Alright folks. Here are some questions I have about Carpentier’s text

Essentially every character in this text takes violence to be a norm. Violence is everywhere and Carpentier makes it graphic. Violence is public, violence is private, spoken and unspoken.

-Is Carpentier arguing that violence is simply a reality of Haiti and of slave societies? -                  -We also talked a little bit about fetishised objects last class. Is                                       violence fetishised? If so, who fetishises it?

-What can be said about Pauline and Soliman’s relationship? Do they “fall in love”? Why does he freak out so much during the statue/corpse scene? Can we make an assessment about the power dynamics in the relationship, or does Carpentier not allow us enough information to do so?

-”All the bourgeois norms had come tumbling down” (77) is how Carpentier describes the situation of the slave owners in Cuba. There’s definitely something going on there, in terms of significance and meaning for the larger work. The slave owners become free, in a sense. Why do the slaveowners just waste away in sin as they do?

-At the end of ch. 4 (pg. 127), Ti Noel returns to his straw pallet and questions whether “he had really gone to the Cap”. Is this just an example of Carpentier playing with the temporal? Or can more be said about this and the horrors he witnessed in town.

-Apparently, there’s a prologue written by Carpentier (not found in our versions) which outlines his idea of “lo real maravilloso ” and such. Why would the editor not choose to have this prologue in the edition?  What can be said about an author’s writing about his own text – does it help us read it better, can it limit our analysis? Considering some of the fantastical elements found in this novella, is a prologue necessary?

I struggled for a while with pronouncing Carpentier’s name because he was Cuban but Carpentier isn’t a Spanish last name; then I learned that his father was French. All my questions are answered.

This is only semi-appropriate because I can not for the life of me think of any good questions for this text, but I’ll try.

1) The role of sons. Ti Noël has 12 sons. Henri Cristophe has one son, his legitimate heir, assassinated 10 days after he killed himself. Ti Noël’s sons are barely mentioned. Cristophe’s is never mentioned at all, though his daughter’s are; why does Carpentier ignore sons in this novel?

2) After Macandal’s “execution”, it is stated that “Macandal had kept his word, remaining in The Kingdom of This World”. Of course, the end of the novel makes explicit that The Kingdom of This World is a world of suffering. What does this say about the role of suffering in revolution?

3) Ti Noël by the end of the novel (before his metamorphoses) is reduced to a pathetic figure: wearing a stolen coat every day, talking to dolls, living in ruins, entertaining himself with delusions of power. If Ti Noël represents the black everyman, then what is Carpentier saying about the state of the black man, or of Haiti?

4) Queen Marie, both in this novel and the Césaire play, is the only female that is not sexualized. Why?

That’s all I can think of for now.

I struggled for a while with pronouncing Carpentier’s name because he was Cuban but Carpentier isn’t a Spanish last name; then I learned that his father was French. All my questions are answered.

This is only semi-appropriate because I can not for the life of me think of any good questions for this text, but I’ll try.

1) The role of sons. Ti Noël has 12 sons. Henri Cristophe has one son, his legitimate heir, assassinated 10 days after he killed himself. Ti Noël’s sons are barely mentioned. Cristophe’s is never mentioned at all, though his daughter’s are; why does Carpentier ignore sons in this novel?

2) After Macandal’s “execution”, it is stated that “Macandal had kept his word, remaining in The Kingdom of This World”. Of course, the end of the novel makes explicit that The Kingdom of This World is a world of suffering. What does this say about the role of suffering in revolution?

3) Ti Noël by the end of the novel (before his metamorphoses) is reduced to a pathetic figure: wearing a stolen coat every day, talking to dolls, living in ruins, entertaining himself with delusions of power. If Ti Noël represents the black everyman, then what is Carpentier saying about the state of the black man, or of Haiti?

4) Queen Marie, both in this novel and the Césaire play, is the only female that is not sexualized. Why?

That’s all I can think of for now.

A couple of things really interest me about Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. The use of imagery was striking, most likely because of the fact that none of the works up until this point have used it to this extent. Additionally, the fact that I was in the process of writing an essay about Rousseau at the same time that I was reading this essay made me realize some of the differences between unpacking a work of non-fiction and a work of fiction. I found myself trying to decipher and find some sort of symbolic order to the nature imagery in the text, while simultaneously reflecting on my own efforts to do so. The clip I posted about Kafka in my last blog post is mostly at the root of that: acknowledging one’s analytic tendencies as a function of cultural is not something I had ever thought of before. I mean, there is evidently some difference between Carpentier’s form of storytelling and what we might consider European fiction.

Towards the end of the novel it became clear to me that there was a case to be made for a reading of Carpentier’s imagery as deliberately distinct when different perspectives/worldviews are in focus. The way imagery is used when Pauline Bonaparte first sees the Plaine du Nord is drastically different from the imagery at the beginning of the novel when Macandal is central.

Beyond just the imagery though, how much should one try to make sense of magic and the fantastical? Should a reader try to make sense of that which is outside of the realm of reality and sense?