Dictator novel
Encyclopedia
Literary genre
A literary genre is a category of literary composition. Genres may be determined by literary technique, tone, content, or even length. Genre should not be confused with age category, by which literature may be classified as either adult, young-adult, or children's. They also must not be confused...
of Latin American literature
Latin American literature
Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous languages of the Americas. It rose to particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the...
that challenges the role of the dictator
Dictator
A dictator is a ruler who assumes sole and absolute power but without hereditary ascension such as an absolute monarch. When other states call the head of state of a particular state a dictator, that state is called a dictatorship...
in Latin American society. The theme of caudillismo
Caudillo
Caudillo is a Spanish word for "leader" and usually describes a political-military leader at the head of an authoritarian power. The term translates into English as leader or chief, or more pejoratively as warlord, dictator or strongman. Caudillo was the term used to refer to the charismatic...
—the régime of a charismatic caudillo, a political strongman—is addressed by examining the relationships between power, dictatorship, and writing. Moreover, a dictator novel often is an allegory for the role of the writer in a Latin American society. Although mostly associated with the Latin American Boom
Latin American Boom
The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world...
of the 1960s and 1970s, the dictator-novel genre has its roots in the nineteenth-century novel Facundo
Facundo
Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism is a book written in 1845 by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, a writer and journalist who became the seventh president of Argentina...
(1845), by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was an Argentine activist, intellectual, writer, statesman and the seventh President of Argentina. His writing spanned a wide range of genres and topics, from journalism to autobiography, to political philosophy and history...
. As an indirect critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas
Juan Manuel de Rosas
Juan Manuel de Rosas , was an argentine militar and politician, who was elected governor of the province of Buenos Aires in 1829 to 1835, and then of the Argentine Confederation from 1835 until 1852...
's dictatorial régime in Argentina, Facundo is the forerunner of the dictator novel genre; all subsequent dictator novels hearken back to it. As established by Sarmiento, the goal of the genre is not to analyze the rule of particular dictators, or to focus on historical accuracy, but to examine the abstract nature of authority figures
Authority
The word Authority is derived mainly from the Latin word auctoritas, meaning invention, advice, opinion, influence, or command. In English, the word 'authority' can be used to mean power given by the state or by academic knowledge of an area .-Authority in Philosophy:In...
and of authority in general.
To be considered a dictator novel, a story should have strong political themes drawn from history, a critical examination of the power held by the dictator, the caudillo, and some general reflection on the nature of authoritarianism
Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is a form of social organization characterized by submission to authority. It is usually opposed to individualism and democracy...
. Although some dictator novels centre on one historical dictator (albeit in fictional guise), they do not analyze the economics, politics, and rule of the régime as might a history book. The dictator novel genre includes I, the Supreme
I, the Supreme
I, the Supreme is a historical novel written by exiled Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos. It is a fictionalized account of the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who was also known as "Dr...
(1974), by Augusto Roa Bastos
Augusto Roa Bastos
Augusto Roa Bastos, was a noted Paraguayan novelist and short story writer, and one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century. As a teenager he fought in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia, and he later worked as a journalist, screenwriter and professor...
, about Dr. Francia of Paraguay, and The Feast of the Goat
The Feast of the Goat
The Feast of the Goat is a novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. The book is set in the Dominican Republic and portrays the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, and its aftermath, from two distinct standpoints a generation apart:...
(2000), by Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation...
, about Rafael Leónidas Trujillo
Rafael Leónidas Trujillo
Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina , nicknamed El Jefe , ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. He officially served as president from 1930 to 1938 and again from 1942 to 1952, otherwise ruling as an unelected military strongman...
of the Dominican Republic. Alternatively, the novelist might create a fictional dictator to achieve the same narrative end, as in Reasons of State (1974), by Alejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba; and despite his European birthplace, Carpentier strongly self-identified...
, in which the dictator is a composite man assembled from historical dictators. The genre of the dictator novel has been very influential in the development of a Latin American literary tradition, because many of the novelists rejected traditional, linear story-telling techniques, and developed narrative styles that blurred the distinctions between reader, narrator, plot, characters, and story. In examining the authority of leadership, the novelists also assessed their own social roles as paternalistic
Paternalism
Paternalism refers to attitudes or states of affairs that exemplify a traditional relationship between father and child. Two conditions of paternalism are usually identified: interference with liberty and a beneficent intention towards those whose liberty is interfered with...
dispensers of wisdom, like that of the caudillo whose régime they challenged in their dictator novels.
Literary context
Literary critic Roberto González EchevarríaRoberto González Echevarría
Roberto González Echevarría is a Cuban-born critic of Latin American literature and culture. He is currently the Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale University....
argues that the dictator novel is “the most clearly indigenous thematic tradition in Latin American literature”, and traces the development of this theme from “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 Latin American Boom
Latin American Boom
The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world...
, a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. For critic Gerald Martin
Gerald Martin
Gerald Martin is a prolific critic of Latin American fiction. He is particularly known for his work on the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias and on the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, both of whom are winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature....
, 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 1970s, many dictator novels focused 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 El Señor PresidenteEl Señor Presidente
' is a 1946 novel written in Spanish by Nobel Prize–winning Guatemalan writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias . A landmark text in Latin American literature, explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society. Asturias makes early use of a literary technique now known...
(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 the genre did not gain impetus until it was reinvented in the political climate of the cold war
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, through the Latin American Boom
Latin American Boom
The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world...
.
The dictator novel came back into fashion in the 1970s, towards the end of the Boom. As Sharon Keefe Ugalde remarks, "the 1970s 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
The Autumn of the Patriarch
The Autumn of the Patriarch is a novel written by Gabriel García Márquez in 1975.A "poem on the solitude of power" according to the author, the novel is a flowing tract on the life of an eternal dictator...
or I, the Supreme, offer the reader a more intimate view of their subject: "the dictator becomes protagonist" and the world is often seen from his point of view. With the new focus on language, Keefe Ugalde points to the realisation 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 1970s, when enough Latin American writers had published novels dealing with military regimes, that "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 includes 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".
Style and theme
The novelists of the dictator novel genre combined narrative strategies of both modern and postmodern writing. Postmodern techniques, constructed largely in the late 1960s and 1970s, 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.A predominant theme of the dictator novel is power, which according literary critic Michael Valdez Moses, in his 2002 review of Feast of the Goat, is linked to the theme of dictatorship: "The enduring power of the Latin American dictator novel had everything to do with the enduring power of Latin American dictators". As novels such as El Señor Presidente became more well-known, they were read as ambitious political statements, denouncing the authority of dictators in Latin America. As political statements, dictator novel authors challenged dictatorial power, creating a link between power and writing through the force wielded by their pen. For example, in Roa Bastos's I, The Supreme, the novel revolves around a central theme of language and the power inherent in all of its forms, a power that is often only present in the deconstruction of communication. González Echevarría argues that:
Dr. Francia's fear of the pasquinade, his abuse of Policarpo Patiño ..., [and] his constant worry about writing all stem from the fact that he has found and used the power implicit in language itself. The Supremo defines power as being able to do through others what we are unable to do ourselves: language, being separate from what it designates, is the very embodiment of power, for things act and mean through it without ceasing to be themselves. Dr. Francia has also realized that he cannot control language, particularly written language, that it has a life of its own that threatens him.
Another constant theme which runs throughout the Latin American dictator novel, which gained in importance and frequency during the Latin American Boom, is the interdependence of the Latin American tyrant and United States imperialism. In Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat, for example, Trujillo faces serious opposition shortly after losing his material backing from the CIA, previously held for over 32 years in lieu of his anti-communist leanings.
Gender is an additional 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. Masculinity is an enduring motif in the dictator novel. There is a connection between the pen and the penis in Latin American fiction, but this pattern cannot be explained by machismo alone—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".
Dictators in Latin American history
Since independence, Latin American countries have been subject to both right and left-wing authoritarian regimes, stemming from a history of colonialismColonialism
Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
in which one group dominated another. Given this long history, it is unsurprising that there have been so many novels "about individual dictators, or about the problems of dictatorship caudillismo, caciquismo, militarism and the like." The legacy of colonialism is one of racial conflict sometimes pushing an absolute authority to rise up to contain it—thus the tyrant is born. Seeking unlimited power, dictators often amend constitutions, dismantling laws which prevent their reelection. General Manuel Estrada Cabrera
Manuel Estrada Cabrera
Manuel José Estrada Cabrera was President of Guatemala from 8 February 1898 to 15 April 1920.Manuel Estrada forcibly took the presidency after the assassination of José María Reina. The Guatemalan cabinet called an emergency meeting to appoint a new successor, but declined to invite the General...
, for example, altered the Guatemala
Guatemala
Guatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast...
n Constitution in 1899 to permit his return to power. 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 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 control over free thought. Despite intense criticisms leveled at these figures, dictators involved in nationalist movements
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
developed three simple truths, "that everybody belonged, that the benefits of Progress should be shared, and that industrial development should be the priority". Epitácio Pessoa, who was elected President of Brazil in 1919, wanted to make the country progress regardless of whether or not Congress passed the laws he proposed. In particular, during the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, Latin American activist governments of the 1930s saw the end of neocolonialism
Neocolonialism
Neocolonialism is the practice of using capitalism, globalization, and cultural forces to control a country in lieu of direct military or political control...
and the infusion of nationalist movements throughout Latin America, increasing the success of import substitution industrialization or ISI. The positive side-effect of the collapse of international trade meant local Latin American manufacturers could fill the market niches left vacant by vanishing exports.
In the twentieth century, prominent Latin American dictators have included the Somoza
Somoza
The Somoza family was an influential political dynasty who ruled Nicaragua as an hereditary dictatorship. Their influence exceeded their combined 43 years in the de facto presidency, as they were the power behind the other presidents of the time through their control of the National Guard...
dynasty in Nicaragua, Alfredo Stroessner
Alfredo Stroessner
Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda, whose name is also spelled Strössner or Strößner , was a Paraguayan military officer and dictator from 1954 to 1989...
in Paraguay, and Augusto Pinochet
Augusto Pinochet
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, more commonly known as Augusto Pinochet , was a Chilean army general and dictator who assumed power in a coup d'état on 11 September 1973...
in Chile, among others. As an outside influence, United States interference in Latin American politics is 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?" As a theme in the dictator novel, the link between U.S. imperialism and the power of the tyrant is very important. Dictators in Latin America have accepted military and financial support from the United States when it suited them, but have also turned against the United States, using anti-American campaigning to gain favour with the people. In the case of Trujillo, "Nothing promises to reinvigorate his flagging popularity more than to face up to the Yankee aggressor in the name of la patria."
Los Padres de la Patria
In 1967 during a meeting with Alejo CarpentierAlejo Carpentier
Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba; and despite his European birthplace, Carpentier strongly self-identified...
, Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...
, and Miguel Otero Silva
Miguel Otero Silva
Miguel Otero Silva , was a Venezuelan writer, journalist, humorist and politician. Remaining a figure of great reference in Venezuelan literature, his literary and journalistic works were strictly related to the social and political history of Venezuela.-Life:Born in Barcelona, Anzoátegui State,...
, the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes Macías is a Mexican writer and one of the best-known living novelists and essayists in the Spanish-speaking world. He has influenced contemporary Latin American literature, and his works have been widely translated into English and other languages.-Biography:Fuentes was born in...
launched a project consisting of a series of biographies
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
depicting Latin American dictators, which was to be called Los Padres de la Patria (The Fathers of the Fatherland). After reading Edmund Wilson's portraits of the American Civil War in Patriotic Gore, Fuentes recounts, "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
Manuel A. Odría
Manuel Arturo Odría Amoretti was the President of Peru from 1948 to 1956.Manuel Odría was born in 1897 in Tarma, a city in the central Andes just east of Lima. He graduated first in his class from the Chorillos Military Academy in 1915. He joined the army and as a lieutenant-colonel was a war...
, Jorge Edwards
Jorge Edwards
Jorge Edwards Valdés is a Chilean novelist, journalist and diplomat. He is currently the Chilean ambassador to France.-Life and career:...
about José Manuel Balmaceda
José Manuel Balmaceda
José Manuel Emiliano Balmaceda Fernández was the 11th President of Chile from September 18, 1886 to August 29, 1891. Balmaceda was part of the Castilian-Basque aristocracy in Chile...
, José Donoso
José Donoso
José Donoso Yáñez was a Chilean writer. He lived most of his life in Chile, although he spent many years in self-imposed exile in Mexico, the United States and mainly Spain. Although he had left his country in the sixties for personal reasons, after 1973 he claimed his exile was also a form of...
about Mariano Melgarejo
Mariano Melgarejo
Manuel Mariano Melgarejo Valencia was the 19th President of Bolivia, from December 28, 1864, to January 15, 1871.-Early life:...
, and Julio Cortázar about Eva Perón
Eva Perón
María Eva Duarte de Perón was the second wife of President Juan Perón and served as the First Lady of Argentina from 1946 until her death in 1952. She is often referred to as simply Eva Perón, or by the affectionate Spanish language diminutive Evita.She was born in the village of Los Toldos in...
. 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
Latin American Boom
The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world...
, such as Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Forerunners
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was an Argentine activist, intellectual, writer, statesman and the seventh President of Argentina. His writing spanned a wide range of genres and topics, from journalism to autobiography, to political philosophy and history...
's Facundo
Facundo
Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism is a book written in 1845 by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, a writer and journalist who became the seventh president of Argentina...
and José Marmol
José Mármol
José Mármol was an Argentine journalist, politician, librarian, and writer of the Romantic school.Born in Buenos Aires, he initially studied law, but abandoned his studies in favor of politics. In 1839, no sooner had he begun to make a name for himself than he was arrested for his opposition to...
's Amalia
Amalia (novel)
Amalia is a 19th century political novel written by the exiled Argentine author José Marmol. First published serially in the Montevideo weekly, Amalia became Argentina's national novel...
, published in the nineteenth century, were precursors to the twentieth century dictator novel; however, "all fictional depictions of the Latin American 'strong-man', it must be noted have an important antecedent in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo, a work written as a sociolodical treatise". Facundo is an indirect critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas
Juan Manuel de Rosas
Juan Manuel de Rosas , was an argentine militar and politician, who was elected governor of the province of Buenos Aires in 1829 to 1835, and then of the Argentine Confederation from 1835 until 1852...
's dictatorship, directed against the actual historical figure, Juan Facundo Quiroga
Juan Facundo Quiroga
Juan Facundo Quiroga was an Argentine caudillo who supported federalism at the time when the country was still in formation.-Early years:...
, but is also a broader investigation into Argentine history and culture. Sarmiento's Facundo has remained a fundamental fixture because of the breadth of its literary exploration of the Latin American environment. In Facundo, Sarmiento criticizes the historical figure Facundo Quiroga, a provincial caudillo, who like Rosas (dictator of Argentina from 1829 to 1853) was opposed to the enlightened ideas of progress. After returning from exile, Sarmiento worked to reinvent Argentina, eventually becoming president himself from 1868 to 1874. Sarmiento's analysis of Facundo Quiroga was the first time that an author questioned how figures like Facundo and Rosas could have maintained such absolute power, and in answering this question, Facundo established its place as an inspirational text to later authors. Sarmiento perceived 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 the 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 city or even a country, could become a terrifying prison. Amalia also attempted to examine the problem of dictatorships as being one of structure, 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
Ramón del Valle-Inclán
Ramón María del Valle-Inclán y de la Peña , Spanish dramatist, novelist and member of the Spanish Generation of 98, is considered perhaps the most noteworthy and certainly the most radical dramatist working to subvert the traditionalism of the Spanish...
's Tirano Banderas (1926) acted as a key influence on those authors whose goal was to critique power structures and the status quo.
Classic dictator novels
- El Señor PresidenteEl Señor Presidente' is a 1946 novel written in Spanish by Nobel Prize–winning Guatemalan writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel Asturias . A landmark text in Latin American literature, explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society. Asturias makes early use of a literary technique now known...
is a 1946 novel by Guatemalan Nobel Prize-winning writer and diplomat Miguel Ángel AsturiasMiguel Ángel AsturiasMiguel Ángel Asturias Rosales was a Nobel Prize–winning Guatemalan poet, novelist, playwright, journalist and diplomat...
. 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 CabreraManuel Estrada CabreraManuel José Estrada Cabrera was President of Guatemala from 8 February 1898 to 15 April 1920.Manuel Estrada forcibly took the presidency after the assassination of José María Reina. The Guatemalan cabinet called an emergency meeting to appoint a new successor, but declined to invite the General...
for his title character. This novel explores the nature of political dictatorship and its effects on society, and is an overtly political novel in which Asturias denounces Latin American dictators. By keeping time and place ambiguous, Asturias's novel represents a break from former narratives, which until this point had been judged on how adequately they reflected reality. Asturias's distinctive use of dream imagery, onomatopoeia, simile, and repetition, combined with a discontinuous structure consisting of abrupt changes of style and viewpoint, sprang from surrealist and ultraistUltraist movementThe Ultraist movement was a literary movement born in Spain in 1918, with the declared intention of opposing Modernismo, which had dominated Spanish poetry since the end of the 19th century....
influences. Furthermore it made early use of a literary technique that would come to be known as magic realism. The President went 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 ZalameaJorge ZalameaJorge Zalamea was a Colombian writer, best known for his anti-dictatorship satirical prose works. He was also an author of poems, dramas, novels, essays...
, El gran Burundún Burundá ha muerto ("The Great Burundún Burundá is Dead", 1951). For Keefe Ugalde, "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 LafourcadeEnrique LafourcadeEnrique Lafourcade Valdenegro is a Chilean writer, critic and journalist who was born in Santiago, Chile, on October 14, 1927.-Brief Biography:...
'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." As Hulet observes, Lafourcade's "powerful and razor sharp satire" is directed "presumably against the Trujillo regime and others like it."
- Alejo CarpentierAlejo CarpentierAlejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba; and despite his European birthplace, Carpentier strongly self-identified...
's, Reasons of State (El recurso del método, 1974), is a synthesis of several historical figures from Latin American, most prominently Gerardo MachadoGerardo MachadoGerardo Machado y Morales was President of Cuba and a general of the Cuban War of Independence...
, dictator of Cuba. This fictional character, in his bid to be refined, spends half of his life in Europe, perhaps reminiscent of Sarmiento's dichotomy of civilization and barbarism. This novel is tragicomic in nature, the first and only novel by Carpentier to combine elements of both tragedy and comedy.
- Augusto Roa BastosAugusto Roa BastosAugusto Roa Bastos, was a noted Paraguayan novelist and short story writer, and one of the most important Latin American writers of the 20th century. As a teenager he fought in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia, and he later worked as a journalist, screenwriter and professor...
's I, the SupremeI, the SupremeI, the Supreme is a historical novel written by exiled Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos. It is a fictionalized account of the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who was also known as "Dr...
(Yo, el Supremo, 1974) is a fictionalized account of the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de FranciaJosé Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia200px|right|thumb|José Gaspar Rodríguez de FranciaDr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco was the first leader of Paraguay following its independence from Spain...
. However, it is also a historical account, making use of real documents and accounts of people who knew Francia. Roa's portrayal of a despot in Latin American fiction is distinguished "not only by the quantity of detail lavished on him, but by his remarkable capacity to seem at one moment a person, at another an embodiment of contradictory elements not usually associated with a single person, let alone a powerful tyrant". Its title was derived from the fact that Francia referred to himself as "El Supremo" or "the Supreme". Making use of non-traditional writing techniques, the novel is composed of separate discourses with their own distinctive styles, and the demarcation between them is often blurred. Gerald Martin claims that Roa Bastos's novel "was more immediately and unanimously acclaimed than any novel since One Hundred Years of SolitudeOne Hundred Years of SolitudeOne Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel García Márquez, is a novel which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, the metaphoric Colombia...
, and critics seemed to suspect that its strictly historical importance might be even greater than that of García Márquez's fabulously successful creation."
- Gabriel García MárquezGabriel García MárquezGabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
's The Autumn of the PatriarchThe Autumn of the PatriarchThe Autumn of the Patriarch is a novel written by Gabriel García Márquez in 1975.A "poem on the solitude of power" according to the author, the novel is a flowing tract on the life of an eternal dictator...
(El otoño del patriarca, 1975) details the life of an eternal dictator, "el macho", a fictional character who lives to be over 200 years old. The book is divided into six sections, each retelling the same story of the infinite power held by the archetypal CaribbeanCaribbeanThe Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
tyrant. Márquez based his fictional dictator on a variety of real-life autocrats, including Gustavo Rojas PinillaGustavo Rojas PinillaGustavo Rojas Pinilla was a Colombian politician, military officer, General of the Army and President of Colombia between 1953 and 1957.- Biographic data :...
of his ColombiaColombiaColombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
n homeland, GeneralissimoGeneralissimoGeneralissimo and Generalissimus are military ranks of the highest degree, superior to Field Marshal and other five-star ranks.-Usage:...
Francisco FrancoFrancisco FrancoFrancisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
of SpainSpainSpain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
(the novel was written in BarcelonaBarcelonaBarcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
), and VenezuelaVenezuelaVenezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
's Juan Vicente GómezJuan Vicente GómezJuan Vicente Gómez Chacón was a military general and de facto ruler of Venezuela from 1908 until his death in 1935. He was president on three occasions during this time, and ruled as an unelected military strongman for the rest of the era.-Early years:Gómez was a barely literate cattle herder and...
. One of the key characters of the novel is the IndianIndigenous peoples of the AmericasThe indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
General Saturno Santos, who devotes himself to "inscrutable service to the patriarch." In this novel, García 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 García Márquez's home country, Colombia, is distinguished as literarily not recognizing the Indian populations which are very much alive today.
- Luisa ValenzuelaLuisa ValenzuelaLuisa Valenzuela is a post-'Boom' novelist and short story writer. Her writing is characterized by an experimental, avant-garde style which questions hierarchical social structures from a feminist perspective. She is best known for her work written in response to the dictatorship of the 1970s in...
'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 éminence grise José López RegaJosé López RegaJosé López Rega was Argentina's Minister of Social Welfare during the Peronist government started in 1973 by Juan Perón and continued after Perón's death in 1974 by his third wife and vice-president, Isabel Martínez de Perón , until the coup d'etat of 1976 that initiated the so-called National...
. 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 ConeSouthern ConeSouthern Cone is a geographic region composed of the southernmost areas of South America, south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Although geographically this includes part of Southern and Southeast of Brazil, in terms of political geography the Southern cone has traditionally comprised Argentina,...
.
- Tomás Eloy MartínezTomás Eloy MartínezTomás Eloy Martínez was an Argentine journalist and writer.-Life and work:Born in San Miguel de Tucumán, Martínez obtained a degree in Spanish and Latin American literature from the University of Tucumán, and an MA at the University of Paris...
's The Perón Novel (La novela de Perón, 1985) uses a mixture of historical facts, fiction, and documents to retell the life story of Juan Domingo Perón, "dramatizing the rivalries within the ranks of Peronism". This allowed the author to construct an intimate portrait of Perón rather than an historically accurate one. This method of analyzing Perón, that delves into his early history and family upbringing to theorize the motivation for his actions later in life, can be linked to Sarmiento's similar analyses of Facundo, and through him, Rosas.
- Gabriel García MárquezGabriel García MárquezGabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America. He is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in...
's The General in His LabyrinthThe General in His LabyrinthThe General in His Labyrinth is a novel by the Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. It is a fictionalized account of the last days of Simón Bolívar, liberator and leader of Gran Colombia...
(El general en su laberinto, 1989) is a fictionalized account of the last days in the life of Simón BolívarSimón BolívarSimón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Yeiter, commonly known as Simón Bolívar was a Venezuelan military and political leader...
. Bolívar, also known as the Great Liberator, freed from SpanishSpainSpain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
rule the territory that would subsequently become VenezuelaVenezuelaVenezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
, BoliviaBoliviaBolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
, ColombiaColombiaColombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...
, PeruPeruPeru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
, and EcuadorEcuadorEcuador , officially the Republic of Ecuador is a representative democratic republic in South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and by the Pacific Ocean to the west. It is one of only two countries in South America, along with Chile, that do not have a border...
. However the character of the General is not portrayed as the glorious hero that traditional history has presented; instead García Márquez develops a pathetic protagonist, a prematurely aged man who is physically ill and mentally exhausted.
- Mario Vargas LlosaMario Vargas LlosaJorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa is a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation...
's The Feast of the GoatThe Feast of the GoatThe Feast of the Goat is a novel by the Peruvian Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. The book is set in the Dominican Republic and portrays the assassination of Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, and its aftermath, from two distinct standpoints a generation apart:...
(La fiesta del chivo, 2000) recounts with "gruesome detail and dramatic intensity" the last days of the tyrant and dictator Rafael Leónidas TrujilloRafael Leónidas TrujilloRafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina , nicknamed El Jefe , ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. He officially served as president from 1930 to 1938 and again from 1942 to 1952, otherwise ruling as an unelected military strongman...
of the Dominican RepublicDominican RepublicThe Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of La Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are shared by two countries...
, as he becomes infuriated that, despite being a long-standing ally of the United States because of his anti-communist stance, he is no longer in favour with the U.S. administration who have withdrawn their backing on discovering his extensive human rightsHuman rightsHuman rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
violations. Following several interwoven storylines—those of Trujillo, his assassins, and the daughter of a man who once served in Trujillo's inner circle of advisers, Urania Cabral—this novel reveals both the political and social environment in the Dominican Republic, past and present. The story opens and closes with Urania's story, effectively framing the narrative in terms of remembering and understanding the past and its legacy for the present.
'Not quite' dictator novels
Latin American novels that explore political themes, but that do not centre upon the rule of a particular dictator, are informally classified as “not quite dictator novels”. For example, Libro de ManuelLibro de Manuel
Libro de Manuel is a novel by Julio Cortázar published in 1973.-Summary:The novel is a blueprint that synthetizes the controversy of politics and social movements during the 1970s...
(A Manual for Manuel, 1973), by Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...
, is a postmodern novel about urban guerrillas and their revolutionary struggle, which asks the reader to examine the broader societal matters of language, sexuality, and the modes of interpretation
Interpretation
-Language:* Language interpretation, the facilitation of dialogue between parties using different languages* Interpretation of tongues, a supernatural ability to understand unknown languages* Semantics, assignment of meanings to symbols-Philosophy:...
. In the Time of the Butterflies
In the Time of the Butterflies
In the Time of the Butterflies is a historical novel by Julia Alvarez, relating an account of the Mirabal sisters during the time of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. The book is written in the first and third person, by and about the Mirabal sisters...
(1994), by Julia Álvarez
Julia Álvarez
Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist. Born in New York of Dominican descent, she spent the first ten years of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, until her father's involvement in a political rebellion forced her family to flee the country.Alvarez rose to...
, tells the story of the Mirabal sisters
Mirabal sisters
The Mirabal sisters were four Dominican political dissidents who opposed the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Three of the sisters were assassinated by unknown persons...
, whom patriotism transformed from well-behaved Catholic débutantes to political dissenters against the the thirty-year dictatorship of the Trujillo régime in the Dominican Republic. The novel sought to illuminate the officially-obscured-history of the deaths of the Mirabal sisters, not to determine what happened to them, but to determine how the Mirabal sisters happened to the national politics of the Dominican Republic
Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of La Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are shared by two countries...
. In the mock-diary “Intimate Diary of Solitude” (third part of El imperio de los sueños 1988; Empire of Dreams, 1994), by Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi
Giannina Braschi is a Puerto Rican writer. She is credited with writing the first Spanglish novel YO-YO BOING! and the poetry trilogy Empire of Dreams , which chronicles the Latin American immigrant's experiences in the United States...
, the protagonist is Mariquita Samper, the diarist who shoots the narrator of the Latin American Boom
Latin American Boom
The Latin American Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world...
in revolt against his dictatorial control of the fictional narration. Moreover, in Braschi’s most recent work “United States of Banana” (2011), the Puerto Rican prisoner Segismundo overthrows his father, the King of the United States of Banana, who had imprisoned him for more than a hundred years in the dungeon of the Statue of Liberty
Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, designed by Frédéric Bartholdi and dedicated on October 28, 1886...
, for the crime of having been born. The story of Distant Star
Distant Star
Distant Star is a novella by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, first published in Spanish in 1996. Chris Andrews’s English translation was published by New Directions in 2004...
(1996), by Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos was a Chilean novelist and poet. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes , and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes...
, begins on 11 September 1973, with the coup d’état by General Augusto Pinochet
Augusto Pinochet
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, more commonly known as Augusto Pinochet , was a Chilean army general and dictator who assumed power in a coup d'état on 11 September 1973...
against Salvador Allende
Salvador Allende
Salvador Allende Gossens was a Chilean physician and politician who is generally considered the first democratically elected Marxist to become president of a country in Latin America....
, the President of Chile. The writer and professor of literature Raymond Leslie Williams describes the aforementioned novels as not-quite-dictator-novels, which are reminiscent of the genre for being “acutely and subtly political fiction” that addresses themes different from those of the dictator novel, which cannot be divorced from the politics of the stories, and so each “can be read as a meditation on the horror of absolute power”.
Legacy
Although it is difficult to establish the exact origin of the dictator novel in the nineteenth century, its intellectualIntellectualism
Intellectualism denotes the use and development of the intellect, the practice of being an intellectual, and of holding intellectual pursuits in great regard. Moreover, in philosophy, “intellectualism” occasionally is synonymous with “rationalism”, i.e. knowledge derived mostly from reason and...
influence spans Latin American Literature
Latin American literature
Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and indigenous languages of the Americas. It rose to particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the...
. Most of the novels were written in the middle years of the twentieth century, and each has a unique literary style
Literary language
A literary language is a register of a language that is used in literary writing. This may also include liturgical writing. The difference between literary and non-literary forms is more marked in some languages than in others...
that employed techniques of the “new novel”, by which the writer rejected the formal structure of conventional literary realism
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
, arguing that “its simplistic assumption that reality is easily observable” is a narrative flaw. As a genre, the dictator novel redefined the literary concept of “the novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
” in order to compel the readers to examine the ways in which political and social mores affect their daily lives. Therefore, the regional politics and the social issues of the stories yielded to universal human concerns, thus the traditional novel’s “ordered world view gives way to a fragmented, distorted or fantastic narrative” in which the reader has an intellectually active role in grasping the thematic gist of the story. Additional to the narrative substance, the novelists redefined the formal literary categories of author, narrator, character, plot, story, and reader, in order to examine the etymological
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
link between “author” and “authority”, wherein the figure of the novelist (the author) became very important to the telling of the tale. In the dictator novels, the writers questioned the traditional story-teller role of the novelist as the “privileged, paternal figure, as the authoritative ‘father’, or divine creator, in whom meaning would be seen to originate”, and so, the novelists fulfilled the role of the dictator.