Alejo Carpentier Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Frances Wyers

SOURCE: "Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos: Heart of Lightness, Heart of Darkness," in Revista Hispanica Moderna, Vol. 45, No. 1, pp. 84-95.

In the following essay, Wyers discusses the influence of history, allegory, nature, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness on Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos.

Los pasos perdidos tells about a journey into the depths of the Orinoco jungle by a narrator-protagonist who wants to recover certain primitive musical instruments that he believes will explain the origins of music. But the quest is also an escape; he wants to free himself from the drudgery of modern life, from the alienation of the metropolis (presumably New York) and from his servitude to clock-time and calendar-time. He finds not only the instruments he seeks but also, deep in the jungle, an unexpected "heart of lightness," a world he sees (as do most critics and doubtless Alejo Carpentier himself) as a paradise, a world...
(read more)