Teaching Carpentier's 'The Lost Steps' (Los Pasos Perdidos)

I recently did a lecture series with a group of MA-M.Phil-Ph.D students of English Literature at a university in Mumbai (Bombay) where Alejo Carpentier's 'The Lost Steps' has recently been introduced as part of contemporary World Literature. Since I was told that students know nothing about Latin America, I had to start from basics. So I did the first session as an introduction to Latin American literature and the second lecture dealt more directly with the novel. I thought I might as well share this with others who might be interested. 

Lecture I: An Invitation to Latin American Literature

<<… The eccentricity of Latin America can be defined as a European eccentricity: I mean, it is another way of being Western. A non-European way. Both inside and outside the European tradition, the Latin American can see the West as a totality and not with the fatally provincial vision of the Italian or the German or the French or the English… >> Octavio Paz, Vuelta, no. 117, 1986

• New World and the Old: Engravings of Great Voyages (Historia Americae) inspired by Columbus’ extravagant accounts of the “exotic”  lands bear testimony to European ideas about the New World (see image at the end). “Discovery” vs invention (America was never discovered, it was invented by European imagination). These images enfolded them within the mythological vision of a Europe still emerging from the Middle Ages. The fantastical images of America -- “where men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders” [i]  -- found unscrupulous acceptance in Europe over a long period spanning several centuries. The explorers and later the ‘conquistadores’ used the exhilarating fantasies of the chivalry romances to express the marvels of the New World in the attempt to come to terms with the diversity and difference of America.
• Three mechanical inventions had changed “the whole face and state of things” (as per Francis Bacon)-- printing, gunpowder and the magnet  -- which permitted literature, conquest and navigation and let the Renaissance spirit flourish.  Indeed it can be said that the discovery of the New World  released the Renaissance imagination itself.

• The New World had been, since the Renaissance, a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories, landscapes and unusual experiences. For Europe (and later on, Anglo-Saxon America) “Latin” America represented one of its deepest and recurring images of the Other.

• The term "Latin" America was coined by the French in their imperialist zeal during the 19^th century. They opposed Latin to Anglo America to claim for political gain a historical and linguistic kinship with the regions recently freed from Spanish domination. The name has stuck although clearly many of the cultures in the region have no connection with the Roman Empire.

• Columbus’ diaries: “discovery” [ii] of America in 1492 initiated a long chain of unfortunate, violent events. Columbus’ genocide in Latin America. Indian population came down in 40 years (since Columbus’ arrival) from 3 million to 60,000 (2% of population). The Chroniclers (mostly clergymen who were witnesses). Most Spanish officials argued that that the indigenous people’s work in the silver mines was the contribution they had to pay in exchange for the ‘gift’ of being evangelised (converted to Christianity). [Readings from Columbus’ diaries attached, with highlighted sections.]

• Encounter of races; Carpentier considered the “discovery” to be the most important watershed in history; Neruda’s ‘Canto General’: ..’antes de la peluca, habian los rios. Los rios arteriales.’ (Before the wig, there were the rivers. The arterial rivers.)

• Fiction writers like Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez plunder the colonial record for stories, characters and situations. Ref: Autumn of the Patriarch, p34.  Octavio Paz has written a massive literary biography of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the 17^th century Mexican poet-nun. Also explore the pre-Columbian roots of Latin America.

• Colonial rule thus represented a definitive cultural rupture. Alienating the New World Man from pre-Columbian Man. Latin America eventually became the site of a creative cultural symbiosis, immensely rich with the possibilities of cross-fertilization. Most thinkers from the nineteenth century down to our own time have located the cultural specificity of Latin America to the incongruous amalgam of the continent. (diary, pp 11, 12, 15)

• Crisis of identity and the search for forms of authenticity become abiding concerns; masks and labyrinths are recurring metaphors;  private search for meaning and authentic personal language conflated with a larger continental quest for identity. Neruda’s invocation of The Heights of Macchu Picchu or Cesar Vallejo’s lamentation in Trilce  (“...between my where and my when / this crippled coming of age of man” )[iii] are moments when personal anguish moves to a broader vision of a suffering humanity.

• Art, society and history have become profoundly interlinked. Individual artist’s private search for meaning epitomizes the society’s search for a new, amorphous self-definition. Every work of art has consequently implied a certain social ideal even if it chooses to represent a deliberately alternative reality.

• Ban on reading and publishing of the novel during the Inquisition; reading became a sinful adventure; novels like DQ reached the New World concealed in the false bottoms of wine barrels; Chronicles got fictionalised because the novel was prohibited. “Revenge of the novel” led to “novelisation of the whole of life” – a world reconstructed and subverted by fantasy (Mario Vargas Llosa) Ever since then, the European tradition of the realist novel never took hold in LA. The novel remained a misfit. First novel: The Itching Parrot (1816, Mexico).

• Civilisation vs Barbarism: The turbulent excitement of political life in nineteenth century Latin America stood in sharp contrast to the dullness of much of its literature. Major debate revolved around notions of civilization (represented by Europe) and barbarism (savagery as represented by the chaos of traditional society).

• Independence from colonial rule and the birth of new republics ushered into a new era:  no more shadowboxing between European fashion and LA reality

• Uruguyan José Enrique Rodó hoped that “the noble and winged part of the spirit” would eventually rule over gross sensuality (Ariel, 1900), others like the Cuban José Martí declared in a celebrated essay called Nuestra America (“Our America”, 1886) that the “barbarians” had an authenticity and spontaneity which would finally be more valuable to the continent than the borrowed fineries of the “civilized” European. [1]

• While the traditionalists endorsed a reworking of the clerical civilization of Catholic Spain suitably adapted to the new republics in their post-colonial era, the liberals turned to the values of the French Enlightenment with its primacy of reason and equality before the law.

• Archetypal landscape: pampas  (the Prairies) as a place of barbarism but also the crucible of national identity. The gaucho (inhabitant of the pampas) became the primary agent of this landscape. In several countries with strong indigenous traditions, the liberal Creoles laid the foundation of a neo-classical “americanismo”  disclaiming the heritage of Spain by evoking an ideal vision of the Indian past. (indigineous novel).  Thus in every country, there emerged an archetypal, authentic son-of-the-soil and by transforming that figure into an ambivalent national symbol, artists and intellectuals temporarily crystallized the problem of national identity.

• “Cold America of the North” vs “the warm America of Spanish origin”; Mexican revolution & the flowering of lit after indep (mask metaphor): p 144 of King
• Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of The West (1918) was received with great fanfare because it suggested to them that  Latin Americans may soon leave behind their sense of inferiority to Europe.[iv]
• 1920s mark the emergence of the modern novel. “Creative cannibalism” in Brazil; 20s-30s: Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias drew on pre-Columbian traditions in order to explore myths and realities of the people, Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges asserted a self-confident cosmopolitanism and emphasised form and coherence in writing, Cuban Alejo Carpentier defined and explored the ‘magical realism’ of LA. 1950s- the ‘boom’.
• Literature of the ‘boom’ (“Latin Freakshow”): a US marketing term implying vigorous promotion; describes the increased consumption of cultural production in the 1960s. A readership emerges, the author becomes a brand name, a mark of quality; writers become superstars: Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Donoso, Isabel Allende, Manuel Puig, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, etc. Cuban revolution of 1959 remains a key point of reference: battlelines were drawn with regard to those in favour of it and those against it.
• Use of the baroque and Faulkner’s influence in Latin America: p139, 140 (Carlos Fuentes interview): ‘the great novelist of defeat in a country premised on success, success, success, all the way, a country that never learnt anything from defeat’
• GGM: The collision between a largely matriarchal oral tradition and an aristocratic, patriarchal written tradition is one of the fascinating aspects. Most of his novels are written from a point in time when everything has already happened. Read the famous first paragraph of 100 years of Solitude (note its complex tense– a Faulknerian ‘present’-ation of time - and a sentence from Autumn of the Patriarch). This type of narrative structure relates to the central issue of memory, personal and social, written and oral. The contagion of amnesia, in 100 years, arose from the local Indians, an oral community, whereas the cure is brought by Melquiades, the writing man.

• Definitions: MAGIC REALISM
It’s a mode, not a genre. The unreal happens as a part of reality, quite logically. It possesses often an allegorical quality as well as a sense of time and space contrary to normal perceptions.
Magical realism is a term used to capture the living contradictions of societies in the active process of underdevelopment and neocolonialism  although it originated in Weimar Germany where it referred to the mystery in the mundane. Alejo Carpentier used the term as "our marvellous American reality" in the '50s. "The fiesta of metaphors, of allegory, of symbols is not a carnival of subjectivity; it is the attempt at a rational analysis of a deformed reality, deformed by European culture and suffocated by American imperialism," said the brilliant Brazilian filmmaker, Glauber Rocha.
o        Magical realism differs from pure fantasy primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world with authentic descriptions of humans and society.  According to Angel Flores, magical realism involves the fusion of the real and the fantastic, or as he claims, "an amalgamation of realism and fantasy". 
• Surrealism and Magic realism: Frederic Jameson called MR “poetic transformation of the object world but a world in which the objects are also narrated”.
      Surrealism: Surrealism: A 20th-century literary and artistic movement that        attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by         fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtaposition of subject matter. +  An artistic           movement and an aesthetic philosophy that aims for the liberation of the mind by       emphasizing the critical and imaginative powers of the subconscious.
• Presence of the historical and the political below the surface of the narrative.
Magic realism writers express their view of a world fissured, distorted, and made incredible by cultural displacement. It marks a view from the fringes of European cultures and an interest in syncretism produced by colonialism. 

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[1] ‘Ariel’ is an allusion to Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’ where the master Prospero has two slaves: Ariel (winged part of the spirit) and Caliban who is base. Caliban is an anagram of Canibal, canib, carib, Caribbean. Tempest alludes to the ‘discovery’ of the Americas. Shakespeare created in the figure of Caliban, the other face of the nascent bourgeois world: “…I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour/ One thing or other, when thou dids’t not, savage, / Known thine own meaning, but would babble like / a thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes / With words that made them known.”  The attitude of the rebellious slave Caliban is thus: “ …You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid thee / For learning me your language.” (Act 1, Sc 2)

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[i]            “. . . travel’s history:

            Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

            Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,

            . . . And of the Cannibals that each other eat,

            The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

            Do grow beneath their shoulders.”

            (Act I, sc. iii, W. Shakespeare, Othello, 1605)

[ii]           Amerigo Vespucci’s reports (the Italian navigator from whom the continent got its name) encouraged Sir Thomas More to invent a vision of an ideal  society in his Utopia (1515). 

[iii]           “. . . entre mi donde y mi cuando

            esta mayoria inválida de hombre.”     Trilce, 1922         (Translation mine)

[iv]          “Spengler’s explanation of history in terms of cycles of cultural growth and degeneration enabled Carpentier to overcome his pessimism about the historical prospects for Latin America: if the loss of spirituality to which rationalist humanism appeared to lead was not an ineluctable destiny, then to approve the vitality of primitive cultures as the nativist writers had done, was not necessarily reactionary; for these local cultures could now be seen not as vestiges of the past but as the seeds of a new, specifically American culture in the making.”

            Edwin Williamson, ‘Coming to Terms with Modernity’ in John King. (ed.), Modern Latin             American Fiction : A Survey , London : Faber and Faber, 1987, p. 83.

Lecture II: Textual Analysis of Alejo Carpentier's 'The Lost Steps' (Los Pasos Perdidos, 1953)

• Carpentier’s voodoo experience; his protagonist is the Haitian shaman, Mackandal who has extraordinary seductive powers over his audience. Thus, he becomes the creator of identity for the black slaves. This is symptomatic of the new mood of nationalism that emerged in the 1920s. Such powerful storytellers employing techniques and material rooted in long standing popular traditions, could not fail to appeal to cultivated writers seeking to connect more fully to American realities.  Cultural nationalism thus combined with modernist experimentalism to create an autochthonous culture where tradition could be reconciled with modernity. Thus it became an occasion to reassess LA’s relation with Europe and it meant coming to terms with the modern culture of the Enlightenment. MR= Surrealist desire for psychic wholeness (rationalism of the Enlightenment had alienated Europeans from the life of the instinct, desire and imagination) + Haitian experience in 1943 (magic & religion, the repositories of authenticity and wholeness, were capable of intervening positively in history as vehicles of freedom) + reading of Spengler (explanation of history as cycles of cultural growth and degeneration helped him dispel his pessimism about LA’s future; also rise of Fascism).
• Disenchantment with surrealism (literary trick): “redeem the mind from the dead hand of rationality by unblocking once more the sources of the marvellous, the experience of which presupposes a faith.” …The marvellous in literature entailed a belief in the supernatural: those who do not believe in saints cannot heal themselves by the miracles of saints.” Carpentier thus took the novel out of the drawing rooms of Europe and thrust it in the deep wilderness of America, where it might recuperate the mythological powers of the epic and romance, those narrative forebears it had once destroyed through irony and burlesque in Europe. – source of the exuberance of modern LA fiction. By celebrating the supernatural and the miraculous, magical realism inevitably generated antinomies between faith and reason, imagination and intellect, nature and culture.
• THE LOST STEPS: AC’s “American cycle” of novels (Kingdom of this world – ‘49, The Lost Steps - 53, Explosion in a Cathedral –‘62); written in Venezuela during the dictatorship in Cuba; looked at his own life in Paris between the Wars; in 1947 travelled to the wild interior of the Gran Sabana. Realised the cultural significance of the “Forest”; next year travelled through the upper Orinoco river
• Background of AC: 1904-1980; studied architecture and music; family background in music; early childhood in a Cuban ranch, father was a cellist/architect, grandma worked with Cesar Frank; formation on European novels – Balzac, Zola, Flaubert; spoke Spanish with French accent; moved to Paris to become journalist (music critic) where he wrote elevated accounts of European salon and concert scene; popularised High Art in LA, sponsored first Picasso exhibition in LA, wrote librettos for classical composers; became a major radio personality playing classical music (1939-45); wrote “Music in Cuba” (1946) his first non-fiction masterpiece; prepared the ground for his novels; went to jail in Cuba and then moved to Paris; returned after 1959 Cuban Revolution, after which till his death, he was Cuban ambassador in Paris; personal journey symptomatic of the Latin American intellectual of the 1920s and 30s.
• The novel is a repudiation of Europe and the pretences of surrealism; Felt the need to free himself “from the grip of surrealism”; he felt that Europeans whored after a surrealism that they never understood as the Enlightenment had taken the magic out of their lives (with its emphasis on rationality) and yet this sensibility was fully formed among Afro-Cuban shamans. He hated himself for measuring LA with European yardstick; rise of Fascism made him lose the traditional LA respect for European civilization.Magic and religion – the repositories of  authenticity and wholeness -  were capable of intervening positively in history as vehicles of freedom.
• Title is an allusion to Andre Breton’s ‘Les Pas Perdus’ (the lost steps/ not lost)
• PLACE of the novel: Indeterminate, deliberately; Pan-Americanism
• NARRATOR of the novel: anonymous; relationship with Carpentier; narrator fails not tragically but inevitably; living by the metronome; doppelganger?; search for authenticity (travels to the roots of all life). Native vs authentic; novel of self-condemnation; AC avoids the narrator’s fate; King p91: Is AC lamenting the fate of the composer, or subtly mocking his folly in seeking refuge from history? No doubt, as the allusion to Don Quijote would suggest, he remained ambivalent, torn between heart and head.
• Use of capital letters: Forest, Time, Theatre, The Valley Where Time Stands Still, etc. Allegory?
• USE OF LANGUAGE: operatic, overblown, possibility of irony lurks behind every phrase; sonorous, complex prose style, ornately gilded like an altarpiece.
• MYTHS:  Book of Genesis & Fall (origins of the God’s chosen people, first book of the Hebrew Bible; Sisyphus (king condemned to roll the stone for eternity only to see it roll back the mountain), Odyssey (episodic quest structure), Don Quijote, Prometheus Unbound (217) – steals fire from Zeus and gives it to mortals and is then his liver is eaten every day by an eagle only to grow back the next day; Genevieve of Brabant 218 (the chaste wife falsely accused and repudiated), Deuteronomy: Traditionally seen as recording the words of God given to Moses; fifth book of the Hebrew Bible.
• THEMES: All stages of civilization can be witnessed in America in the present (possible to evade time) Read Paz’s passage in ‘Labyrinth of Solitude’, p11-12; p80: ‘the question of our origins is the central secret of our anxiety and anguish’. + p194 of Paz: we cannot dwell in the past but become contemporaries of all mankind. We have to live in our own epochs. He is a man seeking to recover that faith upon which the sense of the marvellous depends.
• If the Artist is bound to History, what is the place of the imagination in the unfolding of time? Once a magical consciousness came into contact with a rationalist one, the magic was condemned sooner or later to evaporate. But if the magical elements in the “marvellous real” were unsustainable, was it possible to salvage the sense of the spiritual and the transcendental?
• FOREST: Symbolism: ‘great theatre of the forest’; journey through space becomes journey through Time; celebrate Nature but rejects European hankering after ‘the natural man’. Positions men in nature against the mediocrity of pallid existentialists. In Europe this Forest can no longer be experienced – sanitised and erased several centuries ago.
• RUTH: decadence  5; wife to leading lady 8
• MOUCHE: contempt for shallow bohemianism (wild about primitive art); for them it is neither creative nor liberating but crude and reactionary. Mouche projectsthe writer’s own ANGER against his own self, his aesthetic detachment during the pre-war years. Lost Steps: AC’s own way of purging his own past.
• ROSARIO: Don Quijote reference; is this his Dulcinea of the New World? Rosario completes the opening sentence of DQ. She is the soul of Nature, the essence of womanhood, Rosario doesn’t pose any challenge to his male authority; she is lost.
• Read King: p 90

Readings from the novel:

Ruth’s decadence: 5, 7

Sterility: 6

Allusions 12, 33, 59, 80

Freedom: 16 (irony)

Backstory 21

Surrealism 24-25… 29

Wild about primitive arts 32

Seeing LA with European lenses 43

Living in different ages 51

Mouche 70

Three Wise Men of America 71

Discovery 77

Description of mountain journey 78

Rosario’s appearance 81

Bookburning 90

Father 95

9^th symphony boring 97

Bodily love 99

Recalling the chroniclers accounts 110-111

Authenticity and validity of primitivism 123

Butterfly rain: 133 + amphibious men 144

Rediscovery of the power of Christian myth: 135

Description of the dark power of the Forest: 138, 149

Example of Allegory: 141

El Dorado: 142 – 143

Rosario beats Mouche: 147, 149 (revenge of the authentic)

“We are the conquistadores” 158, 176, 177

Nature’s mimetism: 165

Rosario’s mystery: 173

Refinement of the savage: 173

Time travel: 178-179, 186, 187

Woman: 180

Sun entering the body: 197 – 198

Sisyphus: 198

Decision to stay + Ruth’s stage show: 244

Disenchantment with city life: 252

Against surrealism: 254