Alejo&Carpen,er, TheKingdomofThisWorld · Alejo&Carpen,er, TheKingdomofThisWorld & Arts&One&...
Transcript of Alejo&Carpen,er, TheKingdomofThisWorld · Alejo&Carpen,er, TheKingdomofThisWorld & Arts&One&...
Alejo Carpen,er, The Kingdom of This World
Arts One Jon Beasley-‐Murray November, 2013
Sans Souci
A Tour of the Ruins
• Literature • Carpen,er • Narra,ve • MaIer • Form • Spectacle • Performance • Revolu,on • Ruins
LITERATURE
Plaque at the Citadelle La Ferrière
What is a Canon?
• “Great Texts” • Who decides? • Borges, “KaSa and His Precursors”
• The present can influence the past
• Past texts become KaSaesque
• Rereading and reorganiza,on
What is a Canon?
Three literary canons are built on the ruins of Sans Souci and the Citadelle La Ferrière: the La,n American Boom; Francophone Caribbean literature; Anglophone postcolonial literature. The hemisphere’s literature replays a legacy of violence and domina,on, reimagining the material traces of a history of revolu,ons.
The La,n American Boom
• 1960s and 1970s • Gabriel García Márquez • Mario Vargas Llosa • Julio Cortázar • Carlos Fuentes • Lezama Lima, Donoso...
• Magic(al) Realism
The La,n American Boom
• The crea,on of a world market • The migra,on of High Modernism • The forma,on of a new style • The compensa,on for underdevelopment
• A reflec,on on the role of literature
The La,n American Boom
• Many possible points of origin: • Publishers, editors, translators, advocates • Civiliza,on and Barbarism; Na,onal Romance • Precursors: Asturias, Borges, Carpen,er • Literary eclec,cism: Cervantes, Faulkner
• The Prologue to The Kingdom of this World
CARPENTIER
Inside the Citadelle
“Aher having felt the undeniable enchantment of this Hai,an earth, aher having discerned magical warnings on the red roads of the Central Plateau, aher having heard the drums of Petro and Rada, I was moved to compare the marvelous reality I'd just experienced with the ,resome aIempts to arouse the marvelous that has characterized certain European literatures for last thirty years.” (Prologue)
Carpen,er
• 1904-‐1980 • Cuban • Writer and ethnomusicologist
• France, 1928-‐1939 • Visits Hai, in 1943 • Venezuela, 1945-‐1959 • The Lost Steps (1953)
NARRATIVE
The Citadelle
“His narra,ve arts, when, with terrible gestures, he played the part of the different personages, held the men spellbound.” (13) “Drawing therefrom a number of philosophical considera,ons on the inequality of the human races which he planned to develop in a speech larded with La,n quota,ons.” (46-‐7)
Narra,ve
• Folktales • Religion • Novels • Newspapers • Rumor • Song • Theatre
• This Novel
Narra,ve
• History as a series of flows • Not the least of which are informa,on flows • Words have power, and are troubling • More or less linear, but episodic • 1760s-‐1820s • Ti Noël as slave everyman, Forrest Gump
MATTER
Cannonballs at the Citadelle
“Ti Noël clasped that white, chill skull under his arm, thinking how much it probably resembled the bald head of his master hidden beneath his wig.” (9) “Henri Christophe would never know the corrup,on of his flesh, flesh fused with the very stuff of the fortress, inscribed in its architecture, integrated with its body.” (150)
MaIer
• Heads, skulls • Arms, mills • Women, statues • Poison, fire • Bricks, buildings • Bodies, books
• Incarna,on and Reincarna,on
MaIer
• History as “what hurts” • An ongoing violence • Stress on affect, rather than ideology • MaIer is resistant, but not impervious • The material is also a means of expression • This World vs the Heavens • What forces move and shape us?
FORM
Sans Souci
“The alert ears never despaired of hearing, at any moment, the vision of the great conch shell which would bellow through the hills to announce to all that Macandal had completed the cycle of his metamorphoses.” (37) “The substance was different, but the forms were the same.” (159)
Form
• Metamorphosis • Transforma,on • Style • Fashion • Dress
• Remaking and Remodelling
Form
• Free Indirect Discourse • Narrator and character(s) conflated, iden,fied • MaIer is subject to point of view • Magic realism: magic treated “as though” real • What does the novel offer to history?
SPECTACLE
Vista from the Citadelle
“A gala func,on for Negroes on whose splendor no expense had been spared. For this ,me the lesson was to be driven home with fire, not blood, and certain illumina,ons, lighted to be remembered, were very costly.” (44) “The Negroes of the Plaine would raise their eyes to the fortress [...] thinking that there [...] a king of their own race was wai,ng.” (118)
Spectacle
• Enlightenment • Educa,on • Visibility • Color • Aesthe,cs
• A New Regime of the Sensible
Spectacle
• A play of visibility and invisibility • Appearance and Appari,ons • Who can see what, when? • Is power established through the gaze? • Or despite it? • Master/Slave dialec,c
PERFORMANCE
Football at Sans Souci
“The Cap theater, where actresses from Paris sang Jean-‐Jacques Rousseau’s arias or lohily declaimed tragic alexandrines.” (52) “It was as though all the purple conchs that served as doorstops, all the shells that lay alone and petrified on the summits of the hills, had begun to sing in chorus.” (67)
Performance
• Bodies subject to gaze • A world of appearances • Or the body on the line • Rituals and conjura,ons • Who par,cipates?
• At nexus of narra,ve, maIer, and spectacle
Performance
• Who are the actors in this novel? • Does this change? • How does performance shape iden,ty? • Be all you can be? • The surveyors: quan,fica,on and measure
REVOLUTION
The Citadelle
“The Negro began to think that the chamber music orchestras of Sans Souci […] were all the product of a slavery as abominable as that he had known on the planta,on of M. Lenormand de Mézy.” (116) “The old man hurled his declara,on of war against the new masters, ordering his subjects to march in baIle array.” (179)
Revolu,on
• Making new • Star,ng again • Liberty • Equality • Fraternity
• Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Man?
Revolu,on
• When and why to resort to violence? • What changes and what does not? • Is Revolu,on worth it? • Or is it, by contrast, inevitable? • Sisyphus as revolu,onary?
RUINS
On the road to Milot
“Ti Noël sat down on one of the cornerstones of the old mansion, now a stone like any other stone for those who did not remember.” (106) “The ruins threw a pleasant shade over the abundant grass, and if one dug in the dirt a liIle it was not unusual to find a marble ear, a stone ornament, or an oxidized coin.” (156)
Ruins
• Absence • Presence • Trace • Interpreta,on • Reconstruc,on • Sign
• Hinge between Past and Present?
Ruins
• Modernity and moderniza,on built on ruins • Crea,ve destruc,on • Ruins are cajoled into underwri,ng power • But they are also a reminder of temporality • Ozymandias: warning or boast? • The permanence of impermanence
More Resources
• Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpen,er: The Pilgrim at Home
• C L R James, The Black Jacobins • Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present
• hIp://artsone-‐open.arts.ubc.ca