¹ The Russian formalists established a useful distinction between the story line, which they called the fable and the narrative structure or “plot,” which they called sujet. The fable is the basic story stuff, the sum-total of events to be related in the work of fiction; its order is that of realistic temporal-causal sequence; it is not truly a literary entity, part of an esthetic structure, but rather the raw material that is elaborated in the sujet. Narrative structure or sujet is the artistically constructed arrangement of events, the story as actually told. According to Victor Erlich—Russian Formalism (The Hague, 1955) p. 211—the difference between fable and sujet “lies often in the deviation from the natural chronological sequence, in temporal displacements.” See also Austin Warren and René Wellek, Theory of Literature (New York, 1956), p. 208.

² In Los pasos perdidos (Mexico, 1953), history is viewed as a process of development and degeneration. Contrasted to the purity of primitive human forms of life, our modern epoch, which has produced the empty culture of the great cities and barbaric and frightening social disorders, undoubtedly is the most vile. Carpentier evokes a lost Golden Age (actually referring to two separate periods: the age of great art of the past and, more remotely, the age of original innocence) and this retrospective nostalgia forms the basis of the mechanically simple structure of the novel: the narrator regresses through various historical levels as he moves through space from the coastal city to the heart of the jungle.

³ All page references to El acoso are taken from La guerra del tiempo (Mexico, 19S8).

⁴ In an introductory comment to the English translation—Manhunt, in Noonday 2 (New York, 1959), p. 109—the author forewarns the reader that there are two characters in his tale. The sections dealing with the ticket-taker are set off in this edition bv the use of italics.

⁵ In his analysis of the techniques of the stream-of-consciousness novel, Robert Humphrey—Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley, 1958)—discusses the necessity of creating, in the absence of a unifying external drama, formal links to hold together the scattered materials of psychic processes: “If … the stream-of-consciousness writer cannot draw on the conventional use of plot to provide a necessary unity, he must devise other methods. … This accounts for the unusual reliance on formal patterns which is found in the works of stream-of-consciousness fiction” (p. 86). He lists several kinds of patterns: 1) the unities (time, place, character, and action); 2) leitmotifs; 3) previously established literary patterns; 4) symbolic structures; 5) formal scenic arrangements; 6) natural cyclical schemes; 7) theoretical cyclical schemes (musical structures, cycles of history, etc.). In El acoso, the fable does offer the materials for a conventional plot, but the author has deliberately chosen to fracture it, replacing chronological order with an apparently illogical sequence.

⁶ Boris Tomashevsky, in his Teoriya Kteratury (Moscow, 4th ed., 1928), makes these distinctions between dynamic and static motifis and between connected and free motifs. Free motifs are usually static, but not all static motifs are free (pp. 138–139; based on notes by James E. Irby on unpublished translated selections).

⁷ On p. 153, it obviously refers to the will of God; on p. 185, it stands as emblem for the heroic illusions of the protagonist; on p. 228, in connection with the short distance between the University and the prison cell where he informed, it points to the abyss separating his first enthusiasm and the abomination of his betrayal (“lo corto que habîa sido el tránsito entre aquel edificio de altos peristilios, con el HOC ERAT IN VOTIS que podía leerse a distancia … y la fortaleza expiatoria, tenebrosa, donde le tocara vomitar abyectamente—‘cantar,‘ llamaban a eso—lo aprendido de hombres encontrados, mal encontrados, en los pasillos de las Facultades,” p. 228). The source of the quotation, the opening words of Horace's Satire, “The Country Mouse” (Satires ii, 6, 1) provides an ironic reminiscence for this tale of a disastrous displacement from country to city. Nor are these words the only assertion of divine will before which man must submit. Carpentier prefaces Part ii, which relates the past life of the Hunted One, with this quotation from Job x.13: “Aunque encubras estas cosas en tu corazón yo sé que de todas te has acordado.” The words of the Biblical citation, echoed twice within the story, assume, in addition to the notion of God's omnipotence and omniscience, the connotation of a desired forgetfulness on the part of the fugitive, the obliteration or concealment of painful memories: “aunque haya tratado de encubrirlo” introduces the recall of one of his betrayals; he longs for the peace of church naves to “liberarme de cuanto tengo encubierto en el corazón” (p. 250).

⁸ In his discussion of the composition of modern novels, Enrique Anderson Imbert—“Formas en la novela contemporánea” in Crítica interna (Madrid, 1960)—describes El acoso as “un rompecabezas de trebejos cuidadosamente mezclados”; the pattern emerges clearly with a second reading: “A la primera lectura sentimos vértigo. A la segunda lectura el caos se ilumina en una espléndida geometría” (p. 270).

⁹ While the taquillero's narrative (Part i, section one) describes the sensuous incitements of the warm night and the bare backs of gowned women, the contemporaneous action in the Acosado's narrative (Part ii, section twelve) tells how the fugitive and the Becario witness the violent coupling of two negroes on the beach; they see them depersonified, reined: “un nuevo relámpago iluminó, por un segundo, un cuerpo en metamorfosis. … De pronto, aquella carne anudada rodó del banco, con desplome de odre caído” (p. 262). The carnal forces linking Acosado and laquillero through Estrella here unite the two stories in a moment of time.

¹⁰ We know that the day is Sunday because the previous morning the pursued man heard the children singing “Tilingo, tilingo—Mariana es domingo” (p. 194).

¹¹ One can reconstruct the following schedule: on a Saturday, two weeks before the day of the concert, the protagonist successfully carries out the Antología de oradores project—the book explodes, killing the addressee (pp. 225, 244); that evening he goes to Estrella's house and the next morning is arrested in the cafe where he usually takes coffee (p. 244). After two days in jail without food, he breaks down at the beginning of torture and informs (pp. 244–246); through the intercession of the A Ito Personaje, he is released the next morning (p. 247); that afternoon he sees the newspaper photographs of his murdered comrades and barely escapes death at the hands of unseen gunmen in a speeding car (it is Carnival, for he sees “un automóvil negro de placa oculta por una marafia de serpentinas—pues se estaba en carnavales,” p. 248). He seeks aid from various acquaintances but is everywhere rejected until at one place he receives, “como una limosna,” the new bill (p. 207); his old nurse, overcome with pity, agrees to hide him in the decrepit mansion (pp. 201–202); this probably occurs on Ash Wednesday; soon afterwards he undergoes a religious conversion (p. 193), and the old woman lends him the prayer book with the Cross of Calatrava on its cover from which he derives his first religious instruction (pp. 153, 186, 256); when the old woman takes to her bed, he must confine himself to the belvedere (p. 171); he suffers hunger and falls unconscious for three days (p. 188); he eats the old woman's soup (pp. 188–192) that day and the next (the Sunday of the concert), when she dies (pp. 198–199). The subsequent events, from the old woman's wake to the racing ambulance that cuts between him and his pursuers (pp. 204–264), are arranged in chronological order—his brief appearance at the wake, his visit to Estrella, her attempt to go to the house of the Alto Personaje, the incident with the cab driver, his wanderings through the city, the encounter with the priest and later with the Becario.

¹² This reminds us of the interpolations of past scenes in the classic epic, which are also inserted as present foreground actions, but the intent of Carpentier in using this technique, as well as its effect in the total structure, is quite different.

¹³ One character is consistently portrayed as the embodiment of timelessness—Estrella, in her own eyes “inmovilidad y espéra” (p. 214); the ticket-taker is sensitively aware of her waiting quietude: “la que esperaba—no podía pensarla sino esperando” (p. 143); “Aquel billete que le haría dueño de la casa sin relojes” (p. 146); “percibiendo, como siempre, que desde el instante en que hubiera llamado a la puerta, los pensamientos, sensaciones y actos, se sucederían en un orden invariable … El ‘hoy’ se reiteraba en una apetencia sin fecha” (p. 156).

¹⁴ “El tiempo dejaba de acarrear sonidos incohérentes para verse encuadrado, organizado, sometido a una previa voluntad humana, que hablaba por los gestos del Medidor de su Transcurso (Los pasos perdidos, p. 21). The composer does not relinquish his authority over time at death: ”Conservaba derechos de propriedad sobre el tiempo, imponiendo lapsos de atención o de fervor a los hombres del futuro“ (pp. 21–22). In music, man solidifies time so that one can speak of ”un tiempo hecho casi objeto por el sometimiento a encuadres de fuga o de forma sonata“ (p. 22).