Populism as Rhetoric: The Case of the Dominican Republic Author(s): Doris Sommer Reviewed work(s): Source: boundary 2, Vol.

11, No. 1/2, Engagements: Postmodernism, Marxism, Politics (Autumn, 1982 - Winter, 1983), pp. 253-270 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/303028 . Accessed: 21/03/2012 06:53
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Populism as Rhetoric:The Case of the DominicanRepublic

Doris Sommer Dedicated to the memoryof VictorFernandezFragoso

The main reason for the difficulty in defining populism in Spanish America is that the term describes the general political life of the region, not a particular ideology or movement. Spanish American politics is, then, best understood as a complex of varied and competing forms of populism which I am interpreting to mean the cultural framework for very different ideologies. And instead of being identifiable by or synonymous with any particular political philosophy (everything from Nazism to Maoism has been called populist),' populism is recognized by a certain rhetoric that casts ideology in a narrativeform. Other attempts to define populism have either focused too hard on one particular manifestation to notice that its opposition may also have qualified for the title, or they have assumed that some variations realize the essence of a populist ideal while others violate it.2 My point here will be that populism as a cultural system,3 specifically as a familiar narratable rhetoric, can function left, right and center on the political spectrum. I will further argue that the narrative, almost by its very nature, can best be analyzed in a body of prose fiction which elaborates the populist assumptions in 253

significantly critical ways. Populism and the novel are intimately related. The populist rhetoric represents the difficulties faced by a nation in transition to industrial society in terms of a traditional family that has been disrupted and that strives to reintegrate and to reestablish harmony. The People is cast as the Husband and thus is often identified with the populist leader;4this gives the entire population of a country the function of a coherent and socially predetermined unit. Even when class differences are acknowledged, they amount to separate but equal status since everyone is assumed to share the same analysis of national problems and to benefit from the solidary solution. The Land is the Wife, who is treated with all the love and respect that the raw material of (re)productioncommands. She is the legitimate propertyof the People; though fruitful she is either inert or chaotic without the fecundating or civilizing intervention of Man. In this framework it is clear that social classes are not the only categories subsumed or made to disappear into the unity of the People-Nation. Women disappear almost entirely as human protagonists.5 The Land-Wife's partners use her to advantage, whether they are legitimate or illegitimate exploiters. This brings us to the role of the Usurper or adulterer, played by the Imperialist, the "oligarchy," or other unpopular local government, who exploits the Woman selfishly. Meanwhile, the dispossessed Husband is coerced into being an accomplice of his family's defilement. National destiny thus becomes the expulsion of the Usurper to re-establish legitimate ownership by the Husband so the (re)production can proceed naturally, that is to say legitimately. At that point the Husband will no longer be forced to support, if I may continue the metaphor, the bastards whom his helplessly fruitful Wife was made to spawn. In this way, political movements, understood rhetorically as family relationships, are charged with the intense emotionality of private life. The significance of the macho as the national hero who overcomes both political and sexual impotence is evident here. It should also be evident that his Woman-Land is literally the object of the macho's dual activity as fighter and father. She is the prize of his struggle and the resource for his work. The narrative trajectory of populism, from original love-bonded harmony to estrangement and then to re-integration, is familiar as the structure of Romance, a generic feature to which we will shortly return. At this point I think we can safely deduce a feature that is common to populism but which does not appear in the social science literature on the subject. The "People" whom populism celebrates and who seem to be as protean as the word populism itself share an important identity. They are all men.6 This is so obvious that it has been passed over in silence. Yet the consequences are hardly negligible: a celebration of masculinity, patriarchy and consequently a hierarchy of men over women, children and other men metaphorically identified with them.7 One of the great strengths of populism, then, is that it does not have to invent a rhetoric or a culture, perhaps the challenge that has 254

dogged Marxists more than any other; instead it "captures," as Alvin Gouldner calls the process,8 traditional patriarchal relationships of an agricultural economy for a political discourse that suggests an identity between familial relationships and national history. The result seems more like a natural given than an ideological construction because of the way family structure tends to be taken for granted. The populist romance is not particular to Spanish America, and certainly not to the Dominican Republic which will serve here as a case study, although part of its appeal is the assumption of uniqueness in the national experience.9 In fact, the cluster of metaphors and the structure of feeling'o produced by the nation-family homology should be familiar from many national literatures written during the transition from traditional to industrial society: the People yearns for the Land that has been possessed by an unnatural (read un-national) competitor. The populist rhetoric is thus at least as old as Romanticism and its bifurcated reaction to modernity (parallel to two broad tendencies in populism): the assertion of a traditional hierarchy by frightened or disappointed monarchists; and the desire for democratic liberation by those who objected to capitalist exploitation. Both reactions posited a lost harmony and the need to regain it." While these two tendencies-the affirmation of traditional hierarchy and the demand for popular participation-are certainly very different, they tend to overlap in twentieth century populism and to produce a political ambiguity that social scientists almost invariably address. Ambiguity is one of the only things they agree on regarding populism; the other is the historical context for the Janus face that populist regimes often assume.'2 Although scholars who focus on the ideology, the politics, or the concept of populism either confess to being perplexed by it or lock horns in a debate about specific definitions,'3 they concur that populism is a response to the problems of political authority and economic development posed by rapid, often sudden, industrialization. That response tends to go in two directions. On the one hand it embraces the economic advances that would make a developing country relatively competitive and independent on the world market; and on the other it affirms preindustrial social relationships so that the traditional values associated with that nation are not lost to the culturally homogenizing and depersonalizing effects of market relationships. Culture is evidently important here because it is a major area in which an accomodation between the traditional past and a modern future is struggled over. Several social scientists recognize this, at the same time that they recognize the limits of their own analyses; but Juan Corradi makes the strongest case when he practically calls populism a cultural invention of intellectuals in a dependent society in an attempt to offset social disarticulation: "Culture and politics seek to integrate, from inside dependent societies, what economic power, operating essentially from abroad, tends to disintegrate. This attempt at reintegration is what gives Latin American culture and politics their peculiar flavor. It is expressed most distinctively in 'populist' movements."'14 This quest for re-integration is precisely 255

what organizes the populist rhetoric. But, as I have described it, that rhetoric specifies traditional society as the patriarchal family threatened by dissolution; and the corrupting economic power from abroad is interpreted as the insatiable lust of the Usurper. It follows in populist reasoning that if economic dependency reduces the local patriarch to a mere wage slave,15then a nationalist people's movement would resist the subordination of family to money and reverse the terms of domination.16The desire to regain economic power and patriarchal pride can take at least two directions, given the ambivalence of populist responses. One direction leads the familynation to modernize, ironically, at the expense of the traditional patriarchs who forfeit their authority to a father figure of national proportions. Through him the traditional values of collectivity and reciprocal responsibility among independent patriarchs are transformed to the ideals of national solidarity and obedience to a single father.' Populism of this type, in other words, may reinforce the traditional structure of feeling, but displaces it outside the traditional family and makes it operate in a very different system. In contrast, the second alternative manifestation of populism is a rejection of the corporatist, hierarchical structure described above,'8 and a reassertion of the relative independence and communality associated with the traditional patriarch. This movement would be related ideologically to liberalism and social democracy. What is striking about these competing responses is that they share a single legitimating language that defends the patriarchal family. The struggle is over who can really perserve it. In the case of the Dominican Republic the contestants were Trujillo,"the Father of the and New Nation,""'9 his many enemies, most notably Juan Bosch who planned to redistribute some of the wealth that the monstrous father had appropriated from the natural ones.20 Among my purposes in focusing on the practically unknown body of Dominican history and literature, when so general a cultural phenomenon as the populist rhetoric is in question, is the striking fact that the Dominican Republic was practically constituted as a modern nation by the formulation of the populist romance in Enriquillo(1882) by Manuel de Jesus Galvan. Its narrative structure and ideological assumptions have since been accepted and debated in novels and in the general cultural life of the nation. The focus is, furthermore, overdue because of the merits of Dominican literature and because it remains virtually ignored despite the proliferation of university courses and academic analyses of Caribbean literature. Most of its many admiring readers consider Enriquillo a good historical novel; but its familiar structure as a contest between good and evil and its happy ending for the virtuous lovers after apparently insurmountable odds give the book a closed, neat form that novels resist. Because romances posit an ideal harmony and thereby distinguish themselves from a static representation of reality, they "now and again seem to offer the possibility of sensing other historical rhythms, and of demonic or Utopian transformations of a real now unshakably set in place.'21 However, romance as a genre 256

celebrates sameness more than it makes unsatisfying comparisons between a lofty ideal and a degenerate real world. At the climax of the romance, the outsider is revealed as a member of the virtuous group and invited inside, so that evil becomes a "baleful optical illusion"'22 and is banished from interpersonal relations. This is, in fact, what happens in Enriquillo, which celebrates and legitimates an internal harmony after noble Indians and Spaniards recognize their familial relationship. Perhaps the easiest way to signal the difference between the two novels to be discussed soon and Galvan's romance is that it is written backwards, progressing like religious or mythical discourse from a sacred given and reconstructing a trajectory toward that given. The narrative is generated in retrospect from a resolution of conflict and a celebration of the peace concerted between Enriquillo's Indians and the Spanish Crown. As a romance, Enriquillo is neither a novel nor historical; and it is indigenous only in the most exotic and sentimental use of the term. The title character is, in fact, an Indian who rebelled against unjust representatives of the Spanish Empire. But the revolt is not precipitated by the decades of mistreatment and murderof Indians by Spaniards; all this serves only as background. Enriquillo leads his band to the hills as the result of his master's violation of the Indian's conjugal purity, which is restored, like his Land, through his own valor and the good will of the great father, EmperorCarlos V. Galvan's work shares little with the indigenous literature that advocates Indians' rights or defends Indian culture. In Hispaniola Indians had been practically exterminated by the late sixteenth century and were no longer in need of protection. It was thanks to Galvan's legend itself that the myth of an Indian or Mestizo nation was created. This conversion, or redemption, of the Dominican masses through association with enlightened Spaniards was far less important for the conquistadores than for the Dominican ruling classes of the 1880s. Then, at the end of a long series of occupations by Haiti and internal racial wars, the cultivation of sugar boomed and the nation was incorporated directly into the world market. These circumstances demanded a new nationalism that would unite even traditional defenders of Spanish imperialism, such as Galvan,23 with the black and mulatto masses under the black president Hereux whose name was suspiciously Haitian-French. Galvan's brilliant solution for assuaging the racism that inhibited the political and economic incorporation of the Dominican working masses by the ruling whites, who were accustomed to identifying blacks as the enemy, was simply to exclude blacks from the national epic. From the time of its publication, dark Dominicans have a new identity; they are Indians from the line of Enriquillo, living in harmonious mutual respect with the descendants of good Spaniards. While later Dominican novels often work within the populist rhetoric, since it is the common language of politics and thus hardly avoidable, their formal experiments indicate ways in which the familynation homology breaks down. In other words, the novels tend to 257

dislodge the ideological givens by revealing them as constructions that can be reformulated and modified. Once the populist rhetoric is tampered with, it becomes secular and debatable as the possible subject of a rational rather than a mythic discourse.24 Therefore, the various travesties against the populist romance in the novels will illustrate the open, ironic and "dialogical" form of the novel in contrast to the relative ideological closure of romance. Said in another way, the ideological adjustments to narrative structure in the novels tend to undermine the very positions that a particular book apparently argues. Ourexamples here will be two almost contemporary works, La Mafhosa(1936) by Juan Bosch who was Trujillo's arch-enemy and who won a landslide presidential election in 1962, after Trujillowas killed, and Over (1939) by Ram6n MarreroAristy, who became a member of Trujillo's government and lost favor only months before the tyrant died. If Bosch's La Mafosa nostalgically evokes a paradise of small producers and merchants of tobacco, a world made extinct by Trujillo's expropriations of the tobacco regions in the first few years of his regime, the book also makes painfully clear the similarities between those small holders and the personalist caudillo to whom they are opposed. And although Marrero'sOver makes an impassioned nationalist demand to expel the North American Usurper of the sugar plantations so that a new class of petty-bourgeois administrators and technicians patronized by Trujillo can develop their own Land, the text's insistent foregrounding of the exploitation and racism suffered by sugar workers, whether West Indian, Haitian, or Dominican, complicates the narrowlynationalist and white-collar propaganda that the didactic passages formulate. The works of Bosch and Marreroshare at least two important features; even if one defends the traditional petty-bourgeoisie against Trujillo and the other supports Trujillo's plans for modernization through a new technocratic petty-bourgeoisie, both novels use the populist romance as the ideological grounding and both deviate from it significantly. II. LA MAFOSA The action of Bosch's semi-autobiographical work25begins when Juan's father, Don Pepe, prepares the family's favorite mule, called la Manosa or the wily one, to take him on a business trip. While he is away, a civil war breaks out, one of a long series that ended in 1916 when North American troops first landed to insure stability and customs revenues. Juan's mother worries and the peasants who frequent the dola's house sigh in resignation because their sons have been recruited; it doesn't matter to them into which army. On hearing this bad news, the narrator,whom we imagine to be about five or six years old, forgets caution, falls asleep near a mosquito infested swamp and contracts a fever from which he recovers only at the end of the narrative. As the fighting gets closer to home, local peasants drop by to discuss events with Juan's safely returned father; even the 258

heroic General Fello Macario pays Don Pepe visits, first as a gesture of greatness and then to beg for a horse. After the war gets so dangerously near that the family has temporarily to flee to a neighbor's hut, the novel ends in death and despair. La Manosa dies slowly of a wound inflicted by those who abused her during the war; and Juan's father cannot understand how the once generous and now victorious General Macario has become a tyrant. The motivating principle of this novel is a growing consciousness of impotence. The wars seem to have no human agents and cannot, therefore, be understood in rational terms or on a human scale of emotion. Bosch thus sidesteps the traditional narrative of romance motivated by love or the struggle between good and evil (p. which frees the novel to reinterpretthe populist rhetoric. A happy 10),26 decision in this novel makes the narrator not only one victim among many, but so naive and confused that any attempt at a consistent interpretation would have been out of character. He offers the reader only the unconnected results of the panic that adults might have been tempted to explain. When we read this text on the level of the populist romance, it seems redundant to observe that the father, Don Pepe, is the FatherHusband-People in the family-nation analogy. But Pepe doesn't quite fit the role, because both he and the independent farmer, who stops at the house after losing his land in the wars, look up to Fello Macario as their father-liberator and leader: "One recognized in him valor, nobility, integrity and dignity. He embraced every cause that the humble supported and made them triumph on the battle field" (p. 177). We may assume that the humble does not refer to landless peasants who would either escape the recruitments or resign themselves to being canon fodder.27 The grateful reference to the humble is evidently to the class represented by the speaker and his listener, the rural pettybourgeoisie. Yet the general doesn't fit the role of Husband-People either. Though he is described as a "generous and valiant leader" (p. 70) and even though he made the narratorfeel "full of enthusiasm, in love with the elegant and manly posture of the lengendary general about whom they told a hundred acts of generosity and who knows how many of heroism" (p. 95, see pp. 117, 175), the hero has a sinister aspect. Like all the patriarchs in La Maflosa, Macario is stubborn and conceited; orders" (p. 94). This does not point to a contradiction in his personality; it merely renames his virtues of single minded courage and the ability to command from the point of view of his enemies rather than from the praise of his supporters. Juan signals this ambiguity through disjointed glimpses of the general. Immediately after the feverish child practically swoons over Macario's romantic figure, he is reduced to human size by the irony of their meeting. Repeatedly over-estimating his own powers, Macario is absolutely sure that he can cure the boy:" 'Iwill cure him once and for all,' he assured. In response to the smile of doubt that my father couldn't hold back he responded with another of all-knowingness" (p. 259
he was "serene and arrogant . . . like a man accustomed to giving

97). But Juan remains ill for a long time, as long, in fact, as Macario continues fighting. The ultimate irony occurs when the thief and adventurer Jose Veras joins Macario during a period when his defeat seems unavoidable. The charismatic general, ignorant of Veras's intention to use the military mobilization for personal revenge, prides himself on still being able to attract supporters (p. 120). By the end of the novel, "Governor"Macario is an unfeeling, self-serving Usurper.To maintain power his rebelliousness hardens into simple authority and his generosity gives way to expedience. Perhaps the concept of generosity is a key here for understanding the Janus face of the patriarch. Generosity is predicated on social privilege rather than on a commitment to justice; it can be freely granted but also arbitrarilywithheld. Macario's single-mindedness, despite the odds and the cost to others, is repeated in a minor key by Juan's father, who refuses even to consider his family's pleas that they return to the grandfather's safer and more prosperous homestead: " 'Here is where I leave my bones before I go back and consider myself beaten,' he said. His eyes shone strangely; and I felt the debris of a new ruin collect inside me" (p. 145). The father figures are thus as helpless before fate as are their child-like subjects; and though they are given to momentary lucidity about their limitations, it is only with a reluctance that verges on hostility and propels them into action again. Don Pepe's final conformity represents a kind of coming to consciousness which brings him to the position of his poorest neighbors, whom he in fact would join after Trujillo's expropriations. If, in terms of the populist romance, the contestants for the Land-Womanhave ambiguous metaphoric identities, just as the identity of the "patriarch"became problematic after Trujillomade himself the archi-patriarch by absorbing the others, the prize in the contest is at least more stable, as befits her. But even here, she is not the predictable wife or the farm of the populist rhetoric, but a mule, la Maiosa. My identification of her is defensible on at least three counts. First, she is the means for Don Pepe's livelihood as a businessman. In other words, she corresponds nicely to the Land as the means of production and source of wealth that characterize the Land in the agriculturally based populist rhetoric. In Bosch's asides he tends to highlight the traditional setting of his father's and his grandfather's world (pp. 33-34); but the formal decision to focus so much affection and admit so much dependence on the mule that she gives the novel its title marks a significant departure from agricultural, patriarchal stability. The principal value of la Manosa for the family is that she is unstable, restless, and moves swiftly and lightly to and from the market place. The commercial nature of Don Pepe's and his father-in-law's economic activity is clear also from the fact that they employ several laborers, some permanently and others seasonally. The second reason for identifying la Mafiosa as the object of the struggle between Husband and Usurper is obvious from the fact
260

that she is called "adorable" and loved by everyone. The mule is so feminine and pampered that even she mistakes herself for human as she admires her shadow (pp. 39-40). Finally, the mule's metaphorical identity as the object over which legitimate and illegitimate masters struggle is clear from the covetousness she arouses in everybody. Don Pepe generously offers her to Macario when he is desperate and losing the war. Macario leaves la Maiosa in the care of Jos6 Veras, and when she is stolen, Veras hunts her down and forces the thief to return the pitiful dying animal to her legitimate owner. Her death is another important departure from the populist romance, where we expect the prize to be an inanimate object that can be lost but not destroyed. Perhaps the dead-end of the contest for la Mahosa derives from the author's and the reader's inability clearly to identify the contenders as good, bad, legitimate, illegitimate, for or against the People. This ambiguity brings us back to a recognition of the patriarch's Janus face in this novel and to the historical ambiguity of the patriarch as both defender of traditional morality and the leader of brutal change. Because his identity is mixed, the narrative can be read to suggest the need to construct, rather than simply to identify, the metaphoric Husband-Liberator of the populist romance. In other words, the concept of the People and its goals is problematized rather than taken for granted. If we imagine that the victims of usurpation and the militants for justice are "the humble" to whom the visiting farmer refers, then we accept a petty-bourgeois class identity of the heroes. They represent the entire People only because poorer peasants depend on the patriarchs. But class distinctions are central in La Marhosa;it is after all a nostalgic celebration of an extinct traditional class. Bosch did not attempt to identify everyone with his father or to suggest that the People, as an undifferentiated unity, was the protagonist; he simply implies that everyone lived in harmony under the patriarchy. But his evidence rather convinces us that the harmony was illusory because both the Land and the leaders are described as possessed by the devil, who is throughout identified as a culebra (snake) (see pp. 19, 20, 26, 62, 149). The first chapter ends with man's victory over the serpent and a re-integration with paradise. But the chapter may be more profitably read to indicate that the Land has been and will always be dominated by Satan, and that man's provisional suppression of the demon is necessarily short-lived. In one form or another, the culebra damns everyone in the novel: la Mahosa dies of culebrilla, ring-worm,that she contracted during her service to Macario; Juan's feverish dreams are obsessed with the culebra (p. 150). And the incomprehensible, apparently irrational force that dashed the hopes of Juan's victimized family is sometimes called Revolution, and at others, Satan. We might add Usurper or caudillo as other terms in the equivalency, stressing the phallic imagery of the culebra. The tragedy of La Mafiosa can then be understood as the patriarch's illusion that his possession of the Land is qualitatively dif261

ferent from another's and that he is less possessed than is the Land, when the real enemy, as the novel identifies it, is the culebra or domination itself. Even if Bosch had no intention to relate paternalism to the Satanic, his experience of Trujillo probably made the connection so patent that it came to color the memory of the earlier period. In this subversion of the populist romance the Usurper is identified with the Father and both suffer the ills that they perpetrate on the Land,or rather, on commerce. Ill. OVER One of the more remarkable things about Over(1939) by Ram6n MarreroAristy is that it was published at all. Written at the height of Trujillo's efforts to monopolize the nation's resources and published only three years after his brutal massacre of about 20,000 Haitian workers, Marrero's novel is a frontal attack both on monopolies and on racism. But Over was paradoxically appropriate for Trujillo's plans of 1940. Besides denouncing injustice, the novel redefines the villain. The Usurper of the People's Land and property was not the dictator, but the North American sugar industrialists whom he newly defined as his competitors. The great virtue that Marrero's novel had for Trujillo was that, without minimizing the nation's misery, it left him entirely out of the picture. It is as if Marrerohad learned from Galvan how to reduce an uncomfortable reality by squinting; Enriquillo describes a colonial Santo Domingo without its most threatening problem by ignoring the black slaves; and Over manages to criticize exploitation in the 1930s without mentioning Trujillo. When Trujillo seized state power in 1930, the sugar industry was already controlled almost exclusively by North American capitalists. The major impact of the sugar "enclave" on the rest of the Dominican economy was to erode it. Specifically, the traditional petty-bourgeoisie comprised of shopkeepers, artisans, and independent farmers was either reduced to a class of wage laborers, or worse, was effectively marginalized from the economy through unemployment.28 After Trujilloanointed himself redeemer of the nation, his plan was not to reverse the process but to nationalize the sugar industry, thereby creating a new "urban petty-bourgeoisie" of bureaucrats and technicians, able to administer and to maintain an industry as advanced as sugar was. These social groups also constituted a home market for the products of nascent Dominican industries.29 With the nationalization of sugar production, Trujillo would have greater revenues for further projects of industrialization.30 Trujillo's World War IIflirtation with national socialist style, its combination of xenophobia and alleged anti-capitalism, made him a good competitor against the U.S. sugar interests; it also made him enthusiastic about Marrero's novel in which the Dominican Land and People are cruelly usurped by North American greed. This does not make Over a fascist book, but rather illustrates how Trujillo's corporatism overlapped with Marrero's populist rhetoric that demanded 262

the rights of Dominicans to their Land. As in La Mahosa, the People, the humble, are most often identified with the limited middle class; but here it is not the traditional class of independent producers, but rathera new class of white collar professionals and shopkeepers. Tru"They jillo must have been pleased to read Marrero's accusations: 31 robbed us of the land, and with her of our happiness" (p. 208). "He outrages me, me who descend from those who made this soil a However, the overlapping is imperfect and Marrero's novel often spills over into a radical critique of exploitation which helps to explain why Over was issued only once during Trujillo's regime. One such ideological excess is signalled by the title, and by the oppressive disruption of the English words over, boss, pay-roll in the flow of the Spanish prose. "Over" was the untranslatable term used by Dominican workers to designate the profits made in company stores and services by, among other things, dispensing less food than laborers paid for. The word refers to the North American Usurper, to be sure, but the reference is specifically to economic exploitation, that is, to a systemic injustice in the industry, and it thus goes farther than a merely nationalist objection. Trujillodidn't plan to reform sugar production, but simply to own it. Racism is another abuse that is criticized here far beyond its convenient association with North American exploitation. At times it seems as if racism were introduced by the sugar magnates who are unfailingly white and fat men with eyes the color of ice. But Marrero slips out of this simple objection to the foreigner by complicating the issue of racism, first with the protagonist's mistrust of all whites, including Dominican whites with whom the mulatto Trujillo liked to identify, and second, with references to the disdain that Dominican workers feel for Haitians and West Indians, a disdain that contaminates the narrator's prose as well. The plot of Over alternates between alienation and reintegration that mark the movement of romance; but here the alternative endings are open to unmentionable solutions that can therefore not be realized: one is Trujillo, the other, is a radical adjustment of social relationships. At the beginning, when the narrator is thrown out of his father's home for petty theft and general parasitism, he almost pinches himself to see if he's still alive. Daniel's father, a self-made caudillo, macho, indomitable and fiercely independent, represents the no-longer-possible hero of the national romance. The son is neither the man nor the entrepreneur his father was, presumably because the opportunities are lacking. This is the first instance where Trujillo is absolved by exclusion. Like the U.S. sugar industrialists, Trujillotoo had expropriated Dominican independent farmers; but he had been forced to limit himself initially to the less developed sectors of tobacco and cocoa. From this point on, Marrerowill convert the slightly spoiled and very desperate anti-hero into a variation of the romantic independent Husband who plans to repossess his Land, but one who would recognize his own weakness and be available for a stronger leader. 263
fatherland for us to enjoy as masters! . . . Intruder! Thief!" (p. 180).

Daniel's momentary reintegration into the world, thanks to a newfound source of livelihood as a shopkeeper in the sugar industry (p. 26), becomes despair on the very next page as he is transported, like an object, from the town to the plantation. The low level management of the central is shown to be systematically alienated from everything, though not as brutally contained as the cane workers whose protests are silenced by machetes. Even the loyal and subservient clerks have lost all control of their lives: of their friends who may be spies, of their wives who may be asked to "entertain" the bosses, even of themselves, who are like prisoners being their own guards (p. 112). This second stage of alienation is resolved through Daniel's meeting and marrying the daughter of an independent and therefore idealized storekeeper. Raised to the level of the clearly implied populist romance, the marriage offers a solution to the nation-family's discord by reuniting the dispossessed People with his rightful and independent means of production. But the store is not part of the marriage bargain and the Usurper himself gives the couple its means of survival. Predictably everything goes wrong. Daniel's wife becomes ill with her first pregnancy and almost dies in the company clinic where whites are cured and others are left to perish (p. 173). However much in love and optimistic, the People and his Land are barren under the domination of the Usurper. The protagonist's frustrations finally run so high that he insults the assistant manager and is duly fired. With this climax Daniel's final and irrevocable alienation from the foreign-dominated sugar economy is sealed. His wife's family excludes the unemployed ex-storekeeper from their company, insisting that any ignominy at work is better than starvation. This may serve as some general statement about decent women (and Land)not responding to losers; it may also be a critique of those women for preferring dependence over honor. In any case, they cannot offer a way out. Daniel begins to drink heavily with friends in similar lumpen situations and to live with a prostitute, which is the true identity of all the women and men who are bought and sold by the foreigners. Rather than be angry with his wife's family, Daniel criticizes himself for being unjustly hard on them. He realizes his complicity in ruining her life: "You should have known that you couldn't give her anything of yourself, because everything you had-mind, body, heart-belonged to the monster who strangles men in the agony of over" (p. 210). Logically, the self-reckoning leads the Husband to challenge the Usurper:"Look, Man, if you still have anything worthy in your soul, understand. And if you can't kill your anger, turn it against yourself, or against the force that ruined you." But this ending can only be provisional in the novel. It has apparently learned too much from the communist friends and takes on too much responsibility and self-respect, as if the People could repossess the Land from the Usurper in a battle of equals. In other words, by eliminating Trujillo from the narrative in an ingeniously protective looking askance, Marrero in fact eliminated 264

him from the solution of the national problem. That may be why the author appended what can only be read as a second ending in which Daniel sinks ever deeper into despair with his drunken friends and prostitute lover. Here his only way out is exile. Besides ending the novel in an undaunted if undirected step into the future, the decision to escape, rather than to commit suicide as another storekeeper had done (p. 122), neatly accounts for the great number of Dominicans who were leaving the country. By attributing the blame to the foreign exploiters, Trujillo is once more cleared of any blame for making life impossible at home. Despite Marrero's evident pains to leave Trujillo out of the picture, however, the novel remains disturbingly critical of the absent Father. I am persuaded that this is because of a third ideological excess that Marrerocommits, aside from his radical denunciations of exploitation and racism. It is the author's objection to paternalism, a critique that is not given by the populist rhetoric, quite the contrary, but that is evidently generated by his circumstances. A comparable, though never explicit, critique also accounted for the disquieting ambiguity of Bosch's nostalgia for small scale paternalism. Marrero's charges are directed, of course, against a North American overseer, a Mr. Norton whose Spanish is so fluent and who is so friendly and down to earth that "he seems like a comrade" (p. 166). The West Indian communist whom the protagonist befriends points out the danger: "That one is worse than the others. I know that type of bird. He seems more like an Englishman than a Yankee. No one can protest to a man like that. I prefer the despots, who keep alive the desire to make a rebellion" (p. 167). But here again, paternalism, like the expropriation of the traditional petty-bourgeoisie and white supremacy, describes Trujilloeven better than it does the North American industrialists. In 1932 the Dominican Congress passed an "urgent" resolution to authorize the title of "Benefactor of the Fatherland" for Trujillo.32 Later he added others: "Father of the Nation," "Constructor of the New Fatherland," and the like. It may be unclear, therefore, why particular indictments fit the enemy without fitting the implied hero. When Marrerodares to isolate the functions of a "legitimate" paternal state from the capitalists who masquerade as fathers at their convenience, he opens the possibilities both for justice decreed from above and demanded from below in a way that telescopes the shared space in Over between nationalist and socialist rhetoric: -Governments punish the desperate who kill exploiters and commit acts of terrorism, but the ones they should punish are these capitalists without hearts. Blinded by their fever to make money, and stubborn in their ideas about racial superiority, they exploit, oppress, and sow such anger in men, that when the day of the inevitable explosion comes, the revenge of the masses will raze everything like a hurricane. (p. 206) 265

I am obviously not the only one who believes that this indictment of the foreign capitalists spills over into an indictment of any form of exploitation and a justification of mass resistance, because Trujillo banned the book long before his campaign against North American sugar interests got seriously under way. It was even before Trujilloincited the long sugar strike of 1946 which soon got out of his control. In my attention to the two novels discussed, I have been most interested in the ways they deviated from the populist romance. The liberties novels take with the accepted language of politics illustrate at least two things: the ambivalence of populism which affirms both tradition and modernity; and the secularizing narrative process of novels that complicates received ideas and opens some ideological space for new ones. Amherst College NOTES
1 2 See Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics, ed. Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (New York, 1969) especially p. 3. I am thinking specifically of Ernesto Laclau's Politics and Ideology in Marxist (London,1977),where he argues that Theory:Capitalism-Fascism-Populism socialism is the highest form of populism (p. 198). Even militarism and antisemitism can be politically progressive when they are associated with populism (p. 98). For a good critique of Laclau's failure to specify what socialism or social class may mean, see Jose Nun and C.B. Macpherson in LARUStudies, Toronto, Vol. 3, no. 2-3, (January, 1980). Clifford Geertz's essay, "Ideology as a CulturalSystem," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York,1973), pp. 193-233, makes, I think, the assumption that a "culturalsystem" is a more or less coherent totality and can therefore be identified with a particular ideology. My use of the term here is broader; it accomodates different ideologies which compete as the "true"interpretations of the cultural/rhetoricalsystem. Trujillowas one leader who manipulated that ideal nicely. HowardWiardaputs it like this: Since Trujilloclaimed to have grasped the essence of Dominican reality, since he personified the society and the nation, and since his regime, as Vegueriza put it, was "united with the existence of the Dominican nation," it followed that there could be no division of authority within the country. . . . The Dominican Republic thus came to resemble the corporate ideal with each group or interest knowing its place and harmonizing into an organic whole. Dictatorship and Development: The Methods of Controlin Trulillo'sDominican Republic (Gainsville, Fla.: 1968), p. 110-11. 5 The similarities between feminist concerns and those of oppressed groups, especially the working class, is the starting point for Batya Weinbaum in The Curious Courtship of Women's Liberation and Socialism (Boston, 1978). Her concern with the traditionof subsuming women into a single concept of the nation, specifically among marxists, is shared by Alvin Gouldner;see The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins, Grammar,and Future of Ideology (New York, 1976), especially p. 103. Most analyses of the nation-as-family ideology of corporatist populism miss

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the point that the family itself is internally hierarchical. But Wiarda at least mentions this in the context of his discussion of the cult of machismo, and the point is implied at the level of the state. In fact, the paternal authority that is being undermined in the family can be said to be reaffirmed in the populist models of the state. See HowardWiarda, The Dominican Republic: Nation in Transition(New York,Washington, London, 1969), p. 83. 7 The challenge then becomes how to manage these politically inept subjects, and a long tradition of Latin American literaturegives varied but consistently paternalistic advice: Sarmiento would eliminate the immature barbarian gauchos and indians; Montalvo has fatherly compassion for hopelessly backwardcholos; and while Hostos is sure that everyone can be educated and therefore equal-a refreshing idea-his interest in educating women remains based on their value for men. I find Alvin Gouldner's remarks on the way the disaffected, often pettybourgeois, intelligentsia "captures" the family unit for a political struggle particularly provocative in the present context. They help to account for the apparently paradoxical juxtaposition between a pre-capitalist grammarof relationships and a liberal or a socialist political program. See The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York,1979), p. 73; also pp. 10, 17. Peter Worsley, "The Concept of Populism," Populism ed. lonescu and Gellner, p. 218. He notes this by saying that populism in a specific country is not aware of being analogous to other movements, whereas communism in China, Cuba and the USSR is aware of a tradition and similarities. Angus Stewart makes a similar point in this volume, p. 192. "Structureof feeling" is a term coined by Raymond Williams; see "Literature and Sociology: In Memoryof Lucien Goldmann,"Problems in Materialismand Culture(London, 1980), pp. 11-30.There he defines it as the articulation, in the best literatureof a period, of a new and possible community through innovative form. My use of the term is evidently very different, more static and common to predictable ratherthan formally innovative literature.Structure of feeling in the present essay refers to a system, like the patriarchal family, that can be transferred and adapted to various aspects of life; politics and the literaryimagination are examples. One has only to think of the success enjoyed by C.G. Jung in presenting his codification of sex-related and nationalist fixed ideas, as if it were a natural system of atemporal archetypes, to be impressed with the currency of those ideas in contemporary Western culture. See especially essays like "Seele und Erde"(Mindand Earth),originally published in Zurich in 1931 and translated by R.F.C.Hull for the Collected Works(Princeton, 1970),vol. 10, pp. 29-46. Here the Mind or Soul is the masculine active principle and Earth is predictably the feminine, passive principle, ridiculous when she tries to be reasonable. "Onthe same ground the ancients conceived of a feminine soul, a 'psyche' or 'anima', and not without good psychological reasons did the ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages propound the question, Habet mulier animam?" (p. 41). When Jung is not being venerated as a manifestation of the wise oldman archetype he is often dismissed as irrelevant.But if we understand him to be descriptive of very broadly accepted cultural phenomena, rather than explanatoryin the ultimate sense he attributes to himself, Jung becomes a useful tool for prying open a deeply embedded ideology. If aspects of his work seem wrong-headed, if not silly or pernicious, we may use him to dismiss the mythic aura that he articulates and that protects so much of our lived relationship to the world. This is Lenin's characterization of the ambiguity of populism: "Thatis why the populist, in matters of theory, is just as much a Janus, looking with one face to the past and the other to the future." Cited in Andrzej Walicki, "Russia", in

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Populism, p. 72. Since then, others have adopted the image. See, for example, a section of Angus Stewart's "TheSocial Roots" in the same volume called, "The 'Janus Quality' of Populist Movements," pp. 186-91. 13 The debate rages even regarding specific populist movements. KalmanSilvert remarks, for instance, that, "Enormousconfusion has attended the question of whether Vargas and Per6n led leftist or rightist movements. Because of the populism they espoused, they are called leftist. Because of their quasi-fascist views, they are called rightist." "ContemporaryInterpretations,"Politics and Social Change in Latin America: The Distinct Tradition.ed. Howard Wiarda (Amherst, MA, 1974), p. 164. I think, though, that populism is a more inclusive term than what Silvert implies; it is at the center of the confusion he points to. Juan E. Corradi,"The Politics of Silence: Discourse, Text, and Social Conflict in South America," Radical History Review, no. 18. (Fall 1978), pp. 38-57, especially p. 41. The concept comes from Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture.(New York,1976).See particularly Chapter 5 called, "Father:The Patriarch as Wage Slave," pp. 151-57. If we compare the Latin American experience to what happens in a more classically capitalist setting, as Ewen describes it for North America, one important difference will immediately be clear. Although he too discusses the reconstitution of patriarchyin an industrialsociety (p. 129),the "business patriarch"(p. 132) in whom authority is displaced and concentrated coexists with others in a dynamic, competitive relationship. Competition, in fact, is obviously central to the mythology of capitalism; and it affords a range of affective freedom, however limited and trivialized by the consumer culture that Ewen evokes so well, that is inconsistent with populism of the corporatist type. HenryFordmay well have "pioneered . . . the extension of industrial authority to family relations" (p. 133), but he could not have imagined making himself the uncontested father of his entire nation. Yet this is precisely what populist leaders may do. The father-figure of the corporatist nation-family towers above his subordinates through the accumulation of their authority and the traits of masculinity that go with it. While some marxists argue that they and feminists share the same objective of eliminating paternalism because it is linked historically with the rise of private property,others point out that capitalism at a more advanced stage is neither identical with paternalism, which is much more general to human society, nor even consistent with it. Thus it is possible to have bourgeois feminists who want a fair share of the pie and paternalist marxists who believe that women's demands are eventually granted through "workingclass" politics. The fact that patriarchal elements exist in capitalism has, in other words, sometimes obscured the tension between these systems in a particularsocial formation. See Wiarda, Dictatorship and Development, p. 119, for the example of Trujillo. Dictatorship and Development, pp. 110-11. See also Lawrence de Beault's celebration of this corporatism before the tyranny was clear to all: President His Workand the Dominican Republic (Washington, 1936). Trujillo: Earlyon Trujillolegislated official paternal titles for himself. By the end of 1932 his congress passed an "Urgent" resolution to bestow on him the title of "Benefactor of the Fatherland." Later, his self description as father became less personal, more transcendent and god-like. Joaquin Balaguer's famous discourse, "God and Trujillo,"is a good indication. See FranklinJ. Franco, Trujillismo: G6nesis y rehabilitaci6n (Santo Domingo, 1971), pp. 40, 57. For Trujillo'ssexual activity, literally fathering many of his nation, see Robert D. Crassweller, Trujillo:the Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator (New York, 1966), p. 80.

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In his constitution of April29, 1963, Bosch laid the basis for a land reformthat would protect private propertyon a small scale and expropriate concentrated landholdings. See Piero Gliejeses, The Dominican Crisis: The 1965 Constitutionalist Revolt and American Intervention,trans. Lawrence Lipson (Baltimore, London, 1978), p. 87. And through his successful electoral campaign of 1962 Bosch endeared himself to the farmers and agricultural workers, while with his condemning the ruling class even if it considered itself anti-Trujillist, common rural language that spoke of growing, storing, and selling crops and de la democracia de also of exploitation by the rich. See also his Crisis America Latina (Mexico, 1964), pp. 86-89. Ironically, Bosch's impulse to have propertyand dignity shared among Dominicans and so to reduce the authoritarian nature of the president may have worked against his ability to keep a mass support. He was never the apotheosis of masculinity that was expected and would have been associated with a more autocratic leader. Bosch's "hesitancy to returnto the Dominican Republic from his exile in Puerto Rico during the height of the shooting in the 1965 revolutionand his refusal to leave his house during the 1966 election compaign for fear that he might be assassinated demonstrated to Dominicans a lack of machismo, and it undoubtedly contributed to his electoral defeat." Wiarda, The Dominican Republic, p. 83. Steve Stein observes that the corporatist, tyrannical, type of populist leader is the norm in Latin America, whereas the more democratic variety, like Bosch, has a relatively short term in office. Populism in Peru:The Emergence of the Masses and the Politics of Social Control (Madison, Wisconsin, 1980), pp. 14-15. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, 1981), p. 104. The Political Unconscious, pp. 118-19. Some readers attribute to Enriquilloand its affectionate portrayalof Spaniards the narrow intention to absolve Galvan of his support for the re-annexation of the Republic to Spain that he helped negotiate (1863-65).But the reason is too personal and seems, moreover, unnecessary given his easy access to government positions. If anything threatened GalvAn's comfort, it was the general political instability that made the Dominican Republic unattractive to foreign investors. He is sometimes misunderstood as an irrational conservative Hispanophile, opposed both to the imagined continuous threat of Haiti and to the encroachments of the United States, the power that BAez had courted to annex the Republic. Fromthe evidence, however, Galvan was both rationaland liberal, dedicated to progress and justice. When the black President Hereaux proceeded to win favors abroad after having pacified his country by a combination of force and cunning, he sent GalvAnto Washington on a special secret mission to negotiate the renting of Samana Bay to the U.S. armed forces. As for Haiti, Galvin did fear it, but not as a power. Rather, Haiti was a tradition and a model of non-European revolutionaries incapable of incorporation into the enlightened world system. In Gouldner's terms, it becomes available for an ideological discourse-subject to the rhetoric of rationality-by abandoning the sacred and timeless qualities that myth claims for itself. The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology, pp. 30-38. References to La Marfosaare made in the body of this essay to the seventh edition (Santo Domingo, 1978). Translations are mine. "La Maf7osaresponded to my plan to develop a novel in which there would be no central character nor person of flesh and blood who could attract the attention of the reader and 'rob'the book for themselves. InLa Marfosathere was not to be a single theme developed with the normal requirements of intrigue, the habitual struggle between 'good' and 'evil' that is so attractive to readers, the presence of a woman whose love is the prize offered to the 'good' character as

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recompense for his troubles and for the heroism with which he confronts the bad guy. In La Maflosa, according to my plan, there would be only one central 'character' and it would be the civil war; and all the living beings who would parade through the pages of the book including the mule who would give it its title, would be, in one way or another, victims of this central figure." 27 FranklinJ. Franco, Rep~blica Dominicana: clases, crisis y comandos (Habana, 1966), p. 13. Roberto CassA, Modos de producci6n, clases sociales y luchas politicas. (Santo Domingo, third ed. 1978), p. 21. See also Franc BAez Evertsz, Azdcar y dependencia en la RepLblica Dominicana (Santo Domingo, 1978), p. 103. CassA, Modos de producci6n, p. 59. Badz, AzOcary dependencia, p. 101, and CassA, Modos de producci6n, pp. 23-25. References to Overby Ram6n Marrero Aristyare made in the body of this essay to the eighth edition (Santo Domingo, 1977). Translations mine. See note no. 19.

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