Rewriting the Enlightenment: Allegory and Trauerspiel in Alejo Carpentier's El Siglo de las luces

Abstract

Readers of El Siglo de las luces are confronted with a mysterious opening prologue, which consists of a few paragraphs of solemn meditation, an unidentified scrap of speech. There are so many spectral images that the reader feels he/she has entered a hallucinatory world, a dream world; there are so many enigmas and riddles that everything seems wrapped in an impenetrable secrecy. The very employment of allegorical figures in El Siglo de las luces points beyond a Lukacsian replica realism. Benjamin's theory of allegory is based on the distinction between symbol and allegory as it is found in German neoclassical aesthetics. In Benjamin's view, allegorical structure presents an immanent set of antitheses or, more properly, a system of contradictory oppositions. El Siglo de las luces – which is formally quite similar to allegory and Trauerspiel – can be reread as an exercise in the baroque process of giving form.