The Kingdom Of This World

Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain references to enslavement, rape, suicide, and violence.

Carpentier writes that in a 1943 visit to Cap Français (“the Cap”), he found “signs of magic by the sides of the red roads” (xiii). He compares his experience of the miraculous with that evoked in Western literature, from tales of the Knights of the Round Table to literature’s use of “ghosts, immured priests, lycanthropies, and hands nailed on the door of a castle” (xiv). He argues that writers who include such symbols are often juxtaposing objects in ways that lack authenticity. When such a technique is used, “the magician becomes a bureaucrat” (xiv). He writes that the marvelous can be better evoked when it emerges from reality as an “unexpected alteration,” or “illumination” of what is already there (xvi). Finally, he argues that the marvelous is often “invoked in disbelief” (xix)—it is a joke or a symbol rather than something that stems from the author’s real experience and perceptions. He introduces The Kingdom of this World as a text based on research in which the marvelous “flow[s] freely from reality” (xx).