My paper addresses various issues such as identity, sexuality and race within the context of the Caribbean multicultural experience of carnival. I will focus on the work of the Trinidadian writer Robert Antoni, Carnival published in 2005 to explore the intertextual cobweb that Antoni weaves with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1920) and to address the question of literary freedom and the validity of literary recuperation and intertext.
In Carnival, Robert Antoni transposes Hemingway’s novella and characters to a Caribbean reality of migration and endless criss-crossing that many West Indian expatriates engage into between their home and the Western World. On the face of it, Antoni’s characters, William, Lawrence and Rachel seem to be replicas of Hemingway’s Jack Barnes, Robert Cohn and Brett. They have the same jobs, share the same social activities and indulge in similar quests of impossible love relationships that make them stand in both novels as examples of the twentieth century emancipated men and women whose endless pursuit of perfect happiness is in an unredeemable way doomed to failure. Yet, Robert Antoni is not only interested in a rewriting of Ernest Hemingway’s novella. His main concern in Carnival is an intertextual procedure that yields new meanings in shifting contexts and which gives Hemingway’s story and characters, in carnival fashion, a Caribbean existence. A Caribbeanness that establishes a pervasive sense of indeterminacy and complexity marking the Antonian novel as an expression of the West Indian versatile experience of belonging.