Remoteness and Proximity: The Parallel Ethnographies of Alejo Carpentier and René Maran

Abstract

This essay constellates and compares two major writers of Caribbean origin—the Cuban Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) and the French writer born in Martinique, René Maran (1887–1960). Though both Caribbean authors share some remarkable resemblances in terms of the evolution of an ethnographic representation in their early works, they have rarely (if ever) been juxtaposed in a comparative analysis. Moreover, the point of departure for this comparative reading is a rare document by Carpentier, one of the Cuban author's first published texts: a review he wrote of Maran's Batouala (Prix Goncourt, 1921) while still a teenager. Carpentier notes elsewhere that Batouala was avidly read by a generation of Cuban writers and intellectuals and therefore impacted the afrocubanismo movement in Cuban culture. The essay goes on to show a parallel development between Carpentier and Maran in terms of the way they negotiate their representation of the other through ethnographic approaches (Ecue-Yamba-O, Batouala), Enlightenment tropes (such as the bon sauvage) and historical representation (El reino de este mundo, Maran's biography of Jacques Cartier), and the confessional novel (Los pasos perdidos, Un homme pareil aux autres).

Keywords:

• afrocubanismo
• Batouala
• bon sauvage
• Caribbean
• Alejo Carpentier
• Jacques Cartier
• Cuban
• Ecue-Yamba-O
• Enlightenment
• ethnographic
• Los pasos perdidos
• René Maran
• Un homme pareil aux autres

Acknowledgments

Paul B. Miller is Assistant Professor of French, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University. He has published Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination (U of Virginia P, 2010), as well as numerous articles on Cuban and Caribbean literature and culture in journals such as MLN and Latin American Literary Review. He is currently working on a book-length project on Haitian-Cuban cultural exchange.

Notes

1. The question has been addressed in Jorge Klor de Alva's polemical essay.

2. “De la véranda où, étendu sur sa chaise longue, M. René Maran écoutait les conversations de ces administrés,—c’est lui qui nous revèle ce détail,—il n’a dû entendre celles-ci qu’imparfaitement. Car j’imagine que, du village indigène de Grimari à la résidence du ‘commandant,’ entouré d’un large espace vide où toute une tribu peut danser, il doit y avoir plus de quelques mètres, sans compter la rivière Pombo. Peut-être, après tout, est-ce seulement la voix de ses boys qui est parvenue aux oreilles de l’auteur, ce qui expliquerait bien des choses” (Delafosse 171).

3. “al cabo de veinte años de investigaciones acerca de las realidades sincréticas de Cuba, me di cuenta de que todo lo hondo, lo verdadero, lo universal, del mundo que había pretendido pintar en mi novela había permanecido fuera del alcance de mi observación” (Carpentier, “Problemática” 11–12).

4. I am convinced that Carpentier self-parodied this tendency in the closing passages of El reino de este mundo, when the land surveyors or agrimensores invade Ti Noël's habitat, armed with rulers, notebooks and “Carpenter's pencils,” measuring and gauging everything (142–43).

5. Or, stated otherwise, “Il est capital, en effet, de ne pas considérer l’opposition entre sciences sociales et littératures comme un donné” (Debaene 21).

6. Delafosse, who is persuaded that Maran was awarded the Goncourt solely because he was black, also protests that Maran's portrait of the sub-Saharan African is caricatured: “Quant aux vrais nègres, comme les vrais coloniaux, ils valent beaucoup mieux que le portrait caricatural qu’a tracé d’eux M. René Maran” (171–72).

7. Lucas explains the economy of degradation in Haitian literature in these terms: “The fictional space presents a gripping setting of degradation, exposed in all its forms. Nevertheless, the rupture with the Promethean heroes, worn out for the moment, does not mean the abandonment of hope for change … The drive to revolt, as a constitutive element of the human condition and human dignity, and as a means of exorcising the process of degradation, continues to feed the dreams of the characters” (72).

8. See Garraway, 211–20.

9. The original French echoes much more clearly the Rousseauian nuance than the English translation, “ignorant.”

10. See also Ehrard 24–26.

11. See note 6.

12. This discourse bears a striking resemblance to that pronounced by Sergio, the protagonist of the Cuban film Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968): “Eso es una las señales del subdesarrollo: la incapacidad para relacionar las cosas, para acumular experiencia y desarrollarse. Es pura alteración, como diría Ortega. Es muy difícil que se produzca aquí una mujer trabajada por los sentimientos y la cultura. El ambiente es muy blando. Todo el talento del cubano se gasta en adaptarse al momento. La gente no es consistente. Y siempre necesitan que alguién piense por ellos.”