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Fiction 31
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
).