This chapter discusses the concept of revolution in Carpentier’s works, as it moves from an enthusiastic critique of the modern social order to leftist melancholia. As Rojas shows in his readings of Carpentier’s articles for Carteles and correspondence with José Antonio Portuondo, Carpentier did not take a clear stance toward Stalinism while living in Paris. When living in Venezuela, his Diario is full of critical allusions to the party’s “yoke.” However, a poetics of revolution can be found in his narrative and can be characterized as melancholic in its emphasis on cyclical patterns and on unfinished revolutions. Carpentier’s focus on the global revolutions that made the modern world order beginning in the eighteenth century narrows down in his last epic novel, La consagración de la primavera.

Approaches to La consagración de la primavera tend to consider that its central aspects are the historical and the autobiographical, judging the text for its ideological dimension and its stance on the Cuban Revolution. However, the omnipresent discourse on the arts and the figure of the artist, the way in which this is dealt with within the narration, as well as the intermedial devices used in it, confer on Carpentier’s penultimate novel the timelessness and universality of the Great Works. By textual analysis and a comprehension of the functioning of Carpentier’s aesthetic system, this chapter offers a humanist reading of a novel rooted in the dream of being a total work that metaphorically encompasses all arts and the writer’s own previous oeuvre.