3/10/2023 0 Comments The journey back in time![]() ![]() ![]() For a more extended example of its kind, see his 1940 novel, The Kingdom of this World ( El reino de este mundo). This story is a good example of the literary genre. It is worth noting (particularly because it is so little acknowledged) that it was Carpentier who coined the term ‘magical realism’ ( lo real maravilloso) in which the concrete, real world becomes suffused with fantasy elements, myths, dreams, and a fractured sense of time and logic. The story is an amusing meditation on time and causality – but it is situated within a rational framework of normal temporality. The life-history-in-reverse is bookended by two brief sections in conventional chronological sequence, describing first the demolition of Don Marcial’s house after his death, and later the flat plot of land on which it once stood. Don Marcial as an infant re-enters his mother’s body furniture reverts to trees in the forest and then all animal and plant life returns to its origins.īut in fact the composition of the story is a little more complex than this conceit would suggest. In the penultimate section of the story this reversal of time accelerates very rapidly. Candles don’t burn, but regain their full size a piano becomes a clavichord Don Marcial gets younger and younger, until the very furniture in his house dwarfs him as a child. ![]() With one or two minor exceptions, Carpentier delivers this chronological illusion very successfully. The main story starts with the death of Don Marcial and finishes with his birth. The principal conceit of this tale is that it is a narrative in which time goes backwards. Journey Back to the Source – critical commentary This was a group of stories all told in radically different styles, first published in English by Victor Gollancz in 1970 and translated from the original Spanish by the Bloomsbury Group diarist Frances Partridge. Journey Back to the Source ( Viaje al semilla) was written in 1944, but first published in 1963 in Havana, Cuba as part of the collection entitled The War of Time – Guerra del tiempo (1963). Tutorial, comment, study resources, plot, and web links ![]()
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