“…We knew that no evidence of his death was final, because there was always another truth behind the truth.”
As sedate as it appears, reading isn’t passive. Depending on the book, we’re required to be involved to greater or lesser degrees. We’re not simply receptacles words are poured into. And there are certain books that require us to be very involved. They insist that we work. Often, the more we work, the more we get from the book.
One book that requires us to work, and work a lot, is the novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, by Columbian writer Gabriel García Márquez (original Spanish title: El otoño del patriarca).
This is one hell of a behemoth, though it’s not overly long. Six chapters, each 30 to 40 pages of an ongoing flow of words without paragraph breaks, few periods, a handful of commas, clausal to a ludicrous degree, and dialogue without quotation marks. Pronouns change as if on a whim. Whose voice are we hearing?
Text is visual and in this case the vision is of an insurmountable block of words, words, words. What could the author have been thinking?
Grotesque
Márquez has referred to The Autumn of the Patriarch as “a poem on the solitude of power”. The word poem is an inkling as to what the book is, as a text. It’s how I like to think of it—as a form of poetry. But it’s also a story, so maybe it should be called a narrative prose poem.
However you choose to view it, it’s a madhouse.
The vision is grotesque, surreal, and simultaneously moral, immoral, and amoral. It’s corruption run amuck and it’s all for the sake of power, the appetitious apex of an ego without restraints. And it’s the glorification of it, even deification, by those on the receiving end of its willful cruelties.
Time is distorted. Geography disarranged. Physical laws are tossed aside with civil law. Will is the only constant. The nameless general, only an ego, and the only anchor in a mad world.
The Autumn of the Patriarch is a meditation on ego and power and explores every facet which, ultimately, are few. Power is solipsistic, while also being deluded.
And it is so lonely.
The End is the Start
The story begins at the end, with the death of the General, peacefully lying on the floor as he has always slept, “…his right arm folded under his head to serve as a pillow”.
This image, repeated throughout the novel, again and again, of the General and the very individual way he sleeps, almost like a child, humanizes and re-humanizes him throughout all the grotesque excesses, which are so nightmarishly inhuman they seem unreal.
And so the story starts with this image, the General sleeping, except this time he is dead. Truly dead. Isn’t he?
Maybe. The novel moves back and forth in time, to and from various periods during the reign of the patriarch, referring back and forth to events that have occurred or will occur or are occurring.
We’re introduced to Patricio Aragonés, a nobody with the misfortune of being a physical double of the General. Aragonés is everything the General is not, human and without ambition; capable of love where the General isn’t.
He’s discovered by the General, scooped up, put through agonizing changes to make him look even more like his powerful mirror image, then put in the tyrant’s service: A public patriarch to, among other things, be a misleading target for those who would assassinate the tyrant.
The General enjoys the , “… doglike loyalty of Patricio Aragonés, his perfect double, who had been found without anyone’s searching for him when they came with the news, General sir, a false presidential coach is driving around to Indian villages doing a prosperous business of imposturing.”
When the General dies the first time, it is Patricio Aragonés who dies, but not without telling the General who he, the tyrant, truly is. It’s the first of many truths about himself that the General must face. The telling is always tolerated, then ignored. Ego and the will to power always win.
Portrait of Power
Many characters move in and out of the General’s life, and thus the story: General Rodrigo de Aguilar, his trusted minister of defense; Bendicion Alvarado, his beloved, uneducated, and innocent mother. There are the women of the General’s mangled approaches to love: Manuela Sánchez, “of my evil hour”, and his wife, Leticia Nazareno, “of my bewilderment”, romantic confusions who torment him and whom he never understands.
The novel unfolds with a sense of repetition and it becomes apparent that it’s deliberate. We see essentially the same actions and motivations but in different contexts. They’re repeated, but through the eyes of different characters, all based on the usual suspects in the life of a dictator. At the same time we also see it through the dictator’s eyes. (Yes, it can get confusing. The reader needs to be attentive.)
Along with the characters already mentioned there are others, individually and collectively representative of types that appear in a dictator’s life.
When his mother dies, the General wants her made a saint and so we have Monsignor Demetrius Aldous, the Papal representative. Then there is the General’s son, Emmanuel, who is dressed to look like a tyrant in miniature. And there are the ambassadors—American, British, Dutch—all demanding payment for the inevitable loans, the one’s that have ballooned the country’s debt.
In the end, the General sells the gringos the ocean. The national debt is paid but the beloved sea is gone. And we are left with the idea that the dictator, despite his ego, was very small because his power was very limited, just one small Caribbean country in a very big world, and the real power is elsewhere—with the gringos who have the money. The tyrant’s power was posturing, the fantastic dreaming of a loveless ego, none of it real.
A Preposterous and Wonderful Book
I can easily understand why someone might dislike this book. It isn’t an easy read, and I don’t mean that in a slighting way. Even in the context of complex books, it’s difficult. It needs some patience for it to get going and pull you into its particular rhythm and world.
Yet as difficult and preposterous as it is, it’s a wonderful book. To me, it’s on a par with One Hundred Years of Solitude and, on certain days, I sometimes think it is the better book.
It doesn’t matter, however. It’s enough to say it’s very good and if you can read it, you should. It’s memorable and, perhaps in today’s political context, prescient and revealing.
April 2018