Tyrant Banderas and the fictions of authority

This discussion of Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s Tyrant Banderas (1926) is the first in the Fictions of Authority series.

Tyrant Banderas is about the last chaotic days of a tyrant’s rule in a fictional Latin American state. It is one of a handful of works reputed to have served as a model for the dictator novels of the middle of the twentieth century. In it we find not only the central motif of the dictator and the dramatization of his power, but also many of the stylistic and formal signatures of the genre.

Valle-Inclán’s esperpento style—his use of “monstrosity”—systematically depicts authority as grotesque. Owing to an addiction to coca, Valle-Inclán’s dictator, Banderas, has pools of green drool permanently collecting at the corners of his mouth. In Banderas as in every other, later instance of the genre, the dictator is decrepit just as political power is a deformer. The dictator is sick, old, weak; his body is only the most local, but always the most immaculately successful, site of resistance to his pretension to absolute power.

Tyrant Banderas, like its successors in the genre, is also an exercise in self-reflection on the nature of writing. At the beginning of Tyrant Banderas, Valle-Inclán introduces us, in succession, to a band of rebels, the tyrant himself, and then one “Major Abilio del Valle.” Major del Valle marches a prisoner to a hole, and has him buried to his waist and whipped. Note that the very same thing is true of the author Valle-Inclán, too. That is: Valle-Inclán, the author, marches a prisoner to a hole (by writing him there), and has him buried to his waist and whipped. As with the decree-making tyrant, all these things happen because they happen in writing.

Now, Valle-Inclán doesn’t “really” do that, I suppose, but neither does the major. In fact, there is no major, just the author’s imagination; to the extent that such things can be quantified, then, it is less that the major punishes a prisoner than it is that the author creates a major and then punishes the prisoner with him (uses the major as a cudgel). This fact is identically so for all characters and all actions in novels, of course; Tyrant Banderas just so happens to put this fact on conspicuous display with a major whose name, “del Valle,” is exactly halfway similar to the author’s (just as, notably, the prisoner is halfway buried, to his waist). And, moreover, in Tyrant Banderas the tyrant is watching this prisoner’s torture from the windows of an adjacent building—exactly as you, the reader, are watching it, too.

The book is a violent spectacle, the author is its aggressor, and we are the silent bystanders. But not just that, because the violence is for us; we are the figure under whose authority the violence becomes legible; we are the tyrant in the window, too.

In however many other ways Tyrant Banderas anticipates later works in the genre (Banderas was published in 1926; Asturias’ Mister President, the first of the core dictator novels, came twenty years later), its focus on the relation between authority and writing is certainly one of them, and one of the more distinctive ones. In the genre, dictatorial power’s preferred vehicle of state power—of state violence and terror—is the written decree, which stands in uneasy parallel to the novel itself. For a novel gives, even if only in the form of psychological facts and narrative, not only the myth but the justification of state power. In other words, the form of the novel, in a general way, is prone to apologetics. To that end, for all its hostility to the dictator, the dictator novel can be seen as a challenge to the medium of the novel itself.

One technical facet fairly unique to Banderas is its fragmentary and highly structured aspect. Banderas is in seven parts; the fourth part has seven books; all other parts have three. With the prologue and epilogue, there are twenty-seven ($=3^3$) books. Despite the numerological structure, from one section to the next, Banderas moves frenetically across time and space and character. By contrast, most if not all later works in the genre depend on a longer, more immersive, wandering, and centrifugal style.

In the end, Major del Valle turns against the tyrant—and just barely, that is, in the epilogue (198). Perhaps in this bookending dynamic, from ally of state violence to its opponent, Valle-Inclán captures the idea that writing is both the dictatorial regime’s greatest, even its constitutive weapon, but also its point of greatest weakness. As with all writing of the tyrant, the dictator novel inhabits a liminal space between legitimization and critique. (It is worth noting, technically, that Major del Valle transfers loyalties not from state to rebel so much as from state to state, given the force he aligns himself with in the end is exactly on the cusp of seizing state power.)

A motif specific to the Latin American setting (though technically an imaginary state—as if, exactly as if, ‘Latin America’ were as much a specific geographical location as an object of the imagination) is the tension and implicit hierarchy of European and indigenous characters. The Spanish colonizer is a gapuchín, which Peter Bush (the translator) renders “whitey,” capturing one family of connotations nicely (Mueran los gapuchines! the local revolutionaries cry; “Kill all whiteys!” In Manguel’s rendering [35 e.g.]) while perhaps missing the sense in which a gapuchín is a foreigner, a clueless immigrant, an upstart, an unwelcome presence.

But such distinctions—as if state violence and colonialism were like pitched battles—fail to capture critical ways in which power insinuates itself into the immediate fabric of everyday life, is dispersed through the many members of a society. The ring episode (83–95) captures well the many faces of this complexity. A defecting colonel gives a ring to his impoverished aide’s wife. When she brings it to a pawnshop, the gapuchín owner accuses her of having stolen it, knowing fully that she’ll have no recourse with the authorities if he does, and he lowballs her to take advantage of her social vulnerability. When the owner realizes the ring belongs to the colonel, he fulfills his legal obligation to bring the ring to the police, but brings a cheaper ring instead. The workings of the state are a charade that masks the owner’s cruelty. In this instance, the state itself remains immediately innocent, but its legal and administrative institutions—not even anything they actually do, but the shadows they cast—create instruments for the maintenance of class and racial inequality.

Authority as atmosphere—not just a quality or possession that is wielded on occasion but the general and encompassing state of things—is not an incidental feature of Banderas’ tyranny. His fascination with the stars—a motif common to later dictator novels—projects the scope of his ideal.

He loved night. He loved the constellations: the arcane mystery of beautiful enigmas soothed his gloomy soul. He told time by the twinkling of the stars, wondering at their luminous mathematics and the eternal laws that governed them. (31)

One dimension of the atmospheric conception of state authority is embodied in the sight of executed prisoners’ bodies floating in the sea—so many that the sharks won’t eat all of them: “The fucking sharks are weary of all that revolutionary flesh,” says a prisoner, “but that bastard Banderas still isn’t satisfied!” (129). Like Xerxes having the Hellespont whipped, the excesses of power, at their most expressive limits, overwhelm—or pretend to overwhelm—those even of nature.

But the expansiveness of state power is also joined in an important way to an opposite tendency: a certain unburdening of agency that goes together with naturalistic conceptions of authority. When he describes the workings of the state later to a suspect’s mother, Banderas describes it in terms of nature: “[Y]ou must wait to know your boy’s fate. Which will be determined, of course, according to the laws of nature. . . . Console yourself that individually we have no power to alter our fate: yes, there’s next to nothing we can do.” He has “no choice now but to investigate” the crime; so, he adds, “let us agree that in this world we are merely rebellious children. . . . Be assured that justice will be done. And in the last instance, fate calls the shots!” (152). Nature is both the appropriate scale for contemplating the reaches of state power in its ideal manifestation, and also the perennial mask behind which the agency of the state likes to hide. What dictator? There is no dictator, and he surrounds us.

The novel and the state have hard lessons for each other. The dictator novel is not just an instance of writing at a few hundred pages’ length anymore than dictatorship is simply one among many ways in which state power is arranged. The dictator novel brings to the fore a problem about writing, and dictatorship a problem about the modern state.

On the strongest version, writing—more particularly, narrative writing at the scale of the novel—enacts a posture of authority that echoes—and, formally, provides justification for—the absolute reach of political power at its most grotesque. From its origins in modernity (and coincidence with the rise of the European invasion of the western hemisphere), the novel—Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, etc. etc. etc.—has always been a way of making intimate—no doubt, of colonizing—the farthest reaches, the most remote islands of reality from within the cave of the imagination, no matter how idiosyncratic. The novel is a demonstration of the cognitively minuscule demands of universal legitimacy.

And the state, for its part, from Westphalia to Auschwitz, certainly did not need outside literary help in order to become the monstrous beast it has become; absolute territorial sovereignty and its attendantly insular morality (or reduction of questions of this order to matters of territorial hygiene) did everything necessary in the way of the normalization of state emergency powers and the bureaucratization of killing.

The dictator novel—a sustained reflection on, and critique of the nature of absolute authority, and at the same time a self-reflection on the implication of the novel as genre into the web of forces that sustain the legitimacy of the modern state—offers perhaps another future for writing. Tyrant Banderas is at least a beginning for that.

Text

Tyrant Banderas was translated by Peter Bush for NYRB in 2012.