ABSTRACT
Miguel Angel Asturias, far more rooted in a particular Spanish American society than the eternal immigrant Carpentier, also left behind, in his journalism and his early fiction, a legible record of his constitution of his cultural identity in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s. In assuming his right to universalize his own experience, rather than acquiescing to the claims to universality of European cultural productions, Asturias made assumptions and adopted roles whose origins lay in the internal historical evolution of Europe. The intervention of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, whom Asturias had met during his Paris years, persuaded the new president, Juan Jose Arevalo, of Asturias’s trustworthiness. One of the many reasons that the fiction of Mario Vargas Llosa differs in tone, technique and use of language from the novels of Asturias is that Vargas Llosa was able to read and contemplate the earlier writers’ works during or prior to his own Parisian apprenticeship.
