478
PARTISAN REVIEW
I say "rigorously faithful" and I mean it provocatively because the
consistent charge against this novel is formlessness. Judged by the
standards of conventional novel writing-whatever they may be-this
novel is formless , just as
The Waste Land
is formless when judged by
the standards of
Paradise Lost.
But Asturias has been as true to his
sources in the most ample sense of that word as Eliot was
to
his, and
Men of Maize
is a great turning point in the history of Latin American
literature, as Ariel Dorfman pointed out so many years ago, because it
is the first major translation of Mayan myth into the literature and
culture which had rejected it, first as pagan and therefore objectionable
and second as primitive and therefore unworthy. In a way, it ought to
be easier for us, with our background in works like
The Golden Bough
and
The Waste Land,
to see that Asturias's achievement demands new
norms and that if the great poem in English of the first part of the
twentieth century can be worked on the lines of European and Oriental
myth and sectioned on the technological principles of film, so can a
great novel of the same period in Latin America be worked on the lines
of equally venerable New World mythology and the agricultural
aesthetic of developing repetition found in Guatemalan textiles. In
other words,
Men of Maize
raises the most profound questions about
culture and art, not only about the society it presents but also in the
reader who confronts that society. No wonder it is such an unsettling,
iconoclastic book.
In contrast to this "hot" text, which outrages our sensibilities and
aesthetics, Bioy-Casares 's "cool" novel ,
A Plan for Escape,
politely
refuses to disturb us as it grows ever inward with a complexity that is
the ev ident nature of its narrative rather than the apparent hazard of
Asturias's narration .
Men of Maize
embroils us in a novel that is
literally and intentionally
con-fusion; A Plan for Escape
confuses us
with a slim mystery that is monomaniacally single, ostentatiously
planned. Looked at together, the one book offers the lavish raw
material of Latin America, the other an epitome of its refinement.
Inevitably, Bioy-Casares seems less "Latin" to us than Asturias.
Bioy-Casares is a close friend of Borges and the two have collabo–
rated on many fictions, including film treatments. Bioy-Casares 'is
clearly the lesser writer, yet one of his novellas,
The Invention of
Morel,
is the basis for one of Borges's most important aesthetic
manifestos. In his preface
to
that book, Borges suggested a theory of
plot construction which he developed in his essay on narrative and
magic. The theory is quite simply a denial of psychology as a basis for
fiction because psychology admits of all behaviors and explanations;
