Praise for Ariel Dorfman
“One of the most important voices coming out of Latin America.”—Salman Rushdie
“A remarkable writer . . . writing out of a very different cultural perspective from comfortable American readers.”—Digby Diehl, Los Angeles Herald Examiner
“One of the six greatest Latin American novelists.”—Jacobo Timmerman, Newsweek
Praise for Ariel Dorfman
“One of the most important voices coming out of Latin America.”—Salman Rushdie
“A remarkable writer . . . writing out of a very different cultural perspective from comfortable American readers.”—Digby Diehl, Los Angeles Herald Examiner
“One of the six greatest Latin American novelists.”—Jacobo Timmerman, Newsweek
Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction
272
Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction
272eBook
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Overview
Praise for Ariel Dorfman
“One of the most important voices coming out of Latin America.”—Salman Rushdie
“A remarkable writer . . . writing out of a very different cultural perspective from comfortable American readers.”—Digby Diehl, Los Angeles Herald Examiner
“One of the six greatest Latin American novelists.”—Jacobo Timmerman, Newsweek
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822398127 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/30/1991 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Lexile: | 1500L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 506 KB |
About the Author
Ariel Dorfman is the author of numerous works of fiction, plays, poems and essays in both Spanish and English. Death and the Maiden, his most recent award-winning work, has been hailed as one of the most important political plays of the last decade, with productions in over 15 countries. He divides his time between Santiago, Chile and Durham, North Carolina, where he is Research Professor of Literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University.
Read an Excerpt
Some Write to the Future
Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction
By Ariel Dorfman, George Shivers
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1991 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9812-7
CHAPTER 1
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 myth.
In his struggle, Gaspar has the aid of cosmic forces, the yellow rabbits for whom "there is no secret, no danger, no distance," the spirit of the fire which does battle beyond the death of the chieftain himself and is an emanation of the natural order seeking permanence in its being. Everything that refers to Gaspar is seen through whiffs of apparent chaos, which vibrate nevertheless with the secret vertebration of ritual. The exaggerated language, its serpentine, baroque syntax, a world that slithers forward like a snake, the union of dissimilar elements, transfiguration by means of the word, sacred, solemn, and distant, the inner vision of what is happening: it all produces in the reader's mind the process of enveloping primitivism that the character himself is living, and forces the leveling of dream and reality, leading the reader to mix fiction and fact without being able or wanting to separate them. The main theme of the novel, the relationship between myth and reality, has its narrative and linguistic correlation in this fusion, but it is only revealed fully in the first chapter, where the mythic impulse transfixes everything. The fact that legend and reality, word and deed, are the same experience for the reader and for the character, will contrast with the remaining chapters, where it is precisely the relationship between these dimensions, how near to or far from each other they are, that is made problematic.
Take the poisoning of Gaspar Ilóm, at the beginning of the novel. If we were to try to give a chronological or merely logical order to this chaotic moment (Gaspar is poisoned, the poison is made from two white roots, la Piojosa Grande flees), we would find two successive, and perhaps parallel, sequences which coincide in certain recurrences but whose linkage does not allow us to exactly place each event nor to impose any order upon that rush of images, prophecies, and foreshadowings. One of the two sequences (Which of the two? And what if it were both?) is a premonitory dream (or memory dream) of la Piojosa Grande. The repetition, once in dream, again in reality, without being able to define which is which, blurs and clouds the habitual way in which things occur in this world. The reader must simply absorb what happened, must interpret it, he or she suddenly transformed into a magician. What is dreamed and what is lived are inextricably bound together, and this means that any effort by the reader to order that world will falsify it and end up in failure. Just as his characters struggle against civilization and against cold, everyday reality, Asturias will in the rest of the work, albeit in a more subdued manner, continue to destroy all rational mentality, using, although in a less exaggerated fashion, every viable means to make his language boil: tossing out time shifts, interweaving impersonal and subjective points of view, confusing colloquialisms and the thoughts of his characters with the supposed objectivity of actions, silencing men and personifying the animal and plant kingdoms, detaching all points of reference, sweeping away conventions. Fire, one of the protagonists of the novel, is also its formal principle: words are flames, they sputter, they refuse to be enclosed, they hop like gleaming yellow rabbits, they die down and then rise up again with an uncontainable rhythm of revenge, the consummation by the fire-grandfather-son, punishment, and we have reached the second chapter which narrates how those who betrayed Gaspar Ilóm are punished.
Machojón
When the chief died, the witch doctors of the fireflies had foretold the death of all the poison carriers and of their children, indicating that "su semilla de girasol sea tierra de muerto en las entrañas de las mujeres ..." ("their sunflower seed will be a dead man's earth in the wombs of women ..."). The curse begins to be fulfilled in the second chapter with the death of Señor Tomás and of his son Machojón, as also with that of Vaca Manuela.
The first to disappear is Machojón, who was on his way to ask for the hand of his girlfriend, Candelaria Reinoso, in marriage. No one knows what happened to him; only we, the readers, directly sense the supernatural wonder of his absorption by the fireflies, that fire that leaps from the words of the witch doctors: "From his hat behind his ears, along the collar of his embroidered shirt, down the sleeves of his jacket, along the hairy ridges of his hands and between his fingers, like a cold sweat the flickering gleam of the fireflies coursed, a light like the beginning of the world, in which everything was seen without any clear shape."
Suddenly the rumor spreads that Machojón rides each time the land is burned off, just prior to the sowing of the corn. This version originates in the visit of a mysterious woman to Candelaria Reinoso. Everything indicates that the woman is a semi-imaginary creature: we do not know who she is nor where she comes from; she is referred to as "ghost woman"; another customer does not see her; several times there is mention of her "teeth as white as lard" and "lard-like clothing," which is significant when we remember that it is precisely lard that Candelaria sells. What the woman affirms is also vague: "Yes, child, who would believe it, but the men who went out to burn off the land saw Don Macho mounted on his horse among the flames; they say he was dressed in gold." Lost in the gossip of others, anonymous, unknown, coincidental with what the narrator has already revealed, the legend of Machojón is born into reality. Immediately, "Candelaria Reinoso closed her eyes and dreamed or saw that Machojón was riding his wild stallion down from the top of the hill they were burning ..." We are left in suspense as to whether she actually saw him or dreamed him.
In her turn Candelaria will transmit what she has heard, or what she has desired, or what she has imagined, to Señor Tomás, who will begin to give up lands for clearing, just to see his son who "appeared in the middle of the best fires, riding his stallion, bathed in gold ... his spurs sparkling like stars and his eyes gleaming like suns." Señor Tomás consolidates the legend, trying to provoke the presence of the supernatural, while the corn growers take advantage of his weakness, since it is in their interest to obtain lands for their seed "without any formal arrangement"; they feed his madness, assuring him they have seen Machojón galloping among the flames, repeating the same words already on everyone's lips. Thus, this legend, which is of human origin and which has been invented out of the daily needs of each man and woman, will increase the action of the fire, more and more, until the night arrives when Señor Tomás, hearing the truth from the mouths of the children and the fools (who make fun of the story and transform Machojón into a scarecrow), decides to disguise himself as Machojón and imitates the appearance of his son as it is described in the popular tale; he sets fire to the dry corn field "in order to ride among the flames mounted on his stallion so they would believe he was Machojón." He wants that golden Machojón to exist (despite the fact that he cannot see him, he knows that he is real), and he wants the corn planters (who say they can see him, but do not believe in his reality) to be his witnesses. In a little while the fire spreads, the tone of the first chapter returns; Señor Tomás's fire becomes the mythic flame of the fireflies, the avenger who flows from thewords of the witch doctors: "An immense firefly, as immense as the plains and the hills." First it is said that it is "like (igual a) the ears of yellow rabbits, in pairs, by the hundreds, baskets full of yellow rabbits, fleeing the fire, a round beast that was all face, no neck, a face rolling on the ground, a leathery-faced beast with an angry eye, among the heavy brow and the thick beard of the smoke." From the comparison "like" he goes to the metaphor and from there to the full and real narrated presence of the yellow rabbits, the mythological element: "the ears of the yellow rabbits moved among the sandy, deep-water streams without being extinguished." Thus, in one simultaneous instant, men create an action (setting a fire) and effectively provoke another (the revenge of the yellow rabbits); they are the servants of the fire and of the legend that has become reality. The origin of the fire and of the myth is found in human actions, but it has its foundation, its raison d'être, in the magical world, in the fulfillment of a curse. Señor Tomás, the corn planters, and also Vaca Manuela, are consumed by the fire that they themselves set, which is at the same time the cosmic fire punishing their betrayal.
It comes from Gaspar Ilóm who "had managed to hurl the lasso of his word around the fire that wandered freely in the mountains of Ilóm, and then to take it home and tie it up in his house, so that it wouldn't destroy all the trees, so it wouldn't work in collusion with the corn planters and merchants." The Indian's death means freedom for the fire, because "fire is like water when it is spilled. There is no way to hold them back." Men are transformed into "little fingers of a dark will that struggles, after millenia, to free the captive of the white hummingbird, prisoner of the man in the rock and in the eye of the grain of corn," the fire that sleeps there, ready to burst forth: "the captive can escape from the guts of the earth, into the heat and the light of the clearing fire and of war." When there is war (men destroy men) or there is clearing of land (men destroy earth), fire can escape, infected by human action, aided by the gestures of those beings who, without understanding the unlimited mythic power of their instrument, use it for their own ends, freeing the great, universal fire that seeks to wander free and destroy. "Its prison is fragile, and if the fire escapes, what brave, virile soul can struggle against it, when all flee in terror?" Therefore, because it is magical, only the word could bind the fire "so that it could do no damage." The supernatural cannot intervene arbitrarily; it must be invoked from the world of the human; it must originate in everyday events, just like the legend, that has its origin in small human words, and becomes gigantic because once man has hurled it out it begins to grow, to swell, on its own account. Myth, like fire, is held by fragile bonds, and it only requires a tiny spark to produce the final conflagration, a single word in an unknown mouth, a nothing that speaks, so that a story goes out victoriously to move around the world and take over reality. The words of the witch doctors are fulfilled. The legend of Machojón ends up being real, creating a fire, provoking an imitation that leads to the desired revenge.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Some Write to the Future by Ariel Dorfman, George Shivers. Copyright © 1991 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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