Literature and history in El señor president of Miguel Ángel Asturias: your time record

Abstract

The Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974), writer, diplomat and Nobel Prize for Literature (1967) was one of the greatest Latin American writers, along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Among his many works, the most renowned is El señor presidente (1946), a novel that brought him international fame and through which he represents, in a very bizarre way, the portrait of a typical Latin American dictator and his government based on terror, evil, and death. In this context, dominated by fear and cruelty, two women appear – Camila Canales and Nina Fedina – who, united by the tragedy, will have to cope with this power play between good and evil. In the analysis of the female trajectory, one can observe the construction of a hybrid narrative since it incorporates “la historia en la literature,” which shows the struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. According to the Latin American myths, the former represented the oppressed, including women, often ignored; the latter, the dictator and all those people who condoned him by fear or ambition. By highlighting the role of these two female characters, this work aims to show that literature and history reflect reality through different levels of identity (Pesavento, 2006), and that literature can serve as a source for history, regarding “registration and impression of life”, since it is “an undeniable record of its time.”