Configuring Beirut's vague urbain: A Marvelous Real
Writing Places : Investigations in Architecture and Literature. Klaske Havik, Jorge Mejía Hernández, Mike Schäfer, Mark Proosten, Susana Oliveira (eds.). (2017). Rotterdam: NAi010 publisher.
Configuring Beirut's Vague Urbain: A Marvellous Real
Let me begin with words from Alejo Carpentier:
The word “marvellous” has, with time and use, lost its true meaning. […] Dictionaries tell us the marvellous is something that causes admiration because it is extraordinary, excellent, formidable. And that is joined to the notion that everything marvellous must be beautiful, lovely, pleasant, when really the only thing that should be gleaned from the dictionaries’ definition is a reference to the extraordinary. The extraordinary is not necessarily lovely or beautiful. It is neither beautiful nor ugly; rather, it is amazing because it is strange. Everything strange, everything amazing, everything that eludes established norms is marvellous. (Carpentier, Baroque and the marvellous real, 101)
In an introduction to his novel The kingdom of this world, he adds to this revision of what should be defined as marvellous, that the “marvellous begins to be unmistakably marvellous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality […], [a sort of] amplification of the scales” (Carpentier, Marvellous Real in America, 86) during which improbable juxtapositions suddenly emerge as dominant features of the real. In this novel set in French occupied Haiti, a simple cook becomes the emperor of the island who, believing that Frenchmen will try to reconquer the island, sets on building a magnificent fortress for he and his people to outlive a 10 years’ siege. Twenty thousand people, men and women, built the fortress atop a 900 meters mountain, for a battle that never came. This, according to Carpentier, is marvellous. While it may appear as an improbable heroic task, the folly of king Henri Christophe was clearly beyond reason and built a reality that could only be possible by “virtue of a specific history, geography, demography, and politics – not by manifesto” (Carpentier, Marvellous Real, 75). The marvellous defended by Carpentier is one that is latent, omnipresent and always in the commonplace.
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