Jan
26
El Reino de Este Mundo 1
Posted by: | January 26, 2010 | Comments Off on El Reino de Este Mundo 1
Hi class, hope all your reading is going well…
This week for Alejo Carpentier I had a few thoughts in particular as to the presence of magical realism in the book.
The first thing I noticed was that "lo maravilloso" is repeated an incredible number of times in the prologue. I found the use of this word rather intriguing as it could be taken to mean magnificent in a description of something, or it could be taken to mean magic.The author further delves into the distinctions of magic between what is ‘just for show’ such as european magic tricks and the magic that is really marvelous, as in the legends and beliefs of societies who have not yet lost their faith to civilization, industrialization, urbanization, etc. His explanation of magic clarifies for me why the word was repeated so often and predisposed me in a way to pay attention to hints of magical realism in the rest of the reading.
One thing that I would like to focus on for this blog entry is a very small part of the text where the author says "prodigiosas batallas en que los animales habian ayudado a los hombres"(page 20). Now for the sake of this entry I am going to assume that he is referring to horses, seeing as they would be present in battles of the time. What intrigued me about this particular phrase is the wording. I believe that a European of the time would have said that "horses were used in the battles", but such a slight difference in point of view "horses helped the humans in the battle" can have a huge effect in changing the origin of the account. All of a sudden, we are seeing the event from the perspective of the colonized nations where there are still omnipresent beliefs about nature, and where nature nearly has a stance of its own: this wording implies that the horses had a choice. This particular phrase made me reflect on how a minute change in wording can lead to a hint of magical realism and add to an account that truly encompases a belief system that is different from the European one.
