Farewell El Señor Presidente

The end of El Señor Presidente left me feeling cold. We had witnessed the “hero” of the novel, Miguel Angel Face, undergo a metamorphosis from being a seemingly cruel man, no better than The President himself, into a person of conscience. Asturias seemed to let us hope, at one point, that there was hope for Miguel Angel and his wife, Camila, that they would be able to escape from the complete and total prison that The President has created – a prison that is not only physical, but psychological as well. There was also the hope that Camila’s father, General Eusebio Canales, would create and lead the insurrection that would topple The President’s regime of fear. However, both hopes were crushed as Miguel Angel Face was killed by a lie in the form of the spoken word and General Canales was killed by a lie in the form of the written word. Both of these lies originated from The President, hence the link between writing, words, and power.

At the same time, I found it difficult to find hope in Asturias’s novel. It seemed more to me to be a reflection and analysis of the vicious, cyclical nature of The President’s reign of oppression. At the end of the book it was as though everything that I had read had no overall effect, it was as though none of it had ever taken place in the world that El Señor Presidente is set in; because at the end of the novel nothing had really changed at all. However, perhaps Asturias is saying that [I]real[/I] change cannot come about all at once, because some change did occur – Camila and her son Miguel did manage to break out of the cycle by moving out of the city and into the countryside, and Angel Face’s name does live on through his son. So perhaps little by little others will manage to break out of the circle as well.

Angel Face’s transformation from a man into a bestial creature was very depressing to read, especially after having watched his transformation via his love for Camila, although it was beautifully written (as was the whole novel).