Introduction: the repeating island. From Columbus's machine to the sugar-making machine. From the apocalypse to chaos. From rhythm to polyrhythm. From literature to carnival -- Pt. 1. Society. 1. From the plantation to the Plantation. Hispaniola: the first plantations. The emergence of creole culture. Contraband, repression, and consequences. The island creole and the mainland creole. The Plantation and the Africanization of culture. The Plantation: Sociocultural regularities -- Pt. 2. The Writer. 2. Bartolome de Casas: between fiction and the inferno. Las Casas: Historian or fabulist? Las Casas and slavery. The plague of ants and the uncanny. The piedra soliman: Sugar, genitalia, writing. Derivations from the "Las Casas case" 3. Nicolas Guillen: sugar mill and poetry. From Los ingenios to La zafra. From the libido to the superego. The Communist poet. The controversial poet. The subversive poet. The philosophical poet. 4. Fernando Ortiz: the Caribbean and postmodernity. The Contrapunteo as a postmodern text. Between voodoo and ideology. A danceable language. Knowledge in flight. 5. Carpentier and Harris: explorers of El Dorado. The voyage there. The Path of Words. The trip to El Dorado. Concerning the three voyagers -- Pt. 3. The Book. 6. Los panamanes, or the memory of the skin. The puzzle's next-to-last piece. Displacement toward myth. The "other" Caribbean city. Violence, folklore, and the Caribbean novel. 7. Viaje a la semilla, or the text as spectacle. A canon called the crab. We open the door to the enchanted house. We close the door to the enchanted house. All quiet on the western front. Noise. Directions for reading the black hole. 8. Nino Aviles, or history's libido. Nueva Venecia, an onion. Of palenques and cimarrones. The temptations of Fray Agustin -- Bibliographical notice concerning Chaos.