La fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat): Trujillo between patriarchal authority and the savage image of the nation
Keywords:
Historical novel, Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian novel, Latin American novel, dictators, nation, Dominican Republic, TrujilloAbstract
In La Fiesta del Chivo (The Feast of the Goat), by Mario Vargas Llosa, the author presents the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, as a hybrid between patriarchal authority and authoritarian bureaucracy. The reflection that the author suggests is centered on the observation of the relationship between representations of the leader’s credibility among the Dominican people and supposed “realities”, concerning these representations in the novel, that is, the relationship between literary fiction and the supposed cultural reading of the legitimacy of power in popular culture. One approach to this never-ending relationship between the representation and its object and the claims of adequacy between the two allows us to observe the relativization of violence that is part of the aforementioned literary representation.
Downloads
References
Ainsa, Fernando, “La reescritura de la historia en la nueva narrativa latinoamericana”, en Cuadernos Americanos, No. 4, 1991.
––– Reescribir el pasado, Caracas/Mérida, CERLAG, 2003.
Álvarez, Julia, En el tiempo de las mariposas, Buenos Aires, Editorial Atlántida, 1994.
Burke, Peter, Formas de hacer historia, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1993.
Carpentier, Alejo, El reino de este mundo, Madrid, Alianza editorial, 2011.
C.L.R. James, Los jacobinos Negros, La Habana, Casa de las Américas, colección “Nuestros Países”, Serie estudios, 2010.
Richard, Lee Turits, Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003.
Said, Edward, Orientalismo, Madrid, Libertarias/Prodhufi, S.A., 1990.
Vargas Llosa, Mario, La fiesta del Chivo, Madrid, Grupo Santillana, 2001.
.png){kind=logo}
