A Novelist for the Twenty-First Century
Vargas Llosa has remained as active a novelist in recent years as he was in his youth, and his most noteworthy novels of the twenty-first century are Lituma en los Andes, La fiesta del Chivo, El paraíso en la otra esquina, Travesuras de la niña mala, and El sueño del celta.1 For Vargas Llosa, as well as for many Latin American writers, the more important epochal shift took place not exactly in 2000 with the new millennium, but more significantly in 1992, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the former Soviet Republic, with the rise of the Internet, and after the reflections on the five-hundredth anniversary of the Spanish presence in the Americas. For Vargas Llosa specifically, his new life (his third period) began in Europe after his failed presidential campaign in Peru.
This is a stage in Vargas Llosa’s writing career about which, on the surface, one might well reach the conclusion, as several critics have, that the author has become a pessimist with respect to culture and politics in Latin America, indeed the future of Latin American society. Nevertheless, it will be shown that there are some notes of optimism in the writing of this period. These five novels might well represent the most accomplished and ambitious period of Vargas Llosa’s writing since the 1960s Boom, when he came forth with La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral. In these five twenty-first-century novels, the Vargas Llosa reader finds some familiar terrain, as well as explorations of new facets of individual human experience, and the inclusion of distant societies not previously part of the Peruvian writer’s fictional world. These five books, in their totality, comprise Vargas Llosa’s most personal and compelling meditation on trauma, which is qualitatively different from his dealings with the subject in the earlier twentieth-century works. Indeed, as I will argue here, these novels could well represent Vargas Llosa at his very best.
The work of this period, particularly La fiesta del Chivo and El sueño del celta, is more closely aligned with his modernist project than his dialogue with the postmodern. The modernist work is interesting and noteworthy for the ways patterns unfold in themselves, but these patterns or systems are less rigid and more variable in this twenty-first-century work than in the major novels of the twentieth century.
Vargas Llosa remains fascinated with the ways in which he can tell stories by using variations on what Jonathan Culler has called “omni-communicative narrators” and, in contrast, deliberately suppressive omniscient narrators. Among the five novels under consideration here, four contain narrators that operate, to some degree, as deliberately suppressive omniscient narrators.
Vargas-Llosa-the-reader uses the term “crater” to describe unforgettable moments in a novel when powerful actions or events take place. The scholar Jean Franco refers to a reading phenomenon comparable to Vargas Llosa’s craters when she speaks of the intensity of reading modern texts. In her reflections on Borges, she proposes that fictions can be compared to a spiritual exercise in which the world must be read skeptically in order to provide the motor force for spiritual withdrawal and privatized intensity.2 In her essay on Borges, she proposes that this Argentine writer makes literature into a highly personal experience. For Franco, Borges believes that experience can only be individual: the more intense the experience, the more it satisfies our immortal longings. “Intensity” is thus what is at stake for Borges in literature, according to Franco, and I would add that in Vargas Llosa’s work, increasingly, from the 1960s to the twenty-first-century novels such as El paraíso en la otra esquina, it is a similar priority for this writer who, as a reader, prizes “craters” in novels. He self-consciously constructs “craters” in his fiction, and then, in his essays, theorizes about “craters” as a key component of a reader’s experience.
Borges and Vargas Llosa differ from many of their cohorts in Latin America, such as Pablo Neruda and García Márquez, in allowing this intensity to be readerly rather than reserving it for the poet or the creator as representative of the comunitas. In this discussion, we are speaking of the Neruda of the Canto General and the early García Márquez of the cycle of Macondo. As Franco has observed, Neruda and García Márquez retain an identification of culture with community. In his twenty-first-century fiction—and this is evident in El paraíso en la otra esquina and in fact all five of these novels—Vargas Llosa prioritizes intensity of personal experience and is skeptical of writers such as García Márquez and Neruda (whom he openly ridicules in these works) who think of themselves as representatives of the comunitas.
With respect to the familiar, these five novels are ambitious, totalizing works in the lineage of Vargas Llosa’s “total” novels. More specifically, La fiesta del Chivo and El sueño del celta are in the totalizing lineage of Conversación en La Catedral and La guerra del fin del mundo. In his less ambitious Lituma en los Andes, Vargas Llosa also relies on his trademark shifting of perspective—his “communicating vessels” (vasos comunicantes)—to present the tragic series of events surrounding two young French tourists. Initially, the French couple appears directly in the first chapter as the innocent and unaware tourists who assume the good will of all entities around them in Peru—even as the Shining Path hijacks the bus in which they ride and orders all the passengers to exit from the vehicle. After this initial direct and close-up presentation of the French couple, the reader never again sees them directly as actors in the novel. Rather, from stories involving the other characters we become aware of the final outcome: in the second chapter Lituma hears of the attack of the bus and that the young French couple had been stoned to death. In chapter 3, the couple is mentioned for a third time, after an assault, with a brief reference to how their faces were “beaten to a pulp.”3 From the early novels La ciudad y los perros and La casa verde to this set of novels produced in the twenty-first century, Vargas Llosa has used this strategy, inviting readers to see the fictional lives up close, and then allowing scenarios to unfold as they do in real life—the reader gradually pieces together the whole as different life stories overlap.
This use of multiple perspectives—communicating vessels—is an important basis for what underlies both these five novels and Vargas Llosa’s novelistic career: strong development of plot and strong suspense. The suspense in Lituma en los Andes is based, from the beginning of the novel, on a death threat: the invasion of the town and the military garrison that Lituma and his soldiers protect is imminent from the novel’s first narrative segment; this threat of being overwhelmed and brutally slaughtered by the Shining Path remains at the end of the novel: Shining Path is still taking control of entire towns, killing anyone whom they perceive as an enemy, and destroying private property at random.
On another level—another plot line—Lituma and Tomás Carreño maintain a dialogue in each chapter that creates suspense around the lives of these two characters. On the one hand, the reader learns of Lituma’s special attachment to his hometown of Piura and his seemingly urgent desire to be with his old sidekicks, the Inconquistables (“The Champions” in the English translation), back in the Mangachería neighborhood of Piura. On the other hand, the reader learns of Carreño’s relationship with the love of his life, Mercedes. Carreño returns obsessively to the topic of his love/hate relationship with Mercedes. The dialogue between the two includes intermittent references to the physical need for sex that subvert any idealistic vision the reader might start to develop of Piura as utopia (in the case of Lituma) or Mercedes as the ideal woman (in the case of Carreño). More specifically, Lituma and Carreño operate too frequently on the basis of primordial instinct for the reader to accept their occasionally idealistic language associated with Piura and Mercedes: they are questionable idealists.
Nevertheless, these two basic story lines—the imminent attack of the Shining Path and the personal tales of Lituma and Carreño—are the foundations upon which Vargas Llosa builds his double-layered plot. In addition, Lituma en los Andes is replete with stories of an intriguing and sometimes exotic Andean world, one in which traditional indigenous rural tales are told in the context of confusing urban legends of the Shining Path. Thus, we follow the indigenous legends of the cannibalistic pishtacos, who supposedly murder humans to eat human fat, and urban legends about the Shining Path, who take over rural villages and commit atrocities against human beings comparable to those of the pishtacos.
In his analysis of Lituma en los Andes, Misha Kokotovic delineates four plot lines: the investigation that Lituma carries out regarding the disappearance of three men; the failed love affair as narrated by Carreño; the story of the couple who own the local town bar, Adriana and Dionisio; and the story of five violent attacks by the Shining Path.4 As Deborah Cohn has pointed out, Kokotovic’s synthesis is illuminating, for each of the five chapters in part I has three sections that narrate, respectively, Lituma’s investigation, an attack of the Shining Path, and an episode of Carreño’s love story. Similarly, each of the four chapters in part III has three sections, although here the second section focuses on Adriana and Dionisio, rather than the Shining Path.5 In classic Vargas Llosa mode, this structure suggests a thematic one. Kokotovic observes that the epilogue contains the culmination of each man’s quest: Carreño’s love story reaches a happy ending; Lituma finds answers that only thwart his pursuit of justice. All in all, this is classic Vargas Llosa manipulating a plot: the epilogue both resolves ambiguity and creates other unresolved ambiguities.
As recent writings of Culler and Vargas Llosa himself have demonstrated, matters of narrators and omniscience are as important to reading narrative in the twenty-first century as they were in the twentieth.6 In his 2007 book The Literary in Theory, Culler discusses how problematic, for example, different types of omniscience can be in fiction.7 In his twentieth-century book on Flaubert and Madame Bovary, as well as his twenty-first-century book on Victor Hugo and Les Misérables, Vargas Llosa scrutinizes these French narratives as a reader acutely aware of the nuances of omniscience, as well as related matters of narrators and narrative point of view.
Culler points out that one basis of omniscience often appears to be the frequently articulated analogy between God and the author (Culler, 184); Vargas Llosa began his book-length study of García Márquez with his theory of the author as a substitute for God and, in parallel fashion, with writing as an act of “deicide” (deicidio). Citing Steinberg, Culler also distinguishes between the “omnicommunicative narrators” of Trollope, who do not withhold any important information, from the “deliberately suppressive narrator” of Fielding, who withholds information he indicates that he possesses in order to create and maintain suspense (Culler, 187).
In the context of reading Vargas Llosa, the omnicommunicative narrator of the Spanish language is the product of nineteenth-century novelists such as Benito Pérez Galdós of Spain, Clorinda Matto de Turner of Peru, Alberto Blest Gana of Chile, and José López Portillo y Rojas of Mexico. Ranging from far too omniscient to far too wordy, the narrators of these authors are the very writers Vargas Llosa has categorically and systematically rejected—almost exclusively because of their narrators—at the same time that he has enthusiastically embraced Flaubert and his “transparent” narrator. In Lituma en los Andes, in these five twenty-first-century novels, and in much of Vargas Llosa’s previous fiction, the extradiegetic or external narrator is Culler’s deliberately suppressive narrator. This supposedly “omniscient” (deliberately suppressive) narrator systematically limits the reader’s access to information about Vargas Llosa’s fictional world, sometimes accomplishing this by employing what Vargas Llosa calls the dato escondido (the hidden piece of information). In La ciudad y los perros, for example, the deliberately suppressed narrator never reveals who assassinated the cadet who mysteriously dies of a gunshot wound during military exercises. The missing information about this death is the dato escondido. In La casa verde, to the novel’s very end, certain key details about the lives of Anselmo in Piura and Fushía in the jungle are never revealed. In both novels, a variety of characters other than the narrator contribute to the ambiguity by speculating in contradictory ways about the details surrounding the work of the deliberately suppressive omniscient narrator. In Lituma en los Andes, Vargas Llosa’s omniscient narrator portrays a military camp under siege by the Shining Path, but this precise control of the narrator—this precise control of an omniscient deliberately suppressive narrator—means that the reader is never able to discern fully to what extent this seemingly imminent danger is real and what the ultimate outcome at the military camp might be.
Several critics have pointed to the pessimism of Lituma en los Andes. Efraín Kristal maintains that pessimism is patent in Lituma en los Andes at the same time that he underscores the novel’s violence.8 For the first time in Vargas Llosa’s fiction, according to Kristal, the violent instincts of some characters have no rational explanation. Unlike in some of Vargas Llosa’s earlier work, where violence is the result of religious or political fanaticism, now violence just happens. As Kristal points out correctly, Lituma en los Andes is Vargas Llosa’s first literary response to the Shining Path.9 According to Roy C. Boland, the recent novels such as Lituma en los Andes, independent of political and economic theories that one might use to explain Peru, suggest that one of the great problems of the country is the ignorance and resentment that divide Peruvians among themselves.10 For Boland, the enormity of the Peruvian dilemma in Lituma en los Andes is transmitted by the shadow of Camarada Gonzalo, the leader who systematically assassinates in the name of ideology.11 Cohn agrees about the pessimism observed by these critics, pointing to Vargas Llosa’s portrayal of an “apocalyptic” Peru in both Historia de Mayta and Lituma en los Andes.12 According to Cohn, in Lituma en los Andes Vargas Llosa attributes the nation’s situation to the dissemination of indigenous traditions as well as to the violence of Shining Path. In reality, the problem is not so much the indigenous traditions themselves as it is the ignorant and fearful interpretation of those traditions.
In accordance with these critics, however, this is indeed one of Vargas Llosa’s most pessimistic novels. When the rational capacity of human beings dissipates or is dysfunctional, Vargas Llosa does seem, on the surface, to lose hope; it is a somber and immanently dangerous fictional world. Irrational forces had appeared in novels such as La casa verde and, even more prominently, La guerra del fin del mundo. In Lituma en los Andes, however, irrational forces seem overwhelmingly powerful and threatening to the entire human population.
And with respect to the reader, he or she is able to take refuge in nothing more than the aesthetic pleasure of observing a pattern unfold—even participating in the unfolding of the pattern—in novels such as La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral. In Lituma en los Andes, the pattern is basically simple. The one note that saves Lituma en los Andes from an absolute pessimism (or a kind of nihilism) begins with storytelling and ends with survival: Carreño and Lituma tell stories and, in the end—perhaps partially with the aid of storytelling, and despite all the threats to their lives—they survive.
. . .
In La fiesta del Chivo, Vargas Llosa uses the technique of the communicating vessels, plot suspense, and subtleties of the narrator with more proximity to the novels of the 1960s than he does in Lituma en los Andes. The omniscient narrator is sometimes deliberately suppressive.
The subject of La fiesta del Chivo is the former dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the authoritarian head of state from 1930 to 1961. The historical and political focus of this novel is the Trujillo dictatorship; nevertheless, the protagonist of La fiesta del Chivo is Urania Cabral, the daughter of Senator Agustín Cabral, Truji llo’s right-hand man for much of his dictatorship. Using a narrative strategy that he had exploited fully in his previous dictator novel, Conversación en La Catedral, and to a lesser degree in Historia de Mayta, Vargas Llosa makes a dialogue between two characters his point of departure for entering into multiple temporal and spatial planes or levels of reality. In this case, the opening dialogue is between Urania and her decrepit, moribund father. Consequently, the reader experiences the dictatorship, its downfall, and its aftermath from the numerous perspectives of an author who fully exploits the possibilities of the communicating vessels—multiple perspectives that change the whole. As is Conversación en La Catedral, this is a novel of both political and sexual truculence. And as in Conversación en La Catedral and La guerra del fin del mundo, the real generator of much of the novel’s action is less the politics of the surface (despite obvious political motives) than individual desire and quirky personalities.
Vargas Llosa’s use of communicating vessels in La fiesta del Chivo is less rigidly systematic than in many of his twentieth-century novels. The operating principle of the communicating vessels is basically the same: the reader’s focus moves back and forth, from Urania to a group of conspirators who plan the assassination of Trujillo. In the novels of the 1960s, and many of the later works, this type of change in focus took place as a rigid alternation of chapters. In this twenty-first-century novel, however, the first chapter focuses on Urania and the second and third chapters focus on the conspirators. Up until the sixteenth chapter, this asymmetrical pattern continues: seven consecutive chapters focus on the conspirators, leading up to the last chapter, which centers on Urania. In this twenty-first-century novel we find Vargas Llosa’s new, entirely asymmetrical use of his formerly more rigid employment of communicating vessels.
Vargas Llosa constructs an intensely suspenseful plot in La fiesta del Chivo; indeed, it is a paragon of the possibilities of an engaging plot for any writer. He develops two basic story lines throughout the novel. On the one hand, the reader follows the intricacies of a group of plotters failing to overthrow Trujillo but, in the end, actually doing so. On the other, the reader slowly discovers how Urania is betrayed by her father and lead into the trap of being raped by Trujillo.
The functions of the narrator and the multiple focalizers are exceptionally interesting and carry resonances of a dictator novel that Vargas Llosa knows well: García Márquez’s fictionalization of another Caribbean dictator in El otoño del patriarca. García Márquez tells the story of an isolated dictator who is a seer or focalizer, and who often finds solace by looking out the window of the presidential palace to observe the sea.13 In Vargas Llosa’s version of this situation—a more feminist version—the focalizer observing the sea is not the dictator but Urania. In the opening chapter of La fiesta del Chivo, Urania returns to Santo Domingo after a four-decade absence, committed to finally dealing with her traumatic past as an adolescent. Upon her arrival in a city that has been transformed since she last saw it, she is the “seer” or focalizer. She looks out the window of her hotel at the beginning of the novel (second paragraph): “She waits for the sea to become visible through the window of her room on the ninth floor of the Hotel Jaragua, and at last she sees it.”14 Here she is positioned in a place similar to the solitary power as the dictator in El otoño del patriarca: she is the focalizer observing the sea through a window. The passage continues as follows:
The darkness fades in a few seconds and the brilliant blue of the horizon quickly intensifies, beginning the spectacle she has been anticipating since she woke at four in spite of the pill she had taken, breaking her rule against sedatives. The dark blue surface of the ocean, marked by streaks of foam, extends to a leaden sky at the line of the horizon while here, at the shore, it breaks in resounding, white-capped waves against the Sea Walk, the Malecón, where she can make out sections of the broad road through the palms and almond trees that line it. (3–4)
What Urania sees here, as focalizer, foreshadows her encounter with her traumatic past. Thus, the “brilliant blue” of the horizon seems to anticipate the intensely emotional nature of her work, over the next few hundred pages, as a victim who will attempt to more fully understand her trauma as a pathway to recovery.15 As such, her work that begins as focalizer looking out the hotel window parallels the work of Vargas Llosa, whose entire body of work is his reworking of his own traumatic past. In the cases of both—Urania and Vargas Llosa—the centerpiece of the trauma is the authoritarian and abusive father. After the reference to the “brilliant blue,” the next phrase that stands out is the reference to her anticipation of the “spectacle” that has kept her awake since four in the morning. This reenactment of her trauma, which is what her visit to her father will be, promises indeed to be a “spectacle.” In the remainder of the paragraph, the white-capped waves contrast with the blue waves, seemingly suggesting a possible undermining of the old traumas, perhaps even a potential liberation from them.
Near the end of this passage, after she sees the white waves, Urania observes a road that leads beyond the Malecón. This road seems to allude to her pathway to recovery; it is also a foreshadowing of the isolated roads that a group of conspirators will hide around in order to ambush the Trujillo figure in the novel, as well as the very road on which she herself will travel on the way to her traumatic rape. All in all, the early pages of the novel set up much of what will happen in the remainder of the work.
In addition to our thinking of the plot as a dual interplay of communicating vessels, as Clive Griffin has pointed out, it can be conceived as three principal strands.16 The first covers Trujillo’s activities on May 30, 1961, which will culminate in his assassination; this plot line occupies chapters 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, and 18. These passages include interiorizations of Trujillo and his myriad of personal and political problems. The second strand, which appears in chapters 3, 6, 9, 12, and 15, deals with four men who conspire to assassinate the dictator. They are the real historical figures who execute the ambush that May of 1961. In this narrative line, Vargas Llosa demonstrates his capacity for creating and maintaining suspense, which is in effect until the end of the novel. The third strand, already mentioned above, involves Urania’s return to Santo Domingo and her confrontation with her traumatic past. Elaborated in chapters 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, and 24, it also takes place in a single day. (Some chapters [16, 17, 19–22] contain elements related to more than one strand or narrative line.) Now a successful lawyer in the United States, where she has lived since the age of fourteen, she returns to see her aging and ailing father, Agustín Cabral, who had once served in the inner circle of the dictatorial regime. Once again Vargas Llosa is building suspense, for the reader is not aware of the exact source of her trauma until the scene where she is raped by the decrepit dictator at the age of fourteen. This scene is the moment of most intense personal experience of the novel, the work’s most memorable moment, or what Vargas Llosa would identify as the “crater” of the reading experience.
For many scholars and critics, the publication of La fiesta del Chivo represented Vargas Llosa’s return to his writing of the 1960s. Indeed, this voluminous novel about a dictator figure harkens back to Conversación en La Catedral. For Gene Bell-Villada, La fiesta del Chivo is a technical tour de force on a grand scale, a return to those vast “totalizing” novels of the 1960s.17 Bell-Villada asserts that Vargas Llosa takes an enormous risk by attempting to paint a dictator from up close, albeit in third person, yet succeeds in doing so with mastery and flair. Bell-Villada’s main point, however, is that the lifeblood of Flaubert—rebellion, vulgarity, violence, sex—is to be found in La fiesta del Chivo.
Griffin also heralds the return to the dictator novel for Vargas Llosa, and later points out how the novel not only manipulates history, but also invites the reader to meditate on how much she can discover about the past, especially when it involves a dictator who controlled all sources of information.18 In addition, Griffin offers an incisive understanding of Vargas Llosa’s presentation of history in this novel: history does not follow a predetermined or logical course; rather, events are presented not as the inevitable outcome of rational causes, but as the result of such causality combined with chance and irrationality. I concur with this assessment, and would point out that this presentation of history was initially explored, perhaps to a lesser degree, in La guerra del fin del mundo (with emphasis on the irrationality), Historia de Mayta (chance and irrationality), and Lituma en los Andes (irrationality).
The deliberately suppressive omniscient narrator in La fiesta del Chivo leaves the reader to resolve exactly what Urania’s return to Santo Domingo really means. She attempts to improve her state of mind by this encounter with her traumatic past, and seems to complete her stay with at least a better understanding of what had transpired.
This twenty-first-century novel, as similar as it may appear to be to his total novels of the 1960s, also offers some novelties among Vargas Llosa’s work. Traumatized characters appear throughout his fiction, but this is the first time a major character, the protagonist, is a trauma victim and trauma is the primary subject of the novel. Finally, decades after being transfixed by reading about a female protagonist created by Flaubert, Vargas Llosa had written his own Madame Bovary.
. . .
With El paraíso en la otra esquina, Vargas Llosa constructs a plot around a familiar structure, but as in Lituma en los Andes and La fiesta del Chivo, there are some new, twenty-first-century twists. This is a lengthy (485 pages in the original edition in Spanish) and reasonably complex novel consisting of twenty-two chapters. In this story of two historical characters, the Peruvian-French Flora Tristán and the French artist Paul Gauguin, Vargas Llosa once again employs the narrative strategy that he has successfully exploited since his early fiction—the communicating vessels. In El paraíso, the chapters alternate between Flora Tristán’s story and Paul Gauguin’s story, beginning with hers. In accordance with the strategy of the communicating vessels, one story line affects our understanding of the other, and vice versa.
In the initial chapters, the characterization of Flora underscores her utopian social and political ideals as she articulates them in the early nineteenth century. She campaigns for workers’ rights and an egalitarian society, as well as equality for women. In the even-numbered chapters, Paul Gauguin initially seems to be the opposite, for he lives in the world of business. When he abandons his position in business for his passion—painting—he seems distant and divorced from the social world and, consequently, unrelated to Flora’s ideals. As Gauguin’s story unfolds, however, his passion for painting takes him to the island of Tahiti, where he attempts to construct not only a new, non-European life, but his own personal utopia of art and sex. In chapter 14, slightly more than midway in the novel, Gauguin is actively involved in local politics, and his fanatic campaign against Chinese immigration resounds of Flora’s campaigns several decades earlier. By this point in his life, at age fifty-two, Gauguin is becoming increasingly dedicated to mysticism, and his painting becomes progressively more mystic. This search for mystic experience is yet another form of utopia in the novel.
In El paraíso en la otra esquina, Vargas Llosa also uses the technique of communicating vessels within individual chapters, moving back and forth between two settings, to enrich each other. For example, chapter 13, titled “La monja Gutiérrez,” begins with Flora Tristán in the French city of Toulon in 1844 but then, with an analepsis, the deliberately suppressive omniscient narrator moves quickly ten years back in time to Arequipa in southern Peru when she was there to witness, among other things, a civil war. Vargas Llosa achieves several effects with the use of this narrative technique. On the one hand, it underscores the similarities between nineteenth-century France and Latin America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The political chaos of nineteenth-century France is comparable to the political chaos of Latin America in both centuries.
The suspense created in the several story lines of La fiesta del Chivo was one of the novelist’s important achievements. Again in El paraíso en la otra esquina Vargas Llosa is using suspense to create and maintain reader interest. Vargas Llosa typically intensifies the drama as the plot develops, and in this novel, as in the two that follow, the presence of the sexual adds to this. Approximately three-quarters into the novel—in the sixteenth of twenty-two chapters—Vargas Llosa informs the reader that the natives of Marquis are more spontaneous and free than the Tahitians.19 In effect, Vargas Llosa is promising the reader more sex than in the previous chapters. In addition, the novel’s structure creates the expectation of the development and unfolding of an aesthetic pattern: as the novel progresses, the reader discovers an increasing number of connections between the narrative line of Flora Tristán’s story and the narrative line of Paul Gauguin’s.
The initial parallels in the plot have to do with the respective sex lives of Paul Gauguin and Flora Tristán. In the novel’s early chapters, both characters experience violent, dysfunctional sexual experiences: Gauguin sodomizes an adolescent girl in Tahiti in chapter 2, and in chapter 3 Flora Tristán experiences her first sex with her husband, André Chazal, as a form of brutal and animalistic copulation.
In general, however, the sexual experience of the two is developed through contrast—the use of opposites—and other aspects of their lives through similarity. Thus, Gauguin’s sexual activity is frequent and exuberant, as he engages in a series of sexual relations, throughout the novel, with adolescent girls. In most of the novel, Flora Tristán, by contrast, seemingly lives ignoring the sexual, rejecting potential suitors or sexual partners as if all were as brutish as her ex-husband. Eventually, Paul Gauguin and Flora Tristán come to share a common interest: gay sex. From his early experiences in Tahiti, Gauguin is interested in how the natives blur gender boundaries; in the fourth chapter, he observes a young boy whom the narrator describes as follows: “He was a male, close to that hazy boundary at which Tahitians became taota vahine, or androgenes, hermaphrodites, that third, in-between gender, which the Maori, unlike Europeans, still accepted among themselves with the naturalness of pagan civilizations, behind the backs of the missionaries and ministers.”20 In the novel’s early chapters, Flora Tristán avoids the topic of sex, even though some of the utopian thinkers whom she admires, such as Charles Fourier, articulate elaborate theories about how the sex lives of citizens should be organized in their ideal societies. Despite her avoidance of things sexual in her own personal life, she encourages a group of rebellious priests to break the celibacy rule (chapter 5).
The sexual experiences of Paul Gauguin and Flora Tristán lead to parallel episodes of violence (early in the novel, chapter 6) in different times and places. Gauguin takes his lover Annahi on a trip to Bretagne (the Brittany region of France) and in the town of Pont-Aven they are violently assaulted by locals, who break Gauguin’s leg. In a flashback to her marriage with Chazal (in chapter 7), violence takes place when he attacks Flora Tristán verbally; she responds by hitting him with a ceramic plate, and then he physically abuses her. At the level of plot, the novel uses both stories to underline just how violent nineteenth-century French society was.
In El paraíso en la otra esquina, the above-mentioned passage in which Chazal and Flora perform acts of violence against each other is one memorably intense moment, or crater, in this novel. This is a key passage in that it explains the depth of the trauma that Flora deals with over the remainder of her life; it does much to explain her feminism, which was pioneering and radical for the time.
Finally, Vargas Llosa uses his technique of communicating vessels to tell two parallel stories of survival: Flora travels to Peru to recoup a supposed inheritance in an attempt to ensure her economic survival but fails to secure any funds, and thus is forced to live a precarious financial life; Gauguin seemingly passes his entire life going from one financial crisis to another, and during most of his time in the Asian Pacific he scrapes by with very little money. By chapter 14, Gauguin looks much like Flora the political activist, calling a town meeting of the town council to discuss his imagined “invasion” of the Chinese.
If Urania of La fiesta del Chivo was Vargas Llosa’s first Madame Bovary figure, Flora Tristán is his second. Now, in the twenty-first century, the writer who had been attacked as a misogynist when he published Pantaleón y las visitadoras is finally being associated closely with female figures, with whom he had aligned himself psychologically since his early twenties. On the surface, the aggressive and often masculine Flora Tristán might seem like a Madame Bovary figure. Tristán’s traumatic experience with domestic violence, however, and her distant subsequent relationship with her brutish husband make her more obviously comparable to Madame Bovary.
As in Lituma en los Andes, in El paraíso Vargas Llosa makes use of his well-rehearsed modernist strategies, including tightly conceived structures based on principles of communicating vessels, but not rigidly so. In these two twenty-first-century novels, Vargas Llosa eschews the rigidly organized and predictable structures of novels such as La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral (on which topic see part III). This is the twenty-first-century novelist with his high modernist project, who has written through the postmodern and whose modernism is tempered in Lituma en los Andes and El paraíso en la otra esquina.
In these two novels, Vargas Llosa is in the process of rethinking his utopian ideals of earlier years. In Lituma en los Andes, he presents the horrific results of the armed guerrilla warfare initiated in the 1960s. In El paraíso, Vargas Llosa is more explicitly critical of the very roots of utopian thought in the nineteenth century. His ridicule of Flora is a critique of all twentieth-century utopians, from the international Left to Latin America’s armed guerrilla groups, to himself as a former supporter of these groups.
. . .
In the novel Travesuras de la niña mala Vargas Llosa offers a variety of plots for his different types of readers. In this sense, as one of his entertainments, Travesuras is a throwback to La tía Julia y el escribidor, with its complex set of readers and writers implied in the text. To some degree, much of Vargas Llosa’s writing is about readers and writers, and Travesuras is among the works that deal with this topic most directly and elaborately. This is a novel without an omniscient narrator of any sort.
For the reader of commercial literature (and Vargas Llosa has sold several of his entertainments in the mass markets of commercial literature), Travesuras can be read as a love story, albeit a pathetic one. In this story, the narrator-protagonist, Ricardo Somocurcio, falls madly in love with an adolescent girl, who uses multiple names from when the two of them are adolescents, and throughout their adult lives. Ricardothe-adolescent lives in the upper-middle-class Miraflores neighborhood of Lima, and there meets the even younger adolescent “Chilean” girl (as she first identifies herself), who charms him and all of his peers with her coquettish ways and her cute Chilean accent. This initial adolescent crush ends with an entertaining surprise at the end of the first chapter: the supposed Chilean girl is not really of Chilean nationality at all, nor does she actually live in ritzy Miraflores: she comes from a working-class neighborhood of Lima and is Peruvian. Then the plot jumps forward in time to Paris, where Ricardo is beginning to see his lifelong dream enacted, for he has the opportunity to live in the French capital. He works as a translator and soon encounters, by chance, the now–young adult who was the coquettish adolescent “Chilean” in Miraflores. Now, however, she self-identifies as a “revolutionary” on her way to Havana, via Paris, to learn armed guerrilla warfare tactics in Cuba. In her first of several opportunistic marriages, she weds a Cuban diplomat, thus affording herself not only an improved material life, but access to the upper range of the social order in Paris. During this still relatively early period of their respective lives and relationship, Ricardo already recognizes a key issue for the development of the plot: it is both his good fortune and his bad luck that he would always love this woman, the Chilean now disguised as an upper-class Peruvian in Paris. In the late 1960s (about the time, in real history, of the 1968 military coup of General Velasco, which overthrew the government of Belaúnde Terry), she steals funds from her husband’s bank accounts and disappears from Paris.
At this point in the novel (chapter 3), the political revolution in Paris and Latin America becomes less interesting for Ricardo than the cultural revolution in the London of the late 1960s. (In this sense, the seemingly “apolitical” Ricardo is something of a utopian.) Thus, he begins frequent stays in Great Britain, while at the same time maintaining his permanent residence in France. In London he connects with an old friend from Peru and, in turn, with the Bad Girl, who has once again mutated, and manages to present herself to British society, convincingly, as an upper-class Mexican. In a week-long return to his sexual relationship with the Bad Girl in London, Ricardo lives what he claims to be the happiest days of his life.
Vargas Llosa pushes the limits of credibility of the plot (even for a piece with little pretension of being anything beyond entertainment), creating one of the novel’s most memorable moments—an intense crater—in chapter 4. Here the Peruvian Bad Girl is in Japan, living with a unique and wealthy Japanese entrepreneur, Fakuda, who uses her for his sexual pleasure, as a voyeur, by having her perform sexual scenes merely for the sake of his pleasure in observing. Ricardo manages to somehow locate her in Japan and has an apparently passionate sexual encounter with her (an intense crater), only to realize, at the end, that the real pleasure was neither his nor the Bad Girl’s, but the voyeur’s, for the whole scene had been orchestrated by him.
Back in Paris, in chapter 5, Ricardo-the-narrator relates two stories. At this point, Ricardo is feeling old at the age of forty-seven, and he tells the story of two recoveries from childhood trauma. On the one hand, he tells the story of yet another of Vargas Llosa’s traumatized characters—a young mute boy who cannot speak because of his trauma. By means of therapy, he does eventually speak, uttering sentences in Spanish and French, and later learning English when the family moves to New Jersey. On the other hand, the Bad Girl, now an aging senior citizen in Paris, receives therapeutic treatment for her trauma in the form of psychiatric analysis. She relates to Ricardo, who now confesses that she is the great love of his life, more details of her recent life: she had been imprisoned in Lagos in the next stage of her identity change, and she had initially claimed to have been raped in prison. As her story from Japan and Lagos develops more, however, it becomes apparent that she is still suffering the trauma of her sexual relationship with Fakuda, who had destroyed her psychologically in Japan, through a variety of forms of exotic sexual abuse. In Paris, and in a seemingly miraculous transformation, she assumes a more intimate role than ever with Ricardo, now approaching him, for the first time, with the desire only to have a relationship exclusively with him.
With her aging and growing self-awareness, the Bad Girl discovers a facet of her personality that has interested Vargas Llosa throughout his career: the value of intense personal experience (or what Franco has also called “privatized experience”). The Bad Girl states that by living life as she has chosen (a bizarre series of events with multiple personalities), she experiences it more “intensely.”21 With her aging, her newfound self-awareness, and her new closeness with Ricardo, he finds her beautiful in a different way, unlike the raw sexual attraction of before. Now, he perceives a new “stability” in her and a “permanence” that he had never felt before. With her aging, she even appears to Ricardo to be timeless. On the surface, the relationship between Ricardo and the Bad Girl seems to be finally reaching a maturity heretofore unattainable: they have discovered a new intimacy and Ricardo has discovered a new beauty in her old age. Nevertheless, at the end of chapter 5, once again, as always, she disappears.
In the novel’s final two chapters, some of the mystery of the Bad Girl’s persona unravels. In a trip to Lima, Ricardo learns of her true socioeconomic background. Her real name was Otilia, and she had been reared in impoverished shantytowns in Lima’s port of Callao. Back in Europe, but now in Madrid, Ricardo loses the Bad Girl one last time. She and Ricardo had married, but she could not tolerate the “routine” and “mediocrity” of the marriage. At the end of the novel, Ricardo encounters the now-aged, decrepit Bad Girl in a café in the working-class Lavapiés neighborhood of Madrid.
Filled with the violence and entertaining plot line of the novel of chivalry, as well as numerous sex scenes, Travesuras de la niña mala is Vargas Llosa’s most elaborate and accomplished entertainment. This is perhaps because, on the surface, it shares so many qualities with his entertainments of the 1970s (Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La tía Julia y el escribidor)—above all, the light humor. Nevertheless, this twenty-first-century novel explores more human perversity than any of the earlier entertainments. It is also one of Vargas Llosa’s most enigmatic and intriguing works. In a provocative reading of this novel, Efraín Kristal suggests that “it becomes a meditation on the effects of trauma.”22 He makes this observation in the context of the Bad Girl’s extremely impoverished childhood and the sexual violence that she suffered while living in squalor. Kristal’s follow-up to this reading of Travesuras de la niña mala as a meditation on trauma is that “this theme offers a key to Vargas Llosa’s entire ouevre.”23 Indeed, this novel plays out obsessively Vargas Llosa’s traumas in ways closer and deeper to the author’s own psyche than perhaps any of his other works.
Both main characters, Ricardo and the Bad Girl, are often distant alter egos of Vargas Llosa, and sometimes surprisingly close to the writer himself. Among the superficial similarities, Ricardo lives in Lima, Paris, London, and Madrid at approximately the same times that Vargas Llosa did. Ricardo’s observations about political events in Peru, from afar, thus correspond to Vargas Llosa’s own life experience, covering a period roughly from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. In the twenty-first century, Vargas Llosa writes more closely and more openly to his own trauma.
When Vargas Llosa lived in Paris, writing La ciudad y los perros and La casa verde, his economic survival depended to a large degree on teaching and translation. Of course, these were also years in which Mario Vargas Llosa was a visible public intellectual on the Left, publishing essays in defense of armed leftist guerrillas and the Cuban Revolution, and in defense of individuals associated with these causes. In Paris and in Caracas, Vargas Llosa took public stances defending these causes. His literary alter ego, Ricardo, on the other hand, is seemingly “apolitical.”24 As a reader and translator of literature, and professional translator in general, he lives a life in Paris similar to Vargas Llosa’s imaginary life if he never had become a professional writer in Paris. Thus, the Vargas Llosa reader is left to observe and speculate, as Vargas Llosa has in several essays, about the mediocre life of the failed Peruvian and Latin American writer.
Ricardo also shares with Vargas Llosa an escape into a special complex world. One of Ricardo’s most difficult undertakings, as a translator, is the study of the Russian language, a metaphor for Vargas Llosa’s parallel exercise in complexity—the construction of La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral in the 1960s. For Ricardo, this entrance into the intricate linguistic and cultural world of the Russian language and literature is comparable to Vargas Llosa’s psychological survival in Paris by delving into not the hermetic Russian language, but the complex novels that he wrote.
Many of these parallels between Ricardo and Mario Vargas Llosa—two characters fully enthusiastic about living in Paris in the 1960s—are relatively obvious. To think of the Bad Girl as an alter ego of the author Mario Vargas Llosa, however, is less obvious, and initially counterintuitive. Only this type of thinking will lead the reader to a full understanding, however, of Kristal’s well-conceived observation that Travesuras is really a meditation on trauma. Both Mario Vargas Llosa and the Bad Girl were victims of trauma, as children, in circumstances beyond their control. In both cases, they compensate for a world that they find unbearable (or “insufficient,” to use Vargas Llosa’s term) by creating lies and fictions. Vargas Llosa, in essays and interviews, often refers to fictions as lies; the Bad Girl lies constantly to create fictions that she plays out not by means of creative writing, but as an actress who lives the dramas and melodramas that she creates. Her cruelty is simply her way of surviving in a world that she perceives, as a traumatized victim, as a chaotic jungle from which she obsessively attempts to escape by means of her erotic encounters and cruelty. Vargas Llosa’s chaotic jungle is the Amazon jungle of Peru that he evokes repeatedly in his fiction, from La casa verde through El hablador to El sueño del celta, in novels that, eventually, lead the characters either to their death within the jungle (Fushía) or to find harmony in the jungle (Saúl) or out of the jungle (many of his other characters).
Vargas Llosa the author, of course, has also played the Bad Girl’s role in his personal and political life in Latin America as a kind of “bad boy.” As an adolescent, he was the “bad boy” of his family who eloped with his aunt, contrary to his parents’ wishes, and married her. Then, as the political rebel and revolutionary, he was the Peruvian “bad boy” of the 1960s. Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, he was the Latin American “bad boy” among leftist intellectuals in Latin America, of whom he was publicly critical. Thus, in many ways throughout his life, Vargas Llosa has been, in his way, the intellectual and writer who has played out much of the role of the Bad Girl in Travesuras. What the male writer and the female character share in their background is childhood abuse and trauma.
On the surface, Travesuras might itself be considered one of the most “apolitical” of the author’s novels. The sometimes politically simplistic and often politically indifferent Ricardo, after all, has only two real passions (and neither is politics): the Bad Girl and Paris. Thus, Kristal’s assertion that Ricardo is “apolitical” has some validity. Nevertheless, there are some political elements to this novel. The appearance of the Bad Girl early in the novel, preparing to be trained in Cuba as a guerrilla fighter, exposes one ugly side of some political activity, including on the left: blatant and cheap opportunism. As minor as this anecdote in the life of the Bad Girl may be, it represents Vargas Llosa’s political critique.
In reality, Ricardo is essentially a utopian, but weak and ineffective in actualizing any of his utopian desires. A sympathizer of his politically active Peruvian friends, he sits passively in Paris, too enthralled with his imagined Paris—still very much an addict to Benjamin’s Paris as cultural capital of Europe, even though Ricardo has not read The Arcades Project. Less a totally apolitical being, Ricardo is an indifferent, weak political being. For example, he is strongly attracted to the cultural revolution centered in London in the late 1960s, but would never think seriously of actually joining this revolution any more than he was capable of giving up his romanticized Paris for guerrilla life in Peru. Ricardo is something of a utopian, but a failed utopian.
. . .
El sueño del celta (2010) is Vargas Llosa’s revisiting, some four decades later, of some of the issues and settings initially explored in La casa verde, as well as in El paraíso en la otra esquina. It is the fifth of Vargas Llosa’s twenty-first-century meditations on trauma.
The novel deals with the European use of slaves and the colonial presence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Africa and Latin America. In La casa verde, Vargas Llosa had used two settings—the Amazon jungle and Piura—to tell what became, in the end, one story; in El sueño del celta, the settings in the Congo and the Putu-mayo region all become part of a larger picture of European colonization in the Congo, Peru, and Ireland. It is the story of the historical figure Roger Casement, whose travels and adventures are the focus of the plot. A novel completed and in press when the Nobel Prize announcement came forth on October 7, 2010, this is the fifth of Vargas Llosa’s ambitious and lengthy (454 page) total novels, after La casa verde, Conversación en La Catedral, La guerra del fin del mundo, and La fiesta del Chivo.
El sueño del celta consists of an epigraph and four parts identified in the text as “The Congo” (El Congo), “Amazonia” (La Amazonía), “Ireland” (Irlanda), and an “Epilogue” (Epílogo). As an emissary of Great Britain, Casement travels to the Congo and to the Amazon region to investigate claims of human rights abuses, particularly of workers in the rubber industry in the Congo and the Peruvian Amazon. Years later, upon returning to Ireland, Casement becomes a leader in the growing nationalist movement toward autonomy and independence in Ireland. An enigmatic political figure, Casement becomes even more controversial in early twentieth-century England, a period when homosexuality was a serious social stigma.
El sueño del celta opens with an epigraph citing a text by the turn-of-the-century Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó, Motivos de Proteo: “Each one of us is, successively, not one but many. And these successive personalities that emerge one from the other tend to present the strangest, most astonishing contrasts among themselves.”25
This quote from Rodó is a kind of theory of human personality that appears in several of Vargas Llosa’s novels, but underlies in a consistent and significant way La casa verde, El paraíso en la otra esquina, Travesuras de la niña mala, and El sueño del celta. In La casa verde, Bonifacia is an innocent and fearful adolescent native American in the Amazon; in the city of Piura, she is a seemingly different person and personality, and in Piura she is not known as Bonifacia, but rather as “Wildflower” (“La Selvática”). Similarly, the character whom we know as Lituma, a military figure in the Amazon, is the Sergeant in Piura. In Vargas Llosa’s fiction, human character is not stable and fixed, but fluid and changing according to the social milieu.
The problematic and ambiguous figure of Roger Casement does not undergo name changes in El sueño del celta, but he is even less fixed in identity than those changed names—from Bonifacia of La casa verde to Koké in El paraíso en la otra esquina and the Bad Girl in Travesuras. In the region then known as the Belgian Congo, Casement is the young and idealist diplomat assigned as the British consul in the city of Boma. In the novel’s second and third parts, Casement’s identity mutates into that of the experienced rational human being and highly respected diplomat in the Amazon region; then near the end of the novel, in Europe, he is portrayed as less rational and the fanatic nationalist. Brief allusions to his sexuality in the early parts of the novel become direct descriptions of gay encounters in the latter parts of the work.
After the opening epigraph, the novel’s first of four parts, “The Congo,” consists of 124 pages (pages 13 to 137 in Spanish) and contains seven chapters. The first chapter, identified with Roman numeral “I,” is the briefest chapter of the novel, consisting of a five-page (pages 13 to 17) introduction to Roger Casement, not in the Congo (as indicated in the title, “El Congo”) but in Pentonville Prison in Great Britain. The basic “present” of this “Congo” section is late nineteenth-century Congo; this first chapter is a prolepsis to 1916 England, where Roger Casement pleads for clemency in the face of execution for treason. His diaries, containing scandalous anecdotes of supposed gay encounters with young boys, are circulating in the public sphere. This chapter in Pentonville Prison is the direct forerunner of the novel’s last chapter, in which Casement is executed for having collaborated with the Germans in World War I and actively campaigning to create an Irish Brigade among prisoners held in Germany to attack England.
The remainder of part I alternates between the Congo and Pentonville Prison. Chapter 2 begins with Roger Casement awaiting his death in Pentonville Prison, but then moves back in time to his childhood. From this point in chapter 2 the novel develops in a generally linear fashion to cover Casement’s life. Born in 1864 in the suburbs of Dublin, he was reared with three older siblings in the Anglican Church of Ireland, even though his mother was Catholic. One of Vargas Llosa’s lifetime “demons” (demonios), the Catholic church, appears intermittently throughout the novel and at the end, as he faces his hanging. Casement converts to Catholicism.
Vargas Llosa portrays Casement’s father as a strong figure, in several ways similar to his own father, Ernesto Vargas. Both are adventuresome men who travel to far-off places. In the case of Ernesto Vargas, he traveled from Peru to Argentina, where he joined the merchant marines. Casement’s father liked to read books about distant and exotic places, and served as a captain in the military mission in Afghanistan.
Casement’s childhood, as described in chapter 2, was traumatic: he lost his mother at the age of nine, an age similar to when Mario Vargas Llosa symbolically lost his mother to his returning father. Casement’s loss is described as an extremely difficult and traumatic one; then, at age twelve, he lost his father to tuberculosis, leaving the young boy an orphan. After the loss of his parents, Casement’s youth, according to Vargas Llosa’s fictional account, is strikingly similar to Vargas Llosa’s: Casement lived in solitude and isolated himself in his own private world of literature and fantasy, reading books about distant, exotic places and writing poetry. Struck by the story of Livingston’s disappearance in Africa, however, Casement abandoned school at the age of fifteen to join the merchant marines. At the end of chapter 2, Casement departs for Africa on a mission to “modernize” it.
Chapter 3 returns to the original setting of chapter 1: Roger Casement is in Pentonville Prison facing death for treason while debates over the morality of the death penalty are raging in London. As Casement receives a visit from his cousin Gee, he reflects on the irony of the fact that he had once favored the death penalty for the Peruvian rubber baron Julio César Arana. In his final days, he is a pathetic and obsessive character who writes poetry to provide solace in this dismal and demoralizing setting. As his life ends, he is portrayed as a radical nationalist, obviously not a position that Vargas Llosa views in a positive way.
Roger Casement begins his life as an adventurer in chapter 4, assuming his duties in Boma. Casement meets Henry Morton Stanley. In the Congo, Casement observes European colonial efforts at imposing post-Enlightenment European “progress,” and the schemes to convert the African “barbarians” (“bárbaros”) into “modern” and “educated” human beings (“seres modernos e instruídos”).26
Casement’s African experience in the Congo is completed in chapters 5, 6, and 7 of the novel. In chapter 5 the reader sees Vargas Llosa revealing Casement’s interactions with European celebrity intellectuals such as Joseph Conrad and W. B. Yeats. While he is a prisoner of the British government, Casement’s case gains the attention of Irish intellectuals such as Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, and Robert Cunningham Graham. In some ways, the reader cannot resist the observation that Vargas Llosa would be sympathetic to Casement: a well-intentioned, progressive intellectual of his times, and lifetime crusader against the abuse of power who ends up being politically defamed in the local press and fundamentally abandoned by many of the most prominent writers of his time. The basic situation of Casement in the Pentonville Prison offers several parallels to Vargas Llosa’s life of that two-decade period from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s when, after being a highly visible public intellectual on the Left, he was the most harshly criticized of the writers of the Boom by the Left.
The sixth chapter of El sueño del celta is a flashback to Casement’s Congo experience, and his perception of the imbecility of the world (“imbecilidad del mundo” [El sueño, 88]). This is Casement’s opinion, but, again, the Vargas Llosa reader cannot resist hearing the double voice of Vargas Llosa’s essays in which he uses some of the same language about some intellectuals. In this chapter, which takes place in the Congo in 1903–1904, Casement begins to establish the connections between the colonial status of the Congo and the colonial status of Ireland, connections that will, in the end, lead to his demise. In the early twentieth century, then, Casement begins his transformation to a nationalist, a change that Vargas Llosa would consider ill-conceived. For the Peruvian writer, nationalism is a mistaken form of identity for world citizens from all nations.
The last section of the first part, chapter 7, ends in Pentonville Prison once again. Casement has reached a psychological state in which he is focusing on the “stupidity” (“estupidez”) of “human nature” (“la naturaleza humana”) (El sueño, 137). As he becomes increasingly aware of his imminent death, he views life in general as a “trap” (trampa) (El sueño, 137).
The roots of part II of El sueño del celta, “Amazonía,” go back to La casa verde and Vargas Llosa’s 1958 trip to the Amazon. It was during this trip that Vargas Llosa discovered and first directly experienced the part of Peru that served as a setting for La casa verde and for part II of El sueño del celta: the Peruvian Amazon jungle and the exploitation of natural resources (rubber) and human beings (indigenous peoples) in the early twentieth century by the Peruvian magnate Julio César Arana. In the first chapter of part II, Casement arrives in 1910 in the major city of the Amazon basin, Iquitos. In this chapter, however, the narrator also takes us back to Ireland and the rise of Irish nationalism in the early twentieth century. He recounts, for example, the 1904 founding of Sinn Féin by Arthur Griffith. When Casement arrives in the region, he leads a commission on behalf of the British government to investigate allegations of ill-treatment and abuse by Arana’s bi-national British-Peruvian company. Casement first discovers that Arana is the de facto leader of the region—a caudillo figure to whom local government officials, such as the prefect, report. Casement also experiences life in the jungle as “barbarism” (barbarie), given the multiple forums of “barbarism” that he observes in the Amazon under the rule of Arana. As in La casa verde and as in the history of much of Latin America to varying degrees, the caudillo works in collaboration with the government and the Church. In El sueño del celta, Father Urrutia collaborates with the government in covering up crimes against the indigenous people.
A writer figure, Benjamin Saldaña Roca, appears in chapter 8 and denounces Arana’s exploitive operation in the newspaper Truth in 1909. One result of this investigative reporting is that the writer is kidnapped, tied up, and thrown into a river to be devoured by piranhas. Another writer figure Vargas Llosa reinvents is a North American engineer, Walter Hardenburg, who also writes against the abuses in the Amazon. In this chapter the reader discovers a situation in the Peruvian Amazon of the early twentieth century that is a mirror image of what had been seen in the African Congo: the systematic use and abuse of slaves by rubber barons in Africa is identical to the system of slavery operated by the rubber baron in Peru. The juxtaposition of these two slave stories represents Vargas Llosa’s use of communicating vessels: each story is enhanced by the presence of the other; the presence of the two stories makes a larger, more universal statement than the telling of only one local case of abuse might achieve.
By the end of chapter 8, the reader, like Roger Casement, is exhausted by the depth and breadth of human abuse as it is depicted in Africa and Latin America in the early twentieth century. Vargas Llosa’s approach to the total novel and to violence is comparable in many ways to the experience of the total novel in Latin America since the 1960s, from García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 in the twenty-first century.
The second chapter of the Amazonía section in El sueño del celta, chapter 9, moves forward in time: the reader is transported from the Peruvian Amazon to Pentonville Prison in London. At this point, El sueño del celta is firmly historical, with references to the Irish uprising of April 21, 1916, and the series of events involving Casement’s work with the German government to secure arms for the Irish nationalists. Along with La guerra del fin del mundo and La fiesta del Chivo, this is one of Vargas Llosa’s most historically based novels.
In chapter 9 Vargas Llosa delves more deeply into the complex and controversial personality of Roger Casement. While in prison, he embraces Catholicism at the same time that he experiences gay sexual fantasies related to sexual practices prohibited by the Church of the time. While in prison, he realizes his own innocence in trusting as many people as he had during his espionage scheme of working with Irish nationalists and the German army to secure arms for the nationalists. Perhaps his most innocent error was trusting his Norwegian colleague, Eivind, the person who had betrayed him to the British authorities.
. . .
Critical reception of El sueño del celta has been generally positive and has suggested ways in which this novel represents both continuity and novelty in Vargas Llosa’s total work. In her review of this novel, Liesl Schillinger delineates Vargas Llosa’s two chief modes of writing: “serious politico-historical novels” like La fiesta del Chivo and La guerra del fin del mundo and “sensual picaresques” like La tía Julia y el escribidor and Travesuras de la niña mala.27 According to this characterization of Vargas Llosa’s work, El sueño del celta clearly would be considered among those “serious” political-historical works. As a point of departure for discussing Vargas Llosa’s fiction, Schillinger’s dichotomy can be useful. I would maintain, however, that novels such as Travesuras de la niña mala and Pantaleón de las visitadoras are, indeed, “serious” works making important contributions to the sociopolitical dialogue in Peru and Latin America. Following Schillinger’s line of thought, then, I would distinguish between Vargas Llosa’s totalizing modernist project, which includes El sueño del celta, La fiesta del Chivo, La guerra del fin del mundo, Conversación en La Catedral, and La casa verde and the anti-totalizing entertainments, which includes the novels Travesuras de la niña mala, Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, La tía Julia y el escribidor, and Pantaleón y las visitadoras. The five latter can be read as light entertainments, but in all cases they also offer a “serious” thematic engagement for the reader.
Among these totalizing modernist novels, El sueño del celta is, indeed, his most serious political-historical work, and one of his most heavily historically documented novels. Beginning with Conrad’s abundant writing on Casement, Vargas Llosa used a substantive series of studies on Casement, as well as additional materials on the Irish uprising against the British during World War I.28 The result of this thorough research is a novel with encyclopedic detail; Schillinger also notes Vargas Llosa’s encyclopedic impulse: the action is organized by biographical milestones and itineraries, encyclopedically recapitulating Casement’s observations about “indescribable cruelties” which, as Schillinger correctly notes, Vargas Llosa describes effectively.29
This then is Vargas Llosa the totalizing modernist whose efforts in this direction began in the 1960s with La casa verde. The differences between La casa verde and El sueño del celta are also noteworthy. Both novels use the Amazon basin as one important setting, and a significant socioeconomic context for both works is the rubber industry of this region. In both cases, detailed descriptions of the jungle environment are provided by a novelist who characteristically shows the reader the minute details of each physical setting. Beyond these basic similarities, however, there are important differences. The most important difference is the historical detail offered in El sueño del celta. In La casa verde, the rubber industry is a background presence to Jum’s torture and related events, but without the historical details of the rubber industry ever being explained in the text. The reader is left to speculate, and in some ways the jungle setting is more mythical (in the Faulknerian mode) than historical. Now, in the twenty-first century, Vargas-Llosa-the-researcher leaves the mythical Faulknerian mode behind and directly unravels the ugly historical details of the rubber industry in the Amazon and in Africa. This encyclopedic style is also the impulse of the total novel unleashed. The twenty-first-century writer of the encyclopedic total novel no longer feels the need to be “universal” in the Faulknerian sense.
For Efraín Kristal, El sueño del celta offered Vargas Llosa the opportunity to “revisit the theme of transgression” from a perspective consistent with the writer’s “new conciliatory mood.”30 Kristal points out that the narrative frame of the novel is the relationship between Casement and his prison guard. Despite their opposing convictions on everything from politics to sexuality, the two men realize they share a sense of fatalism. Kristal points out that, in the end, Casement and the guard eventually are both stripped of their respective convictions, and left with a shared sense of emptiness.31 Life had lost its meaning for the guard when his son died fighting the Germans, and the jailer confesses that he almost committed suicide. For Kristal, Casement has become a nihilist who embraces no causes. Tellingly, Casement’s conversion to Catholicism near the end is similar to his experiences as a human rights activist and as a nationalist, for he rejects the meaningfulness of all three.
After reviewing Vargas Llosa’s fictionalization of Gauguin and Flora Tristán in El paraíso en la otra esquina and of Casement in El sueño del celta, Kristal concludes that Vargas Llosa’s most recent novels share in the assumption that the sources of human dissatisfaction with the here and now are intractable; that evil is a real preserve, generating a need for reconciliation among flawed human beings, an opening to love; and that transgression and rebellion are preconditions for spiritual intimations. Kristal also maintains that the “power” of Vargas Llosa’s fiction lies in its ability to “keep his readers unsettled by the imperfections of our world and riveted by the literary imagination, whether or not it can compensate for the insufficiencies of the here and now.”32
This informed reading by Kristal might be overreading with respect to the “love” and “spiritual intimations,” both of which are concepts articulated by fictional characters but more difficult to ascribe to the writer Mario Vargas Llosa. In reality, in the totality of Vargas Llosa’s twenty-first-century work, “love,” “spiritual intimations,” and the like are more negative than Kristal seems to imply. Vargas Llosa, although changed in some ways in the twenty-first century, is still skeptical. In the end, neither Gauguin, Flora, the Bad Girl, nor Casement are convincingly loving or spiritually motivated characters. The reader is left to question, for example, exactly what motivates them.
Kristal is more on the mark when referring to the “insufficiencies” that Vargas Llosa constantly and consistently sees in life, as noted in novels, essays, and interviews. In El sueño del celta and Vargas Llosa’s twenty-first-century writing in general, however, he has been consistent on this matter: reading and writing of literature are indeed the vehicles for dealing with the insufficiencies of life. Throughout his essays, and culminating in his Nobel lecture, Vargas Llosa makes this point often. In the conclusion of his Nobel lecture, he states: “That is why we have to continue dreaming, reading, and writing, the most effective way we have found to alleviate our mortal condition, to defeat the corrosion of time, and to transform the impossible into possibility” (“Por eso tenemos que seguir soñando, leyendo y escribiendo, la más eficaz manera que hayamos encontrado de aliviar nuestra condición perecedera, de derrotar a la carcoma del tiempo y de convertir en posible lo imposible”).
CONCLUSION
In these five twenty-first-century novels the reader encounters a major modernist writer and a trauma victim. One of Vargas Llosa’s central interests is the complexity of human beings as individuals and as a part of collectives we call “society” and the “nation.” In El sueño del celta this complexity of the individual human being is evoked initially in the quotation from Rodó: “Each one of us is, successively, not one but many.” This basic idea has been a virtual credo for Vargas Llosa since the 1960s—a cornerstone of La casa verde—but never before had the author taken one historical character and dedicated an entire novel to the exploration of this concept and this character. In this sense, El sueño del celta is a first and special type of novel in Vargas Llosa’s oeuvre.
Conversación en La Catedral has the historical figure of Odría as an important character, and La fiesta del Chivo has Trujillo as a prominent one. In neither novel, however, is the admittedly important historical figure the main focus: in Conversación en La Catedral Odría is a shadowy background force that affects the actual protagonist, Santiago Zavala, and a plethora of other characters, in a negative way. In La fiesta del Chivo, Trujillo is more present and developed than Odría, but the protagonist is actually Urania, the one who suffers the most from the abusive power of the regime. With El sueño del celta, for the first time in Vargas Llosa’s work, the historical figure is both the central figure and the protagonist, who is also the most developed character. In this significant way the twenty-first-century Vargas Llosa distinguishes himself from the twentieth-century authors of the Boom.
Indeed, Roger Casement embodies the complexities and ambiguities that make him the ideal material for a modernist writer such as Vargas Llosa to explore, interrogate, and, eventually, reinvent. For this task of re-creating his fictional Roger Casement, Vargas Llosa exploits a full range of his well-practiced strategies. The major strategy, as briefly discussed, is the use of communicating vessels: Casement is presented in an external manner in his geographical settings of Africa, Latin America, and Europe; he is presented internally in Pentonville Prison. In the external mode, the omniscient narrator, functioning as the deliberately suppressive narrator, is effective in deliberately not clarifying the ambiguities that are necessary for the text. This applies to the case of Roger Casement’s sexual orientation and his actual sexual behavior. Given the lack of a fully omnicommunicative omniscient narrator, the reader can never fully ascertain what Casement’s sexual orientation is and, even more so, to what degree his highly erotic encounters with young boys might be “real” (within the context of the “real” of the fictional world of El sueño del celta).
Even more external and distant than the deliberately suppressive omniscient narrator are the multiple characters and texts that contribute to the characterization of Casement. The various intellectuals and nationalists who embrace Casement’s personal and nationalistic cause or distance themselves from it, for example, provide an external view of Casement as a social human being. One of the most intriguing anecdotes of the novel, in this context, is the behavior of Joseph Conrad, a writer who had befriended Casement in the Congo, who seemed to support his lifetime human rights campaign, but who inexplicably declined the opportunity to support Casement when he was facing the death sentence. In some passages, Vargas Llosa employs a narrative style learned from Flaubert—free indirect style—in which the narrator is technically in third person, but imitates the language and thought of characters, usually Casement.
These five twenty-first-century novels are among Vargas Llosa’s most engaging and compelling books for several reasons. First, at this stage in his fiction-writing career, this fundamentally and deeply modernist novelist writes in a manner still tempered by his lifelong modernist project and postmodern exercises, but in ways beyond standard modernism. That is, he resists the need to be as systematic and rigid, the temptation to be flashy with narrative technique, and the tendency to be extremely complex. In this sense, by the twenty-first century this Nobel laureate is truly a modern master.
Second, Vargas Llosa creates strong plots, as well as compelling and memorable scenes in each of these five novels, scenes that he would identify as “craters.” These are elements of Vargas Llosa’s privileging of individual, private experience both for his characters and for his readers. Franco discusses the lack of sense of comunitas; Vargas Llosa maintains that the act of telling a story of deeply personal experience is essential to being human. As a lengthy meditation on trauma, these five novels go to the core of human experience on an individual level. In these twenty-first-century novels, Vargas Llosa fictionalizes a series of traumatized characters unlike any of his twentieth-century portrayals: three women (Urania, Flora, the Bad Girl) and a sexually ambiguous but probably gay male (Roger Casement). In the twenty-first century, as suggested earlier, Vargas Llosa writes the closest to his own trauma and more openly about it than he ever had before.
Third, Vargas Llosa explores complex feelings, themes, and political debates, now after decades of not only writing fiction, but also acting in the political sphere as a public intellectual. In this sphere, his five twenty-first-century novels are noteworthy components of the total work of a public intellectual who, like Fuentes and García Márquez, has an overriding belief that the exercise of literature and culture still plays a positive role in progressive change in society. If an implicit belief in post-Enlightenment Anglo-American society is that reason, education, and science are cornerstones for human progress, for Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and García Márquez these foundations are to be found in literature and culture.
More specifically, Vargas Llosa offers reasons in these novels to be relatively optimistic and pessimistic about the power and efficacy of human reason, imaginative literature (“creative writing”), and culture (i.e., “high culture”). Novels such as Lituma en los Andes and El sueño del celta certainly offer reasons to be pessimistic; the main characters at the end of both of these novels might appropriately be described as nihilists. In addition, the main characters in El paraíso and Travesuras, in the end, are pathetic. In the face of the setbacks, defeats, and even deaths of so many key characters, Vargas Llosa offers not exactly hope or optimism. Rather, traumatized and suffering human beings, such as Urania, the Bad Girl, and Roger Casement survive by means of storytelling.