Jump to content

The Feast of the Goat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Sunnybeddow (talk | contribs) at 04:52, 31 March 2008 (expanded lead). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Feast of the Goat
The cover of a recent translation.
AuthorMario Vargas Llosa
Original titleLa fiesta del chivo
TranslatorEdith Grossman
LanguageSpanish
GenreHistorical novel
Dictator novel
PublisherAlfaguara (Spanish)
 ??? (English)
Publication date
2000
Publication placePeru
Published in English
2001
Media typePrint (Hardcover and Paperback)
ISBN[[Special:BookSources/ISBN+978-9505115846+%28Spanish%29%3Cbr+%2F%3E+ISBN+%3F%3F%3F%3F+%28English%29 |ISBN 978-9505115846 (Spanish)
ISBN ???? (English)]] Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character

The Feast of the Goat (Template:Lang-es, 2000) is a novel by the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa. The book is set in two times periods; during the regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and in the modern day Dominican. The novel follows three interwoven story lines. The first storyline is a modern day retrospective look at the regime through the eyes of a fictional character named Urania Cabral. The second story line is from the perspective of inside members of the regime, including the dictator himself. And the third storyline is from the perspectives of his assassins. These three story lines reveal the political and social environment in the Dominican Republic, past and present.

Mario Vargas Llosa paints a vivid picture of the ending of a 31 year regime by using powerful themes in the story. The themes of the book including political corruption, machismo, memory, and writing and power, all contribute to Vargas Llosa's picture of tyranny in the Dominican Republic.


Title

The novel's title is taken from the popular Dominican merengue Mataron al Chivo ("They Killed the Goat") which is rooted in the assassination of May 30, 1961 of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the Dictator of the Dominican Republic. It is cited at the beginning of the novel:

"El pueblo celebra
con gran entusiasmo
la Fiesta del Chivo
el treinta de mayo"
"The people celebrate
With great enthusiasm
the feast of the Goat
the thirtieth of May"

Merengue is a style of music created by Ñico Lora in the 1920s. Rafael Trujillo promoted it during his era, and due to the influence of Merengue in the Dominican Republic, it soon became the country’s national music. Therefore, incorporating a part of this music in the beginning of the book reminds readers of the roots of Latin American society.

Plot summary

The plot centres around three distinctive strands: a focus on Urania Cabral, a focus on the conspirator of Trujillo's assassination, and a focus on Trujillo himself [1]. The novel alternates between these strands and between 1961 and present.

The novel begins with the return of Urania to her hometown of Santo Domingo, a city which was renamed Ciudad Trujillo during Rafael Trujillo's Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina time in power. This storyline is largely introspective and deals with Urania's memories and her inner turmoil over the events preceding her departure from the Dominican Republic as a young woman. Urania escapes the crumbling Trujillo regime in 1961, allegedly to study under the tutelage of nuns in Michigan. In the following decades, Urania achieves success as a prominent New York lawyer. When she finally returns to the Dominican in 1996, she does so on a whim, and finds herself compelled to confront her father and elements of her past she has long ignored. As Urania speaks to her ailing father, Augustin Cabral, she recalls more and more of the anger and disgust that galvanized her thirty-five years of silence. Urania retells her father's descent into political disgrace and the betrayal that forms the crux of both Urania's storyline and that of Trujillo himself.

The second story is set in the days and months surrounding Trujillo's 1961 assassination. Vargas Llosa uses this segment to meticulously examine the thoughts and lives of the most important political actors of the era: Trujillo himself, then-figurehead president Joaquín Balaguer, intelligence chief Johnny Abbes García, and each of the general's assassins, as well as a variety of fictional and composite characters. Each of these figures makes for a fascinating character study; the motivations and philosophy of the Goat and his cronies provide valuable insight into the mind of a dictatorship. The moral and rational justifications presented for the iron-fisted governance of Trujillo, the torture and persecution, the terror and assassination campaigns against Dominican exiles, and Trujillo's 1937 massacre of tens of thousands of Haitians on the Haitian-Dominican border are as informative as they are shocking. The story furnishes a real perspective on the mind of the Dominican people, and indeed, any people living under oppression, as well as allowing a glimpse into the machinations of global and hemispheric politics during the Cold War. Vargas Llosa examines Trujillo's attitudes towards communist Cuba's Castro, Venezuela's Betancourt, and of course John F. Kennedy and the "Yanqui meddlers" who eventually brought him down.

Vargas Llosa dedicates a large portion of the novel to narrating the eventual sad fates of Trujillo's assassins. Principal among these stories is that of the ex-Secretary of the Armed Forces José René "Pupo" Román, who had a minor role in the conspiracy to kill the dictator. Román was tortured in the most brutal and horrendous manner possible for several months before dying at the hand of Trujillo's son Ramfis. Some of the tortures described in The Feast of the Goat are horrific to the point of incrediblity; nevertheless, the writer insists that he had to tone down descriptions of some of the procedures used in the La Cuarenta prison in order to make them more believable, which is not to say more palatable.

Characters

Modern Day Characters

Urania Cabral: the protagonist, who escapes from the Dominican as a teenager and returns in adulthood to confront her past. Urania left the Dominican Republic at the age of 14 after being sexually abused by the dictator himself, at the willingness of her father. Since leaving she has become a successful woman living in New York, with a side interest in learning about Trujillo's regime from an academic perspective. She did not return to the Dominican for over 30 years until her return in the novel.

El Senor Cabral: the father of Urania and the president of the Senate under Trujillo's rule. In the past parts of the book, Cabral had fallen into disgrace with the regime during one of Trujillo's tests of loyalty. In the modern thread of the novel, Cabral has suffered a severe stroke and is incapable of speaking or caring for himself, requiring constant care.

The Trujillo Regime

File:Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.jpg
The picture of dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo

Rafael Trujillo: "The Goat", "The Chief", the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961 and official President of the Republic from 1930 to 1938 and 1943 to 1952 (Delpar, p 597). Trujillo assumes power after the U.S. military occupation of the Dominican, during which time he rises to the rank of Commander in Chief of the Dominican Armed Forces. In 1930 he becomes President of the Republic through electoral fraud (Balderston, p 1501). During his "thirty-one years of horrendous political crimes", Trujillo modernized the country's infrastructure and military, but his regime's attacks against its enemies overseas (particularly the attempted assasination of Rómulo Betancourt, president of Venezuala) led to the imposition of economic sanctions on the Dominican Republic by the Organization of American States in the 1950's (Tenenbaum, p 274). The resultant economic downturn, in conjunction with other factors, leads to the CIA supported assasination plot that ends Trujillo's life on May 30th, 1961 (Delpar, p 597).

Joaquín Balaguer: The puppet president of the Republic who assumes real power after Trujillo's death.

Johnny Abbes García: The head of Trujillo's secret police and the mastermind behind the regime's most cruel acts. He is a fat, poorly kept man, but is the most trusted man to Trujillo.

Henry Chirinos: Supervisor of Trujillo's business operations at the time of his assassination. At various times held other positions such as Senator and Minister of Justice.

Ramfis Trujillo: the son of Rafael Trujillo and a brutal military leader who seeks vengeance against his father's killers. He was decorated as a military officer by his father, and was unsuccessfully schooled at the Fort Leavenworth Military Academy. Ramfis was also known for his womanizing.

Radhamés Trujillo: the second son of Rafael Trujillo.

Petán Trujillo: Rafael Trujillo's brother, who seeks vengeance against his brother's killers.

Héctor Trujillo: Rafael Trujillo's brother, who seeks vengeance against his brother's killers.

The Conspirators

Antonio Imbert Barrera: A politician who becomes disillusioned with the deception and cruelty of the Trujillo regime, and who later helps to kill Trujillo. His first conspiracy to kill Trujillo was foiled one day early by the unsuccessful attempted overthrow of the regime by Cuban para-military forces.

Antonio de la Maza: One of Trujillo's personal guard whose brother is killed as part of a government cover-up, and who later helps to kill Trujillo.

Salvador Estrelle Sadhalá: "Turk", A devout Catholic who, in indignation of the regime's many crimes against God, swears an oath against Trujillo and later helps to kill him.

Amado García Guerrero: "Amadito", a Lieutenant in the army who gave up his beloved as proof of his loyalty to Trujillo, and who later helps to kill Trujillo.

Major themes

There are several important themes in The Feast of the Goat. These include political corruption, machismo, memory, and writing and power. They can help us understand some irrational forces of Latin tradition that give rise to despotisism. [2]

Political corruption

The structure of the South American Society was very hierarchal and gendered. It was ruled by a cruel dictator, Rafael Trujillo, who haunts the people of Santo Domingo even 35 years after his death. He is truely a caudillo who ruled with brutality and corruption. He encourages personality cult in his capitalist society and causes decadence to the regime.[3] Prior to promotion to a position of greatest responsibility, an officer is subjugated to pass “The test of loyalty to Trujillo”.[4] His people are to remain loyal to him at no cost, and they were periodically tested by public humiliation and censure even though they were usually not at fault for anything. Some lieutenants who's wife or children were violated still remained blindly loyal to him, as he validates the violation of women as an expression of political and sexual power.[5] Even the church and military institutions were employed to give women to the tyrant for pleasure.

Many of the assassins had belonged to the Trujillo regime or had at one point been staunch supporters of him, only to find their support eroded away by the crimes of the state against its people.[6] Imbert, one of the assassins, sums up this realization, "They kill our fathers, our brothers, our friends. And now they're killing our women. And here we sit, resigned, waiting our turn."[7] This was in response to the infamous murder of the Mirabal sisters.

Mario Vargas Llosa described the nature of Trujillo as a dictator in one interview, "He had more or less all the common traits of a Latin American dictator, but pushed to the extreme. In cruelty, I think he went far far away from the rest -- and in corruption, too."[8]

Machismo

The two important parts of machismo are aggressiveness and hyper-sexuality. The aggressiveness means that all men should show their strength and power to others. The hyper-sexuality means that men should demonstrate their sexual virility with many female partners.[9]

In this novel, "[Vargas Llosa] reveals traditions of machismo, of abusive fathers, and of child-rearing practices that repeat the shaming of children, so that each generation bequeaths a withering of the soul to the subsequent one."[10]

Trujillo demanded of his aides and cabinet that they provide him with sexual access to their wives and daughters. Urania recalls a memory of seeing a neighbor's wife allow Trujillo in to her home while her husband, a member of his regime, is not at home. Mario Vargas Llosa said of Trujillo's machismo and treatment of women, "[h]e went to bed with his ministers' wives, not only because he liked these ladies but because it was a way to test his ministers. He wanted to know if they were ready to accept this extreme humiliation. Mainly the ministers were prepared to play this grotesque role -- and they remained loyal to Trujillo even after his death."[8] It also served the purposes of affirming his political power and machismo. "The implication is that maximum virility equals political dominance."[11]

The sexual abuse of Urania is part of this quest for machismo that the dictator was known for. However, it is a humiliating experience and a failure for Trujillo, who fails to achieve an erection and is unable to reach his role of supreme "macho."[12]

Memory

All three threads of the novel deal with the issue of memory in some sense or another. The most apparent confrontation of memory is on the part of Urania Cabral, who has returned to the Dominican Republic for the first time in 30 years, and is forced to confront her father and the traumas that led her to leave the country at 14. She was the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of the dictator himself, a sacrifice her father made to try to gain favor with the dictator again, a fact that she alludes to through the whole book. The book ends with her recounting the memory of that night to her aunt and cousins, who never knew the true reason she left the country. When her aunt is suprised that she remembers all these details, she responds that while she forgets many things, "I remember everything about that night."[13] For Urania, forgetting the atrocities committed by the regime is unacceptable.[14] Her father, on the other hand, is not capable of joining her in this process of remembering, since he has suffered a stroke and is not capable of speaking; however, Urania is angry that he chose to forget these things while he was still capable of aknowledging them.[14]

Memory is also important in the sections about the assassins. Each recalls the actions that led him to take place in the assassination of Trujillo. These real historical events included the 1956 Galinez kiddnapping and murder, the 1960 murder of the Mirabal sisters, and the 1961 split with the Catholic Church. "Vargas Llosa systematically links each conspirator with a specific historical event that typified the violence of the dictatorship."[15]

Mario Vargas Llosa also uses the fictionalized Urania to facilitate the novel's attempt at remembering the regime. The story opens and closes with Urania's story, effectively framing the narrative in the terms of remembering the past and the process of understanding the past and its legacy in the present.[16] In addition, because of her academic study of the history of the Trujillo regime, she is also confronting the memory of the regime for the country as a whole.[17] This is in keeping with one purpose of the book, which is to ensure that the atrocities of the dictatorship and the dangers of absolute power will be remembered by a new generation of people.[18]

Writing and power

Power can be seen as a discourse of prohibition which can be reflected in history, for history reflects on what is told or was not told.[19] The government's discourse in The Feast of the Goat shows prohibition discourse: foreign newspapers and magazines were prohibited from entering Trujillo's country as they were seen as a threat to the government's ideas.

Writing expands and limits knowledge. As power influences what gets written, history goes through a selection process. In Trujillo's era, abuse were not recorded in offical history. Through time, writing evolves. The discourse in The Feast of the Goat brings back history and unveils some of the abuse under Trujillo's regime. It shows the role of power in society and its influences on different people.

Writing also has the power to transform reality. It brings us back to the past which allows us to comphrehend myths or distorted stories told by historians. Knowing the past is crucial to our understanding of the present that takes us to postmodernism. This novel, thus, can be seen as a postmodern discourse that gives power to history recreation.[20]

Fact and Fiction

The novel is a combination of fact and fiction. Blending together these two elements is important in any historical novel, but especially in The Feast of the Goat because Vargas Llosa chose to narrate an actual event through the minds of both real and fictional characters.[21] Some characters are fictional, and those that are non-fictional still have fictionalized aspects in the book. The general details of the assassination are true, and the assassins are all real people.[22] While they lie in wait for the Dictator to arrive, they recount actual crimes of the regime, such as the murder of the Mirabal sisters.[6] However, other details are invented by Llosa, such as Amadito's murder of the brother of the woman he loved.[6] In this way, Vargas Llosa weaves fact and fiction together to create a narrative of the events of the assassination.

Those within the regime are also a mix of fictional characters and real people. Cabral is a fictional person, but the current President Balaguer is not. The Cabral family is completely fictional. According to Vargas Llosa "uses history as a starting point in constructing a fictionalized account of Trujillo's "spiritual colonization" of the Dominican Republic as experienced by one Dominican family.[23] The fictional family allows Vargas Llosa to show two sides of the Trujillo regime: one, through Augustin, of the ultimate dedication and sacrifice to the leader of the nation; the other, through Urania, of the violence of the regime and the legacy of pain it left behind.

Vargas Llosa also fictionalized the internal thoughts of the characters who were non-fictional, especially those of the Goat himself, "Vargas Llosa's expands all the way into the very "dark area" of Trujillo's consciousness (as the storyteller dares to conceive it)."[24] Vargas Llosa also built an image of the regime with the troubled historical events: "...the slaughter of 25,000 Haitian immigrants in 1937, the murder of the dissident Mirabel sisters, the turncoat bishops with their Pastoral letter, the invasion of Dominican Exiles on June 14 1959 and the enduring, clandestine, “June 14” dissident movement". [25]

Mario Vargas Llosa said about the historical accuracy of his book, "It's a novel, not a history book, so I took many, many liberties. The only limitation I imposed on myself was that I was not going to invent anything that couldn't have happened within the framework of life in the Dominican Republic. I have respected the basic facts, but I have changed and deformed many things in order to make the story more persuasive -- and I have not exaggerated."[8]

Critical Reception

The realist style of The Feast of the Goat is recognized by some reviewers as being a break from a more allegorical approach to the dictator novel.[26] The novel received largely positive reviews, most of which were willing to accept sacrifices of historical accuracy in favour of good storytelling.[27]

A common comment on the novel is the graphic nature of the many acts of torture and murder which are depicted in the novel. Vargas lets the reader see the realities of an oppressive regime with a degree of detail not often used by his compatriots in Latin American literature, as Michael Wood suggests in the London Review of Books: "Vargas Llosa ... tells us far more about the details of day-to-day intrigue, and the sordid, sadistic minutiae of torture and murder."[28]

Walter Kirn of the New York Times suggests that the "grisly scenes of dungeon interrogations and torture sessions" cast other aspects of the novel in a pale light, draining them of their significance and impact.[3]

Similarly, Kirn implies that the "narrative machinery" mentioned by Wood as being somewhat unwieldy also produces a largely superfluous storyline.[3] The plot line centered on Urania Cabral is described by Sturrock as being an emotional centre that focuses the novel, and Wood agrees that her confrontations with past demons holds the readers attention.[26] In contrast, Kirn's review states that Urania's segments are "talky and atmospheric ... seem to be on loan from another sort of book."[3]

Most reviews of The Feast of the Goat make either indirect of direct reference to the relationship between sexuality and power. Miller, Heawood, Kirn, and Wood detail the connection between Trujillo's gradual loss of ultimate control, both over his body and his followers. The means by which Trujillo reinforces political power through sexual acts and begins to lose personal conviction as his body fails him are topics of frequent discussion among reviewers.

Adaptations

Film

A motion picture adaptation was made in 2005 in English. It stars Isabella Rossellini as Urania Cabral, Paul Freeman as her father Agustin, and Tomas Milian as Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. This was directed by Luis Llosa, Mario Vargas Llosa's cousin. It was filmed in both the Dominican Republic and in Spain.[29]

Theater

A theater adaptation of the novel was written by Jorge Alí Triana and his daughter Veronica Triana in 2003, and directed by Jorge Triana.[30]

Notes

  1. ^ http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/vargas/fiestac.htm#ours
  2. ^ Lorenzo 2002
  3. ^ a b c d Kirn 2001
  4. ^ Vargas Llosa 2001, p. 35
  5. ^ Neissa 2004, pp. 120–129
  6. ^ a b c Patterson 2006, p. 232
  7. ^ Vargas Llosa 2001, p. 137
  8. ^ a b c Gussow 2002
  9. ^ http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/machismo
  10. ^ Loreza 2002
  11. ^ Niessa 2004, p. 129
  12. ^ Wolff 2007, p. 287
  13. ^ Vargas Llosa 2001, p. 385
  14. ^ a b Wolff 2007, p. 268
  15. ^ Wolff 2007, p. 275
  16. ^ Niessa 2004, p. 124
  17. ^ Wolff 2007, p. 267
  18. ^ Wolff 2007, p. 263
  19. ^ Ruiz 2005, p. 22
  20. ^ Ruiz 2005, p. 31
  21. ^ http://www.themodernword.com/reviews/feastofthegoat.html
  22. ^ Patterson 2006, p. 224
  23. ^ Wolff 2007, p. ??
  24. ^ Patterson 2006, p. 225
  25. ^ http://www.themodernword.com/reviews/feastofthegoat.html
  26. ^ a b Sturrock 2002
  27. ^ Cheuse 2001
  28. ^ Wood 2002
  29. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0428532/
  30. ^ Weber 2003

References

  • Vargas Llosa, Mario (2001), The Feast of the Goat, New York: Picador, ISBN ?? {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help). Trans. Edith Grossman.

See also

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Feast_of_the_Goat&oldid=202229388"