Why I Believe in the ‘Marvelous Real’

Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier’s counterpart to magical realism revealed untold stories of South America

Alejo Carpentier in Paris, September 13, 1979 (Getty Images) 

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“What is the entire history of America if not a chronicle of the marvelous real?”  — Alejo Carpentier

Novelist, essayist, and critic Alejo Carpentier was born in Switzerland in 1904, but would become known as one of the greatest Cuban writers. He moved to Cuba as a child and throughout his life spoke Spanish with a French lilt, but nevertheless saw himself as an offspring of the cultural mélange of the New World. He was also a revolutionary leftist, who as an adult lived in France, Haiti, and Venezuela, before returning to Cuba as a man in his 50s, after the Cuban revolution.

When I was a college student, I read Carpentier in courses on Latin American literature. But I only recently read his 1949 essay “On the Marvelous Real in America.” In it, Carpentier drew a distinction between the term magical realism (often applied to Latin American literature with fantastical elements), and what he described as the “marvelous real.” Magical realism, he argued, found its origin in surrealism. But the marvelous real had a genealogy in the particulars of the history of the Americas: the encounter between Europeans, Indigenous Americans, and Africans and the conditions of their living. Out of that rich cultural tapestry, and deep suffering, people sustained potent beliefs in things unseen and unmeasured.

Of his time in Haiti, Carpentier wrote, “I found myself in daily contact with something that could be defined as the marvelous real. I was in a land where thousands of men, anxious for freedom, believed in Mackandal’s lycanthropic powers to the extent that their collective fate produced a miracle on the day of his execution.” François Mackandal was an African maroon leader and an insurrectionist who was ultimately captured by French authorities. The French were fearful he would be effective at overthrowing their power. Though burned at the stake, Haitian lore held that Mackandal rose from the flames as a winged beast and escaped to freedom. This was, according to Carpentier, the marvelous real.

Offering that example, Carpentier went on to say, “This marvelous real was not the unique privilege of Haiti but the heritage of all of America, where we have not begun to establish an inventory of our cosmogonies.” Carpentier believed that in this inventory one finds much more than interesting literary devices. There are alternative and insurgent ways of understanding the world that come from the marvelous real.

One of the most consistent, challenging questions I get about South to America is why I include a trip to Cuba. My most frequent answer is that the Americas were made at the crossroads of the history of conquest and the transatlantic slave trade. In addition to the trip to Cuba, I describe southern U.S. businessmen’s ventures in Central America, and Gabriel García Márquez’s experience traveling across the South, writing about Venezuelan sailors in Alabama, and his creation of the character Jack Brown, the Alabama businessman from his most celebrated novel, 100 Years of Solitude. Although now the borders and respective histories of nations in the Americas are neatly separated, there are still so many connections. And this is why Carpentier’s article resonated so much with me.

Recently at Ole Miss I met a student who is studying the Confederados, the Confederate soldiers who left the South for Brazil after emancipation and built a community there. Because of that history, one can find Confederate flags flying in Brazil. And though they don’t have the same social meaning as these flags do in the United States, they speak to our shared historical foundation in enslavement and settler colonialism, as well as genocidal practices toward native peoples. As Jamaican British intellectual Stuart Hall once wrote, “When a conjuncture unrolls, there is no ‘going back’. History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You are in a new moment. You have to attend, ‘violently’, with all the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ at your command, to the ‘discipline of the conjuncture’.” That is to say, to know what these shared circumstances made of us, for worse or better. To that end, I am also interested in how, across the Americas, the human imagination, especially of those at the bottom, met circumstance.

Carpentier’s idea of the marvelous real makes me think about how Black American writers like Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, and Alice Walker found  resonance with Latin American writers. Morrison once said in an interview, “I was once under the impression that that label ‘magical realism’ was another one of those words that covered up what was going on. I don’t know when it began to be used, but my first awareness of it was when certain kinds of novels were being described that had been written by Latin American men. It was a way of not talking about politics … If you could apply the word ‘magical,’ then that dilutes the realism, but it seemed legitimate because there were these supernatural and unrealistic things, surreal things, going on in the text … My own use of enchantment simply comes because that’s the way the world was for me and for the black people I knew … there was this other knowledge or perception, always discredited but nevertheless there, which informed their sensibilities and clarified their activities.”

Her description of the world the way it was was akin to Gabriel García Márquez’s reflection on what it meant for him to tell stories like his grandmother did. He said, in an interview in The Paris Review in 1981, that “she told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness … What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.”

Salman Rushdie once called magical realism a distinct creation of the “third world” or what today we would call the “global South.” And this is part of what Carpentier was suggesting by choosing the term the marvelous real rather than magical realism. It is an animated faith that is absolutely real even if not measurable according to the scientific method. And that faith suggested an alternative order, one that lay beyond the brutal society the people who held that faith occupied.

Carpentier saw power in the marvelous real: “The marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favored by the unexpected richness of reality or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state.”

There are some who see politics only in the real of the rational, the measured adoption of positions and deeds. I am inclined to see them as Carpentier, Morrison, and many others did, in being open to other ways of knowing. That is part of the tradition of the Americas, submerged though it may be.

And that brings me to W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1897 article, a precursor to The Souls of Black Folk, that was published in The Atlantic. In it, he began setting forth the ideas that would  ground his theory of double consciousness, one of the most important concepts for describing African American identity and experience, a twoness of being Black yet American. In the piece, Du Bois talks about a particular kind of insight and describes it as a form of second sight. He uses the metaphor of a veil that he says exists between the white world and the Black. Though it is not immediately obvious, this was a marvelous-real example. Du Bois drew upon the African American folk belief that babies born with cauls or membrane-veils over their faces were gifted with the ability to see beyond the natural world, past the veil separating the living and the dead, into the lives of ghosts and other spectral truths.

For Du Bois the veil was a marvelous-real metaphor, but also a truth, because there is a second sight that comes from being able to see the society from the bottom.

As a reader I seek connections. This is both because I’m interested in what connects people across vastly different communities, and more specifically, because I’m interested in how human beings survive different but similar histories of injustice and struggle against them. I’m interested in the multiple faces of resilience, and how imagination is indispensable for hope to be sustained. Even if your primary journey is to understand yourself and your own community, I believe it is good and probably essential to read and learn far beyond the borders of your immediate experience. And so I returned to Carpentier who reminded me that I belong to a whole continent, in addition to a genealogy, a people, and a nation.

Imani Perry is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Unsettled Territory. Perry is also the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, and her most recent book is South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.