Miguel Ángel Asturias.
“The earth falls dreaming from the stars, but awakens in
what once were green mountains, now the barren peaks of Ilóm, where the
guarda’s song wails out across the ravines, the hawk swoops headlong, the giant
ants march, the dove sighs, and where sleeps, with his mat, his shadow and his
woman, he who should hack the eyelids of those who fell the trees, singe the
eyelashes of those who burn the forest, and chill the bodies of those who dam
the waters of the river that sleeps as it flows and sees nothing until trapped
in pools it opens its eyes and sees all with its deep water gaze …
Men of Maize
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what
you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.”
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do
not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its
luminous summits.”
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1
Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974) is a pivotal figure for
anyone who wants to understand Latin American culture and the anti‑imperialist
struggle. His fiction and political writing—above all Hombres de maíz (Men of Maize) and El señor presidente
(Mr President) combine a literature of the oppressed with a critique of
oligarchy, comprador rule and imperialist intervention. Hombres de maíz in
particular provides a complex myth‑social account of indigenous life
and capitalist dispossession.
Having said that, outside of the work of Gerald Martin and a
few others, Miguel Ángel Asturias has been, for a long time, treated by the
literary establishment in Latin America and around the world like a “dead dog”,
and not content with that, they have continued to pile a further amount of other
dead dogs upon his literary reputation.
One of the primary reasons for the cultural abandonment of Asturias
has been decades of political and cultural reaction, with dire consequences. The
professors, critics and journalists who make up what is called the
intelligentsia want no part of Asturias’s sharp critique of both Yankee
imperialism and its oligarch friends in Latin America.
There is a hostility amongst these layers to his tireless commitment
to social truth, to historical and psychological reality, his building up of
his characters’ situations and dilemmas, his engagement with towering
questions, including many of the essential facts of class society, critique of Latin
American illusions and delusions, his refusal to flatter his readers, all this
continues to fly in the face of contemporary academic pettiness and
subjectivism, lazy, irrationalist postmodernism and political timidity.
While that dire situation has apparently not changed much,
there have been slight but significant recent developments regarding this great
writer's work. David Ungar’s excellent new translation of the 1946 novel El
Señor Presidente (Mr President) by Ángel Asturias was published in 2022. While
welcoming this critical event, several reviewers bemoaned the “strange lack of
interest in the author in the English-speaking world.”[1]
On April 25th 2025, Penguin republished Men of
Maize with a translation by Gerald Martin, and in 2026, Verso Publications will
release an English translation of "Weekend in Guatemala" by the
renowned academic David Lee. The book is an essential collection of stories
written in anger after the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of the Guatemalan
government.
Men of Maize, Asturias’s 1949 novel, is considered by many to be his most essential work, yet it remains one of the least understood novels he wrote. Asturias himself said of it as “a singular,
difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.”
Hector Tober goes so far as to call it “Asturias’s Mayan
masterpiece, his Indigenous Ulysses, a deep dive into the forces
that made and kept the Maya a subservient caste, and the perpetual resistance
that kept Guatemala’s many Mayan cultures alive and resilient. Like most people
born in Guatemala, Asturias likely had some Indigenous ancestry, even though
his father, a judge, was among the minority of Guatemalans who could trace
their Spanish heritage to the seventeenth century. When the dictatorship of
Manuel Estrada Cabrera (later the subject of Asturias’s novel Mr
President) sent the future author’s father and family into internal exile in
the Maya-centric world of the provincial Alta Verapaz, the young Miguel Ángel
fell deeply into the great well of Indigenous culture for the first time.”[2]
Miguel Ángel
Asturias and the origins of magical realism
Asturias has long been credited with originating the Magical Realism style of writing. His novel El Señor Presidente (published 1946) prefigures the techniques later associated with Magical Realism. As Rafael Azul points out in his excellent article Gabriel García Márquez: A giant in the literature of the Americas, “Making the experiences of Latin American social struggle, repression, and tyranny the subject of his literary effort was not unique to García Márquez. Mister President (El Señor Presidente), by the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, who was exiled in Paris, was published in Mexico in 1946. The novel details the assembly line quality of sadistic brutality meted out by an unnamed dictator in an unnamed Central American nation. The novel, a blend of surrealism and naturalism, inaugurated a new style, magical realism, that characterised the later literary boom on the continent. García Márquez became one of its masters. By incorporating fantasy and magic into their narratives, Asturias, García Márquez, and others sought to represent reality, including the reality of human consciousness, in all its facets and complexities. Memories, native myths and fantastic beings are all integrated in the stories. The characters travel back and forth in time, and their memories of the past become activated in the present. The dead intervene in the lives of the living. All this is done not as a means of escaping or masking reality, but as a way of penetrating it.[3]
Any examination of Asturias’s work must situate it in the
concrete social and political conditions of Central America—U.S. imperial
intervention, oligarchic rule, and the class domination that produced mass
dispossession and terror. Asturias wrote amid the rise of authoritarian regimes
and open imperial interference in the region. The grotesque continuity of
oligarchic power, state terror and foreign corporate influence created a social
reality in which everyday life often had the character of a nightmare and the
irrational. Magical realism emerges when lived experience itself is surreal:
mass violence, dispossession, and ideological mystification produce a popular
consciousness that mixes myth, memory, and the uncanny. Asturias’s novels
compress these social facts into narrative forms that reveal the social
totality behind individual pathology.
Asturias does not merely adorn his prose with “magical”
elements for aesthetic effect. His technique fuses myth, surreal episodes and
symbolic grotesquerie to expose the law of motion of class rule: how state
power, landholding elites and imperial influence reproduce domination. This
method both records popular memory and refracts historical processes through
mythic forms—an approach that can illuminate social contradictions when read
dialectically.
It should be warned against reading Asturias too uncritically.
His examination of myths, while important, is no substitute for a concrete examination
of social relations. There is, of course, a danger that idealist constructions
can hide real social relations. Leon Trotsky insisted that aesthetic form must be
abstracted from its social and class roots: the formalist separation of form
from content obscures the class forces that shape cultural production. As
Trotsky wrote
“It is unquestionably true that economic conditions do not
create the need for art. But neither is the need for food made by economics. On
the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. Indeed, one
cannot always rely on Marxist principles in deciding whether to accept or
reject a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by
its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and
how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in
other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for
another, and why. It would be childish to think that every class can entirely
and fully create its own art from within itself, and, particularly, that the
proletariat is capable of creating a new art by means of closed art guilds or
circles, or by the Organisation for Proletarian Culture [Proletkult], etc.
Generally speaking, the artistic work of man is continuous. Each new rising
class places itself on the shoulders of its preceding one. But this continuity
is dialectical, that is, it finds itself through internal repulsions and
breaks. New artistic needs or demands for new literary and creative points of
view are stimulated by economics through the development of a new class, and
minor stimuli are supplied by changes in the class's position under the
influence of its growing wealth and cultural power. Artistic creation is always
a complicated turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new
stimuli originating outside art. In this large sense of the word, art is a
handmaiden. It is not a disembodied element feeding on itself, but a function
of social man indissolubly tied to his life and environment.[4]
Asturias’s life work must be read as a socio-historical
document, not as an ahistorical ornament. Studying Miguel Ángel Asturias
scientifically is not an inward-looking cultural exercise; it is a political
weapon to expose the roots of oppression.
Notes
Revisiting Men of Maize: Historical Truths, Literary Distortions, and Asturias in Today’s Guatemala -Elaine Elliott
Tall Tales Made to Order: The Making of Myth in Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias René Prieto: MLN, Vol. 101, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1986), pp. 354-365
Myth As Time and Word by Ariel Dorfman
Myth and Social Realism in Miguel Angel
Asturias-Luis Leal
A Literary Study of Magical Realism in Hombres
de Maíz -LIU Lu-yao
[1]
See keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2024/07/mr-president-by-miguel-angel-asturias.html
[2]
On Asturias’s Men of Maize- August 16, 2024-www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/08/16/on-asturiass-men-of-maize/
[3]
www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/05/14/marq-m14.html
[4]
The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism-Literature and Revolution-www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch05.htm
