The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier

First published:El reino de este mundo, 1949 (English translation, 1957)

Type of plot: Magical Realism

Time of work: 1750 to after 1830

Locale: Haiti, Cuba, and Italy

Principal Characters:

• Ti Noël, the protagonist, a house slave and rebel
• Monsieur Lenormand de Mezy, his master and a plantation owner
• Mackandal, a fugitive slave, rebel, and Ti Noël’s spiritual father
• Pauline Bonaparte, the wife of General Leclerc and a symbol of decadent European culture
• Soliman, Pauline’s masseur, who abandons his African past, works for Henri Christophe, and accompanies Christophe’s wife and daughters to Rome
• Henri Christophe, a black ruler who governs the northern part of Haiti as would a European monarch

The Novel

Mixing history and fiction, The Kingdom of This World recounts the transition of Haiti from slavery to emancipation and from colony to republic. The change occurs through the use of African religion. The novel begins by establishing a difference between black African culture and white European culture. Although these two systems take on different forms throughout the novel and history, they remain antagonistic toward each other. One is dynamic, the other static. Mackandal, Bouckman, and Ti Noël represent the liberating spirit of African religion and culture, while Monsieur Lenormand de Mezy, Monsieur Blancheland, General Leclerc, Rochambeau, Henri Christophe, and the Mulatto Republicans represent the oppressive force of European culture. The two groups offer conflicting interpretations of history; the novel supports the African perspective.

Mackandal initiates the struggle against slave owners. After losing an arm in a sugar mill accident, he studies poisonous plants as a means of fighting the whites. Drawing on his knowledge of African lore, he transforms himself into an animal or an insect to elude his pursuers. When Mackandal is captured and burned at the stake, the whites who are present witness his death, but the blacks see him transformed into an insect, and they watch as he escapes. This important passage illustrates clearly the difference between the European and African worldview.

Bouckman and Ti Noël follow in Mackandal’s tradition and continue to fight for the liberation of blacks: Bouckman plays a prominent role during emancipation and Ti Noël during the struggle against Henri Christophe and the Mulatto Republicans. To Ti Noël, Mackandal is a spiritual father of sorts and a link with the African past.

After the success of the Haitian Revolution, in which the French are ousted from the island, Henri Christophe rules the northern part of Haiti. The ruthless Christophe betras his own people and continues to oppress them; with his reign, oppression transcends racial designation. Like Mackandal and Bouckman before him, using a knowledge of voodoo, Ti Noël joins the struggle against the enslavement of the Haitian people.

The novel ends by proposing that the cycle of oppression and liberation is ongoing, perhaps endless. Recognizing this cyclic pattern in human history, disillusioned with the prospects for meaningful change, Ti Noël transforms himself and escapes into the animal and insect worlds. He soon discovers, however, that their world, although superficially harmonious, is not any different from the human one. Having gained a greater understanding of his life and destiny through African religion, Ti Noël continues the fight against oppression and for liberation.

The Characters

The characters in the novel participate in and contribute to a historical process. They are divided into two groups, one supporting European culture, the other African. Although there is no protagonist in the traditional sense, Ti Noël comes closest to fulfilling that role, if only because the novel opens and closes with his presence and spans his life. A Haitian-born slave, Ti Noël has no direct ties with mother Africa, but he learns about voodoo from Mackandal. From this perspective, the novel is not only a description of history but of Ti Noël’s development as a major rebel figure.

After Bouckman’s rebellion and the extermination of blacks, Monsieur Lenormand de Mezy rescues Ti Noël and a few other slaves and, as did many Frenchmen in history, escapes to Cuba. While the exiled Frenchmen preserve and promote their own European culture, Ti Noël realizes that voodoo has a common ground with African religions in Cuba. Eventually, he buys his freedom and returns to Haiti, only to discover that the former master chef, Christophe, who had joined the colonial forces, is now the ruler of the Plain du Nord. Christophe lives like a white ruler, constructing the palace of Sans Souci, modeled after Versailles, and the fortress of the Citadel, which Ti Noël and others are forced to build.

Unlike Mackandal, Bouckman, and Ti Noël, Christophe and Soliman abandon their African origin and accept European culture. They uphold values best represented by the sensual Pauline Bonaparte; Soliman, who becomes Pauline Bonaparte’s masseur and religious adviser, serves as a link between Pauline and Christophe. When the plague claims Leclerc’s life, Pauline survives her husband by accepting voodoo. Once Pauline returns to France, however, Soliman, who has been contaminated by white culture, works for Christophe, and upon the ruler’s death, Soliman accompanies Christophe’s wife and daughters to Rome, claiming to be his nephew. The African gods punish both Christophe and Soliman for rejecting their religion and destiny; both meet with tragic deaths.

Critical Context

In the prologue to the original edition of The Kingdom of This World, Carpentier discusses what he calls “Marvelous Realism,” anticipating the vogue for the closely related term Magic Realism, which has been widely used to describe the style that brought the Latin American novel to international prominence in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Only a style that embraces the marvelous, the magical, he suggests, is capable of doing justice to the reality of America, the New World. In the novel itself, although not in the prologue, Carpentier emphasizes the African component in the heterogenous culture of the Americas, linking Marvelous Realism to African traditions.

In The Kingdom of This World, Carpentier continued the exploration of black history begun in such early works as Ecue-Yamba-O!Historia Afro-Cubana (1933) and “El milagro de Anaquille” (1927), a scenario for a ballet. Of Carpentier’s works with a black theme, The Kingdom of This World is clearly his best. Within the context of Cuban literature, his concern with blacks and the theme of slavery is not isolated. The Kingdom of This World is part of a continuum which can be traced from the antislavery narratives of the 1830’s to the literature of the Cuban Revolution. By writing about the lives of an important but marginal segment of Western society, Carpentier brings the history of blacks to the foreground of literature.

Although many critics regard El siglo de las luces (1962; Explosion in a Cathedral, 1963) as Carpentier’s greatest literary accomplishment, Carpentier himself continued to believe in the historical significance of The Kingdom of This World, citing the importance of Mackandal, Bouckman, and the Haitian Revolution for an understanding of Caribbean history and culture. Yet there is no need to choose one novel over the other; indeed, they are best read together: Explosion in a Cathedral is set during the Haitian transition from colony to republic—that is, from 1789 to 1809—and many of the themes developed in that novel are already present in The Kingdom of This World.

Bibliography

Echevarria, Roberto Gonzalez. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. Explores what seems like a radical disjunction between Carpentier’s fiction and nonfiction. Echevarria finds unity, however, in certain recurring themes, which he illuminates by discussing Carpentier’s debt to writers such as José Ortega y Gasset and Oswald Spengler. The novelist’s penchant for dialectical structures and for allegory is also explored. Includes a bibliography and index.

Harss, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann. Into the Mainstream. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Includes a chapter often cited as a succinct introduction to Carpentier’s work up to the early 1960’s.

Janney, Frank. Alejo Carpentier and His Early Works. London: Tamesis, 1981. An introductory survey that is still useful.

Kilmer-Tchalekian, Mary. “Ambiguity in El siglo de las luces.” Latin American Literary Review 4 (1976): 47-57. An especially valuable discussion of Carpentier’s narrative technique and handling of point of view.

King, Lloyd. Alejo Carpentier, Caribbean Writer. St. Augustine, Fla.: University of the West Indies Press, 1977. Often cited for its perceptive introduction to Carpentier’s work.

Shaw, Donald L. Alejo Carpentier. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Chapters on Carpentier’s apprenticeship, his discovery of the “marvelous real,” his handling of time and circularity, his fiction about the Antilles, his explorations of politics, and his last works. Includes chronology, notes, and annotated bibliography.

Souza, Raymond D. Major Cuban Novelists: Innovation and Tradition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976. Should be read in conjunction with Harss and Dohmann.