NOTES TO ACCOMPANY THE LOST STEPS
Chapter One
5 Sic semper tyrannis: "thus tyrants will always die": What Shakespeare's Brutus says when he kills Julius Caesar. Also John Wilkes Booth's words upon assassinating Lincoln, followed by "The South is avenged!" (and the motto on the Virginia state seal). This reference plays into Civil War theme of Ruth's drama
9 Myth of Sisyphus, eternally condemned to roll an enormous stone up a hill, compared in this chapter to the condition of modern urban man (Albert Camus' 1942 The Myth of Sisyphus, which draws this parallel, influenced Carpentier)
10 Venusberg: in medieval German mythology, the court of the goddess Venus. Suggests the sites of nocturnal debauchery narrator visits on the streets of New York
11 Santa Rosa de Lima: b. 1586 in Lima, Perú; d. 1617, canonized 1671. As the Latin inscription says, patron saint of Latin America. By revisiting these points of contact with his early (religious) self and with the maternal homeland of Latin America, the narrator begins to sense the forthcoming journey back in time
12 reading material: The Odyssey reference has obvious overtones; the "American comedies" of the great Spanish Renaissance dramatist Lope de Vega are full of Old World myths, fears, and speculations about the newly discovered continents. Shelley's 1820 dramatic poem Prometheus Unbound (the subject of the failed musical composition to which the narrator will later return) echoes the theme of human bondage and liberation from the whims of the gods
15-16 music: Beethoven-- and especially the "Ode to Joy" choral finale to the Ninth Sympthony, which the narrator scrambles to avoid hearing here-- is at the center of a pantheon of European Romantic artists whom the narrator simultaneously rejects and worships. Other members of this circle were radical poet-revolutionaries: Friedrich Schiller (author of the "Ode to Joy," whose famous first lines are repeated here in German), Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron (both British [p. 43]), Lamartine (French [p.43]), Heinrich Heine (German [p. 89]), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German [p. 276]).
16-19 Curator's primitive musical instruments: the quena is a flute of Peruvian Indians; the sacabuche is a European wind instrument similar to a trombone. The knowledge the Curator seeks recapitulates the Conquest of America, in that the sources he gives are its early chroniclers (often priests), who would accompany expeditions in order to collect information about indigenous cultures even as they described the actions of the Spaniards who were bent on destroying them
17 Pangelingua: hymn of Corpus Christi fest (see note to p. 117) composed by St. Thomas Aquinas. St. John Damascene's Oktoechos was written in 8th-century Greece
19 Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli (1555?) and J.S. Bach's Art of the Fugue (1740?) represent two major landmarks in the progressive development of Western civilization and culture-- a progress the narrator has been taught to believe in, but about which he is now extremely skeptical. Cremona: Italian city famed for its violin makers (e.g. Stradivarius)
22 Psalms of Penitence: seven Psalms included in the Catholic Breviary, connected with the services for the dead
22ff idiophones: classification of percussion instruments, especially drums. Schaffner and Curt Sachs: famous German musicologists who were particularly interested in primitive music in Latin America, and with whom Carpentier was in correspondence. Father Castillejos: apparently a composite of several Spanish chroniclers of the Conquest period (see above)
25 St. German-des-Prés: bohemian neighborhood in Paris known as hangout of Surrealists and Existentialists, whose intellectual legacy comes under attack in this and the next chapter. Mouche's little salon, with the mysterious X.T.H. as its leader, seems to try unsuccessfully to imitate this bohemianism-- with the addition of a hodgepodge of Western and Eastern mysticism, astrology, and other forms of cheap (at least in the narrator's view) enlightenment. Of particular interest is the Cabalá [or Kabbalah], a mystical and semiotically complex way of reading the Jewish scriptures; Carpentier and Borges were very taken with Kabbalistic thought
28-9 Bayreuth: Bavarian city, home of Wagner festival. Mallarmé: narrator's thoughts are an allusion to a famous first line of this Symbolist poet: "A roll of the dice will never eliminate Chance"
31 Bateau ivre: Arthur Rimbaud's famous poem, "The Drunken Ship," is a key document of 19th-century French Symbolism. Rimbaud (like the narrator?), abandoned art for a life of travels and adventures
35 Museum: This meditation in the teaching gallery is a trip backward through the history of Western art: from the paintings of the Impressionists, to the dark Romanticism of the Spaniard Goya (an important figure for Carpentier: it's his Kronos— a horrible, affecting canvas of Saturn eating his own children— that finally brings the narrator back to the present at the end of the paragraph), to the ordered chaos of Northern Renaissance painters, and finally to artifacts of medieval Europe, classical Greece, and prehistoric man in various periods
Chapter Two
37 The epigraph is from Prometheus Unbound (see note to p. 12)
38ff architecture: the city here, as Carpentier says in the Preface, is a composite: it resembles Caracas, except that it is not a seaport. The eclectic mix of super-modern, neoclassical, and indigenous architectural styles with the chaos of abject poverty can be found in any major Latin American city, including Carpentier's own Havana. Le Corbusier, a 20th-century Swiss architect, influenced the clean vertical lines of the modern city
41 Esto, Fabio: First lines of "Song to the Ruins of Italy" by the Spanish Baroque poet Rodrigo Caro, repeated on 49: "This, Fabio-- ah, how painful!-- that you see before you / the solitary fields, the gloomy heights, / were once famed Italy." Both the ruins of the modern city and the ruins of the narrator's memory seem pertinent here. Biva el Precidente! A semi-literate rendering of "Long live the President!"
43-46 Busts on the theatre and musical references: a pantheon of Romantic opera composers: Giacomo Meyerbeer ("Robert the Devil"); Gaetano Donizetti ("Lucia de Lamermoor"), Rossini ("Barber of Seville"); Louis Herold ("Zampa"). This scene recalls the theatre in New York; but more importantly, it recreates the startling contrasts often created by the transposition of European high culture to the America. Gemma di Vergy: another opera of Donizetti. On 45, the narrator and Mouche again invite this transculturation theme Europe and America by imagining how the scene would have looked to characters in great French realist novels by Flaubert and Stendhal. Taglioni: 19th-century French composer and ballet master. Kappellmeister: concert-master
48 Browsing in the bookstore: Maximilian of Hapsburg was made Emperor of Mexico during the French occupation of the 1860s, assasinated by nationalist forces, and succeeded by the great democrat Benito Juárez. Marmontel: French Encyclopedist and novelist. Mozart's opera The Magic Flute has been read by some as an allegory of Freemasonry— another occult symbological system of great interest to Carpentier (and associated as well with political revolution)
50ff: Revolution: here, a generic Latin American political conflict, as difficult to untangle as the early Renaissance wars between the Guelphs and Ghibellines in Italy
60: Posada de la Sangre in Toledo: 16th-century inn famed for its architectural beauty in that Spanish city, said to have been visited by Cervantes; destroyed by fire in 1936
61 Things Spanish: the name of the grocery store is "Faith in God"; the suits of the Spanish deck of cards are wands, cups, gold coins, and spades. The familiar flora of his childhood- night-blooming jasmine, pomegranates, etc.-- produce the unforgettable scents and colors of the tropics. The portrait of Los Altos [The Heights] is a wonderfully rendered vision of a typical provincial "city," with its narrow-gauge train (no doubt the legacy of British or German investors gone bust) and its dusty remnants of the last three centuries of colonization. The passage from building to building is compared to the Stations of the Cross: in Catholic ritual, the 15 points along Christ's path to Calvary, each of which is recalled in prayer
68 Italian tourist sites: the Barberini Palace in Florence, church of San Giovanni in Rome, San Carlos of the Four Windows in Milan. On the cathedral theme: the mention of English Gothic writers Matthew Lewis (The Monk) and Ann Radcliffe (The Castle of Otranto) on the next page links these sites to the "mysterious sensuality" of closed-off, sacred buildings steeped in the past
69 Rimbaud's hippocampe: hippocampus, a mythological beast, half-horse, half-fish. The Symbolist poet retreats into the fantastic realms of his own imagining; Mouche is content merely to imitate him and-- more damningly-- is blind to the indigenous mythologies that surround her
72 Carte Taride: a map of the Paris Métro by the Taride publishing house. See note to p. 25
72 Nietzsche: In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), he elevates the cult of Dionysius (instinct, raw strength, poetry) over the cult of Apollo (order, social life, conformity); Nietzsche's work was influential in the development of Nazi ideology. The narrator's sense that World War II has rendered the classic manifestations of artistic beauty (emblematically, the Ninth Symphony) vulgar in the light of so much suffering becomes clearer in this and the following chapter
74 atonality: the twelve-tone scale, a reaction against the harmonic principles of classical Western music, influentially propogated by composer Arnold Schonberg in the first decade of this century
Chapter Three
76 epigraph: The Book of Chilam-Balam is an anonymous Mayan text written just after the Spanish Conquest
81 La Hoya: the hole, or the river basin; the pun that prompts his recall of Don Quixote is based on the Spanish homonym, la olla, the pot (of stew). It ought to be clear by now that the narrator mediates his understanding of his own life through literature, music, and art
81ff Meditations on race: the narrator begins to be more aware to the racial mixing so central to Latin American history, although at first his only available models for comparison are European. La Parisienne is the name given to a figure on one of the ancient frescoes of Knossos on Crete. "New Christians": a euphemism for Jews forcibly converted by the edicts of Ferdinand and Isabella in late 15th-century Spain. Because that ethnic cleansing was cotemporaneous with the conquest of America, the Spanish obsession with purity of blood carries over into important racial themes in the Latin American imagination: the desire to hide what are perceived as the "stains" of Jewish, black, or Indian blood, or the contrary wish to take pride in one's mixed ancestry. In Carpentier's time, intellectuals such as José Vasconcelos (The Cosmic Race, 1925) reversed the current of racist thinking to praise miscegenation (mestizaje) as a sign of Latin America's vibrancy and modernity next to the worn-out politics, philosophies, and (implicitly) bloodlines of Europe
83ff Rosario's gods: In addition to the Catholic pantheon, Rosario pays homage to Osain, the Yoruba god of the forest— another example of the increasing syncretism of East and West that the narrator encounters in Latin America
86ff Fall of Jericho and the "fall" of Western Civ.: in this recollection of his father, musical references are interwoven with political ones; the assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo began World War I. Other historical references connected to the father identify him as a protester, an activist: French novelist Emile Zola's "J'accuse" defended the Jewish official Dreyfus against the charge of treason around 1900; German industrialist Walter Rathenau was assassinated in 1922 by an anti-semitic group. The metaphysician of Heidelberg suggests Martin Heidegger, an important philosopher who collaborated with the Nazis (note that the two world wars are placed along a continuum here). The Confession of Augsburg was a 1530 declaration of faith by the rebellious Lutherans. All these hints of treason or punishment under the pressure of authoritarian institutions culminate in the descriptions of rabbis hiding the Torah under the Nazi regime and of the concentration camps (p. 94): the latest, and most horrific, developments in what the narrator sees as a long line of tyranny and human cruelty stretching back at least to the Spanish Inquisition (see note on race, above). The theme of religious intolerance links these disparate historical occasions
96 The fuller citation of Schiller's "Ode to Joy," prefigured in Chap. 1, dramatizes the tragic contrast between Nazi Germany and the humanistic mileposts given here: Montaigne's humanism, More's Utopia, Voltaire's rationalism, and "the essence of Elzevir"-- the name of a family of publishers in the Netherlands during the Renaissance who helped humanism flourish
99 The Story of Geneveive of Brabant: a 5th- or 6th-century legend of a faithful queen who is unjustly accused of infidelity and exiled to live in a cave, where she is fed by a gazelle; the animal eventually leads the king to her lair, whereupon he is convinced of her innocence and reinstates her
101 Names of the oil pumps: in Spanish, "Skinny Raven," "Iron Vulture," and a difficult-to-translate third (Evil Trident? Bad Three-Toothed One? a pun on maltraer, to mistreat?)
105 Seven Against Thebes: a fratricide theme in Greek tragedy: one brother claims the throne of Thebes; the other attacks the city with his "seven heroes," and both brothers perish. The character of Yannes re-introduces the Odyssey theme of Chapter One
106 St. Mary of Egypt: 4th-century saint who converted from a life of prostitution to do 47 years' penance in the desert. Sublime Porte: metonym for the royal court of Turkey. Against these exotic and sensual associations, contrast the two virgin martyrs to whom Rosario is compared: St. Lucy and St. Cecilia (patron saint of music)
107 Edict of Nantes: In 1598, Henri IV of France pronounced this official tolerance of the Huguenots (Protestants); the repeal of the Edict by Louis XIV in 1685 doomed the Huguenots to death or exile (often in the Americas). Again, note the violent social upheavals associated with religious disagreements (see note to p. 86). Holbach and other French Encyclopedists (see earlier references to Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau) opposed both of these warring factions of Christianity with the materialist idea that man is essentially good, but corrupted by society
108 Amphitrite: No, not a cliched salamander: Greek goddess of the sea and wife to Poseidon
117 Feast of Corpus Christi: "Body of Christ": founded by St. Thomas Aquinas to celebrate the gift of the Eucharist to Christ's followers. In medieval times (and, in this remote town, modern ones) it was observed with pageants and miracle plays. Here, the villagers incorporate the figure of their patron, Santiago, one of the most venerated saints in Hispanic Catholicism (St. James, brother of John, one of the Disciplines; martyred by Herod). The campus stellae (field of stars) that is his symbol gave the name to Compostela, the city in Northern Spain that, with its famous cathedral, has traditionally been a popular place of pilgrimage (but compare the scene a bit earlier in which the prostitutes' march is linked to a pilgrimage!)
118 Ballads: the black troubadours are, presumably without knowing it, continuing medieval Spanish traditions with the stories they sing of here
120 Liber usualis: Throughout the book, Carpentier makes mention of the major kinds of books in Catholic ritual use: the missal (texts for Mass); the breviary (missal for the officiating priest); the gradual (musical accompaniment to the Mass); and the antiphonal (songs for the officiating priest). The liber usualis, daily book, is a modern compilation of all four, containing texts that are both written and sung. These ritual tomes echo both the narrator's quest to find the origins of ritual music and his old project of setting Shelley's poem to music
126 Gavilán: Spanish, "sparrow hawk." (Polyphemus, the name of the other dog, whom we'll meet presently, was a cyclops in Homer.) The Adelantado exercised, during the Conquest period in America, a position of political, military, and judicial power; it would seem anachronistic for a modern man to have this colonial title
130ff Hecuba: wife of Priam, mother of Paris and Hector; a tragic figure who sees her house destroyed. Naturally, one needs a Greek chorus to send her off properly. Alcinous is a king who comes upon the shipwrecked Odysseus (Ulysses) in books 7-8 of Homer's Odyssey, from which Yannes quotes
141 Raymond Lull: 13th-century Catalan theologian and Scholastic philosopher; author of Ars Magna. Fray Pedro insists upon giving the Catalan version of his name, rather than the Spanish
142ff El Dorado: the various explorers of the Americas mentioned here were motivated by the search for the mythological city of gold, called Manoa (and ironized in Voltaire's Candide--more Encyclopedists!). One question raised here is whether the conquistadors can be thought of as martyrs, like St. Sebastian, suffering for their "faith" in the glorious riches awaiting them in America. The Amazon Queen and the Utopian fantasies described on the following pages round out the inventory of European myths and fears about America-- beliefs in which our beloved narrator is himself complicit
150 "Anima, vagula, blandula": Montsalvaje excuses Mouche's moral and physical weaknesses with a reference to Emperor Hadrian's famous (!) words: "A small soul, soft and ethereal, is the guest and companion of this body." Clearly, a dis.
Chapter Four
158 Epigraph: the Popul-Vuh is the sacred book of the Quiché Indians of Guatemala. The members of Balboa's party of explorers mentioned here recall the previous reference to the search for Manoa (El Dorado) (see note to p. 142).
168 Following the mention of American martyrs (Bendito Diego, Juan de Lizardi) comes Santa Teresa of Avila, an influential 16th-century mystic and poet who, in works like The Road to Perfection, described the passage to God as a journey into the soul's interior (relevant to the quest theme, ¿no?)
171 Hieronymous Bosch, 15th-century Flemish painter of fantastical, perverted scenes along the theme of man's downfall
172 Titans, Cyclops: again, figures from Greek mythology
176 Mass: The Latin liturgy sends the narrator imaginatively back in time, to a point of origin in American history when spirituality and exploration were inextricably linked (in case you hadn't gotten that point already). He imagines the priest calming the Spaniards with Christ's words of faith to the fearful. The question of whether the Conquest was the product of the medieval or the Renaissance mind has been the subject of much debate among historians. The Clearing House (Casa de Contratación) in Seville kept elaborate records of the commercial dimension to the American ventures; it holds an amazing amount of information about this period, and Carpentier searched in the publications of these archives for historical source material. Teocalli was an Aztec temple
181 Magdalenian: name of the late stage of the Paleolithic era, corresponding to the first known cave paintings— the earliest known human representational art
185 Threne, also threnody: a funereal dirge
187 The last sentence repeats the opening of the Book of Genesis: the state of the universe before Creation
Chapter Five
189 Enoch was the name of a city founded by Cain after being cast out by Adam and Eve; Tubal-Cain and Jubal are among his descendants, also mentioned in Genesis
190 Santa Mónica de los Venados: for once, the religious reference is spelled out: note the recurrence of the faithful-wife theme, and the reverencing of the Adelantado's mother next to that of St. Augustine. "Venados" is Spanish for "deer" (pl.). Then back to the Spanish Conquerors: Pizarro conquered Perú and took over (not “founded”) the city of Lima; Losada, the city of Caracas; Mendoza, Buenos Aires.
199ff In Book 9 of the Odyssey, Odysseus is detained from his quest by the magic described here. Later, upon his return home to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, his old nurse recognizes him by a scar he received from a childhood hunting wound which had been magically staunched by the sons of Autolycus
191 caduceus: that little pharmacy symbol, the emblem of the god Mercury
201 teponaxtle: a wooden percussion instrument of Mexican origin
203ff Other civilizations and their deluges: Tenochtitlán, the Aztec name of what is now Mexico City (no deluge myth, but plenty of destruction and reconstruction); Mt. Ararat, where Noah's ark landed; Deucalion, the Greek version of Noah who escaped a deluge and landed on Parnassus; Unapishtim, the Chaldean Noah
214 Music: Modest Mussorgsky, Russian Romantic composer (Boris Gudonov); Claude Debussy, French Impressionist composer (Afternoon of a Faun); Dies irae, famous medieval plain-chant that forms part of the Requiem Mass. Dim as my musical understanding is, it seems that the theory of the Gregorian chant outlined here draws an analogy betwen music and text: the chant is a kind of dialogue between the voices of the cantor and the chorus, a theme and variations. Magnard, a French opera and symphony composer
218 Faust: The third part of Goethe's masterpiece was published separately as an allegory of Helen of Troy. Pelleas and Melisande, an opera by Debussy (q.v.). Rainer Maria Rilke, a great and melancholy Czech-German poet writing at the turn of the century
219ff We're now in Book 11 of the Odyssey, in which the hero visits the dead souls in the Valley of Persephone, where he has gone to make a sacrifice in honor of the prophet Tiresias. Among the dead are his mother, Anticleia, and Elpenor, the young companion killed by Circe earlier in the voyage
226 The book of Leviticus instructs the Israelites to banish lepers
227 Marcos's ballad: "I'm the son of King Mulatto / and of Queen Mulatta / Whoever marries me / Will become a mulatta too." See note on race in Latin America
230 Demerara: name of a river in Guyana, sometimes used to refer to the entire colony; these simple double-barrelled shotguns seem to the narrator almost as primitive as the village itself
233 Lost explorers: Percy Fawcett, English explorer who disappeared in central Brazil in 1925, never to be found, and the object of numerous searches and speculations; David Livingstone, 19th-century Scottish missionary who retreated to deepest Africa and was famously "discovered" by Stanley
Chapter Six
239 Epigraph: The Sueños of Francisco de Quevedo, a contemporary of Cervantes, are written in the baroque, mystical-symbolic poetic style of the Spanish Golden Age
240 Monte Cassino: Southern Italian monastery destroyed in WWII by Allied bombers; Villa Wahnfried, Wagner's mansion in Bayreuth
244 Faithful wives: Genevieve and Penelope you know by now; Griselda is another such paragon of wifely virtue, featured in works by Petrarch and Boccaccio
248-9 Kundry: a magician in Wagner's opera, Parsifal. Atalá: the noble savage in Chateaubriand's Romantic novella of the same name, which was very influential among Latin American writers. Themis: Greek goddess of Justice
251 Gregorian chant: based on Psalm 91, "The righteous man will flourish like the palm tree, like the cedar of Lebanon, in the house of God"
254 Bandiagara: place in Mali. Ibeyes: figures in Yoruban mythology and carried over into Afro-Cuban magical practice; Discourse on Method of René Descartes, cornerstone of Enlightenment thought and the source of the title pun of another Carpentier novel, The Recourse to Method
255 The Sixth Seal: The earlier references to Genesis are closed off with the narrator's imagining of the final book of the Bible, Revelation (or Apocalypse), which of course describes the end of the world. In this prophetic book, an angel opens seven scrolls, and with each, a new disaster strikes Earth. Icaria was the name of a utopian-socialist community founded in Illinois in 1849
314 Giovanni Piranesi was an 18th-century Italian architect and engraver; his 14 “Prison Inventions” (mentioned here) depict fantastical interiors of prison cells and were supposedly drawn under the influence of a fever
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My notes are based in part on those of Roberto González Echevarría, in the critical edition of Los pasos perdidos (Madrid: Cátedra, 1985).
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