Arts and Literature of Cuba

Carpentier first won acclaim for his 1950 novel, El reino de este mundo , or The Kingdom of This World. It was in the prologue to that book—a historical novel set during the Haitian Revolution—that the author made his famous observation about Latin American history and magical realism. Carpentier believed that Latin America couldn’t be adequately represented in solely rational terms, because for the peoples of the region— most of whom had indigenous or African ancestry—magic, myth, and supernatural happenings were absolutely real. Lo maravilloso real —the marvelous in the real—pervaded Carpentier’s fiction. Time and logic were often fractured, and fantastical events presented in a matter-of-fact manner. Thus, for example, in The Kingdom of This World , Mackandal—a leader of the slave uprising in Haiti—is burned at the stake but, witnesses believe, escapes death by transfiguring into an insect. Or, in Carpentier’s short story “Viaje a la semilla” (English title: “Journey Back to the Source”), time flows backward. The main character, a dissipated Cuban aristocrat named Don Marcial, travels from death back to the womb. “His hands caressed delectable forms,” Carpentier writes toward the end of the story. He was a purely sensory and tactile being. The universe penetrat- ed him through his pores. Then he shut his eyes—they saw noth- ing but nebulous giants—and entered a warm, damp body full of shadows: a dying body. Clothed in this body’s substance, he slipped toward life. “Journey Back to the Source” appeared in a critically acclaimed 1958 collection of short stories titled Guerra del tiempo ( War of Time ).

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