Indeterminacy and the Subversive in Representations of the Trujillato

The mid-twentieth-century dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo established in the Dominican Republic one of the most hermetically tyrannical states in the history of Latin America. The most well-known literary reconstruction in Spanish of that regime is La fiesta del Chivo by Mario Vargas Llosa, a grimly denunciatory novel published in 2000. La fiesta del Chivo, however, does not seem particularly subversive. This is due to its general absence of ambiguity at levels of both structure and content. The reader is led tightly by the author from character to character, narrative strain to narrative strain, with little freedom of interpretation beyond that inherent in any literary artifact. By contrast, less-disseminated texts by Dominicans that consider the Trujillato, such as Freddy Prestol Castillo's testimonial novel El Masacre se pasa a pie and Juan Bosch's short story "La mancha indeleble," mask their subversiveness in, respectively, narrative fragmentation and uncertain allegory. These fictions are compellingly indeterminate in that the ambiguities offered by a choppy polyphony in one case and an imprecise symbolism in the other force a reader to work actively to arrive at conclusions about the dictatorship. Although the indeterminate nature of the two Dominican texts leaves open interpretive possibilities that are not contestatory of the regime they consider, at a deeper level such readerly freedom works against the suffocating control of word and person wielded by Trujillo.