Of course it isn’t. It lives on in television infomercial hosts, wrestling announcers and multi-level marketing gurus. But I’m talking about the real thing–the carnival barker, the frontier snake oil salesman, the witch hunter. I didn’t think that was something you could see anymore in a public setting: a silver-tongued philanthropic capitalist addressing a preferably credulous public in order to convince them at length and in grand style to buy whatever it is. In Guatemala I was astonished and really very happy to find that tradition thriving. These people are serious storytellers, doing it to survive.

I took a series of chickenbuses to Chichcastenango, a highland maya town on a hilly plateau at about 6,000 feet where they have a big market on Thursdays and Sundays. It was windy and cold and the thin air made it hard to walk uphill. At one end of town, there’s a pastel-colored graveyard on a cliff, at the other, a stark white church built in 1600 on whose steps the local adherents of the maya religion make their offerings of flowers, tobacco and copal.

Five steps into the market I met a lady selling packets of medicine to kill stomach parasites, ringworm and the like. Four pills for four days. She had a collection of specimens–actual stomach parasites preserved in alcohol in baby food jars. She picked them up one at a time as she lectured. “Look at the size of this one,” she’d say. “This demon came out of the belly of a twelve year old girl.”

Chichicastenango, you’ll recall from my earlier ranting about it, is the town where the Popol Vuh was hidden away for 250 years before Friar Ximenez found it in 1701, transcribed it and copied it into Spanish. I went to the museum in Chicago where that copy now resides; they wouldn’t let me see it, but the whole manuscript’s been scanned online anyway. Anyhow. I went to the monastery courtyard where Ximenez would have sat to make the translation. It’s right in the middle of the market, and it was packed with people resting from the ordeal of shopping. A man by the fountain was telling a story to a crowd of a hundred mostly boys, teenagers and young men. The story consisted of a long series of ad-libbed episodes illustrating how the magic elixir of strength he was offering–in clear plastic vacuum bags with straws like those juice packs you drank in junior high–had caused hilarious awesomeness to spring out wherever it fell. He’d puncture a bag of elixir and use it as a visual aid to demonstrate peeing, a pregnant lady giving milk, a guy spitting at a joke, some more peeing, wine being turned to water, water to blood, hooch being drunk, rain. The resourcefulness of it was impressive, despite the lowbrowness perhaps of the humor. And I stood there and listened for 15 minutes, trying to figure out if there was some underlying thread I’d missed or wasn’t picking up, or if this was just how the story went. Everybody was having a good time, anyhow. And when I left, he still hadn’t tried to sell anybody anything.

Now there’s a storyteller.

A bridge in Chichi. Note the depiction of quetzalcoatl above the arch. (That’s El Nubo in the backpack–my intrepid guide.)

On the long bus ride back from Chichi, a twelve year-old kid got on for the leg from Chimaltenango to Jocotenango with a shoebox full of glue sticks–paste glue in a blue lipstick tube, like I used in 2nd grade. He handed two glue sticks out to every person. He clambered to the middle of the bus, gave a three minute lecture on the proper use and benefits of these glue sticks–great for arts and crafts, a great gift for the niños, easy to use, no mess. He named a price. Then he walked back around collecting up most of the sticks he’d handed out and some money from people who wanted to keep theirs. He got off in Joco, replenished his supply from a bigger box guarded by a girl a couple years younger, and climbed back onto the return bus to present his spiel again.

Then there were the “saved” men. Usually with scars or an arm missing from the civil war. Booming preacher voices, a summary of their path from loneliness and sin to oneness with Dios. They are performing a public service, providing a lesson with a clear moral. They ask for donations.

I couldn’t resist sharing a little bit more of Miguel Ángel Asturias’ The President, which, yes, I am still reading after all this time, partly because of all the TNEO crits piling up on the floor around my desk, but mostly because of the astonishing, cerebellum-like convolutions of the novel’s structure, characters and prose. Each chapter is a unit unto itself, more often than not with its own point-of-view character and its own unique conceit. I have been restricting myself to a chapter a night, often flipping back for multiple re-readings.

The following nocturne comes as a married couple, newly wedded almost by coercion and as a result facing political disfavor and the immanent threat of execution, settle into separate beds in separate rooms and try desperately to sleep:

The moon went in and out of floating niches in the clouds. The road flowed like a river of white bones under bridges of shadow. Now and again everything grew indistinct, with the patina of some old religious relic, only to reappear brightened with gold thread. A vast black eyelid intervened, and cut off this vision seen through flickering eyelids. Its enormous lashes seemed to come from the highest of the volcanoes and spread like a huge spider over the skeleton of the town, plunging it in mourning shadow. The dogs shook their ears like door-knockers, night birds flew through the sky, a moan passed from cypress to cypress and there was a sound of clocks being wound and set. The moon disappeared completely behind the tall summit of a crater and a mist like a bride’s veil came to rest among the houses. Angel Face shut the window.

Asturias spends the first half of the novel establishing his namesake character, Miguel Angel Face, as a left-hand-of-God figure, the eponymous dictator’s personal equivalent to an Archangel Gabriel: beautiful, frigid, fickle and cruel. But by the point of the above excerpt (nearing the end), we see him transformed, a half-redeemed and now entirely sympathetic antihero, more akin to Milton’s Satan. In an astonishing and damning feat of postmodernist cheek, Asturias has written himself into a scathing criticism of a dictatorial government which he himself had served and would continue to serve in the future. He finished El Señor Presidente in 1933, but because of the reigning political climate in Guatemala and his personal implication, it wasn’t published until 1946.

I’ve been thinking of Asturias lately as the originator of the magic realist genre, though, like most originators, he doesn’t actually fit into that genre himself. He was apparently the first to apply the term to fiction (rather than to art), but his own writing is far bleaker, less romantic, less accessible, and more abstract than the flagship works of magic realism’s current market share. All of which tendencies I find myself tempted to strive for in my own writing.

I notice a lot of contemporary writers—Lucius Shepard (in this Strange Horizons interview), Angelica Gorodischer (this interview at Fantastic Metropolis), Alberto Fuguet ((in an essay at Salon.com)—trying deliberately to extricate themselves from the entangling spines of the magic realist umbrella, even as more crossover titles with magic realist leanings (The Shadow of the Wind, Murakami) keep popping up in the bestseller lists. The term having been appropriated and standardized by the publishing industry, I think, deprives the style of some of its impact. Which shouldn’t really come as a surprise; it’s not like it hasn’t happened before, with everything from grunge to hip hop to the co-opting of Che Guevara iconography, etc. A year ago, the implication that nothing truly innovative or vibrant could be done anymore with magic realism would have and did piss me off to no end. Now, though, I have to admit I am coming around to the side of the scrappy heroes of the fringe. Not that I’m quite ready to abandon the term altogether. I still do get mildly annoyed when I see some new and bitter initiate of the ivory tower taking attention-begging potshots at magic realism as a whole rather than at any of the actual human beings who perpetrate it. But I do begin to think that Theodora Goss was doing me a favor when she lumped “The Utter Proximity of God” with the surrealists instead.

Which doesn’t exactly bring me back around to Asturias, except in that his authorial mindset and storytelling style were developed entirely out of the influence of the twenty-first century publishing conglomerate climate, but rather squarely under that of European surrealists like Paul Valéry. And so perhaps I do ok for myself by choosing to obsess about him instead of García Marquez for awhile.