The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez

First published:El otoño del patriarca, 1975 (English translation, 1975)

Type of plot: Episodic fantasy parable

Time of work: The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Locale: An unnamed Caribbean country

Principal Characters:

• The Patriarch, an unnamed Latin American dictator who is somewhere between the ages of 107 and 232
• Bendición Alvarado, his mother, a former prostitute
• Patricio Aragonés, his double, who is assassinated
• Leticia Nazareno, his wife, a former nun
• Emanuel, their infant son
• General Rodrigo de Aguilar, the chief of national security
• Manuela Sánchez, a beauty queen who vanishes during a solar eclipse
• José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra, a sadistic torturer

The Novel

The Autumn of the Patriarch, published eight years after Gabriel García Márquez’s highly praised Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), was a novel for which both general readers and critics had waited. It was, however, a project that García Márquez had put aside earlier to write One Hundred Years of Solitude because, as he has commented, he was writing it at first without any clear idea of what he was doing. García Márquez has said that he got the idea for writing the work two or three days after the fall of the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, when the ruling junta met. He was in the anteroom of the presidential office with other journalists when an officer in battle fatigues came out walking backward with a machine gun in his hand and mud on his boots. It was at that moment, García Márquez reveals, that he had a sudden insight into the mystery of power.

Consequently, he wanted to write a “poem on the solitude of power,” in which a mythical Latin American dictator would be used as an embodiment of many such dictators, from “Papa Doc” Duvalier of Haiti to Juan Vicente Gómez of Venezuela. His first attempt at the structure of the book—a long monologue by the aged dictator as he is waiting to be executed—he abandoned for the existing polyphonic structure of a multitude of blending voices in six sections that make the book begin and end in a spiral fashion with the discovery of the patriarch’s body. The result is a difficult book to read, for each of the six episodes of which it is composed is a single paragraph. There are no other breaks in the novel, and many of the sentences go on for several pages in a run-on, seemingly rambling and disconnected fashion, much like some of the novels of William Faulkner or the stream-of-consciousness works of James Joyce. The stylistic experiment of the book goes even further than Faulkner or Joyce, however, for the point of view of the work shifts constantly, sometimes even within a single line, from first-person participant to third-person author to first-person-plural choral response. García Márquez has called The Autumn of the Patriarch the most experimental of his novels and the one that interests him most as a poetic adventure; it is, he says, a book that he wrote like a poem, word by word, sometimes spending weeks on a few lines.

The novel begins with the discovery of the body of the aged patriarch pecked at by vultures and sprouting parasitic animals. Yet because he has not been seen by anyone in many years, and because this is the second time he has been found dead (the first time was with the death of Patricio Aragonés, his exact double), those who find him are not sure if he indeed is the dictator. Although the patriarch’s entire life—from birth, to ascendancy to power, to marriage, to suspected coups, to examples of his autocratic and magical rule—is recounted in the six chapters of the work, the primary plot line (if that is possible in such a multifaceted novel as this) focuses on the twenty-four-hour period from the discovery of the body to the final celebration and jubilation at the end of the book.

There is no real sense of chronological time in the novel, for the various voices which recount the events that characterize the patriarch’s life blend into a kind of grotesque tone-poem in which time becomes a mythical cycle, ranging throughout the supposed two centuries of the patriarch’s mythic life and even beyond to one scene when the patriarch looks out the window and sees the ships of Columbus beside a battleship of modern-day marines. Yet this world of mythic reality, like the world of many of García Márquez’s other works, is a world of violence and grotesquely brutal events. A few examples should be sufficient to indicate the nature of the details of the novel and to show the mythically mad world that the patriarch creates around him.

There is, for example, the execution of General Rodrigo de Aguilar after he is suspected of instigating an attempt on the patriarch’s life. On the night when he is to be the honored guest at a banquet for the palace guards, he makes his entrance on a silver platter decorated with cauliflower and laurel branches, marinated in spices, browned in the oven, then carved and served up with the order to eat heartily. There is the death of Bendicion Alvarado, the patriarch’s mother, who rots away of some mysterious disease but whose body is preserved and displayed throughout the country, revived and, according to some, still alive as the patriarch attempts to have her canonized as a saint. There is the death of Leticia Nazareno, the patriarch’s wife, and his small son, Emanuel, devoured piece by piece by a pack of trained dogs.

After this murder, José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra, who is hired to find the killers, sends the patriarch numerous bags of what appear to be coconuts but which really contain the heads of some of his enemies, until, finally, 918 heads are delivered, many of which decay in a filing cabinet. There are the two thousand children who have been used by the patriarch as a way to cheat on the national lottery and who, because of their innocent complicity, must all be killed—an atrocity that is achieved by placing them in a ship filled with concrete which is then exploded. The list of absurd and grotesque events goes on and on—countless horrors that become so numerous that the reader can no longer take them completely seriously but must allow them to blend together in a kind of lyrically maintained mythical world of madness and extremity.

The Characters

The central character, the figure for whom the entire novel exists, is the patriarch himself. Yet he is less a unified character than a pastiche of the idea of the dictator: one who has ultimate power to create his own world and to manipulate other human beings as though they were dispensable pieces in an elaborate, self-indulgent game. If the patriarch were to be taken as a real person, he could be dismissed simply as mad. Since, however, he is an embodiment of the horrors of ultimate power that corrupts absolutely, he suggests the madness of power itself, which is a much more horrifying concept.

He is given all the attributes of the magical personage—one who can change the weather, who is invulnerable to bullets, who fathers hundreds of children, who is destined to live forever, who rules so absolutely that when he asks what time it is, the answer is whatever time he wishes it to be. At the same time, however, he is also seen as weak, fearful of assassination, often sexually impotent, at the mercy of those around him, and generally in a state of aging decay. His gigantic herniated testicle, which he must carry about in a leather case, is a central symbol of this double image: Even as it suggests the magnitude of his sexual organs and thus his power, it also is like a hump on his back, a burden that limits him. Moreover, his seemingly unrestrained power is made ridiculous by the various ruses that his followers must employ to maintain the illusion of power; for example, the young virginal schoolgirls whom he sexually accosts on their way home are really prostitutes hired by his men, and the soap operas he watches are created for his eyes only, because he insists on happy endings.

The other named characters in the novel (there are hundreds who are not named) are similarly extreme and grotesque images rather than real people. The patriarch’s mother insists on living in the servants’ quarters and paints birds to make them more colorful for sale, seemingly unaware of her great wealth. At one point, during an official parade, she hands a basket of empty bottles in the window of her son’s car and asks him to drop them off at the store. Leticia Nazareno, the patriarch’s wife, continually goes to the marketplace and buys numerous useless items with the order to “send the bill to the government”—bills which never get paid. During the wedding itself, when she is seven months pregnant, she squats in the “steamy puddle of her own water” and brings “out from among the tangle of muslin the premature infant.”

Critical Context

García Márquez has admitted that his primary literary debts are to the lyric, stream-of-consciousness style of William Faulkner, the restrained and stylized realism of Ernest Hemingway, and the nightmarishly concrete world of Franz Kafka. After the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a work which astonished the critics and the reading public with its fantastically realized world of myth and magic, many wondered how García Márquez could go beyond the experimental narrative style of that work. The Autumn of the Patriarch did not disappoint them, although many found it much less readable than his earlier works. As might be expected, professional critics have had a field day with the book, for it is surely ripe for explication. Indeed, they have itemized the obsessively repeated symbolic motifs of the novel, have suggested historical sources for the patriarch himself, and have generally delighted in demonstrating their ability to “read” and then to clarify what seems to be an extremely demanding book. Although the book has been generally praised, it has also been criticized for being too long, often too self-indulgent, and too stylistically idiosyncratic to be widely read.

Still, although it is a book more often referred to than actually read, it reaffirms García Márquez’s place as the most famous and respected figure of the Latin American literary renaissance—an elite group that includes Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and José Donoso, all of whom share García Márquez’s narrative worldview of a reality that is much more fictional and absurd than our common sense and our sense of common decency will allow us to accept.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Márquez. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. A collection of eighteen essays by various authors on different aspects of Márquez’s works. Covers the whole range of literary criticism and offers in-depth analysis of several of Márquez’s novels.

Dolan, Sean. Hispanics of Achievement. New York: Chelsea House, 1994. A solid introduction to Márquez’s work, featuring photographs and quotations. Discusses Márquez’s family background, literary influences, and personal politics and how these shaped his writing.

McMurray, George R. “Gabriel García Márquez.” In Latin American Writers, edited by Carlos A. Solé and Maria I. Abreau. Vol 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Offers a comprehensive and critical discussion of Márquez’s life and works. Provides a selected bibliography for further reading.

Márquez, Gabriel García. Interview. UNESCO Courier 49 (February, 1996): 4-7. Márquez offers his views on the teaching and protection of culture. He also discusses his daily writing discipline and how it has influenced and enhanced his work. An informative and interesting interview.

Styron, Rose. “Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Kenzaburo Oe: From the Rose Styron Conversations.” New Perspectives Quarterly 14 (Fall, 1997): 56-62. A revealing interview with three renowned authors. They share their views on topics such as women and power, first and lost love, journalism as literature, spirit and faith, and multiculturalism.