The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier

First published:Los pasos perdidos, 1953 (English translation, 1956)

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: The late 1940’s

Locale: An unnamed metropolis (probably New York City), a South American city, and the South American jungle

Principal Characters:

• The narrator, a composer and musicologist, now working in an advertising agency
• Ruth, his wife, an actress
• Mouche, his French lover as the novel begins
• Rosario, the mestizo woman who becomes his lover in the jungle
• The Adelantado, the explorer who leads the expedition into the jungle, founder of Santa Monica de los Venados

The Novel

The Lost Steps narrates a journey, through space and back through time, to the most remote origins of Latin American history. The novel, which is written in the first person, can be read as a diary kept by the unnamed narrator-protagonist as he flees mechanized civilization in search of a more primordial existence. The dated entries which provide the basic structure for the novel are augmented by the narrator’s fragmented recollections of the past and his meditations on art, culture, and history.

As the novel begins, the narrator is surveying the set of a long-running play about the antebellum South; in this play, his wife, Ruth, has a leading role. The play is a resounding commercial success despite its banality, and as he surveys the soiled costumes and the dwarf magnolias the narrator is overcome by boredom and loneliness. Once a promising young composer and musicologist, he now prostitutes his talents in an advertising agency. Neither the automatic nature of his weekly sexual relations with Ruth nor the frenetic, pseudo-intellectual gaiety of Mouche and her friends can satisfy him. Every aspect of his life seems mechanical and uninspired. Faced with the beginning of a three-week vacation, he feels empty and disoriented.

A chance encounter with his old friend and employer, the Curator, whom he has not seen for several years, presents the narrator with a unique opportunity. The Curator reminds him of his earlier work on primitive instruments and of his theories on the origins of music and asks him to travel to South America during his vacation to acquire a number of indigenous clay instruments for the museum. The narrator initially rejects the offer, but finally Mouche convinces him to go, announcing that she will accompany him.

The second chapter opens with their arrival in an unspecified South American city. The central role that geography will play in the novel becomes more explicit. The narrator hears once again the language of his childhood and is haunted by memories of his early years. In these new surroundings he begins to feel more alive, to recover his spiritual equilibrium. At the same time, Mouche’s urban pretensions and protestations of trendy modernity strike him as increasingly false and ridiculous. When he meets the mestizo woman Rosario during the bus ride to the interior, he is captivated by her strength, simplicity, and obvious connection with nature. He and Rosario become lovers and Mouche, bedraggled and weak with malaria, is dispatched home. The small group—which now consists of the narrator and Rosario; a Capuchin friar; Yannes, a Greek prospector and miner; and their guide, the Adelantado— presses its way by boat into the jungle. They pass through remote, almost mythic regions. When the Adelantado appears with magnificent specimens of the primitive instruments for which he has been searching, the narrator is suddenly overcome by the realization of “the first outstanding, noteworthy act of my life to that moment.” He decides to continue on the expedition. Then, in a small village which seems to exist before time and before history, the narrator hears a funeral lament which convinces him that he has witnessed the birth of music. He resolves to remain in the jungle, never to return “back there.” With Rosario, he sets up housekeeping in Santa Monica de los Venados, the town founded by the Adelantado, and begins to compose a new work, Threnody, based on the text of Homer’s Odyssey.

The narrator is increasingly troubled, however, by a number of misgivings: the Adelantado’s establishment of a civilized order in what has been an idyllic, natural place; his own failure to deliver the prized instruments to the Curator; Rosario’s refusal to marry him; and, most important, the growing scarcity of the paper he desperately needs in order to complete his composition. The unexpected arrival of a small plane, part of an expedition sent by Ruth to find her lost husband, offers him the irresistible chance to return briefly to the city in order to settle his affairs and stock up on those items he considers indispensable for his new life in Santa Monica de los Venados. The return occasions a series of personal and professional difficulties: a messy divorce from an embittered Ruth, loss of both job and credibility, and financial troubles brought on by his mounting legal expenses. The “tentacular city” alienates him more than ever; he stumbles through an almost apocalyptic landscape which underscores the bankrupt quality of the city’s inhabitants and their art, religion, work, and relationships.

When the narrator is finally able to return to the jungle, it is too late. The incision which marked the path to Santa Monica de los Venados has disappeared beneath the rising waters of the river. Yannes tells him that Rosario is now pregnant by another man. The narrator immediately recognizes his error: “One day I had made the unforgivable mistake of turning back, thinking a miracle could be repeated, and on my return I found the setting changed, the landmarks wiped out, and the faces of the guides new.”

The Characters

The narrator-protagonist of The Lost Steps is to some extent an autobiographical figure. Like his character, Carpentier grew up in Latin America, studied musicology, and found himself trapped by necessity in a large, hostile city, working in an advertising agency. While living in Venezuela in the 1940’s, Carpentier made several trips into the jungle and was awed by the geographical and ethnological richness he encountered there. Carpentier’s protagonist is a man caught between two cultures, between two languages, between “here” and “back there.” His chaotic memories of his earlier life—his childhood, the war, his adulterous courtship of Ruth, his disillusionment with his artistic efforts—confirm and explain the rootlessness that seems to be his identifying characteristic. Although the expedition into the jungle begins as an escape, it soon becomes a pilgrimage to personal and cultural origins. The narrator sees the trip as a new beginning and believes that he is traveling not only through space but also back in time.

Yet he cannot escape the inherent tension between “here” and “back there” that is the heart of the novel. He is unable to express his wonder at the exuberant beauty of the jungle without resorting to allusions to Western culture. Thus a natural rock formation recalls “the world of Bosch, the imaginary Babels of painters of the fantastic, the most hallucinated illustrators of the temptations of the saints,” and finally, “an incredible mile-high Gothic cathedral.” Before he can arrive at Santa Monica de los Venados, he must pass through a series of trials—first, the nocturnal terrors of the jungle and then a cyclone which hits as he is traveling on the river. The third and final trial is the arrival of the rescue plane. The narrator confesses: “I did not want to go. But I admitted to myself that what I lacked there could be summed up in two words: paper, ink.” He leaves behind both Rosario and his unfinished composition. Later, he is unable to return, in part because of his own blindness: He cannot find the incisions in the tree trunk. Yet he also understands that he has tried too hard to understand life in the jungle; instead of feeling and living life, he has insisted on thinking about it. Certain forces of the world that he has been trying to escape pull him back toward modernity and history.

It must be confessed that the women in the novel serve mainly to illustrate different stages in the narrator’s journey. Ruth is described solely in terms of her profession; the fact that she is an actress underscores the essential falseness of the narrator’s life in the city. Even as she anxiously awaits her husband’s rescue she seems to be playing the role of Penelope, the faithful wife. Mouche (whose name in French means “fly”) represents decadent modernity. The animal sensuality which the narrator once admired loses its attractiveness once they have arrived in the South American capital. Unlike Mouche, who is totally alien to the jungle surroundings, Rosario is at one with them. Her high cheekbones, thick black hair, and sensual mouth reveal her to be the living sum of Indian, Mediterranean, and black races, and the narrator senses that her intimate knowledge of plants and herbs somehow provides a link between him and the jungle. Rosario is the ultimate Earth Mother, who refers to herself in the third person as “Your woman” and watches the narrator leave Santa Monica de los Venados with contemptuous indifference.

The minor figures in the novel appear more as archetypes than as fully rounded characters. The Curator, who reminds the narrator of his musical interests and sends him on the mission to the jungle, is identified only by his title. The Adelantado’s name (in Spanish it means “he who goes ahead”) is a reference to his explorations in the jungle and to the city he has founded there. Yannes, the Greek sailor, reads with great pleasure a bilingual copy of the Odyssey that the narrator has given him and, at the close of the novel, tries to interpret what has happened in terms of that epic.

Critical Context

The Lost Steps is Carpentier’s most important work, and it represents a turning point in his development as a writer. Latin America in the 1940’s beckoned to avant-garde writers as a place of artistic and spiritual rebirth. Carpentier took the surrealist concept of magic realism and attempted to redefine it as a purely Latin American phenomenon. His theories were published in the form of a prologue to El reino de este mundo (1949; The Kingdom of This World, 1957). In The Lost Steps, Carpentier confronts this issue directly within his narrative; the protagonist struggles to come to terms with questions regarding the origins of language and tradition. El siglo de las luces (1962; Explosion in a Cathedral, 1963) represents a further attempt to write Latin American fiction based on the history of the New World. In El recurso del método (1974; Reasons of State, 1976), Carpentier paints a hilarious yet biting portrait of a Latin American despot caught between his European pretensions and the reality surrounding him.

The Lost Steps is often mentioned as one of the forerunners of the “boom” in Latin American literature, the explosion of literary activity in the 1960’s and 1970’s—writing, publishing, and translating—that brought authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges to the attention of readers outside Latin America. Finally, the language of The Lost Steps, rich in metaphor and cultural allusions, is as dense and prolific as the jungle it describes, making the novel a primary example of the Latin American neo-Baroque.

Bibliography

Echevarría, Roberto González. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. Explores what seems like a radical disjunction between Carpentier’s fiction and nonfiction. Echevarría finds unity, however, in certain recurring themes, which he illuminates by discussing Carpentier’s debt to writers such as José Ortega y Gasset and Oswald Spengler. The novelist’s penchant for dialectical structures and for allegory is also explored. Includes a bibliography and index.

Harss, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann. Into the Mainstream. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Includes a chapter often cited as a succinct introduction to Carpentier’s work up to the early 1960’s.

Janney, Frank. Alejo Carpentier and His Early Works. London: Tamesis, 1981. An introductory survey that is still useful.

Kilmer-Tchalekian, Mary. “Ambiguity in El siglo de las luces.” Latin American Literary Review 4 (1976): 47-57. An especially valuable discussion of Carpentier’s narrative technique and handling of point of view.

King, Lloyd. Alejo Carpentier, Caribbean Writer. St. Augustine, Fla.: University of the West Indies Press, 1977. Often cited for its perceptive introduction to Carpentier’s work.

Shaw, Donald L. Alejo Carpentier. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Chapters on Carpentier’s apprenticeship, his discovery of the “marvelous real,” his handling of time and circularity, his fiction about the Antilles, his explorations of politics, and his last works. Includes chronology, notes, and annotated bibliography.

Souza, Raymond D. Major Cuban Novelists: Innovation and Tradition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976. Should be read in conjunction with Harss and Dohmann.