The Autumn of the Patriarch: Inside the Mind of a Mad Head of State

 

Original image from The New Yorker

From a radical agrarian reformist ordering the evacuation of whole urban populations and moving them to the countryside to toil in rice paddies, to a voodoo-obsessed physician ordering the execution of all black dogs across his small island nation amid rumors that his most dangerous political rival could morph into said animal, “the pathological fascist tyrant” (to use book critic William Kennedy’s words) has been a staple of many a postcolonial nations’ literary works throughout much of the twentieth century, with some regimes even extending well into the present day.

In addition to Africa and much of Southeast Asia, the Spanish-speaking world has seen its fair share of these maniacal, ostensibly messianic despots: from Spain’s Francisco Franco to Mexico’s Antonio Lopez de Sta. Anna to Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner; each of these strongmen—typically hailing from military backgrounds—came to power through less-than-democratic means and ruled with varying degrees of authoritarianism and atrocity. In fact, the figure of the ironfisted military strongman is so embedded in the Spanish world that they’ve even come up with a term for it: El Caudillo, which loosely translates to “the leader” or “the chief” (Encarnacion).

 

While most literary works tend to examine the societal effects a dictatorial regime has on the everyman, and perhaps even some members of the upper echelons, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1975 novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch, is that rare piece that enters the mind of the madman himself, allowing us a glimpse into the unimaginable extravagance, the constant paranoia, the insatiable hubris, the unbridled capriciousness, and the unfettered callousness that plague such a persona.

 

The Structure of Autumn

 

Just like pretty much every other entry in Garcia Marquez’s bibliography, and all other works to emerge from Latin America in the late twentieth century, Autumn falls squarely in the genre of magical realism, where the writer paints a florid locale that could have otherwise existed in the real world were it not for fantastical elements that seem to appear out of nowhere and to which the characters react rather nonchalantly. According to John Green, this genre came to prominence in the postcolonial world because it helped writers from these former colonies “make sense of multiple realities” (the realities of the colonizers and the colonized; the realities of the natives, the mestizos, and the settlers; the realities of the elites, the relatively privileged, and the marginalized) (McArthur, Beth, et al.). The end result is a slew of narratives that either make little sense to the uninitiated or can be interpreted in multiple ways. What makes Autumn unique, though, and what may prove to be a turnoff for the average reader, is Garcia Marquez’s employment of only six chapters told in run-on sentences, many of which span several pages. Periods are rare in the novel’s narration, with the author utilizing commas instead to signify a shift in setting, thought, or perspective. The shortest sentences, in fact, can only be found in the first chapter, specifically the first page, but even this goes on for several lines:

 

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur. (1)

 

The above quote is only the first sentence in the novel, and it already appears like a short paragraph. Periods become fewer and far between as the plot progresses, with the last chapter essentially being one lengthy sentence. Although the novel is kept at a lean 255 pages, it takes a while to read given its imposing sentence structure and its somewhat muddled narrative, which can jump from the central character’s POV to that of any of his generals or subjects with the mere insertion of a comma.

 

Book blogger John Boland likened Garcia Marquez’s use of lengthy sentences to the tense emotions one experiences when in the presence of an ironfisted dictator, as if “the simple act of drawing breath seems like sedition.” My take on this, though, is perhaps Garcia Marquez wished to emulate the unpredictable tendencies of a tyrant’s thought processes. A dictator, after all, rules by decree, with the backing of several yes men among his ranks, and any citizen can be named a friend or foe of the state at his whim. Garcia Marquez did also mention that the spark that finally compelled him to write Autumn came when he witnessed how a group of bickering Venezuelan military officials decided who would lead the country in the wake of the 1957 coup. New Yorker profiler Jon Lee Anderson (qtd. in Lichtblau) writes of that pivotal moment in the writer’s life:

 

“The day of the coup, [GGM] went with other reporters to stand outside the door of the room where the Army commanders were haggling over who would be Venezuela’s next ruler…Suddenly the door opened and a general came out walking backward, his gun drawn and pointing into the room, his boots covered with mud.” As he watched, transfixed, Garcia Marquez said, the general crossed the room and, still walking backward and holding his gun out, he went down the stairs and out the front door to the street. Within moments of the general’s dramatic exit, a decision was made in the room: Venezuela’s new leader would be Rear Admiral Wolfgang Larrazabal. “I was amazed that this was how power could be decided,” Garcia Marquez said.

 

Additionally, the imposing nature of the dictator, as shown in Garcia Marquez’s quote, is reflected in the structure of the text, where a formidable wall of words just rushes up to meet the reader’s eyes. Indeed, one can draw a lot of interpretations from Garcia Marquez’s unconventional writing for Autumn, but one thing is clear: this stream-of-consciousness style is intended to reflect the realities of and dynamics inherent to an authoritarian atmosphere.

 

El General

 

Just as in real life, personal details of the ironfisted protagonist are kept to a minimum, with the little that we actually know bloated into mythic proportions. The narration provides only physical descriptions—his massive physique, his crooked teeth, his ailing testicles—and the protagonist’s name, along with that of his tiny island nation, is never truly disclosed (and even when the reader thinks it is, the narration proves very much unreliable). It is, however, plain to see that he is an amalgam—perhaps even a parody—of the quintessential Latin American caudillo. Like Augusto Pinochet of Chile and Fulgencio Bautista of Cuba, he is a high-ranking military official installed as his country’s head of state by a foreign power (the British). His illiteracy or outright anti-intellectualism, as encapsulated by the quote “he did not poison his blood again with the sluggishness of written law, but governed orally and physically” (7–8), is a hyperbolic reflection of a military man’s ineptitude in handling complex state affairs, though it does also call to mind Guatemalan Catholic strongman Rafael Carrera, an illiterate pig farmer and bandit who rose to the presidency and ruled his country for nearly thirty years.

 

El General’s closeness to his mother, Bendicion Alvarado, parallels that of someone like drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, whose own mother remained oblivious to or outright denied her son’s wrongdoings (Associated Press). Although Escobar was not a caudillo in the strictest sense of the term, nor was he officially a head of state, he might as well have ruled his native Colombia by decree, considering he had several armed men at his beck and call, alongside his ability to sway public opinion and policy in his favor.

 

The General in Autumn also exhibits an animosity toward the Catholic Church, which bears a significant voice in his country’s society, just as the said institution holds sway over many real-life Latin American societies. In one chapter, upon finding out that the Vatican has denied his request to beatify his deceased mother, whose uncorrupted corpse is said to be the wellspring of many a supposed miracle, the General orders the church to be stripped of all its holdings in his country, and he has the papal nuncio exiled by sending him adrift upon a raft. This act prompts the Vatican to excommunicate the caudillo, but he seems unfazed by this.

 

Just like fellow Caribbean tyrant Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, who renamed the capital city and several other monuments in his honor with little protest from the public (History.com Staff), a significant cult of personality (an all-too-common trait of many despots) surrounds the unnamed general, with his face plastered “on both sides of all coins, on postage stamps, on condom labels, on trusses and scapulars” (4). Yet, despite his “popularity” among the people, he drives his country’s economy so disastrously into the ground that he is forced to pay the national debt to foreign investors, the gringos, with the surrounding sea so that nothing remains but a mere crater, which he can view from his opulent presidential palace, where cattle that are born with his name branded upon their bodies roam freely like regular residents. All this can only happen in a magical realist novel.

 

Another extravagance of the General is his employment of a body double, Patricio Aragones, who is plucked from obscurity by virtue of his resemblance to the head of state, and forced to live a life in close proximity to and very similar with that of the General himself. Through Aragones, who eventually meets his end via a botched assassination, Garcia Marquez provides us another unique perspective in history, literary or otherwise: that of the despot’s body double; and in doing so, the author treats the double as more than just the mere, voiceless stand-in he is expected to be.

 

Having been a close friend of Fidel Castro, the leftist Cuban dictator who was rumored to have survived over six hundred assassination attempts, Garcia Marquez works in some close brushes with death that the General has. In the third chapter, for example, when El General finds out during a dinner party that one of his own high-ranking officials has conspired in a plot to assassinate him, Garcia Marquez writes a disturbingly appetizing scene:

 

And then the curtains parted and the distinguished Major General Rodrigo de Aguilar entered in a silver tray stretched out full length on a garnish of cauliflower and laurel leaves, steeped with spices, oven brown, embellished with the uniform of five golden almonds for solemn occasions and the limitless loops for valor on the sleeve of his right arm, fourteen pounds of medals on his chest and a sprig of parsley in his mouth, ready to be served at a banquet of comrades. (117)

 

The General’s own wife and child, though, are not as lucky as he is, and after the family have already narrowly survived a previous attempt on their lives, the wife and child are killed by a pack of rabid hunting dogs while visiting the public market. In retaliation, the General orders another round of killings for the nth time in his regime and finds out that one of his aides was a conspirator. Ironically, just like Castro or Pinochet and several other dictators who managed to evade political assassination or never answered to the charges of injustice perpetuated during their rule, the General in Autumn manages to live to a ripe old age—to be precise, “somewhere between 107 and 232 years” (79).

 

Conclusion

 

Regardless of how unconventional and intimidating the writing style and form of Autumn may be, or how outlandish the events in the narrative appear, what will perhaps prove most striking to the reader unacquainted with dictatorial regimes is how Garcia Marquez’s novel takes a staggering amount of inspiration from reality. And perhaps no other novelist was equipped to tackle such an enigmatic topic as Garcia Marquez himself. The celebrated Latin American author was known to be in the good graces of many caudillos, particularly the Left-leaning sort, having been “feted with champagne and culinary delicacies” by Castro (Lichtblau), or being praised by Panamanian strongman General Omar Torrijos, who remarked of Autumn that it was his favorite book because it so beautifully captured the image and essence of a tropical tyrant. (It may be also worth mentioning that, like El General in the novel, both Torrijos and Castro kept a retinue of pleasure women at their disposal, thus establishing an unequivocal link, in Garcia Marquez’s eye, between power and sex.)

 

Ultimately, though, it is the people and the nation as a whole that suffer, for their destiny is perpetually tied to the dictator’s unpredictable mood swings for as long as he remains in power. And while it is fortunate that nearly all of Latin America has moved past its shared history of coups and caudillos, with many countries on that continent having experienced more than a few decades of uninterrupted democracy for some time now, most other parts of the world have not proven to be as lucky. Decades-long dictatorial regimes still exist throughout much of Africa and Central Asia, with a single person or a handpicked successor staying in power since independence.

 

Even if the rest of the world may have an idea of what life is like for the citizens living under such oppressive regimes, thanks in large part to media outlets that are occasionally allowed access into these countries, we can only speculate what goes through the minds of these tyrannical heads of state. Fortunately, Garcia Marquez has given us that rare novel that offers such a glimpse.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. The Autumn of the Patriarch. Harper Perennial Modern Classics ed., New York, New York, HarperCollins, 1999.

 

Associated Press. “Mother of Slain Colombian Drug Lord Dies.” The Washington Post, The Washington Post Company, 27 Oct. 2006, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/27/AR2006102701654.html. Accessed 29 Aug. 2017.

 

Boland, John. “The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” Musings of a Literary Dilettante's Blog, Wordpress, 26 Apr. 2010, musingsofaliterarydilettante.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/the-autumn-of-the-patriarch-by-gabriel-garcia-marquez/. Accessed 25 Aug. 2017.

 

Encarnacion, Omar G. “American Caudillo: Trump and the Latin-Americanization of US Politics.” Foreign Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations, 12 May 2016, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-05-12/american-caudillo. Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.

 

History.com Staff. “Rafael Trujillo.” History.com, A+E Networks, 2009, www.history.com/topics/rafael-trujillo. Accessed 28 Aug. 2017.

 

Kennedy, William. “A Stunning Portrait of a Monstrous Caribbean Tyrant.” The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Company, 31 Oct. 1976, www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/reviews/marque-autumn.html. Accessed 25 Aug. 2017.

 

Lichtblau, Julia. “Reading Gabriel García Márquez in the Age of Trump: The Autumn of the Patriarch.” The Common Online, The Common, 13 May 2017, www.thecommononline.org/reading-gabriel-garcia-marquez-in-the-age-of-trump-the-autumn-of-the-patriarch/. Accessed 25 Aug. 2017.

McArthur, Beth, et al. 100 Years of Solitude Part 1: Crash Course Literature 306. Thought Cafe, 10 Aug. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWNcCs__vQg. Accessed 29 Aug. 2017.