Review: Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier

Explosion in a Cathedral (El Siglo de las Luces) [1962] – ★★★★★

When Victor Hugues, a merchant sailor, enters the quiet life of a trio of adolescent orphans, bringing with him revolutionary spirit and new ideas, they do not immediately suspect the consequences of their newest attachment or the corrupting influence he will unleash. Left directionless after the death of their father, ambitious Carlos, grounded Sofia, and feeble, asthma-prone daydreamer Esteban are taken in by this stranger who has vivid tales to tell them of his Caribbean exploits. Soon, the orphans are entangled in an adventure that takes them across the Caribbean as an insurrection is brewing in Port-au-Prince. This is a magnificent novel with wondrous, erudite prose that, as is usual with Carpentier, is all about that fine line between freedom and slavery, the liberator and the enslaver, and violence and peace.

Carpentier weaves an arresting narrative, unveiling the tapestry of life and death, stripping away the illusions of a fun Caribbean getaway and showing the hidden damage and human wounds beneath festive appearances, doing so through the language of metaphors and sprawling details: “Foreigners praised the colour and good humor of the population, after spending three days at their dances, gambling dens, and bars, where the bands enlivened the spendthrift sailors and set the women’s hips aflame; but those who suffered life there for a year knew how the dust and grime and saline breezes left a verdigris sheen on the doorknockers, ate into the iron, made the silver sweat, spread mildew on old engravings, and clouded the panes of glass in frames over drawings and aquatints at whose centers the figures, warped by humidity, seemed swathed in fog brought in by the north wind” [Carpentier/West, Penguin Random House, 1962/2023: 4].

When Victor stormed into the lives of Carlos, Sofia, and Esteban, he presented himself almost as their “saviour”, for example, by uncovering the fraud committed against the youngsters by their Executor. With Victor’s arrival, “a diabolical operation was set in motion, upturning three lives that had previously been one” [Carpentier/West, Penguin Random House, 1962/2023: 161]. In chapter I, symbolic parallels can be drawn between Victor’s arrival to the adolescents’ home in Havana, and future events pertaining to the events in the Caribbean. In a way, Victor is a “disruptor” who inserts himself into the childish dreams and hopes, promoting among the siblings “innocent debaucheries”. Carlos, Sofia, and Esteban are like heirs who have lost their king, and gained a new one. That new one is Victor, who now “oversees” his new “Empire”– first, it is merely the adolescents’ home and business in Havana, but, later, whole new territories overseas, as he later became the Lord of Guadeloupe. From that first chapter, Victor is already both the “liberator” and the “enslaver”, the dual role he would play later on a much larger scale in the Caribbean. In Carlos, Sofia and Esteban’s home, he also established his new order both literally and figuratively. He rearranged the siblings’ furniture, took new pieces from boxes, and abolished the old traditions by imposing new lifestyles.

Later in the novel, Esteban gains entry to Victor’s ship by writing to him and being hired as a scribe. It was initially an adventure in turbulent waters swarmed with enemy ships, with Victor, a Commissar, envisioning himself the second Robespierre and leading the anti-slavery movement in the Caribbean. However, Esteban soon understands the price to pay to maintain power in those waters. So, the driving force of the narrative is Esteban’s fascination with Victor and how he made sense of the revolution through this larger-than-life character. Victor is fascinating because he has “ the audacity, the secrets, the zeal”. Later, the same qualities would repel Esteban as his disillusionment with the man sets in: “Esteban was taken aback at the slavishness of a mind dynamic and energetic, but utterly subservient to politics, fleeing the critical examination of matters of fact, looking away from the most flagrant contradictions; faithful to the point of fanaticism – …to the dictates of the man who had conferred on him his power” [Carpentier/West, Penguin Random House, 1962/2023: 127].

It turns out that Victor brought with him both the guillotine and the printing press because, as it happens, liberty and equality must also be enforced through terror and death (“The Day of the Trees of Liberty gave way to the Day of the Scaffolds”). The paradoxes and contradictions of the so-called “liberation” become glaring. Esteban notices that the ruling elite wants free labour without slavery, and the worship of the Supreme Being without religion. The situation slowly grows absurd as good intentions are paving the road to real hell: “More than a revolution, he was in a gigantic allegory of revolution, a metaphor of revolution – a revolution waged elsewhere, based on hidden polarities, elaborated in underground councils, invisible to those most anxious to know. Esteban, apprised of names yesterday unknown, which moreover would change on the morrow, was unsure who was waging the revolution. In an instant, there emerged obscure figures from the provinces, former notaries, seminarians, lawyers without cases, even foreigners, and their stature grew within weeks” [Carpentier/West, Penguin Random House, 1962/2023: 80].

All this sets the stage for Carpentier’s main argument in the novel – history is circular, idealistic notions would be sacrificed on the altar of necessity, morality would bow down to terror, and absolute power would corrupt absolutely: “The Revolution has forged sublime men, it was true; but it had also given wings to a multitude of failures and grousers, exploiters of the Terror, who, as a sign of their lofty civic spirit, had bound the Constitution in human skin” [Carpentier/West, Penguin Random House, 1962/2023: 106].

Victor’s relationship with Sofia is more complicated. It morphs from admiration to friendship to an intensely sexual coupling. In many places, it is deeply worrying, fascinating and finally tragic, as he becomes to her a person “who could transfigure reality at all moments”, but it all started with her seeing him as “an envoy from forbidden lands, versed in arcana; an explorer of Asia who had come upon an unknown book of Zoroaster – an Orpheus, traverser of Avernus” [Carpentier/West, Penguin Random House, 1962/2023: 66]. Even so, there are hardly any truly sympathetic characters in this novel. Victor is a ruthless anti-hero (“he evinced a disconcerting blend of vulgarity and distinction”), but Esteban is also a hypocritical man, being constantly driven in the story by either wonder or sex, and, of course, partaking freely in the spoils of war and being part and parcel of the bloody machinery that purports to abolish slavery as it finally trades in slaves.

Carpentier stampedes through the events big and small, moving from fables with signs and symbols to moments of intense realism as smoothly as a knife cutting through butter. There are colour and vitality in every sentence of his circular narrative. Trained in musicology, he also knows how to play with narratives and does so in the manner of a musician who teases his audience by diving in and out of the principal theme, introducing repetitions and contrasting sections. At one point, just like the protagonist in Carpentier’s The Lost Steps who imagined himself a “conquistador who head[s] out in search of the kingdom of Manoa”, Esteban also feels like he is returning to some primordial land when he lands on a particular Caribbean island and is awed by what nature has on offer: “Esteban saw in the coral forests a tangible image, an intimate yet ungraspable figuration of Paradise Lost where the trees…were endowed with the apparent immortality of this luxurious flora” [Carpentier/West, Penguin Random House, 1962/2023: 154].

🥥 “We are living in a world that’s lost its mind”, says one of the characters, pointing out the contradictions of the regime of liberators who, in reality, start to operate like a tyranny engaged in the slave trade. One of the pleasures of reading Carpentier is that he turns upside down the known and the familiar, making the reader taste “lo real maravilloso”. The new translation by Adrian Nathan West underscores Carpentier’s talent for playing with narrative structures, delving into the minute details of history and thrilling with sensuous descriptions. Explosion in a Cathedral is an entrancing adventure, brimming with richness and intensity.

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