Alejo Carpentier’s electric demons and the origins of the marvelous real

Abstract

This article studies a short story by Alejo Carpentier, ‘El milagro del ascensor (Cuento para un apéndice a la ‘Leyenda Áurea’)’, as a way to discuss multiple elements which would come to be foundational of the latter marvelous realism in the new Latin American narrative. Among them, we find a rewriting, under modern irony, of a baroque discourse, besides a resignified use of the allegory as a mean of expression, and also a dialectic between the local and the foreign that is synthesized through the project of a mestizo cultural identity and a marvelous based on the ubiquity of a syncretic Christianity formalized in a literary aesthetic – characteristics that have an effect on the verbal expression of time and space in the narration, as well as on the relation between narrator’s and character’s discourse, conceived as actively responsive. We are helped by Carpentier’s own definition of marvelous real, created in 1949, Walter Benjamin’s discussions on allegory and Bakhtin’s definitions of modern irony and the cultural value of the foreign language; those theoretical definitions are then mediated by further studies on Latin American literatures that identify in them the prevalence of a baroque and allegorical discourse (Doris Sommer, Luis Ernesto Lasso and Irlemar Chiampi).