According to Latin American literary scholar Gerald Martin, Asturias's El Señor Presidente, which was written and published before the Latin American Boom of the 1960s, uses a style now classified as the "new novel" or "new narrative".[49] In this novel, Asturias breaks from the historic and realist style that dominated novels at the time.[49] Martin argues that the novel "exemplifies more clearly than any other novel the crucial link between European Surrealism and Latin American Magical Realism. It is, indeed, the first fully-fledged Surrealist novel in Latin America."[50]
Richard Franklin contends that on occasion surrealist writing obscures meaning, but in El Señor Presidente Asturias avoids this flaw. His combination of rationalism with "a world of forms" creates "an imagery which reveals a deeper reality, one which is more deeply rooted in the human psyche".[37] As such, Asturias's surrealist style highlights the modern disintegration of long-standing belief systems.[49] Literary scholar Gabriele Eckart gives as an excellent example of Asturias's surrealist style his portrayal of The Zany's psychic processes in which "language sometimes breaks apart into incomprehensible sounds".[51] This allows Asturias to present the real and imaginary, as well as the communicable and incommunicable, as non-contradictory.[51] Himelblau also highlights how El Señor Presidente projects "reality in relative, fluid terms—that is it allows its characters to disclose the temporal setting of the novel's fictional events". In this regard, then, Himelblau notes that El Señor Presidente "is also, as far as we are aware, the first novel in Spanish America that seeks to render fictional reality of time as a function of point of view".[52] The novel defies traditional narrative style by inserting numerous episodes that contribute little or nothing to the plot as the characters in these episodes often appear inconsistently.[47] Instead of relaying the book's themes through characters, Asturias uses repetition of motifs and a mythical substructure to solidify the book's message.[47]
Asturias employs figurative language to describe dream imagery and the irrational. Literary critic Hughes Davies points out that Asturias frequently appeals to the reader's auditory senses.[7] Asturias's often incantatory style[7] employs "unadulterated poetry to reinforce his imagery through sound".[37] This helps readers to understand the physical as well as the psychological aspects of the novel. According to Knightly, "few of Asturias's characters have much psychological depth; their inner conflicts tend to be externalized and played out at the archetypal level".[53] More significantly, Asturias was the first Latin American novelist to combine stream of consciousness writing and figurative language.[54] Hughes Davies argues that from the outset of El Señor Presidente, the gap between words and reality is exemplified through onomatopoeia, simile and repetition of phrases.[28] Knightly notes that "animistic elements surface occasionally in the characters' stream of consciousness".[53] For example, in the chapter "Tohil's Dance", Tohil, the God of Rain in Maya mythology, is imagined by Angel Face as arriving "riding on a river of pigeons' breasts which flowed like milk".[55] In Angel Face's vision, Tohil demands a human sacrifice and is content only so long as he "can prevail over men who are hunters of men".[55] Tohil pronounces: "Henceforth there will be neither true death nor true life. Now dance."[55] As Knightly explains, this scene follows the President's orders for Miguel Angel Face to go on a mission that ends in his death,[53] and is "a sign of the President's evil nature and purposes".[53] Davies contends that these literary techniques, when "combined together with a discontinuous structure, give the text its surrealistic and nightmarish atmosphere".[28]
