SOURCE: Mejía, Adelaida López. “Burying the Dead: Repetition in El otoño del patriarca.” MLN 107, no. 2 (March 1992): 298-320.

[In the following essay, Mejía examines the relationship between the dictator and populace as portrayed in The Autumn of the Patriarch.]

Of course, there is no need of a signifier to be a father, any more than to be dead.

—Jacques Lacan¹

I

The figure of the unburied corpse, which Gabriel García Márquez evokes with an epigraph from Antigone in his first novel La hojarasca, returns in El otoño del patriarca (OP) with the force of an obsession.² In the later novel, at the beginning of each chapter, a first-person-plural narrator describes the dead body of the dictator. Although this narrative voice repeatedly splinters into first-person singular and third-person narrators, it never fails to recompose itself into the first-person plural, whenever a new chapter begins and at the jubilant end of the novel. Such unstable, polymorphous narration might conceivably issue from what Julia Kristeva terms the semiotic chora, “an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases” (25). For Kristeva, the chora serves as a model with which to interpret the unruliness of the avant-garde text. The Protean narrative voices of García Márquez' most difficult and experimental novel could be viewed as articulating the struggle of pre-Oedipal drives within the text, drives that Kristeva describes as “semiotic functions … that connect and orient the body to the mother” (27). Even a Kristevan interpretation, however, would not answer the question that plagues most critics of the novel: does a collective narrator gather together and give unity to the multitude of individual narrating voices?³ According to Stephen Minta, the impossibility of determining “the identity of the people who lie behind the omnipresent first-person pronouns … is part of the novel's psychological project” (106). Angel Rama and Julio Ortega find in the recurrent first-person-plural narrator a collective subject that speaks for that elusive political and cultural entity, the people of a nation.⁴ Yet the voice of the people repeatedly confesses an almost pathological dependence on the dictator, a troubling reliance on him for a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives:

lo único que nos daba seguridad sobre la tierra era la certidumbre de que él estaba ahí, … invulnerable al tiempo, consagrado a la dicha mesiánica de pensar para nosotros, sabiendo que … era el único de nosotros que conocía el tamaño real de nuestro destino.

(115-116)

This expression of extreme political passivity is not just a reflection of the patriarch's own discourse, a self-delusional justification of his own power. Too many other passages unequivocally suggest that the narrating “we,” as people of the nation, have evaded the responsibility to take control over their lives. Towards the end of the novel, the people-as-narrators explicitly declare their unwillingness to accept his death: “no queríamos que fuera cierto, habíamos terminado por no entender cómo seríamos sin él” (242). At times recognizing their passivity as a flaw best left concealed, the people-as-narrator nonetheless acknowledge that the dictator's presumed immortality reassured rather than stifled them: “No sólo habíamos terminado por creer de veras que él estaba concebido para sobrevivir al tercer cometa, sino que esa convicción nos había infundido una seguridad y un sosiego que creíamos disimular” (143). García Márquez' literary creation of such an inert, apathetic collectivity has elicited varying critical responses, and it is still a matter of debate whether the novel leads us to bleak conclusions about the political history of Latin America and its future.⁵

Psychoanalysis provides an interpretive guide to the dictator-populace dyad in El otoño del patriarca, as well as to the relations between the patriarch and various strongly individuated characters. Although the very title of the novel demands a provisional interpretation of the dictator as paternal figure, one of the protagonist's most cherished fantasies is that his people love him as unconditionally and intensely as might occur in the idealized relation between mother and child. The dictator's specular identification of himself with the people, of course, also makes for useful political rhetoric: he can justify his actions by stating that they express the people's will. Particularly in the first chapters, he is meticulously attentive to signs of the populace's affection for him. Betrayal from the officers of his army never surprises him, but he refuses to admit that his formidable power may be based on the people's fear of him rather than on their love (85). In the dictator's hankering after the nation's affection, the people act as object or mother to his infantile desire; his own omnipotence over their lives, however, places him in the position of the all-powerful parent. The people themselves never dream of bonding with him as an ambiguous half of the mother-child dyad. They will mourn him not as the desired other, not as the maternal provider of pleasure, but as the repressive provider of law.

Nothing could be more ambivalent than the combination of disorientation and euphoria the dictator's death provokes in the narrators. Although they dub the Monday on which they storm the presidential palace as “el lunes de liberación,” they also describe themselves as anchorless and adrift after his death, fearing the uncertain future thrust upon them. Unrepressed ambivalence towards the dead is uncharacteristic, according to Freud, among recently orphaned sons and daughters: “Hostile impulses towards parents (a wish that they should die),” he writes, “are repressed … at times of their illness or death” (Freud's letter to Fliess, qtd. in editor's note SE [Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud] 14:240). In Totem and Taboo (TT), Freud suggests that our reaction to the death of political leaders allows for more conscious ambivalence than does the death of parents. Yet in spite of the distinction Freud draws between parents and rulers, he clearly views political leaders as paternal surrogates and as the objects of murderous Oedipal fantasies (TT: 69). The entire second chapter of Totem and Taboo is concerned with the “ambivalence of emotions” that the death of the powerful evokes in us.

Many passages of Totem and Taboo owe a considerable debt to Frazer's The Golden Bough. With characteristic insistence on the force of repressed desire, Freud argues that the prohibitions and rituals regulating the daily lives of rulers point to “a forbidden action for which there exists a strong inclination in the unconscious” (TT: 44). This disguised desire is no other than to kill the powerful: “everybody would perhaps like to be king” (TT: 45). Freud also likens the apparently unmotivated behaviour of “compulsive disorders” to the prohibitions of taboo (TT: 36-41). In El otoño del patriarca, the dictator's methodical bedtime ritual (“pasaba las tres aldabas, los tres pestillos …” [67]) resembles nothing if not a compulsion neurosis. The dictator's obsessive revision of palace windows and doors before bedtime seems a useless attempt to ward off or control the circumstances of his own death, which, if he trusts what he saw in a fortune-teller's tea-cup, shall come from natural causes in his sleep (11:26).

Freud, following Frazer, stresses that the restrictions surrounding rulers arise not only to protect the powerful from harm but also to shield others from the evil that contact with the powerful may bring. Taboos evolve out of the belief that “some persons and objects possess a dangerous power which is transmitted by contact … almost like a contagion” (TT: 31). The dictator in El otoño del patriarca also enjoys such lethal, supernatural power. Casual contact with him is particularly dangerous during the early years of his rule, when violent deaths would follow his visits to a villager's house:

él no era consciente del reguero de desastres domésticos que provocaban sus apariciones … aparecía sin ningún anuncio en una cocina cualquiera … sin sospechar que aquella casa quedaba marcada para siempre con el estigma de su visita.

(101)

The dictator's youth coincides with the apex of his potentially contagious presence, just as the physical vigor of chieftains, Frazer claims, was directly related to their continuing hold on power (Golden Bough: 309-330). Rituals and taboo were devised to guard the king's life because a nation's agriculture was believed to depend on its leader's physical well-being (Frazer: 340). In the early years of the dictator's reign, before the consequences of his own power immobilized him, the nation's leader was rumored to have precisely such effects upon crops, rainfall, and fertility: “bastaba con que él señalara con el dedo a los árboles que debían dar frutos y a los animales que debían crecer … había ordenado que quitaran la lluvia de donde estorbaba las cosechas y la pusieran en tierra de sequía” (102).

In the catastrophic effects that careless contact with the dictator brings ordinary people, in his alleged abilities to cure the sick and control the cosmos, the patriarch joins the mythical company of monarchs described by Frazer, although the resemblances between García Márquez' fictional dictator and the kings of The Golden Bough fail to completely substantiate the Colombian novelist's rash claim that “the figure of the dictator is the only mythological figure that Latin America has produced.”⁶El otoño del patriarca cloaks its protagonist with the aura of royalty if only by continuously referring to the dictator as king. A fortune-teller who saw him as an infant predicted he had born to be king (“había nacido para rey” [148]). The patriarch cannot understand the ingratitude of his double, Patricio Aragonés, to whom he granted the advantages of living like a king without the disadvantages of being one (“todas las ventajas de vivir como un rey sin las desventajas de serlo” [16]). At times, García Márquez uncrowns his monstrous monarch, as in the incident when the dictator's wife, Leticia Nazareno, causes fruit to rot and gold to rust at her touch (201). This episode parodically inverts beliefs, described by Frazer and Freud, that wives of high officials may share their husbands' supernatural influence over their country's prosperity.⁷

Although the novel implies that the dictator's supernatural powers exist only in propaganda and legend, the mendacity of these rumors in no way diminishes his incontestable might. Even the dictator is unsure whether one of the few recollections he has of his childhood, of towns so poor they buried the dead without coffins, was a real or a fabricated memory (188-190). What matters politically, however, is the widespread belief that he lifted his nation out of horrific poverty. To have put an end to coffinless funerals stands as one of the dictator's more memorable achievements, just as indicative of the progressive ideology of his first years in power as his outlawing of public executions and his sponsorship of the national railroads (189). In García Márquez' short story, “El mar del tiempo perdido,” burial without coffins also indicates a village's level of abjection and material poverty. If indeed the dictator in El otoño del patriarca once raised his people's sense of human dignity by ensuring decent funerals for them, the people-as-narrators make a reciprocal gesture when he dies. Whatever ambivalence they express towards their dictator, the narrators do not question their responsibility to give him proper burial. And yet, although El otoño del patriarca can be read as a prolonged preparation for burial, that final rite of passage is constantly deferred, never actually takes place.

II

Characteristic of the initial phase of mourning, Freud writes, is “a turning away from reality … and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis … in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected” (“Mourning and Melancholia” SE 14:245). Kathleen Woodward, in her insightful critique of the affectless tone of Freud's writing on loss, sympathizes with his concept of mourning as “a passionate … a hyper-remembering … a dizzying phantasmagoria of memory” (“Freud and Barthes”: 95). Woodward's rephrasing of Freud serves as an apt description of the narrative structure of El otoño del patriarca, where the narrators' obsessive recounting of their encounter with the corpse is followed, in each chapter, by an avalanche of memories or remembered rumors about the dictator's life.

The first sentence of the novel, as Darío Puccini notes, prefigures most of what will follow (“Utopía y antiutopía”: 105). The allusion to the smell of the dictator's rotting body, which seems to have contaminated the entire city, inscribes the hyperbolical magnitude of his power: “la ciudad despertó de su letargo de siglos con una tibia y tierna brisa de muerto grande y de podrida grandeza. Sólo entonces nos atrevimos a entrar …” (5). Both ominous and enticing, the stench lures the people-as-narrators (the people-as-vultures?) to approach the grounds. Once inside the palace, they describe their experience in a repeated, hypnotic series of “vimos,” in other words, through the sense of sight.⁸ The emphasis on vision, repeated in the second chapter when the crowd rummages through the bedrooms of the dictator's mother and his wife (52-53), is not entirely innocent. As Elizabeth Grosz writes, paraphrasing Sartre, “vision performs a distancing function, leaving the looker unimplicated in or uncontaminated by its object … the look is the domain of domination and mastery; it provides access to its object without necessarily being in contact with it …” (38). The incantatory tone of the narrators' passage through the ruined presidential palace suggests their momentary, vertiginous illusion of control, for they are acutely aware that they have entered a formerly inaccessible space. Even the marginal, outer sections of the palace, with its stables, kitchens, concubines' quarters, and multiple courtyards, constitute a Latin American analogue of the Forbidden City. The sound of the narrators' voice empowers them, as it magically opens the door to the main building, granting them access to the dictator's private residence. “No tuvimos que forzar la entrada, como habíamos pensado, pues la puerta principal pareció abrirse al solo impulso de la voz” (7). In the rambling reconstruction of the dictator's life following the discovery of the corpse, the people-as-narrators remark on their own passive acceptance of dictatorial rule. Such insistent calling attention to their own weakness recalls the ego-hatred of melancholics, who, Freud argues in “Mourning and Melancholia,” turn the anger they feel towards others against themselves (SE 14:246-248). If in Otoño the people's resentment towards the autocrat has turned inwards, the day of the dictator's death proffers a tentative, fleeting opportunity for change. Remembering, telling, and narrating, coincide, at least temporarily, with psychological and political liberation.

The crowd's actual confrontation with the dictator's corpse frustrates their desire to see or know him dead. Whereas the repeated use of “vimos” gave the narrators inside the palace a voyeuristic illusion of control and possession at a distance, touching and turning over the corpse is followed by a painful recognition of limits, by the anguish of this body's unrecognizability. Two apparently irrefutable proofs of his identity (his lineless hands, his herniated testicle) offer no assurance to the crowd, for they remember that an identical but fraudulent corpse has lain in state before (11). With the story of the funeral of the dictator's physical double, the narrative shifts away from the first-person-plural chorus to a predominantly third-person narration. The narrating “we” recedes into the background, and the evocation of the past begins in earnest:

Freud argues that the ego's unwillingness to confront its own mortality plays an important part in bringing the process of mourning to its conclusion, for the ego constantly resists confronting the fact “that the object no longer exists … (and) the question whether it shall share this fate” (SE 14:255). The people-as-narrators in the first chapter are particularly sensitive to the brevity of their life-span, since the dictator's longevity and years of isolation accounts for their inability to remember or recognize his face. Nonetheless, their “work of mourning” is far from over: they have not even begun to remember what they know or have heard about his life.

The anxiety-producing image of the corpse of Aragonés haunts the opening pages of the second chapter, which begins with a first-person-plural voice bemoaning the difficulty of corroborating the authenticity of the dictator's body; the narrators now mistrust any report of the leader's death: “la segunda vez que lo encontraron … ninguno de nosotros era bastante viejo para recordar lo que ocurrió la primera vez pero sabíamos que ninguna evidencia era terminante” (51). Such insistence on doubt and disbelief not only evokes a dictatorial society in which information is always rumor and nothing can be believed, it also suggests the wish to deny the patriarch's death.⁹ Denial, in fact, constitutes part of the work of mourning (“a turning away from reality … a clinging to the object” [SE 14:244]). Nonetheless, the fear that the dictator has not died coexists with a not-so-unconscious desire that he come back to life and retain control of the nation. The narrators cling to the lost object by dredging up a chaotic series of memories, triggered in the second chapter by the discrepancy between official historical descriptions of the dictator and the body found by the narrating crowd. The second chapter ends with an image that recurs throughout the narrative, the reflection in a fortune-teller's tea-cup of the dictator's face-down body, dead of natural causes in his sleep. This other specular image of his death provides the seamless transition to the third chapter, which once again holds up the memory of the double's body as a caveat against the ingenuous acceptance of any new corpse as authentic.

The reflection in the fortune-teller's tea-cup inverts the relation of subject to image as Lacan describes it in his classic account of the mirror-stage, where the child sees a harmonious visual image of itself while still experiencing its own body as fragmented (Ecrits: 2-4; Grosz: 39). At the height of his power, the dictator glimpses a premonitory image of himself relegated to the final powerlessness of death. Yet since his reflection in the tea-cup shatters any illusions the dictator may have concerning his immortality, it activates the aggressivity and frustration characteristic to the mirror-stage, as evidenced by the dictator's murder of the fortune-teller who showed him the circumstances of his death (Lacan: 14-17; OP: 106). This will not be the only time specular images provoke the dictator's rage.

The last three chapters show the narrators preparing the leader's corpse for public display, and the difficulty of positing the existence of an over-arching narrator in the novel informs Minta's question whether the crowd that finds the corpse is the same as the group that prepares it for embalming. Minta points out that “this latter group, if indeed they are distinct from the former, are clearly interested in perpetuating a patriarchal myth beyond the grave, by ensuring that the body is transformed in accordance with its legendary status” (109). If the mummified dictator is to lie in state indefinitely, deified in death as he was in life, the work of mourning may never end. The political implications of El otoño del patriarca might be more optimistic if the end of the novel pointed to a definitive closure, to a burial of the dictator outside the text. Yet despite the jubilant tone of the last pages, there is no real indication that the people-as-narrators have accepted their own responsibility in the militant creation of a less unjust future.

The narrative's constant return to a description of the dictator's corpse suggests the people's reluctance to bury it as well as the possible satisfaction they derive from gloating over the body of the man who formerly ruled them. In Totem and Taboo, Freud implies that the almost universal dread of touching the dead may hide an unconscious desire to control, retain or become the dead by handling them (46-47; 69-71). Touching and embalming the dictator's corpse manifests an attempt to master the vertiginous vacuum left by the ruler's death and reverses, if only in gesture, the people's centuries-long domination. But it also brings to mind Freud's controversial concept of the death-instinct, described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (BPP) as the “compulsion to repeat” (10). Freud's initial, deceptively optimistic description of the death-instinct interprets a child's play as an imaginative mastery of loss through an active, voluntary recreation of it (BPP: 8-10). Later, Freud formulates his more somber definition of the death instinct as precisely what its name implies: “a conservative instinct to return to an inanimate state” (BPP: 32), as a recollection of “extremely painful experiences” (BPP: 14), an impulse “to work over in the mind some overpowering experience” (BPP: 10). The narrator's insistent return to the corpse dramatizes their own compulsion to repeat, because in their fascination with the dictator's body they remain under its sway. The momentary clearing (aüfklarung) created by the dictator's death results in the lonely vertigo of responsibility; the narrator-populace averts its gaze from the demanding future, postpones its own responsibility in that future's creation, by its fascination with the remains of the past. The death-instinct informs the narrators' ambivalent mourning: they mourn their political infancy, in a regressive attempt to hold on to their own previous “inanimate state,” passive in their fascination with the body yet active in their vicarious mastery of it. Also pertinent to El otoño del patriarca is the pointed distinction Freud makes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle between repeating and remembering. Freud describes repeating as a sign of remaining trapped in neurosis, whereas remembering is a therapeutic breaking through and recognition of the origin of trauma (BPP: 12). In García Márquez' novel, the return of the dictator's corpse locks the narrating collectivity into a vicious, narcissistic contemplation of the dead political body with which they wish, on some level, to become one, whereas the memories that follow the description of the corpse explore, perhaps cathartically, their own complicit dependence upon him.

III

The narrators' very capacity to mourn the dictator, however ambivalently, marks the distance that separates them from him. The patriarch is no stranger to loss; he, too, has confronted “the loss of a loved person, or … of some abstraction which has taken the place of one” (SE 14:243). Each of the novel's six chapters, in fact, re-enacts the death or disappearance of a man or woman the dictator allowed to draw close to him.¹⁰ In the first chapter, the object of the dictator's desultory affections is his physical double, Patricio Aragonés, who gave the leader the power to appear to be in various places at once and the freedom to roam his beloved city alone (14-19). His double does not interpret the patriarch's decision to accompany him during the last hours of his life as any indication of the leader's affection for him. Aragonés himself takes those hours as an opportunity to express his hatred for his autocratic double. This death-bed confrontation shatters any illusions the dictator may have regarding his double's love for him. It remains unclear whether what moved the dictator to witness Aragonés' death-throes was only cold-blooded curiosity or whether a momentary tenderness towards his dying double led the dictator to feed the other man spoonfuls of painkiller and to entreat him to die with dignity (29-32). What is clear, however, is that practical thoughts about the use to which the leader can put his double's body, namely, to ferret out the dictator's own enemies, quickly take the place of any affection he might have felt for Aragonés.

The problem of what is to be done with a dead body preoccupies the leader as much as it does the narrators, but his reaction to men's death is swift, practical, and unmarked by obsessive recollections. The efficiency and composure with which he disposes of Aragonés contrasts with the narrators' deferral of the dictator's own burial. The group of men who grasp at the dictator's legacy of power are at a loss with what to do with his corpse, unsure how to reveal the news of his death to the populace (186). Roberto Hozven, who also invokes Totem and Taboo in his analysis of El otoño del patriarca, relates the hesitance and anxiety of the dictator's survivors to the guilt that ensues after the slaying of the primal father. Assuming, as does Oviedo, that the corpse at the beginning of each chapter is not necessarily the dictator's own, Hozven argues that the nation's attempt to establish a covenant of morality will fail because its people must contend with an invincible, unkillable corpse.¹¹

Like Amaranta in Cien años de soledad, the dictator proves a “virtuoso” in the rituals of death. In chapter five, the narrators tell of their collective efforts to scrape the patriarch's body of sea scales, wash it with rock salt, and dust and color his face (185). The dictator scrapes and washes Aragonés body with the meticulous attention the narrators give to his: “tuvo que restregar el cuerpo con estropajo y jabón … lo vistió con la ropa que él llevaba puesta, … sintiendo a medida que lo hacía que se iba convirtiendo en el hombre más solitario de la tierra” (32). Although the dictator's piercing loneliness in front of his double's corpse somewhat recalls the people's disconcertion after their leader's death, a practical reason for the dictator's concern is that, deprived of his double, he is more vulnerable to attempts on his life. In order to distinguish his enemies from his loyal followers, the dictator cunningly prepares his double's body to lie in state:

prefiguró a la perfección hasta los detalles más ínfimos que él había visto con sus propios ojos en las aguas premonitorias de los lebrillos, para que al amanecer del día siguiente las barrenderas de la casa encontraran el cuerpo como lo encontraron tirado bocabajo en el suelo de la oficina, muerto por primera vez de falsa muerte natural durante el sueño

(32-33)

The material details of the death of Patricio Aragonés prefigure the patriarch's own. As an archetype of the “people,” the sweepers who find Aragonés resemble the narrating crowd that discovers the dictator; the dictator also positions his double's body in the way that he himself will be found.

The physical differences between Aragonés and the dictator tell us something about the inhumanity of the patriarch's power. The patriarch's lineless hands are a marvelous conceit that suggest his superhuman ability to impose his will on the world. We have incomplete control over our future and our character if these lie coded in the palm of our hand. It is the dictator's lineless hands which lead a fortune-teller to conclude he was born to be a king; the palms of his less than powerful doubled are normal (15). What the double does lack is the dictator's congenitally deformed testicle; Aragonés' is enlarged through torture. That other distinguishing mark of identity becomes a grotesque parodical inversion of the kingly phallus. The vultures, indifferent to every taboo surrounding the dead, peck at every part of the dictator's corpse except the enormous testicle, which consequently becomes a sign of utter pollution and corruption (OP: 10). Freud points out the negligible role of the testicles in popular conceptions of virility: “From all one hears in analyses, one would not guess that the male genitals consisted of anything more than the penis” (“Infantile Genital Organization” SE 19:142). El otoño del patriarca recurrently refers to the dictator's testicle but is significantly mute regarding his penis. Far from enhancing his desirability, his swollen testicle horrifies the first woman he approaches (180-81). Neither impotent nor infertile, the dictator nonetheless fails to satisfy the majority of his sexual partners. The novel repeatedly associates his monstrous appetite for power with his incapacity to love; his deformed testicle seems a physical sign of both.

After Aragonés, the next man to win the dictator's apparent affection is Rodrigo de Aguilar, who becomes the dictator's “right-hand-man” after his physical double dies. To be given permission to win at dominoes functions as the ultimate sign of male bonding with the patriarch (Saturno Santos, the dictator's Indian bodyguard, never wins that sign of the dictator's trust). Like Simón Bolívar in García Márquez's recent novel, El general en su laberinto, the patriarch cannot abide losing; their pathological need for mastery both tarnishes and constitutes their political genius. In El otoño del patriarca, only three men emerge victorious from a game of dominoes with the dictator: Aragonés, Aguilar, and Sáenz de la Barra. The domino game becomes a potential space of play between equals, between masculine specular doubles. In their cold-blooded understanding of the workings of power, Aguilar and Sáenz de la Barra distantly mìrror the dictator's character. Precisely while playing a game of dominoes, the dictator intuits that Aguilar, his “right-hand man” is plotting against him (135-136). The savagery of his revenge dwarfs any pain he may feel at Aguilar's betrayal, which is followed, as with case of the death of Aragonés, by an immediate severing of affect and a politic disposal of the body. In an inversion of the original totemic feast described by Freud, the traitor is served on a platter to the horrified members of the presidential guard. As victorious primal father, the dictator obliterates any thought of rebellion among his remaining “sons” and forces them to ingest the one who dared to turn against his leader, temporarily achieving in life the moral aftermath of the totemic feast in Totem and Taboo: a tacit agreement not to plot again against the father.

The sinister Sáenz de la Barra impressed the dictator precisely because he dared to win without asking for permission (229-230). Just as Aguilar became the dictator's right-hand-man after Aragonés died, Sáenz de la Barra wins the dictator's confidence in a way no man had after Aguilar. The dictator entrusts a similar sort of power to the two men; both immobilize him and detract from his own authority (110; 230). Even Sáenz de la Barra, however, dies in a lynching instigated by the dictator after provoking the latter's rage by broadcasting reconstructed electronic images of him on television (257-58). In this episode, the leader's fury evokes the “primordial frustration” of the mirror stage in which the child's reflection “prefigures a unity and mastery that the child still lacks” (Grosz: 39). Whereas the dictator's treatment of his human double as if Aragonés were his toy suggests the pleasure specular images may give, Sáenz de la Barra's illicit appropriation of the dictator's imago sparks the jealous aggression of the subject that sees a unified form in the mirror but fails to experience its body as such.

The three men who enjoy the dubious privilege of beating the dictator at dominoes exert a peculiar physical fascination over him. Patricio Aragonés provides the dictator the narcissitic satisfaction of seeing himself reflected in another. What most intrigues the patriarch about Aragonés is the paranoid thought that the lines on his double's hands may hold the key to the dictator's own inscrutable future: “lo inquietó la ilusión de que las cifras de su propio destino estuvieran escritas en la mano del impostor” (15). The dictator's physical attraction to Aguilar and Sáenz de la Barra echoes the homosexuality of some officers of his army. He is not unaware of these men's pull over him nor of the danger that such fascination holds. In Aguilar, what mesmerizes the dictator is the other man's eyes (“hermosos ojos de artillero de mi compadre del alma” (135)). And the dictator perceives Sáenz de la Barra as the most beautiful man in the world: “el hombre más deslumbrante y altivo que habían visto mis ojos, madre” (228). Freud, in his account of the sons' exile from the primal horde, argues that “homosexual feelings and activities which probably manifested themselves among them during the time of their banishment” eventually strengthen the social ties that become law after the death of the primal father (TT: 186). Men's unconscious homosexual loyalty to one another, as well as the identification with their leader, strengthens the power and authority of institutions such as the army.¹² The dictator's fear is that if his affection or attraction turn to trust, his power will falter. Not long before Aguilar betrays him, the dictator ruminates on the risks entailed in trusting another man: “el enemigo más temible estaba dentro de uno mismo en la confianza del corazón … los propios hombres que él armaba y engrandecía para que sustentaran su régimen acaban tarde o temprano por escupir la mano que les daba de comer” (127). To conquer the dangerous emotional urge to trust others, the dictator believes, holds the key to power.

The specular relations the dictator has with men prove to be deceptive but he does not mourn their betrayal or their loss for long. His apparent incapacity to mourn them coincides with the absence in his life of what Lacan calls real (genetic) and imaginary fathers. The dictator's fatherlessness is directly related to the Gargantuan dimensions of his power: “era un hombre sin padre como todos los déspotas ilustres de la historia” (56). An imaginary father, often distinct from the real father, “is a person, an other to whom the child may relate … [L]aws and prohibitions must be culturally represented or embodied for the child by some authority figure” (Grosz: 47). A child's identification with the imaginary father eases its passage into the Symbolic, into the repressive order of culture and society (Grosz: 158). Such identification, however, is not the dictator's lot. The imaginary father as loving masculine figure, as he who coaxes the child into culture, is conspicuously absent from any of the dictator's memories. Since there is no mediator for the dictator, no person other than his mother “to whom he could relate,” the question arises as to whether or how the dictator gains access to the Symbolic, that is, to language and the Law.

To have no real or imaginary father means, in the Lacanian model, to forego identification with the Symbolic father and to remain in a psychotic identification with the mother (Ecrits: 199; Grosz 164; 185). For Lacan, as Grosz explains, “castration plays a crucial role in the child's entry into the symbolic” (104). So, too, do real fathers; as Lacan states (with uncharacteristic clarity): “the real father has a decisive function in castration … which is always thrown off-balance by his absence” (seminar, March-April 1957; quoted in Wilden: 271). Real and imaginary fathers force the subject out of its narcissistic, incestuous enjoyment of the mother, positioning the subject in culture under the name of the father and the father's law (Grosz: 101-105). In Otoño the dictator's adoring relation to his mother and his lack of real and imaginary fathers do not precipitate psychosis, unless one chooses to interpret his entire rule as psychotic. Nor is the dictator effectively locked into a vicious specular relation with the maternal. Rather, the fatherless patriarch enters a full-blown and monstrous into the realm of the Symbolic, the realm of the law which he remakes as he pleases. As mythical and dead abstraction, the dictator himself recalls the Symbolic father, defined by Lacan as “he who is capable of saying ‘I am who I am’” (Wilden: 271). The dictator utters that exact phrase (“yo soy el que soy”). But his access to the Symbolic is restricted to the latter as judgement, repression, and law. The Symbolic as art or loving morality remains alien to him.¹³ He learns how to read very late, only after his mother dies; his envy of Rubén Darío's poetry suggests the dictator knows full well to what extent the artistic dimension of the Symbolic is barred to him.¹⁴

IV

The dictator unfeelingly discards the remains of the men who were close to him but the loss of women irrevocably traumatizes him. After his mother's death, the rumor-mongering narrator tells us, he is never the same again: “teníamos noticias verídicas de que él no volvió a ser el mismo de antes por el resto de su vida” (151). When Manuela Sánchez touches him by accident on the night of Halley's comet (89), the dictator, encouraged by that involuntary caress, asks his astronomers to find or stage another disturbance in the heavens. In the darkness of the ensuing eclipse, Manuela vanishes. Memories of the lost object besiege the dictator as they do traditional mourners: “se acostaba en la hamaca bajo los cascabeles del viento de los tamarindos a pensar en Manuela Sánchez con un rencor que le perturbaba el sueño” (107). Unlike the betrayals of Sáenz de la Barra and Aguilar, Manuela's rejection is one he is unable to avenge. The concerted efforts of his armed forces never succeed in bringing Manuela back, a failure particularly infuriating to the dictator in light of his repeated insistence that a man's power is undermined whenever he gives orders that are not carried out (107; 211). At first, the dictator's possession of Leticia Nazareno reverses the humiliation of his courtship of Manuela; he interprets the latter as indicative of his diminishing authority: “estas vainas me pasan por lo pendejo que me he vuelto” (107). In the case of Leticia, the army deciphers the dictator's unvoiced desire for the exiled nun, his future wife, and smuggles her back to him.

The orgasmic intercourse of the dictator and Leticia Nazareno, the only one the novel describes with any sense of ecstasy, culminates not with the ejaculation of semen but with the dictator's expulsion of excrement (184). In anal rejection, as Kristeva reminds us, “Freud sees the sadistic component of the sexual instinct” (149). With Leticia, the dictator regresses to the pleasures of pre-Oedipal sadism. In classical psychoanalytic theory, the anal-sadistic phase antedates the child's perception of the mother as castrated and precedes the phallic stage of the Oedipus complex.¹⁵ In Kristeva's gloss on Freud and Lacan, “anal rejection or anality. … precedes the establishment of the symbolic” (149). Leticia Nazareno's acceptance of the dictator's anality (“le apartaba el testículo herniado para limpiarle los restos de la caca del último amor” 192), and her eventual enormous influence over him place her in the position of the phallic mother.

Freud's first reference to the phallic mother in the New Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis (NILP) describes her as a maternal figure “of whom we are afraid” (22). In his later lecture on femininity, the phallic mother is synonymous with the pre-Oedipal mother, not yet identified as having a lack (NILP: 112). Leticia Nazareno, stepping into the empty space left by Bendición Alvarado's death, clearly becomes the dictator's surrogate mother. He mistrusts the fleeting memories of his childhood and identifies his only real infancy with his marriage: “su infancia real no era ese légamo de evocaciones inciertas. … sino que en realidad la había vivido en el remanso de mi única y legítima esposa” (190). Leticia herself attempts to efface the public memory of the dictator's real mother: “habían vuelto a poner la lápida al revés en la cripta con las letras hacia dentro para que no perdurara ni la noticia de tu nombre” (195-96). His wife also succeeds in doing what Bendición never did: teach the dictator how to read and write. Whereas Bendición Alvarado impolitically blurted out that her son never learned to read (58), Leticia gives him the gift of literacy. In Lacan's view, it is the symbolic father, represented by a masculine intermediary, who introduces the subject into culture and language. Elizabeth Grosz raises the interesting question whether the phallic mother might be, in certain ways, identical to the imaginary father (159). Certainly Leticia Nazareno acts as both: as imaginary father she introduces the dictator to the spectacle of literature, as phallic mother she wields a power that eventually costs her and her child their life.

The death of Leticia Nazareno places the dictator in the excruciating situation of Antigone: unable to bury his dead. Man-eating dogs, trained to recognize his wife and child, eat them alive. His dilemma resides in that if he kills the dogs who devoured them, he further mangles his family's remains: “despertó gritando de rabia atormentado por los ladridos de los perros que pasaron la noche en las cadenas del patio … preguntándose aturdido si matar a los perros no sería otra manera de matar de nuevo en sus entrañas a Leticia Nazareno y al niño” (220). By killing the dogs, he desecrates his family's only grave. Leticia's remains are as elusive as the body of the live but vanished Manuela Sánchez, an elusiveness all the more terrible because the dictator can see and hear the dogs who ate her. These animals, as tantalizing as they are terrifying, combine the paradoxical attributes of taboo: sacred and untouchable because they contain the remains of the beloved, punishable and guilty because they have murdered them.¹⁶

It seems particularly uncanny that Sáenz de la Barra appears as the avenging angel sent by the dictator's dead mother, as an answer to her son's prayer to help him avenge the horrific death of his wife and child (228). To avenge the crime perpetuated by man-eating dogs, the mother's spirit sends an aristocrat inseparable from his own ferocious beast (234). Sáenz de la Barra occasionally restrains Lord Köchel, his vicious Doberman, from attacking the dictator himself (238; 253). Seymour Menton has called attention to the novel's recurrent references to dogs (“Ver para no creer”: 190). These animals, I suggest, materialize the dictator's deepest Oedipal fears. When his dying mother tries to talk to him about his ignoble conception, the patriarch refuses to listen (149). He prefers to remain fatherless, originless, and omnipotent. Freud, arguing that the revered sacrificial animal of the totemic feast functions as a substitute for the murdered primal father, insists that animal phobias manifest an infantile fear of castration by the father.¹⁷ Dogs in The Autumn of the Patriarch become the dictator's totem, the father-substitute at its most benevolent and most frightening. The dictator's own resemblance to his totem manifests itself at vulnerable moments, when he sleeps or during orgasm (13;58). But the totem as executioner, as the father so long repressed, returns in the form of a man-eating dog to punish the son who erased the traces of his origin.

For the dictator, senile amnesia follows in the wake of Leticia Nazareno's death. In his extreme old age, the only memory left to him is that of his mother's mortal illness, during which he cared for her pestilent wounds with the assiduity of a lover, in the anomalous role of nurturer and caretaker. The episode suggests his own androgyny, his power to take on feminine, maternal characteristics at will. By ordering his mother's corpse to be put on ice, by hiring men and women who groom her after death, he attempts to stave off the putrefaction he was unable to save her from in life. In an attempt to defer the mother's definitive absence, the dictator orders her body transported to and displayed in the remotest corners of the nation, as if the trajectory of the funeral train could trace her presence onto the living body of the land.

The cult of the mother's body leads only to shameful revelations. Demetrio Aldous, a pivotal figure in the Oedipal drama of El otoño del patriarca, arrives from Rome to investigate the sanctity of the dictator's mother. He discovers that the leader's cronies have enriched themselves by taking the fraudulent preservation of the maternal corpse into their own hands. Aldous acts as the purveyor of truth, a searching, scrutinizing intellect peering into forbidden corners, the most dangerous of which is the primal scene where the dictator was engendered by an unknown father. Aldous' rigorous examination of Bendición Alvarado's past recalls Freud's summary description of Sophocles' Oedipus: “an investigation ingeniously protracted” (Introductory Lectures: 330). The possibility that Aldous may unearth the enigmatic identity of the dictator's genetic father frightens the army even more than the dictator. His officers deliberately and uncharacteristically disobey his orders not to harm Aldous in his investigation (167-168). Just when he is about to decipher the secret of the patriarch's origin (“decifrar el secreto de su origen” [167]), the envoy's mule falls into the abyss, down the varied landscapes of the Andes, evoking a fall through (or back through) the repressed layers of the mind after a glimpse of the original primal scene: that of conception.

In El otoño del patriarca, recurrent references to the dictator's enormous feet suggest his Oedipal lineage. García Márquez' fascination with mother/son incest in One Hundred Years of Solitude needs no elaboration here. What if the dictator's real father, whose identity is too horrible to be mentioned, was another of his promiscuous mother's sons, as Polynices was the son of Oedipus by Jocasta? What if the dictator's real father committed the ultimate transgression: incest with the mother? For the dictator, the authority behind social interdictions would be shattered, and the name of the father, defined by Wilden as “the authority of the father upon which [the mother] calls in her dealings with the child” (296), would vanish. Might this explain the dictator's own monstrous transgressions, his own virtual namelessness, his appropriation of power as law?

The dictator, like Polynices, lies unburied; the death of Leticia and Bendición deprives him of women who had the familial obligation to lay him in the ground. In her essay on Sophocles' Antigone, Luce Irigaray argues that

it is the task of womankind, guardian of the blood tie, to gather man into his final figuration … woman has to take it upon herself over and over again, regardless of circumstances, to bury this corpse that man becomes in his pure state.

(214-15)

Later Irigaray identifies Antigone with “the voice, the accomplice of the people, the slaves, those who only whisper their revolt against their masters secretly” (218). In El otoño del patriarca, after the loss of his mother and wife, the nation's people become the ones who will give the leader decent burial. That the dictator feels his people should naturally take the place of his female blood-relatives is perhaps most apparent in his response to Demetrio Aldous, who attempts to mitigate the inconclusive results of his investigation by telling the dictator he has also discovered the extent of the people's love for their ruler (173). Before that point the dictator seemed to hanker after such reassurance, but after his mother's death he responds as if he were entitled to his people's fealty:

no más faltaba, padre, sólo faltaba que nadie me quisiera ahora … más solo que la mano izquierda en esta patria que no escogí por mi voluntad sino que me la dieron hecha … con este sentimiento de irrealidad, con este olor a mierda, con esta gente sin historia que no cree en nada más que en la vida.

(174)

This uncharacteristically overt expression of contempt for his nation, incidentally revealing Eurocentric or Old-World prejudices, represents the dictator's people (Latin Americans) as a people without history. They are the same people who did not resist the patriarch's government, did not work to instigate his downfall nor protested against the imperialist partitioning and plundering of the sea. The history of apparent defeat, passivity, and powerlessness (the history of “femininity”?) becomes no history at all. Yet it is precisely the people's “lack of history,” their “femininity,” which not only places them in the position of Antigone but allows them, far more than the patriarch, to experience happiness. At the end of the novel, the narrating people of the nation proudly differentiate themselves from the dictator by pointing to their ability to reap pleasure from ephemeral moments: “esta vida que amábamos con una pasión insaciable que usted no se atrevió ni siquiera a imaginar por miedo de saber lo que nosotros sabíamos de sobra que era ardua y efímera” (296). Before Aragonés and Sáenz de la Barra die, they confront the dictator with his incapacity for love, an inability directly related to his monumental genius for power. Sánez de la Barra accuses him of not fearing death because he has never felt happiness: “el miedo de la muerte es el rescoldo de la felicidad, general, por eso usted no lo siente” (261). The dictator himself suspects that the roots of his thirst for power lie intertwined with his emotional avarice: “había conocido la incapacidad de amor en el enigma de la palma de sus manos mudas … y había tratado de compensar aquel destino infame con el culto abrasador del vicio solitario del poder” (295). The pessimistic dichotomy of El otoño del patriarca, then, lies in its stark delineation of the incompatibility between the desire for power and the capacity to love.

Notes

1. Ecrits 199.

2. On Antigone in La hojarasca see Pedro Lastra.

3. Jo Labanyi (145) and Menton (190) strongly object to the interpretation of the collective narrating voice as the sum of individual voices. Labanyi points out that the collective “we” also shrinks to a smaller, less-encompassing first-person plural, such as the “we” of the treacherous generals of chapter two, or of sycophants, or of apparently loyal followers. Rama, however, in one of the first critical essays on Otoño, states that such an over-arching narrator does exist: “es el mismo pueblo abigarrado, variable, confuso … el que ha estado contando la historia” (63).

4. Rama 63; Ortega “Texto y cultura” 215.

5. In “García Márquez on the Margin of Utopia,” Peter Earle comments on the novelist's “grim political overview” (13). In Labanyi's opinion, the collective narrator “shows remarkably little political awareness” (147); Puccini calls the collective narrator “timid” and “malleable” (105); Minta comments on the novel's depiction of “a dangerous submissiveness to an illusion of eternal order” (102). Interestingly, Rama and Ortega as Latin American critics offer a more optimistic reading of the novel.

6. García Márquez, Olor de la guayaba 89 (my translation).

7. Frazer 165-75; Freud, TT 62.

8. For a different interpretation of the use of anaphora and the sense of vision, see Menton.

9. On the function of rumor in dictatorship, see Minta 98 and Menton 191.

10. Raymond Williams notes that each chapter of Otoño focusses on the dictator's relation to a different character.

11. Hozven 51; Oviedo 153.

12. On identification with the leader see Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 35; 56-57.

13. See Alford for a description of Klein's notion of a morality based on love instead of fear.

14. See Palencia-Roth for an analysis of the patriarch and Darío.

15. See Freud's “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex.”

16. On the paradoxical attributes of taboo, see for example TT 26; Golden Bough 198.

17. TT 164-71.

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