EL SIGLO DE LAS LUCES (EXPLOSION IN A CATHEDRAL), by Alejo Carpentier

Last night I drank a little bit, only a little bit. Since I was only dizzy, I was still able to read, but, as often happens when I am in this state of slight alcoholic intoxication, thoughts not related to the novel I was reading kept disturbing my concentration. One of them kept me puzzled for a while. Confused, I couldn’t help but asking myself if writing this blog does in fact help me making the most of my readings. The idea is simple, and was some years ago pointed out by Raimon Pannikar in an interview I had seen on the Internet a few days ago: writing kills life. I don’t know if what he said was exactly this, but in the end the idea is roughly that writing, or for that matter any other external memory device, kills life insofar as it kills our capacity for remembering.

My memory has always been bad, but I wonder if it is true, as some intruding thought whispered in my ear last night, that ever since I started writing this blog I remember even less things about the books I have read, since something in me thinks that being the reviews and the memories and reflections they contain stored somewhere else, I don’t need to make a mental copy of that information. Every time I need it, I can easily reach them so far as I have an Internet connexion at hand. Even more, have I started to read with the idea constantly hanging over me of writing my review, of analysing the text, hence spoiling the sheer pleasure of letting myself go, being carried away by the story? This book is an example: I loved it, it is marvellous, a great novel, a beautiful story, but I just can’t be as fascinated by the world it recreates as I was when I read, say, A hundred years of solitude. Then again, maybe the problem is not this blog or writing as an external memory device, but simply that I am growing old and I find it more difficult to feel that sensation of visiting other worlds and times that literature once managed to awake in me.

What is more important, may I ask, a profound and intellectual understanding of the complexities of a novel, or a lingering sensation that one cannot explain easily? I guess that the answer to this question is than none of the above: the choice is sometimes imposed by maturity and a new approach to materiality. Perhaps, being more analytical is normal and just another way of enjoying literature. In the end, one must be aware and always watching, considering, judging and weighing, in order to make the most of a novel not as a story, but as an intellectual artefact that explores our relationship with reality and knowledge.

Well, now that I feel relieved after justifying to my own eyes the existence of this blog and the utility of my reviews (at least for me), I can proceed to write a few follies about the book whose title’s translation into English has literally nothing to do with the name in Spanish: El siglo de las luces, which in English would be something like “the age of enlightenment” (better than “the century of lights” as the former translation conveys the idea that we refer to the grandiose 18^th century cultural, intellectual and political atmosphere), was translated as Explosion in a Cathedral. There you go, mate. Course, there is a very reasonable reason for such differing choice for a title: the English translation is not only the title that was first intended for the book, but is a reference to a painting, which exists in real life, belonging to one of the characters and which appears at the beginning of story the and again toward the end. The painting depicts what could be one of the main themes of the book, one of its key ideas, its core: grandiose ideals may explode in your face if you don’t handle them carefully.

The ideals Carpentier brings up in El siglo de las luces are political, even more, revolutionary ideals. The book is often referred to as a historic novel. I reject such degrading label as historic novels are often no more than an effort to set in the past a present story for our present entertainment. What we have here is an intelligent approach in the shape of a novel to the influence of the ideas of the enlightenment in the Caribbean region, their political embodiment in the French Revolution, the fascination this major event generated in America and its degeneration into counterrevolution when events in British and French colonies in the West Indies got out of hand. In short, revolution and counterrevolution, the guillotine, Robespierre and the Montagne, in its Caribbean version. Our Robespierre is Victor Hughes, only that he manages to survive thanks to a dose of political pragmatism. It must not be forgotten that Carpentier wrote the novel precisely when the Cuban revolution was taking place, and it has been hinted that his criticism of counterrevolution was a subtle reference to America’s nasty policies towards the triumphant Cuban revolution.

Below the surface, in the depths of the conundrum that a good novel always is, looms a love declaration to the Caribbean. Carpentier had confessed that he wanted to “write America” which reminds me of the general relationship of many Latin-American writers with their home: a mixture of nostalgia and the desire to escape it and also to explain it as if this would somehow help to solve the problems of the continent. Of course, every writer is a world and his or her literary solution is different: Carpentier’s America, or Caribbean to be more exact, is not that quasi-mythical Macondo fighting for survival and dawning to the marvels but also ills of civilization, but the colony where Europe’s grandiosity and decadence is mirrored. The racial partition of the Caribean society is an important question that Carpentier addressed in most of his books, particularly the black slaves’ culture and their involvement in political matters the only way they could, by revolting against their owners and killing them. Nature stands aside, as if Carpentier wanted to keep her away from the tarnishing and polluting actions of the homo politicus. The sea and the solitary inland regions that remain untouched are described in a baroque and florid style that seems to embellish nature and to praise the pleasures of isolation, but which also creates an artificial sensation of nature as a wild ornament.

El siglo de las luces has often been categorized as belonging to that hotchpotch of a label which is “magic realism”. There is not much of it compared with A Hundred Years of Solitude. What we find is rather what is called “real maravilloso” (marvellous real), that is, the presence of unexpected and astonishing events, but not an instinctive and natural acceptance that the paranormal is simply another component of daily life.
If I must be honest, the lingering sensation is that of a world that struggles to keep believing that ideals are good and must be pursued to their utmost consequences whatever the repercussions. After all, two of the characters die in Madrid in 1808, fighting alongside the Madrilenian people against the French invaders, those who had revolted against the old regime and were in Spain supposedly to bring a new political constitution to a nation governed by idiotic kings and superstitious priests. One these two characters, Esteban, is driven by sheer inertia, after having witnessed the inconsistency of political ideals transformed into a revolution, and the other, Sofia, by a an idealistic faith in the purity of the Enlightenment and its effectiveness to change the world. Ultimately both ends meet and encounter their deaths in the streets of Madrid, along, by the way, with their century. A conclusion is, at any rate, not easy to draw. What lingers is that in a cyclical universe, beyond nostalgia and love, fighting for a better world is still worth it.