ABSTRACT
One of the more striking paradoxes of current critical discussions of Latin American literature and culture is how, even as the question of postmodernism arouses widespread and sometimes vehement argument, that of modernism itself remains only slightly less open-ended and controversial. Reading El siglo de las luces into the critical-theoretical system of The Historical Novel there seems at first no way to evade the conclusion that it, too, succumbs to "modernization." To the extent that modernists, as Carpentier's readers, intuitively grasp the Tightness, the poetic truth of El siglo de las luces in its peripeteia, it is because they detect in them, whether consciously or not, the "prehistory" of the imperialized present in settings such as the Caribbean and Latin America. The very concept of "bourgeois revolution"—so central to the conceptual system of The Historical Novel—takes on a radically changed meaning in the Caribbean and Latin American context.
