reality writing in Quiché. Rather, it is the attempt to attain an independent discourse that, on the one hand, will suggest the melding of the two cultures into an idealized sociohistoric reality and, on the other hand, will attest to the role of the artist and writer as the mediating bridge between two cultures which deplorable but all-too-present circumstances keep separate by a virtually unbreachable abyss.

The influence of surrealism in Latin American literature has meant not merely the recovery of the subconscious and the unconscious as it has in European culture. More significantly, it has meant the recovery of indigenous cultures and the aspects of those cultures that may be seen as prerational or authentically mythic. The discovery by the Latin American of his subconscious reality is, therefore, not simply a psychological discovery; it is the discovery of those mediating cultural elements—usually indigenous but often creole—which were repressed by nineteenth century liberal and Europeanizing ideologies.

“Leyenda del sombrerón”

“Leyenda del sombrerón” (legend of the big hat) is an excellent example of the elaboration in a fictional text of the aforementioned principles. Superficially, it reminds one of those nineteenth century narratives by such writers as Peru’s Ricardo Palma or Colombia’s Tomás Carrasquilla—narratives that represent an ironic, urbane retelling of traditional or legendary material of a quasi-documentary nature, lightly fictionalized by a somewhat partronizing narrator who claims to have either discovered his material in an out-of-the-way corner of a dusty library or heard it on the lips of gossipy washerwomen and garrulous mule drivers. These narratives were part of the Romantic and prerealist fiction of Latin America and represented that area’s version of local color and the discovery of an idealized past and an idealized Volkspoesie.

Asturias’s story is like these antecedents in that it deals with quasi-or pseudolegendary material: the origin of the devil’s big hat. The legend as Asturias tells it concerns a monastery built by the Spanish conquerors of Central America, a monastery inhabited by devout monks, specifically by one monk who spends his time in appropriately devotional readings and meditation. One day, the monk’s exemplary otherworldliness is broken by a ball that comes flying through the window, the lost toy of an Indian boy playing outside the walls of the monastery. At first, the monk is entranced by this unknown object which he takes in his hands, imagining that so must have been the earth in the hands of the Creator. Thus distracted from his saintly preoccupations, the monk begins to play with the ball with almost childish joy. A few days later, however, the child’s mother comes to the door of the monastery to ask that her son be given religious instruction; it seems that he has been heartbroken since the loss of his ball in the area of the monastery, a ball claimed popularly to be the very image of the devil. Suddenly possessed by a violent rage, the monk runs to his cell, picks up the ball, and hurls it beyond the walls of the monastery. Flying through the air, the ball assumes the form of the black hat of the devil. The story ends with: “And thus is born to the world the big hat.”

The superficial resemblance of Asturias’s text with its nineteenth century ironic predecessors is borne out by an overt narrator who obliquely addresses himself to the reader. This narrator assumes the function of telling the reader what happened and sharing with him the unusual, surprising, and notable event. Thus, the text is characterized by a number of rhetorical ploys to be seen as markers of this conventional form of ironic storytelling: the explicit allusions to the recovery of the story from antiquarian sources; the fact that the event narrated concerns a remote time and place that because of its strangeness for the reader makes the story all the more notable; the heavy-handed condescension toward the simplicity of manner and ingenuous behavior of the participants—the monk, the Indian child, and his humble mother; and, finally, the explicit allusions to the fact that someone is telling a story. These allusions take the form of phatic formulas such as “Let us continue,” “Let us go on,” “And thus it happened,” “And thus it was,” as well as frequent references to the noteworthiness of the event being related, toward confirming the value of the narrative as narrative and as a form of privileged discourse.

It must be stressed that all these features are only superficial characteristics of nineteenth century ironic, local-color literature. Indeed, the fact that they are superficial echoes in Asturias’s text becomes a wholly different sort of irony, an irony at the expense of a reader willing to take them as indicative of peasant superstitions recounted in a straightforward fashion by a narrator slightly amused at folk superstitions. To understand the way in which Asturias’s story is much more than such a retelling of a local superstition, it is necessary to keep in mind the presence of two systems of cultural reference in the text. In the first place, it is necessary to recall the enormous sociocultural impact of the activities of religious orders in Latin America during the Colonial period. The conquest was accompanied by religious orders charged with the establishment in the New World of Christianity and the conversion of the indigenous population. In the case of the area known today as Guatemala, this imperative meant the wholesale destruction of the artifacts of indigenous culture, so that today less than a half dozen of the Quiché codices are the survivors of the Christian priests’ destructive zeal. It would be no exaggeration to say that, as a consequence, the sort of monastery described with much detail in Asturias’s text dominated the daily lives of the conquered indigenous peoples.

Second, ballplaying enjoyed a ritual and religious status in Quiché culture. Indeed, one of the cultural contributions of the Quichés to their conquerors was the ball, an artifact of leisure. Thus, in Asturias’s text, the encounter between the priest and the ball—and through the ball, between the former and indigenous culture—may be a circumstantial occurrence. In terms, however, of the cultural system represented on the one hand by the pious monk and the fortress-like monastery he occupies and on the other hand by the system represented by the Indian boy’s ball are posited by the story as antagonistic forces. The ball becomes a token in a pattern of cultural invasion and expulsion. In the event narrated, the cultural space of the monk is “penetrated” or “invaded” by the alien object, just as the cultural space of the Quichés had been invaded by the Spanish conquerors and their representatives of an alien religion. The indigenous culture, however, cannot displace the invading culture. The priest’s almost hysterical realization of the “diabolical” meaning of the ball with which he has played with such childish abandon is the acknowledgment that the ball is much more than a child’s toy. In casting the ball away from the monastery, he is expelling indigenous culture from the fortress of Christianity and reaffirming the primacy and the dominion of the latter. The miraculous transformation of the ball into the devil’s hat is not really a fantastic but a phenomenological circumstance. At issue is not a superstitious belief in such occurrences (although an antirational ideology may well affirm them) but rather the perception of the symbolic importance of the object the priest flings away from him with words that recall the “Vade retro, Satanas” commonplace.

It is significant that the narrator of Asturias’s story does not end his description of the monk’s expulsion from his sanctuary of the artifact of indigenous culture with an explanation of the meaning of that gesture, particularly since, in the opening segments of the text, he takes great pains to describe the setting of the religious community concerned and the monk’s initial distraction with the child’s stray toy; yet, it is the abrupt end of the text that most confirms the significance of the symbolic interplay between the cultures here described. By not appending an explanatory conclusion, the narrator runs the risk of his reader’s taking the event at face value—that is, as a miraculous or fantastic event, the authenticity of which is maintained by conventional and ingenuous superstition. Nevertheless, to the extent that the conventions of serious twentieth century literature preclude the telling of superstitious material for shock effect, the reader is obliged, when confronted with such material, to attribute to it some profound, if only vaguely perceived, semiological value. Such is the case with the encounter between the monk and the ball.

The reader need not endorse the overwhelming significance here implied of the religious community on the one hand and the ritual value of the child’s ball on the other to appreciate how the story concerns conflicting antagonistic forces. In terms of the most elemental cultural values in the story one sees the ball interpreted in a conflicting manner by the monk: He sees it first as a symbol of God’s creation, and it is only with the appearance of the peasant woman and her casual reference to the ball as the image of the devil that he suddenly becomes enraged with its offending presence. It crosses the monk’s mind initially that the ball may be bewitched; nevertheless, he sees in it something less worldly that his books cannot explain. In giving himself over to its humble simplicity, he is, to a certain extent, escaping the treacheries of a bookish culture. Thus there is a subsystem of oppositions whereby on the larger level of the narrative there is a contrast between the monk and the ball, between Christian and indigenous sociocultural values, and there is in the monk’s own world a contrast between signs of the devil and signs of God’s grace. Before he realizes that the ball is the symbol of the devil, to the extent that it is an artifact of the culture which Christianity is dedicated to eradicating, he considers the errant toy a sign of God’s simple grace against the potential treachery of the books with which he surrounds himself. The opposition between grace and evil which the monk perceives in his cell with the appearance of the ball is projected onto the larger plane of the opposition between two alien cultures.

In the world evoked by Asturias’s story, there is an impenetrable barrier between two cultures given objective representation by the walls of the monastery. Asturias’s text is nevertheless a mediator between these two cultures in the sense that they are brought together as opposing and interdependent elements in a narrative system. Without either one, there would be no story. It is because both are necessary for this narrative to exist that the text then becomes a form of mediation between the two of them, confirming the unique status of the text as a form of unifying cultural discourse. Asturias’s text is unquestionably ideological, but not in the sense of sociopolitical denunciation. Rather, it is ideological by virtue of the implied conception of the praxis of narrative art as a form of mediation between two cultures often condemned to an oppressor/oppressed relationship. Writing such as that of Asturias provides the attempt at mediation with a coherence and purpose that is singularly distinctive.