ABSTRACT
The formation of Miguel Angel Asturias’s literary and cultural persona in the Paris of the 1920s grew out of a rich soil of assumptions, obsessions and illusions generated by more than a century’s interaction between Parisian fashions and Latin American intellectual hunger. The origins of the Spanish American intellectual’s subservience to French literary and political fashion lie in the Enlightenment. France established itself in Latin American eyes not merely as the source of the world’s most vital and prestigious cultural developments, but also as the principal conduit for the achievements of other European cultures. One consequence of this new orientation was that Paris became ensconced in the Spanish American consciousness as the site of continental debate. The Spanish American intellectuals’ adoption of Paris as the terrain of their internal debates coincided with a surge of French interest in non-European cultures and modes of thought.
