03/30/2006 . THE APPROXIMATION
Mario Vargas Llosa to the Trujillo dictatorship
Mario Vargas Llosa to the Trujillo dictatorship
By Robert Cassá
.
Roberto Cassá paper provides an analysis so clearly weighted as necessary. Author not given to nationalist clamor makes the complaint here though corresponding to the intellectual committed to the dignity of their country, presented by Mario Vargas Llosa as totally corroded. With joy we deliver to readers of this valuable commodity streaks on commercial novel Feast of the Goat. Cassá is a famous Dominican historian, author of a substantial historiographical work. He is retired as professor of art at the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo. He was president of the Dominican Academy of History and currently serves as Director of the National Archives. It has been a recognized intellectual left.
.
La fiesta del Chivo Mario Vargas Llosa's novel about the regime of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961, was bound to generate controversy among writers and intellectuals Dominicans.
Their approach had to be different from any other analysts, because the findings of the Dominicans, almost inevitably, relate primarily to the historical and political implications of the work and almost no aspect literary (1). For this reason, the novel was greeted with sharply differing attitudes among those who condemned it outright and those who extolled as a monument to historical truth. But with little elaboration formal, old servants of Trujillo and politicians lined up in the right neo-Trujillo judged the work of a very unfavorable considering providing false information and distorted the meaning of the time. (2)
.
Such judgments were summarized by Ramón Font Bernard, who called it "sewer of filth", as in his opinion, Vargas Llosa was devoted to destroying reputations. Conversely, the no less passionate anti-Trujillo often came to the defense of the work, seeing it as an argument against the continued dictatorship that does justice to that era and especially the detested courtiers of the regime, as one of the arguments outlined by the literary historian Peter Conde (3).
.
This warns that political disagreement with the normal positions Vargas Llosa does not preclude assessing the complaint the "Goat." Beyond this bias, some historians objected timely in terms of fidelity to facts told with the names of the participants. (4)
.
should be advised that these objections, relating to details of the actions were outside guidelines policies, as well as anti-Trujillistas Trujillistas offenses or expressed disagreement with aspects of the story, especially when it pertained to persons or other related, although it was indirectly. In these controversies are summarized basic reactions that resulted in Dominican society pages of The Feast of the Goat. Overall, the arguments are confined to episodic perspective of the novelist's denunciation of the dictatorship of Trujillo, which explains the passion and references to facts. Those involved in these trials are not always asked whether, apart from details, the work could reveal the working mechanisms of an authoritarian order extreme, such as Trujillo, whose protests caused much fascination in the novelist. To answer this question must be based on the structure of the work.
.
La fiesta del Chivo sequence consists of three stories: that of a Dominican resident in the United States, Urania Cabral, returning the country to finish her old face dramatic relationship with the dictatorship, the personal narrative Trujillo on the last day of his life and that of the conspirators succeeded in liquidating the night of May 30. By the overlapping planes of the three stories, with their characters and approaches, Vargas Llosa attempts to recreate an era, which is characterized around a series of theses, which is putting into the mouths of the characters, especially of Urania Cabral. These three blocks contain no homogeneity, which introduces problems when characterizing the genre with operating the novelist. The memories of Urania Cabral fully ascribed to fiction, the novel genre itself conventional, because, although relating to specific characters, as the same Trujillo first blatantly built around facts and nonexistent people or other whose identities and actions are processed by the novelist.
.
In the other two blocks, however, with few exceptions, which include part of the courtiers of Trujillo, Vargas Llosa refers to existing individuals, identified by name and referring to shares held. Thus, while the story about Urania Cabral is attached to the conventions of the realist novel, and to some extent to the historical novel, those relating to Trujillo and his enemies conspirators operating in a different plane, identified with the fictionalized historical account .
.
Vargas Llosa has clarified that he did not intend to chronicle the era of Trujillo and deliberately go to the "conscious lies" argument that has earned the approval of some literary critics, both Dominicans and other countries. However, the structure of the two historic blocks offers little room for justification to that argument, since it does not operate through fiction, but, on an ongoing basis, relates to circumstances prevailing in reality, to the extent that the novel may even be likened to a kind of chronic, especially in the last hours of life of Trujillo or who killed him as a literary device to portray apparent situations of oppression and degradation.
.
heterogeneous literary These plans largely explain the problems that have been addressed in the Dominican critical. This has not been misguided in terms of focus on the narrative of the details, since that is the emphasis that the author has been granted for consideration of the time. However, such criticism has usually been in the details for evaluating the work, regardless of that he should make an adverse or favorable. For some Trujillo would have been the monster described, which approved it, for others the narrative does not succeed in describing the character, regardless of any Trujillo, Bernard Font, not denied that indeed was a wicked Trujillo.
.
A different perspective can be concluded that the work contains data depicting shameful realities that occurred during the dictatorship, while being riddled with inaccuracies and untruths, which may be classified as such because of the aforementioned narrative structure .
.
However, the reduction of criticism to the presence of descriptions tailored to the facts and consider other distorters prevents their ability to fill a role around the fictional recreation of an era. It is assumed that with this book the author tried to portray the atmosphere of the time, to characterize the dictatorship as an evil system. At this level, who knows something of what happened during the 31 years that captures Trujillo Vargas Llosa provides virtually no new information and original features even for interpretation.
.
This explains the observation of Frauke Gewccke that the novel was received by the Dominican public with curiosity but not with interest. (5)
.
The disconnection the medium is easily betrayed by language. Vargas Llosa, in repeated interviews, has said he made enormous research to grasp what happened. However, in colloquial leguaje not reflected this alleged investigation, which holds a key deficiency of historical fiction stories or historical novel. On the one hand, puts into the mouths of the protagonists, often on a recurring basis, words and expressions used in the country, which is counterbalanced by the absence of a vocabulary that portrays the ways of expression and thought then in effect.
.
The code of vulgar terms, which seems to give the keynote of the live search vocabulary, the novel misses, as most of them were simply unknown. The title itself is a nonsense, because Trujillo was never called Living The Goat, Vargas Llosa term puts in the mouths of some of the protagonists. It seems that the writer did not even know that the term Chivo was introduced through a meringue, which he cites, to celebrate the assassination of 30 May, in which it is said that, supposedly, the tyrant moaned like a goat - before he was given the coup de grace. If I had a low penetration how to speak, would simply put into the mouth of the players the term of Chapita-listed in other contexts, "whose use was so eloquent that generated a furore in the tyrant, so it was extremely dangerous. (6)
.
Equally important is the lack of recovery of the language of power, a key issue within the reproductive mechanisms of dictatorship. Vargas Llosa refer merely historical justifications outlined in a current, but does so out of context, so you can not roll back the effectiveness of bureaucratic discourse that so much attention paid to the Trujillo presented as a purely primary. This ignorance, within a story novel, evidence in it that is consistent with facts, Vargas Llosa is a tributary of a few texts, which earned him accusations of plagiarism.
.
The most marked was the Kiwi journalist Bernard Diederich, a former correspondent for The New York Times, who was among the first foreigners to cover the death of Trujillo, and years later wrote a book whose English title is The Death of the Goat. (7) Diederich has been reported that the term Goat in the title offers a clue enough of plagiarism.
.
Regardless of Vargas Llosa transcribed information without reference to the source, as is possibly true in a work of fiction, it is easy to demonstrate that his chronicle of the action of the conspirators on the 30th of May is taken, almost entirely, of the author. In any case, no doubt, as he himself has accepted Vargas Llosa, who has contracted a debt to Diederich, but to the extent that it contains nothing new, it would not be the case if it had done historical research that has claimed .
.
Rather, it introduces is a plane controversial in a thorough review, it overlaps statements and data that have proven false, in order to prove his thesis that, for practical purposes, the conspirators acted moved by personal resentment. This is the case, just to put one in the story that Lt. Amado Garcia Guerrero was forced to kill Rene Gil, brother of what had been his girlfriend, as evidence of loyalty to Trujillo. The detail may seem inconsequential, like so many other errors can be attributed to Vargas Llosa, but it is important because it would challenge the simplicity with which he handles the participation of García Guerrero. From these deficiencies can be detected that the knowledge gained about the time is clearly insufficient, not to say outright that misses the target. From reading the novel that the author focused on the dictator and the hustles conspiracy that led to his removal. It is not objectionable from there you can develop a literary, but in no case to characterize a time and a system, as indeed is the claim of The Feast of the Goat. What is revealed in more than five hundred pages is a poor account of the prevailing environment and the lack of multiple levels of the process of the dictatorship. From that single point of view, the novel is a Freudian slip, if part of the literary and historical claims implicitly set.
.
is not asked to make a new story about the period, similar or superior to the existing, but through the freedom of fiction, could productively rethink the mechanisms of running a extreme authoritarian system. The novelist certainly had reason to be intrigued by the extreme perfection of oppression during the reign of Trujillo, to a degree almost unique in the modern world. But consideration is anecdotal in the figure of Trujillo, explicitly stated as the genesis of the time, thesis otherwise not new, since has been present in historiographical approaches of the dictatorship. (8)
.
Indeed Trujillo personality exerted an overwhelming influence on Dominican life, but her figure can not be detached individually considered a literary interpretation consisting of the time, assuming that this constitutes a realistic genre, basically historical novel. Consideration of the time through the tyrant is doubly flawed because not even close to what psychological traits were sufficiently highlighted in stories, memories and interpretations of historiography which, surely, the vast majority did not review Vargas Llosa.
.
is true that he did not need to be familiar with all literature, but at least to let him live affirm a vision and a new interpretation of the character. Solomon Sanz, an official of the regime and frequent interlocutor Trujillo during his last days, including former Trujillo Trujillo or have referred to the text, certainly had good reason when it claimed that Trujillo Vargas Llosa has nothing to do with him met in life. This failure to account for the character could be excused in a novel with a different structure as those mentioned in The Feast of the Goat. But Vargas Llosa refers to a flesh and blood Trujillo, linked to events recorded by history or stories accepted.
.
This misunderstanding comes from anecdotal account through the features of the dictator. Since the system is monstrous, the demiurge it has to be the most. It is not, of course, exonerate Trujillo, who was capable of committing the atrocities that Vargas Llosa and passing on many other worse. Much of what has denounced the book on the psychotic personality can in principle be accepted, but will not include any new development, "provided it is done except that this aspect of personality of Trujillo clothes being misused in the work and, therefore, preclude consideration of the complexity of the character.
.
For the author, Trujillo was not born criminal but imbued with a thirst for humiliation and murder, leading him to develop an effective vision, since it does not pursue a thoughtful purpose. The book is formed in a sensationalist outlook, as the hype, carried to the point of the grotesque, is its hallmark. Again it should be stressed that, in a play with another narrative structure, such a procedure would have been valid, but never in the historical novel.
.
Anyone who knows a minimum figure of Trujillo know that many of the thoughts that are passing on Vargas Llosa quite alien to his personality. In the reality of their enforcement, the primitive delirious crime was to integrate the systematic search for a civilizing function, where it appeared the search for a respectable statesman image, radically opposed to the Dominican tiguere bold. The recognition of the complexity of the subject is not to humanize and less to the enhancement, as claimed in its assessment Conde favorable for the Feast of the Goat.
.
Falla, therefore, the process of displaying a time that is taken only to the point of grotesqueness, a gap that extends to the whole story through its main character. No doubt that dictatorship was a terrible order for his cruelty and complete lack of freedoms. But his characterization through ridiculous note does not account for it, regardless of Trujillo, indeed, should contain drawings grotesque in their personality and their actions.
.
Contrary to the claims by Vargas Llosa, everyday life then it was seen through the ridiculous, but the terror that lay repression, coupled with the crushing feeling of the physical effect that the order sought to be moved.
.
planes remain so absent explaining how so extreme that domain could be implemented and maintained indefinitely. Precisely this is that lie some of the most controversial thesis of the novel, since in it the general state of humiliation is not just the product of the externalization of the substance the dictator, but of the community. The dictatorship, Vargas Llosa's eyes, is nothing but making and responsibility of the Dominican people themselves.
.
Hence, asserting an innate state of moral perversion in most of the Dominicans, which has no justification other than the fantasy of a decadent mind in a certain Don Rigoberto expansion formula. The story reaches the wicked when in fact asserts that virtually all Dominicans were Trujillo and, worse still, they were simply feeling part of a generalized state of ignominy. It is true, of course, that the dictatorship entailed disgrace and, occasionally seen, many of Vargas Llosa's comments have nothing to object. But it is inexcusable that, with exceptions in place, dominated by a purported order of general mental abnormality, people reveled in the state and weighted as an attribute inherent in their identities.
.
At this point, the novel is wrong because it does not take into account the nature of the victims even own courtiers, that are seen collectively and simplistically as abject beings, rejoicing that the humiliations received from the tyrant. It also misrepresents and denigrates when recognizes no political motivation and moral resistance to the dictatorship.
.
A better understanding of the mechanisms of operation of the dictatorship would have involved less coarse treatment of the relationship between bureaucrats Trujillo. While it is undeniable, as Vargas Llosa points out that many of them held positions with an opportunistic approach in order to enjoy the grace of the tyrant, it is equally true that they were forced to serve, either by direct compulsion or by the accumulation of the circumstances present in that society. At the same time, many experienced a malaise that was part of their identities, that articulated in fear and guilt. This dual character of the location of many of the bureaucrats lies one of the paradoxes of a system of extreme oppression such as Trujillo, Vargas Llosa was unable to reveal.
.
Maybe could have guessed the topic, but did not have interest, since it was not consistent with the intent to caricature. In this regard, the prototypes are unsuccessful literary courtiers who built through Agustín Cabral and others, he takes obvious features of subjects were described by informants. None fits the complexity of their actions, not even the only one that apparently knew personally, Joaquin Balaguer, probably the closest to passing on the subtle Machiavellian all but apologizes through an image that leads him to naively assert it as a mystery.
.
In this regard, it is clear that Trujillo's relationship with his subordinates was carried out through an absolute pre-eminence of the former, which entailed a chronic state of fear in the latter. Vargas Llosa register it, but it exaggerates the note when the plane takes widespread grotesque. In the novel, Trujillo was nothing but the tiguere male, which was imposed on all and abused the wives of all. Thus, the relatively limited were cases that happen to be the rule demonstration of a flagrant distortion of the dominican lives under Trujillo.
seems, throughout the novel, that the dictatorship there was no note of personal humiliation, to grasp what eludes many different aspects of existence at the time. To that social life is reduced, which is a simplification that descends to the level of caricature. The comic features the courtiers, as Henry Chirinos, the "Constitutional Sot", imply the absence a political system domain, as subjects of that would be unfit catadura to ensure administrative efficiency and the ideological legitimacy of order.
.
The author does not get close to what were the actual terms of the relationship between Trujillo and his courtiers and ignores the existence of a pattern of bureaucratic functioning efficiently. What refers to as psychological traits of Trujillo, as discipline, psychological insight remains anecdotal. Interpretive perspective betrays inability to account for reproductive function diagrams of the dictatorship that transcend the psychological traits of the tyrant and the gruesomeness that they were derived. In particular, the approach can not work any how it was a system of oppression so extreme.
Ignorance of the nature of the society of the time it replaced with formulas on the morbid literary responsibility. Urania Cabral, the chief interpreter of the thesis of Vargas Llosa, from the first page shows the general cowardice as the key state of oppression. For example, referring to plates of exaltation to Trujillo, closely exclaims: "the thousands of Dominicans that bought and hung in the most visible of the house, so no one would doubt his loyalty to the Chief, and when the spell is shattered, they wanted to erase the tracks, ashamed of what she represented: his cowardice. "( p. 22).
.
such cowardice What could be the subject of endless digressions, of the burden of relativism which involves the indictment, but the attribution of "spell" that goes just evidenced by the dismissal of the novelist. This search leads causal attribution of a state of quasi-animality to the Dominican people, which is manifested in the question machismo as the quintessence of the dictatorship and therefore the people themselves.
.
contrasts with the tone common feature, the eyes of Dominicans with less barbaric and Latinos in the U.S., approximate to civilization: "In New York no one looks at women with that nerve. by measuring, weighing, calculating how much meat is in each of her breasts and thighs, how many hairs on his pelvic bone and the exact curve of your buttocks ... In New York, and no Latinos, Dominicans, Colombians, Guatemalans, look like that. They have learned to restrain, not be understood look at women as they look the dogs to bitches, mares, horses, pigs to sows. "(p. 23). The reverse of such a realm of instinct is a state of" pre-rational ":" Chaos animated, need Deep stunned not to think and perhaps even feel, which was your people, Urania. Also, an explosion of wild, free to the waves of modernization. Dominicans something like that clings to pre-rational, magical: the appetite for noise. "(P. 19).
.
Beyond insults like that, lacking any value, as indicated there is no evidence explaining why established the iron dictatorship. Not appear to be checked Pedro Conde postulated hiatus between the neoliberal political thinker and novelist critical. On the contrary, what is at stake is not only a current topic of the dominant ideology, whereby the pre-modern barbarity has no other source than people in some way inferior, genesis of dictatorship while the antithesis of the single civilization.
.
The corollary of the above lies in an ideological shallowness. The reflections of Urania Cabral cited above constitute sufficient evidence, because part of the regular level of the work. For more is sought, not only is there an effort to source location from the ignominy of the dictatorship, but is also absent any intellectual level reflection on the consequences of such an order in the existence of those involved.
.
is why it is so striking that several newspapers have been critical of the Feast of the Goat exalted as a masterpiece and even David Gallagher, cited by Sabine Kollmann, indicated that "will stand out as emblematic of great novel of Latin America's Twentieth Century. "(9)
.
More balanced approach is the Frauke Gewecke, who sees a series of failures in information, learning, internal consistency and "exoticism" or "tropicalization, although broadly recognized as respectable to work.
.
The intellectual poverty that shows the author in the work, which leads to the location of people as the dictatorship genetic factor explains the approach of the universal state of degradation of Dominican society.
Thus, the most important defining note of the novel is not the indictment of the dictatorship, but the human soul in tropical barbarism. Given the assumption of universal responsibility with the order, the end of the dictatorship, through the plot that occupies one of the three stories, not a rational belief in pursuit of freedom, but a resentment that form part of degradation.
.
The implications of this attribution of altruism in the absence of those killed in Trujillo is the reverse of the "conscious lies" that denature a time. Therefore, with the dictatorship is also reviled the opposition. The novelist was proposed at all costs to prove the depth of degradation, a conclusion that does not tolerate any criticism, because in the life of time, with submission, dissent remained constant, often so clear that required the application of Selective crime as part of the reign of terror.
.
Indeed, the denunciation of the dictatorship is of ambiguous connotations. Vargas Llosa does not address itself to Trujillo, but a general phenomenon presented as the antithesis of the modern world as a sphere of exalted dignity and human fulfillment.
.
For this came, in other interviews, to draw a parallel between Fidel Castro and Rafael Trujillo. Almost unequivocally, said that the latter part of the content attributed to the first issue that reveals not only an anachronism episodic, but a starting point that explains that the construction of Trujillo as a character to respond to a decisive ideological exaltation of the era neoliberal.
.
Underlying then anachronistic dictatorship perceived as homogeneous phenomenon and is one of the determinants of the caricature that is reduced Trujillo order as finished expression of that system. Consequently, the final substrate is only the exaltation of the imperial modernization through economic success Urania Cabral-reflective figure exception, escape from the barbarism as an official international organizations.
.
Within this context, it is not surprising that the work can be viewed as a commercial operation, in accordance with the commercialization that characterizes the neoliberal order. The story calls for an aberrant exotic contrast to the normality of freedom today, in which the grotesque appears as an article consumption. In that order, grotesque heads to the squalid, since, as commercial operations, the book seeks to respond to a type of blood avid reader and sex. Truculence is reduced to the duality issue, beginning with the fictional account of Urania Cabral, who answers prompted by the extreme bitterness that has made sexual violence that he suffered from Trujillo.
.
is, moreover, a poor motivator for those who, by way of alter ego of the novelist's claims is without an endorsement, presented as a formidable scholar in the field.
.
sexual thing going through the story from beginning to end, introducing a bill that makes it decadent conclude in its final pages, in bad taste that reveals the commonplace.
.
bad taste This summarizes the commercial nature of the work and turns on accessory part of your inability to grasp the real mechanisms. This map can be seen regardless of the setting of the narrative to the times and deeds. So strange that vulgarity has not been highlighted by a criticism that has raised the Feast of the Goat to the status of masterpiece.
This statement implies categorizing the novel not only as the supreme realization of Vargas Llosa, what is obviously wrong, but also as superior to what was done by Gabriel García Márquez and Augusto Roa Bastos.
________
Notes
1 - An exception was that of Diogenes Cespedes, who pointed out grammatical errors, to conclude at trial that the work was written in haste. Diogenes Cespedes Mario Vargas Llosa and the subordination of fiction to history ", El Siglo, March 18, 2000.
2 - See the interview with General Felix Hermida, son of a former military chief Trujillo:" General refutes Hermida Vargas Llosa " , The Nation, June 1, 2000.
3 - Pedro Conde Sturla, "Break row and live the Chief!". Supplement streaks, year VIII, No. 55 (April 2001). the presentation of this text notes that was sent to several newspapers and censored.
4 - Bernardo Vega, "Fiction and History in La Fiesta del Chivo", El Siglo, April 30, 2000.
5 - Frauke Gewecke, "La fiesta del Chivo, by Mario Vargas Llosa: prospects of receiving a successful novel," Iberoamericana, Year I, no. 3 (September 2001), pp. 151-165.
6 - There are several versions about the origin of the nickname Chapita, as Trujillo was known in his childhood and youth. The interesting thing is that it be used commonly disaffected sign mocking the dictator's love of medals and decorations bear. In any case, banning the nickname was a powerful symbolic meaning, of absolute respect of the tyrant and his silence about his past insignificance.
7 - It is intriguing that the title of the translation into English is: Trujillo, the dictator's death, Santo Domingo, 1978.
8 - For example, Juan Isidro Jimenez Grullon, Dominican Republic. Analysis of past and present, La Habana, 1940, Juan Bosch, Trujillo. Causes of unprecedented tyranny, Caracas, 1959.
9 - Sabine Kollmann, "La fiesta del Chivo, change and continuity in the work of Vargas Llosa, Latin American, Year I, No. III (September 2001), pp. 136-149. This article was published exclusively by the magazine streaks, number 65, May 2003, pages 36-40 .
0 comments:
Post a Comment