Alejo Carpentier. Reasons of State. Frances Partridge, translator. Melville House Publishing, 1974/1976.
The Cuban Alejo Carpentier always reminds me of Henry James. His books require a serious commitment of time, intellect, and attention. One cannot skim a book by Alejo Carpentier, one cannot skip lightly over the prose, one cannot speed through the reading. One moves through his novels at the pace of a complex and deep literary and historical landscape, and one must make the commitment to take it all in or put off the reading until one has the time. I have read few other novelists who are not only as knowledgeable as Carpentier but can deploy that erudition is extraordinarily vivid and imaginative ways. To read Carpentier is to fully immerse one’s senses, intellect, emotions, and creativity in his fictive and historically grounded worlds, so one must take the time needed for that immersion, which amplifies the value of the work.
Reasons of State is one of the classic dictatorship novels of Latin American, alongside Miguel Angel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente and Gabriel García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch. The original Spanish title of Reasons of State–El recurso del método–plays off of Descartes’s Discours de la méthode, and Carpentier uses quotations from Descartes at the beginning of the novel’s seven sections and most of the chapters as choral commentaries. The novel focalizes through an unnamed dictator in a fictional Central American country, and it is set at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the years in and around the first world war. He seems a composite of nineteenth century dictators, like Dr. Francia (Paraguay), Juan Manuel de Rosas (Argentina) and Porfirio Díaz (Mexico), whom he explicitly praises and admires throughout the novel.
Reflecting the educated classes of Latin America at the time, the dictator is a francophile and lover of European culture and history. His son and daughter essentially live in Europe on perpetual vacation, and he spends as much time as possible in Paris– his apartment overlooking the Arc de Triomphe–spending his country’s funds on the luxury goods, furniture, books, and art that make him feel civilized and reinforce his Romantic sensibility of the myth of his own Napoleonic superiority. He surrounds himself with others–servants, caretakers, government officials, a tailor, a barber, a Distinguished Academician, wealthy decadent Parisians–who reinforce his self-image, and he can remain in this ideological and geographical bubble (that is, delusion) until there is a coup attempt back home, and he has to return to defeat it. The cycle between Old World and New World–the Dictator’s movement back and forth between the two–structures the novel. Reasons of State begins en medias dictatorship, and the cycles represent stages in the dictator’s inevitable fall. In the course of the novel, Carpentier uses the cycle to closely link the Old and New and criticize decadence, authoritarianism and violence on both sides of the Atlantic. Carpentier not only holds a candle up to Latin American dictatorship but the authoritarian culture in Europe which spawned it. After all, Porfirio Díaz believed rather ironically that it is only the “genius” of an authoritarian who can realize all the improvements (technological, scientific, social, political, economic, artistic) that Cartesian Enlightenment promises: “Think for yourself. . . No, think like the authoritarian who would dictate your thoughts and your actions, and if you, citizen, do not conform to those dictates you are beyond saving and can be abandoned, sacrificed, tortured, made into fodder, killed.” (Not a real Porfirian quotation)
The first cycle begins in Paris. The Dictator lives in a well-appointed apartment full of traditional, figurative heroic art complemented by furniture and furnishings that fit his civilized self-image. At night, he and his associates go to a brothel that mimics–in reality, parodies–the tropes of civilization the dictator celebrates. Isabel Allende features a similar brothel in her first novel, The House of the Spirits. From the very beginning of Reasons of State, there is a tightly bound binary of celebration-degradation. At the end of the first chapter, there is a coup back home, where the dictator must return. He sells off a part of the country to the United Fruit Company to finance his fight against the coup army, and on his way home he stops in New York City to arrange for the necessary arms and ammunition neede and to catch an opera, Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande, which he dislikes because it is too quiet and not a conventional, martial nineteenth-century opera. Afterwards, after a bout of culture, a visit to a brothel. Carpentier keeps the circuit between civilization and degradation open, active, and cycling throughout the novel.
Back home, the Dictator takes a train to the capitol, which is poor, pathetic, and broken down: a colonial broken mirror to 19th century European culture. He gives a florid speech to rouse the citizenry, but its affected nature only rouses the disdain of the press, commentators, and university students, because everyone knows that the Dictator too came to power through a coup and that talk of the constitution, law, and the sanctity of the nation is just rhetorical cover. Both the dictator and the coup leaders are two sides of the same coin, exercising the privilege of violence as means to power, leaving everyone else to struggle in a political landscape that is neither constitutional nor democratic. The Dictator, though, is a military mastermind who knows the theory and history of warfare, and he slowly but inexorably defeats the coup. The problem comes with the final battle in an old colonial city, Nueva Cordoba, where the coup army is trapped. The city surrenders, but then an artist and demolitions expert rejects the surrender and re-initiates fighting, which produces an utter blood bath as the Dictator’s army moves in. There was a foreign photographer in town, and he took pictures of the horror, which he published along with a story in a French newspaper, after which the dictator is internationally known as the Butcher of Nueva Cordoba. Moreover, the rebels may have lost, but they have stolen $200,000 from the United Fruit Company. After all the hard work of governing through violence, the Dictator becomes ill and returns to France even though the order he has established is fragile, the country is smaller, and the treasury decimated. In France, because of newspaper articles and pictures of the massacre, the dictator’s former contacts–all those people who gave him access to French culture–shun him. Even his son and daughter shun him.
Second cycle, World War I starts, and the Old World is as engulfed in barbarity and violence as the New World. The Dictator loves decadence and militarism, prefers Germany because of its military discipline, and is surprised when the French and the Allies win The Battle of the Marne, after which he is surprised again by a coup back home. The Dictator is always surprised when forces rise against him: the bubble life of a dictator. Preparing to leave France, isolated, his idealized Germany struggling, the Dictator feel uninspired to enter the fight again: the old rhetoric feels flat. It’s getting old, and the bubble has become porous. Fortunately, he reads the editorial his friend the Distinguished Academic wrote celebrating the Latin over the Teutonic, which persuades him to reverse his opinion about German superiority, which in turn inspires his language, and he dashes off a speech and articles to be consumed at home and prepare for his return. Still, he feels bad about leaving Paris, which is where he wants to be, rather than in the torrid country which he rules.
The Dictator then does what he does best, and he defeats the coup. The head of the coup drowns in mud and quicksand, because his soldiers, who hate him, won’t save him. Authoritarians are everywhere in the political spectrum, and they will inevitably be brought down: a truth the Dictator knows. Previously, he could escape to Paris after exercising so much violence, but with WWI he can’t now and becomes a sitting duck for the forces arrayed against him. WWI does, though, bring an economic boon to the nation, so the Dictator goes on an irresponsible spending spree, remaking the capitol, like Haussman did Paris, and feeling that he finally has the means to create civilization in the New World. Unfortunately, the new capitol is built with enslaved peasant labor, and there are huge cost overruns and lots of graft. Outside the capitol, the country is looking shabbier, and everyone is more desperate. There is an assassination attempt–the Dictator’s bathroom is blown up when he usually takes a bath–and as a response he wreaks havoc across the nation, arresting, torturing, and killing many. Despite another round of excessive violence, the Dictator cannot stop publications (pamphlets, newspapers, flyers) from being printed and distributed. The underground press not only complains about the violence, but they also publish the secret knowledge of what is happening in the government and inside the palace, where there is a mole. The banks shut down, but the excesses continue. With Europe still in disarray after the war, the Dictator decides to make his the capitol a cultural center, builds a new theater, where an opera company full of European celebrities, like Caruso, perform. There are protests and a bomb in the orchestra pit that doesn’t kill anyone. The country looks like a primitive backwater. The Dictator is pissed, and he builds an even larger prison to hold even more people. But, as Carpentier is good at pointing out through the rest of the book, in the postwar period things in Europe aren’t any better (for example, the starvation that resulted from the Russian Revolution).
In another round of crackdowns, the Dictator’s people capture one of the opposition leaders, The Student, and deliver him to the Dictator for questioning. The Student disavows violence, and the Dictator tries to buy him off with a trip to Paris. With Paris introduced into the conversation, the Dictator shows himself once again to be culturally knowledgeable. It is almost as if he is a stand in for Carpentier’s sophistication, but he is also an expert and relentless purveyor of violence: his is the duality that represents the modern world. Contrast: the poor, skinny Student vs The corpulent dictator sitting in a large thronish chair. After another non-lethal bomb explosion in the room in the palace where the two are talking, the Student claims the bomb is proof that he is not violent. In a moment of rationality, the Dictator lets the Student go. Still, the dictatorship is spiralling to its end. Outside the capital, everything is in disarray; in the capitol, the businesses call a general strike, and when they won’t open at the Dictator’s command he has them all machine gunned, destroying his last economic lifeline. But since the Dictator cannot help himself, he spreads the rumor of his own death, and when people come out to celebrate he has them all killed. Another massacre! So many massacres!!
Finally, after so much death and so much culture(!), the Dictator is overthrown. He sneaks down to the port, where a US consul arranges for his departure on a freighter. What is left of his retinue, including the mole, absconds, and the Dictator is left with Elmira Mayorela, his caretaker and some time intimate, a Zamba: in Latin American racial/racist categories, a person of mixed African and Amerindian descent.
Before they leave, they watch a crowd throwing broken of the dictator into the sea. The novel’s Ozymandias moment. In future, when someone recovers the the broken statuary, will anyone be able to identify the subject? No.
The Dictator, now calling himself the Ex, ends where the novel began, back in Paris. Carpentier, though, uses this final section for something other than the inevitable death of the Ex. There are a few interesting cultural shifts. First, his daughter has stripped the apartment of all its old Romantic, Napoleonic, Heroic furnishing, and replaced it all with Modernist austerity and abstraction. Moreover, her friends come to the house to get drunk and dissolute rather than head to a brothel, as he would have done. Second, the focus of the novel shifts away from the Ex to Mayorela, who discovers all the postcolonial wonders that have emigrated to Paris. She prepares food from home, which wins both the Ex’s approval and his daughter’s. Once again, the Old and New World mix, and the New is changing the Old. Paris is invaded by exotica, and both the old Romantic heroism and the new coldness of modernity are put on notice. Third, another shift in focus, a set of characters (historical characters actually) find each other in Paris on the way to The First World Conference against Colonial and Imperialist Politics (Brussels, 1927). They speaks dismissively of the new leader in the dictator’s country, because he is moving too cautiously and not initiating changes. They also Recognize that more dictators have already and will continue to pop up, and that they are just beginning a long fight for justice, empowerment, and democracy.
At the end of the novel, the unnamed dictator, the Ex, dies of a stroke and heart attack, and the Old World and New World are different places than they were at the beginning of the novel. To play with the Spanish title a bit, the Dictator’s methodical recourse to civilization and violence has not worked. Authoritarianism is not the engine of Cartesian thought.