Minoritarian “Marvelous Real”: Enfolding revolution in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World

Abstract

Alejo Carpentier’s 1949 novel The Kingdom of This World appropriates aesthetic principles of the Baroque and surrealism to re-narrativize the Haitian Revolution from the perspectives of minor figures, thus challenging the reader to recognize not only the limits of epistemological perspective to organize reality, but the capacity to escape those limits. For Carpentier, lo real maravilloso both reveals and moves beyond European narrative structures. This article suggests that The Kingdom of This World demonstrates the minoritarian potential of lo real maravilloso when the narrative facilitates a recognition of the disjunctive quality of Enlightenment- and modernity-coded reality, which is the first step towards producing alternative realities and narratives.

Keywords:

• Alejo Carpentier
• Gilles Deleuze
• marvelous real
• baroque aesthetics
• minoritarian literature

Notes

1. Wherever possible, I cite the English translations available for primary and secondary sources.

2. I use the capitalized term “Baroque” to reference the 17th-century aesthetic movement, and “baroque” to signal the transhistorical “trait” suggested by Deleuze and others.

3. While the Rousseau painting is the obvious allusion here – which depicts a nude woman reclining with one arm over the back of a settee in the middle of a jungle landscape that includes, among animals such as lions and elephants, a black figure emerging from the shadows playing a flute – another possibility is the 15th-century engraving The Dream of Raphael, by Marcantonio Raimondi, which includes two classical nude female figures asleep on an embankment across from an apocalyptic scene of fortresses burning with human-like figures running about. I like to think the two possibilities perform a transhistorical marvelous real allusion that condenses European representations of colonial modernity from the 15th century to the 20th.