In Carpentier, as in most modern literature, allegory rests on the possibility of carrying the permutations [of allegory] further, to an idea of transcendence that is itself fictional and changeable. That movement away from each metaphor or conceit (the system of ideas to which allegory refers, and more specifically that movable center on which it rests) occurs at the very moment when the implications of a given philosophy threaten the fictionality of the text, by upsetting the balance of the dialectical play.

The plot in Carpentier's stories always moves from exile and fragmentation toward return and restoration, and the overall movement of each text is away from literature into immediacy, whether by a claim to be integrated within a larger context, Latin American reality or history, or by an invocation of the empirical author. But because of the dialectics just sketched, the voyage always winds up in literature...