The art of dictator novels

Among the forerunners were Tirano Banderas by Ramón María del Valle-Inclán and El Señor Presidente by Miguel Ángel Asturias. Both are set in unidentified countries, the first inspired by Mexico and the second, Guatemala. These dense, multi-pronged narratives set the tone for much later work, especially a remarkable trinity that appeared towards the end of the so-called Latin American Boom in the mid-Seventies.

Their genesis was a suggestion by Carlos Fuentes, who had earlier written about the crumbling ideals of the Mexican revolution in the influential The Death of Artemio Cruz. Fuentes recalls that one evening in 1967 when sitting in a Hampstead pub with Mario Vargas Llosa, they came up with the idea of inviting a dozen Latin American authors to write novellas about their favourite national tyrants. The results would be published in an anthology called The Fathers of the Fatherlands.

Sadly, the project for this portrait gallery of dictators fell through. However, three of the authors jointly decided to write full-length novels of their own. These were Alejo Carpentier’s Reasons of State, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Augusto Roa Bastos’ I, the Supreme.

Carpentier’s novel deals with an unnamed dictator living it up in Paris, who returns to his country to quell a coup. Marquez’s patriarch is based on actual leaders such as Colombia’s Pinilla and Spain’s Franco, and tells of the ebbing and flowing powers of a despot known as the General. And Bastos’ book is a fictionalised account of the regime of Dr Francia, the 19^th-century Paraguayan autocrat.

All of them portray the past and present of the powerful and the powerless with panache. They contain elements of the magical realist style that Latin American writers were then famous for, but go deeper in their depictions of how a state can be throttled. It’s as though the very texture of the work is intended to convey that since tyranny is against the natural order of things, it should be written about in a preternatural manner.

Through pages-long sentences and dreamlike prose, Marquez demonstrates how power can corrupt and degrade in what he referred to as “an extremely long poem about the loneliness of a dictator”. Bastos combines grotesquery, comedy and pathos in a parable of power’s abuse. Carpentier’s baroque style and richness of perception highlight “the marvellous real” of those wielding power and afraid of losing it.

With their allusions and intricate structures, they drill down into the damaging effects of dictatorship by investigating the fundamental sources and structures of authority: control over time, history, and language itself. This transcends the regional to become universal.

Years later, Mario Vargas Llosa was to add to the list of dictator novels with his strikingly detailed The Feast of the Goat. His work is not about an imagined or composite dictator, but based on the life and assassination of the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo.

The Feast of the Goat shares some characteristics of the earlier works: it encompasses time periods through multiple viewpoints and a large cast of characters and conspirators. It has been criticised by some, though, for being less sparkling than the rest.

What do autocratic leaders do in light of such dissection? When not composing manifestos, delivering speeches, or rewriting history, some of them turn to fiction and verse themselves.

To mention just three examples, Saddam Hussein wrote a romance novel; Stalin published poetry; and Turkmenistan’s Niyazov composed a rambling national epic. These are rarely remembered. The work of Carpentier, Marquez, Bastos and others endures.