Manner from heaven
Peter Ackroyd
The Eyes Of The Interred Miguel Angel. Asturias translated by Gregory Rabassa (Jonathan Cape E5.00.) A big book brings out the worst in the best of us. And there is particular attraction in i moralising about a Nobel-Prize winner, who s also a South American, who is also a 'friend' of the 'oppressed.' The fact that I have slotted those words within single quotes shows that I have succumbed to the temptation already.. This is a novel with hooded eyes. The Eyes Of The Interred is couched in a rhetoric that is more Latin than American, and the book suffers from an excess of historical somnolence.
It is almost exhilarating to read the first two or three hundred pages, since the language has a surface sheen which reflects the world in its own image. The ostensible heroes of the book, the poor and the oppressed, are invaded by its presence as though it were an incantation and the purlieus of aestheticism have never seemed more heroic. The novel is set in the 'forties, and it offers that brand of heroic realism in whi-Th only the homunculi deserve to inherit the earth. Recent history is always the most resonant, and Asturias resurrects the nights and days of the poor with a very free hand. There is Anastasia "with no last name, no watch, no drawers," there is Juan Nepo Rogas with his broken bicycle and broken sleep and there is Juan Pablo Mondragon, alias Octavio Sansur, who comes by night to raise the dead, alias the workers of the banana company. A national strike ensues and the dictator of the Republic, "the Beast" resigns. That is what fiction means.
In other words, this is not a novel consumed by 'social realism.' Asturias's language is too grandiose to encompass the range and tactility of ordinary reality, and it quickly becomes inflated and romantic: "he took care of the fans at the Granada, dirty with old wind that had become dust on the sadness of cold metal." When you fuel so much sound and fury into the dust, ordinary human life must scream to be heard. Unfortunately, Asturias's language of revolution is flat and peripheral, it becomes nothing more than the lifeless mouthing of slogans:"You said it Malena! Real love takes part in the future conquest of the world." The Malena in question is a schoolmistress who, as you can see, believes in mixing business with pleasure.
Asturias maintains the momentum of his -vvriting only with the considerable use of cliche and lyrical abreaction. I am not sure how much this is the invasion of translator's demotic, but I am assured that the English is faithful to the point of idolatry. Here is a passage which suggests the flesh and spirit of the book:
The sound of the bells was followed by a hailstorm, as if all around the silence of the night had broken into pieces. A ram of almonds with dark corneas and clear pupils that bathed it in looks. And another, another wave of hail, as if suddenly billions of tears had solidified over the nearby graveyard, beat him with its seed of naked eyes, watery, congealed.
The images glissade into each other to create a rhetoric rather than a sense; the lyrical slackness promotes a confusion of thought and an imprecision of feeling, and we are left with the sour and bankrupt manipulation of stock reaction. Any substantial, human reality is, of course, exiled from this finesse and As tunas becomes a Stylist and an enormous bore. Since everything resides on the surface, there can be very little complexity or development within the novel. The romance , between revolutionary and schoolmistress, for, f example, remains at the level of perspex and the transformation of Malena into a revolu • tionary simpleton is handled heavily and clumsily. There is a story but no plot, speeches but no characters. Novels that depend upon rhetoric must alsa, depend upon images, metaphors ana, allegories rather than upon motive and character. So it is that Asturias has Octavio Sansur crouching in labyrinthine caves before the revolution. It is an image of the living dead, the interred whose eyes "more numerous than the stars," will be opened. And it is through these images that we reach the heart of his design. Which, in The Eyes Of The Interred, is very different from his ostensible theme. The imaginative substance of the novel is taken from images of death and Pa; trefaction, or what Asturias calls a 'dead man's tone," and the novel takes on a gro. tesque swerve. On the surface, Asturias raises the dead through the agency of Octavio Sansur and his incantation of liberation, but — whether unconsciously or not — he constructs a ghastly parody of resurrection in the odd manners of a certain Juambo. He is the brother of Anastasia and naturally becomes a revolutionary under pressure, but it all becomes too much for him. He disinters his dead father, accidentally losing the bones in the street. The progressive madness of Juarabo is lovingly detailed, and it has much more imaginative substance than the flat and neutral course of revolution. And when Asturias goes on to comment in the middle of all that fiddle, "their bare feet, which yesterday had been slave feet, were like brutal hooves. . . ," he adds matter to manner and it is not difficult to recognise where his creative sympathies lie. A lover of language is no lover of people, and Asturias shows verY little instinctive sympathy for the helpless masses under the iron control of his style. They remain the brute stuff of his dreams, the residue of his fantasies.
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