BOOKS
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gradua ll y assume ascendency a nd lead him into tho roughly committed
and comple tely di sas trous works such as his notorio us " banana
trilogy" and the la tter in to a novel like
M u lata,
which is so completely
a mythic recon struc tion tha t it is a lmos t unintellig ible to the unini–
tia ted. Fo r mos t people, these two ea rly works are a lso Asturias's bes t;
and now with
M en of M aize
in English long after the appearance here
of o ther lesser wo rks by him, we can definitely say tha t
M en of M aize
is
not onl y As turias's mas terpiece but a mas terp iece for a \1 o f us.
T he p lo t device out of which As turias spins his leng thy nove l is a
conflict so basic as to reverbera te in a lmos t every culture: opposed to
men who grow corn as the staple o f life come the men who grow it as a
live lihood , ca lling into ques tion the cult of corn as a simple ma tter of
economics. Obvio usly, this conflict invo lves the entire hi story o f La tin
America but because Asturias had no t ye t entered his
engage
period ,
which he began with
S trong Wind,
the first vo lume o f hi s trilogy, this
conflict is only the founda tio n on which he builds his mythic structure.
At the nove l's o pening, the leader o f the agricultural soc iety,
Gaspa r 116m , is urged by the vo ices o f the earth to fi ght off the
materia lists and when he does he is a bandoned by his wife a nd
eventua lly kill ed . More from the fli ght o f the woman , who becomes a
mythic figure o f los t love and mo ther earth , than from the soc io–
economic struggle, Asturias elabora tes a sprawling na rrative which
takes up success ive adventu res of men in search of themse lves by
searching for the women who have abando ned them . Some of these
searches are des pera te and pa thetic-like the ques t o f a blind man who
rega ins hi s sight and goes o ff in search o f his wife only to rea lize tha t he
will never recognize her because he has never seen her-while o thers
lead to comic, slapstick events-like the long jo ke about the two men
who buy a barrel of booze in o rder to se ll it but drink it up themse lves,
always exchang ing the same six pesos in payment until they are left
drunk , in ja il , and una ble to expl a in how the ba rrel became empty
without their earning mo re than six pesos.
Looked a t in thi s way,
Men of Ma ize
is a bruptly episodic, nonse–
quentia l in any linea r no tio n o f time or space; but the novel is in fact
rigorously fa ithful to its guid ing princip le, bo ldl y a nnounced in the
epi graph, which for some reason has been left in the orig ina l Spanish :
Aqui la mujer,
yo el dormido
(Here the woman ,
I the sleeper)
