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I n one of the many provocative scenes of Asturias’s novel Mulata de Tal (1963, translated as Mulata, 1967), the aged Nana Hollín covers her naked body with leftovers so that dogs can lick her.1 Even though in this orgiastically bestial act she ends up covered with dog urine and is so badly bitten on her genitals that she cannot cure herself afterward, Hollín enjoys herself as a child would because she believes that, at this stage of her life, only dogs dare to caress her given how old, ugly, and wrinkled she is.2 Other visceral scenes from this novel highlight sex, bodily excretions, and personal suffering. Consider, for instance, the moment when the ugly dwarf Huasanga goes to the land of the giants to plead that her husband, Chiltic, be handed over to her. Jealous, the giantess Giroma (Chiltic’s first wife, when he was still known as Celestino) throws her to the bottom of a latrine. She is rescued from a horrible death by the church sexton. He, a hunchback like all inhabitants of Tierrapaulita, tries in turn to possess her, thinking that she embodies the mushroom that straightens backbones. Huasanga is saved from this second ignominy by flies that are attracted by the excrement covering her entire body. This grotesque description is not at all atypical in this singular novel. If readers were to notice only the contents without perceiving the underlying rhythm, tone, and what Gerald Martin calls “the to-and-fro organization of the syntax,” they might presume that they were simply reading a sadistic text.3 As I suggested in chapter 1, Asturias’s Mulata was the most innovative novel to come out of Central America during the 1960s.The importance and 26 2 Erotic Transgression and Recodification of Values in Asturias’s Mulata complexity of this forgotten masterpiece by the 1967 Nobel laureate, one that is still practically ignored by critics to this day, warrants a special chapter .4 My comments here are concerned with the sexual and fecal codes operating within it. This undertaking might appear odd at first, but I argue that the sexual symbology of Mulata articulates a reading that will allow us to understand the protagonists as masochist subjects, and their symbolic powerlessness in turn makes a political reading possible.5 The politics might be unusual, but they represent the legacy of transgressive surrealist experience that Asturias learned from Robert Desnos in the 1920s.6 It may seem bizarre that at the peak of his politicization Asturias would have written what appears to be simply a sexually transgressive novel. However , we have to understand that, for Asturias, the body is always a political body as well. Following this line of thought, I will argue that, to exacerbate Guatemala’s post-1954 defeat and make it visible, the masculine representation is rhetorically expelled in the text in favor of the feminine or maternal element.7 In this lettered symbolization, the Mulata can be seen as evidence of the fantasy of the “phallic woman” in a Freudian sense, representing, among other things (because a symbol is not an allegory and embodies a multiplicity of meanings), the oppressed individual’s capacity for resistance in the populist tradition that all avant-garde writers of the 1920s attempted to embrace. This fantasy is associated with a subconscious desire to represent a castration complex that one can easily trace throughout the novel, thus complicating the apparent simplicity of the Mulata as emblematic of the oppressed. This unexpected complication is typical of Asturias, who always shies away from linear simplicity. In this case, he alludes to the inner demons of the masses: contrary, irrational, ambiguous, and untrustworthy, yet seductive, dynamic, sexy, and irresistible at the same time. These symbolisms signal the paradox of populism typical in the author’s work, one that celebrates the popular aspect of the masses while simultaneously yearning for an aristocratic, cosmopolitan aestheticism. I also propose that the masochism present in the text is part of Asturias’s framework to represent the sociopolitical situation of Guatemala. For him, the events of 1954—an invasion sponsored by the CIA that overthrew a democratically elected government and unleashed thirty-seven years of civil war—were devastating. Intuitively, he not only understood them as epitomizing a loss of autonomy (both personal and social), but also grasped that his nation had been the victim of the clash of two competing social systems, Erotic Transgression in Asturias’s Mulata 27 [3...

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