Double Talk: Asturias's America in Cuculcán

M iguel Angel Asturias's Cuculcan, a dramatic collage of color, sound, motion, and words, is his most overtly ethnographic play, and, as a product of his vanguardist years, it is also the most radically experimental. Cuculcan did not appear in print until 1948, but Asturias described the work in progress in a 1932 journalistic essay, "Las posibilidades de un teatro americano." Although both Cuculcan and the Leyendas de Guatemala into which it was incorporated manifest Asturias's pursuit of new art forms that might evoke autochthonous New World experience, the play constructs a more complex version of America and its art than initially meets the spectator's eye. Americanist aspirations constituted a significant thread in Latin American vanguardist activity of the 1920s and early 1930s. Manifestoes with an Americanist orientation often proclaimed with hyperbolic rhetoric the continent's energy, "ancestral" spirit, and radical newness as antidotes to European cultural exhaustion. With echoes from Whitman, Nietzsche, and Spengler and doses of Bergsonian elan vital, vanguardist documents forecast an energetic new American day, a potent new American species, and a radically new American art. Vanguardist creative works with an Americanist orientation such as Cuculcan often incorporated ethnographic materials from Latin America's non-Western cultures. Cultural critic James Clifford has documented the interaction between ethnography and art in Parisian post World War I vanguardist activity. He has also argued that, because of its decontextualized quality, ethnographic writing undertaken either by artists or by anthropologists is always allegorical. As Antonio Candido pointed out with regard to Brazil, during the vanguard period Latin American writers claimed a privileged connection to the non-Western cultures that surrounded them. Although ethnographic material was employed in part to affirm the intrinsic worth of these cultures, it was also used allegorically to speak more broadly about the New World and its art. The international avant-gardes, in particular through primitivist modes, posed a connection between originality and origins, between artistic creativity and a notion of radical human or cultural beginnings. Latin American texts often recast this connection into New World contexts and portrayed America as a primeval world of ontological innocence and unprocessed experience retrievable from autochthonous sources, indigenous or imported. In this spirit, Cuculcan appears on the surface to reinforce the organicist myths of Latin America's cultural originality that, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarrfa suggests, marked Latin American literature from the independence era until the emergence of the new narrative (41 -43). But, at the same time, the play undermines primitivist representations of America by portraying a not-so-innocent New World as the site of creative deception and critique. Asturias's 1932article on Cuculcan in progress underscored America' s newness with a language typical of what Djelal Kadir has characterized as the obsession in Latin America's cultural imagination with "perpetually unfolding fictions that endlessly remake the New World anew" (6). Asturias was seeking a theatrical formula for what was "yet to be bom" as an American form of expression (477). His romantic description of the America to be embodied in such theatre was typical of the period in its telluric, organicist, and primitivist imagery: