Alejo Carpentier

1
Alejo Carpentier

• Lil Ryan Charlotte Skeffington

2
Carpentier

• 1902 Born in Cuba
• -French and Russian heritage
• -Interest in music, history, architecture and
  painting
• 1920s avant-garde artist
• 1928 Self initiated exile in Paris
• Lived in Venezuela during Castros armed
  insurrection
• Writing Achievements
• -1949 The Kingdom of This World
• -1953 The Lost Steps
• -1974 Concierto Borraco
• -1979 The Harp and The Shadow
• Died in Paris in 1980

3

• Classification
• The marvelous real (el real maravilloso)
• Specifically Latin American what it has to
  offer in terms of myth, dreams, and the
  subconscious as a result of its hybrid history
• Latin America itself is marvelous (ontological)
• Criticized surrealism, but was influenced by it
• He rejected the magic realist label
• Elements of primitivism in his work
• Primitivism extraordinary explained as
  manifestations of the primitive mentality
• Archival writer
• Archival narrative concerned with the act of
  writing
• The Lost Steps archival, The Kingdom of This
  World non-archival

4

• Defocalized narrative
• Focalization perspective from which events are
  presented (Faris)
• Defocalization(term coined by Faris)
  simultaneous presentation of two perspectives
• Baroque descriptiveness
• In Carpentiers opinion, inherent in Latin
  American literature
• Classification in terms of comparison with Borges
• Borgesquestions meaning, Carpentier restores
  meaning with marvelous real

5
Does Classification Matter?

• Classification is secondary
• Latin America is like the literature it produces
• The inability to classify is one of its best
  qualities

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Viaje a la semillaJourney Back to The Source

• 1944
• The War of Time
• (1958)

7
Musicology Influence

• Musical Form canon cancrizans
  (recurring canon, crab canon)
• First voice enunciates a given theme
• Second voice states a copy of it in reverse

Theme fa la do mi sol si re Copy re si sol
mi do la fa
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VI

• And a splendid evening party was given in the
  music room on the day he achieved his minority.
  He was delighted to know that his signature was
  no longer legally valid, and that worm-eaten
  registers and documents would now vanish from his
  world. He had reached the point at which courts
  of justice were no longer to be feared, because
  his bodily existence was ignored by the law.
  After getting tipsy on noble wines, the young
  people took down from the walls a guitar inlaid
  with mother-of-pearl, a psaltery and a serpent.
  Someone wound up the clock that played the
  Ranz-des-vaches and the Ballad of the Scottish
  Lakes, Someone else blew on a hunting horn that
  had been lying curled in a copper sleep on the
  crimson felt suitcase, beside a transverse flute
  brought from Aranjuez. Marcial, who was boldly
  making love to Señora de Campolorido, joined in
  the cacophony, and tried to pick out the tune of
  Trípili-Trapala on the Piano, to a discordant
  accompaniment in the bass. Then they all trooped
  upstairs to the attic, remembering that the
  liveries and clothes of the Capellanías family
  had been stored away under it beams which were
  recovering their plaster.

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Historical Influences

• Caribbean Syncretism
• Indigenous, European Imperialist, African Slaves
• Santeria, Voodoo

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References to syncretism found in Journey Back to
the Source

• I II
• -The old Negro reciting the monologue of
  incomprehensible remarks (222)
• -Orisha Elugua from Yorubu and Ewe-Fon West
  African Cultures
• -Keeper of doors, keys, locks, and houses often
  takes shape of an old Negro with a cane
• - In Cuba, Eshu, a devil who at times speaks
  backwards

IV - The Old Negress who keeps pigeons under her
bediyalocha -Warning of Never trust rivers, my
girl never trust anything green and
flowing! -Serpent river, the snake river of
African and Caribbean myths -Mother of Waters,
lives in the rivers of Cuba, Brazil, Guyana and
Haiti. mermaid who demands sacrifices
11
Bibliography

• Angulo, Marâia-Elena. Magic Realism Social
  Context and Discourse. New York Garland Pub.,
  1995.
• Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island The
  Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. 2nd ed.
  London Duke UP, 1996. 221-238.
• Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments Magical
  Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. 1st
  Ed. ed. Nashville Vanderbilt UP, 2004.
• Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto. Alejo Carpentier
  The Pilgrim At Home. Ithaca Cornell UP, 1977.
• Kristal, Efrain, ed. The Cambridge Companion to
  the Latin American Novel. Cambridge Cambridge
  UP, 2005. 129-131.
• Sanchez-Boudy, Jose. La Tematica Novelistica De
  Alejo Carpentier. Miami Ediciones Universal,
  1969.