Carpentier, Alejo | Salvador Jiménez-Fajardo (essay date 1977)
Salvador Jiménez-Fajardo (essay date 1977)
SOURCE: "The Redeeming Quest: Patterns of Unification in Carpentier, Fuentes, and Cortázar," in Revista de estudios hispánicos, Vol. XI, No. 1, January, 1977, pp. 91-117.
[In the following excerpt, Jiménez-Fajardo details the significance of the inverted temporal progression of "Journey Back to the Source," linking the linguistic implications of the protagonist's search for a unified identity to similar developments in other Latin American texts.]
With strange cadences of his walking stick, an old Negro in Alejo Carpentier's "Viaje a la semilla"1 reverses the course of time toward the origins, the seed. The demolition of the Marqués' palace is halted, then reversed; the Marqués himself reenters life, youth and infancy; as he returns to his mother's womb and nothingness, the palace disintegrates, all of its materials restored to their natural state.
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