The “esperpentized” tyrant and the modernist aesthetic

Abstract

This paper outlines the twofold portrait of a dictator type that has become referential for the Latin American modernist poetics of the first half of the twentieth century, a period neatly dominated by the authors’ subjectivity in transposing the historical reality and by the grotesque depiction of the dictatorship rather than of the dictator, who is viewed from the outside, without a psychological probing of some kind. Tyrant Banderas (1926) by Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, which is considered the first novel that gives special prominence to the dictatorial figure, aims to coalesce various
geographical, racial, historical, and linguistic elements of Hispanic America. Moreover, the unscrupulous despot Santos Banderas, hiding
into himself the mechanism of an infernal machine, is a diverse character ensemble, an “esperpentized” synthesis of several Latin American despots. On the other hand, Miguel Ángel Asturias’ novel, The President (1946), represents an etching of the Latin American society crippled by dictatorship and a sociopolitical protest with vehemently satirical accents. The convulsed political situation that the writer’s country was facing at the
beginning of the twentieth century and his involvement in conspiratorial and revolutionary actions against the state leadership have led critics to see in the novel the fictionalization of the abominable dictatorial regime of the Guatemalan Manuel Estrada Cabrera.