SOURCE: "Patterns of Repetition in The Kingdom of This World," in Latin American Literary Review, Vol. XIX, No. 38, July-December, 1991, pp. 23-34.

[In the following essay, Goldberg traces the instances of repetition in Carpentier's El reino de este mundo and discusses what the repetition says about his conception of history.]

Alejo Carpentier's conception of history as based on repetition was first expressed through structural patterns in El reino de este mundo [The Kingdom of This World], at the levels of story, text and narration, as well as through explicit narrator-author declarations.

"Man never knows for whom he suffers and hopes. He suffers and hopes and toils for people he will never know and who, in turn, will suffer and hope and toil for others who will not be happy either, for man always seeks a happiness far beyond that which is meted out to him." In socio-political history, this basic pattern can be found in the dialectic alternation of order and disorder: any established social system constitutes an order that contains disruptive elements (internal disorder) which provoke its fall through external disorder. The latter, in turn, contains the chance for a better social arrangement, but also tendencies—such as the desire for power—which will make the new order faulty, and so on and on.

While this isotopy is signified in KTW along the diachronic axis of successive events, another isotopy moves vertically, from the particular-temporal to the universal-atemporal, through three levels of progressive abstraction: (1) the history of the island of Haiti between 1750 and 1820; (2) that history as metonymy of the specificity and difference of Latin American history as a whole—"a history impossible to locate in Europe"—; (3) this "otherness" as symbol of the ultimate sense of universal history.

Thus the ideology underlying the novel runs along two axes, the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, each implying repetition, and each projected and repeated upon the other. The story of the novel is announced in Carpentier's prologue as "a succession of (…) events"; but the episodes, besides being 'successive', are linked by a pattern of intratextual repetition, i.e., the recurrence of components on all levels—unitary events, sequences, characters, words, images, symbols—which make each one reflect and reinforce the other.

Simultaneously, there are continuous references to a vast series of other texts, namely human experience as expressed in historical, religious, and artistic creations. This intertextual interplay (a repetition on another level) inserts the novel into universal culture. We shall not develop here the complex intertextualities of KTW. We merely mention that they include, among others, historical works like the Description … de l'Isle de Saint Domingue by Moreau de Saint-Méry and Carpentier's own La música en Cuba, the Old and New Testaments, and a full range of works from the literary, musical and plastic arts that constituted the cultural lot of the historical period covered by the novel, and which are also the sources of the quotations used as epigraphs.

Inter- and intratextual repetitions are interwoven when reference to a certain external text appears more than once. For instance, fragments from Racine's tragedies are quoted when the slaves are forced by their mistress to listen to her recitations. Shortly after, during an uprising, one of them rapes the lady "who, on those nights of tragic declamations, had displayed beneath the tunic with its Greek-key border breasts undamaged by the irreversible outrage of the years." This 'blind' quotation of Atalie exemplifies the technique by which the novel shapes its narrate as one capable of a very complex reading in which every interrelated detail and its sometimes hidden clues have to be decoded in all their richness. To put it bluntly, in order to enjoy all the beauty of KTW, the reader has to know as much of history, religion, ethnology, music, art, and literature, as the author does. In this sense, undoubtedly, Carpentier is a writer for elites.

A succession of episodes, weakly related by unity of space (a sector of the Caribbean islands), unity of time (some 70 years), and a character who can hardly be considered a hero (Ti Noel and, alternatively, Soliman), receive structural unity and significance by means of the repetition of an overall pattern, on the one hand, and the recurrence of sequences, characters, objects and words, on the other. During the actual process of reading, it is precisely the minor recurrent unities that gradually build the bigger structures (like the clay bricks with which Christophe's Citadel is slowly erected). We shall first identify the main motifs that run along the novel, and then analyze their concentration in the capital episodes.

The basic pattern, as stated earlier, is the dialectic alternation of order and disorder. Order is any stable state of social affairs, in which roles (economic, political, religious, and cultural) are perfectly established and delimited. This order contains its own disruptive components (again like the Citadel, attacked by fungi and thunderbolts), mainly despotism, injustice, disregard of the powerless by the powerful, etc. The disruptive components burst out at one point, provoking a revolt. This disorder may or may not succeed long enough to establish a new order: the Macandal revolt does not, Haiti's independence wars do. But the new order fatally repeats with variations the same old patterns, and different actors—individual or collective—fill in the same actantial roles: Christophe's rule is "a slavery as abominable as that he [Ti Noel] had known on the plantation of M. Lenormand de Mezy. Even worse, for there was a limitless affront in being beaten by a Negro as black as oneself." Power changes hands, but its rules are the same; and if some individuals or groups succeed in climbing up the scale, others, the Ti Noels, always remain at the bottom.

The novel opens with a perfectly clear division of power and submission between two collectives: the masters are white-European-Catholic-strong-despotic-violent; the slaves are black-African-pagan-weak-submissive. But the masters are weakened by their naiveté in believing their domination is absolute, and also by their indifference toward the culture of the blacks—and, as a consequence, their unawareness of its hidden energies and potential danger. In their turn, the slaves' strength lies in their hiding their beliefs and feelings, and, though they also despise the culture that is not their own, they are eager to learn the use of what they perceive as its true instruments of power: guns and, most significantly, writing.

The revolts bring about the social, economic and moral collapse of the political, social and cultural order established by the white masters: "All the bourgeois norms have come tumbling down." Settlers whose only purpose on the islands was to make profit abandon all productive activities and "give themselves over (…) to a vast orgy." When Negroes, in turn, attain power, they betray their own tradition and imitate the European imperial or republican states—instead of sticking to the dream of Macandal and restoring in America "the great kingdoms of Popo, of Arada, of the Nagos, of the Fulah."

The same process takes place with individual characters. At the start they clearly belong to one of the two basic collectives, but as the novel develops, some of the semes change fields. Ti Noel, Macandal, Henri Christophe and Soliman are black and slaves and hate whites. But while Ti Noel and Macandal remain loyal to their original codes, Christophe and Soliman are traitors that 'go over' to the enemy. Christophe acts like a European master, Soliman even reaches Europe; their death will symbolize the punishment for their disloyalty. Lenormand de Mezy and his wives, Pauline and Leclerc repeat all the characteristics of the European settler-tyrant in America; but Lenormand and Pauline will 'convert' to the Caribbean life, which for Pauline is a return to her original Corsican self carefully disguised by "the lies of the Directory."

In the Caribbean, Indians were completely exterminated soon after the Discovery, and in the period of KTW there was no native population in the islands. Both whites and blacks came from somewhere else, and were voluntary or involuntary exiles in a New World that itself came into historical being through a foundational expedition. Voyages and longing for the original land as Paradise Lost are recurrent motifs in the novel. Characters travel (or have travelled) continually, by various means of transportation (ships, horses, or on foot), along short or long distances: Europe-America, America-Europe, Africa-America, Haiti-Cuba, plains-mountains, etc. These voyages constitute the passage between qualitatively different spaces: from freedom to slavery, from culture to barbarism, from death to survival, and vice versa. But, paradoxically, the continent of forced or temporary residence becomes the real home for most of them, both when return is possible and when it is not. First is the case of Lenormand de Mezy: "But something strange had happened to him [in Paris]. After a few months, a growing longing for sun, for space (…) made it plain to him that the 'return to France', to which he had looked forward for so many years, was no longer the key to happiness for him. After all his cursing of the colony (…) he returned to the plantation." The second is the Negroes' case. For Ti Noel, home is no longer in Africa but in "the former lands of Lenormand de Mezy, to which he was now returning like the eel to the mud in which it was born (…) feeling himself in a way the owner of that land." At the end, the missing symmetrical possibility of his return voyage to Africa is replaced by the symbolic flight of the vulture "into the thick shade of the Bois Caiman," the forest where the slaves exerted their will for freedom through their Solemn Pact.

The untamed power of the Caribbean climate and organic world turns out to be much more akin to Africa than to Europe, and therefore the slaves' adaptation to life in the islands is easier and more complete. As if in keeping with that fact, nature becomes an ally of the blacks in their political struggle. Macandal's revolt is based on the use of poisonous mushrooms unknown to the whites. The plague kills Leclerc, drives out Pauline and provokes turmoil in the colony. Fungi and thunderbolts attack the Citadel before it is finished. Insects corrode Sans-Souci, a palace built according to an architecture appropriate for another geography. In a milder way heat, the dominant natural force of the Caribbean, erodes the transferred European ways of life and culture: the "actresses from Paris (…) declaimed tragic alexandrines, pausing between hemistitches to wipe the sweat from their brows." During Pauline's voyage to the islands, "each change of wind carried off several alexandrines," and the heat will soon unfasten the officers' coats and strip Pauline herself naked. Her wardrobe, we are ironically informed, included "skirts of striped muslin that she planned to wear the first warm day" (our emphasis).

González Echevarría points out "the complicity between history and nature" in this novel, history being the struggle of the African culture (as part of the germinal tendencies of the genuine America-in-the-making) against the European establishment. Natural forces and human violence have the same effect of disrupting all that is European, and this collapse or regression becomes a symbolic motif. The first human victim of Macandal's poison "had suddenly dropped dead (…) dragging down in his fall the clock he was winding." Christophe's wife will use her fan "to quicken the slow-burning fire" on which she is preparing some "root brew" for her paralyzed husband, "with little thought for etiquette," and when running away from the palace she "discarded her slippers when the stones of the road wrenched off a heel." Fitstricken Christophe is carried home in "a royal carriage drawn by six galloping horses"; but after his defeat and death, his body is hurriedly taken from the palace by a few men "carrying on their shoulders, in the primitive way, a machete-trimmed branch from which hung a hammock" (our translation and emphasis).

Buildings function as an overall signifier for the European enterprise in the islands, both literally as concrete constructions, and metaphorically as a ruling system. Ruins are the consequence of that enterprise's failure, as an outcome of nature's or man's violence. The whites had cultivated the lands; after Macandal's poisoning "putrefaction had claimed the entire region for its own," and the Plaine becomes "the domain of the worms." Lenormand de Mezy's manor will turn into an unrecognizable ruin. On the social level, revolts and sickness disrupt morality and social rules: with each crisis comes social chaos, cruelty worsens, people devote themselves to sheer pleasure, the finest ladies sleep with Negroes, and so on. Pauline, dominated by Soliman, also becomes a ruin of herself—the only reversible case: she will return to the old Pauline during the inversely symmetrical voyage back to Europe.

Again, lines cross. A standing building can already be its own ruin, like the Citadel attacked by fungi creeping from below and by thunderbolts falling from above; or the Sans-Souci palace eaten by insects (again, metaphorically, like a social system with its internal disruptive components). A building becomes a potential ruin if it has been abandoned: the Sans-Souci palace without guards, the Palazzo Borghese without its masters. And the opposite is also true: ruins can become a home, like the one Ti Noel makes for himself by accumulating in what is left of the Mezy's manor all kinds of objects shifted to an unexpected use, as the "three volumes of the Grande Encyclopédie on which he was in the habit of sitting to eat sugar cane."

The motif of the statue is, in a wider sense, the relation between the living body and its artificial/artistic representation: "The substance was different, but the forms were the same." The motif will culminate in the Borghese episode, but its variations already appear in the first chapter, called The Wax Heads. While his master is at the barber's, Ti Noel contemplates the display counters of the town's shops. "The morning was rampant with heads": first he sees "four wax heads" bearing wigs; "by an amusing coincidence," the "tripe shop next door" exhibits "calves' heads (…) which possessed the same waxy quality," and in his refrained aggressivity he imagines "heads of white men" served for "an abominable feast." When the master comes out of the barber shop, "his face now bore a startling resemblance to the four dull wax faces that stood (…) smiling stupidly." On their way home, touching a calf head the master bought for lunch, Ti Noel will think "how much [its skull] probably resembled the bald head of his master hidden beneath the wig." There is also a series of prints showing the "bewigged heads" of the King of France, warriors and dignitaries; only one print shows fully-bodied people, an African king receiving the homage of a French ambassador. Therefore, this first chapter already raises the themes of the natural and the artificial, the authentic and the false, the full and the fragmented, and the pattern of repetition. There is also a subtle intertextual game: the time of the story is approximately 1755 and the European country of reference is France, which would soon find itself very busy with heads separated from their bodies and worth even less than a calf's skull.

The statue motif accompanies Pauline from her very entrance in the novel. On the ship that carries her to America, she enjoys exciting the officers and every morning stands "alongside the foresail, letting the wind ruffle her hair and play with her clothes, revealing the superb grace of her breasts." Even the most disciplined among Leclerc's men "found himself dreaming with open eyes before the statue that was her body, evoking in her honor the Galatea of the Greeks." As an intermediate reminder, at the Sans-Souci palace there is "a bust of Pauline Bonaparte which had once adorned her house at the Cap." The motif will culminate when Soliman encounters the Venus of Canova, which he will take for the actual corpse of Pauline: the theme that opened with a body that resembled a living statue will thus close with a statue seen as a dead body.

The tragic counterpart of this game between stone and flesh is when flesh becomes not a statue, but undifferentiated stone. Henri Christophe's corpse will be sunk into the fresh mortar of his fortress: he who wanted to be unique, to sit above everything, will remain on his heights, but shapeless and irreversibly lost.

The drum is the central material component of the African Voodoo culture in the novel. It accompanies the slaves' work, as well as their feasts and dances, always with religious connotations. Drums are the emblems of the gods and heroes on whom the slaves rely for delivery and victory: the horses of the Mandinga emperor in Africa "went (…) bearing the thunder of two drumheads that hung from their necks"; in the African kingdoms, in period of peace and abundance, "under palm-frond covers slept the giant drums, the mothers of drums, with legs painted red and human faces." The whites do not perceive the significance of drums, what makes them all the more effective. Only too late will Lenormand de Mezy "realize that, in certain cases, a drum might be more than just a goatskin stretched across a hollow log."

As religious symbols and instruments of communication in war, on story level drums alternate or join another primitive instrument, conch shells, and a non-human phenomenon, thunder, which is understood by Negroes as a drum-signal of supernatural origin. In his Messianic return, Macandal "would bring the thunder and lightning and unleash the cyclone." Bouckman's solemn pact is a secret conspiracy and so cannot be announced with drums, but tempest and thunders accompany the ceremony. Santiago (St. James), the Catholic saint of lightning, is assimilated to the African god Ogun Fai, Marshall of the Storms, and brings thunderbolts on Christophe's Citadel. On text level, thunder and drum serve as alternate metaphors for each other: "the thunder of two drumheads"; "thundering like the roll of a kettledrum."

Drums (conch shells, thunder) announce and accompany all the blacks' armed revolts. The signal to Bouckman's uprising is the most accomplished, symphonic development of the motif:

From far off came the sound of a conch-shell trumpet. What was strange was that the slow bellow was answered by others in the hills and forests (…) It was as though all the shell trumpets of the coast, all the Indian lambies, all the purple conches that served as doorstops, all the shells that lay alone and petrified on the summit of the hills, had begun to sing in chorus. Suddenly, another conch raised its voice in the main quarters of the plantation. Others, high-pitched, answered from the indigo works, from the tobacco shed, from the stable. M. Lenormand de Mezy, frightened, hid behind a clump of bougainvillaea. All the doors of the quarters burst open at the same time, broken down from within.

The deaths of the four main Negro characters constitute the progressive climaxes of KTW. The first of them, the execution of Macandal, is a minor climax, because it happens very early in the novel and functions rather as a motivation of further developments, lacking the strong closure quality of the other three: the deaths of Henri Christophe and of Soliman, and the climactic death of Ti Noel with which the novel ends.

The motifs that have been running along the text cluster in these three episodes, potentiating and multiplying their significance as a result of cumulative repetitions, to reappear in the subsequent event, which in its turn will become a repetition with variations of the previous episodes.

This episode is built of three sequences: Cornejo Breille's execution and revenge; the death of Christophe; and Christophe's burial.

The story of Christophe's cruel condemnation of Archbishop Cornejo Breille is introduced by images in which buildings and men are metaphorically/metronymically equivalent:

Ti Noel found the whole city in a death watch. It was as though all the windows and doors of the houses, all the jalousies, all the louvers, were turned towards the corner of the Archbishop's Palace with an expectation so intense that it distorted the facades into human grimaces. The roofs stretched out their eaves, the corners peered sharply forward, the dampness painted only ears upon the walls.

A wall is precisely the instrument of Breille's execution, for he has been "buried alive in his oratory." That wall has "a small opening like a cathole. Out of this hole, black as a toothless mouth, burst from time to time howls so horrifying …" (our translation and emphasis). The howls gradually fade away to a "death-rattle" and to an ominous silence. In the next chapter, the royal family attends Mass at Breille's church, "against the advice of all." The melodic Latin prayers (carefully quoted) are sung against the background of drums heard from far off, "which he [Christophe] felt sure were not imploring a long life for him." Suddenly, a ghost appears, identified through the inversion of the previous metaphor: "And while his face was taking on contour and expression, from this lipless, toothless mouth, as black as a cat-hole, a thundering voice emerged which filled the nave …" (our emphasis). The Christian prayer becomes a thunder: "thundering like the roll of a kettledrum, there arose the words Coget omnes ante thronus…." The fit that strikes Christophe is narrated by means of the same metaphors: "At that moment a thunderbolt that deafened only his ears struck the church towers (…) A rhythm was growing in the King's ears which might have been that of his own veins or that of the drums being beaten in the hills." Like thunder (divine punishment) and prayer in the church, drums (human revolt) and prayer will mix again at the palace where courtesans of weakening loyalty watch over a king condemned by men and gods:

It was impossible to know whether the drums were really throbbing in the hills. But at moments a rhythm coming from the distant heights mingled strangely with the Ave Maria the women were saying in the Throne Room, arousing unacknowledged resonances in more than one breast.

In the next chapter, Christophe, barely recovered, listens to the "ruffle of eight military drums" that announce the change of guard. Suddenly the drum beat changes from the European "prescribed call" to a "syncopated tone in three beats, produced by hands against the leather. 'They are playing the mandoucouman', Henri Christophe screamed, throwing the bicorne to the floor." The revolt breaks out: "It was a general rout of uniforms to the sound of military drums beaten by fists."

The silence, Christophe's loneliness, and the insects "in the beamed ceilings which had never been heard before" turn the palace into the ruin it is to become: "It was the spoils of anyone that wanted to take it." A new relevant motif of repetition appears: the mirrors, that reflect only a deserted king. Christophe enters the Throne Room:

Two crowned lions upheld a shield displaying a crowned phoenix (…) Henri Christophe opened a heavy coffer (…) Then he threw on the floor, one after the other, several solid-gold crowns of different weight. One of them rolled to the door and went thudding down the stairway with a noise that reverberated through the palace" (our emphasis).

The crown motif has accompanied Christophe since his first appearance in the novel as the owner of an inn called Auberge de la Couronne, the sign of which was a "tin crown." After Bouckman's uprising, Lenormand de Mezy learns that Christophe "has given up the business for the uniform of the colonial artillery" and "the tin crown has been taken down." When he nominates himself as Emperor, his emblem is "in the shape of a crown and phoenix."

A digression is in order here. In his analysis of Carnival as a deep kernel of Western culture and literature, Mikhail Bakhtin says:

The primary carnavalistic act is the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king (…) Under this ritual act of decrowning a king lies the very core of the carnival sense of the world—the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal (…) Crowning/decrowning is a dualistic ambivalent ritual, expressing the inevitability and at the same time the creative power of the shift-and-renewal, the joyful relativity of all structure and order (…) And he who is crowned is the antipode of a real king, a slave or a jester (…) precisely in this ritual of decrowning does there emerge with special clarity the carnival pathos of shifts and renewal, the image of constructive death.

The Christophe story contains a full cycle: a tin crown is set up and "taken down," and then replaced by "solid-gold crowns" that are later symbolically thrown on the floor in an act of self-decrowning; the phoenix symbolizes "renewal [and] … constructive death." In fact, all of Christophe's absurd political project has something of the carnavalesque about it. When Ti Noel first sees the Sans-Souci palace, the Negroes dressed as French courtesans look very much like guests at a costume party. González Echevarría finds a deep carnavalesque structure in KTW, and indicates that chapter 5 of part II, which describes the decay of social rules among the white population after Bouckman's revolt—another form of Carnival—is the 13th in a sum total of 26 chapters and therefore the axis of the novel.

Drums and thunder close more and more upon Christophe, in a text that recalls the Bouckman conch shell symphony:

At that moment the night grew dense with drums. Calling to one another, answering from mountain to mountain, rising from the beaches, issuing from the caves, running beneath the trees, descending ravines and riverbeds, the drums boomed, the radas, the congos, the drums of Bouckman, the drums of the Grand Alliances, all the drums of Voodoo. A vast encompassing percussion was advancing on Sans-Souci, tightening the circle. An horizon of thunder closing in. A storm whose eye at the moment was the throne without heralds or mace-bearers.

The mirror motif reappears with the fire that:

lighted up the mirrors of the Palace, the crystal goblets, the crystal of the lamps, glasses, windows, the mother-of-pearl inlay of the console tables—the flames were everywhere, and it was impossible to tell which were flames and which reflections. All the mirrors of Sans-Souci were simultaneously ablaze. The whole building disappeared under this chill fire….

Ironically, the drums cover the noise of the shot with which Christophe puts an end to his life.

In the following chapter, the family and a few loyal servants (Soliman among them) run away with the king's corpse, and their flight, as already mentioned, represents the dismissal of the useless European costume and habits. As they run, they see from above "a torch dance" in the palace as the looting begins, the same looting already witnessed at Lenormand's house. The Citadel's guard soon joins the rebels, and one of the soldiers asks for the Queen's head, showing "that the example set almost thirty years earlier by the idealists of the French Revolution was still vividly recalled," thus closing the head motif of the first chapter. The fortress "stood empty, taking on, with the vast silence of its rooms [the same silence of empty Sans-Souci] the funereal solemnity of a royal tomb." Christophe is buried in "his Escorial," sunk in a pile of mortar; he who immured Cornejo Breille, "became one with the stone."

The Night of the Statues brings together the main motifs related to Pauline Bonaparte (sculpture/body, and the misreading of cultures), the motifs clustered around Christophe's death (symbolic ruins, drums, mirrors, fires, and gods' vengeance), and the voyage towards salvation or death.

Christophe's family and servants have reached Rome, where the Mediterranean climate and some irrational traditions of Christian worship help ease their adaptation. Soliman is lead by his lover, a maid of the Palazzo Borghese, to the impressive residence, abandoned by its owners and neglected by its servants, that is already a potential ruin. As he reviews paintings and sculptures he is unable to understand, the limits between the living and its artistic reproduction become blurred: "It was a white, cold, motionless world, but its shadows took on life and grew under the light of the lantern (…) Soliman thought that one of the statues had lowered its arm a little." "After crossing a gallery adorned with mirrors," Soliman confronts the statue of "a naked woman lying on a bed and holding out an apple." "He knew that face, and the body, too; that whole body aroused a memory." He caresses the marble: "That voyage of his fingers refreshed his memory, bringing back distant images. He had known this contact before." Drunk and terrified, he takes the Venus of Canova for the corpse or the dying body of Pauline. He screams, "his heels stamped so strongly on the floor, turning the chapel beneath into a drumhead"; guards arrive, "the courtyard came ablaze with candles and lanterns." A second terrible memory awakes in him:

As the mirrors were lighted up, the Negro turned sharply about. Those lights, the people crowding into the patio among the white marble statues, the unmistakable bicorns (…) brought back to him in a second's shiver the night of Henri Christophe's death.

He manages to escape, but overcome by malaria (the symmetrical equivalent of Leclerc's cholera), he dies praying to Papa Legba, Master of Roads—an amulet of whom he had once wrought "to open the paths of Rome for Pauline Bonaparte"—, one of the gods he (as Christophe) had forsaken to enter a culture that was not his own.

At the beginning of Part III, "old, but still steady on his bunioned, calloused feet" Ti Noel returns from Cuba to Haiti as a free man. After being forced to work in the construction of the Citadel, he settles in what is left of the house of his first and long-since dead master, Lenormand de Mezy. "Feeling in a way the owner of that land whose contours were meaningful only to him," he clears away some of the ruins and furnishes them with the spoils of Sans-Souci; for him, these become the attributes of his own "Royal Palace." He takes special pride in "a dress coat that had belonged to Henri Christophe (…) which he wore all the time, his regal air heightened by a braided straw hat that he had folded and crushed into the shape of a bicorne." Countryfolk come to his "palace" to dance and celebrate, "and Ti Noel, more majestic than ever in his green coat, presided over the feast, seated between a priest of the Savanna (…) and an old veteran, one of those who had fought against Rochambeau." Through this return of the carnavalesque, Ti Noel becomes both Lenormand and Christophe.

"But one morning the Surveyors appeared (…) the Republican mulattoes, the new masters from the Plaine du Nord." For Ti Noel, their 'new order' is but the threat of a new tyranny: "The old man began to lose heart at this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles." Remembering Macandal, he will procure lycanthropic escape among animals. But injustice reappears within communities of wasps, ants and geese, and Ti Noel finally understands that Macandal's message had been "to serve men, not to abjure the world of men." In a moment of illumination, he relives "the finest moments of his life" and feels in himself the whole of human history:

He felt centuries old. A cosmic weariness, as of a planet weighted with stones, fell upon his shoulders shrunk by so many blows, sweats, revolts.

The meaning of human destiny becomes clear to him:

Bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World.

Raised to the universal Man and assimilated to Jesus Christ (a series of previous allusions connect him intertextually with episodes from the Gospels, such as the Sermon on the Mount and Palm Sunday), his death becomes a ritual sacrifice in which, in a symphonic manner, the whole of the novel's geography, motifs, and main episodes are brought together.

Ti Noel climbed upon his table, scuffing the marquetry with his calloused feet. Toward the Cap the sky was dark with the smoke of fires as on the night when all the conch shells of the hills and coast has sung together (…) At that moment a great green wing, blowing from the ocean, swept the Plaine du Nord, spreading throughout the Dondon valley with a loud roar. And while the slaughtered bulls bellowed on the summit of Le Bonnet de l'Evêque, the armchair, the screen, the volumes of the Encyclopédie, the music box, the doll, and the moonfish rose in the air, as the last ruins of the plantation came tumbling down.

After this Apocalypse "nobody knew of Ti Noel" (our translation) except that "wet vulture," "a cross of feathers," "who turns every death to his own benefit," i.e., a variant of the phoenix, pointing to the eternal return within the cyclical history of mankind.