Here and There: The Pillars and Sounds of Carpentier’s Havana

Proclaiming magical realism his nationalist aesthetic project, Carpentier’s writing practice engages in a more rigorous disruption of the so-called lettered city and modern market agendas. His texts stage movements between a “here” and “there,” between genres of sound and music, and between urban columns, thus highlighting conflicts and tensions permeating everyday existence in Havana. The texts’ aesthetic play exceeds any notion of a cohesive Cuban (or Latin American) style. This essay traces these forces in Kingdom of This World, The Chase, and “The City of Columns.” Beginning with the Haitian revolution, moving on to the waning days of the Machado dictatorship, and ending in post-revolutionary Havana, we show how Carpentier’s temporal figurations subvert colonialist and modern aesthetic orderings that at another level they invoke. In a doubling of this strategy, what we call Havana names and collects links and shifts between sonic, architectural, and literary frames. This process, which enacts decolonial modes of reading and place making, sustains Carpentier’s aesthetics. The insistence on the aesthetic conflicts making up the daily life of the city becomes also apparent in the recent incantations of “homeland and life” (patria y vida) in Cuba and in the film Juan of the Dead (2011).