An Island in the Stream by Taylor David;Slovic Scott;Fernandez Soriano Armando;

Author:Taylor, David;Slovic, Scott;Fernandez Soriano, Armando;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Nature of Carpentier’s Baroque World

In 1947 and 1948, Carpentier made two voyages of several weeks in duration to the Amazonian interior of the Orinoco watershed, the same territory that had inspired Sir Alfred Conan Doyle and Jules Verne, the lands of El Dorado. These voyages would later find fictional form in The Lost Steps. What he came to appreciate was that culture has a tendency to grow impatient with and distant from the dynamism of the natural world, at its own peril. In a column he wrote for El Nacional in Venezuela months before the publication of The Lost Steps and after his voyages, he insists on a commitment to a dialectic contact and comparison between the space of the city and the space of nature:

The tentacular cities—as the poet Verhaeren calls them—New York, Philadelphia . . . produce a kind of man, son of modern times, who inspires in me an infinite pity. He is the one who passes months of the year without having any contact with nature. . . . For me, such an existence—which is the existence of millions and millions in this world—is an intimation [prefiguración] of hell. Moreover, I cannot bring myself to believe that it is worth living in such a manner. Without frequent contact with nature, man forgets who he is, he is sterilized, loses his vital rhythms, he becomes distrustful of his own biology [se hace desconfiado ante la propia carne]. In his labyrinths of reinforced concrete, in his pathways of asphalt, he comes to forget, as well, the very sky that exists overhead—a round and true sky, not framed by the stony edges of buildings [la estereotomía de los edificios]. [This man] knows a little bit about everything . . . but he has forgotten the names of the stars.” (“Presencia” August 23, 1952)[12]

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