Word: patriarchalism
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...protagonist of Autumn, a patriarch who is all South American dictators compounded into one, shuffles with his flat feet "like a senile elephant" through his declining years, remembering all that he has sown and reaped, left untouched or blighted. We watch his powers slowly rot over seemingly endless time, and plow with him through strata of recalled events...
...carried by the currents of a collective consciousness, the consciousness of all those whose lives have intersected with that of the general. After a few pages, punctuation seems gratuitous, and ceases, save for the caesuras of commas. Voices are heard: "we," who dare to go in and find the patriarch dead; "he," with a deceptively small "h," the patriarch; a series of "I's" who speak when their event is picked out by the roving spotlight of Marquez' description...
...harsh moon ash on the endless plain where the sea had been," we hear "a disaster of hoofs and animal sighs from behind the fortified walls," we smell "the lunar dust-covered rosebuds under which the lepers had slept." Such descriptions return to haunt us, as they do the patriarch; they are fragments of a real or created past, the whole of which we do not know and he has forgotten...
...illustration at random: the patriarch devises a system for beating the weekly lottery. His scheme to fulfill this child-like desire is a transparent cheat any kid could see through. Three blindfolded children select numbered balls from three bags. The patriarch invariably holds the number they choose. (The correct balls are frozen, so the children can feel which ones to pick...
Symbols of the "innocence" of his cheat, the children bear the consequences of his guilt, and he imprisons them. After a while, the children's captivity becomes an international scandal and the Red Cross is called in to inspect the situation. In a panic the patriarch orders the children shipped to the farthest jungles, put on a steamer and blown up. He then kills the men who executed his order--poor kids, he says...