A Tendency of Commitment

Guatemala's Miguel Angel Asturias, 68, is a man of many talents. As a diplomat, he is his country's ambassador to France. As a Sorbonne-educated sociologist and lawyer, he has lectured as far afield as Italy's University of Rome and Britain's King's College at Cambridge. As a writer, he has turned out seven novels, ranging from biting political satires to surrealistic folklore, and been translated into 36 languages. Last year his leftist writings and political novels won him the $28,000 Lenin Peace Prize for exposing "American intervention against the Guatemalan people." Last week his whole body of work won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, carrying with it a $60,000 cash award.

Asturias is a novelist of the poor and oppressed; he fills his books with the same gothic ribaldry and nightmarish fantasies that Hieronymus Bosch brooded on five centuries ago. In his latest novel, Mulata, published in the U.S. a month ago, boars talk, women are impregnated through the navel, men are transformed into dwarfs, giants or rocks. A healer tests the sacredness of a place by touching the earth "with the ten tongues of his hands." When an old woman dozes, she is "butterflying with sleep like all old people." When a crowd gathers, "nightfall assembled them, as it did the stars."

Creative Battle. Asturias' creative life, he feels, has come out of a battle--"not an armed battle but a political and civic battle." The son of a judge, he grew up under Dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920), a ruthless strongman who imprisoned or murdered his political opponents and all but cut off Guatemala from the outside world. After Estrada's overthrow in 1920 came a series of military-dominated governments that were almost as bad; when Asturias published a set of anti-militaris tic articles, his family persuaded him to move to Europe for his own safety. In 1933, Asturias returned home, became a radio broadcaster, worked on his first novel, then went into the diplomatic service.

Though never a Communist himself, he was a strong supporter of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman's Communist regime, which took power in 1950. As ambassador to El Salvador in 1954, he tried to thwart the U.S.-supported military coup that toppled Arbenz. The new government stripped Asturias of his citizenship, and sent him once again into exile. Last year, after the election of Moderate Leftist Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro, Asturias was invited back to his country, where he rejoined the foreign service.

Hover in Twilight. By then, Asturias was one of the favorite writers of Guatemalan intellectuals; he had established himself, along with Brazil's Jorge Amado (Gabriela) and Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges (A Personal Anthology), as one of Latin America's most important literary voices. His first major novel, The President (1946), was a razor-edged indictment of Cabrera-style caudillismo. Three years later, he completed Men of Corn, an intense, poetic treatment of the poverty, hopelessness and dark mysticism that haunt the life of the Guatemalan Indian. Over the next ten years, he produced a trilogy of political novels that attacked widespread "Yankee economic imperialism" in Guatemala, focusing--if sometimes too polemically --on the growth and power of the United Fruit Co. Last week Asturias was busy on his eighth and ninth novels, one biographical and the other a dreamlike fantasy set in 16th and 17th century Guatemala during the Spanish conquest.

In its writing awards, the Swedish Academy frequently chooses in order to honor the giants of literature in the twilight of their careers. Asturias rep resents the other extreme--the choice of a worthy writer who might otherwise go largely unnoticed. Asturias feels he was picked also because he embodies a new irend in Latin American literature. "We have long had a tendency," he said last week, "of avoiding our problems, submerging them in romanticism and folklore. With me, the academy has selected the other tendency--that of involvement, confrontation and commitment."

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