Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (December 26, 1904 – April 24, 1980) was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous “boom” period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, of French and Russian parentage, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba, and despite his European birthplace, he strongly identified as Cuban throughout his life. He traveled extensively, particularly in France, and to South America and Mexico, where he met prominent members of the Latin American cultural and artistic community. Carpentier took a keen interest in Latin American politics and often aligned himself with revolutionary movements, such as Fidel Castro’s Communist Revolution in Cuba in the mid-20th century. Carpentier was jailed and exiled for his leftist political philosophies.

With a developed knowledge of music, Carpentier explored musicology, publishing an in-depth study of the music of Cuba, La música en Cuba, and integrated musical themes and literary techniques throughout his works. He explored elements of Afro-Cubanism and incorporated the cultural aspects into the majority of his writings. Although Carpentier wrote in a myriad of genres, such as journalism, radio drama, playwrighting, academic essays, opera and libretto, he is best known for his novels. He was among the first practitioners of magical realism using the technique lo real maravilloso to explore the fantastic quality of Latin American history and culture. The most famous example of Afro-Cuban influence and use of lo real maravilloso is Carpentier’s 1949 novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) about the Haitian revolution of the late 18th century.
(Wikipedia)

Carpentier Re-Stages History

It is the fact that in Haiti—and the Americas more generally—two (or more) perspectives rub up against each other and clash, shattering the notion that they can harmoniously be contained within the same organic totality, that provokes the surprised awe and wonder that Carpentier reports experiencing, and attempts to recreate in this novel.

Audio | Transcript | Slides | Conversation

  • Carpentier, Alejo. The Kingdom of This World. Trans. Harriet de Onís. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

On Alejo Carpentier

A conversation about The Kingdom of This World, with Luis Duno-Gottberg (Rice)

Audio | Lecture

Carpentier videos

Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World:

Haiti and The Kingdom of this World (Carpentier, 1949):

Michael Grafals, On Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (Caribbean Literature, LIT 4192):

The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier (Magical Realism & the Haitian Revolution):

  • Anderson, J. Bradford. “The Clash of Civilizations and All That Jazz: The Humanism of Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo.” Latin American Literary Review 35.69 (January-June 2007): 5-28.
  • Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
  • Carpentier, Alejo. “Prologue to The Kingdom of This World (1949).” Trans. Alfred Mac Adam. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 26.47 (1993): 28-32.
  • Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
  • Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “The Haitian Revolution in Interstices and Shadows: A Re-reading of Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World.” African Literatures 35.2 (Summer 2004): 114-127.
  • Tal-mason, Ali. “Voyage to the Marvelous: A Traveler’s Guide to The Kingdom of This World.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 7.1 (January 2020): 50–68.

There is, in fact, more brandy than rum drunk in The Kingdom of this World, even though brandy is made in metropolitan France, rather than the Caribbean: brandy is distilled wine, which is in turn made from grapes, which grow in Europe and other temperate regions; rum, by contrast, is distilled from the juice extracted from sugar cane (or from molasses, a concentrate of that juice), which grows almost exclusively in the tropics. Under the French, when the colony was known as Saint Domingue, sugar production in what is now Haiti was immensely profitable, but also very labor-intensive, with the back-breaking work of harvesting and processing the cane undertaken by many tens of thousands of imported slaves. While the slaves worked in appalling conditions, the profits from their forced labour enabled the white plantocracy to import luxury goods, such as brandy, for their own personal consumption. It is rum, however, that is the drink of the Caribbean—not only in Haiti, but also for instance in Carpentier’s Cuba, whose economy has similarly been long dependent on sugar, despite the country’s best efforts under Fidel Castro to industrialize and diversify. Revolution or no, it is hard to alter the economic paradigm, of resource extraction and export-oriented agricultural monoculture, first established under colonial regimes.

Carpentier questions

The following questions are taken from your blog posts…

How did you think the idea of revolution in this novel compared to other novels we’ve read such as The Underdogs?

Is magical realism a style which has always been a vital component of describing most Latin culture, as shown through Carpentier and Marquez, or simply a modern phenomenon which transcends region?

If written in the first person, how do you think the text would change?

How much does an author’s origin affect their ability to write about somewhere else?

Why do you think the author chose to illuminate Ti noel’s ending transformation using the pact of geese? Do you think there is a deeper significance to the geese that helps guide Ti Noel to his revelation or do you believe there would be another animal that could have had the same effect on Ti Noel?

Alejo Carpentier–philosophically–is probably a mystic. Especially after that intro. But then again, isn’t that what some writers are? In some type of union or bond with reality.  What do you think?

What do you think of the final messages on pages 130 and 131? Do you think an adherence to adversity is our greatest strength?

For you, were there any particular events or scenes from the book that exemplified what “magic realism” could be?

How do others feel about the way you experience history in your own lives? Do you ever feel as if you are really taking part in history or is it always something distant and inaccessible?

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