"On the Marvelous Real in America" by Alejo Carpentier

The editor's note for Carpentier's essay, originally written in 1949 (twenty-four years after Roh's coining of the phrase magic realism), states: "As opposed to European Surrealism, a movement in which Carpentier had participated in the 1930s in France, Carpentier's "marvelous American reality" does not imply a conscious assault on conventionally depicted reality but, rather, an amplification of perceived reality required by and inherent in Latin American nature and culture.... where improbable juxtapositions and marvelous mixtures exist by virtue of Latin America's varied history, geography, demography, and politics--not by manifesto" (75).

Carpentier's essay traverses the globe, describing the incredible complexity in a variety of cultures, from China to the world of Islam, to the Soviet Union and Prague before "returning" to dwell on the uniqueness of Latin America. In each instance, Carpentier suggests the impossibility of completely understanding any of these cultures or languages. Also, it's noteworthy that Carpentier briefly touches on literary movements from Western Europe, instead placing that are sufficiently "other." Also, he credits Prague's atmosphere for helping imbue Franz Kafka with the "mystery and possibility" present in his writing.

Carpentier takes a shot at the Surrealists as mere magicians, "forgetting that the marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favored by the unexpected richness of reality or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state [estado limite]. To begin with, the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith" (86).

In this move, Carpentier places "the marvelous real" on the moral high ground, stating that virtue and faith play a key role, whereas the "magicians" of Europe are still laboring to undercut the "privileged revelation" of the Western tradition without having anything authentic to replace it with. For Carpentier, finding such virtue and faith does not trouble people of the Americas: "Because of the virginity of the land, our upbringing, our ontology, the Faustian presence of the Indian and the black man, the revelation constituted by its recent discovery, its fecund racial mixing [mestizaje], America is far from using up its wealth of mythologies. After all, what is the entire history of America if not a chronicle of the marvelous real?" (88).

Critics state (rightly in my opinion) that such statements take an essentialist, Eurocentric view of the population of the Americas, where the people and the land are somehow saturated with magic whereas the European tradition has gone stale. Carpentier's intent is to empower writers in the Americas, to stop them from looking to Europe for approval and inspiration but rather take advantage of the rich cultural, pre-Colonial landscape that is truly their own, yet in doing so Carpentier also helps to sensationalize native beliefs and traditions.