Leyendas de Guatemala - Criticism and Reception

Criticism and Reception

Asturias has been described as a "poet-author" whose unique literary abilities have created a narrative of the evolution of Guatemala in a way that traverses the boundaries of a poem, story, legend or work of prose.

After the book's publication in 1930, it was translated into French by Francis de Miomandre and won the Sylla Monsegur award. This translation also succeeded in gaining the admiration of Paul Valéry, who wrote a letter about Leyendas de Guatemala that has been used as a prologue to the book in certain editions.

Heninghan critiques the book, claiming that it courts a European audience because the exoticism of Guatemala that conforms to the Parisian expectation. Therefore Henighan thinks that Leyendas de Guatemala is both genuine and fake; Asturias' accomplishment in creating the illusion of fiction was entirely stimulated by the perceived expectation of the French audience. According to such interpretations, the book is based in French Orientalist fantasies. However, Henighan claims that "Leyendas de Guatemala deforms the Orientalist assumption because here the 'explorer' transmitting the magical world back to the Parisian readers is a native Guatemalan himself". He says that Asturias uses strategies to persuade the validity and trustworthiness of his writing to the European audience he targets; this is the reason he included pictures, the introductory preface by Paul Valéry, impersonal narration, and disclaimers such as 'that no one believes the legends of the past'.

Henighan also argues that the introduction which presents Guatemala as a palimpsest of past civilizations produces an inherent subordination of Guatemala to Europe. Henighan's main argument is that the book presents a clash between Guatemala and Europe, and this mirrors Asturias' own conflict of identity. He says "Guatemala" focuses on alienation while "Ahora que me acuerdo" ends with confusion of estrangement from these myths. The five legends attempt to reconcile the tensions embodied in the books double introduction. "Syncretism, doubleness, and heterogeneity are portrayed as inevitable human conditions" in the legends. He says that Asturias wants to demonstrate the impossibility of maintaining some kind of purity of identity. Thus existence of mestizaje, both racial and cultural seems to be unavoidable and desirable. The clash of cultural identity reaches its climax in the final story, "here the dynamics of doubleness becomes permeated with questions of cultural power." He contends that Asturias becomes aware that the two cultures will always collide and that "the weaker culture will always be subjugated by the cultural dictates of the stronger." The conquistadors caused a volcanic eruption and both groups became divided, yet not equal. Therefore this story represents Asturias accepting his Parisian self.

Asturias received much criticism for his earlier essay "El problema social del indio" (1923), which saw no future for a Guatemalan identity based on its Mayan heritage, and encouraged a progressive ideology to take over. The criticism comes from the complete change of attitude which Leyendas de Guatemala seems to convey. Martin Lienhard argues that this former essay has become a dark spot in Asturias' past, which everyone seems to have forgotten once the author received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967. He goes on to argue that the young Asturias made undeniably racist claims in this essay, which cannot be deleted, and Leyendas de Guatemala does not entirely break from such an attitude either. Lienhard compares the way in which Asturias re-wrote the creation myths of Guatemala to that of Soviet educational propaganda, claiming that he progressively manipulated the culture and the collective memory of a people to serve the interest of a State.