ABSTRACT
After first exploring Carpentier’s response to the Haitian Revolution in The Kingdom of this World, this chapter uses Carpentier’s fascination with the kairotic relationship between a person and a statue to understand the crisis of revolution as part of a broader crisis of human perception and experience. By contextualising Carpentier’s use of this transformatory encounter in his novel against descriptions of similar meetings between flesh and marble in the writings of Heinrich von Kleist and Sigmund Freud, the chapter draws attention to the way that Carpentier rereads the revolution and thereby retrains the focus on the emotional and psychological investments that fuel revolutionary action. In this way, the chapter calls into question the relationship between reality, classicism and history. The dialectic of the material and the spiritual that Carpentier revisits across the novel is on one level a reflection on the different avenues that classicism and magical realism offer for understanding the chaotic historical fact of revolution.
