Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

1 Carpentier and the Temporalities of Mutual Exclusion

1 Carpentier and the Temporalities of Mutual Exclusion The character of Victor Hugues fascinated me, because it answered to an old ambition of mine, which was to bring European characters to America or to take Americans to Europe. That is to say, to establish a powerful symbiosis of cultures and not to enclose ourselves within a limited milieu with no penetration of ideas coming from the outside. Alejo Carpentier, Afirmación literaria americanista The import/export operation that Carpentier describes in this epigraph does not amount to a “symbiosis” characterized by mutual benefit to the parties involved. Symbiosis implies compatibility, whereas much of the force of Carpentier’s writing stems from the incongruity of different peoples and civilizations that occupy the same space at a given historical moment. Perhaps no image is more characteristic of Carpentier’s description than that of the old slave Ti Noël seated on several volumes of the Encyclopédie eating sugarcane: even more than the narrative engine itself, this kind of juxtaposition amounts to a vignette whose poetic force owes almost entirely to its incongruity rather than its status as an image of symbiosis or mutual benefit. Those familiar with Carpentier’s writing will perhaps have taken notice of a binary manner of thinking that informs his narration: oppositions such as black/white, Caribbean/Europe, baroque/classical, and oral/written are not so much terms locked into a dialectical engagement promising synthesis as they are entities whose incommensurability results in an irresolvable play reminiscent of the baroque. Whenever one of these realms infiltrates the opposing camp, it seems that the result is not so much a symbiosis or synthesis as it is a grotesque spectacle or caricature . This dualistic penchant is at once Carpentier’s flaw as well as his discursive and creative impetus. Carpentier wavers or hesitates, then, between two possible cognitive frameworks: a positive fusion or synthesis, on the one hand, brought about by the convergence and exchange of European and Afro-Caribbe- 30 The Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination an cultures; and, on the other, a Manichean irreconcilability. In the latter scenario, a blending or miscegenation between Europe and the Caribbean results in a kind of monstrous progeny, underlining the incommensurability between the two worlds in question. In this chapter, I trace the evolution of Carpentier’s conceptual undecidability in his early fiction. Though there has been no shortage of critical commentary on the opposition between Europe and America, black and white in Carpentier, it is my view that revisiting these issues in detail in his early work demonstrates a perhaps surprising direct historical lineage of many of the more contemporary discussions in postcolonial and Caribbean studies that are similarly preoccupied with questions of hybridity and Manichaeism. In many ways, Carpentier’s narration anticipates this dialectic or dynamic , suggesting an intellectual kinship not only with Frantz Fanon and Fernando Ortiz, but also schools of thought such as those associated with third cinema, the subaltern studies group, Said, créolité, Stuart Hall and cultural studies, and the ongoing interpretative struggles over Rigoberta Menchú and Latin American testimonial. If, as Alberto Moreiras has pointed out, there is a genealogical line in Latin American thought from notions of transculturation (Ortiz) to heterogeneity (Cornejo Polar) to hybridity (García Canclini), with each subsequent notion opposing while supplementing the former, we can view Carpentier’s writing as a precursor of these discourses of Latin American modernity.1 And yet Carpentier’s conflicted attraction to Manichaeism also suggests an imminent comparability with Fanon. Though the world conjured by Carpentier’s fictive version of the eighteenth century is historically and geographically removed from the decolonization process that Fanon describes so powerfully, the latter’s description of the Manichean mechanism is certainly applicable to the conceptual framework of Carpentier’s project: “Thus we see that the primary Manichaeism which governed colonial society is preserved intact during the period of decolonisation; that is to say that the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be overthrown.”2 What Carpentier calls “symbiosis” can also be considered a precursor to more recent discussions on transculturation and “hybridity.” Fernando Coronil suggests that “it is significant that two critics of imperialism [Edward Said and Fernando Ortiz] developed, independently of each other and fifty years apart, a contrapuntal perspective for analyzing the formation of cultures and identities.”3 Perhaps a more appropriate juxtaposition with Ortiz would have been Carpentier himself, who also avails himself of a contrapuntal technique that may...