Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America

3. Identity or Literariness: The Emergence of a New Maya Literature

C entral American narrative textuality has been labeled an “invisible literature,” one that few people read outside of its area of origin due to techniques of market domination.1 This invisibility has a great deal to do with the circulation of cultural products from and in the peripheries, which I label the“marginality of marginality”to evoke the ways that critical disciplines and practices constitute the relevant subjects of literary production and reproduce the invisibility of certain works within hegemonic centers of cultural decision making.This form of“written invisibility” is also related to the contradictions generated by a literature encoded within an indigenous source, such as the Maya-K’iché text Popol Vuh (1540s).2 Even contemporary symbolic figurations in Central American literature differ in significant ways from traditional Western parameters, rendering many of its signs “illegible.” This is a problematic issue for critics who either are unfamiliar with this Mesoamerican cultural matrix or favor urban or metropolitan topics as distinctive signs of Latin American literature’s modernity. In chapter 1 I considered the general literary tendencies that prevailed in Ladino or mestizo cultural-symbolic zones during the guerrilla period so as to better reflect on the new forms emerging in the 1990s. I proceeded to present, in chapter 2, an analysis of Asturias’s Mulata de tal, contending that the novel’s importance and complexity warrant a particular reconsideration of this work, for it signals a phantasmatic delineation of a Maya cosmogony. In this chapter I will trace a short genealogy of the Popol Vuh, working my way up to Gloria Guardia’s El último juego (The last game, 1977) and Roberto Armijo’s El asma de Leviatán (Leviathan’s asthma, 1990) 49 3 Identity or Literariness: The Emergence of a New Maya Literature while incorporating some reflections on Augusto Monterroso’s work and on Asturias’s Hombres de maíz (1949, translated as Men of Maize, 1995). I examine both the indigenous “Mongolian spot” that exists at the heart of mestizo literariness and the perverse role that racism has played in Central America’s referential symbolic horizon.3 I conclude by contrasting contemporary Maya literature to mestizo production, not only to make evident that their parallel lives inevitably lead to fissures in our understanding of what Central American literature might be, but also to propose a different conception of the present-day meaning of “literature.” I argue that certain subaltern forms of textual knowledge can, and do, become functional for contemporary social movements claiming political agency. A Traditional Vision Prefabricated in the 1960s Augusto Monterroso, winner of Spain’s Prince of Asturias literary award in 2000, recounts in Los buscadores de oro (The gold diggers, 1994) that on 23 April 1986, at sixty-five years of age, he was invited to Siena, Italy, shortly after his work had been acclaimed in Spain. After being introduced with lavish praise, he began by saying,“Despite what Professor Melis has said, it is quite probable that you don’t know who is about to speak to you. I will start by recognizing that I am an unknown author or, perhaps more accurately , an ignored one.” He went on to poignantly describe the way he had felt thirty years earlier, weeping at the humiliation of his exile. He realized that he had arrived at “the highest point to which I could aspire as an author from the fourth world of Central America, which was almost like coming from the very first world, from the primal innocence alluded to by Don Luis de Góngora.”4 Monterroso had not yet arrived at the highest point of his career. That happened when he was awarded the Prince of Asturias literary award,which, alongside the Premio Cervantes,is one of the most important literary awards in the Spanish language.Upon receiving the award,Monterroso commented: Central America, as Eduardo Torres could have said it, has always been defeated , both by nature and by enemy ships. . . . But it is my duty to point out, once more, that, as the centuries have gone by, it has not only been bananas that we have produced. I will remind you that our Maya ancestors, refined astronomers and mathematicians who invented zero as a mathematical concept 50 Identity or Literariness before any other civilization,had their own cosmogony in what we know today as the Popol Vuh, the national book...