Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

/ARTS WEEKLY/LITERATURE-CUBA: A Year of Homage to Alejo Carpentier

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Oct 11 2004 (IPS) - After years of veritable famine in the publishing industry, brought on by the economic crisis, Cuban readers can now feast upon new editions of works by one of the country’s most important literary figures, Alejo Carpentier.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Carpentier’s birth, and the occasion is being marked with seminars, lectures and TV spots, as well as the publication of works by and about the writer, considered one of the most innovative and influential Latin American writers of the 20th century.

Among the highlights is an international congress, The Century of Alejo Carpentier, to be held in November by one of Cuba’s foremost cultural institutions, the Casa de las Américas.

"The years of paper shortages and the crisis in the publishing industry in the 1990s brought to a halt the printing of new editions of Carpentier’s works, which had been a regular practice for years," novelist and essayist Leonardo Padura told IPS.

The author of Un camino de medio siglo: Carpentier y la narrativa de lo real maravilloso (Carpentier and Magic Realist Literature), published in 1994,Padura believes that these efforts to refocus attention on Carpentier’s works and make them available to new readers will be "fruitful".

In the last few years, Cuba’s cultural institutions have organised similar tributes for the centennial anniversaries of the births of painter Wilfredo Lam and poets Dulce María Loynaz and Nicolás Guillén, as well as the bicentennial of poet José María Heredia’s birth.

A number of different institutions are involved in the homage to Carpentier, including the Ministry of Culture, the Office of the Havana City Historian, the Cuban Institute of Literature and Linguistics and the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba.

The son of a French architect father and Cuban mother, Carpentier was born in Havana on Dec. 26, 1904, and went to France in 1912 to attend school. Nine years later, he enrolled at the University of Havana to study architecture, but left this field to become a journalist.

His collected works include thousands of articles and arts reviews, along with essays, lectures and numerous novels, ending with El arpa y la sombra (The Harp and the Shadow), published in 1978.

The first Latin American recipient of Spain’s prestigious Cervantes Prize for Literature, in 1978, Carpentier died in Paris on Apr. 24, 1980, three years before the founding of the Cuban National Literature Prize, an honour he most undoubtedly deserved.

Along with Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and Mexico’s Juan Rulfo, Carpentier is considered one of the most influential figures in the Latin American literary renaissance that began in the 1920s.

According to Padura, the publication of El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) in 1948 earned Carpentier a place among the most noteworthy novelists of his generation, but it was with his three subsequent works that he established himself as "a classic of contemporary literature."

Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps), El acoso (The Chase) and El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral), published between 1953 and 1962, are considered groundbreaking works for their reflection of a new and uniquely "American" literary style.

Through these novels, Carpentier helped to craft "a new vision of the American continent" based on its distinctively unique historical, social, cultural, ethnic and political characteristics.

This need for a new way to express the specific – and often wondrous – – realities of the "New World" led the author to coin the term "lo real maravilloso" (quite literally, "marvellous reality"), a concept that eventually gave rise to the literary style known as magic realism.

Padura believes that "in order to understand the artistic and theoretical discoveries and contributions made by Carpentier, it is essential to consider the impact on his life and work of his formative years in Cuba and the 11 years he spent in France (1928-1939)."

As a young man in Cuba, Carpentier moved among the most avant-garde intellectual circles of the times. Later, while in Paris, he was drawn towards the surrealist movement, which radically influenced his view of the functions and possibilities of art, Padura explained.

Anniversary tributes like the one currently devoted to Carpentier are an excellent way of reviving interest in the country’s most important cultural figures, Padura believes. "Today there is a whole generation of new readers who will now have the opportunity to discover his works," he said.