[In the following essay, Eiríksdóttir discusses Carpentier's use of irony in his earlier work.]

La Consagración de la Primavera, Carpentier's most committed novel, seems not to have gained acceptance as the masterpiece its author clearly intended it to be. It has been suggested that among the reasons for this is that it lacks irony. To that extent it seems to bear out Barthes' comment that Marxist writing "aims at presenting reality in a prejudged form." It is as though Carpentier had resolved, or repressed, his earlier doubts about the process and speed of historical change and about the capacity of individuals to accept it. In consequence, La Consagración de la Primavera, for all its length and complexity, presents a tidy, unambiguous picture of reality, which contains certain reliably predictable features including the inevitability of progress through collective effort.

It was not always so. The fundamental tension identified by Muecke in what he terms simple ironies, where "one term is seen more or less immediately, as effectively contradicting, invalidating, exposing, or at the very least modifying the other" is more pronounced in Carpentier's fiction prior to El siglo de las luces (1962, but most probably written between 1956 and 1958) than later. This would accord with the view hinted at by Labanyi, in a seminal article, that we can discern in El siglo de las luces a certain shift in Carpentier's outlook towards a more positive, or as she calls it "dynamic" vision of historical progress, which was to triumph in La Consagración de la Primavera. According to Muecke, irony flourishes in "open ideologies," characteristically proposed by the "General Ironist [with his] distrust of systems, his acceptance of impermanence as normal, his ability to see 'that it might just as well have happened the other way around.'"

Irony as a general precept is not readily compatible with dogmatic or univocal thinking, and, in the words of Gurewitch, "entails hypersensitivity to a universe that is permanently out of joint … the ironist does not pretend to cure such a universe or solve its mysteries." As sentimentality is the mark of a tender-minded writer, who designedly presents a comforting vision of the world around us, so irony is the mark of a tough-minded writer who refuses to simplify and reassure. This is not to imply, of course, that Carpentier altered his stance totally after the late 1950s, but rather that there is a certain shift of emphasis, particularly after his return to Cuba.

However, it is noteworthy that even in his earliest fiction explicit irony, that is to say, verbal irony either in dialogue or through direct authorial commentary and the assumption of an intrusive authorial persona, is usually absent. Carpentier deals almost exclusively in impersonal, situational irony and in implied irony, which it is left to the alert reader to perceive and appreciate. Expectation is played off against event, the reader is presented with similarity where the author had prepared him to expect contrast and vice versa, and the writer stands detachedly aside without revealing any unqualified sympathies. In the body of the work to be discussed in this article, from the earliest writings up to and including El reino de este mundo, the main fount of such irony seems to be the author's awareness of the role played in human affairs by the need for belief.

As late as La Consagración de la Primavera itself, he is still insisting on the contrast between Vera's admission "Yo en nada tengo fe" and Gaspar Blanco's "sólida fe" in Marxism. Joseph Sommers identifies the beginning of this preoccupation, which is already endowed with ironic overtones, in the outer frame of Carpentier's first novel Ecue-Yamba-O. "La acción dramática," he writes, "se desenvuelve dentro de un marco de ironía, sugerido en primera instancia por el título mismo de la obra" (se traduce "Loado sea Dios"). Sommer's argument is that from the outset Menegildo, the hero, is confided to the care of the voodoo gods by magical rituals and observances. But such care neither assists him in his courtship of Longins nor protects him from imprisonment, subsequent relapse into criminality, and a violent death. Nonetheless his son is placed under the care of the same gods. The irony lies, at the primary level, in the discrepancy between the absolute faith of Menegildo and the total absence of protection which it affords him.

But it goes much deeper than that, and therein, in our view, lies much of the ironic ambiguity of the novel. Menegildo does not simply believe: he needs to believe in order to find his Black identity, that identity which allows him to credit himself with a deeper understanding of essential reality than the understanding enjoyed by the Whites. This has led to a division of opinion among critics about the inner meaning of the novel as a whole. Brushwood and González Echevarría suggest that Carpentier is affirming the superiority of "natural" (Black) values. Sommers argues that the reverse is really the case. In fact, the two stances co-exist uneasily side by side in the novel and the attentive reader perceives a certain fluctuation on the part of Carpentier from one to the other. The irony, compounded of course by being found in a novel by a White writer about Black outlook, reveals an unresolved ambivalence on the author's part. The story is told from the Black point of view, that of Menegildo, who quite explicitly attributes to himself and to his race a special understanding of reality.

Some passages of authorial commentary, notably the key paragraph in Chapter XII in which Carpentier seems to endorse the "altísima sabiduría" underlying the Blacks' magical conception of the cosmos, at first lend credibility to the contention of González Echevarría and Brushwood. But they are offset not only by the ending, in which Menegildo dies in the course of a brawl between rival groups of voodoo initiates, but also by certain ironic juxtapositions which tend to devalue the authority of the magical beliefs on which Menegildo's presumption of his own superiority is based. We notice, for instance, that after his voodoo initiation some of the adepts present at the ceremony hurry off to watch a Catholic procession in which the image of the Virgin being carried along is described as dancing above the heads of the faithful exactly like the voodoo "Nazacó" during the initiation rite. A few pages later, the episode of the children visiting their den in an empty house in order to adore with "mágico respeto" a picture postcard of a naked woman, is strategically positioned so as to comment ironically on the enchantment of the voodoo ceremony which is the central episode of the novel. The general point, underlined by the drunken hymn-singing of the North Americans ("Borrachos evangélicos") in the Christmas scene and the comic presentation of the Salvation Army, is that both Blacks and Whites, Christians and voodoo adepts, derive their sense of superiority from belief (parodied in both cases) in supernatural powers. Carpentier indicates ironically that such belief, while commonly an important ingredient in coming to terms with a hostile cosmos, in fact betrays the believer. Faith is a form of hubris, a tragic assumption.

A similarly ironic treatment of magical ritual and Christian belief is visible in Carpentier's next work, the little-known, serio-comic short story in French "Histoire de lunes." A number of details connect the story to Ecue-Yamba-O. The pimp Radamés, whom Menegildo meets in prison, is here awaiting his naturalization papers: the girls wearing ribbons with the inscription "Viva la música" turn up afresh; above all the division of the voodoo adepts into "chivos" (here "boucs") and "sapos" reappears, once more with murderous consequences. In the story a number of village women are raped by the local boot-black who has been bewitched through his animal-double. When it is discovered that he rapes only the women of the rival voodoo brotherhood, the vigilantes' attempt to shoot him develops into a bloody feud which ends only when he is executed, not as a rapist but as a political subversive!

Here Carpentier adopts a more detached stance towards the Blacks' magical beliefs, with consequent benefit to the narrator's ironical approach, which becomes more explicit than in Ecue-Yamba-O. In the first part of the tale his ironic barbs appear to be directed against Catholicism, and we have a rare example in Carpentier of actual verbal irony, an authorial intrusion pointedly and disparagingly extending the terms of what Muecke would call "simple incongruity" or "minimal irony." The villagers, that is, are at Mass when they are summoned to the local sorcerer's dwelling by the voodoo drums. To satirize this Afro-Cuban mass, Carpentier describes how a china dove, representing the Holy Spirit, hangs ludicrously from the ceiling of the church on a piece of string. But the satire turns to irony when the sound of the drums, calling the faithful to their true spiritual allegiance in the middle of the church service, is compared deliberately to the "roucoulement d'un pigeon monstrueux." But lest we imagine that this implies the triumph of voodoo magic over Catholicism, Carpentier then nimbly shifts his stance to show the two brotherhoods mounting rival, apparently pious, Catholic processions which end in a riot at the church door. Just as he was to do later in El reino de este mundo, Carpentier stresses the stronger hold exerted by magical beliefs than by those of traditional Catholicism. But the ending of the story makes it clear he is not endorsing either. Rather, after separating them in the Mass episode, he then with equal ironic distance collapses the former back into the latter. Critics have taken too much at their face value Carpentier's famous assertions in the preface to El reino de este mundo about the role of "fe colectiva" in Haiti during the Black rebellions. His treatment of it in his second novel cannot be properly understood without taking into account the context provided by his earlier work.

In "Oficio de tinieblas" Carpentier again uses the device of an ironic interruption of the celebration of Mass. This tale is not told with the tone of slight amusement which we perceive in "Histoire de lunes." A macabre story of earthquake and plague, its theme is cosmic irony, nature's mockery of the vanity of human wishes, which contrasts the love of pomp and display typical of the colonial criollos of Cuba with the frightful forces of destruction which the tropics can suddenly unleash. Its title, like those of Ecue-Yamba-O and El reino de este mundo, is itself ironic and underlines the presence of such an attitude in nearly all the direct references to Catholicism in Carpentier's early work. Two features of the tale are relevant to the present study. One is the barbed notation which tells us that the prelude to the widespread destruction and death from cholera is a play performed by the wealthy criollos, the title of which is La entrada en el gran mundo. The second ironic effect is created at the climax as the defiant song of the common people, "Ahí va la Lola," incorporates itself into the Te Deum which celebrates the end of the epidemic. Janney rightly perceives that the story alludes to the "absurdity" of life in thrall to the arbitrary power of death. But he is wrong, in our view, to suggest that it is balanced by the "Choteo cubano" of the masses. The central figure, Panchón, is first seen carrying a doublebass on his head, and later carrying in the same way a corpse, which he lifts like a hat to salute the posters advertising the play—irony commenting on irony—before being carried off himself. The episode reveals that the technique of the tale is not merely one of humourous or satirical contrast, as Janney tends to imply. It is more a representation of the tragic fulcrum pointed out by Muecke, in which "irony regards assumptions as presumption and therefore innocence as guilt"—at least for the vindictive forces of the cosmos which make mockery of all human aspirations. Gurewitch comments, "Perhaps the fundamental distinction between irony and satire, in the largest sense of each, is simply that irony deals with the absurd, whereas satire treats the ridiculous." There is satire in "Oficio de tinieblas," but the irony is more significant.

"Viaje a la semilla," Carpentier's next story, occupies a unique position among his earlier writings, because it is the only one into which what Gurewitch calls irony's preoccupation with "the morals of the universe" as distinct from "life's corrigible deformities" does not intrude. The story is concerned not with whether insight into human experience suggests the possible presence of "an incurable hoax of things," but with the quite different issue of the subversion of apparential reality. The thrust of the tale, that is, moves in a wholly different direction from that of the writings that surround it. In consequence, it may be excluded from this account. "Los fugitivos," on the other hand, is described by Shaw as "intentionally ironic." His argument is that the second meeting of the two central characters, a tracker-dog and a slave, both runaways, contrasts ironically with the first. But this hardly does justice to the story as a whole. Man and dog are both initially slaves, fearing the same whip and chains. Both have escaped and returned to the wild. From this beginning Carpentier draws out a parallelism. For both slave and dog liberty means simply subjection to a different set of compulsions: the need for food and sexual activity. The technique of the story is based on the reader's surrender to this parallelism, rather than on the five elements identified by Shaw or the carnevalesque implications which González Echevarría unconvincingly reads into it. As the tale proceeds, the dog, whose sexual desire is more controlled and discontinuous than the slave's, predictably adjusts better to their new life-style. The slave, unable to control his body's demands, is recaptured in consequence, while the animal, toughened by life in the open, fights for and gains a bitch.

So far the ironic implications of the contrast thus established are banal and obvious. But at the climax these are suddenly and unexpectedly reversed. The dog, which hitherto has carried the associations of successful self-affranchisement from the experience of captivity, is confronted afresh by the newly-escaped slave. If the story had been, as González Echevarría suggests, essentially about the slave's condemnation by the "superfluity of his desires and actions," it would have ended with his recapture and the dog's successful incorporation into a pack. As it is, what the climax of the story emphasizes is the fact that, when the animal leaps at and kills the maroon, it is paradoxically because of its training and not because of its return to instinct. In this dashing of the reader's expectations, this sudden refutation of seemingly straightforward assumptions, lies the unlookedfor ironic aspect of this deceptive tale.

The elements of irony so far identified in Carpentier's earliest fiction matter both intrinsically and as a lead-in to cognate elements in his first major novel El reino de este mundo. For example, the episode in Part III, Chapter V of the latter, when the throbbing of ritual drums interrupts the Mass which King Henri Christophe is attending with his court, acquires a more emphatic meaning and greater effectiveness as a coded signal of impending conflict if we are aware that it is the third time in succession that Carpentier had employed this device of ironic juxtaposition. Granted, the context is rather different. The Masses alluded to in "Histoire de lunes" and "Oficio de tinieblas" are, in a sense, "genuine," whereas the Mass attended by Christophe symbolizes the betrayal of the "iglesia cimarrona" by aping the religion of the Whites. As in Ecue-Yamba-O there is a temptation to interpret the events of El reino de este mundo as indicative of the superiority of the Black culture pattern, which is based on real belief, over the White one with its ostentatious appeal to the mere external manifestations of faith. Indeed R. A. Young in his pithy Critical Guide to the text asserts confidently that "its central issue is the conflict between a dynamic culture and another in a state of decay. But at the same time he realizes that "The conventional view of history as a chain of consecutive events is … replaced by a view in which history … turns back on itself as if following the trajectory of a spiral." This is a superb scenario for irony. El reino de este mundo brings to an end the first phase of Carpentier's fictional work with a climax in the concluding chapter incorporating the often-quoted statement of his mature conviction that "la grandeza del hombre está precisamente en querer mejorar lo que es. En imponerse Tareas." Now, the basic irony of the novel lies in the contrast between the aspirations of the Blacks and their fulfillment. How are we to interpret the apparent discrepancy between this postulate and our recognition, along with Young but in contrast to those critics who have seen Carpentier's view of history as merely circular, that "history is not entirely static but remains open to the future?" The answer involves one of the least well-understood features of Carpentier's ideology, the clue to which appears in a crucially important remark in La Consagración de la Primavera: "Hay un inconciliable desajuste entre el tiempo del Hombre y el tiempo de la Historia. Entre los cortos días de la vida, y los largos, larguísimos años del acontecer colectivo." It is precisely this awareness of a desajuste, of the inevitable but not insuperable setbacks to historical progress, which leaves open the possibility for irony in El reino de este mundo.

Young notices its presence in the novel, notably in the title itself and in the titles of some of the chapters. He remarks that it "is also a sign that Carpentier has not limited himself to identifying and simply reproducing the contexts of history." So indeed it must be, for irony is a comment on events. Discussing the episode of the wax heads and the calves' heads in Chapter I, Young concludes that there and elsewhere, the irony derives from "an inversion of conventional perspectives," "a juxtaposition of opposites." This is certainly the case, both here and in the episodes relating to Mlle. Floridor to which Young also refers. But his treatment, in our view, does not bring out the wider ironic implications of this story. The main thrust of the novel harks back to the contrast between Catholicism and voodoo already prominent in the "Histoire de lunes." When the Blacks triumph over the French planters, it seems as though what Carpentier calls "la viviente cosmogonía del negro" has vanquished the tepid beliefs of the Whites. But the triumph is ironic, for it leads to the tyranny of Christophe. When in turn, as the drums interrupting his Mass portend, he too succumbs to the superior force of Blacks beliefs, the result is the oppression of the Blacks by the mulattoes. The fact that the novel virtually ends with a completely unambiguous declaration by Carpentier of the need for man to "imponerse Tareas" in order to accelerate the slow onward march of history, does not alter the irony of the premise on which it is based. The premise is built structurally into the novel by the careful organization of the plot into two parallel cycles of events. In the first cycle White royal rule is overthrown, but is replaced by tyranny: in the second, Black royal rule is destroyed, but is again replaced by tyranny.

In the light of Carpentier's ambiguous presentation of the Blacks and their beliefs in Ecue-Yamba-O, it is hazardous to take his picture of them here at its seeming face value. Ti Noel, like Menegildo, believes unquestioningly in the superiority of the voodoo deities ("dioses verdaderos") over the Christian God of the Whites. At first sight they do appear to overcome. But Ti Noel's dream of Black "reyes de verdad" to replace the King of France finds ironic fulfillment in the rise of Christophe, a more savage, and repressive monarch than the White rulers had ever been—his construction, at a terrible human and material cost, of a fortress which in the end serves only as his tomb is thus an irony within an irony, qualifying the action on more than one level at once.

It is a simplification to suggest that what Carpentier is saying is that the Blacks had a "dynamic culture." What the novel implies is that belief, however grotesque (in this case belief in Mackandal's self-transformations), can be a powerful force in changing society; but more importantly, that lasting transformations come far more slowly than faith leads man to anticipate. In other words, the real message of El reino de este mundo is rooted in the ironic discrepancy between the effectiveness of the slaves' faith in fuelling their revolts and the extreme slowness with which these revolts approach their objective. It is Carpentier's refusal to gloss over this discrepancy which lends weight to his interpretation of history in El reino de este mundo. There, as in El siglo de las luces, the residual irony provides an indispensable counterbalance to the author's belief in the need for revolutionary commitment. As is characteristic of the ironic perception, even Carpentier's own worldly conviction is not entirely immune from ironic qualification.

Further study of irony in Carpentier's subsequent works would improve our critical perspective. In particular, one is struck by the fact that none of the critics of El arpa y la sombra whose essays appear in Alejo Carpentier et son oeuvre seems to have thought worthy of comment the reappearance of irony in Carpentier's outlook with that of a consistent verbal ironist, such as Borges, we perceive that the former is really a reluctant ironist. He is a writer whose honesty compels him to include irony as an ingredient of his response to reality, rather than one who enjoys it for its own sake. This is a significant aspect of his intellectual profile. It seems probable that the deeper level of his creative self tended to be uneasy with a detached, bifocal, paradoxical view of experience. Such uneasiness is of a piece with his gradual evolution towards the form of Marxist humanism which he eventually seems to have embraced. The thrust of his early work is more interrogative and based on a more "open" and ambiguous world view. His later development, especially after 1959, seems to have been towards the ever-latent more declaratory stance and based on a more closed system of ideas.