Power, Will and Freedom: Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat

Abstract

This article seeks to explore and elucidate the liberal values and principles underpinning Mario Vargas Llosa’s work by offering a careful reading of his recent novel, The Feast of the Goat (2000). Having critically examined in several of his earlier novels what he regards as the inevitable destructiveness of socialist utopianism, Vargas Llosa turns his attention in The Feast of the Goat to the equally destructive force of right-wing authoritarianism, manifested in this case by the brutal thirty-one-year dictatorship of the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Unlike other versions of the so-called Latin American dictator novel, which tended to utilise allegorical and even magic-realist techniques, The Feast of the Goat focuses in meticulously researched historical detail upon the very real figure of Trujillo in order to consider the tensions between the eternally antagonistic human aspirations of power and freedom. While providing a vivid if harrowing account of the dictator’s grim tyranny and corruption, the novel goes on to reveal, more pertinently perhaps, how people are all too often and too easily prepared to forfeit their liberty for some other putative social or economic good, only to find themselves becoming complicit, voluntarily or otherwise, in their own oppression. Finally, through the characters of a number of Trujillo’s victims, as well as his eventual assassins, the novel presents an alternative vision of a truly free and open society.

Opsomming

Hierdie artikel poog om die liberale waardes en beginsels wat Mario Vargas Llosa se werk onderlê te ondersoek en duidelik te maak, deur ’n omsigtige lees van sy roman, The Feast of the Goat (2000). Hy het in vroeëre romans wat hy beskou as die onvermydelike destruktiwiteit van utopiese sosialisme krities eksamineer, en nou gee hy aandag aan die eweneens destruktiewe krag van verregse konserwatisme, daargestel in die brutale een-en-dertig jaar diktatorskap van die Dominikaanse Republiek se Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Ander voorbeelde van die sogenaamde Latyns-Amerikaanse diktatorroman het gebruik gemaak van die tegnieke van allegoriese en magies-realistiese tegnieke, maar The Feast of the Goat fokus in nougesette geskiedkundige detail op die werklike figuur Trujillo om die spanning tussen die ewigdurende antagonistiese menslike aspirasies van krag en vryheid te te bedink. Alhoewel die roman ‘n duidelike dog kwellende verslag van die diktator se wrede tirannie en korrupsie lewer, openbaar die roman ook, meer pertinent miskien, hoe mense al te dikwels en al te maklik bereid is om hul vryheid vir een of ander vermeende sosiale of ekonomiese welsyn te verbeur, en hoe hulle dan medepligtig is, hetsy vrywillig of andersinds, aan hulle eie onderdrukking. Uiteindelik, deur die karakters van verskeie van Trujillo se slagoffers, sowel as sy eventuele sluip-moordenaars, bied die roman ’n alternatiewe visie van ’n ware vry en oop samelewing.