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Deathwatch
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17382 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1990 |
1,754 Words |
| Author
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Alfred Mac Adam
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EL GENERAL EN SU LABERINTO
[THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH]
Includes biographical chronology and map of Bolívar's final voyage in 1830
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Mondadori, 1989
pp. 11-274
Bolívar was the commander in chief of the patriot forces that won at Junín in 1824. A little later the battle of Ayacucho marked the final triumph of the revolution in South America. Bolívar was unrivaled as the most powerful man of the continent…. Bolívar declared himself dictator in 1828, and the next night, Sep. 24, 1828…he barely escaped assassination…. Bolívar …resigned the presidency in 1830. Soon afterwards he died of tuberculosis near Santa Marta.
(Columbia Encyclopedia)
The encyclopedia succinctly summarizes the roller-coaster pattern of the final six years of Simon Bolívar's short, turbulent life. Born in Venezuela in 1783 of aristocratic Creole stock, Bolívar was a committed revolutionary by age twenty-three and entered the army of the newly formed Venezuelan Republic five years later. Despite a series of military defeats, Bolívar managed to rally the revolutionary forces and led several successful campaigns, finally routing the Spanish forces at the battle of Junín in 1824.
His career synthesizes the Romantic era in politics, the model set by Napoleon, whose shadow fell over Bolívar and so many other leaders in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bolívar's combination of absolute will, total autocracy, and overweening ego would plunge Spanish America deeper into the morass created by Spanish colonialism: Instead of truly liberating the former Spanish possessions, the wars of independence would only make manifest Spanish America's dearth of political and social institutions and its catastrophic inability to create them. Bolívar's life also symbolizes the political reality of today's Latin America: A struggle among antagonistic egos and vested interests, a battle where ideology is used as a mask for self-promotion and the direct exercise of personal power.
As the progenitor of all Latin American maximum leaders, Bolívar is, at the same time, an enigma: Who is this revolutionary who promised freedom but who left an inheritance of personalism instead of enduring institutions that could transcend the egos of national heroes? It is precisely this ambiguity that intrigues García Márquez and explains why he transforms Bolívar into a literary figure.
The Masks of Power
Gabriel García Márquez’s brilliant fictional account of Bolívar's final days begins on Saturday, May 8, 1830, and ends on December 17, 1830. It is a novelist's reconstruction of the final months of Bolívar's life: Tuberculosis (and perhaps other more socially offensive maladies) had virtually destroyed the Liberator's body, slowly effacing his charismatic, mad personality, his exacerbated Napoleonism, and his political brilliance. The historical Bolívar is a genuinely tragic figure who seems more appropriate for the stage than for the world of the novel, because of that genre's insistence on circumstantial details - the serving of dinner,
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