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6 Ideological Frailty and the Marvelous in Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo Carpentier’s artistic enterprise in the forties became a search for origins, the recovery of history and tradition. . . . Carpentier is reaching for that elusive Golden Age when fable and history were one. —Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban novelist, essayist, musicologist , and communist, is widely acclaimed as having been one of Latin America’s most influential writers. His innovation of the concept of “lo real maravilloso”—the marvelous real—gained such influence among the writers of the region who chose to affiliate themselves with the term that the particular perception of Latin American social reality it encouraged is evident throughout the writings of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s.1 Lo real maravilloso was an extraordinary and distinctive literary style and theory that was defined by the bewitching novel of the Haitian Revolution El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) and in Carpentier’s landmark essays “On the Marvelous Real in America” and “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real.”2 In those essays, Carpentier called for a new and radical way of perceiving Pan-American cultures and histories with a particular emphasis on their syncretic and non-European elements; significantly, the essays also reveal the influence of Oswald Spengler’s vision of the cyclical nature of history on Carpentier ’s conception of the nature of historical change. It is my argument in this chapter that in spite of its technical brilliance and economy, El reino encourages an understanding of the Haitian Revolution that obscures its most radical qualities. In failing to attribute to the former slaves of Saint Domingue a radical rational humanism in addition to a consciousness imbued with the marvelous, Carpentier, contra James and Césaire, conspicuously circumvents recuperating the Haitian Revolution as the fullest articulation of the political implications of the Radical Enlightenment. Hence, Carpentier’s attribution of instinct and spirit to the actions of 122 Conservative Visions the former slaves of Saint Domingue, as opposed to reason and matter, becomes a problematic aspect of the novel that I suggest reveals an ideological frailty at the heart of Carpentier’s deployment of the concept of the marvelous real. Thus, it is part of the argument of this chapter that although Carpentier’s marvelous realism shares certain aesthetic affinities with the négritude of Aimé Césaire and René Depestre, it lacks any corresponding vision of emancipatory political action. The roots of what Carpentier dubbed lo real maravilloso can be found in his reaction to his trip to Haiti in 1943. It was in this journey that he first perceived the existence of a distinct continental American sensibility that encompassed Haiti; this in turn would lead him to his “first inkling of the marvelous real.” Everyday Haitian culture struck him as being deeply connected to its historical past, and “to certain synchronisms , American, recurrent, timeless, relating this to that, yesterday to today.” Carpentier conceded that this reality bore certain similarities to European surrealism, which he faulted for its artificiality: “having felt the undeniable spell of the lands of Haiti, after having found magical warnings along the red roads of the Central Meseta, after having heard the drums of the Petro and the Rada, I was moved to set this recently experienced marvelous reality beside the tiresome pretension of creating the marvelous that has characterized certain European literatures.”3 Carpentier’s theory of lo real maravilloso, then, displayed a deep awareness of the critical differences between a manufactured surrealism and the inherent surrealism of Haiti’s cultural practices, history, and geography: “if Surrealism pursued the marvelous, one would have to say that it very rarely looked for it in reality. . . . Where is it [surrealism ] going? What is its purpose? No one knows. A mystery. A manufactured mystery.”4 However, Carpentier argued that the marvelous real could not be disengaged from reality since he saw it as belonging to reality itself, since it was “latent and omnipresent, in all that is Latin American.”5 Thus, although it has been argued that Carpentier’s work has a more ambivalent relationship with surrealism than his denunciations would suggest, the basis of Carpentier’s theory of lo real maravilloso can be found in the allegedly strange, or surreal, material realities of Haitian life. The Origins of the “Marvelous Real” Alejo Carpentier’s essay “On the Marvelous Real in America” remains the most important key...

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