SOURCE: Webb, Barbara J. “The Poetics of Identity and Difference: Black Marsden and Concierto barroco.” In Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant, pp. 129–48. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Webb compares Black Marsden with Alejo Carpentier's Concierto barroco, arguing that both novels narrate a journey in which “the protagonists confront questions of personal identity and the relationship between art and reality.”

The ludic conception of the novel, the play of language, form, and ideas in what Harris calls the “Conception of the Game,” is the context of the reexamination of writing, history, and cultural identity in Harris's Black Marsden (1972) and Carpentier's Concierto barroco (1974). The ludic elements in these two later novels are humor, parody, and above all the self-referentiality of the texts. Theater and carnival are the common paradigms for Harris's and Carpentier's experiments with novelistic form in...