Dictator novel

The dictator novel (Spanish: novela del dictador) is a genre of Latin American literature which developed the theme of caudillismo. Its hallmarks include a concern with the relation between writing and power, and so also is an allegory of the role of the (Latin American) writer in society. The goal of the dictator novel is not to dissect and to analyze the rule of particular dictators in history, but rather, it concerns itself with the more abstract nature of authority figures and with the question of authority in general.

Historical Context

Dictators in Latin American History

Since independence (and arguably earlier), Latin American countries have been subject to more than their fair share of both right and left-wing authoritarian regimes, stemming from a history of colonialism in which one group dominated another. The legacy of colonialism is one of racial conflict requiring an absolute authority figure to contain it, a tyrant. Marked by a need for unlimited power, they often amend the constitution, dismantling previous laws which previously prevented their reelection. General Manuel Estrada Cabrera, for example, altered the Guatemalan Constitution in 1899 which had previously forbid reelection. Despite the number and prevalence of these regimes, the dictators themselves who have become the focus of the Dictator Novel (Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo el Supremo, for instance, is based on Paraguay's dictator of the early nineteenth century, the so-called Dr Francia) do not differ all that much from each other, especially in terms of how they govern. As author González Echevarría states: "they are male, militaristic, and wield almost absolute personal power". Their strong-arm tactics include exiling or imprisoning their opposition, attacking the freedom of the press, creating a centralized government backed by a powerful military force, and assuming complete liberty over anything resembling free thought. Despite intense criticisms leveled at these dictators, they leave behind a legacy of development. "Pessoa (Elected as President of Brazil in 1918) wanted to make the country progress, no matter whether Congress passed the laws he presented to it or not". In the twentieth century, prominent Latin American dictators have included the Somoza dynasty (in Nicaragua), Alfredo Stroessner (in Paraguray), and Augusto Pinochet (in Chile), among others. As an outside influence, the United States interference in Latin American politics is quite controversial and has often been severely criticized. "Does it want peace or is it controlled by certain interests?"

Los Padres de la Patria

Carlos Fuentes launched in 1967, during a meeting with Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar and Miguel Otero Silva, the project of a series of biographies depicting Latin American dictators, which would be called Los Padres de la Patria (The Fathers of the Nations). Vargas Llosa was to write about Manuel A. Odría, Jorge Edwards about José Manuel Balmaceda, José Donoso about Mariano Melgarejo, and Julio Cortázar about Eva Perón. Although the project was never completed, it helped inspire a series of novels by important authors of the Latin American literary boom such as Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Literary Context

Modernization and Modernism

The Dictator novel of the Latin American Boom would not have been made possible were it not for advances made in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter half of the nineteenth century featured economic expansion and relative political stability linked to "consolidation of liberal political institutions that eliminated many vestiges of Colonial society". Regional writers of the twentieth century took on that history, creating new narrative forms which drew on both international influences and local culture, laying the groundwork for the Boom. Despite adopting new narrative devices, elaborating political themes, and defining Latin America's cultural modernity, their significance lies in establishing the crucial role of the novel in Latin American intellectual life.

Foreign authors of modernist literature from the 1920s and 1930s became the most important forerunners for the rise of modernist fiction in Latin America, as opposed to significant local authors like Torres Bodet and Vicente Huidobro. These Latin American novelists inclined to become the next Latin American Dos Passos or William Faulkner. Under the umbrella of modernists we include Rosario Castellanos, David Vinas, Antonio de Benedetto, Yolanda Oreamundo, Salvador Garendia, and Jacques Stephan Alexis, as well as established writers Agustín Yáñez, Juan Rulfo, and Leopoldo Marechal. It is important to note that not all contemporary authors supported modernization. The 1940s and 50s saw a time of cultural tension in Latin America linked to debates on national identity and cultural identity. Heavily influenced by the Argentine poet, essayist and short fiction writer Jose Luis Borges, writers such as Mexican Carlos Fuentes and Rosario Castellanos “fictionalized attendant issues of cultural conflict, cultural difference, and hybridity”. As regional awareness became stronger in several areas of Latin America, these authors began to produce works which functioned to criticize the power held by the leaders in their respective countries.

The Latin American Boom

The dictator novel is largely associated with the so-called Latin American Boom. This is a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s throughout the entire continent, though some scholars argue as to whether it began in 1958, when Carlos Fuentes published La region más transparente (Where the Air is Clear), in 1962, with Mario Vargas Llosa winning the Biblioteca Breve Prize for his manuscript Los impostores ("The imposters"), in 1963, when Julio Cortázar published Rayuela (Hopscotch), or even as late as 1967, when Gabriel García Márquez introduced Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), setting the stage for the recognition of magical realism.

The Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, had a significant influence on the Latin American Boom as it diminished the Spanish presence in Latin America, which at this time was largely dependent on Spain for books and other literature from the rest of Europe. The Civil War had essentially cut off that flow of reading material. Another contributer, following the civil war in Spain, was World War II from the late 1930s to 1945, which consumed the rest of Europe and challenged many long-standing notions and ideas throughout the western world. The Boom began as Latin America became a producer of essays, poetry, and novels linked to various Latin American countries' introspection of themselves as they attempted to define their own identities on the national and continental level.

Development of the Genre

Forerunners

Both Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo (Civilización y barbarie, 1845) and José Marmol's Amalia (1851) of the 19th century are examples of precursors to the twentieth century dictator novel. Facundo is an indirect critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas's dictatorship, directed against the actual historical figure, Juan Facundo Quiroga, but also, a broader investigation into Argentine history and culture. Facundo has remained a fundamental fixture through time because of the breadth of its literary exploration of the Latin American environment.Like the more famous Rosas, an Argentinean dictator ruling from 1829 to 1853, Facundo was opposed to the enlightened ideas of progress which Sarmiento attempted to put into practice when he became president of Argentina himself (1868-1874) . Sarmiento's analysis of Facundo Quiroga was the first time that an author posed the question of how figures like Facundo and Rosas could have come about to himself and to his readers. In answering this question, Sarmiento brings about the modern dictator novel when he perceives his own power in writing Facundo as "within the text of the novel, it is the novelist, through the voice of omniscience, who has replaced God", thereby creating a bridge between writing and power that is characteristic of the dictator novel. Set in post-colonial Buenos Aires, Amalia was written in two parts and is a semi-autobiographical account of José Mármol that deals with living in Rosas's police state. Mármol's novel was important as it showed how the human consciousness, much like a cities or even a country, could become a terrifying prison. In the early twentieth century, the Spaniard Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Tirano Banderas (1926) acted as a key influence to these authors whose goal was to critique power structures and the status quo.

Classic Dictator Novels

Significant dictator novels include Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State (El recurso del método, 1974), said by Carpentier to be Descartes' "Discourse on the method at reverse because, to my mind, Latin America is the least Cartesian continent that one can think of." The same year, the Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos published Yo, el Supremo (I, the Supreme; 1974), forged around the figure of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. In a 1977 article, Roa Bastos clearly described his project as a "counter-history, a subversive and transgressive reply to the official historiography." The following year, Gabriel García Márquez published El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975), located in an indeterminate Caribbean country. Finally, in 2000, Mario Vargas Llosa published La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat) on the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.

• Miguel Ángel Asturias, El señor Presidente (The President, 1946) — implicitly refers to Manuel Estrada Cabrera, dictator of Guatemala
• Jorge Zalamea, El Gran Burundún Burundá ha muerto (1952)
• Enrique Lafourcade, La Fiesta del rey Acab (1964) (King Ahab’s Feast)
• Alejo Carpentier, El recurso del método (Reasons of State, 1974), on Gerardo Machado, dictator of Cuba
• Augusto Roa Bastos, Yo, el Supremo (I, the Supreme; 1974)
• Gabriel García Márquez, El otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975)
• Luisa Valenzuela, Cola de lagartija (The Lizard's Tail, 1983) is set in the period after Juan Perón's return to Argentina in 1973 during the reign of José López Rega and it deals specifically with themes surrounding the nature of male-female relationships during this regime of military oppression. The novel's title is a reference to an instrument of torture that was invented in the Southern Cone.
• Tomás Eloy Martínez, La novela de Perón (The Perón novel, 1985)
• Gabriel García Márquez, El general en su laberinto (The General in His Labyrinth, 1989) is a fictionalized telling of the last seven months in the life of Simón Bolívar, the Great Liberator of Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador from Spanish rule.
• Mario Vargas Llosa, La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat, 2000) about Rafael Trujillo

Others

• Julia Álvarez, En el tiempo de las mariposas (In the Time of the Butterflies, 1994) — on the lives of the Mirabal sisters who were assassinated by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo
• Roberto Bolaño, Estrella distante (Distant Star, 1996) — opens with the 1973 Chilean coup by Augusto Pinochet against Salvador Allende

Style and Theme

Techniques

These writers employed methods such as use of interior monologues, stream of consciousness, fragmentation, varying narrative points of view, neologisms, innovative narrative strategies, and frequent lack of causality. In addition, to these narrative techniques, a new world view was inserted into their texts in which time and space become flexible qualities in a chaotic, fragmented modern world.

Magical Realism

The term magic realism was first used by the German art critic Franz Roh to refer to a painterly style also known as Neue Sachlichkeit. However, in contrast to its use in literature, when used to describe visual art, the term refers to paintings that do not include anything fantastic or magical, but are rather extremely realistic and often mundane.Magical realism is an important feature of the Boom literature of the 1960s in Latin America. Magic realism (or magical realism) is an artistic genre in which magical elements or illogical scenarios appear in an otherwise realistic or even "normal" setting. Magical realism is often considered a subcategory of postmodern fiction due to its challenge to hegemony and its use of techniques similar to those of other postmodernist texts, such as the distortion of time. Many early magical realists such as Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias studied with the surrealists, and surrealism, as an international movement, influenced many aspects of Latin American art. Surrealists, however, try to discover and portray that which is above or superior to the “real” through the use of techniques such as automatic writing, hypnosis, and dreaming. Magical realists, on the other hand, portray the real world itself as having marvelous aspects inherent in it. Many scholars have criticized the term 'magical realism' as it is a European term that is applied to non-European literature. Summed up well by Alfred J. Lopez, is this process of naming is "a futile European attempt to categorize and thus 'understand' it by this process of naming-which is already itself an act of appropriation, a bid to harness the wild, 'exotic' text within a reasonable European framework - to 'master' the other's difficult text?"

Gender

Masculinity is an overarching theme in dictator novels largely because they are written predominantly by men about men.

References

• Brotherson, Gordon (1977). The Emergence of the Latin American Novel. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521214785.
• Calderon, Garcia F. (1925). [<http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca:3819/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=1483044&site=ehost-live> "Dictatorship and Democracy in Latin America"] (PDF). Foreign Affairs. 3 (3): 459–477. Retrieved 2008-03-10. {{cite journal}}: Check |url= value (help)
• Dey, Susnigdha (1988). Contemporary Latin American Literature. Delhi: B.R. Publishing Corporation. ISBN 8170184819.
• Echevarría, González (1985). The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0292787162.
• Gollnick, Brian (2005), "The Regional Novel and Beyond", in Kristal, Efraín (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 44–58 ISBN: 1-85566-120-9
• Hart, Stephen M. (2005), "Magical Realism: Style and Substance", in Ouyang, Wen-Chin; Hart, Stephen M. (eds.), A companion to Magical Realism, Woodbridge: Tamesis, pp. 1–13 ISBN: 1-85566-120-9
• King, John (2005), "The Boom of the Latin American Novel", in Kristal, Efraín (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 59–80 ISBN: 1-85566-120-9
• Martin, Gerald (1989). Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso. ISBN 0860912388.
• Ouyang, Wen-Chin (2005), "Magical Realism and Beyond: Ideology of Fantasy", in Ouyang, Wen-Chin; Hart, Stephen M. (eds.), A companion to Magical Realism, Woodbridge: Tamesis, pp. 13–20 ISBN: 1-85566-120-9
• Swanson, Philip (1995). The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and popular culture after the boom. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. p. 1. ISBN 0-7190-4038-8.
• Williams, Raymond Leslie (2003). The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel. Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0-292-79161-5.

Further reading

• Calviño Iglesias, Julio. La novela del dictador en Hispanoamérica, Madrid : Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1985.
• López-Calvo, Ignacio. "God and Trujillo": Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator, Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2005.
• Monterroso, Augusto. "Novelas sobre dictatores".
• Rosario-Vélez, Jorge. "God and Trujillo": Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator (review) in The Americas - Volume 63, Number 4, April 2007, pp. 656-658
• Subercaseaux, B. 1976. «Tirano Banderas en la narrativa hispanoamericana: la novela del dictador, 1926-1976», in Hispamérica, 14, pp. 45-62.
• Zuluaga C. 1979. Novelas de dictador, dictadores de novela, Bogotá, C. Valencia.

See also

• Films depicting Latin American military dictatorships
• South American literature