Carpentier, 1960: Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño (Life is a

11/12/08
Alejo Carpentier (Cuban novelist)
theorizing the ‘marvelous real’, 1949:
What many forget, as they style themselves
cheap ‘magicians,’ is that the marvellous truly
comes out of an unanticipated alteration of
reality (the miracle), a privileged revelation of
reality, an unusual insight into the hidden
richness of reality, an amplification of the
scales and categories of reality…
This continued presence of lo real maravilloso
was …the patrimony of all of América, where
the inventory of cosmogonies is still not
finished. . . . What is the history of América
but a chronicle of lo real maravilloso?
Carpentier, 1960:
As far as the marvelous real is concerned, we have only
to reach out with our hands to grasp it. Our
contemporary history presents us with strange
occurrences every day. The mere fact that the first
socialist revolution on the continent should occur in
the country least likely to sustain a revolution….is a
strange event in contemporary history, a strange
event added to many strange events that, to our
credit, have occurred in American history from the
conquest to the preent, and with magnificent results .
..
Calderón de la Barca, La vida
es sueño (Life is a Dream),
circa 1660
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAT9CxmiJK8
• Segismundo’s speech is to Spanish lit what Hamlet’s
soliloquy is to English:
¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño:
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son.
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