Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias

First published:Hombres de maíz, 1949 (English translation, 1975)

Type of plot: Social morality

Time of work: The twentieth century

Locale: Guatemala

Principal Characters:

• Gaspar Ilóm, an Indian who revolts against the commercial corngrowers
• Piojosa Grande, his wife
• Machojón, an Indian turncoat who sells Gaspar to the Mounted Patrol
• Vaca Manuela, his wife
• Colonel Chalo Godoy, the Commander of the Mounted Patrol
• Goyo Yic, a blind beggar
• María Tecún, his runaway wife
• Nicho Aquino, the postman of San Miguel Acatan
• Hilario Sacayón, a mule driver with a penchant for spinning yarns

The Novel

The action of Men of Maize is divided into two periods. In the first part of the novel Gaspar Ilóm wages war against the professional maizegrowers who set fire to the brush and ruthlessly exploit the land. According to the Indians of Guatemala, the first men who were created, their ancestors, were made of corn. Therefore, this grain is sacred; it may be consumed but never exploited, eaten but never sold. The maizegrowers, however, prefer profits to traditions, an attitude which opposes them to the peasants both morally and ethically. This is why Gaspar and his Indian guerrillas revolt against them and gain the upper hand until the maizegrowers call in the Mounted Patrol. With the help of an Indian turncoat, Machojón, and especially of his wife, Vaca Manuela, the commander of the Mounted Patrol lures Gaspar and his men to a feast. During the celebration, Vaca Manuela tricks Gaspar into drinking poison, but Gaspar dives into the river and manages to “extinguish the thirst of the poison in his intestines.” He returns after dawn, only to discover that the soldiers have taken his men by surprise and massacred them. Gaspar dives into the river once again, and the maizegrowers return to the mountains of Ilóm, unaware that a curse has been cast. The yellow-eared rabbit sorcerers who accompanied Gaspar condemn all the perpetrators of the massacre to die before the seventh year is ended. One by one, in the chapters which follow, they are all punished. Machojón and his wife burn in an eerie blaze which razes their cornfields. On his way to ask for the hand of his intended, their son is surrounded by fireflies and mysteriously disappears. The man who sold the poison used on Gaspar is decapitated along with his entire family, and finally Colonel Godoy and his troops are consumed by “flames in the form of bloodstained hands” which “were painted on the walls of the air.”

The second part of the novel describes the adventures of three men whose lives become intertwined. The first, Goyo Yic, is a blind beggar whose wife, María, runs away, taking with her their many children. Goyo cannot live without her and seeks the help of a curer, who removes the veil of blindness from his eyes. He has, however, never seen María. For this reason, he becomes a peddler and travels from fair to fair; he coaxes women to buy his wares in order to hear their voices and one day, he hopes, recognize his missing wife. Goyo invokes O Possum, patron saint of peddlers, to guide him on his search, but to no avail. One night, he gazes at his shadow by the light of the moon, and “it was like seeing the shadow of a she-opossum.” The moonlight turns him from a man into an animal. He wanders into the forest so long as a fugitive that his skin turns black. One day, he is lured by the lights and the laughter of the big fair in the town of Santa Cruz de las Cruces. He returns to the world of men and teams up with a certain Domingo Revolorio to start a little business selling liquor by the glass. They buy a demijohn and take turns carrying it on their backs to a distant fair. It is a hot day and they soon get tired. They start selling glasses of liquor to each other until, finally drunk, they lose their permit and are sent to jail for selling liquor without a license.

Time passes. People preserve and repeat the legend of the blindman and his runaway wife, María Tecún, immortalizing it by referring to all runaways as “tecunas.” One day the wife of Nicho Aquino, the postman in the little town of San Miguel de Acatán, suddenly disappears. Nicho is overcome with grief and gets drunk to forget and remember. On his next trip to the capital, mailpouch on his back, he meets a wizened old man with black hands who offers to tell him the whereabouts of his wife. Nicho follows him into some caves where the old man brings to life the tale of creation according to Maya tradition. He reveals to Nicho why maize is sacred and explains the import of Gaspar Ilóm’s death and of the cycle of retribution which it has for a sequel. Nicho is enlightened. Upon discovering his origins, he regains a sense of self. For a moment he becomes a coyote, his nagual, or animal protector.

Meanwhile, in San Miguel, the townspeople are worried that the postman—and especially their letters—may never reach their destination. They send the muleteer, Hilario Sacayón, to look for Nicho and steer him onto the right path. Hilario looks everywhere and on his way ponders the nature of tales and the difference between reality and fiction, but he never finds Nicho. The former postman ends up burning the mail and running away to the coast, where he becomes a factotum for a hotel proprietress. One of his duties is to ferry people to the Harbor Castle, fitted out as a prison, where Goyo Yic is serving a sentence for selling liquor without a license. Once again, years have passed. Goyo’s own son is serving time in the same prison, and one day his mother, María Tecún, comes to pay him a visit. Nicho ferries her across and is astounded to discover that the woman he knows as a legend really exists. The members of the Yic family are reunited, and when the men are set free, they all go back to harvest corn in Pisigüilito, where the action started. This is the story’s climax. Man, blind for a time to the ancient traditions which bind him to the soil, returns to harvest the sacred substance which constitutes him. Gaspar’s sacrifice is not in vain if it has succeeded in doing away with the sanguinary breed (the commercial exploiters) who keep the men of maize from engaging in the most fundamental of occupations.

The Characters

The influence of Mayan literature on characterization in Men of Maize cannot be overstated. Asturias spent years studying anthropology and helped to translate the Mayan book of Genesis, or Popol Vuh. Many of the narrative features of this ancient manuscript filter into his indigenous novels. For example, character and chronological development in Men of Maize are minimal; the protagonists substitute for one another in what could be termed a character substitution principle. They are cast as friends or foes of the men of maize, and, for the most part, they are emblematic of behavior patterns. Gaspar Ilóm is a character whose portrayal evolves throughout the fiction without undergoing any psychological development. He fights for the communal values dear to the Indian in the first part of the novel, but in the chapters which follow he is portrayed as a mythic figure from a remote past, while other characters step into the limelight. The reader soon realizes that this novel does not have a hero in the conventional sense but rather a collective beneficiary, the men of maize, who profit from the moral teachings extolled by Asturias.

As the first part of the novel is typified by emblematic characters who do not develop in the traditional sense, the second part is noteworthy for the original characters who do. Here, Goyo Yic shines forth as an Everyman figure who has lost touch with the world of his forefathers. For this reason, he is portrayed as both blind and a beggar when introduced to the reader. Yet, prompted by the need to find his wife and children, he launches forth in a search which must be seen as a rite of passage. His wife, María Tecún, is a beacon throughout the novel (although she materializes as a character only in the last few pages). As are all women in Men of Maize, she is an absent presence, alluded to, sought, and eventually found, a symbol of the telluric forces from which the men of maize have become estranged. In fact, the wives of all the Indian protagonists in the novel either run away or disappear, and only one couple (Goyo and María Tecún) are reunited.

Two other important characters, Nicho Aquino and Hilario Sacayón, should be seen as pegs in a well-oiled narrative machine, who serve their purpose (bringing together Goyo and María) and subsequently fade. In addition Hilario, the muleteer, functions as Asturias’s mouthpiece in Men of Maize. Hilario is a man capable of imagining a woman piecemeal and then falling in love with his own creation. This self-persuasion suggests that words can be as concrete as action, that what man hears becomes, eventually, what he sees.

Influencing readers was exactly what Asturias intended to do. He wrote Men of Maize during a period of great political optimism in Guatemala. Juan José Arévalo had been elected president in 1945, and he had enacted controversial social laws aiming to return lands to destitute peasants, to organize cooperative farms, and to make way for agrarian reform. Men of Maize translates into fiction the changes which Arévalo was bringing about in reality. Asturias wields words—as does Hilario—to motivate reality. His design was to present in fiction (by means of emblematic characters) the blueprints for a society whose roots went back to the days of the great Maya nation and heralded, at the same time, the progressive community planned by Juan José Arévalo.

Critical Context

Men of Maize is, without a doubt, Asturias’s most controversial novel as well as his best. It has been disparaged and misunderstood by critics ever since its publication. Given its unique narrative structure and the fact that Asturias underplays character and chronological development, many readers have believed it to lack unity. In fact, the conception of Men of Maize is so revolutionary (in form as well as in content) that unity must be found in features other than those dictated by convention.

As James Joyce did in Ulysses (1922), Asturias turned to an earlier, classical work for the infrastructure for his ground-breaking novel. He borrowed from the past but actualized it in the present and, most important, developed his novel through an association of key themes. For example, all Indian characters in Men of Maize are associated with water, and all their enemies with fire. Three sets of three animals each also play a primary role in the novel, and each set is associated with one of the three elements which anchor Asturias’s pyramid to Meso-American man: fire, water, and corn. Finally, four numbers—four, seven, nine, and thirteen—enter the alchemy of Men of Maize. Each is associated with an animal and a color in keeping with Mayan mythology, and all the elements are portrayed in a progression which culminates, in the epilogue, with the return to the land. At the end of the harvest, Goyo and his family become ants, one of the animals responsible for the discovery of corn, according to the Meso-American mythic tradition. Goyo’s animal protector is also the opossum (god of dawn in Meso-America), known in Maya as Zach Och, the white animal (white betokens the beginning of something, specifically, of civilization). The novel starts with a cycle of struggle and retribution and then picks up the thread of a wandering blindman, a beggar, who ends up fully healed, a farmer, and a begetter of many children. Thematically speaking, Asturias shifts the action from chaos to order and concludes with a return which is in every respect a beginning, a hope-filled eulogy to the common man of Meso-America.

Bibliography

Callan, Richard. Miguel Ángel Asturias. New York: Twayne, 1970. An introductory study with a chapter of biography and a separate chapter discussing each of Asturias’s major novels. Includes a chronology, notes, and an annotated bibliography.

Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990. A very helpful volume in coming to terms with Asturias’s unusual narratives.

Harss, Luis, and Barbara Dohmann. Into the Mainstream. New York: Harpers, 1967. Includes an interview with Asturias covering the major features of his thought and fictional work.

Himmelblau, Jack. “Love, Self and Cosmos in the Early Works of Miguel Ángel Asturias.” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 18 (1971). Should be read in conjunction with Prieto.

Perez, Galo Rene. “Miguel Ángel Asturias.” Americas, January, 1968, 1-5. A searching examination of El Señor Presidente as a commentary on the novelist’s society.

Prieto, Rene. Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Archaeology of Return. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. The best available study in English of the novelist’s body of work. Prieto discusses both the stories and the novels, taking up issues of their unifying principles, idiom, and eroticism. See Prieto’s measured introduction, in which he carefully analyzes Asturias’s reputation and identifies his most important work. Includes very detailed notes and bibliography.

West, Anthony. Review of El Señor Presidente, by Miguel Ángel Asturias. The New Yorker, March 28, 1964. Often cited as one of the best interpretations of the novel.