Alejo Carpentier, The Harp and the Shadow: Literature, History and Fiction

Not entirely a historical text, The Harp and the Shadow, the last novel published by Alejo Carpentier, takes as its pretext certain historical data in order to offer the readers a specific view of the protagonist, Christopher Columbus. Considered by some the great discoverer of the New World or highly regarded as “The Admiral of the Seas” and despised by many others as an adventurer and a liar, Columbus is also the author of some disturbing writings that still put critics and literary historians in discomfort. This is the novel’s point of departure, together with the intent of Pope Pius IX to initiate the canonization of Columbus, an idea regarded by the great majority of his contemporaries as a complete blasphemy. At the aesthetic level, comparable up to a certain point to the conception of Jorge Luis Borges, Carpentier’s form of understanding and practicing literature is always, in a more or less obvious way, reliant on Cervantes himself. But it is not limited to Don Quixote: in The Harp and the Shadow, the Cuban author builds an endless network of intertextual associations connecting his own creation to The Works of Persiles and Segismunda, the last work by Cervantes.

The Vulture of History in The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier

In thesis IX of the Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin indicates, from the painting “Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee, that the Angel of History has his face turned back, contemplating a catastrophe. He wants to stay, but the great wind of progress is pushing him forward into the future, leaving rubble on its pass. The new historical novel The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier narrates the long and tortuous process of the Haitian Revolution and beyond. At the end of the novel, there is a great green wind that sweeps across the Northern Plain and the ruins of the old sugar mill. In Carpentier's novel, there is a “wet vulture”, which I will call the Vulture of History, which is thrown over Bois Caïman, the sacred space where the revolution originated. My purpose in this essay is to explore the Vulture of History as a baroque allegory of the Haitian Revolution. Unlike the angel from Benjamin's thesis, who wants to go back to the past to reconstruct history, Carpentier's vulture is an angel of death who feeds on the detritus of history.

Más allá de lo real maravilloso. El surrealismo y el Caribe

Más allá de lo real maravilloso reflexiona sobre la manera en que ciertos encuentros entre intelectuales latinoamericanos y europeos durante el siglo xx dieron forma a la representación de América Latina en las artes. En la primera parte, revisa algunas exposiciones de arte latinoamericano que tuvieron lugar en la década de los ochenta, como parte de los prolegómenos de las celebraciones del quinto centenario de la llegada de los españoles a América, y llama la atención sobre los estereotipos que estas perpetuaron. Plantea que el origen de dichos estereotipos se encuentra en la teoría de Alejo Carpentier de lo real maravilloso americano, un ambicioso proyecto encaminado a combatir el colonialismo cultural que, sin embargo, dejó a América Latina aislada del resto del mundo. En la segunda parte, explora las intrincadas relaciones entre el surrealismo y América Latina, y pone énfasis en los asuntos que surgieron de la lucha de intelectuales y artistas empeñados en encontrar el “lenguaje apropiado” para representar culturalmente la región. Profundizando en este último punto, la tercera parte se concentra en la figura del pintor cubano Wifredo Lam, cuyo trabajo mezcla elementos afrocubanos con la estética surrealista y cubista, lo que cambió el ideal de arte producido en América Latina. Lam realzó los encuentros que dieron forma a la cultura latinoamericana y combatió la idea de un pasado prístino anterior a que los europeos llegaran a América. Este cambio radical de perspectiva —apoyado en la teoría de la transculturación de Fernando Ortiz— anticipó las teorías contemporáneas de creolización, que hablan del proceso de formación cultural de América Latina a partir del intercambio

El arpa y la sombra en el marco de la “nueva novela histórica” de América Latina

El artículo tiene como objetivo analizar las estrategias narrativas presentes en El arpa y la sombra de Alejo Carpentier (1979) que comprenden lo que la teoría literaria actual ha identificado como la “nueva novela histórica” latinoamericana. Primero se proporciona un breve panorama de la novela histórica tradicional y su contexto de aparición durante el romanticismo europeo del siglo xix, a partir de las aportaciones de Georg Lukács (1966), con la intención de diferenciar su modelo del correspondiente a la producción posterior en este género. A continuación se ofrece una caracterización general de la novela histórica escrita en América Latina a partir de las décadas finales del siglo xx, para reconocer las circunstancias histórico-sociales que dieron lugar a su renovación y a los rasgos que la determinan, junto con las propuestas de Mentón (1993) y Aínsa (1991) sobre el papel fundamental de Carpentier en su constitución. Finalmente, se realiza el estudio de cada uno de los aspectos señalados (distorsión consciente de los eventos históricos, ficcionalización de las grandes figuras históricas, uso de la primera persona en la narración, el dialogismo y la polifonía) con el objeto de demostrar la pertenencia de El arpa y la sombra a este reciente tipo de textos.

Intertextualidades religiosas en El arpa y la sombra de Alejo Carpentier

Este artículo explora el modo en que Alejo Carpentier (1994), en su novela El arpa y la sombra, cuenta la historia de Colón desde la ironía y la parodia, ayudado por la investigación histórica del siglo xx y por los intertextos a los que acude con regularidad. Se resalta la hermenéutica de Colón que transforma los textos antiguos al hacerlos contemporáneos a su entorno. Este aparece como como un hombre medieval y renacentista, enraizado en el catolicismo e impulsado por la osadía y la creencia de la tierra que está hecha por Dios para ser dominada por el hombre.

Unblocking tapones and finding pleasant places

Tapón is the word that comes to mind when I think about this piece. The tapón of my bathtub in Cuba when I was a child that prevented the water from streaming out. The tapón of the traffic jams in Puerto Rico, leaving my mother-in-law´s house to go anywhere, as the traffic stopped flowing. And the tapón I feel today, in NYC, in the midst of a pandemic that has hit poor communities of color the hardest, and as a smooth transition to a new president has been slowed down by lies and innuendos of fraud. I have written many academic articles, but never have I struggled with the tapón I have felt in writing this piece that urged me to take a “viaje a la semilla,” the title of a book by Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban author. Taking a trip ‘to the seed of it all’ is painful, and I have resisted lifting the tapón that has kept me from looking inward, linking my today with my past. I thank Sonia Nieto, a beacon and inspiration to all Latinas and all educators, for asking me to unclog memories of who I am, and how my who is related to the work in which I have engaged. In so doing, I recognize those who have been with me in the streams of my life as a woman, a student, a mother, a wife, a grandmother, a teacher, an academic. As I have done so, I have realized more than ever that as Psalm 16 says: “The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places,” and it has been my family, teachers, colleagues and students who have given me more than I deserve. [Download the PDF to read more about Dr. Garcia's journey and wisdom]

Kontynent i jego konteksty w zwierciadle literatury. Studium jednego przypadku

The author attemptsto capture a selection ofissues that she considersvital for the debateon theLatin-Americancontinent as such. The research toolisliterary productionofasingle author,Alejo Carpentier.Hiscreationwasselectedout of manyoutstanding works of Latin American writers. The first part of the article, Carpentier's method, presents the justificationfor choosing this particular writer. Init, the author offersbibliographical and literary data based on his manifestos (Tientos y diferencias) and the very “core” of his literary production, i.e. stories (Guerra del tiempo, Concierto barroco) and novels (Reinode este mundo, Pasos perdidos, Elsiglo de las luces, El recurso delmétodo, La consagración de la primavera, El arpa y la som-bra). If the value of literary worksis to be estimated (among otherthings) according to the universality of its message, all the works listedabove become an inherent part of auniversal paradigm. Complicated trajectoriesof protagonists’lives (Sophia, Esteban, Wiera, Enrique, First Official...), their personalities,and their entanglement inthe Wheels ofHistorytranscendborders of the continent. Hence the (controversial) common interpretational routesforK.andtheTrapped. Individualsand societiesduring wartime, internal battle of identities, revolutionarydia-lectics, relations of power, acts of open and hidden violence, antinomies of tradition and mo-dernity, conflicts of spirituality and rationality, changes of individual and collective conscious-ness, structural social inequalities, colonial oppression, mechanisms of resistance, cultural, po-litical and economic imperialism, geopolitical fields of game–all theseissues (and manymore) can be found in Carpentier’s novels. The second partidentifies eleven ofCarpentier’s Latin-American contexts. They includeracial, economic, chthonic, political, bourgeois, distance-and proportion-related, chronological inconsistency-related, cultural, culinary, lighting-related,andideological aspects. Particular focus is dedicated toracial (Pasos perdidos), economic (Guerra del tiempo) and political-military (El recurso delmétodo) issues. The third part, a critical ap-proachto culture, follows up onprevious matterswith special consideration ofthe following three: confrontation of cultures(El arpa y la sombra), humanitarianism and modernity (El siglo de las luces), and the beginnings and ends of the Western World(La consagración de la pri-mavera). Finally, the text concludes witha range ofquestionsonculture, society, and politics,with the most prominent being: What is our culture,when reflectedinCarpentier’s mirror?Keywords: Latin America, Alejo Carpentier, continent, context(s), literature.