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Cyclones And Vortices: Alejo Carpentier's Reasons Of State As Cartesian Discourse, Joseph F. O'Neill

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State is a reconstruction of Cartesian discourse that is paradoxically both fantastic and baroque in its implications. Building upon the assumption that Cartesianism is typically baroque and therefore a dynamism, rather than a dichotomy of subject and object, the novel proceeds in the form of a retrospective deathbed narrative to suggest the radically anti-Cartesian polarization of subject and object in fin de siècle Latin America by portraying its dictator/narrator as a man whose world-view, like his culture's, is schizophrenically divided between magical realism and positivist progressivism. This ambiguous narrative perception is comparable to that of the …