Exile, Allegory, and the Totality of the Nation: Miguel Ángel Asturias After the Guatemalan Revolution

Abstract

There is little direct engagement with a discourse of exile in Asturias's essays or interviews, yet in the years following the end of the Guatemalan Revolution, which left him exiled in South America and Europe, Asturias consistently treats the loss of the nation as paramount. In the major works from this period, including Week-end en Guatemala, El Alhajadito, and Mulata de Tal, Asturias engages the crisis of national and social breakdown indirectly through allegorical modes as a response to the fall of Jacobo Árbenz, which likewise brought to a close the land reforms of the Guatemalan Revolution. For as much as the political breakdown of Guatemala emerges through the Central Intelligence Agency–sponsored Castillo Armas coup, the nation in Asturias's writings is also severed by the displacement of its citizens through exile and threatens the possibility of totality within the national sphere. In these works, Asturias recognizes this threat to the totality of the nation as he attempts to mediate the breakdown of the national structure, from the social realism of Week-end en Guatemala to the highly mythic context of Mulata de Tal.