| Summary: | Miguel Angel Asturias is a relatively under-appreciated author, in spite of the fact that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967. Most critics tend to consider his work either outdated or irrelevant since he does not belong to the immensely popular "boom" generation of contemporary Latin American novelists. At the same time, many of his novels are dismissed as conceptually weak, uncontrolled flights of imagination that lack recognizable form. Even the few critics who appreciate his creative talent generally concentrate on his earlier and more easily comprehensible socio-political works rather than the more complex ones written in the last ten years of his life. Nevertheless, these later books are highly original, and reflect a certain artistic maturity on the part of their author. The main problem is that very few critics are willing to undertake the ask of finding a method with which to approach these more elaborate texts.
An analysis of the different trends that affected his writing style reveals a very close affinity with the French Surrealist school of the early 1920s and 1930s. Asturias clearly believed in their fundamental aims and used many of their stylistic innovations. Although it is difficult to speak of a Surrealist technique per se, since the philosophy itself rejects all standardization and rules, it is possible to see the movement as a method of approaching art and creativity through the revolutionization of the traditional modes of thought. This required a double focus based on a deliberate destruction of the old, established artistic norms, and the generation of a new and completely original form. The Surrealists, in general, distorted and confused the accepted patterns of logic and replaced then with a new "logic" of their own making. Asturias himself admits to the importance of this philosophy with respect to his creative development, and stresses his desire to find an authentic "surreality" within the native cultures of Central America. For this reason, any study of his works should begin with an examination of the Surrealist aesthetic and its influence on his literary technique.
For the present study I have chosen Mulata de tal, written in 1963, because it is one of his least studied and most criticized novels. Taking into account the dualistic focus of Surrealist writing, the analysis has been divided into two main parts. The first chapter deals with the techniques of destruction, or, in other words, those devices which Asturias uses in the novel to challenge ad invalidate the traditional narrative structures. It examines in particular his distortions of time, space and narrative point-of-view. The last two chapters concentrate on the actual constructive elements used to organize the material and give it an impression of unity. Chapter two examines the novel in the light of the Surrealist fascination with primitive myth narration and its structural devices: the "mythopoetic" structure. Chapter three traces the specific re-existent myths incorporated into the text as structural motifs that provide a global "mythological" framework. It also investigates their contribution to the general meaning of the novel. In this way, the thesis demonstrates not only the extent of Asturias' adherence to Surrealist goals and attitudes, but also the fact that his novels, and specifically Mulata de tal, are indeed coherent and carefully structured, and are therefore deserving of more critical attention. === Arts, Faculty of === French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of === Graduate
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