In the preface to this work, Alejo Carpentier employs the phrase lo real maravilloso —which translates as "the marvelous real"—delineating a literary attitude that would pervade Latin American fiction over the next half century. In the hands of other, better known writers, this approach would gain legitimacy under the label "magical realism," but many commentators would later trace the origins of this influential movement in Spanish language literature back to Carpentier's 1949 novel.
But The Kingdom of This World could just as easily fit into other literary pigeonholes— post-colonial fiction, the historical novel, fabulism, social realism, the political novel and other categories come to mind. Some will delight in the elements of myth and folktale that often come to the fore in this book, whereas others will be tempted to draw on grand theories of the clash of civilizations or the vanity of human wishes. Carpenter takes a kaleidoscopic approach to his subject—so much so, that the key characters, settings and themes change periodically during the course of the work, and a wide swathe of real-life history and biography are incorporated in its pages, as well as a thick cultural soup of traditions, Hispanic and African, European and American.
Yet this description might make The Kingdom of This World seem unwieldy or unfocused. Such allegations could hardly be more unwarranted. Perhaps the most salient qualities of Carpentier's novel are its tautness and concision. Events that, in the hands of other authors, might span several volumes—the 1791 Haitian slave rebellion, the nation's independence from France, the presidency (and later monarchy) of Henri Christophe, the aftermath of Christophe’s suicide—are deftly treated here in stirring interludes in which a few emblematic historical episodes underpin both the realistic and fanciful elements of Carpentier's fiction.
Other sections of the book follow key characters in their travels to Cuba or Europe, where our author shows his deep grasp of the peculiarities that result when radically different cultures intermingle. Carpentier understands the complexities of these interactions, in which friction and xenophobia are often balanced by curiosity and the almost hypnotic appeal of the exotic. In an odd way, he is a counterpart of Henry James, that master of stories in which Old World and New World destinies clash and cooperate by turn—but instead of Boston Brahmins and Harvard chitchat as his starting-point, Carpentier latches on to sugarcane plantations and voodoo rites. And for him, the formula has become even more intricate—an Africa-Americas-Europe triangle in place of James's dyad—and certainly more piquant.
The key character in The Kingdom of This World , Ti Noel, is mostly a bystander at tumultuous events, albeit one who is sometimes too close for comfort when calamities transpire. At the start of the novel, Ti Noel is a slave on the estate of M. Lenormand de Mézy, where he falls under the influence of Macandal, a charismatic fellow slave and singer of tales. Macandal speaks "of the great migrations of tribes, of age-long wars, or epic battles in which the animals had been the allies of men. He knew the story of Adonhueso, of the King of Angola, of King Da, the incarnation of the Serpent, which is the eternal beginning, never ending, who took his pleasure mystically with a queen who was the Rainbow, patroness of the Waters and of all Bringing Forth."
This volatile mixture of history, myth and group cultural identity sets the stage for a major slave rebellion. This conflict, which culminated in the establishment of the Haitian republic, stands out as the only slave revolt in the Americas that led to the founding of a new political regime. But here too Old World and New World tendencies play off each other. The Haitian revolution took place only two years after the French revolution, espoused the same principles, and brought about results that were, in some instances, eerily similar.
Carpentier presents a cornucopia of characters, contexts, cultures and conflicts in his novel. Yet the epigraph to the book could very well be "the more things change, the more they stay the same." The identity and background of Ti Noel’s oppressors may shift over time, but the nature of the oppression is sadly undifferentiated. He is forced into servitude by King Henry, the black monarch, just as he was enslaved by a French landowner, or the Cuban plantation master who won him in a card game, or the mulattoes who eventually fill the power void left by the various sociopolitical upheavals.
Ti Noel's escape eventually comes through mysticism rather than rebellion. He learns the art of transforming himself into other creatures—a bird, a horse, an ant, a wasp. This shift from fact-based realism to mythical extravagance must have shocked Carpentier's first readers, especially given the prominence of historical materialism and other pieties of class conflict that were on the rise in Latin American intellectual circles at the time he wrote. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can taste the distinctive flavor of magical realism in these pages, a tone that would emerge as the single most influential current in Latin American fiction over the next several decades. And just a few short years after the publication of The Kingdom of this World , Claude Lévi- Strauss would draw on his own Latin American research in asserting the primacy of myth in the annals of storytelling, and showing—much as did Carpentier—that the borderline between mythology and history is not as sharply delineated as many long believe.
Yet even without this later validation, Carpentier's choices here seem quite fitting. In a book so aligned with the tragic mutability of human conditions, the further leap into a modern-day equivalent of Ovid's Metamorphoses , that ultimate literary celebration of changeability, feels right and proper. In a work that delves into both the force and futility of change, Carpentier both delights and instructs by bringing into play the most powerful change agents—magic, politics, wealth, and brute force—and teaching us how much they have in common.
Certainly other writers before Carpentier drew on the phantasmagorical, and any claim that this novelist invented 'magical realism' must be treated with a degree of skepticism. (By the way, I'd go back another thousand years in locating the origins of the magical realism novel.) Yet Carpentier's unwillingness to escape into the beguiling charms of fantasy or even highlight its strangeness when it appears in these pages would prove especially influential. In this regard, he anticipates the distinctive tone of later classic works by Gabriel García Márquez , Günter Grass , Salman Rushdie and others. The title says it best: Carpentier focuses on the kingdom of this world, not some other one—no Middle-Earth or Narnia for him. And Carpentier's ability to forge fantasy without escapism stands out as his defining achievement, and one that the current-day literary community (and, even more, the publishing industry) could still benefit from emulating.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature, and popular culture. His newest book is The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire .