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The dictator novel (Spanish: novela del dictador) is a genre of Latin American literature which developed the theme of caudillismo by specifically challenging the role of the dictator in Latin American society. Its hallmarks include a concern with the relation between writing and power, and so also is an allegory of the role of the (Latin American) writer in society. The goal of the dictator novel is not to dissect and to analyze the rule of particular dictators in history, but rather, it concerns itself with the more abstract nature of authority figures and with the question of authority in general.Echevarría, p. 64
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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.Calderon, p. 475 The legacy of colonialism is one of racial conflict requiring an absolute authority figure to contain it, a tyrant. Marked by a need for unlimited power, they often amend the constitution, dismantling previous laws which previously prevented their reelection. General Manuel Estrada Cabrera, for example, altered the Guatemalan Constitution in 1899 which had previously forbid reelection.Calderon, p. 470 Despite the number and prevalence of these regimes, the dictators themselves who have become the focus of the Dictator Novel (Augusto Roa Bastos\'s Yo el Supremo, for instance, is based on Paraguay\'s dictator of the early nineteenth century, the so-called Dr Francia) do not differ all that much from each other, especially in terms of how they govern. As author González Echevarría states: "they are male, militaristic, and wield almost absolute personal power"Echevarría, p. 1. Their strong-arm tactics include exiling or imprisoning their opposition, attacking the freedom of the press, creating a centralized government backed by a powerful military force, and assuming complete liberty over anything resembling free thought.Calderon, p. 468,470 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"Calderon, p. 466.
In the twentieth century, prominent Latin American dictators have included the Somoza dynasty (in Nicaragua), Alfredo Stroessner (in Paraguray), and Augusto Pinochet (in Chile), among others. As an outside influence, the United States interference in Latin American politics is quite controversial and has often been severely criticized, as García Calderon noted as far back as 1925.Calderon, p. 469 "Does it want peace or is it controlled by certain interests?"Calderon, p. 469
Carlos Fuentes launched in 1967, during a meeting with Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar and Miguel Otero Silva, the project of a series of biographies depicting Latin American dictators, which would be called Los Padres de la Patria (The Fathers of the Nations).De los orígenes a la nueva novela histórica paraguaya p.43 (Spanish) Big Daddy: the dictator novel and the liberation of Latin America. - The Feast of the Goat - book review in Reason, August 2002, by Michael Valdez Moses (English) 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.Donoso, p. 58 Although the project was never completed, it helped inspire a series of novels by important authors of the Latin American literary boom such as Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
Literary 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."Roberto González Echevarría, The Voice of the Masters, p. 65. And the nineteenth century saw significant literary reflections on political power. But on the whole the dictator novel is associated with the so-called Latin American Boom. In fact, for Gerald Martin it 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."Martin, p. 237
The Boom was a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s throughout the entire continentSwanson, p. 1, though some scholars argue as to whether it began in 1958, when Carlos Fuentes published La region más transparente (Where the Air is Clear), in 1962, with Mario Vargas Llosa winning the Biblioteca Breve Prize for his manuscript Los impostores ("The imposters"), in 1963, when Julio Cortázar published Rayuela (Hopscotch), or even as late as 1967, when Gabriel García Márquez introduced Cien anos de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), setting the stage for the recognition of magical realism.King, p. 59
The Spanish Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, had a significant influence on the Latin American Boom as it diminished the Spanish presence in Latin America, which at this time was largely dependent on Spain for books and other literature from the rest of Europe. The Civil War had essentially cut off that flow of reading material. Another contributer, following the civil war in Spain, was World War II from the late 1930s to 1945, which consumed the rest of Europe and challenged many long-standing notions and ideas throughout the western world. The Boom began as Latin America became a producer of essays, poetry, and novels linked to various Latin American countries\' introspection of themselves as they attempted to define their own identities on the national and continental level.Dey, p. 13
Both Domingo Faustino Sarmiento\'s Facundo (Civilización y barbarie, 1845) and José Marmol\'s Amalia (1851) of the 19th century are examples of precursors to the twentieth century dictator novel. Facundo is an indirect critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas\'s dictatorship, directed against the actual historical figure, Juan Facundo Quiroga, but also, a broader investigation into Argentine history and culture. Facundo has remained a fundamental fixture through time because of the breadth of its literary exploration of the Latin American environmentBrotherston, p.?.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) Brotherston, p.?. Sarmiento\'s analysis of Facundo Quiroga was the first time that an author posed the question of how figures like Facundo and Rosas could have come about to himself and to his readers. In answering this question, Sarmiento brings about the modern dictator novel when he perceives his own power in writing Facundo as "within the text of the novel, it is the novelist, through the voice of omniscience, who has replaced God"González Echevarría, p. 69, 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.Martin, pp. 109, 151. 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.
Miguel Ángel Asturias\'s The President (written in 1933, but not published until 1946) is, for critic Gerald Martin, "the first real dictator novel".Martin, p. 151 Other literary treatments of the dictator 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."Martin, p. 269
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."Keefe Ugalde, p. 369 By this she means that the dictator novels of the 1970s, such as The Autumn of The Patriarch or I, the Supreme, offer us a more intimate view of their subject: "the dictator becomes protagonist"Keefe Ugalde, p. 369 and we see the world often from his point of view. And 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."Keefe Ugalde, p. 369
There are other Latin American novels that are set in periods of dictatorship, or that reference dictatorship in some way: Julia Álvarez\' In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), for instance, deals with the lives of the Mirabal sisters who were assassinated by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo See 2007 Ph.D. thesis titled El símbolo de la mariposa y el mito del dictador en la novela En el tiempo de las mariposas (Spanish); and Roberto Bolaño\'s Estrella distante (Distant Star, 1996) — opens with Augusto Pinochet\'s 1973 Chilean coup against Salvador AllendeLook to the skies, The Telegraph, 12 December 2004 (review) (English)
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.
These writers employed methods such as use of interior monologues, stream of consciousness, fragmentation, varying narrative points of view, neologisms, innovative narrative strategies, and frequent lack of causality. In addition, to these narrative techniques, a new world view was inserted into their texts in which time and space become flexible qualities in a chaotic, fragmented modern world.
The term magic realism was first used by the German art critic Franz Roh to refer to a painterly style also known as Neue Sachlichkeit.Hart, p1 However, in contrast to its use in literature, when used to describe visual art, the term refers to paintings that do not include anything fantastic or magical, but are rather extremely realistic and often mundane.Magical realism is an important feature of the Boom literature of the 1960s in Latin America. Magic realism (or magical realism) is an artistic genre in which magical elements or illogical scenarios appear in an otherwise realistic or even "normal" setting. Magical realism is often considered a subcategory of postmodern fiction due to its challenge to hegemony and its use of techniques similar to those of other postmodernist texts, such as the distortion of time. Many early magical realists such as Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias studied with the surrealists, and surrealism, as an international movement, influenced many aspects of Latin American art. Surrealists, however, try to discover and portray that which is above or superior to the “real” through the use of techniques such as automatic writing, hypnosis, and dreaming. Magical realists, on the other hand, portray the real world itself as having marvelous aspects inherent in it. Many scholars have criticized the term \'magical realism\' as it is a European term that is applied to non-European literature.Ouyang, p14 Summed up well by Alfred J. Lopez, is this process of naming is "a futile European attempt to categorize and thus \'understand\' it by this process of naming-which is already itself an act of appropriation, a bid to harness the wild, \'exotic\' text within a reasonable European framework - to \'master\' the other\'s difficult text?"Ouyang, p15
Masculinity is an overarching theme in dictator novels largely because they are written predominantly by men about men.
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 unique techniques of the "new" novel. The "new novel" rejected the premises and formal structure of conventional realism,Swanson, \'The New Novel in Latin American Literature\' p. 2) arguing that its realism was flawed in "its simplistic assumption that reality is easily observable".Swanson, \'The New Novel in Latin American Literature\', p. 3 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. These authors defined the novel in a completely untraditional way and forced the reader to think the role that social and political concerns affect their daily lives.
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