Table of Contents I. Literature and Revolution II. Portrait and Self portrait: The Hispano-american Novel Confronted with Society III. "Der Zauberberg" in the Literature of Latin America IV. Miguel Angel Asturias, Novelist of the Old and the New Worlds V. Alejo Carpentier: Magic Realism VI. Rayuela: or, Order out of Chaos VII. Cesar Vallejo: The Mestizo Masks VIII. Parra anti Parra IX. Anti-literature X. Antipoetry Chapter 5 - Alejo Carpentier: Magic Realism I should confess that, before the year 1950, the name, Alejo Carpentier stimulated in me a humorous remembrance of certain intense literary encounters during my university years in Chile. Down there around 1934 or 1935 we received his novel, "Ecue-Yamba-O, Historia afrocubana" and, momentarily, it illuminated us. Resembling a gust of passionate folkloric currents, with something of popular emotion and almost, almost revolutionary, his work brought dragging along all that was crass and false in a Cuban pseudo-tradition after the Spanish gypsies that had been indifferently sustained by critics who, confusing literature with the couplet, still considered that the Cuban black was a character out of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Of course, even in those years, we could see that Carpentier narrated his objects with a certain erudite perspective not a guarantee for the accuracy of his folk world--with some of the detachment of the hermaphrodites of Uruguayan folkloric pseudo-poetry or that of the Caribbean rumba dancers--but his experiment turned in commotion, progressing like a tractor which opens roads in mountains, plains, plantations and villages to which the Cuban novel had seldom dared approach. The exoticism of "Ecue-Yamba-O," the primitive mixed with the societal and embellished with an attractive constructionist imagery is what seduced us. In that generation we read Claude MacKay's Black Cocktail and, The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill; we never completed the discovery of jazz in all its aspects and geographic variants, but we followed it from New Orleans to Chicago and looked for it too in Afro-Spanish Harlem. Without furthering this literary impression, sensing perhaps but without clearly distinguishing the aesthetic-social factor contained in "Ecue-Yamba-O" that would later be expanded and deepened in interpretations of the hemispheric mythology, Carpentier therefore appeared to us like a precursor, slightly strange and a little alien in his own country. I did not read anything else of his until 1958. I read Los Pasos Perdidos: the first page with interest, the following, up to the beginning of the voyage to South America, with indifference; from there until the end with the unforgettable emotion of having discovered a decisive work, and I say "discovered" because I learned only after finishing reading it that the book had achieved an amazing success in France, England and the United States. I found his other tales and the impression was verified; it seemed incredible that over years of theorizing about the decadence of the descriptive super-regionalism of the hemispheric novel and about the advent of a new novelistic form consisting of essential realities, of universal communion in the social and philosophical drama of contemporary man, set in the meaningful, sometimes subterranean, sometimes supernatural realm of the old indian mythology, the black and white of our peoples, I would not have known the work of this Cuban, of his power to give form to the passing, solid and splendid structures in a baroque style only comparable in Latin American literature to that of Miguel Angel Asturias in prose, and to that of Pablo Neruda, in poetry. I then followed the track with greater care. I know of his life through an essay by his compatriot Salvador Bueno.(1) Carpentier was born in Havana in 1904, the son of a French architect and of a language teacher, of Russian origin, inclined "toward letters." With his parents he traveled in France, Austria, Belgium and Russia. After completing his secondary studies in the Janson de Sailly school, he specialized in musical theory and architecture. He returned to Havana from France with the intention of obtaining a university degree, but before long he went back. Music attracted him especially, as much in its creative aspect as its historical.(2) Carpentier struggled to generate an autochthonous movement that would supersede the mechanical imitation of the European vanguard. He wrote four "scenarios" to works by the composer Amadeo Roldan: "La Rebambaramba" (1928), a ballet in two acts, "El Milagro de Anaquille" (1929), "Mata-Cangrejo" and "Azucar," choreographic poems. In 1927, Carpentier was jailed for his participation in revolutionary political activities. In prison he wrote the first draft of his novel "Ecue-Yamba-O," edited in Madrid in 1933. Free from persecutions, he traveled anew to Europe in 1928. France called to him, to the point where in Cuba many consider him an expatriate but, as Bueno says: ...this expatriate will find his sources of nourishment in a variety of cultures: the Western European, the Hispanic and the African, in a rich blend of their environmental circumstances. In his home study the dialogues and the books will bring along echoes of those old European cultures, the British and the Slavic in fruitful conjunction. Outside, in the street, in the city, among the friends he meets, among the people he talks to in passing, he incorporates the Spanish colonial with the African transplant which, in the last analysis, form what is essentially Cuban.(3) In Paris he devotes himself to radio broadcasting in collaboration with Louis Barrault, Artaud and Desnos. He also writes the text and prepares the montage and the synchronization of a documentary film titled, "Le Vaudou."(4) In 1944 he publishes a short story, "Viaje a la Semilla." He visits Haiti in the company of the French actor Louis Jouvet, and the product of this trip is his novel "El Reino de este Mundo," edited in Mexico City in 1949. He locates, later, in Caracas where he played a role in a publicity firm. There he writes "Los Pasos Perdidos" which, translated into French, receives the "Prix du Meilleiur Livre Etranger" in 1956. Following, Carpentier has published the short novel "El Acoso" (Buenos Aires, 1957), "Guerra del Tiempo" (Mexico City, 1958)(5) and in 1962, "El Siglo de las Luces." One can see in Carpentier's work a certain evolutionary development that is relatively easy to identify. From "Ecue-Yamba-O" to "El Acoso" he moves in a survey--vertical and horizontal--of the mythological hemispheric roots, to confront them with his urge to understand the secret signs that divide his creative faculty and his social conscience. Fundamentally, the idea of exceeding the limits of time obsesses him, of transcending them and achieving a monumental historical synthesis in which man changes in circumstances but not in essence and, at root, repeats an eternal fable whose design it is possible to capture and hold in the work of art. From a literary viewpoint his evolution proceeds from the scientific exoticism of "Ecue-Yamba-O" up to the neo-symbolist abstraction of "El Acoso." We shall examine the details of the process. "Ecue-Yamba-O" is a semi-documentary novel about the magic primitive world of a sector of the black population in Cuba. An important part is played in it by religious rites, initiation ceremonies, formulas for enchantment, the occult substratum of peoples who live in an see of collective, pre-logical and mystical representation, even in the midst of a modern civilization. Referring to the scientific aspect of the novel, Salvador Bueno says: Apparently the work has a documentary character. The wish is to reveal the mysteries of the Afro-Cuban religions. Therefore the written text is accompanied by photographs of occult symbols, of ritual objects such as drums for chants. The folkloric is predominately Afro-Cuban in nature. Nevertheless, an essential note in this novel is the stylization of the Cuban life in which it appears. The customs, the language, the physical and human scenery are artistically elaborated.(6) A characteristic product of the African tradition that believes in the life of one's ancestors, Menegildo Cue, the hero, represents in his passion and downfall the destiny of his race. Menegildo goes from exaltation to ruin, from the expressive play of picks, voices and guitars, to the abyss illumined by the myths which he consecrates with his blood. The sex, the violence, the magic chant, prepare him for martyrdom. In thrall to Longina, a Negress who lives unmarried with a Haitian, in a jealous fever he looks for the occasion of combat with his rival. He kills him with blows and goes to stay in the jail. It could have been five in the afternoon when the pair of rural guards arrested Menegildo. They did not accuse him--fortunately--of making communist propaganda nor of threatening the security of the State. It was simply that the Haitian, Napoleon, had been found on a shoulder of the highway, losing blood, with a thigh opened by a knife thrust....(7) Menegildo accused of communism? Menegildo has seen how a yankee enterprise usurps the lands of the Cuban peasants, including those of his father. The blacks lose their sugar cane farms before the unlimited power of the company which advances with its apparatus of latest model technical material. The grandparents received a certain compensation in exchange for the lands; their descendants, however, came to be peons and, very soon, slaves. Menegildo sees the theft of which his father is victim and senses, at the same time, that his own son, whom he shall never know, would have to inherit the unwritten slavery that is his patrimony, thus perpetuating in an interminable chain of Menegildos the foreign domination over the deposits of the national wealth. Perhaps a black was worth less than an American? At least the blacks did not exploit anyone or go around stealing lands from the poor, obliging them to sell for two cents. The Americans? Sanamanbiche! As against them he came to take genuine pride in his primitive life, full of small complications and magical subtleties that the men of the north would never know. ...what good was the War for Independence, which the political orators spoke of so much, if one was continually uprooted by those sons of the great dog...? It was such that, at last and finally, only the yankees, friends of the Central, succeeded in benefiting from the ill-won profits of those ruinous plantations! And the Cuban workers and peasants, exploited by the ingenious yankee, defeated by the hiring of scabs at low wages, deceived by all the world, betrayed by the authorities, bursting with misery, ate--when they ate--what they could harvest in the narrow alleys between the walls of the buildings.(8) Carpentier does not avoid economic and social conflict. He examines it frankly and responds with aggressiveness, without falling into the excesses of propagandistic literature. Social injustice is one more ingredient in the bloody routine that consumes Menegildo. From politics he proceeds, without transition, to occult rites and in the frenzy of these currents that pulse with mystical visions, as prisoner of ancestral forces that, without the richness nor the prestige of ancient myth, churn today in the background of the village, beneath the light of old street lamps, to the rhythm of sweaty drums and in the confusion of cheap liquor, Menegildo falls with the jugular cut by a blade during a mortal duel between the initiates of the "People's Physique Sextet" and those of "Tropical Soul." Still at his back are the consortiums filling with money; the capitalist patriots hide in the shadows of their sumptuous mansions; the blacks pray, sing and procreate on the brown and green earth; they expire in miserable shacks; while in the fathering of the city the eternal rumba persists, the sacrifice of beaten and possessed women, of betrayed terrorists, of wise perverted shoeshine boys, of hermaphroditic convicts, all delivering themselves orgiastically to a black god and a white devil who insist on their demand for secret and fallen blood. Like a luxurious and tender shadow, in soft relief, strong in her primitive passion and in her silence, the negress Longina appears to represent the only agreeable symbol in the story: somehow one senses that, perhaps, in the generosity of her giving and in the heroism, tenacity and vigor hidden in her faith in Menegildo, there is an essence from the land that refuses to recognize the destruction imposed from outside and that affirms, that tightens within herself and, with irresistible energy, releases a new and victorious beginning. This woman-shadow in whose presence one detects a single message, shall become a splendid type of woman symbol in Los Pasos Perdidos. Juan Marinello, considering Carpentier "as anxious about primitivisms as a slave of refinements," censured his lack of political definition in "Ecue-Yamba-O." Marinello said: Neither our black nor our community achieve their reality in "Ecue-Yamba-O." Menegildo, without losing his profile, could have communicated to us his great anguish of the trapped man, and the poor of "San Lucio" the pain of their hopelessness. The novel, despite its realized beauties, remains a book of effects, when it could have been a book of essences.(9) Marinello refers, pointedly, to a marginal condition that, even in the most impassioned moments of the tale, applies to Carpentier: the condition of the technical and erudite observer, the ingenious artisan who with refined instinct can combine the types of the Afro-Cuban world, who paints with blood, who releases sexual odors and fumes from secret initiations at artistically measured intervals, and who arranges his myths in series of undeniably surrealist order to extract from them their transcendent moment. So graphic is his world of standing madness, so real seem his baroque ornaments of wax, marble and emeralds, that Carpentier soon seems to us a prodigious "meteur en scene," a master interior and exterior decorator. The truth is that in "Ecue-Yamba-O" he does not yet demonstrate the road of his own re-integration into Latin America, nor his explorations beyond time in search of the myths which, revealing the circular channel between the plains and civilization, will unite the halves of his creative personality. Such is to be the message of "El Reino de este Mundo" and "Los Pasos Perdidos." For the moment he toured the black nation desirous of finding the sense of the visions of his infancy, accumulated and absorbed, but not comprehended. He photographed its nightmares, documented its premonitions, and gave order and meaning to its affections; he did not identify with this world because it was not fully his. He touched it intimately, could even engage it, but not change it in the sense of definite salvation or perdition. "El Reino de este Mundo" is a novel of fabulous adventures based upon true incidents in the history of Haiti. Carpentier's attempt in this story is to demonstrate that the phantastic world of the damned poet, in the tradition of the English Gothic, of black surrealism--I use the word in its literal sense, as with its meaning in esoteric literature--is a reality in Latin America. In the prologue Carpentier declares: This was made particularly evident to me during my stay in Haiti, upon finding myself in covert contact with something that we could call the marvelous actual. I walked in a land where thousands of men striving for liberty believed in the parapsychic powers of Mackandal, to the point where this collective faith would produce a miracle the day of his execution. I already knew the phantastic story of Bouckman, the Jamaican initiate. I had been in the La Ferriere fortress, a work without architectural antecedents, uniquely foreshadowed by the Prisiones Imaginarias of el Piranese. I had breathed the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, ruler of incredible designs, much more surprising than all the cruel kings invented by the surrealists, very prone to tyrannies imaginary although not regretted. At each step there was the marvelous actual. But I thought, furthermore, that that presence and relevance of the marvelous actual was not the privilege of Haiti alone, but rather, patrimony of the entire hemisphere, where the development of cosmogonies, for example, had still not ceased being established. The marvelous actual is found at each step in the lives of men who inscribed dates in the history of the Continent and left surnames still remembered: from those who searched for the Fountain of Eternal Youth, or the golden city of Manoa, to various rebels from the first hour or various modern heroes of our wars for independence of such mythological stature as the colonel Juana de Azurduy.... And it is so that, because of the virginity of the region, because of its constitution and its ontology, because of the conjoint presence of the indian and the black, because of the Revelation that its recent discovery was, because of the fertile cross-breedings that it propagated, Latin America is very far from having drained its kettle of mythologies. Without having intended it in a systematic way, the text which follows is a response to these kinds of concerns. In it a succession of extraordinary deeds are narrated, that happened on the island of Santo Domingo, in a specific epoch beyond the span of a human life, wherein the marvelous flows freely from a reality followed strictly in all its details.(10) With the years, this description of his aesthetic attitude will become a declaration of principles and will sound above, below, and on the sides of the new Hispano-american novel, particularly in the case of "Cien Años de Soledad." The magic realism of Carpentier is affirmed, then, in an authenticity which is, simultaneously, ideological and material. That which, at first sight, could seem inoffensive, contains--as will be seen later in "Los Pasos Perdidos"--a profound rift in a cultural complex that up to now has compromised the hemispheric artistic expression. Carpentier writes like the Spanish chroniclers of the Conquest, for a European public. He is dominated by the obsession to convince peoples who now subsist in the quintessence of artifice, that in the Americas there exists an active deposit of mythological forces--sometimes latent beneath a lid of superficial Westernism--whose workings, in the area of art, give reality to an entire system of symbols that the European culture conceives only on a static, abstract plane. What in the surrealist tradition is organized chaos, in his work is a natural and irrational chaos; the artifice is reality, and the exotic becomes the authentically primitive. From the European imagination Carpentier is particularly interested in French Romantic pseudo-primitivism. On first impression, the Cuban novelist could impress one as a man of culture, a westerner attracted by Latin American exoticism, a creator who, before producing his fable, proceeds to study it with the minuteness of an archaeologist, from this point of view, his work could seem to be an idealization of the Americas' mythological world. The references to Atala and to Paul et Virginie are many in "El Reino de este Mundo" and "Los Pasos Perdidos." The basic idea of this latter novel--the man corrupted by supercivilization, who discovers in the steppes his true self' and the perfect surrounding for creating his masterwork, who is born to a sane, pure, primitive life, crystallizing his creative vitality into art and in a rustic passion and earthly idyll--thus described, superficially, could be identified as an outgrowth of French Romantic encyclopaedism. It is possible that his European readers--Sitwell has called him "one of the greatest writers of our age"--look to his works for the drop of that barbaric elixir that Montaigne and Voltaire liked in La Araucana, following in fascination the process of a second discovery of America, of a hemisphere in which the mythology is preserved and exalted to provide new blood to the parched remainder of a culture surfeited with itself. Against poisonous artifice, we have here the myth in flesh and bone. Carpentier's message is transformed as follows into an admonition directed against the idealizers: Leave go the tricks of the salon, come to live the delirious reality of the magic Americas, come to submerge yourselves in the new black saving legend. All this falls short, however, because there is something else to consider, something of fundamental importance: Carpentier wishes to meld himself in body and soul to this mythological organism in which his literary work functions. Soon he will give testimony of this dependent essence of his creative genius and of the venture in which he tries to define his conception of art and life beyond the limits of time: that testimony and that venture constitute the core of "Los Pasos Perdidos." Carpentier is not alone in the attempt. The same year in which "El Reino de este Mundo" appears, "Hombres de Maiz" by Miguel Angel Asturias is published in Buenos Aires. Both, Carpentier and Asturias, return from an erudite and analytic Europe to the totemic, magical, baroque and tropical world of certain zones of Latin America. Both studied the mythological net they were going to penetrate, not completely enveloped in artifice and in rhetoric, to search out the soul in an active animistic ritual, spiced with exorcisms and revolutions. Both come with the acclaim of sheepskins and diplomas to test the reality of a vision discussed in French conference rooms. In the magical realism of Carpentier and Asturias, nevertheless, there is no idealization whatsoever of romantic origin; on the contrary, that realism stems from the facts of historical deeds that become legendary in the popular imagination and operate, later, as myths out or a collective subconscious. This ethnological and social root is the distinctive mark of the work of Carpentier and Asturias. Without the anti-rhetorical auto da fe of the prologue, "El Reino de este Mundo" could be considered as a small masterpiece of Gothic literature, a surrealist flowering loaded with black elements, rich in self ornamentation, luxurious in its organic density and in the vivid tone of its sensualism. But, as was said, each character, each event--the age, the surroundings, the region--all have an essential historical reality. Art (could one say, trickery?) consists of the arrangement of the elements and in the focus with which they are presented to the reader. Thus for example, from the initial scene we hold the image of a barbershop display where wax combed heads are exhibited, next to a window where a butcher shows heads of slaughtered animals. In one scene rich in suggestion the novelist deliberately emphasizes those heads and achieves the desired extravagant effect. Selecting the occurrence, presenting his characters--Mackandal, Bouckman, Henri Christophe, Paulina Bonaparte--at a culminating moment of their incredible adventures, arranging the objects and the region from an angle which sharpens the incongruity and the poetic absurdity, in Carpentier's hands the story acquires a frenzy of movement, a richness of association that as soon touches the feelings as the intellect. The world of violence, of bloody tyranny, of violations, assassinations, that is the island described by Carpentier, schematically emerges, direct, hallucinatory. He lives in a language of such vibrant symbols, both in their spare hardness and in the suspension of time in which the author places them among lights and shadows, that the tale is removed from history and we remain watching with all the faces of his multiple reality. Such a feat of symbolism of the essence of the history of the hemisphere has not, that I know of, more than one antecedent: "El Matadero" by Esteban Echeverria and, perhaps, one parallel: "El Senor Presidente" by Asturias. "Los Pasos Perdidos" is the highest expression of what traditionally was called the artistic novel in Latin America. The fine current of modernism with its search for the exotic and the phantastic, the renewal of hemispheric indianism in its complex relation with the Spanish Renaissance spirit, ideas and forms of literature that surpass romanticism and the tradition of Dario, are harmonized in the work of Carpentier and, taking on the luminosity of an allegory shaped from a careful aesthetic viewpoint, also acquire the depth and the transcendence of an adventure of the spirit which directly affects contemporary man. Carpentier's hero is a man consumed in the spiritual vacuum and the awful psychological pressure that generates the great modern city. His habits consist in maintaining the efficacy of worry, in giving solid respectability to cynicism, in elaborating lies and dissimulation, in crowning the collective and individual corruption with a halo of serene bourgeois superiority. At bottom, the threads which support his performance are on the point of breaking, the worry is already desperation, the vacuum is almost madness. Postponing the culmination he goes from the bed of his wife to the bed of his girlfriend stopping along the way to replenish his strength in a bar. His woman conscientiously plays the role of the wreck in the costume of prosperous respectability. During the week she is the main actress in a play whose events occur in the south of the United States. On Sunday she celebrates sexual rites with her husband. The girlfriend, dedicated to astrology and other similar sciences, is the exquisite stimulant of the spirit and supports the sensual heat of her body with arrangements of lights, music, paintings and various aspects of interior decoration. On the verge of definitely succumbing, the hero departs for an area of the Latin American wilderness--the Orinoco, according to the explanation in the epilogue to the story--with the intention of discovering some primitive musical instruments that will allow him to test his thesis concerning the origin of music. His girlfriend accompanies him. First the Hispano-american city, where they observe a violent revolution, and later the wilds, act like an acid which upon coming into contact with humanity tired of the couple, produces a sudden reaction. It accentuates "her lifelessness": without the interior decor, exposed to the implacable light of the tropics, she falls apart like a wax mannequin, the knots are loosened, the sensuality becomes flabby and ends, dragging, impotent, consumed by malarial fever, rejected by the man and by the woman--the temptation of lust had also affected another peasant woman--who seeks refuge in the original shelter of her existential home. The man, on the other hand, breaks the vacuum bell and enters the world that ancestrally he brought pulsing in his blood. We have here the path of his salvation. Faced with two cultures--one which runs in the blood and the other in books--and silenced by years of dissimulation and upright unconsciousness in the midst of a common pit where only instinct sustains one, he gradually begins to know his place of origin, to understand his reason for living, to search for the final integrity. He must flee from the indecent sterility of the native artist attached to a foreign culture, like a snail that absorbs the mask of colors of dissonances and abstractions, resolved to parody a decadence that still seems excessive. He discovers, en route, among primitive shades, the expressiveness of harps, flutes and bongos that open the track towards a zone of the hemispheric world where he is to capture the genuine image of himself, transfigured in the mirrors of the prairies. Referring to his own work in an interview with Salvador Bueno, Carpentier has said: In that book the plot has only one function of a structural kind, the factor of unity. In "Los Pasos Perdidos" one idea predominates: that of a possible evasion within time. In said novel a crisis of conscience, suffered by the central character who speaks in the first person, causes him to confront a mode of evasion that leads him beyond everything imaginable. (And where does that evasion lead him?) Once that supreme independence before Time, before the Era, is discovered, the protagonist should discover, within the same achieved evasion, the reasons which would make him undo what is done, returning to the point of departure.(11) And in a letter directed to the same critic, Carpentier specifies even further: All this speaks of my present concern to universalize the Latin American scenario, to open it, amplify it, extend it.... Now one must orient himself to a more ecumenical concept of the hemispheric.(12) His pilgrimage in the wilderness is a parabola. As in the novel of Jose Eustasio Rivera, "La Voragine,"(13) the discovery of the plains occurs in a journey of the protagonist, man of the city, who goes hurried by intense emotions of a sensual and aesthetic sort, toward a lyrically intuited terminus. Arturo Cove as well as Carpentier's anonymous hero are fugitives from decadence; both have, like a Kantian category, a clear-cut artistic conception in which to place the unfamiliar primitive world, but it flattens them like a supernatural power. Each is accompanied by a woman who represents what, subconsciously they desire to destroy. They and the women reveal their most secret essence in the contact with the mythological presence of nature and with brutally fascinating beings that the wilderness diabolically uses for their perdition. But, one should not confuse the fundamental movement of one work and the other. The wilderness of Rivers is seen through the refined vocabulary of Romantic modernism and the social conscience developed from the crisis of capitalism that followed the first European war. Carpentier's wilderness, without constituting a literary idealization, like that of Hudson, for instance, is a mythological world interpreted above history and described in a language full of symbols of surrealist ascent but at base concrete, contemporary, autochthonous. Both novelists, the Colombian and the Cuban, express the tropical hemispheric mythology, in the same sense that also Miguel Angel Asturias and Eugene O'Neill express it, but the romantic-social root of Rivers becomes a romantic-aesthetic root in the work of Carpentier. In "Los Pasos Perdidos" the hero marches with a Scout, a friar and a woman, like the Spanish colonizer of the past. Just like during the Conquest, there are some to search for gold, some the Fountain of Youth, some to found missions and some to populate them. But also traveling with them is a Greek who reads the Odyssey. The truth is that, while on one plane the expedition repeats the exploits of the Conquest--in the actual 20th century--and discovers the secret of- the fabulous union of two cultures, on another plane, of deeper meaning, the hero duplicates the adventure of Ulysses and the dream of every visionary who would search our Continent for the Promised Land, call it El Dorado, The City of the Caesars, Cibola or Santa Monica of the Flock. He finds the source of happiness but, beneath the implacable divine eye, he abandons it, believing that he has to return, without guessing that leaving it, even momentarily he has renounced it, for it cannot exist except in the miraculous instant of possession. The two adventures are engrossing. We participate in the founding of the city in the wilderness, wish to remain with the hero and establish our farm in the slowly growing township, want to warn him of his mistake when he boards the airplane of the explorers who come to rescue him. Later--when like the hero in "Lost Horizons", the novel by James Hilton--he fights to return, wanders the roads of the plains, to the lengths of the currents of the Orinoco, risking all to find the secret way through the disorder and the pathway which must lead him to the hidden city, and we are moved by the dramatic fervor of his exploit and suffer with him the effects of deception. On another plane, that of spiritual endeavor, Carpentier also proceeds without subterfuge. The process of discovery of the world of his ancestry is authentic in all its complexity. The language is the first serious obstacle. The first pages of his tale, written in an idiom in which the verbal ornaments do not yet hide a certain grammatical stammer, contain sentences like these: I knew that the new President of the Republic lived there and that, for a few days, I had failed to attend the popular festivities.... Not a magazine remained, not a mystery novel, not a distracting lecture.... Whoever opened a door, all of a sudden would have provoked flights of termites still unable to live in wood.(14) This same Carpentier has his moments of syntactical extravagance: This is, then, the idiom that I spoke in my childhood; the idiom in which I learned to read and to recite; the idiom rusted in my mind by disuse, left to the side like a useless tool, in a country where it could little serve me.(15) Much later, nevertheless, the grammar and its tiny traps disappear like a small boat in the tumultuous current of the Latin American baroque and we stop noticing the incongruities and the errors, do not take account when a term is invented, translated from French or disinterred from the splendid treasures of classical Spanish. Carpentier's language rises like a cathedral in the plains, it rests or soars, it illuminates or it darkens, its jewels are blinding, it contorts and is stylized, resonates with infinite cadences, explodes in colors, or exhibits the patina of an antique painting. It is, finally, a magical instrument. Mariano Ticon Sales, affected by the style of El Reino de este Mundo, has said: Only some of the best designs of Valle-Inclan could compare in the Hispanic prose of our time with the almost pointedly plastic style in which it is written. A style that by strength of mastery gives alternatively not only the color or the half-tint, but even offers--when it is necessary--that luxury of the masters which is called shading. A style that when required to, can constitute its own perfection.(16) The language of Carpentier is not an accumulation of sounds produced in a hollow and resonant horn, in the fashion of the verbal refinement of the turn of the century which has traditionally been called tropicalism. The "tropical" in the language is like a vegetative growth that appears on the surface of words: a spot of fungus, or a tight bouquet of blossoms of transient stability; it is a positing of the voice and a translation of the gesture into sounds. The work of Carpentier does not show this vegetal invasion of the structure of the language. The frenzy of his extensive and minute descriptions is rational; at base, it encloses a dominion of exaltation. It is not difficult to find similarities in his work with that of Miguel Angel Asturias. Carpentier seems to follow Asturias when he tries to suggest one's transition from his human condition to his mythical condition. For example, Carpentier says in "Los Pasos Perdidos": Already near the dwelling, summoned by Montsalvatje, were appearing the medics who closed wounds reciting the spell of Bogota, the giant Queen Cicanocohora, the amphibious men who to sleep would go to the bottom of lakes, and those whose nourishment was the mere fragrance of flowers. He already accepted the Carbuncle Kids who wore a sparkling stone between their eyes, and the hydra seen by the people of Federmann, and the Bezar Rock, of prodigious qualities, found in the entrails of sheep, and the tatunachas, beneath whose ears up to five persons could hide, and those other savages whose legs were crippled into the talons of poultry.... The Amazons had existed: they were the women of the men lost to the primitives, in their mysterious migration toward the Maize Empire. From the wilds of the Mayas surged stairways, piers, monuments, temples full of portentous paintings, representing rites of priest-fish and of priest-locusts....(17) This language which evinces the intention to transcendentalize by means of word-symbols is common in a certain area of the contemporary Latin American novel; it is employed by writers desirous of creating powerful and deep syntheses, amalgams of men and surroundings, of visions that surpass the circumstantial and the ordinary. This frequently imbalanced linguistic ambition, or heavy or arid, always difficult, holds no relation to what is usually called "tropicalism." If "tropicalism" is untying, the language to which I refer is uniting; if "tropicalism" means to cover the void with a dense fabric of lyric frenzy, the style of Carpentier and Asturias is to denude the deep spiritual vein to define it in a rigid poetic structure. Nevertheless, the word "tropicalism" properly understood should be in this case as valid as the word "baroque," except to the extent that it refers to the style of Carpentier and Asturias which represents the adaptation of a European artistic form to the native idiosyncrasy of the Americas, or to be more exact, of tropical America. Let us revise, in consequence, the meaning of the term: those who speak of political "tropicalism" to refer to the rule of Central America, in fact refer to a type of excess not foreign to the rest of the hispanic world; similarly those who speak of "tropicalism" when they allude to an easy and puerile sensuality, or when they censure an exuberance in the customs, in the manner of dress, or of speaking, a lack of reserve, an inconsequential enthusiasm, in truth recognize a mixed tendency in the peoples called "white" of South America, but they transfer it to those who carry it, accidentally, more to the surface of the skin. We shall consider then legitimate the use of the term, tropical, to designate the variety of the baroque that constitutes the language of Carpentier. Tropicalism in his work--like in that of Asturias-- is the name for an artistic expression in which the magical basis of the primitive cultures of the Americas joins with the formal beauty of the European baroque tradition in an attempt to interpret the spirit and the sort of reality of the man of the Caribbean and of Central America. No other idiom serves for such an enterprise: not that of the old traditionalist norms, not that of crude branched regionalism, nor that of modernist impressionism. An instrument is needed to create myths, or to rescue them from the pre-Columbian past, to bring to life the resident and the region in the essential unity that artistic creation requires, to take the magic of the indigenous hemisphere to the fatigued intellectualism of Europe. Exactly that which makes Carpentier "strange" and Asturias "difficult" in Latin American literature, and distances them from the official critique, is precisely that which they communicate to us with the aesthetic thinking universally projected. Not otherwise can we interpret the eulogies of Paul Valery upon the "Leyendas de Guatemala" by Asturias and those of Edith Sitwell about the novels of Carpentier. On the linguistic plane Carpentier awakens mysterious resonances that promptly invade the worlds of the sensations and ideas. From the words matter is released which touches the hero and changes him. To the extent that he confines himself to the selva he proceeds losing one soul and having another emerge, like a serpent that changes skin. We see him advance in the Tierras del Caballo: Upon entering a town where there was much talk of tail-lash and hoof-covers, I knew that we had arrived in the Lands of the Horse. It was, before anything else, that smell of the circus ring, of equine sweat, that walked the earth for so long, announcing the culture with the whinny. It was that flat hammering sound that announced to me I was near the blacksmith, still toiling upon his anvil and bellows, painted in shadows, with his leather apron, before the light of the furnace. It was the horseshoes heated to red put out in cold water, and the song tapped by the quarter-horse shod with new iron, still timid about sliding on the stones, and the bucking and snapping, held bridled, before the youth by the window, a ribbon displayed in her hair. With the horse had re-appeared the saddle shop, perfumed of leather, fresh with hides, with its operatives laboring beneath hangings of cinches, cowhand stirrups, embossed leather covers and bridles for Sundays with silver disks on the frontispieces. In the Lands of the Horse it seemed that man was more manly. He returned to being master of ancient techniques which put his hands in direct contact with iron and hair, it taught him the arts of breaking and riding, developing physical dexterities to flaunt on festival days, in front of the admiring women who knew so well how to squeeze with their legs, who knew so much what to do with their arms. Reborn were the male games of taming the plaintive mules and jumping and tossing the bull, the ancient beast, causing his arrogance to roll in the dust. A mysterious solidarity was established between the animal of well placed testicles, who entered his cows more deeply than any other, and the man, who had for symbols of universal courage that which the sculptors of equestrian statues had to model or forge in bronze, or shape in marble, so that the steed would properly convey the hero upon his mount, casting a fine shadow over the lovers who strolled past in the municipal parks. There was a grand reunion of men in the houses where many horses nuzzled in the driveway; but where only one horse waited through the night, half hidden among the threats, the resident must have removed his spurs to go more quietly into the house where the shadows awaited. It seemed to me interesting to now observe that, after having been the greatest fortune of the man of Europe, his machine of war, his vehicle, his messenger, the pedestal for his personages, the ornament of his monuments and triumphal arches, the horse extended its great history in the hemisphere, and in the New World continued to fulfill, generously and on an enormous scale, its secular offices.(18) We see how the hero moves into the Tierras del Perro (pp. 147-48); we view with some amazement the slow and steady knotting of two worlds-- now, not the Spanish and the indian of the 15th century, but the European and the mestizo of the 20th century--both crossed with magical and cabalistic strains: sometimes scientific, psychological and philosophical, sometimes religious and sexual. One of them, that of the European decadence, chases the other with a sensual voracity. It saw the latter in the distance, and imitates it wearing ritualistic masks upon its factions of blonde and brunette being. In moments of aesthetic paroxysm a cult has been dedicated extravagantly mixing the east and the west, magic, superstition and the dramatic apparatus. From that cult we have Negroid masks hanging in luxury departments on the banks of the Seine, we have ceramics, leathers, woodwork and opals in fashionable stores, we have piano chords, and saxophone wails and rhythms of drums in little obscure boites. "Los Pasos Perdidos" are lost steps which lead Carpentier's hero to discover the truth behind this parody and in his words to revive the life that ended in useful but artificial concepts of primitive art and in the automatic approximations of surrealism. What could have been a surrealist picture hanging at a Parisian exposition is here an environment of impeccable reality: The matter taken care of, with a magisterial handling of finances and another choice of pathways made, I found myself that noonday in a prodigious city in ruins. It was long deserted streets, of uninhabited houses, with rotted doors, down to the jambs or the plaster, whose ivied tiling collapsed at times merely in the center, following the break of a master beam, shortened by termites, discolored by exposure. There remained the columns of an entranceway burdened with the remnants of a cornice, broken by the roots of a fig tree. There were stairways without beginning or end, as if suspended in emptiness, and flimsy balconies, attached to a window frame opening on the sky. The layers of bluebells simulated the lightness of curtains in the space of rooms that still retained their slotted tiles, and there were old treasures of aromas, captured in poinsettia in obscure corners, and armed cacti in a lamp that trembled in the corridor, in the path of air currents, like uplifted hands of invisible servants. There were mushrooms behind the doors and vines in the chimneys. The trees struggled the length of the walkways, claws grasping the crevices of the masonry, and of a burned down church there remained a few buttresses and decorations and a monumental arch, ready to fall, on whose bell tower one could still detect, in vague outline, the figures of a celestial concert, with angels who played the woodwind, the horn, the composite organ, strings and maracas. This last left me so admiring that I wanted to go back to the boat in search of paper and pencil, to show the Caretaker, by means of some sketches, this rare reference to the organ. But at that instant there was the sound of drums and sharp flutes and various demons appeared on a corner of the square, pointing to a miserable Church, of plaster and tile, situated in front of the burned out cathedral.(19) In France they have dreamed of a surrealist Latin America and Africa, like Chateaubriand imagined the Americas romantic. The Atala crowned in feathers and icons has had her counterpart in a nocturnal Atala, totemic, laden with diamonds or grounded on planes of Mexican sun, open and wounded by the accumulation of phallic symbols that the poet-ethnologists fire there during impassioned trances. Carpentier recognizes the deceptive duality, and through the intermediary of a character, alludes to the poison of that puerile idealization, or of the superimposed symbol that could discredit the authenticity of the hero's adventure. Because this hero, although apparently motivated by an old Romantic utopia, although in moments of sexual laxity confuses the clarity of the wilderness with the wilderness itself and thinks he sees it in the woman who follows him, prepares, he enjoys and develops, a kind of earthly allegory, something like an upside-down war drum, soon shaken by the impact of the elemental realities. As soon as he leaves the hidden city, his Atala joins with another colonist, thus, as the Greek of the novel expresses it: " She no Penelope. Young woman, strong, beautiful, needs husband. She no Penelope. Nature that woman here needs man....(20) The roads to the hidden city close and when they re-open they lead nowhere, so the protagonist, although he conquers time, does not discover the secret of his own inner liberation, but only exterior recourses, probes, signals, aids of an inconclusive sort. He does discover the road for a resigned return to the usual world. As already stated, in 1958 under the title of "Guerra del Tiempo" Carpentier brought together three brief, stories--"El Camino de Santiago," "Viaje a la Semilla" and "Semejante a la Noche"--and his short novel: "El Acoso."(21) Carpentier experiments in these works with an idea which seems to have long obsessed him: that of breaking the artificially solid margins of time and of integrating the past, the present and what is to come in one duration, simultaneously stable and volatile, whose locus can be a person, an event or an entire life. That this idea is not completely original could go without saying; antecedents of Carpentier in this respect are: the Romantic comedy of John Balderston, Berkeley Square, and the lyric novel of Virginia Wolf, Orlando. Just as a tap of the finger changes the planes of a kaleidoscope, the stories by Carpentier willfully situate themselves beyond the conventional unities of time until they establish in their nobility, throughout "years" and even "centuries," a harmonious flux in which the root of the human destiny is identified with hallucinatory clarity. A supreme moment of crisis in "Semejante a la Noche" concerns the fortune of a man before the imminence of war, and the will to live. The Greek soldier who observes the loading of the ship in which he shall sail to Troy and approaching the community to bid farewell to his parents becomes, without transition, the Explorer who marches to the Americas and, during his meeting with his girlfriend, is transformed into a colonist who emigrates across the Gulf of Mexico, to conclude anew as a Greek soldier in the moral downfall and the shame of his impotence, that soldier is man, from the beginnings of history in a mortal trance, corroded by the acid that, beneath the heroic adventure, peels off layer after layer, the solitude, the emptiness, defeat and the tragic cynicism of those who manipulate him from the shadows and who make ready to cut the threads that suspend him in the abyss. The pilgrim who goes to Santiago de Compostela--"El Camino de Santiago"--is a man who undergoes, through the experience of another man, that which he himself- should have later tried. That which is going to happen later is already lived in this and other tales of Carpentier's. We have here, basic intrigue and the surprising effect of its story line. Fighting against time, plotting to dismantle it like a clock, piece by piece, and re-assemble it arbitrarily, in "Viaje a la Semilla" Carpentier recounts the life of his character in reverse. He leaves a house being disassembled and, like in a film in which the action regresses thanks to a trick of the projector, the house is reconstructed, the hero returns to dwell in it, he is rejuvenated, once more he reaches adolescence, infancy, he joins his mother, is unborn, installs himself in the womb and ends in the uterine darkness re-integrated to the original seeds. "El Acoso" is a synthesis of these experiments with the notion of time and an application of Carpentier's theories to the technique of literary narration. The equilibrium between the diverse occurrences that continue accumulating like a dramatic charge around the characters is the result of a tension that Carpentier maintains until the last instant of the story. Everything in this drama of the terrorist pursued by his persecutors seems to depend upon a diabolical will that lets the minutes fall like grains of sand in an hourglass and with each one the fateful execution approaches. The scenes, the words, the gestures, constantly seek their respective places in the puzzle until, with the integration of the final image, the resolution is produced and the entire story is shown in essential complexity. The ethical substratum of the drama is, as in the allegories of Kafka, gathered in the atmosphere of the tale, intense like a presentiment or like an echo of something that still must be said. Nothing has a meaning in itself--not even in the classic perfection of the detail--but rather in the final and total concatenation where the secret significances are defined, where time, detained for an instant, or better 46 minutes, the length of Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony, resumes its circular progress inciting us to begin again to read the story, assimilating ourselves to that lapse of time which reflects the pace of life. The scheme of the tale--if we organize it chronologically and in the abstract--is of a deceptive simplicity; it begins with Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony in a concert hall; an individual arrives in haste, throws currency between the bars of the box office, and enters the theater; two men follow him, and without losing sight of him, they take seats in a back row. The ticket man, who cannot identify who has given him the currency without awaiting the change, leaves during the performance of the Symphony in search of a woman. She tells him that the currency is counterfeit; he returns to the theater, hears the last moments of the concert. The music terminates. Applause. The public leaves. The two men that arrived behind go to a box where the one with the counterfeit hides and they blast him with bullets. Let the reader compare this plot with the organization that is given to the events in the tale. Carpentier narrates the story in an interior monologue extending from the two central characters: the persecuted terrorist and the ticket man of the concert hall. From within them is spun the spider's fabric in which move the assassins, the old negress of the Mirador, Estrella, the prostitute, the revolutionaries, the spies. A world of portentous dramatic intensity emanates from the condemned man, it leaves him like blood, a trickle first, a spot and then an overflow. True happenings from the modern history of Cuba--the subplot in the cemetery to overcome the authorities, the shooting of the debtor--are interlaced with the chronic nightmare of the terrors of the hunted, with the details of his confinement starving of hunger, and the chase through the streets of the city. The worlds of both central characters touch at each instant in acts of insignificant appearance but full of fatalism, they touch and are confounded, but not essentially, instead, like two concentric circles that, floating, cross to later separate. In this novel in which Carpentier--like O'Flaherty in The Informer-- reveals in the crisis of a man, pursued by the band of betrayed terrorists, the naked and brutal basic solitude of the human condition, his talent as a narrator culminate. Neither his previous work nor El Siglo de las Luces surpasses this novel in artistic perfection and genuine emotion. The techniques of the account--counterpoint, the flashback, the interior monologue and the free association of ideas--are mechanisms of an accelerated rhythm. The traditional baroque exuberance of Carpentier comes measured with a cold and calculating power of aesthetic discernment, nothing is lacking here and nothing is left over. The language does not detach from the work like an ornamental afterthought, on the contrary, it comprises it, the one joins and integrates the other like flesh on the bone, it painfully exposes the marrow and leaves vibrating in its spareness echoes that are going to follow us, insistent, pointed, like the memory of the fright of the accused. Notes 1 Cf. Salvador Bueno, La Letra come Testigo, Havana, 1957. The essay is called, "Alejo Carpentier, Novelists Antillano y Universal," pp.153-79. 2 Carpentier is the author of La Musica en Cuba (F.C.E., Mexico City, 1946), a work noted for its historical and critical value. 3 Salvador Bueno, op. cit., p.157. 4 The protagonist in "Los Pasos Perdidos" (1st ed., Mexico City, 1953, pp.34-35) similarly creates a cinematographic work. 5 This last volume includes "El Acoso" and the stories, "El Camino de Santiago," "Viaje a la Semilla" and "Semejante a la Noche." 6 Salvador Bueno, op. cit., p.163. 7 "Ecue-Yamba-O," Alejo Carpentier. 8 Ibid. 9 Cf. Juan Marinello, Literatura Hispanoamericana, Mexico City, 1937, p. 175. 10 "El Reino de este Mundo," pp.12-16. 11 Cited by Bueno, pp.169-70. 12 Ibid., pp. 178-79. 13 Carpentier--through the intermediary of his central character-makes a curious reference to a South American novel that could very well be "La Voragine" by Rivera: "I have in my bag a famous novel, by a South American writer, in which are given the names of animals, of trees, references to indigenous legends, ancient occurrences, and all what is necessary to give a ring of veracity to my tale" (Los Pasos Perdidos, p. 293). 14 "Los Pasos Perdidos," pp. 52, 54, 68, 70. 15 Ibid., p.53. 16 Cited by Bueno, pp.169-170. 17 "Los Pasos Perdidos," pp.174-75. 18 Ibid., pp.139-417. 19 Ibid., pp.141-42. 20 Ibid., p. 331. 21 "El Camino de Santiago" is based upon a sentence taken from Carpentier's book, La Musica en Cuba: "In 1557, Havana had no more of a musician than one Juan de Amberes who played on the drum when there was a ship in sight...." "Viaje a la Semilla" was published previously in Havana in 1944 and was included in the Antologia del Cuento Cubano of S. Bueno.