Caribbean and its violent integration into the world market as a cash-crop exporter.