ROBERTO GONZÁLEZ ECHEVARRÍA

In Carpentier, as in most modern literature, allegory rests on the possibility of carrying the permutations [of allegory] further, to an idea of transcendence that is itself fictional and changeable. That movement away from each metaphor or conceit (the system of ideas to which allegory refers, and more specifically that movable center on which it rests) occurs at the very moment when the implications of a given philosophy threaten the fictionality of the text, by upsetting the balance of the dialectical play.

The plot in Carpentier's stories always moves from exile and fragmentation toward return and restoration, and the overall movement of each text is away from literature into immediacy, whether by a claim to be integrated within a larger context, Latin American reality or history, or by an invocation of the empirical author. But because of the dialectics just sketched, the voyage always winds up in literature and remains as the reason for yet another journey. (p. 22)

History is the main topic in Carpentier's fiction, and the history he deals with—the history of the Caribbean—is one of beginnings or foundations. (p. 25)

But if this origin-obsessed history is the theme of Carpentier's fiction, its deployment is more the product of Latin America's second beginning—that is to say, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—than of its remote origins in colonial times. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are also the historical setting of three of Carpentier's major works, The Kingdom of This World, Explosion in a Cathedral, and Concierto barroco, a fact that is clearly not accidental. The persistence of the structure and thematics of fall and redemption, of exile and return, of individual consciousness and collective conscience, stems from a constant return to the source of modern Latin American self-awareness within the philosophical coordinates of the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. The origins of this concern in Carpentier are to be found in the dissemination of a strand of German philosophy throughout Latin America in the twenties, specifically the works of Hegel and Spengler. (pp. 26-7)

Carpentier's work is inscribed precisely at the point where the desire for immediacy stumbles upon the fiction of Latin America…. The itinerary of Carpentier's works includes the invention of an archaic language, as in Larreta, an encyclopedic erudition, as in Borges, and the constant desire to inaugurate Latin American writing, as in Neruda. To come to know Carpentier's trajectory is to come to know the problematics of modern Latin American literature. (p. 29)

In a sense, as in The Lost Steps, Carpentier's entire literary enterprise issues from the desire to seize upon that moment of origination from which history and the history of the self begin simultaneously—a moment from which both language and history will start, thus the foundation of a symbolic code devoid of temporal or spatial gaps. (p. 32)

Seen from the perspective of his later work and judged by purely aesthetic criteria, there can be no doubt that ¡Ecue-Yamba-O!, "Histoire de lunes," "El milagro de Anaquillé," and other pieces of [the thirties] appear as hopelessly immature Jugendwerken, callow works in which only the barest outline of the future is discernible. Outside such a temporal chain, however, the works of the twenties and thirties constitute in themselves a fairly coherent nucleus, almost a single text wrought around one all-encompassing metaphor or conceit: the alluring otherness of Afro-Cuban culture, the cohesive religious force of which can become the source for a different writing, freed from the strictures of Western mentality. But whereas in Carpentier's later work that metaphoric center is strong, a dense and resilient structure that tenaciously preserves the illusion of unity, the nucleus formed by the early work is, overall, a distinct example of the impossibility for a fictional text to become an autonomous, self-enclosed unit. The "failure" of that early nucleus is not its falling short of accomplishing a closure, but the ease with which its openness is revealed. (p. 61).

Carpentier … does not write directly against the conventions of the realistic novel, but in response to the crisis created by their crumbling. The failings or successes of his text must be seen within that moment of crisis, when fragmentation and dispersal were the order of the day. (p. 66)

What is striking about the documentary tendency in ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! is the relative independence of [descriptions, plot, and characters], their unmediated incorporation, as in an anthropological treatise—witness the photographs, the "Anima Sola" prayer, the quotations of ritualistic songs. This bringing together of concrete slices of the real world has more in common with the syncopated rhythm of the collage than with the realistic descriptions of the classical novel, partakes more of the objet trouvé than of the integrated texture of a Balzacian or Galdosian description….

[The text of ¡Ecue-Yamba-O!] seems at times like a series of scenes and tableaux written separately and shuffled at random like a deck of cards. It is not stable even in a diachronic sense, for toward the end of the novel the texture of the prose becomes more even, losing some of the metaphoric impetus found at the beginning. (p. 71)

The most striking feature of "Histoire de lunes" is its careful temporal arrangement…. The locus of the narrative is the train station, a place of chronometrically determined passage and repetition, and the story, as the title indicates, hinges on the repetitive cycles of the moon. The vague complicity between the cycles of nature and events in ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! has become more precise in "Histoire de lunes." But there is more, even in the opposition between the two nouns in the title itself: "history," implying a linear development, and "moons," involving a series of cosmic repetitions. The complex game of times, dates, and the cycles of nature begins to form a system of correspondences in this story that was not present in the other texts of the period. (pp. 90-1)

"Histoire de lunes" does not, of course, provide answers to all the questions arising from the various ideological trends of the avant-garde, the concrete sociopolitical problems of Cuba, and the crisis of the novel. But it is a more organized attempt to answer such questions than Carpentier's essayistic efforts, where Hegel, Marx, Spengler, and Ortega, in addition to the contingencies of Carpentier's own life and the history of Latin America, mingle to produce extremely confused statements. Basically, his answer to the problems posed by the narrative is a theological one, whose basis is mostly Spenglerian. The lack of continuity brought about by the crisis of the novel Carpentier solves with an all-encompassing metaphor of order, where the linear development of the plot is not the sole unifying force; rather, order is created by a complex web of symbolic relations outside the action—a sort of symbolic plenum. It is not an order on an assumed temporal continuity, but an atemporal system of symbolic relationships, akin to Spengler's model of culture where all modes of expression are linked by a central symbol derived from the observation of landscape. This allows Carpentier to integrate description and action in "Histoire de lunes" in a way that he had not been able to do in ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! and had been able to circumvent in "El milagro de Anaquillé." (pp. 93-4)

If the five stories and The Kingdom of This World hold the most interest from a purely literary point of view, the book that defines this period in Carpentier's career and distinguishes it from the years of the avant-garde and Afro-Cubanism is La música en Cuba, a book that traces in scholarly detail the historical evolution of Cuban music from the colonial period to the present. The forties also encompass Carpentier's most sustained and significant experiments with fantastic literature—a kind of literature that critics have commonly associated with the concept of "magical realism." (p. 98)

History breaks into Carpenterian fiction as a result of the work done in writing La música en Cuba. ¡Ecue-Yamba-O!, "Histoire de lunes," and "El milagro de Anaquillé" reflect, without historical precision, events that are contemporaneous, or nearly so, with their author. The research and the writing of La música en Cuba furnish Carpentier with a new working method, which consists of minute historical investigation, and creation from within a tradition that the author remakes himself with the aid of texts of different sorts. More specifically, La música en Cuba channels Carpentier's fiction into a new course, a search for those forgotten texts which will allow him to "finish" the incomplete biographies of obscure historical figures with the aid of rigorous documentation and almost verifiable chronology. (pp. 102-03)

Another significant change takes place in Carpentier's writing during the forties, on which his research for La música en Cuba had a direct bearing: style. In ¡Ecue-Yamba-O!, "Histoire de lunes," and even the scenario for "El milagro de Anaquillé," Carpentier's prose is laden with the stylistic tics of the extreme avant-garde: daring metaphors, oxymoronic adjectives, onomatopoeia, syncopated syntax. In the forties, Carpentier's prose begins to rid itself of these (although it will never lose them all) and to become the archaic, textured, and baroque prose for which he is known. (p. 106)

Carpentier's artistic enterprise in the forties became a search for origins, the recovery of history and tradition, the foundation of an autonomous American consciousness serving as the basis for a literature faithful to the New World. Like an American Ulysses, Carpentier sets forth in search of this goal through the winding roads and the turbulent rivers of the continent, but also through the labyrinthine filigrees of worm-eaten texts eroded by time and oblivion…. [In] recovering history by in a sense allowing the texts that contain it to repeat themselves in his writing, Carpentier is reaching for that elusive Golden Age when fable and history were one. (p. 107)

Carpentier searches for the marvelous buried beneath the surface of Latin American consciousness, where African drums still beat and Indian amulets rule; in depths where Europe is only a vague memory of a future still to come…. Besides his attacks against certain Surrealists, which are echoes of skirmishes in the thirties, Carpentier's [prologue to The Kingdom of This World] affirms that the marvelous still exists in Latin America, and reveals itself to those who believe in it, not to those who would apprehend it by a reflexive, self-conscious act. The appeal to faith and to history ("still"), cast Carpentier's formulations in a Spenglerian mold. Even Carpentier's attacks on the Surrealists are based on Spengler, and it is only by returning to The Decline of the West that we can understand the meaning that Carpentier assigns to the marvelous and his definition of the faith that sustains it. (p. 123)

Spengler posited that cultures were like organisms that underwent homologous evolutions until they disappeared (the world as history)…. For Spengler, as for Carpentier and other Latin American intellectuals who fell under his spell, the New World found itself in a moment of its historical evolution—a moment of faith—prior to the moment of reflexivity, while Europe felt estranged from the forms of its own culture and searched in laws and codes of universal pretensions, like Surrealism, the mystery of creation irretrievably lost…. Spengler is the common ground of Carpentier's works of the thirties and forties; the differences are only a matter of narrative strategy. Whereas in ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! and "Histoire de lunes" he attempts to situate the narrative focus or source within an unreachable African world of beliefs to which his own consciousness has no access, now he will attempt to clear a space from within which he can lay claim to a more broadly conceived faith. The works of the forties are also grounded on a theological view of history and the narrative process except that such theology has become better refined and its contradictions more skillfully concealed. Magical realism, or "marvelous American reality," is but a new theology of fiction bent on bridging the gap between maker and cosmos. (pp. 124-25)

Carpentier's concept of the marvelous or of magic rests on an onto-theological assumption: the existence of a peculiar Latin American consciousness devoid of self-reflexiveness and inclined to faith; a consciousness that allows Latin Americans to live immersed in culture and to feel history not as a causal process that can be analyzed rationally and intellectually, but as destiny. From the perspective to which that mode of being aspires, fantasy ceases to be incongruous with reality in order for both of them to turn into a closed and spherical world without cracks or ironic detachment…. (pp. 125-26)

Carpentier's stories of the forties are distinguishable from his earlier production and from that which immediately follows them by their historical setting; costumes, objects, known incidents, and other aspects serve to designate a past epoch which in most cases is the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries…. [Static] history characterizes Carpentier's fiction in the forties. It is not simply that Carpentier offers a decentered anti-Hegelian view of history, but that the historical process appears as a dynamic cycle of repetitions that results in a static and permanent image, like the spokes of a turning wheel which project static images of themselves. This is why the historical world presented by Carpentier in his stories is always one of imposing buildings and ruins, a world of palaces and dismantled mansions, the two poles of a universe in constant construction and demolition. (pp. 129-30)

All the devices used by Carpentier to evoke the fantastic during the forties must be seen within the context of [a] baroque magic: fantasies conjured in the name of a faith that is the greatest artifice, the all-encompassing fiction, the liturgical sacramental theater where the irreconcilable poles of the contradictions are exchanged, conjugated, where they interplay. Such a faith is the space of literature that does not satisfy the Carpentier of the prologue, but within which all of his gestures are inscribed. (p. 153)

There are many indications of a new Carpentier in The Lost Steps. To begin with, this is the first work of his that he calls a novel since ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! (the title page of the original reads: Los pasos perdidos. Novela). The Kingdom of This World, though commonly referred to as a novel, was subtitled relato (French, récit). The distinction is noteworthy. The stories written during the forties and The Kingdom of This World are fragmentary accounts of lives caught up in the swirl of history represented as a series of repetitions and circularities. The emphasis falls on the telos of the narrative or on the formal interrelation of the various scenes, not on the characters' lives or the motivation of their actions; the characters are like hieratic figures in a large historical tapestry. (pp. 156-57)

Viewed against Carpentier's previous production, The Lost Steps represents an attempt at unification and synthesis, if only because it is centered on a continuous and reflexive narrative presence—a narrator-protagonist who sets before the reader a totality of his life and experience in our times, instead of a series of fragments projected against a background of monumental and dwarfing historical events….

Whereas Carpentier wove his previous fictions around the biography of an obscure historical figure, in The Lost Steps he himself is the object of the biography, and the writing of the novel becomes a theme of the narrative…. Furthermore, the ideological framework of earlier works (mainly Spenglerian) is set off against a different and conflicting conception of man and history: Sartrean existentialism. (p. 158)

The clash of Spenglerian and Sartrean concepts in The Lost Steps reveals its recollective, stock-taking quality—as does the title itself, a translation of Breton's Les pas perdus that might allude to Carpentier's Surrealist past…. [The] novel shows a totalizing desire on both the level of personal and world history; as the protagonist moves through the jungle, he believes he is traveling across all of man's history, as if his voyage were not through landscape but through an imaginary museum or through a compendium of world history read backward. His voyage is also through individual memory, across all the stages of his past life, to childhood and ultimately his own birth. The overall movement is toward the moment of plentitude when the end of these journeys will coincide and merge in a true synthesis of the totality of history and the self. It is because of this search for restoration and integration that The Lost Steps assumes such an abstract form. (pp. 159-60)

The autobiographical nature of The Lost Steps, in all its complexity, is both cause and effect of the strategic position that this novel occupies in the totality of Carpentier's production. Its recollective synthesizing attempt, at both a biographical and literary level, bear the mark of the conversion. (p. 186)

The fact that ["Manhunt"] reconstructs a history closely related to the author, the fact that both protagonists are artists of sorts, and the fact that commitment to the present-in-history leads them away from their vocations justify considering "Manhunt" in relation to The Lost Steps. These and other elements indicate that "Manhunt" is, as it were, a postscript to The Lost Steps. If the narrator-protagonist of that novel realizes at the end that he must return to the city, to present history, the drama lived by the two protagonists of "Manhunt" in the city is the future that their predecessor did not narrator, but acted out by writing the text of the novel. If The Lost Steps was generated by the questions about history and the artist raised by The Kingdom of This World, "Manhunt" centers on the problems of writing that The Lost Steps, in turn, opened. Like an auto sacramental in its intense and self-reflexive symbolism, "Manhunt" is Carpentier's allegory of writing. What the novel dramatizes is the generation of the text: a liturgical, primeval drama of its birth and death as well as of its filial relations….

The question of the artist in contemporary society is, as in The Lost Steps, the manifest theme of "Manhunt," and this Romantic topic of the artist's alienation is couched in terms of a longing for the absolute, for oneness and restoration. This desire involves once more returning to a lost paradise, the world of nature and the mother, and a search for God, the maker of order and giver of meaning in the universe. (p. 191)

The most striking and confusing aspect of "Manhunt" is its Faulknerian multiplicity of narrators, a bewildering technical tour de force that makes the novel the most inaccessible of Carpentier's texts. No antecedent can be found in Carpentier's work for this experimentation with narrative voice except in The Lost Steps. The plurality-in-the-present realized by the narrator-protagonist at the end of The Lost Steps is as it were, blown up in "Manhunt," a text narrated by an omniscient third-person and two first-person narrators, who are themselves pluralized. The displacement of narrative voice between third person in The Lost Steps and the subsequent unfolding of the protagonist into several selves that comment upon each other are concretely re-enacted in "Manhunt" in the political activist and the ticket seller, who meet fleetingly but whose lives are intertwined without their knowledge. (pp. 197-98)

The text of the novella is composed mostly of recollections of these two parallel yet separate consciousnesses and by their actions in a brief fictional present that is supposed to comprise the forty-six minutes that it takes to play Beethoven's Third Symphony (chapters 1 and 3, encompassing five subchapters). But the fragmentation of the narrative voice occurs not only through the splitting of the narrator-protagonist but also within the consciousness of the hunted one [the political activist] and in the presence of the third-person narrator. (p. 199)

The drama played out in "Manhunt" is that of the text's attempted escape from its sources, its fear of repeating, like a protagonist, an archetype, an archtext. (p. 209)

The Lost Steps and "Manhunt" take to its limits and subvert the metaphor of nature as logos, of the fusion of creative consciousness and nature as the source of narrativity. (p. 211)

The stories written before 1953 hinged on the metaphor binding history and writing into an uninterrupted continuum, a flow from the same source—nature—lost in the past but subject to recall. The attempt to return to that source shows in The Lost Steps that no such unity exists, that writing unveils not the truth, nor the true origins, but a series of repeated gestures and ever renewed beginnings. After 1953, Carpentier's fiction assumes another origin, discarding the metaphor of natural writing and fantastic literature. In "Manhunt" Carpentier offers an alternate origin, political history, delving into the background of today's Cuba. In Explosion in a Cathedral, his next novel, Carpentier returns to the eighteenth century in the Caribbean as a means of telescoping into the present and beyond (by means of strategic anachronisms) the historico-political process undergone by the New Continent…. The quest for origins in the natural fusion of history and consciousness in a utopian past is abandoned in favor of a political history whose origins are to be found in the dissemination of the texts of the French Revolution throughout the New World. The myth of a past utopia has been replaced by the correlative myth of the future, when all versions of history will at last be one, and all steps will finally be found. (p. 212)

The most revealing contradiction in the essays [published in Tientos y diferencias (1964)] revolves around Carpentier's concept of the baroque, which he now puts forth as the distinguishing characteristic of Latin American literature, and which has come to replace the "real marvelous."… The contradiction centers on the status of literary language. On the one hand, Carpentier maintains that the baroque nature of Latin American literature stems from the necessity to name for the first time realities that are outside the mainstream of Western culture. On the other, he states that what characterizes Latin American reality is its stylelessness, which results from its being an amalgam of styles from many cultural traditions and epochs: Indian, African, European, Neoclassical, Modern, etc. With the first statement Carpentier is, of course, resurrecting the Blakean and generally Romantic topos of Adam in the Garden after the fall, having to give names to the things that surround him. But the second claim runs counter to the first insofar as the reality in question, if it is the product of manifold traditions, would have already been "named" several times, and by different peoples. (pp. 222-23)

The baroque as a new metaphor, a new conceit designating that which is particularly Latin American, is quite different, however, from the concept of "marvelous American reality" woven in the forties. To begin with, Carpentier insists now on defining cities, not the jungle or the world of nature. More importantly, though, in the concept of "marvelous American reality" the mediator between that reality and the literary text was the self; the conceit was that of the writer as a spontaneous, unreflexive mediator between the transmutations of nature and those of writing. The new theory of contexts, on the other hand, establishes a new relationship. If there is an inherent tension between the desire to name for the first time and a reality that has already been named several times, the theory of contexts assumes and subsumes that tension: it provides for a writing that purports to name for the first time even while it is conscious of naming for the second time, of being a renaming. The text is a context, which is already inscribed in the hybrid reality issuing from previous conceptions; the text, in other words, is a ruse, an evasive gesture that points to itself as a beginning that never was, but knows that it is instead a future of that beginning, its ultimate end. Latin American writing will then be that third style that is the future of all styles; their degradation in heterogeneity, when their codes lose their referentiality…. The negative way in which Carpentier describes this third style, as that which has no style, provides the clue for the grounding element of the new conceit. If the narrative must go beyond itself to contexts and at the same time constitutes, in a sense, those contexts, then the text is the empty space opened by the negation; it is the point at which things cease to have a style and the locus where they shift from one level to the other. (pp. 224-25)

At the end of The Lost Steps, when the narrator-protagonist decides to abandon his quest for the single point of origin in the jungle and return to the city, he gazes at the sign with the name of the cafe where he has heard about the fate of Rosario and his other companions of the previous voyage: Memories of the Future. This is the last threshold he crosses in memory toward the point from which he has written or rewritten his account of the voyage, the threshold of assumed self-reflexivity and history, of writing in the city, in that third style that is the future of all styles remembered. Explosion in a Cathedral, Reasons of State, and Concierto barroco will be written, so to speak, in that future perfect where the beginning of history is already history. (p. 225)

[Beneath its traditional] outward appearance Explosion in a Cathedral conceals a radical experiment with history and the narrative. Though the voluminous historical research that went into the writing of the novel obviously links it with The Kingdom of This World, Carpentier's return to the era of revolutions does not imply a continuation of his experiments of the forties, but a revision. The most salient and deceptive feature that issues from this revision is the detailed attention to historical, social, and geographical particularities; the conventional and gradual development of the characters and the focusing of the action on the destiny of a household. On this level, where the novel appears almost as a nineteenth-century popular historical novel of adventure, Explosion in a Cathedral allows for a rather conventional thematic reading. (pp. 226-27)

Carpentier offers in this novel a radical revision of the historical process he portrayed in The Kingdom of This World. The difference lies in the breaking of the daemonic circle in which history, moved by natural forces, was entrapped in the earlier novel. The clearest indication of this is found not only in the minute details of the social and ideoloical evolution of the characters, but also in the absence of circularity and in the characters' ability to return to the fray of history after they have completed a first cycle of their lives…. Self-consciousness is now a return from which a new departure may take place. There are repetitions and returns in Explosion in a Cathedral, but not historical cycles that mirror each other and create a vertiginous composition en abîme. The characters return to what appears to be a previous moment in their lives, as history appears to repeat itself in certain events. But the return is not to the same point; it is rather to one that is merely similar and creates the illusion of sameness but is really far removed from the previous one: instead of identical cycles, history in Explosion in a Cathedral follows a spiraling movement. And history is no longer determined by cosmic cycles complicitous with nature, it is man-made. (pp. 232-33)

There can be no question that Carpentier is establishing an analogy between the modernism of the eighteenth century and that of his own time, and the futuristic quality of the novel is put within the future-oriented thought of the eighteenth century, with its desire to abolish the past and its proliferation of cities of the future and the like. (p. 234)

But what is peculiar about the future evoked in Explosion in a Cathedral is its quality of being simultaneously a past…. [In Explosion in a Cathedral] there is no counterpoint between ideal project and historical execution but a constant re-enactment of the gap between project and execution, as well as an affirmation of their indissoluble link. By making the future also past, history becomes the dynamic textual counterpoint between means and ends. In other words, the future that the history narrated in the text implies is, of necessity, nothing but the text—which forecloses any projections beyond its own specificity but allows for linear free play within itself. Contradictions are not bypassed and resolved in the novel, but merely begun again and again within the text's own dialectical free play. (pp. 234-35)

The anachronisms [which occur throughout Explosion in a Cathedral] perform the function of pointing at the density of the historical field encompassed by the text, which integrates the past and the future on a single horizontal level. History, the grounding object of narration, and the text, its outcome, are one. (p. 236)

[It] is mostly in the presence of the occult, in sects such as the Masons and the Rosicrucians, that the irrational appears in Explosion in a Cathedral, investing the gap between reason and action with a quasi-religious and symbol-producing quality. It is by means of this reference to the occult that the text itself partakes of that symbolic quality, the allegorical configuration that invites a reading that goes beyond the peripety of the action and the development of the characters. The most consistent code to which this reading alludes is the Jewish Kabbala, which had a notable resurgence during the eighteenth century and the presence of which in this text is a clear indication of Carpentier's reconciliation with his Surrealist past. (pp. 237-38)

By appealing to the Kabbala, Carpentier is recasting the pattern of fall and redemption, of exile and return—of all his writing—within a system that centers precisely on these themes…. But beyond these thematic considerations, the importance of the Kabbala in Explosion in a Cathedral, as in Borges's work, is its concern with the nature of symbolic action, its centering on a hermeneutics whereby writing is accorded a crucial role in the composition of the world—as is well known, for kabbalists the world issues from the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Thus its presence in the novel is not, like history, an external referential code but one which attempts to explicate the text of the novel itself. The metaphor of light is of primary importance in this connection, for although light emanates from a given source, its dissemination through space is so fast that both source and illumination appear as one. The analogy between this metaphor of light and that of the explosion in the painting "Explosion in a Cathedral" is clear; for an explosion is so sudden that cause and effect coincide and constitute a single experience, a sort of instantaneous movement…. (pp. 239-40)

The kabbalistic code in Explosion in a Cathedral contains the basic elements of Carpentier's new concept of writing, his new metaphor to link writing and history. If Carpentier's fiction in the forties sought its foundation in a theological, transcendental source from which it received order, his new writing will have a much more dialectical conception of the source. Earlier fiction sought an original source, a single fountainhead of origination from which writing flowed in a continuum. In The Lost Steps the irrevocable absence of that source is made manifest, while "Manhunt" issues from the terror of its presence. In Explosion in a Cathedral, for the first time, there is a clear separation between worldly and divine realms. The presence of the Kabbala points precisely at the secondary status of writing and of the world…. Writing, in other words, is always the future of a past that does not exist, that is re-created. (pp. 241-42)

It is, appropriately, in Esteban's meditation in the second epigraph of the novel that the connotative range of [the] deferred centerlessness of the text is given through the most prominent emblem in the novel, the guillotine…. (p. 251)

In the context of Carpentier's persistent evocation of buildings and ruins, the guillotine appears, then, as a frame left standing after the demolition of a house, or before its construction, as the empty, demarcated space around which the house is built. (p. 252)

The central metaphoric chain in Explosion in a Cathedral revolves, then, around these emblems of the constitution of the text itself and of its inner dialectics. Rather than a self-reflexiveness of a thwarted return to the source and to a grounding notion of beginnings, as we found in The Lost Steps, Explosion in a Cathedral posits a kind of writing that appears as a series of returns to origins that turn with the same movement: revolutionary writing in its etymological sense, in that it revolves around an absent axis that is constituted by the very movement of its periphery….

The elaborate symbolic structure of Explosion in a Cathedral attempts to come to grips with the relationship between the movement of history and the fixity of emblems, not only in an abstract sense, but in the very concrete mode in which Carpentier's historical fiction tends, by its allegoric and archetypal quality, to move into an ideal realm of significantion. (p. 253)

It is the materiality of the emblem, in this as well as in previous novels by Carpentier, that has the most significance. Carpentier's insistence on the guillotine, on costumes, on buildings, on paintings and statues, obviously related to his use of capital letters, is an attempt to invest a character or event with a solid, materially fixed meaning. (p. 255)

What emerges from Carpentier's experiments in Explosion in a Cathedral is parody: parody that results from the confrontation of the future with a source, a pre-text, whose ideal, phantasmatic form is violated to allow for a textual free play. In historical terms, the parody results from the overturning of the core of Western civilization by the popular culture arising at the juncture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In terms of writing, parody becomes the locus created by the fissure, now assumed, between thought and its signs—a humorous allegory that underlines the hollow materiality of signs and the temporal gap between meaning and its representation…. [History] has become parodic repetition, its own end, and the sources of the text are revealed in their deformed, desecrated condition, instead of being concealed and covered to safeguard their originality and that of the text. The most superficial indication of a change is the absence of solemnity; humor was almost completely missing in Carpentier's earlier production (with the exception of "El milagro de Anaquillé"). Stemming from this new element and from the recapitulatory nature of Carpentier's works from Explosion in a Cathedral on, which recover themes and topics of his earlier works, there is also an element of self-parody that is obviously related to self-reflexiveness. (pp. 256-57)

Faithful to the implications of [the third style, mentioned earlier, which Carpentier defines as nonstyle], the newest narratives constitute a return to the city—not to the city as the stony labyrinth of architecture (of arch-texture) but to the city become a mock-up, a stage for comic opera. (p. 257)

[The] degradation of the architecture reflects a similar process in the texts themselves. Now, more than ever, and with increasing impunity, they are a mixture of styles and sources; historical and fictional characters mingle on the same level. Bits and pieces of other literary texts are brought together in a textual amalgam….

The ponderous titles of Carpentier's two most recent novels, El recurso del método and Concierto barroco, seem to indicate quite the opposite. But their solemnity, which at first glance makes them evoke weighty erudite treatises, belies their parodic nature, for just as El siglo de las luces meant precisely the opposite, so do these titles mock rather than designate their overt referents. (p. 258)

As in Explosion in a Cathedral and Reasons of State, the temporal disposition of Concierto barroco is future-oriented…. As in Explosion in a Cathedral and Reasons of State, the text is the moment where past and future are one, in permanent revolution; it is the locus of infinite contaminations. Carnival and Apocalypse were the two poles of the pendular movement in The Kingdom of this World. In Concierto barroco Carnival and Apocalypse are one. (pp. 268, 270)

As opposed to his earlier work, Carpentier's work of the sixties and seventies contains the possibility of return…. The new beginning results only in the consciousness that [the characters of Carpentier's new fiction] must always begin anew, that the steps to the past are lost and those to the future are already here, ready to begin an ever repeated voyage in time whose anticipation is the text itself and their memory of the future voyage. For if the past is lost, the present is never here, except as future, Carnival and Apocalypse are one, the text is a revolution. Writing will always be that ailleurs, that future remembered, where signs will cease to shuffle their meanings and will empty themselves out.

In his latest phase Carpentier traces a return, a recapitulatory journey through his fiction, to erase and reconstitute its point of origin. The new version that emerges is one where the crack at the core of ¡Ecue-Yamba-O! is covered through recourse to that part of the novel—the urban, mixed underworld of cultural clashes and indiscriminate assimilation—where hybridness reigns and where the text emerges as the self-conscious outcome of manifold traditions…. The Spengler-Hegel counterpoint of the 1941 essays on the decline of Europe is resolved, as it were, in favor of Hegel. The textual synthesis of Carpentier's late fiction, however, is not Hegelian but post-Hegelian. It is the chaos after the end of history which is simultaneously a self-conscious beginning of history. The search for reintegration is dissolved in a textual amalgam that is at once emanation and source, separation and union, concert and disharmony—concert in disharmony. Carpentier's new style issues from that productive negativity of nonstyle, from that void in which the memory of the source is lost, in which the archtext is exploded.

Fiction is now the Carnival assumed as the permanent revolution, a history whose end and beginning are constantly commemorated and celebrated. Fiction celebrates the consecration of spring. (pp. 271-73)

Carpentier's legacy is [a] relentless attempt to synthesize history and the self in a form of Latin American writing. While in this sense Carpentier's work has merely repeated a gesture found in all Romantic and post-Romantic literature, he has given that enterprise a particular Latin American character—not, however, by demonstrating the autonomy of Latin American culture, as he once hoped, or by tracing the precise boundaries of a Latin American context. He has demonstrated, instead, the dialectics of dependence and independence that subtend any effort at cultural definition, and made manifest the pervasive heterogeneity of writing. The total novel is a Hegelian experiment whose failure is the very condition of its existence. By having repeatedly taken it to the limit where its unattainability becomes apparent, Carpentier has made possible the total novel and its ironic counterpart, the antinovel. Both possibilities are already present in The Lost Steps, in that "I" that attempts to be one and is at the same time many.

Carpentier once defined his role as "translator," and such it has been, ven if not in the way he had hoped. His work, by its encyclopedic and totalizing nature, is akin to the summae and cathedrals that appear in thirteenth-century Europe. It is an iconographic storehouse, a monument—the foundation of Latin America's house of fiction. (pp. 273-74)

Roberto González Echevarría, in his Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (copyright © 1977 by Cornell University; used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press; Chapter 4 was originally published in part in Diacritics and is reprinted by permission), Cornell University Press, 1977.