43 pages • 1 hour read
The Autumn of the Patriarch
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Themes
The Pursuit of Power
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses murder, suicide, and sexual assault.
Márquez explores the ambiguity and unruliness of power through the General, demonstrating that one can exercise but never possess ultimate power—especially over death and love. Though the narrator reflects that, in the earlier part of the General’s regime, “power was a tangible and unique matter, a little glass ball in the palm of his hand” (49), it eventually evades the general and anyone who attempts to steal it from him, save the foreign powers that eventually take everything that the General has. The “glass” used to represent this power is indeed fragile and potentially dangerous.
Power is precarious in the novel; anyone who can gain the upper hand on the General can steal his power from him, even if only for a moment. The glass ball continues as a symbol of power when the General tells a visitor in his office that “this little glass ball […] is something a person has or doesn’t have, but only the one who has it has it, boy” (98). The paradox inherent in this idea is that anyone can take power; in the novel, the wrong people so often do. Throughout the novel, Márquez critiques the futility of attempting to pursue power and the resulting bloodshed and corruption.
In fact, the corruption and corrosion that comes from power is so complete by the end of the novel that the General dies in a state of dementia surrounded by animal feces and his own scribbles after he is forced to sell the sea. The narrator’s insistent return to the decaying body continually reinforces the results of each moment of terror within the novel and to what it eventually amounts: death.
The novel is also as much a commentary on those susceptible to the will of power as those who wield it. The final pages of the story recount memories of the people over whom the General ruled and their infatuation with him despite the grievous harm he causes them. A 12-year-old child recounts that “he tempted [her] with a male tenderness which [she] never found again” (208). This example of grooming is a reflection on the harm which occurs when power is exploited for personal gain.
The Impact of Corruption on the Human Body
The human body reflects the consequences of corruption in the novel. When attempting to control people and society, the General and others in power attempt to control the body which frequently cannot be controlled and acts as a parody of power at times. For example, when Bendición is dying, she is covered in maggot infested pustules and, despite the General's adamant refusal of her death, she dies disease ridden and without a cure. Her body is then carried through the streets, meant to be exalted while she is stuffed instead like an animal to refute the processes of decay. In another example, when the General erupts in orgasm and defecates, the precise moment of pleasure collides with an immense amount of pain, and a fluid meant to suggest life and virility (semen) collides with a torrent of waste.
While the General attempts to uphold corrupt policies by attempting to hide, conceal, or control the body, embodied problems grow larger than they might if they were directly addressed. This is especially true when the General must kill two thousand children to perpetuate his image and hide his secrets. The people with leprosy constantly roaming the palace and the consistent cases of disease and illness without efforts to spend money to solve them reveal that exorbitant spending and wealth results in an equal amount of poverty and decay. In the novel, degraded embodied states are the consequence of corruption.
Márquez repeatedly uses instances corruption and the degraded body to demonstrate this relationship. General Narciso Lopez, a General who ruled over a province after the federalist war, dies by blowing himself up with dynamite which he inserts into his rectum because he is ashamed of what he does as a result of the power he now wields and cannot control. In another example, Leticia’s power to bring rot and decay to anything that she touches reveals her growing corruption. The most critical revelation of this truth comes when Bendición cannot rid the palace walls and floors of the blood spilled within it when the General murders what’s left of his guard. In each circumstance, Márquez suggests that the body bears the impact of corruption because of violence and attempts to wield control.
The Inevitability of Death
For the General of the Universe, death is the only foreseeable end to the power which he does not own—this is the General’s major internal conflict. The General can demand control of everything, imagined or real, except death. What ploys he does manufacture to extend his life only result in more death. Death, for the General, is a reminder that he is not the “master” of power.
No matter how much power the General gains or loses, he cannot alter the inevitability of death. Márquez suggests that the one thing that despots can never truly gain is immortality, though the General attempts to achieve immortality through legend. The function of this theme in the novel is to suggest the futility of total rule and the mockery despots make of themselves when attempting to achieve it, without downplaying the real effects of despotism. This is especially evident when the general confronts what appears to be his own body through Patricio and he is “wounded by the horror and shame of his own body of a military stud lying among the flowers” (26), subtly parodying the shock of something obvious: mortality. The people both grieve and celebrate his loss, too, and consequently are either rewarded or punished.
Much of the General’s rule is in service of his aversion to death; he spends most of his energy either trying to evade it or punishing those who seek it. Evading death is the only policy that the General truly enacts in the novel; others never come from him. He is fated to die—an omens that he could never escape—and the novel’s structure of returning to the body repeatedly reminds the reader of this. Toward the end of his life, the General thinks to himself that “[t]here was no punishment more humiliating or less deserved for a man than betrayal by his own body” (244). The many corpses in the novel and the murder of his loved ones forces him to look at this fate repeatedly, and death constantly undermines his power.
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