About the Latin
American Real Maravilloso (1949)
by Alejo
Carpentier
Commentary, Notes,
and Translation by William Little©
(2008)
Carpentier begins his essay by
quoting a couple of verses by the nineteenth-century French Symbolist poet
Charles Baudelaire[1] about
exoticism in Asia and Africa. The Cuban author
then describes in intensely synesthetic prose scenes and places he has observed
in China: buildings with rounded corners, non-figurative decorative art,
sampans with quadrangular sails, fogs over rice paddies, polychrome Chinese
art, sculptures mounted on carved dragons, pagodas in Shanghai, and much more,
all, as he says about himself, without truly understanding Chinese culture. He
then moves to Islamic culture, which he appreciates with equal amounts of
amazement and lack of deep understanding. In the third part of his essay he
reviews his impressions derived from a visit to the Soviet
Union, whose cultures were much more accessible to him despite the
fact that, as he himself states, he does not understand Russian. In his next
stop, he evokes what he discovered during a visit to Prague, where he
experienced churches related to Jan Huss,[2]
famous palaces, and various cultural elements that reminded him of Schiller,[3]
the Faust myth,[4] Tico
Brahe,[5]
Johannes Kepler,[6] Mozart's
opera Don Giovanni,[7]
the works of Franz Kafka,[8]
compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach,[9]
and, again, much more. In the fifth and last "movement" of this
seminal essay he turns his attention to Latin America:
5
A
Latin American returns home and he begins to understand many things. He
discovers that, assuming Don Quixote belongs to him rightfully and de
facto, in the text of the Goatherds' Discourse[10] he
learned words that reminded him of Hesiod's Works and Days.[11] He
opens the great chronicle of Bernal Díaz del Castillo[12]
and he finds the only real and believable chivalric romance ever written, a
chivalric romance in which the doers of evil deeds were visible, palpable teules;[13]
unknown animals were real; isolated cities were viewed; monsters were seen in
their rivers; and stunning mountains were seen topped with snow and smoke.
Bernal Díaz, without suspecting it, had outdone the deeds of Amadís de Gaula,
Belianis de Grecia, and Florismarte de Hircania.[14]
He had discovered a world of monarchs' headdresses made from green-feathered
birds,[15]
of plants that went back to the origins of the earth, of never-before tasted
foods, of drinks made from cacti and palm; but he did not even realize that, in
that world, the events that humans deal with usually take on their own style
according to the trajectory of the event itself. Latin Americans carry with
them a heritage thirty centuries old, but, despite observing absurdities,
despite having committed many sins, they ought to recognize that their style
continually takes shape throughout their history, even though that
style can sometimes engender true monsters. However, there are compensations: a
Melgarejo,[16] Bolivia's
tyrant, can force his horse Holofernes [17]to
drink barrels of beer; from the Mediterranean Caribbean, there arises a José
Martí,[18]
able to write one of the best essays about French impressionist painters that
has ever appeared in any language. Our Central America,
inhabited by illiterates, produces a poet, Rubén Darío,[19]
who transforms all poetry written in Spanish. There is even, down there,
someone who, a century and a half ago, explicated philosophical propositions
about alienation to slaves who had been freed three weeks earlier. There is,
down there (one cannot forget Simón Rodríguez)[20],
someone who created educational systems inspired by Rousseau's Émile,[21]
in which it was only expected that students would learn to read in order to go
up the social ladder by virtue of their understanding of books, which is to say,
law codes. There is someone who strove to develop Napoleonic war strategies
with mounted lancers who had neither saddles nor stirrups to put on the backs
of their nags. There is the protean solitude of Bolívar in Santa Marta,[22]
the battles fought at bayonet point during nine long hours in a lunar landscape
in the Andes; the towers of Tikal;[23]
the mural paintings rescued from the jungle at Bonampak;[24]
the ongoing enigma of Tihuanacu;[25]
the majesty of Monte Albán's acropolis;[26] and
the abstract beauty—absolutely abstract—of Mitla's temple[27]
with its variations on vivid themes that are foreign to any figurative
intention. The list is well nigh interminable.
Instead,
I shall say that a first notion of lo real maravilloso came to my mind
when, at the end of 1943, I was fortunate to be able to visit the kingdom of
Henri Christophe—the ever-so-poetical ruins of Sans-Souci; the huge block of
the La Ferrière citadel that is imposingly intact despite earthquakes and lightening—and
to become acquainted with the still Norman city of Cabo, the Cap Français of
the former Colony,[28]
where a house with very long balconies leads to the stone façade palace where
Pauline Bonaparte[29] once
lived. My encounter with Pauline Bonaparte, there, so far from Corsica, was like a revelation for me. I saw the
possibility of establishing certain possible syncretisms—American
ones—recurring beyond time and relating this with that, yesteryear with the
present. I saw the possibility of importing certain European truths to the
latitudes that are ours but acting as a counterbalance for those who, wishing
to travel against the sun's path, tried to transport our truths to a place
where, even thirty years ago, there was neither the ability to understand them
nor a way to judge them in their proper dimensions. (For me, Pauline Bonaparte
was a Virgil and guide, a first groping step—starting with the Venus of Cánova[30]—toward
my research efforts concerning characters who, like Billaud-Varenne, Collot
d'Herbois, Victor Hugues, would come to populate my Siglo de las Luces[31],
which I saw as a function of American lighting. After having experienced the
heretofore unmentioned spell[32]
of the lands of Haiti, having found magical traces of the red roads of the
Central Plateau, and having heard the petwo and the rada drums,[33] I
saw myself transported to a state in which I could fuse that recently lived,
awesome reality with the exhausting presumption of giving life to the maravilloso
qualities that characterized certain European literatures of the past
thirty years; namely, what is maravilloso sought in the clichés of the
forest of Brocéliande, the knights of the Round Table, the magician Merlin, and
the Arthurian Cycle.[34]
The marvelous, as it is badly portrayed by the workers and freaks in
circuses—when will young French poets tire of the weird characters and the
clowns in the fête foraine, which Rimbaud[35]
had already dismissed in his "alchemy of the word". The marvelous
that is seen in the Surrealists' shows and that is achieved by means of
prestidigitation tricks while putting together objects that usually have nothing
to do with each other: the old tall tale about the fortuitous meeting of an
umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table that produces ermine
spoons, snails in a rainy taxi, and a lion's head in a widow's pelvis. Or,
again, the marvelous in literature: the king in the Marquis de Sade's Juliette,[36]
Jarry's supermacho,[37]
Lewis's monk,[38] and the
chilling machinery in dark Gothic English novels: walled up priests,
lycanthropy, hands nailed on castle doors.
But,
by dint of their headlong effort to evoke the marvelous, these miracle-workers
become bureaucrats. By invoking tired formulas that turn certain paintings into
a monotonous jumble of caramel-colored clocks or mannequins stitched together
with vague phallic monuments, the marvelous is nothing more than an umbrella or
a lobster or a sewing machine or whatever sitting on a dissecting table in the
middle of a sad room or a rocky desert. In Unamuno's words,[39] poverty
of imagination results in codes learned by rote memorization. And nowadays
there are codes for the fantastic based on the principle of the donkey devoured
by a fig, which was proposed in the Chants de Maldoror[40] as
reality's supreme inversion to those to whom we are indebted for "children
threatened by nightingales" or André Masson's[41]
"horses devouring birds." But note that when André Masson tried to
depict the jungle on the Island
of Martinique, with such
incredible intertwining of its plants and the obscene promiscuity of certain
fruits, the marvelous truth of the subject matter devoured the painter, leaving
him nearly impotent before his blank paper. And it had to be a Latin American
painter, the Cuban Wifredo Lam,[42]
who could teach us the magic of tropical vegetation, the frenzied creation of
the forms of our nature—with all its metamorphoses and symbioses—into
monumental canvases with unparalleled expressiveness in contemporary painting. Considering
the disconcerting imaginative poverty of a Tanguy,[43]
for example, who for the past twenty-five years has been painting the same
stony larvae under the same gray sky, I feel like repeating a phrase that makes
the first-generation Surrealists proud: Vous qui ne voyez pas pensez à ceux
qui voient.[44] There
are still too many "teenagers who find pleasure in raping the cadavers of
recently deceased beautiful women" (Lautréamont), without noticing that what
would have been marvelous would have been to violate them when they were alive.
But what many people forget, while disguising themselves all too easily as
cheap wizards, is that lo maravilloso begins being marvelous in an
unequivocal way when it arises from an unexpected alteration in reality (a
miracle); from lighting that is unusual or uniquely favorable to reality's
unnoticed textures; from a privileged revelation of reality; from an increase
in the scale and categories of reality as these are perceived with particular
intensity by virtue of a spiritual exaltation that leads it into an
"extreme state" mode.
To
begin with, the sensation of lo maravilloso presupposes faith. Those who
do not believe in saints fail to be cured by means of saints' miracles, nor can
those who are not Quixotic be transported body, soul, and earthly goods into
Amadís de Gaula or Tirant lo Blanc.[45] Prodigiously
true-to-life are certain sentences spoken by Rutilio en Los trabajos de
Persiles y Sigismunda[46] about
men transformed into wolves, because in Cervantes' time it was believed that
people could suffer from werewolf mania. In the same vein, the character's trip
from Tuscany to Norway on a witch's blanket. Marco
Polo[47]
asserted that some birds could fly with elephants grasped in their talons, and
Martin Luther[48] threw
an inkwell at the head of a demon he saw standing in front of him. Victor Hugo,
so exploited by book dealers for the marvelous aspects in his books, believed
in apparitions because he was sure he had spoken with Léopoldine's ghost in Guernsey.[49] Van
Gogh[50]
was satisfied having faith in the sunflower for having concretized its
revelation on canvas. Hence, the marvelous invoked in disbelief—as the
Surrealists did for so many years—was never more than a very boring literary
dodge that went on too long like some "arranged" oneiric literature,
or some praise of madness, which some of us oppose very strongly. Of course,
that is not sufficient reason for some proponents to think they are right for
returning to what is real—a term that, then, takes on a gregariously political
meaning—for they only substitute prestidigitators' tricks for clichés uttered
by card-carrying men of letters or the scatological delight of certain existentialists.[51] But
it is indubitable that there is scant defense for poets and artists who praise
sadism without practicing it; who admire supermachos out of impotence; who invoke
specters without believing they respond to spells; and who found secret societies,
literary sects, vaguely philosophical groups, with saints and signs and
never-achieved arcane ends and without being able to conceive a valid mysticism
or to give up their most miserable habits in order to risk their souls on the
fearful card of a faith.
This
became particularly clear to me during my stay in Haiti, when I came into daily
contact with something that we could call the real maravilloso. I was
treading a land where thousands of men hungry for freedom believed in the
licantropic powers of Mackandal[52] so
much that that collective faith could produce a miracle on the day of his execution.
I was already acquainted with the prodigious story of Boukman,[53]
the Jamaican initiate. I had been in La Ferrière Citadel, a construction
without precedent in the history of architecture and anticipated only in
Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons[54]. I
had breathed the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, a monarch of
incredible determination, who was much more stunning than all the cruel kings
invented by Surrealists, who are most fond of imaginary—but not
experienced—tyrannies. At each step I would find lo real maravilloso. Yet,
besides, I thought that that presence and the validity of lo real
maravilloso were not a privilege unique to Haiti, but rather they were the
patrimony of all of Latin America, where we have not yet finished establishing
an inventory of our cosmogonies. The real maravilloso is found at every
step in the lives of the people who inscribed their dates in the continent's
history and left surnames that are still in use today: beginning with those who
searched for both the fountain of youth and the golden city of Manoa including
certain early day rebels or certain modern heroes of our wars of independence,
people with a mythological aura like the female colonel Juana de Azurduy.[55] It
has always seemed significant to me that, in 1780, some sane Spaniards left
Angostura[56] in
search of El Dorado, and that in the days of the French Revolution—long live
Reason and the Supreme Being!—Francisco Menéndez from Compostela would wander
about the region of Patagonia searching for the enchanted city of the Caesars.[57] Turning
our attention to another aspect of this matter, we would see that, for example,
precisely contrary to Western Europe folkloric dance, which has completely lost
its magical or invocative nature, in Latin America, on the other hand, you will
hardly ever find a communal dance that does not contain a deep, ritualistic
sense by creating an initiation process around it. Witness the Cuban santería
dances or the prodigious Black version of the Corpus holiday, which can
still be seen in the Venezuelan pueblo of San Francisco de Yare.[58]
There
is a moment in the sixth canto of Maldoror[59]
in which the hero, who is being pursued by the world's combined police forces,
escapes from "an army of agents and spies" by adopting the appearance
of different animals and using his talent for transporting himself
instantaneously to Beijing, Madrid,
or St. Petersburg.
This is the acme of "marvelous literature". But in Latin
America, where nothing like this has been written, a Mackandal
already existed endowed with the same powers by the faith of his
contemporaries. With that magic of his he also inspired one of the strangest,
most dramatic uprisings in history. Maldoror—as avowed by Ducasse himself—was
no more than a "poetical Rocambole."[60] From
him alone there followed a short-lived literary school. From the Latin American
Mackandal, on the other hand, an entire mythology remains accompanied by
magical songs that are preserved by an entire people, and those hymns are still
sung during Voodoo ceremonies.[61]
(Additionally, there is an unusual coincidence in the fact that Isidore
Ducasse—a man with an exceptional instinct for the poetically fantastical—was born
in the Americas
and that, at the end of one of his cantos, he boasted so emphatically about
being Le Montévidéen.[62]) And it so happens that, due to the virginity
of its countryside, its conformation, its ontology, the Faustian presence of
its Indians and Blacks, the revelation that its recent discovery entailed, and the
fecund racial mixing that it occasioned, Latin America is a long way away from
exhausting the immense wealth of its mythologies. But, what is the history of Latin America but a chronicle of lo real maravilloso?
[1] Charles
Baudelaire (1808-1867) was the French poet who made the transition from
Romanticism to Symbolism and who made the first critical analyses of modernity
and modern art.
[2] Jan Huss
(1369-1415): Czech mystic, religious philosopher, Christian reformer, who was
judged to be a heretic and was therefore burned at the stake.
[3]
Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805): German neo-Classical poet, philosopher,
historian, and playwright.
[4] The
Faust myth was made famous in by the Enlightenment German writer and scientist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Faust: The Tragedy Part One was
published in 1808.
[5] Tycho
Brahe (1546-1601): Danish astronomer who worked with Johannes Kepler.
[6] Johannes
Kepler (1571-1630): German mathematician and astronomer.
[7] Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Austrian composer: Don Giovanni (1787).
[8] Franz
Kafka (1883-1924): Jewish Czech writer who created characters oppressed by a
nightmarish, boring middle class world.
[9] Johann
Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), German Baroque composer and organist.
[10] Don
Quixote (1605, 1615), novel by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), the
inventor of the modern novel with this novel. The Goatherd's Discourse refers
to the first of the two principal speeches delivered by Don Quixote. In this
speech, which he pronounced in front of unlettered goatherds, he talks about
the glories of the Golden Age.
[11] Hesiod
(ca. 700 BCE), early Greek poet, rhapsode, and writer of mythologies and
cosmologies.
[13] Teules
is an Aztec Náhuatl word for priests.
[14] Amadís
de Gaula, Belianis de Grecia, and Felixmarte de Hirancia are protagonists of 16th
century Spanish chivalric romances.
[16] General
Manuel Mariano Melgarejo Valencia
(1818-1871) was one of the most ruthless and incompetent presidential dictators
(1864-1871) in Bolivia's
entire history.
[17]
Holofernes (6th century BCE) was king Nebuchadnezzar's Assyrian
general mentioned in the Book of Judith in the bible. A city of the Hebrews was
saved by the widow Judith, who seduced the general, got him drunk, and beheaded
him.
[18] José
Martí (1853-1895), was Cuban writer, politician, father and martyr of Cuban
Independence, and he is acclaimed as the father of the first generation of modernistas.
For notes on Martí, one of his poems, and an excerpt from one of his essays,
see: => HUM 2461.
[19] Rubén
Darío (1867-1916): Nicaraguan poet. For notes on Darío and one of his poems,
see: => HUM 2461.
[20] Simón Rodríguez (1769-1854):
Venezuelan educator and tutor to Simón Bolívar.
[21]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was the French Enlightenment essayist and philosophe
who wrote the book Emile about education. He is the political theorist
responsible for the notion of the "social contract".
[22] For the
chronological reference to Simón Bolívar, the Liberator of Venezuela, and his
stay in Santa Marta,
see: => HUM 2461.
[23] Tikal refers to the
largest of all ancient Mayan ruins (300 BCE-900 CE). It is located in Guatemala.
For a virtual journal of Tikal
and environs, see: => HUM 2461.
[24] Bonampak. Mayan ruins
(600-800 CE) and archeological site in the Mexican
State of Chiapas.
[25]
Tihuanacu: major pre-Incan civilization in the Bolivian Andes (ca. 1200 BCE).
[26] Monte
Albán, precontact (500 BCE) Zapotec civilization and archeological site in Oaxaca, Mexico.
[27] Mitla:
precontact (500 BCE – 200 CE) Mesoamerican archeological site in the Mexican State
of Oaxaca.
[28] Henri Christophe, Sans-Souci, La
Ferrière, Cap-Français, etc. are all Haitian. Henri Christophe
(1767-1820) was a leader of the Black slave War of Independence against France before becoming king of Haiti. The Citadelle La Ferrière
was built by Henri Christophe after 1804, and it is the largest fortress in the
Caribbean region. After committing suicide Henri Christophe was
buried in La Ferrière. Sans-Souci (1810-1813) is a palace also built by Henri
Christophe when he was king Henri I. Cap-Français is now known as Cap-Haïtien.
It is a beach resort city on the north coast of Haiti.
[29] Pauline
Bonaparte (1780-1825) was Napoleon Bonaparte's favorite sister.
[30] The
Venus of Canova refers to a life-size sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte done in
white marble by the Italian neo-Classical sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822). The work's title
is "Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix". It was made in 1805-1808.
[31] Alejo Carpentier published his
novel Siglo de las Luces in 1962. The three names refer to
characters in the novel.
[32] At this
point in the Spanish version of the essay, Carpentier inserts the following
footnote: "Here I turn to the text of the prologue to the first edition of
my novel El reino de este mundo (1949), which did not appear in later
editions, although today I think it is, with a few details, as valid as it was
then. For us, Surrealism has ceased being—due to an imitative process that was
still very active fifteen years ago—an erroneously exploited presence. But what
is left for us is the real maravilloso, with its very different nature
that is more and more palpable and discernible and that begins to proliferate
in the works of some young novelists on our continent."
[33] Petwo
and rada refer to two kinds of drums used in Haitian Voodoo music. Rada drums
have cowhide covers attached to the drum with wooden pegs. Petwo drums have
goatskin covers attached with cords.
[34] In
medieval literature about King Arthur—the king of the famous Round Table at
Camelot—Merlin is said to have loved Vivian in the Forest of Brocéliande, a
Celtic forest also known as the Paimpont forest.
[35] Arthur
Rimbaud (1854-1891), French symbolist poet whose metaphors, he said, were
inspired by the images in country carnivals (i.e., fêtes foraines).
[36] The
Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) is the author of famous pornographic works and a
philosopher of extreme freedom. Juliette (1801) is the sequel to Justine;
les infortunes de la vertu, a pornographic novella written while de Sade
was in the Bastille prison in Paris
in 1787.
[37] Alfred
Jarry (1873-1907) wrote the grotesque French play Ubu Roi (1896) about
an outrageous, foul-mouthed character named King Ubu.
[38] The
reference is to the Gothic novel by Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), The
Monk (1796).
[39] Miguel
de Unamuno (1867-1936), Spanish existentialist philosopher, essayist, poet,
playwright, and novelist.
[40] Les
Chants de Maldoror is a novel about a quite evil character by the Comte de
Lautréamont (1846-1870). It is considered the first surrealist work. This author's
real name was Isidore Lucien Ducasse.
[41] André
Masson (1896-1987) was a French artist who was interested in Cubism,
Surrealism, and automatic drawing. Masson is famous for—as Carpentier mentions
here—forcing himself to work into and past exhaustion in an attempt to free his
unconscious mind from rational control.
[42] Wifredo
Lam (1902-1982), Cuban artist. For paintings by Lam, see: => HUM 2461.
[43] Yves
Tanguy (1900-1955) was a French surrealist painter.
[44] French:
"You who do not see think about those who do see." For a definition
of Surrealism, see the following: => Independent Web site.
[45] For
Amadís de Gaula, see fn 14 above. For Don Quixote, see fn 10 above. Tirant lo
Blanc is the protagonist of a Catalan chivalric novel of the same name (1490).
He was known for his down-to-earth, realistic qualities.
[46] Los
trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, a "Byzantine novel", is the
last work produced by Cervantes. It appeared posthumously in 1617.
[47] Marco
Polo (1254-1324) was one of the first Europeans to travel the Silk Road to China
and to visit the Great Khan of the Mongolian Empire.
[48] Martin
Luther (1483-1546) is the German monk and theologian who began the Protestant
Reformation in 1517 by nailing 95 theses on the castle church door at Wittenberg in order to
protest abuses in the Roman Catholic Church.
[49] Victor
Hugo (1802-1885) was the great Romantic French author of Les Misérables (1867)
among many other novels, plays, essays, and poems. From 1855 to 1870, he lived
in exile from France the Island of Guernsey
in the English Channel. Léopoldine was Hugo's
first daughter and second child.
[50] Vincent
Van Gogh (1853-1890) was the great Dutch painter in the modes of Impressionism,
Fauvism, and Expressionism. Indeed, many of his most famous works are still
life canvasses of sunflowers.
[51] Existentialism
is a philosophy about human solitude that proposes the existence precedes
essence. The first existentialist philosopher was the Dutch theologian and
philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). In the twentieth century, Miguel de
Unamuno and Jean-Paul Sartre were important existentialist thinkers.
[52]
François Mackandal (d. 1758) was the Vodou "priest" who led a
pre-Independence slave rebellion of the Haitian Maroon against the while
plantation owners. He was betrayed by one of his own men, captured, and burned
alive in Cap-Français (now, Cap-Haïtien).
[53] Dutty
Boukman was born in Jamaica,
became a Voodoo "priest" (houngan in Haitian Creole), and went
to Haiti
where he started the Haitian War of Independence in 1791. At a Voodoo ceremony
in the renowned forest called the Bois Caïman, he foretold the future leaders
of the Haitian slave revolt that would lead to the formation of the first free
Black republic in the world: Jean-François, Biassou, and Jeannot. Boukman was
caught and beheaded. As a result of his martyrdom he was admitted to the
pantheon of Voodoo spirits (loa in Haitian Creole).
[54]
Giambattista Piranesi (1720-1778) was an Italian who drew pictures fantasy
prisons, which prints were published in his book Carceri d'Invenzione
(1750-1761).
[55] Juana
Azurduy de Padilla (1780-1862) was a remarkable woman who was born in Bolivia and died in Argentina. She was famous during
the war of independence in the Southern Cone, where she was the commander of
the Northern Army of the Government of the United Provinces (i.e., Argentina)
with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel at first and then Supreme Director of the
United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. She commanded mostly native-American
troops (Quechua and Aymara). Four of her sons were killed during the independence
wars, and she even fought while pregnant. Today, the international airport in Sucre, Bolivia
is named the Juana Azurduy de Padilla International Airport. Also, a woman's
rights organization in Argentina
is named for her.
[56] Angostura, Venezuela,
is now called Ciudad Bolívar. It is situated at a narrows on the Orinoco River, and it is the city in which Simón
Bolívar gave a key address to the Congress of Angostura during the War of
Independence in 1816.
[57] I
cannot identify this Francisco Menéndez from Compostela. The City of the
Caesars is synonymous with El Dorado.
[58] San
Francisco de Yare is a small town roughly 40 km south of Caracas. Tourists still flock to this town to
witness the Afro-Latin custom of "devil dances", which are celebrated
on the Catholic holiday of Corpus
Christi. A male-dominated fraternity of Diablos
(devils) organizes these solemn dances, whereas female dancers honor St. John. The masks worn
by the male dancers are similar to masks used in Central
Africa.
[59]
Maldoror: see fn. 39 above.
[60]
Rocambole refers to a fictional character created by a French writer (Pierre
Alexis, 1829-1871) in the 19th century. The character was so popular
that the word rocambolesque (French and English) is still used to refer
to a fantastic adventurer.
[61] Carpentier's fn: "See Jacques
Roumain, Le Sacrifice du Tambour Assolo (r)."
[62] The
French phrase Le Montevidéen means "The Montevidean"; i.e., a
man from Montevideo, Uruguay.