ABSTRACT
The symbolic and narrative movement, in El senor presidente, from city to countryside, from ladino to Mayan precepts, develops through a struggle between images of light and darkness. The ambivalence with which the novel portrays mental and spiritual illumination reflects Asturias’s awareness of the contradictory consequences of his own irradiation by the light of another continent. The call for light contains recognition of illumination’s Satanic potential. Camila Canales breaks down his sterile dichotomy between light and shadow by enabling him to develop an alternative definition of darkness as the source of a potentially affirmative connection with the cultural core of his homeland. The bourgeoisie locks out the potentially creative, liberating union of shadow and light. The installation, through the account of Canales’s exile, of an expatriate consciousness as the novel’s dominant narrative intelligence, reinforces the patterns of shadow and light.
