Rereading Vargas Llosa
All of Vargas Llosa’s sixteen novels have to do, to varying degrees, with trauma, loss, and dealing with these and closely related issues as they surface in his writing in the form of constant themes and “obsessions,” as many critics are wont to call them. In his most elaborately constructed and lengthy works—his five “total” novels—he approaches and confronts his most deep-seated traumas, “demons,” and “obsessions,” beginning with the abusive paternal figure, the loss of his childhood paradise (his utopia of early childhood in Cochabamba), and the loss of the mother figure as he had known her. This is, to some extent, the subject matter of La casa verde, Conversación en La Catedral, La guerra del fin del mundo, La fiesta del Chivo, and El sueño del celta. These five voluminous “total” novels are the central work of a major Latin American modernist novelist of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and a Nobel laureate.
In the least elaborately constructed and more brief novels—his six “entertainments”—Vargas Llosa not only critiques the societal institutions most closely related to his “demons” and “obsessions” (the military, the Catholic Church, traditional political parties, and the like) but also ridicules himself. These are the humorous novels of satire and self-parody. A Vargas Llosa figure appears in each of these six entertainments: Pantaleón y las visitadoras, La tía Julia y el escribidor, ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, Elogio de la madrastra, Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, and Travesuras de la niña mala. These six novels are the work of a professional writer who is secure enough in his writing career and mature enough in his life to find humor in his most cherished personal and professional defects, as well as enough of a storyteller to construct entertaining stories about all of this. The more informed the reader might be about matters such as Mario Vargas Llosa as a writer, a political thinker, and a person, the more amusing these six novels can be. The ideal audience for these six entertainments is the “Mario-Vargas-Llosa-reader.”1
The five remaining novels that have not been identified as the “total” novels or the “entertainments”—La ciudad y los perros, Historia de Mayta, El hablador, Lituma en los Andes, and El paraíso en la otra esquina do not aspire to create the illusion of totality, nor are they humorous and lightly self-deprecating entertainments. These are the work of a writer dealing with his Peruvian circumstance as he has lived the experience of childhood, a military school, the discovery of storytelling in the Amazonian jungle, armed guerrilla insurrection, sexuality, and Peru’s past. These all have something to do with Vargas Llosa’s traumas and losses, they were probably the most painful and unpleasant to actually write, and they might well be the most unpleasant of his works to read.
THE MODERN NOVEL OF CHIVALRY: THE ENTERTAINMENTS
The entertainment value of these six novels depends to a large degree on their amusing and engaging plots, but these are also Vargas Llosa’s novels about readers (and particularly about readers of Vargas Llosa’s novels) and writers (to a large degree, about the writer Mario Vargas Llosa).
For Vargas Llosa, the roots of the novel as entertainment can be traced back to the medieval novel of chivalry, a genre that he discovered in the Biblioteca Nacional during his graduate student days in Madrid, and these books have fascinated him from the days of these early readings. This interest in the novel of chivalry is one of Vargas Llosa’s very personal preferences: writers of his generation in Latin America have written and spoken extensively of their devotion to the novels of William Faulkner, for example, and Cervantes is also universally admired. But of the writers of the 1960s Boom, and even for modern novelists in general in Latin America, Vargas Llosa’s praise of the novel of chivalry, as well as his exercising of the right to merely entertain in some of his novels, is not typical.2
Since the late 1960s Vargas Llosa has been known to be an avid reader of novels of chivalry, particularly that of the Catalonian Joanot Martorell. This is one of the primary sources for his interest in writing novels as entertainments. Vargas Llosa has written about the importance of Martorell for Iberian literature. His novel Tirant lo Blanc, a classic work of Iberian Peninsular literature from the fifteenth century, was promoted by Cervantes, who declared in Don Quixote that Tirant lo Blanc was “el mejor libro del mundo” (“the best book in the world”).
Vargas Llosa’s essay titled “Joanot Martorell y el elemento añadido en Tirant lo Blanc” has been amply republished, circulated, and cited since its initial presentation in English in Pullman, Washington, in 1968—bringing Martorell almost as much notoriety as did Cervantes’s hyperbolic claim. In this essay, Vargas Llosa sets forth once again, as he has done in other essays, his theory of the “elemento añadido”—the element that each author creates as an addition to the basic anecdotal material. Perhaps more noteworthy for his readers than Vargas Llosa’s main interest—the “elemento añadido” in Martorell’s writing—are the subtle ways in which the Peruvian writer “modernizes” this medieval classic work. Of course, “to modernize” has multiple possible understandings. On the one hand are those novels of a “modern spirit” that break with European medieval and Catholic orthodoxy. For example, Carlos Fuentes considered Cervantes’s Don Quixote to be an early novel of this modernity, placing emphasis on its ambiguity. On the other hand, for Vargas Llosa, the modernity of a writer has to do with formal matters and narrative technique. Thus, for him, the greatest modern writer is Faulkner because of his narrative strategies. When Vargas Llosa reads Martorell for entertainment, he cannot resist also focusing on matters of narrative technique.
In his prologue to a volume of Martorell’s letters, Vargas Llosa observes not only the prevalence of action and violence, but the importance of the “forms” of action, in medieval chivalry, the “ritual” that surrounds the violence and deaths.3 Vargas Llosa notes the complex ritualistic ceremonies that the customs of chivalry had established for duels, with their complex preliminary interchanges of challenges and letters of war, along with infinite negotiations about the exact place and conditions of combat, the identity and rank of the judges, and so forth—all of which offered an ideal scenario for the passion for form that characterized Martorell. Of course, the same can be said of Vargas Llosa: his own passion for story and the formal aspects of the story are what attracts him to Martorell. Vargas Llosa describes the epistolary negotiations as a “ceremonial verbal feast” and then notes how this “verbal feast” eventually becomes more important than the duel itself, which, in fact, loses major interest. After these lengthy negotiations, the time and place of the duel are established, and Martorell and his adversary must next discuss the characteristics that the judge should have; the language now becomes very precise, another sign that the real subject of these letters is not actually the physical duel, but the formalities of the text and language. As Vargas Llosa continues his discussion, by the time he comments on the third of Martorell’s letters, words have taken priority over acts. The matter of the battle and the formal arrangements for the battle ends in Martorell extending an invitation not to a duel, but to a party or feast: from London, Martorell-the-formalist, lover of rules and the spectacle, invites his enemy to a party being offered by Henry VI. Obviously, this is pure entertainment. Vargas Llosa’s conclusion concerning Martorell’s letters relates the medieval writer to many of Vargas Llosa’s preferred novelists: he identifies him as a “dissident” (“dissident of reality”) and a “blind rebel” who took his dissatisfaction with reality to such an extreme that he wanted to create another world, another reality, even if it were to be constructed with nothing more than words.
As the result of the efforts of Vargas Llosa, the Spanish scholar Dámoso Alonso, and several Catalonian academics, Martorell’s novel of chivalry, originally published in 1490, appeared in a new Catalonian edition in 2005, edited by Rosa Giner and Joan Pillicer.4
The original text has three dedications, establishing a note worthy series of interactions with the reader. Tirant lo Blanc opens with the following dedicatory in Catalonian, confirming that the book was published in the honor of Jesus Christ and for the Prince Fernando of Portugal:
A Honor Llaor I Gloria de Nostre Senyor Deu Jesucrist I de la gloriosa sacratissima verge Maria, mare seua I senhyora nostra, comença la lletra del present llibre anomenat Tirant lo Blanc, adreçada per Mossén Joanot Msartorell, cavaller, al sereníssim Príncip Fernando de Portugal.
This dedication might well lead the reader to question exactly how much of a “rebel” or “dissident” the author is.
The work consists of thirty-six chapters in five parts, in the Catalonian edition (in the English edition it contains eleven chapters). In the narrative part of this “Dedicatoria” (the two pages that follow), Martorell directs his words to the “glorious prince” (“gloriós príncep”) who has wanted to know the facts (“coneixer els fets”), the virtuous, famous, and glorious men of chivalry of the medieval period, and, above all, the many famous acts of that famous man of chivalry named Tirant lo Blanc (“els moltes insignes actes d’aquell tan famós caballer, anomenat Tirant lo Blanc”) who, in turn, stood out in the art of chivalry among the other men of chivalry of the entire world (“resplendía en l’art de cavalleria entre els alters cavallers del món”). This statement allows the Catalonian author to fulfill appropriately a fundamental act of writing in the fifteenth century, praising the appropriate patriarch of the hierarchy, in this case a prince. (Unlike the truly violent patriarchs who had traumatized Vargas Llosa in Peru, these are patriarchs who value writing and ceremony above physical violence.) We note from the beginning, then, that the author of this text does not seem, on the surface, to be a “rebel” or “dissident,” but rather an artist who apparently respects the formalities of the political hierarchy.
What follows in the second preliminary text, the second dedicatory, is noteworthy for post-Romantic readers who have emphasized the concept of “originality.” Martorell writes that his narrative originated from a translation from English that the prince had supposedly requested of Martorell, since the origin of the story was English—and not an invention of Martorell.5 Then the author demonstrates that he both understands and accepts the importance of telling stories as a member of the order of chivalry: “estic obligat a manifestar els actes virftuosos dels antics cavallers, sobretoto perquè en l’esmentat tractat estorba molt extensament relatat tot allò referent al dret i a l’ordre de les armes i de la cavalleria” (Tirant, 19). Despite the importance of the labor of translation (not the free invention of modern authors, such as Borges and Vargas Llosa), Martorell excuses himself from this work, because of his “insufficiency” (“insuficiència”) and his “family duties” (“ocupacions curials i familiars”) and thus, “m’atreviré, malgrat la meva ignorància, a traduir l’esmentada obra no sols de la llengua anglesa a la portuguesa, sinó de la portuguesa en vulgar valenciana . . .” (Tirant, 20): the Catalonian translator/author had translated this novel of chivalry from English to Portuguese to Catalan, and thus his Catalonian compatriots in Valencia will be able to take advantage of the noble acts of the men of the order of chivalry. In addition, he explains that some of the characteristics of the English language have made the translation difficult to such a degree that it has produced roughness in some sentences (“la rudesa d’algunes sentències”).
What Martorell has set forth here, then, has multiple implications: his novel of chivalry is not an original but a translation; it is a labor that he has undertaken for the pleasure of the prince (the future king of Portugal, Don Fernando). In this sense, it is the “entertainment” that Vargas Llosa has valued from the beginning of his adult life as a reader and writer; indeed, Martorell is an author who confirmed in Vargas Llosa’s mind the value of entertainment in fiction. And it is intended to be a book for the well-being (bienestar) of his compatriots, despite being a rough translation from the “rude” or “rough” English language.
The third preliminary text of Tirant lo Blanc, a prologue (“Pròleg”) of two pages, follows the convention of many medieval texts in which the authors propose that their book, replete with numerous forms of entertaining yet ill-advised human behavior, supposedly serves as a model (a countermodel, of course) of what good behavior might be. In this entire prologue, Martorell explains the same basic idea: the stories of strong and virtuous men—men of chivalry—serve as a model for life today (“Es, doncs, molt convenient i útil posar per escrit les gestes i histories antigues dels hòmens forts i virtuosos perquè siguen clars espills, exemples i doctrina per a la nostra vida, segons afirma el gran orador Tulli” [Tirant, 21]). Far from being the critical voice of a modern writer—such as those of the 1960s Boom—in these three preliminary texts Martorell claims to offer the reader a book of some entertainment, in a crude style, with moralist objectives.
This novel of chivalry begins, in its part I, with the gestures of the count Guillem de Varoic, an English count who the author assures us is of “noble lineage” (“noble linaje”) and “great virtues” (“grandes virtudes”), terms that Martorell tends to juxtapose because of the basic supposition of the novel of chivalry that the nobility is necessarily a model of superior behavior and morality. The nobility is also the place for deeper and more pure love, as the narrator indicates in his entertaining description of the count: “It is better to be a man of chivalry of a good death than a person of a sinful life” (“Amb gran pesar, el comte s’acomiadà d’ella bezant-la moltes voltes i llançant dels seus ulls vives llàgrimes. També s’acomiadà de totes el altres dames amb un dolor ineffable”).
Among the chivalric values promoted in the text, the king explains one of importance in the first part: “It is better to be chivalric in death than lead a painful life” (“val més ser cavaller amb bona mort que persona de penosa vida”) (Tirant, 47). Among the accomplishments of the noble Englishman in this first part of the novel is the killing of twenty thousand Moors in a battle (Tirant, 50), and the recovering of the British Isles from them. Throughout this hyperbolically violent and entertaining work, victories in battle are represented as accomplishments of exceptional valor and strength.
All in all, this “verbal feast” of entertainment—with its highly entertaining plot, and extensive and elaborate interaction with the reader—found in Tirant lo Blanc is an early source for Vargas Llosa’s appreciation for novels of entertainment and, in this sense, serves as a model for his six novelistic entertainments. His first two entertainments, written shortly after his essays on the novel of chivalry and Martorell, Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La tía Julia y el escribidor, are rich in their play with readers and writers. The verbal feast of La tía Julia y el escribidor involves four persons who are writers. The first, Pedro Camacho, appears in the chapters narrated by the character named Marito. Camacho can be described more precisely as a “scribbler,” to use Roland Barthes’s term. The second writer is Marito, the young narrator of the odd-numbered chapters. The third writer in the novel can be identified as Pedro Camacho–narrator, who appears implicitly as such in the even-numbered chapters (the text of the nine soap operas). It is important to make the fundamental distinction that theorists of the novel in general and Vargas Llosa in particular have made often between an author (in this case the entertaining person Pedro Camacho) and a narrator (the fictional entity present in any narrative). The fourth writer is Mario Vargas Llosa himself, the author of several novels and, a notable factor here, of numerous critical and theoretical texts (see chapter 7). Although never identified directly, Mario Vargas Llosa is recognized by his name, of course, as the writer, and by the intertextuality. Each of these four writer figures is related, and the multiple relationships create Vargas Llosa’s most accomplished novel-as-entertainment.
Using the odd-numbered chapters as a point of departure, the reader realizes the relationship established between Pedro Camacho and Marito. Given the limitations of a first-person narration (Marito’s narrative), the reader becomes acquainted with Pedro Camacho only according to what Marito is capable of observing and describing. The protagonist’s information, like the reader’s, is limited to encounters at the radio station and a few other visits. Camacho’s humorously entertaining self-characterization has a parallel thematic development in Ma rito’s desire to be a writer. As the relationship between the two characters develops, the young writer learns of Camacho’s daily life and his ideas about the art of writing. Marito tends to view all this exclusively as a matter of personal and artistic style. Inasmuch as writing is above all a matter of “style,” his first stories are imitations of writers such as Borges, Twain, and Shaw. He is captivated by Camacho’s discipline and total devotion—in an entertaining parody of Mario Vargas Llosa—to his chosen profession. Both the novice and the professional writer aspire to create art, even though the scriptwriter is merely an entertainingly compulsive scribbler without the capacity to grow intellectually or artistically. But Marito sees the attraction Camacho’s creations have for Lima’s radio listeners. In addition to the issue of style, the relationship between Marito and Pedro Camacho reveals to the former that, in order to make himself a professional writer, he will be obliged to face certain practical problems: he will have to attract readers and resolve the contradiction between a personal life not conducive to literary production and a desire for total devotion to literature.
With respect to the relationship between Marito and Mario Vargas Llosa, it should be clarified that they represent different persons. The former is a fictional character who can be considered somewhat similar to the young Mario Vargas Llosa. A retrospective observation can be noted from the first line of the novel, where the Marito figure states that when he was young he lived with his grandparents in Miraflores. In this narrative, the narrating self is the adult writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, while the experiencing self is the young Marito. There are several elements of tension between these two entities. Marito’s useless attempts at imitating Borges and Hemingway are amusing for the contrast between the products of Marito and Mario Vargas Llosa.
The relationship between Pedro Camacho and Mario Vargas Llosa involves parody, humor, and intrigue. Vargas Llosa’s theories—which hark back to his fascination with the novel of chivalry—are pertinent in this discussion, particularly his view of the writer as dissident who practices the art of writing as an exorcism to liberate himself from his “demons.” Vargas Llosa has always embraced the roles of discipline and diligence, rejecting the Romantic concepts of “genius” and “inspiration.” Parallel to Vargas Llosa’s insistence on discipline is his description of his obsessive reading of certain works, in particular his devotion to Madame Bovary, described in his book La orgía perpetua: Flaubert y Madame Bovary.
This relationship between Pedro Camacho and Mario Vargas Llosa is based on self-parody by the author, the extratextual writer. Even though Pedro Camacho is the fool, the scribbler ridiculed throughout the novel, the pseudo-artist totally dedicated to his work, at the same time he is an entertaining mirror image of his creator: Pedro Camacho is amusingly similar to Mario Vargas Llosa. Both are literature fanatics. Vargas Llosa has praised discipline; Camacho practices it conscientiously in his soap operas.
The relationship between Pedro Camacho and Pedro Camacho–narrator suggests another type of relationship. Pedro Camacho appears as a character in Marito’s story; Pedro Camacho–narrator is the implied author of the soap operas. Some aspects of the entertainment in the soap operas are determined by the interaction between these two entities. Camacho’s inexplicable but vociferous prejudice against Argentines, for example, becomes humorous in the soap opera sections, given what the reader knows about the narrator. An acquaintance with Camacho as a person adds dimension to the soap operas. Despite the suggestions from the radio personnel that listeners prefer young protagonists, Camacho stubbornly presents them as older individuals, thus creating humorous situations.
The relationship between Camacho-narrator and Mario Vargas Llosa suggests a fifth level of interaction among the writers. Once again the dichotomy between the two types of chapters invites comparison, and in this case between narrative technique in the soap operas and those in Vargas Llosa’s other novels. Camacho-narrator’s exaggerated, polished style, notable for its excessive number of adjectives, contrasts with the precise and direct language that characterizes Vargas Llosa’s other writing, and with the chapters that deal with Marito. Camachonarrator’s excesses are apparent from the very first sentence of his first soap opera.
As far as point of view is concerned, Vargas Llosa has always been an adherent to the “objectivity” of Flaubert. Consequently, when the soap opera narrator interrupts his story to explain that the fifties are the “prime of life,” such an editorial comment contrasts markedly with Vargas Llosa’s theories of fiction and his previous novels. Camachonarrator also tends to explain his characters through introductory portraits rather than revealing them through action and speech, as in Vargas Llosa’s novels.
As these relationships suggest, La tía Julia y el escribidor is a novel that deals with the relationship, manifest on various levels, of the writers fictionalized in the novel. Marito learns about the art of writing; one of the themes of the novel is this art, and the relationships among the writers provide the reader with an entertaining experience regarding the act of writing itself. In this experience the reader contributes to the creative process, incorporating “theoretical” writings (on Martorell, Flaubert, and others); and it becomes evident that the novel proposes a corollary to the problem of writing: reading. The reader is invited to resolve technical problems of readings, and the reader concurrently encounters the act of reading as a theme in itself.
Marito’s career as a writer deals directly with a complementary problem: the reader. The young novelist discovers that his first obstacle to the attainment of literary success depends less on literary merit than on the reaction of his readers. He employs Aunt Julia as a reader, for example, and discovers for the first time the discrepancy between the author’s perception of his literary creation and that of the reader. When he reads her his story “The Creation of the Cross,” he notes that precisely what she criticizes are the imaginative elements. This anecdote is important for two reasons: first, as an example of Walter Ong’s proposition that reading is an apprenticeship of conventions, a knowledge of things that she (Julia) still lacks; second, as an early lesson in the realization that in the communication of fiction a new entity exists: the reader. Marito has not yet successfully fictionalized a role that his mock reader is willing to accept. Consequently, maturation consists not only in learning to write stories, but also in knowing how to invent a reader.
The reader of La tía Julia y el escribidor inevitably confronts a series of problems specific to the very act in which he or she is engaged. In this particular case the reader is presented with two types of chapters and can, logically, question what the function of simple (albeit entertaining) soap operas is in a contemporary novel—especially when such creations make up half of the novel. The question can be set forth as follows: How can the reader of contemporary fiction (a supposedly sophisticated reader) deal with a novel half of which is composed of mediocre soap operas? They do serve as an example of the activity of one of the main characters, but as an example one chapter would have sufficed.
This problem can be considered by examining the “mock reader” created for the soap opera chapters. This fictional reader of the even-numbered chapters does not have the self-respect of the Mario Vargas Llosa reader of the previous novels. If the subtle use of narrative techniques in Vargas Llosa’s previous novels functioned as a form of flattering the reader, here the reader is seemingly degraded, for Vargas Llosa explains the most simple matters—which places us in a position of inferiority. This fictional reader is interested in crude violence and sex, and the mode of presenting these elements is melodramatic; this fictional reader enjoys a simple humor, such as, for example, a scene in which the secretary of a judge is fascinated by a promiscuous adolescent.
The “soap opera reader” is seen disdainfully by the reader of the autobiographical chapters (the “Vargas Llosa–reader”). The essence of the Vargas Llosa–reader’s experience in this entertainment is based on observing the fictional reader of the soap operas. Distanced from the violence, melodrama, and simple humor, the Vargas Llosa–reader is entertained by the fictional reader of the soap operas. The creation of this fictional entity—which contributes a level of understanding beyond a literal reading of the melodramas—is one of the principal achievements of La tía Julia y el escribidor and each of Vargas Llosa’s multilayered entertainments. The fictionalization of this particular reader marks a culmination in the novels of Vargas Llosa in which the author exorcises, within the text, one of the “demons” he has discussed extratextually: the typical Peruvian reader.
The dynamics of reading and writing make La tía Julia y el escribidor more entertaining than much self-conscious fiction, which is often characterized as “writers’ writing.” These dynamics work similarly in each of his entertainments. Thus, a novel that might appear to be detective fiction, such as ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?, contains many elements of the suspense novel, but it also offers another layer of reading in which the mock reader observes the fictional reader of the detective novel. In his supposedly “erotic” novels Elogio de la madrastra and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, the reader is entertained by the multiple interplays between observers and the observed, readers and writers. Vargas Llosa has written six novels that might be called “entertainments,” but they offer multiple levels of reading and complex dynamics of reading and writing that surpass much popular or commercial fiction identified as “entertainments.” All in all, Vargas Llosa’s entertainments escape the adjective “light” that often accompanies the phrase, as in “light entertainment.”
TRAUMA AND THE WORK OF A WRITER
Five of Vargas Llosa’s novels are the work of a writer dealing with his Peruvian circumstance as he has lived the experience of his childhood idealizing Peru from afar, a Peruvian military school, the discovery of primordial storytelling in the Peruvian jungle, armed guerrilla insurrection in Peru, sexuality growing up in Peru, and the nation’s past. These five novels, Vargas Llosa’s most explicitly Oedipal project, are La ciudad y los perros, Historia de Mayta, El hablador, Lituma en los Andes, and El paraíso en la otra esquina. To a large degree, these are books that deal with the traumas of Vargas Llosa’s youth and how he has dealt with them throughout his life. His traumatic past consisted of the re-introduction to his father in Piura, the subsequent loss of his ideal childhood, and the abuse he then suffered at the hands of his father and in the Leoncio Prado military school.
This series of events is the direct forerunner to his first novel, La ciudad y los perros, his first of several exposés of military authority, but all his writing about military authority should be understood to include patriarchal authority. Authoritarian paternal/military figures then appear through his work following La ciudad y los perros: La casa verde, Conversación en La Catedral, Pantaleón y las visitadoras, La guerra del fin del mundo, Historia de Mayta, and Lituma en los Andes. In La ciudad y los perros, the military figures are the administrators of the school who, in the end, cover up the details regarding the death of a cadet. At the same time, they create the violent and abusive environment that is the microcosm for Peruvian society under the dictatorship of Odría. With a father who supported the dictatorship, Vargas Llosa associates abusive paternal authority with abusive military authority as he portrays it in La ciudad y los perros.
In La casa verde, the military abuses and exploits the indigenous people of the Amazon basin. They appear in the novel from the beginning, capturing the young Bonifacia and taking her to the Church authorities, who fundamentally enslave her. Military figures operate in the background in a supportive role for the rubber exploiters, and Lituma, the former Sergeant, appears in this novel and later novels as the ignorant, racist, and sexist abuser.
In his first two novels, as in Conversación en La Catedral, Vargas Llosa is writing against his father, dealing with the adolescent trauma that began with the symbolic loss of his childhood and mother, and culminated in suffering the abuse of the father, the military school experience, and the Odría regime. Writing can be a form of therapy for trauma, as Caruth and others have explained, and this is an important part of the work of Vargas Llosa as a novelist.6 In Conversación en La Catedral, the military and paternal figures are the most explicitly and visibly perverse. The primary military figure seen up close in the novel, Cayo Bermúdez, not only organizes the destruction of democratic-minded Peruvian citizens, but also abuses women by creating sexual scenarios in which he functions as a voyeur of lesbian sexual encounters. Here Vargas Llosa plays out his own trauma of his initial encounter in Piura with the dominant and abusive Ernesto Vargas, who abused the young Mario at the same time that he was perceived by the boy as the sexual aggressor with his mother. Often in Vargas Llosa’s work, the abusive paternal figure functions also as sexual aggressor—there is a constant interplay among authority, power, and sexuality.
If the work of this novelist in his first three novels is to deal with his traumatic past, in the next two he distances himself from the grim issues with the humor of Pantaleón y las visitadoras and La tía Julia y el escribidor. In Pantaleón y las visitadoras Vargas Llosa not only criticizes military values and the military mentality, but also ridicules himself as the figure who had struggled, working obsessively through his traumas, with those first three novels. His own celebrated work as a highly organized and productive writer is a mirror image of Pantaleón Pantoja. Vargas Llosa’s first rebellion against parental authority, finally, by eloping with his aunt is ridiculed in La tía Julia y el escribidor. Once again, he pokes fun at the obsessive writer that he was in the 1960s by creating a mirror image in Pedro Camacho.
In La guerra del fin del mundo, paternal authority as embodied in military and ecclesiastical authority is once again the central focus. The entire tragedy of war and death in Canudos, in fact, hinges on the ignorance and stupidity of military and Church leaders. By the 1980s, new “demons” began to surface: the leftist intellectuals who, in the 1950s and 1960s, were Vargas Llosa’s allies in opposition to patriarchal authority. For Vargas Llosa, the promises of the Left eventually became as much of a betrayal as he had endured from the previous authority figures. Thus, the intellectual figure whom Vargas Llosa ridicules in La guerra del fin del mundo is the journalist, a man of limited eyesight (he is nearsighted) and of limited intellectual faculties.
Vargas Llosa’s first novelistic exploration of the Peruvian Left appeared in Historia de Mayta. Now the armed guerrilla warfare that Vargas Llosa had supported in the 1960s had a presence in Peru that transmuted into its 1980s identity: the Shining Path. In the 1960s, Vargas Llosa’s essays, such as “Literature is fire” (1967) had favored armed revolution as the needed vehicle to create social justice. In the 1980s, with the publication of Historia de Mayta, Vargas Llosa began questioning the evolution of the Left from the idealism of the 1960s to what he portrays as the destructive role of the Shining Path in the 1980s. For Vargas Llosa, the new equivalent of authority figures that threaten individual freedom and human rights are no longer just the paternal and authority figures of the military—they are also to be found in figures such as the Shining Path in Peru (portrayed in Historia de Mayta as quite dangerous) and Fidel Castro in Cuba.
Vargas Llosa’s increasingly skeptical and sometimes negative writings about the sociopolitical situation in Peru, as well as his distancing from the Left (his latest “demon”), can easily lead the Vargas Llosa–reader to believe that his later writing is that of a critical and hopeless dissident leaning toward a kind of nihilism. Several factors, however, argue against such a simplistic and reductionist reading of Vargas Llosa’s later work. In a chaotic world of loss and abuse (Vargas Llosa’s lifetime traumas), the author offers, among other more positive responses, storytelling.
Vargas Llosa’s early insights into the special qualities of storytelling came in 1958 during his first trip to the Amazon, a trip he recounts in detail in his book on Onetti, El viaje a la ficción.7 After hearing of oral storytellers—habladores—in the jungle, Vargas Llosa became more interested in the basic rules and functions of storytelling in human life. In El hablador, Vargas Llosa returns to the roots of storytelling among premodern hunting and gathering people. In this novel, a protagonist who is marginalized by the modern society of Peru in Lima finds an identity and a purpose in life. The narrator-novelist, in turn, intuits by the end of the novel that he shares a certain commonality with the oral tradition of the storyteller.
In this novel of the 1980s and Vargas Llosa’s later fiction, story telling in itself assumes an increasingly central role as the deeply human act that a broad range of individuals representing different social and ethnic backgrounds—as the protagonist of El hablador does—find helps them survive their circumstance and their traumas, and thus live through the sometimes violent and sometimes unjust Peruvian society that has damaged them. Telling stories is how characters survive in Historia de Mayta and El paraíso en la otra esquina.
In the end, the reading and writing of stories in the Peruvian-based novels, from La ciudad y los perros to Historia de Mayta and beyond, are metaphorical expressions of Vargas Llosa’s own processing of trauma. Indeed, the work of this writer has been to deal with trauma by means of reading and writing stories.
TOWARD AN ECOCRITICAL READING OF VARGAS LLOSA
The vast majority of critical readings of Vargas Llosa’s novels appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, well before the recent rise of ecocriticism.8 The pioneer theorist of ecocritical readings, Lawrence Buell, published his seminal book on this subject, The Environmental Imagination, in the early 1990s, and since then a growing number of scholars and readers have become increasingly aware of the multiple roles and representations of nature in literature.9 Inevitably, many discussions of nature in literature lead to parallel considerations of elements that are not considered part of the natural world: culture and technology.
In this section, I will begin with a discussion of background canonical literary texts for an understanding of nature and technology in Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde, reviewing the ecocritical tradition Vargas Llosa and this novel inherited, with an emphasis on two books that have been exceptionally important for Vargas Llosa—García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad and Cortázar’s Rayuela; and then move to an ecocritical reading of later Vargas Llosa novels. What is ecocriticism? We might bring to the discussion a 1999 definition constructed by the editors of a special issue on ecocriticism of New Literary History that emphasizes focus on the nonhuman.10 In this section I will briefly consider the modern Latin American novel of the early twentieth century (1900–1967) in the context of the role of nature therein, and then move to the Vargas Llosa novels that followed.
Many of the studies on nature and Latin America deal with the Colonial period, when the foundational texts for writing about nature were written. Within Latin American literary studies, a recent study by Jennifer French, Nature, Neocolonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers (2005), is a groundbreaking study of early twentieth-century cultural discourse and nature. She studies the British Colonial Empire in Latin America and how neocolonialism affected the discourse on nature. She proposes in her introduction that neocolonialism does not become visible in Spanish American cultural discourse until Britain’s international hegemonic formation begins to break down in the post–World War I era.11 In this study of nature in the early twentieth century, she focuses on the stories of Horacio Quiroga, and the novels La vorágine by the Colombian José Eustasio Rivera and El inglés de los huesos by Benito Lynch. In her study of nature, she concludes that neocolonialism is not simply a matter of colonized and colonizer, but a much more complex and nuanced triad comprising land, labor, and capital. In her study of these regionalists, she concludes that these writers recognized the limits of the neocolonial order.
The key word for an initial approach to the Latin American novel is the word “land”—tierra. This is the keyword for the classic 1920s and 1930s Latin American novela de la tierra, for most novelas indigenistas, and for the novel of the northeast region of Brazil. These were the works that Vargas Llosa harshly criticized in the 1960s for their simplicity and Manichean world vision. In the Portuguese language, in fact, the term terra refers back to the Iberian Peninsula and the word in Latin, terra. This word, terra, is the historical backdrop to most discussions of the land in Latin America: the reconquering of the tierra of the Iberian Peninsula was the precedent to the conquering of the tierra of the Americas. Fuentes’s novel Terra Nostra is the most elaborate novelistic consideration of terra on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, from the reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula to the conquista of the terra and, in turn, its destruction. Although portrayed very differently than by his predecessors, tierra is central to Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde, El hablador, and El sueño del celta.
Terra is the key to the opening of one of the most elaborate novels (and one that Vargas Llosa admires) about the land of the twentieth century, Grande Sertão: Veredas (1956) by the Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa. This terra in the opening line of the novel evokes the image of land as the vast infinity of the Brazilian sertão. In addition to being seemingly infinite, the sertão has no figure of authority, making it a utopia for the gun-slinging main character. The terra of the sertão extends both infinitely and indefinitely—a radically new reconceptualization of nature with indefinite and ambiguous lines of extension and definition.
The natural world of Grande Sertão is divided into two regions, two discrete spaces that have as their common boundary the São Francisco River. The territory of the Jagunço is an ordered and rationally understandable space in comparison to the lack of geographical boundaries, lack of precise names, and characters who seem to have emerged from an unknowable place and time. This space evokes numerous images of hell, rather than images of nature; however, the evocations of hell come from literary sources.
The characters’ names might also emerge from this novel’s abstract and essentially unknowable terra, which resonates with the past but is imprecise in the present. All in all, Grande Sertão, Veredas, like La casa verde, is a complex and innovative statement about nature, and one that constructs a nature that offers more ambiguities and imprecision than had been the case in the realist approaches to the subject.
García Márquez constructs an elaborate and complex web of nature from multiple sources, but many of these are in fact human rather than nonhuman parts of nature. Critical studies on Cien años de soledad with ecocritical underpinnings have been limited to relatively brief commentaries on the presence of varying climatic conditions in García Márquez’s work, as well as commentary on the role of nature in the Colombian author’s masterpiece. In an introductory study of climate in the fiction of major Spanish American writers, George McMurray notes that the hyperbolic rains in Cien años de soledad remind us of the purifying biblical flood and cause Fernanda’s day-long tirade directed at her husband.12 In his study, McMurray also refers to climate in García Márquez’s other work, and concludes that weather change is sometimes a source of humor in his fiction. All in all, McMurray offers a close reading of García Márquez, with an awareness of nature.
In a study on nature and natural sexuality in Cien años de soledad, Patricia Struebig points to the differences between sexuality as it is manifested in the natural world of nature and natural human instinct in Macondo, as well as how sexuality plays itself out within the confines of conventional social mores. She points out how natural behavior, acts of nature, and nature are portrayed as a threat to the Buendía family and the town of Macondo and, consequently, metaphorically, to civilization itself. Struebig emphasizes García Márquez’s “approval of the natural or original state of things.”13 Indeed, nature wars with man to reclaim the space taken by both traditional “civilization” and modern technological progress. Struebig concludes that, in the end, García Márquez affirms nature and condemns the incursions of civilization. Thus García Márquez, according to this reading, does privilege the nonhuman. Indeed, he is critical of many aspects of the modern progress associated with the rise of the modern capitalistic nation-state. Cien años de sole-dad, however, is not as unambiguously and consistently supportive of the natural world and unequivocally critical of the modern. To the contrary, this novel is also a celebration of the modern on several levels. For example, Cien años de soledad is a celebration of literary modernism, and all of García Márquez’s work represents a triumph of modern innovation over the forces of traditionalism.14
In a study of broader scope and more closely connected to the current concerns of ecocriticism, Ursula Heise has explored how literary texts, including Cien años de soledad, negotiate issues of ecological globalism and localism and how they link issues of global ecology with those of cultural globalisms (“think globally, act locally”). In this study, she discusses how in Cien años de soledad, García Márquez translates scenarios of global connectivity and ecological alienation.15 Heise is interested in how literary texts reimagine Earth from a perspective that does not privilege human voices over all others. In the end, however, her conclusions deal less with Cien años de soledad than with novels that have drawn upon this work for ecological wisdom. Several book-length studies offer commentary on nature and ecology in Cien años de soledad or make allusions to them. Gene H. Bell-Villada’s book García Márquez: The Man and His Work is typical of many introductory studies that point to the presence of science and technology as the antithesis to the natural environment in Cien años de soledad.16 To some degree, nature is a threat, as manifested in the five-year rainstorm that brings ruin to Macondo.
García Márquez, of course, is not a pioneer in the imaginative fictionalization of nature, which, in reality, can be traced back to the original Colonial crónicas that he occasionally parodies in Cien años de sole-dad. The most broadly read and influential of the early writings on nature in Colombia were penned by the German scientist and explorer Alexander Von Humboldt. Among his voluminous writings were lengthy descriptions and commentaries on the flora and fauna of Latin America, such as those produced during a trip to Nueva Granada, the Spanish colony that geographically encompassed the present-day territory of Colombia.17 Humboldt saw himself as a man of the Enlightenment who not only wrote with scientific rigor, but was also in the vanguard on certain social issues of his day. Thus, he was a strident critic of slavery and liked to think of himself as a friend and protector of the indigenous peoples in the Americas, North and South. Present-day readers will note, however, that Von Humboldt was actually a racist who sometimes contradicted his own campaign to free the indigenous and African peoples from slavery, a practice he abhorred. Despite the numerous contradictions of his writings, he was a foundational figure for both much of our understanding and some of our misunderstanding of nature in the Americas.
Cien años de soledad includes several traces of Humboldt’s texts; the narrator names Alexander Von Humboldt in the novel’s fourth chapter, in reference to the parchments of Melquiades.18 García Márquez is not only revealing his awareness of Humboldt, but also alluding to the title of the Spanish translation (widely available in Colombia) of his book Viaje a las regiones equinocciales del Nuevo Continente. In his Personal Narrative, Humboldt vacillates between two general methods of articulating nature. On the one hand, he insists on a highly “scientific” account of his observations, with abundant lists and categories of flora and fauna in the New World, often inserting words in Latin, as evoked in the word “equinocciales.” This is the voice of “Humboldt the scientist” that is the predominant voice of the text.
On the other hand, however, Humboldt occasionally betrays the “scientific” voice with comments that are more closely allied with the literature of Romanticism. In both his Personal Narrative and his later gathering of scientific writings, Cosmos, he reveals his Romantic worldview. In Cosmos, for example, Humboldt states: “the view of nature ought to be grand and free” (Cosmos, 83) and “Man learns to know the external world through the organs of the senses. Phenomena of light proclaim the existence of matter in remotest space and the eye is thus made the medium through which we may contemplate the universe” (Cosmos, 83). In another passage that reveals the Romantic rather than scientific voice, he states “Nature, in the signification of the word . . . reveals itself to the single mind and feelings of man as something earthly, and closely allied to himself” (Cosmos, 82). In his Personal Narrative, then, Humboldt assumes the voice of both the scientific rationalist and the Romantic writer in his construction of nature.
A novel often described as a classic text of Spanish-American criollismo (and equally rejected by Vargas Llosa and Fuentes), La vorágine by José Eustasio Rivera promotes the criollista agenda of tying national identity with the land, so nature necessarily has some importance in these novels. This specific criollista agenda is not as fully developed as in the two other classic criollista works Don Segundo Sombra and Doña Bárbara, both of which create a more obvious and direct connection between national identity and the land. For Vargas Llosa, as well as García Márquez, these connections are too simplistic. In La vorágine, the protagonist does escape the city and flee to the inland jungle of Colombia, but the jungle never carries the positive connotations attained in Don Segundo Sombra (in which the pampa is an aspect of the very essence of authentic Argentine identity) or Doña Bárbara (in which the llano serves as an essential backdrop to Gallegos’s elaborate discussion of Venezuela’s need to resolve the dichotomy between civilización and barbarie). To the contrary, the natural setting of the jungle serves as the ultimate threat, devouring the protagonist Arturo Cova in the end.
Given the ambiguities concerning this novel’s status as a criollista text and other ambiguities, the real subject of La vorágine has been a matter of considerable debate, and these debates and readings invite us to read beyond the text that Vargas Llosa and Fuentes have rejected. Readings have stressed the portrayal of the New World as one of the three classic criollista texts: civilization versus barbarity, the evil forces of the universe, and social injustice. Such forces do indeed operate in the fictional world of La vorágine. The costumbrista cockfight scene and the revelation of exploitation of rubber workers are two of several examples of subject matter that supports such readings. The question, however, is whether these are the primary subject matter—the thematic core of this supposedly criollista text so tightly tied to nature. The predominant subject of La vorágine—I would argue—is not really the fictional representation of the natural world and rural Colombia in 1924 (with its concomitant bedraggled workers), but rather the self in the process of writing. Read in this light—not at all the way it was read by Vargas Llosa—the novel fits squarely in the realm of self-conscious writing culture as a key precedent to Cien años de soledad in its representation of technology and nature.
Undoubtedly María and La vorágine have a role in García Márquez’s representation of nature and technology in Cien años de soledad. Nevertheless, between the publication of La vorágine in 1924 and the appearance of Cien años de soledad in 1967, numerous other intervening texts of considerable interest in informing Cien años de soledad appeared in print. Among the Modernists, two key predecessors with respect to nature and technology were the Argentines Adolfo Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges. Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel (1940) was a relatively early exploration in Latin America of the possibilities of integrating new technology (at that time, film) into a Latin American novel. Borges’s Ficciones (1944), well known as canonical works for both Vargas Llosa and García Márquez, were as dramatic a revolution with respect to nature and technology in Latin American literature. In these stories, nature is dramatically diminished in value from its privileged role under the guises of the criollistas who had dominated the literary scene in Spanish America for over two decades. Even in stories with some natural setting and presence of nature, such as “El Sur” (The South) this natural world is understood as artificial and having literary sources: the South of this story is the southern region of Argentina, with its entire literary legacy related to literatura gauchesca.
In Latin America in general, one of the major fictional representations of nature in the second half of the twentieth century was Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde (1966). The construction of nature in this novel follows two broad patterns. On the one hand, nature is a fictionalized version of the geographical region of the Amazon centered on the city of Santa María de Nieva in Peru. Human beings who hold a “nonhuman” relationship with nature in this region, the Aguarana Indians, are treated as commercial objects by the military and the Church. The design of the novel’s plot can be likened to the unfolding of the fluvial web of nature in the Amazon, with its maze of main rivers, tributaries, and small streams appearing and disappearing in the thick undergrowth. This jungle, however, is not the wild and uncontrolled vorágine (vortex) of the 1920s criollista texts in which human beings are devoured in an irrational chaos. Rather, it is a nature that Vargas Llosa constructs with scientific vigor: “Santa María de Nieva is like an irregular pyramid whose base is formed by the rivers.”19 This scientific discourse is a radical contrast with the descriptions of nature in criollista texts.
On the other hand, the other broad setting of La casa verde is the dry, sparse, and semi-desertic region of northern coastal Peru and the city of Piura. Vargas Llosa undermines the long-standing dichotomy between civilización (among other things, urban space) and barbarie (among other things, nature) that formed the premise of much fiction and critical discourse for well over a century. Vargas Llosa uses several strategies to undermine this dichotomy and the Mannichean simplicity that it implies. The reader eventually discovers that the lives and identities of certain characters (particularly Bonifacia and Lituma) blur the boundaries of the “jungle” and “the city.” Around the city nature is not the threatening and hostile nature fictionalized in criollista novels, but a friendly companion to the creation of Piura with mythic overtones. The initial descriptions make nature as mysterious and potentially mythical as the main character of La casa verde, Anselmo, and the town of Piura itself. In summary, La casa verde is a radical redefinition of nature as ambiguous.
In La casa verde, the most important context of the biosphere is the Amazon basin of Peru during the early twentieth century. This novel can be read as Vargas Llosa’s fictional representation of multiple environmental and ecocritical issues related to the European and the parallel Latin American oligarchy’s presence in this Amazon region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this novel, the historical context is the presence of the Peruvian rubber baron Julio César Arana and the brutal exploitation of both natural resources and human beings in this region. In this novel, unlike Vargas Llosa’s later El sueño del celta, Arana is not named, and his huge rubber collection-and-processing empire is fundamentally a vague backdrop to those sections of the novel set in the jungle. The indigenous character identified as “Jum” and a Japanese character identified as “Fushía” are at the forefront of this story, and vaguely associated with it is the story of a young indigenous girl, Bonifacia, who is kidnapped from the jungle by the government and sold first to nuns, then to domestic work, and eventually to prostitution. In this novel, Vargas Llosa re-creates the violent destruction of the “natural resources”—including the human beings native to the region—at the hands of local and foreign business interests. In this general sense, La casa verde is an important contribution to the twentieth-century dialogue on the global environment in general and ecocritical literary criticism specifically.
La casa verde leads the reader away from the traditional anthro-centered vision—with human beings as the privileged center—to an ultimately eco-centered vision in which nature and human beings are on equal footing. A key passage of La casa verde appears near the end of the novel, when Aquilino observes Fushía in the jungle. At first, Aquilino withdraws as he sees Fushía’s body on the path. Then he observes puddles in the low spots, and a strong breath of vegetation invades the air, with a smell of sap, resin, and germinating plants. As Aquilino continues withdrawing, he sees a small pile of still-living and bloody flesh, lying motionless in the distance. Then Aquilino turns around, runs toward some cabins, and whispers that he will return the next year. The narrator ends the passage by simply stating that it is raining hard. In this passage, Aquilino-the-focalizer first begins by distancing himself from the focus of the scene, and observes the puddles of water. He then observes a personified vegetation that he either sees or feels breathing and smells plants that are germinating. The omniscient narrator then changes the focus slightly from the natural environment to a pile of human flesh. This pile, however, seems to be a part of the natural environment. The juxtaposition of the personified vegetation and human flesh in a pile creates an equivalency of sorts, a democratizing effect: nature and the human being are of the same order, fundamentally identical. The image of flesh appearing behind ferns is powerful and effective in regards to this democratizing effect.
In Rayuela (1963), Vargas Llosa’s close colleague of the early 1960s, Julio Cortázar, sets forth a critique of the very basic tenets of Western Manichean thought, including many Western assumptions about reason, such as “progress” as a value in itself. As such, Rayuela is a noteworthy predecessor to ecocritical thought that raises similar questions and critiques the proposition that humans live as the center in opposition to nature, or that the nonhuman might have a value similar to the human. Cortázar’s critique of Western culture’s confidence in post-Enlightenment rational thought is the basis for this fundamental indebtedness of later ecocriticism to the Argentine writer.
As an alternative to post-Enlightenment Western constructs of nature, Cortázar explores Eastern understandings of nature that invite a radical rethinking of this concept. In chapter 151 of Rayuela, Cortázar’s theorist Morelli proposes a “new vision” of nature (“vegetable life”) that is different from how it had traditionally been conceived. Morelli speaks of a vegetative life that responds to the voices of Buddhism, Vedanta, Sutism, and Western mysticism to renounce mortality.
Cortázar questions other Western constructs of nature in chapter 134, titled “The Flower Garden,” from the Almanach Hachette. The text describes French and English models of parks. These parks are admittedly “artificial.” Thus, in this urban novel Cortázar invites the reader to recognize the artificiality of all human constructs of nature, whether in a “natural” setting or in a park. In the case of the humanly constructed nature of parks, “absolute perfection” is an ideal of one typically European concept of nature.
Among the texts that appear after the 1960s Boom, but still during the twentieth century, Vargas Llosa’s Historia de Mayta and El hablador are noteworthy contributions to a discussion of nature in the latter half of the twentieth century in Latin America. In Historia de Mayta, Vargas Llosa contrasts two fictionalized nations with many similarities to the real nation of Peru: a fictionalized Peru of the early 1960s, which the first-person narrator-novelist figure claims to be 1958, and a fictionalized Peru of the early 1980s, which the narrator-author figure suggests to be 1983. Like Rayuela, much of this novel is urban, in this case taking place in Lima. The most important political context of these two periods is the presence of guerrilla groups in the novel: the earlier period is when the first armed insurrections took place in Peru; the second period, in the 1980s, is when the Shining Path was operating there. As Cohn has carefully explained, however, the first fictionalized Peru differs in detail from the actual chronology of events in real Peru.20 In Vargas Llosa’s fictionalized version, an insurrection in the Andean town of Jauja takes place in 1958, prior to the Cuban Revolution; in real history, similar events actually occurred in Jauja, but in 1962 rather than in 1958. In the novel, the narrator-novelist figure (who is similar in many ways to the real Mario Vargas Llosa) reads of the Jauja uprising in 1958 in the French newspaper Le Monde while in Paris; in the real life of the author Mario Vargas Llosa he did, in fact, read of this event in Le Monde in 1962 while living and writing in Paris. By 1962, the young Vargas Llosa, an ardent revolutionary himself who fully supported the Cuban Revolution, had written several pieces in support of his friends engaged in armed guerrilla warfare. Obviously, then, the real-world Mario Vargas Llosa, as an insider, was quite aware of many of the facts related to both the guerrilla warfare of the 1960s and the activities of the Shining Path in the 1980s. In this novel, however, he creates a narrator-novelist who invents fictitious versions of Peruvian political reality in the two periods already described.
The opening and closing paragraphs of Historia de Mayta are of particular ecocritical interest, as Jonathan Tittler has pointed out.21 The opening paragraph begins with a landscape of seemingly ideal pastoral beauty, a landscape that takes the reader to a rhapsodic plane, a privileged transcendent state. As in La casa verde, however, this initial gesture is soon to be refuted by its darker other, for this rapture swiftly becomes a scene of misery, or what Buell has identified as environmental apocalypticism.22 Once the presence of human beings enters this ideal landscape, it becomes a scene of misery, industrial waste, disorder. Urban life in this opening paragraph consists of pollution and degradation. On the surface, Tittler argues, the narrator-novelist figure is distant from this scene: he is a jogger who runs over the surface of the earth with a critical eye, but with no intention to reform. According to Tittler’s reading of the last paragraph, the narrator imagines the scenario as unchangeable, a gesture that this critic considers “defeatist.” Even worse, according to Tittler, the narrator figure does not recognize his own complicity with the postcolonial order responsible for the piles of trash that threaten to choke the city, thus tacitly collaborating in its perpetuation.
Tittler’s fundamental oversight in his otherwise provocative ecocritical reading of Historia de Mayta is his resistance to distinguishing between that fictional entity that is the narrator-novelist figure in this novel and two other, similar entities: the implied author and the real author, the Mario Vargas Llosa born in Arequipa in 1936. If we isolate and quote the narrator-novelist figure, as Tittler has, then that figure is arguably defeatist, a seemingly weak person who seems incapable of any action other than asking questions, writing fictitious versions of the responses, and witnessing the progressive degeneration of the world around him. He is a victim. The implied author in this work, however, offers a broader picture of the scenario, and finds vitality and order in the act of creation. He suggests an order that is livable not because the environment can improve, but because the act of invention in itself can make life survivable.
The real-world author, Mario Vargas Llosa, clearly distances himself, however, from both the revolutionary Mayta (whom he portrays as an idealist and political innocent) and the defeatist figure of the narrator-novelist. These four figures in the novel—the fictional entity named Mayta, the fictional implied author, the fictional narrator-novelist, and the real-world Mario Vargas Llosa—are the cornerstones around which a more comprehensive ecocritical reading than Tittler’s initial foray can be constructed. In this reading, a key point is the relative power of ideology. Mayta and his cohorts are driven by ideological concepts that imbue them with absolute confidence that their armed insurrection will prevail, generating the revolutionary collapse of the old oligarchical order. In this novel, however, the power of nature prevails over ideology: the cold temperatures and soroche (altitude sickness) undermine Mayta’s revolutionary work, ultimately leading to his defeat. This is the world-view of the pragmatic, ex-revolutionary author Mario Vargas Llosa, who often includes elements in his novels (such as sexual desire or forces of nature) that trump ideology as the truly moving forces in key moments of the novel.
With respect to Vargas Llosa’s ecological vision in Historia de Mayta, several passages in the novel are noteworthy. On the one hand, there are passages in which the misery, roughness, and degradation of the external environment are contrasted with the beauty and softness of a small, artificial, humanly constructed “natural” environment: the pleasant patios decorated with plants and flowers. In these patios, the characters of the novel find some brief respite from the brutality and roughness of urban life.
In Historia de Mayta, fictionalized Peruvian life is in many ways barbaric, but Vargas Llosa eschews the now-classic Latin American model of civilización versus barbarie. Now, the urban space is often the barbarie and nature offers glimpses of the pastoral ideal, but not consistently. Rather, as in Fushía’s death scene in La casa verde, human beings in Historia de Mayta are as degraded as is nature. Mayta experiences a world in which millions of Peruvians, living amid urine and excrement, without light or water, are experiencing the same vegetative life as the plants of nature (“llevando la misma vida vegetitiva”). As in Fushía’s death scene in La casa verde, humans become part of the plant biosphere in Historia de Mayta, like Mayta does in this passage as he “vegetates.”
In El hablador, as in Historia de Mayta, Vargas Llosa uses his “communicating vessels” (vasos comunicantes) to alternate story lines that take place in urban and rural settings, here returning to the rural setting that appears throughout his work: the Amazon jungle. From the 1980s onward, Vargas Llosa is also increasingly intrigued with the functions and forms of storytelling in different cultures, and El hablador is at the center of these matters. As one critic has pointed out, the specific juxta-position of chapters in this novel brings into conflict the oral and written modes of storytelling and their corresponding worldviews.23 Chapters 3, 5, and 7 of El hablador consist of oral Machiguenga tales as they are transcribed in written form in this novel. Chapters 2, 4, and 6, as well as the first and last framing chapters, are a more conventional written narrative, as told by a narrator-novelist figure who, as in Historia de Mayta, resembles the real-world author Mario Vargas Llosa.
The first paragraph of El hablador is quite engaging in the context of an ecocritical reading of this novel. The narrator-novelist figure speaks of going to Florence, Italy, with intentions of immersing himself in Renaissance culture, a mirror image of what his friend Saúl Zuratas does in Peru, where he goes to the jungle to immerse himself in Machiguenga culture. Once in cosmopolitan Florence, however, the narrator-novelist fails in his attempt to immerse himself so completely that he can forget Peru, for he happens upon some photographs of indigenous people of Peru—the Machiguenga. As he gazes at the individuals in the photographs, they interfere with his urban retreat in Florence, which, ideally, was intended to serve in reverse, as the equivalent to the rural, pastoral retreat for urban dwellers since the Industrial Revolution. In Italy, he seems to recognize the face of a storyteller in the center of one of the photos. In this opening passage, then, Vargas Llosa juxtaposes an urban with a natural setting, and this juxtaposition is the generator of the story.
In relating the Machiguengas’ story, the storyteller, who turns out to be an acculturated Saúl Zuratas, shares tales of considerable ecological interest. These Machiguenga stories tell of the imminent annihilation of their people, their culture, and their natural environment in the face of the expansive development of the modern Peruvian state. One story describes a Machiguenga people who own no land, or no more than they can carry as they walk, an activity that takes them closer to the cosmic order. Their mutually dependent interaction with their natural surroundings, and their continuous movement across the land’s surface without damaging it, are, as Tittler has suggested, alien to globalization’s dominant discourse and, at the same time, akin to planetary environmental thinking.24 Indeed, this hunter-gatherer culture of the Machiguenga represents an ideal for the environment. In the novel’s development, however, this environmental ideal is challenged by multiple negative forces: the dominant culture reduces their space in the biosphere and the narrator-storyteller himself (Saúl) suffers the impact of all the cultures to which he is exposed. Despite his attempts to preserve Machiguenga culture in its “pure” state (a topic that has always interested Vargas Llosa), he cannot help but be influenced by his own Judeo-Christian upbringing, creating a god in his stories named “Jehovah-Tasurinchi.”
From the beginning of El hablador, the key issue of the novel is not only the cultural assimilation of human beings, but also environmental concern. In the conversation between the narrator-novelist and the Saúl of early in the novel, for example, the focus of their interaction is the survival of the rainforest in the face of human destruction headed by the lumber industry.
Saúl’s decision to abandon his life as an educated, upper-middle-class urban resident of Lima in order to assume his role in Machiguenga society is not only a dramatic lifestyle and cultural exchange, but also a commitment to preserving the biosphere, for Saúl is aware that the Machiguenga live in harmony with nature.
Vargas Llosa’s attempt to expose the reader to the harmonious, environmentally friendly world of the Machiguenga is carried out using the most important vehicle he shares with the Machiguenga: story telling. Thus, what the narrator-storyteller (Saúl), the narrator-novelist, any Machiguenga storyteller, and the real author Mario Vargas Llosa have in common is the fact that all have at the center of their lives the activity of storytelling. Concurrent with this shared interest in storytelling, in El hablador Vargas-Llosa-the-author directly ridicules the canonical novelas de la tierra that seemed to aspire to enter the natural world, but actually failed to understand storytelling in the natural world, by failing to understand the oral tradition. Thus, in chapter 4, Vargas Llosa refers to Arturo Cova, the protagonist in La vorágine, and his failed adventure into the Amazon jungle, comparing his failure to that of missionaries in Peru: “Pero, a los misioneros se los está tragando la selva, como el Arturo Cova de La vorágine” (“But the missionaries are being devoured by the jungle, like Arturo Cova of La vorágine”).25
Indeed, the second half of El hablador places great emphasis on the oral tradition and storytelling. Vargas Llosa’s highlighting of the oral tradition (the art of the hablador) privileges the natural environment as experienced by the Machiguenga, for the world of primary orality and oral tradition is one of a pristine (“pure”) nature in which the indigenous people live in harmony with a nature untouched by Western culture and science, as well as by writing.26 In several passages in the second half of the novel, the narrator-novelist privileges his own act of storytelling, striving to find similarities between oral storytelling (primary orality) and his own storytelling within the framework of writing culture. In attempting to position himself as a rough equivalent to the oral storyteller (the hablador), the narrator-novelist simultaneously privileges the importance of nature as part of a pristine natural environment. In this sense, El hablador is arguably Vargas Llosa’s most explicitly eco-friendly novel.
El hablador follows up on the storytelling topic set forth in Historia de Mayta and expands it. In these two novels, Vargas Llosa develops an engaging tension between, on the one hand, a fundamentally harmonious nature on the verge of destruction—a loss of order—and, on the other, a storytelling that is a force of unity—creating order out of chaos. This tension also exists explicitly in La casa verde, where the reader is confronted by an initial chaos of the Amazonian jungle, as well as the narrative chaos that eventually, at the end of the novel, finds order.
The twenty-first-century La fiesta del Chivo and El sueño del celta share several of the elements observed in La casa verde, Historia de Mayta, and El hablador. As in Historia de Mayta, La fiesta del Chivo projects a world of urban deterioration (of Santo Domingo) and a threatened natural environment (especially the coast and sea of the Dominican Republic). The urban and natural life of the Caribbean island seem as traumatized as the adult protagonist when she returns to the island. A thorough ecological reading of El sueño del celta, which I will not pursue here, would be far more complex. On the one hand, Vargas Llosa continues his consideration of the seemingly primordial and basic need to tell stories, exploring the oral tradition (or, more specifically, primary orality). In El hablador, Vargas Llosa had referred to the Irish storyteller, the Seanchaí, the “decidor de viejas historias” in chapter 6.27 In El sueño del celta, some of which is set in Ireland, he also refers to the Seanchaí, as Vargas Llosa interrogates, now in Ireland, the oral tradition first observed in the Amazon jungle among the Machiguenga in 1958.
In El sueño del celta, Vargas Llosa explores specifically the global rubber industry, the exploitation of human beings, and the destruction of nature, all with a breadth not found in La casa verde. Now, in Vargas Llosa’s most recent novel, these matters are no longer the vague, ambiguous, and often mysterious operations hidden in the Amazon basin. If the machinations of the rubber industry and the government were a vaguely negative and ugly backdrop to other, more directly compelling human dramas and melodramas, in El sueño del celta a fictionalized Roger Casement carefully documents for the reader the record of the historical figure Julio César Arana, the Peruvian rubber baron who founded his bi-national company in London. Vargas Llosa often portrays the rubber workers in both Africa and Peru as part of a natural environment under attack by Western neocolonial powers. The setting is the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, this twenty-first-century novel deals with an ugly side of globalization in its nascent stages.
Finally, an initial ecocritical reading of Vargas Llosa’s most environmentally interesting novels—La casa verde, Historia de Mayta, La fiesta del Chivo, and El sueño del celta—is enhanced by reading them in the context of works that have been close to Vargas Llosa most of his adult life: the medieval novel of chivalry, García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, and Cortázar’s Rayuela. He also writes against an entire tradition of Latin American nature writing from the Romanticism of Isaacs’s nineteenth-century María to the 1920s criollismo of Rivera’s La vorágine. As a writer always acutely aware of his natural and humanly constructed environments, Vargas Llosa becomes increasingly concrete and historical in his assessment of the natural environment—from the mythical world of La casa verde to the real historical story of Roger Casement in El sueño del celta.28
VARGAS LLOSA THE MODERNIST (AND HIS POSTMODERN EXERCISES)
“Perhaps it isn’t necessary to say in this farce I have attempted, as in my novels, to attain an illusion of totality,” Vargas Llosa claims in his preface to the play Katie y el hipopótamo. Indeed, Vargas Llosa’s lifetime writing project from the early 1960s to the first decade of the twenty-first century has been his search for the “total novel,” or at least the creation of the “illusion” of having created that “total” work.29 The key readings for his eventual conceptualization of the total novel and then the actual creation of these novels were the novels of Faulkner, which he explored in the early 1950s in Lima (and reread in the early 1960s in Paris); Hugo’s Les Misérables, which he read in 1950, at the age of fourteen, in the Leoncio Prado military school; Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc, which he read in 1958, at the age of twenty-two, in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid; and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which he read in the early 1960s in France, during a trip to Brittany. Vargas Llosa claims, in fact, that the reading of War and Peace impressed him a lot: it was the only novel that marked him more (“me marcó”) than did Madame Bovary.30
The works of Faulkner presented Vargas Llosa with novels in which the totality of reality was approached by means of multiple forms of interiorization and several temporal planes. In Les Misérables, Vargas Llosa found an exhaustive exposé of broad sectors of French society, as well as a piece of Hugo’s lifetime, indefatigable work of relating the totality of France’s story. In Tirant lo Blanc, as discussed, Vargas Llosa found entertainment value, but was also impressed by the breadth, depth, and detail of this medieval narrative. In Tolstoy’s War and Peace Vargas Llosa found one of the most ambitious of the “total novel” projects: this lengthy and detailed novel is the most obvious model for the total novel of Vargas Llosa.
Vargas Llosa’s career has consisted of a search for the total novel that began in the early 1960s with the publication of La casa verde, and then continued with Conversación en La Catedral, La guerra del fin del mundo, La fiesta del Chivo, and El sueño del celta. All in all, Vargas Llosa’s “total novel” project consists of five works, and these span his entire writing career. These works represent the substance of his writing project as a major modernist writer of the West.
With respect to modernism—and speaking of these works as five modernist masterpieces: as practiced by European and North American writers, it functioned on the basis of a separation of the sphere of art from other cultural and political practices. This separation gained little acceptance in Latin America, where two generations of modernists, from Miguel Ángel Asturias and Alejo Carpentier to García Márquez and Fuentes, nevertheless enthusiastically appropriated the narrative strategies of Western modernism. They insisted on bringing to bear their own political agenda and their interest in historical truth.
“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being eternal and the immutable,” Charles Baudelaire stated in his 1863 essay “The Painter in Modern Life.” This is the modernity of Vargas Llosa and his generation in Latin America, for their key modernist works—Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde, Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz, García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, and others—express the contingent at the same time that they reveal their desire for the eternal and the immutable.
The commonly accepted tenets of literary modernism in Europe and North America were developed by writers such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot, and further exploited by Franz Kafk a and Faulkner. These tenets involve formal innovation (fragmentation, the use of multiple points of view, the use of neologisms, and the like), a breakdown of the nineteenth-century insistence on causality, and an incessant search for order within an apparently chaotic world. The British scholar Raymond Williams criticizes the ideology of modernism because it gives preference to some writers for their denaturalizing language, their break with the view that language is either a transparent glass or a mirror. In his book The Politics of Modernism, Williams concludes that Modernism is uncritical and has lost the “antibourgeois stance” of some previous literary expression. This is not necessarily the case, however, with the work of Vargas Llosa specifically and the Latin American novel in general.
Interestingly in the context of a Vargas Llosa who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2010, Jameson agrees with Benjamin’s questioning of modernism and views high modernism as a dead phenomenon: “This is the sense in which high Modernism can be definitely certified as dead and a thing of the past: its Utopian ambitions unrealizable and its formal innovations exhausted.”31
The Anglo-American modernist project also became associated with a subjectivist relativism, as critic Steven Conner points out.32 Consequently, modernism had increasingly less to do with the world of “ideas or substances which may be objectively known in themselves” than with the fictionalization and understanding of the world that can be known and experienced through individual consciousness. A first generation of novelists in Peru and throughout the remainder of Latin America, consisting of relatively ignored avant-garde novelists of the 1920s and 1930s—the Peruvian Martín Adán, the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, the Mexican Jaime Torres Bodet—enthusiastically subscribed to this credo. (These modernists were unknown to Vargas Llosa during his formative years.) Martín Adán’s La casa de cartón (1928, The cardboard house) and Torres Bodet’s Primero de enero (1934, First of January), for example, were just two prominent celebrations of subjectivist relativism. In El Señor Presidente (1946, El Señor Presidente), Miguel Ángel Asturias filters the image of a dictator through the individual consciousness of several characters, using a series of stratagems well developed in European and North American modernism. Similarly, Vargas Llosa and García Márquez use Faulknerian strategies in La casa verde and La hojarasca (1955, Leaf storm), respectively, novels with multiple narrators. Their later work (i.e., Conversación en La Catedral and Cien años de soledad) shares the modernist predisposition toward subjective relativity, where truth comes into play inasmuch as one can argue for the supposed universality of individual experience fictionalized in the modern novel.
The modernist novelistic tradition extends from the 1920s to the present, but its most notable production was really from the 1940s (with the advent of Borges, Asturias, Agustín Yáñez, and Alejo Carpentier) to the late 1960s; it culminated in such complex exercises as Vargas Llosa’s Conversación en La Catedral and his four other major modernist novels. In North American and European modernism, this subjectivism was accommodated with a whole series of announcements of the end of individual subjectivity, such as Eliot’s famous defense of impersonality in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and Joyce’s promotion of an aesthetic authorial detachment in which the author removes himself or herself from the work. Fuentes makes a similar announcement in his La muerte de Artemio Cruz, as does Vargas Llosa in his first three novels. (After these works, an author figure enters frequently in his fiction, as he leaves behind some of the pretense of complexity of the modernist novel in La guerra del fin del mundo, La fiesta del Chivo, and El sueño del celta.)
But modernism is an ideological expression of capitalism, Fredric Jameson argues boldly in The Political Unconscious.33 An analogy for Jameson’s polemical affirmation is that modernism is the truth of capitalism. These were the truths of early liberal humanism so predominant in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, pioneer modernists in Latin America of the 1920s (i.e., Peru’s Martín Adán) were accused of being “false” to Latin American political and social reality: these groups in Peru, Mexico, and Argentina were often questioned and criticized for their interest in individual psychology at the expense of the supposed value of social critique and nationalistic expression.
The culminating moment of Latin American modern fiction was the international recognition of this successful modernism that has been called the Boom. These novels of the Boom, however, can hardly be viewed simply as a product of capitalism (as Jameson claims in the case of European modernism) that engages in the strategies of containment to deny the truth of history. In La muerte de Artemio Cruz (dedicated to the Marxist economist C. Wright Mills), Fuentes does not employ the strategies of containment that Jameson claims to be the case for certain modernists. To the contrary, Fuentes’s early fiction is an explicit critique of Mexico’s institutionalization of modern capitalism, and Vargas Llosa’s early fiction is a direct questioning of Peru’s major state institutions. García Márquez’s early fiction questions the collaboration of the modern state of Colombia with neocolonial powers.
With respect to the formal aspects of Vargas Llosa’s modernist and total novels, La casa verde is arguably Vargas Llosa’s modernist masterpiece. In this work he also uses a variety of modernist strategies to create an illusion of totality. La casa verde is a patently dialogic novel in ways more complex than even Bakhtin could have imagined when he coined the term “heteroglossia.” First, it is richly dialogic in its incorporation of multiple layers of dialogue by means of Vargas Llosa’s telescoped dialogues. The novel is also dialogic in its use of many-layered discourses from different spheres, such as religion and the varied social classes. The reader of this modernist text is in constant contact with a reality in continual flux. Since the varied communications of languages are in opposition, reality takes on a capricious quality that the reader becomes accustomed to questioning. Reality becomes so innately relative, in fact, that the nature of truth and the possibility of truth are called into question. And this type of questioning—of the techniques specific to La casa verde—is essential to the experience of the Vargas Llosa–reader, who also comes to question the possibility of attaining a complete understanding exclusively through rational means. In this sense, La casa verde is a deeply critical novel.
La casa verde contains five interwoven stories that cover a period of approximately four decades. These stories are discontinuous, however, in both time and space. The reader’s experience with respect to the development of the multiple stories involves observing the concurrent advance of all the plots, which produces a continual overlapping of temporal levels so that characters and events are simultaneously viewed from various perspectives and at different distances in time. Despite the discontinuities and false clues, the overlapping advancement of the plot does allow for a gradual understanding—as is typical of intensely modernist texts—of the overall picture. By the end of part I the reader has established the basic system of the five narrative segments and is able to relate the jungle story to Piura’s story: La Selvática of Piura is revealed, by then, as the Bonifacia of the jungle; the Sergeant of the jungle has been identified as Lituma of Piura.
Lack of causality is often offered as a characteristic of the high modernist text, and the logic of cause and effect in a sequential story is systematically undermined in La casa verde. Thus, incidents leading to the development of conflicts as well as those pertaining to their resolution are revealed before the exposition of a climatic moment for each character. For example, Bonifacia’s story at the mission in Santa María de Nieva has not yet been fully developed when it is revealed that she has become a prostitute in Piura. The experience is controlled by the fact that several of the displaced key events occur near the end of the novel. The reader does not see Anselmo take Antonia to the Green House, for example, until part IV. Lituma also leaves Santa María de Nieva with Bonifacia in part IV. In the very last segment of the novel, Dr. Zevallos tells the dramatic story of La Chunga’s birth and Antonia’s death.
Modernism is about complexity, and this complex pattern of relationships in itself creates a sense of totality and determines the reader’s perception of the characters as human beings. They tend to lose their individual identity and exist, rather, as elements within the overall scheme. Consequently, crucial acts in the lives of the characters define them not so much in terms of their own personalities as in terms of their relationships to their surrounding world.
Characterization in La casa verde is achieved through narrative strategies typical of the modernist novel. The techniques portray many characters in an exterior fashion—the lesson from Flaubert—that reveals only words and actions; other characters are revealed psychologically. As persons they range from simple one-dimensional figures to sophisticated individuals. Anselmo is the most complex, the most ambiguous, and the most fascinating character in the novel.
Vargas-Llosa-the-modernist changes his method of presenting Anselmo as the novel progresses. The initial segments of part I introduce him in a strictly exterior fashion. By the end, however, the reader is privy to his most intimate thoughts as they are revealed in three interior monologues. At the beginning of the novel the exterior presentation of Anselmo makes him an enigmatic figure. Both the reader and the inhabitants of Peru view him as a mystery, since neither he, nor the narrator, reveals his past or his motives for coming to Piura. He seems superior to the people of the town. Given his special status there and his enigmatic nature, he becomes a mythical figure for the reader as well as for the inhabitants of Piura. At the end of part I, the narrator explains Anselmo’s mythical status, stating that “new myths” about Don Anselmo arose in Piura. At the end of the novel, he is totally humanized.
A set of contradictory factors surround the characterization of Fushía. At the beginning of the novel, the story that he tells of his escape from jail in Brazil makes the reader question his integrity—he betrays two friends in order to flee safely. His treatment of other persons, particularly the indigenous people in the Amazon, makes his character even more dubious. Because Fushía is also the victim of political and economic circumstances beyond his control, however, his own vulnerability inspires compassion. Fushía prospered during the war, trafficking contraband rubber in collaboration with Julio Reátegui. But he spends the rest of his life struggling, after Reátegui’s betrayal leaves him with no legal business and few resources for survival. Fushía’s voyage at the end of his life toward an inevitable death gives his being the special resonance of a prototype—and this is Vargas Llosa writing very much in the Faulknerian mode.
The highly dialogic content of the novel makes characterization a process of evaluation on the part of the reader. One particular technique Vargas Llosa uses for these indirect characterizations is “choral” characters who are largely nonindividuated. Lituma and Bonifacia, for example, are presented in part III through what could be called the chorus of the Inconquistables and the chorus of the “orchestra.” The musicians’ account of the encounter between Lituma and Seminario is a blending of the three musicians’ distinct impressions of the incident: one offers verbal recollections, another vivid visual summary, and the third the emotional reaction.
Vargas Llosa’s ambitiously modernist uses of narrative point of view and related strategies are also effective devices for characterization. The narrator’s presentation of the narrative segments dealing with Piura illustrates a more subtle control of narrative point of view. The initial Piura segment portrays the town from a distant point of view. The segment begins by leading the reader’s eye across the town, and then describes several neighborhoods briefly. The presentation is strictly exterior. In addition to what the narrator presents visually, he recounts what is said about the town—the talk of the peasants, the women’s gossip. The narrator relates several anecdotes of “what is said” in and about the town. Despite the narrator’s panoramic vision of Piura and seemingly classic position of omniscience outside the story, he is not totally omniscient in the Piura segments. For example, the narrator is unsure exactly how the “stranger” feels.
In the remainder of the segments in part I of the novel, the narrator takes a position as an insider of Piura who does not examine Anselmo psychologically or even know more about his background than the inhabitants of Piura. The effect of this precise position of limited omniscience on the part of the narrator is to make Anselmo as mysterious and potentially legendary a character for the reader as he is for the citizens of the town. An extreme contrast then appears in Anselmo’s characterization in part IV: the only extensive interior monologues of the novel are three of Anselmo’s interiorizations dealing with his relationship with Antonia. Consequently, the character who was presented via systematic distance in part I becomes the one with whom the reader is most intimately acquainted by the end.
The outstanding narrative techniques that Vargas Llosa develops specifically in La casa verde involve innovative uses of dialogue pioneered by the Peruvian writer. A simple, basic use of “telescoped dialogues” that Vargas Llosa had found in Madame Bovary, and then initiated at the end of La ciudad y los perros, becomes more complex and considerably more frequent in La casa verde. For example, in the first Fushía segment of the novel, he speaks with Aquilino, and a telescoped dialogue moves directly into a past dialogue between Fushía, Chango, and Iricuo. The dialogues take place on two temporal levels. On one hand, the use of actual dialogue from the past—rather than a character’s observation of it—makes the reader’s experience with even the remote past direct. Unlike less intensely modernist texts that present some anecdotes directly and others as indirect experience, La casa verde provides the reader with a constant and direct confrontation with multiple planes of reality. On the other hand, this technique of telescoping dialogues creates juxtapositions of an occasionally contradictory and paradoxical nature: the reader experiences a capricious reality that seems to be perpetually relative to circumstances and the subjectivity of the individual speaking.
In its jungle passages and throughout La casa verde, descriptive passages of any length are rare—Vargas Llosa makes an explicit effort, in these brief descriptions, to divorce himself from the verbosity of the realist-naturalist tradition. Rather, he fixes an impression with a single image. For example, the images of Fushía’s death and of the Green House in the desert at the edge of Piura are permanently associated with the novel. Such images also offer brief glimpses of the indigenous world, for the reader gradually assembles a visual picture of the movement of vaguely identifiable creatures who vanish before their presence is fully clear. In this way, Vargas Llosa creates the sense of an alien world.
Closely related to style is the many-languaged text of hetero glossia that is woven into the dialogues. There are two languages that pervade all communication in this novel: the language of Christianity and the language of the Mangachería. The language of Christianity emanates from two focal points, the mission in Santa María de Nieva and Father García in Piura. Bonifacia’s entire story (and hers is the central story of the novel) centers on learning the language of Christianity. In the Amazon region there is a constant tension around this language of commerce and government. Government officials carefully adopt the language of Christianity when they negotiate with the nuns to take the girls from the mission to the outside world. Even the conversations between Fushía and Aquilino, although often vulgar, vacillate between the language of the sacred and the language of the profane. In Piura, Father García’s zealous articulation of Christian language—screamed from his pulpit and even in the streets—is in direct conflict with the numerous other discourses of Piura.
The language of the Mangachería, like that of Christianity, has multiple and ubiquitous manifestations. Just as the language of Christianity is expressed with the emotion of songs and screams in churches, the language of the Mangachería is sung regularly by the Inconquistables in their theme song. Their language is one of machismo. They speak constantly about seducing women and demonstrating their masculine prowess before other males. Lituma’s roulette confrontation with Seminario is, above all, an act of machismo. The language of the mangaches even has its peculiar idiomatic forms in Spanish.
By the end of the novel the two dominant languages are visibly moribund. Bonifacia has forgotten much of the Christian language she learned in Santa María de Nieva. Father García’s tired language has not only lost its forcefulness, but is being replaced by the foreign discourse of modernity: technology and science are part of the world of the movies that the youth prefer over Mass at church. The theme song of the Inconquistables has also lost its vitality by the end, and there is a general sense that their language will soon be forgotten; the Mangachería will be destroyed for the construction of new buildings.
If La casa verde is Vargas Llosa’s modernist masterpiece, Conversación en La Catedral is the writer’s continuation of his modernist project in the form of his most lengthy and epic total novel. The vastness of this novel, however, which seems to encompass virtually all aspects of Peruvian social life over an entire generation during the 1950s, produces what is perhaps Vargas Llosa’s best effort at creating the illusion of totality. A resounding question set forth by the protagonist in the second sentence of the novel read as follows: “At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” (“¿En qué momento se había jodido el Peru?”). This question resonates and reappears throughout the text. It can be associated with three of the novel’s most fundamental characteristics. The first, suggested by the phrase “at what precise moment,” points to the importance of time; whereas in La casa verde space takes priority over time, in Conversación en La Catedral time takes priority over space. The second important element is Peru itself: the novel will be a portrayal and questioning of an entire nation—with the ambition of a modernist writer of the total novel—during a specific historical period. The third significant characteristic is suggested by the question mark at the end of the sentence (or in the case of the original Spanish, the question marks at the beginning and the end). The novel presents itself initially—as a good modernist text—as a question to be solved. The reader’s task will involve attempting to solve a series of mysteries about character, plot, and, indeed, what happened to Peru, when, and why.
The complex and amorphous reality of Conversación en La Catedral derives from a set of multiple narrative procedures. In the end, the reader may conclude, the complexity here is perhaps a false complication: nothing complex is happening, relatively simple events are being related as if they were part of an enormous modernist jigsaw puzzle. Before the reader will be able to reach such a conclusion fully, however, it will be necessary to experience a complex set of situations and even master a series of sophisticated narrative techniques associated with the modernist novel.
The type of dialogue configuration pioneered briefly at the end of La ciudad y los perros and fully developed in La casa verde is even more fully exploited in Conversación en La Catedral. The telescoping of dialogues, such as in the Fushía-Aquilino segments of La casa verde (and learned from Madame Bovary), becomes one of the major challenges to understanding precisely and fully what happens in Conversación en La Catedral. In La casa verde Vargas Llosa frequently intercalates two dialogues that belong to different temporal and spatial spheres; at a maximum level of complication he creates telescoped dialogues with as many as three different conversations in juxtaposition. In Conversación en La Catedral, however, passages containing as many as eighteen juxtaposed dialogues appear (as in part III, chapter 4). Vargas Llosa achieves several effects by his use of telescoped dialogues and similar techniques. Some characters in these dialogues are insiders to the events at hand and tell the story as participants, while others are outsiders. In addition, the juxtaposition of dialogues affords the reader the opportunity to observe and judge the contradictions and paradoxes of different situations.
Narrative point of view in Conversación en La Catedral, as learned from Faulkner, is another effective vehicle for communication. A key element in the text’s organization is the use of an omniscient narrator who reveals the thoughts and feelings of characters at all levels of the social scale. The narrator’s distance from Santiago varies from chapter to chapter, but his discourse is often closely linked to Santiago’s language or thoughts.
The important issue with respect to point of view in Conversación en La Catedral is not “Who speaks?” but “Who sees?” The speaker in this novel is always either a character in dialogue (or brief interior monologue) or the omniscient narrator; the subtleties of the text, however, are related to who is seeing, or the focalizer. Vargas Llosa employs several principal focalizers who function as such regularly throughout the novel. In addition to Santiago and Don Cayo, there are Amalia and Ambrosio. Besides a focalizer outside the story—who provides a more distanced and external view than the focalizer characters—other characters are the principal focalizers throughout the novel.
The two predominant and most significant acts in this lengthy and complex modernist novel are speaking and seeing. The act of speaking is announced in the title, and actually determines the structure of the novel. The self projected in the characterization of Santiago Zavala acquires its ethical status and identity through the act of storytelling, a topic to which Vargas Llosa returns regularly in his fiction of the 1980s and beyond. In telling his story to Ambrosio, and reconstructing the entire story with Ambrosio’s collaboration, Santiago spends four hours attempting to constitute a self from the incidents and persons that have touched his life as part of a complex network. He attempts to create some order out of the emptiness, contradictions, paradoxes, and chaos that this period of his life represents. His particular kind of speaking—the act of storytelling—is thus important and not merely a frivolous or insignificant exercise in talking.
The reader’s role with respect to the multiple stories offered is identical to Santiago’s: he or she must make judgments in order to construct the total story. Just as Santiago leaves The Cathedral with many questions resolved, but yet still with some nagging doubts, so does the reader. There are not definitive answers to such questions as “Who killed Queta?” As a now-accomplished modernist writer, Vargas Llosa does create a sense of closure at the end of the novel by returning to the original setting, The Cathedral. This closure, however, is a formal device and not a solution to the problems and questions proposed in the work. In this sense, the much-discussed “fatalism” and “determinism” of this novel are not a fully accurate description of the novel’s experience: Santiago’s life, as constituted by his own act of storytelling, at the age of thirty, is still in flux during the novel’s “present.” Even though the general situation is unquestionably dismal, he is still acting as part of a process—indeed, believing yet another different story of his life—rather than simply existing in a predetermined pattern. Although neither Santiago nor Don Cayo is likely to place faith or trust in the types of individuals or institutions that have caused them failures in the past, both seem at least capable of continuing some sort of dialogue, of retelling the story.
If “speaking” in Conversación en La Catedral is to be associated with the nature of the materials, or content, then “seeing” can be associated with the nature of the presentation of the materials, or form. Speaking is one predominant vehicle of communication: dialogues are abundant in the novel and serve an important storytelling function for certain characters—above all Santiago—and the reader. Seeing, on the other hand, is the reader’s means of accessing the direct experience that the modernist text aspires to achieve, frequently a direct experience simultaneous to that of the characters. Such is the case, for example, in the scene in which Amalia and the reader concurrently discover Hortensia nude in a bathtub. Actions that the reader sees are a part of a “real” or “true” experience (to the extent that any fiction can be considered real or true), as opposed to those that are told in dialogue, which first must be believed before they can be considered “real” or “true.” This act of seeing establishes the radical difference between Santiago’s and the reader’s experience.
When La guerra del fin del mundo appeared fifteen years later, it represented a synthesis of Vargas Llosa’s ambitious modernist project to create the total novel. With respect to the writer’s modernist narrative strategies, on the surface the novel seems traditional and even relatively simple. It was the first of Vargas Llosa’s novels to be narrated extensively and consistently by a traditional omniscient narrator who is outside the story. His prior complex modernist novels feature a multiplicity of speakers, most of whom are characters within the story. In La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral, passages of traditional third-person narration are sparse, and they are usually abundant in dialogue. One of the few exceptions to such a generalization are those passages early in La casa verde that describe Piura. If La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral are Vargas Llosa’s intense high modernism, then La guerra del fin del mundo, La fiesta del Chivo, and El sueño del celta are his more subtle approaches to the total novel written in the modernist mode.
More specifically, there are four types of narrative situations in La guerra del fin del mundo. The first and most common are narrative segments told by an omniscient narrator outside the story. The second narrative situation, of which there are only two segments in the novel, is Gall’s account, written for publication in the newspaper L’Etincelle de la Révolte. The third narrative situation, similar but not identical to the second, is a report written by the nearsighted journalist in the Jornal de Notícias. The fourth narrative situation, already used extensively in Conversación en La Catedral, involves an omniscient narrator, but the fictional world is filtered through the eyes of a character who functions as a focalizer. This technique is far more important to the experience of La guerra del fin del mundo than the apparently traditional format of the novel might initially suggest.
In many of the narrative segments with an omniscient narrator the “seer” or focalizer is the figure of the narrator himself; this is the prevalent mode of narration in part I of the novel. A few of the narrative segments in part I, however, present the fictional world partially through the eyes of one or more other characters. For example, the end of Big João’s story features him as focalizer, and the following segment dealing with Gall has Van Rijsted as focalizer. Four other narrative segments in part I have focalizers who are characters—two with Gall as sole focalizer, another with Goncalves and Gall as focalizers, and a fourth with Jurema and Gall functioning as focalizers.
In part II and part III of the novel there is even more division between an omniscient narrator who is the seer and characters who are focalizers. Of the thirty-eight narrative segments in these two parts, in sixteen the omniscient narrator is the “seer” and twenty-two have characters who function as focalizers. By part IV each of the twenty-four narrative segments has a character who is the focalizer—all of the final events are presented to the reader through the eyes of characters.
The novel’s most noteworthy “seer” is the nearsighted journalist, perhaps an alter-ego figure for the author. He not only appears in nine narrative segments as focalizer, but also functions as a da Cunha–type character who provides the reader with a journalist’s “firsthand” account of the events at Canudos. As a newspaper man charged with getting the complete story, the journalist is the seer par excellence. He first appears as focalizer in a narrative segment in which he shares the seeing with Moreira César (part III, chapter 3). In the opening paragraphs of this narrative segment Moreira César is the focalizer; the reader is able to be cognizant of the situation only within the limits of what Moreira César perceives. The reader is privy to what the officer sees, hears, and thinks.
A key passage for the nearsighted journalist—and quite likely one of the most memorable passages of the novel, a “crater” for Vargas Llosa—takes place near the conclusion of part III, when he views Canudos after a devastating battle (part III, chapter 7). This passage begins with a series of sensations as experienced by the nearsighted journalist. After a lengthy paragraph of confusion and questioning on the nearsighted journalist’s part, the world literally comes into focus for him and for the reader. Here Vargas Llosa achieves a maximum impact in the culminating scene of part III by using the journalist as focalizer. At this point, both the chaos of war and the emotional impact of its savagery have reached an apex and breaking point. Consequently, it seems only appropriate that the journalist (and the reader) see no more: the journalist’s glasses break, and when he puts them on again he finds himself looking out at a shattered, cracked, “crazed” world. This narrative segment ends with him feeling in his right hand a woman who pulls him along, without a word, guiding him in this world which has suddenly become inapprehensible, blind. Thus, without his glasses the journalist is thrust into a world of vague sensations, just as this narrative segment had begun—before he puts his glasses on.
By using a focalizer in this fashion Vargas Llosa has made one of the key events in the novel not only a turning point in the development of the plot but also a unique and direct experience for the reader. The reader has had the privilege of experiencing the horror of Canudos not vicariously, but as a co-participant with the nearsighted journalist.
The use of focalizers contributes to another of Vargas Llosa’s most effective—albeit standard fare for modernism—narrative strategies: the presentation of two versions, or sides, of the same story. This is what Vargas Llosa calls the “communicating vessels.” In La guerra del fin del mundo, of course, there are basically two groups in conflict as far as the physical combat is concerned, and Vargas Llosa presents both sides in the same intimate detail. Da Cunha had begun his account of the Canudos conflict by describing adversaries such as Big João and Moreira César; the Brazilian author then associated himself with the government soldiers (“our troops,” as he calls them), only to become enchanted, in the end, with the Jagunços’s heroism. Vargas Llosa consistently seems to take both sides. Throughout the novel there are characters who appear as focalizers on both sides of the war. Part IV, especially, affords the reader a constantly changing point of view on the events at hand, ranging from characters actually on both sides of the battlefield to such distant observers as the Baron.
Vargas Llosa’s use of the language of both sides is one of the most effective means of underlining the real differences—misunderstandings—between the two groups. The people of Canudos always use the term “Throat Slitter” when they refer to the character known to the reader and to outsiders to Canudos as Moreira César, patriot and hero. The inhabitants of Canudos appear in their narrative segments as poverty-stricken and religious, yet in those narrative segments focusing on the military they are the “English” and “Freemasons.” Neither side even questions this contradictory language. In this way, through language itself, the reader becomes aware of the enormous distance between the two enemies. This use of conflicting descriptions for different groups communicates to the reader precisely what Vargas Llosa has said about the historical events in Canudos: both sides were fighting ghosts that were the products of their respective imaginations. The nearsighted journalist arrives at this conclusion: it is not so much a story of madmen, he observes, as a story of misunderstandings.
Vargas Llosa has been characterized from his early work as a technician and a storyteller. If Conversación en La Catedral is the final step in his development as a master of modernist narrative strategies, La guerra del fin del mundo is both the apotheosis of storytelling and the beginning of less flamboyant, less overwhelmingly complex, and more subtle modernist storytelling. In this sense, this latter novel is the immediate forerunner of novels to appear two decades later—La fiesta del Chivo and El sueño del celta. Both of these novels function on the basis of Vargas Llosa’s now well-developed use of communicating vessels.
Although a committed modernist, and a writer whose five major novels are totalizing modernist projects, Vargas Llosa nevertheless has also flirted with the postmodern from the time such fictional projects became fashionable, in the 1970s. His playful relationship with the postmodern is evident in four novels that also are among Vargas Llosa’s five entertainments: La tía Julia y el escribidor, Historia de Mayta, Elogio de la madrastra, and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto.
Differing concepts of postmodernism in Europe and North America were articulated in the 1970s and 1980s by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Jameson. These three theorists were primarily interested in the analysis of culture and society in the postindustrial societies of Europe and North America, and all three often equate “post-industrial” with “postmodern.” At the same time, it can be argued that Latin America in many ways harkens back to the premodern. Nevertheless, it also has been aggressively involved in the modernization since the late nineteenth century.
Lyotard’s once fashionable and oft-cited The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979; a best seller in Argentina in Spanish translation) is an essay on the state of knowledge in postindustrial society. Lyotard asserts that we are now living at the end of the “grand narrative,” or master narrative, of science, the nation-state, the proletariat, the political party, and the like—all of which, according to this French theorist, have lost their viability. In postmodern culture, he says, “the grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation.”34
As Hutcheon has pointed out, Lyotard and other theorists of the postmodern question the bases of our Western mode of thinking, which we usually label “liberal humanism.” (At the same time it should be noted that many of the premises of this Western humanism were placed into question directly by Cortázar and Fuentes in the 1960s, and less explicitly by Vargas Llosa.) The works of Lyotard, Baudrillard, Jameson, and other theorists of the postmodern from Europe and North America were translated into Spanish and were central to debates in the late 1980s and 1990s over modernism and postmodernism in Latin America.
For Vargas Llosa’s postmodern fiction in particular and Latin American postmodern fiction in general, the politics of postmodernism were an extremely important issue. Linda Hutcheon has argued against the critical postures Jameson took toward a postmodernism that he saw as politically suspicious for its lack of historicism; Vargas Llosa and many other of the major Latin American writers who flirted with postmodernism were, indeed, most historical. Similarly, Hutcheon argues in favor of a postmodern novel that was indeed historical and provides numerous examples (including García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude) of postmodern novels with strong historical components. Clearly, Hutcheon is interested in a different kind of fiction than the writing that is the subject of Jameson’s argument; she accepts the postmodern of the later fiction of Fuentes and Vargas Llosa.
Writing about contemporary fiction in general (including some texts from Latin America), Hutcheon is interested in the contradictions of postmodernism. Citing Larry McCaffery, she begins her definition of postmodernism by referring to literature that is metafictionally self-reflective and yet speaks to us about historical and political realities of the empirical world. Vargas Llosa’s work of the 1970s and 1980s was thus prime material for her discussion, but her reading of Latin American writers was centered almost exclusively on Borges, Fuentes, and García Márquez. For Hutcheon, the key concepts for postmodernism are paradox, contradiction, and a movement toward anti-totalization, all of which appear throughout her books A Poetics of Postmodernism and The Politics of Postmodernism. While Vargas Llosa’s novels of the 1960s were his most elaborate totalization projects, his novels of the 1970s and 1980s, with the exception of La guerra del fin del mundo, are more appropriately aligned with the anti-totalization about which Hutcheon speaks.
Hutcheon proposes that the term “postmodern fiction” be reserved for what she identifies as “historiographic metafiction.”35 This postmodern fiction, as she describes it, includes works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it often enacts the problematic nature of writing history, raising questions about the cognitive status of historical knowledge. Some of Vargas Llosa’s novels, such as Historia de Mayta, can be discussed in the context of historiographic metafiction.
Umberto Eco claimed that the postmodern was born at the moment when we discovered that the world had no fixed center, and that, as Foucault taught us, power is not something unitary that exists outside of us. This moment occurred in Latin American literature with the rise of Borges, who became a seminal figure for many European theorists, for Vargas Llosa, and for many Latin American postmodern novelists of the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, even though the now-classic Borges fiction they were reading dated back to the 1940s—Ficciones appeared in the original Spanish in 1944. The two books that contained these ground breaking stories, in fact, were Ficciones and El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941). One of the key themes in Borges’s work was the labyrinth as a centerless universe. An image of great interest for three generations of Latin American writers, the labyrinth appears in Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde and Conversación en La Catedral. In general, however, Vargas Llosa shows little resemblance to Borges, even though he was an avid reader of the Argentine master from an early age. More important to Vargas Llosa was what the writing of Borges represented to a young aspiring writer: an invitation to invent rather than imitate reality, a pioneering innovation for a young Latin American intellectual in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In stories such as Borges’s “The Circular Ruins,” language has priority over empirical reality, as the protagonist, who has the power to dream a person into being, realizes at the end that he, too, is an illusion—that someone else was dreaming him. There are moments in Vargas Llosa’s later work, such as Elogio de la madrastra, in which language, as in Borges, seems more powerful than empirical reality, and many of Latin America’s most experimental writers have privileged language in this way.
After Borges, one of the most important contributions to the creation of a Latin American postmodern fiction was Cortázar’s Rayuela, a book very close to Vargas Llosa’s literary experience, as he was a close personal friend of Cortázar in Paris in the early 1960s. This novel was not really a postmodern work, but its chapters about the writer figure Morelli were a radical proposal for a postmodern fiction. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the postmodern novel began to appear in Latin America, almost always under the sign of either Borges or Cortázar, and it consisted of experimental novels such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres (1967, Three Trapped Tigers), Néstor Sánchez’s Siberia Blues (1967), and Manuel Puig’s La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth). Another key novel for the formation of a Latin American postmodernism—particularly for writers of the 1980s such as Diamela Eltit—was Severo Sarduy’s Cobra (1972, Cobra).
Several North American and European critics have observed the postmodern’s bridging of the gap between elite and pop culture, or art for the masses. Several Latin American writers have accomplished this, including Vargas Llosa. Writers such as Puig, García Márquez, and Cabrera Infante began exploring this terrain of the elite and pop culture in the 1960s, followed in the 1970s by Vargas Llosa and Luis Rafael Sánchez, among others. Three of the works that have indeed been marketed to a broad reading public (and sold well as best sellers in the United States in English translation), at the same time that they have been amply studied by “elite” academic scholars, are Vargas Llosa’s La tía Julia y el escribidor, García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada, and Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus. For Hutcheon and some other theorists of the postmodern, postmodernism’s relationship with contemporary mass culture is not just one of implication, but also one of critique. This critical position toward mass culture is particularly evident in Vargas Llosa’s La tía Julia y el escribidor and Sánchez’s La guaracha del Macho Camacho. Jameson tended to categorize postmodern fiction in terms of mass culture—missing the critical function—limiting the post modern to what might be considered its “lighter” versions.
In her study of postmodernism and popular culture, Angela McRobbie suggests that some of the debates in the 1980s and 1990s on postmodernism offered both a positive attraction and a usefulness to the analyst of popular culture.36 McRobbie had correctly observed the high structuralist preference for the works of European high modernism, especially the work of writers such as James Joyce and Stéphane Mallarmé. In the case of Vargas Llosa, one group of scholars with an attraction to structuralist and formalist concerns has been the critics who have done much of the major critical analysis of his modernist work (i.e., La casa verde et al.). In contrast, postmodernism was more interested in popular culture, and this applies to La tía Julia y el escribidor, a novel in which half of the work is derived directly from the pop culture genre of the soap opera broadcast on the radio. Creating a complex interaction among reader and writer figures in the novel, Vargas Llosa not only uses pop culture, but also parodies the melodramatic excesses of the soap opera, as well as the figure of the “writer” of pop culture genres such as soap operas.
Historia de Mayta is a response to some of Vargas Llosa’s political “demons” as well as an expression of some of his postmodern impulses in the 1980s. As a historiographic metafiction, this novel questions the writing of the history of guerrilla movements in Latin America; as a metafiction, it contains a writer figure (a narrator-novelist) who reflects upon fiction as he writes it. Keith Booker has pointed out several of this novel’s postmodern tendencies.37 Using as his point of departure the title of this novel in its English translation (The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta) and its resonances of Vladimir Nabokov, Booker observes that both novels (Vargas Llosa’s and Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight) have as their central interest the relationship between fiction and reality. For Booker, the loss of faith in social and political change is a typical element of postmodern fiction, even though arguments to the contrary can be made about postmodern fiction in Latin America.
Compared to his previous fiction, Vargas Llosa’s Historia de Mayta is among the most self-reflective of his novels. The narrator-novelist’s work, in fact, undermines any sense of the real “reality” of the events at hand. As such, Historia de Mayta, like Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot and Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, participates in a discourse of postmodernism that includes a wide range of postmodern fictions. This questioning, in turn, leads the reader to doubt the stability of human identity in itself. As Booker states, Vargas Llosa is skeptical of the epistemological research into the profundity of the human subject, since for him, the individual is not constituted by internal and mysterious desires, but by external social forces.
In the end, in Historia de Mayta Vargas Llosa creates doubts about the boundary between reality and fiction. In the interview between the narrator-novelist and Mayta near the end, the reader becomes aware that the previous interviews had been fictionalized. What has been read at this point has been the story of writing a novel. Consequently, with respect to the matter of Mayta’s homosexuality, what had appeared to be the result of the facts of research are, in reality, nothing more than the narrator’s invention. In the end, however, even though Vargas Llosa, like many postmodern writers, seems to doubt the expressive possibilities of language, he still believes in the opportunity it provides to make some critical observations about social and political reality.
Vargas Llosa continues his questioning of the borders of literature and exhibits other postmodern interests in Elogio de la madrastra. As Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal has proposed, the writer who juxtaposes painting and writing invites the reader to function as observer.38 This novel invites the participation of the active postmodern reader; it functions on the basis of the constant interaction between texts created by Vargas Llosa and six paintings by well-known artists. Each of the fourteen chapters has something to do with these paintings. As in many postmodern texts, borders are erased—in this case the borders between the narrative levels and the visual paintings. Geisdorfer Feal concludes appropriately that Elogio de la madrastra invites the reader to observe the internal mechanisms of desire and textual production.39
Unlike Vargas Llosa’s more ambitious and lengthy modernist projects, this is a brief postmodern narrative. One of the more subtle postmodern elements of this novel is the way in which the characters’ actions and reactions do not appear to be a part of “human nature,” but are generated from works of art. Thus, Rigoberto and Lucrecia act at times while thinking of the paintings that the reader finds in the text, erasing the borders between literature, art, and empirical reality. Post modern Vargas Llosa presents a world that doubts the concept of “human nature,” that questions the concept of a unified subject, and is skeptical, once again, of the epistemological research on the depths of the individual subject. He subverts the concept of human activity as a continuous flow of history.
Booker reads the postmodernism of Elogio de la madrastra as an encounter between high culture and popular culture, or the high culture of serious literature; canonical art in the face of pornography. As in several other postmodern works that erase borders, in this novel the reader also functions as voyeur, observing the sexual relationship between Alfonso and Lucrecia (supposedly a matter of cheap popular culture) in a novel by one of the foremost writers associated with high culture, Mario Vargas Llosa. Booker also observes that Lucrecia and Rigoberto convert sexuality into aesthetics.
Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto is a continuation of Elogio de la madrastra, with the same characters, a continued development of the same plot, and the presence of some of the same postmodern tendencies. Vargas Llosa returns to the triangular relationship among Lucrecia, Rigoberto, and the boy Alfonso. As in Elogio de la madrastra, the dynamism of this novel is based on literary play similar to the play of texts in La tía Julia y el escribidor. The reader has access to several of Rigoberto’s texts, texts that reveal his sexual fantasies. On the one hand, the reader is entertained by Rigoberto’s very specific pleasures; he is so rigid that he is an object of humor. On the other hand, some of his rigid attitudes are similar to Vargas Llosa’s, creating a self-parody. As in La tía Julia y el escribidor, this novel can be read on many levels, and the biographical level includes Vargas-Llosa-the-author.
Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto contains several of the post modern tendencies of Vargas Llosa’s flirtation with postmodern culture. The characters’ actions, once again, have less to do with an inherent human nature than art. This fact in itself does not make Los cuadernos a postmodern novel, but this aspect, along with the role of metafiction and the parodic play with Vargas Llosa’s other work, places this novel in the terrain of the postmodern. There are many levels of metafictional play, but the moment of most metafictional interest in this novel takes place when Rigoberto writes commentary on the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti, parodying the interests of Vargas Llosa.
In Vargas Llosa’s postmodern work, he invents new roles for his readers. Like some other Latin American postmodern works, such as José Emilio Pacheco’s Morirás lejos, Elogio de la madrastra and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto invite us to question who sees and who is seen. In effect, in both novels it is easy to assume a role of moral superiority (and laughter, in the case of the latter novel) in the face of some of the events at hand. But these postmodern texts also invite us to question our role as reading voyeurs. By inventing multiple roles for his readers in La tía Julia y el escribidor, Vargas Llosa sets forth in this and the two later novels the following question: What exactly is our superior role as readers before the events at hand?
By publishing Historia de Mayta, Elogio de la madrastra, and Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, Vargas Llosa entered into dialogue with international postmodernism. In Historia de Mayta, he presents history as a constant combination of truth and lies; he obviously doubts the expressive capacity of language to establish truths. In Elogio de la madrastra, desire predominates over reason and truth is a problem of minor importance. In addition, both novels, in different ways, blur boundaries, as typically happens in postmodern fiction. With Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto, he follows the exercises begun in Elogio de la madrastra in which individual desire takes priority over the reason of the collectivity and in which borders, including generic borders, are blurred. Vargas Llosa is primarily and deeply a modernist who, after establishing his place as a major modern writer in Latin America, entered temporarily into playful dialogue with the postmodern as a temporary exercise, distancing himself from the utopian impulses that had characterized his totalizing and modernist fiction.