Creative Questers: Remedios Varo and the Narrator of Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos

This comparative study considers the treatment of the quest motif in selected paintings of Remedios Varo (covering her highly productive period from 1955 through 1963) and in Alejo Carpentier's novel, Los pasos perdidos (1953). Both the novel and the paintings tell the story of a journey that leads to self-discovery, creative awakening, and spiritual rebirth for the artist/protagonist/narrator. Both can be shown to trace out the stages of the archetypal hero adventure, although the paintings were not planned to represent phases in a heroic quest in the systematic way that Carpentier's narrator presents them in his carefully constructed narrative. The most prominent and interesting difference that comes to light in the course of the comparison has to do with the artist's need for an audience and the extent to which the creator identifies with his/her creation. Carpentier's male quester must return to the world of time in order to communicate his vision (in his case, his musical composition) to his contemporaries. As such he repeats the pattern of the successful hero adventure: departure, sojourn in the timeless realm, and eventual return to community with a "boon" or insight. Varo's female quester is not confronted with the dilemma of return. Once she breaks free from the conventional world of time, she begins to sense her own oneness with nature, and her creativity is expressed in terms of liberation—liberation of self and other, and from the time-bound self. Her mission eventually becomes clear to her: to align herself perfectly with the creative principle of the universe and to disappear into her creation.