Los Pasos Perdidos Research Articles

Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America by Victoria Saramago

Reviewed by: Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America by Victoria Saramago Charlotte Rogers Saramago, Victoria. Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Northwestern UP, 2021. 274 pp. Can literature literally shape the landscape? In Fictional Environments, Victoria Saramago explores this question and others in a thoroughly researched and elegantly written examination of canonical mid-twentieth-century Latin American [End Page 819] novels. The impressive breadth of this book, which analyzes João Guimarães Rosa's Grande sertão: Veredas, Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, Clarice Lispector's A cidade sitiada, and Mario Vargas Llosa's Amazonian fiction, is matched by the depth of its engagement with ecocritical theory and the extensive critical bibliographies on each of these well-studied authors. Saramago argues that the fictional texts in her corpus do not merely reflect each author's vision of the physical biome, but rather that they serve as "sites for the production of knowledge about, imaginations of, and interventions in Latin American environments" (5). In doing so, she stakes a significant claim for the ongoing importance of studying canonical novels through innovative theoretical and methodological lenses. Most importantly, by showing how literature informs ecological perceptions, Fictional Environments points out the agency, and therefore the urgency, of literary works on our rapidly changing planet. A major contribution to Latin American literary studies, this book is also essential reading for scholars of the broader field of environmental humanities interested in how literature configures physical spaces and collective imaginations. Fictional Environments proposes that these iconic novels published from the 1940s to the 1960s sparked ecological imaginaries, inspired the creation of conservation areas, and contributed to environmental policies even before the advent of organized environmentalist movements in Latin America. Deforestation, a hallmark of the ecological history of the South American continent that accelerated rapidly in the period she studies, forms the backdrop against which varying forms of extractivism, agricultural industrialization, and urbanization play out. The complex, mimetic relationship between the physical landscape and the fictional realm during times of ecological change lies at the heart of Fictional Environments. Saramago offers sure-footed explanations of the shifting role of mimesis in literary studies, including Auerbach's classic text and Timothy Morton's concept of ecomimesis. The author makes her own original contribution to this field in coining the term "reverse mimesis" to indicate how physical environments have been shaped to more closely resemble literary texts in national parks and conservation areas. At the same time, Saramago shows, referential reality becomes a painfully spectral presence in literary works as deforestation, urbanization, and industrialization make the contemporary landscape diverge sharply from its earlier fictional representations. Rather than organizing her study according to language, geography, or temporality, Saramago divides the book into three sections: "Conservation," "Development," and "The Rights of Nature, the Rights of Fiction." In each section, Saramago offers a bird's-eye view of the literary texts' reception history and socioecological context, and occasionally swoops down to perform close readings of key ecological entanglements in the works themselves. Special credit is due to the editors of the Flashpoints series at Northwestern University Press for retaining the original Spanish and Portuguese quotations in addition to English-language translations, which deepens the richness of Saramago's analysis. "Conservation" consists of two chapters examining how Grande sertão: Veredas and Los pasos perdidos distill environments in fiction and simultaneously shape preservation efforts. For example, the famous sertão is now the site of extensive soy, [End Page 820] corn, rice, and eucalyptus monoculture plantations, and the larger savannah biome known as the cerrado is predicted to disappear entirely by 2030. Saramago's argument for reverse mimesis is strongest in this first chapter, which shows how the Guimarães Rosa Tourist Circuit, the Manuelzão Project, and the Grande Sertão Veredas National Park each attempt to make their protected area imitate the sertão of the novel. This remarkable intervention "challenges the very notion of literary representation as a one-way process" (33). Los pasos perdidos, Saramago proposes, is one of several works (including Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Richard Schomburgk's Travels in...

Notes on the Trip to the Great Savannah

In July 1947, the Cuban Author Alejo Carpentier traveled from his home in caracas to the sparsely inhabited interior of venezuela, visiting the country's tropical forests and its great plains. At the time, Carpentier was known principally as a music critic and newspaper columnist for El Nacional in Venezuela and Carteles in Cuba; he had yet to publish El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World; 1949), which would launch his career as a novelist and earn him international renown. Carpentier later wrote a novel about a trip much like the one he took in 1947. In the now-canonical Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps; 1953), a failed composer finds inspiration by traveling from a cosmopolitan city to the tropical forests of South America. Carpentier's creativity was similarly sparked by his trip to the Venezuelan wilderness, as his travel diary Notas del viaje a la Gran Sabana (Notes on the Trip to the Great Savannah) makes clear. Notas is the only contemporary account of the journey written by Carpentier, who later made contradictory statements about the details and even the number of trips he took. Beyond its documentary value, the travel diary reveals that Carpentier's experience was deeply enmeshed with his readings, a characteristic that also marks the narrator-protagonist of Los pasos perdidos. Moreover, Notas is of broad ecocritical and historical significance because it makes clear the extent to which the forests and plains of South America were changing during Venezuela's boom in oil drilling and gold mining in the 1940s. Inspired by what he witnessed in Venezuela, Carpentier created the central drama of Los pasos perdidos out of his protagonist's desire to inhabit what the author called the “mundo del Genesis” (“world of Genesis”) at a time when extractive industries were rapidly transforming the economies, ecologies, and societies of the region (“La Gran Sabana” 32).

Tierras en trance. Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje by Jens Andermann

Reviewed by: Tierras en trance. Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje by Jens Andermann Brendan Lanctot Andermann, Jens. Tierras en trance. Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje. Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados, 2018. Jens Andermann’s latest book engages in a reinterpretation of Latin American modernities from the post-human present, by focusing on cultural production whose work, we might say, is the earth itself. Its five central chapters consider a wide-ranging corpus in rough chronological order. This sequence begins with the filmmakers, poets, and automobile pioneers who crisscrossed the interior of the continent in the 1920s, and concludes with present-day cinema and bioart. The intervening chapters consider, respectively, architecture, (neo)regionalist literature from Quiroga to the memoirs of Central American guerrillas, and land art, installations, and performances by figures that include Hélio Oiticica, the Ciudad Abierta collective, and Ana Mendieta. There is not enough room in a review of this length to enumerate the many artifacts that Andermann examines over the course of more than 400 pages, but the summary above points to how Tierras en trance traverses disciplinary boundaries in order to demonstrate how different forms of human inscription trace and undo the conventional partitions between subject and landscape, culture and nature, and techne and poiesis. An underlying premise for this interrogation appears in the form of a rhetorical question that most directly concerns the structures and gardens examined in the second chapter: “¿Por qué no hacerle a un edificio o un parque, entonces, las preguntas que le haríamos a un poema o un cuadro, preguntas acerca de las historias que narra sobre ese lugar, y de cómo lo acomoda a nuestras miradas y nuestros cuerpos para que lo habitemos?” (141). That is, in spite of the relatively autonomous fields that condition the cultural practices that precede what Andermann coins the “giro ambiental” of the latter half of the twentieth century, there is a kind of discursive economy by which they articulate variants of a common experience: the trance or in-corporation that uproots bodies and places from preexisting forms of belonging and relating. Bringing art, architecture, film, and literature into dialogue, Tierras en trance argues that the reconfiguration of landscape that took place as state power was ascendant toward the beginning of the twentieth century has gradually ceded to new modes of agency that arrest and explode the limits between human and non-human. This shift is neither linear nor cohesive, as Andermann takes care to stress the affinities (or “vibrations” as he calls them) linking works from different disciplines and historical periods, as well as the contradictory visions of contemporary works. For example, the final of section of chapter three, “Días de la selva: del Putumayo al Quiché,” demonstrates that, while the memoirs of Central American guerillas share apparent ideological affinities, plots, and settings with Che Guevara’s Pasajes de la Guerra revolucionaria, a biopolitical reading reveals a deeper and deeply ambivalent relationship to the human-nature interface elaborated in novelas de la selva such as La vorágine and Los pasos perdidos. Indeed, the incessant return to the [End Page 1037] liminal sites of exploration, exploitation and extraction is central to the book as a whole, from Roberto Burle Marx’s repurposing of an old fazenda as a sort of “landscape laboratory” (168–72), to Robert Smithson’s photolog of his mirror installations in the Yucatan, to the pampa of Albertina Carri’s films (to trace yet another arbitrary trajectory). These engagements do not passively represent prevailing modes of land use, but instead rehearse and enact alternate ways of relating to the earth. Take, for example, the contrast Andermann draws between Andrea Juan’s Antarctic performances known as Sur Polar (Arte + Ciencia), initiated in 2008, and Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares’s Forest Law – Selva jurídica (2014), a project inspired by a lawsuit filed by the Kichwa community against the Ecuadorian government and an Argentine petroleum company. Juan’s project, whose immediate audience is restricted to the small scientific community permitted on the Antarctic base, figures art as a kind of privileged witness to a sequestered natural environment, held in reserve in times of climate change...

시원의 세계를 찾아 떠나는 아나바시스: 알레호 까르뻰띠에르의 『잃어버린 발자취』와 유토피아적 비전

시원의 세계를 찾아 떠나는 아나바시스: 알레호 까르뻰띠에르의 『잃어버린 발자취』와 유토피아적 비전

The Power of the Archive in El negro Francisco by Antonio Zambrana

During most of the 19th century, an important body of literary works appeared outside of Cuba criticizing the institution of slavery on the island, the system’s inherent violence, its sexual practices, and its repercussions on the white population. Among the most famous works published at the time were Sab (1841), by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Cecilia Valdés ([1839] 1882), by Cirilo Villaverde. In this essay, I would like to explore a lesser known novel that was published by a Cuban writer of the following generation—El negro Francisco (1875), by Antonio Zambrana y Vazquez—in order to understand the principal role of the legal and anthropological archives in the novel, as well as the author’s use of newspaper reports and advertisements. How are these texts and styles intertwined in the novel to criticize institutional slavery on the Island? How does the authorial voice appear in the novel when we consider a tradition present since the beginning of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas—which reached the 20th century with novels such as Los pasos perdidos (1958) by Alejo Carpentier? I would base my arguments on Roberto González Echevarría’s interpretation of Latin American novel in Mito y Archivo, una teoría de la narrativa latinoamericana, in which he employs basic concepts of US critical anthropology in order to re-interpret various aspects of 19th century Latin American history.

Del escrito ensayístico Los orígenes de la música y la música primitiva de Alejo Carpentier y de su proyección en su novela Los pasos perdidos: de un eufónico viaje a la semilla

La proliferación de escritos teóricos e investigaciones en torno a la figura de Alejo Carpentier y su novelística se hizo hecho notorio a lo largo de los años 60, 70, 80 e inicios de los 90. Tras un aplacamiento de dicha fiebre en las postrimerías del anterior siglo, el interés por el autor rebrota con la celebración del centenario de su nacimiento (2004). Con todo, cabe apuntar que resulta pobre y exiguo el número de acercamientos de tipo interdisciplinario que se han practicado para con la ensayística de índole musicológica del autor. En el presente artículo procedemos, por un lado, a diseccionar, analizar y presentar el ensayo inédito de Carpentier Los orígenes de la música y la música primitiva, cuya importancia, como una significativa parte de la ensayística musicológica del autor cubano, ha sido devaluada por los integrantes del aparato crítico; y a examinar, por otro lado, cómo el ensayo sirve al autor como teoría programática para la consolidación de su novela Los pasos perdido.

Wagner and Schoenberg in the New World: The Legacy of German Musical Romanticism in Los pasos perdidos

Alejo Carpentier's voyages to the Amazon in 1947 and 1948 gave him plenty of inspiration to write his novel Los pasos perdidos. However, the premise of the novel (the problems of the Latin American composer) predates these Amazonian expeditions. By examining the novel alongside several essays and cronicas, in this article I present Carpentier's hope for the Latin American artist's ability to create freely: disengaged from the pressure of having to either conform to European traditions or fully embrace Latin America's myths and natural landscape. In doing so, I analyze Carpentier's complex views towards Richard Wagner, which are informed by Nietzsche, and I ultimately propose that for Carpentier, the model for Latin American composers is Arnold Schoenberg, despite the disinterest expressed towards his compositional techniques by the unnamed protagonist in Los pasos perdidos.

The Bibliographical Collections and Archives of the Fundación Alejo Carpentier, Cuba

The great Latin American novelist Alejo Carpentier was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 26 December 1904, to a French father and Russian mother. Some years later, the family settled in the outskirts of Fdavana, Cuba. Carpentier's literary and musical sensibility became apparent from a very early age. In 1922, he began his journalistic career. Fie was imprisoned for some weeks during the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and, in 1928, after being given Cuban nationality, he was able to move to France where he joined the Surrealist group. In Paris, he became a correspondent for Cuban magazines and also wrote for French and Latin American publications. It was during this period that he concluded his first novel, iEcue-Yamba-O!, which was first published in Spain. In 1939 he returned to Cuba where he continued his journalistic work, also publishing some short stories and undertaking research for what would later become La musica en Cuba (1946).1 In 1945, he moved to Venezuela in order to work in radio, which gave him more time for journalism and literary production. It was during this period that some of his most significant works were published: El reino de este mundo (1949); El acoso (1956); Guerra del tiempo (1956); and Los pasos perdidos (1953). It was also where he wrote El siglo de las luces (1962).2 After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, he settled permanently in Cuba and took up several cultural posts (this is also where El siglo de las luces was first published). In 1966, he was appointed to a diplomatic post in France; it was there that he collated and published a large number of his essays, as well as writing his last novels: El recurso del metodo (1974); Concierto barroco (1974); La consagracion de la primavera (1978); El arpa y la sombra (1979).3 Carpentier died in Paris on 24 April 1980. During his lifetime, he received many national and international awards, including the international Cino del Duca World Prize and the Spanish Miguel de Cervantes Prize for literature in the Spanish language. He is considered to be one of the most representative Latin American authors of the twentieth century and one of the first writers to be recognised in the Latin American 'boom'.The Fundacion Alejo Carpentier (FAC) was created by the writer's widow, Lilia Esteban Carpentier, who bequeathed before her death all her goods, including those inherited from her husband. In 1982, she established the Centro de Promocion Cultural Alejo Carpentier (Alejo Carpentier Centre for Cultural Promotion) which in 1993 became the FAC. The FAC is a cultural NGO whose principal objective is to disseminate the life and work of Carpentier through the following areas of action: by supporting Cuban and non-Cuban research on this topic; by publishing, in Cuba and elsewhere, Carpentier's oeuvre, both known and hitherto unpublished; by conserving and restoring the bibliographical collections and archives; and by generally disseminating the archives through organising conferences, postgraduate courses and exhibitions. The FAC is based in two headquarters: the first, in the Habana Vieja area of the Cuban capital, is located in the mansion which was the inspiration for the house inhabited by the protagonists of El siglo de las luces (intelligently restored thanks to the efforts of the Oficina del Historiador de La Habana [Office of the Historian of Havana]); the other headquarters, where the directorate is located, is the former residence of the novelist and his wife, where the latter lived until her death in 2008, located in the Vedado neighbourhood of Havana.4The FAC has negotiated publishing agreements with publishers in many countries around the world, which help the writer's work become known in many different languages. In Cuba, the most important relationship with publishers is maintained with Editorial Letras Cubanas, under the Instituto Cubano del Libro (Cuban Book Institute), which has established the Biblioteca Alejo Carpentier (Alejo Carpentier Library). …

Mario Vargas Llosa and the novela de la selva

This article considers the Nobel prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa's four Amazonian novels within the context of other twentieth-century works set in the region, especially the Latin-American novela de la selva, or jungle novel. Vargas Llosa's employment of techniques such as shifting, unreliable narrators, irony, parody and intertextuality are similar to jungle novels such as José Eustasio Rivera's La vorágine, Rómulo Gallegos' Canaima, and Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos. Moreover, the presentation of Amazonia as a site of adventure, unbridled sexuality, violence and injustice clearly links Vargas Llosa's works to the Latin-American telluric novels of the 1920s and 1930s, despite the author's proclaimed low opinion of that genre. In fact, Vargas Llosa composes a literary wilderness that reveals his fractious and long-standing relationship with the novela de la selva. By examining the Peruvian writer's novelistic production over the course of fifty years, this article shows that Vargas Llosa's depiction of Amazonia pays a complicated homage to the jungle novel of the early twentieth century.

Marvelous realism in the Caribbean: a second look at Jacques Stephen Alexis and Alejo Carpentier

In 1943 the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) visited Haiti for the first time, an experience which inspired his novel El reino de este mundo and his controversial theory of marvelous realism. During the trip Carpentier gave a speech entitled “L'evolution culturelle de l'Amerique Latine” that was heard by a young Haitian writer named Jacques Stephen Alexis (1922–1961). Most critics who have studied the literary relationship between the two writers have concluded that Alexis' approach to Haitian culture and identity draws heavily upon the ideas from Carpentier's theory of marvelous realism. However, I argue that Alexis' “Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens” can be read as a critique of Carpentier and an effort to break from the path he had established by creating a more grounded form of marvelous realism for the Haitian context, one with a strong social commentary. These divergent positions are reflected in the fiction of the two writers; whereas Alexis's novels concentrate on key historical events in Haiti in the twentieth century and emphasize the need for societal change via Marxist revolution in the future, Carpentier's texts look to events in Europe and Latin America in the recent past and cast a more skeptical eye on the consequences of revolutions. I trace the development of these ideas through Carpentier's two essays on marvelous realism and his novels El reino de este mundo, Los pasos perdidos, El siglo de las luces, and La consagración de la primavera and in Alexis's essay on Haitian marvelous realism and his three novels Compère Général Soleil, Les arbres musiciens, and L'espace de un cillement.

Dialectical Geographies in Contemporary Chilean Literature: The Case of Diamela Eltit’s Narrative Production

WITHOUT a doubt, spatial representations are as multifarious as life itself. From the seemingly real depictions of space in texts such as Alvar Nunez's Naufragios and Bernal Diaz's Historia verdadera, (1) to more imaginary representations of space such as Cadalso's Cartas, Celine's Voyage and Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, or even litero-ethno-sociological portrayals of the likes of Carrio de la Vandera's Lazarillo or Claude Levi-Strauss's ethnographic Tristes Tropiques as well as the purely literary journeys of critics such as Guy Davenport's brilliant The Geography of the Imagination, it would appear as if space's fate, of necessity, is to be the victim of representation and even theorization (think of Blanchot, Lefebvre or Jameson, for instance). It would appear, moreover, that engravings in general, followed by the first photograph and especially the public introduction of photography in 1839, (2) immensely enriched the possibilities of spatial representation, directly or indirectly enabling, in the case of Latin America, the creation of the deliciously intimate geographies of the modernist novel (De sobremesa, Amistad funesta) as well as the wide-open locales of texts bent on inscribing the nation (La voragine, Dona Barbara), as Carlos Alonso has noted regarding the so-called "novelas de la tierra." Now, if in narrative representation in general space perennially oscillates between what could be called an outside and an inside, one might safely argue that Chilean novelist Diamela Eltit privileges enclosed settings. (3) At the same time, it could be said that, to a large extent--and leaving aside the well-known themes of her works--, (4) she confects an aesthetics of space. What I wish to analyze here is the way in which, in this aesthetics of space, even in the most claustrophobic of terrains, and as paradoxical as it may seem at first, there is a constant tension between the inside and the outside, the local and the global, the national and the transnational. The tension present in her first novels, nevertheless, starts to dissipate in Mano de obra (2002), being mercilessly overtaken in Impuesto a la carne (2010)--her most recent novel--by a neoliberal Biopower too strong to combat. If in Pedro Lemebel's urban chronicles there is a relatively clear distinction between the local and the global, (5) and if in Alberto Fuguet's narrative there is a patent confirmation of the cultural transformations brought about by globalization especially among the affluent members of Chile's capital, (6) in Eltit's novels we witness the trajectory from what might be called a "national-Chile" to a "post-national nation." My analysis centers its attention foremost on Jamas el fuego nunca (2007) and Impuesto a la carne, even though it also alludes, in passing, to Mano de obra. First, however, a brief overview of some critical assessments concerning spatial representation in Eltit's previous narrative output is warranted. Attention has been brought to the presence of "no-exit" type spaces, or "anti-espacios" (Olea, "El cuerpo" 89), in Eltit's works, as well as to "[e]l problema de los limites" (Kirkpatrick 42) that characterizes her aesthetics of space. One critic underscores the nefarious effects that power and violence have upon interpersonal relationships in general, and between mother and son or mother and daughter in particular, at the very heart of the private sphere of the home (Llanos 110). Regarding "la plaza" in Lumperica (1983), Eltit's first novel, some have seen it as an essentially ritualistic and sacred site for the construction of a new type of community, the community of the socially and politically destitute (Tafra 49; Avelar 170), while others, on the contrary, have seen it as "una metafora de la comunidad ausente" (Ortega 53) and even as a prison (Brito, Campos 122) where public space has been colonized by "el luminoso" (Donoso 255). Concerning Por la patria (1986), Eltit's second novel, the multiple geographies that populate the text, that is, "el bar," "el erial," "el barrio," and "el galpon" have been construed, metaphorically, as propitious spaces to build a Latin American feminine identity (Arrate 150). …

Remoteness and Proximity: The Parallel Ethnographies of Alejo Carpentier and René Maran

This essay constellates and compares two major writers of Caribbean origin—the Cuban Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) and the French writer born in Martinique, René Maran (1887–1960). Though both Caribbean authors share some remarkable resemblances in terms of the evolution of an ethnographic representation in their early works, they have rarely (if ever) been juxtaposed in a comparative analysis. Moreover, the point of departure for this comparative reading is a rare document by Carpentier, one of the Cuban author's first published texts: a review he wrote of Maran's Batouala (Prix Goncourt, 1921) while still a teenager. Carpentier notes elsewhere that Batouala was avidly read by a generation of Cuban writers and intellectuals and therefore impacted the afrocubanismo movement in Cuban culture. The essay goes on to show a parallel development between Carpentier and Maran in terms of the way they negotiate their representation of the other through ethnographic approaches (Ecue-Yamba-O, Batouala), Enlightenment tropes (such as the bon sauvage) and historical representation (El reino de este mundo, Maran's biography of Jacques Cartier), and the confessional novel (Los pasos perdidos, Un homme pareil aux autres).

READING MUSIC BACKWARDS: ALEJO CARPENTIER'S UNPUBLISHED TEXT 'LOS ORÍGENES DE LA MÚSICA Y LA MÚSICA PRIMITIVA'

This article examines Alejo Carpentier?s unpublished and undated text ?Los or�genes de la m�sica y la m�sica primitiva? (The Origins of Music and Primitive Music). This important but hitherto unknown document appears to be the most important antecedent for the musicological discussions narrated in Carpentier?s groundbreaking novel Los pasos perdidos (1953), an account of a musicologist-composer who travels into the South American jungle to collect musical instruments and discovers the origin of music among South American so-called primitives. In ?Los or�genes de la m�sica y la m�sica primitiva?, Carpentier proposes that speech and music emerged simultaneously, seeking the origin of music in rhythm. He incorporates the paradigm of cultural evolution, making extensive use of the nineteenth-century analogy between prehistoric humanity and current-day ?primitives?. Carpentier also adheres to some of the concepts and methods of comparative musicology ? which made use of evolutionary models ? stressing the potential of primeval music for Western researchers and composers. The present study frames ?Los or�genes de la m�sica? in the context of evolutionary theory, drawing on a range of anthropological and musicological accounts. It traces how Carpentier assimilates, resists, distorts and challenges theories concerning primeval music by Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Richard Wallaschek, Jules Combarieu and Fernando Ortiz, among others. The article concludes with a brief examination of the discussions of primeval music and ethnomusicological research in Los pasos perdidos.

Alejo Carpentier in Light of the Indigenous Question: Anthropologist, Writer, or Native?

Two written pieces on the matter of indigenous peoples by the Cuban writer, Alejo Carpentier (the novel Los Pasos Perdidos and the story Los Advertidos) have led some to give the author the title of “anthropologist”. This title, however, can be called into question when these pieces – and others in the same context – are examined in light of what would be a specifically anthopoligal attitude in Latin American narrative.

Creative Questers: Remedios Varo and the Narrator of Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos

This comparative study considers the treatment of the quest motif in selected paintings of Remedios Varo (covering her highly productive period from 1955 through 1963) and in Alejo Carpentier's novel, Los pasos perdidos (1953). Both the novel and the paintings tell the story of a journey that leads to self-discovery, creative awakening, and spiritual rebirth for the artist/protagonist/narrator. Both can be shown to trace out the stages of the archetypal hero adventure, although the paintings were not planned to represent phases in a heroic quest in the systematic way that Carpentier's narrator presents them in his carefully constructed narrative. The most prominent and interesting difference that comes to light in the course of the comparison has to do with the artist's need for an audience and the extent to which the creator identifies with his/her creation. Carpentier's male quester must return to the world of time in order to communicate his vision (in his case, his musical composition) to his contemporaries. As such he repeats the pattern of the successful hero adventure: departure, sojourn in the timeless realm, and eventual return to community with a "boon" or insight. Varo's female quester is not confronted with the dilemma of return. Once she breaks free from the conventional world of time, she begins to sense her own oneness with nature, and her creativity is expressed in terms of liberation—liberation of self and other, and from the time-bound self. Her mission eventually becomes clear to her: to align herself perfectly with the creative principle of the universe and to disappear into her creation.

Hearts of Darkness: The Celebration of Otherness in the Latin American novela de la selva

This article examines the role of the early twentieth-century novela de la selva in the imaginative reconfiguration of post-independent Latin America. Despite the genre's apparent complicity in traditional representations of American nature in travel writing, the novela de la selva can also be read as an example of what Homi K. Bhabha has termed 'colonial mimicry', where (post)colonial subjects engage with the terms of the colonizer to produce a powerful counter-discourse. With reference to an important precursor of these novels, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, this paper will discuss how formerly disabling stereotypes of Otherness and savagery are intensified and adopted as empowering postcolonial concepts in two emblematic Latin American Jungle Novels, José Eustasio Rivera's La vorágine and Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos.

Gender Monologue in Carpentier's Los Pasos Perdidos

In section XII in chapter 2 of Los pasos perdidos, the narrator reaches an area of the South American jungle which, in his calculation of his movement back through the stages of civilization, he calls del (177). As always, his immediate reaction is highly wrought description-the construction of a complex semantic web to make sense of the unknown. This description of the del emphasizes physicality: the vivid sounds, smells and colours associated with horses and blacksmiths are invoked and also an imagined male rider's display of horse and self for a young woman (177-78). These romantic associations lead into a description of the man who inhabits this geographical-cum-temporal environment: En las Tierras del Caballo parecia que el fuera mas hombre (178). And the passage continues through a celebratory characterization of this archetypal man. His attributes are centred on control of the materials that he works, of the horse that he rides, and of the women whom he knows how to subdue:

Carpentier and Jolivet: Magic Music in Los pasos perdidos

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

MAGICAL ECLECTICISM: LOS PASOS PERDIDOS AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

MAGICAL ECLECTICISM: LOS PASOS PERDIDOS AND JEAN-PAUL SARTRE IAN R. MACDONALD IAN R. MACDONALD Aberdeen Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume XV, Issue 2, April 1979, Pages 97–113, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/XV.2.97 Published: 01 April 1979