Dictator novel

File:Pinochet y Videla 2.jpg

Latin American military leaders such as the Chilean Augusto Pinochet (on the left) and the Argentine Jorge Rafael Videla (on the right) inspired the dictator novel genre

The dictator novel (Spanish: novela del dictador) is a genre of Latin American literature that developed the theme of caudillismo (a political-military leader at the head of an authoritarian regime) by specifically challenging the role of the dictator in Latin American society. Its hallmarks include a concern with the relationship between writing and power, and so is an allegory for 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 with a focus on historical accuracy, but rather, to examine the more abstract nature of authority figures, and to question the idea of authority in general. To be considered a dictator novel, a book must have strong political themes that draw upon historical accounts, while critically examining the power held by an authoritarian figure, allowing the specific to explain the general. Therefore, these novels, while they may centre around one historical dictator do not, for example, analyze the economics, politics, and rule of a regime in the same way that a history book might. Two examples of novels that focus on particular dictators are Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme (about Paraguay's Dr. Francia), and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (about the Dominican Republic's Rafael Leónidas Trujillo). A montage of different dictators forms the 'dictator' in Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State.

Although mostly associated with the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and ‘70s, this genre has roots that go back as far as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo in 1845. An indirect critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas's dictatorial regime through the figure of Juan Facundo Quiroga, Facundo is considered to be the forerunner of the dictator novel. All dictator novels since have hearkened back to Facundo in some form or another.

Literary context

Literary critic Roberto González Echevarría argues that the dictator novel is "the most clearly indigenous thematic tradition in Latin American literature," and he traces the development of this theme "as far back as Bernal Díaz del Castillo's and Francisco López de Gómara's accounts of Cortés's conquest of Mexico." The nineteenth century saw significant literary reflections on political power, though on the whole the dictator novel is associated with the so-called Latin American Boom, a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The Boom began as Latin America became a producer of essays, poetry, and novels linked to many Latin American countries' introspection, as they attempted to define their own identities on the national and continental level. For critic Gerald Martin the dictator novel marks the end of the Boom and even (as he says of Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme), "the end of an entire era in Latin American history, the era which had stretched from Sarmiento's Facundo in 1845." In the seventies, many of the dictator novels focus on the figure "of the aging dictator, prey to the boredom of a limitless power he is on the verge of losing."

Definition

Miguel Ángel Asturias's The President (El Señor Presidente) (written in 1933, but not published until 1946) is, in the opinion of critic Gerald Martin, "the first real dictator novel". Other literary treatments of the dictator figure followed, such as Jorge Zalamea's El Gran Burundún Burundá ha muerto, but as Martin also notes, the genre was not so attractive in the 1950s and 1960s, "a time of ' apertura ', when the people were on the move."

The dictator novel came back into fashion in the 1970s, towards the end of the Boom. As Sharon Keefe Ugalde remarks, "the 1970's mark a new stage in the evolution of the Latin American dictator novel, characterized by at least two developments: a change in the perspective from which the dictator is viewed and a new focus on the nature of language." By this she means that the dictator novels of the 1970s, such as The Autumn of the Patriarch or I, the Supreme, offer the reader a more intimate view of their subject: "the dictator becomes protagonist" and we see the world often from his point of view. With the new focus on language, Keefe Ugalde points to the new recognition on the part of many authors that "the tyrant's power is derived from and defeated by language." For example, in Jorge Zalamea's El Gran Burundún Burundá ha muerto the dictator bans all forms of language.

According to Raymond L. Williams, it was not until the 1970's that enough Latin American writers had published novels dealing with military regimes that the dictator novel became common nomenclature. The most celebrated novels of this era were Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State (1974), Augusto Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme (1974), and Gabriel García Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). He defines the dictator novel as a novel which draws upon the historical record to create fictionalized versions of dictators. In this way, the author is able to use the specific to explain the general, as many dictator novels are centred around the rule of a one particular dictator. Within this group he does include those novelists who took to task authoritarian figures such as Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) and Denzil Romero's La tragedia del Generalísimo (1984). He even includes Sergio Ramírez's ¿Te dio miedo la sangre? (1977), a novel about Nicaraguan society under the Somoza dictatorship, which has been described as a "dictator novel without the dictator". Novels such as Julio Cortázar's A Manual for Manuel (1973) and Alejandra Pizarnik's La condesa sangrienta (1976) that contain political themes, but do not centre on the rule of a particular dictator or authoritarian figure cannot be classified as dictator novels.

Style and theme

The novelists of the dictator novel combined narrative strategies of both modern and postmodern writing. Postmodern techniques, constructed largely in the late 1960's and 1970's, included use of interior monologues, stream of consciousness, fragmentation, varying narrative points of view, neologisms, innovative narrative strategies, and frequent lack of causality. Alejo Carpentier, a Boom writer and contributor to the dictator novel genre pioneered what came to be known as magical realism, although the use of this technique is not necessarily a prerequisite of the dictator novel, as there are many that do not utilize magical realism.

The predominant theme of the dictator novel is power, however, we see a strong link between power and dictatorship. As novels such as The President became more well-known, they were read as ambitious political statements, denouncing the authority of dictators in Latin America.

Gender is another overarching theme within dictator novels. National portraits in Latin America often insist on the importance of women (and men) that are healthy, happy, productive, and patriotic, yet many national literary treasures often reflect government rhetoric in the way they code active citizenship as male. Of course claiming egalitarianism while operating within a largely masculinist framework is certainly not limited Latin America alone, and one must be cognoscente of this fact in order to avoid the risks of reinforcing simplistic stereotypes about machismo and the supposedly unique form that it takes on in the Latin American world. Masculinity is an overarching theme in the Latin dictator novel; one cannot deny the connection between the pen and the penis in Latin American fiction, however this pattern cannot be explained by machismo alone, as it is far more complex.

According to Rebecca E. Biron, “where we find violent, misogynistic fantasies of masculinity, we also violent social relations between actual men and women.” Many Latin American works, “include characters who act out violent fictions of masculinity, and yet their narrative structure provides readers with alternative responses to misogynistic fantasies of masculine identity formation”.

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 sometimes pushing an absolute authority to rise up to contain it—a tyrant is born. Seeking unlimited power, they often amend constitutions, dismantling laws which previously prevented their reelection. General Manuel Estrada Cabrera, for example, altered the Guatemalan Constitution in 1899 which previously forbid his reelection. The dictators who have become the focus of the dictator novel (Augusto Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme, for instance, is based on Paraguay's dictator of the early nineteenth century, the so-called Dr Francia) do not differ that much from each other, 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 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 Paraguay), 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, as García Calderon noted as far back as 1925: "Does it want peace or is it controlled by certain interests?"

Los Padres de la Patria

In 1967, during a meeting with Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, and Miguel Otero Silva, the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes launched a project consisting of a series of biographies depicting Latin American dictators, which would be called Los Padres de la Patria (literally, "The Fathers of the Fatherland"). In Fuentes's own words, "Sitting in a pub in Hampstead, we thought it would be a good idea to have a comparable book on Latin America. An imaginary portrait gallery immediately stepped forward, demanding incarnation: the Latin American dictators." 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.

As M. Mar Langa Pizarro observes, the project was never completed, but it helped inspire a series of novels written by important authors during the Latin American literary boom, such as Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Development of the genre

Forerunners

Both Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo (1845) and José Marmol's Amalia (1851) of the nineteenth century are examples of precursors to the twentieth century dictator novel, however, "all fictional depictions of the Latin American "strong-man," it must be noted, have an important precedent in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo". 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 to himself and to his readers, of how figures like Facundo and Rosas could have come about. 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. Amalia also attempted to examine the problem of dictatorships as being a structural problem, and therefore the problem of the state, "manifested through the will of some monstrous personage violating the ordinary individual's privacy, both of home and of consciousness." 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

The President

• The President (El Señor Presidente) is a 1946 novel by Guatemalan Nobel Prize-winning writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias. Although the novel does not explicitly identify its setting as early twentieth-century Guatemala, Asturias was inspired by the 1898–1920 presidency of Manuel Estrada Cabrera for his title character. This novel explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society, making early use of a literary technique that would come to be known as magic realism. By keeping time and place ambiguous, Asturias's novel represents a break from narratives, which until this point, were judged on how adequately they reflected reality. Asturias's distinctive use of dream imagery, onomatopoeia, simile, and repetition, combined with a discontinuous structure, which consisted of abrupt changes of style and viewpoint, sprang from surrealist and ultraist influences. The President would go on to influence a generation of Latin American authors, becoming an early example of the "new novel" and a precursor to the Latin American literary boom.

• Jorge Zalamea, El gran Burundún Burundá ha muerto ("The Great Burundún Burundá is Dead", 1951). For Keefe Ugarte, "El gran Burundún Burundá [. . .] occupies an important midway point in the evolution of the dictator novel" and Peter Neissa emphasizes "its cultural and political importance and subsequent influence on dictator narratives." More broadly, Martin describes this "remarkable Colombian novelette" as seeming to contain "the seeds of García Márquez's mature style." The book describes the (fictional) dictator "Burundún's rise to power, selected events during his regime, and a description of his funeral." It is at this funeral that it is revealed that the body of the dictator is absent, and has somehow been replaced by or transformed into "a great big parrot, a voluminous parrot, an enormous parrot, all swollen, inflated and wrapped in documents, gazettes, mail from abroad, newspapers, reports, annals, broadsheets, almanacs, official bulletins."

• Enrique Lafourcade's King Ahab’s Feast (La Fiesta del rey Acab, 1964) portrays the fictional dictator César Alejandro Carrillo Acab, and opens with what Claude Hulet describes as an "amusingly ironic, tongue-in-cheek note in preface" which declares that "This is a mere work of fiction. [. . . ] Indeed, no one is unaware that neither the United Nations, nor the Organization of American States, permits the continued existence of regimes like the one that serves as pretext to this novel." But as Hulet observes, Lafourcade's "powerful and razor sharp satire" is directed "presumably against the Trujillo regime and others like it."

• Alejo Carpentier's, Reasons of State (El recurso del método, 1974), is a synthesis of several historical figures from Latin American, most prominently, Gerardo Machado, dictator of Cuba. 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." This fictional character, in his bid to be refined, spends half of his life in Europe. This novel is tragicomic in nature, the first and only novel by Carpentier to combine elements of both tragedy and comedy.

Yo, el Supremo

• Augusto Roa Bastos's I, the Supreme (Yo, el Supremo, 1974) is a fictionalized account of the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who was also known as "Dr. Francia." Its title was derived from the fact that Francia referred to himself as "El Supremo" or "the Supreme." In a 1977 article, Roa Bastos described his project as a "counter-history, a subversive and transgressive reply to the official historiography."

• Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca, 1975) details the life of an eternal dictator. The book is divided into six sections, each retelling the same story of the infinite power held by the archetypal Caribbean tyrant. Márquez based his fictional dictator on a variety of real-life autocrats, including Gustavo Rojas Pinilla of his Colombian homeland, Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain (the novel was written in Barcelona), and Venezuela's Juan Vicente Gómez. One of the key characters of the novel is the Indian General Saturno Santos, who devotes himself to "inscrutable service to the patriarch." In this novel, Garcίa Márquez proposes an interesting contradiction: "that Latin America's patriarchs owe their most intimate support to their victims of longest standing; and that America's revolution is inconceivable without the Indian". Illustrating the importance of the Indian in Latin America is all the more prudent given that Garcίa Márquez's home country, Colombia, is distinguished as literarily not recognizing the Indian populations which are very much alive today.

• Luisa Valenzuela's The Lizard's Tail (Cola de lagartija, 1983) is set in the period after Juan Perón's return to Argentina in 1973, when the Argentine president was heavily influenced by the sinister eminence grise José López Rega. The novel 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.

El general en su laberinto

• Gabriel García Márquez's The General in His Labyrinth (El general en su laberinto, 1989) is a fictionalized account of the last days in the life of Simón Bolívar. Bolívar, also known as the Great Liberator, who liberated the territory that would subsequently become Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador from Spanish rule. However the character of the General is not portrayed as the glorious hero that traditional history has presented; but instead García Márquez develops a pathetic protagonist, a prematurely aged man who is physically ill and mentally exhausted.

• Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo, 2000) is set during the regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and follows several interwoven story lines, both revealing the political and social environment in the Dominican Republic, past and present.

'Not quite' dictator novels

There are other Latin American novels that are set during periods of dictatorship, or that reference dictatorship in some way: Julia Álvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), for instance, is a fictionalized story of the lives of the Mirabal sisters who transformed themselves from well-behaved Catholic debutantes into dissenters of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. In her novel, Julia Álvarez seeks to unmask the officially-obscured history of their deaths, not uncovering what happened but to find out how it happened, or more specifically, how they happened. Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star (1996) opens with Augusto Pinochet's 1973 Chilean coup against Salvador Allende. Giannina Braschi's Empire of Dreams (1988) closes with a mock diary of a make-up artist working at Macy's at Herald's Square; the diarist shoots to kill the Narrator of the Latin American Boom whom she accuses of being the modern day leader of the dictator novel.

A counterpart to the dictator novel in Latin America are novels of exile which were written in Europe or the United States. These novels are distinct in that they have "produced critiques that the writers could not have published in their homelands". For example, Tomás Eloy Martínez's The Perón Novel (1985) uses a mixture of historical facts, fiction, and documents to retell the life story of Juan Domingo Perón, "the greatest caudillo in Argentine history since Rosas." This allowed the author to construct an intimate portrait of Perón rather than an historically accurate one. This method of analyzing Perón that goes into his early history and family upbringing in order to theorize the motivation for his actions later in life, can be linked to Sarmiento's similar analysis of Facundo, and through him, Rosas.

There are also novels written outside of Latin America that deal with dictatorship in ways influential for or reminiscent of the genre: Franz Kafka's novels about bureaucratic power, for instance, such as The Trial; or Salman Rushdie's portrayal of Indira Gandhi in Midnight's Children.

Legacy

While it is difficult to pinpoint the origin of the dictator novel, its influence spans throughout Latin American Literature. Written largely in the middle of the twentieth century, these novels followed a unique style, employing many of the techniques of the "new" novel. The "new novel" rejected the formal structure of conventional realism, arguing that its realism was flawed in "its simplistic assumption that reality is easily observable". Regional issues gave way to universal ones and "an ordered world view gives way to a fragmented, distorted or fantastic narrative", in which the reader no longer takes a passive role. In addition, writers redefined many formal categories such as author, narrator, character, reader, plot, and story. Importantly, the role of the author was examined as the etymological link between "author" and "authority" was established, and the very figure of the author became highly important. The authors themselves then questioned the traditional role of the author as a "privileged, paternal figure, as the authoritative 'father' or divine creator in whom meaning would be seen to originate" and who seemed to fulfill the role of dictator. These authors defined the novel in a new nontraditional way and forced readers to examine the way in which social and political matters affect their daily lives.

See also

• Films depicting Latin American military dictatorships
• South American literature

References

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