A DIALOGIC READING OF ALEJO CARPENTIER’S THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD by Nathan King APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ René Prieto, Chair ___________________________________________ Milton A. Cohen ___________________________________________ Enric Madriguera ___________________________________________ Charles Hatfield Copyright 2019 Nathan King All Rights Reserved A DIALOGIC READING OF ALEJO CARPENTIER’S THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD by NATHAN KING, BA, MAIS DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES - STUDIES IN LITERATURE THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS May 2019 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all of my committee members for being patient with me throughout this process. Special thanks to the Margaret McDermott Library staff for ensuring that any books that I needed were found in a timely fashion. Thanks to my wife, Elizabeth, for making sure that I needed anything and everything to ensure my success. December 2018 iv A DIALOGIC READING OF ALEJO CARPENTIER’S THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD Nathan King, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2019 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: René Prieto This dissertation examines Alejo Carpentier’s novel, The Kingdom of This World, by using Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic theory. To do this, the first chapter of my dissertation focuses on Carpentier’s interaction with and participation in Afro-Cubanism and the Surrealist movement, as well as on how writing Music in Cuba prepared him to write The Kingdom of this World, particularly the famous prologue on “the marvelous real.” My second chapter details the theoretical implications of Bakhtin’s theories and maps how The Kingdom of This World pivots around a Hegelian notion of historical identity which Carpentier describes in spatial terms as "here" and "back there.” Since the Cuban author never offers a resolution to this cycle, I will argue that his novel is a negation of Hegel’s view of history. In my third chapter I analyze the musicality of the novel including elements borrowed from the symphony and first age rhythms. Basing my analysis on Aaron Copland’s description of both the symphony and of rhythm, I argue that Carpentier wrote The Kingdom of this World as a four-part symphony composed of first age rhythms. His novel is divided into four parts and within each there are examples of rhythms—such as the drums and chants—that relate to or represent people of the first ages of the v world. From this explication, I seek to show that the novel’s music strengthens and reinforces Carpentier’s view of identity, one that is already present through the spatial concept, “here” and “back there.” Chapter Four examines how notions of “here” and “back there” and the musical elements are in dialogue with one another via the character of Ti Noël. On the basis of this discussion, I offer an answer as to how identity is portrayed in the novel, and what that portrayal means to the author. My conclusion draws from my findings to show how The Kingdom of This World provides a new and previously untried framework for understanding all of Alejo Carpentier’s major works. In fact, this novel should be considered the start of the Cuban author’s fascination with identity, music and history. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................................. iv ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 HAITI, ALEJO CARPENTIER, AND LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE ......14 CHAPTER 2 BETWEEN “HERE” AND “BACK” THERE: IDENTITY IN THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD ..........................................................................................................................43 CHAPTER 3 A SYMPHONY OF FIRST AGE RHYTHMS IN THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD ........................................................................................................................................101 CHAPTER 4 “DIALOGISM” OF THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD ....................................161 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................192 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................212 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................223 CURRICULUM VITAE…………………………………………………………………….….224 vii INTRODUCTION Without a doubt, the culmination of Cuban author Alejo Carpentier’s unique blend of fiction, history, and music is his 1949 novel, The Kingdom of This World. Naturally, these three fields of study—veritable building blocks of Carpentier’s fiction—are directly related to his personal life. Parts of Carpentier’s life sound like fiction, especially since the accounts of his birth have been so often nefarious, a tendency to which he has contributed himself. For many years, it was believed that “he was born in the heart of Havana, on a street called Maloja, on December 26 1904” (Pérez-Firmat 183). According to this version, architect Georges Carpentier met Nina Valmont, a Russian medical student, in Switzerland and then they moved “to Cuba looking for a fresh start in a young country” (Pérez-Firmat 183). As it turns out, this was a fabrication on the part of Carpentier and was not disproven until the middle of the twentieth century.1 The “truth” (or what is generally acknowledged as such nowadays) is that the author was born on December 26, 1904 in Lausanne, Switzerland. Although he spent most of his youth in Havana, he also lived in Paris “where he studied musical theory at the Lycée Jeanson de Sailly before returning to Cuba to complete his secondary education at the Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza” (Paravisini-Gebert 21). Carpentier later enrolled in architecture at the University of Havana, but did not finish his degree 1 Pérez-Firmat goes into detail, via an endnote, of how Carpentier’s “Maloja Myth” was disproved. See Gustavo Pérez-Firmat. “Ese idioma: Alejo Carpentier's Tongue-Ties.” Symposium, vol. 61, no. 3, 2007, pp. 183-198. 1 because he opted to further his musical education and eventually became a musicologist of considerable renown. Even after such a cursory overview of Carpentier’s early years, it is easy to see why he was confronted with conflicting notions of identity: was he Swiss, French, or Cuban? Should he be speaking and thinking in French or in Spanish? The truth is that he spent his entire life between cultures and languages. In his search for a way to express this identity crisis, he became interested in two artistic movements: Afro-Cubanism and Surrealism, both of which will be discussed in greater detail in my first chapter. Afro-Cubanism was a Cuban literary and artistic movement of the 1920’s that sought to define Cuba in terms of its black heritage.2 Carpentier’s interest in Afro- Cubanism was brief and resulted in the writing of his one and only Afro-Cuban novel, Ecué- Yamba-o (Paravisini-Gebert 21). The Cuban author began writing this novel in 1927 while in jail for opposing the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, but would not publish it until 1933 (21). The following year, because of his opposition to Machado, he fled Cuba with the help of the French surrealist poet, Robert Desnos, who introduced him to the Surrealist movement (22).3 Between both World Wars, Carpentier spent eight years in France where he met other persecuted and exiled Latin American and Spanish intellectuals; he would eventually break away from Surrealism in favor of an entirely personal aesthetic approach that he labeled “the marvelous real” (22). The elaboration of this new aesthetic tendency took the author a number of years, during which he left France for the island of Cuba. 2 For a full historical account of Afro-Cubanism, I refer readers to Edward J. Mullen’s Afro- Cuban Literature: Critical Junctures. Greenwood Press, 1998. 3 Roberto González Echevarría gives a more detailed account of Carpentier and Surrealism in Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. 2 In 1939, at the onset of World War II, Carpentier began researching and writing his now famous, Music in Cuba, published in 1946. This compendium of Cuban music from the colonial era to the early twentieth century emphasizes the fusion among Spanish, African, French, and other styles of music on the island (Paravisini-Gebert 22). Carpentier has stated that this book prepared him “to write later novels,” and in fact the next novel that he would write, The Kingdom of this World (1949) briefly references the sixteenth century Cuban composer Esteban Salas as well as a variety of African drums (Music in Cuba 4). In the preface of Music in Cuba, Carpentier notes: “we have tried to create a […] schematic study of the music of other Antillean islands—particularly Haiti—whose slave-led revolution unexpectedly brought to Cuba a number of rhythms and genres, altering certain aspects of its folklore” (60). In 1943, as he was composing Music in Cuba, Carpentier and his first wife, Lilia Estéban, visited Haiti and the fruit of that trip was the novel, The Kingdom of this World published six years later, in 1949. The prologue