Approaches to a Self: Asturias’s Parisian Fiction to ‘La Barba Provisional’

Peasant Jacinto is presented as the inheritor of the modernizing Liberal tradition of late nineteenth-century Central America which, impregnated with positivist assumptions, had shaped Asturias’s own ideology. The extravagance of Asturias’s descriptions, calling up an atmosphere far more frenetic than that of the sleepy milieu of 1920s Guatemala City, suggests that these passages may be a transcription of Asturias’s own seduction by the verve and energy of London or Paris. ‘Florentina’, the most successful of Asturias’s European short stories, explores the alternative path that lay open to him: immersion in European culture, the elaboration of a neo-modernista creative identity. Asturias’s depictions of this struggle generate an authentic emotional force by comparison with which the puffed-up sensitivities of the expatriates in ‘Florentina’ feel bogus. Asturias’s allusions to Robert Desnos in ‘La barba provisional’ constitute a troubled, much-qualified declaration of allegiance to the Surrealist project as Desnos had presented it to him.