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July 14, 2002
REVIEWS: Autopsy of an autocracy
The Peruvian Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa is one of the leading writers of Latin America today. The feast of the goat, his thirteenth novel, is an account of the last days of Gen Rafael Trujillo, the caudillo (strong man) of the Dominican Republic in 1930-1961. An unflinching dissection of tyranny and its effects, Vargas Llosa’s novel is of extraordinary force and abiding significance.
The original Spanish title La fiesta del chivo encompasses two different meanings. “Fiesta” ordinarily means a large meal, and Trujillo’s voracious sexual appetite had caused him to be nicknamed “the goat.” But fiesta also means a religious ritual, in which a goat might be sacrificed.
Based on exhaustive research, and factual in much of its details, Feast has three narrative strands that form alternating chapters. Only the opening strand is wholly fictional: “in 1996, the 49-year old exiled daughter of a former Trujillo acolyte returns home, seeking retribution for an unspeakable torment in her past”.
The second strand is made up of the thoughts and activities of Rafael Trujillo on May 30, 1961, the day of his assassination. We hear the generalissimo’s thoughts from dawn until his death that night. Weaved through this section is an accurate history of Trujillo’s grisly rule.
The third strand introduces the reader to the dictator’s assassins and their histories, and narrates the catastrophic after effects of the assassination. It is a measure of Vargas Llosa’s consummate artistry that he braids the three strands to a soul-shattering denouement.
In the author’s trenchant portrayal, Rafael Lesnidas Trujillo Molina becomes an emblematic despot. A Pakistani might find eerie echoes: the sartorial elegance of Gen Ayub Khan and the avarice of his family, the compulsive womanizing of Gen Yahya Khan, the false piety of Gen Ziaul Haq, the present incumbent’s push for modernity and his tolerance of a puppet President for the initial period of his rule. Rafael Trujillo’s SIM resembles Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s FSF: both organizations were devoted to torturing and eliminating their leader’s political opponents. And last but not the least, all our dictators have needed a “constitutional sot” to give “the appearance of juridical necessity to the most arbitrary decisions of the executive”.
American influence is another parallel. The United States supported Trujillo for most of his 31-year reign. In words of US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, since used for all US-supported dictators worldwide, Trujillo was “a son of a b..ch, but he was our son of a b..ch”.
From his leap into the dictatorial abyss, Vargas Llosa brings up this insight: the dictator pities himself and feels unappreciated by his nation. “He whipped his pathetic homeland into shape, modernized its attitudes and highways” but in return gets criticized. Says the critic Walter Kirn: “The tyrant must rationalize his rule with fantasies of self-sacrifice and victimhood.”
The main themes of The feast of the goat are: (1) the complicity of the dictator’s subjects and (2) the public’s wish for a strongman. “I didn’t want to present Trujillo as a grotesque monster or brutal clown,” Mario Vargas Llosa has remarked. “I wanted a realist treatment of a human being who became a monster because of the power he accumulated and the lack of resistance and criticism. Without the complicity of large sections of society and their infatuation with the strongman, [the dictators] wouldn’t have been where they were; converted into a god, you become a devil.”
The public’s craving for a strongman is a well-known phenomenon of mass-escapism, the abdication of the responsibility to self-govern. Since the 1979 Iranian revolution, Pakistanis have not tired of asserting that what the country needs is a Khomeini, who will cleanse the government and nation by simply executing all the corrupt, the thieves, the looters.
The complicity of the people to become, in the words of Milan Kundera, “accomplices in their own murders” is less understood. Feast attempts an answer. The mass consequence of the tyrannical regime he describes is a kind of paralysis, “the numbing of determination, reason, and free will, which this man, groomed and adorned to the point of absurdity, imposed on Dominicans, poor and rich, educated or ignorant, friends or enemies.” Lying and cheating, torture and murder, corruption and moral anarchy become a way of life.
Mario Vargas Llosa then reveals a greater mystery, one that is more relevant to Pakistan: “You’ve come to understand how so many millions of people, crushed by propaganda and lack of information, deprived of free will and even curiosity by fear and habit of servility and obsequiousness, could [accept the dictator]. But what you’ve never understood is how the best-educated, officials, the intellectuals of the country, cultivated men of experience and ideas, could allow themselves to be savagely abused. [They] had lost their scruples, their sensitivity, the slightest hint of rectitude. Just like the whole country, perhaps. To become a heartles monster, to be unfeeling and self-satisfied. Was that a requirement for staying in power and not dying of disgust? Was it for the illusion that they were wielding power?”
The most harrowing part of the novel is the aftermath of Trujillo’s assassination. The moral confusion, the paralysis of will of those who could have saved the situation, the continuing ascendancy of the dictator’s family, the witch-hunt in which thousands were tortured and murdered — all manifest the truth that despotism does not die with the despot. “Terror, once unleashed, slithers through the body politic gradually to eviscerate all its members.”
In Pakistan, where the recidivist debate on democracy versus dictatorship still persists, fiction imbued with moral outrage could not be more welcome. In The feast of the goat, Mario Vargas Llosa has resolved the debate: “autocratic rule rends the whole fabric of society, arrests political evolution, and cripples the society’s ability to reform itself. If we learn one lesson from this masterwork, it is this: the consequence of complicity in a dictatorship is ‘moral annihilation.’” Few other phrases describe today’s Pakistani society more aptly.
The feast of the goat
By Mario Vargas Llosa
Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
Faber & Faber, London
ISBN 0571207715
404pp. £16.99
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