Explosion in a Cathedral, page 1
penguin classics
EXPLOSION IN A CATHEDRAL
alejo carpentier (1904–1980) was one of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century, as well as a classically trained pianist and musicologist. His best-known novels are The Lost Steps, Explosion in a Cathedral, and The Kingdom of This World. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and raised in Havana, Cuba, Carpentier lived for many years in France and Venezuela before returning to Cuba after the 1959 revolution. A few years later he returned to France, where he lived until his death.
adrian nathan west has translated more than thirty books from Spanish, Catalan, and German, including Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, a finalist for both the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the International Booker Prize. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and the novel My Father’s Diet, and his essays and literary criticism have appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Baffler. He lives in Philadelphia.
alejandro zambra is the award-winning author of numerous novels and other works of fiction, including Chilean Poet, Ways of Going Home, The Private Lives of Trees, Bonsai, Multiple Choice, and My Documents. His short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Granta, and Harper’s Magazine. Born in Santiago, Chile, Zambra lives in Mexico City.
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Copyright © 1962 by Alejo Carpentier
Copyright © 2023 by Fundación Alejo Carpentier
Translation copyright © 2023 by Adrian Nathan West
Foreword copyright © 2023 by Alejandro Zambra
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Originally published in Spanish as El siglo de las luces by Compañía General de Ediciones, Mexico City
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Carpentier, Alejo, 1904-1980, author. | West, Adrian Nathan, translator. | Zambra, Alejandro, 1975- writer of foreword.
Title: Explosion in a cathedral / Alejo Carpentier; translated by Adrian Nathan West; foreword by Alejandro Zamba.
Other titles: Siglo de las luces. English
Description: [New York] : Penguin Classics, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022056085 (print) | LCCN 2022056086 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143133889 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505679 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Hugues, Victor—Fiction. | LCGFT: Biographical fiction. | Magic realist fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PQ7389.C263 S513 2023 (print) | LCC PQ7389.C263 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64—dc23/eng/20230320
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056085
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056086
Cover art: Vue de l’incendie de la ville du Cap Français, by Jean-Baptiste Chapuy, engraver; after J. L. Boquet, artist. Art Collection 3 / Alamy Stock Photo.
Interior design adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For Lilia, my wife
Words do not fall into the void.
The Zohar
Contents
Foreword by alejandro zambra
A Note on the Translation by adrian nathan west
EXPLOSION IN A CATHEDRAL
Concerning the History of Victor Hugues by alejo carpentier
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Foreword
Alejo Carpentier’s Second Language
I.
I like to think of literature as a second language—especially the second language of the monolingual. I’m thinking, naturally, about those of us who never systematically studied a foreign language, but who had access, thanks to translation—a miracle we take for granted all too easily—to distant cultures that at times came to seem close to us, or even like they belonged to us. We didn’t read Marguerite Duras or Yasunari Kawabata because we were interested in the French or Japanese languages per se, but because we wanted to learn—to continue learning—that foreign language called literature, as broadly international as it is profoundly local. Because this foreign language functions, of course, inside of our own language; in other words, our language comes to seem, thanks to literature, foreign without ever ceasing to be ours.
It’s within that blend of strangeness and familiarity that I want to recall my first encounter with the literature of Alejo Carpentier, which occurred, as I’m sure it did for so many Spanish speakers of my generation and after, inside a classroom. “In this story, everything happens backward,” said a teacher whose name I don’t want to remember, before launching into a reading of “Viaje a la semilla” (Journey to the Seed), Carpentier’s most famous short story, which we would later find in almost every anthology of Latin American stories, but which at the time, when we were thirteen or fourteen years old, we had never read. The teacher’s solemn, perhaps exaggerated reading allowed us, however, to feel or to sense the beauty of prose that was strange and different. It was our language, but converted into an unknown music that could nonetheless, like all music, especially good music, be danced to. Many of us thought it was a dazzling story, surprising and crazy, but I don’t know if any of us would have been able to explain why. Because of the odd delicacy of some of the sentences, perhaps. Maybe this one: “For the first time, the rooms slept without window-blinds, open onto a landscape of ruins.” Or this one: “The chandeliers of the great drawing room now sparkled very brightly.”
Although our teacher had already told us that everything in the story happened backward, from the future to the past, back toward the seed, knowing the trick did not cancel out the magic. The magic did come to an end, though, when the teacher ordered us to list all the words we didn’t know and look them up in the dictionary—each of our backpacks always contained a small dictionary, which, we soon found, was not big enough to contain Carpentier’s splendid, abundant lexicon.
Was that how people in Cuba spoke? Or was it, rather, the writer’s language? Or were we the ones who, quite simply, were ignorant of our own language? But was that our language? We discussed something like that, dictionaries in hand, while the teacher—I don’t know why I remember this—typed some numbers into a calculator laboriously, perhaps struggling with his farsightedness.
I reread that story just now, and I again find it extraordinary, for reasons I presume are different. But I get distracted by the melancholic attempt to guess which of those words I didn’t know back then: embrasure, denticle, entablature, scapulary, daguerreotype, psaltery, doublet, gnomon, balustrades, licentious, gunwads, matchstaff, epaulet, sentient, décolleté, tricorne, taper, tassel, calash, sorrel, benzoin, sophist, crinoline, ruff, octander . . .
To read Carpentier entailed, first of all, listening to him, and then translating him. First, listening to him the way we listen to a song in a language very like our own but that we don’t understand entirely, and enjoying the echoes and contrasts. And then translating him; translating before we knew how to translate, or even that we were translating. Translating him in our own language. For someone who grew up with the Spanish of Chile, reading Carpentier was, of course, to travel to the island of Cuba, but above all it was to travel to the island of Carpentier.
II.
The foreignness of his own language was clear to Carpentier from the start, as the son of a French father and a Russian mother. Throughout his life, he affirmed the official story that he had been born in Havana, but a few years after Carpentier’s death, Guillermo Cabrera Infante leaked the juicy tidbit that he had actually been born in Lausanne, Switzerland (a bit of gossip that was never disproven, perhaps because it was supported by a birth certificate).
The hypotheses about this lie—or, to put it more kindly, this slight displacement of the truth—are numerous, of course. Carpentier probably wanted to minimize his foreignness, for reasons we do not know, though contemplating them is fascinating. Listening to him in interviews on YouTube, any Spanish speaker would agree that this is a person who speaks the language with unusual dexterity and mastery, with his guttural pronunciation of the r as the sole, though conclusive, mark of his foreignness. And so it isn’t hard to believe this new version of his biography, which presents him to us as a Cuban whose mother tongue was not Spanish, though he mastered the language very quickly, with extraordinary proficiency, when he arrived in Cuba with his parents at four or five years old.
There is no disputing that Carpentier was born on November 26, 1904, which is not relevant in and of itself, of course, except for readers who are interested in astrology. But I mention it because that is also the birthday of Esteban, one of the protagonists of Explosion in a Cathedral, who in
The novel opens with these three teenagers in mourning after the death of their father, a well-to-do plantation owner who had been widowed years before. Instead of returning to the convent where she has been educated so far, Sofía chooses to stay home with her brother Carlos—who is destined, or more like condemned, to take over the family business—and her cousin, whom she tries to care for and protect. The three young people cope with their pain even as they discover the joys of this shared life, “absorbed in interminable readings, discovering the universe through books.” Grief becomes, as well, “a fitting pretext to stay aloof from all commitments or obligations, ignoring a society whose provincial intolerance tried to bind existence to ordinary norms, to appearing in certain places at certain times, dining in the same modish pastry shops, spending Christmas on the sugar plantations or on estates in Artemisa, where rich landholders vied with each other over the number of mythological statues they could place on the verges of their tobacco fields . . .”
They are distracted from this intense and entertaining life of seclusion by Victor Hugues, a trader from Marseille of indeterminate age (“thirty or forty perhaps, or maybe much younger”), whose seductive irruption on the scene opens up a promising space attuned to revolutionary idealism and enthusiasm. Rounding out the group is Doctor Ogé, a mestizo physician and Freemason and a friend of Hugues’s, who tries to help Esteban as he is in the throes of an asthma attack. There is a crucial scene in which Sofía refuses to give her hand to the doctor, betraying racial prejudices that are typical of her class and time (“No one would trust a negro to build a palace, defend a prisoner, arbitrate a theological dispute, or govern a country”). But Victor Hugues replies categorically, “All men are born equal.” And it turns out that Ogé not only treats Esteban’s asthma attack, but also cures him completely. This miracle leaves an indelible mark on the characters’ values and prospects, especially Sofía’s and Esteban’s; the latter, now free of illness and faced with the racing speed of history, dares to embark on a different life.
I don’t want to give anything away here about the fate of certain characters who go on to engage directly with the changing and bloody era in which they live. Perhaps it will suffice to say that Victor Hugues and Esteban set out for France, from where Hugues—a historical character adapted by Carpentier from diverse and elusive sources—returns to the Caribbean in a position of power, on his way to becoming the “island Robespierre,” while Esteban, after discovering Paris and feeling “more French than the French, more rebellious than the rebels, clamoring for peremptory measures, draconian punishments, exemplary retribution,” and moving to Bayonne to translate ineffective revolutionary pamphlets, also returns to the Caribbean, having now become the narrator who, almost without realizing, we met in the novel’s preamble. Increasingly disillusioned and guilt-ridden, Esteban finds the appreciative contemplation of nature to be practically his only consolation. As for Sofía, her marriage to Jorge seems to set her up for riches and insignificance, but widowhood and her later reunion with Hugues turn her into the surprise protagonist of the novel’s last stretch; her decisions, motivations, and fate have for decades fed an interpretive debate that is today perhaps more current than ever.
III.
“I think I am one of the few Cubans who can boast of having visited almost all of the islands in the Caribbean,” said Carpentier in an interview in which he emphasizes that none of those islands is like any other. That cult of the specific inundates each of the minute and vivid descriptions that abound in his work. The beauty of Carpentier’s prose can never be emphasized enough, and here it rises to incredible levels, especially in the descriptions of marine landscapes: “Esteban saw in the coral forests a tangible image, an intimate yet ungraspable figuration of Paradise Lost, where the trees, still badly named, with the clumsy and quavering tongue of a Man-Child, were endowed with the apparent immortality of this luxurious flora—this monstrance, this burning bush—for which the sole sign of autumn or springtime was a variation in tone or a soft migration of shadows . . .”
This exuberant prose, which is proudly and decidedly baroque, still manages not to compete with the story. We are carried forward, it seems to me, at a fluctuating speed, and we even, at times, laboriously change ships; the pace is remarkable, as are the pauses, the tricky overall tardiness that opens up emotional spaces and unsuspected storylines. The narrative inhabits us, so to speak. At times we don’t really know what we are reading, and, more importantly, for long passages we forget that we are reading. Carpentier works his style in such a way that it is still possible to read this book as a historical novel, even as an adventure tale, although of course he problematizes the idea of adventure (“Esteban knew well the tedium the word adventure could conceal,” the narrator says at one point).
It’s possible that a pessimistic reading, one that is grounded in the brutality the novel relates so bluntly, is more persuasive than one that fully validates the idea of progress. The world of this novel is—much like our own, in fact—complex, protean, ambivalent, filled with characters who fluctuate between feeling fascinated and repulsed by the present, between heroism and mediocrity, between opportunistic conformity and radical idealism. It occurs to me that, as much for Spanish-speaking readers as for English-speaking ones, the change in title is useful. The original title, El siglo de las luces—something like The Century of Lights in English—is ironic in a way that hangs over the book like a disturbing shadow, while the English title highlights the crucial recurrence in the novel of Explosion in a Cathedral, the painting by François de Nomé that depicts a halted movement, an “endless falling without falling,” and, along with the repeated references to Goya’s The Disasters of War, gives the novel a constant and powerful visual counterpoint.
Since it was first published in 1962, the novel was initially read, naturally, in light of the Cuban Revolution, with Carpentier already en route to becoming an emblem of a successful revolution, as he was until his death. I don’t think that the novel, in and of itself, allows for some of the unequivocal expert readings it was subjected to: there are some critical commentaries that seem to understand it as a collection of the author’s badly disguised opinions, which is particularly unfair given its complexity, ambition, and reach. Does this novel express a real hope in revolutionary processes, or rather a radical skepticism? “Esteban’s journey is not circular but spiral,” notes Roberto González Echevarría in his stupendous book Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home, a particularly illuminating reading that attends to the nuances of Explosion in a Cathedral’s striking monumentality.
IV.
Explosion in a Cathedral is a novel that, just like Italo Calvino said about classics, has never finished saying what it has to say. Especially to us, who in a way inhabit the future that it foresees or prefigures. Read today, some sixty years since its original publication, at the end of a pandemic, amid wars and totalitarian governments and a radical climate crisis, a novel like Explosion in a Cathedral continues to accompany us, to question us, to challenge and move us, and ultimately to help us in the arduous and terrible exercise of reading the world.
Contrasting the novel with the present could open many a debate, and I imagine them all as vibrant and impassioned. What happens to us when we realize that there are others for whom we are the others? Do we ever truly become aware of such a thing? Is it possible to change history without violence, without thousands of innocent dead? What does this novel have to tell us about colonialism, globalization, feminism, human rights, the rights of nature, transculturation, migration, war?
