"God and Trujillo": Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator (review)

Abstract

IGNACIO LOPEZ-CALVO, God and Trujillo: Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2005. 256 pp.A large body of works on the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Molina (1891-1961) went largely unknown in its breadth and multiform complexity, at least outside certain literary circles, until the appearance of this significant 2005 study by Ignacio Lopez-Calvo. Lopez-Calvo describes the scope of his book in these terms: Besides contributing to the rescue of the voices of numerous Dominican authors and testimonialists from oblivion, this study adds further insight into the lasting effects Trujillo's ironclad rule had on the Dominican psyche, on the formation of the Dominican nation, and on the contemporary political arena (xv). Such insights are substantiated by the book's astounding catalog of atrocities committed under the aegis of the dictatorship, whose monstrous abuses were masked in general by the regime's own extreme style but also justified, perhaps most notably, in the invocation of the providential principle God and Trujillo by courtesan and heir to the Trujillist legacy, Joaquin Balaguer.Indeed, what Lopez-Calvo accomplishes here is a dynamic sort of x-ray (reminiscent in some ways of Martinez Estrada's Radiografia de la pampa) of the authoritarian personality in and through the multiple dimensions of domination. Making this book a must-read for all concerned the blight of dictatorship and its treatment in the novela del dictador is the thorough-one could say horizontal-approach taken by the author in his account of virtually every literary text having to do the dictatorship. As Gene H. Bell-Villada rightly notes in his foreward to the book, Lopez-Calvo succeeds in providing necessary plot summaries with skill and sensitivity (xi). Not only plot summaries, but also an invaluable reconstruction of the contexts render understandable the sociopolitical critique that the author elaborates in masterful prose. The entire book constitutes a complex cautionary tale, grounded in a reading of some thirty-six narrative texts, which takes in the entire system of Trujillo's hell and explains the ways in which the dictator turned the whole Dominican Republic into his private corporation and the whole Dominican citizenry into his accomplices.As the author states on the first page of his preface, he aims to fill a surprising lacuna in the critical study of the narratives. In doing so, Lopez-Calvo's contribution not only supplies us valuable insights into the mechanisms of the dictatorship but also validates the use of literature as a way of knowing and analyzing the inner workings of tyrannical rule and the wounded psyche of a people who most directly suffered its violence. Attentive to the conventions of the genre as well, Lopez-Calvo appropriately places the narrative of the trujillato in the context of the Spanish American novel of the dictator, so as to elucidate the place of this body of works within a larger literary tradition.This work of literary history is also a valuable political analysis: recourse to the tools of criticism, it lays bare the monstrous Machiavellianism of Trujillo's rule over all Dominicans in all its diabolical themes and variations. Lopez-Calvo recalls the dictator's ruse of ordering the execution of his adversaries but afterwards honoring the same victims and pledging justice against their assassins. He also tells of the corruption of the intellectuals, some of whom had long opposed the tyranny only to succumb finally to its blandishments or extortions. Additionally, he relates the dictator's penchant for picking and choosing schoolgirls whom he forced or seduced into sexual submission, as in the well-known case of Lina Lovaton. Lopez-Calvo's study thus provides an etiology of subjugation under the shadow of Trujillo. Among the book's signal achievements is an examination of the not widely read The Era of (1956), written by the former subordinate and later critic of the regime, Jesus Galindez, who, working in self-imposed exile as a professor at Columbia University, was almost certainly abducted by Trujillo's agents and returned to the Dominican Republic, where he was tortured and executed. …