Mono220-CH-06.qxd 9/21/05 6:29 PM Page 67 Alejo Carpentier’s Re-invention of América Latina as Real and Marvellous Jason Wilson ‘Marvellous! The marvellous beauty and fascination of nat- ural wild things! The horror of man’s unnatural life, his heaped-up civilization’, D.H. Lawrence, St Mawr1 The work of the Cuban novelist and musicologist Alejo Carpentier (1901–1980) was a nodal point in the debate about how to define Latin American uniqueness. His fiction struggled to identify this Latin American cultural uniqueness within the long-standing history of Latin American dependence on and mimicry of Europe – in essence, Paris. Paris, as is often cited, was the capital of the nine- teenth century,2 where the life of the mind vibrated most contagiously, to para- phrase Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío,3 famously accused by the Spanish critic Juan Valera in 1888 of having adopted a French mindset. A crucial moment in this history of Gallic cultural dominance was the Parisian-based surrealist move- ment, which developed out of post first-world-war Dada despair into an organ- ized group, energetically controlled by André Breton with the first surrealist manifesto of 1924. Surrealism ushered in a poetics based on unpredictability, magic, primitivism and surprise that in fiction became loosely called magical realism. The French Connection Alejo Carpentier’s creative tussle with André Breton and French cultural dom- ination has been well studied and I intend to review this briefly.4 Parisian sur- realism welcomed foreign painters into the group. The visual image transcends 1 D.H. Lawrence, St Mawr (New York: Vintage, 1953), p. 128. 2 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002). 3 Rubén Darío, ‘Las letras hispanoamericanas en París’, in Rubén Darío, La caravana pasa, ed. Gunther Schmigalle (Berlin: Verlag Walter Frey, 2001), p. 69. 4 Klaus Müller-Bergh, ‘Corrientes vanguardistas y surrealismo en la obra de Alejo Carpentier’, Revista Hispánica Moderna (October–December 1969), 323–40; Stephen Henighan, Mono220-CH-06.qxd 9/21/05 6:29 PM Page 68 68 JASON WILSON the language barrier. The Hispanic contribution to surrealist painting has been enormous, as just listing names like Miró, Dalí, Domínguez, Matta, Varo and Lam (whom I will discuss in greater detail later) suffices to indicate. In the case of writing, the Latin American ‘viaje a París’ (journey to Paris; the literal trans- lations are mine) rarely resulted in a change of language from Spanish to French, but it did lead to bilingualism in Latin American attempts to be recognised and accepted abroad in Paris. The Chilean experimental poet Vicente Huidobro, who invented his own rival theory of poetry against surrealism, called ‘creacionismo’, but lacked the group energy of Breton’s surrealists, duplicated what he wrote in Spanish in the 1920s in French, modifying his name as Vincent Huidobro. A Peruvian poet pseudonymously called César Moro, the sole Latin American writer to publish in one of Breton’s main journals (Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution in 1933), went one step further and wrote his poetry in French, despite living in Peru and Mexico. The Ecuadorian poet, Alfredo Gangotena, who accompanied Henri Michaux around Ecuador in the 1920s, also wrote in French.5 From the periphery, it seemed that cultural life could only happen in certain magic spaces inside Paris, often cafés, and seeking Parisian approval. Carpentier and Desnos’s Critique of Surrealism Carpentier was brought up speaking French; he wrote French well and could have become a French writer from the Caribbean, like Saint-John Perse or Aimé Césaire. Pablo Neruda mischievously referred to him as ‘el escritor francés’ (the French writer).6 Carpentier contributed to fringe surrealist magazines in French, though usually as a spokesman for the Caribbean, and as a translator. In 1928 he arrived in Paris as a 24-year-old Cuban on the run from five months in the Prado prison under dictator Gerardo Machado, escaping on the surrealist poet Robert Desnos’s journalist’s documents. Desnos was his quick entry into surrealism and he couldn’t have found a better guide. In fact, Carpentier’s attitudes to and crit- iques of Breton closely follow Desnos’s. Robert Desnos was the most active member of the group in the 1920s, during the period of self-induced trances as a means of liberating the unconscious. André Breton called him the most surrealist of the surrealists.7 Desnos travelled to Havana by boat with many Latin ‘The Pope’s Errant Son: Breton and Alejo Carpentier’, in André Breton. The Power of Language, ed. Ramona Fotiade (Exeter: Elm Bank Publications, 2000), pp. 139–48. See also Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier. The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) and Leonardo Padura Fuentes, ‘Carpentier y el surrealismo’, Cuadernos hispanoameri- canos, 649–50 (July-August 2004), 35–41. 5 Adriana Castillo de Berchenku, Alfredo Gangotena, poète équatorien (1904–1944) ou l’Écriture partagée (Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 1992). See my ‘Spanish American Surrealist Poetry’, in A Companion to Spanish Surrealism, ed. Robert Havard (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2004), pp. 253–76. 6 Pablo Neruda, Confieso que he vivido. Memorias (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1974), p. 171. 7 Dominique Desanti, Robert Desnos. Le roman d’une vie (Paris: Mercure de France, 1999), p. 128. Mono220-CH-06.qxd 9/21/05 6:29 PM Page 69 CARPENTIER’S RE-INVENTION OF AMÉRICA LATINA 69 American journalists, including the Mexican poet and critic Jorge Cuesta and the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, representing an Argentine newspaper La Razón, for the seventh congress of Latin American journalism. Carpentier and Desnos immediately became friends, and Desnos learnt about Cuba through his friend’s knowledge of music, santería and the sugar business. Back home in Paris, Desnos wrote five articles on his Cuban trip.8 However, Desnos (with Prévert and Leiris), and despite his special role in the group, was publicly expelled by Breton in his 1929 second surrealist manifesto. According to Breton, Desnos was not sufficiently militant politically (he had refused to join the French Communist Party), was an individualist, was reported quoting Racine while in Cuba, was involved in a nightclub in Montparnasse called Maldoror (thus besmirching Lautréamont), and, worst of all, was a journalist.9 At that time, Breton began to be compared to the Pope as the surrealist group was split apart by arguments about political involvement. Desnos contributed to a group protest, Un cadavre (referring to the surrealist game, Un cadavre exquis and to Breton as a corpse), mocking the leader Breton in 1930. In his piece, Desnos imperson- ated Breton, confessing that he (Breton) had lied, deceived his friends, hated ped- erasts, written stupid sentences, faked everything, and mistreated his best friend Desnos. Thus spoke the ‘fantôme puant d’André Breton’ (the stinking ghost of André Breton).10 As Desnos’s friend, Carpentier, never a surrealist and thus not expelled, wrote the closing piece in the pamphlet. In it he admits that he only ever met Breton once when he had told him that surrealism in Latin America was essentially Paul Éluard’s poetry. Breton replied by saying that if that was really so, then surrealism was ‘foutu’ (screwed), and repeated the word several times. Breton went on to say that Éluard’s poetry was the opposite of real poetry, and that he couldn’t understand what was happening in Latin America. Carpentier swore that this dialogue took place, and named his witness Jorge Cuesta (who wrote up his interview with Breton in the Mexican magazine Contemporáneos in 1931). A cunningly placed epigraph cites Breton praising Eluard’s poetry. Carpentier’s piece highlighted Breton’s vanity. How could Éluard represent sur- realism? What about Breton’s own poetry, his novel Nadja, his essays? Thanks to Carpentier’s wit, Breton seemed a careerist, moved by envy for his rival Éluard (Pierre, p. 148). In April 1930 Carpentier wrote a chronicle about the nightclub Maldoror, where he said that Breton, with his abundant hair, looked like Titta Ruffo (a well-known male baritone), and acted like a dictator, a Mussolini.11 In 1975, Carpentier evoked his close friend Desnos. They saw each other nearly every day between 1929 and 1939, even sharing a pair of shoes during the worst 8 Vásquez, Carmen, Robert Desnos et Cuba. Un carrefour du monde (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999). 9 Manifiestes du Surréalisme (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1962), pp. 196–202. 10 José Pierre (ed.), Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives 1922–1939 (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1980), pp. 143–4. 11 Alejo Carpentier, ‘El escándalo de Maldoror’, Obras Completas, Vol 8, (México: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1985), pp. 256–8. Mono220-CH-06.qxd 9/21/05 6:29 PM Page 70 70 JASON WILSON post-Crash days. Desnos exalted love and friendship, and even while a surreal- ist had never failed to have Sunday lunch with his parents. Carpentier found him to be secretive, very private, never talking about his writing.12 The surrealist map of the world was based on a grid of exoticism and a desire for the freedom of the unknown; the less the surrealists knew about a distant cul- ture the more they admired it, sure that it would produce natural surrealists.13 Breton visited Mexico in 1938 to meet, and draw up a manifesto, with Trotsky, but which was signed instead by Diego Rivera, Trotsky’s host.14 In Mexico, Breton discovered Frida Kahlo, who, though she had studied in Paris, was deemed to be naturally surrealist.15 Earlier, in Paris, Breton had discovered Mexican jumping beans, that led to Roger Caillois being expelled as he chal- lenged Breton’s willed self-delusion about Mexico and magic.