36 pages • 1 hour read
Alejo CarpentierThe Kingdom Of This World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
PrefaceChapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain references to enslavement, rape, suicide, and violence.
Carpentier writes that in a 1943 visit to Cap Français (“the Cap”), he found “signs of magic by the sides of the red roads” (xiii). He compares his experience of the miraculous with that evoked in Western literature, from tales of the Knights of the Round Table to literature’s use of “ghosts, immured priests, lycanthropies, and hands nailed on the door of a castle” (xiv). He argues that writers who include such symbols are often juxtaposing objects in ways that lack authenticity. When such a technique is used, “the magician becomes a bureaucrat” (xiv). He writes that the marvelous can be better evoked when it emerges from reality as an “unexpected alteration,” or “illumination” of what is already there (xvi). Finally, he argues that the marvelous is often “invoked in disbelief” (xix)—it is a joke or a symbol rather than something that stems from the author’s real experience and perceptions. He introduces The Kingdom of this World as a text based on research in which the marvelous “flow[s] freely from reality” (xx).
Preface Analysis
Carpentier juxtaposes Western literature that includes fantastical detail for the sake of symbolism with his use of magical realism. His main argument is that details like ghosts, séances, and more have become stale: They are all stock metaphors for readily apparent elements of reality, such as mental illness. Therefore, they are unbelievable and unoriginal. When he writes that in such literature, “the magician becomes the bureaucrat” (xiv), he suggests that the magic of the work is lost, as it becomes rote and perfunctory.
He contrasts this kind of tepid fantasy with the magical realism of artists depicting and working in the postcolonial world, including André Masson and himself. Masson, he suggests, made paintings that sought only to reveal the extant miracles in the world around him. Carpentier’s project is similar: Rather than arbitrarily inserting magical elements into the world, his version of magical realism emerges directly from reality. His descriptions of Vodou rituals and characters’ transfigurations are based on his research into real beliefs rather than inventions that merely represent real-world occurrences. As the novella unfolds, the theme of Catholicism Versus Vodou will therefore be central to the work’s genre.
Carpentier more generally suggests that the “magical” emerges when the artist focuses on amplifying existing qualities of reality rather than creating an alternate reality. His own experience in Cap Français showed him that elements of the miraculous are already present in the world, and his work simply seeks to illuminate them. That he associates these elements with Haiti specifically is significant to his choice of setting. Carpentier grew up in Cuba, which The Kingdom of This World portrays as a comparatively mundane world because it is more Westernized. Haiti, by contrast, is a place of elemental forces and a population of African descent that understands The Power of Nature. In this depiction of Haiti and its residents, Carpentier (who, it is important to note, was of European ancestry) invokes a kind of racist essentialism even as he sympathetically portrays the plight of the enslaved Haitians.
