Ilan Stavans: The Novelists and the Dictators
[Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. His latest book is Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years (Palgrave Macmillan). He is general editor of The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, due out in September.]
Does the current crop of left-wing caudillos in Latin America, like Hugo Chávez, inspire the type of animosity their military counterparts once did? And will its members be turned into larger-than-life dictators in novels, as they were in Gabriel García Márquez's 1975 The Autumn of the Patriarch? Or have the literary intelligentsia finally given up the foolish practice of using fiction to pretend to force tyrants from their throne?
Those aren't rhetorical questions. For centuries, literature in the former Spanish colonies on this side of the Atlantic has sought to define itself, in part, as resistance to autocratic rulers, as if what justifies writing is fighting oppression and totalitarianism. There is a plethora of novelas del dictador, narratives, mostly gargantuan in scope, in which a narcissist tyrant serves as protagonist and, at times, as narrator: El Caudillo (1921), by Jorge Borges, father of Jorge Luis Borges (the younger Borges was apolitical, or in any case conservative, so that link to the tradition was broken); Miguel Ángel Asturias's El señor presidente (1946); Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State (1974); Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (2000).
The key to success has been to find a worthy foe, an avatar of evil—arrogant, dogmatic, overbearing, if possible misogynistic, maybe even a voodoo practitioner if you're writing about the Caribbean. God knows, there has been no scarcity of dictators. Pick your choice: Porfirio Díaz in Mexico, François "Papa Doc" and his son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc," Duvalier in Haiti, Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda in Paraguay, Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, José María Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador. ...
Of course, fashion is ephemeral. García Márquez once promised never to write again until Augusto Pinochet renounced power in Chile. For a while, the stance helped sell his earlier books. But Pinochet couldn't have cared less. And García Márquez wasn't really serious about interrupting his illustrious career. In the end, it was the writer who gave in to pressure....
Read entire article at CHE
Does the current crop of left-wing caudillos in Latin America, like Hugo Chávez, inspire the type of animosity their military counterparts once did? And will its members be turned into larger-than-life dictators in novels, as they were in Gabriel García Márquez's 1975 The Autumn of the Patriarch? Or have the literary intelligentsia finally given up the foolish practice of using fiction to pretend to force tyrants from their throne?
Those aren't rhetorical questions. For centuries, literature in the former Spanish colonies on this side of the Atlantic has sought to define itself, in part, as resistance to autocratic rulers, as if what justifies writing is fighting oppression and totalitarianism. There is a plethora of novelas del dictador, narratives, mostly gargantuan in scope, in which a narcissist tyrant serves as protagonist and, at times, as narrator: El Caudillo (1921), by Jorge Borges, father of Jorge Luis Borges (the younger Borges was apolitical, or in any case conservative, so that link to the tradition was broken); Miguel Ángel Asturias's El señor presidente (1946); Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State (1974); Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat (2000).
The key to success has been to find a worthy foe, an avatar of evil—arrogant, dogmatic, overbearing, if possible misogynistic, maybe even a voodoo practitioner if you're writing about the Caribbean. God knows, there has been no scarcity of dictators. Pick your choice: Porfirio Díaz in Mexico, François "Papa Doc" and his son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc," Duvalier in Haiti, Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda in Paraguay, Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, José María Velasco Ibarra in Ecuador. ...
Of course, fashion is ephemeral. García Márquez once promised never to write again until Augusto Pinochet renounced power in Chile. For a while, the stance helped sell his earlier books. But Pinochet couldn't have cared less. And García Márquez wasn't really serious about interrupting his illustrious career. In the end, it was the writer who gave in to pressure....