ALEJO CARPENTIER: REGIONALIST OR UNIVERSALIST

ALEJO CARPENTIER: REGIONALIST OR UNIVERSALISTAuthor(s): J. A. GEORGE IRISHSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 4 (DECEMBER 1972), pp. 57-66Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40653289 .

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ALEJO CARPENTIERI REGIONALIST OR UNIVERSALIST

Alejo Carpentier defies any facile categorization or identification with literary schools and movements. He has passed through various literary movements -

Afro-Cubanismo, nativismo, Surrealism, Neorealism - without allowing his vision to be circumscribed by any one of these. He cannot be called a costumbrista writer even though he deals with native customs; he is not simply a realist, for his mythopoetic vision of reality transcends the limitations of objective realism; he cannot be regarded as a naturalist though he sees man in a special relationship to his environment. Even the basic questions of regionalism and universalism are not easily distinguishable in Carpentieri work, for his vision of regional (Latin American and Caribbean) reality is never narrow, parochial, nor superficial. It is always the starting point for a serious world view, a pathway to deeper insights into human experience, a way of interpreting human nature and the human condition through regional experiences.

The traditional regionalist novel which dominated the Latin American literary scene for the first three decades of the twentieth century focused on limited literary themes within a restricting literary method. Having accepted the nineteenth century realist-naturalist models of France, liberal, nationalist novelists got trapped in a wave of unpenetrative, and at times, romantic, description and evocation of local landscape, folklore, and rural life in their effort to depict with pride the beauties of their landscape and to establish some relation between man and nature. The result was a stereotyped view of man being overwhelmed and crushed by the vastness of a living and dynamic environment of trees, jungles, rivers, plains and deserts.

This approach to regionalism had little to offer the Caribbean and Latin American peoples in terms of getting to understand themselves and to appreciate the deeper currents of their historical and cultural heritage. It lacked the spirit of searching and inward looking which alone could bring the peoples of the region to examine and explore the living values that give this region its authentic imprint; its real vitality. Regionalism was then merely an exhibition in assimilation and alienation.

Another form of regionalism would take one away from the superficiality of imitations in description and into an area that leads into universality; not the kind of universality that hides the regional stamp giving the writer world-wide



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acclaim because he cannot be distinguished as a Caribbean or Latin American writer, (that would be a disgrace), but rather the kind that retains the imprint of a valid and vibrant personality and has regional values to offer to the rest of the world.

Carpentier adheres to what he calls the regional contexts as his inevitable point de depart for the discovery of the profound, transcendental reality of the region. He rejects the facile "costumbrismo" (description of folk customs) of Ecúe-Yamba-0 saying, "... I realized that the profound, the real, the universal aspect of the world I claimed to be depicting in my novel had remained outside the scope of my observations." Carpentier admits that whereas he could see dances, drumming, singing, religious rites etc., he had completely lost sight of the animism of the Negro peasant, his relation to nature and the essence of his ritual. (Tientos y Diferencias p. 13). And this is precisely the duty of the artist, according to Carpentier:

It is not in painting a Venezuelan peasant or a Mexican Indian that our novelist ought to fulfil his task, but rather in showing us what there is among our peoples that is universal, i.e. related to the wider world, even though this relation, in some cases, may manifest itself in contrast, in our differences. (Tientos y Diferencias p. 1 1 -12).

He therefore invites his fellow writers to explore local contexts in depth - the landscape, the cities, the cultural patterns, the political, racial, economic, mythical, legendary, historical, scientific, material, spacial, and other circumstances which have gone to shape the modern Caribbean and Latin American man. All of these have a style of their own which must be defined and given its true name. And then man's relation to these must be examined and put into proper perspective, for this is the only way of revealing the fundamental uniqueness of this region to the rest of the world. Revelling in typicalities and the description of folk customs is not a means of understanding, interpreting and defining the character of the surrounding praxis.

Regionalism, in Carpentieri case, does not fit into the old conventional mould. One significant way in which he diverges from this extablished pattern, is in his interpretation of the nature of the Caribbean or Latin American man's conflict with himself in his search for an identity. His main characters are not rural men who lose their individuality in the strangle-hold of the hinterland but educated urban citizens in search of their identity and a sense of personal fulfilment: Esteban, in El siglo de las luces, is a disorientated urban youth who goes out in quest of meaningful identification with people and political movements and ideologies because of his own uncertainty about his authentic identity; the nameless protagonist of El acoso is a haunted youth who feels alienated not only from himself but from the rest of the urban community; the protagonist of Los pasos perdidos, also nameless, is a disillusioned young man who gropes for identification with the folk elements of the American reality during a sterile period of his experience when his European education began to seem like a form of cultural alienation.



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This last character, for example, highlights the dilemma of the contemporary Caribbean man, facing the problems of assimilation and alienation. Because his character is shaped in a mixture of cultural heritages (a European father, a European education at University level; a Cuban mother and Cuban education in his formative years), he suffers a peculiar internal tension when torn between decisions involving a clash of these cultures. As he plunges into the jungle and learns about the Indians, his disenchantment with Europe increases and there he senses what seems to be an instinctive emotional and cultural attachment to the Indians. This internal conflict leads him to engage in a series of symbolic gestures: taking a resolute decision to adopt the Indians' mode of life; throwing off his European dress, habits, religion, food and intellectualism; fighting to ward off all temptations to be reflective, rationalistic and speculative; relegating his wife, Ruth, and his lover, Mouche, to second place in his affections, whilst lavishing his love on the native mestiza, Rosario. But the conflict is not so easily resolved, for his European education, rationalism, and cultivated tastes are too deeply rooted in his personality for the rejection to be effective. Europe is forever within him with its language attractions, its spirit of artistic creativity and the many technological and literary facilities on which he had become so dependent. He is a musicologist and musician and cannot resist the urge to compose music in an effort to convey what he has experienced in America, but his problem is to cut away the navel string of his training in European art. His youthful ambition to write a cantata on Shelley's Prometheus Unbound had been frustrated by the outbreak of war, but it now comes back to him, in his leisure, with renewed forcefulness, since the theme of the escaped prisoner expresses his personal experience of escape from Europe, and provides the necessary inspiration. Necessity forces him to return to civilization: he runs out of paper which is unavailable in the jungle; he needs a copy of Shelley's book as a source, but that too is unavailable; the available books are unsuitable (Fray Pedro's Liber Usualis with its Christian thought is inappropriate for the indigenous threnody he has in mind, and La Odisea, written in Spanish, is unacceptable since he considers Spanish unfit for musical pieces). He has to return to "civilization" with its rigid forms, its traditions of intellectual and artistic sophistication and he is therefore forced to admit, "My renunciation could never be real as long as I continued to surprise myself in such bad habits," that is, his inclination to European thought and tradition. (Los pasos perdidos, p. 226).

There is really no end to his internal tug-of-war, for, as in the case of the modern Caribbean man, the question of his true identity must accommodate the facts of his historical experience of Europe, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of eradicating the profound imprint of Europe on his sensibility and his character. But is must also come to terms with the strong indigenous undercurrents which flood the sub-conscious.

This difficulty of finding one's true identity is central to the expression of a regional consciousness in the Caribbean and also central to the trauma of artists



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and sensitive individuals. The coloured West Indian poet, Derek Walcott, crystalizes this problem in his poem, "A Far Cry From Africa" when he writes:

I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live?

(In a Green Night, p. 18)

The Cuban mulatto, Nicolás Guillen, utters the anguished cry of a man who has lost his name:

Do you know my other name, the one that came with me from that enormous land, the bloody, captured name that crossed the sea in chains, which came in chains across the sea?

Am I Yelofe? Nicolas Yelofe perhaps? Or Nicolas Bakongo? Perhaps Banguilo? Or Kumba? Perhaps Nicolas Kumba? Or Kongue Could I be Nicolas Kongue? Oh, who knows? What an enigma in the waters of the sea!

(El apellido, Translated by G.R. Coulthard)

The Martinican writer, Aime Césaire, caught in the same dilemma, works out an exit in his poetry. As he said to Réne Depestre in an interview:

I don't apologise for French influence. Like it or not, I am a poet writing in French, and it is clear that French literature has influenced me. What I would stress however is the fact that, taking French literature as a starting point, I have striven to create a new language, capable of expressing the African heritage. To put it another way, the French language was an instrument which I wished to endow with a new expressiveness. I wished to write a Caribbean French, a black French, which although French, would bear a black seal.



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Here are people grappling with a regional problem but at a level that explores profound psychological and cultural issues. That is the level of Carpentieri regionalism.

Carpentieri protagonist in Los pasos perdidos, in the course of all his moral, emotional and cultural tensions, opens up a range of human experiences that are universal and yet regional. He is more than a modern Caribbean man. He is a modern urban man with all the pressures of big city life forcing him into isolation, frustration and boredom. He is being consumed in a state of spiritual emptiness and lack of inspiration. His wife is so caught up with the busy life of the theatre that she can only spare him a few brief moments on Sundays. There is no delight in his home life, so he keeps himself extremely busy at his job in an attempt to forget his inner suffering and loneliness and to fill up the vacuum created by time. He takes recourse to revelry and drunkeness as escape valves to relieve his sense of disorientation, lack of fulfilment in life, solitude and boring repetition of meaningless activities. As he states the problem:

There were great lagoons of weeks and weeks in the chronicle of my own life; periods that left me no valid memory, no mark of any exceptional sensation, no lasting emotion; days in which every gesture produced the obsessing impression that I had done it before in identical circumstances - that I had sat in the same corner, that I had told the same story . . . ascending and descending the hill of time with the same stone on my shoulder. (Los pasos perdidos, p. 14).

He sees hundreds of people like himself in the modern big city; people who talk vaguely of yoga, astrology, mysticism and existentialism as forms of escape from the drudgery of their existence; people who are concerned with the rapid passing of time and their relative lack of accomplishment; frustrated people who drink daily, "so as to defend themselves against discouragement, the anguish of failure, dissatisfaction with themselves, fear of rejection of a manuscript or simply the hardness of city life with problems of perennial anonymity among the multitude and with the eternal rush." (Los pasos perdidos, p. 34).

He concludes that the real problem is a generational crisis of moral and spiritual decadence for which contemporary man has no absolute answer:

To escape from this, in this world in which it is my lot to live, was just as impossible as trying to relive in this age, certain gestures of heroism and sanctity. We had fallen back into the age of the man-wasp, the No-man, when souls were sold not to the Devil, but to the Accountant and to the Galley Boatswain. (p. 15).

It is this kind of inner life that relates Carpentieri character to man outside the Caribbean region. He could well be an anguished soul in Buenos Aires or London or New York or Paris.

Similarly, the way in which Carpentier dramatizes the tenderness of his conscience has little to do with narrow regionalism. He is a human being with



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constant crises of conscience and moral struggles which draw him into serious introspection. His decision to remain in America brings with it twinges of conscience over the unfairness of his action in causing the responsibility for his defection to fall on the shoulders of the Curator of the University who had arranged his trip and demonstrated confidence in his integrity. In a moment of mental torture, he says, "Nevertheless, I cannot do it because my conscience has returned to the place it once deserted, and I had had it so far removed that it has come back to me full of distrust and grief, (p. 210).

He suffers further pangs of conscience when the priest, Fray Pedro, advises him to marry Rosario. He recognizes that, inspite of the social and emotional impasse between his wife and himself, his genuine love for Rosario cannot justify his marrying her and living in bigamy.

Such deception is beneath his dignity: ... I have forbidden myself from telling lies ... the idea of deceiving her is revolting ... the awareness of my conscience still prevents me from showing such meanness, (p. 230-231).

And then there is always the nagging thought that "there is a paper, signed and legalized, back there, far away, which strips me of all moral strength." (p. 233).

It is similar qualms of conscience which highlight his humanity, dramatically withholding him from committing murder. Nicasio, the leper, has raped a young village girl. He is found in the woods by Marcos and the protagonist. The latter has the gun on his shoulder ready to execute the rapist, but his finger freezes on the trigger as he considers that he who protested the massacres in Europe is now about to take a sacred life. He compresses the moral struggle in these few lines:

But there stood two eyes: two eyes without eyelids, almost lifeless, but they kept on looking ... To wipe out those two eyes. A man's two eyes . . . something within me resisted the act as if something would have changed forever from the very moment I pressed the trigger. There are acts which build walls, milestones, boundaries in one's existence. And I was afraid of the life which would commence for me from the moment I made myself an executioner, (p. 238).

More than that his characters are motivated by universal mythical dreams and visions, and here, one does not make reference to his constant allusions to Greek mythology. This is by far too conscious and obvious a way of relating one's creative work to what is considered universal literature. One refers, rather, to Carpentieri mytho-poetic vision of the landscape of the region. All around whether in the riverbeds of gold or the luxuriant slopes and valleys, he sees mythical associations related to man's general motivations and quests. One of his recurrent themes is man's search for happiness on earth, the mythical pursuit of a Paradise on earth.

Ostensibly, the protagonist of Los pasos perdidos goes into the jungle in search of musical instruments, but the issue goes deeper than that. He accepts the job as a means of escape from the routine of his hum-drum life in the big



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city. He is out in search of new experiences and happiness, and this he finds in the simplicity and intelligence of the Indians' way of life. Very early he admits to El Adelantado that he is aware that the beautiful American jungle cannot be the perfect Paradise mapped out by ancient cartographers since there exist countless plagues of insects, reptiles, sicknesses, floods and hunger. But at least, he claims man finds true happiness even in the fierce struggle for survival against natural forces.

What he finds, however, is an elusive happiness. On his return to the jungle, he is faced with an unexpected change: the priest has been murdered by bushmen; Adelantado's settlement has disintegrated; the people with whom he once lived in an ideal community have disappeared; the Greek Yannes is apparently demented or obsessed with a diamond mine he has just discovered; his lover, Rosario, is married to Marcos. To crown it all, the jungle has arbitrarily covered over the Greek's former settlement and the river has swollen to the point where it covers the entrance to the village. Symbolically, the door to the jungle, his Garden of Eden, is concealed. Disappointed and frustrated, the hero accepts the fact that there is no real Paradise on earth. America, like Europe, has its deceiving appearances and its horrors. Man everywhere, like the mythical Sysiphus, must one day be snatched away from the fleeting pleasures and the brief respite of a temporary Paradise to face the harsh realities of hell. Significantly, he closes the story of his experiences with the fateful words, "Today is the end of Sysiphus' holidays." (p. 286).

The myth of the Earthly Paradise is more fully developed in El sigio de las luces. Esteban's idealistic and enthusiastic involvement in the revolutionary movement is really a search for fulfilment and happiness in life. He is reaching out for the Better World, the Promised Land which Victor and his colleagues promise to establish. What they aspire to is a world of bliss:

An ideal of equality and harmony, at the same time as they work for thé perfection of the Individual, destined to rise, with the help of Reason and Enlightenment, to the spheres where the human being would forever be free from fears and doubts. (El sigio de las luces, p. 71).

As Esteban leaves Haiti for France, he imagines himself guided by the biblical Column of Fire towards a Promised Land. When he returns to the Caribbean to help with the Revolution, he gets the feeling of being in the world of Creation, in the Garden of Eden; the Lost Paradise has been regained:

Esteban could see in the coral forests a tangible image, a close figuration - and yet so inaccessible - of Paradise Lost. (p. 151).

Indeed, this special world is inaccessible and he never seems to cease looking for it even though he comes upon so many signs of it. The myth of the Promised Land again seems to materialize and becomes a physical reality as he enters the mouth of the Orinoco, whose verdant splendor opens up for him the world of the Earthly Paradise.



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Esteban soon realizes, however, that this newly discovered Paradise is nothing but a vast and beautiful garden without the reality of happiness in it. The horrors of the guillotine, massacres, warfare, Negro uprisings, and the rivalry and cruelty of ambitious and power-thirsty leaders leave Esteban frustrated in his search for a Better World. As the author puts it:

And to a Better World Esteban had gone not so long ago, led by the Great Column of Fire which loomed in the East. Now he returned from his unaccomplished mission with a great weariness that vainly sought relief in the recollection of some little likeable detail. (p. 211).

He returns to Cuba disillusioned with the empty idealism articulated by so many people who fail to support their words with action. He begins to feel that his only hope is to forget the pursuit of collective happiness for mankind and to concentrate on his personal happiness within:

This time the revolution has failed. Perhaps the next one will be good. But for them to get me out when it breaks out they will have to search for me with lanterns even at midday. Beware of beautiful words; beware of better Worlds created out of words. Our age suffers from an excess of words. There is no Promised Land other than that which man finds within himself. (p. 223).

This search for Utopian happiness has no limits in time or space. Carpentier points out that the Caribs migrated northwards in search of a Promised Land, that is, the Inca Empire of the north; ancient cartographers from Asia and Africa believed in the existence of an Earthly Paradise. Besides, man is forever pursuing personal happiness, however momentary it may be, in his love affairs, his adventurous exploits, his desire for the excitement and thrills of drugs and travelling. Carpentieri characters are like that: Mouche and her lover try to find happiness in adultery and travels in exotic lands; Sofia flees to Victor Hughes' bed to find it; Hughes engages in active politics and Esteban in the Revolution. They have a common goal but also a common end - pessimism, defeat and disillusionment. Carpentier, convinced of the historical and universal significance of this quest, allows these thoughts to float through Esteban's mind as he sails up the Orinoco:

According to the colour of the century, the myth changed its character, always responding to new tastes, but it always remained the same: there was, there had to be, it was necessary that there should be somewhere in the present - any present time - a Better World. (p. 211).

Ti Noel expresses a similar thought in El reino de este mundo, claiming that "man forever longs for a form of happiness situated somewhere beyond the limits of what he has available to him." (El reino de este mundo, p. 119). Like Esteban then, he seems to admit the inevitable frustration that results from man's pursuit of idealistic and mythical worlds and recommends living in this



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world, accepting its harsh realities and striving for the happiness and satisfaction that can be found in loving and in humble service:

Man's greatness lies precisely in his wish to be better than what he actually is; in imposing tasks on himself. In the kingdom of heaven there is no greatness to conquer, since there everything falls within the categories of an established hierarchy, the unknown clarified, endless life, impossibility of sacrifice, rest and pleasure. For that reason, man, overburdened with pains and tasks, beautiful even in his misery, capable of loving in the midst of plagues, can only achieve greatness, his maximum stature in the kingdom of this world. (p. 119-120).

To Carpentier, then, man will eternally be finding new outlets through which to channel the optimism, idealism and visionary enthusiasm so basic to the human spirit. He will set himself goals and struggle to achieve them, making sacrifices in the process, notwithstanding all the evidence of weakness in human nature. Life will continue in a vicious circle: aspirations and hopes of escape from misery, the pursuit of a dream world of bliss, always terminating in inevitable frustration.

This is part and parcel of what Carpentier sees as the epic dimension of regional reality - the story of man in struggle in his social interaction, in class stratifications, in economic inequalities, in revolutions. His role therefore is to bring the epos to bear upon the agon, the word expressing the essence of the struggle. It is mass movement in history that attracts his eye, the collective actions which determine the pattern of the individual's life and reveal the basic promptings of the human spirit. His individual characters, however strong, can never determine the course of history. They are the pawn of history, time and events. Things evolve, they happen and man gets caught up in the course of events. This happens to Victor Hughes, Esteban and Sofia in El siglo ... ; and to Christophe, Bouckman and Ti Noel in El reino . . . Their aspirations and dreams are fed and moulded by the forces in history that involve the masses. The epic material available to the writer is therefore a means of opening up a world-view of history and of man's relation to the historical processes.

This is why Victor Hughes is the controversial and enigmatic character he is in El siglo de las luces. His fickleness has to be seen as part of the vicissitudes of life and the fluctuations in great historical movements. He is basically an ambitious opportunist whose convictions and life pattern are determined by the course of events. He simply shifts with the tide of a Revolution in which he is so intimately involved that the history of the movement in the Caribbean is almost identical with his personal history. As he confesses, "The Revolution has given my existence an objective. I have been assigned a role in this grand event of our age and I shall try to show my maximum stature in it." (El siglo ... p. 127). If the Jacobin Revolutionary leaders condemn freemasonry, Hughes, though previously the most ardent of freemasons, immediately condemns it as counter-revolutionary and upholds Jacobin morality as the standard of the day. While Robespierre leads the Committee of Public Safety in his reign of terror,



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Hughes assiduously emulates him in the Caribbean. When the early revolutionary idealists preach equality, fraternity and liberty, Hughes follows suit, but has no

qualms about the re-enslavement of Negroes as a political strategy after

Napoleon, as First Consul, orders it. The man who persecutes the church in

Guadeloupe with the guillotine is the very man who, in Guyana, can reinstate the Church, hear mass and even persecute those who had earlier renounced their faith and taken an oath to the Revolutionary Constitution.

What Carpentier calls "the dramatic dichotomy" of Victor Hughes' extraordinary personality is, in fact, the essence of the character's epic stature. He represents a fundamental human search for fulfilment and greatness and demonstrates, in his own life, the possibilities open to man for struggle and sacrifice and for the release of the epic potentialities in human nature.

J.A. GEORGE IRISH



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ALEJO CARPENTIER: REGIONALIST OR UNIVERSALIST