To me, that's how it felt reading Isaac Bashevis Singer for the first time, Jose Saramago, Bohumil Hrabal, Vasily Grossman, Naguib Mahfouz, Carlos Fuentes, and yeah... a few of the classics too. For some reason, I don't read the stuff my generation of Americans reads, not because I think I'm smarter than them--sometimes I read more complicated shit and my mind goes blank--but because my emotions are intense enough I really need things that engage on infinite levels: books where nothing means what it says it means, and you have to 'do the work', intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. However exciting or boring on the surface, they mean a hundred different things beneath and you can't just view them as entertainment.
What a lot of people don't realize is that the easiest way you know you're looking at art is that the vast majority of great art is piss poor entertainment. Even the simple art is not that great a time. If you want a diversion, you'll have a much better time listening to Taylor Swift than even a composer as entertaining as Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky may not be complicated intellectually, but the majority of his music is depressing like you wouldn't believe. He's a whirlwind of negative emotions: sadness, anger, fear, horror. He fries your nerves, he tears you up, he takes you through hell. Why would anybody willingly subject themselves to that unless their lives were already complicated enough to crave a situation like that?
But the writers I mentioned at the top are just writers I've found that speak to me most viscerally: they're usually mid-20th century writers from developing nations, challenged nations, poor nations, authoritarian nations. Their books' relationship to real life is usually fungible, but the real still has its say. In fact, their forays into irrational worlds are usually metaphors for the all-too-real, not escapes from it. Too often, they need to write in coded metaphor because the real thing could get them killed. There are so many more of them that I have yet to get to.
And let me add, I eagerly await the day I find sci-fi/fantasy writers who speak the same way. I'm particularly looking forward to Octavia Butler. Sadly, America is getting to the point where their writers might begin to speak in code too. I firmly believe America's best artistic days are ahead of us, because the more our politics fail, the more we'll need art to articulate our plight.
Macandal was now lashed to the post. The executioner had picked up the ember with the tongs. With a gesture rehearsed the evening before in front of a mirror, the Governor unsheathed his dress sword and gave the order for the sentence to be carried out. The fire began to rise toward the Mandigue (Macandal), licking his legs. At that moment, Macandal moved the stump of his arm which they had been unable to tie up, in a threatening gesture which was nonetheless terrible for being partial, howling unknown spells and thrusting his torso forward. The bonds fell off and the Negro rose in the air, flying overhead, until it plunged into the black waves of the sea of slaves. A single cry filled the square:
Macandal saved!
Pandemonium followed. The guards fell with rifle butts on the howling blacks, who now seemed to overflow the streets, climbing toward the windows. And the noise and screaming and uproar were such that very few saw that Macandal, held by ten soldiers, had been thrust head first into the fire, and that a flame fed by his burning hair drowned his last cry.
On the one hand, the literal explanation is that the fire burned through his bounds and he was able to escape for just a moment, only to be thrown back into the fire. But in the mind of the slaves, he literally did rise up from his captivity, perhaps just to escape, perhaps as divine resurrection, and they were too excited by the sight at that moment to realize the truth of what happened. In just a few seconds, the course of history was changed. That's how history often seems to happen--just as war has a fog, so do world events.
And think of what happened with the Governor. He literally rehearsed his order, but it was Macandal's spontaneous gesture which people would remember, a gesture which he could not plan because he had no way of knowing his captors couldn't tie him to the stake.
Even the most exciting historical events can make flies drop to the floor when told in dry fashion. Part of what best animates these historical recreations is inclusion of the irrational. The irrational here takes the form of Voodoo, the West African religion competing with Christianity for the devotion of Southern slaves: a religion of spirits, possession and ancestors. There are all sorts of passages where Carpentier matter of factly tells us that characters transformed into all manner of animals. Nobody was there to see them do it, so we can take it at face value if we so choose; and we might as well, because their transformations were probably extremely real to them. When Henri-Christophe has a stroke, it's described as a lightning bolt only he could hear sending a shudder through all the bells of 'the cap' (obviously Port-au-Prince). Just a page or two later, real thuds and noises happen: the rebellion is struck up against him. This is not quite magical realism as we generally understand it in the writing of a generation later, it is, rather, magic that humans coin through illusions that we modern find easily explicable. Carpentier coined a magnificent term for it: 'marvelous realism.'
All throughout, the presence of nature is uncommonly vivid, colorful, tactile. The florae and faunae are its own character, a silent observer and witness, as much an audience surrogate as Ti Noel, silently marking the time and observing events with reactions that seem quite arbitrary. Animals are constantly slaughtered, and blood is as present in this book as plant life: life and death are everywhere.
But what makes this book go from great to transcendent is the second half. Carpentier was a devoted Cuban Communist who welcomed Castro, but he was too good an artist to let politics get in the way. He realized what all good artists realize, that if you portray a revolution, you have to leave room for the possibility that the revolution was always doomed to failure, and that all revolutions might be doomed to failure: just as a conservative artist has to leave room for a depicted revolution to succeed. But for a Cuban book, the implication of all this is clear: beware. The Communists may overthrow Batista, but they may turn out as corrupt and murderous as those who came before. As it turned out...
Ti Noel is our protagonist, but he is no hero. The book leaves open a highly likely possibility that Ti-Noel and his sons raped and murdered their master's wife in a manner still more gruesome than it sounds--a wife warned against staying in the new world in the starkest possible terms the moment she was introduced. Violent situations bring out violence in their participants. God knows what Ti Noel endured at her hands and many others before that moment. He is a participant of his time and place, and can only observe it for us properly by being an accurate representation of it.
Halfway through the book, he returns to Haiti a free man, but there is no sense that he is better off than he was. The chief rebels have become the new aristocrats, and the revolutionaries seem just as draconian and arbitrary as the reactionaries who preceded them--conscripting people to work in a way that's slavery all but name, and killing without mercy. It leaves us with the question: are revolutions destined to failure, or is there hope for revolutions to live up to their promises?
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