PRAISE FOR ALEJO CARPENTIER
AND REASONS OF STATE
“Alejo Carpentier transformed the Latin American novel … He took the language of the Spanish baroque and made it imagine a world where literature does not imitate reality but, rather, adds to reality … We are all his descendants.”
—CARLOS FUENTES
“[Carpentier is] one of the great novelists of the Spanish language.”
—MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
“ ‘Magical realism,’ made famous by García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, was primarily Carpentier’s invention … Carpentier, except for Borges, is clearly the genius of Latin American fiction in its great period, during the second half of the twentieth century.”
—HAROLD BLOOM
“Mr. Carpentier’s writing has the power and range of a cathedral organ on the eve of the Resurrection.”
—THE NEW YORKER
“[Reasons of State is] a jocular view of imaginative idealism, repressive power and burgeoning revolution, all done with breezy panache. Once again, Carpentier has shown how canny and adept a practitioner he can be in mediating between the many realms which his own life has touched upon. I wonder what Fidel thinks of his emissary’s Reasons of State.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES
“The question asked by both of these remarkable novels [Carpentier’s Reasons of State and Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch] is, how were these men able to make themselves so needed, and more important, how is a country to do without them, and to keep their future avatars from coming back? They are the malign royalty of a whole culture, clarifiers of countless fears and hopes and hatreds: hence their fascination even for those who detest them.”
—MICHAEL WOOD,
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
“Reasons of State is the slow, sarcastic exploration of the exercise of power—a power inevitably bastardized, secondary, illusory—in a misdeveloped continent.”
—ARIEL DORFMAN
“Carpentier’s energy is gigantic and pell-mell, sweeping colossi on top of each other with ruthless, contemptuous daring.”
—THE YALE REVIEW
REASONS OF STATE
ALEJO CARPENTIER (1904–1980) was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, the son of a French architect and a Russian-language teacher. When he was eight years old, the family moved to Cuba. Carpentier studied architecture at the University of Havana, but he left school and began to work as a political and cultural critic to support his mother after his parents’ marriage broke up. He soon became a founding member of Revista de Avance, a magazine devoted to the avant-garde, and his involvement in leftist groups that resisted the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado y Morales led to his arrest in 1927. After his release, he escaped to Paris and spent the next eleven years there, immersing himself in the Surrealist movement and writing his first novel, Écue-Yamba-O, an exploration of Afro-Cuban traditions among the poor. He also pursued his interests in music and anthropology, which resulted in 1946 in a magisterial ethnomusicological study, La Música en Cuba, the first history of the mixed origins of Cuban music. He spent time in Venezuela and Haiti, the inspiration for his novel The Kingdom of This World, in whose introduction he laid out his theory of lo real maravilloso, the origins of “magical realism.” In 1959, after the Cuban Revolution, Carpentier moved back to his home country to serve in a number of official positions, including Director of the Cuban State Publishing House and Professor of the History of Culture at the University of Havana. In 1966, Carpentier returned to Paris as the Cuban cultural attaché and remained there until his death.
FRANCES PARTRIDGE (1900–2004) was a member of the Bloomsbury group, a writer, and a translator from French and Spanish.
STANLEY CROUCH is a novelist, essayist, and jazz critic whose books include Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing and Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker.
THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY
I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET
REASONS OF STATE
First published under the title El Recurso del Metodo by siglo veintiuno editores, s.a. Mexico, Madrid, and Buenos Aires
Copyright © 1974 by siglo XXI editores, s.a.
Copyright © 1974 by siglo XII argentina editores, s.a
Translation copyright © 1976 by Victor Gollanez Ltd
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Stanley Crouch
First Melville House printing: October 2013
Melville House Publishing
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eISBN: 978-1-61219-280-2
Design by Christopher King
A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.
v3.1
To Lilia
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Epigraph
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
Chapter 1
Part Two
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Three
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Four
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Five
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Six
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Seven
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
GRAND ALLUSION
BY STANLEY CROUCH
Alejo Carpentier transformed the Latin American novel. He transcended naturalism and invented magical realism. He took the language of Spanish baroque and made it imagine a world where literature does not imitate reality but, rather, adds to reality … We owe him the heritage of a language and an imagination. We are all his descendants.
—CARLOS FUENTES
The novelist makes no great issue of his ideas. He is an explorer feeling his way in an effort to reveal some unknown aspect of existence. He is fascinated not by his voice but by a form he is seeking, and only those forms that meet the demands of his dream become part of his work …
The writer inscribes himself on the spiritual map of his time, of his country, on the map of the history of ideas.
—MILAN KUNDERA
Reasons of State is a magisterial novel that raises ideas and passions about time, seamlessly converting them into mythic fact. I first had my coat pulled about it by Enrique Fernandez, a low-keyed critic and writer who was then either in possession of or working on a doctorate. We met at The Village Voice, headquarte
red in Manhattan, back during the time now thought of as the Voice’s good years, roughly three decades from the middle 1950s to its final period of occasional depth and quality, the 1980s. Even so, that is as dubious a description of a “counterculture” newspaper as “the good years” is of the Third Reich that Borges was not impressed by—long before the removed literary sect that this grand inquisitor of a world-class librarian supposedly represented, because Borges stood apart through his accurate awareness, his tendency to ongoing study, his rejection of simplemindedness. Way down yonder in Argentina, this was a man who clearly saw the blood on that tragically warlike and naive German entity led by an imperial Austrian who loved to savagely flash his pure white Aryan teeth.
Fernandez was not taken in by much of the Voice because he was not opposed to adulthood or growing up, but he was as responsible for this essay as any that I was lucky enough to hear as well as I could, during an influential and heated learning time, one in which intelligence, discernment, and any attempt to understand life through reading the best books was in a photo-finish with the adolescent drives that seem to permanently have a good chance to stand in the United States, either in its academy or in a homemade lynch mob, because of a confusion between overly or underrespecting the aristocracy and the common people.
This confusion is usually undisputed as a version of freedom. It can be defended as such while throwing eggs and rocks over the barricades, missiles that are supposed to be taken as the released birds of the revered leaders who had risen from the mud, purportedly glistening with blood and scars from their ennobling wounds: they were then floating, willy-nilly, atop the surge of hypnotic chaos indifferently threatening us all, worldwide. Call it what you would, those years were like a return to the mad years following the fall of Louis and Marie Antoinette. Deep blues turned her hair gray, that last mile soiled by eruptions from her terrified stomach as she rolled in a cart on the Parisian thoroughfare not far from the guillotine. But the former immigrant queen was permitted, by her guards—obviously sympathetic servants of the people, and easily appreciated in the era of the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers—to relieve herself against a wall.
This was a period when heresy became a profession, a religion, an ideology that worked for pursuing an updated Never Never Land; rebellion had become a reduced kitsch, resulting from a starvation diet of loud and shallow entertainment, what Kundera describes thusly: “the need to gaze into the mirror of the beautifying lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection.”
So there was plenty of darkness to go around, and plenty of muddy water to swim through, no shortage of hollow logs to sleep a mind inside.
Decisively as a burst of sustained wind or light or water, Enrique told me about Reasons of State and recommended getting with Carpentier. This man was, he said, the most formidable writer since Borges. This was uttered with a startling confidence that did not condescend to any others from wherever in the Latin World they grew up or moved. Carpentier was beyond the Latin or Spanish-speaking universe. Rendering his range and ability, Enrique made sure that the Cuban writer I had never heard of was introduced as a world force.
I was told he seemed a mythological figure in his sense of order, where everyone had to be evaluated by a couple of things—all that had been done and was known—as well as by what was most important—how much an original creator could make anew when he stepped into the heavyweight boxing ring of the literary world, in which one did not defeat other careers while pummeling to the top. At the very best place, one established what all writers sought, recognition distinguished by the fire, the subtlety, and the grace of the individual talent. Lord help us.
I was intrigued because I had never heard of this Cuban. García Márquez was the one considered above all others, so I wondered. But I had to step up because I was now in New York and trying to make my way through new information and newer circumstances. For too many years, I had been longing for Manhattan, its filth, its overcrowding, its sublime intelligence, its buried and hidden soul.
Back in Los Angeles, my hometown, I’d spent some time, after graduating from high school, as an outsider teaching English for the Poverty Program in East L.A. There I wandered and wondered how all of that American Latin world went together, so much of it a penetrable synthesis that made life seem a bit bigger, part of it from here and part of it from somewhere over there, as Carpentier loves to say, pulling a popular song’s lyric into the narrative of Reasons of State. Over there could be in Southern Europe or the Caribbean or South America. It could also be Africa, the Dark Continent, or the City of Light, where the deposed dictator with a smutty soul dies a pariah at the end of the novel, disgraced for shouting the downstairs blues so recognizably upstairs and showing no class at all.
After moving up as a teacher and serving seven years in the academy, I left Los Angeles and moved to New York at almost thirty years old in the fall of 1975.
I soon found myself writing for The Village Voice, for which I penned reviews of music, theater, and film, believing I had made it to the big time. But I discovered I had to travel either in or out of the country in order to learn what I had to say about a subject. Subjects were perhaps serial murders and the attendant inner complexities of ethnic politics in Atlanta, Georgia; or a jazz festival superbly backdropped by the vibrancy of Perugia, Italy, and hovered over by Rome itself.
As far removed as those faces and places were, one by one they became essential to understanding or comprehending the massive girth of Carpentier’s talent. His work was beyond everything popular in American literary trends. Synthesis and the grand allusion were his goals, and he paraded them as completely in Reasons of State as he ever did, except, perhaps, for the feeling and music delivered in his late novel Baroque Concerto.
Almost exactly like Borges, the unconvinced blind man in the porno house, Carpentier had not been duped into a limited sense of personal identity or irresistible appetites. He too could smell something more rotten than anything that had flipped out the great Dane. The Cuban did not step into and break the legs of his literary imagination with reductive nationalism, or let a ring be ideologically inserted into his nose and pretend to sing sorrow songs as it was pulled and forced him into motion, with the wondrous horror of great pain radiating from a tender part of the head.
INEBRIATED BY THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE
Around those early 1980s, I became an acquaintance of Enrique at the big office of the paper on Thirteenth Street and Broadway, where an unknown man once wheeled a cart with an old phonograph onto the cold and barren first floor downstairs. He played both sides of Caruso singing, then continued down Broadway going from place to place, never insulted for making noise because the tenor sound did certain things it might have done in Reasons of State. That horned phonograph player melted all hostility with the beautiful made audible from the hissing surfaces of frail shellac discs. One could understand why Louis Armstrong, the titan who had risen on the banks of the Mississippi, remembered being moved by Caruso recordings floating from windows in the New Orleans slum where he grew up.
I had many conversations with Enrique about Latin American literature and Spanish writing in general. He was more than ready to teach me. Bilingual, he became an important influence on me and a guide who introduced me to the depths of Borges. Fernandez possessed the calm common to many so gifted with large, well-informed minds. They do not become too activated when explaining things they had concluded were either profound already or on the way there. He did not think that all of Borges or Carpentier was great, but he was firm in seeing all their material, failures or not, as creation that never slumped under the trivial, or drew an academic chalk line around a version of bragging on having absorbed so much gargantuan data it was hard to keep in check, too hard and valuable to lose itself in the simple ways of the dregs. He chose not to be one of the slick, self-assured academic rodents running from the belly of a dead horse that had rotted in the street, turned into an instrument of percuss
ion as it was beaten by the newest regime. When I first read Reasons of State, I was in the midst of many independent studies, undertaken because I was impatient with the academy and had little respect for degrees. This was why it became one of my favorite novels from the moment I finished it and sat happily furled by a state of wonderment that occupied my loft apartment on the derelict-ridden Bowery.
Reasons of State proves that vast knowledge is cold comfort in a time of preferred hogwash, particularly if the living presence exits in smoke; we can see it leaving the bucket as flaming swords are dipped by blacksmiths wanting razor smoothness. Carpentier constructed a double-edged tool as broad as a sword on one side, as slim and shining as a shaver ready for all wet soap or mayonnaise on the other. He decided to make a style or approach that was direct and simple-seeming, because all his variations were based on popular art, clichéd stances, and stories that were so familiar they might result in being a version of the aesthetic and mythic fact that Moby-Dick, after all the huffing and puffing, is no more than a fish story; but one told like those tales Jack Johnson used to befuddle reporters, because he lived in a dream world where freedom could be realized only if the dreamer was as big as the dream.
The magnum dream drunk by Carpentier was the New World, sensibly in need of new ways to match new forms, sights, and the distance of deep thoughts, safe in the mind, if not in the air or on the earth. Fuentes writes that Carpentier called it “ ‘the marvelous reality’ of a land where ‘the unusual is a daily occurrence’ … The men and women said, America is, and the world has to be ceaselessly re-imagined from now on. Carpentier in his fiction made this marvelously explicit.”
MODERN FREEDOMWAYS
Carpentier was, in other words, alienated from nothing, having taken seriously the modern freedom of utilizing all things that could be connected to one another. Choosing that route makes him a descendent of the first great and internationally effective writer from the Americas, Walt Whitman, who swallowed all the fish in the bowl of life and spat them out as fire and brimstone, ready for war against separation, garbed in the audible mufti of celebration, that commonplace lyric sung with open arms in the graveyard, its strongest song. The man Carlos Fuentes says is the father of a vision abandoned all religion or nationalism or ideology, stationary in air-tight dictates, instead favoring recurring myth, tweaked, as they say, by the specifics—time and period, geography, the animal kingdom, tradition, and functional intelligence, none completely devoid of poetic explanation, terror, ambivalence, or affirmation.
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