Prologue to The Kingdom of This World (1949)

<http://instruct.uwo.ca/english/785a/Prologue.html>
Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980), one of Cuba's most distinguished writers and musicologists,
had spent the years 1928-1939 in Europe as part of Andre Breton's Surrealist movement. He
returned to Havana in 1939, having broken with the Surrealists, whom he now accused of bad
faith, and otherwise thoroughly disenchanted with European and and literature. In 1943, he
travelled to Haiti with the French actor Louis Jouvet and his troupe. In Port au Prince he
delivered a lecture on "L'evolution culturelle de l'Amerique Latine," in which he insists on
the anti-Cartesian character of Latin America. On his return to Cuba, he began writing The
Kingdom of this World, which recounts the slave insurrections led by Mackandal and
Bouckman, and the rise to power and downfall of King Henri Christophe. The text that
follows is a translation of the original preface to that novel. It is at once a screed against the
Surrealists and a manifesto on the marvelous reality of the Americas. A revised and expanded
version of the Prologue was published as a travelogue in 1975; a translation of that essay is
available in Zamora and Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995).

...What we are to understand in this matter of metamorphosis into wolves is

that there is an illness doctors call lupine mania ...
(The Toils of Persiles and Sigismunda) (1)
Toward the end of 1943, I had the good fortune to visit the kingdom of
Henri Christophe (2)---the poetic ruins of Sans-Souci, the massive citadel of
La Ferriere, (3) imposingly intact despite lightning bolts and earthquakes--and to acquaint myself with the still-Norman Cap-Haitien (the Cap Franais
of the former colony) where a street lined with long balconies leads to the
cut-stone palace once inhabited by Pauline Bonaparte. (4)
After having felt the undeniable enchantment of this Haitian earth, after
having discerned magical warnings on the red roads of the Central Plateau,
after having heard the drums of Petro and Rada, (5) I was moved to compare
the marvelous reality I'd just experienced with the tiresomsome attempts to
arouse the marvelous that has characterized certain European literatures for
last thirty years. The marvelous, sought for in the old clichs of the Forest
of Broceliande, (6) the Knights of the Round Table, Merlin the Magician,
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and the Arthurian cycle. The marvelous, pathetically evoked by the antics
and deformities of sideshow characters--will the young poets of France
never get tired of the freaks and clowns of the fte foraine, which Rimbaud
dismissed long ago in his Alchemie du verbe? (7)
The marvelous, manufactured by sleight of hand, by juxtaposing objects
ordinarily never found together: the old, fraudulent story of the fortuitous
encounter of the umbrella and the sewing machine on an operating table
(8),which engendered ermine spoons,(9) snails in a rainy taxi, the lion's
head on the widow's pelvis in Surrealist exhibitions. Or, even more to the
point, the literary marvelous: the king in Sade's Juliette, Jarry's
supermacho, Lewis's monk (10), the hair-raising theatrical props of the
English gothic novel: ghosts, immured priests, lycanthropy, hands nailed to
the castle door.
The result of attempting to arouse the marvelous at all costs is that the
thaumaturges become bureaucrats. Invoked by means of cliched formulas
that turn certain paintings into a monotonous mess of drooping clocks,
seamstress' dummies, or vague phallic monuments, the marvelous is stuck
in umbrellas, or lobsters, or sewing machines, or wherever, on an operating
table, in a sad room, in a stony desert. Miguel de Unamuno (11) said that
memorizing rule books indicated a poverty of imagination. Today there are
codes for the fantastic based on the principle of the donkey devoured by the
fig ( proposed in the Chants de Maldoror as the supreme inversion of
reality), codes to which we owe Children Menaced by Nightingales or
Andre Masson's Horses Devouring Birds. (12)
But we should note that when Andre Masson tried to draw the jungle of
Martinique, with its incredible entangling of plants and the obscene
promiscuity of certain fruits, the marvelous truth of the subject devoured
the painter, leaving him virtually impotent before the empty canvas. It had
to be an American painter, the Cuban Wifredo Lam (13), who showed us the
magic of tropical vegetation, the uncontrolled creativity of our natural
formations--with all their metamorphoses and symbioses--on monumental
canvases whose expression is unique in contemporary art (14).Faced with
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the disconcerting poverty of imagination of a Tanguy, (15) for example, who

for twenty-five years now has been painting the same petrified larvae under
the same gray sky, I feel compelled to recite the dictum that was the pride
of the first generation of Surrealists: Vous qui ne voyez pas, pensez a ceux
qui voient.[You who don't see, think about those who can.]
There are still too many "adolescents who take pleasure in raping the
freshly murdered cadavers of beautiful women" (Lautreamont), who do not
realize that it would be more marvelous to ravish them alive. (16) It's that so
many people forget, because it costs them so little to dress up as magicians,
that the marvelous begins to be marvelous in an unequivocal way when it
arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (a miracle), from a privileged
revelation of reality, from an unusual insight that is singularly favored by
the unexpected richness of reality, or from an amplification of the scale and
categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by means of an
exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of "limit-state."
In the first place, the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes a faith. (17)
Those who do not believe in saints cannot be cured by the miracles of the
saints, in the same way that those who are not Quixotes cannot enter, body
and soul, into the world of Amadis of Gaul or Tirant lo Blanc.
(18) Certain remarks by Rutilio in Cervantes's Toils of Persiles and
Sigismunda, about men being transformed into wolves, are prodigiously
believable because in Cervantes's day it was believed that there were
people afflicted with lupine mania. The same applies to the character's
journey from Tuscany to Norway on a witch's cape. Marco Polo allowed
that certain birds could fly carrying elephants in their talons; Martin Luther
saw the Devil right before his eyes and threw an inkwell at his head. Victor
Hugo, so exploited by the sellers of marvelous books, believed in
apparitions, because he was sure of having spoken, while in Guernsey, with
the ghost of Leopoldina.
All Van Gogh needed was faith in the Sunflower (19) to capture its
revelation on a canvas. Thus, the idea of the marvelous invoked in the
context of disbelief--which is what the surrealists did for so many years-3

was never anything but a literary trick, and a boring one at that for having
been prolonged, as is the literature that is oneiric by "arrangement," or the
praises of folly now back in fashion. But, by the same token, we are not, for
all that, going to yield to those who advocate a return to the realism--a term
that takes on, in this context, a slavishly political agenda--because they are
merely replacing the magician's tricks with the commonplaces of academics
or the scatological delights of some existentialists.
There is clearly no excuse for poets and artists who praise sadism without
practising it, who admire the supermacho because of their own impotence,
who invoke spirits without believing they answer to incantations, and who
found secret societies, literary sects, or vaguely philosophic groups with
passwords and arcane goals that are never achieved, without being able to
conceive a valid mysticism or to abandon their pettiest habits in order to
risk their souls on the frightening card of faith.
All of this became particularly evident to me during my stay in Haiti, where
I found myself in daily contact with something we could call the marvelous
real . I was treading earth where thousands of men, eager for liberty,
believed in Mackandal's (20) lycanthropic powers, to the point that their
collective faith produced a miracle on the day of his execution. I already
knew the prodigious story of Bouckman, (21) the Jamaican initiate. I had
been in the citadel of La Ferriere, a structure without architectonic
precedents, portended only in Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons. (22) I had
breathed the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, a monarch of
incredible undertakings, much more surprising than all the cruel kings
invented by the surrealists, who were very fond of imaginary tyrannies,
never having suffered through one.
I found the marvelous real with every step. But I also realized that the
presence and vitality of the marvelous real was not a privilege unique to
Haiti but the patrimony of all the Americas, where we have not yet
established an inventory of our cosmogonies. The marvelous real is found
at each step in the lives of the men who inscribed dates on the history of the
Continent and who left behind names still borne by the living: from the
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seekers after the Fountain of Youth or the Golden City of Manoa to certain
early rebels or modern heroes of our wars of independence, those of such
mythological stature as Colonel Juana Azurduy (23)
It has always seemed significant to me that as recently as 1780 some
perfectly sane Spaniards from Angostura set out in search of El Dorado, and
that, during the French Revolution-- long live Reason and the Supreme
Being!--Francisco Menendez, from Compostela, traversed Patagonia
hunting for the Enchanted City of the Caesars. (24) Looking at the matter in
another way, we see that while in western Europe folk-dancing has lost all
its magical evocative power, it is rare that a collective dance in the
Americas does not embody a profound ritual meaning that creates around it
an entire initiatory process: such are the santeria dances in Cuba or the
prodigious African version of the Corpus feast, which may still be seen in
the town of San Francisco de Yare in Venezuela.
There is a moment in the sixth song of Maldoror when the hero, chased by
all the police in the world, escapes from "an army of agents and spies" by
taking on the shape of diverse animals and making use of his ability to
transport himself instantly to Peking, Madrid, or Saint Petersburg. This is
"marvelous literature" at its peak. But in the Americas, where nothing like
that has been written, there did exist a Mackandal who possessed the same
powers because of the faith of his contemporaries and who used that magic
to inspire one of the most dramatic and strange uprisings in History.
Maldoror--Isidore Ducasse himself confesses it--was nothing more than a
"poetic Rocambole." (25) All he left behind was a short-lived literary
school. The American Mackandal, on the other hand, has left behind an
entire mythology, accompanied by magical hymns, preserved by an entire
people, who still sing them at Vaudou ceremonies. (There is, on the other
hand, a strange coincidence in the fact that Isidore Ducasse, a man who had
an exceptional instinct for the fantastic-poetic, was born in the Americas
and bragged so emphatically at the end of one of his chapters of being "Le
Montevideen.") Because of the virginity of its landscape, because of its
development, because of its ontology, because of the Faustian presence of
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the Indian and of the Black, because of the Revelation its recent discovery
constituted, because of the fertile racial mixtures it favoured, the Americas
are far from having used up their wealth of mythologies.
The text that follows, even though I didn't conceive of it in programatic
fashion, responds to this order of concerns. It tells of a sequence of
extraordinary events that occurred on the island of Saint Dominigue over a
period of time which does not exceed a single human life. It allows the
marvelous to flow freely from a reality set down strictly in all its details.
The reader must be warned that the story he is going to read is based on
rigorous documentation which not only respects the historical truth of the
events, the names of the characters (even the minor ones), of the places, and
even of the streets, but which also conceals under its apparently nonchronological facade a minute collation of dates and chronologies.
And yet, because of the dramatic singularity of the events, because of the
fantastic bearing of the characters who met, at a given moment, at the
magical crossroads of Cap-Haitien, everything seems marvelous in a story
it would have been impossible to set in Europe and which is as real, in any
case, as any exemplary event yet set down for the edification of students in
school texts. What, after all, is the history of all the Americas but a
chronicle of the marvelous real?
Notes (by J.M. Zezulka):
1. The Toils of Persiles and Sigismunda (1617); Cervantes last romance, the story of the religious
conversion of some travellers from Greenland to Rome.
2. Henri Christophe (1767-1820); president (1807-1811) and king (1811-1820) of the French
Caribbean colony of Saint Dominique (now Haiti). He was born in Grenada, and distinguished
himself in the revolution against the French in 1791. In 1806, he and the Haitian general Alexandre
Ption helped to overthrow the self-proclaimed emperor Jean Jacques Dessaline. In 1811, following a
civil war between Ption and Christophe, who in 1807 had proclaimed himself President of nothern
Haiti, Christophe proclaimed himself king as Henri I. He did much to improve the lives of his
people, and his court tried to rival the splendour of Versailles, but his rule was brutally autocratic. In
1820, he was incapacitated by a stroke, and shot himself when his army mutinied.

3. Images of Sans Souci and la Ferriere

4. Pauline Bonaparte (1780-1825); Napolean's favorite sister resided in Cap Francais as the wife of
General Victor Leclerc, who had been sent to quell the insurrection. He died from fever in 1802, after
which Pauline returned to Europe to marry Prince Borghese of Italy.
5. Petro and Rada: "loas" or spirits, in the Voudon religion. Rada loas are benevolent and gentle;
Petro loas are dark gods, counterbalances to the benevolent forces of the Rada, and can be very
aggressive and sometimes ferocious.
6. The forest of Broceliande lies in the region known today as Paimpont, to the south west of
Rennes.. This enchanted region is the setting for the quest by the Knights of the Round Table to
recover the Holy Grail under orders from King Arthur. One of the best known inhabitants of the
forest was Merlin the Magician.
7. The second Delirium, "The Alchemy of the Word," is from A Season in Hell (1873) the best known
prose poem by the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1881). The poem recounts his
sufferings close to madness and his failed experiment to become a seer poet.
As translated by Paul Schmidt, and published in 1976 by Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row,
the poem reads, in part:.
My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.
For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes and I thought the great figures
of modern painting and poetry were laughable.
What I liked were : absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops,
billboards, bright-colored prints ; old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of
misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas,
silly old songs, the nave rhythms of country rimes.
I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories,
religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents : I used to
believe in every kind of magic.
I invented colors for the vowels ! - A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. - I made rules for the
form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a
kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its
translator.
I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote
down. I made the whirling world stand still. ........
The worn-out ideas of old-fashioned poetry played an important part in my alchemy of the word.
I got used to elementary hallucination : I could very precisely see a mosque instead of a factory, a
drum corps of angels, horse carts on the highways of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a
lake ; monsters and mysteries ; a vaudeville's title filled me with awe.
And so I explained my magical sophistries by turning words into visions ! ........
8. Carpentier alludes to, and may be misreading Isidore Ducasse (1846-1870), who wrote under the
name Comte de Lautramont. The image of the umbrella appears in the sixth canto of Les Chants de
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Maldoror (1890) and was for Breton and the Surrealists the emblem of a fortuitous and incongruous
encounter. Lautramont describes an encounter with a passerby as follows:
I am an expert at judging age from the physiognomic lines of the brow: he is sixteen years and four
months of age. He is as handsome as the retractility of the claws in birds of prey; or, again, as the
unpredictability of muscular movement in sores in the soft part of the posterior cervical region; or,
rather, as the perpetual motion rat-trap which is always reset by the trapped animal and which can go
on catching rodents indefinitely and works even when it is hidden under straw; and, above all, as the
chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table! (Maldoror and
Poems. Trans. Paul Knight, Penguin Books, 1978)
The Surrealists regarded Ducasse as an antecedent, and this particular image and variations of it seem
to have been especially resonant with them. See, for example, Salvator Dali's poem, "You Could See
the Ass's Bone," in Julien Levy's Surrealism (New York, 1936) or Joseph Cornell's Collage(1932)
below. According to Nancy Gray Diaz, Carpentier is reading Lautramont through a Surrealist filter;
in actuality, the Chants of Maldoror constitute "a vigorous, multivalent assault on the French popular
novel, Romantic literature and beyond these, the western literary tradition, for the transgressions of
its myth-making"(52). See "The Metamorphosis of Maldoror and Mackandal: Reconsidering
Carpentier's Reading of Lautramont," Modern LanguageStudies 21, no 3 (Summer 1991): p. 48-56.]
9. Carpentier here alludes to a number of works that he might have seen at the 1938 "Exposition
Internationale du Surrealisme" in Paris (Galerie Beaux-Arts).
Meret Oppenheim created her Object: Fur Covered Cup, Saucer, and Spoon in 1936.
Salvador Dali's Rainy Taxi was the main object in the lobby of the January, 1938 "Exposition
Internationale du Surrealisme". The installation consisted of the hulk of a taxi containing a driver
with a shark's head (supposedly Christopher Columbus) and a blonde female passenger. Holes had
been cut in the roof of the taxi to let rain seep through the installation for the benefit of the 200 live
snails.
The "head of a lion on the pelvis of a widow" refers to Georges Hugnet's Woman Panther(1938).
10. Carpentier aludes to Donatien Alphonse Franois, comte de Sade (1740-1814). His Historie de
Juliette; ou, Les Prosperites du vice (6 vols.) appeared in 1797. Alfred Jarry (1873-1907); his Ubi
Roi appeared in 1896. Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818); his The Monk was published in 1796.
11. Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), important member of the Spanish Generation of 1898; a
philosopher in the Existentialist vein.
12. Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale (1924), by Max Ernst; Horses Devouring Birds (1927)
by Andre Masson, oil and feathers on canvas. The image of the fig devouring the donkey occurs early
in the fourth canto of the Chants, and is intended to convey Maldoror's condemnation of figurative
language. The "drooping clocks," "seamstress' dummies," "phallic monuments," etc. referred to
earlier in the paragraph indicate works by Dali and Giorgio de Chirico.
13. Andre Masson (1896-1987) left France in March 1941, and spent three weeks in Martinique in
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the company of Wilfredo Lam(1902-1982) and Claude Levi-Strauss. Lam had come to Martinique
with Breton and numerous other artists and intellectuals, all heading for the USA directly or
indirectly. Early in 1942, and in subsequent years, Lam attended Afro-Cuban ritual dances and
naigo ceremonies in Havana and elsewhere with Carpentier and others. In 1945, Lam, Breton, and
Pierre Mabille visited Haiti, where they witnessed voudon ceremonies.
14. Note with what American prestige the works of Wilfredo Lam triumph, in their deep originality,
over the other painters shown in this special issue--a panorama of modern art--published in 1946 by
Cahiers d'Art. (Author's note)
15. Ives Tanguy (1900-1955)
16. "In his critique of Ducasse, Carpentier demonstrates ironically how much of a Surrealist he is.
Furthermore, the remark about the delights of raping live women places him with the Surrealists in
the cult of gratuitous violence advocated by Breton, Artaud, and other French writers of the thirties
(including Gaston Bachelard, who wrote his study of Lautramont, a celebration of violence, in the
thirties. Violence in El reino itself, of course, is in no way gratuitous, since it serves the goal of
revolution against oppression. But here again Carpentier approximates Ducasse, in whose work
violence is anything but gratuitous, as it works to try to demolish what Ducasse considers to be the
pernicious influence of literary myth, metamorphosis arming itself to destroy metaphor" (55). Nancy
Gray Diaz; see note 8.
17. Cf;: William Seabrook, The Magic Island (1929)] " I learned from Louis that we white that we
white strangers in this 20th century city (New York), with our electric lights and motor cars, bridge
games and cocktail parties, were surrounded by another world invisible, a world of marvels,
miracles, and wonders--a world in which the dead rose from their graves and walked, in which a man
lay dying within shouting distance of my own house and from no mortal illness but because and old
woman out in Logane sat slowly unwinding the thread wrapped round a wooden doll made in his
image, a world in which trees and beasts talked for those whose ears were attuned, in which gods
spoke from burning bushes, as on Sinai, and sometimes still walked bodily as in Eden's
garden...Voodoo in Haiti is a profound and vitally alive religion--alive as Christianity was in its
beginnings and in the early Middle Ages when miracles and mystical illuminations were common
everyday occurences" (12).
18. Romances of chivalry read by Don Quixote.
19. Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)
20. Franois Macandal, was the famous runaway slave who led a six-year rebellion (1751-57) against
the French colonists in Saint Domingo. He was reputed to be an hougan, or voodoo sorcerer, and
drew upon African traditions and religions to motivate his followers. The French burned him at the
stake in Cap Franais in 1758, although his followers believed that he escaped execution by turning
himself into a fly.
21. Bouckman, a houngan who employed vaudau in its most aggressive (Petro) form to summon the
slaves to revolt at a ceremony at Bois Caman in 1791. He was assumed by some of his followers to
be the reincarnation of Mackandal.He was captured and beheaded.
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22. Giovnni Batista Piranesi (1720-1778). In Carceri d'Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1745 this
Italian engraver transformed Roman ruins into immense, fantastic dungeons with gloomy arcades,
staircases rising to incredible heights, and bizarre galleries leading nowhere. Piranesi's engravings
were an influence on 19th-century romanticism and also played a role in the development of
Surrealism.
23. Juana Azurduy de Padilla (1781-1862), a heroine in the Bolivian wars for independence.
24. The enchanted City of the Caesars is a variant of the Eldorado legend and has incited countless
explorations in Patagonia. Many Spaniards claimed to have actually been there, and and numerous
others went in search of it.. Sebastian Cabot, who discovered the Paran and Paraguay rivers and
established the first Spanish settlement in the Plata basin in1528, was preparing to search for the
fabled city when a surprise attack by the Indians in1529 wiped out his base at Fort Sancti Spritus.
25. Rocambole was the hero of Les Exploits de Rocambole (1859), French popular romances by
Pierre-Alexix, Vicomte de Poson du Terrail (1828-1871). Maldoro is thus the ultimate parody of the
Romantic literary hero and, at the same time, the embodiment and the destroyer of the Romantic
literary myth. See Nancy Gray Diaz, note 2.

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