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This essay examines the intersections of architecture and literature in the work of Alejo Carpentier. It makes use of original research performed at the Fundación Alejo Carpentier to analyze the role of the agora, the central square of Ancient Greece, in El siglo de las luces (1962). In that novel, Carpentier presents the agora on the island of Guadeloupe as a subversive site of social, commercial, and political action. A close study of the festive, insurgent activities of the central square in Carpentier’s work demonstrates the connections between the agora as he perceives it and Michel de Certeau’s theory of the practice of everyday life. This observation gains further meaning when the essay places the novel within the context of the oil boom in Caracas, where Carpentier lived from 1945-59. In newspaper articles he published in El Nacional in the 1950s, Carpentier declares the social function of the agora to be endangered by the new construction wave of those years. Finally, the essay shows how Carpentier gradually incorporates the chaotic new architecture of Caracas into his notion of “lo barroco americano,” thus celebrating the capacity of Latin American literature and architecture to transform disparate styles into a synthetic, resilient aesthetic vision he calls the neobaroque.
