[(essay date May 2009) In the following essay, Weldt-Basson surveys the tradition of historical fiction in Latin America, focusing on four genre-defining characteristics: the interplay of history and the individual, the use of magical realism, the mystification or demystification of historical figures, and the employment of a specific historical period as a symbol for a larger social reality. Weldt-Basson concludes that The Feast of the Goat adheres to the fourth characteristic.]
The Latin American novel of dictatorship has long constituted a "subgenre" of Latin American historical fiction.1 The mid-nineteenth-century novel Amalia, by José Mármol, is frequently cited as the very first work of this sort, based on the dictatorship of Juan Manuel Rosas in Argentina. A long list of novels has followed, including Miguel Ángel Asturias's El señor presidente (1946), Alejo Carpentier's El recurso del método (1974), Gabriel García Márquez's El otoño del patriarca (1975), Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo el Supremo (1974), and Luisa Valenzuela's Cola de lagartija (1983), just to name a few. Mario Vargas Llosa has twice forayed into this genre: first, in his novel Conversación en La Catedral (1969), based on the dictatorship of Manuel Odría (during the years 1948-1956 in Peru); second, in his novel La fiesta del chivo (2000), based on the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic from 1931-1961. In an interview with Enrique Krauze, Vargas Llosa explains his motivation for writing La fiesta del chivo:
Yo estuve en República Dominicana [en 1975] cerca de ocho meses y oí muchísimas anécdotas sobre un tema que parecía inevitable en todas las conversaciones con dominicanos: la era de Trujillo. También leí algunos libros sobre este personaje, sobre la conspiración para acabar con él, sobre la vertiginosa represión. Y de todo eso quizá lo que más me impresionó fue la conducta de personajes como el general Román, conspiradores importantísimos que hicieron fracasar la conspiración. ¿Por qué fracasó? Porque los principales conspiradores quedaron paralizados por lo que habían hecho ... Trujillo seguía dentro de ellos, vivo aunque el cadáver estaba allí.(22)
Thus, the author's stated intent is to illustrate the effects of Trujillo's dictatorship on the Dominican psyche through a historically-based, novelistic recreation of the Trujillo era. Since its appearance in 2000, many critics have commented upon the historical basis of La fiesta del chivo, but none has fully explored the relationship between the novel and history. Only Robin Lefere has discussed the text's place within the Latin American historical novel, suggesting first, that La fiesta del chivo falls short of what a contemporary historical novel should be, because it does not problematize its relationship to history ("Lectura crítica," 544). Second, Lefere claims that because the novel lacks any aclaratory paratextual information regarding its historical sources, it would be:
erróneo--no procedente, contrario al 'pacto ficticio' que se nos propone--inferir del texto datos y conocimientos relativos a un referente extratextual determinado, como la dictadura de Trujillo [...] en rigor, sólo podemos y debemos leer la novela como una fábula, que nos habla de la dictadura y del poder, pero de...