University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The art of 'la fuga': Mythic and musical modes in relation to the theme of identity in Alejo Carpentier's "Los pasos perdidos"

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The art of 'la fuga': Mythic and musical modes in relation to the theme of identity in Alejo Carpentier's "Los pasos perdidos"

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Content THE ART OF LA FUGA; MYTHIC AND MUSICAL MODES
IN RELATION TO THE THEME OF IDENTITY IN
ALEJO CARPENTIER'S LOS PASOS PERDIDOS
by
Roland Edward Bush
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Comparative Literature)
January 1981
UMI Number: DP22541
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UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N CA LIFO RN IA
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LOS A N G ELES, C A LIFO R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
— Boland-Edwaj3d-Bus.hr................
under the direction of his.... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R OF P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
•21
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION.......................................... 1
CHAPTER I ............................................ 12
CHAPTER I I ............................................ 64
CHAPTER I I I .......................................... 121
CONCLUSION............................................ 161
BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................... 166
ii
INTRODUCTION
In a period, marked by novelistic experimentation,
Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos is no exception to
the rule. It has long been recognized that this novel is
certainly his most "ambitious."'*' Although it reflects
many of Carpentier's usual thematic concerns and utilizes
stylistic devices found in earlier works, it also repre
sents for him a radical departure from anything written
previously. Moreover, the difficulty in attempting to
classify or narrowly categorize the novel becomes appar
ent when one surveys the generic identifications offered
by Carpentier's critics. Part of the difficulty derives
from the author's use of autobiographical elements, com
ments on the novel as an art form, what his specific
objectives were in writing Los pasos perdidos and, above
all, the highly successful synthesis of conventions
characteristic of different narrative modes.
As outlined in his many statements on the art of
writing, Carpentier believes that the Latin American
novel begins to develop authenticity and a potential for
greatness when it "ceases appearing like the novel";
that is, when, as a result of investigation (indagacidn)
and exploration (exploracion), it develops its own tradi-
2
tion— one characterized by its own "dynamism." This
1
tradition is acquired only through a concerted and contin
uous effort of technical experimentation (experimentacidn
de la tecnica) by a number of novelists of different gen
erations. Authenticity, in other words, coincides with
innovation, and both are inseparable from what Carpentier
perceives as the daring acceptance of the possibility of
3
failure implicit in all literary experimentalism. It is
not surprising, then, that Carpentier has expressed his
judgment upon his own work in a very simple and straight-
4
forward manner: "Personally, I experiment."
The origin of this attitude is traceable to several
related events in Carpentier's early life: his formal
study of music; his self-imposed exile in search of his
true personal and cultural identity: and his involvement in
5
the Cuban vanguardista movement. From these experiences
comes an almost obsessive preoccupation with the creative
synthesis of mythic, musical and literary forms as an
appropriately innovative mode of self-definition. To
Carpentier, the novel— like myth and music— is a symbolic
form for the expression of human feeling; it is an instru
ment of knowing, for discovering the identity and nature of
0
men and the world in which they exist. And in the works
which attempt a synthesis of modes and forms, the goal of
"knowing," of self-knowledge, is a pervasive concern. In
Los pasos perdidos it is a central theme.
Los pasos perdidos is a novel based primarily on the
2
search for identity by a writer-composer whose personal
experience of alienation and artistic impotence is trans
formed into a sense of individual understanding as he pur
sues the origins of music in the virginal interior of a
South American jungle. The unnamed narrator’s journey
carries him physically, temporally, and psychologically
from the alienated condition of urban exile, through the
formative influences of his cultural identity, to a
meaningful level of self-possession and understanding of __
his purpose and function as a composer of the New World.
In order for this transformation to occur, however, the
protagonist-narrator must seek the primary sources of his
artistic identity— sources whose origins lie in both Old
World and New World traditions. Self-identity, then, is
to be achieved in a recognition of the interplay of these
forces. Thus Carpentier's concern is for the symbolic
function of music. In the novel, each leads to the
relationship between music, myth, identity and the theme of
time.
The fictional treatment of the themes of identity
and time, like the rich polyphonic texture of Carpentier's
prose, has long been the subject of general encomia.
Critics such as Salvador Bueno, Sofia Fisher, Francis
Donahue and Frances Weber have enumerated some of the more
7
important aspects of this thematic preoccupation. And
the kind of exhaustive, "detailed analyses" of Los pasos
3
perdidos that Klaus Muller-Bergh attempts in his book-
length biographical study and Esther P. Mocega-Gonz&lez
pursues in her analysis of time as a fundamental literary
theme in all of Carpentier's works are helpful in revealing
many of the components of Carpentier's narrative style in
8
relation to the prevailing issues of identity and time.
Along with the recent study by Roberto Gonz&lez-Echeverria,
Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (1977), they repre
sent a substantial body of insights into the complex me-
9
chanics of Carpentier's art. However, none of
Carpentier's critics has explored the themes of identity
and time as developed through mythic and musical modes. No
one of Carpentier’s critics has recognized the extent to
which his concern for experimentation has stimulated his
interest in fusing different artistic forms. None of
Carpentier's critics, in other words, has identified the
importance of his artistic search for authenticity in a
synthesis of the confessional tradition with elements of
the heroic (or epic) quest myth to create what Paul-Emile
Cadilhac has called the "symphonic novel"; that is, a novel
in which the "orchestral effect" is created by being at
times lyrical, ironical, descriptive, epic and fantastic;
a narrative, moreover, in which music (in the form of
images, comparisons, musical vocabulary, allusions,
structural elements,, and thematic patterns) is prevalent.10
Most of his critics have preferred to examine each
4
of these elements in isolation. The mythic mode, for
example, has been studied discerningly by Juan Loveluck,
11
Ian Adams, and Klaus Muller-Bergh. All three have in
terpreted its significance generally as that of merely
establishing mytho-historic parallels with the modern
period. In agreement with Muller-Bergh, Loveluck and Adams
view the mythic references as motifs which suggest the
symbolic tendencies of the narrative. They have been seen,
like the many musical references, as little more than
12
"erudite allusions." But while the efforts of these
critics have contributed many invaluable insights into the
novel, their approach has, of necessity, limited a full
appreciation of the pervasive, functional dimensions of
myth in Los pasos perdidos. For what makes the issue of
myth so noteworthy in Carpentier's novel is the degree to
which Los pasos perdidos is permeated by the conscious
artistic formulation of myth, like music, as part of style
and structure.
Carpentier himself has been quite explicit in
stressing not only the experimental nature of much of his
writing but also in classifying the musical character of
that experimentalism. And although most critics of the
novel have been sensitive to this aspect of the writer's
art, few have explored beyond the most superficial level
the aesthetic or formal implications of this concern.
13
(One has even tried to deny its importance.)
5
The earliest piece to identify the importance of
music in Los pasos perdidos was that of Emir Rodriquez-
14
Monegal. Published originally in 1957, Monegal's essay
noted the thematic significance of musical theorization.
In a similar vein, Alexis Marquez-Rodrlquez expresses
a layman's suspicion of the structural importance of music
in works such as El acoso, "Viage a la semilla," and "El
camino de Santiago," but, like Zulma Palermo and Helmy
Giacoman, stops short of any analysis of formal musical
15
principles and procedures in Los pasos perdidos.
Moreover, all these critics overlook the degree to which
each theme (i.e., myth, music, identity, and time) is
embedded in the expressive modes, in the structural
dimensions, of the narrative itself.
Among the published studies of Los pasos perdidos,
this aspect of the novel has been approximated, to date,
by only one critic. In "La creacion musical en Los pasos
16
perdidos," Karen Taylor studies the importance of music
from the composer's perspective. In so doing she antici
pates some of my own findings. However, Taylor's analysis
centers on the protagonist's Treno. And although she
takes into account the implications of mythic allusions
(i.e., Sisyphus and Prometheus) in relation to the theme
of identity, she does not find myth amd music integrated
into the general structure of the novel; that is, her
findings do not investigate the formal implications of
6
these themes beyond the symbolic connection with the
protagonist's alienation as an artist and composer.
In effect, the shortcomings of these particular
critics exemplify a longstanding weakness in most studies
of Los pasos perdidos; that is, the tendency to view theme
and form, idea and techniques of presentation, as essen
tially independent of each other. However, the various
elements of Carpentier's narrative techniques are inte
grated with the total structure and prevailing thematic
forms of his novel. Consequently, the richness and
meaning of Los pasos perdidos can only be fully measured
when the critic demonstrates the connections between
individual themes and fictive form as a whole. By
focusing on Carpentier's persistent concern with the
themes of music and myth while confronting the problem of
New World identity, we become aware of the wide range of
narrative forms through which he communicates his fictive
insights.
Thus, here I have attempted to supplement the works
of the critics mentioned earlier by emphasizing not only
the degree to which Carpentier's concern for myth, iden
tity and the theme of time stems from a preoccupation with
the essential origins and the forms of music but also the
extent to which this persistent interest has shaped and
influenced the structure of Los pasos perdidos. The
present study, then, claims to be innovative because its
7
major arguments are based on the premise that Los pasos
perdidos is a "symphonic novel"— a novel in which the .
theme of identity is developed through mythic and musical
modes of time and in correspondence with mythic and
musical principles of construction. In other words, Los
pasos perdidos is a fictional narrative in which the act
of self-reflection establishes not only an essential
thematic connection but also an analogous formal corre
spondence with myth and the art of music. It is a novel
in which genuine authenticity is achieved through a
combination of the narrative conventions of the confes
sional novel and the quest myth synthesized in a manner
and form fully compatible with the procedural and
structural patterns of musical process and design.
Therefore, the organization of the study is as
follows: Chapter I will discuss the sources of the nar
rator's alienation and Carpentier's presentation of this
theme through the conventions of the confessional genre;
Chapter II will examine the author's use of the heroic
epic quest as a structural device, allowing the narrator
to flee the present era and, in the atemporal realm of
mythic consciousness, spiritually regenerate himself
through the reenactment of and identification with the
specific mythic archetypes of his cultural and artistic
identity, In this connection, by way of reference to
such theoreticians as Mircea Eliade and Susanne K. Langer,
8
the implications of myth in relation to time, self-
expression and music will be considered; and Chapter III
will examine Carpentier's use of music as a structural
element in Los pasos perdidos; that is, I define the
author's creation of a symphonic novel by focusing on the
degree to which general musical suggestion is reinforced
by correspondence between literary structure and musical
procedures and forms.
Introduction Notes
Zulma Palermo, "Aproximacion a Los pasos perdidos, "
in Historia y mito en la obra le Ale.jo Carpentier, ed. Nora
Mazziotti (Buenos Aires: Fernando Garcia Cambeiro, 1972),
p. 91.
d
Alejo Carpentier, "Problematica de la actual
notela," in his Tientos y diferencias (Montevideo: Area,
1967), p. 10.
3
Carpentier, "Problematica," p. 10.
4
Quoted in Alan Cheuse, "Memories of the Future: A
Critical Biography of Alejo Carpentier," Diss. Rutgers
University 1974, p. 249.
5
Cheuse, "Memories," p. 249.
6
Carpentier, "Problematica," p. 10.
7
See Salvador Bueno, La letra como testlgo (Santa
Clara: Universidad Central de las villas, 1957); Sofia
Fisher, "Notas sobre el tiempo en Alejo Carpentier," in
Homenaje a Alejo Carpentier (New York: Las Americas, 1970),
pp. 261-274; Francis Donahue, "Alejo Carpentier: La
preocupacion por el tiempo," Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos,
LXII, No. 202 (1966), 133-151; Frances Weber, "El acoso:
Alejo Carpentier's War on Time," PMLA, 78 (1963), 440-448,
8
See Klaus Muller-Bergh, Alejo Carpentier: Estudio
biografico-critico (Long Island City: Las Americas Pub
lishing Co., Inc., 1972); Esther P. Mocega-Gonzalez, La I
narrativa de Alejo Carpentier: El concepto del tiempo como
tema fundamental (Madrid: Eliseo Torres, 1975).
9
Roberto Gonzalez-Echeverria, Alejo Carpentier: The
Pilgrim At Home (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977).
This is the first book-length study in English to be
devoted to Carpentier.
^Preface to Cadilhac's La pastorale (Paris, 1924).
Cited in Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature (Athens:
University of Georgia, 1948), p. 174.
^^See Juan Loveluck, "Los pasos perdidos: Jason y el
10
nuevo vellocino," Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 55, No. 165
(1963), 414-426; M. Ian Adams, "Alienation, Culture, and
Myth," in Three Authors of Alienation (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1975), pp. 81-105; Klaus Muller-Bergh,
"Reflexiones sobre los mitos en Los pasos perdidos," in
Homenaje a Alejo Carpentier, ed. Helmy F. Giacoman (New
York: Las Americas, 1970), pp. 275-292.
12
Muller-Bergh, "Reflexiones," p . 286.
13
Alan Cheuse minimizes the importance of what he
calls "melody" fiction and even disparages those critics
who engage in such analysis: "I find the method less than
valuable and a waste of good critical energy." "Memories,"
p. 171.
14
Emir Rodriguez-Monegal, "Dos novelas de Alejo
Carpentier,” in Narradores de esta America: Ensayos (Monte
video: Editorial Alfa, 1966), pp. 147-153.
15 - *
Alexis Marquez-Rodriguez, La obra narrativa de
Alejo Carpentier (Venezuela: Ediciones de la Biblioteca,
1970); Palermo, "Aproximacion; Helmy F. Giacoman, "La
estructura musical en la novellstica de Alejo Carpentier,"
Hispanofila, 11, No. 33 (1968), 49-57.
16
Karen Taylor, "La creacion musical en Los pasos
perdidos," Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispanica, No. 26
(1977), pp. 141-153.
11
CHAPTER I
In the last chapter of Los pasos perdidos the narrator
observes:
A mi regreso encuentro la ciudad cubierta de
ruinas mas ruinas que las ruinas tenidas por
tales. . . . De los caminos de ese cemento salen,
extenuados, hombres y mujeres que vendieron un
dia mas de su^tiempo a las empresas nutricias.
Vivieron un dia mas sin vivirlo, y repondran
fuerzas, ahora, para vivir manana un dia que
tampoco sera vivido, a menos de que se fuguen—
como lo hacia yo antes, a esta hora— hacia el
estrepito de las danzas y el aturdimiento del
licor, para hallarse mas desamparados aun, mas
tristes, mas fatigados, en el proximo sol.
Porque aqui, en la multitud que me rodea y corre,
a la vez desaforada y sometida, veo muchas caras
y pocos destinos. Y es que, detras de esas caras,
cualquier apetencia profunda, cualquier rebeldia,
cualquier impulso, es atajado siempre por el
miedo. Se tiene miedo de la reprimenda, miedo a
la hora, miedo a la noticia, miedo a la colec-
tividad que pluraliza las servidumbres.^
And again:
No quiero volver a hacer mala musica, sabiendo
que hago mala musica. Huyo de los oficios
irrutiles, de los que hablan por aturdirse, de
los dias hueros, del gesto sin sentido, y del
Apocalipsis que sobre todo aquello se cierne.
. . . Ademas, aqui se plantea una cuestion de
transcendencia mayor para mi audar por el Reino
de este Mundo— la unica cuestion, en fin de
cuentas, que excluye todo dilema: saber si peudo
disponer de mi tiempo o si otros han de disponer
de el, haciendome bogavante o espaldero de
galeras, segun el celo puesto por mi en no vivir
y servirlos los. (Pp. 275-276)
12
Here the narrator-protagonist reveals the degree of aliena
tion that he is now able to recognize in his urban environ
ment and, more importantly, the anguish and lassitude that
he himself is experiencing prior to his journey of artistic
self-discovery and to his act of confession. For the pro
tagonist's apprehension of the world in which he lives and
his ability to act effectively in that world are in direct
proportion to the degree of self-consciousness that he
possesses-^-self-knowledge which inevitably derives from his
artistic perception and the self-creative process of
becoming. At the beginning of the novel, however, this
kind of self-awareness is conspicuously absent. Instead
the protagonist is undergoing an emotional, spiritual, and
intellectual crisis related to a problem of identity. The
sources of this crisis, and the alienation it produces,
undermine his will and his courage to create. He cannot
forge authentically either music or the identity that music
uniquely expresses.
Carpentier's text is heterogeneous or synthetic, com-
2
bining autobiography, epic medieval romance and myth.
But the narrative method of Los pasos perdidos illustrates
and emphasizes the essential features of the modern con
fessional novel combined with the archetypally educational
journey of the quest. Just as the structure of the
external journey provides the outer stimuli for the inner
transformation that ultimately occurs, the important
13
function of the confessional form, then, is the discerned
need of the protagonist to reestablish contact with his
true self, to piece together the fragmented elements of his
life by restructuring his past through the process of mem
ory. Divided into thirty-nine episodes which constitute
six separate chapters, the novel's first two chapters are
the most crucial for establishing the basic conflicts, the
sources of these conflicts, and for identifying the narra
tive with the confessional tradition. Before proceeding
any further, however, a few remarks on the confessional
genre are necessary.
As a form of autobiography, the confessional tradition
in Western literature extends as far back as St. Augus
tine's Confessions. Augustine proclaims that true knowl
edge can only be gained by first turning inward, by the
process of self-confrontation; and his narrative opens the
way for, in the words of William Barrett, the "interioriza-
tion of experience" that is strikingly similar to the self-
3
examination of the modern confessor. It is with Rousseau
that the secular and Romantic form is established (although
writers and works as separate in time and intention as
Montaigue's Essays, Gogol's "Diary of a Madman,"
Lermontov's A Herd of Our Time, and De Quincey's Cortfes-
fessions of an English Opium Eater have contributed sig
nificantly to the evolution of the genre). However, as
students of the confessional novel have noted,
14
Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground represents a major
development of the genre. Dostoyevsky rejects the optimism
of the Romantic confessional and emphasizes the suffering
4
that is inherent in self-discovery.
From Dostoyevsky on, the central characteristic of the
contemporary confessional novel is the anguish of a dis
illusioned narrator-protagonist whose pain originates as
much in the chaos within the self as in the chaos of the
external world. For such a protagonist the needed sense of
order can only come from the achievement of a self-
understanding, of self-identity. The confession, then,
which usually assumes the form of a journal, becomes the
means by which the protagonist undertakes his search for
perception through self-confrontation. The journal (or
diary) of the essentially passive hero becomes the mirror
into which the "confessor" peers to examine his values, his
past, and his innermost thoughts. It also constitutes the
means by which he seeks to achieve some degree of freedom
5
from suffering, for he lives in a constant state of
anxiety. Although usually in disagreement with the status
quo, he prefers self-doubt and self-criticism to rebellion.
His confession usually begins in a setting and atmosphere
appropriate to the feelings and emotions he is
experiencing— an underground den, a cell or, the contempo
rary equivalent, the apocalyptic world of the polluted,
crisis-ridden modern city. Events appear in the journal
15
(1) because they are of importance to the narrator's con
tradictory sense of self (2) because they are prompted by
external forces and experiences, or, more importantly (3)
because of compulsions within the narrator-protagonist1s
psyche. The two most important narrative techniques which
identify the form are the use of "the double" and the use
6
of irony. The double functions as a "mirror symbol," a
means for the narrator to perceive himself; and irony is
used to establish distance between the narrating author and
the narrating protagonist. It helps to maintain the
7
"author's detachment from the hero."
Carpentier gives us an early indication of the narra
tor's inner turmoil and anguish in the novel when the
protagonist runs into his former music teacher, the Curator.
When the latter asks about the protagonist's music
research, the protagonist loses his temper and screams
loudly " lEstoy vacio! IVacio! iVacxo!"(p. 26). But he
quickly perceives the disparity between his emotional out
burst and the impassive coolness of this figure from his
past. The recognition of this ironic contrast— and perhaps
the need to explain it— prompts him to reveal to his former
teacher the chaos of his life. The revelation is a confes
sion, one that reflects a hazy mixture of guilt, suffering,
and paradox. As he himself admits:
> •
Y asi como el pecador vuelca ante el confesionario
el saco negro de sus iniquidades y
16
concupiscencias— llevado por una suerte de
euforia de hablar raal de si mismo que alcanza el
anhelo de execracion— , pinto a mi maestro, con
los mas sucios colores, con los mas feos betunes,
la inutilidad de mi vida, su aturdimiento durante
el dia, su inconsciencia durante la noche. (B.
26)
This disclosure establishes the compulsive nature of the
protagonist's confession and in turn the degree of dispair
to which his alienation has driven him. Moreover, the con
fession reflects his affliction— his disgust with the times
and civilization into which he has been thrown. It is his
response to being driven by forces beyond his control,
forces which have caused alienation from his self by under
mining his cultural and artistic sense of identity.
The opening passages of the narrative offer the earli
est and most direct evidence of the protagonist's internal
suffering. The "unheroic hero's” consciousness is dis
located in time and space:
Hacia cuatro anos y siete meses que no habia
vuelto a ver la casa de columnas blancas, con su
fronton de cenudas molduras que le daban una
severidad de palacio de justicia, y ahora, ante
muebles y trastos colocados en su lugar i
invariable, tenia la casi penosa sensacion de que
el tiempo se hubiera revertido. Cerca del farol,
la cortina de color vino; donde trepaba el rosal,
la jaula vacia. Mas alia estaban los olmos que
yo habia ayudado a plantar en los dias del
entusiasmo primero. Cuando todos colaborabamos
en la obra comun; junto al tronco escamado, el
banco de piedra que hice sonar a madera de un
taconazo. Detras, el camino del rio, con sus
magnolias enanas, y la verja enrevesada en
grabatos, al estilo de la Nueva Orleans. Como la
17
primera noche, anduve por el soportal, oyendo la
misma resonancia hueca bajo mis pasos ....
(P. 9)
His life, we soon discover, is slowly and imperceptibly
g
beginning to slip away from him. He has begun a diary in
order to stabilize his sense of existence: in it the text,
9
the drama of his life, unfolds. The opening scene with
its theatrical setting draws attention to that drama, to
the script in the making, and to the self-conscious,"self-
ref lexive"nature of the narrative.^ However, it is not
until some twenty-one lines into the novel that we realize
the protagonist has actually returned to a theatre to begin
the narrative of his personal existence: "A tiempo sail
de la luz, pues sono el disparo del cazador y un pajaro
eayo en escena desde el segundo tercio de bambalinas" (p.
9). Only now are we able to identify the temporal and
spatial dimensions of the narrative. The importance of
11
this maneuver cannot be overemphasized. It establishes
important links between the external and the internal:
between the external world and the narrator's conscious
ness; between the narrator's personal sense of being
"encaged" and his need to compete for Ruth with "el vasto
mundo del Drama" which has all but imprisoned her. The
stage also provides a "microcosmic" image of the larger
social and cultural worlds from which the protagonist feels
equally estranged. The stage, the theatre, life as dramatic
18
role and script, then, is the initial metaphor that medi
ates between the internal and the external: it serves as
a mirror of the one to the other. The protagonist, like
Ruth, has been merely playing (and his narrative now
interpreting) a role upon a stage— a role which no longer
has any personal value or importance. He has been merely
repeating, acting out meaningless gestures which remained
unfulfilling and with which he can no longer identify.
Thus the sense of disorientation in time and space belies
12
the simplicity of the "retrospective nostalgia" which
forms the basic structure of the confessional narrative
method. It not only establishes one of the many "reflec-
13
tors" used by Carpentier to externalize the inferiority
of the narrating consciousness; it also indicates early in
the novel the important literal and symbolic relations
between internal and external realities. For the protag
onist’s act of confession, like the "act of autobiography
and the act of poetry, both as creation and as recreation,
constitute[s] a bringing to consciousness of the nature of
one's own existence, transforming the mere fact of exis
tence into a realized quality and a possible meaning.” All
14
are "definitions of the self at a moment and in a place."
In the beginning of the novel the "moment" and the "place"
are intentionally obscure and indefinite. This obscurity
mirrors the image of a world in flux— a world in the pro
cess of disintegration.^^
19
Just as the theatrical setting reflects the chaos of
the protagonist's internal life, so too does his urban
existence help us to understand his alienation and his
artistic impotence at the beginning of the novel. Several
aspects of his life in the city contribute to his isolation
and alienation. His marriage is unstable and so is his
relationship with Mouche, his mistress. He is alienated
from the artistic and intellectual society of the city; he
is unhappy with his work. And having been exiled from the
land of his birth, he is separated from the language and
culture of his infancy.
The narrator understands the nullifying effect of his
experiences upon him. He speaks of the city as that place
of "perenne anonimato dentro de la multitud, de la eterna
prisa, donde los ajos solo se encontraban por casualidad,
y la sonrisa, cuando era de un desconocido, siempre
ocultaba una proposicion” (p. 34). His statement empha
sizes the narrator's essential loneliness and the infre-
16
quency of meaningful human contact. Secondly, it links
the anonymous identity of the narrator with the alienating
circumstances of his setting, suggesting that his lack of
identity derives at least in part from his inability to
withstand absorption by his sterile and hurried environ-
17
ment. For in spite of the presence of Ruth in his life,
he is isolated from any significant or rewarding form of
intimacy. His earliest references to his marriage indicate
20
clearly the degree to which that estrangement is dependent
upon the unnatural rhythms of his wife's theatrical career.
Trapped by her job, a part in a play originally expected to
run for no more than a month, but now approaching its fifth
complete year, Ruth is caught in "una carcel donde
cumpliera una condena perpetua" (p. 12). And because of
their incompatible hours, their marriage has been reduced
to "la Convivencia del Septimo Dia." Both of them have
been forced to subordinate their emotional and physical
needs to the demands of the play. As a result, their
marriage, like the repetitive "automatismo" of her job, has
become a meaningless ritual, an act primarily motivated by
contractual obligation. Yet he is unwilling or unable to
sustain himself indefinitely through the reenactment of
this routine, so he rebels by taking a mistress. Thus,
both husband and wife "play" at marriage until Ruth aban
dons the domestic playhouse to go on tour with her company,
preferring her role as Arabella to that of wife on the
Seventh Day. Both husband and wife are guilty of acting in
what Jean-Paul Sartre calls "bad faith": Ruth in her
18
willingness to depart, the narrator in his infidelity.
But his affair with Mouche is really no more
meaningful— although perhaps, in the long-run, more
rewarding— than his marriage. It does not solve his actual
needs. From the protagonist's point of view, however,
Mouche offers an escape from his marital frustrations and a
21
temporary release from that perennial fatigue of his urban
life. She is, in other words, the physical refuge of his
spiritual and emotional longings, an acquired and important
part of his nocturnal life but an aspect of his existence
about which he feels a strong ambivalence. Spiritual com
patibility is the least important element of their rela
tionship .
La habia conocido dos anos antes, durante una de
las tontas ausencias profesionales de Ruth, y
aunque mis noches se iniciaron o terminaran en Su
lecho, entre nosotros se decian muy pocas frases
de cariiio. Reniamos, a veces, de tremenda
manera, para abrazarnos luego con ira, mientras
las caras, tan cercanas que no podxan verse,
intercambiaban injurias que la reconciliaeion de
los cuerpos iba transformando en crudas alabanzas
del placer recibido. (Pp. 29-30)
On the one hand, he maintains an attitude of intellectual
superiority to Mouche. On the other hand, however, he
envies in her life that which he perceives to be absent
from his own— self-control. Mouche is, in spite of her
superficiality, "duena de su tiempo. She exercises a
desired autonomy. Unlike the narrator who describes him
self as chained among the clocks and metronomes of his
windowless rooms, Mouche's pseudo-intellectual enterprises
have nevertheless given her studio "una util singularidad"
which translated itself into money. And they have given
Mouche herself a degree of independence and freedom to
pursue personally meaningful interests that the narrator
has been unable to acquire.
22
In the early sections of the novel her autonomy under
lines the protagonist's contrasting enslavement to the
lifeless world of the city. It is Mouche who dominates
the relationship; and it is her "anhelo de evasion" that
responds to "la llamada de lo desconocido" (p. 35). It is
also Mouche who, excited by the possibility of adventure,
intrudes significantly upon Ruth's influence over the
narrator and exerts her will against his initial refusal to
leave— even though her plan to accept the university's
subsidy to search for primitive musical instruments
requires falsification and deceipt. Therefore, although
"problematic," her relationship to the protagonist is a
20
crucial one. By urging his journey, she forces his
encounter with Rosario and, ultimately, with his identity.
The urban milieu being her "natural" environment, she is
the central force in the narrator's life outside of the
limited realm of his marriage.
Nevertheless, Mouche's pseudo-intellectual pursuits
and the social contexts in which they thrive mirror the
urban world from which he is alienated:
Y a gritos hablabamos todos cuando un "jHalt!"
energico, arrojado desde la entrada, por una voz
de bajo, inmovilizo a cada cual, como figura de
museo de cera, en el gesto esbozado, a la media
palabra pronunciada, en el aliento de devolver
una bocanada de humo. Unos estaban detenidos en
el arsis de un paso; otros tenian su copa en el
aire a medio camino entre la mesa y la boca.
("Yo so yo. Estoy sentado en un divan. Iba a
rascar un fosforo sobre el esmeril de la caja.
23
Los dados de Hugo me habian recordado el verso de
Mallarme. Pero mis manos iban a eneender un
fosforo sin mandato de mi conciencia. Luego,
estaba dormido. Dormido como todos los que me
rodean.") Sono otro mandato del recien llegado,
y cada cual concluyo la frase, el ademan, el paso
que hubiera quedado en suspenso. (P. 33)
The narrator is aware of himself as an uncommitted actor in
a bizarre drama of intellectual charades performed in the
implacable setup of the modern city. Moreover, his criti
cal perception of their desperate but ineffective antics
only heightens the awareness of the insipidity of his
existence. In other words, they become a reflector of his
21
isolation and self-alienation. In an ironically self-
revealing commentary on the group's behavior he notes:
Mouche y sus amigos pretendian llegar conello a
un mayor dominio de si mismos y adquirir unos
poderes que siempre me resultaban problematicos,
sobre todo en gente que bebxa diariamente para
defenderse contra el desaliento, las congojas del
fracaso, el descontento de si mismos, el miedo al
rechazo de un manuscrito o la dureza, simplemente,
de aquella ciudad del perenne anonimato dentro
de la multitud .... (Pp. 33-34)22
Not unlike the typical Sartrean hero who finds himself
"surrounded by mirrors that he himself welcomes as instru-
23
ments of self-torture," the narrator's shrewd perceptions
of others serve the important function of ironic self-
24
commentary. In his disdainful reflections on others, the
protagonist of Los pasos perdidos presents an unflattering
image of himself. This ironic commentary nevertheless
24
implies a relationship in which there is a paradoxical
need. On the one hand, he desires to communicate and to
find support for his identify as artist-intellectual in
their midst. And, on the other hand, he needs to disengage
himself from their inauthentic behavior. Thus, the ques
tion of his alienation is related to the problem of authen-
.. .. 25
ticity.
Significantly the narrator compares Mouche1s misguided
friends with "los mercaderes" and "los negociantes" for
whom he labors daily (p. 34). The issue of work for the
narrator is a crucial one and central to an understanding
of his crisis of identity. As a music composer whose
entire daily effort amounts to publicity designed to sell
commercial products, the protagonist's creative impulse has
been reduced to a monetary enterprise. Imprisoned between
the memory of his youthful artistic hopes and the reality
of his stifling daily routine, his disillusionment engen
ders constant frustration and feelings of guilt. Without
the freedom of time or "la continuidad de propdsitos
exigida por la creacion" (p. 24), he has become trapped,
like Ruth, in meaningless labor. (The recognized emblem of
this "automatismo" is the image of suffering Sisyphus.)
Unable or, more precisely, unwilling to rebel against these
circumstances, husband and wife have become victims of the
very commercial success they earlier so ardently had hoped
would provide "un medio de evasion" and a cushion against
the asphalt jungle of the city. os.
Prior to his military service during the war— an
experience which his former teacher, the Curator, later
declares, "tested" his physical endurance— the protagonist
informs us that he had creative ambitions. One of these
was the writing of a cantata based on Prometheus Unbound.
After his return, however, he felt "tan distinto" that the
work never progressed beyond the finished prelude and the
first draft of the opening. He drifted into the drudgery
of studio work, an activity that so saturated him with bad
music used for detestable purposes that he sought release
in drugs and sexual excesses. Nevertheless, the narrator
maintains a nostalgic desire for the experience of freedom
and the authority over Time offered by musical forms. For
in music, as he tells us, the artist solidifies time so
that one can speak of "un tiempo hecho casi objeto por el
sometimiento a encuadres de fuga a de forma sonata" (p.
20). In other words, the composer of "good music" does not
relinquish his authority over Time at his demise. For the
narrator, however, such thoughts only increase his frus
tration and alienation. Since in his view the successful
expression of the artist’s creative will is a meaningful
(read: nonalienated, self-recreating, self-affirming,
self-identifying) labor which places him beyond the normal
human limitations, this condition is in direct opposition
to his own. His use of music, on the contrary, reveals
him to be subjected equally to the tyranny of Time and the
26
uncertainties of economics. Thus denied to him is the
sense of fulfillment and transcendence, derived from the
creative use of his imagination in musical composition,
which should carry him over the chasm that separates those
who merely consume from those who create. Instead, it
26
becomes a constant reminder of his "Loss of self.1' The
protagonist's practice of composition, in other words, is
competitive, economic- and product-oriented.
Therefore, the spiritual anxiety with which he
struggles has its roots deeply embeded in the problem of
his work-— the involuntary repetition of a meaningless
activity that his artistic self perceives as completely
inauthentic. Moreover, the ironic parallel with Ruth's
creative efforts reinforces the theme of dehumanization
and alienation as a consequence of urban industrial
27
society. As the narrator tells us: "Habxamos caido en
la era del Hombre-Avispa, del Hombre-Ninguno, en que las
almas no se vendian al Diablo, sino al Contable o al
Comitre" (p. 15). Husband, like wife, has taken a job
which feeds his stomach but leaves his soul untouched.
Like Ruth's "successful"•play, the narrator's commercial
successes have not diminished his experience of alienation
through creative fulfillment but, on the contrary, ironi-
28
cally, have increased it. Such "objectification" through
labor is a crucial source of the protagonist's alienated
29
identity. (Consequently, one of the major objectives of
27
his quest will be his disalienation as creative artist;
that is, his renewed ability and, more importantly, will
to meaningfully create.)
Equally important as his occupational, social, intel
lectual, marital and extra-marital relations in connection
with his problem of identity are those events from the
narrator's past which shaped or determined his limited
consciousness of self. Revealed by the narrator's almost
obsessive concern, the most crucial of these— including
his early years spent in a Latin American atmosphere, his
move to Europe and subsequent return to America; his early
artistic ambitions and their interruption by the war,
throwing him onto a continent in ruins— is exile from his
native land and the consequent separation from the language
of his childhood. Although the theme of exile is a recur-
30
rent one in Carpentier's fiction from 1939 on, in Los
pasos perdidos it is interwoven not only with the thematic
but also with the structural development of the narrative
through the psychic-spiritual evolution of the protagonist.
The narrator's self-conscious anxiety (what he refers to as
"mi verguenza") is associated with the separation from a
cultural matrix. It is the consciousness of an uprooting
which has left him at odds with his essential self. The
medium through which the awareness of this crucial psychic
disruption remains painfully present, moreover, is lan
guage. That is, whether perusing a Spanish edition of the
28
Lives of the Saints or aimlessly walking the streets and
glancing into bookstore windows, the narrator is constantly
mindful of the language he spoke in his infancy and through
which he learned to read and to "sol-fa"— the language that
has become a "herramienta inutil" (p. 46) in a country far
31
from the land of his childhood. Repeatedly he makes the
same point: "Un doloroso amargor se hincho en mi garganta
al evocar, a traves del idioma de mi infancia, demasiadas
cosas juntas" (p. 17).
Since language, as ah aspect of culture, is a part of
the machinery by which we code the sense of ourselves,
since it is a tool which helps us to organize and to give
meaning to our perceptions of the world and to define our
relation to it, it has a special importance for the dis
covery of identity. For the protagonist, who has been
forced to abandon the language of his childhood, the lan
guage on which much of his past hinges, the separation from
•4
his "mother tongue" is a primary factor contributing to
the intensity of his alienation. "A man who repudiates his
language for another," writes E. M. Cioran, "changes his
identity, even his disappointments. Heroic apostate, he
breaks with his memories and, to a certain point, with him-
3 2
self." Thus it is no coincidence that the narrator
experiences "shame" ("verguenza") in the form of a
heightened self-consciousness. However, aside from being
"characteristically painful," shame, in relation to
29
identity, may serve the important function of interrupting
an "unaware sense of oneself" and lead in the direction of
33
a positive experience of self. Therefore, the exile's
physical return to the continent of his birth provides the
plausible means by which the narrative and the process of
self-confrontation and discovery become possible. In other
words, it is through the reacquisition of his native
tongue, Spanish, that they become one and the same. The
narrator tells us:
Mientras los cambios de altitud, la limpidez del
aire, el trastorno de las costumbres, el
reencuentro con el idioma de mi infancia^ estaban
operando en mi una especie de regreso, aun
vacilante pero ya sensible, a un equilibrio
perdido hacia mucho tiempo . . . . (P. 73)
As Alan Cheuse has observed:
Thus, it is precisely by reeducating himself in
Spanish that he recaptures the elegiaic quality
of human experience, that reflexive, self-
conscious recollection of the past in the present
moment which allows the thinker or the artist to
create memorable notations for future genera-
t ions.^
It is in the confession that the conflicts and confusion
are resolved; for, consistent with the genre, it is in the
telling, the recollective process, that the full
35
perception— negative or positive— is achieved.
Moreover (and Cheuse’s remarks come close to articu
lating it), Carpentier presents a complex arrangement of
30
events in his protagonist's confession. Present self-
knowledge and former self-deception are juxtaposed in such
a manner that the protagonist's narrative viewpoint inte
grates different moments of experience within the narrative
design. It is an integration that allows the reader to
follow the narrator's development on a linear, sequential
pattern based on the chronos of the journal— the protagon
ist's autobiographical consciousness— which consistently
associates past with present while anticipating the future.
Furthermore, it culminates in a highly intricate fusion of
all these into a continuous single moment of complex
awareness. The narrator's alienation from himself, there
fore, is a necessary precondition for that analysis and
vision which constitute his confession. "He is, in a
sense"— like St. Augustine— "fallen, and the call to a
re-entry into a state of grace comes from deep inside his
36
memory." Through what Ernst Cassirer terms "symbolic
memory," the "process by which man not only repeates his
past experience but also reconstructs this experience,"
37
the narrator confronts himself. The problem of urban
38
alienation and exile (or "uprootedness"), then, combine
with fear as the initial conditions for the protagonist's
reconstruction of the past and his search for identity
through confession.
As the confessional hero seeks his identity through
the reconstruction of his past, there emerges inevitably an
31
awareness of a former self— an aspect of his identity which
contradicts his present conscious mode of self-perception
and which represents the essential duality of his personal-
39
ity. In some instances this other or "second self"
appears as an internal or "latent double"; in others, a
40
physical presence or "manifest double." However, taking
into account the extreme importance generally of the other
as mirror of the self and the fact that the act of confes-
41
sion is, fundamentally, a dialogue, it seems safe to postu
late the presence of both (latent and manifest) in any
confessional narrative. More important, however, is the
fact that the presence of this characteristic and unifying
42
trait of the confessional signifies the result of the
43
decomposition or fragmentation of the narrator's psyche.
It is a fragmentation or self-division that, when recog-i
nized, "arouses the need for self-knowledge and sets in
44
motion the adventure of self-meeting."
We encounter the earliest extensive expression of this
sense of an inward division or twofoldness following the
protagonist's anguished admission to the Curator of his
deep-felt emptiness:
A tal punto me hunden mis palabras, como dichas
por otro, por un juez que yo llevara dentro sin
saberlo y se valiera de mis propios medios
fxsicos para expresarse, que me aterro, al oirme,
de lo difxcil que es volver a ser hombre cuando
se ha dejado de ser hombre. Entre el Yo presente
y el Yo que hubiera aspirado a ser algun dxa se
ahondaba en tinieblas el foso de los anos
32
perdidos. Parecia ahora que yo estuviera callado
y el juez siguiera hablando por mi boca. En un
solo cuerpo convivlamos, el y yo, sostenidos por
una arquitectura oculta que era ya, en vida
nuestra, en carne nuestra, presencia de nuestra
muerte. (Pp. 26-27)
In the reflection of the Curator's mirror he views with
dismay the contradiction that he has become. The painful
discord within himself, associated with the figures of "el
Libertino" and "el Predicador" and represented by the two
opposing "yo" 's, embodies the alienated self that he really
is against a self that he would like to be or, at least,
might have been. This is the potential hinted at earlier
when he remarks, "Ruth y yo hubieramos destrozado, con
nuestra fuga, la existencia de un hombre excelente” (p.
24). And later, identifying these selves by more specific
images, he notes:
El personaje lleno de reproches y de razones
amargas que yo habia visto aparecer horas antes
en el espejo barroco del Curador para vaciarme de
cenizas. La necesidad de revisar los equipos de
sincronizacion y de acomodar nuevos locales
revestidos de materias aislantes propiciaba, al
comienzo de cada verano, ese encuentro que pro-
movia un cambio de carga, pues donde arrojaba mi
piedra de Sxsifo se me montaba el otro en el
hombro todavia desollado, y no sabria decir si,
a veces, no llegaba a preferir el peso del
basalto al peso del juez. (P. 37)
Here the duality and inner conflict become clearly person
ified in the images of the selves associated with
45
"Sisyphus" and "the judge" or Doppelganger. This refer
ence forces us to recognize that the protagonist is "a man
33
of intelligence and discrimination" who has a "compulsive
impulse to codify and arrange his experience in symbolic
46
fashion, and a certain passion for self-dramatization."
On another level, such symbolic projection underscores the
typical propensity of confessional narrators for literary
allusions and further implies authorial identification with
narrators such as Roquentin, Joseph K, and Meursault.
The narrator's self-conscious identification with
Sisyphus is appropriately revealing as an emblem of his
present alienated self. However, it is "the judge" within
who constantly gnaws at the base of his being and with whom
the confessor identifies the intensity of the anguish from
which he can find no respite. The conjunction of these
two selves represents the divided existence that the narra
tor suffers: on the one hand, the human Sisyphus whose
rock at various times is Ruth, Mouche, the physical and
intellectual pitfalls of urban life, and the anxiety and
hollowness of cultural alienation; and, on the other, the
artiste manque— shadow of the spiritual aspirations of the
would-be composer of meaningful music whose unrealized
potentiality has become a persistent source of anguish.
Moreover, the psychic fragmentation represented by the
doubling, the theme of the multiple self, is underscored by
Carpentier's "secret architecture"— the deft stylistic
ploy which emphasizes the various selves of the narrator-
protagonist as a "succession of predicates attached by
34
linguistic convention to the unassertive 'I' of the narra-
47
tive." In other words, from the very first sentence of
the novel, the narrative incorporates an ambiguity of
person (detectable only in the original Spanish of the
narrator's "infancia") which, reinforced by the use of the
verbs "hacer" and "tener" in the third-person singular
impersonal form of the imperfect tense, sustains a "confu
sion" or uncertainty that corresponds to the central prob
lem of the novel— identity. Looking again at the first
few lines of the novel will help to illustrate this point:
Hacia quatro anos y siete meses que no habia
vuelto a ver la casa de columnas blancas, con su
fronton de cenudas molduras que le daban una
severidad de palacio de justicia, y ahora, ante
muebles y trastqs colocados en su lugar
invariable, tenia la casi penosa sensacion de que
el tiempo se hubiera revertido. (P. 9)
Since the verb forms (underlined) of the first-person and
third-person singular imperfect are identical, the ambigu
ity (that is, two possibilities: "I" or "He"; "Yo" or
"El") makes it initially "impossible to determine if some
one is speaking about himself or about another person. In
a sense, as Roberto Gonzalez-Echeverria notes:
the thread of the whole novel runs through this
sentence, which encompasses the circulation of
the narrating self between first and third person
and the displacement between an indeterminate
past (hacia) and the present (ahora), all in one
syntactical period. In the novel this lack of
identity of the narrator-protagonist is indicated,
of course, by his remaining nameless, and the
35
shifting temporality of the text by the fact that
the reader . . . never knows just when the
narrator has set down what he is reading. These
unknowns also preclude the possibility of con
sidering the text "finished." The narrator is
that space between the "I" and the "He" and
between then and now. . . . This lack of center
generates the baroqueness of Carpentier's style—
the excessive accumulation of predicates attempt
ing to define an ever fleeting subject— and the
repetitiveness and open-ended nature of the
text.
On the other hand, E. G. Gonzalez (who has written of Los
pasos perdidos that it is "one of the most ambitious
novelistic attempts produced by Latin American literature")
considers the "reflexive distance" or activity and its
persistence in the work as illustrative of the "essential
fragmentation of man as a subject before things and before
his own being. A fragmentation," he adds, "which is
temporally and illusorily suspended by means of the crea-
49
tive act." Both of these points of view, of course,
coincide with and emphasize the confessional nature of the
narrative; that is, just as the element of confusion in
the first-person narrator of Los pasos perdidos suggests
its function as a cathartic, the central duality and con
tradiction of the protagonist's personality lies in that
juxtaposition of the two I's. In other words, paradoxi
cally, the dichotomy represented by the duplication or
doubling provides the possibility for the creation of a new
being, a new awareness and self-perception— the true pur
pose of the confession— through language, through the act
36
of narration. The conflict, then, allows for the ultimate
emergence of what the narrator eventually terms "nuevos
testimonios tangibles en plena conciencia de lo hecho hasta
hoy" (p. 286).
In the passage quoted above in which the narrator's
perception of himself in the Curator's baroque frame mirror
provokes a recognition of his "secret sharer," the close
association between the function of the internal double and
that of the mirror is established. Less complex and subtle
but no less important to the confessor's progress toward
self-confrontation and understanding is the presence of the
external or "manifest double"— the figure whose words and
experiences mirror or reflect aspects of the narrator's
existence and whose presence or fate forces the protagonist
to recognize certain things about himself.
In Sartre's Nausea this feature of the confessional
genre is presented in the "Self-Taught Man" whom Roquentin
meets in the Bouville library and whose naive and provin
cial humanism furthers his own recognition of the valueless
nature of the "historian's trade." This recognition pro
vokes his eventual search for personal freedom through the
50
discovery of his true vocation. Largely as a result of
his observations of and dialogues with this autodidact,
Roquentin comes to realize that he must go beyond "vicari
ous participation" in the life of M. Rollebon (the subject
of his historical research) and turn to the creation of his
37
51
own "adventure." Similarly, in Andre Gide’s Immoral1st
(1902)— a confessional novel that Henri Peyre describes as
"the portrayal of the individualist who breaks free from
his past, from his education, and from his environment and
52
asserts his determination to live authentically"
53
Menalque "accelerates" Michel’s self-perception and
awareness and, more importantly, the resolution of the
internal conflict from which his confession derives.
Reflecting upon the occasion of his renewed contact
with this figure from his past, one to whom he had never
taken a particular liking, Michel contrasts his own bookish
pursuits with the experiential focus of Menalque’s life:
"But how pale the phrases became, alas, in the face of
action! Was not Menalque's life, his slightest gesture, a
54
thousand times more eloquent than my learning?"
Menalque's relation to the narrator serves the purpose of
illuminating certain suppressed facets of his identity and
55
of the portrayal of important elements of his confession.
This conscious identification is crucial to the confes
sional hero's development. In Los pasos perdidos the
character whose presence or fate most clearly serves this
function is Nicasio, the leper.
The protagonist's identification with Nicasio comes
at the most critical point in the novel and, in fact,
significantly influences his ultimate destiny: his con
scious decision to return to the urban world and to resume
38
56
the labors of Sisyphus. As we have seen, one of the
sources of the narrator's alienation is his sense of iso
lation: his inability to genuinely feel a part of a com
munity. Towards the end of the novel (having united with
Rosario, the maternal telluric goddess of this city of the
future), the narrator appears on the threshold of entry
into a new society headed by its founder, the Adelantado.
However, while working on the musical composition he has
undertaken and beginning to imagine what his life will be
like once Rosario conceives the child she is carrying, a
fearful outcry brings his thoughts and his new life to an
abrupt halt. Nicasio's attempted rape of a young girl and
the narrator's enlistment in a search-party bring about
57
"the terrible test the story has been leading up to.
Forced to remain outside the settlement, the leper (is),
like the narrator (Was), an outcast— unable to feel a part
of a communal whole. The narrator's identification with
him, moreover, is suggested by the sympathy he exhibits
upon Nicasio's first appearance:
Se ahora que he visto a Nicasio, un buscador de
oro a quien el Adelantado encontro aqux a"l
llegar, ya muy enfermo, y que vive en una caverna
distante, esperando una muerte que le tiene
demasiado olvidado. (P. 234)
The identification becomes more pronounced once the search-
party, led by the Adelantado's son, Marcos, discovers the
fugitive kneeling in the middle of a clearing, gazing at
39
them imploringly, pleading for his life. When the narrator
cannot follow Marcos' command to shoot Nicasio in the face
with the rifle he has given him, Marcos, who has earlier
chased the leper away, shows neither patience, guilt nor
mercy. Infuriated, he snatches the instrument of death and
kills Nicasio, deprecating the protagonist's will to
action. The narrator's inability to kill the leper is in
part related to his past war experiences. Equally influ
ential, however, is the protagonist's awareness at this
point in his adventure that his newly found identity as
Creator-Composer is opposed to that of Executioner-
Destroyer: "Hay actos que levantan muros, cipos, deslindes,
en una existencia. Y yo tenia miedo al tiempo que se
iniciaria para mi a partir del segundo en que yo me hiciera
Ejecutor" (p. 238). More significant, however, is his
recognition of himself in the eyes of Nicasio, who asks for
nothing but the right to confess— to be allowed to re-enter
the human community through purgation before dying. But
just as Marcos insists on shooting the leper in the face,
he is equally insistent in his denial. What disturbs the
protagonist, however, is the mirroring eyes. For a close
look into them shows his own face. The identification
between the two is further established by the mutual act
of confession:
"Apunta a la cara," me dijo Marcos. Levante el
arma y puse la mira al nivel del agujero que se
40
hundxa en el semblante del miserable. Pero mi
dedo no se decidxa a hacer presion sobre el
gatillo. De la garganta de Nicasio salia una
palabra ininteligible, que era algo asx como:
"onjejion . . . onjejion . . . onjejion." Baje
el arma: lo que pedxa el criminal^era la
confesion antes de morir. Me volvi hacia Marcos.
"Dispara— apremio— . Mas vale que el cura no se
meta en esto. Volvx a apuntar, Pero habxa dos
ojos ahx: dos ofos sin parpados, casi sin vida,
que secjuxan mirando. De la presion de mi dedo
dependia apagarlos. Apagar dos ojos. Dos ojos
de hombre. (P. 238)
Although from the community’s point of view Nicasio*s vio
lation of the young girl represents the encroaching forces
of death and, therefore, must be battled instinctively, in
relation to the protogonist's search for identity the death
58
of "ese Lazarino" (p. 237) has an entirely different
meaning. Like the Self-Taught Man in whose condition
Roquentin is able to see the limits of his own life or,
conversely, Menalque, whose freedom challenges Michel to
discover the unlimited possibilities of his own existence,
the execution of Nicasio, the would-be confessor and social
outcast, unveils to the narrator certain aspects of his
newly discovered community and his relationship to it.
The protagonist finds his crime repugnant yet attribu
table to all men because of their nature ("es como si yo,
el hombre, todos los hombres, fudsemos igualmente culpables
del repugnante intento, por el mero hecho de que la
posesion, aun consentida, pone al varon en actitud
agresiva" p. 237). It provokes a kind of Joycean epiphany.
41
For the protagonist who has lost faith in the possibility
of discovering a future Utopia and lost faith in the
unfilfilled promises of Art (especially as represented by
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with its unconsciously ironic
choral conclusion), the Valley Where Time Had Stopped ("El
valle del Tiempo Detenido") represents a resurrection of
that hope. However, in this "fundamental episode" the
protagonist realizes that his participation in this
murder— however much justifiable from the community's point
of view— would return him to the barbarism of the modern
world from which he is trying to escape. Thus his inabil
ity to kill makes it clear to him (and to us) that he does
59
not belong to this "Arcadian world."
In surrendering the rifle to Marcos, then, the pro
tagonist also surrenders Rosario and her world. Following
immediately upon the execution, the protagonist decides to
leave, ostensibly to procure paper that will allow for the
completion of his musical composition. Below the surface,
revealed in the eyes of the sacrificed Nicasio, however,
lies the true meaning of the telling juxtaposition of the
announcement of Rosario's conception and Nicasio's
attempted rape of a child: the protagonist's true goal and
his authentic role is not in the Valley Where Time Had
Stopped but "back there" in the world of Sisyphus' labors—
back there where the confession will begin and where its
meaning will be clearly understood. It is for this reason
42
that the last sight that the protagonist has, as the rescue
plane moves beyond a thick cloud bank and toward an opa
lescent mist that obscures his vision of everything below,
is that place "Lejos, en el lugar donde cayo Nicasio" and
where "hay un gran revuelo de buitres” (p. 245). Thus at
the center of this important episode is a deep-seated
irony: the crucial act which holds forth the possibility
of full entry into a new community— a true rite of passage
for the protagonist— results instead in his ultimate expul
sion from this false Eden. In this ironic reversal struc
tured around the fate of the hero's double, moreover,
Carpentier reveals a fundamental trait of the narrative's
development. However, the use of irony in the novel is not
limited to this highly dramatic climax. As we shall see
now, irony is also employed effectively for establishing
esthetic distance in his confessional narrative.
Much of the appeal of Los pasos perdidos icomes from
its sense of immediacy and a veracity grounded, as so many
contemporary confessional works are, in "its self-conscious
awareness of itself as a means of arranging the facts of
60
existence." To the degree that Carpentier uses the
familiar set of geographical and topographical elements
that appealed to earlier nineteenth-century and twentieth-
century Latin American writers, Los pasos perdidos follows
an established tradition. However, it significantly
departs from that tradition in that by means of the
43
first-person, confessional approach it arranges the stuff
of life into "a pattern which implies a whole coherent
cosmos behind itself, creates its own set of references,
interior and exterior, and blurs the line that divides the
world of the text from the human world that engendered
g
it" (and, we might add, at times appears to blur the line
that divides the writer-musicologist protagonist from the
writer-musicologist author). There is in the novel, how
ever, that characteristic presence which is "essential in
62
the confessional novel”— aesthetic distance.
This becomes apparent when we consider that, in spite
of Carpentier's numerous devices to maintain the illusion
that what has already happened is happening now, this con
fession is linked to other epistolary (and autobiographical)
narratives not only by the biographical (or pseudo-
biographical) purpose but also by its sharing another
important trait. The narrator is involved in two time
schemes: the time which operates as the narrator records
and comments on his past experiences (what may be called
the "narrator's present") and the time which operated in
that past about which the narrator writes (the "narrative
63
past”). The novel, then, has two basic distances of
narration: (1) that between the narrator and the author
who projects a character whose life shares (not without
certain important reversals) similarities with his own and
(2) that which exists between the protagonist and that
44
which he has written; that is, the
narrator narrates things that he is incapable of
narrating during a voyage, events which for prac
tical reasons of time and convenience created by
traveling down the river and through the jungle,
he could not have written immediately if only
because of the fact that between the experiences
and the act of writing there is the mediation of
a reflexive distance articulated in time and
memory.64
As Roquentin discovers, "one must choose between living or
65
telling"; however, "with narrating everything changes."
And since time is the medium of narration as it is the
medium of life, through the medium of time what we are
makes sense only in terms of what we have become; that is,
in terms of "the objective historical facts together with
the pattern of significant associations constituting the
66
biography or the identity of the self." As the narrator
acknowledges early in the narrative, recalling the cloud
burst that precipitated his encounter with the Curator:
Al cabo de un tiempo cuya medida escapa, ahora, a
mis nociones— por una aparente brevedad de
transcuro en un proceso de dilatacion y
recurrencia que entonces me hubiera sido
insospechable— , recuerdo esas gotas cayendo
sobre mi piel en deleitosos alfilerazos, como si
hubiesen sido la advertencia primera— ininteli-
gible para mi, entonces— del encuentro.
Encuentro trivial, en cierto modo, como son,
aparentemente todos los encuentros cuyo verdadero
significado solo se revelara mas tarde, en el
tejido de sus implicaciones. . . . Debemos
buscar el comienzo de todo, de seguro, en la nube
que revento en lluvia aquella tarde, con tan
inesperada violencia que sus truenos parecian
truenos de otra latitud. (Pp. 18-19)
45
Thus distance is established by the use of multiple dimen
sions (or levels) of narrative time and, as at least one
astute critic has observed, the existence of work (or fic-
67
tion) within a work (or fiction).
Unlike Sartre, who chooses to emphasize this narrative
distance or separation of the confessional narrator from
the author through the use of footnotes that "imply an
impersonal editor separating the hero from both the author
68
and the reader," Carpentier achieves this effect through
a combination of the above mentioned device(s) and, most
importantly, irony. The observations of Roberto Gonz£lez-
Echeverria— who traces the origins of much of the language
and the detailed descriptions of Chapters III and IV to
Robert Schomburgh's Travels in Guiana, 1840-1844—
illuminate this aspect of the novel. Gonzalez-Echeverria
writes:
The addition of Schomburgh’s account of his own
lost steps creates yet another version and begins
to produce a Cervantian kind of composition en
abime— a series of infinitely repeated and reced
ing sequences, evoked in the text by the V's set
within each other that mark the entrance to the
Valley Where Time Had Stopped. This is the kind
of infinite regression that is found within the
novel itself--a novel which is, ostensibly, in
parts that have dates, the travel journal written
by the narrator-protagonist, but which could also
be the newspaper accounts that he plans to write
for profit, or even the novel that he also says
he is writing ["y esto da visos de realidad a la
novela que . . . estoy fraguando"]. (P. 165)®^
Considered together with Gonzalez1 comments concerning the
necessary presence of "una distancia reflexiva,"
Echeverria's discussion of the repeated and receding
sequences of the novel points to Carpentier's subtle reli
ance upon (and effective use of) irony. For just as
Nausea is the novel that Roquentin-Sartre sets out to
write at its own end, Los pasos perdidos, like Joyce's
Portrait of the Artist, is a fulfillment of its own prom
ise; that is, ironically, all three works are their own
records of how they came to be written. However, in the
finished product of Los pasos perdidos, the diary or
travel journal, the potential newspapers accounts, and the
proposed novel flow together, creating a narrative in
which aesthetic distance emerges from the ironic juxtaposi-
70
tion of essay, legend, chronicle and fiction. This syn
thesis (or fusion) becomes apparent at such times as when
the narrator reveals his intention to accept the large sum
of money offered by the newspaper that had brought about
his rescue:
No puedo, en efecto, revelar lo que de mara-
villoso ha tenido mi viaje, puesto que ello
equivaldria a poner los peores visitantes sobre
el rumbo de Santa Monica y del Valle de las
Mesetas. . . . Lo que vendere, pues, es una
patrana que he ido repasando durante el viaje:
prisionero de una tribu mas desconfiada que
cruel, logre fugarme, atravesando, solo,
centenares de kilometros de selva; al fin,
extraviado y hambriento, llegue a la "mision"
donde me encontraron. Tengo en mi maleta una
novela famosa, de un escritor suramericano, en
que se precisan los nombres de animales, de
arboles, refiriendose leyendas indigenas, sucedi-
dos antiguos, y todo lo cecesario para dar un
giro de veracidad a mi relato. (P. 252)
47
So while the narrator feels compelled by thoughts of
his imminent divorce from Ruth to plagiarize the local
color descriptions of a South American writer, ironically,
the actual voyage he made goes undescribed (like the
interior of the continent) until he himself narrates his
confession. This is the narrative the reader holds in his
hands. Moreover, Carpentier's ironic intention becomes
clear when we note the narrator's earlier reference to the
novel he is "forging" (p. 158). The key word in the pas
sage is the verb "fraguar." One meaning is explicit: to
create; and, as in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, the idea
of creation, the theme of the artist as hero, is central
to the novel. But just as the ironic overtones of the
word "forge" at the end of Portrait ("Welcome, 0 Life! I
go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of
experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the
uncreated conscience of my race.”) reveals Joyce's attempt
to establish narrative distance— considering Stephen's
72
pitifully few attempts at artistic creation — the other
possible meaning, stemming from Carpentier's irony, becomes
equally meaningful and important, especially when we con
sider the subsequent events (those mentioned above), the
protagonist's original decision to falsify (to forge) those
"primitive" instruments desired by the Curator, and the
fact that the musical composition he undertakes while at
Santa Monica de los Venados is never completed. In fact, it
48
is not impossible that Carpentier is being deliberately
heavy-handed to emphasize the ironic implications of the
ending: the narrator, like Stephen, is as yet in no posi
tion to "forge"— except in the pejorative sense of the
term.
Therefore, although Carpentier's ironic tone is more
overt in the beginning of the novel (e.g., the narrator's
speaking of his and Ruth's "unparallel lives" when, in
fact, both are alienated for many of the same reasons,
72
etc.), the use of irony is constantly present. It is
always used with telling effect and constitutes a surround
ing aura through which we view the narrator. And this aura
(like the ubiquitous mist that surrounds him once he begins
his journey) does not obscure him. It reveals him. Much
of the initial irony of the novel, however, manifests
itself in the repeated clashes between the narrator's
artistic aspirations and the world of external reality--the
urban contexts of his alienated existence. The implica
tion, as we have seen, is that the world in which he finds
himself submerged— the world he is trying to escape at the
opening of the novel— is no fertile breeding ground for
art or creative endeavor. It is an environment which posi
tions the narrator against himself— a "context" which
forces him to seek relief first in flight then in the act
of retrospective self-confrontation.
Toward the end of his comparative cultural study of
49
"archaic ontology," in a chapter devoted to modern man and
"The Terror of History," Mircea Eliade makes the following
pertinent observation:
Modern man's boasted freedom to make history is
illusory for nearly the whole of the human race.
At most, man is left free to choose between two
positions: (1) to oppose the history that is
being made by the very small minority (and, in
this case, he is free to choose between suicide
and deportation); (2) to take refuge in a sub
human existence or in flight. The "freedom"
that historical existence implies was possible—
and even then within certain limits— at the
beginning of the modern period, but it tends to
become inaccessible as the period becomes more
historical, by which we mean more alien from any
transhistorical m o d e l .
This statement is relevant to Carpentier's works generally,
in which the theme of exile and return fosters a sense of
the eternal recurrence of events, and Los pasos perdidos
in particular, in which the personal pursuit of freedom
takes the form of escape or "flight" (fuga) from a subhuman
existence. As we have already seen, the contexts of the
narrator's urban life, coupled with the effects of
uprootedness, have created a situation in which his normal
existence resembles that of an "automaton." In this con
text, devoid of all natural means for expressing or experi
encing any meaningful sense of the unity of personal life,
the narrator feels unable to change anything in his life.
Like Sartre's Roquentin, the one thing he becomes certain
of is that he is no longer free. In his alienation, how
ever, he lacks that important spirit of rebellion that
50
74
Camus, echoing Nietzsche, called a necessity for change.
Thus, as noted earlier, it is Mouche who forces the gener
ally passive narrator— although not without some
resistance— to seek meaning in "adventure":
Con gran sorpresa mia se me abrazo, clamando que
la noticia era formidable, pues corroboraba el
vaticinio de un sueno reciente en que se viera
volando junto a grandes aves de plumaje azafran,
lo que significaba inequivocamente: enderezar el
equivoco, se entrego a los grandes topicos del
anhelo de evasion, la llamada de lo desconocido,
los encuentros fortuitos, en un tono que algo
debia a los Sirgadores Flechados y las Increibles
Floridas del Barco Ebrio. (P. 35)
The protagonist, who once earlier had made his pilgrimage
to the Europe of his father's memory in search of himself,
concedes to Mouche1s prophetic announcement that "Este
viaje estaba escrito en la pared" (p. 38). In fact, the
constant travels which constitute most of the physical
action of the novel underscore its central theme: for as
well as implying an "escape," travel also suggests a change
in identity, a continual becoming through repeated confron-
75
tation with one's self.
Thus, characteristic of the genre, the repetitive
nature of the journeys (the fact that the narrator dupli
cates his earlier lost steps) allows for the "achieving of
perception incrementally rather than in a single, redemp-
76
tive moment." In Gide's Immoralist, for instance,
Michel's constant excursions to the south— from Paris to
51
Tunis, from Tunis to Biskara and back again— provide the
outer stimuli for the inner metamorphosis that gradually
occurs: "Yet Tunis proved a great surprise. At the con
tact of new sensations, certain parts of myself stirred,
dormant faculties which, not having functioned as yet,
retained all their mysterious youth" (p. 14). And later:
"More than once I thought I would have to stop, give up. I
perspired like a dying man, gasped for breath, repeatedly
lost consciousness. At the end of the third day I reached
Biskra, on the point of death" (p. 20). As Michel's con
stant movement and reflections bring him closer to what he
terms his "authentic being, the old Adam whom the Gospels
no longer accepted," he compares his symbolic death and
self-awakening to the study of a "palimpset," below the
surface of which is an "infinitely more precious ancient
77
text.” However, whereas in The Immoralist the constant
movement of Michel's search for stability represents the
"paradox and hopelessness" of his quest, reflecting his
constant flight from his "barely repressed homosexual
78
drives," in Los pasos perdidos the protagonist's dis
placement in space represents the means by which he estab
lishes renewed contact with the spiritual and creative
sources of his artistic identity. For once the protagonist
again comes into contact with the land of his birth, we
realize that the idea which "obsesses" him ("La btisqueda
de los instrumentos indxgenas," p. 52) is merely the
52
conscious, external manifestation or symbol of a much
deeper, unconscious and more individually profound search
for origins— personal and artistic.
Arriving simultaneously with the outbreak of a revolu
tion in the helter skelter capital with its anarchic lay
out, the protagonist and Mouche descend into a world of
man-made chaos. Thus the movement of the narrator's flight
constitutes and determines the movement of the novel— from
the sterility of the North American urban contexts, to the
Latin American urban "chaos generated by the destructive
forces of dissolution," to the "chaos that precedes the
79
creation of new forms." And it is the protagonist's
ordeal as he moves between these domains that is one of the
main concerns of the novel; that is, "his voyage and quest
80
occupy center stage in Los pasos perdidos." He moves
from a world which is no longer meaningfully directed— the
emblem of which is the futile labors of Sisyphus— to one
in which the mythic image is vital and pedagogic, a world
in which, in Eliade’s words, "the symbol, the myth, the
rite, express, on different planes and through the means
proper to them, a complex system of coherent affirmations
81
about the ultimate reality of things" — about their essen
tial identity.
As a prerequisite to the establishing of any meaning
ful self-awareness, the protagonist must rediscover himself
as a spiritual, creative force through a return to the
53
sources of his artistic identity. With a change in physi
cal environment comes a change in emotional environment and
with it profound revelations and consequences for the com
poser's artistic identity. In other words, his perception
and knowledge of himself are altered not only by the new
context but also by the imaginative impulses— the inner
creative resources— released and stimulated by it. At the
core of this transformation is the protagonist's discovery
of the significance of music. Therefore, we will now turn
to Carpentier's use of the quest myth as a structural
device, allowing the protagonist to flee the present era
and, in the atemporal realm of mythic consciousness,
spiritually regenerate himself through the reenactment of
and identification with the specific sources and meanings
of his cultural and artistic identity.
54
Chapter I Notes
Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos (Mexico:
Compania General de Ediciones, 1959), pp. 252-254. All
further references to this work appear in the text.
2
One of the "problematics" of Los pasos perdidos, as
Roberto Gonzalez-Echeverria has noted, is the relation of
the novel to Carpentier's life: "The anecdotal parallels
between The Lost Steps and Carpentier's life are numerous
and many of them well known, for Carpentier himself has
often drawn them, first and foremost by adding a note to
the novel suggesting that some of the adventures in the
book were experienced by the author." Alejo Carpentier:
The Pilgrim At Home (New York: Cornell University Press,
1977), p. 162. In this study of Carpentier's major works,
Gonzalez-Echeverria argues that the novel is primarily
autobiographical, an exercise in "self-demystification."
3
William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Exis
tential Philosophy (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., Inc.,
1962), pp. 95-96. About Augustine, Barrett writes further:
"Where Plato and Aristotle had asked the question, What is
man? St. Augustine (in the Confessions) asks Who am I?— and
this shift is decisive." See also Eugene Vance, "Augus
tine's Confessions and the Grammar of Selfhood," Genre,
No. 6 (1973), pp. 1-28.
4
Peter Axthelm, The Modern Confessional Novel (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 7. In this
excellent study of the confessional form in the twentieth-
century, Axthelm identifies Gogol as the "forerunner" of
Lermontov, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky. Of Dostoyevsky's
Notes from the Underground, a work which provided a "pre
scription" for the modern confessional genre, he writes:
"Its origins can be seen in reaction to rather than in
derivation from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century confes
sions; it constitutes a biting attack on the optimistic
memoirs of Rousseau and the entire rationalist creed that
man acts for his own best interests. The only previous
confessional work which shows a positive similarity to the
Notes— in its mode of self-examination although not in its
ultimate world-view— is that of St. Augustine” (p. 8). In
Los pasOs perdidos, in addition to references to Montaigne
and Rousseau, there is an allusion to St. Augustine and a
55
direct quotation from the Confessions: "Santa Monica de
los Venados— me advierte fray Pedro— , porque esta es
tierra del venado rojo; y Monica se llamaba la madre del
fundador: Monica, aquella que pario a San Agustin, santa
que fuera mujer de un solo varon, y que por si misma habia
criado a sus hijos" (p. 199). Regarding the confessional
form, see also Eugene Goodhart, The Cult of the Ego: The
Self in Modern Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1968); and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism:
Four Essays (New York: Atheneum Press, 1970), pp. 307-309.
5
Axthelm views the act as deriving from and related
to the traditional religious notion of "purgation or abso
lution through confession." Axthelm, Confessional Novel,
p. 11.
6
Axthelm, Confessional Novel, p. 11.
7
Axthelm, Confessional Novel, p. 11. The above is
intended to serve as no more than a basic outline of the
essential features of the confessional novel-^that is, to
provide a framework for our discussion of LOS pasos perdi
dos. Carpentier's use of these features will be noted in
relation to other modern examples of the genre (i.e., Andre
Gide's The Immoralist and Jean-Paul Sartre's NauSea).
8
Javier MartInez-Palacio,tin "Los anti-heroes de
Alejo Carpentier," Insula] 20, No. 226 (1965), 1-14,
notes that Carpentier's evaluation of centuries of "collec
tive anti-heroism in America" is reflected in his protagon
ists who generally reveal "the flaw of moral instability
which has always characterized the Americas."
9
In addition to containing an allusion to T. S.
Eliots' "The Hollow Men," this opening passage echoes the
novel's title (i.e., "la misma resonancia hueca bajo mis
pasos").
''"^Gonzalez-Echeverria, Pilgrim, p. 158.
■'"■''This device of the "maquina escenografica" is char
acteristic of the baroque theatrical tradition and, says
Echeverria, is used "to remind the spectator that what he
sees is only an illusion." The device is especially typi
cal of Calderon with whom Carpentier, according to
Echeverria, "has much in common." Roberto Gonzalez-
Echeverria, "Ironia narrativa y estilo en Los pasos
perdidos de Alejo Carpentier," Nueva Narrativa Hispano-
amerlcana, 1, No. 1 (1971), 117-125.
56
12
Frances W. Weber. "El acoso: Alejo Carpentier's
War on Time,” PMLA, 78 (1963), p. 440.
13
Eduardo G. Gonzalez, "Los pasos perdidos, el azar y
la aventura," Revista Iberoamericana, 38, No. 81 (1972),
585-614. Gonzalez alludes to the importance of the
repeated play on reflectors ("juegos de reflejos”) that
"establish in the novel a relationship between the micro-
cosmic and the macrocosmic dimensions.”
14
James Olney, Metaphors of Self; The Meaning of
Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1972), p. 44.
15
Axthelm describes the world of the modern confes
sional novel as one without firm values and meaningful
relationships.
16
The isolated narrator is a characteristic of the
confessional novel. "Every confessional hero is essen
tially alone when he makes his confession . . . .”
Axthelm, Confessional Novel, p. 62.
17
The city has usually been identified as New York by
Carpentier's critics, although the author leaves it name
less intentionally in order to deemphasize the specific and
to underline the archetypal or allegorical.
18
Mauvaise foi. Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existen
tial ism, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: The Citadel Press,
1970), p. 148. Roberto Gonzalez-Echeverria notes that
although the "ideological framework: of Carpentier's ear
lier works reflects Spengler's influence, Los pasos perdi
dos
"is set off against a different and conflicting
conception of man and histroy: Sartrean existen
tialism. In spite of Carpentier's negative com
ments about Sartre in the Prologue to The Kingdom
of This World and in journalistic pieces that
precede and follow The Lost Steps, Sartrean con
cepts like 'authenticity,1 to mention only one,
surface in this novel, and the predicament of the
protagonist, caught between a search for his
essence in the past and a commitment to the
present-in-history, is clearly Sartrean."
Gonzalez-Echeverra, Pilgrim, pp. 158-159.
■^Raymond Souza argues that Mouche represents "the
qualities of the seductive world of illusion" to which the
protagonist is "very much attracted." In Major Cuban Nov
elists: Innovation and Tradition (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1976), pi 40. The author's attitude toward
this character is perhaps best revealed in the meaning
of the name he confers upon her: "fly." And c7
although the reference (as Souza's point suggests) may be
simply to the "seductive" qualities associated with mouches
(flies)— those beauty spots cut into the shape of stars,
hearts, teardrops, etc., and then placed on interesting
visible parts of their anatomy by aristocratic European
(especially French) women of earlier centuries, the impli
cation in either case is of superficiality.
20
Juan Manuel Alonso, "The Search for Identity in
Alejo Carpentier's Contemporary Urban Novels: An Analysis
of Los pasos perdidos and El acoso," Diss. Brown University,
1967, p. 33.
21
The technique of "the other" as a mirror, reflecting
certain aspects of the existence of the protagonist and
thereby increasing his self-awareness, derives from
Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground. This device, as
Axthelm observes, is characteristic of "all confessional
novels, as the hero seeks self-perception in others" (p.
44) .
22
Earlier the narrator has spoken of her excessive
drinking and his struggles with despair (p. 15).
23
Victor Brombert, "Sartre and the Existentialist
Hero: The Intellectual 'Impossible' Hero,” in The intel
lectual Hero: Studies in the French Novel, 1880-1955
(Philadelphia: Lippincott Co., 1960), pp. 198-199.
24
The comments of Sartre's Roquentin, observing cus
tomers huddled together in the cafe Mably, parallels this
episode in Los pasos perdidos: "They drink a cup of coffee
and play poker dice; they make a little noise, an 'incon
sistent noise which doesn't bother me. In order to exist,
they also must consort with others." From Jean-Paul
Sartre's Nausea, trans. Lloyd Nolan (Norfolk: New Direc
tions, 1938), p. 14. Roquentin establishes a "reflector
relationship" with his double, "The Self-Taught Man,"
whose false humanism and intellectual habits reflect the
protagonist's lowest opinion of himself as an intellectual.
25
Wylie Sypher's remarks, in Loss of Self in Modern
Literature and Art (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 29,
point to the complexity of these relations: "The main
post-romantic task is to identify the irreducible minimum
of our experience that can be honestly identified as our
own. Thus the question of our identity is the question of
our authenticity; and the question of authenticity involves
also the question to what extent we are 'engaged1 with
others."
9
Sypher, Loss of Self, p. 29.
27
See Eric Fromm, "Man in Capitalistic Society," in
The Sane Society (New York: Fawcett, 1955), pp. 76-184.
28
Jorge Rodrlgo-Ayora, in "La alienacion marxista en
Los pasos perdidos de Alejo Carpentier," Hispania, 57
(1974), 886-892, calls this "the irony of capitalism that
Marx reduced to a principle." Ayora argues that Los pasos
perdidos is not an existential novel but a "parody of exis
tentialism" and an example of what has been called "Human
istic Marxism." The distinction, he notes, is "essential."
29
In The New Marxism: Soviet and East European Marx
ism Since 1956 (New York: Pegasus Press, 1968), pp. 86-87,
Richard T. de George writes:
"For Marx the essential alienation is economic
and it can be changed not by revising its con
cepts, but only by changing the existing economic
order. Man for Marx was alienated in three basic
ways: the worker was alienated or separated from
the products of his labor, from his productive
activity, and from both other men (his species
life) and nature."
^^Gonzalez-Echeverria, Pilgrim, p. 38.
31
The metaphor ("useless instrument") and the explicit
association between the Spanish language and his musical
training (e.g., "Sol-fa"), point to— as we shall see more
clearly in subsequent chapters— the essential and inextri
cable connections in the novel between musical creation,
language ("mythos") and the protagonist's search for iden-
t ity.
32
E. M. Cioran, "Advantages of Exile," in The Tempta
tion to Exist, trans. Richard Howard (Chicago: Quadrangle
Books, Inc., 1968), p. 74.
33
Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search for
Identity (New York: Science Editions, Inc., 1961), p. 19.
34
Alan Cheuse, "Memories of the Future: A Critical
Biography of Alejo Carpentier," Diss. Rutgers University
1974, p. 164.
35
Axthelm, Confessional Novel, p. 11.
36
Alonso, "The Search for Identity,” p. 23.
3 7
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1962), p. 52.
38 ^
Eduardo G. Gonzalez remarks that although the theme
is a constant one in Carpentier's narratives, Los pasos
59
perdidos represents "the work most exclusively dedicated to
defining everything that characterizes modern uprootedness
(el desarraigo moderno) situated in this case within the
subjectivity of the artist looking for his lost roots in
the Tropical South American setting," in "el azar y la
aventura," p. 586.
39
C. F. Keppler, The Literature of the Second Self
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972).
40
Robert Rodgers, in A Psychoanalytic Study of the
Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1970), makes a distinction between "latent" and
"manifest” doubles.
41
Vance, "Augustine's Confessions," pp. 3-4.
42
Axthelm, Confessional Novel, p. 44. Axthelm writes:
"The idea of the double has been equated with that of the
mirror, reflecting certain aspects of the hero's existence
and thereby accelerating his self-examination." He goes on
to note that for Dostoyevsky, as in The Double, it also
represented "a more specifically psychological phenomenon,
an extreme schizophrenia symptomatic of a tortured and
unbalanced mind."
43
Rodgers, Psychoanalytic Study, p. 173.
44
Keppler, Second Self, p. 199.
45
Keppler considers the Doppelganger to be the "out
standing personification of fear,” p. 184.
46
Lloyd King, "A Note on the Rhetorical Structure of
Los pasos perdidos," Reflexion, 21, No. 1 (n.d.), 147-152.
47
Gonzalez-Echeverria, Pilgrim, p. 165.
48
Gonzalez-Echeverria, Pilgrim, pp. 165-166.
49
Gonzalez, "el azar y la aventura," p. 587.
50
Writing on the function of the (manifest) double in
Sartre's novels, Victor Brombert notes the following:
"Roquentin's observation ('with the autodidact one is two
only in appearance') applies to every Sartrean character.
His is a lonliness shared with himself, a perverted form of
mental narcissism which impels him to search for his most
unflattering image. The many 'couples' in Sartre’s work
(Roquentin-autodidact; Orestes-tutor; Hugo-Herderer;
Mathieu-Brunet) are symptomatic. They suggest the extent
to which the Sartrean intellectual needs the other in order
to feel the contempt for himself he wants to feel. The
other exists also as pretext and confirmation." In Intel
lectual Hero, p. 190.
51
William R. Mueller, "Jean-Paul Sartre: A Portrait
of the Existentialist As a Young Man," in his Celebration
of Life: Studies in Modern Fiction (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1972), p. 47.
52
Henri Peyre, French Novelists of Today (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 88. Of Michel's double
Peyre writes: "Menalque, a predicating and not too witty
Oscar Wilde, teaches Michel in ponderous formulas to
believe in his own pleasure and to cultivate his own
uniqueness," p. 89.
53 '
Axthelm, Confessional Novel, p. 44.
54
Andr£ Gide, The Immoralist, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Random House, 1970), p. 100.
55
Axthelm refers to this as the "main use";of the
external double.
56
Alonso sees this as the critical, "climatic section"
of the novel and the episode that distinguishes the pro
tagonist of Los pasos perdidos from that of El acpso. In
"The Search for Identity," p. 89.
Alonso, "The Search for Identity," p. 107.
58
It is important to note the thematic significance of
the presence of this allusion in Dostoyevsky's Crime and
Punishment (when Roskolnikev asks Sonia to read to him from
the Bible and she instinctively chooses the Story of
Lazarus by way of contrasting Rosholnikov's immediate situ
ation and the potential for ultimate salvations) and in
Gide's Immoralist (when Michel tells us: "yet I couldn't
have said what I meant by living, nor whether my longing
for a more spacious and exposed life, a life less con
strained and less concerned for others, was not the very
secret of my uneasiness— a secret which seemed so much more
mysterious: the secret of Lazarus, for I was still a
stranger among the others, like a man raised from the
dead" p. 92). The importance of this allusion in Los
pasos perdidos and the identification between Nicasio and
the narrator is further established by the narrator's deci
sion to compose a Threnody ("Treno"), which "was a music
song intended to bring a dead uerson back to life" (p.
225) .
61
59
Ariel Dorfman, ME1 sentido de la historia en la obra
de Alejo Carpentier," in his Imaginacion y volencia en
America (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1970),
p. 106.
60
Cheuse, "Memories," p. 158.
61
Cheuse, "Memories,” p. 158.
62
Axthelm, Confessional Novel, p. 11.
63
Natascha Wurzbach, The Novel in Letters: Epistolary
Fiction in the Early English Novel, 1678-1740 (Coral
Gables: University of Miami Press, 1969), p. xiv.
64
Gonzalez, "el azar y la aventura," p. 587.
65
Sartre, Nausea, pp. 60-61.
66
n Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature (Berkeley: Uni
versity of California Press, 1955), p. 28.
®7Lloyd, "Rhetorical Structure," p. 150.
6 8
Axthelm, Confessional Novel, p. 62. On the contrary,
Carpentier's "insistence” upon identifying his own voyage
with that of the protagonist has helped to create what
Echeverria has termed "further fictions by critics."
Gonzalez-Echeverria, Pilgrim, p. 168.
69
Gonzalez-Echeverria, Pilgrim, p. 183.
70
Raul Silva-Caceres, "Una novela de Carpentier,"
Mundo Nuevo, No. 11 (1967), pp. 33-37.
71
Eugene Goodhart notes that "Joyce struggled hard
between Stephen Hero and The Portrait to gain a distance
between himself and his hero that would make it possible to
see his hero freely. Sometimes the irony is very severe."
In Cult of the Ego, p. 187. Regarding the subtlety of that
severity, Wayne C. Booth adds: "so far as I know no one
said anything about irony against Stephen until after
Ulyssess was published in 1922, with its opening in which
Icarus-Stephen is shown with his wings clipped. Ironic
readings did not become popular, in fact, until after the
fragment of Stephen Hero was published in 1944." Wayne C.
Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1961), p. 333.
72
Gonzalez-Echeverria, "Ironxa narrativa y estilo.”
This is an interesting discussion of how the
62
extra-calendarial nature of certain dates in the novel
serve the purposes of irony as a distancing factor.
73
Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the
Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper
and Row, 1959), pp. 156-157. (Italics mine.)
74
Camus writes:
"Rebellion in itself is not an element of civili
zation. But it is a preliminary to all civiliza
tion. Rebellion alone in the blind alley in
which we live, allows us to hope for the future
of which Nietzsche dreamed: 'Instead of the
judge and the oppressor, the creator.' This
formula certainly does not authorize the ridicu
lous illusion of a civilization controlled by
artists. It only illuminates the drama of our
times in which work, entirely subordinated to
production, has ceased to be creative." Albert
Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York:
Random House, 1956), p. 273.
75
Mouche's definition of "adventure" (based upon an
interpretation of her dream) bears a striking resemblance
to Roquentin's recognition that to experience an adventure
is also to acknowledge the presence of some dynamic, life-
renewing force.
76
Axthelm, Modern Confessional, pp. 22-23.
77
Glide, The Immoral ist, p. 51. Carpentier's narrator
also makes this comparison on p. 51. In Nausea the rhythm
of Roquentin's psychic journey is less well-defined because
he does not move, throughout the novel, from one location
to another that is clearly distinguishable from it, thus
leaving behind one to enter another.
78
Axthelm, Modern Confessional, p. 66.
79
Souza, Cuban Novelists, p. 44.
80
Souza, Cuban Novelists, p. 44.
81
Eliade, Cosmos and History, p. 3.
63
CHAPTER II
In an interview with the Cuban critic, Salvador Bueno,
Carpentier observes that in LOs pasos perdidos ,Tthe plot
has only the function of a structural element— a unifying
factor. In Los pasos perdidos," Carpentier added, "one'
idea dominates: that of a possible evasion in time."^
With such authorial support behind him, in one of the
earliest serious attempts by a Latin American critic to
assess the literary significance of this former music
critic and historian turned prodigious novelist, Bueno goes
on to note that "a ;good part of the novel is conducted in a
2
contrapuntal manner." Taken together the above statements
by author and critic suggest the important structural func
tions and thematic implications of the quest-myth in Los
pasos perdidos; that is, both myth and music impose and
constitute a particular mode of perception and being-in-
the-world from which the narrator (like modern urban man)
has become estranged. Carpentier develops the progressive
disalienation and increasing self-knowledge of the pro
tagonist through the reencounter not only with the land
of his birth but also with the origins of music. And this
encounter takes place in the mythic quest of the artist-
hero: he is the mortal through whose artistic acts man
64
becomes free to usurp the function traditionally ascribed
to the gods— the task of creating order out of chaos and
giving meaning to existence. As in many modern novels the
search for meaning and identity is answered with the dis
covery that, for the artist, self-knowledge is not found in
concepts but in the reality of artistic activity. Carpen
tier uses the quest to take his hero through a series of
initiatory episodes or adventures which parallel the mythic
quest from which he emerges (with the god-like power to
create) a new man. The quest, like the protagonist's con
fession, constitutes a search for identity, a meaningful
self-perception. The pattern of the mythic descent into
the pit or telluric womb has been specifically employed—
the ancient or archaic initiation of the great going down
into the darkness of symbolic death and the resulting
resurrection— because the pattern (departure-initiation-
return) is cyclical and, from the point of view of "archaic
ontology," represents an evasion or annulment of linear
3
time-consciousness. Thus the novel resembles in this form
the ritual cycle it reenacts; that is, in the words of
Northrop Frye, "the finishing point is the starting point
4
renewed and transformed by the hero's quest." The descent
with its attendant revelation is identified with the uncon
scious, the world outside of linear time and movement. The
journey is therefore also— and necessarily— an interior one.
In other words, the protagonist-narrator has, as
65
Carpentier's frequent extratextual statements confirm,
5
"lost the key to his authentic existence." Not only is
this in terms of separation from his cultural roots but, as
the novel makes clear from the beginning with its multiple
and scattered references to various European and non-
European musical traditions, it also involves separation
from the sources of his very artistic being. And since, as
Susanne Langer notes, "self-knowledge, insight into all
phases of life and mind, springs from artistic imagina
tion," the quest becomes essentially a search for the
6
"authentic" sources of music and musical creation. Most
important, then, and the issue with which this chapter is
concerned is the fact that Carpentier uses the quest as a
literary device to bring about the larger and more central
issue of music as a symbolic form and vehicle for the
articulation of human feeling; that is, the significance of
music, which transcends time and culture, lies in its
capacity, like myth, to reveal and to project inner reali
ties. Moreover, again like myth, its origins are to be
found in the ceaseless human quest for meaning embodied in
the expression of religious rite and ritual. Thus the
protagonist, like the mythic voyager-initiate, must retrace
his steps to the moment of genesial euphoria of musical
7
creation. This goal is achieved in the novel when the
protagonist witnesses what he calls the "Nacimiento de la
Mdsica"— a scene which in its ironic echo of Nietzsche,
66
draws our attention to the central thematic and structural
importance of the musical quest.
As we have seen, the protagonist’s alienation and
anonymity derive largely from the multiple circumstances of
his urban environment. Central to that context of aliena
tion is his attitude toward his job. Ironically, his work
is the one area of his life in which he experiences marked
success and from which he should feel some modicum of
justification of an otherwise unfulfilled existence. But
he does not feel that justification. Instead of providing
mental satisfaction, as we have already seen, it becomes a
constant source of anxiety. For in spite of the enthusias
tic praises heaped upon the professional products of his
labor, he realizes that in the end it amounts to selling
his soul to the Devil of profits:
Una verdad envenenaba mi satisfaccion primera:
y era que todo aquel encarnizado trabajo, los
alardes de buen gusto, de dominio del oficio, la
eleccion y coordinacion de mis colaboradores y
asistentes, habian parido, en fin de cuentas, una
pelxcula publicitaria, encargada en la empresa
que me empleaba por un Consorcio Pesquero . . . .
(P. 31)
It is from this "automatism" that the protagonist hopes to
escape in acquiescing to Mouche1s plan to deceive the uni
versity With forged "primitive musical instruments” osten
sibly from the jungles of South America. In his decision
he appears to accept Mouche's equation--journey = success,
67
change of residence. But it is his encounter with his
former teacher and spiritual father during a thunderstorm
which in fact determines the protagonist's goals. The
meeting evokes his musical past and initiates the prelimi
nary stages of his quest. This chance meeting reveals the
protagonist's earlier consuming interests in the origins of
music as well as his ambition to compose a cantata based on
Shelley's Prometheus Unbound:
Inconforme con las ideas generalmente sustentadas
acerca del origen de la musica yo habxa empezado
a elaborar una ingeniosa teorxa que explicaba el
nacimiento de la expresion rxtmica primordial por
el afan de remedar el paso^de los animales o el
canto de las aves. Si teniamos en cuenta que las
primeras representaciones de renos y de bisontes,
pintados en las paredes de las cavernas, se
debian a un magico ardid de caza— el hacerse
dueno da la presa por la previa posesion de su
imagen— , no andaba muy desacertado en mi
creencia de que los ritmos elementales fueran
los del trote, el galope, el salto, el gorjeo y
el trino, buscados por la mano sobre un cuerpo
resonante, o por el aliento, en la oquedad de los
juncos. (Pp. 24-25)
Having abandoned both these personally meaningful projects,
however, the protagonist is accosted by "una intolerable
resonancia" of his former life as he listens impatiently to
his mentor's treasured discovery, the priceless gift which
the Curator expects to substantiate the hero's theory of
the "magical-rhythmic-imitation" (mimetismo-magico-rxtmico)
origins of music. Moreover, as he listens to the bird that
is not a bird, with a song that is not a song, but a
magical imitation, the protagonist experiences a kind of
68
rage at the rhythm of his life. It prevents him from com
pleting his theory and thereby giving substance and meaning
to his existence and identity as a creator of music. Thus
confronted with the consequences of his denial of feeling
and his flight ("fuga") from himself, the impetus and the
vehicle for the narrator's eventual escape from the spiri
tual constraints of his urban life are established. All
that remains to be done at this point is for the protagon
ist to be consciously persuaded to make the trip. As we
have seen, Mouche accomplishes this at the preliminary
stage of the departure. However, although it is Mouche who
is excited by the possibility of "adventure," it is the
Curator who represents the mytho-musical "herald of adven
ture": the Hermetic male guide of souls whose physical or
symbolic presence accompanies or "guides" the protagonist
through the crucial stages of his odyssey— from departure,
8
through the trials of initiation to, finally, his return.
Through the novel the Curator's "summoning" presence is
associated with the thunderstorm. The Curator is indeed
a character who is more than just a character, a
typical technique of Carpentier in the novel.
The Curator stands for a spiritual and imagina
tive link between the museum "of concrete and
glass," between pre-Christian/Christian eras of
Europe's cultural assimilations and developments,
and the labyrinths of primitive folk.9
It is, in fact, when the protagonist frees himself
from Mouche (his "female stone"), after leaving Los Altos,
69
that his spiritual quest begins in earnest. The brief
stay in Los Altos, however, is important for several
reasons: Carpentier uses this episode to develop the
important relationship between alienated identity and the
issue of musical meaning; it is also here that the protag
onist discovers his sense of responsibility as a New World
artist; and, lastly, the episode prefigures the subsequent
’’ Birth of Music” scene and the consequent spiritual rebirth
of the protagonist's creative potentiality.
After the total social chaos of the unnamed Latin
American capital city, Mouche and the protagonist arrive in
Los Altos on "Saturday, the 10th.The protagonist is
overwhelmed by this provincial corner of the world "donde
cada esquina, cada puerta claveteada, respondxa a un modo
particular de vivir, yo encontraba un encanto que habian
perdido, en las poblaciones-museos, las piedras demasiado
manoseadas y fotografiadas" (p. 70). This further redis
covery of the forgotten physical beauty of his unalienated
youth rekindles his aesthetic sensibility. And, conse
quently, he becomes more aware of Mouche's essential
indifference:
Mientras los cambios de altitud, la limpidez del
aire, el trastorno de las costumbres, el
reencuentro con el idioma de mi infancia, estaban
operando en mi una especie de regreso, aun
vacilante pero ya sensible, a un equilibrio
perdido hacia mucho tiempo, en ella se
advertian— aunque no lo confesara todavia—
indicios de aburrimiento. (P. 73)
70
Her aesthetic apathy and her lesbian tendencies lead
ultimately to his rejection of Mouche1s hoax. He decides
to keep his pledge to the Curator by pursuing what was
slowly becoming an obsession with him— the search for
native instruments. He is also forced into this decision
by his encounter with the three artists whom he sarcasti
cally dubs "The Three Wisemen" ("los jovenes Reyes Magos”).
The three young artists--a musician, a poet, and a
painter: one White, one Black, one Indian— are all flee
ing the chaos of the capital— and themselves. They are
also symbolic representatives of the three major cultural
and racial constituents of Latin American society. The
meeting confronts the narrator for the first time with the
issue of the artist's responsibility to his culture. And,
%
equally important, it reminds him of the harmful effects
wrought by his early uprooting from the environment. He
is infuriated by their doting attention to Mouche's gossip
about Parisian cultural life, and he tries to disrupt
Mouche's big scene. Thus the protagonist quizzes the
three about the first manifestations of their national
folk and literary traditions.^ As artists, however, they
are alienated from their cultural heritage and particularly
from its rural sources. They respond in a manner which
provides the protagonist with insight into his own loss of
authenticity. In their longing for evasion and their
preferences for European cultural models, the narrator
71
perceives his own ignorance of indigenous traditions; and
he realizes the dangers of flirting with foreign cultures
and values— to the neglect of those of the New World. In
his trenchant evaluation of the "Three Wisemen" he reveals
an increasing awareness of his cultural alienation. And
this awareness will have a profound effect upon his con
sciousness and behavior as he journeys deeper into the
hinterland and, simultaneously, into himself:
Los vela yo enflaquecer y empalidecer en sus
estudios sin lumbre— olivaceo el indio, perdida
la risa el negro, maleado el bianco— , cada voz
mas olvidados del Sol dejado atras, tratando
desesperadamente de hacer lo que bajo la red se
hacia por derecho propio. A1 cabo de los ahos,
luego de haber perdido la juventud en la empresa,
regresarian a sus paises con la mirada vacia,
los arrestos quebrados, sin animo para emprender
la unica tarea que me pareciera oportuna en el
medio que ahora me iba revelando lentamente la
indole de sus valores: la tarea de Ad&n
poniendo nombre a las cosas. (P. 77)
This is the first time that the protagonist articulates the
psycho-cultural dangers of persistent alien values. In
other words, in their desperate attempts as artists to du
plicate foreign cultural norms they have become cultural
orphans, constantly in search of themselves but consis
tently unable to affirm themselves. They are unable to
perceive or express creatively the richness, the ambigui
ties, the dilemmas or the human emotion around them. They
are obstructed by their facile bedazzlement with the
theories and labyrinthine intrigues of intellectual faddism.
72
Thus Carpentier makes clear his perception of the New
World artist in relation to indigenous culture: "His aim
should be to register what is specific, and at the same
time archetypal in the Latin American experience. Every
12
possible factor must be taken into account."
Los Altos heightens the protagonist's sensitivity to
the sociohistorical geography of the Americas and his
awareness of the Adamic responsibility of the artist, but
13
the central importance of the episode remains musical.
The protagonist's immediate response is a consuming desire
to create. He now feels the heretofore absent urge to
create. When he flees the painter's house and the group's
unbearable discussion of modern themes, the departure is
accompanied by a clashing of chords. He recognizes the
heavy-handed touch of the young composer from the capital
city :
Por juego conte doce notas, sin ninguna repetida,
hasta regresar al mi bemol inicial de aquel
crispado andante. Lo hubiera apostado: el
atonalismo habxa llegado al pais; ya eran usadas
sus recetas en estas tierras. (P. 78)14
Both the foreign city, Paris, and the equally alien atonal-
ity represent a kind of modernism, artistic "progress" and
flight from self that increasingly has become anathema to
the protagonist.
The reference to atonality encourages the reader to
draw analogies between the theme of harmony and well-being,
73
on the one hand, and, on the other, alienation and atonal-
ism. Carpentier is developing an incipient harmony here in
the protagonist, as a result of the latter's encounter, not
only with nature, but also with his native land (e.g., the
deformed jargon of the Negro porters, the rhythms of the
marinera, the children singing "Mambru se fue a la guerra,"
the repeated memory of the verses: "Esto, Fabio,lAy dolor!
. . . ," the shrill tonality of the crickets, the rhythm of
the creaking axles of the carts, etc.). And this incipient
harmony is contrasted with the jarring and tortured sounds
15
of anti-traditional modern music. From the point of view
of the protagonist's socio-cultural aesthetics, the atonal
music of the young pianist represents the composer's essen
tial alienation; that is, a reflection of his inauthentic
search for musical inspiration and creation in traditions
and styles fundamentally foreign to his own cultural
identity. Furthermore, beyond an evaluation of the mis
guided direction of the composer's technical pursuits, the
protagonist's reaction is significant because it illus
trates an intensified concern for indigenous musical tradi
tion as much as a rejection of the symbolic meaning of
modern music (not that a rejection of musical modernism
alone Would constitute such a position, but we notice that
increasingly in the novel he demonstrates a preference for
traditional and even archaic modes of musical expression— -
from the choral innovations of Palestrina, to Gregorian
74
chants, to Ambrosian hymns, to, finally, the shaman's dirge,
the inspirational source of his own composition). The
protagonist associates the modern atonality of Schoenberg
with all of the bankrupt experimentation in the arts char
acterized by "surrealism" and "existentialism" and the
potpourrism of which Mouche is so disingenously fond. But
Mouche's opinions are always in keeping with the aesthetic
slogans in fashion at the moment; that is, her affection
for the superficial, "au courant" is an implicit rejection
of tradition— the presence of the past which provides the
vital context from which the present emanates and in which
■ j g
it acquires meaning. In rejecting these modern European
cultural manifestations the protagonist is in fact reject-
ing and fleeing the anguish and alienation of which they
17
are so blatantly a representation. Thus his "fuga" is a
flight in time— through music— into a more harmonious and
coherent past— one in which music, like myth, maintains an
explicit functional character and reveals the possible
depths of human feeling in mankind's eternal strife against
the forces that threaten his life and welfare in the king-
18
dom of this world. In other words, the basic plot—
which, as confirmed earlier, allows for an "evasion in
time"— evolves in a manner to reflect the hero's psychic-
spiritual evolution, and in turn this psychic experience is
interwoven thematically with musical creation as a process
of self-affirmation, growth and development. Moreover, the
75
importance of this episode in relation to the protagonist’s
self-confrontation or self-definition becomes further
apparent when he enters the near-by tavern and hears the
music of a young harpist recently returned from the inte-v
rior. Perceiving the contrast between the borrowed formu
las of the young pianist and the solemnity of the offering
of the young harpist, the protagonist is carried into
reverie:
Habia en sus escalas, en sus recitativos de grave
diseno, interrumpidos por acordes majestuosos y
amplios, algo que evocaba la festiva grandeza de
los preambulos de organo de la Edad Media. (P.
79)
In his evaluation of the harpist's performance ("with the
solemnity of one performing a rite”) is a prefiguration of
the protagonist's later vision of Rosario's father's funer
al and his subsequent attendance at what he terms "the
Birth of Music.” For implied in his description and his
reference to Medieval majestic chords is the association
between music's significance and mankind's spiritual quest.
As we have seen, for the protagonist atonality, the absence
of harmony, amounts to alienation or spiritual negation;
but art, and above all music built upon a functional, vital
tradition, is a verification of spiritual existence and, as
he has yet to discover, a meaningful expression of human
feelings and shared experiences. Therefore, unlike the
music of the urban pianist, in whose attempt to create by
76
imitation, by utilizing technical devices and theoretical
systems which do not correspond to his culture's expressive
needs or demands is an implicit rejection of New World
realities and traditions through a tonal denial of authen
tic feeling, the music of the rural harpist is a tonal
history of New World identity. In its "authentic primitiv
ism" it achieves the most valid objectives of certain con
temporary composers while maintaining loyalty to its most
19
varied components. As the protagonist remarks: "me
dieron ganas de subir a la casa y traer al joven compositor
arrastrado por una oreja" (p. 79). As a tonal expression
of New World realities, it is an artistic statement which
recognizes and embodies, musically, the multiple elements
20
of New World cultural identity. Moreover, "that solemn
improvisation” of the harpist becomes one of the primary
sources of the protagonist's artistic envisagement— a
prototype of his Treno, the "symphonic ode" in which he
later attempts to express the interplay of forces that con
stitute and define the synthetic nature of the New World
i
experience and his own mult ifacted identity.
The protagonist's residence in Los Altos, therefore,
is an important prelude to the full process of self-
discovery. In this episode Carpentier establishes the
basic relationship between the themes of music and identity
that will define the primary concern of the protagonist for
the rest of the novel. The brief stay amounts to an
/ 77
incubatory period in which the "seeds" of musical percep
tion, inspiration and creativity are sown and begin to grow
toward their full development. Before this can be real
ized, however, the protagonist must journey alone deeper
into the interior, farther back in time, and undergo a sym
bolic death and rebirth under the tutelage of Rosario, the
mythic female embodiment of the temporal, telluric, and
cultural elements/forces of the South American context. It
is only with the abandonment of Mouche, then, that the
spiritual quest can proceed. With the conclusion of
Chapter II and the stay in Los Altos, the period of initial
21
rediscovery comes to an end. But the termination of this
first initiatory stage— as is typically the case in the
Carpentierian fictional cosmos— signals a new beginning.
At this juncture we find the protagonist consciously assum
ing responsibility for himself and, significantly, for the
first time in the narrative, asserting his will over
Mouche's and responding consciously now to the call to
adventure proffered by the Curator, the masculine spiritual
guide and "keeper" of the protagonist's creative potential
ity :
Esa desagradable evidencia que vendria a
estrechar mas aun nuestra— para mi ingrata—
convivencia con la ca nadiense, se me tradujo, de
sub ito, en una decision que venla a culminar todo
un proceso de reflexiones y recapacitaciones. De
Los Altos partian precisamente los autobuses que
conduclan al puerto desde el cual habia modo de
alcanzar, por rio, la gran Selva del Sur. No
78
seguirlamos viviendo la estafa imaginada por mi
amiga, puesto que las circunstancias la contra-
riban a cada paso. Con la revolucion, mis
dineros hablan subido mueho al cambio con la
moneda local. Lo mas sencillo, lo mas limpio,
lo mas interesante, en suma, era emplear el
tiempo de vacaciones que me quedabla cumpliendo
con el Curador y con la Universidad, llevando a
cabo, honestamente, la tarea encomendada. Por
no darme el tiempo de volver sobre lo resuelto,
compre al tabernero dos pasajes para el autobus
de la madrugda. No me importaba lo que pensara
Mouche: por vez primera me sent la capaz de
imponerle mi voluntad.22 (Pp. 79-80)
Just as Chapter II of the novel is dominated by the
23
theme of personal rediscovery, Chapter III is concerned
with the protagonist's complete separation from Mouche and
the preoccupations of the apocalyptic world with which she
is identified. It focuses on his introduction to the
marvelous-mythical vision and setting of New World culture
and, through contact with its indigenous folk existence,
with the beginnings of his intuitive understanding of its
ritual-based authenticity. In each case, it is Rosario,
queen of "un reino misterioso" (p. 90) into which the pro
tagonist is moving, who is the crucial agent of change,
perception and discovery. And as he travels from Apoca
lypse to Genesis, his creative potentiality is restored.
As the two travellers begin their journey away from
Los Altos and deeper into the interior, the internal meta
morphosis taking place in the protagonist is developed and
emphasized by contrast; that is, as the protagonist is
further entranced by the increasingly virginal beauty and
79
power of the natural physical environment, a world not
subdued for centuries but defined by "una aplastante
afirmacion de proporciones nuevas" (p. ,84), Mouche, con
trariwise, becomes progressively indifferent and alienated
from it : "Quien tan piafante y vivaz se mostraba en el
desorden de nuestras noches de alia, era aqui la estampa
del desgano" (p. 104). Moreover, in addition to the spa
tial opposition (expressed in the text by "aqui"— "de
alia"), the difference is further emphasized by individual
physical changes. The protagonist notices the transforma
tion in himself after a week of travelling and remarks:
"este viaje recuperaba la facultad de dormir a cualquier
hora, que recordaba haber tenido en la adolescencia" (p.
89). Mouche's physical condition, on the other hand,
begins to deteriorate almost in direct proportion to his
own increasing vitality and self-control. The perception
of the physical changes, the increasing psychological dis
tance between them, and the fact that for Mouche nothing
that met the eye seemed to touch her, all force the pro
tagonist to recognize that her presence has become intoler
able. Concurrent with this awareness is his wish to sever
the bond that holds her to him. Moreover, this desire
becomes increasingly compelling once the protagonist meets
Rosario.
Rescued near death on the side of the road as the bus
made its descent from the high, icy Andean peaks down into
80
the clouds above the world of men, Rosario, with her
knowledge of plant life and rural folk beliefs, almost
immediately begins to attract the protagonist and to exert
an uncanny influence over his vision of this strange new
world. As Rosario befriends Mouche with a slightly ironic,
maternal solicitude, the protagonist has increasing oppor
tunities to compare the two women. As Rosario appears to
establish links with her surroundings, Mouche becomes more
alien, taking on an aura of "exoticismo" that distances her
from others, her environment, and the norms of conduct of
the land. As Mouche seems to recede into the distance she
had created, Rosario grows more authentic, establishing in
the protagonist's mind her telluric identity:
Entre su carne y la tierra que se pisaba se
estableclan relaciones escritas en las pieles
ensombrecidas por la luz, en la semejanza de las
cabelleras visibles, en la unidad de formas que
daba a los talles, a los hombros, a los muslos
que aqui se alababan, una factura comtin de obra
salida de un mismo torno. (P. 113)
Although the protagonist is fully conscious of his
feelings toward Mouche at this point of his journey toward
Puerto Anunciacion— the town near the Jungle of the South
where Rosario's sick father is waiting for her and the
miraculous scapulary that would revive him— his essential
passivity can be seen in the fact that he does nothing that
24
would rupture completely their relationship. Even when
he learns of her (second?) act of infidelity with Yannes,
81
the Greek Diamond-Hunter, the discovery only serves to
increase the distance between them and to draw him closer
to "Rosario, que embellecia de hora en hora" (p. 113).
Once again it is pure chance, this time in the form of
Mouche's illness, which determines the course of the pro
tagonist's actions. Following the violent physical con
frontation brought on by Mouche's sexual advances, the
latter succumbs to malaria. For the protagonist, who is
surprised that after such a lengthy relationship he could
become completely indifferent to her, Mouche's illness
comes as an answer to a prayer. Two days from the southern
jungle, on "las fronteras de lo desconocido" (p. 155),
Mouche's defeat by the nature she loathed appears like a
perfect revenge of the authentic on the synthetic. And
although her illness initially threatens to sabotage the
voyage, Dr. Montsalvatje, the Herbalist, offers to return
her to Puerto Anunciacion. This bit of luck permits the
protagonist to fulfill his wish to know Rosario, this woman
whose "deeper being" eluded him and whose intense yet
remote warmth he lacked the courage to probe.
The true initiatory significance of Rosario's charac
ter in relation to the protagonist's quest becomes clear
once Mouche is abandoned. The tutelary influence of
Rosario's presence on his self-perception and awareness of
the radically different temporal, telluric, and especially
cultural dimensions of the new setting is almost immediate.
82
Unlike Mouche whose natural domain is the urban metropolis
and for whom the word ’'adventure” had meant being shut up
in a hotel in the city, landscapes of monotonous and repe
titious grandeur, seeing one thing after another without a
thrill of any sort (p. 129), Rosario, the woman of the
earth, begins to unveil before the protagonist's eyes the
"marvelous" dimensions of New World reality:
Por su boca las plantas se ponian a hablar y
pregonaban sus propios poderes. El bosque tenia
un dueno, que era un genio que brincaba sobre
un solo pie, y nada de lo que creciera a la
sombra de los arboles debia tomarse sin pago. Al
entrar en la espesura para buscar el retono, el
hongo o la liana que curaban, habxa que saludar
y depositar monedas entre las raices de un tronco
anciano, pidiendo permiso. . . . No sabria decir
por que esa mujer me parecio muy bella, de pronto,
cuando arrojo a la chimenea un punado de gramas
acremente olorosas, y sus rasgos fueron acusados
en poderoso relieve por las sombras. (P. 90)^5
Unlike the three artists who are all unable to establish a
meaningful relationship of identity with the physical con
tours of their cultural environment, Rosario constitutes
the physical embodiment of the very symbiosis "the Three
Wisemen" as artists are as yet unable to acknowledge or
express.
As a symbol of telluric American identity, the great
meeting-ground of the great races of the world, Rosario is
the embodiment of what Wilson Harris refers to as
a drama of living consciousness— a drama within
which one responds not only to the overpowering
83
and salient features of a plane of existence . . .
but to the essence of life, to the instinctive
grains of life which continue striving and work-,
ing in the imagination for a visionary character
of fulfillment.2®
As a latent "ground of old and new possibilities," she
reconciles in her very person the heterogeneous elements,
27
the "broken parts," of an enormous heritage. And
although initially he feels apprehensive about the thousand
books he has read and of which she knew nothing, these
irreconcilable factors seem to diminish in importance as
the group reaches the bank of the river and the protagonist
gives himself over to the creative rhythm of a descent. He
is in the timeless setting of Rosario's domain. ("Estaba
vestida," he notes, "fuera de la epoca, fuera del tiempo,"
p. 89.) As the party travels relentlessly toward the
south, under Rosario's tutelage the protagonist begins to
perceive and experience the peculiar "co-existence of cul
tures that forms the basis of Carpentier's idea of a
28
journey through time." In the transition from Puerto
Anunciacion, the Land of the Horses, to Santiago de los
Aguinaldos, the Land of the Dogs, from a herding culture to
a hunting culture, the protagonist encounters a natural
time capsule in which the simultaneous observations of
different cultural forms engenders in his own consciousness
a less cerebral and more physical and emotional perception
of time and space. Contrary to the metropolitan museums in
84
which he tells us formerly he took refuge, making long
journeys through time, only to reemerge from his "sanc
tuary” to discover a world in the process of dissolution,
in this domain he discovers that there were still great
areas of the earth where people were immune to the ills of
the day. He discovers people who are contented with a
thatched roof, a water jug, a clay griddle, a hammock, and
a guitar. He observes a certain animism in the people of
the jungle: "una conciencia de muy viejas tradiciones, un
recuerdo vivo de ciertos mitos que eran, en suma, presencia
de una cultura mas honrada y valida, probablemente, que la
que se nos habia quedado alia" (p. 129). As he passes into
the influence of this New World dynamic, he begins to per
ceive through Rosario's consciousness the complexity of New
World culture and to experience a sense of time, space, and
reality from a perspective instinctive to the indigenous
29
vision. Recognizing a change in his perception of time,
the protagonist tells us:
El riel y la carretera han quedado atras. Se
navega contra la corriente o con ella. En ambos
casos hay que ajustarse a tiempos imnutables.
Aqux, los viajes del hombre se rigen por el
Codigo de las Lluvias. Observo ahora que yo,
maniatico medidor del tiempo, atento al metronomo
por vocacion y al cronografo por oficio, he
dejado, desde hace dxas, de pensar en la hora,
relacionando la altura del sol con el apetito o
el sueno. El descubrimiento de que mi reloj estd
sin cuerda me hace reir a solas, estruendosamente,
en esta llanura sin tiempo. (P. 117)
85
As he perceives the importance of the human spirit as the
dynamic of the cultural and artistic imagination he
expresses joy at the absence of modern technology's alien
ating and emotionally abrasive presence. From here onwards
in fact, as the narrator consciously pursues the research,
in justification of his theory of mimetismo-magico-rxtmico,
Carpentier develops a progression in which the spiritually
sterile patterns of modern urban existence are contrasted
with and abandoned for the dynamic and culturally self
affirmative ideas inherent in the indigenous traditions.
Prior to his witness of the "Birth of Music," the most
dramatic instance of the protagonist's increased cultural
awareness under Rosario's influence which has a major
impact upon his musical or artistic imagination and phase
of discovery follows the occasion of Rosario's father's
death. In his observation of the confrontation between
life and death, ceremonially enacted by Rosario and her
eight sisters, the protagonist has revealed to him an
emotional pattern, expressed through a medium of meaningful
formalized gesture, which has become foreign to the con
temporary apocalyptic urban world he is escaping. In the
highly dramatic funeral service performed by these peasant
women playing the role of a Greek chorus, he recognizes
that the nine sisters were carrying out one of the noblest
forms of a millenary rite. In the violence of their con
vulsive grief, the protagonist perceives fundamental
86
elements of ancient tragedy. He perceives a contrast
between their death agony, in which he identifies the
earliest rites of mankind, and the modern consideration of
death as a commercial enterprise:
con sus grandes negocios frxos, de bronces,
pompas y oraciones, que mal ocultaban, tras de
sus coronas y lechos de hielo, una mera agremia-
cion de preparadores enlutados, con solemnidades
de cumplido, objetos usados por muchos, y algunas
manos tendidas sobre el cadaver, en espera de
monedas. (P. 137)
In this contrast we can detect Carpentier’s concern
with a perception of not only the sterile functions of
ritual in modern society but also of the "anthropological
30
continuities" (as in the young harpist's music linked to
that of the medieval church) which manifest themselves in
the indigenous New World folk traditions. The protagon
ist's perception of these elements, moreover, contributes
considerably to his increased understanding of the origins
and significance of musical creation. For in his observa
tion of this cathartic rite, concerned as it is with an
emotional pattern derived from and defined by mankind's
confrontation with the awesome power of Death, he intuits
the significance and meaning of ritual as a symbolic
expression of human feeling and shared experiences; that
is, he perceives, in this situation of profound emotional
significance, the expressive function of religious ritual:
a symbolic vehicle for the articulation and transmission of
87
meaning between people in a vital cultural context. In the
incessant repetition of the women's "antiphonal" praying
and the grief-stricken gestures that follow, he identifies
the presence of a paradigmatic model, an exemplar of tra
dition, in which is embodied the group's "quest for concep-
31
tion and orientation," their defiant demand for security
amid the confusing and terrifying presence of death:
Pero esas mujeres que se repart fan tareas
consabidas en torno a una agonia, que desde la
infancia sabian de vestir difuntos, velar espejos,
rezar lo apropiado, protestaban ante la muerte,
por rito venido de lo muy remoto. Porque esto
era, ante todo, una suerte de protesta deses-
perada, conminatoria, casi magica, ante la
presencia de la Muerte en la casa. (P. 136)
The implications of this discovery in relation to the
protagonist's theory are, of course, of central importance.
For contained in his insight into the functional rite as a
form of "magical protest," a symbolic self-affirmation and
expression of moral intrepidity, is a recognition of the
aesthetic potentialities of archaic religious ritual and,
specifically, the magically-rhythmic proto-elements of his
theory. In other words, Rosario's inhuman howl (like the
revealing mythological concept of human physiology with
which she explains her father's death) reflects the kind of
3 2
"homeopathic sorcery," the word magic, the protagonist
will experience at the shaman's ancient dirge and with
which he will identify himself and the meaning and origins
33
of musical creation. The performance of the rite, then,
88
has the immediate effect of increasing the protagonist's
artistic understanding of the ritual sources and meaning of
musical creation and preparing him mentally and emotionally
for his complete union with Rosario. This symbolically
important act (or rite of transition) occurs when the pro
tagonist, listening to Rosario's explanation of the fight
with Mouche, is overcome by a sudden emotion and abruptly
seizes her in an act of possession, momentarily interrupted
by Mouche's delirious spitting of insults:
Desde el suelo, Rosario dispara golpes a la
hamaca con los pies, para hacerla callar. Pronto
la voz de arriba se extravxa en divagaciones de
delirio. Los cuerpos desunidos vuelven a
encontrarse, y, entre mi cara y el rostro morte-
cino de Mouche, que cuelga fuera del chinchorro
con un brazo inerte, se atraviesa, en espesa
caxda, la cabellera de Rosario, que afinca los
codos en suelo para imponerme su ritmo. Cuando
volvemos a tener oxdos para lo que nos rodea, nada
nos importa ya la mujer que estertora en la
oscuridad. Pudiera morirse ahora mismo, aullando
de dolor, sin que nos conmoviera su agonia.
Somos dos, en un mundo distinto. Me he sembrado
bajo el vellon que acaricio con mano de amo, y mi
gesto cierra una gozosa confluencia de sangres
que se encontraron. (P. 158)
Following this "fateful" meeting with the Adelantado
and his decision, in spite of Mouche's attack of malaria,
to continue his search rather than return "shamed" before
the Curator, the protagonist and Rosario dispose of Mouche
with the determined ferocity of lovers who have just found
one another. This move begins his adventure through the
"gateway of enchantment" into the depths of the interior.
89
With Mouche's return to Santiago de los Aguinaldos he
experiences a sense of physical and spiritual renewal.
And, as if to underscore his readiness now to be fully
initiated into the mysteries of the interior, Rosario con
fers New World identity and meaning upon the existence of
the unnamed protagonist by uttering his true name:
Hoy, por vez primera, Rosario me ha llamado por
mi nombre, repitiendolo mucho, como si sus
sllabas tuvieran que tornar a ser modeladas— y mi
nombre, en su boca, ha cobrado una sonoridad tan
singular, tan inesperada, que me siento como
ensalmado por la palabra que mas conozco, al
oxrla tan nueva como si acabara de ser creada.
Vivimos el jdbilo impar de la sed compartida y
saciada, y cuando nos asomamos a lo que nos
rodea, creemos recordar un pais de sabores nuevos.
(P. 162)
34
Following this "moment of great importance in the novel,"
the protagonist departs for Santa Monica de los Venados in
pursuit of the objects of his quest.
The comments by Alejo Carpentier referred to at the
r
beginning of this essay draw attention to the fact that
certain elements of any novel can be structurally determi
native and that an awareness of them can be employed for a
deeper understanding and/or for its interpretation. In
Los pasos perdidos, as Carpentier's critics have not failed
to notice, fictional reality proceeds according to the
35
ordering pattern established by the protagonist's quest.
The novel's multiple mythic references, moreover, have led
to varying interpretations of the central mythic figure
90
36
with whom the protagonist is to be identified. However,
in spite of the numerous allusions which invite such iden
tification, the central purpose of the quest, the structure
of which coincides with that of the novel, is a search for
authenticity and meaning— the authentic sources and meaning
of music and musical creation. It is a search, moreover,
which evolves in a manner to reflect the protagonist's
psychic-spiritual evolution and rebirth. In other words,
although the protagonist's progressive disalienation 1
parallels the movement of the journey away from the urban
context into the wilderness of the virginal jungle, the
more important issue is that his movement toward disaliena-
tion under Rosario's influence is accompanied by a corre
sponding increase in self-perception and understanding. At
the center of this transformation is an increased awareness
of the nature, meaning, and origins of his art and, sig
nificantly, the renewed ability to create. Therefore, the
journey, which on its most obvious level is geographic,
also has temporal and psychic-spiritual dimensions. As in
many modern quest novels, Carpentier utilizes the symbolism
of the three-part archetypal pattern of initiation
(departure-initiation-return or separation-initiation-
3 7
incorporation) as a literary or structural device to
parallel the "primitive" or archaic concept of a rite de
passage— that is, the dying to one mode of existence (or
38
level of awareness) and the rebirth to another. In the
91
protagonist's case, the rebirth and its attendant revela
tion have consequences of profound artistic and creative
importance: they lead to the renewed act of musical compo-
sit ion.
As the protagonist and Rosario take their leave of
Mouche and set sail into the impenetrable greenness of the
jungle, travelling in the company of Fray Pedro, the mis
sionary, Yannes, the Greek Diamond-Hunter, and led by the
Adelantado, Carpentier makes a direct connection between
his literary vision and the main perceptual mode of the
indigenous vision of the New World. For his is a vision
that "looks through the present into the past, recapturing
Time, reversing the modern imagination with its penchant
for a civilization based upon the sciences, into a mythical
39
universe, into a mythical realtiy." As the group travels
by canoe along the vegetable wall and through the concealed
entrance to the real jungle, Carpentier makes clear,
through image and event, the archetypal, initiatory pattern
40
of the quest. The protagonist, like Conrad's Marlow,
identifies with the historical conquistadores. The mythic
41
act of conquest (the "monomyth" structure of his journey)
brings him into contact with the primeval telluric reali
ties of the new continent. He experiences a series of
trials which, under the stabilizing presence of Rosario,
has the symbolic and literal effect of changing him, pre
paring him through an initiatory death for a transformation
92
of consciousness. It prepares him for an entrance into
another and higher, more insightful level of artistic
awareness and spiritual existence:
. . . somos Conquistadores que vamos en busca del
Reino de Manoa. Fray Pedro es nuestro capellan,
al que pediremos confesion si quedamos malheridos
en la entrada. El Adelantado bien puede ser
Felipe de Utre. El griego es Micer Codro, el
astrologo. Gavilan pasa a ser Leoncico, el perro
de Balboa. Y yo me otorgo, en la empresa, los
cargos del trompeta Juan de San Pedro, con mujer
tomada a bragas en el saqueo de un pueblo. (P.
165) <
As the boat, the symbolic womb of his difficult passage,
makes its incredible trip through the submerged undergrowth,
the protagonist is overcome with an "indefinable fear"
which, along with the experience of "desorientaci6n," cre
ates a sensation of vertigo. It is an attack on his con
sciousness that represents the initial stages of a profound
inner transformation:
Era como si me hicieran dar vueltas sobre mi
mismo, para atolondrarme, antes de situarme en
los umbrales de una morada secreta. Me preguntaba
ya si los remeros conservaban una nocion cabal de
las esloras. Empezaba a tener miedo. Nada me
amenazaba. Todos parecian tranquilos en torno
m£o; pero un miedo indefinible, sacado de los
trasmundos del instinto, me hacia respirar a lo
hondo, sin hallar nunca el aire suficiente. (P.
168)
These images and symbols of ritual death (disorienta
tion, airlessness) are inextricably connected with germina-
42
tion and embryology. With its seething chaos of living
93
and dying forms, the protagonist perceives the interior as
”a place of constant change that threatens him with the
spectre of formlessness. He is awed by this world that
would devour him, and he experiences anew the primordial *
43
fear of darkness and the chaos it represents.” In the
symbolism of initiatory rites, the momentary return to
44
chaos is the equivalent of "death.” In his fearful pas
sage, the jungle becomes the world of deceit, subterfuge,
and duplicity; everything there is "disguise, stratagem,
artifice, metamorphosis” (p. 1). In what the protagonist
calls his "trials," Carpentier's depiction of this strange
new world presents images of mythological import which set
the pattern for the rest of the novel. Because of the
values attached to these multivalent and recurring
symbols— that is, "snakes" (along with "insects," "toads,"
"spiders," "frongs," and "lizards"), traditional denizens
of the nether realms and, therefore, symbolically associ
ated with death and renewal; and "birds" (e.g., "herons,"
"kingfisher"), obvious symbols of transcendence— his trials
very clearly prefigure his ultimate transformation. More
over, like Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, Carpentier
conveys the psychic importance of this encounter with a
world of possible wonder and threatening appearances
through the somnambulist motif, supported by the recurrent
mythic imagery and the presence of the "presiding genius of
45
the natural cycle":
94
No se sabxa ya lo que era del arbol y lo que era
del reflejo. No se sabia ya si la claridad venia
de abajo o de arriba, si el techo era de agua, o
el agua suelo; si las troneras abiertas en la
hojarasca no eran pozos luminosos conseguidos en
lo :anegado. Como los maderos, los palos, las
lianas, se reflejaban en angulos abiertos o
cerrados, se acababa por creer en pasos ilusorios,
en salidas, corredores, orillas, inexistentes.
Con el trastorno de las apariencias, en esa
sucesion de pequenos espejismos al alcance de la
mano, crecxa en mi una sensacion de desconcierto,
de extravxo total, que resultaba indeciblemente
angustiosa. (P. 161)
Cuando desembocamos en un pequeno estanque
interno, que morxa al pie de una laja amarilla,
me sent! como preso, apretado por todas partes.
(P. 169)
Despues de un sueno de muchas horas, agarrd un
cantaro y bebx largamente de su agua. Al dejarlo
de lado, viendo que quedaba al nivel de.mi cara,
comprendx, aun mal despierto, que me, hallaba en
el suelo, acostado sobre una estera de paja muy
delgada. (Pp. 177-178)
And as his trials come to an end:
Cuando regrese a la idea de transcurso, con
desperezo de durmiente que abre los ojos, me
parecid que algo, dentro de ml, habia madurado
enormemente .... (Pp. 181-182)
Since the telluric realm into which he travels is
associated with the female principle, in the archetypal
division of father-sky/mother-earth, the presence of female
figures at every important stage is a dominant aspect of
the hero's achievement of his destiny. Woman's influence
may be either positive or negative— that is, the influence
of the helpful companion and/or benevolent mother, or the
influence of the enraged witch or harmful temptress. But
95
in each case the hero must recognize her power and either
appease it or overcome it before he can successfully ter
minate his labors. In Heart of Darkness Marlow's first of
many significant encounters with the female principle is
described as follows:
A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high
houses, innumerable windows with Venetian blinds,
a dead silence, grass sprouting between the
stones, imposing carriage archways right and
left, immense double doors standing ponderously
ajar. I slipped through one of these cracks,
went up a swept and ungarnished staircase, as
arid as a desert, and opened the first door I
came to. Two women, one fat and the other slim,
sat on straw-bottomed chairs, knitting black
wool. . . .
People were arriving, and the younger one was
walking back and forth introducing them. The old
one sat on her chair. Her flat cloth slippers
were propped up on a footwarmer, and a cat
reposed on her lap. She wore a starched white
affair on her head, had a wart on one cheek, and
silver-rimmed spectacles hung on the tip of her
nose. She glanced at me above the glasses. The
swift and indifferent placidity of that look
troubled me. Two youths with foolish and cherry
countenances were being piloted over, and she
threw at them the same quick glance of uncon
cerned wisdom. She seemed to know all about them
and about me, too. An eerie feeling came over
me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far
away there [sic] I thought of these two, guarding
the door of darkness, knitting black wool as for
a warm pall, one introducing continuously to the
unknown, the other scrutinizing the cherry and
foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Ave!
Old knitter of black wool. Morituri te salutant.
Not many of those she looked at ever saw her
again— not half, by a long way.
The symbolism here quite clearly identifies the two strange
female figures as awesome guardians of the "narrow and
96
deserted" passage into the world of Death. And just as
Odysseus was forced to pass through the straits guarded
by Scylla and Charybdis, so too must Marlow pass through
"the door of darkness," the threshold of experience through
47
which he will unite himself with a new world. Because
48
Carpentier's fictional vision is ultimately "Edenic,"
however, during the protagonist's passage through the
potentially fatal cyclone he seeks and acquires succor at
the breast of the telluric goddess, Rosario:
Perdida toda razon, incapaz de sobreponerme al
miedo, me abrazo de Rosa.ro, buscando el calor de
su cuerpo, no ya con gesto de amante, sino de
nino que se cuelga del cuello de la madre, y me
dejo yacer en el piso de la curiara, metiendo el
rostro en su cabellera, para no ver lo que ocurre
y escapar, en ella, al furor que nos circunda.
. . . Con los dientes apretados, resguardando mi
cabeza como se resguarda el craneo del hijo
recien nacido en un trance peligroso, Rosario
parece de una sorprendente entereza. . . .
Prosigue la terrible lucha durante un tiempo que
mi angustia hace inacabable. Comprendo que el
peligro ha pasado cuando fray Pedro vuelve a
pararse en la proa, afincando los pies en las
bordasl La tormenta se lleva sus ultimos rayos,
tan pronto como los trajo, cerrando la tremebunda
sinfonia de sus iras con el acorde de un trueno
muy rodado y prolongado, y la noche se llena de
ranas que cantan su jubilo en todas las orillas.
Desarrugando el lomo, el rxo sigue su camino
hacia el Oceano remoto. Agotado por la tension
nerviosa, me duermo sobre el pecho de Rosario.
(Pp. 176-177)
i
With the end of this, "the Second Trial," Carpentier
signals that the initiatory death of the protagonist,
indispensable for the beginning of spiritual life, has
97
transpired. His consciousness emerges from these ordeals
with the curosity and pristine perception of childhood for
the enveloping "telluric" architecture. He has been pre
pared for the insights and discoveries which will mark the
end of his quest and the successful achievement of his
49
spiritual and creative regeneration. Thus, contemplating
Rosario as he moves around in this new Capitol of Forms,
almost overwhelmed by so much grandeur, the protagonist
recognizes her relationship to the Indian women of the
interior jungle and begins to apprehend her importance to
his own self-perception and transformed identity:
Comprendi por que la que era ahora mi amante me
habia dado una tal impresion de raza, el dxa que
la viera regresar de la muerte a la orilla de un
alto camino. Su misterio era emanacion de un
mundo remoto, cuy a luz y cuyo tiempo no me eran
conocidos. (P. 180)
Just as he earlier discerned the "terrible symphony" of the
storm's prolonged thunder— the recurring symbol of the
Curator's presence— and experienced amazement at the awe
inspiring proportions of this new mysterious kingdom, he
now is capable, with equal amazement, of recognizing the
complex and closely woven connections between his altered
temporal sense, the physical attributes of this original
world into which he has come, and the delicately guarded
dignity of this woman of the earth:
Este vivir en el presente, sin poseer nada, sin
arrastrar el ayer, sin pensar en el manana, me
98
resulta asombroso. Y, sin embargo, es evidente
que esa disposicion de animo debe ensanchar con-
siderablemente las boras de sus tr^nsitos de sol
a sol. Habla de dxas que fueron muy largos y de
dlas que fueron muy breves, como si los dias se
sucedieran en tiempos distintos--tiempos de una
sinfonla telurica que tambien tuviese sus
andantes y adagios, entre jornadas llevadas en
movimiento presto. Lo sorprendente es que— ahora
que nunca me preocupa la hora— percibo a mi vez
los distintos valores de los lapsos, la dilata-
cion de algunas mananas, la parsimoniosa elabora-
cion de un crepusculo, atonito ante todo lo que
cabe en ciertos tiempos de esta sinfonla que
estamos leyendo al reves, de derecba a izquierda,
contra la clave de sol, retrocediendo hacia los
compases del Genesis. (Pp. 187-188)
Expressed as an acknowledgment which implies Rosario's
intimate relation to the temporal rhythms of the New World
and an awareness of his own musical "fuga"— a regression in
50
time to the origins of music— this "artistic perception"
of significant form in nature coincides with his discovery
of a primordial rhythm of life among these Indians of the
interior whose oneness with a culture that provides a mean
ingful orientation in nature and human society belies the
term "savage." At this stage of his psychic-spiritual
evolution he realizes that here there are no useless
callings like those he had plied for so many years and that
the culture created and participated in by these indigenous
people constitutes a unified life pattern in which meaning
is incorporated into every activity. The protagonist
expresses in its widest sense the notion of culture that
derives from Carpentier's works and which he locates within
99
the environment or context of a vital society: "an accumu
lation of signs, of 'significants,1 true symbolic sources
of illumination that each man needs in order to be able to
organize and order events, in order to be able to orient
51
himself within the continuing becoming of his existence."
In other words, just as the protagonist earlier had per
ceived the disparity between the magic protest at the pres
ence of Death performed by Rosario and her sisters and the
sordid petty thing death had become for modern mankind,
having penetrated beyond the internal and external accre
tions of a sterile modern society he now comprehends the
psychic and spiritual importance of man's establishing a
true self-perception and identity devoid of alienation.
This he sees as possible through an harmonious relationship
with one's environment; it is a relationship in which life,
as a unified and intrinsically meaningful experience, can
be lived. It is significant, moreover, that upon the heels
of this recognition the protagonist discovers the roaring
52
jar and the primitive musical instruments which represent
the objective and end of his physical quest:
Alii, en el suelo, junto a una suerte de anafre,
estaban los instrumentos musicales cuya coleccion
me hubiera sido encomendada al comienzo del mes.
Con la emocion del peregrino que alcanza la
reliquia por la que hubiera recorrido a pie
veinte paises extranos, puse la mano sobre el
cilindro ornamentado al fuego, con empunadura en
forma de cruz, que senalaba el paso del baston de
ritmo al mds primitivo de los tambores. Vi luego
la maraca ritual, atravesada por una rama
100
emplumada, las trompas de cuerno de venado, las
sonajeras de adornos y el botuto de barro para
llamar a los Pescadores extraviados en los
pantonos. Ahl estaban los juegos de cararaillos,
en su condicion primordial de antepasados del
organo. Y ahl estaba, sobre todo, dotada de la
cierta gravedad desagradable que reviste todo
aquello que de cerca toca a la muerte, la jarra
de sonido bronco y siniestro, con algo ya de
resonancia de sepultura, con sus dos canas
encajadas en los costados, tal cual estaba
representada en el libro que la describiera por
vez primera. (P. 181)
Thus, upon the acquisition of these tangible goals of his
pilgrimage, he concludes an important part of the task
assigned to him by the Curator and, in so doing, arrives on
the threshold of a new phase of his existence. For the
first time in the novel he experiences an inner satisfac
tion derived from an arduous mission accomplished, and he
basks in the personal glory of an exceptional act performed:
"El rescate de la jarra sonora— pieza magnxfica— , era el
primer acto excepcional, memorable, que se hubiera inscrito
hasta ahora en mi existencia" (p. 181). At this point the
protagonist is able to verify the uniqueness and validity
of his theory of miroetlsmo-m£.gico-r xtmico. However, two
crucially important events take place which have the com
bined effect of radically transforming his conception and
understanding of music, its origins and meaning, and his
perception of himself as an artist and composer: Fray
Pedro’s celebration of the Christian Mass, as an act of
thanksgiving for safe passage through the cyclone of the
101
previous night, and the tribal shaman's act of "magic
protest" against Death. In the juxtaposition of these two
scenes Carpentier reveals the central thematic importance
of the quest structure of the novel.
While the protagonist reluctantly witnesses Fray
Pedro's performance of the Eucharistic rite of the Latin
Church, the embryonic insight achieved in Los Altos during
the harpist's performance begins to mature. As he observes
the portentous solemnity of the priest's celebration of the
Mass in the midst of the virginal jungle, he discovers "the
53
presence of the timeless in the temporal"; that is, in
Fray Pedro's enactment of the principal spiritual event of
Christianity, the protagonist recognizes the lingering
presence of a vital sacred or religious form which confers
a heroic meaning upon the mystery of life and connects the
past with the present in a significant relationship of
ident ity :
Yo me habia divertido, ayer, en figurarme que
eramos Conquistadores en busca de Manoa. Pero de
subito me deslumbra la revelacion de que ninguna
diferencia hay entre esta misa y las misas que
escucharon los Conquistadores del Dorado en
semejantes lejanxas. El tiempo ha retrocedido
cuatro siglos. (P. 183)
In his observation of the presence of the liturgical
objects and ornaments of the Old World priest-sacrificer
who articulates those ancient, unchanging words, the pro
tagonist recognizes the crucial implications of this drama
102
of sacred regeneration. He discovers what Mircea Eliade
refers to as the "paradox of rite": the fact that through
the phenomenon of the sacred gesture
every consecrated space coincides with the center
of the world, just as the time of any ritual
coincides with the mythical time of the "begin
ning." Through repetition of the cosmogonic act,
concrete time, in which the construction takes
place, is projected into mythical time, in illo
tempore, when the foundation of the world
occurred.54
In other words, in his observation of this imitation of a
sacred act, the sacrifice that "repeats the initial sacri
fice and coincides with it," the protagonist not only
acquires an understanding of the dynamic process of accul
turation but also of the mythic continuum of New World
cultural identity. Through a repetition of certain para
digmatic gestures "there is an implicit abolition of pro-
55
fane time, of duration, of history." Just as he had
earlier perceived the presence of the earliest rites of
mankind in the burial of Rosario's father and felt himself
caught up and dragged along by obscure memories of funeral
rites that had been performed in ancient times, he now
recognizes in this living Mass the profound vitalizing
presence of the past which had suddenly become the present:
Que lo palpo y aspiro. Que vislumbro ahora la
estupefaciente posibilidad de viajar en el
tiempo, como otros viajan en el espacio. . . .
Ite misa est, Benedicamos Domino, Deo Gratias.
Habla concluido la misa, y con ella el Medioevo.
(P. 185)
103
Here the past is recycled into the protagonist's conscious
ness of now through the dynamics of rite and ritual. The
56
evasion in time has been achieved. Moreover, the impor
tance of this perception in relation to his "fuga" becomes
dramatically clear when he witnesses an equally momentous
articulation of human sentiment before life's ultimate
demands. It is performed by the indigenous priest, the
shaman, trying to drive off the emissaries of Death:
Detras de mx, bajo un amasijo de hojas colgadas
de ramas que sirven de techo, acaban de tender
el cuerpo hinchado y negro de un cazador mordido
por un crotalo. Fray Pedro dice que ha muerto
hace varias horas. Sin embargo, el Hechicero
comienza a sacudir una calabaza llena de
gravilla— unico instrumento que conoce esta
gente— para tratar de ahuyentar a los mandatarios
de la Muerte. Hay un silencio ritural, prepara-
dor del ensalmo, que lleva la expectacion de los
que esperan a su celmo. (P. 190)
57
The "mythos" — the sacred incantation of the tribal con
jurer, the archaic counterpart and prototype of Fray
Pedro's ancient, unchanging words— reveals not only a
ritualized primordial human response to life's supreme
realities but also a profound insight into music's genesis
in the pre-verbal, emotive utterances of human song. In
effect, it is a refutation of the protagonist's highly
ingenious theory. For prior to his attendance at the
shaman's magical chant the protagonist maintained a notion
of the mimetic origins of music. Contrary to the prevail
ing theories of music, he explained proto-music, the
104
beginnings of primitive rhythmic expression, as having a
practical function of aiding the hunt— as an attempt to
imitate the movement of animals or the songs of birds.
Therefore, his journey into the interior has been to him a
search for the justification of his theory. However, what
he intuited at the occasion of Rosario's father's funeral
and what he now discovers at the shaman's ceremony consti
tute not evidence of music's beginnings in a type of hunt
ing magic but music's matrix in the ceaseless human quest
for meaning emobdied in religious ritual and, specifically,
in the magical, rhythmic tonal forms of primitive mythos—
the "language" of sacred ceremony and rite:
Y en la gran selva que se llena de espantos
nocturnos, surge la Palabra. Una palabra que es
ya mas que palabra. Una palabra que imita la voz
de quien dice, y tambien la que se atribuye al
espxritu que posee el cadaver. Una sale de la
garganta del ensalmador; la otra, de su vientre.
Una es grave y confusa como un subterraneo hervor
de lava; la otra, de timbre mediano, es col6rica
y destemplada. Se alternan. Se responden. Una
increpa cuando la otra gime; la del vientre se
hace sarcasmo cuando la que surge del gaznate
parece apremiar. Hay como portamentos guturales,
prolongados en aullidos; sxlabas que, de pronto,
se repiten raucho, llegando a crear un ritmo; hay
trinos de sdbito cortados por cuatro notas que
son el embrion de una melodxa. Pero luego es el
vibrar de la lengua entre los labios, el
ronquido hacia adentro, el jadeo a contratiempo
sobre la maraca. Es algo situado mucho mas all^
del lenguaje, y que, sin embargo, esta muy lejos
aun del canto. Algo que ignora la vocalizacion,
pero es ya algo m£s que palabra. (Pp. 190-191)
In this phrenetic ritual the protagonist perceives, as he
105
had earlier in Rosario’s inhuman howl, not only the basic
elements of tragedy but also the fundamental materials of
musical expression; that is, in the random verbiage of the
shaman's gutteral counterpoint, synchronized with the
rattle of the maraca and the gyrations of possession, he
discovers the embryonic features of music's creation and
evolution. In the shaman's alternation of voices, the
58
"real voice" and the "feigned voice," each at a different
pitch, he detects the elemental constituents of melodic
form and comprehends how a musical theme could originate in
an extramusical practice. For in the expression of inco
herent speech-impulses made to conform to a rhythmic pat
tern through repetition, he recognizes the word— become
sacred in its ritual form— travelling the road of song
without reaching it (p. 208). As a composer and ethno-
musicologist he perceives in the shaman's terrifying outcry
over a corpse not only the noble pathos of deepest emotion
and a confirmation of its ritual formulation. He also
identifies the authentic sources of music and musical
creation. In other words, the protagonist realizes that in
this magical chant before the reality of Death there is
something other than language but not yet song— the elemen
tary materials of music.^
Thus through the protagonist's "fuga"— the flight
which allows him to experience this ceremony and its
attendant revelations— Carpentier establishes the central
106
thematic importance of the quest. Through his protago
nist's geographical movement back into the interior reaches
of the South American continent, Carpentier forces the
reader to retrace "los pasos," to regress in time to the
ancient sources or roots of music embedded in the pre
musical tonal forms of ritual. In the bizarre vocal man
nerisms of the "orphic conjurer" ("orfico ensalmador")
Carpentier's protagonist views the earliest attempt to
combat the forces of annihilation. In short, the author
illustrates the central function and importance of music.
It is a symbolic vehicle for the articulation of human
feeling. Like "mythos," the language of sacred rite,
music is defined as a "symbolic language" whose import,
although verbally ineffable, is a containment of contraries
60
on the level of symbolic expression. In other words,
like all art, with its capacity to render paradox and to
synthesize opposites by means of formalized articulations,
for Carpentier the meaning and real power of music lies in
the fact that, in the words of Susanne K. Langer, "it can
be 'true' to the life of feeling . . . ." With its "ambiv
alence of content"— its wealth of knowledge of "emotional
and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict,
the ways of living and dying and feeling"— it is "our myth
of the inner life," an untranslatable but meaningful
"semantic of vital and emotional facts" of human exis-
61
tence. Thus when the protagonist experiences the tonal
107
configurations of the shaman, he in fact perceives, in this
"Birth of Music," the function and "implicit meaning"
(Langer) of music: that it is essentially a tonal projec
tion of the forms of human feeling; that it stands, in
other words, in a symbolic relation to the fundamental
contradictions and ambivalences at the core of human life.
He realizes that
music is "significant form" and its significance
is that of a symbol, a highly articulated sensu
ous object, which by virtue of its dynamic struc
ture can express the forms of vital experience
which language is peculiarly unfit to convey.
Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its
import.
This understanding of music's function and
importance— derived from the shaman's ritual intention of
protesting against the forces of darkness--thus "coincides"
with the discovery of his authentic identity as a creator
63
of music. Stated differently, art, like ritual, is
"essentially the active termination of a symbolic trans-
64
formation of experiences." Consequently, upon his
arrival in Santa Monica de los Venados the protagonist
undertakes the creative (and symbolic) expression of his
65
New World "adventures." In other words, the discovery of
the origins and symbolic nature of music leads him to not
only a perception of his function and identity as a com
poser but also to the origins and rebirth of his artistic
6 6
self. As a direct consequence of his mytho-musical quest
108
the protagonist has "recuperated with the capacity of
67
creating the possibility of self-belief," self-
affirmation and identity.
It is at this juncture, then, that Carpentier under
scores the importance of the New World artist's need to
seek self-definition in authentic creation. Therefore, I
will now turn to the issue of experimentation in Los pasos
perdidos and examine Carpentier's pursuit of fictional
authenticity through an explicit narrative adaption of non-
literary devices.
109
Chapter II Notes
' ' ‘Salvador Bueno, La letra como testigo (Santa Clara:
Universidad Central de las villas, 1957), p. 173.
^Bueno, La letra como testigo, p. 174.
3
Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the
Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper
and Row, 1959), p. 3. Carpentier has said,
"In that novel a prise de conscience is suffered
by the central character, who speaks in the
first-person, which forces him to find a means of
evasion that carries him behond anything imagined.
. . . Once having found supreme independence in
Time, before the.Epoch, the protagonist discovers,
within the achieved evasion, the means to undo
what has been done by regressing to the point of
departure." Bueno, La letra como testigo, p. 174.
4
Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in
Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
Inc., 1963), p. 262.
5
Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, Into the Mainstream:
Conversations with Latin-American Writers (New York:
Harper and Row, 1966), p. 51.
6
Susanne K. Langer, Problems of Art (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957), p. 71.
7
The first of many not so obvious clues to the mythic
element and to the musical significance of the mythic di
mension is the title of the novel. In addition to meaning
"steps," pasos also, as a musical term, refers to "trill,"
terminology which in origin goes back to the sixteenth-
century in English and European choral traditions. The
term, in its more archaic usage, also refers to a now "ob
solete vocal ornament in which a single note was repeated,
the repetition getting even faster." Arthur Jacobs, A New
Dictionary of Music (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1958),
p. 393.
8
See Karl Kerenyi's "The 'Hermes Idea,1" in Hermes
Guide of Souls: The Mythologem of the Masculine Source of
Life, trans. Murray Stein (Zurich: Spring Publications,
110
1976), pp. 1-11. I do not intend to describe specific
correspondences between elements of the Hermes mythologem
and the substance of the novel, merely to suggest general
connotat ions.
9
Rolstan P. Adams, "The Search for the Indigenous:
An Evaluation of the Literary Vision of Alejo Carpentier
and Miguel Angel Asturias," in The Analysis of Hispanic
Texts: Current Trends in Methodology, ed. Mary Ann Beck
(Jamaica: Bilingual Publishers of New York College, 1976),
pp. 74-88.
■^Roberto Gonzalez-Echeverria, in noting the fact that
the novel ends on Saturday and that it has six chapters,
adds :
"Saturday is the day of fiction, of Saturnalia
and Carnival. Saturn's day is the feast where
the king is ritualistically killed to give way to
a new epoch: 'A characteristic of ancient
mythology is the idea that each reign must give
way to another, even on the plane of the divine;
it was an idea which was inextricably bound up
with the notion of life as a continuity and suc
cession, and of sacrifice as the sole source of
re-creation.' [J. E. Cirlot, Dictionary of Sym
bols, trans. Jack Sage (New York: Philosophical
Library, Inc., 1962), pp. 266-26 7.]" Roberto
Gonzalez-Echeverria, Alejo Carpentier: The Pil
grim At Home (New York: Cornell University
Press, 1977), p. 185.
"^Throughout the novel, Mouche is a symbol ,of the
alluring, superficial but negative attraction of French
culture to Latin American artists. This is especially true
of the nineteenth-century, following the wars of indepen
dence and the nationalistic rejection of Iberian cultural
models.
12
Harss and Dohmann, Into the Mainstream: Conversa
tions with Latin American Writers (New York: Harper and
Row, 1966), p. 43.
13
In "Problem^tica de la actual novela latino-
americana" Carpentier speaks of the Latin American artist
as a New World Adam whose act of naming things ("nombrar
las cosas") is an "act of self-definition.” In Tientos y
diferencias (Montevideo: ARCA, 1967), pp. 9-43.
14
The New College Encyclopedia of Music, ed. J. A .
Westrup and F. L. Harrison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967),
p. 44, includes the following entry under "atonality":
"a term often used loosely of any music whose
111
harmony appears unfamiliar, but properly applied
to music which rejects traditional tonality, i.e.,
which abandons the use of a tonic or key-centre
to which all the notes and chords of a piece are
related. What is often described as the 'break
down ' in tonality began during the second half of
the 19th century, particularly in the works of
Wagner (where the amount of modulation was suffi
cient at times to disguise the true tonal centre
of the music) and Debussy. From Wagner's Tristan
it was just a short step to Schoenberg's Trans
figured Night."
The protagonist elsewhere speaks negatively of Schoenberg
when, discussing his Threnody, he alludes to "the convul
sive achievements of the Viennese school" (p. 214). There
is more than a superficial importance attached to Carpen
tier 's references to Schoenberg and atonality. This
becomes especially apparent if we consider Roy McMullen's
comments on music and alienation in Art, Affluence, and
Alienation (New York: Signet, 1968), p. 70:
"I have just defined, in passing and in a vaguely
philosophical-metaphorical fashion, the avant-
garde (the term is here hopefully meant to be
descriptive and neutral) response to the crisis
of 1900 as 'taking a step forward in history.'
Since this is what Western composers have been
doing for more than a thousand years, avant-
gardists can maintain that they are the only
genuine traditionalists— which they are, if tra
dition is regarded, as probably it should be, as
a process of change. But of course the catch is
that going forward from the point reached in
19th-century European music has meant leaving
what is usually, and will continue to be in this
essay, referred to as 'the' traditional system.
Beethoven moved ahead from Haydn on the same con
tinent; Schoenberg, when in 1908 he pushed ahead
with Wagnerian chromaticism and thus automati
cally abandoned tonality, stepped off the edge.
Other 20th-century composers, in other ways, have
done likewise. One result is that many listeners
have felt at sea ever since; another is that
modern music— -music in which the avant-garde
response is apparent— can be described in terms
of what it has left behind [italics mine].”
See also "Schoenberg, Webern and the Austro-German Tradi
tion," in Joan Peyser's The New Music: The Sense Behind
the Sound (New York: Delacorte Press, 1970), pp. 1-80.
15
In discussing the history of Western music between
1600 and 1900, Eric Salzman, in Twentiety-Century Music:
An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
112
Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 4-6, argues that its distinguish
ing developmental characteristic was "functional tonality."
Stated briefly, the term indicates the tonal forms of tra
ditional harmonic patterns. However, of twentieth-century
music, he notes:
"The history of music in the twentieth-century
can be understood in terms of two great cycles:
first, the abandonment of functional tonality
after 1900, the explorations of vast new materi
als before and after World War I, and the new
tonal and twelve-tone systheses that followed;
and second, the very different but parallel set
of rejections, new beginnings, explorations,
analyses, and syntheses following World War II.
The bond that connects all of twentieth-century
music grows out of the fact that each composer—
and each piece— has had to establish new and
unique forms of expressive and intellectual com
munication [italics mine]."
There is a certain irony in this (as we shall see) when one
considers the protagonist's subsequent creative objectives.
The fact that the protagonist more often than not inter
prets the impressions and feelings provoked by the new
surroundings with musical metaphors is not surprising, con
sidering that, as a composer, he perceives things "musi
cally." As Susanne Langer tells us: "The only way we can
really envisage vital movement, the stirring and growth and
passage of emotion, and ultimately the whole direct sense
of human life, is in artistic terms. A musical person
thinks of emotions musically." In Problems of Art, p. 71.
16
Much of Carpentier's intention in Los pasos perdidos
is illuminated by the epigraph (from Stravinsky's Poetics
of Music) to La musica en Cuba (Mexico City: Fondo de
Cultura Econdmica, 1946), p. 16: "Une tradition veritable
n'est pas le temoignage d'un passe revolu; c'est une force
vivante qui anime et informe le present."
17
Frederic V. Grunfeld, in Music (New York: Newsweek
Books, 1974), pp. 137^138, writes:
"Schpenberg's ideals in music had always been
very different from Stravinsky's, although he was
no less of a revolutionary. Schoenberg belonged
to the German expressionist generation, which had
put the scream onstage and turned angst and
anguish into art. . . . His essential rhythm was
not that of the tribal.drum but of the palpitat
ing heart."
And following a reference to the composer’s "A Survior from
Warsaw,” Grunfeld notes: "The twelve-tone method was the
ideal way of dealing musically with the psychopathology of
the twentieth-century."
113
18
As the double entendre indicates, "flight" and/or
"fugue."
19
Later, following his return to the apocalyptic North
American city, the narrator refers to the composers of his
generation mistakenly striving for the elemental power of
primitive rhythms in the abuse of percussion instruments.
The basis of the narrator's positive response to the harp
ist 's authentic musical expression and, on the other hand,
his negative judgment of the young composer's atonalism is
reflected in the shrewd opinion of Aaron Copland concerning
the "weaknesses” of atonal music:
"But admitting our lack of sufficient perspective
for judging it fairly, one can even now see cer
tain inherent weaknesses; for whatever reasons,
atonal music resembles itself too much. It
creates a certain monotony of effect that severe
ly limits its variety of expression. It has been
said that the atonal system cannot produce folk
songs or lullabies [italics mine]." Aaron Cop
land's Our New Music quoted in John Tasher Howard
and James Lyons, Modern Music (New York: New
American Library, 1958), p. 69.
20
In "Problem^tica" Carpentier makes a revealing allu
sion to the unnoticed importance of the harp ("the musical
instrument of many regions of the Americas") in the new
world artist's search for "American autochthony," p. 25.
21
M. Ian Adams, Three Authors of Alienation (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1975), p. 91.
22Emil Volek has noted that Carpentier's characters
(especially the male ones) are defined according to their
professions or jobs: "the Curator, the President of the
Republic," etc. In "Algunas reflexiones shbre El siglo de
las luces y el arte narrativo de Alejo Carpentier," Casa de
las Americas, No. 74 (1972), pp. 42-54.
23
M. Ian Adams, Three Authors, p. 91.
24
M. Ian Adams, Three Authors, p. 96.
25
Harss and Dohmann, in Into the Mainstream, write:
"Of particular importance to the protagonist is the figure
of Rosario, the embodiment of the female principle, symbol
of the original matrix, of lifegiving Mother Earth, source
and fountain, under whose mythological sign he places him
self in his quest for regeneration and rebirth," p. 54.
Carlos Santander, "Lo Maravilloso en la obra de Alejo
Carpentier," in Homeriaje a Alejo Carpentier, ed. Helmy F .
Giacoman (New York: Las Americas, 1970), has noted the
114
importance of women marking the stages of the protago
nist's journey, pp. 99-144.
26
Wilson Harris, "Tradition and the West Indian Novel,”
in Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays
(London: Beacon, 1967), p. 34.
27
Harris, "Tradition," p. 31.
28
M. Ian Adams, Three Authors, p. 97.
29
Rolstan P. Adams says:
"He now experiences time as great columns of
existent possibilities leading from massed human
survival into individuation. At the same time he
becomes aware that the proportions of time in
such a perspective demand a kind of cyclic compu
tation where one is aware of moving into the
future as much as one is aware of recreating the
past. This vision of time is rather -like the
Indian's magical and mythical vision of time.
Space too takes on a magical quality in the
novel. It does not now exist so much as dimen
sions through which man can relate to his arti
facts, but as a phenomenon to which man himself
must relate for its own sake. One no longer
passes upon the landscape, for example, but one
instead passes through and into the landscape."
Rolstan P. Adams, "The Search," p. 80.
30
Rolstan P. Adams, "The Search," p. 77.
31
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study
in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 157.
32
Curt Sachs, The Wellsprings of MUsic, ed. Jaap Kunst
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1962), p. 82.
33
Sachs, the eminent historian of music and dance (to
whom the narrator refers early in the novel while discuss
ing his responsibilities to the university, p. 23), writes:
"sound, as we mentioned, affects our nervous sys
tem more than other sense perceptions; and since
the 'primitives' project their own emotions onto
the invisible forces around them, these too must
succumb to the unique mysterious spell of timbre,
rhythm, and tune." Sachs, Wellsprings, p. 83.
34
Juan Manuel Alonso singles out the importance of
this event
"because the protagonist, whose name is still not
115
revealed to the reader, believes he has begun to
find himself at last. He feels as if he had been
taken out of the chaos of modern life by the true
recognition of him which is implicit in Rosario's
ability to speak his true and unique name.
Through this act he feels born into the world."
Juan Manuel Alonso, "The Search for Identity in
Alejo Carpentier's Contemporary Urban Novels: An
Analysis of Los pasos perdidos and El acoso,”
Diss. Brown University, 1967, pp. 18-19.
R. Skinner, "Archetypal Patterns in Four Novels
of Alejo Carpentier,” Graduate Studies on Latin America 2
(1973), 75-82; Santander, "Lo maravilloso en la obra de
Alejo Carpentier,” pp. 99-144; Lloyd King, "A Note on the
Rhetorical Structure of Los pasos perdidos," Reflexion, 21,
No. 1 (n.d.), 147-152.
36
Many critics, responding to the preponderance of
mythic allusions to heroic voyagers and conquerers, have
chosen to emphasize the heroic elements. Fernando Alegrxa,
"Alejo Carpentier: Realismo magico," Humanitas, 1 (1960),
345-372, rpt. in HOmenaje a Alejo Carpentier, ed. Helmy F.
Giacoman (New York: Las Americas, 1970), pp. 33-69, recog
nizes that the expedition led by the Adelantado is a
twentieth-century repetition of the feats of the Conquest
of the New World but suggests that, on another level, the
protagonist's voyage "duplicates the adventure of Ulysseus."
This view is shared by Juan Loveluck, "Los pasos perdidos:
Jason y el nuevo vellocino," Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos,
55, No. 165 (1963), 414-426, who considers the novel, "as a
tale of deeds," to be "a new voyage of Ulysseus"— although
Loveluck associates characters other than the protagonist
with Ulysseus and identifies the protagonist as a "Prome
theus without fire" and a type of "eternal Jason pursuing
the fleece." Klaus Muller-Bergh, "Reflexiones sobre los
mitos en Los pasos perdidos," in Homenaje a Alejo Carpen
tier , ed. Helmy F. Giacoman (New York: Las Americas, 1970),
pp. 275-291, on the other hand, who sees Carpentier devel
oping the theme of the artist in our time by "rejuvenating
the ancient myths of Sisyphus, Prometheus, and Odysseus"
and recognizes parallels between The OdysSey and many of
the journeys into the forest in the novel, nevertheless
denies any "rigorous correspondence" between the two. He
concludes, moreover, by stating that:
"In spite of the many mythic parallels between
Sisyphus, Prometheus and Ulysseus which we noted,
to me it seems no more than the skeleton of the
structure of Los pasos perdidos. These parallels
are riot substantial elements of the personality
of the narrator. They are only erudite allusions.
. . . They no doubt reflect the intellectual
r
116
character of the novel, but their principal func
tion is that of helping to organize the narrative
material and the theme of the artist in the
modern age [italics mine].” Muller-Bergh1s
assessment of the protagonist's personality in
relation to the mythic mode is in keeping with
the author's statement; for the very notion of
"evasion" indicates something other than heroism.
37
Skinner, "Archetypal Patterns," p. 80.
38
Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation,
trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1958),
p. x.
"The term initiation in the most general sense
denotes a body of rites and oral teachings whose
purpose is to produce a decisive alteration in
the religious and social status of the person to
be initiated. In philosophical terms, initiation
is equivalent to a basic change in existential
condition; the novice emerges from his ordeal
endowed with a totally different being from that
which he possessed before his initiation; he has
become another."
39
Rolstan P. Adams, "The Search," p. 76.
40
Henderson and Oakes write:
"The separation rite as a threshold experience is
frequently symbolized as the act of passing
through a door. Therefore to cross a threshold
is to unite oneself with a new world." Joseph L.
Henderson and Maude Oakes, The Wisdom of the
Serpent (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 53.
41
In speaking of Carpentier's relation to and influ
ence upon the immense quantitative and qualitative increase
of Latin American novels since 1940, E. R. Skinner notes:
"In part, this exceptional growth of the novel
resulted from the conscious recognition of cer
tain patterns of human behavior that allowed the
novelist to perceive, within the particular tem
poral and spatial manifestations of life, con
figurations of archetypal and universal signifi
cance. Early twentieth-century research in the
fields of psychology, anthropology, and compara
tive religion, through the accumulation of data
on man's ritual behavior, made possible the for
mulation of archetypal patterns that profoundly
influenced literary movements, particularly two
movements with which Carpentier was closely asso
ciated: Afro-Cubanism and French Surrealism. The
117
second or transcendent reality posited by these
two movements reveals characteristics peculiar to
the religious experience of the sacred, and their
methods of expressing it exhibit patterns similar
to those of primitive ritual and to the psycho
logical processes of confronting the unconscious.1'
Skinner, "Archetypal Patterns," p. 75.
42
Eliade, Rites and Symbols, p. xiv. They indicate as
Eliade notes, "a new life in the course of preparation."
43
Raymond Souza, Major Cuban Novelists: Innovation
and Tradition (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1976), p. 41.
44
Eliade, Rites and Symbols, p. xiv.
45
Frye, Fables, p. 263. Marlow's frequent and all too
obvious comments make clear the importance of this aspect
of the tale:
"Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It
seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—
making a vain attempt, because no relation of a
dream can convey the dream-sensation, that com
mingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment
in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of
being captured by the incredible which is of the
very essence of dreams" (p. 27);
and: "a touch of fantastic vanity which fitted well with
the dream-sensation that pervaded all my days at that time.
Perhaps I had a little fever too" (p. 42). Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: ¥. W.
Norton and Co., 1963).
46
Conrad, Heart of Darkness, pp. 10-11.
47
This phrase repeats an earlier allusion to Erebus
(generally no more than a synonym for Hades or the Under
world) . In Los pasos perdidos an identical allusion is
made when the protagonist chooses a section from Book XI
of The Odyssey as the textual basis of this Threnody.
48
Harss and Dohman say:
"There are unmistakable echoes of Conrad, not
only in the lushness of Carpentier's style but
also in his Gothic-symbolic treatment of charac
ter and drama. Though at least on one main point
the two authors are poles apart. Conrad's Heart
of Darkness is a world of primitive savagery.
Carpentier's vision is Edenic." Harss and
Dohmann, Into the Mainstream, p. 53.
49
"Initiatory death," writes Eliade,
118
"provides the clean slate on which will be
written the successive revelations whose end is
the formation of a new man. . . .But now we must
note that this new life is conceived as the true
human existence, for it is open to the values of
spirit. What is understood by the generic term
•culture,1 comprising all the values of spirit,
is accessible only to those who have been
initiated. . . . All the rites of rebirth and
resurrection, and the symbols that they imply,
indicate that the novice has attained to another
mode of existence, inaccessible to those who have
not undergone the initiatory ordeals, who have
not tasted death." Eliade, Rites and Symbols,
p. xiii.
50
Susanne K. Langer describes "artistic perception" as
an "insight," an "act of understanding, mediated by a
single symbol." Langer, Problems of Art, p. 61.
51
Eduardo G. Gonzalez, "Los pasos perdidos, el azar y
la aventura," Revista Iberoamericana, 38, No. 81 (1972),
593. Gonzalez notes that this cognitive nexus ("nexo")
between the individual and the signs of his culture is "the
fundamental theme of Alejo Carpentier's works."
52
The implicit irony, of course, is that the Adelan-
tado is the one who actually "discovers" it.
53
Harss and Dohmann, Into the Mainstream, p. 51.
54
Eliade, Cosmos and History, p. 20. Lloyd King notes:
"For Carpentier Latin American experience is an
adventure provoked by visions and ideals. But
time and circumstance confuse men and are ever
conspiring to devour man's impulse to heroism.
Thus the image that presides over his work is the
image of the Eternal Return." King, "Rhetorical
Structure," p. 150.
55
Eliade, Cosmos and History, p. 35.
56
Esther P. Mocega-Gonzalez, in her book-length study,
La narrativa de Alejo Carpentier: El concepto del tiempo
como tema fundamental (Madrid: Eliseo Torres, 1975),
enumerates several temporal categories in the novel:
"chronological time,” "subjective time" (which constitutes
the different temporal levels perpeived and felt by the
narrator), and "the absence of time" (or atemporality: an
eternal or mythic time which, she notes, "also falls within
the above hierarchies"), p. 176.
119
57
In Greek, "Mythos": narrative, ’’story." Lord
Raglan, in "Myth and Ritual," notes that "myth is not
merely a narrative associated with a rite, but a narrative
which, with or without its associated rite, is believed to
confer life." In Myth: A Symposium, ed. Thomas Sebeok
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), p. 124.
58
Speaking of rhythmic "speech" as an act of "ecstasy”
or depersonalization, Curt Sachs notes: "Scattered all
over the world is the queer nasaling caused by a tiny mem
brane which screens the voice and colors it in covibration.
The membrane . . .is used as a sound mask to depersonalize
the singer's voice just as visual face masks dehumanize the
ritual dancers." Sachs, Wellsprings, p. 84.
59„ . . ,
Sacks writes:
"Music began with singing. However rudimentary
this singing may be, it flows all through primi
tive man's life. It conveys his poetry, and in
rest and peaceful work diverts, elates, and
lulls; it gives hypnotic trance to those who heal
the sick and strive for luck and life in magic
incantation; it keeps awake the dancer's yielding
muscles, intoxicates the fighting men, and leads
the squaw to ecstasy." Curt Sachs, The Rise of
Music in the Ancient World: East and West (New
York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1943), pp. 21-
22.
60
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1962), p. 178.
61
Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 234-245, et
passim.
62
Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), p. 32.
63
Alonso, "The Search for Identity," p. 81.
64
Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 45.
6 3
Muller-Bergh, "Reflexiones," p. 284.
66
M. Ian Adams, Three Authors, p. 100.
67
Loveluck, "Los pasos perdidos," p. 417.
120
CHAPTER III
Acknowledgment of Alejo Carpentier's profound knowl
edge of the art of music is by now a commonplace in the
criticism of his fiction. As Alexis Marquez Rodriquez
observed over a decade ago, Carpentier is no mere "amateur
to the art of music but rather a technician with
extensive control over the discipline.”^ Recognized now
for his life-long interest in the evolution and revital
ization of Cuban music, Carpentier enjoys the reputation
2
of a highly esteemed critic and musicologist. His
voluminous work in this area includes not only lectures,
reviews, and ethnomusicological investigations, but also
an internationally acclaimed historical study of Cuban
. 3
music.
Besides being a musicologist, Carpentier has also
written librettos for operas and ballets and even worked
4
as an audio-synchronizer. He is also at least a
reasonably proficient (in his own words, "acceptable")
pianist and a trained composer. "Every writer," he has
stated, "should have knowledge of a parallel art in order
5
to enrich his spiritual world." It is not surprising
then that this "knowledge" is reflected in all his
fictional works. Nor can there be any doubt that
121
Carpentier's interest in music constitutes a serious
dedication. Consequently, these facts are important
not only for what they imply about his general familiarity
with music but also because they have specific relevance
to certain procedural and structural characteristics of
Los pasos perdidos.
"The symphonic novel," wrote Paul Emile Cadilhac,
"will create a musical atmosphere by the use of images,
comparisons, and words borrowed from the musical vocab-
6
ulary." In these terms Carpentier's novel is "sym
phonic." Musical metaphors proliferate in Los pasos
perdidos, fusing under sheer numerical weight into a
cohesive family of references, a pervasive musical motif,
reinforcing an already strong feeling that the book is in
many ways analogous— in quality and effect--to a musical
composition. However, music is not only a thematic
element in Los pasos perdidos. It also largely defines
the structure of the novel. As a symbolic form for the
expression of human feeling, music— specific musical
references, adaptations and patterns— encourages the
reader to draw analogies between the theme of artistic
growth and identity and the evolutionary form of the
novel as a whole. In other words, music was an important
component not only of Carpentier's metaphorical
imagination and prose style but of his structural--indeed
in the broadest sense "creative"— imagination as well,
122
governing his choice of language, tone, rhythm, metaphor,
but above all his se5.se of process and design.
Carpentier's principal concerns and contributions are
in the realms of time, process, the flow of consciousness,
New World identity, and forms, and_ each of these facets
of his fertile imagination is inseparable from yet
another— the transmutation of musical rhetoric, princi
ples, and structure to literature. Like Andre Gide with
The Counterfeiters, and Aldous Huxley with Point Counter
Point— in fact, like almost every writer engaged in the
"musicalization of fiction" as Huxley was to name it—
Carpentier has been very explicit about his interest in
this area. "The problem of musical form has preoccupied
me a great deal, always. And I have tried to make trans
positions of formal musical concepts to formal literary
rj
ones." And "in the case of Los pasos perdidos [music]
. . . is of fundamental importance to the features of
8
the work."
Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to examine
the close relationship between musical form and fictive
structure. I focus on the degree to which general musical
suggestion is reinforced by correspondence between
literary structure and musical procedures and forms, and
in doing so I hope to make evident the multiple and
essential functions of music which justify the designation
of Los pasos perdidos as a "symphonic novel" in which the
123
author, in his search for an appropriate form, has
adapted his structural principles to the subject at hand
— namely, music. For Carpentier simulates within the
limitations of a linear medium (the novel) those effects
of musical counterpoint which are associated with the
ternary from of the fugue (and sonata). And although
not a novel strictly patterned on the fugue, Los pasos
perdidos reflects many fugal elements, either directly
transposed or achieved through roughly suggestive equiv
alents. The primary fugal characteristics of the novel
are in the areas of contrapuntal (or polyphonic) texture
and thematic organization and development. And these
characteristics are linked with the theme of time.
Carpentier more than any other Spanish American
writer of his generation— with perhaps the notable
exception of Jorge Luis Borges— is preoccupied with the
nature and experience of time. A mere glance at the
titles of his novels and stories is enough to indicate
this persistent interest. With very few exceptions, all
of his works are marked by an astutely clever manipulation
of temporal sequence as he pursues this repeated thematic
objective. And considered within the context of
Carpentier’s musical interests, this literary preoccu
pation with time is to be expected. For "inevitably,"
as Victor Zuckerkandl writes,
anyone who speculates about music sooner or
124
later finds himself facing the problem of time—
first, simply the concrete question of what the
function of the temporal element in music really
is, and what particular musical effects are
based upon the flow of time as such. And this
question may well imply another: How are we to
think of this entity "time" if we want to under
stand how it can produce such effects?®
As a composer, ethnomusicologist, and musical theorist,
these issues are of utmost importance to Carpentier's
protagonist.
The central metaphor Carpentier develops throughout
Los pasos perdidos in order to express the protagonist's
plight in relation to time and the dilemma of temporal
experience is that of "la fuga." On one important level
(as we have seen in Chapter II), the image expresses the
hero's consciousness of a need for evasion. In the
deadening routine of his repetitious existence, the
narrator is driven toward the idea of escape,or, as he
repeatedly acknowledges, "flight"— flight from his job,
from his useless marriage, and flight from the alienation
and anonymity to which they both contribute. For example,
Ruth’s enslavement to the unnatural rhythms imposed by her
dramatic roles allow only temporary periods of freedom
("Sus breves fugas, en funciones beneficias que le eran
permitidas . . . , " p. 10). The narrator compares his
commercial associations with her rigorous professional
routine ("Ruth y yo hubieramos destrozado, con nuestra
fuga . . . ”." p. 24); he describes the chaotic hotel
125
scene (with Mouche) during the Latin American revolution
("un p£nico sin fuga"); and, finally, even far into the
jungle's interior he witnesses the celebration of the Mass
and recalls his impressions in temporal terms using "la
fuga" ("En fuga desaforada, los anos vaciaban . . . . , "
p. 185). In effect, he chooses the term "fuga" to desig
nate the forces which circumscribe his freedom.
On another level, however, the metaphor signifies the
ultimate source of his salvation; that is, in contrast to
the absence of leisure time which characterizes his urban
situation, "la fuga" also implies the achievement of his
liberation and salvation in the art of flight— in the
Art of the Fugue. I n other words, Carpentier uses this
ambiguous metaphor to suggest not only the circumstantial
limitations of the protagonist's existence— including his
frantic flight from time as Death, symbolized in the early
allusions to Goya's Cronos— but also within that existence
the possibilities of meaningful freedom through artistic
(i.e., musical) expression. For music, to Carpentier, is
the achievement of human dominion over time. As the
narrator informs us, composers do not relinquish their
authority over time at death; instead, "Conservaban
derechos de propiedad sobre el tiempo, imponiendo lapso
de atencidn o de fervor a los hombres del futuro" (pp. 19-
21). The identity of musical form, in other words, is
directly related to the issue of time (and vice versa) and
126
the expression of self-identity. But the repeated
references to "la fuga" denote the paradoxical phenomenon
of an escape into that very thing which the protagonist
flees. The metaphor suggests, that is, not only the
thematic importance of flight but also (and equally impor
tantly) the centrality of the implications of the fugue
as a musical analogy in relation to the novel’s conform
mation of temporal experience. For the fugue is a mu
sical style characterized largely by the presence of
unity emerging from duality. And in the protagonist's
consistent allusions, Carpentier creates— through the
word's distinct and alternating meanings— a literary
semblance of the term's fundamental and characteristic
musical effect. And this is the effect of counterpoint.
The objective is a "semblance" of effect because the
fact of the matter is that contrapuntal techniques in the
art of literature are practically nonexistent. However,
like most writers who have sought to duplicate counter
point and who have been forced to recognize from the
very beginning the impossibility of an exact literary
parallel, Carpentier has used devices which produce a
suggestive equivalent. Hence, besides the pun on "la
fuga"— one of the "simplest" literary devices with contra
il
puntal implications --Carpentier suggests the contra
puntal effect through a fusing of temporal modes: that
is,.the narrative attempt at aesthetic transformation is
127
based on temporal multiplicity within a linear narrative.
Musical counterpoint is essentially characterized by
the combination of more or less independent melodies. It
is, in other words, "Music consisting of two or more me-
12
Iodic lines (or voices) sounding simultaneously." De
rived from the Latin contrapunctus (properly, punctus con
tra punctum, meaning "note against note" or, by extension,
"melody against melody"), counterpoint, in fact, is not a
musical form. It is instead a "manner of organizing musi
cal form. It is instead a "manner of organizing musical
13
material." Like the fugue, it is nore a process than a
specific form; it is more of a procedure which produces a
certain quality or effect, more of a "texture" than a
14
rigidly defined pattern. As such, contrapuntal (or
15
polyphonic) texture implies a listener who can detect
separate strands of progression (or movement) expressed by
separate voices, instead of hearing the sound of all the
voices as they happen from moment to moment, vertical
fashion. It is, in other words, a method of tonal organ
ization which creates the effect of contrast through the
simultaneous presentation of distinct (but related) lines
of progression and development.
As a musical process, then, counterpoint constitutes
a procedure for perceiving and organizing time. For
music is a chronological art. "Music," as Stravinsky has
written, "presupposes before all ease a certain organi-
16
zation in time, a chronomy . . . ." It is design in
128
tone and time. And fictional counterpoint may be safely
termed a dual or double temporal perception corresponding
to the simultaneous combination of two (or more) melodies
to make musical sense.
The temporal relationship or distance between nar
rator and narration is the source of much of the novel's
counterpoint. The protagonist is writing an autobiog
raphy. ! Sitting at his desk at some time after the events
being recollected, he is leading a life independent of
the one he describes. In that autobiographical narrative
past and present come together in one unified progressive
pattern.
A1 cabo de un tiempo cuya medida escapa, ahora,
a mis nociones— por una aparente brevedad de
transcurso en un proceso de dilatacion y
recurrencia que entonces me hubiera sido
insopechable— , recuerdo esas gotas cayendo
sobre mi piel en deleitosos alfilerazos, como
si hubiesen sido la advertencia primera—
ininteligible para mi, entonces— del encuentro.
(Pp. 18-19)
As this passage makes clear, the narrating protagonist is
separated from the events he narrates by a long span of
time. As a consequence, he must as pseudo-author consider
how he felt at the time of the events being related from
the later period or time at which he is describing them.
In his duplication of past experience in the present, the
narrative achieves through the different "voices" a degree
of simultaneity. For the event is being repeated, as it
129
were,at another "interval" thus producing an analogous
musical effect. The present "yo" and the past "yo"
alternate in contrapuntal relation to one anotherias voices
in a musical composition. Through the act of memory, the
consciousness of experience and the consciousness of post
experience come together in a seemingly amorphous flow in
which two persistent narrative strands or voices comple
ment one another, parallel one another, connect and then
intertwine. In the juxtaposition of inner and outer
worlds, past and present, Carpentier achieves a represen
tation of simultaneous presence.
Moreover, as the narrator insists on our awareness of
the density of his experience (as perceived musically),
he constructs a "quite extraordinary interweaving of
tirne-units, destined," in the words of Thomas Mann
(speaking about Doctor Faustus), "to include even a third:
namely, the time which one day the courteous reader will
take for the reading of what has been written"; that is,
17
"historic time." He constructs, in other words, a
three-tiered musical model in which the past event unfolds
in the progressive narrative present of the reader con
current with the indeterminate narrative past of the
protagonist. He constructs, that is, a model of experi
ence whose depths are measured primarily in temporal
terms: three layers of experience compounded into a
single dynamic present. So that while the reader can
: 130
trace the narrator-protagonist's development on a linear
or sequential pattern based on clock time, the narrator's
autobiographical consciousness— his narrative viewpoint—
is constantly associating past with present, anticipating
future, and fusing all of these into a single moment of
complex awareness.
The earliest textual indication of this procedural
method comes when the reader discovers that the protago-
ist is on a stage:
A tiempo sail de la luz, pues sond el di-sparo
del cazador y un pajaro cayo en escena desde
el segundo tercio de bambalinas .... Por
molestar menos fui a su cainerino, y alia el
tiempo volvi6 a coincidir con la fecha ....
(P. 9)
The narrative here establishes a counterpoint between the
reader's present, the narrator's present (and even future)
and the narrator's indeterminate (multiple) past. The
only real time of the (linear) narrative flow is the
multiplex present which includes the voices of perception,
recollection, and projection— past, present, and future.
Time in the novel, then, again shares common ground
with music. For time in music— like that in human
consciousness— partakes of multiple identities and
dimensions:
Musical time does not have an objective,
abstract, 'non-musical' future and past as its
131
orientation. It sets up, so to speak, its own
future and past, and it does this constantly in
the process of its own motion .... This is
the very essence of musical motion: the con
stant creation of a future and a past in the
actual present moment, in each present moment.
Even this moment is not present in the strict
sense; it is not there in front of the listener
in the manner of an object. The moment of musi
cal time is not present, it is at best pre
senting, creating the temporal tension of what
has gone before and what is to come, the tension
of the whole in the moment.18
In Carpentier's juxtaposition or fusion, in what has been
19
called "the preteritization of the Future," narrative
time is a continually unfolding present that cannot be
defined or understood independently of where it has come
from and where it may be going, that continually sets up
its own future and past and includes both within it as
memory and projection. It is mind we are observing,
and memory and anticipation are no less components of
mind than present perception.
Carpentier is interested in what takes place inside
his narrator-protagonist: in the nature and simultaneous
complexities of thought and feeling, the problems of
personal wholeness, identity, and self-presentation. He
is interested in the architecture, as it were, of mental
and emotional experience as they define one's sense of
self. Music, the art of time, then, as a symbolic form
for the expression of human feeling is an appropriate
analogue of consciousness. And consequently musical pro
cedures are the corresponding principles of formation in
132
that process by which consciousness is rendered. The
novel strives, in other words, for an evocation of feel
ings and effects that are traditionally associated with
music. Past, present, and future; character, author, and
reader; recollection, perception, and reflection; event,
emotion and idea— all these fuse into a single unfolding
moment of complex awareness. And the goal within this
textural density of actual experience is to imply--through
this technique of fusion and overlap— that the events we
are witnessing are occurring together; that is, it is to
simulate, within the limitations of a linear medium, the
effects of .(fugal;) counterpoint.
The narrative thus establishes an analogous relation
ship to musical form. For in
all music, whether it submits to the normal
flow of time, or whether it disassociates itself
therefrom, establishes a particular relation
ship, a sort of counterpoint between the passing
of time, the music's own duration, and the
material and technical means through which the
music is made manifest.20
Although contrapuntalism is primarily a function of
the complex relationship between past, present and future,
story, author and reader, the rapid progression and move
ment of contrasts— contrasting "voices," themes, situa
tions and places, characters, utterances, and even modes
of perception— are everywhere in the novel. Like counter
pointed melodies, independent and contrasted on the one
133
hand, complementary and related on the other— Mouche and
Rosario, the young harpist and the young pianist, the
Adelantado and Fray Pedro, Beethoven and the Shaman (and
even the protagonist and Adam); the city and the jungle,
the Old World and the New World; North America and South
America; history and myth; music and literature; etc.--
all are contrasted in their respective identities and
roles. And these contrasts not only support Salvador
Bueno's claim that a good part of the novel is presented
in a contrapuntal mode, but they also suggest the charac-
21
teristic interplay and texture of the fugue. However,
the primary evidence of Carpentier's focus on the
musicalization of fiction is to be found in the elabora
tion of the central themes.
In accord with . i t ' s , - function as a musical entity
(i.e., a group of notes, usually melodic), a theme is the
chief idea (or one of the chief ideas) of a composition. It
is, in other words, the basis for discussion, development
or variation. In a musical novel or, what often amounts
to the same thing, a novel about music, one expects a
certain degree of correspondence between those tradition
ally defined areas of theme and form. As Mark Schorer's
now almost classic statement in "Technique as Discovery"
proposes, theme and form are one in a work of art. The
former so thoroughly transforms and even creates the
latter that it is impossible to talk about one as
134
separate from the other. There are no preexisting laws
that govern the elaboration of a novel as a form. Each
one is different. Each one is, as Fredric Jameson has
since worded the perception, "a leap into the void, an
invention of content simultaneous with the invention of
22
the form." And in Los pasos perdidos the aesthetic
design follows specifically from the principles and
tendencies which generate and shape musical composition;
that is, not only is contrapuntal interplay a significant
aspect of the narrative but also modulation and such con
trapuntal techniques as imitation and theme and variation.
In other words, here too the essential musicality of the
novel — its "symphonic" affinities— can be seen in the
sonata-form and in the predominately fugal characteristics
of the pattern in which the central theme(s) is(are)
23
stated, developed, and resolved.
"What I should like to do," announces Edouard in
Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, "is something like the
24
art of fugue writing." Influenced perhaps by Gide’s
musical experimentalism, Emile Cadilhac years later
prefaces one of his three attempts at the creation of a
"symphonic novel" with a manifesto in which he explains
that this genre takes its shape and special character
from the systematic use of musical principles of struc
ture, creating, as he expressed it, "a musical atmosphere
by the use of images, comparisons, and words borrowed
_____________________________________________________________ 135
from the musical v o c a b u l a r y ."25 The basis of the
symphonic novel, he argues, is its themes: "Musically,
themes are the dominating ideas of a work— its framework."
26
And those themes, he insists, are "fugally treated,"
As a procedural form of order for the elaboration of
theme, the scheme of the fugue is relatively simple.
Being derived ultimately from the element of contrast,
the fugue, like the sonata (the essential form of the
symphony), is also a large musical form based upon three
large divisions whose essence lies in the imitation
(repetition) in several "voices" of a phrase or subject
announced earlier by one voice. Like the sonata, it is
essentially an expanded version of ,the basic ABA ternary
27
form. And although not a strict formal analogue for the
fugue (and vice versa), Los pasos perdidos contains many
fugal elements. "La fuga," in other words, is both a
thematic issue— centering on the protagonist's experience
— and along with the broadest dimensions of the sonata, a
narrative strategy.28
Like the sonata-form, as Howard A. Murphy points
out, "the Fugue is best heard in three large divisions:
the exposition, the middle modulatory section, and the
29
final restatement in the tonic key." In the fugue,
however:
Each of the divisions is made up of two or more
sections .... Each part (or voice) enters
successively with the theme (called the .
136
subject), while the other voices continue with
'counter-melodies.' The first announcement
of the subject by all the voices is known as the
'Exposition,' the end of which is usually marked
by a definite cadence. For the remainder of
the fugue the composer develops the possibil
ities of the subject through the use of contra
puntal devices and modulation. Free connecting
and developmental passages which do not contain
a complete statement of the subject are known
as Episodes. After the final statement in the
original key a coda is often added.30
From Murphy's description it is clear that Los pasos
perdidos suggests the rudimentary elements of the fugue.
It has multiple "voices"; it has a subject (or theme)
announced on the opening pages (the artist's achievement
of identity in time through the creative act); a counter
subject is introduced contrapuntally in Chapter IV (the
writing of the book or "novela" which becomes the basis
of the confession); it has a continous series of what
may without strain be called "Episodes"; and Carpentier
develops the theme through a literary equivalent of mu
sical modulation.
Consistent with the.general structure of the fugue
(and the sonata), Carpentier introduces the central theme
in the first section of the novel. As we have noted
before, the protagonist is a despairing artist. So
profound is his sense of artistic frustration that not
even suicide has been ruled out as a possible solution to
his painful condition. In fact, he intuits its presence
31
on the immediate horizon. Indeed his thoughts of death
137
make even more urgent his need to create meaningful— as
opposed to purely commercial— music. This compelling
necessity and the potential spiritual consequences of
its fulfillment lie at the heart of Chapter I as the
32
novel's expository movement or section.
We discover in the first episodes that music is to
the protagonist a means of transcending the mortal
limitations that flesh is heir to. In music man solidi
fies time so that one can speak of "un tiempo hecho casi
objecto por el sometimento a encuadres de fuga o de forma
sonata" (p. 22: italics mine). As he stands in the
museum operated by his former music teacher, the Curator,
the protagonist reflects upon the significance of Goya's
Cronos. It is an image of time devouring its living off
spring, As one of the masks of time, Death appears in
opposition to the power of creation. Music as an art of
Time appears, paradoxically, as a means by which to
establish and define human identity in relation to a
temporal force of negation. Music and time, Time and
musical creation, are the two sides of the thematic coin
of uncertain identity with which the novel begins.
In the image of "la fuga," the metaphor of flight and
the metaphor of music as temporal art form, the two
aspects are combined. As the protagonist undertakes his
frantic flight from Death, as he pursues his human and
artistic identity in the creation of musical form,
138
internal association replaces chronology and external
reference as formal determinant. As suggested earlier,
the novel thus begins its approach toward the condition
of music. And the result of that is an almost inevitable
musicality of texture and form.
By way of contrast, the second theme or "counter
subject" is introduced later in Chapter IV when the
protagonist begins the composition of his linear narrative
which will ultimately become a novel and, ostensibly,
the basis of his journal. In other words, just as the
double perception and the effect of the sustained pun
("la fuga") draws attention to the contrapuntal texture,
so too the explicit reference to the "novela" draws
attention to the linear nature of narrative. Analogous
to the formal nature of fugal procedure, this apparent
conflict between two potentially contradictory modes of
temporal progression— the narrative and the musical— is
the basic tension which animates the form and from which
the contrast and interaction between imagistic design and
linear narrative arises. An early prefiguration of this
development appears when the narrator refers to "grandes
lagunas de semanas y semanas en la cronica de mi propio
existir" (p. 15). This signals the difference between
the linear progression of narrative time and the simul
taneously circular, repetitive process of musical time.
It also adumbrates the "contrapuntal associate" of the
139
principal theme which is established in the "Development"
section of the novel.
In music, the Development follows the Exposition. In
the larger forms it is the middle section in which the
central thematic material is developed. Properly defined,
the term refers to "an important technique of composition
consisting in the elaboration or working out of a theme
33
or themes." It is, in other words, the exploiting of
the possibilities of thematic material by means of
contrapuntal elaboration, modulation, and rhythmical
variation. In Los pasos perdidos the development corre
sponds to Chapters II to IV (specifically episodes IV to
34
XXXIV). And perhaps the central clue to the musicaliza-
tion of Carpentier's thinking lies in the evolution in
this section of his central theme through a process of
continuous expansion. That is, Carpentier achieves unity
and variety through the (musical) techniques of "imita
tion" and modulated variation. In the novel, as in poly
phonic music, "unity is achieved through the continuous
3 5
use of the same material; variety, by its treatment."
The narrative connection between music and death is
recurrent. The protagonist's initial spontaneous asso
ciation between memories "de enfermedades de infancia,"
"de ciertos objetos evocadores de una muerte" and
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is, upon his flight, followed
almost immediately by an identical development. During
140
the violent revolution which breaks out in the Latin
American capital (the first stop of the protagonist's
fuga), the Austrian Kappellmeister is killed while pre-
36
paring a performance of Brahm's Requiem. Ironically,
he is the same one who only a short time earlier had
exhorted the hotel residents by invoking "el sublime
37
ejemplo del Testamento de Heiligenstadt. " (p. 61)
The juxtaposition is repeated again shortly there
after when the protagonist accidentally hears the entire
Ninth Symphony and his thoughts turn immediately to death:
Y lo peor fue que la noche de me encuentro con
la mas frxa barbarie de las historia, los
victamarios y gaurdianes, y tambien los que se
llevaban los algodones ensangrentados en cubos,
y los que toraaban notas en sus cuadernos
forrados de hule negro. Que estaban presos en
un hangar, se dieron a cantar despues del rancho.
Sentado en mi camastro, sacado del sueno por el
asombro, les ola cantar lo- mismo que ahora,
levantandos por un lejano gesto del director,
cantaban los del coro: .... (P. 102)
These and subsequent repetitions of the association
emphasize this aspect of the central theme. Moreover,
this pattern of repetition is characteristic of the pro
cess of musical development. For within the pervasive
ABA (or ternary) form are "smaller sections of parallel
structure. Within these are often others, smaller still.
"The point to remember about these smaller units of music,"
writes Aaron Copland, "is that every time a theme is
exposed, there is a strong likelihood that it will be
141
repeated immediately; that once repeated, a digression is
in order; and that after the digression, a return to the
3 8
first theme, either exact or varied, is to be expected."
Furthermore, through imitation (the restatement in
close succession of a musical idea in different parts of
a contrapuntal texture), Carpentier gradually widens the
possibilities and implications of the central theme. In
doing so, he approaches the kind of form that E. M.
Forster was looking for in fiction when he wrote of
"rhythm." "Easy rhythm," says Forster, "may be defined as
39
repetition plus variation . . . ." Through the repeti
tion and the juxtaposition of similar or identical ele
ments, the novel achieves a degree and quality of expan
siveness which approximates music, its "nearest parallel":
Music, though it does not employ human beings,
though it is governed by intricate laws, never
theless does offer in its final expression a
type of beauty which fiction might achieve in
its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the
novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not
Not rounding off but opening out.^O
Carpentier’s pursuit of expansion can be seen in the above
(and subsequent) examples of imitative counterpoint and
underscores the degree to which repetition contributes to
a sense of overall unity or rhythm without sacrificing or
compromising the degree of variety that life (or the novel)
demands. Instead of narrowing in toward a dramatic climax
or closure, Carpentier continues to expand the meaning of
142
"la fuga,” providing- both emphasis and broader implication.
Rhythm and pattern (described by Huxley as aspects of
the total effect) are elements of narrative art which
spring mainly out of the plot. But whereas plot and story
appeal to our intelligence and curiosity respectively,
pattern and rhythm appeal to our "aesthetic sense." In
other words, as in the larger and analogous musical forms
(e.g., fugue and sonata), they "cause us to see the book
41
as a whole." They involve not only plot per se but.
also character, situation or scene, atmosphere, word and
theme. And both, as Huxley suggests, rely upon the tech
nique of variation.
In Los pasos perdidos variation, as in musical
practice generally, has two identities. On the one hand,
it designates the principle by which the given theme is
suggested or presented in a number of modifications; on
the other, it refers to the principle by which the entire
independent composition is viewed as a variation (e.g.,
Bach's "Goldberg Variations" or Beethoven's "Diabelli
Variations"). In this latter sense, the idea of "la fuga"
must be understood not only in relation to Los pasos
perdidos but also within the more general context that
includes "Viaje a la semilla," "Semejante a la noche,"
El acoso , and even La Co mac ion de la primavera."
Internal coherence, in other words, derives as much, from
external literary (and musical) reference as from
______________ 143
internal context and thematic concentricity. The impor
tance of this aspect becomes especially pertinent when the
protagonist comments on his journey:
Lo sorprendente es que— ahora que nunca me
preocupa la hora— percibo a mi vew los destintos
valores de los lapsos, la dilatacion de algunas
mananas, la parsimonisa elaboracion de un
creptisculo, atonito ante todo lo que cabe en
ciertos tiempos de esta sinfonla que estamos
leyendo al reves, de derecha a izquierada,
contra la clave de sol, retrocediendo hacia los
compases del Genesis. (P. 188)
The perception of his journey ("fuga*') as a musical return
to Genesis is a direct allusion— with reverberating
echoes— to "Semejante a la noche" and, especially, "Viaje
a la semilla." In the first, one can see "the forebodings"
of Los pasos perdidos in the first-person narrator's
reflections on six different historical events in which he
4 2
participates; and, in the second, a concern with personal
and world history, the double and reverse flow of time,
the impetus of music and eroticism which constitute the
thematic sources orchestrated in Los pasos perdidos. In
both, moreover, the idea of regression in time to the
point of conception (or Genesis) is predominant. This
aspect of variation, suggests Roberto Echeverria, reveals
the novel's "totalizing desire" in relation to the rest of
Carpentier's body of works (and is especially true with
El acoso in which the "experimentation with narrative
voice" and the thematic concern with the music of Beethoven
43
is persistent).
However, the most significant use of musical
variation involves the first kind (i.e., modifications)
and appears in connection with the most common element of
fugal development— modulation. For like E. M. Forster,
Carpentier demonstrates a recognition that modulation
44
is "interwoven1' with pattern. In actual practice,
however, he comes closer to Point Counter Point, Aldous
Huxley’s confessed experiment in literary modulation,
variation, and counterpoint.
In Point Counter Point, a novel heavily influenced
by the musical experimentalism of Gide’s The Counter
feiters , Huxley provides a structural rationale for the
type of central character he has placed in his novel.
Presented as an excerpt from the notebook of his protag
onist, Philip Quarles, a novelist, he writes: "Put a
novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic general
izations, which may be interesting— at least to me. He
also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may
illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling
45
a story." This device of having an artist within the
novel set down remarks on the technique of the novel
which embody his own literary principles suggests not
only a significant parallel— if not influence— between
Carpentier and Huxley; it also underscores to an
astonishing degree the extent to which thematically
associated aesthetic issues (or "los problemas de
145
creacion," as Carpentier's narrator terms them) have a
direct bearing on the novel in which they appear. For we
observe in Los pasos perdidos that the passages in which
the protagonist laboriously explains the technical prob
lems and forms he will be concerned with are revealing not
only because they demonstrate the similarities between
his Treno and Beethoven1s "Choral” Symphony. They also
reflect the general structural tendencies which correspond
to the narrative patterns and the principles of construc
tion in Carpentier's own mind.
While conceptualizing his musical objectives, the
protagonist tells us:
As! pensaba yo lograr una coexistencia de la
escritura polifonica y la de tipo armonieo,
concertadas, machihembradas, segun las leyes
mas autenticas de la musica, dentro de una oda
vocal y sinfonica, en constante aumento de
intensidad expresiva, cuya concepcion general
era, por lo pronto, bastante sensata. La
sencillez del enunciado prepararia al oyente
para la percepcion de una simultaneidad de pianos
que, de haberle sido presentada de golpe, le
hubiera resultado intricada y confusa, hacien-
diseke oisubke seguir, dentro de la logica
indiscutible de su proceso, el desarrollo de una
palabra-celula a traves de todas sus
implicaciones musicales. (P. 223)
This clear indication of simultaneous planes and the
"development" of the musical implications of the "cell-
word" constitute, like the quote from Philip Quarles' note
book, an explicit indication of the technique of the book.
As we have noted, "la fuga" is that "palabra-celula"; and
146
the direct reference to the simultaneous development of its
implications on multiple levels points to the technique of
1iterary modulat ion.
The apparently gratuitous comparison between Point
Counterpoint and Los pasos perdidos is then justified by
the fact that Carpentier introduces modulation into the
novel precisely in Huxley's terms. "A novelist," says
Quarles,
modulates by reduplicating situations and charac
ters. He shows several people falling in love,
or dying, or praying in different ways—
dissimilars solving the same problems. Or, vice
versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar
problems. In this way you can modulate through
all the aspects of your theme, you can write
variations in any number of different moods.
This statement by Huxley (as Quarles) is, as Calvin S.
Brown has noted, "an exact description of the technique
47
of the book." In the characters of the Adelantado,
Montsalvatje, and Fray Pedro, Carpentier presents us with
figures whose lives are parallel in relation to their
objectives and in relation to their influence on the
protagonist. Each constitutes a variation on the arche
typal tutelary guide. As the protagonist moves deeper
and more meaningfully into himself, their presence (like
that of the three women) becomes correspondingly more
important to his penetration and recognition of his own
essential identity.
147
Much like the Curator who stands on the threshold of
the protagonist's passage from urban alienation into the
telluric wonders of Nature, the Adelantado and his "twin
persona," Montsalvatje, are the "humanized replicas of the
48
El Dorado seeker." As much alchemists as they are
exploitive conquistadores, they teach the protagonist by
example how "to match his spirit to the spirit of place
and to allow the unity of space and season in the land-
49
scape to harmonize with his own consciousness." In
doing so, they, like Fray Pedro Honestrosa, take part in
the forging of their own destinies— in giving meaning to
their own lives. So that when the protagonist hears of
the priest's tragic end, we understand why he can say
with a truthfulness which applies equally to the Adelan
tado and Montsalvatje:
habia tenido la suprema merced que el hombre
puede otorgarse a si mismo: la de salir al
encuentro de su propia muerte, retarla y caer
traspasado en lucha que sea, para el vencido,
asaeteada victoria de Sebastiln: confusi6n y
derrota final de la muerte. (P. 271)
Seen in relation to the protagonist's "forging" of his own
destiny through trial and tribulation, the three lives
develop through a procedure Quarles refers to as "parallel,
50
contrapuntal plots.” They emphasize through repetition
and variation, in other words, a modulation to a signifi
cant aspect of the central theme— a struggle against all
148
odds, including death, to create and define one's sense
of self in time.
The richest source of modulated variations on the
central theme, however, lies in the parallels between the
burial of Rosario's father, the Shaman's rite, and the
protagonist's Treno. In each instance Carpentier develops
a different "mood," a distinct (but closely related)
51
emphasis on the central theme. In the women's protest
"ante la presencia de la Muerte en la casa," the protag
onist perceives a millenial rite the force of which is
embodied in the magical verbal power of Rosario's "aullido
largo, inhumano." Later in the Shaman's dirge, the hero
acknowledges the transcendental power of verbal utterance.
Here also he intuits an affirmation of human identity in
the magic objective of the sacred rite. In the transition
from verbal protest to sacred incantation, he discovers
the creative power of rhythm confronting the destructive
power of death. The negation of life by the ravages of
Time is opposed by the creation of life through the
rhythmic verbal generation of sacred chant. The change
in perspective permits the discovery which leads to his
own attempt at musical creation. Music (his Treno) gener
ated from the power of the word becomes the "canto magico
destinado a hacer volver un muerto a la vida" (p. 225).
Distinct from (but parallel to) the women's (and the
shaman's) invocation to the power of their ancestral gods
149
by the use of their magic words, the writer-composer-
protagonist "causes the darkness of the apocalypse to
recede, and he reasserts the presence of order and harmony
52
in the universe," Death— as temporal negation--is
opposed by life— as temporal creation— in the musical
power of the rhythmic word.
Therefore, music (as time and creation), like the
contrasting theme of death (as time and negation), is
viewed from a variety of conspicuously parallel but con-r
trastive points of view, modulated into a still richer
variety of keys. The protagonist's own attitude toward
death (as toward creation) shifts with mood and context,
And consistent with the process of musical development,
each variation is a new revelation of the implications of
the central theme. As Quarles' description suggests,
modulation is a structural device supportive of and
consistent with thematic development:
The musicalization of fiction. Not in the
symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound.
(Pleuvent les bleus baisers des astres
tacitUrnes. Mere glossolalia.) But on a large
scale, in the construction .... More
interesting still, the modulations, not merely
from one key to another, but from mood to mood.
A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out
of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though
still recognizably the same, it has become quite
different.53
The purpose, in other words, is to bring about that
special feeling of dynamic growth, tension and dramatic
150
conflict which is characteristic of musical development.
The idea in Los pasos perdidos (as in Point Counter Point)
is clearly to compete with the musical form and to use the
same methods for the thematic development of a literary
work.
The final section (of fugue and sonata) following
the "Development" is the "Recapitulation." Recapitulation
is all but indispensable to musical form, "as inveterate,"
'54
said Donald F. Tovey, "as symmetry is in architecture."
And although we have noted Forster's injunction that the
novelist should "seek expansion instead of completion,"
not rounding off but opening out," it is at this point
that thematic expansion ceases to be endless.
Musical recapitulation is essentially a "restatement
55
of the exposition." However, since Los pasos perdidos
is a work of fiction, not a piece of music, we cannot
expect the exact conventional return to the opening. In
other words, there is no identical recapitulation in Los
pasos perdidos; there is no verbatim reappearance of the
opening episodes. There is instead something equally
appropriate to the novel and equally analogous to music:
a modified and abbreviated recapitulation of the main
chiefly expository events and themes and a reduplication
of the central plot device implicit in the novel’s
central metaphor (i.e., "fuga").
The repetition and restatement which contribute to
151
internal coherence in the process of thematic development
take the fuller and more climactic form of final recapit
ulation in Chapter Six. For one thing, there is an
increased number of tacit or overt reminders of what has
gone before— dramatic and thematic connections which link
the last chapter with the events which have brought us
and the protagonist so forcefully to it. Primary among
these are the reasons for his initial flight: his mar
riage (and its extramarital.entanglements); the spiritual
sterility of his commercial composition; and the oppres
sive weight of urban existence:
Ahora, aquel escenario de la Guerra de Secesion
que tanto torturara a Ruth por el automatismo
cotidano de la tarea impuesta, pasaba a ser un
santaurio del arte, el camino real de una
carrera, del que ella no habxa vocilado en salir,
sacrificando gloria y fama, para darse m£s
plenamente a la sublime labor de tornear una
vida— una vida que la amoralidad de mi
procedimiento le negaga— . Tengo todas las de
perder en ese embrollo que mi esposa alarga
indefinidamente con el animo de poner_el tiempo
de su lado y hacerme regresar,plvidado de mi
evasion, a la existencia de antes. En fin de
cuentas, ella ha tenido el mejor papel en la
gran comedia armada, y Mouche quedo eliminada de
su terreno .... Tampoco me perdona, mi
empresa publicitaria, la demora en regresar, en
tanto que Hugo, mi antiguo asistents, ha pasado
a ser jefe de estudios. He buscado
infructuosamente alguna tarea en esta ciudad
donde hay cien aspirantes para cada cargo. Me
fugar£ de aqux, divorciado o no . . . . La
ciudad no me deja ir. Sus calles se entretejen
en torno mxo como los cordeles de una nasa, de
una red, que me hubieran lanzado desde lo alto.
(Pp. 265-266)
In this one poignant cri de coeur we are returned to the
152
opening episodes of the novel— Civil War theatrical
setting and all— as the protagonist vainly searches for
that sense of order he left behind with his music manu
script in the jungle to the south. Moreover, as he begins
his "interminables caminatas," we are reminded of an
earlier reference to "el desaforado ritmo de mis dias,"
the days spent walking the streets without a conscious
sense of direction, a characteristic activity which
illumines his plight at the beginning of the novel. And
the early fortuitous discovery of his mother's Spanish
edition of "el libro de vidas de santos" which prefigured
his journey to the jungle and his meeting with Rosario
(Sanctae Rosae Limanae Virginis) is repeated, although
now charged with "un dolor intolerable" for the things
that are past, for "el recuerdo de Rosario." Even the
protagonist's dramatic encounter (also prefigured) with
musical styles of Medieval Europe is repeated, emphasizing
with greater intensity his initial perception of the
"musicas mecanicas" of the modern age and his desire to
56
escape it and the profound meaninglessness it implies.
However, more important— and more conspicuous in estab
lishing the recapitulatory nature of the concluding
episodes— is the fact that Carpentier, in Huxley's word,
"reduplicates" at the end of the novel the central event
initiated at the conclusion of the expository first
chapter. The protagonist undertakes another "fuga”;
153
that is, he undertakes another journey into time (and
time as music). As he tells us of his first trip:
Porque mi viaje ha barajado, para ml, las
nociones de preterito, presente, futuro. No
puede ser presente esto que sera ayer antes de
gue el hombre haya podido vivirlo y - -
contemplarlo; no puede ser presente esta fr£a
geometria sin estilo, donde todo se cansa y
envejece a las pocas horas de haber nacido.
Solo creo ya en el presente de lo intacto; en el
futuro de lo que se crea de cara a las
luninarias del Genesis. (Pp. 264-265)
Through the Return (flight in time), then, Carpentier
concludes his thematic development by bringing the nar
rative back to the point of departure. For his "fuga" is
not only a dramatic image of a pervasive narrative tech
nique traceable to the opening question about the nature
of musical time but also a culminative reiteration of the
theme of self-definition in time through the art of music.
Like the tail-in-the-mouth form of a musical composition,
Los pasos perdidos circles back on itself and ends with a
recapitilation of major themes. And no other incident,
one might add, resembles so completely the one that begins
the novel as the one that brings it to an end.
However, in relation to the novel's conclusion, and
implicit in Huxley's injunction, there is an apparent
(creative) paradox. For any duplication (or "reduplica- .
tion") is a return and every return is a»t the same time at
least potentially a possible point of departure. The
154
conclusion, in other words, amounts to an end that does
not amount to an ending. This open-endness of the nar
rative is Carpentier's compromise with'possibility and at
the same time the demonstration that the novel— perhaps
only the musical novel— can, in part at least, imitate the
art of the fugue, can be as inconclusive and as surprising
as life itself. As the narrator informs us:
El Adelantado se situa en su primer capltulo,
y yo hubiera podido permanecer a su lado si
mi oficio hubiera sido cualquier otro que el de
componer mdsica— oficio de cabo de raza— .
Falta saber ahora si no serA ensordecido y
privado de voz por los martillazos del Cdmitre
que en algdn lugar me aguarda. Hoy terminaron
las vacaciones de Slsifo. (p. 286)
Beyond the implications of counterpoint,' so characteristic
of fugal works, the literary pun on "la fuga", then,
implies in the Coda-like end of the recapitulation the
possibility of a new point of departure. The conclusion
is, paradoxically, an open-ended invitation to further
expansion— the tonic of the score that is the dominant of
another key. In brief, it underscores again the degree
to which the entire novel is in correspondence with
musical principles of process and design.
155
Chapter III Notes
"^Alexis Mdrquez-Rodriguez, La obra narrativa de Alejo
Carpentier (Venezuela: Ediciones de la Biblioteca, 1970.
o
Alan Cheuse notes that Carpentier "made musical
history by organizing Havana's first music conference
(whose title was 'Las zonas inexploradas del sonido') in
the Institucion Hispanocubana." Alan Cheuse, "Memories of
the Future: A Critical Biography of Alejo Carpentier,"
Diss. Rutgers University 1974, p. 94.
3
Alejo Carpentier, La musica en Cuba (Mexico: Fondo
de Cultura Economica, 1946). .A book-length volume, La
hausica en Cuba is a perceptive and penetrating analysis of
the primary styles and distinctive elements of musical cul
ture on the island since the sixteenth century. Gilbert
Chase, in A Guide to the Music of Latin America (Washing
ton, D.C.: Pan American Union, 1962), calls it "the first
attempt at a systematic historical survey of the origins
and development of music in Cuba," and "a model of how
musical history should be written" (pp. 213^218).
4
In La musica en Cuba Carpentier alludes to his per
sonal work with the exiled Cuban composer, Amadeo Roldan.
5
Quoted from "Confesiones sencillas de un escritor
barroco," in Homenaje a Alejo Carpentier, ed. Helmy F.
Giacoman (New York: Las Americas, 1970), p. 26.
6
From the Preface to Cadilhac1s La pastorale (Paris,
1924). Cited in Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature
(Athens: University of Georgia, 1948), p. 174.
7
From "Cuatro preguntas a Alejo Carpentier," Imagen,
No. 30 (1968). Cited in Marquez-Rodriquez, La obra narra-
tiva de Alejo Carpentier, p. 10.
8
-Alejo Carpentier in El nacional (Caracus, May 4 and
May 22, 1957), pp. 12-14 respectively. Cited in Cheuse,
"Memories," p. 195.
9
Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol: Music and the
External World, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 152.
156
"^One of the many allusions to Bach mentions specifi
cally The Art of the Fugue.
■^Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature, p. 42.
^^Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Will Apel and Ralph
Daniel (New York: Washington Square Press, 1960), p. 72.
13
New College Encyclopedia of Music, ed. J. A.
Westrup and F. L. Harrison (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976),
p. 142.
14
Howard A . Murphy, Form in Music for the Listener
(Camden: Radio Corporation of America, 1948), p. 66.
15
The terms are almost synonymous. The difference is
largely one of emphasis. The term "polyphony” is preferred
in connection with early music (e.g., medieval polyphony);
the term "counterpoint" is used in connection with the
sixteenth- to eighteenth-century period (e.g., Palestrina,
Bach).
* | 0
Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, trans. Arthur
Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1970), p. 28.
17
Cited in Adam,A. Mendilow, Time and the Novel (Lon
don: Peter Nevill, 1952), p. 90.
18
Joan Stambaugh, "Music As a Temporal Form," Journal
of Philosophy, 61, No. 9 (1964), 276.
19
Carlos Santander, "Tiempo y espacio en la obra de
Alejo Carpentier," in Recopilacion de textos sobre Alejo
Carpentier, ed. Salvador Aris (Havana: Case de las Ameri
cas, 1977), p. 180.
20
Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, pp. 30-31.
21
Salvador Bueno, La letra como testigo (Santa Clara:
Universidad Central de las villas, 1957), p. 174.
22
James Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Prince
ton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 73.
23
It is worthwhile to note that Beethoven's interest
in his last years was with fusing the fugue and sonata
forms in the symphony.
24
Andr£ Gide, The Counterfeiters, trans. Dorothy Bussy
and Annotated by Justin O'Brien (New York: Modern Library,
1955), p. 190.
157
25
Cited in Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature, p.
174.
26
Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature, p. 174.
27
Like the protagonist's personal instrument, the
piano, it is essentially a musical development of the
eighteenth century.
28
Unlike the sonata-form, the fugue is less suscep
tible of transformation into other mediums. However, like
Beethoven, Carpentier combines sonata and fugue in his
symphonic novel. For his major musical inspiration is,
like Emile Cadilhac's, the symphonies of Beethoven.
29
Murphy, Form in Music, p. 66.
30
Murphy, Form in Music, p. 66.
31
"Me sostenia por obra de un impulso adquirido a
fuerza de paroxismos— impulso que cederia tarde o temprano,
en una fecha que acaso figuraba en el calendario del ano en
curso— Alejo Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos (Mexico:
Compania General de Ediciones, 1959), p. 15.
32
More than one critic has identified the important
expository nature of the first chapter. Jorge Rodrlgo-
Ayora, in "La alienacion marxista en Los pasos perdidos de
Alejo Carpentier," Hispania, 57 (1974) 886-892, refers to
the first forty pages as "the key" to the entire novel.
And Eduardo G. Gonzalez, in "Los pasos perdidos, el azar y
la aventura," Revista Iberoamericana, 38, No. 81 (1972),
585-613, notes that the three episodes of the first chapter
are similar to a musical composition, a "microcosmic repre
sentation" of the basic ternary structure of the novel.
33
Harvard Dictionary of Music, p. 80.
34
It follows the cadence-like ending of episode three
which conveys the necessary "feeling of temporary repose."
Harvard Dictionary of Music, p. 39.
35
Murphy, Form in Music, p. 66.
36
Along with Wagner, Brahms is usually considered the
immediate successor and perpetuator of the symphonic tradi
tion established by Beethoven.
37
The "Heiligenstadt Testament" of October 6-10, 1802,
is the most striking confessional statement in the biogra
phy of Beethoven. In it he expresses his feelings of deep
158
despair at his encroaching deafness, but he concludes by
affirming life on the basis of the hope contained in his
art: "It was virtue that sustained me in my misery. It
was thanks to virtue and also to my art that I did not put
an end to my life by suicide . . . From George R.
Marek's Beethoven: Biography of a Genius (New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1969), pp. 325-326.
O Q
Aaron Copland, What to Listen for in Music (New
York: New American Library, 1957), p. 83.
39
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1955), p. 168.
40
Forster, Aspects, p. 169.
41
Forster, Aspects, p. 150.
42
Roberto Gonzalez-Echeverria, Alejo Carpentier: The
Pilgrim At Home (New York: Cornell University Press,
1977), p. 158.
43
Gonzalez-Echeverria, Pilgrim, p. 159.
44
Forster, Aspects, p. 159.
45
Aldous Huxley, Point Counterpoint (New York:
Harper and Row, 1928), p . 301.
46
Huxley, Point Counterpoint, p. 301.
47
Calvin S. Brown, Music and Literature, p. 210.
48
Rolston P. Adams, "The Search for the Indigenous,"
in The Analysis of Hispanic Texts: Current Trends in
Methodology, ed. Mary Ann Beck (Jamaica: Bilingual Pub
lishers of New York College, 1976), p. 80.
49
Rolston P. Adams, "The Search," p. 80.
50
Huxley, Point Counterpoint, p. 301.
51
An English term of the early sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, "mood" designates note relationship
(mode, time, prolongation) of mensural notation.
Rolston P. Adams, "The Search," p. 85.
53
Huxley, Point Counterpoint, p. 301.
54
Donald Francis Tovey, The Forms of Music (Cleveland:
World, 1956), p. 220.
159
55
Harvard Dictionary of Music, p. 277.
56
"Ya se alza el canto gregoriano: Justus ut palma
florebit:— Sicut cedrus Libani multiplicabitur:— plantatus
In domo Domini,— in atris domus Dei nostri. A la
ininteligibilidad del texto se anade ahora, para los
presentes, la de una mdsica que ha dejado de ser musica
para la mayoria de los hombres: canto que se oye y no se
escucha, como se oyo, sin escucharse, el muerto idioma que
lo acompana." Carpentier, Los pasos perdidos, p. 260.
160
CONCLUSION
We have seen that Los pasos perdidos is a complex
narrative. It is an ambitious example of experimentation
in the art of the novel. It is a unique narrative synthe
sis in which music as thematic element and structural
device is fused with the mythic quest of the epic preterite
and the essential conventions of the modern confessional
genre to produce what has been rightfully called "a sym
phony in time."'*'
In the protagonist's confessional narrative Carpentier
constructs a model of experience whose depths are measured
primarily in temporal terms. Because Carpentier is inter
ested in what takes place inside his confessor-narrator-
protagonist— in the nature and simultaneous complexities of
his thought and feeling, the problems of personal whole
ness, identity and self-presentation, in the architecture
of mental and emotional experience as they define one's
sense of self— music and myth are the symbolic vehicles
(analogues) for the expression of that experience.
In the protagonist's mythic journey Carpentier estab
lishes the basic relationship between the themes of music,
identity, and time. Fictional reality proceeds according
to the ordering pattern established by the hero's quest.
161
Bringing him into intimate contact with the temporal
rhythms of the New World and producing an awareness of his
own "fuga"— a regression in time to the origins of music
and self— the mythic quest allows the protagonist-narrator
to achieve profound insight into music's genesis in the
pre-verbal, emotive utterances of ritual song. For the
protagonist’s quest is a flight in time— through music—
into a more harmonious and coherent past— -one in which
music, like myth, maintains an explicit functional charac
ter and reveals the possible depths of human feeling in
mankind’s eternal strife against the forces that threaten
life and welfare. Music and myth, in other words, are both
presented as means by which to establish and define human
identity in relation to the negating force of time. They
are the two human creative responses to death as a temporal
force of negation.
The basic mythic plot evolves in a manner to reflect
the hero-narrator's psychic-spiritual evolution, and in
turn, this psychic experience is interwoven thematically
with music (and musical creation) as a process of self-
affirmation, growth, and development. In other words, la
fuga ("fugue” and "flight”) is both a thematic issue—
centering on the protagonist's experience and— along with
the broadest dimensions of the sonata— a narrative strategy.
It encourages the reader, as such, to draw analogies
162
between the themes of New World artistic growth and iden
tity and the evolutionary form of the novel as a whole.
Furthermore, we have seen that Carpentier's knowledge
and love of music led him to utilize specific musical
references, adaptations, and patterns. Consequently, Los
pasos perdidos has been defined as a "symphonic novel."
It is a narrative in which there is a total integration of
theme and content. The entire novel is in correspondence
with musical principles of process and design; that is, the
integration of technique and subject is so complete that
the aesthetic design follows specifically from the princi
ples which generate and shape musical composition. More
over, we have found that Carpentier employs not only
contrapuntal interplay as a significant aspect of the
narrative process but also modulation and such contrapuntal
musical techniques as imitation and theme and variation.
As a "symphonic novel" Los pasos perdidos strives for an
evocation of feelings and effects that are traditionally
associated with music. For the idea— as in other musical-
ized novels such as Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters and
Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point— is to compete with the
musical form and to use the same methods for thematic
development.
In short, Los pasos perdidos is the symphonic expres
sion par excellence of the "interior voices" of the New
2
World artist. It may rightfully be called "the first
163
authentically 'American' novel to be published on the Latin
3
American continent."
164
Conclusion Notes
Graciela Perosio, "Los pasos perdidos: Olvido y
remeniscencia," in Historia y mito en la obra de Ale.jo
Carpentier, ed. Nora Mazziotti (Buenos Aires: Fernando
Garcia Cambeiro, 1970), p. 134.
2
In an interview with Joaquin G. Sontana, printed in
Prensa Latina, Carpentier compared "the interior voices of
the Cuban artist to the relationship of the lines in
Bach's Art of the Fugue." Cited in Alan Cheuse, "Memories
of the Future: A Critial Biography of Alejo Carpentier,"
Diss. Rutgers University 1974.
3
Alan Cheuse, "Memories of the Future: A Critical
Biography of Alejo Carpentier," Diss. Rutgers University
1974, p. 166.
165
BIBLIOGRAPHY
166
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Creator Bush, Roland Edward (author)

Core Title The art of 'la fuga': Mythic and musical modes in relation to the theme of identity in Alejo Carpentier's "Los pasos perdidos"

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Caribbean,Literature, Latin American,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

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