Study Questions for Carpentier's The Lost Steps
by Thad Curtz (for Politics of Identity)

1. The fundamental question, as always - What can this book contribute to deepening your understanding of the program's theme, the politics of identity, or to raising new questions for you about the issues we are working on...

2. Begin at the beginning - the title...

Play around with it before you begin the book and see how many possible meanings for the title you can come up with. Are steps stairs, strides, musical intervals...? Is lost forgotten, deprived of, bewildered (like a "lost soul", in perdition)...? (The title in Spanish is Los Pasos Perdidos.)

3. Who's telling the story? And when?

Are some of these episode diary entries? Is he writing it all at the end, after the experience is all over?

What can you tell about the narrator simply from the way he talks and the way he tells the story, as opposed to anything that he tells you about himself? Why do you suppose we never learn his name?

In the middle of the journey, describing his responses to the landscape, he says, "... this gave an air of reality to the novel I was forging..." What is the narrator making out of his experiences as he goes along? How does he do it? For example, why does he keep capitalizing things? What kinds of comparisons does he make? What guesses and assumptions does he make about what other people are feeling and thinking? To what extent would you say that the book itself involves "...deriving, from talking ill of himself, a kind of pleasure..." (p. 22)? Is "forging a novel" different from "...giving ourselves over to the wonder of myth" (p. 144)? Different from interpreting experience through astrology as Mouche does? Different from the gigantic "scene" that he describes Ruth creating at the end of the book? Does he think so? Do you?

You might say that the narrator's life has "turned from sea-green to mold-green" (p. 2). Precisely how would you describe this change in the narrator's life? What are its causes? How far back can you trace them? To his sea voyages with Maria? To "..an uprooting that had made me live two adolescences" (p. 9)? To one or both of his parents?

Most important overall question, by far: Does the novel as a whole harmonize with and support the narrator's views, or are we supposed to read it as displaying his shortcomings and failures as a person from beginning to end? Pay attention to your opinion about this as you read the book. Keep track of anything that you think is evidence, one way or the other, to help us try to sort out this question.

4. Some things you might free-write about before you begin, or in short breaks while you are studying the novel.

a. Make a list of anything that you personally think is wrong (if anything) with modern civilization, modern culture, and how people live in big cities. In what ways do the narrator's views agree or disagree with yours?

b. Make a list of the ways in which earlier moments in human culture survive in your own life - moments (if there are any) at which you have felt that you are re-experiencing some earlier phase of your own personal life, or some earlier phase of huuman history. In what ways (if any) does each of these regressions seem valuable to you? In what ways (if any) do you view each of them as something to try to avoid?

c. In reading this book, many of you may experience considerable gaps between the narrator's culture and values and your own. As a student, working on educating yourself, what do you think the most useful steps for dealing with such gaps are? How do those steps compare or contrast with the steps that the narrator takes to deal with the gaps he experiences between his own culture and those he encounters on his journey?

d. What do you think is the point or value or significance (if any) of composing classical music? (Not just of creating art, although that might be a good place to begin with this question, but of creating music in particular.) What does the narrator think about this? What light do the encounters with other musicians and other kinds of music in the book throw on this question?

5. The allusions and references to other works

On practically every page, this narrator talks about some work or some person that many readers will not know about. Presumably, the author was well aware that this was going to happen. How do these references make you feel as a reader? Why do you suppose he decided to do it this way?

Some short-term advice about how to deal with this issue. Some of the time, you can guess, just as you should when you encounter some word that you don't know. Use the context; read ahead a little if you need to; imagine as much as you can about what the work or the person must be like from what he does say and imply about it; keep going. Sometimes, you can ask somebody. Sometimes, you may want or need to go to the library. You can call up the reference librarian at X6252 and ask brief questions. We have put a few of the texts that are most central on reserve so that you can go experience them yourselves more easily. We highly recommend that you spend some time doing this as part of studying this book- they are all quite wonderful in their own ways, and, of course, knowing something about them will help you understand what the narrator is thinking and feeling when he talks about them.

On Reserve:

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (The final choral movement, the "Ode to Joy," is mostly what the narrator refers to.)
Homer's Odyssey (a summary of the story, and a translation)
Shelly's Prometheus Unbound (a summary, and the poem)
Rimbaud's "Le Bateau Ivre" ("The Drunken Boat"), and a few pages about his career
A little stuff about Sisyphus

6. Relations of the characters

Make a picture or a diagram showing the three central women in the story and the psychological dynamics of the narrator's relationships with each of them. (You might begin by thinking about their names, and their occupations: Jean and the theatre, Mouche and astrology, Rosario and prayers.) What do these relationships have to do with earlier ones in the narrator's life - with Maria del Carmen, "the daughter of the gardener"; with Saint Rose of Lima (p. 11); with his mother?

7. Other structural questions

a. The first paragraph

Why begin here? Why is the sensation that "time had turned back" a "distressing" one for the narrator?

How does this scene with ..."the elms I had helped to plant during the first enthusiastic days when we had all lent our hands to the common enterprise...", compare and contrast with his experiences at the jungle city of Santa Monica de los Venados?

b. This book has chapters and "episodes" (presumably the little numbered sections). Why not just episodes? What makes each chapter a chapter? Is each one a step? If so, how? Is each one a lost step?

c. There are several transition zones in this experience - when do they occur, and what are they like?

8. Some themes to pay attention to

a. The various ways in which the past interacts with the present, or doesn't. Which are good, which are bad, and why?

b. "The multitudinous world of the drama" (p. 5) Which sorts of theatricality are good, which are bad, and why? Compare, for example, p. 1 and p. 159; are the narrator's assesments of these different ways of playing roles valid, or not?

c. Keep track of places where he uses music figuratively, as a way to talk about things besides music. To give a couple of examples more or less at random, consider "All about me everyone was busy at his own work in a harmonious concert of duties that were those of a life moving to a primordial rythm." (p. 173) or "Bullets were rebounding from the metal lampposts, making them vibrate like organ pipes hit by a rock." (p. 49.) Focus on a few of these references that seem especially interesting, and see what you can figure out about how they affect you as a reader.

d. Origins

Why is he so interested in origins? How is the vision of the origins of music that he arrives at in the jungle different from his first theory about this question?

e. Fear and fortitude. Who's afraid of what? Is there anyone in the book who isn't afraid of anything?

f. Time - how it passes, how it is experienced...

g. Death - ways of dying and ways of dealing with death

h. Kinds of knowledge and kinds of ignorance - what's the status of "the bizarre image" (p. ), of thinking?

i. Tyranny and Freedom/ Order and Anarchy

How does his attitude toward composing (bottom p. 14) fit with his disgust at being "always subject to the will of others" (p. 16)

j. Reality/Myth/Fiction

In the author's note which preceeds the book, Carpentier goes to some trouble to tell us that the relation between the novel and the world changes as the book proceeds. How would you describe his account of this relationship, "beyond the place called Puerto Anunciacion" (p. v). Does this note make any difference to how you approach the book? If so, what?