Review of El general en su laberinto
A common phenomenon of the contemporary literary scene is the tendency to demythologize historical figures, and perhaps the greatest of these for Latin America is Simón Bolívar. In reading El general en su laberinto (Eng. The General in His Labyrinth, 1990), one gains the impression that García Márquez feels the author has no right to compose an epic concerning the founder of a nation that never truly came to be. A myth often concludes with the appearance of a new star or constellation, but in this work one of the general's companions comments that there are now fewer stars than there were eighteen years ago.
Accordingly, the author has left a key element out of the myth of Theseus that appears to underlie his text. As Theseus is about to enter the labyrinth to slay the monster that has been devouring his people, Ariadne gives him a thread to follow in order to find his way out safely. For Bolívar there is no thread; in the penultimate paragraph of the novel he exclaims, “How am I going to get out of this labyrinth!”
Throughout the work the general is haunted by news of the growing anarchy that is making impossible his dream of one great nation in the region. He is forced out of power and toward exile (although he never actually embarks for Europe) by the fragmentation brought about by General Santander and the oligarchies.
El general en su laberinto is a politically committed work. The implied narrator's stance is squarely in the present, and the contemporary sociopolitical distress of the region in question is never far below the surface of the text. The reader comes to feel that unworthy wielders of power not only crushed the Liberator but forced the writing of a demythologizing novel; this may be what García Márquez, at the end of his “Gratitudes,” calls “the horror of this book.”
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