Carpentier and Jolivet: Magic Music in Los pasos perdidos

Abstract

ALEJO Carpentier's preoccupation with music is well-known and well-documented in his own work as well as in criticism about him. Three volumes of his music criticism, aptly titled Ese misico que Ulevo dentro, and the prominence of music as a narrative theme and structural device in works such as El acoso, Concierto barroco, La consagraci6n de la primavera and Los pasos perdidos attest to this lifelong enthusiasm.' A parallel may be drawn between Carpentier's musical interests and his search for a new narrative form appropriate to his depictions of the New World and to the recurring theme of a return to the source. This quest for primitive purity lies at the structural core of Los pasos perdidos, the narrator of which is a composer whose travels into the jungle take him backward in time, allowing him to discover what he believes to be the beginnings of music, and inspiring him to return to his artistic vocation. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria in The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, 1977) has demonstrated in detail the eclectic nature of Carpentier's literary style. In Los pasos perdidos, the novelist draws on early chronicles and the accounts of nineteenth-century explorers, as well as his own travels, in order to transform what began as simple reportage into a work of fiction. His use of music is also eclectic, drawing on specific sources for the musical substance of his narrator's fictional world. For example, in his Nota Carpentier gives us a source of the shaman's dirge in Episode xxiii, a recording