SOURCE: "Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos: Heart of Lightness, Heart of Darkness," in Revista Hispanica Moderna, Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 84-95.

[In the following essay, Wyers discusses the influence of history, allegory, nature, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness on Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos.]

Los pasos perdidos tells about a journey into the depths of the Orinoco jungle by a narrator-protagonist who wants to recover certain primitive musical instruments that he believes will explain the origins of music. But the quest is also an escape; he wants to free himself from the drudgery of modern life, from the alienation of the metropolis (presumably New York) and from his servitude to clock-time and calendar-time. He finds not only the instruments he seeks but also, deep in the jungle, an unexpected "heart of lightness," a world he sees (as do most critics and doubtless Alejo Carpentier himself) as a paradise, a world he eventually loses and to which he will be unable to return.

The narrator's journey is marked, at a few but significant moments, by his feeling that certain overarching laws determine his actions. These moments, as well as the historical reversal itself, suggest that the novel has an allegorical structure. As we shall see, what starts the trip backwards in time looks to him like a fateful occurrence, that is, an event outside of human time. The allegorical pattern, however, is only intermittent, never complete and it gives way to a reversal of one of the novel's primary mythic references, an "innocent" natural world untouched by humanity. Another novel of a journey up-river, Conrad's Heart of Darkness also looms behind this work. The explicit ideologies of both novels are quite different though we see certain curious coincidences.

Allegory and history, as everyone knows, figure in all of Carpentier's fictions, though if we look at them chronologically we see a shift in balance from the first to the second. Intertwined with these conceptual and organizational modes, are two central motifs: the opposition of culture to nature and the mimicry and changeability that pervade both. In some works these motifs contribute to a sense of allegorical law or historical design and in others they demolish those patterns. Los pasos perdidos wavers in a middle ground between these effects, but the whole of the work stresses the polarity of human history and natural metamorphosis. Nature becomes a world of ceaseless and inexplicable change, that overturns any kind of order. And history reverses itself as it moves towards a "paradise" that—unbeknownst to both the narrator and Carpentier—ironically repeats the outlines of the birth of civilizations, the beginning of an all too familiar repressive order.

Los pasos perdidos is characterized by the constant coincidence of anticipation and memory. Both, I believe, are purely formal. The narrative is a memoir that steadily pays heed to time but repeatedly negates change in the characters and in their world. The opening of the novel describes the setting of a play in which the narrator's wife is acting; the time is the U.S. Civil War; we learn exactly how long that play has run (four years and seven months). This ever-repeating bit of frozen past serves as a model for the novel's description of a history that goes backwards across a series of static tableaux. Time shifts back in jumps from one historical plateau to another. These shifts stand in place of continuity and progression. Throughout the narrator does not change. After fifteen days of travel in the jungle, and after having discovered the musical instruments, he says "algo dentro de mí, había madurado enormemente." But the reader does not see any maturing. In an interview, Carpentier spoke of his character's "momentary resurrection." I do not think there is any kind of resurrection. The character deludes himself, as does Carpentier and, it seems, very many readers.

The peculiar rigidity in the representation of time is emphasized by the narrator's occasional glimpses of a causal system that looks magical, as if ruled by supernatural powers. The first example is a chance meeting with the curator of the museum of musical instruments. The narrator is simply trying to get out of the rain, but the first drops on his face are "como si hubiesen sido la advertencia primera—ininteligible para mí entonces—del encuentro." The meaning of the encounter will only be revealed later in the web of its implications. "Debemos buscar el comienzo de todo, de seguro, en la nube que reventó en lluvia aquella trade, con tan inesperada violencia que sus truenos parecían truenos de otra latitud." The "annunciation" seems to refer to perfectly ordinary, even trivial events, but it stretches out to the tropical latitudes he will visit. The meeting with the curator is what sets the narrator on his journey and the text on its retrogressive course.

The first chapter is full to references to childhood memories, as well as later ones, that point ahead to future events, so that time takes on a kind of backwards-forwards sliding motion. He remembers the language of his childhood, the Odyssey that will play a symbolic part in his trip, his plan for a composition based on Prometheus Unbound, and, finally, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with Schiller's "Ode to Joy." These artistic icons remind him of his father's unbounded admiration for all the products of European high culture; his father could not, of course, have foreseen the future that was part of the narrator's past, the rise of Nazism and the Second World War. In another glissade, the recollection of his mimetic-magical-rhythmic theory of the origin of music sends us forward towards the coming journey at the same moment that it makes us think of primordial time and of origins. Later, in the museum gallery, the chronological display of art works and implements allows the narrator to retrace humanity's past through the paleolithic and to "los confines del hombre." This voyage in time prefigures the whole of the novel's course.

In the midst of these trackings to and fro, before the above scene, the narrator watches and describes a film he had made, underwater views of "la llegada de las anguilas y el vasto viñedo cobrizo del Mar de los Sargazos. Y luego, aquellas naturalezas muertas de caracoles y anzuelos, la selva de corales y la alucinante batalla de los crustáceos, tan hábilmente agrandada, que las langostas parecían espantables dragones acorazados." This is the first of the novel's sightings of plants and animals that mimic others or evoke works of art and fantastic creatures. Such scenes are frequent in Carpentier's fictions. A set piece places characters or narrators before unknown and surprising plants, animals and minerals that change, entwine and create new symbiotic shapes. Although all descriptive passages interrupt the course of narrative, Carpentier's accounts of metamorphosis do not establish a background so much as a world that counters the human one. The positioning of these highly significant suspensions invariably comments on what comes before and after. But here the vision is an artificial one, produced by the skillful enlargements of the camera. And its aim is commercial. Yet placed among personal memories and historical references, the film contrasts the realm of natural mimicry and transmutation with that of human history. The scene prefigures later direct views of natural metamorphoses. It is placed in this first chapter between two different kinds of fixed systems: clock and calendar time that portion out the "daily tyrannies of modern life" and that hidden order announced by the drops of rain on the narrator's face.

Referring to the novel's many anticipations, Eduardo González has pointed out how the individual's most significant experiences are enclosed within an allegorical scaffolding and how Carpentier sees culture as "una acumulación de signos, redes o fuentes simbólicos de iluminación y de perplejidad para el sujeto." I would add that the doubling of scenes and thematic clusters also points to a level of hidden, magical principles. In his book on allegory, Angus Fletcher says that "any struggle between antithetical positions will arouse … formalized doubling." Antithetical pairings are central to the novel's plot and to the narrator's scheme of values. Among them are the valued past/the devalued present (or prehistory/history); authentic or integral culture / unauthentic or alienated culture; the origin of art / the "end" or degeneration of art in commercialism (for example, the "theater" that originates in the funeral rites for Rosario's father / Ruth's commercial theatrical function). The narrator sets these oppositions before us and is generally aware of them. But he is often not aware of the symbolic unity behind them. Nor, as I have mentioned, does the author consistently maintain an allegorical subtext throughout the novel. Indeed, the narrative's figurative pattern is fragmentary, inconsistent and finally, as we shall see, reversible.

The mimesis that threads through the novel appears in different ways, the principal ones being mimicry in nature and mimicry in culture. Both are portrayed alternately in positive and negative terms. Cultural imitation can be a servile response to the social and economic power of the dominant world, an attempt to participate magically in its strength, beauty or prestige. It easily turns into falsification. Colonial culture attempts to appropriate the forms of the metropolis. The architectural jumble of the South American city, first stop on the journey, is a man-made anarchy of different period styles. The public attending an opera there duplicates a nineteenth century audience. As duplicate, it is a debasement, a sham on two different time levels. The narrator also looks down on other kinds of imitation: the way Mouche apes the intellectual fashions of St. Germain-des-Prés, and, in a country resort, the eagerness with which a white musician, an Indian poet and a black painter (surely an allegorical trio) seek information from Mouche so that they too might insert themselves in a foreign culture as faithful copyists.

Yet the novel's most significant—and positive—mimetic doubling occurs through the narrator's projection of European cultural history onto the different space-time periods of this American "Odyssey" (a reference he repeatedly uses to describe his travels). The first image in the creation of this palimpsest is the long forgotten "presencia de la harina en las mañanas … el pan que reparte el padre luego de bendecirlo." The almost religious allusion opens out to an earlier, even more exalted experience: "el gran sabor mediterráneo que ya llevaban pegado a la lengua los compañeros de Ulises." As he moves into the jungle and backwards in time, the narrator casts over each waystation a network of European references, from the nineteenth century through the Middle Ages to Homeric times (beyond that, in prehistoric eras, the importance of place, of continent, of Europe or America, quite naturally disappears). It is a curious lamination, convincing if one accepts the thesis that it was a medieval Spain that discovered and colonized the New World, but puzzling in view of the uniformly heroic portrayal of those times, especially when we remember that the narrator, telling about visits to European museums just before the outbreak of World War II, sees medieval art as the forerunner of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazism. "Ya no podía contemplarse un tímpano ilustre, un campanil, gárgola o ángel sonriente sin oírse decir que ahí estaban previstas ya las banderías del presente…." We do not know who "says" this but the narrator offers no disagreement. The "sin oírse decir" leads the reader to imagine a whole chorus of condemnation. That critique, however, does not cross the Atlantic. Quite the contrary, the narrator's enthusiasm for the marvelous transfer of European culture to the wilds of Latin America, might be described as a conceptual recolonization of that space. He never suggests or asks if this new world will follow the old one into the same inhumanity. By the end of the novel, the conflation of America and Europe appears as part of the narrator's unconscious confusion of notions of good an evil embedded in nature and civilization.

Conrad's merging of good and evil rests on different foundations: the evils of the European colonial enterprise become so entangled, through imagery and ideology, with the menace of the African landscape and population that in some passages we cannot tell which is which: "It was like the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect." If the reference is to the Congo, are we to think of nature, of the impenetrable jungle or of the people who live there?

When it takes the stance of turning away from cultural imitation, Carpentier's text must turn to the opposite, to creation. For the narrator, and for Carpentier, both enamoured of language, this means giving names to things. The narrator is scornful of Mouche because she sees all new things through the filter of European literature. As we have seen he does almost the same thing, though his range is broader. He proposes for himself "la única tarea que me pareciera oportuna en el medio que ahóra me iba revelando lentamente la índole de sus valores: la tarea de Adán poniendo nombre a las cosas." González Echevarría points out that this is one of the most frequently repeated commonplaces in Carpentier's work, identifying it with the desire to create an art free of the influence of Europe where everything is already named. Yet we have seen the narrator repeatedly places the social life of the New World under the template of European history. The only things to which he can give new names are features of the natural world.

Naming is a primary cultural act, involved with the making of tools and the transmission of that craft. Separated from toolmaking, it is the writer's special pride. We might related this enterprise to what Freud and Fenichel called "the magic of names" which, as Fletcher observes, dominates the allegorical work more than any other linguistic phenomenon. Although the weave of allegory is quite torn in this text, the treatment of language and the well-known idiosyncrasies of Carpentier's style show a basic allegorical orientation. Fenichel says that words are shadows of things, constituting a microcosm that reflects the macrocosm of things outside. "This-representations" (words) are "an attempt to endow the things with 'ego-quality' for the purpose of achieving mastery over them. He who knows a word for a thing masters the thing." Fletcher says the magic of names, the so-called "omnipotence of words," is explained as a superabstract withdrawal into a verbal universe. For Carpentier's narrator, as well as for Carpentier himself, words not only confer mastery but rescue things from namelessness, which is seen as a kind of non-existence: looking into a hallucinatory crater of demonic plants, the narrator forsees their disappearance from the planet without ever having been "recreated by the word." Carpentier's baroque style aims at both mastery and recreation. When confronted with realities already named he piles word upon word upon word in order to create anew the objects of his description, to bring into being an original, unique, linguistically crowded entity, thereby asserting his dominion over the "macrocosm of things."

The narrator's revelation about his task of naming is followed, a few pages later, by the first direct description that combines different orders of natural reality. He must now take on that "única tarea." Ascending the Andes he sees "peñas tristes como animales petrificados," where every night the organs of storm bellowed "en garganta y abismos." In this portentous environment he meets Rosario and learns about the members of a scientific expedition of fifty years ago who are congealed in transparent ice. Against this image of petrification, Rosario's physical features make him think of living change and transformation, the blending and mixing of races. Shortly afterwards, hearing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on a radio, he thinks not of the accomplishments of Europe's high culture but of the shame and horrors of its history. Yet he describes the mourning for Rosario's father by reference to earlier monuments of that same culture; it is "una tragedia antigua," a "un rito milenario," an "auto sacramental"; all these command his deepest respect. The text repeatedly sets before us the narrator's ambivalence towards all culture, (especially that of the West), and repeatedly shows us that he is unaware of his contrary feelings.

In contrast to this narrator's admiration for racial mixing and in contrast to his reverent vision of the funeral rites for Rosario's father, Marlowe describes the Congo's inhabitants in the dehumanizing terms of fragmented body parts and frenzied gestures: "a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling …" He is "appalled" as "before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse." Arguing that Conrad provides no alternative frame of reference for the actions and opinions of his characters, that there is no distance between Conrad and Marlowe, that "Marlowe seems to enjoy Conrad's complete confidence," Chinua Achebe has called the novel "an offensive and deplorable book." And if, as some students of Conrad claim, Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of Kurtz's mind, then it becomes "a metaphysical battleground devoid of all recognizable humanity."

Aside from Rosario, Carpentier's narrative does not really refer much to the people of the Orinoco. One important exception is the tribe where he finds the musical instruments; he is impressed that Indians, whom he had previously seen only through more or less fantastic tales, live according to primordial rhythms, absolute "owners of the culture," their reality far from "the absurd concept of savage." They are human beings who master "la totalidad de los oficios propiciados por el teatro de su existencia." Another group of Indians, as we shall see, lives in the mire of pre-human squalor. But most of the narrative focuses on a mestizo, colonial culture that represents different stages of European culture set against an ever more astounding natural world.

Turning from one to the other—nature, culture, nature—the text always goes back to nature, a nature that copies not only its own creations but also those of man (culture in this text is invariably masculine). We see "bloques de granito en forma de saurios, de dantas, de animales petrificados." Enormous heaps of basalt look like "restos de una necrópolis perdida … los vestigios de una arquitectura creada con fines ignorados." If nature is cast in a man-made mold, so too is sexual experience; it is totally acculturated, fully circumscribed by a male scheme of domination and submission. The narrator will possess Rosario. Mouche may be dying, but he and Rosario exist in a world apart where he caresses her public hair "con mano de amo," the "master's hand." In this brave new world he discovers that the female "serves" the male "en el más noble sentido del término."

The shifting back and forth between scenes of a mineral world in metamorphosis (towards the animal, towards the architectural), references to human races also in metamorphosis, memories of the abominations of European history, archaic dramatic rituals and a sexual rite of masculine appropriation sets the predictability of human history—including the male ideology that informs it and that is clearly beyond any critical consciousness on the part of the narrator—against a natural world far from the human, even though it is portrayed by dint of man-made comparisons.

The confusion of natural forms grows in intensity as the voyage inland progresses. The river provides a "disorder of appearances" in a succession of "small mirages" that disconcert and disorient. Yet dawn brings "a primordial sensation of beauty"; while Rosario cleans his breakfast dishes, he feels "el orgullo de proclamarse dueño del mundo, supremo usufructuario de la creación." The "hombre-avispa," of the first chapter, the worker subjected to the schedules and rules of others turns into the supreme capitalist. The experience of nature becomes ownership. Its otherness is tamed and claimed in possession. Conrad sees this quite differently: "We could have fancied ourselves taking possession of an accursed inheritance." Of course Carpentier refers to esthetic possession, Conrad presumably to the appropriation of the material wealth of the Congo. Yet in the Carpentier text the esthetic is ominously linked with destructive power; it sets forth several inevitable historical sequences that tie art or language to annihilation, control, enslavement: the unstoppable progression from medieval art to the rise of Nazism is repeated by the memories awakened later on hearing Beethoven's Ninth; naming or the mastery over the "macrocosm of things" presents itself in another variation as the male's subjugation of the female. Linked images of control enclose the description of nature's awesome independence.

The natural world is bent to images of human fabrication: he sees twisted trees as anchored ships, more marble than wood, "emergían como los obeliscos cimeros de una ciudad abismada." A fertile vegetation is ensnared in lianas, bushes, vines, hooks and parasitical plants that jostle each other. What is most astonishing is "the endless mimetism of virgin nature": "Aquí todo parecía otra cosa, creándose un mundo de apariencias que ocultaba la realidad … La selva era el mundo de la mentira, de la trampa y del falso semblante; allí todo era disfraz, estratagema, juego de apariencias, metamorfosis." Plant, animal and insect forms combine; flowers are not flowers, fruit is the deceptive guise of some insectivorous plant. Even the sky lies at times, inverting its height in the quicksilver of ponds. This is the realm of an exuberant proliferation of lianas, an eternal shuffling of appearances and simulacra; we are back at the first chapters of Genesis. The pride of ownership gives way to an ethically loaded catalogue of the jungle's foreignness: lies, deceit, falsity. We are closer to Conrad's ambiguity. The narrator must feel that he can no longer domesticate nature through metaphors and imagery, so he denounces it even while expressing awe at its baroque inventiveness.

González Echevarría has observed that Carpentier's language echoes that of the mid-nineteenth century German explorer, Robert Schomburgk who, in his Travels in British Guiana, struggled futilely to resist describing the landscape in Western terms. He finds traces in images, adjectives, similes but also in the coincidence of the unifying theme of the constant transformations of nature. He goes on to say that nature is a code, akin to that of writing in which meanings are always changing and "signs … engender other signs in perpetual multiplication." Therefore the narrator cannot 'read' it; he cannot get through the web of deception, subterfuge and metamorphosis. I would go further and point out how the narrator's own code, his ordered memoir—which ends with a neatly pointed moral about how "la única raza humana que está impedida de desligarse de las fechas es la raza de quienes hacen arte …"—contrasts with the disorder of a nature he ultimately come to see as rebellious and repellent. In Conrad's view, it was 'prehistoric' man who confounds the reading of signs: Marlowe cannot tell if the frenzied yells they hear are curses, prayers or forms of welcome.

From the entanglements of living forms the narrator's gaze moves to enormous rock formations, a world of Bosch and other painters of the fantastic. Everything is gigantic: a titantic city of multiple spacious buildings, cyclopean stairways reaching to the clouds; strange obsidian fortresses "defienden la entrada de algún reino prohibido al hombre." The capital of Forms asserts itself—a realm of the gods where some Final Judgement might be celebrated. In a small village he finds the primitive musical instruments that are the object of his search. Fray Pedro celebrates mass with simple religious artifacts and the narrator becomes acutely conscious of the backwards movement of time—from 1540 to the Middle Ages, to the birth of Christ, to the paleolithic. The past is made present; he touches it, breathes it. The reversal is swift, like the one in the final section of "Viaje a la semilla": "Perdió el Graal su relumbre, cayeron los clavos de la cruz, los mercaderes volvieron al templo, borróse la estrella de la Natividad y fue el Año Cero, en que regresó al cielo el Ángel de la Anunciación…. Estamos en la Era Paleolítica … intrusos, forasteros ignorantes … en una ciudad que nace en el alba de la Historia." In "Viaje a la semilla," the reversal is magical. Here it takes place in the narrator's imagination where reeling sequences of objects mark different epochs. What is suggested throughout the text by spatial-temporal shiftings is here dramatically condensed in a cinematographic unravelling of the course of history. The effect (also suggested throughout the memoir) is the merging of historical and magical causation. Significantly, the history sighted is Western and Christian. The people without history do not appear. Only nature, with its amazing changes, stands as the contrast to this world of recorded human events.

History, inconceivable without writing or some form of visual recording system, is closely connected with the development of the state; it is, therefore, the story of hierarchical society. Such a society is the only one imagineable to the narrator, though others have imagined otherwise. For example, the anthropologist Salvatore Cucchiari has posited a pre-gender society unmarked by hierarchies and the rule of male over female, an era when social gender categories have not yet been constructed. Woman is not "other," not object and subordinate. (He situates the subsequent gender revolution in the Upper Paleolithic). Carpentier's narrator does not take us back to this pre-kinship social formation. Quite the contrary, he fancies an idealized world of total female subjugation. Rosario, as a "woman of earth," serves the male. She calls herself "your woman" and "en esa constante reiteración del posesivo encuentro como una solidez de concepto, una cabal definición de situaciones, que nunca me diera la palabra 'esposa.'" Rosario fulfills "un destino que más vale no analizarlo demasiado, porque es regido por 'cosas grandes' cuyo mecanismo es oscuro, y que … rebasan la capacidad de interpretación del ser humano." Are these "cosas grandes" part of that figurative realm that has almost vanished out of sight? Innocently, and with great delight, the narrator believes he has reached the absolute and "exact" definition of gender relations—mastery and servitude, ownership and unquestioning, happy slavery.

That slavery and debasement are part of this "return to paradise," or the move towards "momentary resurrection" appears in more ominous form in the next landing place, the habitat of a people with a culture much earlier than the one just seen. The travelers have left the paleolithic and entered "un ámbito que hacía retroceder los confines de la vida humana a lo más tenebroso de la noche de las edades," peopled by creatures who are barely human. The Adelantado shows him a muddy hollow, a kind of pig-sty filled with the captives of others who consider themselves a superior race, "the only rightful owners of the jungle." The prisoners look like living fetuses with white beards, wrinkled dwarfs with enormous bellies covered with blue veins who smile stupidly, fearfully, servilely." We have gone from the pleasures of oppression to its horrors, with no indication whatsoever that there might be some link between them. The narrator is unaware of the very connections he has put before us. And nothing in the sequence of plot—or in anything else—points to an ironic author behind the narrator.

Beyond this realm of infrahumanity, is a world prior to the creation of living beings: "Acaban de apartarse las aguas…. Estamos en el mundo del Génesis, al fin del Cuarto Día de la Creación," almost reaching the "terrible soledad del Creador." Then, repeating the forwards and backwards slidings of the first chapter, the plot line advances to the Adelantado's secret: he has founded a city. "Se puede ser Fundador de una Ciudad. Crear y gobernar una ciudad que no figure en los mapas, que se sustraiga a los horrores de la época, que nazca así, de la voluntad de un hombre, en este mundo del Génesis. La primera ciudad, la ciudad de Henoch…." The city turns out to be very similar to those built by the Spanish conquerors, with a Plaza Mayor, a Government House, the houses of the founder's children (the son's close to the center, the daughters' farther back) and behind, the Indians' settlement. The church will be built next. The city reproduces well-known distinctions between state, colonizers and Indians. Fray Pedro agrees that it is just like the cities founded by Pizarro, Diego de Losada and Pedro de Mendoza. It springs from the same impulse to impose one's designs on nature and on other human beings, especially on those who can be seen as racially or sexually inferior. It is the self-reflecting creation of a solitary man, "born out of the will of one man." The narrator marvels at the possibility of such an achievement; it fires his imagination. "Yo fundo una ciudad. Él ha fundado una ciudad. Es posible conjugar semejante verbo." The city, this compelling heart of darkness, is an expression of sheér willfulness. No wonder the Adelantado is no longer interested in searching for gold; he wants land and "el poder de legislar por cuenta propia." To rule over others and devise laws to control them, that is the Adelantado's Arcadian dream that the narrator so much admires. Arcadia turns out to be a city, civis, a nascent civilization. In miniature we see the establishment of class distinctions, racial separations, the state, church, and the inevitable structuring and reinforcement of gender divisions and roles. The conceptual recolonization effected by portraying Latin America through the stages of European history, here becomes a true recolonization, a real subjugation. Captivated by an order that he does not recognize as the roots of the very civilization from which he flees, the narrator decides to stay.

Fray Pedro takes him to see petroglyphs and, near those "Signs," on the side of the mountain, a crater filled with frightening, hallucinatory plants. This is the last long description of untouched, unruly nature, now perceived as a repugnant confusion of forms: "gramíneas membranosas, cuyas ramas tienen una mórbida redondez de brazo y de tentáculo. Las hojas enormes, abiertas como manos, parecen de flora submarina, por sus texturas de madrépora y de alga con flores bulbosas,… pájaros colgados de una vena, mazorcas de larvas, pistilos sanguinolentos, que les salen de los bordes por un proceso de erupción y desgarre, sin conocer la gracia de un tallo. Y todo eso, allá abajo, se enrevesa, se enmaraña, se anuda, en un vasto movimiento de posesión de acoplamiento, de incestos, a la vez monstruoso y orgiástico, que es suprema confusión de las formas." Fray Pedro calls these monstrous and orgiastic plants rebellious because they fled from man in the very beginning, refusing to serve as food. Here they hide in the last valley of prehistory. He explains that this diabolic vegetation surrounded the Earthly Paradise before the Fall. The whole cauldron is "demoniacal." These are the plants that the narrator says will disappear from the planet "without being named, without having been recreated by the word." The rebel plants will never be mastered or possessed by language.

Marlowe too refers to the absence of signs: "We were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories at all." But he is speaking not of the jungle but of those creatures who make him think "the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman."

In Los pasos perdidos, the vision of a vegetation now identified as incestuous, orgiastic, unheeding of man's wants and needs, stands in contrast to the orderliness of a man-made city with its hierarchies of racial, sexual and social privilege. By re-introducing these hierarchies and founding civilization anew, the text keeps at bay Marlowe's vision of savagery and cannibalism. It is the realm of plants, not of man, that becomes diabolical. The opposite of human history and human laws is the incomprehensible disorder of nature. First described as living and mineral forms that mimic each other, then as a scramble of appearances and simulacra, endless proliferations and metamorphoses, later as lies and deceits, nature finally appears as "demoniacal" and unnamable. Deep in the jungle, vegetation is the heart of darkness, the horrifying face of chaos. And, in a symmetrical reversal of terms, goodness, order and personal glory attach themselves to the newly founded city, which is, in reality, a perfect embryo of human repression. The narrative has turned itself inside out, deconstructing its forms and the myths to which it alludes.

González Echevarría speaks of how "en la mejor tradición de las confesiones, el texto traiciona a cada paso a su autor que pretende develar verdades sobre sí pero que sólo lo logra indirectamente." He adds that by placing Latin American reality within the framework of European history, the text establishes a marked contrast between what the narrator-protagonist says about himself and what he does. This fragmentation or multiplication "es irónica y socava la autoridad del narrador. No podemos fiarnos de la coherencia ideológica de su discurso, empedrado como está de una enorme cantidad de alusiones librescas…." Eduardo González, reviewing this edition, also refers to the split between the protagonist's voice and "the ironic commentary which [his] actions and evasions weave around him…." But not only bookishness and irony (the latter, in my view, disappearing in the second half of the book) make the reader stumble but also the presence of an underlying myth about nature and society that is barely stated and never explicitly affirmed or contested. Yet when it finally does take form in the text, we see that our cherished image of innocent nature vs. sinful metropolis has been turned topsy turvy. Whatever is left of the novel's allegorical and historical tapestry has been swallowed up in this reversal.

Not surprisingly, only back in the shelter of the new town, does the narrator recover the image of a placid landscape where bamboos dance in the breeze and where he can imagine a future time when men will discover "un alfabeto en los ojos de las calcedonias, en los pardos terciopelos de la falena, y entonces se sabrá con asombro que cada caracol manchado era, desde siempre, un poema." Most critics have been as misguided as the narrator in thinking that Santa Mónica de los Venados is a utopia (though many utopias are restrictive and rigid), a paradise beyond time and corruption. They confuse it with an idealized pristine landscape that only rarely makes an appearance in the work. People tend to read the novel as a voyage to the origin of things. When this critic says that the narrator-protagonist cannot "permanecer en el origen porque no puede suprimir su conciencia histórica," he ignores the fact that historical consciousness has embedded itself in the very town plan of Santa Mónica. In Conrad's original manuscript, Marlowe quite correctly says that comprehension of their surroundings "could only be obtained by conquest or surrender." History is the history of conquest. The beginning of a new life, what many critics have called simply "el origen," is tainted with all the discontents of civilization, with all its barbarisms. When Carpentier, in an interview, spoke of the "thesis" of his novel as a voyage "hasta las raíces de la vida," and of how his character had lost "la puerta de su existencia auténtica," he unwittingly (I suppose) situated authenticity in a class society that is racist and sexist. So strong is our cultural (romantic) paradigm of natural innocence and city wickedness that even so astute a reader as González Echevarría slides right past this radical reordering of the myth and speaks of "escape a la naturaleza, regreso a la civilización, intento fallido de regreso al mundo natural." Santa Mónica, as we have seen, is hardly natural. It is the creation of "the will of one man," cast in a mold of conquest and exploitation. In introducing "evil" in the form of the rape of a child by a leper, the author must be unaware that evil lies in the very heart and idea of the Adelantado's city. The rape and the bloody punishment that follow are gratuitous, melodramatic additions to the portrayal of a society whose unhappy future we can easily predict. We live in that future. The narrator tried to escape from it by going into the jungle. His return to the metropolis and his failed attempt to get back to Santa Mónica might look like the loss of paradise, but we know that it is simply a dream, a hallucination of good, just as the "diabolic crater" is a hallucination of evil. It is not, as Carpentier claimed, that his protagonist-narrator's resurrection is "momentary"; it is that it never happens. In moving from the immorality and exploitation of the modern metropolis to the innocence of nature in metamorphosis and then from the supposed virtues of a proto-metropolis that promises all the abuses of the world we know, to the "immorality" of an incestuously entangled, rebellious nature, the narrator—and the narrative (with its author)—confound all principles of good and evil, freedom and repression. The novel's title aptly expresses this profound disorientation.