The magician becomes a bureaucrat - what Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World is about

The Kingdom of This World (1949), Alejo Carpentier, tr. by Pablo Medina (2017).

What is this novel about.  It is about the Haitian Revolution, although not in the sense that it is a substitute for reading The Black Jacobins (1938).

It is about – I am looking at the translator’s Afterword – “the clash of cultures and races; it is a book about overwhelming social injustice; it is, above all, a book about the good and the evil that people will inflict on one another” (133).  True up to the last item; I do not know where in the novel anyone is inflicting good.  There is certainly plenty of evil.  “Like Mark Twain before him, Carpentier tackles slavery head-on and in so doing helps us to understand the awful legacy of racial discrimination with which our society still struggles.”  I doubt anyone reading this will improve their understanding of racial discrimination at all by reading The Kingdom of This World, but maybe some readers at a much earlier point in their education will?

The novel is about the failures of Surrealism, and it is also a positive argument for a particular kind of post-Surrealism that Carpentier calls “the marvelous real.”  Let’s look at the novel’s prose.  I’m on the second page here:

While his master was being shaved, Ti Noël was able to study carefully the four wax heads propped on the shelf by the entrance.  The wigs’ curls framed the fixed faces before spreading into a pool of ringlets on the red runner.  Those heads seemed as real – and as dead, given their motionless eyes – as the talking head that a traveling charlatan had brought to the Cap years before as a ploy to help him sell an elixir that cured toothaches and rheumatism.  By charming coincidence, the butcher shop next door displayed the skinned heads of calves, which had the same waxy quality.  (4)

I want to quote the entire page, I enjoy it so.

… Ti Noël distracted himself  by thinking that the heads of white gentlemen were being served at the same table as the discolored veal heads…  All they needed was a bed of lettuce or radishes cut in the shape of fleur-de-lys as adornment.

The novel is more or less written like this.  The point of view moves around.  There is, for example, an amusing digressive section starring Josephine Bonaparte.  Ti Noël becomes the protagonist because, essentially, he survives the violence.  Let’s see what happens to him at the end of the novel.

Tired of risky transformations, Ti Noël used his extraordinary powers to change himself into a goose and thus live among the birds that had taken residence in his domain.  (128)

Humans transforming into animals is one of the novel’s running themes.  Why, I see an example up above, way back on page 4.  Now, even within the realm of fiction is it not likely that Ti Noël transformed into a goose.  Sadly, he is rejected by the other “real” geese, because “no matter if he tried for years, he would never have access to the rites and roles of the clan” (129).

Ti Noël believes he becomes a goose, though, and given how narrative works, what is the difference between him believing he is a goose and actually being a goose.

I think you may be able to detect a little bit of Revolutionary political symbolism in the earlier passage, and the story of the geese has a parable-like quality.  The entire ending, the last three chapters, is full of marvelous symbolic writing, all with this Surrealist character, things transforming into other things, or things in illogical places or logical reasons.  Real and also marvelous.

I might have figured out Carpentier’s argument with Surrealism from the novel itself, but in the Preface he openly says all this.

By dint of wanting to elicit the marvelous at every turn, the magician becomes a bureaucrat.  Invoked by means of the usual formulas that make of certain paintings a monotonous junk pile of rubbery clocks, tailor’s mannequins, or vague phallic monuments, the marvelous never goes beyond an umbrella or a lobster or a sewing machine or whatever, lying on a dissection table inside a sad room in a rocky desert.  Imaginative poverty, Unamuno used to say, is the consequence of learning codes by heart (xiv-v).

Although there are some recognizable targets in this passage, only poor Yves Tanguy is directly attacked for his “troubling imaginative poverty” in “painting the same stony larvae under the same gray sky for twenty-five years” (xv).  The de-bureaucratizing solution, by the way, is to go to America, Haiti for example, and write about what is actually there.  “For what is the story of all of the Americas if not the chronicle of the marvelous and the real?” (xx).  Americans still believe in magic and miracles.

I will note that in the last two paragraphs of his Afterword, Medina takes up these more aesthetic ideas.  He also translated that Preface.

I will also note that, although I have not read the older translation or compared it to the Spanish at all, Medina’s translation seemed wonderful, energetic and clear.  Brightly lit, like freshly restored baroque architecture.

Carpentier’s subsequent novel, The Lost Steps (1953), strongly recommended to fans of the Pixar movie Up (2009), is also about aesthetics, Modernism versus Romanticism, say.  It is too long since I read Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) to argue that it is mostly about books, really, but now I wonder.

Carpentier praises Wilfredo Lam in the Preface so I put a contempory Lam painting, La Jungla (1943), up above.