Magic Realism, Sep 7

Alejo Carpentier, 1904-1980 (Cuba)

"For what is the history of Latin America but a chronicle of magical realism?"
Alejo Carpentier prologue to El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World)

In the first part of the following essay, which serves as a prologue to his novel, The Kingdom of This World (1949), Carpentier excoriates European surrealism for its empty falsity; the second refers to the marvellous reality of Haiti. Henri Christophe was a revolutionary leader who later became Emperor of Haiti, and who built Sans Souci and La Ferrière Citadel; Macandal and Bouckman were slaves instrumental in the Haitian Revolution. Macandal led an ultimately unsuccessful uprising a few decades before the revolution proper, whereas Bouckman was one of the principal actors in the uprising that led to Haiti's independence from France.)

What must be understood concerning this matter of being transformed into wolves is that there
is an illness that the doctors call wolf madness.

--Los trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda

1.At the end of 1943 I had the good fortune to visit the kingdom of Henri Christophe -
the ruins, so poetic, of Sans Souci; the imposing bulk of the Citadel of La Ferrière,
intact in spite of thunderbolts and earthquakes - and to discover Ciudad del Cabo
[Cap Haitien], still Norman to this day - the Cap Français of the former colony -
where a street of very long balconies leads to the stone palace once occupied by
Pauline Bonaparte. Having felt the indisputable charm of the Haitian landscape,
having found magical portents in the red roads of the Central Plateau, and heard the
drums of the Voodoo gods Petro and Rada, I was moved to compare the marvellous
reality I had recently experienced with that exhausting attempt to invoke the
marvellous which has characterized certain European literatures of the last thirty
years. The marvellous, pursued in old prints of the forest Brocelianda, of the knights of
the Round Table, the wizard Merlin and the Arthurian cycle. The marvellous,
pathetically evoked in the skills and deformities of fairground characters - will the
young French poets never tire of the freaks and clowns of the circus, to which Rimbaud
had already bade farewell in his Alchimie du verbe? The marvellous, produced by
means of conjuring tricks, bringing together objects which would never normally meet:
the old and fraudulent story of the chance encounter of the umbrella and the sewing
machine on an operating table, which spawned the ermine spoons, snails in a rainy
taxi, and the lion's head in a widow's pelvis of the surrealist exhibitions. Or even the
marvellous in literature: the king of de Sade's Juliette, Jarry's supermale, Lewis's monk,
the blood-curdling theatrical props of the English Gothic novel: ghosts, walled-up
priests, werewolves, hands nailed to the doors of castles.

2.But, determined to invoke the marvellous at any cost, the miracle workers turn into
bureaucrats. Calling on timeworn formulae which reduce certain paintings to a
predictable jumble of drooping timepieces, dressmakers' dummies, and vague phallic
monuments, the marvellous is consigned to the umbrella or lobster or sewing machine,
or whatever it may be, on an operating table, in the interior of a desolate room, in a
desert of rocks. Imaginative poverty, Unamuno said, consists in learning codes by
heart. And today there exist codes of the fantastic - based on the principle of the
donkey devoured by a fig, proposed by the Chants de Maldoror as the supreme
inversion of reality - to which we owe many "children threatened by nightingales," of
André Masson's "horses devouring birds." But note that when André Masson wanted to
draw the jungle of the island of Martinique, with its incredible tangle of plants and the
obscene promiscuity of certain of its fruits, the prodigious truth of the subject devoured
the painter, leaving him all but impotent before the blank paper. And it was left to a
painter from America, the Cuban Wilfredo Lam, to show us the magic of tropical
vegetation, the unbridled Creation of Forms of our nature - with all its metamorphoses
and symbioses - in monumental canvases of an expressiveness unique in contemporary
painting.* Confronted by the disconcerting imaginative poverty of a Tanguy, for
example, who for twenty-five years has painted the same petrified larvae beneath the
same grey sky, I am moved to repeat a dictum which filled the first crop of surrealists
with pride: "You who do not see, think of those who do." There are still too many
"adolescents who find pleasure in violating the corpses of beautiful women recently
died" (Lautréamont), without realizing that the truly remarkable thing would be to
violate the living. But what many forget, in disguising themselves as cheap magicians,
is that the marvellous becomes unequivocally marvellous when it arises from an
unexpected alteration of reality (a miracle), a privileged revelation of reality, an
unaccustomed or singularly favourable illumination of the previously unremarked
riches of reality, an amplification of the measures and categories of reality, perceived
with peculiar intensity due to an exaltation of the spirit which elevates it to a kind of
"limit state." First of all, the sense of the marvellous presupposes a faith. Those who
do not believe in saints will not be cured by the miracles of saints, nor will those who
are not Don Quixotes be able to enter body and soul into the world of Amidis de Gaul
or Tirant lo Blanc. Certain statements made by Rutilio in Los trabajos de Persiles y
Segismunda about men being transformed into wolves are entirely trustworthy,
because in Cervantes' time it was believed that people would be afflicted with wolf
madness. Likewise the journey of the character from Tuscany to Norway on a witch's
cloak. Marco Polo accepted that certain birds could fly carrying elephants in their
claws, and Luther came face to face with the devil and threw an inkwell at his head.
Victor Hugo, so exploited by the book-keepers of the fantastic, believed in spirits,
because he was convinced that he had spoken, in Guernsey, to the ghost of Leopoldine.
It was sufficient for Van Gogh to believe in the Sunflower to fix his revelation on
canvas. Thus the marvellous born of disbelief - as in the long years of surrealism - was
never more than a literary ruse, as tedious, after a time, as a certain brand of
"ordered" oneiric literature, certain eulogies of madness, with which we are all too
familiar. But this is not, of course, to concede the argument to those who advocate a
return to the real - a term which acquires, then, a gregariously political meaning - who
do nothing more than substitute for the magician's tricks the commonplaces of the
committed man of letters or the eschatological humour of certain existentialists. But it
is undoubtedly true that there is scant defence for poets and artists who praise sadism
without practising it, who admire a miraculous virility on account of their own
impotence, who invoke spirits without believing in spells, and who found secret
societies, literary sects, vaguely philosophical groups, with saints and signs and arcane
objectives - never attained - without being able to conceive of a valid mysticism or
abandon their petty habits in order to gamble their souls on the fearful card of faith.

3.This became particularly clear to me during my stay in Haiti, where I found myself in
daily contact with something which might be called the marvellous in the real. I was
treading on land where thousands of men anxious for freedom had believed in the
lycanthropic powers of Macandal, to the point where this collective faith produced a
miracle on the day of his execution. I already knew the extraordinary tale of
Bouckman, the Jamaican initiate. I had been in the Citadel of La Ferrière, a work
without architectural antecedents, foreshadowed only in the Imaginary Prisons of
Piranese. I had breathed the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, a monarch of
incredible exploits, far more astonishing than all the cruel kings invented by the
surrealists, so fond of tyrannies of the imaginary variety, although they never had to
endure them in reality. At every step I encountered the marvellous in the real. But I also
thought that the presence and prevalence of this marvellous reality was not a privilege
unique to Haiti, but the patrimony of the whole of America, where there has yet to be
drawn up, for example, a complete list of cosmogonies. The fantastic is to be found at
every stage in the lives of men who inscribed dates on the history of the Continent and
who left names still borne to this day: from those who left names still borne to this day:
from those who sought the Fountain of Eternal Youth, from the golden city of Manoa,
to the first rebels or the modern heroes of our wars of independence of such
mythological stamp as the colonel's wife, Juana de Azurduy. It has always seemed
significant to me that, in 1780, some Spanish wiseman, setting sail from Angostura,
should still embark on a quest for El Dorado, and that, at the time of the French
Revolution - long live Reason and the Supreme Being! - Francesco Menendez from
Compostela should wander through the lands of Patagonia in search of the Enchanted
City of the Caesars. Considering another aspect of the question, it is clear that,
whereas in Western Europe folk dance, for instance, has lost all magical or invocatory
character, rare is the collective dance in America that does not incorporate a deep
ritualistic meaning, becoming almost a ceremony of initiation: such as the dances of
the Cuban santeria, or the extraordinary negro version of the festival of Corpus
Christi, which can still be seen in the town of San Francisco de Yare, in Venezuela.

4.There is a moment, in the sixth of the Chants de Maldoror, when the hero, pursued by
all the police in the world, escapes from an "army of agents and spies" by adotpting
the form of different animals and making use of his gift of being able to transport
himself in an instant to Peking, Madrid, or Sanit Petersburg. This is "fantastic
literature" at its most uninhibited. But in America, where nothing similar has been
written, there existed a Macandal endowed with these same powers by the faith of his
contemporaries, and who inspired, with that magic, one of the strangest and most
dramatic uprisings in History. Maldoror - Ducasse himself confesses it - was never
anything more than a "poetic Rocambole." His only legacy was a literary school of
ephemeral duration. The American Macandal, on the other hand, left behind a whole
mythology, along with magical hymns, preserved by an entire people, which are still
sung in Voodoo ceremonies.** (There is, besides, a strange coincidence in the fact that
Isadore Ducasse, a man who had an exceptional instinct for the fantastic and the
poetic, should have been born in America and have boasted, so insistently, at the end of
one of his songs, of being "the Montevidean.") And the point is that, because of its
virginal landscape, its formation, its onotology, the Faustian presence of both Indian
and Negro, the Revelation represented by its recent discovery, and the fertile
interbreeding it has fostered, America is far from having drained its well of
mythologies.

5.Without any systematic intention of my part, the text which follows [The Kingdom of
This World] is concerned with this sort of preoccupation. In it is narrated a sequence of
extraordinary happenings which took place on the island of Santo Domingo
[Hispaniola, divided into Haiti and The Dominican Republic], in the space of a period
which does not equal the span of a man's life, allowing the marvellous to flow freely
from a reality precise in all its details. Because it must be stressed that the ensuing
story is based on the most rigorous documentation, which not only respects the
historical truth of events, the names of characters - including secondary ones - places
and even streets, but which conceals, beneath its apparent intemporality, a meticulous
collation of dates and chronologies. And yet, because of the dramatic singularity of the
events, the fantastic elegance of the characters encountered at a given moment at the
enchanted crossroads of the Ciudad del Cabo, everything seems fabulous in a story
impossible to situate in Europe, and which is nonetheless just as real as any exemplary
incident consigned, for the purposes of pedagogy, to scholarly textbooks. But what is
the history of Latin America if not a chronicle of the marvellous in the real?

*Note with what American prestige the works of Wifredo Lam stand out,
in their profound originality, among those of other painters collected in the
special issue - an overview of modern art - published in 1946 by Cahiers
d'Art [Carpentier's note].

**See Jacques Roumain, La sacrifice du Tambour Assoto [Carpetier's
note; the reference is to Roumain's anti-anti-superstition campaign
writings, including this work {'The sacrifice of the Assoto drum'}].