 So... So... Tadw i... So, I'm doing this thing well, but I'll occasionally update this. Oh, if I can get it for you. The mouse seems to be stuck. Oh, here we are. Oh, there you are. Shameless. Thank you for that. So that means if you want to ask me something, say, then one possible way of doing it is sticking up your hand another possible way of doing it on the tweet, or whatever. Or you can just ignore that and look at the central screens if you wish to. So today, I guess we're halfway through, or two-thirds of the way through this little mini sequence, which has got a lot to do with Haiti and the Haitian Revolution. So we started with Silence in the Past. A few of you, I believe, may have missed last week's lecture, I'm afraid. I give you my unhappy and disapproving face to those people who missed that. But so, and a little announcement, that's not up on the digital site yet. Hopefully it will be soon. But they're working on it, the techies. But it's not up yet. Okay, so last week with Silence in the Past, Michelle Roff Trio, who talks in part in general terms about history, histories, the different meanings of the term, history, history as a way of talking about what happened and history as what happened, and the gaps and overlaps between those two senses of the term. History, history in terms of silences, of course, and taking as a particular case study, a couple of moments, a couple of episodes, a couple of issues around the Haitian Revolution, as well as Columbus and the Alamo and so on and so forth. So, on the cover of his book, there is this castle, Fortress, which I will be talking about at greater length today as well, and which features also in the Carpentier book. And then for next week, we're going to be looking at two plays, two fairly short plays, one by Aimee Césaire, a Martin Eakin writer, and one by Gary Walcott, who's from St Lucia, both of whom wrote quite significant early plays about the guy who had this fortress built, Henri Christophe, who we also find here. So, this is some of the ways in which these three texts work together, remake and remodel and bounce off in each other in different ways. I'll be talking more about that. Okay, so today the focus is on Alejo Carpentier, the kingdom of this world, el reino de estimundo in the original Spanish. I also get the chance here to show you a lot of my holiday photos. So, one of which is... I probably shouldn't be showing you, but I will anyhow. So, this is something to see. I noticed that the picture in this is a rather poor quality black and white thing, but this is a palace that Trio talks about at some length and also features in the kingdom of this world, which is in the north of Haiti, a little bit inland, where the plain... So, Carpentier talks about the plain, which is by the sea and sort of surrounds what was at that time the capital of Haiti, a town which has changed its name various times. Under the French was called Cap Francais, under Henri Christophe was called Cap Henri, and then now it's called Cap Etienne. The capital itself now has moved south and west to Port-au-Prince. So, there's the plain, and then the palace is where the plain meets the mountainous interior. And the palace itself is just in the foothills, and if you keep on going up and up and up, as I did, they told me it was a horse. I think it's a donkey or an ass, and look what he's sitting on. Anyhow, you go up and up and up. I was like, I can do this, I'll just walk up. And then it was rather steep, and I didn't even have to be carrying bricks as Tinoel does. And I sort of gave up and I said, oh yes, my horse, my horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse, and they gave me a donkey. And I proceeded up that way. So further up, you go up this hill, this long upward stretch, and you hit the citadel. I'll give you a picture of that, but you can also look a little bit on the cover of here. These are quite extraordinary ruins, and ruins is going to be one of my themes here, and so I'm suggesting that what we're going to do is a sort of tour of the ruins. A tour of the ruins, and we can work with that metaphor a little bit, it means this is going to be a little bit fragmentary in some places, as ruins are. I'm not going to pretend to bring everything together, but to show different possible correspondences, different ways in which we can fit the fragments together. Therefore, there'll be a little bit of circling back as well, sort of retaking up certain ideas and putting them in relationship with other ideas or other parts of the text or other concepts. We're going to look at literature. We're going to look at Carpentier, I'll give you a little bit of a bio of him. Then we're going to look at issues of narrative, of course we're returning to again, that's something that, what Trio amongst others has already talked to us about. We're going to look about matter, the material, the stuffiness of stuff, the thinginess of things, ruins and bodies and stones and so on and so forth, which I think are important here. Substance. Then what we might think to be is a positive substance, but we'll look at the interrelation, form or style, the way in which substance is given shape, in a way in which things take shape. Oh, that's not good. Everyone turn off their phones. I should. Then we're going to look at spectacle, what we see I suppose, right, the kind of imagery. Performance, revolution and back to ruins. There's quite a lot, but given I'm doing two in a row, I feel I have the right also to move things to next week if necessary. First of all, literature, as I said, I'll get to show you my pictures. I'm interested, this is a plaque that you can see at the Citadel, which says it's a relatively recent plaque. Well, to me it is. You're probably all born long after it was put up to me in 1990. It's just yesterday. But it's sort of describing and trying to situate, trying to provide an initial narrative, right, for what these ruins mean to Haiti, what these ruins mean to Haitians, who are mostly those people that go. This is Haiti's, I suppose, number one tourist site, Haiti doesn't actually get very many tourists, so most of the people who go are Haitians, and school groups and so on are taken up there. It is Haiti's only UNESCO World Heritage Site, by the way, and it is also the largest fortification in the Western Hemisphere, so it is worth seeing. But I'm interested in this writing that here is literally stuck to the ruins, right, stuck to the thing, there's a certain materiality about it. It's made out of, I don't know what it's made out of, brass or something like that, right? So this writing, which is also matter, material, thingy stuff. But I want to look also at, this is a slide which I showed you, which you've seen already, so there's a certain repetition and remaking and remodeling already, which I showed you as part of the introductory lecture back in, whenever it was, September, when I asked the question about a cannon and great texts and who decides, because one of the things I want to suggest is, well, both of this, this is a pretty canonical book, one of the better-known books within the Latin American cannon, although there are better-known books and we're going to talk about those in a minute, because in some ways this is a book which is thought to be or we can argue allies at the beginning of a cannon. It sort of initiates something. But, of course, as with Borges' short story, Catherine is precursor, those kind of judgments always take place afterwards, right? There are sort of retrospective projections in some ways. There are ways in which once we get these other authors, once we get a whole series of other texts and we try and project back an origin, try to figure out where did this start and how did this start. And this is one of those post-apostiori constructed or projected origins for a Latin American literary cannon. And I think that this is the argument I'm going to try to make. You can ignore it if you want. I'll be saying other things too. But this is more or less the argument that I'm going to be trying to make in this lecture and the next lecture. More or less. But there are three literary cannons that are built on the ruins of Saint-Souci and the Citadel Laferia, which is sort of the palace and the fortification. And those three cannons are the Latin American boom. I'll explain in a moment what I mean by that. Francophone, Caribbean literature and Anglophone, post-colonial literature. And I'll talk about those too when we talk about Derek Walcott and Amy Césaire. You could also perhaps suggest that these ruins are also the origin of another cannon, by the way, which is that of 20th century United States theatre. Because another very important text, which was inspired by Henri Christophe and Saint-Souci and the Citadel is Tennessee Williams, the Emperor of Jones, which was a kind of revolutionary text in establishing the 20th century as a U.S. theatre. But I won't talk about that. And then as such, given that these cannons are built on, these ruins, this history, a history marked by violence, I mean that is why, in part, that is why these buildings are ruined. Natural violence, on the one hand, the result of an earthquake in 1842, but also political, historical, human violence, social violence, if you wish. And the two are interconnected often in different ways. The reason why the earthquake in Haiti a couple of years ago was so devastating was partly for very much social reasons, not simply natural reasons, right? The two things, natural disasters are always social events too. But so the hemisphere's literature replays a legacy of violence and domination. And through literature, there are attempts to reimagine why I'm suggesting the material traces of a history of revolutions. Okay, that's mine. That's my take, but I'll say we'll be doing other things too. Okay, let me tell you a little bit about the Latin American boom. This is probably the Latin American literature that you know if you know any Latin American literature, probably. The 1960s and 1970s, when Latin American literature becomes a boom, and it's talked about boom, and it's interesting that it's an English word that it's used in Spanish, they say el boom Latin Americano, because it is a point at which these literary texts by a fairly select group of mostly male writers from different parts of the continent suddenly become extraordinary, both popular and critically well regarded. Everyone pretty much agrees that there are five members of the boom, and they all agree as to who the first four, but never exactly who the fifth is. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this is a picture of him here, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, or 82, I think. Also Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is from Colombia. Mario Vargas Llosa is from Peru, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature much later, a few years ago, I think, 2008, if I was to hazard a guess. Then the Argentine Julio Cortasa, who isn't read so much, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, and then there's a few other people who compete for the honour of being in the fifth place. Since then, there are other writers who have in some ways piggy-backed on the success of the boom, post-boom writers that are sometimes called people like Isabel Allende, for instance, who is, I guess, commercially successful but critically less so, although things are now changing a little bit with a guy called Roberto Bolano, who you may or may not have heard. If you read The New Yorker, they are very excited about Roberto Bolano. But to return to the boom in the 60s and 70s, and we're talking of books like 100 Years of Solitude, 100 Years de Soledad, the kind of tagline for this extraordinary, successful literary movement or wave soon came to be so-called magic or magical realism, which is a term you may have heard of. Essentially, the reason why I'm suggesting that this is a particular originary text is that in some ways this is the origin of magical realism. I'll explain more in a minute. Briefly, we can think of the boom in different ways. In some ways, as the creation of a world market, as I was suggesting, these are writers who often were published in Spanish but in Barcelona by a group of publishers. There's one in particular, which is very important, called Cé Barrel, and then quickly translated, and now a group of elite translators who took on these jobs and published again in New York. On the other hand, less cynically, we can think about it as the sort of migration of high modernism by which I mean the kind of style which we associated with people like Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot's and James Joyce, for instance, and the migration to the new world of that style after the war, after World War II. That's how it's sometimes imagined or described, but also the formation of a new style, and that's where the notion of magical real comes into things. Also, in terms of, I put it as a compensation for underdevelopment, Latin America, in the early years of the century, at least in certain parts of Latin America, there really wasn't much difference between, say, Argentina and Canada or New Zealand or Australia in a number of different ways. Socially, for instance, these were all settler colonies. These were all colonies, or most of them, which their economies were based on livestock, for instance, a livestock raised for export. But also their economic levels were very similar. In fact, Argentina was in some ways in the lead in the 1910s to 1920s. Its economic level was more or less that of, say, depends on which indicator you use, Belgium, say, or one of these sort of more peripheral European countries. In the pack. But then, after, in the decades following the 1940s, basically Latin American economy was a disaster zone. Development didn't seem to kick in in the way it did in other settler colonies, such as Canada or New Zealand or Australia, and the whole region lagged behind. And to the extent, therefore, the literature of the 1960s and 1970s, this boom was celebrated because at least there, Latin America seemed to lead the world. So in all these three aspects, therefore, perhaps especially in that last one, we might think about what literature does, what kind of social role it might have. And then the questions of origin. We can think of origin in different ways. The kind of agents, the social agents who were responsible for publishing and editing, translating and so on, writing in journals to say, oh, you've got to read the new Garcia mergers or whatever. We can think about in terms of, I guess, native traditions, like Latin American traditions. There's long been a preoccupation with this dichotomy, supposed dichotomy between civilization and barbarism. There's long been also a kind of genre of national romance, essentially boy meets girl, and the nation comes into being. Especially if the boy is indigenous and the girl is. Well, normally the boy will be white and the girl will look like she's indigenous. So it brings the two halves together. Then we discover that she's white. So that really, she's just been stolen by the indigenous a long time ago. And so you have your cake and eat it. You get this sort of national reconciliation without actual racial miscegenation. But that's another sort of Latin American tradition that feeds into these texts of the 1960s and 1970s. There are also specific precursors. Again, we're kind of inventing or projecting back precursors. Borges is one, the story that I got you to read the first week. Carpentier is another, and it's a sort of neat ABC. There's this guy at Guatemalan called Miguel Angel Astorias as well. At the same time, people like Garcia Magas and Vargas Llosa are also very eclectic in their own reading from Cervantes, the Spanish novelist of the early modern period to people like Faulkner, who was particularly influential. But at least one point of origin is this book. And particularly the prologue to this book. Now, strangely, bizarrely, you don't have the prologue to this book. So let me tell you what it says. The prologue to this book, it begins by recounting Carpentier's own voyage to Haiti and what he found there. Specifically a voyage to northern Haiti that was now Capetien. And it recounts his visit to Saint-Sussis and to the Citadel Laferia, the fortress. And on the basis of which he suggests, enough of Europe. Europe is old and tired. We have nothing to learn from it. In Latin, the Europe is trying to produce the marvellous by artificial means. He's particularly thinking of surrealism. Every sort of little surrealist tricks. Like what's it called, where they fold up pieces of paper and somebody draws the head and folds it up and somebody draws the torso and then someone draws the legs and so on and so forth. Miraculous corpse, that's what it's called. These little tricks or notions of automatic writing and so on. He says, no, we don't need these tricks. In Latin America, you don't need tricks to find the marvellous. In Latin America, the marvellous is real and people live with it all the time. He came up with this idea of the marvellous real. Essentially, I'm suggesting magical realism is usually taken to be a development of that. Let me tell you a little bit more about Cup and Jew. Is anyone asking me questions? Kingdoms of your world. Oh goodness, shame us. This is inside the Citadel. While I was there, they were creating a film set. It's interesting that people are still being drawn to this place. There's a place to stage or set a narrative of different kinds. This is the prologue. This is near the end of the prologue by Cup and Jew to this book when it came out in 1949. After having felt the undeniable enchantment of this Haitian earth, after having discerned magical warnings on the red roads of the central plateau, after having heard the drums of Pietro Enrada, I was moved to compare the marvellous reality I just experienced with the tiresome attempts to arouse the marvellous that has characterized certain European literatures for the last 30 years. This is what manifesto. We don't need to be derivative. We don't need to copy European models. We have here this conjunction of the marvellous and the real in front of us, where we find in the history and the actuality the sort of lived history of Latin America. Cup and Jew himself was a Cuban, not Haitian, so it's kind of interesting that he's visiting Haiti and writing about Haiti from a hispanophone, rather than a francophone perspective. He's writing this in Spanish. He lived in 1914-1980. He's a novelist but also an ethnomusicologist. In other words, your dean is an ethnomusicologist. You may not know this actually of Haitian music. He's interested in recording and writing about folk music. It's a poor approximation. It's a kind of anthropological study of peoples through music. He lived in France from the 20s to the 30s and hung out with the surrealists. Then he visits Haiti. Haiti interrupts these two periods of exile, first of all in Europe and then in Venezuela, 1945-1959. He returns to Cuba 1959 after the revolution, Castro's revolution. Another book which is worth reading of his. There are a bunch of them, but let me particularly recommend The Lost Steps. It's a book about a composer who is looking for the origins of music. It's set in Venezuela and he goes up a river and he's looking for primitive, so-called primitive, uncontacted societies, the notion that they will have, they can recreate, they can show for him the point at which people started to play music, move from sound to music. Of course he can't find it. He can't find his way back. This is the Lost Steps. There is no point of origin. There are only repetitions and remakings and remodellings. Let me talk a little bit about narrative. This is the Citadel itself. This is what we see on the front page, the cover, sorry, of this. As you can see, on a mountain, it's kind of the first mountain you come to when you're coming from the north, from the sea. You cover the plain. I think it's about 30 miles from Capetien. It looks over the plain and you can see the sea. There's a certain pragmatic quality to that. The idea is that, or part of the justification for building the Citadel, was in case the French tried to reinvade again. As they already had done once with Leclerc, we see that whole episode kind of a slant in this book. We see it, I guess, through Pauline Bonaparte's eyes. But that's the story. That's the 1804 reinvasion of Haiti by the French army sent by Napoleon Bonaparte, which is repelled. But the Haitians, there's this feeling that independence is precarious. You've had your revolution, but you're surrounded by enemies of one sort or another. Most of the Caribbean remains colonised, remains under the British or the Spanish. In fact, Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic, so it's still under Spanish rule. Although Toussaint Louverture, the hero of the Haitian Revolution, invades the Dominican Republic and takes over Santo Domingo. But there's a sense of being beset by enemies. One ally, which should be an ally, at least is the United States, the only other western hemispheric revolutionary state. Of course, the United States is still trafficking and dealing in slaves at the time. The United States is worried that Haiti is a bad example to its own slaves. The United States, which is the natural post-colonial, if you like, ally of the newly born Haitian state, tries to distance itself as far as possible. Haiti was, by all around, people thought it was a bad example. What if other slaves tried to do the same thing? So it's a very precarious situation. So Henri Christophe builds this fortification on the mountain, looking out over the sea so they can see the French fleet if it was to come back in. A few... The way in which I'm going to deal with all these themes is work through a picture and then a couple of quotations and a few ideas after that. A couple of quotations, a couple of moments in which Carpentier directly talks about a narrative. The first is a description of Macondale. His narrative arts, when with terrible gestures, he played the part of the different personages, held the men's spellbound. This is before, so Macondale goes on to become this figure of a kind of shaman or conjurer, right? And to be invested with these magical powers by the other slaves. But even before he starts to go off and sort of commune, find out the natural poisons and so on, with which he'll wreak a kind of vengeance against the whites, even before that, he's portrayed as having some kind of powers, extra-normal powers, but as a result of narrative. So the notion of what are the powers of narrative? You can leave men spellbound. On the other hand, this is sort of counterpoised in a rather comic moment. This is the slave master, the plantation owner, Lleu-Normand-O-Macy, reflecting after what may or may not be the death of Macondale. He goes back to his wife in this sort of super pretentious mode. Talks to her about the fact that the reaction of the slaves of the blacks that showed demonstrated the inequality of the human races in a way that she planned to develop in a speech a lot of Latin quotations. So we had these different modes of narrative, right? Different possibilities, different ways in which narrative works, both in terms of different political or social positions, but also different genres, right? Oral, on the one hand, drawing from Africa in this case, because these are the stories that Macondale's telling, and then the European with the Latin quotations and so on and so forth. So there are a lot of different genres, lots of different kinds of narrative, kinds of discourse, I suppose, that are being produced that we see throughout this book. From, I don't know, yes, let's call them folktales, right? Stories about the gods from Africa and so on, religion, different kinds of religious narrative as well. We have novels, in fact. So when Pauline Bonaparte comes, it's suggested that she's prepared for the tropics because she's read one novel in particular, which is Paul Averginie by Jacques-Henry Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. This is the picture here. So I'm looking at what screen I can see. This picture over here, I should look at the screen, I should point to the screen that you can see, is an illustration of this novel. It's a 1788 novel set on Mauritius, whose themes are very much Rusoian, I suppose, of natural virtue in tropical environments. The two characters are white, though, of course. So novels, newspapers, rumour, right? There's all this, both amongst the slaves amongst the whites. When something happens, for instance, the Macindale's rebellion, the poisoning, everyone talking, how did this come about? And the information is flowing and moving around and accentuating the terror song. There's a lot of song in here, theatre, which we'll talk about. Then we can also talk about the narrative of this particular novel. What we see is a series of flows, not the least of which is the flows of information, from Europe to the Caribbean, from Africa to the Caribbean, within, from the cities of the countryside, the countryside to the city, from the masses to the slaves, less so from the slaves to the masters. I'll talk about that, I hope, a little bit later. The slaves always know more than the masters do. That's a point, because they're always listening in. The slaves see everything the masters do. The masters don't necessarily see everything that the slaves do. But there's all this talking and writing and information flowing. Oh, that should be words, of course. Anyway, words have power, but there also can be troubling or destabilising in different ways. There can spread fear. There can be a sort of contagion, a sense of contagion sometimes. Or for instance, we have the planters, the plantation owners, who are reacting against the proclamations of the French assembly in Paris. What these guys think, they're over in Paris, they don't understand our situation here. Then what do they want to do, abolish slavery? Crazy talk. So this notion also, political ideas might be flowing or might be picked up in the colony from the Metropole, from the centre. The story itself is... I'll be interested to hear from you, I suppose, how you felt the narrative went. In some ways, it's more or less linear. We began in the 1760s, goes on to the 1820s. 1760s, the Macondow Rebellion, 1820s, after the death of Henri Christophe and the arrival of the Mulattau Republic. So these things are narrated one after another. But it's very episodic. In other words, there's quite a few jumps, 12 years go by, or so on. Or we shift perspective as well. Tino El is obviously the central character. Forrest Gump, he's everywhere. But interestingly, he's not quite everywhere because he misses the revolution and the counter-revolution. But he's everywhere else. So he happens to be with Macondow at the beginning. He happens to be, for instance, at the end, he sort of sees first hand the impact of the Mulattau. He participates in the building of the Citadel or something. But he's displaced, he's on an island, he's in Cuba, when I guess the central moments of the revolution take place, the initial victory. It's a long, the Haitian Revolution is a long drawn out process. You've got some of that from Trio. But he's not there for, I guess, the most intense fighting. And then he drops out altogether for a few, several chapters, which are the counter-revolution, the Napoleonic expedition to retake the island. And we suddenly take the perspective, but we also, we're again displaced onto another island when we're given the perspective of Pauline Bonaparte. But Leclerc comes in but we only ever see him as sort of dying of yellow fever, basically. Everything else revolves around Pauline's slightly displaced. So, and then I guess one of the things here is about, you can think about the differences between this kind of narrative and what we'd more conventionally think about as a historical narrative. I mean this is a narrative about history. It is a narrative that invokes what we'd normally think of as historical events, the Haitian Revolution, and the various elements of the Revolution. Lots of the characters and events within the narrative are characters of an event such a matter of historical record. For instance, the meeting in the Boac Caimont with the Jamaican Bookman where they slaughter a pig and announce the insurrection is coming. The Leclerc expedition, for instance. Bonaparte is a real person, and so on and so forth, right? But it's a novel, I mean, it's a historical novel. So, Tino L is not a historical figure. That's why he sort of stands in for, I suggest, he sort of stands in for the mass of, at least the mass of the male slaves. He's every man, he's not every person. So, it accomplishes, it tells us something, I think, about history without being, without submitting to the norms, right? Trio would talk about the norms of historiographical writing. OK, let's talk about matter. So, if on the one hand we have words, I wanted to say, I wanted to suggest again how the... Caimontia doesn't suggest these are mere words, right? He wanted to talk about the ways in which words have concrete effect. They aren't to be just dismissed, but then you have the matter, which is in some ways the object, the material stuff, which is often the object of these discourses and these narratives. Here are some things, the very sort of thingy things, very solid things. Cannibals of the Citadel, if you go up there, there's a massive pile of them. And people try and sell you them as well. There's not much concern for the national patrimony sometimes, but smaller ones than these, I guess you can't see how big these are. These are this big, I suppose, but they're little ones too. So, there are things that are gradually being sold off and taken away by tourists and others, but still there's a lot left, right? There's the sense of the weight of these legacies of the past, of Omri Christof's kingdom. And I think there's a repeated concern for things. Again, in their materiality, in their thinginess, in this book. I think of the first chapter, for instance, right? I think the title is The Wax-Heads, right? In which we're with Tino El and his master as he goes into town, as he goes into the city, and I'm going to read a couple of quotations, actually, which take us here. So first of all, page four, he could gaze his fill of the four wax-heads. So we get the wax-heads first that are dawned, the counter by the door, the curls of the wigs opening into a pool of wringlets on the red bays, framed, expressionless faces. And when we move, we sort of cut, in an almost cinematic way, by an amusing coincidence to the next door. In the window of the tripe-shot next door, there were calves' head, skinned and each with a sprig of parsley across the tongue, which possessed the very same wax-equality. So the question is, we've got the artificial, I suppose, and we've got the organic. But they're both connected in terms of texture, the wax-equality that they have. And then this is the organic, but dead. But as he's going home, he's given a calf's head, and he's going home, and he thinks how much it probably resembled the bald-head of his master hidden beneath his wig. So I think a lot's going on there. There's a certain question of, yes, the master's head as an object, right? It's not as this thinking, this sight of thought and agency of subjectivity. It is all that as well, although Lou Normand doesn't get, he gets a pretty short shrift from Cabinier. He's not the smartest kid on the block, is he? But it's also a thing, and a thing that can, like the calf's head, in theory be dislocated from its body and be cut off. So there's the notion of how violence or the thread of violence or the thought of violence can transform things or can transform the way in which we think about things. So the next quotation is, this is Omri Christof, who dies, who commits suicide, but commits suicide in the face of imminent rebellion, deserted by his allies. He's already, in some ways, becoming a thing. He's suffering from paralysis. He's no longer quite the man of action that he had been. He's gradually becoming one with the things that he has built, with the materiality of these fortifications, of these monuments that he's produced, and here it's very much literalised, as he's buried by being embedded in this wet concrete. So Omri Christof would never know the corruption of the flesh. So now there's about the difference between different forms of substance. Some substance, the flesh, corrodes and degrades and rots over time, is eaten up by maggots and so on and so forth. But there are other substances, stone for instance, which are more resistant. So what substances are more resistant and what substances are less resistant to time, which is also to history? What remains and what doesn't remain? That's also a question about the silences that history leaves us with, especially when we think of writing as material too, right? So that plaque, like that one we saw before, that's going to survive quite a while. Books are a little bit more transient, a little bit more impermanent, right? But we have books from this period too. Whereas what happens to... The slaves can't write, remember they have to put a declaration together and they suddenly realise we need to find someone to write this. So what about those memories which are perhaps more ephemeral? OK, they depend on other forms of communication, right? Rumour, for instance, and talking. And in some ways that's what this book's about too, right? How Tinoel becomes Macandal or preserves the memory of what he has been taught and told in an oral means by Macandal. Well, it's only Christophe becomes one with his fortress and with the mountain in fact. It's very stuff of the fortress inscribed in his architecture, integrated with his body. So there are lots of things in this book. Heads and skulls, I was suggesting. And then arms and mills, right? We get the very physical sense of the mutilation when Macandal's arm is taken, is crushed by the sugar mill. Because that's what the slaves are doing, by the way, of course. That's the main industry here and in most of the Caribbean is sugar, which is very labour-intensive indeed. So we have a certain sense of the physicality of the slave relationship, the slave process, the slave labour. Now, as I said before, Tinoel is very much not every man, well, very much every man rather than every person. Because women, I think, I suggest to you, are very much presented as matter, as material. They're very much identified with their bodies. Again, you might want to think about this or talk about it to what extent does or does not the representation of Pauline Bonaparte complicate that. But we see towards the end of the book where Pauline Bonaparte becomes a statue. She becomes something like but not like, like but not like Henri Christophe. She too becomes stone, not like because she retains her form. I'm going to show you a quotation a little bit later in which Salimann, her ex-servant, I suppose, says something like, the form had stayed but the substance had changed. With Henri Christophe, the form is absorbed, I suppose, into the substance. Other matters, poison, fire, the circuit of food and commodities, the fire which may or may not eat the body of Macindal. Bricks, buildings, bodies, books. This is a book, I think, which is very much concerned with incarnation, with becoming body, and then, of course, with reincarnation. Again, with Macindal and Tinoelle, book-ending, I suppose, the story, as shapeshifters, people who were told are able to change shape into different kinds of animals, different kinds of beings. This is just a statue, which is at the palace of San Suzy. Remaking and remodelling in a very physical, incarnated way. I think that tells us something about history, as opposed to the first of the trio's senses, or maybe something a little bit different. History, on the one hand, is what happens, what takes place, on the other hand, is the way in which we talk about what happens and what takes place. This is an allusion to a phrase by a literary and cultural critic called Frederick Jameson, who says, history is what hurts. History is about trauma and pain and the effect of violence upon the body. An ongoing violence, right? Which, at least in this book, there's no sense that it's going to be put behind us or put behind them. All these attempts, right? But the book ends with this. Another question for you to think about and talk about in seminars. Is the ending of the book optimistic or pessimistic? Is there a knowledge that pain will continue? Or Tino El seems to have been offered the option to choose the kingdom of heaven rather than the kingdom of this world. Because the kingdom of this world means pain, means inequality, means violence, means an ongoing experience of domination. It means history. I mean, Tino El has the option to leave history, and he decides no. I'm staying put, although then he immediately disappears. But there we go. This is a stress. This notion of this ongoing violence and affect, emotion, the feeling, the precise notion of the sensation, I suppose, is what the book stresses. Rather than ideology, there's very little talk about, I don't know, the kinds of things that we think about when we talk about the French Revolution, for instance, the idea of liberty, for instance, or fraternity or equality or so on. This is a revolution, this is a rebellion that may incorporate those ideas, but is driven by affect, is driven by a resistance to a rebellion to the ways in which the body is treated or mistreated under this particular mode of production, under this particular regime of slavery and the violence that sustains it and surrounds that. The notion of resistance, which I was just talking about, is kind of interesting. Resistance means a number of different things. On one hand, it's sort of resistance is about when matter resists, some kind of matter is more resistant than others. Playdough is not very resistant, because you leave marks, right? But there are other forms of matter in which the mark is not left so easily, but then resistance, of course, in political terms, is about something like, I don't know, fighting back as well, right? It's about vengeance. So this is all about vengeance in this book, too. And the notion that the slaves, a resistance in both ways, I think, right? They've put up with a lot. But their treatise is objects, but they're not objects, right? They are feeling bodies, feeling beings, affective subjects, above all. And they express themselves above all through the material. Again, the sexual politics here are difficult, I think. Tina Well in particular, right? When something good has happened, he goes off to celebrate it by, I guess, sort of taking it out on all. In a very gendered way, shall we say, shall we put it that way? Ultimately, it's about the questions about the world versus the heavens. As I said before, that's the question the Macindale faces, the question that the Tina Well faces at the end. But I think that's a question that runs through the entire book. And it's a question of what kinds of forces move and shape us, right? Do we believe in the gods? Do we believe in, I don't know, the reason? Are these rational actors? In what sense are they rational actors? Are there any rational actors here? Are some more rational than others? There's a lot of talk about enlightenment, right? Enlightenment is the discovery, or the construction, or the creation of the rational actor, right? There's, and then, forces of economic forces, I suppose, political forces, and so on. How does history work in Trio's sense? But now, how does history proceed and how is it changed? Can it be changed? Is there an inevitability or fate or even destiny sometimes here? Even when we're talking about one of the great revolutions of world history. And that's part of the paradox here, in which everything changes, but in some ways nothing changes. I think we should take our break. See you in nine minutes. So... Hello. Two people have just pointed out to me. Have I made a mistake? Human or too human? One of the readings for next week, I looked at the last page and I thought there's nothing on it, apart from the library stamps. And this is not true. There are four lines that are missing from your copy. So I believe Christina has just informed me what those four lines are. I'll probably redo the PDF or do the last page again and get that together. But... Yes. Actually, it's three lines in a stage direction. But... Yes. We don't believe in this class, in this stream or group. We're trying to make you doubt origins and non-existent origins and maybe it will make you doubt ends as well. We're always in the middle. We're always in process. In fact, maybe we shouldn't hand out this last, those last three lines. Maybe we'll keep that as a secret. OK. Also... I know I say I will respond to your tweets, but obviously I haven't responded to any of them. Because, you know, I get in the flow. So does anyone have any questions? Isn't that a nice moment for questions, comments, thoughts, disagreements? I took no cannibals home, no. I thought it was a little wrong to buy a cannibal, but I thought it was kind of... Interesting. Yes. Just sort of pick it up. It would have been easier going down, of course. You just sort of kick it or roll it down. We're going to talk about football, by the way, later. Which I put that in for Rob. I always try and... I haven't got a Smith's reference this time, but I've got a football reference, so that should make... It's always good to make your boss happy, isn't it? The guy who's in church. Any other questions, thoughts? James. What's a real person? He's a historical figure, yes. There's a rebellion. What we know about him is not very much, to be honest. But there was a figure called Macindell. There was a rebellion associated with Macindell. There was a large-scale attempt to poison. Most of the historical details in this book are historical. Yes, there was a Macindell. He was described as somebody who shifted shape. Right? He had his ability to shift form. Aha, segue. Let's talk about form. Another of my holiday pictures. Someone said... Someone on the tweets said they've been to the Dominican Republic, but not to Haiti. Has anyone actually been to Haiti? This is an extraordinary place. But yes, the only people I met there who were white were soldiers, policemen, doctors, and missionaries. They were strange. There was me. Canada's had quite a role in Haiti over the last 10, 15 years or so in terms of what would you call it, peacekeeping, pacification or whatever. There's quite a large contingent. I met Canadian police going for donuts, of course, in a Cappé Tien pastry shop. But then they go around in these jeeps, or equivalent with tinted windows and so on. The history, the legacy of the revolution, Trio talks about it a little bit. Of course it's by some measure one of the poorest, if not the very poorest country in the hemisphere. Part of that is because of the indemnity that the French forced them to pay to recompense the slave owners, which they paid for decades. Part of that is because of the international isolation that the post-revolutionary independent republic suffered and for various other reasons, too. This is not wanting to do this thing. This is another shot of Saint-Souci. One of the things about Saint-Souci, the palace architecture is interesting. It's this bizarre mix of forms and styles. It's very eclectic, heterogeneous. One side you've got neoclassical columns, and the other side you've got this. On the one end, it's everything brought together. A crazy synthesis, but agglomeration of styles and forms. Even before it was a ruin, it was already, in some sense, a collection of fragments, stylistically. Again, a couple of quotations from the book about form. One of them I gave you before. The substance is different, but the forms are the same. This is Solimann in Rome, coming across the statue of Bonaparte. But before that, the alert ears never despaired of hearing at any moment, the vision of the Great Constell. This is what happened, this is about the messianic faith that Macindow will return. I think the notion of messianism is also interesting. That's another notion of history. The history will be redeemed at some point. So there's a quasi-religious notion of the history will come to an end, and at the end of history, what is wrong will be made right. A division between sheep and goats, for instance. That's a metaphor, a Christian metaphor, a version of messianism as well. There's also very much hardwired into some of indigenous notions. In Peru, for instance, there's the myth of Pachacuti, but also in Carpentier's suggesting, ways in which there's a messianism is also part of the ways in which the slaves approached or thought about rebellion and thought about history and faith. A sort of inversion of tragedy, I suppose, but not comic either. See, the alert is never despair of hearing at any moment the vision of the great console, but this is the only one who's gone through all the forms. Macindow would bellow through the hills to announce to all the Macindow that's completed the cycle of his metamorphosis. So this is a Haitian coin with an image of not from life in any way, I presume, but an image of Macindow here. A sort of precursor, again, as with all precursors, projected subsequently into the past, but the precursor, the first announcement of the revolution. So form makes us think about the change or transition between forms, this notion of metamorphosis. The one remains in some way the same, even or one can remain in some way the same. But the question is also, again, this is the basic issue. When things change their form, how meaningful, what changes, really? How meaningful is that change? Again, that's the question of the revolution here. Or is the question of the revolution actually the reverse? But the form hasn't changed, only the substance has changed. But now the oppressors, the overseers are black if before they were white. Maybe the problem is that the revolution hasn't been sufficiently revolutionary because it hasn't involved sufficient transformation, sufficient change in form as well as in substance. So not just the colour of the skin of the people who occupy the different social positions, but then the relationship between those positions needs to change, too. Is that what... That's in some way also at the kernel, at the heart of this book, or at the heart of what it has to say about historical change. Also questions of style, by which I mean also literary style to some extent. I mean, that's the notion that this book initiates or helps initiate a style which is recognizably Latin America, which is recognizably distinct magical realism. Again, Carpentier's term is the marvellous real. But there's always a tension between... There's a certain complication of style and fashion. Is style something which is the mark of individuality, or is it the mark that you've just found a new club of other people to hang out with? Are you one of those many individual people who dresses like everyone else does to express their individuality? How does one express oneself? What are the possibilities of an authentic expression? Is this an authentically... I mean, the notion that Carpentier's suggesting in this book is this is somehow an authentically Latin American mode of expression that no longer needs Latin American writers to be dependent upon models from elsewhere. Copying endlessly what goes. There's something about geopolitics of literature, geopolitics of literary and artistic and aesthetic expression. But it's not that the first world, the centre, the metropole always leads the way. There can be original and different and new and novel forms and styles that are forged at the periphery in the colonies or the post colonies, if you like. But there's also an interest here in the book about fashion and dress, how one dresses oneself. Again, there's a play between dress and the body, especially, right, in the substance. Again, we can think about it metaphorically. To what extent, when changes happen, is it just a sort of change in dress, right? Dressing up that doesn't change something else. Or is, to what extent, does dress or dressing have its own historical or social or political impacts. So this is all about remaking, remodelling, obviously. Both of those terms, remake and remodel, are about form, about changes in form. You take the same story, Antigone say, you give it a new form. What changes and what doesn't change in that? What are the continuities and what are the differences? What's at stake in giving new form to old narratives or old substance? In terms of the form of the book, the style of the book, one thing I might point out, just a few things as much that could be said. One is the use, I guess, of free and direct discourse in which the narrator, without ceasing to write as a third-person narrator, but takes on the attitudes or the positions of individual characters. Very often, Tino L, as we go through, as he becomes the central character, but others too. A certain conflation or identification of narrator and character, in which this is just another book that... Well, I guess another question for you, for your seminars as you write your essays and so on, is what kinds of claims are there to something like objectivity here? Or is it the matter is always subject to a point of view, which is not quite the same thing as subjective? I think that's what's the issue also in magical realism, because in magical realism, I guess, if you want a one-line definition of the style or the approach known as magical realism, you treat what is real, we need a lot of scare quotes here, right? We treat what is real as though it were magic. Has anyone read 100 Years of Solitude? So at the beginning of 100 Years of Solitude, for instance, there's this little story of the gypsies who bring ice to this jungle town, but it's viewed as magic. It's presented and viewed as magic, also things like a compass, for instance. The same thing, a magnet. And then on the one hand, so there's this, from the point, from the perspective of rural, isolated town in some of that, like Columbia, or what is elsewhere accepted or normalized or habituated or just viewed as everyday real, is treated, is de-familiarized, that would be a fancy way of putting it, but we see it from the perspective of a position, of a character, a series of characters, a collective, for which it is not familiar, for which it comes to seem magical. So that's the one side, I think, and the other side is where real, what is magic, what we would think of as magic, is treated straightforwardly as though it were real. In 100 Years of Solitude, for instance, someone who ascends to the heaven. But that's treated in exactly the same kind of rather deadpan, realist manner as any other event that takes place in the book. And here, for instance, I don't know, the final sequence where Tinoel transforms himself into geese and insects and so on and so forth. This is formally treated in exactly the same way any of the other events, as when Tinoel goes into town and goes shopping with his master, for instance. Perhaps the most interesting point of this moment in which this takes place, or in which this is played out, I suggest is in the scene in which Macindale of Macindale's, let's call it Macindale's execution, which is told to us twice, if you remember. So it's told us twice, once from the point of view of the whites, and once from the point of view of the blacks. Or there's a tension there between these two perspectives on what is normally the same event. This is page 44 to 47, I suppose. So I'm going to return to this later in a different context. So the white masters have prepared this scene, this spectacle, this staging for the blacks who have heard it into town to see what's going to go on. Macindale is wastegirded by striped pants bound with ropes and not to skin gleaming with recent wounds. Again the stress on the corporeal. The material was moving towards the centre of the square the masters' eyes questioned the face of the slaves but the negro showed spiteful indifference. What did the whites know of negro matters? They're coming with different knowledges, different contexts and see completely different things as a result. So the blacks see the bonds fell off the body and the bonds fell off the body of the negro rose in the air flying overhead until it plunged into black waves by the body of slaves. A single cry filled the square, Macindale saved. The narrator adopts that point of view, adopts that perspective. There's not hedged around here. But later on we get very few... and the noise and the screaming and uproar were such that the very few saw that Macindale had by ten soldiers had been thrust head first into the fire and that a flame fed by his burning hair had drowned his last cry. The style, the form in which this scene is narrated doesn't distinguish between these two totally incompatible conclusions. Macindale saved or Macindale dies. So yes, what does the novel offer to history? Think about that. So this is a segue I suppose to the notion of spectacle to what we can see to the visual. This is a view from Macindale. This is what I was talking about earlier. The strategic locale of the fortress, you can see that it... you can see the sea at the top of the blue thing. Bits of the blue thing. Some of the blue thing is sky, of course, but some of the blue thing is sea and looking out over the plain and you can see some of the cannonballs and cannons that seem to fascinate Rob. Well, they're quite fascinating too, I think that's fair enough. But the citadel is a place to see from and also to be seen. So it's both the object of the gaze and the place from which one gazes out to see the fleets. In fact, it's often commented that I think not necessarily in any of the images that I've shown you, but from at least one aspect as you're coming up the mountain, the fortress looks quite like a ship. It's kind of like an inversion of the French fleet that it's established to oppose, to guard against or to war against. Okay, so this first quotation comes from that scene that I was just talking about the end of Magendal or not. A gala function for Negro is on whose splendor no expense has been spared. For this time, the lesson must be driven home with fire, not blood. Okay, so there's a kind of opposition that's being set up. So one way in which you drive the lesson home is through beating, through whips, through violence. But here it's through illumination. Is this what Paul last week was talking about in terms of hegemony? This is appealed to the sight, but it's appealed to the sight of the fails, as we've seen. Certainly illumination, and obviously, but the notion of illumination also, we're getting an echo here of the notion of enlightenment, right? The century of lights. Certainly illumination is lighted to be remembered very costly. And then here's the notion of the notion. The fortress is not only a readout from which one sees, but it too is in some ways a spectacle from which one learns. The Negroes of the plain would raise their eyes to the fortress thinking that they're a king of their own race was waiting. And this is not so much here, but elsewhere, this is a common part of the discourse about the citadel in particular. The free blacks are now showing that they could produce a monument, every bit as impressive as that produced by the Europeans. In fact, more so this being the largest fortress in the hemisphere. So it has another purpose. So if one purpose of the citadel is this defensive looking out, ensuring that you can see the French, and in fact, here it is, it's so huge, right? The thousands of people could live in it and withstand a siege. If another purpose of it is sort of educational, the appealing to the blacks to the subjects of Henri Christophe's kingdom, but there's the other notion, I think that's the one that's been picked up most. I mean, that's to some extent what the plaque that I showed you very early on is trying to say, is that this is a lesson in what Haitians can achieve. I mean, this is why the citadels become something like one of the national symbols on stamps and so on, right? And this is, I think, also where trio's coming from to some extent too, especially when he begins, he talks about his father and Cabernetier being members of the Order of Henri Christophe and so on. This is an example of a spectacular achievement by those of whom nothing had previously been expected. So spectacle, this is a statue in the central square in Capitien, the first president of independent Haiti. The history, again, trio talks about this, the history of immediately post-resolutionary Haiti is a rather complex one. It splits into two separate territories. In the north is where you have Henri Christophe who establishes a kingdom. So spectacle is about, as I say, the notion of enlightenment, education, other modes, other forms of trying to, whatever, to secure social rule or domination, more refined modes perhaps, right? It's often suggested that now there's a book by a guy called Gidebord in a society of the spectacle. This is the mode by which, above all by which social order is secured today in the 20th and 21st centuries. But there's issues, of course, in the book about visibility and colour. Colours absolutely in terms of ethnotype, phenotype. Colours are absolutely an issue here. You know, blacks and whites and then mulattos and quadroons and so on and so forth. The whole kind of colonial and post-colonial series of classifications of peoples as subjects or as non-subjects or with varying degrees of assumed subjectivity according to what one can see, according to what the visual field and the question of aesthetics as well, which I think relates more to sans souci, this stylistic profusion and so on. So I guess this notion of a new regime of the sensible. What becomes visible as a result or in the revolution? Or what does Carpentier want to make visible through this book? In what way, how does certain things become visible that have previously been invisible? I suppose I'm suggesting this, I'm just trying to put this notion of a play between visibility and invisibility as, I don't know, a supplement to or another way of thinking of what Trio talks about in terms of voice and silence. So Trio's got a, whatever, an acoustic metaphor. He's got an acoustic vocabulary to talk about history and what falls in and out of history. What if we thought about a visual, a set of visual figures? Is that the same? If one is silent, does one also are made invisible? Or not. I don't think so, right? Then it's about, back to matter, questions of objectification for instance. Statues and so on and so forth, or women even again in this book. A play about appearances and apparitions. I'm thinking for instance particularly of the point at which Henri Christophe sees the ghost of the, was he the bishop, the cardinal that he's, that he's had killed. Someone wanted, Seamus once, Seamus once Shakespeare references, right? This whole question of how much the hammer's father's ghost and so on and so forth, or banquet. Anyway, that was just a piece Seamus. So, but there's something very similar going on there, right? That this is now an unwanted phantom or spectre that seizes and terrifies, that undoes to some extent Henri Christophe's power, paralyzes him. So if the spectacle on the one hand, so now we've sort of inverted things. On the one hand you've got the notion that for instance in a spectacle provided for the blacks or the spectacle of the fortress of the Citadel, this is a mode of trying to secure social domination, but now you've got this other kind of intrusion in the visual field, the spectre that undoes power, that is somehow subversive perhaps, or somehow undoes the projects of the would-be sovereign. So it's power established through the gaze or despite it, or the ways in which modes of visibility can be articulated or projected or something, the undo or the question, the way in which power works. And then, oh yes, I said I was going to talk about this a little bit. It goes back to the Macindole thing. The master slave dialectic in Hegel, the notion that sort of crudely, in any relation sometimes called Lord and Bondsman, in any relation of domination, strangely the person or the people's dominated have an advantage in terms of what they can see. That is again what Capentier suggests here when he says that the whites could not see what the blacks could see, what the slaves could see. Because the slaves know, they see what the masters see, they know the masters, right, because they're sort of inculcated with a white, a European culture. And we get this point at which Tinewell, for instance, is looking at the prince in the shop, for instance. And they also know what they can see. They also have their own sort of alternative counter-traditions, if you were. This is what Macindole's suggesting when he's given these stories of the African gods and so on. So they see both, whereas the Lord, the master, knows what he knows, obviously, but is cut off to some extent from subaltern culture, from the culture of the slave, from the knowledge, or the sort of visual powers of the slave, of the dominated. OK, this is for Rob. One thing about ruins, there are always kids playing football in ruins. Wherever you go, at least in Latin America. I mean, in Canada, of course, you wouldn't do that. You'd all be very sort of respectful. So I'm interested in the ways in which ruins are repurposed and reused. One of the first ways is... There are also great places to go and make out with someone. You know, there are all these little corners and so on. There are also lovers all around. There are usually quite picturesque and so on, but you can find some little place to have a snog. So these ways in which new kinds of activities, and there are other activities, there are more official activities, too, right? So tour guides and people selling cannonballs and other kind of stuff. A whole industry grows up around the ruins. They didn't give me my donkey. I had to pay for my donkey. So the ways in which history becomes merchandised and marketed, perhaps similar, but also different ways in which... I'm talking about the Latin American boom as being a question of marketing. But there's quite a lot of interest in performance in this book, as well, I think. Sometimes cynically, cynically, I don't know. There are certainly many of the ways, I think, in which there are sort of high cultural or white European theatrical presentations. There's lots of actresses, especially actresses rather than actors here. The Cap Theatre where actresses from Paris, Saint-Germain-Rousseau areas, or loftily-declaimed tragic Alexandrines. But then there's also another sort of performance, for instance, in the Bois Carmel, in which this sort of ritual of collective power is enacted and everyone's gathering together in a space which is not an un-theatrical one. Or here, this is a kind of notion of call and response, I think. This is the moment in which the rebellion, the insurrection is announced. It's announced that all the purple conscious that serves as doorstop, which has previously been seen as simply inanimate objects as pure matter, but they become vehicles of expression. All the shells that lay alone and petrified like stone on the summit of the hill had begun to sing in chorus. Things are made to perform or to be performed or to perform something, to express something, which is both. It's got sort of an aesthetic but also a political content to it. And the performance is also where some of the thought and the ideas or the concepts that I've been talking about come together. It's where the body and the visual feel come together. I mean, in some ways that's surely a definition of performance. What is performance? Body is subject to gaze. That would be my thing. I took a class with somebody who, of course, of somebody who's thing was performance studies. And what he used to do is a little sort of seminar, a graduate seminar, and he'd say, the performance has started. Everyone suddenly, he'd put you in the centre of this, his gaze, but immediately construct this audience, right? And now you're on the spot. And that's there. So the performance is not necessarily about a theatre in a proscenium arch or whatever, whatever. But it's these daily, everyday moments in which we realise suddenly, perhaps, that we're subject to gaze. But again, that's also socially differentiated into the class and gender and race and so on. Some of us can more often feel the need, the pressure to perform than others. So it's both a world of appearances on the one hand, but also a performance is a body on the line. And think about the world of performance art, for instance, where that notion, that in a performance, unlike, I don't know, an artist, a visual artist, pictures or sculptures or whatever, in performance art, the artist very often directly invests his or her corporeality and materiality. So I don't know, there's a guy called Chris Burden, for instance, who had somebody shoot a bullet through his arm. Other kinds of performances also played with that danger and that risk, which is to some extent inherent in all performance. We had that with the guy who nailed his, wrote him to the, what was it, to Red Square in Moscow the other week as well. Performance is also about rituals and conjurations. I think that's the Buakayman event, right? Collectively constructing perhaps a different kind of body, a collective body now. A performance could be, is also a moment in which one the individual can, on the one hand, merge into a collectivity or become a member of it in the kinds of performance and rituals or rites of transition, of puberty or so on and so forth. But there are also moments in which perhaps, yes, new forms of subjectivity, new forms of agency, new forms of identity are constructed. Again, I think that's what's going on quite often here. And therefore new stories can be told. We're also at the nexus here, the point at which narrative, matter, spectacle form as well perhaps meet. This image is a voodoo performance, which is also obviously an interest for a concern throughout a carpentier. So the question is if we think about performance, we also think about actors. Acting is another of these interesting words, which means, which has more than one sense and two of the senses may seem to contradict each other. On the one hand, acting means not really doing. You act as though you're doing something but you don't really do it. But on the other hand you can say act is when here. It's time to act. Precisely when you say it's time to actually get down and do something, right? So I think both those notions of acting are in play here. And then yes, the question is, who acts here? Is there a point at which people begin to act who haven't acted before? When and how does that change? A question of yes, be all you can be. That's the US Army line as well. But there's also something about performance and identity. Of course, that's Judith Butler's concern. How we perform gender, for instance. How do we perform race as well? How do we perform other versions or iterations of identity? And then there's a performance of, I don't know when you think about a car's performance, for instance. When you think about the sort of numbers, it's about how fast it goes from north to 60 or whatever. And at the very end of the novel, when the surveyors come in, it is, I suggest about, subjecting the body, subjecting the land, subjecting matter to quantification and measure. And what happens there? Revolution. Again, I'm not offering any answers here. These are all questions for you to think. There's a number of things that the book has to say about revolution. So at some point it's suggested, this is when Tino El is part of the Labour gang, which is constructing the citadel. And the negro began to think that the chamber music orchestras of Saint-Souci and so on and so forth were all the project of a slavery as abominable as that he had known on the plantation of Monsieur le nom de messie. And then he goes on saying if anything is even worse. Because it's the added dignity that the slave masters now are black. So is this a conservative novel? Is this a novel that is arguing against the attempt of revolution? Well, on the other hand, we also have this final moment or almost final moment at page 179 in which after deciding, after deciding for the kingdom of this world, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the kingdom of this world. It's like the revolutionist Sisyphus, I think, to go back to the text that Jill had us read at the very beginning. Endlessly rolling the boulder, again the materiality, the stoniness of things, up the hill, only for it to come back, but we must imagine Sisyphus happy despite and because of all these repetitions. So isn't that to some extent what Tino El's conclusion is? Hence he goes out on another, he says, okay, even though life is suffering and hope and toil for people who you'll never know and who in turn will suffer and hope and toil for others who will not be happy either. Right, the fact that life is just an endless series of again and again indignity and violence and trauma and inequality and the scars, right, which one wears on one's body. Despite that, he says, the old man hurled his decoration of war against the new masters, ordering his subjects to march in battle array against the insolent works of the mulattles in power. The revolution continues. So is this a sort of, I don't know, a hyper-revolutionary book? Is this calling for permanent revolution as opposed to being conserved for a reactionary book? And again the notion of revolution itself. Is that making new or is it starting again? Is it a repetition or is it an attempt to begin, an origin, a found, a new tradition? Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Man. Okay, I do have something else, ruins. I'll talk about ruins next week. Because we're out of time.