I broke the rules a bit this week and ended up reading both Pedro Páramo and The Kingdom of This World since they were both on my reading list anyways. I enjoyed both, but I’m writing about the latter since I read it more recently so it’s fresher in my head. Though I don’t want to spend too much time comparing the two, I do have to comment that I find it surprising that, between the two books, Pedro Páramo is the one most often regarded as the precursor to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both in style and content, Carpentier seems far closer to García Márquez; he shares the same neutral, matter-of-fact tone and the blending of history with myth, while Rulfo’s writing is more intimate and dramatic with a focus on characters rather than historical events.

Otherwise, The Kingdom of this World was not what I expected it to be. Having read about the Haitian Revolution in C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, I expected any fictionalized account to focus on the dramatic shifting of political alliances and the violent warfare that took place across the island. As it was, the novel almost jumped over the actual revolution – it depicted the first stirrings of revolution in Voodoo rituals, then skipped straight to the rule of Henri Christophe after independence had already been achieved. Toussaint L’Ouverture, easily the most famous figure in the revolution, was mentioned only once in passing, as was Jean-Jacques Dessalines; on the other hand, names like Dutty Boukman and Henri Christophe were as important in Carpentier’s fictional narrative as they were James’s historical one.

There’s a way in which this is an accurate representation of the way one experiences history through their own personal memories. I think we’ve all had moments when we found out that some major event that everybody else seemed to know about somehow just passed us by, only discovering it after it has already become enshrined as part of history. Other historical events can dominate our lives as much as they do a history textbook. However, even when we are aware as historical events take place contemporaneous to us, there’s still a kind of alienation between our own experience and history as such, that grand narrative stretching back to the origins of human storytelling. Perhaps we can intellectually accept that we are part of the same temporal sequence that included such historic events such as the Haitian Revolution, but those semi-mythical moments never really exist in the same way our daily affairs do.

Yet, as Carpentier would suggest, we do not all participate in the same history, but only a limited number of many histories. It’s somewhat like Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, but the paths don’t only fork; they twist over and under each other, some reaching outwards and others turning back on themselves. It’s not just that Macandal either died or survived, or even both; each story only has significance insofar as it is remembered, transmitted, and acted upon. If one version of the story is “true,” that is because, from our position, that is the story that has been transmitted to us and appears most relevant, but alternative stories are still exercising their own subterraneous influence under and against it.

How do others feel about the way you experience history in your own lives? Do you ever feel as if you are really taking part in history or is it always something distant and inaccessible?