The three major novels of Miguel angel Asturias

248 Pages·2015·13.43 MB·English

by  Martin, G. M.

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THE THREE MAJOR NOVELS OF lVIIGUEL ANGEL
ASTURIAS: A STUDY IN FICTIONAL METHOD
G.M.MARTIN
Ph.D
University of Edinburgh
1970
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the Department of Education and
Science for granting me the State Studentship which
allowed me to carry out my research; and to the Lever
hulme Trust, for the Overseas Scholarship which took
me to Mexico and Guatemala in 1968-69.
More personally, I am grateful to Professor A.A.
Parker, then of the University of Edinburgh, and Mr.
S.Bacarisse, of the University of St.Andrews, for much
help and encouragement from the very start of my stud
ies; also to Senor Asturias himself, and his wife Dona
Blanca Mora y Araujo de Asturias, for giving me so much
of their time in May and September of 1967 and again in
April 1970.
Above all, my thanks must go to Dr. D.L.Shaw, of
the University of Edinburgh, who for four years has
guided me unfailingly both in and beyond my studies;
and to my wife, Gail Martin, for her help throughout
and especially in the all-important final stages.
April 1970
INDEX
SillJIMARY iv
PREAMBLE 1
I THE CRITICS 3
II THE WRITER 24
III "EL SENOR PRESIDEN11E" 40
IV "HOIVIBRES DE MAI Z" 119
V "MULATA DE TAL" 198
VI IN CONCLUSION 220
BIBLIOGRAPHY 230
-iv-
SUMMARY
1. THE CRITICS. Despite the award of the Nobel Prize
to Miguel Angel Asturias in 1967, he appears to have gone
into decline with the rise of the nueva novela latinoame
ricana. Emir Rodr{guez Monegal's influential but negative
view in "Los dos Asturias" ignores several important points
already raised by G.Yepes-Boscan•s "Asturias, un pretexto
del mito". Asturias' two major innovations are a function
al incorporation of Latin American myth allied to audacious
experimentation with language, and these are the acknowl
edged central features of the "L.ew" novel. El Senor Pre
sidente and Hombres de ma1z together prefigure all the var
ied manifestations of the nueva novela, an example of which
is Asturias• own Mulata de tal.
2. THE WRITER. Asturias is not himself a literary theor-
ist, and has never acted either as critic of his own fict
ion or as its propagandist. He is usually considered a
disorganised, inspirational writer; yet, although he does
not carefully "plan" his novels in advance, he bases them
on a previously conceived central situation, or hecho cen
tral, which "automatically" determines the novel's devel
opment towards a completed pattern. This technique may be
called the creative synthesis.
3. "EL SENOR PRESIDENTE". The novel is a system of pol
arities reconciled through a complex series of poetic cor
relations. In examining and actualising the situation in
Guatemala under Estrada Cabrera's dictatorial regime, As
turias constructs a prose poem on various levels flowing
into a central dualism based on his characteristic real-
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unreal distinction. The novel alternates continuously
between emotive and rational visions of its hecho cen
tral, and thereby succeeds in reproducing the divorce
between perception and conceptualisation in modern ex
istence. The central character, Cara de Angel, _becomes
the central motif of a mosaic closely uniting moral and
aesthetic concerns. In the absence of a true mythical
substratum, the dictator becomes a legend, and the col
lective unconscious of each individual character becom
es the fragmentary "past11 in which he resides, whilst
Cara de Angel constitutes the pool of consciousness whe
rein the varied currents of the novel take their most
precise and definitive form.
4. "HOMBRES DE l\1AIZ". The first half of the novel is
essentially an exposition of a 8emi-mythical, purely In
dian reality, as the descendants of the Maya come into
conflict with the Ladino representatives of modern civ
ilisation. Part VI, the second half, reveals the effect
of this legendary past upon the now partly Westernised
Indians of modern Guatemala through the figures of Ni
cho Aquino (collective unconscious) and Hilario Sacayon
(consciousness). Part VI is thus the pool into which
the earlier currents flow. The structure is determined
by the gradual association of its central male and fem
ale figures with the earth and the rain, respectively,
which together produce the maize of which the Maya be
lieved man to be made.
5 • "IV!ULA TA DE TAL" • The subject matter of the novel,
cultural conflict, requires a narrative technique quite
different from the one employed in the other two novels.
In a relatively short work Asturias moulds a vast num
ber of elements taken from all periods of Guatemalan
history into a homogeneous whole by means of a technique
which is the literary equivalent of the animation proc
ess for film cartoons. The novel is both humorous and
-vi-
violent, highly colourful and almost wholly pictorial,
achieving its effects through the flexibility of its
language and the power of its author's imagination.
These qualities enable Asturias to invent a new appr
oach to character and incident, whilst remaining faith
ful to his earlier work and concerns.
6. CONCLUSION. Asturias' fictional method tends to
produce not the kind of relatively loose development
which is usual in the novel, but a continuous and con
trolled evolution of interlocking parts, of major and
minor motifs, which at plot level is determined by the
possible thematic links between incidents and between
facets of character, and at sentence level by the poss
ible links between words, effected through imagery.
Asturias' close understanding of the relation between
consciousness and the unconscious in the human mind al
lows him in El Seffor Presidente and Hombres de maiz to
build psychic constructs· corresponding to the European
ised life of the ciudad and the essentially Indian life
of the in modern Guatemala. Where each of those
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two novels builds a mind, Mulata de tal builds a cult
ure, the syncretic culture which has evolved from the
clash of those two minds across the ages. It may con
fidently be predicted that Asturias' fiction is destin
ed for triumphant reassessment.
PREAMBLE
The last four years or so have seen a revolution in
the study of Miguel Angel Asturias. Unfortunately, as usu
ally happens with revolutions, the initial result has been
to confuse a situation which, however unsatisfactory, was
at least clear and easy to understand. No lasting definit
ion of his role in the development of Latin American liter
ature in this century has yet appeared, which is naturalo
Nevertheless, critics are now slowly beginning to align
themselves in one of two central camps, and attitudes seem
to be polarising around these critical nuclei, one of which
may be called negative, the other more positive. Despite
agreement with the second of the two views in general terms,
the present study argues from the assumption that neither
those who are for Asturias nor those who are against him have
yet approached his work head on: neither group has really got
to grips with the fundamental mechanisms of his technique.
It is believed that these basic approaches to fictional cre
ation mark Asturias off unmistakably as one of the key fig
ures in the literature of Latin America in this century. New
means of access are urgently required at a time when Asturias
appears to have fallen into obsolescence with the rise of the
nueva novela latinoamericana; it will be suggested that befo
re Asturias is buried beneath the mass of criticism now app
earing in response to the new novel a great deal of work has
still to be doneo
The first chapter is concerned with the views held by
critics, and the kinds of general approach that have been
used up to the present timeo The second chapter considers
Asturias' own often contradictory statements about literature
in general and about his own literary method. There then
follow three individual studies of what are taken to be As
turias• three major achievements: El Senor Presidente, Hom
bres de maiz, and Mulata de tal. Little enough work has
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been devoted to this author's style, and even less to his
fictional method in general. It is argued that although
style is of the utmost importance in any critique of As
turias, it should not overshadow the examination of his
narrative technique as a whole, a technique which tends
constantly towards unity through stylistic devices which
mirror the deeper structure of each novel. This study
attempts to view the one aspect in terms of the other,
and thereby to demonstrate a profound unity in conception
and execution which has not yet been recognised in Astur
ias' work.
CHAPTER I THE CRITICS
The four decisive years for Asturias have been over
lapped by the five years which have seen the Latin Ameri
can novel come to assume a prestige and an importance un
imagined in earlier decades. This is the era of the nueva
novela, the time when Latin America has "caught up". Nov
els like Rayuela, Paradise, Cien anos de soledad, Corona
ci6n, Tres tristes tig~, have either appeared for the
first time or been fully recognised for the first time on
an international scale. In Britain the year of the Parry
Report was the year in which Encounter published the spe
cial number which marked the first British awareness of
the phenomenon, and two editions of the Times Literary
Supplement have since been devoted to it. As for Asturias,
1966 saw him awarded the Lenin Prize for Peace, and appoin
ted Guatemalan Ambassador to France, after 12 years in the
political wilderness; and in 1967 he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature.
Such a bald statement of the facts might seem to sug
gest that Latin American literature has at last come of
age, which is true, and that Asturias is regarded as its
leading exponent, which is not. Indeed, this is very far
from the truth. Despite the appearance of some of the
most perceptive and intelligent articles ever written a
bout his work, and even the odd book or two, Asturias now
appears as a figure gone into a deep declineo The reasons
for this are complex and not always easily understood,
though there is one simplistic but very influential view
which must be considered at the start. It means that to
put this whole matter into perspective we must start from
the present moment, before moving back. And to do this we
must begin with the phenomenon of Emir Rodr1guez Monegal,
the ubiquitous propagandist of the nueva novela latino
americana.