"Baroque and the Marvelous Real" by Alejo Carpentier

This piece, a 1975 lecture from Carpentier, discusses the difficulty in creating acceptable definitions for a number of terms including baroque, Surrealism, the decadent, and classicism. This final term Carpentier concludes with saying "Classicism is academic, and all that is academic is conservative, vigilant, obedient, and therefore declared enemy of innovation, of anything that breaks rules and norms" (92).

Carpentier continues the discussion using architecture as his principal metaphor, the symmetry and harmony found in most European monuments such as Versailles, El Escorial, and the Parthenon where blank spaces serve to highlight the importance of the ornamented spaces. The baroque, on the other hand, is surrounded with "proliferating nuclei" that fill every possible space (92-93).

The examples of such architecture can be found in India, Moscow, and Prague--places he also specifically mentioned in his essay on the magical real in the Americas. Other architectural styles are historical for Carpentier, whereas "the baroque spirit can reappear at any moment" and he goes on to claim that Plato and Aeschylus do not possess any baroque style at all, but that all of Indian and Iranian literature is a baroque literary style, and summons this same spirit in European literature via Cervantes, Ariosto, Rabelais, and some works of Shakespeare (95-6), as well as the development of Surrealism (98).

"Academisim," Carpentier writes, "is characteristic of settled times that are complete, sure of themselves. The baroque, on the other hand, arises where there is transformation, mutation, or innovation... the baroque always projects forward and tends, in fact , to a phase of expansion at the culminating moment of a civilization, or when a new social order is about to be born. It can be a culmination, just as it can be a premonition... America, a continent of symbiosis, mutations, vibrations, mestizaje, has always been baroque" (98).

Carpentier sees the baroque intersecting with what he has called "the marvelous real," but returns again to the dictionary to seek a definition for marvelous. "Dictionaries tell us that the marvelous is something that causes admiration because it is extraordinary, excellent, formidable. And that is joined to the notion that everything marvelous must be beautiful, lovely, pleasant, when really the only thing that should be gleaned from the dictionary is a reference to the extraordinary. The extraordinary is not necessarily lovely or beautiful. It is neither beautiful nor ugly; rather, it is amazing because it is strange. Everything strange, everything amazing, everything that eludes established norms is marvelous" (101).

After speaking of fairy tales and the limited scope of Franz Roh's definition divorced from a political agenda, he then describes why Surrealism does not meet the requirement of the marvelous real: because their fabrications of the marvelous were premeditated (103). The European conquerors on the other hand saw very clearly aspects of the marvelous real in America, "where our nature is untamed, as is our history, a history of both the marvelous real and the strange in America that manifests itself" in unusual occurrences (104-5).

This complexity can only be described in a baroque style of writing, Carpentier says: "I have to create with my words a baroque style that parallels the baroque of the temperate, tropical landscape. And we find that this leads logically to a baroque that arises spontaneously in our literature" (106). Carpentier concludes with a statement explaining that "el boom" is a result of a generation of artists embracing the stories that surround them and have become "the interpreters of our great Latin American reality" (107).

Critics of Carpentier claim that he fails to break with European/Eurocentric notions of Latin America. Also, Carpentier also seems to underestimate the diversity and histories present in all cultures and the voices that may have been historically muffled, for example the Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom. Moving toward the end of the 20th century, it is also difficult to see how Carpentier's theory would hold up against the fantasists and fabulists of today. Does the "baroque" nature of a fragmented postmodern worldview diminish the primal and untamed Latin American spirit? Or would Carpentier claim that, like the Surrealists, that these writers are mere magicians fabricating the marvelous premeditatively?

"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.