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Reviewed by:
  • Miguel Angel Asturias’s Archeology of Return
  • Gordon Brotherston
René Prieto, Miguel Angel Asturias’s Archeology of Return. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 307 pp.

Given its significance, Miguel Angel Asturias’s work remains seriously understudied, as René Prieto reminds us when presenting this new contribution of his. The archaeology in his title is to be taken literally insofar as it points to Asturias’s particular involvement with the Maya culture that has such ancient roots in Guatemala. As the focus of three successive chapters, Prieto takes a trio of works which have a Maya substratum and which mark the beginning, middle, and end of Austurias’s career as a writer: Leyendas de Guatemala (1930), Hombres de maíz (1949), and Mulata de tal (1963). Situating and comparing them enables him to gauge Asturias’s originality within American traditions of indigenismo.

At the same time, each of the three works is discussed as a moment in the story of Asturias’s own life and of the world he inhabited. Hence, Leyendas corresponds to the years in Europe which first opened Asturias’s eyes to the dazzling wealth of Maya culture and cured him of his initial racism. Hombres de maíz parallels and defends the brave attempts of Arévalo and his successor Arbenz to heal decades and centuries of savage white oppression in Guatemala. And Mulata is read as testimony to the incoherence and yet more violent oppression that followed on Arbenz’s U.S.-backed deposal. [End Page 430]

As Prieto himself makes quite clear, his readings of these three major statements and of Asturias’s literary production in general benefit from advances in criticism of recent years. He points especially to Marc Cheymol’s 1987 account of Asturias’s journalism in the 1920s, and to Gerald Martin’s monumental edition of Hombres de maíz (1981; it is a pity he was not able to consult the revised and much enhanced 1992 ALLCA version of this work). He also notes that he himself has explored firsthand the Parisian archives on which his predecessors have drawn so profitably .

The main strengths of Prieto’s study are that in sustaining a particular approach to Asturias’s indigenismo, he causes the three chosen works to illuminate each other, as part of a highly defined series. In this, Rama, Guzmán Böckler, and others provide a firm basis for his working definition of indigenismo, which stresses the need not so much to integrate Maya populations into the nation state as positively to respect their culture and language in their own right. Hence we find an implicit critique not just of the reactionary landowners but of Marxist programs which fail to acknowledge the particularity of indigenous practices that have evolved over centuries and millennia. Following Martin closely, Prieto shows how the underlying coherence of Asturias’s central work, Hombres de maíz (1949), resides in just the scheme also proposed at that date by President Arévalo: the Maya would not be collectivized but encouraged to develop socially within the framework of their own culture. In the novel this is worked out in the story that begins with the massacre of Gaspar Ilóm’s community, where the world is understood in the terms of the Popol vuh, and which culminates in Goyo Yic’s new maize-growing community in Pisigüilito.

Prieto differentiates between the various ways in which Maya culture impinges on Asturias’s three works, from the kind of ideological impact just noted to the more formal questions of language, character, and narrative techniques. Here, he goes so far as to suggest that for Asturias Maya served as a “generative grammar”; and he deconstructs paradigms and enumerations in the novel which have their ultimate roots in Maya ritual (a subject which, however, he would have been wise to have approached with more caution, given its technical complexity). One might quibble at Prieto’s use of the term “neo-indigenismo” to categorize Asturias’s distinctive procedures; and he is surely wrong to suggest that Asturias was somehow more in tune with native language than was José María Arguedas in Peru. Indeed, in order to understand Asturias...

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