Excesses and absurdities: Representation of sexuality in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The autumn of the patriarch (1975)

Abstract

The novel The autumn of the patriarch (Patriarch) is Rabelaisian in its expression of the totality of political power, power that is often expressed in sexual imagery, particularly that of the patriarch’s hugely herniated testicle in its jangling truss and that of the rooster chasing a hen. The lonely larger-than-life grotesque patriarch, referred to only as the general (the General of the Universe), or stud, is thought to be a composite figure of Latin American dictators. In this novel there is a sharp and well-defined link between political power and sexual power. Both states are expressed through the tropes of the grotesque body and scatology. Thus Marquez takes to task the excesses and absurdities of the all-powerful military rulers of Latin America (and those of the rest of the world), through the fictive and anamorphic character, the general. Principally the author constructs an all-powerful character whose only sexual mode is rape to explore the nature of unlimited political and military power in all its perverse excesses and absurdities. Thus the current discussion explores Marquez’s construction of sexuality to express his social and political concerns about tyranny and absolute power.