Men of Maize: Myth as Time and Language

A strange fate has befallen Miguel Angel Asturias's masterpiece, Men of Maize. Along with Alejo Carpentier's remarkable The Kingdom of This World, which was also published in 1949, it could well be said to inaugurate the extraordinary renaissance of the contemporary Latin American novel. And yet it has been consistently underrated by critics and neglected by readers.

Most critics seem to feel it to be a confusing, explosive splinter, not easily cataloged in Asturias's production. They prefer the dynamic coherence of the previously published and more famous El Señor Presidente, and would probably have liked to proceed in orderly fashion from that novel about the internal tyranny of a country to the Banana Trilogy with which Asturias, some years later, would portray the external tyranny of imperialism. They feel Men of Maize to be deficient, lacking in unity, unwieldy and fragmented, a generic amalgam. Readers seem to agree, finding the novel boring or difficult—a conclusion I base on numerous conversations and the even more telling fact of its three sparse editions (1949, 1954, 1957), until, after a ten-year delay, Editorial Losada, its hand forced by the Nobel prize, has finally brought out a fourth edition.

Even those few critics who recognize Men of Maize's outstanding qualities, have had to accept the arguments of its detractors, affirming its greatness in spite of its defects. Giuseppe Bellini, for instance, who has given it the most affectionate consideration, asserts that its unity is not to be found in the plot but rather in the "climate." In order to transmit the "spirit of Guatemala," he suggests, or because it is a "symphonic poem" which mixes the social and the mythic spheres, its structure is inevitably dispersed.

If we are to rescue a work that has contributed so significantly to the founding of a new dynasty in Latin American fiction, a new way of transmitting and understanding our reality, we must go beyond such vague generalizations. Only a close reading of its six parts, attempting to find the novel's hidden unity, will allow, I believe, a real understanding of the significance and originality of Men of Maize, the reason why it should be considered a major source for the new forms of fiction that were to be written on our continent in the following decades.

Gaspar Ilóm

The first chapter tells how Gaspar Ilóm, the chief of the lands of Horn, begins a war against those who plant corn for commercial reasons. Señor Tomás Machojón, instigated by his wife, poisons the chief, and the latter, abandoned by his wife, la Piojosa Grande, drinks the river to pacify his guts, thus saving himself. But he gains nothing thereby, since Colonel Chalo Godoy has taken advantage of his absence to kill the Indian fighters. Gaspar throws himself into the river so as not to have to survive his warriors.

This action must be deciphered by the reader, who will find himself submerged in a buzzing swarm of words that float dreamlike between the real and the fictional. One must interpret, break the linguistic spells, and uncover within that flowing cavern the profile of a meaning. This narrative method serves to indicate that we are confronting a moment, at the beginning of the book, in which dream and reality cohabit, in which the mythic is still fully incarnate in man, in which the human and the natural worlds are interchangeable.

Using certain magical, iterative formulas, the "ground" tries to awaken Gaspar Horn, who is sleeping, buried, "unable to break away from a snake of six hundred thousand twists of mud, moonlight, forests, springs, birds and echoes which he felt around his body." The earth "falls dreaming," but he cannot go on sleeping because there is no shade, no vegetation, "he awakens among what were once mountains, but are now the bare hills of Horn"; it (the earth) has been violated, snatched from its natural, sacred, state, thus making impossible the magical union of man and nature, the primordial link that is possible in a prelogical, unreal stage, where everything sleeps and everything dreams, not like now, a present in which there exists "corn-growing land filled with stagnant water from being awake so much." Provoked by the action of the corn growers who burn the vegetation in order to be able to grow corn for sale, offended by the destruction of her shade-filled forests which are converted into useless gold, desperately needing to go back to sleep and to make magic, nature orders Gaspar Horn to destroy the sowers, to install a symmetry of retribution, doing to them what they have done to the earth: "chop out the eyebrows of those who put axe to trees, burn the eyelids of those who burn the forest and freeze the bodies of those who stop the water." The cleansing from evil is proclaimed, and the return to balance, and revenge upon those who have separated man from nature. This loss of origin, a theme that runs throughout Astu-rias's work, necessarily brings oppression and exploitation in its wake, whether it comes from a local dictator, a Spanish conquistador, or the North American Empire. Corn "sown to be eaten is the sacred nourishment of man, who was made of corn. Sown for business it is the hunger of man who was made of corn." There are two types of men of maize, those who live in the magical plenitude of a sensual continuity with nature, the forms of a dream, of a sleep, and those who live in wakefulness, hunger, and death. The latter are uprooted, lose their roots, not only in a metaphorical sense, but also really and literally, becoming vagabonds upon the earth, deniers of the sacred vegetable growth. Therefore, the picaresque is ever-present in all of Asturias's production and in this work in particular: the directionless wandering in search of food, the absurd pilgrimage, a wind which passes again and again and brings ruin, which "will diminish the land and the corn grower will leave, taking his seed elsewhere, until he himself is finished, like a faded ear of corn in the midst of rich lands," with the nostalgia of rest in the wind of his eyes, the memory of the primal immobility that Gaspar Horn imitated and that is the equivalent of the lost paradise. As we shall see later, the novel is a tense dialogue between both kinds of men of maize, those who live the exile of never finding rest and those who become fixed in...