page_title: Dictator novel
section_title: Forerunners
hierarchical_section_title: Dictator novel / Development of the genre / Forerunners
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Juan Manuel de Rosas, Governor of Buenos Aires Province.
context_page_description: The dictator novel is a genre of Latin American literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American society. The theme of caudillismo—the régime of a charismatic caudillo, a political strongman—is addressed by examining the relationships between power, dictatorship, and writing. Moreover, a dictator novel often is an allegory for the role of the writer in a Latin American society. Although mostly associated with the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, the dictator-novel genre has its roots in the nineteenth-century non-fiction work Facundo, by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. As an indirect critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas's dictatorial régime in Argentina, Facundo is the forerunner of the dictator novel genre; all subsequent dictator novels hearken back to it. As established by Sarmiento, the goal of the genre is not to analyze the rule of particular dictators, or to focus on historical accuracy, but to examine the abstract nature of authority figures and of authority in general.
context_section_description: Both Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo and José Marmol's Amalia, published in the nineteenth century, were precursors to the twentieth century dictator novel; however, "all fictional depictions of the Latin American 'strong-man', have an important antecedent in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo, a work written as a sociolodical treatise". Facundo is an indirect critique of Juan Manuel de Rosas's dictatorship, directed against the actual historical figure, Juan Facundo Quiroga, but is also a broader investigation into Argentine history and culture. Sarmiento's Facundo has remained a fundamental fixture because of the breadth of its literary exploration of the Latin American environment. In Facundo, Sarmiento criticizes the historical figure Facundo Quiroga, a provincial caudillo, who like Rosas (dictator of Argentina from 1829 to 1853) was opposed to the enlightened ideas of progress. After returning from exile, Sarmiento worked to reinvent Argentina, eventually becoming president himself from 1868 to 1874. Sarmiento's analysis of Facundo Quiroga was the first time that an author questioned how figures like Facundo and Rosas could have maintained such absolute power, and in answering this question, Facundo established its place as an inspirational text to later authors. Sarmiento perceived his own power in writing Facundo as "within the text of the novel, it is the novelist, through the voice of omniscience, who has replaced God", thereby creating the bridge between writing and power that is characteristic of the dictator novel.
  Set in post-colonial Buenos Aires, Amalia was written in two parts and is a semi-autobiographical account of José Mármol that deals with living in Rosas's police state. Mármol's novel was important as it showed how the human consciousness, much like a city or even a country, could become a terrifying prison. Amalia also attempted to examine the problem of dictatorships as being one of structure, and therefore the problem of the state "manifested through the will of some monstrous personage violating the ordinary individual's privacy, both of home and of consciousness." In the early twentieth century, the Spaniard Ramón del Valle-Inclán's Tirano Banderas (1926) acted as a key influence on those authors whose goal was to critique power structures and the status quo.
caption: Juan Manuel de Rosas, Argentine caudillo, by Cayetano Descalzi (1809-1886)
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